Binghamton and the Hudson River Valley (click on photo for history and pictures of the area)
New York & Massachusetts
Binghamton, New York? How'd I end up there? For people who know me now, that probably seems like a very strange place to have been part of my life -- a small, industrial town in upstate New York. The reality is that when I decided in '72 to go to graduate school, the main thing I knew was that I wanted to leave the South but I otherwise didn't really have a lot of direction as to the type of school I needed. I had done a little bit of traveling around the Northeast and thought I might like it up there, but I also felt intimidated by the thought of trying to live in a big city like NYC or Boston. So, I looked around for medium size schools in smaller cities in the Northeast, and somehow ended up starting at SUNY (State University of New York) Binghamton in 1973.
The graduate school part didn't work out too well, but Binghamton did. The upstate mountains and weather reminded me of what I had liked about Germany when I was stationed there; being in an old, decaying, factory town gave me a sense of connectedness to history that I never felt from being raised in the New South; and it was just the right size and the right time to come out and deal with my sexuality. It also was close enough to NYC to go down and enjoy the city, but still get back to something that was calmer and much cheaper.
Though I tried many different education and work paths over the next 10 years and lived in quite a few places, Binghamton and then Boston were basically my home bases until I moved to SF in 1983. Those were particularly important years in terms of my gaining a sense of my place in the world, and hopefully some of that will be conveyed in my pictures and comments below. After developing a community in San Francisco in the 1980's, I didn't go back east again until I was there for a conference in August of 2007. Thus the pictures below are mainly digital photos taken in 2007, plus a small number of scans of film photos that were taken in the 70's and 80's.
Photos are broken down into three sets -- Binghamton and rural Northeast, Boston, and New York City. For each set, click on the lead photo below to get to the stories and photos for each area.
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Binghamton and the Hudson River Valley (click on photo for history and pictures of the area) |
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New York City (click on photo for history and pictures of the area) |
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