MORE SUPPORTFROM THE WEST COAST...UPLIFT AND SEPARATE?

I sent a number of change-of-address e-mails when I discovered that some people had paid no attention to the notice I had been putting on the bottom of all my e-mails for several months, saying, "Please pay attention to this new e-mail address and change any occurrences in lists"... Now, as someone who rarely reads and therefore even more rarely follows directions, I should not be surprised that nobody reads anything. I am, after all, the man who wanders around saying: “No hints, please, just hit me with the brick.” [This has already solicited one reply from a dating service “match” that asked whether I didn’t want to be hit with something almost as hard, almost as red, etc., etc. — you really have to wonder what they use to consider someone a “match.” For the record, based on my own research, 9 out of 10 lonesome homosexuals list “sarcasm” as a major turn-off. Well, I guess we are well-known for not liking ourselves very much...]

To cut a long story short, in response to my change of address message, from which he drew all the correct conclusions, I got a call from an old friend on the West Coast, whom I'll call "Larry." No, not the madman who drove five hours for dinner -- but someone I had known a little in college, admired for coming out Very Publicly while running for office, and got to know again at a college reunion, at which he showed up with his very pleasant partner. Any partner who agrees to attend a reunion they have no connection to gets all sorts of points in my book, and that was before I found out Larry's was actually nice above and beyond that line of "above and beyond the call of duty." [That wasn't very short, was it?]

Anyway, I was driving back to What Used to Be Home to do more packing -- the final passage in that particular story, I think -- and we finally connected on my cell as I was tooling along some not very scenic interstate. Now there, as Kipling's Bi-coloured Python Rock Snake says, is "Vantage Number One" for cell-phones. I should call someone whenever I get in the car... if I didn't know all the reasons for not doing it...

Larry really gives me a pep-talk, as perhaps only an ex-serviceman can. And he doesn't want to hear anything about putting off dating or telling people there's no action yet; he has very particular advice. For the first hour it was simply great, although he wasn't really changing my mind -- it was his enthusiasm and sense of connection that spoke to me. Then he started to recap "The Road Less Traveled," or some similar source of wisdom, and to talk about the stages of loss. Now I heard all these from Elizabeth Kuebler-Loss herself years ago, and spending half an hour listening to it as the latest dispatch from Mt. Sinai was something of a trial. But it was only the beginning of the end.

Because then Larry, whom I really like and am delighted to have as a friend, let alone a friend who would spend an hour and more of his weekend trying to help me, started to lay into my wife. Now, call me narrow. There are some things he said which I could sort of accept, in fact, have been working overtime not to focus on, myself; but it is my wife we're talking about, so I have some sort of right to decide how I am going to view her actions and reactions. This seemed, as the minutes dragged on, to be a really nasty misogynist rant the likes of which I had not heard since the less comfortable moments of my Dinner with the Professor.

Don't gay men hear what they sound like when they start beating up on women? And this had nothing to do with my wife, whom Larry hardly knows by sight, and everything to do with Women in General. When it didn't stop, even at my repeated nudges in the direction of changing the subject, I began to get more than uneasy -- I got angry. I mean, who's he? Yes, I am slowly working my way around to accepting some of the things that I have been working so hard not to think, slowly accepting that at least some part of the blame for the mess we have landed in is not mine, slowly letting those last remaining barriers down... But I don't for a minute believe that anyone is at bottom responsible for the mess but the two of us, and the one of me in particular. I was there, and I did what I did, and said what I said, and now I have to lie in the bed I made for myself. [See "choking on desire," below.]

There is part of some gay men that must take women not only off their pedestal, but down into whatever mud they themselves are mired in. Things crop up, like the unstated assumption that all women are whores [though the figures on who has how many partners put that little fantasy nicely to rest] or how the women in their lives ruined them [a) Freud is history, fellows, and b) grow up and get on with it.]. Drag is passed off as an affectionate lampoon, but I think it seldom stops there. Yes, I have my issues with drag queens, and with queens in general, I know, and they are [surprise!] all about me: I know that. But let's call a spade a spade here. Sometimes it just gets ugly, and you ask yourself, well, I ask myself: why? what's really going on here? Well, I don't have the answer, but I do sometimes ask the question...

Now, my discomfort with Larry's rant in no way makes me feel any less affection for him as a human being; he has done incredible, courageous things, like coming out to an all-military family and coming out at the start of his campaign. I like him. I just wish he could get this monkey off his back. Put it to rest, like Norma Desmond's chimp, some night when no one is looking, and get on with life. I mean, what's the point of resenting half of the world's population? Where does that get you?

On the other hand, my own most recent shining moment was definitely not the e-mail I sent to my children with news on my social life, and on how hard it is to feel like I fit in. One of them responded by asking me not to say too much on certain subjects -- we were all getting used to a lot of things, and sometimes a little information [and maybe a lot less] was all that was needed. I do understand that, it's just hard not to share what sometimes feels completely overwhelming.
So, there's another reason to expand my social life a bit.

[Moral of the story: blog less, live more! Don't hold your breath...]

On a completely different note, I was doing my late-night Stat Counter cruise and found that I had found readers in Oman and the Dominican Republic. Someone in New York City had landed on my Second Thoughts page by googling "an anus is not a vagina." Someone from the Nanyang Polytechnic Institute in Singapore had checked in, and my friends at Bank One, Columbus and Wells Fargo were proving true. [What is it about banks???] But I really had to laugh when I got up to the recent visitors, and found that someone from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, DC, had checked in. So now you know what's really happening with your tax dollars while they are they are supposedly coming up with those numbers we are all force-fed at the end of the quarter. Dear God, it felt good to laugh, and I laughed long, if not last.

Oh.

"Mybad," as my second son would say.

It's now the general opinion of the folks in marketing that we are 6.8% of the population; that contrasts of course with the Lowland numbers that put gay men at 3.4% [that lines up] but lesbians at only 1.7% [and what does that mean?]. So I guess I have to pull in my horns and stick with the 6% estimate, no matter no badly it reflects on us in statistics...

Gay and lesbian market by the numbers

15 million - Gay, lesbian and bisexual adults in U.S. (6.8% of population)

$641 billion - Buying power of U.S. gays and lesbians in 2006

$42,700 - Per-capita buying power of U.S. gays and lesbians in 2006

$232 million - What US companies spent on gay media or sponsorships in 2005

175 - Number of Fortune 500 brands that actively market to gay consumers.

Take-away message here: You can do anything in America, as long as someone else can figure out how to make money off of it.

I wrote to a sweet, elderly English couple who sent their Christmas letter [!] to M and me at this address, including my letter to my siblings which ends:

"...thank you for your understanding."

That understanding has come in varying degrees, from the total to the totally inappropriate. But there is simply no denying that I have made my bed, and now I have to lie in it; so much of what comes my way I just have to accept. I wish it had not had to come to a break, but I completely understand M's position that she would not settle for less than 100%. My moral universe seems to composed entirely of grays at the moment, so I cannot say that I share her view of things, though I did paper over that fact in my letter.

I have seen too much reality to think that the ideal has any place below heaven, if in fact it can even be found there [I suspect that the place the Platonists seek the ideal is not recognizable as heaven to a Christian, but that would be to posit that we might recognize it as something else...] "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" It is no easy process, being made as a new thing. "Ways in the wilderness and rivers in the desert" are nowhere in sight at the moment. But as H.J. von Moltke said on his sentencing to death,

God makes himself known in the things we do not want to do.

Amen to that.

Hang in there. Today was a better day. Here's hoping for many more of them.
And not just for myself...

Whether or not you are a praying person, remember Drew, Joe the Bear, Nate, Woe, and all others on the stony road to a new life.