MARCH 2006 (LIVEJOURNAL)

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47065
2006-03-02 17:21:00
2006-03-02 23:38:19
Back On Track
Yesterday I woke up sweating. Then I got really cold. I figured something was not right, but I also knew that I wasn't 'getting sick' so I went about my day and went down to run at the Center. Well, that lasted about 45 minutes and I REALLY felt sick - sick enough where I called a cab and got home ASAP. Got home, and went right to sleep. I didn't feel like I was going to get sick because I had not eaten anything, and I wasn't hungry anyways. I just think I needed a day where I did nothing and slept, which is what I did. I watched about 20 episodes of the Cosby Show on Tivo, and a few episodes of Chicago Hope and 90210. I woke up today and felt okay, not 100% better but good enough to do my thing for the day, but I came home this afternoon and have rested again. I usually never - ever- get sick. I have more of an appetite than i did yesterday but not much. I hate feeling sick because it slows me down from doing what I want to do during the day, which I hate. Now I guess I have more of an appreciation for all those patients I see at the hospital all the time who are making huge progress just by being able to walk down the hall once a day. I would hate for that to be me...I workout so much, and enjoy such a high activity level that I couldn't imagine being slowed down like that. I would hate it. So I guess that made me appreciate once again what I have, which is my health...because it comes to show you that when you least expect it, it can change dramatically and you're not sure for how long. So my week has been sort of screwed up because of that, I didn't get anything done yesterday and that's carried over into today, so I suppose this weekend I will have to get busy with schoolwork that I haven't started yet. I needed a good day of rest I think. I have been worrying about things and not feeling too happy about other things, and I'm sure that contributed to not feeling well. One thing I know is that within time the mind affects the body, and your physical health reflects your mental health. For me its just, I dunno, a combination of things. Feeling really lonely and isolated with no answer in sight on how to change that. I feel as if I've tried everything and exhausted every possible option I have. I'm not moving to another city again. That's what screwed up everything to lead me where I am now, which is not very far in life. I kept thinking that if I move here or there then things will magically change or get better, which they didn't. I just really wish I could cross paths with someone here who I've never met before, who would like to hang out with me as much as I'd like to hang out with him, and begin something nice. It seems to impossible but yet so simple. And when I think about how many years I've been trying to find this thing that is so simple, it seems all the more impossible. I've spent about the last six months hanging on to memories of events that happened a decade ago, and in the beginning of all of this it was another romantic hope - that wishing hard enough would somehow bring him back here, or at least receive a phone call or letter. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Nothing. It has hit me that I have been chasing after someone who can't love someone back, or doesn't want to. And those are the kinds of people who we allow to hurt us he most, because there is no closure to that. Instead what you do is waste 10 years wondering what it was you did that made him leave without saying he was going to leave...it throws you off in terms of who you can trust, and at what point do you think you really know someone. It makes you question why so many people want relationships but the moment things become difficult the bolt in the other direction. All of those things make me who I am now, and it's been something I've been working on alone. I've had to figure these things out, and believe me for years I've taken a step forward and two steps back thinking I've figured all of this out when I was really fooling myself. Society has changed so much in the other direction where you're expected to change whatever you don't like about life, and that is true (school, job, body) but other things, like relationships or connecting with people, don't work that way. They are complicated, and when you are dealing with the tiny % of people that I am, at some point you have to accept this for what it is: unfair. And move on.
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48094
2006-03-03 15:49:00
2006-03-03 21:49:15
A great day to take photos...why some of these resize and some don't I'll never know!





























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48487
2006-03-03 21:13:00
2006-03-04 03:13:38
Jon & Sarah; November 1996
From November 1996. This was when I worked at the Duluth YWCA with my friend Sarah...one of me is in the fitness center, one is walking up 2nd Ave W along side of the YWCA, the other of Sarah, and the other of me in the locker room - I think! =)








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49130
2006-03-04 16:31:00
2006-03-04 22:31:30
A beautiful Saturday
Ten years ago this weekend Jeff and I moved into this building.

Otherwise I had a good day. One of the things I used to do as a kid was walk around downtown, which I still do; this time with a camera. I know it sounds terrible but I used to love hanging around skid row here, which is in a lot of the pictures I take. There's a lot of history on those blocks, between 3rd Ave E - 3rd Ave W on First Street. You wonder how people got there...what went wrong, and how their addictions got so severe that they are living like that. This other picture is the worst bar in the city - if there is a fight, stabbing or shooting at a bar in Duluth, the Kozy is where it happens. I would never even go in there. As a kid I was afraid to even walk on the same side of the street as the Kozy Bar. The apartments are even worse, this is one of the only places downtown that will let convicted sex offenders move in:


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49158
2006-03-07 17:07:00
2006-03-07 23:32:30
Amazing People
So I was reading two different stories today...one was about the rise in Syphillis cases among gay men in Minnesota and the other story about gay travel in Istanbul, Turkey. What's fun about he internet, especially informal sites where comments can be posted at the end, is the attitude among the people reading the stories. The responses at the end just never cease to amaze me. The first story about Syphillis was "completely blown out of proportion", "not that bad", "that's what those guys deserve", "the statistics aren't real, they're just trying to scare us" - those were some of the comments by the gay men responding to the story. Denial. It's not happening here, it's not happening to me, so I don't care; just this whole self-centered mindset and living for right now...no cares about the future or what these changes mean for us as a very tiny group of men who happen to have sexual relationships within this small group. My point is that when something like this is in our community, it IS a big deal. There are only so many degrees of separation within the gay community, and sooner or later, you will know someone who either has it, or has been with someone who does. And yes, the science backs it up. The complications from Syphillis do indeed increase your chances of becoming HIV+. Again, nobody seems to think this is his problem - just something that the other guy should worry about, and who cares about him. The other article was on gay.com and it was talking about how safe it is to travel there. All the commens revolved around sex, and how easy it is to get fucked there because the Muslim men are fine with gay sex as long as they're the giver, much to the delight of the readers of the story. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. If you want to go have sex in other countries, fine. But it's like that is the only reason they wanted to go there. To find all these masculine guys who didn't appear to be gay. Which, again, I get. But if that's the case, then why are we pretending this whole Pride celebration thing here, if most of us are disgusted by all things 'gay'? How can we say we have Pride in being gay if we are disgusted by anything that looks or seems to be gay? I don't get that. And once again, the whole safe sex thing goes out the window. A couple who has been legally 'married' in MA claims that they both go there whenever they can to troll for young masculine boys who want to fuck them. Again I hate being judged but because we make up such a small percentage of the population, we need to be worried about how many men are infected and don't know it, and are spreading HIV around. I've heard numerous times that only a third of men infected with HIV even know it, and who knows how many men they infect before they get sick. So many guys use this formula of 'well, he looks healthy, so he must be fine, I'm not gonna ask any questions'. I do a lot of reading with health care mostly concerning school and social work, because things are going to change a lot between 2006 and 2016. In terms of insurance, and coverage and prescription drugs, we have two huge realities on the horizon: 1) the largest population of people in this country's history will be retiring and living longer than ever, thus needing health care, prescriptions, therapy, etc...these are people who have worked their entire lives and expect (and certainly deserve) top quality health care services. 2) this war in the Middle East, I predict will be lasting a decade. We will be bearing the brunt of troops returning home with severe injuries - psychological and physical - that will require lifelong care. Who is preparing for this? Does Bush realize that this will result in decades of continued care for thousands of people who won't be able to work again? The problem I see with young gay men regarding HIV or any health problem is similar to generations of people who have depended on the government for welfare: the money and programs are gonna be around forever, and it's going to somehow take care of you (and fix itself). We will not enjoy the same quality of health care in 2016 that we have now. We will be waiting longer, and in some cases we will not receive the services we do today. The bottom line is, if there is no money left in health care budgets to research HIV / AIDS, then we will not see much in terms of drugs or programs and services for those affected by it. And we can for sure forget about this administration and Supreme Court valuing the lives of gay men with HIV. I just think that right now is the time to start seriously thinking about how this is going to affect the future. The gay and AIDS activism have both lost about 20 years of hard work and will have to start over again. Problem is that we have nobody able or interested in leading, and gay groups that are around have broken up and fragmented into their own little groups that never speak to each other. That will never accomplish anything.
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49464
2006-03-08 13:25:00
2006-03-08 19:47:05
A Great Day Until...
You know, I was having a good day today. I woke up with positive energy, I had a great run, a good workout, my mind was calm and my mood was pretty good. Then I got home and got the letter I had been waiting for - whether or not I got into the Masters in Social Work program. I didn't get in, thanks to my bad grades at the beginning of my academic career. It's not all bad news, I was told that I could still take MSW classes as a continuing education student, reapply to get in, and then the classes I took would still count. So even though I wouldn't formally be an 'admitted student' in the program I could still take the classes and they would count when I got admitted. But it still depresses me. I really hoped I would get into this program. I hate getting news like this (who likes it?). Things could be a lot worse - I keep reminding myself that - considering everything else that goes on everyday in the world - this is hardly a huge setback. And I've gotten really good at waiting, so if I'm set back another year I honestly don't care. But all my life I've never felt like I was enough...I could never make sense of who I was or where I fit in this society. Things that come easily to other people have been huge milestones for me. I never liked school - from the very day I entered nursery school I remember my stomach hurting and wanting to go home. I didn't know I was gay at the time, of course, but I did know that something about me was very different and I sensed that the other kids knew it also. The feeling of rejection intensified as I grew older, and it didn't go away once high school was over with either. It comes back into my life every now and then, and it hurts. The sense of rejection - whether its not getting a job or feeling like a personal failure or not getting into this program or not meeting anyone - it never gets any easier for me. It no longer makes me sad as much as it's defined who I am in terms of how I react to the feeling. For a while I felt like my niche was finally found in the academic world, that finally I came around and realized that school was something I liked, that reading the research and talking about it was something I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to make changes in my life, but I wanted to make a difference in other people's lives too. Getting this letter of rejection was in a small way really personal for me. After hearing nothing from UMD for a few weeks I assumed this was coming, but like always you never are ready for it. All this time I felt like I had been doing something wrong with my classes at UMD. I had a few tough ones that i was happy to pass with a C, and I was puzzled as to why some of these kids were miserable as to why they didn't get an A. Because my interest has been in social work which is more of a abstract approach - I never worried a lot about GPA and getting A's in every class. Now I know why these kids were worried. This has a lot to do with getting into graduate school. I suspected after awhile that this would come back to haunt me someday, maybe I just hoped that my suspicions were wrong. Oh well. Right now I almost don't care, I don't know why. I'm tired of feeling this way and feeling like I can't do anything about it. It's like with Jeff...I wrote two letters to him over the last six months and never heard anything back. So again...it's this feeling of failure, feeling of rejection, what did I do wrong, why won't he talk to me. And you know I drive myself crazy sometimes because I almost set myself up to succeed at either hearing back from someone or applying for something that's almost a long shot that I will never get and I know it's a long shot, yet I am devastated when I find out the bad news. And I had all this energy this morning and I was going to come home and do school work and just feel like...I was going somewhere with all of this, that no matter what I had a goal in sight and could at least know there was a finish line and now that's all changed somewhat. I just want to not deal with things right now and think of something else.
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49709
2006-03-08 19:23:00
2006-03-09 01:24:39

I had to include this letter I saw in the Star Tribune site today...it's just too great of a letter to not include here: INSTEAD, LEGISLATE AROUND THE MALE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM I think I've finally come up with a solution to the abortion problem once and for all: Pass a law requiring every man in the country to have a vasectomy. All boys would be required to get one when they "come of age." They could have the option of banking their sperm for future use if they so desire. Imagine that, no chance of unwanted pregnancy, and when couples decide the time is right they can grab the turkey baster and head for the clinic. In my mind this is a win-win solution. Men have felt they had no say in unwanted pregnancies and subsequent abortions; that now is a moot point. They're in control now. Women no longer would have to endure the emotional torture of waiting out birth control failures or rapes to see if they are pregnant; then having to make a life altering decision if they are. This could even be sold as a war on poverty and a way to justify those Medicare/Medicaid cuts that President Bush wants. It would put a stop to "those damn women who have babies just to get more welfare" and those government-funded Medicaid abortions. The best thing of all, every baby born would be a planned and wanted baby. Come on all you legislators, especially all you male prolifers. Let's get this done. SALLY PAULUS, RAMSEY
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50038
2006-03-10 17:25:00
2006-03-10 23:25:48
A beautiful Friday afternoon









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50939
2006-03-11 21:12:00
2006-03-12 03:18:47
Some photos scanned
Me in the hospital after my ruptured appendix; January 1986 Me in 9th grade Me, Minneapolis, 1992 My sisters basketball team (Duluth East) after a miracle victory over Duluth Central; 1983 My sister going up for a block at the state tournament; Duluth East vs Minneapolis Washburn 1983 Me in Minneapolis, 1992.
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50999
2006-03-12 07:45:00
2006-03-12 13:53:15
More Scrapbook Stuff
Duluth East vs Duluth Central; 1983 7AA Championship Duluth East vs Duluth Central; 1986 7AA Championship I've belonged to a lot of gyms Lifeguarding with Debbie at the Minneapolis YMCA, Summer 1997 outside my first apartment in Minneapolis, 1992 Things from Minneapolis Things from Duluth Things from Central Duluth East poster at State, 1983 My sister Missy in the center, playing for Woodland Jr High...Duluth city championship 1980 Missy (in red) East at state vs. Spring Lake Park 1983 Duluth East (in white) vs. Minneapolis Washburn (blue) at state 1983 Duluth East vs International Falls, 1984 regions Duluth East vs. Grand Rapids, 1985 championship Duluth East vs. Anoka; 1984 Minnesota Volleyball State Championship
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51360
2006-03-12 21:09:00
2006-03-13 03:22:37
Other photos...
March is a fun time of year because of the basketball tournaments...they remind me of when I was in 1st - 5th grade when my sisters were playing for Duluth East, whose girls teams went to state tournaments most of those years. Girls basketball was very big in Duluth then (the boys were more into hockey than basketball)...but basketball was always my favorite sport. Still is. It was fun going to the games and watching the teams play - especially the Duluth East vs. Duluth Central games...those always drew full crowds and the games were always within a few points. Some of these other photos are of me, and my sisters and my cousins, and a few of Sydney, our Alaskan Husky who was with us from 1995-2004. My cousins Jackie and Christine with me (I must've been about 4) Left-Right: Missy, Jackie, Steph, Christine, and me (again, about 4) Sydney Sydney Sydney with my nephew Julian (my sister Missy's son) Newborn me Playing golf, or something like it Me with my mom Julian My mom with my sisters, before I was born 20 years ago this week: one of the biggest sectional baskeball games in Duluth history (my dad took these pictures)...1986 7AA Championship, Duluth East vs Duluth Central (Central won by 2 pts)
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51622
2006-03-14 16:14:00
2006-03-14 22:15:31
Why gay men don't like gay men
The following is a research study from J Michael Bailey, professor of psychology at Northwestern. I thought this was a very interesting article: Femiphobia The six men addressing my undergraduate sexuality class have two things in common. First, they all look fabulous: fit, muscular men, with square jaws, short neat hair, and stylish masculine clothes. They look like models from J. Crew or Banana Republic catalogues, which may be one reason why many more female than male students are asking them questions. I see the looks on the women's faces as they listen to the panel, and they convey wistful attraction. This is due to the hopeless nature of the attraction-hopeless not because the men are 10 years older than my students, but because of the second thing the men have in common: they are all gay. Because the class' subject is sexuality, I have asked my students not to hold back from asking questions of interest even if the questions are personal or explicit. (The men on the panel have assured me that such questions are okay.) The students eagerly oblige. "How and when did you come out to your family?" Answers ranged from Rick's "I haven't yet" to Ben's humorous account of telling his mother: "She was visiting me at college and I took her out to dinner. I told her 'I have something to tell you,' and she looked very worried. At that point the waiter leaned over and said to me 'Just tell her honey!' When I told her, she was relieved and said that she had been afraid I was angry at her." "Did you ever have sex with a woman?" Four of the guys have (two enjoyed it, and two did not), and two have not. "Can you give the girls in the class some oral sex tips?" The men agreed that it is important to actually enjoy giving oral sex, and not to use one's teeth. "Do you really enjoy it when a man with a large penis has anal sex with you?" Answer: "Honey, you don't know what you're missing." "Professor Bailey says that gay men are usually feminine during childhood. Does that describe your childhoods?" I am happy that someone has brought this up, and I am eager to hear the panel's responses. Ben says, "I wasn't much different than other boys. What about the rest of you guys? Anyone want to say anything?" For a few moments the remaining men look at each other and shrug, and then Ben says "Next question?" I am disappointed with the lost opportunity to hear recollections of childhood femininity. To be sure, many gay men do not recall being markedly feminine boys, and a few even recall being more masculine than average. But I suspect that this panel does not consist only of gay men with masculine boyhoods. Rather, I think the guys avoided the question. This explanation is consistent with their body language and their eagerness to go on to the next question. It is also consistent with my past experience talking with many gay men about femininity, especially femininity during childhood. I immediately think of two episodes during my career as a scientist studying this issue. The earliest occurred in Dallas, where I had traveled to interview gay twins for a study regarding the genetics of sexual orientation. I had a standard interview, which included questions about childhood gender nonconformity. ("Were you ever called a sissy?" "Did you ever dress up in girls' clothes?" and so on.) I had noticed that during this part of the interview some of the gay twins looked uncomfortable. One twin in Dallas took a long time to answer-he had, in fact, been a very feminine boy-and then he told me, "I haven't thought about those things in years." I think he wished I hadn't made him remember. The second incident occurred recently when I gave a talk at a conference on sexual orientation. During my talk I showed a short video of a feminine boy dressing in girls' clothes and playing with dolls. Afterwards, a local gay politician approached me, smiling uncomfortably. He thanked me for my presentation and said that he thought it was extremely important work. But he confessed that watching the boy in the video was a wrenching, "obscene" experience for him. He had just revisited his own childhood from his present perspective and found it disturbing. Reactions like these have been common among the gay men I've spoken to about childhood femininity. In fact, of all the controversial topics related to male homosexuality, the contention that gay men tend to have been feminine boys (and may be feminine men) has provoked the most discomfort and dispute. Initially, I found this odd, because the link between childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality is one of the largest and best established associations regarding sexual orientation. But after repeatedly encountering this kind of reaction, I began to think something interesting was going on. I made up a word to describe gay men's attitude: femiphobia. (Independently, the writer Tim Bergling came up with "sissyphobia.") Why are gay men femiphobic? Part of it is adverse childhood experience. I don't think that either the gay twin or the gay politician would endorse the belief that childhood femininity is a bad thing, but both behaved as if it were something to be ashamed of. I inferred that as boys, both men had been subject to the shame-inducing disapproval of others, including parents and peers. To be reminded of this is unsettling. But I have come to realize that it is not only childhood mistreatment that causes gay men to react negatively to the suggestion that they are, or were, feminine. To explain the other reasons requires some additional knowledge, and so I will return to them. ********* I have omitted several pages not directly relevant to this issue. ********* The main characters of the movie, The Birdcage (originally a French Film, La Cage aux Folles) are a gay couple. One of them is a very masculine man, and the other is a flamboyant drag queen. In the movie, they clearly take separate roles as husband and wife, and this is a common stereotype about gay relationships. In this chapter I have been arguing for the accuracy of some stereotypes about gay men. What about this one? In 1995 I became interested in using personal advertisements to study gay men's mating psychology. One can learn a lot about what people want in mates by studying these ads. They cost money, for one thing, and when people have to pay for each word, they try to make every word count. When describing whom they're looking for, people often have a mixture of idiosyncratic desires ("likes opera" or "enjoys camping"), but when the same preferences recur in ad after ad ("tall, dark, handsome, and rich;" or "attractive, sexy, and fit"), you know these are commodities that most people want. For example, psychologists have analyzed personal ads to show that straight men are much more concerned than straight women about a potential mate's looks; straight women are more concerned about resources and the ability to acquire them: income, wealth, ambition, a good job, and intelligence. You can also tell a lot about the mating market by they way advertisers describe themselves. Advertisers want to entice readers to answer their ads, and are sometimes quite creative in their self-description. So the self-descriptive adjectives also tend to be those that are highly valued. When my lab first started looking at gay personal advertisements, we were struck by a couple of differences from straight ones. First, gay men's ads were much more explicitly sexual than straight men's were-I will explain why I think this is so in the next chapter. The other difference was that gay men's ads used many more words related to gender conformity and nonconformity, such as masculine, feminine, butch, femme, straight-acting, straight appearing, and flaming. This suggested that these traits were important to many gay men, but how so? If gay men tended to pair off as in The Birdcage, we would expect to see both advertisements in which the advertiser described himself as "masculine" (or "butch" or "straight-acting" or something similar) and requested a "feminine" (or "femme" or "flaming") partner; and advertisements with the reverse pattern ("Flamer looking for butch guyä."). We would expect to see similar numbers of both types. In order to check our expectation, we looked at more than 2,700 personal ads placed by gay men. For each ad, we looked for gender-related words and we kept count of how often the advertiser: (a) requested a masculine partner, (b) requested a feminine partner, (c) described himself as masculine, and (d) described himself as feminine. Forty one percent of all the ads had some gender-related word. What we learned suggested that The Birdcage is indeed fiction. When advertisers requested either masculine or feminine characteristics in a partner, they requested masculine traits 96 percent of the time. Furthermore, when they described themselves as masculine or feminine, it was masculine 98 percent of the time. Both what gay men seek and how they represent themselves suggest that they are massively biased in favor of masculinity. Or is it a bias against femininity? In all 72 ads in which an advertiser was explicit about what kind of gender-related trait he did not want, it was a feminine trait; "no femmes" was the most common request. These results raise at least a couple of questions. First, if gay men are almost all so masculine (as their self descriptions imply), why do they bother requesting masculinity in partners? After all, most personal advertisers don't waste money asking for someone with four limbs, because even if they have this preference, they can reasonably assume that it applies to almost everyone. The answer is-and this will not surprise most people who have answered a personal ad-that people sometimes misrepresent themselves in a favorable way. How often do advertisers describe themselves as having "below average looks," even though half the world should? This consideration, as well as everything I've discussed in this chapter, should make one skeptical about accepting the masculine self-descriptions of gay male personal advertisers. A second question is less easily dismissed. Perhaps gay men who place personal ads are not representative. Perhaps their unusual characteristics or preferences are what necessitate placing such ads in the first place. Maybe most gay men love feminine men, and because feminine gay men are plentiful, they don't need to advertise for them. To answer this question this we did a second study. We made up mock "gay dating brochures," each of which profiled two competitors. Each profile had both a picture and a self-description of an ostensibly gay man. Some of the pictures were of very attractive men, others of average-looking men, and the rest were of men we considered very unattractive. One of the descriptions was: "Good-looking masculine gay man in early twenties seeks partner for relationship. I am in shape and enjoy rollerblading, jogging, and tennis. I live in the city and would like someone with whom I can share everything from an exciting evening in town at the clubs to a relaxing day at the museum. My hobbies include traveling, being outdoors, and listening to music." The other descriptions were similar. The key word in the description above is "masculine." A third of the time, that word was included in the description; a third of the time, "feminine" was substituted for it; and a third of the time neither "masculine" nor "feminine" was included. Each brochure contained one description with either "masculine" or "feminine" and one description with neither term. We went to a gay-oriented bookstore, a gay gym, and a gay pride rally, and we asked gay men to look at the brochures and choose which person they would prefer to date. Most of those polled chose the physically attractive men in the brochures-no surprise, gay men like good-looking guys. But the raters also strongly preferred the brochures with the "masculine" self-description. Substituting "feminine" for "masculine" had about the same effect as substituting an average-looking man's picture for a very attractive one. The idea that gay men want masculine partners may be surprising to straight people, but it is less so to gay men. Jaye Davidson, the actor who played the homosexual transsexual in the movie The Crying Game explained: " To be homosexual is to like the ideal of sex. Homosexual men love very masculine men. And I'm not a very masculine person." The gay (and flaming) humorist Quentin Crisp speculated about gay men: "To understand what kind of man they most admire it is only necessary to guess what they wish they themselves were-young, frail, beautiful, and refined. Hence their predilection is for huge, violent, coarse brutes." Whether or not Crisp's explanation-gay men want masculine men to feel more feminine- is correct, he recognized the preference. When gay men say "No femmes," what is it, exactly, that they are eschewing? Gay men tend to be feminine in several ways, including their interests, their voices, and their movements. (Although it is unclear that the gay accent is a feminine accent, even gay men discuss it as if it is.) Do gay men dislike hairdressers, men who speak with a gay accent, men with limp wrists, or all three? One relevant but surprising finding from our study of gay interests, speech, and movement patterns is that a gay man who acts feminine in one respect doesn't necessarily display other feminine traits. For example, gay men who sound the gayest do not tend to be the ones with the most feminine movements or the most feminine occupations. If our results are correct, then knowing that a gay man is a hairdresser tells you nothing about how he sounds or moves. When I ask my gay friends about what feminine traits they dislike, they usually begin by talking about the voice. An older acquaintance related how once in a gay bathhouse, he was on the verge of having sex with a very attractive and muscular stranger, when the stranger spoke. "When he opened his mouth, a purse fell out. I got limp." But when I went to a Halsted bar with my gay graduate student, he was able to determine which men he would likely reject merely by watching them move. We don't yet really know what gay men mean when they say they dislike femmes. This leaves the question of why. When I talk about this with other psychologists, the most common suggestion is internalized femiphobia-femininity has been punished so often by the straight world that gay men, too, come to hate it. This makes sense to me, but it is not the only plausible hypothesis. Another is that behavioral masculinity characterizes the prototypic man. If one is attracted to men, then one will be attracted those with masculine behavior. The second hypothesis is less malevolent but more pessimistic than the first. The second hypothesis implies that femiphobia is not due to societal intolerance but is intrinsic to male homosexuality and is not remediable even by reforming straight society to make it less homophobic. It suggests that across time and place, gay men will desire masculine men, and thus, acknowledging their own femininity makes them feel undesirable. We don't know yet how universal the gay male preference for masculinity is, although most of my foreign gay friends say that it is true in their locales as well. Earlier in this chapter I suggested that having been mistreated as feminine boys is not the only reason gay men tend to react uncomfortably to the implication that they are, or used to be, feminine. The other reason, which I hope is now obvious, is that gay men themselves dislike femininity, or at least they find it sexually unattractive. To call a gay man "feminine" is not only to say that he is a target of many straight men's ill will, but also that he is less attractive than he would be otherwise. It is certainly an unfortunate state of affairs that gay men tend to be feminine, tend to be less attracted to femininity, but tend to be stuck with each other. There are similar ironies in straight relationships. The designer of the universe has a perverse sense of humor.
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51757
2006-03-14 17:11:00
2006-03-14 23:12:30
This cartoon was too cute to let slip by

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52134
2006-03-20 16:29:00
2006-03-20 22:29:29
Duluth's West End


This is the centerpiece of the West End - the Seaway Hotel. This is probably the worst place you can live in Duluth - if someone gets shot, beat up, robbed, stabbed, etc - it usually happens at the Seaway. This is the place where two Duluth Police Officers were killed in 1990 when responding to a person with gun call...they were shot by the man while he was inside his room (the walls are so thin that the bullets went right through the walls).

Why do I do things like this and take pictures of these crazy places? I don't know. I think too often that we treasure 'classic pieces of history' but forget that places like the Seaway serve a purpose to certain people also. They have a story to tell also, and so does the building itself. I have always been fascinated by people who are on the fringes of society...and places like the Seaway are slowly dying away - leaving these people to live on the streets instead.

Ten years ago I worked at the fitness center just down the street from the Seaway and I would wait for the bus right here to go home - on the other side of the city. It was interesting to watch people come and go from this place.

Right next to the Seaway is Curly's Bar - which is also known as a typical 'hooker bar' - next to the Kozy Bar this is probably one of the toughest bars in the city where all the hookers hang out (the Tokyo Sauna is just around the corner)...usually if the cops are called to Curly's there's at least two cops that will go in because of how obnoxious the people are here.
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52421
2006-03-22 14:33:00
2006-03-22 20:33:28



1st Ave W & 1st St (the YWCA is the dark building on the upper right)

a dense shot of downtown

another shot of downtown

Washington Junior High School - where I went to junior high

old Duluth Central High School

downtown's wino liquor store - Lake Superior Bottle (1st Ave E & 1st St...this is where the real desperate drunks go.

the Wabasha "Adult Entertainment Center" 114 E 1st St

Grandma's Marathon - which I'm running in June - the official finish line.

old Duluth Cathedral High School, 204 W 4th St





YWCA
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52693
2006-03-25 14:12:00
2006-03-25 20:12:43
Downtown to West Duluth


the armpit of the Central Hillside; 7th Ave E and E 4th St...in a few years it's predicted all this will be gone and new buildings will be built.

The original boy's YMCA, now it's the Minnesota Teen Challenge which is another Christian program for bad kids.

the exit to downtown from I-35

exit signs for West End and West Duluth

Greyhound Bus Station, 45th Ave W & Grand Ave

Grand Motel, next to the bus depot. This is where all the drug dealers and gang members hang out after getting off the bus in Duluth (or, at least, this is where they end up getting busted because this place is always in the news).

a picture I got from Skyline Drive in West Duluth overlooking the lift bridge.

industrial parts of West Duluth, the bridge to Superior, Wisconsin in the background.
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52758
2006-03-25 14:58:00
2006-03-25 21:14:31
Me and Greyhound
I wanted to get a picture of the bus station because it's one of the places I have spent a lot of time, and it's been my main way of transportation to Minneapolis, 165 miles south of Duluth. The bus ride takes about 3 hours, if you're on regular bus, about 2 hours and 30 minutes if you're on the nonstop bus. And if you're on the local bus, which stops every place there is an exit, it takes about four hours. That bus stops at every prison town (former farm towns) along the way. Not fun. That January night in 1996 when we had over a foot of snow I waited for Jeff at the bus station for more than two hours after the bus was supposed to arrive...the bus from Minneapolis took a long time to get up here. It finally made it, and I was so happy to see him. I had some good moments at that bus depot (in 1996 it was at 21st Ave W & Superior St; in 1999 it moved to 4426 Grand Ave., a couple miles away). After moving to Minneapolis a couple years later, I started coming back here every weekend or so once I sensed that life in Minneapolis was pretty boring...I figured I would rather be here where my family is and I had some extra money to do whatever I wanted. Minneapolis was pretty restrictive with no car, and there was nobody to do anything with. It made for long, boring weekends, and you can only go to coffee shops so many times. Then about four years ago I felt I was done with Minneapolis and packed my stuff together, hopped on the bus and came home. I've been here ever since, and I have only taken the bus once since then - once to go to MInneapolis last October to run the marathon. The bus ride sucked; the marathon was great. I've never owned a car in my life. One reason is that I'm just cheap and I'd rather save my money for other things, another reason is that I've always lived in cities with good transit systems and hung out downtown, so I have been able to walk wherever I go. I just don't see the need for a car, and there is no way I'm going to spend the money now with gas prices going up again this summer. It's just an expense that I don't need to have. As you can see by the photo the bus station here has gone downhill quite fast. The bus station that was at 2122 W Superior Street wasn't so bad - it was a real Greyhound station, it felt like a bus station, with a waiting area and everything. There were 4 buses to Minneapolis a day. There was also a bus to Thunder Bay, Ontario; a bus to Detroit, a bus to Grand Forks, ND., a bus to International Falls....it was a busy place. Today there is one daily bus to Minneapolis which leaves at 8 in the morning. And a bus that comes into Duluth around 5 in the afternoon from Minneapolis. And that's it. The depot has moved from a real bus depot to a garage-looking place out in West Duluth - to the delight of the two churches next door who get people knocking on their doors at night begging for food and shelter because they arrived here with no money, and the Grand Motel, which has turned into a drug dealing haven for dealers who just hopped off the bus. It's not done much to improve the image of West Duluth. But me and the bus station go back a long ways, and it's fun to remember that night that when Jeff finally got off the bus here in Duluth.
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53206
2006-03-25 19:49:00
2006-03-26 02:04:45
I hate Saturday
Another Saturday night with nothing to do, crabby parents, nobody to do anything with, and noplace to go. This past decade is going down as probably one of the darkest times of my life. Let's see...there's nowhere to even GO. The few places there are to go, I already know the 10-12 gay guys who are there. They are the same guys who have been here for a dozen years; I wasn't interested in them then, and I'm not interested in them now. There's no point in even going to those places. The same guys who are in the chat rooms locally are the same guys who go to the bar. The same guys who go to the sauna, are the same guys who were there years ago and will likely be the same guys there years from now. God that's depressing. I've finally figured out what's been bothering me so much lately. I go to the mall or downtown, or to UMD, or the fitness center and I can pick out about 20 guys I'd love to get to know better. Yet, none of them are ever gay. Then I turn around and go to the 'designated gay places' because nobody gay is going to confront you (or you confront him)...and it's the same goddamn guys at the gay places who you aren't interested in anyways. But you are in the 'real world' and there are new young attractive guys all the time - looking for girls. Not for you. That's what so difficult for me - despite being out since 1989, since I was 14, I still have not figured out how to feel good about this. I think about what turned me on to other boys when I was growing up - the qualities that made my stomach tingle - masculinity, health, athleticism, youth, confidence, compassion...those are all things that I found so intriguing - things that made me want to get to know another young man when I was growing up. Then I moved to Minneapolis in hopes of finding one of these men, since none of that existed here. Imagine my disappointment when I arrived in Minneapolis, and all I found were guys who said "yea, I want a guy like that too...know where to find any?". After hearing this about a few hundred times, it dawned upon me that as someone gay, I was amongst all these other men who had the same attractions I did, but none of us had them for each other. What the hell good is that? I didn't want to talk to any more guys who shared the same fantasy I had. I wanted to FIND that guy I had fantasized about who wanted me just as much. But after what, 16-17 years, it never hapened. Not even close. And I'm not saying that I'm extremely picky in terms of wanting someone with money or connections or whatever - I want the same kind of everyday, wears-whats-on-the-floor kind of young guy that straight girls get to date. Nothing less. No Abercrombie bitches, no frilly queens, no sweater girls. I didn't spend all this time developing my attracting towards men only to discover that the only ones I get to choose from are pretty much the opposite of my kind of guy. Because the shitty reality is this: you can't make yourself be interested in someone who you aren't interested in. Sure, he might be a nice guy. There's a lot of nice guys out there, and that is important, but if that's the only quality that matters, then all the nice people would be with each other, sexual orientation wouldn't matter, and that problem would be solved. You can't make 'sizzle' happen. You can't force butterflies to make your stomach tingle. That either happens or it doesn't. My problem is that it happens but it's one sided - the guys I want aren't gay, so naturally they don't even notice that I'm around. Another thing I have caught on to is that I have been lied to by the gay media - and that the gay media is no different from FOX News or any right-wing news source. All of these machines have agends of their own to push. and they have advertisers spending big bucks expecting a return on their investment. It's about selling advertising - not telling the truth. In terms of the gay media, what I see is deception and half-truths - the gay media uses things like gay marriage and the gay games to make us 'look good' to the general public and therefore get us to believe that everything's great in the gay world, there are no problems, we all have money, we all have our degrees, we've all arrived, and everything's just wonderful. So what happened to all the GLBT youth who dropped out of high school? What about the gay people who work low-wage jobs? What about the gay men who have spent 20 years trying to meet someone and nothing happened? What about gay people who lost their battle with depression or addiction and decided to end their lives? These are serious issues that happen all the time in the gay community. Much more than gay wedding plans. But gay weddings look good, they make us 'look like we matter' and therefore who cares about the other gay people whose issues need to be addressed. Being gay is about appearances - if it looks good, then it must be. If he appears to be healthy, then he doesn't have HIV. Gay men are great at taking a pile of garbage and dressing it up with beautiful wrappings, ribbons and a bright red bow on top. They are great at taking terrible realities and dressing them up as false stories which give us a false sense of security. Everything is not great. In fact, I don't think that things have ever been this bad. In 5 years, the gay community has lost 20 years worth of activism and hard work. It's gone. The rights we fought for, the allies we formed, the policies and programs we insisted upon - are gone. The people who fought for them are too tired to start over, or they are dead. The younger gay generation doesn't care, or they're like me - they're so disillusioned at how nasty the gay community has become, that they don't believe in the community anymore. All we do is lie to each other anyways. Were these programs really working, or just enabling the unhealthy choices we were making?
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53415
2006-03-26 19:03:00
2006-03-27 01:10:43
Slightly Better
It was a beautiful day outside, which definitely helped my mood overall. I had a good workout today and made some plans regarding next year with school. I am going to get into contact with some folks at UMD and figure out what I can do or need to do in order to get things moving for next year. The good news is that I got an A both in History and I got an A in that composition class - after three units the instructor said that my writing was great, and I didn't even need to finish the class. So those were good things to hear this week. I needed some good news, that's for sure. I'm looking forward to spring and the weather getting warmer. The hard part about winter is I didn't get to spend a lot of time outside even though it wasn't that cold of a winter. It's just more when you can do what yuo want outside - and it's warm enough so you can spend the whole day out there.
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53564
2006-03-29 20:19:00
2006-03-30 02:36:44
The end of winter
I might be speaking too soon, but I think the long days of winter are over with. This hasn't been much of a winter to be honest, I think we only had a few days of below-zero temperatures at the most, and I didn't have any days where my legs were frozen from being outside. No frozen tear ducts, no freezing toes. It wasn't a bad year at all. So now, the little bit of snow we had is melting, and I think spring might be on its way. The return of the Canada Geese is a good sign - many of them are in their huge flocks honking away as the fly above the city in the early morning. It's fun to watch them come back. They don't sound very bright, but they seem to know exactly where they're going and have a brilliant sense of doing it. If only people were like that. So it's been an interesting winter for me. The tenth anniversary of Jeff in my life has been extremely intense and emotional. Probably the most emotional experience of my life thus far in terms of reflection, and it's been really therapeutic for me. I needed to go through these emotions and memories and experience what those meant to me and how that shapes me today. I think it was meant for me to go through this 10 years later to re-evaluate and grow. I am much different today from 1996. I loved him very much, but as the winter fades away, so does the intensity of my need to hang on to those memories. The height of our time together was during the coldest - and I mean COLDEST months of that winter. The early part of 1996 was probably the worst winter Duluth ever saw in terms of cold temperatures and snow. Being with him made it hardly noticeable - just having him around made my life very warm and comfortable. But as I was to find out, being gay opens up a lot of ugly realities that two men must face at some point: one is out and the other is not - sooner or later the resentment of the others accepting family or how to handle the holidays rears its ugly head. Jealousy begins. Sexual frustration starts to develop because you didn't clear up specifics concerning who's "going to do what" - and as silly as it sounds, it's a big deal with gay men. It's not much fun to find out that neither guy wants to play the active role with the other. That's why our relationships are so complicated - there are no rules, nobody knows who's doing what right off the bat (with straight couples this is pretty much a given), and we have little to no skills to negotiate or compromise. And when it comes to sexual dseire and intimacy, I'm not sure if you can compromise. Certain things will make a guy hard, and certain things just won't. You can't make yourself want to do something if you truly don't want to. And when that comes to sex. sooner or later that converation that you're both afraid to have will become a big deal - because someone is going to either cheat, leave or lash out. Neither Jeff nor I knew much about sex because we were so young. I had no idea of any of these roles - I had watched gay porn, but that was the extent of my knowledge of it. He was more like a great friend that I felt so comfortable sleeping in the same bed with, hugging and kissing. But nothing more. And to be honest, that wasn't enough for either of us. We both wanted and needed something that neither of us could provide for the other. And I wonder how many gay relationships fall apart because of that very reason. How early is too early to discuss these things so the relationship doesn't end in heart break? Again, I am glad I re-lived some of the things that made me so fond of Jeff and I was lucky to have met him. But I also remember how avoidant and nasty he could be too. The times I tried contacting him this year and hearing no response - reminded me of just that. And what I realized was that I was wrong. You CAN have closure with someone like that. Despite the fact that they are avoidant and evasive, the fact that they don't care enough to contact you speaks volumes. Why would you want to spend time with someone you have to chase after? Is that the kind of relationship you'd want your siblings to have? Or your best friend? Of course not. So at some point you have to care about yourself enough to say...I did what I could. And that has to be good enough for me. You have to close the book on some things - on some people -and move on.
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54004
2006-03-31 15:53:00
2006-03-31 22:31:59
What's real, what's not
I've been reading other gay blogs lately and all I have read about are two things: 1) Brokeback Mountain and why it should have won whatever award it was supposed to have won, and 2) gay marriage. These are not new topics at all, but if I hear any more stories about either one I shall eat this computer. I don't go to movies anymore because I dislike the quality of movies made today, plus I know I have Attention Deficit DIsorder and there is no way I will sit two to three hours in a theater looking at a screen without going nuts. I've never been able to sit still; when I want out, I want out. So I can't say much about the actual movie because I didn't see it. But I know enough just from hearing the commentaries and comments and whatever else you can imagine. People are trying to make this movie out to be more than it really was...it appeared to be a story between two extremely unrealistic looking young gay men decades ago who fell in lust with each other. This may happen every day, it may not. Until I see it for myself, I don't believe it. Finding anyone who is gay, not on drugs, not significantly overweight and under 45 is a damn miracle. Of course, I suppose showing two 51-year-old gay cowboys with pot bellies and receding hairlines rolling around on the grass wouldn't have generated much revenue. Anyways. Nowhere in the previews or discussions did I see anything that suggested a political tone or anything even close. The only thing that seemed to remain on most gay men's minds were the images of two 30 year old straight men who look great and played gay-themed cowboys. APPEARANCES - not reality. The gay community has to be the only minority group I know of that puts appearances - no matter how bullshit and unreal they are - over anything else. That has to say a lot about what gay people think of each other in general, if we only want the cream of the crop representing us as a people. Nope, the guy who had to work hard to get through graduate school or who had to struggle through treatment with drugs to find his way through this closeted mess doesn't make him a role model; however the guy who isn't even gay but is willing to pose for a gay magazine for the right amount of money becomes an icon. This kind of mindset - which was rampant in Minneapolis and I imagine even worse in other cities - is one main reason why I came back here. That kind of value system drives us to destroy each other after a while. Brokeback Mountain is the same thing. Why do we need two not-gay guys in a movie to make history? We have enough gay men who have overcome tremendous obstacles in their lifetimes who would be great inspirations for us all. Except they don't look like the two guys in the movie. So to hell with them. That also got me to thinking the other day when I was watching the news on dish network from KTLA. They were covering the latino students in Los Angeles who were protesting the immigration bill and walking out of school by the thousands - blocking freeway traffic and everything. And I was thinking...gay men would never, ever do this. Thirty five years ago, maybe. But not now. We're too concerned about our own selves; we are mostly white, and white people have never had to get their hands dirty and fight for their rights, so most gay people do not know how to unify with each other and just raise hell. We also have money, and most of us do not want to risk going to jail and losing our $5000 watches or high-end corporate jobs that we are using that precious MBA for. All these materials that we've acquired mean more than people - our own gay community. And that's what's fucked everything up. Historically, when the chips fall, gay men scatter from each other, and it's every man for himself. Because of this, most gay people (myself included) have a tremendous amount of mistrust for one another where there is no way in hell we would go out as a group and protest. We can't trust that the other guy has our back covered because it's our experience that other gay men will up and run when they get scared rather than stick around and defend each other. And when that's how a group of people traditionally acts, then you won't see them rallying around each other for a cause anytime soon. Those latino kids in California have nothing to lose. They probably didn't want to be in school anyways, and sure, maybe the majority of them didn't even know what the proposed bill meant. They were just creating trouble in numbers. And to be fair, the adults -the working-age latino folks were not doing this because they had jobs to be at. They couldn't protest because they can't afford to miss work. So in some respects the kids would have been the only ones able to protest this anyways. But it still is on my mind regarding how gays really view each other...we aren't really a minority group because traditionally in America minority group is associated with being poor, not having much education, having more kids than most other groups, having to depend on others within your group because you don't have enough money to cover things like child care and food - so the experience fosters one of community because the community needs each other in order to survive. Gay men, looking at the big picture, are the opposite of this. Many have so much money they don't know what to do with it. I know a lot who are over-educated. None have been denied entry into higher education; in fact many of the gay people I know are running the institutions or are professors. Usually there are no kids. There is no partner. It's just the gay man by himself...so there is no sense of family or community, or need for child care or anything like that. It's this solitary existance. And it's very hard to categorize because we have little in common with racial minorities in terms of traditional exclusion, but the way we exclude each other...and the way we understand exclusion as a community...makes us understanding of what that's like.
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