Observations From the Bedroom Window

A GAY ALLEGIANCE

Several years ago a gay friend for whom I’d been doing some substantial re-modelling vacationed in the Faroe Islands. He loved that country’s flag, its colors and composition and, having purchased one at a gift shop, he brought it home and hung it from a forty-foot flagpole in his front yard. Back then we had a larger community of intolerance than, thank goodness, we do now. Jake lived openly with his partner.
During a regularly scheduled Selectmen’s meeting the Board was considering his appointment to the Park Commission. A fellow Board member registered an oblique objection. When pressed, he blurted out, “Do you know what you’re doing? Put him on the Park Commission, in charge of where kids hang out? Have you seen that flag?” “Flag?” I asked, puzzled. “That queer pride flag he’s got flying right in our face,” he stammered. Although he was corrected to understand that the correct term was Gay Pride not queer pride, and informed of the flag’s real origin, the word only got out to those who paid attention. If our local rednecks were among them, the fact that it a Faroe Islands Flag and not a Gay Pride Flag was apparently unpersuasive.
A few days later, late at night, a few of them ran a rope from their pick-up truck to Jake’s flagpole and pulled it over and into the road. The next morning, quite early, as an employee and I were headed to work, we found the pole lying on road, obstructing our passage, and bent, about ten feet from the base, nearly ninety degrees, that juncture where it had succumbed to the truck before being yanked out of the ground. Recognizing it for the vandalism that it was, we lashed it to my own truck, took it to my shop and tried to bend it back straight but the best we could do was create another bend a couple of feet from the first so that when we put it back in the ground, the pole went up ten feet, then horizontal a couple of feet or so, and then vertical again. When Jake woke up later that morning and looked out the window, the Faroe Islands Flag was flying, as always, but it was clearly a foot lower than it always had been and a few degrees farther to the westward. He called my house, quite concerned that my carpentry work had gone horribly wrong since his house was suddenly a foot higher than it had been when he went to bed and seemed to have shifted a little to the east.