Authors: Fay Jacobs
Fried & True (24 page)
September 2005
LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH
With the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina playing on TV or in my head 24 hours a day, it's impossible to think of a light-hearted thing to say.
I've been picturing our gulf coast sister resorts, families in crisis, folks who lost everything and pets left behind.
I hope my favorite gay bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Café Lafitte in Exile, is still there. Just as I hope its regulars, who loved to sip that now eerily-named New Orleans drink, The Hurricane, got out safely, with places to stay and means to recover their lives.
Disasters make me think about connections and people. About counting my blessings.
And one of those blessings was a friend who rescued me. She didn't swoop down in a helicopter and pluck me off a rooftop amid swiftly rising water, but she might as well have.
I showed up at age 30, on the doorstep of this liberal, socially conscious, recently widowed, heterosexual friend in her mid-fifties. I stood there with two cat-carriers (inhabited), the clothes on my back and the need for a place to reinvent myself.
She invited me to make a nest in a downstairs apartment in her Maryland home, and for four years Mary Jane and I had a grand time as she tried to teach me to cook, taught me to drink booze without mixers, proved absolutely non-judgmental in a hostile and homophobic world, and gave me the courage and good-natured push to come out of the closet.
In addition, she had Schnauzers. She gets alternating credit and blame for my Schnauzer fixation. My first dog, Max, was a birthday gift from her. Bonnie called him the gift that kept on giving. Sometimes she meant love, sometimes other things.
Actually, Mary Jane was pretty much responsible for
Bonnie, too.
It was a windy March night in 1982 when Mary Jane would rather have had me stay home to share linguini, clam sauce and
Cagney & Lacey
, but she urged me to go out to a dance “and meet somebody for heaven's sake.”
I did. But the rest may not have been history, because, as months went by, as much as I adored Bonnie, I was plagued with guilt just thinking about telling Mary Jane I was moving out. I was certain I couldn't do it.
A short time later Mary Jane picked a terribly uncharacteristic fight with me over Margarita glasses left sticky, which quickly escalated to, “I think you better consider getting a place of your own.” I never asked and she never confessed, but we both knew she picked that fight so I'd be able to leave.
Bonnie and I stayed close to Mary Jane all these years, until she was frail, battered by disease (although still enjoying booze without mixers) and ready to go. She passed away at age 81 two weeks before Hurricane Katrina and took with her a large chunk of my heart.
But just as the subsequent New Orleans disaster sharpened my grief for her passing, it also urged attention to the important stuff.
Despite droning Katrina coverage, my rage at the inept and insensitive bureaucratic emergency response, and my sadness at losing my friend Mary Jane, I noticed the sun did shine in Rehoboth and we did have a Pride Festival on Sept.10 at our state park.
There, as I sat in my beach chair, hawking books, Bonnie shilling for me, our friend Marge arrived.
Marge is memorable. She had been Bonnie's friend since 1968 military days (and you thought there were no gays in the military!). She is a back-to-the-land militant feminist, lesbian separatist; cowboy-hat and Southwestern jewelry-wearing, outspoken gem of a dyke. When we met we had nothing in common except Bonnie.
One day in the early 80s she showed up in our redneck
Maryland town wearing a t-shirt with a drawing of, forgive me, hairy labia on it. Showing up in it at my house was shocking enough, but she wanted to go to the local diner wearing it. She reluctantly agreed to change when she saw me starting to hyperventilate.
But I remember her loudly proclaiming herself a “militant lesbian feminist” several times during dinner, to the total disgust of nuclear families at neighboring tables. Barely uncloseted, with still-smoldering internal homophobia, I was appalled. Damn, I'd like to go back to that silly community now and shout, “We're queer! I'm here, Get a life.”
It's a funny thing about Marge. Bonnie and I sometimes went years without seeing her and then we'd run into her, by chance, at a D.C. March on Washington, amid 250,000 people. It happened in 1987 and then again in 1993 in the midst of a million people. And this was before cell phones made meeting up a breeze.
Sometimes Marge would pass through town, call and we'd have a meal togetherâand then we wouldn't see her again for years. But there was always a special connection.
This time Marge found the surprise link. Several weeks before our Pride event she was deep in the woods at a lesbian retreat, dancing nekked and listening to women's music, when she went back to her cabin to read for a while. She sat on her cabin steps. A friend sat nearby, book in hand as well.
She heard her friend chuckle.
“Whatcha reading?” Marge asked.
Her friend passed her the book.
Marge stared at the cover and whooped, “Oh my gawddess I know this gal!” She flipped through the pages, shaking her head and exclaiming, “I'm stunned, it's about Fay and Bonnie-girl. Oh my gaaawwwwddess.”
So we got an e-mail asking about the book, telling us she was heading our way to attend the Nanticoke Indian Pow-Wow held every year near here, and arranging to meet at Pride.
At the festival we pow-wowed too, catching up and re-connecting.
Marge was off to Arizona, to (can you guess?) an all-lesbian retirement community.
We sat and laughed. The sun shone. Couples, troupes, singles, dual mommies with strollers, people we knew and people we didn't listened to music, shopped the vendors, made new connections and celebrated existing ones.
I am more determined than ever to celebrate those connections, cherish our friendships, and, as Suede sang here a few weeks ago, see the rose petals in life, not the thorns.
I had finished this column, having talked about connections until I was blue in the face, and was preparing to hit the “send” button to submit it to
Letters
, when an e-mail popped up.
“Hello you two wonderful womyn. It was so great visiting with you all at your pride event. It was the highlight of my trip. I absolutely love the connections we all make, and it's especially great to have them for many, many yearsâ¦may the fun continue. You're always welcome to bask in the beauty of my new home in Arizona. Sleep well and love to you both. Marge.”
Her echo of the connection theme proved a teeny bit spooky. But divine.
So I'm retooling the end of this column and as soon as I send it, I'm going to lift a Martini in memory of my rescuer Mary Jane, consider having some tofu in honor of Marge (it's the thought that counts, right?) and look up the recipe for an official New Orleans Hurricane.
Here's to recovery down South, precious friends, Gay Pride and Vodka without tonic.
October 2005
LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH
I intended to write a fluffy column this time. Following weeks of flood coverage, with Anderson Cooper interviewing anybody wearing waders, I felt we needed a break.
But that was before I read about the Vatican's new edict on gay priests. While I know little about the Catholic hierarchy I do know something about gay people. And the former has just pissed off one of the latter.
To be specific, if the Church does this dreadful discriminatory thing, seminaries nationwide will soon post “For Rent” signs. Ban gay guys from giving compassionate assistance to congregations and who'll be left in the profession, Nascar Dads?
It would be like banning lesbians from the military for goodness sake. Oh, right, our government thinks it does that.
But this new Salem-style witch hunt is so wrong-headed, so totally bass ackwards, it's delusional. You mean the Vatican just found out that a portion of the flock is queer? Give me a break.
Barring gay seminarians will make gay priests who have been serving admirably feel appallingly betrayed. Why stick with a fraternity that would blackball you from pledging? It's the reverse of Groucho's famous line that he'd never belong to a club that would have somebody like him for a member.
Let's face it. Young people questioning their sexuality haven't had it easy. Rather than crumble under pressure to conform, lots of gay people escaped to the priesthood, the nunnery, the military (mostly for the girls) or, God love it, musical theatre (mostly for the boys).
By the time gay people figured out why they felt “different” they were already enmeshed in the clergy, the infantry or dinner theatre.
Presumably, the troops and troupes had a little more freedom
to express their newly uncloseted orientation. Not so with the priesthood. A vow is a vow.
Or is it? I'll never forget Father Frank putting the moves on a friend of mine after officiating at her sister's wedding. The affair lasted several years. There are gay priests who lead double lives, too. The bottom line is that a vow of celibacy is tough for anybody. I'll bet the strays are equally straight and gay.
But what, pray tell, about pedophiles? Everybody but bigots knows that gay people and pedophiles are not synonymous; both hets and homos can suffer from the illness of pedophilia.
But in a shameful, scandalous history, the church has refused to recognize the rampant pedophilia in its ranks. In fact they colluded with the abusers by playing Sick Priest Hopscotchâspiriting pedophiles out of towns before they could be tarred and feathered and then unleashing the beasts on other unsuspecting communities.
In this whole sorry mess, the priestly pedophiles have been shuttled around like astronauts, sheltered from criminal and civil prosecution. Want to travel? Be a pedophile priest.
But has the Vatican announced a rooting out of this problem? Nooo. They're protecting the damn pedophiles by scapegoating gay folks.
I'm mad and concerned. Exactly how will the authorities screen for homosexuals? A questionnaire?
“Did Stephen Sondheim write
Company
or
Mama Mia
?
“Would you rather wear Prada or Keds?”
“Who played Vickie Lester opposite James Mason in
A Star is Born
?”
And if they do ban homosexuals from the priesthood, when the dust settles the Church will be made up of a few compassionate and truly religious heterosexual men, a bunch of offended gay priests, and a trove of pedophiles taking refuge in the church because it's a great place to meet kidsâor more likely, men whose Church-ordered repressed sexuality, homo or hetero, has caused them to behave very, very badly indeed.
Meanwhile, gays are barred from serving. The poster
priest for this debate should be The Rev. Mychal F. Judge, the New York City Fire Department chaplain who died in the 9/11 rubble.
Judge was out to his friends as a celibate gay man, admitting his orientation but keeping his vows. This man gave his life to assist the New York firefighters trapped in the towers. According to
The New York Times
, this man had a 40-year career, ministering to firefighters, their grieving widows, AIDS patients, homeless people, Flight 800 victims' families, and countless others. He was, and still is, one of the most beloved Roman Catholic priests in New Yorkâin fact, there is a movement to canonize him.
Under the Vatican's new rules, this man would not have been allowed to be ordained.
In this shocking burst of wrong-headed bigotry, the Church is blaming homosexuals for its own inability to call a pedophile a pedophile.
Someday, and I hope sooner than later, our country will wake up, follow the lead of more progressive nations and see that homosexual Americans, in the religious or secular life, want a “Gay Agenda” that looks suspiciously like the aspirations of The Constitution of the United States.
And, like previously racist politicians or vocal anti-Semites, the Catholic Church is going to be very embarrassed. Very.
Let my people comeâ¦to any calling they choose.
