JUNE 2006 (LIVEJOURNAL)

2006-06-05 02:10:26
One gay spot gone - the Wabasha closes
The Wabasha Adult Bookstore, at 114 E 1st St, was shut down the other day. I haven't been there in years; it's in the worst part of downtown and I don't think it was getting as much business as it used to. But, it is one more gay space that is gone in Duluth, sending even more guys to the internet seeking hookups or whatever else. Wabasha Book shut down, reports bomb threat BY MARK STODGHILL NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER Police worked for and against Wabasha Book in downtown Duluth on Friday as they investigated a bomb threat affixed with a knife to the door of the pornography shop and, in an unrelated action, told the business owner he was being shut down. Sgt. Scott Campbell, supervisor of the Violent Crimes Unit, said the Wabasha notified police at 8:17 a.m. that a threatening note directed toward Eric Ringsred was found on the front of the store at 114 E. First St. Ringsred owns the NorShor Theatre and has approved a plan for Jim Gradishar, owner of Wabasha Book, to bring nude dancers into the theater located on Superior Street. The words of the note were pieced together with letters taken from a newspaper or magazine, Campbell said. It was stuck to the door with a kitchen knife. He said the crime scene unit was processing the note for fingerprints and other evidence and it wasn't available for public inspection Friday. A vandal also spray-painted a red "X" over the Wabasha door. Gradishar didn't see the threatening note, but a police officer told him what it said. "It said something like, 'If you open the NorShor strip club we will blow you up' or something like that," he said. "If they think my business is wrong, then why do another wrong? Two wrongs don't make a right," Gradishar said of the threat. "They're obviously upset with my business.... I can't understand how terrorism can do anything good for anybody. Some humans think like jackasses. Violence is not the answer, that's for sure." STORE'S LOCATION VIOLATES CITY CODE Gradishar received another dose of bad news Friday when Duluth police licensing officer Steve Latour told him his adult bookstore was being closed. Latour determined that Gradishar's business is in violation of a Duluth city ordinance that doesn't allow an adult bookstore within 600 feet of churches, parks, pedestrian plazas or schools. Latour measured the distance and found that the front door of the bookstore is 65.9 feet -- about the distance of a baseball pitching mound from home plate -- from the front door of the nondenominational On Eagle's Wing Church. The Clayton-Jackson-McGhie Memorial meets the generally accepted definition of a pedestrian plaza and is 170.5 feet from the Wabasha. A youth center and Hillside Community Church are located at 201 E. First St., about 319 feet from the adult book store. Duluth City Attorney Bryan Brown said the denial of the adult bookstore's permit application was coincidental to Gradishar recently bringing nude dancers into the NorShor Theatre as part of his plan to turn the theater into a multi-entertainment complex. The permit was granted through May 31 and the city denied renewal on June 1, Brown said. He said he informed Gradishar several months ago that the city had problems with the adult bookstore because of the distance ordinance that went into effect in September. "His comment was that he'd change the nature of his bookstore and start selling other publications," Brown said of Gradishar. Under the city ordinance, an adult bookstore is defined as having 40 percent or more of its gross sales in books, pamphlets, magazines or other pictorial or printed material which are distinguished or characterized by a principal emphasis on nudity, sado-masochistic abuse, sexual conduct or sexual excitement; and/or has 30 percent or more of books, pamphlets, magazines or other pictorial or printed material displayed for sale on the premises distinguished or characterized by a principal emphasis on nudity, sado-masochistic abuse, sexual conduct or sexual excitement. Gradishar said Friday he planned to talk to his magazine distributor and he would provide everything from "Sports Afield to Hot Rod to Women's World" at his store. The businessman was traveling to Minneapolis to meet with his attorney. "I'm not worried whatsoever about either business," Gradishar said. "I believe they both will be open shortly."
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63996
2006-06-06 18:59:00
2006-06-07 00:18:49
The Dentist
Another thing I have put off doing for years - going to the dentist. Last time I went, Jeff and I went together, in January 1996. I've had my teeth cleaned since then but haven't had a real dental checkup or dental work done. Part of the reason is I am terrified of the dentist, the last time I went it was a horrible experience where I had to keep coming back over and over to get cavities filled, it looks like it will be the same deal this time - except now I have to have two teeth extracted on top of it. The other reason why I never went was because my insurance never covered dental work, and with a crown costing upwards of $750, it was not something that I placed in 'things to do immediately' category. I just figured, my teeth feel fine, I have no money to go to the dentist, so I'm not going to worry about it. It doesn't cost that much to get your teeth professionally cleaned once in a while, so I would do that, but not the big stuff. Today, I had it all done and was given the news that I knew I was going to get...I have a lot of cavities and two teeth beyond repair. I knew it was bad when the dentist said to just come in for the first appointment and we'll figure out how many more appointments I'm going to need after that. So it looks like I'm going to spend a lot of the summer in the dentist's chair...oh, and I have gum disease, which is reversable. As long as I floss. A lot. I knew this was going to be bad. I haven't had dental xrays in so long, so I knew that something bad was going to show up. I had two teeth that were throbbing in pain a year ago but again, I had no insurance to get it looked at, so I just took some painkillers and waited the pain out, and got on with it. I shouldn't have neglected my teeth for as long as I have, but I guess it's good that I went...even though I know I'm going to hate having all these appointments to go to and deal with the drills and whatever else. When Jeff and I went in 1996, the dentist was this unfriendly older man who didn't seem to like practicing anymore. Neither of us had a good experience, and we both had to go back many times to get our teeth fixed. Of course, I won't wait this long to go again, but I just have to get through however many appointments I'm going to have. The dentist this time was very young for a dentist, probably about my age, and not bad looking. And of course that means, not gay. Had a wedding ring on. I check these things, you know. Even though I had a cute young dentist that isn't enough for me to turn my trust over to someone sticking a drill in my mouth and hitting exposed nerves. The sound of the drill, the smell of the tooth as it's being drilled into, the sound that the spit-sucker thing makes as it's in your mouth...ugh - why anyone would want to become a dentist is beyond me. I'm sure it's fascinating work, but I can't believe I'm the only one who has a fear of going (and so they just don't go, like me)...then when they finally muster up the courage to go they find out they have to have massive work done. Last time I had my teeth cleaned they used sound and vibration which made my teeth look super clean. This time, because they were worried about the gum problems they just used the regular spinning brush thing. My teeth look nice, but they don't feel as shiny as they did when I had the sound cleaning done.
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64235
2006-06-06 19:32:00
2006-06-07 00:38:59
Downtown Duluth's Adult Entertainment in Jeopardy again
Law will shut down strip acts DULUTH: A new state law will put an end to nude dancing at Club Saratoga and prohibit a proposed NorShor strip-tease operation. BY CHRIS HAMILTON NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER Duluth has begun using a new state law to limit nude dancing at the Club Saratoga and head off a strip-tease operation at the historic NorShor Theatre. Eventually the Saratoga will have to close the curtain on strip acts, Duluth City Attorney Bryan Brown said Monday. Brown said the Club Saratoga, 331 Canal Park Drive, and the NorShor Theatre, 211 E. Superior St. -- where the NorShor Experience was planned to open in July -- are in clear conflict with a state law that strictly restricts where and when live adult entertainment can be shown. The law took effect May 27. Its strongest language says strip clubs cannot be within 500 feet of the property line of any residence or within 2,800 feet -- nearly a half-mile -- of churches and schools. The manager of the proposed NorShor Experience, Jim Gradishar, said Monday that plans to open what he calls a high-class establishment this summer are on hold. But he warned that strip club owners across the state will challenge the law in court on constitutional grounds. As for the Club Saratoga, the dancers won't be getting dressed immediately. The city hasn't set a timetable for enforcing the entire law, Brown said. "We're not going down there (to the Club Saratoga) this afternoon with a paddy wagon to arrest every one," Brown said Monday. "We will try to be reasonable. Yeah, we will enforce the law, but we're going to explain it to them first." TOO CLOSE TO THE 'TOGA For the Saratoga, two apartment complexes and a condominium development within the law's proximity ranges may have doomed the dancing. One apartment unit shares a wall with the club. Duluth police officers on Friday already made certain that the club's dancers stopped much earlier than the 2 a.m. advertised in the phone book. The new statute says live nude dancing can only be conducted between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. But they are working with the club's owner, Phil Fish, to make the rest of the transition as smooth as possible, because they were legislated out of business, Brown said. He said using force would be "distasteful." Brown said the club could still operate as a bar, or Fish could relocate the nude dancing operation out of town. "They can still have dancing there; they just can't have nudie dancing there," Brown said. Police Chief Roger Waller said Fish is upset but cooperating with the changes so far. Efforts by the News Tribune to reach Fish for comment Friday and Monday were unsuccessful. NO GRANDFATHER The new state law contains no provisions to exempt or grandfather existing adult-entertainment operations. Many of those businesses could be forced to close their doors. Sen. Steve Dille, R-Dassel, the bill's author, said it was modeled on legislation from Delaware that has withstood legal challenges. However, the Delaware law did grandfather in existing businesses. Dille said he won't be surprised if some operators try to strike down portions of the law. Business owners could argue they invested in properties that complied with existing state and local regulations only to later find themselves forced to relocate, he said. "It's tough to know for sure how it will play out in the courts," Dille said. "But I'm confident that most of the law will stand." Brown said the city is on firm legal ground. The holder of a business license, which is required for places such as bars and pull-tab stands to operate, don't have the same rights as property owners, he said. Sen. Yvonne Prettner-Solon, D-Duluth, said local government authorities do have the authority to adopt stricter or more liberal standards, superseding the state law. At Large City Councilor Jim Stauber said he doesn't plan to write an ordinance that would grandfather in the 62-year-old Saratoga, but he would support one. "I know the Club Saratoga has been there almost as long as I have," said Stauber, one of the City Council's conservatives. "I am not a real advocate, but I think it would probably be appropriate. In my five years on the council, I have never received a complaint about them." NO NORSHOR When news of the long-troubled NorShor's re-imagining as a nude dancing parlor broke last week, it ignited a firestorm of frustration among neighboring business owners and city politicians, including Mayor Herb Bergson. Many of those same people have supported building owner Dr. Eric Ringsred's attempts over the years to make the aging structure viable. The NorShor is too close to a high-rise for elderly residents as well as four other residential buildings, three churches and two schools. The law also requires the owners of any proposed adult entertainment establishment to notify the city 60 days in advance of opening. Brown said on Monday that Gradishar and Ringsred have not filed with the city yet. "I don't see how they can operate an adult entertainment establishment at the NorShor," Brown said. Gradishar said he met with about 15 other strip club owners and an attorney in Minneapolis on Friday. He said there's some big money out there ready to fight the law. "The (NorShor Experience) doors will be ready to fly open when we successfully fight the law," Gradishar said. Penny Perry, of Perry Framing across the street from the NorShor, is a member of the area business group that staged a rally last week in opposition to Gradishar's and Ringsred's plans for the NorShor. She said they felt from the beginning that the new law would apply in their case. However, she said they first wanted to sort things out with Ringsred, a noted preservationist, and gave him a deadline of Monday to respond to their concerns. Dianna von Rabenau, owner of the Green Mercantile next to the NorShor, said they received a letter from Ringsred saying his position on pursuing a strip club hadn't changed. Ringsred apologized on his Web site over the weekend for the apparent suddenness of his decision. Gradishar's proposal was the first to come along with money and a concrete business plan, Ringsred wrote. If Duluth is to become a world-class tourist and convention town, it deserves a world-class cabaret, wrote Ringsred, who has tusseled with the city in the past over its spending on tourism. "We still want to keep him involved in a more family-friendly vision of the neighborhood," Perry said. "This isn't just about stopping this. This is about making the NorShor succeed." FUZZY'S SHUTTERED The statute's intent is to protect the public health, safety and welfare as well as to prevent criminal activity, according to its language. For Gradishar, this has been a bad few weeks for his line of businesses. The new state statute also would have affected his other strip club, Fuzzy's Place, at 116 E. First St. "Fuzzy's Place is no longer in business," Gradishar said Monday. "I personally closed it. There was a lot of gang problems, and it just wasn't worth it." The club's last day was May 19, and the closing had nothing to do with the pending legislation, he said. "I didn't know that the law would apply," Gradishar said. "I wasn't worried about the law. That just was my personal decision. Way too many troublemakers." Fuzzy's opened in 1999 and adjoins Gradishar's pornography shop, Wabasha Book, which police closed last week for being in violation with a completely separate city ordinance restricting adult bookstores. Gradishar said he plans to cut out his live dancing at Wabasha Book until "this law gets blown apart." Gradishar also said he expected his bookstore to reopen today. "We're not going to have a problem reopening," he said. "We've just got to jump through some hoops, and we'll fight back later. I just want to get the doors open." On Friday, Duluth police shuttered the Wabasha because it violated a city ordinance that doesn't allow an adult bookstore within 600 feet of churches, parks, pedestrian plazas or schools. However, an adult bookstore is defined as having 40 percent or more of its gross sales in sexual material. Gradishar said he planned to provide a wide range of mainstream magazines to comply with the ordinance. At Large City Councilor Don Ness asked Brown on Monday to look into including strip clubs in the city's weaker adult bookstore ordinance. He also may request that the City Council adopt a resolution recognizing that the law should be enforced, he said. "It is the law," Ness said. CHRIS HAMILTON is a general assignment reporter who covers transportation and public safety. He can be reached weekdays at (218) 279-5502 or by e-mail at chamilton@duluthnews .com.
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64277
2006-06-07 21:11:00
2006-06-08 02:12:20
We were in Minneapolis the weekend this happened
The Breaking Point The girls all agreed: They went to Christi Mendoza's house to rob her. But something happened--and by the time it was over, she had died an unfathomably brutal death. by Josie Rawson Exactly what happened in the downstairs duplex at 3109 36th Ave. in South Minneapolis in the late-night hours of July 9, 1996 may never be clear. What we do know is that there was a robbery; things got out of control; and there was a body. Christine Mendoza, a 20-year-old woman who earned her living as a stripper at the downtown Déjà Vu nightclub, was discovered three days later by her boyfriend, Courtney Rhines. He returned from a Las Vegas vacation to find her body lying face up in the dining room in boxer shorts, a tank top, and bedroom slippers. There was a belt around her neck. She'd been strangled, and someone had stabbed her over a dozen times in the stomach and chest. Her throat had been slashed so deeply that it nearly decapitated her. A large bruise showed up on her right shoulder in the shape of a shoe print and her fingernails were ripped to the quick. There were signs she'd been kicked hard, a bloody shoe print between her legs, and circular bruises on one hand made by four fingertips. Even though her jugular was severed, the medical examiner figured that with the belt cinched round her neck like a tourniquet, it took "a while for her to bleed out and die." A good part of her face had been sliced away, as if whoever killed Christi meant not only to cause her death but to disfigure her. To erase her face. Her apartment had been ransacked. The over-300 CDs Christi kept in order on her entertainment center had been cleaned out, and dozens of them were found outside in the street. There was a chair tipped over in Christi's dining room, and two bloody knives were found lying near her body. Her weed was missing from the wooden box where she stored it, and so were her credit cards and a lot of her gold jewelry--a Gucci watch, chains, earrings, pins, bracelets. The kitchen cupboards had been emptied, food and utensils strewn on the counters, and the matching cloth-napkin-and-ring set Christi kept arranged around a floral centerpiece on the table was scattered across the floor. In the back bedroom where she'd ordered her furniture ensemble to look like an interior decorating showroom, complete with vanity table and mirror, several of Christi's designer outfits, costumes, and accessories--including the belt used to strangle her--had been yanked off their hangers. A pillowcase was missing from her matching sheet set. When Christi's mother cleaned out the apartment later, she found $2000 in cash rolled up and stashed in the toe of one of her daughter's shoes. Eight days later, three young women landed in the Hennepin County jail with $1 million bail on each of their heads. They wound up there because a 16-year-old named Valerie Martinez had gotten scared, either of police or of her own accomplices. Through relatives, she got the phone number of a lawyer; she called up and started to unburden herself of the awful details. She named names. Unfortunately it turned out that she had dialed the direct line of St. Paul Police Chief William Finney. Once she realized her mistake, she hung up. Then she got in touch with attorney Keith Ellison at the Minneapolis Legal Rights Center and told him a version of the story--one that differed from what she had told her stepmother. Ellison accompanied her to a garbage can on a Mississippi River bank where Valerie said she and the other girls had dumped a pillowcase full of Christi's things--jewelry, keys, a phone, a caller ID box, and a single black knit glove. Ellison turned it all in to a police officer late that night at City Hall--homicide's first break in the case. In the next few days, Valerie worked out a plea agreement and traded an 82-page statement for juvenile probation. She's set to be out of prison at age 21, unless the court revokes her deal. In the first version she told investigators, she and three acquaintances--18-year-old Leah McGinley, 21-year-old Denetta Caldron, and 18-year-old Maia Diederich-Lee--had spent the evening of July 9 driving around South Minneapolis in Maia's car trying to score some pot. They all ended up at Christi's place late, intending to "jack" her--to steal her cash and weed--and get out. In the year since that hot July evening, Leah and Denetta have added their own accounts of the crime to the mix--stories that clash dramatically with Valerie's and are so riddled with discrepancies that only one woman has been tried to date, and that trial ended in an acquittal just three weeks ago. What we do know is the jack turned bad: Something went terribly wrong, and the late-night visit ended in a murder so ruthless that one of the lead homicide investigators is said to have suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time under psychiatric care in the wake of the killing. In the year since, the four girls accused of murdering Christi Mendoza have earned a kind of dark celebrity status around South Minneapolis. And they've generated a lot of talk on the grapevine that runs through the neighborhood--friends telling friends what other friends heard, rumors repeated and knit together into a kind of urban legend. There's talk that a few days before the killing, Leah was threatening to kill somebody, anybody, at a party. That Valerie got pregnant in the days before her confession as a way to gain sympathy in court. That when the cops showed up with a search warrant at Denetta's, one asked her toddler if mommy had any new CDs and the child retrieved a 69 Boyz disc that belonged to Christi. That Maia was circulating lyrics from a rap song about orgasms and murder among her friends. That Leah was spotted at the Chicago-Lake liquor store one night wearing Christi's gold jewelry. That the gang Valerie was trying to run with required killing as part of its initiation ritual. That the murder eerily resembled scenes from a movie released last year, Set It Off, about four down-and-out young women who jack banks, make their getaway in stolen cars, and drive around the 'hood tossing CDs out the window. Christi Mendoza had just turned 20 the month before her death. In a victim-impact statement, her mother, Cindy Murry, remembers Christi as a young woman two years out of high school "trying to make something of [her] life, to be somebody." By all accounts, she was. After graduating from Roosevelt High in 1994, Christi started dancing at Déjà Vu, earning more than she or her friends imagined possible. In her off hours she took a few classes at Northeast Metro Technical College with an eye toward becoming an interior designer--an ambition that her mom, who works for the Air Force, and her dad, a career bartender, backed as a way to get out of the strip-club scene. "Christi had a flair for putting things together, a natural talent," Cindy told me recently. "She liked things in order, to have all her possessions in place and perfect--black and brass and gold everything. You could say she was a real together kind of kid who took care of business, kept up on her credit cards, never missed a family event, and loved to take her little sister shopping and buy her things. By the time Christi was just 19, she had a bank account and could afford her own nice place." Several of Christi's friends remember her as a fairly easygoing girl who loved to party, wasn't into hard drugs, and stuck by her on-and-off-again boyfriend, Courtney, who is black, even though her folks, as they've said, "weren't real approving of the interracial relationship." They mention her slender beauty, and her vanity--how Christi moved as if the camera was always trained on her, striking poses, holding a smile a bit too long, arranging her manicured hands like she'd been taught at the John Casablanca modeling school. Her sister, Lori, told me one night not long ago that if Christi had survived the attack, "she could've had plastic surgery, but seeing her patched-up face in the mirror would've crushed her." Soon after Christi's death, her mom found a notebook she'd started a couple days before the murder. Page one was a to-do list: Get the apartment locks changed, take better care of her health, and buy a gun. "I don't know for sure what made her write that last thing," Cindy told me. "It could've been just the neighborhood she was living in or it could've been a premonition. It's anybody's guess." What is known for certain is that Leah McGinley and Denetta Caldron had been best friends since Roosevelt High--where they went to school with Christi--and that they ran with a fast crowd who were into drugs, shoplifting, skipping class, and raising hell. During high school both lived at home with their mothers, and their families had been tight for years. Another friend of theirs--I'll call her Angela--remembers the two as being "real thuggish type girls," bullies around school who liked to pick fights for no reason and flash gang signs in the hallway. Denetta, whom Angela says once taped herself having sex and played it for her friends, "used to always try to get me to be in a gang. Her and Leah used to both be in gangs. I don't know if they still are." She also remembered the bad blood between the two women and Christi Mendoza: "It was jealousy, pure jealousy there. I know Leah used to try to fight Christi in school"--something Christi had told her mom at the time. "I know Denetta didn't like Christi either. Every time she'd see her it was dirty looks. One time Leah was supposed to fight Christi and she went into the sewing room where Christi was all by herself and she 'fronted her. Christi was like, 'Why don't you just fight me now?' but Leah didn't want to fight her because she wasn't with her friends. 'Cause Denetta wasn't there for backup." Another friend from Roosevelt--I'll call her Margo--remembers Leah and Denetta as "real big girls, like 200 pounds each, with nothing going for them. They were about as far from where Christi was headed as they could get. I mean, no ambition but thuggin' and bossin' littler girls and intimidating people they hated. Leah didn't even graduate on time; she had to go to an alternative school just to finish, and that was late. To them, Christi had it all--the nuclear family thing with her parents and sister, the house they owned, the stylin' clothes, a skinny little white butt." Plus, added Margo, who is black, "she dated black men from way back, which drove lots of girls like those two crazy. She was stealing the men they wanted. "They liked to stalk after Christi and just give the girl shit, even though Denetta's sister was a friend of hers--in fact, the two of them walked down the graduation aisle together. Christi wasn't one to back down. I mean, she stood her ground. What I'm saying is that this went way back to that time--back to when Leah and Denetta and whoever else was in on it started figuring out they were facing a dead end, starting to have babies, not graduating on time, not getting jobs or making the kind of money Christi could make with her brain and that beautiful body of hers and her bright, white smile. "Christi got out of school, got her own place with Courtney, this rare black man who was solid and trying to be responsible to his girl. I'm saying they'd all started in the same place, you know--same neighborhood, same school, not a lot of money, all that. But when they went their ways, Denetta got kicked out of her mom's house for being bad and moved in with Leah for a while, which was a scary party all the time--guys running around with guns, getting busted up, all that shit. Meantime, Christi starts coming up in the world. She had the nice car, a little red Mazda. She had spending cash for nice things--art on the walls, CDs, fine gold, clothes they could never wear, dinner on the town. You could call it the high life. And what did these girls have?" Leah had a part-time job at Dollar Bill's in a suburban strip mall, but she also had a steady weed habit to the tune of 10, 20 bucks a day, and she was behind on rent. Denetta--who'd once been a varsity cheerleader and a junior on the pep squad--was out of work with a young baby to take care of. A few days after talking with Angela and other friends, I visited with Leslie Angerhofer, a young black woman who'd been in Christi's circle at Roosevelt and close to her since. (In fact, she was called to help clean up the apartment once the police got done with it.) "Denetta's the freakiest person I know," Leslie said. "Her mom's sweet, her sister's sweet, but she just preyed--she was like a predator, just looking for somebody to mess with. Leah, she grew up thug life. She probably thought Christi was just gonna, you know, sit down and let her. "I guess these girls were what you'd call 'player haters'--Christi was a player, with a nice car, trinkets, glass furniture, good groceries in her refrigerator. And she had gold. They must've seen that night a real opportunity to finally punk her and they took it. I'm guessing they went there out of pure greed, just for the cash, and it turned into something else. Everybody knows what dancers make--I mean, a good night would be $500 to $700, a bad night maybe $300. Plus I gotta say that Christi had a black man, and for that reason alone every black girl I know would love to beat up a white girl." Valerie Martinez, the petite 16-year-old who turned the older girls in, lived at home with her father and stepmother on the South Side, in a cramped apartment near the freeway. She'd been a student for a while at DeLaSalle, a private high school in Minneapolis, where as a freshman she'd been picked as a B-squad football cheerleader. Her boyfriend of several months at the time of the killing, Michael Olson, was a friend of Christi and Courtney's and lived in the duplex above them. Valerie was a frequent hanger-on downstairs--a girl, as one person who was part of the crowd there put it, "who started off big-eyed and naive, just wanting to please everybody and learn how to go along to get along. She knew that apartment real well, and had plenty of time to get greedy wanting the stuff she saw Christi had. She also knew Courtney made money. She wanted to be down with the scene. It was like she was looking around for somebody cool to copy, somebody who knew how to play." The woman said Leah felt sorry for Valerie and befriended her. Matissa Burnip, Courtney's cousin, had known Valerie for years. They went trick-or-treating together, shared some of the same friends, and from time to time crossed paths at parties. "Toward the end," Matissa told me--meaning in the months before the murder--"Valerie was trying to be the biggest part of the scene. Right before it, she was the biggest hard person, wearing rags around her head and all, just changing--probably from the people she started hanging with." Another friend of Valerie's, who also asked not to be named, called her desire to fit in a kind of obsession, one that may have sprung from a fairly strict upbringing and what she called "Valerie's being real confused about how to turn from a kid into a grown-up. What she saw was that real grown-ups, the kind you see on TV shows, had money to burn and were all sophisticated. She wanted to get there fast, date older men, hang with the big girls. She liked to talk big around that time, but basically she'd just do what anybody bigger or cooler than her told her to do." Besides having been close with Christi, Leslie Angerhofer also hangs around with Valerie's sometime-boyfriend, Michael, and was dating a friend of Courtney's at the time, a guy named Jamar who came into the house with Courtney the morning the two got back from Vegas and described the place as a helter-skelter scene, "real sloppy, like there'd been a hard struggle." Leslie lived next door to Leah and her cousin Nate when the killing went down, but says she stayed out of their way as much as she could. Just a couple weeks ago, she told me, Leslie went by Valerie's folks' place to play with the baby Valerie gave birth to while in detention in Texas--Michael's baby. "You can see in this that people's lines crossed a lot, with Valerie dating the guy upstairs from Christi, Leah's cousin Nate being like brothers with Courtney, some of these girls all going to school together. It's a web, not what I'd call a real random thing when it comes down to it." According to Leslie, Michael had been telling Leah for months to stay out of Valerie's life, to quit egging her on and putting ideas in her head. Just before she gave her first statement, Leslie said, Valerie called her boyfriend and told him what they'd done--or at least hinted at another version of it. "Michael told me just what Valerie said to him after the murder--that they all cleaned up at Leah's house. Another guy who was at Leah's house that night said the same thing. He asked them, 'What's going on? You guys are full of blood.' And Leah told him that Michael beat up Valerie and that's why she's crying and hysterical. Valerie and Denetta were crying 'cause somebody'd just got killed and they know who it was and they know what's going to happen. Because the girl's got friends, her man's coming back into town. Valerie's just a baby then. She thinks she's living a grown-up life by going to clubs and having an older man, but now she's just seen Christi get killed--the girl who lived underneath her boyfriend. Michael said she was having nightmares about it, with Leah telling her to shut up or you're gonna be dead like that bitch." Because Valerie was a juvenile at the time of Christi's death, all her statements to county prosecutors, before the grand jury, and during her sentencing remain sealed except for bits and pieces. In one excerpt that was included in Leah's case file, Valerie told a police interrogator that she and Leah were both broke that Tuesday and spent the day in vain looking for work. When Michael called long-distance from Florida and told her that everybody who lived in the duplex at 3109 was out of town except Christi, Valerie and Leah hatched "the perfect plan." Sometime around 9:30 p.m., her friend Maia called. Maia told Valerie she'd just put out a page for her boyfriend, Dirty, and that "if Dirty calls me back, you know, I'm going Dirty," and if not, she'd come over with her car. Maia Diederich-Lee, the only one of the four young women who went to trial for the Mendoza murder, is like a missing person in this universe. None of the many people I talked to knew much about her. She didn't go to Roosevelt, didn't know Christi, and didn't run with their crowd. Denetta said she'd never met Maia before the night of the killing. Leah'd spent some time with her, but not much and not for long. Valerie was the connection; they were friends from back at DeLaSalle when Valerie was a freshman and Maia a junior in 1995. And it was her phone call to Valerie that supposedly brought Maia into the picture as the perfect plan got rolling. She was just getting off her cashier's job at the Target store on East Lake Street--the same store where Christi had gone to buy a curling iron and a mop earlier that evening. At the time, Maia was a slim 18-year-old living with her mother, a white bank employee, and her father, who is black and works in the Minneapolis school system, at a house they owned in South Minneapolis. She'd gone to DeLaSalle for a time and then to Washburn, a public school on the South Side; she'd meant to graduate in 1996 but, as one family member put it, "got a little sidetracked by this whole thing." Maia held down a steady job the summer Christi was killed, drove a 1987 Chrysler New Yorker, and like the others had no adult criminal record. Not long ago, Maia's aunt told me that "our family's doing OK, under the circumstances... and my niece is working hard to get her life back." Just two weeks ago, she added that "nobody is clean in all of this. Nobody is pure as snow here." What Courtney's cousin, Matissa Burnip, did recall was that Maia was loosely dating a friend of hers when Christi was murdered, and that "he said she'd go off for no reason. Her way or no way, that's what he said. That's the way it is with her. Control freak, that's exactly what he said." Denetta's phone rings on the night of July 9, 1996. It's her best friend, Leah, telling her that she and Valerie have the perfect plan. They're going over to jack Christi, who's supposed to be alone in her apartment. Can they borrow her BB gun? Denetta says she wants to go along, get some drugs and money, whatever they can lay their hands on. All three agree that Christi won't tell. Jacks like that happen all the time around their neighborhood, no big deal. So what if they know Courtney? If Valerie's boyfriend lives upstairs? If Christi knows them from high school? They're broke, out of weed, and nothing else is going on tonight. Around 11 p.m. they pick up Denetta in Maia's car and cruise over to Christi's place. It's dark except for the downstairs porch light, so they circle around the block and through the alley where they see Christi's red Mazda and Courtney's red-and-black Blazer parked out back. You sure he's not home? Leah asks, and Valerie says nobody they know would drive their car on vacation. Just to be sure, they swing by the White Castle a couple blocks up on Lake Street to call Christi on the pay phone. Leah and Valerie get out just as their friend, Ira Mishow, is riding by on his bike. He stops, gives them a quarter, and ducks his head into the car to greet Maia, whom he knows from middle school. Before he rides off, he also notices that all four girls are dressed in dark clothing. Valerie dials the phone but doesn't get any answer. They drive back by Christi's and park on a side street. Valerie gets out and goes to the door, knocks, and goes inside. After a few minutes, she comes back and reports that Christi's in there alone smoking a joint. The plan from there is for Valerie to ask if her friend can use the phone. They walk up to the front door and Christi lets them all in. She and Denetta start talking while Leah grabs a couple bottles of booze and does shots with Maia in the kitchen. Then the two head into Christi's bedroom to rifle through her stuff. Leah wedges the door shut with her foot while Maia digs around by the bed. Then they hear Denetta telling them to open up, Christi wants them out of the bedroom. When they come out they see Valerie and Denetta by the door and Christi in the dining room with the cordless phone up to her ear. Leah snatches the phone and cracks Christi in the head with it. In an instant, the whole room's tense--four girls with the perfect plan in mind and Christi no doubt wondering what the hell they're here for. Then Leah sets it off: You know what time it is, she tells Christi. It's jack time. That much of the story everyone but Maia and her supporters more or less agrees on. Both Denetta and Leah tell it as part of their plea bargains at Maia's first-degree murder trial, which got underway with an all-white jury in late June and wrapped up just three weeks ago on July 8. During Leah's testimony in court, Maia repeats a gesture she'll make a half dozen times before the verdict. She reaches out and unscrews the top of the water pitcher on the defense table--carefully, as if she's used to wearing false nails. She takes the top styrofoam cup off the stack and picks the second one, turns it upright, methodically, and fills it with water. Then she picks up the pen she's been taking meticulous notes with on a legal pad and writes her name--MAIA--on the cup, underlines it, and above it draws a happy face. Valerie, whose handprint was found on the glass tabletop in Christi's dining room and whose story is wildly at odds with those of Leah and Denetta--she's claimed all along it was Maia and Leah alone who did the killing--never takes the stand. (In a document included in the state's motion for a joint Murder One trial for Maia and Leah, Valerie told her psychiatrist in late December 1996 at the San Marcos Treatment Center in Texas that after the jack turned sour, they all "huddled up" and started "talking about killing the victim.... Valerie states that Maia grabbed one knife. Valerie remembers two knives but isn't sure if she touched one.") Shortly after Valerie snitched, the cops found evidence at Denetta's house--a bracelet, the 69 Boyz CD, the BB gun--linking her to the crime scene. As for Leah, just before her arrest she'd sold a piece of Christi's jewelry at a neighborhood pawn shop for $25. As part of their deals to avoid going to trial for first-degree murder, they both agreed to testify against Maia. Denetta ended up with a nine-year sentence for aggravated robbery, Leah with 13 years and nine months for second-degree murder. They both should be out of prison by the time they're 35. Each has maintained that neither of them laid a hand on Christi that night. And in their testimony in court they both fingered Maia and Valerie as the ones who butchered her, right after Leah announced jack time. As their story goes, after they bagged up the CDs in the living room, Denetta pocketed some pot while Leah headed toward the back of the house. Maia was in the bedroom, Valerie in the dining room with Christi, and none of them was talking. Then Leah came out of the kitchen with the two liquor bottles and yelled at Christi, "Where's your stuff? Where's the rest of your stuff?" As Leah tells it, Christi then said, "C'mon, you guys. Courtney knows you and you won't get away with this." She told them she didn't have anything else--it was all out in the open. Take what you want and get out. Then Maia came out of the bedroom wearing black gloves and holding a belt, which she and Valerie put around Christi's neck and started yanking while Leah hit her in the head with the gun. In a daze, Christi got up from her chair and went to the mirror to study her injured face--her face that would be nearly unrecognizable within minutes, or hours. (Although Denetta claimed they spent less than an hour in the house, the medical examiner estimated that Christi had smoked pot two to three hours before she died--the joint Valerie saw--meaning her attackers left before she was dead or they spent a lot longer in the house than anyone in court was willing to say.) According to Leah, after looking at her reflection Christi turned from the mirror and sat back down. As Denetta tells it, Leah pistol-whipped Christi before "anything serious" happened. She and Leah grabbed the garbage bag they'd been filling and were heading for the door when she turned back and saw Maia fastening a belt around Christi's neck with Valerie's help. When Denetta started yelling, "Stop, stop, that's enough," Leah warned her to shut up, and then, before anybody could stop it, something snapped. Valerie's statements say they all just freaked out--a sudden, obscene rush of paranoia. Somebody stomped on Christi's shoulder. Somebody went for a knife, and then another one. One or more of the girls stabbed her in the belly and chest, slashed her throat, and purposefully sliced off the better part of Christi's face. Leah says she doesn't know why the plan turned from a jack into murder; it just did. Denetta has claimed that Valerie spoke Maia's name out loud, there was a pause, and then Maia said, "Fuck that, now I'm gonna have to kill her." It's after midnight now. According to Leah and Denetta, they grabbed the bags and a pillowcase full of loot and ran out of the house, with Maia and Valerie a few seconds behind them. They drove to Leah's place, took their pick of Christi's stuff, and dumped what was left by the river or tossed it out the car window as they drove. Leah went to Denetta's apartment and the two of them stayed up all night, smoking the weed they'd jacked, just talking until the sun came up. On July 8, the jury came back after a single night's sleep with a unanimous not-guilty verdict for Maia Diederich-Lee. They didn't know what to believe beyond a reasonable doubt. None of them knew for sure who held the belt, the first knife or the second, or who it was that left the single unidentified bloody shoe print between Christi's legs. In fact there was no evidence at all that Maia had ever been in Christi's house that night short of Leah and Denetta's word, best friends telling their stories for plea deals against a snitch and another girl they hardly knew. After it was over, I talked to Leslie Angerhofer, Christi's close friend, about the jury's decision, which so upset the entire courtroom that even the clerk couldn't get through reading the verdict in its entirety before she broke down midsentence and rushed from the courtroom. Leslie's view of what probably happened that Tuesday night was simple, at least in terms of what she believes her friend would have done once she knew she was about to die. "That girl would've fought to the very end," she told me. "She don't play, especially about her stuff. If they came in calling her names, she'd snap--she don't play. That girl took her clothes off for a living; she ain't gonna just sit down. They're calling her whore and tramp--Valerie said that. That's how they are. They been calling names ever since they could talk. How you gonna jack somebody and not call them names? "They were trying to intimidate her, and that wasn't easy to do to Christi. They were small-time fools, working each other up and into it, wanting to get her stuff. When it all comes down, I'd say them getting together whatever it took to do this was a long time coming."
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64639
2006-06-09 16:02:00
2006-06-09 21:33:21
Jerks and others
Every once in a while I remember why I left Minneapolis and came back to Duluth. All I have to do is read the personal ads in the gay news magazine there, or in any large city for that matter...and see how utterly ridiculous and unrealistic most of these guys are who seek someone so specific that it's unlikely they'll ever find him. Most of the guys they're looking for aren't gay to begin with; those who are typically are closeted. This isn't to say that I can be just as unrealistic and particular, but I go into things knowing the facts: 1) gay men make up an extremely small percentage of society. 2) factor in gay men who don't do drugs, don't smoke, are ready to have more than sex for 20 minutes, have some emotional intelligence, etc., and that percentage drops to about, I'd say, 0.75% of the population, also known as nothing. 3) Along with knowing that, I am aware of fantasy (the guys I'd love to have) and reality (after being out for so many years, I am aware that many gay guy have a certain look, dress and walk, and like it or not, that's just how it is most of the time. I don't find it attractive, but there's not much I can do to change who is gay and who isn't. I do know, though, that in bigger cities with a larger gay population, these kinds of things can be very hurtful and leave you feeling as if you're never going to be good enough, or even equal, inside of the gay community. That's why I think this whole concept of Pride is bullshit - nobody looks you in the eye, everyone's glaring at the guys they've already seen, and they're also looking right past whoever is in front of them for the next new guy. Yea...that sounds like pride to me. Pride in the fact that these relationships never make it through a year, that we can't even be civil towards each other, and that everything is some sort of contest? In Minneapolis, it was all about how you looked, how much money you had, and basically what you could present yourself AS image-wise rather than who YOU were as a person. I found that to be really damaging to my self-esteem and sexuality, ironically the opposite of why I moved there in the first place. In Duluth, it's a much different story. I came back here fully aware that there was nothing to choose from, so it doesn't make me feel like a failure because nothing's happening...this is a straight person's city, and I have always seen myself as an outsider with a comfortably anonymous, distant status here. I don't take it personally that there's nobody here for me, it has to do with very few gay men who I'd be interested in, and the reality that those who are what I'd want have yet to even come out, and I'm not going down that road again. In Minneapolis, and I'm guessing other cities like it, the feeling is much different. You're competing against other gay guys but you're looking for someone gay. So nobody knows what side you are on, what you're looking for, etc...I've seen ads where a 50 year old guy only wants someone 22-25 with red hair and a goatee, and nothing else. I'm thinking...good luck! What are the chances of finding that within an already microscopic population of people, who would just happen to be interested in someone twice his age? The problem is, when you're gay, your first portal into what gay people look like is often porn. The 'gay' guys they use in porn are about as gay as the 'lesbians' they use in straight porn - in other words, those guys aren't gay. They're having sex with other men on cue because their drug habit is that bad, or their gambling addiction is so deep that they'll do anything to get money for it. So what happens is, we are fooled by porn - most of those men in the videos and magazines are noplace to be found in gay communities (believe me, in Minneapolis, I looked and NEVER saw any gay guys who looked like the guys in gay magazines)...which blurs the fantasy/reality thing and leaves a great deal of us extremely disappointed -where are all these guys we were expecting to find? All those years fantasizing about these men, and the men who are really gay look and act nothing like them. Now, I understand that those two things don't make a relationship, but consider this: take a male, put him through sexual development with no chance at touching another male, no chance at finding anyone who would even consider it, this is such a huge secret that porn is the only thing for him. That's all he knows - straight kids get to experiment with dating, kissing, who pays for which dates, etc...they're developing emotionally to decide what kind of spouse they want. Gay boys have to put that on hold for another 10-20 years. That emotional maturity is not there, because everything is based on physical stimulation - and that is such a strong thing, that I'm afraid that it''s no different than sexual orientation itself: what you 'like' is about as ingrained in your system as your sexual orientation. Men, in particular, are visually oriented and, in sex, have to respond physically - women don't have to get hard. If a man is with someone he isn't interested in physically, you will almost never see him pursue a relationship with that person. That physical attraction and chemistry has got to be there, and the fact that we make up so few people doesn't override that. I don't think that womens' sexuality is that black or white; I think that the environment is not as hostile or rejecting. Because so many gay guys are lost in fantasies, they end up viewing other men as not human, as something that gets them off, and thus have no feelings. I think that is partly responsible for the rates of HIV transmission among gay men, too many of us - when it comes right down to it - don't really care what happens to the other guy. We just want him out of the house after the sex is over. That's why I think that gay marriage is putting the cart before the horse...there are definitely some gay couples who have stayed together for a long time (and they deserve to have the benefits that marriage provides) but for every couple like that, I'd say there are thousands of gay men who wouldn't even know how to ask another guy out, or resist temptations to cheat after a year long relationshp. As a whole, we just aren't there yet. I think the marriage concept might make things worse, because then those stereotypes that people have about us would be confirmed if 90% of our marriages fail after 1-2 years - it's verified, it's documented, and it's all at the county courthouse. Getting back to the personals...I have tried them in the past, but I would never bother responding to one. I already know from prior experience what the typical personals placer is going to be like, arriving at a date with a long checklist of qualifications, and in my opinion those kinds of guys can go screw themselves. It usually ends up being an uncomfortable situation, and it's not worth wasting my time over. One thing that I know from my own expereince is that we get an idea in our heads about what the other guy looks like, and then, without ever meeting him or knowing much about him yet, place a lot of heavy expectations on him - and then wind up devastated when he turns out to be an ordinary guy. We all think we're very special and unique, which we are, in our own way...but gay men are famous for wanting to be the center of attention (look at any pride event and these guys act as if the whole weekend was centered around them) and when you have so many people within a population with similar personaliites and behaviors, it ends up being a disaster. That's why I no longer believe that moving to a city like New York or Chicago or San Francisco would make a significant difference. Gay men don't get the concept of quality and quantity. Just because there are lots of us in a particular location does not mean that the selection will be much better, it just is what it is - more gay people in a city. If anything, the rejection bar goes up even higher because the men know they can weed through lots of guys to find what they want. In smaller cities, knowing the selection is very small, it sometimes forces you to get to know people outside of your interests.
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64912
2006-06-11 22:31:00
2006-06-12 03:32:35
Another story I've followed closely - Mental Health
Assisted Suicide Minneapolis officials insist police did everything by the book before Clay Fingerman killed himself. But nobody wants to talk about the shotgun left by his door. by Mike Mosedale As Jim Erickson tells the story of the worst night of his life, he pauses now and then to dab away a tear. Over the past seven months he has relived the night countless times, in both memory and conversation. It never seems to get easier. He has shared the story with his friends, his psychiatrist, fellow recovering alcoholics, and any lawyer who will listen. He has tried to get it across to the higher-ups in Minneapolis City Hall and at the Minneapolis Police Department, too. Sometimes, he says, he has had to shout into the phone. And sometimes he still wonders whether he should relent. But he wants something good to come of that dreadful night. So he breathes in deeply and sets out to recount the story once more. He is a slightly built man, 43 years old, with closely shorn, dirty-blond hair. When he smiles, he has a pleasant, open face. But his features seem to tighten into a knot as he tries to sort out the emotions that hound him; a bleak trinity of anger, frustration, and regret. On this hot July day he is sitting bolt upright on a black leather couch in the living room of his tiny three-room home, an old bungalow a few blocks east of Lake Calhoun in south Minneapolis. It is immaculate, a well-tended property with flowers, shrubs, and an artfully constructed cedar fence and deck. A hunk of granite engraved with the word Imagine is mounted on the front of the home. Inside there is no clutter or mess. Everything is just so. "I had to take out a second mortgage just to get it livable again," he says with a shrug. Erickson guesses he has spent nearly a year trying to erase the physical legacy of that night, and the undertaking has required a fair amount of remodeling. The carpet is new. A fresh coat of yellow paint and an array of neatly framed 1960s photos from Life magazine cover the blood stains that dappled the walls. And the small bedroom at the front of the house--site of the single, calamitous shotgun blast that has caused Erickson so much grief--is entirely gone now. He tore down the walls and made it part of an expanded living room. He didn't think he would be able to sleep there anymore. Not after what happened in the early morning hours of December 23, 1999. At 4:32 a.m. that day, Erickson called the Minneapolis police. He remembers being exhausted and desperate, not knowing where else to turn. He had an emergency on his hands. And in an emergency, he figured, the best thing to do is call 911. It is a decision he has regretted ever since. In the tape recording of Erickson's call for help, his tone is firm and insistent, entirely lucid. "Hi. I have someone who is suicidal and I need somebody here right now," he told the operator. He then quickly related the most pertinent information. His former partner, 38-year-old David Clay Fingerman, had been threatening to kill himself. Fingerman had recently purchased a shotgun. Erickson earlier managed to smuggle it to a neighbor's home for safekeeping, but he feared Fingerman might have another weapon stashed somewhere in the vicinity. As he repeated his plea for immediate assistance, the connection went dead. Fingerman had hung up the phone. Erickson called 911 again. Besides requesting a squad ("now," he says emphatically on the tape) he warned the operator that Fingerman planned to tell the cops this was just a run-of-the-mill domestic squabble. Erickson knew that Fingerman could be persuasive, that he had an actor's gift for deception. He thought it was important that police be forewarned. Within ten minutes four night-shift officers from the MPD's Fifth Precinct, which covers the southwest corner of the city, arrived on the scene. Worried about a possible lawsuit, Minneapolis police and other city officials have steadfastly refused to discuss what happened next. But, as Erickson tells it, the visit was brief, thirty minutes at the most. After Erickson let the cops in the house, he says, Fingerman emerged from the bedroom and quietly took a seat in the living room. "I told them the whole story about how Clay had showed up at my house with a shotgun a few days earlier. And then I got Clay's dad on the phone. He told them he didn't think Clay was suicidal because he'd talked to Clay that afternoon. And then Clay told the officers that he wasn't suicidal, that this was just a quarrel." Fearing that the police weren't taking the situation seriously, Erickson began desperately combing the house for one of the suicide notes Fingerman had written over the course of the past week--evidence, he thought, that might persuade the officers Fingerman ought to be taken into protective custody. He couldn't find the notes, and says when he returned to the living room he overheard an officer asking Fingerman whether he had anywhere to go. Fingerman said he did, walked out the door, and drove off into the winter darkness. After Fingerman's departure, Erickson says, one of the officers asked to see the gun he had been talking about. So Erickson took the cops next door to meet his neighbor, John Early. Early led one of the officers to the locked garage where he had stored Fingerman's 12-gauge Remington pump-action shotgun. "He [the officer] checked and made sure it wasn't loaded," recalls Early. "And then he said to me, 'I'll take care of this for you.' And I said, 'That's great.' I was relieved, because it wasn't my gun and I was uncomfortable having it around in the first place. When the officer said he would take care of the gun, I figured he meant the police would keep it in their possession." They didn't. After introducing the police to Early, Erickson had hustled back to his own home in the hopes of tracking down Fingerman's therapist. "I was on the phone when I saw one of the officers come through the door. He put the shotgun against the wall, not ten feet from the door, and then left without a word." Frantic and distracted, Erickson was not thinking about the gun. After a few minutes he managed to get the therapist's emergency number. "As I was writing down the last digit, I looked up and Clay was at the door. He was smiling. He saw the shotgun, and within seconds he'd found a box of shells and got it loaded," Erickson says. "That's when everything turned." Less than three hours later, Clay Fingerman was dead. Jim Erickson first met Clay Fingerman in February of 1994 on the opening day of a weeklong Caribbean cruise. Erickson, a commercial filmmaker, was shooting video for the cruise's sponsor, RSVP Travel Productions, a company that caters to the gay and lesbian market. "It was pretty much instantaneous attraction for both of us," Erickson remembers fondly. "He was like a figure from a romantic novel. He had this very, very deep voice and this Southern accent. My God, he was charming." He had an air of mystery about him, Erickson says: "Something in his eyes, an energy that if you caught, you'd just snap back and say, 'Whoa!'" At the time Fingerman was living in Austin, Texas, where, he told Erickson, he'd recently been a professor of anatomy at the state university. Later Erickson learned that was a lie, a bit of autobiography constructed on the fly. Actually, Erickson says, Fingerman was then, as he was most of his life, unemployed, living off a small family stipend, and moving from relationship to relationship. He'd gone on the cruise in search of romance, having just gone through another breakup. Fingerman did quickly confess an important truth to Erickson, however. He had recently tested positive for HIV. "He told me right away, and he was really scared I would reject him," Erickson says. As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about. Erickson was seduced by Fingerman's knowledge of art, history, and politics--beguiled by "his sweet, loving manner." Just three weeks after the cruise Fingerman packed a couple of suitcases and his Airedale, Brandy, into an Alfa Romeo convertible and headed up I-35 to Minneapolis for a visit. After a couple of weeks Fingerman and Erickson decided to make the arrangement permanent, and Fingerman had the rest of his belongings shipped to Minneapolis. As soon as he was settled Fingerman began meticulously researching his treatment options, eventually enrolling in one of the early AIDS cocktail trials. "His number-one goal was to keep himself healthy and alive," Erickson explains. "And I was just happy to have him around and share my life with him." At first Erickson was ecstatic. Fingerman taught him about carpentry and helped fix up his house. He built the fence and deck, laid the brick walkway, installed a set of French doors, even picked out the "New Orleans colors" for the bungalow's exterior. That Thanksgiving Erickson and Fingerman exchanged marital vows in a small family ceremony held at home. The happiness didn't last. By midwinter, Erickson recalls becoming increasingly alarmed by Fingerman's drinking habits; on at least two occasions Fingerman had become so ill from overconsumption that he needed to visit the emergency room. In June 1995, about a year and a half after first meeting, Fingerman and Erickson split up. "I was sober, and he was blacking out, and I finally told him, 'You have to leave, because if you don't I'm going to start drinking again.' I regret that now," Erickson says with a sigh. "We had a commitment to care for one another in sickness and health." In the intervening years, Erickson had little contact with Fingerman, but admits that he watched over his friend from afar. Fingerman, meanwhile, found a new partner about eight months after the breakup; a man with whom he lived until the last six weeks of his life, in a home just a few blocks from Erickson's. Like Erickson, Bill Boyd (who requested his real name not be used), a manager with a national financial services company, was immediately smitten with Fingerman. And like Erickson, Boyd exchanged wedding vows with him. "He was one in a million," Boyd says of Fingerman. "It amazed me to see Clay in a social setting. He could read the emotions in a room and respond to make himself look like he was feeling what everybody else in the room was feeling. Or he could take the room and change what everybody was feeling. And he could talk incredible amounts of money out of people." As it turned out, Fingerman put that latter talent to good use. In 1998 he began volunteering with the Minnesota AIDS Memorial, a nonprofit foundation with ambitious plans to install a public sculpture in Minneapolis's Loring Park and create an endowment to help fund AIDS education efforts. Fingerman quickly rose to the position of executive director, and on World AIDS Day (December 1, 1998), he stood next to Terry Ventura and Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton for the official dedication of the site. "It's not for people who have passed on," Fingerman later told Focus Point, a newspaper that covers gay and lesbian issues. "It's for the people who are living...people who wouldn't go to a support group, but they'll sit there and tell each other stories." According to Boyd, the memorial became "the most important passion of Clay's recent life." But Fingerman had also become increasingly frustrated with his inability to meet the memorial's goal of raising $1 million by year's end. "He didn't deal well with failure. And when he felt he was failing, that brought out the dark side," Boyd explains. During the last year of his life Fingerman's behavior became increasingly erratic, marred by severe bouts of depression, infidelity, and frequent talk of suicide. "Clay fundamentally did not believe he deserved to be alive," Boyd observes. "His HIV treatment was very expensive, and it was keeping him healthy. But every month, when he saw the bills, he'd say, 'What am I doing to warrant consuming this much money? I should be doing something brilliant for society.' Clay was two different people. He had a very dark side and he had a light side, and the two sides fought continuously with each other. There were moments when he'd be brilliant, and you'd be amazed just listening to him talk. And there were other times when he'd be an idiot." By the time Boyd broke off his relationship with Fingerman this past November, the downward slide was in full motion. Unhappy about the failed romance, Fingerman had also grown increasingly preoccupied with his appearance. "Clay was a beautiful man, but he was very vain. And he was approaching 40, and when you're approaching 40, whether you're HIV-positive or not, you start to lose some of that," Boyd says. "His looks were his most prized possession. He did not want to get old. He didn't want to age, and--to use the term--become a tired old queen." In addition, Boyd says, a round of blood tests last fall showed a spike in Fingerman's viral load, which for years had remained nearly undetectable. Fingerman interpreted that development as a sign of his certain decline, and his mood grew darker still. At the same time as Fingerman's life began to fall apart, Jim Erickson was struggling. After ten years of sobriety, he suffered a brief relapse. Feeling isolated, he leapt at the chance to reconnect with his former partner, who had invited him to attend an AIDS Memorial benefit at Bobino Cafe and Wine Bar in northeast Minneapolis. Fingerman briefly addressed the assembled crowd that night, but seemed out of sorts and under the influence. "He wasn't speaking loudly enough, and he wasn't making much sense. He ended by saying something like, 'I'm the luckiest guy in the world,'" Erickson recalls. "He came over to me afterwards and gave me a big hug. And I told him, 'I think you're really in trouble. If you ever need a safe place to stay, you can come to my house.'" A few weeks later, in late November, Erickson received a note from Fingerman, asking whether he could take care of his dog, Brandy. When he dropped Brandy off, the dog was underweight and "not in the best condition," Erickson remembers. Then, on December 18, Erickson says, Fingerman showed up on his doorstep. Erickson was shocked. In the years since their breakup Fingerman had worked to build up his body, but now he looked like a skeleton with muscles. Erickson attributed the changes to the multiple drugs Fingerman was taking; an array of hormones, stimulants, and steroids designed to counteract the effects of the AIDS cocktail, along with an antidepressant. "He was just a mess," Erickson says. "He was shaking and severely toxic. "He asked me whether I was serious about my offer. And I said, Of course. When he came into the house, he was carrying a duffel bag. He set it down on the floor and he pulled out this shotgun and said, 'We've gotten to be really good friends, this gun and I.'" For the first two days Fingerman clung to the gun like a security blanket. Then, while he was sleeping, Erickson managed to snatch the shotgun from Fingerman's side and ferry it to John Early's house. At first, Erickson says, Fingerman said nothing, but--seeming agitated--began searching the house high and low. Then, quite suddenly, his whole demeanor seemed to lighten. At Erickson's encouragement, Fingerman made an appointment to see his therapist. He put down a $300 deposit for a membership at U.S. Swim and Fitness. He even called his father, Milton Fingerman, to assure him all was well. (An eminent marine biologist living in New Orleans, Milton Fingerman declined to speak about his son's death, saying only that he's "not interested in pursuing the matter." His mother is deceased.) Today Erickson recognizes Fingerman's improved mood as a that of a suicidal person who had simply made up his mind to die. At the time, though, he was less well versed on the subject. He just thought his old friend has started to round the corner. On the evening of December 22, Erickson decided Fingerman was well enough to accompany him to a company Christmas party. At the party Fingerman seemed himself again, comfortably mixing with the crowd. Erickson and Fingerman both consumed drinks. "It was stupid, and I'll regret it till the day I die," Erickson says now. They stayed at the party for about four hours before returning to Erickson's home and splitting a bottle of wine. As the night wore on, they stayed up, laughing and talking until about 4:00 a.m., when, Erickson remembers, Fingerman made a sexual proposition that involved bondage, something the couple had never done together. "Clay had gotten really into deep dark rough stuff, and I told him that's not love. After that, he just kept saying, 'There is no hope. Dreams can't come true. Go to the bedroom and leave me alone,'" Erickson recalls. "I knew I couldn't reach him anymore. He had told me earlier that he still had two guns hidden somewhere, and I wasn't about to leave him alone." It was a little after 5:00 a.m. when Fingerman returned to Erickson's home and found the shotgun the police had left by the door. This time, Erickson says, he decided not to call the MPD. He knew that Fingerman was scared of the police (a fear both Erickson and Boyd attribute to a drunk-driving arrest in Texas years ago). And now that Fingerman was armed the situation seemed too volatile. Instead he led his friend into the bedroom and tried to talk him down. "I sat him in my lap, facing a mirror. And I said, 'You're not well. This not a picture of a well guy. But there are places that can help you. It doesn't have to be like this." To Erickson's surprise, Fingerman agreed to seek help. But with two demands: no more cops and no psychiatric wards. "I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe this was coming from him, because he could be a very stubborn guy. But he'd finally surrendered. And that's what's so tragic about what happened," Erickson says. "He'd gotten to the point where he might have been able to get his life back in order, but he never got the chance." Figuring that Fingerman needed to be "detoxified," Erickson called the Betty Ford Clinic in California. No answer. Then he dialed up the renowned Hazelden Foundation in Center City, Minnesota. A staffer answered the phone. Erickson inquired about Hazelden's admission procedures, letting it be known during the course of the conversation that Fingerman was in desperate shape and that he had a gun. "She said, 'You're giving me heart palpitations,' and I said, 'Well, how you do you think I feel?' But I told her I wasn't in any danger. And I told her at least three times that we didn't want the police here." Finally, Erickson says, the staffer promised that a Hazelden caseworker would call back at 8:00 a.m. Erickson was relieved. It was just after 7:00 a.m. What Erickson didn't know was that someone from Hazelden had called the Minneapolis Police Department. According to a police report, whoever called from Hazelden reported that Erickson had "told them he was being held in his home by another male who was armed with a gun." (The caller's identity has been redacted from the police report. A spokeswoman for Hazelden told City Pages that Hazelden could not comment on any aspect of the incident). The Fifth Precinct responded quickly, dispatching four beat officers from the day shift to the scene and simultaneously attempting to establish contact at the door and via phone. The sudden commotion riled Brandy along with Erickson's other dog. While they barked wildly, Fingerman retreated to a small bedroom in the northwest corner of the home, shotgun in hand. "I told Clay, 'Stay calm. I'll take care of this. I'll be right back,'" Erickson recalls. "Those were the last words I ever said to him." Officers Marvin Schumer and Scott Shepard, sidearms drawn, were the first to reach the door. According to Officer Schumer's account of the incident, an agitated Erickson tried to persuade them to back off. "He told me, 'The gun's inside here and we don't need police. We can handle this,'" Schumer wrote in his report. "I told him we needed to come inside to make sure everything was OK....and he told me, 'Just go away' and began closing the door." (Erickson remembers his words a little differently: "I told them, 'The situation is under control. He's still got the gun but has agreed to go to Hazelden.' And then I said, 'Please don't come in, because if you come in, he's going to kill himself.'") According to the report, Schumer then blocked the door with his body and pulled Erickson from the home. Erickson says he told the officers that Fingerman would shoot himself if they entered the home. Another officer on the scene, Robert Cunningham, then handcuffed Erickson and placed him in the back seat of a police cruiser parked on the street out front. It was now 7:30 a.m. For the next twenty minutes, Clay Fingerman remained on the bed, a shotgun to his neck. He asked for Erickson and, according to Officer Cunningham's report, repeated "over and over that he wanted us [the police] to leave.'" Schumer, Cunningham, and Ofcr. Sarah Saarela were standing just inside the entryway where, through the open bedroom door, they could make out a reclining figure and a shotgun. Schumer's report states that Fingerman began laughing hysterically, asking whether he should shoot himself in the head, and then threatening to shoot the officers if they entered the bedroom. At an impasse, the three police officers retreated on the orders of Sgt. Cheryl Alguire, who, upon arriving at the scene, made the call to establish a perimeter around the home and bring in an Emergency Response Unit, the MPD's version of a SWAT team. The ERU never had a chance to do anything. Three minutes after the officers backed out of the house--and before the ERU arrived--Fingerman pulled the trigger. Erickson heard about the report of a gun fired on the police radio, handcuffed in the back seat of a squad car. "It was my worst nightmare realized," he says now. "I'd hoped to see Clay being led out of the house and taken somewhere he could get help. Instead, I saw him rolled out on a gurney." On June 13 Erickson read a newspaper story about the death of a mentally ill woman named Barbara Schneider, who was shot by Minneapolis police officers in her apartment. Unlike Clay Fingerman's suicide, Schneider's death was big news; in the view of critics, it was clear evidence that the department's rank and file officers are inadequately equipped to deal with the mentally ill. In the wake of the Schneider shooting, Minneapolis police officials and politicians began speaking publicly about the need for additional training for cops, modeled after progressive programs in cities such as Memphis and San Jose. For Erickson the public debate over Schneider's death set "bells ringing." If the police department had special crisis teams and better training, he wondered, would Clay Fingerman be alive today? Would the officers who visited his home the first time have taken Fingerman into protective custody? Would they have at least handed Erickson a crisis hotline information card? Would they have confiscated the shotgun? Would they have been able to talk Fingerman out of killing himself? For six months Erickson brooded over these questions, becoming increasingly frustrated while trying to find the answers. His calls to Hazelden were never returned. Requests to meet with city officials met with silence. And efforts to retrieve the official police files were rebuffed, he says, under the pretext that only Fingerman's immediate family and the executor of the estate were entitled to that privilege. (Police spokesman Cyndi Montgomery initially told City Pages that the documents were not part of the public record, but later arranged for the release of a partially redacted version.) Along the way, though, Erickson found some allies, including Jackie Casey, the executive director of Suicide Awareness/Voices of Education (SAVE), a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that works to raise public awareness of depression and suicide. As she learned more about the case, Casey adopted a critical view of the MPD's actions--both before and after Fingerman's death. The failure of police to confiscate Fingerman's shotgun was the most glaring miscue, she says, but hardly the only error in the cascading series of events that led to his death. To begin with, she contends, the first set of officers who visited Erickson's home should have filed written reports: "It just seems like they didn't take it very seriously. But when somebody calls the police because of a potential suicide risk, it should always be documented. We've got mandated reporting of domestic abuse, and it seems to me we should pursue a similar policy for suicide calls. Especially when a gun is involved. Because when a gun is around, the risk of lethality goes way up." In April Erickson and Casey wrote to Belton requesting a formal meeting between "key individuals and officials" to discuss Fingerman's suicide. That letter, Erickson says, went unanswered. After Barbara Schneider's death, he became increasingly intent on getting answers and he took his case to city council member Lisa McDonald, in whose ward both the Schneider and Fingerman deaths occurred. McDonald then arranged for a sit-down in the community building at Bryant Square Park. Among those present at the meeting in late June were Erickson, his neighbor John Early, Jackie Casey, Inspector Christine Morris of the Fifth Precinct, council member McDonald, and the assistant city attorney assigned to the police department, Margaret Culp. Erickson began by reading a list of prepared questions: Why did police allow Fingerman, whom the medical examiner later determined to be "acutely intoxicated," to drive away after the first call? Why wasn't a police report filed after the first call? Why was the gun brought into Erickson's home? According to Erickson and others who were present at the meeting, very little in the way of specific answers was offered by Assistant City Attorney Culp. (City Pages made three calls to Culp. They were not returned.) "The lawyer for the police only said there's a lot of legalities associated with police confiscating guns, and that they wouldn't take the gun from the owner because there wasn't a crime," Early says. According to Early, on the day of Fingerman's death he telephoned Inspector Morris with the same questions and got a different answer: "She told me that she didn't have an explanation, but that standard procedure would have been to keep the gun in police custody and return it to the owner at a later date. And she said she couldn't say anything because of the potential for a lawsuit, but that there would be an investigation." Early and Erickson say they were never questioned in connection with any investigation. Inspector Morris declines to discuss any specifics of the case. "As a citizen it bothers me when government officials say they can't talk about something," she explains. "But we really can't talk about this, partly out of respect for a family that has already suffered a lot, and partly because of the potential for litigation. It was a frustrating meeting--kind of dehumanizing. I felt like a bureaucrat, having to sit there and not be able to talk. I really wish I could have." Council member McDonald, meanwhile, says she hopes the police department will seriously examine its procedures for dealing with the mentally ill. "Because of this incident, and because of the Schneider incident, I sat down and talked with the police chief [Robert Olson] about the way we respond to these types of crises," she says, adding that her office will press for increased training for rank and file cops. "The short-term goal is, What are we going to do if we have another incident like this?...And the long-term goal is, What are we going to do in the future to try and narrow these incidents down to zero? And I'm going to bird-dog this one. Trust me." Casey, the executive director of SAVE, came out of the June meeting cautiously optimistic: "There does seem to be an interest in fixing the problem, and I think the city is moving forward because of the Barbara Schneider incident. But I don't feel there's been enough acknowledgment of the seriousness of the situation with Clay Fingerman and the impact it had on Jim and his neighbors. The city is just saying, 'We can't talk about it, because you're not immediate family.'" Bill Boyd, who is acting as the executor of Fingerman's estate, says he has talked about the specifics of Fingerman's death with Inspector Morris. Initially he agreed with some of Erickson's complaints. But now Boyd says he is satisfied with the MPD's promise that it will review department procedures. And he's convinced they are acting in good faith. What's more, he has come to view Fingerman's suicide as inevitable: "I have a hard time holding the Minneapolis Police Department responsible for failing to save Clay's life. If the city had a squad of highly trained officers that could have talked Clay down that night, that would have been great. That night. But Clay had been on a self-destructive path for a long time, and the bottom line is that he was going to do what he did, and it was just unfortunate for Jim Erickson and the officers of the Fifth Precinct that he chose to involve them. The truth is, I think Jim [Erickson] should be grateful that neither he nor any of the neighbors were hurt. I don't think Clay had a malicious bone in his body. And I don't think he would have intentionally tried to hurt Jim. But he had a very powerful weapon in his hands, and he didn't have a clue what he was doing." In the wake of the June meeting, Erickson received letters from both Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton and Police Chief Robert Olson. They mayor wrote that it "appears from the records...that the police acted promptly and in good faith in attempting to resolve this crisis." Olson, more circumspect, said that the department was "reviewing some promising programs in other cities which may help us go a long way to help us further minimize the risk of future tragedies." None of this has satisfied Erickson, who says he now hopes to interest a lawyer in his case. "You know, people sue because of their treatment after the fact," he says. And while he regrets much of his own conduct the night Clay Fingerman died, that guilt is minuscule compared to his continued outrage with the city. "I'm angry about this. And I want the public to know what happened here. I don't want Clay's death to be swept under the rug with no benefit."
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2006-06-12 20:30:00
2006-06-13 01:30:27
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65336
2006-06-14 19:38:00
2006-06-15 01:38:24
Pride Month 2006
There hasn't been much to write about lately. It's been a nice summer so far, the weather's been good, and Grandma's Marathon is this Saturday. As tradition goes, I'm running the marathon again this year, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn't rain. The weekend after this is Minnesota's Pride Weekend basically - the Minneapolis Gay Pride events are the largest in the upper midwest I think, and so that will be in Loring Park. In Lavender Magazine, which is the gay news magazine down there, I saw some stories about Pride and the parades and people's first pride events, etc. I thought it would be interesting to share some of my own. I was 15 when I came out, but I didn't go to the pride events until I was 19. I was living in Minneapolis at the time, at Loring Towers, which is just two blocks from Loring Park, where the weekend's events were held. My parents came down to Minneapolis and my mom even marched in the parade with me - I was carrying my nephew Julian in my arms (he was about 18 months at the time). That was 1994, and that was probably the best pride I went to. I think that, because I had my mom there with me, and I was holding on to my nephew, I was removed from the social insecurity of the whole event, which, if you go by yourself, you are a spectacle. I quickly found this out when I returned for the 1997 pride...alone. It also didn't help that I bumped into Jeff while he was walking around with some guy. And both of them sailed right past me. I went back for the pride events the next couple years I think, until I went to the 2002 Pride. That was the worst event I ever went to...not that I expected to meet anyone (well, maybe I did) but I was already feeling bad about how I looked, and I didn't really see any friendly faces there. By then the tone of the event had changed completely. It had gone from a gathering of gay people to a contest concerning who looked the best or who had the most expensive clothes, and with the corporate sponsors marketing their services - coupled with the junk and crap that the other vendors were selling ($10 for a coke and a hot dog - that sounds reasonable!). I no longer felt like I was there as a welcomed participant; instead I left the event feeling like I was a demographic...since I am gay, that means I like blah, blah and blah; therefore I was handed all this political garbage and financial specialists were trying to get my attention. There were some great nonprofits that always appear at Pride and those are the groups I love to see, because they are there for public awareness, more or less. I know that without the corporate sponsors the event might not be an event, but it really does set the tone for the weekend. He who has the most money is the most important, and therefore the most likely candidate for love, sex, and whatever else comes with it. That message - which was clearly sent to me while I was there - changed my entire attitude about being gay, about gay people, about the whole thing. It was confirmed that I felt completely disconnected from whatever this community was supposed to be. Around that time I began to cut my ties with Minneapolis and also cut my losses with myself. I was beginning to understand what this was all about, and that there was something fake about the whole thing. I started to watch some of the men at the event since I had pretty much had nothing else to do. And what I saw was a lot of guys who had the exact same mannerisms, the exact same tastes, the exact same "look", the exact same everything and I started to think...so, what's the point in coming out if you're basically leaving one large society that you couldn't conform to, only to enter another society where standards and expectations are much higher and more difficult to maintain? The message became this: no matter what you do, no matter how much you earn, you'll never be good enough. If they can't reject you based on one thing, surely they can reject you because of something else. A lot of these guys are broken souls that never got a chance to develop...it's isolation covered up with the most expensive clothes at Banana Republic, whitened teeth, and $700 sunglasses which scream to everyone, "See, I'm worthy of being here! I have done everything that you guys do!"...meanwhile this guy has lost all sense of his individuality while wrongly believing that he has freedom because of his coming out. He's actually more constrained than ever, and he will find this out some day when the clothes no longer 'do it' or money gets tight and the expensive stuff has to go on the back burner for a while. My point is, what I am seeing is not a celebration of who you ARE, it's an event that showcases what you have or what you look like. It's about things, not the essence of what makes us human beings who found our own way to self-discovery. And a general feeling that being different is okay. I did not get that feeling at the 2002 Pride event. I have not been back since, and I doubt I will ever return to it. So what have I learned and how do I celebrate who I am today? Well, that's a tough question. I have learned that following anything blindly is ignorance. I complained for years about how I disliked Pride, but I kept going anyways thinking that this year will be different, the people will somehow be nicer, or I will go with someone and that will offshoot whatever is going on in my head. Those things never happened. I finally discovered that if you don't like something - even if it's an event that is for "you", then don't go. I felt better not going than I did when I went. Today, I have pride because I can talk about being gay - it has been good, and it has been very bad as well. I've been able to be honest about how I really feel about my experience this far. I would never want anyone to go through the sense of isolation and hopelessness that I have lived through. It's completely invisible - nobody really knows you're experiencing it, but you sure do. Especially at night when you lay in bed alone and look up at the ceiling and wonder why this has happened to you...why were you the one who was 'picked' to be gay...and why are the other gay people always the ones that you're not interested in? Why were they the other ones who were 'picked', and not the guys who you are typically interested in instead? It's a very difficult thing to explain, but it's worth talking about...because so many gay men act a certain way...have the same interests and tastes, it would be like straight women and men having the same interests in movies, music, tastes, styles, etc with no real differences. Everyone knows that men and women are different in general, certain things are marketed towards women (specific movie genres) and certain things are marketed towards men. There's enough intrigue and curiousity between the sexes that create something interesting. With gay men, too often we have the same interests, so it's nothing new if we meet yet another gay guy who likes to shop at this store or likes to eat this kind of food or likes to do this with his spare time. It's so predictable and familiar that there's nothing interesting or insightful to be gained. To quote a book (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue)...one gay guy, who is really the caretaking type, the stereotypical gay man, falls for another gay man who is a construction worker, big hands, burly, outwardly appearing to be very much a typical heterosexual male. The 'gayer' of the two talks to this masculine guy, and they get to know each other. He can't figure out why this hot guy isn't interested. The guy tells him that, what he sees are two men around the same age who are both attracted to the same sex. They both are looking for a man. But that man that they're both seeking isn't each other. Because that masculine man actually hates his big hands. He hates that he doesn't have a college degree and has to get dirty every day and work in the sewer system. He hates that he can't tell his coworkers about the real him, which is really a scared little girl in a big, muscular man's body. The physical image of him does not fit who he is emotionally. He is just as much of a 'queen' as that stereotypical gay man, but he just doesn't look like it. So, they're both disappointed because they've both met yet another gay man that matches the other 5000 men they've met over the years, and neither one finds the kind of gay man he is seeking. That sameness somehow comes through - if not physically - it comes through emotionally. There's just not enough gay men from two separate 'tribes' that attract one another. We're all thrown together into one group, and (we all do this) unconsciously, we aspire to find a "straight acting" man who is unlike all the other gay men we've met, he's this prize, one in a million type of guy. The problem sets in after a long time of waiting, and this guy never shows up, which makes us question everything about who we are and what's really out there. For example, I'm sure that, if given the opportunity, most young straight men would love to have a girlfriend who looks like Jessica Simpson or Jennifer Lopez or a Cover Girl model, but after some point it becomes apparent that there's just not that many women who look like that; also after some years of dating a man discovers that there are other things that are important in finding a wife, and if he wants to be married to someone for a long time, he better be able to accept that people change, some get cancer and don't look like they did a year ago; people go through emotional trauma and things don't always seem stable, but you chose to share your life with her. They are looking for a woman who might be a good parent or might be someone he is comfortable sharing his insecurities with. When you have two men, these things are usually not considered much, if at all. We can't have kids nor can we get married. It is easy to shift the emphasis on 'right now' rather than the future, making it that much easier to cut and run. Also, with women, information revealed to them suggests a possible emotional connection; with two men, that information - personal and emotional - is often seen as potential ammo. Rarely do two men trust each other enough to say exactly how they feel or what they're really afraid of in life. Or if one does, the other doesn't; or if both do, then the 'caretaker' type feels threatened because he's met another guy just like himself, and who wants that? It complicates a lot of things. Now that I've been far away from Minneapolis for a few years, I have been able to put everything that was swirling around in my head into words. It makes sense to me now, and of course it's disappointing, but I understand what I'm feeling. I'm not saying that I've given up on gay people and I hate being gay, but I am saying that you can still be gay without everything that comes with it. I hate bars. I really don't like gay events because of the kinds of people who are there. Of course this limits the chances of meeting other guys, but my experience has been that the same guys are there all the time anyways. I think that Pride is best spent with those who were there for you in the beginning - whether that was your parents or siblings, or a close friend. They are the ones who made the transition a safe thing for you. They are the ones who need to be hugged and never forgotten.
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2006-06-18 16:45:00
2006-06-18 22:10:09
Highlights from Grandma's Marathon 2006
I believe I am in the best shape of my life at this point. I never thought I would be able to run a marathon one day, and wake up the next day being able to work out, go running, and play basketball. When I first started running marathons, the next day I could barely make it down the stairs. But at the time, my training wasn't that serious. I wasn't ready for the run, and I paid the price the next week. This year, I put in a lot of time running and working out, and I ended up having a great marathon on one of the worst days possible (weather wise). The forecast for the last week has called for rain and about 84 degrees - which translates into high humidity and hot weather. What we ended up with was a hot, humid run, and the rain literally downpoured about an hour after the race was over. I don't know how it happens, but every year that marathon doesn't get rained on until right after the last runner crosses the finish line. 2006 marks the 30th anniversary marathon, and the finishers t-shirts and medals are beautifully designed. They were hard-earned prizes though - this is the first marathon where I saw people getting sick after the first few miles. People were collapsing, vomiting, passing out; on more than one occasion I would see someone just drop to the ground with heat exhaustion. The problem was, we would be running along Lake Superior, which is normally a cooler place to run, but as the path veered inland, the heat REALLY began to intensify. It caught a lot of people by surprise, and almost everyone was literally drenched by mile 7. You could have squeezed my running shorts and there would be water everywhere. That was about a quarter of the way into the run. The other low note for me was my ipod. Now, I love my ipod. I've had one since the 2nd generation came out, and every time a new one comes about they improve something. When I used this ipod to run the Twin Cities Marathon back in Octboer, I was so impressed with the way it worked throughout that whole run. No problems, no skipping, no freezing, no drained battery. However, this time, by mile 17, the music stopped and I had an ipod with a blank screen. Multiple attempts at resetting it were fruitless; the damn thing was dead. So there I was with 9 miles to go - the last 9 miles, with no music. I cursed myself because I had planned to bring along my ipod shuffle, which I hardly ever use, as a backup. But I figured this one was so reliable I wouldn't need to do that. Either way, I finished the race wihout too much trouble. My inspiration, which is always my music, was gone and I had to rely on the cheering of the crowds and volunteers to get me by. As always, the people who come to watch the marathon did not disappoint - they cheered us on and got us going. I think it is so great that folks volunteer their weekend to be there for us and make the marathon a party instead of just a race. Half the fun is seeing the people along the way, seeing how excited the first time runners are, who often can't believe they are actually in a marathon, especially for those of us who were former fat kids who never excelled at any sports and now were official athletes. It's a great feeling. For most people, their childhood was a time of sports and fitness, as they got older they lost their shape and fiddled out. For me, it's been the opposite. I was an overweight kid until about 9th grade, and then slowly fell in love with fitness as an adult. Now, it is my drug, my therapy, my love. Working out helps me separate all that negative shit that goes through my head sometimes. Being able to physically do something with it - and running gives me a feeling of escape and freedom - makes all the difference. And subtly, I think is has to do with a sense of control. I may not have much control over meeting someone special or having kids of my own or other things that would make me feel like a 'real adult', but I will be in shape, and I will be healthy. If I don't get to have anything else, I will have those two things. That's a lot more than most people have. I felt bad for the runners who had to drop out of the race. It is so frustrating to prepare for something like a marathon, look forward to the big day, and get out there and injure yourself or get sick. Most of the time, it was starting out too fast, or someone who was running their first marathon and didn't dress right - either their clothes were too heavy or uncomfortable, and after 10 miles, believe me, sweatpants and long sleeve shirts which are drenched with sweat might as well weigh 200 pounds. I've found that keeping everything light is the ideal - no more fanny packs. No more basketball shorts with pockets. The ipod is okay, but nothing more than that. If I haven't trained with something (like wearing a hat, or wearing supports in my shoes, etc) then I'm not running a marathon with it. The biggest mistake I once made was changing everything on the day of the race! I ran with new shoes, and I also ran with a fanny pack full of junk, which bounced up and down the whole time. Never again! I realized the next year that, for 4 hours or so, I don't really need candy, gum, band-aids, etc...this year I ran with the lightest amount of supplies possible and had the best results. As much as I hated running with no music, I was amazed at how much lighter my stride was without it. I kept singing songs to myself in my head. Not the same thing, but it did the trick. So today I am relishing my best Grandma's Marathon moments, and looking at my finisher's medal. I can't wait for the 2007 run!
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65797
2006-06-19 19:10:00
2006-06-20 00:51:04
Who Am I?
I was reading someone's story the other day about relationships and he mentioned that, with online society, most of us describe exactly what we're looking for, but we don't really say who we are, what we have to offer, what kind of values we have and what we need in someone else. He said that opposites can attract when you're talking about personalities or other traits, but they do not attract when it comes to values, intentions and behavior. If someone's a jerk, he isn't going to do well with a nice guy. If someone really doesn't have a long-term relationship in mind, that wouldn't work well with someone who is seeking that. But often times, especially in the gay world, we don't get into that much detail early on, or other times, we're just lucky to meet whoever we're with. Literally, it's either him or nothing. So it would be different if there were hundreds of guys to choose from, but when you've only got 9 or 10, that doesn't leave much room for finding someone who really shares your values and interests. End result being, either you go for someone you're really not interested in, or you just settle with being by yourself. I've decided that I'd rather be alone than be with someone that I know I won't be happy with. And I also know that, the kind of man I am seeking is very hard to find in the gay world because every other gay man is seeking him too, with no luck. I was thinking about this when I was on the bus that took us to the starting line for Grandma's Marathon. I got on first, and sat down. As the bus filled up, an obviously gay man sat down next to me and immediately turned to his female friend and they began to gossip and go on about people they know. And then the conversation went to clothes. I didn't pay much attention after that. Then it hit me: for the most part, I put gay men in the same category as women. This isn't a bad thing; I mean, conversations are fine, some of them I find fascinating, but that's about where it ends. There is nothing these men can do that would turn me on sexually. It just wouldn't happen. So this isn't to say that I dislike females, because I love women, but sexually, my arousal stems from masculine, athletic, young men. I have hardly ever met anyone gay who fits this description. And while I don't totally fit that persona either, I am athletic and somewhat masculine, I know who I am, I love to play sports, and I live a healthy lifestyle. My love in life, my passion, is to be active and exercise. I feel alive through movement...working out makes me feel like I'm transfering all that negative energy into something good, that's why it's necessary that I work out every day. I love being outside, I love to sweat, and I love to run. I want to be healthy so I can be this way for the rest of my life, which is why I do not smoke, and I do not drink. I live a very simple life, and things like clothes or designer colognes or cars just don't appeal to me. I don't need much to be happy, and I would like to find someone who shares those feelings. And have a mutual interest in each other emotionally and sexually. Both of those things have got to be there. Another thing that I like is a guy who isn't a perfectionist, or competitive. I can spot these kinds of guys right away, and it sends me in the other direction faster than anything. One time, about six years ago, I met someone who seemed very nice, even though he still had a lot of coming out issues to deal with that I wasn't willing to go through again. But as I got to know him, he was one of these 'mother's little angels' types and got straight A's in school, did everything right, dressed perfectly, got a scholarship to this great college, got his bachelors and masters degree all within four years, etc. and I knew what kind of man he was going to become. He was going to be someone who wanted the best of everything, wanted to outdo everyone else, everything in life was a contest to him, and he was out to win. I felt stupid around him. I felt like he thought he was better than I was - so I did feel threatened by him, but I was also turned off by his demeanor. He reminded me of the little princess in high school who wins Harvest Queen and is on the student council and in the honor society. There's no...what's the word I'm looking for...there's no sparks with someone like that. I like a guy who is good with his hands, likes to do physical work, loves simple things, and has both feet on the ground. This guy was never going to be like that, because he was always in search of something or someone better. I've met many guys like that, and I certainly don't want to meet any more. The thing is, also, that I have learned over the past 10 years that stability is attractive. Someone who wants to stay here, has some ties to the city, and has an interest in a future here - that appeals to me. Someone who may or may not be moving to new cities every 6 months is not someone I would want to get involved with because from the start everything is uncertain. And I have also found that when someone has a sense of where they want to be, and that's where they are, then they are ready to have someone in their lives. If they are constantly in transition, they have too much going on in their heads to focus on a relationship with one person. I've also met a few guys like that, and I've also been that guy. I wasn't happy in Minneapolis, especially the last year I was there. Even if I would have met someone there, I had made up my mind months before that I didn't want to stay there. Meeting someone would have been a temporary lift, but I think I would still be here today writing this from Duluth. The disappointment comes to me when I see this as being a real long shot. I pretty much know everyone who is gay in Duluth from either talking to them online or seeing them around the city. And if the kind of guy I was looking for was here, I feel like I would have heard something abouut him by now - or, he is so closeted that he would not be able to offer me much in terms of a relationship that would last very long. Someone who is that deeply closeted has years of work ahead of him before he can be involved with another man, be out in public with that man, be okay with being seen as a gay couple, etc...that is a lot to put onto someone's plate, particularly when they are just coming to terms with their sexual identity. Again, I have learned to back off from these types of guys also, because of the history I've had with closeted guys. They are extremely manipulative, they often times lie about everything, and their intentions are to cling on to you until someone new comes along, and they do the same with that guy, until someone new comes along. Everyone is a stepping stone. Nothing real ever develops with anyone because he still hasn't grapsed that being gay is more than having sex with the same gender. It's a lot of work, it goes against everything that traditional society believes in, and you've got to be ready and able to defend yourself to them, while having the capacity to love someone at the same time. That doesn't happen overnight. As I read more about this story on relationships, I thought about how different gay ones are from straight ones. Obviously, the most stark difference is in the numbers, straight people may not have an endless supply of partners, but they do make up over 90-95% of the population. It makes sense to say that if one relationship didn't work, there's plenty more out there. For gay people, this is not the case. Those guys I met? I had to DIG to find them. And they were nothing close to what I needed in another person. They were just gay and available. That's the only thing that they had in common with me. That's just not enough for me. And unless you want to move every year or so to a new city, hoping that, this time someone's gonna cross paths with me and this will be the one, you have to appreciate the fact that we make up a very, very small number of people. I've wrestled with that ever since I came out. I knew what kind of guy i was looking for, but it didn't dawn on me until a few years ago that, sure, I can be attracted to this type of guy, but he also has to be gay, interested, available for a relationship, and share a lot of the same values that I do. What's the likelihood of ever finding someone like this? For me, the irony is....gay people have never had more ways to meet each other, largely because of the internet. I met more guys before the internet - and in the past 7 years or so, I've barely met anyone at all. During that time, the online sites and dating sites and chat rooms have increased and become very popular, yet it has turned up nothing for me. In some ways that is even more depressing because, before the internet, there was always hope that someone might be out there, you just never know, tomorrow is another day. But with the internet, you get a pretty good guess at who is available and really out there - you figure that if someone is gay, single and has a computer, chances are he either has found gay.com or has an ad on there. And while you do see a lot of ads on there, unfortunately, it's mostly a collage of ads from all the men you already know in town, rather than all these guys you never knew about. That's what sucks.
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66080
2006-06-22 20:45:00
2006-06-23 01:45:49
The most gorgeous summer evening in Canal Park

























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66400
2006-06-23 16:52:00
2006-06-23 21:53:57
Interesting Study - Social Isolation in America
I find this story very interesting - it confirms many of the changes I have seen personally over time. Read on: ASA News June 16, 2006 Johanna Olexy or Lee Herring (202) 247-9871 pubinfo@asanet.org AMERICANS' CIRCLE OF FRIENDS IS SHRINKING Washington, DC —Americans’ circle of close confidants has shrunk dramatically in the past two decades and the number of people who say they have no one with whom to discuss important matters has more than doubled, according to a new study by sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona. “The evidence shows that Americans have fewer confidants and those ties are also more family-based than they used to be,” said Lynn Smith-Lovin, Robert L. Wilson Professor of Sociology at Duke University and one of the study’s authors. “This change indicates something that’s not good for our society. Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action,” she said. The study, published in the June 2006 issue of American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association, is based on the first nationally representative survey on this topic in 19 years. The study compared data from 1985 and 2004 and found that the mean number of people with whom Americans can discuss matters important to them dropped by nearly one-third, from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Researchers also found that the number of people who said they had no one with whom to discuss such matters more than doubled, to nearly 25 percent. The survey found that both family and non-family confidants dropped, with the loss greatest in non-family connections. The study paints a picture of Americans’ social contacts as a “densely connected, close, homogeneous set of ties slowly closing in on itself, becoming smaller, more tightly interconnected, more focused on the very strong bonds of the nuclear family.” That means fewer contacts created through clubs, neighbors and organizations outside the home—a phenomenon popularly known as “bowling alone,” from the 2000 book of the same title by Robert D. Putnam. The researchers speculated that changes in communities and families, such as the increase in the number of hours that family members spend at work and the influence of Internet communication, may contribute to the decrease in the size of close-knit circles of friends and relatives. The study also finds that: • The trend toward social isolation mirrors other class divides: Non-whites and people with less education tend to have smaller networks than white Americans and the highly educated. • Racial diversity among people’s networks has increased. The percentage of people who count at least one person of another race in their close network has gone up from about 9 percent to more than 15 percent. • The percentage of people who talk only to family members about important matters increased from about 57 percent to about 80 percent, while the number of people who depend totally on their spouse has increased from about 5 percent to about 9 percent. General Social Survey Measures Americans’ ‘Discussion Networks’ The data come from the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the nation’s longest running surveys of social, cultural and political issues. The survey, which has been conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1972, is composed of face-to-face interviews with Americans over 18 who are not living in institutions. In addition to the standard set of questions, additional questions are added for specific studies, such as this one. The last survey on confidants was done in 1985. In the 2004 GSS, the questions were repeated to measure how people’s social networks had changed over time. This study, comparing the data, was funded by the National Science Foundation and the CIRCLE Foundation. In addition to Smith-Lovin, the study was conducted by Miller McPherson, a research professor of sociology at Duke and professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, and Matthew E. Brashears, a graduate student at the University of Arizona. In the survey, 1,467 people were asked to give the first names or initials of the people with whom they had discussed matters that were important to them in the past six months. Researchers followed up with questions about the gender, race, education and age of their confidants, as well as family ties, the length of their relationship and frequency of contact. The answers measure what the researchers call “core discussion networks” and provide “a window into an important set of close, routinely contacted people who make up our respondents’ immediate social circle,” the study said. The dramatic drop in the number of people in these discussion networks was not anticipated by the researchers, who have plans to follow up with more surveys in the future. “We were surprised to see such a large change. We remain cautious—perhaps even skeptical—of its size. It’s unusual to see very large social changes like this that aren’t tied to some type of demographic shift in the population,” McPherson said. “But even if the change is exaggerated for some reason, given our analyses of the highest quality, nationally representative data available, we are confident there is a trend toward smaller, closer social networks more centered on spouses and partners.” Other Findings Show Racial Diversity, Disparity in Social Networks Most sociologists consider these “discussion networks” to be an important social resource, providing counseling and other valuable help in people’s lives. Hurricane Katrina showed how important these resources are, Smith-Lovin said. “They make up a safety net of people who will help and support us, both in terms of routine tasks and also of extreme emergency. Americans have become much more dependent on a small number of very close family contacts -- usually spouses or partners or parents -- for that kind of help,” she said. The researchers also found that Americans are stratified according to education and race when it comes to these social networks. African Americans and other non-white Americans have smaller networks of confidants than white Americans. African-American men older than 60 have seen the biggest decline, from 3.6 people in 1985 to 1.8 in 2004. “People who are disadvantaged in various ways are especially likely to have smaller, more family-based networks,” Smith-Lovin said. Why such a large change? While this study did not uncover the reasons behind this social change, the researchers offer some ideas based on other research. One possibility is that people interpreted the questions differently in 2004 than they did in 1985. What people define as “important” might have changed, or people might not equate emailing or instant messaging with “discussing.” The researchers also suggest that changes in work and the geographical scattering of families may foster a broader, shallower network of ties, rather than the close bonds measured by this study. Research also shows a decline in the number of groups that people belong to and the amount of time they spend with these organizations. Members of families spend more time at work and have less time to spend on activities outside the home that might lead to close relationships. And new technology, while allowing people to connect over larger distances, might diminish the need for face-to-face visits with friends, family or neighbors, the study said. “Group membership is very important in creating ties to people outside the family,” Smith-Lovin said. “But those ties may be more superficial now. If people spend less time in groups, they may talk to people, but just about matters that involve the club, and they may be less likely to share personal troubles or triumphs with them.” For more information or to get in touch with the researchers, contact Sally Hicks (Duke University) at (919) 681-8055 or sally.hicks@duke.edu. For a copy of the article, “Social Isolation in America,” contact Johanna Olexy (American Sociological Association) at (202) 247-9871 or pubinfo@asanet.org. # # # http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June06ASRFeature.pdf (the actual report)
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66815
2006-06-25 17:34:00
2006-06-25 22:34:55
Downtown & Central Hillside on a Sunny Sunday
Some of the photos have the construction of the new condos downtown (www.311superior.com)














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66926
2006-06-26 19:48:00
2006-06-27 00:48:37
Osho and Enlightenment
Lately I have been reading the work of Osho, (www.osho.com) and I am so moved by what I've read thus far. Here is an article I just read on loneliness: Loneliness is pain, alone-ness is peace; hmm? Every time I am on my own, I feel separate, lonely and miserable. I love myself only when I am with others. If I am alone I feel ashamed and dislike myself. It seems as if I judge myself through the eyes of others. It is one of the basic problems. Every human being has to face it. It is not only you. The way children are brought up is the cause of this whole misery. No child is accepted as he is. He is rewarded if he follows the directions of the parents, the teachers, the elders. Those directions may go against his nature, because those directives were not made by him or for him. Somebody five thousand years before made those principles, and they are still being used in raising the children. Naturally, every child is displaced. He is not in his own self. He is not himself; he is somebody else. That somebody else is given to you by the society, by others. So when you are lonely, and there is nobody to dictate to you, you simply relax in your nature. There is no need to perform anything, because there is nobody who is seeing. That relaxing into your own nature makes you feel guilty. You are going against your parents, against the priest, against the society; and they have told you that you, in yourself, are not right. You have accepted it. It has become a conditioned thing in you. Whatever you do on your own is always condemned, and whatever you do following others is always praised. In your aloneness there is nobody else there. Naturally, you need not act; you need not be a hypocrite. You simply relax into what you are; but your mind is full of the garbage given by others. So when you are with others, the others are dictating to you; and when you are alone, the mind that has been created by the others is making you feel ugly, guilty, unworthy. That’s why people don’t want to be alone. They want always to be with someone else, because with someone else they cannot relax into their nature. The presence of the other keeps them tense. The other is there, judging every moment, every action and gesture that you are going to make. So you simply perform a certain act that you have been told is right. Then your mind feels good: it is according to the conditioning. Your mind feels happy that you did well; you are great. People need crowds. This is the psychological reason why they always want to belong to Hinduism, to Christianity, to Mohammedanism, to this country, to that country, to this race, to that race. Even if that does not suffice, they create rotary clubs, lion clubs. They cannot be alone. They have to be surrounded by people continuously. Only then, they can keep the tension alive, the act alive. In the crowd, they cannot be themselves. Alone, why do you feel afraid? To be alone is one of the most beautiful experiences. You are no longer bothered by others; you are no more forcing yourself to do something which is expected. Alone, you can do what you want to do. You can feel what you want to feel. All that you need is to become detached from your mind. Your mind is not your mind. Your mind is only an agent of the crowd you belong to. It is not in your service; it is in the service of the crowd. The crowd has put a detective in your mind who goes on forcing you, even if you are alone, to perform according to the rules. The whole secret is to witness the mind; allow your nature and say clearly to the mind, “You are not mine. I came into the world without you. You have been given to me later on by education, by example. You are something alien; you are not part of my nature. So at least when I am alone, leave me alone.” You have to learn to say, “Shut up!” to the mind, and allow your nature full freedom. You will be immensely surprised what beauties you have, what innocence, what perceptiveness. Once you have learnt that the mind can be put aside, and you can be really alone — because with the mind you are not really alone; all those voices of your parents and teachers and priests and the politicians are recorded in the mind; the mind simply goes on repeating them. It is a very great strategy played by society against the individual. One psychologist, Delgado, has been working his whole life on a project — and he has succeeded in the project — which will give you some insight into yourself. In your brain there are seven hundred centers. All that you do is done through one of the seven hundred centers He has figured out — working for his whole life — which center controls what kind of activity in you; with anger, hate, murder for example — which center is active when somebody gets angry. He has made very small electrodes. Of course, he is not allowed yet to experiment on human beings, but he has a great gift. The whole humanity can be changed by it, and he has worked on animals. For example, in Spain he showed this. He put the electrode in the brain of a bull, and was standing his ground as the bull was rushing towards him to kill him. Just one foot away from him, the bull suddenly stopped, frozen. What has happened? The people could not believe it. They have never seen such a scene. They were not aware that it was an experiment. He had a remote controller. He could stop any activity of the bull just by pressing a button in his hand. He allowed the bull to run so close; up to one foot; it could have killed him. But as the button was pressed, the activity completely stopped. Delgado’s experiment is of immense importance. If it gets into the hands of the politicians, it is going to be very dangerous to humanity, because as the child is born.... For example, in Russia, no child can be born in your own house; every child has to be born in the hospital. Now that is the right moment to put any kind of electrode into the child’s brain — for example, any electrode that stops him from revolutionary activity against the government, any electrode that prevents him feeling miserable, full of suffering, tortured. The central board of the communist party would have all the remote controls. They can have a system that if somebody is thinking in terms of anti-communism, on a board a light will show suddenly. And then they just have to push a button, and all his revolution, anti-communism will disappear. What Delgado has done and proved, has been done to you by society in a more primitive way. But it has been successful up to now. They don’t put an electrode in your mind — they had no idea of it — but what they do functions in the same way. They go on telling you what is right. And continuous repetition of what is right and what is wrong goes on making a spot in your mind without putting in an electrode. By and by, you start thinking that it is your mind which is deciding what is right and what is wrong. It is not so. The society has conditioned you. That you can see in different societies, because different societies have different conditionings. For example, the American flag has meaning for the American, because from his very childhood he has been told, “Even to sacrifice your life for the flag is something great.” And what is the flag? Just a piece of cloth. It has no intrinsic value. For an Indian, it means nothing; for an American, it means everything. The Indian flag means everything to the Indian; to the American it means nothing. So it is not your mind that is deciding. It is the mind of the society that has imposed upon you certain ideas. In whatever crowd you happen to be, the crowd gives its mind to you. Slowly slowly, you completely forget that this is not your real self. My sannyasins have to make a clear-cut distinction. The mind is part of society, not part of you. What is part of you is your awareness, your consciousness, your witnessing. Then you can be alone and immensely happy. In fact, you can be happy only when you are alone. One who knows how to be ecstatic being alone can be alone in the crowd. Who is going to find out that inside you are completely centered in your witnessing, and you are not at all bothered by the mind? It takes just a little time but as you go on disidentifying with the mind, the mind loses control over you, and finally it starts disappearing. That is the beginning of freedom, the birth of a new man, the birth of an authentic man. Now you will act out of your awareness not out of your mind. You will act moment-to-moment, seeing the situation clearly. There is no problem to worry about what is wrong and what is right. Your clarity will decide what is right, your clarity will take you towards the right. It may not coincide with the right of your society. That’s why society is afraid and wants to put a mind in you. The old method is a long process. Delgado’s method is simple, can be done within seconds, but it is more dangerous too. You can disidentify yourself with the mind that the society has given, but the electrode is a different matter. Even if you disidentify, the electrode will control your body. You may not like to do something, but the electrode will force you to do it. You are absolutely incapable. In a way, the discovery can be a blessing, because we can stop all that is ugly in man, all that is inhuman in man with such a simple methodology — just a small operation in your skull, and placing a small electrode. If you are too much of a man of anger, you can just go to the scientist and tell him that this is your basic trouble: small things make you angry. He can put an electrode at the exact point from where anger arises. He can give you a remote controller to keep in your pocket. Whenever you don’t want to be angry, just push the button and anger will simply disappear. It is good in a way, but spiritually it is not something that I will support. For society it is good, but if you can manage just by a remote control all your emotions, feelings, actions, you will never think of being aware. You will never think of becoming meditative. Strangely enough, in those seven hundred points in your mind, there is not a single point which can create meditation in you. So it is something beyond the mind, above the mind. If a man is clear about the whole situation, he can use electrodes, but he should not forget meditation, because he is not only the body and the brain; he is also a luminous being. That experience is possible only through meditation. So my suggestion to the questioner is: when you are alone, tell the mind, “Shut up! You are not part of me. Leave me alone!” There is a Sufi story.... A young seeker came to a great Sufi master. As he entered his room and saluted the master with great respect, the master said, “Good. That’s perfectly good. What do you want?” He said, “I want to be initiated.” The master said, “I can initiate you, but what about the crowd that is following you?” He looked back; there was nobody. He said, “What crowd? I am alone.” The master said, “You are not. Just close your eyes and see the crowd.” The young man closed his eyes and he was surprised. There was the whole crowd that he had left behind: his mother weeping, his father telling him not to go, his wife in tears, his friends preventing him — every face, the whole crowd. The master said, “Now open your eyes. Can you say that people are not following you?” He said, “I am sorry. You are right. The whole crowd I am carrying within myself.” So the master said, “Your first work is to get rid of the crowd. This is your problem. And once you are finished with the crowd, things are very simple. The day you are finished with the crowd I will initiate you, because I can only initiate you; I cannot initiate this crowd.” The story is meaningful. Even when you are alone you are not alone. And a man of meditation, even though in the crowd of thousands of people, is alone. When you are alone, nobody can see the crowd, because it is within you. And when a meditative man is in the crowd and yet alone, nobody can see his aloneness, because that too is within him. To know your aloneness is to be acquainted with existence, nature, your reality. And it gives such blissfulness that there is no comparison with any joy that you have felt in the past. You are saying that, when you are with people you are perfectly happy. It is not happiness, it is an hallucination of happiness, because your mind is in tune with the people. Alone they are also in the same trouble as you are. So together there is a certain harmony in the mind, and that harmony gives you the sense of happiness. But the sense is very superficial; it has no roots. Unless you can be blissful in your total aloneness, remember, anything that you think is happiness is only a deception. Once the thing is clear, it is not difficult to do it. Find time — even for a few minutes, once in a while — just to be alone. In the beginning you will be miserable, because nobody is there to say how beautiful you are. Nobody is there to say, “What a great artist you are!” There is nobody, just silence around you. But a little patience, and a little alertness not to get identified with the mind, will bring the great revolution which will make you really a sannyasin.
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67125
2006-06-26 20:14:00
2006-06-27 01:15:31
Addiction: A Gay Man's Perspective (I)
Max Gordon June 2006 These are men I have known. Paul: he and I met at the gym, I was in my early twenties, Paul a little older. We’d outsmarted both a suspicious custodian and a roaming security guard by going into a bathroom stall at the back of the locker room and having sex there. It had barely lasted three minutes (there wasn’t that much we could do in the cramped space), but we hadn’t been caught, and the thrill of unpunished crime had sealed our friendship. We shared easy laughter about it afterwards and a wink: our little secret. Later, while we were getting dressed to leave, we were approached by a man in his late forties, early fifties. He told Paul that he saw us go into the stall together, and invited the two of us to go to his apartment for a “three-way.” Paul didn’t know him and neither did I, but Paul thought he was “kinda hot”, and I was attracted to Paul, so we said yes. The man told us he’d meet us downstairs and went to dry his hair, so Paul and I had a quick conversation about him while we waited. Since neither of us knew exactly where his apartment was, or what we’d find when we got there, we decided that if anything got weird, we’d leave together. We figured he couldn’t do anything too crazy to both of us at the same time. I’d never made an agreement like that with another gay man before. I’d been out of the closet for only a few years, and when I cruised for sex – in bars, in bathhouses, or on the street, I was always by myself. It felt reassuring, knowing that Paul and I were looking out for each other, even though I didn’t know him that well, either. I hoped we were becoming friends. When we got to the man’s apartment, it was clear he was more into Paul than me, so I resigned myself to watching the two of them have sex. I watched as Paul let the man fuck him without a condom. I watched as the man came inside him. Afterwards, the man stood up and went into the bathroom and closed the door. When he walked out moments later, Paul went in after him. I heard the toilet flush, twice. When Paul eventually came out, he reached for his underwear as if his stomach hurt, and looked near the couch for his socks. The man was talking. Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? We have to do that again sometime. You guys know how to get out of here, right? Take care now and we were out of the door, and back on the street. Downstairs, I made a joke about him, about how fast he’d rushed us out of there, his ugly, dusty furniture, and weren’t his nails too long? Paul just smiled. We walked together silently, and said goodnight near the train station. I bought a slice of pizza and went home. A few days later, I was sitting in front of the computer, when I saw that Paul was instant-messaging me. I’d been wondering what I wanted to say about what happened, if anything. I thought: it’s his life and it’s none of my business. Still, I was horrified that he’d had unsafe sex. I’d grown up with the slogan in high school, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” and wondered now if the same thing applied to “Friends Don’t Let Friends Fuck Raw.” I knew Paul had recently been dumped by his lover of four years, a man he’d thought was going to be his life-partner, and his willingness to have a stranger penetrate him without protection spoke of despair. I thought, if he did it this once, and in front of me, he’ll definitely do it again. Maybe he’s doing it all the time: letting anybody fuck him however they want, just to have someone’s arms around him. I’d rarely been a spectator during sex, as I had been during our three-way, and I’d noticed that Paul’s skin seemed fleshy and detached, as if his body, having been rejected by his partner, was no longer worth claiming as his own. I decided I had to say something. If I didn’t, what if he got infected one day? I braced myself, glad we were having the conversation over the computer and not face to face. I told Paul that I was concerned about what happened, that I wasn’t trying to tell him what to do with his life, and that if unsafe sex was what he really wanted, that it was none of my business; I was just worried that he was depressed and hurting himself because of the break-up. Everything sort of rolled out – messy, judgmental, and arrogant, I’m sure, but I didn’t know any other way to say it. I waited. It felt like an eternity passed before I got his response. He made excuses – “he wasn’t really inside me that long”, “I don’t bareback that often”, “he looked healthy”, “he told us both at the gym he was negative.” When I tried to reply, Paul had signed off already. I sat there and told myself off for him. I really had a hell of a lot of nerve telling Paul what was safe and unsafe, when I’d pretty much met him while having sex in a public bathroom. I’d risked being thrown out of the gym or getting arrested that day, and that wasn’t even the most reckless thing I’d ever done in my life to get sex. Who was I to tell anybody where to draw the line? When I saw Paul at the gym days later, I was eager to apologize, but he barely waved, and walked past me into the showers. I got dressed and went over to his locker - our practice for the last couple of weeks - but he’d already left. He never spoke to me again. Nathan: is married, has two children 3 and 5, is gay, closeted, an alcoholic and addicted to cocaine. I heard from a mutual friend that his wife threw him out again last week. Nathan’s latest debacle in an ongoing saga: he called drunk in the middle of the night to see if he could crash at this man's place. When he arrived, the friend offered to make him coffee; Nathan reached for his dick. The friend, who is gay, said the sex they attempted to have was disastrous. Nathan had “coke dick” from using too much cocaine earlier, so an erection was impossible. He got some blankets and tried to make a space for Nathan on the couch, but Nathan had already passed out in his bed. When he woke up the next morning, Nathan was gone. Nathan will tell you that he is not gay, that he is not attracted to men at all, in fact. He will also tell you that he has a lot of gay friends, because he likes to hang out with gay guys - they are fun and they dress well. If you run into Nathan in the park and it is a warm day and you are a gay man, he will complain about how hot it is and take his shirt off. He will make sure the conversation is filled with double entendre, gay sexual references and jokes, and if he knows you well enough he may even slap you on the ass when he greets you; or he’ll compliment you on your outfit, but “Here, let me adjust that collar for you”, and his hands are on your neck. A hug from Nathan always lingers a few seconds longer than it usually does from a straight man – but Nathan is definitely not gay. If you are gay and choose to tease him, however, if you slap his ass, if you meet his usual penetrating stare with a sexually provocative stare of your own, or if you decide you are tired of his constantly violating your personal space by standing too close, and finally close that extra couple of inches between the two of you so that your lips are almost touching for a kiss (basically calling his bluff), he will suddenly back off. With a look of genuine surprise and consternation, he will raise his hands in protest: “Whoa, wait a minute, you got it all wrong, buddy. I’m cool with you and everything, but hey, dude, I’m straight.” Many gay men, myself included, have cut our gay baby teeth on men like Nathan, usually in college. Gay men who don’t get the point the first time have a succession of Nathans, until they finally give up in frustration or have a nervous breakdown. We have dashed our self-esteem to pieces against his macho impenetrability, trying to get his “straight man” approval. We’ve craved the exalted spirituality of his platonic agape love, his pure, sexually unrequited intimacy with another “brother”, and wondered as gay men why we always have to complicate our same-sex relationships with something as base and cheap as actually having sex. Although I have become aware over the years that behavior like Nathan’s is obviously a “cry for help”, there is also something sadistic about him that can’t be ignored. At the gay bar, to which he had to be “dragged” by his gay friends the first time (he gets points for being a straight guy who’s accepting and tolerant), he gives his number out and says good-naturedly to a guy he’s been talking to, “Hey, call me sometime, man.” When the man does, he meets him for coffee. Under the guise of friendship he is, in fact, dating this man who, after weeks of these “good natured” coffees is starting to fall in love with him. He eventually drops the guy because the relationship obviously can’t go anywhere: he’s married and he’s straight - but hey, he told you that from the very beginning. He takes no responsibility for his behavior, and a month later it starts all over again, as another of his serial flirtations develops into an intense, frustrating friendship and ends in another psychological murder. Even if he succumbs to sex once in a while when he’s stoned, he will never make himself available to a gay man emotionally. Gay men with self-esteem and enough experience with “Nathans” will wish him well after patiently listening to his monologue: “I’m not really gay, I just like to go dancing in gay bars…” They will refuse to get lost in that labyrinthine sexuality, and tear his business card to pieces as soon as his back is turned. Nathan is a fundamentalist born-again Christian. He is doing his best to stay sober, but he keeps relapsing. One of the reasons, of course, is that he can express his natural sexuality only when he is high, which means being high is the only time he can be himself. When he is sober he is a good Christian, a good husband, father, and son-in-law. He repents. His repentant phase can last for months, sometimes even years. Someone told Nathan that if he got married to a woman in the church, having formed a holy union before God, he and his wife would be able to pray his homosexuality away. When it didn’t work, and homosexuality still reared its ugly head (she found his porn magazines in the garage), they prayed harder. He felt ashamed about the magazines, and about failing her, and dealt with it the only way he knew how: he went out and partied. They met with their pastor. The new advice was that since marriage alone wasn’t grounding enough, they should have children right away. Kids would settle him down, forcing him to stay sober to meet the responsibilities of his family. When his daughter was born, he adored her, but her beauty didn’t change the fact that nothing changed at all, except he was now a married homosexual with a daughter. What he really needed, wisdom said, was another child, hopefully a boy this time, whom he would teach to be a man - that would definitely help him out of his “confusion.” After his son was born, he had a few good months, but the homosexuality came back, and with a vengeance (his wife discovered his internet porn and a profile on a gay dating site). Now he is a married closeted homosexual born-again Christian with two kids. When the rubber band of sexual tension stretches and almost snaps, when the pressure of pretending becomes too great and his life feels unmanageable, he calls his dealer, buys a couple of grams of coke, goes out and gets drunk and high. When he is completely fucked up and close to blackout (and thus “no longer responsible for what happens”) he has sex with a man, usually in a porno theater, where he can get a blow job while standing in a booth, where it is dark and he doesn’t have to see the man’s face. Or he calls the one married friend he has who fucks around with other guys. He can have sex only with men who are anonymous, or who are hiding in the closet themselves, men who will never see him again or who he can be sure will keep his secret to protect themselves. He comes home drunk and his wife kicks him out again, he stays away for a few days, calls, apologizes, she calls her parents, he apologizes again for hurting her, and the next morning the family gets dressed for church. The in-laws stay for a week or two to help them through the rough patch; Nathan and his wife go out to expensive dinners and socialize with married friends. The evenings are perfect, illuminated by candlelight, although she notices that he smiles a little too long at the waiter when he hands him his credit card. They take the kids to the park on the weekend and plan their next vacation, and things seem back to normal And then one night he doesn’t come home from work and he doesn’t call, and he doesn’t answer his phone which goes straight to voicemail. After midnight, his wife finally decides to stop leaving messages and waiting for him. Every relapse is worse than the last for Nathan, because there is always more pain he has to keep at bay, and more disappointment he has to face when he finally returns - and he always returns. He stands at the door to the bedroom at four in the morning, asking for her forgiveness again, drunk and sobbing, but not too loud because he doesn’t want to wake his kids. Nathan was the topic of conversation at a party I was at the other night. To most people who know him, his marriage is a total joke, and so is he. But he is an enigma, endlessly fascinating to discuss. Everyone has an opinion, everyone speculates. The rumor is that he’s gay and cheats on his wife, but no one is sure. Straight people love to play the “is he/isn’t he gay” game, and gay people love it too because of the crumbs of power they are proffered in groups like this. If I choose, I can play gay Uncle Tom and encourage their speculation, pronouncing like a turbaned TV psychic, and revealing who I think is gay in Hollywood, at work, in our group of friends. By betraying Nathan, I can finally belong to the cool group, the way many gay people never do in high school (which is surely the level of our gossip). My power is directly proportional to my ability to “other” him. Since men’s having sex on the down-low continues to be a hot topic on television (the term “down-low” used to be exclusively reserved for black and Latino men, but since the film Brokeback Mountain it now extends to blacks, Latinos and cowboys), some women and men feel justified in their outrage towards him (that poor wife). Hating him is hip. There is a frenzy to the conversation - conspiratorial whispers and eyes widened with disbelief (“well, the other day I heard…”) followed by explosions of uproarious laughter. I am ashamed of myself because I share in the laughter, feeling superior because I’m an out gay man, I’m political, I’m not a liar like him, hiding in a marriage, ruining my family. I’ve been on the other end of Nathan’s flirtations and condescension: “I don’t know why people discriminate, you gay guys are just like everybody else,” and despised him for it. But it’s easy to forget that I haven’t always been out, and that coming out of the closet is usually a terrifying, sloppy process for everyone, filled with lots of confusion and mistakes. Every gay man has lied about his sexuality once, if only to himself. When we all grow bored with Nathan’s story, there is a new topic for discussion and the host offers to refresh the drinks. I can’t quite shake him, though, and I’m seeing his stupid, corny, grin, the hearty slap on the back that comes with the over-the-top “Popeye the Sailorman” gestures. I am haunted by Nathan. I know as an addict that if he doesn’t get help soon, he may one day “accidentally” commit suicide from a drug overdose. Homosexuality can’t kill him, but his addiction to cocaine and the judgment from his church might. Ravi: is the man from the leather store in the Village. We stand together near the back where I am trying on a pair of boots. When I bend over to tie the laces, I can tell that he is getting aroused from the prominent bulge growing in his jeans. We are alone. Ravi and I lock eyes, exchange “the look”, and hold it for a brief moment. “The look”, for those who don’t know, is what tells two men that it is okay for them to express attraction for each other, especially useful in parts of the world where two men who are sexually attracted to each other aren’t necessarily safe (in other words, almost everywhere). A few weeks before, I’d exchanged “the look” with a guy behind the counter at a fast food restaurant while he was taking my order. We paused for a few seconds when our eyes met. “The look” is an unmistakably soulful mix of potential attraction, sadness from our shared experience as gay people, and solidarity. It is more than just flirting; it is a come-out-come-out-wherever-you-are gay look that happens just behind the eyes; a knowing. But as quickly as he opened his little gay drive-thru windows to stare at me, he made his face became a cold mask of professionalism, and said: “Would you like a sundae with that, sir?” He knew it was impossible to take back the look that had occurred between us, and the new expression on his face, one of fear, came from the fact that he didn’t know what I’d do with the information about him now that I had it - whether I would choose to be discreet, or behave in a way that would draw attention to us and embarrass him (like asking for his phone number). The more open about his sexuality a gay person is, the more danger that sexuality presents to others. In a patriarchal, homophobic society, to know that a man is gay, and ashamed about it, is to have a certain power over him, which is why coming out becomes so important - the potential emotional extortion that hangs over some relationships can no longer exist. As James Baldwin once said, “You didn’t tell me, I told you.” At the shoe store, Ravi tells me that I have something on the back of my pants, a tiny piece of paper or some lint and offers to brush it off for me. “There, got it,” he says, but his hand lingers. I step away slightly, but we exchange a knowing smile. We also exchange names, talk about where we are from originally, why we came to the city in the first place, how many years we’ve been here – a typical New York introductory conversation. He isn’t from the United States, he tells me, but came a few years ago from his country. His skin is darker than mine, the color of a polished plum. “Damn,” he leans over and whispers, “How did you ever get that big, juicy ass?” I know he means well, but I’ve always sort of hated that, like when the guy who is penetrating you from behind says, “Yeah, baby, give me that fat ass!” and mortified, you think to yourself, fat ass? Excuse me, but I don’t exactly consider that a compliment. A woman walks into the store in a fur coat, and Ravi rushes to attend to her. He is a model of efficiency, and all traces of homosexuality in the air evaporate in that moment. She isn’t interested in his wares, but thanks him anyway, and as soon as the bell tinkles over the door announcing her exit, he is at my side again. A rack of clothes obscures him from the rest of the store and, presumably, surveillance cameras. “Look what you’re doing to me,” he says, and pulls out his erect penis (true story!) in the middle of the store. I ask him to put it away, in fact, I practically have to beg him. I know I’ve crossed a line by encouraging him before and even letting him touch my ass like that, and while I have been feeling lately that my ass is fat, and I appreciate his attention, I certainly didn’t expect this. As part of my recovery, I no longer have sex in public places - places where I could potentially be arrested (or mugged, or beaten, or killed.). I’ve known men who were arrested by an undercover cop for public sex on Monday, and as soon as they got out of jail went right back to the same bathroom or park on Tuesday and got busted all over again. There was a time in my life when I would have asked Ravi if it was possible to lock the door of the store for a few minutes and the sex would have been on, right there between the racks, but I’ve been through a lot in the last couple of years, and for the first time in my life I can play the entire movie, not just the selected scenes I want to see. I can think, “This might be fun, but the cost is just not worth it.” I have to admit, his penis is beautiful, though. When he follows my orders to put it away, I feel like someone who announces at a dinner party that they are lactose intolerant, and then has to watch miserably as their piece of cheesecake is carried back into the kitchen. “You have a lover?” Ravi asks, zipping himself up, and glancing over his shoulder. He explains that he has a co-worker who has gone on a dinner break, and will be returning at any minute. “Yes,” I tell him. “I do.” “He the jealous type?” he asks. “No, I mean, we sort of have an agreement.” “How long’ve you been gay?” “I came out when I was nineteen, after high school. What about you?” He draws back, and shakes his head vigorously, frowning as if he’s just tasted something unexpectedly bitter. “I’m not gay.” “You’re not?” “No.” I do a rapid scan of his face, searching for any traces of irony. Finding none, I nod, keeping my own expression pleasantly thoughtful, and decide not to remind him that a few moments ago he’d just shown me his cock. A man enters the store and waves. It is Ravi’s coworker. Ravi winks at me as he starts towards the front of the store. “My philosophy about being gay is this,” he says and shrugs. “I’m not gay, but hey, man, you only live once, right?” You only live once. Which is the reason it is hard to write an article about gay men and the addictions we struggle with, because you just don’t know who you are talking to, who is included in, and who excludes themselves from, the gay tribe. When I leave the store, I think of all the men like Ravi who “aren’t gay” but who keep the sex clubs, porno theaters, and public bathrooms full and thriving twenty-four hours a day, who are gay enough to have sex with me, but aren’t available for social movements, public recognition or gay empowerment. Gay men who will never exist as a group to be reckoned with as political or economic power, who can’t be used to refute religious prejudice by saying, “See, your father, uncle, brother, nephew, son is gay too.” Men who recognize each other when they meet, who share “the look”, whether they are standing next to each other in sporting arenas, car dealerships, supermarkets or crowded subway trains during rush hour, shifting their polished briefcases so one man can rub his erect penis against the other’s thigh while the train is in motion. When the train stops, one of them steps off and says goodbye with a wink: our little secret. These men seem to have no problem going home to girlfriends and wives because they figure, as far as sex with another man once in a while is concerned: hey, man, you only live once. Doug: has just come back from a major coke relapse. He’s the kind of person who says goodbye after you spend time together, and as he walks away you think, this may be the last time I see him alive. Or when you haven’t heard from him in a while and run into a mutual friend, you unconsciously brace yourself for the news: Doug’s dead. This time he’s hurt his body permanently because of his addiction. When I run into him we discuss how far down he went, how he lost almost everything - his job, his savings, his apartment. Frankly, it’s hard to love Doug; not because he isn’t a good man, or talented, or kind - he’s all those things - but because it just feels like a bad investment. He’s always in the hands of someone who wants to kill him…him. Sometimes I wish Doug had a fairy godmother, guardian angel, or an old-fashioned English nanny, someone to look after him, keep watch with him when he can’t sleep; he’s too alone in the apartment he lives in, surrounded every night by shadows and silence. After six months of sobriety, the quiet always becomes too much, and he dials up hustlers and starts using again. Doug is attracted exclusively to black men, and a specific kind of black man. He likes “roughnecks”, guys in chains and baseball caps, and the more dangerous-looking the better. Doug thinks nothing of bringing home men he’s met in the park at night or on the street at all hours, men who may be addicted, homeless, or mentally ill. During the week, he has a quiet job, few friends, and avoids bars, he might even be considered shy; but when he’s using, Doug sometimes hosts sex parties in his apartment on the East Side, and has been known to have six or seven sexual partners at the same time. Sometimes men just randomly show up who’ve been to his apartment before - looking for a party. He owes a few people money for drugs. Because of the traffic of black men coming in and out of the building at all hours, a neighbor has written him an anonymous note threatening to call the police on him and his “dealers and hustlers” if he doesn’t stop. He laughs at the note, but acknowledges he does need to “slow down” a little. I fear for Doug because, as clichéd as it sounds, I feel he has a death wish, and that one day someone may help him fulfill it. It is not impossible that one night Doug will spark the rage of one of his more unbalanced dates, a man who doesn’t appreciate being objectified, whether he is a hustler or not, and feels humiliated that he’s debased himself by fulfilling Doug’s MTV “rap video” fantasy of what street life is like, a fantasy that Doug can pick up and discard at his leisure, but that the black man will have to return to as soon as he is back on the streets. After a taste of Doug’s “white-boy” privilege, he may not appreciate being shown the door before he’s ready to go, he may not like the cold, impatient, New-England look that is now on Doug’s face, when a half hour ago Doug was climbing the walls and screaming how he wanted to be fucked harder with that “beautiful big black dick.” The man may refuse to leave until Doug gives him a little cocaine to take with him - what difference does a tiny bag of coke make to someone like Doug who will just get more tomorrow? Doug, now in his robe and already thinking of how he has to get up early for work tomorrow, gets indignant and refuses to share the coke, not because he doesn’t have the money to buy more, but because it is his, the evening is over, and he’s already paid this guy for the sex. He says firmly with a tight jaw and folded arms, “I really need you to go now,” and glances at the phone that calls the doorman downstairs. The man reaches into his coat pocket as if to grab something, takes a step towards Doug, and then thinks better of it. Doug recalls the story now with detachment – it happened weeks ago, and he’s pretty much forgotten it. “And then what?” I ask. The horror that has been absent from his delivery is now all over my face. “What else?” Doug says. “He left.” Richard: wants a meaningful relationship, but here’s the problem; he’s in his mid-fifties, he’s extremely overweight, often broke from hiring hustlers, and a chicken chaser. As there are plenty of other fifty-five-year-old, out-of-shape, broke men walking around in this city, meeting someone like himself shouldn’t technically be that hard. The problem is he isn’t interested in those men: what he desires is a twenty-year-old. He refuses to create a partnership with any gay man who isn’t at least thirty years his junior, preferably with blonde hair, who looks as if he spends two hours at the gym every day and just walked out of a Calvin Klein ad. When men like this don’t respond to him, he feels like a failure. So he pays for sex workers, and assumes that because he hires the same men successively, and they are friendly and seem genuinely to like him (he tips well), that means he’s having an intimate relationship. I suppose there is nothing wrong with chasing chicken; I was a piece of chicken once. I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, shaking my ass in a club, catching the hungry eyes of the middle-aged men around me, and feeling powerful because - thank God - I wasn’t “old” (over thirty) like them. I was twenty-one and sitting at the bar drinking. I got off the stool to go and dance, and when I came back to my seat, I looked in the mirror above the bar and I was suddenly thirty-five. I really don’t know where the years have gone, but when I turned thirty (that awkward stage in your gay adolescence when you are too old to be chicken, but too young to be a “daddy”), I saw a poster for an organization I’d always considered geared for the elderly. Their notice said that men in their thirties and forties were now welcome. I knew in that moment that I needed an identity that was more than just being somebody’s idea of what was cute and fuckable. (A friend of mine with a slightly different dilemma, who came out in his early forties after his divorce, laments, “I never even got to be chicken!”) Richard spends hours trying to meet younger men on a dating website he frequents. On the site, if someone likes your introduction, they can click to see an enlarged picture of your penis or ass. (If they want to see your face, however, that’s considered private and they have to ask your permission first.) He goes out with a guy he meets for a few weeks, and then calls, distraught when another one of his “boys” walks out on him for someone with more money, or in better shape, or closer to his own age - “I really thought Matthew, Craig, Tyler, Brett, Collin, Martin, Shawn was the one, now what am I going to do?” - I want to shake him and say, “Just for once, what’s wrong with dating a man who doesn’t look like he’s just graduated from high school?” Chasing chicken can also have dangerous consequences. Richard has been mugged repeatedly by tricks and hustlers and, unlike Doug, has had a knife pulled on him in his home by a guy who was tweaking on drugs (miraculously he wrested the knife away); he even recognized the picture of a man who had been arrested as a murder suspect in the newspaper, and whom he remembered once trying to get to come up to his apartment for sex. My rage at him comes partly from the fact that he looks at me and probably thinks that at thirty-six I’m “too old” too, which in America is synonymous with useless. I want to slap him the way you slap a hysterical person during a group crisis so that his insanity doesn’t spread to the others. If he doesn’t find men his own age attractive, I want to ask him, then what does it say about how he feels towards himself? There is nothing wrong with an age difference between lovers, even a considerable one, as long as both are consenting and adults, but his unwillingness even to consider a man who doesn’t still have peach fuzz makes me wonder. There is a certain kind of shame, gay or otherwise, that craves youth and “innocence”; young ass becomes like the paper-towels in that old TV commercial – “the quicker picker upper.” In this perception, if the person you are having sex with is young enough, he absolves you of all your sins (and in some parts of the world, your HIV status, if he or she is a virgin.) Maybe if I can get a “boy”, even if I have to pay for him, then I am not a man who is aging too fast, who is afraid of being alone, who has suffered and seen more than my share of death and grief over the years. I may actually believe I’m more of a “man” for having sex with younger guys, because young men are “feminine” by way of vulnerability and lack of experience - if I can’t be “normal”, i.e. straight and fucking women, then I’ll fuck “girlish” men. (This also applies, in an indirect way that is beyond the scope of this essay, to those men who choose to fetishize Asians, who see Asian men as “eternal” boys, or fragile, underdeveloped men. I’m not speaking of a man who is in love with an Asian man; I’m taking about the men I’ve known who, around the time of their gay mid-life crises, suddenly “discover” Asian men as a group, and, as if having found the elixir of life, will no longer date anyone else.) Maybe I am so afraid of getting old myself that I’m bitter and resentful of them, the younger gays. But it is strange, the way we render each other invisible as gay men. When I used to cruise steam rooms for sex, I’d watch four or five men, all in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, ignoring each other as potential sexual partners, as if there were literally nobody there. But let the young gay man looking for sex walk in, and suddenly they all became animated at the same time as though someone flicked a switch, moving across the room towards him in a slow, macabre march, with their hands outstretched and ghoulish, like something out of Night of the Living Dead. I remember wondering, why are we giving this man so much power because of his age? Is he really the only one of us that is attractive, and don’t we still exist, even if we can’t have him? I’ve met men in their sixties, seventies and eighties who were definitely sexy as hell (one in particular disabused me of the notion that just because you assume an octogenarian to be out of circulation, doesn’t mean he can’t still give you the clap), and known from their example that it is possible to get old beautifully and to be beautifully old; to age with dignity and grace. I needed to believe in older gay men who could see when a young gay man’s ego was fragile, when he had to invent himself on the spot because he had no support system, had been rejected by family or the church and now found himself “out there.” There had to be at least one older gay man who would say to him: “I promise not to take advantage of you or exploit you as I was exploited when I came out. I know how hard it can be at the beginning. If you get kicked out of your house, I have some food for you and a couch for the night. And I won’t make you have sex with me to ‘pay’ for it or justify being abusive to you by saying, ‘Well, he is going to have to learn sometime how men are. If I don’t hurt him, someone else will.’ I will not turn you onto drugs, or pimp you, or seduce you when you are vulnerable, and then drop you when I’m bored or find someone younger than you are. If you’re black or Latino, I won’t humiliate you by asking if you are a hustler, or how big your dick is, assuming you are prepared for sex all the time because of your color. If you are white and poor and hustling, I won’t pay you for sex, then throw the money at you with contempt and reconcile it by saying, ‘It doesn’t matter, you’re trash anyway.’ Even if you’re a manipulative little shit, who drinks and smokes too much, or uses drugs to prove how mature you are, I know most of that is insecurity and defensiveness, because I did the same thing, and although I won’t tolerate your bad behavior, I won’t punish or abuse you for it, either. And I won’t feed your addictions so that I can control you and make you stay with me in order to keep from facing my own insecurity about being alone or getting older. Here is one place in the world where you are safe.” I never heard those words, but there was that older man at the mall near where my mother had recently moved: I was in a department store and went to the men’s bathroom where I noticed the men who were lingering, obviously cruising for sex. I was too afraid to do anything and risk being arrested in an unfamiliar town. An attendant came in to change the paper towels and a man who was washing his hands and glancing over at the urinals met my eyes in the mirror, stared, and then walked out. When I followed a few minutes later he was waiting for me, standing with his hands in the pockets of his coat beside a large fountain. We walked past the food court and he whispered that he didn’t recognize me amongst the guys he usually saw there and I told him that I was visiting from out of town. We must have made an interesting tableau: black man in his twenties dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt and a white “businessman” in his fifties wearing glasses and a suit. He told me his name, said he was married with kids, and that if he ever got arrested for looking for sex there his life would be over. I told him I lived in New York and that I was only in that town because my mother was at home dying, and that although I knew I was a sex-addict and had even been in recovery and had managed to stop cruising in public places for a while, I’d started visiting bathrooms again when things got too painful. He said, “You seem like a smart kid to me and you’re still young. I know it seems like there’s something back there in that bathroom, but there really isn’t. I’ve been saying since I was your age I wouldn’t come back and I’m still here. And I could tell you, hey, it’s no big deal, just have fun. But I’m going to tell you the truth. If you can find a way to stop, and stay stopped, then do it, guy. Don’t wake up, twenty, thirty years from now when you’re my age, still doing this shit, promising every day that you’ll stop tomorrow, like me.” Jeremy: sat directly across from me that evening; his striking beauty made him the center of attention at the crowded table, but behind his dark eyes and natural smile was a deep sadness; at moments when he thought no-one was looking and his face went slack, I felt that he wasn’t just exhausted from the long day - his soul was tired. Jeremy had shared with some of us earlier, in the context of the workshop, that he’d been in the sex industry for years, not just as a “masseur” earning money to get through college, as so many of the online advertisements read, but as a serious escort with a top New York/LA service. Jeremy had been flown first class to some of his appointments and had had famous clients whom he wouldn’t name. The workshop was over, and we were having our last meeting together. Jeremy had been generous with his story during the sessions, but now it was time for dinner, and in that moment, he didn’t want to be an ex sex-worker; he wanted to eat. Another man at our table, Ed, however, wouldn’t stop asking him questions. I, too, was curious to learn more about Jeremy’s experience, but I felt his resistance and respected it. In the end perhaps I was worse than Ed, getting the benefits from his prurient prodding, without having to be perceived as tacky and cruel. How many people do you think you went to bed with? Did anyone ever try not pay you, and if so, what did you do? Did you ever get beaten up or arrested? What if they wanted unsafe sex, did you charge more? Did you have sex with anybody famous? Come on, you can give us a hint! As Jeremy answered Ed’s questions, one person excused himself and got up from the table. I felt as if I were participating in an emotional gang rape, and that Jeremy had no boundaries to protect himself. I considered that Jeremy might have had sexual abuse in his childhood and wondered if that played a role in his attraction to sex work. Since Jeremy wasn’t protecting himself from Ed’s pornographic fantasy of hustling, and none of us was protecting Jeremy by asking Ed to stop, and Ed was in too much of an addictive trance to see the pain on Jeremy’s face, it went on and on. I felt murderous towards Ed at one point, but I was angry at Jeremy too, wondering why he couldn’t he see that his story was his gold - however much shame he felt about it - and that Ed’s rummaging through his memories like items in a reduced sale bin, rejecting anything with too much pathos or heartbreak, was reprehensible. I never apologized to Jeremy for that night, and I never saw him again. At the height of my addiction, when I was facing a stack of unpaid bills and having compulsive sex with my own merry band of trollops, trolls, goblins, munchkins, cretins, gnomes, hobbits and roaches, I’d said to a friend, somewhat facetiously, but seriously enough to find out what response I’d get, “You know, as I’m having all this shitty sex anyway, maybe I should be getting paid for it.” There was a moment of silence, and she said gently, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Do you think there is another way you could make a little extra money?” There was a bar near where I worked at the time that was known for its “exotic dancer” (hustler) traffic. I watched older white businessmen sipping drinks as half-naked black and Latino men traveled through the crowd and danced or sat on their laps. They leaned over and laughed while the men whispered in their ears, tucked dollar bills into their bikinis, looked them in the eye and told them how beautiful they were while their random fingers grazed the men’s asses or tried to grab the length of their penises. I knew better than to assume that everyone involved in the sex industry was a victim, and while I strongly advocated a person’s right to choose that work without being demonized, the fact that I was even considering it meant I’d already crossed a potentially dangerous line with my sex addiction. I’d always used men like Jeremy to feel superior, to differentiate a level of behavior that, thankfully, I’d never had to “sink” to. I might have anonymous sexual contact with four or five or fifteen people in one day (surely more than Jeremy on one of his high-profile sex dates), but at least I wasn’t a prostitute like him. I’d never been given money for sex, and I was outraged when a man approached me at a bar one evening and said he’d pay me for a blow job. (I was probably less angry at his assumption than horrified at the forty dollars he offered me. I was devastated for the rest of the evening and wondered if I really looked like someone who would give a blow job for forty dollars. I’d always envisioned myself, if or when I ever did cross that line, as a first-class escort like Jeremy - not somebody’s “toothless hag” or funky chippy.) A therapist I was seeing at the time finally confronted me on my behavior. “Oh, so you’re a whore,” he said; and when my jaw dropped and I began to protest, he raised his hand. “I’m not talking about the amount of sex you’re having; I’m talking about why you’re having it. Your currency isn’t money, it’s validation. You’re a whore to fill your empty bank account of self-esteem.” Greg: would call me for dinner, we’d talk about art and careers, and smile fondly at each other across the table, and then go to his apartment and have sex, which was actually gentle and enjoyable every time - until we both came. Then he’d hand me a towel to wipe myself off and while I was in the bathroom, he’d dress and busy himself with important details in the other room; playing the answering-machine to see who had called while we were in bed, washing out the glass I’d used earlier and putting it away, checking his e-mail. I emerged from the bathroom, feeling the anxiety that emanated from his skin like heat and followed the trail of my clothes to the living room. “You got everything? Well, it was great to see you. We really have to do this again some time. Well, you take care now.” The door slammed shut behind me and the sound of the flipped lock echoed in the hall with the finality of a gunshot. As I walked to the elevator (if he’d gotten me out of there any faster, I’d have been carrying my shoes in my hand), I tried to reassure myself that I hadn’t imagined the intimacy during the earlier part of the evening, regardless of how the rest had turned out. I wasn’t a whore for trusting him, even though, minutes after our sex ended, I was now standing on the street corner. I’d thought it had been a fluke: the first evening we’d gotten together, after sex in my apartment, he’d rushed out the door so fast, he’d practically left it open. I barely had a chance to get out of bed, much less walk him to the door and say a proper goodnight. I vowed never to see Greg again. That’s why I was surprised weeks later when he called, eager to get together. The enthusiasm in his voice told me that he hadn’t perceived that anything had gone wrong, and because I’d had a good time (until the very end), I considered the possibility that maybe I’d overreacted, or had too many expectations of someone who was just a “fuck buddy”. I agreed to see him. We met for dinner, had another evening of great conversation, followed by another invitation to come up to his apartment and have sex. I considered bringing up what had happened the first two times, but didn’t want to ruin the mood, or embarrass him. Seconds after the sex was over, Greg scooped up his shorts, walked into the bathroom and closed the door. The room was dark except for the light that came from inside the bathroom, and there was the sound of running water. I wanted to die for being such an idiot, and wished there was a way I could somehow magically be swallowed up by the mattress and transported to my own bed without having to get dressed, ride the subway home, or ever face him again. Greg eventually emerged with a clean towel which he handed me to wipe myself off, and a few minutes later, still dazed, I found myself by the door, my hand reaching for the knob. He hugged me briefly this time, almost by way of explanation or apology, but refused to meet my eyes. His voice sounded like a friendly recorded announcement or a flight attendant standing at the door of the plane and saying goodbye to passengers after a journey: “You got everything? Well, great to see you. We have to do this again some time. You take care now.” When I got past the pain of having set myself up to be humiliated yet again, I had an unexpected reaction: fascination. I knew that Greg had grown up Catholic, and although he’d traded his Christian crosses for Buddhist iconography, worshipping a guru whose smiling, disconcerting face watched us from every corner of the apartment as we undressed, I saw for the first time that deep down Greg was just as ashamed as ever. He was still a good little Catholic boy underneath his conversion, burdened now with New Age sex guilt. This was sometimes the most insidious kind of sexual guilt to have, mostly because it was so easy to believe one was too spiritually evolved to have it. Before and during sex, New Age guilties could talk about tantric sex, meditation, relaxation, chakra points, Kundalini and the flow of energy in the body, but after orgasm, they often had the same desire to discard their sexual partners and hide the evidence, the way cats bury their turds in kitty litter. I knew Greg would call again (he did) and that if I said yes to an evening with him and we chose to have sex, I had to take full responsibility for any emotional damage I incurred, because he certainly wouldn’t. I truly didn’t believe he wanted to hurt me, and once I realized that, I felt more forgiveness. The problem Greg faced every time we went to bed was that since I was the guy he’d just had sex with, I knew where the bodies were hidden and I had to be destroyed. I’d seen that he was a faggot, a “real” man’s worst nightmare, and so when the sex was over he had to get me out of there fast, because he wanted to deal with his chronic shame in private. It didn’t matter that he’d had a long-term relationship with a man before; in some ways, sex in a relationship was easier for him because he could always say that the connection wasn’t just fucking, it was about “love” and “partnership”. But sex sex, sex just for the hell of it, sex that wasn’t anonymous (so you had to look at the man’s face afterwards), but equally wasn’t based on a selfless commitment to a partner (so you couldn’t deduct it from your ledger as a sort of spiritual tax write-off), was the kind of sex which greedy, selfish, evil people had, sex with no justification other than pleasuring the body; backsliding sex. Homosexuality as an abstraction is enough of a religious burden, without having to add genuine pleasure to it. I learned over the years that the Gregs weren’t rare. And part of my compassion, even though I knew I couldn’t see him again, was that I had to admit something else - I was a Greg. There were the times I rushed to orgasm first, knowing that when two gay men with shame have sex, if they don’t ejaculate at exactly the same time, one of them is going to end up alone in bed, masturbating to orgasm, while the other is already in the shower. I didn’t mind the Gregs so much when it was my recorded message by the door, “You got everything? Well, great to see you. We really have to do this again some time,” my flipped lock. Andrew: had to make a sudden decision when his roommate went into the hospital for pneumonia. The roommate had been sick for a while, and on his last visit to the emergency room slipped into a coma. His family arrived the next day, but he never woke up again and died a few days later. The roommate made Andrew promise once that if his family ever visited and he was in the hospital close to death, before they came to the apartment, Andrew would go into his room with boxes and throw out all his all gay paraphernalia - the S&M sex toys, the dildos, vibrators, porn collection, bottles of poppers and leather, because “my family will be totally scandalized.” They knew only the handsome child they’d raised, a child who over the years communicated with them mostly through long-distance calls and “I love you’s” from hundreds of miles away, sharing stories of his corporate success, and reminding them on every phone call that no, he wasn’t ready to get married just yet. Yes, of course they know, the roommate said to Andrew once when he got off the phone, but that doesn’t mean we talk about it. It is okay for them to know, as long as I’m not the one to tell them. In the end, Andrew decided not to throw his roommate’s life away, and chose instead to go back to the apartment with the family. Handing them the boxes, he opened the bedroom door, and introduced them to their son.
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2006-06-26 20:15:00
2006-06-27 01:15:56
Addiction: A Gay Perspective (Part II)
Terry: black and gay, and a dancer living with AIDS; we met while performing in a friend’s show together. During rehearsals he came down with the ‘flu and had to miss rehearsal for a few days. When he returned, he was told he didn’t have to do the show if he wasn’t well, but Terry insisted, pushing himself, even stumbling to the dressing-room with coughing fits when he walked offstage. He made it through the three scheduled performances, using an asthma inhaler in the corner of the room whenever he began to wheeze. I felt sympathetic to Terry, and closer to him in a way, having had inhalers and hospitalizations throughout my childhood for my chronic asthma. I asked him once if he was okay and respected his privacy when he silently nodded. A few weeks after the show ended, we were told that Terry had died. He’d been coughing at home, had a relapse of the “cold” he’d had during the show, and despite friends’ protests, had refused to go to the doctor. He felt he was strong enough to fight the illness since he’d been through this many times before, and chose to isolate in his apartment until it was over. Finally a friend or family member came, used their key, and after finding him throwing up in bed, insisted he go to the hospital. He died the next day. I couldn’t believe Terry was dead. I’d just been speaking to him the week before the show about a project he was enthusiastic about developing, we were laughing about it, and while he was talking, I stopped listening for a moment, and marveled instead at his beauty and (strange to recall now) how perfect his teeth were. After I heard the news, I thought about black men and pride, and the fear some of us have about trusting doctors really to take care of us. (As irrational as it may seem, the conventional wisdom has been that since white people can’t be trusted, and since all doctors are technically white, most doctors won’t take care of us any better than we can take care of ourselves. And they charge too damn much.) I wondered if he’d had any health insurance, or what services, if any, he’d been offered as a man living with AIDS and whether or not he’d had shame about taking advantage of them, or felt they were a handout. Maybe he’d had such a threshold for pain, having been through so much in life as black and gay, that his perspective was permanently warped and he no longer knew when it was time to stop relying on himself, to stop “getting over” and “getting by” and finally ask for help. Where did it come from, this determination to survive even if one died trying – the black or the gay part? The old adage that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger has probably inspired many, but nobody ever seems to talk about the fact that that is a hell of a high price to pay for the experiences that sometimes don’t make you stronger at all, but just kill you. I called another black gay male friend, Marcus, who also knew Terry and had been in the show, and we expressed our mutual shock. Marcus was honest enough to express some frustration and anger with Terry (“We told his ass to rest”). When I went to the memorial service and Terry stared out from a poster-size picture, his gorgeous smile surrounded by roses, I envisioned him somewhere as bewildered as Marcus and I were. We made a pact that afternoon that we wouldn’t be black gay superheroes, able to leap AIDS, loneliness, low self-esteem, racism or depression in a single bound, no longer keeping ourselves isolated from friends until we felt “fabulous” or “healthy” enough to let people see us. No matter what, we wouldn’t let ourselves die alone, as Terry did. But I’ve broken the promise already: I’m isolating right now, and I haven’t returned Marcus’ last two phone calls. He might have given up on me on this time, he has his pride too. Or he might say to himself, “That’s just Max” and accept my apologies when I finally do call him. I’m sick of being in this place again, sick of feeling sorry for myself, sick of my broken promises to change my life, sick of analyzing and bargaining with my addictions, sick of reading self-help literature, listening to friends’ advice, sick of feeling stuck. I don’t know why I hit the addict jackpot and have to be vigilant about alcohol, and drugs, and sex, and food, and co-dependency. One of the things you learn in recovery is that if you are compulsive in one area of your life, having fifty years free from one addiction doesn’t mean that you are necessarily dealing with any of the others. Sometimes you have to go for help more than once. I’m feeling fat, my eating is totally out of control again, and my masochistic decision to go into the new Abercrombie and Fitch store on Fifth Avenue while shopping the other day certainly didn’t help matters any. The man who greeted customers at the door with his washboard abs was naked from the waist up, like the image on the movie-screen-size posters that surrounded him, and the tableau seemed to say: “Welcome to the house of Narcissus.” The music was pumping, and there was a dark, subterranean bathhouse feeling on the first floor (I didn’t go any higher). It was more than a little jarring to share this experience with tourists and families of six, including babies in their strollers, Mom sipping Starbucks and grandma and grandpa holding shopping bags - Disneyland presents the Fire Island Meat Rack. So I fled - all 175 pounds (all right - 190) of me. I don’t want to see Marcus or anyone else until I lose this weight. Joan Crawford would be proud of me: even in her seventies, she refused to go to the supermarket for eggs unless she gave the kids “Hollywood.” My addictions cost so much energy and time; and for me food goes back farther than anything else - before there were sex, alcohol, drugs or abusive relationships, there was candy. I’m ashamed because I have to wear my “fat pants” again, and the angrier and more disappointed I feel, the more I want to eat. I’m hiding in this house, letting messages go to voicemail even though I’m standing here listening to every word the person is saying, not returning calls, waiting, waiting, until I “feel better” - whenever the hell that is. I’m missing-in-action, hiding until the coast is clear. Thinking about Terry for the first time in years, I see that the costliest addiction for gay men isn’t crystal meth, the deadliest disease isn’t AIDS. It is our perfectionism. Growing up with the shame of being flawed, and haunted by the idea that we aren’t good enough, some of us are driven into an insane life of overachieving, good grades, starvation, overwork - trapped in our little “factory of perfection” until we feel adequate to live. We strive until we are on the verge of collapse. Eventually, the only thing that can turn that voice off is getting high, getting drunk, fucking compulsively, shopping until we drop. Addiction becomes a relief, a way of finally saying no, even if only for a few hours, to the constant need to control everything in our lives: “I give up, I can’t stand this shit any more, I can’t meet all these expectations. I’m going to let go for once, I’m going to have a little fun for a change…” There is a public bathroom here in the City and the traffic is heavy: men in business suits and uniforms, college students, millionaires and homeless men, immigrants, addicts, black and white men, men in their seventies,19-year-olds, Democrats, and Republicans - all come here to expose themselves and watch each other masturbate. This bathroom is open all day and into the night; I discovered it when I first came to New York, and no matter what time you go there it is always busy. There are bathrooms like this all over America, in fact – in bus and train stations, parks, bars, department stores, gyms, rest stops, airports, college libraries. And it is not only America – I found the same bathroom in the first train station I entered in Italy; there you had to pay the equivalent of fifty cents to get in. Men wait around for hours sometimes in these places, coming back several times in the same day. As a young man I was amazed. I often had the fantasy, and I am not the first, that if the skin of each of the men who cruised here for sex turned a certain color for just one day, a bright shade of purple or green, legions of men in this country would have a lot of explaining to do – at work, at home, at church. We’d discover that people we’ve revered for their accomplishments – superstars, politicians, and world leaders – were always gay and we just never knew. Like the homosexual who is forced to come out because of public scandal, the conversation would have to change. But until that day occurred, I knew men would continue to have sex in hiding places, and local high school principals arrested at highway rest stops would offer their humiliated denials to the press, and powerful men in the public eye would hire escorts who knew their very lives could be in danger if they ever exposed their famous clientele. I have almost three years of sobriety from pubic sex, and yet today I want to act out. I always make the mistake of thinking my sex addiction is about craving sex, but it rarely is. So much of my addictive behavior is about anger. It’s like a piece of film; run it through the projector and you get a moving image of a man crossing a street, but slow it down and you are just watching a series of photographs, one frame imperceptibly different from the last, an illusion. My life feels unbearable today and the first thing I thought this morning was: I want sex. That’s my internal answer, my panic button for everything. When I slow it down and look at what I am feeling frame by frame, I see the anger that leads to the rage, the rage that when unexpressed becomes despair and the need to numb my feelings, which becomes the desire for sex. I don’t even need an orgasm, just looking for sex – watching porn, cruising, starting to masturbate - takes away all the pain. I wasn’t allowed to get angry in my house growing up, and the only way I learned safely to express anger was against myself. Which is the reason I don’t want just any kind of sex today – I know this because I ran into a fuck buddy on the street and I wasn’t interested in going home with him in the slightest. I want public cruising, the danger of possibly getting caught, the feeling of oblivion that comes after the adrenalin rush of baiting a confrontation with an undercover cop, of just barely escaping trouble. Today I’m outraged at narcissistic fathers who keep turning their adult children into emotional pretzels because they refuse to change or take responsibility for their own lives, and narcissistic governments that send their poorest citizens to fight wars so the weapons manufacturers they have private stock in make even more money; I want to piss off an authority figure even if it means abusing myself in the process. On the news yesterday, I saw that there is a religious group protesting the funerals of soldiers who have died in Iraq. They claim that God is glad our soldiers are dead, and that He is killing them to punish America for its tolerance of homosexuals. What do I do with this anger? I think about the gay children hearing this, what they must think about themselves, the future addicts that are being created from hearing this hate. I feel like I did as a child when I couldn’t escape, when I couldn’t fight something that felt oppressively unfair. After a while, I’m past rage, I’m exhausted, and the stale anger begins to harden, calcifying into depression. Now I don’t want to fight anymore and I don’t really care about anything; I want to go back to bed and sleep. I used to believe it was my addictions that made me feel so much shame; now I know I’m addicted to being ashamed; the addiction just helps me re-create that experience. The result of growing up hating yourself as a gay person is that you get used to having your aura consistently violated. Even if there is no one hurting you in the moment, the microchip is planted, you’ll find a way to hurt yourself. The gay body in this society is constantly in peril. Addiction ensures that, if you aren’t in your body, in some perverse way you are safe; you can’t be hurt if there’s no one home. A nation of addicted gay people - codependent, materialistic, workaholic, drugged out, drunk, self-hating, anorexic and obese – will never come together and demand their rights, will never drop their racism and sexism to form a united gay political force, or have the courage to defy the violence that continues to be perpetrated against them. Keith: is unable to talk to about crystal addiction in the gay community, he feels it is all an exaggerated media ploy to stigmatize gays, and that the reports of crystal being highly addictive, of epidemic proportion, and extremely hard to recover from, are simply untrue. “If you can’t handle it, you shouldn’t use it, but if you become addicted, you can’t blame the crystal,” he says. Keith has never talked to Henry, a gay man in his forties who explained to me, in the most honest terms I’d ever heard, why he uses crystal. “I was hooked from the first time I tried it. The very first time. I love crystal. I don’t feel my age when I’m using it. I can have sex with anybody, any age, I can have sex with a twenty-year-old, and he doesn’t care how I look, especially if I have some to share. Whoever pays for the drugs is always beautiful. Crystal gives me energy, I feel like I’m twenty again.” As a gay man, it is hard to talk about addiction. I feel reluctant to criticize the bathhouses; thank God they were there or I might not have had a place to go for sex at all. If it hadn’t been for gay porn, I wouldn’t have known what to do when I got there. And alcohol – thank God for some of those strong drinks, or I never would have had the courage to ask another man to dance, or to come home with me - the shame and terror of being rejected were too overwhelming. But how do you talk about not being able to stop partying, feeling out of control and not knowing how to ask anyone for help, when the only thing more shameful than feeling that you are bad because you’re gay is feeling the shame of being gay and an addict, and that the addiction, like the gayness, is all your “fault”? And even though we recently had a major Hollywood motion picture speak to some of the issues that closeted gays face, and people will tell you things are better for lesbians and gay men than they have ever been, gay teenagers are still killing themselves and being gay-bashed in towns across the country. It is impossible to know how many we have lost when we have no idea how many gay men and women are hiding in the closet, when families and publicists revise death announcements, when an obvious loss through AIDS becomes “cancer” or a “serious health issue”, when a gay suicide is covered up and attributed only to “depression” or “moodiness”, or when a sex-worker is murdered and the obituary doesn’t bother to acknowledge that the person who died was transgender, that the murder wasn’t random, but a hate crime. David: black, gay, an inspiration to me, having come back from the other side of the looking-glass, is recovering from crystal meth addiction. While I never tried meth, whenever I fantasize about using crack cocaine again, when things feel dreadfully mundane, David reminds me how fortunate he and I are even to be alive, given what we’ve been through and some of the situations we put ourselves in. David says, “Somewhere out there is an alternative reality where I never stopped using, I never got help, and I died from crystal. If ever choose to pick up again, there is a tombstone waiting for me with my name on it.” Me: I was twenty, I would come home from the bar so drunk that I fell asleep in the empty subway car and missed my stop, riding until the train came to the end. The G line would take me to the last stop at Smith and 9th Street where I would wake up and have to get off; there you could see the Statue of Liberty, it would be four or five o’clock in the morning and there was a misty look in the sky that said the sun was coming up soon. I believed I cared about myself: I took showers every day and on Monday mornings I always made it into work, but I didn’t care enough to protect myself, playing Russian roulette with whoever would find me sleeping on the subway and might want to cause me harm. It is easy for me to dismiss my partying in those days as just “being a young man”, ”getting my bearings”, “learning to hold my liquor”, “sowing some wild oats” and let the conversation end there. What is difficult to explore is the part of me that wanted to die. I think of Nathan, married, two kids, trying to rid himself of his homosexuality, his subconscious goal to drink enough alcohol, use enough drugs to kill the “parasite” that exists inside him. But as the parasite he’s trying to kill is part of his God-given identity, the set-up is that the victory over homosexuality will only be realized when he kills himself. And unfortunately there are still those among us who would rather hear a gay man’s eulogy than be on the other end of his coming-out speech. * all the names in this article have been changed. © 2006 Max Gordon All Rights Reserved
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2006-06-28 22:03:00
2006-06-29 03:05:08
New Street Drug Showing Up in Duluth - "Drop Dead" or "Suicide Packets"
This drug is killing hundreds of people and apparently it is coming here from Chicago and Detroit: Deadly heroin mix tightens grip on city Across Chicago, police and hospitals are racing to curb a surge in fatal overdoses, many of them linked to a potent blend of the drug and a powerful painkiller. By David Heinzmann, Carlos Sadovi and Tonya Maxwell, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporters Brendan McCarthy and Gerry Doyle contributed to this report June 8, 2006 Hospitals and outreach workers are struggling against a surge of fatal heroin overdoses in Chicago, as word has spread that more potent, though deadly, drugs have hit the street. Police were linking 14 deaths on Monday and Tuesday to heroin overdoses, an alarming toll that shows the drug's broad reach into society. A 17-year-old son of a Franklin Park police official died in the back seat of his car Tuesday, still clutching the small packet of heroin he had just bought on the West Side, police said. That same day, a 39-year-old mother from Lombard collapsed after shooting up the drug and later died in a West Side hospital. Also among the dead were a day laborer and a union worker from Chicago. Police are trying to determine whether these deaths should be added to a list of 60 people who have died this year in Cook County from a deadly combination of heroin and the powerful painkiller fentanyl. The most recent rash of deaths, centered on the West Side, may be one of the largest clusters of fentanyl-related deaths since investigators have been tracking the problem. Officials say the synthetic narcotic, used legally for pain management, is being added to heroin to give a more powerful high to users. "Most people have heard the stories. They just think it's good heroin. They think the media and the police and the doctors and nurses just don't want them to have it," said Chuck Thomas, chairman of emergency medicine at Norwegian-American Hospital on the West Side. Over the last several months, Thomas said there has been a spike in overdose victims in the hospital's emergency room. The hospital typically had one or two overdose victims a day, but in the last few months, "We're seeing 10, 15, 20 a day." Thomas said the hospital was recently given approval from executives to order the narcotic Revex, a much more powerful antidote to what is typically used in heroin overdoses. As hospitals scramble to save lives, outreach workers are warning drug users to steer clear of the potent fentanyl-laced heroin. But for those who don't, outreach workers also educate them on what to do in case of heroin overdoses. Susie Gualtieri, with the Chicago Recovery Alliance, said they show drug users videos with step-by-step instructions and dispense vials of the drug naloxone. The heroin causes you to "relax to death," she said. "What [naloxone] does is it blocks your receptors from feeling the heroin," she said. Meanwhile, local police are making undercover buys of heroin, to track where fentanyl is being sold, and testing the samples for clues to the drug's source. Their federal counterparts focus on trafficking--tracing the drug's routes into Midwestern and East Coast cities, most likely from Mexican labs. The rise in deaths over the last few days has been alarming for police, and it has meant heartbreak for families across the Chicago area, from Englewood to Park Ridge. Joseph Krecker, the son of Franklin Park Deputy Chief Jack Krecker, graduated from Maine South High School on Sunday. Two days later, he was found dead on the Northwest Side in the back seat of his car. He was about halfway between his Park Ridge home and the street-corner drug markets of the West Side. "The stuff must have been so powerful that it killed him instantly," said Frank Limon, chief of the Chicago Police Department's organized crime division. Keith Lee got a phone call about 10 a.m. Tuesday telling him his brother's body had been found in an alley near Kedzie Avenue and Huron Street. Craig Lee, 45, did odd jobs and worked as a day laborer, his brother said. "He was always saying he was going to stop. The last time was last year," Lee said. The family's funeral plans for his brother will have to wait for toxicology tests to tell investigators if the drugs that killed him were tainted with fentanyl, he said. While many addicts are drawn by the lure of fentanyl's dangerous potency, some addicts who believe they've survived brushes with the drug say they are staying away. Catherine Wrencher is a 36-year-old longtime heroin addict. She said she believes the terrifying episode she had in recent weeks was due to fentanyl. "I couldn't breathe and I started spitting up blood," she said. Wrencher called 911 before she passed out, she said, and was revived by EMS workers. She said she wants nothing more to do with fentanyl, but short of stopping her drug use, the decision is not within her control, she said. "Now that [expletive] is everywhere. You don't know what you've got until you do it," she said. Phil Thorn, 50, and Jaime Salinas, 28, said they heard about a more potent heroin in January and went with a group of people to buy $10 bags on the South Side. After shooting up in his Cicero apartment, Thorn said the others got sick and passed out. "It was right away, as soon as they injected, they were dropping, within a minute," said Thorn, who said he was able to administer naloxone and revive them. Salinas said he knew the drug was different from anything he had ever tried. "I had tunnel vision and I felt real light-headed. On heroin you get high, not light-headed and no tunnel vision," he said. Ever since that night, he said, he goes to the same dealers because he trusts their drugs. Thorn, a heroin addict for 10 years, said he promised himself he wouldn't use heroin that he knew was laced with fentanyl. But he said the withdrawal pains that come 12 hours after using heroin may be too strong. "I'm a dope fiend and I'll probably do it, but I'll be very careful," he said. "It's not a matter of getting high anymore, it's about not being sick." Alert escalates on drug mix: 'Too many dying' BY BEN SCHMITT and KIM NORRIS FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS As metro Detroit officials braced for what could be a deadly Memorial Day weekend, a dozen drug abuse counselors fanned out across the city Thursday to warn users about a fatal mix of drugs laced with a pain medication that is suspected in the deaths of as many as 33 people in the past week. With federal agents chasing down leads to the source of the drugs and investigators combing through autopsies and toxicology reports, the counselors deployed in hopes of alerting people to the dangers of the fentanyl-laced drugs suspected in more than 100 deaths in metro Detroit since September. In recent days, that number has surged -- officials in Wayne County said Thursday 10 drug deaths occurred Tuesday, up from four reported a day before -- as health officials and police struggled to react to the distribution of a mix dealers are marketing as "drop dead" and "suicide packets." "The idea that it is deadly potent could be a come-on for the dyed-in-the-wool drug addict," said Dr. Calvin Trent, director of Detroit's Bureau of Substance Abuse, which is part of the city's Health Department. Another concern is whether less hard-core users of heroin and cocaine will try the fentanyl-added mix in search of a stronger high. "This is not the time to be going to the streets and buying a recreational bag of drugs," Trent said. "This is one of the most serious issues we've dealt with and we're not sure if the community is taking it seriously." On Thursday afternoon, Edward Aniapam, coordinator of special services for the substance abuse bureau, visited eight Detroit shelters as part of a coordinated effort to pass out information warning about the fatal mix. "We need you to help us spread the word," Aniapam told a group of about 30 people at the Detroit Rescue Mission shelter on Third Street. "There are too many people dying. You may think: 'Gimme some of this bad stuff. I'll do just a little bit and it won't kill me.' Please, this is killing people." Down the street, at the Neighborhood Services Organization shelter, people said word is out about the high-powered mix. "We hear the drug is used for cancer," Robert Nesbitt, 56, said as he rolled homemade cigarettes in a tray. "It's genocide, in my opinion. Someone should have spoke up about this a long time ago." Outside of the shelter, a group of men and women sipped from beer bottles and smoked marijuana before Aniapam approached them. "Take these flyers, man," he said. "We've got something bad going on." 'We have some good leads' As drug counselors tried to spread the word, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials said Thursday they were tracking information that could lead to the sources of the heroin and cocaine that is mixed with the painkiller, typically given to terminally ill patients. The officials said their investigation could last at least two more weeks. The source of the drug itself, however, is still unknown -- possibly a clandestine lab or a rogue pharmacist. "We have some good leads," said Carolyn Gibson, a DEA spokeswoman. She did not elaborate. The DEA has been working with its offices in Camden, N.J., Philadelphia and Chicago, where other cases of fentanyl-laced heroin have been identified, in hopes of figuring out whether those cities were supplied from the same source. Although those cities have experienced problems with fentanyl, the number has paled in comparison with the death toll now being investigated in Detroit. The DEA first identified fentanyl mixed with other drugs in Michigan last November when investigators bought heroin off the street to test it -- a practice aimed at monitoring the spread of the drug. The recent surge has been so serious that investigators from the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have come to Detroit to try to re-create the events that led to the suspected fentanyl deaths, CDC spokeswoman Bernadette Burden said. So far, they have not had anything to report. Teresa Blossom, a Wayne County spokeswoman, said there have been 33 drug-related deaths in Wayne County since May 18. Although toxicology reports, which take weeks to complete, will be needed to determine how many are fentanyl-related, the majority of the 106 drug deaths in Wayne County from September through March were linked to fentanyl mixed with heroin or cocaine. That leads officials to believe the recent surge is related to fentanyl as well. Blossom said the county would not release the names of the people who have died, because the investigation is ongoing. Deaths from the drug are not just a Wayne County or Detroit issue, however. Oakland County chief forensic toxicologist Gary Kunsman said Thursday the county has tentatively identified 28 fentanyl-related deaths since late September. In Macomb County, medical examiner Daniel Spitz said he has seen more fatal drug overdoses in recent weeks, but so far just one has been linked to fentanyl, and it wasn't mixed with either heroin or cocaine. John Roach, a spokesman for the Wayne County Sheriff's Office, said the majority of the special operations unit is investigating the suspected fentanyl cases. "Much of that is interviewing people we know or have contacted before that are known heroin users," he said. "It's a street-level approach we are taking." Quick treatment is crucial Officials said those who overdose can be saved if they get to an emergency room immediately. "This can be treated: The key is looking for signs that include dizziness, trouble breathing or an inability to walk and talk," said Michele Reid, medical director of the Detroit-Wayne County Community Mental Health Agency and chairwoman of the newly created Wayne County fentanyl work group. Asked why anyone would willingly take the more powerful drug, Dr. Michael Boyle, medical director of Henry Ford Health System's Maplegrove Center, a West Bloomfield drug treatment facility, said simply: "To feel good." "An addict will go to any lengths to feel good," he said. And the knowledge that a drug has a potentially deadly ingredient will not stop addicts, particularly if that ingredient promises an even better high. "There are two mechanisms in play," Boyle said. "One is denial: 'It will not happen to me.' The other is thinking: 'They took too much. I'm going to take less.' " Getting the word out to users is not an issue, he said. "Heroin addicts are aware better than you or I what's going on out there," Boyle said.
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2006-06-29 17:19:00
2006-06-29 22:19:41
The Brand New Duluth Clinic...


I got to walk around the new building yesterday and I took a few photos. It's a nice building, and it's been something that 1st Street needed for a long time. This building is just the beginning of a revitalization of downtown, and the next phase will be the condos (www.311superior.com) that will be built just a block from the new clinic, on Superior St. There will also be a Sheraton Hotel there. It's amazing. Having grown up here, I've watched as nothing ever happens downtown, until a few years ago when criminal activity (drug dealing, gangs) really moved into downtown, which is when the powers that be in Duluth finally agreed to start doing something about fixing up downtown. It has a long ways to go yet, but at least this is a start. If it means that SMDC owns half of downtown, so be it. I would rather see new, up to date buildings downtown than the blight that is currently there. Nobody wants to shop downtown or even walk down certain streets because they will be bothered for money or intimidated by drunks or people on drugs. Personally, I love downtown because, having always felt different myself, I've found that being in the company of other odd people fascinates me. I like to see a variety of people. I like to know whats going on...I don't like the mentality of hiding from certain people because you're afraid of the unknown, or convinced that they're bad. They're not. I find that downtown has a history, a soul, so to speak, that is not present at the mall. The mall is mostly new, big box retail which has no genuine space for public assembly, there's nowhere to just sit and watch people or blend. Now, on to the stories I posted this week. Max's article this month really struck a chord with me, as his writing always does...I feel like our experiences and thoughts are right on, I completely get what he's saying because I've seen much of the same things. Many of the gay men (and gay women) I've met in my lifetime have been very similar to the ones that Max describes...the very first guy I met, Mike, was actually here in Duluth, and we were both turning 18 around the same time. I moved to Minneapolis, and he called me from down there saying that he had nowhere to go, and could he stay with me for three days. Well, three days turned into three weeks, and I figured out how to get him out. He finally got his own place because I told him the landlord would evict me if he didn't leave (I made that up). But he was the best con artist I met; he ended up moving in with three girls, stole all of their money, ran up their phone bill to $300, and that's the last they ever saw of him. They all worked together at SuperAmerica, and one night while they were gone he packed up his stuff and headed to the Greyhound and apparently hopped a bus to Baltimore. During the short time I knew him, he managed to convince his 'lovers' (usually very naive older man) that he had brain cancer, hemophilia and even AIDS in order to seek sympathy and get money from them. I had no idea he was doing these things until after he left Minneapolis and I would pass by them downtown, and we would stop and talk for a few minutes. I guess I'm damn lucky he didn't steal anything from me. Then there was Bart and Jack. Again, I was 18, and I was on the fringes of downtown's gay youth 'scene' at the time. There was a lot of street kids who did what they had to in order to survive. Being from east Duluth, I was not aware of a lot of this (even though I moved to Minneapolis thinking I knew everything)...anyways there were these two kids who were 16 and 18, Bart, who was 16 and really short, looked like a little thug wanna be, a 'wigger' at the time; Jack was a tall, skinny, lanky guy who always seemed nervous. I first met them at the Saloon, which is the gay bar in downtown Minneapolis which had youth nights on Thursdays and Sundays. I don't remember what it was about them that we started talking. I think that I must've known someone they knew and we all started talking. Anyways I guess they liked me enough that whenever I would see them downtown they talked to me and we'd talk about the people we knew (or gossip about the people we wish we knew) and I kind of kept my distance because the rumor was that Bart was into some heavy drugs, and Jack was a prostitute (which explains why they were always downtown by the Saloon). What I didn't know was that they worked as a team, robbing people. About two years later I picked up the newspaper one morning to find that a well-known gay man had been murdered, apparently he had picked up someone at the Saloon - Bart - who must have signaled Jack to follow behind and show up at this man's house. They managed to tie him up, stab him to death and slice his throat afterwards. Then they ransacked his house and took everything they could get. They're both serving 30 year sentences at Oak Park Heights, which is the maximum security prison in Minnesota. Seeing their mugshots freaked me the hell out - I knew these guys - not well, but I knew them well enough to put the pieces together and have it make sense. They were profiling people who they knew had money. When I would first see them all the time I thought...wow they really like to go out...I never thought they were robbing people as a team and then getting drugs. But that's exactly what they were doing. Unfortunately they killed someone in the process who sounded like a very respected man, who happened to pick up the wrong kid downtown one night. I'll never forget seeing their mugshots in the paper that day. Then there was Happy. I met him around the same time, I would always see him downtown and I had heard some things about him but never talked to him until one day during the summer when I was sitting outside of Bruegger's Bagels on Nicollet and 12th. He sat down and must've assumed I was okay to talk to because that's exactly what he did. He was called 'Happy' because that's how he always seemed; the reality was the amount of drugs (probably meth) he was doing. His eyes were always huge. He was very, very thin. But he was always very polite and very easy to talk to, except when he was agitated and seeking drugs. Ironically he was a pharmacy technician down the street at a drug store...people used to laugh when they'd hear that, figuring that's where he got his drug supplies most of the time. Since not many people knew the specifics on meth at that time, who knows? The last time I saw him was about 5 years ago, he cleaned up his act, got sober, and was a shift manager at the McDonald's in Gavidaae Center downtown. I was glad that he finally looked healthy and sane...I just hope he still is. Izzy was another kid I met along the way through a few friends of Mike's who hung out at City Center, which was probably the worst place in Minneapolis to be hanging out - it's all gang members, dealers, basically people up to no good. Well, City Center had a food court and Mike was working at 1 Potato 2 at the time, and worked with Izzy, Angela and some other girl I can't remember. Izzy was hard to figure out. At first, I thought he was light-skinned and black...if you were to talk to him on the phone, you would think he was black. Even in person, he had the 'walk', the mannerisms, the stereotypical black everything...his hair was a darker brown and in corn rows. Turns out, Izzy was white. Grew up in north Minneapolis, one of seven white kids at Folwell Junior High and North High School...and you'd think that, as a white person, he would have felt really threatened there by that because we assume that we are in danger anywhere that we might me in the minority, but to him, because he grew up there and that's all he knew, that was life. He was treated like everyone else. His personality was a reflection of the people he grew up around - not a put on or a fake act like you see with suburban white kids. The white kids I met in Minneapolis were the real thing, and their personalities were no act. That was what amazed me. The interesting part to all of this was the demographic of kids I met when I was 18 in Minneapolis. For the first time, I met a lot of urban white kids who came from nothing and knew the streets very well. They weren't afraid of anything because they had either seen it before or done it themselves; life was about risks and doing whatever it took to get to tomorrow and if that meant stealing things from stores or things like that, then that's what they did. Many of them did drugs, as their moms did too. Almost all of them had no dad in the picture. Growing up in Duluth, I lived in a neighborhood with mostly privileged white kids, and along the way met some people of color who came from a variety of backgrounds. But I never met white kids from the inner city. It's different because in some ways you can see yourself in them, if only the cards had been played different, maybe you would have been in their shoes...their view of the world was very different from mine. Deep down I think that I trusted people were - for the most part - good people who had good intentions. Because of what these kids experienced, their view was the exact opposite. A lot of them had moms who were prostitutes and drug addicts. They grew up seeing their moms come home after getting beat up or raped. They grew up with no concept of a parent being a parent - they came from homes that were so bad, that they didn't have one to go back to if things went wrong. A couple of them had moms in and out of homeless shelters. So as I got to know these kids, I realized that the definition of friendship and relationships didn't match what I had thought to be true. To them, because a lot of them grew up with the phone being disconnected every month or so, you'd see them whenever you'd see them, and if you didn't, you didn't. That was a friendship. Things weren't planned in advance, if you were lucky to bump into them downtown one day then it was meant to happen. Relationships were casual and didn't have any expectations, because their lives were always in transition. You didn't know if they were leaving town the next month because things were getting too hot here or they pissed off the wrong person who was now after them. You just assumed that if you didn't see them again, something must have happened, and you go on with your life. That, to me, made no sense. I had to have some kind of answer or explanation; I never could handle having people just up and disappear for no reason. I also realized something else. Often times society looks at inner city people largely as poor, black and uneducated, but rarely do we see the white people who grow up along side them. If we do, it's complicated - because these kids do not appear to be part of a 'culture' but that culture is largely a part of them. Other white people assume that they're losers, that their families don't have anything because they don't want it, but they wouldn't say that about people of color. Likewise, people of color often look at the urban white poor as 'white trash', again, people who could get up and leave if they wanted, after all, they have the privilege of white skin (but don't have the privilege of having willpower to kick their coke habit, or stop turning tricks, or stop drinking, etc). Because a lot of those friendships were so frustrating, when I left Minneapolis, I don't think I ever heard from anyone I met down there. And today, while I am glad I met a variety of people then, I am a lot more careful who I pursue friendships with. I need someone who is dependable and there's a mutually fulfilling experience. I can't be around people who are constantly in crisis or in the fog of addiction. I can listen, I can guide them to help, but I can't do it all or get tangled in it now. It's too much for me, and I learned that I can not solve other people's problems for them. Once you do that, if you are a caring person, there is no way to detatch yourself from it.
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