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Mr. Morrissey
Interlac 69
October 15, 1987
HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION
by Denys Howard
[ s o u r c e ]
This summer I got visited two different times by Interlackers and I got to go on two vacations of my own and I had some real sad adventures, too. So I'll just try to tell it all from the beginning and hope it makes some sense.
It started back in August when the amazing Mercy Van Vlack and her boy, Kenny Gale, came to Seattle for a vacation. When they first got here, they stayed somewhere not-in-Seattle (sort of like Connecticut is not-in-New-York-City) with Margie Saaski. It was really neat to finally get to meet Margie, who I first heard of when she was Margie Spears and her name was printed in the New Teen Titans letter-column because she was starting up a new apa and it was going to be about The New Teen Titans (surprise!) and she lived right close to me. Off in not-Seattle. It was really exciting but I never did write to her because I was just losing interest in The New Teen Titans right about then, and then it got more awkward to think about writing to her, because what was I going to say, Well I don't like them anymore but it's neat that you do because you live so close to me. No way.
So anyway it turns out that the amazing Mercy is real good friends with Margie, so Mercy and Ken stayed with her (and with her husband Elric [honest!] who I never did get to meet but I heard about) when they first got here. Then they came to stay with me for a while and I got to meet Margie. But I told you about that, didn't I? No? Well, I did finally get to meet her, and we all went down to the Pike Place Market to have lunch at a real good restaurant with a balcony and Mercy and Margie and I made rude remarks about cute guys walking by and Ken put up with us all. Then we went to Fantasy Unlimited which is this real upscale, yuppie sex store out by the main entrance to the Market and has real cool dildoes and leather things that you want to ask somebody just what exactly a person is supposed to do with that anyway. Margie and Mercy were in hog heaven, and I think Ken liked it too. I have always preferred The Crypt, myself, but we never went there so they couldn't compare. Then Margie went home to Elric and I got to be a host for a while.
It was real fun. I had to work, though, so I didn't get to do much in the evenings (which is when I work). But I think Ken and Mercy had fun, too. At least they didn't complain too much. A friend from Alaska left a message on my answerer on Sunday but he didn't leave a phone number so I never got to talk to him. People should always leave phone numbers on answering machines. I think that should be a law. Sally Aaron was in Seattle, too, but I never got to see her because my work schedule kept messing up with her tourist schedule. She's somebody you might know if you hang out on the CompuServe comics forum ever. She's from South Carolina and someday I will meet her. Honest, Sally!
At the end of when the amazing Mercy and her Ken were getting ready to leave, I got a real funny letter from the Blond Bombshells, which they called "Do You Know the Way to Federal Way", which is this joke, see, because "Federal Way" sounds like "San José", which is in the original song, but they were going to stay with Tom's sister in Federal Way, which is what the area between Seattle and Tacoma calls itself. Oh, I mean Tom and Mary Bierbaum, of course. See, they were coming up to here on a vacation so they were two more Interlackers that I got to see. But wait, that's not all! When I finally talked to Mary and Tom they said that Arnie Starkey was also up in Tacoma (which is where he is from, so it's not all that surprising).
So they picked up Arnie and came up to Seattle and we all went to the Pike Place Market to have lunch at a real good restaurant with a balcony but this time I tried to behave myself at least in relation to making remarks about cute guys walking by. I was real glad of the chance to talk to all three of them for a while, because I totally screwed up my chance at the Los Angeles WorldCon in 1984 and I have been very embarrassed about it ever since. I'm still embarrassed about 1984, but 1987 turned out okay. Talking to Arnie was neat because as you know he's not in Interlac any more so I didn't know what he is doing now and I found all that out. Which I liked. But I didn't find out his address so some day I will remember to write to the Bierbaums and ask for it. I only got to see all of them for that one afternoon but I really was glad for the opportunity.
The next thing I did was go to San Francisco to see the pope. Well, not to see him really because as it turned out I never did lay eyes on that gorgeous gown he wears but even more importantly I wasn't going down there to be, you know, reverent. Anyway, I didn't want to fly down there just to scream at the man, so I took a vacation, too. I stayed for a while with my sister and brother-in-law, who I thought lived in the Bay Area but it turns out that Santa Rosa is like fifty miles north. Which is a major distance when you're not in a car. So I just stayed up there for a few days and laid in the hot tub and read and was very lazy and had a lot of fun not doing anything. See, they're both lawyers and they have this really nice house that I was at least a little bit jealous of, at least the hot tub and the kitchen and the very awesome typewriter. And my sister works at home, so I got to see her a lot and talk with her, which I haven't had a chance to do for a long time because we mostly see each other at things like my brother's MBA graduation or my mom's funeral. We drove off to the Russian River for lunch one day and I discovered I was within a hop, skip, and a jump of the Eclipse offices but I hadn't realized it before so I decided not to change my plans by dropping in on them but I would really like to see that kitchen that Dean is working on, wouldn't you?
Then on Thursday I took the bus down to San Francisco (and finished reading the Riddle of Stars trilogy by Patricia McKillip, which was delightful). I checked my suitcase at the Transbay Transit Terminal. I took an antique trolley up Market to the Castro and had lunch. I walked down to the Mission Dolores, which on this day at least seemed pretty well-named to me. The area where the demonstration was allowed to happen was around the corner from the crowd that was more, um, positive about the visitor. The bad part, though, was that it was the area closest to the Mission district, where most of these positive thinkers were coming from. A lot of them came into the demonstration area; most of them left again. I spent about four or five hours there, mostly sitting and waiting for things to happen, and looking at the people around me. They were an interesting group. Some of the signs were very funny, like "The holy father is neither", "Ex-nuns for ex-popes", and "Curb your dogma". The people were very interesting, too. There were some believers who disagreed with the pope on things like sex and love. There were lots of lesbians and gay men angry at the pope because he acts like he hates us, even when he says he loves us. There were some atheists who seemed angry at everyone about everything. And then there were the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. They are men and they are not catholics. But they have very nice gowns, much nicer than the catholics were wearing. When the pope finally came by, most of us couldn't see him but everyone started yelling things like "Shame!" and "Pope go home!" I thought that was silly, because after all he was going to go home, right? But it was even funnier when I saw a sign saying "Popo go homo". Then after a while he went away and then we went away. The police said there were 2000 of us, which I don't believe because I saw more than that with my own eyes; but the biggest estimate I saw of the pro-pope crowd was 150,000, which was strange because the archdiocese had said that 1.3 million people would show up for the pope. But this was the same archdiocese that rented all of the PA systems in the city, so the anti-pope people had to go to Sacramento to rent one, so they were probably capable of almost anything.
I spent the rest of that vacation with my friend Christopher over in Berkeley. I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in a long time, and some of them I didn't even expect to see. Like that night after the pope left I went walking along Castro until I found a restaurant that would take plastic because I didn't have enough cash on me for dinner, and as I was standing there getting ready to go into the restaurant this guy came up to me and said "Denys? Denys Howard?!", which was really surprising because I couldn't figure out who the hell he was but that was definitely my name. In fact, it still is. Anyway, he was someone I knew in Portland in the early 70s, after I got out of college but before I moved into the gay house I lived in for a while, so we had dinner together and it was really great to find out what each of us had been doing and to find out what other people had been doing who I hadn't heard about in a long, long time.
Christopher lived in Moon Brothers, too, which was the name of the house in Portland. I hadn't talked with him in about five years, so it was neat to spend time with him and find out about his recent divorce and meet all of his truly fine housemates and explore Berkeley and have him take me on a tour of stairways in San Francisco and talk about the political work he's doing and read his poems. We talked about some of our other housemates from the mid-70s, too, and I told him about Kenny's new name which was Martin and gave him the last address I had for Kenny which was almost seven years old from when he first moved down to San Francisco.
All weekend I kept not reaching Larry on the phone, who I went to high school with and who was the only other person to talk about being gay in the biographies we sent in for the memory book for the twenty-year reunion last year. Then on Sunday Christopher and I were in the city and decided to drop by the Folsom Street Fair, which was a pretty amazing experience in itself because it had all these regular street-fair things but it was sponsored by a bunch of leather bars so it had some pretty special things too. But anyway as we were walking back to the car this person came up to me and said "Denys? Denys Howard?!" only this time I knew my lines! And it was Larry! So I got to see him too, after all, and he showed me a video tape of a gay liberation film he had made in about 1970 or 1971. It also turned out that he was the first guy that Christopher had made love with when he moved to Portland from Pennsylvania only he was embarrassed because he didn't remember Christopher but that's the way things went back then.
I was glad to get back home because one week is about long enough for me to be away from home, but I was real glad to have had my vacation in the Bay Area. I had a real good time visiting with old friends, and also had a chance to just relax which is very important. I also bought a great James Dean calendar for next year.
After I got home I only had a couple of days to get ready for the birthday party. My best friend, who is also my roommate, has his birthday one week before mine so we have a big birthday party every year and invite all our friends. We also have an unbirthday party every year but that's not in the summer so I won't talk about it here. As usual it was a really great party, and we even got the house cleaned up and everything and people gave us some really neat blow-up toys (like a blow-up birthday cake and a superman punching bag) and truly awesome earrings. Christopher called during the party but didn't want to talk and I was worried because I thought he was calling to remind me about the money I had borrowed from him but hadn't sent a check for yet so I didn't call him back until Monday. Then he told me Kenny had just died.
I'll drop out of the junior-high voice here for a few minutes. I met Kenny Allison shortly after I came out, in the very early 70s. We had been born within a few hours of one another, he in Klamath Falls and I in Portland. We looked a bit alike and used to joke about being twins. He was in the consciousness-raising group that had decided to live together and started Moon Brothers. I lived with him for about two years. We did some theater together and some writing together and were active in the anti-sexist men's movement together. He changed his name to Candor Smoothstone and moved to the Radical Faerie farm in Wolf Creek in southern Oregon. I last saw him down in San Francisco in the early 80s, where he had moved to do some serious theater work. His name was now Martin Xero. On our birthday, the day before the party here in Seattle, Christopher had been walking down a street in the Castro and saw a notice for a memorial service for Martin Xero. He went to it and found out that Kenny had moved back to Portland in 1986; in August he went to a doctor with some complaint or other, was diagnosed with AIDS, and died on September 11th. I haven't cried so much since my mother died. I admired Kenny and cherished him and will always remember him. We are too fucking young to have our friends dying now. I cannot imagine what it must be like to live in San Francisco or New York or Houston. I cannot imagine what it will be like to live anywhere, in the next decade.
My final vacation was a trip to Washington, D.C., from which I just got back which is the reason this report is so short. I stayed with my cousin Steve and my aunt Shirley who is my mom's sister. They raise Siamese cats. I got to sleep in the living room with the cats. They have fourteen cats right now. I got to sleep with eleven of them. They also live in Annapolis which is not only not-Washington but is also not even in the District. In fact it is the capital of Maryland. They had a boat festival in Annapolis while I was visiting but I didn't go to it. Each day Steve drove into the city to go to work and he dropped me off at the end of the subway line and I went into the city to be a tourist. I was a pretty good tourist. I took a tour of the city, just to see where everything was, and then I decided that I would only go to the Smithsonian museums. I made it through three of them, the Natural History Museum, the Asian Art museum, and the Air and Space Museum. I also went to the Superman exhibit at the American History Museum, but it was pretty boring. In fact the only really interesting part of it was seeing a real, actual copy of Action Comics #1, because most of the rest of the stuff was very recent.
The most interesting thing I did on this vacation was the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. During the week while I was being a tourist more and more queers started showing up in the city. Each day there were more of us. It was really great. We all walked around with silly grins on our faces, smiling at each other and waving and looking at the het'ros as they looked at us. The first demonstration was on Saturday. It was called The Wedding and it took place on Constitution Avenue in front of the main IRS building and there were about 7000 to 10,000 of us there. Most of the het'ro media said that there were about 2000 couples there. I was the bride's maid for two friends of mine. I had been afraid that the wedding itself would be fairly sappy, but it turned out just fine. Troy Perry and Robin Tyler (who the Washington Post called Robin Turner, I guess because het'ros figure they don't have any professional responsibilities when it comes to homos) said things like "We aren't here to make our relationships legitimate, because they already are legitimate. We aren't here to mimic straight marriages where one person owns another, or swears obedience to another, because those relationships are sick. We are here to demand legal equality for our relationships." They were hot. People took chalk and wrote their names inside hearts on the street. Afterwards, Oscar Hernandez saw me and we yelled and hugged and talked for a while. I didn't talk to Tom Burkert because he was already off to a museum. He was an even better tourist than I was. The Sunday Washington Post said that more than 100,000 homosexuals were in town for a demonstration.
The subway was opened special at 8:00 Sunday morning because Metro said that 200,000 homosexuals were in town. People who lived there weren't on the subway because it usually doesn't open until 10:00, so as the subway trains moved into town they filled up with more and more of us. It was great. It was like a big party and everybody was being really friendly. There was going to be a rally at the Ellipse (behind the White House) from 9:00 until 12:00 and then the March was going to start. Because I was pretty early, I decided to go to the Capital end of the Mall first and look at the quilt.
Some people in San Francisco had got the idea of making a quilt with the names of people who had died from AIDS. There was a panel for each person that was 3x6 feet, and there were sixty quilts that were each 12x12 feet, and they were put together with walkways between the quilts and it was one of the most intense and awesome things I have ever seen in my life. They had started putting it together at 6:00 that morning, each quilt slowly and reverently unfolded and then put into place; they also started reading over a loudspeaker the names of the people who are on the quilt. They were just finishing the last half-dozen quilts when I walked up to it and it stretched out for two city blocks and there was no noise at all except the reading of the names and there were people standing all around the edges of it and there were about two dozen Names Project people out there unfolding the quilts, very slowly and with much love and I couldn't stay there. I had to walk away and sit down under a little tree and cry because I knew that there was a panel out there for Kenny and just because of all of the quilts out there and all of the love out there. I cried for Kenny and for Michael and for George and for Sam, and I cried for myself and for everyone who knew each of them and for all of the haters who think we aren't capable of love. And a woman I didn't know came and sat beside me and held me and we cried together.
Then after a while I went and got a map of the quilt and figured out where Kenny's panel was and stood at the edge there and waited for them to finish opening up all of the quilt, and I still cried some but not as hard. Then they finished and they asked us all to stand quietly for about half an hour then they let us walk out on the quilt and I found Kenny's panel and I just stood on the walkway and cried and cried some more. And a man I didn't know came and held me and patted me on the back and we cried together for a long time. I was at the quilt for about two hours. When I finally left and started walking up the Mall towards the rally at the Ellipse I saw a lot of people coming the other way towards the quilt and I figured they must have announced that you could walk out on it now. I wondered if people realized how powerful it was going to be to look at it; I know I didn't realize it, and I sure didn't think I was going to be two hours about it.
The rally was boring because I got there late and couldn't figure out what the speakers were talking about (except one man who was talking about AIDS and quoted Mother Jones, "Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living!" and I started crying again but more quietly and I didn't sit down) and because the crowd was much more interesting than the speakers. There were thousands and thousands of us and people were holding up banners for different states and regions and going around and looking at all of us and trying to find people they knew and just generally having a lot of fun. I guess we got started a little after noon, but it was hard to tell because there were so many people. I was close to the front of the March.
Most of the marchers were in geographic groups, and they were arranged starting out west and moving eastwards. So the western region was first and Washington was close to the beginning and most of the Washington people were from Seattle and I even knew a lot of them. I found my friends Gary and Tony, who had got married the day before, and Sam and Bruce. There were about 500 people in the Washington group, and behind us was the California group which seemed just immense to us. It took more than an hour of waiting before we finally got going, and then it took about 45 minutes or an hour to walk past the White House and down Pennsylvania Avenue and onto the Mall. There were six christian men across the street from the White House who were saying rude things to us; they had come from Los Angeles; when we went by we chanted "Shame! Shame!" at them. When Troy Perry led a religious group past them he started singing the song "Jesus Loves Me", which I saw later on TV. There weren't any other people being rude, but there were some people with signs like "Straights for gays" and "I'm not gay but I'm angry". Walking was really fun, it filled you up with energy to see all of the people on the sides and to look back sometimes and see how many of us there were.
When we got about a block away from the Mall, Tom and Oscar finally found me, which was really neat because I hadn't even seen Tom yet. We walked together for a while and then they went off to join the Hispanic contingent and I never saw them again. By the time we got onto the Mall, there were about ten or twenty thousand people there. I decided to go back out on the street and watch the rest of the marchers come in. It took about another three hours. There were 650,000 of us there. (The DC police said there were 200,000 of us, which would make me laugh if it didn't make me so angry. I think I know the difference between 200,000 and 650,000. But after all these are the same police who said there were only 50,000 of us at the 1979 march, which even the media couldn't swallow so they got out their aerial photos and counted 150,000. Sometimes I think they have it in for us.) It was utterly amazing to watch everyone come by. As the geographic groups got closer to the east coast, they just kept getting bigger and bigger. The Boston group looked like it went on for a mile; they were chanting "We're from Boston, we should know: Mike Dukakis has to go!" The Minnesota people said "Don't blame us; we didn't vote for Reagan!" The Vermonters said "Out of the mountains and into the streets!" Somebody was chanting "1 - 2 - 3 - 4, Reagan wants another war! 5 - 6- 7 - 8, he also thinks his son is straight!" A lot of the signs and chants were really funny and it was a lot of fun to listen to them and to talk with the other people on the sides and make jokes and just really feel good about all of us being there and being together. The regional groups were separated by marching bands and political groups and student groups and other kinds of groups.
After the last of the marchers got onto the Mall, I decided to go back to the quilt again because I thought I could look at more of it this time but I was wrong again because I went to Kenny's panel again and started crying again, so I went off the quilt and sat down again and cried again, and a woman I didn't know came over and sat down with me and held me and we cried together. I think this is important: when I was scared and crying and filled with loneliness and sadness, strangers came to me and held me and shared all that pain with me and helped make me feel better. That doesn't happen a lot in my life, and I don't think it happens a lot in very many people's lives. It seems like a very special thing that our community has been doing for ourselves because so many of the haters don't think they have any human responsibility to the people with AIDS and to the people who love them. But we really are doing it, for all of us.
Then I went out into the crowd on the Mall and listened to some of the speeches. Robin Tyler and Tom Ammiano were very funny. (I liked his joke about the haters: "I don't think they've really figured out this quarantine thing; they think it's a punishment to take all the gay men and make them live together in one place.") Most of the political speeches were okay but didn't say anything new. Then Jesse Jackson made a speech. It was very controversial, because he is running for President of the United States of America, and not all of the gay people are in favor of him (in fact some of us are even Republicans, which has always seemed to me a little like being a Mormon archaeologist -- ha ha!). It was obvious that his speech was a standard one, because it had some concrete examples but was addressed to "you" and "your concerns". Some of the people around me were becoming angry and yelling "Say the word!" because it didn't seem like he was ever going to say "gay" or "lesbian" and it was just going to be a stupid campaign speech. But then he finally said it (I think he said something about violence against gay men and lesbians) and the whole crowd went absolutely wild and you couldn't tell Republicans from Democrats or communists. I think I'll vote for him, even if he is a christian minister. It might not seem like a lot, but when the haters are always telling us that we are sick and not human and not capable of normal feelings and should be locked up in concentration camps and even killed, and when even someone as liberal as Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts still thinks that we are not fit to care for children and most of the liberals refuse to call us by name and even the media still use a stupid word like "homosexual" when you know they would die before they would use "colored" or "Negro", then it's really a big deal to have a candidate for President actually speak directly to us and acknowledge that we are here and have a right to be here. I like his image of a quilt, too; he said America is not one piece of seamless cloth, it's a quilt, with many colors and many sizes and many textures. I like that a lot.
There wasn't much more to the rally but I waited until it was completely over, when the Park Service turned off the electricity rather than let us keep talking. One of the signs I really liked in the March said "With liberty and justice for all. (Void where prohibited by law.)" That's us, all right, because even the Supreme Court says it is okay for police to come into our bedrooms and check out who we're sleeping with and how we have sex and take us off to jail if they don't like what they see. I wish I could take people off to jail if I don't like what I see, because there is a lot of things I don't much like the looks of.
There was a meeting on Monday to start a gay and lesbian Congress. I went to it but I didn't stay very long because in the first place I definitely do not think that we need another national gay group because the ones we have already don't work too well together, and in the second place they were using parliamentary procedure and I have never in my life found a group that knew Robert's Rules of Order but they all try to use them and it drives me crazy so I left. There was also a demonstration on Tuesday, but I didn't go to it because I was flying home at the time. It was at the Supreme Court and was protesting that it is legal to be rude to lesbians and gay men in this country and people got themselves arrested by walking up the steps of the Supreme Court which it turns out is illegal which surprised me a whole lot. The police wore rubber gloves to arrest people and that made me real angry so I called up the White House and asked them if those police intended to put their hands inside somebody's asshole because how else could they be in danger of catching AIDS from the demonstrators? The operator said she didn't know, but she would pass my concern on to the president, which I'm sorry but I don't believe for one minute.
Then I came home and then I wrote this.
SOURCE: This apazine was written for Interlac mailing #69, which was distributed by Central Mailer Rich Morrissey in October 1987. I wrote it all in a rush as close to the deadline as I could cut it. Today, I can't decide whether the tone I got was grade school or junior high school. You tell me. © 1987, 2001 by Denys Howard.
[ N O T E S, 2 0 0 1, 2 0 0 4 ]
MERCY AND BRENDA: The way an apa works is that members send copies of their zine to the central mailer (in comics fandom; in the ancestral SF fandom this role is "official editor" -- go figure), who assembles "mailings" comprising one copy of each member's zine and then sends one mailing to each member. So it was not until a few weeks after writing this that I received my copy of Interlac 69 and re-read my contribution for the first time. And discovered to my never-ending embarrassment that I had consistently referred to Mercy Van Vlack as "Brenda Mings" throughout the piece, for reasons beyond the ken of fan or mundie alike. Sheesh.
I corrected the gaffe in this latest revision, as I had already silently corrected spelling errors. I offer it by way of ongoing apology to Mistress Mercy, whose forgiveness I beg eternally, and Brenda alike.
SILLY GRINS: As I transcribed this in June 2001, my willful fingers opened this sentence with the phrase "We all walked around with silky grins on our faces..." I found that interesting enough to note here, albeit not interesting enough to leave in place.
THE POLICE WORE RUBBER GLOVES: I believe I heard later that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence stood on the sidelines with pom-poms chanting "Fashion crime! Fashion crime! Your gloves don't match your shoes!" You go, girls!
