Poetic Hill by Karen Lyon

sionless leadership that values money over truth.

Pete Daniel is an award-winning historian whose previous books include “Lost Revolution: The South in the 1950s” and “Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights.” He retired from the Smithsonian in 2009.

R. Kevin Mallinson, the first openly gay firefighter in the US, shares his story in “Alarm in the Firehouse.”

Trial By Fire

The first day on any job is always a challenge: unfamiliar environment, new people, different procedures. Imagine if your co-workers were also snarling epithets at you. That’s what happened to R. Kevin Mallinson when, at 25, he joined the Key West Fire Department. His greeting from a fellow firefighter that morning in 1981 couldn’t have been clearer: “We heard you’re a goddamned faggot!”

He tells that story—and many more— in his book, “Alarm in the Firehouse: A Memoir of America’s First Openly Gay Professional Firefighter.” Having realized at an early age that he was gay, Mallinson decided to live as openly and honestly as he could. “I had always heard that ‘the truth will set you free,’” he writes. “Well, it seems that it might slap you across the face first. Then, it will set you free!”

Mallinson took a lot of slaps in pursuing his dream of becoming a firefighter. Being snubbed and bullied was bad enough, but there were times when his co-workers actually endangered his life, abandoning him in burning buildings and aiming powerful hoses at him to try and knock him off his ladder. How, he wondered, could “adult men devolve into acting like hostile adolescents? [And] why was I such a threat to these guys?”

Despite the obstacles thrown in his path, Mallinson refused to quit. He became a top-notch firefighter, finishing first in the grueling six-week ordeal of Fire College and gaining the respect of some of the older firemen, who appreciated his commitment and skill. The overall harassment from his co-workers, though, never stopped.

After four years with the KWFD, his life began heading in another direction. Even while he was fighting fires, he was volunteering at a local HELPLINE and at a hospice. As the AIDS crisis came to the fore and friends began dying, he found himself providing health education and counseling. On the advice of a friend, he quit the fire department to enroll in nursing school, eventually earning a Ph.D. in nursing.

While Mallinson acknowledges that many strides have been made in securing rights for LGBTQ+ people since his experience of the 1980s, he notes that we still have a long way to go in overcoming the “boys will be boys” mentality that allows such abuse to take place. “Alarm in the Firehouse” serves as a powerful reminder of why we should all work to overcome ingrained prejudices so that no one is ostracized or harassed because of their sexual orientation.

R. Kevin Mallinson is a retired university professor, public speaker, and researcher who advocates for disenfranchised groups, particularly LGBTQ+ communities and people with, or at risk for, HIV disease. He and his husband split their time between Lewes, Delaware, and Capitol Hill. https://alarminthefirehouse.com u

THE POETIC HILL

by Karen Lyon

Capitol Hill poet Jean Nordhaus is the author of several highly regarded poetry collections, including “A Bracelet of Lies” (1987), “The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn” (2002), “Innocence” (2006), which won the Charles B. Wheeler Prize, and “Memos from the Broken World” (2016), as well as a poetry chapbook, “A Language of Hands” (1982). Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, the New Republic, Poetry, Best American Poetry, and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Nordhaus was the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s poetry programs, has taught at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and serves as the review editor of Poet Lore, the oldest continuously publishing poetry journal in the US. The poem below appears in “This Is What America Looks Like” (2021), an anthology of poetry and fiction from DC, Maryland, and Virginia published by The Washington Writers’ Publishing House and edited by Caroline Bock and Jona Colson (www.washingtonwriters.org). The anthology will be on sale at this year’s Literary Hill BookFest on May 1 in the North Hall of Eastern Market from 11am to 3 pm. www.literaryhillbookfest.org

Face to Face

In the House of Zoom, we sit each at our windows, gazing out

like days on an advent calendar from a study, a living room, a den

into the common. Some have given thought to the mise en scène, arranging

the art on the wall, objects and books on the shelf. I enjoy the display,

but what grips me most is the glimpse into the rooms beyond, a bathrobe hung

on the back of a door, a hanging pot in the kitchen just over

your shoulder, the bottom step of a flight of stairs I could climb

to a place that is hidden. Imagination helps, but who

can truly grasp the mystery of another’s life: Summer is coming.

Now we see through a glass darkly images of trouble and smoke

as we wait in our separate rooms in the one human house.