The Early Years - Part 2

I think it's about time I wrote some happy memories. I've been stuck for awhile writing about the past year and a half, so let's switch gears.

Dennis and I chose September 1, 1980 as our anniversary date, even though we had decided on Sunday August 31st to become partners. Dennis always believed that the sixth month opposite your birth month always brought out bad things, so he didn't want an anniversary in August as this was his "sixth month" from his February birthdate. That was fine with me as well.

In New York on our honeymoon, Sept. 1980

About mid-month in September, we did a quick honeymoon trip to New York City, meeting up with my friend Jose Gonzalez and his partner Bryan. By quick, I mean it was a 3-day weekend, just enough time to do a few fun things. Dennis and his ex-wife were married in NYC, his son Aragorn was born there too. But we were just going for fun—and fun is what we had. We took in two off-Broadway shows, both of which we enjoyed immensely—the musical review One Mo' Time and a one-woman show called I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, starring Phyllis Newman, a TV personality. Both plays were held in smaller theaters in the Greenwich Village area of New York. We had a wonderful time the entire weekend, and believe it or not, I have not been back to NYC since that time. The main reason: once we moved to San Francisco, most of our vacation time was spent in Hawaii. And if we didn't go to Hawaii, we usually ended up in Michigan visiting our respective families.

We had our first Christmas together that year as well. Because we were expecting to be together forever, we decided to buy something that we could carry throughout the years that represented Christmas to us. Dennis hated to go shopping, but I talked him into accompanying me so we could buy this "item" and he went along with it. We bought a rolly-polly Santa Claus candle, which is very cute. We ended up creating our own tradition—each Christmas season that came around, as soon as we unpacked the decorations, whoever found Santa first would hold him up so the other could see him, we then would smile at each other and say "Ho, ho, ho." This past Christmas, even though there were tears when I did it, we held to our tradition.

Mom and Dad's evolution of getting used to me being gay took an unexpectedly happy turn. Back when I had come out to them in the summer of 1976, Mom had written me a letter a couple months after that in which she stated that I would never be allowed to "bring a friend" to their home, but once we arrived in Traverse City that December 1980, she welcomed Dennis and matter of factly told us that we'd be sleeping in the back bedroom. No muss, no fuss; she just came out and stated it like it was the most natural thing to say. What a pleasant surprise, at least to me.

February 1981 brought us our first opportunity to take a vacation together. We decided on Key West as Dennis's ex-brother in law lived there. Dennis contacted him and he said we could stay with him (we were only going for one total week, and driving no less). We went about half way the first day, spending the night in Macon, Georgia. The next morning, we headed out to the Tampa region first to look up Dennis's best friend, Maurie. We spent the afternoon and evening with him before heading out the next day to Key West.

Once we arrived in Key West, we were in for another surprise. Bruce lived in a studio apartment, something he had neglected to tell Dennis. We ended up sleeping three to a bed; talk about strange. But since we were on vacation and we were only going to be there a couple of days, we made the best of it. We rented a tandem bicycle and rode around the island. A number of people found us pedaling around quite amusing as I had noticed people pointing at us and smiling. I'm sure they were laughing with us, not at us, right?

On the drive back home to Michigan, we detoured from I-75 to I-95 up the coast of Florida, as I wanted to go through Savannah, Georgia and look up my gay uncle and his partner. It was a comedy of missed opportunities—first, no one was at home at their carriage house. The next stop was at "The Pink House" a little caberet club where Uncle Maynard played piano. We missed them by about ten minutes, but were told they were going back to their house. We stopped one more time at their house, but no one was there, so we never did hook up with them. I had really wanted him to meet Dennis, but such is life. The trip back to Michigan was pretty uneventful, other than realizing that spring was right around the corner. It had been great getting away from cold Michigan for a week.