“The gay world then was somewhat brutalized–it was enormously sexualized. New York was absolutely wild. People were just [having sex] all over the place, literally. But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. I did not see a society that was progressing. It was extremely commercial; people were making a lot of money out of it. It was in its way not dissimilar, I thought, to what Germany was like in the Weimar era.”
-Martin Sherman, Playwright, author of “Bent”

“But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible.”

Larry Kramer wrote a novel about that period in NYC, titled Faggots. It got a lot of static but he had a point, distilled down to this one line toward the novel’s end: “The fucking we’re getting is not worth the fucking we’re getting.”

Had you come of age back then, you could understand why the freedom to be our sexual selves was so important. The sodomy laws practically defined us as criminals, sexual deviants, perverts, queers, that needed to be isolated from the rest of society, for the good of society. If many of us fixated on sex it was because that’s what we were told was all that was all there was to us. But there was a necessary element of Yes We Are defiance to it. I can appreciate that too. Progress, as George Bernard Shaw once said, is made by the unreasonable man. Also the unreasonable woman.

But it was never just about sex. We needed wholeness. Getting the sodomy laws off our backs was a big fight, but not the only one. There was still the rest of it. Making that space for our sexual lives was important, but also the space for our love lives; Our whole lives. We couldn’t be neighbors so long as we were criminals. We couldn’t be people so long as we were sodomites.

I reckon I don’t really need to hide who it is I’m talking about in these remembrances anymore. He doesn’t read my blog (Hi!) and his comfort zone turned into the Berlin Wall a decade ago anyway. But I get these memories posts on Facebook now and then that remind me that it was real…

Some days I visit he’s being a jerk and doesn’t want to talk to me. Others, like last night, he’s all warm smiles and cheerful eyes and just can’t stop talking and we stay long past park closing time and I’m walking on air all the way back to my room. But then it’s always why can’t we spend some time together outside the park and his comfort zone won’t allow it.

So either way I have to struggle to get my vacation started back up again. If he’s grouchy then I’m miserable and just want to go home. I’ve called vacations off early when it’s been that. If he’s full of sunshine and smiles then I feel like I’ve hit the high point of my trip and why bother staying. There’s that back to the reality of things after the visit let-down to climb back out of somehow. I have to remind myself I need the break regardless.

This morning I’ll hit the grocery store for some perishables I couldn’t bring down with me, and more ice tea, and maybe something from the liquor store so I’m not always paying Disney prices for alcohol. Then spend the rest of the week chilling out, maybe working some more on A Coming Out Story (I brought my drawing things). But I’m in a state now I really have no words for, or at any rate words I’m willing to speak. He said something to me that lifted me out of myself in a way only someone who really gets you can. And it took a load off my psyche certain other gay someone’s I know weighed me down with for years.

It was all about how I don’t interact well with people. Too shy, too self absorbed, blah, blah, blah, your photography has no people in it, blah, blah, blah… Biergarten is “Octoberfest” seating, which means you get seated at a table with other random guests and you’re expected to talk and share a good time together. This time I was seated with a group that seemed really stand-offish. They just gave off chilly vibes. But after a while I got them talking about where they’re from and what they do, and of course when they found out I work at Space Telescope and on Hubble and James Webb they got all interested in that. And by the end of the night we were all chatting happily.

And after they left he and I were chatting and he noticed too how chilly that group was initially. He’s worked this line of business for so long now he can probably read a table the second he walks up to it. Then he said he’d always seen me open people up and that I was good at it and that I was always getting everyone talking and having a good time no matter how chilly the table seemed at first.

Well…yeah… One thing is you always know you’re with other Disney people here…so that’s something. It’s not like you’re in some random bar with bad mood people. We’re all Disney people here. And that Disney kid just comes out of me here. It’s a kind of freedom to be that kid I once was I never really appreciated I was missing before I started coming here. But I’m not the hopelessly detached single certain other people somehow managed to convince me I am either. I’m not that…so how did I get to thinking of myself like that? He just pulled that out of me with a few words and the look on his face when he said it.

He does that. It’s when someone shows you things about yourself you didn’t know, but should have known, that makes it serious. And…it’s been like that since we were teenagers. When he’s not in a touchy mood, it’s still like that.

But we never got the chance other kids did. And now he has his comfort zone, and I need to get on with my vacation. Somehow.

And speaking of those certain other gay someones…

Hi! I’ll be 73 in a few weeks, just a couple months after I got my Parkinson’s diagnosis. The search for someone to love and be loved by is in my rearview mirror now. I will die having been single all my adult life. You could have made a difference in one gay guy’s life. And…actually…you did! You and every other homophobic nutcase. Be proud!

This came across my Facebook stream yesterday. Another chapter in the old heartbreaking story of what bigotry has done to our lives…

Paul Bettany’s father came out at 63, fell in love with a man, and spent 20 happy years with him. Then his partner died – and what happened next is heartbreaking.

While most people know him as Vision, far fewer know about the story that shaped him. After his father Thane’s partner Andy Clark died in 2015, the elder Bettany – in his 80s and a lifelong Catholic – went back into the closet.

He told people it had all been “a big misunderstanding” because he was “concerned about getting past Peter through the pearly gates.”

Paul has spoken openly about how devastating that was to witness. “He was unable to mourn the person who I think was the love of his life,” he said.

It’s part of what drew Paul to star in “Uncle Frank”, playing a closeted gay professor – his very first film role had been in an adaptation of the gay play “Bent”.

“I want everybody to just live authentically as the person they are,” Paul has said. “However hard that is, it’s absolutely better than pretending to be something other than you are.”

I have witnessed people my age and younger going back into the closet after a period of outedness rather than stand up to the pressures of family, religion or career. I’ve stood up to those same pressures and I know it can be frightening and painful, but the alternative is, as C.S. Lewis said in a different context, damnation.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be 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 casket – 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, “The Four Loves”.

…particularly, the girls.

Memories. Something that delights me no end is being able to share my photography with my classmates at reunions and online. Because my camera was a constant companion at school, I have tons of photographs of daily life at Woodward back in ’70-’72. It’s fun to reminisce with my classmates over them. But now and then I’ve had some unpleasant surprises.

I could be a clueless little dweeb at times. Probably most of the time at that age, but even now at age 72. I don’t think I was stupid, but it really keeps surprising me how much of what was going on around me back then kept going right past me or right over my head. Put it down to being a gay boy, plus being raised by a single divorced Baptist woman. Some subjects you just didn’t get anywhere near in that sort of household. Especially sex.

A Coming Out Story – Episode 12, “Dinner Table Danger Zone”

Now we’re all grown up, and I’ll be happily reviewing some of my Woodward photos with a classmate, and they’ll off-handedly tell me what was going on behind the scenes in this or that photo…and it throws me for a loop. Who was dating who. Who had sex with who. What? WhAT??? Laugh if you like, but I just assumed none of us were really having sex at our age, that it was just a lot of talk. I never took it seriously. I was clueless. Also gay. And a Baptist. So if there were signals a straight kid would have picked up on, little gay me was oblivious to them.

And to a lot more.

So…before one past reunion…not the most recent one… I’m arranging some of my photos with a couple of my female classmates here in the art room at Casa del Garrett. We’re selecting photos for a photo CD we want to sell to the classmates to support the costs of the reunion. We were looking at some photography I did of some of the teachers and students in the Activity Clubs for the yearbook, when I start hearing from them about which teachers in my photos were having sex with which of the other girls in my photos.

I was stunned. But it wasn’t just baseless gossip I was hearing then, because later on one of the teachers they were pointing to in my photographs was arrested and jailed for it. I never heard if the other one they kept pointing out in my photography ever did or not.

And even more than the accusations I was hearing, the casual offhanded way they told me about it stunned me even more; like it was some sort of common knowledge, among the girls back then. Because back then, among themselves, the girls talked to each about things they’d never feel comfortable talking to the boys about. I think in that moment they were comfortable talking about it to me because by then I was out to all my classmates. I don’t think they would have said anything to me about it if I was straight.

And I was stunned listening to all that. And even more…at the offhanded way they were telling me, as they looked at my photos of a couple of our teachers, the one who later got arrested and the one that, to my knowledge did not, surrounded by the other kids in one of the Activity Clubs, and they’re pointing and telling me He had sex with that girl…and that one…and that one…

Why am I bringing this up now? Oh…no particular reason…

A true flag is not something you can really design. A true flag is torn from the soul of the people. A flag is something that everyone owns, and that’s why they work. -Glibert Baker, creator of the rainbow Pride flag

All the hate I was seeing this morning in the news about Pride at the last Giant’s game isn’t helping my mood or my energy levels, which are pathetic as a baseline now anyway.

I’ve been in this struggle since I came out to myself in the early 1970s, and I’m practically a connoisseur of all the shifty, tactically evasive little ways hatemongers spit in our faces and excuse themselves as only having an opinion, or just following the bible, or citing some junk science from the likes of Paul Cameron. This year they, or more likely some well paid right wing propaganda mill, came up with a couple new ones.

Red state governors and local mayors are proclaiming Faith And Family month as a pushback to Pride. But those four Giants pitchers were showcasing another one that’ll probably spread around. On their Pride event caps, which they could have chosen not to wear, they scrawled Genesis 9:12-16. It’s trending on Google search now…for some reason…so you can easily look it up.

It’s a neat trick. Instead of throwing Leviticus or Paul at us, they’re simply quoting the only passage in the bible where the rainbow is mentioned. This allows them to deflect accusations of being motivated by prejudice because the verses say nothing about homosexuality directly. You can’t have your rainbow because it belongs to God.

One of the pitchers, Landon Roupp said of writing the inscription on the Pride event cap that “…the rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant to us, and us as believers to stand firm in that. … There’s no hate at all. It’s just what I stand for and what I stand in.”

Swell. But context is everything and when you wave the bible at your LGBT fans during a Pride event you might as well be waving Leviticus at us too because it amounts to the same incitement of religious passions that have justified killing us, throwing us in prison, torturing us with quack cures, wreaking our lives in every way possible so that Jesus will know you love him. You might think you’re not being hateful because you’re not waving Fred Phelps signs at the fans, but all you’re really being is a coward about it. LGBT fans came to the game that day hoping to feel welcomed and appreciated and you just could not stop yourself from spitting in their faces.

Arne Johnson, of the Rainbow Families Action, said afterward, “One night a year, we asked for the players to cheer for our children, and they couldn’t even manage that.”

They say not to read the comments, but I often do just to find users to block. But this time the comments on all three articles I read, including one on a gay sports page, were thick with vitriol against the LGBT fans. It was so intense I was wondering which right wing pages here were linking to the stories for rage bait. But it could just as easily have been Facebook’s own algorithms stirring up trouble because that translates to engagement.

Andy Woodard
The players finally found the balls to stand up for what is right

Roger Alan Cotton
Exactly why are people and the government expected to celebrate and defer to the Alphabet Community?

Ray Hegarty
The demons are twisting in pain at the site of a Bible verse

Anthony C Hargreaves
Fag pride is garbage dog shit trash. They have no protein anything but perversion and destruction of anything they don’t agree with but then accuse others of doing that instead. Mental broken people should be put away or down. Society doesn’t allow rabid animals so why do we allow these ones ?

Tom Marsh
Yea. Wouldn’t want to mar your Satanic celebration!

It’s left me profoundly depressed, which leads to more overall fatigue, and no heart left in me to create anything, and it’s a vicious circle. I just want to lay in bed all day. For every story I read about Pride, I see like a half dozen or more about how much people hate us and want us to be gone. And they’ve done it before.

[Update…] I added a few from the comments to one of those news stories, to give you a flavor of how it is in there. The only thing surprising about it to me is the torrent of it, which leads me to think some Facebook hate page(s) were directing traffic to those posts, or that, as I say above, Facebook’s algorithm was doing it automatically because rage translates to engagement. That said, how many of those are simply right wing bots is hard to know for sure, but a lot of them likely are.

Bill Browning on Facebook posted this image about how republicans will enact a synthetic panic over gender affirming care for trans kids, but are just fine with actual gender reassignment surgery on intersex babies…

Intersex people are born with reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, or hormones that don’t fit standard definitions of male or female. It happens in about 1.7 percent of births. That’s more common than being a natural redhead. Beginning in the mid-20th century, doctors started performing surgeries on intersex infants to make their genitals appear more “normal,” driven by the view that without surgery, these children would not be able to have a normal marriage or sex life. Doctors cut first and asked questions never.

The intellectual foundation came from a psychologist named John Money. His theory was simple and wrong: gender identity was malleable, and surgeons could assign intersex newborns to whichever sex the doctors preferred. That theory justified thousands of surgeries on children who never asked for them. His star patient was David Reimer, a boy raised as a girl without his knowledge or consent. Money published the case as a success. He was lying. Reimer struggled his entire childhood, reverted to living as a male when he finally learned the truth, and later died by suicide.

The medical establishment believed Money’s lies for decades.

He raises a good point, but I have another. I watched a documentary about the boy mentioned there, David Reimer, who had this gender reassignment surgery after a botched circumcision, and was raised as a girl. David was not born intersex, he was surgically made female because at that time it was easier to do than reconstruct his damaged penis. His parents then took him to Money because Money believed gender identity was malleable and that David could be successfully raised as a girl. I saw an interview with David’s parents after David was told the truth about what happened to him (read the Wikipedia article…it’s just horrific), and during that interview they made one of those little aside comments where you see a deeper truth.

They said they had a lot of difficulty when David was very young, getting him to stop trying to pee standing up.

And there it is. Money was wrong. Tragically, horribly, categorically, wrong. Gender identity is not malleable. But that is not to say it always agrees with the body.

That casual aside is one of those things I count as a personal proof that transsexualism is a real thing, because that wasn’t the boy’s body telling him to do that, it was his brain. He had gender reassignment surgery, had been told all his life up to that point that he was a girl, but he still had that male brain. And it was telling him something about his body, despite the gender reassignment surgery he’d had, but didn’t know about then.

And if you can admit that the brain has anything at all to do with how gender is perceived, that it’s not simply a matter of the body you were born into, or made into, then I think in all intellectual honesty you have to also admit that there can be times when a child is born with a mostly male body, but a mostly female brain. There’s gender dysphoria.

It’s a real thing. I have a story I should tell on this blog someday about the time I met a trans man at a gay bar and how that opened my eyes.

Via Fred Clark’s Slacktivist blog…which you should read regularly.

Conversion therapy is soul-crushing — and it doesn’t work

None of the hundreds of people I met in conversion therapy received the miracle we’d been promised. In fact, it has been discredited by every major medical and mental health organization as ineffective and harmful. -by Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez, April 2, 2026

You should go read Timothy’s post. He is a survivor of conversion therapy. He is a witness.

I would only respectfully submit that the right wing members of the Robert’s Court that struck down Colorado’s conversion therapy ban understand what it does completely. If anyone misunderstands it that would be the ersatz liberal members of the court, who seem to think healthcare, at least when it comes to LGBT Americans, should maintain a neutral stance between medicine and poison, and really is poison so bad as long as the patient can also choose medicine if they want? The conservatives however knew exactly what they were doing and the harm conversion therapy does. We have to be carefully taught to hate ourselves, to the point that self hate leads to dangerously harmful behaviors, even to the point some non-trivial percentage of us kill ourselves. Otherwise where will they get the broken pieces of our hearts to build their stepping stones to heaven with? As is said in my trade, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

But this is good that these stories are once again being told. It was the authentic voices of people, teens and adults, who had been through this, voluntarily and by force, that these laws were passed in the first place and the first wave of these outfits started closing their doors. Now we will have to fight these battles all over again but that’s the story of the ages. Love completes us, but hate is never satisfied.

I came of age before the Internet was opened to public commercial use, before the advent of amature computer bulletin boards, before the first home personal computers. So in my coming of age years I never had Grindr or anything like it.

All I had to navigate my way through the maze of my own teenage emotions to find love in a world that was screaming hate at me from every direction, when it wasn’t expressing a kind of rancid pity, was the knowledge given to me by that first teenage crush that there was nothing more wonderful than falling in love, and there was nothing wrong with me. I’m in love. I’m gay. It’s wonderful. But I flailed my way through my first teenage crush like someone who doesn’t know how to swim trying to figure out the trick while in the middle of drowning. Because the first thing you know when you know about yourself is you have to hide.

So then I’m a position of trying to say something to my crush from inside my closet, terrified that if I say anything to him next thing is it gets all over the school. Which is bad enough, but then it gets back to mom and she breaks into tears and starts yelling at me, and I get dragged to church to pray it away every day of my life until I turn 21 and have to leave the house. If I don’t get thrown out first. I have never doubted that mom loved me. But the stigma back then was something I reckon you had to be there to experience and really appreciate. For years after grade school, whenever I tried to nudge the conversation some place where I’d feel comfortable coming out to her, the icy glare I got back would scare me to my bones. I’ve often wondered if there had been something like Love In Action or Exodus Ministries whether mom would have tossed me into one of those if she found out when I was an age I could not refuse.

One day after I graduated I discovered my crush’s family had left the country with him and I fell into a dangerously deep despondency, made all the worse for my self perceived cowardice in not telling him how I felt. Because I wasn’t brave enough to tell him that meant I wasn’t worthy of him. Maybe I wasn’t worthy of any love. I walked to one of my favorite bridges where I would watch the trains go by, and decided I would fall off in front of one. Maybe they’d think it was an accident. But while I was waiting I began thinking about what doing that would do to the engineer and I pulled back. The lesson I learned was if you can wait it out the urge to kill yourself will eventually go away. It has been helpful.

In high school I knew of one gay bar in DC, The Georgetown Bar & Grill, which was supposedly located somewhere on Wisconsin Avenue close to M street. It was spoken of like a dirty joke among the other kids and I would have died rather than be seen anywhere near it. I’ve told the story elsewhere about how I found I could get my gay newspapers and magazines in a seedy adult bookstore in Wheaton that sold hard core pornography. That was the world young gay hearts were confined to back in the 1970s, and for decades after. In some parts of this country that’s still where we’re supposed to stay.

Eventually, after I got my driver’s license I found my way to a gay bookstore in downtown Washington DC; Lambda Rising, where I discovered a world of gay literature and history that was much Much bigger than I’d ever hoped. It was as if a parallel universe had opened up to me, and in a way it was. There was a rich and deep history I’d never known or had a chance to explore in grade school. There were books that spoke to the honor and dignity of the love of same sex couples and I devoured those. The books of Mary Renault stand out for me in that period of my life. The books I found there gave me hope.

I attended my first Pride block party in front of what used to be the Earthworks comic book store and headshop, around the corner from where Lambda Rising had moved. I let myself get picked up by a cute guy watching the party with me on the porch of Earthworks, only to discover that being attracted to someone’s looks wasn’t nearly enough to make me ready for having sex with them. Took me some decades more before I began to understand that I am a demisexual: someone who experiences sexual attraction only after forming a strong emotional bond with someone. I still love to look at and draw beautiful sexy guys, but for it to go any further than that there needs to be at least a crush.

When Personal Computers became a thing I bought a Commodore C64 and the modem for it and discovered the world of computer bulletin boards. I found my way into a gay FidoNet echo board and suddenly the whole gay world opened to me and I didn’t have to go into a bar anymore to find it. Eventually that ability to socialize with others like me motivated me to dive into computers and programming, and I built an IBM PC compatible from parts I got at a HAM Fest at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. This would eventually lead me to a career as a computer programmer, and to a job at Space Telescope Science Institute. I found my way to G.L.I.B., The Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS, and I was able to socialize on and offline with the other members.

That was my first experience with the idea of online gay dating which looked attractive because it meant I could try to find a boyfriend someplace other than a hook-up bar. It was a time before graphic user interfaces so we got to know each other through posting messages on the BBS echo boards, by private email, and the occasional meetup at a local gay or lesbian bar. I had high hopes but I got nowhere. Two of the members that I’d fancied ended up dating each other instead, and one of them, a guy I’d managed to coax out a couple times to let my camera, if not me, give him some love, apologised profusely about it which only left me thinking it was just as well he’d pushed me away. Many years later at a Pride Fair I ran across him manning one of the booths, I forget what it was promoting, and asked him how things were. He was single just then and began complaining about how relationships were So Much Work. I wanted to smack him.

At around that time I bought into a gay dating service, and when that one didn’t pan out, another. They never matched me up with anyone even close to what I was looking for in a date, and none of the ones they set me up on resulted in seconds. Usually we would both end our date complaining that the service kept missing the mark. One guy I was matched up with was a sports jock whereas I said one of my interests was hiking and wilderness backpacking and those are two very different sorts of personalities. But since we both ticked of the interested in outdoor sports box it must have been good enough. Except it wasn’t. We met in a parking lot and chatted for maybe five minutes and mutually decided to go our separate ways. I remember the look on his face when he laid eyes on me, and in all fairness I probably gave him the same look. It took a lot of time and money, neither of which I could afford to finally figure out those things only existed to extract money from lonely people.

I got older. The years went by, the universe expanded, I never found a boyfriend.

I have no idea what I might have done had something like Grindr been available to me when I was young, let alone the kind of social media we have now. But I don’t think I would have gravitated to a hook-up app because hook-ups were never my thing. I have always been looking for a boyfriend. Well, until I hit 70 and figured all that was in my rearview mirror. Would I have posted sexy selfies of myself like they used to do on MySpace until they clamped down on it shocked, shocked that anyone would even Think of using social media for such things!? Probably not. I have always had a poor body image, and I mentioned the time I was shocked to learn about group showers in gym class didn’t I?

But I look back at those few photos I have of myself back then and I was pretty cute for someone that skinny whose hair was always a mess. Maybe I would have learned a better body image of myself from the examples of others. Maybe I would have dressed myself better, worn better fitting clothes. (My butt is the only part of my body that ever reliably got complements…and a few straight up feels before I could object. One guy almost got slapped for it. I am not a touchy-feely kind of guy.) Maybe I would have found someone to give me better haircuts and learned to use a straightening iron, and got my teeth fixed so I could smile back at people without hesitating. And then maybe I could have attracted some attention and found a date without feeling like a beggar for asking. Or maybe all that would have just made me a target for sexual predators and gay bashers. For every better world there is an infinite number of worse ones.

[NOTE: This blog post is dedicated to the betraying older gay jackass who kept telling me that I was single because I was too shy didn’t get out more…then fucked me over by keeping a slender probably impossible chance at love from me because people who look like that want people who look like that.]

The seductive thing about nicotine is it calms you down but doesn’t dull your mind. To a degree it actually improves concentration and deep thinking. But today, just now, I only needed some calming. The stress was really getting to me. It’s probably not doing my heart any good either.

There are certain kinds of crimes against youth that really get to me. They press all my buttons, and I have to find some way to distract myself from it. Maybe it’s just the natural adult reaction to monsters who hurt kids. But my reaction is so intense I wonder if I don’t have a suppressed memory in there somewhere from way back when. I just get too angry about it. Maybe there is no suppressed memory, it’s just I can see it could easily have been me.

So I continued watching the second season of the Disney+ Percy Jackson series. Maybe work on finishing the book I’ve been struggling to read. I should read more books and do less doom scrolling. Stories about ICE ripping apart young married couples and kids from their parents isn’t helping my mindset either. But this is about one specific book that started nagging at me again for some reason I can’t pin down. It’s still pushing my buttons after all these years.

I should go ahead and buy another copy of it, second hand, and put it in my collection of homophobia, because it’s really about that author’s disgust of his gay kid, and his need to punish him for it. You have to dig into the homophobia that runs through everything he ever wrote to really see it, but then you can’t unsee it. It’s like how Wagner’s anti semitism runs through all his operas, or Rowling’s cheapshit prejudices her stories and it surprises people when you point it out because they like listening to or reading that crap. It has a different impact when it’s about people like you.

Well it seems like you’re not on Facebook anymore, not even just to be on messenger, or I’d have wished you a happy birthday. But anyway…Happy Birthday! I hope things are still going well for you and your significant other, and that life is wonderful. I’m old and tired and coming to the end of my road, but I will always remember you fondly, and that strange amazing time. Good things happened in spite of all the static circling everything. Progress was made. And smiles. Lots of smiles.

Posts on Facebook today celebrating the release of Biloxi Blues with Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken, who is amazing in his role (as usual) as Sergeant Toomey, but I cannot even think of that movie without remembering the scene where they gay soldier (private Hennessy, played by Michael Dolen) is taken out of a troop line by Toomey and some MPs, presumably after they pressured the other private he was involved with to name him, and driven away between them in a jeep. I can still see the look on his face and while I understand he was an actor playing a part it was so very disturbing. Great acting on everyone’s part but I cannot think of that movie without thinking of that scene. That Hennessy was the only one to stand up for the two Jews in the troop against the bigots (the character has a great line when asked by one of the bigots if he’s Jew too) just added to the impact of what was about to happen to him.

But of course, if you didn’t know very much of the history of that time and what happened to homosexuals who were caught in the jaws of the laws back then, you might just think it a sad little subplot in a movie about a young soldier enduring a slightly crazy drill sergeant and having his first time getting laid. If that story really was based on Neil Simon’s recollections of his time in the army then I am wondering if that character and was what happened to him was based on a real person and did they survive.

During World War II, U.S. military personnel suspected of homosexuality faced intensive interrogation, psychiatric evaluation, usually to implicate others in exchange for leniency. If found to have committed acts of sodomy, they were court-martialed, imprisoned in a federal penitentiary with terms of hard labor, and then given a dishonorable discharge. After the nightmare of what prison life was for a homosexual, that dishonorable discharge would keep him from getting any kind of a good job, and the conviction for sodomy attached to it would more than likely mean he’d lose his family, friends, and have to leave wherever he’d grown up for somewhere nobody knew him. It might have even been reported in their local hometown newspaper, and his entire family ostracised.

If he was a real person you wonder what happened to him, with a very dark pit of your stomach feeling that you know damn well what happened to him.

Yay for private Jerome losing his virginity! To a female prostitute, when we wasn’t old enough to drink or vote, which was a rite of passage and certainly no federal offense.

And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam…

In my news streams today I see that Country Joe McDonald has passed away, and I don’t think there is anyone of my generation and those older kids who came of draft age during the Vietnam war who aren’t replaying that song in their heads now, like when they were teenagers back in the day wondering if they would live to be adults, or breath their last in some far away jungle for the sake of Realpolitick, the Domino Theory, and the egos of various presidents, generals, and cabinet members. Or get fried in a nuclear holocaust between us and Russia. For all the same reasons.

I’m sure a lot of us have vivid memories of those times, most of them horrible. Let me tell you about mine. The day I almost got drafted and sent to war.

It started, as it did for young American males in the late 60s – early 70s, with the obligatory trip to the local draft office when you turned 18. At 18 I was a skinny little gay teenager, coming off his first broken heart after my high school crush’s family suddenly moved away, and so rail thin a friend’s mother once asked him if I was a heroin addict. But no…I was your usual teenage boy with a physiology that could snarf down candy bars, doughnuts, cheeseburgers, fries and sodas and not gain so much as an ounce. How I wish some days I still had a body that could do that.

Looking at me back then you wouldn’t think I was G.I. Joe material, but when a nation needs cannon fodder for a war nobody but the politicians and generals wanted size doesn’t matter. Much.

And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?

My draft office was in the basement of the old Rockville post office. After my 18th birthday I presented myself to them as required by law, and as I sat while the clerk behind the desk typed up my forms I glanced around the room, and saw a sign they’d posted over the door…

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

Ha ha. And happy birthday young man! Maybe you’ll have another one.

I was issued my draft card, which by law I had to carry with me at all times. And as it turned out, almost immediately afterward I got this letter in the mail…

Notice the word “ORDER”. You are ordered to report. Not asked. Not told. Ordered. That’s how it was. There was a war on and nobody really understood why we were in it until Daniel Ellsberg leaked copies of a 7,000-page top-secret Department of Defense study to the New York Times and The Washington Post. That study detailed 25 years of American involvement in Vietnam, and not so incidentally the torrent of lies aimed deceiving the public and congress about the Realpolitik motivating that war, it’s actual scope, and our glorious progress in defeating world communism and keeping the dominoes from falling. 

There was no declaration of war, there was only the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution giving the president authorization for a “military action” to defend US military forces. But the basis for that resolution, that our destroyers in the area had been attacked, was a lie. There was no attack. The American public would not know that for decades. But it got us where the generals and the politicians wanted us.

You hear people speak after these mass casualty disasters, of all the lost potential, all the things that could have been, all the progress in the arts and sciences that might have been made, only to end up buried in so many thousands of graves. But in the rarified halls of power where their Realpolitik hallucinations mattered more than the lives of the kids they were sending off to war, of course war had to be the case and never mind the cost. Those were other people’s children.

You hear a lot of things said about my generation and the 1960s/early 1970s. If you want to really understand those times you need to look at, really look at, what that war did to this country. How many parents never got to see their kids have families of their own, and grandchildren they could dote on. And Vietnam went communist anyway.

So there I was the early morning of October 4, 1972 waiting at the designated draft office bus stop with several dozen other teenage boys, wondering if that morning would be the last time mom ever saw me alive.

They loaded us onto a couple Greyhound busses to drive us to Fort Meade for the pre-induction physicals. But before we were driven off, some men from the Navy and Air Force got on the bus and told this group of trapped and terrified teenage boys they’d get a better deal from them if they enlisted now. Some left the bus with them.

When we got to Fort Meade we were made to strip down to just our underwear, weighed (I did not know this at the time, but the moment they weighed me I failed the exam, but they kept on with it anyway), and then led to stand in two lines for an initial examination.

I’ve told this story here before…

…about the morning I came to my sixth grade class and I saw that some kids from the previous year had come to class before we got there to visit their old teachers. And they’d written about their experiences in junior high on the chalkboard, and how much fun it was going to be for us when it was our turn. I started reading…and then I came to this line…

Tell them not to worry about group showers. It’s no big deal.

I wish I had a picture of my face just then. My jaw dropped. I was horrified. What!? WHAT!? WHAT!!!??? Suddenly I was no longer looking forward to high school, junior or otherwise.

So there I am in this line of several dozen other teenage boys in their underwear and you might be thinking as you read this that I‘m in gay kid paradise and it wasn’t that at all. They wouldn’t let us put our clothes back on for the entire two hour ritual and I spent them in a kind of state of shell shock. I am just not a clothing optional kinda guy, and that was the most degrading thing I’d ever experienced up to that time or ever since. But it was the point being made, right then and there: From now on you are government property. 

And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?

A pair of doctors went up and down the lines, making us take deep breaths while listening to heartbeats, checking pulses, examining teeth, skin (I guess looking for tattoos). They made us drop our underwear, bend over and spread our butt cheeks while they walked up the lines looking for I have no idea what. Then they walked the lines feeling each kid’s balls and telling them to cough. I’m told that lets them detect hernias. We were cattle being sized up for grade. One kid across from me started laughing uncontrollably when the doctor cupped his hand around his balls and the doctor quickly moved on.

We were allowed to pull our underwear back up. Then led to booths where eyesight and hearing were tested…still wearing only our underwear. Then, still wearing only our underwear, we were led into something like a classroom where were put under oath, and told to sit in some small student desks. We were handed sheets of paper, told to fill out our names, and then look at each of the line items and check Yes or No. Are you an American citizen? Were both your parents citizens? What is your race? Ancestry? There were the names of various subversive organizations and we had to check if we’d ever been a member of any of them. I forget now if the American Civil Liberties Union was one of them, or the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Then I came to this question…

Are you a homosexual?

I looked at it carefully, weighing my options. I had just sworn to tell the truth, and the truth was I knew damn well by then that I was, and the honest answer was Yes. And answering that question honestly would have probably kept me out of the army and Vietnam. But it would have also probably got me placed onto some police and FBI lists somewhere, which would haunt me for the rest of my life. It was 1972, sodomy was illegal in nearly every state, and those laws were used against us in so many ways never mind having sex. You could be denied employment, housing, an array of professional licenses. They would have probably told mom and I still don’t like thinking about what would have happened then. It could have been that every time somebody’s child disappeared I’d get a couple policemen knocking at the door.

So I lied. I checked No.

At the end of the ritual I was told that since I was eleven pounds underweight I would be put back on the bus for Rockville. As I remember there were a couple others of us on it. I was told they’d call me back for another physical in six months. But before that could happen Nixon turned off the draft and I was never inducted into the Army and never had to go to war.

I have no idea how many of those other kids that were with me during the pre-induction ritual never made it back to their country alive. But I can still see their faces.

After Nixon turned off the draft, for a brief period of time, nobody had to register for the draft. There’s a subset of baby boomers who never felt its touch, and who keep being lumped in with the rest of us. I met one of them once on a gay BBS I did some volunteer work for. He was staunchly conservative, and a big fan of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. 

Eventually they bought draft registration back, but so far nobody has been forced to join the Army or go die in another war nobody wants. Yet.

And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?

…only the targets ever change, and then only for a while.

So there is apparently a new survey MAGA is waving around that shows a decline in the number of people identifying as transgender. Elon Musk and Matt Walsh are celebrating it as a victory over “transgenderism.”

Oh really?

I was drafted, not entirely against my will, into the gay civil rights struggle ever since I fell in love back in my teen years, and I have seen how this game is played over and over. The idea is to minimize our numbers, as if that makes our demands for equal rights seem unreasonable and excessive. Oh you don’t want equal rights, you want Special Rights. But when you question people for a survey about sexual orientation, in a climate of hate, you are unlikely to get a lot of honest answers. Combine that with people’s own misunderstanding of their sexual orientation because they’d grown up with nothing but myths, lies, and superstitions about it, and a good many of your respondents will give what they think is an honest if completely wrong answer. Then add to that the spectrum of sexual orientation. There’s a reason Kinsey’s scale goes from zero to six, not zero to one.

I would have answered incorrectly about my sexual orientation if asked, before I realized I was in love that first time and saw that everything I had been taught about homosexuals was wrong, even though I was crushing madly on the object of my affections. I was 17…what did I really know about it back in 1971? And even knowing I was gay at that point, I would have been unlikely to publicly identify as that, in a time when almost every state had a sodomy law on its books, and you could be discriminated against in jobs, housing and services. I’d like to think mom wouldn’t have thrown me out of the house had I identified, but lots of gay kids had that happen to them.

What does it mean to Identify As? Being willing to stand your ground and say publicly Yes I Am…or is it a private Yes I Know.

So no surprises, they’re doing the same playbook now against transgendered people. This from comments in a thread about the new survey…

“It’s raw data of those who took the survey. Going just on that, it’s much more probable people are less likely to say they identify given the hostile politics. And when it’s actually weighted correctly, the data shows a 9% increase, not a decrease.”

There is nothing complicated about this. Transgender people start coming out of the closet and asserting their own true identities. A vicious backlash ensues in the commercial press, political campaigns, and social media. Hostile billionaires throw tons of money everywhere they can to demonize transgender people. And then transgender people find themselves facing a torrent of threats against their lives and livelihoods. And surprise, surprise, they start ducking for their own safety and mental well being. And the bigot industrial complex declares victory when their surveys show a decline in the number of people identifying as transgender.

My people have been there too. We know how this game is played.

And understand this: they don’t think the actual number of transgender people has declined. What this survey is telling them (which it actually fucking isn’t) is their expensive hate mongering is working. Transgender people are afraid.

Victory.

This graphic came across my Facebook feed just this morning. It’s about the rerelease of Goldeneye…a James Bond movie starring Pierce Brosnan, who I always thought made an excellent Bond, though I didn’t watch the movie. I haven’t watched any James Bond movies after the series jumped the shark with the addition of the Sheriff Claude Pepper and Jaws characters. Roger Moore was another excellent Bond though. I’ve always thought his Bond movies could have done with a little (a Lot) less camp. Anyway…friends and readers of this life blog can probably see which part of it caught my attention right away.

No stream rises higher than its source…as Frank Lloyd Wright once said. If you’re wondering why Fleming just had to specify hetrosexuals in that passage, you have not taken a good look at the man or his most famous character.

“Fleming himself had a deeply unpleasant attitude to women,” writes David Sexton in this 2015 article in The Standard, titled It’s no surprise James Bond is a misogynist when you meet his creator. And as usual, scratch a misogynist, find a homophobe…

[Pussy] lay in the crook of Bond’s arm and looked up at him. She said, not in a gangster’s voice, or a lesbian’s, but in a girl’s voice, “Will you write to me in Sing Sing?” Bond looked down into her deep violet eyes that were no longer hard, imperious. He bent and kissed them lightly. He said, “They told me you only liked women.” She said, “I never met a man before.” His mouth came down ruthlessly on hers.

-Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet.

This also works for gay men, as I discovered when some straight classmates dragged me to see The Opening Of Misty Beethoven, which claimed to be a porn/comedy. In it, a call girl is selected by a pornographer to become his magazine’s New Girl of The Season. But to cinch that title she has to go through a series of sexual challenges. And I’m sitting in this theater watching one sex scene after another after another after another, including the obligatory lesbian sex scene, and I’m trying to figure out if pornography really is that boring after all or was it just I’m a gay guy with zero interest in sex with women, when her final most challenging challenge is to cure a gay man of his homosexuality. Which of course she does because this is straight male fantasy and there is no such thing as bisexuality.

Back when Goldfinger came to the theaters I decided to pick up a copy of the paperback. The paperbacks of Fleming’s James Bond novels were everywhere then, even in the grocery store checkout lane racks along with the gossip magazines and tabloids. Back then the secret agent phase of kid culture was in full swing, and I had the James Bond Secret Agent Briefcase and a Man From U.N.C.L.E. pistol-rifle-combination-submachine-gun (it took your usual cap rolls) and several secret agent toys that would probably give adults kittens today if they were sold to kids, like the transistor radio that converted at the touch of a spring loaded button into a rifle, and a pocket knife that likewise became a pistol. By then I was already a voracious reader, escaping into the world of books whenever the world outside my bedroom became too much, and scanned the paperback bookshelves constantly for new material.  I read westerns by Louis L’amour, science-fiction by Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Hal Clement, the Lensmen series by E.E. Smith. I read the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories, mysteries by Earl Derr Biggers and Robert L. Fish. I read the novels of Arthur Healy. But the only cold war secret agent stories I could get into were the ones by Alistair Maclean. His stories really drew you in and kept you hooked. I tried to read Goldfinger and could not get past the first few pages. I scanned a few more, gave up and put it back. It was probably just as well.

Some years later I picked up a Raymond Chandler book whilst browsing the racks at a small local bookstore/newsstand (are there still any of these left?), because I’d heard he was the gold standard in hard boiled detective novels. It was The Big Sleep. Randomly I opened it up and began reading…

“Don’t kid me, son. The fag gave you one. You’ve got a nice clean manly little room in there. He shooed you out and locked it up when he had lady visitors. He was like Caesar, a husband to women and a wife to men. Think I can’t figure people like him and you out?”

I still held his automatic more or less pointed at him, but he swung on me just the same. It caught me flush on the chin. I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.

…and then I put it back.

Yes, that really happened. I just flipped open the book and the first thing I read is this crap. 

It’s a better world for the gay and lesbian readers now, though sometimes it makes me ache for the world I could have had growing up, instead of the one I got tossed into where a pansy has no iron in his bones. There is so much more for us to read now…adventures, mysteries, stories where we are real people in them and not cheapshit bar stool stereotypes.

Here are some young adult books on my To Be Read stack, for the young adult I was once, who had to grow up in a world where young hearts like mine had to build walls around around ourselves to survive. It did its job on me…I never found a boyfriend to have and hold…but I have seen it destroy so many others, so runts like Fleming and Chandler could feel good about themselves.