A quote by newly out Christian musician Jennifer Knapp scrolled by my screen a few moments ago. I’m going to quote the entire passage from the Christianity Today interview…
Q: So why come out of the closet, so to speak?
Knapp: I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios. As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith. It’s a hard notion. It will be a struggle for those who are in a spot that they have to choose between one or the other. The struggle I’ve been through—and I don’t know if I will ever be fully out of it—is feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.
[Emphasis mine…] The problem after all isn’t sex, it’s love. But asking people to acknowledge that same-sex couples love is precisely the problem. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… People sitting in the pews side-by-side with their gay neighbors aren’t asking them to choose between their love and their faith. When they look at same-sex couples they don’t see love at all…merely sex. They are “struggling with homosexuality”. The bedrock prejudice insists, absolutely insists, that is all there is to same-sex couples. Empty, barren, transient lust. Gay couples, as Orson Scott Card once said, are just playing dress-up…
“However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were…”
“They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes…”
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… There’s the problem. Look at it if you have the nerve. This isn’t about sex.
In the fight over same-sex marriage, it’s often argued that gay couples cannot rise to the level of marriage because they don’t produce children, and marriage is mostly about family life. But this argument is a sham. And it mirrors another sham argument often heard in conservative religious communities, that being homosexual is not a sin, only engaging in homosexual acts is. If only the homosexuals just didn’t have sex, they could be welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven too…just like the rest of us. But heterosexual couples, medically incapable of having sex, are as welcome to marriage as they are the Kingdom and nobody in either group is saying that same-sex couples can marry as long as they don’t have sex.
The heterosexual couple who stick together even if they are denied a sex life, are seen as vindicating the power of love. That is why sterility among heterosexuals is no barrier to marriage. But same-sex couples somehow defile the institute of marriage with their very presence, whether they bring children into it (via adoption) or not, whether they can have sex or not. And that is because homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
It’s not about children. It’s not about family life. It’s not even about heterosexuality. What homosexuals steal from people like Orson Scott Card is the idea that marriage is about love. All arguments to the contrary, what this fight is about, Exactly, is love, and who can be allowed to love and be loved, and who cannot. Marriage is love’s sanctuary, a sacred place where lovers can find shelter, protection, support. Letting homosexuals, who are incapable of love, into it, defiles that sanctuary, turning it from a sacred place into a brothel.
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be…In 1983, Sharon Kowalski suffered severe brain injuries in a motorcycle accident leaving her unable to care for herself. Her lover, Karen Thompson, with whom she had exchanged wedding bands and shared a house, had to fight a long and bitter legal battle with Kowalski’s parents, who refused to allow Thompson any contact at all with their daughter. When Sharon, with difficulty, typed her wishes to go back home with Karen on a keyboard provided by a doctor, her parents took the keyboard away. At one point, Donald Kowalski, Sharon’s father, asked a reporter in exasperated frustration “What does that woman want with my daughter…she’s in diapers!” For almost nine years Thompson fought it out in court with Kowalski’s parents, refusing to let the woman she loved be condemned to life in a nursing home where she would be kept isolated from the world outside and denied any therapy that would have allowed her to communicate her wishes to be taken back home to Karen. When she finally won, Donald Kowalski called her an animal.
What does that woman want with my daughter… A same-sex couple who cannot have sex would be, if unrepentant nonetheless, ineligible for the Kingdom, let alone marriage. It’s not about the Act, if not engaging in the Act makes no difference. Their crime is that they love, and love is not permitted to homosexuals.
We cannot be human beings, we must be animals. Not sinners in need of salvation, but scapegoats for other people’s sins. The right wing politician who goes hiking the Appalachian trail with his mistress while his wife and children wonder where the hell he went. The religious right preacher who gets caught visiting prostitutes. The conservative moralizer who gets caught gambling. Jennifer Knapp didn’t choose love over faith, but love over fame because there was no other way. Karen Thompson fought for nine years to free her beloved because their was no other way. The gay civil rights struggle is not a fight over scripture. It has nothing to do with faith. It is not about sex. It is a fight over the right, the essential human need, to love and be loved. Because love can overcome any obstacle, endure any hardship, hold on to any hope no matter how distant and faint. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to do is move mountains.
(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama’s latest overture to the homosexual community – an executive order directing his Health and Human Services Department to issue new federal rules on hospital visitation and medical decision-making – is a “solution in search of a problem,” one conservative activist said.
CNS, formerly the Conservative News Service, now going as the Cybercast News Service, is an arm of Right Wing activist L. Brent Bozell The Third’s Media Research Center. This is how they report news as it relates to gay and lesbian Americans: They interviewed some heterosexual hospital workers, a chaplain from the right wing Ave Maria School Of Law (Justice Scalia helped develop the school’s curriculum, and Clarence Thomas delivered its first annual Ave Maria Lecture), and Peter Sprigg of the anti-gay Family Research Council…
…all of whom say nobody ever discriminated against the gays to begin with:
The Rev. Michael Orsi, chaplain and research fellow in law and religion at Ave Marie School of Law in Florida, told CNSNews.com that his work with AIDS patients in a New York City hospital in the 1980s impressed upon him the need for sick people to have the support of people who love them.
…
“Whenever someone does a health care proxy, there is no stipulation that the person has to be a spouse of the opposite gender — or a spouse at all,” Orsi said. “So with a health care proxy, you can appoint anyone that you trust to make those decisions. And so there is no law prohibiting that.”
Oh really?
Sprigg, who made hospital visits in his previous work as a pastor, said he’s never known hospitals to interfere with visitors – regardless of whether the visitors were related to the patient or not.
“I just don’t think that this is a very common problem,” he said. “I think ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you just walk into the hospital, you walk into the person’s room. Nobody stops you. People talk about this issue — you would think there is airport level security surrounding hospitals in America. That’s just not true. The idea that you have to present ID or persuade them to let you in is just laughable,” Sprigg added.
Laughable. Actually…I think this is what Peter finds laughable…
President Obama issued a surprise memorandum Thursday night, April 15, calling for an end to discrimination against gays and lesbians by hospital visitation policies that limit visitors to immediate family members.
The timing for release of the memo was a little odd—at 7:29 p.m. while the president was onboard Air Force One enroute back to Washington from a day of events in Florida.
After signing the memorandum onboard Air Force One, the president then called Washington State resident Janice Langbehn to express his sympathy for the loss of her partner of 18 years, Lisa Pond.
Pond and Langbehn’s story was the subject of a profile last year in the New York Times, illustrating one of the urgent problems gay couples face because they cannot marry and because some entities still refuse to respect their relationships.
During a family vacation to Miami, Florida, in February 2007, Pond collapse with an aneurysm and was taken by ambulance to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s trauma center. When Langbehn and their three children arrived at the hospital, a hospital social worker said they would not be able to visit Pond, even though Langbehn and Pond had executed a health proxy and Langbehn had a friend fax the document to the hospital.
[Emphasis mine…] Yes…that’s real belly laugh that all right. And…oh look…here’s another moment of lighthearted hospital mirth…
On October 16, 2000, on a cross-country trip to visit family, Bill Flanigan’s partner Robert Daniel was admitted to the University of Maryland Hospital’s Shock Trauma Center with a serious illness. Despite the fact that Flanigan and Daniel were registered as domestic partners in California and that Flanigan had with him a Power of Attorney to make health care decisions for Daniel, hospital personnel prevented Flanigan from seeing his partner. Hospital staff told Flanigan that only “family” members were permitted to visit and that “partners” did not qualify. Flanigan was unable to consult with doctors or to tell surgeons of Daniel’s wish to forego life-prolonging measures such as a breathing tube. Several hours later, when Flanigan was finally allowed to visit, Daniel was no longer conscious, his eyes were taped shut and doctors had inserted a breathing tube. Daniel never regained consciousness and died three days later.
Daniel was terrified of having a tube stuck down his throat…and guess what happened. And he’d been put into restraints as well, probably because he tried to fight having the tube inserted. Laughable. Laughable.
Both Flanigan and Langbehn suffered the same fate in the courts: both hospitals argued that oh goodness they weren’t discriminating against homosexuals goodness no they were too busy taking care of Daniel and Pond to allow their loved ones into the room at the time and oh goodness it was just coincidence that in the case of Daniel they stopped being busy at the exact moment Daniel’s mother who goodness just happened to be his legal next of kin arrived. And the heterosexual juries bought it because goodness knows doctors need to be able to concentrate on doing their jobs not letting in visitors willy-nilly.
Discussing his opposition to the Uniting American Families Act — “which would allow gay Americans the same right straight Americans have to sponsor a foreign partner for citizenship” — Family Research Council Vice President Peter Sprigg recently offered rhetorical support for exporting gay men and women from America. “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society,” said Sprigg.
…would say that exporting homosexuals from hospitals is a good thing. Take it as a measure of how much the tide has turned against the hate factories that they can’t come right out and say the filthy homos should consider themselves lucky hospitals even treat them, and not turn them over to the police for prosecution under the sodomy laws.
But if you can’t make homosexuality disappear you can at least try to pretend anti-gay discrimination does not exist. And one way you do that is to not talk to any homosexuals about discrimination, in an ersatz news article about anti-gay discrimination.
I’m Sorry You Don’t Get Me. Now Here’s A Picture Of A Rabbit With Pancakes On Its Head.
I’m reading in The Advocate that another Jesus Music star has come out…Jennifer Knapp…who was apparently a “…million-record-selling, multiple-Dove-award winning Christian singer-songwriter.” when she walked away from it all amid rumors that she is a lesbian. And as I read her story, I read this…
Knapp no longer feels like being gay and being Christian are in opposition, even if others do. “I’m quite comfortable to live with parts of myself that don’t make sense to you,” she says.
Emphasis mine. She had to basically leave music and her country for a period of time in order to find this comfort, and more to the point, in order to have it knowing that some of what he was comfortable with would not make sense to some people, sometimes. She had to get away from practically everyone and everything to, as the saying goes, to find herself. But if the individual person is their own unique song, that song is not so much a Thing as a performance of many different instruments…some of which are older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone we humans let alone you.
We are amazing creations, each of us not only bearing our own history, but also the history of life on earth in our blood and bones, and sometimes in our deepest thoughts and feelings whether we’re aware of them or not. That we struggle sometimes to understand ourselves is probably the most understandable thing about is. One of the biggest ugliest crimes certain organized religions…and political movements…perpetrate is to set the parts of us that make us a whole human against themselves, so we end up tearing ourselves apart, after which they, the church or the party, offer to come inside and clean the mess up for us.
How convenient. And how convenient that they have to keep on doing it, because left to ourselves we mess everything up again. If there is such a thing as Sin, capital ‘S’, in this life, then to teach a kid to fear themselves, to hate themselves, to regard themselves as innately untrustworthy, must be a big one.
But it isn’t just organized religion and politics. It can start in childhood with the taunts about anything from being left-handed to having a strange accent or red hair or a favorite book or a particular skill at something. Anything about you can be a target for bullies, well meaning adults who just don’t get you, or uncomprehending friends who think this or that little thing about you is just…you know…Weird…
So you grow up mistrusting a part or parts of yourself. You hide them from view lest you get taunted again and the hurt returns. It isn’t just sexual orientation. I was a little bookworm in school and for years I got taunted as That Kid Who Uses Big Words. I loved to draw and paint and for a brief period I remember turning Everything I did in school into an art project, until the grief I caught for drawing on my test papers finally made me stop. One teacher wrote in my files (which I later saw) that Bruce “…takes excessive interest in personal art projects.” Probably she was trying to warn the other teachers down the road that they were dealing with a little fay boy who needed some toughening. I was good at figuring things out, especially technical things, and I was always wanting to share what I’d discovered with others, discovering in the process that others didn’t necessarily get it or even care. I was the Weird one.
The blessing in disguise was I had a personality that would have suffocated had I tried to conform anyway and that kept me from trying too hard. But over the years I have hidden things about myself in order to make friends and that’s always self defeating in the end. To make friends who accept you as you are, you need to be…well…As you Are.
As Knapp sings on “Inside,” the track from Letting Go that “I play when I get angry,” what Knapp fears the most is that “I know they’ll bury me / Before they hear the whole story.”
A lot of us come out of adolescence with parts of ourselves deeply buried. You eventually start reclaiming your inner self, stop being ashamed or embarrassed of things you really never needed to be ashamed or embarrassed about in the first place. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is being comfortable with those parts of yourself not making sense to others.
That’s what can take years. Decades even. Ask me how I know. I had an old and dear friend once lecture me when we were alone that being crazy is okay so long as I concealed it from the rest of the world. But I’m not crazy, I don’t think I even qualify as eccentric. Not by gay community standards at any rate. But crazy or not, I can’t be anything else but me. Well…I could pretend…but I won’t. Not anymore.
I’m quite comfortable to live with parts of myself that don’t make sense to you.
My sexual orientation, my geeky techno babble, my ability to just disappear into my head for hours at a time, my odd fascination with seemingly random objects in the world around me. All that Weird Stuff inside of me, is also part of all this…
Maybe this image says something to you. It did to me when I was standing in front of it with my camera. Now you have it too.
And…this…
I do this. And also…this…
“…takes excessive interest in personal art projects.” Whatever. She may just as well have written that I take excessive interest in electronics, in books, in the other boys.
It’s a struggle familiar to most gay people, even those who haven’t had to make room for sex and God, often uncomfortable bedfellows. Choosing to come out can still mean choosing away from family and friends who just can’t accept us as well as making institutions like marriage and parenthood exponentially more difficult to access. For Knapp, the process of bringing faith and sexuality into a coherent self required her to step away from her life and career in the U.S. The music that had spoken through her voice and hands became completely alienating. “I would think, I don’t even have a right to sing a song I wrote, because I am a hypocrite,” she says. Knapp spent her first three years as “a PlayStation guru,” and, when she tired of that, spent four years working at everything but music. She didn’t even pick up a guitar until her last year in Sydney. “I was building something new, starting something fresh,” she says. “I had to go someplace that would completely redefine my perspective of who I was in the universe.”
Coming out is, I have come to realize in my middle ages, not only an issue for gay people. A good slice of the human race have issues with being told they’re weird for various reasons. We’re encouraged to bury those parts of ourselves so that our neighbors in this life don’t have to deal with things that don’t make sense to them. And yet, all that weirdness inside of us is sometimes considered useful. Beautiful even…
Later that night Knapp plays a set to a full house at Manhattan’s City Winery.
I read this on Andrew Sullivan’s site just as I was composing this blog post last night. And serendipity it was…
Eric Barker recently referred me to this interesting study, which looked at how elementary school teachers perceived creativity in their students. While the teachers said they wanted creative kids in their classroom, they actually didn’t. In fact, when they were asked to rate their students on a variety of personality measures – the list included everything from “individualistic” to “risk-seeking” to “accepting of authority” – the traits mostly closely aligned with creative thinking were also closely associated with their “least favorite” students. As the researchers note, “Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity.”
This shouldn’t be too surprising: Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? How about a baby Gertrude Stein? Or a teenage Eminem?
Perfect! The little dears wouldn’t draw inside the lines and that makes teacher frown. But sometimes we make people smile too…
She follows old friend Derek Webb, a straight and happily married Christian artist, who plays “What Matters More,” a track off his recent album that is explicitly critical of antigay Christians. Knapp is less blunt, playing a mix of her Christian favorites and new songs that hew to themes of love and loss. She does include “Inside,” the song that broadcasts the fears and frustrations that lick around the edges of what is otherwise an exciting and joyful return to what Knapp does best. But as she closes the set, graciously telling the applauding crowd that the night’s schedule doesn’t allow an encore, it’s clear that no matter what happens next, Jennifer Knapp will be playing music
You have to let people be weirded out. You have to let them put you into whatever little box they have handy, that lets them quickly dismiss you, categorize you, calculate, number, index and catalog you. Some people just have to have their boxes. Just so long as you don’t put yourself into one. All those things that make you different from the others. It doesn’t matter they don’t understand. Just so long as you do. Or even if you don’t, that you’re comfortable with it. Better you don’t make sense to people sometimes, then you don’t make sense to yourself. Creativity and oddness just go hand in hand and you don’t want to wake up one day and realize you’ve buried everything inside of you that could have been grown wings and soared, that could have been beautiful, and now you can’t find it anymore.
How About A Day Of Keeping Your Hands Off The Altar Boys?
As usual, the upcoming Day Of Silence isn’t getting a warm reception everywhere. Like the California Catholic Daily for instance…
Keep your children home Pro-family groups urge parents to keep kids out of school on ‘Day of Silence’ (Editor’s Note: Some schools observe the “Day of Silence” on dates earlier or later than April 16. Parents should check with a particular school to determine if and when the observance is held there.)
TINLEY PARK, Ill. /Christian Newswire/ — On Friday, April 16, thousands of public schools around the country will permit students and teachers to refuse to speak during class during a political event sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) called the Day of Silence, which is intended to increase society’s affirmation of homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder. A national coalition of pro-family organizations is asking parents to call their children out of school on the Day of Silence if their school permits students and/or teachers to remain silent during class.
Under the guise of anti-bullying, GLSEN’s goal is to have all children come to believe that moral disapproval of homosexual acts constitutes bullying and hatred and to make it socially unacceptable to express their beliefs that homosexual acts are immoral and dangerous.
GLSEN is using publicly funded schools to promote its agenda.
Worried about the children are you?
Bullying gay kids, whether it’s done by other kids or by adults, is a form of child sexual abuse, and I can understand completely why that isn’t regarded as such a big deal in Ratzinger’s house. Every day is a day of silence for children who’ve been sexually abused in Ratzinger’s house…
I think part of the reason Glenn Beck’s 912 Project opts for the term “values” rather than “virtues” is because virtues take work. They require practice to acquire as habits.
This is not what the 912 Project is for. It is not a group or “movement” of people who have chosen to practice these 12 virtues in order to acquire them as habits. It is not a group that seeks to learn or to embody those virtues at all.
Look at that list again: Honesty, reverence, hope, thrift, humility, charity, sincerity, moderation, hard work, courage, personal responsibility, gratitude.
Does any of that characterize the agenda or the practice or the visible habit of Beck’s tea partying mobs? Were any of these virtues on display in the town-hall disruptions, in the angry marches or the signs carried under Beck’s “912” banner? Was there even a hint that these gatherings were composed of people even slightly interested in such virtues?
This is why Beck’s list of “12 values” can’t withstand comparison to the first similar-seeming list that comes to mind, the Boy Scout Law. The Boy Scouts of America isn’t my favorite organization as I’m not a fan of either homophobia nor vacuous civil religion, but I am a big fan of that Scout Law:
A Scout is: Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
Against such there is no law.
The 12 virtues listed there are at first glance quite similar to Beck’s, but the differences are telling. The Scout Law begins “A Scout is“…
Is verses waving them around like a damn flag. This is the single most telling thing about the culture warriors. They yap, yap, yap about Values…but they don’t ever act like they have any. And there’s a reason for that. Values are to them as weapons to wield against the Faceless Other…not things that actually sustain and guide. Values aren’t a part of your bedrock, they’re rhetorical tools to use as needed and discard like a Kleenex afterward.
Women who went to university consume more alcohol than their less-highly-educated counterparts, a major study has found.
You don’t say…
I have often wondered about the relationship of intelligence to recreational drug use…and let’s be serious here, alcohol and tobacco are merely legal ones. Sherlock Holmes did cocaine because his mind couldn’t stand being without a problem to solve. I’ll go down to my household bar and humidor whenever Mr. Logical…
…this guy, if you’ve been reading A Coming Out Story, becomes too much to deal with.
The only cocktail I know how to reliably mix is the “Blue Glow-tini” I first had at the Disney World Hollywood Studios 50s Prime Time Cafe’. I loved it so much I googled the recipe the instant I got home. On thing I love about watching Rachel Maddow is her occasional Cocktail spot. One of these days it’s going to motivate me into fixing up the art room bar a little nicer. Add a bar sink and under the bar fridge and ice machine. The disadvantage of having a brain is the world makes you want to drink, but at least having a brain lets you do it decently.
So I went to Key West a few weeks ago, for a little vacation with some friends. I love Key West. I absolutely love the climate (at least the winter climate…I hear the summer swelter is a bit much…). Even more, I love its laid back live and let live attitude. It’s a place where people go, creative people, intelligent people, non-conformists, go to live lives away from the mainland mainstream. The t-shirts on sale everywhere there celebrate sex, drinking, cigars, smuggling, toking, Harleys, growing old and not giving a damn, being poor and not giving a damn, drinking, drinking, and sex. Levittown it ain’t. It’s San Francisco and New Orleans but more laid back. It’s Taos but instead of mountains it’s surrounded by a beautiful turquoise tropical sea and never gets below freezing.
The old town part of the island shelters dozens of historical landmarks and structures with history going back to the first Americans, embracing pirates, salvagers, smugglers, shipwrecked settlers, writers, artists, actors and presidents. Hemingway, Truman, Hunter S. Thompson, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost and Thomas Edison called it home at one point or another. The locals call themselves Conchs and call their island home a nice little drinking place with a tourist problem.
In 1982 the U.S. Border Patrol put up a roadblock between Miami and Key West, and vehicles were searched for narcotics and illegals. The roadblock put a huge dent in tourism. The city council complained to the Feds and got nowhere. So Key West declared itself The Conch Republic, seceded from the Union, declared war on the United States (by way of the mayor breaking a loaf of stale Cuban bread over the head of someone dressed in a military uniform…), then immediately surrendered and asked for a billion dollars in foreign aid and war relief.
Well they didn’t get their billion, but the roadblock came down.
I love Key West. Ever since my first visit, I’ve thought often about moving there someday. I love its laid back, away from the mainland mainstream attitude. And it is a party town, at least around Duval Street. You practically can’t spit in any direction without hitting a bar, at least one of which, The Garden of Eden, is clothing optional. There are strip clubs, gay and straight and the dancers will walk over to customers to negotiate commerce, barely legal and possibly otherwise as well. A blind eye is turned to a lot of things as long as no one causes any trouble. For all its open sexuality and drinking, there is actually very little rowdiness.
You have to love a place where all this can be going on and yet it stays laid back about it all. I could love to live in a place like that. The ironic thing is, this trip to Key West really emphasized it for me that I am not that.
I have this love/hate relationship with my Baptist upbringing. Sometimes I feel like it made me grow up entirely too inhibited. Sometimes I am deeply grateful for it. There are values, moral values, I still hold to, and find ever more vital as I grow older, and see more and more of what a world without them looks like. Honesty. Prudence in ones financial matters. Earning your keep, and the trust of others. A regard for social justice, tempered by a little humility every now and then, when the urge to thump your pulpit strikes. But for every positive, I can find a negative.
I was never allowed to think of myself as beautiful or desirable. That was vanity and it was a deadly sin. Once when I was in my middle teens, mom, grandma, and a few other family members were at the beach. I had decided to wear the new swim suit I’d bought, which I knew might raise some eyebrows but I thought I’d dare it. It wasn’t terribly sexy by today’s standards, but it was colorful and showed my body off at a time when I definitely had one to show. I strolled out onto the beach with it feeling beautiful for one of the rare times in my life, and just loud enough for me to hear some of the folks made a few off color cracks about it…precisely aimed to embarrass the hell out of me. I must have blushed fifty shades of red and went back to the hotel. I never wore it again.
I’ve had trouble my entire life with being sexually inhibited, and it isn’t just the beating my psyche took being a gay adolescent. But there is inhibited, and there is reserved and it’s taken me the better part of adulthood to discover that my sexual reticence isn’t all the result of having the bible beaten over my head all throughout my childhood. It’s been like carving out a hunk of marble to find the shape within that is really me, and not the stone cast around me from an early age. I think I’m about down to it now, and swear I’d have thought the inner uninhibited me was a tad more footloose and fancy free then this. But…no.
My friends stayed in “Big Ruby’s”…a gay “clothing optional” bed and breakfast. I stayed at the Coco Palm, just around the corner. Let me tell you about that. Two of the guys I went down with are a couple. The other is a party kind of guy, and not to put too fine a point on it, he went down there for the sex. So this guy makes some arrangements for rooms at Big Ruby’s and the night before, he sends me an email asking if I wanted to share a room with him. I had a pretty good idea what he was going to be getting into down there and I didn’t want to be sharing a room with him if he was going to be bringing guys back to it. So I made a polite excuse…told him I’m an “only child” who always had his own room and I like my privacy…blah, blah, blah… The next day I learn he’d made arrangements for himself and my two friends at Big Ruby’s, but not me. So I guess “yes” was the right answer. But…NO.
In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t stay there. My two friends got themselves a nice apartment room with a kitchen that we all used as a headquarters. We used the kitchen for making lunch and sometimes dinner too, and we all relaxed around the pool during Big Ruby’s happy hour. Since I wasn’t a guest there I couldn’t drink their booze, but the landlord was fine with my bringing my own liquor and sharing with the others. And as I walked in and out of Big Ruby’s, I got an eyeful of the stuff going on there and sometimes it was embarrassing. They had a hot tub… Walking past it was a real challenge. Part of me would be deeply embarrassed while that damn logical/analytical part of my brain was absolutely fascinated, full of questions. Don’t they have lovers…???
I watched several naked guys rise from the hot tub at full attention and I was not only unaroused, but actually turned off by the whole thing, and I swear the thought crossed my mind right at that moment that maybe I’m not gay after all. Later I tried to think of a situation where I would be aroused. Immediately one came to mind, but it involved not a group of guys but one…one special one…just him and me in the tub all by ourselves. The plus side of having the high intensity imagination I do is I can make myself all hot and bothered pretty easily.
Yeah, I’m gay all right. Just not the kind of gay guy who goes for casual hooking up in the hot tub with a bunch of strangers regardless of how gorgeous they are. While reading John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley I came across this saying: Cold Feet, Warm Heart. At the age I read it I kinda thought I knew what it meant, but it took years of growing up and passing through adolescence to really understand it. Yeah. That’s me. Cold feet, warm heart.
So I wandered for a time amongst the party crowd at Key West, enjoying myself very much, but coming to an understanding, finally, that I am not that. I am a quiet little romantic, who feels suffocated wherever people have to stifle themselves in order to survive. I’m a shy little homebody looking for his soulmate, who despises people who impose particular gender and sexual roles on others. I’m a gay man who understands intimately well how conformity kills the soul. I’ve watched it happen. I will not willingly live in that world. Even if I could pass for normal in that environment…I couldn’t. But I am not that.
Tales Of The Snowpocalypse: How We All Just Try To Get Along And Get Through It…
I’m walking home from work…my first working day after last week’s torrential snow storms. The neighborhood looks mostly like this…
A lot of painstakingly shoveled out parking spots sprinkled between friggin’ huge piles where the snow got shoveled into. You can appreciate that people are a tad defensive of the spots they’ve cleared out.
So anyway…I’m walking back home through my little Baltimore rowhouse neighborhood. I come upon a big pickup truck parked in the middle of the street. There is an equally large linebacker type of a guy walking around a ratty old pickup truck parked in a spot next to it. He looks a tad…angry…
Me: Someone take your space?
He: Yeah…
Me: I think I’ve seen that truck around here before…
He: GODDAMN SONOFABITCH LIVES OVER THERE AND HE’S MOVING IT RIGHT NOW OR HE ISN’T GOING TO BE DRIVING IT ANYWHERE FOR A LONG, LONG TIME !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Me: Uh…well…good luck…
(Bruce continues walking down the street…)
Hopefully it was settled without any gunfire. I am Not moving my car until the last snowpile has melted. I’m just not.
The Third Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest…(Part 3!)
Well it’s almost time to wrap up this year’s contest! And I have to say, this year’s batch of embarrassingly sincere losers was the best ever. A sentiment that probably makes our year one and year two losers feel even more left in the dust. Every Valentine’s Day is a little more special then the last one, for that very reason.
But we have one last batch of also-rans to celebrate here…
Let’s all give this year’s losers a drink and some helpful advice about getting out more often and meeting people!
Coming next…the Winner! You might want to look away…
The Third Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest…(Part 2!)
Here’s another batch of worthy hopefuls whose dream of winning the big prize were torn to bits by cruel reality. What would Valentine’s Day be without that? Lots and lots of it in fact…
We have a couple more worthy contestants to keep twisting slowly, slowly in the wind a little while longer. But isn’t that desperately remote, almost laughable chance of success worth it? Who knows…maybe…just maybe…
Hahahaha… No. But like lemmings to a cliff they will try. And what would Valentine’s Day be without them?
The Third Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest…(Part 1!)
Well right off the bat we have four very worthy entries for our contest! These entries would have easily won top honors hadn’t there been others that completely dashed their hopes of glory and left them mere broken shells of their former selves. But isn’t that what Valentine’s Day is all about?
Let’s all give these hopeful loosers a friendly pat on the back and a very brief but sincere look of understanding…
More hopeful dreams will be dashed on the rocky shore of cold reality tomorrow…but we’ll keep them on the hook for a while longer, tossing and turning all night long hoping…hoping…knowing how futile their quest ultimately is, yet unable to completely let go of that little sliver of ridiculously wishful thinking. There is simply no other holiday in the calendar that speaks more about the human heart then Valentine’s Day. Unless it’s National Cut Off The Gas And Electricity To The Unemployed When The Temperature Is 20 Below Day.
And then…the winner gets the Valentine’s Day heart!
The Third Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest…
I was seriously considering skipping this year’s contest, on the basis that unfulfilled expectations are part of the fun too. Then a friend sent this extremely helpful link along…
What would Valentine’s Day be without an opportunity to mention the three-letter word that gets everyone so riled up? Yes, you guessed it–I’m talking about at a little S-E-X. So, let’s chat, shall we? Beyond being just one-heck-of-good-time, medical studies report that an active sex life contributes to a longer and more fulfilling life…
Well who needs a longer and more fulfilling life when you can join in the fun of The Third Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest!!!
Er…except you can’t. See…the deadline for new entries has already passed. Sorry. But that feeling of being left out of all the fun is actually Part Of The FUN!
Let’s start the fun by reviewing some worthy entries from past contests. These contestants gave it their all…which makes their failure to win the Big Prize its own very special Valentine’s Day win!
Here’s a couple fabulous losers from our First Annual Poster Contest…
And here’s some wonderful losers from the Second Annual Contest…
These exceptionally worthy contestants all received our very special Sorry But Your Best Is Not Good Enough consolation prize which can be redeemed at last call in any bar on Valentine’s Day for a pat on the back and an understanding look.
Our winners though, like the Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come, were truly one with the spirit of the holiday. Here’s our First Annual first place Winner!
Our Second Annual Contest resulted in a tie. Here’s one of the lucky winners…
This year’s crop of entries is clearly going to have to work hard to achieve glory. They are going to have to give it everything they’ve got and then some…only to fail miserably after having come oh-so-close. How many dazzlingly inevitable crashes and burns will we enjoy this year? I swear, this is better then watching democrats trying to pass a health care bill. So tomorrow…let the bleeding begin!
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