On This Day.

On this day in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence vs. Texas that state laws against homosexual sex were unconstitutional. I was 42 years old when it became legal for me to have sex in the United States of America. (I recommend the book Flagrant Conduct, about the Lawrence case. It’s a real page-turner.)

When I was born, 1961, “the infamous crime against nature” was a felony in every state. Over the next 42 years, a handful of states repealed their sodomy laws or reduced the penalties, but in 2003 same-sex sodomy was still a crime in 13 states, in some states still carrying long prison sentences and hard labor.

Lawrence vs. Texas reversed the 1986 S.C. ruling in Bowers vs. Hardwick which had upheld laws against gay sex. 1986. I was 25.

I place these events in my own timeline not to make it all about me, but to, 1, say that these are laws that shape lives, and 2, to convey how recent, and to my mind tenuous, is this so-called rapid shift in attitudes toward queer people that we keep hearing about. The Republican Party, as it exists today, doesn’t just want Roe vs. Wade reversed, not only are they gunning for the Voting Rights Act, they’re coming after all the 1950s and 60s civil rights laws, and the New Deal, and Obergefell (gay marriage) and Lawrence vs. Texas while they’re at it. (Sixteen states still have sodomy laws on the books which they still occasionally find sneaky ways to enforce, and which would go back into full effect if Lawrence were overturned.) For minorities whose ability to live their lives unmolested has so often depended on court rulings, the current religious conservative makeup of the Supreme Court is terrifying.

I don’t say all this to wallow in despair (though I struggle with my share of that lately) but to say that it’s a long war with an uncertain outcome. But that’s no reason not to keep fighting. In fact, it’s the reason TO keep fighting.

The Last Time I Saw Richard.

Of course Blue is one of my favorite albums but it sounds stupid to say that. Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which is 50 years old this week, exists somewhere outside of any trivial list I or anyone might make, any bestowing of a subjective distinction or rank.

When I hear it, or any of its songs, the thought is never far of the first time I heard it, or rather listened to it, with a boy named Richard in his dorm room at DePauw University, where I ended up one winter night my sophomore year of college when I was home for the Christmas break. I went to school in Oxford, Ohio at Miami University. DePauw was the small liberal arts college in the town where my family lived, where I’d gone to high school.

I had become friends with a piano student named Nancy, who was wildly funny and wildly talented and just wild, and somehow through her had met Richard, a soft-spoken boy with thick, dark hair and bright blue eyes, wearing a soft, expensive-looking yellow sweater, a vocal performance student in the music school, though no one I talk to now who was part of that group of friends remembers how we met Nancy, who is dead now so we can’t ask her, and they don’t remember Richard at all. A week or two into January, when I was back at school, Richard drove to Oxford to visit me. I don’t remember exactly what happened — I’ve probably pushed it out of my memory because I’m ashamed to have treated him, or anyone, so badly — but in Ohio everything felt different, or I should say I felt differently about Richard. He left brokenhearted.

But before all that, we were alone in his dorm room together very late one very cold night until very early, sitting on two chairs facing each other, his stocking feet between mine, listening to Blue. He knew every word, as I do now. Before that night I used to say, if anyone asked, that I didn’t care for Joni Mitchell because “all her songs sound alike.” I’m nearly as ashamed of that as I am of dumping Richard.

The Richard in The Last Time I Saw Richard is nothing like my gentle, effeminate college boy in the yellow sweater. But still.

1990, Lizzie, Outweek, Pride.

The beginning of Pride season, combined with Sarah Schulman’s new book about ACT UP and my current writing/rabbit hole, had me thinking about Outweek. Life, for a few years there, revolved around Outweek, the magazine that kept us all up to date on the epidemic, queer life, ACT UP and Queer Nation and WHAM and all the other AIDS and queer activism, as well as arts and culture in fin de siècle plague-era New York. I can’t think of another example of any media that so shaped my life and world view. Everyone I knew devoured it every week.

I loved Outweek so much that this nasty little diatribe by a pseudonymous lesbian music “critic” about the very first version of what is now LIZZIE in 1990 didn’t put me off the magazine as much as it put me off pseudonymous lesbian music “critics.” And pseudonymous non-lesbian music “critics.”

This is probably self-evident, but it’s not a super great idea to send a letter to a magazine protesting a negative review. They will win. They have a magazine. (But the thing about Outweek is that it felt like our magazine, everybody’s magazine, and in many ways it was. The “Letters” section was long and probably the most read.)

Anyway, I should say that — though it retains its spirit and volume, the story, the core idea and some of the songs, its queerness and wild feminism, its reason for being — 1990’s Lizzie Borden: An American Musical is not 2021’s LIZZIE. It was 45 minutes long, started with the murders, and contained 4 songs. It was rough and some of the criticism in this review is legitimate. That was the beauty of the downtown experimental theater scene, that you could work stuff out on stage in front of a supportive audience that understood that creating serious, provocative, original work is a process. There would be no LIZZIE, in the full-length, narratively coherent, every beat completely thought through, professionalized form it takes today if we hadn’t had the freedom and support of that community.

I miss how wild you could be back then though. I miss the low commercial stakes that allowed artists to take crazy aesthetic risks.

LIZZIE in Barcelona, coming in fall 2021.

1979-1983.

I’m writing now about the time between summer of 1979 and the middle of 1983 — roughly my two years at Miami University and my first 2 years in New York. This period of my life is the most heavily documented. (Well, that’s not strictly true — the late 90s and a few other random times are chronicled pretty extensively but for this particular project I’m stopping at, roughly, 1990.)

My high school diary is what sent me on this trail to begin with, and it contains some of the most compelling material for me, but it’s often very sketchy and selective regarding events. That’s typical of most of my journal-writing: much of it revolves around questions in my head, and people, places, and things are there sporadically but they are not the main thrust. All that is to say that my childhood and high school years are lightly documented and so were easier to write about because I was writing about memory, which is always accessible even if spotty and unreliable. But from the early 80s, I have piles of journals, drafts of plays and stories and essays, manuscripts, drawings, and various hybrids of all of the above. And whereas the years from 0-18 largely revolved around waiting, the following few years are dense with new experiences, exposure to new people and ideas, a massively hectic life in a city that never stops giving you something to do or contemplate, and men men men art art art. Things moved fast. It’s a lot to absorb and synthesize. Rabbit holes abound.

1982. I was 21. You know how it is.

Artists Are Vampires.

Journal, 11/9/1980.

Poring over my journals and letters and manuscripts going back to when I was 14 has been — I guess not unexpectedly because why else would I be doing it? — revelatory in ways big and small. I think the most striking sort of overall discovery is that words I use now, habits of mind, views and opinions I hold deeply, things which I might have otherwise, without a lot of analysis, insisted I’d learned or developed over the course of 60 years, actually show up regularly and more or less fully-formed in my writing at 25, or 19, or 16.

This entry from 1980, when I was a sophomore at Miami University studying acting and directing, pulled me up short this morning. Not the first bit — that feeling of lostness is something I mention over and over in my journals from all ages. I mean the second paragraph, where I write that my closest friend and I are in the middle of a tense, painful episode, and even as it’s happening I’m mulling over its potential as “material.” It struck me as incredibly cold and also I recognize that I’m doing that all the time, every day.

It’s something I’ve heard lots of artists describe, that sense of there being two mental tracks running simultaneously all the time: one on which you experience your life, and two, the one where you’re observing and evaluating it as a “story.” But for some (obviously self-serving) reason I never really saw the stark reality that that process infiltrates every relationship I’ve ever had in my life. And I didn’t realize I was already so cold-blooded at 19.

Going Through Some Stuff.

Work these days consists mostly of poring over journals and correspondence, drawings, drafts, and manuscripts from the first half of the 1980s. And then feeling a bit nauseous and sad the rest of the day. Maybe the nausea is a side effect of the vaccine, I don’t know. But the sadness is not, not a medical side effect is what I mean, but I did start crying out of the blue on my walk home after I got the shot.

The big overall impression I get from this look back at my early twenties is how insanely precarious life was: practically and financially, artistically, emotionally and psychologically, physically. Jesus Christ. It’s just falling in love with every man who says hello, suicidal breakups, crazy druggy days and nights, losing jobs every other week and job hunting and quitting jobs and moving, and getting sick getting sick, making art and questioning it TO DEATH. And all that stuff is just the background for a wild life of incredible freedom and fun, ecstasy, abandon in a neighborhood that is vibrating with it all day every day.

Looking at all the ephemera from that time is disorienting and to say the least emotionally complicated. It’s a lot to process, but process I will! For my birthday, Chan gave me a week’s retreat in a cabin in the Adirondacks to write. Work here at home is going well and steadily, but it’ll be great to be alone with it for a chunk of time.

An Elegant Line.

My reference to “an elegant line” is about one of my teachers at Parsons, where I studied fine arts — Harvey, whose last name I’ve forgotten — having said in a critique of one of my drawings that I had “an elegant line.” I was deeply insulted, shaken. I took it to mean that I was producing kitsch, not art, and from that moment on I was determined that all my lines would be inelegant. It’s like a phobia, back then and even still, my fear of being good enough at something to fake it. It was like every time I sat down to make art, of any kind, I had to reinvent the wheel. I couldn’t just paint, I had to invent painting first.

These journal entries are from the year after my year at Parsons. I had dropped out of school because I wanted to be an artist not an art student, but I was careening from one idea to the next, one style to another, a different medium every week or two, feeling like I’d figured it out, realizing I hadn’t, and over and over. (If I’d actually made every piece of conceptual art I described in my journal that fall, I’d … have made a lot of pieces of conceptual art.) I spent much of the previous fall sick, culminating in a bout of pneumonia, one shitty low-paying job after another, barely scraping by even in the cheap 80s East Village, and I was exhausted.

I was ideologically opposed to making money with my art. Not just a young idealistic desire to put artistic before commercial considerations, but a moral line in the sand. And yet I complained constantly about having to do other work to pay the bills. I don’t remember seeing the dilemma built into that.

These years were consequential years. I began to get a sense of myself as an artist, what was important, what was not, and I fell deeply in love about 25 times, mostly with men I’d spent one night with and never saw again and then I fell in love for real and it nearly killed me.

(The period of 1982-84, at least as I’m mapping it out now, will be the climax of my book, when all the threads come together: my first serious love and heartbreak, the arrest and trial for child molestation in my hometown of the man with whom I had my first sexual experience at 16, and the active years of the serial killer Larry Eyler in and around that part of Indiana.)

So … I will be 60 on Monday. I have reached that age “when the real anxiety comes, about the passing of time, about age and death and accomplishment, when I can’t say ‘I’m young’ anymore.” I want to go back and tell my 21-year-old self that he’s right to be vigilant about the elegant line. And also, calm the fuck down man.

Pride/Shame -- My Thoughts on It's a Sin.

(Probably don’t read this if you plan to watch the series. If you haven’t seen it, do. It’s gripping.)

I’ve seen lots of rapturous reviews of It’s A Sin in social media, and I’ve seen some very strong criticism. It’s unavoidable that a series whose subject is the AIDS plague years would arouse strong feelings and opinions among the men and women who lived through those years in those communities.

Most of the negative critique seems to center around the scene near the end, after the death of Ritchie, who, in the first episode fled his homophobic family to come to London (all the characters do that) and who early on dismissed the seriousness of the risk of getting infected and the risk of infecting others. The scene is between Ritchie’s mother and his best girlfriend, Jill. Jill says:

 “Actually, it is your fault, Mrs. Tozer — all of this is your fault… Right from the start. I don’t know what happened to you, to make that house so loveless, that’s why Ritchie grew up so ashamed of himself — and then he killed people! He was ashamed, he kept on being ashamed, he kept shame going by having sex with men, infecting them, and then running away. Cuz that’s what shame does, Valerie, it makes him think he deserves it. The wards are full of men who think they deserve it. They are dying, and a little bit of them thinks ‘Yes, this is right, I brought this on myself, it’s my fault because the sex that I love is killing me.’“

The monologue is a gut punch when you’ve spent your life arguing that promiscuity was not killing us, sex was not killing us, we were not killing ourselves. Governmental neglect and societal indifference and antipathy were killing us.

A common slogan on posters and other ACT UP media was “Homophobia kills.” Meaning that a homophobic government was ignoring the pandemic because it was queers who were dying. A homophobic society didn’t care that we were dying, because it was our own fault, and we deserved it. But this series asserts something deeper and more insidious: homophobia causes gay men to feel shame, and shame makes them hate themselves, which causes them to believe their lives are worthless. They internalize society’s view of them, and that causes their promiscuity and carelessness about sex. That’s a lot to swallow when you have cut your gay political teeth on the idea that openly celebrating our sexuality is the most potent political weapon we can exercise, the most important act of resistance. 

(And of course there’s a convincing argument to be made that the conservative turn of the post-90s gay rights movement, toward marriage, children, military service, assimilation, and away from sexual freedom is a community-wide shame reaction to the plague years. It’s A Sin is very much a post-90s work of art, a product of this era.)

Here’s what I think. Can we allow for the possibility that we experience, and perceive, our promiscuity as both things: freedom, joy, celebration and a grinding compulsive need to replace our self-hatred, even if it’s just for a few minutes, with the feeling of worth and control that being attractive to someone brings? For me, in my life, promiscuity was both these things at different times and often at the same time.

Pride and shame are two sides of the same coin. Can anyone honestly say that when they came out all the bad feelings just went “poof!” For me, coming out, being out, feeling pride, protesting homophobia, all these things are part of a lifelong project to chip away at the shame. We insist on joy because we’ve been told all our lives that our desire is disgusting. We live in a world that hates us. That was true when I was a child, true in 1979 when I came out, true in 1981, and it’s still true. How would we not feel shame?

I think depicting gay men who don’t feel shame, who don’t to some extent think terrible things about themselves, hate themselves sometimes, would be a misrepresentation, but as a community we do it all the time, refuse to acknowledge our shame, our damage, our pain. The relentless rainbows and unicorns PRIDE! message might be politically necessary, but it can compound our shame. Constantly being told that we should be proud and not ashamed makes us ashamed of our shame.

My thoughts, for what they’re worth.

One thing I can’t really make sense of is that this monologue, this “thesis statement,” comes not from one of the gay men characters — who would presumably speak with more authority on the subject — but from the straight woman friend. To be honest, I’m not sure how to parse that narrative choice.

Thoughts On a Damaged Photograph.

This is one of a set of snapshots of my mother and father’s wedding in the summer of 1958. I think Mom said that it was a photo of the wedding day lunch, which maybe was a more traditional affair than it is now, or possibly more traditional there than it is everywhere? I don’t know. It was taken in the kitchen of the DeMeyer farmhouse on Grange Hall Road in Gurnee, Illinois. The road is now much bigger and busier and has a different name, and the house, though still standing, has been converted into municipal offices and is unrecognizable. I don’t know how this photo was separated from the set, but I ended up with it in my 20s. I loved it and probably just asked to have it.

When I left Brian in 1990, I moved from our apartment on Ashland in Ft. Greene to an apartment on Warren Street in Boerum Hill on the other side of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I had never lived alone in New York but I had just negotiated a large raise in my hourly rate as a temp proofreader, and I could afford the tiny one-bedroom apartment in what was then a very poor neighborhood. The apartment was on the top floor of a row house, freshly painted, no frills but clean. My landlord was only a little older than me, had long wavy hair, muscles, and crooked teeth, and coming and going I often saw him cleaning or repairing the building and another building he owned nearby. He wore very short black leather shorts and a cropped tight white t-shirt when he worked outside.

The outside wall of my long, narrow kitchen was exposed brick. Next to a small table where I ate my meals, I hung several small framed photographs and pieces of art that were special to me so I could look at them while I ate, this photo among them.

Days after I signed the lease, my graveyard shift “perma-temp” gig at Weil Gotshal collapsed with everything else that collapsed at the end of the 80s, and I could no longer afford the rent. Luckily, my old friend Joan needed a roommate in her apartment on 10th and 1st — I had lived there with Joan years earlier, when I was at Parsons — so I broke my lease in Brooklyn and moved back to the East Village.

When I took down the art from the brick wall, the frame on this photo felt damp in the back, and then I saw that the wall itself was wet, possibly with condensation or maybe the brick wasn’t sealed so moisture came through the wall when it rained. Water had seeped into the frame, behind the glass, and when I tried to remove the photo, no matter how carefully or slowly I worked, most of its surface came off with the glass.

On the left you can see Diane, one of my mother’s best girlfriends in high school, who was a bridesmaid, with her husband at the time. In the left foreground is probably Don, my mother’s little brother and next to him would be Mom’s much younger sister, Nicki, who was called Susan then. If you look closely you can see Mom at the head of the table, framed by the window, and farther right the front of my grandmother Elsie’s face, and then at the far right a fragment of my mother’s best friend and maid of honor, Carole. On the table are what look like a platter of fried chicken and a plate of large rolls. The table is set with what were their best dishes, probably my grandparents’ wedding China. It could just be the awkwardness of being caught off guard for a snapshot, or the stiffness of the formal clothes and serious occasion, but no one looks comfortable, no one is smiling in this photo. All of these things were of course much clearer to see before the photo was damaged.

This is the only photo I know of taken inside that house. I feel sick to my stomach every time I see it, contemplating the loss. But Mom never shared good memories associated with that house; she only talked about violent arguments and days-long bitter silences between my grandmother Elsie and grandfather Emil DeMeyer. And between Emil and my mother’s older sister Carol. It was not a happy family.

The Man Who's Not in My Family Tree

Pretty sure all my friends have heard me go on about my grandfather Edward Cheslik, who my father believes was a homosexual and who was certainly an alcoholic and an unreliable husband and father, as far as that goes. My father told me these things when I came out to my parents at 20 (if you accept my telling) or 18 (if you believe my mother). And when I say “told me” that’s short for “told my mother and she told me.”

This story, or these stories, or I should say the gaps in this story, are, I’m realizing, the driving force of my life’s work. In my twenties, I wrote a song called My Family Tree, the subject of which was not knowing anything about the man my grandfather loved. (My father has since changed the way he tells it — he used to say that his father disappeared several times, his mother tracked him down, and she always found him living with a particular man, but recently Dad told me that it was not the same man but always a different man. Though there’s no way to be sure, I’m inclined to go with the first version because my father often alters facts in stories in later tellings. But to be sure it is possible the revision is correct.)

The geography of my father’s childhood tracks his abandonment by his father. Lenore found Ed in Albert Lea, she packed up and moved the family to Albert Lea. Lenore found Ed in Waukegan, she packed up the family and moved to Waukegan — where my father met my mother and where I was born. Even a series of earlier moves within Winona, where they lived when my dad was little and where the Chesliks go back several generations, seem to have been prompted by a series of frustratingly undescribed “scandals.”

For a long time, that was enough to know. Or I should say it was enough to not know. Just the knowledge that my grandfather was probably queer, the sense of a forebear, was potent and moving to me. More recently I’m less satisfied. As I’ve studied more and more lives of gay people and seen how almost every biography is full of holes — holes created specifically, explicitly, by the imperative to preserve secrecy in order to avoid public shame, ostracization, injury, death: correspondence burned, personal papers burned, everything containing any hint of intimate or domestic life, any sign of love, destroyed, lost to history — I’ve become more angry, more unsettled, more heartbroken. Because it’s not just a family history lost but the history of a people.

I mean to tell Edward’s story in this book I’m writing, and I want more to tell.

My grandfather and my grandmother Lenore were divorced I think in the very late 1950s or early 1960s. My mother said that Ed held me as a baby, and then, after many shorter disappearances, disappeared for good. In 1965, he was found dead under a tractor trailer in Tucson where he had crawled for warmth and shelter. He was what they used to call a “transient” — homeless. He must have been carrying identification because the small article in the Arizona Daily Star about his death named him, and the coroner phoned his “next of kin,” his sister Sylvia in Minnesota. Silvia flew, alone, to Arizona to identify and claim the body of her brother. She and the minister were the only people at the funeral service. Edward Paul Cheslik was buried in Holy Hope Cemetery in Tucson.

Now I yearn for the seemingly impossible. Who was the man he left his family to be with? Or was it men? Where did they meet, and how? What could it possibly have been like to be a homosexual in small town Minnesota in the 1920s? 1930s? Where was Ed during the period after his final disappearance until his death a few years later? There are 1800 highway miles between Waukegan, Illinois and Tucson, Arizona. Why Tucson? Where did he stop along the way? For how long? How did he get by?

I found a woman on Ancestry.com, in that list they give you of “2nd/3rd cousin, shared DNA,” who had written a short remembrance of her grandmother Silvia Cheslik Luxem, Ed’s sister. I sent her a note asking if she had heard any family stories of Ed. She wrote back right away, having contacted an aunt who was Silvia’s daughter. The aunt remembered Ed and Lenore and that Ed had disappeared and the family never spoke of it, and she remembered meeting my father when he was a teenager and he showed her his model airplanes. Just reading these fragments of a stranger’s memory of my father and his family this morning I found myself suddenly crying, though it amounts to nothing much.

Most people research their genealogies, construct their family trees, based on marriage records, but of course there’s none of that. I know about Ed’s marriage, but that’s such a small part of his story.  Maybe one of the big questions I need to answer as I write this book is — what is the nature of a story that has been mostly erased, the only people who might have had direct memories of it all dead, about a man whose family for the most part wanted to forget and nobody living much cares about?

I just want to give Edward Cheslik’s life the dignity of being remembered, and I don’t know how to do that.

It's Not Christmas Till Christmas.

We’re three days into the Little Drummer Boy Challenge and Whamageddon (so far, so good) which I think really just stand in for our collective impulse to run from all the the terrible Christmas songs and execrable recordings of good Christmas songs that saturate our manmade environment for 6 weeks every year — though this year most of us are getting a break from it because we’re not leaving home. OR SHOULDN’T BE.

I don’t have any strong feelings about the Wham! song. It’s fluff and doesn’t pretend to be anything but. I don’t mind it nearly as much as, I don’t know, Christine Aguilera bushwhacking her way through O Holy Night. The LDBC I take much more seriously. There literally is no song worse than that song, and there are a thousand self-serious covers of it out there, from Boyz II Men to Bad Religion, waiting to assault you. It is endless and, for such a messagey song, it has no message. I hate it.

I do have strong feelings about Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and I avoid it more scrupulously than either of the official challenge songs because the revised version that everyone sings now completely misses, or I should say avoids, the whole point of the song, which is the whole point of the season, which is that, no matter how bad things might be right now, if you have faith, the darkness will end. There will be light again. You don’t have to be Christian or even religious to feel the power of that metaphor.

Reportedly, Frank Sinatra loved the song but didn’t want to sing something so sad — the obvious question being that if he loved the song why did he murder it? — and had it re-written. (It’s fitting that Sinatra is the culprit here. Much later, he stole New York, New York from Liza Minelli, who, also, like her mom, did it better. To say the least.)

I was heartened to come across this article this morning. Maybe this year, because the words of the song, as in its original wartime context, can be read absolutely literally, it’s possible to appreciate again the power of this song, its honesty about our sorrowful circumstances, the pain we feel being so long separated from so many of our loved ones, a pain without which the hope in the song (“someday soon we all will be together”), the faith, the promise of light after the long dark night has no meaning.

It is, no question, the best Christmas song ever written. But you will never hear it even if you spend from now to Christmas Eve in a mall. You will hear some bullshit that sounds like it about a million times. If you want, you can do what I do: every time someone starts singing it, sing along (either out loud or in your head — read the room) but sing the original lyrics.

5/26/82.

I found another journal!

There have been huge gaps, sometimes of many years, in my journal-keeping, particularly frustrating because they often occur at times when the most is going on in my life. But this one is a real find — a lot is happening.

Armelia McQueen died today (or yesterday?), which sent me looking for the Playbills that I saved from my first trip to New York in 1979. The second Broadway show I saw was Ain’t Misbehavin’. For years, decades, I used to tell people that I’d seen the original cast with Nell Carter, and I truly believed that I had, but several years ago I was looking at the Playbill I’d saved and I realized that I’d seen a replacement cast over a year after the show had opened. So … I love Armelia McQueen, my college friends and I wore that cast album out so I’m very familiar with her voice, but I wanted to see if by chance she was still in the Broadway production when I saw it. She was not.

But as I was digging, I found a stack of pages tied with a shoelace, and it turned out to be my journal from spring of 1982 to June 1983, for some reason stored separately from the other journals. It’s the period of time when I’m becoming more and more impatient with studying fine arts at Parsons, contemplating and then deciding to leave school and just be an artist in the city.

I spent that summer back in Greencastle, Indiana, working at a menial job on the graveyard shift at IBM and living cheap to save up a little cushion (back then, $100 was a sizable cushion). But before that, in Indiana for Christmas, I met this guy Paul. I don’t remember a lot about him, except that he was visiting my friend Nancy, that the night we met we played footsy under the table at dinner or a bar where we’d gone out with a group of friends, that he was very handsome, and I think a music student, and that I was obsessed with him for a disproportionate length of time considering we saw each other twice.

We slept together that night, and I fell deep into a crazy obsession, which was par for the course for me back then. That was before I learned that lust and love are two different things. He gave me crabs, which took a while to get rid of. Then, I saw him again that spring, and he gave me crabs again! As far as I remember I didn’t see him again.

I don’t remember any of the stuff I’ve written here about Chicago. Scott was my best friend in college, and I don’t think he even knew Paul.

His last name was unusual enough that I found him quickly with a Google search. He worked as an actor for many years in Chicago and Los Angeles. At some point, he met a man and together they started a successful catering company. He died of AIDS in 1995.

July 20, 1998.

I mean I know those years actually happened (though as I read my journal from that period I would say a good half of the gigs I mention I have no recollection of) but I don’t know how we did it, day after day after day. Man were we busy. A couple weeks before this entry, one of our cats had died, another was on death’s door with a failing liver, we were in the middle of the process of pitching a variety show to execs at Comedy Central, preparing to move to Nashville, and we were playing several shows a week, most of them out of town, while still working full-time at a law firm.

That period of time felt very much like the beginning of something big, but it was, looking back, the beginning of the end.

Four years later, after it really did end, therapy and meditation and a lot of hard core self-examination helped me reconnect with my love of the work and loosen my intense attachment to the idea that it must lead to fame and fortune. Every once in a while in the last 10 years or so, the various successes of LIzZie will arouse that old familiar feeling of inevitability, that you just have to bear down harder and harder and it will happen. It’s not true, it’s not productive, and it eventually destroys the work, so I have my guard up against its return. But now, reading this and being reminded just how extreme that feeling was back then, how it controlled every aspect of our lives, I realize I don’t have to worry. I will never be that crazy again, it would kill me, not just the cats.

It actually IS a journey.

My intention recently is to focus on my work to divert my mind from election news. Obviously, I don't always succeed, but I have managed to stick with it for at least a few hours every day for the last few weeks

The work right now consists mostly of reading my old journals. The last few days it's the period (late 1997 - spring 1999) when Jay and I were floundering in New York and moved to Nashville, which was a time of grinding uncertainty about the future, low lows and high highs. My journals are dense with anxiety about the direction of our career, endless speculation and hypothetical scenarios, picking apart every decision, every plan, every dream and aspiration. So the reading is every bit as emotionally taxing as the news. At least it is productive.

One thing we did during that time was rent an RV and take a road trip to Austin for SXSW. We took along two people, Suzanne, our neighbor and dear friend who performed with us many times and often took care of our four cats when we were away. And our friend Brian, who was a student at the time, a filmmaker and lighting designer who did lights for our shows at HERE. And we took all four cats with us. (That’s Honey on my lap in the photo.)

The trip was magical and joyful and weird and a lot of fun. (On the other hand, SXSW itself was mostly kind of awful — ah, those lows and highs.) Brian shot lots of video and made a film. This clip is from the drive down when we stopped at Suzanne’s parents’ home in Charlottesville for a night. A couple minutes in, there’s a bit of us singing one of my favorite songs we ever sang, “Far Side Banks of Jordan.” Terry Smith wrote the song, but Johnny and June made it famous. Sorry for the poor quality video, it’s from a very old VHS.

I don’t miss those days at all. But I miss those days.

Journals.

I spent a few weeks researching the serial killer Larry Eyler, reading and listening to whatever I could find on the internet. Next I want to read the transcripts of his 1989 murder trial in Chicago. I have to do that in person at the courthouse, and that visit will be part of a much larger trip to Indiana and Illinois for research, interviews, etc. It might be a while before I can do that, so I’ve moved on to other tasks.

This week I am locating and compiling all my journals. All of them. My journal-keeping has been sporadic, regular and comprehensive for certain periods of time and then nothing for long stretches. But I started at 15 and I’m nearly 60, so even sporadic adds up to a lot. The old ones are on paper, many of the newer ones are digital. For many years I’ve been frustrated that a few months worth of entries from 2000-2001 are in WordPerfect files, too old to open in newer versions of Word, and I thought they were probably lost to me. But the internet is full of miracles, and today I found a website where I was able to convert them online.

They are from a time that seems almost like fiction or a dream. Jay Byrd and I were still living in Nashville after two years, but our moorings were coming loose. We’d lost our apartment, two of them in fact in rapid succession. We’d bought a camper and parked it in a friend’s driveway, and we were living in it, planning a months-long trip to the West Coast, a trip neither of us had ever taken. We would set off in January, and I’m not sure how or when but this “trip” would turn into two years of living permanently on the road (“permanently” being a deeply ironic word for anything that happened in that time), and those would be our last years together.

But first, apparently though I can’t remember now the logistics, we took a shorter trip in December to Indiana, played a bunch of shows, and spent Christmas with my family. I assume we had the trailer with us, probably left it at my parents’ house while we rattled around Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

Here are two entries that capture well what our life was like then. When I was reading them just now, at first I didn’t remember any of it but then it started to come back. We had hundreds of remarkable experiences and encounters like this in those days. The circumstances of our life and our career were incredibly challenging, and people took care of us, lifted us up, took us in, everywhere we went. I’ll never forget that or stop being grateful for it:

December 15, 2000

I don’t know if it’s the weather, the time of year, the circumstances of my life right now or what, but I feel raw. All this snow is so beautiful, I find just looking at the landscape as we drive by, deeply moving. The trees dusted with snow, the stark white fields, even the gray highway slush because it recalls so many memories: walking in New York after the snow has been on the streets for a couple days; those black rubber snow boots with the big metal buckles which we were so embarrassed to wear to school when we were little kids.

This day seems to go so deeply into my memories of winter, my notion even of what winter is. The sky that’s as white as the fields so there’s no horizon, the only thing showing any perspective in the landscape being the barns and brown stands of trees getting grayer, smaller, and paler into the distance. And that brown that strikes me as so rich, but only because there’s no other color anywhere, only gray and white.

We’re on our way to Ft. Atkinson Wisconsin today for a show. We have a phone interview on a gay radio program before the show. The program is in Chicago, so the radio spot will promote our Sunday concert there. I’m looking forward to the show tonight mainly because it’s in a listening room with a cover charge, so everyone in the room will be there to see us. I’m having a hard time lately with playing in cafes, etc., with an accidental audience. Like last night, we played at Lula’s in South Bend. When we walked out and started, we had everyone’s rapt attention for 2 songs, then half of them went back to talking, reading, studying, and ignoring us. I was furious, and had trouble focusing enough to perform. In situations like that sometimes what happens is I withdraw, Jay goes into overdrive to try to win the audience and he’s good at it, so then I feel like I’m left out and I start to resent Jay and feel like he’s taking over ... all of this happening in my head on stage!

December 16, 2000

Ft. Atkinson and the Café Carpe were the perfect antidote to South Bend. We had a wonderful audience in a warm, quiet room. Our audience consisted of one large party who all came together, so thank god for them. They were Will Fellows and his friends. Will wrote the book Farm Boys, of which a New York fan is writing a stage adaptation. This New York fan, Dean Gray, wants to use some of our music, or we may write some new material specifically for the production. At any rate, Dean told Will about us and Will saw on our web site that we were performing in Ft. Atkinson which is close to where he lives, so he arranged for a group of friends to meet for dinner and our show. Thus, our audience. I think both Jay and I were aware the whole time we were performing of the fact that if this party hadn’t shown up, and the weather has been pretty treacherous so they may not have, we would have been performing for a lot of empty tables and Ernie, a local laborer who comes to every show and falls asleep halfway through. It was a little like performing for the Rotary Club, only because they were all white men, between about 35 and 60, sitting at one long table. The sing-along portions sounded like the bass section of the glee club.

Our hosts were Bill and Kitty who own and run the Café Carpe (it’s the French for carp, the fish, not the Latin carpe, as in “carpe diem,” Bill explained to us. Because we asked. We wondered why he didn’t pronounce the “e” at the end. A river runs behind the café, and periodically it has to be purged of carp. I didn’t exactly follow Bill’s explanation of how and why, but for some reason there is an overpopulation problem with the carp. The species was introduced here by the European settlers. Bill and Kitty named their café after the fish because they enjoy the poetry of the European fish doing essentially the same thing to the river that the European people have done to the land, i.e., overpopulating and destroying or running off the local natives. When we arrived, Kitty showed us our “quarters” upstairs. Up a winding staircase and through a maze of rooms was a little apartment that I think they used to live in with their kids Satchel, who is 16, and Savannah, who is 10. They have moved to another apartment I think she said across the street. She said this second floor above the restaurant used to be two or three apartments, which explained the maze of rooms. Kitty had made up a bed for us in a cozy little room with a huge rubber tree overhanging the bed and a bookshelf full of books.

Bill made us salads for dinner before the show. Then we went upstairs to do an on-air phone interview with a Chicago radio show. When we came back down to set up the stage, Will’s party had arrived, so we didn’t do a proper sound check. Satchel helped us set up microphones and we set some rough levels, then went back upstairs to change. While we were setting up microphones, Satchel asked me, “Which one of you has to change before the show?” I said, “We both change, but I’m still wearing pants when we come back down.”

Afterwards we had Christmas cookies (they had had a cookie-baking party and there were still boxes and boxes of cookies around to be eaten, because, as Kitty explained, the process was more the point of the party than having a purpose for the cookies) and I had decaf and Jay had hot buttered rum because he has a cold. I also had a piece of carrot cake. All evening we had been seeing these perfectly square pieces of cake being served on white plates. Their neatness and regularity intrigued us enough to ask for a piece (not that the fact of cake in and of itself isn’t reason enough to want a piece). It was the best carrot cake I’ve ever had, and I told Kitty that this morning and she copied down the recipe for me. Bill came over and sat with us as we ate (pushing cookies). That’s when he told us the fish story.

When we came downstairs in the morning, Kitty was making coffee. We sat at the long bar while she made us scrambled eggs and toast, and Savannah poured us juice. Then Kitty sat down with us and told us the story of Ernie, who has a disability that affects his speech. He wandered in one day looking for country music, found it, and has come back for every show since. He answers personal ads in the local weekly paper, and he solicited Bill and Kitty’s help in writing one of his own to place. His social worker told Kitty that he’s been engaged in this pursuit for a mate ever since his wife died 16 years ago.

I wonder how it’s even possible that people like Bill and Kitty exist who have so much love in their hearts that they can treat perfect strangers like family. That they can make the 20 odd hours of our moving through their life feel to us like coming home. And then I wonder how it’s come to be that everyone is not like this, because it seems so natural, feels so essential.

Today it’s back to Indiana again, to Goshen, about a five hour drive. Last night we had freezing rain, but this morning it warmed up enough to melt. The highways are clear. But it’s wet, so there’s a danger that the temperature will drop and every surface will freeze again. We hope not. We’ve seen our share of overturned trucks and mangled cars on the side of the road this month. I asked Jay if he would ever consider living in a place that had winters like this. He said that it would be good for writing. I was thinking the same thing when I asked. I love this part of the country. I think it would be a great place for us to be, with the beautiful lush green summers and the long cold snowy winters. The thought of that inevitable yearly contemplative season for writing and thinking and meditating makes me swoon. Someday. I get through the anxiety and fear of our life as traveling musicians by holding onto my faith that we will spend some portion of the later part of our life together in a more focused and peaceful environment where we can write and sing and make our art without the shrill nagging of poverty.

It's a Book!

After months of toggling between a sort of panicked mental reeling and total despair, having less idea every day since the advent of the pandemic and sharing the apartment all day with my now working at home husband, not to mention the shutdown of live theater, i.e. the world in which my art lives, of what the fuck to do with myself, a state of mind that for all intents and purposes from the outside I’m sure is indistinguishable from mere whining and moping, a couple nights ago I felt a simple, clear shift. I finally relaxed into the idea (the fact?) that this is not temporary but the new condition of my life.

I decided to go back to structuring my day to spend the better portion of the afternoon doing something productive toward a larger project: writing or researching or thinking or planning. Working. I will stake out the bedroom/office every afternoon and relinquish the living room to the inner workings of the financial industry. Save my marriage, preserve what’s left of my sanity, make art. Win, win, win.

And since I still have paralyzing questions about the future of theater, and because writing is something I can do alone at home every day, and because working on something that is finished when it’s written, rather than something where the writing is just the beginning, removes my apprehension about writing for theater, I am going to write a book.

I’ve had this story in my head for quite a while. (My musical Jack sprouted from the same ground but is much more limited in scope.) It’s a multi-generation saga radiating out from memoir to tell the stories of my grandfather Ed Cheslik who, homeless in Tucson, died under a tractor trailer where he’d crawled looking for shelter; Larry Eyler, the gay serial killer who murdered 21 teenagers and young men in the early 1980s mostly in and around the county where I went to high school; and finally the 40-year-old man with whom I had my first sexual experience, a service he provided to gay teenagers for decades in that small town in Indiana, mostly right under the noses of anyone not too repulsed to care. Which was practically no one until 1983 when he was arrested and convicted of child molestation in a lurid trial at the Putnam County courthouse.

Anyway … I found in my research today two items that thrilled me and I wanted to share.

Mrs. John Kirby is my father’s older sister, Jane. She married John Kirby, who, until I read this item on the society page of the Winona Republican-Herald, I didn’t know had studied acting. He went on to have a long career as a lawyer and judge in St. Paul. My father never liked him. John and Jane must have been very recently married at the time of this article. They had a daughter Lucretia a few years later and then in 1957 Jane became very ill with some kind of infection, spent nearly a year in the hospital, and died in 1958, a little over two years before I was born. She was in law school at the time.

That’s Ed, my grandfather, posing for an ad in the Winona Daily News, 1947. Ed and my grandmother Lenore owned and operated Eddie’s Tavern in Winona, Minnesota for several years. Two years after this ad ran the same paper announced that Ed and Lenore had sold Eddie’s Tavern. My dad would have been 16, and I believe this is when the family moved to Waukegan, Illinois under a cloud of scandal. (Waukegan is where he met my mother and where I was born.) I don’t know the details of the scandal — pulling teeth is way easier than getting my father to elaborate — but the gist is that Ed was caught somehow somewhere fooling around with another man. Finding him here behind the bar in his long white apron smiling with his hand on his hip made me very happy today.

Dreams.

I was sitting on a patch of grass next to an airport runway with a small group of friends watching planes take off and land. A very large white plane came down the runway with a downturned snout like the Concord but a much fatter fuselage, massive wings, and a sort of fishtail mechanism on the back that swayed from side to side to turn the plane. It was so pure white it sparkled in the sun and we were all mesmerized by it. After it took off, it turned and circled back, got lower and lower and then crashed nearby in a cloud of dust and debris and smoke. A moment later it exploded with a boom and a bigger cloud rose. It was gorgeous and some of the group got out their phones to take pictures. My only thought was “Damn! I can’t believe I didn’t bring my phone.”

Later we had a party at an old Victorian house with big rooms and a yard. At first it was just my friends but soon there were hundreds of people in the house and yard, and live music, food everywhere, vats of soft ice cream, cookies so undercooked they turned liquid when you tried to pick them up. We were drinking gin and tonics and we smoked lots of pot. My friend Kristin arrived late and brought whippets. When she handed me one, I made a big show of saying to the room, “I haven’t done whippets since I was in college!” and immediately I felt embarrassed. My friend Martha, in a minidress and blue pantyhose, was dancing alone in the middle of the room; she made a big flourish at the end of the song and finished on the floor with her skirt hiked up too high. She came and sat next to me on the couch and worried she was a little too stoned but I told her she wasn’t and she put her head on my shoulder and I stroked her hair and told her not to panic, I’d take care of her.

Somebody Needs to Do This Mashup.

Listen to the first two words of each of these three songs first. (Then listen to the rest.) They’re harmonized differently, and the melodies are not exactly the same, but pretty dang close.

Ever since I heard the Jennifer Hudson tune I’ve been wishing I had the mixing skills to do a mashup of it with “Stay.” But now, there are three! Somebody please do this!

It will redeem the King George character in Hamilton for me, and all will be right in the world..

Thoughts on Tulsa and History.

Something good (Jesus Christ we need something, anything, good!) to come out of this horror show contemporary American life has become is that everyone is talking about history. There’s exasperation in it, but I’ll admit also to a certain amount of satisfaction for those of us who love and study history.

Most people don’t know about Tulsa and Tuskegee. Don’t know about the Upstairs Lounge. Don’t know about Wounded Knee. That is because history has been erased and hidden. By people who don’t want us to know it.

I think there are people who at some point in their lives have had an epiphany about history and their knowledge of it — a realization that a vast amount of it has been deliberately and systematically kept from them — and there are people who have not. It feels like a bright light is suddenly focused on the fact that this is an intentional project carried out over centuries. I hesitate to use the word conspiracy because it’s not as if history had a secret meeting and decided — which is not to say that pieces of it have not involved conspiracies; sometimes in the dark of night, like the removal of dead bodies from Greenwood, and sometimes in broad daylight, like the Texas State Board of Education’s influence on textbook publishers — but if history is not a conspiracy it operates like one.

You realize that the writing of history is always, completely, myth-making, a process which has many motivations but in the end they just add up to the old saw that history is written by the victors. Not just written by the victors, but written by the victors in order to keep the vanquished vanquished. Hundreds, thousands, of people over time have made hundreds, thousands of decisions to tell a story this way and not that way, to tell this story and not that story, to exaggerate this one, hide that one, tell this truth, tell that lie. Out of a fear of justice, if not retribution. Because knowing our history makes us angry. And powerful. And demanding.

Learning, in a college class when we read the Martin Sherman play Bent, that homosexual men were imprisoned and killed in the Nazi camps was that moment for me. Once I knew that, my life of reading and listening and learning has been a lifelong project of uncovering more, about gay history, about Black history, women’s history, and on and on. Can learning about Tulsa be that moment for America?

Fucking Plato.

Early this year, I planned a reading of the musical I’m working on, the one called Jack. I‘d booked the room, cast the roles, and it was going to take place on April 14. Of course it didn’t happen. Even though the event was just a table read, not an audience thing, I was so looking forward to sharing this new work with a roomful of actors.

Back when I was writing songs for bands or for Y’all, I knew that if I wrote a new song and I thought it was good, we’d work it up and put it in the set. And when I wrote songs for theater, even in cases where there was no venue on the horizon there were always collaborators to respond in real time to the new stuff. But most of Jack no one but me has read or heard.

I’ve always been apprehensive to the point of superstition about exposing unfinished work — it just feels too fragile. But these are unusual times. It’s driving me crazy sitting on all these new songs for months, so I started making little videos of selected songs. The videos at first were solely about the fact that it’s easier to get people to click on a video than an audio file, but once I started to put images together the process became a way to get to know the songs more deeply.

In this song, Fucking Plato, 16-year-old Jack goes to the library to look up who he is. It feels like a perfect song for Pride month. The whole show is gay gay gay, but this song is the gayest.