ANOTHER SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM...MAYBE TWO OR THREE...

Today the scale read 168. In an ideal world, it wouldn't matter. And even in this one, it doesn't, really. It's just a long way from 161, that's all.

I recently traveled into a near-by Big City which shall remain Nameless to visit friends, attend a gay social event, see a movie, and attend a cathedral I had often heard had wonderful GLBT [LGBT? LGBTQIA? BLT? LSMFT? how about QUEER?] programming. The visit with friends went OK, though I could tell they were getting tired of my air of hopeless sadness and longing toward both the past and the future.

There are quite a number of people who like me, but can't understand why I didn't let well enough alone, especially when they find out I haven't been getting anything on either side of the street. Why not just shut up and let everything go on as before? Why screw up my life when I didn't even get anything for it --- not to mention screwing up the lives of my wife and children?? Well, what can I say, except, why does it never occur to these well-intentioned people that this question has in fact occurred to me also, and was the Great Cross of my life for months last spring? I can only repeat that necessity is called "grim" for a reason. I suspect that many of these good people have never met a necessity they didn't find a way of avoiding somehow... or am I just parading my own lack of comprehension?

I get a parallel version on the pink side of the street: why am I not busy @#$%-ing my brains out now that I'm free to do whatever I want? I'm young enough [I love that one -- it definitely puts a "best sold by" date on U-No-Who], I'm good-looking enough [and I recently received a vote on that score from someone who has never seen anything but the top of my forehead], and I am in my own way appealing, even if not to everyone and even if the people who do find me wildly exciting lose all interest when I can't be picked up at the next drive-through for a hot evening... Now I know I am living in the narrowest possible bandwidth between scripture and gay "community", between tradition and call, between a rock and a hard place. But is it all really so very incomprehensible? Jaime took me to task for being jealous of the guy he had had his one-and-only fling with since leaving his wife -- as though my desire to postpone [or just plain "pone"] the slut phase were somehow incompatible with having feelings, let alone conflicted ones.

I like my friends who had agreed to be my hosts. They are one of quite a number of couples who have reached out on their own and done everything within their comprehension to make me feel at home. [And I have been learning a lot about the real basis of humanity in hospitality recently]. But these two do have their quirks: she is a "Save the Earth Please" left-wing nutcase ["GW Bush engineered the attacks on the Trade Towers" is where conversation starts], and he believes that the sun rose and set, for all intents and purposes permanently, with the Greeks and their Renaissance admirers. This is not fertile ground for good behavior from Trolls.

Their sons, one of whom was home from A Major University, and one of whom is a senior at a weeds-and-seeds private high school that has to be seen to be believed, sat around the table making sweeping pronouncements about everyone who had ever achieved anything. Poetry came in for some heavy broadsides: "Russians can get away with rhymes in a way that Wordsworth can't" was one gem; "I rather abhor the Beats" was another. [Actually, I rather tire of the Beats myself, but I don't think I can sit in judgment on them except as a matter of personal taste. "Abhor" seems a tad strong...] The "children" were hustled off to work on various school-related projects after dinner, but I think they had been told that I was there to discuss The Break-up, of which they had just heard, and was to be made More At Home by the absence of whippersnappers.

Unfortunately I was NOT on my good behavior. The poetry pronouncements brought out my best needle-nosed sarcasm -- I kept demanding that the youths tell me who they accepted as a standard against which all these other people were falling short [the high-schooler eventually shut me up by saying that it was measured against Shakespeare that he considered Wordsworth "silly". You can always shut me up by making Shakespeare the criterion. Well, almost always.]. And after the boys had been dispatched, I seemed compelled to stay in attack mode, and proceeded to gut the cows held sacred by my hosts in turn. It was just not a good evening for Trolls or their hosts. But they didn't throw me out of the house, my bedroom was not set alight during the night, and everyone was civil at breakfast.

Gee, guess who had a bad conscience that morning...

That afternoon I attended a screening of an interesting movie. Interesting to me, anyway. "God and Gays: Bridging the Gap." It is not terribly polished, and some terrible choices were made in the shooting of it, but it contains powerful interviews with Mel White of Soulforce, who has actually moved to Lynchburg, VA to attend Jerry Falwell's church and stand up in silent witness against him every time he inveighs against gays; Deborah Johnson, pastor of the couple who produced and directed the film and an incredibly articulate woman; but perhaps most compelling, Mary Lou Wallner, a formerly staunch religious conservative Christian who not only turned her own faith around but dedicated her life to combating religious homophobia after her own lesbian daughter committed suicide. What I found most moving, aside from Mrs. Wallner's testimony, which is practically written in blood, was the simple fact that the title simply joins the words "God" and "gay" with "and" without mentally substituting "or". The producer and director sell T-shirts that say "Jesus brought me out." What's not to love? it was a good afternoon.

That evening, however, was a bit more complex. Early readers of this blog will [OK, may] remember a certain amount of hand-wringing over my discovery that I was hard-wired for kink, and the devastating effect some of the corollaries of that discovery had for me. Well, months have gone by -- thirteen years have gone by -- and I am now all grown up, almost ready for prime time, so I thought I would try dipping my toe directly into the waters of The Leather Zone. [Sorry, I can't highlight stuff in black on this page...] I couldn't have asked for a friendlier, more open and accepting group of guys. The "presenter" had just come back from Mates' Weekend in P'town, where by all reports everyone who showed up in their chaps and not much else practically froze to death in the rain at the end of the big competition evening... but started by somewhat shamefacedly reporting that while he was "queer," he was not in fact gay. It was that sort of evening.

The most puzzling thing was the appearance of Yet Another Alternate Version of Mr. Right: a gray fox motorcycle-rider with a chest that went on for days. His entrance brought me to a pretty complete standstill, and I had just managed to stop twisting my finders into pretzels when he came in...

In the course of the evening, he waxed eloquent about music, coming out in San Francisco in the '70's -- ah, the '70's, when I too was out and the "S" dentist [!] and his rather shame-faced "M" lover had probably not been born yet -- complained about the dearth of leather tops after AIDS had taken away all the popular guys, and generally made me work overtime not to drool on my shoes... Coming on top of my discovery of the appeal of the Young Adonis, and my sudden response to a nearly shaved redhead at a charity event our local gay social group participated in last weekend, this aha! moment leads me to speculate that I am classed as "polymorphous perverse" for good reason.

Well, let's look on the bright side: it should make it easy to find SOMEBODY. Well, I can live in hope at least. Can't I?

There was a touchingly small-town quality about the evening. I guess by the time you get down to the tiny minority sub-cultures of our 3%, you really are talking about a "Small World After All." Here, where a certain number of people were in full harness gear, and some were just in leather one way or another, I felt surprisingly at home, though realizing that some people had been partying hard for the entire 30 years I had been out of the picture did give me pause. There was a professional concern for the accuracy of handkerchief code, the courtesy and potentially life-saving necessity of negotiation before entering into a "scene" -- why, it sounded almost like courtship!

I think I can say that I have never met a less judgmental group of people in my life. After some initial [obligatory?] discussion of safe[r] sex, the evening went on into a discussion of what people classified as part of "the scene." Some people, including some of the couples, were remarkably forthcoming. And this is where I began to suddenly feel like a Vanilla Wafer on foreign soil. There was a lot I could contemplate intellectually, or accept as giving life a certain frisson, but just not see as anything I could contemplate doing to another human being no matter how badly he wanted it ["No! suffer!"]. And people offered to fill in the blanks in the "spectrum" our presenter had prepared with such eager good will.

We got from what seems like "the basics" to Greasetank territory with astonishing speed, and everyone seemed to have a story to share. Now it's theoretically possible that this was all collusion to give me the fright of my life -- in which case it failed -- although I WAS the first to leave, and I would have given a lot to be a fly on the wall to hear the group's response to my situation and complete newbitude. But I think the talk, like the rest of the evening, was really genuine. How often do people get to let their hair down? Especially, if you don't mind my asking, THESE people?

You can imagine that there was a certain amount of mind-warp on returning from this little soirée to my hosts of the philosophical differences. We had a rather stilted conversation over a glass of wine -- the Troll suddenly REALLY wanting to behave -- and then we all headed for bed. I said my farewells fairly early in the morning -- my hostess may be a certifiable fruit-cake, but she makes GREAT coffee -- and headed off to the Cathedral of Dreams.

Which turned out to be an even bigger mismatch than Leather Night. Or at least, more perplexing. Those of a religious bent -- are there in fact any of you out there, or am I just boring the five members of my audience to tears with all this? -- know that I have a respect for tradition that mainline Protestant denominations no longer seem to share. [They are all so busy welcoming me, which seems to require that tradition make way for the Flavor of the Month. Am I really the Flavor of the Month? God help us next month...]

This particular congregation had fractured as a result of the various wars within the E-piscopal framework over the last decades, and there were now a group of semi-hostile camps: the conservatives, who had to get up and in by 8 am for the Rite I service; the family-friendly, who had split off from the rump non-conservatives to have a space where the children would be made more of, and who now had the traditional high ground of 10 am; and the remainder, who were few and far between, and apparently often nearly outnumbered by the choir. I had, oh joy, unwittingly elected to join the Family-Friendly service, because it met at the hour that everyone used to meet, when this house was within my haunts.

I will spare you all the gory details. I am after all the man who bailed out of my own church's sentimental excess on Mother's Day, but once made the mistake of running away to the Universalists across the street, where I not only got "Mother" writ large, but the Moon Goddess as well. Here, children were certainly welcome; my question was what the unattached adults were doing there. I have never experienced a service where less gravity was attached to the central act of Christian community: the shared meal. In the middle of the preparation of which, there was a melée of greeting, kissing, hugging, and general grinning -- and the officiant, who messed with the liturgy to some secret end of her own, which had gotten my hackles up already, opened her arms wide at the altar to receive her child from the arms of her lover. That, like the sermon on World Champioship Wrestling on Easter in my own church one year, was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back. I have [well, had] a female pastor at my old church, and a male pastor who is exceedingly child-friendly, but no one has ever interrupted communion for hug-time. I guess I am just getting a mite cranky in my old age. After the babe-in-arms moment I checked the bulletin, and yes, indeed, she was the person in charge of the queer programming there... sigh.

I attended an E-piscopal church in Downtown Denver once where the rector was a woman and the rest of the staff were Obviously Gay. As were most of the congregation. I obviously had/have some level of internalized homophobia, but I don't think it is required to ask yourself whether a set-up that revolves exclusively around the concerns of women and gay men is going to long remain a recognizable institution -- what exactly happened to all those awful men who had to be thrust from their seats of power to make room for this cheerful and exquisitely liberal and friendly rabble? They are certainly getting thin on the ground, or just very good at flying under the radar.

Well, who would think that one weekend could possibly offer so many opportunities for growth?

I mean, who thought I would EVER respond to a redhead, let alone at a charity event? Not me. At least I know he's gay. Now if I could just get him to give me a call or offer me a cup of coffee... Oh, and if anyone wants to head for hell, there is probably room in my handbasket.

Hang in there.
And stay in touch.