I had a share in the Pines. Every year for a decade when I was younger.
We used to love getting on that ferry, knowing that once on the other side, there was a paradise with no cars, just little red wagons, and no straights except some very,very cool ones who didn't judge us and would never beat us up. We felt safe there. Maybe too safe.
We danced and we drank well and we ate well and we did drugs and had sex, but we also did things like discuss books and politics and history and how to fight for equal rights and how to fight for our lives. and the lives of our friends.
We took care of our sick and dying housemates, lovers, friends, crushes, tricks. Young, young men, too young to be so sick, too beautiful and smart and talented to be taken so soon. They died so swiftly at first, then they died long, excruciating illnesses. I don't know which was worse. Either way, it was unthinkable.
We buried them and scattered their ashes and mourned their untimely deaths--and their un-lived lives. And we worried about our own mortality and wondered why they were dead and we were still alive. And so we drank a little too much and smoked a little too much and partied a little too hard and tried to forget. We cried ourselves to sleep and woke the next morning to the same sunlit beaches and the same long, lazy summer days, the same twilight cocktails and the same all-night barn dances. But something was missing, maybe someone, maybe too many someones, something was gone that would never be the same.
So we stopped taking the ferry, and never looked back. And, soon, others took our place.
But before we stopped, I met my partner waiting for that ferry. So did others. We know eight other couples who met that year, 1994, all of them still together. It was a good year, a very good year. It was the best of times, and the worst of times were ending. Sometime around 1995, 1996, our friends stopped dying. Well, dying in droves, at least. And the world changed. Next thing we knew, there were gays in the military and gays in sitcoms and gays getting married and gays having babies. Things we never dreamed would ever be, things our dead friends would never see.
Maybe we were as vacuous as the boys on this reality show; maybe we were deeper. But somehow, I just can't bring myself to judge them. I wish them happiness and love and good food and good wine and good sex--and good friendships!--and, above all, the good sense to wake up one morning and take that ferry across the bay and never look back.
And then others will take their place.
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