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.

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."