The following is an article I wrote for the new issue of BARtab magazine – you can check it out on their site here.
When it came to sex, I used to be a closed book. This was due in part to my innate shyness, though growing up in Minnesota probably didn’t help. “Are you having a good time?” was a question I’d heard a dozen times in bed by various men, usually following a bout of what I thought were obvious noises of my approval. I went through life speaking, and groaning, at volume level 9, while the world heard me at 2.
A few twisted fantasies percolated in my head but I lacked the guts to ever talk about them until the ripe old age of 35, when I went straight from a sex life of pure vanilla to dating an International Mr. Leather.
Low volume was never a problem for Joe Gallagher. Even with his mouth shut he was communicating, like the first time I saw him, wearing a t-shirt that read: “I Make Boys Cry.” The T-shirt scared the crap out of me. My fantasies did not involve tears. But still I found him compelling. Some of us are just cursed with a need for bad boys.
We liked each other for more than just the physical. Still, we both harbored doubts about our sexual compatibility. I didn’t know what to make of leather, which seemed to me a world governed by a million mysterious rules, where stuffing a red hanky in the wrong pocket could lead to trouble. Membership in this world seemed to depend upon the right boots, the right chaps, and knowledge of rigid protocols.
As a kid I’d dropped out of private school because I hated the uniforms, and I found these rules stifling. I liked Joe for his irreverent streak – he’d carved out his own place in leather. He wore what he liked, when he liked, and made no apologies.
He showed me some essays written by Robert Davolt, a leatherman who’d died of melanoma in 2005. Davolt loved the leather community, but like all good writers he was a bit cantankerous. Leather, he argued, was a relatively young world, which began as a group of “outcasts, leftovers, the dark secret of the gay community.” He advised its members to question its “traditions,” and to distrust anyone who claimed to be a leather “authority.” He wrote often of leather as a group of people on individual journeys, with no two paths the same.
Like most of us, I looked for role models in all areas of my life, and here in leather I’d found two. Joe and Robert gave me the permission I’d always thought I’d needed, permission it turned out I had only to give myself.
I began my little journey by learning what I didn’t want. A Leathermen’s discussion group taught me that I didn’t want, for example, to walk one pace behind and to the left of Joe at all times, nor did I want to be in charge of his frickin’ Outlook Express. Fortunately, on these matters, Joe and I agreed.
At Joe’s side, I went to a lot of leather events and met a lot of kinky folk, most of whom I liked. Sometimes, though, I’d meet a boy who’d talk my ear off about protocols, questioning whether or not half the people at the event were “real” leather folk, or a titleholder who seemed to have gotten lost in the intricate local leather politics. I had no stomach for politics, and was wary of protocols, but I’d learned that leather was big enough to fit us all.
Prodded by Joe, I began to speak up in bed, to set in motion my fantasies, and to claim the kind of sex I’d always wanted. And though I’d long feared it, the first time he made me cry (during sex, that is) it came as a catharsis. In leather scenes, I watched others challenge their fears and their limits and come out exhausted, exalted, and content.
I felt this sense of liberation spreading into other areas of my life. I was less fearful, less shy, less concerned with what others thought. Still, I considered myself a fringe member at best until I heard an acquaintance dismissing leather as “just another form of drag.” My reaction surprised me with its strength: anger, yeah, but also a sort of protectiveness, for the people I’d met and the experiences I’d had. And pity, too, since the acquaintance was cutting himself off from trying something new. My reaction told me that maybe, in my own way, I did belong.
“I think we need to take a break,” the Manly Fireplug told me. “I think we need to see other people. But only for Dore Alley.”
Fortunately this was not real-life Fireplug talking, but merely the Fireplug in last week’s nightmare. I used to be, in the beginning of our courtship, nearly four years ago, a jealous wreck of a man. But I thought those days were long gone. I felt secure in our whatever-you-want-to-label-it-ness. I no longer wasted time worrying if he would leave me, in part because he pretty much dotes on me all the time now.
Oh believe me, he tried in the beginning to resist my charms. But really, what chance did he have, once I’d made up my mind?
But apparently my subconscious is still an anxious amusement park filled with scary clowns and seductive porn stars. Because yes, in my nightmare I caught a glimpse of the Fireplug, hand-in-hand with some humpy little thing much closer in height to himself, traipsing through Dore Alley: a bullet shot straight through my heart.
Maybe you’ve never had nightmares that your boyfriend will leave you during a street fair devoted to half-naked kinky men from all over the planet. I suppose this might be a San Francisco-centric nightmare. But any of us in any half-way sizable city can easily drive ourselves nuts fearing that the humpy number just around the next corner will woo our loved ones away. Curse those next corners, they’re always holding back some temptation.
In real life I forestalled such tragedy by signing us both up for the beer booth at Dore Alley, where will we be slinging suds half the afternoon, side-by-side, getting the kinky fucks drunker and raking in the cash for my Gay World Series-bound softball team. Just like we did last month at Pride, pictured here (with our handsome, totally-single friend Lon: call him!), in a moment of tender capitalist camaraderie. What you don’t see is the leash around the Fireplug’s waist.
If you’d like us to get you closer to intoxication this Sunday, or if you want like a Diet Coke or something, come to our booth outside the Powerhouse between 3-6 pm, right about the time the crowd turns a tad messy. My team could use the cash.
So about two days after posting all about My Triumphs in D League Gay Softball, I hit a slump. At our last game of the regular season I struck out twice and eked out a couple of anemic singles. At our next practice, one of only two before play-offs, I swung and hit only air, and let more than a few grounders bounce past me on the manicured grass of the lonesome right field.
It was more than a little humiliating. Understandable, yes: common, no doubt. But still humiliating. The next morning I woke light-headed and thunder-pulsed, a dizzy sensation that would cling to me for the next seven days. My dreamy doctor prescribed an echocardiogram and then ran off to Bear Week in Provincetown. I holed up, ate massive plates of pasta for the first time in months, wrote nothing, and watched reruns of Veronica Mars, missing the final practice before play-offs.
I woke the first morning of play-offs still light-headed and quick-pulsed, but determined to at least show up for moral support. The winner of the play-offs would qualify for the Gay World Series in glamorous Columbus, Ohio. But our team had finished the season fifth out of seven teams. To win playoffs we’d have to win six out of seven games over the next two days, a doubtful proposition.
Our first game was against a team we’d been 0 for 2 against during the season, so I figured I’d rest my dizzy head while warming the bench, shouting out the occasional Inferno cheer and offering my condolences afterwards.
Yeah, right. We fucking won.
And watching that felt so good that I played the next three games, poorly again, though the rest of my team did well enough that we won two of them. We still had a shot the next day. The adrenaline seemed to knock the dizziness from my head, and I went home that night feeling pretty damn good.
I came back the next morning, the Manly Fireplug in tow, just as dizzy as before. Worse, in the intervening night I’d had a Mildly Traumatic Event. I need to stay vague about this Mildly Traumatic Event for various reasons, so my apologies to you for kinda sorta leading you on.
I say mildly because no one was killed. I was not hurt. The Manly Fireplug was not hurt. No family or friends or little red terrier were hurt. But the memory of the event clung to me over the night and through the next day, the second day of play-offs. And between the memory of the event and the return of my dizziness, I was one bummed dude. I was sick and scared and stuck in my head, and I did the one thing I’d never done, all season long.
I gave up.
I told the coach the dizziness was back, keeping the other details to myself, and spent the rest of the day avoiding her eye. I hung back.
And watched my team win the whole fucking thing.
Yep, we won the next three games, the last two in a row against the top-seeded team, and we routed them.
It was thrilling. It was heartening in a way I can hardly describe. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had with another group of people, and I’m so glad that I was there.
The thrill, of course, was tempered, for all the reasons you might expect. I had wanted so badly to take part, to pull my weight and help my team reach that unlikely victory. But I couldn’t do it. I went home that night with a complicated heart.
The dizziness cleared. My dreamy doctor is still, as I write this, at Bear Week, and I have yet to learn the results of my test, but my symptoms have cleared up, and yesterday I drove down to the batting cages and swung until the sweat flew from my arms.
And next month I will travel with my team to Coumbus where no doubt I will spend most of the week warming a bench or two, something I will be happy to do, cheering on my team.
Thank you, D league softball, for giving me a little more confidence, even if I sometimes lose track of it. And thank you Inferno, my team, my comrades, you unlikely band of rag-tag misfits, for proving that you can still come from behind and kick some major ass. Flame on!
Since then I’ve stayed stuck in my head. Sometimes something hurls at you through the cover of night, colliding with you and jarring you awake. Last weekend was like that. I had somewhere somehow once again lost my way.
I’d stopped working on my book, had taken up with softball and the gym and looking good. I get that way sometimes. It’s hard for me to balance the physical and the cerebral, the short-term gains of hot pecs with the long-term gains of creative expression. I don’t do balance well, but then one does not develop a daily affection for crystal meth, say, if one has a talent for moderation. I find it easier to lift weights than to write a paragraph, and sometimes I get lazy.
And though I’ve become a better softball player, in secret I know the score. I will never be a better player than a writer. And I need to write. Which is rather too bad, in matters of paycheck and practicality. But it’s too late now, that die was cast way too long ago.
It took me a few days to get back to this, to get less scared and less stuck. To turn off Veronica Mars and sit down and log off and open a new document, a blank white screen, the blinking cursor that I chase with one word, then two.
“My God,” my stepsister said after hugging me. “You look like the Incredible Hulk.” I’d driven out to meet her at SFO, where she had a three-hour layover. It had been a while since we’d seen each other. “Seriously, you’re huge.”
“Oh come on,” I said, “I’m not THAT big.”
“I guess I still think of you as that skinny fifteen-year-old,” she said.
“So do I,” I said. “Which is why I now look like this.”
I’d been a scrawny kid, the kind of scrawniness that perfect strangers felt compelled to comment on when meeting me for the first time. My first year of college I was an inch shy of six feet tall and weighed 128 pounds.
I now weigh 190, due in no small part to the gym. I realized the other day that I’ve now been working out over half my life. But it wasn’t until the last couple of months, when I changed what I ate, that I started seeing the results I’ve always wanted. Turns out all those guys telling me to up my protein actually knew what they were talking about. Go figure.
I’ve been kicking around in my head this subject of change for a little while, after something profound happened to me.
That day I was walking from my apartment to the museum lot at the end of my street where I’d parked my car, about 100 yards. Blue skies, the air cool, Finley trotting just ahead of me, sniffing the ground, his little tail wagging. And for a moment I felt a particularly tender love for him, for his enthusiasm and his charming little strut, and that feeling inside me spread out to the day, and to my life.
I realized that I was happy.
This may be the kind of feeling, or awareness of feeling, that other people have all the time. But for me it was a revelation.
Most of the time I worry. I live in tomorrow (a strange position for a memoirist, but I never claimed to be consistent.) I struggle with impatience, full of ambition and thwarted by doubt. I think that I should have met all of my goals by the age of 25. And now I am 39.
But for those 100 yards I felt content.
Of course my next thought was, “Why?”
The most obvious factor was this thing I have going with the Manly Fireplug. We’ve only been back together a few short weeks, and I’m reluctant to say this out loud, but a couple of days ago we linked our Facebook profiles again so I think I can risk it: today we are happy together. I now recommend breaking up as a terrific method for reflection and re-prioritization. Things are better than they ever were before, and they were pretty damn good before. That goes for sex too. Just sayin’.
The second factor was with writing. At some point in the last few months, after a string of career rejections, my approach to writing shifted. I’m giving up trying to impress readers. I just want to reach them. Sure, I still hope to impress – c’mon, I’m a writer – vanity and insecurity come with the job. But the contortions I twisted myself into, trying to impress, didn’t serve me so well.
Third, I look good.
I guess what I felt, coming together in one short walk down the street, was a comfort inside my skin, a strange sensation for me. And upon further reflection I could trace it all back to D league softball.
I like to poke fun at D league softball, because really, the stakes couldn’t get any lower. But that is why I am continually amazed at what it has done for me. I told you already how bad I was in the beginning, how bad it felt being so bad in front of so many people, and how being so bad in front of so many people made me want to cut my losses and run.
I’d joined in the weeks after the Fireplug and I had broken up, when I’d already felt like a failure; I’d failed at love and I’d failed at writing and now I’d failed at sports.
I needed to flex some muscle. So I stuck it out, hit the practices, hit the batting cages in my spare time, and over the course of the season transformed from the guy who could reliably strike out every time at bat, to the guy who could reliably get on base every time at bat. I’m no D league rock star, just a solid member of the team, which for this season is okay.
That subtle transformation fed my confidence, and that confidence spread into other areas of my life. I had a stronger sense of myself as a man, of what I wanted out of love, out of sex, out of writing. All because of D league softball.
And if D league softball could tap unknown potential inside me, then what else did I contain?
Of course I still harbor doubts, mostly about my abilities. Cynics say, “People don’t change.” But they can, and they do, though only with tremendous effort. For the past three months I’ve watched the Fireplug transform into a more open, loving man, his changes – both big and small – unfolding on a near-daily basis, and that transformation astounds me, humbles me, makes me want to hold on to my front row tickets.
And I keep circling this subject of change, trying to figure it out. I suppose it gives me hope. Maybe, as I close in on forty, I need reassurance that change is still possible, that as long as I draw a breath I can keep throwing aside, year by year, a couple of the doubts that I lug around – buying myself a few more yards of this hard-won feeling.
My brother and me, fashion-forward Midwestern boys, circa 1980.
So this weird thing happened when I gave that reading the other night. I got choked up. This surprised and embarrassed me – I’d been working on the book for several years and I figured by now that I had enough emotional distance from the material, the distance that making a good book pretty much requires. By getting choked up I felt as though I were letting everyone know that I hadn’t yet achieved that distance. And that the book would be closer to an undigested therapy session than to something like literature.
I guess by most standards I did not have a happy childhood. And the excerpt I read the other night comes from a time of enormous upheaval in the story, just after my parents split up and begin dating people of the same sex, when I was ten and my brother five, about a year after this photo was taken. For several years I’ve steered my way through this book, afraid above all else of falling into self-pity. And I think I steered it too sharply in the other direction, away from the hard feelings.
So with this latest draft I tried to delve a little deeper into each scene, and to just say what was going on in my little head and little heart at the time, and I can already tell it’s a stronger story as a result. Whether I can do so and still keep it from teetering into self-pity, well, time will tell. But those feelings were closer to my surface, I guess, the night of the reading, because of this recent draft. The choked-back tears came early, and I fought them down pretty much the whole time I was reading. At one point I looked up and made eye contact with the Manly Fireplug, but then had to look away. He may look like a tough cookie on the outside, but really he’s a big softie (it’s this combination of bad boy looks and good boy heart that makes me love him), and there’s a scene on a tractor that always makes him cry. The tears in his eyes triggered my own, and I had to look elsewhere the rest of the reading.
Thanks to everyone who showed up, and to those who gave me feedback. It was a good night – it energized me to keep working, and to finally finish (again) this damn thing.
Also, I recently wrote an article for the new BarTAB magazine, which covers the San Francisco nightlife scene. The article is essentially a collection of locals’ memories of their first time at a Pride march, or their first time at a gay bar. Special thanks to editor Jim Provenzano for the assignment.
Another June, another Pride – another chance to reflect on how far we’ve come. We can measure our progress as a community by examining our own memories. If we’ve been out for a long time, we can forget the early obstacles we faced. BarTAB asked several locals about their first time at a Gay Pride parade, or their first time at a gay bar.
Monica Nolan, author of Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher, came close to her first Pride in 1984. “I was working in an ice cream shop on North Halsted in Chicago. One night the place was suddenly packed with men. Two guys (I think wearing leather chaps but I may be embroidering my memories) said, ‘Wish us “Happy Gay Pride”.’ ‘Okay. Happy gay pride,’ I said in monotone obedience. I was, after all, only being paid $4 an hour, which wasn’t enough if the customers were going to start writing my dialogue. However, I did genuinely wish them well. In 1988 I marched in the enormous New York Pride Parade, and it seemed impossible that I could ever have been so oblivious and disinterested…”
Daniel Rhatigan, aka Ultrasparky, editor of Pink Mince, the journal for the “confirmed bachelor of exceptional taste,” holds up the latest issue, which features the article I wrote on the bear fashion show, along with work by or about Sina Shamsavari, Sean Welker, Greg Thorpe, Paul Baker, James Goss, João Braz, Pablo Leon Dela Barra, Terry Vietheer, Jonathan Dredge, and Mark Walton. The issue, “The Louche, Limp-wristed Lifestyle,” is now available for ordering online. Find it here at the Pink Mince site. Beefcake shot included.
Elements of a good story: juicy details, brutal honesty, painful conflicts, a weird landscape. And at “Guywriters: Small Town Boys — Gay Men Revisit Their Histories and Hometowns,” that’s what it’s all about. The featured writer is K.M. Soehnlein; this much-awarded person wrote the definitive gaydungsroman of the decade, “The World of Normal Boys.” He’s in his idiom here; look for literary backflips and fireworks. We’re currently crushing hard on another writer, Michael McAllister, whose story is mind-expanding in its barest-bones description: His parents both came out of the closet(s) within months of each other when he was in elementary school. He hoped he would grow up to be straight, but he gayed up in college and stayed that way — only his younger brother is straight, the freak. If this bear doesn’t have some funny things to say about small towns, we’ll eat our baseball hats. (We’re hedging our bets, actually — we loved his contribution to 2006’s “From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up,” so we know what McAllister is capable of.)
“My family broke for good on the last day of August, 1981. That day I’d roamed the grounds of the nearby State Fair. During the fair our little suburb grew into the state’s largest city. Neighbors rented out their lawns for five bucks a car, and the tourists swarmed our streets, littering our yards with plastic beer cups and cotton candy sticks. Every year, the Midwest Dairy Association held a pageant for girls from local counties, and the winner was crowned Princess Kay of the Milky Way. On the first day of the fair she sat, wrapped in a ski parka, in a rotating glass cooler for nine hours, where her likeness was carved from a 90-pound block of butter. Afterwards they’d carve the busts of the eleven finalists, one per day, until the display case held an entire shelf of dairy princesses. To me they all looked like the same girl, and I spent more time worrying about the health of Princess Kay, refrigerated for nine hours, than I did admiring her golden smile.”
The above is a little excerpt from my book-in-progress. I’ll be reading from that book at a event next Friday, “Small Town Boys: Gay Men Revisit Their Histories and Hometowns,” which is part of the National Queer Arts Festival. I’ll be reading with a few other writers, including K.M. Soehnlein, who wrote THE WORLD OF NORMAL BOYS. If you’re in San Francisco and free that night, I’d love to see/meet you.
Friday, June 11, 2010
7:30pm – 9:00pm
S.F. LGBT Community Center – Ceremonial Room
1800 Market St.
San Francisco, CA
Tickets are $12 – $20 sliding scale.
Tickets will be available at the door.
For more information or to purchase tickets in advance, visit Queer Cultural Center or Brown Paper Tickets.
And now for something completely different…DOGPOET’S FIRST VIDEO! The Finster and I make our weekly pilgrimage to the Manly Fireplug’s barbershop so that I can keep up appearances. And so Finley can play Dog Bowling. If you’d rather not see the man behind this curtain, feel free to skip it. Otherwise enjoy. Music: “Temptation” by New Order.
