“That was Percy Faith and the 101 Strings playing Holiday In Cambodia, and you’re listening to WGAY, 99FM, Washington’s beautiful music station…”

I’ve been systematically removing my artwork from Facebook whenever a “Facebook Memory” presents it to me, because I’m disgusted with the way its automatic censor handles other people’s artwork, as well as mine at least once. But I think I’ll leave this Work In Progress note up…

…at least for another year maybe…and also put it here too…because I don’t have any other copies of this particular piece in progress. And I’m still very happy with how this one-off turned out. I called it The Rain, The Park, And Other Kids, riffing on one of the ultimate 60s songs by The Cowsills (The Partridge Family TV show band was modeled after them). The cartoon about growing up gay in a world that refuses to acknowledge that gay kids like you exist, and you end up mentally changing some pronouns as you’re listening to the radio, so you can imagine the songs are speaking to you too.

Because those teenage feelings are pretty universal…

It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.
-Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet

…but the world around you tells you that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. And there you are anyway…crushing on a classmate, listening to all the pop tunes about being in love, and on the one hand those songs are making your heart sigh, and on the other they’re telling you that your feelings aren’t real because you’re never in them. At best you maybe got a few gender neutral songs. Eventually you gravitate to female vocalists who could sing songs about being in love with a guy and nobody thought anything about it and you could imagine yourself into those songs. Stevie Nicks. Carole King. Carly Simon. Janis Ian singing At Seventeen.

I’m certain The Cowsills never intended anything like that about their gay and lesbian audience. They were just writing and singing songs about their own lives as artists do. It was the music industry, and the culture at large, that decreed back in the 1960s that songs about gay love and romance were unfit for the airwaves. That said, The Cowsills did do one song that hit me so hard I wore out several 45 rpm copies playing it over and over: In Need Of A Friend.

While I was working on this cartoon I decided to do something out of the ordinary for me and try to get it published. But it seemed then that nobody was doing a gay comics anthologie like the one Howard Cruse began a few decades ago. I asked Howard if he could point me to someone who was and he graciously gave me a pointer to someone I could ask. He would give me lots of encouragement on A Coming Out Story. But when I asked the person Howard pointed me to about submitting this one, they politely told me to go away (just self publish it). So I ended up putting it on my website that nobody reads. It’s okay…at least I got it out of me.

I have another one like it in the works, but it’s a struggle to get it out of me now. I just don’t have the energy I used to. And if I am honest, the interest. I haven’t touched my cameras or the film I still need to develop in almost a year either. Grant Snider, who is light years better than me at getting his stuff out there, has one with Dickens three ghosts, only they’re the ghosts of creativity. The last one, the Ghost Of Creativity Past, is telling him “Nobody will remember you unless you make something lasting.” I saw it just now, right before I saw this Facebook Memory, and it kinda hit me.

Fear of being forgotten is not why you make art of course. that’s just another way artists have of tormenting themselves. Social memory is a tricky thing and often what is remembered isn’t what actually was. But it would be nice if the artwork has a life after mine. Probably it won’t, and I’m getting too tired to make more.

I take a retrospective look at some of my stuff (there’s a bunch of it here on the website) and I see that I was actually pretty good at it. Then I regret not making more of it. But I had no focus, and dragging an emotional ball and chain around with you all the time doesn’t help. I needed a friend. A boyfriend. I never found one.

I did what I could.

The first thing to know is I am not calling out any one heterosexual person in particular in this post. Especially those I know personally. Mostly. You’re all good people. Mostly. This isn’t about you. Mostly

And the pulpit I’m thumping here probably only really applies to my own generation, and maybe a couple nearby ones. It’s not the 1950s/60s/70s/80s anymore. If you read the social media posts about this or that fictional same sex couple, or same sex celebrity couple, what you see is very heartwarming…

Fan art of Will Solice and Nico di Angelo, characters from
Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians

There is a lot of acceptance and friendship waiting for us out there now. The usual bellyaching by the usual suspects too of course…but anyway…

So…with that out of the way…

Long, long ago, in a Facebook far, far away, a straight friend I’d known since my teenage years finally signed up and friended me. I’d met him at a Jesus kids coffee hangout in the basement of the Rockville Baptist church mom and I used to go to. Back in the 70s, when coming out to Anyone was a risky business regardless of how safe you thought they were, he was one of the very few I felt safe coming out to. He was straight, but seemingly comfortable with the fact of my homosexuality. He just gave off that I’m cool about it vibe.

But it was an illusion. He was comfortable with me as long as he didn’t have to see or hear evidence of my sexual orientation. Which was easy because I had no love life. There was nothing for me to talk about. Much. But it was when he would talk about his current girlfriend, and I would try to talk about my own struggles trying and failing to find a boyfriend, that his discomfort would become apparent.

Instead of pressing it, I wrote it off as a learning experience for him, and I thought that eventually he’d figure it all out. After all, I was taught the same horrible myths, lies, and superstitions about homosexuals he was, that everyone in my generation was, and I reckoned he just needed some time to work through how wrong all of that was, because I was living evidence of how wrong all that was. Not that I was this straight acting lumberjack kind of guy…

I was a little art and techno geek. But we come in all kinds of flavors. I figured he’d eventually get that. But…no.

Before social media we hung out together lots. Then, shortly after he friended me on Facebook, he defriended me. When I asked him why he said he didn’t want to see any of that “gay stuff” on his Facebook page. I was sad and disappointed, but by then not completely surprised.

Nominally I probably appear to be pretty low key about my sexual orientation. Put it down to the times I grew up and came of age in, and also being raised in a Baptist household. Perhaps I should have been more…FABULOUS. But I am geek tribe gay, not fabulous peacock tribe. And that comes with some unexpected difficulties beyond knowing you will never be one of the cool kids and your clothes will never fit quite right.

I’ve been documenting in cartoon form my own coming out story. There’s a point in the story I Still haven’t got to yet, where I finally figure, rightly, that it changed nearly nothing, except now I better understood why I had no interest in dating girls. In retrospect, had I known guys could fall in love with other guys and it was okay, I would have been all about it. In fact it was crushing hard on a classmate that made me realize how it was with me. But in 1971/72 what we got was a torrent of contempt, loathing and outright hate thrown at us from all directions. That, and the horrible sex ed class I’d had in 9th grade ,made me believe I couldn’t possibly be One Of Those Queers. So when it hit me it came at me all of a sudden. I fell in love and it was wonderful. But thinking about it I realized it didn’t really change anything about me. Still a long haired awkward art/techno geek. And that’s okay.

So from that point on I just let the fact of my sexual orientation rest loosely on my shoulders. What I eventually came to understand was that mindset confused some of the people around me. I didn’t “act gay”. I found that entire gay acting/straight acting concept offensive. We are not the stereotypes we are often imagined to be, and regardless studies have shown that given enough time people will figure you out no matter how “straight acting” you are or make yourself. In one of those studies volunteers were shown photos of the faces of a bunch of men and asked to identify the homosexuals. The volunteers were accurate much beyond random chance.

It shows. Somehow. The people you think you’re hiding that part of yourself from either already know, or at least will figure it out pretty quickly. So just be yourself…however fabulous or unfabulous that might be.

I recall a job interview I had once that I thought was going well until I saw a sudden change of expression in the HR person’s face. It was something that I’d become familiar with by then, that sudden realization that the person they were talking to was a homosexual. And at that point I knew I wasn’t getting the job. But given that reaction it was for the best.

The only thing closeting yourself accomplishes is a kind of internal self destruction. I’ve seen it. I’ve sworn I’d never let it happen to me. But when you raise a gay boy in a Baptist household they tend to get a bit…well…reserved about that whole dating and mating thing. It just comes with the territory. And some people in my life misinterpret that.

Besides the Baptist reticence about sex (y’all know that old joke about why Baptists don’t dance…right?), the fact was I never had a love life to be loud and proud about anyway. If I’d had a boyfriend Everyone would have seen just how gay Bruce is…all the open declarations of love, all the PDAs, the unambiguous acknowledgment of a sexual relationship, the silly couples t-shirts (I love you / I know).

Oh there were the occasional political fashion statements…a lambda necklace here, a rainbow t-shirt there. For a few decades I did political cartoons on the subject of gay civil rights, but that was for a local gay community newspaper which none of my straight friends ever read…because why would they? Among them I was always open about my political beliefs, which included a rock solid belief in gay equality. But about my own sex life I said very little, because there was very little to say apart from being lonely, and gay or straight Nobody wants to hear you talk about being lonely.

I remember the sister of a friend telling me once, approvingly no less, that I was a “discreet homosexual.” I told her I’m single and it’s very easy to be discreet about your love life when you don’t have one. But I’m pretty sure that went right over her head.

So I wasn’t hiding that part of me, and I wasn’t trying to be discreet. But all the same a number of straight friends from back in the day, and one or two classmates I’d had since I was a teenage boy, suddenly became shocked, shocked, at what a militant homosexual I really am, when they read my blog or my social media posts.

What…didn’t you Know?

My bad I guess.

Here’s something I’ve said many times:

A militant homosexual is a homosexual who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual. A militant homosexual activist is a homosexual who acts like they don’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual.

That’s it. That is all there is to it. You don’t have to march. You don’t have to wave your pride flag. You don’t have to be loud and proud. You just need to have that There Is Nothing Wrong With Me mindset. Because with that comes a willingness to stand up for yourself…the same as anyone else would.

Let me repeat that: The Same As Anyone Else Would.

That’s all it takes. Just stand up for yourself and suddenly you are a militant homosexual.

In retrospect, the problem was that apart from my blog, which nobody reads (Hi…thanks for reading my blog btw!), and my artwork, which nobody sees…

…nobody ever really had to see that side of me because I had no boyfriend and no love life. It was as if…okay Bruce is gay, but only theoretically so I don’t really have to know it for a fact.

And then they catch a glimpse of it…maybe I’m gawking at some beautiful sexy guy that walks past, maybe it’s a casual remark correcting someone about some myth about gay male sexuality, or they read something I posted online, and suddenly it’s OMG Bruce Really Is Gay…and I get static. Which I don’t think I deserve, but in a way maybe I had it coming. Maybe I should have been louder about it all the time. But I’m not good at faking a loud personality. I’m not stage, I’m stage crew.

I like to think I have good manners. I might steal some glances at cute guys who happen by but I won’t be rude about it, even among other gay friends, although when among them I might point and raise a toast (something I’d probably also do if I was among heterosexual women). In a room full of males traditionally regarded as handsome I might not even glance at any of them, because my libido is so damn picky. But glance I will if I see a beautiful sexy guy and then it’s obvious. Like my jaw dropping obvious. That’s just how it hits me.

I remember a moment years ago…I was working as a mailrooom clerk for a data processing firm, and that afternoon we were all having a celebratory lunch at a nice restaurant. I was seated across from my supervisor and his deputy. A Very Cute waiter walked by and turned my head. When I turned it back to the table I caught the tail end of this short conversation…

Deputy: “What’s one step beyond a tendency?”

Supervisor: “I don’t know…actually being one?”

Then they see me looking back at them and they shut up. The very next day I got laid off.

Because I have never really had a love life, plus having that very picky libido, it probably made it a bit too easy for some of my straight friends and acquaintances to ignore the fact of my sexual orientation. Many times I have dug in my heels and been out with it when one of those sudden moments of truth hit me in the face. I’m intensely proud of those moments too. But apart from that I’m pretty low key I reckon.

So if you are new to my circle it may not seem obvious, but sooner or later you will have to deal with it. And then I get to see How you deal with it. What I’m finding is, generally, younger people deal with it very well, and that is very gratifying. There is hope for this poor angry world after all.

So that straight friend who I’d known since my teenage years that I met at a Jesus kids coffee hangout back in the 70s, called me the other week to ask about my maybe doing some video photography work for him. Then he asked if I’d seen the cat video he posted here on Facebook. So I went to look but he’d set it to friends only. I had to remind him that he defriended me and I couldn’t look at it.

So he messaged it to me. But didn’t change his mind about friending me again.

I’m fine with people I used to know keeping me at arm’s length as long as they’re fine with my keeping them at arm’s length too. I told him I was okay with doing some casual video photography work for him, largely because my photographic eye has been tightly closed since the trip to California, and I thought maybe that would pry it open a bit. But I never heard back. I’m okay with that too.

They say when someone tells you who they are, believe them. But also, when they tell you how close they’re willing to be, to the person you actually are, eventually you have to let them be that. The mistake I think a lot of us make is we keep reaching out long after it’s obviously pointless. Looking back on it, for decades while I thought I was teaching some of them that things they learned about homosexuals were almost all wrong, they probably thought they were teaching me to be discreet.

But I’m 70 years old now, and I’m tired of talking to brick walls.

If you get comfortable enough with someone that you were willing to let them into your heart, and they either bail when they see what’s in there, or just start keeping you at arm’s length, or Worse…being a friend only so long as you keep yourself closeted…just let them go.

Grieve about it if you need to. Then get on with your life. Your authentic life. The life you’ve already taken a lot of risks to live honestly.

They openly admit now, that the plan is to use the tools of democracy to destroy our democracy. But here’s the thing: only the tools of democracy can sustain democracy.

Resist. Not just fascism, not merely the tyrant, but also the beast within. When you fight fire with fire, everything burns. Defend democracy.

sig·na·ture /?si?n?CH?r,?si?n??CHo?or/
noun

1. a person’s name written in a distinctive way as a form of identification.

2. a distinctive pattern, product, or characteristic by which someone or something can be identified.

Or in other words…

This sweet little cartoon about a gay boy’s first crush was finally released to the public July 2017 and became an instant worldwide hit. It was shortlisted for the academy awards best animated short but of course it wasn’t even nominated because John Wayne was still rolling in his grave about Brokeback Mountain.

Go see it Here.

What struck me…as it always does…about the comments, how they were all divided between the oh cute oh how sweet oh how darling comments from (gratefully) so many heterosexual viewers who were in this day and age finally getting it how gay kids have crushes and fall in love too, just like everyone else…and then also the comments about why are you forcing sex onto kids. There was no sex at all in the cartoon…not even so much as a kiss. But the negative comments were all about sex.

And there it is. Or as Vito Russo once wrote:

It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.

The cartoon short was about a gay kid’s first crush. And it was like a Rorschach test for homophobia.

Some years ago when I began A Coming Out Story my intention was to do the artwork in the style of the old underground comix. It would be all ink line art with cross hatching instead of my usual charcoal shading. In addition to the object of my adolescent crush, Mom, and various friends whose names and faces I would change around a bit, I had a notion that my journey to sexual self discovery would also include three fantasy characters representing different aspects of my consciousness.

Left Brain and Right Brain would represent the art/spiritual versus the science/techno geek in me. Then, because this was a coming out story, there would be a character representing my libido. I visualized him as an unfailingly polite yet absolutely relentless nag who would be making me very anxious and irritated all through the story. Unlike the other two, who would only inhabit subconscious central, Libido would be able to interact with me in the real world, because he was a sudden pest whenever I least needed it.

And in the spirit of the underground comix I initially decided that he would embody as a naked version of me. Left Brain would embody as a stereotypical nerd with white business shirt, narrow tie and a pocket protector. Right Brain would be hippy child me with a flower in his long hair, a tie-dye t-shirt, bell bottoms and bare feet. But I figured Libido, because he represented my sexual self, had to be naked, just like nearly all my favorite underground cartoonists would sometimes represent themselves. To Hell with the comics code authority!

But as I began working out the first few episodes of the story, I kept feeling very uncomfortable about drawing myself naked. Let me see if I can illustrate that with a side story.

Back in sixth grade one day I arrived in class to see someone had written stuff on the big blackboard in the front of the classroom. It was some kids from the class ahead of us, who had gone on to Junior High (what they now call Middle School). They wrote a bunch of stuff on the blackboard to tell us what to expect because Junior High was a very different experience, according to them. Instead of just one classroom all day long, you went from this class room to that and each one taught a different subject. Also, there was no recess. But there was gym class.

My eyes came across the following verbiage: “Tell them not to worry about group showers, it’s no big deal.”

I could feel my jaw dropping. What?! WhAT??! WHAT!!!???

You might think a gay kid would be just delighted to shower naked with all the other boys, but I was in denial all the way to my senior year, and I never got past the embarrassment of showering with the others. I would just tune everything out. I love a good shower, especially after a lot of physical work. But I would just imagine I was the only one there and that got me through it.

And it’s a bit of a running joke in the story (and my life) about how mom and I would just avoid the subject of her boy’s emerging sexuality whenever it got dangerously close. To paraphrase Monty Python, are you embarrassed easily…I am…but don’t worry, it’s all part of growing up and being Baptist.

So there I am fretting about drawing my libido character as a naked me, but I felt I had to in order to respect the truth of my story, except it was too damn embarrassing to draw myself naked…but TRUTH…but…but…I just can’t do it…

..and then I realize…hey wait…that’s Truth. And I swear as soon as I thought that, the first four episodes of the story just immediately came to mind fully formed. And the punch line in that first episode is perfect; “I’m your libido, not Robert Crumb’s libido.” Yes…that.

And all this is a long drawn out way of saying that I’ve still been fussing with how to draw that cartoon riff on Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On” that I started about four years ago and couldn’t finish, because I couldn’t get comfortable with drawing the dancer in it naked but for the hat which they were told they could leave on. Last time I brought this cartoon up I said I was going to do it the way the song was written because TRUTH, instead of the way I started it which was to just let the dancer keep their tiny little briefs on. But no…TRUTH.

But I have my own truths to deal with, and this reticence about nudity and how to draw nudes is one of them. Maybe I’m a prude after all. Maybe this is what you get when you raise a gay boy in a Baptist household. But I dislike sexuality being turned into cheap push button entertainment and I would much rather be teased than doused with porn. Pornography is obvious. I like sensuality and romance, which is why porn never really did much for me. And there is a sweet sexy and romantic subtext that I see in that Randy Newman song. That is what I want to develop in the cartoon.

And I’m getting back to work on it because I think I see a way now, to respect the song’s truth and my own. An artist has to be faithful to their own truths or don’t even bother because it’s way too much work to be faking it.

Hoisted from today’s Facebook Memories…

On a “Worst First Date” challenge thread I see a story about a guy who met his date at the agreed upon restaurant and she never spoke a word the entire time, ate her food and left. Then he sees an earlier text message he missed from his date saying she couldn’t make it and could they reschedule, and now he’s wondering who it was he just fed.

I see a ghost story here…something along the lines of the trope about the hitch hiker or ride giving trucker who turns out to have been a ghost…but all this ghost does is eat your food and leave.

Oh…that was Eleanor, who died of starvation after waiting hours for the waiter to take her order…see, it was the shift change…oh yes, she’s a hungry one…

Why? Why on Earth?? When I have so many other things around the house that need doing.

So I’ve been doing some “downsizing” here at Casa del Garrett, mostly getting off of old computer manuals and documentation I will never need again (these go to recycling so at least the paper can have another life), plus some other items in my extensive (not kidding) library that I will probably never read again, and don’t seem likely to ever be reference material. I’m still trying to find a second hand book repository for these.

It began when I had to buy a new furnace/AC unit and had to move around a bunch of furniture for the contractors to work. That gave me an opportunity to clean in places that are otherwise hard to get at. In addition I had a duct cleaning done, which had probably not ever been done since the house was built, judging by what the duct cleaners found. So I had to move around a bunch of other furniture too. 

Before putting it all back, I decided to use the opportunity to do a little downsizing. The fact is I have too much Stuff. I’ve lived in this house since the summer of 2001, but moved into it with a lot of stuff I’d accumulated over the years. Much of that, like my hand and power tools, and all my spare parts, proved to be even more useful when owning a house than they were when I was living in apartments and the basement of friends. But I’d also managed to collect a pretty large library of books and LPs…a fact the movers probably didn’t appreciate since both are very heavy when boxed up. And I was already loaded with computer stuff, since I was by then making a living as a software engineer, which was what enabled me to buy a house of my own in the first place. And before that I was into computers partly as hobby, partly as a means of communicating over a modem. When I discovered modems and BBSs I dove into it. That led me to volunteering on a local gay BBS, and that led me to my first jobs writing software.

Which brings me to this. It’s an IBM PS2 Model 80…the top of the PS2 line once upon a time. My first big W-2 software gig was at Baltimore Gas and Electric Home Products and Services, which was an exclusively IBM worksite The big iron downtown was all IBM, and in the offices where I worked everything on the desktops was a PS2…usually a model 50. or 55. So when I came across this model 80 for sale at a computer flea market years later, I was already pretty familiar with them. 

Poor thing has just sat in my basement storage area for over a decade, beside an Apple PowerMac G5 I bought for the art room and eventually replaced with an Intel based Mac Pro. As I began deciding what to downsize around here, I looked at both of those computers and the space they were taking up. It seemed ridiculous to just be holding onto them when I knew I’d probably never need either one ever again. But I didn’t want to just take them to the city recycling place. This wasn’t like giving up an old VCR or TV…both those machines were the top of their lines back in the day. I knew some collector would want them both. But how to find them good homes? 

And the more I thought about the PS2, the more I remembered the days of DOS and how the advent of the personal computer seemed to open up fantastic new worlds…worlds which, surprisingly I found I could navigate pretty easily. I didn’t have a college degree in computer science and wasn’t likely to ever get one since I had no money for college. No matter in retrospect. Computer logic just seemed to click with me.

Long before that first job, and those first days volunteering at G.L.I.B. (The Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau) I discovered I could build my own IBM PC compatible from parts. There was no way I could afford an actual IBM PC, but I could buy a part here and a part there until I had all that I needed. I remember after I built that first IBM compatible and got it to boot, just sitting on the edge of my bed staring at the monitor with it’s 640k memory test still on the screen and an ‘A’ prompt (that first computer initially booted PC-DOS from a floppy disk) and looking at the blinking caret in something like awe. Until that moment my computer was a little Commodore C64. Now I had a Serious computer…and IBM no less. Well…a pretty good copy since it booted genuine PC-DOS, not the more generic MS-DOS. This was no toy. This was International Business Machines serious business. I sat there for I don’t know how long stunned at the awesome computing power I suddenly had at my control. What have I got myself into…

Well…what I’d got myself into, though I didn’t know it then, was a career that would pull me out of near poverty and eventually into the space program. Walt Disney was fond of saying his success story all began with a mouse. Well mine began with a boot to DOS. And I rode it all the way to the James Webb Space Telescope Mission Operations Center and Integration and Test Lab.

So that PS2 machine had more of my life wrapped up in it than the PowerMac by light years. I began to wonder if I could just find a place for it in my den where I could work on it again as a kind of hobby.

I tried booting it the other day and it threw a couple error codes that I needed to look up, but I was pretty sure what they were. The PS2s need a small internal battery to maintain their configuration memory and the one in mine had likely died many years ago. It’s a simple fix…replace the battery and boot with the configuration disk and restore your configuration. But while Googling the error codes I discovered there are hobbyists out there who love to work on these machines. And they know where you can get parts. So that notion of keeping the PS2 as a hobby became lots more attractive.

So I got it running again and I’m just going to let it run for now and see what I can make of it. See if I can give the PowerMac to a good home later. 

And try to get all my other stuff around the house done. I still have a lot of Stuff to sort through and decide what to get off of, and what to keep. It’s going to take weeks, but I’m 70, on retirement income, and I need to simplify.