Good morning my friends. I was sitting here thinking/remembering a couple of things. I once took a Comparitive Literature class where an assignment was to answer the question "What Is Love". Of course it was the late 70's so a lot of the answers had to do with either peaceful coexistence and/or sex. I came up with the following which I rediscovered in a box of old papers I was going through.

"Love is the ability to share, at the most intimate level, the very essence of your being with another."

That was what My Robert and I had. While being two very unique individuals we were also one. The amazing and almost impossible ONE where you do not lose yourself but actually become one with another. You think alike, you like the same things, you even often have no need to speak because you know that the other has already heard what you were going to say. All that and maintaining the individual and uniqueness of you both.

Now a blast from the past. Way back when, before My Robert and I met, I did volunteer for a couple of years as the overnight help line person at the original Gay Community Services Center (GCSC) in Los Angeles. Those were wonderful days. Days of awakening, growing and becomming for an entire community of people. I found this picture online of the old original GCSC.

What began as a group of activist meeting in the living room of Morris' home has now grown to possibly the largest LGBTQ+++ organization in the world. And, that Gay community has grown from just a handful of openly Gay men scattered around the country to millions of openly proud LGBTQ+++ people around the world. When I remember those days and look a the past 40+ years I know, in my heart of hearts, that no matter what "they" try to do to roll back the clock we will never be defeated.

And, if I have any regrets at all, they are not self directed but rather a massive regret that so many never had, or will have, the experience of being Gay and alive pre-AIDS and the gentrification of America.

There is a history to be learned and loved. If you are as old as I am share those memories, good and bad, with the world. If you missed out on those days of discovery and growth, know that you have within you the seeds that were planted and you can plant those seeds to continue the growth and development of this amazing community that we are all a part of.