As we get the last of the boxes unpacked and things put away, we're both discovering things that are…missing. Sure, some of it is inconsequential stuff that can easily be replaced, but other things are irreplaceable.
Case in point, two (of three that I owned) small, one-of-a-kind, clay gargoyle masks by Tucson artist Miles Thompson:
I'd had these little fellas since the late 90s, successfully surviving several moves unscathed. But now they're gone.
I could've sworn I rescued them all, during our pouring over the contents of the house prior to the restoration companies coming in, but sadly I have only found the third, and largest of them.
While not missing from the things we were expecting to get back, there are other items that we failed to pull from the house before the restoration company came in and judged what was salvageable and what was not. Chief among those was a banker box of CDs that had been located in the one closet the firefighters absolutely trashed. Now granted, I haven't played a CD in years—other than to rip them to MP3—but this box held the disks that had special memories and which I'd wanted to hold onto. I didn't see it anywhere during our walk-through (and frankly it wasn't even on my mind at the time), nor did I see it inventoried in the list of objects the restoration company pulled when I did think of it weeks later. I consciously chose to abandon my DVD collection—another stupid decision despite not even having a DVD player hooked up anywhere—along with my old Kenwood KR-7400 receiver. Even though I didn't have it hooked up anywhere, it was something I'd owned for nearly 20 years and wish I'd kept…
The only thing I know for sure that's missing from Ben's belongings is an original framed photograph of he and his grandmother when he was a kid. Fortunately, that was something I'd scanned years ago and through the magic of Photoshop restored the colors. so I was able to print out a new copy. But still, it's not the original. Waiting now to get a new frame for it, but that's on hold because the frame we want (to match the photo of he and his other grandmother)—like it seems with everything we want to get from IKEA these days—is out of stock.
But back to the gargoyle masks, it appears Miles is still working and producing masks. I'll never be able to replace these masks, but they're being sold by a nursery* in Tucson, and I should be able to find suitable substitutes. Our original plan was to head south yesterday and hit up the nursery, but they're only open Wednesday thru Saturday…
*I bought the originals from Antigone Books on 4th Avenue. I didn't even think of checking with them because I'd assumed that they—like so many other GBLT-centric bookstores—had gone out of business years ago. I was wrong. So when we do head back to Tucson a few weeks from now, I'll check there as well.
Some things old, some things new, some a combination of the two.
After six weeks, slowly but surely, our lives are coming back together. We have a new place to call home. We haven't gotten any money from the insurance company yet, but they have dispersed funds to the two companies that were handling the restoration/cleaning of our clothing and belongings, and we have received all those items. In addition to the furniture that was restored, we ended up with approximately 175 boxes full of stuff. And as we go through these boxes, we're discovering things we didn't even remember we had.
I was feeling extremely frustrated last week as it seemed we were making no headway whatsoever with the mountains of boxes. I described our abode to a friend as "an episode of Hoarders." And as I said to Ben the other night, "If we never got any of this back, we probably wouldn't have missed most of it." We've already taken one carload to Goodwill and I'm sure there will be several more before the last box goes to recycling…
I never thought I'd say the words, I am so tired of spending money, but that's exactly where I—where both of us—find ourselves at the moment.
Everything should be put away a week from now, and as of tonight there are only about 30 boxes remaining, and probably half of those are full of record albums, books, and tchotchkes, which I can't do a thing with until I get one or more replacement Kallax shelf units from IKEA on which to store and display them.
And before I can do that I need floor space upon which to put them together, something that is still at a premium in this place.
The irony is not lost upon me that we are now just around the corner from one of my favorite Phoenix clubs in the 80s and about a mile away from my favorite neighborhood bar in the late 70s. Sadly, both venues are long gone now, but oh, the memories…
…it's that we have absolutely no control over our lives. And our sense of security and…consistency in our affairs…is an illusion. It can all come crashing down at any moment.
I would normally use this day-before-Christmas post to wish everyone a very happy holiday tomorrow, but frankly my dear readers, I have no Christmas sprit at all this year.
This photo perfectly sums up my mood at the moment.
Despite the fact we've secured a new place to live and will be taking possession on January 1st and a slew of new furniture will be delivered on the 2nd, we still have no idea when all our other possessions and the rest of our clothing will be cleaned and returned to us. The logistics of all this has been a nightmare. And we won't even discuss the four of us living in his hotel room. Ben's stressed. I'm stressed. The dogs are stressed. I've been on the verge of tears all day.
My friend Cindy—who went through this herself many years ago—has told me that shopping for new things will be fun, and to some degree it is, but more than anything it's just making me angry. We're being forced to replace things we never would have had to if our landlord had taken the simplest of safety precautions when installing that fucking water heater.
Saw this place last week. Put in an application and got word yesterday that we were approved. Documents are being drawn up today. It's at the upper edge of our financial comfort zone (and frankly may be renting above market value for the area), but we both really like it and hope we can call this place home for many, many years to come.
3 bedrooms (including one downstairs that can be converted to Ben's sleeping quarters when the time comes for his knee replacements), 3 baths (overkill, but whatever), 2-car garage, laundry, nice patio area, and NO yard maintenance.
We have friends who live in this development, and we've always wanted a place there, but I wish it could've happened without all the drama of the past three (has it only been three?!?) weeks. Sometimes however, the Universe has to deliver a kick in the backside for your to overcome your inertia…
That graphic has been sitting in my downloads folder for weeks. When I originally ran across it, the message resonated, although at the time there was really nothing in my life it directly pointed to.
Oh, how things can change.
I realized this morning that emotionally I'm going through the same things with the loss of hour home as I did when I received my cancer diagnosis in 2003. It came out of nowhere and totally changed the direction of my—now our—lives. At first it was disbelief (although not totally), and then anger. Once a plan of action was in place, I felt somewhat better and was able to wrap my head around it, but not knowing where things were ultimately headed or the final outcome was still overwhelming at times.
The shock of the fire has for the most part worn off, but we're both dealing with the anger. As I mentioned in my last post, "Fuck James" has become our go-to phrase for pretty much everything at the moment and will unlikely remain so for many, many months as we begin to heal and rebuild our lives.
Right now it's a waiting game to see what the insurance company comes up with and how many of our items are actually returned from restoration. We've started looking at new digs (and actually applied at one place), but we're discovering that while places may be available, in the age of COVID it's not just a matter of walking into a leasing office, seeing a place and signing a lease. EVERYTHING is done by appointment, and so far only about half the places we've contacted have gotten back in touch with us. (This waiting period is akin to the time between my diagnosis and when I actually started treatment.)
Once we have secured a place, we can get out of the hotel, but what will we sleep on? What will we sit on? And since the leasing agents we've spoken to want us to move in sooner rather than later, this poses a real challenge.
Yes, if we secure a place we can go ahead and buy a few pieces of furniture in anticipation of reimbursement by insurance, and frankly I'd rather do that with my available credit than sending it down a black hole of continued life in this hotel, but until we actually sign a lease, nothing like that can move forward.
Additionally, we've been told we aren't going to be receiving any of our items from restoration until after the first of the year, so it's not just a few pieces of furniture we'll need to acquire to begin resettlement. It's bedding, towels, cooking utensils, dishes and silverware. All things we wouldn't have had to buy if it were not for the short-sighted "I can fix anything" mentality of our former landlord.
That's where the anger comes from.
Fuck James.
Our friend Cindy, who along with her husband, went through this herself many years ago and was not nearly as lucky as we were, tells me that eventually things will get better. She says that it will be fun to shop for new things once we have the insurance money in hand, and I tend to agree with her in that limited regard. But even buying new stuff promises to be a pain. I'm not looking forward to putting furniture together again. Or organizing a new house. Or essentially having to move when we had no desire to move at all. Or any of the thousands of other things that will need to be done over the next six months.
Fuck James.
On the other hand, these are things I know we have to go through, as painful as they may be; the same attitude I had when the radiation treatments began ravaging my throat making eating even the softest of foods was unbearable at times. (One of the reasons god created Ensure, my doctors told me.)
Eventually, things did get better. I made it through the crucible and onto the other side. My throat healed. I received a clean bill of health from my doctors, and life went on. I didn't want to get cancer, but looking back on everything now, it was obvious that changes needed to be made in my life, in me, and that was the catalyst necessary to bring them about.
Hopefully the same will happen as Ben and I travel through this crucible. I think we both sensed that change was needed, but at the same time we needed a bitch slap from the universe to bring it about. Hopefully this journey—much like my cancer journey—will leave us better people when we emerge from the other side and years from now will ultimately allow us to look back on it and see it as—if not necessarily a good thing—at least a necessary one.
I know that over the years, I've warned everyone I know against buying anything they see advertised on Instagram. I'd been burned more than once, yet I kept throwing caution to the wind, but since those first couple painful lessons, pretty much every subsequent purchase went off without a hitch. When the item arrived, it was as described and I never felt like I'd been cheated. The only recent exception was that poster, and even then, after providing proof that the quality of the product was shit, I got my money refunded.
So about a month ago this clock showed up on my stream:
To be honest, the price at $19.99 did seem suspiciously low. I figured the worst case would be that it was half the size it was advertised or not of the quality the photos indicated. Against my better judgment, I ordered the clock.
I didn't really think too much about it again until I got notice that the item had shipped (from mainland China, of course).
When the package arrived—even before unwrapping it—I knew something was up.
This is what was in the package:
Okay, I thought. Maybe this wasn't the package I was expecting, and it was a strange gift sent by someone. But there was no note enclosed, nothing to indicate who had ordered it. Then I checked the tracking number on the package against the one on the receipt for the clock.
It was the same.
Obviously it was an honest mistake, so I emailed the company (with photos and tracking numbers) and I got this response:
Dear Customer,
Sorry, I didn't reply to your message in time.
I'm sorry to hear that you are very dissatisfied with the product you received. In order to express our sincere apologies and reduce your losses, we hope to refund 50% of your total order as compensation. can you accept it?
If you cannot accept the compensation I provide and want a full refund, you need to return our product. However, returning the product to China can be cumbersome, requires you to spend a lot of time and effort waiting for the refund, and you must ensure that the returned product is not damaged in order to receive a full refund.
If you agree with my proposal, I can pay you immediately. Hope you consider my suggestion.
Looking forward to your reply.
What the actual fuck?
I replied that I didn't want a refund; I wanted the product I ordered. In the meantime, I started doing some research on these Nixie Clocks as they're called, and not only was $19.99 low, it so low as to be ridiculous. There was no way this company would be selling them at this price because they typically sell in the $200-300 range and without exception, almost all of them come from various locations in the former Soviet Union.
I'd been had.
I filed a claim with PayPal. I decided to just "let them sort it out."
Within a day of filing the claim with Paypal, I got a second email from the seller:
Dear customer，
I'm very sorry to hear from you.
Due to the global epidemic, courier services are no longer able to be shipped abroad.
I applied for a 70% refund discount from the company. If you agree, I will give you a refund as soon as possible.
If you do not agree, please send the product back to our company, and we will give you a full refund after receiving the courier.
The address is: 7th Floor, Easy Handling Center, No. 1, Lane 3, Changtang Avenue, Yantian Village, Fenggang Town, Dongguan City, China Thanks for your understanding.
Yeah, I'll bet you're very sorry to hear from me.
I'm not responding. It's up to Paypal to extract their pound of flesh from this motherfucker and issue the refund.
I guess this is just something else to be thrown in the "If It Sounds Too Good To Be True, It Is" folder—and to humbly realized I can get scammed as easily as anyone else.
I glanced at the forecast Saturday morning. No rain for the next two weeks. So I figured it was safe to wash the car. (It had been months.)
What did I see on the forecast yesterday? Rain during this morning's commute. I bitched to Ben about it via text and he responded, "I'm going to start calling you Tialoc. And yes, I had to look that up."
I said to Ben, "You know it's just gonna spit; just enough to get the car dirty."
Between my mom and grandmother, I was taught most of the basic life skills: how to cook, clean, dust, bake, do laundry, iron, make small sewing repairs, dress cuts and abrasions, and generally keep a household. I suppose on some unconscious level they both knew I was destined to be living by myself for the majority of my adult life, and didn't want me imploding because I couldn't boil an egg.
The one bit of arcane forbidden knowledge that they did not pass on however, was how to fold a fucking fitted sheet, and I mutter curses under my breath whenever I'm forced to attempt it. I am destined to live out my life not fully understanding the magic necessary to bring it about—much like my never mastering algebra, chemistry, physics, and the Law of General Relativity.
Seriously. Five decades removed from childhood and I still can't. The best I can hope for is to create something resembling a flat, square, bloated puffy pillow that will at least slide into a drawer and looks good on the outside—even if it's a crumpled mess on the inside. Wait…isn't that a metaphor for me?
Last night Ben received his second Master's, this one in Educational Administration. I am so proud! As I told him, "You've done more in your 36 years than I've done in my 61!"
I never finished my Bachelor's. After 2 years slogging away at the University of Arizona School of Architecture, I decided college just wasn't for me (and frankly coming out in the late 70s was such a distraction that my grades suffered immensely). I never regretted it, and if my lack of a degree stood in the way of advancing my career I was never aware of it, but I'm entering that stage in life where I do have regrets, and not sticking with my university studies is one of them.
Of course, if I had done that, my life would've taken a completely different path than it's on today, and I'm not sure that's a good thing…at all.
While my dad had arranged for he and my mom to be out of the house for the duration of my birthday party, they did stick around long enough to meet everyone who had accepted my invitation and made the drive up from Tucson.
My crew at my 19th birthday party, May 1977. (L-R) Don Hines, Phil Oliver, Chas Dooley, Kent Kelly, James Uhrig, Eduardo Robins
I remember very little of the party itself. There was food. There was cake. There was dancing. I recall someone shoving a bottle of poppers under my nose at one point. But mostly it was simply the jumping off point for my first steps into gay life in Phoenix. Phoenix was a very different place from Tucson and I'd been reluctant to go out on my own for two reasons: I was, until that night, still underage in the eyes of the law (and I'd been warned that the Phoenix clubs—unlike Jekyll's in Tucson—carded religiously), and frankly I was still more than a little apprehensive about throwing myself into the environment unaccompanied.
I shouldn't have been worried. Our destination that evening was a newly-opened/renovated club called Moon's Truck and it was 3-F: fierce,fabulous and friendly.
The club was located in a nondescript concrete block building on the east side of 16th Street just south of Indian School Road, and despite its recent rechristening, the actual name was unimportant because I soon learned that regardless of what was on the sign over the entrance, everyone simply referred to it as Maggie's. It changed names again about a year later to HisCo Disco before finally being forced to close by the neighbors' continual complaints about noise and other goings-on in the area.
It was a cavernous, magical place, and at the time was known for playing the some of the best music in Phoenix. It had a slightly raised lighted dance floor and a sound system that would leave your ears ringing for hours. The clientele was as interesting as Jeckyll's.
While outwardly an all-inclusive club (gays, straights, men, women, and people of indeterminate gender) were always welcome at Maggie's, the one thing I remember most was Hubert, one of the DJs (who did not want women in the club) was how he'd always yell "Uterus!" when women arrived. I found it amusing at the time, even if it embarrasses the fuck out of me now.
I also have no real memories remaining of the club that night. I must've suffered sensory overload. All I know is that soon thereafter I began to call it home on Friday and Saturday nights.
At the time, Phoenix probably had a dozen or so gay bars, the vast majority of which I would never be caught dead in. The names that spring to mind beyond Maggies are The Forum (which became my second favorite hang-out, a place I would automatically head to if Maggies seemed too dull on any given night), The Ramrod, The 307, The Connection, and several more whose names completely elude me (I will amend this later if/when they pop into memory). Since I didn't drink, I only went for the dancing—and the possibility of meeting someone for the evening, the non-dance establishments barely registered on my radar.
My other concern that summer was obviously finding a job. That arrived by way of my dad, who needed architectural drafting assistance at the office where he worked. Other than income it provided, our summer working together prompted the tag line for this post.
I don't recall the exact moment Dad acknowledged that I played for the other team; whether he outright asked or I volunteered, but I do remember a conversation that followed shortly thereafter. We had obviously been discussing something regarding my lifestyle and he blurted out, "Yeah, when you and your mom and sister were back east during the summer, I'd head down to The Ramrod with Oscar from down the street…"
Oh. My. Fucking. God. The Ramrod?!? My dad had just come out to me and had outed our equally-married-to-a-woman neighbor two houses down!
Well, this certainly explained how he got the article he'd sent me the previous spring from the gay paper.
And the flood gates opened. I provided the open and appreciative listener he so desperately needed after a lifetime being forced to lead a double life; how he joined the Navy at 17 to escape an abusive relationship with his father, his long-term love affairs with several of the"friends" who'd come around the house while I was growing up, how my parents met and why he got married, and how he worried that he'd somehow failed me as a father after watching my budding gayness develop from an early age. I learned more about my dad that summer that I'd ever thought possible, and our relationship—best described as loving but distant until that summer—improved to such a degree that Dad became more than just my father; he became a trusted friend.
While Mom obviously knew a lot of his history, she didn't know all of it, nor did she know the reasons or the underlying stories behind that history. Suddenly so much of why my dad did the things he did while I was growing up became clear to me.
I respected his desire for all this to remain solely between the two of us—at least for many, many years after their divorce. Dad's closet became mine.
So I had a gay dad. I famously knew about his brother Edward thanks to my mom. This led me to wonder who else in the family tree was sprouting lavender leaves, because in some families it ran; in ours it apparently galloped.
After Ric disappeared and we'd gone our separate ways, I would be lying if I said the rest of the semester was filled with sweet romantic interludes—or at least hot monkey sex, because it most certainly was not. That's not to say I didn't fall in love—or at least lust—with two more individuals, both of whom occasionally popped in at Louie's, but were far from regulars.
The first was a Hispanic boy named Jesse.
(L-R) John Marion, Tommy (aka Spider Lady), Jesse, and two queens I didn't know
Jesse and I were friendly, but he barely knew I existed. And yet, at 18 years old, I fawned over him. I remember sharing some writing I'd done about him with another friend at the table, James Uhrig. James, who was older and wiser than I was…kind…in his assesment of my musings, but suggested that perhaps I move on.
Kent Kelly
It was around that time that Kent Kelly and Peter Whitman entered my orbit. Kent was the catalyst that caused me to move on from Jesse. Peter and I immediately became best friends. I think Kent—also older and wiser by a couple years—sensed my fragile, newly-minted gay state, and very gently let me down when I confessed my feelings for him. It didn't make it sting any less, but I respected him for it, and out of that grew a friendship which lasted until his death in 1987.
(L-R) Kent Kelly, Chas Dooley, Don Hines
Kent became my mentor, my friend, and my dance partner; my Life Teacher if truth be told. After I quit school in 1978, Kent ended up in Phoenix with me, proclaiming that Tucson had simply gotten too small—or more likely as I suspected he'd simply slept with everyone he'd been interested in sleeping with there.
Kent in 1981
Shortly before the semester ended, I arrived at Louie's one afternoon and found the table abuzz. Ric was apparently at Student Health with a case of Hepatitis and they'd advised everyone who'd had sexual relations with him during the previous few months to get a Gamma globulin shot.
Needless to say, I was more than a little surprised at the number of us who got up from the table and formed a little parade that headed over to Student Health. Not as surprised, I'm sure, as the staff at the center was…
Apparently Ric was the table's resident Welcome Wagon.
I returned home at the end of the semester, leaving all my new friends behind and wondering what the hell I was going to do, not only for summer work but also with my new gay life in general. My 19th birthday was quickly approaching, so I decided to say fuck it and invite everyone up to my parents' house for an impromptu party. Not exactly how I envisioned coming out, but if they figured things out, they figured things out.
I think—based on that article he'd sent months earlier—Dad knew what was up, and arranged for he and Mom to be out of the house that night. My sister was having a sleepover at a friend's house.
Phil (the man who initially welcomed me into GSA) arrived on his motorcycle the afternoon prior to the party. Since no one else was showing up until the following day, he and I headed out (not on his motorcycle) to the local mall.
As we walked the mall, Phil freely ogling boys as they passed like a dog in heat and whispering salacious suggestions in my ears, by the time we got back to the house I was…aroused…to say the least. He tried to put the moves on me in my bedroom, but I rebuffed his advances. That was not the way I intended to come out to the family.
Phil was an expert at the art of seduction, and while it didn't happen that weekend, he did eventually bed me. Or maybe it was the other way around. It doesn't matter. He and I had many an overnight encounter until he moved to San Mateo in 1980.
As an aside, I briefly reconnected with Phil (not that way—although to be honest, prior to him actually showing up at my door that afternoon I'd fantasized about it) once in 1992 long after I'd moved to San Francisco. I didn't pursue anything phyiscal or even reigniting the friendship because something just seemed off, and frankly it creeped me out.
It was shortly after my second meeting with GSA that I was introduced to thetable at Louie's Lower Level.
Louie's—located in the basement of the Student Union—was the funky laid-back alternative to the more traditional and sterile campus cafeteria upstairs and doubled as a great gathering place for students before and after class. Think lots of dark wood, Tiffany lighting, and plants in macrame slings. Kind of TGI Fridays on a budget. (It was 1977, after all.)
I'd been going there since I started at the university, but until my second GSA meeting and a group of us headed downstairs afterward to grab a bite to eat, I'd somehow been completely oblivious to the fact that one long table off to the east side of the dining room was home base for many of the campus homosexuals.
It was there where I met my tribe that spring: John Maguire, Ric Hathaway, Chas Dooley, Don Hines, Kent Kelly, John Marion, Abe Marquez, Tina, Marco, and many others who became friends, mentors, and yes, in a couple cases, even lovers over the coming months. I shall do my best to give each their proper due since so many of them are no longer with us.
Chas Dooley
I actually met Chas before GSA or Louie's. He was a good friend of Andy's and visited him a lot when I was in the old dorm. Chas was young, black, proud, flamboyant, and simply had no fucks to give. He intimidated me when I was still in the closet; once out I came to admire and adore him. In fact, there were times over the next couple years I wanted nothing more than to jump his bones, but while the interest seemed to be mutual, the timing was always off and it never happened.
I lost track of Chas sometime between 1978 and 1980. He'd moved home to Louisiana and while we'd continued to correspond eventually a letter was returned as undeliverable and the phone number I had for him was disconnected.
It was in 1991 or so that I was walking home from the Castro to my apartment off Church Street in San Francisco and I passed a handsome black man coming my way. We made eye contact, smiled, and after we'd passed almost immediately turned around. "Chas?" "Mark?" We rushed to each other and hugged. He was late to be somewhere, so we couldn't catch up. We exchanged numbers (I guess everyone ends up in SF eventually), but not for lack of trying, we never did reconnect.
I have tried to track him down, both through normal channels as well as through the Social Security Death Index (you never know, and if he's gone I'd like closure) but there are hundreds of Charles Dooleys listed online (but none in the SSDI), so I've given up hope of ever reconnecting with him.
The First Time: John Maguire
I wasn't particularly attracted to John. We'd both become regulars at Louie's and had gotten friendly, enjoying each other's company, but while there were many tasty things on Louie's menu, lust of John definitely wasn't one of them. One Friday afternoon we were at the table talking and discovered we were both still virgins. He looked at me and asked, "Do you want to do something about that?" A thousand thoughts ran through my head in a flash, and I blurted out, "Sure!" It was one of those, "Oh fuck, why not?" moments.
We didn't go out on a proper date beforehand and there was no romance; he simply showed up at my dorm room at the appointed time and we got naked. I won't go into all the gruesome details, but let's just say the experience was far from what I think either of us had hoped for. After he left I thought, "This is what has everyone in such an uproar?" John and I were still amicable after the encounter, but something had definitely changed and neither one of us really put any further effort into our friendship developing further.
I have no idea whatever happened to John. Upon returning to school for my sophomore year, many people had disappeared from GSA and the table, John being one of them. I heard he'd moved home to New Jersey.
And again, like Chas, there are hundreds of possible John Maguires online. So…yeah, tracking him down, living or dead…not going to happen.
Okay…remembering and writing about all this is fun!
Previously on Battlestar Galactica… (In case you're wondering, I'm calling it this as a throwback to my original posting of these stories on the old blog, written at peak Battlestar Galactica popularity.)
While I suppose I could have come out publicly in High School, for a variety of mid-70s reasons I chose not to. I had consciously decided that I would announce to the world once I'd moved away from home and started college. Based on my mother's earlier reactions to gay men—which was surprising considering she was an interior designer and had worked around them her entire career—I wasn't entirely convinced it would be warmly received by the family and wanted to be as far away as possible when I dropped the proverbial bomb.
My first semester at the University of Arizona was—not surprisingly—a difficult one, if only for the usual problems of any first year college student. I had never lived away from home, and while I made friends easily, in the beginning I knew no one in Tucson.
My first dormitory roommate was a Japanese-American gymnast. I don't remember his name or even what he looked like at this point other than he had a body that wouldn't quit. He was a gymnast, after all. Might've been a fantasy come true if not for the fact he was virulently homophobic and made it known almost immediately. While I was still firmly in the closet, I knew this was not going to work as my plans for coming out slowly began to coalesce in my head. After a week or so I swapped rooms with a guy down the hall I'd gotten friendly with.
My new roommate was Karl Kilgore, a tall, blond, good-looking civil engineering (?) student from southern California.
Karl and I got along famously. We shared the same world view, liked the same music, and enjoyed each other's company.
I still hadn't come out yet, but the guy in the room adjacent to ours read me from the moment I arrived on the floor. Andy was…flamboyant…out and proud. He was one of the first gay men I met who was not. taking. shit. from. anyone.
In many ways he took me under his wing for those first couple months at the university, keeping my secret to himself. I remember one day toward the holidays we were chatting and he flat out asked, "When are you going to end this charade and just come out?"
I was quite taken aback, and at the same time relieved that he knew it was time as much as I did.
Along the same time this happened, I was over at the campus planetarium one night, when a series of events were set in motion that led to my tearing the door off that closet and bursting forth into the light. I was touring the exhibits when another boy caught my eye, one David Miller.
Another freshman, David was from the hills of West Virginia and frankly, turned out to be sweet as fuck. We struck up a conversation and a friendship soon formed. Was David gay? I didn't get that sense about him at all, but I didn't get "wholly straight" either. I remember that when I told Andy I'd made a friend outside the dorm he quipped, "So…Mark's got a boyfriend."
No, that wasn't it at all, but when the opportunity presented itself for me to switch dorms and share a room with David, I jumped at it.
David accompanied me back to Phoenix for Thanksgiving that year and my family loved him.
The Christmas and New Year's holidays came and went, and upon returning to campus for the spring semester I'd resolved that this was now the time to come out.
One evening in late January, after we'd gone to bed, I said to David, "I have something to tell you."
"What is it?"
"You know that guy Adam I told you about? The one I met up with again at the library?"
(Adam was a guy from Phoenix whom I'd met and buddied up with during the Freshman Orientation weekend on campus the past August.)
"Yeah."
"I like him."
"Great! You made another friend. What's he like?"
"No, I like him, David. I really like him."
(It should be noted that nothing had ever actually happened between Adam and I at the library or anywhere else for that matter—but I was mightily infatuated with this now newly-minted frat boy I'd reconnected with.)
"What are you saying?"
"I'm gay, David."
There was an extended silence. After several minutes he said, "I have a confession too."
Was David about to tell me he was gay? I mean, that would be awesome.
"My uncle is Christine Jorgensen."
Now while I hadn't been officially out, I had done my gay history. I knew who Christine was.
"We don't talk about uncle George much anymore," he added.
Of course, this opened the conversational floodgates and for several days thereafter it seemed all was well in the world. David showed no signs of being freaked out, nor had his attitude toward me changed in any way.
HOWEVER, a little over a week later, David announced he was moving out of the room and in with—in his words several months later—"an Iranian who never bathed."
I soon learned that shortly after my coming out to him, David—who never had a drink in his life—had gone out one night and had gotten absolutely shit-faced. He returned to the dorm at 2 am and basically went door to door telling everyone on the floor, "Mark is a fag!"
Well, I was now officially out. It also explains why there was no hurry to backfill that empty bed and how I ended up with a single room for the remainder of the semester without having to pay for it. Membership has its privileges.
The question remained, "What now?"
Andy suggested going to one of the GSA (Gay Student Organization) meetings on campus. After ignoring his suggestions and the adverts in the student paper for weeks, one chilly February night I decided to head over to the student union and check out this GSA.
Nervous doesn't even begin to describe what I was feeling. Would I be accepted? Would they like me? Would I get raped by a group of sex-crazed homosexuals?
It turned out two of of three were correct and I left the meeting with my virginity intact.
When I first entered I was greeted by a guy named Phil Oliver. His first question—something no one had ever outright asked before—was "Are you gay?"
I answered in the affirmative.
The meeting was actually a bit of a bore, but I met a group of people who almost immediately became my tribe and ultimately confirmed two famous quotes from Richard Bach's book Illusions:
All the people, all the events in your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
and
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
In the original incarnation of Voenix Rising—that I stupidly deleted in 2011 after realizing a link to it had been sent out in the signature line of emails I'd sent to recruiters—I'd written multiple posts documenting my coming out and first tentative steps into gay life. It was one of the few things I truly regret not having backed up.
More recently, I've been following Mike Balaban, a gay historian on Instagram who is doing much the same thing, this time with pictures. From what I've seen we're about the same age, and considering how everything else in the world is fucking awful right now, it's inspired me to relate my stories again, to do something positive.
Grade School
Like a lot of gay men, I'd known I liked boys instead of girls from an early age. When I first discovered masturbation in fourth grade, it was sex between men and women that captured my imagination. But then my focus turned more and more to the imaginary men in these imaginary encounters, and finally coalesced with my Phys Ed coaches and the men—not the women—in the Sears catalogs exclusively fueling my fantasies. Oh, how I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the Summer Catalogs because it meant shirtless guys in swim trunks!
Growing up, my exposure to men-who-love-men had been less-than-ideal. I don't know if my mom already sensed my budding gayness or if she was just trying to—warn?—me, but I remember her coming into my room one evening in advance of a visit by my dad's brother. She turned on the television (or changed the channel) to show me an interview happening with Truman Capote. "That is a homosexual," she said, "And so is your Uncle Eddie. I don't want you to be alone with him." The old child molester trope…
My uncle was nothing like Truman Capote. He wasn't a butch queen, but neither was he anything like the mincing, lisping example my mom was so keen to show me. Anyhow, I took some solace in knowing I wasn't the only one in the world like that, and not the only one in the family. [Spoilers: If I only known the full extent!]
Uncle Edward (R) and his "friend" Lenny (L) in 1966. They were together until Edward's death in 2002.
I remember my uncle (especially after I became an adult) as loving, generous, and very, very funny. As a child I always thought him so cosmopolitan for living in New York City. I mailed him my coming out letter in the late 1980s (because somehow he hadn't gotten the news), telling him I was "living the life" in San Francisco and hoping we could connect over drinks sometime to share stories. After not hearing from him a couple years thereafter, one Christmas in the 90s a card arrived from him with a five hundred dollar check enclosed and a note that read, "I'm sure you'll be able to put this to good use in 'frisco."
High School
Your host, 1972-1976
My freshman year in high school was the first time I fell in love with another boy. His name was Tom Pleger.
It was odd how we initially met. I was crushing hard on his best friend, a guy named Jim Hurst, with whom we all shared a Freshman Communications class. Jim wouldn't give me the time of day, but Tom and I soon discovered shared interests and we started hanging out together.
Tom's family belonged to a neighborhood Lutheran church. I'd been raised Lutheran but my family was one of those Christmas and Easter churchgoing broods. That was, until I met Tom and convinced my mom that we needed to start attending—and more regularly than just twice a year. (Ulterior motives, of course.) She was initially reluctant since this church was Missouri synod and we were Wisconsin. (How that makes any difference is just one more reason when I came out I gave up on organized religion altogether. It's all bullshit.)
Anyhow, we started attending on a regular basis and I found Jesus and developed a typical teenage religious streak that no doubt absolutely drove my dad (who was very non-religious) to absolute distraction.
Sadly, my romantic overtures to Tom were not reciprocated, and my confession of true love ended our budding friendship about a year after we met. Nothing more was said of it, and surprisingly, when we crossed paths at church he and his family were still cordial.
It was during my sophomore year that—perhaps because of my newfound churchgoing habits—my mom decided that I was well overdue for my Confirmation; a right-of-passage that would allow me to start taking communion. This led to classes led by the new, young, cute, and very liberal pastor who had just come on board. I remember the subject of homosexuality coming up during one of our question and answer sessions and he pointed out that Jesus never said anything about the subject…
Anyhow, these classes threw yet another boy into my life, Mike Knigge.
Mike was a year younger than me and a few inches taller. His family had recently moved to Phoenix from Lake Zurich, Illinois, a small suburb north of Chicago. From his description (he was terribly homesick) it sounded like a wonderful little hamlet, and I often fantasized moving there with him after we finished college and building a beautiful English Tudor home (my preferred architectural style at the time) with a huge swimming pool and cabana out back. I don't remember much of our year or so together, but it must've been something special because I grew to love him as well.
Like Tom, it all fell apart after I confessed my feelings to him.
My junior year, after Mike, I took a break from romantic entanglements with boys, no doubt because no one had entered my life to pique such interest. I spent the year concentrating on existing friendships, including the one I shared with Jean Davis.
Jean and I were inseparable; partners-in-crime. People thought we were dating, and even though she was the first—and only—girl I've kissed and made out with (there was never any sex)—I only ever thought of her as my best bud. I think she viewed me as something more however, and when I ended up leaving Phoenix to go to the University of Arizona in Tucson, we both breathed a sigh of relief when she decided to stay behind. It was a breakup without any of the associated drama.
My senior year brought my unrequited love life new trouble in the form of Daniel Baxa.
Tom and Mike were just warm-up acts. I fell hard for Daniel. But sadly, like Tom and Mike, it was ultimately not meant to be.
His family had just moved to Phoenix from somewhere and I have no memory of how or where we met or why we even started hanging together. Why do teenage boys do anything?
Why did I keep falling in love with straight boys? Because at the time I knew of no other gay boys in high school—or at least none I was even remotely attracted to. The ones who were gay were so obviously gay that they were the subject or scorn and ridicule wherever they went. It was the mid 70s, after all. Despite Stonewall years earlier, was no gay marriage, no Love, Simonpositivity swirling around gay relationships.
Daniel was a bad boy. He smoked. He drank. And yet he drove a pink 1968 Mustang and loved ABBA. He was…confusing. As our friendship grew, he wasn't above physical contact, and many evenings while laying on my bed watching television, a spontaneous wrestling match would erupt, with one or the other of us getting pinned with obvious erections involved. But that was as far as it ever went, much to my disappointment. I often fantasized about just kissing him while pinned, yet never garnered enough courage to actually do it.
I was obsessed with Daniel, going so far as to climb up on the roof of our house to watch him arrive home at night from his job at Sirloin Stockade, telling my parents I was up there to "look at the stars." I even got a job at the same Sirloin Stockade the final summer before I headed to college—ostensibly to earn money for college—and it showed me what an absolute jerk he could be when it wasn't just the two of us together. It didn't sour me to him, but I learned that great life lesson of people weren't always what they seemed 100% of the time.
When I finally confessed my love, there was no big scene. I told him I loved him and he responded, "Oh, you mean like a friend?" "No," I replied. The color kind of drained from his face as I recall and he said something to the effect, "Look Mark, I like you, but I'm not…"
Holding back tears, I left his house and went home. That fall I moved to Tucson.
I heard from a mutual friend sometime later (who, by that time, also knew I was gay) that our parting left Daniel hurt and confused. He hadn't been ending our friendship; he was simply straight and didn't want anything more.
After getting his address from the same mutual friend many years later, I wrote him a letter, apologizing for the misunderstanding and asking if he'd like to talk. I never heard back.
On our way back from Tucson a week ago (has it only been a week?), the four of us wanted to stop for dinner in Casa Grande. The initial decision was to go to Olive Garden, but upon arrival it was obvious we weren't going to be seated any time soon. That led to a discussion of where else to dine, and one, well actually two of our party suggested Cracker Barrel.
I have never set foot in one of their establishments, having long since decided to boycott the chain for its past misdeeds to the GBLT community. I didn't want to go that night either, but I was outvoted.
The fact that the place was nearly deserted at 6:30 pm on a Saturday should've set off red flags, but for some reason it didn't.
After getting past the gut-wrenching kitsch, we were seated and after being handed menus, I can honestly say there wasn't a single item listed that I wanted to consume. I finally settled on a cheeseburger, assuming that would be a safe choice. Ben went with biscuits and gravy, and one of our friends went with chicken fried steak. When our food finally arrived—easily 30 minutes later—our friend took one bite of his chicken fried steak and asked his roommate to have a taste. "It's like it was fried in stale oil." Roommate agreed, and it was sent back to the kitchen and exchanged for something different.
Ben described his biscuits and gravy as "flavorless." My cheeseburger was wholly unremarkable. The bun—much like our friends steak—was stale and the French fries were mushy, like they'd been sitting under a heat lamp for hours.
Lesson learned. Don't compromise your morals, because in the end it will get you nothing.
And I'm home. Not at all unusual for the last twenty-five years. Ben is out at the moment doing his Lyft thing to pay some bills. I don't expect him back until around 3 am, by which time I will be deep asleep and probably won't even hear him come in. I'm listening to some classic jazz on the radio while Bobo is sleeping in his bed and Sammy is running around the living room like a maniac.
Forty years ago however, at 9 pm on a Friday night I'd be heading out the door to go dancing. (We didn't call it clubbing.) I'd most likely start out the evening by meeting my friend Kent at His Co. Disco because the cover charge between 9 and 10 was only a dollar. If the crowd got boring or if certain B-list DJs were spinning, we'd then head over to The Forum. But His Co. always seemed to play better music and have the new stuff sooner. It also had a slightly raised, lighted dance floor and a much better light show, so whatever else happened we'd always start out there. I can't say I ever reliably got laid on a regular basis via either place (it wasn't until many years later that I discovered The Connection and all that changed), but His Co. was where I met the great unrequited love of my life Steve Golden, and where I connected with Paul Bayfield and Ken Coyer, the two doormen—with whom I did have carnal relations on multiple occasions. Separately. (They couldn't stand each other and were each aghast when they learned that I had slept with the other.)
Oh, and there was the boy who'd driven all the way into town from Gilbert (which was to hell and gone in relation to the club's location back in the day and still is—just not out in the middle of nowhere like it was in 1978). My buddy Chas was up from Tucson that weekend and since I was still living at home he let me borrow his hotel room for a few hours to entertain Mr. Gilbert. "Don't get anything on the sheets! I have to sleep on those!"
And come to think of it, His Co. also served up Craig—and his lover—whom I'd encountered at work as customers in the housewares department at Broadway Southwest just that afternoon. "You really should wear underwear with those Angel Flights," Craig told me later that evening. "I could almost see veins!"
Good times.
Anyway, I bring this up because my previous post about Live and More triggered lots of memories of my wonderfully misspent youth.
And speaking of 3 am, forty years ago if neither none of us was busy getting laid, I'd probably be at breakfast with Kent and a drag queen or two before heading home…
I need to keep this in mind as I head into week four of unemployment, because yes…this has forced me to admit that I really was very unhappy where I was. It was beyond time to move on, and as I've said many times in the past, "If you know it's time to make a change in your life and you don't, the Universe tends to do it for you."
I had two good in-person interviews and one relatively decent phone interview last week. I haven't heard anything back on any of them. I know I won't hear anything about the phone interview until late this week at the earliest; the next step will be an interview in person, and the hiring manager is out of town at the moment. I should hear about the other two today or tomorrow.
Tomorrow I have to attend a mandatory "Employment Reorientation" meeting at AZDES in order to continue receiving my meager $240/week unemployment benefit. (Colorado paid more than twice that.) When the notice arrived the other day, Ben quipped, "'You've been selected…' Because you're OLD and don't know how to use the internet to find a job."
Obviously, this show is a little out of step with its misanthropy. It's a little out of step with where we're at culturally where it's a time of great optimism and we're all just knocked out daily by the warm bath of humanity that we find ourselves in these days. [Pauses, and then reveals he was being sarcastic.] No, it's a fucking disaster. It's a fucking total disaster. And every time I turn on the news I'm provided with fodder for our discontent. I think our timing might have been exactly right on.
Listen, I'm surrounded by the wonders of the creations of human beings. I have children and [series co-creator] Lisa Joy and I are reminded daily of how much beauty there is in humanity. But yeah, you turn on the fucking news and it's a shit show. And I've been reading a lot of history this season, a little bit connected to the show, but also just following the train of things I'm interested in, and it's depressing to realize how familiar some of these problems are, right? It's like we just can't figure these fucking things out. We come back to them again and again. It's as if there's a flaw—and this is very much the premise in our second season—there's a flaw in our code and it follows us around. Wherever we go, there we are. And we just can't get out of our own fucking way. All the beauty and incredible things we brought, and we just consistently find a way to fuck it up.
Much of the dramatic storytelling across the ages has concerned itself with "how will we overcome?" and personal growth and change. At a certain point you gotta fucking call it. We're not going to fix this shit, we're not going to figure it out. But there's an opportunity for the things that replace us to do so. And that's the dream of every parent, right? That their child doesn't face the same things they do, that they make better choices? But there does seem to be a pattern of behavior that follows us, that history echoes from the past, the same mistakes, the same foibles. So you say: At what point does this fix itself? Or are we just stuck this way?" ~ Jonathan Nolan, co-creator of Westworld on HBO, speaking to Entertainment Weekly
Maybe this just mirrors my general mood these days, but it sounds right on.
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Obviously, this show is a little out of step with its misanthropy. It's a little out of step with where we're at culturally where it's a time of great optimism and we're all just knocked out daily by the warm bath of humanity that we find ourselves in these days. [Pauses, and then reveals he was being sarcastic.] No, it's a fucking disaster. It's a fucking total disaster. And every time I turn on the news I'm provided with fodder for our discontent. I think our timing might have been exactly right on.