Well at least now I know that some people get it.

In my current issue of The New Yorker, Paul Bloom, Critic At Large, writes about how A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness and That’s A Problem. How, you ask, could that possibly a problem given the hellish internal prison chronic loneliness is, let alone all the medical and health consequences associated with it. Well even before I cracked open the article, I had a few hunches, but I wanted to see what the Manhattan cultural gatekeepers thought the problem was too.

He gets it. At least, to a degree…

Loneliness, everyone agrees, is unpleasant—a little like a toothache of the soul. But in large doses it can be genuinely ruinous. A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Even the psychological pain can be hard to fathom, especially for those who have never truly been lonely. [emphasis mine] In Zoë Heller’s novel “Notes on a Scandal,” the narrator – Barbara Covett, a connoisseur of the condition – distinguishes between passing loneliness and something deeper. Most people, she observes, think back to a bad breakup and imagine that they understand what it means to be alone. But, she continues, “about the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. . . . I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing to the ground.”

If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky—and probably below a certain age.

And probably heterosexual. Or at least somewhere close to a Kinsey zero. Probably. I began feeling it when I was a young adult, some years after my first high school crush vanished from sight, and my second disastrous crush on a straight close friend blew up in my face, and I began to perceive that eternal long dark night of the soul that was ahead of me. I read a story back in the day about a gay man who turned 30 and still never had a boyfriend, and I swore I would never let that happen to me. I’m 71 now and I have still never had a boyfriend.

A bunch of near misses, sure. That’s probably a common story among gay guys of my barely post Stonewall generation. You start getting close to someone and next thing you know the righteous step in to break it up, because they need the broken pieces of our hearts to make their stepping stones to heaven out of. Or if not the righteous, then the contemptuous.

If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky…and probably below a certain age. And probably heterosexual. And probably not the sort of person who can be easily satisfied with a series of sexual one night stands. For these there were always the hookup spots, and more recently hookup apps like Grindr. Finding that heart and soul other is difficult under the best of conditions, and gay males do not enjoy the best of conditions, much improved though they are now. But there are those of us who just seemed to be condemned to the darkness right from the beginning.

You began to sense it every time you were last to be picked for a team game, or never invited to sit with the others at lunch. And like the kid born into poverty, you never really noticed how different your social life was from the others, because it was always thus. Normal was not getting invites. Normal was you had to ask if a someone wanted to go to the park with you, or a movie, or just hang out, not being asked. You weren’t a creep to everyone, you were that polite and friendly if scrawny kid with the puppy dog enthusiasm, a homely face, unkempt hair and clothes that were clean if not well fitting and fashionable, and you lived on the other side of the railroad tracks with your divorced mother, and you just assumed that everyone has to work at being included. But no…not everyone.

Then you reach a certain age and a need for something more than a friend to pal around with awakens within. But you’re need is different from the others around you. Different in a way that sets you apart not just from them, but it seems from the entire world around you.

From A Coming Out Story – What I Learned About Homosexuality. . . And Myself (Part 2)

And now, on top of being the kid who gets chosen last, now you’re afraid. But you’re as human as all the other kids, different only in the detail, and you’ve come of age and have to try. But you have to roll models to show you the way, only every dirty joke you’ve ever heard about homosexuals. And the thing is the objects of your affection are just as afraid as you are.

My first crush and I recognized something in each other. But it was 1971/72. 

A Coming Out Story – What I Learned About Homosexuality – Part Three – Aftermath

Mad Magazine, #145, Sept 1971, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”

I’m pretty sure it was after we made plans to go to Great Falls and stroll the towpath with our cameras, and I called to say I was coming over and one of his older brothers intercepted the phone call, that he got told to stay away from me. And being the obedient son, he put a distance between us, and that summer the family moved away, and I didn’t know until I saw the for sale sign on their empty house. 

Here’s something I found online. Whoever wrote this, gets it.

A psychotherapist specializing in military rehabilitation once stated in a lecture that the deepest truma isn’t loss.

Loss is a fact, Someone left, died, or vanished. There’s pain, but there’s also a definitive end point. When you’re not chosen, however, an unending void remains. It’s the crushing feeling that you were there, you tried, you invested, but ultimately you were deemed superfluous. Not the worse, just “not the one.”

This experience pulls more powerfully than betrayal, because there’s no explanation in being rejected. The other person simply decided they didn’t need you. Not because you did something wrong, but because you didn’t captivated them, inspire them, or align with them. And your mind begins to frantically search: Where was the mistake? Where was the moment you could have pleased them more, loved quieter, walked more patiently?

This is where the insidious feeling takes root: that something is wrong with you. Not the situation, not with the other person, but with you. You are insufficient.

This is the trauma of unchosenness. Not because love wasn’t present, but because the choice wasn’t about you. And in that place where you weren’t chosen, you begin to doubt your right to exist.

My situation is different, but only slightly. There was the added pressure of homophobia making it difficult to nearly impossible for gay guys of my generation to make a romantic connection. But I know other gay guys of my generation who were successful, who did find their other half and made a life together, despite the hostility of the world around them. So it wasn’t just homophobia that kept me from finding my other half. And so I find myself in this exact situation anyway. Where was the mistake? Where was the moment I could have made a difference, and had a different outcome? Could I have been more patient? Or more forward, less afraid? Every time I tried, I failed. What is wrong with me?

There is not a night I don’t go to bed thinking about it, and then imagining alternate universes where gay kids could find love, and I was one of them. But only in my dreams.

Why am I never the chosen one? Well…except for big guys who think I have a cute butt and just want to fuck me. I used to get “Nice ass” lots from them. And also the occasional heterosexual woman. I got a butt squeeze in Kayenta from (I assumed) a young Navajo woman who walked up behind me and then quickly walked away. I took it as a complement, probably because there was no sexual baggage in it for me, but from other guys it just feels off putting at best, probably because there is.

I’m what the kids these days call a demisexual. 

DEMISEXUAL demi·?sex·?u·?al
feeling sexual attraction towards another person only after establishing an emotional bond with that person.

Now, that’s not quite it with me. My low energy libito can readily feel sexually attracted to the right guy on sight. But to actually go through with it I need that emotional bond too or nothing is going to happen. Sex without any sort of love feels a little more than vaguely disgusting at best. There has to be romance. There has to be love.

Which is why despite chronic loneliness I’ve never availed myself of a sex worker, and I’m pretty sure an A.I. boyfriend won’t do it for me either.

Five years ago, the idea that a machine could be anyone’s confidant would have sounded outlandish, a science-fiction premise. These days, it’s a research topic.

You know what I wish were research topics? Homophobia. Or at any rate, how to get them to leave the rest of us alone. Maybe in a better world we teach gay kids the emotional and intellectual tools to stand up to bigots and see themselves as the perfect and whole human beings that they are. And…coupling. I have tried multiple gay dating services and I have to conclude they are mostly scams that prey on lonely people. There needs to be some science here. In the better world of my imagination, there would be not just sex-ed classes, but courses in flirting, dating, non-judgmental understanding of your own romantic and emotional needs, the better to know what sort of person is likely to match up with you. And how to let someone down graciously. That was a Big roadblock to getting myself in situations where I can meet random guys who might be compatible. Because I know how picky my libido is, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings because I know how it feels to be rejected. I know how it feels to be told, by other gay guys no less, that people who look like that want people who look like that.

A.I. companionship might be okay for some, but not for the likes of me. I have already walked through an adult life alone, in the most intimate sense. And despite what others have told me, I tried, I really tried. And those helpful others were really just telling me to go get laid and then I’ll feel better. But no. I was the unchosen one. Always.

I’m not anxious to leave this life just yet. But I won’t be entirely unhappy when death taps me on the shoulder either. I think my last thoughts might be something like Thank goodness I won’t be lonely anymore…

And no more trying to explain the trauma of how it is to live an entire adult life with that constant drip, drip, drip of heart loneliness, to people who think they understand, because maybe they were lonely and heart broken for a little while themselves, but really are light years away from getting it because they have never experienced that empty void of chronic loneliness for themselves.

It really lifts my heart to see so many stories out there now about gay kids finding that first love and it’s not tragic and the central premise of them isn’t that they’re tragically damned but that love is magical and wonderful, and worth whatever hardships the characters in these stories face to have and to hold. Films like Young Hearts, animated stories like In A Heartbeat and the different webtoons I’ve read like Tripping Over You, and this new one I learned about on Instagram called 3rd Wheel.

But there’s a downside to this for me. I “ended” A Coming Out Story abruptly because my heart issues made me wonder how much longer I had to work on it and I didn’t want to suddenly go belly up and leave the story in an uncompleted state. So I moved some episodes around so I could just tack one on at the end that I felt gave the story some degree of closure. But there was a lot more to that story and every time I go reading some new webtoon I see how incomplete my own story is and I want to fill out the rest of it.

And I have no energy for it. Along with having no energy for any of my creative arts.

There are short, one-off cartoons I’d like to do that I have all scripted out in my head but when I try to get them out of me it just…stops. Partly it’s my lack of confidence in my own abilities. And the longer I stay away from it, the rustier I get. Party it’s something like Approaching End Of Life Sadness and I never found that significant other and I’m just…alone. I sit down to work on A Coming Out Story especially, and it just drains all the interest out of me. But there was so much more to tell.

I posted the other day about how painful it is to try and revisit that past where AIDS was killing so many of us, and the hate was thrown at us from every direction. It’s hard to remember all those faces. It’s hard to remember all the static you had to live in the middle of every day. But for some of us every failure to connect romantically is another hard thing to look back on. Not even my own awkwardness about it all, but the fact of the times I was living in, and trying to connect while the world around me was making sure I could not because what I needed, what young gay guys like me needed, was a disgusting sin. So many close calls in my life that others had to put a stop to in the name of decency and morality. I blog about some of them every Valentine’s Day.

And so I sit down at the drafting table, or in my darkroom, and I just feel empty, and I can’t get it out. And I see all this wonderful storytelling out there and it lifts me up. But I’m still empty inside, and I am not a natural talent at the drafting table. The level of concentration I have to maintain when I draw or paint is even more than when I am coding. Lots Lots Lots more. I hardly touch my cameras anymore. I have undeveloped film piling up. I have a tank with rolls I ran through the Hasselblad I loaded up two weeks ago and still haven’t made some chemistry to develop so those rolls have just been sitting there in the tank. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to manage doing art again.

Cardiologist appointment tomorrow.

I have a postcard I sent to mom long ago, that I keep on one of my bookshelves with a bunch of odds and ends from passages of my life. Oh, and also some books. This particular postcard was one I found among her things after she passed away. Every now and then I take it off the shelf to read once more.

I would have been dating, or thought I was dating, strike three, “K” who was living on Hilton Head at the time. I would have been making a good living as a contract software developer renting a very nice garden apartment in Cockeysville, Maryland.

It was a time before affordable cell phones and the end of long distance charges. He and I would chat for hours on our land lines. The new cordless telephones were a blessing for us. We could chat together while going about our household chores as if we were together. This was a time when long distance rates still applied, so if he called me the plan was, since I was making good money and he wasn’t, that we’d hang up and I would call him and take the charge. We’d talk for so long the batteries in our phones would give out and we’d have to restart the conversation on the corded phones for a bit. I’d make plans to go visit him in Hilton Head when I was between contracts, or could take a long weekend. His place in Hilton Head was less than a day’s drive down I-95 so it was easy to spend time together with him. I was in love…again. This time, I thought, it’s really happening. I have a boyfriend.

But it was more a thing in my own mind than his. At some point I started making plans to move down there to be with him…I’d talked with a recruiting agent with the firm I contracted for, who told me there were jobs down there to be had, though mostly in North, not South Carolina. But it was shortly after that K dumped me for another guy who lived in Massachusetts he’d been chatting with on AOL. That guy eventually moved down there and they began living together. He told me later that he decided to call it off when he heard me talking about moving down there.

Anyway…this is a postcard I sent to mom during one of my visits to K. Mom knew…but we had a don’t ask don’t tell agreement she enforced almost right up to the day she died. So it’s my sad little way in my scrawly handwriting of trying to tell her that her boy is gay and he’s in love with another guy.

She liked K. He was a good Baptist boy from our church. I like to think she’d have reconciled herself to it if it was him. Anyway, she kept that postcard. Now I have it. Every now and then I look at it and remember K and I strolling the beach late at night when nobody could see us holding hands and looking up at the stars.

The first thing to know is I am not calling out any one heterosexual person in particular in this post. Especially those I know personally. Mostly. You’re all good people. Mostly. This isn’t about you. Mostly

And the pulpit I’m thumping here probably only really applies to my own generation, and maybe a couple nearby ones. It’s not the 1950s/60s/70s/80s anymore. If you read the social media posts about this or that fictional same sex couple, or same sex celebrity couple, what you see is very heartwarming…

Fan art of Will Solice and Nico di Angelo, characters from
Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians

There is a lot of acceptance and friendship waiting for us out there now. The usual bellyaching by the usual suspects too of course…but anyway…

So…with that out of the way…

Long, long ago, in a Facebook far, far away, a straight friend I’d known since my teenage years finally signed up and friended me. I’d met him at a Jesus kids coffee hangout in the basement of the Rockville Baptist church mom and I used to go to. Back in the 70s, when coming out to Anyone was a risky business regardless of how safe you thought they were, he was one of the very few I felt safe coming out to. He was straight, but seemingly comfortable with the fact of my homosexuality. He just gave off that I’m cool about it vibe.

But it was an illusion. He was comfortable with me as long as he didn’t have to see or hear evidence of my sexual orientation. Which was easy because I had no love life. There was nothing for me to talk about. Much. But it was when he would talk about his current girlfriend, and I would try to talk about my own struggles trying and failing to find a boyfriend, that his discomfort would become apparent.

Instead of pressing it, I wrote it off as a learning experience for him, and I thought that eventually he’d figure it all out. After all, I was taught the same horrible myths, lies, and superstitions about homosexuals he was, that everyone in my generation was, and I reckoned he just needed some time to work through how wrong all of that was, because I was living evidence of how wrong all that was. Not that I was this straight acting lumberjack kind of guy…

I was a little art and techno geek. But we come in all kinds of flavors. I figured he’d eventually get that. But…no.

Before social media we hung out together lots. Then, shortly after he friended me on Facebook, he defriended me. When I asked him why he said he didn’t want to see any of that “gay stuff” on his Facebook page. I was sad and disappointed, but by then not completely surprised.

Nominally I probably appear to be pretty low key about my sexual orientation. Put it down to the times I grew up and came of age in, and also being raised in a Baptist household. Perhaps I should have been more…FABULOUS. But I am geek tribe gay, not fabulous peacock tribe. And that comes with some unexpected difficulties beyond knowing you will never be one of the cool kids and your clothes will never fit quite right.

I’ve been documenting in cartoon form my own coming out story. There’s a point in the story I Still haven’t got to yet, where I finally figure, rightly, that it changed nearly nothing, except now I better understood why I had no interest in dating girls. In retrospect, had I known guys could fall in love with other guys and it was okay, I would have been all about it. In fact it was crushing hard on a classmate that made me realize how it was with me. But in 1971/72 what we got was a torrent of contempt, loathing and outright hate thrown at us from all directions. That, and the horrible sex ed class I’d had in 9th grade ,made me believe I couldn’t possibly be One Of Those Queers. So when it hit me it came at me all of a sudden. I fell in love and it was wonderful. But thinking about it I realized it didn’t really change anything about me. Still a long haired awkward art/techno geek. And that’s okay.

So from that point on I just let the fact of my sexual orientation rest loosely on my shoulders. What I eventually came to understand was that mindset confused some of the people around me. I didn’t “act gay”. I found that entire gay acting/straight acting concept offensive. We are not the stereotypes we are often imagined to be, and regardless studies have shown that given enough time people will figure you out no matter how “straight acting” you are or make yourself. In one of those studies volunteers were shown photos of the faces of a bunch of men and asked to identify the homosexuals. The volunteers were accurate much beyond random chance.

It shows. Somehow. The people you think you’re hiding that part of yourself from either already know, or at least will figure it out pretty quickly. So just be yourself…however fabulous or unfabulous that might be.

I recall a job interview I had once that I thought was going well until I saw a sudden change of expression in the HR person’s face. It was something that I’d become familiar with by then, that sudden realization that the person they were talking to was a homosexual. And at that point I knew I wasn’t getting the job. But given that reaction it was for the best.

The only thing closeting yourself accomplishes is a kind of internal self destruction. I’ve seen it. I’ve sworn I’d never let it happen to me. But when you raise a gay boy in a Baptist household they tend to get a bit…well…reserved about that whole dating and mating thing. It just comes with the territory. And some people in my life misinterpret that.

Besides the Baptist reticence about sex (y’all know that old joke about why Baptists don’t dance…right?), the fact was I never had a love life to be loud and proud about anyway. If I’d had a boyfriend Everyone would have seen just how gay Bruce is…all the open declarations of love, all the PDAs, the unambiguous acknowledgment of a sexual relationship, the silly couples t-shirts (I love you / I know).

Oh there were the occasional political fashion statements…a lambda necklace here, a rainbow t-shirt there. For a few decades I did political cartoons on the subject of gay civil rights, but that was for a local gay community newspaper which none of my straight friends ever read…because why would they? Among them I was always open about my political beliefs, which included a rock solid belief in gay equality. But about my own sex life I said very little, because there was very little to say apart from being lonely, and gay or straight Nobody wants to hear you talk about being lonely.

I remember the sister of a friend telling me once, approvingly no less, that I was a “discreet homosexual.” I told her I’m single and it’s very easy to be discreet about your love life when you don’t have one. But I’m pretty sure that went right over her head.

So I wasn’t hiding that part of me, and I wasn’t trying to be discreet. But all the same a number of straight friends from back in the day, and one or two classmates I’d had since I was a teenage boy, suddenly became shocked, shocked, at what a militant homosexual I really am, when they read my blog or my social media posts.

What…didn’t you Know?

My bad I guess.

Here’s something I’ve said many times:

A militant homosexual is a homosexual who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual. A militant homosexual activist is a homosexual who acts like they don’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual.

That’s it. That is all there is to it. You don’t have to march. You don’t have to wave your pride flag. You don’t have to be loud and proud. You just need to have that There Is Nothing Wrong With Me mindset. Because with that comes a willingness to stand up for yourself…the same as anyone else would.

Let me repeat that: The Same As Anyone Else Would.

That’s all it takes. Just stand up for yourself and suddenly you are a militant homosexual.

In retrospect, the problem was that apart from my blog, which nobody reads (Hi…thanks for reading my blog btw!), and my artwork, which nobody sees…

…nobody ever really had to see that side of me because I had no boyfriend and no love life. It was as if…okay Bruce is gay, but only theoretically so I don’t really have to know it for a fact.

And then they catch a glimpse of it…maybe I’m gawking at some beautiful sexy guy that walks past, maybe it’s a casual remark correcting someone about some myth about gay male sexuality, or they read something I posted online, and suddenly it’s OMG Bruce Really Is Gay…and I get static. Which I don’t think I deserve, but in a way maybe I had it coming. Maybe I should have been louder about it all the time. But I’m not good at faking a loud personality. I’m not stage, I’m stage crew.

I like to think I have good manners. I might steal some glances at cute guys who happen by but I won’t be rude about it, even among other gay friends, although when among them I might point and raise a toast (something I’d probably also do if I was among heterosexual women). In a room full of males traditionally regarded as handsome I might not even glance at any of them, because my libido is so damn picky. But glance I will if I see a beautiful sexy guy and then it’s obvious. Like my jaw dropping obvious. That’s just how it hits me.

I remember a moment years ago…I was working as a mailrooom clerk for a data processing firm, and that afternoon we were all having a celebratory lunch at a nice restaurant. I was seated across from my supervisor and his deputy. A Very Cute waiter walked by and turned my head. When I turned it back to the table I caught the tail end of this short conversation…

Deputy: “What’s one step beyond a tendency?”

Supervisor: “I don’t know…actually being one?”

Then they see me looking back at them and they shut up. The very next day I got laid off.

Because I have never really had a love life, plus having that very picky libido, it probably made it a bit too easy for some of my straight friends and acquaintances to ignore the fact of my sexual orientation. Many times I have dug in my heels and been out with it when one of those sudden moments of truth hit me in the face. I’m intensely proud of those moments too. But apart from that I’m pretty low key I reckon.

So if you are new to my circle it may not seem obvious, but sooner or later you will have to deal with it. And then I get to see How you deal with it. What I’m finding is, generally, younger people deal with it very well, and that is very gratifying. There is hope for this poor angry world after all.

So that straight friend who I’d known since my teenage years that I met at a Jesus kids coffee hangout back in the 70s, called me the other week to ask about my maybe doing some video photography work for him. Then he asked if I’d seen the cat video he posted here on Facebook. So I went to look but he’d set it to friends only. I had to remind him that he defriended me and I couldn’t look at it.

So he messaged it to me. But didn’t change his mind about friending me again.

I’m fine with people I used to know keeping me at arm’s length as long as they’re fine with my keeping them at arm’s length too. I told him I was okay with doing some casual video photography work for him, largely because my photographic eye has been tightly closed since the trip to California, and I thought maybe that would pry it open a bit. But I never heard back. I’m okay with that too.

They say when someone tells you who they are, believe them. But also, when they tell you how close they’re willing to be, to the person you actually are, eventually you have to let them be that. The mistake I think a lot of us make is we keep reaching out long after it’s obviously pointless. Looking back on it, for decades while I thought I was teaching some of them that things they learned about homosexuals were almost all wrong, they probably thought they were teaching me to be discreet.

But I’m 70 years old now, and I’m tired of talking to brick walls.

If you get comfortable enough with someone that you were willing to let them into your heart, and they either bail when they see what’s in there, or just start keeping you at arm’s length, or Worse…being a friend only so long as you keep yourself closeted…just let them go.

Grieve about it if you need to. Then get on with your life. Your authentic life. The life you’ve already taken a lot of risks to live honestly.

Many years ago a girl that a friend of mine was dating told me, approvingly, that I was a discreet homosexual. I replied that I was single and it is easy to be discrete about your love life when you don’t have one.

I blogged about my relationship with that family previously, and about when I finally realized that all the time I thought I was teaching them that gay guys were just another thread in the American quilt, and that liberty and justice for all thing applies to us too, they thought they were encouraging me to stifle myself and be discreet. It’s easier for some heterosexuals (not all) to accept a gay friend or family member provided they don’t have to ever see any specific evidence of their sexual orientation. Such as a boyfriend. Or the way a beautiful guy can jerk your eyes around and make you look, stunned. As long as they don’t have to see that, they’re fine with you.

One of my straight friends, from way, Way back, friended me on Facebook, and then promptly de-friended me. When I asked why he said he didn’t want all that gay stuff I was writing about on his Facebook page. Of course I wasn’t putting it on his page, but mine. The thing was that he saw it, because he’d friended me which meant he could see all the posts I marked as friends only, and he didn’t want to. 

It was like that whenever we spent time together. He could talk about his love life, but when I talked about mine, or rather my struggle just to simply have one, he would change the subject. I was okay for me to be his gay friend, so long as I wasn’t…you know…gay. 

Especially when all you can see about your LGBT neighbors in this life, is sex.

It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance. -Vito Russo

It’s on this website, in my artwork and on this blog, that you really see the shameless homosexual that I am. Which is not to say I am given to a lot of overt displays of sexuality here. My art gallery is full of sexy guys, but there is no pornography, which I consider just pushing buttons. I am not given to graphic descriptions of sex, even in my fiction. But there is no doubt that I like beautiful guys and that that same sex couples in my fiction are lovers. What makes me shameless is I really don’t think there is anything wrong with being homosexual. I am fine with this. I am not ashamed. 

Because once upon a time I fell in love with a classmate, a stunningly beautiful guy, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve written before it really was like something out of a Disney movie. I walked with a lighter step, the birds sang a little more sweetly, the skies were a little more blue, the stars shined a little more brightly. I was twitterpated. It was wonderful. There is no reason for me to be ashamed of that.

I can see how your average heterosexual might have some trouble grokking this. Sex is a basic drive inside of us, older than the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone us, and our libidos are what they are. It either turns you on, or it turns you off. Fine. I get that. But you don’t have to obsess about the sex I might be having to appreciate that apart from that detail of sexual orientation my desires are not that different from anyone else’s. 

All my life I have searched for that significant other, to have and hold, to share a life together, body and soul. And all my life I keep getting told that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with being homosexual, and having homosexual sex. But being reduced to a sex drive you can miss how the sight of a beautiful guy arouses more than my libido, but also every higher emotion of wonder and joy within me, that make life worth living. That’s the part that keeps getting missed when all you can see about your LGBT neighbors is the sex you think they’re having.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 

That sonnet speaks to something deep within us, gay and straight alike. 

I never found that significant other. I’m 70 years old now and looking back at having walked my entire adult life basically single and alone in my heart. I blame the world I came of age in, that kept telling me and everyone else that homosexuals don’t love they just have sex. In a better world I might have found someone to have and hold. A nice guy I might have met at a church social or in high school or at some social event for the gay kids arranged by caring adults. Someone I could have brought home to mom and told her this is my boyfriend and she’d have made a place at the table for him. Someone I could have made a life together with, body and soul.

So if you ever see me gawking at some drop dead beautiful guy, just let me have my moment. Beautiful guys are still a good reason to keep on living, and I’m probably not just drinking in his beauty, but also seeing what might have been if only the gay kid I once was had lived in a better world.

I completely forgot that today is Christmas Eve. I reckon that comes with being solitary and retired.

I could have sworn it was middle of next week. So the plan today was to buy a few groceries this morning and sit back and wait the holiday traffic out. But my street is pretty empty of parked cars and it’s not a workday for most of the folks here I’m sure. Plus, the entire neighborhood actually pretty quiet.

I have this horrible intuition that the main roads and jammed with last minute shoppers, and the stores are being mobbed, and I am not going anywhere until after Christmas.

Spending Christmas as I usually do being a gay guy who has failed miserably at love, and because the family I’m closest to now is on the other coast, by myself. I’ll give myself a nice Christmas dinner at home and try not to drink too much.