Tag: LGBTQ

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Straight Friends Who Love Me by Ricky

Sadly, except for my siblings, my children, and my grandchild, I cannot think of any other straight people who love me. Not even my surviving aunts and uncles fall into that category. There is one straight person who tolerates me now. He once told me years ago that he loved me, but he has never said it again.

He was a school friend of my then 13-year old daughter. At one point my daughter told me he actually told his mother to divorce his dad and marry me. His dad is deaf, refuses to learn sign language, and is a drug addict. All his son wanted, was to have the same kind of relationship that my daughter had with me. The quirky thing about this is that my daughter asked me, if I married his mother, could my daughter marry him. I said no, unless they married before I married his mother. I find the mind of 13-year old’s to be very strange. It must be the raging hormones. I never figured out if it was their hormones or mine.

On the other hand, I have a few happy friends, who are very cheerful when around me, and probably even more joyful when not around me. Nevertheless, not to confuse anyone with these multiple designations, I will just call them my gay friends. To me they are as straight as my non-gay family members are, because to me, they do not appear to be bent or crooked.

It is rather depressing not to have straight friends, so I will end this story session with a happy little anecdote sent to me by a friend.

It was a dark and stormy night. Bob Hill and his new wife, Betty, were vacationing in Europe…as it happens, near Transylvania. They were driving in a rental car along a rather deserted highway. It was late and raining very hard. Bob could barely see the road in front of the car. Suddenly, the car skids out of control! Bob attempts to regain control of the car but to no avail! The car swerves and smashes into a tree.

Moments later, Bob shakes his head to clear the fog. Dazed, he looks over at the passenger seat and sees his wife unconscious, with her head bleeding! Despite the rain and unfamiliar countryside, Bob knows he has to get her medical assistance.

Bob carefully picks his wife up and begins trudging down the road. After a short while, he sees a light. He heads towards the light, which is coming from a large old house. He approaches the door and knocks. A minute passes. A small, hunched man opens the door. Bob immediately blurts, “Hello, my name is Bob Hill, and this is my wife Betty. We’ve been in a terrible accident, and my wife is seriously hurt. Can I please use your phone?”

“I’m sorry,” replied the hunchback, “but we don’t have a phone. My master is a doctor; come in, and I will get him!” Bob brings his wife in.

An older man comes down the stairs. “I’m afraid my assistant may have misled you. I am not a medical doctor; I am a scientist. However, it is many miles to the nearest clinic, and I have had a basic medical training. I will see what I can do. Igor, bring them down to the laboratory.”

With that, Igor picks up Betty and carries her downstairs, with Bob following closely. Igor places Betty on a table in the lab. Bob collapses from exhaustion and his own injuries, so Igor places Bob on an adjoining table.

After a brief examination, Igor’s master looks worried. “Things are serious, Igor. Prepare a transfusion.” Igor and his master work feverishly, but to no avail. Bob and Betty Hill are no more.

The Hill’s deaths upset Igor’s master greatly. Wearily, he climbs the steps to his conservatory, which houses his grand piano. For it is here that he has always found solace. He begins to play, and a stirring, almost haunting melody fills the house.

Meanwhile, Igor is still in the lab tidying up. His eyes catch movement, and he notices the fingers on Betty’s hand twitch, keeping time to the haunting piano music. Stunned, he watches as Bob’s arm begins to rise, marking the beat! He is further amazed as Betty and Bob both sit up straight!

Unable to contain himself, he dashes up the stairs to the conservatory. He bursts in and shouts to his master.

“Master! Master! The Hills are alive with the sound of music.”

© 28 October 2012

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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Male Dancing — Same Sex Dancing by Louis

CNN International presented a news report on developing new trends in ballet.

They asserted that there is a “masculine ballet.” The viewer gets a sample.

Another new genre is androgynous ballet. Viewer gets a sample. The sample ballet skits are performed by members of the Royal Ballet in Covent Gardens in London.

I agree with the wholesome experimental side of the Royal Ballet, but, in my opinion, ballet itself is basically feminine. The beloved spot-lighted ballerina is surrounded by masculine subordinate helpers. Ballet is fine for what it is.

However, I have seen other genres of artistic dancing in which the male anatomy, especially the muscular system, are sort of “analyzed” by a vigorous athletic dance routine accompanied by an intense loud rhythmic music. One of the few examples of “masculine dancing” I have seen in the past is the Russian sabre dance.

Many years ago I saw a dance presentation on a VHS tape put out by a gay male porn film company. The dance routines themselves were not porno-graphic although they were certainly erotic. There were two dance routines, both performed by a solo male dancer. One wore a G-string. He strutted and stretched and stomped and showed off his muscles. For me it suggested a completely new genre of artistic dancing. The accompanying music was pounding and pulsating.

The other dancer wore nothing but cowboy chaps and a Stetson hat. Both dancers were quite erotic but tasteful enough that they could have been presented to the general adult public as artistic dancing.

The CNN report on expanding the boundaries of the ballet also reminded me that until recently almost all kinds of art presented to the public are based on an exclusively heterosexual model. Boy falls in love with girl, girl plays hard to get, boy proves himself worthy perhaps by becoming a military hero. Boy wins girl. There is perhaps an epilogue, boy becomes a man, marries woman, they have children (make babies) and live happily ever after. This is how it is in literature (novels, poetry, short stories), in painting, sculpture, decorative arts, music, cinema. There is nothing else.

Of course, we know this leaves out tens of millions of people. This general presentation of art to the public from the powers that be was a dishonest, skewed presentation of what it means to be human. Fake-art.

The androgynous ballet routine as presented by the CNN report is a giant step forward. It acknowledges there are millions of androgynous people in the world, the intersexes. Effeminate men (and yet to be considered masculine women).

The scenario that would appeal to me is a hairy macho man, falls in love with another hairy macho man, and, after a proper courting ritual, they become a couple and live happily ever after. They are successful personally. If somehow they wind up taking care of a bunch of kids, that would be another big plus. Up to now we have been virtually invisible, non-existent.

There should be an honest artistic expression acknowledging us, who we are, what we are and what we really feel.

© 8 March 2014

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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Gay Music by Nicholas

I don’t know what gay music is. In a narrow sense, gay and lesbian music is that music composed or performed by gay or lesbian musicians presumably for gay or lesbian people. There’s quite a lot of that. In a wider sense, gay music is what makes me feel gay, i.e., in the old sense of happy and inspired. There’s quite a lot of that music too. Then there is the music by which I became gay identified or queer (i.e., disco and such) and there’s plenty of that.

If gay music is that music by gay song writers, composers and performers then that can include Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey and many others singing the lesbian blues about how they do not need a man and want to find a good woman. In contemporary times, this category includes k.d.lang, Melissa Etheridge, Joe Jackson and others singing their love songs to their own kind. Then there are the Kinsey Sicks and Romanovsky & Phillips, et al. singing their musical parodies. And the musical Fairy Tale of Zanna Don’t, the gay musical that made it to Broadway (or somewhere near).

I have to mention the many choruses of men and women, sometimes together, sometimes separate, who perform a wide range of choral musical styles in nearly every large city in the country for the benefit of lesbian and gay communities.

Does gay music include composers Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein (more or less openly gay), Chopin and Tchaikovsky (probably gay), and John Cage and John Corigliano (totally out and gay)? And everytime Michael Tilson Thomas steps onto the podium to conduct—whether he’s wearing his leather or not—does that make it gay music?

And there’s Liberace. Nobody knows what to do about Liberace.

There’s also music that brings out my gay identity, or memories of that, from those wild disco days. Abba (definitely not gay) was great to dance to. Sylvester (very definitely gay and no relation to our own Mr. Silvester) practically invented disco music. And Madonna—everybody knows what to do with Madonna.

There is also other music that sometimes makes me gay for no apparent reason like Beethoven (rumored to have had an inordinate interest in a nephew) and his 7th Symphony or his Emperor Concerto for piano. And the whole world of opera, though relentlessly heterosexual, just drips drama and costumes fit for any queen.

So, it seems there’s gay music all over the place, in all genres and in every era. From Bessie to Beethoven, from zany to somber, we love to listen, play, sing, dance and are probably responsible for much of the funding for whatever orchestras and opera companies are surviving in the U.S.
Gay music—there’s just no end to it.

February, 2014

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.