Grief & Gardening: 20 Years

Posted on 2021-09-11 by admin

Written spontaneously as a Twitter thread, and transcribed to this blog post.

I’m avoiding the news today. As well as the retraumatizing snuff porn documentaries. I’ve written about all of it before. I don’t feel the need to day to write any more. I wrote this 15 years ago about Anniversaries, my first “Grief & Gardening” post:

The ways we observe anniversaries is arbitrary. For example, I was shocked to tears for weeks by the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, which killed 100 times more people than Katrina [1st Anniversary]. The earthquake which precipitated it left the entire planet ringing like a bell. The observation of “25 Years of AIDS” at this year’s World AIDS Congress is pinned only to the first official report of a cluster of unusual deaths by the Centers for Disease Control in June of 1981. The timelines of epidemics don’t follow our categorizations of them.
Grief & Gardening #1: 1, 5 and 25, 2006-09-04

At the time, I didn’t have the blog yet. I wrote a lot in my journal. I transcribed some of it to back-dated blog posts. This was the first:

Like an earthquake, the initial shocks have affected each of us differently, and to different degrees. The aftershocks will continue for months. The effects will ripple out for decades. If I believed there was anyone to listen, let alone, answer, I would pray that each of us gets whatever we need to come through healthy and whole. I would pray that, individually and collectively, we respond to this violence with compassion, wisdom, courage and strength.
This Week in History, 2001-09-14

The second back-dated blog post transcribes a letter I wrote to Rev. Joanna Tipple, then pastor of the Copake, NY church, which had been my husband’s church when he was growing up:

Again, and still, horrors are committed in the name of God. A month ago, more than five thousand people lost their lives in a smoking crater, killed in the name of God. It makes no difference to me whether the banner reads “Holy War” or “God Bless America.” This crisis has brought out both the best and worst in people. Like any tool, the idea of God is used for evil as well as good. Then what good is God?
Without God

I worked in downtown Manhattan for 35 years before retiring two months ago. As the 5th Anniversary approached, Ground Zero was still just that, a wound. Everywhere were commemorative signs and symbols. You could feel it just walking around.

I have been feeling this one, the 5th anniversary of 9/11. The city is feeling it, too. Peoples’ grief is closer to the surface, more accessible. Mine certainly is. I’ve also been remembering a lot of what it was like in the city right after. There are reminders of it everywhere, on the news, in the papers, special exhibits and events, and especially, at Ground Zero.
Grief & Gardening #2: Five Years After, “Ths Transetorey Life”, 2006-09-09

I moved to NYC, to the East Village, in 1979. Though I survived, many did not. It’s why grief and loss pervade my writing, including my blog. I wrote this in 2007, after learning of the death, from AIDS, of yet another of my last lovers.

Reminders of the upcoming 6th Anniversary of 9/11 are piling up. My first day back at work from my [recent] trip, I walked by the Deutsche Bank building – ruined in the attacks, condemned, and only now being dismantled – where two firefighters had lost their lives the day before. I could see the blackened scaffolding and walls of the building. I smelled the smoke, startled for a few minutes, taken back to the months after the attacks, when the fires burned for months, when we walked every day through the crematory of downtown Manhattan.
In the Shadow (How shall my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?), 2007-08-08

On the 7th Anniversary, I wrote my name on a beam that was intended to become part of the Memorial at Ground Zero. I was briefly interviewed by a local radio reporter from 1010WINS. I met a good dog.

Flags, flags, flags … flags waving everywhere. I understand the impulse, yet I don’t feel it as a defiant gesture. It feels like a concession to me. That we have no greater symbol than our nation’s flag makes me sad. What evil has been committed in the name of that flag?
Seven years, 2008-09-10

On the 9th Anniversary, with some perspective of years, I was able to write coherently about what our experience had been that day, that week. I worked downtown, through the months of smoke and ash that followed. And year after year in NYC.

We decided to hold to our vacation plans for the week, somber though it was. There was nothing we could do back home. My workplace downtown, blocks from Ground Zero, would not reopen for two weeks. Reminders met us everywhere we went. And everywhere we went, we were ambassadors for New York City. When we told people where we were from, as often as not, they broke down crying. We were their reminders.
Grief & Gardening: Nine Years, 2010-09-11

I avoid “ticker tape” parades.

The gutters were thick with shreds of paper, and ash, for weeks and months after 9/11. The gray ash was the last to go. Living and working in downtown after 9/11 was being in a crematorium.
Grief and Gardening: Remains of the Day, 2019-07-11

So, I don’t feel a need to write anything new today. I’m going to spend the day away from television, and news, and commemorations. I will instead hug my husband, squish our cats, and spend time in the garden photographing bugs, observing and celebrating the diversity of life.

Grief and Gardening: Ashes (Remembrance Day for Lost Species)

Posted on 2019-12-03 by admin

My alarm wakes me Saturday morning. I go downstairs to the kitchen, nuke myself a cup of coffee, and get a fresh batch going. I didn’t sleep well. Today is the Remembrance Day for Lost Species.

I start prepping my mother’s breakfast. I put some orange juice in her small cup, and add some thickener, probiotic, and her liquid medications. I start working on crushing her morning pills. Each of the half dozen takes a different approach. Some crush easily. Others need to be split first.

Their remains collect in the well of the crusher. The easier ones are reduced to dust. The harder ones leave grit, and small, sharp shards.

A black cat with one spot on her chest, like a priest’s collar, finds me in my garden. She adopts me immediately. I name her “Spot”. She dies in my arms as we try to find the veterinarian emergency room in a snowstorm.

We bring her home in a small tin. Inside the tin is a bag. We transfer it to a reliquary box, an artwork of hammered copper, beads, and glass.

She carries me through 15 years of recovery, reconnecting, and relationship. She comforts the man whom I would later marry through his mother’s dying, and death.

The bag doesn’t quite fit the box. I want to rearrange it. It’s my first time handling cremated remains. I open the bag. Its contents are not what I expect. They are not ash. They are crumbs, and grit, and shards of bone, chalky and white. It’s all that’s left of her.

Tomorrow is World AIDS Day. My partners, my lovers, my friends, my neighbors. I think of the photo one friend took of another, spreading his dead lover’s ashes from a plastic baggie – before he died – on their property in the Catskills. The images of ashes thrown over the White House fence. A sea of quilts, holding the names of my partners, my lovers, my friends, my neighbors, so scattered across the acres of battlefield, it takes hours to visit them all.

We are traveling upstate, our first real vacation together. Everywhere we go the mood is quiet, subdued. Whereever we go, people ask where we’re visiting from. When we tell them, their eyes well up.

I walk to and from work. The streets and gutters are filled with ash. It takes months for the rains to wash it all away.

We step out of the shop. I ask him to wait. I walk back inside. I return to where I saw the box. Its title is “Our Lady of Abundance”. I buy it for the meaning the word has for him. It goes to his apartment, then our apartment, then our home. Waiting.

I am standing in a mountain river, cold over my feet and legs. I am here for my father. I am here with my father. I take the small, ornate bronze container out of my pocket. I open it, and begin releasing its contents to the wind and water. It’s not what you expect: They are not ash. They are crumbs, grit, shards of bone. Tomorrow is the anniversary of his death. It’s all that’s left of him. I am here for my father.

It is Lost Species Day. We are burning the remains of countless organisms. Even long dead, we could not let them be. We are burning the world.

In the Catskills we watched the towers fall, again, and again, a hundred miles away. Where I bought a box of hammered copper, beads, and glass to give to a man to mark a relationship that arose out of deeply shared loss, like a phoenix, from ashes.

An Elegy for Biophilia

Posted on 2015-02-23 by admin

I was moved to write this by a short missive from Reverend Billy:

When I go to pray, which is sometimes difficult being so without any god, I think of that time in my life, because the natural world was overwhelming the god that my family insisted was all-powerful and all-knowing. Creation was overwhelming the Creator and it came in the form of undulating prairie grasses.

Post by Reverend Billy And The Stop Shopping Gospel Choir.

I was raised in temperate and tropical suburbia. Even in those landscapes, the woods in the backyard, or the palmetto swamp at the end of the road or the canal, drew me to them. They were my expanse. Yet, compared to what existed before the forests were razed and the swamps drained, the landscapes of my childhood were impoverished.

The shifting baseline degrades further. More than half the world now lives in cities, with less ready access to nature than ever before in the history of our species. Biodiversity is an environmental justice issue.

I’ve chosen to live my adult live in a city. Even here, those childhood experiences guide me. I garden because it connects me to nature, it nourishes me. The beauty I invite is not of my making, but larger, deeper, and older than I can comprehend.

I believe it everyone’s right to have that connection for themselves. Not only a right, but necessary. Not only for our own health, but to have some hope for the future health of our planet.

That hope, however impoverished, is what keeps me going.

Off-topic: 20 Years

Posted on 2013-03-26 by admin

Today is the 20th anniversary of my sobriety. Sobriety, abstinence, and recovery are often conflated. They’re not the same things.

Continue reading →

Grief & Gardening: Nine Years

Posted on 2010-09-11 by admin

Let’s get the usual question out of the way. This is where I was the morning of September 11, 2001.

This is Skytop Tower at Mohonk Mountain House at sunset the previous night. Blog Widow and I had planned a week-long vacation upstate, starting at Mohonk. The morning of September 11, we hiked up to Skytop. A rustic retreat, Mohonk had no televisions or radios in the rooms. As we left the massive wooden structure to go out hiking, I noticed people huddled around the few televisions in some of the common rooms. I thought nothing of it at the time. I later realized we left just after the first attack.
We hiked around the lake, then up to Skytop, and climbed up into the tower. We had the trails almost to ourselves. As we came down the tower, I sang loudly, my voice echoing through the stone structure: “I love to go a-wandering …” Part of the way, we encountered another hiker coming up the stairs. I stopped singing and said, “excuse me.” Only then did he lift his head to us, tears streaming down his face. “Did you hear what happened?” “No.” “They flew a plane into the World Trade Center.”

We hiked back. When we returned to the buildings, the common rooms were packed with people, watching the news on every available television. We went back to our room. Blog Widow went back downstairs to find out what happened. I had brought my laptop with me, so I tried getting online. He returned to tell me the World Trade Center had collapsed. I was incredulous; I couldn’t imagine what that meant. By the time I went downstairs myself, both towers were gone. I sat and watched those horrible images for the first time.

We decided to hold to our vacation plans for the week, somber though it was. There was nothing we could do back home. My workplace downtown, blocks from Ground Zero, would not reopen for two weeks. Reminders met us everywhere we went. And everywhere we went, we were ambassadors for New York City. When we told people where we were from, as often as not, they broke down crying. We were their reminders.

We drove back to my apartment in Brooklyn that Sunday. I was startled when I saw the first airplane flying overhead; with all flights grounded, the skies had been empty since the attacks. I got my first glimpse as we drove along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway: twin trails of heavy smoke, orange and red from a setting sun. I burst into tears. Somehow, I had expected the fires to have burned out by then.

When we were allowed to return to work, I got my first personal glimpse of Ground Zero.

The fires continued to burn for months, through the winter, into 2002. For weeks, until a few heavy rains washed the city, everything was covered in ash and dust. It collected in drifts along sidewalks and gutters. Every day I went to work, for months, I smelled and breathed the smoke. All of Downtown Manhattan was a crematorium.

Thousands of shrines and memorials appeared and grew throughout the city. The most heart-breaking were those around St. Vincent’s Hospital, which prepped for massive casualties, but received very few. Few who didn’t walk, or run, away survived. Even today, remains have yet to be found for over 1,000 people murdered in the attacks.

The ash washed away, the fires died, the smoke cleared. The candles and posters gradually eroded. A year after the attacks, the memorials which covered the fences around St. Paul’s Chapel were carefully removed and preserved. Eventually, even the basin which held the foundations of the towers and other structures on the site was emptied. As the direct evidence of what happened faded, new symbols emerged. For me, these are far more powerful and meaningful than any flag or banner.

Tonight, the Tribute in Light will shine again.

The Sphere, the sculpture by Fritz Koenig that had held place of prominence in the center of the WTC Plaza, was heavily damaged in the towers’ collapse, but survived. It’s been on display at Battery Park for the past few years. It will be returned to the Memorial for its permanent home.

Another sculpture, Steve Tobin’s “Trinity Root,” was placed in the courtyard of Trinity Church, two blocks from Ground Zero. It was cast from the roots of a Sycamore that stood in the cemetery of St. Paul’s Chapel, a few blocks north, and directly across the street from Ground Zero. The tree was destroyed when the towers fell, but it shielded the church itself from even greater damage.

St. Paul’s Chapel has been a moving memorial all these years. It’s filled with an ever-changing display of artifacts and remembrances from all over the world.

And finally, the official, multi-million dollar memorial will occupy the footprints of the towers and the plaza between them. Here’s a model of the National September 11 Memorial at the Preview Site on Vesey Street, across the street from St. Paul’s near the corner of Church Street at Ground Zero in Downtown Manhattan.

The first of 400 trees for the grove were planted just two weeks ago, in time for today’s observations. These are Quercus bicolor, Swamp White Oaks. The other species will be Liquidambar styraciflua, Sweet Gum. A forest and waterfalls will take the place of devastation, natural elements no less powerful and evocative for being constrained to an urban grid. They will also remind me of where I was when I first heard of the attacks. A garden as the ultimate embodiment of reflection and recovery.

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Blessing of the Animals, Chelsea Community Church

Posted on 2009-10-12 by admin

Update 2009-10-12: Added story about Smokey.

Blog Widow and Annie, the new kitten, at the Blessing of the Animals service at Chelsea Community Church earlier today.

An off-topic, i.e. non-gardening, post.

In some recognition of National Coming Out Day, some non-gardening factoids about me:

I’m an atheist.
My partner, known as Blog Widow, is an ordained minister, among many other talents.
People who’ve known me a long time think that’s hysterical.

It takes some enticement to get me into church. Filling the pews with dogs and other companion animals kinda does it for me.

This is also an opportunity to introduce Annie.

Annie is a six-month old kitten we adopted two weeks ago from Sean Casey Animal Rescue in Kensington. We’ve been wanting to adopt a second cat, thinking that Ripley, the old soul, would do better with some companionship when we’re out during the day. Ummm, yeah. That’ll work. Eventually.

Today was Annie’s “coming out,” as we took her to the Blessing of the Animals service at Blog Widow’s church, Chelsea Community Church. Mostly dogs were present; Annie was one of four cats, by my count, in attendance. She even made an appearance on stage when Blog Widow introduced her to the congregation for his general blessing over those assembled, human and otherwise.

Smokey

I shared this story here two-and-a-half years ago. This is an appropriate context to revisit it.

My atheism is life-long, forged in the fires of Catholic catechism during childhood, such as this exchange:

Me: When I go to Heaven, will my dog, Smokey, be there?
Nun: No.
Me: Why not?
Nun: Animals don’t have souls.

Smokey was a magnificent animal, a German Shepherd we obtained as a puppy. I named him during the ride home. Sitting in the back seat, trying to hold onto him: a writhing mass of long, shaggy fur all the colors of smoke. He became my companion, my protector, my model of perfect love. Setting aside, for the moment, the overweening confidence that I would go to Heaven, as a child I recognized that any place that would not grant Smokey admittance was beneath my interest and unworthy of my attentions.

Certainly, there were other, more pernicious, influences that drove me from religious indoctrination. Conversion to active disbelief became a logical extension; without the possibility of evidence, there is no reason to believe. It’s taken me a long time to accept that, nevertheless, I am a spiritual person. There’s no life after death, but there is life; that’s remarkable enough to celebrate it, and reason enough to grieve its inevitable end. Events such as the Blessing of the Animals remind me that, on this point at least, I share some common ground with others, regardless of the differences in our beliefs, or disbeliefs.

Slideshow

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Links

Chelsea Community Church
Sean Casey Animal Rescue

Apollo: a personal/biographical perspective

Posted on 2009-07-20 by admin

40 years ago, we watched the landing on television like much of the rest of the world. Days before, my father had packed our little family into the car and drove to the causeway overlooking the Kennedy Space Center to watch, and feel, Apollo 11 send men to land on the moon for the first time. My father worked for Grumman, which had the contract to develop the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), later dubbed simply the Lunar Module (LM), for the Apollo space program. He worked on the LEM’s telemetry systems. Part of my father is on the moon.

My Dad at work, circa 1960s

My family moved twice while I was growing up. Until I moved to New York City, I didn’t live anywhere longer than six years. In the winter of 1964-1965, we moved from Long Island, east of new York City, to Merritt Island, Florida. As you can see from this map, our home was just a little over 10 miles from the Apollo 11 launchpad. I used to watch rockets launch from my bedroom window. On most launches, our windows shook.

View Apollo in a larger map

The Apollo program had an enormous economic and human toll, an important part of the story which I’ve yet to read anywhere else. Shortly after we moved to Florida, my father began working 60-80 hours a week, a pace which didn’t let up until nearly the end of the development program. Once it became routine to send men to the moon, the development program ended abruptly. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs simultaneously in a region whose development was triggered by this one program. My dad was able to find another job within Grumman, but it required moving back to Long Island. With no buyers, we were only able to sell our home at a greatly reduced price, losing all our equity, and having nothing with which to buy a new home.

We moved back to Long Island in the fall of 1970, just in time for me to start the school year, though just one week late.

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On Activism

Posted on 2008-01-18 by admin

Following is the text, edited slightly, of my contribution to a keynote address to hundreds of attendees at a conference in October of 2000. The occasion was the Fourth Annual Breaking Walls, Building Bridges (BWBB), an annual conference by, for and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth.

From 1999 to 2002, I was a member of the steering committee of a recovery (chemical dependence and other) advocacy group called SpeakOUT. Among the opportunities that offered me was participation in the planning committee for BWBB.

The 2000 conference theme was Activism. Rather than bring in an outside, expert “activist” speaker, the planning committee chose to hold a group keynote of the conference planners themselves.

With my increasing involvement in advocating for and organizing around issues of greenspace, sustainability, and community through gardening, I think this is on-topic for this blog. For me, it’s a timely reflection on where I’ve been and what I’ve done to guide me in my current and future efforts.

I am not an activist.

This is not modesty. I just don’t think of myself that way. I don’t think of what I do as activism. Activists do things I won’t do, or can’t do, or would never think of doing. Activists are heroic, even mythic, beings. What they do is beyond my reach.

When I was a boy I would fantasize about being a hero. I could be walking along a bridge, and hear someone calling for help from the water below, and jump in and save their life. I could know I’d done something good and important. I could know that I mattered, that I could make a difference.

In elementary school the best I could do was read to younger kids at the public library, and organize a fund-raising drive for the local animal shelter. When I was 14 the best I could do was tell my parents one Easter morning that I wasn’t going to church with them because I was an atheist. In high school the best I could do was refuse to recite or stand for the “pledge of allegiance” during morning home room because I didn’t believe in “one nation under God” or that there really was “liberty and justice for all.” In college the best I could do was organize a gay student rap group so I wouldn’t be the only gay person I knew at school.

In each case I never felt that I was doing anything special. I did what I felt I must do. It never felt like a choice to me. I never felt courageous doing any of these things.

These examples predate “gay cancer,” GRID (Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease), AIDS. I’ve lost countless scores, probably hundreds, of lovers, friends, neighbors – and heroes – to meaningless deaths from AIDS, as well as suicide and drug overdose. I have to ask: Why am I still alive?

Since there’s no life after this one, and no divine purpose, how can my life have any meaning? I’ve concluded that the only meaning to be found in life is that which we give it. The best I can do is try to leave the world a better place than I found it, through my words, my actions, my spirit. I have no choice. It’s what I must do.

Some say “The end justifies the means.” Don’t believe it. Those who say so would only take credit, and none of the responsibility, for changing the world. So much unjustifiable violence is done in the name of Family, Nation and God. The end is nothing. The means is everything. How we do things is more important than whether we succeed or fail. How we live our lives is heroic.

Victor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, wrote “What is to give light must endure burning.” Light doesn’t justify burning. Light transcends burning. How we celebrate ourselves transcends what we must endure and survive. It serves only our enemies – and serves us least of all – to be polite, nice, and “normal,” to be unassuming and inoffensive, to be silent and invisible.

Every one of you, by being here today, whatever it took, is a hero to me. Shine on.

American Dream

Posted on 2007-07-06 by admin

A post on Bay Ridge Blog reminded me of an incident I haven’t thought of in many years. Any romance street explosives might once have held left me on the afternoon of a hot, sunny 4th of July.

In 1980, within nine months of moving to New York, I had my own apartment, a fifth floor walkup in a tenement building in the East Village. The rent was cheap.

Across the street was – still is, for all I know – the NYC headquarters of the Hell’s Angels. My apartment faced the street. Every 4th of July, they closed off the street and had their block party. Fireworks and firecrackers were always part of the activities. After the first few years, the novelty wore off, then transformed into endurance trauma.

Over the years, the scale and scope escalated. More fireworks, more elaborate displays, larger booms. My least favorite was some kind of single-shot explosive. It was launched from a canister on the street, rose several stories, then exploded. It rose to just below roof height, right outside my windows. Even on a bright, sunny day, you could see the flash of light through the dirty plastic roll-up shades. Then you felt – not heard – the percussive shock wave pass through your body. Then you noticed your ears were ringing.

One year, I think in the late 80s, my neighbor across the hall invited me to look after his apartment and his cat while he escaped for the 4th. This was a vacation for me as well: he lived in the back of the building, away from the explosions. And he had air-conditioning and cable television, both inconceivable luxuries to me at the time.

I was up on the roof for a while, looking down at the street, watching the people and their barbeques. People were talking, laughing, playing their radios. This year the Angels were loading up metal trash cans with boxes of god knows what, M80s? Then they set fire to them. The first few would go off, sounding like nothing more than loud firecrackers. Then more would catch, firing closer together, then they were firing all at once in a roar magnified by the metal in the can, smoke and flames rising out and up, then dying down, slowly, then silent. The devil’s Jiffy-Pop.

When I’d had enough, I went back downstairs, into the A/C. I could still hear explosions, but they were muffled, distant. I watched TV.

I felt the shock wave pass from the front of the building to the back. Through me, through every piece of furniture in the room, through the building itself. I felt the pressure wave pass through and around me. There was no other sound.

I ran to the roof, to the front of the building, and looked down. On the street, where the trash can had been, was a metal ring. It was smoking. It took me a moment to realize it was from the bottom of the can. The bottom of the can, the rest of the can, was gone. The asphalt of the street beneath where the can had been was on fire.

The scores of explosives, which had crescendoed and subsided like sulfurous popcorn throughout the day, this time had exploded all at once. The trash can was instantly converted into shrapnel slicing into the crowds at street-level. The people on the street were shocked and dazed. People shut off their radios. At first the street was silent. Then strained voices, crying, and screams. From five floors above, I saw blood.

A young man had been hanging out with friends, with family. He was staying with relatives who’d journeyed here before him. Maybe he’d come here to stay, maybe he was thinking of it. He’d only been in this country a month. I didn’t know him. I didn’t even know he existed until a piece of trash can propelled halfway down the block found him. It sliced his jugular. He was dead in minutes.

As I said, I haven’t thought of this in a long time, maybe 20 years. All these images, these sensations, are vivid in me right now. Before I read the post from Bay Ridge, I was going to go to sleep. It will take me a while to get back to that place now.

Back in the Day

Posted on 2007-05-23 by admin

2008.03.10: Welcome – I guess – New York magazine Intelligencer readers. I encourage you to read my post about the BlogFest itself, which inspired this “hyperniche nostalgia,” as NY characterizes it. (Shouldn’t that be hypo-niche? sub-niche? micro-niche?)

Crazy Diamond, aka Flatbush Gardener, circa 1980s.

I wrote the following as part of my Brooklyn Blogfest coverage. I now find myself in the position of being one of the coordinators of the first Brooklyn Blogade Roadshow, which it is hoped will take the spirit and energy of the Brooklyn Blogfest on the road to different neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I hope to provide details of the inaugural event later tonight or this week.

I’m highlighting this bit of autobiography and technology history in its own post here because it expresses what I’m trying to bring of myself to this first event.

[Written 2007.05.11]

Back in the Day

Gather round me, children. Close your eyes, and try to imagine it. It was long before the Web, when the Internet existed only in military and select academic settings. It was the time before GUIs, before mice and color monitors, when MS-DOS and 1200bps dial-up modems roamed the Earth.

There were these things called computer bulletin board services, BBS for short. Your computer told your modem the phone number of the BBS. Your modem dialed, their modem answered, and both modems connected with each other. Then your computer could talk to their computer. Directly. No Web, no Internet. Machino a machino. You could leave messages for other BBS members; the precursor of email. You could even chat with someone else who was also logged in; the precursor of IM today.

I was a member of a BBS based in New York City called The BackRoom. It was, as one might guess from the name, a gay BBS. It was an online community of gay men, mostly, living in NYC, mostly. We had handles, like CB radio users (1970s technology). My CB handle in the 1970s, 30+ years ago, was Green Thumb. My BackRoom handle was Crazy Diamond, after the Pink Floyd song, “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond.”

Donor Recognition plaque on the wall of the second floor landing of the center staircase of the NYC Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center.

We were an online community. A community of humpy nerds, of which I was one. We were not only virtual. We also met, face-to-face, at a periodic event called the Backroom Bash. Sometimes we met at a bar, sometimes at the home of a member or the Backroom founder and sysop, Art Kohn. We built community online, with handles and anonymity. We met in person, still with our handles, and less anonymity, and built community there as well. Our virtual community was enriched by our interactions in 3D, and vice versa.

Last night [the Blogfest] reminded me of that.

Flatbush Gardener

Urban Habitat Gardening with Native Plants

Tag Archives: Biography

Grief & Gardening: 20 Years

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Links

Grief and Gardening: Ashes (Remembrance Day for Lost Species)

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Links

An Elegy for Biophilia

Off-topic: 20 Years

Grief & Gardening: Nine Years

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Gardeners for Recovery Cobblestone Campaign

My photos

Links

Trinity Root

Blessing of the Animals, Chelsea Community Church

Smokey

Slideshow

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Links

Apollo: a personal/biographical perspective

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Links

On Activism

American Dream

Back in the Day