MATRIMONIAL RENOVATORS byRolandWise

In 1968, when the city of Jacksonville decided to consolidate herself with female counterpart, Duval County, Florida, the opponents of this dastard plan noted the once sleepy Atlantic port had afforded herself future sprawling by doing the unimaginable. Over night, the impact of such masculine gerrymandering had turned 841 square miles of mostly Pine trees into the largest city [land area wise] in the contiguous United States. At that point in the American race to see which city could abandon its downtown the fastest, if any town toted the sack of balls to sprawl, it was Jacksonville, for she was loaded with land and ready to move. It was also a quagmire of same sex union between feminine city and county, in turn, securing the natural resources necessary to deliver Jacksonville’s men folk to a higher place in the pecking order of shipping and receiving goods the world around.

All of a sudden, this redneck, shotgun wedding between the ‘Bold New City of the South’ and her feminine County of Duval had formed a holly-rolling-union that was all about land owners becoming wealthy during the suburban flight poised on the horizon. This was a union between the rich and the richer, the daughterly port caught in the middle, with opposing residents lamenting it was a match made in hell; for the worms of urban sprawl have been unleashed with no city limit signs. What happened in the next thirty years was the good old boys in charge of developmental gobbling gobbled their way toward the outlying areas, in some cases going 50 miles or more. Meanwhile the downtown daughter and her surrounding fray would begin to decay while waiting quietly for the renovators.

On a recent trip back to Florida, I met up with several of these renovators who were and still are, busy creating a very new version of Jacksonville.

When I arrived in the fair city, I was beside myself with excitement when my cousin announced we were going to dinner with two prominent Jacksonville Lesbians. They were just like me, my cousin assured. They were renovators. And being the traitor that I am, not having lived in the South for years, or having participated in her renovations physically, I always think of myself as a contributor in the Writerly sort of way. I do my Southern housework from afar.

I have always been terribly curious however, as to the state of affairs regarding the Southern Lesbian Woman. I wondered how my female same sex counterparts were fairing with all the lack of courage and change going on in America? How was all this Bush bullshit about our civil rights (or the lack thereof) regarding the Christians threat of loosing their ‘happy’ marriages affecting the Gay South? These counterparts were sister to me on so many levels, and I was feeling brotherly to check-in and make sure some religious nut jobs had not slipped a Bible belt noose around their necks.

From the reports I was getting however, these two Southern gals were a hoot and they knew everyone in town, and my cousin’s fixer upper friend who was gathering us together for dinner promised we would all three hit it off.
Thus the plan was for us to gather at a restaurant at the newly built Deerwood Shopping Village. I sat there on a park bench made from recycled plastic bags, next to a propagated stream, with a bronze alligator on the shore, waiting for them to arrive. Why in God’s name, I thought; were we eating at a shopping mall 30 miles from downtown? I only had a few minutes to criticize, so I looked around with digression taking notice of the Disney like shopping mall and how its design had been popping up everywhere in my travels. It was the prototypical latest craze in American suburban shopping centers. It was sitting in the middle of what once was a pine tree forest the year before. The land had been cleared away and replaced with a collection of shops and restaurants nestled within an outdoor village setting surrounded by brand spanking new landscape. The buildings had been bathed in various shades of pastels; cool and Miami Vice like [but not] these facades mimicked the yesteryear of Coconut Grove so wanting their coquina style textures to give off the illusion of being there a hundred years or more, although I knew better. The entire mall/village was a series of freestanding piñatas, made of two-by-fours, chicken wire and spackling, each holding the candy of consumer dreams, the Gap, Victoria, Apple, Barns and Noble and the fulfillment of American needs.

Although I noticed the fake crown molding above the entrance to the Pottery Barn and Banana Republic had not been painted [ever], I forgave the property management company as a means to an end of my displeasure. I was beginning to allow the place to grow on me because I was hungry, and I also wanted to have a good chat with my new friends, and the last thing I needed was a less than charming attitude about their new shopping and dinning extravaganza.
Dinner was a prelude to great innovational chatter as we all sat around the table gay and straight and sharing life stories while sharing several glasses of wine. Somewhere in conversation one of the Lesbian gals mentioned their renovation project in Avondale, which was a small neighborhood just south of Downtown Jacksonville. I immediately wanted them to adopt me so that I could be involved somehow in their work to restore up and coming areas of town. It had been two years or more since I had a renovation project of my own, and I missed being around old buildings. I loved the design process and how it evolved into something grand while sitting within the beckoning structure waiting for direction. It was once a good place for working out my own internal reconstruction process while fixing up a house as well.

Throughout the many projects (whether writing or construction) renovation and editing seemed all the same to me now. Renovators and editors and writers and artist naturally attract that which is dilapidating and in need of repair, and like the old homes in the inner city abandoned during the fearful flight of the fifties and sixties, renovators all over the country worked with their original sense of beauty, as if adapting an old novel to the modern day silver screen. The creative process is the renovator’s prize. He or she makes the careful calculations going from room-to-room, sentence-to-sentence, person-to-person, keeping in mind period and color and style, while adding just the write amount of emotion and feeling. I think if the Shaker’s were living today they would have something to say about our desire to renovate the spaces within lives.

Being together at dinner reminded me that our straight fixer upper was the renovator of a great evening. Unbeknown to me she had been planning and conceiving of our potential friendship in the days prior to my arrival, and like a union organizer, she had carefully calculated how we might get along. She graciously gestated the gals and my beginning like an anxious and caring surrogate mother during the attachment of the corsage prior to a very first prom. I love it when good old fashion heterosexual folks step out onto the dance floor with us nerds in tow. There are so many goodhearted folks out there that step up to the plate every single day and help weave our community together, in turn allowing us to dance like we may not have otherwise. And while it is true that many backward and fearful folks in Jacksonville, Florida would have preferred us go back in the closet, the consolidation between humans who respect one another is a virus much like urban sprawl and will eventually win out. Just like the union between Jacksonville and Duval some 30 years earlier, our civil notions are fueled and ready to gobble up rights from sea to shinning sea. And as the sprawling minds and self-respect always do, they renovate the properties left behind by those who leave in fear, meditating and breathing new life into the matrimony of sub culture and suburban myth.

The grandest example of matrimony is the non-stop creative endeavors going on all around us. For they shape our world day and night and would never ask for a certificate of marriage to do so. For marriage is creation, and creation is matrimony. We humans, on the other hand, are caught in a potentially barbaric stand off.

On the one hand, you have religious fanatics claiming that their god is the grantor and keeper of marriage. The leaders of such cults would have their more ignorant congregation members believe and report that that God Almighty coined the term marriage as a way of introducing Adam and Eve back in the dim day of the garden. With knee jerk reaction, Gay folks (like myself) demand to be let into their holly-rolling-matrimony club. But by doing so we are asking the poor Christians to shuck the first book of the Bible, along with all the favorite passages damning homosexuals to hell of course. And although I believe this is a lovely idea (to rid themselves of the Bible) I know a few of them personally, and it is never going to happen. Makes me glad I live in a country that protects me from religious tyrants. Or do I?

Now on the other hand, we have a group of tired and irritated folks wanting, demanding even, equality and fairness regarding civil rights. I believe this is going to have to reach far deeper than down the pants of religion or the occasional lifting of the fig leaves to see who’s Adam and who is Eve. We desire the term MARRIAGE be strip searched as if it were the wrong color person trying to go through an American airport security gate. In short we demand separation between church and state, with full civil rights on all levels, not just this particular platform. The American GLBT community is between a rock and hard place for we have been raised in this country and had the romantic notions to fall in love and have babies shoved down our homosexual throats, yet we cannot partake. And now we are supposed to turn it off as if this little fairy tale of a life we were sold is a Christian value. The American dream, a Christian value all set forth so Jesus’ followers can feel good about their Adam and Eve complex. I don’t think so!


Gathering up a new understanding is our way through this quagmire of uncertainty. It is likely that American voters, like the fixer uppers in our lives, will vote along with you and I in such away as to give us civil unions. If not, the courts will step in at some point and reverse all the tyrannical amendments the ignorant voters of this nation can muster. In the meantime, we can still fight and write letters and go to protest and get married in our ceremonial ways. We can also begin to see how the Bush administration is neither for this side or that side, but see how he plays both sides against one another in order to maintain a position of power.

The renovating language of matrimony and creation is everywhere if you look closely. It can actually be of comfort to count the weddings you see every day. Whether it’s a momentary lane change on the highway to pass another car, or ice cream cones first touch to the mouth, or hands wrapping around free weights at the gym, there is really nothing else out to watch but the coming together of this and that. And who business is it anyway if ‘that’ has a penis and ‘this’ has one as well?

Redefining these imprisoned sprawling terms means making up new ones that will respect everyone for generations to come. To renovate is to marry and to reject such marriage and creation is to divorce oneself from impending evolution.