Tell Me Everything
Nov. update: My confessional journal is evolving to focus on intimate conversations about queer activism, romance and creativity with old and new friends and activists globally. Stay tuned!
Summer 2022. Back in NY…at last, at last.
How is it? Glad to be back? That’s what everyone asks me. Meaning, my old friends in NY, my friends everywhere else who are sort of jealous, not-sure-they-should-be, and my apartment neighbors from when I lived here in the late 90s. I was in my 40s then, and had a new baby and my ex- and I were on again-off again, trying to make it work. It didn’t; we moved, first to LA then SF. Now the baby has turned 23 and is going to be in NY soon herself, in Willyburg, the heart of millennial hipsterdom, living with another of my daughters who just turned 22. Somehow, I became a single parent and raised three daughters in the three decades I’ve been away from my old home. The eldest is 25 now, and she came into my life when she was nine and I was working in Rwanda as an HIV journalist.
I’m not going to spend this first column talking too much about my life from the 90s to now, though memory provides a yardstick for what’s changed, and what feels very much the same about New York now, and Brooklyn, where I live anew. I’ve only been back three weeks. Still unpacking and trying to process the feelings that come and go about that decision.
Are you happy? they ask. It took me a few disorienting days, but Yes, definitely Yes. I’m not especially happy about having given up more space in more beautiful homes, which was a perk of living in the Bay Area and then New Orleans. But New York offers a social architecture of old friends and work connections, something I built when I was younger. In Nola, I had my dream house, and I nested during Covid and imagined the dinner parties I’d have with all these new friends and how old friends would come visit. And I did make some new friends, and old friends did visit a bit. But I realized there’s a difference between visiting a place and living there, between the fantasy of what carries us through our days and the reality. I love what I loved about Nola when I visited, when I imagined a semi-retirement where I would write and read more books and have greater community than I’d found in the Bay Area. Living outside of NY, I also grew to appreciate more nature and I still feel that. I already know I’ll need to escape to the North Fork or upstate New York, swim in some quiet body of water.
Still, for me, New York remains the right place, at least for now. For this phase of my life. What I realized during Covid, and after a bad injury to my leg that occurred in 2020, is that I’m not actually ready to seriously retire or slow down that much, just some, and definitely not from an active, engaged cultural and social life. Also, politics. I missed my people, the ACT UP and Lesbian Avenger 90s troublemakers, the activists, the friends who send me WTF!!** text messages in the middle of the night because they can’t sleep either, or sleep poorly, or their brains are like mine, always racing and processing a million things that make sleep elusive. I missed other journalists, and want to meet some of the people I read regularly. I missed people who care, deeply, about what’s going on politically and are doing what they can to make it right. Of course, those people live in those other cities, and everywhere. But I have my roots in NY and they’re easier to access. A lot of them are still burn-to-shine people, hungry to live. My kind of peeps.
The fact is, true confessions, I was often so restless elsewhere, and I missed New York’s energy and cultural life. At midnight, I’d feel like the only one up, still ready to burn the candle a bit more. I wanted to be at a play, a performance, a protest. I realized, being half-60, which is another subject for this column, that I missed being with old friends, too, and longed for new ones who, like me, still want to go out dancing, even if it’s late, even if it’s mostly younger folks. Who are single and doomscrolling dating sites with varying degrees of pessimism or renewed hopes of success. Or who are still up, pushing away sleep to make progress on an unfinished piece of a book/play/script/painting done. They have things to say.
It’s not fear or worry that usually keeps me up too late either, not really. I mean, of course I worry because we are in the age of American Decline, that’s how it feels. It’s certainly true for my friends – for my peers in the over-50 set. We recognize the America we grew up with is not shaping up to be what we were sold in our youth. Scratch any subject—health care, climate, our retirement plans, our housing, definitely our imperiled democracy – and the complaints pile up. A number of my friends have relocated or fantasize about moving to France or Mexico or now Portugal because one lives better with less money and we aren’t facing a Twitterverse of idiocy coming from the far-right fringes of America.
Having lived elsewhere, though, I also know the grass can be greener on the other side, and when we move, we bring ourselves and our baggage along, metaphorically and materially. The French have their Le Pens, and the Columbians their cocaine economy, and nowhere is a dreamland. Take a break, I suggest to fed up friends. Get out of town for a bit. But try it out first. Rent, don’t buy. There’s a difference between being a tourist and a citizen. Maybe you need a vacation vs. a new home.
Over the years, I’ve visited New York often. That said, living here is different and I’m different now, too. I’m not 20 or 30 or 40. I still find myself surprised when I meet friends and they look a lot older. I must too, of course, I’m not in denial. But it’s all good, that’s really what I feel. I had that world; I want this one, now. I’m curious about this New York, what it’s become in my absence. Who’s here now? What are they up to? I want to know what’s going on. I want to find the fun restos and art galleries and new queer spots and where you can dance all night. Where are my people now? Here they are still and here I am, and what are they up to, what have they been thinking about, reading and seeing, and what’s exciting now? I say, Tell me everything.