Manhunt.

The big gay news lately is Manhunt.net, the web site where men go to find other men to have sex with. Manhunt basically consists of pages and pages of profiles with small photos and a few lines of text running the gamut from those who are seeking love, romance, dinner and a movie-type dates ("I know Mr. Right is out there somewhere") to graphic solicitation ("BB bottom cumdump seeks NSA loads"). It tilts pretty hard toward the direct appeals. Men will be men.

There's an article in the new issue of Out Magazine called, "Has Manhunt Destroyed Gay Culture?" and yesterday it was in the news that the owner of Manhunt is a Republican who has donated money to John McCain's campaign. All the gay blogs are talking about it.

I'll offer a couple random thoughts (which I posted as a comment to the post in The New Gay). There are so many aspects of this issue -- cultural, personal, political -- that it's hard to tease out a point of view.

Just think about two guys cruising Manhunt: one is there because he's deeply ashamed, married and closeted, desperate for the touch of another man, and this is the only way he knows. The other one is Out, sex-positive, and believes that sex is a political act and a fundamental right. (I think you get the same extremes with people who cruise parks or public bathrooms.) Pride is not the opposite of shame, it's the other side of the coin.

There's also a practical consideration. Heterosexual men live in a world where 97% of the women they encounter could at least theoretically, potentially be attracted to them. Homosexual men live in a world where 97% of the men they encounter would not under any circumstances be attracted to them and in fact a large percentage of them would be hostile or repulsed by the suggestion. As gay men, we look for and create situations where the probability of sex is higher. We want better odds.

We need places to find each other, and it's easier to sit in front of the computer at home than it is to sit in a bar. The Internet is a horny man's dream come true. But I don't think I like this development. Alcoholics are much more fun than Internet addicts.

Extras.

Jay and I have been watching Extras, the series by Ricky Gervais who did The Office. I loved The Office, but this is even better I think. The Office was so relentlessly cynical, which was one of the things that made it so funny, but after a while that tone makes me a bit claustrophobic. What I love about Extras is that it is just as biting, but the characters are sympathetic. There's love in it. The Office was short on love. From what I saw of the American version of the Office, they tried to put some love in it, but it didn't ring true to me. The American version would probably be pretty good if you'd never seen the original. Steve Carell is pretty funny, or I should say used to be. He doesn't make me laugh any more. It's like Will Ferrell. I don't know if they're not funny any more or if I just got sick of them.

Moving Out.

J and I are moving some time soon to a house built from shipping containers and building materials salvaged from movie sets, which our friend JP (of M&JP) is building on their land. JP says it'll be done before Christmas.

I was talking with J a few days ago about how -- though I'm excited and happy about our future home -- the move comes with some sadness. It feels like a farewell to a kind of life that I dreamed of when I was a kid and lived for many years, in New York and then briefly in San Francisco, and to some extent in Nashville. A big city life where you live and work and play, shop and eat, all nearby or in places that are easily accessible by public transportation.

I've continued or tried to continue to live like that here in Austin, but it's a struggle because public transportation is so spotty. Sometimes, without a car, I feel isolated, stranded here. I can walk to the post office. I can walk to the bar, movie theaters, coffee shops, restaurants, and various other businesses. But I can't walk to a grocery store. And if I need something outside my neighborhood, I have to do serious planning. I can't just hop on the subway. Usually I can borrow J's truck. If I can't, a bus trip is often an hour and a half to get to a place that might take 15 minutes to drive to. Austin is a driving city, and I hate driving.

So moving out to M&JP's is like giving up, admitting that it may be impossible to have that life now. Life in the urban core is more and more just for the rich. The kinds of neighborhoods I lived in (the East Village and Lower East Side of New York, Ft. Greene in Brooklyn, Waverly-Belmont in Nashville) flip too fast now. There used to be a window of several years between when the artists moved into ghettos and the developers and yuppies came and wiped everything out. Now, I look at the neighborhoods east of our present home, where there is still serious poverty, drug dealing, prostitution on the street corners, not infrequent shootings, etc., and across the street they're building "luxury lofts."

Our new home will be about 4 miles from downtown and the U.T. campus. A reasonable bike ride and a very quick drive. M&JP are family to me, and though I'll be farther away from downtown, I'll feel less isolated there with them. The house is going to be beautiful. We'll have windmills and solar panels generating most of our power, a composting toilet, rain water collection will provide most of our water, a bigger vegetable garden. We'll be more closely in M&JP's orbit, a big and varied group of artists, friends, family. M&JP are like magnets for good, generous, interesting, hard-working, smart, creative people.

This move is a relief. No more yuppies nipping at my heels. It's the end of a long trail of spoiled neighborhoods that were once full of life and art and danger and possibility and are now full of strollers and retail chains and rents that are way too high for the marginal people.

(The new light rail system they're building now will stop near our new home and it goes downtown and to the U.T. campus. And we're right on two major bus routes, one of which goes to U.T., so my commute to school if I don't feel like riding my bike will be quick and easy.)

Heat.

It's 7:30 p.m. and it's 101 degrees here in Austin. But the sun will go down in a couple hours and the temperature will drop to about 95, and then it feels so good to open up the house and turn on the fans. That's the best thing about this extreme heat -- 95 feels cool.

Comix.

I don't know about the comic book thing. It's not generational, the fact that I don't get it. If there is a comic book generation, I'm in it. I think I picked up an Archies comic book a couple times when I was in 5th grade, but that was as deep as I got. Superheroes just seemed kind of dumb and childish to me, even when I was 12. I hope I'm less of a snob now -- I don't dismiss the whole genre, but I still don't get it. I just don't get it.

J and I went to see the Batman movie at the iMax theater on Wednesday. It was fun. It was often beautiful to watch. Gary Oldman is always a treat. And who's more handsome than Christian Bale? (Now I've got a hankering for Velvet Goldmine -- the last time I had the DVD, I watched it about 10 times in 3 days.) Lots of shooting, everybody shooting at each other. Heath Ledger is funny and scary, though at times his performance reminded me an awful lot of Johnny Depp in those pirate movies.

But at the end of the two hours and whatever, I had very little idea what had happened, let alone what it was about.

I've read some great graphic novels, one called Blankets is probably one of my all-time favorite books. And Stuck Rubber Baby is also great. Those are comics, right? Blankets is a beautiful book; the combination of great drawing and great storytelling -- I know I came late to this realization -- is powerful. I'm a huge fan of great drawing, and I can see that there's some great drawing in the superhero comics, so I wonder why that doesn't draw me in. When I try to read the actual comic books, I just can't work up much concern for the characters. It looks silly and contrived to me, the outfits and the things they get really worked up about, like cryptonite or whatever it is. All those cackling villians. I had a hard time not giggling when Batman was on screen in his costume talking to people in regular clothes. (How are these people keeping a straight face standing next to this guy in such a ridiculous outfit?)

So can someone give me some help with the comics genre? (Michael Chabon is one of my favorite writers, but I have avoided reading his most praised book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, because it's about comics.) Is it possibly related to gender? There were a lot more men than women at the Batman screening. Usually when it comes to those big cultural things that divide men from women (love stories or action thrillers, cooking or sports, etc.) I fall on the female side. There are traditionally-male genres that I've come to appreciate and enjoy because I've connected with particular artists -- like Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson for crime stories, Samuel R. Delany for science fiction. Pan's Labyrinth changed my mind a bit about fantasy, though I'm still in the dark with Lord of the Rings. It's a ring, right? The big fuss is about a ring?

I've really enjoyed some porn comics, especially Hard to Swallow, but sex is compelling in any genre.

High School.

I promised to share my Indiana epiphanies, but I should know that making promises doesn't work for blogging. Every day is something new, and I can't go back and catch up. The only writing about the past that I seem to be able to do, and I know I do it a lot, is writing about the distant past. But if there are gaps in my chronicle as the present streams relentlessly by, I just have to let them go and start where I am.

And I say all that just to let myself off the hook for not writing in depth about my encounter after 25 years with T, my best friend from high school, while I was in Indiana last month. Short version: T was the friend I did all the bad things with first (drinking, drugs, sex, shoplifting). T was that friend.

I don't trust my memories from that time. I used to assume that high school was a blur for everyone after so many years, but I've talked to people my age who remember clearly. Generally I have poor recollection of long past events. I lose the details, I lose the chronology. I wonder sometimes if it's a result of being so mentally and emotionally fragmented back then. I was one person in my head and heart, another in the world. Broadly speaking, that's the closet. My art teacher had a record-player in her classroom, the old kind that looks like a little suitcase, and for some reason there was only ever one record, the Moody Blues (I can't remember the name of the album, but it was the one with "Never Comes the Day"), and we would play it over and over in her class and I would fight back tears, "If only you knew what's inside of me now / You wouldn't want to know me, somehow."

When was it that we bought a few dozen eggs and ran around campus throwing them at college kids dressed up on their way to a dance? Whose idea was that? And how did we not get caught? If I was only ever half present in any moment, how can I be expected to remember the details?

I can't put things together. There's no through-line. We drank a lot when we were pretty young, even before high school I think, and started smoking pot when we were around 14. We lived in a college town, and it was easy to walk into frat parties and drink whatever was at hand. We'd both been smoking cigarettes since we were about 11 or 12. But midway through high school, I went through an anti-drugs and smoking phase (can you imagine?) and I didn't start smoking or drinking again until near graduation. I did lots of high school theater and those friends were clean-cut and separate from my pothead friends.

T remembers everything, though. He remembers all the mean nicknames we had for people. He remembers the time his father was beating up his older brother because he'd found his rolling papers and T ran down the road to my house and stayed for 2 days. (I remember how worried my mom was.) He remembers that it was him who first taught me how to give head.

Eduardo.

I asked J to scan a few photos of me and Eduardo from 1983. Except for the last one, these were taken in Eduardo's apartment on 11th St. and Ave. C, the place we shared for a few months the following year. That summer we were very into bleaching our hair, rooftop parties, and dancing at the Roxy. (And taking pictures of ourselves.)

The last one was taken at Jones Beach. That's my friend Liz who was in my class at Parsons. She used to call Eduardo and me the "love affair of the century." I wish I were still friends with Liz.

Home Free.

I'm back in Austin. I arrived last night after 31 hours on an Amtrak train. The trip was, mostly, enjoyable. I was worried for the first couple hours on the train because I managed to choose a seat right in front of 3-year-old twins who chattered, screamed, and cried non-stop. They literally did not shut up. Contemplating two full days of that, I thought I would have a nervous breakdown. But soon I realized there were plenty of other places to hang out, the observation car, the cafe car, etc.

My stomach is a little funny, I'm sure because for two days on the train all I ate was peanuts, ginger snaps, and a foul tuna sandwich I forced myself to eat because I paid $5.50 for it.

I'll write more about the trip and the last part of my stay in Indiana in the next few days,. In the last couple of weeks I've been in touch with several people from my distant past, and such encounters are always revealing. In keeping with the tone of this blog, I will share all the epiphanies, large and small. Right now I'm just glad to be home, cooking in my own kitchen.

A Story.

Here is my coming out story, as I remember it.

I had what I suspect is a typically fucked-up -- typical for homosexual kids, maybe for all kids, I don't know, I don't think people really talk enough (or honestly enough) about these things to know what is typical -- introduction to sex and sexuality. Unacknowledged-by-day (and completely unsatisfying) sex play with a friend starting when I was about 14. Deep fear and shame about it. Eventual admission to myself that I was homosexual. Really sordid "first time" with a predatory older man. (Come to think of it, the second time was of the same genre.) My first criterion when I went to choose a college was that no one I went to high school with be going there, so I could come out without my family or anyone in my hometown finding out.

And when I got to college I came out big time, told anyone who would listen, made plenty of gay friends (I was a theater major), went to my first gay nightclub, developed that sense of defiant pride which is part of any good coming out story. I wore a pink triangle button on my book bag. When people asked me what it meant, I wouldn't say that I was gay, but I would say that it was the symbol homosexuals were made to wear in the Nazi concentration camps.

Two years later, I moved to New York. I was in art school, I lived in the East Village. Being gay was not a big deal; in fact, for years I hardly knew any straight men. I fell in love, and I took my new boyfriend home to Indiana to meet my parents.

What's weird about this is that I was 22 and I still hadn't come out to my family. My folks are fairly liberal about some things, but they have what seem to me very strict, traditional attitudes about sex and relationships. My mother took a dim view of cohabitation before marriage and, especially, divorce. Homosexuality looked to me to fall into the same category.

When Eduardo and I arrived, it was the middle of the day and we went to meet my mother at the library where she worked. I had a thatch of bleached platinum hair on the top of my head with the sides and back clipped short and dark, and Eduardo probably had some equally outlandish haircut. We were both probably wearing oversized plaid Bermuda shorts and Bundeswehr tank tops -- that's what we wore most days (cut me some slack, it was 1983!). [When I get home to Austin, I'll post a photo or two of Eduardo and me from our East Village club days. I have some good ones.]

That night my mom told me how a custodian at work had made a crude gay joke about me to her. She pleaded with me to tone down my appearance while I was in town. She was crying. She said that she didn't want to make me feel ashamed of who I was but that she couldn't bear the ridicule. This is what I remember. She also said something about my earring. (I had had my left ear pierced a few years earlier, my first year of college.) She said that she understood that some men wore earrings as a "symbol of their sexuality," and I understood her to mean that she knew I was homosexual and it was okay. There was nothing more explicit said about it until much later, but I took that conversation to be the moment when I came out to my family.

My father acknowledged the news with stories, told to my mom but meant to be passed along to me, of his own father who he is sure was homosexual, stories that I think he intended to convey that this was not something scary and foreign to him, that he had some context for it. But I'm speculating. My father is a reticent man and was even more so then.

Another piece of this tale is my memory of a slim paperback, left on top of a pile of magazines in a rack in my parents' house, called something like How to Talk to Your Gay Child or What to Say When Your Child Comes Out, I don't remember exactly. This must have been when I was in college, before Eduardo. In my coming out narrative, this scene functions to show how accepting and ready my parents were long before I had the nerve to bring it up to them.

Last week Mom and I were having one of our long, rambling conversations, and she recalled a conversation with my brother, when he was in the Navy and I was in college, in which she told him that I was gay and his jaw just dropped. My brother and I are a year apart, we shared a bedroom growing up, we're very different but have always been close. Mom said he was stunned that he could not know something so important about me. I was trying to figure out when this conversation could have taken place, trying to put the timeline together. I said, "How early did you know?"

She said, "I don't know, I guess it was when you were in college that you came out."

"No -- I didn't come out until I brought Eduardo home."

"Oh, no, it was earlier than that."

"No, I know I didn't tell you before that. I would remember that."

"You must have."

"Well, anyway, I should have known that you knew. You left that book out."

"What book?"

"Like How to Talk to Your Gay Son or something like that."

"I don't remember a book. You must have left that book out. It wasn't us."

"No! It was in the magazine rack. You left it there for me to see."

"I don't remember any book like that."

"I know when I came out to you. I brought Eduardo home, there was that whole flap about my appearance, and I told you."

"Steven, I'm sure you told us earlier than that."

A friend of mine (he's a writer) recently said that as far as he's concerned "one's life is basically a story," and I agree, but I don't like to think that my life is only a good story because I'm writing it after the fact.

I know I saw that book!

Disappearing Man.

My friend The Gardener has disappeared. (I also wrote about him here.) We only saw each other every two or three weeks, and it was a new friendship but, I thought, a deep one. We'd have breakfast on a Saturday or Sunday morning at Los Altos, the dirt-cheap Mexican restaurant just up I-35. We talked about sex and politics mostly. He usually paid, and a couple times he took me out for ice cream which totally made me feel like a girl. In a good way.

He's a sweet man and I think our friendship was getting richer as we got to know each other. I was slowly getting over my urge to lick his neck every time I saw him. But he never introduced me to his long-time partner. I'm sure it was partly because we saw each other so infrequently and there probably wasn't a time when it would have naturally happened, but, also, I felt like maybe he was keeping me to himself. Not that we were having "an affair," but I felt like there was at least a little bit of "the other man" about it, which I liked because it kept our friendship in some small way erotic. Could be all in my head, who knows. At any rate, The Gardener disappeared.

He stopped answering emails. After a break of several weeks, he did reply and say that with the summer he was spending less time at the computer. But then after that, nothing. And I don't have his phone number any more. It was in my cell phone, which I got rid of.

I guess I'm a little worried. His mother died early this year, and a friend killed himself not long before that. He didn't seem particularly thrown by either death, but he's a stolid man, ex-military, not the type to get real emotional. Now, that can mean he has a very healthy attitude, he's philosophical about life and death and deals well with the big stuff. Or it could mean he keeps it all inside and it builds up and he has a meltdown later on. I haven't known him long enough to have an opinion.

I've been thinking of him a lot since I've been here in Indiana with my mom and dad.

Jesse Helms is Dead.

I've been wondering today where all the hate goes when somebody so hateful dies. Does it decompose along with his corpse? It seems like it would at least linger like an odor, a whiff of sulfur. He wielded it with such implacable force, bruised and battered so many people and institutions over so many years that it's hard to believe such hate wouldn't be a hard, solid thing.

Hallelujah, Thank You Jesus.



The tooth is gone. I like that it was tooth #1 on the big master tooth chart (did you know they're all numbered?). He showed it to me after he pulled it out, and it was nasty-looking: huge and discolored, with a big hole in it.

The whole thing took 15 minutes tops and I didn't feel a thing, which is a drag because the oral surgeon was cute. As I was leaving, he said, "Call me if you need me."

Um, I need you!

Young Love.

My nephew L, who is 12 and cute as the dickens (as my grandma used to say), has a girlfriend. He asked his mom (my sister) if he was allowed to "date," whatever that could possibly mean at 12. She says L and the girl are texting each other all day long.

When my sister told me, I was incredulous and maybe even a little appalled. 12? Isn't that extremely young? He hasn't even started puberty yet. I'm sure I had no interest in dating at 12. But then I remembered (duh) of course I was interested in boys at 12, but my interest didn't lead me to ask my mother if I was allowed to go on a date. I knew that if I ever told anyone about the evil growing inside me, I would spend the rest of my life being raped in jail, and even if I didn't tell anyone I would spend eternity roasting on a spit.

My Teeth Again.

Here's something I can write about. This week, I went back to the dentist, or I should say the hygienist, and she finished cleaning my teeth. And I have an appointment on Thursday with an oral surgeon to have one pulled because the filling has fallen out and it's a wisdom tooth and the hole is close to the nerve so it's easier and cheaper to just yank it. I can't describe the joy this brings me, to know that I'll soon have all the filthy, stinky rotten stuff out of my mouth.

I also feel a twinge of sadness about having a permanent part of my body removed. (Not so permanent, after all.) Being here with my aging parents, I've been thinking so much about getting older in terms of what you give up, the accumulation of loss: the people around you who die one by one, the activities you can no longer manage, the shrinking of your zone of travel, the narrowing of possibility in general, and things like bone loss, memory loss, vision and hearing loss, loss of elasticity in your skin. And the always accelerating contraction of the number of years you have left. All of it.

It's just a damn tooth, but that's how it starts!

Sorting Things Out.

I'm at a loss for what to write about these days. There's lots going on in my head for sure, some of it pretty fascinating if I do say so myself, but most of it has to do with unpacking my neuroses in light of my parents' habits. I would be an ungrateful son, not to mention a rude guest, to paint what would surely seem to them an unflattering portrait of my parents here. What I want to do, what I wish I could do, here and in my brain, is forgive my parents and paint the unflattering portrait of myself.

I've been here for 4 weeks now. It's been stormy on and off the whole time. But enough sun that the spinach Mom and I planted the week I arrived is big and leafy, and I thinned the basil so there are about a dozen seedlings now about 3 inches tall. I saw a sleek, black spider on one of the spinach leaves this morning and was glad that I found it and not my mom. They gleefully kill everything here, smash spiders with newspapers and Kleenex, lure chipmunks into cages where they shoot them with guns, rig the lawn with Medieval contraptions that impale moles as they commute in their tunnels under the grass. And god help the dandelions, the lepers of the suburban plant world. Poor little yellow things. So pretty and doomed.

Yardwork.

I won't mow the lawn. Well, I suppose I would if my dad asked me, but he hasn't and I'm grateful to the point of tears. Mowing grass might as well be the eternal flames of hell. I can't think of any worse torment. And it's been raining a lot since I got here, so the grass needs to be mowed every few days. "Needs to be mowed," they say, but I think it looks beautiful when it gets all long and green and lush. I have to admit that I feel guilty watching my 74-year-old father push the lawn mower back and forth -- but not guilty enough to go out there. I think he enjoys it. I'm going to assume he enjoys it.

I feel such a strong urge to be writing one of those usually icky articles like "what I learned about life and myself while taking care of my sick parent," but I have this rule about not writing personal stuff about other people. It's a tricky rule, and I'm usually very uncertain where to draw the line. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't be interesting to you to read about my mom, but I don't think it's my story to tell. At least, not right now in the middle of it.

Just to reassure anyone who might worry: Mom is doing very well. In fact, you wouldn't even know she'd been sick. Yesterday she had me drag all the furniture from the screened-in porch out onto the lawn so she could scrub the mold off with bleachy water. I'm not sure if I should insist on doing these chores for her, because it seems to me that this is what she does. This is what her days consist of. Taking care of the house and the lawn and the gardens. Because her immune system is compromised by the chemotherapy, she's not allowed to dig in the dirt this summer. I try to keep up with the weeding, but I know somehow that's not the point. Someone else weeding is fine, but it's a distance second to doing it herself.

I can say this without betraying anyone's privacy: I am in a foreign and mysterious place where bushes get pruned to the bloody nub and all the condiments are in upside-down plastic bottles. I miss my wild, overgrown yard, and I miss the sound of a butter knife against the rim of the mustard jar. And I miss J.

War and Whiskers.

My dad is a Civil War buff. The military stuff doesn't interest me much, but the politics do. Over the last two nights, we watched Gods and Generals (it's almost 4 hours long) and he's watching Gettysburg tonight. I'm wandering in to catch bits of it, but I can only take so much. Great acting, and beautiful photography, but the ponderous tone wears me out. I know there's a case to be made that this class of people in this time were more eloquent and sentimental, but was everything that came out of their mouths so lofty?

The best thing about these movies -- and the Civil War era -- is the facial hair. It's infinitely varied, elaborate, masculine, and very sexy.