Queer on the Road in America

   I came out as a gay man to my parents and siblings in 1975. I was eighteen. We lived in a suburb of San Francisco, and "Gay Liberation"--the push for freedom from oppression by Baby Boom-era gays and lesbians--was in the air. I had come to feel, after four difficult years of private struggle, that it would be best to live truthfully. This did not make me noble. It was simply a case of enlightened self-interest: I wanted to be free of the pernicious psychological divisions of what came to be called "the closet."
   My family mostly embraced me. (A few questions, quite understandably, were asked). In this I was fortunate. Later, as an inveterate natural interviewer of everyone I met (not for nothing did I eventually become a journalist), I heard horrific stories of young queer people forced from their homes. I have never been a parent, but I cannot imagine expelling a child from the family womb for any reason, including being true to whom she is.
   Others were not so sanguine about my dawning truth; a few friendships broke under the weight of it. But then, are late adolescence and early young adulthood easy for anyone? I know I found them difficult, especially regarding sexual orientation. For every tentative step toward freedom, there were sometimes two backward into the "safety" of denial. At college, for example, I held a rather public position on campus, and never felt I could square it with being gay. So I hid, or at least didn't deal with, my sexuality in what could have been the perfect time and place to do so.

   In early 1983, shortly after turning twenty-six, I moved into San Francisco, the obvious place for a young gay man from the Bay Area--or from just about anywhere in America, at that time.
   Sadly, many of the brave and festive souls of the "Gay Lib" era began succumbing to AIDS, then in its baleful infancy. Even with the shadow of that terrible illness hovering, however, I found a community of like-minded souls and more or less completed my coming-out process.
  When one is of an orientation largely reviled by great swaths of one's country, one tends to hunker down with those of similar ilk. Much time is spent in trying to understand one's place in the immediate and broader world. There are considerations of physical safety and questions of societal acceptance vs. ostracism, never mind the usual life lessons of getting into (and out of) relationships, sustaining friendships, holding jobs and paying bills.
   If it seems to some that LGBT people think an awful lot about their "identity," well, there's a reason for it, at least at the outset: it's tough to know who you are, and where and how you belong, when half or more of the world says you shouldn't exist.

   After eighteen more or less happy years in San Francisco, I moved, in the early aughts, to a town of twenty-eight thousand souls on the Peninsula, a half-hour south of the city. For the first time in my adult life, I did not live in the so-called "gay ghetto"--in my case, San Francisco's Castro district. (I never actually lived in that neighborhood, but I spent plenty of time there.)
   I was by then in my early forties. Living in a largely heterosexual world renewed the challenge of feeling comfortable with my sexual orientation. "Coming out" is an ongoing process. This is especially true when heterosexuals assume that you're one of them, largely because some of them don't readily conceptualize people as being any other way.
   As it happened, living in that area shifted my perspective. The people who mattered to me accepted me fully (just as I accepted them). In time, I realized I'd become a man in the world who happened to be gay, not a gay man who happened to live in the world (or didn't, because he had stayed in the "ghetto"). Arguably, a maturing process happens for some queer people: one eventually moves out from the safety and support of like-minded folk in order to exist in and enjoy the larger world.
   For me, the sea change came when I saw, to my surprise, that my fears of ostracism had ossified into tightly-held grievances. You don't understand--that was my underlying approach to the world. I was chagrined to note that it fostered an unconscious delusion: the pain I'd endured entitled me to behave noxiously.
   I came to see that I'd never be free as long as lived in the seemingly protective castle of resentment. Castles look like fortresses--but so do prisons. I had to dissolve the castle walls: release perceived injustices, forgive past injuries (mine and others'). In that way lay true liberation.
 
   But the coming-out and life-review processes are never quite finished. Recently, my partner, Tim, and I moved from that small Peninsula town to an area of nearly fifty-three thousand people in Florida, an hour south of St. Petersburg. We drove Tim's car cross-country, zooming along Interstate 10 through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and into Florida.
   It was a different America that the one we knew in the Bay Area. Yes, we had been a couple in a small Peninsula town with no discernible gay presence. But that was in the Bay Area, which, although more conservative than its reputation would suggest, is nevertheless still fairly progressive. "Live and let live" is the motto there, even if it's now whispered more than shouted (or sung).
   Along Interstate 10, by contrast, billboards touted the Bible as "the One True Word." Others asked where we planned to spend Eternity. (My answer: right here on Earth, in that stupid, grinding Houston traffic snarl that cost us at least an hour of travel time one day.) Jacked-up trucks flew Confederate flags. We were passing through the land of "religious liberty," where some store owners and/or employees want to refuse service to LGBT people based on "religious beliefs." This was not necessarily a land naturally hospitable to queer people, a thought never far from my mind.
   For this reason, I felt it best that we stick to chain hotels along the main highway. After all, we were renting rooms with one King-sized bed. I even considered renting rooms with two Queen-sized beds, implying to nosy hotel staff that Tim and I are "just friends." But I then realized that those rooms would need closets large enough to hide us and our cowardice. (It surprised us, furthermore, to learn that two-Queen-bed rooms cost more than single-bed ones. In the land of chain hotels, being in a couple is both soul-sustaining and fiscally prudent.)
   Anyway, I figured that nobody in a globally-branded hotel chain was going to pull the "religious liberty" excuse to ignore us--at least not if the chain didn't want an international viral incident, which no corporation does. I figured right. We were left to our own devices, for which I was grateful. I'm not sure this would have been the case had we detoured from the main highway into the back country in some of these spots, but time pressures prevented us from doing that kind of exploring, anyway.

   Perhaps, in the end, I made too big a deal of my inchoate terrors. Perhaps fear blinded me to the truth that most Americans, not just Bay Areans, are live-and-let-live types, the current degraded civic discourse notwithstanding. (A few noxious people do not a country make.)
   I don't know. My recent experiences simply brought home that the ancient scars of oppression never fully heal. It is a balm to be among one's own kind; it is yet more disenthralling to face the old fears in order to walk freely in the world.
   Even if in it's the world of, like, a Holiday Inn or something.
 
 

 
 

Heat Stroked

   The Florida heat does something to you, and it's not something, I am happy to report, that is altogether terrible.
   Tim and I have been staying in St. Petersburg for a few days preparatory to moving, tomorrow, to Bradenton, an hour south. On our recently-completed seven-day car trip, which began in the San Francisco Bay Area, we passed through the California desert, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, bits of Mississippi and Alabama, and finally into Florida.
   It wasn't until Louisiana that we left behind the dry heat of the Western states, where temperatures had hovered at ninety degrees. Indeed, it was a hundred or more in Phoenix, where we stopped for lunch and companionship with my younger brother and his wife and step-son. I do not like dry heat, and was relieved to feel the sticky warmth of the Deep South. (Along with the change in humidity came a change in action and attitude. Texans drove fast and aggressively. Louisianians, by contrast, seemed relaxed, and restaurant servers called us "honey," "baby," "sweetheart," and so on.)
   As it turned out, we witnessed a few distant thunderstorms in Texas. But not until Florida did it really start coming down. Indeed, we drove into St. Petersburg, the end of the road, literally under a cloud, a monstrous ebony construction that dropped rain like bullets. Some people would consider that a bad omen; to us, both rain lovers, it seemed a blessing.

   We're staying at a St. Petersburg Air BnB rental in Old Northeast, a funky historical district of red-brick-paved streets, narrow sidewalks overhung with lush tropical foliage, gorgeous old homes and a general air of gentility and grace. Our rental is a one-bedroom unit detached from the owner's two-story home. I am sitting in a blue plastic Adirondack chair on the screened-in patio, next to a pool. A cup of iced coffee rests on a round wire table next to me. The pool glints blue in the occasional sun that peeks through the gray and white cumulonimbus clouds above.
   A couple of dramatic thunderstorms have rolled in since we've arrived. Rain pounds, lightning blinks the sky bright, thunder alternately booms and cracks like the snap at the tip of a whip. The forecast calls for more next week. Neither Tim nor I complain; having moved from (until recently) drought-fried California, we're delighted when the sky opens up.

   But it's the heat that makes the storms, and this area, interesting. Temperatures have stayed in the mid-to-high eighties; nothing like what we'll see in a month or two, but warm enough for a former Northern Californian.
   I've long pledged allegiance to chilly weather. For thirty years I lived in San Francisco, a city famously cooled by fog. More recently, Tim and I lived south of that city, on the Peninsula. I found the dry summer heat there oppressive. I'd grouse to one and all that my body runs warm, so I value cooler climes.
   Life is a master jester, so when it (and academia) placed Tim in grad school in Bradenton (he starts Monday), I just had to laugh. Cooler climes? Ha! But when, a few weeks ago, we visited St. Pete (not, I've been warned, "St. Pete's," which is to this city what "Frisco" is to San Francisco), I was struck by how much I enjoyed the tropical heat. To be sure, it's not the humid heat we'll get at the apex of summer, which may wind up feeling debilitating. (Two different natives have already lamented that we've arrived in the worst part of the year. Summer heat, as one put it, is "brutal.") But it's hotter than what we're used to, and in a different way.

   Granted, even this current humid heat can feel slightly stupefying. Not for nothing the hoary cliche of the "sultry South." One tends to move more slowly, an animal response to conserve energy and prevent overheating. As with the physical, so with the mental: the mind tends to slow, too. Suddenly it's enough just to... sit. I've been out here for the past hour. Stunned by the heat, I've been content to gaze lazily at the activity around me.
   Outside the screen, not far from me, a series of white pipes enter and exit the mechanisms of the pool's filtration system. Two lizards, one slightly larger than the other, have been resting on one of the pipes for nearly as long as I've been here. The dark-colored, larger one's throat area occasionally puffs out orange-red. The two of them have patiently clung, facing the ground, to a vertical pipe. They, too, appear heat-dazed, but what do I know of local fauna? They could be perfectly comfortable and chatting about dinner plans.
   Earlier, a squirrel skittered atop a tall wooden fence beyond the pipes. He appeared surprisingly thin. Tim sensibly posited that the heat precludes the need for extra animal fat. It is also possible that there just ain't enough nuts around here to properly fill him.
   Again: what do I know? In addition to relaxing my body, the afternoon heat has turned my mind to mush. I am therefore too lazy to take a stab at searching Wikipedia. And offering a plausible theory is, at the moment, well beyond my evidently diminishing mental capacities.
   So, alas, is any ability to think of a snappy finish to this heat-soaked piece. So we'll just leave it at that, as I head into our temporary--and blessedly air-conditioned--home.

 

I Got the Blues

   It is late in the day to talk about this, since it happened half a year ago, but I never got around to commenting on the Dec. 2 release of "Blue and Lonesome," the Rolling Stones' first studio album in more than a decade. This is a ghastly oversight for a forty-five-year Stones fanatic. 

   The album collects obscure cuts by bluesmen such as Buddy Johnson, Magic Sam, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and others. (There are no original songs.) The band recorded it over a three-day period in December 2015, at Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios, in West London (Chiswick). They'd gathered to work out new songs. But guitarist Keith Richards, in interviews published with the album's release, said that “the room” was “fighting the band.” To get comfortable, the musicians kicked around the Memphis Slim song “Blue and Lonesome.” Singer Mick Jagger enjoyed the experience and called for another. Within three days the band had knocked out the twelve blues covers. Two include guest appearances by guitarist Eric Clapton, who happened to be recording down the hall. He sat in after stopping by to say hello.

   It is a stupendous album. The band swings and sways lazily, living in the pocket of the groove. Mick Jagger eschews his recent mannered vocal style for an approach that's honest and wild. His harmonica playing burns with yearning.  Richards' and Ronnie Wood's guitars snarl locomotively. Drummer Charlie Watts plays with crisp snap, bringing a jazzman's sensibility to the swampy tunes.

   Some reviewers raised the question of cultural appropriation. How, they asked, can rich white millionaires perform a music derived from the most painful aspects of African-American experiences of slavery and oppression? But long before the Stones became globally famous and, later, an ongoing corporate performing enterprise, they started out as a bunch of skinny teenaged English boys who revered and mimicked black American blues. Keith Richards has said the young band saw itself, in the early nineteen-sixties, as "purists" who wanted to expose the music to English audiences. Later, he has said, the band did the same for white American audiences, introducing them to a homegrown music they might not have known existed. Indeed, blues guitarist B.B. King and soul singers Ike and Tina Turner opened the band's 1969 U.S. tour. Three years later, Motown phenom Stevie Wonder had the opening slot, which, three years after that, belonged to the New Orleans funk group The Meters. 

   Intellectual questions aside, "Blue and Lonesome" rocks and swings with controlled abandon. It sounds as if the Stones, now in their seventies, have put enough miles on the odometer to inhabit these songs in a way that their teenaged selves could only dream of doing. 

   In interviews near the album's release date, Jagger said the band has four or five songs ready for an album of originals. But one senses it's a matter of pulling teeth for the band to get a new album together. If catastrophe strikes, and "Blue and Lonesome" winds up being their final album, it’s a perfect full-circle testament to the band’s roots, to the tremendous arc of their mad trajectory through more than a half-century of global history, and to their coming to rest where they started: with the pain and sleaze and contrary-seeming life force of the blues.

   The band had a busy 2016, which began with a tour of Latin American countries and culminated, March 25, with a free show in Havana, Cuba, in front of a crowd estimated to number a million. (They have European dates on the books for this fall.)

   A film of that concert, "Havana Moon," is available for streaming, as is a companion documentary about the tour, called "Ole Ole Ole: A Trip Across Latin America." That movie had a one-night screening in various theaters on Dec. 12, and a friend and I caught it at a local cineplex. 

   The drama of putting on the Havana show provides a minor plot engine for the film, directed by Paul Dugdale, which otherwise shows the Stones backstage, offstage, and occasionally onstage, in places such as Peru, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. 

   It is as much travel documentary as a diary of tiny, aged rock stars finding their way around a region they hadn’t visited in a decade. There are shots of kids playing soccer, women of the night standing on street corners, people dancing, shanties crowding hilltops. 

   Each Stone has a moment of his own in the film. Ronnie Wood visits a painter friend and talks about how art--Wood is a painter and illustrator--helps his music, and vice versa. Mick Jagger walks alone in a cemetery (what symbolism, that?), which was no doubt closed to the public for his convenience, and talks about performing. Keith Richards leads a film crew through his hotel room (door opens, Keith chortles, “Gentlemen! I thought you were room service!”) and onto a small balcony overlooking crowds howling his name. “I wake up to ‘Richards! Richards! Richards!'" he says. "I hear that, and it’s, ‘Well, I guess it’s time to get up!’” (Hur hur hur hur.) Charlie Watts, shown drumming in slow motion, talks about, well, drumming, and the jazzmen who influenced him. 

   A backstage shot finds Mick and Keith leaning casually against travel cases and reminiscing about visiting Brazil, in 1968, with Marianne Faithfull (then Mick's girlfriend) and Anita Pallenberg (then Keith's). It was there that they came up with “Honky Tonk Women,” originally conceived as a country song ("Country Honk" appears on the 1969 album Let it Bleed). Moments later, slouching on chairs in front of open wardrobe cases, they sing a couple of verses and choruses of the song, Keith strumming an acoustic guitar. It is an incredibly touching moment.

   The film focuses heavily on the band's fans, especially the “Ringolas” of Argentina, who have made a religion of the Stones. It's evident that for them to see the Stones in akin to witnessing a minor Second Coming. 

   Yes, the film is part hagiography, part propaganda, part celebration of the Stones’ incredibly huge collective ego. But it’s also a fair record, if one made by the State Apparatus of the Rolling Stones, of the incredible global effect the band has had, and not just in the spoiled West. Few if any other bands can claim such a massive and long-lasting effect, and there is an undercurrent of melancholy attaching to this filmic record: time is chasing down these tiny giants, and they will not be forever among us.
    

"Air" Heads

   Two nights ago Tim and I stayed at an Air BnB in northern Palm Springs, and the experience revealed the sometimes looming minor shadow side of the “sharing economy.” Oh, nothing was horribly horrible. It's just that the adventure of travel sometimes offers up realities that don’t quite square with  fantasies or expectations, not that one has many of those left at this late date.  

   The stand-alone rooms were in a house owned by a gay couple in middle age--let's call them Davis and Stoolan--and situated in a slightly seedy neighborhood of one-story stucco affairs with parched front yards. The tiny bedroom had an uncomfortable twin bed and a desk. Beyond a nicely-appointed bathroom was a cozy kitchen with a fridge and stainless steel sink. 

   D & S had peppered about the place three separate page-long typed instruction notes, in laminated sleeves. The couple also had made an effort to decorate the place—Bette Midler and Liza Minelli posters suggest their aesthetic—and while there was nothing particularly wrong with it, it all felt a bit… off.

   So was our visit, from the very start. From the kitchen, a door led to the back patio and swimming pool. Venetian blinds covered it. When Tim pulled a string to open them, the blinds came crashing to the floor, making an impressive racket. “Oops,” Tim said. 

   Soon a balding man appeared on the patio. When I opened the kitchen door, he introduced himself as Davis. I said, "We had a little trouble with the blinds.” 

   “I heard,” he said, but he was friendly and forgiving  as he set about repairing them. 

   As it happened, they were affixed to the door by magnetized brackets. This made it inevitable, it seemed to me, that they'd come undone and fall to the floor. But, Davis explained, “We didn’t want to drill into the door."

   Davis presently excused himself, and Tim and I prepared to head downtown for dinner. 

   The door to our little place had a complex-seeming electronic lock. You pressed the keypad code and then a button marked with the image of a combination lock. Tim had operated it when we'd arrived. (Technological items and I long ago reached a truce: I won't use them; they, in turn, won't break.) 

   Now, on his way out to warm up the car, Tim said, "Just push the lock when you leave." I gathered my stuff and, at the door, turned the little mechanism on the inside door knob to lock it. Tim had said to "push the lock." I figured I knew what he meant. Tim is Taiwan-born; having lived in the U.S. for a decade, he speaks excellent English. Only occasionally does he muddle a word or a phrase. He had said, "Push the lock"; I assumed he'd meant, "Turn the doorknob lock mechanism." 

   After dinner, Tim dropped me back at our Air BnB so he could drive to a pharmacy. At the door, I punched in the code, pressed the "lock" button, and attempted to turn the knob. It didn't budge. And the keypad contraption didn't make the electronic wheezing sound I remembered from when Tim had used it. I tried several times, with similar results. Finally, dazed, I called Tim; he said he’d return. 

   While I waited, a white Mercedes drifted into the driveway, and a stocky man emerged. He offered a wide, bright smile and extended his hand, introducing himself as Stoolan. There was about him something of the excitable canine.
   I explained my predicament with the lock. 

   “No problem!” Stoolan chirped, enthusiastically. “We’re on the same team!” I wondered if he was in corporate Human Resources.

   He punched in the code, pressed the "lock" button, and tried the door handle. It didn't budge, and I felt momentarily vindicated.

   “Ah—that’s what it is,” he said. Evidently, by turning the inner doorknob's lock mechanism I'd shut us out. When Tim had said, "Push the lock," he'd meant, "Push the lock"--that is, the keypad button with the "lock" image on it. That's how I was supposed to lock the door.
   I apologized to Stoolan, muttering darkly about my technological illiteracy. 

   "Hey," he cried. "No big deal! We're on the same team! I'll go around and let you in." 

   A few hours later, Tim and I readied ourselves for bed.

   That’s when Tim discovered, to his horror, the ants.

   Tim doesn’t like bugs. He doesn’t like insects. He doesn’t like anything that crawls. Many times I’ve used a piece of paper towel to carry a wall-hanging spider out of our home and into the great out of doors. In extreme cases I’ve killed the things, but I don’t like to. As much as Tim loathes creepy-crawly creatures, I don’t like to end a life. Everybody lives—that’s my motto.

   We spent a moment considering what to do. Bailing seemed an option. "We could find a hotel downtown," I ventured. Tim demurred: "I’m too tired.” I agreed. So we were faced with the ants.

   They crawled in a line across the kitchen counter, down the wall, along the floor, and into the bathroom. I discovered a can of Cutter, an insect repellent, on a shelf, and sprayed the ant conga line into silence. (Here the motto “everybody lives” takes a back seat to the one saying “my life will be easier if Tim is happy.”) Tim still found random ants crawling in various areas, to his consternation, and urged me to get my suitcase off the floor.

   Finally, frustrated, I called Stoolan. He answered right away, to his credit. When I mentioned the ants, he said, “Oh, yes, if you’d read the note you’d have seen that we have them in the hotter weather. There’s a can of Cutter on the shelf in the kitchen, and if you spray…” I said I’d found the can, and was spraying. He said that should do the trick, and added, for good measure, “If you’d read the note you would have known about that.” He said it cheerfully, of course—we’re on the same team!—but he was plainly ensuring that I knew the error was mine.

   After we hung up, I picked up a note from a small front-room table. At the top it read, “THIS IS A NO-SMOKING HOUSEHOLD.” Below that was a short disquisition on ants and hot weather (“We’ve had everything sprayed!”) which ended by directing the reader to the can of Cutter.
   I am not much of a direction-follower—I do not say that proudly—and so I realized that when I’d seen the no-smoking message in capital letters at the top of the page, earlier in the evening, I’d declined to read the rest of the note. Who knew that informational treasures therein lay buried?

   After a rocky night's sleep, we were glad to put the place in our rearview mirror the next morning. We considered whether or not to write a review on the Air BnB site, but it struck us that even a gently mixed one—especially if it mentioned ants—might elicit a return review from Davis and Stoolan detailing the Venetian blinds fiasco and our evident inability to read notes and follow simple directions. We declared it a wash, and decided not to write anything a'tall.

   The challenging thing about travel, of course, is also what makes it exciting: you never know what’s going to happen. Yes, certain general expectations would seem to apply to something like an Air BnB room—for one, you’d reasonably presume you'll not encounter ants—but that’s the joy of travel; you never really know. 

   Best of all, on a trip like ours, is the fact that however uncomfortable a place turns out to be, you know you’ll leave it the next morning.