Yesterday (as I write this) I attended the unveiling of the first James Webb Space Telescope science images and reception afterward at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Though I am retired since last February, a couple months after launch, my project manager got me an invite. Some day I should sit down and write my memoirs, since it’s been a long strange trip.

It was an amazing day. I’m still feeling the afterglow. To have been a part of it all for the last 23 1/2 years is so very cool. I did not expect to have this life.

They were all happy to see me at the Institute. How is retirement they asked. Very strange I said. And then they all made me feel like I was part of the team again. We did this.

I’ve an invite this morning to go to Hopkins and watch the release of the first James Webb science images with the Institute staff. It was so very nice of my project manager to get me the invite though I am retired now. So I’m all excited about it. And really touched to know that I’m remembered fondly among those I worked with. This last half of my life is very Very different from the first.

…And I finally get to wear the suit I bought for watching the launch that I didn’t get to use because they moved the launch date back to Christmas and the campus was closed that day so we all had to watch from home. Apart of course from those of us actually working in the MOC. I can get all dressed up tomorrow. I’ll take a mirror selfie if I remember, for posterity. I am rarely to be found in a nice business suit.

The amount of concentration I need to sustain to do any sort of drawing quickly becomes exhausting. But I am retired now and I can put a day’s work into it, if a bit haphazardly. I have to walk away from the drafting table frequently just to let my mind wander.

This next episode of A Coming Out Story involves a lot of drawing because it is so important to me to get the feel of what is happening in it right. In most other episodes can use a few tricks to make the going faster. For instance, in the previous one I drew a background once and then copied it into every panel. And for every episode that takes place in the school, I’ve got a long drawing of a hallway with lockers and water fountains and classroom doors that I plug a section of into the artwork. But in this episode, every single panel but one has to be 100 percent original artwork. And the amount of concentration I need to sustain to do any sort of drawing gets very exhausting.

It would probably not be so bad were I a trained artist. But I am self taught and I am not kidding about being a hunt and peck draftsman. The electric eraser gets more use than the pencil. Some days I wish I’d moved mountains to get myself into the Maryland Institute College of Art. But then this entire story is about one of the other central regrets of my life. So it goes, as the Tralfamadorians say…

I’ve given myself a goal of getting the pencils done for one panel a day, or hopefully one entire strip, which this episode are all two long panels each. That gives me eleven days to finish the pencils at most, or less if I can do two. But that’s less likely so it’s not going to happen at lightning speed. But the pencils are the hard part. Once they’re done the rest of it goes pretty fast.

I need to get this story finished. I’m feeling my energy levels dropping in a scary way, since spring. And there are still maybe another thirty episodes to go.

I have a new LED light board now. The large ArtGraph I had for ten years failed due to a poorly designed power switch setup. My first thought was I’d fix it myself, but the unit is not designed to be openable and fixable. After a lot of struggle I managed to peel the top cover off it and saw that it’s all riveted together inside and in order to get at what the problem was would take me drilling out a bunch of rivets and probably rendering the until unusable anyway. So I took a look at what it would cost to replace it and well, things have got a lot less expensive and much nicer in ten years, so there’s that.

This new one from U.S. Art Supply is thinner, a tad lighter in weight but solidly built, has a variable brightness control, and cost a third what the ArtGraph one cost. Not that I’d buy anything from ArtGraph ever again. The one I had was so solidly built I thought it would last a lifetime, but one bad design decision and the whole thing is trash. In the online chats I’ve seen people reporting rudeness from their customer service droids when asked about sending things back for repair. So apparently you can’t even pay them to fix their products. But after looking inside one I can see their point. It just isn’t worth it. As always, you’re supposed to be a good consumer and just buy a new one. Which I did. Just not one of theirs.

We’ve a nice electronics recycling station at the city recycling center nearby. So the old light board isn’t just going into a landfill.

So it seems my central AC compressor has failed beyond repair now and it’s time for a new one. No worries about my situation…I have two window units I can depend on to keep the critical rooms in the house cool. I bought them years ago when the compressor was acting up (it just needed a new start relay then) on the grounds that I needed a plan B for the house in case of failure during a heat wave. So in that regard I’m good.

I was thinking since I’m on retirement income now that I’d have to wait a few years to save the money for a new compressor, and just rely on the window units, and maybe even make that a permanent solution since a window unit is much cheaper than a central air compressor, and a couple of those are unlikely to both fail at the same time. But I got a very nice quote on a new one that I can pay for out of pocket savings, so, if the quote is real, I’m going to go ahead with it.

Sales will be calling back, so I’m told, with either the proper company name on the caller ID, or “UNKNOWN”, which means I have to pause RoboKiller for the day. Swell. So now I also get to be bothered by a bunch of auto warranty foofs all day too. One just called now in fact.

Anti-LGBTQ threats, fueled by internet’s far right ‘machine,’ shut down trans rights and drag events

Inundated with threats during Pride Month, LGBTQ+ rights advocates and allies have been forced to cancel events and involve local law enforcement authorities after a group of white nationalists were arrested outside a Pride event in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.

You could say this is nothing new because the republican machine has been ginning up fear and hatred of gay people to drive their base to the polls, ever since Anita Bryant showed them back in 1977 how well it worked. I have examples of republican hate pamphlets mailed out in critical races and swing states for almost every election cycle since the 90s.

What’s different now is the overt threat of violence, coming against a background of multiple mass shootings in recent years, the violent January 6 storming of the United States Capitol, and a president of the United States that didn’t merely condone political violence, but actively employed it. And he had every reason to believe he could get away with it, because he did it all throughout his campaign in 2016 and instead of rejecting him republican voters flocked to him and he won. With Donald Trump a Rubicon was crossed.

Now we have open carry laws in states already deeply hostile toward LGBT Americans. Now we have mass shootings in places of work, churches, grocery stores, elementary schools. Now we have republican state governors and legislators openly inciting religious and social passions against us, and writing laws allegedly to protect children from us, threatening businesses that treat us with respect, calling out everyone who opposes their hate-mongering as “groomers” and pedophiles, all deliberately calculated to incite fear and hatred toward us. For votes. There is no other reason.

Then come the violent street gangs. Our blood on the pavement, their votes on election day.

There is a political machine behind the targeting of Pride events by this element. A right wing political machine. A republican political machine. What you see there in the photo taken in Coeur D’Alene is no more spontaneous than January 6 was. And just like with the Big Lie, the respectable republican cloth coat establishment is fine with it, and with whatever bloodshed it may bring. So long as it stays far enough away from them personally that they can maintain their aura of establishment respectability, and it delivers them more votes from the mob than it costs them with decent Americans.

Fear of guns is not irrational, the way homophobia is. Guns are dangerous. They’re weapons. That is their purpose. To say same sex marriage is dangerous to society, the nation and humanity is beyond ridiculous, it is perverse.

To love and accept love from another, and everything that goes with it, being trustworthy, honesty, kindness, sympathy, without these things all we have is the jungle. They say that love makes the world go ’round, but it’s the very things that love cultivates in a person, that make civilization possible.

There’s a tombstone in Washington DC that reads: When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one. It took a lot of hard work and struggle, but now they’d have given him and his boyfriend a wedding if that was in the cards for them. And every time I have to choose between the politician who would let me have a gun but not a wedding, versus a politician that would let me have a wedding but not a gun, I will, with some regret but unhesitatingly vote for the wedding over the gun. To regard guns as dangerous things is not irrational, it is obvious. To regard same sex love and romance as dangerous is deranged. Too many people are these days.

…and those of us that aren’t anyway, are reachable and open to ways and means of getting these mass shootings under control, and especially away from our schools. But there are a lot of stereotypes getting in the way of having that conversation, and in the interest of clarity and hopefully a little progress, let me add a note about what motivates some of us to own, and enjoy shooting guns.

A friend on Facebook recently asked us what sort of fear we have that compels us to own a deadly weapon, and what is its basis.  But it’s not always fear that brings the gun into your life, and it’s not always a masculinity crutch. I’m a gay man and I made my peace with masculinity issues long ago. A constant low level of fear isn’t all that surprising given the state of the world and the society we live in. Some of us were bullied growing up. You read the newspapers and watch TV and you see violent crime happening all the time. When the fear of it gets preoccupying or paralyzing you should probably get some therapy. The well adjusted among us watch the neighborhood, stay aware of our surroundings when out and about, look out for our neighbors, keep the doors locked, and maybe have an alarm system installed. Some of us also keep guns, as opposed to katanas or pit bulls. We do not all of us live in fear, just in a world where you need to be careful and aware.

But…bear with me now…there’s another, atavistic fascination that attracts some people to guns, that isn’t about bloodshed or killing anything. It is, I think, a uniquely human attraction, and one that can also be very dangerous in a person without a strong moral sense, plus a lot of common sense about safety.

Fire.

I was a kid who loved thunderstorms, the stronger the better. I would turn off the lights in my bedroom and throw open the blinds and watch raptly. It drove my mother crazy, she hated thunderstorms. We would both go around the apartment and unplug things when a bad storm was coming (I still do this). But then I would go watch. I loved the fireworks displays on the 4th, setting them off with my friends and their families behind the apartments where we lived, and I wondered why we couldn’t do that all year. When friends and I went camping, I was often the one who took charge of the campfire, getting it going, feeding it, and meticulously putting it out. I have a friend who also loves that duty and that also, unsurprisingly, is a fellow gun owner. The thrill wasn’t merely in making fire, but being its master. Since I was a kid watching the first astronauts going into orbit, I’ve always envied their view from space, but also that amazing ride to it on fire. There’s mastery. That humans can do that with fire is just amazing.

So when I was a young man, and a friend back from a tour of duty in the marines invited me to come shooting with him, and he let me try his Ruger Mk1, I think I was hooked at the first shot. Hitting the target wasn’t even really the point, more than it was proof that I had that powerful fire there right in my hands, you could feel it in the recoil, so powerful it would blast me apart if it wasn’t safely contained and controlled, under my command. With every shot in the black I was its master. 

Fire. A powerful force. It can burn down forests, wipe out entire neighborhoods. It can heat our homes and cook our food. It can bring down buildings. It can take us to space. To master it is a thrill, but it is dangerous when uncontrolled. And so are guns. They both need to be well regulated. Also some people.

I guess it was supposed to feel wonderful. And in some ways it does. I’m very lucky. It’s not a fabulous retirement but I can afford to pay my bills and still have some left over for a little discretionary spending. Being mostly debt free (save for the mortgage and DVC points) helps out a lot. Paying off the credit cards took a big chunk off my monthly expenses, and I’m in a situation now where I really don’t need to be using them anymore. So money wise, it’s pretty good. I can relax. What I didn’t expect was that being a problem.

My time now is all mine. And it just feels strange. Almost immediately after my last day at work I skedaddled for my brother’s place in California…a land where I’d always planned to retire to eventually. I spent a lovely three months there…the longest I’ve ever been away from home in my life…but I kept stressing about the house, and the cute little street cat I left behind. My neighbors on both sides are cat lovers and they took good care of her, but I still stressed about it. She’s a small little lady, fierce though she is, and getting very old for a street cat. And the house. I stressed a lot about how the house was doing.

I’m back home now and slowly waking the house up from the coma I put it into before leaving. Water turned back on okay…furnace/AC back on…power restored to this and that…everything looking good. The cat is fine, and I think has mostly forgiven me for going away. Now I have all the time in the world for art projects and Harry Homeowner things I’ve wanted to do. And that feels…weird.

It is more disorienting than I expected to not have work days anymore. I reckon I’ll get over it eventually, but it just feels so strange. Even during COVID lockdowns I still had office hours to keep, albeit at my home office. But still, it was a clock I had to keep, and deadlines I had to meet. And that’s all over now and even with all the stuff I have to do around the house and in the art room I feel adrift, plus feeling like I shouldn’t feel like that because I have so much to do. It’s not like there isn’t anything to do. And I’m doing stuff. I’m busy all day long. But there is no clock anymore. Things get done when they get done. Then I move on to the next thing. There is no clock tapping me on the shoulder all the time and it feels weird. 

I spent an entire adult life tied to the clock. And even when I was a kid, there was school. This isn’t summer vacation. This is something else. Something really strange.

I just had a thought that I’d buy one of those old school bells and have it ring, like at lunchtime and the end of the school day. And then I thought…NO! This is fine…I’ll get acclimatized to it. A little strangeness in your life is helpful. It keeps you thinking.

I’ve been away for a few months, staying at my brother’s house in Oceano post retirement. I haven’t written much about it here because these days it’s a tad risky to let the world know that your house is unoccupied. My new alarm system lets me view my security cameras remotely, and my neighbors all were watching the house, some even mowing the lawn and checking for packages and flyers left on the front porch to make the house look occupied. But I was still reluctant to post about my road trip to California, my stay there, and the road trip back here on my blog. I used Facebook (alas) for all that and set the posts to friends only. Time was, before Facebook and Twitter and such, I’d have been babbling about it like crazy here. You can see some of my old road trip posts in the archive.

But now I’m back. Here’s the traditional end of trip stats off the Mercedes’ trip computer:

(All this includes bopping around Oceano and vicinity, as well as the trip there and back)

Total miles: 7919
Driving Time: 163:29
Average speed: 48mph
Average mpg: 34.4

Fuel prices were the big deal this trip…especially when I got to California. But the fuel economy of my car’s diesel engine made the price of topping off the tank a bit easier to handle, even there where I saw prices go over 7 bucks a gallon (the most I ever paid was 6.60). Mostly on the highway I got high 30s and in town low 30s. On the leg back home from Greenfield Indiana to Baltimore I was getting just a tad under 40mpg (39.6). 

I stressed the entire time I was in California about the feral calico cat who has befriended me for the past decade or so. The look on her face when she saw me packing the car to leave after I’d given her a place in my house for the winter was…awful. But when I got back home she was still alive and kicking and has forgiven me. Somewhat.

If you wanna hang out
You’ve gotta take her out
COVID

If you wanna get down
Down on the ground
COVID

She don’t lie
She don’t lie
She don’t lie
COVID

Those little tasks that remind you of the life you left behind to start a new one. The other day I deleted a bunch of reminders off my Google calendar…things like paycheck days, and logging in to certain lab and MOC machines to keep my accounts active. I suppose I could have just hidden my work calendar from view and just kept the personal calendar active, but the work calendar was as much a work diary as a reminder and I want it to be accurate. There are no more work days. At least not in the past sense.

It may seem like I waited months to do this, since I retired in February, but the fact is since I took the vacation day rollout it wasn’t official as far as Social Security or either of the retirement plans until the day of my last paycheck which was the beginning of this month. I probably could have deleted the login reminders sooner, but…well…I knew it was going to be difficult. I loved that job. But it was time to move on.

That said, I did delete the meeting reminders the day after I left the building.

But Trump endorsed him. Could get even more interesting in the general, if the MAGA decide that it was the hated RINO establishment that took Trump’s guy down. 

Loveless though it was…

I’m still really proud of the Rube Goldberg contraption I made out of a Raytheon Eclipse CECIL script, a DOS batch program, sftp, a bash shell script, a cron job, and three different computers to let me get email notifications whenever we lost the telemetry link to Goddard because I was the only one maintaining that link and Goddard would not allow email (completely understandable) on the JLAB machine we were using.

Six years ago I shared this award with two of my co-workers in the Integration and Test branch.

Finding a copy of this poster in a flea market shop in Cambria, even though it’s only a smaller sized reproduction, just thrilled me to my bones a few moments ago. I have been wanting a copy of this since I was a young guy.

The first time I laid eyes on it, in the window of a head shop in College Park sometime in the mid 70s, I thought the model was the sexyist long haired guy I’d ever seen. I was working for a department store driving returns for repair to various shops around Washington, and every time I passed by that head shop I made a mental note to go in there sometime when I was off the clock, and ask if the poster was for sale.

Alas, I put it off too long. One day I drove past and the shop was closed down, the insides emptied and the poster gone. I never got a good enough look at it to see what band it was for. The psychedelic lettering was impossible for me to read sitting in my delivery truck at a stop light a half block away. But the image of that sexy naked long haired guy was forever burned into my young gay adult brain.

Some years later I chanced upon a book, a very large trade paperback…I’m not at home now so I can’t be sure, but I think it was “The Art of Rock”, that had in its pages a history of rock posters, one reprint to a page along with commentary. And there it was…The James Cotton Band at the Grand Ballroom in Detroit. The book’s author seemed to think the poster began the decline of the art of the poster, as it represented, in his words, a gay hustler motif. But by then I was used to that sort of disrespect, even from the Summer of Love alumni.

So I kept searching. And searching. Eventually along comes the Internet. And search engines. Finally I see a reproduction of the poster I can download and add to my graphics library. And this is where I find out the model in the poster was…Vanessa Redgrave.

Oh.

Decades later I would joke about it in the second episode of A Coming Out Story…

I have this theory that our libidoes glom onto whatever fashions and styles were in vogue when we came of age and our hormones began to percolate. Mine happened in a time of long hair and low rise blue jeans. But my gay libido never strayed into hunk territory, and there’s probably a whole ‘nother post I should do about that, and all the disrespect gay men who love lithe and handsome and very very cute males get from other gay males who are all about hunk.

So now I know my foxy long haired gay hustler is actually a foxy long haired woman. Fine. I still wanted that damn poster. A lifetime of growing up in a culture that at best wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of such as me, if not wipe us out of existence altogether, gave me lots of practise in mental gender switching…usually with flipping the pronouns in the lyrics to songs I heard on the radio, but occasionally in advertising, where I would mentally redraw some of the fashion models I saw as guys, a skillset that would get a lot of work in later years as I pursued my art…

The original model for this was a young women I saw in a google image search…

..which made it easy for me to look at that James Cotton Band poster and still see a sexy long haired guy. Let’s hear it for gay hustler motif!

There’s a shop just down Falls Road from my house where classic rock posters from a bygone era are auctioned off. Once I asked the guy running it about this one. Oh…the James Cotton Vanessa Redgrave one….yes…that one is very popular…if you can find one in good condition it’ll go for about six grand now…

Oh.

This afternoon I took a long leisurely drive up the California coast to a cute little coastal town named Cambria. I wanted to wander around the shops for a bit, and wandered into one with some poster reproductions in the window. I have this stubborn streak that is in constant conflict with my inner pessimism. In the back were racks like the old LP racks with what looked like hundreds of reproductions of various posters all neatly sleeved like classic comic books for sale. I reckoned it might take me a half hour to flip through them all with no guarantee of success. But I got down to it.

Flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… oh, a Rick Griffin classic… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… another Griffin… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… Doctor Strangelove… so there are 60s movie posters in here too… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… I wonder if there are any Victor Moscoso posters in here… flip… flip… flip… Failsafe… I think I’d rather have the Doctor Strangelove one…flip… flip… flip… Jefferson Airplane… flip… flip… flip… flip… if I see that Hendrix poster Bob had over the fireplace I’m buying it… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… flip… THERE IT IS!!!!!!

Finally. Along with that one I bought a couple Rick Griffin ones and the Doctor Strangelove one. They’ll go up in my art room…but the foxy gay hustler that wasn’t, but still is whenever I look at it, gets pride of place right above my drafting table.

As long as Facebook keeps allowing the gay history pages I follow to stay up, I reckon I’ll keep using Facebook. This came across one of the pages I follow the other day…

I had no knowledge of this bit of American history. So I did a little more digging…

Lester Callaway Hunt, Sr. (July 8, 1892 – June 19, 1954), was an American Democratic politician from the state of Wyoming. Hunt was the first to be elected to two consecutive terms as Wyoming’s governor, serving as its 19th Governor from January 4, 1943, to January 3, 1949. In 1948, he was elected by an overwhelming margin to the U.S. Senate, and began his term on January 3, 1949.

Hunt supported a number of federal social programs and advocated for federal support of low-cost health and dental insurance policies. He also supported a variety of programs proposed by the Eisenhower administration following the Republican landslide in the 1952 elections, including the abolition of racial segregation in the District of Columbia, and the expansion of Social Security.

An outspoken opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign, Hunt challenged McCarthy and his senatorial allies by championing a proposed law restricting Congressional immunity and allowing individuals to sue members of Congress for slanderous statements. In June 1953, Hunt’s son was arrested in Washington, D.C., on charges of soliciting sex from an undercover male police officer (homosexual acts were prohibited by law at the time). Several Republican senators, including McCarthy, threatened Hunt with prosecution of his son and wide publication of the event unless he abandoned plans to run for re-election and resigned immediately, which Hunt refused to do. His son was convicted and fined on October 6, 1953. On April 15, 1954, Hunt announced his intention to run for re-election. He changed his mind, however, after McCarthy renewed the threat to use his son’s arrest against him. On June 19, Hunt died by suicide in his Senate office; his death dealt a serious blow to McCarthy’s image and was one of the factors that led to his censure by the Senate later in 1954.

I did not know about any of this. And you can suppose that if tinpot dictators like Ron DeSantis and the rest of the MAGA crowd in government have their way no one will ever know it happened. But it instantly put me in mind of something. A movie from the early 60s, from a time when even a brief reference to The Homosexual in passing was considered extremely daring for any filmmaker, and in some parts of the country might even get your movie confiscated by the local authorities.

The movie was Advise & Consent. Released in 1962, it was directed by Otto Preminger who was a powerful opponent of the Hays Code, and was based on the 1959 novel by Allen Drury. The story concerns the nomination process of a candidate for US Secretary of State, who may or may not be a communist. As the political battle heats up, it gets dirtier.

The movie’s claim to fame was broaching the subject of homosexuality when the Hays Code was still a thing and Preminger was a force for contesting it. There’s this cringe worthy scene toward the end of the movie where the clean cut all American senator with a secret, Brig Anderson of Utah, visits the stereotypical Hollywood gay bar of all stereotypical Hollywood gay bars to confront the long ago lover he was now being blackmailed over…

Who among us has never been to this bar?

In his book The Celluloid Closet Vito Russo eviscerates the movie for virtually canonising Anderson as a Good Homosexual, because he eventually married a woman and began a family, versus the Bad Homosexuals who lurk in the homosexual underworld and gather in piss elegant bars that play Frank Sinatra songs all the time.

Wait…Don’t Go…Maybe the jukebox has some Village People too!

Dury’s novel was published in 1959. Hunt’s suicide happened in 1954. Dury always maintained that his novel was not based on any actual people or events, but was merely made of composites meant to illuminate the realities of Washington politics. But this falls a little too pat. While senator Hunt was not himself a homosexual, it was blackmail over his son’s homosexuality, blackmail effected so as to stop his attacks on McCarthy, that brought him to suicide, and which as it turned out was a key event in turning the senate against McCarthy. The entire story reads to me now, like as of a second rate draftsman tracing over a portrait, and simply changing the hairstyle of the subject, and calling it an original work.

Because the most…interesting…part of all this to me now is how Dury reversed the motivations of the players in that drama. It was a bunch of hard right republican red baiters, including McCarthy, that blackmailed Hunt to the point of suicide. In Dury’s telling, it was democratic communist sympathisers that blackmailed the clean cut all American senator from Utah who had a regrettable secret, so they could install a communist as the head of the State Department. I don’t think all that was merely to lift the specifics of history into the realm of art. I think he was trying to rewrite history into a form he found more palatable.