Baltimore

I grew up in Baltimore. I lived inside the city limits until I was almost four, and then again during my last three years of college, and for three years in my twenties. I left in January 1978, and have only been back to visit.

People don't believe me when I say Baltimore was as segregated in the fifties and early sixties as any place in the South. African-Americans did not attend movie theaters or Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, or dance on The Buddy Deane Show, except on specific days when the white kids didn't come. Someone once told me "Hairspray" was a "nice fantasy" but except for the happy ending, John Waters perfectly captured Baltimore in 1963.

Baltimore's schools integrated in 1954, and that, coupled with inexpensive new houses in the suburbs, led to an exodus from the city to Baltimore County, which surrounds Baltimore on three sides. African-Americans couldn't buy houses in the suburbs. The county schools I attended had  only a handful of African-American kids, and then only beginning in 1959, when Baltimore County closed the separate schools. They came from formerly rural neighborhoods older than the suburbs.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened up public accommodations for people who had money, but those who didn't were often excluded from good jobs and the deindustrialization which was already happening. There were riots in many American cities throughout the sixties, but not in Baltimore, where home ownership was more widespread and there were still jobs. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, the city exploded. I was in college; my parents and sister left the day of the shooting for spring break with my grandparents in Miami. I was home with my uncle, trying to finish my coursework for my freshman year in college. The city and then the county were placed under curfew. Among my friends, many had parents who owned stores in the inner city that were looted and firebombed. Friendships were tested when this group of friends, angry at the rioters, confronted friends who were sympathetic to the rioters.

Baltimore today is very different than it was. The formerly white working-class neighborhoods are being gentrified at a fast clip; the African-American neighborhoods have been hollowed out by losing the middle class to the now-integrated suburbs. The once segregated and largely Jewish neighborhood where I grew up in Baltimore County is now mostly African-American.

I don't remember anyone ever being fond of the Baltimore Police Department. When I was in college, in long hair and bell bottomed jeans, the police always seemed just plain mean. There was a police riot at the downtown Flower Mart held the first week in May in 1968. The press said it was disrupted by thugs, but the truth was, it was peaceful until the police moved in. Nationwide in the last year especially, there has been a focus on police brutality and the killing of young Black men, with no action taken against the officers. I read on AOL this morning that a police report states that another inmate in the same patrol car heard Gray banging against the fence in the car, trying to injure himself. That seems self-serving from the police. A report from a group called "The Fourth Estate" says that Gray had back surgery before this incident. Even the police don't believe that story.

Like in Ferguson, it's time to blame the victim. Friends on Facebook posted Gray's long rap sheet. I had to tell one friend to say one hundred times "THE POLICE DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXECUTE ANYONE." Others have complained that Jeopardy was preempted or the baseball game was canceled, or it took a long time to get home from work.

Back in the day, when I protested the war in Vietnam by helping to block major streets in Baltimore during rush hour, people were ready to kill us for the inconvenience we caused. As opposed to the inconvenience of having your house burned by napalm, or your son killed in action or coming back a broken drug addict.

That's how I feel about this current unrest. People were inconvenienced. The ghetto in West Baltimore hasn't been a good place to live in a long time. There are blocks of empty houses, not many stores. It's bleak. And the police still apparently have the reputation for sheer nastiness they had in the 1970s.

I saw the looters in online videos (we don't have a working television). They were carrying rolls of toilet paper and boxes of diapers. As my late grandmother would say "It's a pity on them, they should have to live like that."

I lived through the Baltimore riot of 1968, safely  out in the suburbs. Same with Miami's riots in 1980, only then I was laid up with hepatitis and couldn't go anywhere anyway.  I lived off Vermont Avenue and Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1992, when the police were acquitted in the Rodney King case. I was in the middle of it then, but even before that, there was anger when a Korean store owner got probation after shooting a fourteen year old girl in the back. The local bus service had also been cut that year.

Los Angeles in 1992 was a terrible place. In Baltimore this week, neighbors came out after one night of looting to help clean up. Most of the protests were peaceful, although that wasn't entirely clear from the news broadcasts. I think Baltimore's mayor was right to delay asking the Governor for help. And I think bringing in the National Guard in full combat gear is excessive. It's not Iraq out there, it's just people frustrated and angry that the system is rigged against them.

I pray for the peace of Baltimore, as I do for Jerusalem, another deeply divided city.

This is a picture I took last June of a street in the "Old West Baltimore Historic District" near where the rioting occurred.

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."