Just now on Facebook…

Relax. They probably have your colonoscopy photos on file too.

[Update…]  I’m queer…I can’t stop myself…

…I’m so ashamed…

This came across my Facebook stream tonight…

This is actually pretty typical. If you are shocked by this I assure you I am not. The imagery here comes from a right wing Catholic group but don’t be paying much attention to that because the sentiment isn’t specific to any one religion or religion in particular and it’s not about how they see us so much as how they want us to be seen. This is the real thing. Most of your gay and lesbian neighbors, except the very lucky maybe, have felt this breathing down our necks all our adult lives.

When other kids start having their first crushes and start discovering love and desire, this is what the gay ones find themselves facing. This is what haunts what should have been one of this life’s most magical times. It cuts you deep. Some people never manage to love wholeheartedly their entire lives because of it.

And others search endlessly for one who can. I was looking at my Facebook stream just a moment ago and this graphic flashed on my screen and for an instant I saw certain someone’s face and relived the conversation I had with him just one week ago…

I need to stay in my comfort zone…

I know. And I’m so sorry…so very sorry. It is what it is. You stayed inside because you had to and I got the hell out because I had to but we are all damaged by it in one way or another. Easter they say is when Jesus of Nazareth died for their sins. So why did we have to die for their sins too?

Yes, you got an F-Bomb out of me.  It was that “you think I deserve all this” crap.  I was so flustered I couldn’t muster the words I needed just then. Well it made you smile anyway.

Firstly, you have a pretty good job, considering what might otherwise be. Ask someone who works at some other chain restaurant how good they’ve got it. You work for a big company that gets lots of traffic into its eateries and if cheerful friendly hard working and handsome you isn’t getting way better than average tips I’m surprised.

And as for what I think you deserve…damn you…you know how I feel. You saw the look on my face. Don’t you Know?   I’ve always wished you the best, and all the happiness and contentment life could provide. Regardless of anything you could ever give back to me. It isn’t a transaction.

If you told me to go away I would still wish you that. Always.

…and I’d just keep tossing these little messages in a bottle out here, like I did for decades before I found you again. Except now you’ll know they’re here. It isn’t a transaction.

I respect your comfort zone. However, don’t be reducing anyone to “acquaintance” status that you ever did a mock strip tease for in the cafeteria during an SGA meeting where nobody else but me could see it. You’re better than that.  

From the minutes of the October 1971 SGA Meeting…

And yes, you’re Still really good at flustering me. But that was classic.

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?