This year instead of my usual Valentine’s Day Poster Contest I’ll just repost a few entries from the pre game countdown I put up last year.  Do you believe in love?  When I was younger I did, most definitely.  And I thought it was just a matter of letting fate cross my other half’s path with mine some day.  And perhaps that would have happened too, but for the fact that I’m a gay man, and lots of people have this religious belief that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  Mind…it isn’t that they have a belief in god or Jesus or whatever…the religion is that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  There are Christians who believe this, there are Jews who believe it, Muslims, Agnostics, Atheists…it doesn’t matter what the avowed faith is.  The faith they’ll spend the significant amount of energy, money, and personal moral capital on is Homosexuals Don’t Love, They Just Have Sex. You want to light a fire in these folks, be a homosexual who believes in love.  Be a homosexual who thinks you deserve the same chance at it they do.  Then watch, as that place in your heart where a love life might have taken root and grown, is systematically, methodically torn apart…

 I was in my twenties, not at all sure of what I was going to do with my life, but at least making ends meet working as a stock clerk at the warehouse of a small catalog retailer. They had two local stores and one, oddly, in Hilton Head, but like a lot of catalog retailers did most of their business around the holidays from the annual Christmas catalog they mailed out. I’d worked there by then for a couple years. Most of summer and autumn were spent bulking up the warehouse with goods for the Christmas rush. But the two local stores had to also be kept in supply. The Hilton Head store periodically got shipments from our warehouse. The two local stores were supplied by me and the company van. One day, one of the clerks from the Montgomery Mall store came by to pick something up. My jaw probably made a mark in the concrete floor the moment I first laid eyes on him. About my height and age, thin but not scrawny, short reddish hair and geek glasses. His friendly smile as he asked me where the warehouse manager was seemed to lift me off the ground. I pointed in the boss’s direction and thought of that smile the rest of the day. No…the rest of that week.

Periodically he would return and I would walk over to greet him and our eyes would meet and we’d share a smile. My gaydar was never wonderful but it seemed written all over him. Problem was we were never left alone so I could strike up a casual chat with him. The warehouse was getting busy for the release of the new catalog and we had a bunch of new temporary hires running around. Whenever he came to the warehouse the warehouse supervisor always seemed to get to him first, and by the time he’d finished his business I was usually busy with something else. Plus, it was the late 1970s. You just didn’t come out to people back then without a lot of careful preparation.

By that time in my life I’d already been let go from a couple places after it became apparent that Bruce is gay. One supervisor had told me to my face that there was no place for homosexuals in his business. You had to be careful. If he was gay, and I was pretty sure he was simply by the way his eyes roved cheerfully over my body whenever he came around, he also knew he had to be careful. But after sharing several long lingering smiles with him I resolved to at least get a name and hopefully…somehow…a phone number.

One day as I was dropping off stock to the Montgomery Mall store, he came to the loading dock. He’d never done that before…it was usually one of the other clerks. His shift I’d assumed, was the late afternoon to closing one and I always made my deliveries in the morning before the stores opened. But that day, there he was, and he offered to help me unload. My heart leapt for joy. We began a casual chit-chat as we took the stock out of the van and into the store’s backroom. Then the store manager came out to the van…just as we were sharing another of those long lingering smiles. The look on her face could have frozen lava. She told him there was a customer he should take care of, glared at me, and left me to finish unloading.

The next day I was fired. Allegedly because some unspecified store manager complained my hair was too long. (yes, seriously) A couple days later I worked up the nerve to go to the Montgomery Mall store and of course there she was and I was told not to come back. I later learned he was let go as well. I never got his name. Never saw him again. But I can still see that last smile he tossed at me.

I’ve no idea if anything would have come of it, but a closer walk with him would have been nice. But someone else’s Closer Walk With Thee probably took precedence. And why buy your stairway to heaven when you can make it out of someone else’s dream.

Some years later I ran into the UPS driver who ran the route that serviced our warehouse…my job had me working closely with him getting our stuff out the door to our mail order customers, so when our paths crossed again we immediately recognized each other and started chatting.  Hey…what’s up…how are things…? As casually as I could manage I asked him if by any chance he remembered the guy who had made my heart sigh, if only for one brief moment out of my life. There was a guy…I don’t know his name, but he worked at the Montgomery Mall store…came to the warehouse every now and then…remember him…? No, says he, he didn’t make runs to the Mall. But the warehouse manager who fired me he said, had ended up getting arrested and going to jail. The owners of the company had apparently caught him with his hands in the petty cash box.

No doubt he went to jail knowing that at least a thief’s chances for paradise were better than a sodomite’s.

(Reposted from last year…because when it comes to love, all that is old is new again…and again…and again…and again…)

Valentine’s Day Broken Heart Countdown!

This year, I propose having a pre-game celebration.   Jim Burroway posted this today on Box Turtle Bulletin and it added some weight to my Valentine’s Day thoughts lately…

New York Times Magazine Publishes “What It Means To Be A Homosexual”: 1971. The Harper’s October 1970 cover screed by Joseph Epstein — the one where he called gay people “an affront to our rationality” and were “condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men” — generated an outpouring of anger in the gay community, which resulted in a protest inside the offices of Harper’s (see Oct 27). Gay activists demanded another article to give the gay community equal exposure, but the Harper’s refused the request. Its editors also refused to apologize. The outrageous insults in the piece become something of a second, lesser Stonewall in the way it brought out even more gays and lesbians who decided it was time to become more involved publicly.

Among them was Merle Miller, a former editor at Harper’s who was also a novelist and biographer…

You should go read the whole thing…Jim’s “Today In History” posts are worth reading every day.   But this one helped remind me of the times I grew up and passed through adolescence in.   That time when we are discovering first the first time, what desire and love are all about.   It should be the most magical, wonderful passage in our lives, but for some of us, condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom it was made into a nightmare.   More so for others than for me, thankfully, or I might not even be here now to type all this.   But the atmosphere of hatred and contempt I grew up within did its job on me too.   In 1971, the year before I graduated from high school, the year I experienced my first crush, Joseph Epstein wrote, “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth.” He couldn’t of course, but there was always the next best thing. You could make sure whenever it was in your power to do so, that a gay person never had that chance to know what it was to love, and be loved wholeheartedly in return.

Without a doubt Epstein did just that whenever he got the chance.   His howl against the homosexual in that Harper’s article almost certainly became a dagger in the the hopes and dreams of young gay men and women back then, reassuring parents, teachers, clergy that it was no sin to put a knife in the hearts of teenagers in love, that if they were condemned to live their one life in loneliness and heartache that was merely the Curse Of Homosexuality, not their own bar stool arrogance and cheapshit prejudices that did it to them.   Bobby and Johnny are getting just a little too friendly aren’t they…let’s pack them off to the psychiatrist quickly now…or to some nice church camp somewhere far away, where they can pray their unspeakable sin away…

Ah…Valentine’s Day…when all the lonely hearts ponder writing new songs about the one that did them wrong.   I have a different thing in mind.   How about stories of that which might have been, but for the cheapshit prejudices of the world we were thrown into.   I have a few stories of my own to tell.   Pull up a chair.   Sit a spell.   Love is in the air.   Let me pour you a drink.   There is a box of Valentine’s Day candy over there on the table, pieces of the moon rattling hollowly inside…angry, angry candy…

This wonderful Allstate ad came across my Facebook stream just now…

Be nice if in the midst of all the celebrations of how wonderful it is to be in love, there was also some recognition of how wonderful it would be if everyone else had a chance at it too.   And maybe…who knows…a little re-dedication to making that world where all the butterflies come from love and not fear a reality.

Just saying…

Self portrait in 1982. Thirty-One years later and I still can’t find the piece that keeps making my life hurt so much. There’s something in there that isn’t supposed to be.  Or maybe someone.  Or maybe someone that isn’t in there, that’s supposed to be. I’ve stopped wondering why my art photography is the way it is. I’ll probably take the question of why it had to be like that to my grave.  Hopefully not too much longer from now. I just want this joke to stop laughing at me.

Sigh…

Everyone, almost without exception, tells me I should get another cat when the time is right.   I am almost inclined to agree, maybe.   But any cat I bring into my life again will have to be a strictly indoor cat because I am not carrying another much loved pet back to the front porch with a broken body. So what kind of life can I offer an indoor cat?   Well, I have a house of my own, and it has three levels and lots of space to run around and find places to lounge in.   But it gets little direct sunlight into it because of the Japanese maples out front, and the aluminum awnings a previous owner put over the windows.   I could put some places up by all the windows for it (her…it would probably be another her) to lounge on and watch the world outside go by. But I would hate to think I was keeping it (her) imprisoned. There’s a reason you can’t keep a cat confined indoors once it’s had the taste of the outdoors.   A life confined indoors would disturb me.   But I can’t be picking up another broken body off the street.

The worst of it though is…it’s just me living there.   I go to work.   I go here and there when I’m not at work.   For a walk when I need it.   In my car when I need that.   Cat’s don’t do cars very well.   Neither do most motels.   The cat would be by itself a lot, and taken care of by a stranger who comes by just long enough to feed it (her) and clean the litter box when I’ve gone on vacation somewhere.   It just wouldn’t be fair.   I take your love and affection and then I leave you alone whenever it’s something I need to do.

It isn’t that another cat wouldn’t be good for me.   Claudia’s love convinced me I need companionship more than I’d thought. I’ve been searching for my other half since I was a teenager in first love, and telling myself that I’d rather be alone then fake it with Mr. For Tonight or Mr. Good Enough.   But alone is more damaging than I’d really realized.   It isn’t that another cat wouldn’t be good for me.   It’s would I and my life be good for a cat.   At least Claudia had the world outside the house too.

Depression is when I decide to go for a short pleasure drive and don’t bother taking a camera along.   Depression is when I go downstairs to do a laundry, look at my drafting table, and then look away. Depression is when I just want to sleep all day long over the weekend, until its time to go to work again Monday morning.

I took his Christmas cards down off the fridge this afternoon while cleaning the kitchen, and put them in the box with all the other cards and letters I’ve received over the years.   All but the first one, which was just a post card it seemed he’d tossed in the mail to me on the spur of the moment.

The evening of my abrupt trip back home from Walt Disney World I had a dream. I’d made the trip back from Orlando in a haze of deep depression; the kind I usually endure over the winter, around February, around Valentine’s Day.

Before sleep, as I lay in my motel bed and read my Facebook stream, I saw Wil Wheaton fretting about not wanting to go to sleep for fear of having night terrors. He has very bravely and publicly talked about his struggles with depression and I assume that the night terrors are a part of that. The deep depression I feel now as I turn in for the night isn’t of the clinical sort, or at any rate I don’t think it is. The evening before I had given a small gift of gourmet chocolates to a certain someone for his birthday, and he handed them back to me. The lonely ache I am feeling this night is almost like a second home to me now, and it is not night terrors I am worried about. Some dreams scare the steaming shit out of you but then you wake up and it’s just a dream. But some dreams, not terrifying, play with your emotions like a dog plays with a stuffed rabbit.

I’m in a coffee house somewhere I don’t recognize, chatting with a handsome guy who I’ve never seen before but I somehow recognize in this particular dream as an old boyfriend from many years. We chat casually about this and that and then out of the blue it seems, he asks me to marry him. Overjoyed, I tell him yes, yes I will.

Then we are in in our tuxedos standing together at the altar. The church is old, but more of a simple meeting house kind of church than the Baptist churches I grew up in. Its old wooden pews seem relaxed and comfortable, not stiff and unyielding. There are tall windows of unstained glass through which pure golden sunlight shines through, free and clear. Oddly, I see rows of old wooden bookshelves tucked between the windows, full of books. In my dream the thought of a church chapel doubling as its library delights me. It speaks to me that my boyfriend, now my spouse-to-be, brought me to this place to be married. I am overwhelmed with joy.

We make our vows and the minister pronounces us married. Oddly, he holds up the marriage license for us and everyone there to see and says that “Now it’s official”. I can’t read what the document says but that’s not unusual. I’ve written before about how for some reason I can almost never read anything in my dreams.

Everyone adjourns to a room next to the chapel where a reception is taking place. I suddenly realize there was no marriage kiss at the altar, so I walk over to my spouse and embrace him happily, give him a delighted kiss on the mouth, and tell him how much I love him and how happy I am to be married to him. As I do this I am thinking how sure I was this day would never happen for me, and it did after all. I am overwhelmed with joy.

He pulls gently away, smiling, but I can see he is very embarrassed about something. So are the people standing nearby. I step back and my spouse and our guests begin talking among themselves, as if to ignore what just happened. Something seems very wrong all of a sudden, but I don’t know what.

I step outside, confused. Didn’t I just get married? Didn’t he ask me to marry him? Then I realize there was no exchange of rings either. I am walking though an old part of town where the church is situated; a smallish main street with shops, all closed I am assuming because it is Sunday and here they still don’t open things on Sunday. As I walk I can see my reflection in the little shop windows, in my tux, walking alone down an empty main street. I begin to realize that this wasn’t a wedding after all, it was a rehearsal, and I was not the one getting married to my old boyfriend, he had merely asked me to stand in for someone else, who could not be there for that rehearsal.

But this theory is confusing too.   Didn’t he ask me to marry him?   Didn’t we have a marriage license? But I could not read the names on it.   I glance at myself in the shop windows again, and oddly, for some reason, start practicing skipping down the sidewalk, like I used to do when I was a kid.

Still not sure that was what happened, I go back to the reception trying to think of a way of asking my boyfriend if he was satisfied with how things went without admitting that I don’t actually know what is going on and getting an answer from him that will tell me. The ersatz reception has moved outside now and everyone is enjoying themselves. I walk up to my boyfriend but before I can say anything his spouse-to-be drives up in their car, towing a small hardware trailer full of gardening things.   Now I know.   The Spouse-To-Be was out buying things for their house and could not be there, so I was asked to stand in for him for the rehearsal.

They embrace and he asks my boyfriend how the rehearsal went and I wake up.

A dim morning light filters through the motel curtains. I check the clock. It’s a little after 6am. I get up to pack the car and finish the drive home, alone.

It was the autumn of 1973. I’d graduated from high school the previous June, come out to myself two Decembers before, and that summer I’d just discovered my first crush had moved away without telling me his family was going anywhere.   But also that summer I’d also somehow attracted the notice of a cuteling at a coffee house a friend and I frequented, who took an interest in me.   He was beautiful and I was dazzled and unlike my first crush, he was perfectly willing to let my camera give him some love. Looking at it in retrospect, I think I might have even been his first crush.

One day he invited me to go with him to watch the quarter mile fuelers run at a drag strip somewhere in southern Maryland. He bought the tickets and even bought us both pit passes. I drove us both in the car I had just bought with money from my first good job at Industrial Photo. It was the first time I got to see the fuelers up close.   I love high energy smoke and belching fire stuff like that, and it was a thrill to see them up close like that.

But it was the time of the first oil embargo and I was young and a tad too self absorbed for my own good. As the races went on into the night I got scared the gas stations would close before the races ended and we would be stranded. He noticed and asked me if I wanted to leave early and I said yes. Just as we left the track he remarked wistfully that one of his favorite racers was probably making his last run just then. I was too busy calculating how far we could get on what was still in the gas tank and didn’t notice.

I saw him again the next night at a city park we both used to rendezvous at.   It was usually packed with other teens and young adults on the weekends and that night was no exception.   I can still see the sad, dejected look on his face before he saw me approach.   He gave me a smile and I noticed then how there had always been a little something extra in that smile before because it wasn’t there then. We chatted for a bit and then somehow we both wandered off with other friends.   A few months later he had pretty much stopped seeing me altogether.   I was still in a knot over the sudden disappearance of my first crush that summer and wasn’t really paying attention to what was right in front of me, and I let it slide.

I’ve been kicking myself over this memory ever since. If I hadn’t been quite so self absorbed back then I might have figured that getting stranded for the night would have been a good thing. Maybe even the best thing ever.

That memory has been nagging at me a lot recently for some reason, so yesterday I decided to see if I could find that drag strip and try to refresh my recollections of the place. I’d heard it had closed ages ago, but thought I could find where it used to me and perhaps scope out the surrounding area and put some of my memories of that night to rest…or at least give them some clarity. I’d thought the strip was somewhere near La Plata, so I drove down Highway 5 to 301 but didn’t see anything I recognized. So I wandered for a bit and then gave in and went home and started Googling. Eventually I found some links and a few images of the drag strip as it is today. Loneliness and regret are like the two pale horses of my love life. This photo could almost be the path I took through it…

But no…it’s what’s left of the Aquasco Speedway. They say some of the most famous names in quarter mile racing raced there. It may have been where I lost the only race that ever mattered.

If you’re out there reading this now…I’m sorry I was a jerk.   I hope you’ve won your race.

I try to be rational about things, but sometimes I wonder about why my life had to be so lonely and when I can’t find a logical answer my thoughts stray elsewhere, down darker paths. Lately I find myself thinking that maybe the reason I have always been so alone is mom was supposed to marry that other guy.  Had war not driven him mad perhaps he and mom would have likely married, and they’d have had a few lovely children (mom said often that she had wanted more then one but alas her one and only marriage did not work out).  And as time passed their children would have each found someone to love and settled down with them.  As the saying goes, “every pot has a lid.”  I never found mine probably, because that person does not exist.  Because I was the child who was never meant to be.

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like, looking at me from the outside in.  It’s only people who have known me the longest I wonder this about though. The people in my life who remember me from grade school, or as a young adult.  How does it feel to see Bruce has walked from adolescence to the threshold of old age, and you’ve never seen him dating anyone, never known him to have a boyfriend, any significant other, even a fling or two.  What are they thinking?  That this is a normal thing?  Expected, completely unremarkable, untroubling?  Yes…Bruce has always lived by himself.  Of course.  We knew he would.  That was always to be expected. Is that what the thinking is?  And if so…why?  What is it about me that made you, not so much certain that I would always be alone, but that it was just completely unremarkable to see that happening to me.  Part of the normal everyday background.  The sky is blue, traffic on the beltway is horrible, the republicans are screwing America, TV sucks, Bruce is alone. C’est la vie.  My friends. This image came across my Facebook feed on Valentine’s Day…

Well, I haven’t read the Twilight books so I can’t say I agree with that or not.  But I did watch Up, bought a DVD copy the next day, and not to give anything away, that first eight minutes, and the little bit about the scrapbook at the end, moves me so deeply I find myself bawling and I can’t stop. And I am crying for everything that might have been, that I lost, forever, for all eternity, because I never got that chance to love, and be loved.  What adventure?  There was no adventure.

You only get one life and now at the threshold of old age, the life I see is one I’d have rather not have lived.  The predators who run the ex-gay ministries would nod their heads and point and say, See…we told you so.  But read their tales about the self destructive gay lifestyle and you see a lot of things that if anything are more about the self hatred relentlessly preached at us, and to our peers.  I am not a drug addict, drugs did not deliver me into a bitter, broken place. That it might have been sex addiction that kept me from finding true love all these years is a belly laugh. At age fifty-nine I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve ever had sex.  My libido was never the explosive vent of hot magma I keep hearing male libidos are supposed to be.  But it wasn’t non-existent either.

I desired.  Oh very much so.  But with that desire, always, was a need of companionship that was intimate in both body and soul.  The one time I let myself get picked up it was with a guy who sat on some steps beside me as we watched the Pride Day block party on the street below.  He was handsome and I was, in my late twenties, already very lonely, and when he suggested we go back to his place I accepted. But with his clothes off came his street persona, and what I saw under it was a personality so vacant I could not maintain an interest and nothing happened. I left hoping I hadn’t hurt his feelings and resolved never to do that again. What I needed was a lover, not a fuck buddy for a night or two. But instead of the lover I got a lot of near misses and a near total indifference from the people around me to the fact that I was getting older and older and still had no companionship.  And now I’m fifty-nine.

A lot of that has to do with being gay, and being born when I was, into the culture I was.  Had I been born a generation earlier I might simply never had borne a hope that I could have someone else to love and be loved by.  I might have resigned myself to life similar to the alcoholic’s of endless struggle against urges I would never defeat but only suppress one day at a time.  Or I might have just tactfully killed myself, as so many have, and continue to do.  Perhaps one day I’ll take that traditional cure for homosexuality myself.  I have come so very close to it.  So very very close to it.

Had I been born just a couple generations later than I was, I doubt I’d be so bitter and so despondent every year around Valentine’s Day. I’m not saying it wouldn’t necessarily have still been a struggle. Just that it seems with each new generation our struggle to find that special someone begins to look more and more like everyone else’s too.  And more critically, it becomes a struggle others in your family and community are willing to help with.  Gay kids can take their dates to the prom.  They can talk their problems and anxieties out with family, seek advice from caring adults, read stories about that universal struggle for love that speak directly to them.

That’s wasn’t the case for me.  I reached adolescence at a moment in time when gay people could begin asserting a right to companionship, but well before homophobia stopped seeming like a perfectly reasonable thing, and the first tentative suspicion began taking root in the social consciousness that perhaps snuffing a budding same-sex romance out before it could even get started might be wrong.  Of course, the best way to keep a homosexual from ever knowing love’s happiness is to plant the seeds of self loathing firmly into them at a young age, and while some of us of my generation were willing to challenge the prevailing beliefs regarding homosexuals and homosexuality, a lot of us were completely cowed by the hatred we all faced, terrified of the stigma, and chose the closet instead.  And even those of us who didn’t, bore the scars of that hatred with us all the same.  A big part of why dating is such a struggle for gay folks of my generation, even today I am convinced, is because of this.  We treat each other like shit because that’s how we were taught gay people should be treated.  Consciously we may reject it, but deep down the scars, and the pain, remain, silently doing their work on us.

When I was in college some friends decided to help out a couple mutual friends who had been eying each other, but could not work up the nerve to actually speak to each other.  That’s how it usually works, at least among heterosexuals. Boy catches the eye of girl, girl catches the eye of boy…they talk it over with their friends…and if the process seems getting a little stuck then friends of boy and friends of girl get together and talk it over and if both parties are interested then a plot is hatched to get the two of them somewhere they can break the ice and say ‘hello’.  That day we all decided we would gather at a local ice cream joint (this all sounds very Disney-esq I suppose) and girl would ride with her girlfriends and boy would drive his friends, each not knowing the other would be there, and we’d all just happen to be at the same place at the same time and hang out and eventually one would leave because they had to be somewhere else…and then eventually another would have to go somewhere…and then another…and another…until finally boy and girl were there at the table by themselves.  As I recall it worked out very nicely for all parties involved.

Over the years I helped in that process several times and always took a deep satisfaction out of it, even though back in the 1970s I could have hardly expected my straight friends to do the same for me, if only because they didn’t travel in gay circles and most of us gay guys my age were still dealing with the closet.  My straight friends might suspect that so-and-so was gay, and maybe even a good match for Bruce…but you could hardly walk up and ask if he was gay and back then not many of us who lived in the suburbs were willing to be out with it.  I even lent my bedroom to some straight friends while mom was away visiting family.  I was willing to help love out in any way I could, because I knew what it was like to be in love myself. What I didn’t know from first hand experience, was what it was like to have a lover.  I still don’t.

So in the 1970s I was on my own, but I figured that would change when I finally was able to connect more with others like myself.  But it wasn’t until the late 1980s and the first computer bulletin boards that I was able to find a community of other gay guys I could easily socialize in.  I was in my thirties by then…an age where by most reckonings you’ve passed over the hill and now you’re ready for the remaindered shelf.  But I made some friends, including that of the sysop of the BBS and his lover, and got a handful of dates out of it, but nothing steady, and in painful to look at retrospect, zero dating support from…anyone.  I had found a gay community I could socialize in and make a few friends, show off my artwork, display my inner self as best I could in my online postings and discussions…Here I Am…and I was still completely on my own.  And…alone.

As I got closer to forty despair grew deeper within me.  I recall one time hashing it out with the sysop…a guy I had tried dating who had rejected me, was suddenly dating this other guy who had rejected me the year before, and I was miserable.  I figured since grade school I wasn’t supermodel material, but never felt that I was actually ugly until then. I poured my heart out and the sysop gave me the advice that would become his constant song for the next couple decades whenever I complained that my love life was going nowhere…that I just had to get out more and meet people…as if I wasn’t already trying to do that on his BBS system.  I still remember this one moment as a kind of shock: he had looked kindly at me and said that of course if I just kept at it I would eventually find someone who would appreciate (pause) how I looked.  I thought to myself then, well he didn’t mean it That way…

There are people like me who want the soulmate and nothing else will do. There are people who are perfectly willing to sleep around until they hit on the one lover, or spouse, or something good that they’ll stick with, but until then they’re fine about having some fun in the meantime.  Some people don’t want a lifelong thing, but want more then a one night stand all the same.  They’ll drop in and out of the singles scene all their lives and they’re fine with that. And some people just want to sleep around and really aren’t interested in, don’t need and have utterly no use for the lover, or soulmate or anything with the slightest string attached to it. Here’s the thing about growing old and single; most of the people you find yourself socializing with in the singles scene at a later age are in those latter categories because most of the rest have found what they were looking for and have settled down and they’re keeping the singles scene far far away from the life they have now.  You’re still there because you kept trying and kept failing and you have no where else to go but off a bridge maybe, but they’re there because that’s home and they just don’t get you.  If anything, they think there is something tragically wrong with you and no, the tragedy isn’t that you didn’t find your soulmate, the tragedy is that you haven’t realized yet that the only thing in life worth worrying about is getting laid.  And they will keep offering you the same helpful Just Go Get Laid And You’ll Be Fine advice over and over and over and they will never get why that isn’t helping.  It works for them, it should work for you too.  And if it doesn’t well that’s obviously because you’ve got hangups you need to get over.

Time passes, the universe expands, and those of us who shared a brief community on that gay BBS system moved on to the Internet.  The sysop had a new and very much devoted lover…his previous lover, dearly missed by all of us, had passed away due to a chronic illness that wasn’t AIDS (we did die of other things back then believe it or not).  He and his boyfriend began a regular happy hour gathering of some of us in the BBS community who still lived in the area.  Others drifted in and out of the new circle.  One of these was a guy who was, like me, middle aged and still looking for that other half. We were not exactly each other’s type, but still recognized that similarity between us.  Still hopeful, still looking, not really all that much about the singles scene but here we are.

One evening we all decided on a different bar as our starting point, and when we walked in my jaw just about hit the floor when I caught sight of the bartender there.  And as always when that would happen to me, I got all shy and befuddled about it.  And…in retrospect…as always, the others just watched as I gawked with my jaw hanging open.  All of them but the new guy, who walked up next to me at the bar and ordered a drink and when the beautiful bartender served it, casually asked for a name, and when it was given, he looked sideways at me with a little smile.

There you go…

In two decades of socializing with the others there, and on the BBS before it, nobody had ever done anything like that for me.  And this new guy, about my own age, comes into our circle and just does it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But it wouldn’t be for another year before I really noticed it, and found myself wondering Where did you come from and why couldn’t I have lived there among the rest of you…???

Well of course nothing came of it…trying to date the cute bartender is about as hopeless as you can manage, though some do succeed with it.  But all I needed was that name and it broke the ice and I gave it a shot. I was grateful for the help.

Eventually the new guy found what he was looking for elsewhere, and he stopped coming to our happy hours. I envied him, I was sorry to see him leave, but I didn’t blame him for leaving.

The sysop had a very fulfilling love life and other boyfriends over the course of time, and lots of stories about them he would tell us every now and then.  One day one of these was slated to get some special recognition at an annual drag ball award ceremony and I, the photographer and camera nut of the group, was asked to play paparazzi for him and document his moment in the spotlight.  I was happy to oblige; I’d never seen a good drag show live before and having the opportunity to photograph the whole thing up close was something I was interested in.

I did my best for the boyfriend, and really got into photographing the performers.  Some of them seemed amateurish, but others really had it going on.  The sysop’s old boyfriend had bought what must have been thousands of dollars worth of costuming for his big day and he knew how to work it.  And there was another, younger, cuter one there too, who I found myself unable to look away from.  Oh…I got tons of photos of him. There was a reason for that.

Those who know me say I have a thing for androgynous males, but I don’t see it that way.  I think of it as more of a happy middle ground between über masculine and über feminine.  Someone who does drag will need to work harder at it if they’ve got that über masculine face, but I’ve seen it done.  This guy at that show, was simply beautiful in a way that I love to see on males and he worked his costume very well.  I found myself wondering what he looked like in his street clothes. At the end of the show I figured I’d seen the last of him but at least I got some good photos.

That weekend I was to bring my computer with the digital images I took to the sysop’s house and the boyfriend of times-gone-by would come and review them and I’d make a CD copy of whatever he wanted. After I got set up we waited.  And waited.  And waited. And waited.  And waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Five hours later we finally got a phone call that he was on his way.  He’d decided to go on a boat excursion up the Potomac river with His boyfriend and they’d just missed one boat so they decided to take the next one instead.  Fine.  Whatever.  He finally arrives and we go over my photography and I’m happy he’s pleased with everything and I make him his CD.  He suggests I put some photos up in a directory somewhere that the others can see them because I might get some business that way.  I’m not really all that interested in making money on them, I have a good job and I’m fine with the income it brings me.  But further opportunity to document the drag performers tweaks my interest.  Then he leaves.  And then the sysop and his lover drop a bombshell on me.

Boyfriend from times-gone-by had called after the show, and told them that I’d attracted the attention of several guests at the awards, and was I available?  Well, says the sysop, knowing my tastes in guys, most of them there probably don’t do it for Bruce, but there was one guy…who went by the stage name…

Oh, says boyfriend from times-gone-by, you mean Robbie!  Yes…he’s actually single now and he’s looking.  He works in computers, as a project manager of some sort…has a house…and he’s into older guys.  Everyone says he’s a sweetheart…

And apparently boyfriend from times-gone-by had agreed to bring Robbie over to meet me.  The sysop and his lover said when they opened the door they wondered where Robbie was, but didn’t ask because it was supposed to be a surprise for me.

I was…to put it mildly…overjoyed.  Sure, it didn’t happen…but that they thought to do something like that for me just about made my heart burst with joy.  Oh thank you!  Thank you!  Thank you!

And the sysop agreed to try again sometime to arrange a meeting, or at least see if one was possible.  And I trusted them.  So a week later I asked about it. Am I going to get a chance to meet Robbie?  And the answer I got was, well…you need to get some photos of the other performers ready to show them and then I’ll have an excuse to talk to boyfriend from times-gone-by again and I’ll see if I can set something up.

Oh.  As if two decades of your friend Bruce being lonely wasn’t excuse enough.  But I tried to think of a way of getting some more photography of the show up on a web site the others could look at.  Problem was, boyfriend from times-gone-by had assured me so well that I would get ripped off or taken to the cleaners with requests for prints if I wasn’t careful that I kept trying to think of a way to put stuff up without there being a problem and I couldn’t.  I didn’t want to watermark everything as I thought that would be tacky.   So I hemmed and hawed about it, and asked again…am I going to have a chance to meet Robbie?  And the answer I got was the same…I need an excuse…we don’t socialize with boyfriend from times-gone-by’s crowd much anymore.

Another week went by.  Then a month.  Am I going to have a chance to meet Robbie?  Welllll…we don’t socialize with boyfriend from times-gone-by’s crowd anymore, but I’ll look into it.  Another month.  Am I going to have a chance to meet Robbie?  Well…I’ll look into it…but we really don’t socialize with boyfriend from times-gone-by’s crowd anymore. Another month. Same answer. Another month. Another Another.

By now you’re probably wondering why I didn’t just take matters into my own hands.  But I had no contact information.  None.  Not even for boyfriend from times-gone-by who didn’t do computers and email anyway. I was utterly dependent on the sysop and his lover for help here.  And I trusted them.  They were old friends from the BBS days.  They were my friends.

Had they told me there was something wrong here…something that maybe they were not free to discuss but that I should just trust them and forget about Robbie…I would have without regret.  I trusted them.  Had they told me that boyfriend from times-gone-by had said I wasn’t Robbie’s type after all, or that Robbie had flatly turned down an offer to meet up with me, I would have accepted it as par for the course.  Same-old, same-old.  There were a thousand things and more that could have gotten in the way of anything happening.  We might have met up and nothing at all came of it but a friendly handshake.  The point is it didn’t have to happen.  But I trusted they cared enough about me, after knowing me for as long as they had, and seeing with their own two eyes how lonely I was, how hard the dating and mating thing always was for me that they, being my friends, would at least give it another try.  Or at least give me enough information that I could try myself.

Another month went by.  Am I going to have a chance to meet Robbie?  I’ll see…but we don’t socialize with boyfriend from times-gone-by’s crowd anymore.  Finally I got fed up and late one evening at the end of yet another happy hour Friday I asked sysop’s lover what the hell was going on?  You said this guy might be a good match. You tried that one time. Why the stonewall now?  What the fuck gives?  And sysop’s lover shrugged and said he’d ask…

…and then he looks me right in the face and says, “Bruce, we’ve seen the people you look at.  People who look like that, want people who look like that.”

In vino veritas… I felt like I’d just been shot. But the real hurt didn’t come until much later.   When sysop sent me an email about how he’d talked to boyfriend from times-gone-by and Robbie was seeing someone now, and anyway Robbie had stood up boyfriend from times-gone-by and that’s why he hadn’t shown up at the house with him that day and so Robbie was probably just another “flaky drag queen” and I just needed to get out more and meet people. Well I’ve met some flaky project managers in IT but you can’t be too terribly flaky about it and still be successful enough to own your own house. And I guess I was supposed to forget about that ad hoc Potomac River boat cruise that had made boyfriend from times-gone-by almost six hours late.  I suspect if anyone got stood up that day it was Robbie.  But I’ll never know for sure now.  And I should just forget about it.

And I should also probably forget about the new guy in our happy hour circle who got me a name one day, like it was the most natural thing in the world, while sysop and the others just watched me flailing around and gawking.

Because everyone knows people who look like that, want people who look like that.

They say sometimes you don’t really feel the impact of a really bad injury until much later. I stopped seeing sysop and the others for a time, angry at them for their indifference. Then I sort of came back into the happy hour circle. Then I came home one day after a vacation in Florida, where I had briefly visited my first crush from so long ago, back in a time when I could still believe that there was someone out there for me…and I took my suitcases inside and looked around my empty house, which I have bought with the money I have earned from working the best job in the world…and I just wanted to find some nice high place somewhere I could throw myself off from.  So I’m not hanging out with the happy hour crowd anymore.  Going out for drinks and dinner with people who think your face does not qualify you for a love life just isn’t the fun it used to be.

You can’t live an entire adult life without love and not know there is something profoundly wrong with you. Maybe I really am that ugly after all. Or just that unlucky.  Or I was the child that was never meant to be.  When even the people around you who know you best don’t give your loneliness a second thought, if in other words, your friends don’t care, then how can you possibly expect someone to actually fall in love with you?  Whatever it was I thought I had to offer it can’t have been all that much if the ones who know me best don’t think it’s odd that I’m alone.  I can’t not see that anymore.  And seeing it, finally, something inside of me has died.  Hope I suppose.  Maybe at long last that’s all that needs to die. I don’t have to kill myself, I was never really there to begin with.  When the actual fact of death finally happens it will be like tying up a loose end that got forgotten somehow.  Oh…right…you’re still here aren’t you…? This time of year is the worst now.  The short days and long nights.  The coldness of it.  Valentine’s Day. 

I’m really getting tired of trying to sleep walk through Valentine’s Day week without wanting to drink a cyanide margarita. I don’t see an ugly face in the mirror, I never have.  But I see an old one now.  Too old to take himself seriously as date material. The skin on my arms has age spots now, my face is growing jowls, the ink on my sell-by date is growing fungus. The child who was never meant to be is all grown up now, still looking in the mirror with that vaguely bewildered expression.

People who look like that want people who look like that… Why me?  Why did I have to be born. I was the kid from the other side of the tracks who wound up with the best job in the world and a nice little house nobody least of all me would have ever expected. I should be amazed and grateful at the wonderful good fortune I have had, and I am.  Really.  Also, I wish I never was. 

There’s a scene in Robert Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice, where the main character Alexander Hergensheimer, angry with God after discovering that he got taken to heaven when the rapture occurred but wife Marga had not (because she was a pagan) complains bitterly to Peter that he was “…willing to wash dishes forever if only I could see her smile, hear her voice, touch her hand”, and concludes by saying that if Marga was in Hell then that was where he wanted to be sent too…and he promptly was.  I would be willing to do both of those things to have my other half, to see him smile and touch his hand…walk away from this wonderful life I have now and wash dishes forever, stand by his side in Hell even if that was what I had to do.  But that is fantasy, and fate does not offer even those choices for the one who was never meant to be.

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

-From “The Man On The Bed” by Debora Greger

I wear my hair long.   I’ve done this since I was a teenager.   I like the look of it on me, and I have a thing for longhaired males. Admittedly it’s high maintenance compared to wearing it short, but it’s worth it to me.   So much so in fact, that I’ve declined jobs rather than accede to an employer’s demand that I cut it.   Of course, a lot of those were probably more about a suspicion of homosexuality than the length of my hair.   Saying I was being fired for a dress code offense after I’d already been employed with long locks suggested there was something else going on.

As I said, I have a thing for longhaired males.   And back in my twenties I was delighted to find that even as the clone look was becoming fashionable among gay guys, lots of gay guys still liked the look of a guy with long hair.   One day, one of these pinged me on a gay BBS I did volunteer work for, and asked me into one of the private online chat rooms.

He said he’d seen my profile (the sysop had created a message board just for the posting of profiles).   This was back in a time when everything you did online you did in a text only terminal.   I think the sysop still hadn’t decided what to do about attaching photos to the profiles. Storage space was pretty expensive back then, and download times on a dial-up modem connection were not wonderful. So the profiles had no photos.   Mine was correct as far as the specs went…my age, my height and weight…I’ve never seen the point of lying about any of that.   But all he knew about me was that, and that I wore my hair long.   And right away as I enter private chat mode, he’s telling me how hot he got reading my profile.

I’ve never thought of myself as ugly, but I’ve been called that more than a few times (“people who look like that, want people who look like that…”).   But I’ve also had complements too, and when I look in the mirror, I generally like what I see.   Yes…I would hit that.   But by my mid thirties, still hopelessly single, I pretty much knew my face and my skinny as a rail body were not supermodel material.   Okay…fine.   I don’t need the world to think I’m good looking…just one special someone if I can just find them.

So I start telling this guy to calm down a bit, because he hasn’t actually seen me.   It was really like that because everything he was typing at me in private chat mode is about how hot it is making him just talking there online to a longhaired gay guy.   Take a chill pill man…I might be your type or I might not be.   The sysop was throwing a BBS party the following week, how about we meet then?

And I figure he just about has an orgasm then….YES!   YES!   YES!   WE HAVE TO GET TOGETHER THEN!!!!   And before he signs off he’s bubbling over about how hot long haired gay guys are.

So (you can see this coming…right?) I go to the party, chat with everyone there that I already know, and this guy whoever he was does not come up to greet me.   Later I learn that he was there, took one look, and kept his distance.   Hahahahahaha…

Later that summer, the sysop organized a picnic for all of us at a nice city park and I was introduced to Mr. Longhairs Are So Fucking Hot.   I’d hitched a ride with one of the other users, who asked me ahead of time if I could find a ride home since he had to go to work right after the picnic.   I figured I could and wouldn’t you know, Mr. Longhairs Are So Fucking Hot offered me one. Several other users offered me rides after that and I declined saying Mr. Longhairs Are So Fucking Hot was taking me home.   As the picnic wound down and my other offers were already gone, Mr. Longhairs Are So Fucking Hot comes back and says he has a date for that night, could I get a ride from someone else.   I think I eventually walked to the closest Metro station, which was a couple miles away.

It wasn’t often some guy I thought was drop dead good looking and sexy asked me out on a date, but that happened one day when a fellow user of a gay BBS I did volunteer work for sent me an email complementing me on some posts I’d made and calling me “intense”. I was happily taken by surprise. At the end of that email, he asked if we could meet up.

I figured it wasn’t going to go well when the first thing he told me when we met at the Dupont Circle Metro, was how much he hated my sunglasses…

Back in the BBS days, the 1990s, before the Internet was opened up to commercial use, I joined a small gay community BBS system and eventually became one of its volunteer support staff. It grew from a single line, single connection at a time system to a multi-line multi-user system, and with that, came the first chat channels I’d ever been exposed to. Gay chat channels.

But this was not a meat market sort of gay BBS…its sysop swore if it ever became that he’d pull the plug on it. He wanted it to be an information resource for the local gay community and to its final hours when the Internet finally killed the BBSs, that was what it was. Even so, you had to expect there would be lots of gay singles there, lonely hearts, mostly computer geeks, looking for something better than the bar scene. Or at least quicker.

I hated the bar scene…just never fit into it…and I joined that BBS specifically to meet people in what I hoped was a nicer environment, and hopefully find a boyfriend. So with the new “chat rooms” came new opportunities for private conversations with whoever else was logged in, and one day, I think I was reading my mail, I got a ping from another user on a different line to have a private chat. Sure, says I, and I entered chat mode.

He asks me if I live in the city. No says I, I live in the suburbs. He asks a few other things, I forget what now, and then he asks me, “What are you into?” So I reply that I like cartooning and photography, and writing software and I tell him about the work I did for that BBS, and the local newspapers I did photography for. I tell him about my work building architectural models and how it tweaked my skills as a draftsman and painter…after a while I noticed he wasn’t responding. Then I saw he’d logged off.

I sat there puzzling it over for a while, wondering if maybe he’d just been disconnected somehow. That happened a lot back in the dial-up modem days. But eventually I figured it out.

There was the guy I met on the path in Rock Creek Park.   I was bicycling to work in those days because I didn’t have a car, and the path through the park was a good shortcut that allowed me to stay off the main roads. It was also a peaceful ride through the woods early in the morning. No busy buzz of traffic, no early morning commuter noise. I saw a cat laying on the side of the path and as I got close noticed it wasn’t moving. At first I thought it was dead, but as I slowed down next to it the poor thing raised its head and looked at me. It was in distress.

Another guy about my age comes bicycling up and together, me gently carrying the cat and him walking both our bicycles, we get the cat to his house, which was nearby. By the time we get there the cat has perked up a bit, but still isn’t moving much. It was a longhair of some sort, there was no blood anywhere on it and its coat was in good condition. But there was no collar so no way to tell who its owner was. Nothing seemed broken but you couldn’t be sure. The guy and his dad agreed to take it to a nearby vet.   I went off to work.

After work I stopped by their house to ask about the cat.   But I had nefarious motives. The guy who helped rescue the cat was beautiful, and had set even my dull gaydar ringing. On the walk back to his house we began chatting about this and that. There was an air of sadness to him.   He spoke in soft, quiet tones as though he was sitting in church. His mother he said, had passed away some years ago and he and his dad lived together.   He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life but for now he was working part time and in school part time and hoped to get his degree soon.   Somehow we begun talking about books we’d read and I’d thrown in a couple trolling comments about Lambda Rising bookstore, which he was familiar with enough that he knew where it was and where it had moved from, and when he mentioned he often used the path for an early morning jog I mentioned Billy Sive, the main character in the novel The Front Runner, and he replied that he was a vegetarian too and it was a better diet not just for runners but everyone.

So there I was at his front door, and his dad answers and invites me in. The guy I’d met was there and the three of us sat in the living room and chatted for a bit, first to assure me that the vet had said the cat would be okay and they were going to take care of it until its owner could be found. Then the talk turned oddly to me…what did I do for a living, how long had I been living in Rockville, what were my interests, and so on. I didn’t mind the inquisition, which came almost exclusively from his dad.   In fact I was wanting just then to make myself seem interesting enough to the guy who knew who Billy Sive was that he’d want to see more of me.

Oh yes…I work at a custom plastic shop over in Kensington, and in my spare time I paint landscapes and and draw cartoons. Plus I do photography work for a couple local newspapers and I’m working on a book of my art photography. I emphasized as I usually do when I’m trying to get someone’s attention, my creative side. As his dad chatted with me about my photography, I noted that I had his son’s absolute attention, and from the occasional sideways glances I could tell that his dad saw it too.

His dad asked about my political views and then, as casually as he could manage, asked how I felt about gay rights.   And with all the nerve I could manage I replied that I was completely in favor of gay equality. At this point I almost expected to get shown the door, but his dad nodded his head and…smiled warmly.   “That’s good,” he said, “that’s good.”

Dad…approves?! This was unknown territory for me, but I was more than willing to explore it. His son seemed very uncomfortable. Shortly after that his dad excused himself, saying he had work to do. When we were alone, his son set me straight.

Dad was a happy agnostic apparently, but when the mother died the son converted to Catholicism. And to be homosexual was a very grave sin (it later became a mere intrinsic disorder…).   I could have argued it with him, but there’s a point where you just see it in someone’s eyes that it’s going nowhere.   Perhaps he saw it in mine too.   He didn’t try just then to get me to believe it too, just to make sure I knew he believed it.

So we shook hands and I left.   Years later I experienced for myself the bottomless grief of my own parent’s deaths…dad first and then many years later, mom…and have never doubted since how despairing and vulnerable it leaves a person.   And I have wondered ever since if that gay guy’s dad had been trying, not so much to set his gay son up with a nice boy, but trying somehow to awaken him out of grief.   Life goes on…find someone to share it with… But there are those who prefer gay people pass the hours of our lives alone, and in despair.   I have no idea if, absent one life hating priest somewhere anything might have come of it between us, but a even a brief walk in the garden might have done wonders for both of us just then.   Which, of course, is exactly why he had to believe that love between men was a grave sin, and I had to believe he believed it.

[Edited a tad…]

Closest I ever came to having an actual boyfriend was the one I met in church. And that’s the way you would imagine it would happen in the best of all possible worlds isn’t it after all. You meet the boy or girl next door, say at church or some other social common ground. Your heart skips a beat and so does his (or hers) and the next thing you know the two of you are dating. The problem for us was twofold: we were gay and we were Baptists.

So, and perhaps unsurprisingly, right from the start of it emotional closeness was difficult for both of us. It’s a common complaint you hear at the tail end of romantic misfires among gay couples. He had trust issues. He was emotionally distant. Perhaps we simply were not right for each other after all. Or perhaps it was something he confided to me one night, as we lay together, in a very quiet, emotionless voice.

We began our tentative affair almost as soon as he got out of the military, having honorably served a tour of duty far, far away from the parent units. His mother and mine were church friends. Every Sunday we gathered at the same church until in my teens I decided church was not for me and mom, while she never stopped trying to nudge me back, never demanded I go whether I wanted to or not. That’s actually a very Baptist approach…there’s a reason Baptists don’t baptize infants and small children.  You have to come to God wholeheartedly, just as you are.

For a while I actually worked for his father, but it didn’t last. As a boss he had a very bad temper, and could not keep his harsh brand of fundamentalist religiosity, so different from my own mom’s, out of the workplace. Religious tracts were scattered liberally all over his employee lunch room, and he and a favorite employee would discuss the finer points of the Bible all throughout the day, interspersed with bitter complaints about how his customers were always trying to cheat him. I wondered what home life was like with him. Then during the holidays he leveled a particularly angry outburst at his employees for choosing to spend time the weekend before Christmas with our families instead of in his shop. He’d not told us to come in to work that weekend, only in his usual passive aggressive way said that he would like it very much if we did. The next Monday morning he was shouting at everyone who walked in the door, €œI WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS SHOP COMES FIRST!!!€ and after storming out to get breakfast all of us (except for the favorite) walked…no, ran…out on him.

Sometime shortly after that incident, the boss’s son came back from his tour of duty and made a beeline to my little apartment in a friend’s basement, and next thing I knew we were in the sack together. Apparently he’d figured me out before I’d even figured myself out. My heart seemed like to burst with joy. I was so very lonely then, broke, no job prospects, no car, living in a friend’s basement, and here comes this guy I’d known since we were both kids, decent, well mannered, with a sharp mind you almost didn’t see behind a very big heart. Everything you would expect in the Baptist boy next door, but without the stereotypical hyper religiosity. He had two eyes that just seemed to smile at everything they saw, and a smile that melted my heart every time I saw it.

He had spent years away from the family nest, and now he was back. Bravely I thought, he came out to them. He said later that his father hadn’t exploded, mom and dad said they still loved him, and it would be okay. I had a chilly feeling then, that I knew just what it was. Within a week his visits dropped sharply off. One day he told me offhandedly that he was probably more of a bisexual than gay, and I saw it coming. Two weeks later, after no visits at all, we happened to cross paths at a local grocery store and he told me he was getting married to a lady at the church his folks had introduced him to. I think I just nodded my head and wished him well.

Time passes…the universe expands… Seven years later I get a phone call from him…now he’s living far from the family nest, and recently divorced. Can we see each other again sometime? Well of course. And so we began another brief little hopeless fling. Sometimes you really see how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Emotional closeness, if not physical intimacy, was still excruciatingly hard for him. Are we boyfriends, I would ask. He would never answer, just change the subject. He lived far from my own home, and I was in love, so I began to make arrangements to move closer to him. At the time I was making a living as a contract software developer, and I studied the job market near where he was living. When I told him about that he seemed to panic. Once more out visits dropped sharply off. Then came a day he told me, via AOL Instant Messenger, that he was seeing somebody else.

Perhaps we were just not right for each other after all. The hard lesson to learn about love is you can find someone who is just right for you, who seems to complete you in all the places you never even knew were empty, until you met that one person, saw them smile into your eyes. And yet even so you may not be right for them. They may have a completely opposite feeling about you. Ask me how I know this. Perhaps we were not right for each other. Or perhaps it was something he told me one night as we lay together, in a very quiet, emotionless voice. About the day he came out to his parents. About how the next morning before dawn his father had gone into the household office, fired up the computer, and created a brochure filled with verses condemning homosexuality and what God does to nations that tolerate that which is an abomination in His eyes. About how his father printed up dozens and dozens of copies of the brochure and as the sun rose, walked around their neighborhood and put one in every door of every house, for blocks around. Then he told his son what he had done.

What gay people know is this: strangers can beat you, can take your life away from you, but only family can chew your heart up, and spit it back out. And what I know is this: when you take the ability to wholeheartedly love and accept love from another away from someone, you stick the knife into that person’s heart and also into the heart of the one who might have been loved by them.