Tag: Ethan Mordden

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Stories that Shaped My Life

Early on the nursery rhyme “Georgie Porgie puddin’ and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry, when the boys came out to play Georgie Porgie ran away” spoke to me because my mom sometimes called me Georgie Porgie. I may have been that little boy. But in my version he liked looking at the boys he sometimes ran away from. He learned to play with them also. Well you can imagine more parts to that story.

James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans grabbed my attention in 9th grade. I little understood it except to know that Indians were living where whites wanted to live and that Indians had Indian enemies and used the whites against them just as the whites used Indians against each other. While Cooper was a white, he opened the idea for me of becoming friends and benefitting from the Indians who knew the land so well and had their own ways of understanding and relating to it. Back then I understood little of the real conflict except to realize that these native people were being manipulated in ways I judged immoral. I was fascinated by the tribal ways of perceiving the world and appreciated their familial and tribal loyalties.

At church, missionaries told stories of carrying the gospel to other lands. I didn’t want to be a missionary but I did want to meet the people who understood the world so differently. This story structure challenged me to be open to others from far-away places and to appreciate the otherized perspectives of those who lived nearby. Dr. Victor Rambo’s story of finding a true and useful medical mission in India made sense to me. Son of missionaries, he wanted to help Indian people. His first attempts were unsuccessful. He earned a specialty in ophthalmology and returned to be very helpful for many years. Emulating him, his determination and courage, I realized his practical approach could help guide my own personal and ministerial development. I realized I needed to see real people with real needs.

For a long time the David cycle in the Bible, those stories about the boy, the young man, even the older man who became King of Israel, helped shape my moral life. I liked the David stories of loyalty, bravery, friendship, love, sin, and most important, of being a person one biblical author described as “a man after God’s own heart.” I liked that and its great flexibility. I was able to pattern myself somewhat like David (although I had little power and never murdered anyone for personal or political reasons), and I often used his stories in religious education resources I developed.

The stories of my Cambodian friend Narin Oum inspired me with his collecting and valuing of various religious traditions, seeing their connection in his own life journey. His conversion model was very tolerantly Asian Buddhist as he studied and became a Muslim and later a Christian. Hearing his story opened my imagination to new outcomes for my own life. I learned to value all my experiences and to let them instruct me how to understand my new life.

Ethan Mordden’s series of books about gay life in Manhattan with titles like I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore, Buddies, and How’s your romance? helped shape my gay life. These stories, some of them extreme, opened me to a vast world of information that exceeded what I’d learned from other writers and from my gay friend Ted. I got a view of the diversity of what is sometimes called gay identity and community. I realized my own experiences would be a tiny part of what actually takes place. I did find my own space within this diverse world of my own people, one that embraces GLBTs and many other queer folk.

I’m sure I still little understand how all these stories came together even in my mind. Still they help me navigate my life and open my eyes to possibilities that were never directly part of the curriculum of any school I attended or any theological or philosophical approach I encountered.

I love stories and their power to transform. I hope to keep learning in my maturity and plan to keep listening to your stories told here at The GLBT Center of Colorado.

© 2 October 2017

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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Ghosts, by Ray S

One day I read a book quite by a happy coincidence. A very wise literary mentor directed my attention to an author’s works that I would find not only well written but outstanding gay fiction and with wonderful character development.

As a child I was a slow reader as they called us in grade school. Reading was rarely fun and generally regarded a tedious chore. I wonder now that I ever got through sixteen years of reading assignments.

Update to that encounter in the library. My quest for a good erotic read had been answered. There were five or six volumes by the recommended author. Not being too adventurous I selected a slim book as an introduction to the make believe world of escapism.

My recent departure from sixty years of closeted double life required a great deal of catching up. There’s no time to waste; it’s not like you were sixteen and too dumb to know who you might be. Now that you’re at the threshold of full-blown “geom.”, it seems there is too little time and too many friends to meet.

The small book was more than a “good read” and having returned it, I went back to the well for a greater challenge. Bravely I picked up a 600 page book entitled How Long Has this Been Going On? by Ethan Mordden. For someone who was scared of any book longer than my third-grade Peter and Peggy, this choice was probably foolhardy.

Suffice it to say that my initial exposure to my author’s writing spurred me on to unknown stories and pleasures. Turns out that this volume was divided into related but not continuous stories. No chapters. Eventually I was tempted to make a family tree of the many characters just to keep up with each other’s life stories. As the saying goes, I couldn’t put the book down; my reading Renaissance had begun.

One day I finished How Long… and set it aside to return it to the library. Procrastination set in and the book kept company with some others—mostly unfinished.

The longer it stayed here at my reading chair, the longer I kept seeing all of those wonderful heroes and heroines in my quiet moments or my dreams. Something was unfinished. I can’t say they were all ghosts; ghosts are usually in another world, maybe even what we call dead.

I loved those beautiful men and women. They are alive to me and like Alice I just needed to step through the looking glass to be with all of them.

I’ve lived through the late 40s and 50s, the war protests, the fight for equal rights, AIDs, Stonewall, Harvey Milk, the wars, and up to Gay Pride March in NYC 1991.

These were stories of real people you could vicariously become and share their experiences, devoted friendships, passionate homoerotic encounters and love that we all have somewhere down deep for each other.

This is a ghost story, if you will, that I need to share with you, as you do each week with me. And I am in the process of re-reading How Long Has this Been Going On? It is more rewarding the second time, like coming home again or being there with my un-ghostly companions.

© 24 April 2017

About the Author

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My Favorite Role Model by Phillip E. Hoyle

For many years my gay life was lived in literature. I read story after story, book after book, seeking to discover just what a gay life might look like. I read to find out more about and build an understanding of the lives of my gay friends. I read to find myself somewhere in that literature.

There I found many disappointing characters. I don’t mean that I didn’t appreciate their stories, but what they did in their lives was not what I would choose to do were I living as a gay man. Still I wanted to understand and kept reading, sometimes re-reading, sometimes discussing what I found with a gay friend. In this exploration I found an alien world filled with people I didn’t especially want to be like. Early on I read works of Malcolm Boyd, an Episcopalian priest. I was impressed by his book of poetry Are You Running with Me Jesus? and realized he was open, perhaps homosexual. Then I read a book by Rev. Troy Perry who started the Metropolitan Community Church. I didn’t like his theology but did think he was doing something very important. I read about the lives of characters in Patricia Nell Warren’s many novels. Some of them were nice people but their experiences of life didn’t really lead me into a world I could easily identify with. I read autobiographical novels of Edmund White and Felice Picano. In these I felt a kind of kinship but still wasn’t interested to live their lives. I kept looking as I read Forster, Vidal, Baldwin, Renault, Isherwood, Puig, Holleran, Maupin, Kirkwood, Rechy, Monette, Kushner, and many more. I appreciated the writing and sometimes identified with a character up to a point, but I couldn’t place myself into their episodes.

It’s plausible that I was looking for a role model although I didn’t or perhaps couldn’t think in those terms. I read the lives of characters in gay novels and stories like I read the characters in stories by the Nigerian Chinua Achebe or the Brazilian George Amado or the Osage Indian William Matthews, as if their characters were from another world or even galaxy. But there was something more important that I did appreciate. I liked especially the scenes in which two men really liked one another, deeply desired one another, and shared their thoughts, feelings and even secrets. I loved when two men lay together in Leaves of Grass. That I could imagine.

In those days I wore a beard because I wanted to; now I wonder if I was somehow emulating Walt Whitman. I visited many people in hospital; was I still Whitman? I cannot answer that question very well. I don’t think so. But I did feel a strong connect with Bud in Ethan Mordden’s series Tales of Gay Manhattan. Often Bud observed his gay friends. Often he was befriending folk who came off the street. He was all around Manhattan and Fire Island with his friends telling their stories. Eventually he lived with a younger man somewhat at the insistence of his group of friends. He seemed surprised at how satisfying it was. Now that I did identify with, even wanted. I suspect at an emotional level, Bud was my bud, my gay role model even though our lives were mostly different. I have made many gay friends in ways similar to his friendships. Like him I have written about them. I have lived with younger and older men. I have built a successful gay life and consciously have connected it to both the character Bud and his creator Mordden. So I guess I have had two or three favorite role model even though I had difficulty naming one.

Denver, ©23 February 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