Tightrope Walking
This year’s Sundance theme, Circus of the Summer Sun, suddenly got me thinking about a poem I wrote back in 1990. The first line reads: “I walk a tightrope that never ends/ ever seduced by what lies beneath and over and around…” Using circus imagery, the piece is about balance and the creative choices we make in life.
This past weekend my sister, DC artist Mary Beth Ramsey and, as we like to say, our adopted sister DC Artist Sondra Arkin, brought my nephew Max to Rehoboth for Sondra’s opening at Ward Ellinger Gallery. Mary Beth is a bit of an “Auntie Mame” to all the kids in the family, and Max was spending a couple of weeks in Washington visiting her and attending an art and fashion camp at the Corcoran.
Max is 14, and gay, and completely comfortable with being who he is. I expect him to grow up to be on Project Runway or certainly to excel in some amazing creative format. He has his own style. He reminds me a little of…well, me.
I’ve written about Max’s older cousin Drew, who’s also gay, in Letters before. Drew is also heading to DC this week to live with “Auntie” Mary Beth and seek his fortune in the DC area. We’ve already signed him up to be a volunteer at Sundance on Labor Day weekend. It will be his first Sundance.
My niece Mamie pointed this out to me last year, and I’m not sure how it happened, but Max is Robert Maxwell, Drew is Robert Andrew, and my name is Robert Murray. Interesting that all the gay boys in the Archibald family are named Robert!
Max has been in Rehoboth many times before, but seeing him here this time, just felt right. I’m not sure I can put my finger on why, but I suspect it has to do with knowing that all the work our generation has done for LGBT equality really has made a difference to those who come after us. Max and Drew were raised in a family where gay and straight existed with equal amounts of love and support.
Steve and I recently had dinner with some friends, and during the course of the evening’s conversation, one of them shared a coming out story with us. As an adult, our friend was living with her mother and providing support and care for her. One day she told her mother she was gay. She came home that evening to discover all the locks in the house had been changed. The message was clear, and the hurt was long lasting.
Seeing Max sitting in the CAMP Courtyard last week really made me aware of why it has always been important for us to create a more positive world for LGBT people of all ages—and why we started CAMP Rehoboth in the first place. Just look at what’s happening in Russia right now. Putin’s horrible new anti-gay laws are encouraging the brutal gay bashing of young gay men.
Gay men and women of my generation will never forget the devastation caused by AIDS in the 1980s and ‘90s. We buried our friends and families in numbers beyond counting. Out of that pain, we endured. Out of that pain we matured. As a people we learned how to find the soul healing we needed to face the world and to deal with issues of far greater variety than just AIDS. CAMP Rehoboth and other organizations like it have grown up in an effort to restore balance and wholeness to gay men and women everywhere; to replace the rejection and closed doors of our churches, businesses, and government with a positive vision of welcome, equality, acceptance, and love.
The thing about balance and wholeness, of course, is that it’s not just about the LGBT community; it’s about the human community. As a collective body, if one part of us is out of balance, all of us are out of balance. When part of us is sick, or homeless, or hungry, or discriminated against because of race, gender, sexual orientation, or any of the other things that divide us, all of us suffer, even if we don’t realize it. It can eat away at us like an unseen cancer.
Something happened last week that might not at first have seemed that consequential: the Pope used the word “gay—and not in a negative way. Something shifted in my soul, at that moment, and though I’m not Catholic, I like millions of people around the world felt a first brush of divine healing coming to an institution where we should, but never expected to find, welcoming change.
Life is a circus sometimes, and finding our balance on its tightrope is not always an easy thing to do. Modern life requires us to juggle so much information and at such levels of stress, it is a wonder any of us can ever keep from falling. In such a world how can we not seek to find peace, to share love, to be less judgmental of one another, and to hold out a helping to those about to lose their balance?
As the end of summer 2013 draws near, I’m grateful to Max for reminding me why we do the things we do here at CAMP Rehoboth. Whether supporting the work of other organizations; providing resources, information, education, outreach, health services, and political awareness to the community; or promoting artistic and creative thinking, CAMP Rehoboth continually strives to live up to its vision of being “the heart of the community.”
Under “the big top” that is CAMP Rehoboth there is room for all.
Murray Archibald, CAMP Co-founder and President of the Board of Directors of CAMP Rehoboth, is an artist in Rehoboth Beach.