Transcription of Smith Galtney for the show Profiles of Resilience #188
Dr. L. Belisle: I always enjoy spending time speaking with people that I have some sort of history with that I have met before. Today I’m speaking with Smith Galtney who I have known for a few years off and on. He is a recent graduate of the General Studies Program at the International Center for Photography. He also studied photography at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland. His recent exhibition Seeing ME: Profiles of Resilience is on display at Maine Magazine’s offices in Portland through the end of April. It’s really great to see you again.
Smith: Great to see you Lisa.
Dr. L. Belisle: I think that we first met at a baby shower.
Smith: We did.
Dr. L. Belisle: I think that child is somewhere around twoish so this must have been two and halfish, three years ago.
Smith: Two yes, yes. Yes. Cleo daughter of Rebecca Falzano. Yes, I remember that very, very well.
Dr. L. Belisle: Yes and you were telling me at that time I think I met both you and your partner and you were telling me about your experiences in Raymond, what it was like to move from New York City to Raymond, Maine which it sounds like it was pretty great at the time and you still feel pretty great about it, but that was a big shift for you.
Smith: It’s fantastic now and I completely consider Raymond to be my home. I can easily imagine living there for the rest of my life. The first year however was horrible. It was absolutely horrible. I had lived in New York City for twenty years. He had lived there for ten and we both were pushing forty and our neighbors were getting a lot younger and a lot louder and suddenly I had become that older neighbor that was just like, “Keep it down. Keep it down.” Usually whenever people did that to me when I was in my twenties, the first thing I would yell was like, “If you don’t like it, get out of New York.” As I was banging on the wall I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to get out of New York.”
Luckily, we had bought a place in Raymond a couple of years before that. My sister’s husband’s family has had a house on Panther Pond in Raymond for decades and decades. One weekend we went up to visit them and it was just a total I mean there’s something about it. It just clicked. We had been looking at places in upstate New York and we didn’t like the idea of the benefit was that it was maybe an hour and a half, two hours outside of away from where we lived.
Then there was that idea of getting on a train with the exact same people, all these New Yorkers and then suddenly being amongst trees, but in the same kind of New York State of mind. There was something remote almost doesn’t, I don’t know I don’t like the way that sounds, but there was something very different about Maine and just so not like what I had come to really loathe over twenty years of living in New York.
Yeah, but the first year was awful. It was terrible. It was people warned me. They were like, “Okay this is going to be a serious transition here. Are you prepared for this?” We were both a little bit like, “Oh, we’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. We’ll just figure it out as we go along.” Because I guess one thing that we didn’t really want to do was go live … New York spoils you as far as cities go we didn’t really want to go live in Boston or even Chicago because as far as I’m concerned New York is the greatest city in the world. I mean even we were lucky enough to take a trip to Sydney once and even in Sydney I was looking around like “Well it’s not really New York.”
The idea of living in a lesser version of New York was not appealing. The idea of just going somewhere that was completely different from it felt like the only way to really go about anything but it was awful. It was awful. We lived these parallel lives in New York that I wasn’t really aware of how parallel they were. John works in finance so there would be long stretches where he would come home and go to work after and before I had gotten up. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I would go to bed and then wake up and he would have come home and gone to work so I would wake up and I would be like, “I sense that someone or something has been here,” but I just wouldn’t see him.
Really our only day to spend together was Saturdays because he would work on Sundays. We went from this parallel life to literally living on top of each other and not having any friends and spending every minute of every day together. It would get to the point where the end of a day would come and we’d like we need some things from Hannaford and I’d be like, “Oh I’ll go get them. I’ll go get them.” He’d be like, “No let me go get them.” He’d be like, “Well maybe we should go together.” I’d be like, “No, I don’t know how to say this, but I just need to be alone, don’t come.”
It was tough because living in New York I didn’t realize how many opportunities I had just to be like, “I’m going to go for a walk,” or “I’m just going to go to the Barnes & Noble and look around,” and the reason I did that was because I needed a little space, but I didn’t actually have to be so blunt and be like, “I need space.” When suddenly we were living in this town that in the off season is about four thousand people and neither of us … I mean that was the other thing was that we would sit there and we’d be like, “Oh we need to find friends.”
We were almost forty. I couldn’t even remember a time that I had been at a point where I needed to go out and find friends. I thought maybe college. In college, they put me in a dormitory and gave me a roommate and you were living in a hall with a bunch of people so friendships just happened. I mean we actually googled how to make friends because I did it as a joke. My partner is even less outgoing than I am. I actually googled how to find friends. Then we found this I think it was about.com or something like that. It was just list of go to social functions. If you’re in the market, say hello to someone.
We were reading it and we were almost fascinated. We were like, “This is actually really helpful.”
Dr. L. Belisle: Is this why I met you at that baby shower?
Smith: Yes. Yes.
Dr. L. Belisle: You were looking for friends.
Smith: We were looking for … Actually at the baby shower, we had made a great deal of progress. It’s funny Rebecca Falzano, the managing editor of Maine Home and Design she was the first person who I had met. I mean when we came up here in Maine in the summer, I had my sister here, my brother-in-law, their kids so it was we had this couple of months buffer time of Maine as we knew it which was summer and people and fires outside and good times.
Then in the middle of August, suddenly my sister left and then it was just us. At night I’d be going to bed and looking at John and I was like, “We’re not leaving are we? We’re here.” I also had to find work and that’s how I found Rebecca because I started to cold email people and look at [mastheads 00:33:46] and social network people and whatnot and Rebecca and responded and so we actually met for a coffee. I remember inviting she and her husband Steve, this is before they had Cleo, their baby, and invited them over for dinner.
We were so nervous all day before they arrived because I mean this was in March of 2010 and we had been in Maine about nine months and this was an entire fall and most of a winter of not really seeing anyone but each other. Our first Maine winter and I remember the doorbell rang and we had never heard the doorbell ring before. We were like, “Oh my God we have a doorbell.” I still want to ask Rebecca what we looked like when we opened the door because I’m sure that we probably looked a little frightening because we were just like, “Hi,” like, “Come in human beings. I’ve heard about you people.”
Dr. L. Belisle: I’m laughing at almost everything that you’re saying because I think anyone who has moved to a new place but specifically a more remote place like Maine can relate.
Smith: Yeah.
Dr. L. Belisle: Just this idea that you’re out in the middle of nowhere. You have your one friend who is the guy that you live with and then you have to go out there and connect with other creatures. It does something interesting to your head.
Smith: No, absolutely. It did something to my head and it didn’t do what I thought it was going to do. I moved to New York. I went to NYU when I was eighteen years old. I basically went there because I was dying to go to New York City, but also I knew that I was gay and I had heard that New York University was right in the heart of Greenwich Village and judging from certain movies that I had seen at the time I was like, “Oh I think that that’s where it’s all happening.” I knew it was a good school. I grew up in New Orleans, so I didn’t want to go to LSU. All my brothers and sisters went to Ole Miss and it’s very fraternity oriented, that kind of scene.
I knew that wasn’t for me so I did really want to get away, but I also went to New York because I wanted to be gay and I felt that that was a place where I could do it. I didn’t realize that I had spent these twenty years of living in this urban metropolitan bubble of feeling like I mean in a lot of ways it opened up my mind to a lot of new experiences. I was able to come out. I was able to live my adult life as a very open gay man, but I was also very protected in New York and in feeling like “Oh my mind is so open because I’m this gay guy who’s open to this. I’m so alternative and I’ve been through all of these alternative experiences,” that in the process of going through that my world view was pretty slim as far as say people who lived in not urban settings, in smaller towns.
When we arrived in Raymond, I didn’t realize how absolutely petrified I was of my neighbors. I was expecting them to be judgmental. I was expecting them to be homophobic, fundamentalists like Christians. I was expecting them to just be like, “We don’t want you in this neighborhood.” What happened was that they threw us a barbecue. They basically rolled out the welcome mat and they were like, “Welcome guys.” It was like they pretty much put two and two together very quickly.
Dr. L. Belisle: They didn’t think you were just good friends.
Smith: Well a couple of people I think thought we were brothers which I always find very interesting considering that we …
Dr. L. Belisle: You don’t look alike.
Smith: … don’t look anything alike and why there would be these two brothers, I mean actually at the time I was like why would two brothers be living together and buy a small little lake house together. I’ve actually seen people, there’s actually three brothers who live together down the road so since then I’ve been like, “Okay well maybe it’s possible.” I mean there was one time where at this barbecue where a guy across the street, older guy, elderly guy he shook John’s hand and he said, “Oh, well welcome.” John motioned to me and said, “This is Smith,” and then the older man shook my hand and he just looked at us and went, “Oh so you two live together.”
I was just bracing myself for here it comes, here it comes. All he did was just go, you could see him turn it over in his brain and then he just went all right and that was that. That’s pretty much if I could embody our experience in Maine at all and I actually feel like people in Maine have this evolved level of this just totally low key. It’s not even acceptance. They just don’t really care which is really cool. I mean sometimes I find it annoying when people try to be overly accepting and be like “Oh you should come over and we can watch Desperate Housewives together or something.” I’m like, “I don’t like that show.”
It’s just nice when people are just like, “Okay, fine. I don’t care.” The gay thing aside there was also this idea of me and this was the worst part, this was the part I wasn’t expecting was this idea of me as a New Yorker. This heightened sense of self that I had as this culturally superior New Yorker, this person who had decided to venture to New York City and leave home and live there for so long and I was on some sort of … I had decided to now leave New York because it was time for me to be elsewhere.
I met a lot of [peo- 00:40:52]. The first dearest, dearest friend I’ve made in Maine I became friends with her and I said, “Oh where are you from?” Because in twenty years of living in New York City that’s what you ask because so few people in New York are from New York. I said, “Where are you from?” She said, “I’m from here.” She was like, “I’ve been living in Raymond all my life.” This is going to sound awful, but I’m pretty sure that the look on my face was like, “Oh I’m sorry.” That’s not something in retrospect, that’s not a reaction I’m proud of, but it’s where I was coming from.
It was at the end of the first year I was smacked in the face which probably sounds a little dramatic, but I was blown away by the fact that okay wait a minute, wait a minute, when did I become the most homophobic person I know, everybody has been nothing but welcoming and then I am so full of myself. I have got to get over this idea of who I think I am and just chill out. I was a snob. I mean that wraps up the first year of just this feeling of okay nobody is acting the way I thought that they were going to be. I’m acting in a way that I never thought I was so why don’t I just spend some time just grounding myself and getting situated here. Yeah, I feel like I didn’t bring that to a …
Dr. L. Belisle: Well it actually does for me because I have wondered since I knew that you were the one who shot the photography for Profiles of Resilience. I have wondered how it felt to be the gay man who was asked to do the photography exhibit on the HIV and AIDS as if somehow because you’re a gay man you have some heightened knowledge of this. I mean I don’t know. I don’t know. I have wondered that though.
Smith: It did feel like a good fit. Donna Galluzzo from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies got in touch with me and she said, “I think you’d be perfect for this.” The best way to answer that I would say would I think they were looking for someone to approach this subject in a way that wasn’t [mottling 00:43:38] that’s not too overreaching of a word, that wasn’t tugging too specifically at the [heart 00:43:47] strings, wasn’t too sentimental, stark, someone who could possibly approach these people just as people and not as necessarily case subjects.
I’ve certainly had friends who I have had an old boyfriend pass away. I’ve had friends who have lived with it since the early ’80s who were some of the first people to get diagnosed and absolute qualify as long-term survivors, so I would say maybe I have a broader perspective about how living with HIV/AIDS isn’t just a condition. I’ve lived and spent many times and have great relationships where I’m not constantly thinking like, “Oh you’ve got it and we need to spend time together.” It’s been around long enough that it’s just a part of life and I always feel like I have to be careful sometimes when I am talking about this because we were so careful to not use words like disease and illness and stuff and instead just plainly saying HIV/AIDS, not referring to it as an epidemic.
I mean it certainly had days when it was a death sentence and when it was not good news to receive, but it’s been around long enough that it’s like everybody seems to know somebody who’s had it or died from it or living with it and unfortunately it’s been around long enough and it’s been treated effectively enough that now people are assuming that there’s a cure for it and regressing to older, not necessarily practicing safe sex like they used to. The alarming thing is since this show I have had two friends who have [seroconverted 00:46:08] which just disturbs me because I guess I feel like we’ve gotten to a … I don’t know. I guess I feel like at this point in my life I mean I’m in my mid forties now. When I first realized I was gay in my head when I was like, “Yeah I probably think I’m gay,” was right when the first news item started to surface about it.
When I imagine the future, I imagine a cure and people not dealing with this anymore, so it’s a little weird in the last few months to know that there’s friends of mine who are still contacting it. That’s a little unsettling and why it makes me think a show like this is important because well there are people in the show who live with it. They take medications and this is not necessarily something that you want to live with. It’s not like, “Oh I’ll just take some Advil in the morning and it will be fine.” I mean these are really intense medications they have.
Some of them are new and they have side effects and long-term effects that don’t necessarily … You still want to be careful. You really, really still want to be careful.
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Dr. L. Belisle: What I’m hearing is that you took this when they asked you to be the photographer, you took this as entirely a good thing, that not only as a gay male you had friends, people that you knew in your background that had HIV and AIDS that you had that, but also you as a person they were saying Smith you have the wherewithal to present these people in a way that is more them, in a way that’s less our filter of what we believe people should look like when they have a chronic disease.
Smith: Sure. Sure. Yeah, I think so. I mean one of the things certainly in the time I was studying at Salt was one of the greatest things, the best things I learned in my photography itself is that when you’re photographing someone it’s very intimate and this is going to sound really cheesy, but I noticed that if I just showed up and started snapping pictures of someone, the pictures almost always sucked. If I spent time with them and got to know them as people and then I said, “Oh would you like to take some pictures,” I always came back and when I showed pictures in class I didn’t just respond to the pictures but the people in the class who didn’t necessarily know the difference between the different kinds of time I had spent with them but they immediately could see in the pictures that they were like, “These are so much better I like this person.”
There was one time where I was working with this one woman. I met her time and time and time again and I really still hadn’t felt like I had gotten to know her yet. One time I hung out with her and we just had this really cool talk and this is the part that sounds a little cheesy, but I actually was like it’s that similar feeling of when you fall in love with someone and you just see the person and just suddenly I wasn’t so obsessed with schoolwork and I’ve got to get her, I’ve got to get her, I’ve got to get her and I just suddenly relaxed and I was like, “I really like this woman.”
I started taking pictures and then everybody was like “These are great.” Everybody really felt the same thing I was feeling. I think Donna knew I had had that experience in Salt and so I was really able to apply that to each of these subjects and not just make it a sob story and coming from the other way and so I’m not putting them on a pedestal, not putting them up and being like, “Oh you’re such an inspiration. You’re story is so triumphant and I get so much from it.”
The way I put it once is that I’m not going to put these people under a microscope and I’m not going to put them on a pedestal. They’re just people and just this mundane level of living with HIV/AIDS, just the day to day of it, not the I was on my deathbed or I was leading the town in the AIDS walk uplifting kind of element that people often attach to. For instance, there was this one guy named Jimmy who lives in Ogunquit and he’s been living with it since the early ’90s. He had done a lot. His credentials were amazing. I mean he’s basically one of the [may- 00:52:29]. I mean I know there’s many mayors of Ogunquit. I’ve met probably four of them, but he is definitely a pied piper character in Ogunquit.
He raises a ton of money for the AIDS walk. He’s inspired many, many men in that town of all ages with his frankness about his status and everything and just the life he leads. It was a pleasure to be in his company, to get to know him. One thing he told me was that when he was first diagnosed, he immediately went into this mindset of I have to enjoy every day. It was the big picture plans were like “That doesn’t matter right now. What I’m going to do is sink my money into a motorcycle and I’m going to ride around the country. It’s all day to day and it’s going to be enjoying life while I have it.”
That was over twenty years ago, so now he’s sitting here now in 2015 he is looking back and thinking, “Oh but those big picture plans.” He never invested in a house. He didn’t pursue his education like he wanted to. He didn’t get to have that big picture plan, didn’t get to commit to it the way a lot of us do. He did say he felt a little cheated by that, but not bitter at all. I mean just still a person who is just so happy to be here and just has an infectious kind of energy to him, but I never thought about that was that it was like these people who just anytime that they got a common cold that they’d be like, “Oh okay maybe I shouldn’t go to school,” or “Maybe I shouldn’t … ” Is that helpful?
Dr. L. Belisle: It is helpful and it’s helpful to hear these stories. I had the chance to look at the photographs that you took when they first were on display I believe at the Salt Institute and now we have them at the offices of Maine Magazine and I went around and looked at them again. What I liked about them is that there’s not really a delineation. You don’t have the people who sick versus the people who look well versus the people that you think might have AIDS because they look like the sort of people who might have AIDS versus the people who you don’t think that they would have AIDS because they don’t look like the kind of people who would have AIDS.
It’s just a very, I don’t know, nondenominational. It’s just here’s a community. All of these people could be living next to you. They could be in your life and you don’t even really know. You specifically did not label this person has AIDS. This person is an AIDS doctor. This person worked at the Frannie Peabody house. They are all just people.
Smith: Yeah, when it came time to doing the text panels. There’s photos and then there’s the text panels that basically is a short paragraph first person account, first person quote from them detailing their experience and we didn’t when it came time to putting their name I was like, “Oh should we include what town they’re from or what they do or whatever?” We were like, “No, just put their names and that seemed to be the right way to go because it really emphasized that this was a collectively experience and it wasn’t just about dying and surviving. It was about living.
Dr. L. Belisle: Smith do you have a website that people could go to learn more about the work that you’re doing?
Smith: Absolutely smithgaltney.com.
Dr. L. Belisle: Smith I’m glad that you were able to come in and talk with me today and it’s good to hear some background not only about your experience with working on Profiles of Resilience but also your experience living in Raymond especially that first year and coming to Maine from New York City. As somebody who has lived in Maine largely for the bulk of her life and gone away for a few years for education, I can relate to the story of the person who’s been here the whole time. It’s been good to talk to you and I appreciate the work you’ve done on this.
We’ve been speaking with Smith Galtney. He’s a recent graduate of the General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography. He’s also studies photography at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of your work. Thank you Smith.
Smith: I certainly hope so. Thank you Lisa very much.
Dr. L. Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio show umber one eighty-eight, Profiles of Resilience. Our guests have included Dr. Thomas Courtney and Smith Galtney. For more information on our guests and extended interviews visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We’d love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Profiles of Resilience show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.