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.
Some Days I Really Regret Not Going To Art School. And…Not Ever Having Had A Boyfriend…
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.
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.
I am grocery shopping and paused between isles with my shopping cart, when a middle aged (I think…I didn’t get a good look at her) woman strides quickly past and says “Nice ass”. Startled I snap out of my hunter-gatherer mindset and look up. She doesn’t look back, just walks quickly away and down another isle. Well I’m gay, so I don’t follow.
It’s nice to be reminded from time to time that a guy physically like me can be desirable…at least to some small segment of the human population. Once some years ago while I was waiting to be seated at a restaurant in Kayenta, a young Navajo (I think…Kayenta is in the Navajo reservation) woman actually put a hand on my butt as she walked quickly by. Had I the kind of love life other people have I’d probably take offense. But starved as I am at this late stage in my life for any kind of romance, burdened by the kinds of doubts about my desirability you would naturally have in the autumn of a life spent single, I take some heart when I get those, like the starving man suddenly presented with a dry loaf of bread. I see how others get complements on their desirability and I know I get them a lot less, and there are just more heterosexual women out there then gay males so it isn’t unusual that I’d hear it more often from that direction then the one I’d really thrill to get it from. But it’s a two edged knife. On the one hand it’s a comfort to know your Use By date isn’t past just yet. On the other, you’re still single and you have no prospects.
I’m gay. As perfect a Kinsey 6 as they come. What seems to confuse a lot of my gay friends is I am not about über masculine guys, which is unfortunate in that the only time I ever seem to get that “nice ass” complement from another guy it’s a bear and I am not about bear. I’ve had gay friends ask me outright if I’m not actually Bi because…well you’ve probably seen the random sketches of beautiful guys I’ve posted here. Here’s one I did recently that I put up on Facebook…
One gay friend cracked about this one…
…that he was one estrogen shot away from a job a Hooters. Thing of it is, I thought I was sketching a fairly butch sort of guy. Gay obviously, in the sense that a straight guy would never call attention to his body in the same way a gay guy does let alone strike that kind of pose. But as far as I can tell I drew a guy there. Ah…but his hair… Yes…it’s a tad long isn’t it. Must be a girly boy then. Maybe I relied too much on the basketball shirt with the University of Maryland insignia on it to make the attitude of the subject plain. On the other hand, there is a strain of human male…I’ve seen them both gay and straight…that seem to feel nothing but contempt for other males who aren’t 200 percent über masculine. Get A Haircut you goddamned fairy…
Here’s the thing: that period of time when we walk out of adolescence into our young adulthood really leaves its mark on your libido.
I came of age in a period of time in America when guys felt free to wear their hair long and their jeans tight to the body and low around the waste and be sexy and show off in a way they just can’t now without being terrified of getting labeled GAY, and I guess I just glommed onto that look as an ideal of male beauty. But there was more then just eye candy to it because with that look usually came a mindset that I found very agreeable to the soul. The über masculine guys my age back then were all either dumb jocks or Nixon republicans who I didn’t want anything to do with. The longhairs more often then not, struck me as beautiful on the inside as outside. Some of them made my heart skip a beat. In high school I hung out with the longhaired art geeks for half my day and the longhaired techno geeks the other half and it was bliss. That was my perfect world. But it didn’t last.
And I think regrettably my libido is still living in that world that does not exist anymore. And really, when I think about that time logically and rationally, I would not want to go back. It wasn’t the best place for a gay kid. Lots of eye candy yes, but you didn’t dare tell anyone you found them desirable or you’d get packed off to a mental ward.
I find myself thinking often at night now, alone in my house, that if only that world had been as accepting of gay kids, as incomplete and spotty as acceptance nowadays is, as this one, maybe I wouldn’t still be single. You see, I was always about finding The One and the problem is the longer you go without finding them the more your social group becomes people who are still in the singles scene because that’s where they always wanted to be and they just don’t get you.
A few years ago I found myself at a new bar my gay friends down in D.C. decided to try out as a change of scenery. With us was a guy who was somewhat new to the group…”D”. D was someone I was always happy to see join us. I wasn’t attracted to him in a romantic sense and I figure neither was he to me or else he’d have probably said something. But at a deep down in the heart place I sensed we were two of a kind. Well practically the moment I walked into that bar my jaw dropped at the sight of one of the bartenders. The friends I’d socialized for decades with simply sat and watched my rapture and confusion as they always did, waiting I guess for me to finally get up and do something about it. D, seeing my eyes never left this guy did something no one else had ever done for me before. He stood beside me at the bar and ordered something from the beautiful bartender and asked him his name where I could hear it given. And once given D looked aside at me with a smile and a nod…
There you go…
It was enough. Instantly I struck up a conversation with the guy. Well, nothing came of it, but it was a chance, small as it was and I was touched by the gesture on the part of D. It wasn’t until some time later, heartbroken at how longtime gay friends let an opportunity for me to meet a guy who, it was said, might actually have been a very good match for me, wither on the vine and die like my desperate loneliness mattered not one wit to any of them, that I really saw that moment with D in that bar for what it was. D and I really were two of a kind. He eventually found his soulmate and dropped out of the happy hour group and I miss seeing him. But I’m happy for him too. And I understand what has happened to me a little better now. For romantics like myself, the social opportunities at this late stage in life are mostly with other singles who are just fine in the singles scene and that’s why they’re still there, not why you’re still there. And thus time passes, the universe expands, and you end up older, less desirable, searching for love in a rapidly depleting dating pool situated in a minority of a minority, surrounded by a lot of very very nice people who just get a little confused as to why, if you’re attracted to some guy you see, you would need to know his name.
What…you’re not on GRINDR? And so they won’t get his name for you when they see your jaw dropping or even bother trying to introduce you or get the two of you together because the mindset is you just go over to him and say “My place or yours” and get it on and be done with it and then on to the next guy and if that guy turns out to be The One all well and good but if not no bother here comes the next guy. They just don’t get how that love thing mixes with that libido thing inside of you and how that keeps you behaving differently from how they would when they see an attractive guy. They just don’t get how you don’t simply walk up to someone who is making your heart skip a beat and offer them a quick fuck in the backroom because that is simply how it’s done in the singles scene. And don’t try to tell me it’s any different for heterosexuals either because I’ve watched that singles scene too and the only difference between them I can discern is the gay singles scene is less hypocritical and more to the point. Backrooms instead of cheap motels then. It saves time and money.
But at least heterosexuals have a bigger potential dating pool, and live for that matter in a culture that for all its hypocrisy at least somewhat supports love and romance among heterosexuals, if not homosexuals. It’s better now for younger gay guys, but you carry those first years of your dating life with you always it seems. When I was seventeen and just coming out to myself it would still be a few more years before the APA decided kids like me weren’t mentally ill and decades before I could lie down with a guy I loved and not risk being thrown into jail in many states. And a problem I run into time and again is a lot of very nice guys roughly my own age are either still in the closet or deep in denial, having spent a lifetime masquerading as heterosexual for that career, for that share of the American dream we were all told we could have when we were kids. It’s what a lot of us had to do to survive. And now they have wives and maybe kids and they’re in that life and there is no getting out of it without a lot of pain and damage to everyone around them and they have to ask themselves at this late stage in their lives is if it’s worth it, or do they just go to their grave wearing the mask. When I was a young man I was determined to avoid that fate for myself. I came out to friends who were mostly accepting, and in the workplace where I felt I could not be openly gay I simply refused to invent imaginary girlfriends let alone actually date girls and build a faux heterosexual life around me as a wall against my inner self. So now I’m in my late fifties and I can say I have always lived the honest life and I am proud of that, but I’m still single and consigned to a pool of other singles of my age group made smaller then it should be for all the guys my age who Still after all these years cannot bring themselves to live openly as gay for reasons I cannot find it in my heart to judge. I feel some nights as if I never had a chance. For gay people of a certain age it seems, it will always be a time before Stonewall.
So at the autumn of your life you are gay and single and your prospects are doubly limited because gay males are simply a minority and in your age group openly gay males are an even smaller minority, and your bar pals solution to your loneliness will always be to just get out and meet people but what they’re really saying is go out and trick because that’s meeting people for them. And they just don’t understand and never will how meeting people is a slightly different process if what you want to come of it is a relationship and not a random fuck in the night with someone whose name you don’t need to know anyway.
The others, your kind, are mostly settled down now. If you had a spouse the two of you could probably still socialize with them but as you are single you represent a world they understandably wish to keep at a safe distance. So you are left to the “scene” and you don’t belong there and you never belonged there but in your youth it was all there was and now it is all that keeps you from going mad from total social isolation and so you keep going back, keep saying to yourself that maybe tonight I’ll find The One. But you know he isn’t there and even if he was your friends would be oblivious and unsupportive. And the “nice ass” you occasionally get from random strangers still elicits a vague hope within you that you are still in the game, but that hope is only an echo from a distant world whose ship you missed long, long ago.
[Updated a tad to clarify some things that I felt needed it.]
I’m stressing more and more lately, and not just about the economy and the future of JWST and my livelihood. Every little thing it seems adds to the stress level, every bit of news I read, every little thing around the house I see that needs fixing or working on…little worries about bills I shouldn’t have to worry about because at the present time I am making more then enough to pay my bills and there is plenty left over to plan the next vacation with…every little ache and pain, even though I just got the best possible result on the colonoscopy…everything.
I am a little tightly wound ball of stress lately. Though nicotine has been a stress blanket I haven’t smoked a cigar in months, worried that my body just can’t take it anymore. Though a drink or two will calm me down I haven’t had anything for days because if I so much as touch glass to lips in my present state I’ll be convinced I’m on the road to alcoholism. So I just do what I have always done when I’m completely stressed out. I sit on it and just wait for it to either go away or kill me. So far it hasn’t killed me. Probably, it is making me crazy. Although some friends from my grade school days would say I’ve always been crazy.
Yesterday I indulged in something I know relieves stress without drugs: I took a drive around the Maryland countryside. I love to drive. I didn’t spend the money on a Mercedes-Benz because I wanted a status symbol. Driving is a favorite pastime. Just get in the car and go find a road I haven’t been down yet and see what’s there. The lovely rolling green hills of the Piedmont are very relaxing to drive through and after some miles of it the stress began to loosen its grip on me. I could feel it letting go. It was nice.
I turned for home and got back on the Interstate, heading back into the city. I wasn’t in a hurry and so I just sat in the far right lane at about the speed limit while to my left everyone else was zooming past me, on their furious way to somewhere. I didn’t care. This was a section of the Interstate I have driven hundreds, if not thousands of times before….in a part of the Baltimore suburbs I used to live in, and still frequently go shopping in because it is so easy to get to on the Interstate. Traffic was light, and I was relaxing.
Suddenly in the rear view mirror I saw a Lexus blasting toward my car and I swear it nearly clipped me on the passenger side rear bumper. It blew past…figure it was doing a good fifty mph faster then I was going and I was doing the sixty-five mph speed limit… and into the deceleration lane of the exit I was coming up on. Scared the steaming shit out of me.
So I catch my breath and…
…and suddenly I don’t remember where the fuck I am. I look around. I don’t recognize anything I see. I’ve been on this section of highway a zillion times before and it feels all of a sudden as though I have never seen any of it before in my entire life. I don’t know where I am. I don’t recognize anything. I don’t recognize anything. I am in a strange place and nothing looks familiar. Nothing. I look around for a reference point. There is nothing here I recognize. Nothing at all.
My logical analytical mind is still functioning enough to get me out of it. I pull a trick I’ve done ever since grade school when a teacher would catch me daydreaming…
…and what would you say the answer to that is Mr. Garrett?
Daydreaming doesn’t cause deafness. You’re still hearing what the teacher is saying, you’re just not paying attention. So, and quickly, I would mentally walk it back to the last thing I remember hearing, and then quickly walk it forward until I get to the question I am being asked, and then give an answer, usually pissing off the teacher who thought for sure that time they’d caught me day dreaming.
Where the hell am I???
So I walk it backward to the last thing I remember, which was getting on the Interstate. The rest pops back into view. Ah…right…I’ve just passed the Padonia Road exit and some jackass nearly hit me… And then it’s like the visual memory suddenly pops back also, and everything looks familiar again.
That has never happened to me before. And so naturally I begin stressing out that I’m getting Alzheimer’s. My brain is going. I can feel it Dave…I can feel it…
I stress about it all night and all morning today. Then while I’m discussing something with my current and former branch managers I do something I almost never do, because I don’t like bothering my co-workers, and especially my bosses, with my private worries, and particularly my private health worries. I tell them what happened. I ask them what they think is happening to me. Has that ever happened to you? Is it time for me to see the doctor about my memory?
And one of them says oh yes, that’s happened to my brother and you hear it happening to people all the time because of stress. Stress does that he tells me. Don’t worry, it isn’t age. A lot of stress can make you loose the zone and you forget where you are for an instant and what you’re doing. It happens. It’s stress. Your brain isn’t rotting…brains just do that when enough stress is applied.
In other word’s it’s expected behavior under certain conditions. I hear this and the worry just melts away. The relief for a moment is overwhelming. Yes…yes, that makes sense! And…I’ve read about that elsewhere. Yes! It’s kind of like when you get smacked in the head hard enough you loose a fragment of short term memory. Stress does adversely impact memory. I’ve read that. The explanation makes sense.
I’m a geek. I’ll probably dig around a bit more and research it some until I’m satisfied and can put it to rest. But in the instant of that worry melting away I saw something else, something I’d seen before often enough, but this one time it really hit me.
Because, really, I”m not under an unbearable amount of stress all things considered. What’s bad is the level even minor things can build up to with me. And that has been the case, for nearly all of my adult life, and particularly since Mom passed away. Stress doesn’t go away for me like it does most other people. I can’t manage it as well as other people can and do. Because nearly every moment of my non-working life I am alone. It’s not the stress, it’s the solitude. It’s a lifetime spent in emotional solitude.
We are not solitary critters…we are social beings. We need our packs, our tribes, our families. We need most of all, in our adult lives, that other half.
It’s not the big issues. It’s all the little day to day ones. All the little minor day to day things that happen and get discussed and hashed out in the casual chit-chat of lovers. All of that just grows and grows inside of me and I can’t really stop it from doing that all by myself.
If only I had friends who cared that Bruce shouldn’t be so alone. If only I’d grown up in a world that understood that some boys like boys and that’s okay as long as they find the right boy. If only.
Oh well… Artists are supposed to be crazy anyway. It’s what makes us creative, and our works valuable long after we have died miserable and alone.
This month’s column is a tale of two rats. One rat got lots of attention from its mother when it was young; she licked its fur many times a day. The other rat had a different experience. Its mother hardly licked its fur at all. The two rats grew up and turned out to be very different. The neglected rat was easily startled by noises. It was reluctant to explore new places. When it experienced stress, it churned out lots of hormones. Meanwhile, the rat that had gotten more attention from its mother was not so easily startled, was more curious, and did not suffer surges of stress hormones.
The same basic tale has repeated itself hundreds of times in a number of labs. The experiences rats had when they were young altered their behavior as adults. We all intuit that this holds true for people, too, if you replace fur-licking with school, television, family troubles, and all the other experiences that children have. But there’s a major puzzle lurking underneath this seemingly obvious fact of life. Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes. Each of our brain cells contains the same set of genes we were born with and uses those genes to build proteins and other molecules throughout its life. The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work.
Neuroscientists are now mapping that mechanism…
This is interesting on a number of accounts. Firstly, as a gay man, it concerns me how the question of nature verses nurture is dealt with, as it has been a trip point in the culture war for decades now. And as it seems to be turning out more and more, it’s a combination of both. The story here is that genes may say one thing, but the effects of the environment, the physical environment, you grow up in, can overrule them all the same…
Two families of molecules perform that kind of genetic regulation. One family consists of methyl groups, molecular caps made of carbon and hydrogen. A string of methyl groups attached to a gene can prevent a cell from reading its DNA sequence. As a result, the cell can’t produce proteins or other molecules from that particular gene. The other family is made up of coiling proteins, molecules that wrap DNA into spools. By tightening the spools, these proteins can hide certain genes; by relaxing the spools, they can allow genes to become active.
How this plays out in terms of one’s sexual orientation fascinated me less then this…
…the influence of environment doesn’t end with childhood. Recent work indicates that adult experiences can also rearrange epigenetic marks in the brain and thereby change our behavior. Depression, for example, may be in many ways an epigenetic disease. Several groups of scientists have mimicked human depression in mice by pitting the animals against each other. If a mouse loses a series of fights against dominant rivals, its personality shifts. It shies away from contact with other mice and moves around less. When the mice are given access to a machine that lets them administer cocaine to themselves, the defeated mice take more of it.
Something, probably my body’s low tolerance to intoxicants, has kept me thankfully clear of addiction. But I know its temptations. There are days when I think if I could only drug myself out my my misery, life would be so much better. But my body simply won’t let me do that. I have no escape. Well…I have one. But it’s one I’ve not reached for. So far.
I have the job of my dreams. A house of my own I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d have. My dream come true car. And I am miserable. Single, lonely and miserable. If you don’t have love, nothing else matters. You can be rich. You can be living in the lap of luxury, and if you have no one, you have nothing and you know it. You will always know it. And at some level I have always known my brain was stacked against me in that struggle.
I was brutalized in grade school. It was only by shear luck that I lived in a tiny neighborhood that was diverted to this little expansion high school in a well to do neighborhood and away from my tormentors that allowed me to have at least a good final three years of grade school. Woodward was paradise compared to my Jr. High School years and my elementary school years were only slightly less brutal. When I wasn’t getting beaten up by the other kids, I was getting emotionally battered by the teachers, nearly all of whom dumped me in the problem child category, simply because mom was a single divorced mother. The few in those days who actually took an interest in me and gave me a chance to learn have always had my eternal gratitude.
Woodward, I have said time and again, was paradise…absolutely the best years of my school life. But even paradise could not undo the damage. It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally started peeking out of the shell my tormentors had locked me into. And by then it was, really, too late to start figuring out that dating and mating thing. And besides, I was a gay kid, and it was 1971.
And I’m 57 now, and still single, and if anything surprises me it’s that I’m still alive. I really shouldn’t be. I honestly don’t know why I am still alive. It’s your own fault Bruce. We had to do it to you. You were so weird we had to. It’s your own fault Bruce. You need to get out more. Friends don’t help friends find a lover, they rub it in that it’s their own fault. People who look like that, want people who look like that. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Why am I still here?
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