To whom it may concern…

Thank you for giving me permission to stick to my script for A Coming Out Story as I originally wrote it.

Also for some much needed motivation to get working on it again!

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.
Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements;
lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that coffin – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change.
It will not be broken, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  –C.S. Lewis

Real, that.

I really hope you’re okay.  You’re like Schrodinger’s Cat sometimes, except even when you’re observed you’re still in an unknown state.  I really hope you’re okay.

-That Guy In Baltimore

…So many things I could tell you about, without breaking security. I know exactly where the lines are. Hubble, James Webb, I could talk your ears off about it and for once know that I wasn’t boring you. The starry nights are something we have in common. Something else. Why is that not surprising? Google WFIRST. I know tons of stuff…I live and breath all the stars in the sky, and the light from near the beginning of time, every day I come to work. I could tell you about it. I could see the stars reflected in your eyes.

But there is never any time. Not now, not when we were kids, not ever. There will never be any time for our generation. So it goes. Maybe someday the work I do will make a difference for somebody. Some astronomer maybe. Or some other kid like the one I was once, entranced by the starry night. But not for me. I could be washing dishes for a living, and still have the stars to look up at, and no one to give them to.

LG
-Bruce

All in all, I had it pretty good compared to a lot of other gay teenagers back in the day.   I need to remind myself of this from time to time.   It wasn’t the best, not by any means.   But I never doubted that mom loved me.   Even so, we had an unspoken don’t ask, don’t tell agreement almost right up to the day she died.   It was okay for me to read gay novels and bring gay newspapers into the house. It was okay for me to not date girls.   It was okay for me to draw sketches and take photos of beautiful guys.   It was okay for me to march in gay rights protests.   I just had not to say it.   Sad to think, but this was actually a pretty good deal for a gay kid back in the early 1970s.   But not every gay kid had that deal.   Not by a long shot.   And even now, for some gay kids of my generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall.

Der Spiegel asks the question…

Is Germany Really as Liberal as It Seems?

A gay couple that was seeking to open a restaurant near the Bavarian town of Freying received an anonymous letter early last year. “Stay away. We don’t need people like you here,” it read. Additional threats followed, including a faked obituary and an open, though anonymous, letter claiming that one of the two was HIV-positive and that there was a danger that diners could be infected. The restaurant was never opened.

That it’s still hard for a gay kids in Bavaria even now is unsurprising.   It’s…Bavaria.   And it was probably a lot harder to be a gay kid in Bavaria, or from a Bavarian family, back when I was a teenager.   Probably still pretty hard for those gay Bavarian kids, even now, all grown up though they may be.   Impossible even.

Secondary school teacher Gabriel Stängle is likewise concerned about public school students in Baden-Württemberg. The 41-year-old, lives in the Black Forest and launched an online petition in November of last year that had been signed some 90,000 times by last Friday evening. His campaign is entitled: “Future — Responsibility — Learning: No Curriculum 2015 under the Ideology of the Rainbow.” Stängle’s primary concern is what he describes as sexual “reeducation.”

Stängle is angry with the state government — a coalition of the center-left Social Democrats and the Green Party — which is currently developing an educational program for public schools which will include the “acceptance of sexual diversity.” Students are to learn the “differences between the genders, sexual identities and sexual orientations.” The goal is to enable students to “be able to defend equality and justice.”

Stängle sees this as being in “direct opposition to health education as it has been practiced thus far.” Completely missing, he writes, is an “ethical reflection on the negative potential by-products of LSBTTIQ (which stands for “lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, transgender, intersexuals and queer people) lifestyles, such as the increased danger of suicide among homosexual youth, the increased susceptibility to alcohol and drugs, the conspicuously high rate of HIV infection among homosexual men, the substantially lower life-expectancy among homo- and bisexual men, the pronounced risk of psychological illness among men and women living as homosexuals.”

Most of the petitions’ signatories live in the rural, conservative regions of Germany’s southwest…

That would be Bavaria…

…and the majority wishes to remain anonymous. Some signed with handles such as “The Gay-Hater.”

And probably a lot of them have gay kids of their own.   Who they love very much.   Conditionally.

Stay in the closet…get married…don’t disgrace your family…or we won’t love you anymore…we’ll hate you for disgracing us…   Still hard for a gay kids in Bavaria even now.   Probably a lot harder back when I was a teenager.   Just saying.

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.

-Roger Waters, David Gilmour

Ich bin gut. Keine Schäden an meinem Haus aus dem Hurrikan. Danke für die Nachfrage.

Bitte Sie wieder schreiben irgendwann vor dem Ende des Universums…

oder auch nicht…

-Bruce

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.

Just a fact.

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Dead air.”

“Dead air who?”

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?

Wake-up.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired.  Tired. Email From You.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile.  Smile. 

Amazingly…life can still be good at times.  Very good.  For a while.

I keep having these dreams where you give me a date or time.  They keep coming true.

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. 

Then I remembered…

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…