Kyle's Bed & Breakfast

The Amazon Trail - Thank you, President Obama

The Amazon Trail

Thank You, President Obama

         

         My week was looking like a trailer park after a tornado until the announcement came that the President of the United States supported marriage equality, also known as civil rights for gays. The day before, North Carolina had fallen into the hands of the morality pirates.  

          It had been the week that was. We were getting ready to try to sell our home, not an easy task in itself these days. Immediately, the house protested. Not only did it start having little issues here and there, but it sabotaged our efforts to fix what broke.

          The news that our president considered my sweetheart and me entitled to marry was vastly validating. It gave me hope that the people of North Carolina would see through the lies told on talk radio and FOX TV. It gave me strength to tackle our more commonplace difficulties. My sweetheart, close to hysterical laughter, listed these.

          Five HUNDRED and nine dollars to Stanley Steemer for leaving more stains on the floor than we had before they cleaned. Not to mention that cleaning the tiles did not include cleaning the grout between the tiles. That would cost hundreds more.

          A day after President Obama blessed our unions, I read that nearly three dozen congresspersons demanded that same gender weddings be included in the Democratic Party's platform. It reminded me how vilified our small Democratic party was for proposing the same thing and opposing the well-organized and very nasty homophobes of Southern Oregon back in the 1990s.

         Then came a two HUNDRED and nine dollar charge to “fix” a four-year old kitchen faucet that still imitates Niagara Falls every time we turn it on. Now the plumbing company wants us to pay another three HUNDRED to replace the fixture they didn’t fix. I began to suspect these service companies had business plans like Mitt Romney's: don't fix it, toss it and abandon the people.

          Our friend from North Carolina, who recently celebrated 25 years with her partner, wrote that after voting this week, she was so shaken that straight people presumed to vote away our rights, she had to sit in her car a long while before she could drive. Multiply her by every gay and progressive in the U.S. getting the news that the haters won, and we'd have national gridlock.

          Three HUNDRED and five dollars for an air conditioning unit we had serviced. The next week it started leaking all over our garage. Two service calls and many buckets of dripped water later and it's leaking again.  Did I mention that nothing in this house is over four years old?

          Back to the plumbing. My sweetheart, being a very competent femme, tried to fix the faucet herself. I looked at the problem and offered her my butch card. She watched repair videos. She talked to the faucet company. Our water bill crept up. She called the plumbing company and they agreed that, for what we paid them, they should redo the job for free. My sweetheart only asked that they send anyone but the initial service person, Steve. On the big day of our new appointment the doorbell rang and the man with the toolbox said, “Hi! I’m Steve!” We still don’t have a working kitchen sink, but no new bill because my sweetheart wouldn’t let him touch a thing. Including the toilet with the broken tube holder-in-place thingy.

          And then we heard that the Secret Service is broken. How could they be so careless while on assignment? We trust them with our leaders. With the President’s stand on marriage equality putting him in greater jeopardy than he already is as our first African American president and our heath care advocate, he is risking more ire from the right than any president in memory.

          When the Stanley Steemer guys came back out to clean up their mess, I mentioned that we kinda thought that for five hundred plus dollars, they might have moved the living room chairs, the lighter bookcases, maybe even the floor lamps...

The floor scrubber stuttered that if we’d asked them to move those items, they would have. I guess if we’d asked them to clean up their dirty puddles they might have done that too?

          As my sweetheart concluded: “$509 for splotchy floors; $200 for a faucet that still leaks; $305 for an AC unit the service guy broke—having the President of the United States say heck yes you should be able to marry – priceless!”

          Our snafus are nothing, however, compared to the way President Obama is now exposed. I’m worried about his safety. I hope the Secret Service and whatever other entities are responsible for protecting him have doubled up on security. The man has stuck his neck out for us big time. He deserves protectors of higher caliber than Steve the plumber and Stanley the floor scrubber.  

          Today we didn’t bother calling an electrician—my sweetheart fixed the light switch that broke. And we sent the money we would have spent on the electrician to the President’s re-election campaign.

Lee Lynch Copyright 2012

May 2012

Kyle's Bed & Breakfast

The Amazon Trail - Viral Victimization

The Amazon Trail

Viral Victimization

               I always thought I’d suffered my first few weeks of college. It was horrible, I was completely unprepared, but I survived. Instead of getting on a train and taking Tyler Clementi’s long jump, I got on a train and went to my big brother’s office to announce that I was quitting school.

          What was I thinking? What did I expect my brother to do? Was I thinking? No; I was just feeling and what I felt must have been similar to what drove Tyler off his bridge: despair, fear, hopelessness, humiliation, shame, blinding desire, loneliness, desperation. You can’t think when you’re a seething vat of emotions and hormones. You can’t make a good decision. You just want to end the pain.

          Like Tyler, I was assigned a straight roommate my first semester. Like Tyler’s roommate, mine lived in a world so extremely foreign to me we could have been different species. She wanted to become a fashion designer, marry a nice boy, move back to Pennsylvania and raise a family. I wanted to become a writer, fall in love with a thousand girls, move back to New York City and drink like Dylan Thomas.

          Instead of web cams back then, we had gossip. I dressed like someone out of the Beebo Brinker stories in Bermuda shorts, knee sox and Oxford cloth shirts. I was the only student, female or male, to bring my bicycle to campus, and listened to FM radio jazz, not rock and roll. Like Tyler, I was just plain different. I learned later that the other students shunned me, made fun of me, whispered about me. There were three of us weirdos on my dorm floor. I was the queer one, although in 1963 nice girls barely knew what that meant.

          The first night in our new lives, my roommate and I went to a freshman mixer together. It was packed, loud, filled with that foreign gender, boys. I backed off, lost the roommate, left immediately. Outside, on the strange campus that still appears in my nightmares, I was as alone as any being on this planet had ever been. I was as alone as Tyler Clementi. Thank goodness the romance of the bridge - Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge, Walt Whitman’s “Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul” – was not a romance that drew me. I simply knew I would get nothing but confusion and misery from four years in the alien land of hetero-college and that I would do better on my own.

          On the other hand, I suspected those years were not the worst thing that could happen to a young gay. College was a privilege. The relative cloistering might have been a cosseted cushion between childhood and the demands of adulthood. It was not. Maturity gives us an anonymity and freedom to crash and burn that’s hard to achieve in the micro-world of school. Tyler knew he couldn’t stay at Rutgers and escape the condemnation and ridicule his roommate’s boorish video-assault would bring. Maybe he hadn’t been through and hardened by castigation and bullying before. Clearly, he had fewer defenses than I had.

          Already, I’d toughed out the schoolyard hounding. Already, I knew there was a community out there, if I could just get to it. Already, I was on medications to still my fears. And I reached out to my semi-sensible brother who reached out to my sensible father. I said nothing about being a pariah. How can you tell your family a thing like that? I only told them I wanted to get a job and live in the city, that college was a waste for me. At my father’s urging, I gave school one more try.

          My poor innocent roommate avoided me. Complained about my drunken late nights. Never came back after that first semester. An artist down the hall invited me to room with her and we’re still fast friends. I found a sort of girlfriend and spent many weekends in the city, feeling like an outsider in the gay bars, but the gossamer thread of my soul at least could anchor there.

          Oh, Tyler, how I wish I, or someone, could have been your guardian angel through those hellish weeks. Mine was a straight male upperclassman named Jonathan who liked my writing, hung out with me and impressed my tormentors with his motorcycle, marijuana and getting kicked out of Columbia University. The other weirdo girls left school, but I made it through. I was lucky: Jonathan and his anti-establishment literary friends, all my elders, took me under their wings and kept my victimization from going viral. They became my life-saving, not lethal, bridge.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2012

April 2012

Kyle's Bed & Breakfast

Kyle's Bed & Breakfast

The Amazon Trail - The Gift of Being Out

The Amazon Trail

The Gift of Being Out

          I always fear bad consequences when I come out to other people. How will they react, will there be more pain than gain for them, for me? Coming out may be easier for some in 2012 than it was fifty years, twenty years, a dozen years ago, but for most it’s still tough. I’m thinking of all the gay people who found coming out to be fatal, all the teen suicides, all the societies that treat their gay citizens as outcasts.

          One recent Sunday, my sweetheart’s aunt and uncle were passing through town and took us to lunch. This same couple had also traveled some distance to attend our wedding. In the course of lunch the subject of marches on Washington came up. My sweetheart’s aunt mentioned having been at Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I’ve only known one other person in my whole life who’d attended that world-changing event. If I hadn’t already known, I would have realized at that moment that I married into exactly the right family for me.

          The conversation continued along those lines and I mentioned having last marched on Washington in 1993. My new aunt asked if that was when the Quilt was there. She was referring, of course, to The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which has been at the National Mall many times and was there, in part, during The 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Were we at the same quilt exhibit? It doesn’t matter at all. The fact that we were comparing notes on the subject was a gift of being openly gay.

          Since I officially came out to my brother’s family, my sister-in-law has spared me the angst that still goes with sharing who I am. She’s eased my way through the world in an altogether unexpected role, sort of a guardian angel opening paths through family that were previously blocked by brambles of fear. In the past few years she got in touch with one of my birth family’s first cousins, who happens to live in Florida, where I reside at the moment. My sister-in-law tested the waters for me so that when I actually got together with my cousin there was no awkwardness and we could just enjoy each other – and our respective spouses. Her spouse happened to be male. What a sense of freedom came with the privilege of being nothing other than queer old me.

          Most recently, my sister-in-law and my brother got together with another first cousin. This cousin and his wife are staunch Catholics, yet my sister-in-law came out to them for me. They have no problem with my gayness. I always loved this cousin - love all of them as a matter of fact – and being out to him gives me a sense of wholeness I never experienced before. Acceptance is nourishing. Rejection is a kind of starvation.

          My youngest cousin never batted an eye. She made a point, each time we got together over many years, to let me know she knew. This quasi-communication we had was a way to connect with each other in the presence of my unenlightened mother. My young cousin simply told me that a childhood friend, who I knew when they were both little kids, lives with another woman and their children. The first time she told me I wasn’t certain she saying she knew and accepted that I am gay. By the third time, I was convinced and consequently invited her to our wedding. How astonishing: these cousins that I’d grown up with, and hidden from all my adult life, now knew I’d married another woman – and the world didn’t end!

          On our most recent visit to New England to see my side of the family, both my brother and sister-in-law said they wished our visit could have been longer. As we ate at the local breakfast hangout that last morning, our sister-in-law introduced us to her whole middle-aged aerobics group, with the apparent delight of someone bringing friends and family together.

          At our memorable Sunday lunch, my sweetheart’s uncle also had a story about the 1993 March on Washington. He worked for a federal agency at the time and, as it happened, a gentleman in his field arrived from Cape Town, S.A., for a meeting just as a million or more queers marched through the city. The visitor later told my uncle-in-law that he saw all these high-spirited gay people and he simply joined the march. “This,” he declared to my new uncle, “is democracy!”

          That story never fails to make me smile. It was a story I would never have heard, a gift I would never have received, if my sweetheart wasn’t out to her family and if we marchers hadn’t left our closets and come out to the whole world.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2012

March 2012