Crazy Fingers

A while back, I wrote about a billboard a bunch of us put up in Denver when the Dead played there in 1992, after the voters in Colorado approved an anti-gay ballot initiative. (Check out some recent comment activity on that post about the billboard.) The billboard was sort of based on stickers that some of us had printed. This is what I wrote about the stickers:

We printed tens-of-thousands of the stickers, and I personally handed out thousands. It was amazing to walk around the parking lot of a show, or circulate inside a venue, just giving something away. I got to meet and talk to many cool people. Almost everybody accepted the sticker with a smile and I can’t recall any negative reaction because of what the stickers stood for. People would slap the stickers on their shirts or jackets, and after a while it seemed like everyone who passed by was wearing one. I imagine many intermission or post-show conversations about “what does this mean” and kids putting it together that it’s ok to be gay or that it’s in keeping with the deadhead community to welcome brothers and sisters with all kinds of sexual orientations. (Being a deadhead used to mean being part of a big, welcoming community, which is what attracted me in the first place, I think. Giving stuff away, randomly, was a community-building activity. It was not uncommon for someone to affix supermarket produce stickers on random strangers, for example. Our Ain’t No Time To Hate stickers fit perfect into that tradition.)

Anyway, I was happy to discover that Jimi posted an image of one of the stickers on =Coffee House Studio=, and I included it here. (I’m too lazy to actually scan one.)

Uh, maybe the guy in Fatburger yesterday was referring to this. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t react.

• I haven’t explicitly come out at work. No pictures of Brian on my desktop.
• When my boss’ boss asked what I did this weekend, I said “I finished moving.” I didn’t say “my boyfriend moved in.” In other words, I’m not being open at work, the way I used to, and the way I think I should.
• Some guy (who doesn’t work here) made a homophobic remark in Fatburger at lunchtime, possibly directed at me, and I didn’t respond. (I was exploring the jukebox, which was playing a Willy Nelson song, and this guy walked past me and said “play some gay cowboy music,” obviously a reference to Brokeback Mountain.)
• An HR person here, who’s like a buddy of mine, commented that one of my coworkers (who I think is a gay woman) “is not such a lady,” and again, I let it go.

In happier news, I did run into my friend Jeff Wenger in Fatburger. He works across the street in the Jersey City planning department. I met him through a mutual friend at Salsa y Salsa over the summer. Jeff loves the Dead; he may give me a USB drive so I can give him all of my shows.

And yes, Brian did move in officially (i.e., his stuff moved in, much of which is still in boxes in the living room). He’s currently tormented about what to do with his apartment, and there are some outcomes of that decision that will cause the boxes to remain in the living room longer than other outcomes (i.e., if he has to go clean up his apartment, the emptying of the boxes will be deferred). It’s all good though. I’m glad he’s there. I would have posted about all this already, except that we’ve both been totally exhausted from the move. Soon, I hope to have the time and energy to post some pictures of the apartment, which now has furniture.

I just added Lee’s blog to my blogroll. Check out his post with pictures from the Dead shows in 1985 (4/27 and 4/28) at the Frost Amphitheater, at Stanford University. (The second set of 4/27/85 is amazing. Check out the Scarlet>Eyes>GDTRFB. Maybe I’ll post mp3s.)

Lee has been commenting on my blog recently. Turns out, we may know some of the same people.

My name is Larry Person.

Larry Person.