The silence here.  Yeah.  For those of you wondering. I’m still feeling pretty much like the guy in White Room and I’m not up for talking about it because I know that, really, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s misery.  Also, I just don’t want to know what’s going on in the rest of the world now, because I’m fucking tired of hearing about how republican’s can throw a party and invite every gutter crawling fag baiter in the world to it and their presidential hopefuls will come to that party and beg the gutter for support.  So I’m not much provoked into saying something right now.

I’m mostly just occupying myself with a couple of photo projects down in the art room lately, including a photo album of shots from the Woodward days.  An old friend of mine complained the other day that he couldn’t get to the albums I’d posted on Classmates.Com without paying their fee and I thought, well hell, I’ll post them here then…and of course then I got to thinking about how I might like to do it a little differently then I could there…and so on. 

So I’m editing a photo layout in Apple’s Aperture, which still has it’s flaws, but they’re more of an irritant now with version 1.5.2 then a hindrance…except when it comes to the medium format stuff anyway.  Otherwise Aperture is a fantastic photographer’s tool and I love it.  But prowling over all those images from back then is leaving me more then a tad bummed out. 

I bought the big film scanner, the Coolscan 9000, so I could start on a project I’d been planning for a while now, to scan in everything I ever took, and get it all cataloged and searchable and workable in the computer.  I actually have a system I’ve been using since the Woodward days, but it makes use of numbered contact sheets and I haven’t had a darkroom where I could process contact sheets in years, so it’s been getting badly out of date.  So I’ve been working the Big Scan project from both ends, that is, from the beginning of the old system forward, and from today, and all the rolls I haven’t made contact sheets for, backwards.  It’ll take years to complete the scan (and Terabytes).

So I’ve been at it now for a couple months and I already have a bunch of stuff scanned in from the Woodward days and I keep pouring over it like I’d just like to go back and do it all over again and I know I can’t and I know it wouldn’t be good even if I could, but there it is.  And I think the reason is that I was happy back then, in a way I don’t think I’ll ever be again.  Which is probably a bizzare thing to say about being a gay teenager in 1971, when you really think about it.  For all that 60s Peace, Love and Understanding stuff going on back then, the environment for gay people was not wonderful.  Not at all. 

I have a stack of underground comix from the period, and never mind the drugs, there’s a ton of free love and sex going on in them.  But without exception, whenever they touched on homosexuality, and the breathtakingly liberating thing about those comics back then, after years under the thumb of the Comics Code Authority, was that there were no taboo subjects, gay people were portrayed in all the typically crude and demeaning stereotypes of the times.  Well…except for Howard Cruse’ Barefootz stuff, which was like an oasis in the middle of a landscape of crude, jackass ignorance.  Not a lot of free thinking there when it came to gays.  As a gay teenager, I mostly just glossed over that when I read it.  Below the surface it was making me angry, but I thought eventually people would wise up.  Some did.  Most have not.  No…the Free Love 60s/70s were not a great time to be Gay in America.  Not at all.

And yet, I had this completely naive faith, after I came out to myself one December evening, that I could find my soulmate, that I Would find my soulmate, and we would have our life together.  And it kept not happening.  And it kept not happening.  And it kept not happening.  And now I’m 53 and it still hasn’t happened, and I suppose I’m prowling over all those photographs from back then, as a way of holding on to that faith, or at least trying to keep it alive.  Because if I loose that faith that it Will happen, I really don’t have anything left.

I have the best job in the world now.  I have a nice little house.  I can buy the cameras I couldn’t afford when I was a kid.  I have an art room now.  A little back yard.  Everything I once assumed, assumed mind you, that would be out of my reach all my life.  I grew up in a fairly low budget family environment, and I’m living a pretty good life now.  And it all seems like props on a stage, and the story has no point.  It just rambles on and on, but it’s going nowhere.  There is no meaning.  Not without that love of my life.

So I’m editing these various photo layouts of that time in my life when I could easily believe that love would happen to me somehow, someway.   That I’d find that love of my life and we’d build our life together.  And if I can see anything at all I can see how much time has really passed since then.  And it hasn’t happened.  And I’m working with these photo layouts in Aperture, and there he is, here and there among the images, the guy who opened my eyes to what it was all about.  And elsewhere in that vast library of negatives and slides I have, mostly still unscanned for now, are the others…I could name them all but I won’t…that I circled around, and tried to start a fire with, and a few of them I dated for a while, and a few of them I could only circle around, but they all told me in one way or another ‘no’, and I grieved, and I moved on.  I’ll see them all again as I work my way though this project.  And here I am prowling over all this visual history of my life, and I’m still as solitary now as I was when I first came out to myself, when, unlike a lot of my peers, I was swept up not in a chaos of self loathing and fear and disgust but of awe and joy and amazement that there was such a thing as love in this world, and that it could possibly be so sweet.  And I just knew that I’d find the love of my life someday.  I just knew it.  And I haven’t.

And I know, reading back over what I’ve just written, that there are people in this world who would be just delighted to know this.   The haters want us to be lonely and miserable in this life because…well…they hate us.   And we need to hate ourselves as much as they hate us.  We need to hurt, simply for existing.  Our wounds are the butter on their daily bread.  I can not begin to describe the anger and outrage I feel toward these monsters in words, though I’ve tried over the past few years to do it with a few political cartoons.  But anger is a brittle bedrock to build a life on.  And it can easily turn into hate.  You need love.  

What I need right now, is to believe that it will happen to me.  No…I need it to actually happen.  But if I stop believing that it will, then for sure it won’t.  So I can’t loose that faith.  I can’t.  But I think I am.

[Edited a tad…]