gay f(e)ather

Names I Have Known

2012-01-01T00:01:00.005-05:00

Donald, the name my mother wants to give me when I am born. No, my father says, they'll call him Donald Duck.

Douglas, the name they settle on. Douglas Jay. Where they get the Douglas, I don't know.

Jay, perhaps after the son of close family friends. Shortly before I am born, three-year-old Jay and his parents pull out of their driveway near the Shady Rest Motel. Two teenage boys are using Highway 2 as a drag strip. Jay and his parents never knew what hit them.

Douglas Jay Marlow! The name I hear when I am in trouble with my mother.

Number One Son. I love it when my dad calls me this.

Dougie, my name at home until I start kindergarten. What my grandmother calls me into my teenage years.

The Ugly Dougling, a name I give myself in third grade trying to redeem the deep sense I carry of being flawed, different, awkward, wrong. I want to hope against hope I might someday look into a pond and see reflected in its depths a beautiful swan rather than a place to drown myself.

Jeezo, the school bully's derisive label for me. And Eeeeeee. I don't have a clue what it means except that it's always accompanied his hand under my chin, thrusting my head up and back, baring my neck.

Queer, as in the game we play in gym class, Smear the Queer? But my classmates don't say it in a playful rambunctious tone.

Fag. Faggot. Terms I look up in the dictionary, tell myself it's not so bad to be called a bundle of sticks.

Pud, a name I know to be jeering, won't know until years later it carries derogatory sexual connotations.

Disco, not because I am a dancer. Because I have the audacity to confront my Christian college floormates about violating school rules by practicing dance steps in their dorm room. The name sticks like glue for four years.

Jay, what I call myself when I withdraw from college, go to live in Alaska.

Dewi, Welsh for David. The name I give myself after studying abroad in Wales. The name I am using when I fall in love with a man. The name I am using when I run horrified from that relationship into marriage with a woman.

Doug, the name I switch back to in order to please my wife who has always disliked Dewi.

Greg, what strangers most often call me when they are certain they know me from somewhere.

Melizza, my online persona in a role playing game, who meets and falls head over heels for a man. She/me/we don't know what to make of the very real accompanying feelings.

Bryn, another Welsh name I am enamored of. The one I give my online lover when we share our "real" names.

Dirty homosexual. Child-molester. Monster. Judas. Betrayer. Liar. Cock-sucking fudge-packer. Lowlife shit. Scum of the earth. Dog turd.Some of the nicer names I hear when I come out as a gay man.

Selfish, selfish, selfish. That's all you are, Selfish. I hear this so many times it's not funny. Never was.

Deceived of Satan, my brother's title for me. It helps him make sense of what is happening to our perfect family.

Reprobate. Damned. Consigned to hell. Delivered to Satan. Your name struck from our roll. Shunned by this fellowship of believers. So my church weighs in on how to address me.

Plaintiff, the court's cold legal term for me in reams of documents in divorce proceedings, child custody hearings, a case brought before the state court of appeals.

Bryn, the name I am using when my sense of self coalesces. The name on my revised birth certificate. On my social security card.

In Tolkein's Lord of the Rings saga Treebeard harumphs at the hobbits' names, so soon said and done. "In my culture, our names tell our story," he says. I add 10 middle names to mine. Verbal touchstones. I include references to my children, father and grandfathers.

Rab, a name that has lived in me since childhood. Since I read Esther Forbes' novel Johnny Tremain. Rab, the older, dashing good friend who looks out for his young friend.

Rab, the new name I am now trying on, trying out, ever so slowly living into.

Beloved, the root meaning of the name David, of the name Dewi. Beloved. Be loved. My experience of living with a man whom I treasure, who affirms, supports and treasures me. Be-loved. At root, the name I have for all life, all beings, all creation, all in flux, all changing, all in their own way, time and place, loved.

This essay appeared in the January 2012 issue of The Community Letter

AN AFFAIR OF THE HEART

2011-12-01T00:01:00.004-05:00

Blood-red Horse of Course, hairless and stuffed with cotton batting. I loved him. He was hairless because I loved him, because I'd plucked out his fur bit by bit, fuzzed it against my face and in my ear each time I lay down to sleep. He'd gone threadbare for love. Threadbare and shabby. And because he'd gone threadbare and shabby, my parents disposed of him.

I remember it this way: we took Horse of Course for a drive to the county dump. Down one long dirt road, then another, ending in an clearing ringed by pine forest. A parking area afforded space for several vehicles. I only ever saw it full at dusk. In our northern Minnesota backwoods, the dump was where the night show took place. At twilight, cars sidled in, families, young couples, old folks. Drivers parked so their headlights would shine out over the star attraction, the black bears that came to rummage through the day's leavings.

But this was daytime drama under a harsh bright sun. Dad parked the '47 Chevy atop the small rise. Nobody else there. A fire burned in one of the garbage piles below. I watched my red horse tumble over the edge, bounce down the sandy incline, land in the burning waste. I do not remember holding my mother's hand as I stood there. I do not remember feeling any tears on my face. I was two, maybe three years old.

"That never happened," my mother said, an edge to her voice, when I recounted this memory to her a year after my dad died. She and I were standing in her dining room beside a china cabinet filled with dishes, dolls, cups, gee-gaws. My husband Dave and I had trekked to southern Missouri to spend a week doing house and yard projects for her. "That never happened," she said again.

"That's the image I have in my head--Horse of Course rolling down the hill and into the fire."

"Well, it didn't happen." A long pause as she looked off into middle distance. "I wish we would have let you keep him."

I pressed the issue no further. My mother already blamed herself for my having come out gay. I figured this was another case of self-recrimination. You wouldn't have turned out like this if I had let you keep your stuffed animal. Why was I so worried about what the neighbors would think?

The lesson I learned at an early age: You cannot love what you love because you love it. You will love what we tell you to, whom we permit you to, that which we deem acceptable.

The message I hope my kids catch instead: Follow your heart. Love what and whom you will. Love matters more than anything.

Our family relocated to Indiana when I was five. Growing up, I was taught I owed my first allegiance to God, then to mother, church, family and Minnesota, in rank order. I was to trust what God and church said over what I heard anywhere else, including my own heart. Especially my own heart. "The heart is deceitful above all things," my mother said, quoting Jeremiah 17:9, "and desperately wicked. Who can know it?" Not my heart but God's word as written in the Bible served as instruction and guide.

Listen for God's voice deep within? No way. Too much like transcendental meditation, Quakers or the Moonies. Too woo woo. Too tricky to determine when it was God speaking and when it was me.

I knew it wasn't God speaking when I found myself attracted to other boys. That was the devil. That was my deceitfully wicked heart. That was sin, pure and simple, complex and tenacious. That was my ticket to hell, sure-fire assurance I would burn for eternity.

+ + +

Christmas morning the year I'd turned three, much was made over one specific package with my name on it. I tore off the paper to find a stuffed gray donkey with lonesome eyes of two large black buttons, each sewn atop a drooping oval of white felt over a larger drooping oval of red. One floppy gray ear held a small jingle bell. Pedro, read the attached nametag. Set down in writing, no questioning authority. "His name is Peed-row," my mother announced.

Peed-row carried me off on many an adventure. I did the same for him, toting him about by his deaf ear. My mother sewed that ear back on countless times. When I at last lost the ear altogether she made a replacement from the toe of a white cotton sock. By then I'd plucked about half of Peed-row's fur. During my high school days, Peed-row became my confidant, listened with a grave and soulful expression as I poured out my heart, told him about how the kids pushed me around, what names they had for me. Peed-row listened and I loved him for it. I wrote out my last will and testament, directing Peed-row be given to my brother Steve, passed on through the generations. I tucked this document behind a loose brick in the school entrance hall.

Today my brother and I are estranged over my having come out. Today Peed-row straddles the headboard of the four-poster rustic pine bed my husband and I share, presides with somber eyes over the activity of love.

+ + +

Church told me if I had faith, prayed earnestly, threw myself into the arms of God I'd be given victory over temptation. Over the allure of Frank Stassek's square chin, enormous dark eyes. My attraction to the shapely curve of Rick Scheesler's shoulders. The pull of pounding thighs as Rodney Young ran the basketball court.

I believed my same-sex attractions were not part of me. They were a foreign incursion by an power that did not have my best interests in mind. My job was to fight, conquer and overcome these desires, never to give them place or purchase in my mind or heart. I tried to resist, to rid myself of these attractions to no avail. No amount of prayer, faith, fasting, self-flagellation seemed to matter. Same-sex desire constantly reminded me what a failure I was, how far I was fallen from grace and God, how weak my will to live aright.

+ + +

My parents had allowed my year-younger brother Steve to keep Teddy even when that faithful companion was bare of all fur, missing his music box, weak in the joints. At age 8, my brother David, five years my junior, still had his much-loved stuffed bears--Pinky and Big Teddy. Then 13, I knew I was different from both brothers, deficient. I coveted whatever it was they had that made their life easier. Somewhere I'd taken a wrong turn. I fixated on the fact I'd never had a teddy bear. I put it atop my Christmas wish list. My parents were puzzled by this odd request, but obliged. I knew they had when I checked the gifts secreted in their bedroom closet. But it didn't happen, whatever magic I was hoping for when I opened that package on December 25, acted surprised. I turned the wind-up key; Rock-a-Bye Baby tinkled forth, devoid of answers. comfort. I never pulled any fur off that bear.

+ + +

At 24, I married a strong-willed woman, sure she would be my salvation on earth even as I believed Christ would be my salvation in heaven. Didn't work that-a-way. I was still tormented by the allure of men. And despised myself for it.

Deep the lesson was scribed in my soul: hate yourself for thinking, feeling, being this way. And count this hatred your highest virtue. (Hate yourself and love yourself for it? Nowadays, I count this a simple recipe for insanity.)

At the time, I didn't know how or where to find the answers I was seeking. More to the point, I didn't know how to phrase the questions.

My coming out process held several turning points. I sensed God speaking to me one Easter, believed deliverance from this lifelong curse of same-sex attraction was immanent. I swore to do my utmost to help it happen within a year. Eleven months later I stumbled into an internet message board chockablock with the stories of people who claimed to be what I had believed was impossible--both Christian and gay. Could such a cross between fish and fowl exist? Yet I recognized myself in their accounts of the lifelong struggle, the never measuring up, the deep deep knowledge that something within is flawed.

Could I be gay? No way. Yes, surely. No, unthinkable. Your answer please.

Declaring myself a gay man would end my marriage, end so many things, so many relationships. And yet I reeled from the possibility there might be a place for me in the world, a name for who I was, a reason why I felt as I did. This got my attention, whispered of life to come, of hope.

But could I square this with what God had to say in the Bible on the subject of homosexuality? No, I could not. And this stopped me cold. Almost.

How do I know if I'm gay? I put this question to the online bulletin board participants. How could I know, really and truly know? Said one respondent, "If you have to ask, you can't be gay." There. I had my answer. But it didn't ring true for me.

Another man joked that he had a sure-fire test. I emailed him privately to say I was all ears. He suggested I imagine I'd died and gone to heaven; God offers me choice of two beds--one with the most beautiful woman in the world in it and one with the most gorgeous man; which would I choose?

My heart sank. This was not the test to lay to rest all my fears. "I'd choose the bed with the man in it, no question," I responded. "But since I'm in heaven, I can't choose a sinful response, so I would know God is OK with it."

This the crux of the matter: what would God think? What would my family think? My church? Minnesota? All these people and forces who held sway over my life. Whose opinion was more important than mine.

+ + +

Family shopping trips were rare excursions when I was a boy. The September I entered Mrs. Hewitt's third grade class, my parents took all five of their children to a department store in the big city. There I was taken by one particular stuffed animal--a six foot long snake in bold magenta. Cloth eyes, red felt tongue. I made sure my parents knew how much I wanted it. "We don't have money to spend on each of you kids right now," my mother said. I nodded. I knew our family wasn't rich. Come Christmas my heart leapt to find that pink-red snake in a package under the tree, my name it. My father had purchased it on that very trip while I was across the store with my mother. Now I smile to think of my parents giving me so phallic a symbol. And my naming it Ferocious. He was soon wrapped around my arm, my neck, my chest, my affections. In childhood he served as jump rope, lariat, repelling cable and more. In my coming out I took him with me when I moved out of the house. He served as touchstone, lifeline, reminded me I am permitted sometimes to love what I love.

+ + +

In coming out I made the conscious decision to look within my heart and trust what I find there, to believe in the value of my affections, the validity of my experience. To love what I love. Ferociously. To say yes to life in the form it presents itself.

This turned my world on its ear. Family, friends, church, employer, trusted others threw me out, consigned me to hell, eyed my tumble from grace. In mind's eye I stood alone on cliff's edge, stared out over a vast wasteland, flicking flaming tongues below, wondered what would happen to me.

Life.

Life happened to me. Pain and anguish and loss and loneliness. Joy and wild gladness, healing and acceptance from members of my own tribe. Laughter and love. Yes, love happened to me, too. Came along a man when I'd had all the stuffing knocked out of me. Picked me up and held me. At my lowest ebb, loved me.

Dared I trust him? Dared love him? I listened to my heart. Yes, it said. Yes.

Yes, I said. Yes. We've been together ever since, some 16 years.

With practice and a certain long difficult repentance, I keep learning to listen to my heart and to trust the wisdom within. On my best days I experience this as living in tune with the divine, expressing gratitude and love, celebrating those times when these manifest in exuberant joy.

Other days, life sucks. Finding the grace and gumption to say "thank you" and meaning it as much as possible, this is the heart's gift. To recognize weakness, inadequacy, failure, pain and to be present to it. Accept it. Say yes.

I shall never be perfect, not in the way I once thought I was called to be. But as I listen to my heart I discover I live in a world infused with the sacred. I choose awareness as often as I remember to do so. I feel my feelings, breathe into the moment, realize I am not alone, walk in wonder, embrace mystery. Say yes.

An abbreviated version of this essay appeared in the December issue of The Community Letter

AUTOMATONS 'R' US

2011-11-01T08:54:00.002-04:00

I had never seen anything like it, of that I was sure. The creature erupted spontaneously, grew quickly, gathered strength, energy and power right before my eyes. Soon it was massive, undulating, amorphous—and hungry. It sported 100 arms, half as many heads, spoke with one voice.

Only later did I realize I have seen it many times before. No, not so much have seen as felt it, feel it. In fact, I feel its presence almost every day—almost all the time.

But back to the moment.

Last month my husband Dave and I participated in a weeklong communal gathering that welcomes people of any sexuality, orientation, gender identity or expression. Over 100 of us camped in the woods of Eastern Tennessee, ate, played, worked, danced and drummed together.

At sun set Friday evening the weather turned unexpectedly chilly. A few people ringed the communal campfire. Several more lay huddled on a nearby grassy knoll, warming themselves by group body heat. Each lay his or her head on another's belly. Some interlocked arms and legs. "Look! It's a puppy pile," said one man as he hurried to join. The clew grew larger by the minute as others followed suit.

We approached with caution. Dave had sprained his ankle and was walking with difficulty. We opted to steer clear of the frivolity, aimed instead for the fire. As we made to pass by, arms reached out grasping, beckoning. Voices called, "Join us! Join us!"

We shook our heads, smiled our apologies to the multi-limbed creature, gestured toward the fire.

"Joooooooiiiiiiiin usssssss!"

From somewhere in the deepening twilight came a single voice: "No! Don't feed it! Get away while you still can!"

We laughed, walked on over to the fire, joined a drumming circle. I tapped out a repetitive line—one and two and three and four. But I kept an eye on the mass of people on the knoll. I loved what was going on there, a spontaneous action, an event, a happening. It embodied humor, served a practical function and fostered togetherness. Plus, the participants were having a lot of fun.

"We could feel each other laugh," one of the group members told me later. "We all had our heads on each others' bellies and we could feel the ripples of laughter. Words, too. A word would just erupt and we'd all chant it in unison. We called ourselves a 'pheno-moeba.'" My informant was located on the outer edge of the group. "I guess I was the asshole of the creature," he said.

One and two and three and four. The moon rose over Short Mountain. The pheno-moeba howled in delight. One and two and three and four. I marveled at how long they kept at it. And with such enthusiasm. With their bodies, their voices, their coming together, they were creating community. They were being playful with it. They were keeping each other warm. And having a great time all the while.

One and two and three and four. A fan dancer decked out in white feathers and sequined drag came by and presented impromptu entertainment. Flashlights served as makeshift spotlights. When the show concluded the howling resumed.

Then the single voice again, this time preaching a gospel of freedom. "You are all individuals! You each have your own mind! You can think independently!"

From 50 mouths erupted one word: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

"WE ARE ONE!" the creature insisted. "ONE! ONE!" The prophetic voice was silenced. Night blanketed the hillside; I couldn't see if the preacher-prophet escaped or if he was pulled in and subsumed into the group mind.

One and two and three and four. I pondered what was playing out alongside me. A parable of sorts about groupthink, about the unwritten codes that pressure us to conform, walk, talk, dress, vote, buy, spend, waste same as everyone else. The call to uniformity. In the larger society and in our subculture niches, as well. The comfort and warmth of being sucked in, feeling a part of a whole. The institutions—church, family, academe, work, legal system, politics—that define, reward and reinforce acceptable behavior. And punish anything else. The voices that cry in the wilderness, speak out against the blob, the pheno-moeba of social structure, stricture, prejudice. What happens to them.

A sudden chill of recognition. Although I do not see a physical creature called Societal Pressure, I feel it breathing down my neck in nearly every aspect of life: I can't do/say/think/love/be that. What will the neighbors think? What will my mother say? Will people like me? Will I be accepted?

Dare I stand against the pheno-moeba? Do I? Will I? Will you?

UNRESOLVED ANGER IS A LEAKY ROOF

2011-10-01T00:01:00.002-04:00

A leaky roof? Been there. Worse, not having the money to fix it. Been there, too. So I sympathized a few years back with the neighbors down the road when they tacked a blue tarp across the east end of their roof. Not always easy, living in an old house.

I like old houses. They have character, heritage. They speak soulfully to me about the human condition. I want to honor what is aged. Protect, preserve, enjoy, learn from it. Yet the aging process is not always graceful. Left untended, a leaky roof robs energy, destroys what it was meant to protect.

Unresolved anger is a leaky roof. The problem is there all the time, even if not always evident. When storms hit there's no hiding it, no time to fix it; it may only get worse. It affects more than one person.

Over at the neighbors' house, the blue tarp crackled in the summer sun, autumn wind and winter weather. When spring rains came pounding down, I hoped the family who lived there was staying dry. I didn't notice them move out, didn't know they'd gone. But as I drove past the house one spring day I was shocked to see the huge trees that lined their lane all toppled. The trees next to the house had been felled too, willy-nilly. One had crashed through the middle of the garage roof, another had smashed into the side of the house.

"Did you see what happened to that house!?" Dave asked me when I got home.

"I did. I am so sad. Looks to me like someone was angry. To cut down trees like that smacks of rage."

"Funny you should say that," Dave said. "I thought the same thing."

If old homes are to be respected, I feel even more strongly about old trees. Seeing those trees—far older than me, alive longer than whomever hacked them down—thrown over without regard, without care, ripped at something in me. We cannot do violence to another—person, plant, animal, object—without doing violence to our souls. As I see it, whoever was responsible for this destruction tore at the spirit within.

When next I drove past, the house was gone. Those huge trees, gone. Had they dug a hole, buried it all? Had they cut up the trees and hauled them away? Only a large patch of trammeled earth marked the site that once housed a farm family, their hopes, dreams, pain, sorrow, despair, joys.

Later that spring the entire place was plowed under, planted. I felt gratified to see stunted corn grow where the house had stood, where the trees had been cut down. I was glad the harvest of rage was almost nil.

The next year's soybeans grew low to the ground. Scraggly things, nothing to write home about. And I was glad. I wanted that land to be as if it were sown with salt, never again to give birth to anything, to be forever cursed. That would show them. I wanted whomever exercised such anger to pay for it the rest of his or her life. I wanted that block of land to be blighted, to stand as testimony against anger and mistreatment.

But life is stronger than my revenge fantasies.

Corn again the next year. And I had to look twice, three times, to identify the place where the trees once shaded the long summer afternoons. Life was coming back into the soil, reaching up into the plants, filling out the grain. I was disappointed.

If I can nurse a grudge, why not nature? Must life go on, take over, will to continue? If I am sad and angry, cannot the whole world be sad and angry too? And if not the whole world, why not this little patch of it? Don't the consequences of our actions reverberate through a lifetime? How can healing take place so soon?

It's been five years now. The corn grew almost consistently well across the entire field this year. Life's message to me: Let grow and move on.

Life has been reminding me lately that I carry resentment, still wish ill upon those who reacted harshly to my coming out. I don't care to hear this. I've wrapped myself in a blue tarp, done what I needed to get by. Yet this old house of me requires structural repair. And that entails the hard work of forgiveness. The sun may be shining right now—but how long before the next storm hits?

Betcha if I keep my eyes open, life will offer me today some small chance to practice forgiveness, letting go, letting grow.

This essay appeared in the October issue of The Community Letter

AH, MEN! AMEN!

2011-09-02T18:16:00.007-04:00

I can live on glimpses. I have to. By choice, my husband Dave and I make our home in a secluded rural area. This offers us much in the way of tranquility, lessons from nature, a quiet retreat from the world. What it doesn't offer is men. Most weeks I can count on my fingers the number of different men I see—Dave and my several male coworkers—and still have my thumbs left over.

There are months when I don't make it into town at all. Used to, Dave was in town every weekday for his job; he could run errands, get the groceries. Now in retirement, he still gets to town more often than I. Those times I do land in civilization I arrive ravenous for the sight, sound and smell of living, breathing male flesh. Hunger is the best sauce, says the proverb. When I'm on full alert, even a walk through the grocery store serves up a saucy feast for the senses. And don't even get me started on Saturday mornings at the lumberyard.

And then there was the other Tuesday. Oh my gosh. I was on my way to work when I saw him. Shirtless, he stood at the end of his parents' driveway, hoisted two empty garbage cans. This threw his shoulders back, thrust his chest forward. His pecs were popping, biceps flexing as he hefted the twin containers. I wanted to slam on the brakes, gawk and gawk some more. I wanted an 8 x 10" glossy. Autographed. With a phone number.

He's the neighbor's boy, college kid home for the summer. I first saw him from a distance about a month ago, out in the field helping his father bale hay. He looked beautiful. Dumb, maybe, for having stripped off his shirt while haying, but mostly beautiful. Thing is, for me nearly every man looks gorgeous from a distance. My imagination fills in details, usually in his favor. And mine.

I had not seen this man face-on, close-up before. Some things are worth the wait. Some moments last forever. As I say, I can live on glimpses.

I can see him even now. Blonde curls wreathe a classic face, rounded full lips, strong chin. Suntanned skin ripples over a shapely body. He might have stepped out of a sacred oak tree or descended a sky bridge from Mount Olympus. Striking, striking man. He is a 3-D iteration—in living color—of the men I pant after in photo books.

And then I flashed on past him, cursing under my breath the oncoming truck that made me wrench my eyes back to the road. I silenced the radio so I could savor the moment, savor him, fix him in mind's eye, exult over such perfectly sculpted pecs occupying space within three-quarters mile of our house. Ah, me. Ah, men. Amen.

Surely such beauty doesn't inhabit every oak tree between home and work. Or maybe it does. Maybe the whole world is sacred, reveals itself as such to anyone who is looking.

His looks have stayed with me. I've watched for him ever since. Begun to think I made him up, or if not, saw more than there was to see. Maybe he's not that good looking after all. Maybe I have an overactive imagination.

And then I think, well, so what? If the rapturous vision doesn't always hold up under close scrutiny, so what? There's plenty of ugliness run amok in the world; I know this. I don't think it would be such a bad thing if we all saw Greek gods in oak trees . . . if we all saw the sacred in the everyday, the divine in the ordinary . . . if we started treating each other as if we were all made of stardust, as if we were all somehow celestial beings.

I caught a glimpse of the ineffable in the college-age son of a neighbor standing cheek-to-jowl with trash cans. And you can bet I keep my eyes peeled every time I pass those oak trees at the end of his drive. If I watch closely, maybe I will see him again.

Or maybe, if I'm attentive and willing to slow down, maybe I'll look within and catch a glimpse of god as close to me as my own heartbeat. The mystics tell us the divine dwells within—within me, within you, within all life, all beings. In all that is, there gleams some spark of the creative energy that animates the world. Not in every instance so visually arresting—alas!—but still, when carefully considered and understood, every bit as beautiful.

This article appeared in the September issue of The Community Letter.

GOOSE ME AGAIN, WILL YA?

2011-08-01T00:01:00.002-04:00

He stood behind the ravaged corpse, blood staining his hands, no apology in his black eyes. The white wall behind him was dotted with crimson handprints as if he had been creating art out of gore.

When I have no words to express what's going on inside, sometimes a line from a poem nails my feeling. As I looked at the carnage, a question from Stanley Kunitz' The Layers came to mind: "How shall my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?"

Then came a question spoken aloud by my husband Dave: "What do you want to do with him?"

What indeed?

I love geese. In particular, I love Chinese geese, the most cantankerous, ornery and aggressive of all breeds of domesticated geese. But also the most garrulous. They always have something to say, will offer an opinion on anything.

Several years back Dave and I reared two Chinese goslings. I have warm memories of going out to pick wild black raspberries one summer, leading a parade of two humans, a raccoon foundling, a dog, cat and two young geese. We all of us picked raspberries, even if only two of us deposited any in the bucket.

I love geese. I love their antics, their gregariousness, their individual temperaments. I see myself in their headlong rush to catch up, being too dense to find simple routes through barriers, the way they think they know it all, imagine themselves far bigger and braver than they are.

The woods around us teem with predators: fox, coyote, raccoon. Probably a weasel or two, as well. We'd had the geese two or three years when some creature of the night killed them, first one then the other. After the second strike, I wandered the yard weeping, clutching a white feathered body to my chest. Eventually my arms grew tired. I dug a grave. A friend gave us a concrete goose statue to mark the site.

These wondrously recalcitrant creatures had been my teachers about life, anger, self-centeredness and getting along with others. And now they were dead.

We've been gooseless the last few years and I didn't realize how much I missed the excited trumpet call of a welcome, soft murmurs of grassy contentment, the way a goose always gets the last word. Didn't remember until this spring when we came home from the farmers' supply store with three goslings, two white Chinese and a gray-brown Toulouse. I was in heaven.

They lived in a box in the dining room the first two weeks, then in a corner of the basement until they were big enough to sleep outdoors in a predator-proof cage. During the day we gave them run of a large pen with a goosecote (a doghouse-like structure) for shelter. Then Dave and I returned from an afternoon trip to town to find one of our Chinese geese missing from the pen. We beefed up security, but about a week later, a second goose disappeared. I looked for her, looked for feathers, evidence of (forgive me) fowl play. I saw nothing. Poor feathered thing. I hoped the end was quick.

Dave conducted a more thorough search. He shone a flashlight into the back of the goosecote. "Come look," he called.

I looked. There was my beloved Chinese goose, snow white feathers spattered with blood, body rent asunder. And there, at the back of the cote, caught literally red-handed, a raccoon, staring up with beady eyes.

What to do? Dave put this question to me. I considered the options. Did I want to get a gun, blow the back out of the goosecote and the hell out of the murderer? I could get a pitchfork, impale the hard-hearted creature. Or seal up the door, let it starve to death.

"Let's let him go," I said to Dave. "The woods are full of raccoons. What will we accomplish by killing this one?"

I removed the dead goose from the cote, let the wild creature be. Dug a grave near the concrete statue. The spade turned up a white grub, ugly toothsome creature with a grey butt, orange-yellow face and legs. I focused my anger on that grub, held it back, threw it to the banty chicks temporarily housed in the basement. They looked askance at it until the biggest of them pecked at it, found it to his liking, chawed it down.

Even in death, geese teach me about dealing with loss: mourn what is taken, give focus to anger, let go resentment and revenge, honor the departed, allow life to feed life, learn that to love is to risk loss. Know it's worth it.

Bryn Marlow lives in Indiana on a 1930s farmstead with his husband Dave who mopes about the house saying, "I can't stop thinking about that poor grub." This letter appeared in the August issue of The Community Letter. Photo credit: Rocket Ship, flickr.com

THE WONDER OF AWARENESS

2011-07-01T00:01:00.003-04:00

I am not one to talk about awareness. Not when I am surprised every mid-April to learn income taxes are due. But I do have moments of lucidity when something rivets my attention. The threat of imminent death, for example. Or immanent sex. Sometimes, too, quiet moments of reflection heighten my awareness.

Small wonder, then, that I was feeling especially aware this past Thursday while sitting in the hospital waiting room outside the cardiologist’s office alongside the sexiest man I know.

Two weeks ago, on the day my husband Dave retired after 24 years at this same hospital, he went to see his doctor about recurrent chest pain. A treadmill stress test uncovered some abnormality. He was referred to this cardiologist. He was told to arrive 20 minutes before the appointment to fill out paperwork.

I took the afternoon off work so I could accompany him. I was late. Dave already had the pickup running when I pulled in the drive. I jumped in and we sped off, sped down the country roads, silence heavy between us.

We arrive at the office only three minutes late. I breathe a sigh of relief. The “paperwork” amounts to three questions the receptionist puts to him in rapid succession. I’m not listening. My eyes are on the man next to us. Slim-bodied and a little shorter than Dave’s 5'-7", thick silver hair cascades over his shoulders and part way down his back. He wears a long-sleeved pink dress shirt and jeans, huge belt buckle, shoes of Italian leather. I keep looking at him, stealing glances. As we seat ourselves in the waiting room for nearly an hour-long wait, I ask Dave, “Do you think that man is gay?”

He knows who I’m talking about. “The man at the counter? What makes you think so?”

“He’s violating social expectaions.”

“How so?”

“He has long long hair. He’s slim and trim. He was telling the receptionist he watches what he eats. He’s wearing pink.”

“Hmm.” Unlike me, Dave is slow to leap to conclusions about people’s sexual orientation.

“This is Indiana,” I say. “Chances are good.”

“Hmm.”

Silence. Then I stare at my husband.

“What,” he says. He knows I’m up to something.

“Want to break some social expectations?”

“Not exactly.”

“You already are,” I say. “You’re sitting too close to another man. You’re thin. You take care of yourself. You look years younger than your actual age. But I could help you bust a few more.”

He gives me a look.

“Bob Wallace?” A woman’s voice. The man in a wheelchair near us jerks his head up. His daughter has stepped out for a moment, however, and isn’t here to push his wheelchair. The nurse tells him she’ll call him again in a few minutes. She does. Daughter has yet to return. More waiting. Third time’s the charm for Bob.

I’m about to pick up an issue of Angina, sole magazine in the wall rack, when Dave’s name is called.

All the cardiologists here are top-notch. Asked which one he preferred, Dave chose the cutest of the bunch. He has good taste in men, my husband. This doctor has a full head of close-cropped dark hair shading to gray, gray-blue eyes, dark eyebrows, a classic profile, compact muscled body.

Doesn’t hurt that he delivers good news. The abnormality in the stress test probably indicates nothing. Dave has none of the risk factors for coronary heart disease, except that he is male and over 50. The physician recommends a low-level dosage of medication to regulate blood pressure, keep the heart from beating too fast.

“Come see me again in a month.”

Hoo yah.

+ + +

Our mood is upbeat as we leave the hospital to run errands en route home. First stop, the expensive grocery store for a few items the cut-rate shop doesn’t carry. Whilst I flip thru a magazine on raising chickens, Dave leafs through a photo collection of the royal wedding. How very gay we are, I think. Here I am looking at cocks while he’s checking out the queens.

Several minutes later Dave gives me a guilty glance. “I know I’m taking a lot of time,” he says, “but I’m enjoying this.”

I tell him not to hurry. I am aware of how little time we have together, any of us, how sweet our shared moments. Attentiveness offers this gift: it reveals the wonder in the everyday.

As we pull out of the parking lot Dave thumps the steering wheel, “Man, I like living with you!”

“And I with you.” I reach over and lay my hand on his thigh. Warm sunshine glints through the open window. A small black jumping spider edges along the windshield wiper. A nearby cardinal sings, “Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty!”

An edited version of this essay appeared in the July issue of the Community Letter.

WE'RE NOT THERE ANYMORE

2011-06-01T00:01:00.006-04:00

My husband Dave very recently retired after 24 years as chaplain with hospice. He looks forward to having time for creative pursuits. Yet even as he says hello to his creative self, he says goodbye to position and daily routine, patient contact and serving as part of a hospice team. He is defined by the space he no longer occupies.

Dave's last day at work was Friday. He left at 3:00, headed for a 3:15 doctor's appointment regarding his heart. "This is not how I envisioned starting my retirement," he said. He's been feeling tightness and sharp jabbing pains in his chest—angina pectoris.

And so we are at the hospital. He's here for tests. I'm here for him. I feel a pang when I look at this man I adore, when I place a hand on his defined pecs, know I love him, fear losing him. I want to hear that all is well, that this pain is perhaps the result of stress and major life transition.

Today Dave will undertake a treadmill stress test with radioactive dye coursing through his system. Just now he is in line for a blood draw when the man behind him engages him in conversation. This fellow had a heart transplant three years ago. Doctors had given him 10 months to live without the transplant, 10 years with it. He opted to pursue treatment.

"I used to weigh 430 pounds," he tells Dave. "I hated shopping for clothes. I felt like I was buying a couch cover when I bought a pair of pants." Before his heart transplant he lost 60 pounds and had bariatric surgery. He's now down to 180 pounds and says he is doing very well, feels great.

Dave says hearing this man's story helps him put his own troubles in perspective. "I realize I'm worried about my condition and there are people who face far greater challenges than I do."

What I hear is how we are defined in part by the space we no longer occupy. This man once weighed 250 pounds more than he does now, and he readily shares this information with a stranger. Part of who he is now is what he does not have. He no longer has the heart he was born with. He no longer has 250 pounds that were once a part of him. These losses allow him to live and to live more fully, but that doesn't mean that he's forgotten about them or no longer thinks about them. In an intangible, invisible way they are a part of who he is.

Dave and I later stand at the radiology counter. An elderly woman comes out of the waiting room, looks about, looks bewildered. The receptionist turns her attention from us to the woman.

"They wheeled your husband down to Area 2. You were on the phone so I didn't interrupt you. Go down this hallway to the desk in Area 2 and they'll tell you where he is."

The woman nods and steps away, then turns back. "When you've been married to a man for 60 years, you miss him when he's not around."

Dave says he hears this as a need to talk, invitation to dialogue, plea for help. I hear a comment about loss, about self-definition, about defining oneself by what or who is not there—or here.

I gauge such encounters through the screen or filter of my own experience. Who am I? I am who I am not; I am the space I no longer occupy. I am the father whose children are lost to him, whose children choose to have nothing to do with him. I am the father whose eldest son at age 10 said, "Dad, I don't want to see or talk to you again." I am the father whose twin sons when they turned 14, obtained a restraining order to put a stop to our visitation together. At issue: my being gay. My being an openly affirming gay man. My being a gay man with the temerity to believe I'm not going to hell for being who I am.

I define myself in part by the space I do not occupy, by the children who are lost to me. By the heart space that is empty, the echo I hear when I call my sons' names. Is this me, the un-father, not-father, used-to-be father? Yes, part of who I am is who I am not. But I sometimes wonder if I spend too much time looking at the empty half of the glass. Still, to be human is to experience loss.

The stress test over, we go to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled. The woman in line behind us says she's been up since 3:00 this morning. Her husband is in the hospital with an unknown heart condition. She received a middle-of-the-night call from the nursing staff suggesting she come sit with him. None of their three children could join her. She's having to go it alone.

"I don't know what I will do if something happens to him," she says. "We're barely making it on two incomes now."

Who will she be when her husband dies? How will she handle a new definition of self when it smacks her in the face? How does any of us handle loss? We adapt, we cope. We grieve. We move on, we get stuck. We do the best we can, the best we know how. We rely on each other. We tell our stories. To anyone who will listen. This is part of being human, too.

Later this month, come Pride Day, I'll be thinking of this as I celebrate us as a people of courage and spirit, as I listen to the stories told of who we are, where we've come from, how we define ourselves. We are who we are—and also who we are not.

This essay appeared in the June issue of The Community Letter.

CAPTAIN JELL-O RIDES AGAIN

2011-05-01T11:24:00.002-04:00

I don't think I was born to my parents at all. I think they opened a box of lime-flavored Jell-O, ripped the top off the brown packet inside, poured the powdery contents into a bowl, stirred in boiling water and ice cubes, and–voila!–there I was. Ready to be poured into a waiting mold. All my life I've let others define my boundaries; decide what shape I am to fill.

On the other hand, I'm convinced my friend Bill began life as a hawthorn tree. His parents planted him in the good earth, watched their sapling son grow tall, strong and iron-willed. Like the sharp-spiked hawthorn, Bill can be worse than prickly if you get too close. Grab him the wrong way and you'll be sorry.

Bill seems to have an inborn ability to summon boundaries. Something comes up automatically in him, some self-protective mechanism which I totally lack. He swells up like the puff adder who when threatened pretends to be a cobra. Mess with him or those he loves and you're in for a world of trouble.

Mess with me and I probably won't even notice. Or if I do, I'll tell myself I deserve whatever ill treatment comes my way. I am the puffball. Threaten me and I just sit there. Step on me and I emit a little gasp and spew green spores into the air.

Growing up, I didn't know I was gay. Didn't know the meaning of the word. Didn't know there was a word to describe who I was inside. Knew I was different; couldn't tell you how. Knew that difference was wrong. Knew I was somehow flawed, disordered down deep inside, sinful, wrong. All this without ever learning there was a term to describe me, without learning there were others like me, that who I was had validity in and of itself.

Instead, I picked up on the message that who I was inside was worthless. That if I were to find acceptance and place in the world, it would be granted me to the extent I made my mother happy, to the extent I followed religious teaching, to the extent I paid attention in school and followed the rules.

I grew adept at molding myself into the exact shape of others' expectations. My parents wanted an obedient cheerful child. Voila. The church wanted a good boy, one who told his friends about Jesus, who memorized Bible verses and volunteered time and energy. Voila. Teacher wanted answers, homework done, legible handwriting, no lip. Voila.

Later I met the demands of professor, employer, girlfriend, fiancée, wife with similar aplomb. I look back now and shudder to remember my boss praise me with, "You have a real knack for knowing what I want." Voila. That's how I survived in a world where I felt nobody would want me if they really knew who I am. Given a whiff of your expectations, I'd mold myself to them. Captain Jell-O rides again!

I wish I could say coming out changed all this. My mother would probably say so. She experienced my coming out as a slap in her face. To me, in coming out I signaled I would no longer kowtow to what and who others wanted me to be. At least in this one area I would claim my right to exist. I would claim my own life. I would live into it. My announcement met with something less than widespread acclaim.

"Bastard," said family. "Not here you won't."

"Fired," said employer. "Not here you won't."

"Reprobate," said church. "Not here you won't."

"Betrayer," said wife. "Not here you won't."

Suddenly I was running naked through a forest of hawthorn trees. Bloody business, that. Some of the puncture wounds are still tender, 16 years later.

I have not altogether broken with the past; coming out did not reshape me into an entirely new person. I'm still beset with Jell-O-like tendencies. What's changed for me is that I now ride though life with greater awareness of when and how I'm shaping myself into another's mold. Sometimes I make conscious choices to shape myself this way or that; sometimes I refuse to bend and flex. Sometimes only afterwards do I say, "Gosh, how very Captain Jell-O of me!" I then resolve to be on the alert, watch for it the next time. I forgive myself and move on.

I'll never be a hawthorn tree. It's not my nature. And why be something I'm not? I'm proud of myself those times I ask this same question when I feel the urge to take up my Captain Jell-O cape and ooze to the rescue.

This essay appeared in the May issue of The Community Letter.

SOMETIMES THE WAY OUT IS IN

2011-04-01T00:01:00.006-04:00

What raises your hackles may not even ruffle my feathers. We're all different. But we share this: there are times when personal growth requires we face our fears and step into them.

A month back, my husband scared himself when he seriously considered attending a weekend quilting class. He spent long years seeking to squelch his creativity. Since coming out 15 years ago, he has sought to nourish this aspect of self. He has taught himself to sew and quilt. The opportunity to receive formal instruction appealed to him, but he resisted. He would be the only man there, feel out of place, obvious, in the spotlight. He put off making a decision until after the registration deadline had passed. Whew.

Me, I faced fear recently when I signed up for a 10-week intensive writing class with two female instructors. I felt energized by this opportunity. I kept talking about it to my husband and to anyone else who would listen. I had big plans. Was going to do great work. Dive into scary places. Write into my vulnerable spots. Just you watch. Can't wait for the course to begin. Bring it on.

I suspect my husband heard my nervous energy for what it was. When I get afraid I can get verbose. This helps me pretend I feel more confident than I do. Behind all the words, I was afraid I would be shown up, fall flat on my face, have nothing to say, once again be outed as an incompetent blowhard.

That first day of class a nighttime dream woke me up to what was going on. I pay attention to nighttime dreams. I find them instructive. They do an end run around my conscious mind, offer me a peek into my inner life. May I relate this one?

I enter a small one-story house. Along with two other men I get on an elevator that will take us eight floors below ground level. Before we even press the "down" button, the floor of the elevator begins to shake and tilt.

"I don't trust this!" I shout. I fling myself up onto the half-wall that surrounds the elevator shaft. My companions follow suit. The bottom of the elevator drops away; my stomach goes with it. A black hole gapes below us. We three belly-straddle the wall; our feet dangle over the abyss. I feel panic, intense fear.

We worm our way to relative safety on the floor. Two women enter.

"Mind the hole!" I yell, even as one of them steps right onto the emptiness, walks across to us.

"We know the hole there," she says.

I awaken, feeling a mix of fear and relief. Respect, too, for what dreams can reveal. I don't know what you make of it, but I see this: Here I am, first day of a writing class with two female instructors and the opportunity to go down deep within, and I dream of a house with a downward passage and two women who safely navigate the abyss.

Message to self: I may be prating on about how excited I am to plumb the depths, but there's a threefold part of me that's scrambling to stay safe, prefers playing the worm to plunging in. I'm running scared. Afraid I won't be good enough, won't have anything to say, won't like what I do have to say. I fear what I might learn about myself, that I may have to act on it.

Message to self: there's also a two-part feminine energy within me that knows this interior landscape, can handle it. Now there's a confidence booster.

Out of the dream comes this way forward: rather than talk about my big plans, I can face my fears. Rather than worm-crawl the perimeter, I can run at what scares me, jump in, plunge 80 feet down, see what happens before I hit bottom. I can start writing. Just do it.

And I do. I write into what absolutely scares the bejabbers out of me. I do good personal work, learn more than I want to about myself. Find it's true, what I've been told: "Write into your deepest fears; that's where the energy is."

The sign-up date had passed, but my husband called anyway. Any chance he could still sign up for the quilting class?

"Love to have you," she said.

He went. This week he finished piecing together a queen-size quilt top in the shoofly pattern, a traditional Amish design. Now begins the difficult work of hand quilting the whole thing. One step, one stitch at a time, he tells me. One leap, one headlong plunge into fear.

^{This essay appeared in The Community Letter, April 2011}

URHO AND ME: TWO PEAS IN A POD? TWO GRASSHOPPERS ON A STICK?

2011-03-01T19:32:00.002-05:00

Every March 16 when I was a teen, my mother and I went all out. We strung streamers in Nile green and royal purple from doorways. We feasted on liver pudding, cranberry whip and other Finnish delicacies. We exchanged homemade greeting cards. We donned purple and green ribbons; clothing in that color combination was hard to come by in the 1970s. I made posters for the wall, grasshoppers holding signs that read, “Hoppy St. Urhoʼs Day.ˮ

I carried my celebrations over to school. Shoving my Finnish heritage in the face of anyone who stood near was one way I tried to explain myself. I knew I was not like others; St. Urhoʼs Day gave me opportunity to celebrate my being different, to pretend this quality was rooted in my ethnic heritage. The rest of the time, I used being the best-ever church boy as lid and lever to repress any hint that I was attracted to the “wrongˮ gender. I did not wish to know this about myself.

At the Christian college I attended I roomed with a man who was as rabidly Swiss as I was Finnish. We got into a knock-down-drag-out wrestling match when he stole my Finnish flag. On March 16 I made a big poster, “Proud to be Finnish,ˮ and plastered it over his bed.

When my children were born, I often sang them the Finnish lullaby my mother sang to me. Theyʼd have to get used to having a father who was not run-of-the-mill. I hoped theyʼd like liver. And church. My wife and I took them to Sunday School, Sunday services, Wednesday night prayer meetings and more.

From my earliest years, religion had helped me make sense of life, of who I was, where I was headed. My religious faith and Finnish heritage were part of me, blood and bone.

No one was more surprised than me when I came out in middle age, in mid-marriage, in the midst of the religious, conservative rural Midwest. Identifying as gay helped me understand why I had felt so different all my life. This was insight of a depth not offered by my ethnic background or religious upbringing.

Who was I? How was I to know? One after another, I watched the touchstones of my life topple.

Down went my identity as husband, every-day father to my children, church leader, church member, employed professional, good son, beloved brother, tacit believer in the legal system, qualified renter, upstanding citizen, acceptable person.

I came to see myself in new ways, as a member of an oppressed minority, part of a creative wellspring of people who as long as life have lived on the fringe, outside the pale, and added to the richness and texture of society. This on a good day. Some mornings I swallowed whole the message that I was outcast, other, a worthless piece of crap, repulsive, dirty, loser, liar, sick-o, sinner, a threat to my children.

Talk about identity crisis.

Who am I, anyway? Who are you? Are we all and only what and who we say we are, who others tell us we are? What comprises our identity? I live these questions every day—Sundays, Wednesday nights and March 16 included.

I never thought Iʼd identity as anything other than Christian, never dreamed Iʼd live outside the churchʼs embrace, yet I have developed a deep mistrust of organized religion. I thought my Finnish roots would always be front and center. But itʼs been a long time since I made liver pudding, waved the white flag with the light blue cross, bought another grasshopper figurine.

According to legend, St. Urho drove the grasshoppers out of the vineyards of Finland, saving the grape harvest and securing a name for himself. In Menaga, Minnesota stands a huge statue of the fearsome saint, a grasshopper speared on his pitchfork. I have often enough made pilgrimage there. The town holds an annual St. Urhoʼs Day festival parade. Some participants dress up like the saint; others go as grasshoppers.

Saint Urhoʼs story parallels that of Patrick, who reputedly drove the snakes out of Ireland, and for good reason. Folks in northern Minnesota dreamed up the legend of St. Urho as a kind of spoof. Why should the Irish have all the fun? The story caught on—any excuse for a party, for ethnic pride, for another mid-March celebration in a cold climate.

Even as Iʼm wearing my purple and green sweater this March 16, Iʼll wonder to what degree St. Urho and I are constituted of the same stuff. How real are we? How useful the identities we attach to ourselves? How long-lasting?

This essay appeared in The Community Letter, March 2011

THE POWER OF ONE

2011-02-01T05:58:00.009-05:00

By the time I met him, Orville had mellowed. Years back he'd had a flash pot temper that went off without warning. As a child, my husband Dave ran scared of his dad's anger, always kept his guard up.

Orville was in his mid-80s when Dave came out. "You're my son. You're always welcome here," Orville told him. "Just don't bring any of your friends around."

At the time I counted myself one of Dave's friends. He and I had formed a mutual-survival pact. We'd agreed to companion each other through the coming out process, shared a six-month lease on an apartment.

Despite his dad's instructions, Dave soon invited me to accompany him on one of his regular trips to visit his father. I agreed to ride along. "He may not invite you in," Dave said. Fine by me. I'd heard enough stories about the old man's temper. I'd sit in the car, no problem.

To my surprise, Orville did invite me into the double-wide trailer house straightway. To my delight, he never looked back. He always welcomed me. I'd ask him about the good ol' days; I'd laugh at his jokes. He laughed at mine. He could hear the pitch of my voice easier than Dave's; I became the designated megaphone during regular visits to the house and later, the nursing home.

Dave's siblings had a harder time with his coming out than did their dad. I think they didn't know what to do with him (let alone me) and preferred to keep their distance.

Many a time Dave and I wished Orville would put his foot down, assert in his role as patriarch, "We are a family and no member of this family will be excluded from family gatherings." He never spoke these words; I think everyone involved lost something as a result. Only now after his death at age 97 have we taken tentative steps towards acting as a coherent family unit. I wish he were here to see it. I wish he had used his influence to make it happen.

In small ways and large we all of us exert influence on the world 'round. Even when that world falls apart, we may have more influence than we know.

When Dave came out, his world opened in many new ways. At the same time, the world his wife had been accustomed to turned suddenly on its head. Family dynamics shifted in the wake of their divorce. Their three adult children muddled through as best they could, provided support to one or both parents as they were willing and able. Holidays were celebrated in duplicate; a daughter's wedding gave rise to some tense moments.

Who knows how long this state of affairs might have continued. With plans underway for yet another daughter's wedding, Dave's former wife decided to take action. "We are going to be a family and present a unified front to the world," she said. She was as good as her word. She began by inviting Dave out for a meal to talk matters over. During their conversation her cell phone jangled. It was one of the kids calling to ask how she was doing.

"Your father and I are on a date," she said. Well. That news lit up the family hotline in nothing flat. Their parents were talking. And laughing together. Mom must be serious about being one family.

She was.

Leading by example, she enfolded both Dave and me into the wider family. We hugged, discussed wedding particulars, hung decorations together. We stood side by side in the receiving line. In the several years since, this one family has celebrated holidays and important events together, welcomed the arrival of two grandchildren, weathered job losses, medical issues and moves—the stuff of life, and for all of us now, the stuff of family life.

This past December I looked at the faces lit by the Christmas tree and thought, those kids' mother gave them back their parents. She gave me a family. What a gift.

My former wife and I took a different tack. Upon my coming out we parted ways and have remained east and west ever since. She found solace and refuge in a system of religious beliefs that left no room for a continuing relationship with me. Our three sons soon followed in their mother's footsteps. Now adults, they remain estranged from me.

Amazing, the power, the potential, of one. Of anyone. Of you, of me. And what shall we do with our power? Squelch it? Use it to build up or to tear down? Ours is the weighty responsibility—and amazing power—to choose.

This essay appeared in The Community Letter, February 2011

TO LIFE, HAMMERING AT THE DOOR

2011-01-02T08:51:00.003-05:00

"Our culture ignores the power of initiation. Uninitiated boys become lost men leading unfulfilled lives. The male initiation experience we offer makes a difference."

This was the official spiel and I was skeptical. I'd come to the graduation ceremony to honor a friend's successful completion of the male initiation program offered by a non-profit organization. I didn't come to be sold a bill of goods.

Then one by one the 30 new initiates stood to speak. Man after man described the recent weekend event as the most powerful experience of his life. I listened intently. That evening I reserved a space on the next initiatory weekend, still some months away. it couldn't come soon enough for me.

I had a vague notion the venture would include drumming in the woods. What else, I didn't know. I didn't care. I wanted whatever those 30 men had found. I set out with anticipation.

What I did not anticipate was boot camp. As soon as I and my fellow initiates set foot on the wooded site, we were ordered about, offered no explanations, extended no sympathy.

We languished in cramped dark quarters. We were yelled at. One instructor played good cop; two dozen more acted bad ass. We received scant rations, cold showers, little sleep, loud lectures. One unexpected experience after another kept us off-balance.

At last, our resistance worn down and our bodies worn out, we were herded into a darkened enclosure. We were told to sit on the concrete floor and keep quiet.

Off in the woods began a distant drumming, accompanied by men shouting and chanting in unison. The noise grew closer, louder, more intense. It erupted right outside the rusty doors of the metal hut in which we waited. Then came a loud rapping. Someone, something wanted in. I was convinced that whatever or whoever it was, it held the power to change my life. My heart raced. My hands shook. My breath came in gasps. I thought the top of my head might lift off. As the chanting reached a crescendo, the man next to me elbowed my ribs. I heard his dry voice: "I'm not buying any of this, are you?" At that moment, the ribbed steel doors of the hut were wrenched open.

For me, that whole weekend was tinged with a sense of possibility, magic—and déjà vu. In condensed form, it echoed some of my coming out experiences of six years earlier.

Coming out remains the watershed moment of my life, the reckoning point that divides the B.C. and A.D. of my existence. It changed the course of my life. It threw me off-balance and held me there whilst a deep reordering took place in my psyche.

I came out at age 34. It remains the single most scary, painful, destructive, instructive, exhilarating and wonderful experience of my life. I will never know what it is to give birth to a child, but I will always remember giving birth to myself.

And I will always wonder, 'why did it take me so long to get there?'

Part of the answer rings in the dry voice at my elbow. For years it was my own arid withering self-talk: "You absolute loser. You sin-sick reprobate of a worm scudding to hell. You little dog turd. Don't you know men are supposed to be attracted to women? Can't you pray a little harder? Can't you control your thought life any better than that?"

I admire young people who come out early. I feel jealous of them. And rather stupid. How could I not realize I was gay? How many clues were staring me in the face? How many chances to come out earlier did I miss? How many times did life come roaring up, rapping at my door, ready to teach me about loving and accepting myself—and how many times, unwilling or unable to face my sexual orientation, did I turn away?

How much life I must have missed out on! Or maybe not. Maybe the time wasn't right. Maybe I was not psychically strong enough to face the truth of my sexual orientation. Maybe a deep inner wisdom whispered, "Not yet, not now." Maybe that wisdom is still at work in me.

Maybe life is forever knocking at my door, wanting to come in and shake things up, offer me chances to grow into more life. Maybe I can trust the process as it unfolds, take one step at a time, be gentle with myself even as I honor my current understanding, knowledge and awareness. Maybe all of life is one long initiation into itself. To which I say, "L'chaim!"

This essay appeared in The Community Letter, January 2011

WE'LL TELL YOU WHAT'S ACCEPTABLE, ALRIGHT

2010-12-01T05:47:00.003-05:00

It was one of those glorious wet snows. Huge flakes frosted the tree branches, carpeted the ground, plastered white-out all over the vehicles in our driveway. My husband Dave and I were headed for town that Saturday morning and I was out of the house first for once. Not enough time to make a proper snowman, not really, so I quick fashioned a dinky one, rolled up three mini-snowballs using the fluff accumulated on the rear windshield of the car. It stood all of nine inches tall. Fine twigs served for spidery fingers and a whispery nose.

While Dave puttered in the house, I played in the snow. I started with a fist-sized snowball beside the driveway. By the time I'd rolled it past the tire swing and over to the redbud tree, it was thigh-high and had left a widening trail of green grass and dry leaves. I rolled another, then another, stacked them atop each other, and packed in additional snow to hold them in place. I hurried. This was no cool young rocker dude. This was a stout middle-aged fellow in a pale white jumpsuit spotted with crinkly brown beech leaves.

My husband waited in the truck whilst I armed the snowman with two sticks and nosed both sides of his head with two more. I wanted two-faced Janus to preside over our yard. I tilted his roadside nose up to give him a spirited air. His private face I turned downward so he could admire the sizeable genitals I fashioned on that side of his body pointed away from passersby.

In less time than it takes to tell I had brought two snowmen into being. In turn they had brought me simple pleasure both in the making in their taking their place in the white world. Dave and I left for town and I thought little more about them. But they weren't finished with me. They yet had lessons to offer.

I eyed Janus when we returned. How like me, this man of snow! On his public face, an upbeat expression, arms held high as if to embrace the world; on his private side, a raging hard-on and thoughts hot enough to threaten a total melt-down. How like me, this man of snow! Creature of a season, temporal, his hold on life so tenuous, of such short duration. How like me, this man of snow! His pale skin flecked with blotches of dried leaves, one arm larger than the other, cracked in the head. Imperfect but with his own quirky sense of humor and sense of self.

On Sunday afternoon I winced to see he had toppled face-forward, smashed his penis into the ground. The mini-snowman atop my car fared better and on Monday morning made the trip into work intact.

There, I learned I had violated a law I hadn’t even known about: men shall not make cute little snowmen and put them atop their cars. If they do, they certainly shall not leave them perched there for the others to see. This message came at me in various ways. Several of my coworkers made a point of alluding to the little passenger. One asked, "Did you get attacked by Frosty on the way into work?" My supervisor was surprised to learn I myself had made the snowman. "I thought one of the guys put it up there on your car," she said.

I then understood she'd seen it as probable harassment. She wasn't the only one. That night a gay friend phoned me. "The guys at work giving you a hard time?" he asked. "I drove by there today and saw somebody had put a little snowman on top your car."

Dang. And here I thought he was cute.

The message to me—and to how many others—is endlessly enforced: Thou Shalt Conform to Gender Roles. You are a man, therefore you will like what men are supposed to like. You will act as we expect you to act. Cross the line and you set into motion a whole lumbering societal machinery; it's aim: crush individuality, maintain order and control, minimize resistance.

A landmark study published this fall reports that 41 percent of transgender persons surveyed have attempted suicide (compared to 1.6 percent of the general population). What does this say about our society? Some of us, more than others, pay a high price to live as individuals, lead lives of courage, say yes to the heart's deepest leadings.

Courageous or not, conformist or quirky, our lives are soon over. We all of us are made of snow. Already we are melting. My advice: Play. Create. Laugh. Love.

This essay appeared in The Community Letter, December 2010

TO THE BITTER DREGS

2010-11-01T06:10:00.001-04:00

The following Thanksgiving story features ups and downs, pathos, passion, more than a hint of extramarital sex, murder-suicide and a surprising plot twist. It sounds like a Hollywood movie—or maybe like life itself. I've fleshed out some details with period research and my own imagination.

As I envision it, this particular Thanksgiving starts out as have many others at the Thompson residence, that big place in the town's better neighborhood. The kitchen hums with activity. That's some good cooking you smell.

The six kids will be arriving soon, along with their families. Thanksgiving has a way of shining a spotlight on family. Mrs. Thompson wants to have everything ready. Oh, it's not as if the President were coming. He and Mrs. Coolidge are upstate this weekend, several hours northeast of Big Stone Gap. Big honor for Virginia, hosting the vacationing First Couple for five whole days. The President read out the traditional Thanksgiving proclamation a few days early this year to allow him to get away from it all.

That's what John Winton Thompson wishes he could do—walk away from everything. Instead, the very walls seem to be closing in around him. He feels trapped, desperate. And all because of that Catron woman.

Rosa Bishop Catron moved to town a couple years ago, lives alone in a little house down by the hosiery mill. Been married three times, has three sons (three that people know about). She's quite the character. Ask almost anyone in town. Young, too. At 41, Rosa is 14 years his junior. She makes him feel like a kid again. Or did at first. Today he feels old, terribly, terribly old.

And angry. Very angry.

He fingers his pistol. How could he have let it come to this? As former deputy sheriff of Wise County, he once swore to uphold the law of the land. He knows rules. He's about to break a whole lot of them.

I wonder how he leaves the house this morning. With a goodbye to his wife? A promise to be back in time for dinner? He won't make it. For John there will be no clink of glasses around the laden table, no clattering of plates. No happy family gathering, no feasting, no giving of thanks. Rather, the taking of life.

Here's what the Virginia Post, Wednesday, December 5, 1928, has to say: "TWO DEAD FROM DRINKING POISON HERE THURSDAY, John Thompson Forces Catron Woman to Drink Drug and Then Poisons Himself — Both Die Within Few Minutes.

"John Thompson, 55, former deputy sheriff of Wise County and road contractor, and Mrs. Rosa Catron, a resident of the district around the hosiery mill here, are both dead as the result of an affair which occurred Thursday morning at 11:00 o'clock in which Thompson is said to have forced the woman to drink a deadly poison at the point of a pistol and to have taken the remainder of the deadly poison himself.

"Thompson it is stated went to a local druggist Thursday morning and purchased forty cents worth of strychnine and a bottle of Abbott Bitters. Upon being questioned by the drug clerk, he declared that he intended to poison some rats. He then went to the home of [Rosa Catron], and according to her story told just before she died, poured the drug into the bottle and told her to drink it. When she refused, she said, he drew a pistol and threatened to shoot her. She complied and drank a part of the poison. He then told her what she had taken whereupon she rushed of out the house to the home of a neighbor where she told her story as doctors worked over her in the half hour before her life was gone.

"Thompson was found in the Catron house dead as the result of drinking the remainder of the deadly drug.

"According to the woman, Thompson and she had been acquainted and had quarreled for reasons not disclosed. Thompson is survived by his wife and six children while Mrs. Catron is survived by three sons."

That's the official story. Now for the plot twist. According to genealogist Brenda H. Reed (weberiteheresy.com), members of the Catron family believe Rosa killed John, then drank the brew herself.

Who knows what really happened. That's life—not knowing. That's life—ups, downs, passion, love, loss, wonderful moments, elusive truths. We all die in the end, that's life, too. Yet we're called to give thanks. The most contented, gentle angry person I know is a gay man who looks life full in the face, as it is, and without flinching, with deep sincerity, says, "thank you."

This essay appeared in The Community Letter, November 2010

SLOWING DOWN

2010-10-08T10:12:00.000-04:00

Had you asked me if I was “driven,” I would have said, “No.” Had you asked my wife or our three young children, they might have given a different answer. They might have mentioned my long hours away from home, the nights I slept on my office floor, the way I’d pack the kids off to the grandparents’ whenever a major deadline loomed at work.

Had you asked if I was running from something, I would have given you a blank stare. I kept busy to avoid seeing how unhappy I was and why.

My frantic pace ground almost to a halt when I came out to myself and to others as a gay man. Voicing this realization cost me my wife, my children, my friends, my employment, my church membership, and my religious beliefs. I went from a desk job at an evangelical Christian college to making biscuits at a fast-food restaurant just off the interstate.

Five days a week for over a year I watched the sun rise with a co-worker. She’d motion for me to join her — “You got to see this!” — and we’d peer at the oranges, pinks, purples, and blues of the broad Indiana sky, often sticking our heads out the drive-through window to get a better view. These moments reminded me that the world presents itself anew every morning; just as night follows day, day also follows night. With this in mind I begin to rebuild my life.

This article appeared in The Sun, Issue 418, October 2010

MAKING IT LAST

2010-10-02T05:30:00.002-04:00

The news hits hard. Friends of ours—coupled a few years longer than our 14—are calling it quits on their relationship. My husband Dave and I didn't see it coming. Apparently, neither did they. Or at least, not both of them. Less than a week ago we asked one of the men what he most wants from life. "To grow old with my partner," he said.

The news of these friends' impending breakup sends a chill down my spine, as if someone somewhere is walking across my grave. It reminds me that at some point my relationship with Dave will end. We will part ways by choice, chance, death or the thousand other ways relationships terminate. We know this.

I remember an article I read about the nature and duration of gay relationships. The author cited the results of a multiple choice survey question that showed newly-partnered couples were most apt to predict their relationship would last "forever." The longer the partners had been together—25 years, 30, even 40—the more likely they were to predict their relationship would last "another month." Perhaps with age comes the realization that nothing is sure, nothing lasts, everything changes whether we like it or not.

How to live in such a world?

The answer is perhaps scribed on a plaque that hangs on a wall of our home. The words are right there in front of my face, penned in a flowing calligraphic hand by my former wife. She copied them from a similar plaque in my parents' house. I can't read the words. They're in Finnish, language of my grandparents, but the translation is etched in my mind: "We have all we need. What we don't have, we don't need." Sage advice about how to make do.

I’ve taken these words to heart. I am notorious for wearing tennis shoes until I walk out the sides of them. To do farm work I slip into a pair of old black dress shoes, their soles strapped on with layer after layer of duct tape. We lay our table with cloths that were new 50 years ago. My husband spent this morning sewing patches onto one of them.

I harbored hopes that my first marriage could be patched together, that my wife and I could make it last as long as my parent's “'til-death-do-us-part” relationship. It was not to be. My wife needed a man who needed a woman, who could love her in ways meaningful to her, to join her in a union of opposites. I needed a man to companion, to brother, to twin with, to form a union of equals.

Even so, I continue to sit with the questions raised by the dissolution of the marriage. Was it best to call it quits? Was anything to be gained by making it last? How would life be different—hers, mine, our children's—had we stayed together? The fallout seems severe: my three sons, now young adults, have nothing to do with me, nor have they had since they were children.

But perhaps I overstate the case. I have found deep happiness in life since the marriage ended. Has my former wife since found something similar? Have our kids moved to a place of satisfaction and joy? How can I know? Will I ever know?

And why the importance placed on making it last—making anything last—in the first place? Isn’t the message of life that everything changes? That we are always in a state of becoming? That existence is one long lesson in letting go?

And yet.

Maybe the deeper truth of the proverb—and I have no clue how to say it in Finnish—is that we do have all we need somewhere deep within. Deep down inside us resides the wisdom to know when to hold on, when to let go, when to take what is as it presents itself. We already possess the gumption, patience and discernment to navigate the river of life, the One-River that bears us all along on its ever-flowing, ever-changing, ever-the-same path to the Sea of—what? Being? Eternity? Nirvana? Truth?

This essay appeared in The Community Letter, October 2010

THE HAND JOB THAT STILL MIGHT CHANGE MY LIFE

2010-09-01T07:23:00.005-04:00

When I was a teen, growing up in a politically and religiously conservative family, an older acquaintance passed along a shoebox filled with pulp fiction novels he had outgrown. Although I can't remember its title, one of the books—about an adventure at sea—contained a passage that made my heart race.

As I recall, the author described an incident in which male captives were paraded on deck. The protagonist was ordered to fellate them to prove their virility. When he fumbled the task, another man took over. The protagonist was amazed at how quickly his replacement brought each man to orgasm. When the first man had to undergo this treatment, the other captives laughed at him. They grew subdued as it came their turn.

That short passage—surely no more than a page or two long—leapt out at me. Totally innocent, only through ignorance, I was unsure exactly what was being referred to. I assumed it was masturbation by hand, something I'd only recently discovered. (I had no concept of oral fellatio.) The account thrummed with sexual tension and titillation. I was sure it was sinful. Reading it was a guilty pleasure, and one I indulged in over and over again.

Yet I never stopped to wonder why the passage interested me, never pondered the implications of its attraction for me.

Never, that is, until after I came out at age 34. Until then, I resolutely refused to consider my same-sex attractions as anything other than sin, a vile temptation, the cross I had to bear. I hated myself. I felt depressed. I sought forgiveness and release in religion. I married a woman, hoping she would save me from myself. I tried to be the ideal church-goer, husband, father, son and employee. I failed miserably on all counts.

Since coming out, I find great joy (most days) in being myself, in celebrating my same-sex attractions, in following the poet Mary Oliver's admonition to "Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." The world now looks different to me, as does the future, as does the past.

Still, I try to make sense of my growing-up years, try to piece together what I knew when, figure out how I could delude myself so long, how I could close my eyes to what I didn't want to see. Was it my need to please? The power of overt and covert societal messages? My wholesale acceptance of church doctrine? Sheer stupidity?

I want to believe in magic—that if I ever locate the book, find the passage I remember, it will serve as a wormhole in the space-time continuum, will suck me back into the past, put me right back to age 13 or 14. This time I will say, "Ah, yes! This is who I am! I am a boy who loves other boys! I am a boy who finds himself attracted to males. I will use this information to make sense of my life. I will make choices in line with who I now know myself to be. I refuse to live shut up and shut out of society. I will find others like me, who can like me and accept me as I am, for who I am. I will walk through this door, through this opening, through this invitation into a world of being and belonging where I know myself, accept myself, am accepted by others, can celebrate life and living in ways that are meaningful to me."

Whew. What will happen if I can go back and be that self-aware at age 13? Probably I will never know. After all, wormhole time-travel is still a bit iffy.

I thought I'd found a copy of the book online one day last month. A week later, my hands trembled as I turned yellowing pages to the opening line, "If I had known then what I know now, I would never have consented to set out on such a voyage."

Alas, while this was one of the shoebox novels, it does not contain the passage (and passageway) I seek. Perhaps time travel is not in my future. The hard reality and mixed blessing is that I cannot go back, cannot refashion past choices.

Better I take a hard look around me right now. To what self-knowledge am I closing my eyes today? What call on my life am I refusing to hear—an invitation to political action? To seek justice? To walk with integrity? To answer my heart?

I shape the future by choices I make in the present, not the past. The time is now. The job is at hand.

This essay appeared in The Community Letter, September 2010

PRIDE AT 40: WHAT DO YOU EXPECT?

2010-08-02T06:20:00.001-04:00

My husband and I attended Pride Day in Indianapolis with friends of ours, a gay couple partnered 27 years. This was their first-ever Pride event. Their straight son attended last year, encouraged his dads to go with him this year. What should we expect? they asked. I didn't know what to say.

Like sex, Pride is better experienced than explained. It's party time, yes. Celebration and song, friends, fun. Our day to shine. To dance. To strut our stuff. To remember where we've come from and how far we have to go.

Pride turned 40 this year. The first Gay Pride celebration and parade took place in New York City, one year after the Stonewall Riots of June 1969. Pride has grown into an international event observed annually by millions.

They weren't all at Indy Pride, those millions. One estimate put the crowd at 75,000. My husband and I arrived before many of them did, met our friends (and their son and his female partner) and easily found open sidewalk space along the parade route. Looking down and across the street, I was struck by the size of the crowd—literally. Have we all grown so large, so hefty? In a subculture that worships the body beautiful, many of us, myself included, do not qualify as objects of adoration.

I looked for those who would fit my sexual attraction grid. Mmm, a 20-something androgyne with long brown hair, slender build, green and white striped shirt, tight jeans. Ooh, a man in white shirt, curly hair, shades, beautiful arms, nice chest.

And there, a smiling middle-aged woman in a t-shirt emblazoned with a rainbow-striped shirt and the words "I [heart] my son." I blinked back tears as I would again when the PFLAG contingent passed, as I do whenever I see the parents I wish mine would have been, could have been—accepting, active, advocating. We met a husband and wife attending Pride for the first time. Their teenage son had come out to them two months earlier. What should they expect?

Hoo boy.

As is traditional, lesbians revved their motorcycles and led the parade. I counted four floats featuring scantily clad sexy men. I lost count of the number of politicians and employee groups. It was easy to keep track of the number of floats featuring scantily clad sexy women: one.

Near us a raven-haired woman in a red head scarf and flowing orange dress stood with her two young sons, ages five and six. Candy-throwers and trinket-tossers targeted the kids. Their mom grew accustomed to this and held out her hand as a matter of course for two of the small packets a parade participant was handing out. After a quick glance at the small plastic bags, she handed them to her boys. Finding no candy inside, the children slipped them into their pockets. I checked the packet I received and found a flyer promoting safe sex, a condom and lube.

Last in the parade line came gay men on motorcycles. As they smiled and waved, we made our way to the vendor booths and concert area. Soon we were elbow to elbow, inching our way along. The sky grew overcast, threatened rain. "Let it get hot and steamy," I thought, "so we'll have men taking their shirts off." As if the weather gods heard, muggy weather ensued. Soon every man and woman I passed—without exception—was hot.

But more than their physical attractiveness, what impressed me was their sheer number. I wanted to take photos of each person I passed. I wanted to find out where they had come from. And where they would disappear to at the end of the day.

Living out in the boondocks, I spend 364 days a year thinking I am perhaps the only gay man in the rural Midwest. Then I come to Pride and am overwhelmed by the mass of people. Here, before my own eyes, proof I am not alone in the world. I am so not alone.

Pride for me builds a sense of community. Pride reminds me that I am welcome in the world, that I belong to a tribe of men who love men, of women who love women, of people who know what it is to live and love in liminal space outside society's easy acceptance. Pride gives me a taste of what it might feel like to inhabit a world in which people are celebrated for who they are, how they are, however they are.

Pride gives me hope. Maybe I can expect more of my world, of myself. Maybe I can be the change I want to see.

This essay appeared in The Community Letter, August 2010

PRETENDING

2010-07-08T10:09:00.004-04:00

The Internet was in its infancy when I logged on to a sprawling online community called LambdaMOO, a virtual world built entirely of words, where members took whatever form they pleased. My friend Manimal was half-man, half-leopard. MugWump described itself as “gelatinous amoeba-type goo.” Gang_of_Eight appeared as a group of people moving about in concert, often arguing amongst themselves. My character, Melanie, had breasts that swelled a cup size or two as time went on.

It’s all a game, I told myself. It wasn’t real. So what if my heart pounded when RazorJack, a virtual cowboy with steel grey eyes, a rapier wit, and a heart the size of Texas, strode into my character’s circle of friends? No way I could fall in love with him. I was happily married with children. A romantic relationship with him — virtual or real — was out of the question.

My feelings paid me no mind. I ached to be with him. For the first time in my life, love songs on the radio made sense. He and I spent hours together online — hours I should have spent working. (My only internet connection was at my office.) I often pretended I had to work late so I could be with RazorJack.

I was wracked with guilt. What was I doing to my kids, my spouse, my marriage? I kept trying to leave the virtual world, but I kept crawling back. RazorJack understood. He supported me and was willing to let go if I was. I wasn’t willing. I clung to our relationship.

I lost my job because of the time I spent not working. I lost my wife when I realized why I wasn’t happy at home. I lost RazorJack when I told him I was only pretending to be a woman.

This article appeared in The Sun, Issue 415, July 2010

THE STRANGER IN THE LIVING ROOM

2010-06-01T06:16:00.002-04:00

He looms large in our living room, silent, dressed all in brown with an olive green overcoat, white rope tied tight around his neck, shoulders, waist, knees. I nearly jumped out of my skin last night when I first saw him. He has startled me several times today. I laugh in sympathy when my husband Dave says, "Every time I see that wrapped bookcase I think it's a man standing there."

Yesterday we were to deliver a set of hand-crafted stepped-back shelves Dave had made as a gift. As rain was forecast, we wrapped the shelves in tarps and roped them down before we realized there wasn't enough available space in the bed of the pick-up truck. We left them behind in the living room. Seen from the side, the shelves look remarkably human.

That we startle easily at a stranger's sudden appearance will surprise no one who has lived with the sobering awareness that violence against GLBT people can strike without warning and with society's tacit approval.

Living in a secluded rural area, Dave and I are constantly alert for strange noises, for the sound of vehicles slowing down outside. Vandals have often targeted our house and mailbox. Not (yet) our bodies. However, it does happen. Recently a gay acquaintance—a kind, gentle sweet man—was fatally stabbed. And friends of friends—a gay retired couple—were bludgeoned to death in their home.

Ignorance breeds fear and fear of gay people lasts a long time in rural areas where people receive little exposure to GLBT persons and culture. Fear can turn to rage, rage to violence.

Yet the threat is not only from without. Seen from another angle, the stranger in our living room might well be me. Those white cotton ropes are the shame-based messages from my past that encircle me, thwart me.

Example: I decide I will at last take the plunge, write a memoir of my coming out experience. I start with great enthusiasm, get up early mornings to write, schedule my time carefully, fill page after page. Six weeks later I fizzle. I'm not good enough to do this; I have nothing important to say; it's too hard. I shelve my dream project.

Example: Put me in a social setting, let me see a man I'm attracted to and I'll come up with 10 reasons why there's no sense in my going over to talk to him. He's chatting with someone else. And if he's not, he wouldn't be interested in me anyway. He's out of my league. What would I say? I can't tell a joke to save my life. And I'm no good at small talk. He wouldn't give me the time of day. I'd look like a fool. He's probably stuck on himself. If he really wanted to talk to me, he'd come my way.

Example: It amazes me how pleasurable masturbation can be. In the blissful moment preceding ejaculation I feel perfectly one in body, mind, spirit and psyche. Such intense pleasure. For free, too! And yet not free—I pay for my fun with guilt, hear the voice of my parents, my upbringing: "What do you think you're doing? You dirty boy. You filthy-minded man. Sex is evil. Thinking about sex is wrong. You always were a bit twisted." So I hide masturbation sessions from my husband. I feel conflicted about what brings me pleasure.

In his poem "Healing," D.H. Lawrence writes about deep wounds to the soul. "Only time can help," he says, "and patience, and a certain difficult repentance/long, difficult repentance, realization of life's mistake, and the freeing oneself/from the endless repetition of the mistake/which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify."

Shaking loose the shame-cords that bind me takes time and effort. Coming out was a first step. Educating myself about gay issues, connecting with supportive people and groups was another. Telling the story of my coming out and listening to others' offered perspective. I limited contact with family members, former friends and others who continued handing me harmful messages—who seemed eager to sanctify messages that strangle.

I may never be totally free of shame or threat of harm, but I can stay aware. I can keep my eyes open to the possibility of threat from without and within, not be totally surprised if and when they appear. I want to make informed choices, do the best I can, live fully as I can as who I am in the time given me. I can easier deal with the stranger in our living room when I remind myself he is still there.

This essay appeared in The Community Letter, June 2010

THE HORSES OF PASSION

2010-05-05T06:12:00.004-04:00

Actor Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter) recently appeared naked on stage in a play about horses. This is all I know about Equus until our community theatre presents the play. I am anxious to see it.

I don't know to expect a psychic thriller, a riveting suspense story, a whydunnit. Back in the 1970s, after reading a newspaper account of a teenager's horrific crime, playwright Peter Shaffer wondered what could drive a person to act in such a way. Equus was his answer.

My husband and I arrive at the studio theatre early. It's festival seating, so first come, first served. We select center seats on the front row. We become unwitting targets for the lead actor's spittle.

We soon learn that 17-year-old horse lover Alan Strang has been working weekends at a riding stable, and one night blinded all six horses with a sharp grooming pick. He has been remanded to the psychiatric wing of a hospital. The psychiatrist assigned to his case addressees the audience as the lights come up.

Behind the rumpled professional in his suit coat and tie, spotlighted in blue against a gray-black set, a young man stands stroking the skeletal, iron-frame, horse head mask worn by a muscled bare-chested actor in tight black jeans. This coupling grabs my attention right off.

So this is how the horses are portrayed. Eerily effective! And this is Alan and this, one of the horses he will viciously attack. Already I'm asking the question, "Why?"

Slowly the answer unfolds. Slowly the psychiatrist lays bare the boy's secrets. By the time of the climactic revelation, Alan's incomprehensible action seems perfectly logical.

Meanwhile, I keep my eyes on the young man who plays the teenager. He has the surly brooding adolescent disregard for authority down pat. His body carriage signals noncooperation and, over time, a struggle to participate in his own healing.

His hands fascinate me. He clenches them most of the time. Rage? The longer I watch, the more I think perhaps they are hoof-like. Too, his mouth. When contemplating an answer he works his jaws in peculiar fashion. Later it strikes me that perhaps he's feeling a horse's bit in his mouth. This makes sense. Alan so identifies—erotically, religiously, whole-heartedly—with the horses he cares for that he begins to embody them unconsciously. This makes his violence toward them all the more heart-wrenching. Perhaps he redirects self-hatred toward the objects of his affection and worship.

The therapist asks hard questions about the cost of appearing normal. He begins to doubt his profession, the ethics of taking away his patient's drive for life, his unique source of meaning and purpose. "That boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life," he says. While he doesn't excuse the boy's actions, he grieves the loss of spiritual energy Alan will incur in fitting in, in finding a level of mediocrity that will win him easy societal acceptance.

I find my own hands clenching. Isn't this an issue for the lgbtiqq community? At what cost, assimilation? Do we give over our passion, that which makes us unique, in the hopes of being accepted by the masses? By the brokers of political power? By the boss? The neighbors? Mom and Dad? By ourselves?

"We're just like everybody else," I heard a gay therapist say yesterday, addressing a college classroom of ostensibly straight people.

But we're not. Yet. Are we?

Maybe some of us have grown indistinguishable from society at large. But some of us have not. Some of us are different, and different in different ways. Effeminate men, drag queens, diesel dykes, transgendered persons, the queer homeless teens on the streets of our big cities and small towns, lgbt persons of color, anyone with an especially queer passion for life...are we not often set apart, singled out as different, less-than, second-class, targeted for injustice, indifference and more?

We blind our own eyes to community members who do not look like us, live like us, shop like us, who do not share our specific brand of passion.

Hope lies not in assimilation, not in aspiring to mediocrity, but in finding the difficult balance between pursuing our own passions in a healthy way and co-creating an environment for others to do the same. Whenever I see it, this coupling grabs my attention. Give me a front row seat. Better yet, let me get up on stage and be a part of the action.

This essay appeared in The Letter, April 2010

AND NOW I AM A HORSE

2010-04-03T09:35:00.001-04:00

REFLECTIONS ON EQUUS • AT MUNCIE CIVIC

STUDIO THEATRE

I'd heard about Equus only from the notoriety Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter) received for appearing naked on stage in the revival of the 1970s psycho-thriller drama. I'd not seen Peter Shaffer's play (nor the movie version starring Richard Burton) until Marty Grubbs and the Muncie Civic Theatre cast brought it to life. The show runs through Sunday, 11 April.

In the opening scene a rumpled aging psychiatrist (ably played by Barry McMullen) talks directly to the audience—and to himself. He thinks a lot about the horses, he says. I get the notion he almost identifies with them. Strange way to begin. By the final scene I understand.

Grubbs transposes the setting of the play to Muncie or whichever area small town you are from. Patched-in references to the Hoosier landscape seem forced, while other lines of the play referring to particularly British aspects are left untouched. Yet Grubbs makes the point: the unthinkable could, can and does happen here. Right here. The play centers around a crime of passion: how might an ordinary kid of 17 from a "normal" family from a "normal" city—Muncie, Indiana, say–come to blind six horses? What could bring him to such an act? What implications do his actions hold for the rest of us?

The meaning for psychiatrist Martin Dysart becomes clear. His client has experienced in his young life a passionate intensity that makes what the good doctor has settled for look like an empty husk, an unrealized dream, a sell-out to the demands of profession and society.

And the therapist is asked to cure the patient, to remake him into his own dull, lifeless mold. He begins to doubt himself and his calling.

Teenager Alan Strang (Taylor Anspaugh) has blinded six horses. That much is clear. The mystery is why. The play's structure parcels out this information a little at a time, keeps the audience wondering, wanting more.

Anspaugh's Alan is brooding and recalcitrant, believable in his evasive answers and adolescent scorn of authority. He gives a convincing display of the deeper currents running below the surface. I watch his hands (or are they hooves?—he tries his most to be human when he spreads his fingers–) clench and unclench, the startle movements he makes, the way his mouth works, almost as if there were a horse's bit between his jaws.

McMullen's Dysart paints the psychiatrist as tired, very tired, yet committed to the boy, and awake enough to voice the questions that come up for himself. He alternates between loud and soft, focused and weary. He confesses to his magistrate friend (and perhaps would-be paramour) Hester (an engaging Rita Wessell) the lack of passion in his life, yet his involvement with and commitment to Alan's treatment belie his words.

Alan works weekends at a riding stable. Under the push-pull of his very religious mother (Kelly Myers) and religiously irreligious father (Scott McFadden), Alan has devised his own rituals of worship that involve the horses he adores. He must deal with his sublimated sexual desires and fumbling attraction to an older, more experienced female coworker, played by Tonya Kunkel. She shows the girl as warm and tenderhearted.

The psychiatrist Dysart is torn: can he heal his patient? What will be lost if he does? He brings the audience right into the story, asks them to ponder the questions, as well.

Black. The stepped-back set is black, blue and gray, echoing the dark cave of the psyche Dysart warns us we will peer into, the layers through which we must descend. The few pieces of furniture (a desk, a couch, a bed) seem somehow out of place, spots of the familiar in a landscape of dreams.

The tightly written script keeps me enthralled, alternately repulsed and thrilled. It asks me to think.

The play includes nudity—kudos to Grubbs and the Civic for not shying away from play for this reason—and it serves the plot in making a dramatic psychological point. The characters bare themselves on many levels and take the attendant risks. Their courage moves both the story and members of the audience.

Still, Muncie is not the easiest town to get naked in, literally or metaphorically.

Most days I can easily meet the overly devout Christian mother on Walnut Street; the repressive father who wants nothing to do with God-talk may be sauntering along High Street right now. And the troubled Alan Strang—the play asks me to look inside and see if he's not within me. So too, to look for the weary sell-out, the one who has settled for less than what might have been.

Is there yet hope for healing of these disparate characters within me? What might such healing look like? What do I give up in the way of spiritual energy in order to fit in, to be accepted and acceptable?

As I was born and bred in the Midwest the play sounds several themes with special resonance for me: the role of religion, of belief in a divine spy cam that sees all, of passion, of sublimated sexual desire, sexual naiveté, what and how therapists work and what they claim to heal, the power of secrets, the importance placed on fitting in and appearing normal. Too, there's something about the connection between my regard for chickens and Alan Strang's love for horses. Animals can serve as teachers, companions and open a doorway to that which is beyond our ken.

In some ways I identify with each of the characters: the disturbed passionate teen, the doubting healer, the bewildered parents with secrets of their own, the winsome girl, the compassionate upholder of law and order, the blustering stable owner (Jeff Rapkin), the tough-as-nails nurse (Debby Girtman), the horses (Drew Eberhard, Nick Gilmore, Brad Root).

The horses. Perhaps it is the horses I most closely identify with in the end. On stage they are represented by bare-chested actors wearing huge skeletal metal masks in the form of horses' heads, platform footwear ending in horseshoes. Eberhard's Nugget makes a very sensuous equine companion (would that the erotic connection between Alan and Nugget were explored visually—what we see as the lights come up on the opening scene looks very stand-offish; it doesn't carry the charge one might expect from the story). In the play the horses are a source of primal mystery, stern lessons, controlled power, divine love, selfless service, and ultimately, senseless sacrifice. Who looks deeply into the horse's eyes may be looking into the human heart, as well. Equus invites the audience to do just this.

Muncie Civic Theatre

www.munciecivic.org

April 2-3 & 8-11

THE BEACH

2010-04-01T10:04:00.000-04:00

It is the summer of 1981. I just finished college in the spring, and now my younger brother and I are waist deep in Lake Michigan, chicken fighting: His girlfriend, Trish, sits on his shoulders. My friend Serge sits on mine, his crotch pressing against the nape of my neck.

My brother and his girlfriend have no idea that I am gay. I am struggling mightily to stay unaware of it myself. I believe I am destined for a literal hell if I continue to do what Serge and I have been doing in bed at my parents’ house this summer.

As Trish and Serge fight to pull each other into the water, I wage an inner battle against the desire to throw Serge down onto the warm sand and ravish him right here and now: To hell with propriety. To hell with my family learning I am gay. To hell with my burning in everlasting fire.

Big plans, but I don’t act on them.

Later, back on the beach, I scout for a clump of dune grass that might afford Serge and me some privacy. Then I decide not to risk it. I will never openly declare my feelings for this man, but will continue to deny, repress, and hate the love I have for him. I know well the fear of damnation. I do not yet know the world of sorrow, heartache, and grief that awaits my future wife, our children, and me.

This article appeared in The Sun, Issue 412, April 2010

THIS DRAG QUEEN IS NOT A HYR

2010-04-01T06:46:00.002-04:00

If there be grace, this must be a part of it: I awaken to frost on the ground and a still-toasty house that has held its heat without the furnace kicking on. I pad about in sleep shirt and cap, naked from the waist down, needing neither sweat pants nor robe. "This is what grace feels like," I tell myself. "Grace warms."

Grace warmed my heart last evening. Coyotes had howled as I locked the chickens in for the night. Yet all my feathered friends were accounted for. Sometimes grace means making it through to bedtime.

I resolve to share my experience of grace with others today, make my world a warmer place. I start by asking myself, "How can I be graceful to Dave this morning?" I find my husband in the kitchen, tell him I enjoyed snuggling with him through the night. I make a small joke ("thank you for sleeping beside me, for not getting out to lie on the cold floor at 3:00 A.M.), then again speak my truth, "You are my north, my south, my east, my west." He looks at me, "I love you, too." And so we restate our love for each other as we do in myriad ways every day. After 14 years it is still brand new. Grace surprises.

When I was growing up, my very conservative church fellowship sang Amazing Grace so often I tuned it out. It's a tired old song, anyway, the crone who shows up at every funeral, black ostrich plume bobbing from her hat. Respectable, uplifting perhaps, and a bit clichéd. Whenever I heard the hymn’s opening notes on the church organ, I wanted to look for the coffin. Nevertheless, I loved an over-the-top rendition by The Impact Brass and Singers. The group toured the country as goodwill ambassadors for one of the Bible colleges our church supported financially. I still remember the first time they sang for us.

Soprano Cindy Phillips had made Amazing Grace her trademark solo. On that last verse, "When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun...," Cindy let it rip, jumping several octaves, her voice rising to meet the sun, raising the roof, bringing our staid congregation nearly to its feet. Grace exceeds our expectations.

Even we knew a good thing when we heard it. Our church invited Cindy and the band back for the July 4 festivities, biggest event of the year in our small town. Her solo blew everyone away and scored us points with the community. Especially from Cindy's lips, grace amazes.

Dave and I perform our morning ablutions and leave for work together, he in the pickup, me in the car. I follow him for a mile. Before he turns right, I flash my bright beams three times to say, "I—love—you." He blinks his brake lights three times in response. Sometimes grace speaks in code.

Once at work, I promptly forget all about grace and being grateful, graceful in the riptide of the day. Yet life goes on doing its work without my participation. Fortunately, grace does not need my say-so.

Early afternoon I receive an e-mail message. A good friend died yesterday. Was found by his best friend who is also one of mine. Heart attack? Something quick, sudden, unexpected. No lingering death, his. Grace? If so, sometimes grace sucks.

Tomorrow will bring amazingly strong winds, warns the National Weather Service. Drivers of high profile vehicles should beware. People with lawn chairs, garbage cans, pets or small children should tie them down, adds the radio announcer. Grace sometimes issues bulletins.

Tomorrow will deliver a tragic accident to the highway near my workplace. A semi-tractor trailer, turn signal flashing, will wait to cross traffic. As my coworker sails by, slows to turn into our parking lot, a panel van will ram the back of the semi. My coworker will describe the explosion of glass, metal and colored plastic: "It was like fireworks!" Rescue workers will close the highway for over an hour as they clear debris, minister to the living. Sometimes grace is sailing on by.

How great our need for grace, for awareness of the moment, of the day, of the gifts given us every minute. An ostrich feather tickles my ear. That old drag queen Amazing Grace leans over, tells me to rise above complaining, self-pity, petty jealousies, thinking I'm not good enough. Life is short, honey, she says. Get a move on. Go all out. Hit the high notes.

This essay appeared in the April issue of The Letter.

PRACTICE NOW FOR YOUR NEXT TRANSITION

2010-03-01T06:39:00.003-05:00

A small place, where I work–a specialty design agency and print shop. A dozen of us employed here all together. The principal's office sits right up at the front of the building. This morning my supervisor comes tearing out of this room screaming, "Call an ambulance! Quick!" My first thought: The big boss has had a heart attack. Then I see my supervisor spin on her heel and head out the front door. My second: Here we go again.

A heavily traveled state highway runs along the east side of our workplace and crosses the Mississinewa River a stone's throw north of us. Our building sits on the river's south bank. In cold wet weather, our front yard is often the landing site for airborne vehicles that hit the icy bridge and launch out over the steep embankment.

In my 10 years tenure, we've seen one fatality, a few motorists left with cuts and bruises, assorted vehicles in various states of disrepair and a fair number of drive-offs where the only signs of an accident are tire tracks in the front yard.

"Here we go again," I think to myself, as I rush outside. "I hope no one's hurt." A white van steams on the front lawn while two of my coworkers help a thin gray-haired man with a gorgeous full gray beard climb out of the vehicle. The van's windshield is gone, its back windows are smashed in; pieces of bumper and our neighbor's sheered-off mailbox dot the embankment. The driver stares about blankly. He can talk. He can walk. I am thankful.

Later my supervisor recounts her story. She was in with the boss, telling him that while money is tight for small businesses like ours, it's not the end of the world. "Bryn reminded me the other day about the Y2K scare, how people thought the world was going to end 10 years ago," she said. "The world's not going to end this year. Maybe in 2040 or 4020, but not this year."

No sooner were these words out of her mouth than it looked as if the world were indeed ending. She saw a white van skittering down the embankment, ploughing up turf, scattering car parts, heading directly for the her. The vehicle stopped short of slamming into the building.

The driver was delivering hot meals to elderly and home-bound clients. I imagine several people went hungry today or had to make alternate dinner plans.

Here at work a baker's dozen of us were served up a heart-stopping reminder of how quickly, how very quickly events can spin out of control. Our forward momentum can turn on a dime; our world can come to an end.

Perhaps the wonder of it is how often this does not happen, how many people even today crossed the Mississinewa without incident. Call it what you will–grace or chance or providence or love or business as usual–it manifests every day in myriad ways unseen, unnoticed.

The challenge lies in the getting through, in crossing bridges (or not) as we come to them. Coming out, going in, starting over, dying–life is full of transitions. Those in-between times–when we're airborne, when we have no firm footing, when everything crashes in around us–those are the challenging times. The liminal moments when anything can happen. Perhaps the wonder is that we get through them at all. Yet we do.

Even when we don't, we do. My husband works in hospice. Death is not the most scary thing that can happen to a person, he says. People in the dying process often say they are not so much afraid of death as of the getting from here to there, the in-between, the process.

Let's practice now, I say. I bet life will soon enough offer you and me both a chance to experience transition, to hang in mid-air, to face the feelings and reactions this brings up for us. I wish you soft landings. Always. I'll look for your tire tracks in the yard.

This essay appeared in the March issue of The Letter.

IS THAT GOOD COMING?

2010-02-01T06:33:00.004-05:00

I stand at my window and watch enthralled as huge snowflakes waft my way. A quote from a George McDonald novel drifts into mind. My paraphrase: "Good is coming to me; good is always coming to me, in the best possible form for me at this particular moment. Even if I do not know it, even if I cannot recognize it, good is coming to me."

I ponder this as I watch snowflakes drift down over the waking world. Maybe this is how life is: maybe good is always falling gently upon us, a unique good, crowning the individual moment, covering our particular needs. Maybe we don't know it's coming. Maybe we can't see it all the time. Maybe we see it only through eyes of faith.

Or maybe this is all so much hooey. Our cat O.B. presented us with a large brown field mouse yesterday. Was good coming–always coming–to that mouse even as feline claws sank into soft yielding flesh, as razor-sharp teeth cut short a mousey life?

My father-in-law may know now if what Walt Whitman says is true: Death is far different than we imagine. And luckier. Orville died recently at age 97. His was a gentle going–a precipitous two-week decline after two years in a nursing home. Even there, he had continued to look after others–staff, residents and visitors alike. He policed the halls, watching for anything out of place. He wept with those who wept, smiled at most everyone he met.

At his funeral people recalled his pulling weeds from his soybean field at age 92, and the cats he kept in his dotage. A grandson told of the time he found his grandpa sad one morning, having buried his favorite cat after it was hit on the road. Later that day Orville had a big smile on his face. He must have buried someone else's cat. His favorite 'Snoopy' had come rubbing up against his legs. Today Snoopy lives on, while his master's body lies buried in the cold ground. Good is coming, Orville, good is always coming.

Or is it? I had a hard time believing so this past fall when a routine blood test suggested my husband Dave had an aggressive form of cancer. The news hit us hard. I went into overdrive, researching the latest treatments, reading what I could find on the subject, talking about cancer with anyone who would listen. Meanwhile, Dave explored taking early retirement, made lists of what furniture would go to which child, reflected aloud on happy memories. He finally took me aside and said, "Look, your talk of 'cancer, cancer, cancer' is not helpful to me. If I do have a shortened life expectancy, I want to focus on being grateful for the time I have had; I want to make the most of what I have left. Please support me in this."

Follow-up test results indicated no cancer. Dave shelved his plans for early retirement. Good always coming.

Meanwhile, my three adult sons remain estranged from me. No response to my continued overtures. Good always coming?

New fallen snow blankets the tree limbs as far as eye can see. I catch my breath as a squirrel in the maple tree crawls out near the end of a slippery branch, leaps into the air towards a snowy oak's outstretched arms, four or five feet away. It lands safely. I sigh with relief.

And I wonder: what leaps are you and I being called to make? In relationships, jobs, healthcare decisions, inner and outer life journeys? No guarantee we won't grab for the branch and get an armful of air instead. Sometimes all we have to go on is hope. Is that enough? Snowflakes plummet faster now. Good is coming, good is always coming. I hope so. Maybe hope helps us move forward, take great leaps of faith, meet whatever comes with open arms. May the branches hold.

This essay appeared in the February issue of The Letter.

LONG NIGHT COMING: BETTER GET ROLLIN'

2010-01-01T06:27:00.003-05:00

We were soon to host seven people for dinner. From the state of our kitchen, you'd have thought we expected an army. My husband Dave and I spent an entire daylight hours cooking and baking up a storm. He used my grandma's recipe for never-fail pie dough, rolled out crust after crust using the huge wooden rolling pin that came from Emil Cager, the white-haired soft-spoken gentleman I remember from Organic Gardening Club days of my youth.

Emil and Gladys Cajer lived somewhere past the railroad bridge coming into Valparaiso, Indiana. Their house was squirreled away down a shady lane. If you didn't know to look for it, you'd drive right on by. Their place offered a taste of country living inside the city limits. Like my parents, the Cajers belonged to the local Organic Gardening Club, a group of mostly elderly people who met once a month for two-hour meetings that included programs on such scintillating topics as making compost and all-natural insect repellents. My siblings and I were privileged (read "forced") to attend.

Emil had retired as a professional baker by the time we came to know him, but he remained an avid gardener to the very end of his life. He gave my parents one of his monstrous rolling pins. I asked my mother for it before she died. It occupies a place of honor in our home--when not being pressed into service for rolling out pie dough, it serves to remind me of dreary talks in a basement meeting room each winter and (weather permitting) outdoor garden gatherings the rest of the year.

Those meetings were the one social event our family attended that did not revolve around our conservative church. It came as revelation to me that there could be kind caring people like Emil and Gladys who did not share our theological beliefs--and from whom we could learn things. Lessons of another sort were delivered courtesy of "Nurse," an ancient wheelchair-bound lady who attended the summer garden parties. She swore like a sailor. My good-boy ears flushed red in her company.

So the rolling pin serves me as more than a simple kitchen tool. It forges an early link to a worldview bigger than the one I bought into as a youth and young man, one I didn't embrace until after I came out. It reminds me that there are all kinds of people in the world, and that some part of who we are and what we love and how we live our lives does implant itself in those around us whether we are aware of it or not. Whether we live to see it come to fruition or not.

Truth to tell, the rolling pin most often serves Dave in its original function. He makes the pie crusts in our family. He has the patience and finesse to roll them out thin so they'll be flaky and light. He takes his time, works at it in a way that would make Emil proud. Dave and I have seen the results of my rolling out pie dough. Think thick rubber strips. Think cardboard. Think fruit leather, chewy and stretchy as you tear into it with your teeth. No, Dave rolls out the pie crusts in our family.

Pie baking became an all-day affair. Darkness had long since fallen before we finished supper dishes. We'd be off to bed in an hour or so.

I turned to Dave. "Maybe this is a metaphor for all of life, but what would you like to do with this little time that remains to us?"

He looked at me. He's used to these kinds of questions, this way of looking at the world. "How about Scrabble?"

And so we played with words, made vampires and orgy and query and zit, then ziti, then zitis. The first word down was "mere," in itself a comment on who we are, how much time we have, what we may hope to accomplish.

All around me, reminders, reminders. Time is short, shorter than I know. Actions do have consequence and impact on those watching. What will I do with the little time before the darkness falls? Care to ask yourself the same question?

This essay appeared in the January issue of The Letter.

TIGHT BUTTS AND HARD QUESTIONS

2009-12-01T07:22:00.002-05:00

Open seating at the university theater tonight, so my husband and I arrive early. It is a love story. They cannot begin to pack all of the actors and actresses involved in this drama onto one little stage. So they make do with those called for in the script. I realize this as my husband and I wait for the curtain to rise.

Nearby, two college men capture our attention. Surrounded by people, they are absolutely ensconced in their own little world — a world bounded by each other. The (slightly) younger of the two has a peaches-and-cream complexion and short curly red hair. In profile he reminds me of a Roman Caesar. Red waves his hands about as he talks, but hardly keeps pace with his companion whose arms fly here and there, punctuating the discussion. He wears a blue plaid shirt. He has curly blond hair — thinning on top — and a matching beard. Both are tall and lanky, but Plaid is the taller of the two. They are equally animated. They almost bounce out of their seats.

Just before the play begins, Plaid moves halfway across the auditorium, sits opposite us. He crosses his arms, remains impassive through much of the show, even the funny parts. The woman to his left leans away from him, rests her chin in her hand, elbow on her left knee. The woman to his right sits with her arms crossed. No sign of him being acquainted with either.

The lights dim, the action begins. The play has a fair proportion of women in it. I keep my eyes on the men. They have slim builds, flat stomachs, tight butts. The play calls for the men to drop to one knee with a regularity I appreciate — the fabric of their trousers pulls tight, rounds off the buttock.

At intermission, Plaid appears glum as ever. Off to his right, I see my friend Joe. As a teenager, Joe wrapped his car around a telephone pole. He barely survived. The accident left him crippled and disfigured. He walks with difficulty. He slurs his speech. He wears plaids and stripes together. When he came out in middle age, he learned first-hand how mercilessly cruel members of the gay subculture can be to people who do not fit cultural standards of physical beauty. Joe has never had an intimate relationship. He has friends but no boyfriends. Dave and I go over and chat with him until the lights dim. Then I go back to ogling sexy actors.

In Act Two, the audience must face the stage death of an endearing character. We welcome the finale, a joyous celebration of the survivors falling in love, one after another. Life will not be easy, they acknowledge, but love will see them through. Love makes life worth living.

I listen to them proclaim their love. And I wonder. I wonder about Joe. I wonder about my friend Scott, who padlocks his heart, refuses to open it to anyone. He will not share his home with a dog, a cat, a fish, a bird — a houseplant, even. He believes that if he loves anyone or anything he will get hurt. He was present when his mother died. Hearing his sister's immediate wail of grief, he said to himself, "See? See? This is what happens when you love someone. You get hurt."

Easy enough for the actors and actresses to make stirring speeches about love, proclaim its primacy, its role in saving us from ourselves — after all, they are reciting their lines. But are they feeding us one? Is this how love works? For Joe? For Scott? For Red and Plaid? For Dave and me? Does love always triumph? Does it for everyone?

Perhaps the answer is too big to fit on the little stage of my mind. Perhaps the answer envelops me, every day, enacted in the lives of those I pass. Perhaps it plays out in this season of the year as our planet turns from the dark powers of winter towards life-giving light once again. Do I have a role in this cosmic drama? Do you?

This essay appeared in the December issue of The Letter.

RE-RIGHTING OUR LIVES

2009-11-01T07:00:00.003-05:00

Ever wish you could rewrite the past? At a friend’s urging I tried this re-righting exercise: “Recall a painful life episode and retell it with an alternate, positive outcome. Include the presence of a supportive, powerful character.” I chose to examine my real-life memories of a high school bully I’ll call Mack.

* * *

I riffle through the tumble of books, notes and papers and pull out what I need for the next three classes: advanced biology, college math and English. Almost there now, almost there. I’ll breathe easy once I reach Mrs. Bush’s classroom. I swing the locker door shut. A hand lands on my shoulder, a piece of lead in my gut.

Mack shoves me against the beige lockers. A silver handle stabs at my back. “Where you going in such a hurry.”

It is not a question.

He jabs a hand under my chin, jerks my head up and back against cold steel.

Mack is not the biggest boy in our class, nor the meanest. But for four years he has loomed large in my school life; for nine months out of every twelve I have let him make my weekdays hell. He seeks me out, baits me, calls me names, teases me, pushes me around, gets in my face. And I let him. I play the good boy, turn the other cheek, pray for his soul to burn in hell.

What does Mack see in my countenance that gives him license to treat me with such disdain? What do I see in his that stops me from standing up for myself? These are questions I won’t ask until years later.

“Where do you get your clothes.” Again, it is not a question. “Fetla’s.” Mack spits out the name of the discount surplus store in Valparaiso, our county seat. “I bet your mom bought that shirt at Fetla’s.” He fingers my shirt collar. “Why do you wear clothes like that anyway. If I had clothes like that, I wouldn’t wear them to school.”

I keep my mouth shut. Long ago I learned there’s no reasoning with him. He steps in close, pushes my chin up again, my head back, presses his chest to mine. “I asked you a question, pud.”

“Mack, please. I have to get to class.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Anything is the wrong thing to say. His chest swells. “Didn’t you hear me, faggot? I asked you a question. You’re not smart enough to—”

“Oh, no you don’t!”

Everything happens at once. One second Mack is on me, over me, the next he’s not even touching me. A loud shout. An “oof.” His body slams into the lockers to my right.

“I’ve had enough of you, Mack.”

It’s Frank Stassek who last year, even as a sophomore, played varsity basketball. Next year he’ll help our school capture the conference triple crown and whup big city Valparaiso—a first-ever feat. In this corner of basketball-crazed Indiana, in this small school where grades K through 12 gather under one roof, jocks are gods.

Blinking, Mack looks up into the face of an angry god.

“You leave this guy alone, hear me? Keep your paws to yourself. I don’t want to see you touching him again.”

Curly ringlets of dark hair frame Frank’s deep brown eyes and gorgeous face. Although I hate sports, I attend every home basketball game I can to watch Frank’s thighs pound the length of the court, his muscled arms pull down yet another rebound, his chest heave under the blue and white jersey marked with a large number 20.

It’s my chest that’s heaving at the moment. Frank takes my arm, pulls me forward. He slips an arm around my shoulder. “C’mon. Mrs. Bush will be looking for us. You don’t want to be late for class, do you?”

It is not a question. It is an answer to prayer.

* * *

In “real life,” neither Frank nor I ever came to my rescue. But in retelling this story, I catch a glimpse of the Frank who lives inside me. Maybe I will call on his power next time I need his protection.

This essay appeared in the November issue of The Letter.

YOU AND YOUR DAD, TOO

2009-10-01T19:10:00.002-04:00

The weather forecast promised clear skies, so we did not cover the exposed part of the roof with tarps. But we did scramble the next morning when we heard liquid sunshine pattering overhead. We rolled out tarpaper and tacked it down, laid shingles as fast as we could.

We were three: my husband Dave, his adult son and me. Son’s house sustained hail damage this past spring. We had volunteered to help re-roof the place. At the end of day one, we were soaked with sweat. Throughout day two, intermittent rain showers wet us to the skin. We exchanged tired happy smiles when we fi nished the job.

Ready to get down, I stood on the ladder alongside the house as Dave and his son walked the ridgeline one last time. They examined their work. They pointed to this and that. I watched them proceed with careful confi dence, one after the other, along the wet roof. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or a blurring brought on by high humidity or exhaustion.

Suddenly, it wasn’t Dave and his son I was looking at on the roof. No. To borrow from the poet Sherman Alexie, it was all the fathers in the world and all the sons in the world. Dave and his father Orville were walking that ridge line. Never mind that Orville, at age 97, uses a wheelchair to get around. It was Orville up there with his son, and he was walking.

It was me and my dead father up there. It was my dad and his dad—my grandpa—walking that ridge line together. It was me and each of my

estranged sons—one, two, three—trying to maintain our balance, trying to find a way forward without slipping over, sliding off the edge. It was you and your dad. And your dad and his dad. And his father before him. It was all the fathers in the world and all the sons in the world on

that roof.

It was two men longing for connection. It was two men already more connected than they know. It was father and son separated by death, by prejudice, by action or insult. It was father and son separated by accident, by intent, by geography, by ignorance.

By spite. By life. By wife. By creed. By war. By family pattern. By social pressure. By suicide. By immigration. By disease. By chance. By choice.

It was two men who had labored together toward a common goal sharing pride in a job well done. It was two men who felt connected, who found themselves in a precarious place having to step carefully. It was recognition that even in perilous situations, some degree of safety may be felt.

It was Father and Son. It was Age and Youth. It was Past and Future. It was lessons being passed on—lessons in how to love, how to protect oneself, how to put a roof over one’s head. It was lessons in frugality, in can-do, in practical carpentry. It was lessons in self-reliance and in accepting help. It was lessons in living, in making it through.

It was ending and beginning. It was passing a torch. It was the longing to pass along all the things that never will be handed off, that are non-transferable, that must be learned for oneself.

It was father connecting to son. It was generation touching generation. It was all the fathers and all the sons in the world on that roof, walking that narrow way, one person at a time, the long slide on either hand, danger, pride, peril, accomplishment, hope ahead.

This essay appeared in the October issue of The Letter.

STUNNING THE BLOND GOD

2009-09-01T19:00:00.004-04:00

From what I am told, I map the geography of his upper body. A faint trail leads southward from the oasis of navel. Northward, the ridgeline runs through a ripple of abs to where well-defined pecs rise up, capped by salmon-brown peaks of aureole and nipple.

Strong neck, square jaw, stubbled chin. Lips full in the flower of youth. Dusting of moustache, unapologetic nose, blue blue eyes. Windblown bangs drift across his forehead. What in his upbringing could prepare him to fathom his own beauty?

He recently came out to himself after growing up in a conservative, homophobic religious tradition. His rugged good looks and generous endowment garner attention, praise, devotion. Heady stuff, I imagine, for one who spent years denigrating himself and his “sinful” desires.

He has thrown himself into the gay sexual scene with abandon. He supplements his sensual exploration with heavy drug use. He regularly engages in barebacking and other unsafe sexual practices.

“I suppose I should get tested.” he says and laughs. His voice tone says he has no such intention. His behavior says he wants it all, wants it now, wants it with no holds barred. No time to think, no time to consider. Take, taste, feel, feel, feel.

In his poem Syringe, Jim Wise describes

The stunning blond god,

His muscles straining against

The taut flesh of a body he

Was just learning to enjoy.

The godlike youth in the poem employs sex as a means of getting heroin into his system. He strips sex of its potential for celebration, emotional connection, a sense of being present to another human being. People make such choices. So do gods. I feel sad when I tot up the costs.

What the gay youth, so recently out, seeks in his headlong rush, I don’t know. To heighten sensation? Numb the pain of losses incurred in coming out? Blot out the confusion of so many new choices? I doubt that he knows himself.

I do not condone his choices, yet I recognize the wild eruption of feeling, the recklessness, the sense that the shackles have been thrown off and anything goes. I felt a similar rush in my coming out journey.

Yet behavior has consequences, understood or not. And desire exerts a powerful pull. The gay poet Cavafy observes (in this translation from the Greek)

He swears every now and then to begin a better life,

But when night comes with its own counsel,

Its own compromises and prospects—

When night comes with its own power

Of a body that needs and demands,

He goes back, lost, to the same fatal pleasure.

In coming out I encountered men who shepherded me, acted as mentors, offered sage advice, modeled appropriate behaviors. I also found men who stood ready to take advantage of my naivete. While I learned something from both sets of men, I have maintained friendships with only one group.

We do others a favor, and bless ourselves and our entire community when we treat others with respect and genuine regard. We can celebrate the body electric—the body erotic, the body taut with pleasure and discovery of its own sexiness—in a way that honors the sacredness of all life, affirms the expression of our sexual selves, and builds community at the same time.

This article appeared in the September issue of the Letter.

BEYOND ALL THE BODY CAN BEAR

2009-08-01T23:57:00.002-04:00

From experience, my husband Dave and I know the perfect vacation is the one we’re planning to take next. The one that’s still a bit up in the air, destination fuzzy, dates wide open, details sketchy. That’s when a vacation is absolutely perfect. Once the dates are nailed down, once the packing list is drawn up, once there are bills to pre-pay and animals to be seen to in our absence, already a vacation starts to feel a little less than ideal.

We prefer to keep our plans a bit open-ended. Make room for serendipity. Leave time to stop at roadside attractions, follow the sign pointing left: “antiques, five miles” or right, “historical marker, one mile.”

Last week we were at last ready for vacation. We scheduled a week and a day off work, would head west to Kansas. We would venture into the unknown by attending a men’s gathering billed as “an experiment in community building.” No appointed leader, daily decisions made by group consensus. We’d registered for three of the twelve days. If we liked it, perhaps we’d stay six. Or maybe we’d head south, visit family members in Missouri.

We were ready to start loading the car when I wrenched my lower back. I felt as if a large needle pierced my spine. Whenever I moved, it jabbed further in. I pull my back about once every other year. I have visited my more than my share of chiropractors, medical doctors and physical therapists. I’ve learned the best treatment for me involves a week of lying flat on my back. I headed for bed. I lay very still. Refused to drink. I didn’t want to have to get up to pee.

Dave and I switched plans. We would stay home. He would nurse me whilst I nursed my back. I had anticipated a relaxing vacation, but this wasn’t what I had in mind.

I told Dave I knew what awaited me: at first I would taking enjoy long naps, reading books, writing letters, listening to NPR, taking it easy, but by day four I’d be ready to climb the walls. He circumvented this outcome on day three. He brought a portable DVD player to my bedside along with Terrence McNally’s Angels in America, an hours-long HBO miniseries. He and I have twice seen the two-part stage play. I bought copies of the scripts. But we had never watched the DVD.

Angels in America won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Set in the early years of the AIDS pandemic, it traces the stories of several characters whose stories overlap and intermingle. They must wrestle with ageless themes such as the problem of pain, betrayal, death, forgiveness, politics, religion, sex, love and hope. Some of its scenes have rumbled in my mind ever since the first time I saw it on stage. When tempted to sidestep difficult questions, I often recall the Mormon mother’s response when Harper who asks if the covered wagon ride west was difficult. “You ain’t stupid. So don’t ask stupid. Ask something for real.” When loss lays me low, when I feel sad and bereft, I recall the Mormon mother’s description of how people change: God rips you open with a jagged thumbnail, pulls out your guts, musses them all around, piles them back in. It’s up to you to stitch up the torn flesh. These are not comforting images, yet I find hope in knowing others have felt the way I do, faced similar challenges, survived, fashioned art of pain and loss.

Dave and I watched the DVD together—all six hours—nearly straight through. Then I watched it again. Then I read through the script of the stage play as I watched the screen adaptation, noted where lines had been cut, scenes shifted around.

The story’s main characters include a young man living with AIDS, his Jewish lover, a big-city lawyer dying of AIDS, a closeted young law clerk and his wife. In the troubled relationship between these latter two, Joe and Harper, I hear echoes of my previous marriage. All through the piece I hear the very human drama of life—harrowing, heavenly, poignant beyond words, laugh-out-loud funny, sobering. The action centers in New York with side trips to Antarctica and heaven.

I lost count of how many times I watched Angels in America during our vacation. As long as it kept speaking to me I kept listening. I'm like that. I can eat the same food for nearly a week. I have more than once downed an entire pecan pie at a sitting. Recently I compiled a CD of Leonard Cohen's song, Hallelujah, sung by 17 different artists. I play it when Dave is not around.

I replayed the Angels DVD time and again, some scenes even more times than that. Especially the one in which the hunky law clerk strips naked on a cold windy beach. The camera focuses on his face and bare chest as he begins to undress. Then it cuts to a back view as he pulls off his temple undergarments revealing his bare back, buttocks, thighs and calves. I played this scene at regular speed, in slow-motion and in stop-action. Twice a day I masturbated to the sight of that gorgeous man on screen. Spent, I'd let the DVD play on, watch through to the end of the movie, then start in again from the beginning.

I quoted lines from the movie in casual conversation with Dave. "Even in New York in the 80s, that is strange," I'd say, and "Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions." Sometimes we quoted lines to each other. I'd thank him for bringing me yet another meal in bed with, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" and he'd reply (per the script), "Well, that's a stupid thing to do." We'd both laugh.

Angels wove itself into my dreams. I found myself wandering a heaven that looked very much as its depicted in the movie. I talked to angels, wrestled with issues far beyond my ken.

For much of our vacation, Angels became the lens through which I looked at the world. I read from Emerson's Essays and connected what he has to say with what Louis yammers on about on page such and such. I read a Mary Oliver poem and thought, "That's what Mother Pitt expresses when she, Prior, Louis and Belize are talking at Bethesda Fountain." I pondered my life in terms of the play, thought about the people on my "to forgive" list. Can I forgive them before I die? Before they die? I wondered if, like one of the supporting characters, I could take my hate and condense it to a pinpoint of light up in the night sky. What color of light would it emit?

Angels brings up all sorts of questions for me. What does it mean that humans have wrestled with many of the same themes for millennia? Or have we? And what is it to look back at the 80s through the eyes of Angels from the perspective of 2009? Do I know how it all turns out? Many of these characters would be my age now. How will they have grown? What will be their thinking now?

Do all stories end happily? No, of course not. Does this one? Will mine? And what is a truly happy ending? Is there truly an ending?

The main character in Angels goes to heaven and talks with the heavenly messengers. They encourage him to stay. He refuses heaven, returns to earth saying (in my paraphrase), “I can’t help it. I want more life. It’s not enough, it is so not enough, and yet we humans we keep hoping beyond hope, beyond all the body can bear, when hope should be gone, still we say, 'More life.' It’s in our nature."

More life. That's what I was after when I came out, when I stepped into the death of my known self, launched into the unknown, the unknowable. Some part of me was saying, still says, "I will not let thee go except thou bless me." Some part of me has long been wrestling with the angels.

More life. That's one translation of the Hebrew word that is also rendered as "blessing." Our vacation afforded my an unlooked for opportunity to wrestle with angels. To look at the world through different eyes. And I come away feeling blessed.

This essay remains unpublished.

AN OPEN LETTER TO ESSAYIST, AUTHOR AND POET NANCY MAIRS

2009-07-14T05:31:00.001-04:00

Dear Nancy,

Thank you for writing, for slogging along, for saying out what's within. Thank you for choosing life, time and again. Thank you for modeling so strong a response to what it is to be seen as different/outcast/less-than. Thank you for writing about loss, its lessons, contours and ordinariness, Thank you for your candor and courage in evaluating yourself and your motives. That’s worth saying again: thank you for modeling honesty and bravery; thank you for your candor and courage.

Thank you for questioning, for not pretending to have the answers. Thank you for lifting the lens of feminism, for allowing me to look through it with you at the world, our society, my motives. Thank you for thoughtful reflections, wry humor, truth-telling.

Thank you for offering hope.

I have read all your books save the most recent one, and that one I ordered today. Finding “On Being a Cripple” in an anthology of essays led me to ferret out your books at our local university library. I read Plaintext, Ordinary Time, In All the Rooms of the Yellow House, then before I finished Remembering the Bone House, I had to return the lot. I was hooked. I ordered a copy of each, paycheck by paycheck. By now I’ve also read and wept and laughed and cheered and underlined my way through Voice Lessons and Carnal Acts and A Troubled Guest and Waist-High in the World.

You show me myself. This dumfounds me. I am not a woman, a wife, a mother. I am not a cripple. I am no Catholic. Yet you lead me into the plain, ordinary, bone yellow house of myself. It stinks. It smells beautiful. It leaves a metallic tang on my tongue. You open one chamber after another, invite me to peer inside. This room reeks of growing up, that one of being different, discounted, discarded. This one smells of sex, cum and desire; that one carries a whiff of wholeness, of bodymindspirit. And here—oh compelling fragrance!—indignation, independence, inseeing.

Am I looking at you? At me? At me through you? You lead me to realize—no, to real-ize, to real eyes. You help me see what’s around and inside me. What you write, what I read rings true. You do not candy coat your experiences, opinions, evaluations. You look long and hard at life, at self, at society. You are candid about the pain involved in all of these endeavors. Yet you come down on the side of hope, of life, of joy. When my journey lands me in similar places I find you already there, already exploring the territory, explaining what you’ve heard, seen, smelled, tasted, touched.

Your writing inspires, instructs, encourages, equips. Your writing resonates, reverberates, reassures. In reading you I better know myself; I lean more deeply into my own losses and my responses to them. I am reaffirmed in my daily decisions to choose life.

Thank you for your acts of creation and co-creation. I remain

Gratefully yours,

Bryn Marlow

Nancy Mairs:

In All the Rooms of the Yellow House (1984)

Plaintext (1986)

Remembering the Bonehouse (1989)

Carnal Acts (1990)

Ordinary Time (1993)

Voice Lessons (1994)

Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled (1996)

A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories (2001)

Essays Out Loud: On Having Adventures & A Necessary End (CD) (2004)

A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith (2007)

ODE DE TOILETTE

2009-07-01T00:45:00.005-04:00

If I had to guess, I'd say your bladder is two or three times the size of mine. Seems I have a teeny one. Probably I have a small large intestine, too. At home, I make tracks to the toilet far more often than does my husband; at work, my colleagues sometimes rap on the restroom door, tell me to get a move on. Whatever the reason, I am a peeing and pooping marvel.

It has occurred to me that I might be full of sh*t.

Indeed, this may come close to the truth. Although I grew up during the societal upheaval of the 1960s and 70s, my conservative mother and father, fundamentalist church members and rural neighbors did their best to keep the 1950s in full swing.

Children obeyed their parents. The spared rod spoiled the child. A woman's place was in the home, or in the hospital, delivering the latest baby. The Bible, especially as interpreted by our denomination, was the final authority on all matters of life and living.

These and other similarly self-evident truths I swallowed whole.

Only as my palette developed did I begin to sort out what is healthful and wholesome from what tastes likes crap. Looking back I feel abashed at some of the beliefs I held. No, I feel sorry for the youngster who ingested whoppers such as these:

I am a good boy. My sole chance at happiness in this life and the next rests upon my being good.

A good boy always makes God and his mother happy, not necessarily in that order.

As a good boy my self-worth depends on how well I please my mother.

A good boy follows the rules and does as he is told.

A good boy does not get angry.

A good boy has neither sexual thoughts nor sexual desires. And never, never sexual experiences.

Never.

Every good boy marries a good girl when he grows up.

These principles and their ilk hung in the air I breathed. They were stirred into my morning oatmeal. They were repeated by school teachers and radio preachers. We prayed them aloud at bedtime. Some I didn’t seriously examine until I came out as a gay man.

I started doing many things differently then. One, I pay attention to my nighttime dreams, peer into an interior world I long ignored. Recently I attended a weekend dream retreat led by a Jungian analyst who is also a Catholic nun. As I told her, a consistent dream theme for me is the elimination of bodily wastes.

“That’s usually a very positive dream symbol,” she said. “It may mean you are getting rid of a lot of shit.” (The Catholic clerics I know seem quite willing to use words good boys avoid.)

She set me thinking. In both my waking and sleeping hours I spend much time on the toilet. What lessons this humble instrument offers!

Oh porcelain fount that every day—several times a day—washes away and makes clean.

I marvel at your ability to accept that which good boys don’t want to touch, smell, admit, own.

You have learned the secret of letting go. You swallow a lot of shit; people dump loads onto, into you, but you allow it to flow through and away.

You model non-attachment. Grasp nothing. Material things are not worth holding onto. There is wisdom and utility and joy in release.

You understand with deep knowing, “This, too, shall pass.”

You do your work without complaint, without ado, no need for accolades.

I am flush with gratitude.

This essay appeared in the July 2009 issue of The Letter

LIKE A ROCK

2009-06-22T20:51:00.004-04:00

When first I see him, my breathing goes shallow and quick. My pulse revs. My hands turn rubbery.

I’m on MySpace or Facebook and I’ve just seen his photo. It's no bigger than a postage stamp but its impact on me is billboard-sized—one of those roadside signs with a picture so arresting it causes traffic accidents.

I click on the word “profile” beside his name. Nothing. Click. Nothing. Click. Nothing. Clicklicklicklicklick. Nothing. I am a stranger to social networking sites. Several eternities pass before I learn I must create an account if I want to view his profile. Fine. Sign me up.

I make up a first and last name, try to enter my real email@yahoo.com address. It goes in and through as me@yazoo.com. Fine. I’ll rename the company if I have to. Just let me see his profile. Let me see if there’s anything more to see.

There is.

He’s posted seven photos of himself. Two show a sandy-haired young man in a red argyle sweater, blue-gray eyes, slight smile. His hair is still curly, I see. His face still mingles considered seriousness with an earnest eager-to-please look. In one photo he leans against a tree. In another he looks directly into the camera. The caption: “Yah, my high school graduation pictures. I look like a dork.” In the other photos he holds a guitar. Stands on a backyard stage, in front of a microphone. Caption: “I play in a Christian rock band.”

My son plays in a rock band! I had no idea.

Four years after his mother and I separated, a few days after he turned 10, he terminated contact with me. “Dad, I don’t want to see or talk to you. Don’t think that anyone else has influenced me to make this decision. I came up with it on my own.”

Except for the two photos of him my mother has sitting out, I’d hardly know what he looks like nowadays. I could easily pass him on the street, not recognize him. These seven photos are the heart’s feast.

They've nourished me for four years now.

This past week I make another of my periodic visits to Facebook. I poke around, find a teeny photo of another of my three sons. He looks to have grown tall, lost weight. He’s dressed all in black—black fedora, too—with a red tie and white boutonniere, hands in pockets, stands beside a young woman, hair piled atop her head, red dress, plunging neckline. His senior prom photo? I can only surmise.

It’s been four years since I saw him and his twin brother. Just before they turned 14 they met with a judge, asked that visitation with me be terminated. I arrived at their mother’s home to pick them up for their birthday party, found the restraining order taped to the door.

Some days it sucks being a homosexual father in rural Indiana.

I look at this small photo, let sadness wash over me. I keep learning to acknowledge, accept and feel my feelings. No sense running from them. No use trying to hide. Buried, they only rot to rise like zombies unbidden and at inopportune times.

Instead, I open myself to my emotions, open wider yet to let them wash over, through, past. Sadness keeps coming, sometimes like waves pounding the coast. I imagine myself as a rock, deeply rooted in living earth. Waves of sorrow, rage and fear may wash over it, but the rock remains.

My feelings are not me. No emotion, no judge, no other person can determine who I am at core.

This essay appeared in The Letter mid-month online issue, June 2009.

WEREWOLVES, WEREFOXES, WERE’POSSUMS, OH, MY!

2009-05-01T20:40:00.002-04:00

No moon or stars visible when I finally go out to gather eggs. The hens have long since gone to roost. Unable to see in the dark, they always settle in early. And chickens don’t sleep walk.

But someone or something is.

I open the coop door, find the hanging feeder swinging back and forth. Some creature has just been digging in it, and it warn’t no chicken. My eyes widen; my heart thumps.

I shine the flashlight all around. Nothing out of place. No signs of struggle. Chickens all present, all okay. What could it be?

A few years back, same summer cancer was eating its way through my dad’s body, some predator raided our coop almost nightly. Chickens disappeared one by one. Or, as with a newly hatched brood of chicks, a dozen at a time. My husband Dave and I didn’t know what was after them, or what action to take.

We doubled the height of the barnyard fence to eight feet. Next day, another chicken gone.

We barred the doorway with chicken wire. Next day, two chickens gone.

We sealed the coop doors tight. Next day, all present and accounted for. Day after that, another chicken gone.

Whatever it was—snake, opossum, raccoon, weasel, mink, marten, fox, coyote, wolf, mountain lion, grizzly bear, Big Foot, Loch Ness monster—it was voracious. It was canny. Fearsome. Stealthy. Smarter than we were.

It upped the ante, started making daylight raids. We foiled its attacks only after enclosing our flock in a high-security fence. We dug a trench, started the chicken wire barricade a foot below ground to discourage digging underneath it, then fenced the sides and up over the top as well. At last the chicken population stabilized.

We never did identify the perpetrator.

Has it now come back? I watch the feeder swinging to and fro. What creature breached our security? A human?

The answer pokes out from under a nest box. I spot the scaly tail of an opossum. The beast must have crept in the other day when I left the gate open, let the chickens roam the lawn.

Next day Dave chases the opossum out using a shovel as shield, the end of a rake handle as motivation. I cheer him on from behind the coop door. Our foe snarls, hisses, bites, leaves. All is quiet for a few days. Then I find the feeder swinging back and forth again. Just our luck, I tell Dave. We’re being haunted by a were’possum with supernatural powers of translocation.

Nope.

Dave thinks to check the maximum security fence, finds a hole big enough for a horde of were-opossums to tromp through.

I fix the fence. No more nighttime visitors.

Yet I’m grateful they showed up in the first place. They gave me a wake-up call, set me thinking about my inner life, put me on the lookout for trespassers. Suddenly (or maybe not), there they were, coming out of the woodwork. What, translocating? Strangers, friends, family, institutionalized religion, former employer tromping willy-nilly over personal boundaries I thought were secure, draining my resources.

I reminded myself that I am only one person, can do only so much. I examined my inner fences, patched the holes, said No.

Out of the coop, ’possum.

Life is like this. Exquisitely coherent. The ’possum in my outer life prompts me to look inside for something similar. What do I notice? What is happening there? How am I feeling about it? What would I like to have happen? How might I feel then? What will I do now?

Out of awareness, change.

An earlier version of this essay first appeared in The Letter, May 2009

A SQUARE OF BRIGHT BLUE SKY

2009-04-01T22:04:00.003-04:00

“I woke up 42 years ago,” she said, looking me dead in the eye. “I woke up and all I could see was a square of bright blue sky.”

I had no idea what she meant. She leaned in, eager to talk. I leaned in, too. Her speech was hard to understand. Her top teeth protruded from her mouth; her bottom teeth were missing. Her words came out fuzzy. I listened carefully. It took time to untangle her story. With no one to corroborate or clarify her narrative, I had to sort out the details for myself.

She is now 83. A month ago she moved into the nursing home where my father-in-law resides. Her husband, at age 42, lost his life in an automobile accident; that was 42 years ago. She was in the car, too. She lost her memory in the collision, had to start over from scratch at age 41. When she woke up she recognized no one, not even her children. She had no recall of her past or her purpose in the world. “I woke up 42 years ago and all I could see a square of bright blue sky. I said, ‘thank you, Lord, for that square of bright blue sky.’ That was all I knew.”

As she spoke, she brushed her white hair back from her neck and I saw a small praying hands pin attached to the collar of her purple velour dress. Her Sunday best, I surmised. She had listened to a Catholic television program that morning, she said. “It helps me, you know.”

It was a challenge for her, reconstructing a life from thin air at age 41. It still is. After the car accident, she was transferred to a Veteran’s Administration hospital, evidence she had once served in the armed forces. She has been in and out of VA hospitals ever since, most recently when she fell this past winter and broke one hip, then fell and broke the other. She was transferred from the VA to this nursing home. Her daughter lives in the next county over.

“It’s not easy to wake up at 41.” She said this several times throughout the course of our conversation and laughed each time in apology. It seems she takes personal responsibility for having misplaced four decades of her life. Here’s another phrase she often repeats: “You just never know.”

“Things change. You just never know.

“I lived with my son down in Florida until he passed away. You just never know.

“I’ve lived too long. I don’t want to be here anymore. Maybe the Lord has some reason for keeping me around, but I don’t know what it is. You just never know.”

I nodded and agreed with her each time. No, you never know. She sums up her life with this one phrase. And no wonder.

I don’t know what it’s like to lose 40 years of memory; I hope I never find out. But I do know that what she says resonates with my experience of coming out. I felt as if I were waking up at age 35. It was upheaval and it was exciting; it was terrible and it was wonderful; it was life and blue horizons and I was grateful. My husband recounts a similar awakening experience at age 48.

He and I often voice regret and sadness over lost decades, lost opportunities, lost life. We also recount joyful memories, our present happiness. And I usually voice anger. I feel angry to see my former self reflected in several people whom I see sleepwalking through their lives. I want to shake them, wake them up, shine blue sky square in their faces.

Of course, I can’t talk. I can barely keep my own eyes open. My husband just reminded me that income taxes are due in a matter of days. This came as a complete surprise. No, I have not the wisdom, wit nor authority to take responsibility for another’s awakening. But what I can do is tell my story. I can lean forward, look you—or anyone who will listen—dead in the eye, and in words that may or may not sound fuzzy say, “I woke up 15 years ago. It’s been hell. It’s been heaven. I woke up and saw a square of bright blue sky, and I said, ‘thank you, world. Thank you for that square of bright blue sky.’ I’ve been looking up ever since.”

This essay first appeared in The Letter, April 2009

UNASSUMING CONQUEROR

2009-03-01T19:23:00.002-05:00

My husband Dave and I tend chickens—a small barnyard flock, but enough hens that we have eggs coming out our ears at the peak of the spring laying season. When production drops in the heat of summer we enjoy something other than egg white omelets for supper.

Every so often during the warmer months one or another of our hens goes broody. She gets a glint in her eye appropriate to a religious acetic about to don a camel’s hair shirt and retreat to the dessert. Approached by rooster, hen or human, she fluffs up to twice her normal size and utters a cry of righteous reproach that one soiled with the affairs of the world should intrude upon the presence of the holy. She clucks aloud as if already addressing a nest of newly hatched chicks. The wise intruder trammels no further motherhood’s sacred domain.

A broody hen sets 21 days upon a clutch of eggs. She’ll use her own eggs if she has been able to sneak away and fill a hidden nest. If home is a hen house with shared nest boxes, she uses a collection of her neighbors’ eggs. We have a separate pen for setting hens so they will be undisturbed. The hen keeps the eggs warm for three weeks, turns them every few hours, gets off the nest only for her daily constitutional. Motherhood is no small commitment.

And so an egg—common, ordinary part of my daily repast—becomes the stuff of miracles. I’ve seen the insides of an egg. It’s all goop and goo. No feathers in there, no chicken feet, no little life form peeping with its own temperament. But keep an egg warm enough, long enough and at 18 or 19 days out it starts talking to you. I’ve heard it. Its mother hears, too, and she answers back, bonds with her baby before its hatched. Love knows no walls. At last a hole appears in the egg. The chick uses its egg tooth, a sharp temporary nail at the tip of its beak, to poke through, then scribe a rough line round the middle of the egg before finally breaking the shell apart. This process can take up to 14 hours. A wet bedraggled ragamuffin emerges, unassuming conqueror who has dared split the world open at its seams and step into a vast beyond imagining. When privileged to witness this process, I feel compelled almost to take off my shoes. The place I stand is holy ground.

Gathered under mom’s soft wings, the chick dries to a fluffy fuzzball of downy feathers—cute and adorable. Precocious, too, soon scurrying about, pecking, peeping, keeping close by mom’s protection, answering her summons, seeking her comforting bosom.

But no matter the joy I take in watching newborn chicks, we need no more additions to our barnyard. We have too many chickens already. Dave and I talked it over this spring. He noted it’s easy enough to control population growth—don’t let any broody hens set this summer. We could try my grandmother’s remedy, I offered, put a broody hen under a bushel basket for a few days to disabuse her of the notion of motherhood. Were we agreed? I let him think so. But a few weeks later Blackie went broody, reminded me how much I enjoy seeing baby chickens. Sorely tempted to let her keep a few eggs, I put off putting her under a basket. I removed the eggs from under her each day, figured one of us would lose our resolve. She gave up first. I was relieved.

Then Thruff and Flighty went to setting at the same time. Golden brown Thruff hatched out a brood of chicks last year; I know her to be a good mother. Black and bronze Flighty is a first-timer. I was amazed she stayed on the nest, let me get within five feet of her. She was serious about this motherhood thing. Surely such commitment demanded I make allowances. Besides, when I consulted our hatchery catalog to see what they charged for fertile eggs one could put under a setting hen, I had dropped my jaw to learn we could order 10 eggs for a little over $40, or take advantage of their special deal—three common white eggs for $30, shipped post-paid, overnight express. Those are $20 omelets we eat each night. Greed tipped the balance. I moved both hens into a small pen with only five brown eggs between them. They could probably handle a dozen apiece. Such restraint on my part made it easier for me to tell Dave what I’d done. This news was better received when I stated aloud my intention to cull our flock, dispatch at least five aged hens to keep our population constant. Two days later I slipped a sixth dark brown egg under Flighty, hoped for the best. So much for restraint.

Come hatch day, four chicks appeared—one black, one dark brown, one buff with feathered feet, one yellow with brown speckles atop the head. The chicks had gathered at the front of the pen near Thruff; Flighty had pushed her way up there, too, asserting her claim to joint-motherhood. Flighty’s nest was now empty save for a dark brown peeping egg. Left cold and unattended, it would die. That would be my fault. This was probably the Johnny come lately egg I’d put to setting two days late. Thruff had one unhatched egg, as well; hers sloshed when I shook it. Apparently, it had not been fertile. I put mothers and babies in the coop, slipped the peeping egg under steely-eyed Fegan who had gone broody a few days earlier. She had been given six eggs. (Dave received a promise of more culling.) Fegan would keep this egg warm, no problem, I knew. Problem was, if it hatched out, I doubted she would tend it. She would keep her focus on the still-to-be-hatched majority. I would check in the morning. If if had hatched, I’d move it in with the other babies.

The next evening the egg was peeping louder than ever, now had a small hole in it. Fegan was characteristically silent. (Her nickname is “Sphinx.” ) Did the little peeper need a mother’s coaxing to hatch? Should I put in under Thruff or Flighty for the night, hope it hatched by morning when the mothers would leave the nest with their brood? Should I leave it under Fegan? She’d stay put all night, in the morning, too. I opted for this latter course of action, went on to bed, would check at daybreak. Before midnight I got up, trekked out to the coop, moved the egg under Thruff. Coming-out efforts might better succeed with a caring, comforting, clucking response. When I checked in the next morning there was a dun-colored fluff ball in the coop and a smile on my face.

This essay is unpublished

DEAR JACK, DEAR ME

2009-02-01T22:05:00.003-05:00

Notes From the Afterlife

If I were a cat I'd have seven lives left. I’m not and I don’t. I’m 15 years into my second life, no promise of a third. The first ended at age 35 with my coming out. Try as I might to reconcile my two lives, they resist union.

Recently I contacted an acquaintance from my first life. I remember him as a tall, sexy graduate student with an infectious smile and an outsider’s insight into our society. A U.S. citizen, he’d grown up overseas. We enjoyed long philosophical discussions. I lost track of him when he returned to Europe.

Thanks to the internet, I learned he now lives stateside, works for a religious institution. I emailed him this innocuous note:

Jack (not his real name),

Warm greetings and (mostly) good wishes to you in the midst of the yammering and clamoring of daily life.

I stumbled across your name today and smiled to think of you back when you wrote for the magazine I edited. Back when I yet called myself Doug, before I named myself.

My file of abandoned to-do projects includes an airmail letter I started to you overseas. Perhaps this note is by way of laying that obligation to rest. <

I hope you are well and happy. Interesting how life continues apace, how it carries us along on its currents, how we do the best we can. How much this matters; how little.

Life and peace to you. And light,

Bryn

He replied, addressing me by my birth name. Red flag. People who refuse to honor my name change also tend to discount the person I am now. Jack wrote:

Dear Doug,

Thank you for your note. I enjoyed writing for the magazine. There is something you write here that lacks wisdom: "I named myself." It is folly to think that we can name ourselves. We are not our own authors. We are the clay, not the Potter.

What's in a name? "She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21). Everything's in THIS name: "For there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).

And this is my only hope—that Jesus came into the world to save sinners. He alone is true peace, light, and life,

Sincerely,

Jack

What gives? His response seems overblown. Somehow he must have learned I've come out. Apparently my making contact threatens him. What, is he afraid I’ll assault his belief system? His person? I feel angry.

At the same time, I've been where he is, smug and secure in self-righteous conviction on his side of the church door. If I write Jack off as a lost cause, I also throw out the former me he represents. I want to believe my first lifetime was not a total wash, that some part of what I did or who I was outlived my coming out. That's why I emailed Jack in the first place. When I answer him I also address the man I once was:

Jack,

Curious (or maybe not) that you and I address comments to persons who lived some 14, 15 years ago, who are no longer present to life in a physical way. I write a Jack whom I perceived/projected to be in the thick of continued learning, able to pose questions, feeling his way into the future. You write a man named Doug, earnest, sincere, sure he knew where if not what the answers were. Peace to both those men. And to the men they are at present, may one day become.

Thank you for your response, for your time, energy and expression of hope/belief. Given the tenor of your words, the judgment I hear in them, and my desire for health, I choose to terminate contact with this email (leaving me the last word, I note) and say to that ages-ago Jack and his present incarnation, as I did to my father four years ago on his deathbed, three years later to my dying mother, then to my beloved grandmother, "I love you; I let you go."

Bryn

When I was little I wanted to be a cat when I grew up. In childhood, all bets were off, all options open. My world has narrowed since then. Nowadays the thought of having to endure nine lives leaves me feeling tired. I can’t seem to reconcile the two that have been granted me, let alone nine. I grieve the loss of my first life and my inability to bring people from my past into my present. This life after death is deeper, richer, fuller, different. I wish those I once loved were here to share it.

This essay first appeared in The Letter, February 2009