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.

Valentine’s Day is Just Around The Corner! So let’s get started with that little pre-game celebration I promised. If all my dreams of love and happiness had to be other people’s stepping stones to heaven, then surely this brief little flare of hope within made someone’s closer to walk to Thee a little closer!

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 the pokey knowing that at least a thief’s chances for paradise were better than a sodomite’s.

“I think you’re allowed to be in love three times in your life.”
-Kurt Vonnegut.

Just what I needed to hear.   Seems about right though.   I had my three chances.   Thank you for playing…

Wil Wheaton ‏@wilw

I have saved every love note  @AnneWheaton has ever given me, because she’s my favorite.

It’s a wonderful thing, love. At least, I figure it must be…

On Twitter…

Atrios ‏@Atrios basically my whole life path can be explained by the fact that a girl refused to kiss me when we were playing spin the bottle in 8th grade

Possibly he’s being a bit ironic there, but it’s true that time in your life looms larger than all the rest of it combined.   Objects are closer than they appear…as the rear view mirror warns.

I had my share, and maybe a bit more than my share, of middle school shocks, but I’m somewhat grateful I managed to escape that humiliation in grade school because playing that game with the other boys was not an option back in 1968.   I say somewhat because living in a world where I could have played that game with the other boys might have left me better able to cope with adulthood, even allowing for a slap in the face like the one Duncan Black got once upon a time.   But by 8th grade I was already a pretty disconnected little guy.

My life changing shock didn’t happen until the summer after I graduated.   More on that as A Coming Out Story unfolds…

This came across my Facebook stream just now…

Which is probably why some gay men of my generation stick to casual sex…why the advice I constantly, reliably get from gay friends of my generation and older, about my chronic loneliness is to just go out and get laid.   It’s the cure that’s worked for them for so much of their own lives.   But for some of us that would only make it worse.

You can work your way past shame and self loathing.   Getting yourself to a place where you can trust another person…intimately…after so many years right when you’re so very young, being emotionally battered and bruised by your own family…your own parents…friends…that’s a lot harder.   Nearly impossible for some.   For some gay folk of my generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall…

I my twitter stream via Juan Cole…

@GoogleFacts: “It’s possible to die because of a broken heart. It’s called “Stress Cardiomyopathy””

No shit Sherlock.   And it does not help that the solitary life is seemingly incomprehensible to those who have coupled.   Even if that coupling was ultimately unsuccessful it was something at least.

I have felt the stress of aloneness taking years off my life for quite some time now.   This winter is going to be…difficult.

I made a promise to myself, the day I turned 30 (ages ago it was), that I would not turn 60 and still be single and alone.   I am going to keep that promise.

One afternoon a few years ago, while I was strolling around Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World, I wandered by this at one of the gift shops…

…and I had to have it.  Sometimes these little random items of consumer art manage to tweak something deep down inside of you, despite themselves.

So romantic isn’t it?  And I am very much the romantic.  But look at it.  What do you see?  A beautiful young girl in love with her handsome prince charming, all dashing and heroic.  But all art, even pop culture commercial art, involves two creative acts.  There is the artist’s turn, wherein the piece is made.  The artist brings to it whatever is within themselves.  Then there is the viewer’s turn.  And the viewer brings to the piece whatever is within themselves.  And I am a gay man just one step away from 60, within arm’s reach of social security retirement age, whose love life has been pretty much one failed attempt after another.  Here’s what I see: she’s in love with a statue and she thinks the person she sees in it is real and it isn’t.

No, I haven’t actually watched Disney’s The Little Mermaid yet.  So if that’s all part of the Disney happy ending then okay…fine.  But I am a fan of Walt Disney all the same if not so much of one that I’ve had to watch everything that ever came out of his studios.  I like his happily ever after mindset, that There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Shining At The End Of Every Day way of looking at life.  That is how I want life to Be.  That is why I keep going back to Disney World these days…for that happy sense of life’s wonderful possibilities.  So never having watched it I can almost picture the story Disney made of that Hans Christian Andersen tale.  And they all lived happily ever after.  In one form or another that was the story Walt Disney always told and I am convinced he honestly believed it and that was why that song always came out of him.  But for the rest of us it isn’t so easy.

So when just the other day I ran across the story behind the story of The Little Mermaid, I saw why there was something about it I could see, even in that Disney figurine, that tweaked a very dark and lonely place inside of me…

The Little Mermaid was written as a love letter by Hans Christian Andersen to Edvard Collin.  Andersen, upon hearing of Collin’s engagement to a young woman, proclaimed his love to him.  He told him “I long for you as though you were a beautiful Calabrian girl.”  Edvard Collin turned Andersen down, disgusted.

Andersen then wrote The Little Mermaid to symbolize his inability to have Collin just as a mermaid cannot be with a human.  He sent it to Collin in 1836 and it goes down in history as one of the most profound love letters ever written.

The story originally ended thusly…

The prince and princess marry, and the Little Mermaid’s heart breaks. She thinks of all that she has given up and of all the pain she has suffered. She despairs, thinking of the death that awaits her, but before dawn, her sisters bring her a knife that the Sea Witch has given them in exchange for their long hair. If the Little Mermaid slays the prince with the knife and lets his blood drip on her feet, she will become a mermaid again, all her suffering will end and she will live out her full life.

However the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his bride and as dawn breaks she throws herself into the sea. Her body dissolves into foam…

Later, Andersen gave it a happier ending.  The little mermaid is turned into an air spirit and told she will gain an eternal soul after doing good deeds for 300 years.  But it seems tacked on and contrived.  You need a Walt Disney to turn that story around and Walt found his other half early enough on that he could believe in it.  Andersen it seems, never did.  A lot of us don’t.

Mom’s tragedy was she liked bad boys. Dad being the specific case in point. Mine is I like good boys. Decent, honest, responsible. Problem was the good boys of my generation were almost universally terrified of telling their parents they’re gay. 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 mother, yes father, 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.

Re-reading that post about what a luxury car is, I am kinda…stunned…to realize that my life went from this…

…to this.

That is not the trajectory anyone would have predicted for me back when I first entered grade school.   It’s not what I would have predicted for me.   If I hadn’t been walking through my life in the past decade or so on autopilot I’d be more amazed.   But I don’t pay attention to my present day life all that much the way probably other people do.   Away from work, back in my house, down in my art room, my head stays in the clouds, because I’m not so lonely there.   It’s only occasionally when I’m at home, that I come back down to earth and it’s like…oh…I have a house of my own…and a Mercedes-Benz.

At night I dream of other worlds, other lives I might have had, where I’m not alone anymore and I’m happy.   Oddly, in those dreams I still don’t own a house, or a Mercedes-Benz.

The Chairman said quietly, “Loki, you weary Me” – and suddenly, Loki was missing. Even his chair was gone. “Odin, will you spare her for part of that cycle?”

“For how long? She has earned the right to Valhalla.”

“An indeterminate time. This creature had stated its willingness to wash dishes “forever” in order to take care of her. One may doubt that it realizes just how long a period, “forever” is… yet its story does show earnestness of purpose…”

-Robert Heinlein, Job – A Comedy of Justice

“Tell a girl she’s beautiful – she’ll believe it for a moment. Tell a girl she’s ugly – she’ll believe it for a lifetime.”  -Unknown.

Boys too. Some boys. Basically what you’re telling people is they’re not desirable. It really cuts to the bone. It just takes all the life out of you. Everything becomes why bother. Every day is just empty going through the motions, walking through it, speaking your lines as though it were something real and it isn’t.  You look in the mirror and you see nothing.