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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1986)
M o vin g on by Lee Lynch Part 3 — Th e Geography of Gay — Conclusion W hen I m oved into a collective, I moved also into feminist political activism as I would have into a religious conversion, but to this day I have no real understanding o f what I was doing beyond saying N O to a patriarchal world. The experience changed me, but not in a positive way. I was a non-political beastie in a political age. 1 ran, shedding slogan-buttons, from col lective living to return to the exclusivity of coupledom . W e took a third floor flat (les bians, we agreed, always live on the third T H E AMAZON TRAIL floor) in an older hom e on the Boulevard of New Haven, close to the colleges. I’d returned to the student housing which felt so comfort able to me. But when winter cam e physical com fort disappeared thanks to a stubbornly frugal landlady who lived on the posher side o f town and, through long-winded, self- pitying tales o f woe, utterly refused to provide sufficient heat Both o f our cats died there, at least partially from that stress. As if that weren’t bad enough, this was also the time of the first gasoline shortage. But it wasn’t until after m y just-paid-off first car (a 7 0 VW nam ed Lana Cantrell — remember Lana Cantrell?) was stolen, that the police told me three to four VWs were being taken off the Boulevard alone each night Great I didn’t say. Glad you mentioned it I rented an eco n om y Chevy named Vegala and trudged up and down every street in the city, in a snowstorm, looking for evidence o f a VW theft ring. But Lana, like her namesake, had disappeared. I felt like a victim. This was not helped by being between social groups: still violently allergic to the “ libbers,” I was not yet integrated into the bars. But luck, and a fine nose for queerness, had led me, with my lover, to jobs in a con venience store chain whose personnel roster was heavily weighted with gays. One young Phys Ed major, also newly recruited to the chain, began to spend a great deal o f time at our house. She’d becom e my drinking buddy and was to graduate from college in a few weeks. If anything, she seem ed more dis placed and w oebegone than us. Our solu tion? Moving on, o f course, to a bigger, more expensive place — all three o f us. It was a terrible idea. I once did a reading and asked my audience for suggestions for future short stories. One sweet and sad wo man in the audience suggested I write about a single living with a couple. She was having a rough time. I think our adopted recruit though she stayed with us through four moves, may have been as disappointed. For the couple, a threesome was obviously the perfect com prom ise between the social and econ om ic advantages of group living, and Just Out September. 1986 the less debilitating circumstance o f indivi dual housing. We m oved all the way around the comer. Why not? The neighborhood was great for long nosy walks past neighbors’ homes and for architectural sightseeing. We were close to laundry, drugstore, grocery — and gay bars, listed not in order o f importance. My favorite o f the bars was a little neighborhood drive called The Parkway, run by an older straight couple. Local straights and gays mixed there. The bartender for ages had been Arthur, a short Italian man given to wearing overlarge rings and long, flowing scarves. Each year he organized a picnic at a State Park south o f us, and one year a Thanksgiving dinner which drew a multi- generational crowd and was an experience that m ade such an impression on me it has appeared and reappeared in my fiction. Arthur created a sense o f community like no one else did in New Haven. Many of the Parkway regulars lived in the red brick apart ment buildings surrounding the bar even af ter he’d left to open his own place. He should have stayed. Perhaps he got too outrageous for whomever controlled bars in that town, perhaps he flirted with danger. Som eone rig ged his car with a bomb. That didn’t get him, but cancer did soon after. Later, I mourned him from my stool by the Parkway door, on a sunny afternoon, watching the street traffic through the open door, playing big band waltzes and “ Help Me Make It Through the Night” on the jukebox. The nearness o f the bars made that apart ment fairly liveable. Our biggest problem was the gypsies downstairs. They were flamboy ant, like Arthur, but totally unmindful o f those around them. And I was intimidated by their flashing tempers. Sometimes, I’d walk where I was goin g rather than fight to get their Cadil lac out o f the driveway where it was blocking Blue, m y new red VW. Perhaps I should have identified with them, another downtrodden social group, but the neon sign in their front window advertising som e occult fortune-telling service som ehow made them very separate from the gay world, though we had similar needs in housing. S o I moved on again. Another convenience store em ployee ventured to add herself to our threesome, and offered accommodation in a House in the Country. AH! I anticipated, back- to-the-!and! But that wasn't quite it The four o f us, with our three cats, crammed ourselves into a tiny suburban ranch-style house. True, we had a fireplace, and a couple o f goats next door, but as for free and easy rural living — forget it The Chief o f Police lived up the road and we were scared to death he’d find out what we were doing in that house. The major shopping malls were five minutes away. We never even put in a garden. W hen the landlord decided to m ove back in, I determined to give the city one last try. Tired o f moving, spoiled by the burbs, it wasn't long after we'd been broken into in our last city flat, that we three, my lover, the origi nal store recruit and I, pooled our meager savings and put a down payment on a town- house condo near Long Island Sound. Still young, idealistic, touched as I’d been by col lectivism and back-to-the-landism, buying a hom e shook my self-image. Yet here, finally, was a hom e safe enough, big enough, warm enough; a hom e where no one could forbid our new cats, block our cars, throw us out for being dykes. Long before Guppies were in vented, I’d, half-ashamed, half-proud, becom e a full-fledged Guppy. And there I thought it would end. The condo exceeded any housing ambition I’d ever im agined. I was fiercely proud and possessive of it I could see the water. I had a workroom where I could actually write in privacy. I had miles o f shoreline, though not quite the Ore gon co a st and safe neighborhoods to walk. Other gays from the Parkway, from the con venience store chain, had begun to move into surrounding condos. I loved it there. I wrote m y first book there. At last I had no desire to m ove on. But there were other gay geographical trends I hadn’t yet lived. My lover wanted to m ove to the West Coast Eight years and many thousands o f miles later, after battles and conflicts, changes and changes and changes, I've stopped fighting the W est The West has won me. A client o f m ine recently described m e as the most laid- back person he knows. (I chuckled inside, recalling collective hysteria on House Meet ing Nights). Rather than cling for life to hom e ownership, now I’d do practically anything to divest myself o f the house I purchased with m y ex. (Anybody want a secluded house and 1 acres on a creek for $39,900).* I keep trying to make life simpler, to hone it down to som ething that’s organically me. Not a gen eration, not a political m ovem en t not a d e pendence on purveyors o f alcohol. Just a place where the stresses o f city life don’t be set m e and I can live like a penniless Guppy, if there is such a thing, in peace, free o f the cycles o f getting and spending without any rhetoric about it My last trip East horrified me. In cars I fought the impulse to cover m y eyes with my arms at the sight and sense o f assaultive traffic. My lungs filled up, my throat was sore. My doctor discovered radioactivity in my body. I longed for Oregon, for the cities not yet out o f hand and the country not yet con- dominimized. For my 31’ x 8 ’ trailer. I keep feeling like, after only two and a half years, I’ve no right to call the West my home, but I can’t deny the bubbling joy I felt at getting back here. It may be that my search for hom e isn’t over; that I haven’t finished with moving on. But it sure feels an awful lot like hom e around here. I sure do hope the geography o f gay allows this gadabout heart to rest •Seriously. Write POB 804, Grants Pass, OR 97526-0069. The P.0. Is Proud to Present: JUNE MILLINGTON* Recording Artist + Pioneer in Womyn’s Music! THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 $5 • QUEERSVILLE S U N D A Y 10:00 SUE FINK jf tam M c C a r t h y FRIDA Y 10:00 PM Recording Artist with a Feminist New Wave Sound KBOO 9 0 .7 F M Sunday SERI. 28 • WOMANSOUL Potatoe Skins. Whole Wheat Pizza and 8 pn $5, Garden Fresh Vegie Tempura! 21 A
