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.