I was reminded the other day, while in the ER, that there is a non-trivial likeness in the experience of being gay and of being atheist. I’m in the ER because I’d become so weak and unable to balance myself it was getting scary, but I am visiting my brother in Oceano California and I don’t have a local healthcare provider here. So I checked with my insurance to see who was in my network and it turned out the local hospital is.
Long story short, they found nothing that could be causing my problem. All the tests they ran not only came back good, but excellent for my age. So I will need to go over all this further with my cardiologist and my new GP (the previous one retired) when I get back to Charm City. That said, I am feeling much better now so maybe it was just a passing infection of some kind.
While in the ER, a technician came to do some paperwork on me. I say “paperwork” but it’s all in digital form these days, and then you get a paper printout when you are discharged. One of the questions she asked me was did I have a religious affiliation.
I said no, and for the briefest of moments, hesitated. I could have left it at that but it felt like I was closeting some part of myself. It didn’t feel right. It felt like I was ducking. So I added “I’m an atheist.”
No problem. She simply nodded and took it down. And that was that. But I took note of how much it felt like one of those little sudden moments a gay guy gets periodically when you are asked some innocuous question but it pertains to your relationship status and out of the blue you have to make this snap decision, do I duck or do I come out.
I am proud to say whenever this has happened I’ve dug in my heels and come out. But it’s always a bit nerve wracking. You never know what to expect. I blogged about a particularly bad outcome Here. Karma there was the guy who fired me and insisted it wasn’t because I am gay, was later arrested for not being able to keep his hands off young girls.
There’s a scene in Howard Cruse’ magnum opus Stuck Rubber Baby where the main character Toland Polk, describes his coming out during the memorial services of an openly gay friend who was lynched, and his lover in present day New York City avers “Say it once in public and the grapevine’ll take it from there.” Yes. But no. Probably within your own community and family that’s true, but you will find yourself coming out of the closet again and again all throughout your life in these little unexpected sudden out of the blue moments of truth.
You come out not simply to assert your own personal truth, and not just simply to stand up for yourself and your right to live an honest life, but also to be living testimony to the stereotypical falsehoods of who people like yourself are supposed to be. Yes I am a gay man. Yes I am an atheist. Whatever you thought that makes someone I’m a living example of one such and you have now been gifted with a small slice of truth, a living fact.
I’ve been seeing ads for the movie All Of Us Strangers and avoiding it because it seemed like the same old struggle for self acceptance kind of gay themed movie that I was over with back in the 20th century. I didn’t bother trying to find out what it was actually about until the other day, when I saw a news article about one of the actors, Andew Scott, being snubbed at the SAG awards because he’s an openly gay actor. So I dug into it and now I really regret that I did.
I should have seen it coming from all the comments all over social media about how the file is So Wonderful and yet it leaves audiences crying as the leave the theater…
He [Adam] is just going back into the everyday feelings that he hasn’t had the luxury of feeling: It’s a luxury for your parents to be annoying you; it’s your luxury for them to be smothering. And that’s what he immerses himself in. It’s a luxury to be able to touch your parents, to be able to hug them, to be able to get into their bed and to get back all that sensuality that he’s missing so much. He lives in this apartment block, he’s eating cookies on the couch, he’s living in a comfort zone. And so by going into that world, telling them who he is, by having that difficult conversation, then he sees himself — and when he sees himself, he’s able to go and let somebody else in and love somebody else.
Yeah. And then what happens?
I am so tired, so deathly tired, of this eternal trope of gay male romances that end tragically. I don’t know…maybe some of the rest of you, who have had some share of love and joy and contentment, regardless of how long it ended up lasting, maybe some of you can watch this stuff and think of it as a tribute to love. But what I see is the film industry’s insistence that we don’t exist, or if we do, that our love can’t. Because…lets face it…two guys in love is just, you know…Unnatural. It can’t possibly be real, or if it is it can’t possibly last. The subcategory of the Kill Your Gays trope is Kill Your Gay’s Love. Because let’s be real here…honestly…can two men really love each other? I mean…you know…like THAT???
Perhaps this is only the bitter ranting of some old gay troll who never found a boyfriend and, like the guy Adam was finally ready to let in, just needs to drink himself to death alone. Or perhaps this is a howl of outrage from someone who bears the scars of this culture teaching, and is Still Teaching Its Gay Young That To Love And Be Loved By Another Is Just Simply Not Their Due In This Life.
Don’t Expect Love…it isn’t yours to have. But hey…we Accept you! Now anyway. Isn’t that Wonderful?
I really wish I’d never heard of this movie. But I have a list of those, so, whatever.
I wake up early this morning, still a bit miserable that I read that synopsis. I see it’s almost sunrise and I could just get up and have my morning coffee, but I’ve no energy to face the day for some reason, and I tell myself I’m old, I’m retired, I can sleep in and waste another day doing nothing if I want to. So I pull up the covers and try to get more sleep. Those early morning nods almost always produce vivid dreams, and this time was no exception.
I’m in a courtroom, apparently fighting with a landlord about getting access to my, and my boyfriend’s things so we can finish moving elsewhere. My boyfriend in this dream is a Woodward classmate, but not the one I’m always going on about being my first ever crush. This is another guy who I will not identify, other than I’m pretty sure he and the other classmate he was always hanging out with were a couple. In this dream he’s my boyfriend, and we had rented space in that apartment complex, and the previous landlord knew we were a couple and was fine with it. But this new landlord had sincere religious beliefs and told us we had to leave. Fine. Okay. But we were only able to get some of our stuff out when the locks were changed and now I’m in court trying to get our stuff back.
The religious fanatic landlord is accusing me of hacking into her renters database with, of all things my graphic editor, GIMP. She’s holding our stuff hostage until I pay her a fine for doing that. The judge (and this is pretty funny like dreams can often be) is Fred Gwynne, reprising his role as the judge from My Cousin Vinny.
I tell the judge that you can’t possibly hack into someone’s database with GIMP. The fanatical landlord says I admitted GIMP has a programming language. Yes, I say, but it’s just for automating tasks in GIMP. You can’t write a program to hack a database with it. The judge asks to see documentation for the GIMP’s Script-Fu language. Somehow I actually have paper documentation of it, and I hand that to the judge, along with the lease we’d signed with the prior landlord. This new landlord never asked us to sign another lease, just told us to get out, and I think the lease we signed is still controlling.
The judge looks over the Script-Fu documentation, shakes his head and looks at the fanatic landlord. “I don’t see how this allows someone to hack into a database.”
She says “Well he did.”
“With this?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Well I don’t know how I’m not a programmer.”
“But you know he hacked into your database with this tool.”
“Yes!”
“But if you’re not a programmer then tell me how you know he did that with this tool.”
“Well…what else could have happened? It had to be him.”
“How do you know your database was hacked into?”
“Because that’s just what people like them do!”
“Tell me what was changed in your database.”
“Well I don’t know yet, I haven’t looked.”
“But you know there is damage.”
“Yes! There has to be! Because I told them to get out.”
“Have they caused any damage to your property that you can document for me now?”
“Yes. They were occupying it.”
“How did that damage your property.”
“It’s against my sincerely held religious beliefs!”
And with that the judge shakes his head, and dismisses the charge of hacking into her database. Then he says something that brings me nearly to tears. Not the kind of tears people leaving All of Us Strangers are shedding though.
Saying my boyfriend’s name along with mine he says “Bruce and [boyfriend] are a couple, and as such they are entitled to the respect and support a decent civilized society gives to all its couples in love. But also, they are married (I’m a bit surprised to hear this because in this dream I wasn’t aware that we were married, just that we were a couple in love), they took that next step, made that deeply profound commitment to each other and to their community, and now in the eyes of the law they are a family, with all the rights and responsibilities that conveys. You are hereby ordered to immediately allow Bruce and [boyfriend] to enter their apartment to retrieve their property, and if you refuse or if any of it is found to have been damaged by you or anyone in your employ the fines will be severe.”
And that was that. I walk out of the courtroom near to tears, not simply of joy, not even of acceptance. Acceptance isn’t quite what I was feeling overwhelmed by then. It was Acknowledgement.
We were Acknowledged. Our place at the American table was Acknowledged. We existed. Our love existed! We belonged. Our love belonged. It was acknowledged.
I woke up still feeling those powerful emotions.
Made me feel a bit better, but I’m still really sorry I read that movie synopsis. This is why I have no fucks to give for movies about beautifully tragic gay male romances. Why do so many people eat those up? Is it because they can give us acceptance, but not acknowledgement?
“In the wake of a two messy and malignant closet cases getting outed – one a Catholic anti-gay activist, the other a very gay “ex-gay” conversion therapist – I’m gonna re-up a piece about a messy and malignant closet case who got outed a while back…”
At the far-right Church Militant, Michael Voris accused liberal Catholics and others he opposed of being gay until he resigned over unspecified ‘morality’ concerns. Staffers now say he had shared shirtless gym photos.
I have no sympathy for ousted Spokane mayor Jim West or other hypocritical closet cases. They didn’t miss out on these years of greater gay visibility. They opted out.
By Dan Savage
January 17 2006
Savage begins his article talking about feeling sorry back when he was an 18 year old, for all the middle age gay men hanging out in bars whose clientele was too young for them. In 1981 he realizes something his friends didn’t…
When those older men in the bars were 18, it was 1961 or 1951–and it might as well have been 1661 for all the difference it made. When they were our age it just wasn’t possible to be an openly gay teenager.
He would tell his friends to give these men a break…that they missed out. I can relate. Sort of.
When I was 18 it was 1972 and you could say I had it a lot better than those who came of age in the 60s or 50s. Yes, but no.
Luckily I grew up in a mostly liberal and prosperous part of the country, and went to school in a smallish expansion school in a nice middle class neighborhood of mostly government and private industry contractor engineers and tech worker families. I was bullied in middle school relentlessly, but in high school I was among my fellow geeks and nerds. Religion there was of the mostly liberal denomination sort, and almost never discussed at school. The older kids had largely worn down the adults by then over things like guys wearing their hair long and bell bottom blue jeans. We protested Johnson and Nixon and the Vietnam war, which was killing the ones who couldn’t go off to college (I would just barely escape the draft the year after I graduated). But you could still not call it a good time for the gay kids.
Maybe for some of the gay young adults it was getting better. But it was just barely post Stonewall and that event had yet to really trickle down from the big cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. And even there it was still a struggle not simply for respect, but basic safety on the streets. Gay people still got static from every direction in the popular media….on TV, in the movies, in the newspapers and magazines…
Mad Magazine, #145, Sept 1971, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”
Jack Davis cartoon, Mad Magazine – July 1978
In the 1970s it was still coming at us from all directions. I spoke to this in my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story…
If only to escape the disgust and ridicule of our peers, the tears of our parents, and gay bashing total strangers, we hid. We ducked. It was survival, even then. You got almost no support anywhere, you had to dig for gay supportive authors, like Mary Renault and their books. But don’t even bother trying to find your copies of The Advocate or The Washington Blade in your local newsstand or bookstore. I blogged several times about having to buy my newspapers and copies of Christopher Street (it was like a gay New Yorker), and The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review (a literary journal) in the backroom of a seedy adult bookstore where they kept the hard core pornography.
When I was in high school I knew of no way to socialize with other gay teens, even in liberal Montgomery County Maryland. And as I grew into young adulthood it was still a challenge. The only gay bar I knew of, its name spoken among the other kids like a dirty joke, scared me to get anywhere near, lest someone see me go inside, or I get gay bashed the moment I walk back out. And a dark seedy bar wasn’t anywhere I reckoned I would find a boyfriend anyway. I didn’t want to simply get picked up and used as some sort of sexual junk food. I was looking for love in a time of Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant.
I missed out, like the others. I wrote yesterday about the heartbreak of finding my high school crush after so many years, still terrified and full of all the same myths, lies and superstitions about being gay that I stubbornly rejected because I was in love with him. He missed out, I missed out, a lot of us who you might say came of age in a more enlightened moment, still nonetheless missed out. And I don’t think that is appreciated enough.
But Savage is absolutely right about this…
Jim West knew better. He knew he didn’t have to live a lie. He knew he could have lived as an openly gay or bisexual man–bisexual is all West has admitted to in most of his interviews, although no pictures of young women were found on his work computer–but he chose not to. Unlike the older gay men I met in 1981, West and other closeted middle-aged men today didn’t come of age at a time when no one could conceive of openly gay and lesbian people and communities. (Or politicians: Washington State has four openly gay members of its legislature.) Jim West chose the closet and shame and lies and hypocrisy.
So while I had sympathy for gay men who came out late in life in the 1970s and 1980s, I find I have no sympathy for Jim West or other men like him today. Their stories aren’t tragic, they’re pathetic. They didn’t miss out. They opted out. Fuck ’em.
I never found a boyfriend, let alone a lifemate. I am still missing out. I could have let myself become bitter (and maybe I am just a tad after all), or I could resolve to do what I could to make sure nobody in the generations to follow had to go through what I did, and miss out on that wonderful, life affirming joy of love and romance, desire and contentment. I dug in my stubborn heels and chose that path instead. Put it down, Rick Blaine once said, as a gesture to love.
I will go to my grave aching over that empty space inside of me I never found another to put at ease. But not in shame over what I did because of it.
I saw an online post from a Hollywood person, someone who I absolutely consider an LGBT ally, hanging out at a comic convention with a lady artist and her husband, both publishers of a well known and well loved fantasy comic series, like they were all old friends. It got my hackles up. This particular comic book pair talk a good talk about being supportive of their LGBT fans, but when it comes to their story world they’ve a track record of, at best, gay vague…
Coined by Michael Wilke in 1997, ‘gay vague’ is the appearance of people who are seen by some viewers as gay, without it being explicitly stated or shown. When done intentionally, this allows brands to court two audiences: those longing for representation alongside those who would be put off by it.
I see these two all the time at Pride events and comic cons, proudly hanging out with gay creators and fans, who I have to assume never ask them where the gay characters are in their world, like I did on a USENET forum once back in the 80s, to which I got the immediate response that “we don’t do pornography”.
Let me be blunt…gay vague is not support, it is erasure. Especially these days, if you are still sticking to gay vague as a way of telling us you’re with us…you aren’t. You’re still deeply uncomfortable with the possibility of our presence in your fantasy world. Because you still really haven’t made that connection that we are people just like you, with the same hopes and dreams of love, and all its joys and happiness, and not some strange and disturbing sexual behavior.
I can see fans of these two and their fantasy world getting a tad pissed off at what I’m saying here. And believe me, I know the feeling of wanting so badly, so very very badly, to see people like myself, see our lives, our hopes and dreams, represented in art, on TV and movies, that I’m willing to accept the occasional nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean know what I mean. But that was a long Long time ago, and now there is a lot of water under the bridge.
No…tears. A lot of tears.
So what made me such an intolerant militant homosexual? I’ll give you the executive summary. In bullet points. In reverse order of importance.
1: Vito Russo’s book, The Celluloid Closet.
You always knew there were the occasional coded homosexuals in the movies. Russo was the first to gather them all up…all the sissies, all the pansies, all the psychos, all the tragically damned…and present them to you all at once in one book. And when you saw it like that, it shocked you, and then it made you angry. Not just because you knew it was what Hollywood was telling everyone, your parents and family, your classmates and friends, how to think of you, but even more because it was how Hollywood told you to think of yourself.
2: In 2005 a 16 year old gay teenager was outed to his parents, who promptly forced him into ex-gay therapy. Before he entered the program, called Love In Action, he put out a cry for help on his MySpace page:
“Somewhat recently, as many of you know, I told my parents I was gay… Well today, my mother, father, and I had a very long “talk” in my room where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist christian program for gays. They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they “raised me wrong.” I’m a big screw up to them, who isn’t on the path God wants me to be on. So I’m sitting here in tears, joing the rest of those kids who complain about their parents on blogs – and I can’t help it.”
Then he did something brilliant. He found the LIA rulebook on the family computer and put the entire thing on his page for the world to see what they were doing to kids in there. And it shocked everyone. I was not alone I later learned, in not being able to sleep for days with worry for this kid. In joining the protests and activism against ex-gay therapy, I met a bunch of people who had been through it…survivors of ex-gay therapy…some who went in of their own accord, others who were forced into it…and through that I came to know them, made a few friends among them, and I listened to their stories.
3: (This could be a subset of #2) The Quiet Room.
As I began documenting the protests against ex-gay therapy with my cameras, I was generously allowed to document some of the ex-gay survivor’s support group meetings. At one of these I attended, they’d established a “quiet room”. Mind you, these people were among Friends. They were there to tell their stories in a safe setting, and support each other as they tried to get on with their lives and past the trauma they’d experienced. And they still needed a quiet room. A spot where they could go and decompress when it all started getting too much.
And they’d covered one wall of the quiet room with some blank sheets of paper and set some Sharpies out, so the people decompressing could write whatever they needed to just then, to Get It Out…Somehow… on that wall.
I read those words. The writing on the wall. And when the conference was over I photographed it.
4: The night the closest thing I ever had to a boyfriend told me as we were having a quiet moment together, what his father did after he came out to his parents. He had just returned from a tour of duty in a Los Angeles class attack submarine and I guess his military experience had given him the courage and resolve to tell his folks. He sought me out and we had a brief fling. One night in a very quiet voice he told me about coming out to his folks, how they both said they still loved him, and how that night his father went into his office and made himself a small brochure with every biblical condemnation of homosexuality he could dig up, plus a bunch of others from who knows where. Then he printed up a bunch of copies and went around the neighborhood, putting one in the front door of every house for blocks around. Then he went back home and told his son what he did.
(I also got a copy anonymously in the mail and was pretty sure where it came from)
5: (Remember, these are in reverse order of importance). Listening to my high school crush tell me I should stay away, because the life he’d lived in the closet had so badly damaged him that some days he looked in the bathroom mirror and didn’t know who it was he was looking at.
I had a crush on him back in high school. Before that I didn’t want anything to do with all that dating stuff. But in the late 60s/early 70s, nobody told me that boys could fall in love with other boys or I would have been all about it. Then I met him. He was beautiful, decent, good hearted, outdoorsy, hard working. It wasn’t long before I thought the world revolved around him. I couldn’t take my eyes away. My heart would beat faster, I’d break into a cold sweat, but it felt wonderful. That first time you fall in love. It felt like a Disney movie. The birds sang a little more sweetly, the sky was a tad more blue, the stars shone more brightly, I walked with a lighter step. Everything was wonderful. I was twitterpated. I put him up on a pedestal. I thought he hung the moon and the stars. But it was 1971.
I’m pretty sure now it was when his parents found out he was talking to me that they put a stop to it. We weren’t doing anything…it was 1971. Gay kids didn’t exist in 1971. We’d only just begun flirting a little. But it came to a sudden halt. Then that summer they took him back to their native land and for 30+ years I had no idea what had happened to him, or where he was.
So I got on with my life. And so did the gay rights movement. I became a young adult, made attempts at dating other guys, nothing really worked. Every now and then I’d make an attempt to find him again, usually by looking through different city’s phone directories. When computer bulletin boards became a thing I would occasionally toss a message in a bottle out into the BBS spaces to see if he was there, and did he remember me. After a while I began thinking that if I ever did find him again he’d be settled down with a much better way more handsome guy than me and I’d just have to accept that.
So many years later I still had him up on a pedestal. I knew he would be braver than me. I wasn’t brave, just stubborn. He would be brave.
I got on with my life. I attended the first ever gay rights march on Washington, and the first ever showing of the Names Project Quilt on the Capitol Mall. It was pretty unnerving walking among all those quilt panels with birthdates bracketing my own. But I resolved to do my part to make it a better world for all of us.
That night the nightmares began. I would be walking among the quilt panels, and see one with his name on it. I’d be in the grocery store, or a bookstore, or just walking down a street in DC’s gay neighborhood, and I’d see him, his face covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma scars, his body shriveled. So I kept looking for him. I had to know what had happened to him. I was afraid. I had to know if he was still okay.
I was stubborn. Eventually I found him, married to a woman, and somewhat closeted but at least not in denial. We reconnected for a brief period. He started flirting with me again. We would sit together after hours and talk and talk and talk. We talked on the phone. We tossed each other Christmas cards and emails. And then it suddenly stopped. I’m guessing because the family found out he was talking to me again.
And one evening as the silence descended, at the restaurant where he worked, he basically told me I needed to look elsewhere because living in the closet had damaged him so much. He tossed ex-gay tropes at me…that sex was no more substantial than a fart. That when I was on my deathbed it wouldn’t be all the times I had sex, but all the people I loved that I would be thinking about…as if the venn diagram of those two things had no overlap. And I sat there and listened to him telling me that some days he would look in the bathroom mirror and he didn’t know who it was he was looking at. The guy I put up on a pedestal when I was a teenage boy. The guy I thought hung the moon and stars. The guy who made my heart beat faster. The guy who made me believe that no matter what life did to me, it was worth living.
I kept going back to see him anyway. I figured a relationship between us was off the table…he was married…but I could at least set an example. But it was too much for him, and maybe we were never really all that compatible anyway. He told me one day by email never to contact him again in any way shape or form. I had to sit on my hands to keep from replying How do you contact someone with a shape? Please accept this dodecahedron in reply to your Octahedron of March 6…
I got angry. I said things to him that maybe I shouldn’t have. But I was hurt. I think the only thing that cut me deeper was when mom died. We haven’t spoken a word to each other in eight years. But I don’t blame him. Enough time has passed that I’m not angry anymore, just sad. I’ll never have that wonderful twitterpated body and soul love now…it’s too late. But my generation did what it could to make the world a better place for those who followed. There are others who need to be held accountable for what the hatred of the world has done, and still does, to us.
And I know what an ally in that fight looks like.
Why I am a militant homosexual…as they say. Five points to hopefully explain myself. Not that I feel like I owe everyone an explanation, but here it is. And I have no fucks to give for anyone who thinks gay vague is enough to make them an ally. I do not care how well liked they are in the community, or who it pisses off. I have read the writing on the wall. I have seen the damage done to beautiful hearts. I have no fucks to give anymore.
I still log onto Twitter/X every now and then and this is why. Despite the gutter Musk has dragged it into there is still the story of the human status to find in there. This was posted by Matthew Hodson (@Matthew_Hodson). I also lived through that period of time. This is how it was.
——
A thread on #AIDS in the 80s/90s
Matthew Hodson (@Matthew_Hodson)
I was 15 when I first had sex with a man.
I’d snuck off to London’s Heaven nightclub with the express intent of ridding myself of my ‘gay virginity’, a goal I achieved easily with a visiting American photographer.
Later that week, I watched with rising panic the Horizon documentary, Killer in the Village.
It warned of a new disease that was killing gay Americans. A few cases had just been identified in the UK too.
At that time, the disease did not have a name.
We now know it as AIDS.
The government’s ’Don’t Die of Ignorance’ HIV advertising campaign, featuring icebergs, a tombstone and a doom-laden voiceover, came out a couple of years later when I was in my first year at university.
At the same time Section 28, inserted into the Local Government Act in an attempt to ban “the promotion of homosexuality”, started making its way through Parliament.
The ‘gay plague’, as the tabloids dubbed it, was all the justification needed for politicians, journalists and religious leaders to condemn our sick and short lives.
AIDS provided a powerful new weapon for those who wished to attack us.
My love life at the time was complicated and messy, often fuelled by alcohol and poor judgement.
I considered myself to be safe – I almost always used condoms but there were slips and breakages and mornings where I woke up with only hazy memories of the night before.
And then my friends started dying.
Death and grief were bound up in my experience of being young and gay.
And it didn’t even feel odd – a community dealing with fear and loss was the only one I knew.
I still picture those I lost: wise, twinkly Mick, a member of the Gay Liberation Front and the first person I knew with HIV; Roy, who denied his illness beyond the time when all of his friends knew; handsome James – and his legendary parties.
I think of David who took his own life rather than face lingering death, and I think of Derek, who loved beauty but lost his sight.
I think of Ian, always the smartest but kindest man in the room, and of Paul with his huge blue eyes and even bigger heart.
Fear, hatred and intolerance of homosexuality, attitudes which were then widely shared across all regions and social classes, combined with a virus to kill people like me and people like my friends.
It was AIDS that killed those men, but it was homophobia that allowed it to happen – and that led to so many men dying alone.
Homophobia killed us then.
Worldwide, it remains the cause of thousands of deaths, through violence and neglect, even today.
An HIV diagnosis is no longer a death sentence.
We need to share the good news that treatment will prevent AIDS.
We must challenge fear by ensuring that everyone knows effective treatment means we can’t pass HIV on to our sexual partners.
Just as we fought for greater acceptance of LGBT people, we now must fight to end HIV stigma if we are to end this epidemic.
I can think of no better way of honouring those who died. #LGBTplusHM #UnderTheScope
Postscript
In 1996 effective treatment was introduced that prevented HIV from progressing to AIDS.
I hadn’t used my Netflix account for a long time and needed to reestablish my credentials on the Roku. The idea was to finally watch Pray Away, the Netflix documentary about the rise and fall of ex-gay ministries like Love In Action and Exodus. When I was able to get my account working with a new password, and some updated profile info, I found the documentary and first watched the trailer. Then I became too depressed to actually watch the documentary. But probably will later.
I never went through anything like that, although I’ve often wondered whether mom would have done it to me had I come directly out to her. I’ve written about that elsewhere, and touched on it in A Coming Out Story. So I don’t have those particular scars on my heart. Mine are different. But I lived through those times, and made friends of people who were there, by choice and not. Revisiting it is difficult, even for the likes of me, who never felt any shame, never believed that God hated him. That torrent of abuse you got from every direction got to all of us, worked its way deep inside.
I might not even be the audience for this documentary. I don’t need convincing about how toxic the practice is. But I do now firmly believe that much of the progress we’ve made to that better world where we can all live honest lives, has been because people who’ve been through this have found their voices and have spoken out. If you need any convincing that sexual orientation is biologically innate and cannot be therapied out of, listen to the people who tried really hard, and then listen to the people who ran those outfits and finally had to stop because they could not keep lying to their customers anymore, or to themselves about what they were doing to them.
Nate Postlethwait, who I follow on Facebook, writes about healing from childhood trauma, but I find that much of what he says makes sense from the point of view of gay adults like myself, who had to endure decades of emotional abuse starting in adolescence, when our sexual orientation began to make itself insistent. You can argue that we started feeling it even before then, when it was only a half awareness that we were different somehow, in some really really bad way, that we had to hide from the world, and ourselves…
A Coming Out Story – Episode 18, What I Learned About Homosexuality Part 2
…but it was when those first crushes happened that you really knew you weren’t just different, you were an abomination. And back when I came of age, the abuse came from every direction. From the pulpit of course, but also from the TV, the newspapers, the magazines…
A Coming Out Story – Intermission – What I Learned About Homosexuality. . . And Myself (Part 2)
And it did its work on you, even if, like me, you came out to yourself in the magic of first love. I was 17 and I thought it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. And I never felt a shred of shame about it. He was beautiful. He was decent. He was the sort of guy I could have brought home to mom in a better world, knowing she would take to him instantly and approve of our relationship. But it wasn’t that better world that I came of age in.
In my early twenties I went to my first Pride Day in downtown Washington DC’s gay neighborhood. Anita Bryant had waged a war on a simple non-discrimination law protecting gay people by throwing every filthy lie about us she could think up and it went down in flames. I was angry, and motivated to activism. I swore I would not allow the homophobia I just witnessed to touch my heart.
But it did. I’m 70 now. I will die having walked an entire adult life without finding love, with the scars all over my heart. Proud though I was, I came of age in a dating pool that was mostly terrified, or in denial. For a while I would post stories every Valentine’s Day about being a young gay man trying to find love in a culture that threw contempt and hate at us from every direction…
The magnitude of what was taken from us, so righteous people could make their stepping stones to heaven out of the pieces of our hearts, is nearly impossible to grasp.
And I have tried for decades to understand that mindset. The books I have read. The studies I have examined. The conversations I’ve sat in on. And I’m thinking, What’s Wrong With Them??? No, seriously, what the Hell Is Wrong With Them??? Read about Christian Identity, the religion of the Neo-Nazis sometime and see if it doesn’t make your head spin.
I have never found any answers I could be satisfied with. But now at last, at the doorstep to 70, I think maybe I can just let go of the question.
Postlethwait put this up on his Facebook page today…
It feels so much like just throwing up your hands and giving up, and that runs against every inner instinct I have. I’m a geek…I have to know. It might even be hard wired into me like my sexual orientation. But I’ve done my best and all I have to show for it is a better understanding of how bigotry and hate embodies in people, how culture shapes the forms it takes, how to recognize the bedrock of hate in mass movements though they may claim a landscape of heritage, faith, and moral tradition. All that is good, but the why of it is as elusive as ever.
It can be that. The physicist Richard Feynman once wrote…
“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”
There’s a scene in the TV miniseries, The Winds of War, I forget which episode now but it taps me on the shoulder at times, with Pug in FDR’s rail car and he’s talking to the president about what he’s seen and experienced in Germany. FDR says wistfully that Germans are a hard people to understand, and Pug replies “The only thing we need to know about the Germans is how to beat them.” Now, that’s a military man talking and I can appreciate that from his vantage point that’s really all he needs to know about a potential enemy. But FDR would want to know more because his job isn’t as focused on the one thing that Pug’s is. Still, it’s a good line. I’ve thought of it often during the course of this civil rights struggle.
The only thing we need to know about bigots is how to beat them. You will never make sense of their hate because there is no sense to it.
Activism can be a way of not dealing with your personal pain, even as you acknowledge it. And prejudice taught me there was something wrong with me. Despite all the activism and all the pride, deep down inside I believed it.
I’m my father’s son. I’m the product of a broken home. An only child. Weird. Not masculine enough. Takes excessive interest in personal art projects, as my first grade teacher wrote in my file. The kid that uses big words. Introverted. Homosexual. Ugly. No fashion sense.
This is how being bullied, not just by the other kids but by adults in your life, corrodes your sense of self. There was nothing wrong with me. I was a kid, finding his way in the world like all the others. And if you’re reading this and you feel it too, then know that there was nothing wrong with you.
I’m my father’s son, but I am not my father. I was raised by a single divorced mother but she loved me and set a good example for me and I’ll have the so-called broken home I grew up in over every traditional family I’ve ever witnessed that can’t stop fighting with each other. Only children aren’t the selfish self centered stereotypes we’re made to be; self motivation and independence are our strengths. We make friends and fall in love like everyone else, but we are almost preternaturally good at keeping ourselves company and we are not going to beg for your attention. Gay people experience the joys of love and desire like anyone else. Introverts just need a little more quiet time than others is all; we get that time to recharge and we’re fine. Ugly is as much a slur as any racist slur against the person within because of how they look. There is no such thing as having excessive interest in your art because art is the joy of being alive. I didn’t use big words so much as I had a big vocabulary because I read so much, and that’s a good thing because reading grows you from inside. If there is no such thing as having an excessive interest in your art, there is also no such thing as having too many books. And I have lived long enough now to see fashions come and go and all you need is to be good with what you see in the mirror.
Sensibility. For when senselessness rears it’s stupid head. You don’t need to know the why of it. There is nothing wrong with you. Do not wear someone else’s labels. It’s not good fashion.
At some point after I’ve finished with the next and final-ish episode of A Coming Out Story, I will need to set up a page and sub galleries for my stand alone artwork and sketches. Because all of that I’ve posted on my Facebook page is going away.
Disengaging from online commercial social media may have another benefit besides not having to endure the censor algorithms. Less time with my face in a smartphone app, more time at the drafting table.
The sketches above are for a cartoon I have been trying to get out of me for, no kidding, four years now. A lot of that is my struggling with how sexy to make it and still not go over the line into cheap thrills. I’ve drawn and re-drawn the frames in it many multiple times because I want it to be authentically what I meant without any ridiculous self-censorship. But when all is said and done it’s still my own personal take on a particular song, nobody else’s, and there’s a reason why the character of my libido in A Coming Out Story is wearing a fig leaf. “I’m your libido not Robert Crumb’s libido…“
If I’d grown up in a more sexually relaxed culture I probably wouldn’t be fighting with myself about this. Also…being raised in a Yankee Baptist household isn’t helping.
I’m digging back into The Sun And The Star to get the foul taste of Dick Hafer’s comic book out of my mind. I’d put the book down at a crisis point in the story because I wasn’t up to crisis points just then, but I’m back on it now because it’s the story I need after researching all the old homophobic articles and op-ed pieces for this “last” episode of A Coming Out Story.
The one on the left is Will Solace, the demigod son of Apollo, and the one on the right is Nico Di Angelo, the demigod son of Hades. You’d think they were horribly mismatched but in Rick Riordan and Mak Oshiro’s The Sun And The Star they’re a couple on a quest to rescue a friend from the deepest, darkest region of the Underworld. This piece of fan art is probably picturing a scene from the end of the novel The Blood Of Olympus, after defending Camp Half Blood from the attack of giants led by Octavian. It’s a good one…how I picture the two of them. Seems like nearly all the fan art I see of these two picture them like this.
Will has inherited his father’s healing powers, he’s the sweetness and sunshine of the two, and little goth Nico..well…there’s a gruesome scene in that novel where he angrily and literally ghosts a villain and banishes him to Hades while the others look on horrified…
“You took an oath to the legion.” Nico’s breath steamed in the cold. “You broke its rules. You inflicted pain. You killed your own centurion.”
“I-I didn’t! I–“
“You should have died for your crimes,” Nico continued. “That was the punishment. Instead you got exile. You should have stayed away. Your father Orcus may not approve of broken oaths. But my father Hades really doesn’t approve of those who escape punishment.”
“Please!”
The word didn’t make sense to Nico. The Underworld had no mercy. It only had justice.
That sword he wears (they all fight with swords in the novels) is forged from Stygian Iron and he dipped it in the river Styx; it has the power to suck away its victim’s essence. You don’t want to make the little dickens angry. He’s sullen enough all the time anyway. But at the end of that novel he and Will are beginning to click. In the later novels their relationship develops and Will starts coaxing Nico out of his dark shell. Nico has had a very hard life before joining up with the others.
Here’s what draws me to The Sun And The Star: It’s an adventure novel, but its center is a love story about a same-sex couple bravely facing the nightmares of the Underworld together. Because it’s about a teenage couple, and aimed at a largely younger audience, and because it’s a Disney print book (part of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series), they have to keep sex out of it…which is good because it makes them focus on the romance, and it’s those sorts of stories I’ve been missing and aching for ever since I came out to myself in my own teen years. At every crisis point in the story their love is tested, and it gets really scary at times (I put the book down some weeks ago when the two of them were captured by the demon of nightmares who begins forcing Nico to relive some really Really Bad memories…), and their love becomes stronger.
This is the story I want told to me again and again…the story of how love wins. And so terribly often…it doesn’t. And it’s like we’re use to that ending. I’m thinking now of Call Me By Your Name which so many people thought was a Wonderful same sex romance…that ends with Elio staring into a fireplace crying his eyes out.
Books about same-sex love and romance have been my refuge ever since I was a teenager. Movies and television, not so much. But even books were never a sure thing. I loved Mercedes Lackey’s Last Herald-Mage series, which had a terrific love story, interrupted by death, then rebirth, then death again, because that’s how our stories always had to end I suppose.
Certainly that’s what Dick Hafer and all the bigots like him want us to believe. Thankfully I’ve lived to see a time when enough writers and filmmakers don’t believe that anymore, that I can finally get more of the stories I’ve always wanted.
Working on A Coming Out Story and looking for quotes for the “last” episode eventually drags me back into Dick Hafer’s noxious swamp. Sigh. I ordered his Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle some years ago for the gay studies bookshelves after seeing some of its jaw dropping panels online. If Growing Up Straight: What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know about Homosexuality is a veritable encyclopedia of homophobia, the Hafer comic is it’s Classics Illustrated version.
And it’s a real doozy. But instructive. Think of it as an extended Jack Chick tract, even including the repenting sinner at the end, plus several pages of instructions as to what to say and what to do to get right with god. All that’s missing is the checklist.
Here’s the thing, and I’m really only noticing it more now due to Fred Clark’s recent posts about the mindset that joins into satanic panics, Q-Anon conspiracies, and suchlike. He writes: “It is always possible to recruit new members to join our cause by telling horrific lies about some group of Other People. But doing so makes those Other People themselves – the ones we’re telling nasty lies about – immune to recruitment.” And he points out the obvious: that’s because those Other People know the truth of their own lives first hand.
The first time you read Hafer’s comic book all you see is that guttural howl of unabridged bigotry and hate. All through the book he refers to gay people as sodomites. You see laughably cheapshit stereotypes of yourself and everyone you know that would be hilarious if you’d never read news headlines about gay bashings and murders all your adult life. But Hafer is at his most energetic when he’s describing our sex lives. The bulk of the comic book is this.
Vito Russo put it best when he said that “It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.” Years ago I blogged about the time I had to walk a gauntlet of hard core heterosexual pornography just to get a current copy of my local gay community newspapers, because back in those days the only place you could find anything gay whether it was pornographic or not was in “adult” bookstores. I got an eyeful. But to read Hafer’s comic book you’d think our sex lives were nothing But hard core pornography.
Hafer begins his descent into gay sex hell by starting with…I am not kidding…kissing.
“Not only are their habits disgusting, but they are incredibly harmful and damaging”
This is followed up with descriptions of commonplace sex that most heterosexuals enjoy but which is somehow made disgusting when same sex couples do it. Following that, every extreme sex practice is laid at our feet as though that was all there is to us. He’s very meticulous about it. But the tell is he can’t resist presenting it like it’s one great big comic book joke. The scenes of gay sex acts are presented as much for laughs as for shock value. He can’t resist doing that even when it comes to the routine accusations of homosexual pedophilia. On page 126 he quotes Paul Cameron’s (now regrettably named ) Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS) that 80 percent of student teacher molestations are by homosexuals, next to his drawing of a deranged older man dragging a small boy by the arm and telling him that it’s time for his sex ed class, while the boy says “During recess?!!”. Ha ha ha.
It’s telling that Hafer doesn’t even bother with religious sermonizing in his comic book until near the very end when, like in a Jack Chick tract, the militant homosexual finally repents, followed by several pages of boilerplate step by step instructions on how to be saved. But the lies in the sixty plus pages preceding the sermon are so glaring, the dehumanized scarecrows representing those Other People so shockingly empty of any shred of humanity, what it’s likely to provoke in the gay reader is more shock, anger, and outrage than repentance. It does not hold up a mirror to them that they might be saved, it spits in their faces.
That is its purpose.
If I wasn’t actively collecting hate literature my first reflex would have been to throw it in the trash less than halfway through it. But Hafer’s comic book, like the Chick tracts, isn’t meant for gay people. That scene at the end, like every scene at the end of every Chick tract, is theater. It’s not meant to save anyone because long before they could get to it, the redemptee has become angered at all the insults thrown in their face and has already thrown the tract away.
No. The audience for these books and tracts is the true believer. These are Tijuana bibles for prigs, allowing them to ogle their neighbor’s sex lives, and indulge their own sexual fantasies, while feeling righteous about it, so they don’t have to reckon with the empty wasteland they’ve made of their own lives.
I think the one quote from Hafer that I have in the final ACOS episode is enough. I was sorely tempted to add another panel with that part about kissing though.
I’ve got all the pencils done now on the episode of A Coming Out Story I’ve been calling “The Mirror Episode” for a while, since I couldn’t give it an episode number just yet. But it looks now like it will be episode 38 and that’s the end of the story.
Kind of.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m way too damn slow at this because I have no taught skills. I’m just hunting and pecking my lines and every panel is a struggle to get it where I want it. Four years after the heart attack and feeling weirdness in my chest more often lately, I’m not sure how much longer I have to work on this story. So I want to get it into a state of completeness such that when the warranty on my ticker finally runs out the story is out there in a state that I can feel satisfied doesn’t leave my readers hanging, and I can feel like I got it out there, even if I didn’t get it all out there.
So what I’m going to do now is a little different than just tacking on an ending and leaving it at that. I can see that if I put the mirror episode up right after episode 37 then you could say the story I meant to tell (The first person you come out to, is yourself.) was the story I finished. But this is serendipity. #37 just makes it work that way. I had two more, possibly three planned after 37 and that was only after cutting out a bunch more. But I can tack the mirror episode after 37 and now it appears to be “done.”
Except it will still need an epilogue. So that’ll have to come next. But then what I can do is begin a kind of in-filling process, putting back all the stuff I cut out piecemeal just to get it finished (call it The Director’s Cut). Some of it is just little slice-of-1970s teenage high school life that I scripted in there and I cut out after the heart attack. That stuff will be easy to put back in piece by piece. Other cuts will take a bit more work to put back in.
I had a big story arc after the mirror episode about how, after I’d come out to myself, the object of my affections, TK, and I kept circling around each other, flirting but carefully, because in 1972 that line between ambiguous and blatant was very Very dangerous ground. Then I discover he’d taken summer school and it didn’t dawn on me until afterward, when I suddenly discovered his family moved away, that he did that so he could graduate early.
And then suddenly he was gone. I had an entire story arc about what that sudden lurch from twitterpated bliss into heartbrokenness did to teenage me.
That’s the darkest part of the story. Maybe it’s for the best I don’t do the artwork about me sitting on a bridge over the railroad tracks near the apartment where mom and I lived, waiting for a train to come along so I could jump off in front of it. Or maybe I will someday, or at least write about it, because it wasn’t just that he was suddenly gone. That wasn’t the worst of it.
Understand I went from hating the idea of dating to suddenly falling in love being surprised, delighted and awe stricken over how wonderful it was after all. And then suddenly it was over. Bang, Gone. Without that love struck bliss all the filthy lies about people like me suddenly came crashing back into my consciousness and all I could think was maybe I am just damaged goods after all, maybe this is all I have to look forward to, and I began to hate myself.
People should think about what they’re doing to gay teens when they bombard them with lies about themselves. Most of us get that first big heartbreak shortly after that first big crush, except maybe the very lucky ones. To tell a vulnerable heartbroken kid they deserved it because they’re trash is about as depraved as it gets.
But I don’t know if I have the time to tell all that in a cartoon graphic form.
This is a webcomic and I dove into it ready to exploit all the flexibility that give me. I started by not giving every episode a standard number of frames, but allowing each to have as many as it needed. Eventually, as I began to see it was going to take me much, Much longer than I’d thought to do this thing, I began splitting some of the episodes I had scripted apart and moving things around. That first “Intermission” (TK and the Taco Stand) was supposed to be part of that post out to myself story arc. I moved it forward after I started getting impatient with my slow rate of progress and I just wanted to do something fun. Then later I took what was originally going to be the mirror episode, and split it apart into a bunch of random “intermissions” wherein I’m reading that ‘Truth Of Homosexuality” book by Dr. Pompous J. Fraudquack.
(That was a shout out to Howard Cruse that I wanted Howard to see because I had an intuition that I might not have as much time for that as I’d hoped, so I split up the episode so I could but that part out there and show it to Howard. Alas, I was right…he passed away shortly after I sent him the link, and replied with the cheers and encouragements he always gave me.)
So…yes…this is a web comic. When I “complete” the story with the mirror episode it’ll be finished…but that doesn’t mean I can’t finish it more. I can still infill all the stuff I’d planned, to the degree my health holds out. Eventually I might even gather up the book intermissions and put them at the beginning of the mirror episode as I’d originally intended.
What I wanted is for this to be my testimony about what it was like to be a gay teenager in the beginning 1970s, and how that first love hits you when everything you were told about being gay was wrong, and all the other kids are having their coming of age according to the script and you’re not and you can’t tell anyone what’s happening to you because…well…read those intermissions. They’re actually quotes lifted from actual articles and books about homosexuality sold back then. And besides you are a clueless teenager because that’s where all the lies about people like you left you, so really what would you have to say anyway.
And there was not a teenage boy alive back then that wanted to see the looks of contempt and disgust in their classmate’s faces, let alone their parent’s.
This is my testimony as to what it was like being a gay teenager in the early 1970s. I tried to do it in a mostly humorous cartoon kinda way because that’s how I can look back on all of it now. Somewhat. But this is my testimony. I want it to not be left hanging. I can fill in some detail later.
There’s lots. I’ve had most of it scripted for decades.
Something that, for some reason, I only posted to my Facebook page a few years ago, that I came across the other day via its “Memories” function and decided it needed a place here…
Back in 2004 I observed Orson Scott Card getting all enthusiastic over the music of K.D. Lang while reviewing what was then her new album, “Hymns of the 49th Parallel”. I wrote at the time…
“You’d almost never know that this is the same man who said that “Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.” Lang has never bothered to hide her Lesbianism, and has taken many a public stand against anti gay discrimination. Yet here Card tells his readers she is “brilliant”. More obscenely, he wishes she could sing just for him, “as a friend.”
It’s one of those long standing grievances LGBT folks have with the majority culture, that we as individuals contribute to it in so many ways, contribute to it with our work, lift it with our art, secure it with our service, and then get spit on whenever someone needs to feel righteous, and maybe build themselves a few more stepping stones to heaven. Expropriation. Something that I wrote about back when Card was bellyaching voraciously after the Massachusetts Supreme Court said that same sex couples have the same right to marry that opposite sex couples do, and he said Homosexuals were stealing something precious from him. Stealing from us however is a right.
And they know what they’re doing. All those righteous cake bakers, that want our labor and our art in their world, but won’t pay us the living wage of decency, civility and respect. All the pious frauds taking our services and then stiffing us Trump-like on the social bill. All the culture warrior hate mongers who just love them some K.D. Lang, Elton John, Tchaikovsky, Copland, Haring, Housman, Andersen. This came across my Twitter stream just now. It’s hilarious. And then it isn’t.
When you need the devil to help bake a cake and get thee behind me when it’s done…
Gay teen, terrified of his emerging sexuality, falls into a hyper conservative Christianity with the usual outcome. Thankfully he drew back from ex-gay therapy figuring (correctly) that it would likely push him over the edge.
I have seen firsthand what this does to people. I wish there was some way to get it more forcefully across, but all there is are testimonies like this one, and a slim hope that someday it’ll finally sink in…
Is My Family Better Off With A Gay Dad Or A Dead Dad?
In order to distract myself from my internal core issues, I spent the next 17 years pouring myself into my marriage, work, and leadership roles within my Churches of Christ congregation. While I prayed daily that God would take away my feelings, the internal conflict persisted, leading to an increased level of self-hatred. I would sometimes go to large Pentecostal church rallies seeking healing, but never divulged my struggle, knowing I would be ‘marked’ and disowned by my community.
Eventually, all this took its toll and brought my life to a crisis around the age of 40. While recovering from major depression, I was under the care of a clinical psychologist. Once again, because of fear, I didn’t divulge my same-sex attraction in these sessions, but I did become aware of the interplay of internalised stress on my wellbeing.
During this time, my anxiety over my homosexuality became unbearable, and I contacted a gay conversion organisation seeking change & healing. I was also dealing with increasing levels of suicidal thoughts. This terrified me. I reached out to a well-known conversion “therapy” organisation, Exodus. After several email interactions, I knew that if I followed through, it would drive me faster down the path to suicide, so I ceased communications.
The years of self-hate had led me to the darkest point of my life…
Back When Guys Could Be Sexy And Beautiful And Not Worry About Being Queer Baited
It was an all too brief period of time in young American male fashion. But I look back upon it fondly, and reminisce about the life I once had, before the heart attack, before I found myself suddenly knocking at the door to 70 and realizing that dating and mating part of my life is all in the rear view mirror now, and I didn’t even get to partake because back then gay teenagers didn’t exist and gay men were all better off dead than in love.
I have this theory that the fashions and styles we find attractive as adults are what were in vogue when we were coming of age. We glom onto that period and all those first crushes and first heartbreaks, and forever after it’s what gets the heart beating.
The problem for me (artistically and…otherwise) is that while “retro” fashions seem to have made a comeback, it’s only among the ladies. Long hair low risers and cutoffs haven’t made much headway among males young and slender enough that, IMO, they could benefit from them. Okay…so I could benefit from them.
It’s a shame. So when I get an itch to do some sexy sketching I usually end up riffing on photos of pretty young ladies I see online or in magazine fashion ads. When you know the basic skeletal and muscular differences between the sexes it’s not hard to convert female to male if you really, really like what they’re wearing or how they’ve done their hair. This drawing I posting some months ago being a good example…
I actually sold a print of that one.
I have a folder in my NAS of pose material that maybe I’ll get to someday and make a drawing from. Stuff I’ve got from various online sites and Facebook pages. Like the one I just started following a few days ago of 70s memories.
That photo was labelled Teenagers hanging out on Van Nuys Blvd. Obviously from the styles and the cars it was taken in the very early 1970s, or maybe even the late 60s. The time of my sexual awakening and that first magical crush. I’m thinking it’s a night shot under very bright street lamps, otherwise why would the sky above that store in the background be so dark. The comments on it are mostly about how street racing at that location was a thing back in the day. Mostly.
I take one look at this photo and instantly the longhair leaning up against the foreground car (check out the mag wheels) gets my attention. Nice jeans, thinks I…okay…I can do something with that. No smirking, please…I didn’t realize at first…. Anyway, it definitely speaks to that time in my life. Those low risers. That long beautiful hair. The floppy sleave shirt. I don’t think many people nowadays get how wide belts were back then, and the huge belt buckles that went with them. You can’t see the feet, but I’m pretty sure those are bells.
So I immediately grab a copy of the image for my “poses” folder. And I’m already thinking about what I need to change around a tad to make her a cute long haired guy…
I’ll have to adjust her pelvis a tad…oh…wait…
Nope. Don’t have to adjust anything.
The pose was just enough to make it unclear which sex you were looking at. What clued me in was figuring out how to change the curve of the hips to the thighs and then realizing that work had already been done for me. I wish I had his jeans too. And the 20-something body I had once upon a time that fit into them.
And…a boyfriend back then.
I wish I had more beautiful guys like that in my world now. Even if, as I said, that part of my life is in the rear view mirror. It would still be nice to have some beauty in my life, even if it’s just to look at now and then. But American males don’t like those styles anymore because HEY ARE YOU SOME KINDA QUEER OR WHAT!? I’m not even all that pretty, and wasn’t back in the day, and I got cat-called lots just for wearing my hair long. I Still get those cat-calls. HEY HIPPY…ARE YOU A BOY OR A GIRL…HAW HAW HAW…
But what’s refreshing about the comments on that photo on that page is there wasn’t any of that. If you remember those days fondly enough to be following 70s memories pages, then you remember that was how guys dressed and wore their hair back then.
And it was all good. At least it was to coming of age gay teenager me.
So…anyway…if I do something with the figure in that photo I’ll post it here. Probably not use the shirt though.
I’ve been working on A Coming Out Story for a couple decades now. I’ve not been promoting it or advertising it anywhere, largely because I am terrible at self promotion. I’m sure the reason for that lies buried somewhere under all the static I got growing up, first for being my father’s son, and then more generally for being gay in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But it’s been a project that, while it began simply as a one shot slice of life cartoon, then turned into something like a self analysis project, it’s become something dear to my heart. That said, when I posted a link to the new current episode on Facebook and a post about my first try at a Flowbee haircut got orders of magnitude more responses, I got a little depressed. Well okay…more than a little.
The visitors here to this website specifically to look for any new episodes have been very gratifying. Also the random visitors who either read an episode that a search engine somehow delivered them to, and then they binge read all of it. That is Very gratifying. And it helps keep me going. But I have other reasons for sticking with this besides artistic recognition.
I dove into this project for several reasons:
To help me understand what happened to me back in my senior year of high school, and how it brought me to the adult I eventually became.
This part has been pretty well successful. It helped that around episode 11 I reconnected with the object of my affections and I was able, with difficulty, to better understand what happened between us and why it went the way it did. Maybe that’s material for a whole ‘nother story.
To let other gay people of my generation know they weren’t alone. We all pretty much went through it. Some had it lots worse than I did, some much better. We were all damaged, but we survived. We should be proud of that.
To show heterosexual adults, in a mostly humorous way, how it was to be a gay teenager back when gay folk basically got static from Every direction in the popular culture, and hopefully show them that the world really needs to give gay kids a break. We go through all the same stages of first love and first heartbreak everyone else does, but with the added torment of all the cheapshit bar stool prejudices, plus all the myths, lies and superstitions of the pulpit thumpers. It isn’t fair. What should be one of this life’s most magical wonderful times, the discovery of love and desire, gets turned into a long drawn out nightmare so some righteous creeps can make their stepping stones to heaven out of our hopes and dreams.
To let gay kids today know what the struggle was like back when we were kids ourselves. The horrible sex ed class I sat through wasn’t anything out of the ordinary back then. What I was taught was what most people blindly believed about us. I’m planning on concluding this story by imploring the generations to come to delve into our history and keep fighting, or for certain the bigots will bring it all back down on us again.
To tell my side of the story.
That’s it. I’ve begun work on episode 37. This little story arc has three more episodes, then the story comes to it’s main climax/conclusion after than. Maybe another year working on it and it’s done. To give you an idea of how hard it’s been to get this out of me, I had the current episode completely scripted back in 2005 and it finally appears here with only minor changes to the dialogue. I have the rest of it done too, except for the very last episode. I’m still thinking about how to end it.
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