DECEMBER 2005 (LJ)

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2005-12-02 19:40:00
2005-12-03 01:40:19

Jon with Misty Me with new Siberian Husky, Misty! She will be a year this Christmas Eve.

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2005-12-02 20:39:00
2005-12-03 02:39:10

Younkers Massage Studio Where I worked as a certified massage therapist.

Me with Misty, again. Me with the pretty puppy!

Me with the 1987 Toyota Supra The "Night Rider" car.

West Supreior Street The western edge of downtown

View of downtown from the harbor, winter. View of downtown on a very chilly day on the lake!

Aerial Lift Bridge & Lake Superior View of downtown Duluth and Lake Superior from the hillside.

Downtown Duluth YWCA Where I worked for...well...ever!

Downtown Duluth View from a boat on Lake Superior

Downtown From Skyline Parkway

Duluth Central High School One of Duluth's finest landmarks, the old Central High School. The new Central is on top of the hill, on the upper left hand corner.

Downtown YMCA Duluth 302 W 1st St. I worked here for a long time too...lots of memories here!!

Kingsley Heights Apartments and Sammy's Pizza 1st Ave W & W 1st St

Frances Skinner Apartments and the Adult Sauna 1st Ave E & E 1st St - Duluth's Skid Row. This is the worst intersection in the city as far as robberies, stabbings, down-n-out types, prostitution and drug dealing. Anything goes here at night.

Downtown Duluth YWCA Another shot of the Downtown Duluth YWCA 1906-2006.

Duluth Sauna, 18 N 1st Ave E This is the last gay sauna left in the midwest. This has been a meeting place for gay men for almost 50 years.

First Bank Place First Bank Building from the 200 block of West 1st St, Downtown Duluth.

Medical Arts and Lonsdale Bldgs. 300 block of West Superior St

Another photo of the Duluth Sauna, 18 N 1st Ave E While this is called the Duluth Family Sauna, it's been an adult business for many years. The upstairs has private rooms for couples, and the downstairs is a public men's sauna mostly for gay men. It's not as sleazy as you think...it's been a place for gay men in the community to hang out and relax because there are very few other places in Duluth to do so.

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2005-12-03 17:10:00
2005-12-03 23:28:26
Back to normal
It's been a long past few months, with school and everything else that has been going on. Part of me is disappointed that the fall was pretty boring, nothing or nobody really brought me much excitement, and I guess I had hoped for something magical to happen (but then again, who doesn't)? The last few weeks (and the next couple weeks) are going to be a reminder of how I let things go with school...the work I didn't get done I will now have to get done before the end of the semester. Why does the 4 months between August and December go by so fast, but the 4 months between January and May just drag along? I have almost everything completed for the Masters' program I hope to begin next fall. I'm excited. This is what I've been waiting for; the chance to really get involved in something I am passionate about and can see myself enjoying someday as a career. My life hasn't made much sense for years and I've found myself floundering before I decided to go back to school. I just have to stick with it, realize that some days you really don't feel motivated at all, and to not quit when things get to be impossible. It's so easy to do these things, and these are the walls I faced in the past where I actually did give up. I've learned a few things since then and I have to prove to myself that I've learned enough to get past this other stuff. Then there are times I dream of doing what I'd like to do, if I had the money and time to do it. With all the experience I have had with fitness and massage therapy, I would love to open a state-of-the-art facility that includes the best of what I saw in Minneapolis: quality equipment, a great setting, comfortable atmosphere, updated programs, and an overall nice facility. When I look at what's available in Duluth, there isn't much: for an area of 120,000 people, we have the YMCA downtown, which is a place that makes no sense - I don't think it was designed to be a gym - there's no fitness studio, and the workout area has no bathrooms - you have to go down two flights of stairs to get to the locker rooms. There is no parking, and the nearest ramp is two blocks away - with no skywalk to get there. The Center at SMDC is where I go, but it's really rundown for only being built in 1991. They've oversold the memberships and flooded the facility, resulting in overused equipment and a facility that is so crowded that it's almost "work" to workout. I would love to have the money to build the kind of place that I know people would like. The thing is, in order to do these things, I must have a lot of money, and there must be a lot of people in Duluth who would be willing to pay money to belong to the club. Duluth and Minneapolis are much different cities - people here do not have the incomes they have there. We don't have corporate headquarters or lots of high-paying jobs that would draw those kinds of members. And unfortunately in order to run the kind of facility I would like, I would need a lot of people with money to spend. People here just don't have a lot of spendable income. So it's a tough thing, and that would explain why 4 out of 5 locally owned businesses fail within one year - because there isn't a lot of money moving around here, people will go to big-box stores or the cheapest places they can find rather than going for quality. I would love to see that change here. I'm not one to move to another city just because it would be difficult to achieve what I want, because that's too easy. It's the same with moving to a different city just to meet someone - because there are no guarantees, and there is a reason why you are where you are. Sure, sometimes you do need to move if it is absolutely necessary, but other times you have to look at where you are, why you are there, and what made you leave the city you were last in. Whenever I think about going back to Minneapolis I remember the reasons why I left. And so I stay. Not because I have any special affection for Duluth or the lack of gay prospects here, but because this is my home. I have to have a sense of place in order for things to make sense. There is comfort in familarity and place. And having family nearby is good too.
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2005-12-04 16:29:00
2005-12-04 22:30:34
Another blog entry I admired
I read this man's blog the other day, and found his insght to be helpful. I will pass it on here: Why The Hell Am I Still Alone: Getting Serious About Serious Gay Relationships by Max Gordon Sapience Magazine* “If he makes even one mistake,” Darren said, “I’m telling you right now, he’s out.” Over brunch, Darren had just finished catching me up on the relationship he’d recently ended. We were now envisioning the prospect of any of his future lovers. He’d been hurt severely by Gary, his boyfriend of eight months who he found out had been having sex with other men. It wasn’t the first time a lover of Darren’s had cheated, or attempted to cheat on him. “Even one mistake?” I asked. For the look he gave me, I might have been the offender. “I’m tired of being taken advantage of, Max,” he continued. “And of ignoring the signs. Gary was constantly flirting, always letting his phone go to voicemail when we were out together. I gave him too many chances, as usual, but he’s the last, and I mean it this time. If a man needs to use our relationship to figure out how to be honest, then he can go learn somewhere else.” I thought about my relationship with my partner, the mistakes I’d made even that morning, and the ones I would probably make by the end of the day. Sometimes, when I was in a particularly cynical mood, my long-term relationship of twelve years felt defined by the mistakes – with the occasional reprieve of companionship and sex thrown in. I considered men in relationships with each other, and fathers who said the same thing to their sons, whether it was literal or implied: “One mistake, buddy, and you’re out.” The sadness of the withdrawal of love from a partner who was imperfect, as all partners are, and yet the very real dilemma of trying to sustain a relationship with a man you were in love with and who couldn’t be trusted. I knew from my own experience as a lover and a friend that it is easier to have a rigid, angry jaw like Darren’s than to feel fully the grief of another relationship’s ending in frustration, of calling your friends about your new boyfriend, introducing him and then having to call them all back months later to announce you’ve just broken up with him. When the next “I’ve just met someone” call is made, you hear in their voices that the enthusiasm has waned, and without saying so, your friends have now developed a grace period for your lovers (groups of friends, like children, can have separation anxiety too). They congratulate you while refusing to meet or bond with the new boyfriend, waiting to see how long “this one will last.” “I’m lonely,” Darren said. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper. I played with the edge of my napkin, and we sat in the silence for a few moments. We’d reached the part of the conversation that couldn’t be laughed away with snapped fingers or double entendre, having exhausted current events, pop-culture gossip, and mutual friends’ successes and failures. It was the tail end of our weekly meetings, right before we parted, that was usually reserved for our own painful embarrassments and heartbreak, deliberately planned to ensure a quick getaway. “And I’m tired,” he sighed, finally. “Maybe I should just face the fact that I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life.” I reassured him that he was wrong, and the conversation brightened as we paid the check and changed the subject. Later, I thought of Darren when I had almost exactly the same conversation with a new acquaintance, Carlos, about the frustration of dating, the exhaustion and constant pressure of trying to be impressive with each new encounter ("It's like preparing the same performance over and over again without an opening night. I'm sick of dress rehearsals!"); of negotiating on which date you sleep with him, and if you choose too early, risking that he may lose interest; of meeting him online and finding out he’s lied about everything including his age, his profession and his 10-year-old picture, and his pleading as you close the door on him that he had to lie about his age or you never would have agreed to meet him in the first place. The get-togethers with friends where you are the only single man there. The online dating services, the workshops, singles parties and paid gatherings where Carlos told me he felt like cattle at a rodeo as he stood up, held a number in front of him, and announced his whole life to the group in less than five minutes and why he was loveable (but couldn’t get a date on his own). “Sometimes, I just want to give up on the whole fucking thing,” he said. It crossed my mind for an instant to introduce Darren to Carlos –why not? they were both looking. But no matter how lonely they were, or how much they felt victimized by the dating scene and a desire to find a real person like themselves, knowing them both, I knew a relationship between them would probably never work. Part of the reason why relationships, gay or straight, are so difficult, and why the failure to find one is so shame-inducing, is that there is a cultural assumption that we know how to have them. There aren’t any courses in our primary education that teach us how to have healthy relationships, and proper sex education, on the occasions when it’s offered, doesn’t get the job done. Knowing how male spermatozoa swim upstream in search of female ova doesn’t tell you how long to wait for someone to call after a first date or whether you should wait at all. It doesn’t suggest how many times to forgive a partner who cheats, what to do if your partner hits you or verbally abuses you, or when to move in together, and if possible, get married, and when, if necessary, to pack your bags and leave. You never hear a child say, “This semester I’m taking math, art history, and romantic relationships.” I’ve never been asked once since high school about the battle of 1812, but a course on co-dependency and love addiction might have come in handy when I entered my first relationship. Those of us fortunate enough to come from homes where our parents communicated, and who modeled for us how two partners can have a disagreement without being abusive to one another, might have some basic relationship tools. But for far too many of us, in our parents’ marriages we saw a range from bitter indifference to physical and emotional violence. We have a cultural data bank filled with images from films, television, magazines and our families of a woman sitting by the phone waiting for a man to call, of a man breaking down a door in a jealous rage or stalking his girlfriend as she drives home from work, of two women fighting each other over a man, or two men “stepping outside” over a woman, of articles about “how to keep him satisfied” and couples who “can’t stand each other” one minute and then are so enmeshed they call each other every half hour and suddenly “can’t stand to be apart.” We’ve all had the close friend, who is completely present and loving when he is single, but the minute he’s is in a new relationship, he disappears - neglects friends and family, never returns phone calls and is missing in action - until the relationship ends and he needs a shoulder to cry on. He is apologetic, and begs for forgiveness, and the friendship is wonderful again – until his next lover comes along. Who can blame him? Most relationships are wonderful at first; like that new shirt or CD we’ll die if we can’t have. Months later, the shirt’s at the back of the closet, the songs on the CD are played out, and there is something new to be desired. Part of the problem of any relationship is that eventually the honeymoon period comes to an end. Until then, our relationship is a shiny new toy. Things are perfect at this stage; mistakes are avoided or ignored, and love can thrive because forgiveness isn’t yet required. When a relationship is new we wear our best outfits, we make sure to arrive on time, we avoid the alienating, controversial topics during dinner, and we make sure not ever to fart, or belch aloud. We excuse ourselves in the restaurant to check for spinach between our teeth. Fast forward a couple of years and, amazingly, we’re now comfortable enough with this person to take a shit with the door open, wear their clothes without asking, and eat the last piece of pie without finding out first if they were saving it. During the honeymoon phase, however, we are on our best behavior and we definitely aren’t in touch with any of the psychological pain that usually comes up for us in intimate relationships. Our personal horror stories are locked safely in the crypt where we feel they belong. Thank God, by the way, for this honeymoon period, or there might not be any relationships in the world at all! It’s between the sixth month and the end of the first year when the relationship enters the second stage: things get “real”, he keeps leaving his socks on the floor, and the crypt begins to open. Our childhood pain rears its head. All the abandonment issues, all the early abuse and incest issues come up in order to be confronted and healed. If we anticipate this, and we’ve done some work beforehand, the relationship may have a chance. Some of us can work through these problems with the tools we have. For the rest of us, as I have seen in my own life, we are bewildered by a relationship that is suddenly, inexplicably different, in which we are sharing a bed with someone who has “changed”. We are shocked to discover our partner feels the same way about us. Our romantic relationships often bring up a series of experiences that trigger “flashbacks” to our original abuse and trauma, the first time we trusted and loved unconditionally and what we got in return. Part of our healing work is knowing when we are in flashback mode, when the overwhelming feeling we are experiencing during an argument with our partner is not completely of the moment we are in, but based on our own unresolved or unexplored history. That doesn’t let our partner off the hook if he or she is behaving like an asshole, it just means we take responsibility for the dysfunction that we bring to the relationship. I should probably take a moment here to acknowledge anyone who expected to read an article on relationships encouraging the reader to pick four-leaf clovers or write love poems to the relationship fairy during a full moon. I apologize if you feel misled – relationships are much harder, and harder won, than magic potions and wishing on stars. I definitely advocate prayer during the relationship, lots of it, in fact. And magic and self-help slogans (believe me, I’ve read and tried them all) may get you a first date. But since most serious dating will eventually turn into a serious relationship, we need more than a magic wand to integrate a person into the sacred parts of our lives, and more than wishful thinking to sustain the intimacy required for them to want to stay there. The truth is that more relationships would have a fighting chance if they weren’t submerged by the weight of our romantic fantasies. A healthy relationship simply can’t withstand the pressure that comes from our expectation that someone is going to save our lives or make us feel valued, safe or vital, especially if we’ve never felt these things from the people who cared for us as children, and if we never learned how to give them to ourselves. We are responsible for meeting our own emotional needs. Everyone loves to join a party that is thriving, and guests will often bring a bottle of wine, or chocolates, but if you invite someone to dinner and you’re starving when she gets there because you expected her to bring the main course, then you aren’t looking for a relationship, you’re holding people hostage. I am thankful that around the time I began my current partnership, still reeling from the personal failures in my last, I read books and listened to tapes which helped me see my relationships as spiritual “assignments.” I began to understand that not only would my insanity come up in the relationship, it was expected as part of my growth. I could move past the shame of being “crazy” in the relationship and learn how to work through my issues with my partner and to ask for help. Depending on the degree of damage we’ve sustained, we may require anything from a weekend refresher-course on intimacy, to couples-counseling, to a padded cell and a shot of thorazine. The support is out there if we are open to it. The real breakthrough is often not the help itself, but getting past the shame of needing it. If we are willing to understand that we aren’t wrong or bad for being terrified of relationships, and that it’s okay for intimacy to be scary sometimes, we can be patient with ourselves when our insanity comes up, and know that it is a sign that the relationship could be working, not failing - as long as we are taking responsibility for our own behavior and healing process. We can choose to love ourselves for having the courage to attempt intimate relationships at all, and can honor and respect ourselves when a relationship matures or when we intuitively know that one has to come to an end. In the conversations about relationships that I’ve overheard amongst my gay friends, it’s sometimes like a war, full of mutual envy and contempt. There is the single man who feels outraged at the “married” man who is dissatisfied with his long-term relationship. He listens to him complain for only so long before he finally says, “Hey, at least you’ve got someone.” The conversation may end there as the man in the relationship holds his tongue out of guilt, fearing he may be ungrateful, and before anyone stops to ask what kind of someone he’s got; his lover could be cruel and duplicitous, but the point seems to be just to “get a man.” Deep down he knows that the conversation has ignored one basic fact: that being in an intimate relationship with someone brings up unexpected challenges and anxieties that you never have to deal with when you are alone, and that a suffocating, addictive relationship with another human being, filled with recriminations, jealousy and rage can be pure hell for everyone involved, including family and friends. At some point, this man has also had to face the fact that it is possible to feel lonely within a relationship - a devistating realization, as he can no longer even maintain the romantic fantasy that finding a partner one day will make him feel complete. So it’s not just “any” relationship that should be envied. The perpetual fantasy of people who are “so happy”, simply because they are in a relationship, is just as sinister as those who do have a mate and who project onto single people the “freedom” that comes from the imagined one-night stands every night of the week and the luxury of not having to share the bathroom - who forget and romanticize what it means to want a relationship and to be single and alone. Part of getting serious about gay relationships begins with having compassion for ourselves whether we are in a romantic relationship or not, and understanding the barriers that sometimes get in the way of intimacy once a new relationship begins. Too often, just when we start to get close to one another, our pornography intrudes. The problem with the pornographic gaze (and I’m not talking about erotic videos of people running around naked, I'm talking about most of the images that pervade our culture, from downloaded internet porn to GQ and Vogue), is that some of us are looking for people in the world who don’t even exist. If you’re used to looking at images in magazines or on a television all day, then you may only be used to seeing airbrushed, digitally altered people who spend three to five hours a day on their bodies, who have personal chefs, trainers and weekly spa visits, and who are paid millions to be a size six or have washboard abs. They may be anorexic or bulimic and only able to keep their weight off with cocaine and amphetamines. After indulging in this orgy of synthesized glamour, we find ourselves extremely disappointed when our date takes off his or her clothes and we discover a human being. People in magazines don’t have liver spots, don’t lose their hair, or have cellulite. They rarely have hair on their backs, or breasts that sag, or wrinkles on their faces and necks, or love-handles, uncapped teeth, or adult acne. If the person we fall in love with doesn’t have a monster cock or a bubble butt, then what? What if our potential partner has chosen to avoid breast implants, liposuction, face-lifts or botox injections and she prefers just to age naturally? As a recovering sex-addict, I understand from my many experiences in the bathhouses and cruising how easy it is to objectify someone until they are reduced to something functional that exists only for our pleasure, like an air-conditioner or a toaster-oven. Some of our outrage and despair in relationships comes from the fact that we discard people (and are discarded) because they have the audacity to expect to be loved despite their imperfections. If we only consider other people who share our shallow standards of beauty, then we know we are in serious trouble in the relationship if, due to an unexpected depression, we gain twenty pounds and feel our partner wants to break up because they refuse to be with anyone who “looks like that.” Insisting on physical perfection from everyone we’re in a relationship with eventually backfires. In the end, we are the ones who end up running to the bathroom to examine ourselves every fifteen minutes and find out if we are any less attractive than the last time we checked; we mutilate our bodies with excessive plastic surgery, addictive tanning or compulsive exercise, in order to feel worthy enough to live. While every relationship has its challenges, gay relationships are tested in unique ways. You might have had my experience of running into people I haven’t seen in a while, and being asked, “Are you still with your boyfriend?” It is not customary for me to go up to my heterosexual friends, specifically those who are in long-term relationships or married and ask, “Are you still with your husband?” I’ve also known siblings, one gay, one straight, who were going through crises in their long-term relationships at the same time. When “Suzy and Jim” were thinking about separating and getting divorced, the family galvanized itself around the couple and began a campaign to keep their marriage together. But when “Paul and Michael” were thinking of breaking up after almost the same number of years together, disappointment was expressed, and Paul was told he’d find someone else one day. The unspoken assumption was that it was amazing the relationship had lasted as long as it had, as we all know how “gay men are.” An interracial gay relationship may have the added pressure of being more visible on the street and thus more vulnerable to racist and homophobic remarks or violence (I once read that given the social divide in America, if a white and black man of a certain age are seen walking together and they aren’t co-workers, they’re assumed to be homosexuals); a partnership between two women may not be taken seriously as family refuse to see them as anything more than “girlfriends” or “roommates” who are just keeping each other company until the right man comes along. Our own internalized homophobia can even rear its head in unconscious ways as we sabotage our gay relationships just when they are starting to take off. Cheating or having an affair, financially debting to a partner, working constantly so that there is never any time to spend together, can all be ways of affirming what we knew all along, having been told it all our lives by a homophobic society: gay relationships are inherent failures, and morally wrong, and love between two people of the same sex can’t possibly work. We have to guard our gay relationships like found treasures, protecting them from homophobic family members, society’s low expectations, or even from our own corrupted thinking. Fighting for our relationships often means challenging our assumptions about the same sex. Gay women in relationships may have to overcome the social conditioning that tells women not to trust each other, to keep a man at the center of a relationship and let him take the lead, putting themselves last. Gay men who’ve been taught a paradigm of macho brutality for solving problems, may have to change their ideas about male competitiveness, communication and anger, for a partnership to survive at all. I went on my first official date with a man months after I arrived at college. Justin was a graduate student a few years older than I who was also coming out of the closet; we’d met in our gay support group. Our evening was an adventure, to say the least, at times both humorous and terrifying. If Justin had been a woman, I would have had some cultural expectation of what to do, about who should pick up whom, pay for the meal and initiate our first kiss. Gay people aren’t the only ones who face this dilemma, by the way - there are heterosexual men and women challenging the cultural assumptions when they date, defying the rules. But for gay people the rules just aren’t there. A gay or lesbian rarely hears from his or her parents, “Now when your father and I had our first homosexual date….” It is important for us as gays to be patient with ourselves and with the dating process, especially when we have come out of the closet late in life. We need to forgive ourselves at 35 for having the awkwardness of a fifteen-year-old. For some of us, our grief in relationships comes from the fact that we weren’t allowed as adolescents in relationships to have the same trial and error as most heterosexuals have had. Years ago, I got the best advice I ever had about relationships, which I’ve tried to apply ever since: I was told never to grab, and that if I wanted a relationship it was good practice to love everything I could – puppies, homemade lasagna, a favorite book, roller-skating, fresh flowers - and that the outpouring of love would eventually attract even more love in my life. The enchanted life was about letting things come to me that were mine; the “grabby” life was about manipulating everyone so I wouldn’t feel alone (and ending up alone because no one likes being manipulated). I was told to drop anything that might get in the way of my enjoying other people, like prejudice of any kind, racism, sexism, or even my own internalized homophobia and judgment of gays. I was told that there might be years in my life when I would be building something other than a long-term relationship, and that a partnership would come at exactly the right time for me. I also had to face the fact that the constant pursuit of a new romantic relationship was sometimes a subterfuge to keep from focusing on myself. Sometimes a relationship ends and we are immediately searching for the next one, while our close friends are thinking, “What Miss Thing needs to be looking for is a rehab so she can get her ass off crystal.” I also knew that for whatever mysterious reason, some people struggled in the area of relationships more than others, as some did with financial security. I have friends who just say the word “money” and then practically find it on the street moments later, who go from promotions at work to pay raises, and who owned their own homes by thirty; while others like me find it a chore to balance a checkbook. On the other hand, these same people can walk into a party and complain that “no-one interesting” is there, sitting bored and alone, while other friends will know most of the names in the room within an hour, and have already exchanged a few phone numbers. I finally realized that the experience of finding a partner isn’t the same for everyone, and that for whatever reason I thought I wanted a relationship, there might be a deeper, more compelling psychological reason why I didn’t want one, a reason as simple as a four-year-old inside me who avoided relationships because he didn’t want to fight all the time like Mom and Dad did. Recently, on an impulse, I saw the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Surrounded by parents and children, I found myself moved to tears by Freddie Highmore’s performance. When Charlie’s grandfather reminds him that there is no way that he will find one of the golden tickets to Willie Wonka’s factory because he is not privileged like the other children who’ve already won, his grandmother says, “Charlie, everyone has a chance.” Charlie later finds a ticket and offers to sell it to buy food for his hungry family; the same grandfather reminds him that money will always be there, but that he shouldn’t miss the opportunity to experience his dream. I felt foolish sitting there crying, but something in the story reminded me that our most valued commodity, what we need most to make our relationships work or even to pursue them at all, is not stocks or bonds, but innocence. The work of recovery is having the courage to search for the child who is waiting for us underneath the crushed and broken house of our past. Underneath all the addictions, underneath the sarcasm and cynicism that fueled the addiction, underneath the grief which led to the sarcasm, is a child who once trusted, loved and dreamed, and craved intimacy with others, a child who said, “Can I play with you guys?” before the “No’s” were heard; or who searched for a place to sit in the cafeteria and asked, “Is anyone sitting here?” before the reply came, “Sorry, that seat’s saved”; who drew pictures for Mom without being asked, just to make her happy. Somewhere in that open, vulnerable place, away from the cruelties of the world, there exists the possibility of true friendship, kindness and honesty, which is always at the core of any lasting love affair. It is easy to forget that the thing we are so often begging others to return to us, or give us in the first place, isn’t lost at all, just hidden, buried underneath jaws locked tight in anger, and heartbroken cries of, “If he makes even one mistake, he’s out.” As there are billions of people on the planet meeting each other every day, the problem isn’t a lack of people, or even meeting each other, it’s staying together once we’ve met. Being serious about serious gay relationships means appreciating the ways we’ve been hurt as people, specifically as gay people. It means facing the fact that trying to have intimacy with another person when our psychological barriers are considerable, when we’re too fucked up and damaged to let anyone close to us, is like trying to reach the top of the Empire State Building using a stepladder. (We'd never question getting professional help if we had a broken leg, why should it be any different with a broken heart?) It’s about getting the support we need, and fully participating in our lives, not when the lover knocks at the door, but before she appears. It’s knowing when it’s okay to negotiate and make compromises in a relationship (choosing a restaurant for dinner, deciding what color to paint the kitchen, planning a vacation) and when it’s not (violence of any kind, untreated addiction, broken sexual agreements). It’s having the dignity to walk away from a destructive relationship and trusting that there is something better out there for us, while also knowing that if we end a relationship just because it’s “uncomfortable” (i.e. because it forces us to look at our pain and grow up) then we will keep leaving partners and having the same experience over and over again. As Marianne Williamson has said in her many lectures on relationships, each new relationship always picks up where the last one left off. It has been said that we really have only one relationship in our entire lives, no matter how many people we date or fall in love with, and that each partnership will always mirror back the love that we have for ourselves. And finally, the most important key to any successful romantic relationship is this: make sure the two of you are never “insane” at the same time. There has to be one of you that doesn’t go into flashback mode during a fight, who avoids the door-slams, broken plates and silent treatment, and who can look at the other and say with clarity, “I’m sorry. I know we both made mistakes here and we’re both feeling angry and hurt. Can we please sit down and just talk about this?” Then one of you puts on the coffee and the other gets the cups and you each talk for fifteen minutes, uninterrupted, about what you are feeling in the moment. In my own relationship, I’m definitely a sulker who never forgets anything; fortunately, I also have a good eye for why things went wrong. My partner, who admits he’s sometimes too internal about his process, is good at forgiveness, apologizing first, and not holding grudges. It’s not a perfect recipe, but that, along with the help of two amazing therapists and a dog who barks whenever we start fighting, has gotten us through the last twelve years. copyright Max Gordon
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2005-12-10 19:26:00
2005-12-11 01:28:35


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2005-12-10 19:30:00
2005-12-11 01:52:45
It's Officially Christmas
So I've got this plan...actually I've been tinkering with this idea for a long time now, but never formally thought about it. I had a classmate who wrote a book on drag kings last year which I thought was pretty cool. I've thought about using my writing skills and all the journaling I've done over the past 10 years or so to make a story. I'm still toying around with the idea, and I want to give myself a few years to really get it organized. I want to write a story about four different people who are here in Duluth...who aren't really from here but somehow end up here. None of them ever meet each other, but the book would kind of examine how they each feel being here - this feeling of being really alone or really different - and feeling like they're the only ones. I want to tell four different stories about people who cross paths every day, maybe even work in the same building downtown or live in the same part of the city - but don't know each other. I want to combine personalities of people I've met along the way at some of the most bizarre places here, whether it was from my experience working at the YWCA and meeting all the street people or working at the bus depot and talking to the drifters and listening in amazement as to how they ended up in Duluth from places like Los Angeles or New York City. So I want to add an element of that to this story as well as your everyday average people who are either seeking love they can't find, trapped in a loveless marriage, or maybe they're unable to love. I think in a way it is to prove to myself that there are many people who feel alone and I don't know - hopeless? - and explain that with four very different people. The interesting thing I got from meeting some of the people I met over the years is that there doesn't seem to be an ending or a conclusion to anything in their lives. You know the books with characters who do this this and that, and the moral of the story is learned and things are better? I want to end the book with life just going on as it has been...that sometimes there isn't much you can do to change your situation. Not everyone has the same luck in life and you just never know where you're going to end up - nothing is what it seems. The people I talked to didn't find whatever it was they thought they would in the other cities. Maybe they didn't find it here either, but the interesting thing is that we survive on illusions that...if only I go here, do this, move there, dress like that...things will change. It's a quick-fix thing because we live in a society that demands instant gratification, and what hasn't changed is that many things, including love and success, don't come easy. Anywhere. The assumption is that more people = more results, but what is forgotten is it also means more competition, more disappointment, and more indifference because someone better is always around the corner - and you can very easily be traded in for a better partner, applicant, boyfriend, etc. So, I'm brainstorming exactly how I want the story to unfold and how it's going to make sense to the reader. Otherwise another Christmas season is upon us all, and I had the joy of hanging out at the malls yesterday with my friend Angela, who was in the massage therapy program with me at Lake Superior College back in 2000-01. That's kind of where I put together the idea for the book while sitting in the food court watching people go by. Even though it was a pretty homogenous crowd (everyone except us had kids in tow), I still saw some differences that would be interesting to get creative with. I didn't do much shopping...still trying to figure out what I want to get. Then the thoughts about getting all these reports for classes done looms over my head too. The good news is the whole semester will be over within a couple of weeks. I sure hope that January - May goes by as fast as August - December did. It always seems to drag along after New Year's because nothing exciting really happens until, well, Memorial Day?
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Night To Remember / Keith Patrick
creative

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33768
2005-12-11 20:48:00
2005-12-12 03:15:22
Another disappointing night on gay.com to add to the pile
There are some days when you pretend that everything's going so well...you think about goals you are wanting to work on, school, career, whatever, and then at night other things suddenly hit you. So many people in the world...so many people out at the stores today and everywhere else...yet sometimes I've never felt more hopeless about a future with anyone. The more I go onto gay.com and see the same guys who are 20 years older than I am, the more I see the exact same kinds of guys I have never been and never will be attracted to, the worse this seems to get. Maybe tonight it just hits me harder, I don't know if that's the case or what...but for the past, I don't know, year or so it's on my mind a lot more. There really is nobody out there for me. The fact that there are so few gay people to begin with...and out of that few, how many are married, have kids and have no intentions of coming out - ever? Probably about a third. Out of the other two thirds I'd say half will ever be at the point where they can have a healthy, successful relationship with another man - in public - without fear for safety or what anyone else thinks. I honestly think I am the only gay male under 35 in this city who is able to even get that concept. I can be gay and not use drugs to deal with it. I can be gay and not have to get high or drunk to feel okay about loving other men. It's basically 2006 and still we have a society of men who refuse to accept themselves and in turn ruin it for the rest of us who would love to be in love. This is a situation where you can not run to another city or country to escape the reality...I do not know of a place on this earth where men are not prescribed specific gender roles, and society sees to it that they adhere to them. Being gay is not necessarily about wanting to be the opposite gender, but it appears that a lot of gay men seem to think that they need to passively accept emasculation as a way of being gay. Coming out has lost all of its sense of individuality because it seems like...coming out no longer says "it's okay to be different". It says, now I'm part of a subgroup of society with its own expectations, its own unwritten rules, its own everything. It has nothing to do with being an individual. In some senses, you are less of your own person after coming out. That is why moving to places like Minneapolis, San Francisco and New York have no appeal to me. If those cities are so wonderful, then why are the HIV and drug addiction rates so high among gay men? It just blows my mind that the gay community is in such denial of the problems we are facing...men don't care about what happens to other men. Women, on the other hand, care. That is why it is so hard to be gay and a male. Men only care when the problem is about them. Maybe because girls are raised to be caregivers and peacemakers (usually) they make spouses who don't just take off because things get rough. When men are gay, they have no clue as to how to keep things going with other men because there's no woman to keep the peace. Two men will turn away from each other. That attitude with men being so self-centered is evident in gay safer sex campaigns - implying that you don't want to get HIV so do this, this and that - not 'be responsible and make sure other guys don't get sick either'. It's as if it only matters when it involves them. Don't do drugs because you might impair your judgment and become HIV+. I don't get it - what about...maybe it's important for YOU to be responsible so you don't infect other guys and don't mess up another life? Is there any wonder why relationships between two men are at such a severe disadvantage of lasting very long? I know that I've been guilty of having an 'it's all about me' attitude too. But I am aware of that and I really think a lot of other guys don't really care. They want what they want, right now, and will shoulder their way past every other guy to get to it. No matter who they hurt. Tonight it just got to me. All I heard from were guys I have no interest in at all, whether it was their attitude, the 'where are you right now?' questions, this is so difficult. I just want to give up on the whole fucking thing. It's been 10 years now since I've even been happy...and I'm not saying that co-dependently, but I felt so happy when I had someone to share my experiences with. Laugh with. Feel like I was 'in this together' with someone else. I don't feel any of those things with these guys other than the fact that we both are attracted to something uncommon - the same sex. And there's gotta be a lot more than that going on to get me interested. I don't want to date someone who is 50 any more than a 50 year old wants to date a 70 year old. I dont' want to be with someone who doesn't share my interests on a basic level. I want to be with someone who isn't going to compete with me on every level. I want someone who is kind and can see that I have a heart that is very fragile especially now. I am very afraid it will be another 10, 20 or more years before I feel the things I felt with Jeff, with another guy again. It feels like a prison sentence and I did nothing wrong. I did not ask for this to happen to me. I didn't ask to be gay and I didn't ask to be alone. I wish that people could see this before they say things like 'cheer up' or 'you're just bitter'. Who I am is someone who refuses to say nothing while those same guys who pick at me are saying nothing and then sniffing paint or getting high. So since I'm doing the right thing, how come I don't feel so good about it?
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Yearning For Your Love / The Gap Band
angry

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33952
2005-12-14 19:23:00
2005-12-15 01:24:52


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34269
2005-12-14 19:31:00
2005-12-15 01:31:58
Jeff, circa 1995-96

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34803
2005-12-16 16:21:00
2005-12-16 22:21:51

Sacred Heart / Duluth Cathedral 1906-2006 206 W 4th St, Duluth MN Home to Duluth Cathedral High School, Sacred Heart Church and the Sacred Heart Convent.

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34907
2005-12-16 21:02:00
2005-12-17 03:03:41


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35082
2005-12-19 17:43:00
2005-12-19 23:53:45
This is a reprint of a murder in Duluth of a gay woman a few years back. Interesting story.
DULUTH, MN A TERRIBLE BEAUTY Faye Wenell was the life of the party--bright and artistic, with a smile you couldn't resist. But that was before the bodies began to turn up. by Beth Hawkins When police found Dora Maria Silva's body in June 1996, little was left but her bones. The corpse was lying in bed, the officers' report noted, "with hands above the head, palms facing upward. The lower portion of the anatomy was covered by a sheet. There was a significant infestation of maggots." The medical examiner found that a slender bone in Silva's throat, the hyoid, had been broken in two places. This meant someone had strangled her, probably by closing two hands around her neck. Police also observed several piles of human feces on the floor in the bedroom. Perhaps because the apartment--the top floor of a slumping triplex in Duluth's East Hillside neighborhood--was hot, and the smell unbearable, investigators didn't bother to collect samples. Instead, they moved the body out and brought in fans. Police quickly came up with two possible suspects: Ron Huff, the man with whom Silva had been living, and Faye Wenell, the woman Silva had left for Huff. Both had been arrested in domestic-violence incidents involving Silva. Prosecutors eventually settled on Huff, in part because of an officer's report that Huff told him he might have accidentally killed Silva while drunk. Wenell, police concluded, had been in Arizona at the time of the death. It looked like an open-and-shut case. Until another body turned up. On February 18, 1998, police discovered a man named Michael Grube dead in a Duluth motel room registered to Faye Wenell. He had been strangled and left lying on the floor faceup, partly covered with a jacket. Police noted that "there was a fecal deposit on the bathroom floor, fecal matter smeared on Grube's clothing, and fecal smudges and deposits on the carpeting near the body." The name Maria was found scrawled on a mirror in the room. Within a half-hour of the estimated time of Grube's death, police found Faye Wenell drunk and unconscious in a booth in a restaurant next-door to the hotel. She had Grube's eyeglasses, wallet, and watch; a hair officers believed could be the dead man's was stuck to her shoe with "what we take to be blood and fecal matter." Wenell was never charged in that homicide, either. But, in an odd twist of legal procedure, she would spend the following months preparing to testify about both murders: Attorneys for Ron Huff were arguing that the similarities between the two deaths proved Wenell was the killer. Three days after Wenell finally told her story to a jury, Duluth police had yet another body on their hands. This one was found facedown at the bottom of a sand pile in a lakefront lot used to store construction equipment. The face was red and swollen and there were stab wounds on the head and neck. Police found remnants of what looked like a pool cue at the scene, along with a broken steak knife. Faye Wenell, an autopsy determined, had bled to death. Though the killings made headlines in Duluth, they drew little notice outside the port city. But 165 miles away, at the south Minneapolis watering holes, new-age cafés, and artists' studios that were once Wenell's hangouts, there have been whispers: What happened, people have asked, to the beautiful, self-assured young painter who attended Macalester College, created murals for the Seward Cafe, and showed up at parties with a succession of beautiful lovers? How did she turn, within a few years, into a hulking crone whose bizarre threats terrified West Bank barflies? And how was that woman transformed into the devastated, defiant character Duluth police and court records describe? Most of the people who knew Faye Wenell are reluctant to discuss their memories of her. Some have gone on to build lives far removed from the circles they traveled with her. Others would prefer not to besmirch the image of a woman they prefer to remember in happier times. Some are simply scared, a fear that seems to persist beyond death. After Faye Wenell was killed, her sister Kelly visited some of the places where she'd spent her final years. It wasn't a long tour; all the scenes that led up to Wenell's murder were played out within a few blocks of each other on the ragged fringe of downtown Duluth. She went to the construction-equipment storage lot where Faye had been found and counted the paces to the outcropping that falls away into Lake Superior. Would the people in the quaint lakefront houses just a few yards west have heard car doors slamming as the body was dumped out? Would late-night strollers on the Lakewalk--a manicured path designed to draw tourists to the city's shoreline--have seen the lights? The police report didn't hold any clues; all it said was that Faye's socks were clean, suggesting she was already dead when she was dumped in the sand pile. In Duluth's downtown, the Olde World Inn (101 W 3rd St) is where Faye had rented a room. It was a short walk from there to the Voyageur Lakewalk Inn, the tiny, tidy motel where Michael Grube had died, and to the liquor store where Faye had once been heard yelling out the name of her murdered lover Maria. Before she left Duluth, Kelly had a drink at the Red Lion, the bar where police believe Faye Wenell met her killers. The place is most charitably characterized as a dive and one of the worst, toughest bars in the city: What of its tiled façade hasn't crumbled away is chipped, and the sign spelling out the bar's name in Old English-style letters is faded and dirty. Inside, the metal seems to have washed away from the wall mirrors, and the tables wedged between the pinball and video machines have lost the topmost layer of their Formica veneer. Little about the Red Lion, Kelly Wenell says, would have appealed to the sister she grew up with. Faye Annette Wenell was born in Wayzata on Christmas Day 1955 to Paul Wenell and Patricia Rock Wenell. Her father was white, her mother Oneida and Ojibwe. "She was tiny and beautiful," her mother wrote in a package of verses and recollections she sent to City Pages for this story. "Her father wanted to name her Jane. I don't think so--the child who shared my body would not have such a common name. Faye Anne was his second choice. He had a sense of humor--'We can call her Café-Inn.'" Faye had five siblings. At times during her childhood, the family lived in Cass Lake on the Leech Lake Reservation, and in Minneapolis near the intersection of Bloomington and Lake. She would later tell friends that her father left when she was a child; Kelly--Faye's junior by ten years--won't discuss that, saying she doesn't remember much about the family's circumstances during her childhood. What is clear in her mind is the picture of a healthy, vibrant Faye. "She was my idol," Kelly says. "She was so happy and full of life. I would just look up at my big sister and think, 'Wow, she's so cool.' She used to go to dance contests. She had these bell-bottoms with bells so big they looked like trees--some of them with Tweety Bird on them." Sometimes Faye took Kelly dancing, usually to the basement of a church near Lyndale and Franklin avenues in Minneapolis. "The music would be blaring--Fleetwood Mac--and everyone would be so happy," Kelly recalls. Some facets of Faye's personality were clear from the start. There doesn't seem to have been a time when she didn't paint and draw, and it was understood early on that she was a lesbian. "No one ever sat me down and said, 'I've got something to tell you about your sister,'" Kelly Wenell says. "When she was young and she was healthy, she was happy with it." Faye often brought her girlfriends home to meet her family; Kelly recalls them as a succession of women so beautiful they could have been movie stars. Faye's weren't the kind of anonymous good looks that sell eyeliner for Maybelline or bras for Victoria's Secret: At nearly six feet tall, she had the proportions of an Amazon, along with dark eyes, jet-black hair, and a gaze as direct as a man's. The air around her seemed to bristle with energy. "She was in love with herself when she was younger," recalls Kelly. "When she was young and it'd be summer and she'd come in in a tank top, she'd say, 'Do you want to come to [a former lover's]?' We'd jump in her VW van and go." Faye was a regular in the south Minneapolis hippie scene, hanging out at the Seward Cafe (where, her family says, she painted a mural) and becoming a vegetarian before it was fashionable. Among her favorite nightspots, says Kelly, was the bar at the Black Forest Inn on Nicollet Avenue. When Faye was 20, her older brother Royal was shot and killed outside a bar on that same stretch of Nicollet. Faye took his death hard, according to Kelly, and responded by chiseling him a headstone. A few years later, Faye started attending Macalester College in St. Paul, where she enthusiastically jumped into anthropology and journalism classes. But she quit after her sophomore year, according to the college's registrar; friends say she gave up in the face of conflict and academic frustration. She struggled with depression and talked about feeling rejected by people who found her direct manner uncomfortable. "People started reacting by just staying away from her," Kelly recalls. "Everyone was too busy with their own mortgage, their own bills. Her depression didn't seem to be anything I could help. I'd eat with her when she would come around. I'd tell her to start taking care of herself again. She was probably drinking, but I didn't see it." In 1984 Faye had an accident while driving her van alone and, according to friends and family, drunk. She ended up with steel pins in her legs and a head injury that qualified her for Social Security disability payments. But it was the damage to her body that bothered her the most. "Faye couldn't wear jewelry," Kelly Wenell says. "Her skin was too sensitive. [The pins] really bugged her. She just got really super-skinny. I've heard a lot of people say it was a turning point for her." It was at about the same time that those who knew her say Faye seemed to become two different people--the flirting, dancing, laughing life of the party when she was sober, aggressive and confrontational when she was not. Many, including her sister, couldn't cope with the hostility alcohol provoked in her. "She would come up and say, 'Oh hi, what's new with you, why aren't you talking to me?'" Kelly remembers. "One time I told her to knock it off and she walked off and then stopped and came back and said, 'No, I won't knock it off.' "The pain of the rejection is what made her so intense," Kelly adds. "She started to wear down and the hurt showed in her eyes. After a while she just said, 'This is the way I am.' Not a lot of people do that." Without her family's knowledge, Faye Wenell was also earning a reputation as a batterer. Police records indicate that she was involved in abusive relationships with other women as early as age 22. By the late 1980s, restraining orders started popping up on her record. One woman claimed Wenell broke into her Minneapolis apartment, waited for her to come home from work, then started choking her. Another former lover told police investigators that Wenell beat and threatened her and her children when they lived in Tucson. She told police she never filed charges because Wenell left town. Still, Wenell's electric presence continued to draw people to her. Peg Wagner, a Duluth massage therapist, met her in 1990 at a Rainbow Gathering in northern Minnesota. Wagner says it was impossible not to notice Wenell among the crowd of latter-day hippies. "She had a smile that would blind you," Wagner recalls. "I had never seen anyone like her. Mythology seemed to surround her at all times." The two stayed friends for the rest of Wenell's life. "Some people warned me about her and her alcohol problems," Wagner recalls, "and so I laid down some real clear boundaries." Rule number one: When Wenell was drinking, Wagner would not spend time with her. During the nine years the two were friends, Wagner estimates Wenell attempted five times to get treatment for her drinking problem, in everything from conventional treatment centers to programs aimed at Native Americans. According to Wagner, she had her longest period of sobriety--nine months--after attending a program geared toward gays and lesbians. But as her problems became more obvious, Wenell became estranged from her onetime supporters. Wagner says many Native Americans were uncomfortable with her lesbianism, while lesbians rejected her as a batterer. "There wasn't a safe place for her to be in the world," Wagner concludes. "Because of her combination of problems, she didn't fit anywhere." In the early 1990s, Wenell stopped producing the complex, realistic paintings she'd created in earlier years and began making cards and T-shirts to sell at art fairs. Most of them contained simple line drawings of women; some pieces contained direct references to domestic abuse and alcoholism. In all of the drawings, the women were faceless. Wagner recalls finding two sketches in 1996 that in retrospect seem prophetic. One showed a female figure with a crown on her head, surrounded by friends, money, a rainbow, a sea with dolphins, and a tipi--the life Wenell wanted, according to Wagner. The other featured a woman bound, hanged, and stabbed, flanked by a snake and a bottle with the words die bitch written on the label. Wagner describes Wenell's behavior as a vicious cycle: "Rejection was a major hot button with her. Her rough-and-tough exterior was her shield. Over the years she became bolder at testing people to see whether they would accept her for who she was. She understood she was frightening people. It was deliberate." Wenell quit seeking help in battling her demons when she met Maria Silva. "It's my perspective that she met her match in Maria," says Wagner. "Somebody as abusive and alcoholic as she was." Kelly Wenell says that when her sister introduced her to Silva, she couldn't get over what a stunning pair the two made. Silva, who told people she was of Mayan descent, was several inches shorter than Faye and more curvaceous, with long, wavy black hair and bow-shaped lips. Faye told friends that Silva had married young in her native California and had been held virtually captive by an abusive husband. She had an adult daughter who lived with her mother in the border city of Calexico. Like Wenell, Silva frequently drank to excess, had a history of depression, and survived on disability payments from Social Security. The two hadn't been together long when Wenell began referring to Silva as her wife; the two sealed their bond with matching silver rings. "She loved Maria, there's no doubt about that," says Peg Wagner. "They had some good times. They both had sober times together. They'd go hang out and have dinner with friends." But those good times were punctuated by violence--fights, according to Wagner, in which both women did their share of battering. At various points, she says, Silva gave Wenell a black eye, a stab wound to the neck, a bite injury to the ear. Still, among the myriad legal documents spawned by the relationship, none cite Wenell as the complainant; all refer to her as the batterer. Wenell's first arrest for assaulting Silva appears to have occurred in June 1994, just months after they met. By New Year's there were four more. In 1995 police arrested Wenell at least 11 more times for beating Silva; one of those incidents took place in a St. Louis Park hospital, where, according to police reports, Silva was being treated for injuries inflicted by Wenell. In July of that year, both women were arrested for disorderly conduct in Bemidji when a fight they were having in the middle of a busy street scared passersby. Wenell was arrested two more times during the next four days for harassing Silva, who had successfully petitioned for a restraining order against her. Two months later came the incident that severed the relationship for good. According to police reports, Wenell barricaded Silva in a room at Duluth's Seaway Hotel (2001 W Superior St) and beat her for two or three days. Police found them both passed out from drinking, Silva covered with dried blood. Doctors at St. Luke's Hospital cataloged her injuries: cuts and scrapes on the face, fractured sinuses, a ruptured eardrum. Wenell was ultimately convicted of assault; by the time she was released from jail several months later, Silva was living with Ron Huff, a Green Bay man with homicide and assault convictions on his record. According to Wagner, Wenell was upset that she had done time while Silva hadn't. Others say she was beside herself with jealousy. Whatever the case, Wenell defied Silva's restraining order and found her way into the rooming house where the couple lived. Exasperated from arresting her yet again, Duluth police offered her a bus ticket out of town, according to Peg Wagner, who urged her to go: If she and Silva continued to run into each other, she argued, one of them was going to wind up dead. In February 1996, according to police reports in Arizona, Wenell got off the bus in Bisbee, an artists' colony some 100 miles southeast of Tucson. During her few days in town, she had a number of run-ins with local police officers, one of whom described her as "a large woman who was dressed in western wear"--long duster coat, big belt buckle, Stetson hat. She told him she was on her way "home" to New Mexico. Wenell next surfaced in Tucson, where her record contains arrests for a series of small-time offenses including drunk and disorderly conduct, street fights, and drunk driving. Police reported that Wenell used several aliases, sometimes introducing herself as Maria Silva. Back in Duluth, the real Silva was falling into a familiar pattern with her new lover. In March 1996 Ron Huff was charged with assaulting Silva after the couple had a fight about Wenell. On June 1 he was arrested again, this time for attacking Silva at a neighbor's house. She ended up with six stitches in her upper lip, and told police she wanted charges pressed. Two days later Huff was released from jail. That afternoon, neighbors would later tell police, he was in the alley behind the apartment he and Silva shared, ranting that he "caught [her] with some other guy." Other witnesses said they saw the couple downtown, walking hand in hand. Several friends reported seeing the two during the next couple of days, though the details of those accounts grew increasingly sketchy. On June 22--at least two weeks after Silva was last seen alive--a neighbor noticed a bad smell and decided to check on the couple's apartment. Inside he found Silva's badly decomposed corpse. In addition to the feces on the floor, the crime scene yielded several curious details. For one thing, the doors of the third-floor unit were deadbolted--meaning that whoever killed Silva had locked the door upon leaving. Duluth's chilly lakefront climate had helped preserve the groceries in the apartment even as Silva's body rotted under its sheet: "The house was remarkably orderly," police noted, "and it was noticed that although the body appeared to have been there for weeks, there was a partially consumed loaf of bread on the kitchen table that did not have mold on it. There were also a number of bananas in a bowl on top of the refrigerator that still had portions of yellow showing on them." In the kitchen, police found a pot of stew that had barely begun to mold, along with a receipt for the ingredients from a store where Huff and Silva had been shopping, according to witness accounts, on June 4. Huff's murder trial--and Faye Wenell's alibi--would later turn on estimates of exactly how long Silva had been dead. Forensic entomologists studied the flies and maggots found at the scene. Temperatures in and around the house were logged in an effort to learn how quickly the insects might have multiplied. The experts eventually decided Silva had been dead for more than two weeks, and possibly as long as a month. Police soon located Huff at Duluth's detox center, where he had just been checked in for the second time that month. He told detectives that he had last stopped in the apartment June 3 to get some clothes. Silva, he claimed, had suffered from depression and grand-mal seizures. "She only took her pills when she was drinking and she sometimes took Huff's medication because she felt hers was ineffective," the police record of the interview notes. "Her drink of choice [was] vodka mixed occasionally with pop or Kool-Aid. He described a [January 1996] incident in which she began to drink a bottle of alcohol without stopping. When Huff took the bottle away from her, she stated she was dying anyway." Huff also said Silva was frequently incontinent. Tucson police located Wenell on July 3, told her about Silva's murder, and questioned her about her own whereabouts. According to their reports, she appeared "genuinely shocked" and claimed not to have left Tucson since she'd arrived earlier in the year. Duluth police actively investigated Silva's death through August 1996, says Cynthia Evenson, one of the attorneys who later defended Ron Huff. After that, she says, very little happened until October 1997, when a woman police had interviewed once before came forward and said Huff had confessed to her. There were problems with seizing on Huff as the perpetrator, though. For one, Evenson notes, Huff's keys were visible in a police video of the murder scene, right where he said he'd left them on his last visit to the apartment. For another, Gordon claimed Huff had told her he'd hit Silva in the back of the head with a baseball bat--an account inconsistent with the injuries noted in the autopsy. In court 18 months later, Huff's defense would note that Gordon had asked police about reward money and threatened to withdraw her cooperation if no cash was forthcoming. Still, Gordon's account seemed to tip the scales for law enforcement officials. It dovetailed with one officer's report that during a chance encounter at a pawnshop, Huff had tearfully volunteered that he experienced days for which he had "no recollections at all. He states it is possible he got into a fight with Silva and she ultimately did die, but he has no recollection of the events." That conversation, Evenson notes, was the only one of many police interviews with Huff that was not taped. On November 3, 1997, Ron Huff was arrested and charged with Silva's murder. Though the trial would not begin for another 16 months, the case finally seemed closed. During the nearly three years between Maria Silva's murder and Ron Huff's trial, Faye Wenell continued to leave a dramatic trail of police reports wherever she went. While most of her arrests were garden-variety "drunk and disorderlies," more and more bizarre episodes started showing up in court files. Four months after Silva's death, Wenell was arrested at a Payless Shoe Source store in the city of South Tucson. According to the police report, she had grown angry after the salesperson refused to give her money for the shoes she was wearing. Three months later, on New Year's Day 1997, Wenell was arrested after dialing 911 from a pay phone in South Tucson and screaming for help. When police arrived they found a frightened man and a drunken, rambling Faye Wenell. The man, who told police he was homeless, said he had been walking down the street when Wenell approached him asking for money and a cigarette, and that when he refused she punched him in the mouth and sliced at his neck with a razor saying she "wanted to get his jugular vein." The arresting officer reported that after she was handcuffed, Wenell struggled to get away and threatened, "I'm going to cut your dick off and swallow your balls." As it happened, the officer recognized Wenell. "I have had frequent prior contacts with [her] in the past," he noted in his report. "She is mentally disturbed and has assaulted City of South Tucson police officers. During the week of 12/25/96, [she] was suspected of assaulting a man with a meat hook. Victim did not want involvement with police." Wenell was charged with two felonies and held on suicide watch in the mental-health unit of the local jail. According to court files on the case, she told staffers that she had been homeless for a year, and "was suffering from bouts of depression after the loss of her 'wife.'" Wenell's public defender requested a psychiatric evaluation, the results of which were sealed by the court. The case was dismissed on the eve of trial, May 27, 1997, because prosecutors could not locate the alleged victim. Wenell reappeared in Minnesota two months later and quickly drew the attention of local law enforcement. At one point police picked her up for prostitution at the intersection of 15th Avenue and Lake Street in Minneapolis. They reported that she had offered to perform oral sex on two undercover officers for $40 each, noting that "it's a little more expensive when one watches." One of the officers noted that after the arrest she berated him: "Why'd you leave Hiroshima, to escape the radiation? What, are you some kind of mutant? Did you come over here to work for the white man who stole our land, you Japanese bitch?" In February 1998 Wenell was picked up outside Palmer's Bar in Minneapolis's West Bank neighborhood. According to police reports, after bar employees refused to serve her, Wenell lay in wait for several hours and jumped them when they came out. Minneapolis police officer Bobby Thunder, who worked the Cedar-Riverside beat at the time, says he heard plenty of talk about Wenell but never had occasion to arrest her--mostly because the alleged victims were afraid to swear out complaints. Other neighborhood regulars say some of her attacks were directed against people she thought were involved in the upcoming trial of Ron Huff. At various points during those months, Wenell also began revisiting her old Duluth haunts--sometimes in the company of Michael Grube, a man she'd known for years and with whom, according to Peg Wagner, she felt safe because he was of slight build and unlikely to attack her. On February 17, the two were seen together drinking vodka in a downtown alley. Later they took a taxi to another bar and a second cab to the Voyageur Lakewalk Inn, where they'd registered. "During the second cab ride, Wenell was slapping Grube in the face," the police report noted. A witness at the motel reported he heard the two yelling in the hall, and saw Wenell punch Grube. At 4:57 that afternoon, police were called to a Mexican restaurant two doors west of the motel. They found Wenell passed out in a booth and took her to detox. There she used several beds to barricade herself in an observation room while threatening suicide. Police were called again and moved her to the mental-health lockup unit at St. Luke's Hospital, where she was still being held when Grube's body was found the next day. An autopsy reported that Grube's hyoid bone had been broken, just as it had been in Maria Silva's murder. The medical examiner told police he believed the death to be "homicide by asphyxia." When the police returned to the lockup unit to question Wenell, she acknowledged that she had Grube's eyeglasses, wallet, and watch, and that the handwriting on the mirror scrawled with the name "Maria" was hers. A hair police believed to be like Grube's was stuck to her shoe, along with blood and feces. This time, police collected samples of the feces at the crime scene. The state crime lab could not find any analyzable DNA in the stool, and investigators never managed to get a sample from Wenell to find out whether she, like the person who soiled Grube's room, was one of the "non-secretors" whose excrement doesn't contain DNA. Dr. Carl Malmquist, a psychiatrist who serves as a consultant to Hennepin County District Court, says that while it's rare for a murderer to defecate at the crime scene, most veteran cops eventually run into such a case. Typically the crimes are sexual in nature and the perpetrators male, he says. "It's an act of desecration, which can [also] take different forms, such as cutting up a body or mutilating it. It's usually an act of great anger, contempt, and humiliation." Police questioned some of Wenell's past lovers and found that she had unusual toilet habits. One woman recalled Wenell talking about having had anal surgery as a child; others said she frequently gave herself enemas, something she believed to be an element of good hygiene. Lovers and acquaintances alike told stories of Wenell urinating or defecating over a bed, on a living-room floor, out a window or in public to humiliate someone. There were other clues pointing to Wenell as the perpetrator. Peg Wagner told police that Wenell called her from the mental-health unit even before officers questioned her. "Do you remember what you said was the worst thing that could happen?" she asked, according to Wagner's statement. "It happened!" Wagner told police that "she tells all of her alcoholic friends that if they continue in their paths, some day they are going to come to and someone is going to be dead. She further explained that she told them that 'not remembering' was not an alibi." Though Wagner considered Wenell and Grube to be friends, police saw their relationship differently. "In 1991 [Grube] had a romantic relationship with a woman who had previously had a lesbian relationship with our suspect, Faye Wenell," they noted. "There are reports, but no charges, of two incidents of violence by Wenell against Grube. One of these allegedly resulted in 21 stitches to Grube's face or head. However, that was in 1993." Last August Det. Mike Moyle of the Duluth Police Department closed the investigation into Michael Grube's death and recommended to the St. Louis County Attorney's office that Wenell be charged with homicide. He declines to speculate on why that recommendation was not followed, saying, "You'd have to ask another agency about that." John DeSanto, the prosecutor handling the Grube case, did not return phone calls requesting comment for this story. But another investigation of the Grube case continued. As soon as details of the killing surfaced, attorneys preparing a defense for Ron Huff in Maria Silva's murder had seized on the similarities between the two crime scenes. In Huff's trial, they hoped to convince a jury that it was Wenell who had killed both Grube and Silva. Peg Wagner says Faye Wenell spent the months leading up to Ron Huff's trial in Minneapolis--in the basement of a burned-out church, she told one friend--preparing herself to testify. When the court proceedings began this past January 25, she moved back to Duluth and rented a room at the Olde World Inn. At the start of the six-week trial, both sides laid out their theories of the crime. The version presented by St. Louis County prosecutors Gary Bjorklund and Tisha Tallman went like this: After he was released from jail on June 3, 1996, Huff returned to the apartment he shared with Silva to get some money. He learned that Silva had spent all the cash at a bar, and the two argued. Silva hit Huff, giving him a bloody nose, whereupon he slapped and choked her until she was unconscious. He went to get a beer, came back, and found her dead on the floor. He put her into the bed, covered her up, took off clothes smeared with his own blood, and left. The prosecution never called Jacqueline Gordon, the woman to whom Huff had allegedly confessed, but it did submit testimony from a former cellmate who told a similar story. (Defense attorneys later noted that the witness had been offered a reduced sentence in another crime in exchange for his testimony.) The manager of a Duluth shelter testified that Huff confessed to him as well. Next, defense attorneys Joanna Wiegert and Cynthia Evenson began presenting their case that "Faye Wenell was the actual perpetrator." The judge had ruled, just after the prosecution rested, that they could not present evidence relating to the Grube killing because it was "irrelevant and thus highly prejudicial." In his opinion, the judge stated, there weren't enough similarities between the two crimes to suggest a "signature crime." Instead, the defense lawyers called witnesses who testified about Wenell's history of violence toward her lovers, her toilet habits, and the fact that at least twice while intoxicated she had bragged about having "killed two people." They also presented testimony suggesting that Wenell's alibi for the period when police believed Silva died was less than watertight. On June 3--the day Ron Huff and Silva had been seen walking through downtown Duluth hand in hand--Wenell had had her $426 Social Security payment wired from her bank in Cloquet to a check-cashing facility in Tucson. Although she didn't show ID when she picked up the money, bank files indicated that the cash was given to a woman matching her description. On June 8--about the latest date, according to the forensic testimony, when Silva could still have been alive--South Tucson police ran a computer check on "Yolanda de Leon," a name Wenell sometimes used. (Trial testimony never conclusively established whether that meant Wenell had been picked up by police on that date, but the prosecution argued it was a "reasonable assumption.") Tucson police officer Theresa Rengal testified that on June 11 she responded to a sexual-assault complaint from Wenell. On the stand, Rengal said Wenell also told her she had recently killed her lover in Duluth. Rengal had no explanation for why she did not act on this information or note it in her report. Huff's defense offered several scenarios that would have allowed Wenell to have been in Duluth when Silva died. Among other evidence, they produced Greyhound bus schedules showing that Faye could have picked up her Social Security payment on June 3, traveled to Duluth, and been back in Tucson by June 8. Huff's defenders also called a St. Louis County Jail manager who testified that on at least one occasion after Silva's death, Wenell was booked carrying two plain silver bands, one of which had been cut at some point. (A year before her death, Silva had broken her wrist and the ring had to be cut off because her finger had swollen.) "I have her ring," Faye told the guard, explaining that she kept it in her "cavity"--her vagina. On March 4 Wenell took the stand, wearing a maroon blazer the prosecutor's office had bought her for the occasion. She had been scheduled for questioning at 9:00 a.m. but showed up so drunk that her testimony was delayed until 2:00 p.m. The Duluth News-Tribune reported that she laughed, joked, and cried on the stand. She talked back to the judge, telling him not to call her "ma'am" and saying she liked it when he raised his voice. "Somebody ask me some questions," she was quoted as saying. "I want to talk." When asked whether she had killed Silva, however, she offered a coherent, monosyllabic answer: "No." On March 10, after 16 hours of deliberation, the jury found Huff guilty of first-degree murder. A week later he was sentenced to life in prison. "I expected it," he told the News-Tribune. "There are too many laws that contradict each other. The jury couldn't understand them.... If it hadn't been for the prior assaults on Ms. Silva, I would have been found not guilty." Huff is appealing his conviction. A hearing in the case is unlikely before the end of the year. "I think she knew it was going to go down this way a long time ago," Peg Wagner says of the months leading up to Wenell's death. While preparing herself for the Huff trial, she says, Wenell had been terrified. "I was afraid she was going to suicide rather than go through with it. She was going to have to own every bad thing she'd ever done. But the week before she testified, she had a peace about her that I never saw before." That week, Wenell brought Peg Wagner some new drawings she had made. One of the drawings shows two benches positioned under twin niches in a church vestibule. One was bathed in light, the other contained a sculpture of a female saint. "Maria came to me only once in my dreams, but now she has arrived again. Gracias Dios!" Wenell wrote on the back of the drawing. "She said, 'Hi honey, come sit with me, there is something I must tell you.' At that moment I had to decide whether to pick the dark or the light bench." The other drawing showed a faceless figure reclining in a casket, a fringed blanket covering her from the waist down, a heart at the base of her throat. Around her floated Native American icons, flowers, a flute, and a cross. At the time, Wagner concluded that her friend was finally getting over Maria Silva's death. Wenell called Wagner on Thursday, March 11, the day after Ron Huff was found guilty. She said she'd lost her money at a casino and wanted to go to the Twin Cities and see her mother. A chaplain she knew arranged to have a ticket waiting for her at the Duluth bus station, but Wenell never picked it up. "She was that close to getting out of town," Wagner says. "Seeing her mom would have helped." That night, Wenell was overheard telling people at a Duluth drop-in center for the homeless that she wanted to "go down to the lake to be with Maria." Two days later, on Saturday, March 13, Wenell was arrested in Cloquet, 20 miles south of Duluth, after allegedly wandering the halls of an apartment building at dawn, banging on doors. According to reports in the Duluth News-Tribune, she was released from the Carlton County Jail at about 6:30 p.m. and had a drink at a nearby bar. Someone she met there drove her back to Duluth. According to the criminal complaint against the three people now charged with Wenell's kidnapping and murder, she ended up at the Red Lion Bar, where she ran into Stacey L. Mullen, Kenneth J. Budreau, and Daniel Deegan. Mullen later told police Deegan was angry at Wenell because he thought she had once made a pass at his girlfriend, and Budreau said he wanted to "get that bitch." According to Mullen, the two men suggested that she chat up Wenell and talk her into coming with them at closing time. She said they drove around for a while and finally stopped near the lakeshore, where Budreau began swinging the broken end of a pool cue at Wenell. According to the police report, she recalled that "Ms. Wenell tried to defend herself, but was overcome and eventually lost consciousness," and that the beating continued nonetheless. Mullen said she got out of the car because she feared one of the blows would hit her. Eventually, she said, the trio carried the body to the sand pile and drove off. (The two men gave police considerably different accounts, with each saying he had gotten out of the car shortly after leaving the bar while the others drove on.) Wenell's body was found at 10:30 the next morning. She was clothed, but without the maroon jacket she had last been seen wearing--presumably the one she'd had on during Huff's trial. A witness told police she saw Mullen bagging up a maroon blazer at about 3:30 Sunday morning. Investigators discovered few clues in the room Wenell had rented for the month she'd been in Duluth. There was a box of condoms--one used--and a Bible opened to the 31st Psalm: "For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away. I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me. I have passed out of mind like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel." After medical examiners released the body, Faye Wenell's remains were sent to a funeral parlor in Richfield. Kelly Wenell, Patricia Rock Wenell, and other family members drove out to the home's parking lot and sat in the car, "just to be near her," Kelly says. While they were sitting there, they concluded that Faye would have hated lying inside, naked and alone with a male undertaker. So, just as Wenell had chosen to carve a headstone for her brother some 20 years earlier, Kelly Wenell decided to wash and dress her sister. Arguing that the corpse was badly battered, the mortician tried to talk her out of it. Wenell prevailed, and bought Faye a simple white linen shirt and a black jacket and pants. Faye's head had been shaved during the autopsy, so Kelly bought a hat, too. Her sister had always liked hats, she says, and she looked good in them. Faye's funeral was held in Cass Lake; her mother, in the letter she sent to City Pages, said that people traveled from all over the nation to attend. Later, Wagner organized a memorial service that packed Duluth's Peace Church to capacity. Faye's drawing of a woman in a coffin was reproduced on the cover of the program, and some of her poems were printed inside. "Many of the attendees had not spent time with her in years," Wagner notes. In the three months since the funeral, Wagner and the Wenell family have kept in touch. Much of Faye's art was stored at Wagner's house, and she has shipped it to the family. Kelly Wenell has been reading journals Faye kept. She and Wagner have talked about how odd it will be if Duluth police finally conclude Faye died because of a simple barroom brawl. "It was just so strange the way it went down," Wagner says. "She kept saying it was over for her."
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2005-12-20 18:30:00
2005-12-21 00:30:49
Photobucket
This is a test post from Photobucket.com
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2005-12-21 21:44:00
2005-12-22 03:44:51
More Duluth Photos









































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2005-12-24 19:49:00
2005-12-25 02:16:08
Christmas Eve...Things to be thankful for...
During the week I had to keep reminding myself it was Christmas because the weather has been so warm (much of the snow has melted already); last year it must have been -20 degrees out on Chrismtas Eve and it felt much more like the holiday season. So it just feels like it's not happening this year. You can't see your breath outside, and nobody's running from their cars to the doors of the mall to escape the cold. It's been a strange year for me, one like no other in my life. I've been forced to deal with some shitty realities that I've been avoiding for a long time. I've given up on some things that were, at one time, very important to me. I've had to go back to my happy memories of the past to feel good rather than feel good and optimistic about my future. I spent much of the 2nd half of this year mourning and remembering the happiest moments of my life which marked it's 10th anniversary in October. I've had to come to the acceptance that I was in love with someone who couldn't love anyone back, and that is extremely hard to understand. How another person could be incapable of love, or even acknowledgement of someone who cared about him so much. Yet there are so many chlidren who are growing up today with abusive parents, or in an orphanage, with no bonding or anything, headed down the same path. They're not being held, they have nobody to trust, and they are taught from the start that the world is not a safe and loving place with good people. These will be the adults who will not be able to have a relationship because they just can not get over their reactive attachment disorder. If those things are not developed in the first 5 years of life, there's nothing that can be done. That was what I faced with Jeff...someone who as so badly abused and traumatized during his first few years in an orphanage that he never had a sense of a caring parent who would always be there. His reaction to anyone who cared was to back away and run. And that is what I was left with in the end of that relationship - I saw something so special in someone who couldn't see it in himself, and in turn could not give me that kind of feedback in return. And thus is the story of many male-male relationships; one man is so much in love and has so much to give, the other has no clue of what loving another man means or is so repressed that he will never be successful in this. This Christmas I am so thankful that I have two very loving parents who - no matter WHAT - have accepted me and loved me through the worst of times and have helped me see my way out of things. They are my gift. They are my best freinds. I only wish I could be the kind of parent (or friend/partner/whatever) for someone that they have been for me. I know what true love means because I have had parents who believed in me and never expected me to become someone I'm not. I know so many other people who have nothing at all - they were kicked out of their homes, they had parents who were too drowned in their own addictions and problems, or they just had very uneducated parents who believed their gay kids were possessed and decided to disown them. A healthy life is one which has a sense of balance and I have not been successful in achieving that yet. What I am missing in a personal relationship I make up for with the close one I have with my family. I have some gay friends who've been disowned by their natural families but make up for it with a relationship or friendships. We are on opposite extremes because while they have no contact with parents or family, I have very little contact with anyone outside my family. And as far as a relationship goes, I'm not sure if I'm missing a lot of good things. I've been reading about how so many gay relationships can not survive more than 5 years without becoming open relationships. Because of the self-esteem and body image issues I've had, this will never be something I would be willing to accept. I would always feel deeply threatened by someone who would do that, nor would i feel that someone who truly and unconditionally loved me would put me at risk for getting sick. I just have a hard time believing that gay men know what real love is, because real love requires you to become less self-serving and more of a unit with someone else. You do not put your partner in harm's way - knowingly - if you truly love him. At least, that is my philosophy. I have been without romance for 10 years and been without sex now for pretty close to that. I have no desire to have sex with someone just for the sake of having sex. At this point it just is out of my system I guess, I know what the realities are of seeing that person again once you've decided to have sex, and how that further crumbles your self-esteem. I am thankful that I have lived through these experiences to make healthier choices today. If nothing else, I do feel I am becoming the adult I've been waiting to become. By "normal" standards, nothing I have done or accomplished signifies me becoming an adult; but emotionally - what I have experienced, witnessed and learned - makes a lot of sense. I know what I'm not willing to tolerate now. I do not invite trouble in to my life. It might be rude, but I know when I meet someone I have no interest or feeling for and I just don't think it makes sense to waste my time leading him or myself on. The only things I truly want for Christmas are things that can not be bought. These are things for myself, yes, but things for my family as well. A lot of these things take time, they take reflection and a lot of listening. Finding this kind of inner peace and learning to let go of things is tough to do...but I think I'm halfway there by not making the mistakes of the past: moving every time things get lonely or boring; anxiety thinking that 'if I do this or buy that it will change my life''; becoming desperate and trying to meet as many guys as possible (the 'throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks' program). None of these things result in anything but disappointment. That I have learned so far.
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2005-12-26 16:25:00
2005-12-26 22:25:48
Walking Around Downtown Day After xmas

























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2005-12-28 20:20:00
2005-12-29 02:40:39
Another West End Business Bites the Dust - goodbye Superior St Fitness
It's officially gone. The out of business signs are posted, the real estate agents phone number with the '7000 square feet for sale' sign and no lights. Driving past the club tonight brought back a lot of memories of the past 10 years - but this time not of Jeff - but of place I worked at on and off. Originally it was called the Palm Springs Health Spa, then when I started working there in September 1996 it was changed to Lincoln Park Athletic Club (they tried to jazz up the neighborhood then). It was the most interesting gym I've ever seen in Duluth. It looked like something you'd see in some industrial section of West Los Angeles...the west end of Duluth is seen largely as a skid row...and over the past 30 years the area - especially at night -is best known as street theater: Asian prostitutes from the China Sauna & Massage on 21st Ave W; the dive bars on West Superior St and the Seaway Hotel which is so bad that even the roaches pull up their chairs to sit down with you at dinner time. If memory serves me correctly, the roaches hold an annual Seaway Hotel Christmas Program where they sing various Cher tunes. Sorry I missed it :(. LOL. Anyway, as much as it was this grimey part of the city, I missed hanging out in the West End. There was nothing uptown about it - this was not a neighborhood that was looking to be gentrified and rehabbed or anything like that. This was skid row, this was where the hookers, drunks and whinos called home and nobody was going to take that from them. I'll always remember one night when, after closing the gym at 10pm, I went over to Lee's Pizza (on 21st Ave W & Superior St - right next to the China Sauna where the hookers are standing around) anyways, I was the only one sitting in this place watching an old early 80's TV set on a shelf while wating for my pizza...and the people who came in and out reminded me so much of Hennepin Ave in downtown Mpls. I saw a black guy with blood all over his face who got smacked up by some Indian guy who ripped him off. I saw a Chinese girl from the sauna standing in a lace gown getting change from the clerk. I saw just the most bizarre people within that 30 minutes I was there. I don't even remember what the pizza was like. The gym was perched at the western gateway to this area...so what we would do is, when perspective membrers would call to enqurie, we'd tell them to take the 27th Ave W exit from I-35 rather than the 21st Ave W exit (taking 21st Ave W would parade them right down past the hookers and addicts etc). 27th Ave W was perfect, come off the ramp, and basically drive right into our parking lot. A sure winner. I so loved the energy of that club. It was as close to an urban gym as Duluth was ever going to get: I worked out alongside gays, blacks, Indians, lesbos, college professors, single moms, you name it. We were all there to work out, talk, get in shape. The older crowd had their spot in the back, where the 'Palm Springs" feel was: three pools, one deep whirlpool, two eucalyptus saunas and a large steam room. And a huge sun room. The original feeling was to create a California climate all year round for those in Duluth...you could spend all day there and it would be -20 outside. But inside the club, you could workout, tan, sit under the red lamps, swim, have a drink at the juice bar, etc. It the coolest place I ever worked. Most of my earlier work has been fitness and water safety, so my job there was just that. I taught fitness classes and weight training; I also taught water aerobics classes which were the most fun because most of the people in class had never taken a class before. So it was cool because nobody was stressing out about how they looked or who the other people were going to be. Then a few years later after I completed my massage threapy certification I set up a massage studio there in the upstairs of the club - which was a very SMALL space if you can picture an attic. Well, one day I had a call for someone who wanted a 2-hour massage (this was towards the end of June and it was 95 degrees outside) - I was just boiling hot towards the end. It's a shame to see the neighborhood go but for as long as I can remembere it's been a very rough section of the city. A Duluth Police Officer was killed inside the Seaway Hotel in 1990 during a fight with a resident who had a gun. The walls were so flimsy that the bullet went through the wall and killed the cop. Now if the police get called out to the Seaway (almost a daily occurrence) they have two cars respond. It's nice to see that areas in Minneapolis and other cities are really revitalizing their blighted neighborhoods and bringing some positive change. I would love to see that happen in the West End. It's going to take a lot of money, and people with money who would be willing to take risks in an area that isn't very visually appealing (a view of the freeway and freeway overpasses). Oh well. I had good memories at Lincoln Park Athletic Club (which again changed its name to Superior Street Fitness a few years back). The books might have been crooked (I was paid cash) but there was a diversity there that I enjoyed. The weirdness of it all made me feel normal. I'll always miss my runs through West End on those hot summer mornings. Goodbye, West End.
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2005-12-29 16:21:00
2005-12-29 22:41:15
My Day At The Clinic
I knew this was going to be bad. Ever since I got the phone call on Tuesday morning saying that my prescriptions could not be refilled and I needed to come in, I was concerned. This had happened in the past, but what I normally would do is talk with my regular doctor about how things are going, get the go-ahead for refills, and be on my way. I sensed something was up this time. And I was right. Because I hate putting things like this off, I decided on doing this as quickly as possible so I could figure out what was going on. Originally, a couple of years ago I tore my achilles tendon. I had been prescribed two things: one was an anti-inflammtory, the other a pain killer. When I take both, I am able to continue my running (I ran a marathon last year) with relatively little pain or inflammation later in the day. This had been going fine for the past couple years, but about a month ago, here's what happened: I was running on the treadmill. In the center of the control panel there's a red button which is easy to hit while you're running, bringing the treadmill to an abrupt stop. Well, this happened to me and the sudden stop caused me to lock my knee, tearing some ligaments behind my knee. Hurt like hell. I went from taking one painkiller after my run to taking one more at night, so I went through a bottle a lot faster than usual. My knee pain is pretty much gone now, but I still take it for my achilles. Anyway, my regular doctor was going on vacation and the only one I could get into I had never met before. I explained to this guy what was up and what I needed, and I was met with a very strange look in return. Maybe I'm reading too far into this, maybe it's because I never met this doctor before and he doesn't know me, I don't know. But I really felt as if I was on trial today and treated like a drug addict. He would't refill my prescriptions and I was told to put an ice pack on my heel. I was taken aback because this was what I had tried for years in treating my heel. I have had it x-rayed. They want to operate on my heel and tweak my achilles around, which I was not willing to do. If I have to be on prescriptions in order to function, I'd rather do that then risk a surgery where I might not be able to walk again. My regular doctor, luckily, was in the building and I was able to talk to him in passing before I left. He refilled my prescriptions and everything was fine. But I'm still left with this uncomfortable feeling of...I don't know...confusion? I never thought much about prescription drug addiction before because it's never been clearly defined: what is it? If you follow the directions on the bottle, have been taking the medication consistently with little problems, then I don't think that is addiction. However, if you go through an entire month's supply in three days and are having extreme withdrawl, then, yea, I think that would be addiction. I was angry because I felt like I was being looked at with suspicion, like I had some weird motive for being there when I was only there to talk to my doctor about what happened with my knee. I just can't get that look I was given out of my head. I think that's the first time I had ever been looked at like - a suspect? Because at the end of the appointment I had asked about getting refills on my prescriptions and he said he wouldn't refill them. I guess I'm confused. Maybe I do have a problem. Maybe I don't. I just know that I love to run - running has been the only thing that has made me feel good about my body and cleared my head. Without those meds I can still run, but I would be much more uncomfortable. So I don't need these medications to live, but they make my life a lot easier. It's just a hard situation because I know that a sports medicine doctor is going to tell me: get surgery. I've read a lot about the surgery and the risks and I'm just too afraid to go through the procedure, and be off from running for 9-12 months. After all the work I've put into my training, marathons, everything; I would be miserable. I'm happy I got my prescriptions refilled, but I never want to go through that feeling again.
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2005-12-30 16:50:00
2005-12-30 23:43:56
Not a bad year but not a great one either
As the year winds down to a close, I stop to think about what's happened, what's been accomplished and what I am disappointed about. The closeted pessimist I am, it's great to say exactly how I feel on here when in public I try to be as nice as I know how to be and appear that 'everything's fine'. Which, in reality, it is. Things could be a whole lot worse, and often we create our misery in our own minds. I am certainly finding this out right now as I am reading this book called Tweakers, which talks about meth use among gay men and what it's done. I've done a lot of...not smart things...in my life, but thank God I have not gone down that path. 2005 started out with a blizzard. I remember because New Year's Day I was going to work out at Anytime Fitness and the roads hadn't been plowed yet, so I had to sit around the house all morning and wait to go anyplace (needless to say I was climbing the walls). And I actually had to be present at UMD for my classes, which I absolutely hated. The three required classes I had to complete were not available online, so I had to bite the bullet and sit among the 19-year-old straight boys from Burnsville telling fart jokes and talking about what girl they ate out and where the next keg party was at. Wonderful. It was made even more clear to me that the undergraduate experience is almost identicial to the high school one. Same people, same kinds of social climate, just optional attendance this time. And no gay people besides 300 lb. theater majors and stoners with purple fingernails and blue hair. Having known this was going to be the situation before I even started the semester, I braced myself for the reality and dealt with it. I think when you know when something's going to be a certain way (no matter how many people tell you it's going to be different this time), sometimes their fabled swan that walks like a duck still end up being a goddamned duck. That's the best way to describe the experience at UMD. It looks as if there's great diversity and with 10,000 students, there should be a lot of gay students, but when you weed through everyone, nothing's there. Thus, I decided to bypass this and take my classes online once again this year. Why waste my time at a place where I neither feel welcome nor feel I will gain anything from the other students that will be worthwhile. By far, the best part of this year was going to Grand Portage to get Misty. We got her in March, and we drove up Highway 61 at 7 in the morning for our 150 mile trip. I was so excited to get there; it felt as if i was seeing my baby for the first time. We got there and I was delightfully surprised, she was affectionate right from the start. Having her around has made me feel a lot better emotionally, much less lonely and has given me someone to play in the snow with when the storms hit. We had a great time today outside shoveling, I threw the snow over the deck and she leaped into it. it was almost as if she was laughing the whole time. That makes me smile. One thing that came out of noplace was the anniversary of meeting Jeff. I knew all along that when the Twin Cities Marathon time comes around (1st weekend in October) it's always a time when I remember that weekend we met, but not until late summer did I really start thinking a lot about it being ten years since I've met someone I really cared about. I don't know what's been the hardest part about that. I have a terrific memory and so it's easy to go back in my mind about what we were doing this time of year then, how much fun I had on New Year's Eve with him, and how exciting things were that winter because I finally had met someone who I felt like I had a future with, and for once it felt like this was finally happening for me. I was feeling like a real adult. I felt good about myself because I met someone who was actually attracted enough to me to want to develop a relationship with me. I was deeply hurt when it ended 11 months later. I don't think I have been same since. I haven't met anyone to date, and I have not realy had sex either. It's just no longer a desire anymore because at this point in my life I want someone to care about me as a person...I don't need to get off with someone. Unfortunately the only gay men who are looking for this are a good 20 years older than I am, or we have nothing else in common besides the fact that we are both attracted to men. Factor in the small percentage of men who are gay, out, ready for a relationship and is willing to work at it, and you aren't left with much of anything. That didn't hit me until this past year. It is going to be extremely tough - whether I'm in Duluth or any other city - to find the kind of gay man I am seeking. Yes, I have tried being with guys I wouldn't normally be interested in. That only turns into resentment or dishonesty every time because you can't fake attraction - especially between two men - because if someone's not getting hard early in the relationship, you've got a problem that's not going away. And nobody likes to talk about it because usually you know why it's happening, but neither guy has the heart to say it. And that's the hard part about biology and psychology...it would be nice if our hormones were aware that we only have such a small % of guys to pick from in the gay world, but reality is, you can't fight what does and doesn't attract you. Most gay men want a man who isn't typically representative of the gay stereotype, yet that kind of man is next to impossible to find. Because gay men are men, and men (gay or not) usually want a younger partner, there isn't a lot of those kinds of guys to go around for everyone. So what we end up with are gay communities where each man is his own island, with little or no interest in the other gay men around him. We are all guilty of this but I think much of it is resentment...we are led to believe certain things when we come out, and to be optimistic, only to find that hardly any of these things come true in real life (or not for long anyways). I am aware that, even if Jeff wouldn't have taken off after 11 months, we most likely would not have been together today. And had we been a straight couple, that may be the case as well. The difference is that I feel as if my choices have been taken away from me as a result of being alone for this long. And I don't know who to blame to feel better about that. I am angry at the gay men who hide in their closets or hide behind their girlfriends and lie about themselves. I am angry at the gay men who choose to numb themselves with meth and alcohol because they see no point in living. I am angry at straight people for abandoning their gay sons and ultimately driving them to self-destructive behavior. I am angry at the thousands of gay men who kill themselves every year because they can't take one more day of isolation. All of these things are so preventable. They take a lot of work, but they are so preventable. If gay men could get along - find one commonality amongst themselves, and not be so damn rooted in sex and alcohol, we could go somewhere. But we make each other uncomfortable because younger gay men see themselves in older gay men. Often they know what their futures hold, and it's not fabulous parties and friends. It's nights sitting alone at home looking out the window. Wondering. Waiting. Questioning if it was worth it...were those men 40-50 years ago who knew they were gay but still got married to a woman, had kids, and lived a lie any happier? They weren't honest about who they were and did not end up with what they wanted, but did the gay man with no partner or family end up happy either? I used to think this was a no-brainer but today I wonder if that man who married a woman wasn't such a coward after all. Maybe he truly wanted a family and knew early on that a relationship with another man would never last, or never provide him with the kind of security and trust that a woman could. No matter what, I end the year missing Jeff terrible after 10 years. 1996 (the first half anyways) was probably the happiest I've ever been. Not just because of Jeff. But because I no longer felt so isolated. I no longer felt like I was left out of conversations when my coupled friends would talk about life. It was just a time in my life where I felt like I was learning how to build a life with someone outside of my family. And when it ended, I was actually okay for a while because I knew that things were not going well. But as the years went by with no new prospects, and finally now a decade, it became clearer to me that the gay life was going to be much more difficult than I had ever realized. And this difficulty is something I did not ask for; I think back at what I might have done to deserve to feel like this and I can't think of anything. I am aware that relationships do not come easily to anyone regardless of sexual orientation, but when you take away 95% of the population from your base, and it doesn't take long to figure out who the remaining choices are. It leaves you feeling hopeless, and it's hard to talk about that. I would love to have Jeff in my life again because he was just very special to me. I remember thinking after I first met him- "wow, he actually called back!". One major problem I have with gay guys is that we are left to fend for ourselves with little to no adult social skills: things that straight kids learn during their experimental years: being nice, calling someone back, how to date, how to act on a date, etc...so many of the guys I had met were just plain rude people who never were taught how to be socially polite to the person they went out with. It's like they had never been taught how to act. Anyways, 1996 was the best time of my life. I know that I will spend much time in 2006 comparing my current reality to a decade ago and all I can say is, I will have to work on not beating myself up over that. My goal is to become more of the man I am without resenting others or being so angry.
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