THE LESBIAN GHOST HUNTER

January 28th 1998 was my twenty-sixth birthday. The afternoon found me on my living room writing a speech. Not just a speech, more like the most important thing I’ve written in my life. I was under a deadline and hard pressed to finish it quickly, this was made extremely difficult because of the subject matter also because Chester my Chesapeake Bay retriever would not settle down and the lights in the house kept blinking off and on. Blink, blink. Roooower, blink, blink. Bark–bark. Blink, blink. Blink.

Last Friday I went to a lecture on the paranormal. This was given by my good friend Ranoli and I went because I trusted her to give one amazing lecture on spirits to kick off the Halloween season.

Okay, so yes I’m fascinated by ghosts. I am not in a true believer, drink the Kool-aide kind of person my any means. I am very mixed about the whole subject. I’m very science minded yet believe some things are possible. When an intelligent person that I trust impeccably speaks to her experiences and thoughts on the subject, I’m going to listen and trust what I hear. That and the idea of lesbians that hunt ghosts is just fucking cool.

Ranoli, the lesbian ghost hunter / lecturer was the first person to help me become that man that I am today. When I was fresh out of high school and new to living on my own the only thing I knew about the gay committee was sex. This first couple of years was very tough. I was adrift in a new world away from the structure of the church and in a sea of nonchalant fucking, drugs and drinking. This is how I ended up terrified on the front steps of a church deciding to go in and join the new gay and lesbian choir forming in Denver. That night was when I met Ranoli, who saw the terror in my eyes, got me to calm down and walk into the rehearsal room. This made me realize for the first time that it isn’t just that we sleep with the same sex that makes up our community.

As she is one of my mentors in life I listened intently to her story of how she became involved in the paranormal. I always love how lesbians are nonjudgmental, and speak to their story and journey without spewing to the established dogma. The dogma here being the aggressive ghost hunting shows on TV or movies. Instead, she addressed the entities that may be hanging around and the compassion to help them move to a better place.

During her speech, I started to reexamine my own experiences in the paranormal….