“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.

Sullivan…

Is Staying Single Selfish?

In a review of Eric Klinenberg’s  Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, Benjamin E. Schwartz critiques the single life…

Schwartz says in part…

Going Solo bases itself on relatively new data showing that more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million- roughly one out of every seven adults – live alone.

Yes, and I am one of those solitary adults.   I guess I was just born to have a bundle of negative stereotypes hoisted onto my shoulders.   I am an only child.   I’m gay.   I’m a socially clumsy art/techno nerd.   And now I’m getting old.   I’m that weird old guy who lives by himself in the house down the street.   The one you read about in all those newspaper stories where someone murders one or more other people and everyone in the TV news story says the suspect was a kinda quiet guy who kept to himself.   Actually I don’t keep to myself.   I don’t like keeping to myself (except when I’m in a mood to be at my drafting table).   But being gay in America you get used to neighbors who chat pleasantly with you when you approach them, but who never once approach you.   There are two openly gay guys on my block and we both get lots of smiles and friendly hellos and that’s about as much socializing with us as the heterosexuals on the block are willing to   endure.   As Truman Capote once said, a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.

So there is more to the solitary life then mere self centered selfishness.   But that’s a pretty reliable stereotype of singles, just as it is with only kids.   We’re all just spoiled rotten…

As his subtitle suggests, he likes what the data tell us; his position could be summed up by the subtitle of a book he commends: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. Klinenberg is rarely explicit about his convictions, which saves him the trouble of seriously assaying their implications, but he finally gets to the point directly in his conclusion, asserting that “living alone is an individual choice that’s as valid as the choice to get married or live with a domestic partner. . . .

I suppose it is for those who choose it.   But not all of us do.   For some of us it is a lot we’ve simply been cast into.   And yes, there are a few negative consequences that follow from that.   But don’t expect Schwartz to grasp them…he just goes off the deep end babbling about “expressive individualism”, a term I think he wants you to hear excessive individualism in, and society’s ability to transmit moral values.   Because, you know, solitary people are innately immoral.   Kinda like how poor people are poor because they’re lazy.

Here’s a moral value for you Schwartz: empathy.   Not all solitaries are in that situation by choice, and even those who are aren’t all selfish.   Selfish is when you stereotype people because you’re too damn lazy to actually look at them and see the people for your conceits.   Maybe then people might see that a culture with half its members living alone has within it both the seeds of its own destruction and it’s own salvation.   It’s a solvable problem, if only we as a society, as a culture can see the value in expending the kind of energy on making it possible for people to find the companionship in life they need that we do on…oh…let’s see…waging war and killing people’s husbands and wives.   How about instead of fighting to keep same-sex couples from getting married, we built a society where no one has to live a life unloved, instead of casting the lonely into the trashcan of society?   Moral values Schwartz, moral values.

And…Mr. Klinenberg…   I am still awaiting all that surprising appeal of living alone you speak of.   For some of us it’s more like life in solitary confinement then an exuberant life lived lightly.   It’s hell but with air conditioned singles bars and pantries full of single size servings.   We just learn to deal with it.   Until we can’t anymore.

I got the inks finished now on episode 15 of A Coming Out Story.   This one has been like pulling teeth.   There’s something to be said for not digging up your past.   Double for not trying to find your first crush after so long.   But I am more determined then ever to get this out of me because I think it’s worthwhile, not just as a personal exercise in exorcising my inner ghosts, but as an accounting of what it was like being a gay teenager in the years after Stonewall, but before the APA decided we weren’t mentally ill anymore.

There’s something to be said for all that advice out there about not searching for your first crush.   But I had to. It’s been since March 2011 that I posted episode 14. There were times I thought I’d never finish this one. When I started this cartoon series I had no idea where the object of my affections in this story was, what his life might be like, or even if he was still alive at all.   After the AIDS Quilt was first unveiled in Washington D.C., I used to have nightmares about walking along its rows and finding one with his name there.   Every time I restarted the search for him it terrified me to think I was simply going to discover he was dead.

Then, shortly after I started this little online comic story I found him.   And…creatively…my head has been a mess ever since.   Somehow in the past couple of weeks I got a head of steam up for it again and I have just zipped through the finishing of the pencils and now the inks.   I finished inking this basically in just two days.   And my head is still as much a mess as it’s ever been these past six years.

I do not understand that right brain side of me anymore.   Not that I ever really did.

[Edited some…]

As I often do, I posted the last couple sketches here onto my Facebook page with a brief explanation…

I’m finding suddenly that technical pencil and a graphite stick work pretty well for me on these sorts of sketches. If I tweak the contrast up in Photoshop they almost look inked but they aren’t. Just pencil and graphite drawn on layout paper, then scanned in.

The models for these are mostly taken from fashion spreads I find here and there online and in magazines, like Out, Details and GQ. I have a filing cabinet folder full of poses I tore out of magazines I use as a reference. When I get in the mood to do one of these sorts of sketches I dig up a pose I like, do a rough sketch of the body, then just add whatever face, hair and clothes to it that come to mind.

It’s probably not as good as sketching from life would be but it’s the best I can manage. If I had it to do all over again I’d move mountains to be able to afford art school.

A friend there responded that I could always hire a model. But that doesn’t fit into how I work on these.   When I do a political cartoon I do almost the entire thing in my head before I even touch pencil to paper.   I know with a pretty good certainly what I want to see on the paper when I begin drawing it out.   But these drawings of beautiful guys are more like daydreams.   As I said in the previous post, the wistful daydreams of a single guy, who has been single just about all his life.

I wouldn’t know where to even begin with a professional, or even an amateur model. What I have are file cabinet folder full of pages I’ve torn over the years from fashion spreads in magazines like Out, Details and GQ.   I use those as a reference when I sit down to a little sexy sketching.   I do a rough of the body in the photo, and then I work on it, firming up the lines, moving them a tad here and there to get the body shape I want.   I add face, hairstyle and clothes purely from my imagination. I have done this for so long now I have no idea how I would work with a model.

When I was a lot younger…about the age of the guys you see me drawing here, I had a small group of friends I would hang out with and I would snap photos of them.  But I don’t have anyone that age in my local group of friends now, for pretty obvious reasons, and even if I did, they’d be of their own time and place and I strongly doubt I could talk any of them into dressing like they’d just stepped out of the 1970s. So those days are gone to me and with them I guess pretty much the last opportunities I would ever have to draw from life in a way that would be both helpful and inspiring. I might see spontaneous things and snap away with my camera, or if someone was patient enough, I’d ask them to pose. But that isn’t the life I have.   If I’d had a boyfriend I’d have probably driven him nuts by now with all my sudden requests to pose while we were out and about. But that wasn’t the life I had.

My art sketches, as you can plainly see, are mostly young twenty-somethings. If you look closely what you see is they’re from a time when I was that age too. I’m stuck. I think this is what happens when you don’t connect, miss out on that chance for first love. You get stuck in a passage of life you were always meant to move on from. That dating and mating thing is part of the maturity process and when you fail at it a part of you gets stuck in that younger mindset, that once upon a time frame. Yes, a part of you does go on to some sort of maturity. You get a job, you enter the workforce, you start earning a living on your own, and accumulate responsibilities in the normal course of life. And you learn to fulfill those responsibilities, be dependable, because others at your workplace depend on you. You earn trust, you manage your finances, you gain various kinds of life experience and it grows you inside. All but one life experience. All but one so very vital life experience. And so a part of you does not get that chance to grow.

And yes, it’s not a completely dire fate. Keeping that youthful mindset keeps a part of you inside awake that too many adults let go to sleep. You ask questions the middle age guy might shrug off. You stay curious, open to new ideas, willing to turn the box upside down, never mind think outside of it, just to see what happens when you do that. So many of my generational peers are still afraid of computers and the Internet and the new technologies, so afraid of being left behind, and to me the fact that the world is constantly changing before my eyes, growing, getting bigger, is the same feeling it always was back in grade school. Something I have learned from being stuck, is that there is no such thing as growing up…there is only growing.

And if you’ve gotten on with the business of life with your eyes open, both to the inner and outer world, then you know well that a younger lover would not get you unstuck. What I need is someone my own age, or nearby. Someone who remembers what the world was like when John Lennon was still alive, before personal computers, cell phones and the Internet. Before cable TV and twenty-four hour cable TV news and over the horizon line was a beautiful tempting mysterious other world only expensive long distance phone calls could penetrate before the six o:clock news or the morning newspaper. Back when cars had lots of chrome and the teachers passed out assignment papers that smelled of mimeograph fluid and Jimi Hendrx played on the radio, not Rush Limbaugh. I could be a kid again with that guy. I could find my way to the rest of growing up that I missed out on.

Maybe then my artwork would grow up a little too. Or go in some different direction that I would have never known or suspected was even there had I not, finally, found my lover, and had my eyes opened to things I’d only imagined before, but never really knew anything about.

[Edited a tad for clarity in a few spots…]

I updated my depressing blog post of yesterday to include something that strikes me as an extra added burden on late fifties gay male dating. It’s a situation that will hopefully be done with, or mostly so, beyond my generation of gay folk. It’s better now for gay people in a lot of ways and especially for gay kids, even accounting for the fact that bullying still takes a frightful toll.   But millennials who reach their fifties and suddenly find themselves tossed back into the dating pool should be in one that is mostly as full as it should be of randomly available older gay singles. That isn’t the case with my generation.   A lot of gay guys in the general vicinity of my age are still deeply closeted because that’s what they felt they needed to be in order to survive when they were young men back in the 70s.

Being a homosexual back when I was a gay teenager was worse then being a murderer, worse then being a rapist, worse even then being a communist. A lot of us took that to heart and never found the inner strength to live openly and honestly because the risks were just too much, the pressure was just too much.   So a lot of us put on a mask of heterosexuality back then. It was a matter of survival. And as they grew older they lived that life even if it wasn’t the life their soul was meant to live.

Now some of them have wives, some have kids, and they just can’t leave that life without doing a lot of damage to a lot of people around them.   And if at this late stage of that one chance for a decent life you get, they find themselves looking in a mirror and knowing it could have been different…harder, more of a struggle initially, but better, more honorable, more decent…they have to ask themselves if getting their self respect back, their honor back, is really worth the toll it is going to take on a lot of people, not just themselves.   And a lot of them are simply going to choose to go to their grave wearing that mask and I can’t find it in my heart to judge them for it.

And what that means for those of us of this generation who took the risk and lived honest open lives is our dating pool is a lot smaller then it should be and if we are still single at this age we’re basically fighting against really horrible odds on top of the fact that gay males are a minority to begin with. And that can’t be helped. It just is what it is.

Millennials…don’t be looking at lonely older gay guys like me in fear that this is your future.   I am not your future.   I am your past.   For gay guys of my generation it will always be a time before Stonewall.