“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.

One last reminder for tonight’s reading, 7:30 pm at the Center.

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.

Virgin Territory

Notable First Pride Tales

by Michael McAllister

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…”

Read the rest of the article at BarTAB’s site.

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.

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