I Got A Name

I was in a nostalgic mood this morning and played Jim Croce's Greatest Hits album. It carried me back to my childhood, and the thought occurred to me that one of the strongest connections I have with my parents is the music of the 70s. Given how much their playing loud music bothered me as a kid, it's pretty ironic that now few things make me feel closer to them.

I've also been thinking back to Labor Day weekend four years ago. I was in Portland for a good friend's wedding, and during the trip I made the decision to move back. Given my situation, it seemed like the best possible plan. I had so much hope.

Alas, things didn't go smoothly at all. Hard to believe that four years have passed since that moment. But I've still got Jim Croce. :-)

President Obama at the memorial in Newtown

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When love beckons

Twenty-five years ago on a warm Labor Day night, I stopped midway through my run across campus and said--out loud, but to no one other than myself--"I'm gay."

It was an announcement that had been working its way to the surface for a long time... the final statement of something that in the beginning was not even expressed in words. I had known I was different from the other boys since at least the seventh grade. By the time I was eighteen, I was beginning to awkwardly reach out physically. But until I was able to break the silence, there was an unyielding wall between my inner universe and the one I shared with everyone else.

I had no idea that night of the changes that would come; I didn't sense how dramatically the trajectory of my life had shifted. But in that moment there was a perceptible change in my experience of the world. The lights had just been turned on in a darkened room.

Within a month I would be the secretary for GLAS, Stanford's student group for gays and lesbians. In two months, emboldened by my first relationship with another man, I wrote my parents a coming out letter. And a mere seven years later, though decades ahead of the societal curve, Tommy and I were married in San Francisco in front of friends and family including my parents, sister, grandmother, aunt, and cousins.

During my first decade of being out I created a new identity for myself: distinct from the adolescent who didn't quite fit in, different from the young man who'd been teased as "one of the girls" during his first year at Stanford. I was out at work, with friends both straight and gay, in my volunteer work, in my relationships, and with my family. While no one who's lived with a secret for twenty years suddenly becomes an open book, my life was finally integrated. I got to be the same person on the outside as I had always been on the inside.

There are things within each of us that we may or may not share with others; in that, at least, we have a choice. And every choice we make nudges us down certain paths while steepening others. Sometimes we confidently make our way down a long road and end up lost, as uncertain as when we'd begun. None of this is too say that I regret coming out; that was inevitable. It's more a recognition that the future, more likely than not, will not match what we've imagined. It hasn't done so for me. The new life I created in the years after coming out is now frayed and tattered; a lot of dreams remain unfulfilled. On the other hand, I never expected a sitting president to bring tears to my eyes by speaking out for gay rights at his party's national convention.

IN THE DAYS that followed my momentous run across campus, I began coming out to my closest friends. One of them, Robin, wrote me and included a quote from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, which I then included in my letter to my parents:

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest
branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them
in their clinging to the earth.

I don't think I've really understood the full meaning of that until today.

Spring has sprung

And I listened to Boston's "More Than a Feeling" about ten times at the gym today. :-)

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Sad but true...

The Pacific Princess from The Love Boat has struck out... another piece of my childhood destined for the scrap heap. Farewell, Julie McCoy...

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The world moves on...

The world really does change. When I was back in Kansas visiting my family in January, I went out in Manhattan one night with my sister to celebrate her friend's birthday. Midway through the evening Molly and I were at a bar waiting for her the rest of the gang to catch up. I spied a table of guys and said, "Molly, those guys all look gay!"

"Oh, yeah, this place is gay-friendly," was her casual response.

I was floored. I had spent my freshman year at Kansas State back in the 80s, and the idea that there was now a gay-friendly hangout in Aggieville was a shock. I know, it's been a long time, and it shouldn't have been. But somehow we still sometimes expect that the places we've left behind are going to be preserved just as they were.

AND TODAY IN WASHINGTON STATE the legislature passed gay marriage. Governor Christine Gregoire has said she'll sign the bill.

The world marches on. :-)

For Tara

She was one of my best friends as a kid; she was my first love. We've long since lost touch with one another, but Billy Joel's "She's Got A Way" has always been the song that comes to mind when I think of her.

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I want a time machine

Back in the 80s, even Reagan knew how and when to compromise.

And then there was cruising Main Street, listening to music like 38 Special's "Hold On Loosely."

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Sigh.

Thirty years ago...

Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the first report in the medical literature of the disease that was to become known as AIDS. From the CDC's MMWR Weekly:

In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection. Case reports of these patients follow.

I was fifteen at the time, still struggling in a small Midwestern town with my conflicted sexuality. It would be four more years before Rock Hudson died of AIDS and brought the disease home to me personally, leading me to slam shut a door I was just on the verge of opening. I remember riding around in my car one warm summer night, taping myself on my cassette recorder: Why did this have to happen now? Just when I was thinking that I could finally express who I am? Will I have to hide forever?

Thirty years. In those three decades I've come out. Demonstrated with ACT-UP and Queer Nation. Had countless friends test positive and several diagnosed with AIDS (though miraculously, only a couple have died). I've walked to raise money. Danced to raise money. Rode to raise money. I've studied the disease in classes. Been tested for it dozens of times. I've seen infection with HIV transition from being a death sentence to something much more manageable... and watched attitudes shift as well. Throughout these years the virus and the disease have been constants in my life as a gay man. Something to be afraid of. Something to fight. Something to assimilate as a fact of life. But it's never over, and each year brings a change in how this disease affects my community and how it affects me.

THE TENTH ANNUAL AIDS/LIFECYCLE begins tomorrow: a couple thousand riders and many hundreds of volunteers making the 545 mile journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I rode that route in 2007, and last year I volunteered for the medical team. I so wish I were going to be there this year!

To all my friends who will be: "Know that you are heroes for countless people. Ride safe and don't forget to use the hand sanitizer. :-) But most of all, when the going gets tough, remember that I love you. I'm so very proud of all that you're doing."

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And as a reminder of the long road from where this all began to the future we still hope for, here's the "I just wanna be there" scene from 1989's Longtime Companion.

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I just wanna be there.

Song of the day

Coldplay's "Warning Sign"

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Whoa! I just watched the video, which I hadn't seen before. And it reminded me that when I was in high school, I had a dream about a girl I had dated being hit by a car during the final week of our senior year. A little unnerving to re-experience that three decades later...

All Summer In A Day

Leave it to Mom, she remembered the name of the story I referred to in my recent "My Life On Venus" post: Ray Bradbury's "All Summer In A Day." Apparently there was even a TV version (on YouTube parts 1, 2, and 3).

I watched the first few minutes, and it reminded me too much of the last month in Portland. And given that this week has been sunny, I think I'll wait to watch the whole thing. :-)

My life on Venus

When I was in elementary school we had to read a story about a bunch of kids living in a colony on a terraformed Venus. The process of altering the climate still had a long way to go, and the weather was nonstop, driving rain. Once every few years the scientists would adjust the conditions so that the rain would dry up for a day.

All but one of the children in the story had been born on Venus; the one exception was a girl who had arrived from Earth and who had experienced the warmth of sunshine on her face.

For some reason that I've long since forgotten, the native Venusians locked the Earth girl in a closet on the day when the rain stopped. They ventured out and enjoyed an afternoon in the open more than they could possibly have imagined. But when the sun set and the rain began again, they remembered the girl and, of course, felt guilty for their actions.

I didn't think about this story much until I moved to Portland. Now I sympathize with that Earth girl a lot. Especially when driving in the rain.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, I did run across one thing that gave me a moment of delight today. A scientist has applied techniques developed for genetic analysis to identify patterns in human languages, and he made this fascinating claim:

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, ... has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: a language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.

If there is one group I wish I'd heard in concert...

Queen. It was at least a decade after my dad suggested that I listen to "Bohemian Rhapsody" on my first Sony Walkman before I became a real fan of the group, and my appreciation has only grown in the years since. (And while we're on the topic, where is that Freddie Mercury movie, anyway???)

Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air interviewed band co-founder and lead guitarist Brian May earlier this year and re-broadcast the segment today. Among other interesting anecdotes about the group, May, an astrophysicist, explained how he created the sound of many stomping feet in "We Will Rock You." Prime numbers, who knew?

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Note to Dad: I'm listening to "Bohemian Rhapsody" on headphones right now. :-)

There's always tomorrow

Merry Christmas, everyone.

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For Sally

I haven't been blogging much these past few months. A couple of weeks ago a friend at work said something about it to me and shared that her friend Sally had also asked about it. I said that I thought it had something to do with my giving up on people (the masses in general, not anyone who reads this, of course :-). When she shared that with Sally, Sally sent back the message that I should write about that.

I actually have a folder full of links to articles and stories that I've thought I'd like to write about. And while it would be nice to say that the reason I'm not writing is that I'm too busy, the reality is that I just haven't had much of an inclination to do so. There's some truth in that offhand remark I made when asked why I wasn't blogging. That feeling of resignation is also behind my loss of interest in politics. It's really all so disgusting, the tenor of things... the utter inanity of political debate in our country these days. We're faced with difficult, complex challenges and what do we hear about? Whether this candidate is a witch, which party is ahead in fundraising, and... I'm drawing a blank. Jesuchristo, I can't even remember what was said in the days running up to the election less than a month ago. It was all so pointless and yet so many people in America just seemed to accept and echo it as if it was what really mattered.

In August I read Nixonland, Rick Perlstein's 900 page book about Nixon's political career, the era he lived in, and the environment he left us with. Somehow the book both reassured me and depressed me at the same time. On the one hand, knowing that politics in America today wasn't that different from what it was back then made me feel better. It meant that I wasn't living in the "worst of times" or in the "last days." If it's been like this for awhile, then maybe it can't be that bad? Maybe we'll still muddle through as we always have?

But at the same time I found myself blanketed with something like despair. Because if this really is how it is--if those in power really have no interest in improving our lot and instead it's all just about the fight for dominance and power and money--then, well, that's pretty bleak. There is this froth on top of Washington which is what you first see: the conversation is about climate change or healthcare or whatever. But underneath is something bitter, and like the proverbial iceberg, most of what's actually there is hidden. I send in my contribution for $25 while untold millions are flowing in from corporations. The money arrived in suitcases in Nixon's day... now the Supreme Court has put its stamp of approval on the whole endeavour. Give any amount and do so anonymously. How can that be healthy for democracy?

Democracy, heavy sigh. I'm tired of hearing about how people have the right to carry a gun into a bar. I'm tired of hearing that the Founding Fathers were somehow so akin to Robert (the Rules of Order guy) that they'd be in favor of tying the hands of government with respect to adapting to the times. I'm sickened by state politicians suing over healthcare reform while their constituents go without coverage. I don't want to tune into Sarah Palin's Alaska or hear that there must be a secret plot because Bristol is still on Dancing with the Stars. I look from screen to screen at the gym and marvel at an industry that gives us endless episodes of overweight people eating fried food at different restaurants and stupid people pretending to act naturally while they're on camera 24x7. The debate over deficit reduction? Good luck! Both sides are hostages to their "beliefs," and the public has no hunger for spending cuts. And I'm simply worn out when I think about the environmental changes today's kids will see because we were too slow to wake up and act. A scientific consensus about global warming? Who cares. We know more than ever about the changes that are likely to come and we're burning more coal than ever, even exporting it to China now. Money triumphs principles, apparently always.

Okay, I guess that's enough of that rant.

I had a dream the other night. I saw a group of gay men off in the distance. There was this strange sense that I ought to go join them. But I didn't; I realized that, like with my writing, I really didn't have much of an inclination to go there, to "be in the group," to belong. Wherever I'm going, right now I'm turned inward. I don't know how to solve the world's problems; I'm focused on my own. There are still those people who I reach out to and want to be there for, but overall I feel chastened. Disappointed in myself and for the mistakes I've made over the past couple of decades. Pessimistic about the ability of people anywhere to make a difference.

And yet, the other night, I finally watched Gandhi. I was in high school when it came out and not very sociopolitically aware. It held zero interest for me at the time (I was rooting for Tootsie on Oscar night). But there in his story, at least, seems to be some evidence that even in the midst of millions of people, individuals can make a difference. Though as I write this, I think it likely that the biggest impact I saw depicted in the movie was not the British Empire leaving India but the reaction of the Hindi man being told by Gandhi that he could find his way out of hell by adopting a Muslim orphan to make amends for the one he'd murdered.

To change something you have to be able to touch it, in one way or another. I'll think about that for awhile.

Nostalgia...

This old wall sign in Portland reminds me of the sign over the drug store in Burrton in the 70s. :-)

Goodbye to the Merc

When I was a kid my parents had a 1941 Mercury two door sedan painted to somewhat resemble a watermelon. It was loud, occasionally backfired on Main Street, and was known to be temperamental about starting when parked out in the middle of nowhere.

But the backseat was so big that we once used it as a camper. :-)

Ford is shutting down the Mercury line which was introduced in 1939. Sigh.

Olympic memories

Scary... it was 30 years ago when Rodnina & Zaitsev squared off against Tai & Randy in the 1980 Olympic pairs figure skating competition. I was so caught up in the drama.

Here's Rodnina & Zaitsev's winning long program performance.

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Song of the day

"Under the Ivy" by Kate Bush, a song I first heard in Portland in 2002. And in further checking out Kate a few days later, I resolved a mystery from my junior high years: who was the woman who appeared one night on Saturday Night Live and sung a song that mesmerized me and had all the boys talking in the locker room the next day. It was Kate; she sang "Them Heavy People" on December 9, 1978. Turns out this was her only appearance on American television. Serendipity...

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That episode also included Dan Akroyd's classic Julia Child skit. :-)

Song of the day

Bob Seger's 1980 classic, "Against the Wind." I've loved this one for a long time... but probably not until the late 80s. In junior high and high school, I wasn't too sure about the people who liked Bob Seger...

And yes, I was crazy.

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"Remasterized," love it. ;-)