In 1981 my parents split up, and within a year they both came out of the closet. I was ten, my brother five. He’d turn out to be the only straight one among us. Like all families we had other dynamics at work beyond sexuality, which pushed him off to the side, where he grew up the black sheep scape goat, a boy with a keen sensitivity to injustice. Sometimes he calls me from New Mexico late at night, after his wife and baby girl are asleep, because something in the world has gone wrong. He called me when Prop 8 passed, and when he’d come home from seeing MILK. Last night he called me and told me he had a dilemma. Fred Phelps was on his way to the Supreme Court. Phelps and his nutjob family had taken to picketing the military funerals of American soldiers, claiming that God was punishing the US for tolerating homosexuals. They’d picketed the funeral of my brother’s old roommate, who’d been killed by a sniper in Iraq. At first I thought he was upset about his roommate, but it turned out he was angrier at the timing. “He’s been picketing gays for years and years, and it’s only now that other people are getting involved? So dead fag funerals are okay to picket, but dead soldier funerals aren’t?” His dilemma, he said, was that he believed in free speech, and part of him thought that Phelps should be allowed to do what he wanted. My brother wanted an answer from me, but I had none to give. I told him I had divided parts inside me, too.  We talked about the futility of caring about matters of right and wrong, and I told him that most days it’s all I can do to focus on my little life, to try and do good work, and surround myself with good people. He talked about his daughter then, his love and his worries for her, and I thought how lucky I was to have this brother, this man who as a little boy could have gone in other directions, a boy who could have grown up bitter and full of hate, instead of the boy who grew up to be a man with a heart big enough to break.

The publishing industry moves at glacial speed. So while I wait the requisite four to eight weeks for agents to lay judgment on my work, I have more than a few hours on my hands, hours in which I have to point my obsessive nature in some direction. It’s best when I can get it pointed towards writing and not, say, BigMuscleBear.com. But most of the time I just find trouble. For a while I trolled the web, hunting for more literary agents, tracking book deals on publishing sites and in general making myself sick with anxiety. I’d count the number of memoirs published by famous people versus the number published by non-famous people (Not encouraging). Or I’d read the one-sentence descriptions accompanying each book deal: follows the author’s journey from adored high school athlete to violent, drug-dealing wife beater and, after several suicide attempts, his miraculous recovery, revealing the overwhelming power of the drug to destroy and the power of the human spirit to override the journey towards destruction. I’d roll my eyes at the cheesy, life-affirming pattern they all seemed to follow, then of course wonder if my own book did the same. Cue despair. I’d wonder if I should tinker with my book to make it more marketable. Then I’d swing 180 degrees and say, “FUCK THE MARKETPLACE! FUCK YOU, YOU WHORISH FUCKERS!” It all felt like a flashback to when I was waiting for word on grad school acceptances. Then I turned off the internet and found serenity while writing a television pilot. Then I picked up my book again and tinkered with it. Then I wrote this. Welcome to my head. I don’t recommend it.

A break up is like a mid-life crisis. You come out of it, look around, take stock. You buy hair plugs or find yourself doing things you’ve never done before – like joining a gay softball team. The Fireplug and I had been homebodies, and after we called it quits I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. A friend told me he had joined D league softball. “There’s a D league?” I said. “I could maybe do a D league.” So I joined. I’m not very good. I panic. I strike out. I drop balls. Of all the sports I could play, softball may just be the one for which I’m least suited. But this is the error-ridden D league, of which someone said, “Every play is an adventure.” I like being good at things. Writing, school, work, sex. When I’m bad at something my instinct is to run away, but I made a decision to stay put in the D league no matter what. I’m not sure why. Character building? Proving my masculinity (yet again)? Or is it because my team told me I looked hot in a catcher’s mask? Only after ignoring the instinct to run away does another impulse fill me: to stick around, till that’s something I’m good at, too.