Thanksgiving Now.

Cross-posted on The Bilerico Project.

We’re in a cabin somewhere in Virginia with C’s extended family for the weekend. He would correct my use of “extended family.” He calls this group of about 20 -- his parents, siblings, aunt, cousins and their spouses, other relatives who live nearby, and half a dozen or so various offspring -- his “immediate family.” The extended family, he tells me, consists of some hundreds of far-flung kin whom I’ve had a small taste of at two weddings but will not feel the full blunt force of until I attend “the family reunion” this summer, an event the contemplation of which sends me into a cold sweat.

I exaggerate. I do -- despite cultural differences (someone Thursday morning asked if anyone was planning a trip to Walmart because she needed a few things) which are, with each family gathering, a little less stressful for me to just shut up about -- love C’s family, all 500 of them. Immediate, extended, whatever. A marriage (or maybe it’s me) can only tolerate so much arguing about nomenclature.

We left our apartment Wednesday at about 3:30, picked up a zip car a few blocks away, and drove 9 hours to get here.  A couple weeks ago, the women in the family circulated an email with information about the cabin, accommodations, plans, and a menu and sign-up sheet for the big meal. I volunteered for mashed potatoes (because I make awesome mashed potatoes) and decided to also make a few pies (god knows why, because I’m not really a baker and nearly had a nervous breakdown Tuesday night when the crust was giving me trouble, but I really wanted to make a pear pie and C wanted pecan, so …).

I also brought 3 dishes without which Thanksgiving would not be Thanksgiving for me: succotash, Grand Marnier cranberry sauce, and maple/garlic roasted carrots. When I said in the email chain that I would bring a couple dishes from my own Thanksgiving traditions, a cousin of C’s replied that she loved that I would be bringing dishes from my own family’s traditional meal. I don’t think I had said “family,” but of course these dishes are from my family traditions. Just not my biological family. I haven’t had Thanksgiving with my parents and siblings in many years, not because I’ve been avoiding it, but because most years I had little time and little money and couldn’t justify or afford two trips to Indiana in less than a month. So I chose Xmas, at least until the last 10 years, when I didn’t even usually make it home for Xmas.

Thanksgiving in my adulthood has been a time for celebrating with what queer people our age call our “acquired family.” My parents are liberal, accepting, not homophobic by any stretch, so I’ve never had the experience of being spurned or excluded by my family like so many LGBT folks have. But I have felt that essential difference that at holidays can put distance between parents and their gay kids, and I’ve known the feeling which so many of us have in common of safety and relief when socializing without straight people.

It was important and inevitable that I put some distance between my family’s lives and mine when I left Indiana at 18, to find and assert the difference between me and them, to find an aspect of me that I couldn’t learn from their example. As I get older, the loss aspect of that experience seems to have more meaning than the assertion of independence aspect. In retrospect I guess it gets more sad than exhilarating.

But what is there to do about it? The most convincing argument for gay marriage, the one that seems to be working because it convinces even, or especially, people with a conservative world view, is that by allowing and encouraging homosexuals to form traditional families we avoid or at least mitigate that loss. Don’t force gay kids to leave their families, but accept them fully as part of traditional families. But won’t there always be something about us that our  parents (if they’re heterosexual) won’t really understand or appreciate? It seems to me that if our parents are heterosexual, that one essential difference between us and them will always force us to seek to find reflections of ourselves outside the family, and that will always in some way weaken traditional family bonds. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is what gay uncles are for. Everybody has a gay uncle, right?

At any rate, it was loss that led me to find and create all these remarkable little families I’ve been a part of through the years. So, though I love and miss my mom’s cooking at Thanksgiving (her pumpkin pie and her sage dressing are still the gold standards), most of the foods that mean Thanksgiving to me come from later epochs of my life.

Succotash. The recipe itself came from the restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen where I waited tables in the late 80s for two years. The owner/chef was a lunatic and a bully, but he made delicious American comfort food at that time in New York when regional American cuisine was making a big comeback.

I loved my co-workers and the food, and I made tons of money, so I stayed for 2 years. When I left I just didn’t show up for work one day and never went back. I am not proud of that, and it literally gave me horrible waiting-tables-and-everything-is-going-horribly-wrong nightmares for about 20 years.

But I loved his succotash so much I started making it myself. It takes me back to that Thanksgiving (1986? 87?) when B and I lived in Brooklyn and my sister was in New York for an internship at Paramount her senior year at Indiana University and she was living with a friend a few blocks away. I wanted so badly for her to move to New York, but just the previous summer she had met the man who would be her first husband, and she went back to finish school in Indiana, then moved to Louisiana to live with and soon marry him.

That fall, she and I and B prepared a sit-down dinner for about 25 or 30 of our friends and various Thanksgiving orphans, and we ate at a long makeshift table crammed into the living room of our floor-through apartment in Ft. Greene. The kitchen was a sink and stove wedged into what had been a closet in the original one-family brownstone which had been converted (but not really – our bathroom and another small room were off a stairway that the upstairs tenants passed through to get to their apartment). The fridge was in the living room.

I have made that succotash every time I’ve made Thanksgiving dinner since. The recipe’s not hard. Equal parts corn and baby lima beans, diced red bell pepper, simmered for about 20 minutes with cream, butter, a pinch (or more) of ground cayenne, and lots of salt and black pepper. I like the consistency better when it’s made the day ahead, cooled and reheated.

The cranberry sauce is J’s recipe. I don’t know if it predates our relationship, but he always made it when we had Thanksgiving at home or if we were invited somewhere and asked to bring something. I can’t imagine a turkey dinner without it. I had to email him last week for the recipe, because I’d never made it. He follows the recipe on the bag of cranberries but substitutes Grand Marnier and orange juice for the liquid, reduces the amount of sugar by about half, then stirs in a little more Grand Marnier after cooking so it has a slightly boozy taste. I added a little orange zest and a pinch of clove too, because I can’t resist fussing with everything and that orange was just sitting there. We also didn’t have Grand Marnier so I used triple sec and didn’t notice the difference. It’s delicious, and it makes me think of all the wonderful things about our years together and how dear and generous J is and how glad I am that we’re still close. He is still as much my family as anyone.

The carrots were on the menu at Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah, where I cooked 2 seasons in 2005 and 06. It doesn’t feel at all correct to me to describe Hell’s Backbone Grill as a restaurant where I used to work. It was more like total immersion.

Boulder is a town of fewer than 200 people, a Mormon ranching settlement and tiny oasis for tourists on Scenic Route 12 which snakes through southern Utah’s glorious landscape. I had just finished my film Life in a Box, couldn’t find a job in San Francisco where I had ended up because an editor I wanted to work with lived there and in 2005 it didn’t much matter where I went because nothing was keeping me anywhere.

I met a skinny smiling queer Buddhist in a leather bar who said, “Why don’t you come to Utah with me and cook in my friends’ J and B’s restaurant?” A couple weeks later I met J and B when they were in San Francisco for a fancy food show, and, a few weeks after that, I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by awesome spectacular beauty every moment of the day, preparing food in a restaurant where love is the mission statement.

The menu there incorporates elements of New Mexican cooking (lots of green chilies), ancient Native American cuisine (seeds, beans, corn, squash),  and Mormon pioneer cooking (beef from local ranches, trout marinated in molasses, dredged in cornmeal, and fried in a cast iron skillet, and lots of Dutch oven dishes). I’ve never eaten more delicious food in my life.

My first season there I lived in an old RV that was half sunk in the yard of one of those women, surrounded by chickens and lilac bushes. I shared the RV with a colony of mice who stole my office supplies and turned them into a vast elaborate city under the mattress of my bed. Though it’s been 6 years since I’ve been back, I still hold that place and those people deep in my heart. I think of them nearly every time I cook anything, and that’s not exaggerating.

The carrots are sliced about ¼” thick, tossed with maple syrup, garlic, vegetable oil, salt and pepper, and roasted at 350 until they shrink and caramelize a bit. I added mustard, which I don’t think was in their recipe (fuss, fuss).

I also learned how to make mashed potatoes at Hell’s Backbone Grill.  There’s no secret to making the best mashed potatoes ever. Just lots of heavy cream, lots of butter, and lots of salt and pepper. Lots. For 10 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes, I added 2 sticks of butter and about a pint and a half of cream. Boil the potatoes, mash the butter in first, then add the cream. Handfuls of salt. At the restaurant we added fresh chopped sage leaves to the breakfast potatoes and lemon zest and sour cream to the dinner potatoes. Though I have nothing against a little lily gilding, even without, they’re every bit as good as you want them to be.

These dishes remind me, on this weekend when we’re all under a lot of pressure to express gratitude, that I have had an abundance of experience, tradition, love enough for a hundred lifetimes, and I’m only 51 years old. It’s almost embarrassing how good I’ve had it. I well up with emotion just contemplating the depth and richness of my life so far.

Now C and I are creating our own family, which is somehow nestled into his larger clan and, what I didn’t expect, finding a renewed closeness with my own parents and siblings, a new way of thinking about my place in their lives and mine in theirs, a re-experiencing that began with the run-up to my wedding and their participation in it. And it all adds up to a much more traditional kind of family. I cherish it. But it’s not without loss. Loss of the primacy of that ramshackle family I cultivated over the last 30 years. I still have those people in my life and love them just as much. But I will not spend Thanksgiving with any of them.

Looking back over what I’ve written, it’s not lost on me that a lot of what I have presented here as acquired family is just past relationships. There’s a lot to contemplate there -- the differences between those relationships and my marriage to C, differences that come from different aspirations and desires, cultural expectations that change with the times, the differences in the particular families of those past partners and their relationships with them. One of the things I love and hate about sitting down to write (or even having a conversation, for that matter) is that it often feels impossible to discuss one thing without discussing another thing, which doesn’t make sense unless we bring in this other thing, and eventually it seems necessary to be talking about everything in order for the current topic to make any sense. Writer’s block is never about there being nothing to write about. It’s about there being too much to write about.

End of an Era ... Again.

(Cross-posted on The Bilerico Project.)

This morning in my regular blog reading, I came across this news that the owners of the trendy (again) restaurants, Indochine and Acme, are going to take over the space on First Avenue that housed Lucky Cheng's and, before that, the Club Baths. The history of this building is particularly fascinating in the way that it illustrates a certain history of the city as it intersects with LGBT history. You don't have to venture too far from the topics of AIDS and gentrification to cover most of what's happened in and to New York since the late 70s.

The old Club Baths was the first gay bathhouse I saw the inside of.

When I was 20 and a student at Parsons. I met a guy very late one night at the Ninth Circle on 10th St. (I lived on East 10th, and, when I had a few bucks to go out, I always went to the Ninth Circle. I hadn't yet discovered The Bar on 2nd Ave. and 4th St., which would be my haunt for the rest of the decade). We were both drunk and he was hungry, so we went to that gay restaurant on Christopher, the name of which escapes me. He tore through a steak and a bottle of wine, fell off his chair, yelled at the waiter. We were "asked" to leave, which at the time, for reasons I can't remember now, I found very sexy. I had a roommate and Jean, that was his name, lived on Staten Island, so he suggested we go to the baths.

Jean paid for a room and a locker. He left me to change in the locker room and meet him in his room. I took my clothes off and wrapped a towel around my waist, but I couldn't work up the nerve to venture into the hallway and find him. I knew I was in a strange land with a complex protocol of mostly unstated rules, and I was, as I am still 30 years later, too often terrified of doing something wrong and being humiliated. I'm working on it.

Eventually Jean came and got me.

Either because thinking about public gay sex while you're talking about eating out is gross or (more likely) because our collective memory of the East Village for the most part does not extend pre-Tompkins Square riots, when the NYPD rode in on horseback with riot shields and cleared that shit out to make the neighborhood safe for people who might think drag queens are a good laugh, but junkies passed out under your stairwell is taking local color a bit too far, this building always seems to be referred to as the former Lucky Cheng's, rather than the former Club Baths. (And what was it before it was a bathhouse? Just another New York Lower East Side tenement building, probably.)

So I did a little googling and found this post on Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, a wonderful blog that I can only read occasionally because it has the same effect on me as actually visiting the East Village, which is that I end up feeling disoriented and sad about New York, my past, missed opportunities, and aging. It's a quagmire I try to avoid.

Anyway, Jeremiah's condensed history of the building takes you back pre-Lucky Cheng's with an evocative description of the baths, then through the late 80s when the yuppies came and ruined everything, and the late 90s when Sex and the City came along and ruined everything else.

Pet Peeve.

We saw the new production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? last night. Because we’re saving money for a down payment on an apartment (it will probably take about a year and a half) we’ve tried to cut back on our theater-going a bit. We kept our membership at Signature Theatre, which is fairly inexpensive and we get to see some incredible stuff, like the beautiful new productions of The Piano Lesson and David Henry Hwang's Golden Child, and the Roundabout, which I think is hit or miss, but the hits make up for the misses. Oh, and Playwrights Horizons because they're always doing great new stuff. But that’s it for this season.

Well, except for 3 shows: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, all revivals that seemed too important to miss, and we were able to get discounted tickets for 2 of the 3.

As expected, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was great, a sort of prosaic interpretation that was surprisingly more shocking because it wasn’t as big and loud as you expect from this play. It felt ordinary, real. I guess I’m talking mostly about Amy Morton’s low-key performance as Martha. Riveting.

Still, as gorgeous and powerful as this production was, I have to register a complaint – and this has become a pet peeve for me because it’s not by a long shot the first time it’s happened in the last couple years at a high-priced Broadway show: our seats were in the left-hand section of the orchestra, not extreme left, not cheap “obstructed view” seats, just a few seats off the aisle, yet about 25% of the playing space was not visible to us.

In fact, C couldn’t see the bar from his seat. The bar! In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?! I don’t know just what we missed, but I know that lots of stuff was going on the opposite side of the stage, the side we could see but clearly lots of people over there could not. I would guess all told there were several dozen seats from which large chunks of the stage were blocked from view.

It’s a shabby way to treat your audience. We didn’t pay $500 for premium center orchestra, but we did pay about 90 bucks for what should have been very good seats. I don’t know how else to see this as but a failure in directing and set design. Sightlines, for god’s sake. It’s theatre 101.

Debate, with Myself.

I didn’t watch the last debate, I was surprised to find that I just didn’t want to. (I watched all the Republican primary debates and I was excited to watch the first two between Obama and Romney. I love this stuff.) I thought I was probably just reluctant to stay up till 11 when 9 is my bedtime, or that I was burned out and needed a break from worrying about the election. I taped it and thought I’d watch it Tuesday, starting earlier so I could get to bed early.

But even on Tuesday I still didn’t want to watch it, and I realized why: it was the foreign policy debate and I didn’t want to watch Obama boast one more time about how he “took out” Bin Laden. I didn’t want to watch all the strutting and posturing about our strong military and how you don’t mess with Americans or you get your ass kicked.

I’m trying to feel good about Obama. I think it’s important to get him elected because Republicans with free reign are obviously obviously worse. But when you start talking about foreign policy -- besides the fact that at least if we elect Obama we don’t have to be embarrassed about our president like during those interminable 8 years of Bush -- when you start talking about foreign policy, you land smack-dab in the middle of everything about Obama’s administration that makes me want to vote for the Green Party.

I felt good about voting for Obama in 2008. Really good. I was confident that, though it’s never going to be a perfect fit, his worldview overlapped with mine about as closely as you could expect from a guy running for president. I should say that I had similar feelings when I voted for Clinton in 1992, but I hadn’t done my research. If I’d looked at Clinton’s biography more closely I think it would have been clear that he wasn’t to be trusted. With Obama, I made a point to be better informed, and nothing in his background indicated that he would seize the power to detain people indefinitely without trial or to kill American citizens suspected but not convicted of “terrorism.” Nothing prepared me for his enthusiasm for drone strikes that “take out” civilians including children.

I’ll admit I’m a peacenik. I’d prefer to live in a world where people weren’t constantly killing and maiming each other like dogs fighting over who gets to control the backyard. It’s heartbreakingly stupid how this just goes on and on and people think that perpetuating it (if we just kill this bad guy…) will somehow make it stop. It’s immature and it’s stupid. But I understand that we don't live in that world, and that most people think it’s absolutely crucial to continue killing people all over the world. One of the things people elect presidents to do is to fight wars. I’m not naïve.

But this new executive power to basically kill anyone anywhere in the world with no checks and balances crosses a line for me. To be honest, it disgusts me.

Lately, we liberals spend a lot of time aghast at "what's become of the Republican party," what with "legitimate rape", etc. But can we spend a little time pondering what's become of the Democrats? This stuff strikes me as much more insidious because Democrats have a reputation for being more reasonable, compassionate, educated than your average Chick-fil-A Tea Party hillbilly.

I can’t imagine how depressing, how horrifying a Romney presidency would be. So I support Obama in this election. And, because the polls are so close, the enthusiasm of “the base” is important. We need every vote. So we put aside our objections for the time being. During the election season, we try not to talk about drones. We try not to get into conversations about detention and execution without trial. But ignoring these things in order to re-elect a president so that he can continue to do them (because we have not objected, after all) is a moral compromise I have a very hard time making. It’s a dilemma.

Sunday, Sunday.

Good day:

I got up at 8 (getting up at 5 all week makes 8 o’clock sleeping in), made coffee, and read the Sunday Times in bed for 2 hours. Then I had a long phone meeting with the LIZZIE people. Can’t give any details until stuff is signed, but it’s likely we’ll be doing something this summer, and maybe something else this winter or coming spring, both things fun and exciting. After that, I spent half an hour on the elliptical machine again -- it was much easier than yesterday. I’ve lost 10 pounds. I figured out a way to approach the solo piece I’m writing in a more organized way, so it’s starting to make some kind of sense to me now. (Reading Spalding Gray’s journals helped, as did listening to Fairport Convention while I worked out today.) I made chicken and green chili tacos for dinner yesterday, they were fucking awesome, and there’s enough stuff left to make them for dinner again tonight. And it’s Sunday, so I can have a glass of wine at 3 o’clock in the afternoon if I feel like it, and I do.

I’m just going to enjoy these last few hours of the weekend before Monday comes down like a hammer on the thumb of my equanimity.

I'm So Hungry!

As you know, C and I are both making an effort to lose weight and get into better shape. I don’t know if I mentioned that we’re doing the P90X workout. I’m a little squeamish to admit it because now it’s so closely associated with the ultra-repulsive Paul Ryan, but whatever, it works. So far. We’ve done 3 weeks out of 3 months and I’m much stronger, though my legs are very tired all the time.

And we’re dieting, which just means eating much less and not eating a lot of stuff that I love to eat (cheese, dessert, pasta, bread, lunch). Not that we were such terrible eaters before; in fact, we ate very healthy meals, which is why it pisses me off that we have to so radically alter our diet just to lose a few pounds. In fact, this last week I had to cut our intake in half again to practically nothing because we both sort of plateaued after losing steadily the first 2 weeks. Seriously, we’re exercising hard for an hour every day, eating next to nothing, and it’s still difficult just to get back to feeling comfortable in my 34 pants?

I’ve been wondering (of course) since we started doing this, how it ends up. I know I’m not willing to keep up this austerity plan the rest of my life. The workout is 3 months long, after which I don’t suppose we’ll just stop exercising, but I know we won’t do anything as intense as we’re doing now. My parents are in their 70s and they ride their bikes and walk a lot. They inspire me. And we live in New York where we walk a lot by necessity. But, one, I won’t give up food I love for long (I’m a firm believer in the health benefits of pleasure), and, two, walking a few miles a day isn’t enough to keep my weight down. As soon as I go back to eating a normal amount of food (not excessive, just normal) and not doing a crazy workout every day, my weight will creep back up. It just will.

Is there a point at which is doesn’t matter to me that I’m big around the waist? It doesn’t seem to matter to C, and to be honest, his extra few pounds don’t matter to me, but somehow we worry about our own bodies.

Is it like when I grew my hair long after Jay and I separated. I had worn it long in high school and then again in the 80s, but I wore it short the whole time we were doing Y’all. I felt like I wanted to have it long once more before I died, once more while I could still pull it off, and then I’d be happy with it short. So I grew it practically down to my waist for a few years but then cut it off when I moved to Texas because it was just too damn hot for long hair.

So I'm wondering if maybe I just want to be thin once more in my life and then I’ll be okay getting old and fat.

Don't Jump.

Either my alarm did not go off this morning or it went off but didn’t wake me up because I had earplugs in because C was snoring or it went off and woke me up and I turned it off and went back to sleep and don’t remember doing that. Regardless, I woke up at 5:48. Even when I get up at 5, those 2 morning hours (I have to be in the shower by 7 or I won’t get out the door in time, about 7:40, to catch the train that will get me to work a few minutes before 9) feel way too short to get any serious writing done because it takes me about an hour to clear the fog enough to see what’s in my brain and try to get it onto the page in front of me.

So instead of writing I’m blogging, which is writing, yes, but it’s not writing.

Years ago, a friend was studying to become a life coach and needed guinea pigs to practice on so I volunteered. This was during the year that I lived in Jersey City after Jay and I separated and I began editing Life in a Box. One piece of advice she gave me – because I’ve always had such a hard time integrating all the exigencies of life (making a living, mostly, but also things like being a good friend and partner) was to read biographies of successful artists I admire to see how they did it.

It was good advice and I’ve learned lots of things that have helped me manage the dilemma, but, maybe because I have a tendency to dwell on the negative, off the top of my head I can’t think of any. What occurs to me recently is that the danger with this advice is that so many of these stories don’t end well. The first two I read were Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.

This is on my mind because I just finished reading The Broken Tower, a biography of Hart Crane. I barely knew who he was before I read it, but I was interested in gay life in the early 20^th century. Crane struggled for years to make a living and make work and then at 32 -- even after being widely recognized as one of the greatest living poets -- broke and practically homeless, he jumped off a ship into the ocean and drowned.

And yesterday I started reading Spaulding Gray’s journals. One book was not connected to the other. I was interested in Crane’s life because of the milieu and Gray’s life because the piece I’m working on is similar in style of presentation to his work. I just have a stack of books here because I buy them faster than I can read them, and these two happened to be next to each other in the stack. 

I knew this but had forgotten: Spaulding Gray also jumped off a boat after undeniable artistic success and recognition. Great. (The other strange parallel is that both Crane’s and Gray’s mothers were Christian Scientists.)

California Ban on "Conversion Therapy" Is Not About Consumer Protection.

Why is it every time a minority makes some small progress toward getting the rest of everybody to get off their fucking backs and let them live their lives, some straight person or white person or male person jumps up and says, "What about me?" I get bullied too! Everybody gets bullied, and what about reverse discrimination, and what about my religious liberties? Why do you get special treatment?!

This guy thinks "conversion therapy" is being unfairly singled out by California's new ban. I guess it's not a new idea that the most interesting characteristic of privilege is that it works whether or not you recognize that you have it:

"Whether government banning of such procedures is the most appropriate response is worth debating, however. There are a number of therapies out there which have been empirically demonstrated to range from useless to outright harmful."

Um, it's not banned because it's useless or even just because it's harmful, it's banned because it is by design used to harm a group of people for who they are. You can't compare it to "rebirthing" therapy, etc., except to say that both are based on quack science. But we're not talking about consumer protection here. We're talking about protecting kids. The author barely mentions the fact that the California ban only applies to people under 18. It is not meant to protect us from quacks; it's meant to keep kids safe from their Christian fundamentalist parents. Rebirthing therapy is a wrong (ineffective, harmful, fake) solution to what could be a real problem. Conversion therapy is also ineffective, harmful, and fake, but the patient doesn't have the problem - the parents, the families, the church people, the culture has the problem.

Not that I don't feel for adults whose experience of their sexuality is so twisted by shame that they would enroll in one of these programs, but it's kids who are most vulnerable to the abuses of religious fundamentalism. The law protects minors from parents who have such deep contempt for their children that they would imprison and shame them in an effort to transform them into something they deem lovable.

Of course it doesn't work - you can't make gay people not gay. The most you can hope for is to fuck them up emotionally and psychologically for the rest of their lives.

Just because banning conversion therapy might "drive it underground" isn't an excuse to tolerate it. Should we legalize wife-beating because making it illegal forces people to do it at home and not talk about it? Obviously, people are compelled to treat each other in all sorts of horrific ways, and they'll continue regardless of whether it's legal or not, but that doesn't mean a society should just throw up its hands.

Cross-posted at Bilerico.com.

Deja Vu.

A good friend who I don't see often but have kept in touch with on facebook commented a few days ago that she has decided to vote for a third party candidate. S is in her early twenties, an artist, super smart, politically engaged (she's very involved in activism around coal mining and mountaintop removal in Appalachia where she grew up). Seeing how she lives her life makes me optimistic in these scary, conservative times. She's one of those young people who give me faith that the world isn't going to go completely to shit. 

It was bracing to read of her decision. This is what one of the smartest young people I know makes of this election?

I have to admit I left a couple very long-winded comments (yes, sometimes I'm one of those people) but to be fair I wasn't the only one on the comment thread and it was a thoughtful, civil conversation, considering the forum. I thought I'd share some of what I said here:

S, I completely understand, but let me just share this with you, from Noam Chomsky. I don't know what state you vote in, but even the great Noam Chomsky advises that if you live in a swing state it's best to vote against Romney/Ryan. I voted for Nader in 2000 and, even though I was voting in Tennessee so my vote didn't matter much, I still cringe when I consider how that election turned out. It's not that I regret it, I just have come to believe that presidential elections are, for all of us for whom neither major party candidate represents our values, an exercise in cynicism. Still, if you want to do the thing that causes least harm, I think it's important to hold your nose and vote for a Democrat sometimes.

Another of her friends commented:

I think my problem with this, and where I disagree with Noam, is that Obama has been terribly harmful when it comes to foreign policy, civil liberties, and corporate power. To be fair, he is less harmful than Romney would be, but still, the violence perpetrated by this administration has been frightening.

And it makes me ask, if that's the price of doing business...if we trade a protection of what little social democracy have for murder overseas...then why even play the game?"

To which I replied:

Not voting or voting for a 3rd party candidate is motivated by a sort of outrageous optimism, a hope that, if enough people express a desire for an alternative, we will, at some time -- and it will not be in my lifetime and I doubt it will be in yours -- bring that alternative into being. Like I said, I voted for Nader in 2000. I understand and still admire and respect this point of view. But my optimism has come to be tempered with the belief that, if you're going to make that decision you also have to come to some kind of peace with the fact, by acting on that optimism you are, in the short term, going to cause things to get a lot worse before they get better, that you are going to cause real harm to people, because in practical terms, in the short term, a non-vote or a vote for a 3rd party will help Romney/Ryan get elected. It just will, and you can't dismiss that fact. You have to take responsibility for that. The reason you "play the game" is that, whether you stay at the table or walk away, somebody is going to win. And that winner will have a huge affect on you and the rest of the world.

Like I said, I don't know where S votes. In my defense, I did not live in a swing state when I voted for Nader. (I've voted in Indiana, New York, Tennessee, and Texas. Do you remember that clip in the opening credits of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, not the first season but later, where she's in a grocery store and she throws something in her cart with a look of mild disgust and resignation? That's what I feel like when I vote.) That was and is part of the calculus, and for all I know S has already done that math and decided that her state is safe enough for her to cast a protest vote. That's what I did. I still believe there's some middle ground here, a way to make the statement we want to make but avoid electing Romney/Ryan who would inevitably be worse than Obama. (You have to know that's true!)

Still, this time, even though New York is safe, I will vote for Obama. I voted for him wholeheartedly in 2008, and -- despite the drone attacks, despite habeas corpus, despite civil liberties, despite the war on drugs, despite my heart that is breaking -- I still want to support his second term, I want to know who Obama is when he's not concerned about getting elected or re-elected.

I am cynical, and I am optimistic, at the same time. It's the only way I know how to be American.

(C linked to this article in the Atlantic with a provocative thought experiment.)

Let's Talk.

When I have a day job, I like to get up early enough to give myself at least 30-45 minutes to catch up on the world: read the half dozen or so blogs I read daily, check out facebook. Now that I’m old and married, it’s also a nice time with my husband, the two of us propped up side by side with our computers.

Three or four times in the last couple weeks, our calm, restful morning hour has been invaded when I’ve opened facebook to the horror of a big photo of smiling Mitt Romney, below it “so-and-so LIKED Mitt Romney.”

For the most part we live in our closed loops. I don’t have Republican friends. You just don’t often find them in the circles I run in: artists, homosexuals, free-thinkers, feminists, peaceniks. Republicans have mostly been people on TV to laugh at, despise, puzzle over, fear, but to keep at a safe distance in real life. Now they’re in my facebook feed.

The bright side is that it forces me to be slightly more thoughtful about Republicans, to see them as something more than an abstraction of evil -- of course, that’s also the dark side: to be reminded that they’re real and among us. What’s really irritating is how the facebook feature that lets you know one of your “friends” LIKES Mitt Romney (or Paul Ryan, which is even worse, and I’ve had a couple of those show up to say good morning, too) does not let you comment on it.

If someone I knew and cared about were sitting in my living room and said, “I like Mitt Romney,” I would respond, “Are you fucking kidding me? What do you like about Mitt Romney?? What is there to like about Mitt Romney?” And in my fantasy, he’d spew some Fox News bullshit about apology tours and death panels and whatever the lie of the week is, and I’d rebuke it point by point, and he’d go home that night resolved to vote Democratic from then on. But on facebook, I can’t engage him. I just have to sit there and seethe, my morning ruined.

But like I said, we live in our closed loops. Maybe there’s something I don’t know about Mitt Romney, or Republicans. From where I sit, they look like liars and bigots (or at least people who don’t hesitate to lie in order to pander to bigots) who will do anything, say anything, in order to gain power and consolidate wealth. Will somebody tell me why this isn’t true?

What do you like about Mitt Romney and his party? To me, they are despicable, frightening, the worst nightmare of working people, African-Americans, GLBTs, Latinos, the poor, the middle class, political dissidents, artists, people of any religion other than Bible-literalist “Christians,” people of no religion, women, women, women, and women.

So break it down for me. Am I wrong? Is this unfair? If so, how? I say I live in a close loop, but I do make some amount of effort to scope out other points of view, and the only justifications for Republicans I've seen have been based on an elaborate and shifting skein of lies about President Obama.

Democracy is a conversation. Let’s talk.

Cake.

C is working late tonight. Or traveling I should say. He went to DC for something or other, took the train and doesn’t expect to be home before 10. I made a very gingery stir-fry for dinner that will heat up well when he gets home, if he’s hungry. It’s become one of my regular weekday meals, this very gingery stir-fry, with chicken or beef and shitake mushrooms and some kind of green like bok choi or even arugula or spinach, anything that cooks quickly, whatever is around. A little onion, lots of garlic and ginger, fish sauce, tamari, and for heat either lots of freshly ground green Szechuan pepper or Sriracha, and that’s it.  C loves it. I used to make fried rice pretty often with similar ingredients. I still love it, and C says it's his favorite meal. I toast the ginger and garlic together first and then sprinkle it on top of an over-easy egg on top of the fried rice. It’s really delicious. But I like this stir-fry a little better for a weekday meal because I have more control over the quantity of rice. C likes a lot. I try to get by with as little as possible. I don’t know what it is with my weight lately but I struggle to stay below 190, and that’s crazy. I should be more like 180, but at least if I stay below 190 my clothes fit me. Seriously if I just ate what I want to eat I would keep gaining weight and who knows where it would stop?  I’m not sure how I feel about this. My mother always said that in order to maintain her desired weight she had to get used to always feeling a little hungry and now I know what she means. It’s not right. C and I have both gained weight since we met.

I wrote that last paragraph a few nights ago but didn’t get around to posting it. Now I’m waiting again for my husband to come home. Business at the prop shop has been really slow lately, so I was sent home an hour early today. I say “sent,” but that extra hour was like a gift that I felt so grateful for I wanted to hold it close to me and cry like a baby. On the way home, I stopped at the drug store to pick up yet another prescription to try on my increasingly annoying irritated skin and at the grocery store for Greek yogurt and lemons to make a dipping sauce for cold chicken that we’re having for dinner tonight with fresh corn that I’m going to sauté with saffron according to a Mark Bittman recipe from the New York Times Magazine. Believe me, I understand that in the scheme of all the horrible situations in the world that I might be in the middle of I have it pretty good with my 4-day-a-week job sitting in front of a computer in an office with very pleasant people and time off basically whenever I need it. I get it. But so so often I feel like “good lord I’m considerably past the halfway point in my time on this earth and I’m still spending 32 hours a week doing someone else’s bullshit” and I want to punch a hole in the wall or curl up in a ball under the desk or come home and gripe at the man who loves me.

Yesterday I made a nectarine upside-down cake and there's half left for tonight. Half a cake might seem like a lot for two people to eat for one night's dessert, but let me tell you it was a feat of will to leave that much on the plate. Seriously good cake. There was vanilla ice cream in the freezer and I wanted to make something to go with it. I was thinking about some kind of pie, but then it occurred to me that fresh peaches are SO good with vanilla ice cream and such a treat and have far fewer calories than pie, so I ventured out to find peaches. I always forget that there are no good peaches in New York. (I miss Texas peaches.) I went to three stores and all of them had peaches, but they were hard and didn't smell like anything, so I gave up. On the way home I saw some nectarines at a fruit stand. They looked ripe and they smelled good and I bought some. Nectarines are not as tasty as peaches but they're more reliable. At home I peeled and sliced them so they'd be ready to spoon over ice cream after dinner, but I tasted a couple slices and they were good but nothing like fresh peaches and I knew we'd be disappointed, so I made a cake. Shut up.

This Is Not About Free Speech. It's About Taking a Moral Stand.

Cross-posted on Bilerico.com

Everyone is talking about Chick-fil-A. People can't shut up about it. That and "Call Me Maybe," which, I don't know, I like a shiny pop song as much as the next homosexual but do people really think that guy is sexy? He's like a focus group version of sexy. My G.I. Joe doll when I was 12 was sexier than that guy.

But anyway, Chick-fil-A.

And I should even preface this harangue by saying that I have very mixed feelings about these boycotts. I thought the recent Target boycott was the pinnacle of beside the point -  "I'm gonna buy my plastic sweatshop crap from Walmart instead of Target for 2 weeks. That'll show 'em." These boycotts satisfy an emotional need to express disapproval (I have to say I still feel a little ashamed of myself whenever I buy a coffee at Starbucks, but now that I'm back in New York, I find it hard to avoid), but in the end I wonder if it isn't mostly an empty protest. So you get your chicken sandwich at Wendy's this month and feel really good about yourself. You still get your chicken sandwich, and as a bonus you get a sense of having participated without even having to spend ten minutes writing a letter to your congresswoman, march in a protest rally, escort women into a Planned Parenthood clinic through throngs of anti-abortion lunatics, or get arrested for civil disobedience.

But something really coalesced for me when the mayors of Boston and Chicago told Chick-fil-A they weren't welcome in their cities, and then came the flood of liberal clucking about free speech.

This is not a culture war debate. This is not about someone's right to express his "beliefs." It's not about someone's politics or religion. It is about pushing back against someone who publicly supports, with his words and money, organizations whose mission it is to persecute a group of people.

Dan Cathy is entitled to his views on same-sex marriage, and, yes, opposition to same-sex marriage is a political view. But c'mon people. Of course he's against same-sex marriage, but he's just talking about marriage right now because that's the issue on the table. Cathy believes that homosexuals should not exist and that LGBT teenagers should be sent to camps to be shamed into believing that their deepest human feelings of desire, affection, and love are illegitimate. He believes that children should be rounded up, separated from their families, and subjected to a pseudo-scientific treatment that results in psychological and emotional damage that lasts a lifetime.

He believes in disseminating lies about sexuality in order to influence legislation - lies which the Southern Poverty Law Center says "almost certainly contribute to hate crime violence directed at the LGBT community, which is more targeted for such attacks than any other minority group in America."

Believing that a whole group of people should be beaten, imprisoned, and brainwashed - and supporting organizations whose mission it is to carry out this agenda - is not a political belief. These people are a menace. They are criminals. And - I probably shouldn't use this word, but it used to mean something besides "Muslim" - they are terrorists, and I don't see any reason why a city or state should not be allowed to say, "If you support these organizations, you are not welcome to do business here." The mayors of Chicago and Boston are not denying someone free speech, they're taking a moral stand.

Did these same so-called liberals who are now crying "free speech!" scold the many American city and state governments that divested in companies doing business with South Africa in the 1980s? Did they complain that economic pressure by a city government was an overreach then?

Calm down. I'm not saying that a fast food chain is equivalent to the South African government. I'm saying there is a difference between political and religious beliefs (I think people should have the right to believe whatever bullshit they want to believe) and actively working to do harm to a group of people. Focus on the Family, the National Organization for Marriage, Exodus Ministries, and the rest, do work that doesn't just disenfranchise LGBT people, invalidate their relationships, and attempt to eradicate their identities, it directly contributes to gay-bashing, teen homelessness, and suicide.

I don't want them or their supporters anywhere near me.

Alone Away From Home.

I’ve been a little compulsive about weather.com this summer. When it gets over 90 I’m obsessed with knowing when the heat wave will be over (“Okay,” I tell myself, “It’s only 5 more days, you can bear it”), and then I become obsessed with knowing when the next one starts (“Breathe” I tell myself, “It’s just hot weather, it could be worse, it could be hot and you could be climbing on piles of garbage all day in the sun looking for things to sell for a few pennies so you could buy some rancid, bug-infested flour to mix with dirt and make crackers to feed your family”).

Something I’ve learned on weather.com is that in New York this summer we’re having basically the same weather that they’re having in Houston. Have you been to Houston? I have. I didn’t stay.

Speaking of Houston, yesterday I flew to Seattle from New York by way of Houston. It’s not exactly on the way. It was a long travel day, and when I got to my hotel at about 7 (10 New York time, which is late for me since I’ve been on this getting up at 5 a.m. to write schedule) I was beat. I had an overdone burger in the hotel restaurant, drove a half mile up the road to Trader Joe’s for a bottle of wine and some bananas for breakfast (the wine, obviously, was not for breakfast, the wine was for ... wine), came back to my room and tried to watch a little TV but couldn’t find anything interesting, so I went to sleep at 9:30 and slept till 8 this morning.

One of many wonderful things about visiting the Seattle area (the most obvious, of course, and the most welcome, being that it seems to be one of the few places in the U.S. this summer that isn’t broiling hot) is that the little coffee packets they give you in the hotel next to the 4-cup drip coffeemaker -- because some people need a cup of coffee so badly before they can summon the strength to even open the door and push the elevator button that they’ll drink just about anything hot and vaguely brownish -- actually makes a very good cup of coffee.

I’ve blogged so little lately, maybe I haven’t mentioned that I’m in Seattle for the next two weeks for a workshop production of Lizzie (new name, dropped the “Borden”) at the Village Theater. I say Seattle, but we’re actually in Issaquah, a charming hamlet just across a bridge over some body of water from Seattle. I guess you’d call it a suburb, a bedroom community. It feels more like a small town.

I miss C already and 2 weeks is a long time to be away, but it’s nice for him to have me out of the house for the Olympics, which he’s way more interested in watching than I am, and he's flying out for the weekend of the performances. I’m here a day earlier than Tim and Alan. I don’t know where along the way I became confused -- I thought everyone was coming out here on Friday. But I didn’t mind having an evening to myself. There’s something really nice about a night alone in a hotel away from home, where I can do whatever the fuck I want and no one will care. Even if it’s just to drink half a bottle of wine and crash at 9:30.

Wah wah.

See, I knew they were working on this. I've always thought it was a bad idea to put so much emphasis on the medical benefits of marijuana, as a reason to legalize it, rather than just making the argument that people should be able to do what they want with their own bodies.

It's the same thing I've been trying to articulate about the gay rights/liberation battle. It's better in the long run to say, "Don't fucking tell us what we can and can't do if we're not hurting anyone," than to say, "We promise we'll be good," because eventually, with the latter, they'll hold you to it, and then it's too late to go back and insist on the former.

I bet there are a lot of hippies in lab coats at their "dispensaries" reading Wired and freaking out.

Happy Pride Day!

Now that possibly a little over half of Americans don't react like a bunch of insane Medieval idiots to the concept that there might actually be people in the world with a homosexual orientation, there are a lot of stories to tell. We're not just telling the stories to ourselves any more.

(Last year, during a recital at a musical theater program, a straight friend asked why so many of the guys chose to sing songs with gay themes, or more generally why there were so many songs now in musical theater with gay themes, and the answer to me was so self-evident that I was a little appalled to be asked. But I guess if you didn't grow up gay you wouldn't see how starkly different things are now compared to even 5 or 10 years ago. It's so much more satisfying now to tell a story with a gay character or subject because the gayness isn't automatically the whole story any more. A general audience might sit and listen and be relaxed (and informed!) enough to see and hear a story about a specific person in a specific situation, doing and feeling unique and interesting and human things, instead of most of the audience just immediately having the reaction, "Oh my god! He's gay!" and not taking in anything else.)

This weekend, as we celebrate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots (if you're not gay and over 40, maybe you need a little history lesson), I want to remind myself that Stonewall was important but it was the 80s when things REALLY started to change. (Okay, yes, I know that's debatable and maybe even not so important, it's not a contest after all, but those years certainly marked a watershed in Americans' ability to ignore an uncomfortable truth hoping it'll go away. People were dying and they were screaming about it and wouldn't stop.)

Once again I credit Andrew Sullivan with some of the smartest, most affecting blogging out there. Where I disagree with him is in his apology for ACT UP's disruption of religious services. He's referring to the notorious demonstration at St. Patrick's cathedral when an ACT UP member threw a communion wafer to the ground. Admittedly it's easier for me, not believing that the cracker actually turns into the flesh of the son of "God," to accept such an act as political protest, but for me the demonstration in St. Patrick's was a galvanizing moment of brilliant disobedience. I think it was brave.

Anyway, I can't wait to see this film. And happy Pride Day -- a little early: this year I'm celebrating our national homosexual holiday by going to North Carolina for a wedding shower for C's brother (who is marrying a woman in September), which is 1) ironic, and 2) nice, because C's family welcomed me so lovingly into their family this spring and now I can in turn help welcome my soon-to-be sister-in-law.

Obama Moved By Our Wedding, Evolves.

We so wanted our marriage not to be a political event -- impossible to avoid, we know, but we aspired none the less -- so it was almost comical on our honeymoon cruise in the Mediterranean to read in the “USA Times” (the 4-page news digest they tucked in our cabin door on the ship every morning) that C’s home state of North Carolina voted by a large margin to extra-double-duty outlaw and ban gay marriage (I don’t know which is the bigger sin: bigotry or redundancy) and then a day or two later that President Obama came out in favor of same-sex marriage. Big week for gay marriage.

I had been so disgusted and to be honest bored with Obama’s gay marriage dilemma that I expected to just roll my eyes when, at of course politically the perfect moment, he finally completed his evolution. But instead I was quite moved. I mean, seriously, the fucking president. I know, it's marriage, and I have all kinds of trepidation about marriage as the flagship issue of our movement. But I came of age politically in the Reagan 80s and lived through Clinton and god-help-us Bush, and now the president of the United States says that he thinks gay people should be able to marry each other.

That’s massive.

And then there’s North Carolina. Of course at our wedding there was a big contingent of North Carolinians, many of them politically conservative but most of whom expressed their dismay about Amendment One and did what they could to persuade their friends to vote against it. And they came with open hearts to celebrate our marriage, to welcome me into their family, to join mine with theirs. Being from a traditional background, they know what marriage means.

One of the most touching things all weekend was watching C’s mother and mine chatting, smiling, enjoying the happy occasion and each other’s company. It was not a political occasion for them. I’m sure they have very divergent views on current issues, but their sons were getting married and they came together, with their families, to share the joy of that.

So all these state governments (mostly Southern, but it’s dangerous to relax with the notion that bigots all live in the same place and have the same accent) and their nasty little amendments. Of course it’s disheartening when it happens, but I come near to dismissing it. I try to focus on history.

All these religious bigots talking about homosexuality as a moral issue, a Christian issue, are identical to Calhoun, etc. in the 19th century defending slavery on Christian grounds. We read that stuff in history class and thought, “Jesus, these people are lunatics, how did anyone take this seriously?” And now we have Maggie Gallagher. It’s the same bullshit. It’s the same punch in the gut when you read it. And if Gallagher is remembered at all, it will be as a horrible person who distorted Christian ideas to justify her irrational hatred of a group of people.

We’ve always had ugly, backward, hateful people among us, but we have at key moments in our history found powerful ways to put them down. The Civil War amendments and Reconstruction. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s. I don’t think it will be too long before some branch of the federal government steps in and says, “It doesn’t matter what you think. People can marry who they want. Grow up.”

I must seem crazy optimistic in light of how conservative Congress and the Supreme Court have become, but the tide has turned. Remember, I still think gay marriage is ultimately a conservative issue and “marriage equality” will be a conservative victory. The normalizing of same-sex marriage is a conservative response to the fact of homosexuality, so I don’t think it’s too much to expect in these conservative times.

Perhaps what’s changed in my view is that I think possibly a conservative response is what’s needed now, at least at first.

Keeping Us Tight and True.

Last night C was snoring so loud not even my earplugs worked, so I got up at 1 a.m. and moved to the couch which is about 1 inch too short to be truly comfortable for sleeping. I feel asleep quickly, but woke up at 5 (the alarm was set for 6), tried for half an hour to get back to sleep, failed, got up and made coffee.

We usually get up at 7, but this morning, on my “day off,” we got up extra early to get to the City Clerk’s office by 8 to be first in line at the Marriage Bureau, which opens at 8:30. Just inside the front door, we saw a line to the right and a closed door marked “Marriage Bureau” to the left. A woman in a security guard uniform with her feet planted shoulder-width barked, “What are you here for?”

I said, “Marriage license?”

She pointed to the line and said, it seemed to me gruffly, “There.”

I’d been drinking coffee since 5:30, so, after standing for a minute, I got out of line and asked the security guard if there was a bathroom I could use. She said, “8:30.”

I thought she didn't hear me, so I said, “I asked where there’s a bathroom.”

She exhaled and said, “8:30!”

I said, “Um. Do you mean the bathroom opens at 8:30?”

She looked at me like she couldn’t fathom why she had been chosen of all the people in the world to endure such unmitigated torture, pointed to the glass office doors, still locked, and said, “Eight. Thirty.”

I said, “Well, aren’t you in a good mood this morning.”

We were not first in line, but we were fourth, and by the time the doors opened there were dozens behind us. The doors opened promptly at 8:30, and we were out of there with a marriage license in our hot little hands by 8:50. To be fair, I should mention that the clerk who issued the license was sweet and polite and gave us a warm congratulations as we were leaving. On the way out, I had in my head that I was going to say to Miss Security Grouch, “Why do you have to be such a horrid witch to everyone?” but she wasn’t there any more, and I’m glad. It’s hard, but I think it’s better to leave people like that to their own nastiness. Contain it. Fire just spreads when you blow on it.

All day yesterday and still this afternoon -- I couldn’t help it -- I have the Joni Mitchell song, My Old Man, in my head: “We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tight and true, no, my old man, keepin’ away my blues.” Now that I am in the thick of this, it’s clear to me how badly I have misunderstood marriage ever since I was a teenager, believing that it was somehow about a relationship between 2 people. Of course we don’t need a piece of paper to keep us faithful or committed or even just together. That’s a commitment we make to each other in our hearts. The piece of paper is about, duh, the community around us that supports our commitment in various ways.

I just finished reading a beautiful, tender novel called “Arcadia” by Lauren Groff. It’s about a hippie commune in New York State. Don’t read it on the train or in a coffee shop if you’re trying to avoid sudden, involuntary weeping in public places. It’s about many things but most directly I think it’s about freedom versus community.

I say “versus” like it’s one or the other. Maybe in some important way it is. When we gain some of one, we lose some of the other. I have all my life seen the fight for gay rights as a fight for more freedom. It’s my body and you do not have the right to tell me what to do with it, etc.

Another book I read recently is “Flagrant Conduct,” Dale Carpenter’s story of Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case which abolished sodomy laws in 2003. He lays out the contrast between the argument made in Bowers v. Hardwick (the Supreme Court case in which sodomy laws were upheld in 1986) and the argument made in Lawrence, a contrast which reflects the general shift in the gay rights movement.

In Hardwick, the argument against sodomy laws was that people should be free to have sex with whom they choose. But the lawyers for Lawrence barely mentioned “sex,” arguing that “intimacy” is an important component of stable relationships which are necessary in order to create families and communities -- so homosexuals’ intimate lives should not be criminalized. We used to argue for sexual freedom. Now we argue for civil rights. We used to want the right to be different. Now we're asking for the right to be the same. It’s not just a rhetorical difference. It’s a fundamentally different idea: freedom or community?

Is the fact that the latter argument is so much more resonant for me now than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago, is this change of heart due to something so mundane as a fear of growing old alone?

From time to time, C and I talk, as people who are about to promise to spend the rest of their lives together might, about the future. I returned to New York feeling like this was my last move, I would grow old and die here. I’d left for a while, tried a few other places, and had come back to the city I love, my home. C on the other hand wants to, eventually, move to Vermont or Upstate, or Maine. I love those places, but I imagine being 85 or 90, stuck in a house somewhere miles from amenities, unable to drive, starving to death some snowy winter. New York City is perfect for the old and frail. You see old people hobbling around the city all the time. It might take all afternoon to get to the corner for a quart of milk, but the trip is possible. It’s not 3 miles in the snow.

I’ve lived in remote, bucolic places and I love them, but I always end up missing the city. I miss that feeling, anonymous in a crowd, that anything can happen. That feeling of possibility is transformed now, though. It used to be not only about sex, but sex was the most compelling, the most urgent of the realms of what could happen if one stayed on one’s toes. Sex was behind the frantic hyper-vigilance, gears constantly turning, trying to turn every situation into an illicit encounter. Now that that part of it is gone, I don’t crave time alone as much or anonymity.

So, maybe Vermont. But not for a long time, and I want neighbors who drop by for pie and coffee, whose kids we’ll babysit, who’ll drive us to the hospital when one of us falls on the icy sidewalk.

Chance of Showers.

Yesterday C and I had a surprise long-distance shower, which his mother and sister had organized. (Now that I think about, they called it a surprise shower but it wasn’t much of a surprise since we hung all the decorations and put out the snacks ourselves. The actual concept was somewhat of a surprise to me, since I never imagined such a thing in my life, but there’s a lot of stuff around weddings besides the wedding itself that I never imagined, like Jack and Jill parties and bow hats, for instance.)

Anyway, C’s mom and sister contacted everyone we’d sent wedding invitations to and asked them to send shower presents. Meanwhile they sent us a big box of decorations, a bottle of wine called “Menage a trios” (which I have to say is a funny choice for a wedding shower), lemon biscotti, cookies, cheese straws.

Last week my sister K and her middle son, my nephew A, who is 12, came to visit for his spring break. I can’t even remember the last time I got to spend so much time with K, my baby sister who is in her forties now, 2 marriages, 3 sons, the oldest a sophomore in high school.

K did an internship at Viacom in the late 80s when she was in college and I was living with my first long-term boyfriend in Fort Greene. She stayed with a friend a few blocks away, and I saw her frequently. Near the end of the semester, she got a job offer but decided against the entry-level-5 girls-in-an-apartment-in-a-shady-neighborhood-because-that’s-what-you-can-afford-but-it’s-New-York life, finished college, moved to Louisiana, got married. We’ve stayed very close but our lives are very different now and we don’t see each other enough.

It was a wonderful week. The weather was perfect, cool and sunny -- it was supposed to rain later in the week but never did. Broadway shows, fancy dinners out, the Empire State Building. My nephew is 12 and not easy to impress, but he fell in love with New York a little. I think Dim Sum in Chinatown kinda blew his mind.

Other wedding news: we finalized the liturgy (our minister, a Unitarian Universalist, gave us a big binder of suggested language, from which we cut and pasted what we liked), and mapped out the procession, recession, etc. Our RSVP date has come and gone. I think the number of guests is a little over 60.

We confirmed plans with the woman doing the flowers. Peonies, white lilacs, iris, grape hyacinth, tulips. Forsythia, if she can get them. Spring came so early this year.

We confirmed the menu for the cocktail hour and dinner after the ceremony.

In non-wedding news, my co-writers and I signed a new option on Lizzie Borden with a new group of producers. We’re making plans for an August production. More details soon.

The Wedding Chronicles, cont.

C and I had brunch at French Roast on the Upper West Side today with my old friend S and her husband. I don’t see S nearly as much as I’d like to. It’s so hard in New York to sustain attention on anything that isn’t right in front of your face at the moment.

S is a playwright. We used to live next door to each other on East 10th Street, back when I was with J and she was single. She watched our cats when we were on tour, and she sang in the “Cowgirl Chorus,” Y’all’s backup choir, for many years. She met and married her husband some time during my hiatus from New York, so I don’t know him well, but he was, until a couple years ago when he left to start his own business, an attorney at the same firm that C is an associate with now. Artists marrying lawyers.

Afterwards, C and I took the train down to Chelsea Market to look for a few goodies to add to the gift bags that C’s mother is putting in the hotel rooms of our out-of-town wedding guests. Apparently this is a thing people do: the hotel gift bag. (My first experience of it was at the wedding of C’s cousin’s son in Savannah recently. In our room we found a bag with bottled water, ibuprofen, and an assortment of snacks. I particularly enjoyed the cheese straws.) C’s mom has picked out a few items already, but we want to add a couple New York-ish things, too. We found some Brooklyn-made “spicy pickle flavor” potato chips (OK, I hate the word, but yes, they’re “artisanal”) and bought a bag to sample. They’re tasty.

C’s family is wedding-crazy. Which is good because I didn’t know the first thing about how all this stuff works. Until I started to contemplate my own, I found weddings very creepy. And, well, I can’t say that I don’t still think most of them are. The difference I guess in my thinking is that, while weddings in general are likely to be pretty revolting, mine is of course going to be wonderful.

I don’t mean to say that my family isn’t super-excited and helpful, too, but it’s hard to compete with the resume of my in-laws-to-be. I know I’ve said this a few times, so I apologize if it’s becoming tedious, but the size and degree of involvement in each other’s lives of C’s family is seriously like nothing I’ve encountered except in 19th-century novels. These folks have been to a lot of weddings. They know the drill.

And C’s brother is also getting married this year, in the fall (just a regular heterosexual wedding) so it’s a wedding frenzy for the C clan.

Everyone asks how the planning and preparation is going. I think we’re more or less on top of it. C bought my ring yesterday. It’s very similar to his engagement ring, a vintage gold band with a stylized orange blossom design. Most of our invitations went out a couple weeks ago, and the last few -- I didn’t have addresses for some people and I’m a terrible procrastinator, but the protocol says 6 weeks in advance so we’re still within the bounds of good wedding form -- will go out tomorrow morning.

We spent a good part of the afternoon yesterday planning the ceremony. The Unitarian Universalist minister who is officiating, though she stressed that we can do anything we want, gave us a binder arranged “Chinese menu style,” as she said, with several choices for each section: welcoming the guests, readings, the homily, declaration of intent, vows, etc. based on a traditional Protestant wedding order of service.

My inclination all along has been to make our wedding as traditional as possible. I want our guests to feel safely oriented, to know that, while we are two men, it’s just a wedding. I want to hear the phrases we all know, like “dearly beloved,” and “for better, for worse,” and “by the power vested in me by the State of New York” (that’s my favorite), and “do you take this man?” and “I do.”

We made all our choices, and I think it’s going to be lovely and touching. We only stumbled twice. First, when I showed C the poem I wanted someone to read right after the processional, during a simple ritual in which our parents will light a candle together to begin the ceremony. It’s one of several poems Harold Pinter wrote for his wife Antonia Fraser. (I just finished reading her memoir of their marriage.) It’s a beautiful, short and evocative poem about being and staying in love.

C hated it. He found it precious and obscure and thought it read like a Christopher Guest-style parody of itself. I was crushed -- because I loved the poem and thought it was perfect for our wedding but also because now I will never love it in the same easy way I did before.

I doubt that any skill is more necessary to cultivate in order to have and sustain a marriage than the ability to not take your partner’s difference in taste personally, to shake off the hurt feelings, and to move on, so the parents’ candle ritual will happen in silence, which in the end, because the purpose of the candle ritual is to create a mood of reverence and sacredness, is much better than would have been muddying the moment with a poem.

The other disagreement was about the prayer we chose. We both love the St. Francis of Assisi blessing (“God, make ___ and ____ channels of your peace, that where there is hatred they may bring love, where there is hurt may they bring the spirit of forgiveness, where there is doubt, faith, where there is despair, hope, etc.”). I wanted to leave out the “God,” at the beginning in order to make it more universal, less alienating and more meaningful to our non-believing friends and family.

We argued heatedly. His argument is that “God” is a universal word. It means whatever notion someone might have of what God is. True. When I hear the word now, I translate it as something along the lines of “the goodness in all creation,” or “the creative force,” or simply, “love.” But, as a lifelong agnostic, getting to that sense of equanimity about the word has not been easy after decades of feeling threatened and manipulated by it. The fact is that most of the time when you hear the word God in the public sphere it’s in the context of making someone feel less than or outside of the group of people who hold similar views about what is godly and what is ungodly. My God is not the God who hates homosexuals and disobedient women and foreigners and artists and communists and prostitutes and free-thinkers and homeless people and the poor.

C feels it would be aggressive to edit the prayer. I feel it’s aggressive not to. The word is in there twice. We took out one of them. We’ll both get over it.

Respondez-vous sil vous plait.

I got in some serious hot water with my last post -- which was not an installment of the Marriage Chronicles but a screed against the Catholic Church. I offended two people who are very important to me: C’s brother and my friend M in Syracuse. I know more about my friend’s -- who has a long history of peace activism, prison ministry, and social justice work, and whose home is now a Catholic Worker House devoted mostly to hospice care for people with AIDS -- than I do about C’s brother’s faith, but I am certain they are very different types of Catholic. Regardless, they are both deep believers and they were both offended, and, looking more closely at my words in light of their reactions, I was embarrassed by my lack of nuance.

I want to talk about the wedding, so I won’t try to recast my argument here and now except to address one thing. Religious folks often respond to agnostics’ or atheists’ criticism of their beliefs and institutions by saying, “you just don’t understand faith.” What I want to say is that I absolutely do understand faith. I might not have faith in a particular story or institution, but I have a deep, unshakable faith that human beings are good and that our ultimate purpose is to figure out how to love each other and the world we live in as best and as much as we can. I doubt these things every day, which is why I know I have faith in them. My anger at religious institutions comes from that faith, not from some desire to tear people down or be right or smarter or to get attention. Just wanted to say that.

OK, the wedding: RSVPs are trickling in. We invited about 95 people and we have room for 75, maybe 80.

When we first started talking about a wedding, we both said we wanted something small, “just family and close friends.” The picture I had in my head was maybe 20 or 30 people. But everyone on the list is someone we couldn’t imagine not inviting, and there are still many I feel terrible about leaving off the list. As we all know C’s family is huge. He had to leave out whole branches of it. I don’t have a lot of family besides my mom and dad and siblings, but after all the traveling and moving around I’ve done, and just being so damn old, I have dear friends everywhere.

Time and geography played a part in the selection. I gave preference to friends who’ve been more present in my life lately, leaving out some whom I’ve been very close to at one time or another but don’t keep in touch with as much any more. And I invited friends from New York who are more likely to be able to come over friends whom I care just as much about but who live far away.

One of the things I’m most looking forward to is bringing all these people together. Not just mixing C’s world with mine, but mixing together all the worlds within my world. It makes me smile to think of my parents hanging out with my friend M and his partner who have the Catholic Worker house in Syracuse where I stayed so many times during the years when I was touring. So many people who’ve been such an important part of my life for so many years have not met each other.

And that reminds me that we still have to decide where everyone sits for the reception dinner. I have this vision of stimulating conversation based on groups of people with mutual interests but possibly different points of view and life experiences, but whenever I spend a few moments thinking about who to put with whom I get a little crazy. We want people to meet new people but we also want to seat people who know each other together and not separate families.

C and I decided that we will sit at a table with just our parents, since there seemed to be no other clear line of cutoff short of having 30 people and their kids at our table. Everyone says not to worry too much about where we’re seated because we won’t spend much time sitting.

I’ve started reading up on Istanbul for the honeymoon. We booked a cruise from Istanbul to Venice, and we have a day and a half in Istanbul before the boat leaves. I bought a book called Strolling Through Istanbul (the maps are impossible to read on the Kindle) and another called American Writers in Istanbul. I’ve never been to that part of the world. I’ve never taken a cruise (though I’ve taken a 14-hour ferry ride from Aberdeen, Scotland to the Shetland Islands, one of the most thrilling and memorable things I’ve ever done), but I love the idea of being stuck on a boat with very few decisions to make. I don’t know if it’s a personality trait of mine or if I’ve just reached a point in life where I’m wearing of making decisions but the idea of being free of it is immensely appealing.

Cross-posted at The Bilerico Project.