In my current issue of The New Yorker, Paul Bloom, Critic At Large, writes about how A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness and That’s A Problem. How, you ask, could that possibly a problem given the hellish internal prison chronic loneliness is, let alone all the medical and health consequences associated with it. Well even before I cracked open the article, I had a few hunches, but I wanted to see what the Manhattan cultural gatekeepers thought the problem was too.
He gets it. At least, to a degree…
Loneliness, everyone agrees, is unpleasant—a little like a toothache of the soul. But in large doses it can be genuinely ruinous. A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.
Even the psychological pain can be hard to fathom, especially for those who have never truly been lonely. [emphasis mine] In Zoë Heller’s novel “Notes on a Scandal,” the narrator – Barbara Covett, a connoisseur of the condition – distinguishes between passing loneliness and something deeper. Most people, she observes, think back to a bad breakup and imagine that they understand what it means to be alone. But, she continues, “about the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. . . . I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing to the ground.”
If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky—and probably below a certain age.
And probably heterosexual. Or at least somewhere close to a Kinsey zero. Probably. I began feeling it when I was a young adult, some years after my first high school crush vanished from sight, and my second disastrous crush on a straight close friend blew up in my face, and I began to perceive that eternal long dark night of the soul that was ahead of me. I read a story back in the day about a gay man who turned 30 and still never had a boyfriend, and I swore I would never let that happen to me. I’m 71 now and I have still never had a boyfriend.
A bunch of near misses, sure. That’s probably a common story among gay guys of my barely post Stonewall generation. You start getting close to someone and next thing you know the righteous step in to break it up, because they need the broken pieces of our hearts to make their stepping stones to heaven out of. Or if not the righteous, then the contemptuous.
If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky…and probably below a certain age. And probably heterosexual. And probably not the sort of person who can be easily satisfied with a series of sexual one night stands. For these there were always the hookup spots, and more recently hookup apps like Grindr. Finding that heart and soul other is difficult under the best of conditions, and gay males do not enjoy the best of conditions, much improved though they are now. But there are those of us who just seemed to be condemned to the darkness right from the beginning.
You began to sense it every time you were last to be picked for a team game, or never invited to sit with the others at lunch. And like the kid born into poverty, you never really noticed how different your social life was from the others, because it was always thus. Normal was not getting invites. Normal was you had to ask if a someone wanted to go to the park with you, or a movie, or just hang out, not being asked. You weren’t a creep to everyone, you were that polite and friendly if scrawny kid with the puppy dog enthusiasm, a homely face, unkempt hair and clothes that were clean if not well fitting and fashionable, and you lived on the other side of the railroad tracks with your divorced mother, and you just assumed that everyone has to work at being included. But no…not everyone.
Then you reach a certain age and a need for something more than a friend to pal around with awakens within. But you’re need is different from the others around you. Different in a way that sets you apart not just from them, but it seems from the entire world around you.
And now, on top of being the kid who gets chosen last, now you’re afraid. But you’re as human as all the other kids, different only in the detail, and you’ve come of age and have to try. But you have to roll models to show you the way, only every dirty joke you’ve ever heard about homosexuals. And the thing is the objects of your affection are just as afraid as you are.
My first crush and I recognized something in each other. But it was 1971/72.
Mad Magazine, #145, Sept 1971, from “Greeting Cards For The Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”
I’m pretty sure it was after we made plans to go to Great Falls and stroll the towpath with our cameras, and I called to say I was coming over and one of his older brothers intercepted the phone call, that he got told to stay away from me. And being the obedient son, he put a distance between us, and that summer the family moved away, and I didn’t know until I saw the for sale sign on their empty house.
Here’s something I found online. Whoever wrote this, gets it.
A psychotherapist specializing in military rehabilitation once stated in a lecture that the deepest truma isn’t loss.
Loss is a fact, Someone left, died, or vanished. There’s pain, but there’s also a definitive end point. When you’re not chosen, however, an unending void remains. It’s the crushing feeling that you were there, you tried, you invested, but ultimately you were deemed superfluous. Not the worse, just “not the one.”
This experience pulls more powerfully than betrayal, because there’s no explanation in being rejected. The other person simply decided they didn’t need you. Not because you did something wrong, but because you didn’t captivated them, inspire them, or align with them. And your mind begins to frantically search: Where was the mistake? Where was the moment you could have pleased them more, loved quieter, walked more patiently?
This is where the insidious feeling takes root: that something is wrong with you. Not the situation, not with the other person, but with you. You are insufficient.
This is the trauma of unchosenness. Not because love wasn’t present, but because the choice wasn’t about you. And in that place where you weren’t chosen, you begin to doubt your right to exist.
My situation is different, but only slightly. There was the added pressure of homophobia making it difficult to nearly impossible for gay guys of my generation to make a romantic connection. But I know other gay guys of my generation who were successful, who did find their other half and made a life together, despite the hostility of the world around them. So it wasn’t just homophobia that kept me from finding my other half. And so I find myself in this exact situation anyway. Where was the mistake? Where was the moment I could have made a difference, and had a different outcome? Could I have been more patient? Or more forward, less afraid? Every time I tried, I failed. What is wrong with me?
There is not a night I don’t go to bed thinking about it, and then imagining alternate universes where gay kids could find love, and I was one of them. But only in my dreams.
Why am I never the chosen one? Well…except for big guys who think I have a cute butt and just want to fuck me. I used to get “Nice ass” lots from them. And also the occasional heterosexual woman. I got a butt squeeze in Kayenta from (I assumed) a young Navajo woman who walked up behind me and then quickly walked away. I took it as a complement, probably because there was no sexual baggage in it for me, but from other guys it just feels off putting at best, probably because there is.
I’m what the kids these days call a demisexual.
DEMISEXUAL demi·?sex·?u·?al
feeling sexual attraction towards another person only after establishing an emotional bond with that person.
Now, that’s not quite it with me. My low energy libito can readily feel sexually attracted to the right guy on sight. But to actually go through with it I need that emotional bond too or nothing is going to happen. Sex without any sort of love feels a little more than vaguely disgusting at best. There has to be romance. There has to be love.
Which is why despite chronic loneliness I’ve never availed myself of a sex worker, and I’m pretty sure an A.I. boyfriend won’t do it for me either.
Five years ago, the idea that a machine could be anyone’s confidant would have sounded outlandish, a science-fiction premise. These days, it’s a research topic.
You know what I wish were research topics? Homophobia. Or at any rate, how to get them to leave the rest of us alone. Maybe in a better world we teach gay kids the emotional and intellectual tools to stand up to bigots and see themselves as the perfect and whole human beings that they are. And…coupling. I have tried multiple gay dating services and I have to conclude they are mostly scams that prey on lonely people. There needs to be some science here. In the better world of my imagination, there would be not just sex-ed classes, but courses in flirting, dating, non-judgmental understanding of your own romantic and emotional needs, the better to know what sort of person is likely to match up with you. And how to let someone down graciously. That was a Big roadblock to getting myself in situations where I can meet random guys who might be compatible. Because I know how picky my libido is, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings because I know how it feels to be rejected. I know how it feels to be told, by other gay guys no less, that people who look like that want people who look like that.
A.I. companionship might be okay for some, but not for the likes of me. I have already walked through an adult life alone, in the most intimate sense. And despite what others have told me, I tried, I really tried. And those helpful others were really just telling me to go get laid and then I’ll feel better. But no. I was the unchosen one. Always.
I’m not anxious to leave this life just yet. But I won’t be entirely unhappy when death taps me on the shoulder either. I think my last thoughts might be something like Thank goodness I won’t be lonely anymore…
And no more trying to explain the trauma of how it is to live an entire adult life with that constant drip, drip, drip of heart loneliness, to people who think they understand, because maybe they were lonely and heart broken for a little while themselves, but really are light years away from getting it because they have never experienced that empty void of chronic loneliness for themselves.
I wasn’t wishing you dead. I was saying that I felt trapped. I was trying to say to you in my own awkward just letting a stream of consciousness unedited words tumble out of me way, what Jack said to Ennis in Brokeback Mountain. “I wish I knew how to quit you.” What you said to me that I won’t repeat here cut me deep, and I was hurting, and I lashed out. Because I knew what I was in for in the years to come.
Ever watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I haven’t…I don’t think I could bear to watch a movie like that, any more than I could watch Brokeback Mountain. But I’ve read the various synopsis. The film, so I am told, follows two people who were in love, who undergo a procedure to erase their memories of each other after the angry end of their romance. There was a time I was desperately wishing it was a real thing. Until I read this part of the plot:
Joel re-experiences his memories of Clementine as they are erased, starting with their last fight. As he reaches earlier, happier memories, he realizes that he does not want to forget her.
No. I couldn’t put myself through that.
Do you dream? I wonder sometimes if you do, and how vividly. So I’m told there are people who don’t. I feel sorry for them. I dream dreams I can remember almost every night. I have a notepad I keep next to my bed so I can jot some things down before I forget them, which I will if I don’t immediately do that. And I have a Google Docs folder where I write some of my dreams. Some of them are so vivid I can feel the texture of clothing and furniture, and the taste of kisses on my lips.
The one I had last night was about you. I have those often, also about other friends who have remained close to me. But it’s the ones about you that linger more. Mostly they are very nice, a little strange sometimes, and so vivid I sometimes wonder if I am not seeing things that are happening in a different universe. But I suppose that’s just wish fulfilment. Last night’s dream really got to me because of one specific detail.
You and I were together in your house, except it wasn’t the one you have in the real world, but a different one, in a different place, something like another suburb but deep in a beautiful woodland zone. It was late in the evening, almost nightfall, and we were having a very deep heart to heart conversation, and it seemed perfectly normal, as if we’d been close all our lives. I won’t write here what we said to each other, only that it was heartfelt and affectionate, like the talk between old couples, only in this dream we were young men, twenty-somethings, and you were still wearing your hair long. Oh…and we were in the kitchen.
Eventually we walked from the kitchen into a space that was both a dining room and a living room, separated by a sofa facing a TV that was tuned to a news broadcast that we were paying no attention to. We were finishing up building a large wooden dining room table. I had made a top piece for it out of several lovely oak boards I’d glued together, then sanded and stained a light brown. Together we put the top of it on and fixed it in place with some wood screws and glue. Then I puttied over the screw heads and stained those.
We moved the finished table against the back of the living room sofa. You got down on your knees between the table and the sofa and asked me for a quote to write on the side of the table hidden by the sofa. I asked you if you didn’t mind a Disney quote, and you rolled your eyes a little but said sure, let me have it.
And I said “Dreams can come true.” And you wrote it on that side of the table, but I couldn’t see the words from where I was standing. Then you went back into the kitchen, and out the door to go to the grocery store. While you were gone I moved the sofa a bit and took a look, and discovered you’d carved the quote I gave you right into the wood, not written them with a marker. In German.
Träume können wahr werden.
Eventually you came back home, and began unloading the groceries you bought in the kitchen and we talked some more, and I woke up.
The full quote is, All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. But it takes more than courage to make your dreams come true, and I never thought I was particularly brave, just stubborn. Some dreams, if they are not shared between two people, will never live. And there is nothing you can do about that.
So we had a fight. It was probably inevitable. It went nuclear, like it was always going to. I wish I didn’t have that last angry glare you gave me to remember. I’d never seen that side of you before.
It’s been almost a decade now, and never mind what you said and what I said, I still feel trapped, I know I always will, and all I can do now is toss out these little messages in a bottle like I was doing for decades after the last time we saw each other in school, before I found you again 35 years later. Here one from my blog…
September 25, 2006
Yet Another Message In A Bottle…
It’s been decades now since I saw that “For Sale” sign on your house. I can measure the years that have passed in all the little messages I’ve stuck in this or that random bottle, and tossed out into this ocean of time ever since. Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?
If only I hadn’t been such a nerdy little geek. If only I’d had a little more courage to just be myself instead of hiding behind my cameras all the time. And my cartoons. There’s more I wanted to say. But mostly this: You opened up the world for me.
Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?
These little messages in a bottle are the only way I have of waving to you now. But I reckon I’ll keep tossing them in…because I can still hope one of them will find you one day. Because I just want to wave at you one more time. Because I just want to see one more smile. Because I have to know. I tossed another one in yesterday. If it finds you, please wave back. Please.
Even before I had my own website I was tossing these out into the digital ocean every now and then, hoping maybe you’d see one and respond. Looking back on it I can see it came so close. If only I’d joined GeoCities. If only I’d not been such an awkward little geek. If only it hadn’t been 1971. If only I had been more brave instead of stubborn. Before I found you again I was sure you would be the braver one. After so much time had passed I figured if I ever did find you again you’re be living somewhere in the country of your birth, settled down with a guy who was much better looking, more intelligent, and a better all around catch than I could ever be and I’d just have to accept that it would never be, because you’d found someone better.
Then I did find you. And for a brief moment in time I saw you smile at me again. And you put your arm around my shoulders again. And we talked, heart to heart like we weren’t able to in the early 1970s. And it went where it had to, where it was always going to, because for both of us it was still the early 1970s.
I remember that time we passed back and forth a ski lift ticket I’d found on the pavement, like it was a talking stick, because you needed to explain something to me and didn’t want any questions. I remember listening to the guy I thought hung the moon and the stars way back when, telling me to go look elsewhere because a life in the closet had damaged him so much some days he didn’t know who it was he was looking at in the mirror.
It broke my heart, and maybe it also radicalized me to gay activism in a deeper way. But I was determined to at least show you by example that there was nothing wrong with you, and you could live an authentic life for yourself, even now, even if not with me. Because by then I was doubting we were ever that compatible. I could have courage, but you had to have it too. The best I could do was set an example, and I was not so much brave as stubborn. But maybe that’s what you have to be sometimes. But it was still the early 1970s.
I don’t think anyone who didn’t live through those times can grasp the hostility, the outright hate that gay and lesbian Americans got from every direction. Today on this last day of Pride month, let me give you one little example of what that did to us.
It was March 8, 1970. A gay bar not far from the New York City 6th precinct was raided, by the same cop that had raided the Stonewall Inn just eight months earlier. Not wanting a repeat of the six-day riots at Stonewall, that cop, lieutenant Seymour Pine, had all 167 of the bar’s customers of the bar hauled off to the 6th precinct, which was just over a block away. One patron, justifiably terrified of what was about to happen to him, because back then the practice was to give the names of those arrested at a gay bar to the local newspapers, which would gleefully publish all their details for everyone, family, friends, neighbors, employers, landlords, to see, attempted to escape by jumping out of a window.
This is what happened to him.
I don’t know how you can expect a gay teenager coming of age in those times, in that climate of loathing and hate, to be anything but terrified at what was going through them when they are having their first crush and it’s on another boy. That is more courage than a lot of adults could muster.
So you and I just circled around each other, flirted a bit, teased at each other a bit, and I took lots of photos of you because I always had my camera with me and I just could not look away. And then you disappeared.
I remember that last telephone conversation we had, after we made arrangements to take our cameras to Great Falls, but instead of getting you on the phone I got someone else and then I guess the jig was up and you got told.
And then decades later I reconnected with you, and for a while we were close again, and this time we didn’t have to hide anything from the world around us, and I suppose you got told again, and then you told me I’ve made my allegiances, I have to stay inside my comfort zone.
It’s not a comfort zone if you’re pushed into it. It’s a trap.
But…so it goes. I am so very grateful I never saw your name on a quilt. And that I saw you smile at me again after all those years. For that I can live with that last angry glare. I get it. For many of us in our generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall. Trapped.
Respect the ones who could escape. Cry for the ones that could not, if the tears will come. Do what you can to keep it from happening to the generations that follow.
And don’t be afraid to dream. For the things that could have been, and might still be, in some better world than the one we are in. Not all dreams come true. But they can still be dreamed. For the courage we need to do the work still left for us to do.
I needed to give you something. An offering. So I brought out a few things from my private treasure box. This and that I found along the way, that reached me where no one ever has, and I kept for myself. My own private gold and silver. It had to be something from there. Something for you. Something worthy.
Stars bigger than the orbit of Saturn. Clouds of ice and dust so big light from when I was born hasn’t seen the other side yet. Secret places tucked in the folds of dust between Orion and Betelgeuse, where new born stars emerge, perhaps one day to beckon new life into the universe. Galaxies, wheeling, colliding, dancing. Spirals. Barred. Ellipticals. And those small faintly glowing red ones, like beacons shimmering on a distant horizon, their light shining into my eyes from near the beginning of time.
They lifted me. They struck the silence into me. So did you once. So I gave them to you. An offering.
I have a postcard I sent to mom long ago, that I keep on one of my bookshelves with a bunch of odds and ends from passages of my life. Oh, and also some books. This particular postcard was one I found among her things after she passed away. Every now and then I take it off the shelf to read once more.
I would have been dating, or thought I was dating, strike three, “K” who was living on Hilton Head at the time. I would have been making a good living as a contract software developer renting a very nice garden apartment in Cockeysville, Maryland.
It was a time before affordable cell phones and the end of long distance charges. He and I would chat for hours on our land lines. The new cordless telephones were a blessing for us. We could chat together while going about our household chores as if we were together. This was a time when long distance rates still applied, so if he called me the plan was, since I was making good money and he wasn’t, that we’d hang up and I would call him and take the charge. We’d talk for so long the batteries in our phones would give out and we’d have to restart the conversation on the corded phones for a bit. I’d make plans to go visit him in Hilton Head when I was between contracts, or could take a long weekend. His place in Hilton Head was less than a day’s drive down I-95 so it was easy to spend time together with him. I was in love…again. This time, I thought, it’s really happening. I have a boyfriend.
But it was more a thing in my own mind than his. At some point I started making plans to move down there to be with him…I’d talked with a recruiting agent with the firm I contracted for, who told me there were jobs down there to be had, though mostly in North, not South Carolina. But it was shortly after that K dumped me for another guy who lived in Massachusetts he’d been chatting with on AOL. That guy eventually moved down there and they began living together. He told me later that he decided to call it off when he heard me talking about moving down there.
Anyway…this is a postcard I sent to mom during one of my visits to K. Mom knew…but we had a don’t ask don’t tell agreement she enforced almost right up to the day she died. So it’s my sad little way in my scrawly handwriting of trying to tell her that her boy is gay and he’s in love with another guy.
She liked K. He was a good Baptist boy from our church. I like to think she’d have reconciled herself to it if it was him. Anyway, she kept that postcard. Now I have it. Every now and then I look at it and remember K and I strolling the beach late at night when nobody could see us holding hands and looking up at the stars.
Seems I need to add another Special Day to my calendar. Call it, The Sweetness Before The Fall.
This is a screenshot of a blog post I came across last night, whilst flipping through some old posts referenced in today’s Facebook memories.
Several months later I got told People who look like that want people who look like that.
God what a naive little twerp I was…
Can anybody who knows me…anyone at all…see how affection starved the guy who wrote that is?? I’m like a starving beggar thrilled to be tossed some vague promises of food and shelter when he knows every time he looks in a mirror he doesn’t deserve that sort of attention.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that you’re allowed to be in love three times in your life. I’m guessing that isn’t counting all those temporary infatuations you might have along the way, until you take a closer look and see they’re really not all that, or if you’re gay, until righteous godly people were able to step between both of you and put an end to it because you’re making baby Jesus cry. I’ve Had My Share of Those.
No. Pretty sure he meant three times to love truly, madly, deeply, as the Savage Garden song goes. Three times to go all in. Three times to lose yourself in it. But only three. Because a forth might kill you.
Three strikes. Strike one was the first. Setting eyes on him in high school yanked me out of denial. But it was 1971. Pretty sure his family found out he was talking to that queer kid in school and after that he kept his distance, and then they moved away so it would have had to end anyway. Strike two was a reawakening of hope. That first broken heart makes you certain it will never be (I nearly jumped off a bridge in front of a train…), and then suddenly it happens again and you believe again. But he was straight…
Pretty sure now that was the start of the Dark Time, though I’ve written before that my memories of that period in my life are so mucked up it’s hard for me to recall the timeline. I couldn’t pull myself out of it for years. I stopped doing art and turned to computer programming instead so I didn’t have to look at my feelings. Then along came strike three.
Strike three eventually told me we were just friends with benefits. Then he dumped me. I found out during an AOL Instant Messenger chat with him. This is how it’s done in the 21st century.
It could have been a lot worse. This graphic came across my commercial social media feed the other day…
I almost moved south to be closer to strike three. I had it set up with the agency I was contracting for. There were jobs to be had down there according to the agent I spoke to. But Three dumped me before I could set it all in motion. So I stayed in my apartment in Cockeysville.
Had I done it I would never have got the job at Space Telescope, and bought a house of my own. And he’d have dumped me anyway.
I have it pretty good now. But I never found a companion for my body and soul. I haven’t been whole for most of my life.
Don’t be telling me that I’m not the only one. Each and every lost one of us who failed at love, are the only ones.
How To Self Publish When You Have Zero Confidence In Yourself.
Someone should write a book on that. Anyway…I was curious how the author of The Martian managed it. From what I heard he’d first serialized it on his own website, and somehow that led to it actually being published. So I asked Google…
Andy Weir, author of The Martian, self-published the book in a serial format on his website, chapter by chapter, then made it available as a free ebook, and later on Amazon for $0.99, which led to its success and a traditional publishing deal.
This could work for me except that if A Coming Out Story is any guide I might be months between putting up new chapters of my Not Really A Ghost Story But Sort-Of. And I would need a good editor to finish it properly. It looks to me like Andy Weir didn’t hire one until after his serialize version took off and Crown Books bought in, so maybe that also works because I think it’s going to be another year at least before I finish the story.
I’ve done it before. I had a fantasy series I worked on decades ago up on this website: The Skywatchers of Aden. At the time I didn’t know Aden was an actual city in the middle east. I gave the nation that plays a key role in the stories that name to make it sound like Almost But Not Eden. So if I ever pursued it seriously again I’d probably have to give it a different name. But I think I’m done with those stories. There were other problems with them I’m not sure how to resolve. I had five short stories up and one novelette. If you look at the page source on some of my website pages you can still see references to it.
Anyway…there’s another problem with this plan. I’ve asked for people to take a look at what I have so far (seven chapters) of my story and nobody responded. My website gets next to zero traffic unless I put up more photos of Robbie Benson in cutoffs or instructions on how to draw sexy guys who wear glasses. I have no idea how Andy Weir got all the interest in his story when he was serializing it on his blog and I am clearly utterly incapable of self promotion or I’d have had photo gallery shows and art shows to look back on. My brother tells me frequently that I should self publish A Coming Out Story and I haven’t.
I know what’s missing. I’ve heard it said that behind every great artist is a lover. But…so it goes… I don’t need to be great, just get it out there somewhere it doesn’t die stillborn.
But I’m liking how the story is working out. Got a lot done on it today in fact. I might start to serialize it here. I actually do get some traffic here on A Coming Out Story. It isn’t a lot but it is still very gratifying. Especially when it looks like someone just stumbled onto it and then they go through all the episodes.
It’s almost not worth looking for that first love, or any of the other might have beens from back in the day. But I can see why gay people of my generation and before do it despite the risks. Something was taken from us when we were young, some deep and essential part of our humanity was cut out of our lives. So offhandedly. So thoughtlessly. So very righteously. So other people could make their stepping stones to heaven out of the broken pieces of our hearts. It is only natural that we try to reclaim it. All the vocalizing about politics and discrimination in jobs and security in the workplace and in our homes and on the streets and even the right to marry, flows like a bottomless sorrow from the one central fact of our struggle: we were not allowed to love.
Not even to imagine it. Others got the happily ever after. We got the gutter. Other kids got Prom Night, school dances, boy meets girl stories, love songs on the radio, in books and magazines. We got every filthy lie that could be imagined hurled at us, at our deepest most tender feelings of love and desire and hope, and taught to believe them. The part of our lives that makes everything worthwhile was reduced to dirty jokes and sneering obscenities, so they could point at us and call us broken.
It’s only natural now, so many years after Stonewall, now that we can marry, now that we can be people, that we try to reclaim the parts of our lives we lost to that mindless hate. Even if it means getting cut even more deeply. I don’t think any of us can stop ourselves. We’ve won so many of the battles we never thought we’d live to see won. There is hope. But beneath it, for so many of our generation there is a bottomless sadness that never goes away. Never.
I saw in my server logs that someone several weeks ago went looking through my older blog posts and came across this one and I revisited it. There’s a nugget of truth in there about me that I don’t think anyone who knows me gets, and I’m all alone with that too.
So now I’m two and a half decades past the year 2000. You should have seen what the future looked like when I was a 1960s teenage boy.
I began the year 2024 two years fully retired, vagueing out on life and unable to be creative about anything.That first year of retirement was pretty good. But I began to spiral inward after that. 2024 began to resemble a bad period of my life back in my twenties when I just sat all night in my bedroom listening to music and zoning out. I couldn’t draw, my photographic eye would not open. The difference between then and now is I’m in my 70s and a heart patient, and I’ve given up finally on ever having a boyfriend, let alone a spouse. It never happened and never will now. So once again I was just coasting along spiraling inward.
But then I ended the year back at Space Telescope working part time. That’s perked me up somewhat, but the initial thrill of being back among people and places I knew for decades is wearing off, and while I still love this job and the workplace I’m still that lost empty soul when I’m back on my own time. I took a train ride to Oceano (I love train rides), bought a small sketchbook here to try and do something, anything, to get that creative spark going again, even if it’s just practicing drawing hands, but it’s excruciatingly hard. I brought the Leica M3 along (it’s good for travelling light) and I think I managed to get a few good shots while I was here, so my photographic eye has opened up a tad. I have the office laptop with me and work to do that I enjoy because I don’t yet have enough leave time banked I can just take the holiday weeks off completely.
I’m 71. How did I make it this far without someone to love and be loved by. I feel like I died years ago and I just never noticed it so I’m still going through the motions of a life. I’m in reasonably good health. I just got a good review from my cardiologist, who would probably disapprove of the Cuban cigar I smoked tonight, let alone my intake at Old Juan’s. I should count my blessings, but I feel so empty. And given the situation here in the United (sic) States I am not looking forward to 2025. I can’t bring myself to wish anyone a happy new year considering, though I’ve wished it back whenever someone passing by has wished it me. Sorry. It just seems unreasonably optimistic.
Soon I’ll be back in my little Baltimore rowhouse, my solitary life, and a job I love for as long as the Republicans will let NASA have a budget for space telescopes, or they get Executive Order 10540 restored, and someone comes to my desk and tells me I can no longer legally work for a NASA contractor. Drifting along through the rest of my life is probably for the best. Paying attention to the world around me is only going to make me unhappy, which I really don’t need.
I wanted to chew a bit on what happened to me yesterday before I wrote about it. But I never felt more alone at a thanksgiving table than I did yesterday. Not my host’s fault though. He worked hard to put out a great thanksgiving table. He’d have sat there and talked my ears off but he was too busy. The others…well…they talked past me, they talked around me, they talked over me. Whenever I opened my mouth to contribute to the conversation someone would immediately start talking over me, and then yank the conversation to a different topic. Fact was I didn’t really know any of them, and they apparently knew each other but not me, although I’d seen some of them at previous gatherings. So that put me on the outside looking in from the start. I tried, but could not break through.
The worst moment came when one of the guests asked to take a group picture of all of us at the table, and the guy sitting next to me quite deliberately put his head in front of mine so my face wouldn’t be in the picture. I had to ask for a second take. What I should have done was get up and leave. But I didn’t want to offend my host, who I’ve known since the BBS days. It was no accident, he knew I was sitting there, he kept crowding my space at the table and I kept having to move away. This is something all us weird outcast kids get to experience over and over. But this was a Thanksgiving table for gay guys who didn’t otherwise have family to be with on that day. I expected some sense of…you know…Family.
I have never felt more alone at a Thanksgiving table.
Later I saw this post from Father Nathan Monk, who I follow on Facebook…
Some of you had a rough day because you were alone. Others choose to be around family that isn’t supportive because that’s easier than the alternative. There are those of you who had to sit at tables with those who hurt you. Then again, this might be your first holiday alone because you finally stood up for yourself. Maybe you are a seasoned veteran of the Black Sheep Society. Perhaps you’ve long ago found a chosen family and never looked back. You might be the person who has to show up because you are the only one who protects your vulnerable sibling who can’t bring themselves to walk away yet. Whatever your situation is as we step into the holiday season, whether you are alone or surrounded by people who despise you, just know that I love you just the way you are.
No one can replace a family with a status or undo all the pain with a few words; I won’t pretend to have that power. I just hope, that if you’ve snuck behind the tool shed to catch some of Willie Nelson’s breath with your cool cousin, or are hiding in the bathroom for just a moment, that as you look down at your phone after being told, “We said no politics!” because you were responding to the thing your uncle said about abortion but it’s only politics when you take the opposing view so he’s not in trouble for bringing it up, but you are for responding, that when the screen glares brightly as you check out of the hell you are in for just a moment, you look down to these words and know I’m thinking about you, I see you, and I love you.
If you fall into one of those cracks know that you’re not alone. But remember that cultivating chosen family requires digging below the labels that get put on all of us at one time or another. I might be gay for example, but that won’t mean we have anything in common with each other apart from a political battle, and you might even disagree with that.
I would have loved to have had Thanksgiving with my little crew of high school classmates. We have gathered semi regularly, those of us who still live in the area, and it is always a good time. We knew each other from when we were teenagers. Those are good friends to have and keep. I would have loved to have had Thanksgiving with my brother in California, and that part of my family tree out there. I’ll be there for the Christmas and New Year holidays though, so there’s that. A casual post Thanksgiving happy hour with some of my co-workers at Space Telescope would have been lovely. Maybe some other year. Assuming I have a few of those still left to me.
I made myself a nice turkey dinner yesterday, to somehow make up for the miserable one I had on Thanksgiving. Yes, I ate by myself. But it was delicious. I made myself a drink and settled into some fond memories before going to bed. I reckon this is what solitary old men do. Then again, I often did this when I was a young man too.
“Acquainted with the Night”
by Robert Frost
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Good thing this little life blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic, especially from anyone I ever loved.
I swear it’s the biggest joke or comedy or tragedy or whatever of my life that the one guy out of all the other’s I’ve ever loved, who turned out to possibly be the best match, is the straight guy. He was visiting briefly on his way here and there and in that short time we talked as I’ve never talked with any of the others, and felt a deep soulful synergy as I’ve never felt with any of the others. And I can see clearly now that none of the others were really a good match. We never talked like that. We never shared ourselves like that. And he’s straight.
Maybe that’s not entirely true. I know I talked lots with the others. Strike one and I talked for hours on the phone after we reconnected…for a while…before others began listening in. We would talk for house past closing time at his place of work. But that had to stop too. Strike three and I lived hundreds of miles apart and would talk on the phone for hours between visits. Before cell phones strike three and I would talk so long the batteries on our cordless phones would die and we’d have to switch to the wired landline. The cordless phones were a godsend. We would talk for hours while we each went about our household chores, untethered by a wire, like we were there together. But then it stopped and I got dumped.
It always stopped. I never stopped wondering what was wrong with me.
For a moment, for a few short hours, I had it back with number two. It was wonderful. My heart sang. And he’s straight.
Good thing I’m an atheist, because if I died right now, right this moment, and there actually was an almighty god creator of the universe, I’d spit in its face. But there is no god. So it’s all good.
Many years ago a girl that a friend of mine was dating told me, approvingly, that I was a discreet homosexual. I replied that I was single and it is easy to be discrete about your love life when you don’t have one.
I blogged about my relationship with that family previously, and about when I finally realized that all the time I thought I was teaching them that gay guys were just another thread in the American quilt, and that liberty and justice for all thing applies to us too, they thought they were encouraging me to stifle myself and be discreet. It’s easier for some heterosexuals (not all) to accept a gay friend or family member provided they don’t have to ever see any specific evidence of their sexual orientation. Such as a boyfriend. Or the way a beautiful guy can jerk your eyes around and make you look, stunned. As long as they don’t have to see that, they’re fine with you.
One of my straight friends, from way, Way back, friended me on Facebook, and then promptly de-friended me. When I asked why he said he didn’t want all that gay stuff I was writing about on his Facebook page. Of course I wasn’t putting it on his page, but mine. The thing was that he saw it, because he’d friended me which meant he could see all the posts I marked as friends only, and he didn’t want to.
It was like that whenever we spent time together. He could talk about his love life, but when I talked about mine, or rather my struggle just to simply have one, he would change the subject. I was okay for me to be his gay friend, so long as I wasn’t…you know…gay.
Especially when all you can see about your LGBT neighbors in this life, is sex.
It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance. -Vito Russo
It’s on this website, in my artwork and on this blog, that you really see the shameless homosexual that I am. Which is not to say I am given to a lot of overt displays of sexuality here. My art gallery is full of sexy guys, but there is no pornography, which I consider just pushing buttons. I am not given to graphic descriptions of sex, even in my fiction. But there is no doubt that I like beautiful guys and that that same sex couples in my fiction are lovers. What makes me shameless is I really don’t think there is anything wrong with being homosexual. I am fine with this. I am not ashamed.
Because once upon a time I fell in love with a classmate, a stunningly beautiful guy, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve written before it really was like something out of a Disney movie. I walked with a lighter step, the birds sang a little more sweetly, the skies were a little more blue, the stars shined a little more brightly. I was twitterpated. It was wonderful. There is no reason for me to be ashamed of that.
I can see how your average heterosexual might have some trouble grokking this. Sex is a basic drive inside of us, older than the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone us, and our libidos are what they are. It either turns you on, or it turns you off. Fine. I get that. But you don’t have to obsess about the sex I might be having to appreciate that apart from that detail of sexual orientation my desires are not that different from anyone else’s.
All my life I have searched for that significant other, to have and hold, to share a life together, body and soul. And all my life I keep getting told that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with being homosexual, and having homosexual sex. But being reduced to a sex drive you can miss how the sight of a beautiful guy arouses more than my libido, but also every higher emotion of wonder and joy within me, that make life worth living. That’s the part that keeps getting missed when all you can see about your LGBT neighbors is the sex you think they’re having.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments; love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom: If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
That sonnet speaks to something deep within us, gay and straight alike.
I never found that significant other. I’m 70 years old now and looking back at having walked my entire adult life basically single and alone in my heart. I blame the world I came of age in, that kept telling me and everyone else that homosexuals don’t love they just have sex. In a better world I might have found someone to have and hold. A nice guy I might have met at a church social or in high school or at some social event for the gay kids arranged by caring adults. Someone I could have brought home to mom and told her this is my boyfriend and she’d have made a place at the table for him. Someone I could have made a life together with, body and soul.
So if you ever see me gawking at some drop dead beautiful guy, just let me have my moment. Beautiful guys are still a good reason to keep on living, and I’m probably not just drinking in his beauty, but also seeing what might have been if only the gay kid I once was had lived in a better world.
There’s a line from the poem The Man On The Bed by Debora Greger that keeps tapping me on the shoulder ever since I first read it in an issue of The New Yorker…
If the heart is a house, he thought, it is rented to strangers who leave it empty…
I was unaware the moment I left Space Telescope for the last time as an employee, how the combination of details of my life just then, being a heart patient, approaching seventy and having an aging body, plus living alone in my little Baltimore rowhouse, would impact my mental well being. But I see now that it is killing me.
I still have many of the friends I made back in high school, and in my twenties. But they are all scattered to the winds now. Most of them living in California, where I had once hoped to retire to. One has late in his life, resisted being pinned down to any one place and is travelling the wide world over, as though to become the very definition of that saying, that not all who wander are lost. We socialize via the Internet tubes and social media things. But as human contact it is second hand at best.
I can’t go live in California, much as I want to. I am tied firmly to my place in Baltimore. It’s not so bad really, in fact logically I have to admit I have it Very Good here. A nice solid little concrete block and brick rowhouse I bought in 2001 for less than ninety grand when I became staff at The Institute, and thus with a Very Easy monthly mortgage payment: a good thing to have on retirement income. The neighborhood is very walkable. In less than ten minutes I can be at the local grocery store, ten more and I’m at an upscale-ish organic food market. There are drugstores, restaurants, bars…just about everything I might need on a day to day basis is close at hand. That’ll come in handy when I become too old to drive. But I don’t want to live that long.
I had not reckoned with how being single, living alone, being old, having an iffy heart and an aging body, would make retirement something like Nietzsche’s abyss. Except I’m not just staring into it, I’m living much too comfortably in it. When I was employed I had human contact throughout most of my workday. And The Institute was such a Wonderful workplace. I actually enjoyed the company of my fellow workers there. Most of them. Some still invite me out to drinks and dinner at some nice place nearby, and there are lots of those. When that happens, I get an evening of intelligent, absorbing conversation. I feel alive again for a little while. Then I come home and go to bed. Alone. City life is invigorating. When you can get outside to enjoy it.
I never used to really notice solitude. I’m an only child. Solitude is something of a birthright for us. We have to make friends and socialize outside of the home just like anyone else, but we don’t wilt if we don’t have company every day of the week. I could spend my evenings home alone with a good book or an art project and still have the companionship of my co-workers at The Institute during the day, and all the joy and wonder of being a part of human space exploration. I did not reckon with what might happen to my mental well being when that part of my life vanished into the doldrums of being retired. I was looking forward to it. I had so much I wanted to do.
I thought I would have more time to work on my art projects, and to travel a bit. I don’t have the money to do the great world tour, but road trips are something a really enjoy and I have a good car for that. What has happened now is that I’m just tired all the time. I can, and have, spent days doing nothing but napping and taking random walks through the neighborhood. For a while I used the local bars and restaurants as a way of grabbing a little second hand human company. But my heart troubles have put the brakes on drinking…I was never a heavy drinker to begin with…and dining out frequently is too hard on my retirement income budget.
So I spend a lot of time alone in the house, and you’d think that’s perfect for getting on to all the art projects I have in the works. But no. I look at my drafting table, or my cameras, and I have no energy for any of it. I ended up short cutting to the end of A Coming Out Story after I became concerned that death would take me before I could finish it properly, because I had no energy to work on the thing after all, and I didn’t want to leave the story hanging. But I’m not happy with it. There’s a whole lot of stuff I could fill into that story that I have no energy for. Which of course makes me feel even worse, even more like just wanting to crawl into bed and sleep forever.
The solitude, something I’ve been fine with all my life, is too much of my day now and it is killing me. I honestly did not expect that to be something that would happen to me in retirement. I didn’t reckon with suddenly losing that workday companionship, didn’t reckon on what effect that would have on me being a single gay male utter failure at romance. My co-workers and friends who have retired are all married and most of them have families. And this past couple month’s worth of rainy, grey overcast or bitterly cold weather hasn’t helped any. February is always a bad time of year for me, and March isn’t much better…memories wise. Valentine’s Day and March 6 only laugh in my face. I can see better now why retired people go live somewhere warm.
So this week I’m packing my car for another road trip to California for a short visit to my brother and Oceano, and a few more days in Disneyland. I need to jolt myself out of this cycle of solitude. Before it convinces me to pack it all in, stay home all day long and wait for the Grime Reaper to ring the doorbell. Figure a road trip will do it. I need something to wake me up and at my age now it’s unlikely to be a boyfriend. Not that it was ever likely I suppose.
I’m still decompressing a bit from Valentine’s Day, which isn’t helped any by it coming in the dead of winter here in central Maryland. So I thought I’d just repost a little something I’d blogged about many years ago…
This is from an old Polaroid a friend probably snapped of me while I was sitting on the balcony of the apartment in Rockville (now North Bethesda!) mom and I lived in during the 60s/70s/80s. I would have been in my twenties. I would have still had the Pinto and probably was working at the Best Products just on the other side of the fence between them and the apartments.
I can tell a lot about the timeframe that this was taken because it has to be sometime in the mid 70s, before that awful couple years I wrote about yesterday. It’s in my face. I look at this and see someone still comfortable in the life he has, confident that even better times are just around the corner. A boyfriend. A good job that paid well (I was going to be a newspaper photographer). A place of my own. Everything was still possible.
As to why I had it taken…I’m not sure. This would have been before the microcomputer days, let alone the Internet, so it wouldn’t have been to post to an online profile. This is a Polaroid, I had no scanner then, and getting copies off a Polaroid wasn’t simple. So this was a one-off. I think I had it taken just to have a couple of me that I actually liked. There are a few other poses in the set but I liked this one best. Which explains why it’s a Polaroid: I could look over each one and decide if I needed another.
The problem was always that I didn’t have many of myself that I liked. By then I was well aware that I wasn’t very good looking, but every now and then I saw a good photo of me so I wasn’t overly concerned about my looks at that age. My teeth were very crooked though, and I was extremely self conscious about that. In every photo of me from that period I’m always smiling with my mouth closed. You almost can’t see the smile here, but it’s there in the corner of my mouth. That problem wouldn’t get fixed until I was in my thirties when a friend kindly financed some dental work for me and pointed me to a super good dentist.
This image is from a time before the Internet, personal computers, cable TV, and cell phones let alone smartphones. I’m pretty sure this was before 1977 and Anita Bryant’s rampage on gay civil rights in Dade County Florida. I had listen to my shortwave radio to get the result of the vote in Dade County because none of the mainstream network news companies bothered to cover it until much later. News for and about gay Americans was not fit to print in those days. If I wanted that news, and I didn’t want to drive into DC to the Lambda Rising bookstore, I had to go to a seedy adult bookstore in Wheaton and walk past racks of pretty hard core heterosexual pornography to get a copy of the Washington Blade and The Advocate. The subway wouldn’t be built out beyond the beltway in Montgomery County until 1978 when the station at Silver Spring opened. After that I could drive into Silver Spring and hop on the Metro to get to DuPont Circle and Lambda Rising. When the Twinbook Metro station opened in 1984 I could just walk from the apartment to the subway and it was a straight shot down the red line to DuPont Circle and back.
I was so happy not to have to go past those heterosexual porn magazines ever again. I mean…okay…whatever floats your boat. But…jeeze… And yet, in many quarters of American culture, not just the pulpit thumping churches, but also mainstream news media, TV, movies, and magazines, the youngster you see in this photo was regarded as a deviant threat to American society, family values, and civilization itself.
That is the world you are seeing in this image. TVs still had vacuum tubes, telephones had a wire connecting them to the wall, you got your news from the morning or afternoon newspaper, or the nightly network news broadcasts around dinnertime. Am radio played mostly music or sports, music came on vinyl LPs or cassettes, big box department stores were still a thing, and bookstores and newstands were everywhere, but you couldn’t get any gay publications in them because gay people like the kid in this photo were almost universally regarded with contempt and loathing. But the kid you see there was still pretty confident of his future. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to meet tomorrow. He never found a boyfriend.
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