One side of our family, mine, is almost entirely Catholic. The other side, Ami’s, is mostly Mormon. I’m not going to identify the relative who sent the note because much as this card hurt us both, it came from someone whom we both want to continue to have in our lives. And while it was one person who expressed the thought, it could have come from a number of our family members from both sides. We will call the writer Chris.

The front of the card said, “Thinking of You,” and the envelope was addressed to both of us. It was from one of the relatives we had visited on our trip. Inside there was an affirmation that we were always welcome in Chris’s house. Then it said, “I don’t think of your relationship as a marriage! nor do I like how you’re living it!” That first exclamation point was obviously inserted as an afterthought. It was signed “Love, Chris.”

To say that the card hurt us is an extraordinary understatement. Even days later, this card makes me cry.

When we visited, Chris had made no indication that our family was anything but a family, and seemed to very much welcome Frances. There were gifts for her, and at Chris’s request, we agreed to send a portrait of Frances to go with the other family photos Chris had on display. Everyone got hugs on the way out the door.

So what happened between the visit and our return home that made Chris write that card? I suspect guilt at having defied his or her church in some small way for having welcomed us. I suspect shame–maybe Sunday came around, and at church Chris worried that some other congregant might know and think poorly of Chris.

If I were to write a response, it would say something like this:

Dear Chris,

Thank you for welcoming us to your home. We very much enjoyed our visit and do plan to return.

However, we do have to say that we do not believe in the Catholic (Mormon) faith, nor do we like how the church is behaving. It has hurt us in both personal and practical ways, and has hurt many other people in our community as well.

Love,
Ruby

How have the queers hurt you, Chris? I can ennumerate the ways that the Catholic and Mormon churches have hurt us. 1. Proposition 8. 2. Question 1. We’re just trying to have our own private lives while your churches are pouring money into state ballot measures–money collected from congregations all over the world–in order to keep us in our closets, keep us ashamed.

That Chris wrote the note to both of us–her biological family member, with whom she might feel an entitlement to express her opinion, as well as to the in-law she doesn’t believe in–implies that s/he feels a moral latitude to correct gayness in the world at large.

The subtext of that note is this: you should feel ashamed of your relationship. God and I think so. You can come to my house, and we’ll all pretend to be a family, but you need to feel shame while you are in my home.

I will not be ashamed.

Chris, you are a member of my family. I will visit your home, and I will participate in your life to the extent you allow, as long as you never express or even imply your opinion on the subject to our daughter. I will keep quiet about your private correspondence to us, and I will not send my response, out of deference to your esteemed place in the family.

But I will never be ashamed or act ashamed of my family or whom I love. This is where the charade ends.

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Cheese Store of Silverlake

We left the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles in the afternoon, in the last hour of pink-sienna-magenta sky before twilight. I’d sampled amazing Italian olive oil at The Cheese Store of Silver Lake, taken a delightful turn through the ReForm School, and eaten the best gelato of my life (Market plum! Chocolate covered raisin! Salty chocolate!) at Pazzo Gelato.

We were sad to leave L.A., but I was even sadder that we were leaving for Fresno.

Fresno: n., The place that you struggled to leave physically many years ago, but still struggle to leave mentally. A place you don’t like to visit, because as soon as you’re back it seems like nothing ever got better at all.

You know what, though? I’m married in Fresno. And I have my family with me. So maybe there’s only one coffee shop (Thanks for the WiFi, guys!) downtown, only one or two gay bars (Glad to see you still bustling, Veni Vidi Vici.). Maybe it freezes at night and you can’t stand to be in the sun after 11 a.m. So what if the public transportation consists of your cousin’s tattered 10-speed and FART, the Fresno Area Rapid Transit?

Fresno has a PFLAG chapter, a Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in its 20th year, and a Gay Fresno website.

After a less-than-perfect morning with my mother, who is an active Mormon, Ruby reached out to the local PFLAG chapter. They were empathetic, and invited Mom to a meeting, even offering to meet with her beforehand to talk. But ultimately it would be up to her to contact them, and only then would she be able to access the literature she desperately needs to begin to understand us. The likelihood that she would do so seemed, well, slim. So the search continued.

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but we found a group of Mormons for Marriage.  As in our marriage.

I cried. At first, when Ruby said, “There must be Mormons out there that support their gay family members,” I didn’t even respond. I thought, Ya, like there must be a Protestant Pope. I’m sure he has a website, too. But lo and behold: “Mormons for Marriage supports marriage equality for all, and stands in respectful opposition to California Proposition 8.” There’s even The Feminist Mormon Housewives, and the Family Fellowship–a volunteer service organization, “a diverse collection of Mormon families engaged in the cause of strengthening families with homosexual members.”

Ruby wrote an e-mail to Mormons for Marriage, and a woman named Laura immediately wrote back. She attached four documents written by Mormons who are LGBT or support LGBT people. She copied another woman who she thought may know some people in Fresno. They even mentioned a book: No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons Around Our Gay Loved Ones.

Maybe Mom won’t read the book when we buy it for her. Maybe she will and even then still say things like, “I’m sad in my heart [about the fact that your aunts outed you to your grandmother], but your grandma and your aunts love you, no matter what choices you make.” Maybe my wife will still cry in the living room once Mom has left for work, feeling like she was that ill-advised “choice.”

But today, in sunny, oppressive Fresno where I once learned internalized homophobia, I found just a little hope for our family. Our whole family.

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But nearly 22%, 192 people, voted to uphold the law. Doesn’t sound like much, it’s true. How about this number? 219,897–that’s the number of people who voted to approve R-71 in the yellow counties, the ones like Garfield County, in which a majority of voters rejected R-71.

In Washington, as is the case in many other states in which one area’s population is massive and the rest of the state’s just isn’t, the Puget Sound area of Western Washington and its left-leaning voters usually win statewide elections. This creates a lot of bitterness in the eastern part of the state, and I guess I can understand why. It would suck to feel like your vote didn’t count.

And in case I didn’t remind you yet today, we are winning in Washington. Approve R-71 holds its lead. Sorry, Eastern WA (not really).

219,897. That’s 37% of the current count of votes in favor of R-71. That’s 219,897 people in the more conservative areas of Washington who didn’t succumb to the pressure of their neighbors to reject the rights of same-sex couples. As much as it mattered that King County and other Puget Sound residents sent in their ballots this year to put R-71 over the top, it mattered that these people did, too. I want to thank each one of those 219,897 people, but I especially want to thank the 192 Approve voters in Garfield County. You are my heroes of the day.

A few days ago we were in Clayton, Georgia, population 2019. We drove up from our campsite at Talullah Gorge State Park about 10 miles south to visit Wendy’s. No, it wasn’t because we wanted a Frosty. Wendy’s is one of the few places in Clayton, Georgia that has free WiFi for its guests, an amenity usually missing from state park campgrounds.

We were there for about a half hour when another WiFi user, a guy, came in and sat across from us, next to the only visible outlet in the place. We exchanged pleasantries, and almost immediately my gaydar went off. No, Ruby. This is small-town Georgia.

We started talking with him about Frances, and several times he dropped hints about his sexual orientation. Still I argued with myself. What were the odds? We were nearly the only people in the place. But when he said, “Well, I’m not going to have children unless they figure out a way for men to give birth,” I had to admit it: this guy was gay.

We spent hours in that Wendy’s, talking to Brandon and eventually his friend Kristen, a straight ally. We talked about the difficulty of being out and gay in a small town, worrying about your safety. We agreed that the recently-passed federal hate crimes law was a good thing.

Then Brandon and Kristen told us about other gay people in the area. There was a gay couple who owned a restaurant that we could see through the window from where we sat. Down the road was a bar owned by a lesbian couple, an LGBT hangout. And nearby, Brandon told us proudly, was an all-LGBT church. Just over the border in North Carolina, he said, was a small town that had one of the highest per capita gay populations in the country.

We were kind of floored by this. I think I used to believe that part of the coming out process for everyone who wasn’t born in a big liberal city was to move to one. And maybe that’s usually true. But some people stay, or come back. And they have friends.

In Garfield County, Washington, they have 192 friends. Brave, wonderful friends who vote with their hearts to protect our rights throughout the state of Washington.

*Note: the numbers change frequently as remaining votes are counted. All numbers quoted are as of 6:39 a.m. PST on 11/5.

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Welcome to Vermont!

If you’re thinking about taking your RV to New York City, don’t. There’s only one RV park anywhere nearby, and it’s a parking lot on the Jersey side of New York Harbor. When I say parking lot, this is not a poetic interpretation of a relatively plain RV park. This place had half the charm of your average rest stop. It was next to a marina and an empty, overgrown lot, and the RVs were so close to each other that you and your neighbor could reach out and shake each other’s hands. Public transportation was very close, and it was damned close to the city. The City. But still.

The experience also illustrated how crippled we are without an Internet connection. Liberty Harbor RV Park did not have wireless. Hence our long absence from the blog.

We did have Internet last night at the Quality Inn in Albany–hard won Internet. We were pretty road-weary after a stop at the outlet mall to get Frances some warmer clothes, and were having trouble locating an RV park that wasn’t closed for the winter. So we decided to use Hotels.com to get a room for the night. Luxurious two-star hotel style.

The Hotels.com app was working poorly with my Edge connection (really, AT&T?), so I called. After touting the Internet connection and the price, the operator talked me into a night at the Red Roof Inn. So when I got there and found that the Internet required an additional fee–times two, for two computers, I was pretty upset. I called and got my money back; we checked out, and the helpful phone operators of Priceline.com found us the Quality Inn. I don’t have much to complain about there, except that the pool gave Frances a rash. But I guess that could have happened anywhere. I guess. And the nurse line says it doesn’t require treatment.

Art by Bethann Shannon, South Street Cafe, Bennington

Currently I’m writing this from the South Street Cafe in Bennington, Vermont, surrounded by Mexican-inspired pop art canvases of multiple sizes and shapes. It’s pleasant, and the homemade bread is amazing. We ran into a couple from San Francisco and their five-month-old son, Henry. We talked babies, breastfeeding, and marriage equality. Nobody here has looked twice at us except to admire Frances in her outlet mall finery.

Something I’ve been thinking about: what legal marriage means as far as how we’re seen. At the Quality Inn there was a group of junior high school cheerleaders in town for a competition. Maybe because of their age, the parents of the girls seemed standoffish and stiff around us. I don’t know where they were from–maybe there aren’t many queer families there. We certainly didn’t go out of our way to come out, but it’s hard to miss that we’re a family. I kept thinking, but we’re married here. And we were–New York recognizes marriages legal in other states. But it doesn’t have marriage equality for its own state’s residents. Yet. More on that later.

Maybe a group of pre-teens decked out in short skirts and their overly-protective parents would have been just as standoffish here in Bennington, Vermont where Bob can marry Bill and Ruby can marry Ami. But I think I doubt it. My theory is that once something is the law of the land, people can more naturally accept it. I don’t have any evidence, but it’s my mission to collect at least some anecdotes while we’re here in Vermont.

But it’s cold here, and most of the RV parks are closed. The ones that aren’t are shutting off their water. So I’m not sure how long we’ll be here.

So far, Vermont, so good. And hey, nice leaves.

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Our first appointment was with Bill, who told us to meet him in a Taco Bell parking lot in Salem, OR. He said he’d lead us back to his property on his Harley with the small front wheel.

We’d made the journey to Portland and environs to look for travel trailers that might be cheaper than the ones up in the Big City–well, Big for this corner of the country, anyway. There was another draw: our new brakes needed to be broken in for 200-400 miles before we could tow with them, and Portland was just the right distance.

Bill’s trailer was well in our price range, but I started to be wary when he led us back onto the highway. We followed the sound of the Harley, his leather jacket with the full-back eagle patch, and the American flag that whipped along from its perch on the bike seat.

“We don’t have to tell him about our trip.” I said to Ami. “Where is he taking us? Why don’t you text T with his information so if something happens, at least he’ll get caught.” Then, “Nobody needs to know we’re dykes.”

That’s what I said out loud. In my head I plotted how I would stand by the back door of the car, waiting for any reason to open the tailgate and release our big-for-a-Pit-small-for-a-Mastiff protectress.

When we got to Bill’s property, none of my fears were assuaged–at least not by the deserted look of the place. The trailer was parked well behind the house, and his backyard stretched out as far behind us as we could see. If anyone else was home inside the house, we had no way of knowing. Every window facing us was covered in plastic.

But Bill took off his skullcap helmet, and his weathered face crinkled up like an accordion. Blue eyes that would give Sinatra a new name shone out from behind all that smile. He told us how he’d come to own the trailer. He’d bought an SUV for his daughter, and when she came for it, she decided she didn’t like it. So he tried to sell the car, but nobody wanted a V-8 in this economy. Except one woman with a trailer to trade for it. Bill didn’t need a trailer any more than that unsellable V-8, but now he had one.

That was the kind of guy Bill was. We admired him, but we didn’t buy that trailer. We had become wise to at least a few signs that a trailer’s lifespan had been exceeded, and two were apparent the moment I stepped inside. The air was live and musty, and the floor spongy. Someone had tried to lay new linoleum tile, but it hadn’t fixed the problem.

Our encounter with Bill was pleasant from the moment he met us–asking if we needed to eat before we went to see the trailer–to the moment we parted. Except for the fact that we knew we weren’t buying. And so it went with the other two trailer owners we met, the car lot guy who bought his little 17 footer at auction, and the barefoot, post-college Texan. The third guy we were supposed to meet flaked after making us wait four hours for him to get off work. Just never called, the jerk. We told the Texan what we were doing on our road trip, but nobody else. I didn’t think it would have mattered if we had, though.

While we drove that same 300 miles back home to Seattle, towing nothing except two tired dogs and one sleeping baby, Ami and I hypothesized. “I think the RV community is going to be fine with us. They seem pretty laid back,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re out there to meet people. We’re people.”

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