A Tale of Two Jimmys

I have mentioned before that I have MS, and I am pretty disabled. I mean, I’m not like quadriplegic -disabled. I can walk, poorly. I need a step to get into bed and a walker for most walking that isn’t just to the restroom. I can stand for a fairly long period of time, if I have something to hold on to, but I can not stand up without bars to push/pull off of/from, and I can’t stand in the middle of the kitchen for any time at all.

Which is all to explain why I was sitting in my rollator this morning, making my OatsOvernight and looking at our wall of magnets.

A long time ago—more than thirty years certainly, I went to Charleston, SC to visit our middle brother, our brother-by-choice, Jerry, who was in grad school down there. I was wicked poor at the time, and the only souvenir that I could afford was a magnet.

But that started me collecting magnets wherever I visited. John collected some from his business travels and Kevin added his to the wall when he moved in. There are a lot of them now, and each one reminds me of a trip or a vacation. I like looking at them.

There is one thing on the wall of magnets that isn’t a magnet at all, though, but a name tag that I glued a magnet onto the back of. It’s not from a vacation, but from an event. But to provide context for the event, I need to tell you about Troy. And to tell you about Troy, I have to tell you about his husband, the aforementioned Jerry, the brother of my heart. And for Jerry to make sense, you have to understand where I grew up. So this just became an essay in three parts. Weird how that happens.

I. Graysville

The place where I grew up was small and rural, but when I say small and rural, I feel like people have a very different idea of what I mean. This wasn’t bucolic Gilmore Girls rural. This was poor, Appalachian-adjacent rural. There wasn’t a fresh coat of paint or a kicky gazebo to be found.

I hated it there. From the first time I was made aware that cities existed—probably from an episode of The Streets of San Francisco or the like—I wanted to live in one. I wasn’t really picky about which one. I just wanted OUT.

Jerry was what passed for a neighbor in this part of the world. He lived a couple miles a way, up at the top of a large hill where occasionally overly-enthusiastic police officers would sit with their radar guns.

But he was the closest person to me that was not in his seventies. He was—well, still is—eighteen months younger than me and eighteen months older than my brother. His parents didn’t want any more kids—didn’t really plan on Jerry—so we became the brother and sister in his life and he became my parents’ middle child. To this day, if I am talking about him to someone who doesn’t know him, I just call him my brother. It’s the truth in any way that matters.

Troy

I don’t remember when I met Troy. It was sometime probably in early 1995. Jerry and Troy had their first date in September of the year before, and while I might have met him earlier, to be honest, I didn’t always meet Jerry’s boyfriends. They weren’t usually around long enough for me TO meet them, frankly. But Troy was different.

They had been together for a little over a year when Troy got shot. In the head, at point-blank range, in a mugging attempt.

I may not remember when I met Troy, but I remember every second of the two or three days following the shooting, and I remember much of the weeks following as well. I remember putting on the ugliest tracksuit known to mankind and going over to the apartment they shared, to sit with Jerry. Jerry had been told in the ER that Troy wouldn’t wake up, that his parents needed to get here as quickly as they could, that it was not likely that Troy would survive the night. Jerry, overwhelmed, fled and called me.

We sat in his apartment for long enough for Jerry’s parents to make the drive from PA, and then it dawned on Jerry that we should be at the hospital, should be sitting with Troy. That he shouldn’t be alone.

We got there just in time for him to wake up.

It was eventually a completely happy ending, but the next year was a complete shitshow. Troy’s parents didn’t know about Jerry, didn’t know that Troy was gay, and to say that they reacted…poorly was an understatement. The moment that Troy was stable enough to transport, they got a U-Haul, packed up ALL his things, and took him back to Michigan to recover. Troy, bless him, had no idea what they had done. He thought he was spending a few months in a rehab there and then he’d be home.

The night he called me, crying, because he had found his suits in a closet in his parents house, and I had to tell him that they’d had packed up everything…that wasn’t a great night.

And Jerry had no say. They lived together, they had a lease and a joint bank account. But Jerry had no legal standing. Troy was 24 years old, legally an adult, but when it came down to it, his parents held all the cards. Whether Jerry could see Troy, could talk to Troy…this decision was all up to Troy’s parents.

It was devastating.

In the end, Troy did come home. He repacked that U-Haul and brought everything back. He and Jerry have now been together for thirty years, and married for the last ten of those.

And that brings us to today’s prompt.

My mission, for a lot of the past 30 years, has been to make sure that anyone who is within hearing range of me knows that equal rights, equal legal, civil rights for the LGBTQIA+ community is paramount. That we don’t get to say that “we have gay friends” and not fight for them, every fucking day. That letting this new administration strip away the rights we thought were codified will not be tolerated.

This is the hill I will die on.

All this brings me back to the magnet on the refrigerator this morning. Jerry and I went to the display of the AIDS quilt when it came to the capital in 96. I think that Troy was still in Michigan when we went. But we went, and walked around, poking at the very concrete evidence of the pain that AIDS had caused, and the beauty that families of the victims had made from it. And I was given a button that day to wear, a button which stated that I was voting in memory of ________ in the election that fall.

I took a sharpie and wrote in the name of my cousin, Jimmy.

Jimmy was my mom’s first cousin, and they were raised essentially as siblings. I know that for a lot of years she thought of him as her brother, much the way that Jerry is MY brother. And Jimmy was also gay, but deeply closeted. None of us found out that he was gay until he got sick. And it was not that long after he got sick that he died. And I took the button, the one with his name on it, and glued a magnet to the back of it, and it has been there on my refrigerator for thirty years.

It reminds me that today, I still vote for Jimmy Tanner. For ALL the Jimmy Tanners. And for Jerry and Troy. And for every marginalized gay, lesbian, trans person, gender queer person. Every non-binary person. Every asexual person. Every Intersex person. I vote for all of them, because their victories are my victories. Their happiness is my happiness. And when they are persecuted, I am also persecuted.

Today was the National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter, a man the likes of whom American politics will never see again. He was kind and compassionate and moral to the core. And when it came to gay rights, he and I were in lockstep:

I don’t have any verse in scripture … I believe Jesus would approve gay marriage, but that’s just my own personal belief. I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else”.

-Jimmy Carter

So. Imma keep fighting. For me, and for Jerry and Troy and for my cousin Jimmy who never, ever got out of the closet, and never ever got to live openly. And for Mr. Carter, who was well ahead of his time.