I can tell how unsettled my head is, by how odd my dreams get.
Last night I was in a large vacation home with other random friends from various parts of my life. We’d all gathered there for some reason I couldn’t remember. You were there too, but in an upstairs room all by yourself. Of course after yesterday I had to be having a dream about you last night. I didn’t want to disturb you.
My friends are all stringing Christmas lights around the door frames to their rooms…it seems like some sort of project we’d all gotten ourselves into…everyone is decorating their doors with Christmas trimmings. I am trying to untangle a favorite set of Christmas lights from my school days to put it up around the door to my room. But the others all keep telling me to just grab a new set from the stack of unopened ones in the corner. I am wasting time trying to untangle mine they all say, and they probably don’t even work. But I know my old set still works because it is lit up…even though it isn’t plugged in yet. Which is strange but sometimes you just accept strange things in your dreams as though they’re perfectly normal. And the new lights are that style I just hate…all transparent wiring and no colors. My old set has all the colors in it. But try as I might I can’t get it untangled from the knot it’s in.
Then I notice my old collection of 45rpm records was scattered all over the place and I start gathering them up off the tables and chairs and off the floor and putting them back in their carrying case. A friend walks over and asks me if I want to take them back home with me now and I tell him not yet, because you hadn’t heard them yet. I tell the friend they can listen to my 45s too…all they wanted…but they needed to take a little better care of them because they could get scratched up and broken laying around like this. That earns me a shrug.
Then I start hearing footsteps from the floor above us. Another one of my friends tells me that it’s probably one of my co-workers at the Institute getting up for a meeting later. My co-workers are here at the house too…some of them…and we all have a conference to go to later that day. I can hear them walking around upstairs now, getting ready to go.
Suddenly I’m worried you’ve left the house and I didn’t see you go. I walk upstairs and I’m relieved to see the door to your room is still closed, which means you’re still here. But I don’t knock. I don’t want to disturb you. I just want to see you before you go. I’m waiting for you to walk out of your room, so I can talk to you before you leave. You’re still here, but the door is still closed. I notice there are no Christmas lights strung around your door.
I see some more of my friends milling around in another room and more of my 45 collection scattered all over the place. So I start gathering it back up and stacking them neatly. A friend walks over and asks why I’m doing that and I tell him they need to be more careful with my records. Then I notice some of them laying by a window in the sunlight and I move them away and tell my friend not to do that because they’ll warp if they’re left laying in the sunlight. I’m starting to get a little pissed off at the careless way my friends are treating my 45s.
And then…I wake up…
Sometimes, you just have to figure a dream is your mind’s way of sorting out the clutter of your day. Of course you were there…after yesterday’s conversation you pretty much had to be…and I get the closed door and the fear that you were already gone, and the relief that you weren’t…yet. I think I get the Christmas lights. But laying in bed this morning I couldn’t figure out where my 45rpm colleciton fit into it.
I look at my record collection from back then…mostly the 45rpm singles I bought in my middle teen years because back then I wouldn’t spend the price of a whole album unless it was a band I really liked a lot, and I see almost nothing but love songs among them. Granted, that’s mostly what rock has always been. But there was a lot of it back then about life and politics, the war and the struggles our generation was going through. Songs I loved like For What It’s Worth, and Incense and Peppermint…and interestingly enough in retrospect, Hold Your Head Up.
And if it’s bad
Don’t let it get you down, you can take it
And if it hurts
Don’t let them see you cry, you can take it
Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high
And if they stare
Just let them burn their eyes on you moving
And if they shout
Don’t let them change a thing what you’re doing
Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high
I don’t think I need to analyze very much why I liked that one. But the songs I turned to again and again alone in my bedroom were the love songs, and what is amazing to me about that in retrospect is that at that age I really didn’t care much for all that gushy love stuff. I was going through my stacks of 45 rpms the other day and it just floored me how much of it was surgery sweet love songs. As I remember that part of my life, I didn’t have much interest in all that love stuff. But then, nobody told me I could fall in love with a guy either.
I wasn’t paying much attention to the lyrics in those songs, but something in the music itself spoke to me, in a way that the lyrics, speaking only to the straight boys in the audience, never could. I would connect with it instantly when I heard it on the radio, and like a flash I was down to the record store to by the single. It would be years before I would find myself listening to the lyrics. I had to grow into myself as a gay man first, and then learn the trick a lot of gay guys have to learn in this world, of mentally changing a pronoun as I listen…
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
[Girl], we couldn’t get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
I never really paid much attention to those lyrics at first. Just the music, and the sultry sound of Morrison’s voice.
You are all the [woman] I need, and baby you know it,
You can make this beggar a king, a clown or a poet.
I’ll give you all that I own.
You got me standing in line
Out in the cold,
pay me some mind.
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
Long as you love me, it’s all right
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
You got the power to turn on the light.
Something in the music spoke to me, in a way the lyrics just didn’t. My record collection is full of these kinds of songs. Bubblegum pop mostly, as they called it back then. In another world, there would have been some that spoke directly to gay guys, or at least was gender neutral enough that I could have taken the lyrics to heart as much as I did the music. But even back then, well before I came out to myself as a gay man, I had a soul for sweet love songs. Perhaps…a tad too sweet.
Okay…now the 45s make sense. Especially the part about my friends (the ones that were there in the house anyway…they weren’t all there…), treating them so carelessly. That was my heart they were treating so carelessly. And of course, what I was trying to save for you.
You said over and over to me yesterday that a relationship between us would happen someday. "It’ll happen", you said. "It’ll happen." Over and over you said that. But "now isn’t a good time". It was more then I’d ever expected to hear from you in my wildest dreams. Okay. Fine. I can wait, if that’s what you want. Whenever you are ready, I’ll be here. But I think something else needs to happen too. You need to love yourself. There’s nothing wrong with you. There was never anything wrong with you. "Maybe after we’re retired", you said. Waiting for age to take desires you’ve always hated having away isn’t a plan.
Okay…I had a crush once upon a time. Okay…I guess I still do. Back then you knew how to push my buttons. And you did. And I loved it. Even if I didn’t have the words to say so back then. Life was sweet…so very very sweet. But we went our separate ways, time passes, the universe expands, and now our lives are what they are. I understand this. I don’t want to complicate the life you have now and I’m not a home wrecker. But I guess coming back into your life has complicated it after all and I’m sorry. I just had to find you.
All I wanted now after all these years was to just be friends, at a distance, since you have your life where you are and I have mine here in Baltimore and nothing can change now without causing a lot of problems for both of us and the last thing on earth I’d ever want is to cause you hurt in any way. But I figured maybe I could come see you and chat over lunch or dinner or something every now and then. But you’re afraid of what might happen. And I was afraid that might be the case. But…as it turns out…you’re not afraid of what I might do, so much as what you might do. Let me guess…you don’t want to turn a friendship into something dirty. Where have I heard that before?
I’m a grown man now and so are you and we both understand the risks here. That’s why I’ve never suggested anything more happens then we just remain friends at a distance. There are perfectly good reasons for me to stay away. I know this. I accept it. But there is nothing wrong with you. Or me. There are plenty of very good reasons why I should keep my distance now, and maybe even forever…but that isn’t one of them.
I should note this day for posterity on my calendars from now on. It’s been the bitterest day of my life, for a reason I won’t go into here. I mean…I’d actually Love to go into it…the blog has been a kind of therapy for me ever since I started it, since I live alone here in Baltimore and don’t have a companion I can actually…you know…talk to. But there are certain someones out there I just don’t want to let see that particular small corner of my heart anymore. I feel abused. So I can’t really talk about what happened today, even here. Much as I’d like to really get it out. I’ve been wandering around in an all too familiar daze all day since it happened.
It’s almost exactly like it was back in the late 1980s, when I fled every creative outlet I had because I just didn’t want to look to closely into my heart anymore, and I started plinking around with computers because I could be creative writing code and I discovered that code could be beautiful and elegant and crafting these beautiful and elegant algorithms didn’t involve my heart but only my brain. All afternoon I was just completely zoned out and yet I was coding like mad. Like the only existence I had was in the code. The code was a safe place. I didn’t have to have a life there, didn’t need a heart, just a brain capable of parsing structured syntax and thinking logically, and some problems to solve.
No I didn’t get laid off…although I’m always expecting that will happen eventually. With the coming post-Bush budget woes NASA certainly will be facing heavy cutbacks, probably of the sort it felt in the 1970s and 80s after Apollo ended. I have no idea what I might do with myself after Space Telescope, when and if that ever happens. But for now I’ll be slightly amazed if I even survive the coming winter.
The wind never seems to stop here on the plains. It is October in Wyoming, and the wind carries with it a chill now. The first tentative breath of winter dances restlessly over rolling hills of sage. The days have grown short, the nights cold. And long. Very long. And quiet, save only for the sound of the wind.
Take a walk tonight across the rolling hills of Wyoming sage. Leave the town lights twinkling in the distance behind you. Walk toward the mountains in the darkness ahead. There is only you here tonight. You, and the wind, and the stars in the sky, so far away. So very far away. Around you are only rolling hills of grass and sage, fading into the night. There are remnants of what looks like a small wooden fence here, that was torn down some time ago.
Listen to the wind. Listen carefully. There are ghosts here on the plains. Hear them talk tonight among themselves…
No one knows why Matthew was determined to go to the Fireside that night, or why he left with Aaron and Russell. It was karaoke night, which would not ordinarily have interested him. There was some speculation that he was buying drugs from Aaron and Russell, but his friends find that implausible. A close friend thinks that depression may have weakened his judgment, and wonders if he had taken a heavy dose of Klonopin before he went to the bar. "When he was depressed," she says, "he would just grab a handful." Romaine Patterson remembers how in the coffee shop where she worked Matthew "would just talk to anyone-people no one else would talk to, like this weird old man…. He had no discrimination in his person." -Vanity Fair
Shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998, 20-year-old Shepard met McKinney and Henderson in a bar. McKinney and Henderson offered Shepard a ride in their car. Subsequently, Shepard was robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied to a fence in a remote, rural area, and left to die. McKinney and Henderson also found out his address and intended to rob his home. Still tied to the fence, Shepard was discovered eighteen hours later by a cyclist, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow. At the time of discovery, Shepard was still alive, but in a coma. -Wikipedia
Aaron Kreifels first met Matthew Shepard in a dream last Thursday night, the night after he discovered his fellow University of Wyoming student badly beaten, barely alive and tied up to a fence outside of Laramie.
Although Shepard was in Fort Collins by then, kept alive by an array of life-support machines in Poudre Valley Hospital’s intensive-care unit, Kreifels said the gay student, who was beaten beyond recognition, allegedly by two young Laramie roofers, perhaps because he was gay, came to visit his rescuer in a dream that night. Kreifels doesn’t remember much of the dream, but he said Wednesday that he awoke the next morning comforted by the vague sensation of having met the person he found in such bad shape two days before.
Although early reports indicated that two mountain bikers had discovered Shepard on the crude fence on an old, double-rutted road, Kreifels was alone that evening, struggling on his mountain bike through deep sand and for some reason ignoring a desire to turn back and find another, easier way back to town. Before he knew it, he had fallen. He was on the ground, his front wheel broken beyond repair. He was unhurt, but what he saw as he got up struck him cold.
"I got up and noticed something out of the corner of my eye,” he said from his room in a freshman dorm at the University of Wyoming on Wednesday. "At first I thought it was a scarecrow, so I didn’t think much of it. Then I went around and noticed it was a real person. I checked to see if he was conscious or not, and when I found out he wasn’t, I ran and got help as fast as I could.”
As the former high school crosscountry runner traversed the quarter- to half-mile of scrub prairie between him and the nearest house in the nearby Sherman Hills subdivision, his thoughts froze before quickly accelerating.
"It was distressing. I was panicked for a couple minutes, because I wanted to make sure I could do all I could do to help save him,” he said. -The Denver Post
Officer Reggie Fluty: When I got there, the first – at first the only thing I could see was partially somebody’s feet and I got out of my vehicle and raced over – I seen what appeared to be a young man, thirteen, fourteen years old, because he was so tiny, laying on his back and he was tied to the bottome of the end of a pole.
I did the best I could. The gentleman that was laying on the ground, Matthew Shepard, he was covered in dry blood all over his head. There was dry blood underneath him and he was barely breathing…he was doing the best he could.
I was going to breath for him and I couldn’t get his mouth open – his mouth wouldn’t open for me.
He was covered in, like I said, partially dry blood and blood all over his head – the only place that he did not have any blood on him, on his face, was what appeared to be where he had been crying down his face. -The Laramie Project
Shepard suffered a fracture from the back of his head to the front of his right ear. He had severe brain stem damage, which affected his body’s ability to regulate heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs. There were also about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate. -Wikipedia
At the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, Matthew lay in bed down the hall from Aaron McKinney. Matthew was comatose; his brain stem which controls heartbeat, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions – was severely damaged. He also was suffering from hypothermia and had a red welt on his back, a red mark on his left arm, bruised knees, cuts on his head, neck, and face, and bruising in his groin. -Vanity Fair
Dr. Cantway: I was working the emergency room the night Matthew Shepard was brought in. I don’t think, that any of us, ah, can remember seeing a patient in that condition for a long time – those of us who’ve worked in big city hospitals have seen this. Ah, but it’s not something you expect here.
Ah, you expect it, you expect this kind of injuries to come from a car going down a hill at eighty miles an hour. You expect to see gross injuries from something like that – this horrendous, terrible thing. Ah, but you don’t expect to see that from someone doing this to another person.
The ambulance report said it was a beating so we knew. -The Laramie Project
Exactly a week after his tragic discovery, Kreifels, 18, an architectural engineering major from Grand Island, Neb., said he tries not to think about the condition in which he found the classmate he had never seen before. Authorities say Shepard’s assailants repeatedly beat him with the butt of a .357 Magnum, fracturing his skull. Kreifels doesn’t talk about it.
"I don’t really want to go into details about that,” he said.
-The Denver Post
Aaron Kreifels: I keep seeing that picture in my head when I found him…and it’s not pleasant whatsoever. I don’t want it to be there. I wanna like get it out. That’s the biggest part for me is seeing that picture in my head. And it’s kind of unbelievable to me, you know, that – I happened to be the person who found him – because the big question with me, like with my religion, is like, Why did God want ME to find him? -The Laramie Project
”They were inseparable, they lived together for half a century, effectively like husband and wife. There were repeated allegations during [Newman’s] lifetime about his circle of homosexual friends. It is uncertain whether their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person’s sexual orientation.”
Peter Tatchell, a British gay rights activist, remarking on the life of the late Cardinal John Henry Newman, an influential Catholic thinker, who may be granted full Sainthood by the Catholic Church despite the probability of a homo-relational life spent with his male companion, Ambrose Saint John.
At his own request, Newman was buried in the same grave as Ambrose St John. He had stated on three occasions his desire to be buried with his friend, including shortly before his death in 1890: "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave – and I give this as my last, my imperative will", he wrote, later adding: "This I confirm and insist on."
–Wikipedia Entry on John Henry Newman
The long-running battle between gay rights activists and the Vatican has moved into the realm of the dead. With 19th century Anglican convert Cardinal John Henry Newman, arguably the greatest Catholic thinker from the English-speaking world, moving ever closer to sainthood, trouble is brewing over where his final resting place should be. The London-born historian and theologian died in 1890 and, following the instructions in his will, was buried beside his lifelong friend and fellow convert Ambrose St. John, who had died 15 years earlier. Newman’s deep expressions of grief after St. John’s death, along with other writings, have led some historians to ask whether the two men, who lived together for many years, lived much like common-law spouses.
Newman, whose ideas on conscience and faith have influenced Christian theology ever since, is expected to be beatified next year following the Vatican’s recent certification of a Newman miracle — when a Boston man’s cure from a crippling spinal disease could not be explained medically. The final step of canonization — full Sainthood — will require proof of an additional miracle achieved through the intercession of Newman’s spirit. The Vatican announced plans this month to move Newman’s remains from a small gravesite in the central English town of Rednal to a specially built sarcophagus in the Oratory Church of Birmingham, where, officials say, they will be more accessible for venerating faithful.
-Time Magazine
Although the passionate love between them was entirely chaste, the campaigners were seeking to claim — extravagantly — that Newman’s was a "same-sex relationship" which the Catholic Church was trying to suppress, an accusation Rome felt the need to scotch. But even those who did not believe Newman was a "closet homosexual" were still concerned that Newman’s body was going to be dismembered to extract relics. For such an English saint — the first non-martyr since the Reformation to be raised to the altars – it all seemed a little, well, Mediterranean.
(It has also been a running joke for religious correspondents, who have been proposing a "graveside webcam" to cover the disinternment, and speculating at the embarrassment that would follow from the discovery that the body of St John, not Newman’s, had been preserved.)
The grave of the 19th Century Cardinal John Henry Newman did not contain his body, the Catholic Church has revealed.
The plot, at the Oratory House, Rednal, near Birmingham, was excavated on Thursday at the Vatican’s instruction.
His remains were to have been moved to the Birmingham Oratory, in preparation for Newman’s anticipated beatification.
Newman’s body may have decomposed, as his coffin was not lead-lined. Its absence will not affect the progress of his cause in Rome, a spokesman said.
In a statement released on Saturday, Peter Jennings from the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory, said: "Brass, wooden and cloth artefacts from Cardinal Newman’s coffin were found.
Newman was actually laid to rest, per his wishes, in St. John’s tomb. That’s what makes the joke Ivereigh mentions of particular interest. Regardless of whether their relationship ever became a physical one, Newman clearly and deeply loved St. John. That’s why his body had to be removed from St. John’s tomb before he could be canonized. The dehumanization of homosexual people proceeds not from a denial that sex between same sex lovers is natural, but from a denial that we love. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. It isn’t the suggestion that Newman ever had sex with the man he loved that outrages the likes of Ratzinger. It’s the fact that he loved another man, and was loved by him, and that their love was vital to both of them. That is what simply cannot be. Not that they had sex, but that they loved each other. That is why Newman’s body had to be dug up, and separated from St. John’s. In his jihad on gay people, Pope Ratzinger isn’t one to let mere death prevent him from separating same sex lovers.
But when the tomb was opened they found no remains. Both men were gone. No Newman, No St. John. The tomb was empty.
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