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
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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.
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