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Growing Up Gay in a One-Street Town
Growing Up Gay in a
One-Street Town
by Bill Lippert
Port
Trevorton, Pennsylvania has just one street. The road wanders slowly off
Route 15, going up one side of a hill overlooking the broad Susquehanna
River, and back down again along the west side of the river. "Port,"
as everyone calls it, is whereI grew up until the end of fourth grade.
I remember going once to Port's old
one-room school, tagging along with my older sister on the day school
photos were taken. I was in kindergarten and proudly wore my striped,
navy blue Reading Railroad train engineer's outfit with a red kerchief
around my neck. My own first-grade class
attended a new, modern 1950s style school. It was so new that on the first
day we sat on newspapers on the floor of Mrs. Wilson's classroom, waiting
for our desks to arrive. These were the desks that would later "protect"
us from the Russians during air raid drills.
We lived in the parsonage, right next to
Olive Church, a large old wooden edifice, one of the two churches on Port's
one street. My father was the minister for both churches. As the new pastor
in town, it was his job to merge the Evangelicals with the United Brethren.
Folks couldn't figure out how to worship together in either
congregation's building, so both churches were torn down and a new brick
church was built.
"Joey" lived next door, on the
other side of the parsonage. He was an only child- a year or two older
than me - whose parents ran the general store and hardware all rolled
into one. Mom used to ask us to "quick, run over to the store"
to pick up a loaf of bread if we ran out on Sundays. You had to be quick.
After all it was Sunday, the Sabbath, a day of rest. It was not a day
for anyone in Port to see the
minister's family going shopping. In a one-street town, everyone knew
the minister's family.
I haven't seen or talked to Joey since we
left Port in 1959, but I have always wanted to because somehow I thought
he too must have turned out to be gay. I don't know why exactly. I just
had this feeling. Maybe it was his red hair and freckles, or a child's
version of "gaydar" even way back then.
Once I tried to reach him by phone, just
to re-connect, but mostly to see if he too had come out. It was after
Civil Unions in Vermont in 2000, and my photo and name had been in newspapers
all over the country. Maybe he had seen me? Maybe he had wondered if I
could be the same Bill Lippert - "Skippy" to him back then -
whohad been Rev. Lippert's son and had lived next door.
How odd, if he is in fact gay, that we lived
right next to each other in our one-street hometown. But not so odd, really.
After all, my own youngest brother, Jonnie, three years younger than me,
raised in the same small parsonage, sharing the same small bedroom with
me and my middle brother, Tim, eventually came out too. (If you really
want to ask some interesting questions: Why did Tim end up straight? What
about the single woman who was a school teacher in town? What about "Bobbie"
who never married, and lived with his mother until she died?)
We really are everywhere, growing up all
across America. This is the good news that will forever thwart the desires
of America's right wing religious groups for us to disappear. We, the
gay men and lesbian women of America, are constantly being bred, born
and raised by the very heterosexual couples they so vigorously promote
as the "traditional family." We do not have to recruit. Heterosexual
traditional families constantly replenish America's future supply of gay
men and lesbians.
We may not have to recruit, but we do have
a major responsibility. It is our job, as yesterday's gay and lesbian
youth, to make sure that today's and tomorrow's generations of queer youth
survive the homophobia of their traditional families' upbringing. It is
our job to make sure that when today's queer youth come out, it is into
the arms of a gay-friendly world, ready and eager to welcome them warmly.
Yes, the survival and thriving of queer/gay
and lesbian youth - that is what first got me thinking about Port Trevorton,
and central Pennsylvania, and Hinesburg, and Vermont.
As 2003 came to a close, I was sending off
contributions to Outright Vermont, to help care for the well-being of
queer youth in Vermont, and to Common Roads, caring for the queer youth
of Central Pennsylvania. Oh how I wish someone had been there in the 1950s
and 60s - in Pennsylvania, in Port Trevorton, everywhere.
Sometime I will try again to be in touch
with Joey. If he is gay, I hope he too has found a way to come out, to
live a good life. And I do still want to know if my childhood gaydar was
working all those many years ago.
Bill Lippert lives with his partner Enrique in Hinesburg.