Once upon a time, a long time ago, I left the United States. It was only to travel to Montreal, and I was pretty excited that I'd be going through Customs and seeing an actual foreign country. From there who knew? Maybe some day I'd get to France and Ireland to see the lands of my ancestors.
Almost immediately, I hated being outside the United States. The traffic went too fast. There were so many bridges I was always lost at the wrong end of one. Camping on St. Catherine Island was like being invited to a mosquito feast, and I was the main course. The city was just like a city in the States, only harder to navigate. I wanted to go home.
This was in the 1970s, when Nixon was president and we were still mired in Vietnam. It made no sense that I should be so attached to my native land. American citizens had been fleeing from it to Canada for years. It was even rumored that gay people were treated better north of the border.
I spent a miserable few days in Montreal with my lover. She wanted to show me the places she had lived and worked when she and her girlfriend ran away from home at 16, but the city was too changed to find her past. I wanted to see McGill, where I had considered going to college; seeing it, I realized college had been lonely enough for the only lesbian on campus without living in a strange, cold city, too.
Crossing back into Vermont, I felt as if I'd barely escaped with my life. This was nonsense, of course, but I was so glad to be home. Forget the ancestral lands. I'd visit Mechanicville, N.Y., where Grandma and Grandpa Lynch had met, and Petaluma, Calif., where Great-Grandpa Lynch bought a horse farm after the Gold Rush. The inn by the sea in County Wexford, Ireland, had probably fallen in by now anyway.
I relished the narrow country roads of Vermont after my great escape. What was wrong with being proud to be an American anyway? What was wrong with being an outright American chauvinist? Just because we were ( and still are ) the over-armed bullies of the world, despised for our riches and polluting with no regard for our own or other populations, didn't mean I couldn't get all choked up when I raised and lowered the flag as a counselor at a Girl Scout camp.
It was on this trip that I learned lesbianism and patriotism are not incompatible. At the time, much of gay liberation seemed to refer to principles of Socialism, if not Communism. The most politically active gays were likely to be peace-loving tree huggers. There were a lot of anti-American feelings in the lesbian-feminist community and who could blame us when multi-national corporations were buying our government and that government was more inclined to fund mass murder—of Third World citizens and our own military personnel—than anti-poverty initiatives.
America was fixable, I thought, and worth fixing.
We camped in an elbow of the Vermont mountains. There were cabins, but we set up our old canvas tent in a meadow. These were to be some of the most peaceful days of my life. The paradox of loving my native country and hating its policies could not disturb my homecoming. I was moved to sing swift un-melodic passages of This Land Is My Land and America the Beautiful at odd moments. The shame of American actions in the world was still with me, the fact that the campground owners would have thrown us out had they known what went on inside our tent was no less real, but the pond outside our door flap was blue and untroubled and the temperature at night was chilly enough to discourage mosquitoes.
I wanted to stay forever there, at my Walden Pond, like so many of my generation who retreated to Vermont and its equivalents all over the country. That is my point, of course: All Americans had rural Missouri towns where we could disappear or we could make sanctuaries of brownstones in Brooklyn or Victorian painted ladies in San Francisco.
I'm not quite sure what a patriot is anymore after the word has been used for centuries as a bludgeon by angry politicians and as a recruiting slogan for the military. So many Americans think gay people are somehow un-American and, of course, we're not exactly welcome in the armed forces, those bastions of patriotism. I do know that this lesbian is as American as they come, and glad of it. I believe in what the Statue of Liberty stands for and that we can be a peaceful force for good in the world. I'm not willing to give the word 'patriot' to the non-gay hawks. A patriot can also defend her country by protecting it from itself.
Copyright 2007 Lee Lynch
