A few days ago I received a Facebook friend request from a man I didn’t know.
But we had 21 friends in common, all people who worked in media or for local organizations on the East End of Long Island. Surely, I must have stumbled across him in real life, when I worked as a journalist in the rough-and-tumble Hamptons —interviewing fourth-, fifth- and sixth- generation potato farmers about how times had changed, high school students about their science fair projects and celebrities looking for a place to get away from it all for a while, where they would still be able to have their photos snapped and published in every major New York City publication; covering farmers markets and maritime festivals; and spending my lunch breaks at bars, the driving range or the beach. It was a dangerous place to be a journalist, a regular bloodbath.
I clicked accept and forgot about him as he was immediately whisked away into the abyss of my virtual friends.
Until two days later. He wrote an inflammatory post about how gay marriage, though it seemed poised to become legal in New York State sometime in the near future, was incredibly immoral, against the will of God.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2011.