Honored

The Pride committee voted to honor Charlie posthumously at last year's gay pride celebration.  I was too broken up to go to Sacramento for the state legislature's presentation and for presentations here in San Diego, but did ride in the gay pride parade in a convertible with Gloria Johnson, another gay rights and womens rights activist, another long term Democratic activist and friend of both of us.  It was very nice they chose to honor Charlie.  The crowd was estimated about 150,000.  Some people did not know who Charlie was, they thought I was Charlie.  I held up a photo of him so people could see who he was.  One person from the crowd shouted, "Is that your grandson?"

Which brings to mind a memory.  Charlie loved playing basketball and was very good at it.  He played in as many as four leagues each week.  One was the gay league and that league has many women players.  At one point one of the women asked who Anita Bryant was.  So you get your positive:  Anita Bryant has faded into insignificance.  But you get your negative:  Bryant's assault against gay equality was, well, evil and cruel.  One of my favorite possessions, I wonder if I still have it, was a copy of some scandal sheet like maybe the 'Star' with a headline story from Bryant's divorced husband proclaiming in huge red letters that his marriage to Bryant had been a living hell.  And so it goes.

Trips

I was thinking about some of the great trips we took together.  Really, too many to mention them all.  Of course New Zealand was absolutely outstanding.  In 1985 Charlie, sister Charlyne & I flew from Honolulu to Christchurch and started a month long vacation on both the North and South Islands.  More about that later.   Charlie and I drove to Vancouver a couple of times, we flew to Seattle and rented a car for another trip to Vancouver and Tofino, also an utterly outstanding trip.  Charlie as a four time delegate to Democratic National Conventions naturally got to travel to them and I went along.  1980 in New York, 1992 in New York, 1996 in Chicago, 2000 in LA.

In 1980 Charlie won for delegate at a caucus at a local union hall.  The New York gay community arranged housing for gay delegates, we stayed with Bruce Voeller and his partner in Soho, it had been Aaron Burr's townhouse, it was one of three houses on Manhattan Island with its own swimming pool. From Soho it was an easy walk to the venue at Madison Square Garden.  I heard President Carter speak in the hall, got to attend gay caucus meetings.  We went to a party that was mentioned in "And The Band Played On", I never figured out why I couldn't get into the bathroom until the passage in the book explained what the bathroom was being used for.  After the convention we went out to Fire Island, it was two weeks before Patient Zero Gaetan Dugas arrived so we did dodge a bullet.  Then on to DC.  A friend of Bruce's had attended a party he threw and invited us to come visit, so we got to explore that very interesting city, too.

1996, Chicago, we were blessed with great weather.  Boated on Lake Michigan, enjoyed the city, then motored around the Great Lakes.  We swam at Miners Beach on Lake Superior.  As we were entering the water the locals told us we would freeze our asses off but it was September, the lake had had time to warm to a comfortable 65 degrees and after we cavorted around in the water for a few minutes the locals joined us.  We enjoyed the Dorr Peninsula, we enjoyed the U.P. of Michigan.  It too was a great trip.

In about 1986 a friend of Charlie's from work, from NYC, needed a car driven from NYC to San Diego, she told us to go anywhere we wanted but to just get the car to San Diego.  That was almost a month, too.  Staying with a friend we'd met at Fire Island in 1980 we enjoyed New York again, then off to Poughkipsie where we picked up the car.  We drove into the Adirondaks and enjoyed autumn colors.  Enjoyed might not be the right word, we were utterly blown away by them.  We climbed Mt. Marcy, highest mountain in NY State. Then on to Montreal where we hooked up with Sandy who, like Charlie, had survived a bout with melanoma. She is fun, she knows how to party, and we did party.  We stayed at the Aubin Motel, a combo motel and plant nursery.  It worked.  Montreal is a great, fun, interesting and beautiful city, I would recommend it to anyone.  Then southeastward toward Maine.The Maine coast is as beautiful as they say.  Acadia National Park is stunning.  More autumn colors, and stunning beautiful beach scenes.  Sandy caught a plane back west from Augusta and we started our drive west.  Through New York State to Niagara Falls, also mind numbingly spectacular.  A down note was a gay hotel in Toronto, for a lot of reasons we did not enjoy Toronto, but you can't win em all.

Through the U.P. again, to Minneapolis where we tried to look up a friend of mine from college, but missed him.  Oddly enough we ran into him years later on a ferry from Nanaimo to Vancouver and he and his girlfriend turned us on to Seattle and the Northwest, but that is another trip. Through the Badlands, on to the Black Hills, to Rapid City, to Mt. Rushmore and I did find it stirring. We love America.  For all its faults and quirks it is a great place and some great people have made it so, and you see four of them carved into Mt. Rushmore.  On to the Corn Palace.  Wow.  Is this even on the same planet as New York City?  Quite a contrast.  Visited the little town where Charlie's employer had grown up.  He went on to an illustrious career in law in California.  To Coloado, on to New Mexico with the stunning beauty of yellow aspens against the purest blue sky.  Finally into Arizona, saw our first palm trees in a month.  Almost hit a coyote eating some road kill on Highway 8 in the desert.  Coming out of the eastern San Diego County mountains still about 30 miles from the sea we could smell the ocean and knew we were home.

New England fall color

Brilliant yellow aspens

Calvin Coolidge's home in Plymouth, Vermont.  Ladies running the museum had been little girls in 1923 when Coolidge got word there that President Harding had died, and he Coolidge was President.  They said it was a tiny sleepy little town but that day it was full of government cars and officials.  They remembered it like it was yesterday.  Fascinating talking with them.  The house had no indoor bathroom.  Quite a contrast to the truly elegant mansion of President Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park, which we also visited.  Also truly fascinating.

My nomination for one of the funnest places I have ever visited, the great city of Montreal.

Some More Pics

In bed in Seattle

At Halema'uma'u, Kilauea, The Big Island

A Northern California beach one cold winter day

Charlie's 66th Birthday Today

Today would have been Charlie's 66th birthday.  He had a great life, but he really deserved a much longer one.

Charlie and friend Stuart of the San Diego basketball team at the Sydney gay games in 2002.  Charlie toured Australia for about a month after the games and enjoyed it immensely.

Photo on our 32nd anniversary.  

Charlie holding proclamation from City Council honoring Charlie for his accomplishments.

Charlie at LaPush, Washington, on another of our great trips.

Charlie & me in Seattle about 1977, we had just gotten together, he had just started his beard.

Today would have been Charlie's 66th birthday.  It is little more than a month from a year since he passed away.

Charlie's Birthday Coming Up

Charlie in Hawai'i

Charlie at Manago's in Kealakekua

Charlie & Stan in the great Northwest

Charlie & me the day we got married, June 17, 2008, before the voters denied equal rights to gay people to marry.  Under the direction of the tax exempt Catholic and Mormon churches.  I could go on...

The wedding party.  We were married right by that grove of palms on the bay side of the County Building.  I had no idea being married would add so much to my happiness, to Charlie's happiness, to Our happiness.  We always joked about ourselves as being a single organism, "Charliebob", a united entity.  Marriage was wonderful, really wonderful.  The gay center handed out roses to the happy couples at the entrance to the building.  It took a few weeks for the wonderfulness of being married to sink in.  A few days after we were married we attended the marriage of two gay guys, both in their 80's, who had met and gotten together back in the mid '50's.  I was the "flower stud", obviously I couldn't be a flower girl, so I was the flower stud.  They have both passed on now, but I am so very glad they got to enjoy being married, before the voters had their precious say.  Truth is, democracy has never stood lower in my estimation, just using it to discriminate and hurt people, to further bigotry.  As I said, I can go on.  All the opponents of gay marriage had to do was mind their own business.  Would they want my church breaking the tax laws to put in a law that discriminated against their marriage?  Not likely, but do unto others as you would have them do unto you has never counted for anything with self righteous Christian busybodies, has it?

This coming Friday, Feb. 8 would have been Charlie's 66th birthday.  So hard to believe he is gone.  

Charlie's birthday would be Feb. 8, the Friday after next.  We are also approaching the one year anniversary of his passing, Mar. 17.  It was a Saturday morning, about 10:15 am.  This Saturday, Feb. 2, will mark 46 weeks since he passed.  It is still incredibly hard to believe he is gone.  He was always so healthy, always took such good care of his health.  When his mind started to go it took a long time to recognize and accept the fact because from day one he had always been brilliant.  Look at that kindly and handsome face.  In pictures, we see Charlie harvesting fruit on a visit to Italy, then him and me at Lake Cuyamaca in about 2008 or so, then me as I was in 1976, a surf local at Tourmaline, then a pic of Charlie about a year and a half before he passed, and finally one of him in a shirt from his beloved Stanford University about a year before he passed.

Charlie on the Kalalau trail on Kaua'i.  We did the 11 mile hike from Ke'e Beach to Kalalau three times.  It is the hardest hike I have ever done, but the best.  We hiked the Grand Canyon from the rim to Phantom Ranch and back about two weeks before the first Kalalau hike, it was easy compared to Kalalau.  It is an amazingly beautiful place, an amazingly beautiful trail.  Hawai'i trails make you strong.  All three times after hiking to the beach Charlie hiked back up into Kalalau Valley, and all three times I passed on the hike to the valley, for me, enough was enough!  He back packed out about 30 lbs of oranges from the valley, gave away most on the hike back to Ke'e, but we kept some and they were delicious.

He had only shortly before recovered from an operation removing lymph nodes in his groin after melanoma was discovered on a leg.  No cancer was found in the nodes, it took him a couple of months to fully recover from the operation.  He was balls out on the hike that followed his brush with melanoma.  (First doctor gave him only a 50-50 chance of survival until the lymph nodes turned out negative, then raised his chances to 95%!)  We met a hippie who lived in a camp up a vertical cliff near the waterfall.  He had been part of a commune living in the valley which was evidently, according to him if I remember correctly, funded by a son of Elizabeth Taylor.  Sterling, the fellow, had lived at the commune with the heir of a great Cuban tobacco fortune, both gay, they had taken lots of ellis-d and had climbed "the cones"while high, during the nights.  Wow.  Charlie and Sterling scampered up the vertical cliff to Sterling's camp, it is of course technically illegal to live at Kalalau, but the authorities had never taken it on themselves to climb those cliffs to force him out.  A very interesting fellow.

The waves at Kalalau were often gigantic and very powerful.  In fact, from the overlook in Koke'e Park you can hear them breaking, they sound like big cannons being fired.  We saw a very large shark through one of the waves once.  We also saw a really attractive brown guy, Mundo, body surfing the giant waves. And then Abe, a definitive hippie with beautiful long hair and a great body.  But I digress.  Of course.