This is making the rounds on certain social media sites…

It’s a good reminder. More than one classmate from my past has surprised me by declining when I offered them a lovely German ice wine as a Christmas gift, and I was embarrassed for making assumptions, especially given my religious upbringing. I think the second time I did that really drove it home: Do not assume. 

People can have many reasons for not drinking. Maybe they’re on the wagon, maybe it’s a religious thing. Having been raised in a Yankee Baptist household, I can appreciate the religious reasons even if I don’t buy into it anymore. Skepticism regarding alcohol is a Good Thing actually. But as is said above, it’s not really any of my business why, and it’s good to keep it in mind during the holidays, especially as New Year approaches. 

I drink, but sparingly. I don’t seem to have the gene that makes beer taste good, and spirits, which I prefer, have always had an exaggerated effect on me. That was great when I was younger because it meant I didn’t have to spend a lot to get thoroughly toasted on good stuff which doesn’t come with a killer hangover. But as I got older it became tiresome. Literally. In my 60s two stiff drinks and I just want to go to sleep. I’m 70 now, and having more than one drink at a time, or one drink on consecutive days, makes me very fatigued. I might also get heart flutters.

I accept this and dole it out accordingly. The point being just because you know that someone partakes it doesn’t mean they’re up for it right then so don’t assume. Ask please, and don’t push it if I say no thanks. I may have already had my couple drinks for that week.

Sweet ice tea is Always acceptable.

Those of you who browse my website every now and then might notice a new link on the main page. It goes to the art gallery I’ve been meaning to put up for years now. This is a place for everything I do at the drafting table that isn’t a cartoon. It’s a gallery for my serious “pure art” artwork…stuff I do to express feelings I need to get out of me.

I don’t have any of my oil paintings up here yet, and not all of it is finished artwork. Some of what I’m putting up there are sketches I did leading up to a finished piece, some of it are pieces that I stopped working on for one reason or another, usually because I got stuck trying to figure out how to move forward with it: unfinished works that I might copy over to the iPad and finish digitally. I’m putting that up because I’m still proud of the work I did, but also because I want to give people an idea of how I work, and that there is no magic to it, just persistence.

The Art Gallery is Here.

Back when I was a teenager and big box department stores were a thing, I used to go shopping, mostly for LPs at the E.J. Korvette’s across Rockville Pike. It was classic suburban car culture retail, with a massive, and I mean Massive, parking lot surrounding a huge store that sold everything from lawn mowers to blue jeans to jewelry and watches to TVs. They had a legendary record department, and I would go there often to browse the movie and TV soundtrack titles. In their day they had a bigger soundtrack selection than anyone else.

I would also browse the book department. One day I saw this paperback title on the shelves and my jaw dropped, completely taken by surprise and completely embarrassed.

I don’t think I was more embarrassed by the Sticky Fingers album cover when I first laid eyes on it. I could not believe a book with thAT title was allowed on the shelves, even if I knew it was obviously not, could not possibly be about…er…those kinds of dicks. I picked it up and looked at the back cover blurb and saw that it was, yes, a collection of pulp detective stories, which I wasn’t much interested in at the time.

I briefly considered buying a copy as a joke. But I was probably still struggling with my emerging sexuality and didn’t want mom seeing it because she was already questioning my lack of interest in girls and my stash of 16 and Tiger Beat magazines.

Time passes, the universe expands, and along comes the Internet and email and social media and and smartphones and this cover became something of a running gag with me whenever the topic of sexting and dick pics came up. The little inner Baptist boy in me will in no way allow the grown up me to engage in online conversations like that. But the Mad Magazine inner tweenager in me loved joking about it with photos of Dick Tracy, Dick Nixon, Dick Clark, and this book cover.

Once, a certain someone down in Florida told me during one of our conversations not to be sending him any dick pics (I’ve often wondered later if he wasn’t actually trying to give me ideas) and I made the usual jokes back at him. Maybe that’s what started our downhill slide. My sense of humor often irritated him, which irritated me.

So when the other day a friend joked when I was bellyaching about Facebook unilaterally removing one of my posts, that I was posting too many dick pics, and I replied with the cover of this book. He laughed, I laughed. And then I began thinking about it more.

I never really got into hard core noir detective fiction but I have loved some of the movies in that genre. After watching and loving the 1975 Robert Mitchum version of Farewell My Lovely, I decided to pick up a random Raymond Chandler book…he was said to be the gold standard of detective noir…and see if I might want to read him.

At the Crown Books in Congressional Plaza I saw and picked up a copy of one of his novels, I forget now which one, and I Just Happened to flip it open to a scene in it where Marlow is roughing up a young homosexual for some information. Chandler writes that the kid tries to swing back but those little queer boys just don’t have the muscle or the skeletal hardness to put up much of a fight.

The contempt was just dripping off the page and I put it back, and never picked up another Raymond Chandler book. But I still love that film version of Farewell My Lovely. I even bought a copy of the soundtrack by David Shire, which set the tone for the movie perfectly.

But the book I often joked about still intrigued me for, perhaps, a different reason: it’s alleged pulp fiction roots. I have long been a big fan of a particular pulp fiction character: The Shadow. I have a bunch of paperbacks, written by Walter Gibson under the pen name Maxwell Grant, with those amazing pulp art covers.

The only other artist to do the character justice was Michael Kaluta in that amazing series of DC comics that are now collector’s items, and really every time he does the character…

The Shadow was the only pulp character I ever enjoyed reading. For some reason I never got into Doc Savage stories, although those are also said to be a gold standard in pulp fiction. But given how much I’ve enjoyed pulp stories about The Shadow I knew I could actually digest pulp fiction…it just had to be good pulp fiction. If that’s not a contradiction in terms.

So after Yet Another dick pics joke about that book I thought, let me actually try reading it. It’s an anthology so maybe I end up hating some of it, but liking others. So I did a little digging and came up with this hardbound first edition in like new condition, for not very much money.

I posted a version of this to my Facebook page, because most of my friends and classmates still don’t seem to get blogs. Now I wait to see if Facebook deletes this post too. Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of social media…hahahahaha…

My annual reminder of why the various faiths and secular peoples celebrate Solstice this time of year, under various names. Or as I wrote some years ago: …because a friend is uneasy about saying “Merry Christmas” this year. There was more to this post but I won’t repeat it because it’s irrelevant. However it began with a slam at Andrew Sullivan via Matthew Yglesias who noted that Sullivan seemed to think holiday cheer is a liberal conspiracy. Why not say “Happy Christmas” (it’s an anglicism apparently) Too much diversity. “Don’t despair. It will all be over soon enough.” Just shut up Andrew. There’s more to it than the trappings of any one religion. Something deeper, more ancient, and more reverent. Something perhaps only those of us in the high northern latitudes get to appreciate this time of year…

(The following is edited a tad from previous versions…)

The holidays have always been a semi-solitary time for me. Being an only child probably made the holidays in my house quieter then most. After present opening I basically sat on my hands the rest of the day. I was always told it was impolite to call up my friends to play. They were supposed to be spending Christmas with their families. So for me, the best day was always the day after Christmas, when all the neighborhood kids would get together and compare our loot. That’s still basically the way it is for me. I get together with friends and family before and after the holiday, but the day itself is my quiet time.

I am not a misanthrope, but a hate phoniness. I dislike advertising, intensely, and especially when that advertising takes something real and wonderful, like love and sex, and turns it into a gimmick to sell cheap junk no sane person would want in their house. Every year of my life I have watched the holidays become more and more commercial. But this one time of year I make an exception. I will never hate the Christmas trimmings, the Santa Clones, the plastic holly, shopping mall creches, plug in candles, and mass marketed holiday spirit. For this one time of the year I am willing to let it all in, and even relish in it.

I remember one Christmas day when I was a kid, while my folks prepared dinner, I walked way out past the apartments into a field by a small creek. I wandered further then I normally went and sat down by a big rock. It was cold, and gray and there were no other kids outside because they were all inside doing whatever they did with their families that day. There weren’t even any birds or animals that I could see. The temperature was something like in the teens and nothing moved. The only sound was the wind which was gusting very strongly through the trees; even when it wasn’t blowing in my face I could still hear it howling somewhere not far by, as though it was looking for something.

The trees surrounding me were bare wooden sticks held against a grey sky. Their fallen leaves on the ground had been compacted by several rains and at least one snowfall that had only partly disappeared. There were some ice patches left on the ground and the creek was frozen solid. I was a very slightly built little kid and even now being warm when I’m outside is something I take care about. I turned my face towards the sun and I couldn’t feel the slightest shred of heat.

I remember thinking that if I was a caveman who had never seen the likes of this before, I would be sure that the world was dying. I had a pretty good idea then of how the motion of the Earth worked to produce the seasons; I tried to block that knowledge out and think of what it would be like to experience winter without knowing, to watch everything get colder and colder until there was nothing left but the wind restlessly looking for something else that moved. I think I understood then why some people are such sourpusses, and why I wasn’t one of them.

Solstice are the most ancient of rites for a reason. I don’t mind the plastic lighted Santas or the relentless Christmas muzak in the shopping centers, or the wire reindeer with motorized heads. I don’t mind the relentless crowds of shop til you drop shoppers. I will even accept manufactured exuberance side by side with the heartfelt joy of total strangers this time of year. I walk among it all, drinking it in, taking time to find something, some little gift or card, to give to the ones who make my life sweet, even if it means wading through forests of vinyl pine. Tell yourself that it is tradition and all in good fun if you want, but it is really nothing less than an ancient reflex that arises when the earth grows cold and still and the sunlight wanes and you are surprised by how quickly the night comes, to be good to your neighbors, and tell the ones close to your heart that you love them, and blaze defiantly into the night.

One of which is the pleasures of walking here and there and happen chancing across someone you know.

I needed some groceries I could only get at the local organic food store, so I take a short walk there. On the way back I pass a guy who is looking at me so I give him a polite wave. Then I hear him say that he knows me and I turn and look more closely. I’m usually horrible with names but pretty good with faces and I recognise him as one of the STScI cafeteria staff from way back when.

He has apparently become a teacher in one of the local schools, encouraging his kids to believe that a life in the sciences is possible to them. He tells me they grow up thinking Baltimore isn’t the center of the universe, and he tells them actually, in one sense, it is. And he talks to them about working at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Hubble and James Webb. We chat for a while, and it’s clear we both have very fond memories of working at STScI.

That really perked me up.

This entry today in my website server logs comes from Hohhot, Nei Mongol, China, where Baidu, a Chinese AI company, seems to have pointed to my website with the following search string:

“Pornographic movies of little boys around the world”

What the hell!? Here’s their mission statement:

Our mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Founded in 2000 as a search engine platform, we were an early adopter of artificial intelligence in 2010 to make content discovery on the internet easier. We have also used “Baidu Brain,” our core AI technology engine, to develop new AI businesses. 

Today, Baidu is already a leading AI company with a strong Internet foundation. We are one of the very few companies in the world that offers a full AI stack, encompassing an infrastructure consists of AI chips, deep learning framework, core AI capabilities, such as natural language processing, knowledge graph, speech recognition, computer vision and augmented reality, as well as an open AI platform to facilitate wide application and use. We have put our leading AI capabilities into our products and services, as well as innovative use cases. 

So it looks like yet another AI scraper, but all they got was my blog link. I’ve no idea why that search string got them my blog but it’s disturbing. Also in a very dark way, amusing, given the puritanical nature of totalitarian states. When you suppress normal, wholesome, sexual expression in people what you usually end up with is a lot of broken sexuality, deranged sexual predation, and depravity. Orwell nailed why totalitarians like to suppress natural wholesome sex in this passage from 1984:

Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was: “When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. 

So why is it not surprising I’m getting searched for pornography from China? And the worst, most crudest predatory kind of pornography at that. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it coming from that direction. Also from Russia, Singapore, Indonesia, and certain eastern block and middle eastern countries.

There’s nothing porngraphic in my blog or anywhere else on my website, unless you think anything gay is by definition pornographic like homophobes do. So maybe that’s why they think I’ve got some of that here. I’m an openly gay man so of course I must be into that. That’s how bigots think.

I don’t do pornography, let alone child pornography which is evil. I do sexy, and in fact I’m working now on a new set of pages for this website to showcase my pure artwork, apart from the cartoons, only some of which will be beautiful sexy guys. I try to make those drawings playful and joyful. Sex is wonderful. Pornography is sexual junk food. Maybe having some every now and then is fine, but a steady diet of that stuff can’t possibly be good for the soul.

Maybe I should just block everything coming out of China…

Photo I pinched off one of the social media sites just now…

This is DeSantis talking to the voters. Notice anything about his boots?

Some would say he’s wearing lifts that are so extreme his toes aren’t even going inside the vamp let alone the toe. I would suggest that he doesn’t actually have feet. He has hooves. Cloven hooves.

When I posted a link to the final (ish) episode of A Coming Out Story to my Facebook page, with its simple title I Am, I figured I’d get some snark. And I did. But that’s okay, I’m giving some sideways snark back to a certain someone (Hi!) with that title.

I had no idea what to title that episode, and now that I’m doing them completely out of order it didn’t make any sense to give it a number either. The title came to me almost at the moment I finished it and I had to rename all my digital files to match it. But it was worth it because that’s the right title for that retelling of that particular moment in my life. There is power in embracing your personal truths, in deciding once and for all to be your authentic self, despite the pressure to conform or hide. It is exactly the right title for that episode.

The snark comes from a t-shirt I bought in Epcot Germany with just the phrase Ich Bin on the front of it. That was all. Not I Am German or I Am A Disneyphile, or I Am Whatever, but simply I Am. I liked it for the simple declaration of self truth, whatever that self truth might be.

During an interview, Stephan Fry said…

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

That’s a good way of looking at it, and it was sort-of what I was thinking when I bought that t-shirt with the words Ich Bin on it. I Am a gay man. I Am a software engineer. I Am a cartoonist. I Am a photographer. I Am Bruce Garrett. I Am.

So, happily, I wore it to my dinner at Biergarten reservation. And when that certain someone saw me arrive I pointed to the shirt, delighted to let him know that I’d learned a few German words and could even put them together into some sort of a sentence (if you’ve ever attempted German grammar you can appreciate how proud I was just then). “Ich Bin”, I said, pointing to the shirt, “I Am”.

And he gives me this look of pure disdain and says “The hilarious thing is you trying to teach me German.”

I wish I had a picture of the look on my face at that moment. But that was when I finally had to admit that we were probably never really very compatible.

What I am is what I am
Are you what you are or what?
What I am is what I am
Are you what you are or what?

I’ve uploaded the last(ish) episode of A Coming Out Story to its pages here. It wasn’t the last episode that I’d planned but it was always intended to be a critical turning point in the story and it works as an ending. 

I choose the subtitle of this cartoon story, The first person you come out to is yourself, to make it plain that this isn’t a story about coming out to family and friends. It’s about when you finally face up to it. That moment can be excruciatingly painful, and was mostly that for lots of us of my generation. But I got lucky in one critical way: I came out to myself by way of realizing I was in love. Probably that saved my life.

I began this story almost two decades ago. I didn’t expect it to take so long when I began the work, but I have no professional art training and everything I do at the drawing board is a struggle. Also, about a third of the way into it I was able to reconnect with “TK” after about thirty years of wondering what had happened to him, and that very seriously upended my feelings about the story I was telling. I began it as a way of trying to understand what had happened to me back in high school, and how that led to the adult I eventually became. Then after the heart attack a few years ago I began to seriously worry I might not ever finish it the way I wanted it finished. Then I turned 70 and felt my energy levels beginning to plummet. So I skipped ahead (again) to what I’d always intended to be a climatic point in the story, and now that I’ve uploaded what can be seen as the last episode, I can feel a bit more comfortable that, whatever happens to me age and health-wise, at least there is an end to my story. My readers won’t be left hanging. Somewhat. I know there is still the question of What Happened Next? I’ll get to that in the epilogue, but what I write below probably tells how it went.

I said at the very beginning that the story I was telling was one-third what happened to me, one-third artistic license, and one-third cartoon fantasy. This last (ish) episode is mostly what really happened, but with artistic license on the exact location. I didn’t say it to my mirror reflection in the dresser in my bedroom, but in the mirror in the bathroom.

What happened was, bearing in mind I had just come out to myself but the object of my affections hadn’t yet moved away so I wasn’t just then in the throws of grief. I tuned into a radio program on the subject of homosexuality. I wish I’d taken notes about what it was and who was being interviewed. But some alleged expert in the field was dispensing all the usual bullshit I’d already dismissed because I was in love and it was all so wonderful. But being the geek child I was I kept digging for information.

So I tuned into this program, and somewhere during the interview the expert was asked some question, I don’t remember what. But in reply he said (I still remember this part clearly) that “the worst thing a man could admit to is being a homosexual.”

And at that moment I could feel the closet trying to grab onto me and drag me in. I’d done enough research by then to see pretty clearly what the closet did to people and I swore I wouldn’t let that happen to me. But at the same time, in 1972, I also knew I couldn’t just be out with it without losing most of my friends, possibly getting kicked out of the house, and possibly getting my head bashed in.

But one thing I could do was acknowledge my own personal truth and deal with it as honorably and as best as I could given the world I lived in. So what you see in the episode is what I really did and said…apart from the location. I knew if I could do that then I could, somehow, navigate the rest.

And I was in love. It put things into perspective.

I know others had a very Very rough time of it. I was lucky that it hit me just that way, just at that point in my life. Yeah…in retrospect things could have been lots better, but they could also have been lots worse. I could have crushed on an abusive manipulative lout and ended up actually killing myself instead of just seriously considering it when “TK” and family suddenly left the country. He was actually a very decent person, and in a better world I could have taken him home to mom, and said “This is my boyfriend” and she’d have approved and made a place at the table for him. But neither one of us lived in that world and I reckon he had his own family issues to contend with. I suppose all that is grist for the epilogue when I get to it. The story of that one time I called his house because we’d agreed to go to Great Falls with our cameras is one that I can’t decide where to put just now.

Putting this episode up allows me to feel comfortable that the story of my coming out to myself is “complete” and I don’t have to worry about how much time I have left to finish it. There’s a bunch more I can add to it to the degree I have time to do that. But I can rest a bit easier now. My story has it’s ending. I actually scripted this episode almost two decades ago and it’s exactly as I wrote it back then. I’ll add an epilogue and then fill in some more of the story as time and energy permit.

There is lots more I had scripted, and I don’t intend to just scrap all that because I still think a lot of it is good material and worth having in the story. Especially where Left Brain confronts the gym teacher who taught that horrible sex-ed class, which is where I was leading things after episode 37 before I got really badly sick and decided I needed to put this “last” one up. So even though I’ve posted a “last” episode, don’t go away thinking there is no more. There’s lots more and I intend to keep on filling in the space between that first episode and this one. Also, there is an important epilogue I need to add after the “final” one.

So thank all of you who have stuck with me on this over the years. I deeply appreciate your repeat views. You helped give me the energy to keep on with it.

And…stay tuned…

At some point after I’ve finished with the next and final-ish episode of A Coming Out Story, I will need to set up a page and sub galleries for my stand alone artwork and sketches. Because all of that I’ve posted on my Facebook page is going away.

Disengaging from online commercial social media may have another benefit besides not having to endure the censor algorithms. Less time with my face in a smartphone app, more time at the drafting table.

The sketches above are for a cartoon I have been trying to get out of me for, no kidding, four years now. A lot of that is my struggling with how sexy to make it and still not go over the line into cheap thrills. I’ve drawn and re-drawn the frames in it many multiple times because I want it to be authentically what I meant without any ridiculous self-censorship. But when all is said and done it’s still my own personal take on a particular song, nobody else’s, and there’s a reason why the character of my libido in A Coming Out Story is wearing a fig leaf. “I’m your libido not Robert Crumb’s libido…“

If I’d grown up in a more sexually relaxed culture I probably wouldn’t be fighting with myself about this. Also…being raised in a Yankee Baptist household isn’t helping.

…you should too!

Got this charming notice from Facebook a few moments ago…

Like everyone else I know on Facebook who this has happened to recently, I have no idea what the hell they’re talking about. The notice helpfully declines to tell you what “content” it was that triggered the mindless algorithm and Facebook has also helpfully mucked up my activity log so I can’t check that. So I go scrolling back in my posts to see if I can remember anything I might have up up that got deleted. I still have no idea. Everything I remember posting is still there.

But I often put up random trivial happy little things now and then, including shares, that I might not now recall. It was easy with the smartphone app in a way that posting to my blog isn’t. So whenever I saw something online while I’m using my smartphone I’d “share” it o Facebook, just to give some online friends a smile.

That behavior stops now.

Facebook makes its money by selling your Facebook data to other businesses. In theory they let you opt out of that, and I’ve done as much of that as I can for now in their settings pages. But also I’ve deleted the apps from my iPhone and hopefully that prevents tracking. IOS has a setting you can use to block tracking from specific apps. Hopefully deleting the apps altogether takes care of it. They like they can use your smartphone to track you.

Old men like me are probably not a valuable source of data mining anyway. But to the degree I can, I’m going to try and be nothing to “Meta” anymore. Not going to delete my profile there just yet because I have too many dear old friends on the platform. That’s how they trap you of course. But all that happy little trivial stuff I used to put there for smiles and simple random pleasures isn’t happening anymore. That’s probably for the best since political data miners use that stuff to push disinformation at you and an election is coming.

Nearly all the younger friends I had there at one time or another have fled the platform for other online fields. Maybe they just got bored with all the older folks being on there. Or maybe something else about it creeped them out. Maybe I should have been paying more attention to that,

Reposted from Thanksgiving 2017…with a wee bit of editing…

(Note…this did not happen this Thanksgiving because I could not attend the yearly gathering…I caught a flu that I’m still getting over. But in all the digging into the homophobia of the 60s/70s for the upcoming episode of A Coming Out Story, I began to feel that suffocating old stereotype dragging me back to a time when most of us didn’t dare live our lives openly, even if we were fine with being gay. Then this post appeared in my Facebook memories (I will often post in both places) and I had to marvel once again at how the anti-gay industrial complex just Does Not Get Us. And I can just hear them saying Oh, but you’re a Good homosexual. No I’m not. Don’t you dare be putting me into that pigeonhole. I am not a Good homosexual. I am a proud homosexual.)

——-

“Gay Community” is an awkward term, but the language doesn’t seem to give us any other ones. We are people of a shared sexual orientation, and to a certain extent, a shared history of oppression. But there really isn’t all that much uniting us. Things you would expect such as marriage equality and protections from discrimination in employment, housing, and the marketplace, often generate a surprising amount of static among us. And running beneath it all like a hidden underground stream is how being hated, and being taught to hate ourselves, damages our capacity for sexual intimacy, trust, and love. And even that is not exactly a shared experience among us.

There is, and I am seeing more clearly with the passing of years, a distinct generational difference. Younglings living in a more accepting and affirming culture, having more and better, healthier, opportunities to date and discover love and desire in the ways heterosexual kids have for generations, are starting to look more and more like their heterosexual peers when talking about relationship issues. For a gay guy of my generation it is wonderful to witness. But then, inevitably, like snapping back out of a pleasant daydream, I must return to my own life, my own generation because that is where I am fixed in time and place, and where I reckon I will always belong. Among them is where I must find companionship, because only they understand me.

They know what the world was like when John Lennon was alive, and Hendrix was playing at the Fillmore, and Jefferson was Airplane. They know what America was like before Reagan. When music came on vinyl disks and telephones had wires and shopping centers had newsstands and bookstores and we were putting footsteps on the moon. They know me. Or so I would like to believe anyway.

But community is an awkward way of describing us and “family” is even more awkward. Yesterday I had Thanksgiving dinner with as much “family” here on the east coast as I have now and while the host was a good friend with a good heart whose company I thoroughly enjoy, most of the guests were gay guys of my generation, none of whom I really knew very well. A couple of them frequently drove the conversation into territory I found uncomfortable at best and distasteful mostly, and the rest just went gamely along and I kept my mouth shut.

A conversation was started about the first gay bar we’d ever been to, a thing I couldn’t specifically recall but I gave it my best shot: a piano bar called Friends, and later Windows. I can’t actually recall the first time I set foot in a gay bar…or any other sort of bar for that matter. When I was a toddler my maternal grandmother would walk me to the grocery store periodically, and every time we passed by a bar she would point at the door and say “the devil lives there” (yes grandma…and I’ll have what he’s having…) So never mind working up the nerve to enter a gay bar, my first step ever into a bar probably took a lot of nerve, but I don’t now recall it. I remember Friends though, because it was the only gay bar at the time I felt comfortable in. And there was a reason for that. But the topic quickly took off and others of the group took it and ran with it into the backrooms and toilets.

I tried to steer the conversation to When Did You First Come Out To Yourself. That generally went in the same direction. Eventually I made myself a drink and sat some distance from the others and just listened.

Understand…I don’t particularly care what sorts of sexual shenanigans people get themselves into. It’s not that important. In her biography (and I know I’ve quoted this often here on the blog so just bear with me…), the author Mary Renault is quoted as saying that politics like sex, is just a reflection of the person within, and if you’re mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what matters is you’re not the sort of person who behaves like that. People who talk at me that there is more to life than sex are missing it profoundly. Life…the life you live…and sex…the sex you have…is a reflection of the person within and it’s the person within that matters. It matters to me that you aren’t mean and selfish and cruel. The rest is detail.

But sometimes the detail can be bothersome all the same. And especially when you are in the company of others who either consistently don’t get yours or regard them as hangups you just need to get over. And that’s one of those generational things I was speaking to earlier. My generation of gay men, post Stonewall, came of age when the gay rights movement was taking to the streets, angrily, loudly, renouncing the suit and tie assimilationist tactics of the Mattachine Society. It went from Michael in The Boys In The Band lamenting If we could just not hate ourselves so much, practically overnight to No fuckers we aren’t just like you, and we don’t want any part of your straight sexist sex-negative society! Nuance is for reactionaries.

When I was a teenager, I fell in love, as teenagers will. It was wonderful. I wanted that feeling to last forever. I thought I’d found the person who could make that happen. But it didn’t. So I kept looking. And looking. And looking. And now I’m 64 and single and never had so much as a boyfriend let alone a spouse to have and to hold. And here I am on Thanksgiving day with a group of other mostly lonely old gay men listening to some of them talking about the time when a certain bathroom at the University of Maryland was a hookup spot, and random sex with strangers at this or that gay bar back in the day. There’s a reason I couldn’t contribute to any of those tales, but I’m broken in a different way, so don’t take any of this to mean I think I’m better than they are because I don’t.

Oscar Wilde once said that we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars. No, we are not all in the gutter. But some of us who are looking at the stars cannot help but notice all that darkness surrounding them. And that it is from that darkness we behold the stars. Some of us.

From my Facebook Memories today…

Young, very Very nice on the eyes guy follows me on Instagram. Messages me. Hi How are you doing? So I took a look at his profile. He just joined a day or so ago, posted three selfies, has five followers, and is following about six-hundred or so other guys. Lots of older gay guys like myself. Let me guess…

Hon, you’re stunningly beautiful. Extra especially that one shot with your shirt half off and those big frame nerd eyeglasses. Oh goodness… But I don’t think I’m the customer you’re looking for. Let me explain…

1) I’m what the kids these days call a “Demisexual”. Google it. Took me even longer to figure this part of myself out than that I like guys. Especially cute angel faced ones like you. If all there is for me is visual appeal, there ain’t nothing more going to happen except that maybe I keep stealing a glance or two.

2) I’m a heart patient. I’m on beta blockers. Think of beta blockers as the antimatter of Viagra. Yes, I am not entirely happy with this effect. No, I will not go into why. So even if I was amenable to capitalist relationships, it would be a waste of my money and your time. Which brings me to…

3) As well off financially as I am these days, I really don’t think I have the kind of income that would buy the time of someone as stunningly beautiful as yourself. Even if I was inclined toward capitalist relationships, which I am not (see 1), I could not afford the likes of you I’m pretty sure.

Best wishes in your business endeavors. I am not one to disparage your line of work. But I am thoroughly unsuited for any place in your little black book. I appreciate the interest. And the photos! Thank you! But you need to look elsewhere.

Wow…they weren’t kidding when they called Peter and Barbara’s book Growing Up Straight a veritable encyclopedia of homophobia. And yes, from what I’ve read of it so far it draws very heavily on the work of Irving Bieber (he of the Mothers Did It school). Every wee passage in the book where they take notice of others in the field who were beginning to realize that homosexuals were not necessarily mentally disturbed and that those mental issues homosexuals face could largely be laid at the feet of the profound social and legal stigmas they face, which the authors freely acknowledge, is dismissed with a wave of the hand to the effect that Bieber disagrees. A better title for the book might have been What Irving Bieber Told Us.

They practically catalog every aspect of the social stigma that homosexuals endured in that period, and then go on to assert that nearly all homosexuals wish they weren’t and would do practically anything to get free of it, as though one had nothing to do with the other. It is the central premise of the book: that homosexuality is a dangerous practice, that homosexuals are inwardly miserable, that adult homosexuals are desperate for a cure, and this is why it is essential that parents nip it in the bud.

There are case histories that I haven’t done much but glance over now, but in their dry yet voyeuristic tone they remind me of all the case histories I read back in the day. These are not people, they are homosexual tropes that only exist to serve the narrative. But that was all we had to see ourselves by in 1968. I still remember vividly when that curtain was lifted for me, and it wasn’t the Internet that did it. It was FidoNet.

To look at how FidoNet worked from the perspective of today is to be stunned at how primitive and rickety it all was. And yet in the early to mid 1980s it allowed me to witness something I never had before, after a kindly sysop gave me private access to a gay echoboard called “gaylink”: gay men talking about their lives to one another, unfiltered, unedited, simply chit chatting away in their own voices. And in that moment, all the case studies fell away.

They had to on first contact with the reality of our lives, because they were never meant to illuminate, to raise awareness of the people we are and the lives we lead. They were self serving stereotypes propped up to prove a point. You never saw any case studies that didn’t prove the point. There, in my first exposure to the authentic voices of other gay men, I saw many.

I’ve blogged before about the young teenager from the Netherlands who said he thought he might be gay and asked the group how they knew it about themselves, and how from all over the world the kid got coming out to yourself stories, the breadth and depth of which you never saw in the case studies. It was stunning. If the wonks of the ex-gay industrial complex seem perpetually bewildered and frustrated that few people take them seriously anymore this is why. They never really looked at us, only the scarecrows they made of us, and ever since the early 1980s we could see ourselves no matter where we lived, if we had a computer and a modem.

A couple links to critical reviews of Bieber below…

The Bieber study: A review revisited (Warren Throckmorton)

A Half-Century of Conflict Over Attempts to ‘Cure’ Gay People (Time Magazine February 12, 2015)