November 2008 Archives

Once again, I find myself having all manner of contradictory sentiments about something you think would be simple enough.  I have AIDS. (Boy, that's a hard sentence to write--proof enough we need WAD.)  Though I'm in remission, my life was irrevocably upended in its prime by a diagnosis.  I have lost countless friends and a brother to the disease.  Of course I want nothing more than a continued commitment to its eradication, on a local and  global scale.

But I must take a bigger perspective. A billion people live on a meal a day, another billion on two, and most of them don't have access to safe and plentiful drinking water. Millions of woman lack access to contraception and decent pre-natal care, many die in childbirth or suffer painful fistulas that make them pariahs.  There's malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, alcoholism, neglected tropical diseases, and that's just on the health front.  If you rack up the damage done by poverty, war and starvation, AIDS is just one of many, many horrific problems in the world. Which certainly doesn't mean it deserves any less attention than any other crisis, but neither is it more crucial than, for example, global warming.

I think those of us personally affected by AIDS must take care not to imagine its treatment and eradication as something of a be all and end all.  I would like to see the passion for responsive government and social change that the fight against AIDS has engendered in so many to not be confined to it.   We needed World AIDS Day as part of a process to give AIDS visibility because the nature of a sexually transmitted disease brings with it denial  and shame, and these are huge killers. But it's also an opportunity to remember every day should be World Poverty Day, World Violence Day, World Social Change Day, etc., and that will be no different when AIDS has gone the way of polio. 

I intend to cheer long and loudly the day of a cure or a vaccine.  But I don't want to pack up my toys and go home just because me and mine no longer have to worry.  Poverty and violence may not be killing me, but it is has killed hundreds in the time it took you to read this. We must not feel compassion for AIDS sufferers because it is AIDS they suffer from, we must feel it because they are our brother and sisters and they suffer.  And that compassion and commitment to action should be the same no matter the disease or the source of the suffering.

MCO 2008

A

newcomer was sharing at a meeting about how difficult he found it to be alone, that his thoughts always drifted to using, I realized how completely far I've traveled from that state of mind. I'm not only alone most of time, but like it that way. I suppose all the more because there's just enough company that the solitude doesn't turn into loneliness, as I usually go to a meeting in the morning, and David is usually here in the evening.  It's a great blessing to be comfortable in your own skin, to consider a nap or a good movie or a tasty meal plenty enough pleasant punctuation in one's routine. And of course, the world is at my fingertips with the internet.

I can kiss solitude goodbye for 10 days, starting Tuesday. It has been agreed that my presence in Chico, to help my Mom settle in to her new digs, would be helpful.  So I'm renting a car on Tuesday and taking Gaza, who I will drop off at my brother's along the way.  Then I'll continue on in the morning.

Between my Mom, my sister,  my niece and nephew, I will be afforded much opportunity to be of service to my family.  I just need to get over my logistics-phobia around travel and arranging it, but I will.  Up to departure, I will be a very busy bee, so of course a long to-do list before going is giving me an overwhelming desire to go back to bed.

If you're traveling back home, drive safely.

MCO 2008

So yesterday I caught the "other"  (after Australia) must-see film for the gay man who likes to work through a kleenex box a month at the movies, "Milk."

This one hit right between the eyes.  I came out very young, at 16, in 1975, and was a political junkie from the get go. Even though I thought I had gone through an awful inner torment--from the first awareness that I was attracted to men at the onset of puberty to the decision  to act on that attraction--I reallize now post-masturbatory regrets for all of 3 years was a pretty tame process.  At an absurdly precocious age, I was out in the bars and sleeping with strangers while spinning fanciful lies to my parents.  (Believe me, there isn't a straight 16-old boy on the planet who wouldn't do the same with girls if he had the chance, the difference between growing up gay and straight is that there is a whole system for managing the hormonal obsessions of hetero boys. Namely, you can talk about it, go on dates, dances, and see role models all around you, starting with your parents.  All I saw is what the gay men in New York City were doing, and so, that's what I did.)

It was the same heady time in San Francisco, when you could pack the bars, then clear them out and form an angry demonstration in an hour flat (pre-Facebook!).  I was in college out on Long Island and then in New York itself during the time "Milk" takes place, I recognized every outfit, hairdo, and sentiment.  I remember Anita Bryant and the Briggs initiative (to fire gay teachers in California)  like it was yesterday. I marched in the NY version of the parades you see on screen.

Here's the weird thing. My sense of being discriminated against as a gay person has almost always been abstract.  My parents were upset, but they got over it pretty quick, and I turned my coming out story into my first student film. I had one job at which I chose to be discreet for 6 months, on Wall Street, but never had to fear losing a job.  I'm sure  behind closed doors, some people had considerations about my being gay and later, HIV+, but never to my face, and I consider fear of disease a somewhat separate entity from homophobia.

Except in prison, I have never felt personally marginalized for being gay. (Prison is so distorted that everyone feels threatened for some attribute or another.)  It's always felt like advantage, socially. I think it's why I have so much trouble with the marriage issue. I always thought not having that option gave us a freedom from traditional expectations that enriched our relationships.

"Milk" does a wonderful job of reminding the viewer why ordinances to protect gays against discrimination in work, housing, healthcare and hate crimes are necessary. The whole raison d'etre for the explosions of the gayborhoods in big cities was the desire of hundreds of thousands of gay people to flee the closets and finger-pointing of small-town and rural America.  Things are much better, but only because of the tenacious commitment to change of the Harvey Milks of the world, willing to battle city and state, law by law.

The cast is a marvel. Sean Penn is a shoo-in for best actor, with likely Oscars all around for supporting actors, director and screenplays.  It is impossible for any gay person (and many a straight one) not to leave the theatre ready to go to a demonstration--luckily in LA we have one every 20 minutes these days!  It's great for understanding all civil rights struggles. I turned to David on the way home and said: "So you can imagine how mad black people are," and he said "oh my God, you're not kidding!" 

I'm not one to think pride is an appropriate reaction to something you are by virtue of a genetic lottery. I'm proud, for example, of learning French, of writing well, of picking up trash. But I have to say, the passion and humor that characterized Harvey Milk I recognize across the board in most gays I know, and I am, this morning, feeling very proud.

MCO 2008

This is Gaza recovering from a walk in our rare recent rainstorm. I'm thinking you might have felt this way after all the turkey yesterday. My day was great.

Today is National Listening Day. I tell you one thing that attending 12-step meetings do. They do teach you to listen.  There's just so much energy you can expend in the endless loop of the chatter in your brain, and you finally realize that maybe other people might have something to tell you worth hearing.  And then you learn to shut up and concentrate, and really try to absorb what's being said without parsing it to death.  It doesn't mean you agree uncritically with every opinion offered, but if someone says: "I was miserable" or "This is how I stay sane," how do you disagree with that?  Accepting the experience of others without judgement is really opening up your heart to the energy of spirit.

But the point of National Listening Day is to encourage families gathered around for Thankgiving holidays to talk to each other and to draw out oral histories, particularly from the elderly.  I have to say that we have always done this religiously in my family, to the point of documenting some of my mother's memories on videotape.  My father was more difficult. He came for an American generation that spoke in bullet points and pooh-poo'd too much self-examination.  He confined that interaction to a bottle of bourbon, which makes for the lousiest psychiatrist.  My grandfather filled my ears with stories of World War I that I can recount faithfully to this day.  (My other grandparents died early.)

Btw, I don't "listen" to anonymous commenters.  If you have something to say, particularly of a hostile nature, you can stand by it with your name and a valid email.  I suspect a recent attack came from someone who I blocked from another blog address and had discovered this one. If so, why are you obsessed with me? Don't answer that. Just move on.

MCO 2008

A neighbor does these tableaux in her yard for holidays. Isn't that adorable?

My gratitude list is so long that if I tried to put everything down you'd miss your ride to eat the turkey.  So I'm gong to try to select, fairly at random, things that happen to come to mind this morning.

I'm thankful for:

1) New and old friends on line, with whom I get closer and closer.   You know who you are. (Yes, I DO mean you. And you.)

2) Living in the lap of luxury.  I make less than $25,000 a year, but I need only read the paper to remember how madly rich I am compared to about 4 billion of the world's people. And rich in freedom.  Prop 8 and Dick Cheney notwithstanding, I pretty much do and say what I like. In Russia these days, you can't even do research on Stalin anymore. Mbeki's AIDS denialism in South Africa cost millions their lives. A cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe is about to be the final straw toward implosion. Rape plagues the lives of Congolese and Iraqi refugees.  And of course, we have this dreadful news from India. 

 I don't even know what a problem LOOKS like. 

3) Movies. Last night I saw Australia. Bravo Baz Luhrmann. At first you think he's doing the old movie homage a bit too much, but it settles down into good storytelling and Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman are absolutely gorgeous. It's a sweepy, weepy, big-assed saga that stays with you after you leave the theater.  And did I mention Hugh Jackman is gorgeous?

4) Obama.  Among a million other cool qualities, have you ever seen a smile that lights the room more than his? I want to be his best friend.

5) An Open Mind. Last night it occurred to me what was really getting on my nerves about this marriage thing.  Of course I think if straights can get married, gays should be able to.  But why should anyone be able to get (legally) married at all? Why is the state elevating couples over people who remain or become single? Marriage confers status--that's why gays want its blessings. But why should it?  If you are lucky enough to find someone who wants to spend their life with you, isn't that plenty of reward? Why should you get an extra dollop of support over the single, the widowed, the divorced?  If you say it's to support the family unit, I say parents should honor their obligations as parents no matter what. But we have a society in which if you've had a mostly good marriage that ends in divorce, the marriage is termed "a failure."  Single people who stay that way are felt sorry for, as are widows and widowers. Honoring couples with legal and social extras is like giving tax-cuts to the rich. It creates a social apartheid that is subtle, but real.

I'm all for love, I hope to find it one day myself.  But I don't know why the state should have any business anointing being in a romantic relationship as somehow better than not being in it. And we're all cooperating in this conspiracy of letting the hitched move to the front of the bus. Gays are now trying to sign on to a system whose very raison d'etre should be questioned.

I don't expect to alter the powerful societal bias for the happily-ever-after scenario that is pursued by virtually everybody. But if my open mind can think about it, so can yours.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody, I'm a guest at my friend Michael's in Ventura

MCO 2008

The good news is that my Mom gets her stuff from New York today, and she'll be able to move into her own place, right next to my sister.  She's going to get the French channel and we're going to  coordinate our TV watching, plus I'm going to get her addicted to Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart. I'm one of those people who think you can find happiness through television.

The bad news is that I'm just so exhausted by the need of groups of people to feel superior to other groups of people.  Such sentiments are fascinating when I'm watching a nature show, and the alpha males or females dominate the pack, but when humans do it, it's just annoying, and often dangerous.  People discriminate, dominate, enslave and often kill because of what you look like, who you sleep with and what you believe. Or at least they use such things as excuses to wield power. People need to justify their bad behavior.

I understand it. This impulse has been evolved in us over millenia, nature's impulse to create order, I guess.  All social animals that live in communities have pecking orders,  But you'd really think that the intelligence we have also evolved might have trumped our baser instincts by now.  You might have hoped.

I'm such a practical person that I've tended to work around these prejudices.  I gotten "into" the idea that my sexual preference was a matter of taboo to much of the mainstream, less now that when I was growing up, but it's still strong.  Screw the breeders, the song goes, let those miserable nuclear families wither in suburbia.  (Even though I was raised in one of those families.)  I've linked up with an alternative tribe of gay, black, Jewish and female friends, and if you throw in the drinking and using years, I'm a Mormon's nightmare.  I've reveled in speeding down the shoulder of the road, leaving the Ford pickups stuck in the endless traffic of conformity.

I'm now wondering if I've done too good a job of celebrating my marginalization.  It's a good thing, in principle, to make lemonade from lemons, but I may have taken it to the extreme. I've been so eager to reject the rejection of the Nofun D. Mentalists that I've turned it into a preference. I'm just so tired of explaining, educating and trying to get them to understand.

And then I think, what if MLK or Ghandi had my attitude? Isn't the logical extension of my thinking a social-sexual Yugoslavia, where we gays and friends get our own province?  (Welcome to Macadamia! Fruits and Nuts welcome!)  Is that really what I want?

This is a interrogative entry, not a conclusionary one.  I have no answers, only questions.  I have a lot of opinions, some strongly held, but one thing I'm not about them is smug.

MCO 2008 

Inner Archaeology

 The Armenian widow, dressed in black,

goes to the corner market, to pick up some milk and fresh fruit,

perhaps some bread.

She keeps busy, helping her daughter-in-law,

but her eyes tell a different story.

She's excavating Yerevan

circa 1952.

The best of times,

the worst of times.

Young and in love always trumps all hell breaking loose.

 

Another kind of archeologist

digs through dumpsters,

many pounds yield few cents.

Is he recycling plastic bottles,

or his soul?

What karmic debt has brought him here?

Why have I been spared his fate?

Our sins are no doubt the same.

 

And down the street comes the short-order cook,

just off the night shift.

He is a jaunty sort.

There is a girl behind his smile,

that is for sure.

He puffs his well-earned cigarette.

All is right with the world.

 

And then he asks the gathering man

if he has no money,

and moves between the cars,

to hand the man a bill.

A random act of kindness

I blush to witness.

 

Who owes whom,

in the world,

when all love is free?

 

MCO 2008

 

Rebecca Anne said she'd be curious to hear about my journey as a writer, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

I've always loved words, always loved reading.  In 1st grade, the teacher's sole complaint about me was that I read too much in class. You can imagine now many parents would kill to see that on their kid's report card. I was fascinated by my mother's ability to speak French, and wanted nothing more than to master it (I eventually did, but years later) . In 6th grade I invented a language named "Racana" and my sister and I spoke it to each other. Well, the one phrase we could remember, "Polamo" which meant "Let's go down to Eddies," the corner drug store where I got Superman and she got Archie and Veronica.

In the 2nd grade, I wrote my first play, "The Tornado" but was kind of slack on actually writing it down. It was mostly in my head, as were rehearsals, but my second grade teacher would not let me stop in the middle. She forced me to improv my way through it with this little girl whose name I can't recall but who I had a crush on.  (Gays are straight as children, did you know that?)  I was probably adorable, but I'd still like to apologize to that teacher.

In third grade I started to write my name backwards, which led to a habit of reading all signs, billboards, labels and t-shirts in both directions, which continues to this day. In sixth grade, I actually taught myself to write cursive backwards, which I can still do.

In fifth grade, we were required to write a short story as the class project, for Miss Mitchell, who was our effervescent and quite beautiful teacher.  I wrote a very creditable chef d'oeuvre called "The Black-Framed Letter" because I was fascinated by the obituary announcements my mother received from France that were bordered in black. In the story, set during WWII because I was transfixed by my mother's stories of being a teenager in occupied France, Paul Lebeau, who is about 14, has to deliver a message to his father, who is in the Underground. Of course, in my 10-year old brain, the Underground meant underground, and he delivered the message to a series of caves in which there was a hidden operations center worthy of the Allied High Command.  I remember the password to get inside was "the geese in France have ants in their pants."  I got an A+.

After that I had, like any good budding homosexual, a flirtation with acting, but really thrived when I got to write a children's play with my friend Eddie Hudson at 15, called "Gadzooks!" which was performed at surrounding elementary schools in a troupe called "the magicmakers."  I did love the drama society, I would have to say I remember those years as pure happiness.

Then I took screenwriting courses in college, and actually started writing them. I made one short film which got several awards, about coming out, called "He'll Grow Up to Be and Strong." Why I don't have a copy is too upsetting to recount, but I think there's one in a basement in Martha's Vineyard, and I will get it one day. My forays into screenwriting have been loosely told here but would take another blog entry entirely.

The biggest challenge, as an adult, is to look people square in the eye, and tell them I'm a writer, even if I've made about $35,000 all told as an adult writing or editing. But I don't think I need to convince you guys that it's a fair self-description. Not to mention, it's about 35K more than a lot of people who call themselves "writers" have ever made!

MCO 2008

 

 

In the original Tissot version, a hush has descended in the room as the guests prepare to hear a solo violinist. In my version,  Waterhouse's Ophelia takes on the role of an aria-singing diva, replete with operatic costume; the violinist seems like accompanist. 

Boy I love coming up with Hy-Art, but  think I will make it a treat instead of a habit. Keep it special.

I was reading an article in The New Yorker about the rise of "overparenting."  There are millions of parents who are overstimulating and controlling their children to death, raising offspring who are deprived of the inestimable benefits of making your own mistakes, learning as you go, unsurpervised play, and unscheduled free time.  Some of these parents follow their kids to college, buying second homes in town; stories are abounding of 18-year olds who can't make the most routine decision without calling Mom, who don't understand why they can't come in to their first jobs at 10 and who quit at the slightest reprimand.

My parents were never far away when I grew up, but they never hovered.  If I joined or quit the swim team, I did not consult them first. When we went out to play, we were trusted not to burn down a house, and though we smoked cigarettes on the sly, shoplifted once or twice, and built absurdly high  treehouses, we also learned to negotiate the wider world, including bullies, mean girls and even foot-fetish twins who used to pay us a nickle if they could smell our shoes and socks.  There was Romper Room but no Sesame Street, instead of TV or Baby Einstein I played with my brothers and sisters and neighbors, and with little prodding, we made prodigious use of our imaginations. I loved to learn. When we got our first set of the World Book Encyclopedias, I would spend hours reading it, with no prompting. According to the mindset of parents who want to first be best friends with their kids and then parents, my upbringing would be considered sustandard.  I'll take mine over what they're doing any day, thank you very much.

I also spent some time clicking on "gay" blogs written by boys in their 20s and 30s, who post short entries full of many pictures of hot men, music videos and plastered with ads.  There's not a lot of thoughtful writing, and not a lot of examples of original creativity.  Maybe if I was 25, growing up in this era, I would have exactly the same kind of blog. Lord knows partying and finding sex were my principal preoccupations and that age, testosterone is a terrible thing to waste.

Perhaps I'm edging into territory of smug superiority and self-satisfaction, but what I mean to emphasize is appreciation.  If I wasn't born when I was, I might not have had the kind of frankly idyllic childhood I had, where parents said "go out and play" and you went out and learned. I wouldn't have experienced that brief decade between Stonewall and AIDS when being gay felt positively revolutionary and sex was not tinged with fear.  I wouldn't be within a few years of age of the first black President, who doesn't consult me (yet) but with whom I feel an extraordinary affinity in our perception of the world.

I have the feeling most of my readers are within a decade of me, age-wise. Do you feel me, people?

MCO 2008

When I was in Provincetown, I was surprised to see this seagull strutting up the main drag.  A group of us gathered around to watch this little show, and only then realized that a fishing hook was lodged into the gull, a strip of nylon trailing behind her.

We surmised the poor thing had figured out the only way to get help was to come close to the humans. I tried to approach but had no clue how to go about it--she was understandably skittish. Instead I opened the door of the breakfast place where we'd just eaten and asked them to call the appropriate authority--which they did, a coastal animal welfare group.

Last night I dreamt about dislocation. I have a similar dream about once a month, and it always shakes me up a bit. I'm in New York, trying to get back to L.A., or in France, trying to get back to New York. Everybody is irritated with me, I am the extra man in class, there is no room at the inn.  I have the sense I've made a series of terrible choices, and yet feel an inchoate urgency to go somewhere new or to return somewhere safe.  (Inevitably, I discover that all I really need to do is get up and take a leak. Once I go back to sleep, the dreams are serene.) 

This is not a particularly original dream, but it strikes me that it seems to occur with no relation to what's going on in my conscious state. I'm not feeling very anxious at all. Despite the possibility that we are facing the second great depression, I am writing every day, and that means a sense of purpose that eclipses my fear of general collapse. (Obama helps, of course.)

I've been watching Malcolm Gladwell promoting his new book, Outliers. He says no matter what the discipline, it usually takes 10,000 hours of apprenticeship to achieve mastery in a craft. I calculated that with all the screenplays I wrote and rewrote in the 90s, the magazines I edited and wrote for, voluminous correspondence since childhood (especially in prison), and mostly, 4 years of blogging every day without fail, I'm probably very close to that 10,000 hour mark.

I'm not quite arrogant enough to claim mastery, but I do note that I never leave the computer dissatisfied with the quality of my writing.  No matter how much work it is, I know I can always shape it into something I'm comfortable with, and often proud of. Suddenly I'm feeling 50 definitely has its compensations. 

MCO 2008

You just never know what I'm going to come up with when I open up Photoshop.  Though it might inspire a meme for the pet-lovers among you who want to see what it would be like if you and yours were melded into one creature.

First off, a shout out to James, who lives in the neighborhood and I met coming out of his driveway yesterday. He says my blog brightens his day, and he also told me his girlfriend actually received a Hy-Art card of mine from a friend!  You can imagine how thrilling that was to hear. Small world.

So, I have a fan. It's not as cool as a stalker, of course, but it's a start. (JUST KIDDING!)

In an exchange with Sheria, who's been writing about Prop 8 and gay civil rights--sometimes off one of my entries, I commented that I "didn't want the approval of the Mormons and Baptists or Catholics, in fact, I consider their rejection a badge of honor."

This is, indeed, the way I feel, but I also feel the need to examine and perhaps question my devotion to this sentiment.  The roots of rejectionism of the rejectionists run deep for any gay person who has achieved self-acceptance.  None of us start out with a sense that we are okay just the way we are. Even if we are one of the very few whose parents are "cool" about it from the get go, we all have to face the clear bias present in society. How we deal with that, at least how I did, was to question all the societal underpinnings which led so many to conclude my kind of love was inferior, sick, unnatural.  This also created a huge opportunity. Once I questioned practically all commonly held beliefs, I got to choose the tenets of my own philosophical and belief system.  (Of course, this journey is not confined to gay people, but we tend to go through it earlier as a matter of psychological necessity.)

But for me, this has also translated into a a reverse bias--against all those who accept without question beliefs they've been taught that espouse any sort of narrow thinking or bigotry, against tundamentalists who cling to certainty and fear doubt, who condemn homosexuals because they've been told to, using  the writings of ancient scribes centuries ago as justification.  

Fine, but does that make me any better than they are?  If the roll of the genetic dice had rendered me straight, would I have questioned the status quo if I was raised Mormon or Baptist?  What is my most effective response to homophobia and bigotry? Do I understand it comes from fear and ignorance, or do I feel superior to it?

What I'm acknowledging is something I said at first jokingly to Sheria.  I like feeling superior to and smarter than other people, and it's not too hard to find much justification for that in a country that twice elected Bush and fear men who kiss each other more than men who shoot each other.  But this willingness to think myself as better than doesn't really serve me and certainly doesn't serve them. I am doing what they are doing to me: demonizing,  judging, dehumanizing.

I will always denounce bigotry, but the bigots are still my brothers and sisters in this sea of humanity. They are manifestations of God every bit as much as I am, and they can infuriate and alienate me, but I must face them at eye level, from neither above or below.  I need to keep reaching for a willingness to inform, exchange ideas and treat them with respect and dignity even if I feel like shaking them silly and exilng them to Alaska.

This is a goal that I'm nowhere near to achieving of course. But it bears striving for. After all, if my dog met these people, he'd be just as sweet with them as he with the lefty cute boys I introduce him to.  I have to ask myself, What Would Gaza Do?.

MCO 2008

I took this picture of a boat on the beach with a shattered window, and that came off as sad, so I replaced the window with a bucolic autumnal shot (of a cemetery, true, but more peaceful than sad. )

Last night I went to see a cabaret show by a friend who sang some of the best songs of the 60's and 70's (Laura Nyro, Elton John, Billy Joel, Jimmy Webb, Joni Mitchell--you get the idea).  It was the kind of walk into nostalgia-land that made you want to slap any 30-year olds in the room, screaming: "You don't know what it was like! 'Summer Highland Falls' was the soundtrack of my first heartbreak, you clueless whippersnapper!"  At the same time, I found myself very grateful for being born when I was, for having the memories I have. The soundtrack of my generation is the finest ever.

Well, the California Supreme Court is going to look at the legal challenges to Prop 8, and we are hopeful.  Without the courts, civil rights in the country would have idled in the backwaters of social attitudes that change much more slowly than history demands.  Changes in attitudes come from personal experience. Fundamentalists and conservatives have gay sons and daughters, brothers and sister and aunts and uncles too. Far too often, these gays have told me "we just don't talk about it." They find it easier to demand recognition from the state than from the family.

If we want to flip that middle five percent, these gays must demand support from their families or be willing to turn their backs on them. Parents and friends who "tolerate" express a form of conditional love that must be defined as such.  I have seem COUNTLESS families go through the change they never thought they could go through, but only because the choice was accepting their gay son  as he was or having no gay son at all, and that includes Mormons. 

When I was 17, in 1976, I made that choice starkly clear to my parents, who were as progressive as they came for the time, but still saddled with the homophobic attitudes of their generation. My mother wanted me to go to a therapist to change my sexual orientation, and I allowed not a smidgen of light through that crack.  My zero-tolerance-for-intolerance stance--combined with massive re-education--was extraordinarily effective. She had a rough year, (my father less so) but both made the strides they made because it was that or no relationship with me at all. By the time my brother came out a few years later, they couldn't be bothered to be bothered by his sexual orientation.

I think this is a crucial difference we as gays have with the traditional civil rights movements. With African-Americans, legal protections drove social change, with us, social change drove legal protection. Rosa Parks needed the right to sit in the front of the bus before she could make friends with the white lady next to her.   But liberal democrat that he was, I don't know if my father would have voted against Prop 8 if he never had to accept and embrace his gay son, much less two of them.

With us,  change begins at home.

MCO 2008

The writing process has become like this for me. It's as if I opened the shutters to this house, and just described what I see inside, through the window. The characters move into the house, and then I observe them more closely, describing as clearly as I can what is happening.

I have a conversation with God before I sit down at the keyboard and I basically pray, "Let me see."  I know that the finished work is out there (or in here), fully formed.  I just have to uncover it.

At least that's how it feels when it's flowing, and it's flowing. When it doesn't flow, it's not pretty. You sit there trying to "figure out" what happens next, what to do with the characters. This was the process that often led to my stopping halfway through a project before. Now I just concentrate on opening my inner eye. The characters are doing a marvelous job of determing the who what where why etc. of the story.  It's the most gratifying experience you can imagine, better, for me, than sex, food, or even an episode of Project Runway.

Speaking of good TV, last night I saw NOVA: Buried Secret of the Bible.  Wow. So fascinating.  It describes the nexus and contradictions between the archealogical, biblical, scientific and historical records, and it should be required viewing for every fundamentalist in the land.  What all the evidence is pointing to is a new theory: that the Israelites were originally poor Canaanites who used monotheism as a religious narrative to overthrow the decadent and oppressive polytheistic ruling class. Exodus (which has zero archeological evidence) was a foundation story invented to delineate these revolutionaires as a people and to sustain them through subsequent, very real exiles in Babylon, in which earlier fragments of the Bible were gathered and rewritten to form the Old Testament as we know it today.  The stress on a God  who commanded fear and required devotion and worship was in direct relation to the rampant polytheism with which the early Jews did constant battle. Their God had to be more powerful than any and all other Gods, this was the only way the ancient tribal mind could conceive of deity. 

I can't efficiently telescope a two-hour show into a paragraph, but if anyone is interested in opening their mind and understanding our common history, it's definitely a recommend.  (I also find it incredibly instructive that biblical scholars who venture outside the Bible in the spirit of objective scientific inquiry NEVER insist the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God.)

MCO 2008  

Welcome to my airboot. You see what I do is pump up that white ball on top and it gets all comfy and cushiony.

Okay, it's not the most fascinating visual. Maybe instead of a boot I should post a picture of my booty caller. (He's got a bathing suit shot on facebook).  I'll think about it.

Meanwhile, my mother's best friend, with whom I have a correspondence for years (she's a retired Professor in England) wrote me about Obama:

Rejoice, Rejoice! A county full of WASPS who can choose a Catholic President then a Black President in one generatoin is surely a living organism which demonstrates political flair, the ability to adapt which is the key to survival. As one paper said: "Welcome Back America." It's true, some of us felt we had lost you! Poor old Europe stinks with its reactivated mummies of Berlusconi & Mitterands. And last but not least, ca va faire raler les racistes de tout poil! [It's going to drive the racists crazy!]

It's funny how even those of us who are very attached to a view that we are citizens of the world way before we are citizen of a specific country can still not avoid the whiff of association.  Though  I was the same person on November 4 as on November 5th, I am walking a little taller since then, there is a spring in my step, and by January 20th I will be skipping.  If aliens land and say "Take me to your leader," I can extend my arm and proudly respond: "Right this way."

Today is my mother's 83rd birthday. My sister's getting her an MP3 player so she can download podcasts, as she finds reading of all kind increasingly hard on her eyes.

I am writing a least a page a day on the novella. It's good stuff.

MCO 2008

P.S. How about those "Christian" churches claiming we have elected a Muslim President and offended God?  Putting aside the bankruptcy of the charge itself, what an impoverished view of a God who prefers some of his children over others.

One of the little pleasures of living in L.A. is that you never know when you're going to run into some kind of film or video shoot. Usually it's just a lot of trucks and people waiting as shots are set up, but in this case, down the street, I got to witness actors in 20's party garb dancing to a song whose title and singer I would have certainly known if I was 30 years younger; Madonna or Rihanna or Piranha or Lil' Wayne or Lil' Kim or Kim Jong Il, it all gets jumbled up.  I seriously need me some Sirius radio so I can see who's doing what when I hear a song I like, I have never understood how people seem to know this stuff.  I'll pass the Music Box, a very well-known concert venue not far from my house, and the lines will be around the block for "Sean & Mary" or "Self-Will Run Riot" or "The Allure of Chaos"  (I'm making all of those up--I think) and it's a thoroughly unpenetrable culture to me in which 22-year olds spend half their waking hours just "checking out music" on line and wording of mouth and Ituning and MP3ing various bands and singers.

In MY day, we had the 5 or 6 performers everyone tried to get tickets to see: Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, the Allman Brothers, Rickie Lee Jones, etc. I, of course, being a good little budding homosexual living in the New York suburbs, saved my ducats for Broad and off-Broadway.  You could always listen to music on earphones, for crying out loud, but nothing could replace the live experience of the theater.

Nothing's changed really. I spend my entertainment dollar on movies or plays, and cable TV. I love music (who doesn't?) but I never stop everything to do nothing but listen to it. I spent much of my 20s on a dance floor, but that was all tied up with m2m socializing.  Now I need to have a relationship with what I'm watching, whether it be the actors or the writers who gave them the words or the news events I'm witnessing.

Sunday is my favorite of the week for TV, because there's football, Ebert and Roeper, 60 minutes, Dexter, True Blood, and Brothers and Sisters.  Depending on the time of the year, sometimes that's mixed up with Masterpiece Theater or Desperate Housewives or Madmen or Entourage--an embarrassment of riches. (Thank God for Video on Demand--I could use TIVO but I have to draw the line.)  I've even been known to shed a tear or two over Extreme Makeover.

But nothing moved me more than the big wide smile of our new President and his simply gorgeous and charming wife on 60 Minutes.  The idea that Bozo is exiting and this smart, spiritual and WITTY duo is going to represent this country as we move forward--all I can say is Glory, Glory, HALLELUJAH.

MCO 2008

This is one of my first Hy-Arts, a Hockney/ Bougereau, that feels eminently appropropriate given that California is on fire again. I'm in an intensely urban area, so don't personally have to worry, but the sky is gray and orange and smells smoky, and of course your heart breaks for all the people losing their homes. I can just imagine the survivalists watching from some sort of shelter in Idaho.  The gays wanna get married, there's a black man in the White House and California's in flames. They must be ready for Armageddon/the Rapture any second now. Luckily for them, they've all been whiteous.

I forgot to take a picture of my "boot," a velcro'd contraption that I get to tromp around in for a month.  I do, indeed have a stress fracture and a ligament tear. I am eminently relieved to have objective proof of my injury, even though I can't drive with it so it will be a pain in the ass to take on and off so much.  I actually got the staff at the doctor's office laughing out loud by showing how I was going to have to walk like a pimp in order to look cool.  I do a good pimp imitation--I knew a few in prison. (The fires are very bad close to where I was, in Chino.  The air quality must be awful.)

I was going to go down to the demonstration late, but Mister Mister called to say he was refugeeing my way from the rally for a booty call.  Sorry people. I want change but I need to get laid even more.  It was hothothot. He never disappoints. 

I have had one change of heart about the gay marriage ban.  Even though I still advocate my ARCUFALLS,  (Adjustable Renewable Civil Unions For All ), it did sink in that legally granted rights were taken away, and that's a very serious issue in and of itself.  I guess the only equivalent is when blacks were granted the vote and then deprived of it in essence with all the obstacles to actual voting that created the need for the Voting Rights Act.  I can be thoroughly ambivalent about whether we should be so anxious to join the institution of marriage, but the removal of civil rights already accorded?  This is a threat to progressive democracy.

Of course, the NRA would insist any restriction on guns would amount to the same thing, As much as I abhor guns, wouldn't it be interesting to try to become their politicial bedfellows by advancing our cause as a parallel argument? If only to see how quickly they found arguments to deny any equivalency.

My mother sounded positively rejuvenated yesterday, having her port at dusk on my sister's balcony, as her grandchildren played nearby.  And my brother had some eye surgery that has a 90% success rate. If I could get married and buy a house, all would be perfect, except the house would probably be burning and I'd probably want a divorce.

Some people just aren't optimists.

MCO 2008 

 

I never post a You Tube, but I just had a craving for this.  I defy you not to enjoy it.

Well, it's a new day in the Olmsted family.  We are now all west of the Rockies, and almost all in the Pacific Time Zone! (I have an errant sister in Alburquerque.)  It's odd how this geographical proximity confers immediate psychological comfort.  I will probably drive 9 hours to see my Mom in Northern California, as opposed to taking a 5 hour flight to New York, so in practical terms, she really isn't closer, but it just feels different. We can coordinate our TV watching!

I happen to have a hard-to-get appointment with the foot doctor smack dab in the middle of what promises to be a huge pro-gay marriage demonstration, coordinated across the country at 10:30 PST.  This is when I find out if I get a cast. If so, of course I could get a lot of bonus points appearing late in my contraption--oh, look how committed he is!

I am still full of ambivalence about our strategies. It is exceedingly difficult to communicate my ideas about expanding and enriching the options available to anyone who wants to get their relationship legally recognized without somehow being perceived as not wanting or caring that gays are treated equally under the law. Of course I do.  But like Elton John, I just don't understand what the problem is with Civil Unions that give us that protection. So what if we can't call it "marriage?"  If I can visit my partner in the hospital, inherit his property, and our children don't have to be adopted by the other--why does it matter under what legal rubric this occurs?  

What is becoming fascinating is the sociological phenomenon of mass protest and action that is generated almost entirely by individuals spreading the word on Facebook and via email.  One of the reasons I want to go to the demonstration is to participate in this kind of new social movement. It's the best kind of democracy--the "60s all over again."  I think I will try to show up late, even with a cast. If only for the flirting opportunities.

On a front that is frankly more important to me personally--as I hightly doubt I will ever be married or unioned--I finally got the novel underway.  I had been stuck on page 1, writing and rewriting it, and now I broke through, and it's moving along. 

The technique I discovered is to open up the file first thing in the morning and do a little work on it, if only a sentence or two. What results is that I take advantage of my A.D.D., my tendency to parallel process. I go back and forth from the novel to email to surfing the net.  This recognizes that I needn't wait till I have everything else done to start writing and then do nothing else. That's not the way my brain works.

Play to your strengths. This is my thought for the day. 

MCO 2008

I'm very grateful for yesterday's tumult.  It was unpleasant to be attacked by the Weonews editor via email, and a bit of a shock that he published a letter which described me as a "human piece of garbage," but then the sheer over-the-topness of such a reaction rendered its writer--supposedly a "Tootsie Reynolds"--so ridiculous that it provided a catharsis of sorts.  After a few long talks to people I trust, I gained some perspective on the whole thing. I am one voice among many on this issue.  Everybody and their mother was not reading the article or spending their day talking about it.  I put some interesting perspectives out there and it perfectly okay if others disagree with me. Finish this chapter and start another.

I also made a new friend.  One of the supportive letters came from an Erika Shroeder, who I found on Facebook and who wrote me this email, which I quote with permission: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to THANK YOU.  I was sent a link to your article from a friend of mine who told me that you really made her think about pursuing "marriage".  The opportunity to write about your article felt almost like a different kind of "coming out".

Ours seems to a be really controversial stance in the face of the passing of Prop 8, but I believe we are correct.  I, in fact, have been trying explain the importance of the rights over the "acceptance" for many years.

Unfortunately, I speak from some devastating experience.  Before the passing of AB 205, my then-partner and I adopted a baby boy.  As you may or may not know, at that time, SS couples had to go through a 2 stage adoption process, where one adopted and then the other partner did a 2nd parent adoption (approximately 1 year later).  Although second parent adoptions by SS couples were rarely blocked, it wasn't condoned either.  You had to get a good judge.  Anyway, my partner adopted first and when it came around to do the second parent adoption, she started hedging and ultimately denied me the opportunity to legally adopt my son.

As you can imagine, after that kind of betrayal, our relationship was doomed.  After 10 years together (3 with the baby) we split up. 

I know that if we had had the rights under AB 205, this all could have been avoided.  We would have been registered and the adoption status would never have been an issue.  Of course the blame ultimately falls on my ex and her fears (don't worry, I won't go on too much more), but there is a reason that these issues are addressed in either a marriage or a domestic partnership, people sometimes make very bad decisions.

I have spent 7 years negotiating on a weekly basis whether or not I can see my son.  I have no legal protection and neither does he.  I live in constant fear that she will just blow up and deny me the right to see him.  Or worse yet, allow her current partner to adopt him. It is a horrible way to live.

Sorry to be so long winded, and I completely understand if you have just skipped to the bottom of this post, but the gist is that we CANNOT forget that we have to end this wrangling and get the rights in place (statewide and federally) to ensure that this sort of situation does not happen to anyone in CA or anywhere else.  Sometimes in all the emotion, the gay community cannot see the forest for the trees and finally,  I firmly believe that some people who have gotten married in the last 5 months do not fully understand the scope of AB 205. They need to know.

Thank you for opening up some eyes.

Best, Erika

For me, this says better than anything that this focus on the rites over rights obscures the fact that when it comes to real life issues, it is the rights that matter so much more.  I would like to see those expanded, particularly on the federal level. This is where our energies, in my opinion, should be focussed.

Two bits of news on the family front. As I type this, my mother is flying over the country with my sister, making the final leap to come live on the West Coast, with my other sister. We are so excited and hopeful this will shake her out of the slow decline to which she seemed to be succumbing.

The second bit is not so good. My brother, Steve, is suffering from a retinal detachment in one eye and a tear in the other.  We are all quite worried for his sight. Please say a prayer.

MCO 2008 

Here are the Letters to the Editor about my article. (You have to scroll down)

Thank God for Ericas and Erikas.

Toostie, however, I suspect is the Editor himself.

MCO 2008

Yesterday was a series of very stressful mental collisions.

The night before last started off the following 24 hours with a real collision. I hit my driver-side mirror against a tow-truck in my parking lot and have to replace it.  Luckily, my neighbor who owns the truck was almost apologetic (the truck is way too big for my lot, but parking is difficult in this neighborhood, he has no choice) and he offerred to install a new mirror when I get one. That will cushion the blow, but it's a bitter expense for a boy on a budget who is normally much more carefully getting in and out of my very thin driveway.

Then the editor of Wehonews.com wrote me an e-mail that my "Jim Crow piece" had received a lot of mail.  There was no reason for the alert--of course I was going to read the letters to the editor. He was going out of his way to let me know how he felt about the article, making an inflammatory reference implying I was a racist.  "Jim Crow" refers to the laws that enshrined the concept of "separate but equal" in the South, and they were struck down as unconstitutional in 1954.  Of course "separate but equal" was a lie, a figleaf.  Blacks were never accorded remotely "equal" facilities, schools, resources etc, that's why separate was ruled as inherently unequal.

My proposal was that all people, straight or gay, be given the right to a better system than marriage--which originally arose as a state rite to institutionalize patriarchal property rights, including over the women. To compare that to Jim Crow laws was ridiculous and deliberately designed to provoke me. (I left the magazine after writing 10 articles for no pay and dealing with the editor's micromanaging megalomania. He's been evidently harboring a grudge ever since.)

Provoke me it did. We had a progressively nasty and personal exchange of emails. What can I say, being called a racist tends to get my gander up, even if I probably should have recognized from the get go this wasn't really about my article and refused to take the bait.

Then David and I had some discussions about buying the house that threw me.  Oddly, it synchs up with the whole marriage thing. I feel like I'm ahead of my time. I think there is far too much societal emphasis on the primacy of relationships based on sexaul and romantic love.  I mean, look at us, in the blogosphere!  Most of us haven't even met each other, and yet what we say every day is of enormous importance to each of us. I'm not proposing we get married, I just think friendship and non-intimate relationships get short shrift in the society when in reality they occupy an enormous emotional space for most of us, often a bigger one then that occupied by any significant other.

David and I have lived together 7 of the last 20 years. We are more married than most married people, but it is an entirely vertical relationship.  Buying a house together represents a commitment to an alternative significant other relationship.  Perhaps I'm being unrealistic expecting it from him or from myself.

Well, I'm nothing if not flexible. If he buys the house without my help and charges me a much lower rent, this could work out.  With me, practicality always trumps ideology.

MCO 2008

This is the house David and I fell in love with yesterday and are putting a bid in for today.  It's huge--5 bedrooms--and is a foreclosure priced at half its original cost. It's big enough to rent out two rooms with their own entrance and bathroom on the ground floor--cutting way into a monthly mortage. It almost feels too good to be true, but David has maintained excellent credit and we have as good a chance as any. 

I figure this would be a great place to spend the next four years before the poles shift and the black hole in the center of the galaxy sucks the milky way into nothingness around December 21, 2012.  That's right, I've been watching the History Channel again, and those prophecies (not just the Mayans, but Mother Shipton, Merlin, and the I Ching too) are scarily plausible.  (There will be an astronomical alignment that occurs once every 26,000 years--that's not even woo-woo, that a fact.)

I find the idea that the end might be near eerily liberating.  What's the point of writing my ass off it there will be no one to read it, no libraries for a book to dwell on, no posterity to worry about? It reminds me that we truly only have the present, and the only reason I need to write is because I enjoy the process--the rest is all gravy.  

Likewise there's the question: if I knew the end was near, would I want to stay sober for it? This is the kind of dilemma only an alcoholic would ask, and my disease grabs onto it as the ultimate justification for a nice big glass of wine every night.  What I have to remind myself is that I LIKE being sober. I like the sense that nothing is impeding my concious contact with God, I love the lack of chaos and unmanageability in my life.  But I do have to remind myself. The basic alcoholic thought is some form of this: ingesting a substance is part of the solution; altering is good, enhance when you can.

Don't worry, I don't sit here and struggle. But I do have these thoughts, along with a daily repreive from acting on them.

MCO 2008  

Isn't it interesting how you can't really tell if this is a sunset or a sunrise? How appropriate as we witness the dusk of one administration and the dawn of the other.

All the preoccupation here over marriage equality, or the lack thereof, may obscure the greater reality that the good news of Obama's ascendancy absolutely outweighs the bad news of not being able to get hitched.  That right is far more a psychological need than a material one.  Except for the anecdotal realities of hospital visits denied or spousal benefits withheld, the right to marry doesn't impact the daily material existence of most gay people.  Most of us who are single need to find a husband much less marry him; and most of us who are attached aren't about to break up because we can't get officially wed. 

I get it, but I don't get it.  I think there's been far too much hetersexualisation of gay life as it is. We used to revel in a little bit of marginalization--taboo, even. At least I did. Who wants to be anything that garners the approval of the Mormon Church? I consider their condemnation a badge of honor.  In France and England they've had Civil Unions for several years now, they have whatever kind of ceremony they like but have ceded the word "marriage" to the Church.  I say let them have it. 

I never cited an this piece from Alexander Cockburn that I read a while back that really inspired me. As for my article, I'm glad to report a lot of good reaction so far. A lot of gays seem to be silently irritated at the emphasis on marriage.  Look at how this battle has exposed the entrenched homophobia in communities of color, not to mention among white evangelicals?  What are we doing to provide outreach and support for all the gay people growing up in those institutions, trapped in self-loathing and lives on the "downlow?"  What will the right to marry garner them when they can't even utter the words: "I'm gay" or get thrown out of the house if they do?  I'm a lot more concerned with their well-being than my right to have the same minister sign the same marriage license as the straight couple next door when I say I do.

That said, I need to acknowledge that I'm fairly all over the place on this. You could probably trip me up in a contradiction or two over the past weeks writing about this. Of course I don't like drinking at a separate fountain. But when I think of how absolutely thrilled we would have been 20 or 30 years ago to have domestic partnerships, I find it strange that we find them so inadequate now.  I think we should make them more fabulous. After all, isn't that what we do best? 

MCO 2008

Here's the article in Wehonews.com I wrote about what to do moving forward from Prop 8.

http://wehonews.com/z/wehonews/archive/page.php?articleID=2847

MCO 2008

 

I got all geometric on the beach one afternoon in Provincetown.  I was going to post these one at a time, but I'm impatient.

Today I went to a gay morning meeting, and had an UPLIFT  (Unexpected Parking Lot Flirtation). I was wearing a cool black shirt I bought yesterday, and looking good, and I came up with a spontaneous but fairly amusing one-liner. We were also introduced by a friend, to whom I was able to signal my interest afterwards, just in case the object of my attention voices interest back.  ("Matchmaker, matchmaker...") This is probably the closest to actual romance I will get all month. I like to think of it as seed planting.  One of these days something's gonna bloom.

These last minute attempts on the administration's part to issue executive orders and regulations that Obama will have to repeal or rescind is the most passive-aggressive bullshit imaginable.  It's got Dick Cheney written all over it.  I personally think Bush is exhausted and beaten down. He doesn't understand how it all went so wrong because he doesn't have the intellectual wherewithal to distinguish ideological good intentions from competent governance.  Cheney, on the other hand, can't bear to relinquish power. He might as well be Hitler ordering nonexistent armies to counterattack as Berlin falls.

I probably shouldn't sully a blog entry bearing artsy photos and talk of love with references to the evil regime we still live under, but it's all on my mind. I may spend most of my time alone here at the computer, but my brain is perpetually engaged with the world. The personal is political, I see what's going on far from home and close to home and in my very head as completely interrelated. I'm as likely to be as buoyed by something Obama does as by a flirt in the parking lot, as upset by an article about Darfur as by noticing my bank account is in the red. What I love about the blogosphere is the capacity to locate others who think the same way, who see themselves as citizens of the world, affecting it and affected by it.

When someone "doesn't pay attention to politics," or couldn't find Afghanistan on a map or, horrors, doesn't vote, I feel sorry for them.  A lack of intellectual curiosity, a sense of separation from the wider world--it makes, in my opinion, for a life so much less rich than it could be.

MCO 2008

Over at Prison's a Bitch there's actually a video of Steven singing "I Can Only Imagine" in church, in Estherville, Iowa.

He has a beautiful voice. THANK YOU Sheria for the technical help posting it.

MCO 2008

When I was in prison, I spent a LOT of time talking to black men in the dorm.  I had decided that I was going to make the prison experience as fruitful as possible, and that meant getting as much backstory as I could, from everyone. And, to be honest, I wanted as many of these guys to have a positive experience of a gay white man as possible.  The homophobia was intense in prison, but it wasn't equal among white and blacks. For example, when I asked the white guys if they'd rather wake up black or gay, they all said "gay," and when I asked the black guys, they all said "white."  Instructive, eh?

Anyway, whether it was C-Crazy, D-Roll, Leon, Yousseff,  Rodney, or a score of other black men I got to know, I noticed that the vast majority referred to an army of women who raised them. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, foster mothers, cousins... sometimes related by blood, just as often by choice. I would hear often: "Well I call her my Aunt, but she's really my Mom's best friend."  Unfortunately, there were precious few references to present fathers.  Almost to a man, their childhoold experience was one of being raised by women who'd cobbled together families of choice as well as of blood.  

I find it highly ironic, and sad, that the African-Americans who voted for Prop 8 cannot see how much they have in common with the gay families who wish for legal recognition of their relationships which fall outside of the traditional nuclear family paradigm.  I really wish the organizers of the No on 8 campaign had thought to point out the commonality of our experience. I know that I got a thrill from one of these guys telling me: "you're all right, Marc," --not because I was white, but because I was gay. Another irony: it was easier for me to come out to them then it was for one of the black gay guys. 

I didn't go to the big demonstration last night because I don't see what good it's doing. But I dreamt all night about Prop 8, so I guess it's bothering me more than I think.  I'm just not comfortable yelling in public, not to mention my foot starts to ache big time.

I ache more for the fact that we're not united on this issue. We should so be allies. 

MCO 2008

These are some random men whose pictures I took in Provincetown. Well, not so random, I guess, because the top one is me and the next two were chose for their hotness.

Sometimes I'm still surprised that I don't have the life I always thought I'd lead. I've now become friends with a host of gay men who have been partnered for many years and gotten married recently, several of whom who also have children. Some are sober, some are not. Most, however, are HIV-.  They didn't go through their 20s and 30s relatively certain the end was near, not to mention their semen was tainted.

Still, I can't really "blame" that, or blame anything. My journey was my journey. I got sober for the first time at 26, and didn't stay sober. I had more research to do. I beat this bad boy to a pulp, dragging out to the bitter end past all sense my story until the LAPD stepped in when I was 45.

I'd love to have a