I Paint My Own Content
Creativity is for lovers
One never knows when the voyage ends. Human beings are terrified of dying. Facing death is something that comes to us all. Meanwhile life goes on—friends, lovers, soul mates, spouses, children. All the unpredictable messy elements in the pursuit of happiness. I bring this up because of late I have been stimulated to think about several projects I would like to finish before I open the door, as Blake would have it—to another room.
The first is The Other Side of the Rainbow book I am working on now. People wonder why I am not working on two other art projects they know I want to finish and get published. My reasoning isn’t simple but it is understandable despite the fact agents are telling writes memoirs are not money makers and only celebrity memoirs are popular. The facts in dollars, cents, and balance sheets probably attest to this at the cash register but memoirs are selling and readers are buying enough of them to justify an authors efforts in creating them.
In my case, I am the only one who knows my life, lord knows I’ve spent enough time in therapy healing the tectonic shifts that have unsettled me over eight decades of negotiating living in a misogynistic, racist, faux Christian dominated hypocritical patriarchal homophobic society and culture. I am first and foremost a curious and creative individual, a wild child unafarid of venturing where others fear to go. I appear to have come into the world that way.
The artist, intellectual and historian in me wants to document a twenty year period of time that shape me and a circle of nonconforming people I knew whose lives reflect a period in our American lives from the mid 1940s when most of my peers, dubbed the “silent generation,” by the media were born. We grew up during and after World War II, parented by individuals who experienced The Great War and The Depression. We were affected by their experiences and parenting styles. We are familiar with the McCarthy era, J. Edgar Hoover and FBI raids, antisemitism, racism, as well as post war prosperity and the rise of the middle-class family model which is rapidly being demolished by a new class of unethical, immoral and soulless billionaires.
But not to digress, my memoir is about a historic period in Miami and New York 1960-1980 that I am part of. It is a history the Florida politicians would like to erase with their, “Don’t Say Gay,” agenda. It covers a very repressive slice of the gay civil rights movement when three seemingly desperate groups of marginalized individual came together to to demand justice and pass protections that however flawed allowed for the freedoms and protections that many younger generations have enjoyed and we are all fighting to protect from the current fascist regime ruling over us. It is a story that focuses on lesbians and their struggle to make meaningful and productive lives and contributions to society, feminism and authenticity during a period when being in the closet was necessary and dealing with the mob, and all the skills we developed to negotiate that razors edge.
To be continued.
