She comes north! She goes back south! Then north again; then south again! Where will jet-setter Evelyn Sedarbaum eventually decide to settle?

At age 94 it hasn’t been easy for Eddie’s newly-widowed mom to decide where she wants to put down her post-Harold roots, and she’s changed her mind already several times.

The current and presumably final verdict is that the pleasure of breakfasting every morning with her son and son-and-law trumps any competing comforts that the Sunshine State can offer. And considering what wonderful company Eddie and I are, can anyone question that her decision is the right one?

Below left: Eddie escorts his mom to her new home. Below right: Yikes! That staircase from street level to front yard suddenly reminds Evelyn of one reason she had thought life might be easier in hill-less West Palm Beach! Well, life is full of trade-offs, isn’t it?

The Juicy Mother "queer comix" anthology series is the brainchild and pet project of cartoonist Jennifer Camper, who put together the first installment a year ago and is now back with more, thanks to Manic D Press, who stepped into the breach when the first volume’s publisher was forced to scale back its commitments.

With the new book hitting bookstores now, it’s time to party! And as I’ve learned from experience there’s nobody more fun to party with than Ms. Camper, whose been a best buddy of mine since her comic strip "She’s My Two-Timin’ Truck-Drivin’ Mama" popped over the proverbial transom while I was putting together the second issue of Gay Comix in 1980.

So it you’re in or near the Big Apple on Saturday the 13th, hie thee downtown to Bluestockings (172 Allen Street) so you can meet a bunch of the Juicy Mother contributors. Not all of them can be there, of course, but some who will reportedly be making the scene are Diane DiMassa, Ivan Velez, Jr., Joan Hilty, Victor Hodge, David Hooper, Fly, Michael Fahy, Katie Fricas, and Chitra Ganesh.

Meanwhile, if you pick up the book you can also spend quality time with comics by the other JM cartoonists who, like me, can’t make it to Bluestockings this weekend (or if they can, are keeping it a secret so they can make a splashier entrance). They are Alison Bechdel, Tristan Cowen, Jamaica Dyer, Leanne Franson, Justin Hall, G. B. Jones, David Kelly, Robert Kirby, Carrie McNinch, Erika Moen, Sara Rojo Pérez, Karen Platt, Carlo Quispe, Lawrence Schimel, Ariel Schrag, Serpilla, Scott Treleaven, Robert Triptow, and Stephen Winter.

The are more Juicy Mother 2 events to come in other cities, by the way, so mark your calendars if you’re gonna be in Boston on November 4 (4 PM at the Center for New Words) or in Philadelphia on December 1 (at Robin’s Bookstore; check locally for the exact time). I can’t make it to the Philly signing but expect to be at the Boston one (along with Jen and Dianne).

For all the emotional confusion and practical changes she’s been forced to go through, though, one thing has been crystal clear for some time: Evelyn likes life in the Berkshires more than she ever liked life in Florida. West Palm Beach air, she says, is murder on her arthritis.

So she’s staying with Eddie and Lulu and me for now.

Never one to mooch, however, she insists on chipping in on whatever tasks we toss her way. For example, as the photo above shows, helping to stuff envelopes for one of Eddie’s projects has put her in a great mood this evening.

And yesterday she helped me fold copies of the North County Perp in preparation for my little ‘zine’s big launch party tomorrow.

Speaking of which, here’s a link to reporter Jennifer Huberdeau’s article about my Perp project that ran in today’s North Adams Transcript.

Unfortunately, Eddie’s dad Harold ("Hesh" to his family and most friends) died last Saturday while we were there, under the exemplary, compassionate care of the staff at Hospice of Palm Beach County. His family was at the bedside as he left. The funeral was on Monday.

You could name a whole range of afflictions that had ganged up to make the man miserable during his final few months (though his reliable stoicism never failed him during the siege), but the basic cause of death was this: After nearly 98 years on this planet, Hesh’s body decided that enough was enough.

Below left: Hesh with Eddie in 1979, shortly after Eddie and I began our relationship. Below right: Hesh with Evelyn, his wife of 71 years, enjoying the cake commemorating his 95th birthday in 2004. The two of them were in North Adams at the time attending Eddie’s and my wedding.

Hesh, Ev and I had spent an evening getting to know each other and, as Eddie and I approached the door to leave, I made a jocular reference to our differing religious heritages.

"You’re a good person," Hesh told me. "That’s what counts."

Blogging will resume when feasible.

That was my first time to set foot on French soil.

And my first time to meet French comics fans.

And my first opportunity to mingle with my French comics- creating counterparts (all of whose drawing skills put mine embarrassingly to shame).

And also, uh, my first time to stumblingly place an order for French Egg McMuffins at a McDonald’s not far from my hotel, using what’s left of my high school French while hoping none of my culinarily cultivated convention hosts would spot me doing so.

It’s always easy for me to remember which year I made this trip, since George W. Bush was busy starting a war while my plane was over the Atlantic. Once I had settled into my hotel in Bordeaux, CNN International provided me with stimulating views of tanks barreling through sandstorms as preparations were being made to visit shock and awe on the citizens of Baghdad.

A welcome postscript to my introduction to les choses français occurred a couple of weeks ago, when Laurent paid a visit to the Cruse-Sedarbaum homestead here in North Adams. Laurent arrived with his girlfriend Lawrence in tow, as well as their friends Yan and Hélène, a charming couple who have only recently relocated from Bordeaux to Quebec.

The four of them stayed overnight with Eddie and me before proceeding to New York City. Laurent had never visited America before, and hence this would be his first exposure to the Big Apple. We recommended the street vendors’ soft pretzels, of course, and I made sure he knew to visit my favorite Manhattan comic store, Jim Hanley’s Universe. We also provided the traditional suggestion that everyone keep their wallets in their front pockets while making their way through dense crowds.

"The city is really magic," Laurent wrote to tell me once the gang had returned to Yan and Helene’s Ottawa digs. "We were amazed at every street corner."

Snapshots taken during Laurent’s North American vacation are now on view in his blog. Seeing New York through Laurent’s eyes reminds me why I’m grateful to have experienced life in that city for as many years as I did.

Which is not to suggest that Eddie and I aren’t thoroughly pleased to be living in rural Massachusetts now.

Eddie’s mom Evelyn, being only 94, felt like hitting the road anyway. So with Harold’s blessing she has been spending the week here in Massachusetts with Eddie and me. She says the relatively dry New England air is great for her arthritis.

Evelyn was seven at the time. Her mother, back then, was keeping food on the table by rolling hand-made cigarettes for a living. This was an illegal enterprise for which Eddie’s grandmother spent several days in a Warsaw jail, says Evelyn.

Staying put wasn’t a viable family option for the long term, though. Soon after this photo was snapped she and her brother and mother would be crossing the ocean to America.

I can see her point. Under circumstances like these, instruction manuals clearly should be part of the package.

The result: an essay that was published in our local paper’s Op-Ed section earlier this week. If you’d like to see what he wrote in its entirety, click here.

—From Eddie’s essay "Missing What We Never Knew",
Published in the North Adams Transcript on March 26, 2007

[Note: if you’d like to read the whole essay but
the link above no longer works, try this one.]

The last word hasn’t yet been spoken on the fate of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts, but at the moment it looks like efforts to engineer an amendment to the Massachusetts State Constitution that would reverse the legalization of gay marriages may have been successfully stymied by a deft (or sneaky, depending on how you look at it) parliamentary maneuver by our allies in the legislature.

Which means that life will go on for a while with doomsday predictions about the supposed bad effects of having lesbians and gays living as married couples amid the heterosexual majority being disproven with every passing day. Eddie and I are pleased to be participants in this process.

The state’s marriage amendment as written cannot undo Eddie’s and my marriage even if our governor Mit Romney succeeds in his effort to resurrect it at the last moment. That said, we all know that political winds can shift unexpectedly, and the deadline for getting an antigay marriage amendment onto the 2008 ballot hasn’t quite passed yet. Therefore, although it seems unlikely, Massachusetts voters could still end up getting their shot a couple of years from now at defining future marriages between the same-sex couples next door out of bounds.

But whatever transpires (barring an unexpected surge for President Bush’s must wished for amendment to the Federal Constitution), a change of marriage’s definition in the Massachusetts Constitution can only affect gay nuptials thereafter. It will not be retroactive. So a sliver of the state’s gay population will be left as legally wed as is possible while discrimination remains the rule beyond our state’s borders. And that "sliver" of married human beings numbers in the thousands by now. That’s no small sliver.

Whatever Massachusetts and America learn from spending years knowing that thousands of gay people are living in officially sanctioned households to no observable ill effect on society will be hard to unlearn, no matter how much the American Family Association rails. Such things can be unlearned (it’s always sobering to remember that a gay-rights movement flourished in Germany before Hitler rose to crush it), but it’s not easy to voluntarily blind yourself when you’ve spent some time viewing life’s realities.

Massachusetts enjoys (grudgingly, sometimes) the reputation of being "the bluest of the blue states." To many people elsewhere this translates as "a breeding ground for liberal wackos." Being an unapologetic liberal who considers occasional wackniness his birthright as a cartoonist, I would feel safer if the Bay State’s embrace of its reputation were a little firmer. The Catholic hierarchy in the state is no friend to "blueness" when it comes to marriage equality, and our governor freely scores points with the Christian right by demonstrating that familial love between members of the state’s LGBT people cuts no ice with him. More disturbing than these fairly atypical examples of homophobic intransigence among the powerful is my awareness that such voices of intolerance clearly have a significant constituency in the state. Otherwise they would not be powerful.

I’m happy that gay people seem to have sturdier friends in this state’s legislature than is common in most other states. Antigay legislation is not a slam dunk here. Whew. It would be more reassuring if marriages like Eddie’s and mine were being defended by straightforwardly enlightened action instead of tricky votes for recesses. But we fringe types who live our lives trying to destroy American family values must take our victories however we can get them during dark times.

Homophobia-based inequality has been imbedded with depressing ease in numerous state constitutions across America since the possibility of equal rights for gays first reared its scary head in Hawaii back in the ’90s. An outcry followed, as outcries always do when prejudices are challenged, and the people who were then in charge of Hawaiian rulemaking scampered to calm the waters. In short order discrimination in Hawaii was made Constitutional by referendum. And that was that in luau-land.

A pattern was established. Marriage equality has been steadily beaten back by votes or vetoes in state after state since then, just as equal rights for African-American citizens would surely have been voted down in my home state of Alabama when I was young, had not some "activist judges" removed bigotry-based laws as an option. Our Supreme Courts were cut from different cloth back then.

Occasional exceptions aside, I grew up viewing the U.S. Supreme Court as a thrilling buttress against the localized tyranny of ignorance. Even obstreperous Alabama Governor George C. Wallace was forced to step aside and allow black students to enroll at the University of Alabama once he was finished with his voter-pleasing "stand in the schoolhouse door." No matter how badly the racists of my home region behaved, the Warren Court saw what the American Constitution demanded in the way of "equal justice under the law" and made sure that the defenders of discrimination would ultimately have to step aside.

Thanks to relentless court-packing since those days by the "radical conservatives" who have taken charge of the GOP, fair rulings by the Supreme Court can no longer be counted upon to make the egalitarian ideals of our U.S. Constitution stick. Judicial appointments by George W. Bush, who happily displays the shallowest comprehension of what American democracy is all about that I have ever seen, may have succeeded in nudging the Supreme Court beyond a dangerous tipping point that will endure long after his own incompetence is expelled from the Oval Office. Time will tell. Am I nervous about Bush’s legacy? I am indeed.

I take nothing for granted in a country as divided against itself as ours. But for now Eddie and I count ourselves lucky to live in a state where rule by antigay hysteria is not as easy a sell as elsewhere. After our 27 years together, being married means relatively little to us. But having the right to be married means a lot.

So it’s handy that Eddie’s birthday falls so close after Thanksgiving every year. The two of us have many things to be grateful for that are unrelated to geographical location, but to be a gay couple legally married under the pioneering laws of a pioneer state adds a special grace note to our gratitude each fall as we brace for winter’s arrival.

We were airborne by the time I made it to the New York Times Book Review and found my mood elevated even higher by my discovery that the Times had seen fit that very Sunday to give Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home its due.

And that was just for starters. Eight days after Sean Wilsey’s aforementioned piece in the Book Review ("a pioneering work…" said Wilsey) there came a second review of Alison’s "Family Tragicomic," this one written by George Gene Gustines ("painfully honest and richly detailed in words and images…") for one of the same paper’s Books of the Times columns.

If you read my March 13 blog entry you already know that I’m firmly in the "Hooray for Alison" camp, and — given the heightened mainstream awareness of graphic novels that has taken place during the eleven years since the Times oh-so-cruelly ignored Stuck Rubber Baby (brief pause for envious teeth-grinding on my part) — I’m not surprised in the least by the widespread accolades garnered by Alison’s book. If any comics artist has even been overdue for general acclaim, it’s the talented Ms. Bechdel.

I would be embarrassed, of course, to own up to even a miniscule degree of professional envy if Alison didn’t admit to similar feelings toward herself. In a profile of Alison written by Hillary Chute in this week’s Village Voice the creator of Dykes To Watch Out For muses, "It’s weird because I’ve been publishing books for over 20 years [and] nothing has ever gotten attention like this. So, in an odd way, I feel envious of my own self. It’s like, how come nobody paid any attention to me before? Is my comic strip worse than I thought? Or is this book better than I thought?"

Yesterday I heard from my French pal (and Wendel translator) François Peneaud, instigator of the Gay Comics List, who tells me that Alison’s book is gearing up to make waves on his side of the Atlantic as well. "I’ve just learned that Fun Home will soon be published in France," he tells me, "and that it will be serialized this summer in a left-wing newspaper, Libération. Which is absolutely great, because a lot of people who don’t read bandes dessinées [That’s French for comics — H.C.] will see it."

François has wasted no time in composing his own online review of Fun Home, by the way, a review capped off with a link to the fascinating video of Alison’s working methods that is currently housed on the book’s promo page at Houghton Mifflin’s web site.

It’s a choice look at the artist at work in her lair. And while I’m fascinated to learn that some of Alison’s secret drawing tricks are almost as peculiar as mine, my favorite moment is a moment of deft synchronicity between Alison and her cat, who clearly has learned from experience how to safely step off of a desk’s surface into what would be, absent Alison’s perfect timing, thin air. You’ll see what I mean if you watch the video.

Our pets come to know us so well. And we them.