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You Don’t Want to Go There, by Louis Brown

You don’t want to go there: The Dominican Republic

Though it is true Dominican men are in general very appealing to look at, so are Sicilian and Italian men. One of the reasons I originally went to the Dominican Republic was to find out how third world people survive. I have since learned that, although the Dominican Republic is very poor, it is not the poorest of the third world nations. The first trip I took back in the early 1990’s was with my union, Local 371 of the NYC Human Resources Administration.

The second time I went there in 1995 on my own I met Leonardo Rojas. He introduced me to his family. His mother, father, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers lived on a small dirt farm about 40 miles north of Juan Dolio which is on the south shore of the Dominican Republic. Juan Dolio is about 4 miles east of Boca Chica. I also observed a few other farms of various local families.

In our neighborhood in Wheat Ridge and Lakewood, many home-owners have tool sheds in their backyards. In the area of the Dominican Republic that I visited that was what one called a house, a casa. Given the occasional hurricane, and the year-round heat of the climate, I realized that is a more sensible alternative to making a home a larger structure that would eventually probably get blown away anyway is to live in a tool shed, a casa. On the Rojas farm there was no electricity or running water, but they did have a water pump with an underground spring beneath. And an out-house. There was a nice population of chickens, ducks, hogs, goats, cows and even a pony. There were about three casas.

Also, when I went the second time, I tried to relocate the hotel I originally stayed at, and a policeman who remembered it told me a hurricane had blown it away.

When Leonardo drove me about in the areas north of Juan Dolio, he told me that large stretches of land had no police which was why he could drive me about without his having a driver’s license. His family’s farm was located in one of these police-free zones.

The third time I went, I paired off with Edwin Velez at the Plaza Real Resort, again in Juan Dolio. I met his father who used to drive me around San Pedro de Macoris east of Juan Dolio especially when I needed to go shopping at Jumbo’s, the thoroughly modern Supermarket, located in that town. I was still also seeing Leonardo Rojas during my 3rd visit, and I once went with him when I rented a car to go to Jumbo’s. I told him he could do shopping for his family, and I observed what the favorite culinary treat for his family would be, and it was octopus tentacles. Can you imagine?

Also, when I was at Jumbo’s with Leonardo, I noticed a blond American doing shopping with a very beautiful Dominican man about 22 years old. I said to myself, “Gee, a gay American with enough money to move to the DR, and get himself a good-looking live-in escort, who probably was also his housekeeper”. The Dominican companion was very well dressed. At least for now I bet the blond man was happy.

The local economy for what it was, consisted of palatial casinos and hotels surrounded by luxuriant palm gardens. If and when you have to go to the bank, do not be surprised to see guards armed with automatic rifles. That was a little scary.

The Republica Dominicana is almost a paradise, a utopia, but “You don’t want to go there,” because the locals have become slighted jaded, and they have learned that the easiest way to realize cash is to con tourists. Mexico has the same problem.

About twenty-five years before my forays into the Republica Dominicana, I had a fixation on Italian men. I kept my eyes open and noticed a lot of beautiful Italian men. On my trip to Europe, I visited Rome. The policemen there are called sbirri. Men just do not get any better-looking. The sbirri were tall, dark-skinned, and mysterious in their long-caped black uniforms. My trip to Europe was mostly sponsored by Queens College, my undergraduate alma mater.

When I returned to Queens College, I took an Italian language course, and the instructor was on loan from Rome or Naples. Signore Genovese. He was amazingly beautiful and wore custom-tailored $2,000 silk suits and perfect expensive Italian shoes. Even the heterosexual men in his class took notice. The girls all fell in love with him. I fell in love with him, sort of. His skin was a dark olive hue, and I remember that, when I was looking at him, I said to myself that he was a beautiful person of color, that is to say, the puritanical racist in me said he was a person of color. We all have these irrational fears and prejudices that have been instilled in us. Of course, scientifically he was a Caucasian.

The liberal in me now says I have just engaged in a sort of evaluating people by their looks and their race, which is a sort of racial stereotyping. I should not want to go there. Still I saw what I saw.

© 30 April 2018

About the Author

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.

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Sorting It Out, by Gillian

Whatever ‘it’ is, I feel as if I have been sorting ‘it’ out for ever; from the all-encompassing entirety of my life, to it’s tiniest details, ‘it’ never-endingly needs to be sorted out.

I guess it started, as so many things inevitably do for us all, with my mother. I have no idea how old I was when I began, only very subliminally at this stage, to try to sort out my mother in my own head, or probably more correctly, in my own psyche. But I was very young; too young to come anywhere close to expressing anything in words, even to myself. This particular sorting-out was going on at a much more primitive, instinctive, gut level. In my teen years, when an aunt told me that my parents had had two other children who had died before I was born, I felt a huge step closer to sorting out my mother’s complexities of hidden emotion. But there I stuck, until much later I finally began to come somewhere close to understanding not only my mother, but the effect her own traumas had had upon me.

And attempting in turn to sort out my own heart and soul was, of course, another life-long challenge. I say life-long, but now I don’t actually think that’s right. I lost the first forty-plus years. During those decades I spent plenty of time sorting out many many things; anything rather than sort out myself and the real me I was born to be. But eventually I got there, and only then could I set about sorting out me – a task which still takes up a considerable part of my time and dwindling energy.

But I must admit there is something oh so satisfying about sorting ‘it’ out. In fact, I frequently feel a great desire to get my hands on something and sort it out. This is in fact just a passing fancy, or fantasy, you understand. I’m retired. I plan to stay retired. If someone offered me millions of dollars to sort out anything from the airline industry to Amtrak to our government to any and all homeowners associations, I would refuse. But I do like to complain instead.

My most recent ‘it’ I dream of sorting out is the mid-range hotel industry. I’m not talking about the low end old roadside motel. You get what you pay for and should not expect more. And I’m ignoring the high end because I cannot afford them and so cannot judge. I am talking about the average Best Western, La Quinta, Ramada, Holiday Inn, Microtel etc. usually somewhere in the $80 to $150 per night range. These are my most recent bugaboo because Betsy and I had stayed in very few hotels over the last twenty years as we always camped. Now we no longer have our camper we have been ‘enjoying’ – and I use the word very loosely – hotels. To start with, almost every one of them has something which doesn’t work, most frustratingly the coffee maker. One we stayed in on our recent Arizona trip, only had hot water; no cold. Most unusual. No matter how you manipulated the knobs you could not get cold, or even cool, water. In more than one hotel, the rooms seem to have been designed for, or at least by, people eight feet tall. In one there was an electrical outlet above the door, just under the ceiling where not even most basketball pro’s could reach it. In another, the microwave was similarly placed, requiring any normal person to stand on a chair to use it. Lawsuits waiting to happen! What are they thinking when they design these places?

In one hotel we had no TV remote – strange but not all bad. There’s something about those things that makes my skin crawl. I am compelled, it seems, to think of all the other hands which touched those buttons after being in God only knows what unthinkable place the moment before.

And I am clearly not the only one with that reaction. In some rooms they insist on proclaiming that their remote is clean. One sign read, ‘this instrument is completely sanitary’, which for some odd reason bothered me more than suspecting it was filthy. Oh well, just one more good reason not to turn on the TV.

Maybe the answer to all this is simply to patronize that old mom and pop 1960’s motel down on the old road, where there is no coffee-maker, no fridge to hum and cough all night, no microwave to malfunction, probably an ancient fat TV sans remote, and sometimes only cold water. She who expects little will not be disappointed. But really, Betsy and I are now becoming so expectant of complications that we move into our hotel room like itinerant tinkers with bags and boxes of miscellaneous equipment: spare light bulbs, a step-stool, extension cords because wherever we want to plug anything in there will beyond any doubt be no convenient outlet, a plug-in kettle in case of the anticipated malfunctioning coffee-maker, and movies on DVD that we can watch on our computers without forming any relationship with that ‘sanitary’ remote.

And last but certainly not least, we provide our own breakfast, which of course has to be something which can be eaten cold if necessary, in anticipation of the out-of-order microwave.

I must admit we have occasionally had an excellent hotel breakfast but too often they offer nothing even remotely edible. Fruit-loops, a day-old sticky bun, weak coffee and some glow-in-the-dark orange drink masquerading as juice just isn’t breakfast. We have also learned to be very wary of the much-touted ‘hot breakfast’. Well OK, toasted Wonder Bread is hot!

So I dream of how I would sort it all out if I were in charge. And it’s only a dream. But in all sincerity, I wish someone would. We have so many tourists these days, visiting from all over the world. Every time the light doesn’t work and the coffee maker spits scalding water on my hand and I’m invited to a delicious breakfast of a plastic packet of instant oatmeal which I can’t eat even if I want to because the ‘hot’ water is only tepid, I cringe with embarrassment for our country.

‘Do you suppose things work better in other countries?’ Betsy asks.

No, perhaps not. But how I wish those tourists and business people could leave here so impressed that here, they do.

But I’m not going to sort it out.

© May 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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How Religion Influenced My Sexual Identity, by Phillip Hoyle

Oh, I was religious. I was so religious that I attended Graduate Seminary pursuing a Master of Divinity degree in preparation for ordination into the ministry of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). I had decided to concentrate on aspects of religious education but found myself more intrigued with the social ethics professor’s offerings. The second course I took from Professor Richard A. Hoehn was called Morality. The first assignment was to write a short paper “How I Came to My Moral Concern.” I wrote something like this:

I am sure I did not conceive of my moral concern as a moral concern. I was reared in a church that assumed that moral concern flowed from religious concern. One sought to be religious; in so doing one would obviously be moral. Not that all believers were moral. More importantly I was taught to be moral at home where its teachings were part of the day to day activities.

Several family decisions of social location established moral contexts and assumptions that greatly affected my life. When my parents were planning to marry, they chose to build their house in the wrong part of town. It was perfect for them: a block from one set of parents, a block from the high school, three blocks from the church, four blocks from Hoyle’s IGA where dad worked, five blocks from elementary schools we kids attended. In the grocery store, all people were treated the same and the customer was, at least in most ways, always right. I grew up in a racially integrated neighborhood, attended integrated schools and classes from kindergarten through ninth grade in an army town where people spoke English, Spanish, German, and Japanese. I grew up knowing preachers and prostitutes, mechanics and madams, choristers and conmen, scholars and sleezes, farmers and fairies, musicians and musclemen, woodworkers and writers. For a kid growing up in a Kansas town of 20,000 population, my world was large. Whatever would become my sense of morality, it would always have to see this larger view of human connection.

Now to the topic of the day: My sexual identity is a part of my human identity, part of my moral identity, part of my Christian identity. I am a person, a nice person, and a religious person (at least in so far as I retain Christian thought in my overall views, Christian values in how I relate to the larger world). In summary, I am a Christian gay man who seeks the common good, (not just of my family, not just of my gay world, not just of my American world, but also of my place in the whole world). I reject any small view of homosexuality or bisexuality or of any of the sexual permutations of that larger term LBGTQAetc, or of queer. I am brother to all gay men and lesbian women and transgendered persons and poly-this-or poly-that folk, and to straight folk of all stripes whether I like or appreciate them or not or can understand anything any of them say. I’d appreciate their acceptance but don’t expect that to be given very freely. So I go on my way into the world and into my future, telling stories, making friends, tolerating, and hoping somehow to be tolerated. And I will continue telling my story as a part of all of you telling yours. I’ll keep smiling and, of course, hanging out with diverse convocations of others who care to get together in celebration of their differences.

Oh, I was religious; still am in an increasingly gay, queer way.

© June 4, 2018

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.” 

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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I Call It Bullshit, by Pat Gourley

“I have talked so much in the past few days that sometimes I feel like I might have used up all my words and I’ll never speak again. And then I hear someone say something really stupid and I can barely keep myself from snapping in two.” 

Emma González from Harpers Bazaar 
February 26th, 2018

Our topic for today is “Your Favorite Childhood Hero”. For some inexplicable reason I wrote on this topic back in January of this year. I must admit though that being off a month or two is not all that unusual for me these days. So I’ll just chalk it up to the vapors of early dementia perhaps and rather write on my current heroine.

That would be the 18-year-old dynamic self-identified bisexual woman of Cuban heritage, Emma González. The opening quote of this piece is from an article Emma wrote for Harper’s Bazaar in late February of this year just a few short weeks after the deadly shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School in Parkland Florida where she is a student.

That this woman is someone to be paid attention to and emulated was further cemented yesterday at the Washington D.C. March For Our Lives. She held the podium for a few short minutes and the last four of which were in total silence with tears rolling down her cheeks. Leading over 800,000 thousand Americans in 2018 in four minutes of reflective silence is powerful medicine indeed that must be reckoned with.

There were many moving and heart-wrenching speeches yesterday, including a few here in Denver. I’ll admit it may be a sign of my own poorly evolved sense of “identity politics” but the fact that Emma identifies as bisexual has me attracted to her and her bravery even more strongly – no apologies.

The vile and psychotic vitriol being directed her way from the slimy corners of right wing nutville is only further proof for me that she is totally right-on in calling bullshit. Attempts to photo-shop her tearing up a copy of the Constitution is so desperate as to be truly pathetic. It is a doctored photo taken by Teen Vogue where Emma is holding and then tearing up a shooting range target. It is hard to pull off this crap in this day and age of instant response and in particular trying to smear a woman with 1.44 million twitter followers as of March 23rd, 2018.

I attended and participated in Denver’s March For Our Lives yesterday in Denver. As with the recent Women’s and Immigrant Rights Marches I have found these events to be very invigorating and they do seem to be prompting me to get off my ass a bit more. Yesterday’s event in particular seemed to be a great example of “intersectionality” finally becoming part of the overall progressive movement though much work needs to occur for this to become an actualized reality.

Intersectionality is a relatively new concept to me, admittedly a bit late to get on the bus here, and I think to many since it has yet to make it into my spell check. It is defined though as: “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage: through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us.” Credit for this concept and analysis goes to a woman named Kimberle Crenshaw an African American civil rights activist and academic who developed it in the late 1980’s. She is currently a professor at UCLA.

I have been impressed with many of the MSD High School student activists urging the mainstream press to talk with kids of color from urban areas where gun violence is endemic and a 24/7 daily fact of life. The intersectionality of race, class, gender and so often gun violence is so striking as to be beyond doubt.

The diversity of people and their often-poignant signs at yesterday’s march were ample evidence of the reality and power of intersectionality. Let me close with my favorite sign from yesterday as proof positive that we are all in this together. A woman a few feet ahead of me in the march was carrying a sign that read: “If I put a gun in my uterus will you regulate it then”.

That women’s reproductive rights and health are so ardently regulated and guns are not is truly bullshit.

© March 2018

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Escape, by Louis Brown

Garrard Conley tries unsuccessfully to escape from his same-sex sexual orientation.

Full Title of book: Boy Erased: A Memoir (2016) by Garrard Conley

Genre: Autobiography

Theme: escaping the deleterious effects of ex-gay therapy

Why notes on books?: When I find a good book, which is rare, if you read my insightful notes, when you read the book, it will be a lot easier and more meaningful.

NOTES

(1) Garrard Conly was the only child of an aspiring Baptist minister in Arkansas. His parents insisted, once they knew he was gay, that he undergo reversion therapy. Garrard was 15 years old.

(2) My guess is there are at least a couple of hundred of books written about the experiences of ex-gay therapy survivors.

(3) When he was 19 years old, Garrard Conley was enrolled in an ex-gay “therapy” program called “Love in Action” (LIA).

(4) Garrard had to enroll in LIA, otherwise his father would not pay for his college education. So, Garrard enrolled.

(5) Needless to say, Garrard fell in love with some of the other program participants who reciprocally “fell in love” with him.

(6) The intention of the author of this book is to get rid of ex-gay therapies because of the obvious (and not so obvious) harm they do.

(7) Because Garrard agrees to go to LIA, he goes to a Presbyterian undergraduate college (sometimes referred to as a seminary), but the location of the college is not divulged.

(8) While at Presbyterian College, Garrard makes friends with Charles and Dominique (he and she) who are black non-believers but who are good gospel singers. Presumably Garrard identifies with them because, like himself, these two black roommates are socially outsiders.

(9) P. 164, Garrard kisses a male art student, named Caleb.

(10) LIA forces Garrard to make a list of his sins in an MI (Moral Inventory).

(11) P. 292, reference to The Firm, a movie produced by Sydney Pollack, that we know was based on a novel by John Grisham. (Louis previously did a Plot Summary of John Grisham’s Sycamore Row).

(12) P. 274, reference to Psycho, the film by Alfred Hitchcock (which by the way I have already reviewed when the prompt was “Drain”. In the movie, the victim’s blood is filmed as flowing down the shower drain, an unforgettable scene.

(13) P. 297, reference to Dorian Gray, a novel by Oscar Wilde.

(14) Pp. 318-9, Garrard ogles J lovingly again. That is, participants in the LIA program are assigned letters of the alphabet to identify them.

(15) This book was made into a film.

(16) Another student at the Presbyterian college is David. Garrard claims that David raped him and also another underage boy. And yet Garrard attends David’s Pentecostal church.

(17) Some LIA instructors are Brother Brandon, Danny Cosby, Brother Hank, Brother Nielson, Brother Stevens and Smid.

(18) P. 92, One of the instructors, Danny Cosby, reminded Garrard of Jeff Goldblum, a character in the movie Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum was the skeptical guess of John Hammond and got his leg broken by a rampaging dinosaur.

(19) Back when Garrard was 15 years old, he was paired off with a girl named Chloë. Garrard’s parents expected he would marry her eventually. Garrard tried but failed to have sex with Chloë because, for obvious reasons, he was just not interested.

(20) P. 333, Love in Action was a subsidiary of Exodus International which has since gone out of business (in 1995), and, when they went out of business, they apologized for all the damage they had caused.

© 9 April 2018

About the Author

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.

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Time and Preparation, by Gillian

This grungy old green tote bag I schlep all my junk in every Monday came as a gift from The Denver Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security when, about ten years ago, I took a class rather grandiosely titled CITIZEN EMERGENCY RESPONSE TRAINING. It was actually pretty basic, but it did inspire me to a certain basic level of preparedness. No, Betsy and I are not about to go and live in a cave in the wilderness where we have hauled enough supplies for a year, accompanied by enough guns and ammo to fight off the hungry hordes who failed to prepare. But I do believe, especially in these uncertain times, a little planning is worthwhile.

And no, I don’t lose sleep worrying over alien invasions (from this planet or any other) or, where we live, floods. Earthquakes and tornadoes are always possible but not huge threats right here. My main concern is our infamous Grid. I fear The Grid could easily fail us. Natural disasters or computer hackers could equally easily bring it down. And no, I don’t necessarily mean the real Doomsday scenario in which one big sector comes down which in turn overloads the next until the entire country, or the whole continent, is without power. It probably could happen, but it is beyond the scale of any preparations I plan to make for survival.

Remember the panic over The Millennium? Computers were going to crash so nothing would work: no power, no gas, no groceries? That’s very much my vision of life without The Grid. Very little will work. How easily we forget, when we have all those things, our degree of dependence upon The Grid. We’ve all sat through power outages of a couple of hours; maybe even a couple of days. It really is miserable. We cannot get out of the habit of anything and everything being available at the flick of a switch or the turn of a knob, or more likely the tap of a key. And it’s all gone.

My worst-case survival preparation is a month without power. It’s not too hard to envision damage to The Grid severe enough that it takes a month to bring it back up. We have enough bottled water and canned food to stretch, very meagerly, for three or four weeks. We have sleeping bags in the basement, which retains a pretty even temperature so we shouldn’t burn up in a summer emergency or freeze in mid-winter. We have wind-up flashlights and a lantern – irritating because of the continuous cranking required but good enough until we can replace the inevitably dead batteries in the good lights. And we do have a good supply of batteries. We have endless books for entertainment in the daylight hours, along with playing cards and board games. We have a camp stove with a couple of fuel bottles, so we could heat up food or water, if only occasionally. We have cash – very well hidden so don’t even think about it! – because even if any supplies are to be had we clearly will not be able to use credit cards. What we do not have is those guns and ammo the TV survivalists always display, so if we get to the stage of starving marauders breaking and entering I fear we’re doomed. Other than that, I’d say we’ve got a pretty good chance.

When I took that class, it was quite apparent that most of us were Seniors. Who among the young people have time even to think about surviving for a month without power, never mind taking time actually to prepare for such a thing. Good preparation in fact usually saves time in the long run, but most young people find it hard to concentrate on that long run. When we’re young we wing it; fly by the seat of our pants. It takes time to prepare and in youth time is scarce – or at least that’s how it seems.

As I age I find preparation increasingly important, you might say vital. Fortunately, in retirement I have time for it. I schedule my cups of tea very carefully so that, with a little luck, I will not have to scuttle to the bathroom in the middle of Act One. Before our month-long road trip last year we each had a ‘staging area’ to collect everything we needed to take with us. This has to be a large area of floor where things can be spread out, so we can check and recheck what we have already placed there. Things cannot be put in the car or into the suitcase because we can’t remember what we’ve packed and spend days or weeks packing and unpacking and repacking.

I never go the grocery store without a carefully prepared list – even if it only has one item on it. If I go without that piece of paper I shall return home with seventeen things I bought in case we’re out but I can’t remember. The thing I won’t have is the one thing I went for in the first place.

Old age is a full-time job!

Problem is, preparation doesn’t always work. Just last Monday I carefully gathered up all library items which needed to be returned on my way to The Center, remembered to put my library card with them to check out new books, placed everything in a tote bag which I put right in front of the door into the garage so I couldn’t possibly forget it. Come time to leave I picked up the bag and went into the garage. There I remembered my other bag, this old green one I talked about earlier, was still sitting on the table with my story in it. I put down the library bag, went back into the kitchen for the Storytime bag, into the car and I was off! Only as I drove past the library did I remember the bag left sitting on the garage floor.

I fear that our careful emergency prep will fail if ever put to the test. We’ve hidden the cash so carefully that neither of us will remember where it is and no amount of searching will turn it up.

Our arthritic fingers will be too weak to open any of the cans with the old manual opener, ditto any screw-tops. We might be able to manage the water, but it’s stored in carcinogenic plastic bottles so by then will probably kill us.

The fact is that time is running out and no amount of preparation can stop it. I don’t find that depressing; I find it deeply relaxing. It relieves an awful lot of pressure. So I’ll try to get the list right before I go to the store, and I’ll try to return my library books on time. But if I don’t, the world will not tilt on it’s axis or turn to blue cheese. I have finally found how to live in the now.

© January 2018

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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My Happiest Day, by Betsy

First of all. What’s happy? Until I define what happy is for me, I cannot begin to address the question of what was my happiest day. So I click on the dictionary on my dock. Happy: feeling or showing pleasure or contentment. This is not much help. Feeling and Showing are two different things—entirely different. And pleasure and contentment are equally different from one another. So which is it? Never mind. I’ll tackle the question from another angle.

I suppose the day I was born may have actually been my happiest day because if I hadn’t been born, there would have been no happy days—zero, zilch. Contemplating this I realize that something was missing in order for my entrance into the world to make me happy; namely, awareness. One must be aware—conscious—of a situation in order to qualify it. Further, to qualify it in the superlative one must have other experiences, situations, with which to compare.

Another problem with defining my happiest day is that my memory is not good enough for me to remember my degree of happiness in some distant time of my life. Nevertheless, allow me to take a chronological journey beginning with birth in my quest to pick out, well, maybe a few of my happiest days.

At 9 hours of age I was extremely happy, probably desperately happy, to have a nipple stuck in my mouth. I was desperately hungry. No conscious awareness there, just survival instinct. So that doesn’t qualify.

Nine months old—same thing—food and milk. Enter the smiling face looking at me and the cuddling and love I am feeling from my parents. I must be very happy. Look at me I’m laughing.But again there is little or no understanding, so I cant really qualify my feelings.

Nine years old and I have definitely learned the difference between happy and not happy. There are lots of things that make me happy now. Alas, though, today 70 plus years later I cannot bring back the feeling. I just know I probably was happy sometimes. But happiest eludes me. Again it’s just a memory—a pleasant memory, but still a memory.

Twenty nine, thirty nine. Yes that’s it! The birth of my children. Certainly three of the happiest events of my life. Forty nine, acknowledging my true self and coming out of the closet. I don’t remember that being my happiest day. It was a difficult time. Happiness and resolution being the result. Approaching 79 my wedding day to the love of my life, but then we had already been together and happy for nearly 30 years. That day did also represent the triumph of a political movement of which we had been a part. Certainly qualifies as one of my happiest days. But again, THE happiest? No way to measure.

All these nines— all the way up to seventy nine, I still cannot honestly say “without a doubt I remember my happiest day.”

One of my favorite spiritual guides, Ekhart Tolle says the past is an illusion because it, that is the memory, is a creation of our mind. It is no longer happening—it is no longer a reality. The only reality is the NOW.

Aha! I think I’ve got it! This exercise in contemplating my happiest day has brought me to one conclusion: my happiest day is NOW, this moment in time. It’s quite clear to me really. Now is the only thing that is real and I am a part of it. I am here, alive, conscious and aware and participating in life. THIS is my happiest day.

© 31 October 2016

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading, writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.

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What Gillian Did for Love, by Betsy

When I started thinking about this topic, all that came to mind were things that my spouse Gill had done for love. A big one being giving up her cat. When we first got together back in the 1980’s she had a cat named “Smokey.” I’ve always been allergic to cats. Being in their presence brings on sometimes serious breathing problems, like not being able to get enough air into my lungs. As time went on and I made more and more visits to her house in Lyons, I became increasingly sensitive to the cat allergen to which I was exposed. It was particularly bad in bed because the cat climbed a lot on the drapes which were hanging on the window at the head of the bed. Putting the cat out of the room did not help the situation—the dander left behind by the cat remains in the room. And in this case close to where I was breathing during the night.

Finally one night the situation became quite desperate and Gill had to get up in the middle of the night and drive to Longmont to get an inhaler for me so I could breath.

What I did for love during that time was to continue the weekend visits to Lyons and avoid suffocation by using an inhaler.

Later when we decided to live together, what she did for love was to say goodbye to Smokey and turn her over to a friend. The choice finally had to be made: Smoky the cat or Betsy the girl friend.

© 16 November 2015

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading, writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.

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My Favorite Childhood Hero, by Ray S

The Millennials have their “E” social network. The “Hip” generation had its rebellion and protests and rock and roll. The Baby Boomers had post-war back to the normalcy of the establishment, the Eisenhower years, Big Bond Era, “Leave It to Beaver” and “Ozzie and Harriet.”

So much as I’ve tried, it has been with “tremendous” (a Trumpian term) effort that I have been able to resurrect any memory of my onetime childhood, much less a hero.

I am of a time influenced and resulting from the inventions of Thomas Edison, Alex G. Bell, and Mr. Marconi. By the time I arrived on the scene all of these scientific advances were well established, in the early 20th C. So instead of TV or the internet, I lived in a world of radio and black and white moving pictures, including “talkies” by the 30’s.

“Heroes”, depending on your interpretation of the term, lived in the air waves. Little Orphan Annie and her dog Sandy every weekday at 5:45, just after Jack Armstrong—the All American Boy. Jack didn’t thrill me, but secretly I did wonder about Annie’s beau, John Corntassel.

There were a bunch of potential heroes on serials like Mary Marlin, Mr. Keen, Trurser of Last Persons, John’s Other Wife, and One Man’s Family. Life was so much more exciting in never never radio land with Ovaltine, Wheaties, The Singing Lady, and the Lux Radio Theater.

Then there was Saturday afternoon at the Roxy to catch the continuing serials: Tom Mix, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Flash Gordon, etc.

Sundays I was sometimes deposited at the little movie house in the next door village when they were going out and just had to get me out from underfoot. Then I danced the afternoon with Fred and Ginger as we all flew “Down to Rio.”

All of this “KULTUR” may have been stultifying for a young child, but it made for some character framing personality that is hard to erase once imprinted on the psyche.

Still no specific childhood hero or heroes—unless you count the moment I discovered how I would like to be Randolph Scott.

© 26 March 2018

About the Author

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Pet Peeves, by Phillip Hoyle

The home my wife and I made included kids and several pets. When the kids were out of elementary school there were three notable additions to the household: a terrapin that loved fresh strawberries, a white rat that doubled its size from nine inches to a nine inch body plus a nine inch tail, and a white rabbit I told my daughter and her boyfriend who gave it to her for Christmas, “How nice. It will be fully grown for Easter dinner.” Long before that rabbit ran away and procreated with the cottontails that lived in the woods, we had Marcie, a mostly black miniature French poodle one of the support staff at the church gave us. Myrna and I brought Marcie to our Wichita, Kansas, home to provide a pet for our children, then ages three and five.

Marcie was a hit. The kids adored her as did Myrna and I. She had an outgoing, enthusiastic personality and loved to play. We had a fenced-in back yard where she could run and where the kids could chase her or encourage her to chase them. She was a fine complement to the family. Myrna, though, was a little more conservative than the rest of us about the prospect of an animal in the house. She’d grown up on a farm where dogs and cats lived out of doors, helped bring in livestock, and controlled the ever-plentiful pest population. But when the weather was bad little Marcie wanted to be indoors. She was allowed to stay in the back entryway. We closed the door to the office, but the opening to the kitchen had no door. We were amused at how she’d come up to the threshold, wag her tail, and look like an under-privileged child. (Well, you know how pet owners so often attribute human qualities to pets.) She’d look happy. She started lying on the floor with her head resting on the threshold. So cute. A day or two later she put her front paws on the threshold and laid her head on them. She’d look sad. Then she rested the front half of her friendly little body on the threshold. So hard to resist. Then she begin sitting on the threshold looking adorable. I laughed at her antics, somewhat like an American version of the Arab story about the camel that during a storm first stuck its head into the tent and eventually, due to the Arab’s empathy over weather and his camel’s needs, took over the tent, the man sitting outside in the weather. Marcie entertained me with her astute training of us humans to be humane toward her, that tiny fluff ball of doggie wisdom and energy.

She hadn’t yet made it to the point of sharing our beds, but nearly so when we knew we were going to move to Texas. We took her to Colorado to give her to some of Myrna’s in-laws before we had to pack and leave. She moved in with a family that was even more responsive to her educational ways. Had she been a writer, she surely would have written to say, “See, I made a perfectly fine house dog.” She did seem to be in charge of the whole place in her new home.

We moved into a Texas apartment that allowed no pets. Still we visited Marcie over the years, saw her hair turn silver, and eventually heard of her death at the end of good life entertaining her owners. No peeves on my part, just fond memories of a few pets.

© 7 May 2018

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com