He was talking about race relations of course, but you can see it apply all across the spectrum of human relationships:  "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will…"

No kidding.  I’m fifty-five years old now.  My walk through life has taken me in many different directions, down many paths I would not have expected.  Paths that even today some people who have known me for ages have never heard me talk about. Most of old high school friends know very little about the life I’ve lead lately.  The friends I’ve made in the 80s and 90s mostly know very little about the life I led as a kid.  My co-worker friends know little about my home life.  My gay friends don’t really know my straight friends, and vice versa.  The two main branches of my family tree live on different coasts, and don’t much like each other.  Mom’s side sees less and less of me as their religiosity grows more and more hardened.  My brother and I talk often, but he is not here to actually see the life I lead, or take part in any of it.  It’s not that I live separate lives.  I live only one.  But it is very broadbanded.  My walk has taken me many places.

I appreciate the fact that no one friend has ever been with me throughout the whole of that walk.  It is the central grief of my life, that I have had no partner in love to share much of the walk with.  I am fifty-five years old now, and any lover I manage to gain now, will only be there to walk with me through the last few bits of it.  I’ll never have that one great lifelong love.  It’s too late.  The closest I could get to it now, is if I manage to make a lover out of someone from my past, who happens to come back into my life all of a sudden.  Which I am pretty sure won’t happen. 

So I can appreciate how some folks I see on a semi-regular basis here in Washington-Baltimore won’t know, can’t possibly know, all there is to my story.  But some of it must surely become pretty goddamned obvious after a few years of hanging out with me.  Let alone a couple decades.  But apparently…not.

Understand that central grief of my life, if you understand nothing else about me, and handle it with care if I choose to let you see it.  Because when that happens, Understand This, I am Not looking for a shoulder to cry on.  If I let you see that grief it’s because, only because, I trust you.  It’s a big part of me, that grief.  I don’t want it there…I hate it…it has drained so much of the energy out of me over the decades.  So much that I could have been, and now never will be.  It still drains me a little, every day.  I don’t want it there…I hate it.  But there it is.  We place our hearts in our friend’s hands.  Mine has a great big wound on it that never heals, and never will until the day comes, if it ever does, that I find that intimate other.  If I give you my heart you will see it there…it’s impossible for me to hide.  And I shouldn’t have to hide it from a friend anyway.  Just…handle it with care.  It’s bigger, deeper, and a hell of a lot more painful then it looks.  You poke it, and you won’t like what happens next.

I get it that not everyone in this world wants the soulmate.  Really I do.  I get that the quick easy fuck, and the shacking up with someone you don’t really like all that much, simply because you just don’t want to go home to an empty house every night, isn’t just a phenomena of the urban gay subculture, but all of humanity.  You need to get that I am not that.  For years, seriously, ever since I was a teenager coming off of my first high school crush, I regarded casual sex as cheap and the people that pursued it shallow.  Well…I grew up.  I came to realize that my temperament in love and sex and the whole dating and mating game were not everyone’s.  I came to realize that you can’t judge people by the kind of sex they have, but by how well they treat one another.  Should have been an easy thing for a gay man to grasp, but it took me a while.  But at last I got there.

But some people seem to think growing up means not simply learning to acknowledge and respect other gay folks lifestyles, but living them too, as if my own romantic needs and desires are childish things, fairy tales, that sensible gay adults leave behind.  If that’s the case, then I’m not the one who needs to grow up.  You are.  I learned the world is bigger then the limits of my own understanding, larger then the reach my own desires.  You can learn it too.  And learn this while you’re at it: people who need the lover and do not need and do not want the fuck buddy are a legitimate part of that world.  Your mileage may vary.  Fine.  I am not you.  And that’s okay.  Let’s hear it for diversity.

No, I will not trick.

No, I will not hang out in meat market bars. 

No, I will not "broaden my interests".  There is nothing wrong with my interests.  You’d know that, if you’d ever bothered to understand what my interests really are, instead of assuming what they are by whatever jerks my head around.  I am looking for a lover, not a fuck buddy.  If I was looking for the fuck buddy then maybe what turns my head would be a good indicator.  It’s not.

No, I will not accept being single as my state in life.  The day I finally accept that I have no chance whatsoever in finding that one great love of my life, is the day I put a gun to my head.  Stop asking me to accept it, or stop pretending to like me as a person.  Pick one.

And stop blaming me for my own singleness!  I Have tried to find that intimate other, that companion of my heart.  As I recall, I sent a certain someone who seemed to have a hard time wrapping his head around this, a several page letter detailing how hard I’ve tried ever since I was a teenager.  And what I got back was a Fisked response that basically ignored every fucking thing I said in that letter, and kept right on blaming me for my own singleness.  The fact is, if you’d care to look beyond your own great good fortune, at just our own little crowd, that finding and keeping that one great love is a goddamned hard thing.  Most people are lucky to get even one chance at it.  Let alone two. 

Which is why we all need friends.  Friends who care.  And I don’t mean care in merely a rhetorical or theoretical sense.  Friends who actually care enough to help.  Shouting out to a drowning man from the safety of the shore, directions to a store that sells life preservers, isn’t helping. 

I don’t expect my friends to set me up with dates.  And especially not if they think it’s asking too much to expect to actually have a love that engages you body and soul, heart and mind.  And extra especially if they think I’m not attractive enough to actually have a chance of finding what I am looking for.  And extra-extra especially if they have a completely fucked-up idea of what it is that I am looking for in the first place.  I don’t expect it.  But if something comes along, and you see a chance to do something like that for a friend, then why the hell wouldn’t you?  That’s what I just don’t understand.  Why wouldn’t you?  I’ve actually done that sort of thing in the past for some of my heterosexual friends.  Hell…heterosexuals do that for each other all the fucking time.  If I wanted to get bitter about how indifferent gay culture is I could easily right now.  But I know better then to judge all gay people by the indifference of some.

And when something just fucking drops into your lap, and you just let it float away like a dead leaf in the autumn wind, am I really being a hardass if I see that as a sign that your friendship was a hell of lot shallower then I’d thought it was?  I thought we were friends.  I don’t just say that word to everyone I know.  Friends.  I put my heart into your hands, hopes and dreams and wounds and all, and you let it drop on the floor.  Is it my fault that it broke?  Maybe.  If it was my fault I put my heart there in the first place.  Should I have known better?

I don’t think of myself as a particularly high maintenance friend.  But I have my tender spots and in my defense I practically wear some of them on my sleeve.  You had to know what you were doing to me when you did that.  Or you’ve just been so goddamned lucky in your own love life it’s so completely so utterly blinded you to how hard it is for others, that you thought it wasn’t any big deal.  Or maybe you just decided on your own that it wasn’t right for me.  Would have been nice to have had the chance to decide that for myself. 

A chance.  That’s all I ask of my friends, is when a chance comes along, they let me have it.  Maybe nothing at all comes of it.  Fine.  At least I had another chance, and it’s seeing the occasional chance still coming my way that keeps me going at my age.  A chance.  It fell into your lap.  And instead of letting me have it, you kept it, and let it slowly wither into nothing.  It’s gone now.  Gone.  And I’m left wondering what the fuck you were thinking when you let that happen.  I suppose now you’re sorry you even told me about it to begin with.  Of course the thing to be sorry about is you told me, not that you let it die.

I am not angry.  I’m sad.  But life, and the one great grief in my own, go on.  I’ve been dealing with the big grief for decades now.  I can deal with this.