Last Thursday I went out with a few friends before I left L.A. I was just out to get a last night in the L.A. scene, so didn’t really think that I was going to do any focus on Project Kinect. Well, it is a part of me now and it was inevitable. I was introduced to these two guys that have been in their relationship for what one of them said was nine hundred years. In reality, it’s only been 9 but time is really subjective. Either way, these two men came off as what one can only define by hopelessly in love.
As we got talking, I learned that the one had been married to a woman for some time in his years. Him and his ex-wife are still best friends and she is an enormous part of both of the men’s lives. They want on to show me all of the wacky and well put together Halloween costumes that she has put together for the three of them. They have been successful in still leading lives full of love.
I also asked them how they met. They thought I asked where they met and that lead the conversation into a completely different direction. The previously married one shouted out “The Revolving Door”. I had no idea where or what that was but I found out.
Apparently, in the later part of the seventies, there was such a high crime rate in West Hollywood that all the bars really had to protect themselves with double pained glass bricks and bullet proof doors. In order to make sure that the wrong people didn’t come in to the establishments, The Revolving Door actually put a revolving door in place to make sure that the patrons in the bar were protected.
The revolving door has so much in this story. Obviously one metaphor is the idea that we have to through revolving doors to know who we are in life. We don’t just start off in life with the plan to how our lives are going to get from point A to point B. In the life of our new friends here, the one fell in love with a woman before he really knew what he wanted and yearned for. He still was able to keep the love of his ex-wife and made it work.
The other metaphor is that we need the revolving door around in order to keep something secret until the rest of society can begin to understand what the secret really means. Fortunately, we have come a long ways from days where even in large cities, in open neighborhoods, homosexuals feared for their lives. The Revolving Door is now a bar called East West that very open to the public with a large patio along a street full of other bars that are just as open with even larger outdoor patios. That is a very comforting feeling.