Tag: Connections

Posted on

Connections, by Pat Gourley

Once again in writing on the early years of Harry Hay’s queer activism, the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, I am relying heavily on the wonderful collection of Hay’s writings edited by Will Roscoe from 1996 and aptly called Radically Gay. Do check out Will’s web site for further info on Radically Gay and Will’s many other books and writings: http://willsworld.org

In thinking about the topic “connections” I pulled Radically Gay off my bookshelf this morning to re-explore Hay’s concept of subject-Subject Consciousness, a profound and co-equal form of human connection, as opposed to subject-to-object. In scanning the book I came across the story of Hay’s first attempt at a call-to-arms to try and get homosexuals to begin organizing themselves. This manifesto from 1948 was rather awkwardly titled: Bachelors Anonymous (Radically Gay. Page 3.). Now that is a name describing gay men I think we can all be glad did not catch on. Two years later, with his then lover Rudi Gernreich and several others, the Mattachine movement was launched and the rest as they say “is history”. According to Roscoe within a few short years there were an estimated 5,000 homosexuals in California involved in one form or the other with the Mattachine movement. Remember this would have been in the early 1950’s in the era of McCarthyism.

Many would say that Hay’s greatest contribution to the LGBTQI movement was his insistence that we are a cultural minority. To quote Hay from Radically Gay:

“We are a Separate People with, in several measurable respects, a rather different window on the world, a different consciousness which may be triggered into being by our lovely sexuality” (Radically Gay. Page 6.)

I would contend that one of the “measureable respects” in how we differ from heterosexuals is a mode of communication, a form of connection, Hay called subject-to-Subject. In a position paper he wrote in 1976, while living in New Mexico entitled, Gay Liberation: Chapter Two- Serving Social and Political Change through our Gay Window, Hay lays out his vision of subject-Subject Consciousness (Radically Gay. Pages 201-216). I encourage all Queers to get the book and read especially this chapter.

Right out of the box he owns that this essay puts forth a Gay Masculine point of view while acknowledging that Feminine Consciousness also exists but is something quite different. I will go way out a limb here and suggest that the lesbian-feminist movement of the 1960’s and 1970’ was all over this non-objectifying form of connecting woman-to-woman.

The essence of subject-to-Subject is that of equal to equal. My very simplistic interpretation of this form of consciousness is that we gay men have a leg up on the hetero world in that we as men relating to men and women relating to women are better able to approach one another as equals without the burden of centuries of institutionalized objectification and sexism i.e. crudely put “Me Tarzan you Jane’.

However, even we as gay men, as opposed to straight men, approach relating to one another with a fair amount of objectifying cultural baggage. It may not involve the competition that comes with landing a mate for procreative purposes but we do often indulge in only hooking up with someone of the ‘right age, skin color, cock size, class background’ etc. This is an area where we need to go back in our lives to that first almost always non-sexual attraction to another boy that was so electrifying. That realization that even though I am ‘other’ so is he. A genuine sense of “equal to equal, sharer to sharer”, we are truly kindred spirits. What an exhilarating form of connecting that was for so many of us.

Gay men in particular still have as much work to do in this area of personal subject-to-Subject relating as we ever have especially once the roiling hormones of sexual attraction bubble to the surface. I am not sure that Grindr could not aptly be renamed “Bachelors Anonymous”. Though that first impulse for out of the box subject-to-Subject connecting still remains and hopefully is the essence of gay liberation. It remains our real gift to the world in this age of Trump regression and insanity.

© April 2017

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.

Posted on

Connections, by Ricky

The Earth is a spider-web of connections: gravitational, magnetic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, physical, and metaphysical. We, as Earthlings, maneuver ourselves and navigate these webs without much conscious thought, except for safety (not counting those under the age of 25).
Everyone surely realizes that all of us are connected to something, if only to our electronic devices, or perhaps to our bank accounts, or vehicles, or pets, or relatives if they are lucky and one gets careless. These tend to be emotional connections rather than those I previously listed. One could also make a case that, besides being mostly a bag of water, Earthlings are just a collection of living connections in the manner of the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, etc.
Everyone has connections. I have connections and not just with my God Father. (Or is that Father God? At my age, I have seen too many movies to keep it straight.) I am connected to my electronic devices and my friends and relatives, living and departed. Through a hobby of genealogy, I stay connected to my forebears and the proverbial three bears. I am even connected to Dr. Seuss’s Tweetle Beetles.
“Let’s have a little talk about tweetle beetles.
When tweetle beetles fight,
it’s called a tweetle beetle battle.
And when they battle in a puddle,
it’s a tweetle beetle puddle battle.
AND when tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle,
they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle.
AND…
When beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle
and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle…
…they call this a tweetle beetle bottle puddle paddle battle muddle.
AND…
When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles
and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles…
…they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle
bottle paddle battle.” From Fox in Sox © by Dr. Seuss
Mayhap my 12-year old persona is connected to Dr. Seuss but it is also connected to Peter Pan. In fact, both of my personas are intimately connected. I know Peter’s favorite place to eat — Wendy’s. Does anyone know Peter better than I? Can you tell me why Peter flies? I know. He flies because he Neverlands.
I feel connected to each of you in our story telling group. Although, some of those connections may have been weakened or broken entirely by the previous trio of juvenile revelry.
I am connected: to the historical past, to those who die tragically in accidents or acts of Satan or acts of man. In other words, I am emotionally connected to everyone to some degree or another. That is why I often cry.
Perhaps the poet John Donne expressed it best (400 years ago) in his poem No Man is an Island.
No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend’s
or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
The end of the poem tells us that when we hear the bells ringing that someone has died, we don’t need to ask who it is. It is as if a part of us died as well because we are all connected to each other. Although it seems like a sad poem when one first reads it, understanding the idea of it – that we are all connected and important – can help one be more concerned about other people. When something happens on the other side of the world, it still affects everyone. If one feels sad or happy about something that seems unrelated to you, this poem explains why that is okay. It’s okay to be interested in people one doesn’t know. It’s okay to be concerned about people one has never met. Because, everyone is a part of mankind — including me and my Rickyisms.

© 24 April 2017

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

Posted on

Connections, by Gail Klock

This is an extremely
difficult topic for me to write about because it reaches into the deepest
places of pain within my psyche. There have been many times in my life when I
have felt extremely isolated, lacking a connection to anyone. I was the little
child in kindergarten who chose to work on jigsaw puzzles during chose time
because it was the only activity which involved no interaction with others, all
the time hearing the other kids laughing and playing and wanting to be with
them. In college, when on a camping trip with a class, I laid awake all night
feeling totally isolated with others all around me, I felt like I was losing my
mind. It was one of the longest nights in my life. The terror I was feeling was
due to the fact I felt isolated, but I was too afraid to admit it. In both
instances, and others like them, if I had only been able to reach out and say
help me, I would have been okay. But I had learned to lock my fears away, I
knew they were not to be hung out like dirty laundry. I came from a very stoic
German family which mistakenly didn’t ask for help, even when it was needed.
There was instead a false sense of pride in handling, or appearing to handle,
all life’s trauma’s by ourselves. The reality was we all needed help,
especially when Karl died at the age of two. Of course back in the fifties this
type of help was not advocated or available. My dad’s yelling at my mom not to
cry on the way to Karl’s funeral was not because he was a heartless bastard, it
was because he was such a sensitive man, who loved this little child so much
and his wife and his other children and he couldn’t deal with his own pain,
much less take on and help the rest of us deal with ours, which he felt was his
responsibility because he was the man of the house. These feelings never left
him, they choked him until the day he died. When he was in hospice, a few weeks
after my mother had unexpectedly died, he lamented to me he felt so guilty and
helpless because he wasn’t there for her when she passed away. He was referring
to the evening of the night when she died in her sleep. She had collapsed in
the bathroom and he didn’t have the physical strength to help her up so he had
to call the neighbors to help him get her up and to bed. He didn’t realize he
had been there for her; he had nearly died the day after Christmas, just a
month before, but after a week stay in the hospital he unexpectedly made it
home. She had told all of us that she was not going to let my dad die first,
she couldn’t handle the death of another person she loved so much. She prayed
nightly, and I think quit taking her heart meds, for this to be the case. She
died precisely as she prayed for, in her own bed, in her own home, next to her
husband. My dad was there for her, by making the call for help to the
neighbors, he provided the means to her prayers.
It was as this four year
old child that I began to surmise that when in pain you don’t cry and you don’t
ask for help. This was solidified further by my mother’s inability to provide
emotional support to me or my brother due to her own debilitating grief. This
was the point in my life when I began to experience a lack of connection with
others. This was triggered once again when I was in college and became aware of
my homosexuality. I instinctively knew, as did my girlfriend, not to reveal our
relationship to anyone else. And in the hiding of who I was I was once again
isolated from society, I could sense the darkness beginning to overtake me but
I didn’t want to ask for help and I doubted there was any to be found. After
all I had learned in my psychology class that homosexuality was a mental
illness and I couldn’t face the label of being mentally ill. This was further
exacerbated by the fact my grandmother had been in the state mental hospital in
Pueblo and no one in the family understood why. None of us ever knew the
diagnoses – but I did know from my visits to the hospital with my mom that I
didn’t want to be sent there. It was very frightening to me as a child to
realize my grandmother was locked up. So to avoid a similar fate, I ironically
locked myself up, tighter and tighter. The longer I stayed in the closet the
more I felt disconnected from mainstream society.
When I experience this
feeling of disconnect I am unable to feel, it is as though I am locked away
from everything, including myself. It is sometimes difficult to access the key
which frees me from my emotional shackles and allows me to deal with the
feelings which I am blocking. I have learned through years of therapy that I
need to let myself feel the underlying feelings, which are either sadness or
fear. It has taken me years to learn this and also to learn these negative
feelings are not permanent and that it is normal to experience them.  I know this and most of the time I can do it,
but I wish I could do it all the time and more quickly.
I have also learned that
life presents us with lots of self-fulfilling moments, that is to say if I go
into a situation expecting it to be enjoyable and thinking people will like me
and want to connect with me, they do. And likewise if I anticipate the opposite
I generally leave thinking I had been right, I was going to have an unenjoyable
time, I wasn’t going to connect with others, and I didn’t. It’s that old bit of
seeing a group of people laughing and looking at you. You might think, “They’re
all looking at me and think I look fat in my outfit”, or you might think “They
look like a fun group of people who like to laugh, I think I’ll join them.”
Sunday mornings for the
past twelve years, minus a few months here and there, and Monday afternoons for
the past two and a half years, have been an immensely important source of
connection for me. I know when I walk into the Golden Recreation Center on Sundays
and the Center on Monday afternoons I will feel connected with whomever I
encounter there, be it a woman with a basketball or a fellow storyteller with a
story. Feeling a sense of connection and the inherent sense of acceptance by my
friends is what makes life worth living.
© 17 April 2017 
About
the Author 
I grew up in Pueblo, CO with my two brothers and parents.
Upon completion of high school, I attended Colorado State University majoring
in Physical Education. My first teaching job was at a high school in Madison,
Wisconsin. After three years of teaching I moved to North Carolina to attend
graduate school at UNC-Greensboro. After obtaining my MSPE I coached
basketball, volleyball, and softball at the college level starting with Wake
Forest University and moving on to Springfield College, Brown University, and
Colorado School of Mines.
While coaching at Mines my long-term partner and I had two daughters
through artificial insemination. Due to the time away from home required by
coaching, I resigned from this position and got my elementary education
certification. I taught in the gifted/talented program in Jefferson County
Schools for ten years. As a retiree, I enjoy helping take care of my
granddaughter, playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the
storytelling group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT
organizations.
As a retiree, I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter,
playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the storytelling
group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.