Looking for America

The week after Trump’s inauguration my weird dreams started again. I dreamt I was at BMCC, the community college where I used to teach. I was sitting in a room with other faculty getting ready to grade entrance exams. Suddenly this woman got up and sat down at a piano in the corner and started playing the Simon & Garfunkel song “America” and we all started singing along.

I woke up singing “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike’ (my home state) “They’ve all come to look for America.”

I didn’t need a psychic to interpret that I was looking for an America that no longer existed.

After I got up and had my morning coffee, I listened to “America” a few times, the original version from 1968 and the remastered version from 2021. I was singing along and crying. I printed out the lyrics although I didn’t need them. I always loved this song but now it was gut-wrenching. Was I crying for my lost youth or my lost country?

Analyzing my vivid dream, the classroom was not at the community college in Tribeca, it was the room at the senior center in Greenwich Village where I taught a memoir class. As I prepped my class for the next morning, I decided to assign my students to listen to “America” at home and then free write for 10 minutes. This was the first time I’d come up with a prompt from a dream.

The class seemed enthused as I explained this new assignment and handed out the song lyrics. I planned to do this also and read back with them the next week.

I noted that “America” was on the Bookends album with another classic, “Old Friends”. I listened to that album while in college, thinking that 70 was so old. “How terribly strange to be 70” sang the harmonic duo from Queens when they were young men. Everyone in my class was a senior citizen. We discussed how our perspective on a song changed as we aged.

As a single 76 year old gay woman, I worried about losing social security and Medicare and losing LGBTQ rights. During the following week, Trump stated DEI was the cause of a fatal plane crash. He fired many watchdogs and Elon Musk had gotten into the government’s payment system. I was outraged. This was a self-coup — an illegal and unconstitutional attempt by oligarchs to destroy our country. At some point, Elon (who disowned his transgender daughter) confessed his love for Donald.

I was reading “Letters from an American”, a newsletter by the brilliant historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson. She described what happened as “the largest data breach in human history.” She urged everyone to take at least one action daily before it was too late to take back our country. I called my three Congressional reps and the Attorney General of NYS and I donated money to the ACLU and Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign. I was also reading “The Contrarian”, a newsletter started by Jennifer Rubin after she resigned from The Washington Post.

I was filling my head with info as if that might protect me. For spiritual sustenance I was reading the newsletter Fierce Love by Reverend Jacqui Lewis, activist and pastor of my church, Middle Collegiate. She insisted we must identify and amplify the things that bring us joy. Reverend Jacqui explained that joy is a weapon, a refusal to let them steal our humanity. It is not weakness. It is resistance.

When we returned to class, I was eager to hear what my students had written. We listened to the song and I invited people to share their free writing.

One woman wrote about attending Forest Hills High School with Paul and Artie and hearing them perform in their early days. My student recalled running into Paul Simon on a bus after they graduated. They said hello and she thought “oh, he’s still at it” as she noticed his guitar case. Not long after that, the duo’s first album dropped.

Another student recalled hearing David Bowie sing “America” at a post 9/11 benefit concert. This led her into an involved description of her time as a volunteer at Ground Zero. She showed the class the ID she had saved. As she read, I feared another terrorist attack as Trump was gutting the FBI and the CIA.

I wrote about our current political situation: “Part of me is glad I’m old, but I don’t want to die thinking we’ve lost our country. We’ve all come to look for America, but will it be there in the future? I feel bad for my nine grand nieces and nephews. They are good kids, good students, full of promise. I want them to have beautiful lives. I hope the American dream is still there for them.”

As the month dragged on, with continued attacks on our democracy, the tipping point for me was when the National Park Service removed the letters T and Q from the website of the Stonewall National Monument. Parts of my community were literally being erased. What an insult to civil rights pioneers like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and Storme DeLarverie. Storme, a butch lesbian, worked as bouncer at the women’s bars and I remember her patrolling Hudson Street, like a queer Guardian Angel protecting lesbians in the Village. She made me feel safe.

While we may never know for certain who threw the first brick or a bottle at the Stonewall riots in 1969, (I’d like to think it was Storme), there is no question that drag queens and butch dykes and trans and gender nonconforming people, many people of color, played a role in the early street fighting and they and also fought to be accepted by the rest of the queer community.

The writing on the website was now reduced to the LGB community. Within 24 hours, GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, condemned the erasure and demanded a reinstatement. On February 14, I joined the emotional rally in Christopher Park as hundreds of members of the LGBTQ community and our allies protested in front of the Stonewall Inn. The fired up crowd spilled out onto the sidewalks, waving flags and holding signs: “You can’t spell Stonewall without the T”.

As we chanted, “Trans Lives Matter”, “They will not erase us”, “We’re Not Going Back”, I felt really angry. And I’d never felt more connected to my trans sisters and brothers. Who would be next? Speakers compared what was happening now to Nazi Germany.

State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, whose district includes the Stonewall Inn, said the erasure was “one of the darkest moments in American history.” Other politicians at the protest included

Congressman Jerry Nadler, state Assemblymember Deborah Glick, and City Councilman Erik Bottcher who represents the West Village and Chelsea.

The crowd ranged in age and color, sexual and gender orientation. As I was leaving the park I ran into a married straight woman from my memoir class. I was delighted she was there. Allies are important, now more than ever.

I believe this hateful erasure will foster more unity in the LGBTQ community. I flashed back to the AIDS epidemic when gay men were dying and lesbians took care of them creating solidarity in a divided community. I cannot forget what it was like in the 1980s when AIDS ravaged the Village. I lost many gay male friends and colleagues to this plague. But thanks to ACT-UP, who fought for research and to have drugs enter the system, AIDS is no longer a death sentence.

I fear that progress will be set back now that anti-vaxxer and science denier Robert Kennedy Jr will be in charge of our healthcare. Fortunately, groups like Rise and Resist have reinvented the radical actions of ACT-UP for this current crisis.
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After I returned from the Stonewall, I went to the weekly session of the Bliss Singers in the Westbeth community room, led by the jazz vocalist, Eve Zanni. I’ve been in this group for eight years and always feel great when singing. Since it was Valentine’s Day, we did love songs from the Beatles to Bacharach and then had we cake and wine after class. It was a joyful celebration, another part of the resistance.

Story and Photos by Kate Walter