Charlie

Most of those photos weren't taken in Lima, OH.

When my spouse and I first met, he had a higher income than I did. Fifty-five years later, my income is higher than his. But we have always used the same method of managing money. Anything that is equally shared, like house, utilities, car, etc., we have always split equally, which meant that we never bought or contracted for anything we used together that would be too much of a strain for one of us to afford. Anything that was in both names was equally paid for. That was also true when we traveled together, unless it was a trip that both of us wanted, and the one who wanted it most was willing to pay a larger share of the cost to make it happen. We also both traveled a lot separately, and each of us then paid his own way. We never expected to pay for one another's personal items, whether it was clothing or sexual adventures. To account for the differential in income, we each maintained separate assets, like investments, retirement accounts, and the like, with each of us named in our wills as eventual beneficiary of the other's personal assets. We have a couple of friends who have been together as long as we have. One of them always had much more money than the other. After a rocky start for a few years, they solved the problem by not living together, with each one responsible for all his own expenses, and sharing only expenses for joint travel and entertainment. One owns a huge condo on Manhattan's East Side, while the other rents a small one-bedroom apartment elsewhere, and each is psychologically satisfied with his financial independence.

My personal experience is decades out of date, but I always went to McBurney to work out and to Westside to play.

One of my former doubles tennis partners is now 92, so she decided she is a little too slow to keep up with the much younger players who are her only options as partners. Now she plays pickleball almost every day instead, but she admits it is not as satisfying. She has only fallen once in all the years I have known her, while hiking on a trail in her 80s, and she simply got up and hiked back home.

His claim to have been to 21 countries also sounds improbable for a 19 year old who doesn't appear to be well-educated or a member of a wealthy family.

@newdad did say expenses "not including travel," which may mean that he is relatively nearby and planning to drive here in his own car (or fly his own plane).

Aww, they're all so cute!

I started this thread with an ironic misquote of a line from an old song ("Nobody loves you when you're old and gray"), but I didn't mean it literally. Most relationships change over time, as both parties age, and for gay men who have no children, there are no younger generations of descendants who typically feel some responsibility for the older family members who raised them. Of course, even gay men may have younger lovers, friends and family members who are willing to take responsibility for them. I don't believe that nursing homes are only "geriatric prisons;" the residents may sometimes feel that way, but often the elderly receive better care there than they would from their family. After five years of living with my spouse and me, my 94 year old mother actually chose to move to an assisted living/nursing care facility, where she thought her life would be more comfortable and interesting than it was with us, and she was right.

I don't remember where I saw most shows, so some of the earliest ones I saw probably weren't actually on Broadway, I saw The Boys in the Band and Hair before they got to Broadway. The first show I saw in New York was probably The Fantasticks, but it wasn't on Broadway. I know I saw Amadeus on Broadway, but I don't remember when.

Do I sense another onetime linguistics student here? (I get palpitations when I hear someone talk about a voiceless dental sibilant!)

Boys?

The way the lists were presented gave the impression that both lists were for cities of more than 300,000, not that a different metric was used for the definition of "city" in the second list. The state of Virginia confuses the question even further with its concept of "independent cities." Until the 1960s, Virginia Beach was simply the principal town in Princess Anne County; then the state decided to abolish the county, and incorporate everything within its boundaries into an "independent city" called Virginia Beach. Much of the original county was actually outlying suburban development for Norfolk, another independent city. Like most American metropolitan areas, the suburbs grew faster than the central city, so Virginia Beach is now larger than Norfolk in population. But it doesn't have much of the character of a "city" in the usual sense, beyond the number of residents. Forbes' #2 "safest city" is actually still mostly a big residential suburb, with a tourist-oriented beach, while Norfolk is the more traditional "city." Most demographers consider the two places to be a single conurbation. The same is largely true of #3 Henderson (Las Vegas), #7 Mesa (Phoenix), and #12 Arlington (Dallas/Forth Worth). For anyone looking quickly at the two lists without knowing how the "cities" are defined or what the demographics are, the presentation is misleading.

My point was that defining "cities" solely based on an arbitrary population minimum leads Forbes (or anyone else making this kind of list) to an apples to oranges kind of comparison, since regardless of the number of people who live within the boundaries of a municipality, most people's image of a "city" would not put Mesa or Virginia Beach in the same category with New York. A better comparison would be between cities with obvious similarities, such as NYC vs. LA, or Raleigh vs. Birmingham. (BTW, some of the cities included on their lists don't actually meet the "over 300,000" population that Forbes claims, and Birmingham is one of them.)

Let's see: bush lovers, armpit lovers, sweet smile lovers, big cock lovers....

I lived and worked in Center City Philadelphia for 38 years, and never thought of it as very dangerous, but I've been gone for 20 years. Forbes list of "dangerous" cities consists almost entirely of old cities with stagnant or declining populations and little economic growth, while the "safe" cities are mostly places with explosive recent growth in population and economic growth in tech industries rather than in the traditional downtown. It's odd that Mesa, which used to be considered simply a suburb of Phoenix, makes the "safe" list, while Phoenix, which is the fifth largest city in the US in population, doesn't make the lists at all. I have to laugh at the idea of #2 Virginia Beach as a "large city," because my parents moved there when they retired, and it was basically just a large beach town with no center, and was really a residential suburb of Norfolk, which itself is no longer even big enough to qualify as a "large" city. The idea of using only the residential population within municipal boundaries as the definition of a popularly experienced metro area is the kind of arbitrary metric that often makes me question lists by Forbes.

I came out in 1960, and being gay in the '60s was different for a well-educated urban man in a professional field who didn't appear effeminate than for those who fit an opposite stereotype. I could live with another similar man in a one-bedroom apartment, have lots of anonymous sex, and take an active part in the gay rights movement, and not constantly worry about the possibility of being beaten up or fired from my job solely because someone learned or merely suspected I was gay. Stonewall was not a sudden switch in the environment, but the culmination of a change that had been building up for at least a decade, and that finally broke into social consciousness, especially in urban America. (I suspect that if it had happened in the '50s, the New York Times would not have considered a riot by patrons at a gay bar part of "all the news that's fit to print.") In the mid-'60s I met a somewhat effeminate middle aged gay couple who had gone to prison in rural Pennsylvania in the '50s, simply because a couple of college kids claimed the guys had cruised them in a public place. That kind of persecution wouldn't work in Philadelphia by the '60s, because gay men and women were fighting back, with the help of organizations like the ACLU, and the equal rights movement in the Black community was making everyone--gay and straight--more aware of what was at stake for everyone. The social and legal climate was changing before the laws themselves did. In 1976, I proposed to my dean that I wanted to teach a credit course in gay literature, and he immediately agreed to it; to my pleasant surprise, most of the students who signed up for it were apparently straight, and weren't afraid to have the course on their record.

Me, too.

I studied German with a German professor who loved opera, so he often incorporated it into the course. One semester Tannhauser was one of the works we studied. Long afterwards, I learned that he was gay, and that he used to throw parties at his home for certain male students. I felt insulted that I was never invited to his own little Venusberg, though I'm sure I would have been uncomfortable in that situation, since I found him physically repulsive.

The singers are responding to Landgraf Hermann's request that they explain the nature of "love." Wolfram sings first. The text is not exactly normal German speech--in fact, Wolfram's initial metaphor for love is actually an archaic term for a fountain or spring, which he praises in rhymed couplets--so translations into colloquial English are pretty variable. Wolfram says he wouldn't dare pollute the fountain by tasting it, i.e., having carnal relations, while Tannhauser responds that he wouldn't hesitate to cool his burning lips from the fountain, and in the ensuing interchange between him, Wolfram, Walter and Biterolf, he admits that he has been getting it on with Venus, who is an actual character in the story. If the demonstrators started during Wolfram's initial reference to the "spring" or "fountain," then they were jumping the gun. They probably didn't know German, and as soon as they heard the word "Bronnen" or "Brunnen," they thought that was the signal. They may not have even understood which singer was which character.

I haven't listened to the broadcast, but it is Tannhauser who sings (in a rough translation of the German text) that "love is a spring to be drunk from" in contradiction of Wolfram's characterization of true love as a pure spring which shouldn't be defiled by drinking (i.e., sex). Given that they are singing in opposition to one another at that point, it's quite probable that the demonstration broke out as Wolfram was reacting to Tannhauser.

Tannhauser was the first opera I ever saw--at the old Met on 39th St in 1961.

BTW, being gay probably helped me achieve the dream, because when I was younger, I met men above my social and financial class whom I probably never would have connected with if I had been straight. I also felt no internal pressure to marry and have children, which gave me more freedom to do things that I couldn't have done if I had a family to support. It also helped that I found a partner from a similar background who had similar experience.

I don't see the point of making the protest at an opera. Has the board of the Met refused to put solar panels on the roof?

It depends on how one defines "The American Dream." If one uses the definition posted above, then I did achieve it, in "The American Way:" I got much more formal education than my parents did--they were both high school drop-outs, while I ended up with three higher education degrees from top schools. As a result, I got better-paying stable jobs. That was what my parents dreamed would happen to me. But America also changed over our lifetimes, because unlike my parents, I didn't live through an economic collapse and a Great Depression which forced them to work at whatever jobs they could get to support their parents, who didn't have Social Security to help them survive through the first years of the Depression. I graduated from high school into a thriving post-war economy, which enabled my parents to afford to send me to college, when tuition, room and board at a good private college cost less than $2000/year. Of course, I did my part by getting good grades, which got me scholarships and work-study jobs that minimized what it cost my parents, and my first graduate degree was covered entirely by a fellowship. Sociologists would probably have described my parents as respectable lower-middle class. I would probably be considered lower-upper-middle class, based on my education, work history, social connections and financial assets. Their/my dream came true. The question is whether the members of an American family today could rise in the same way by the same means.

Seriously. I thought she had died a few years ago.