Thursday, July 31, 2014

Gabe Gelbart

I had heard of the death of a friend, Gabe Gelbart, a few weeks ago. I didn't know until this recent trip to Los Angeles what happened. I first met Gabe at Israeli dancing at UCLA in 1984. I was just turning thirty-five; he was in his early twenties, short, dark and balding. Gabe was from Argentina, but his family left for San Diego when he was young. He identified as Orthodox, and expressed some shock when I told him I was gay.  A few years later, he showed up at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the temple for LGBT people I joined in 1987. We both sang in the choir. Our paths continued to cross. We were in performance art classes taught by Tim Miller, who lost his NEA grant because his gay act was too prurient for certain Southern senators. Gabe's pieces focused on appliances. He would bring in a toaster, or a blender, and then concoct a performance piece. It was brilliant, but I guess you had to be there. We ended up in a writing class for gay men around 2007 that met in Gabe's house, an old Spanish-style house in Pico-Robertson, one of LA's Jewish ghettos. He was working for Disney, creating new theme parks in China.

In 2003, I attended a Jewish genealogy convention in Washington. Earlier that year, at 53, I suffered a heart attack and the death of my mother. I wanted to try something different that summer. I met a cousin at the convention who had traced my father's family back to 1732 in Poland. One branch of the family was named Gelbhard, and had gone to the town in Argentina where Gabe was born. I suggested to Gabe that we might be cousins, but he brushed me off, suggesting that the variant spelling meant we were from different families.

I ran into our mutual friend Richard "Doe" Racklin at Outfest, L.A.'s LGBT film festival,when Joe and I were visiting L.A. It was Doe who posted about Gabe's death on Facebook. He told me that Gabe had married five weeks before his death. He came home from a bike ride (a hobby we shared), told his husband he wasn't feeling well, and went to lie down. Later his husband took him to the hospital.  Gabe died, at 53, of a heart attack.

Gabe wasn't a close friend, although we traveled a similar path in Los Angeles. We looked enough alike and our interests were close enough to make me believe we were related, even if he didn't buy it. We both had heart attacks at fifty-three, very common in my father's family. He died. I'm still here. I can't explain that.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Los Angeles

I lived in Los Angeles more than twenty-five years, from September 1984 to January 2010, when Joe and I moved to Crescent City. I was almost thirty-five when I moved there, and past sixty when we left. We came to Morgantown in July 2012. When people in Morgantown say things like "Aren't you glad to be closer to home?" (I was born and raised in Baltimore) if I'm honest, I'll say "Home is Los Angeles." If I'm less than honest, I'll say "Yes, it is, " or going halfway, I'll say "I no longer have family in Baltimore, but it's good to be near my sister, who lives just outside Washington."

So we were back in Los Angeles from July 15 - 22. I guess the first thing you notice is the backed-up traffic, then the beautiful weather, the two things Los Angeles is most known for.

We stayed with six different friends in seven days, all close friends of mine from the time I lived there. We stayed in Altadena, north of Pasadena, with my friend Jim Potter and his wife, Michelle Huneven, then the westside of Los Angeles,with my dance partner Reva Sober, the east side of the San Fernando Valley (still in Los Angeles City) at the home of my longtime buddy Jeffrey Bernhardt, near downtown LA with Rabbi Lisa Edwards and her wife Tracy Moore, two nights in Alhambra,
 just south of Pasadena with my friend Greg Miller, and finally, with friends Dave Parkhurst and Maggie Anton Parkhurst, near the airport, southwest of downtown near the Pacific Ocean.

I had three places I wanted to be during our week: Israeli dancing at Wilshire Boulevard Temple West, Friday night services at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the temple where Joe and I first met, and where we later married, and the weekly hike in Griffith Park with my former crew of middle-aged gay men. I accomplished all of that and more. We ate at Moishe's Middle Eastern Restaurant in The Farmer's Market, where the three ladies who worked there recognized me,from when I was a regular, and we visited the new Grammy Museum in downtown L.A. With our friend Jay Jacobs, we lunched at The French Market Place, a coffee shop in West Hollywood where Joe and I had our first real date in December 2005, then saw a film called "It Got Better" the last day of Outfest, LA's LGBT film festival, about celebrities who have successfully come out. George Takei and Jason Collins, featured in the film, were on a panel after.

After our Griffith Park hike, complete with L.A.'s signature perfect sunny warm, dry weather, and a gorgeous sunset, a group of us went out for Italian food. This was the time I missed most since our move: twenty-five middle-aged gay men out at a neighborhood restaurant, eating and gossiping. I haven't been able to replicate that experience anywhere else.

We also found time to visit three of Joe's classmates from rabbinical school, Rabbis Sara Goodman, Dalia Samansky, and Deborah Goldmann. The three of them at graduation were not available for jobs outside of Los Angeles. They are all not entirely happy working several part-time jobs to keep afloat. Deborah and Dalia each now have two small children, all four adorable and smart, but limiting their career choices.

I see from my visit the result of choices we all have to make. Dalia and Deborah, young, bright and ambitious, are trying to have families and careers and finding that difficult. I could have stayed in Los Angeles and maintained my single life, but I know that Greg, Richard, Jeff, and Jay, all creative and successful people, feel they should have someone with them.  I could have put limits on where Joe could work, or let him go off on his own. My choice was to go with him and hope that a town with a Reform synagogue that accepted a fifty-six year old gay rabbi with a partner would be somewhere I could get used to.

We attended the Men's Havurah (group of friends) Garden Party from our temple Sunday afternoon. I don't think anyone was under fifty. I knew many of the people there from the 1980s. My friend Steve, who always liked older men, met a guy who was fifty-five when he was thirty-five. They are still together, but the older man, now eighty, is in poor health and couldn't attend. I know the coming out stories, the past lovers, dead and still living, of these men. I knew the middle-aged guys when they were young and pretty, the happily married when they were on the prowl. There was a time at temple when there was a special group for men over forty, who felt uncomfortable with the young men who were active in the temple. Now the mainstream group is over 50, and the minority group is those in their twenties and thirties, who have a special coed social group (unthinkable in the old days) for themselves.

These men have been my friends for up to thirty years. I could have stayed in L.A. with them until we were all in nursing homes or dead. Instead I found a somewhat younger man who was starting a new career, looking to the future and not the past.

I loved being in Los Angeles. I was happy to see my friends, note how old everyone has gotten without saying it, as I'm sure they did for me, and hang out in the old places. There are incremental changes: the temple has a new building , our local Trader Joe's was torn down, the Fairfax Cinema is closed, the hikers go to a different Italian restaurant, but among the oldsters things aren't that different. And they never will be.

I asked Joe if we could visit a cemetery in East Los Angeles where three of my old friends are buried. He agreed, and brought a Bible, so we could read psalms at the gravesites. We visited my best friend Fred Shuldiner, a teacher at Orthodox Yeshiva High School, who died from AIDS at 49 in 1994. We stopped at the grave of  Sol, orphaned at an early age and nearly blind from birth, who always spoke of how grateful he was for God's blessings. Sol died of hear failure at 65 in 1997. Sue Terry has a spot for ashes in a wall. She was a crazy dog and cat lover, a self-described "helpaholic" who always cleaned up after temple events, making sure to be the last to leave. Her dementia went unnoticed because she was always off a bit. She died in a care facility at 74 last year. We did not attend because we were in Morgantown. Joe didn't question my request to shlep across town to see dead people; in fact he acknowledged that this was a mitzvah, a good deed, or a fulfillment of a commandment. Sue was a  friend of his; he did not know Fred or Sol, except from my stories. It was in the cemetery that I knew again, for sure, that Joe was the right man for me.

I don't know if we'll be back again. I can't stand flying any more, and we are building new lives here. Still, if anyone asks where my home is, I'll say "Los Angeles."

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

San Francisco



Joe and I have been in San Francisco for a week. He lived here for many years; I visited maybe ten times. Life there has changed. Here are some examples:

We met with my friend Art and his wife Carol for breakfast near where we have been staying. Art's parents were friends with my parents before we were born, so we go way back. Carol suggested a new place. We were early, before work for Art and Carol, so there was not a full menu. The early menu featured five-dollar donuts and muffins, lavash bread with roasted vegetables and a possible egg, something with "fennellated butter." Not real food in my book. The people who came in were young, white and Asian people. groomed to look disheveled, but not really. Years ago, when Art asked me to go to a coffee shop in Haight-Ashbury with him, he asked me not to be shocked at the place. Everyone there was dressed for Halloween. It was July. In the past, when we stayed with Glenn, Joe's friend, we breakfasted at Java Beach, a funky place with bagels and oatmeal and pastries. The clientele were aging hippies, old lefties, young surfers and the tatooed and pierced denizens of the area. The beach in San Francisco is not the rich part of town; by reputation it is fogged in, cold and moldy.

We met with friends and relatives. The biggest complaints were about the cost of housing. My cousin Emily, who teaches at Stanford and her husband, an acupuncturist, are paying $2000 monthly for a one room guest house in Mountain View. Real estate is astronomical; The Bay Area Guardian and The San Francisco Chronicle note that renters in price-controlled apartments are being kicked out by unscrupulous landlords. The new people in town have been called "heartless, "overprivileged," "techies from Ohio with no idea what the values of the City are." Anyone who isn't filthy with money from their job at Google, Facebook, Twitter or some other hi-tech company is being pushed out of San Francisco. That's the narrative, anyway. I find it ironic that in West Virginia, any town would sell itself to attract young, educated hard-working people to the area. In San Francisco "techies" is a pejorative,  like "illegals" in Arizona, "Puerto Ricans" fifty years ago in New York, or for that matter "Jews" in the early twentieth- century. "Hordes" who are flooding our town, who dress funny, don't speak the language, and undermine our values. That's what I'm hearing.

We shared breakfast, lunch and dinner with friends. Two male couples gave us the same story. They are our age (late 50s into 60s) and are planning their retirement. Both couples are moving to Palm Springs in the next year or two. "We feel more comfortable there. There are gay people our age." All four are caring for elderly parents.

At Sha'ar Zahav (which means "Golden Gate" in Hebrew), San Francisco's venerable synagogue for LGBT people, we ran into a discussion of what the future will be. Their long-term rabbi is leaving, membership is declining, and there is a dispute about what to do. Some say there is no need for a special synagogue for LGBT people, with the mainstream Reform and Conservative synagogues much more accepting. One man told me "It's not fun like it used to be." That's probably true of a lot of gay life. Sha'ar Zahav started as a freewheeling group of social outcasts committed to Judaism. But the temple now has a professional staff, a building and a Sunday school. The free-wheeling people have grown up, or moved away, or had children, or died.

At one of our dinners, I suggested that Sha'ar Zahav declare itself "The Mission District Temple." A temple member was opposed, going on a rant about how gentrified the neighborhood was becoming, how "souless, cruel and uncaring" those people could be. She called them "bullies." But the temple needs money, and they have it. Maybe an outreach to liberal Jews, intermarried, gay or not, but living in the neighborhood, could save that temple. If it wants to be saved. If the members are open to change.

Some of our friends think change is good. The more conservative economically welcome the rebirth of neighborhoods. Those who know history just shrug when someone says, "Our neighborhood isn't what it used to be." Nothing is what it used to be.

I have only flashpoints of memories of San Francisco. I was there as a supervised teen, freezing in July in a T-shirt and shorts. In my twenties I indulged in some of the sexual excess of the times. In the mid-eighties, when I spent two weeks job training in San Francisco, I saw a handsome man on the Muni wearing gloves in warm weather. I could see he was not well, and I watched him struggle to walk up a hill after he got off the train. He filled me with sadness, and also fear. He might not have done anything I hadn't done.

Those of us who took the bait and married our boyfriends no longer hang out at the bars and baths. We feel left out of current culture, which would happen anywhere we went. We don't keep up like we used to, don't need to be in on the latest trend. Our generation, always young, died early. We are left mourning our friends who lost their life to AIDS. Joe's friends here are unwilling to move somewhere where they will have to fight for gay rights, as we do now in West Virginia. Palm Springs is warm, cheaper than San Francisco, and a gathering place for the remnants of our era.

Two stories. In one, we are on the N-Judah Muni train heading back to the coast where we are staying. Most people on the trains are young, not rich. There are people who work downtown, some oldsters and some down-and-out types. The train is late, overcrowded. One of the doors doesn't work. Many are standing in the aisles. With all the money in town, why isn't more spent on transit? Some of our friends blamed pensions and healthcare for the municipal budget problems, but what municipal worker on a pension can afford to live here? And yet, there was money to bring a yacht race to town.

We rented a car to drive to the Peninsula. We had to redo our plan and get a car earlier. A woman at Hertz downtown was helpful to us, but there was an issue about both of us driving. She needed my ID and credit card in addition to Joe's. But she stopped and asked "Are you two married?" "We are!" we said. "Then it's okay. I don't need any more documents."  We are not accepted as a couple in West Virginia, except among a close circle of friends. No one would help us because we are married. In that way, it does feel "at home" here in San Francisco.

It was great to reconnect with old friends, particularly for Joe, who met some of his San Francisco friends in college in the 1970s. But we don't really belong here any more, no matter how beautiful and how gay-friendly it is. It was fun to go to The Castro, the center of gay life in San Francisco, but there is nothing we need there. Time has passed us by. Joe's friends have moved on without us, and we are making our way in a different culture, somewhere else.


Friday, July 4, 2014

Barbour County

Call me crazy, but one thing I've done since we moved here two years ago is visit one county monthly that is within 300 miles (500 km.) of Morgantown. As much as possible, these are in alphabetical order. July 1, I visited Barbour County, the first alphabetically in West Virginia, and, so far, the closest to home.  It's a pretty place, with a declining population. The main town, Philippi, has only a few thousand people, and not much life. There are signs about how the Confederates were chased out of town, but we saw Confederate flags on pickup trucks and in store windows. People seem unclear on the concept of West Virginia.
Here are some pics.


Audra State Park, at the south end of Barbour County on Middle Fork

US 250 covered bridge, at the north entrance to Philippi, the oldest and longest covered bridge in West Virginia


Barbour County Courthouse, Philippi

Adaland Mansion, north of Philippi, 19th century




Coal mine as seen from Adaland







Thursday, July 3, 2014

Morgantown - Two Years later

Two years ago, on July 11, my husband Joe Hample, our cat Tappuz and I arrived in Morgantown, West Virginia, from Crescent City, California. Joe is the rabbi at Tree of Life Congregation here in Morgantown. Our life in Crescent City is illuminated in my other blog, Barry's Excellent Adventure, at barrywendell.blogspot.com. I ended that blog when we arrived here. It's available in book form, with a beautiful cover, some extra posts, many fewer pictures and slightly fewer errors, by sending $25 to me at PO Box 831, Morgantown, WV 26507.

I don't plan to discuss Tree of Life. That is Joe's job and career. This will be hopefully, my thoughts and travels.

So here are the thoughts about living here. We have found a group of friendly, intellectual people here. Both of us are brainiacs, Joe especially, not interested in sports and somewhat outside contemporary culture. This is a university town, the home of West Virginia University. Lots of dreamy intellectual types live here, especially among the older, retired people. In Los Angeles, where I lived for twenty-five years, my friends tended to be younger. Here they are older. I'm older as well - sixty-five in October. The town is pretty enough, and there are places to go and things to do here. Our sadness is that there is not much going on here for gay people. There are student organizations and a bar, but we are too old for those things.

As far as West Virginia, there are thing I don't get. People have a horror of cities here, yet the rural towns all seem to be sinking into the mud, losing population and populated by meth-addicts. "Environmentalism" is a dirty word. Coal is king. The state-wide reps, notably our Congressman, a Tea Party Republican,  our Governor and junior Senator, both conservative Democrats, have come out against same-gender marriage. Meanwhile, the suicide rate among young men in West Virginia is the highest in the country. Some say it is economic issues, but I'll bet there is more to it.

We are not big shoppers or glamour boys. We do with Kroger for a food store, while longing, like many residents here, for a Trader Joe's, Whole Foods or Wegman's. Pittsburgh is an hour and a half drive, so we visit sometimes. People we've met go there for Macy's, Trader Joe's or Costco, but we look for judaica, lunch, and the feeling of being in a "real" city.

We both travel frequently. I've taken it on myself to visit every county within three hundred miles of here, in alphabetical order. Don't laugh. I've been to twenty-five already.

Morgantown could be a lot better laid out. Until recently, there was no zoning outside the city, so large developments are built wherever a developer wants, without concern for traffic or transit. There is a rudimentary transit system, largely controlled by the University. It includes the PRT, a people-mover that connects downtown Morgantown to the sprawling parts of the WVU's campus. It's brilliant, but it dates from the early 1970s. This summer, the University is updating it, but there has been no mass transit added in forty years.

Osher Life-Long Learning, or OLLI, is a school for people over fifty to take enrichment classes taught by volunteers. This is where my older friends hang out. Lots of them are retired professors. I've taken a few classes there, and taught two in the last year about pop music history. One class was about New-York based songwriters in the early nineteen sixties: Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Lieber and Stoller and others, and the second was a six-week class about Motown, from the beginning in 1959 to the end of the last century. Both were successful. I may teach about The Brirish Invasion in the fall.

So I keep busy here. I work out at a gym, take and teach classes, travel, and attend synagogue events with my spouse. We should be here another five years, God willing. Hope fully we will both maintain our health and the congregation will continue to support us.

More to come.







I hope my future blog posts can be more interesting.