The phonebanker's boyfriend
in 2012 I put in 2-3 hours a week doing persuasion calling for Referendum 74 defending marriage equality in Washington State. We won, and legalized marijuana as well. (Was the Old Testament actually right about how gay men should be stoned?) Among the crew of regulars at my south end location was a heterosexual man working so he could legally marry his transgendered girlfriend, a native of Ohio, a state which would not officially recognize herr as female. But the truly most interesting thing that happened was that a nurse who was hoping to legally marry her wife of 26 years acquired a boyfriend of sorts.
If you've done phonebanking, you've probably run into the occasional lonely soul who welcomes a chance to talk to anyone, even a phonebanker with an obvious ulterior motive. There is a delicate balance here--you want to leave them with a warm memory which will hopefully translate into a vote for your issue, but at the same time you know you have to move right along in order to contact as many people as possible during your shift.
Pam knew this dilemma as well as any of us, but she nonetheless stayed on the phone for 20 minutes with a man whose wife had died recently. He was not entirely coherent, and went on about how he stayed out in the yard at night to listen to his wife talking to him from the moon. Pam mainly listened, and the old many asked if he could give her his phone number and talk to her later Not protocol at all, but Pam agreed. We teased her about whether her wife would allow her to have a boyfriend or not.
(An aside: my over-65 demographic voted against marriage equality, but some subgroups were exceptions--LBGT of course, and also old lefties and those who had recently lost spouses. One 85 year old widow told me that there was little enough love in the world, and people had to take it where they could find it.)
I ran into Pam at one of the Dem holiday parties and asked her about her "boyfriend." Pam had called him a few times, and they exchanged life histories and talked about the Mariners and the Seahawks and the weather. She had called the previous week to wish him happy holidays, but the number was disconnected.
I'm not at all too sure about things like an afterlife, the Rainbow Bridge, etc., but I really want to think of this man and his wife as reunited this season of the returning light.
