I snapped a dozen pics of the rather dumpy house in one of San Francisco’s most far-flung neighborhoods when I told our realtor Matt, “It kind of smells like old people.”

It was a Saturday afternoon, and the pics were for the Manly Fireplug, who was working at the shop, and the house was the first stop on our first tour.  We moved to the window of the back bedroom, and Matt pointed out at something in the overgrown yard.

“It comes with its own boat,” he said. A decrepit rowboat had been propped against the sagging fence, half-hidden by weeds.

“Architectural salvage,” I said, “People pay extra for that.” Then I wandered into the pink-tiled bathroom (a vast number of the city’s bathrooms, according to real estate photos, are entirely tiled in pink) and snapped a pic of the cracked toilet basin. Then I followed Matt back down the stairs, and he pointed at a sign hanging on the back of the front door.

“Both hearing aids,” he said. I snapped the last pic of the house, feeling a little guilty about my earlier “old-people” crack. Ms. Martha had lived here, maybe most of her life. Maybe she’d died here, too.

Back in the car Matt kept asking me what I wanted in a home. Location? A garden? A stripper pole in the living room? I told him that after my husband and dogs, nothing was more important to me than my home, but then I found myself stuttering nervously that I…well…I kind of like a place that’s a retreat from the world, if that makes sense?

Truth was, I was scared shitless. Our first application for a preapproved mortgage had been turned down, due to the fact that I’d taken time off for grad school and to work on my book, and though our second application was supposedly “looking good,” nothing yet was certain, and I felt hesitant about this open house tour, and of real estate in general. I’m a writer with one 98%-finished book living in San Francisco, hardly the Danielle Steele of every banker’s dreams.

We spent the rest of the tour driving around the Outer Sunset, one of the few neighborhoods in the city we might possibly afford. I snapped pics of fake-wood paneling, tandem garages, and asbestos tiles. I snapped pics of illegal basement in-law units, and grimy bathrooms straight out of Folsom Prison. I snapped pics of a 12-room house carpeted entirely in, yes, pink.

But I also snapped pics of polished hardwood floors, Wedgewood stoves, and a back yard with cypress trees and a view of the Marin Headlands. We wandered through empty houses, and houses where the owners scrambled to make the beds in the next room. We wandered past a 12-year-old girl, oblivious to us, video-chatting with friends on a laptop at the kitchen table. We wandered through houses where it seemed nobody had ever lived, tastefully staged within an inch of their lives.

I felt the nervous, competitive energy of a house crammed full of prospective buyers – young couples and Chinese families, and more than a few start-up types – all of us pretending not to see each other as we tried to picture the living room in a different color.

After five or six houses I felt giddy and exhausted, a headache gnawing at the edges of my vision. “You have an interesting job,” I told Matt. “You see everyone at their absolute most stressed, teetering at the edge of sanity.”

The next day we got word that our loan application had been preapproved,  and the thing I thought couldn’t happen was now possible. Or near-possible. I felt superstitious and unrelieved.

“I’m getting an ulcer,” I told the Fireplug, who had been through real estate insanity in New York and San Francisco, and who, let’s face it, was the more stable, profitable, loan-worthy of the two of us.

“This is nothing,” he said. “Remember what I said. Roller-coaster.”

And I’ve flown off the tracks, full-out OCDing on real estate sites, my already-fractured attention span splintering atomically, unable to focus on anything else. I am writing this partly to distract myself from the fact that Matt is right this moment touring the house that has reached the top of our list, a house we’ve only seen in professionally-staged online photo galleries,  in another far-flung neighborhood, a house I want to believe is solid, a house we can both picture living in together, getting older and more crotchety, needing at first one, then two hearing aids, hanging notes on doors to remind ourselves of all the things we’d otherwise forget.

A while back the Manly Fireplug and I drove around the Twin Cities for a few hours, looking at all the houses where I’d spent my youth. Having finished my MFA thesis, which formed only the first two-thirds of my actual book, I’d turned our trip into a research expedition.

If you’ve hung around here for any length of time, you know I’m writing about my family, who’ve been awfully charitable about the whole thing considering that everybody (including me) comes out of the story looking like, well, singular pieces of work.

Quick review of the basics:

• Parents separate when I’m ten and my brother five
• Parents both come out of the closet when I’m eleven
• Parents divorce and begin adventures in same-sex dating
• Parents both end up with long-term partners who were also previously married, with kids
• I come out at college, as far from my family as possible
• My brother, poor dude, turns out straight

So I did a lot of packing and unpacking, of boxes, suitcases, and duffel bags, in the midst of a complicated joint custody schedule. My brother and I lugged a lot of bags onto a lot of buses, and were forever leaving things at the wrong house.

So there were a few houses for the Fireplug and I to cruise past in our rented Sebring. Ten or twelve or more, I’ve lost track. But during the tour the Fireplug turned quiet. Silence is an unnatural state for him, so of course I asked if he was okay.

“My stomach hurts,” he said. It took us a while to figure out that he was stressed. He’d spent his entire childhood in one house, the house where his mother still lives, and our day-long tour was getting to him.

Ever since college I’ve had a deep, primal longing for a home. It doesn’t need to be big. I just want one. And only one. I like having all my stuff in one place. I don’t rent storage lockers. Whenever I have to move I unpack everything (and I mean everything) within 24 hours. I hate clutter, and my idea of hell is a bad roommate.

Seems like no matter how much we grow up, it’s the childhood stuff that sticks. So the five years that I’ve spent going back and forth between the Fireplug’s house and my apartment, bags in hand, have been challenging to my nesting OCD. Part of being an adult, however, is accepting life on its own terms, and San Francisco real estate is its own reality.

Following our wedding in New York (and our domestic partnership in California), we’d barely dipped a toe in the tepid waters of possible home ownership when a realtor friend called and said a family was interested in looking at the house the Fireplug shares with his roommate, a house which wasn’t even listed. A pocket listing, he called it. (A lifelong renter, I am mystified by the entire home ownership process, including terminology.)

The same realtor friend had just emailed us a photo of a cute little bungalow near Stern Grove with the subject line, “Your Next House.” Looking at the photo, we had to hand it to him, he was good. We weren’t so delusional as to assume that we’d end up in the cute little bungalow, but it seemed unwise in today’s market to turn down the family’s request.

My head that week filled with fantasies of a cute bungalow, with my husband and our dogs, and my duffel bags tucked away on a back shelf of a back closet. The Fireplug, who’s been through the process more than once,  kept cautioning me, telling me to expect an emotional roller coaster ride, with no certain outcome, and that I’d have plenty of opportunities to work on one of my, um, less noticeable traits: patience.

“We haven’t even applied for a mortgage yet,” he said. I tried not to pout in response.

When the realtor arrived with the family, the Fireplug’s roommate and I ducked out through the garage with the dogs. We drifted up and down the block three times waiting for the family to leave, the dogs giving us curious looks, and it was weird to look through the picture window at the strangers wandering through the living room, assessing the place that I couldn’t quite call home, but where I’d spent so many hours. I felt territorial.

The roommate had done his best to de-gay the house of its most egregious belongings, especially since the family of strangers included a grandmother, but you can’t catch everything. After the family left, the realtor told us that the grandmother had carefully examined the shirts hanging over the dryer and asked, “Who’s the sheriff?”

“Depends on which night,” I replied.

The realtor smiled. “I love my job.”

 

My father and I were strangers for most of my life. Our shared quiet exteriors hid contrasting temperaments. He was, and still is, the most practical man I’ve ever met. As for me, well, I wrote a lot of poetry as a kid, trusted dogs and kitty-cats more than people, and wound up in places like New York and San Francisco where I could barely afford the rent.

I was a gay dude with a gay father, and in our relationship at least, “father” weighed more heavily than “gay.” What I mean is that, like a lot of fathers and sons, we weren’t so skilled at talking to each other.

That began to change ten years ago after my mother’s death, and that change is a part of my book, and since I’m wary of giving away much of the book’s story on the blog, since I want the book to be fresh and full of new stuff for you to read, I won’t go into great detail.

But the years I’ve spent writing the book came with all kinds of obstacles and awkward moments, including the times I’d visit my father, as he struggled to understand why I was going so long without a real job and benefits and a 401k, working on something that might never make one single cent, and as I struggled to reframe the project in terms he might better understand:

“Hey Dad, it’s like, it’s like an investment! In my future. You know, with, like deferred benefits…”

But the benefits weren’t guaranteed. I could spend seven years working on a book that might still go unpublished, and my reframing explanation to my father worked about as well as you’d expect.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time we got along just fine, and when the Manly Fireplug came with me, he amped up the fun factor (as he tends to do) and I even one time, after years of second place, BEAT MY FATHER THE EDITOR AND ALL-TIME REIGNING FAMILY CHAMPION IN SCRABBLE. I tried not to gloat. Wait, I’m still totally gloating. Sorry, Dad.

But at some point during every visit we’d find ourselves alone, and he’d ask me about the book, and work, and money, and down the rabbit hole we’d go. I walked away from these talks frustrated and angry, convinced that he wanted me to be someone I didn’t want to be, with a different set of priorities and dreams, and though I won’t pretend to know how he felt after our talks, I doubt they were any easier on him.

Eventually, as I’ve told you here before, the money ran out, and I was forced to get a couple of jobs, and struggle, and feel broke since I was paying $500 a month in health insurance, and after a year the two jobs turned into three, one of which finally offered me benefits, and for the first time in a very long time I had money in my interest-bearing savings account, and dreams of a house with my husband.

And a new energy swept through me.

I found myself finally using my Mint iPhone app, categorizing my spending and planning monthly budgets. Every day while waiting for MUNI I’d check the balances of my linked accounts before opening my Kindle. Checking my balances turned out to be more fun when the sums went above the double-digits.

This led to me creating all sorts of spreadsheets and lists that I uploaded to Google Docs, where I sorted everything into collections. I don’t know if any of this will actually lead to greater productivity, but man do I feel organized.

This led to me taking ownership finally of my desk at the firm, no longer assuming I had one foot out the door, but instead committing myself to making the three jobs work, and I cleaned out the desk drawers of the last guy’s junk and set up a couple of framed pics of the Fireplug and our wedding, and blew half a can of compressed air into my keyboard (OMG GROSS!).

This led to me taking greater ownership of my second job, where I grabbed hold of the weekly conference call reins and created a brand new categorized agenda template, and got more done in two weeks than I had in the previous three months.

This led to me taking on more freelance clients for my third job, and having a lot of fun with invoices.

This led to me writing down all sorts of tax deduction questions to ask the tax preparer when the Fireplug and I meet (for the first time as a couple) next week to figure out how a domestic partnership (not to mention three jobs) will affect our returns.

This led to me cleaning out my desk at home. Which led to me cleaning out my closet and finally getting rid of clothes I hadn’t worn in two years and all the underwear I’ve been wearing that have been falling apart, since I now had money in an interest-bearing savings account and could spend some of it on underwear that the Fireplug agreed were worth the price, since they made me look, well, like that.

I can be a stubborn ass sometimes. I don’t always acknowledge other people’s influences on me. Dead writers, sure, but real live people? Don’t hold your breath.  But I’ll say this much: the Fireplug is also a practical man, more practical than me, and it has served him well, and it fills me with pride to walk into his shop on a Saturday afternoon and see every chair filled with waiting clients.

He’s a practical man who allowed me the space and time to work on my impractical dream of writing a book, and he allowed me to work on it without complaint until my circumstances changed and I could see for myself that I also had to change, to meet those circumstances. He let me get there at my own speed.

And though this burst of energized productivity, all aimed towards the larger goal of affording us a home together in a beautiful but prohibitive city, feels new, it also feels too thorough to lay entirely at his feet, as much as I love the guy.

Every parent echoes within his child. There was a practical man lurking within me, all this time.

I took this photo in Palm Springs, from the passenger seat of a borrowed car, on the Fireplug’s birthday, as he drove us downtown to meet my gay dads for a birthday lunch at Tyler’s. I like this shot because I remember how I felt, full of this new energy and hope, a feeling that had spilled out and colored other feelings, like my love for the man beside me, which felt like it had expanded in recent days.

And when we met them for lunch I told my father about my three jobs, and the benefits, and the money in the bank, affecting a nonchalance, since I didn’t want to appear, at the age of forty, like a man in need of his father’s approval.

And I could see the change in his eyes as I told him the news, and he smiled broadly and reached out and patted me on the shoulder. We had never been a physically affectionate family, and I’m telling you this so you can feel the full weight of his gesture.

At the end of the meal I slyly handed my new debit card to the waiter.

“Cash only,” he whispered. I blushed, for I had none.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” my father said. “It’s his birthday. Our treat.” He reached for the check, and I let him take it.

In a lovely, rose-tinted alternate universe, I spent the few weeks since my last post lying on a beach in Fiji with the Manly Fireplug, a blissfully unplugged honeymoon.  I’ve never been to Fiji, and I don’t even know if it’s a nice place to go these days, but the poet in me liked the alliteration of Fiji and Fireplug.

But in real life the honeymoon had to wait, and after ten days going from Philly to the Catskills back to Philly then to Brooklyn and Manhattan before returning to Philly on our extended wedding/ Fireplug family reunion tour, we actually had to, you know, work for a living.

I’m writing this on company time, having picked up another weekday of office work, which now puts me somewhere around 50 hours a week between my various jobs. When your health insurance eats up a quarter of your salary, you do what you can.

So a long-winded, carefully-composed narrative of our wedding won’t be forthcoming today.  Besides, this is the internet; who has the attention span for narratives? How about a couple of pics instead…

Since the Fireplug had something like 12 or 13 family members making the trip from Philly to Brooklyn bright and early the morning of the ceremony, the Fireplug’s mom decided to rent an entire bus. What showed up was a stretch limo – the kind with an interior neon ceiling that changed colors, with tiny artificial stars shimmering overhead. I could almost pretend like we were kicking off a Saturday night trip to our junior prom, but really it was Wednesday morning,  and we were heading up the Pennsylvania turnpike.

The driver had some trouble navigating the limo through the narrow streets of Brooklyn Heights, and we arrived at the promenade with only a few minutes to spare. The wedding photographer snapped this as I emerged from the limo, fretting:

There’s a few other photos here. (Thanks again to Jonathan Gati for the great shots.) Various friends and family converged on our location but I continued to fret. The judge was late. No judge, no wedding. There’s a reason I shy away from event planning. I fret.

But the judge arrived with seconds to spare.

I believe our ceremony lasted about six minutes. It included the exchange of vows we’d written together, which I later posted here.

I made it about two words in before this happened to me:

Yeah, I totally cried. Sue me.

My friend Norman Brannon snapped this photo. That’s the Fireplug’s mother beside him; his best man, Joel; and his niece, the flower girl I mentioned in that other post. Beside me stands my father, my best man that day.

I don’t remember what we were laughing at. In fact, I can’t be certain the ceremony lasted six minutes, because a fierce case of tunnel vision overtook me. Beneath the promenade ran the East River, and beyond that stretched the skyline of Manhattan. Somewhere in there stood the Brooklyn Bridge. I saw none of it.

I only remember one thing from the ceremony.  The thing I tried to focus on during our vows. This face:

And I’ll think I’ll just leave it at that.

 

Today I marry my friend.

I promise to tell you “I love you” every day.

I will encourage you in your work and dreams.

I will celebrate with you our joys and stand beside you during our hardships.

I will remember your favorite things and surround you with them.

I will cherish the strengths and imperfections that make you Joe.

I will fight for you, care for you, and protect you.

I will never give up on you.

I will give you the room to be your own man.

I will cultivate honesty, compassion, generosity, and a sense of humor.

Together we will build a home where friends and family are loved and celebrated.

We will be companions in this life.

One of the things I know I’ll always find at my future mother-in-law’s house outside Philly is pictured at left. Also, scrapple for breakfast. Don’t ask what it is, just eat it. It’s good.

The Manly Fireplug‘s sister recounted for us how she asked her 7-year-old daughter if she’d like to be the flower girl at a wedding. The girl, who loves Cinderella and pink and the Little Mermaid, jumped up and down and said “YES!” Then, “Wait, who’s getting married?”

“Uncle Joey.”

“UNCLE JOEY’S GETTING MARRIED!!” Her eyes got wide and she jumped some more. “To who?”

“To Mike.”

The girl stopped jumping. “Mike?!?”

“Yes, Mike.”

The girl looked doubtful. “How does that work?”

“Well,” her mother said, “Sometimes boys like girls, like me and your daddy. And sometimes boys like other boys. And sometimes girls like other girls. The only thing that matters is that you love someone. That’s all that matters.”

The girl was quiet as she considered this. “Does Mike like dogs? Because Uncle Joey likes dogs.”

“Yes, honey, I think Mike likes dogs.”

“He better.”

 

They wouldn’t stop. The local media kept calling, wanting one more interview. First the Bay Area Reporter. Then CBS Radio. Channel 2. The San Francisco Examiner. Channel 4.

“What the hell?” I asked the Manly Fireplug. “Are we the only homosexuals in the whole state going to New York to get married?”

I joked to friends about feeling overexposed. That even I was tired of us. Media whores, a couple of friends called us on Facebook, with what felt like an even mixture of humor and bitterness.

I grew increasingly uncomfortable, due in no small part to my upbringing in Minnesota, where the greatest sin is calling too much attention to yourself. But there were other reasons, too.

After the first article appeared, I received two emails, spaced five days apart, from someone I began to refer to as my “Secret Internet Admirer,” someone who used an anonymizing email program to cloak his real address. I’ll spare you the admirer’s particular vitriol, a confusing mixture of jealousy and homophobia that indicated less than full mental health.

I can’t be certain that my admirer was the same troll with whom I’d recently exchanged a volley of ridiculous emails, but the timing seemed suspect. He (I thought of the admirer as a he, though I couldn’t be certain) looked harshly upon the particular nature of my relationship with the Fireplug. Those who know us would never accuse us of being poster boys for traditional marriage, and so the admirer’s opaque argument fell flat with me.

What concerned me was how he ended both emails, two sentences in all caps: DO NOT GET MARRIED! CANCEL THE WEDDING!

I didn’t want to get melodramatic about a troll (and legally this post right here could be construed as encouraging him), but my admirer was talking about the event that would gather together my husband, our families, and our closest friends. So when the rental hall sent over our contract, I paid close attention to the security guard clause.

The Fireplug encouraged me to shake it off, as I spent the next few days scanning friends’ and acquaintances’ Facebook posts for anything vaguely suspicious, and examining anyone in public who looked at me a half-second longer than necessary. As the days passed without another email from my admirer, my paranoia faded. Mostly.

I told the Fireplug the interviews were starting to feel weird. Like we were putting this deeply personal event up for public dissection. So when Channel 11 called, the Fireplug told them we weren’t available.

Immediately I felt regret. Like we were passing up the chance to do some kind of greater good. Bring attention to the cause of same-sex blah blah blah. A lofty sentiment, sure, but maybe I really wanted the attention. So we did a couple more interviews.

And nothing happened. The articles and stories were little more than sound bites, hardly noteworthy, even to me. For the story they told – a couple of guys going to New York to get married – seemed like distractions from the story forming inside my own head.

I dutifully answered the reporters’ questions about why New York, and why now. After the third interview I stumbled upon my own sound bite, which I worked into subsequent interviews: at some point you just have to live your life, and not wait for California’s stamp of approval.

But all the while my conscience nagged at me, asking me a question that, with my handful of part-time jobs, book-writing, volunteering, etc., I hadn’t had the space or perspective to answer.

And that question wasn’t, “Why New York?”

It was: “Why marriage?”

A question I wasn’t sure I could answer. Which, let’s face it, is a tad disconcerting. For I was about to make the most important promise of my life. To a man making the same promise to me.

The reporters’ calls stopped, and the media moved on.

I’ve had a little more time to reflect on that enormous question. And I’m still not sure that I can articulate a worthy response. As the wedding edges closer, what strikes me most is that the promise I’m about to make doesn’t fill me with fear or doubt.

I had one of those unstable childhoods that left me hungry for affection and afraid of abandonment. Common stuff, I know, but they formed me. And though there are no guarantees in life, especially in love, the Fireplug was about to offer me the closest thing.

All I know is that as the big day nears, those long-held fears are diminished not by the prospect of his promise to me, but by my promise to him. I forget myself for a few seconds when I think of what I’m about to pledge: that even in the toughest times I will be his companion. That I won’t give up on him.

It was disingenuous of me to call our wedding a “deeply personal event.” We’re inviting our family and friends. It’s not personal, it’s communal. Others will have opinions on our mutual suitability and future prospects.

Hell, there’s that tense moment in every movie wedding when the minister asks, “If anyone has any reason why these two people should not marry…” (And if any of you are planning on dragging my Fireplug onto a city bus like Dustin Hoffman, I will hunt you down.)

What comforts me aren’t big answers for that big question. Rather, it’s just a feeling inside me when I picture our big day, an intuition, a sort of quiet space in the eye of the storm, impervious to trolls and judgments and Channel 4, a space big enough for me and one other man.

 

 

I’d rather be getting married.

Those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while know that I now spend a good chunk of my time with a guy I call the Manly Fireplug.  I don’t call him that to protect his identity – he’s just fine with notoriety, thank you very much – the nickname just cracks me up.

His name is Joe Gallagher, he owns Joe’s Barbershop here in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, and we’ve known each other a few years now. Back when he first picked up a pair of clippers, he rented a chair in my barber’s shop. I used to sit in Pasha’s chair and just stare at Joe. A few months after Joe rented the chair, Pasha up and died of a heart attack in his mid-40′s, and so I naturally used the occasion to switch barbers. (I never said I wasn’t capable of cold calculation.)

Joe had a partner at the time, so I contented myself with feeling his hands touch my head every couple of weeks. He wasn’t stingy with advice. After hearing the 22nd installment of my doomed long-distance love affair with another blogger, he spun me around in the chair, looked me in the eye, and barked, “You just need to get fucked. Really hard.”

He had a point.

I went off to grad school in NYC and Joe opened his own shop. When I moved back to San Francisco in the summer of 2006, Joe was single. We started working out together and one thing led to another. He swears I spent a lot of time bending over in front of him at the gym, putting weights away. I never said I was a fool, either.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Joe proposes to me as I lay sedated in a hospital bed with a collapsed lung. I think the experience clarified for us that we wanted to spend whatever time we had left in this world together. The sedation just made it easier to say yes. Not long afterwards, California passed Prop 8, taking a legal wedding off the table.

Like most couples we hit a rough patch, but came back together with renewed purpose and respect. “People don’t change,” the cynics say, but I have first-hand experience to the contrary. With every passing day he became more solidly the partner I’d always wanted. I had to work to do the same for him.

We’d talk about heading off to one of the other states that had legalized same-sex marriage. Joe turned 50 . “I’m not getting any younger,” he warned me. But I kept dragging my feet, wanting to wait until it was legal in California again, wanting to celebrate such a day in the place we call home, with our friends.  But there were no guarantees that Prop 8 would be overturned, and eventually I realized that we could both get what we wanted. We could get married somewhere else for real, and still come back to celebrate with friends.

Which is a very long way of saying that I’m getting married. In like five weeks.

I now understand why people take a year to plan these things. “What are your colors?” a florist asked Joe a couple of weeks ago.

“Um, colors?” he said.

Yeah, we’re not that kind of gay.

The Bay Area Reporter ran an article on some of us heading to NYC to get hitched. You can read it here. My only caveat is that I now better understand why some people feel slightly misrepresented when interviewed by the media. The whole Cher thing was sort of a joke. Also, the idea of a “traditional” wedding matters less to me than the idea of sharing the day with friends. But if that makes it traditional, then I guess I want a traditional wedding.

Two days later CBS radio interviewed us as well. It’s a nice, short piece, and you can hear it here.

Then ReyRey of ReyRey’s Photography offered to shoot some engagement pics, including the one above.

Joe and I had talked about keeping the whole thing low-key. It’s not like we can afford to throw a party for 500 people. But there is no low-key with Joe Gallagher. Frankly by now even I’m starting to find myself overexposed. But it seemed wrong not to mention it here, where I’ve chronicled ten years of my life, and where some of you have been kind enough to follow along.

Goddamn, I’m going to have a husband.

(Via The Bilerico Project)
“Sonoma County CA separates elderly gay couple and sells all of their worldly possessions
Filed by: Kate Kendell

Without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold’s possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold’s lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property. The only memento Clay has is a photo album that Harold painstakingly put together for Clay during the last three months of his life.

With the help of a dedicated and persistent court-appointed attorney, Anne Dennis of Santa Rosa, Clay was finally released from the nursing home. Ms. Dennis, along with Stephen O’Neill and Margaret Flynn of Tarkington, O’Neill, Barrack & Chong, now represent Clay in a lawsuit against the county, the auction company, and the nursing home, with technical assistance from NCLR. A trial date has been set for July 16, 2010 in the Superior Court for the County of Sonoma.

Read more about NCLR’s Elder Law Project.

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Are you disturbed by the story of how Clay Greene was treated by the County? Please blog about this, pass it on over Facebook or Twitter, just do whatever you can to help raise the visibility of what happened to Clay. Send a letter to the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat at letters@pressdemocrat.com. Send them this link to NCLR’s page.” (end article)

Dogpoet says: I should caution against a rush to judgment here, as this is all third-hand information and since all of the extenuating circumstances are not known. But I think it is worth investigating, worth transparency, and since gays on Facebook and blogs successfully brought higher visibility to cases like the Rainbow Lounge raid in Ft. Worth.