Gay Weddings Go Back Years
It was 20 years ago this week, in April 1994, that biographer and book editor Ellis Amburn, a Key West resident at the time and Island Life columnist, reported he’d just attended his first gay wedding anniversary celebration, held on Pearl Street.
Bob McVay and James Eli’s nuptials the previous year at the MCC Church presided over by Rev. Steven M. Torrence was the first gay wedding Amburn had attended. “As someone who grew up in the gay dark ages of the ‘40s and ‘50s, when such occasions would have been busted by the fuzz, I regard such rituals as historic precedents of the highest importance.”
There had been other highlights, added Amburn, after Stonewall in 1969. He recalled a spectacular Fire Island weekend at which he talked to David Geffen, Calvin Klein, Prince Egon von Furstenberg, Jerry Herman, Claudette Colbert, Ron Reagan, Tommy Tune and Colleen Dewhurst. “It was the heyday of the gay dolce vita and I loved it, drank deeply of it and savored its beauties, most of them gone now. But it never gave me a community or the normal human fulfillments of marriage and family.”
Amburn concludes his story this way:
“Steve Torrence is sitting with us at a table in Bob and Eli’s kitchen. ‘What’s new?’ I ask him.
“‘NBC just interviewed me,’ Steve replies. ‘I’ll be on the “Today Show” in two weeks, on a Sunday.’ He said he told the NBC interviewer. ‘In Key West we show everyone how we contribute to society. Happily, it’s an open closet here.
“We don’t tolerate diversity.
“We celebrate it.’”
As each year goes by, we learn more and more about how close we all came came to a nuclear apocalypse during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
On Oct. 27, the tensest moment of the crisis, Vasili Arkhipov, second-in-command of the Soviet nuclear submarine B-59, blocked an order to fire nuclear-powered missiles in retaliation for an attack by U.S. destroyers.
Although B-59 was in international waters and outside the exclusion zone the U.S. had decreed around Cuba, U.S. destroyers were dropping depth charges to force the submarine to the surface.
B-59 was so deep it was receiving no radio signals from either Moscow or Russia and its captain believed that war might already have broken out.
Soviet rules of engagement, however, decreed a unanimity among the three most senior officers in a submarine before nuclear missiles could be launched.
It appears that Arkhipov with his refusal to agree with the order saved the world that day.
The incident only came to light at a conference in Havana held on the 40th anniversary of the crisis.
We also now know, from LBJ biographer Robert Caro’s “The Passage of Power” (2012), that when Gen. Curtis LeMay, as head of the Strategic Air Command and chief of staff of the air force in1962, along with the other Joint Chiefs of staff, urged President Kennedy to bomb the Russian emplacements in Cuba, Vice President Lyndon Johnson sided with the generals.
A gentleman from Minnetonka by the name of Jerry Rabe has communicated with Rick Boettger, Lou Petrone and Mark Howell of Konk Life.
“I’m a snowbird from Minnesota,” writes Jerry, “who spends three or four months in Key West. When I’m here I read Konk Life and find the pieces that you three have written to be exceptionally insightful and thought provoking.”
Mr. Rabe has gifted each of us with a copy of a book he has written, “one of those post-retirement things, but a serious effort,” he says.
Its title is “Through the Lens of Reality: Thoughts of a retiring Grandpa.” Not only does it have outstanding “reality” conclusions — for example, that the lobbying system currently controlling Washington needs to be “changed by law into an information system that is totally transparent, not controlled by viewer ratings or campaign funding but readily available to everyone in order to engage the public in the huge challenges we now face” — but also a number of quotes by others that illuminate its pages.
Here’s a sample:
“The love of liberty is the
love of others; the love of power
is the love of ourselves.”
— William Hazlitt
“We don’t see things as they are,
we see things as we are.”
Anais Nin
“Not everything that is
faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed
until it’s faced.”
— James Baldwin
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Always a pleasure to read “Howellings”. The word “tolerance” in reference to “others” has always irked me, as if one is some kind of hero for allowing others the same rights and treatment as themselves.
P.S. Thank you Vasili Arkiphov! R.I.P.