When my significant other and I left the state of Massachusetts back in 1985, it was not due to any rejection by family and friends because I am Gay. I had gone through an interesting road to self acceptance and in the process first saw that my sources of information were limited and, although often attempting to help, caused more inner confusion. I needed to learn what Gay was, who I was as opposed to who and what type of Gay person I was expected to be as opposed to actually being without more information of varying truth being well intentionally offered but off the mark and too often influenced by opinion, impression, and a faulty foundation of weak facts.
I needed to find the real me and not the allowed me.
In California I found myself in many ways. I became a well known cartoonist, worked hard and was recognized for it when it came to the fight for Gay rights, workers rights, and minority rights, started a city-wide video program in Los Angeles public schools that is still going, helped influence the outcome of the teachers’ strike in ‘89, and as a member of both the L.A. and Long Beach Gay Men’s Choruses, with all that and more got to hobnob with people from the homeless to governors.
I once actually successfully addressed the need for the Los Angeles Unified School Committee to make condoms available to students during the height of the AIDS Pandemic at a gathering of Baptist pastors who originally opposed the idea but accepted that as long as they loved that sinners have the opportunity to come to Jesus, an opportunity lost if they died in sin, while sex out of marriage might be a sin, a condom might keep some kids safe until they found the Lord.
Condoms could save souls
Allowing condoms would be erring on the side of salvation.
I really came to like the me I was able to become.
However, at one point the stars aligned in such a way that after giving into addressing my own needs and not those of others, I fell madly in love with someone whose baggage was carefully stowed out of sight and only came forward when all else was lost.
Long story short, I found myself at one point standing at the highway exit at the end of the Walker Avenue exit ramp in Oklahoma City.
I intended to gather what was left of California and head back East to face those who would see the final failure without any real knowledge of the life I had been leading, and this seemed to be grounds for a very awkward homecoming.
In spite of any attempts to know the whole story, those at home certainly could not avoid seeing me leave, getting updates in writing and catching up on vacations without witnessing anything, and seeing a total failure came home, and I could not fault anyone who might have seen the whole adventure as a mistake, perhaps influenced by all the negative Gay stuff they “knew” about.
I knew they had no idea what it had really been all about.
I would have returned home, but not as me, but as a false impression of a failure with nothing to show for the effort, not because it did not exist, but it had happened a continent away.
I was working as a food server at a posh cafeteria in the rich section of town and some days as a substitute teacher building my reputation in the field and using that time with the help of the State Department of Education to reassemble my complete professional file as some parts, due to the size and multiple departments in the Los Angeles school District had been sent to the many buildings to which various parts of my file had been forwarded over the years by central administration. When most of it was gathered I faced the choice of going home with what I had and dealing with all that would entail, or, getting a full time teaching position for at least one semester to shore up what I had of my file and recorded experience leaving me with options upon return.
And so, I rode my pawn shop bought, rather pink bicycle to school headquarters with my papers such as they were and decided if they offered me a job and I got it I would stay, or, if not, steel myself for my immediate future and the loss of control over my life and the loss of the real me that could result.
I would be returning to people’s expectations again.
As it turned out, one of the middle schools in the district had been found to be out of compliance with a State Special Education requirement because of district actions not any of the school itself, and this could be fixed, and should have been earlier, by hiring an additional Spoecial Education teacher, but for the usual school district administrative excuses this had been put off until the notification arrived from the state that an inspection in two days could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and I walked in the Human Resource Office with my Masters Degree and certifications in English and Special Education with emphasis on the “learning Disabled”.
The school was on my way home from school administration and convenient to stop in if only to go through the motions and I fully felt, the next morning I would be out on the interstate with my thumb out.
The school sat diagonally on its corner lot and had been designed by Solomon Layton known locally for the buildings that characterize the state from banks, to schools, and even the state capitol building. The area was to be the upscale neighborhood, and to this end no expense was spared for a building dripping in Art Deco with parquet floors in the library with its reading area with a working fire place, ceilings throughout the building covered in designs that would make Tutenkiamun jealous, a broadway worthy stage, and all manner of appointments that gained it the title of the country’s fanciest middle school in the country whose friezes above the doors completed in 1932 look strangely like a row little Empire State Buildings of glazed terra cotta. There were huge tableaus on the facade of the building that depicted the four major subjects, English, History, math, and science, along with art and industry.
It was built with a few shades of yellow brick arranged in such a way that a cursory glance revealed a simple brick wall, but mindlessly looking at it would slowly reveal the design hidden in the bricks.
It was built in the style popular in Los Angeles and out of place on the plains.
It is a very impressive building and one I am happy to say I eventually played a major role in getting on the historic registry and safe from architectural molestation.
As I came to it from the South, its facade covered the whole scene before me. I braced myself for the choice about to be decided, and walked slowly up the walk from the corner to the front door.
It was big, but not huge, and it stood long dead at its post by the front entry doors with their heavy oak panels and beveled glass. I only saw it when, taking that last breath before, anticipating an equally strong breath upon exiting. High above on a ledge to the right of the doors stood the Art Deco lamp.
It had to be eight feet tall of long green-veneered copper and brass on its lower half and a white glass cylinder at the top wtih a small crown-like cap at the top of it.
I like Art Deco and there was just something about that irrelevant lamp that made me hope I would be hired by the principal even before I saw any on the building’s interior or the people and programs within.
There had been art deco in all its glory in L.A. from architecture to the memory of the butchest man ever entering the Paradise in Long Beach, California, and having his Erte inspired headdress entangled in the rope spider web at the Halloween soiree..
And here, at a decision point, was a totally out of place art deco lamp.
Based on that, I entered the building.
That was this day in 1994.
And that is why all of my Oklahoma experience and any good I may have done there was because of an art deco lamp.
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