On the Road With

Our touring schedule gives me a little time off, so my friend Rob and I take the ferry to P-town for three days. These are my first days off in weeks and just what I need. We stay in a top floor apartment at the Skiff, overlooking the bay. The weather, which was supposed to be rainy all three days, is very fine. It’s warm enough to swim a little, lie around in the sun, walk around in town. Best of all, even though it’s the off-season, we are surrounded by queer people.

Rob tells me he loves P-town for its architecture, the breakwater, the mud flats, the beaches, the dunes, and the remarkable spiral it makes reaching out into the sea. He also says he loves it because it is “friendly to gay people.” I think that’s why many of us love P-town. It’s why we love Fire Island, South Beach, the Castro, and Chelsea. I am reminded once again of our material from our plays.

In 10 Years Later gay Laramie resident Jonas Slonaker says, “I am completely out now ... Everybody knows that Bill is my boyfriend. But I am in a safe pocket, and the safe pocket is the university. I work in student affairs and that’s a totally safe place to be. Now, if I worked in ag ... agriculture, it would be different ... But finding our safe pockets is what we do as gay people, not just here in Laramie, but wherever we live.”

He’s right. As far as we may have come in our efforts to be safe in this world, we still so often find ourselves gathering together in our “safe pockets.” Even the most outspoken of us sometimes just need a break from the grinding covert homophobia and heterocentricity that surrounds us.