Love's Gay Impressions

4:44 am – My bones are excited that they’re going to Texas.  I get up, get coffee and work for a few hours.

1:21 pm – the chick-a-sticks, pretzels, and pear did me in. I am full.

1:22 pm – current buzzards-in-the-sky count = 11

1:23 pm – got out of car and dragged a rusty bumper off the bridge and roadway

6:03 pm – Park behind the bars off Cedar Springs.  I find Sue Ellen’s when I turn the corner.  I’m a bit overwhelmed.  It’s a really nice bar; it’s a good sized bar and feels empty with only a few women.  After exchanges, the bartender makes the connections for us.

Somehow the conversation gets personal really fast.  I hear the older lady say that she had been married. “I lost my husband and baby.  They were in a car wreck.”  She started a new life after.

The bar tender talks about her pre-teen son. She raises him with her ex-partner and the stepmother.  They are a family who share everything from holidays to rising costs.  She beams because she knows how important it is to do your best with a tender little soul. 

“It must impress the other parents,” I am thinking while she tells that she eats lunch in the school cafeteria with the little guys who make up her basketball team.  They call her “coach.”  I proselytize to her passion and devotion to them. I think of how she's teaching them to love a lesbian before the boys become men.

8:25 pm - The bartender and the barback have both been named Sarah by the patrons.  I begin to wonder if this is a generic name for lesbians like Mary is for gay men.   The other two ladies left and the third bought me a second Shiner, but I have to shoot down Cedar Springs to Dallas Love Field.  My mom is flying in from Birmingham.

10:01 pm – We arrive at Auntie’s house. I go in and hug her and her partner, Murph. Susie is there too.  She’s been my aunt’s friend for as long as I can remember.  Memories of them together at different stages of my life create gravity for my fatigue-filled mind.

After a few exchanges, Auntie says, “I want you to know, today is our 35^th anniversary.”

We congratulate her without champagne, a ballroom dance, or a proper celebration.  Still, we’re all just grateful to be together.

7:35 am - I get up early to talk to my aunt. 

8:35 am – A neighbor comes over and brings frozen trail mix varieties that are the leftovers from a bulk purchase.  After a few exchanges, the neighbor asks about the doctor’s prognosis.

“What’s the good news?” I asked him. Auntie shares the exchange.

“There’s not any good news,” the doctor said soberly.

“He hugged me.  I got a hug out of him. That’s the good news,” Auntie said.

 

9:01 am – An old friend called. That call was followed by a series of calls from all over the US.  Later, a lady from San Antonio called.

“Is that the woman who was a nurse?” my mom, the nurse, asked.

“Yes. The other one died,” Auntie angled the phone away. 

I had met this pair of lesbians in the late ‘80s.  I think they took me on a road trip during the second year that I was “out.”

11:24 am – I am ready to drive Murph to the beauty parlor.  It’s one of the businesses on this retirement campus.  It’s next to the “protestant” and catholic churches, a laundry room, and a consignment store. 

 “You guys have more activity in one morning than I have the entire week,” I’m smiling and pulling on my socks.

“Just wait until you’re dying,” Auntie says.

“I hope I’m as lucky.”

11:30 am- I’m putting on my shoes.

“Where’s Murph?”

“She went to the beauty parlor,” my mom said.

“Did she push her walker there?”

“No, she drove,” mom said.

“The golf cart?”
“No, the Toyota,” Auntie said.

“Should she be driving?” I ask.

When we go in, Murph’s hair is already in curlers.  She’s under the dryer.  The beautician takes my aunt to the back to wash her hair. I hear them talking.

“She’s a lesbian,” my aunt says out loud because her ears are underwater or because my aunt is an external thinker.

I’m sitting next to Murph who is an observer like me.  I believe this is why we’ve always had a secret alliance.   Also, she would pull beers out of the garage fridge and toss them to me.  Before they moved to the retirement campus, they had property and a kennel service.  We would walk over and look at the day’s variety of dogs.   But today, we’ve gotten into a bucket of left-over Halloween candy, choosing a variety of pieces and pretending that we’re not high from too much coffee and sugar.

2:10 pm – Lunch with Martha who is a friend of my aunt’s from Corpus.  That means they’ve been friends for more than 35 years.  And, that means that she and my aunt were young(er) lesbians together, running the streets and going to bars. 

4:00 pm – The others take naps. I go to Trader Joe's for a trunk full of carbohydrates

7:00 pm – Murph and I chill a bottle of wine

8:00 pm - My aunt takes me to her room and asks me to help her create a letter.  We talk about everything except the letter.  Just when we get a sentence typed, my mom comes in.

“It’s Buddy,” she says.  “He wants to talk to you.”

I look over at the top of the dresser where there’s a picture of Buddy when he was young and in Dorothy's Wizard of Oz dress.  He’s been in Auntie’s stories since I was a kid in Corpus.  I think he talked—counseled seems to be too strong a word—to my brother when he came out of the closet.  (See "Fleas on a Hot Tar Roof."). Not that it was a secret.

When my brother was 11, he put on my mom’s dress, wig, and high heels, and then he walked the neighborhood sidewalks. He came out when the neighbors told my mom what she already knew.  It was good that my aunt had a lot of gay male friends who looked out for my brother during his young adult years. I'm sure Buddy was one of them.

“Hi Puss.”

PAUSE.

“Lisa is here.  You remember Lisa?” 

PAUSE.

“Did you happen to touch her like you did her brother?

“You two are not right!” I yell toward the phone.  I imagine that this is an inside joke that they've shared for three or four decades.

Auntie chuckles, and then they talk, swapping more inside jokes that are funny and bad too.  Before Auntie hangs up, she says, “You’re going to get a letter from me.”

PAUSE.

“Bye-bye, honey.”

During the conversation, she mentioned another friend Clifford.  I was at his house, in Corpus, that night my aunt talked about my being gay.  It had been a short conversation.  She remembers that I shouted, “I’m gay,” from Clifford’s balcony.  I remember that she said very soberly, “So, you’re mom tells me you’ve kissed a girl.”  We’ve always observed the world from different angles and haven’t done so well as a result.  This weekend is the first I’ve spent with her in 15 years.  Still, she gave me great advice that night and on many weekends while I was in college.   

Now, I’m sitting on her bed and about to write the letter. I feel honored.

“Do you remember Clifford’s boyfriend?” she asks.

“Yeah, he was younger, right?”

“I ran into him in an airport. I couldn’t believe it was him. I hadn’t seen any of those guys in so long.  He was a real sweet guy,” She pauses to reflect.  “He’s in Houston.  Buddy saw him.” 

I start to remember the late-80s.  When I would come home for holidays or summer break, I would hear from my brother about the men in that circle who were dying.  It was overwhelming.  Somehow Clifford, Wes, Buddy, and my brother survived Reagan’s plague.

9:45 pm – We finish the letter.  “I’ve had a good life; I’ve had a fun life,” she says while I type.  I think about how my aunt is always looking for a reason to smile a mischievous smile.  Aside from making her family crazy, she fills so many lives with light and support.  I will be blessed if I have half the friends.

11:59 pm – Auntie, Murph and mom are awake. I am in bed with ear plugs and the fan is on high to create white noise.  “I can’t wait to go home so that I can sleep without these party animals,” I pop an over-the-counter blue pill and roll over.

8:00 am – Auntie is up.  I get up. 

10:35 am – The reverend is making announcements.  Martha slides between me and Murph.  The room is full, and it’s wonderful to see so many different LGBTs filling the pews, wrapping their arms around each other, and singing with reverence to God while people all over the nation are singing too. 

“This is the life I thought I would live,” I remember the world that my lesbian aunts built.  When I would come for the weekends, their lives were balanced and full with good friends that made everything seem normal, perfect.  

“I want to acknowledge Auntie and Murph’s thirty-fifth anniversary,” the reverend says.

1:00 pm – At lunch we talked about the church and the day’s service.  During the program, they acknowledged new members, announcing a total of 560 with the recent ones.  There was a straight couple on the stage, holding hands.

“They had a gay son,” my aunt explained about them. “When they moved here, they tried a lot of churches.  So many preach against homosexuals.  Finally, they looked and found our church.”

“Wow,” I thought. “It’s an evolution.”

2:10 pm - There’s a storm coming and I have an 8 hour drive. I hug and don’t linger.  There’s too much to sort out and there hasn’t been time to talk.  I’ll have to get back before too long. We have to figure out how to take care of Murph.

9:37 pm – At the base of the Mississippi River bridge, I pull a warm beer from the Trader Joe’s bag that’s behind the driver’s seat.  I put it in the ice chest because I’m 15 minutes from home. I can’t wait to hear my dogs go nuts.

“It’s nice to love and to be loved.”

In the course of a few days, I was introduced to so many different approaches to gay life.  It was serendipitous to hear the ladies at Sue Ellen’s and sit with the congregation at Celebration Community Church.  I wanted to share.  Also, I hope this story about my aunts’ long relationship gives you stamina someday.  It’s possible to find love late in life and love that will happily follow you to a retirement campus.  I think the secret to Auntie and Murph’s relationship is so very simple.

“You just don’t leave,” Murph said.