that’s what i was thinking about.
“und i’m zee only man, ja!”
“diddly deet dee dee! two orchids, diddly deet dee dee, two orchids! und i’m zee only man, ja!”
it’s possible that i know all of the words to all of the songs in “cabaret”, but i’ll spare you my singing them. you’re welcome.
“do you think the world is spinning out of control?” asked the begonia.
“you know, what with the shootings in movie theaters, temples of worship, a street full of pedestrians, indelicate political discourse, wars, famine, pestilence, syria, pakistan, evangelicals (“our morals are better than yours”), the lack of compassion for our fellow flowers man — whether immigrant (like you’re not), gay, a person of color (you know, “driving while black”–but not just behind a wheel, it’s your entire life), a woman (don’t let men tell you what you can or cannot do, ladies, it is a historically indefensible position) — the list is too long, and were i to be completely honest with you, i do have my own agenda; my season is short and soon i must return to my dormant state, laying eyes closed with infrequent waterings, and wait, wait, wait for you people to come to your senses. but i fear that may be folly. <sigh>”
i know i shouldn’t assume, but…
there are times when i think my head will explode at the insensitivity of my fellow man.
this time it’s personal (isn’t it always?) you’ll forgive me, but i’m going to single out a group of humans — heterosexuals, let’s say, and not to generalize, i’ll select one in particular (i do worry about the rest of you, though.)
a woman that i know, close to my age, with one child and a husband, that i also know, came up to me the other evening before a committee meeting that we both serve on began and said, “i have to show you this,” and as she pulled out her phone she looked at me again and continued, “but you won’t care about this, what do you care about children?” and turned to another heterosexual standing close by and went on, “you’ll love this video of my twin nephews laughing, it’s so sweet and delightful.” she pressed the play button and i was excused.
i ignored the snub and looked anyway and said something complimentary about how cute they were; we had our meeting, we left, end of story. except it isn’t, because, for the life of me, i cannot get over how hurt i am by her assumption — gay men don’t like children — and by her insensitivity to my feelings. am i wrong to feel this way? do you heterosexuals just assume gay men/people don’t like children and don’t have any interest in the triumphs and antics of small children? don’t answer too quickly…dig deep down and examine your feelings on this topic. because, you know, you should.
the fact is i love children. children and i get along famously and always have. i’m delighted that there are people on this earth who are willing to give up so much to continue producing and raising children–many of them do this job well (and many don’t, but that’s a story for another time).
i can’t bring myself to say anything to her; usually i’m not that shy, but this time it’s really set me back. maybe one day i’ll get past it and chalk it up to the battle we are still fighting to be recognized as human beings just like you.
it’s what i was thinking about.
and when you’re feeling camp, you should just roll with it.
“Ennis Del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing in around the aluminum door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes in blue. He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get them full on. The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the horse trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, “Give em to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.” –Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain” (from her collection of short stories, “Close Range, Wyoming Stories”)
a small town on the prairie gay child. of course, back then we weren’t ‘gay’; it was queer, faggot, sissy, homo, pansy, if you even heard what your neighbors, your classmates, your teachers, the preacher, the life guard at the public pool were saying about you behind your back or quietly to your mother over the backyard fence. ”you know, evelyn, he is a bit effeminate, aren’t you worried he may be, well, you know,” delivered with a nod and a wink or with the euphemisms “light in his loafers,” “limp-wristed.” what’s a mother to do?
my mother did nothing, at least nothing effective, for truly, what’s a mother to do when her boy child exhibits such tendencies? i was not rushed off to a therapist or put under any psychological scrutiny. there were no long talks about the birds and the bees and the way nature works (in the majority’s opinion at least). at this time in my life (the pre-pubescent years, 10, 11, 12) there were half-hearted attempts at leading by example: boy’s club, boy scouts, big brothers, and other forms of male dominant surrogacy. try as they might to mark me, i was resistant (but not impolite–after all, i did want to see these men with their clothes off, not for sexual gratification, but to get an idea of what a man looked like, you know, for future reference.) it’s not that i was playing with dolls or dressing up in my mother’s clothes (well, maybe not always) when she wasn’t at home. the fear of exposure, of being found out, i mean, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon at that age to know that you’re not quite like everyone else, but those fears lingered underneath the surface of my character until i was 20, perhaps even until today.
[an aside*: there was a period of time in these years when i would 'sneak' a spoonful of peanut butter, licking it clean sitting on the living room sofa, staring out the picture window, and when i was done, would slip the spoon underneath the couch to be retrieved at a later date for washing and replacement in its drawer. this went on for some time until one day when my mother was cleaning she discovered a half-licked-clean spoon with dried peanut butter under the sofa that i had put there when she had come home early one afternoon and i thought i might get in trouble for spoiling my dinner and then forgot to retrieve it later. "honey, you shouldn't be ashamed or embarrassed for having a spoonful of peanut butter before dinner," she said when i explained what had happened. but for some reason i was. and so i added it to the list of other things i wasn't good at hiding.]
i played with the neighbor children; we rolled down hills in the summer, rode our bikes, explored, built forts in the backyard, climbed trees, roller-skated, tumbled, and fell, scraping knees, elbows, the occasional bruise as big as a hand-print; spanked for some infraction that seemed important to adults, much less so to us children. if you had not stood with your pants/shorts around your ankles, held by your hands and whipped with your own cowboy belt, a hair brush, or the stinging slap of an angry adult hand across your buttocks <snigger, he said ‘buttocks’>, you really weren’t doing the whole ‘child’ thing the right way, now were you? later, showing off where you’d been hit to the neighbor kids, a bit of swagger marking your gait, a survivor of the wars.
by this time in my child-life there were chores. picking up dog poop (frozen dog poop being the worst, no matter how i tried to keep my mouth closed when i would go out in the frigid, oftentimes sub-zero weather to clean up our large backyard, hacking away with a garden trowel at the brown frozen waste; me wrapped and quilted in wool, scarves, gloves, hats, snowpants — or even with an extra pair of pants pulled up over; i’d be out there panting, sweating, possibly cursing my mother or mary, most assuredly cursing the dogs for shitting, stooped over with an old dustpan in one hand and the trowel in the other and a little fleck of crap would fly up–in slow motion–aimed directly for my open mouth, gulp. i’m surprised i didn’t die from it, it happened so often); mowing the lawn in the summer, raking leaves, and weeding–to this day it, of all the garden chores, is my least favorite–now that’s marking behavior.
[i have grown to love dandelions--do you remember taking the yellow flower heads and rubbing them on your arm to see if your secret infatuation loved you? i despaired of being found out that my secret love was another boy, or robert conrad from "the wild, wild west" t.v. show--that hairy chest! i only watched that show for the chance to see his hairy chest and those tight blue pants. excuse me for wandering away from the topic (he sighed), but wasn't that swipe with the dandelion flower on your palm, or hand, or arm also able to tell you if you liked butter? which also conjures up the tale of "little black sambo" and the pool of melted butter the tigers become in their dervish and the resulting delicious pancakes his mother makes. even a dandelion's dried flower, each seed whisked by the wind or your own little blow, lips pursed together, and the delight of watching each little parachute of a seed fly off into the sunlight. always more then to dig up eventually, but their gossamer charm in the meantime irresistible.]
it is impossible for me to remember exactly when we got our first t.v., although i do know when we didn’t have one which would be pre-1961. i wasn’t particularly enamored of t.v. watching as a child–when mary lived with us, homework and chores took first and second place in my after school schedule. there was something about sitting around doing nothing that irked the adults in my life. in my memory of our first t.v., a black & white box that sat on a low table with metal legs in a corner of the living room by the picture window, it was turned on in the evening after dinner, after the dishes had been washed and put away, after homework had been completed, after the dogs had been tended to, after, after, after…
the september of the year i turned eleven, “jonny quest” premiered. i was not then a big cartoon fan, those of you who know what i do for a living may be surprised to hear that; my favorite shows were ed sullivan and jackie gleason, carol burnett and later in the ’60s, sonny and cher, laugh-in and as i mentioned earlier, the wild, wild west or any western for that matter–cowboys always on my mind/groin.
jonny quest surprised me. they looked like a family unit to me (still do.) of course that thought would not have been something i would or could have vocalized when i was 11 and in love with race bannon, but with dr. quest so distracted by his work, jonny a blond (not unlike me), his friend hadji, exotic and smart, too; the dog bandit and all of them cared for, looked after by the dashing, handsome, manly, practical race bannon (a macgyver before there was a macgyver). i would sit on the floor in front of the t.v. engrossed in the action–so different from other cartoons, somehow more plausible; wanting with each passing second to be eaten by the t.v. and to become a part of the story unfolding in front of me–to be rescued by race, carried in his strong arms, delivered safely into the arms of my loving father; safe at last, cared for, loved by men.
i’ve just finished a new yorker story on the suicide of tyler clementi and the secrets he carried around with him and then took with him as he jumped from the george washington bridge–that impulse to disappear, to die, to just get out from under the burden of not telling someone, anyone, the world, how you feel and then to not have to worry about how they will react–combined with the daily fact that being gay is still marginalized and excused by “but i have gay friends” as if that excused their behavior, their vocabulary, their disregard for the deteriorating effect of their ignorance and their callousness.
i loved race bannon. i still do. his quiet way of looking after the people he loved, his life lived in service to his love; setting a standard of acceptance (unwittingly, i’m sure hanna-barbera had not set out to defend homosexuality) of a family unit different from the accepted standard. i learned the lesson, did you?
*you might be thinking right now, “but robert, your writing is seasoned with asides, diversions, and digressions,” to which i would reply, “true, it is how my brain works and i see no need to stop now.”
no discussion of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s can be had without talking about the politics of sex. besides, if as they say, all politics are personal* it would be a fruitless effort; no story would be the same and all stories would be the same one (an orgy of similarities, greased and slippery, rampant and limp.)
there they are, all lined up, posing for this group photo; the short one, the tall, the muscle-bound, barrel-chested, and model-thin, bald, moustachioed, bearded or shaved smooth, the priest, the artist, the chef and the thief (nothing but heartache); some with roadblocks of hair everywhere, slowing you down as you explored their terrain and others so smooth that your hand would slip right off of them as you stroked their haunches driving ever onward, a few so well-schooled that whispering with them, our heads under the covers, breath hot, lips together, was an education, and their opposites–all physical, nothing personal, cool to the touch, hard and uncaring (marble, veined in the black of night, glimmering under the disco light).
lasalle street, high-rise, or three-flat, southside, uptown, burroughs & ginsberg, lachaise (gaston), the boat basin at congress, miller’s pub & the berghoff, henry james, fyodor d. and the romantic poets, libraries and restaurant kitchens, leather, levis, and prep school, drag queen/straight man (men), socks on and socks off, backrooms, the bushes (a bar and a hedgerow), nightlife/afternoons only, red high top all stars, cellos, voyeurs, and drugs; a well-aimed mayonnaise jar that shattered on the street missing its mark not because i wanted it to miss, but because i’m a sissy and throw like a girl (so i was told, it was not my misogyny, but his), tops and bottoms and everything in-between–there is much to be said for the middle ground–role-playing, limits, agreements and a safe ‘word’ that would end it all (if you were lucky enough to have found a master with a heart, many didn’t, bruising ensued).
all of the heterosexual world writ large, in hyper-drive, grandiose illusions of what our sex meant, a carnival mirror reflection of what we decried as bourgeois, missionary, vanilla, and bland. all the while longing for that one, true love, a partner we could call our own, the picket fence and two cars in the garage (sometimes you may even have had a ‘chicken’ in the pot). three-ways and group sex, baths and the backrooms, the triumph of climax over being at home alone (either way you may have had a towel wrapped around your waist and your cock–or someone else’s– in your hand.)
of course, you continued to be an object of scrutiny and scientific study by anyone involved in the ‘me’ generation, the hip, the progressive all wanting a little of your fairy dust to sprinkle on their lives just as they imagined that you were able to turn your life into a tale of some kind of triumph; many of them not wanting you to step outside the roles of decorator, ribbon-clerk, hairdresser, dancer, actor (always suspect–there’s all that deep sharing–and the touching–that frightens them the most), making their lives more beautiful, just don’t step outside of those boundaries. you couldn’t possibly be a tinker tailor soldier spy teacher banker mechanic candlestick-maker (okay, maybe a candlestick-maker), but you know those gay men spent the 70s in the closet, some of whom i dated, some of whom i left for that reason because the lying was too much to bear or to hear (and i quote), “i’m not queer, i just like to fuck men sometimes,” as he dressed in the half-darkness of one late winter afternoon in my chicago apartment on his way to meet his fiancée for dinner–the last we saw of each other.
please understand that i believe all men are equal and as such deserve the same rights afforded to their neighbors, but, and it is a big BUT, our heterodoxy — however you describe it — deserves a place at the table as well. i want to live a life that’s my own and i believe that gay men and women live life differently than heterosexuals. so, speaking as a gay man…
*Quoting Christopher Hitchens in “Hitch 22″: As 1968 began to ebb into 1969 however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “the personal is political”. At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference”, to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” left: We earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. There are many ways of dating the moment when the left discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.
what conversation can be had about the 1970s without talking about sex? on the nights that i walked up dearborn to my mentor’s apartment north of division (elaine with her tangled fall of golden curls and those fragile little sticks of arms, her legs stuck out from a cable knit sweater–i don’t even remember what we would talk about or how she helped me); the walk would take me past a little block square park with the newberry library to its north and the masonic lodge with its magic and secrets to the south, the fall of leaves, autumn in chicago.
the stone facade somber, draped in ivy’s deep mourning
iron-gated against the decades, windows flash and spark in the
headlights of circling cars.
it is not easy for me to pinpoint when i figured out what exactly was happening in the park; what journey its inhabitants were on–i didn’t even notice that cars would circle it repeatedly until later. this was the time that i was finding what my sexuality was really about, who else may be like me (many more than i had thought)–i was only 20 and particularly naive, and particularly horny–just as a 20 year old should be.
darkness attracts these visitors,
it is their cloak of anonymity.
tending their casualness, they lounge
legs spread in invitation to passersby.
the next time, the next time i walked into the park on my way home, smoking a cigarette, a little nervous about what i didn’t know (before i’d graduated with some street smarts), but sure that i was on my way to knowing more. i sat on a bench across from another man who was pointedly ignoring me, his eyes catching the street lights, the car lights, his legs spread, on the lookout.
a quick flame of anticipation, smoke then unfurls
in careful examination of opportunities.
an open car door beckons, an ash of interest
flicked their way,
i was fascinated and turned on, afraid too. some secret signal reached him, he stood and shook a leg allowing his package to fall into place, packed tight against his thigh (delicious-looking, a drumstick, juicy) and walked to the curb where a man had opened a car door and my next lover (not true, but i had hoped) slipped into the dark leather seat waiting for him and the car took off. instead of circling the park it turned away and was gone.
fumbling freedom, release, all promised,
the blood rushing in your ears, but discovery, disclosure, dissolution,
was the true tempo of this dance of metal and flesh.
was that it? was that all there was? i walked home quickly, pushing my jeans down around my ankles as soon as the door to my apartment had closed behind me, leaning against it, rubbing myself to orgasm through my jockeys in record time. i went back to the park the next night, no pretense of going to elaine’s (i’d used that excuse once, what was the point, when my intention was to satisfy myself?)
fall’s leaves and car’s tires whisper, whimper,
skittering across the concrete, buried in the curb.
the sound of promises left untended by
these shepherds, forests, nights.
that night it was my turn to slip into a waiting car, confronting a panting older man, belly within inches of the steering wheel, too eager to grab my crotch, too quick too, pulling my hand and putting his own need ahead of mine. “let’s drive,” he looked at me and i knew i should step out, get out, excuse myself, politely, suddenly, but, but my curiosity and my desire (not for him, but for the act) was too strong and by the time i was hiding my panic, lighting, smoking, trying to engage in small talk, it was too late, we were off on our way up the street, cutting loose from the other circling cars.
slowly past the stone wall, this side, and that,
and around again, patience and
desperation in equal parts;
youth spectral, shades silhouetted in moonlight.
he was surprisingly strong, surprisingly quick to come, surprisingly slipping twenty dollars in my hand at a corner, “get us a cup of coffee, will ya, kid?” and when i got back from the corner diner with the hot paper cups, steaming, he was gone, the taillights of other cars replacing his. i thought for a just a moment that i might faint (embarrassment, fear). that what had happened hadn’t, that i knew what corner i was standing on (i didn’t), late on a fall night in chicago, that wind off the lake winding around my neck, a noose tightening its grip on my life.
the truth is much different than the fantasy we concoct about sex, about love, about our life. it’s always a little messier, a little more dirty, a little less proper, a little more like what we didn’t want, but accept anyway, always a little more hopeful than the truth would allow.
pulp fiction, part one
you wouldn’t be surprised to know that we spent holidays, particularly christmas, at my aunt and uncle’s house, would you? after all, they lived in the right part of town; they had the split level house with the finished basement (a pool table!) and the two car garage with an automatic (“genie”) roll-up door. everything, from the food to the decor, was always just so, just so perfect. my aunt did it all, from flocking the tree to putting up the lights at the top of the gable over the garage (when she wasn’t mulching the winter roses, knitting an afghan with silk yarn, adding rick-rack to a new apron she’d just made on her singer in her perfectly organized craft room–the third bedroom–and the one room that was my favorite of all the others.)
did i mention that her hair never moved? i don’t believe i ever saw her with anything but every hair in place, whether bouffant or hidden under a scarf, no wisp escaped — it would have meant defeat, had they misbehaved — and she thin as one of her crochet needles in her holiday sheath, red wool one year or blue the next — always coordinated with the holiday decor, so well, in fact, that if she stood still for a moment, you’d wonder where she’d went, someone would say, “where’s marilyn?” and her voice (if i can recall it) would pipe up from this corner or that, living room, dining room, kitchen, the back porch with a bag of garbage in her hand, the detritus of being the perfect hostess her burden.
of course i thought she was the paragon of all that was right with the world, at least as far as design and entertaining went (and only for the time we spent with her–when she wasn’t in front of me, she didn’t exist.) it wasn’t that my mother and i were in a position to emulate the opulence (as mean as it was) of her danish modern home with its walnut breakfront and the low slung dark blue couch with its nubby upholstery that seemed a mile long up against the picture window in the living room, but these holiday visits always spurred some home improvement project, interior in the winter, exterior in the summer–not that it would have mattered to her, because try as i might, i cannot ever remember her visiting our house and we only lived on the other side of town — perhaps no more than 5 miles away, our house was even on a paved road, but she just wouldn’t have ever found herself on our street or in our house with its braided rugs on linoleum floors–the neighbors across the street with their car hoods open, some kind of repair always going on. (this, of course, is possibly not true, but the fact remains that i can clearly recall being in her home, but cannot recall her being in our home.)
[a side note: after one christmas at their house, i remember preparing cheddar cheese cubes on toothpicks and sliced black olives on ritz crackers (or vice versa) and surprising my mother with a cocktail (whiskey, straight with a water side) and hors d'oeuvres --it's true, that's what i called them-- when she got home from work one night--i was probably 10 or 11--and she saying "where did you learn to do this?" which was a refrain i often heard her say, as i was always trying to prettify our lives--a voracious reader of redbook and family circle and as you may have surmised, slavishly devoted to the ideal perfection of my aunt's house-keeping, as remote as it might have been from our reality.]
on the other hand, her husband, my uncle, my mother’s half brother (10 years her junior almost to the day) came by to visit us on a fairly regular schedule–usually after working on saturday morning at his plumbing shop — he the boss/owner and not a plumber — would drive up the hill to the north side of town, dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt, pulling into the driveway (the crunch of gravel) or up to the curb in front of the house, his peculiar speech pattern (most sentences would start with “uh yup” and accompanied by a little duck of his head and a chuckle), and he and my mother would sit at the dining table or out on the patio in back of the house weather permitting and talk about their parents, their work, their lives and the kids (me and my cousin, rodney, two days older than i and an only child as well)–i’d reckon they would sort out whatever adults sorted out then–working out the little miscommunications, misinterpreted signals–the sign language of families–as well as the news of the day, he with a beer in a glass (served with the salt shaker which he’d sprinkle over the foam) or in later years, a glass of milk to quell the turmoil of an ulcer before he headed out to the elk’s club golf course for a round of golf and many more cocktails.
one christmas, just before my pubescence i went up to their bathroom, with its plush carpeting and when you shut the door, the muffled sound of the goings-on downstairs (a split level house, so it was just 6 or 7 up to the bed & bath–& beyond) would seem a world away; a scented candle burning in a holiday dish/jar/ and pine cones on the long tiled vanity (one year it was chocolate brown, another it was a dark green, money can do that for you–change things you know, little things that you wouldn’t have thought of if you didn’t have the money to make those little changes). it’s most likely that i used going to the bathroom as an excuse to get away from my cousin (in his own house, imagine!) because he didn’t like me and i knew that he was on his best behavior, “be nice to your cousin robert, it’s only for a few hours,” she’d say and he, “but mo-o-o-m, do i have to?” and like other only children i know he’d be patted on the head or back or shoulder or have his arm squeezed, hair messed with, (all of that imparts the essence of privilege and condescension, passed down like baldness or bad teeth or alcoholism, not unlike balzac’s “la cousine bette”, but without the triumphant revenge.)
we’d play pool or snooker (i was miserable at it due to lack of practice) or ping pong — which was worse, because any game with a moving object that arced through the air flummoxed me–i could never tell how close or far the ball was from me, swinging too early or too late at that little white ball — which, by the way, stings when it hits you if it’s been hit hard enough by your opponent, another reason not to like the game (or my cousin). i’d lose interest somewhere in the middle of a game and wander away, back upstairs to sit on the floor by my grandmother, she’d stroke my neck and absentmindedly pat me on the head while the murmur of the talk of adults continued, a cigarette smoke cloud floating above, shadowing the ceiling with its whorls of plaster (which my aunt had done herself with a whisk broom, the perfect evocation of her character.)
but there i am in the bathroom sitting on the closed toilet with its christmas cover made of many layers of green, white and red felt, holly & berries made of sequins, and snow from angel’s hair (like spun glass insulation–the stuff you can only handle with gloves on or you’ll cut yourself), and i reach into the magazine rack that’s positioned right in front of me and pull out “true detective” stories or some such, maybe “men’s adventure” the title not the important part — because there on the cover, chest heaving and bare (i learned that i preferred the hairy ones within minutes of discovering this trove of manliness) and i started paging through it, delighted with my discovery, maybe even a little tingling in the crotch, but because i’m not in puberty yet, maybe not so much, but the drawings and the stories captivated me; i’d scan the articles for the descriptions of the men and words like “swarthy”, “sweat glistening on his hairy chest”, “muscles straining”, “tumescence” (which i had to look up when i got home that evening in my big blue american heritage dictionary, and when i did learn what it meant–swollen–had to ponder how that figured into the story, and did not understand what it could have meant and was too confused about my feelings regarding men–such complicated feelings too, half-filled with lust, the other half wanting the comfort of a man’s arm around my shoulder, father to son, both feelings filled with love–to have asked anyone, including and especially my mother.)
and for a few minutes i’d lose myself in the heroic (am i the only one who sees how closely related the word heroic is to erotic?) deeds of manly men and the women who loved them, or if not love, lusted after them, needed them, relied upon them, called after them, “shane, shane, come back to me, shane,” or some such exotic name or perhaps they were known only by their last names, raleigh, windsor, jones. and afterward, after saving the damsel-in-distress, these men would not settle down with the woman, but ride off into a sunset, or back to war, always turning from the love of a good woman, in fact what it seemed to me was that they preferred the company of men. and that is it, isn’t it? they did prefer the company of other men; women were accessories, perhaps even a necessity, but the true romance, the heart of the story was the camaraderie of men in the heat of battle, in the jungle wilds, on the prairie, in the mountains, conquering, defeating, standing tall and erect over their vanquished enemies, alone or with a male partner, companion, lover.
finally i’d hear my name float up the stairs — breaking through the sound of blood buzzing in my ears — and i’d carefully place the magazine exactly where it had been in the magazine rack, flush the toilet i hadn’t used, wash my hands and step out into the hallway, making an entrance back down the stairs that looked as if i was coming from the craft room, such subterfuge a cover for what i took to be behavior outside the norm. who read those magazines? was it my uncle? surely not my aunt–but possibly my cousin? i know i felt like i had gotten away with something bad, and it wasn’t that i felt an attraction to men that i thought was bad (although i had put up with my share of “sissy” and “queer” , that bothered me a lot less than you might imagine) but that i had learned what it meant to be a man.
a few years later at my first visit to the notorious leather bar “the gold coast” in chicago you must imagine my surprise and delight when i found that same hyper-masculinity from the pulp magazines on display–the cowboy boots, the flannel shirts, the white t-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, the tight jeans showing off their manhood (a lovely word, is it not? so full of promise, so snake-y, so sexual), their hairy, heaving chests, with a few motorcycles parked out in front, that i could not help but marvel at the fact that i was not the only one influenced by these magazines. and it wasn’t just me, the graphic artists of the day also called up those pulp fiction heroics in their depictions of man-to-man sexual combat: tom of finland, toby, etienne whose work would decorate the bars & bath houses, the porn shops & the ‘art’ magazines, such as in touch or after dark. what the pulp writers had so exhaustively described in their stories, appeared to be true.
…more to come
when do you admit that beauty is all around you?
that even in the most mundane juxtaposition of color and form there is beauty?
beauty is not always gay.
and the choices we make when we decide beauty is in front of us are often difficult.
acceptance is perhaps the most difficult when you are reminded that you are out of your comfort zone.
but then you see that others have decided that their mean life is beautiful and you succumb to their choices, their decisions.
even when you are constantly reminded of the differences that still exist between your world and theirs.
