MAY 2006 (LIVEJOURNAL)

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59183
2006-05-03 15:58:00
2006-05-03 21:19:45
Another memorable event...
Ten years ago this week, Jeff and I moved into a new apartment. Not just any apartment, but one that we fixed up, painted and beautified ourselves - we washed the cigarette residue off the walls, we painted, we shampooed the carpet three times; we took a dump of an apartment and made it look like a million bucks. We had been living at King Manor, just a few blocks away, however at the time the rent was like $446 which was a lot...I had the chance to take the 'manager's apartment' at the YWCA, which is actually the largest apartment in the building with a bathroom and a large living space. Since I was working there, the rent - total - was $225 a month. Only $112.50 each, and that was very, very do-able. So do-able that we could play around and have fun that summer, which sometimes we did. I was worried about moving into the Y because of it's reputation for being a problem building, and since I worked there, it was a little too close for comfort. I wasn't cool with the idea that I could be called upon at any time to work for someone who hadn't showed up, for example. But, that didn't happen except for maybe once. Jeff wasn't thrilled about moving there at first, but once he saw how much money we saved I think he liked the apartment. The other place was just too much and we didn't need all that room. But it was fun. I knew a month in advance that we could have that apartment; #216, so we spent a lot of time fixing it up and cleaning. I really wanted to rip out the carpet and see the hardwood floor underneath, but we didn't have the money to finish the floors the way they would have had to be finished. Those were good times. I miss those kinds of things, how we arranged our stuff, how we worked together to paint that apartment, and how we were going to make the arrangement work. And we did, for a little while. Jeff had surgery the weekend after we moved in, so I spent the day with him over at St. Luke's (it was day surgery) and my parents brought him back to the apartment which I had everything all in place for when he got home. For the first time ever I felt like my parents looked at me as someone who was in a relationship and with someone, and for someone who's never had that (and never had that since) that was a proud moment for me. I don't know why I continue to bring these things up...I feel like I have to keep the memories going because I still remember quite well the short time we had together and I don't want to forget it...it's hard not to remember these things ten years later, and just measuring how much I've changed...and how in many ways I'm still the same person. Sometimes I wonder if there was 'someone' in my life if I would have these strong feelings still...I don't know. If that person was a good guy who had been in my life for a while, the feelings of the past would always be with me but not this intense. Part of the emotions come from the lingering feeling that 'this was it' and there won't be any more experiences like this...I hear people talking about relationships and marriages and things that I could never even vision myself having and at the same time I don't think these people realize how lucky they are to have over 95% of the population as their selection base, I am living proof that 2-5% yields you with basically nothing, and the fact that you have no control over that can eat you alive. You fght it for years - you think...if only I move to this city; if only I change my body, if only I do this or that...but you do those things and still nothing happens. It's a sense of anxiety that no straight person could ever imagine because at the lowest denominator, they have someone to pick from at the very least. I don't even feel like I have that. So much of this is a reminder to myself that at one time there were happier times and to keep those in mind.
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59402
2006-05-04 20:14:00
2006-05-05 01:23:44
Now I know why nothing's happening...
http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/cgi-bin/personals.cgi?category=m4m&SID= Somehow I ended up looking at craigslist, which doesn't even have anything listed for Duluth anyways, but it was interesting to look at the site. In the bigger cities, craigslist is the biggest networking place for finding a room or apartment, and now even for meeting people. So out of curiousity, I scanned the personal ads since I haven't done this in a long time, to see if anything much has changed from the days of personal ads in the papers or even the ads you see all the time on gay.com. The SAME guys I remember in Minneapolis are still there and a lot of them have ads with photos on cragslist, they're all looking for the same guys that aren't available, and so that tells me that nothing much has changed down there either. The ads leave me with a pretty bleak outlook: 'married man seeking a fuck while wife and kids are gone this weekend' or 'looking to get fucked by as many guys as possible while I'm in town'. I know this goes on all the time anyways, and I thought that nothing could really shock me after seeing the thousands of gay websites I've seen ranging from gay millionaires clubs to fat guys seeking other fat guys. You name it, it's out there. Unfortunately though, there just aren't enough gay guys in the mix to fit everyone's interests. We only make up such a small percentage of people that it's impossible to think that you are going find someone who is 1) gay, 2) interested in you, 3) you're interested in him too, 4) he has the personality you like and vice versa, and 5) sexually you are both compatible. Almost every single one of those guys are seeking muscular, masculine young top men. Which tells me that, in Minneapolis anyways, there are none to be found, otherwise the dozens and dozens of ads wouldn't be on there. Any guy who was black or latino was an escort who wanted money - for you to suck his dick. Just to make sure this wasn't just a Minneapolis thing, I was intrigued and looked at the ads in New York, Los Angeles and Houston - same thing. Except there, over half the guys were black, and all of them were escorts. Well this is depressing. I already knew the selection in Duluth was pretty much next to nothing, but even in the other cities it's just as bad - if not worse. I think I'll stay here. If someone's into me, he can come here.
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59854
2006-05-07 20:43:00
2006-05-08 02:13:45
Another hurdle for now...
I am getting set to finally earn a college degree - the one thing I never thought I'd be able to get, the one thing that I always believed had held me back from ever getting anyplace in life, and now I'm finally getting one. So now that the time is getting closer, how come I'm not getting all excited, why am I not going to the events and living it up? I dunno. It's not the big deal I thought it was going to be, and now I am finding out that when I originally dreamed of having that degree, 8-10 years ago, sure, all you needed was a 4-year degree. Guess what? In 2006, now you need a Masters. Today, you tell people you have a college degree and they are like...so what? I have one too, big deal. For me though, getting this degree - the road to getting it rather - was a big deal. It was about proving to myself that I could come back from some shitty times and get on with my life. Which I have done, slowly. The learning that I have gone through during this time hasn't been in the classroom or on campus, most of it has been building my own confidence and knowing that I will somehow be okay doing whatever I need to do. Probably from the day I started school - preschool - I did not want to be there. The minute I entered the educational system I knew I was different from everyone else, and not in a good way...and I also knew that the other kids were picking up on that. I didn't know I was gay then, but I did know that something about me was different enough where I did not trust the other kids at all in terms of disclosing any information about myself. So began the days where I just said nothing, didn't make waves and got through with no serious problems. It all built up inside after I graduated from Central. I said this experience was so isolating and unhappy that there was no way I would go to college and pay to go through this for another four years. At that point I didn't care about the consequences of missing out on college. I was suffocating from being trapped in a place I didn't want to be. My goals were to make it through high school without committing suicide or dropping out. When those things are on your horizon, you aren't thinking about college. And maybe that was a good thing, because what I needed to do was move away and see how other people lived, see what life was like for those who didn't get a lot of education and find out for myself if this was the kind of life that I wanted. And I needed to do this for a good five years or so before deciding, no, this isn't what I want. I know that I can do something with my life, whether it's helping others or teaching...there has to be a place for me. Even though I didn't know where that was yet, I knew that I had to get my degree to even get my foot in the door. That meant that I was going to have to move back here to go to UMD, so I could live at home and afford to do all this. There was no way I could have afforded life in Minneapolis along with going to the U of M. With no car. Luckily I got to UMD just as they were implementing their online learning programs, and being in psychology, that was the first department they did the trial classes with. My first year at UMD was so uncomfortable that I decided this was a mistake, this felt no different than high school except now I was 8 years older than everyone, so now I really didn't fit in...I pretty much decided this was not going to work. Then I noticed that they were starting to offer web-based classes the following fall semester. I signed up for a full time class load, and did well. Online learning is what kept me interested in UMD - no bullshit, no straight white kids from Minnetonka taking about how many girls they fucked over the weekend or how drunk they got...just me, the computer, and whatever I needed to research and learn on my own. The one thing I learned at UMD was that college has now replaced high school in terms of the expereince. It's just high school that goes up to 16th grade, and you have to pay for it. I had no interest in being a part of that, because I expected more and was disappointed that the viewpoints of the students were so ignorant and just the fact that everyone was white, straight and from the Twin Cities. I felt like I had nothing to gain from sitting there listening to these kids talk about shopping at Ridgedale or how many parties they were going to this weeekend. I didn't act like that at 22. I didn't act like that at 12. I just sat there in disbelief thinking "THESE are the people who will be holding degrees?"...these are the people who will be running businesses and supervising employees? At that point, the significance or social status of having a degree had dropped dramatically for me, because my attitude became, if these kids can earn a college degree, so can any idiot, so what's the importance of having one now besides simply needing one? So this graduation is not as important as I had initially believed it was going to be. Getting my masters degree, yea. But this one, well, it's a necessity, but not something I feel like celebrating either.
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60014
2006-05-08 21:03:00
2006-05-09 02:04:07
Old postcards

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60181
2006-05-12 21:19:00
2006-05-13 02:19:38
This is from another gay guys blog but it was so funny I had to paste it here
Mass Marketing by Lance Arthur (DISCLAIMER: I have nothing interesting to write about. I mean it. Life is mundane. I thought of writing about "things that fall off my body," or maybe "that one shirt I saw but decided not to buy because I wasn't sure if it would go with my tie and I don't want to buy another tie," but really, that's the whole story right there. Oh, sure, I could drag that out into a book if I needed to (meaning: If someone was paying me real cash money to) but this is just a Web site and it's ever-hungry-for-hits. So now, for your reading pleasure, a rehash of a rehash about online dating. Cue music. Lights. Action!) Here I go again. If you want to see the real face of terror, venture into the online datin scene, my friend. Go ahead, pin your hopes on three pictures you took of yourself in a room with bad lighting wearing th t-shirt you've been wearing for three days and sporting a two-day growth of beard in the hopes it makes you look sexier, o more hunky, or something other than unkempt and dirty—and not Xtina Dirrrty, just plain old dirty I don't like online dating, but I have no choice. What are my options, realistically? I could go to a bar, but I'd end up going alone since all my friends here are either coupled or straight, and picking up a guy while your straight, coupled friends egg you on like parents at a kindergarten pageant is about as embarrassing as it gets. Going alone into a gay bar spells Big Fat Loser in which all the letters are capitalized and have lights in them and they blink in time to Cher's bass warbling. Going alone into a gay bar, unless you are Abercrombie & Fitchbait or Mr. Six Pack or Mr. Gotbucks or Mr. Porn-on-a-stick (and, let's face it, if you were any of those you'd never be alone in the first place—at least in my imaginary world which is a lot like TV only with less Jennifer Aniston and more that new Tarzan guy) is an invitation to disaster and depression and way, way, just way too much Sapphire. So, what are our other options? There's the "I have a friend who would be perfect for you!" Unfortunately, through some little quirk of Lance, most of my friends here, the gayest gay city in the land of gaydom, are straight. Go figure. And they tend to want to think that because Person A is gay and Person B is gay that they will be perfect together, so much in common, the dick thing and I've seen Queer Eye and I know you all get along famously and you'll have so much to talk about because you're both gay. Funny thing is, we usually do have a lot to talk about, and it's what a horrible mess this first date is, oh my god you are so not my type, but I also want to emphasize that I don't have a type but if I did you wouldn't be it, no offense, let's have pie! (Because everybody loves pie.) Then there's the joining of an organization that will introduce you to people outside the same fucking circle of friends you see every fucking time at every fucking party and your god knows I love them but, Jesus and Mary and their pet goldfish Jones, I see them at every party. For a while I stopped attending parties altogether because all they did was remind me that everyone had someone else and that I had no one and was unlikely to get anyone, me being me and in that state at that time and hello, therapy! and like that. I would inevitably leave feeling worse than when I came, and I'm fairly certain that the word 'party' never had that definition. But we were talking about the joining of things, were we not? If you have Craig's List in your choice of city, you can find oodles of things to do with other people you've never met. Can I just say that the thought of showing up someplace to do something with someone I've never met terrifies me? I can't even fit it into my reality, the one with the less Aniston and the more shirtlessness. Nope, not there. I mean, there's so many things to do that it could drive one insane. Because it's not only the biking and the cooking and the volleyballing, my friend. No, here in San Francisco they're all creative and shit. It's the naked volleyball barbecue and cat fanciers club. It's the gay and straight bicycle alliance for better square dancing. It's the men who like other men who wear aprons and hairnets while mixing concrete for patios club! I mean, talk about your stereotyping! Okay, so I nixed that, too. Which leaves me with the hottest new trend in failing dot-coms, the online dating services. Which is another term for nightmare. There are a slew of gay-focused dating services, I suppose because when you don't live in a metro area you're apt to be spending a lot of time surfing for porn and chatting up guys on AOL who live miles from you and you can stay hidden and scared and ashamed just like America wants. Unless you're sexless and tasteful and armed with quips and can convince straight men to buy more crap, in which case welcome to Bravo. I chose gay.com not only for it's obvious name but also because at any given moment of the day, at least 400 men in San Francisco are hooked in looking for sex. So, just to be clear, I'm not looking for sex. Rather, I'm not just looking for sex. Me and sex, we're strangers. We see each other on the street and have a nodding acquaintance. I let sex go first in the 10-items-or-less line and sex lets me touch him every month or so. Sex has a great smile but I never think it's meant for me. I mean, he smiles at fucking everyone, so how do I know if that's a smile-smile or a 'hey you're hot and I'm horny, too great tastes that taste great together' smile? Stupid, confounding sex. Anyway, I'd been there before and I know the rules of the game, which are: The ratio of men whom you ask out to the number who will actually respond to your request for coffee: 7 to 1. The number of men you consider better looking than you who will answer any message at all, even "Help me, my hair is on fire and I live at 451 Linden St.!": 0 The likelihood that the results of any search you perform for a match, no matter how detailed, will include pictures of men who only display their dicks: 100% Of the number of men who respond to your request for coffee, the percentage of which will end up on a second date with you: 10% Of that number, the percentage of which you agreed to go on a second date because you were too much of a pussy to say, "No, actually, I find you boring and your pictures were obviously taken when you were in High School or something": 50% Finally, the likelihood that you will actually find someone you like who likes you back and something 'clicks' and you end up in a relationship together: 1% Yes, I figure if I date 100 men, one will turn out to like me like I like him and we like each other enough to actually be able to proclaim "I have a boyfriend." The reasons for this are as numerous as they are obvious. Number One, if you're looking online than all those other opportunities I mentioned previously have been tapped. You're scraping the barrel's... middle. So you're already feeling kind of bad about yourself. You couldn't pick up a guy "in real life" and have to do this, take poorly focused pictures of yourself in the bathroom mirror and lie about your interests in the hopes that someone else will nibble the hook. Suck in your gut perpetually and fluff your porn shots and Photoshop the hell out of your pockmarked, bloaty, weirdly sunburned face so someone, anyone, will notice you from the hundreds of other guys. I mean, the whole thing is horrible, isn't it? The looking and the dating and the turning down and being turned down over and over and over. Even when you realize that everyone goes through this and everyone hates it and everyone does it, it still feels like hell. You want to detach yourself from it until it's over, but if you detach than you're not giving away the "real you" so you may have found an actual catch but you're detached so he doesn't know it and thinks you're some freak and then it's too late, the first impression you left is stuck in his head and he's moved on to bachelor number 43 while you're sitting in a puddle of self-loathing wondering "why didn't he like me?" Not that I've been there. So I'm two weeks into this latest session, but this time I've really taken the plunge and rather than sit around and wait for someone to ask me, I'm doing the asking. And if you think having the power to pick and choose is something special, let me just say that there are those who get picked and those who pick, and never the twain shall meet. Admittedly, some of the guys I wrote to figuring "there's no way he's going to respond," responded. Some. A few. Two. Two of those guys. I've assigned myself a goal, you see. I ask five guys a day out for a first date. The whole "I saw your profile and thought, hey! I saw his profile!" thing, where you're trying to figure out how much of a pathetic and lonely guy are you putting across in as few words as possible. It's entirely evident that, as the pursuer, you're already at a disadvantage. On the other hand, I have to ask myself, "This guy is incredibly handsome. What is he doing on the block? What is wrong with him that he isn't already in a committed relationship, happy go lucky, having his toys played with on a regular basis?" The answer, probably, is that he's not interested in that, he wants more sex with more guys in less time, and online is the easiest, fastest and least personally embarrassing way to get it. Being turned down online is easy to handle. You ask, they never answer. When the same thing happens in a bar (You ask, they don't answer) you feel like a piece of shit. You feel ugly and stupid and useless. They don't even look at you. They don't talk to you. You are nobody, live, and in person. Online, no answer is easy to shrug off by any number of lies you tell yourself. "They didn't get the email! So I wasn't turned down, it's a network problem!" Or, "It's that picture of me from the left. That's my bad side! I'll change it on the next round!" Or, "He hasn't updated his profile in two days. He probably met someone. Yeah, that's it." Rejection in absentia has many advantages, for both parties, and it's so much easier to move onto the next profile than to try and gather one's courage in a bar having been totally snubbed in the open like that and try again three stools down. So far, I have gone on exactly one date. I've been corresponding with, like, seven guys but someone always cancels out. It also takes a hell of a lot of negotiating to get anywhere. "Do you like coffee?" "Caffeine gives me a headache." "Wine, then?" "I'm in AA." "Dinner?" "Where?" "I'm in Hayes Valley." "I'm in San Leandro." "I don't own a car." "I work until 8." "I own a cat." "I'm allergic." "Well, this was fun!" "You're not my type." "Buh bye!" "Loser." Someone take me out of this, please? Someone come up with a pill or something, an inflatable boyfriend who can carry on a conversation and has a sense of humor about himself and looks good in jeans or a suit and understands the vital need of $200 dinner bills and really dark glasses of Cabernet and movies in foreign languages and sitting at tables outside in the cold night air for hours making fun of everyone who walks by. That's all I ask. Sex is purely optional. Until the third date. When the toys come out. Postscript: Confidential to C - I still make that face. I think it's endearing. I am trying to tremble less. Or less obviously. Post-postscript: Confidential To E - Me neither, but then I'm hardly qualified. Just ask C.
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60444
2006-05-13 18:06:00
2006-05-13 23:46:13
Another day of rain, rain, rain
It has rained here now since Monday. Right now it's the "brightest" it's been since then, but it's basically been raining, foggy, cold and unbearably depressing because we had been teased with this gorgeous weather during April, I got outside and got my basketball game on, I was up and running almost all the time, in addition to my working out...I had nonstop energy and I was feeling good. One of the problems with the winter here is that, at night, it's easy to sit and brood over whatever is easy to feel down about. Last night was one of those nights. Some people with depression have definitive patterns of bad days - or bad times of the week. For me, it's Friday night through the weekend, because things slow down, there aren't as many people out and about, you see more couples and families together, and if you don't have enough to do you can end up spiriling downward fast. However, these feelings are temporary, and often times the next day I feel a lot better. Like last night, for example. I read that story (yesterday's post) and I laughed, at first, because the story was funny and it was something that I could relate to. But then I read it again and I began analyzing a few things - if this guy is having such bad luck in San Francisco, then what does that mean for me, here? I thought a lot about that, I thought about this whole experience being gay and how, after all these years being out, I still don't really know who I am or what I want, and the hardest part is that there is nobody out there to explore life with, even if I did know what I wanted. I've had the opportunity to visit my cousins in Arizona, where my mom left for today for two weeks to see my aunt. She usually goes for a couple weeks twice a year and has a great time. The weather in Phoenix is great and nothing like it is here; you'd think that I would love to go. But I don't feel like going, and I don't feel like traveling anywhere right now either. I haven't been on a real trip now for years. And I think I know why. My cousins have never had a problem with my being gay, most of them are busy with their own lives by now...but for me (and this is what my parents don't understand) - the fact that I have had no boyfriend now since 1996 is humiliating. I hate being the only adult there who shows up alone. I hate going to dinner and feeling like a 5th wheel, and at the same time, these looks of pity from these people who don't know what else to say. I am good at steering conversations, and at times, had it not been for me being there, I don't know if they'd have anything to talk about. But I'm tired of it being jackie and Tom, Erik and Teresa, Christine and Patrick, oh and Jon - alone. That's basically how it's always been. They don't see the problem, and I know they accept me for who I am, but for once I want to show up with someone I love, someone I am proud to be with, and someone who is proud to be with me. I don't think they grasp how hard it is to be the only person who is alone among this sea of couples and couples with kids. And I don't expect them to understand because this isn't their reality. Being gay and being straight come with two completely different realities - with straight people, it's assumed that men and women have their assigned roles (usually), the relationship develops, things go however they go, and if doesn't work, then someone else will come along. If you're gay, the thing is, there are no rules. There is no father-in-law to fear if you up and leave someone. There are no kids that serve as an incentive to stay together. People ask straight friends after a year, "So how are you and so-and-so doing" - with gay couples, they ask if you are still together. Usually both families secretly wish their gay kids remained single, because that way it puts them out of the spotlight and saves them from a lot of uncomfortable situations and discussions. I don't mind showing up alone because I've always prided myself in being different and unique - but at times, it's so damn difficult to feel okay about always feeling SO different. And that is what this is like. You are so different from everyone else, because as a gay person, everything about you goes against all the things that society expects from young adults - being in a couple (opposite sex, of course), having kids, having a career path in place by a certain age, just all these things that are not my reality and have never been...I feel as if I wouldn't have much to contribute to a conversation with people like that. When I met Jeff, I temporarily got to feel like I was part of a couple that was headed for good things, that believed in the same things, and I finally understood what other people were talking about. Which was great, until it ended and I never found anyone again. The feelings are hard to describe because no matter how I describe it, I end up sounding crazy, desperate, pitiful and sad. But I guess I ask of people, how would you respond? How would you, at 31, alone for 10 years, deal with this after trying so hard to connect with other people, tried every way possible to get involved with things you like to do, get in school, work out, place personal ads, get on the computer, move four times to cities where there are a lot of gay people; only to have nothing happen? The truth is, you don't know what you'd do either. There is no consolation in "well, you did what you could." And that's where I am stuck. This life doesn't come with a guidebook, nor does it come with any mentors because the other people in the gay community tend to be dealing with the same thing I am, and we are of little help for each other because he doesn't have the answers either. We're talking about human connection, attraction, real emotions and feelings - something that gay men have been taught to shut off very early in adolescence - leaving many of us stuck at 14 emotionally with no skills on how to date, be honest or even ask someone out because we missed out on the skills we needed to be able to do these things. Likewise, we are men - and men, whether they are gay or not, have physical preferences for who they desire to be with. For straight men, unless there is some major obstacle like a 30 year age difference, usually they can find a woman who they are interested in, attracted to and are confident enough to ask out and it works. For us, the window of selection is so small that there's just not enough gay guys - in any city - to match our interests and desires. Too often the stereotypical queen prevails, and the young, healthy, strong guys are very few and far between. Since there is not much demand for 50-year-old overweight smokers, what happens is there is a never-ending supply of these kinds of men in the gay community, and hardly anyone young, nonsmoking, attractive, confident or masculine. The end result is that we have a community that doesn't want much to do with each other because we are all waiting for this latter guy to magically show up in our lives, want us exclusively, and we all tip toe off into the happy sunset. Unfortunately, as I am finding out, this almost never happens. I see men on gay.com who are 48-58 who have been out for many years, and haven't found anyone either. What depressed me last night was....I thought, why do I think things will be different for me? These guys apparently thought they would find someone too, and they still didn't find anything. After that awful day on September 12, 1996 I had my parents by my side convincing me that things would get better and I would meet someone again. Then a couple years after that I got discouraged because nothing was happening. Now in 2006, I guess I have nothing to say besides this just isn't fair. And there really isn't someone for everyone. Not when your options make up a whopping 2% of the population. There's just not enough of us to match up with each other - realistically - where we would be happy together and interested in staying together. There needs to be more to match us up besides the fact that both of us are gay. The other thing that bummed me out was, I crafted the perfect personal ad in the local alternative paper because it's the only place where you can respond to personals by mail, and I figured that a lot of people hate leaving those messages on the new 900 numbers that the mainstream paper runs their personals from. So I described the qualities I needed in a potential date or mate: someone young, who didn't smoke, who liked to exercise, who didn't live at the bars, someone who would be willing to pursue a serious relationship if it led to that...basically I wrote the ad using positives instead of negatives, I wanted to make it clear what I was looking for without being rude. A month later, all I got were two replies: one was 52 and in the process of getting a divorce, he sent me a nude photo that was hideous, and he was pretty much all the things that I had no interest in at all. Through the paper shredder it went. The next reply came from a 49-year-old who was here in a drug treatment program getting off of heroin and IV drugs, he was a smoker, and has permanent liver damage from his drug use so he lives on Social Security. Again, I threw the letter out. So, for all that work I put forth to create an ad that would speak to the guys I was trying to meet, that's what I got. The exact, polar opposite of what I was seeking. Who the fuck do these two guys think they are? When someone says, I'm seeking these qualities in someone - if that's not you, then don't fucking respond to the ad. It's rude, you're wasting my time and your time, and I guess for me it's just upsetting that, out of what, 110,000 people in Duluth/Superior, I ended up with two responses that were pretty much everything I didn't want.
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60700
2006-05-18 19:24:00
2006-05-19 00:25:56
From Max's blog - porn. My response follows...
This is from the blog of a man who I really love to read about...I admire him for his honesty and how real he is with his feelings. Read this entry. I read it three times. I will post my own response and feelings next. PORN by Max Gordon Sapience Magazine April 2006 Porn is in my life again. Sometimes when I look at porn, I can’t stop. I walk away eventually – but usually hours, or most of an entire day, have gone by. On occasion, I’ve forgotten what time or what day of the week it was, missed appointments or gone to bed at dawn because of porn. I always tell myself that I’m only going to watch it for a few minutes - as I’m leaving for work, after I finish dinner, right before bed. Three hours later, four or five or six hours later, I’m still sitting there, staring at the screen, wondering where the time went. I’ve lost years like that. I’d had several months away from porn this last time. Then I just got up one morning last week, walked over to the computer and went to a porn site. I was disappointed in myself for failing yet again, but I felt excited too. I’d missed my porn. When I downloaded the first image and felt the familiar rush, the release of tension it was like I hadn’t been away at all. All my favorite sites were still there, beckoning. No matter how much porn had been added to the site since I’d last visited, the experience was exactly the same. It’s like porn knows I’ll always come back eventually, and waits for me. I’m always trying to “stop looking at porn.” Perhaps a little porn never hurt anybody, but I’ve never looked at a little porn in my life. If I am honest, I will admit that sometimes I want to look at porn all day and do nothing else. You can never run out of porn. No matter how much you look at, there is always more porn. I’ve spent a lot of money on porn. The thing about porn is that pornographic images get old fast and you constantly crave fresh ones. I’d buy tapes and get bored with those and buy new ones to replaces the old. After the tapes started stacking up, I decided one day, I could no longer keep porn in the house. I went to the booths in porno theaters where I dropped token after token, and watched people having sex for a few seconds before the screen went blank. All the money I spent! Amounts of money I would never have squandered anywhere else; but with porn it is possible to spend thousands without even realizing it - one dollar at a time. Then there was my phone-sex phase - 3.99 per minute. I was lured by advertising that told me I was getting a great deal because the first minute of phone sex was free (of course, it took most of my free minute to get past the automated prompt and reach an actual human being). I learned that year how fast minutes go by. When the phone bill came and my lover saw it, I was ashamed, then outraged that I had to pay all that money. I vowed never to call those lines again. And then I discovered porn on the internet. This morning I got up early, to give myself a little extra porn time. Since I am only recently back to looking at porn after a break, I am encouraged by the fact that I am able to walk away after fifteen minutes. I feel like a regular person, someone who can take porn or leave it. But when my partner gets in the shower, I want to go back on the computer again. It’s starting – the secretive behavior, the nervousness of being caught or interrupted before I can find the exact porn I want to download this morning. When he leaves the house, I shut the door, close the blinds. I’m familiar with secrets. Porn is perfect for gay people like me. Having grown up with shame, we are already use to hiding. Straight people get to have romantic movies, Hallmark cards, fantasies that aren’t pornographic, but often for gay people there is nothing else. It’s a porn reflection or nothing at all. Some people would prefer it if homosexuals expressed themselves only in porn’s moldy and private crevices where no one can see us and we can’t see each other. Evidently, I agree with them, which is why I’m sitting in the dark holding my penis and staring at a computer screen. I will not tell anyone close to me that I’ve started looking at porn again because I’m too ashamed. (what I can’t talk about is the lady whose house my father and I used to visit, the one with the nice cookies, I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone we went there, I was supposed to sit there and play quietly, I was four, it got dark outside, I couldn’t reach the door handle so I knocked and said isn’t it time to go home daddy mommy is waiting) ii Porn is like candy. One day as a kid when my mother denied me a candy bar in a store, I remember thinking: I’m going to be rich when I grow up and buy all the candy in the world, and I’ll eat candy all day and nobody is going to stop me. I’m a man now, so I buy my own candy and my own porn. I don’t hide porn under the mattress or in the back of the closet, as I did when I was fifteen, praying that it wouldn’t be discovered. Now, I have as much porn as I want, whenever I want. (what I can’t tell anyone about is being ten years old, sneaking downstairs to watch TV with the sound turned down until I found a movie with nudity. Or trying to watch the Playboy channel through the wavy lines used to block out non-subscribers. A couple was having sex. I could only just make out their bodies, so I pressed my face against the television and licked the screen where the lady’s breasts were. I pretended to French kiss the man and felt red and blue prickly dots on my tongue, a tangy, electric feeling. I went to bed humiliated because there was no one to talk about what I was feeling, to ask where my desire to kiss another man had come from.) I’ve looked at so much porn over the years, I’ve done myself permanent harm; I believe I’ve changed my brain chemistry. And the internet has only made it worse; now it is no longer required to go the porn store late at night to get your porn; no more pacing the aisles under fluorescent lights, waiting until that moment of truth when you slide your purchase across the counter, avoiding eye-contact with the man who has the same practiced dispassionate look as a pharmacist or priest, who has also learned to make his face bland and pretends not to care that you like porn with grannies, bondage, enemas, feet, midgets, fisting, men in military gear, cops, firefighters, piss, people having sex with food, people having sex outdoors, people who don’t know they are being watched as they undress in locker-rooms and department stores, people who are fucked by machines, people in prison, women who are menstruating, women dressed as schoolgirls, pregnant women, women who are lactating, women with shaved vaginas, piercing, transsexuals, obesity, nuns, incest, anal sex, shit, slaves, torture, “twinks” and “barely legal” (children), fratboys, simulated rape, “crack whores” and “trailer trash”, wrestlers, orgies, celebrities, sex with animals or with people who look dead. Now, no one has to know what you are “into” anymore, no one sees your face on the other side of the magazine, the videotape, DVD, the download. And the images on the screen come so quickly these days, anyone who owns a cell-phone camera can make porn, so there are thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions of images, catalogued by fetish for your convenience. I sit there, clicking away, knowing that if even it were possible to look at them at all, within minutes there would be hundreds, thousands more. I am absolutely powerless over porn. iii It is only a few hours before I have to wake up for work and in the morning I’ll have a porn hangover. A porn hangover is like a regular hangover only it’s harder to detect because it is psychological. It’s a curmudgeonly, foul mood that clouds everything and is usually relieved only by looking at more porn. Last night I said I was going to bed at one o’clock, then it was one-thirty, then two. It was two-thirty and I was still looking at porn - just one last movie preview, one last “profile” of someone else cruising online for sex, one last advertisement for hustlers, one more naked “bear” or “daddy”. When I have a porn hangover, I’m edgy and close to raging or tears at any moment. Yesterday, I could have torn a desk apart with my bare hands because the computer froze, and I lost an amazing site with free porn. I feel like jumping out of the window when something goes wrong with my wireless service, which means I have to use dial-up to get my porn. With dial-up, every image takes five times as long as usual to download, unfolding gradually before me at a snail’s pace as I sit there, grinding my teeth, rocking back and forth waiting, waiting. Actually, wireless and cable aren’t fast enough either. I want the image to be there the second I click on it, the second before I clicked on it. When one image doesn’t satisfy or is spent, it’s only seconds before I’m searching for the next. On my lunch break at work, I might go into a porn store, or even a “regular” bookstore and go to the adult magazine section. I don’t look for too long, and the magazines there aren’t really satisfying. I just need a little porn snack to get me through the day and ease the pressure: an ass here, a cock there, something to nibble on until I can indulge fully later on tonight. I’m superstitious about porn, now that I’ve been looking at it again for a few days, I have to have it in the morning to start my day right, like coffee. Sometimes I think I love it more than anything else, even food. If I get up late, and there’s only a little time to eat, I’ll have porn for breakfast. When I come home from work, I turn on the computer before I take off my suit or check for phone messages because there is another site I found last night that is showing free clips and I don’t want to miss anything good. (I remember the temp job I had in 1995; the woman I replaced had been caught downloading porn at her desk - a co-worker told me everything. It was only soft porn, she pleaded, as they escorted her out of there crying and clutching her purse, a joke her friend sent her, and she maintained to the bitter end that she always minimized her screen whenever anyone was coming. I tried to imagine this woman’s surprise, when the boss who needed a correction on a letter, came up to her desk, and this woman, while looking for the letter, accidentally maximized the wrong window. They both stood there, mouths agape, staring at an image of a man’s ass with a dildo in it.) iv Things begin to unravel in my life when I look at too much porn. I don’t know exactly how it happens, but it has started already after only a few days: little things. I can’t find my keys. I go into a room and can’t remember why I went in there in the first place. I show up late for work. I drop things. I feel fogged in. I don’t want to leave the house unless I absolutely have to. I have to drag myself to the shower. I may not shave on the weekend or I’ll stay in the same robe or pajamas. If someone I live with starts to confront me about how much time I’m on the computer, I’m instantly savage. “I’ll be off in just a second,” I say, my voice friendly-sweet, but with a “mind your own fucking business” edge underneath. That’s why it’s better just to look at porn when everyone has gone to bed or behind a locked door. My friend Will describes his porn habit as a process where he gets smaller and smaller until no one understands him anymore but his porn, and he feels tiny enough to crawl into the screen. “I never open the blinds or windows when I’m watching porn. Usually you can tell if I’m watching too much because all my plants start dying.” If you don’t live alone, you may have to hide your stash under your mattress or in a special place in the closet where your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife doesn’t look. Porn sometimes means keeping secret files on your computer, delete your links to websites so no one can find them. For some, porn can mean having your computer confiscated at work and handed over to the police, being on the local news, being lowered into the back of a squad car, going to jail or prison. Everybody looks at porn these days – doctors, nurses, church people, teachers, politicians, daddies, mommies, grandparents, even young kids. I try to shame myself into stopping by imagining how pathetic I would look if anyone I knew saw me, or if my porn could see me from the other side of the screen. Here he is, this poor desperate guy, sitting in the dark in front of a box of wires, images illuminated from the screen onto his concentrating face, sitting with his pants around his ankles, again. He thinks he’s having some kind of experience with the people he’s watching but there is really no one here but him; the people in the movie he’s watching will never know he’s there; he was never really touched or included. Then he has the audacity to be jealous of them, angry that they are having better sex than he is. How could they not be? They are fucking twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every time he pays for it, every time he presses a button, available, dependable. People sometimes leave you, but porn is always right there. (once during a porn binge which lasted for weeks, I stayed home from work because I had the “flu”. I was in the house alone, my partner was traveling. I opened e-mails, checked voice messages on the answering machine, but I didn’t call or talk to anyone. I watched porn, “real” movies, and more porn. With the exception of the delivery guys who brought my Chinese food and pizza, the only faces I’d seen were the hundreds and thousands on my computer and TV screen. After one exhausting porn session after another, I realized finally that I hadn’t had an actual conversation with a living human being in more than three days.) Friends call but I let the machine pick it up. I’ll get it later. When later comes and I’m still looking at porn, I decide to call them tomorrow. When tomorrow comes and another evening is spent indulging porn, I decide I’ll get in touch with them this weekend. My partner kisses me goodnight and with my eyes closed, I see porn highlights from the day: the four greasy mechanics having sex on top of the racecar; the shemale who put a lit candle inside a man’s anus and then tilted the wax onto his testicles; a woman masturbating with one hand while holding her false leg with the other; the three men and one woman rolling around in mud with plastic pig snouts on their faces. The internet has made it possible, with a click of a button, to see things I’ve never dreamed human beings could do to each other. In fact, I’ve probably seen almost everything except two people who are genuinely affectionate with each other, a couple who don’t mind if the man loses his erection, or if the woman orgasms first. Two men who caress each others’ faces and hold each other before one goes down on the other. People who look as if they want love, like me. My partner and I are making love now and I’m a little bored. I’ve had a steady diet of porn for two weeks now, and I feel like I need “something else” to spice up our sex. When I get like this, I’m antsy, itchy, unsatisfied - so I blame him. I feel I have the right to turn him into porn because he’s naked, he’s in bed and he’s my partner. I break him down into parts, a foot here, a nose there, the sex becomes Picasso-scrambled, I’m grabbing handfuls and giving orders: turn this way, no, that way, yeah, I said that way, yes, let me see your ass. Sometimes I listen to myself and I sound like I’m in a porn movie, “Yeah, man, that’s it, yeah, suck it man, yeah, you bitch.” When I talk to him like this, after I orgasm I usually don’t want to look at his face. v I probably owe a debt to porn. What else in our culture has the power to cut through our puritanical ideas about sex, the silence that prevents meaningful sexual conversation? For those who would have us ban all sexual images, play on our sexual fear and put sex back in the closet, give me some raunchy porn any day. Besides, what harm did they really do, the Playboy magazines I discovered in our basement? One can’t say I was exposed to them, exactly; I was the one who surreptitiously opened the boxes of papers kept there and dug them free; by then they were pretty much covered with mildew and rot. There wasn’t much to see; a heavy magazine, fat with too many pages of text and ads for cars or liquor, with the occasional interruption of a honey-glowed woman, her round breasts reflecting light like shiny Christmas bulbs near a crackling fire, a gift for any man under the tree - kitten-playful and naughty, as white sheets tumbled down her body and collected near her vagina like fresh milk poured into her lap. The National Geographic magazines I found were not erotic in the same way. Naked black women are taken for granted (I don’t recall any naked white women in National Geographic. Maybe it was too cold where they were). Dust-covered brown mammaries, or black men holding spears and wearing nothing but ceremonial face paint and a smile were still sexy to me because they were pictures of “naked people”, but those breasts weren’t being served up for the reader’s delectation like the ones in Playboy. Besides, you didn’t get that charge that comes from looking at something forbidden and wrong. National Geographic sits on the coffee table and the doctor’s office; nothing makes prurient sex more boring than the absence of shame, thus eliminating the need to peek. Those people didn’t look as if they felt they had anything to hide, and if you aren’t hiding something then it isn’t sex. (I’ve always believed that if the Religious Right really wanted to kill the rebellious curiosity that they think attracts some young people to homosexuality, all they would need to do is fiercely encourage gay acceptance everywhere, endorse same-sex marriages and invite gay couples to join their churches, their bridge games, their Rotary clubs, encourage us to wear sensible shoes, attend all-you-can-eat buffets on Sundays and be in bed by ten o’clock reading Reader’s Digest to each other: homosexuality would become just as boring and mundane as most everything else, so that young people, except the incurably afflicted, would run from it in droves.) Even though I did have some conscious parenting around sexuality as a child, if I hadn’t rented the bisexual movie from my local video store my last year in high school, how would I have known what two men did in bed? No one was actually in bed in that movie – a female coach walks into the male locker room and discovers two jocks whipping each other with their towels, having just emerged from the shower. Enraged at their lack of discipline, she decides to humiliate them by forcing one jock to sodomize the other while she stands there fully dressed with her clipboard and supervises. It wasn’t exactly Romeo and Juliet, but I got the idea. Sometimes porn confused me: if two men had their penis in a woman’s vagina at the same time, didn’t that mean that their penises were technically touching? The box the porn came in (which belonged to Robbie’s older brother and that we watched at his house when his parents weren’t home) made it clear the tape was for “straight” people but didn’t the penis to penis contact make them gay, or at least bisexual? Our school nurse definitely wasn’t going to answer that question. Porn taught me what gay men looked like (not me), which men were attractive (not me), as I flipped through page after page of men with handlebar mustaches, men with toolbelts around their waists, men with blonde hair, blue eyes, men with athletic grins and masculine grips around their penises, macho daddies with perfect bodies whose inviting smiles and hard jaws hinted at violence and promises of nights of sweet brutality as they violated you until dawn, and then gently kissed away the hurt they’d caused. Black men gleamed off the page as if drenched in a sugar glaze; sweating, sexual gorillas with erect penises so fat they promised internal damage if you dared to straddle one. A man with red hair, boyish, glanced over his shoulder with a manic look of desire and need – his buttocks were open and his anus suggested a portal – like the “point of no return” entrance to an amusement park ride. The caption read, “I need someone to fill this hole.” I looked for these fantasy men when I went to the bars and never found them, but instead noticed a very friendly man staring at me from the other side of the bar who looked like my drivers’ ed teacher in 11th grade. On the dance floor, two gay men pranced from one corner of the bar to the other, giggling, slapping at each other with drunken sassiness, enjoying the freedom that the bar provided for two men to be “girls” together, to sissy-out. I definitely didn’t see sissies in porn. The disappointment that nobody looked like the porn I had at home (at least nobody I was ever going to get my hands on without having to pay first), made me only want to go back home to my movies, made me crave more porn. There was one guy I did want to speak with but I didn’t have the courage, so I left. My fantasies, as precarious as they may have been, were at least familiar and didn’t have the power to reject me. Porn also encouraged fantasies of exotic far-away lands where gay men ruled (San Francisco) and engaged in non-stop sex as they genuflected before glory holes, navigating their way through parks and steamed-up bathhouses. When I finally went to San Francisco for the first time and arrived at Castro Street in 1992, I was devastated - it wasn’t what I’d envisioned at all. How could it have been? I’d imagined a place where disco classics played until morning, men dressed in leather or feather boas greeted you like personal tour guides, and drag queens moved through the streets on floats basking in the adulation of roaring crowds – a 24-hour gay high school pep rally. It feels scary to criticize porn; like betraying a friend. There is always the danger of sounding sexophobic, reactionary, and worst of all, unhip. I’m not against people making love or even having sex on screen, I’m not against raunchy talk, and I’ve even been spanked once or twice – problematic given my history, but to each his or her own. It’s not the random sex, or anonymous sex either, or the stranger sex. But maybe if there were a way to regulate porn, to protect the people who appear in it, to have stricter guidelines for who has access to it. I don’t know how to describe this pain around porn, the frenzy that porn creates for me. I’ve lived with it for so long in one way or another, I don’t even know what it is like to live without it, to envision sex without it. Sometimes I feel trapped, as if I’ll never be able to shake the pornographic gaze, or see anyone, including myself, outside it. I am addicted to porn. vi Porn is the only thing that can fully distract me and help me forget what happened last week. I had a very painful fight with a close friend and we are not speaking to each other at the moment. Something also happened in my immediate family and I’m angry about that, and work, is, well, work. I’m feeling cynical about the world at the moment, (fuck “people who need people”) and I don’t want to deal with any human being at the moment that I can’t download, erase, slide over with my mouse, rewind, fast forward or turn off their sound when I want them to shut the hell up; people I can make disappear with the click of a button when I am exhausted and want to be left alone. I can’t really afford to lose any friendships at the moment (who can?), and it feels horrible to think I failed at a relationship again. Sometimes I think that if I ever started to deal with the grief I feel, I’d start crying and not be able to stop. Whenever life feels intolerable, I know I can masturbate and look at porn. (what I can’t talk about is how disconnected I feel so much of the time, how enraged I feel at work, at life, how I paid almost five dollars for a cup of coffee the other day and the man behind the counter, who probably doesn’t care about his job, as I often don’t care about mine, who knows he’s just another worker in this stupid coffee chain that’s devouring the city, didn’t fill the cup to the top, and I wanted the rest of my coffee because nobody asks for less money when they don’t fill your coffee up to the top, people just snatch your money and then look at you like you are crazy when you say, I’d like you to put more coffee in this please because I paid for it. You’re just supposed to take whatever it is that you get and not complain, but I’m swallowing so much shit I can hardly breathe these days. I just want to go home and look at some porn because I know it will relax me. I don’t how it works, but it does, and then I won’t to have to feel any of this) It’s an old pattern, porn and masturbation. And it has happened again; I’ve masturbated so much this week that my penis is starting to scab over slightly. Now I’m masturbating in the shower, before bed, several times throughout the day. As a teenager, I taught myself a little trick to cope with emotional trauma - I could masturbate pain away and a few minutes later leave for school or a party as if nothing had happened. I wish I could go back sometimes and masturbate the way I did when I first discovered it, when it felt like really making love with myself, when there was at least a sense of discovery. I would turn myself around in the mirror at twelve, thirteen, fourteen and marvel at my developing body, curious about the man I was becoming. But over the years, masturbation, and most specifically masturbation to porn, has become something else: my own built in drug fix – my heroin, only I don’t even need a dealer, I just reach down below my waist. I’ve masturbated until I’ve bled, or at least until my penis was sore enough that when I put on my underwear in the morning I winced. I’ve masturbated like autistic kids who slam their heads against walls, or compulsives who get a feeling of safety from repeated hand washing or saying the same word over and over again. Porn is like a lullaby, a patting, a gentle goodnight kiss on the forehead. Porn is magical-thinking. Somewhere in my mind exists the thought that perhaps if I find and look at the right porn I rewrite my history. If I can watch the right couple having sex maybe my parents didn’t fight all that much, or if, mirror, mirror on the wall, I can find the most perfect penis of them all, I won’t have to deal with the shame I felt as a gay child being attracted to other boys, of thinking I was flawed and not good enough - the isolation and terror of feeling so alone. I stand looking in the mirror now, a man in my thirties, still comparing myself to porn. I’ve compared myself to porn from every angle, and felt too fat, too black, too hairy, or too whatever. I’ve stared at my penis, my buttocks, and wondered if I am big enough, bubble enough to be attractive? I’ve smelled under my armpits, fogged up the mirror to check my breath. I’m the perfect consumer, constantly insecure about the way I look, ashamed, always willing to buy the new cologne, face cream, sunglasses, diet product to improve it, whatever it is that needs improving, or when it can’t be improved, for God’s sake, covering it up so that no one sees it. That’s why I like porn so much. No one stinks in porn, you don’t have to smell anyone’s shit, or unwashed body, or sweat or bad breath. There’s no lube that gets all over the sheets, no messy condoms. No one accidentally farts in porn, unless you’re specifically “into” farts. Nobody cries after an orgasm in porn. No one finds they can’t perform halfway through and loses their erection, no one is ever exhausted. Porn is perfect - there are no awkward moments during sex, and you don’t have to wait for the “good part”, it’s all good parts! That’s what film editors and fast forward buttons are for. vii Race is important in porn. Asian women squeal in porn; they make little squeaking noises and yelps like a puppy having its claws pulled out or fingers scraped against the side of a wet balloon. On screen it looks like rape because of the grimaces on their faces, the pleading wails of lost innocence and the almost regal, ceremonial “baring it.” Asian women don’t cry for help in porn, they don’t moan with pleasure, and their black marble eyes don’t reflect anything. They weep and endure; their degradation hovers just outside their bodies where male imagination and fantasy exists; Japanese samurai honeymoon, Saigon brothel, Chinese open-market baby girl slave; mouth open, clown eyes bugged wide, painted on blush, red smile, vibrating devouring lips. Asian women are plastic sex dolls come alive in porn, Pygmalion grunge fantasies, and in porn white, black, and Asian men tear them to pieces. A white man and a black woman are having sex in porn. I try to provide a subtext for who they are, how these two people have found each other for sex. I imagine they are colleagues on a business trip, I decide that she is his boss. In his room to discuss an important business presentation, she spills wine on her blouse. When she has to take it off to remove the stain, their lovemaking begins. I know, of course, that given the people I am actually watching on the screen, a more believable porn scenario might take place in the land of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings. The “reality” of the exchange between this black woman and white man is so impenetrable, dictated as it is by American race relations, I can’t even free-associate with it; my fantasy is a little too fantastic. The black woman I’m watching is wearing a skewed blonde wig with enormous bangs, it hangs over her head like an umbrella as she trembles underneath it. I think she is a teenager. The implication of her costume and the way she licks her lips is clear: she is a sex worker, drugged or on drugs, a woman that nobody will miss if she happens to disappear, no family, no community, a woman who exists solely for his sexual enticement, as he slides his American Express card through her various slots. He could be “John” or “Tom” or “Mike”, he could be married or not, have kids or not; his whiteness gives him a context and make him vivid; we can only envision her through his pornographic view. In another scene, a white man and black woman have sex in the cabana of a ritzy house. Porn makes it clear she doesn’t own this house. This black woman is the maid or nanny and that white man’s wife has gone out shopping and he is having a little afternoon poontang by the pool. Black gay men in porn have often been a source of derision – friends of mine have laughed as we have compared in an intimate moment the porn we’ve watched and the black gay men we see there, tacky, lanky with straightened hair, do-ragged, jerry-curl dripping (almost two decades after the Eighties!), corny, country brothers – and the ones we never see in porn: us. It’s not that black men like this don’t exist, it’s that they seem to be the only ones who exist in gay porn. A friend exclaims, “Where do they get these men?” Is it that for those who want to see black gay men in porn, they are only interested in the “street hustler” look? Where is the”professional” black gay porn, Wall Street executives, college professors, doctors? Working class men who load trucks or drive cabs, men with an air of aloof honor? The black men in gay porn often look emaciated, hungry, desperate, as if they have been promised their porn fees in drugs or sandwiches. It feels deliberate somehow, this attempt to focus only on black men who look, regardless of their off-screen reality, as if they are broke and broke down, like a racist fantasy of busted field-hands who, having picked all the cotton by sundown, are now picking at each other for the camera. The focus on black male and female wretchedness, to the exclusion of any other kinds of images, feels sinister and deliberate in these films and keeps us enslaved in sexual representations of victimization Even our fantasy selves are sanctioned. Interracial gay sex between black and white men in porn usually falls into two categories; Master Harold and the Boys, or the sole “white boy” who, having stepped into the wrong locker-room minutes after winning the away-game against the high school from the wrong side of the tracks, finds himself gang-raped by their all-black basketball team and loves it. (Porn for masochist white men who think that being beaten up by a black man is some kind of reparation for slavery, or a tribute to the power of black masculinity. The black man may be holding the whip this time, but he’s just as enslaved as ever; still defined by his flesh, weighed by the ounce, having traveled in the racist imagination only from savage monster to glorious beast). There are few images of white and black men together suggesting a relationship of balanced power or social equality. Black men and white women have an abundance of sex in porn; African slaves raping Miss Anns. Sometimes a white man watches them in the background. There is something so shocking about this, it rocks the foundation of every American institution, challenges the purity of white womanhood and the constant threat to it of black male menace. The porn makers know this and also how to exploit this fear deliciously. (Don’t think I haven’t fantasized about tying a raging white supremacist to a chair and forcing him to watch one interracial couple having sex after another as he froths and squirms; but in the end I have dismissed the thought when it occurred to me that he was probably already watching this porn in the privacy of his own home.) Bob Jones University may still frown on miscegenation, but online you can visit porn sites where white women and black men are greedily getting it on, sometimes even four black men to one white woman. A site I discovered was even named for what might have been inspired by at least one white mother’s consternation at the news of her daughter’s sexual exploits: (Oh My God) “My Daughter’s Fuckin’ a Nigga!” To mitigate the offensiveness of it all, one might decide these white women are just trash anyway and therefore who they sleep with doesn’t matter; they are “ugly”, poor, addicted, pockmarked, ravaged, and turned out, and really can’t get anyone else, so technically it is not really their fault. But then all of a sudden a “real” white woman pops up on the screen, a true-blue Sally Sue with natural blonde hair (no black roots), Teutonic and blue eyed, a white woman who might have come from a “good home” once - not plucked from the pornographers’ discard pile, a woman who looks as if she might have had some money in her life or have come from money once. To the white supremacist, she may be, in fact, the most offensive of all women in porn; a white woman who, at least within the film’s imaginary context, isn’t being raped by a nigger, or craving black dick because of temporary insanity, but who chooses black men because she is genuinely attracted to them, prefers them to white men, and because she believes they are superior, or, far worse, her equal. The woman who has her hands tied behind her back is an actress. Someone has placed clothpins on her breasts and vagina and she writhes as an off screen hand holds her neck on the preview for a bondage site. But those are fake tears, that is fake rope, those clothes pins don’t really hurt, and if they do, she is enjoying it, and if she isn’t, then at least she agreed to it and if she didn’t completely agree to it then at least she’s getting paid. She tilts her face or has it tilted for her when someone ejaculates on her face, but something is wrong with her eyes; her head nods when it isn’t lifted. Because porn is created in an imaginary out-there land, I don’t know who these people are that I’m watching or where they come from. Am I looking at someone who will die of an overdose, or is already dead? As there is an increasing number of internet sites devoted to finding missing children, women and men around the country, people who were on their way to work, or were supposed to meet friends or family and just didn’t show up, people of all races, sexes and ages who just “disappear” in America every year, I wonder if the person I’m looking at is also someone being looked for by someone else. If you listen carefully enough, their psychic screams can be heard through the screen, between the moans of pleasure, but I’m numb at this point, high on porn, and I can’t hear them. My porn hangover will be particularly intense this morning and I’ve probably ruined my day. I will walk away and I do not feel any responsibility for their horror, because I’m not a porn-maker. But porn-makers make porn for porn-watchers. A friend and I discuss the number of crime shows on television – as she clicked from channel to channel in her hotel the other night, she watched women in body bags, on autopsy tables, outlined in chalk, running from killers, being felled by killers, screaming for help, begging for their lives. Some shows were based on real cases, others were dramas, and some were dramas based on real cases. “I counted and watched five women in a half-hour period being murdered in sadistic ways. If you just came here from another planet,” she observed, “and watched television in this country, you would think that our favorite pastime was the killing of women.” Mothers, sisters and daughters don’t exist in porn. Men don’t imagine their girlfriends or wives raped by intruders on their favorite simulated rape sites. The man raping the woman in porn is never the man who raped your mother in college, the boy getting spanked for just $19.99 a month is not the boy you were who got his ass whipped by his dad for being suspended from school in the fifth grade. The woman who brings the drinks to the table in the topless club or the stripper on stage, whom businessmen pay thousands of dollars for a lap dance, is never your daughter trying to earn some fast money to stay in college. The boy getting fucked without a condom on our favorite barebacking site isn’t the kid we were at nineteen, infected by the man who didn’t bother to tell us he was HIV-positive because hey, we didn’t ask. Sometimes just as you are sitting down to enjoy a nice funky little porn session, you click the window to browse and a pop-up appears on the screen, a link to something you didn’t invite or bargain for. There in front of you is a small child. Not a boy or girl of eighteen (because the sites disclaimer says all the models are of legal age) who happens to looks young for her age, but a child of six or nine or twelve. And it’s not enough just to say, well, she’s Indian, or Russian, or Asian, so it’s not the same as an American boy or girl being exploited; their cultural standards are different “over there” or “they are more liberated about sex than we are.” If you have any sensitivity, if you care at all, even if your care emerges only after you climax, then you might try to imagine a reality for that child. Is he in Idaho or Chechnya? Was it a neighbor who led him into a basement under false pretenses to have his picture taken, was it a trusted aunt, father, teacher, babysitter, cleric, or coach? Is this a child sold somewhere in the world, or kidnapped? Or is it a child forced out of their home because of family and sexual violence, homophobia, or addiction, a child who may be in porn because she needs money for a fix, who feels she has been doing “porn” for years anyway after having been objectified and incested by brothers, uncles, step-fathers and guardians meant to protect her? Is this child still alive? And if images like this come up so easily when you weren’t even searching for child porn, what could you find if you were? viii Last month on the subway platform there was a poster advertising a new horror film that came out in March. The poster had an image of a woman lying down in terror, while a mummified hand pressed down on her head as if eventually to crush it. A lady passed by it with her kids, one was in a stroller, the other clutching her hand. The film is rated R, so I knew these kids would be unable to go to see this film without her, but evidently they were old enough to see this poster. As the train left the station, I saw the image repeated over and over again, plastered at nearly every stop, the same woman’s face, the same mummified hand. The first hundred times I see the image I’m offended and feel queasy, but I notice after a few weeks I barely pause when I look at it, engrossed in conversation with a friend. The graphic violence just doesn’t register anymore and the poster has become little more than wallpaper now. I’ll forget about it anyway when another just like it replaces it next month. Days later, a man is selling music on the street and I see the cover of Britney Spears’ 1999 debut album Baby One More Time. Britney sits on the ground in a relaxed cutesy little-girl pose against a pink ground, smiling into the camera. The body position suggests that of a child having just shown us a cartwheel or somersault. Recorded when she was seventeen, Britney is made to look about twelve years old; this is definitely pre-teen, time-for-recess porn. Britney is so happy to see us that she is oblivious to the fact that her skirt is hiked up around her waist. The innocent tilt of her head, the placement on her hands beside her legs create the image of a girl relaxing on the school playground. The camera angle means that we as viewers have no other way to view her except towering above her. It is clear, we are not another child enjoying Britney or a parent who has come to protect her, we are someone who has caught her playing alone. The dark shadow near her crotch suggests she may not be wearing panties, and her smile reassures that she won’t tell if she is violated because although she doesn’t realize it yet, she wants and is ready for sex. Maybe one day we will be able to see the violent porn in our culture as images that put women and children at risk, images that would never be tolerated if they were directed at any racial or religious group. As in the case of propagandist Julius Streicher. publisher of the anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stürmer and convicted for his depiction of Jews in Nazi Germany, or the media executives found guilty of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for the hateful editorials and broadcasts on Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) that led to the murders of Tutsi and moderate Hutus, we will see a connection between an artist’s hate speech, the effect it has on his public and fans, and its fatal consequences. In 2005, Christopher Duncan, 21, battered law student Jagdip Najran, 26 to death with an iron baseball bat (he claimed, after an argument) and stuffed her in a suitcase while she was still alive. Duncan was an obsessive Eminem fan down to his tattoos, and murdered Najran in the way that recalled Eminem’s “Stan” video. While it is difficult to say that Eminem bears any direct responsibility for this man’s crime, the consistently misogynist message in his lyrics, the theme throughout his work that “pushy, demanding” women (mothers, girlfriends, wives) who constantly get on men’s nerves deserve to be killed, has at least to be questioned. (there is a loop in my brain that I can’t shut off, an unresolved image of a woman or a child being violently murdered, abused or violated. The only thing that will interrupt this underlying disturbance in my mind is identification with the child I was, which means opening myself up to feelings of horror and powerlessness that I haven’t allowed myself to experience for years. It’s not the sex in porn that devastates; it’s the underlying contempt, for women, for children, for human life. And because most of us refuse to feel the grief for the children we were who had to live through those terrifying, confusing experiences, because human cruelty is mystifying and sometimes can’t be explained or resolved, and because healing trauma takes courage, a great deal of time and the willingness to live with uncertainty, we find it easier to watch a woman or child being objectified and treated violently over and over again. We identify with the aggressor, re-traumatize ourselves, look for closure and relief that we’ll never find in the violent, pornographic images, and call it “entertainment.”) Gay men are sitting at computers - typing, downloading, dreaming, fantasizing, lying, bargaining, cruising, rejecting each other brutally and jacking off bucketloads of semen in tiny rooms that keep get smaller and smaller - while a country is making laws about us, denying us our rights. Someone is counting on us to stay in those tiny rooms which, if the right law is passed or changed, will become, in an eye blink, our private jail cells and mental wards. (Abortion laws in South Dakota, anyone?) When you are locked in private rooms of quiet isolation, you don’t invite the neighbors over for dinner, you don’t talk to your friends or your partner about what hurts and shames you in your life, and you certainly don’t get angry enough to start a revolution. I want to turn off my computer, close that image that keeps me mesmerized, engaged, enslaved, numb. I know my porn is only grown-up thumb-sucking, a constant shopping in unavailable places for love: “Excuse me, Sir, would you like your intimacy in paper or plastic?” It never really is about sex, or naked people, anyway, it’s about being treated with dignity, respect, and feeling as if you belong, which as a gay man I haven’t always known. But if I turn off this porn, I must ask this, my good friend: how do I deal with a past which sometimes feels intolerable, how do I deal with how alone I feel in this moment, how do I cope with all this pain I’m in right now? I will give up my porn addiction first thing tomorrow, I promise you. I just need one more download to get me through tonight.
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60989
2006-05-18 19:32:00
2006-05-19 00:57:21

This paragraph, at the end of Max's entry, stuck with me: "Gay men are sitting at computers - typing, downloading, dreaming, fantasizing, lying, bargaining, cruising, rejecting each other brutally and jacking off bucketloads of semen in tiny rooms that keep get smaller and smaller - while a country is making laws about us, denying us our rights. Someone is counting on us to stay in those tiny rooms which, if the right law is passed or changed, will become, in an eye blink, our private jail cells and mental wards. (Abortion laws in South Dakota, anyone?) When you are locked in private rooms of quiet isolation, you don’t invite the neighbors over for dinner, you don’t talk to your friends or your partner about what hurts and shames you in your life, and you certainly don’t get angry enough to start a revolution. I want to turn off my computer, close that image that keeps me mesmerized, engaged, enslaved, numb. I know my porn is only grown-up thumb-sucking, a constant shopping in unavailable places for love: “Excuse me, Sir, would you like your intimacy in paper or plastic?” It never really is about sex, or naked people, anyway, it’s about being treated with dignity, respect, and feeling as if you belong, which as a gay man I haven’t always known. But if I turn off this porn, I must ask this, my good friend: how do I deal with a past which sometimes feels intolerable, how do I deal with how alone I feel in this moment, how do I cope with all this pain I’m in right now? I will give up my porn addiction first thing tomorrow, I promise you. I just need one more download to get me through tonight." Because I know exactly what he's talking about, his entry really hit a nerve with me. I know how humiliating it is to go to the adult bookstores, saunas, and now the internet, to seek what is the easiest addiction for gay men to fall into: porn. It's something that I compare to Native Americans and alcoholism: like their predisposition to alcohol, I believe that gay men have been emotionally starved - literally - for so many years that most of us don't have any sense or feeling of hope...that things will get better, that real. loving relationships can happen for us; so we go for the quick fix: if we can't have sex with the person we want...if we can't love who we want, then we can get pretty damn close by watching porn. At least, that way, we get off. But after that, then the high is gone. The excitement, the chase, whatever the rush was at the moment is over and you crash. Real life comes back to hit you - the one thing you were trying so hard to run from that whole time. You're alone. You might be in an adult bookstore with other gay men, but they are also in their own high...they might as well be a million miles away. They don't even see you because they are frozen emotionally at 14; fantasies going through their heads, these naked men and porn movies turn real people into nobodys whose only purpose is to get you off...not that they're doing this because they are an addict (which is almost always the case)...and even though you never meet the guy, really we all know that by paying to see porn all we do is feed his drug addiction. So one addiction helps another, and the cycle continues...I never got as hooked into porn as he has, but I've definitely been having those feelings that 'this is as good as it gets for us, so you either get to watch porn, or have nothing. Happy Pride.' The internet has created an entirely new gay community which, in many ways, has revealed who we really are while continuing to cause us to be an anonymous, faceless people...I have seen men who are so nasty and rude that I hate everything that being gay stands for: selfishness, rudeness, narcissism, capitalism, classism, only to name a few; we have taken everything that the religious right has done to tell us we are worthless only to use it against each other, so not only are gay men victimized by these right wing fanatics, we victimize each other through rejection or rage that usually has nothing to do with the other guy, it has to do with our own anger and isolation - it has to do with having nobody to talk to, or having nobody in our lives who can listen or understand why our anxieties are what they are. Porn soothes those feelings because you don't get rejected, nor do you have to do anything besides watch. You don't know their names or know that some guy introduced him to cocaine a few years ago and now he hardly knows what day it is and will do anything for drug money; at this point he still looks good enough to be on camera but in another five years he will most likely be dead or HIV+. I see a lot of gay men online who can't believe this is what they came out for - to sit in front of a computer screen talking to people who they will never meet, seeing local guys that they aren't interested in, and the only hope they have is that, for $19.99 a month, they can join a porn site and download as many images as they want. It fixes their need for intimacy but does nothing to acknowledge their sexuality or their need to be touched, to be understood, to be loved. To be gay today is to be nothing more than a marketable audience with money, something that the porn industry knows very well of, that we are usually alone, terribly lonely and will pay anything to see images or movies of the guys we wish we could be with, rather than settle for the fat hairy queens that largely populate our gay communities. And getting lost in those images is great - it makes you feel, that for a little while, you're a part of this beautiful man's life, that you matter enough, that you might meet someone like this only if you keep the faith. But years go by and this never happens, if anything there's just more of the fat hairy queens that piss you off because they don't get the hint that you're not interested, at the same time you are in a rage because every straight person you know is in a relationship and talks about it nonstop; you just want to grab them by the neck and tell them to walk a few days in YOUR shoes - try having to spend the next 50-60 years by yourself and see how well you do listening to everyone else's stories of love and affection that will never apply to you. So you see, porn is a very, very easy thing to fall into. You have to be very careful about the sites you join, and why you're doing it. I find that if I'm having a bad, lonely night I do best to just get out of the house for a while - go for a walk, go play ball outside. Anything besides sitting in front of the computer.
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61317
2006-05-21 12:19:00
2006-05-21 17:19:51

I'm typing this entry from my phone to see how well this works...I'm down at SMDC after working out at the fitness center. Now I'm lounging in the cafeteria. Lakewinds...which is technically the hospital cafeteria. but it doesn't feel like one. It's got a nice view of downtown and Lake Superior. I went on a long run today and did leg work but think I may have overdone some of the hamstring work as my lower back is a bit sore. Sometimes that happens when I increase the weights too much. I am at a weird place in my life right now that seems really familiar to the end of high school. Now that I have a degree in psychology, what do I want to do now? Do I really want a Masters in Social Work or do I want something else? I need to start thinking about this before I begin taking the classes. I read the descriptions of the grad programs and you can enter many programs with a psychology undergrad degree, which I didn't know before. I know that a psychology degree by itself is useless. I do need to figure out what would bring me the most chance at a good job somewhere down the line...at UMD most of the graduate programs take about two years to finish unless you're going into the school of pharmacy or medical school; however those both require about two years worth of chemistry and physics which I haven't had. And I think the bulk of the pharmacy program is chemistry classes, which wouldn't be thrilling for me. I like science, but I like getting to the point - I understand why you need chemistry for the pharmacy program, but three years of it? In the future, everything is going to be computerized and the pharmacist will be doing nothing more than dispensing the drugs and consulting with the physician. Yet pharmacists are so in demand that they added the program at UMD because they had so many applicants at the main University campus. It would be a guaranteed job, and I'm sure it would be rewarding, but it would also be another six years of school after completing the chemistry/physics classes. No thanks! I just want to be done with this part of my life so I can move on to something else, something meaningful and have my life make some kind of sense. Right now I like my life, for the most part; I live a life that most people never get to live...I live simply which affords me a mostly carefree life, concentrating on school, working out, my running, I don't have to worry about money because I don't need a car (which probably is the biggest benefit right there)...most people I know are working so much or working two jobs just to keep up with whatever payments they have, and I've always lived without a lot of excess, so I can do things like spend summer afternoons here at home playing basketball outside, or working out at the fitness center in the morning without rushing. It's nice. The tradeoff, of course, is the weather. It is nice here between May and early October, but when winter hits, it's pretty cold for a while. However, if I were living in warm places like California or Florida, I would have to work so much just to stay afloat and would never get the chacne to do what I get to do here. So I guess, as much as I complain about it here, I would rather have this. Another thing I never really thought about is the benefit of being gay. Since I am gay, and being alone and gay almost go hand in hand, nobody's forcing me to do anything that I don't want to do. I can take time to stop and think about what I want, where I want to be in my life, and what route I want to take. There are no rules, and no right or wrong answers. Since there are no kids, there's also no panic to make money to support a family, or buy a house, or all the other things that go along with that life. I am exempt from that. The only person I have to worry about is me, and I know what I need and don't need, and so far the way I live works just fine. It gets damn boring at times - but even if I had all the money in the world to have a nice car, brand new clothes, etc., where would that get me? I've lost weight, I've gained weight. I've moved to big cities, I've come back here. I had no degree, now I have one. All of those things - changes that made a positive difference in my life went pretty much unnoticed except by me, and I certainly didn't meet anyone along the way. So I don't believe that those other things are going to bring you true happiness and/or companionship because for me, with what limited things I have achieved and acquired, it didn't make any difference in that sense. I think that is why a lot of people give up, because they try - and keep trying - so hard at something, they keep trying to be the best or acquire the most in order to impress someone and be noticed, but often times people are so wrapped up in their own lives that they don't even see you in the first place. So I say, do whatever makes you happy (without hurting anyone else, of course). I think that my life is good, because I live to find something to enjoy about each day rather than being overwhelmed with 'what the hell am I gonna do'...or being unhappy about things that I have little control over, nor do I have much power to change the situation. I am happy when the sun is out and it's warm outside. I love to be outside, to be active, to sweat. I hate sitting around the house having nothing to do. And over the past few years, since I've moved back here, I've found some comfort in being at home and doing what I want to do. I don't have to be running around all the time someplace to occupy myself. I don't have to be spending money on junk that won't mean anything to me in 6 months either. It makes more sense to save your money, relax a little and enjoy the warm days ahead rather than live each paycheck right down to the last cent.
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61519
2006-05-22 19:09:00
2006-05-23 00:11:08
sad story
http://www.manship2.lsu.edu/perkins/Handouts/chubbucknew.pdf I wish there was a way I could have copied and pasted this story. I read it, and it really made me sad for this young woman. It also brought up a lot of questions about myself, and how I've felt over the past few years...what I'm afraid of in my life, and reading this story was very hard for me emotionally. I really connected with how Chris felt about her life. I have felt the same way. Almost all of my life, I have never felt as if I fit in anyplace; nor have I felt that I had any really close people in my life that were within a five minute drive - who I could go talk about anything with. So I had to really read this story and think to myself...how are we different? I will be honest and say that I have thought about suicide during my lifetime. I think that most people have, but most people wouldn't actually go through with it. Because they know that there are people in their lives whose lives would be ruined if they were to do something like that. I have those people in my life, I know how crushed they would be, and I would never do something like that. However, I also know how painful life can be - I am extremely emotional and everyone who knows me knows that I am not afraid to disclose those feelings...therefore I do not judge people who commit suicide as bad, selfish people. We don't know what was going through their minds when they decided to end their lives. I know what it's like to feel as if there is literally no options and that things will never get better. It takes a lot of self-discovery and reflection to know that...when you have lived a little, you know that next week can bring new things into your life that you didn't know about when you had a terrible week (and couldn't see ahead that things will get better). Keeping a journal has been great for me - for that very reason. I have been able to look back on those weeks where I couldn't see the light of day only to have something great happen the next week...or hear a funny joke, or see the sun, or just feel good about life again. It does happen. Chris died a week after I was born, in July of 1974. She would have been the exact same age as my mom at the time (29) and I often think about what the social climate was then...at that time, it was terribly embarrassing for women to still be single at 29. Today, because of how long it takes to get established, a lot of women don't even have kids by 29, and a lot of women (and men) have had to scrimp and save for school, making it a longer journey to finish college. Things are a lot longer delayed these days, and many more women, my sister included, are having kids at 40 because it either took them that long to find the right person, or they simply couldn't afford to have kids until then. Or their careers were taking off during their 30's and by the time they hit 40, they realized if they still wanted to have kids, they better do it now. I think that part of the problem is that we place expectations and labels on people, and because we are all so different, it's not so easy to categorize everyone. For me, being gay has made my life extremely complicated but at the same time easier (see yesterday's post). I can REALLY relate to what Chris' mom said about learning to crawl before you walk (in terms of relationships), and Chris at 29 never even had a crawling relationship with anyone, yet she wanted to walk side-by-side with someone more than anything. God, how I relate to that. I almost started to cry when I read that. Not everyone is at the same place in life during the same age. I know that I'm a good 10 years behind (emotionally) most of the kids I graduated high school with. That's because I missed out on a lot of the social building skills, the relationships, a lot of things that people need to develop when they're at that age. I never got to do that, and yea, I admit, I will probably be stuck with some depression problems for the rest of my life because of that. But the difference is, I am aware of it - the depression is nothing to be ashamed of, it's no different than any other disability that you need to get help with and treatment for, and realize that you need to take care of yourself. You have to be able to manage your depression the same way you'd manage diabetes, know when you're about to have a 'bad day' and do the things you need to do in order to get through it. I think that we know so much more about depression today than we did in 1974. The stigma is still there, somewhat, but there are many more enlightened people today who live with depression - and know how it can be - and we also have doctors who can help, as long as you are honest with your doctor. I've told my doctor everything, and that has been a great help for me. To be able to trust my doctor with these feelings is something that I know a lot of people do not have...but today, you have to be your own advocate. If you don't tell your doctor what's going on (if you have depression) then he or she can't really help you. Like Chris, I know that I have a very selfish depression at times where I think I'm the only one who is single, alone, isolated, you name it...and I think that's normal. I think what would be scary is if someone didn't have those feelings - it's called being human! The one disadvantage that I see today is that, while the internet had been a great thing, it's also detached a lot of us from each other. Person to person anyways. We are able to be open and honest about things to people far away, like I am right now, but what's not happening is a local connection where you go out to coffee with a new friend and talk about these same things. I am not seeing that happening as much anymore. I guess this is better than nothing, but I think that as a society we aren't seeing other people as much as we were. Either we are working a lot, or we are focused on whatever we're doing, so we just don't see other people. As a consequence, I think that there are a lot more people today who are suffering alone at home...whether it's depression, addictions, and being closeted. When I came out at 15, I had to get out of the house and see other people and find them. Today, you don't have to leave your room as long as you have a computer with internet access. Because of this, the gay community might be a lot smaller than it used to be, because so many more guys never go anywhere, never meet real, live gay men, and have no intentions of ever living life as openly gay. And because there are no gay people in their 'real' lives, nobodys around to care enough to drag that guy out of the house.
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61917
2006-05-24 19:39:00
2006-05-25 01:15:24
Sunny for a week now!
It's been a great week again, weather-wise with the exception of rain we had today and supposedly tomorrow. All in all, can't complain. I've had the chance to get outside every day so far, and it feels great. Certainly a nice change from the two weeks of rain we had a while ago. I am hoping we are done with that for a while. Yesterday I was outside playing basketball and this very nice looking young guy walked up the driveway. This only happens once in a lifetime around here - I figured he was either selling something or I was having a vision. Turns out, he was selling something. He was from College Pro which is some painting thing where these students come and paint your house in the summer or some bullshit like that. I knew it was too good to be true. He wasn't gay anyways, I could just tell, but he was a cute guy...must have been latin, very olive skinned with black hair and just the kind of guy I'd love to meet. So even though he wasn't gay and there was pretty much no chance for anything to develop from the start, the fact that this hot guy was in my driveway was a nice ending to the day. I don't know whether that's a happy or sad thing. It wasn't like he was coming up the driveway to talk to me 'just because'...I mean he was selling something. It could have been some fat 50-year-old smoking a cigarette and he still would have come up their driveway. I don't need someone young, dark, attractive and not gay to paint the house. I need someone who is young, dark and attractive, and gay to have fun and go out with. Someone who doesn't chain smoke, someone who doesn't resemble the elephant man or the fat guy on display at the circus. You know, these feelings come and go. Some days I'm feeling so confident and I think that if I take life day by day I can get through anything on my own, who knows; anything can be around the corner, but I've had 10 years of 'going around corners' and haven't found anything. It's not that I 'want Jeff back' because I have learned over the past year or so that you can't fix something that was never in place to begin with. That was a relationship that was very special to me, but I now realize that I was the only one in love. What complicates being gay is, you have guys who have been out for a while, got kicked around a little and learned from life, and so they are ready to use what they've learned and want to find someone to get serious with. Then, there are other guys who look at gay people as a past-time; a free 'hooker' to suck them off or have sex with when the urge is there. They don't view gay men as people but rather as a means to an end, someone who he can utilize for a little while and then place in his past - hopefully forgetting the whole thing even happened once the orgasm is over with. I still have yet to figure out if ths is a way that gay people grow or if it's just how some gay guys are, and it's not likely they will change. While I did my share of screwing around when I first came out, I never led people on, nor did I enter a romantic relationship when I clearly was not interested in the other guy. From the day I came out, I have been totally honest about what I'm looking for, what I am not looking for, and what I won't tolerate. If that intimidates people, too bad. I'm not on this planet to make everyone feel included or feel good - I have found that if you are constantly saying 'that's okay' or 'it doesn't matter to me' when it really DOES, you end up resenting the hell out of the other guy, and wanting to get out. If you can't accept what you see from day one, then the relationship is not for you. And that is hard in the gay world because we are a community that has no face, nor does it have a foundation. It's like this big, extravagant mansion with the newest exteriors and designer windows, but on the inside of the mansion there is no running water, no electricity, and dirt floors. That is the gay community - this glowing image of wealth, looks and clever designs; but no character, no real honesty, and no interest in other gay men if they don't match your standards. And we're all guilty of that But as a whole, we are going nowhere. You can't have a mansion with an image of 'now' and the best looking when inside it's not even livable. That's us. We present an image that is false - if we as a community are doing so well, then all these suicides wouldn't be happening. All these people wouldn't be sitting at home (like me) because we are disgusted with the gay community or the lack of it - or we're just plain sick and tired of seeing the same 10 guys all the time. So we have a bad deal going on - we don't know each other, we're all sitting at home, nobody is interested in each other so nobody talks to anybody (or everyone's so afraid of being rejected that nobody dares to talk)...so years and years go by, we might be living within a mile of each other, yet nothing ever fucking happens. When I came out in fall 1989, I NEVER thought we would still be this stuck as a people in 2006. Never. I don't blame the internet for that because I think the internet is no different than an encyclopedia or a notebook, it's what you do with that information. That's up to the individual...and as gay men, we are used to looking for the nearest exit or the easiest way out (i.e. moving to Minneapolis or not meeting real gay people locally because we're afraid, or staying closeted and locked in our rooms). We don't stick around and face the conflict that we've been afraid to confront our whole lives. And this is the exact reason why society continues to treat us the way they do. They know we're scared. They know we're weak. They know we don't like each other. And they know we don't fight back. And they're winning. My frustration all along has been that...I did what I was supposed to do. I came out at 14-15. I got involved with whatever resources I had at the time to possibly find the one gay kid my own age - searching through the dark, so to speak. Never found him. Kept trying; moved to Minneapolis, and was in for a shock when I saw a gay community of young people who had either turned to chemicals to deal with it or became the stereotypical queens, rather than accepting their gayness secondary to their maleness. It's as if they assumed that being gay meant that you were no longer a man, that you had to, once again, become someone that wasn't you; all to follow the group rather than be an individual. What is ironic is...coming out is a statement of individuality, that being different is okay, and we should respect those who are strong enough to have the courage to say that they are different. What has happened is that this society of sheep (in the mainstream), translates into a gay society of sheep who all look the same, act the same, do the same drugs, wear the same expensive clothes, walk the same, talk the same; it drives me stir crazy. Imagine a heterosexual world where men and women like exactly the same kinds of music, or exactly the same kinds of movies, or exactly the same kinds of everything - between men and women there are enough differences to make it interesting and unpredictable; with gay men, at least for me, I almost always know what I'm getting...I won't say it here but it's the typical gay list of things and while that's okay, it still gets boring. Aren't there any gay guys who don't follow this stereotypical list of female personalities and desires? That guy I saw last night was - at least for the moment I talked to him - everything that makes me interested in MEN - confident, strong, good voice, confident walk, good posture. He carried himself like he knew who he was and knew where he was going - no drug-induced fog, no cigarette being lit up as he walked away, no 480 pound frame that makes everyone stop and say "holy shit!" to themselves after he walks away. I am so used to seeing that with the gay men around here (and elsewhere)...I guess my fantasy would be to run off with this guy from last night and just find some other comfortable reality. Now I'm in my own fog! Oh well, another night...
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62200
2006-05-25 20:40:00
2006-05-26 01:43:45
Downtown Duluth the new generation
Look who's becoming 'Twin Cities North' 5/17/2006 by Anne Bretts, Minnesota Real Estate Jounal Duluth already had been through a couple of economic boom-bust cycles by the turn of the 20th century, establishing a reputation over the next 100 years as a city always on the brink of a comeback. Spurred by Twin Cities-based developers, a healthy pool of investment capital and a few strong economic sectors, the city appears to be getting the push it needs to move beyond that series of shaky comebacks to full-fledged success, essentially as the Metro area’s northernmost suburb. The city of Duluth issued a record $200 million in building permits in 2004 and slightly less in 2005. That’s not huge by Twin Cities standards, but it’s nearly four times the anemic $60 million total for the city in 1996, most of it from home remodeling. All nonresidential permits totaled a barely noticeable $12.6 million. “I think if you talk to the business people in town the buzz is really positive,” says Greg Wegler, director of business development for Kraus-Anderson Construction’s Duluth office. “Working with the city of Duluth has been a good experience. It used to have a bad rap, but that’s changed.” He declines to speculate on the underlying reasons, but he says the process is working smoothly, even on major projects. One key change in Duluth’s business climate is that so many outsiders have become established fixtures here. Minneapolis-based Kraus-Anderson Cos. opened a small Duluth storefront six years ago and now has a permanent and growing office here with nearly $95 million in projects underway in Northeastern Minnesota, most in Duluth. Development spreads across sectors. Another key factor is that enough private money is available to avoid massive subsidies from city government, a surefire way to stir up controversy. There are projects going on in almost every part of this long, narrow city, created as a string of separate communities eventually grew into one. And the projects are spread out, in sectors ranging from higher education and medical to general aviation and retail. But the most interesting and creative growth may be in housing. “Five years ago, if somebody told you that there would be condos over downtown storefronts going for a half-million dollars, you wouldn’t believe it,” says Tom Cotruvo, who heads the city’s business development office. Indeed, city leaders were obsessed during the 1980s and much of the 1990s with luring back retail — along with new commercial development — to the central business district. When the downtown commercial vacancy rate spiked in the 2001-02 recession, and with little retail success to show, the strategy quietly shifted. The new strategy: Develop housing to serve the growing medical, higher education and professional sectors — as well as lure urban tourists looking for a new twist on owning a lake home. The result, they hope, will generate enough people downtown to lure retailers. New, old urbanism Citywide, Cotruvo says Duluth’s neighborhood structure, with shops and homes clustered together, is precisely what newer communities are trying to create under the umbrella of “new urbanism.” “We’re an example of the old urbanism,” he says. Well-known Twin Cities builder George Sherman is putting together traditional mixed-use development principles in a unique way in a $30 million project underway at 311 E. Superior St. He’s linking the venerable Greysolon Plaza, a former hotel-turned-senior apartment complex, with a new Sheraton Hotel/condo combination across the avenue. The new hotel will revive the beautiful but underutilized ballrooms at the Greysolon, parking will be created to serve residents and guests, and the whole complex will be linked to the main campus of the St. Mary’s/Duluth Clinic Health System, which is completing a $75 million expansion. Oscar J. Boldt Construction’s regional Cloquet office is leading the Sherman project. New housing moves up the hill There are other condominium projects in all shapes and sizes, from Canal Park to the top of the city’s scenic Skyline Drive. That’s where Tim Wiklund is building 45 units of upscale condos perched on the site of the former Buena Vista Motel and restaurant. “We had to blast a lot of rock out of there,” Wiklund says. The Duluth builder had focused on single-family residential development, still the core of Duluth’s housing market. But that market has softened. While working on a new home for one of the owners of the Buena Vista, the owner asked Wiklund if he had ever thought about developing condos. “All of a sudden here we are and we’re putting up 45 homes,” he says. It took some creative design and construction by LHB Corp. and Kraus-Anderson, but all 45 units have lake views. Prices range from about $269,000 to $529,900, high for Duluth but a steal for Twin Cities buyers. About two-thirds of the units are sold, with sales split between local residents and Twin Cities residents. “Some people are looking at it as kind of a cabin. This is one of the best fisheries in the nation,” Wicklund says, pointing to all the trout streams that course through the city into Lake Superior. While residents on the shore can see the lake, people on Skyline Drive see the entire city, he says. Wiklund practices what he preaches. He’s sold his house and is moving into one of the units when the complex is completed later this year. Industrial, commercial struggle Not everything in Duluth is soaring. Traditional industrial, commercial and office space remains overbuilt and new projects still are a slow go. Andy McDonough, development director for the Duluth Seaway Port Authority, says the authority recently opened 18 lots in an expansion at Duluth Air Park, near the airport. Only two have sold, and McDonough describes progress outside the aviation sector as slow. “It comes in spurts,” he says. “It’s obviously not a Twin Cities-type market. It’s slow but steady development.” Developing relationships with the Twin Cities is a recurring theme in Duluth. And it goes both ways. LHB Corp. started in Duluth but now has offices in Minneapolis. A few years ago, Dale Lewis, Park State Bank’s president, saw the limits of the Duluth business sector, and the crush of giant banks entering and expanding in the market. So she opened a branch in the bustling Minneapolis Warehouse District in 2004. While she’s no immediate threat to Twin Cities banks, she is being invited to participate in some Metro projects. She notices another piece to this changing Duluth-Twin Cities story. “I must have talked to at least a dozen people from Duluth who have bought condos in the Twin Cities to use on the weekends,” she says.
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62439
2006-05-26 20:13:00
2006-05-27 01:40:43
Spring Weddings and other things...
So it's almost June, and wedding season is in full swing here. I live by three huge churches, which I'm sure will be busy every Saturday for the next couple of months. It's weird for me, now that I'm in my 30's, to see people 10 years younger than me getting married. And still, I feel like this child who can't even conceptualize what it would be like to have someone ask me out, and want to see each other again, and meet my family; have that excitement last a year or two and plan a wedding a year after that. I can't imagine what that would even be like. At this point in the game, I don't even see it as something on my radar anymore because not only are gays barred from getting married, but even if we could, who would I marry? I can't even meet anyone. I haven't been to 'first base' in almost 8 years now with anyone. If nothing's happened in that amount of time, then what does that say about the future? Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to cloud these happy couples with my dissatisfaction with the way things are. It is the thorn in my side though. June is also gay pride month and I no longer feel any pride about being gay. I feel anger and sadness much of the time...I no longer feel liberated to be out. I feel alienated. I feel...misled? All these people I had expected to meet in the gay world were nowhere to be found, instead I got a selection of absolutely horseshit men that I couldn't be any less attracted to. What good is it to be out when the few scraps that are available don't do it for you? Everyone says to me "Why don't you just move?". I've moved many times in my adult life, and each time I have learned the same lesson: if you're gay, it doesn't matter if you live in Duluth, Seattle, Portland, MInneapolis or Fort Lauderdale. Gay people are gay people wherever you go - it's got nothing to do with where they're living because most are transplants from other cities anyways. People who have shared a common experience or mistreatment from society in general respond in similar ways. And for gay people, that response has been one of compliance, and one of insecurity. We've been taught that who we are is offensive, therefore we should be ashamed of ourselves and project that onto other gay people and dislike them as well. And that's pretty much how it works. The hardest part is something I never considered before - gay men, at the most, make up about 2% of the population. It was believed in the past that we were 10%, but that study was done in the 50's, using white male college students in New York and San Francisco. Not a very representative sample. The new survey, which was conducted over a number of years, included people of all races and economic backgrounds, from all kinds of locations, and used ten times the number of people that the original one did. In terms of sexual orientation, it only found that 2% of men and 1.5% of women responded as being gay. Some said they were bisexual, but overwhelmingly the response was straight. I think that we have been misled that there's so many of us out there when that's just not the case. So within this 2% of the population, we have to navigate friends, sex, relationships, support, dating, and everything in between. This is not an easy thing to do because no matter what city you go to, eventually you're going to know just about everyone in the community, or you will know someone who knows someone. And also, I don't need the numbers to prove to me what I already know, and have known for the past decade - being gay is much, much more difficult that I originally imagined. A lot of us don't like each other, so the support network is not a given, which is what most non-gay people seem to believe. I won't go to the bars here because I have seen the guys who go there and I'm plain not interested. Same goes for the gay mens center; I've met 'em all, don't like any of them, and I don't see the point in going to places where the only thing I have in common with the other men is my sexual orientation, and since I'm not attracted to any of them, then why would I want to go? I want to be around people who share the same sexual orientation but there is a mutual attraction - I'm interested in them too, and they're interested in me. No creeps, no addicts, no leeches, etc. And I figure in the number of gay men who fit the former description (the guys I don't want) and the guys who fit the latter one (the guys I want), and I think that it's pretty bleak. For every 1 gay guy I'm interested, I suspect there's about 10,000 I don't give a rat's ass about. I know it sounds mean, but since we are horrible at communicating with each other, a lot of misunderstood signals get crossed and someone thinks something's there when that stare actually means "thanks, but no thanks". 2% of anything is basically nothing. I keep reminding myself of that whenever I go places because I used to always wonder, if gay people make up 10% of the population, then how come I never see anyone? Now I know why...that number was inflated to give us false hope. Lying to people to get them to feel better doesn't work because they always learn the truth, especially in this case. The question is, and has always been, so what next? The internet has been useless because the same guys on gay.com - who've been the exact same guys for the past 7 years since that damn site started, are the same guys at the bar and the gay mens center. They simply log on the minute they get home, and voila - the guys I don't have any interest in are now on my computer screen. Computers can develop just about anything now. How about some new, young, attractive gay guys rather than the same ol' same ol' that's been hovering around Duluth for the past 15 years? I had to rant. Sorry. It's just one of those nights. Today was actually a great day, I got outside, got some color, felt good. But at night it's still difficult. There's just nobody to do anything with here and it sucks.
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62714
2006-05-29 14:40:00
2006-05-29 19:57:59
Memorial Day 2006 - Warm!!
Right now, it's gorgeous outside. Not a cloud in the sky, and perfectly warm. I'm just taking a breather from being outside for over and hour and running around...and then planning to go back out as soon as I finish this. Apparently we are supposed to get strong thunderstorms later this afternoon, so I don't want to miss out on what's left of a nice day. It's rare that we get a Memorial or Labor Day that is warm and comfortable - it's usually raining! I had another dream last night that stopped me in my tracks after I woke up this morning. You know the kind of dream that seems like it's great, and then you wake up and realize it was only a dream? And you wonder how all these people got into your dream in the first place? Well, from what I can recall, Jeff was in this dream. Whenever he is in my dreams they are powerful memories, but I see him as I did in 1996, not as he probably looks today. The other thing was that he was with me the whole time, I could see him, talk to him, everything, but when I tried to hug him or hold his hand it was like thin air or something, physically he wasn't there...or it didn't seem like it anyways. We were staying with my cousins, and I don't remember much about that whole part of it other than we had been staying at a plain looking house in some city, and Jeff and I were trying to get back here, I think...the whole point of the dream seemed to be that we were trying to get home together or something; the dream was taking place now, and I remember in the dream that it seemed unreal because I had hoped I would see him again, and there he was, not only as a visit, but we were apparently going back home as if nothing had changed. It was great. It was scary. None of it seemed to make any sense. He was still wearing that royal blue windbreaker/jacket thing that he always wore, and that belt that was so long that the end of it could have wrapped around his waist again. And I remember thinking, this is great. This is what I wanted. Things are working out the way I wanted them to. But as I was waking up I realized that it wasn't real, and, nope, I didn't hear from him again after all that letter writing and trying to contact him. In the end, the efforts and hopeful waiting were grasping at straws to have something to get excited about, that this might be the day that he calls/writes/whatever but it never happened. And then I'm left with the uncertain....maybe he doesn't live at those addresses anymore. Obviously he does not speak to his family anymore either, because they don't even acknowledge his existence. So he never got my letter I sent to their house either. At first, the chase was exciting, this reunion after 10 years, you know, the nostalgia of it, maybe a couple of tender moments and rekindle something special again, just like in the movies. But this is real life, and I'm finding that some people do change in that amount of time, but some people are the way they are for most of their lives, and if they were stubborn and unwilling to do anything with that ball in their court then, it's not very likely they are going to do it now. Jeff is just that kind of person. And of course that drives me crazier because I keep thinking, what is it about me that he doesn't like? A lot of people tell me I am great to talk to, I have an open mind, and i have no problem initiaiting conversations. I can talk about almost anything and at some level relate to what the other person is saying. I don't play games, I don't set people up to hope for something that I had no intentions of doing all along. Yet I fall, time and time again, for this person who I haven't seen for 10 years, who has literally become this ghost in my dreams. And yea, I think it totally has to do with the fact that there are no prospects in my life, and the memories and hopes of Jeff are what keep me going. I hang on to those things so tight because they are so special to me. We all want love and companionship, but when you're gay in particular, the fact that there's so few of us makes those chances very slim. I have become more and more aware of that, I've tried to keep an open mind, but when it comes down to it, the shitty reality is, no matter how limited your selection is, you like what you like. Not much can change that. I loved Jeff because he was exotic, masculine, a guy (gay guys know what I mean by this); he was no perfectionist, wasn't trying to show me up or make me feel inferior, I really thought that he was the one. Why do I let this continue to consume me?
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62763
2006-05-31 18:58:00
2006-06-01 00:42:30
2006 - 2031: AIDS, the next 25 years
A lot of press has been dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the AIDS virus, which was first detected in 1981. As a society we have seen a dramatic change towards attitudes about sex and relationships, but little has changed in terms of the quality of gay relationships. I talk about gay relationships because AIDS has been, and continues to be, mostly our problem. And because we make up such a small percentage of people, chances are we are much more likely to come into contact with someone who is HIV+ (or has been with someone who is) than a non-gay person. The degrees of separation in the gay world are very few. I've watched some amazing things take place. I remember when I met the first person who was in the end stages of AIDS...this was in 1990; I was 15, I had met this man because he was a good friend of my friend Tony. This man lived in a senior high rise building because of his disability, and I remember being afraid to meet him...not because of the AIDS, but because how close to home this hit...I had some familiarity with the virus then, but I had never met someone with it. I had a great time meeting him...he was a funny, easygoing guy who wasn't consumed by his circumstances. But make no mistake, he was very ill. I don't think he lived to see 1991. It was in Minneapolis where most of my encounters with HIV+ people took place. My first, and scariest, experience was getting tested at the Red Door Clinic. This is a place outside of downtown which was basically where hookers and drug addicts got tested for free; they got some counseling, the hookers got free condoms, and nobody's name was asked. I was 18 at the time and I think they assumed I was a prostitute at first, until I mentioned that I was told to go to Red Door because of the confidentiality issue. So I got some 'counseling', a blood test, and two awful weeks of waiting later, found out I was okay. In April 2006, even though I have not been sexually active for years, I continue to get tested. It just comes with the territory of being gay. Except today, I go to SMDC and get tested by my family doctor. I see no need to hide around and give fake names in 2006. Anyways, in Minneapolis I met HIV+ gay people my own age, and I also met an HIV+ man who worked at the YMCA with me. I knew him, although not very well, and was very upset when I found out he died. I was even more upset when I found out he had no partner, no family, and didn't want anyone to see him at the end. Even though I did not know Scott very well, that was a turning point for me. I decided that I had to take care of myself from now on, that there was not going to be anyone to push me into getting tested or taking care of myself. If I wanted to live a good quality of life, that was up to me. Scott no longer had that choice. I did, and I have tried my best to take care of myself - for me, because I have to do it. Too many gay men just give up because they're tired. They're tired of being alone. They're tired of not being noticed or understood. They're tired of their relationships not working. They're just plain tired. When you reach that point, you don't care what happens to you anymore. Now that I have lived a little, I have observed that the pendulum swings in different directions throughout life. I believe 2006 is very similar to 1986 in that we are in the midst of evangelical fanaticism, political administrations that have no intentions of helping out its own citizens help themselves, and have pretty much returned us to a time where all the activism that has been done since 1986 has to be done over again. Except now, in 2006, many of our early leaders - those who lived through Stonewall, those who didn't care if they got arrested - are gone. They lost the battle to AIDS and there's nobody left who knows how to get things started. So we all are standing here with no clue on what to do, watching more and more young men, who were born during a time when AIDS first began, are now joining the ranks of HIV+ people. We have had so much education during the 1990's on safer sex and how to use a condom, there was money available, and for the first time gay men's health projects were taken seriously and at the very least, funded. Ten years later that's all disappeared. Many of these organizations have had to close, and the Bush administration is not ever going to give them any money or even acknowledgement. I won't rant about our president much longer, because I believe there is something bigger going on here. It's important to understand that, for many gay people, our own worst day was November 3, 2004 - the day after the presidental election. The propaganda used by the people who elected Bush - largely based on hatred of gay men (in particular), beliefs that gay people are possessed and evil, and that we need to stop them - worked. It worked so well that this man, who has done nothing but lie, steal and manipulate this entire country, actually won the election when everyone thought he didn't stand a chance. For gay people, it was pounded into us that, no, society has NOT accepted us, and no, we are not as safe as we thought. For people to be fully aware of what Bush stood for, and to know exactly what his feelings were towards us (not to mention other groups of people), it made me very much aware that not only are we still seen as deviant people, but the fact that we are outnumbered by those religious groups - with no thanks to racial minorities who voted for Bush who had the attitude of 'we got ours, good luck gettin' yours, faggots' - turned the gay world into a very isolated place...one that many of us had not known for a decade or more. So we retreated back to our rooms, hid in front of our computer screens, afraid to go out; now it's 2006 and based on the amount of men I see on gay.com, I don't think I've ever seen more gay men who are closeted, or once again closeted, with no intentions of ever coming out. So they go for the anonymous, never see you again sex with men who are on drugs, men who sleep with men for money, and men with HIV who won't tell you. Nobody knows each others names. Years pass, someone gets very sick, ends up HIV+, and has no clue what the guys name was. That's how all this begins. A vaccine will make absolutely no difference because AIDS is a virus which can take on many different forms. It is not measles, it is not meningitis. It is a virus that is in your system for life, which can replicate and go down many different paths. MY FEARS - 2006 TO 2031: 1) We are assuming that we will be living in a country with an abundance of money to fund all these HIV trials, vaccines, research, and prescriptions when the reality is, by 2016, we will have very little money left in the health care budget. There is barely any money left today. With all the baby boomers retiring, troops returning home with no arms or legs, who will require ongoing, lifelong physical and mental health care...my gut feeling is good luck getting HIV care. Seniors aren't about to get out of the line, and there will be so much praise for the troops that gay men with HIV will not be the first to access the best in care. The quality of health care in general will be much worse in 2016. Those who have taken care of themselves, been responsible, didn't smoke, didn't drink, and made healthy choices will enjoy a good life, while those who didn't, won't. 2) We are moving towards a society that emphasizes personal responsibility. Look at the energy crisis. As I stated in #1, it is up to you, NOW, to take responsibility for your health. Gay men have an attitude similar to that of people on welfare for generations: that somehow, someway, the government will 'get me outta this mess' - and that is not going to be an option. Between now and 2031, we will have so many people in this country living longer lives needing extraordinary amounts of health care. We won't be the only ones needing costly prescriptions and medical procedures. 3) Unfortunately, very little has changed in terms of how gay men have conducted their relationships from 1981-2006. Whether it's the lack of choices, the lack of interest among our chocies, or a simple inability to keep our dicks in our pants, our relationships for the most part do not work. Being able to get married will only make it worse, because you can bet that the marriages will be heavily researched, documented and studied; if it is seen that 90-95% of gay marriages fall apart within 5 years, we are in serious trouble. Before we consider gay marriage, we need to figure out WHY the majority of our relationships don't work - honestly - and figure out, realistically what can be done to improve our communication and trust. 4) Increasing isolationism. In 1992-1996, I SAW gay people. I knew them by name, I saw them downtown, I said hello. Today, they're gone. The new gay men are hiding at home, or they're closeted, or they simply don't go anywhere. We've become this bizarre group that exists via internet connection, and so there is very little real interaction that involves emotions, facial expressions, touch, and a potential for relationships. We are becoming further and further removed from other gay people, thus I think that we have become meaner. We don't see the impact of our attitude on the other side of the screen. We are not learning how to grow up. We are becoming stuck at whatever stage of development we're at with little or no help from other gay men who've 'been there' and lived through it. There is a general disinterest among gay men which will definitely result in more isolation, alcoholism and suicide. MY HOPES: 1) That the next generation of gay people are currently watching what's going on politically, and getting angry. I hope that they replace this current generation of young people who have become passively compliant and sheepish and instead become pissed off (as an age group)...my hope is we see something similar from 1960 to 1970. We are due for a new radicalism in politics and idealism. People are being treated terribly in this country and nobody's doing anything because everyone's terrified to make the first move. 2) That gay people, one by one, have a breakthrough and realize how few of us are out there. We need to treasure our relationships and not let them die slow (or quick) deaths. Look at how long I've waited just to MEET somebody. I don't ever want to repeat another 10 years of waiting if I fall in love again. We need to be able to seriously understand that our actions affect other people, and that it's important that, when we say we are going to stay in a relationship, we mean it. 3) Gay people have to stop expecting a new president or new governor to do our work for us because it will never happen. The women's rights movement began because women got pissed off to the point where they put aside their differences, got organized and did something about it. Their power in numbers got something done. Gay men have to understand that throwing money at a problem without showing up and demanding change isn't only a really snobbish thing to do, it accomplishes nothing. We have to stop being so scared of being arrested, or afraid to offend people or being the wusses that so many of us are. That's what society EXPECTS of us - they know we'll never do anything. We have to prove them wrong. more to follow...
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