I have the book by Peter Wildeblood, who was caught up in this scandal and sent to prison for 18 months hard labor for “conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons”…or in other words, being a homosexual and having an affair with another man. This was Britain in 1954…about a year after I was born here in the United States where things weren’t much better.

This is from the Wikipedia entry on Peter Wildeblood:

In the summer of 1952, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu had offered Wildeblood the use of a beach hut near his country estate. Wildeblood brought with him two young RAF servicemen: his lover Edward McNally, and John Reynolds. The foursome were joined by Montagu’s cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers. At the subsequent trial, the two airmen turned Queen’s Evidence, and claimed there had been dancing and “abandoned behaviour” at the gathering. Wildeblood said it had in fact been “extremely dull”. Montagu claims that it was all remarkably innocent, saying: “We had some drinks, we danced, we kissed, that’s all.” Letters from Wildeblood and Montagu to McNally, a serviceman and John Reynolds were found by the RAF. They were thus offered immunity as they agreed to turn evidence against Montagu, Pitt-Rivers and Wildeblood.

The atmosphere of the 1950s regarding homosexuality was repressive; some called this period a witch-hunt. The Montagu trial followed a number of other cases in the press, including that of Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Labour MP Bill Field, writer Rupert Croft-Cooke and actor John Gielgud. It is in this context that around 1,000 men were imprisoned each year in Britain amid widespread police repression of homosexuals.

But the case against Wildeblood attracted public attention against the law as it stood, and Wildeblood was not shy about speaking out about being homosexual, and what was done to him in the name of the law.

The verdict divided opinion and led to an inquiry resulting in the Wolfenden Report, which in 1957 recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK.

Wildeblood’s testimony to the Wolfenden committee was influential on its recommendations. The committee was set up during the prison sentence of Peter Wildeblood in order to investigate the law regarding homosexuality and to give advice and recommendations for reform if need be. Setting up the committee was made possible thanks to increased public attention about homosexuality generated by this and other cases. Peter Wildeblood thus made a great contribution to legal reform, by providing evidence and arguments for the debate in the House of Lords where the law to decriminalise homosexuality was passed in October 1965. Peter Wildeblood was the only openly gay witness to be interviewed and his book Against the Law served as a passionate account of the case and the need for reform.

Which is a perfect example of how gay visibility helps us make progress.

I’m reading Wildeblood’s book Against The Law, but it is slow going because it takes you back to a really bad time, and I have to read it in small doses.

Foghorn Leghorn often said it best…

That girl is about as sharp as a sack of wet mice

That boy is about as sharp as a bowling ball

I say, that boy is playing with a full deck alright, he’s just really slow at shuffling.

Boy, I say, boy, you are as useless as a back pocket on a T-shirt!

But Walter Olson on Facebook posted a few international ones I’m going to add to my collection.

Venezuela: Intelligence is chasing them, but they are faster.

Swedish: The wheel is spinning but the hamster is dead.

Also Swedish: Missing a straw for the broom.

Korian: Is your head a decoration?

And then this from LBJ: He couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.

I think I get better now, why Vivian Maier didn’t show her photography to anyone, died alone and unknown, and her work was very nearly lost forever. She probably did show it to a few close people and when they shrugged it off she stopped showing it to anyone, but she couldn’t stop doing it because she was an artist and had that need.

You wonder how much art has been lost to us. Mine will probably vanish after I’m gone. Not that I’ll know it. Every time I have reached out and got the shrug it’s felt like a knife to the gut, but you don’t ever say so because nobody wants to hear that. Eventually you just get beaten down. When it makes you stop creating altogether then you know you’re finished.

Way too cute for my own good college age guy behind the counter at the camera store in San Luis Obispo when I went there looking for red filters for my Canon F1n and Miranda Sensorex. Even worse, he knew everything about my F1s and really liked that I had that Sensorex and we talked film photography all the while he was digging up filters. Or trying to.

Searching for parts for film cameras these days is a lot like browsing flea market tables. You find a camera store that stocks used equipment and asking about things like filters and lens caps quickly turns into a deep search through boxes and trays. But that’s how it is. I feel lucky there’s even a decent camera store nearby.

They didn’t have any to fit the 28mm lenses I had on those cameras, but instead of just throwing up his hands and telling me he couldn’t help me, this kid digs up a 62mm red filter and proposed finding me some step up rings for both lenses for that filter.

I liked the idea because I didn’t want to have to go online for the filters I wanted. You find any camera stores now that have stuff for film cameras and you want to support them so they stay in business. And this kid’s creative solution to the problem was appealing. I could tell he wasn’t just trying to sell me something, he was trying hard to help a fellow photographer. I mean…he just took one look at my cameras and we instantly clicked. So to speak.

Eventually the counter top between us filled up with step up/step down rings and he kept trying this and that combination until he found ones that worked for both cameras. All the while we kept talking photography and film cameras. While checking my F1n to make sure the step up rings weren’t causing any vignetting with the 28mm lens he looked confused momentarily, then we both realized I had installed a diopter on the viewfinder and his eyes, being still 20/20, couldn’t quite focus with that in place. He was super impressed that I’d managed to find a genuine Canon diopter. I told him I’d got that camera body long enough ago that parts for it weren’t so hard to find, but I still had to look hard for diopters.

Then he realized the Canon F1 I had with me was an F1n…the slight improvement over the original F1, which he had one of and loved. I think my heart skipped a beat right just then. I remarked about how one tiny but very nice improvement over the original was the battery check button position was spring loaded so you couldn’t accidentally leave the battery check on and drain the battery. He emphatically agreed and wondered why they’d not done that on the first generation F1s.

I showed him some of my shots of Monument Valley as a way of explaining why I like to work in black and white with a red filter. He loved them, told me what he liked most about them, and about the film he likes to use that gets him similar results. And it really cheered me up to see how another generation of film photographers was coming into their own.

I think a good rule of thumb now for film photographers is if you need supplies go find a college town nearby if possible. The kids there are into it. I often see Hopkins students at the camera store near where I live in Baltimore.

So many times I run into other middle age and older photographers and we start talking and it turns into a subtextual duel to see who the alpha photographer is (that happens with software developers too). This kid (yes I got his name but I won’t repeat it here) and I just started talking like a couple fellow countrymen. We had a perfect affinity, at least regarding our mutual love of photography. Made me feel very good.

And wishing I was 40 years younger so I could ask for his phone number, and could he take me someplace he knows where there are good photos to be had, and I’d bring my camera. And some film. And that red filter he just sold me.

Fifty-Four years ago…

December 15, 1971…sometime around twilight I took a walk from the apartment mom and I shared, up Parklawn Drive to Twinbrook Parkway, then across the railroad tracks and to Rockville Pike. I sat down on a curb near the Radio Shack and watched the twilight deepen over Congressional Plaza. A classmate I was madly crushing on, but could not admit to myself that I was crushing on, had put an arm across my shoulders as we walked together down a school hallway to a side exit where he always parked his little motorcycle, and given me a quick little squeeze, and my head went into the stratosphere and I’d been walking on air ever since. I was watching the colors in the sky deepen, but all I could see was his face, and all I could think about was how it felt to have his arm around me.

Eventually I could think it: I’m in love. And then I could think the rest of it and not be afraid or ashamed, because nothing had ever felt so wonderful. And from that moment on I was never afraid or ashamed. Life was better than I’d ever thought possible.

It didn’t last. He left the country the following summer for parts unknown. A classmate told me he probably went back to Germany which surprised me because he always led me to believe he was a Brazilian. It wasn’t until many years later I found him again and we reconnected briefly. I should tell the rest of this story at some point.

I need to make this point first: I had it good. I had it very good. Compared to other kids I had it golden. Mom loved me, I never doubted that. But there were others on her side of my family tree who would have been happy if I’d never been born. Not all of them…I need to emphasize that too…but enough of them that I felt the static over being my father’s son all the time I was growing up. Here’s the thing: you grow up in these situations others might consider strange and it doesn’t seem strange to you at all. It seems normal. Because for you it is normal. I didn’t get to meet my dad until I was 15 and that had to be on the down low because otherwise mom’s family would go nuclear. Which…they eventually did anyway. But that was normal for me. Your mileage may vary.

Part of the reason I was able to handle my emerging sexual orientation as well as I did was I’d already accepted by then that there would be people in my life who would hate my guts for something I couldn’t help being, and which all by itself wasn’t anything for me to be ashamed of. But it left its mark all the same, and at age 72 I’m still picking out pieces of the scabs.

So if it seems strange for a guy my age to be completely taken by a series of books aimed mostly at teenagers and young adults, it’s because that background premise in those books of “Forbidden Children” and “Children Who Should Not Have Been Born” and its main character telling the gods at the end of the first series to recognize all their children from now on so no one ever feels unwanted again, really hits me in a very deep place where I didn’t expect the books to take me.

I started reading the Percy Jackson books when I saw the cover art pop up in one of my feeds for The Sun And The Star and realized looking at it that it was a story about a young same sex couple in some sort of fantasy/adventure story.

I have been devouring those kinds of stories ever since Mercedes Lackey wrote her Last Herald Mage books, as a way of vicariously having/reliving an adolescence reading boy meets boy, have adventures, win their battles, defeat the bad guys and fall in love stories I never had a chance to have growing up in the late 60s/early 70s. So I bought a copy and started reading, and then fell into Rick Riordan’s universe of forbidden demigod children, unknowingly born into world where they are misunderstood weird kid outcasts at best, targets for monsters at worst, and half their family tree is dysfunctional, and they have to fight for acceptance and find and defend their chosen family.

I was only able to get halfway through the first Harry Potter book before I got bored with it and put it down. It was at the quidditch match part and I put it down to my reliable allergy to watching sports, and bad memories of being forced into it in grade school. This was well before I saw her dark side online. At the time I thought I should at least try to finish it because it seemed like everyone was thoroughly enjoying the books and the story of an outsider kid growing up in a family that raised him in a little closet away from the world of his birthright should have appealed to me. But once I put it down I moved onto other things, and then later I saw her dark side. It was probably less traumatic for me than others since I’d already become bored with her world. In retrospect Rowling had all the tropes and the skill to use them better than most, but not enough to make them rise above themselves. It’s like the difference I found reading Zane Grey versus Louis L’Amour, or Tom Clancy versus Alistair MacLean.

Looking forward to watching the second season of Percy Jackson And The Olympians, and then season three where we finally get to meet a young Nico di Angelo. Alas at the rate they’re going it won’t be for another six years after than before we get to Nico’s fight with Cupid and it comes out he’s gay and he had a crush on Percy. Maybe in seven years Disney Corp will have enough backbone to actually tell its audience that no kid should ever feel unwanted again.

Even if they’re gay and their father is Hades.

[Edited a tad…]

I took a wee trip to Disneyland and now I’m back at my brother’s house. He lives about two miles from the Amtrak station at Grover Beach. There are two trains that run up and down the coast regularly from there. The Very Nice Coast Starlight which runs from Seattle to San Diego, and the Pacific Surfliner which runs from San Luis Obispo to San Diego. Both stop at Los Angeles Union Station and I have traveled on both of them to and from there, but only the Surfliner stops in Anaheim. The biggest problem with the Surfliner is I have to catch it in both directions at an ungodly hour. This time instead of asking my brother to get up at 5:30am to take me to the station I rented a room at a nearby motel I could walk it from. But I still had to be up by 5:30am just to make sure I got dressed and ready to walk to the station before the train got there. In Anaheim I have to cross my fingers that a ride share will pick me up at 5am from a hotel near Disneyland to get me to the station. Which means I need to be up sometime after 4am to dress and make sure I’ve packed everything.

It’s about a six hour ride on the Pacific Surfliner from Anaheim to Grover Beach, and a large segment of that around Vandenberg is kinda boring if you’re not on the ocean side of the train, until you catch sight of the launch facilities there. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of lumpy treeless hills and no cellular data signal for about an hour and a half. I was wishing I’d brought a book along.

A situation at work has been super stressing me out since I got here and I’m going to try one more time to find a resolution to it, otherwise I’m going to need to disappear into my vacation for the rest of the trip and take whatever static I get out of it. I won’t go into details other than remark quietly under my breath that I am ready to retire again. One heart attack and an ablation later I am not up for a lot of stress anymore.

I got not very much relaxation out of my Disney visit, and maybe a big part of that was how crowded the parks were. Also that notification that I had a fifteen hundred dollar hospital bill waiting for me that I wasn’t expecting. But I should consider myself lucky health expenses wise. I asked if it was another out of network doctor trying to gouge me (this has happened before) and the hospital said no it wasn’t a doctor charge but a hospital charge. I’m still going to run it my my health insurer.

My Disney visit was good…I adore California Adventure…but I am still just as stressed as I was before I went. On the other hand…I’m back in California…so there’s that.

Made my usual Back In California visit to an IN-N-OUT burger joint to see if the burgers and fries as still as deathly bland as I remember.

Yeah…same old same old completely tasteless food. Especially the fries. How hard to you have to work to make fries taste like nothing? Why this chain is so popular out here I will never know.

Milkshake was pretty good though. They will need to work on that.

On the left of Nico is (I think) Persephone, and on the right is dad (Hades).

I’m back in California and the ancestral Garrett Family homeland for the month of December. Neighbors, the alarm company, and all the remote gizmos I’ve installed are watching the house for me. During the winter and summer months it’s really nice to be able to remotely monitor the house and control the thermostat. 

I took the train this trip. Probably after I retire for the second time, and have more free time to myself, I might do more road trips out to here, but the other side of that coin is the political situation and my Maryland license tags might make that somewhat dicey if I have to go through places like Texas and Oklahoma. Plus ICE on the roads. I would never have believed when I was younger that someday I might need to have my passport with me when I go on a road trip.

Initially I was going to take the Amtrak Cardinal from Baltimore to Chicago, but I got bumped off it, despite having made my reservations many months ago. I didn’t get any notifications and only found out about it when I was double checking my ticket for departure time, and saw I was on the Acela not the Cardinal. That was confusing (the Acela doesn’t go to Chicago), so I looked closer and saw that the Acela was taking me to DC Union Station so I could connect with the Floridian.

The Cardinal is a small train with only one sleeper car and it only runs three days a week. The thinking among the Amtrak crew I talked to was they’d overbooked it and I, being a solitary traveler, was easy to bump. But Amtrak made it up to me. When they put me on the Floridian they gave me an upgrade to a full bedroom, and refunded me nearly 500 bucks. So…okay…not complaining about having to make an extra connection to DC Union Station. Also, the Floridian is a bigger train that takes a much quicker route to Chicago.

The snow storm in the midwest worried me. Last train ride back home the Southwest Chief had to turn around in Albuquerque due to a big snowstorm in Kansas and instead of getting to Chicago I went back to Los Angeles and back up the coast to my brother’s house. I didn’t want to get turned around back to Chicago because then I might just as well have gone back to Baltimore and cancelled my December visit altogether. But the weather cleared up quickly once out of Chicago and I made it all the way to Oceano with no trouble.

The three day three night train ride is a lot of fun…at least I think so. Provided of course you get at least a roomette. With a sleeper ticket you are a first class passenger and your meals in the dining car are included, and you get to use the first class lounges in the connecting Union Stations. (The one in Chicago is Super Nice!) One other nice thing about going to bed on a rocking moving train is I don’t have to worry about my self winding watch, winding down when I take it off for the night.

It’s nice to be back in the land of my birth, with family that gets me, Old Juan’s Cantina, and that lovely Pismo Beach to walk.