There’s the baggage you carry that’s yours, that got dumped onto you at some point in your life, and then there’s the baggage you carry that belongs to others. Oftentimes you will be told that you don’t have to carry someone else’s baggage too. But letting go of theirs is not always easy, let alone possible. More often than not it’s easier to let go of your own, because that’s something you have control over. 

I retired last February, spent some time with my brother out in California, then came back to my little Baltimore rowhouse and began the work of integrating what was in my office at the Institute into my house. In my previous post, Walking Through Hell To Get To Heaven I mentioned that after working for 23 years and a few weeks for the Space Telescope Science Institute I’d managed to get a few awards and recognition for the work I did, along with some photos with the astronauts, and that now I was trying to find a place for it all on my den walls.

It’s been going through all that, seeing for myself the evidence of work I did on Hubble, James Webb, and Roman, over the course of nearly half my adult working life, that I think I’ve finally shaken off the low expectations laid on me when I was a kid. I’ll be 69 in a few days. It’s taken that long, and seeing that I might not have enough room on my den walls for all my awards and certificates.

I’m still the weird art kid I always was, still the techno nerd, still the guy in the conversation who can pull out all sorts of strange references out at a moment’s notice because he sees a connection others probably just find…you know…Weird. It’s taken me this long to allow myself to be that and not let that Weird Geek Kid baggage attach to me anymore. I’m retired. I don’t care. You get this close to the end of the road and it improves your perspective about things like that.

Homophobia for example. For most of my adult life I believed that I avoided a lot of internalized homophobia because it was falling in love with a classmate that woke me up to the reality of my sexual nature. But while I never hated myself, never felt the least bit of shame about it, the cultural hatred and contempt still left its mark. You get the boot from one workplace after another when they find out they hired a faggot and eventually you come to expect it. Low expectations again. And I have met lots of gay men who were smart, kind hearted, hard working, thoroughly decent people living well below their potential because striving for something better just hurt too much. 

All my adult life I searched for someone to love and cherish and make a life together with.  Someone decent, honest, responsible. Someone that in a better world I might have met at a church social or youth retreat or a coffee house like The Lost And Found. But the good boys of my generation were terrified. They didn’t want their parents to hate them, the didn’t want God to hate them. And should their parents have found out anyway, and told them to pack themselves off to a therapist or a nice ex-gay ministry, they’d pack their bags and dutifully headed to the nearest one. Yes mom, yes dad, I will put my heart and my soul and whatever fulfilled and contented love life I might have had, put them in this little coffin and bury it. Because I am your good son.

They talk about sin. I don’t think they really get the concept. Sin is telling a kid they’re worthless and making them believe it. Sin is poisoning a kid’s ability to love and accept love from another right at the cusp of their adulthood. 

We all carried that baggage to some degree back then. And still do. For many in my generation it will always be a time before Stonewall. But the painful thing to realize is we carry each other’s baggage too. I carry your baggage, as well as mine. In our solitude. In our loneliness.

Those of you keeping track of the timeline of my love life fail from my ruminations about it here (oh you poor lost souls…) might recall that about the time of Strike Three’s visit I had also reconnected with Strike One and had begun visiting him a time or two. I could drive down I-95 and visit both. In retrospect I think the fates were trying to slam something into my head that I wasn’t ready to admit just then.

Why don’t you give up? How many more times do you need to be kicked in the face?

Ah…Facebook memories…

This was about the one and only time Keith came to visit me in Baltimore. Before that, way before that, when I assumed we were a couple…long distance though it was…he used to live on Hilton Head and I was living in a Baltimore suburb. He came to visit my apartment there in the suburbs several times. That was before he cut it off. But that one visit to Baltimore was when he said he just wanted to be away from the boyfriend for a while and travel around for a bit. I figured they might have been going though a bad patch and not to presume on it. But it was nice having him there with me. Despite myself I fell in love all over again.

I got static repeatedly from the gay happy hour gang I used to hang out with, about how I just needed to go out more and meet people. Which is to say, just go get yourself laid and it’ll be all good. I’ve written about this previously…

 For romantics like myself, the social opportunities at this late stage in life are mostly with other singles who are just fine in the singles scene and that’s why they’re still there, not why you’re still there.

So that one time Keith came to visit I brought him with me to one of our happy hour gatherings to show them I actually had a dating history, brief and pointless though it was. Of course it had no effect…see the above link. They seemed to like him. And when he went back to his home and his boyfriend a few days later, it struck none of them to be sad for me. It was the last time Keith and I spent any time together at my place, or I at his.

Today Facebook tells me it’s been 13 years since that visit. Before then, as I said, he lived on Hilton Head and I in the suburbs, and I would go visit him, or he would come up to Maryland and visit me. But it wasn’t those visits Facebook reminded me of seeing this. It was how in between visits we would spend hours on the phone just chatting away about this and that. It was a time before cell phones, when the first affordable cordless telephones began to appear. We would wander around our houses doing housework, imagining we were together for a while. We would chat for hours until the batteries in our phones died, often picking up the conversation again on the wired line.

It’s remembering all those hours at a time we spent chatting about this and that until the batteries died that brings it all back. I was in love. I thought he was too. It was wonderful. I would go visit and it was like a dream. I’d come back home and we’d start the long phone chats again.

Then they suddenly started tapering off, and one day while we were chatting on AOL messenger he told me he was seeing someone else. He told me later that my starting to talk about moving down there made him decide to cut it off.

Strike three. He was the last one.

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

Wise words that helped clarify something within me. I have always resisted the prison of being a thing, despite wanting to be a thing. There were times in my life I wanted to be a cartoonist, a painter, a photographer. Somehow it never worked. I became a computer programmer, a software systems engineer. It made me a very good living, and I am retiring comfortably on what I made, proud to look back on my time with the teams that worked on Hubble, James Webb, and for a brief period, Roman. But I was always bouncing back to one or more of those other things, telling myself that they were what I really wanted to be.

Eventually, as I grew older, I accepted that I just could not focus on any one of them for very long. I began to think of it as seasonal. Now is the season of drawing, now the season of cameras…the season of computers was when I was as preoccupied with computer work at home as I was at work. There was also a season of writing. There was a season of the open road, which often coexisted with the season of cameras. I came to see myself as hopelessly unfocused, unable to bring to any one of my creative arts the kind of fanatical single minded pursuit that would have got me a career in it. I blamed my cluttered mind. I would never have the large body of works other successful artists did. Randomly wandering between my arts and accomplishing very little would forever be my fate. But maybe it was that cluttered mind that was telling me something all along, that I never listened to: I am not a noun.

And now I’m old and retired, and looking back on all of it, I can see that I actually have accomplished a lot, if I take it all together instead of just looking at the nouns. My artwork has continued to improve, my photographic voice is purer, surer. I understand what I’m doing better. I’m happy with the life I had, random and bewildering though it often was. And lonely…so very lonely. But that’s another story for another time. Or not. Let me leave a small piece of that here, because it’s something I’m still wondering about.

He wasn’t the last guy I took a fancy to. I guess that would be the cute 30-something bartender at a place near The Avenue. It was hopeless of course, but not any more hopeless than all the others really. People who look like that… His name was Eddie. I met him on the gay BBS we both frequented back in the day. He was beautiful and for a time I was all about him. But he was not about me. So I played my trump card. He said he hated pictures of himself. I’m a photographer I told him. I can make you see how beautiful you are. Years later I was primed to play that card one more time, but people far wiser than I in matters of the heart decided not to allow it. People who look like that want people who look like that…

So Eddie and I went on trips into the country, and into the city, and he let my camera give him some love. The more I showed him how beautiful I saw him, the more comfortable he became with my camera. I did some of my best beautiful guy photography with him. And it was the last I ever did.

Eventually he started dating someone else and we went our separate ways.

Time passes, the universe expands, and a day came when I began revisiting the photography I did back in those gay BBS days. I posted a bunch of it on Facebook for the friends I made on that BBS, who I have stayed in touch with. Eddie wasn’t one of them…he simply disappeared, but for one time I saw him managing a booth at one of the gay marches on Washington. I asked him if he was seeing anyone, and he just sighed and told me relationships are So much work. I guess it all gets tiresome when you are so beautiful. I’ve never seen him since. That was before Facebook. So I when I posted a bunch of my gay BBS photography on Facebook, I probably only included one or two of Eddie.

But those tweaked my geek side because they were so damn hard to scan, being Kodachrome slides. Kodachrome slides are notorious for having a blue-ish tint in scans that’s very difficult to get rid of. I ended up buying a highly expensive scanning software for its ability to neutralize that tint. It was still a lot of work, and fiddling with those shots, I became re-acquainted with how beautiful Eddie was. And at some point I began to realize that I hadn’t done anything like it since.

Those shots of Eddie are the last shoots I ever did with anyone posing for me. Much, Much later I’d do some enjoyable work for Baltimore OUTloud, photographing some really beautiful guys wearing barely nothing at all (swim suit fashion shows). But those were all taken at public events and I was simply recording what was happening in front of me. But back in the day, when I was a much younger man, I actually did a lot of one-on-one shoots with a few beautiful guys who I could regularly ask out from time to time. We’d go somewhere, maybe to Great Falls, maybe somewhere in the city, and I’d snap away at them. After Eddie, that all just suddenly stopped.

I’ve been trying to understand this. I’ve been told a bunch…laughingly at times…that my photography is noticeable for it’s nearly complete absence of people. But I have the archive of it all right here in the house with me, and that absolutely wasn’t always true. I look back in time in my archives and I see most of what I did back in the day was people photography. Then the people seem to just vanish. The obvious answer is after Eddie I began to despair of ever finding love, and I didn’t want to keep looking into that abyss. 

Sometimes the pat answers are the correct ones after all. There’s a big gap in my photography right after those sessions with Eddie, where I stopped doing art altogether, along with painting and drawing. That was when I took up computer programming as a creative outlet, which led to the life I have now. In writing computer programs I was immersed in a world of pure logic that didn’t have to touch my emotions, my deepest feelings, where there was only despair. I managed to pull myself out of it the year after I got the job at Space Telescope, and found myself one day wandering among the carnival rides being set up for the student spring fair at Hopkins where STScI was located. That awakened something inside of me, and I began creating art again. But something had changed.

So I think of my artwork as having before the dead zone/after the dead zone periods. My catalogue of negatives and slides reflects that break in the numbering. But here’s the thing: There is almost zero creative people photography in the After period. And revisiting that time, I can see that the photo shoots of beautiful guys ended before the dead zone, when I stopped seeing Eddie.

The pat answer is now I’m too old to be asking beautiful young guys to pose for me. I came close to it that one time I was once more ready to throw down my trump card. But instead I was escorted from the table and shown the door, and now it’s all just despair there, in that one dark empty corner.

No more beautiful guys. You can say my art photography is purer now. I accept it. 

Those of us who are single. Those of us who have never found that intimate other. Those of us who crashed and burned on the alter of Love. It’s the day after that is ours. The day when the flowers start to wilt and the candy goes stale. There you will find us. The books holding stories of love that never was, waiting forever on the remainders shelves as a last desperate hope for a buyer. The closest thing I ever had to a boyfriend told me we were but merely friends with benefits. Swell if that sort of thing suits you. Too bad I was in love. Strike Three!

Today is the most miserable of days for those of us who have been single our entire adult lives. This year I have my pending retirement to distract me from it, so there’s that. That, and the fact that I’ve reached an age now where the need is beginning to wane. Let’s hear it for getting old. I tell myself I survived the heart attack because my heart has a lot of experience living with damage.  

But…since I’m seeing so many others sharing their favorite Valentine’s Day poems on Facebook today, let me share a couple of mine. Not really Valentine’s Day poems you say? Oh my goodness…yes…yes they are!

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.
To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
‘Good-bye,’ said you, `forget me.’
‘I will, no fear’, said I.
If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,
Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.
-A. E. Housman

I’ll just quote a couple lines from The Man On The Bed by Debora Greger…

If the heart is a house, he thought,
it is rented to strangers
who leave it empty.

That’s a hard one to find to read since it’s not been published widely, but it’s there in the November 24, 1974 issue of The New Yorker. If you have a subscription you can read it online. I bought a copy from a place that sells back issues just so I could have the entire thing. I think it’s a perfect Day After Valentine’s Day poem, but that’s probably not what the poet had in mind.

Many years ago I did a series of charcoal and ink drawings on a theme of first love, which I’m still really proud of…

The Old Gate

I was still so sure that I’d find my other half eventually. But that was then, and this is now. Crush #1 and I are not speaking to each other anymore, and crush #3 is living happily with the guy he dumped me for, except you can’t really say you were dumped when all you ever were was a friend who provided benefits when called upon. Age brings wisdom. And…heart attacks. Of the physical sort no less. If I’m still alive next year I might restart this blog’s annual Valentine’s Day Poster Contest.

But by then I might be fully across the threshold of old enough not to care anymore. Think of it as being nature’s way of saving the quest for love for younger folks who can take a beating. Or culling the herd of the ones that can’t. Some nights I have no idea why I’m still alive.

I wrote this several years ago, about a bartender I just couldn’t stop gawking at. He was straight, had a nice girlfriend, but he took kindly to the roving eyes and dropping jaw of a lonely old gay man, and some days when he wasn’t too busy, we’d chat for hours across the bar about this and that…life…music…Disneyworld…

Something about the face…those beautiful eyes, that lovely smile that appears spontaneously and lights up his face…Something about the way his hair flows easily down the back of his neck to his shoulders. Something about the shape of the hips, the lovely curve of the glutes under skin tight black low rise jeans, the occasional peek of black bikini brief just a tad above the belt line against bare skin, and the way that cute blue bandanna hangs down from his left back pocket…

My libido is picky. Very Very picky. But when it alerts…

Gay male sexuality. Every single guy I’ve ever taken a fancy to…Every One…could fit this pattern in a general way. My libido may not be very energetic, but it isn’t dead yet either…

At the time I wrote this I was well into my sixties and afraid of losing interest altogether. Now I’m a heart patient, and on beta blockers, which can be fairly described as antimatter Viagra. That, and a libido that seldom alerts on anything keeps me worried that someday I’ll just forget what it was that ever interested me in the first place about sex. 

But I’m not dead yet. Just…old…and looking at an entire lifetime spent on the outside of love and desire and romance looking in. That knife in my heart has so many names on it, and not just the names of bigots and bible thumpers. Shockingly there are gay names there who I trusted to lend a hand to an awkward gay kid who didn’t have the first clue about flirting, and who might as well have been bigots and bible thumpers too. The damage to my love life aren’t any different that I can see.

But a beautiful guy can still make my heart beat. So there’s that anyway. Joy and torment all wrapped up in one!

To whom it may concern…

(Note, this does not include anyone whose peace and quiet began March 6, 2016…)

I heard you. Now hear this.

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.  -Malcolm X

I’ll put it behind me, when it is behind me.

Deleted my Instagram account just now…or at least I Think I did…after it punched me in the gut this morning. This could be the start of something. I’m at a stage in my life where I need to start letting go of things. Like having any hope for a love life for example. Like looking reverently at beautiful guys and thinking life is good after all. People who look like that want people who look like that. 

I need less social media in my life. Really all I need is my blog and my website here. It’s getting too painful to look out at the world through social media. I grew up in a time that didn’t even have personal computers, let alone smartphones. I can deal better with the life I have now, by re-introducing myself to some of that. I could pretend I’m living again back in a time when I was happy and looking forward to the next day, and all the days after that. 

Never going back to using a telephone attached to a wall with a wire though. Nope. 

Wandered around Sunbury the other day, all alone with my cameras. First the Canon F1N loaded with some Tri-X Pan, then the new 6D mark II. It’s like the only time I ever feel alive anymore is when I’m taking a camera walk, or doing anything in the art room. Otherwise I’m just a walking corpse, putting one foot in front of the other to get through the day.

The thing about having to wear a mask in some situations…say, at the office when moving about the building, or in meetings…is nobody can see how wreaked you are inside by the empty dead corpse look on you face. The eyes don’t tell the whole story.

This challenge came across my Facebook stream this morning, because a friend replied to it jokingly. Oh…there is lots of joke material in this one…

You walk into your house & all your ex’s are there. Reply w/ just 3 words.

Alone again, naturally.

I don’t have ex’s…just a lot of near misses and strike-outs. And soon I’ll be 68.

This world I’ve come to learn, is equipped to handle lovers, ex-lovers, couples and the tragically dumped to the curb. It can handle the married…happily or otherwise…and the divorced. It has room for them all. What it can’t seem to wrap itself around are the one’s like me who never got the chance, who went from one end of a human life to another without knowing what it was like to be in a lover’s embrace. Ever.

So when one of us enters the room, the world looks the other way…and doesn’t see us at all…

I’m insomnia scrolling on Facebook early this morning, and a set of photographs pops into view. It’s my old high school being torn down completely…the one A Coming Out Story takes place in…

Photos by Christopher Cherry

I thought they were going to do an extensive remodeling, not a complete teardown and rebuild. That’s what the plans looked like to me anyway.

It really feels like looking at the end of life, but it’s worse than I imagined it would be, because it’s not enough that I die someday…it’s that everything I ever loved has to die too.  Not just Woodward…nearly nothing of the old neighborhood exists anymore. Just try to follow some of the old roads and paths now.

Maybe I will sell the house after all and go live in a trailer somewhere in the desert. Did I have that life? Was any of it real? Am I real?

This stabs worse than I could have imagined. I’d rather have seen an empty lot than those pictures. That senior year I had there was one of the best years of my life, difficult though it was in some ways. I had a really difficult time in just about every other grade school I attended, but I felt embraced by the people and the culture at Woodward in a way I’ve never felt anywhere else since. It set me on a path forward in life I wouldn’t have bothered walking otherwise, because there wouldn’t have been anything inside of me to make me believe I could do anything with my life.

So it goes…

Just shoot me now…

Joseph Gordon-Levitt occasionally posts these little challenges on Facebook for his readers. Every now and then one of them hits me pretty hard…

He was beautiful, but it was 1971.

Kinda hard to realize that even back when you were a teenager falling in love for the first time it was already over and done.
But I had to keep learning it over and over…and over…and over…

Strike one…strike two…strike three…strike one redux… You’re just not getting the message are you kid…your kind isn’t allowed to love…

Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins) is a cartoonist I’ve followed avidly since I first saw his cartoons in the local alternative weeklies (many of which have gone belly up in the print news devastation). I love his strip This Modern World, and when I needed a new host for my own personal website I did an nslookup to see who his was, thinking that if they were cool with his cartoons they’d be cool with mine and my blog.

He suffered a divorce a few years ago and he’s occasionally bled about it on twitter. Apparently it was sudden and unexpected. This thread he posted today this New Year’s Eve speaks to me so much…

“Three years ago today I was crawling out of the wreckage of a previous life, moving into my new apartment in New York on the coldest day of the year, absolutely no clue what lay ahead…”

“Some of it was very good and some of it not so much … and then we got to March, 2020 and everything sort of flatlined…”

“I wasn’t expecting to live the life I have now, but … it’s definitely been interesting. And sometimes, really good!”

That is so much me in many ways. And yet, my situation could not be more different. I reckon that speaks to the universal human condition. I didn’t suffer a divorce, but that’s because I never had the lover. The breakups in my life did not happen after years and years of peace and joy and happiness. So they would not have been as wounding. I suppose. Instead the wound was a never ending cloudy drizzly sky I somehow became accustomed to. A constant ache from a place within that should not have been so empty for so long. There was nothing in my romantic life to loose. But I lost everything. And now I’m 67, and given my own set of recent events, health-wise, I’m not sure I have a lot of life left.

Loosing both parents changes you. Old age changes you. The first heart attack, or whatever that first serious brush with death due to an aging body is, changes you. In some ways for the better. You kinda stop giving a flying fuck about things you probably never should have anyway. The regrets you’ve carried with you all this time get shuffled and re-arranged, and maybe some of them weren’t all that worth carrying around anyway. Baggage is dropped. But then fresh baggage is picked up along the way. It always is.

It’s odd in a way for me the elder man to be watching how the younger ones deal with their life’s knife wounds in a way that teaches me how to live with mine…at least a tad. I wasn’t expecting to live the life I have now, but…it’s definitely been interesting. And sometimes, really good! Yeah…I can relate. And especially to a previous tweet he put out there about how nobody wants to hear about getting kneecapped by love…probably because they’ve all been kneecapped too at some point and nobody knows how to deal with it. Yeah…I can relate. Absolutely. Somewhat.

And here’s the thing…all those times in my life when I’ve been asked/challenged/preached to, in the context of a discussion relating to my sexual orientation, if I had it to do over would I still want to be a homosexual…in the expectation that of course I would choose to be a heterosexual…all those times I may have stared back at them like they were from another planet…what’s going through my mind just then is You’re heterosexual and you’ve lived your entire life in that world and you’re trying to tell me that the grass is greener on Your side of the fence?? What have you been smoking all this time?

I’m sorry for what happened to you Mr. Perkins. I’m sorry for what happens to all of us. Somehow we manage. What I learned in 2020 is romantic alienation did not prepare me at all for imposed alienation. This is worse. In a world full of broken hearts at least we had each other…

“…but man I miss the possibility of a weekly hangout in that dive bar.”

…and our favorite local bar.

Here’s to the new year. May the day come quickly when we can at last all be brokenhearted together once more.

Some years ago, a dear friend died suddenly, and at least among some of us, unexpectedly. We knew he had health problems, but he always managed to pull through. When the end came it was a shock to all of us, and especially to his lover of many years.

At the funeral I resisted visiting the open casket. Years later I would dig in my heels and flatly refuse to look into mom’s open casket. I didn’t want to remember her that way. But lover of many years nudged me over. And I looked. I just don’t understand why people find comfort in that. But many do and I won’t begrudge it of them. Just don’t ask me to. I want to remember life.

Maybe lover of many years saw the look on my face. He was in the depths of grief and I know what that’s like, if not over a lover because I’ve never had one. When mom passed away I went out of my mind for weeks. I was glad the man in the casket and the one left behind looking at it had so many friends, so the left behind would not be lost and alone in grief. He looked sideways at me looking at the dead, and said something to me that almost reached a place of grief inside of me that I have lived with nearly all my life. All my life since one summer in 1973, when I discovered my first love had moved away and I had no idea where he’d gone. He said that perhaps someone like me who had been lonely all his life would also understand how it was, if not to lose the one you had loved, to have to deal with grief. Decades later he would let a chance to introduce me to a possibly Very compatible someone drop on the floor because, as he told me, he needed an excuse to do the work of arranging it, and my loneliness wasn’t it.

This came across my Facebook stream this morning…

This is good advice, and it isn’t just the recently bereaved who can say it from that empty knowing wasteland. I know what unrequited love is like. I know what being seen as a second best sex toy for heterosexuals who aren’t getting any is like. I know what it’s like to have my ass admired by random passing strangers.  I know what it’s like to have someone’s crotch shoved into my car window and ask me if I “want some”, all because they saw the lambda sticker on my car and figured a homosexual is as good a sperm dumb as any. I know what being called friends with benefits is like when I was in love and thought the other guy was too, and it turned out I was just a between serious relationships snack. I know what it’s like to have a gay friend tell me to my face that people who look like that want people who look like that. And I am going to go from one end of an adult life to another without knowing how it feels to be embraced by someone I loved and desired, who loved and desired me back. I turned 67 a few days ago. I really don’t see anything to look forward to now but the same existential aloneness I felt for the first time that summer of 1973, when I walked past the home of my first love and saw it was empty and for sale. For a moment I wondered if that was how the house felt too.

Make the chili. And if you have lost the love of your life, listen to this man who knows how much and how deeply that hurts…

There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son, or daughter, or your wife or your husband, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner than later.  –Joe Biden

I will never tell you this, but I envy you your grief. I envy you your memories. Staring into that casket decades ago, I envied his.