I got a phone call a few moments ago from a local newspaper concerning one of my posts and the follow-up comments to it.  I’m at home, telecommuting today because the roads here in Baltimore are in pretty bad shape after all the sleet and freezing rain we had last night and this morning.  I heard the answering machine pick up and a voice ask if they’d called the guy who runs this blog.  There seemed to be some slight confusion over what kind of a blog this is and I just want to take a moment to clarify that for some of you who may have tuned in late.  I can understand the confusion.  Blogging isn’t what it was back when I started doing it.  It’s becoming it’s own big business now.  But that was never what I intended with mine.

My name is Bruce Garrett and I live in Baltimore, Maryland.  I’m a 53 year old single gay guy.  I’m a senior software engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins here in Baltimore.  I paint and draw, have an insatiable camera bug, and spend too much time in front of a computer, or at my drafting table, and not nearly enough out looking for a boyfriend.  But I’m a deathly shy sort, and probably that’s why I do a lot of my socializing on the Net.  I’ve been addicted to the online world since the mid 1980s, and the first PC BBS systems.  As a gay man especially, this technology has always appealed to me.  I am certain in my own mind, that PC networks have been a powerful force in the struggle for gay civil rights ever since the Reagan years.  They allows us to see ourselves, to see our lives, in our own words, in our own stories straight from the source and not second hand, filtered through the media of the heterosexual majority.  When I was a teenager back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the only things I knew about gay people, was what I was told by heterosexuals.  But we no longer have to see ourselves through the eyes of heterosexuals anymore.  I thank the personal computer for that.  But then, I’m a bit of a computer geek too.

This is my blog.  I started it way back in 2000 as a personal online diary of thoughts and stuff going on in my life that my scattered-all-across-the-country family and friends could tune into whenever they wanted to know what was up with Bruce.  Back then, blogs were still a pretty new thing, and mostly the kind of personal online diaries that I started here.  And that’s basically how I still think of this one, except it’s become a tad more political now then I’d thought it ever would be.  Chalk that down to the times we live in.  I had one other thought in mind when I started it, and that was by putting my day to day life out there for strangers to see, I might make some small difference in how they saw gay people, and perhaps how some gay folk might see themselves.  The more openly we all live our lives, the less effective the hate monger’s tales about us are.

At first I my site was just a basic web site account I got with my yearly Newsguy Usenet News account.  It was located at extra.newsguy.com/~bgarrett.  In December 2001 I was talking with my friend Jon Larimore, who used to run the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS in Arlington Virginia.  He was running the Zzapp Internet Service at the time, and I asked him how hard it would be to set up my own web site with my own domain.  Not hard at all says he, and there and then he offered to host me free of charge on his servers because he felt my words should have a place of their own on the web.  We sat down together and checked the domain registry at Network Solutions and lo and behold brucegarrett.com and brucegarrett.net were available.  I was surprised and delighted that nobody had taken them yet, and I snapped them up.  Then Jon set me up with space on his servers and I moved my pages from Newsguy to their new home at brucegarrett.com.

I started my blog fresh the following January, because I wanted a better look to it then the bare text file that it was previously.  And I added a cartoon page.  In my high school years, my political cartoons about Nixon and Vietnam were all over the school.  I decided to take up political cartooning again, in part for something to set my web site apart from the others, and in part because it’s an art form I love, and I’d been very disappointed that the mainstream political cartoonists were so skittish about tackling the gay civil rights struggle (though some of them have become more willing to lately).  I figured I’d add a photo gallery and some of my fiction later.  Some of you poking around here may occasionally see references to The Skywatchers of Aden.  That’s a fantasy/Alternate Earth series I’d created some years ago.  At one time I had about a half dozen short stories in the series, and two novel length stories posted here.  I’ve since taken them down for some major re-writes, and to add illustrations when I manage to find a few more hours in a day.

Jon has since retired, and Zzapp was sold, and last year I moved my web site to Winters Web Works, the folks who also host This Modern World.  Jonah Winters runs a great web hosting service, I’ve been with him a year now, and I would recommend him to anyone. 

Apart from the cartoon page, I never intended this blog to be primarily a political thing.  It’s just sort of turned out that way, because there is so much in the news nowadays that makes me angry and I need a place to vent.  For years that place was the Usenet newsgroup alt.politics.homosexuality.  I was a regular participant in that newsgroup from 1992 to 2002, and then my online venting pretty much took up residence here.  I think the reason for it is that I can more easily link to stuff on a web page then in a Usenet posting, which ideally should be plain ascii text only.  I can’t for example, easily include images of crap like this…

…in a Usenet post.  But it’s the sort of thing I think people need to see to understand what’s happening to their gay and lesbian neighbors in this country now, and why we fight.  So now I pretty much vent exclusively on my blog.  Occasionally I vent in the comments of other people’s blogs.

So that’s it.  This is the personal online space of one middle aged (there…I said it) gay guy.  That’s still really all I visualize it as being.  It isn’t topical, in the sense that Eschaton or Daily KOS or Pam’s House Blend or Box Turtle Bulletin or Ex-Gay Watch are topical.  This is my soapbox, my message board to the world and my art gallery.  I have a fairly small, but it seems very regular set of readers here, judging from my server logs, most of whom don’t email or leave comments but keep coming back all the same and I am just amazed and gratified by that (thank you!).  My brother in Oceano pings this place regularly.  Some old classmates and friends do also.  My regular traffic here seems to break down mostly between folks who come to read the blog, and folks who ping my cartoon page.  I keep trying to nudge folks from the one to look at the other with cross links but it seems that some people just want to look at the cartoons, and some just want to read the blog.  That’s fine.  I’m pleased and amazed that complete strangers can come here and find something they like enough to keep coming back.  I don’t advertise this blog like some others are doing now.  I doubt I ever will.  If I ever get around to producing cartoon books or photo books I’ll probably advertise those.

You gotta love this technology.  Once upon a time the only way we had of seeing ourselves was through the news media and commercial pop culture.  Now we can talk to each other, listen to each other, firsthand.  Via other people’s blogs I’ve discovered so many things about my world I would never have discovered otherwise.  I’ve found new music.  New artists to watch.  Books and essays I would never have heard of otherwise.  Places to visit.  Things to think about.  Often, when news is breaking somewhere, I can find local bloggers and get the local take on things firsthand. These are amazing times to be living in.  They say the world is a much smaller place now, but I can remember when my world pretty much ended at the horizon line.  If I wanted to know what was going on beyond it, I had to wait for the evening newscast, or the morning paper.  Now I just go find out.  My world, and yours, is bigger now.  Much, much bigger, and vastly more engaging.  Lets hear it for blogs.