{"id":12626,"date":"2023-11-24T12:01:28","date_gmt":"2023-11-24T17:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=12626"},"modified":"2023-11-24T12:11:43","modified_gmt":"2023-11-24T17:11:43","slug":"thanksgiving-family-a-repost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/12626","title":{"rendered":"Thanksgiving Family…A Repost"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reposted from Thanksgiving 2017…with a wee bit of editing…<\/em><\/p>\n

(Note…this did not happen this Thanksgiving because I could not attend the yearly gathering…I caught a flu that I’m still getting over. But in all the digging into the homophobia of the 60s\/70s for the upcoming episode of A Coming Out Story, I began to feel that suffocating old stereotype dragging me back to a time when most of us didn’t dare live our lives openly, even if we were fine with being gay. Then this post appeared in my Facebook memories (I will often post in both places) and I had to marvel once again at how the anti-gay industrial complex just Does Not Get Us. And I can just hear them saying Oh, but you’re a Good<\/strong> homosexual. No I’m not. Don’t you dare be putting me into that pigeonhole. I am not a Good<\/strong> homosexual. I am a proud homosexual.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

——-<\/p>\n

\u201cGay Community\u201d is an awkward term, but the language doesn\u2019t seem to give us any other ones. We are people of a shared sexual orientation, and to a certain extent, a shared history of oppression. But there really isn\u2019t all that much uniting us. Things you would expect such as marriage equality and protections from discrimination in employment, housing, and the marketplace, often generate a surprising amount of static among us. And running beneath it all like a hidden underground stream is how being hated, and being taught to hate ourselves, damages our capacity for sexual intimacy, trust, and love. And even that is not exactly a shared experience among us.<\/p>\n

There is, and I am seeing more clearly with the passing of years, a distinct generational difference. Younglings living in a more accepting and affirming culture, having more and better, healthier, opportunities to date and discover love and desire in the ways heterosexual kids have for generations, are starting to look more and more like their heterosexual peers when talking about relationship issues. For a gay guy of my generation it is wonderful to witness. But then, inevitably, like snapping back out of a pleasant daydream, I must return to my own life, my own generation because that is where I am fixed in time and place, and where I reckon I will always belong. Among them is where I must find companionship, because only they understand me.<\/p>\n

They know what the world was like when John Lennon was alive, and Hendrix was playing at the Fillmore, and Jefferson was Airplane. They know what America was like before Reagan. When music came on vinyl disks and telephones had wires and shopping centers had newsstands and bookstores and we were putting footsteps on the moon. They know me. Or so I would like to believe anyway.<\/p>\n

But community is an awkward way of describing us and \u201cfamily\u201d is even more awkward. Yesterday I had Thanksgiving dinner with as much \u201cfamily\u201d here on the east coast as I have now and while the host was a good friend with a good heart whose company I thoroughly enjoy, most of the guests were gay guys of my generation, none of whom I really knew very well. A couple of them frequently drove the conversation into territory I found uncomfortable at best and distasteful mostly, and the rest just went gamely along and I kept my mouth shut.<\/p>\n

A conversation was started about the first gay bar we\u2019d ever been to, a thing I couldn\u2019t specifically recall but I gave it my best shot: a piano bar called Friends, and later Windows. I can\u2019t actually recall the first time I set foot in a gay bar\u2026or any other sort of bar for that matter. When I was a toddler my maternal grandmother would walk me to the grocery store periodically, and every time we passed by a bar she would point at the door and say \u201cthe devil lives there\u201d (yes grandma…and I’ll have what he’s having…) So never mind working up the nerve to enter a gay bar, my first step ever into a bar probably took a lot of nerve, but I don\u2019t now recall it. I remember Friends though, because it was the only gay bar at the time I felt comfortable in. And there was a reason for that. But the topic quickly took off and others of the group took it and ran with it into the backrooms and toilets.<\/p>\n

I tried to steer the conversation to When Did You First Come Out To Yourself. That generally went in the same direction. Eventually I made myself a drink and sat some distance from the others and just listened.<\/p>\n

Understand\u2026I don\u2019t particularly care what sorts of sexual shenanigans people get themselves into. It\u2019s not that important. In her biography (and I know I\u2019ve quoted this often here on the blog so just bear with me\u2026), the author Mary Renault is quoted as saying that politics like sex, is just a reflection of the person within, and if you\u2019re mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what matters is you\u2019re not the sort of person who behaves like that. People who talk at me that there is more to life than sex are missing it profoundly. Life\u2026the life you live\u2026and sex\u2026the sex you have\u2026is a reflection of the person within and it\u2019s the person within that matters. It matters to me that you aren\u2019t mean and selfish and cruel. The rest is detail.<\/p>\n

But sometimes the detail can be bothersome all the same. And especially when you are in the company of others who either consistently don\u2019t get yours or regard them as hangups you just need to get over. And that\u2019s one of those generational things I was speaking to earlier. My generation of gay men, post Stonewall, came of age when the gay rights movement was taking to the streets, angrily, loudly, renouncing the suit and tie assimilationist tactics of the Mattachine Society. It went from Michael in The Boys In The Band lamenting If we could just not hate ourselves so much,<\/em>\u00a0practically overnight to No fuckers we aren\u2019t just like you, and we don\u2019t want any part of your straight sexist sex-negative society!<\/em> Nuance is for reactionaries.<\/p>\n

When I was a teenager, I fell in love, as teenagers will. It was wonderful. I wanted that feeling to last forever. I thought I\u2019d found the person who could make that happen. But it didn\u2019t. So I kept looking. And looking. And looking. And now I\u2019m 64 and single and never had so much as a boyfriend let alone a spouse to have and to hold. And here I am on Thanksgiving day with a group of other mostly lonely old gay men listening to some of them talking about the time when a certain bathroom at the University of Maryland was a hookup spot, and random sex with strangers at this or that gay bar back in the day. There\u2019s a reason I couldn\u2019t contribute to any of those tales, but I\u2019m broken in a different way, so don\u2019t take any of this to mean I think I\u2019m better than they are because I don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Oscar Wilde once said that we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars. No, we are not all in the gutter. But some of us who are looking at the stars cannot help but notice all that darkness surrounding them. And that it is from that darkness we behold the stars. Some of us.<\/p>\n

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Reposted from Thanksgiving 2017…with a wee bit of editing… (Note…this did not happen this Thanksgiving because I could not attend the yearly gathering…I caught a flu that I’m still getting over. But in all the digging into the homophobia of the 60s\/70s for the upcoming episode of A Coming Out Story, I began to feel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[203,7],"tags":[165,204,157],"class_list":["post-12626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gently-tapping-my-pulpit","category-life","tag-love-and-sex","tag-the-broken-heart-chronicles","tag-the-old-man-chronicles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}