I’ve actually restarted work on an art piece I began several years ago and I can’t tell whether that’s improved my head space or that a better headspace has somehow made it possible for me to go back to my drafting table. I suspect it’s the former because I have no idea what could have possibly improved my mindset at this time. But it could be anticipation of my upcoming Walt Disney World DVC vacation. But there’s pain there too, this particular visit.
The art piece is an absolutely unique one for me, in that it’s a pencil and charcoal drawing, no ink, and there will only ever be that one original. Only my oil paintings have been one-offs up to now. The artwork doesn’t scan well but I’ve no plans on making high quality scans anyway. I wanted to try something entirely in pencil and charcoal on high quality cold press paper, not the Strathmore board I usually use for my artwork. That sort of paper is usually used for water colors but I thought the texture would be good for how I work with charcoal. I wanted to try something without ink, all grey scale in graphite and charcoal, and I wanted it to be a finished piece, not something I would tweak later in the computer. Something frameable.
But that caused my innate fear of failure to bring a halt to it after I got only a third of the way through it. The computer has turned into something of a crutch over time, and it’s why I don’t use media I can’t easily erase and redraw over. Some of the most amazing political art I’ve seen employed Conte Crayon or grease pencil and once you put something down with one of those that’s it, unless you’re working for publication and can get away with white gauche correction like Herblock did (you should see his originals…they’re full of that…but it didn’t show up in the halftone newsprint process so he knew what he could get away with). One of the grand masters of the form, David Low, once said that every cartoon he did took three days to complete, two spent in labor, and one “removing the appearance of labor.” I have tried over the years to take heart in that. Instead I’ve felt badly all the time about not getting over my fear of making a mistake on the drawing and learning to use those old techniques of the masters. This was going to be an attempt at making a start on that and I choked.
So I put it aside, but somewhere I could see it every time I went down into my art room. I needed it to remind me.
Somehow, the other day, something clicked and I could see a way forward with it, and I got a renewed interest in it coming from who knows where. Maybe it was something adjacent to my sudden interest in developing and scanning in some film that had been languishing for years. Maybe it was a willingness to visit its themes, which are full of so much joy and pain both after watching and reading so many new stories of young gay couples in love. But one day I took another look and I saw a way forward with it, and I put it back on my drafting table for the first time in years. I’ve been working on it in little baby steps for several days now and for the first time in years I’m feeling really good about where it’s going.
The work in progress is here at the end of this blog post, but be warned: It’s not pornography, I don’t do pornography, but it’s probably NSFW either. As I said, it doesn’t scan well but I can snap some shots of it off my iPhone. My intent though is there will only ever be one copy.
There’s a backstory.
Somewhere, possibly a Fark Photoshop contest, I came across an image of someone wearing bluejeans. But the image is tightly focused on just their hips…bare skin above the beltline and these tight fitting blue jeans below…with a product tag hanging off one of the belt loops. The tag reads:
WARNING: Removing this article of clothing guarantees the wearer a portion of your soul.
Most of us, except for low life creeps, know how that works. You lay down with someone and afterward they will be somewhere deep in your soul forever, for better or worse, but hopefully for the better. I thought the image was cute in its way and I made a print and stuck it on the wall behind the art room bar.
Time passes, the universe expands, and one day my brother came for a visit to Casa del Garrett East. While he was here he wanted to go to the local Harley-Davidson dealers to get a t-shirt from each with their locality on it, because collecting those is a Harley thing. So we went to the dealer off RT 40 near White Flint and while he was browsing around so was I.
Time was I really wanted a Sportster, so I was gawking at some of those. Then I walked over to where they had their fashion selection. Leather jackets and various Harley branded items. Over in the t-shirt section where the usual motorcycle culture prints, including one kinda rude one I’d seen many times before…
Gas, Grass, or Ass. Nobody Rides For Free.
And looking at that t-shirt I remembered the image behind the bar back home and thought: there’s two sides to that coin isn’t there.
And immediately an image came to mind.
A young guy is camped camped on the side of a dirt backroad somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It’s somewhere deep in the empty wide open spaces of the American southwest. The road he’s camped beside goes in a straight line and vanishes somewhere over the distant horizon. His motorcycle is nearby, and also his empty sleeping bag and camp stove. The young man stands looking to the sunrise in the far horizon with his morning cup of coffee in one hand, and the other resting on his naked hip; he’s only wearing a t-shirt since he’s just got himself awake and hasn’t dressed yet. His back is to the viewer, his t-shirt drapes suggestively just above his very cute butt. On the back of his t-shirt is a message that reads: Nobody Rides For Free.
This came fully formed to mind in that moment I saw the t-shirt there at the Harley dealer. The only change I made to it when I set down to draw it was initially he had a companion with him who was still asleep in his sleeping bag. But the more I thought about it I decided that, no, he’s alone on his road trip to somewhere.
At first you might think it’s just an effort in sexy art. Which it is, but there’s more to it I hope the viewer sees. It’s not just about whatever struggles he’s having in the romance department (because he wouldn’t be wearing that t-shirt if things had been easy for him), it’s about he’s looking ahead to the life he wants to find…somewhere, somehow, over that horizon. Desire and dreams. Life as a road trip. Nobody rides for free.
It’s interesting how the artistic process works in your head. Or mine anyway. I have such a vivid imagination that I rarely do preliminary drawings and roughs. I think it until I can see in my mind exactly how I want it to look before I start drawing. I do make tweaks once I start, but they’re very few.
So it was really important to me that I get this one right. It had to be my best ever, and deep down inside I don’t see myself as being that good. But I work on it because there’s no other way. I have to get it out of me. And this one says just about everything I’ve ever wanted to say in my art paintings and drawings…if not my art photography, which is just relentlessly bleak (unless I get to work with a model which I haven’t in decades (are you out there Robbie? I bet you’re still beautiful…thanks for nothing Jon and Joe…)). My other art is a lot more positive. This includes A Coming Out Story. The political cartoons are what they are.
So here is the work in progress. Please be kind…it is nowhere near finished, but hopefully you can see where it’s going. Some of this is cropped because of how I had to capture it in the iPhone, so there is more to it on the sides than you see here. There’s probably still months of work ahead because I’m doing this in baby steps. I may post more updates as I go along.
Something seems to be reawakening inside of me. Hopefully it stays away for a while. I feel so much better today than I have in a long time.
I am so easy to manipulate once you have the key. Oh I can come off as a stubborn single minded I Don’t Care What You Think so and so, yes. Also The Brat can be provoked out of me given certain specific events. Just ask a certain German someone. But once someone has that key I can be talked out of or into practically anything.
Obviously I guard that key carefully. It’s why I will often just walk away from a situation I don’t want to be in, rather than talk it out and get dragged back into somewhere I don’t want to be, especially if it’s someone I like, or did like at some point. It’s very easy for me to brush off angry people. It’s super easy for me to take a walk from someone who questions my intelligence after I’ve already taken the measure of theirs and found it wanting. But if you have that key it’s nearly impossible for me to keep my mind made up about anything you don’t want me to keep it made up about.
So just a few days ago I got a shock at work, and that on top of all the changes to the work environment which had to be made for security reasons (the arms race in cyber space between the good guys and the bad never lets up and we have an active mission going on) made me determined to go back into retirement. I was in tears. A bit of software I’d created that I was intensely proud of got snatched out from me with no notice. I was simply cut out of it. That, and the constant security roadblocks I was colliding with trying to do the work I was tasked with, was too much for me. I’m 71 years old and too old for the stress and heartbreak. I had not come back out of retirement for all of this. I told them I was retiring. Again.
The short version of the story is I got talked out of it.
I’m easy.
I’m hoping we’ve all arrived at an understanding that I’m just keeping an open mind. I have not committed to staying. We will, hopefully, work though things and see if the solutions proposed are agreeable to me after all.
But I have my doubts. There is more to me than the computer nerd/software engineer, but all of it centers on the fact that I am (yes I know it sounds pretentious to say so) an artist. I bring that to everything I do creatively. If the work isn’t worth giving my heart to, then it’s not worth doing. You only get one life and let me reach back into the religion of my childhood and say (I mean this) that it’s a sin to allow yourself to do work without heart. It’s like sex without love. Okay…yes…I realize there are people who are fine with that as long as the money is good. I am not. It’s why for most of my young adult life I bopped from one job to another to another. Once my heart stopped being in it, I was tendering my resignation. Although sometimes I got the boot before that when my sexual orientation became an issue. Which I was fine with because I don’t want to be anywhere people like me are held in contempt either.
There is art I have brought to my work that I must continue to be able to bring to it if I am to stay long term. In the short term, there is a Very Important project I am committed to bringing forth, a proof of concept, and I am going to do that however the f*ck I have to, because I agree it is Very Important and I am Going to get it done.
So at some point today I’ll probably log back onto Facebook. But the week without wasn’t so bad at all, allowing that I felt disconnected from my friends, classmates, and co-workers. They tend not to show up anywhere else like on Blue Sky. So I’ll be back if only to maintain my connection there. But that’s all. I happily found plenty of online entertainment to while away the hours when I should be doing something else, elsewhere.
I am on BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social). Whiling away the hours scrolling through my BlueSky feed is fun and informative, but getting a constant stream of Oh God What The Fuck Has Trump Done Now can be painful at times. I know we need to stay aware, but you have to be careful not to let it deliver you into despair.
YouTube is easy and fun to just scroll through, even if you haven’t bought the subscription. My brother does this for hours as a way of decompressing after work. This is almost a one on one replacement for Instagram, which is a Meta site, but I remain looking for an alternative source of still photography of cute guys. The video clips of movies and TV shows are nice.
I joined Reddit after reading about the MAGA bellyaching that it was freezing out or limiting the reach of Nazis on the site. I took a look and found a lot of chatter about banning crossposting from Musk’s Twitter, all of which was positive. So I signed in and discovered a rich source of information and entertainment I can scroll through untainted by MAGA/Nazi poison. I was assigned a very weird login name but I can change by visible user name at some point to my own I think.
The only thing I really missed was hearing from friends and classmates. Only one regularly posts on BlueSky and I don’t think any of them are on Reddit, and I get nearly no traffic on this life blog. So the only place I have online to chat with friends and family is Facebook. This is how Meta keeps us hostage to its business model, which Zuckerberg is tilting hard, toxic masculinity right. But we don’t have to capitulate. A former Meta lawyer, fed up with it, posted this and bullet point 2 is especially relevant here:
No more clicking through to buy things. No more checking in. And in the future I’ll be looking for ways to keep Meta cookies off my computers and smartphone because my online activity is also something Meta sells to advertisers. I have location services turned off on the smartphone apps, and I’ll be looking for any chatter about Meta working around that.
A short time ago I read a story about the Spiderman actor Tom Holland discussing why he decided to quit alcohol and his three years of sobriety. What interested me about it was that after a discussion with his doctor about his liver scared him, Holland decided to quit drinking for a month to prove to himself he didn’t have a problem. It turned out to be so difficult that he extended his test to another month without drinking. Then it was three. Then, finally after a year without a drink, he was noticing how much better he felt, how much better he was dealing with his personal and professional relationships, his life and its stresses. He says now he’s never going back because he feels he’s having his best life.
Addiction can take many forms, but probably all of them are damaging to some degree. This week the loyal opposition (as opposed to the unloyal in power) have called for a week long boycott of Facebook and all of Meta’s social media properties, to protest Mark Zuckerberg’s not only kissing the Trump ring but belly flopping into the toxic masculinity pool along with Musk, Thiel, et al. The problem for me is I’m not sure I can. I’ve tried it before whenever Facebook has ticked me off about its content moderation policies; I’ve even removed a bunch of my artwork from it. But I’ve always come back to it fairly quickly. It isn’t just because I have a lot of friends on it.
I’ve told this story before, about how a question from a 14 year old kid in the Netherlands posted to a primitive FidoNet BBS echo board awakened me to the power of this technology to liberate gay and lesbian people forever from the identities pushed on us by heterosexual culture and its fear and loathing of homosexual people. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. I consider “social media”, broadly defined as any computer communication technology that gives individual users a means to access a digital “commons” where they and others can gather and chat freely, as a vital part of gay liberation. Anyone who remembers being a gay kid in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s can plainly see that this technology has done miracles for our lives. It has done miracles for mine. And now I live and walk among a generation of gay people who do not remember a time before personal computers and modems, let alone smartphones and the internet.
But commercial social media is profoundly different from those first amature BBS systems, and then later after the internet became a thing, the first blogs. Prior to commercial social media, the users of various forums and commons were also either the owners, or the maintainers, or were purchasing the hosting of those forums and commons out of their own pockets. Now those commons are owned, if not entirely (thankfully!) by billion dollar corporations, or Elon Musk, whose interest in maintaining them could not be less about the welfare of the gay community, let alone this country, let alone humanity. And we are the products. The lives we live on commercial social media are sold to investors and advertisers. Our loves, our losses, our joys, our sorrows, our fondest hopes and dreams, our deepest fears…it’s all grist for the profit mill.
It was tolerable, barely, when what you could say you were getting out of the bargain was easy access to family and friends you didn’t have when all there was were blogs and AOL Instant Messenger. You needed a decent amount of expertise to use a computer and modem to connect to the greater outside world and a lot of people simply didn’t have, or want, that kind of involvement in computers. Commercial social media made it easy to connect. Also, and gradually, hard to go back to your favorite websites. Initially Facebook made it easy for bloggers to link their posts to Facebook. And when their users all flocked to Facebook it cut the blogs off. I admit the east of use Facebook gives me to knock out posts on my smartphone as opposed to writing this blog post on my personal computer, has left my little life blog suffering.
That ends today. I am joining the Facebook/Meta strike week not only as a show of solidarity against the impending billionaire fascism to come, and against Zuckerberg’s belly flop into toxic masculinity, but also as a test to see how big an addiction to Facebook problem I have. I see lots of people saying they understand the impulse to leave Facebook but they can’t because all their friends and family are there. But this is how it holds us hostage to its business model and it’s the number one reason you Must leave, or at least attenuate your use of it severely. Facebook wants you to believe if you leave it’s clutches you will lose all your friends and family contacts. But if they really love you that much, they’ll follow you elsewhere, even if they decide to stay on Facebook.
It’s easy to point a web browser to your favorite blog. It’s even easier to link a blog reader to it, and to others (I use Feedly these days). Once upon a time there were lots of blogs and websites where like minded people could gather and chat. There were blog rolls where you could see what the folks running the blog liked to read. There was a community of bloggers. I got invited to one such gathering in Philadelphia by Jim Capozzola, author of The Rittenhouse Review blog. There I met other well known bloggers like Fred Clark and Duncan Black (Eschaton) who flips your bogus bit far too quickly. It was a happy gathering and a feeling of comradery I miss deeply. And none of us were beholden to a corporate business model.
I dropped off Twitter completely and it wasn’t hard at all, given what Musk had done to it. I joined BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) when a friend gave me one of their test period invitation codes. I never felt any pain of leaving Twitter because BlueSky was an even better alternative. I give leaving Facebook a week. If it is excessively difficult then a month. However long it takes for me to not feel compelled to visit. After that I’ll only be going back to check for messages and remind people who want to follow me to visit my blog.
Maybe I’ll end up seeing myself living my best life…
Which is good, but I think we’re (the sane part of humanity anyway) beyond this point even. This came across my Facebook feed the other day…
A good many years ago, after I got my first Internet account and discovered USENET news groups, I got into it with homophobic bigots on one of the ‘alt’ groups created specifically so gays and lesbians and the ‘phobes could have at it with each other. What I quickly discovered was the arguments you got from them were empty of all reason, morality and logic. All they had was a bottomless hate (almost always not just toward us either) that would not suffer self examination and would not be moved. They’d dress it up in religion, thump their bibles, throw out the anti-gay junk science du jour, do it over and over again no matter how often it was debunked, and just not stop. But there was nothing behind any of it more then contempt, loathing, and hate.
I was asked often back then why I bothered arguing with them. But it was a different time and place. You knew there were other gay people watching these arguments and I was doing it for them. I knew I wasn’t going to change any hearts or minds among the ‘phobes. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, a bigot’s mind is like an eye; the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. There was no changing their minds about us, ever. But I could show the lurkers that the ‘phobes weren’t anything to be afraid of, that they had nothing and especially did not ever have the moral high ground.
That was the middle 1980s and 90s. It’s almost a different world now, at least for LGBT people. The ‘phobes of course, have never changed. And they elected Donald Trump to a second term as president.
With the help of a couple white racist South African billionaires and silicon valley tech bros who think they’re running the world now.
So a bunch of people have ended up over at BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) after Elon Musk turned Twitter into a fascist playpen and began babbling about mind viruses. And now that a significant percentage of Americans decided reelecting Trump was what they wanted we are done with arguing with all of them. I mean how do you discuss Anything really, with Anyone who thinks that man is presidential material, let alone anyone who thinks ‘free speech’ means you promote nazis and silence anyone who speaks out against them. And now were hearing complaints from the howling monkey tree that we’re building an echo chamber, which is really rich considering the right wing one they’ve been living in ever since Reagan and Fox News.
This is not about the “low engagement” voters, it’s about the ones that are completely engaged in the politics of it, just immersed in that Fox News cocoon because that’s where they want to live, and if they can’t make the rest of us live there too, they’ll insist that we have to play along. But no. A lot of people now are tired of them. I’m tired of them, and I did my time in USENET.
It’s different now. I don’t see any plus to getting into it with a Trump voter. I see them in the social media comments and I block them. Block block block blockety block. The notion that by blocking and not engaging with them we’re choosing to live in a cocoon is ridiculous on its face, considering all the hostility toward science and the humanities the rest of us have to listen to whenever they open their yaps. By cutting them out of our lives, online and off, we are choosing not to live in theirs.
Last night’s nightmare was vivid, intense, and very unwelcome. Not that any nightmares are welcome, but this one which clearly sprang from all my stress and fear over the coming election was one I could have done without. I won’t retell it, partly because some of its details are almost comical in their surreality. I’ll write it all down in a private dream diary I keep later today. But the essence of it was I was among 14 others being rounded up to be taken to a place where I was pretty sure we were all going to die. I tried to slip the line but was put back into it by an idiot who was also in the line and thought he was being helpful. I escaped once, was recaptured, escaped again, almost recaptured, then finding my way to a safe hideout, only to realize that one of the others there, by a slight slip of the tongue, was a betrayer.
When I awakened from that last moment, it reminded me of a meme I’ve been seeing lately on commercial social media. The one about being disappointed to realize that you had friends you would not want to know where Anne Frank was hiding…
I considered reposting that except I don’t have any friends or family (on my dad’s side) that I would feel that way about. We would all keep Anne hidden, of that I am certain. But there’s another side to that coin.
Turn it around. Put yourself in Anne and her family’s place. If You had to hide, let’s say because the hate mongers have been painting a target on You for decades, and now suddenly they have free reign to do with you and everyone like you as they please, who out of all the people you know would you worry about turning you in?
Well…again…nobody among my friends or family (paternal side) would do that to me I am certain. And yes, there are a couple on the maternal side who I’m pretty sure would resist…which would make them just as much a target as me. But there are those others who have occasionally walked into and out of my life that I’m pretty sure would.
But even more disturbing than that are the ones I’m not sure about. I can see their faces as I type this and I honestly don’t know what they would do. It’s a very creepy feeling.
I’m part time at the Institute now, theoretically three days a week up to 40 hours per pay period, which is every two weeks. That actually works out to just five days per pay period. So my weekends are Very long by comparison. Today is the end of my first pay period, but I have been off since last Wednesday at 1 because I hit my limit that soon. So I’m off work until next Tuesday, apart from an hour web tag-up on Monday. I put the final touches on my front yard Halloween display Thursday, and fed the goblins Thursday night. But starting Thursday was also the beginning of a few days I could slow walk myself out of bed, and then take my morning coffee walk around the neighborhood.
I can feel myself starting to stress once again about work and I promised myself I would not let that happen. But I reckon it’s just me. Understand that my workplace is an exceptionally good environment, I just stress over every little thing. I can keep telling myself that whatever happens I can always go back to being retired with enough retirement income I can live comfortably, but it doesn’t work. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of just letting whatever will be…be. Que Sera, Sera…but not right this moment. I’m going to be a mess on election day.
My thoughts this morning as I took my walk weren’t helping.
Nowadays, they call it The Lavender Scare. That McCarthy time in the 1950s when the witch hunts for communists and homosexuals in government and private industry contractors was, shall we say, energetic. The newspapers of the day referred to gays and lesbians obliquely as “security risks” because you don’t actually use Those Words in family newspapers.
Now comes Trump and MAGA and Project 2025 and all the fascist energy to tear down our democracy and rebuild it in their image, and it’s going to make the McCarthy years and all the witch hunts and black lists look positively liberal.
And here I am thinks I as I’m having my morning coffee walk, an open and proud gay man, working for a government contractor.
I remember when I was living in a friend’s basement, dialing around looking for whatever likely work I found in the want ads. At that moment in time I had enough programming skill I could plausibly apply for computer work so long as a degree wasn’t required…which wasn’t often. But one day I saw one and called the number in the ad. A man on the other end asked me about my skill set…what programming languages had I worked in, and did I have any database experience. When he seemed satisfied enough to schedule me for an interview, he asked if I could pass a background check for a security clearance. And I told him honestly, because I have always dug in my heels at moments like this, that my police record was spotless, but that I am an out gay man, so not vulnerable to blackmail but if it’s going to be a problem anyway then no. He assured me that it Would be a problem, and hung up.
Is it going to be a problem again in my lifetime? I hope not. But don’t be telling me it can’t happen here. In my lifetime it Was happening to people like me. It did happen here. Yes it can happen again. You bet it can happen again. A lot of decent god fearing oh so sinless and righteous people who vote are praying for it to happen again.
It isn’t just me. I have a few young gay friends on Facebook that I worry about. I saw the before Stonewall time…
I feel grateful sometimes that I lived to see a better world for us emerging. Now it’s this. And unlike me my young friends have their whole lives in front of them.
This came across my Facebook stream just now, by way of Craig Kennedy in the Gay New York 1970s and 80s page, accompanied by a photo of Richard Gere in Martin Sherman’s play Bent…
I went with my bf shortly after the opening, end of 1979. From the opening moment when Rudy crosses the stage naked, we knew we were in for a wild ride. (The 2nd act “sex scene” with Max and Horst facing forward motionless 10 feet apart in the Dachau concentration camp is nothing short of brilliant.)
A quote from the playwright:
“The gay world then was somewhat brutalized–it was enormously sexualized,” Sherman recalled. “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.”
But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. Yes. At least in the urban enclaves like New York City.
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.
You could understand why the freedom to be our sexual selves was so important. The sodomy laws practically defined us as criminals, sexual deviants, that needed to be isolated from the rest of our communities. 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. Progress is made by the unreasonable man. And woman.
It was never just about sex. We needed wholeness. Getting the sodomy laws off our backs was a big fight, but 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.
They openly admit now, that the plan is to use the tools of democracy to destroy our democracy. But here’s the thing: only the tools of democracy can sustain democracy.
Resist. Not just fascism, not merely the tyrant, but also the beast within. When you fight fire with fire, everything burns. Defend democracy.
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.
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