I Weep for My City

Sitting on bench in Central Park’s Conservatory Gardens on a beautiful spring day I look up as the sun filters through the apple blossoms and my eyes fill with tears as I weep for my city. I weep because this city will recover from this pandemic, but I know it will be forever changed by it. Just as it was changed by economic crisis 47 years ago when I first arrived. In 1973 the city’s tax base was depleted by “white flight” to the suburbs and its infrastructure was in shambles. Subway cars were covered in graffiti that was horrible and at the same time beautiful. Central Park’s landscapes and nineteenth century structures were crumbling from neglect, but they were still beautiful. The trees and flowers still bloomed every spring and New Yorkers still gathered there by the thousands every summer. The city recovered from that crisis and was better. There were more economic booms and busts, blackouts, epidemics of crack cocaine use that caused massive crime and incarceration, the AIDS epidemic that decimated my community, terrorist attacks, and hurricanes. I’ve seen my city survive and recover from these things and in each case be forever changed. Survival and change is and has always been an indelible part of New York’s DNA. It is the magnificent invalid always dying, always being reborn or reinvented. A city of contradictions as unfathomed wealth exists around the corner from unforgiving poverty. Sun kissed pink apple blossoms thrive three blocks away from Mt. Sinai Hospital’s emergency department as healthcare professionals struggle to care for the sick and dying in unanticipated numbers. What will my city be like when this is over? It will be forever changed but I don’t know how. I weep for the city that I know so well and for the city forever changed that I don’t yet know. 

The Conservatory Gardens, Central Park

Indeed the whole country will be changed by this pandemic. My hope is that the changes will be for the better and New York will be the catalyst for Americans everywhere to reevaluate the cultural and economic inequities that have left all of us so unprepared for this pandemic. Many of the movements that changed how this country viewed public healthcare, workplace safety and the value of labor started in New York City. Many of these movements were reactions to great tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that was a major factor in the labor movement’s success in getting governments to set basic workplace safety standards. While many of the efforts regarding public health, education and safety began in the private sector, the local and state governments in New York became leaders in taking responsibility for these issues. The idea that government has a responsibility to be a force for the “public good” sprang from the slums and sweatshops of New York. Now again this pandemic has shown us that while we have made a lot of progress in our quest for maintaining the “public good” for all, there are still vast inequities that have left us all vulnerable in unforeseen ways. My city is once again the epicenter of our national tragedy and I struggle to be optimistic about the future.

Will the workers who we have long taken for granted who are now “essential” and have no healthcare, childcare and sick leave continue to show up for their minimum wage jobs? Will all those healthcare worker “heroes” be placated by the nightly applause and shouts of support from apartment windows? Will the thousands of small family run businesses and restaurants that have always been such a special aspect of city life be replaced by soulless corporate franchises? Will we finally be ready to face the consequences of the systemic racism that still plagues our country and find solutions? Will we look away as Amazon and Walmart monopolize our retail and food distribution with their fulfillment centers becoming twenty-first century sweatshops? Will all the titans of finance and industry who have fled their gilded towers to their country homes during this crisis return to resume their lives of privilege and continue to be oblivious of their culpability in this? Will things change for the better?

This city has been the source of great joy and great sorrow for me. It is the place where many of my dreams have been shattered and my heart has been broken many times, but I’m always drawn back to it. Every time I return to New York that first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline from the plane or train window reassures me that I am coming home. Whatever happens I do know that I will be a New Yorker as long as I’m able.

Now that I have ceased most all of the usual activities of my city life I’m forced into a lot self reflection and meditation, which lately has mostly revolved around memories of my life in New York City. My apprehension about how my city is going to be forever changed by this crisis has triggered many memories of the changes I’ve witnessed in my 47 years here and the circumstance that brought me here. Now that I’m an old man living the last chapters of my story, I’m going to use this venue to explore some of those memories with more regular posts to this blog.

Saying Goodbye to Mom

How to you say goodbye to your mother when it seems likely that it may be the last time you see her? It was something I couldn't stop thinking about last week as I prepared to go visit her and all the days there until it was time for me to go. 

My mom is 97 and since last February living with my older brother Larry and his wife Sally. After 3 years in an assisted living facility where a stroke and several injuries requiring long stays in rehab with remarkable recoveries it became clear that she needed more care. Larry and Sally rearranged their home in the hills of eastern Kentucky and along with the help of local hospice care are providing our mom with a sunny room for her last days. She can only sit in a chair for brief periods and spends most of her time in bed sleeping. She seemed to drift between strange dreams and odd memories to moments of awareness that she will not be recovering this time. At these moments she makes her wishes plain with statement “I don’t want to do this anymore, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

There are no words that can express how grateful I am to Larry and Sally for what they are doing for our mom. That she will have the loving hands of family caring for her in her final days is an amazing gift. They practice the tenets of their christian faith more selflessly than anybody I know. They have built a little eden on the side of a hill with terraced gardens overlooking pastures of grazing cows and horses. It’s a beautiful peaceful place far removed from the world I inhabit in New York, but very fitting for our mom’s final stop — surrounded by gardens like the gardens she always had wherever she made a home.

So after several days of quiet walks in the garden, great meals and forthright discussions about the practical matters of end of life care, it was coming near the time to say goodbye and I was fearful I wouldn’t be able to say the right thing. I was afraid I would’t be able to make my mom understand how much I loved her and appreciated everything that she did for me. I have recently been going through family albums and doing genealogy research in order to write a family history. When I got to my immediate family history I gained a renewed appreciation for my mother. A child of the Great Depression, she was the ultimate care-giver beginning when she was a teenager having to care for her grandmother. She became a wife and mother during WWII, raised three sons, moved her household seven times, cared for her parents in their final days, cared for her elderly aunt in her final days and cared for her husband for nine years as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. Even though my brothers and I have taken different paths in life and become very different men, we will always be a family of brothers because of our mom and her unconditional support and love. 

My family tends to favor quiet stoicism rather than big displays of emotion when facing tragedy and loss. Now that I’m facing my mother’s mortality as well as my own, I find that I’m embarrassingly prone to crying like a baby at the most trivial expressions of sentimentality, even if it's just in a movie or TV show. So I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to Mom without blubbering uncontrollably. When I went into her room she looked at me sadly and talked again of not knowing what to do. I told her that I knew she would get through this. I reminded her of all the tough things she got through before and she was still strong enough to figure this out too. She relaxed a bit and said, “I had a good life.” I told her I loved her because I was a beneficiary of that good life. She smiled for the first time since I’d been there and said, “Kiss me so I can feel your mustache tickle.”  So I did and I knew she understood how I felt. By now the tears were coming and I couldn’t speak. I saw the determination and strength in her eyes and still smiling she dismissed me saying, “OK, carry on.”

A Witness to History

Last month I attended a tour of New York’s City Hall along with some of my fellow Friends of Governors Island volunteers. It was led by a volunteer docent and who really knew her stuff and gave a great tour of this marvelous New York Landmark that has served the city well for 205 years. 

Walking through stately old buildings like this filled with statues, portraits and furnishings from the past always conjures up a connection to historic people and events that almost makes me believe in the supernatural. There is a presence that I can feel in unexplainable ways as though the thoughts and deeds of all who passed through are somehow absorbed by the marble and pigment and transmitted back as some kind of energy. This day these feelings were particularly strong for me, particularly when we went into the city council chamber and stood in the visitors gallery. Thoughts of the last time I was in that gallery 31 years ago swept over me. I had to walk away from the group and discreetly keep my composure as memories of the day that I was a witness to a historic moment here swirled through my head mingling with our guides historic narrative. Standing in that gallery all the emotion and drama that I was a very small part of so many years ago came flooding back in startling detail because I was back where it all happened.

In March of 1986 after 12 years of debate, 17 years after the Stonewall Riots, the New York City Council was going to vote on adding sexual orientation to the city’s non-discrimination law and it had a good chance of passing. I was with a group of activists that had spent the night before in City Hall park in a vigil in support of the law. We were also there all night so we could be the first in line to get passes to be in the gallery for the council’s vote the next afternoon. We were successful and able to fill the gallery and had plans to silently protest the council members who would speak and vote against the bill. There was also a plan for a non-violent protest from the gallery if the vote did not go our way.

I was new to this type of activism and felt a bit unworthy to be amongst so many people with much more experience and bonafides to be there than I. Up to this point I had never been much of an activist when it came to politics and gay rights issues. As a gay man, I certainly had strong very liberal, pro gay rights opinions, but personally I had not experienced a lot of the discrimination and fearfulness that other gay men had. I worked in the theater and lived in New York where it was fairly easy to be open about your sexuality. By the time I arrived in 1973. A new exciting period of freedom of sexual expression had rapidly grown in New York since the closet door was blown open by Stonewall in 1969. I was one of the many young men who dove headfirst into the party without much thought about those who had struggled and suffered for years before or those that still suffered outside of the gay enclaves of New York and San Francisco. I just took for granted that the music would never stop — that the party would never end. In my twenties I wasn’t a bad person, but I was too stupid, self-centered and having too much fun to allow the political struggles of the time to be more than peripheral to my personal life. Then two Harveys woke me up.

It was a film “The Times of Harvey Milk,” a documentary narrated by Harvey Fierstein. I went to an early screening of the film with an old friend who had been the set designer for Harvey Fierstein’s play “Torch Song.” Coming out of the theater I could barely see because tears were still streaming down my face. I’m a sucker for cheap sentiment and cry easily at even the most maudlin films, but I was genuinely moved very deeply by this film. I had been properly saddened and horrified by Harvey Milk’s assassination when it happened in 1978, but this film laid out the story in a way that awakened a deeper understanding and appreciation for the sacrifices that Harvey Milk and other men and women like him had made.

Coming out of the theater I was confronted by an eager young man with a clipboard. He told me he was working for the campaign of David Rothenberg who was going to be the first openly gay man to run for city council. Would I like help by volunteering for the campaign? I did not hesitate and put my name address and phone number on his form. Soon after I was spending many evenings at the campaign office stuffing envelopes and making phone calls to voters. I met a lot of really great people and acquired a new sense of pride in myself for being part of something that might make difference for the greater good. Passing out flyers and registering voters wasn’t going to change the world, but it was a small part of something that would. David Rothenberg’s campaign was not successful, but it did make a difference. He came very close to winning and paved the way for the many openly gay members of our city and state government who were successful in subsequent years. Working on this campaign introduced me to a lot of politically savvy people, organizations involved in gay civil rights and local political clubs — which in turn led to my attendance at meetings, rallies and demonstrations that would not have been on my radar before then. The vigil in City Hall Park was one of them.

I hadn’t intended to spend all night in the park, but I got caught up by the enthusiasm of the crowd I was with. I was not working a regular job at that time and there was nowhere I had to be the next day, so after we did our thing chanting and waving our signs for the eleven o’clock news cameras I decided to stay on overnight with the core group of stalwarts who wanted to be in the council chamber the next day for the vote. It was a chilly March evening. Blankets appeared from somewhere and we huddled together on the sidewalk in the park trying to keep warm and sleep a bit. It was not comfortable and I didn’t get any sleep, but there was laughter and giggles all around. The necessary huddling for warmth amongst strangers in some cases turned into cuddles and strangers became special friends of common cause and shared adversity. 

That’s how I came to be in the visitors gallery of New York’s city council chamber that day. I had never been in City Hall before and to be there for a reason to see the council in action was a new and exciting experience for me. Watching the formalities of an important council vote was quite an education. Once they got to the vote we were there to witness it was to be a roll call vote and most council members gave a little speech before casting their vote. The common wisdom was that we had enough support for the bill to pass but it was not sure thing and it would be close. We cheered every yea vote and the speaker would pound his gavel for quiet. When ultra-conservative council member Noach Deer was called, we stood up silently and turned our backs as he spoke. He was the most vocal and hateful opponent of the bill. During hearings about the bill his supporters from the orthodox jewish community he represented had stood and turned their backs during the testimony of people supporting the bill and we were giving him a taste of his own medicine. It felt so good to literally stand against this bigoted man in this historic room.

The other dramatic moment came when council member Wendall Foster representing a district in the Bronx was called. He was also conservative ordained minister of a largely black congregation and it was assumed he would be a nay vote. I remember him looking around the room and saying in spite of his personal misgivings, he had to believe in the truth of the Thomas Jefferson quote painted on the ceiling of the chamber. There was an audible gasp in the room as he continued in his best pulpit voice, ''In the spirit of Christ I must love my homosexual brothers and sisters, even though I don't understand them. They frighten me. They intimidate me. Yet, I have to live with myself. I vote yea.’’ The gallery went crazy with cheers and applause and it took the speaker several minutes of gavel pounding to quiet things down. Those counting the votes realized that Foster’s vote assured that the bill would certainly pass as a majority of the votes yet to be called were solid yes votes. As that realization swept on whispers through the gallery incredulous smiles broke out all around. Every yea vote after that prompted cheers but was a bit anticlimactic after Foster’s surprise vote. By the end what had started as a determined solemn example of democracy in action turned into a celebration. As we left the chamber there reporters and cameras. People were crying and hugging. Someone with a microphone asked me how I felt about what just happened but I was a blubbering mess with tears streaming down my face hardly able to speak. Being exhausted from lack off sleep and exhilarated from the roller coaster of emotions and real life drama I’d just been a part off left me totally unprepared to respond to reporters questions.  That would not be the last time I was involved in a demonstration, but it was the last time I would be speechless when faced with a reporters microphone.

That day was one I’ll never forget but being back in the place where it happened brought back a lot more detailed memories and allowed me to quietly relive the joyous exhilaration that comes from being a small part of something bigger than yourself — a witness to history. Thank you Harvey Milk, Harvey Fierstein, David Rothenberg and the many countless others who led the way for me to be there.

I Never Would Have Believed…

The Stonewall bar form Christopher Street Park

The older I get, the more often I find my conversations include the phrase “Forty (or ten, twenty, thirty) years ago I never would have believed that today I’m…” I suppose this is a quite natural phenomenon of aging. Things change. What was once unusual is common. Life takes us places and provides us with experiences that we couldn’t have imagined in our naive youth. Our personal history converges in circles of unexpected complexity. The convergence of retrospectively unbelievable circumstances was quite multilayered for me personally this past weekend. Let me explain.

Twenty years ago I never would have believed that the president of my country would include the Stonewall riots along with the civil rights movement as examples of American history to acknowledge and take pride in as President Obama in did in his second inaugural address. This is the government that fifty years ago carried out policies that systematically rooted out, shamed and fired gay people from it’s agencies as unfit to serve their country. Now the president was acknowledging an event considered a major turning point in the movement to change those policies. I thought I could never be prouder of this president. 

Ten years ago I never would have thought it possible that the President of the United States would declare Christopher Street Park and the area around it a national monument. For almost half a century this area has been a rallying cry and gathering place for LGBT people to protest, mourn and celebrate. What happened here in June of 1969 was not big news much beyond the neighborhood at the time. Most of the people who decided to fight back against the police who raided a gay bar run by the mafia that night remain anonymous to history. They would not have believed that their angry reaction to the indignities they suffered at the hands of the police that night would be the spark to ignite and unite a movement that would create positive change in so many lives many years later. This is history that always mattered to me as it has come to matter to LGBT people around the world. As a community we have always honored all those who had the courage to speak up and fight back that night. Now that history is not honored just by my community. It’s honored by my country as well. President Obama’s list of accomplishments in support of LGBT people is so extraordinary that this almost seems like just icing on the cake, but I think over time it will have just as significant effect on our community as marriage equality and ending sexual orientation discrimination in the military.

Park rangers prepare for their talk about the Stonewall riots.

Ten years ago I never would have believed that I would be standing in Christopher Street Park  listening to a National Park Ranger talk about the Stonewall riots and the early 20th century history of the oppression of LGBT people in our country. A small diverse group of people listened as he spoke just as they would have to a park ranger at Ellis Island, Federal Hall or any other historic monument or park overseen by the National Park Service. In the group were many young men and women, some presumably gay for whom the Stonewall Riots are distant history from long before they were born. That they and many generations after them will be able to come here to learn about and celebrate this history is amazing. The government agency that just a few years ago would have denied employment or fired any employees that were found to be gay, now is charged with preserving and interpreting the history of the LGBT equal rights movement for park visitors at a National Monument! LGBT folks who just a generation ago were marginalized by their government as second class citizens without equal treatment under the law — whose open expression of their sexuality could get them arrested, beaten up or ostracized by their families — can now come here and feel part of the American experience as previous generations never could have dreamed of. This is huge and made me more deeply proud to be an American than I ever have before.  

Six years ago I never would have that thought that I would know so much about what a national monument is and how important they are because of my experience as a volunteer with the National Park Service (NPS) at another of New York City’s national monuments, Governor’s Island. When I started volunteering for the NPS on Governors Island it was just something useful to do with my time as a retiree. I had a modest interest in history, but it was mostly an opportunity to be outdoors in a pleasant place and have interaction with other people which is something you miss when you retire from going to an office everyday. Over the last five years that I have been doing it however it has become much more to me. I have become more interested in the history of my city and country and what it reveals about our present. The more I learn, the more I want to know more and I’ve discovered that the best way learn new stuff is to share what you know with others. I found I really enjoyed interacting with visitors to the park and answering their questions. When I started leading tours of Castle Williams and Fort Jay just as the park rangers do it was especially gratifying. When I had a very engaged group who asked questions that I could answer I felt useful and appreciated in a very special way. I understand why many of the park rangers seem to enjoy their jobs so much. Now I’m excited about our newest National Monument, Stonewall, because in the future I may be able to expand my NPS volunteering in a new direction and be part of how this important place and history is preserved and presented. The possibility of someday standing in Christopher Street Park wearing my NPS volunteer badge and telling visitors about the early history of the LGBT movement and the Stonewall riots is a very exciting prospect for me to contemplate. The Park Service has made a great start but is just beginning to figure out how they can best interpret this history for the public and I intend to be involved as much as I can.

Lastly, forty-seven years ago when I was languishing the summer away in my parents house recovering from hepatitis that had caused me to leave school, I never would have believed it if someone told me I would discover the possible source of my illness forty years later from reading a history book. The summer of 1969 it was a total mystery how I had come down with a case of non-infectious hepatitis that is usually the result of poor sanitation or hygiene. There were no other cases at my school and I was always pretty careful about my personal hygiene so I didn’t think it was because of insufficient hand washing as my mother seemed to think. In any case it wasn’t serious and I never felt sick. I just had to stay home for many weeks and suffer extreme boredom until my yellow jaundiced eyes returned to normal. Many years later (probably around 2005) while reading Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter, I read his description of the Stonewall bar and how there was no running water behind the bar and how they washed the glasses by swishing them around in a tub of dirty water. He went on to note that there had been an outbreak of hepatitis among some of the regulars that spring that may have been caused by that filthy water. A lightbulb lit up in my head as I read this. In April of 1969 I was at the Stonewall and I had several drinks there. I had come to New York with my best friend on spring break from college. I was nineteen and thrilled to be in New York on a Saturday night in one of the hottest gay clubs. I had worked several odd jobs to earn enough for the plane fare to New York. I have a letter that my mother had saved that I wrote to her at the time describing everything I did on that trip — well not everything. I didn’t mention going the Stonewall even though that was certainly one of the highlights of my visit. I had been to gay bars before, but the gay bars in Indianapolis at that time were small and unsophisticated compared to the places we went to in New York. The Stonewall had two dance floors and was packed with well-dressed handsome young men enjoying themselves fearlessly. Or so it seemed to me at the time. I was too naive to know that the music could stop abruptly at any time if the police decided that it was time to put the faggots in their place. It had happened before and it could have happened the night I was there. I remember being kind of overwhelmed by the scene at the Stonewall that night. As excited as I was to be there, I was too shy and unsure of myself to strike up a conversation with any of the sophisticated men surrounding me. The friends I had come with were not so shy and I ended up taking a taxi alone back to the apartment where we were staying. My only souvenir from a night at the legendary and future historic Stonewall would to be a nasty microbe that would turn the whites of my eyes yellow three months later. This past weekend I told this story to a group of strangers and two park rangers in The Stonewall National Monument. 

More Innocent Times

Obviously my little brother Mark found this hilarious

I found this childhood photo of me while going through family albums at my mother’s house last year. I’m around eight years old and dressed up like a girl. This wasn’t just playing “dress-up” as we used to call it in 1958. This was what we would view now as full on drag with lipstick, pearls and a ponytail made out of lock of hair my mother had saved (more on that later). My mother had dressed me for the entertainment at the monthly meeting for the cub scout troop to which I belonged. I wish I could tell you that I lip-synched to Patti Page’s big hit that year “How Much is That Doggy in the Window?” and brought the house down, but alas no. Apparently the Boy Scouts of America in 1958 in their publication sent to leaders outlining possible programs for troop meetings, suggested that it would be hilarious for all the den mothers to dress their sons as girls and have a “Funny Fashion Show.” That’s the reason that the “dress” I’m wearing in the photo is actually a burlap feed sack. “Sack” dresses were a fashion statement in 1958. I don’t remember what the other boys/girls were wearing except for the one member of my den who refused to where a dress. They put him in capri pants.

"Sack" dresses were a thing in 1958

Seeing this photo made made me laugh and brought back a lot of long forgotten memories. I was also very surprised to find this photo because I thought that I had destroyed them all when I was old enough to be embarrassed by them at 13 or 14. I remember being quite determined to get rid of all the photos from that day ripping them up and throwing them in the trash. Now I’m glad I missed one and that I can share it with friends and fans who know that playing “dress-up” is something I came back to have some fun with much later in life. In the photo it looks like I was having fun back then as well.

Seeing this photo also made me think about all the issues surrounding gender identity and children which is perplexing many parents these days in ways that would have been unthinkable in 1958. It’s hard to imagine that the Boys Scouts of America we know today suggesting to den mothers all over the country that it would fun to dress their young sons up as girls and parade them around in public for everyones amusement without a second thought about what kind of irreparable damage it my do to their fragile prepubescent minds. Yet that is what they did. 

I was curious to verify that this wasn’t just some outlier den mother in Michigan that came up this idea, but that it was actually something that came from the BSA headquarters. Thanks to the miracle of the internet I found a newspaper article from around that time with pictures–from Salt Lake City Utah no less. I can only presume that many of the “girls” in the picture are just a decade away from being called by the LDS to do their missionary work in crisp white shirts and ties.

From the Salt Lake Telegram, 1957

The 50’s was a more innocent time and I’m sure that there were many parents, particularly fathers, who wouldn’t let their young sons participate in such an emasculating thing. However it did happen and cub scouts all over the country were cross-dressers for a day just for fun without any judgement or concerns from adults about what the experience might mean to their development into well adjusted young men. Perhaps there were some who were psychologically damaged by it and grew up to be wife-beaters or bullies to compensate for the for the shame of knowing they once were forced to wear gender inappropriate attire. Perhaps some of those boys even grew up to be secret cross-dressers living double lives remembering the day it all started in the cub scouts – the day they discovered the feel of silk and chiffon against their skin made them happy. Certainly some grew up to be homosexuals. I know of at least one who did. However I can also say with certainty that the fact that I had some fun in a dress at the age of eight didn’t make me gay. I played dress-up a lot when I was a kid. In my closet there was a box of old clothes that was there for us to play with and we did. We put on old hats, shoes, ties and yes, dresses. We pretended to be people we were not. It’s what kids did and I presume still do when they play. Then you get older and you put little kid things aside to please your parents and fit in with your peers. Certainly back then any boy beyond a certain age who continued to choose girlie things to play with over boy things was going to have problems in most families. 

Certainly if I had continued putting on dresses and lipstick after the age of nine or ten there would have been concern from my parents, but by puberty I was “normal” enough to be embarrassed by reminders of my childish behavior as a little kid, especially the pictures of me dressed like a girl. However, in retrospect I think my parents didn’t pressure me too much to conform to hardline gender specific behaviors and interests. In my family, as the middle child who was considered the more “creative” of my siblings, I was allowed to stray a bit outside the boundaries of normal gender specific interests. I played with cars, trucks and toy guns but I also had a puppet theater. I liked music and performing and both my parents encouraged me. I learned how to use tools from my dad and my mom taught me how to use a sewing machine. Dad would take my brothers and me to the movies to see many of the action-adventure movies of the 50’s and 60’s like “Ben-Hur” and “The Buccaneer.” Very much “guy” movies, but he also bought sheet music of songs he liked for me to learn how to play on the piano. Mom took me to see shows and concerts. I learned many skills from both my parents that have served me well in life for which I will always be grateful..

My grandmother Edith as a young girl

I can only imagine what new challenges are brought to the parenting game today with all the gender and sexual identity issues being being more openly discussed and dealt with publicly by young people, adults and children. However while I look at all the old photos of me and my brothers and cousins as kids, I think that maybe back then in more innocent times, there were fewer things for parents to worry about. I wouldn’t suggest that things were better when I was growing up. However, I think one lesson that 21st century parents might take from their mid-20th century predecessors is to relax a bit and try not to obsess too much over the consequences on their kids for everything they do as parents. Parents today would probably cringe at much of what their grandparents did as parents, but a substantial number us survived without too much permanent damage. Children are pretty resilient and will probably deal with a whole bunch of really crazy stuff that we haven’t even thought off yet. So if your eight-year-old son wants to put on a dress and lip-synch to Lady Gaga don’t discourage him (unless of course he’s got no talent). He will move on to other things tomorrow or maybe he won’t, but either way, he’ll probably survive just as most of those little boys that the BSA encouraged to dress like girls in 1958 did. I’m pretty certain that most of them grew up to be respectable adults Sure one or two of them may have grown up to be drag queens, but so what? Today it’s a viable career choice.

About the ponytail I was wearing in the photo: It was a long lock of hair that my mother had saved from when her mother cut her hair. It was a long substantial amount of hair and I assume that my grandmother saved when she gave up the Gibson Girl look of her youth. It matched my hair color perfectly and I used again ten years later when I needed a ponytail for a period play I was in my senior year of high school.

A Conversation With My 18-year-old Self

I've been playing some Back to the Future games in my head lately that have been keeping me awake at night. So after a long absence from contributing to this blog I'm going to throw some more words into cyberspace in hopes of exorcising them from the front of my brain.
While sorting through things in my elderly mother's apartment to prepare for her to move to an assisted living facility I found several letters that I wrote to her and my dad over the years. One is dated 1968, my first year of college. It was quite a shock to meet my 18-year-old self in a letter from 47 years ago, especially since that 18-year-old was really pissed off (more about that later).
My mother was a reliable letter writer through all the years since I left home for college. It was our family's preferred form of communication in those primitive days before the internet. Long distance phone calls were for emergencies only. I would regularly receive envelopes from my mom that contained not just letters from her, but letters from other family members with all the family news from aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. She would often ask me to contribute my own news and send it on to one of my brothers. She called it the Round Robin.
The letters my mom saved were not the ones filled with innocuous small talk that revealed only sparse and sanitized stuff about myself for family consumption, but ones where I had something of importance (or so seemed at the time) to say. Reading them again all these years later brought back a lot of personal history that I haven't thought of for years. They touch on a lot of life decisions I made as a young man that in retrospect must have been difficult for my parents to understand. They are also revealing in what they don't say to my parents. Between the lines of these letters are also memories, experiences and life decisions that I chose not to share with them – choices I made that set me on a path of emotional and physical distance from my family. I think my mother was able read between the lines as well and realize that there was a lot I wasn't telling her. These letters represent little islands of honesty and real emotion in a vast ocean of midwestern WASP stoicism. That she saved them tells me a lot about my mother that I'm just now beginning to understand. They also are markers along a path spanning 22 years starting 1968 taken by many gay men of my generation that put physical and emotional distance between us and our families because we had to protect them from having to really know who we were. It would take 22 years to get to point where I felt I could begin to feel confident enough to be totally myself around my family.
Ironically, the thing that my 18-year-old self was so pissed off about that he threatened to "make other plans for my life" was not about his budding sexual orientation, but a haircut. Would my 18-year-old self have made different decisions if I could go back in time and have a conversation about his future? Probably not.

Scene: Late night in a dorm room at Butler University, 1968. The lights flicker on dimly as the young man wakes up from a deep sleep startled by a strange sound.

66-Year-Old-Self: AHHOOOOOOUU!

18-Year-Old-Self: Who are you? How did you get into my dorm room?

66-Year-Old-Self: AHHOOOU! I'm your future self here to show you the consequences of all the decisions your making as a young man that will determine your future. AHHOOO!

18-Year-Old-Self: Is this some kind of a joke? Barry, is that you trying to scare me? I've got to get a new room mate. Please go away. Besides you couldn't possibly be future me. You're old and fat… and bald!

66-Year-Old-Self: AHHOOOU! But I am you. If I wasn't you how would I know you're thinking about ditching your family over a haircut? AHHOOOU!

18-Year-Old-Self: That's none of your business and stop making those stupid ghost noises. You're not scaring me.

 66-Year-Old-Self: OK. But do you really think you can leave school and go out on your own without your family's support?

18-Year-Old-Self: I'll get a job. I was on my own all last summer. I didn't need anything from my parents.

66-Year-Old-Self: You were getting a $6o a week apprentice stipend and living in a dorm room at that summer theater. A real job in the real world means you have to show up every day to do real work and earn enough to pay real rent. Besides you'll lose your student deferment and you'll be drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam.

18-Year-Old-Self: If I can't get a job I'll join the navy. At least then I won't be canon fodder in that stupid war… and they have cuter uniforms.

66-Year-Old-Self: You know if you join the navy, the first thing that they do is give you a haircut.

18-Year-Old-Self: Leave me alone! You're worse than my parents! WHO ARE YOU?!

66-Year-Old-Self: AHHOOOU! I'm your future self here to show you…

18-Year-Old-Self: Shut up! If you're future me, then tell me my future. Tell me how I get so old and fat and bald! Tell me what happens if I don't get a haircut that my narrow-minded parents deem suitable for my narrow-minded relatives. Are they really going refuse to take me for Christmas at my grandparents? Do they really think I'm not old enough to make decisions for myself yet?

66-Year-Old-Self: It sounds like this isn't really about a haircut, but about you making your own decisions and whether your parents can accept it. Whether they can can accept who you really are.

18-Year-Old-Self: What do mean by who I really am? What do you know about who I really am?

66-Year-Old-Self: I know what you did with that oboe player last week. I know what you wanted to do with the cute blonde bass player in the band you saw at the dance last month. I know about the guy who took you for ride in his corvette and…

18-Year-Old-Self: Shut up! Now you're really scaring me. This is a nightmare!

66-Year-Old-Self: Look, I know this is a confusing time for you. I realize how unfair it is for 18-year-olds to have to make all these important life decisions that affect their future. I know what's in that letter that you're going to mail to your parents tomorrow. I read it 47 years from now. It reminded me of how angry and frustrated I was. That's why I decided come back here and have a conversation with you. I thought maybe I could make things a little easier and reassure you that…

18-Year-Old-Self: This is crazy! Reassure me about what? If you're really what you say you are, just tell me what to do. I'm really scarred that I'm not going to make it on my own. I feel so different about stuff than most of the other guys here, but then there are some that seem to feel the same way and are OK with it. Sometimes I feel like there's just so much out there I don't understand, things I want to do and places I want to go, but I'll never get to because I'm stuck with a family that will never understand me and let me decide things for myself. They want me to be like them. I'm not like them. I don't want to be like them. Or maybe I do and I just can't. I just don't know. If they really knew how I felt about things, knew about some of the stuff I've done would they even like me anymore? (laying back in the bed he turns away and gently sobs)

66-Year-Old-Self: I'm sorry. Maybe it was a mistake for me to come here. It's just that when I read that letter 47 years from now all the confusion and emotions that I felt – that you felt – when you – I – wrote that letter came rushing back to me. I just thought that if I could come here and have a conversation with you I could make it a little easier for you. Let you know you things would turn out OK. I'm not sure if this is my dream 47 years from now or your dream 47 years ago, but now that I'm here/there I realize dream or not, there's nothing I can tell you that will change anything or make anything any easier for you. I'll just go.

18-Year-Old-Self: Wait! Don't go! I don't care if this is just a weird dream. I can't believe I'm talking to my old self, but now that I am you've gotta give me more than that. You can't just show up here and fuck with my head, tell me "things are going to be OK" then skulk away.

66-Year-Old-Self: Alright, here's what I can tell you. You will be OK. But it won't be easy. You're going to make lots of mistakes, fuck up a lot of things and generally make many bad decisions that will cause you immense pain, suffering and self-doubt just as you're feeling now.

18-Year-Old-Self: Great! Then why bother if everything is going to be so fucked up and hard?

66-Year-Old-Self: Because even though you're being an ungrateful little shit to your parents now, they will come around and support you through all those bad decisions. They won't understand you or even know much about your personal life and you will continue to be a major source of anxiety for them for many years, but they will always be there when you need them and eventually you will be there for them when they need you. They will come to know and appreciate you as a man with no secrets. It will take many years for it to happen, but it will.
Because even though your life is going to be rife with disappointment, lose and grief it will also be filled with great moments of joy and wonder. You will come to know many great people and find yourself in many places that will surprise and delight you. You will make lots of mistakes, but you will have fun, lots of fun. Your life will be very different from what your parents had, but you will eventually appreciate that the people who raised you will always be part of who you are no matter how different you turn out.

18-Year-Old-Self: OK, that all sounds great. I guess I can go back to sleep now or wake up or whatever I have to do to make you go away. I just have one more question for you. Am I really going to be so old, fat and bald?

66-Year-Old-Self: There are just some things 18-year-olds shouldn't be told. AHHOOOU!

BLACKOUT

A Walk in the Woods

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I had recently read a murder mystery novel by Linda Fairstein called Death Angel. It's set in New York City Ms. Fairstein prominently used Central park as it's setting, particularly the Ravine and North Woods sections. These are in the northwestern part of the park which is not as well-known other areas. As 40 year NYC resident and ardent urban explorer it surprised me to learn of a section of Central Park that I had not been to. Ms. Fairstein described a stream and waterfalls in a low lying under-used and somewhat desolate area of the park as her characters searched for clues to solve a murder. I made a mental note myself that I must go there sometime. On a balmy autumn afternoon earlier this week with my camera I made it there.
There are many places in Central Park where by Mr. Olmsted and Vox's brilliant design one can turn a corner or go through an underpass and suddenly find themselves in a landscape that seems miles removed from the city that surrounds you. The Ravine is one of best examples this. I found the entrance by The Pool which is a lovely pond on the west side near 100th Street. You go down some steps by a waterfall and through an underpass called the Glen Span Arch and suddenly your deep in the woods by a stream.