Tag: Escape

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Escape, by Pat Gourley

Ah, escape, the act of breaking free. This word could well be one more synonym for “coming out”. This does seem to be a recurring theme, if one chooses to so interpret, for many of our Story Telling topics. It may be stretching a metaphor, something I seem at times to excel at, but I think we can view our LGBT Community Center here in Denver as an escape hatch and participation in this group for many as an accelerant. For me personally it has not been so much an accelerant as a re-fueling station. Story Telling has been a validation for me that what started in the mid-1970’s, thanks to the hard work and dedication of a small cadre of like-minded queer folk, was certainly worth the effort. I was not part of that initial group but did hitch my wagon to the Center in 1976.

Areas many of us LGBTQ folks have had experience trying to escape are the mental health issues we face in significantly greater proportions than the non-Queer community. Many of us have had very significant issues with depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide. The suicide rates remain, for LGBTQ youth in particular, disturbingly high even in this supposed age of post-liberation. The Trans community in particular is at grave risk for both suicide and murder.

Mental health issues among LBGTQ people are complex and in need of contextualization, intersectionality analysis and exploration with knowledgeable queer professional providers. It would be nice to see these issues addressed with the same depth and vigor that the sexual habits and health of gay men have been addressed in the last 40 plus years. Yes, certainly HIV was and remains a strong incentive to address how we fuck and the potential consequences of that but I must wonder about the very significant current and historical carnage from unaddressed mental health needs. These issues were prematurely thinning our numbers centuries before HIV came along and continue to this day.

A word of caution though in addressing depression in particular involves you and your provider not simply reaching for a pill or pills to address the problem. I am in no way saying that anti-depression medications do not serve a role and have been actual lifesavers for many. Do though proceed with caution, often easier said than done in our extremely fucked-up health care system so dominated by Big Pharma.

I read an interesting article in the NYT Sunday morning about how hard it is for many people to get off of antidepressants. They focused primarily on the difficulty some people had specifically getting off of Zoloft and Cymbalta. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/health/antidepressants-withdrawal-prozac-cymbalta.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

I’ve included a link to the article since I think it is important that the whole thing be read by anyone considering stopping their antidepressant or for that matter whether or to start one. This might be a great article to take to your mental health provider or primary care person if you think issues of depression are something that need to be addressed for you personally. It might piss them off a bit but they will get over it or you will hopefully find a new provider, though admittedly not an easy task in the current health care environment in this country.

Another piece I ran across in writing this was an article in The Guardian from May of last year by a fellow named Alexander Leon. He argues that we should be and I quote “ defiant in our acceptance of mental health problems in the same way we would about our sexuality or gender identity”.

A link to the piece: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/12/lgbt-mental-health-sexuality-gender-identity

Rather than describe our mental health issues as weakness, or perhaps a reason to seek out conversion therapy, a healthier and more spot on way to look at these issues is as “battle scars” to be addressed, a term used by Leon in the Guardian article. What is really remarkable is that so many of us have survived an at times unrelenting societal onslaught since an early age as a result of our budding identities. I am a firm believer that pharmaceuticals may sometimes play a role in addressing these battle scars but they should always be used in conjunction with strong Queer community support. So welcome one and all to SAGE Story Telling at the LGBT Community Center of Colorado and a grand escape from the often at times suffocating “hetero-normative” world we are born into.

© April 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 Gillian

The thing is, you can’t. Not completely. You can perhaps escape your current location and situation, your lack of money, to some extent your social status; even your family. But you can never escape who you are. You can perhaps escape some of your character traits, your paranoias and phobias. But you can never escape the basic YOU. You cannot escape being male or female, straight or gay. You cannot escape the color of your skin, or your ethnicity.

I have read that the average male thinks about sex every seven seconds. Whether or not that is true, I wonder if there have ever been studies of how many times a day I think of being a woman, or of being a lesbian. How often does Carlos register that he is Latino, in all circumstances.

Sadly, these frequent acknowledgements of who we are are most often, at least in my case, brought about by negatives; not directed at me, but at a woman, or women, a lesbian or members of the LGBT community. My tribe. You attack members of my tribe, you attack me. Or as Jesus said it, (depending on which translation you choose), ‘whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do also unto me.”

It took me a long time to get over the Orlando nightclub mass shooting; if indeed I have. 49 people died and another 58 were wounded for no other reason than that they were members of, or friends of, the LGBT community. It was ME that man was shooting at; ME that he hated enough to kill.

I saw a news video of blood-lusting ISIS men tossing a man from the rooftop simply because he was gay. I fell with him. It was MY body bursting as it hit the ground like a watermelon fallen from a truck.

The #metoo [Twitter] movement has brought much recent attention to the emotional and physical pain suffered by an appalling number of women in this country. But world-wide the treatment of, and attitude towards, women is frequently so much worse. I feel the pain of every woman forced to marry a man against her wishes, or forced to hide her shameful body in clothes she hates. Crimes against women, rape in particular, are rarely prosecuted or even illegal in so much of the world. In Hungary I met a young woman whose grandmother had been raped many times in World War Two, first by the Germans going East and the by the Russians battling West. Rape has always been a weapon of war; indeed of brutal men everywhere, in all circumstances. I feel for, in every possible sense of the words, those tragic Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boca Haram and forced to live as nothing less than sex slaves to big, angry, violent men.

In February of this year, Rodrigo Duterte, the mass-murdering president of The Philippines, issued a new order. He reportedly told his soldiers to specifically target women rebel fighters, and not to bother killing them but to shoot them in the vagina because then they will be useless as women anyway.* You could write a book, a whole series of books, about that statement. Except that I am way too angry, and it hurts too much even to address those terrible words. What you do to them, you do to me.

Just last month I read about the neo-Nazis in Australia. (Maybe I would sleep better if I went back to my old favorite Winnie the Pooh books!) They sing a delightful ditty, those modern-day Nazis, the refrain of which is, we will get the seventh million yet. Those words sickened me. But I am not Jewish. Yet I know how very much black lives matter, as I hide here in my white skin. And I am forced then to realize that my tribe is not women; not gays and lesbians. I am stuck with feeling the pain of the whole damn world: the entire bloody human race, all the freakin’ people everywhere. And, given the pattern of man’s inhumanity to man, I don’t see the pain going away any time soon.

But I know, somewhere very deep down, that I welcome the pain; the anguish I feel for every hurting member of my huge tribe. It assures me that I am capable, indeed all too capable, of feeling empathy. And for

that I am indeed grateful. Without it I would be some kind of sociopath; pain free perhaps, but we all know that it’s the old story of the yin and the yang, the ups and the downs, and no joy without pain. We see that lack of empathy every day in the Orange Ogre’s behavior. We hear it in his words. And being like him is somewhere I never want to go; someone I never want to be.

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/philippines-rodrigo-duterte-orders-soldiers-to-shoot-female-rebels-in-the-vagina

© April 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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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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Escape, by Phillip Hoyle

Years ago I’d escape to the hideout in the attic of the garage where this boy with no brothers hung out with boy friends. I’d sometimes go there alone or at least sit downstairs in the garage with my dog Tippy. In Jr. Hi years I’d close the door to my room. I’d matured and moved from sharing a room upstairs with two sisters into my own bedroom across the hall from my parents. Mom consulted with me about color and I ended up with dog wall paper—a mix of portraits of several dog species. Having my own room was great. It was my escape and it had a door! I did my projects and reading there. I enjoyed the solitude.

My friends and I made escapes to the countryside—both on our own and with the Boy Scout troop. We’d hike or ride bikes, or sometimes pull our sleds through the snow. With Scouts we were driven to a campsite south of town where hundreds of years before Native Americans had camped, grown crops, and lived out their summers, one of my favorite places on my great grandparents’ homestead. Kansa and earlier tribes had lived in the valley for centuries. While there I had the further escape of dreams and imagination. I knew I was camping and swimming with Indians long gone from the place.

My other great escape took form in 8th grade with my discovery of the historical novel. I started with James Fenimore Cooper’s stories, The Spy and The Last of the Mohicans, but then found more by contemporary writers like Kenneth Roberts’ book Arundel. I was hooked and spent much of my escape time tramping through forests and prairies with explorers and pioneers, spies and troops, and American Indians of many tribes. Books are still a major escape for me.

Escape is an important factor in personality development (as Don Johnson might point out), to independence (as my daughter would avow), to maintaining long-term relationships (as I testify, both as related to my 29-year marriage and 32-year career in churches). I found meaningful the saying: when a minister leaves one congregation for another, it’s turning in one set of tired problems for a set of new ones.

I still need escapes in retirement. They relieve pressure. Some days escape takes the form of going for coffee, having lunch out, searching a public library, or visiting a museum. These mini-breaks remind me of childhood’s yearly one-week vacation trips with the folks. I recall the morning we woke up in the tiny motel room where we’d slept. Dad complained about how the blinking red neon sign announcing “FULL” had kept him awake, but then, putting his arm around Mom said, “But in all it was a really good night.” My junior-high eyes and ears realized that while we kids slept, Mom and Dad had sex. I’m committed to working hard and then escaping to a change of pace or another book. I guess my upbringing taught me that.

© 19 February 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