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When We First Knew, by Nicholas

At first, we laughed. That was how the years of fears and tears began.

It was a cool, breezy but sunny day in San Francisco as we took our lunches out to Union Square. Scattered high clouds and wisps of fog flew across the sky but not enough to dim the sun or block its warmth. Lloyd, Bill and I worked together at Macy’s and loved to spend our lunch breaks on a grassy patch in the busy park, the center of SF’s retail district. The elegantly turned out ladies who shop swirled around us. From Macy’s to Saks to Magnin’s to Neiman Marcus, they pursued their perfect ensembles. Meanwhile, tourists hurried about trying to catch a cable car ride up Powell Street over Nob Hill to Fisherman’s Wharf.

As we munched our sandwiches, Lloyd, I think, read a little item in the San Francisco Chronicle recapping a report in the Los Angeles Times about “gay cancer.” We chuckled at this latest concoction of the flourishing gay lib movement. We had our own newspapers, book stores, bars, choruses, churches, and clubs, so, of course, wanting nothing of the straight world, we would have our own cancer. We laughed.

That LA Times report told of the strange coincidence of young and otherwise healthy men who happened to be gay contracting a rare form of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma which usually appeared only in elderly Jewish men. A cluster of these cases had shown up in Los Angeles. Nobody had a clue as to why.

We threw away the newspaper and went back to work.

Lloyd, Bill and I had by chance one day walked into a temp agency, not knowing each other. A staffer there said there were three openings in the back office at Macy’s receiving, sorting and distributing expensive fine jewelry and watches for 19 Northern California stores. We all said yes.

We got to know each other a little on the walk from the agency to Macy’s. Lloyd was a former theater major and loved disco. He and his lover Steven were regulars at Trocadero, San Francisco’s top disco in the 1980s. Bill had just moved to SF from Boston to get away from his family and to take part in the punk rock scene. He loved the B-52’s. And there was me. Recently arrived from Ohio, returning to the city I loved from a decade earlier, and hoping to start of new life, a real life, in this dynamic community with its combination of dramatic flash, earnest politics and organizations of every kind.

The three of us—me in my early 30s, Lloyd in his mid-20s, and Bill in his early 20s—hit it off from the start. We were all sassy then and made up for the routine job with a running repartee. Every morning we re-hashed that day’s episode of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a serial in the Chronicle whose characters parodied prominent city figures. Guessing what was true to fact and what was made up kept many a conversation going for days. After work many times we went out together to a cabaret. And we went dancing at the glitzy, all-night disco parties at the Galleria. I remember one Halloween when Lloyd used his theater skills to deck us all out as Renaissance princes. I danced all that night in tights and a velvet doublet with puffed shoulders, a flouncy beret and feathered mask. I found out what fabulous really meant that night.

Through 1981 and ‘82, reports of “gay cancer” continued to grow and generated deep fear in the community. Suddenly, cases popped up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and other places. It seemed to be a contagion that rapidly turned young men into withering, festering old men but nobody knew what or why or how it happened. Or who would be next. Then gay cancer grew into other diseases and came to be called Gay Related Immune Deficiency—GRID. Sexual transmission was believed to be involved somehow. Or maybe those disco queens just did too many drugs. Or too much alcohol and too much sex. Or a poor diet. Or not the right vitamins. Or not enough exercise, as if flinging yourself around a dance floor to a frantic beat isn’t exercise.

Bill, the youngest of us, was the first to get sick. He kept complaining of just not feeling well though his ill feeling didn’t match anything he knew, like flu or tummy ache. I told him that these weren’t days you didn’t want to be feeling well and urged him to see a doctor. He didn’t know any doctors, he said. So, one day I took him to see my doctor. I don’t know what the doctor said or did, but Bill seemed to get better. We even went dancing sometimes.

But then he didn’t feel like dancing. And some days he didn’t show up for work. And then stopped working. Soon he felt too weak to do much of anything. A few months later, he went back to his family in Boston. I lost touch with him but heard he died not long after that. He died before they could even name the disease that killed him.

Then Steven, Lloyd’s partner, got sick. Then two other guys in our little dancing circle. And then even Lloyd, whom I was closest to. It was like a stalker picking us off one by one. Pretty soon I was dancing alone. Suddenly, those corny, wrenching, kitschy disco ballads became desperate pleas longing for love and life.

I think back to that breezy day when we laughed and went on laughing until it was impossible to laugh and then some of us wondered if we would ever laugh again. I think back to the days of not knowing and then getting a phone call that let me know that I did know, did know another one sick and that I had come that much closer to it and maybe I’d be making the next phone call.

Wayne, a former boyfriend whom I’d dated for a few months, called one night. We exchanged the normal chat about how we were each doing but he hardly had to say anything to explain to me why, after months of not seeing each other, this call on this night.

“I have to tell you,” he said, “I was diagnosed with…,” something or other, the exact name of the obscure ailment escapes me or maybe I never even heard it. The word “diagnosed” told me enough. I had now, if I hadn’t already, definitely come into direct contact with whatever it was that caused this illness or combination of strange illnesses—nobody ever seemed to have just one thing going on.

I asked him how he was doing and feeling and he said he was doing pretty good. He was getting his support network together. Count me in on that, I said. Anything you need, I’m here. He said he was determined to beat this thing, an obligatory statement that everybody made back then not knowing if it had even the slightest chance of coming true. I said I hoped I could help.

“Maybe we should get together and go out for dinner or a movie,” I suggested. About the most anyone could offer then was hugs and hand holding. He liked that idea so we made a date. We got together a few times and I cooked a dinner for him sometimes. Wayne was lucky. He had lots of friends and we all made sure that he almost never had to be left alone. But each time I saw him, he was thinner and weaker and then he started getting seriously sick with high fevers, no ability to eat, and wasting away. His own body was killing him. He died six months later.

It would be a few years before science figured out anything. Eventually, a name was given this strange syndrome that turned healthy young men into withering, festering old men overnight. That name was Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS. And AIDS was about to dominate my social, romantic, political and professional life for some years to come.

© 2016

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.

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Changing Images, by Gillian

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

                                           William Shakespeare

As most often, I completely agree with you, Will.

A reputation is a dangerous thing; good or bad, yours or someone else’s.

I guess the essence of their threat lies in the fact that we all tend to become sucked in by them, rather than by the reality of a person’s character. And, again, this is as true of our own as of others’. Being fooled by another person’s reputation, or image, is dangerous. Being led astray from your real self by your own, can be disastrous.

Reputations, and the images they create of us, can stay pretty stable throughout a lifetime, but for many of us they are fluid, changing as we grow. Who doesn’t know that wild child with the dreadful reputation in high school, who grew up to be a boringly conventional pillar of the community? Nevertheless that past reputation can hang around. Who has completely forgotten Chappaquiddick? It followed Ted Kennedy to his grave and beyond into the history books. The same for Monica Lewinsky, who will forever haunt Clinton’s reputation.

I’m not sure whether reputations have become more insidious in our modern word, or less.

In the days when most of us lived in small communities where everyone knew everyone else, it was hard for anyone to escape their established reputation and build a new one. You aren’t going to employ Bob to put in your new windows. He got caught shop-lifting at the dime store when he was ten. Probably rips off all his glass from some place. And as for letting Mary baby-sit. Remember how she knocked her baby sister off the chair that time? Well, yes, probably was an accident but still ……

These days, we tend not to know that the woman selling us insurance used to beat her children, or that the man fixing our car is a longtime alcoholic. On the other hand, anything you do or say can swoop around the world in a nanosecond, and if whatever it is goes viral, God help you!

I believe a lot of what Facebook is about is changing reputations, your own and others’, which is surely much easier to do these days than back in the small town where you were the town drunk for life no matter that you had been on the wagon for half of your life.

Winston Churchill was a perfect example of changing reputations. Come to that, he still is.

His youthful military escapades were a mixed bag, but, never lacking in ego, by the age of 26 he had published five books about them. His reputation was mixed, but he was made Lord of the Admiralty at at the ridiculously young age of 37. Sadly for him, and alas much sadder for the 250,000 casualties, his poorly-conceived Siege of the Dardanelles during WW1 was a total disaster and he was forced to resign, with his reputation in tatters. He immediately redeemed much of it by consigning himself to trench warfare, where he reportedly fought with vigor and valor.

Between the wars, his constant warnings of impending and inevitable war with Germany again diminished his reputation. No-one wanted to hear it. The Boer War was not so long over, and the British were not up for another. But when Germany broke its promises and invaded Poland, Churchill was proven right and his reputation soared. Almost instantaneously he was made Prime Minister and, with his reputation as that British Bulldog thundering around him, proclaimed by most as Britain’s savior. His very reputation, along with endless stirring speeches, did much to keep spirits high under desperate conditions, and to keep most Britons determined to go on fighting.

But that reputation, as a supreme fighter who would never give up, lost all appeal the moment the war ended. Churchill’s hawkish reputation coupled with his endless warnings over the new threat from the Soviets, were too scary for peace-time. Two months later Winston Churchill was defeated soundly at the polls.

His ego, however, remained undaunted. He had no fear for his reputation.

“History,” he pronounced, “Will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

Which he did. Over his lifetime he wrote 43 books in 72 volumes.

But still he was unable completely to preserve a positive reputation.

Although for many years it was considered akin to blasphemy to criticize such a great hero, that is no longer the case. There is much discussion these days as to whether Churchill was, to quote Dr. Andrew Roberts, “Brilliant Statesman or Brutal Demagogue.” Just from his own quotations, he was clearly misogynistic and racist, but in his day that was not condemned as it is today. So reputations change not only as a person changes, and events change, but as attitudes change.

And so we re-write history.

It’s hard to be sure what one’s own reputation is. Probably, in many cases, not exactly what we think it is or would like it to be. I do know that when I was married the first time, to a man, we were considered a really strong, stable couple. I know that because our friends were so utterly shocked when we split up. And, in so many ways, that reputation was valid. Except for one teensy weensy detail which no-one knew. In one way our reputation as a married couple was true. In another, it was as far off as it could be. But I was the only one who knew that; and I played my part so well.

When I came out, I became a bit confused. I wasn’t at all sure what the archetypal lesbian would be; but whatever it was, that’s what I would become. I observed carefully in this new world, and acted accordingly to create a new reputation, a new version of myself. Thankfully, this stage did not last long.

You’re doing it again! I said to myself. Your entire life you have created a false reputation for yourself, and now you’re finally free, you’re doing it again! STOP!

So I did.

And for over 30 years now, I have simply been me. I don’t know what kind of reputation I have.

I don’t care. A reputation is simply others’ visions, versions, of me. It may or may not be anywhere near the truth. It simply doesn’t matter.

Free at last!

© October 2014

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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Falling Wall, by Eym

The Stones of my wall are made of paint

recalling when you said “I Ain’t”

No more a victim to be shoved

You were fashioned and always loved

I will hold you in hands of heart

And in my doubting recall your start

The pink stone wall began to fall

when you stepped up and took the call

Brave army you in heels and lace

Your riot bold has changed this place”

© 10 January 2016

About the Author

A native of Colorado, Eydie followed her Dad to the work bench to develop a love of using tools, building things and solving problems. Her Mother supported her talents in the arts. She sang her first solo at age 8. Childhood memories include playing cowboy with a real horse in the great outdoors. Professional involvements have included music, teaching, human services, and being a helper and handy woman. Her writing reflects her sixties identity and a noted fascination with nature, people and human causes. For Eydie, life is deep and joyous, ever challenging and so much fun.

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In the Zone, by Betsy

As one member of this group has mentioned, Mozart may be an exception to the statement “any writing is experimental.” True, Mozart was writing music not words. But there is no reason that the statement which is today’s topic cannot apply to the writing of music as well as the writing of words. Mr. Mozart is said to have been divinely inspired never having to go back over his work to correct or improve it. His writing was perfect the first try. Some might say he was continually “in the zone” at least when he was writing music.

It’s hard for me to relate to always being in the zone when I am writing. Although, I must say, some writings have come a lot easier to me than others. On occasion, depending on the topic and/or depending on my state of consciousness, I have felt myself “in the zone” as I was writing. Mostly, it is the experiences I have had that have given me awareness or knowledge which make it possible to be there. Being in the zone could be equated with being mindful—a state of complete awareness. Also a requirement for being in the zone when writing might be an element of passion for the subject and a clarity of one’s feelings about it.

I best relate to being in the zone when I am immersed in a sports activity. Some days—though they may be rare—it’s as if you can’t make a mistake in a tennis game. Or the body flows particularly easily, gently and rhythmically through the moguls on the ski slope. Those days might be rare, but we remember them—at least I do. Probably the sun is shining as well on that day, and there is little or no wind and the temperature is just right for perfect conditions.

I can recall also being in the zone in a beautiful spot surrounded by nature—feeling part of nature or one with one’s natural surroundings. Being in the zone and being completely immersed in the moment, I believe, are one and the same thing.

As for being an experiment, I’m quite sure writing falls into that category. I often set out to write about something related to the topic of the day and I find I am completely surprised at the outcome of that writing. The piece may take a totally different tack than what I had first intended.

This can apply to other art forms as well. I have attempted to draw or paint an object, a landscape, a tree or what have you. In this case I know when I start out that it is an experiment.

I have no idea how the project will turn out. I suppose that’s because I have very little experience in creating visual arts, and almost no confidence. Yet I find that to draw a tree or paint, even try to copy an object or a landscape is an adventure, and most certainly an experiment. I start out with no idea where the effort will take me, how I will feel about it, or what the outcome will be—other than either boosting my confidence or totally obliterating what little bit I had to start with.

The fact is that most active things we do—that is active vs. passive—most things we do are an experiment. Even everyday activities. That is, if we define an experiment as a course of action taken and followed without knowing the outcome. Cooking certainly can fall into that category—at least MY cooking does. Even the laundry, shopping, etc. What the heck, which outcomes CAN I be sure of. Even when I sit down to watch television who knows, (I certainly don’t)—who knows how long I will be awake.

© 24 July 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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Bicycle Memories, by Will Stanton

My bicycles memories are very clear still, even though they are from long ago. I still toy with the idea of riding a bike from time to time, yet I never seem to get around to it. I do have two English Raleigh bicycles in my garage. They are about fifty or sixty years old, three and five-speeds, no resemblance whatsoever to advanced, modern bicycles of today. They were hanging on hooks for many years. Two summers ago, a friend helped me lower one off the hooks so that I could ride it. After all, there is a park right across the street from me. However, I still haven’t pumped up the tires. It still sits there in the garage with flat tires. I’m not even sure that the tires are still good after all these hot summers stored in the garage.

I see lots of young and adult riders in the park when I occasionally take a walk there. What astonishes me are the very tiny, pre-school kids, mostly boys, wearing protective helmets, zipping around the park on miniature bikes without trainer-wheels. I never saw that when I was very young. I never did that myself, either.

Back in the day (I’m talking two generations ago), kids that age had tricycles and no helmets. Apparently, no one dreamed of putting tiny kids onto tiny bikes. Then, when kids graduated to small bikes, they started out with training wheels. I was grade-school age before I biked around on just two wheels. Although I did a lot of exploring around the neighborhood on that bike, I never raced around, jumping over humps are doing dangerous tricks like kids today or like the ones portrayed in kids’ movies such as “E.T.” or “Max.”

My small bike was a typical, rather heavy bike, similar to ones that all the other kids were riding in those times. My older brother was the first to experiment with the new European style bike that was taller and had very narrow tires. It sported a generator attached next to the wheel that powered the headlight, a small saddle-bag with tools, and a tire-pump attached to the frame. That was quite something. I inherited this French bike when my brother went away to college.

I road this bike everywhere, even all the way to down-town, so often that I became quite expert; and, that is saying something, considering how rough the streets were. For example, there were two ways to ride to the center of my small town. One was a two-lane State Street that originally was the state highway through town. It was the busier street, so I normally avoided it. The other was a zig-zag course of rough brick streets through residential areas. Because the railroad line curved around the south side of town at an angle, a street ran straight south until it could go not farther, then I would have to turn right onto an adjoining street, then south again, then west again, right, left, right left. At one point, there was a very bumpy railroad crossing where a siding ran to the A&P grocery store.

I rode the French bike so often that I gained a remarkable degree of balance. I could ride without touching the handle bars, even on rough patches, going around corners, or over the railroad crossing. I steered simply by shifting my weight one way or the other to turn corners.

I recall one day, I spotted a teacher of mine slowly approaching me in his car going the other way. I decided to tease him. I sat up straight on the bike, grabbed a large book from my bike-rack, and pretended that I was reading, holding it with both hands while riding my bike. I did see a clear view of his face as we passed by each other. His eyes looked very big, and his mouth was hanging open.

I continued riding my bike early in college. I was so confident with my skill that I recall an incident when, ordinarily, a rider might have become hurt, but I wasn’t. There was one very steep, rough-brick hill that I rode down – – – no problem. At the bottom, however, all the sand from winter had washed down to the base of the hill. As I began to ride around the corner, I could feel the wheels slipping out from under me. I knew I could not prevent my going down, so I decided to gently lay the bike over on its side, coming to a halt just as I touched the ground – – – not a scratch! One kind-hearted student was concerned that I might have been hurt, but I was just laughing about how easy a landing I had.

On occasion over the years, I have considered possibly obtaining a more modern bike with fatter tires that would be less likely to become punctured by all the sharp stuff in the streets; however, I never have felt that ambitious. If I don’t even ride my old bikes, why get another?

Maybe it’s just as well. I have met people who bought fancy, $2,000.00 bikes and had them stolen, even with bike locks and chains on them. My acquaintance Larry always hired cheap laborers, including one young guy who was a drug-addicted thief. After the helper died of throat-cancer from the effects of constantly smoking marijuana, people checked out a storage shed he had and found around 200 bikes. I’m fairly certain he never bought them.

Now that I have way too many years and pounds on me, I sometimes think back to those easy-biking days. I have a feeling that, if I pumped up the tires on my fifty-year-old Raleigh and took it for a spin, I’d feel like an over-size circus-bear laboriously pumping away on a little bike, much too small for his bulk.

© 15 May 2016

About the Author

I have had a life-long fascination with people and their life stories. I also realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual ones. Since I joined this Story Time group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group. I do put some thought and effort into my stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.

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Where Do We Go from Here? by Ricky

In the beginning was The Center. Within The Center lived The SAGE. The SAGE was troubled for there were many senior citizens who wanted to speak out and share their wisdom with anyone who would listen, but their efforts to speak were thwarted due to sheer randomness of contacts and little opportunity to share their wisdom. So there was much listlessness, lack of purpose, and frustration in the senior community. The SAGE was not happy with the situation, but knew not what to do. One day, Jackie Foglio, a young female college student, came to visit The SAGE and presented a plan to help the senior community organize to share their wisdom. The SAGE recognized value in the proposal and sanctioned the formation of a group-program to get the senior community to share their wisdom and history with others – and so it began.

It started in another place and later continued in a small room near this room six years ago. The first seniors to gather were very few in number and all male. In fact, there were more words in the room than people doing the speaking. The spoken words described personal memories of each senior’s life related to a topic used to trigger the memories of each senior.

At first, spoken words were all that was necessary but all such group efforts evolve with time. Eventually one person after another chose to prepare their spoken words in advance, writing them down on paper to ensure clarity and to maintain focus on the memory inspired by the topic.

After a relatively short time, women began to join the group. What a positive impact that had!

As time progressed, the quality of the writing improved for most seniors attending the group. It was also decided that the group was neither to become a “writers group”, teaching seniors how to write better, nor to be critical of another’s writing. Once again evolution happens and now many words are straying from personal life memories and occasionally delving into topics which have nothing to do with one’s own life.

In 2011 I joined the small group of seniors in the small room near this one. I discovered that writing my story was to be preferred as I am prone to either ramble or forget parts. I also found that either telling or writing my memories to be very therapeutic, especially since I’ve been in the “coming out” process since October 2010. I believe some others in this group are experiencing the same.

Soon after joining, I began agitating for an idea that had previously been discussed but nothing had come of it – publishing our stories. I suggested a small paperback book for The Center to use as a “thank you” gift to financial donors. A lack of funding cancelled out that option. Eventually, The SAGE and The Center, decided to host our stories on their website and our group’s blog began.

As the size of our group grew, so did the number of submitted stories to the point that every author would have at least one story each month. Sadly, as some seniors have left the group and other seniors joined, the volume of submitted stories to the blog has greatly diminished. There are a few legitimate reasons for this that I will not list here, but the net result is that the blog now represents basically five group members. This is not sustainable in the long term as we do not have all the wisdom and experience that this group of seniors collectively has.

Group dynamics and evolution are still operating. Since the beginning, our group has added a strong social component to the story telling purpose. So I ask, “Where do we go from here?” or perhaps I should ask, “Where are we heading? Where should we go from here? Do we want to keep the blog? Will you all support the blog by submitting stories?” In my opinion, the answers to these questions will determine not only the future of the blog but also of the group itself. Please give it some thought.

© 11 January 2016

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

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Raindrops, by Ray S

Splat, splat, splat—

The sky is almost black, the wind is howling, and that is the sound of the rain drops hitting my window panes like raindrops morphed into water-born missiles. 
Splat, splat, splat—
And as I gaze out on the almost blank glass immersed in an angry sheet of water, a ghostly vision emerges from my deepest memories.
Splat, splat, splat—
A radiant bride dressed in a white lace wedding gown comes down the stairway to meet her father waiting to escort her to her betrothed. That day it rained too.
Splat, splat, splat—
The vision fades into an aspen grove golden in the September sun. There’s a rushing mountain creek, there is a gathering of family and friends. The ashes are silently scattered. That bride has found her way home.
Splat, splat, splat—
Another vision momentarily fades into view. The raindrops scream as they pound the windows’ glass. There is a bed now with only one grieving man restlessly tossing and turning. Aloneness is the only bed partner.
Splat, splat, splat—
The torrential tide begins to recede and in the faint new light a wonderful phantom moves out of the ether, and I can sense the warmth of strong arms embracing me. I am no longer alone; there is a new love next to me in OUR bed.
Splat, splat, splat has transformed into a symphony of raindrops.
© 4 April 2016

About the Author

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Moonlight, by Phillip Hoyle

The approach of the full moon makes my partner cranky, occasionally not very pleasant at all. We just went through that phase. Now the moonlight is still intense but the mood is changing. I’ve never quite understood these lunar changes, but they’ve been a part of human behavior for millennia. In fact lunacy has its root in Luna, the moon goddess of Rome. And Monday is the ancient day of the moon. At some point I read of a folk tradition that warned not to sleep in the light of the moon, especially on Monday; one might go crazy in doing so. The idea seemed quaint and unlikely to me.

Still I really like those nights when the moon is in its full stage and its reflected light even makes shadows. That light changes the perception of what it illuminates, sometimes sharpening, sometimes soften what I see. The eerie beauty of it has inspired in me some moonlight art with white Prismacolor® pencil and black ink on black paper, white moon and wispy clouds setting off black trees and housetops. I really do like at least some imaginative aspects of moonlight.

As a teenager I began to pick up hints of the moon’s part in romance. Perhaps it was a moonlit autumn night when I drove my new college girlfriend Myrna up to the hilltop parking lot of the Manhattan, Kansas, City Zoo to talk. The night sky was beautiful—bright shining stars and planets overhead, a few clouds on the western horizon, occasional orange lights flashing beneath those clouds from war games being practiced by US Army Units at neighboring Fort Riley, a full moon overseeing it all. I leaned over and kissed Myrna. I don’t know if she meant to (she later claimed she was just nervous), but she bit my earlobe in response to that first kiss. I don’t know if right then a fake bomb went off at the Fort or if the full moon winked, but electricity shot through my body, and I was sure I was in love.

Oh that moonlight!

Now I realize that a culture of romance can convince one of many things. I guess it did that to me, a boy who had seldom felt much deep emotion except when singing classical music, seeing children baptized, or kissing with his boyfriend when he was fifteen lying with him naked in bed. I kissed Myrna that electric night and a few weeks later in public and felt sure we were on our way into a wonderful relationship with marriage, sex, children, and a shared life of meaning and romance. We did enjoy a wonderful marriage, but eventually I did have to pay attention to a sense of love and life beyond what my central Kansas culture had taught, one that seriously altered my perception of moonlit romance. Myrna and I are still friends, even while I have lived with three different men in the past sixteen years. I still like the moonlight even with its unpredictable and confusing glow.

© 6 July 2015

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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Purple by Pat Gourley

The first chapter of Judy Grahn’s wonderful tome Another Mother Tongue from 1984 deals extensively with the color purple and its historical meaning and connections to gay people. She posits both current and ancient connections to the color for us as a people.

Whether or not there are legitimate historical connections to the color purple and queer folk it certainly has appeared repeatedly throughout the ages in association with those of us often seen as “other”. For example we have continued to own and quite liberally use the word lavender, with lavender of course being a pale shade of purple.

I was involved with a project of the LGBT Center of Colorado called Lavender University in the late 1970’s. Interestingly one of the more successful gay male hook-up Internet sites is called the Lavender App first appearing recently in 2015. There are many other examples of the use of the word lavender in describing our organizations and us.

The color purple can be created mixing shades of red or magenta that have a more feminine association with blue and its male connotations. Though I prefer to view us as a distinct phenomenon rather than a hybrid of the straight male and female I can live with purple being attached to us as an expression of the ambiguity and mystery we present to the larger hetero society. It is to our advantage to keep them guessing as to who we really are. It is of course also a color historically associated with power and royalty. For years I had a wonderful flouncy silk purple shirt I would wear for special occasions that required that I appear as royalty.

Sadly it was the color purple in the form of skin lesions that began to strike fear in many gay men at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The rather sudden and mysterious appearance of purple skin lesions on gay men over 35 years ago quickly became a dreaded hallmark of the disease. I am referring of course to the lesions of Kaposi Sarcoma (K.S.) which we now know is caused by a herpes virus, the acronym for it being HHV-8, human herpes virus 8.

I would add that the lesions appear most purple on white skin. When K.S. lesions are an issue for darker pigmented folks the lesions can still appear purple but also often have a reddish or brown hue.

K.S can cause problems other than just skin lesions with the sarcoma able to involve internal organs as well. It was the facial lesions though that I personally feared the most. If one wanted to be on the down low with your HIV infection it was often hard to mask the facial lesions. I was never one to be shy about my HIV but I was certainly vain enough to fear a lesion on the tip of my nose. There are limits after all to ones love of the color purple.

HHV-8 is most commonly transmitted through saliva. There was apparently a fair amount of this virus among sexually active gay men in the 1970’s and as HIV began to spread, and severely compromise immune systems resulted, HHV-8 was able to take advantage and in many the result was Kaposi Sarcoma. Fortunately with the advent of effective AIDS drugs that restore pretty good immune function this virus, though certainly still around, causes dramatically less K.S.

HHV-8 can now I suppose be viewed as just one more little virus that uses us humans as transport media but kept in check if our immune systems are in good working order.

I’ll end with an interesting antidote I heard Sunday at the gym watching television coverage of Nancy Reagan’s death. She was a close friend of Rock Hudson. It was apparently a photo taken of the first couple that also caught the back of Rock’s head while he was visiting the Reagans in the White House that showed a suspicious lesion on his neck.

As incredulous as it might sound the photo catching this lesion supposedly alerted Hudson to the fact that perhaps he was also at risk for this new and devastating illness. Being quite familiar with how AIDS would present and progress I suspect there must have been some major denial in old Rock’s life to not notice any other symptoms before a K.S. lesion showed up on the back of his neck. Or perhaps it is just one more validation of the strength of the color purple, a hue capable of often grabbing one’s attention.

© March 2016 

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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Let’s Eat! by Nicholas

There is nothing like the aroma sent up when the garlic hits the hot oil in the pan. That is one of my favorite moments in cooking. Sauteeing a mire pois—onions, carrots and celery—in preparation for a stew, I’ll toss in the chopped garlic and a wonderful scent fills the kitchen.

I like to cook. But, first, let me back up and say, I like food. I like planting and growing vegetables, watching the plants mature into delicious edibles. I like picking them just before cooking dinner. I like picking out my food at markets and bringing home bags full of fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses, breads. And, I like to eat. And I like to enjoy a glass of wine while cooking. And, of course, to complete the cycle, I like a good nap.

Every spring I look forward to planting the garden in my backyard with three kinds of tomatoes, three summer squashes, green and yellow beans, long and globe-size eggplant and a host of herbs—oregano, thyme, sage, tarragon, rosemary and basil. For me, summer starts when I taste the first fresh basil in a salad.

Cooking is but one aspect in my relationship with food. I do consider my eating habits as a complex relationship from start to finish. I don’t understand how some people can just eat what comes out of pizza box or a fast food bag or a take-out carton. I want a connection to my food. I want meals to involve multiple steps from purchase or picking to preparation to cooking to the table. If I couldn’t do all that, I would miss it. It’s a whole sensual experience. One that starts at the Saturday morning Cherry Creek market, picking out the fresh fruits—last Saturday, sweet cherries from the Western Slope began to show up. The season will last maybe a month and then no more cherries until next summer. But then there will be peaches and pears.

When I recently spent two weeks visiting San Francisco, I planned part of my trip around food. I rented a small apartment with a full kitchen so I could cook in it. I always felt in previous visits there that I was missing something when I would see all this wonderful food in stores and street markets and not be able to do anything with it. This time, I went to a local farmers market and bought the freshest, most delicious strawberries and lettuces and assembled fabulous salads. It was as much fun as going to dinner at a great restaurant. We did that too.

I’m not a fussy or elaborate cook. I prefer minimal ingredients. I do not see myself cooking as if I were some fancy chef at home. That’s what restaurants are for—the food I would never try at home. In San Francisco, a friend took me to a Nepalese restaurant. The food there was flavored with complicated combinations of spices in rich sauces that probably took hours to make.

I prefer less complicated approaches. Yesterday, I made pork chops using rosemary picked fresh outside my back door and garlic and, of course, salad with a touch of basil and arugula also from the backyard.

Many times, I check what’s in the frig and what’s in the garden and make up a recipe. I’ve found that paprika and dry mustard powder are a nice combination to flavor a stir fry. A spoonful of yellow curry can make a lamb stew sparkle with flavor.

One of the food books I use most frequently in cooking is not really a cookbook with recipes. Instead it lists elements of food that go together like turnips, apples and tarragon or kale, bacon and lemon instead of complete detailed recipes. It suggests spices and herbs that are good seasoning matches. Then I make up my own concoctions letting my appetite and taste buds tell me what to put in the pot.

Of course, I like cooking with wine. As the joke goes, sometimes I even put it in the stew. What’s even better is having a grateful husband to wash the dishes.

© June 2016

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.