Running away wee-wee-wee all the way homophobia and back again.

We small town folks who leave home for the “big city” do so for many reasons, some of us leave because we want to see the world, some of us are artists and feel a city has more to offer us creatively and professionally, some of us seek diversity of ideas and ethnicity while others merely seek freedom, freedom of thought and expression. Whatever the reasons we small town refugees seek refuge in the cities of the world looking for something different than what our native land offers us.

We surround ourselves with like minded people who become both friends and family of choice, artists in the city are familiar with the terms “Orphan’s Christmas, Orphan’s Thanksgiving, orphan’s Easter, Orphan’s Passover” we soon discover that holidays with other orphans are often far more peaceful than when we brave elements and distance and travel back to our tiny nests.

In a way we are runaways, whether we fly, bus or drive—we have chosen to escape. Escape the norms of small town life, seek out the unknown, the other, the exotic bustle and honk of city life. Some of us are merely in love with the idea of ordering food to be delivered.

What drove me to leave? I have pondered this over the past few days as I sit at the family farm. When I was young, the desire to leave was burning, instinctual, like the call to birds to migrate. Even as a three year old child, I knew I was going to “grow up to be an artist and live in Los Angeles” even before I knew where that was, when all locations were just destinations Bugs Bunny had on his many cartoon vacations. Even though I am from a very conservative and homogeneous region, I had a highly atypical childhood. My mother, a fourth generation descendent of original Idaho pioneers, the Lambeths of Lemhi County had a rebellious streak and a strong desire to avoid accidentally dating a cousin (it had happened more times than she liked to remember). She developed a fondness for dating the Japanese Americans in the region whose numbers are rather high  due to the one lone town who hired Japanese after the second world war, so many of the prisoners of Heart Mountain Wyoming  and Minidoka Idaho settled neat the town of Ontario, Oregon  a tiny farming town on the Oregon Idaho border. My father, who left Heart Mountain camp for Ontario which by then derived the slur of “Ontokyo” due to the Japanese influx translated the racism and cruelty of his country into a cautious flag waving Americanism and a strong desire to mate with white women—even though it was illegal and he had to drive to Winnemucca Nevada to get married. The marriage lasted barely a year and by the time I was three my mother had married and divorced a total of three times, we had moved from Ontario to Fruitland, Boise, Portland, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Sacramento and back to Boise. I had hitchhiked, bussed, flown and met showgirls, gamblers, dissidents, hippies, hipsters, drag queens and even Tiny Tim. My favorite baby sitter when I was 5 was Ricky, a 19 year old boy who told me that even though he was a boy on the outside, inside he was a girl which made total sense to me at 5 because even though on the outside I looked like a little girl, inside I was really a kitty cat. We were fast friends, and years later when I was a teenager at a BBQ Tupperware party of Boise drag queens and bikers, a beautiful blonde woman called my name—Ricky had become Chris. I learned at a very early age that people are people and that racism and prejudice made no sense.  From the age of 5 to 12 my mother and I lived with her boyfriend, who was one of maybe five black families in Boise, Idaho. Elijah Clayton Jr. “Jay” was 6 foot 4, handsome, funny, patient and kind. He made my mom very happy and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had a real home. The only problem was my dad’s incredible racism. The shiny glow of adoration a little girl feels for her dad tarnished each time he called my beloved Jay a “nigger”. My heart actually hurt, a deep stabbing pain when my dad would come to the front door to pick me up and say  “Is the jiggaboo here?”  Which would inevitably result in a screaming fight with my mother and me not getting to visit my dad, I would walk upstairs with my suitcase in hand and feel ashamed of my father. At six I remember asking my dad “why are you a bigot?” I could not understand how my dad, usually so funny and nice turned into this judgmental creep. It made no sense to me that someone who had been treated so unfairly because of his race could turn around and do exactly the same sort of thing to another person because of his. It made no sense. My dad couldn’t explain it either. It just was. I tried to pretend he was like Archie Bunker on TV but it was never funny. A wall built up between us, he tried to lower it by changing his slurs and just calling Jay “Kurumbo” which is black in Japanese (Japanese people consider this to be a slur BTW)  but the intent of his words belied the language. My wall went up a little higher. Years later when my mom was no longer with Jay but a woman named Judith, my father never said a thing about lesbians.

Judith was white.

Those little tidbits of life, the facets of people, their races, sexual identity, views of the world all effected me making me curious about the world and the people in it, staying in a place where people dress the same, eat the same, think the same held no interest for me, I blazed out of town as soon as I graduated and like many other rural emigrants, I only returned home for the occasional holiday, biting my tongue most of the visit and steering the conversation to the weather or the nieces and nephews, safe topics.

Now I am here for the long haul, caring for my elderly father and uncle and I realize that I cannot live in a state of permanent tongue biting. I sit stunned as racist tirades spew forth from nephews floating on a wave of homophobic vitriol and ignorance that stabs me in the heart. Once again, I am in the position of loving people with views that hurt my very soul. I am trying to ask questions, to understand while also trying to interject some reason and experience into an ignorant modus operandi. I think of my many young gay friends, some have expressed interest in seeing where I come from and I feel a great sadness to think of the pain these dear friend might feel at the words and treatment they might experience. I think of the people I grew up with who turned out to be gay or lesbian and I understand that migration. Some have migrated home and I try and send them love and good wishes, wondering if their culture shock is similar to mine. I wonder and I hope.

In a way this reflects the polarities of our nation, cities with more liberal views baffled at tea party rhetoric and vise versa. The easy and simple thing to do is to walk or run in the opposite direction and seek the company of like minded folk—which I intend to do as often as possible while also doing the more difficult thing, stay and face the issue, ask questions, try and find understanding and even some sort of common ground. I guess mutual respect will have to be the shield. 

I will try and remember that everyone is someone's family member somehow.

I am sure I will make plenty of mistakes, go for lots of walks, cry, scream and weep but I also hope I will learn, teach and maybe somehow understand. 

If I didn’t have hope I wouldn’t even be able to try. 

Wish me luck, friends, any advice is welcome. 

My tongue does have a few bite-marks, I have been home for two days.  My tongue might very well resemble a sieve when I leave in 10 days. Will two months in the city and a trip to the world’s largest theater festival in Scotland buoy me through staying the fall in rural America? Hope springs eternal. Especially for my very holy tongue.