I wasn’t wishing you dead. I was saying that I felt trapped. I was trying to say to you in my own awkward just letting a stream of consciousness unedited words tumble out of me way, what Jack said to Ennis in Brokeback Mountain. “I wish I knew how to quit you.” What you said to me that I won’t repeat here cut me deep, and I was hurting, and I lashed out. Because I knew what I was in for in the years to come.

Ever watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I haven’t…I don’t think I could bear to watch a movie like that, any more than I could watch Brokeback Mountain. But I’ve read the various synopsis. The film, so I am told, follows two people who were in love, who undergo a procedure to erase their memories of each other after the angry end of their romance. There was a time I was desperately wishing it was a real thing. Until I read this part of the plot:

Joel re-experiences his memories of Clementine as they are erased, starting with their last fight. As he reaches earlier, happier memories, he realizes that he does not want to forget her.

No. I couldn’t put myself through that. 

Do you dream? I wonder sometimes if you do, and how vividly. So I’m told there are people who don’t. I feel sorry for them. I dream dreams I can remember almost every night. I have a notepad I keep next to my bed so I can jot some things down before I forget them, which I will if I don’t immediately do that. And I have a Google Docs folder where I write some of my dreams. Some of them are so vivid I can feel the texture of clothing and furniture, and the taste of kisses on my lips. 

The one I had last night was about you. I have those often, also about other friends who have remained close to me. But it’s the ones about you that linger more. Mostly they are very nice, a little strange sometimes, and so vivid I sometimes wonder if I am not seeing things that are happening in a different universe. But I suppose that’s just wish fulfilment. Last night’s dream really got to me because of one specific detail.

You and I were together in your house, except it wasn’t the one you have in the real world, but a different one, in a different place, something like another suburb but deep in a beautiful woodland zone. It was late in the evening, almost nightfall, and we were having a very deep heart to heart conversation, and it seemed perfectly normal, as if we’d been close all our lives. I won’t write here what we said to each other, only that it was heartfelt and affectionate, like the talk between old couples, only in this dream we were young men, twenty-somethings, and you were still wearing your hair long. Oh…and we were in the kitchen. 

Eventually we walked from the kitchen into a space that was both a dining room and a living room, separated by a sofa facing a TV that was tuned to a news broadcast that we were paying no attention to. We were finishing up building a large wooden dining room table. I had made a top piece for it out of several lovely oak boards I’d glued together, then sanded and stained a light brown. Together we put the top of it on and fixed it in place with some wood screws and glue. Then I puttied over the screw heads and stained those.

We moved the finished table against the back of the living room sofa. You got down on your knees between the table and the sofa and asked me for a quote to write on the side of the table hidden by the sofa. I asked you if you didn’t mind a Disney quote, and you rolled your eyes a little but said sure, let me have it.

And I said “Dreams can come true.” And you wrote it on that side of the table, but I couldn’t see the words from where I was standing. Then you went back into the kitchen, and out the door to go to the grocery store. While you were gone I moved the sofa a bit and took a look, and discovered you’d carved the quote I gave you right into the wood, not written them with a marker. In German.

Träume können wahr werden.

Eventually you came back home, and began unloading the groceries you bought in the kitchen and we talked some more, and I woke up.

The full quote is, All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. But it takes more than courage to make your dreams come true, and I never thought I was particularly brave, just stubborn. Some dreams, if they are not shared between two people, will never live. And there is nothing you can do about that. 

So we had a fight. It was probably inevitable. It went nuclear, like it was always going to. I wish I didn’t have that last angry glare you gave me to remember. I’d never seen that side of you before.

It’s been almost a decade now, and never mind what you said and what I said, I still feel trapped, I know I always will, and all I can do now is toss out these little messages in a bottle like I was doing for decades after the last time we saw each other in school, before I found you again 35 years later. Here one from my blog… 

September 25, 2006

Yet Another Message In A Bottle…

It’s been decades now since I saw that “For Sale” sign on your house. I can measure the years that have passed in all the little messages I’ve stuck in this or that random bottle, and tossed out into this ocean of time ever since. Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?

If only I hadn’t been such a nerdy little geek. If only I’d had a little more courage to just be myself instead of hiding behind my cameras all the time. And my cartoons. There’s more I wanted to say. But mostly this: You opened up the world for me.

Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?

These little messages in a bottle are the only way I have of waving to you now. But I reckon I’ll keep tossing them in…because I can still hope one of them will find you one day. Because I just want to wave at you one more time. Because I just want to see one more smile. Because I have to know. I tossed another one in yesterday. If it finds you, please wave back. Please.

Even before I had my own website I was tossing these out into the digital ocean every now and then, hoping maybe you’d see one and respond. Looking back on it I can see it came so close. If only I’d joined GeoCities. If only I’d not been such an awkward little geek. If only it hadn’t been 1971. If only I had been more brave instead of stubborn. Before I found you again I was sure you would be the braver one. After so much time had passed I figured if I ever did find you again you’re be living somewhere in the country of your birth, settled down with a guy who was much better looking, more intelligent, and a better all around catch than I could ever be and I’d just have to accept that it would never be, because you’d found someone better.

Then I did find you. And for a brief moment in time I saw you smile at me again. And you put your arm around my shoulders again. And we talked, heart to heart like we weren’t able to in the early 1970s. And it went where it had to, where it was always going to, because for both of us it was still the early 1970s.

I remember that time we passed back and forth a ski lift ticket I’d found on the pavement, like it was a talking stick, because you needed to explain something to me and didn’t want any questions. I remember listening to the guy I thought hung the moon and the stars way back when, telling me to go look elsewhere because a life in the closet had damaged him so much some days he didn’t know who it was he was looking at in the mirror.

It broke my heart, and maybe it also radicalized me to gay activism in a deeper way. But I was determined to at least show you by example that there was nothing wrong with you, and you could live an authentic life for yourself, even now, even if not with me. Because by then I was doubting we were ever that compatible. I could have courage, but you had to have it too. The best I could do was set an example, and I was not so much brave as stubborn. But maybe that’s what you have to be sometimes. But it was still the early 1970s.

I don’t think anyone who didn’t live through those times can grasp the hostility, the outright hate that gay and lesbian Americans got from every direction. Today on this last day of Pride month, let me give you one little example of what that did to us.

It was March 8, 1970. A gay bar not far from the New York City 6th precinct was raided, by the same cop that had raided the Stonewall Inn just eight months earlier. Not wanting a repeat of the six-day riots at Stonewall, that cop, lieutenant Seymour Pine, had all 167 of the bar’s customers of the bar hauled off to the 6th precinct, which was just over a block away. One patron, justifiably terrified of what was about to happen to him, because back then the practice was to give the names of those arrested at a gay bar to the local newspapers, which would gleefully publish all their details for everyone, family, friends, neighbors, employers, landlords, to see, attempted to escape by jumping out of a window. 

This is what happened to him.

I don’t know how you can expect a gay teenager coming of age in those times, in that climate of loathing and hate, to be anything but terrified at what was going through them when they are having their first crush and it’s on another boy. That is more courage than a lot of adults could muster.

So you and I just circled around each other, flirted a bit, teased at each other a bit, and I took lots of photos of you because I always had my camera with me and I just could not look away. And then you disappeared.

I remember that last telephone conversation we had, after we made arrangements to take our cameras to Great Falls, but instead of getting you on the phone I got someone else and then I guess the jig was up and you got told.

And then decades later I reconnected with you, and for a while we were close again, and this time we didn’t have to hide anything from the world around us, and I suppose you got told again, and then you told me I’ve made my allegiances, I have to stay inside my comfort zone.

It’s not a comfort zone if you’re pushed into it. It’s a trap.

But…so it goes. I am so very grateful I never saw your name on a quilt. And that I saw you smile at me again after all those years. For that I can live with that last angry glare. I get it. For many of us in our generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall. Trapped.

Respect the ones who could escape. Cry for the ones that could not, if the tears will come. Do what you can to keep it from happening to the generations that follow.

And don’t be afraid to dream. For the things that could have been, and might still be, in some better world than the one we are in. Not all dreams come true. But they can still be dreamed. For the courage we need to do the work still left for us to do.

November 30, 2006. . .

Offering

I needed to give you something. An offering. So I brought out a few things from my private treasure box. This and that I found along the way, that reached me where no one ever has, and I kept for myself. My own private gold and silver. It had to be something from there. Something for you. Something worthy.

Stars bigger than the orbit of Saturn. Clouds of ice and dust so big light from when I was born hasn’t seen the other side yet. Secret places tucked in the folds of dust between Orion and Betelgeuse, where new born stars emerge, perhaps one day to beckon new life into the universe. Galaxies, wheeling, colliding, dancing. Spirals. Barred. Ellipticals. And those small faintly glowing red ones, like beacons shimmering on a distant horizon, their light shining into my eyes from near the beginning of time.

They lifted me. They struck the silence into me. So did you once. So I gave them to you. An offering.

Please give me back a sign.

Well…I got my sign alright. Eventually.

Germans like you probably saw this coming but I never thought I’d see the day and I am scared for you. Never mind all the water under this bridge I am scared for you. Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and he is using it to deport even green card holders like you without any sort of appeal or legal review.

I’m watching my country going down the tubes. It’s just stunning. I’ve no idea what I’ll do to get by but I reckon I’ll cross those bridges when I get to them.

I hope you’re somewhere safe. Please be somewhere safe.

-Bruce

I had a surprisingly nice dinner at Biergarten yesterday. I say it was surprising, because I’d just assumed that all the servers I used to know there (excuse me…Cast Members) had either retired or left Disney by now. But no…several who remembered me and a certain someone were still there and I got to talk to a couple of them about what was going on with me, and what was not going on with me and a certain someone. One of the servers came over to chat with me for a bit and congratulated me on my return to work at Space Telescope.

I’ve had the theme song for the first series of The Littlest Hobo (the one I grew up with, not the second series music) going through my head all night for some reason…

Facebook Memories shows me this one from the end of 2015…

Why do I stay on Facebook anymore? I left Twitter after Musk turned it into a fascist playpen and went to Bluesky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social). But most of my friends and classmates are still there and that Memories feature is a nice way of looking back. But not always.

So this was when I realized the Christmas card wasn’t just late…it wasn’t coming at all. They say hindsight is 20-20, but I knew something was up then. I knew it years before when we sat at that table where he worked and passed a ski ticket I found back and forth like a talking stick, and he tried to explain to me how living in the closet fucked him up so badly he didn’t know some days who it was he was looking at in the bathroom mirror, and I needed to look elsewhere. But whenever I came into his presence I fell back to being that awkward clueless teenage geek I was in 1971-72 and I kept coming back anyway. And some visits he seemed grateful for my company, and others he was icy cold. By then our conversations were not private and I realized that it was when I told him I was coming down that Icy Guy appeared, and when I just showed up unannounced it was all smiles and conversation like it used to be. But that was not sustainable. 

So anyway that was the year I sent a card and he didn’t. He was being told, just like when we were schoolboys and the family learned somehow that he was talking to that faggy kid at the school… We agreed to go to Great Falls with our cameras. I never said that. Yes you did. I just don’t know why you’re calling me. You gave me your phone number. Well I didn’t think you’d use it. Two and a half months after this Facebook memory he told me never to contact him in any way, shape, or form, and I felt betrayed and angry and I lashed out, and said things maybe I shouldn’t have, but he said things to me that cut deeply and after everything we had said to each other it was completely unfair. 

So it goes. Maybe I should have paid closer attention to when he said life in the closet had fucked him over. I’d seen how it did that to other gay guys of our generation, I just didn’t want to see it in him.

I was sitting down to a lovely Kobe beef steak when I got his angrygram. What I should have done then and there was send him a shape.

Regards your angrygram of March 6, please accept this truncated dodecahedron by way of reply…

Then I should have drawn up an Affinity Return/Exchange form for him to fill out. Please include original receipt…

…which gives me an idea.

You should say Hi sometime.

(It works equally well in both English and German)

Bridges burned can always be rebuilt.

If you are still living in Orlando, leave now! Or at least batten down the hatches. But seriously…get out!

I don’t know why I still care. But I still do. Alas. And now I’m back to tossing these little messages in a bottle out into the sea of sighs like I was doing for decades before October 2006. Life comes full circle I reckon. Except now I have to go on knowing. So it goes.

Seriously…get out!

[Update…] Yes, this blog post is speaking to a certain someone who has told me to my face Many Times that he Never reads my blog or looks at my cartoons, so I am confident he will never see this and take offense.

That said…Seriously Mr. A, get out of your damn comfort zone, breathe the free air again. You had so much to give to this world, and we’re both old and gray but it’s not too late. Your allegiances are suffocating you. They are not worthy of you.

Live a life, while you still have some life to live. There is more to you than you think. Let the world see it. Let yourself see it.

I have been called “a piece of work.” Perhaps. But there’s another word for it. It’s a word that feels really pretentious to call myself. But I am an artist. Given what Stephan Fry said even so…

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
— Stephen Fry

This is truth. So maybe artist is just one of the verbs I go by. But notice all the verbs he goes by are arts. I am an artist, and not simply because I create art…

art·ist / noun

a person who produces paintings or drawings as a profession or hobby.

a person who practices any of the various creative arts, such as a sculptor, novelist, poet, or filmmaker.

I would add something to this. Something about you produce art so you don’t go crazy. Something about you do it because you have that inner compulsion to do it and you can’t not do it. Vincent van Gogh so I’m told, once said he painted so he wouldn’t go mad. I know that feeling even if not to the degree he felt it. And to that I would also add that you have that need to get it out of you, whether or not you have an audience. You would do it if you were alone on a desert island. You would do it alone on a desert island if you did not have any of your artist’s tools, because you would make tools out of whatever you found on that island.

This is me. There was a time when I became so depressed at seeing what was coming out of me…my second attempt at finding love failed miserably because I’d crushed on a straight guy…that I stopped completely because I just didn’t want to deal with my feelings anymore. But it’s not so easy. You can’t stop yourself…

One way or another it comes out. I was doing volunteer work for a gay BBS and while creating login scripts and programs to help out with some of the work I’d signed up for, I discovered there was beauty in the relentless machine logic of computer code, and it was a kind of beauty that didn’t get into my broken heart feelings. It was mostly a left brain enchantment, all logic and elegance of form. I dove into it. And that led to a well paying career as a software engineer that I worked for just over thirty years before retiring. Then, part way through that I stumbled onto the Hopkins student fair grounds while they were setting up the rides and something inside me reawakened, and I got out my camera again after nearly a decade. I rediscovered my other art media…painting, drawing, cartooning. I am a graphic artist, mostly. For a while I felt whole again.

Maybe being a bit older by then allowed me to work with my feelings and make art again. Also, I was part way into strike three and it had not yet come undone, so there was a new allotment of hope there. Now I’m 70 and at a crossroads feeling hopeless again and not wanting to do art anymore because I hurt so much inside. But I know I will eventually.

So this is the essential thing to know about me, noun or verb: I am an artist.

And the thing about that is, if you have a thin skin, we really can’t be friends.

Because I’ll either piss you off or weird you out. I won’t mean to, I won’t want to, but it’s like that scene in the movie The Adam Project, where Big Adam played by Ryan Reynolds asks his younger self (it’s a time travel movie) played to perfection by Walter Scobell, “Do you ever have a thought and not let it come out your mouth?” I’m 70 years old now and I’m only just getting the hang of that. It mostly goes into my artwork, but sometimes it does just come out of my mouth or it’s something I do or something I’m wearing or something I’ve done with my hair that you just think is weird.

I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. I’m pretty solidly Chaotic Good on the chart, but that’s my tribe.

I am not the sort of person who provokes for the sake of provoking. To make me deliberately insult someone they have to really Really get on my nerves and even then I’m more likely to just walk away. I was raised by a single divorced Baptist mother and there is a lot of morality baggage that comes with that, some of which I still very much appreciate and live by, some of which I still struggle with (I really should have learned to dance). But though I might initially appear to you as some sort of middle class quiet kind of guy, not very adventurous, not given to extremes (except for that long hair), I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. Not that I think it was weird when I said or did it. If anything I might have thought you would appreciate it. 

If that is going to bother or offend you then maybe just keep your distance. Even if I am sending signals that I’d like to get closer. No…especially if. 

We tend to wear our hearts on our sleeves (if you’re any sort of regular reader of this life blog you know what I’m talking about here), and that makes them easy targets, even if you don’t really mean to stab. And the thing about that is we also wear the scars on our sleeves (have you been reading my blog?). Hell, we take them out and make art with them. Some of my best art is stuff I made from the scars. Nearly all of my art photography is off of some bleeding part of my heart. This is how we deal with the weight of our lives. Normal people just drink. Well…we do that too actually.

The fact is a thin skin does not pair well with an artist.

(This post is mostly for a certain lieber Deutscher. Yes I was talking to you. Mostly.)

I saw an online post from a Hollywood person, someone who I absolutely consider an LGBT ally, hanging out at a comic convention with a lady artist and her husband, both publishers of a well known and well loved fantasy comic series, like they were all old friends. It got my hackles up. This particular comic book pair talk a good talk about being supportive of their LGBT fans, but when it comes to their story world they’ve a track record of, at best, gay vague…

Coined by Michael Wilke in 1997, ‘gay vague’ is the appearance of people who are seen by some viewers as gay, without it being explicitly stated or shown. When done intentionally, this allows brands to court two audiences: those longing for representation alongside those who would be put off by it.

–Outvertising – 12 February 2022 “The vague vanguard: The story of one unintentionally groundbreaking 90s TV ad.”

I see these two all the time at Pride events and comic cons, proudly hanging out with gay creators and fans, who I have to assume never ask them where the gay characters are in their world, like I did on a USENET forum once back in the 80s, to which I got the immediate response that “we don’t do pornography”.

Let me be blunt…gay vague is not support, it is erasure. Especially these days, if you are still sticking to gay vague as a way of telling us you’re with us…you aren’t. You’re still deeply uncomfortable with the possibility of our presence in your fantasy world. Because you still really haven’t made that connection that we are people just like you, with the same hopes and dreams of love, and all its joys and happiness, and not some strange and disturbing sexual behavior.

I can see fans of these two and their fantasy world getting a tad pissed off at what I’m saying here. And believe me, I know the feeling of wanting so badly, so very very badly, to see people like myself, see our lives, our hopes and dreams, represented in art, on TV and movies, that I’m willing to accept the occasional nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean know what I mean. But that was a long Long time ago, and now there is a lot of water under the bridge.

No…tears. A lot of tears.

So what made me such an intolerant militant homosexual? I’ll give you the executive summary. In bullet points. In reverse order of importance.

1: Vito Russo’s book, The Celluloid Closet.

You always knew there were the occasional coded homosexuals in the movies. Russo was the first to gather them all up…all the sissies, all the pansies, all the psychos, all the tragically damned…and present them to you all at once in one book. And when you saw it like that, it shocked you, and then it made you angry. Not just because you knew it was what Hollywood was telling everyone, your parents and family, your classmates and friends, how to think of you, but even more because it was how Hollywood told you to think of yourself.

2: In 2005 a 16 year old gay teenager was outed to his parents, who promptly forced him into ex-gay therapy. Before he entered the program, called Love In Action, he put out a cry for help on his MySpace page:

“Somewhat recently, as many of you know, I told my parents I was gay… Well today, my mother, father, and I had a very long “talk” in my room where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist christian program for gays. They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they “raised me wrong.” I’m a big screw up to them, who isn’t on the path God wants me to be on. So I’m sitting here in tears, joing the rest of those kids who complain about their parents on blogs – and I can’t help it.”

Then he did something brilliant. He found the LIA rulebook on the family computer and put the entire thing on his page for the world to see what they were doing to kids in there. And it shocked everyone. I was not alone I later learned, in not being able to sleep for days with worry for this kid. In joining the protests and activism against ex-gay therapy, I met a bunch of people who had been through it…survivors of ex-gay therapy…some who went in of their own accord, others who were forced into it…and through that I came to know them, made a few friends among them, and I listened to their stories.

3: (This could be a subset of #2) The Quiet Room. 

As I began documenting the protests against ex-gay therapy with my cameras, I was generously allowed to document some of the ex-gay survivor’s support group meetings. At one of these I attended, they’d established a “quiet room”. Mind you, these people were among Friends. They were there to tell their stories in a safe setting, and support each other as they tried to get on with their lives and past the trauma they’d experienced. And they still needed a quiet room. A spot where they could go and decompress when it all started getting too much.

And they’d covered one wall of the quiet room with some blank sheets of paper and set some Sharpies out, so the people decompressing could write whatever they needed to just then, to Get It Out…Somehow… on that wall.

I read those words. The writing on the wall. And when the conference was over I photographed it.

4: The night the closest thing I ever had to a boyfriend told me as we were having a quiet moment together, what his father did after he came out to his parents. He had just returned from a tour of duty in a Los Angeles class attack submarine and I guess his military experience had given him the courage and resolve to tell his folks. He sought me out and we had a brief fling. One night in a very quiet voice he told me about coming out to his folks, how they both said they still loved him, and how that night his father went into his office and made himself a small brochure with every biblical condemnation of homosexuality he could dig up, plus a bunch of others from who knows where. Then he printed up a bunch of copies and went around the neighborhood, putting one in the front door of every house for blocks around. Then he went back home and told his son what he did.

(I also got a copy anonymously in the mail and was pretty sure where it came from)

5: (Remember, these are in reverse order of importance). Listening to my high school crush tell me I should stay away, because the life he’d lived in the closet had so badly damaged him that some days he looked in the bathroom mirror and didn’t know who it was he was looking at.

I had a crush on him back in high school. Before that I didn’t want anything to do with all that dating stuff. But in the late 60s/early 70s, nobody told me that boys could fall in love with other boys or I would have been all about it. Then I met him. He was beautiful, decent, good hearted, outdoorsy, hard working. It wasn’t long before I thought the world revolved around him. I couldn’t take my eyes away. My heart would beat faster, I’d break into a cold sweat, but it felt wonderful. That first time you fall in love. It felt like a Disney movie. The birds sang a little more sweetly, the sky was a tad more blue, the stars shone more brightly, I walked with a lighter step. Everything was wonderful. I was twitterpated. I put him up on a pedestal. I thought he hung the moon and the stars. But it was 1971.

I’m pretty sure now it was when his parents found out he was talking to me that they put a stop to it. We weren’t doing anything…it was 1971. Gay kids didn’t exist in 1971. We’d only just begun flirting a little. But it came to a sudden halt. Then that summer they took him back to their native land and for 30+ years I had no idea what had happened to him, or where he was.

So I got on with my life. And so did the gay rights movement. I became a young adult, made attempts at dating other guys, nothing really worked. Every now and then I’d make an attempt to find him again, usually by looking through different city’s phone directories. When computer bulletin boards became a thing I would occasionally toss a message in a bottle out into the BBS spaces to see if he was there, and did he remember me. After a while I began thinking that if I ever did find him again he’d be settled down with a much better way more handsome guy than me and I’d just have to accept that.

So many years later I still had him up on a pedestal. I knew he would be braver than me. I wasn’t brave, just stubborn. He would be brave.

I got on with my life. I attended the first ever gay rights march on Washington, and the first ever showing of the Names Project Quilt on the Capitol Mall. It was pretty unnerving walking among all those quilt panels with birthdates bracketing my own. But I resolved to do my part to make it a better world for all of us.

That night the nightmares began. I would be walking among the quilt panels, and see one with his name on it. I’d be in the grocery store, or a bookstore, or just walking down a street in DC’s gay neighborhood, and I’d see him, his face covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma scars, his body shriveled. So I kept looking for him. I had to know what had happened to him. I was afraid. I had to know if he was still okay.

I was stubborn. Eventually I found him, married to a woman, and somewhat closeted but at least not in denial. We reconnected for a brief period. He started flirting with me again. We would sit together after hours and talk and talk and talk. We talked on the phone. We tossed each other Christmas cards and emails. And then it suddenly stopped. I’m guessing because the family found out he was talking to me again.

And one evening as the silence descended, at the restaurant where he worked, he basically told me I needed to look elsewhere because living in the closet had damaged him so much. He tossed ex-gay tropes at me…that sex was no more substantial than a fart. That when I was on my deathbed it wouldn’t be all the times I had sex, but all the people I loved that I would be thinking about…as if the venn diagram of those two things had no overlap. And I sat there and listened to him telling me that some days he would look in the bathroom mirror and he didn’t know who it was he was looking at. The guy I put up on a pedestal when I was a teenage boy. The guy I thought hung the moon and stars. The guy who made my heart beat faster. The guy who made me believe that no matter what life did to me, it was worth living.

I kept going back to see him anyway. I figured a relationship between us was off the table…he was married…but I could at least set an example. But it was too much for him, and maybe we were never really all that compatible anyway. He told me one day by email never to contact him again in any way shape or form. I had to sit on my hands to keep from replying How do you contact someone with a shape? Please accept this dodecahedron in reply to your Octahedron of March 6…

I got angry. I said things to him that maybe I shouldn’t have. But I was hurt. I think the only thing that cut me deeper was when mom died. We haven’t spoken a word to each other in eight years. But I don’t blame him. Enough time has passed that I’m not angry anymore, just sad. I’ll never have that wonderful twitterpated body and soul love now…it’s too late. But my generation did what it could to make the world a better place for those who followed. There are others who need to be held accountable for what the hatred of the world has done, and still does, to us. 

And I know what an ally in that fight looks like.

Why I am a militant homosexual…as they say. Five points to hopefully explain myself. Not that I feel like I owe everyone an explanation, but here it is. And I have no fucks to give for anyone who thinks gay vague is enough to make them an ally. I do not care how well liked they are in the community, or who it pisses off. I have read the writing on the wall. I have seen the damage done to beautiful hearts. I have no fucks to give anymore.

When I posted a link to the final (ish) episode of A Coming Out Story to my Facebook page, with its simple title I Am, I figured I’d get some snark. And I did. But that’s okay, I’m giving some sideways snark back to a certain someone (Hi!) with that title.

I had no idea what to title that episode, and now that I’m doing them completely out of order it didn’t make any sense to give it a number either. The title came to me almost at the moment I finished it and I had to rename all my digital files to match it. But it was worth it because that’s the right title for that retelling of that particular moment in my life. There is power in embracing your personal truths, in deciding once and for all to be your authentic self, despite the pressure to conform or hide. It is exactly the right title for that episode.

The snark comes from a t-shirt I bought in Epcot Germany with just the phrase Ich Bin on the front of it. That was all. Not I Am German or I Am A Disneyphile, or I Am Whatever, but simply I Am. I liked it for the simple declaration of self truth, whatever that self truth might be.

During an interview, Stephan Fry said…

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

That’s a good way of looking at it, and it was sort-of what I was thinking when I bought that t-shirt with the words Ich Bin on it. I Am a gay man. I Am a software engineer. I Am a cartoonist. I Am a photographer. I Am Bruce Garrett. I Am.

So, happily, I wore it to my dinner at Biergarten reservation. And when that certain someone saw me arrive I pointed to the shirt, delighted to let him know that I’d learned a few German words and could even put them together into some sort of a sentence (if you’ve ever attempted German grammar you can appreciate how proud I was just then). “Ich Bin”, I said, pointing to the shirt, “I Am”.

And he gives me this look of pure disdain and says “The hilarious thing is you trying to teach me German.”

I wish I had a picture of the look on my face at that moment. But that was when I finally had to admit that we were probably never really very compatible.

What I am is what I am
Are you what you are or what?
What I am is what I am
Are you what you are or what?

Finally…Finally…I got the pencils all done for A Coming Out Story episode 36. Tomorrow I’ll start on the inks and shading. The rest of it should go faster now. It’s the pencils, where the artwork begins, that I always have to struggle with the most.

Probably still another couple weeks before it’s up…

This came across the LGBTQ Heritage/Memorial Project page this morning…

…and it reminded me to go dig into this man’s story a little more. Because last Disney trip I took while we were still talking to each other, I discovered that a certain someone kept a photo of this King of Bavaria in his wallet, and I don’t think that was entirely out of Bavarian pride.

They still call him the “Mad King”, but it doesn’t look to me like he was actually mad, but simply different in the way many gay men are. That view of him seems to be changing. He wasn’t a warrior king. He liked his artistic pursuits, was a big fan of Richard Wagner, brought the best of European theater to Munich, and built amazing castles. He looked to the French for the way they glorified their culture in the arts, architecture, and music, and saw how lacking Bavaria was by comparison. He used his own money to build his castles, not by raiding the state treasury as is sometimes claimed. And those castles have paid for themselves many times over in tourist money. He made Bavaria rich in the arts and architecture.

But…Bavaria. To bring the arts to Bavaria was perhaps amusing, but to have a gay King was intolerable. So I think when his only engagement fell through then were plans to depose and, yes, murder him put into motion; because as Emerson said, if you strike at the king you must kill him. In exile he might have felt even freer to be the man he was. Bavaria. They weren’t having it. The official version puts it as suicide by drowning, but you look at the conflicting stories and it’s probably he was shot trying to escape.

You wonder how many gay Bavarians see something of their own stories in his.

Fark thread about a dad who is supportive of his diagnosed sociopathic daughter brings a comment from a user who first claims that he ticks

“…boxes on a number of DSM scales, enough that analysts tend to take notice. Everyone likely has some behaviors that would, it’s the number of these, their frequency and severity that matter.”

He goes on to list the good points of his personality thusly:

“I have no criminal record and I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never assaulted anyone that didn’t attack me or someone else first. I don’t self medicate with drugs or alcohol.”

Okay. Fine. Sociopaths aren’t necessarily dangerous people, just…disconnected. As I understand it, every human interaction is entirely left brain with them. Sympathy, empathy, just aren’t there. People are things that one must deal with. But they aren’t quite real now are they? Then he lists what he considers to be his not so good points. This quickly ratchets up my attention…

“I am impulsive. Dangerously so. Intimacy is illusive. Sex is mechanical, but being proficient makes my partners feel good, that feels like a reward so therein lies my motivation. But I have little or no desire for it personally. I think sex is the most overrated thing in history. I am very self focused. Everything you do, you do for yourself anyway. There is no such thing as altruism.”

Apart from the impulsive thing, this reminds me Very Much of things a certain someone once told me nearly word for word. Mind you, not about himself specifically, but in a manner of trying to educate me about some elemental life truths I seem to have missed.

This guy at least, didn’t compare sex to farting. But no…for some folks it’s about not having desire, asexuals do exist after all, and the ones I know personally are capable of love, sympathy, empathy, and form deeply emotional bonds with the ones they love. But for others it’s about not having the politically correct set of desires. Why is that queer kid from school calling you? Why did you give him our phone number? It isn’t sex that’s overrated, it’s third party approval that’s overrated. Love and desire, linking bodies and souls, heart to heart, can move mountains. Which is why authoritarians fear them. Courage. Too late to learn that now I suppose.

I subscribe to MeUndies. I like the fit and the material, and it’s one less thing I have to buy at the store. But mostly what I like about MeUndies is the fun, colorful new patterns they come up with every month. Raised in a gloomy Yankee Baptist household where disapproval at anything smacking of personal vanity was always in the air, nearly all my life since I left the nest I’ve been trying to give myself permission to…well…just be myself. I like color in my wardrobe, even the parts not generally visible in public. Well…except for my blue jeans. Blue jeans must be blue. It’s tradition. But I want color everywhere else. Ask me about the electric blue streak I sat in the chair for three and a half hours to get in my hair. Lately I’ve taken to wearing a bandanna hanging out a back pocket again, like I used to when I was a younger guy, only now I get ti-dyed bandannas, partly to confuse anyone who thinks I might be signalling something (ask me how much I Hate that damn hankie code!) , but mostly because I like the idea of tie-dyed bandannas. Next winter I swear I’m going to buy some new flannel shirts like I do every winter, but this time I’m going to bleach them white and then tie-dye them.

So…anyway…the Very Day before I got on my train to Florida and Walt Disney World, MeUndies sends me a new pair with their latest pattern… 

Llamas. They sent me Llama underwear. Well of course I wore it to my Biergarten dinner reservation.

Dude, it’s hilarious. You’re hilarious. Good thing you’re not reading my blog or this post might piss you off.