I’ll be 70 soon. Just so all you younglings who happen to be reading this know, that dream about being back in grade school? You know the one. Maybe you’re walking the hallways of your old high school. Maybe you’re sitting in class. And you’re stressing out because you haven’t prepared, and you don’t know the material. And you know you’re going to flunk that class and probably every other class too. And then you wake up and you’re all stressed out. That dream?

Yeah…you’ll still be having it at 70.

There’s probably some sort of enlightenment in that fact…

I should have posted this here earlier. It’s sunset in Oceano California, looking off my brother’s backyard deck toward the Pacific ocean, the evening that hurricane Hillary came inland. I was expecting a more impressive than usual sunset over the Pacific that evening and I wasn’t disappointed. It was a Frederic Church level sunset.

I took this with the Canon 6D and 24mm f1.4 lens. Coulda used a 17 or better but the only one of those I have is an FD lens for my film cameras. So after this I priced getting one for the 6D but I would use it so infrequently that spending the money just doesn’t make sense at this stage in my life, and being on retirement income.

This is looking east toward the central valley where Hillary tracked, from my brother’s front porch…

Bakersfield is maybe 100 miles as the crow flies past those mountains in the distance. Barstow, a place I drive through often on my way here and back to Maryland, took a direct hit. Here in Oceano we got a little rain and a little wind and nothing more. Everything on the coast north of Vandenberg was pretty much untouched. But the skies were lovely.

Facebook memories this morning brings me back to a Pearls Before Swine cartoon I riffed on briefly a couple years ago. Rat is harassing Stephan about how old he is, asking him if he was alive during World War 2, and Stephan says he wasn’t born until 23 years after that war ended, at which point Rat brings up the fact that his prom was 34 years ago.

Ha ha. Yeah…

My prom would have been 52 years ago now. I’ll be 70 shortly. Oddly enough, still regretting I didn’t get my prom. Or those first dates. Gay teens didn’t exist back in 1971.

Could have been worse I suppose. I could have been born right after the war instead of eight years after and had to be a gay teenager in the late 1950s/early 60s. I’m trying to slug through “Hoover’s War On Gays” by Douglas M. Charles. It’s a Very difficult read. My generation, just barely post Stonewall, had it pretty good all things considered. One of my high school teachers, Bill Ochse, actually brought a group of gay activists to his class to talk to his students, and the mob didn’t burn the school down.

I had him for a class but I wasn’t in that particular class that day. So I watched from a distance as they left his classroom, still talking to Bill and a few of the other kids. How I wished I could have sat in and listened to them. I’ve ached at the memory ever since. But at least I could know back in 1971 that there was such things as gay activists. I could at least know that I wasn’t alone, even if it felt like it.

I didn’t get my prom. It was 1971. Not even Woodward would have been ready for gay teens stepping out onto the dance floor back in 1971. Are you kidding? And even in a better world I probably wouldn’t have been able to take the guy I was crushing on to the prom. He was a catch, stunningly beautiful, smart, decent, lived in the nice neighborhood, and I was a weird kid from across the tracks, unhandsome, crooked teeth, unruly hair, living with a single divorced mother, preoccupied with his artwork and photography. Didn’t get my prom. Didn’t get a boyfriend either.

I’ll be 70 soon. I’ll die having walked from one end of an adult life to the other single. And the fact is there was more stacked against me than the treachery of a few I believed to be my friends (We’ve seen the guys you look at. People who look like that want people who look like that.). Back in 1971 even Mad Magazine thought our claim to having a common humanity with out neighbors was ridiculous (You shout that you are victimized by bigoted attacks. Forgive us if we’re more concerned with Indians and Blacks). The scale of what was taken from us so righteous people could build their stepping stones to heaven out of pieces of our hearts is nearly impossible to grasp. And the teenager I was stopped hoping long ago.

70. It isn’t quite the milestone I was thinking it would be. I really don’t want any more birthdays. But I need to get A Coming Out Story finished.

It’s an absolutely lovely California day here in Oceano. 64 degrees but comfortably warm in the sun. California blue skies. Ocean breeze.
Well…okay…we’re likely to get a hurricane over the weekend. But apart from that…

Let’s hear it for global warming!

Roy Edroso has a Substack today you should go read.

And if you’re not already one of his subscribers or reading his blog from time to time you really should.

So I had the white wedding dream this morning.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but it’s one of those odd family things. My mom’s Yankee Baptist side, for all it’s religiosity, has it’s superstitions, handed down through the generations. Many of which Good Yankee Baptists are Not supposed to entertain. Mom’s dad came from Mennonite stock. River Brethren they called themselves. Her mother was pure bitter Yankee Baptist (not all Yankee Baptists are as unpleasant as she was. I know of a bunch of really good people in those pews) Not sure how far back some of these superstitions go, but a few seem very old.

One of them is the dream that is a premonition of death. Not yours, but of someone close to you. And it’s not that they die. In the dream, they’re getting married.

I can hear the snickers, but this is really creepy. It’s a big wedding usually. The bride, or the groom, are someone you know personally. You never see who they’re getting married too. And it’s usually, but not always, attended by people that you don’t know. And here’s the thing: the more white you notice in the dream…like in how people are dressed or in the place settings…the closer the death is.

I’ve googled this and it seems it is a thing. I can’t pin the history and origins of it down because there is so much argle bargle in the results, but apparently it goes way way back.

I’ve never had this dream. Until this morning. And it didn’t quite follow the usual script.

In my dream, I am a photographer working at a huge catering business. They have a massive building with a lot of big well decorated rooms to hold weddings and receptions. I actually have my own apartment on an upper floor. It’s a nice one. Apparently the cat I once had, Claudia, lives there with me.

I’m walking around the premises, checking on this and that, to make sure everything is ready for today’s guests. Nobody has arrived yet, but I know it will be busy later and I am on duty.

Then a huge wedding party arrives. They seem to be Indians, all dressed in traditional Indian garb for a wedding reception. There’s a Lot of them and I despair thinking there’s so many everyone else won’t be able to use their rooms. But the new party uses the lovely outdoor courtyard instead and I am relieved. There’s plenty of space there and it’s a beautiful setting for a wedding reception.

I watch them enter. The courtyard has a lovely colorful tiled floor, white marble columns with green hanging plants, white statuary, and big wooden intricately carved tables for the guests. I see the bride and groom at one end of the space. Dancers line up and begin some sort of traditional dance for everyone.

It’s bright and sunny outside this morning, and everyone is wearing white, bright, bright white, which makes the scene even brighter. It is so bright it begins to hurt my eyes and I have to leave and go back inside. And anyway, it’s time for me to get ready for the other guests.

I go back to my apartment and take a shower. As I’m drying myself off Claudia comes into the bathroom and hops up onto the sink to get a drink. As I’m walking to my room I hear a voice I recognize from downstairs, asking me if he and his bride to be can come up so he can show her my photography. I have it all over the walls of my apartment. I call back down, yes, but let me get dressed first please, I have nothing on.

With just a towel wrapped around me I run around my living room quickly, irritably picking up some crumpled up paper bags that were left on the floor by friends I had over the previous night. People need to pick up after themselves I think. Then I wake up.

I wake up in a very disturbed state. The voice I heard downstairs of the groom to be was a very dear friend. As close to me as anyone ever got. He’s getting married. I didn’t see the bride. And the wedding outside was so white it hurt my eyes. But…I tell myself desperately, that wasn’t His wedding. I don’t even know those other people.

I try to be rational. I try to avoid superstition. I’m an atheist for god’s sake (ha ha). But when you’ve got the imagination I do that’s very hard. The collision between my left and right brains (I know…that’s a myth too…but it’s a useful metaphor) that I’ve represented in A Coming Out Story, is the central struggle of my life. More so even than dealing with my sexual orientation. And deep down inside I’ve always been afraid of this dream.

It was an all too brief period of time in young American male fashion. But I look back upon it fondly, and reminisce about the life I once had, before the heart attack, before I found myself suddenly knocking at the door to 70 and realizing that dating and mating part of my life is all in the rear view mirror now, and I didn’t even get to partake because back then gay teenagers didn’t exist and gay men were all better off dead than in love.

I have this theory that the fashions and styles we find attractive as adults are what were in vogue when we were coming of age. We glom onto that period and all those first crushes and first heartbreaks, and forever after it’s what gets the heart beating.

The problem for me (artistically and…otherwise) is that while “retro” fashions seem to have made a comeback, it’s only among the ladies. Long hair low risers and cutoffs haven’t made much headway among males young and slender enough that, IMO, they could benefit from them. Okay…so I could benefit from them.

It’s a shame. So when I get an itch to do some sexy sketching I usually end up riffing on photos of pretty young ladies I see online or in magazine fashion ads. When you know the basic skeletal and muscular differences between the sexes it’s not hard to convert female to male if you really, really like what they’re wearing or how they’ve done their hair. This drawing I posting some months ago being a good example…

I actually sold a print of that one.

I have a folder in my NAS of pose material that maybe I’ll get to someday and make a drawing from. Stuff I’ve got from various online sites and Facebook pages. Like the one I just started following a few days ago of 70s memories.

That photo was labelled Teenagers hanging out on Van Nuys Blvd. Obviously from the styles and the cars it was taken in the very early 1970s, or maybe even the late 60s. The time of my sexual awakening and that first magical crush. I’m thinking it’s a night shot under very bright street lamps, otherwise why would the sky above that store in the background be so dark. The comments on it are mostly about how street racing at that location was a thing back in the day. Mostly.

I take one look at this photo and instantly the longhair leaning up against the foreground car (check out the mag wheels) gets my attention. Nice jeans, thinks I…okay…I can do something with that. No smirking, please…I didn’t realize at first…. Anyway, it definitely speaks to that time in my life. Those low risers. That long beautiful hair. The floppy sleave shirt. I don’t think many people nowadays get how wide belts were back then, and the huge belt buckles that went with them. You can’t see the feet, but I’m pretty sure those are bells.

So I immediately grab a copy of the image for my “poses” folder. And I’m already thinking about what I need to change around a tad to make her a cute long haired guy…

I’ll have to adjust her pelvis a tad…oh…wait…

Nope. Don’t have to adjust anything.

The pose was just enough to make it unclear which sex you were looking at. What clued me in was figuring out how to change the curve of the hips to the thighs and then realizing that work had already been done for me. I wish I had his jeans too. And the 20-something body I had once upon a time that fit into them.

And…a boyfriend back then.

I wish I had more beautiful guys like that in my world now. Even if, as I said, that part of my life is in the rear view mirror. It would still be nice to have some beauty in my life, even if it’s just to look at now and then. But American males don’t like those styles anymore because HEY ARE YOU SOME KINDA QUEER OR WHAT!? I’m not even all that pretty, and wasn’t back in the day, and I got cat-called lots just for wearing my hair long. I Still get those cat-calls. HEY HIPPY…ARE YOU A BOY OR A GIRL…HAW HAW HAW…

But what’s refreshing about the comments on that photo on that page is there wasn’t any of that. If you remember those days fondly enough to be following 70s memories pages, then you remember that was how guys dressed and wore their hair back then.

And it was all good. At least it was to coming of age gay teenager me.

So…anyway…if I do something with the figure in that photo I’ll post it here. Probably not use the shirt though.

We all remember Stephan “Goebbels” Miller…right…?

Stephen Miller’s legal group sues Target over LGBTQ Pride collection backlash

A conservative legal nonprofit led by Stephen Miller is suing Target on behalf of one of the company’s investors, saying it should have anticipated public backlash to its LGBTQ Pride displays in June.

America First Legal — founded by Miller, a former senior adviser to former President Trump — claims the company misrepresented the adequacy of its risk monitoring after its Pride month campaign led to employee harassment, bomb threats and a conservative online hate campaign.

A conservative group. A conservative group. Yeah, and the Al Capon mob was a private investment fund. You gotta admire the brazenness of the anti-gay industrial complex. First they start a hate campaign against retailers that support Pride Month, then they sue them for the damage to the investors that they caused. Nice work if you can get it.

There is no growing up, I used to say, there is only growing. Then today I came across this comment I made in a Facebook post about technological change:

Something I’ve noticed: progress makes some people feel old and others always feeling young…

…because you’re always having to learn new sh*t. All this time I’ve been attributing that constant twenty-ish mindset I have to a state of arrested development and that’s not it. It isn’t that I never grew up, it’s that I never got tired of growing up.

Never get tired of growing up.

I’ve been working on A Coming Out Story for a couple decades now. I’ve not been promoting it or advertising it anywhere, largely because I am terrible at self promotion. I’m sure the reason for that lies buried somewhere under all the static I got growing up, first for being my father’s son, and then more generally for being gay in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But it’s been a project that, while it began simply as a one shot slice of life cartoon, then turned into something like a self analysis project, it’s become something dear to my heart. That said, when I posted a link to the new current episode on Facebook and a post about my first try at a Flowbee haircut got orders of magnitude more responses, I got a little depressed. Well okay…more than a little.

The visitors here to this website specifically to look for any new episodes have been very gratifying. Also the random visitors who either read an episode that a search engine somehow delivered them to, and then they binge read all of it. That is Very gratifying. And it helps keep me going. But I have other reasons for sticking with this besides artistic recognition.

I dove into this project for several reasons:

1. To help me understand what happened to me back in my senior year of high school, and how it brought me to the adult I eventually became.

   This part has been pretty well successful. It helped that around episode 11 I reconnected with the object of my affections and I was able, with difficulty, to better understand what happened between us and why it went the way it did. Maybe that’s material for a whole ‘nother story.

2. To let other gay people of my generation know they weren’t alone. We all pretty much went through it. Some had it lots worse than I did, some much better. We were all damaged, but we survived. We should be proud of that.
3. To show heterosexual adults, in a mostly humorous way, how it was to be a gay teenager back when gay folk basically got static from Every direction in the popular culture, and hopefully show them that the world really needs to give gay kids a break. We go through all the same stages of first love and first heartbreak everyone else does, but with the added torment of all the cheapshit bar stool prejudices, plus all the myths, lies and superstitions of the pulpit thumpers. It isn’t fair. What should be one of this life’s most magical wonderful times, the discovery of love and desire, gets turned into a long drawn out nightmare so some righteous creeps can make their stepping stones to heaven out of our hopes and dreams.
4. To let gay kids today know what the struggle was like back when we were kids ourselves. The horrible sex ed class I sat through wasn’t anything out of the ordinary back then. What I was taught was what most people blindly believed about us. I’m planning on concluding this story by imploring the generations to come to delve into our history and keep fighting, or for certain the bigots will bring it all back down on us again.
5. To tell my side of the story.

That’s it. I’ve begun work on episode 37. This little story arc has three more episodes, then the story comes to it’s main climax/conclusion after than. Maybe another year working on it and it’s done. To give you an idea of how hard it’s been to get this out of me, I had the current episode completely scripted back in 2005 and it finally appears here with only minor changes to the dialogue. I have the rest of it done too, except for the very last episode. I’m still thinking about how to end it.

Having a bout of vivid strange dreams here in the Golden State…

A couple nights ago (early morning actually…it’s when I usually have my most vivid dreams) I dreamt I was a student again, this time in a small private college. There was just one large, long, oldish red brick building with tall windows and a huge grassy courtyard in front. 

I was taking some sort of business accounting course, and failing miserably at it. My usual approach to class time was to hide the fact that I just wasn’t absorbing the material by parroting what the professor, who was also the college headmaster, said in his lectures. But I understood none of it and I was sure that was going to catch up with me soon. I was feeling intensely guilty the whole time for faking it and I finally just admitted to the professor that I was out of my depth and I wasn’t going to continue with it anymore because I hated myself for faking it.

And instead of working on the problems we’d been assigned, I began to draw. The professor came over to my desk, looked at my drawings, said I should keep doing that instead of the business course I was in, and assigned me some art projects. Then he said his college needed to offer art classes and wondered why he hadn’t done that long ago.

That dream ended with my feeling intensely happy about the change in direction.

This morning I dreamt I was producing a crime/mystery movie for Alfred Hitchcock with Cary Grant in it. I’d assembled something like a pre pre pre production proof of concept around the script but instead of doing a bunch of storyboards I used clips from other movies and voice overs to give a sense of what a film based on that script might look like. It was just to get approval from Hitchcock to spend the money to continue with it.

In the movie, Grant is supposed to play an investigator with a major power company, assigned to investigate what appears to be a huge theft of power and money from the company. But it gets dicy. The powers that be think this guy can be duped into believing the whole thing is just a big mistake and there is no theft, when in fact it’s a huge cover up of missing millions and power being diverted for secret organized crime activity and the board of directors is party to all it it in exchange for kickbacks. But the FBI is getting suspicious and they need this guy to give them a clean bill of health to maintain the cover up. Unfortunately he won’t, and the pressure on him gets…dangerous. 

Hitchcock comes into his office, obviously dog tired from exercise. I come in and I can see he’s already busy on the phone and I apologise profusely but tell him I’ve finished with the movie. He misunderstands…it’s only that proof of concept I’ve finished…and tells me to get a screening ready for the investors.

I leave the office appalled, pretty sure that we didn’t want to be showing this proof of concept to the investors. And we didn’t actually have Grant on board yet. But I’m told yes, that’s exactly what Hitchcock wants, and I need to get Grant on board.

The dream ends as I’m describing the script to Grant, and he’s saying no, it’s just like North by Northwest again and he’s been there done that, and I’m telling him no, it’s not really like that because he’s not playing someone dragged into it by mistaken identity, he’s deliberately involving himself because it’s his job, but he’s playing someone who is determined to get to the bottom of things, because that’s his job after all, against a lot of very powerful people, some of whom are his bosses, just as determined to stop him from doing that but without alerting the feds that there really is a big crime going on.

I wake up while carefully going over the differences between our script and North by Northwest with Grant, who remains skeptical.

Wherein Left and Right brains have a no meeting of the mind…

I can laugh about all this now, all these years later. But it was no joke while it was happening. I can make the various parts of my consciousness embody as cartoon characters and get playful with it (cartooning is Fun)…and I was a Lot luckier than most of my generational gay peers…but this is pretty much how it went for a while.

I was in love…it was wonderful. And it was alarming. I thought I was above all that mushy love stuff. And then it happened to me. And in that moment I understood why all that dating and mating stuff didn’t appeal to me.

I was never shown a wholesome same sex romance, never told that it was possible.

I wasn’t quite ready to face it. For years I was in denial. And then I got shoved into it. This is why I can really relate to the Cupid in Rick Riordan’s novel, House of Hades…and to Nico in that moment…

“Stop t!” Nico yelled. “It’s me you want. Leave him alone!”

Jason’s ears rang. He was dizzy from getting smacked around. His mouth tasted like limestone dust. He didn’t understand why Nico would think of himself as the main target, but Cupid seemed to agree.

Poor Nico di Angelo. The god’s voice was tinged with disappointment. Do you know what you want, much less what I want? My beloved Psyche risked everything in the name of Love. It was the only way for her to atone for her lack of faith. And you – what have you risked in my name?

“I’ve been to Tartarus and back,” Nico snarled. “You don’t scare me.”

I scare you very, very much. Face me. Be honest.

Really could have benefitted from having those books back then…but it was 1971.

A Coming Out Story – Episode 37, Here.