My Life Today…

I live in Palm Springs, California with my husband, Stephen Boyd.

We have been togeth­er for over thir­ty years (Since Octo­ber 13, 1982), and have been mar­ried (legal­ly) since Octo­ber 13, 2008 (dur­ing the first brief peri­od when gay mar­riage was legal in Cal­i­for­nia).

Stephen and I met in Atlanta, Geor­gia, where I spent all of my adult life before mov­ing to Cal­i­for­nia. We were work­ing on a cat­a­log project togeth­er. Stephen grew up just North of Detroit, in the small sub­urb of Claw­son, Michi­gan. His fam­i­ly all lived around there (near or in Roy­al Oak), or out West in South­ern Ore­gon (Rogue Riv­er). I grew up in West­ern North Car­oli­na, but you already know that.…

Stephen and I both “end­ed up” in the mar­ket­ing busi­ness — adver­tis­ing and pub­lic rela­tions. I say “end­ed up” because nei­ther of us real­ly planned it. It just sort of hap­pened for both of us. The indus­try fit(s) both of us like a glove so I pre­fer to think it was meant to be. His focus tends to be graph­ic design and pho­tog­ra­phy, but he’s actu­al­ly quite good at all of it. Con­verse­ly, I’ve always come from the writ­ing side, but I can be a pret­ty good art direc­tor when pressed upon, and I love Plan­ning and Strat­e­gy.

We moved to Cal­i­for­nia in Jan­u­ary of 2000 (right in the mid­dle of Y2K — and wasn’t that such a BIG deal — NOT!) to buy the Tri­an­gle Inn Palm Springs — a gay men’s resort in Palm Springs, Cal­i­for­nia. That was a deci­sion we made very much on pur­pose, and we’ve nev­er regret­ted it. We do miss fam­i­ly and friends on the East Coast, but this was our path.

We’d orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to only run the Inn and enjoy time for our artis­tic pur­suits, but world events (9/11, George W. Bush, the econ­o­my, and our own type “A” per­son­al­i­ties) changed all that. Today, Stephen has a busy graph­ic design busi­ness of his own, I have a mar­ket­ing and PR con­sult­ing busi­ness, he vol­un­teers on the board of the local ani­mal shel­ter, I man­age a local non­prof­it, and we do lots of local vol­un­teer work. We’re also involved in local trade orga­ni­za­tions — a must if you own a local busi­ness in the com­mu­ni­ty.

We still make time for our art. Not as much as we might like, but we do OK. We also spend a lot of time track­ing our fam­i­ly his­to­ries — some­thing very impor­tant to both of us — and not enough time trav­el­ing (Also some­thing very dear to us but not as much pos­si­ble at this point in our lives).

What else? Well, plen­ty. I love to cook and gar­den a lit­tle. Stephen loves to paint a lit­tle. And nei­ther of us takes enough time to our­selves. I guess I’ve come to accept the fact that that’s just not who we are. We like to stay busy, and seem to fill our time if we aren’t.