Day 28-30, Boulder and Colorado Springs.

The Boulder Police Station has a kitchen area complete with large outdoor deck and barbecue on which Officer Linda's husband, Dan, grilled the chicken and veggies for our dinner. In a summer of firsts, add eating vegan fajitas in a police station while joking with an officer about her Chief's potential reaction if this year's Bike-AID theme happened to be the legalization of pot.

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Digression: I'm actually making this entry on Day 33 in Oberlin, KS, a rare lapse in journaling for me caused by the long, long days of the CO and KS prairie. It struck me just now as funny that last night I slept in the renovated garage apartment of the St. Francis, KS Chief of Police, and tonight, at our campground in Oberlin, KS, we are surrounded by enormous fields of wild pot.

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Boulder is a rest day for us, the first one since Salt Lake City, and although there were many community service projects set up: preparing veggies in a CSA for its members, working on bikes for "Spokes for Folks" which leaves bright green painting bikes around Boulder for anyone to just ride to their destination and leave there, and talking to a group of youngsters at a bicycle summer camp, I disappeared for the day to relax, plot and prepare for several interviews.

Boulder is like any college town USA: except more moneyed and more environmentally and politically correct. There are also fabulous, amazing bike lanes everywhere; on the streets, sidewalks and all along the creek system. If Portland, OR is the most bike-friendly city in the US, then Boulder must be the most bike-friendly town. It was annoying, I must admit, to be worried about colliding with the hundreds of cyclists everywhere, when for the last four weeks cyclists have been instant allies in the struggle for a share of the road.

My first reaction to Boulder was a big sigh of relief: health food stores, hippies, queers, stoplights, piercings, Thai and Indian restaurants, a gay/feminist bookstore, panhandlers, buskers, bills for strange bands and clubs posted everywhere, bookstores, and on and on. I thought to myself, at least some diversity! I can eat at the Indian vegetarian place for lunch, the Thai place for dinner and the whole-grain organic bakery/coffee house for breakfast. But I had a strong gut reaction to myself. The ability to eat "ethnic" food (as if white Americans had no ethnicity) is NOT diversity. It's NOT multiculturalism, even though I and many others of my class like to think of ourselves as worldly because we can tell you the ingredients of "Pad Thai" and correctly pronounce "cappuccino" and use chopsticks. This is an empty excuse for the ongoing education, enrichment and struggle that comes when people, not foods, from different cultures engage one another.

In Colorado Springs, I found, in some ways, more "multiculturalism" than I had in Boulder, or than I often find in my own life. In Colorado Springs it's not Latino families and young white hipsters co-habitating like in my old SF neighborhood. And it's not Chinese immigrants and University highbrows trying to accept the ways each chooses to use their front and back yards as it was in my old neighborhood in Toronto, it's the middle-of-the-road to progressive long-time inhabitants and the newer thousands upon thousands of fundamentalist and Christian radical families that have moved to the Springs following the relocation there of the 90 million-dollar-a-year Focus on the Family radio and literary empire and the 140 other religious right organizations that have followed it. Colorado Springs is not an American city divided by race, it's a city divided by politicized creed, with the fundamentalist families on one side of the tracks.

At the height of the Amendment 2 battle, a statewide initiative started in CO Springs which prevented any level of government within the state from enacting anti-discrimination laws for gay people, essentially sanctioning the continued firing, eviction and hate-violence against gays in the state, fear ran high among the folks I talked to, all of whom had a story about the vandalism or beatings or pet-poisoning that happened to a friend because he or she was gay. But since that time, "people have moved on," says Wendy whom I stayed with there, the mother of my friend Noel, "None of us could keep putting in that much energy towards that struggle, so most people have just gone back to their lives."

My second night in Boulder, I'd done two interviews, one with a man who has a gay dad and one with a woman, Laurie, who has a transgender father (essentially her father is not happy as a man and lives most of her life as a woman.) Laurie picked me up in Boulder and drove me back to her home in Denver where I picked her brain for material for my book. Although being transgender (a blanket term which covers a variety of gender-bending or breaking or reformulating, like transsexuality, transvestitism, drag kings and queens, and onwards towards the limits of the false binary of male/female) is different from being gay, the former is about your feelings about your own gender, the latter is about your feelings about other genders, there is a lot of overlap in the issues facing kids with gay parents and kids with transgender parents. For instance the school stigma is high. The isolation and shame that comes with it is also common. The break-up of one's parents precipitated by one parent's "coming out" as gay or transgender is common. Although in Laurie's case her mom and "Dana" (she often uses the proper name instead of "dad" or pronouns) are still married, even though her dad lives as a woman. Laurie's mom says, "I am not a lesbian, I'm just married to one." A legal same-sex marriage points out Laurie.

From Denver I rented a car and headed down to "The Springs". There are actually no springs in Colorado Springs, they are off in the mountains. It's a full day: I started with a meeting to talk about COLAGE with the Director of the Gill Foundation. Tim Gill is the Bill Gates of desktop publishing, his company, Quark, is worth about $450 million. Tim, who has been out as gay since college and is one of the few industry giants not in Silicon Valley or Redmond, WA, had a political awakening when he realized his freedom was threatened by Amendment 2. Among other things, he gave a million dollars to start two fund, the Gill Foundation which gives to gay organizations which work either nationally (COLAGE) or in Colorado, and OutGiving, which gives "gay money" to non-gay organizations like children's groups and hospitals and public radio stations, "to show that gay people are as much a part of the broader community as anyone else."

From there it was on to interview a 17 year-old with a lesbian mom who has grown up in The Springs. In many ways she is similar to Emily in Ogden, UT, even sharing the same name, but while Emily in Utah is out to her neighbors and friends, Emily in Colorado is not so comfortable being open, and neither is her family. During our interview her younger sister and her boyfriend walk in and there is a sudden change of subject: I'm introduced to the young man but no explanation of who I am is given. After they leave, mom says to me, "that boy's a fundamentalist, so be careful what you say." I have a sense that this is protecting the younger sister more than mom or Emily or "that boy", but this is the first time I've had to be so aware of my purpose and the controversy surrounding it, even in a private home, since I conceived of this project.

After the interview is over and I've taken a roll of film of Emily, Emily and her cat, Emily and her front-porch swing (thank goodness I've been hauling around a tripod for some reason), I have a few hours before showing up at my next engagement, so I take the car back out to the highway to check out something I'd seen coming into town.

The official federal highway green-with-white-block-lettering sign says, "Focus on the Family Visitor Center, Next Right." As I pull into the large parking lot, the car fits: the rental company "upgraded" me to a gas-guzzling, road-hogging 4-door Ford, but every other vehicle but mine has a use for those four doors as children scramble into and out of every door in sight. Feeling slightly conspicuous in my cool biking shades, holding no little hands, and wearing my "Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere" T-shirt, I enter the big brick building where my sworn enemies put on their best face for the public.

The war metaphors tumble out easily: enemies in an ideological war, battling with religious and secular weapons hoping to claim victory (power) over the hearts and souls of the world's people. What doesn't come so easily is giving them up, which many insist must be done before we can truly conceive and solve the differences between diverse people. It's hard for me NOT to feel, as I enter the bright air-conditioned multi-million dollar structure with its own theater, interactive computer displays, gift show, cafeteria and chapel, and Brenda, my meeter-and-greeter hands me a 4-color brochure, map and a name-tag that I'm to fill out and slap on, like I'm an undercover agent behind enemy lines. When Brenda asks me where I'm from, I blurt out, "Toronto, Toronto Canada" as if "San Francisco" would blow my cover. I have to consciously push down my arms which keep drifting up to hide the words "lesbians and gays" on my shirt. I focus my camera on innocuous things before turning slightly to photograph people and the slick, animated, polished propaganda.

While you wouldn't know it from this best-foot-forward fundamentalist funhouse, Focus is the most active, outspoken, organized, and reactionary organization working to undermine and erase the existence of gay people and especially gay families. Focus's charismatic yet cautiously private leader, James Dobson, is one of those frightening folks who will look you in the face and tell you that you and your family are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, while never breaking his righteous grin. Dobson and his colleagues have quite effectively created a fundamentalist media empire which broadcasts their dozen weekly radio shows to millions of radio listeners around the world. It may have been Dan Quayle who put "Family Values" at the forefront of the American ideological battle, but he was fed it by his friends at "Focus" who have been and continue to define these values, and the evils that occur when we transgress them.

Focus is one of the richest 100 charities in the USA. But they are not your average service organization. Their mission-statement says quite clearly that they are an evangelical Christian movement seeking to bring the word of God to those that won't listen. And, like the even more powerful Christian Coalition, they are doing that through the media and politics. While I couldn't find one mention of the words "gay" or "homosexual" in any of the dozens of displays, or dozens of books I perused in the Gift Shop, Focus routinely sends out millions of fundraising letters which use the gay family, gay "agenda", the gay "lobby", gay teachers, etc. as their main appeal to people's fears. Focus raises every year, and quite handily, more money off of gay people than all gay organizations in the country put together. We in gay organizations get worried when we ask our members for a donation more than 3 times a year, but ministries like Focus ask every Sunday. This is one reason, among many others, that the most popular product in the COLAGE office is the bumper sticker (I have one on my bike) which proclaims, "Focus On Your Own Damn Family."

Chilled by the smiling, gleaming, anti-septic and organized Focus on the Family welcome center, one small part of the giant Focus complex surrounding me, I thank Brenda (my meeter) and have my picture taken with her. "Did you have a good time, Stefan?" she asks, "Very educational, Brenda, thanks." "Make sure to come back again and Godbless." I nod and think to myself "Me and a hundred queer families, Brenda," as I scurry to my car.

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