Family vacation

No, not my family - Susanne's. Rusty, her brother his wife, Amy, and their son John. Cousin David, his wife, Debbie, and their daughter, Wendy. The weekend before last, I met up with Susanne in Ithaca and then drove up to a spot on Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, where they'd rented a cottage for the week. Cayuga juts northward from Ithaca and goes for 40 miles. The cottage had a lovely little yard that ran right down to a dock, where Rusty had a small sailboat. The weather was at least 10 degrees cooler and lots less humid than the city had been.

It's kind of odd to hang out with people you've heard about for years but never met - you know things about them -- some things that are maybe not so positive -- that you can't mention. So there's a strange sort of dissonance. They turned out to be very nice people, quite hospitable and fun to hang out with. They were the people I had heard about in some ways, but not in others. As much as we talk about our families to our friends, we can't really convey the absolute truth about them, because there is no absolute truth - just our experiences and peculiar biases and conflicted feelings about the people we love.

So, Susanne, thanks for the pleasure of your company on Cayuga Lake - and for the experience of meeting your family - not so different from my family, after all.

Switch gears now, to the trips up and back. I took the Greyhound, and I honestly don't think I've been on a Greyhound since taking a trip to Port Angeles sometime back in the '80s, before Sophie was born. This was also my first trip upstate since moving here.

The trip north was pretty uneventful, except for the fact that the bus driver at the Port Authority (the infamous Port Authority) had some sort of system for seating his passengers that he couldn't explain very clearly. Some seats were "reserved" but not really, so people would sit in them and then he would make them move, get off the bus, let more people on, and then make another group of transgressors move. Then suddenly, all bets were off and those seats were open to anyone. Before we got on the road, he announced over the mike that he wanted us to know he wasn't showing any bias towards any individual or group - just following some arcane Greyhound rules. But to my ear, he sounded like the Emperor of the Bus, a petty tyrant with a tiny, mobile kingdom all his own. Not a bad guy, but definitely happy to be In Charge.

My fellow passengers made up a sort of low-rent UN - there must have a dozen nationalities represented, and several entire families with kids, aunts, uncles, grandparents, many with Canada as their ultimate destination - 12 or 13 hours on the bus. (My trip was only about 5 hours.)

I got off in Binghamton and tranferred to a Shortline Bus for the last leg to Ithaca. The bus station was stuck in the '70s - see the yellow plastic chairs in the picture -- and in some lonely corner of Lost America. It was nice to get back on the bus again and cruise through the low, green Adirondacks towards Ithaca.

After three days in Ithaca and environs, I was back on the bus. This time, it was a different cast and crew. The conversation between the two guys behind me quickly drifted to drugs. The older of the two - he later said he was 40 - was full of advice for his young seatmate, who was maybe 18 or 19. The relative merits of Perc and Oxy, Beck's and PBR, the cost effectiveness of buying a kilo of coke for $8K, splitting it into 8-balls, and selling them for $100-$150 each. By Mr. Big's calculations, you could turn the $8K investment into $25K.

"I get everything wholesale. I buy two kilos, keep one for myself and sell the other." By now, Mr. B was clearly enjoying his role as teacher to The Kid. I had the impression they had just met on the bus. The younger guy said he had been visiting family upstate and was heading back home to Florida (another unbelieveably long bus ride . . .). Mr. Big assessed the status of Utica and Ithaca as drug markets and came down on the side of Utica. He bragged about having fought the police when he was arrested at some point in the past - his punishment for resisting, he said, was that they confiscated his expensive sneakers. He told his stories in a raspy, supremely confident New Yorkese. He was from the Bronx.

Pretty soon, a sale was made and the Kid took his pills and drifted off to sleep. (I didn't see any of this, mind you - just overheard it.)

Mr. Big also had an appreciation for good cheese. "Once, I went on this trip to this place where there was nothing but Amish. They make this cheese, man, and it is SO soft. They send their guys to the city and they don't even know what they're doing. They look like f--king Jews."

The conversation shifts to tourism as we near the city. Two women on the bus mention that they've never been to New York - they're looking out the windows for the skyline and keep mistaking Jersey cities for NYC. Mr. Big explained that there were certain places they should avoid but he wouldn't be more specific than "parts of Chinatown at night" or certain areas around Times Square. They said they'd heard the Bronx was bad, but he demurred. "It used to be," he said, "but now you go to the Bronx and you think you're in Queens, it's so pretty. They got cul de sacs and everything."

Welcome home.

(more pics here)

My favorite lesbians

I went with Sophie and Melissa to the NYC Pride parade last weekend - it was an especially auspicious year for this celebration because it was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Seeing the veterans of Stonewall riding by on a float was at once heartening and sad. Many are now old men, and they still can't legally marry or live entirely free of fear that they could be the victims of anti-gay violence - even on some of the streets of liberal New York.

I imagine their stories are hard for people of Melissa and Sophie's generation to grasp, though they and the other younger people in the crowd absolutely recognize the contribution of these gay elders and they cheered them as they went by - they are heroes to all of their gay "children" and "grandchildren." And to people like me as well - parents of young men and women who are just trying to get on in the world and live their lives as free Americans. Stonewall is Selma.

This week's New Yorker quoted an article called "The Homosexual in America" that was published in 1966 in Time magazine: "[Homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness."

Back in those days, when I was in high school, I read Time voraciously. It was a sort of pop culture Bible to a certain people of my generation, and I am horrified to think that I was reading that sort of crap.

Times change, but not that much in some ways. I will never forget stopping with Sophie in Laramie, Wyoming, when we drove cross-country from Seattle to Poughkeepsie in 2003. It was just a few years after the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, and we pulled over to take some pictures of one of those lonesome stretches of fence that go for on for miles in that part of the west. Suddenly, Sophie started to cry -- and I knew right away what she was thinking. This was much like the spot where Matthew had been tied to a fence, beaten, and left to die. We both realized the horrifying implication -- that you could be targeted for violence simply because you were gay, plain and simple.

Now, 40 years after Stonewall and 11 years after Matthew Shepard, a parade seems a slight way to recognize the veterans of the struggle. But it does provide a moment of solidarity, and a chance to remind people of the gay rights issues that are critically important right now -- the fight for marriage equality and the struggle to get rid of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't ask, don't tell.

Bare butts and drag may seem frivolous, but in a way that's what it's all about - the freedom to pursue your own happiness. See more pictures here.