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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Coming Out Story – Episode 37, Here.

I’m having a good time now finishing up episode 37 of A Coming Out Story (finally). It’s a good sign when I find myself laughing while I’m adding all the little details after the inks are done.

Speaking of which…I can really fuss over the smallest of lines, especially around mouths and eyes, because just a tiny change makes a Big difference in a facial expression. I’ve redrawn mouth and eyes dozens of times and you might think I’m not actually changing anything, but it’s that little difference that can make a scene work.

So just this morning I was working on one of the strips and noticed I could do something with one of the figure’s eyes that made a big difference in the running gag in this episode. It’s a dialogue between my left and right brain characters and the joke is right brain is completely blissed out and I just pasted the same drawing of him with a blissed out expression throughout the episode. But then I realized I could do something with his eyes in two of the panels that makes the moment in them hit the bullseye and it was so satisfying to see it happen on the screen while I was doing it.

Probably next to nobody will notice what specifically I did, but it makes the whole episode work Much better.

Like I did before, I’m adding the strips to the episode 37 page as I finish them, but no live link until it’s all done and I have a chance to look it all over. But those of you who can figure out how I was building the links to the individual episodes can go see it happening as I add the strips. Probably be finished in two or three days more.

Currently 56 degrees and sunny here in Oceano. I took a short camera walk around the neighborhood and you do get a bit heated in the direct sunlight, but not to the point that it gets uncomfortable. I’m back in my brother’s house now, working on a software project for him, and the next episode of A Coming Out Story.

This must be how my friends who live in warmer climates feel about teasing those of us who live where it freezes and snows. Oh, cold is it where you live? Yes, yes, I know just how you feel…I had to put a light jacket on just the other day! And here I am where it’s a bit chilly, but just a bit, and it seems like the rest of the country is baking, and I’m basking in the cool ocean breezes here.

I have a thermostat at home I can check and set remotely. Right now it’s telling me it’s 106 outside my house in Baltimore. Wow…

The southern hemisphere is really going to get it bad when their summer hits I think.

Downside to those cool ocean breezes is they come with beach sand and it dusts your car and you don’t dare just wipe it off because it’s hard little sand particles that will scratch your paint. You have to hose the car down and then make sure you dry it off so the hard water here doesn’t leave water stains which are nearly impossible to remove.

“But too much love is poison, especially when that love is not returned”

-Rick Riordan (author), The Blood of Olympus

Batman: I am the night.

Baine: You merely adopted the dark; I was born in it, moulded by it.

Nico di Angelo: I am the son of Hades. I go where I wish. The darkness is my birthright.

Ten points to house Hades.

I think it was something like 58-59 degrees when I took this off my brother’s balcony. 

I snapped up a copy of The Sun and The Star the moment I saw the cover art and looked at the synopsis…

…because at 69 I am still starving for stories of gay love and romance, and even though these books are aimed primarily at younger readers, I can still read them and maybe the gay teenager I once was will finally have the stories he needed to grow on. Also, it’s good to support authors that give gay kids stories to dream on.

The books are part of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series of young reader novels, and Nico and Will apparently start out as background characters who gained in popularity with the readers. They don’t start out as boyfriends, but by the time this book came out they had become a couple.

And I’ve been digging into the story arc of these two, and I see now that there is at least one book I need to read first, before I go onto this one. It’s the fourth book, The House of Hades. I think I should read this first, not only to get a better sense of the entire series and it’s characters, but also because there is a scene in it that, so it seems, really gets to the heart of the character Nico di Angelo, son of Hades, and his inner struggle. Nico, it seems, has had a very hard life, and the process of coming out to himself has only made it worse. It’s a scene where Nico has to confront the god Eros/Cupid to get an artifact they need.

“Nico, you can do this,” Jason said. “It might be embarrassing, but it’s for the scepter.” 

Nico didn’t look convinced. In fact he looked like he was going to be sick. But he squared his shoulders and nodded.

“You’re right. I -I’m not afraid of a love god.”

By this point in the series, Nico clearly has some sort of grudge against Percy. The thinking of the others is it might be because Nico has a crush on Percy’s girlfriend Annabeth. But it isn’t that. The crush he has is on Percy. Nico’s been dealing with it, and with what it tells him about himself, by withdrawing. 

Cupid taunts him mercilessly about his hiding himself from the others, and hiding from himself, over his crush on Percy and the fact of his sexual orientation. The god forces Nico to admit the crush he has on someone who could never love him back that way. There is fan art representing this scene, but in the book there’s a buildup to it that makes it even more powerful.

“Is this guy Love or Death”, Jason growled.

Ask your friends, Cupid said. Frank, Hazel, and Percy met my counterpart, Thanatos. We are not so different. Except Death is sometimes kinder.

This is not your Hallmark Cupid…

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

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

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

Wow. Just…wow… 

If this invisible guy was Love, Jason was beginning to think Love was overrated. He liked Piper’s version better – considerate, kind, and beautiful. Aphrodite he could understand.  Cupid seemed more like a thug, an enforcer.

Lots of us have probably met that Cupid at one time or another. Gay men of my generation especially. If you haven’t, consider yourself very, very lucky.

…since my last post here, I know.  I’ve been on a wee road trip to the ancient Garrett homelands in Oceano, California. It took me through the amber waves of grain, up to nearly the tree line in altitude on I-70 in the purple mountain majesties, through stunningly beautiful canyons and across the Utah/Nevada/California desert in the ongoing blistering heat wave. Car trouble was experienced and diagnosed at a Mercedes dealer in Utah, I was able to proceed to my brother’s house in Oceano, where I shall hopefully and shortly finally get the emission system recall done and give my car some detailing love at a local place that always does excellent work.

I’ll tell more about it later. But I just want to add that I’m not kidding about how hot it was going from Grand Junction almost to the California coast. You stepped out of your motel room or your air conditioned car and into a furnace. Then I get to Oceano and start unpacking the car and it’s in the high 60s and there’s lovely cool breeze and I might not go back home until there is snow on the ground in Maryland.

As I write this it’s sunny blue skies and 56 degrees here in Oceano. 

I’ve re-enabled Ex-Gay Watch on my blogroll and added Beyond Ex-Gay to it. I disabled (basically just commented out) Ex-Gay Watch after they shut down. Now they’re back because the darkness is roaring back. The link is a bit different so if you have it bookmarked use the one in my blogroll. I’ve added Beyond Ex-Gay after reading the last passages in Boy Erased and being horrified all over again at what was being done to so many young hearts.

Boy Erased…I finally got my way to the end of it the other day. Christ that was a difficult read…especially those last few pages where the kid curls up in a ball and has a breakdown in his mother’s car and she’s scared to death that he’s going to kill himself and finally decides he’s not going back to Love In Action.

The author of Boy Erased mentioned Beyond Ex-Gay at the end of his book and I realized I hadn’t added it to my blogroll, probably because it’s a private community of survivors and I am not a survivor of ex-gay therapy (just of the ongoing torrent of hate directed at all of us). But others can read the stories they’ve posted and I strongly recommend that to everyone who might be wondering if there isn’t something to it after all.

Yes there is. Evil. The worst kind of evil. The kind of evil that thinks itself righteous.

Facebook gives me memories. Today’s remind me that I was seeing trouble ahead just a couple years after I reconnected with him…

I remember this. We’d fallen into a pattern where I’d hang out for a bit after closing and he’d come over to my table and we’d chat for a bit. Some years later I worked up the courage to ask him why we couldn’t just hang out maybe on one of his days off and he told me straight up that wouldn’t happen because he’d made his allegiances and he had to stay inside his comfort zone. So those little after hours chats were all I ever had with him. And almost right away I began to see a darkness within that stunned me. In my hopelessly twitterpated state that was the last thing I expected to see.

It really shook me…

All those years after high school I’d put him up on a pedestal in my memories, and then thirty years later, with that much more life under my belt, I saw the person. And I saw what the world had done to him. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen that before. By that time I’d already been years working with others in my tribe fighting against ex-gay therapy cults like Love In Action and Exodus and I’d listened to the stories of people who’d been put through all that firsthand. It made me angry and it made me determined, but it was easy for me to keep the hurt tucked safely in a place far away from my own personal life. I had escaped all that through luck and my innate stubbornness. But I hadn’t really. I glimpsed it that day and it stunned me and there it was, tapping me on the shoulder, letting me know that none of us escaped being damaged by that torrent of hate we all had to live under. There I was, out and proud and unashamed and willing to take the hits I had to take to live an honest life. And in that moment I saw how much, really, all that mattered. It didn’t. If the world can’t cut us directly, it’ll cut the ones we love and that does the job equally well. None of us escaped it. Not a one.

After high school he vanished from my life and I went on to have a few major crushes, and fell deeply in love two more times. Once disastrously to a straight guy and once more to a gay who mostly just needed someone to fuss over him for a while. I was serious and he was casual and he told me we were just friends with benefits, and that was the end of my quest for love and joy. And the only one among all these who wasn’t damaged in some way by the climate of hate was the straight guy.

I try so hard not to hate the world back. I see all the expressions of love and support during Pride month this year and it helps a lot. I was basking in it a few weeks ago in Walt Disney World, and its surrounding communities. It made me feel fully human and recognised, in a way I just couldn’t when I was a teenager. 

But then I remember what happened… 

In my drawings I have always worked to very well defined lines like the cartoonists I’ve admired most (Howard Cruse for example). It’s only lately that I’m discovering that if I let my lines get a little scruffy, like in my roughs, the finished artwork seems more lively.

And it’s easy in Procreate, to simply make a duplicate layer of the rough blue lines instead of just inking over them in a fresh blank layer, and then changing the line color from blue to black. I will still tidy things up a bunch, but not to the point I’m taking away the scruffiness. That most recent drawing I posted the other day is, I think, the beginning of a new(ish) style for me, though I did it once before. But that one happened because I was feeling too tired to do my usual ink lines so I just copied the roughs and made them look inked and low and behold it worked. That last one was a deliberate attempt to duplicate the effect of that other one and it worked too.

I’m going to stick with it…at least for a while…and see where it goes. At least for the one-offs if not the multi panel cartoons. I’ve got another I’m working on I’ll post about later.

Finished with this one…

…and then made a couple prints with the good art room inkjet…

Oh lord have mercy I do believe I’ve outdone myself this time. This photo does Not do the final print justice. I really hit the bullseye with this one. Just delighted with it.

A bit more on a black & white version of the figure I sketched out previously…

I was browsing the work of an illustrator whose ink wash techniques I greatly admire, for some pointers as to how to do shading on arm and leg joints, when I came across one of his that inspired some imagining on my part.

I did this in Procreate on the iPad Plus…I find myself doing more and more artwork digitally like this. It was easy…I knocked it out in just a hour or so, then went to bed. When I looked at it this morning I saw I’d got the scale of his head wrong in the initial drawing, and that was an easy fix in Procreate. I find I need to put things away for a while so I can look at them with fresh eyes later and see where I get it wrong in the detail. I’m going to keep working on this throughout the day here at Casa del Garrett, then get back to the next episode of A Coming Out Story.

I’ve no backstory for this character…I just spent a few moments visualizing him and then drew him adding detail as I went. He’s a character in some fantasy or science-fiction adventure but I’m fine with not knowing the details of his story as I draw. It gives him an infinite universe to exist in. I did that with several panels in A Coming Out Story episode 19. Three panels in that episode are fantasy imaginings that could be about anything. Consider them the beginnings of stories that could go anywhere.

Yes, yes…costuming in fantasy and science-fiction illustrations and especially in comics can look ridiculously scant. But then again…so what? It’s all wish fulfillment. The stories…the artwork…the sexy characters…