Joy and Sorrow

In the space of one week; a joyful reunion of old friends and then a few days later, gunshots shatter our joy and fill us with sorrow.

Joy and Sorrow. Communities coming together to laugh and dance, and to weep and grieve.

High school reunions are like nothing else. It brings back with a rush the laughter, awkwardness, insecurities and innocence of our younger selves. With drinks in hand, we remind each other of long forgotten memories. We renew friendships that have slipped away and we feel the affection with long, deep hugs.

The storytelling and laughter rise above the band playing our favorite 70’s songs. By the end of the night, everyone is on the dance floor moving like we did at our Senior Prom. Many of us have maintained a handful of precious friendships over the decades, but many of us had not seen each other in 40 years. Yet we still remain a community. We can see our youth again, past the extra pounds, and greying and thinning hair. And we are all grateful for our name tags that have our high school photos on them.

A few days later, while basking in the glow of reconnected classmates; a shooting happens. The movie theater where lives are forever shattered is less than an hour from where we danced the night away. Lafayette is now home to some from that Class of 1975. All of us have spent time in this south Louisiana town that was voted the happiest place in the country. There’s a quintessential Louisiana phrase, “laissez le bon temps rouler.” It means “let the good times roll” and no where does the phrase come to life more than Lafayette.

We are all interconnected in south Louisiana. My work intern rushed to console friends who were sitting on the same theater isle as the shooter. I had a long conversation with another friend who was broken-hearted over the death of artist and musician, Jillian Johnson. Jillian’s band, the Figs were scheduled to play at a Fall party at my friend’s camp a few miles from Lafayette on the mighty Atchafalaya River. My sweetie’s adult children grew up in Franklin, the same small town where the beautiful, 21-year old college student, Mayci Breaux grew up. We have another phrase down here, “Who’s your momma and dem”. It’s how we connect because we know there’s just one degree of separation between us.

The murderer was not from our community—but just like the shooter in Charleston—he would have been welcomed. We love to share our culture down here with our great food, ice-cold drinks, music and dancing.

The hate group Westboro (I won’t call them a church) has threatened to disrupt the funerals with its evil since the shooter was a supporter of their particular brand of hate. Fifteen thousand have pledged to shield the families from another horror. There’s a call to show the world the beautiful gumbo pot of South Louisiana. Black and white and Indian and Cajun and Creole and young and old and conservative and liberal will hold hands to shield our community from hate.

I’m admittedly often frustrated by many things in my beloved deep South. But we have something here that is special…deep community. Maybe because we know we’re just one hurricane away from tragedy that we live our life with extra zest.

Together we attend our graduations and reunions, weddings and funerals, births and deaths, together. We are all interconnected in this web of life. We are one community.

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One Degree of Separation

It’s been a transformative year for the LGBT community. I live in a place that is one of the last holdouts for trying to “keep things the way they have always been”. Most people in my sleepy, river town don’t know this place has a rainbow-hued history with historical significance to the transgendered world.

There’s just one degree of separation in Baton Rouge. If you meet someone who grew up here, you can always find a connection. My connection to this story is through my sweetie, Steve. Steve and his late wife bought a house with a storied past. In the 60’s there was a woman, Rita, from an affluent family, who went to Sweden and became Reed. Reed Erickson and his beautiful Swedish nurse fell in love, got married and moved back to Baton Rouge, Reed’s hometown.

It was the home Reed, his wife and their adopted child lived in, that my sweetie bought decades later. As Steve renovated this home, its history came alive. Nowhere more so than when he turned the Erickson’s room for their pet into his office. It was a large room because it was a large pet…it was a pet leopard. That’s right, a leopard, whose name was Henry. Henry was well known in the neighborhood and Henry sometimes wandered away from home, as cats are prone to do. While Henry never hurt anyone, the thoughtful Erickson’s kept their neighbors refrigerators stocked with steaks. The steaks were for Henry, so if he wandered into the neighbor’s yard, they just had to throw a steak over the fence and Henry would leap over and go back home.

Other neighborhood stories included the knowledge that the beautiful Swedish wife as also a bit of the nudist. Apparently the presence of a leopard did nothing to deter this being a popular home to make deliveries to.

Reed Erickson went on to set up the Erickson Education Foundation which helped the transgender community during a time when they had few allies and little resources. The house in this older Baton Rouge neighborhood, with it’s stately oaks that form a shady canopy over the streets, became a safe home for trans people to quietly begin their transformation into a new life.

This story was an open Baton Rouge secret for years. Steve said that even though it had been years since the Erickson’s lived in the house, mail would occasionally come to the family that was long gone. Out of curiosity, Steve once opened a letter and found its contents so heartbreakingly sad that he never opened another.

That unassuming, ranch-style home has had a few more owners since Steve lived there. I hope it is still filled with hopeful dreams of a good life. I celebrate that the LGBT community does not have to live in secret any more. I also celebrate the fact that I don’t live next door to a leopard.

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