Gay Pride

I knocked on Glen's door at precisely 9:00 a.m.

"Time to get up. We're going to church, then straight to the Pride Festival. So pick clothes you want to wear to pride. Rainbow colors are du jour."

"I hate rainbows!" he said.

"Then wear black if you want. Be emo. Just get dressed so we won't be late for church!"

Glen is a bear to wake up in the morning. But within less than an hour, he was up wearing bright colors to match his favorite, rainbow-colored belt. By the end of the day he was sporting a rainbow feather boa and waving around a rainbow colored flag.

"What did you tell me this morning?" I reminded him, later in the afternoon.

"I lied," he admitted sheepishly.

I wore white: skinny white trousers, and a beautiful white linen shirt with purple trim that I bought on our last trip to Utah at a Native American store. Göran wore a white t-shirt and tan shorts.

Going to church made us a little bit late for Pride, but to me the most significant moment of the day was during the prayers of the people, when I was able to raise my voice in thanksgiving for the outpouring of gifts: for Glen, for our upcoming wedding, and for the discovery of Göran's family. All gifts it would be deeply ungrateful not to recognize God's hand in.

The Pride parade is a smorgåsbord. There's something there to offend and please just about everybody. (Except the occasional handful of picketers, who presumably are pleased by nothing.) Pride parade wouldn't be complete without the running commentaries from the granola types who are offended by the "commercialistic" corporate floats and the Log Cabin Republicans. ("Did you hear? McCain has a booth at Pride!" "No, really? The nerve!") Then there are the bar-sponsored floats, featuring over-the-top drag queens and thong-wearing, undulating men. (Definitely, by the way, not very hot this year. Yawn-inducing, almost.) There is the never-ending stream of religious groups: "open and affirming" Presbyterians, Catholics, Episcopalians, Quakers, Unitarian-Universalists, UCC'ers, Lutherans, Wiccans, you name it. The Jewish contingent was impressive this year. Glen asked me, "Will there be a contingent of Mormons?" "If there, were," I replied, "It would have been me who organized it." And of course there were the Atheists, all proud that they are none of the above. I saw several signs this year saying, "Happiness is being a gay atheist!" (I thought, "Yes, I was happy that way. But not nearly as happy as I am now!") The only group that garners loud cheers from anybody and everybody is PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).

I could worry. I could fret that certain members of the parade are giving GLBT folks a bad name. I certainly don't agree with everything and anything represented in the parade. But it's not my image to fret about, not my movement to control. Not a movement at all really, more like a moment. A pause to reflect on the courage it's taken to reach this place in the journey where we don't have to fear for our lives or our livelihood. (At least, not in this corner of the world.) It's a pause to reflect on what integrity means to us. To me, integrity means having learned sufficient self-acceptance to want to be better than I am, to accept that I am more of who I am when I acknowledge One Greater.

So no worries on Pride. No control fits. No criticism or insecurity or anger. Just the awesome recognition that truth will eventually out. It's the integrity of the journey that counts for all.

Family! Again!

In the past twenty-four hours Göran and I have laughed, wept, offered prayers of thanksgiving, and just been amazed. We are quite overwhelmed in an excellent way.

As I have discussed elsewhere, Göran's mom was very secretive about her family and about his origins. She took whatever she knew about those things with her to the grave. Finally, last summer (almost exactly one year ago!) we located his birth certificate, which began to give us some answers to these questions.

It took time for Göran to get up the courage to try looking up his father -- the man listed on his birth certificate. He was not sure what the outcome of such an encounter would be. At first, he wasn't even sure he wanted to do it, but over time he gradually realized that he had to. He did some research and found a man with his father's name living in Memphis, Tennessee, the place where he was born. A month or two ago, we together drafted a letter to send. We wanted verification it was received, so we sent it certified mail.

After several weeks the certified letter was returned to us, and we were told that it couldn't be delivered. A co-worker encouraged Göran to send it again, but this time by Fedex (so no one would have to sign for it). He did this on Monday.

Yesterday, he got a phone call from a woman he's never met.

"Is this Göran?" she asked (mispronouncing his name "Juron").

"Yes," he replied.

"I'm your cousin Nikki," she said.

He called me immediately. I was taking Glen to a meeting. When he told me what had happened, and told me that he had also spoken to an Aunt, we both wept together. I wanted to be with him, but I couldn't until after Glen's meeting was done. Göran spent the entire evening on the phone, talking to his cousin Nikki, his aunt Dottie, his father, and his younger half-brother and half-sister. He would have talked to his grandmother too, but she couldn't speak. All she could do was cry. She is 82 years old, and she has been praying to God to find her lost grandchildren (Göran and his sister Gay) before she died. They had been searching for him for a much longer time than he has been searching for them, but he had been harder for them to find since he legally changed his name in 1992. But they had never given up hope trying to find him and his sister. His grandmother kept their childhood pictures on a little altar.

Thanks to the marvels of the Internet, we soon had pictures of his new clan -- pictures of his dad, his half-siblings (there are three of them), his aunt and his cousin. We wept again, as we instantly recognized the family resemblance.

In the letter we sent, Göran mentioned his "life partner." They were full of questions about me. Göran told them about our upcoming wedding in California, and his Aunt Dottie immediately said she wanted to come. They all wanted to meet me, to meet us, meet our foster son. We have begun making travel plans again. This time to Memphis, Tennessee.

I went on-line, found a good genealogy program for Mac, and started mapping out all the relationships and names.

Last night as we lay in bed together and cried more tears of gratitude, he said, "I have a family too. I have a place in the Universe."

This story is... to be continued! For now we are simply astonished and happy beyond belief.