When gay Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco moved to Bethel, Maine three years ago, he stayed in the closet. After all, Bethel is a small (population 2,600), socially conservative town nestled near the New Hampshire border, 65 miles northwest of Portland.
So it wasn’t until he delivered his inaugural poem, “One Today“, last months at President Obama’s second inauguration that many of Blanco’s new neighbors knew that he was…a poet.
Folks in Bethel knew that Blanco and partner Mark Neveu were gay, and that Blanco’s parents came from Cuba. They were delighted when Blanco, a civil engineer, offered to serve on the town Planning Board, and when he volunteered at the Chamber of Commerce, serving (among other things) on the “sign committee”.
But as Blanco himself says in a lovely Boston Globe profile (alas, behind a paywall), “I never came out of the poetry closet in Bethel for some reason…. I was waiting for the right time.”
Now that Blanco’s “out of the closet”, the town threw a big celebration for him, complete with “a birthday cake the size of a ping-pong table (that) was decorated with the entire text of the inaugural poem“.
Forty years ago, Bethel—and a lot of other towns in Maine (and elsewhere)—was the kind of town where young gays and lesbians stayed in the closet if they knew what was good for them. It was the kind of town young gays and lesbians fled from in droves to live in big cities like New York and San Francisco, or small towns like Northampton, MA and Taos, NM where they could live openly (well, more openly) with their sexuality. It was the kind of town where, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, young men came home to die—achieving an imperfect reconciliation with family and neighbors.
“Bethel native Mark Bennett, a 70-year-old upholsterer with grown children, remembered a time when the town was not so welcoming to different lifestyles. When he came out as a gay man, he said, ‘I was the talk of the town for a while.’
‘Times have changed,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to feel free to speak your mind.’“
Bennett’s single syllable words (when folks talk about Mainers being “laconic”, this is what they mean) contain within themselves layers upon layers of hard-won meaning and emotion. Being “the talk of the town” isn’t a good thing in a place like Bethel. “Free to speak your mind” is just the first of layers-upon-layers of freedom that Bennett and his peers never had in mid-20th century America. And “times have changed” is about as succinct a verdict as one could pass on the whirlwind of social revolution that ends up with Richard Blanco not just delivering an inaugural poem, but perhaps even more radically, living life as an ordinary citizen of Bethel, ME.
crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
