Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy began Anna Karenina, a book I  should cop to never having read, with the words, “Happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

My own family’s particular unhappiness was, on its surface at least, so unusual that it defied belief, and I tended over the years to keep it to myself. Long story short, when I was ten years old my parents separated, and within a year they both came out of the closet. I’d suffered my first unrequited crush, on a grown man, the year before, and my one brother would eventually turn out to be the only straight one among us, a sort of photo-negative reversal of the usual situation gay kids find themselves in, growing up feeling freakish and alien in a family of heterosexuals.

Given just these bare set of facts, the reaction over the years from friends and strangers has always been illuminating. Certain  gay guys would get a starry-eyed look as they imagined this alternate-universe childhood, as if I’d been raised by some fabulously surreal pairing – Cher and Elton John, maybe. Ellen and Liberace. More than one guy asked if I ever cruised the bars with my Dad.

The gap between these fantasies and the reality kept me reticent. I mean really, look at those plaid pants.

But maybe I should revise my statement. My own family’s particular unhappiness wasn’t about homosexuality. It was about how two adults tried, with varying degrees of grace, to exit a family created more from convention, from social pressures, than from love or lust. To exit a family that didn’t fit, with two sons still in tow.

There was a lot of unhappiness, more than I cared to dwell on, and throughout my teens and 20′s I did what a lot of gay boys do, I too exited my family, the best I could, just like my brother had tried, unable even as a young writer to think of my family as particularly fertile material, and it wasn’t until my mom died, when I was thirty years old, that I turned around and looked back.  And began working on this book.

But if my family has remained, if not completely unique, then at least fairly unusual on its surface, the consequences of our particular kind of unhappiness are common to every family. The pull between social obligation and authenticity. The need for attention. The pain of abandonment. Favored sons, scape goats, and black sheep. The baffling power of parents to reduce grown men to little children again within ten minutes at Thanksgiving dinner.

Unhappy families are so common now as to appear the norm. Friends with happy childhoods speak of their families with a tone of quiet apology, as if they’d been graced with unfair luck.

It took a while, but after my parents’ exit they each created a new family, with same-sex partners and stepkids, each with its own particular laws of physics – each with days both happy and not.

Tolstoy’s opening sentence is quoted often, no doubt because it feels, to many people, true. Maybe your family was happy like other happy families, or unhappy in its own way. Maybe your family, those lovely, frustrating, adoring, infuriating people, fell outside the lines of convention.  How did they form you?

Before the internal editor and the censor and the sentimentalist kick in, what do you think of, when you think of your family?

As you can see from my Hipstamatic pics, I snagged one of the early Verizon iPhones, which I’ve been waiting on for, oh, a few years, and its delivery on Monday currently ranks as the high point of my week. Yesterday, for about an hour, I had a different high point: my graduation after three weeks in encasement to a short-arm cast. I had my elbow and thumb back, and boy, did they hurt. Still, my spirits remained high until I returned to work and my brand new iPhone rang with a call from my orthopedic doctor, who told me that he’d just showed my x-ray to a colleague and they were now concerned my wrist might need surgery.

This was the second time he’d called me after a cheery visit with a more sobering second opinion, and I felt my confidence in the guy starting to slip. I found it hard, though, to accurately gauge our conversation because, as the Manly Fireplug put it, orthopedic doctors are assholes. Or, as another friend put it more diplomatically, while the rest of us spent our college years getting drunk and sleeping around, they spent them looking at bones.

A series of missed calls, crossed signals, and “Are we speaking English here?” doctor-patient conversations stretched on over the last two days, and I found myself wandering the halls of the law firm and staring at the walls of my cubicle, trying to grapple with the prospect that the last three one-armed weeks were a total waste, and that my recovery had yet to begin.

In that time my sense of humor, which I stumble across every three days or so, abandoned me again, and I de-friended two Facebook saps who had the temerity to leave more fisting jokes on my profile’s wall. I banished them from the warmth of my virtual aura, and yes it felt good.

So I began to type this with one hand, muttering to myself during my hour covering reception, mourning the possibly extended loss of softball and the gym, two pursuits that have reliably taken on and vanquished my noonday demons, picturing myself withering away to that scrawny kid I used to be, and and and my little violin played on…

Then an email popped into my inbox with a rather demanding subject line: “Write your book, damnit!”  Blushing already, I clicked it open and what followed was less an admonition than a plea, laced through with more than a few very kind words, asking me to, yes, finish the damn book.

The last three months distracted me with money worries and day-job negotiations. It felt good to start earning some money again, and to be, after six weeks, fielding more than one job offer at a time. Still, that nagging little voice, common to every writer, nibbled away at the back of my brain, saying the same words contained in this email.

So, Sandi, thank you for reading this blog, thank you for the email, for the kind words and the little nudge. You have good timing.

You can have your astrology. No, really, just keep it. I have yet to read a description of an Aries that fits me, and no, I don’t care what light my rising moon might shed on that discrepancy.

But as long as we’re talking categories (and who doesn’t love, deep down, categories?) I will admit a soft spot for the Myers-Briggs. I don’t care if it’s out of fashion, or disproven, or simplistic. It’s the only kind of categorization system in which I’ve ever recognized myself.

That’s because, according to Myers-Briggs, I am a very special person. My type, INFJ, is the “rarest of all the types.” Which makes my personality “intricately and deeply woven, mysterious, and highly complex, sometimes puzzling even themselves.” I am a freak of nature and you will never get to the bottom of me. Fortunately you are just as self-absorbed as I am, which means you will quickly tire of my infuriating defenses and return to mulling over your own problems.

I mention INFJs here because our supposed first line of defense has been on my mind. “Mute withdrawal,” it’s called, and any friend of mine, and anyone who’s been a regular reader here, knows that I tend to drop out of sight every few weeks. I stop posting because, usually, life has once again grabbed me by the gonads, reducing me to the kind of of pre-verbal vegetative state that makes activities like blogging and cocktail parties challenging at best.

A few weeks ago I was involved in a car accident, an accident that sent someone to the hospital and an accident for which I was eventually deemed “100% responsible.”  I hadn’t had an accident in 18 years; it happened as the Manly Fireplug and I were picking up a pizza, and though I was eventually able to eat a couple of slices, I spent the rest of the night throwing them up.

As the Fireplug kept trying to assure me, accidents are called accidents for a reason. But I have a habit of looking for meaning in everything, a habit common to writers and maybe to the INFJs of the world. And so, traumatized, I turned to this habit with full force.

I can’t say for sure why the accident felt like such a rebuke, only that I harbor low-lying feelings of guilt at most times, and the $500 deductible cast a glaring light on my personal finances, and so that’s where I began my atonement. Somehow, through a deeply intuitive process of association,  fueled by dimly-lit anxieties, I came to believe that my eyes had been closed for some time. To life, to reality, what have you. I’d been blind, and now I wanted to, well, you know…

I gave up a few monthly subscriptions to various non-essential (i.e. porn) websites. I cut down on Starbucks and protein shakes and stopped buying clothes. Most importantly, I gave up my office, a little rental in the Mission, since I had yet to break even with my writing and it felt like an ostentatious display of…something.

Naturally I expected, having made the smallest of sacrifices, to reap immediate karmic reward. But life had other plans.

Due to circumstances outside of my control, money got incredibly scary incredibly quickly, such that as of today I do not know how I will be paying rent. Long story short, I must now get a real job.

I know. It’s so unfair. And though you will want to shower me with pity, I ask for my own sake that you refrain.

With a bank balance that makes it rather difficult to be picky, I’ve started casting my net. And though I just began my search, today I heard back from two prospective employers who had posted on Craig’s List. Asking for my name, address, telephone, social security number, and perhaps my bank account routing number, too, you know, just to get the wheels in motion…

So yeah, for a few seconds here I will set aside this self-protective self-deprecation, and admit that as I fast close in on the age of forty, I am as confused as ever by life. I have spent several years putting all of my eggs into one basket, writing a book, an art form that any cursory glance at media will tell you is going the way of dinosaurs. I did what they say, Follow Your Bliss, though they decline to tell you what to do when the bottom drops out.

All month I’ve been hearing the voice of my father, the most practical man on the planet, whom I have put in severe psychic pain by my lifelong ambivalence towards Jobs That Come With 401ks.

Yes, Dad, I hear you now.

I have a new recovery sponsor, who asks me every time I come to him with a problem, “Have you prayed yet?”  Yes, I usually want to punch him first. And though none of my gauzy-lit visions of a higher power include an omniscient dude who sits up there pulling all the strings, I try to take this question seriously. Really what he means is, “Have you asked for help?”

I hereby argue against the American myth of the self-made man. The up-by-his-own-bootstraps guy. No such man exists. We are helped, all of us, some more than others, all along our lives. Parents, maybe, siblings, friends, coaches, the occasionally stellar English teacher. Someone gave us a break. Maybe our first, maybe every single one. Someone opened a door, someone gave us a job.

Which is not to say that we ourselves don’t need to do most of the work. Only that we can’t pretend to be the complete and total masters of our own destiny. And now as the Manly Fireplug and various friends begin to circle around and prop me up, I must once again face a fact I’ve tried often to ignore. Though I retreat into mute withdrawal, though I’m no good at parties, though I think of “networking” as a particularly insidious form of torture, though I find other people to be at times absolutely confounding and infuriating and disappointing, it turns out that I still need them.

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.

Wow, a very very nice write-up and plug from SF Weekly for this coming Friday’s reading:

“Guywriters: Small Town Boys”

By Hiya Swanhuyser

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.

Here’s the event on Facebook

So January pretty much sucked. That’s as articulate as I can be on the subject. I don’t know why I was surprised at how tough that month turned out, considering recent heartbreak. But surprised I was, and while nursing a mildly annoying cold I logged more hours on Playstation 3 than I’d care to admit. Makes sense though; for a while you can be a different person, in a different world, working towards concrete, clearly delineated goals, all in the comfort etc, etc.

Playstation 3 also distracted me while I waited a few weeks to hear back from friends who were reading my book. Fortunately the feedback was all I could have hoped for, more or less, and now comes a fresh round of waiting. Today I mailed my book to the first literary agent on my list of potentials.

These days the big publishing houses won’t even read manuscripts unless they come from an agent. You could go the self-publishing route, an option that’s become much more viable in the past couple of years. But I’m a writer, not a businessman, and I could use somebody on my side to navigate the industry.

When looking for an agent, they suggest casting your net wider than one at a time. But for this first guy I’m going off my gut. One of the fringe benefits of getting my MFA at Columbia was its proximity to the publishing industry, and I met more than a few agents at horribly awkward cocktail parties. Imagine seventy desperate, insecure, socially awkward writers pitching their books to six agents. It was like six chunks of meat dropped into a shark tank.

But this guy I liked. He had a great reputation, a good sense of humor about the industry – which seems almost necessary these days – and he said he’d like to read the book when I was ready. I’m about as ready as I’ll ever be.

I sent him the first 50 pages, standard practice, with a letter that attempted to condense my 300-page memoir into a couple of sentences. And now I wait as my envelope works its way through the pile on his desk. We’ll see if he likes it enough to request the rest of the book, in which case more waiting…

I can’t quite begin to express the significance of this moment. I’ve been writing this book for over five years, and over that time I have gradually transferred all of my eggs into this one basket, fueled by little more than daydreams, blind hope, and the conviction that this is the only thing I’m really cut out for in this world. I’ve done what I can, now the rest is out of my hands.

So I’ve been a little quiet around here lately. I started this blog over nine years ago, and I only seem to grow less inclined to share my every thought with the internet as the years go by. Whether this is due to getting older, or due to all the work I’ve poured into the book instead, is not entirely clear.

But all things considered a little recent silence makes sense. No easy way to say it; after three and a half years together the Manly Fireplug and I decided last week to end our relationship. We started out as friends, several years before, and we both feel that might have been a better fit for our very different personalities. And that’s all I’m going to say about the reasons why. Some things aren’t meant for internet consumption.

And after the decision comes regret, relief, second thoughts, sleepless nights, skipped meals, reheated meals, meals picked up from a drive-thru window. An overwhelming urge to hide. Friends and families to inform. Desktop photos to change. Bad TV and Playstation 3. Sad songs in the car on repeat. A disappointed dog. The many ties to disentangle. Occasional conversations with very hot boys that only make clear what you’ve just given up. The break-up is about as amicable as one could hope but as a friend put it, amicable doesn’t mean easy.

With him I saw Philadelphia, Tahoe, Palm Springs, and Minneapolis. We slept in a hotel in Los Angeles. We ate at shrimp shacks on Oahu and noodle shops in Japantown. We bought Carhartt shirts in Manhattan and sun tan lotion on the Jersey Shore. We walked the manicured streets of Disneyworld and drove the narrow roads of Ireland.

He taught me confidence. He taught me to pay people more compliments. To hold apologies for only those things that require apologies. To take pride in what I’ve accomplished. To be more forgiving of my family. To ask for the kind of sex I’ve always wanted. He saw the best and the worst in me. He charmed my friends and my fathers and he cut my hair every damn week for free. He sat beside me in the ER when my lung collapsed. He never asked me to give it all up for a normal job. He urged me to finish the book, and with his support I did.

“I’m glad we tried,” I told him.

“We would have been crazy not to,” he replied.