I’ve been at the receiving end of a creepy message from an older guy but at the same time I’ve felt anger towards a community that seems to have forgotten what Pride was originally all about. I’ve been an out gay man since I was 14 (I’m now 26), and I’ve experienced both of these attitudes. Or appearing bitter and deriding younger people who don’t’ understand the history of what people went through just a few decades ago. It’s a supposedly comical slant on the fact there is widespread discrimination against older people in the gay community.Īt the same time, there has been criticism of the older LGBTQI+ community overstepping boundaries when it comes to dating. In this world, at this time, can love really join the tribes of man? It was not a question when the Judds asked, “Don't you think it's time?” Naomi knew the answer all along.It has long been a joke that any gay man over the age of 30 is considered old. It was so beautiful and artful, he thought it was a Broadway song. I once sang that song at a piano bar, and a man in the audience approached me afterward, impressed by the song (probably not by my performance). The lack of animosity between us reminds me of that line in “Love Can Build a Bridge,” perhaps Naomi’s crowning achievement as a songwriter: “Love and only love can join the tribes of man.” When my husband and I moved to Philadelphia and they stayed in New York, we continued our campground reunions, and there was never a camping trip without a Judds singalong around the fire, under the starlit Pennsylvania sky.īoth couples have since divorced, and I have remarried - making sure to impress an appreciation of the Judds upon my new husband - but we all remain close and in touch. Soon we two couples became inseparable, taking camping trips together several times a summer. I had to go to all the way to New York City to find my country people. One night a Judds song came on, I forget which one, and one of my new friends began singing along. There, I cultivated a new circle of friends, many of them also from Michigan. Like Naomi, I had persevered and made it out. I went off to college, got married (well, committed - same-sex marriage wasn’t yet legal in those days) and ended up in New York. When cancer visited one of my leg bones after my senior year in high school, I thought of Naomi and her hepatitis diagnosis. Naomi’s single motherhood, a nurse trying to score a recording contract, clicked with my view of my newly widowed mother, another country woman, trying to keep it together while still raising children.Ĭlick here to sign up for our free, seven-day newsletter course on legal cannabis in Connecticut. And would Ashley have made it in Hollywood without her mother’s support?Īs I grew older, the story of the Judds impressed me, and I saw bits of it in my own life. But without Naomi’s harmonies and stage presence, I doubt her daughter ever would have become the one-name star she is.
Wynonna was clearly the bigger voice of the duo. For a lonely gay boy in the rural Midwest, they were a calling card, and a lifeline of sorts. But I still always think of my grandpa.)Īnd after my father died, I wanted to be at that breakfast table they sang about in “Love Is Alive,” soaking up all the love that sat there.
(The song has since lost its luster for me a bit - the good old days weren't really that good. After my grandfather died, I listened to “Grandpa” over and over, crying that he would no longer be able to tell me about the good old days, which he actually used to do.