Remembering Myself

Recently I had the chance to reflect on my life and what I have accomplished as a designer. Where do I begin? Should I say the Yale School of Art, where I finally finished a full university degree and from which I set up the business that is still my daily home and workplace? Perhaps it is further back, when I ran away to Europe and found myself as a gay man who desired the love of other men. Or should I go back even further, to the real beginning, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where I was born at mid-century? It has been a journey over time and space. I am the sum of the parts of my life, the places I have lived, the people I have known, and the experiences that I have had.

Recently I was made a Fellow of SEGD, which is the professional association of designers who do the kind of signage and wayfinding work that I am known for. With this award, my peers have recognized my career and achievements. It was a splendid moment, fellow professionals saying that I had accomplished something significant, a room full of people gathered to honor me, David Gibson. It was my moment. How to describe the journey that I have taken to arrive at that very moment?

I have always loved biographies. This comes from two interests: my baser love of gossip and stories about people, and my higher love of history, the sweep of people and places and events. My library, which is finally coming out of boxes after a year in the closet, is filled with biographies, memories of my temporary companions, Bloomsbury, gay and lesbian notables, people in the arts, any number of people who adorn the walls of London's National Portrait Gallery. I have a particular love of English history. Despite this Anglophilia, last year I had my French period. Here's how it works: Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette lead me to Antonia Fraser's biography of the French queen, which formed the basis of the movie. I enjoyed the texture of Fraser's acclaimed telling of the life of this notorious and fascinating woman. This book lead me to Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, a fascinating account of Marie Antoinette's wardrobe, the clothiers who kept her supplied with gorgeous attire and her evolving image as the style icon at the center of French life headed toward the cataclysm of the Revolution. This overload of Antoinettiania left me wanting to know more about the dynamics and logistics of life at Versailles. Along came Versailles: Biography of a Palace to answer all my questions about the history of the French court, how it was built and how it was used, who lived where, all about the kitchens and toilets and salons of the huge palace. This is how my mind works, a book or movie opens the door to a world I didn't know. I find myself wanting to open other doors to learn more about other parts of the story.

Since I moved to Jersey City, I have appreciated my daily PATH train journey. I get on the train at the beginning of the line in the morning, settle into my seat, open my book, and find myself transported not only to New York City, my morning destination, but also to the court of Versailles and the minutiae of the queen's toilette or the layout of the king's apartment.

Recently my morning journeys have taken me to England—more precisely to London between the wars (World, not Iraq/Gulf). Remember I said I was an English history fan. It all started with Bright Young People, a charming account of the Bohemian aristocrats who dominated the gossip sheets of the Twenties with the outrageous costume parties and drunken country house revels, frothy stuff about a city and country clinging to many of the old values while also tossing others away amidst the social wreckage of World War I's aftermath. This naturally lead to Evelyn Waugh, a witty right-wing Anglo-Catholic novelist who wrote fictionalized accounts of his time as a bright young person. This quote from Vile Bodies captures the period:

"Oh Nina, what a lot of parties." (...Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—:all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.... Those vile bodies....)"

The trail lead me to Anthony Powell, a novelist, journalist and astute observer of the London scene from the Twenties to the Seventies, a kind of English Proust. He knew them all and wrote about all of it in a twelve-book novel series and four volumes of memoirs. I found reading back-to-back Michael Barber's biography of Powell and Powell's abridged one-volume autobiography a great inside-outside view of a rich and fascinating twentieth-century life.

By now I was hooked and headed down the rabbit hole of London literary life. With Tom Driberg I hit pay dirt. This fragment of his Times of London obituary says it all.

"Tom Driberg, who worked for some years under the name of William Hickey and died under the name of Lord Bradwell, was a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual, a friend of Lord Beaverbrook, an enemy of Lord Beaverbrook, an employee and biographer of Lord Beaverbrook, a politician of the left, a member of Parliament, a member of the Labour Party National Executive, a stylist, an unreliable man of undoubted distinction. He looked and talked like a bishop, not least in the bohemian clubs which he frequented. He was the admiration and despair of his friends and acquaintances."

That is brilliant biographic writing, an obit as only the Brits can do it, a snapshot of this man in all of his complexity and variety. Yet again I headed for the autobiography (Ruling Passions) and biography (The Soul of Indiscretion) combo on Tom Driberg. His is the great story of a public life lived in and out of the shadows in Parliament and in public washrooms where he found sex on a very regular basis when being gay was neither accepted nor fully legal.

So back to that luncheon at the conference in San Diego where I was preparing to take the podium and accept my Fellow award. I had prepared a visual presentation of my own journey, an interweaving of the highlights of my life and the work I have done. I had a moment of real panic—what the hell was I doing going on about myself in this professional context? I was not hitting just the high points. I included my sojourn in Denmark in the Seventies and the Aussie porn (soft-core Seventies literary porn) star (well, maybe a "featured actor," as they say on Broadway) that I fell hard and fast for. It was weird to see his rugged, handsome face up on the screen at an SEGD event. I don't even remember his name. But I sure remember the excitement of allowing myself to love a man. OK, it was infatuation, but it was real and it was me. My fears about the talk melted as I took the podium and began to talk abut my journey, Montreal, Cornell, Nova Scotia, Yale, Two Twelve, New York, relationships, 9/11, travel, my book, on and on. I felt it, this was MY moment, the people was there to hear about me. It was all over in about twenty-five minutes. The applause was sustained, the audience loved it.

Over the next three days of the conference, many people told me they were inspired by my talk. I was surprised and delighted. People are not used to the mix of the personal and the professional that I offered up that day. I guess other people like biographies as much as I do. And I have lived an interesting life; I have a story to tell. This blog is my story.

True Colors

Blue Boy is a great book about a funny kid who doesn't fit in. Written by Princeton grad book editor and sometime cabaret singer Rakesh Satyal, it depicts the challenges of an Indian boy growing up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. The main character, Kiran, is a bright young boy who always gets it wrong. His attempts at great art and theatrical flair always fall flat, reminding him that he is not quite of the world that he inhabits. The title refers not to an eighteenth-century English portrait of a young gentleman, but rather the mission of Kiran to make good on the lie he made to his mother who catches him in the master bath covering his face with her lipstick, mascara and eyeliner. When confronted by his mom, who "has four terms to describe the looks of young Indian girls: "ugly," "passable" "presentable," and "That is the type of girl you vant to marry, Kiran." he says that he was making himself up as the Hindu deity Krishna, who is usually depicted with blue skin. The book follows young Kiran through his hostile, mostly white school, his forays into the (for him) equally uncomfortable Indian community in Cincinnati, and through the daily routines at home with his stern and distant accountant father and his spendthrift, loving mother. Preparations for the school's talent competition and Kiran's plan to appear as Krishna provide the narrative thread that ties the central part of the book together.

This morning I read a few pages of the book before heading off to work, a relaxing moment before the hustle and bustle of my daily life. Out the door and up the street, I saw my morning bus pull away from the stop as I prepared to cross The Boulevard. Damn, the number 10 bus that I take to Journal Square is erratic, it's often a long wait, then three buses pull up all at once. Whew, today I am lucky, the one I missed is the first in a convoy. Another quickly pulls up and I hop on. After paying my $1.45, I grab a seat, settle in and open Blue Boy to continue reading. Before I get too absorbed in the book, my eye wanders. Across from me is a South Asian woman with her distinctive Indian attire. By chance it is blue. In the other direction is a young Filipino woman, beside her is a Latino kid. An African-American mother and daughter are further back. Once I do a full scan of the bus, I realize that I am the only white person on board. The tables have turned, and now I can imagine a bit of what young Kiran feels in his white Ohio school when he doesn't look like his peers and he doesn't fit in. Of course it's not that simple. In this society whites have privileges, whiteness has power.

I lived in the West Village of Manhattan for over twenty-five years. At one time the neighborhood was gritty and bohemian. The process of renewal and gentrification has transformed it to an expensive, upper middle class, mostly white neighborhood. Each wave of big bucks and house renovation in the neighborhood removed some of the grit and a lot of the life of the area. Multi-tenant buildings have become grand single family houses. Instead of stoop parties and street fairs, drawn shades and the hush of limousines mark street life in my old haunt. The move to Jersey City was a BIG transition for me, out of the city, across the river, into the wilds of Jersey. Once I overcame my fear of change I began to embrace the idea and the fact of my new home. Rich and I are a mixed race couple, he's Filipino and I am a white Canadian, though we are both American citizens, he by birth, I by choice. Among its other assets, the multi-racial tapestry of Jersey City appealed to us. The mix on our street is like the mix on my number 10 bus this morning, and it's engaging and interesting and reassuring to me. Our little hybrid family is going to fit in here. Jersey City is home to a huge variety of races and ethnicities, making it one of the most diverse cities in the United States.

In this life I have come a long way. I grew up in Montreal, in the English part of an overwhelmingly French city. In that context, white privilege was English privilege. One of the French-Canadian separatists of the late 1960s, called his powerful book about the French-Canadian experience in Quebec, White Niggers of America. The French-Canadians were tired of the way we Anglos controlled business in the province. As English-speaking kids, we kept apart, as Protestants, we went to different schools from our Catholic neighbors. We learned French but we never spoke it to the French-Canadians who lived and worked all around us. Things came to a boil in the mid- to late '60s. Those were trying times in Quebec, I remember standing in the playground when our school was evacuated because of a bomb threat. As we stood there in taut rows of nervous kids on a warm spring day, we all shuddered when the bomb went off, blowing up a mail box just a few streets away and maiming the policeman who was trying to defuse the bomb that had been inside the box.

Times and place have changed me. Back in the 1950s or early '60s I remember that the sister of a friend was getting married. She belonged to the United Church of Canada and her husband-to-be was Anglican. At the time I wondered, how would this work, how would they fit together, how would these different kinds of people form a family? That long ago concern seems bizarre and rather quaint to me now when I celebrate the differences that surround me and that define my own relationship and household. These days I am engaged and stimulated by this diversity. I hope that I am showing my true colors.

By the way, I haven't finished Blue Boy yet, but I have a sinking feeling that Kiran's performance as Krishna at the talent show isn't going to go well. Read the book for yourself and you'll find out what happens. I think you'll enjoy it, Rakesh Satyal is a good writer.