Becoming Sodom. Or Gomorrah. Whichever had all the hot gay sex...
Let me tell you a little something about the Town of Kearny, the little penisula in northern New Jersey where I grew up. Kearny is smack dab between Jersey City and Newark, two of the dirtiest and most crime-ridden cities in the country.
Kearny's residential area sits atop a hill that slopes down to the South to reveal a breath-taking view of New York City. You just have to ignore all the rising smoke from the constant tire fires and the smoke stacks. South Kearny houses plenty of industries that must constantly be breaking environmental laws, because the smells and pollution that often ride upwind to assault you should be illegal. Although there are those lucky times when they try to unsuccessfully mask it with butterscotch. I don't think I've been able to stomach a Werther's Original since we moved in, come to think of it. Also in South Kearny, there sits a few large landfills, now closed, that for years was the home of New York City's rubbish. These landfills were huge islands, surrounded by the depressingly polluted Kearny freshwater marshes, part of the Hackensack Meadowlands area.
On the other slope of residential area, Kearny butts up against the Passaic River, fomerly the country's dirtiest river. Now after a century of pollution, steps have been taken to lessen the verdict from "dirtiest" to "consistently at-risk." But that doesn't stop the high school Crew teams from rowing and swimming in it from time to time.
But not all of Kearny's attractions are environmental disasters. We also have a state prison in South Kearny that houses New Jersey's sex offenders. When everyone else was saying "not in my backyard," Kearny exclaimed "why not?" Indeed!
If you think there is nothing redeeming about this Little Town That Didn't, you might be surprised to learn that we are the location of many scenes and location sites for HBO's hit series The Sopranos. Yes, that's right. Kearny will forever be synonymous Italian mobsters and ultra-violent tendencies.
Despite the narrow-minded absurdity of the past, Kearny has now become the latest Den of Inequity to make Baby Jesus cry. Last week Kearny had its first domestic partnership legitmized by the government. In a tearful-eyed scene at Town Hall, a lesbian couple signed a few documents and became the first same-sex couple to be almost married. This is a very good sign to me.
As someone who grew up in Kearny's sexually-stifling atmosphere and came out in high school, I always convinced myself that I'd have no real choice, that in just enough ways for it to matter, this town could never really be for me. For gay partnerships to be recognized on the shoddy craftsmanship of the Town Hall's office building, it is an omen that maybe this place can change a little bit. Maybe there's a chance that this country really can get a little better in the long run. New Jersey is now the fifth in the nation to allow same-sex couples to file joint tax returns, make medical decisions for an incapacitated partner and visit each other in the hospital. And the Gates of Hell didn't even open up to feast on our heathen souls. If any place needed a Rapture, it's Kearny, New Jersey, but instead we got civil rights. Some might say it's just one more item on a long list of mistakes or bad deeds that our town has committed. I say it's a change in the wind. Only 45 more states to go.
posted by Matt Coleman @ 11:17 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
i think the smell of butterscotch is attributed to explosions at the artificial flavoring plant actually...
~ryn
ps - can you talk about the assault weapons ban next?
Don't tell me you're going to get all NIMBY about the damn prison. I had to sit through those damn council meetings, and by the end of it, I was about ready to throw half of the town's population behind bars with the lot. They have to go somwhere, and for christ's sake, it's South Kearny. I'm pretty sure the fumes there make them impotent anyway.
Glad to know that Kearny has moved up on some level with my current homestead of Cambridge, MA. Now if only our average IQ level could jump up a few points, too.
Perhaps this wasn't obvious in the post, but I love Kearny despite all of its flaws. If not for Kearny, I would have grown up on the mean streets of Jersey City (where I lived till I was 9). Could you imagine me, a fragile little red-headed gay boy, surviving in that environment? Not me.
In other news, I wrote a letter to the Kearny Observer about the domestic partnerships and my thoughts on the subject. So all of you out there with subscriptions to The Observer, or The Paper of Record as I like to call it, look for that to be published next week.
just for the record, i as well may be published in the observer next week, and i'd like to point out that not only did they get my letter first, but i also had to keep on matt's ass for almost a week to get him to write a letter to them, and then tell him what to wriet. i'm just sayin....
Sharyn certainly is my little underground mole in Kearny, smuggling out all the juicy gay gossip she spots in the Observer. Like I said, Den of Sin and all. Why she thinks she told me what to write I don't know. The stealing of one's ideas is a very touchy subject with me she doesn't seem to understand. We talked about her letter being too congratultory and how I intended to be a little more critical of using domestic partnerships as a substandard alternative to marriage. But if she needs to think she wrote a letter for me to a local newspaper to make herself feel important, then go right ahead. Sheesh.
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