So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange a walk on part in the war
for a leading role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
Every now and then, like yesterday morning I run into a fellow American who has spent time in Germany. When I tell them I want to visit there someday they all tell me I should definitely go. They always say Germany is a really great place and their time there was just wonderful. And if some of their time was spent in Bavaria, I always ask them what Bavaria is like compared to the rest of Germany. And the first thing they always say about Bavaria is that it is a Very Conservative part of Germany. Also, generally very expensive to live in. But Very Conservative is always the first thing that comes to their minds, when it comes to Bavaria. Not just conservative, but Very Conservative.
So I’m guessing it would probably be hard to be a gay kid there. Or to be a gay kid whose family is from there.
On the other hand, it’s hard for gay kids here in the U.S. too, in some states. The mostly rural conservative states anyway. You see a lot of them who have fled to the more liberal, tolerant states or cities to get away. But it’s hard to get away from your family. Those kids, they always have the most difficult time of it, even when they’re out and proud and living in the gay ghettos. What happens is they just learn to live with the stress of family relationships and move on with their lives. Because one way or another it’s going to be hard. Everyone who comes out of the closet does so knowing what is on the other side of that closet door. So you might as well just be yourself. You can’t please everyone. But you can be real.
That’s something I learned ages ago, ironically well before I entered adolescence and found myself having to deal with being gay. See…mom’s family positively hated dad, and dad’s family. After my parents divorced when I was about two, mom moved me back across the country and I grew up here in Maryland instead of California (which I will probably go to my grave regretting except for the fact that I met you). And since I had dad’s face, I got a lot of flack growing up just for being his son. Stinking Rotten Good-For-Nothing Garrett Just Like Your Pap was grandma’s favorite name for me (where mom couldn’t hear it), even though I was a pretty well behaved kid. But I had his face, and grandma hated dad, and I was handy. So I caught the flack. And gay people catch a lot of flack too, simply because we are handy.
So you see, when I turned seventeen and came out to myself I’d already had a childhood knowing that some people would hate me just for something I was and couldn’t help being. But I knew I was loved too. Mom never let me doubt that. So much as it distressed me, I just learned to live with the fact that grandma and others just didn’t like me because I was my father’s son and I would never change that, and I got on with my life. Mom loved me. I knew I was loved. I knew I could be loved. That was all I needed to grow up on.
Here’s what gay people know: strangers can gay bash you, beat the living crap out of you, take your life from you, but only relatives can chew your heart up and spit it out. What we learn from it is this: your family are the people who love you just as you are. That’s the real family you have. Everyone else is just a relative.
This is mostly a growl at a certain someone who bellyaches about how I overdo the packaging of the randoms gifts I send his way, which I am posting here (and on Facebook) even though he doesn’t bother reading my blog (So He Claims) or do Facebook (So He Claims) because I just need to vent about the unfairness of it all. I do not overpack and thereby “waste postage” as has been claimed.
So I bought two (count ’em) +1 diopters for my Nikon SLRs to replace one I lost at Disney World a few weeks ago. If you’ve never seen a diopter for the old all mechanical film SLRs they’re about the size of a dime and they correct for…er…older eyes. Nikon diopters, unlike the Canon diopters apparently, have this tendency to unscrew themselves and drop off the eyepiece. If you’re lucky you hear the delicate little ‘clink’ as it hits the pavement and if you’re not you just walk blithely on without realizing you’re walking away from a piece of hardware that nobody makes anymore and is hard-to-find on the used market without which you will have serious difficulty seeing and focusing on your subjects.
So I was lucky enough to find and buy two (count ’em) more +1 diopters for my Nikons. I bought them both at the same time from the same online company. They came in separate packages, one of which was a small bubble pack envelope which was about right for something the size of an SLR diopter. The other one came packaged as follows…
Now stop complaining about how I pack things. In the grand scheme of things I am actually very sensible about how I pack gifts I’d like my friends to have. Particularly when it’s breakable…like a couple of latte mugs. I appreciate and share your waste not, want not attitude, (though probably not to the degree a German would) but if you’d opened a box from me that was full of broken glass you might have gotten the wrong impression.
“The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods
but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.”
-Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957
I thought loving someone deeply, strongly, absolutely, I’d finally understand how it might feel to be jealous. Instead I discovered how incomprehensible jealously is. It makes no sense. How can everyone not love you?
I can tell how unsettled my head is, by how odd my dreams get.
Last night I was in a large vacation home with other random friends from various parts of my life. We’d all gathered there for some reason I couldn’t remember. You were there too, but in an upstairs room all by yourself. Of course after yesterday I had to be having a dream about you last night. I didn’t want to disturb you.
My friends are all stringing Christmas lights around the door frames to their rooms…it seems like some sort of project we’d all gotten ourselves into…everyone is decorating their doors with Christmas trimmings. I am trying to untangle a favorite set of Christmas lights from my school days to put it up around the door to my room. But the others all keep telling me to just grab a new set from the stack of unopened ones in the corner. I am wasting time trying to untangle mine they all say, and they probably don’t even work. But I know my old set still works because it is lit up…even though it isn’t plugged in yet. Which is strange but sometimes you just accept strange things in your dreams as though they’re perfectly normal. And the new lights are that style I just hate…all transparent wiring and no colors. My old set has all the colors in it. But try as I might I can’t get it untangled from the knot it’s in.
Then I notice my old collection of 45rpm records was scattered all over the place and I start gathering them up off the tables and chairs and off the floor and putting them back in their carrying case. A friend walks over and asks me if I want to take them back home with me now and I tell him not yet, because you hadn’t heard them yet. I tell the friend they can listen to my 45s too…all they wanted…but they needed to take a little better care of them because they could get scratched up and broken laying around like this. That earns me a shrug.
Then I start hearing footsteps from the floor above us. Another one of my friends tells me that it’s probably one of my co-workers at the Institute getting up for a meeting later. My co-workers are here at the house too…some of them…and we all have a conference to go to later that day. I can hear them walking around upstairs now, getting ready to go.
Suddenly I’m worried you’ve left the house and I didn’t see you go. I walk upstairs and I’m relieved to see the door to your room is still closed, which means you’re still here. But I don’t knock. I don’t want to disturb you. I just want to see you before you go. I’m waiting for you to walk out of your room, so I can talk to you before you leave. You’re still here, but the door is still closed. I notice there are no Christmas lights strung around your door.
I see some more of my friends milling around in another room and more of my 45 collection scattered all over the place. So I start gathering it back up and stacking them neatly. A friend walks over and asks why I’m doing that and I tell him they need to be more careful with my records. Then I notice some of them laying by a window in the sunlight and I move them away and tell my friend not to do that because they’ll warp if they’re left laying in the sunlight. I’m starting to get a little pissed off at the careless way my friends are treating my 45s.
And then…I wake up…
Sometimes, you just have to figure a dream is your mind’s way of sorting out the clutter of your day. Of course you were there…after yesterday’s conversation you pretty much had to be…and I get the closed door and the fear that you were already gone, and the relief that you weren’t…yet. I think I get the Christmas lights. But laying in bed this morning I couldn’t figure out where my 45rpm colleciton fit into it.
I look at my record collection from back then…mostly the 45rpm singles I bought in my middle teen years because back then I wouldn’t spend the price of a whole album unless it was a band I really liked a lot, and I see almost nothing but love songs among them. Granted, that’s mostly what rock has always been. But there was a lot of it back then about life and politics, the war and the struggles our generation was going through. Songs I loved like For What It’s Worth, and Incense and Peppermint…and interestingly enough in retrospect, Hold Your Head Up.
And if it’s bad
Don’t let it get you down, you can take it
And if it hurts
Don’t let them see you cry, you can take it
Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high
And if they stare
Just let them burn their eyes on you moving
And if they shout
Don’t let them change a thing what you’re doing
Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high
I don’t think I need to analyze very much why I liked that one. But the songs I turned to again and again alone in my bedroom were the love songs, and what is amazing to me about that in retrospect is that at that age I really didn’t care much for all that gushy love stuff. I was going through my stacks of 45 rpms the other day and it just floored me how much of it was surgery sweet love songs. As I remember that part of my life, I didn’t have much interest in all that love stuff. But then, nobody told me I could fall in love with a guy either.
I wasn’t paying much attention to the lyrics in those songs, but something in the music itself spoke to me, in a way that the lyrics, speaking only to the straight boys in the audience, never could. I would connect with it instantly when I heard it on the radio, and like a flash I was down to the record store to by the single. It would be years before I would find myself listening to the lyrics. I had to grow into myself as a gay man first, and then learn the trick a lot of gay guys have to learn in this world, of mentally changing a pronoun as I listen…
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
[Girl], we couldn’t get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
I never really paid much attention to those lyrics at first. Just the music, and the sultry sound of Morrison’s voice.
You are all the [woman] I need, and baby you know it,
You can make this beggar a king, a clown or a poet.
I’ll give you all that I own.
You got me standing in line
Out in the cold,
pay me some mind.
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
Long as you love me, it’s all right
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
You got the power to turn on the light.
Something in the music spoke to me, in a way the lyrics just didn’t. My record collection is full of these kinds of songs. Bubblegum pop mostly, as they called it back then. In another world, there would have been some that spoke directly to gay guys, or at least was gender neutral enough that I could have taken the lyrics to heart as much as I did the music. But even back then, well before I came out to myself as a gay man, I had a soul for sweet love songs. Perhaps…a tad too sweet.
Okay…now the 45s make sense. Especially the part about my friends (the ones that were there in the house anyway…they weren’t all there…), treating them so carelessly. That was my heart they were treating so carelessly. And of course, what I was trying to save for you.
You said over and over to me yesterday that a relationship between us would happen someday. "It’ll happen", you said. "It’ll happen." Over and over you said that. But "now isn’t a good time". It was more then I’d ever expected to hear from you in my wildest dreams. Okay. Fine. I can wait, if that’s what you want. Whenever you are ready, I’ll be here. But I think something else needs to happen too. You need to love yourself. There’s nothing wrong with you. There was never anything wrong with you. "Maybe after we’re retired", you said. Waiting for age to take desires you’ve always hated having away isn’t a plan.
Okay…I had a crush once upon a time. Okay…I guess I still do. Back then you knew how to push my buttons. And you did. And I loved it. Even if I didn’t have the words to say so back then. Life was sweet…so very very sweet. But we went our separate ways, time passes, the universe expands, and now our lives are what they are. I understand this. I don’t want to complicate the life you have now and I’m not a home wrecker. But I guess coming back into your life has complicated it after all and I’m sorry. I just had to find you.
All I wanted now after all these years was to just be friends, at a distance, since you have your life where you are and I have mine here in Baltimore and nothing can change now without causing a lot of problems for both of us and the last thing on earth I’d ever want is to cause you hurt in any way. But I figured maybe I could come see you and chat over lunch or dinner or something every now and then. But you’re afraid of what might happen. And I was afraid that might be the case. But…as it turns out…you’re not afraid of what I might do, so much as what you might do. Let me guess…you don’t want to turn a friendship into something dirty. Where have I heard that before?
I’m a grown man now and so are you and we both understand the risks here. That’s why I’ve never suggested anything more happens then we just remain friends at a distance. There are perfectly good reasons for me to stay away. I know this. I accept it. But there is nothing wrong with you. Or me. There are plenty of very good reasons why I should keep my distance now, and maybe even forever…but that isn’t one of them.
So far away; Doesn’t anybody stay in one place any more?
It would be so fine to see your face at my door;
Doesn’t help to know you’re just time away…
Long ago I reached for you and there you stood;
Holding you again could only do me good;
How I wish I could, but you’re so far away
One more song about movin’ along the highway;
Can’t say much of anything that’s new;
If I could only work this life out my way;
I’d rather spend it bein’ close to you;
… I sure hope the road don’t come to own me;
Yet so many dreams I’ve yet to find…
Once upon a time there was a gay teenager, who fell in love with a beautiful high school classmate. But at first, he didn’t know that the wonderful thing he was feeling, that he’d never before felt in his life, was love. The days were more beautiful then before. The wind at his face was sharper and sweeter. The sunsets were a little more brilliant. The stars shone a little more intensely in the night sky. He felt more alive then he ever had before in his life. But he did not know it was love that he felt.
For one thing, the gay teenager had been taught that gay people don’t love. Gays, he was taught, just have sex. Ugly, monstrous, murderous, sordid and twisted sex. He was taught that gays often killed the people they had sex with. He was taught that gays usually mutilated the bodies of the people they had sex with. He was taught that gays raped children. He was taught that gays hated themselves, because deep down inside, they knew how sick and twisted they were.
His teachers taught him those things about gay people. The newspapers and magazines he read said those things about gay people. The TV shows and movies he watched told him stories about the ugly things gays did to normal people, and to each other.
And since the gay teenager knew deep down inside that he wasn’t any of those horrible, evil things he had been taught that gays were, he believed he couldn’t possibly be one. His family thought he was a lazy dreamer. His grades in school were barely passable. His teachers and his mother scolded him constantly for not doing his homework. But he knew he wasn’t a monster. So he couldn’t be in love. Because to be in love with another male would have meant that he Was a monster.
All through his junior year, and through most of his senior year, he could not allow himself to believe that it was love he felt for the beautiful classmate. He could only glance silently, and then quickly away, as they passed each other in the hallway, feeling a terrible longing deep in his heart that he couldn’t understand, because he knew it could not be love.
But the classmate he was in love with had a good heart. He worked hard in school, and at home, and treated all his friends well, and he was trusted and loved by all of them. One day he spoke to the gay teenager, and soon after they began to talk to one another as they met throughout their schoolday. They began finding times and places they could be alone together. In the library. In certain empty classrooms, or certain empty corners of the school, at certain times of the day. Wherever they knew they could be alone. And they would meet at the end of their schoolday at his locker, and walk together into the world outside their school, where they would part company…the gay teenager to his mom’s apartment across the railroad tracks, his classmate to his parent’s house in the nice neighborhood across the street.
And one day…one bright beautiful day the gay teenager would never forget…he realized that he Was in love, and that to be in love with another male was beautiful after all. Because he saw that he had fallen in love with someone who was as beautiful within, as they were without. Because he saw that he had fallen in love with someone whose heart was as good as his smile was beautiful. Because the one he loved was smart, and worked hard, and treated his friends with love. And the gay teenager saw it was all of that which he had fallen in love with; not merely the surface beauty his eyes could see, but also the inner beauty his heart saw as well.
And because his classmate studied hard, the gay teenager also began to study hard. His grades went up and his teachers and his mother were pleased. And because his classmate worked after school, the gay teenager got a job and worked nights too and earned money for himself and his mother, and his family who had thought him nothing more then a lazy dreamer were pleased. And because his classmate was bound for college, the gay teenager, whose own father had never graduated from high school, decided he must go to college too. And he did.
And whenever they met for the rest of that last summer together, whenever his classmate smiled at him, the gay teenager smiled too. And for the rest of his life, the gay man the gay teenager eventually became would smile whenever he remembered it. And he never hated himself.
He never hated himself.
He had been taught that to be gay was to be a terrible monster. He had been taught that to be gay was to be human garbage. He had been taught that to be homosexual, was to never know love. But because self understanding had happened to him in just that way…and because of who it was he had fallen into first love with…he knew at once, as soon as he saw it, that he had been taught lies. He Did know love. And it Was beautiful. And it Was good. And the gay teenager saw the truth of it, and how fine and beautiful it was. And he never hated himself.
And because of that, he never did any of the self destructive things that ignorant people taught him that gay people do. Oh for certain he partied it up like all of his boyhood friends. But he never tried to destroy his mind with drugs or alcohol because he knew there was nothing wrong with the person he was. And he never sought out sex with strangers in the alleys or toilets or empty parks, because he knew his heart wasn’t ugly, and that his heart’s desires weren’t terrible, but noble and good and decent, and the love he was looking for, that his heart needed, couldn’t be found in the toilet, and didn’t belong in the gutter, and wasn’t to be given away to strangers.
Because he never hated himself. Because of that first love.
Happy birthday. I wish for you all the best that life can bring your way, and everything your heart holds dear. Life took us in different directions as life will do, and there is never any going back. But the boy is father to the man and you are still that decent, good-hearted, hard working person I knew way back when, and a lot of what I am today I am because of that. It could have gone in so many different directions for me back then, taken so many hard and cruel and ugly turns like it did for so many gay guys of our generation and it didn’t because of you.
Thank you.
And…
Alles Gute! Alles Gute! All the best! All the best!
Can you see my smile? There’s a little space in the center of my door that I’ve been saving for one particular Christmas card, I wasn’t even sure would come. It hadn’t by the time I was on my way south. I was tempted several times to call the lady who watches my house while I’m gone and ask her if it had come. When I came home last night from Key West, the first thing I did was look through the stack of mail for it. And there it was. With a nice little note inside.
Thank you. And Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours too!
I keep looking for something in the little stack of envelops that greats me at the door when I get home from work. A pleasant little surprise from warmer climes, like the one I got last December that put a smile on my face that lasted well into the New Year. I got three Christmas cards in the mail today. One of them was for the previous occupants of this house. I’ve owned Casa del Garrett for just over seven years now and I occasionally still get mail for them. But this card was from an address I’d never seen before in their mail, so I’m guessing it’s from someone they haven’t heard from in a while. Maybe someone who lost touch and, after searching around online, found an old address they decided to give a try. I’ll put it back in the mail stream tomorrow with a note about the old owners new address, and hopefully the little card will find its way to the hands it seeks to open it.
See…This is why I wish you’d let me email you…I could just bop these little questions back to you and maybe get a quick answer, instead of putting them into the Christmas card I’m sending.
My friends up here are just a tad too disorganized this year to count on them doing anything all together this New Years, alas. I’ve pinged them and pinged them and it looks like it’s just going to be catch as catch can and I tend to slip right between the cracks when it’s like that. I have a week off between Christmas and New Year and I don’t want to spend it moping around the house alone. Be nice to take a drive in my new car somewhere…particularly somewhere it’s warm. Somewhere I’ve never seen before.
So…basically…will Disneyworld be open during the week between Christmas and New Year…?
And…
What part of the complex, in your experienced opinion, would most appeal to a single adult? I’m not interested in the kiddy stuff, or the thrill rides so much (Unless I had a companion to thrill along with). I’ll probably just be wandering around all by myself. So maybe something to engage my mind and my curiosity? If such as that even exists at Disney? Epcot Center maybe? Or is there something else you think would be better?
And where would you suggest I get a room for a few days. Something basic, and not horribly expensive.
Even through the darkest phase
Be it thick or thin
Always someone marches brave
Here beneath my skin
Constant craving
Has always been
Maybe a great magnet pulls
All souls towards truth
Or maybe it is life itself
That feeds wisdom
To its youth
Constant craving
Has always been
Craving
Ah ha
Constant craving
Has always been
Is this all there is?
Is there nothing more?
They say there’s a lid for every pot…
But…where’s mine?
Are you there? Somewhere?
Please…knock on my door…
Say hello.
Please. I need you. So badly.
There must be more. Please tell me there is more.
There is so much more I could be. But I need you there…
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