Tag: LGBTQA

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Dance, Dance, Dance by Phillip Hoyle

I have a kind of dance thing. It started early. In second grade I had my first date with a neighbor girl attending a square dance at the Elks Club. I did other folk dancing with the Girl Scouts. I’ve done interpretative dances in therapeutic and religious settings including one in a sermon I gave in a seminary preaching class. I taught African tribal dancing to children. I danced Universal Peace with adults. I danced in traditional Native American style at intertribal powwows and two stepped with an Indian guy at a cowboy bar. I’ve danced to rock music: first the bop, then the jerk, then disco, then new wave, and finally on-your-own improvised dancing to a variety of music, which brings me to this story.

I went down to The Denver Compound/Basix to dance one Saturday night several years ago; went with my friend Tony. I had been a number of times before and especially liked dancing there by myself. The music at the club had provided me some firsts: hearing a club mix with Gregorian chant in it, and then another mix with American Indian singing. The music there seemed to pull together several themes of my life, so my dance responses to the nearly deafening techno music combined barely-disguised choral directing, Indian dance steps, interactions with various friends, sexual movements, and my ever-changing dance steps to the ever-changing music. Dancing had become for me an exultation of life, of my still relatively new life as a gay man. Evenings there combined sweat, music, men, reveries, and always movement enhanced by a light show; an evening dancing on the Basix floor for me an unparalleled celebration. This evening like others seemed a mix of need, allure, and creative movement.

I had noticed a man who danced there regularly on Saturday nights. He stood off to the side of the dance floor, out of the way of other more exuberant dancers. Always dressed the same in cap, tee shirt, Levis, and work boots, he swayed from side to side shifting his weight from left to right, barely lifting his heels, and for several hours never missing a beat. He was there simply to dance. I imagined him as dancing alone with his daemon— perhaps St. Speed or the great god Oxycodon. He never moved toward a partner. He seemed a symbol for my too-solitary self. Would he ever alter his repetitions? Perhaps it was he that one of my friends watched the night he judged the techno music boring! Tonight he was there in his place.

I knew I was different than the solitary dancer, knew I’d move toward someone eventually, would need a human partner to copy, contrast, or complement my dance. Would this night be the one? I didn’t know. I just melded into the crowd as if joining a primal dance of love. A male-to-male mating ritual. A free-form yet stylized communication bolstered by drugs and alcohol (I was in a bar) just like in so many primal cultures. One alcoholic drink sufficed for me to enter the ceremony, released me into the musical exploration of what I could communicate there. I emulated the booted swayer as I moved into the magic of the rhythm. When I felt the backbeats my arms joined in the dance. My feet began to move me out from the wall-flower pose and into the seething mass of the group. Finally my whole body took up the demands of the beat, the possibilities of the night. I danced.

Then I saw him, not the solitary dancer who barely moved, but another guy across the room. He didn’t seem to be dancing with anyone, so I started dancing with him. I’d never noticed him before, didn’t know him, didn’t even know if he was aware of me. I just wanted some kind of relationship with another man, another dancer whose movements I could complement. It seemed a game and a pleasant game at that. For nearly an hour I danced with him at a great distance. I stepped this way and that, always in touch with him in my sidelong glances, my peripheral awareness as I slowly edged across the room to be near him. Eventually he did acknowledge my moves. Then we danced back to back, then side by side, then face to face. Dancing, smiling, moving away, then together. We touched. Shy smiles. Sparkling eyes.

He was not particularly handsome. Dark brown hair neatly trimmed, black stretchy shirt revealing a nice-enough body with square build, black slacks obscuring the shape of legs and more. His dance moves more conservative than mine. As I matched his pace I wondered what was going on in his mind. Was he amused? He didn’t turn his back except to bump. Drunk? On drugs? Didn’t seem to be, but I was not sure. What I had drunk? Probably the Cape Cod I liked to start my dancing nights with, that and water. We were warmed by our dance that winter night, warmed by our responses, our constant motion, the crowded dance floor.

“Gotta go,” I finally said when my friend Tony signaled his need to leave. “Thanks. Oh, I’m Phil. Hey, this was fun. Hope to see you again.” He didn’t object. Said “Bye.”

I rode the bus down to the Baker neighborhood the next Saturday night. He showed up too there across the room. I was pleased. We danced. The move across the floor didn’t take nearly as long. The body to body movements were more direct, not requiring much interpretation. Then it was closing time. “Gotta catch the bus,” I said. I stalled while he got his coat out of a locker. That’s when I saw the pin, knew it was a Trekkie symbol. I politely said “Thanks for dancing” and “Goodnight” and moved away. Somehow his identification with science fiction stood in the way for me. Made him less attractive? Boy. I danced out of there, across the Walgreens parking lot to catch the Number Zero bus back home. I wondered what I had learned about myself, what I had learned in a bar. What was the truth? The reality? Really. What dance was I willing to execute? I admit I was looking for more than a dance partner, but I certainly wasn’t interested in a relationship characterized by going to sci-fi movies and that kind of fantasy. I wanted a dancer that could dance a domestic and somehow romanticized relationship. Me? Romantic? Must have been the effect of living with my wife for twenty-nine years. Or was it the combination of booze and dancing? Thought about these things all the way home. Boy. What we can learn dancing and ponder riding busses.

© Denver, 2012 

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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To Be Held by Phillip Hoyle

If “to be held” is a goal, my relationship with the goal was one of slow, slow discovery. I have no memory of being held by my parents. I slept alone throughout my childhood since I was the only boy in the family. When as a little boy I went to my grandparents’ farm, I slept with Grandpa in his big Mission-style oak double bed. I recall he kidded me about having to build a wall of pillows to keep me from kicking him. I now wonder if he built the wall because I wanted to snuggle up to him, something he was uncomfortable doing. I’ll never know. One could say I am from a home in which touch was not withheld; it just wasn’t much of a factor, at least for this child.

In my early teen years I asked girls to school dances. I asked them because I liked to dance having been taught by my older sisters. In the junior high gymnasium we danced the Bop with its spins and fancy steps, the Twist with its aerobic benefits, and sometimes slow dances based on the Fox Trot. My favorites were several line dances the teachers taught us. I liked slow dances, too, for the holding and being held. Sounds pretty normal I guess. Anyway, as we danced, my ninth grade girlfriend rested her hand on my lower back, a fact that others noted and commented on. She was very short, and we danced very close. I had no objections. So we danced a lot that year hanging onto one another. Although at that time I wanted to dance with African American kids in line dances, it never occurred to me to dance with another boy. I had engaged in sexual things with grade school friends but none of my friends danced. I had never heard of boys dancing together let alone seen it. But had I imagined it, I’m sure I’d have wanted to dance with a boy, black or red, brown or white, or any other color of the rainbow.

In my mid-teens a new friend introduced me to a new kind of male-to-male sex that included the intimacy of kissing. I’d never been able to get myself to kiss a girl. I suppose I was still under the influence of my childhood groans during movie love scenes. I had no idea that the fact the hugging and kissing was between a female and a male could have anything to do with my lack of interest. Of course since I am music-sensitive, the introduction of sappy-sounding orchestral strings in such scenes may have really repelled me. But I readily took to kissing with my boyfriend. I didn’t realize that my kissing relationship with him was the kind that felt just right. I didn’t think in terms of either/or, either girl or boy. I just enjoyed what we did together and kept open my search for a girlfriend. In high school I dated several girls. We danced but didn’t fall in love.

Then I met a girl who with my grandmother was visiting our family. We attended a dance together. I danced close with this very sexy and enthusiastic young woman. In the car after we drove back home we held and kissed one another hungrily. She seemed to enjoy that I knew how to kiss even though I hadn’t been able to practice it for over two years, ever since my kissing boyfriend had left town. The next day she returned to her home a couple of counties away. I went off to college. I never saw her again.

I didn’t find anyone I wanted to kiss again for about a year. Then I met Myrna. We held hands. I put my arm around her. On the third date (the appropriate time according to discussions in the 1950s youth group I had attended) I worked up my courage to kiss her. We were parked late at night in the city zoo parking lot watching the lights caused by military maneuvers at nearby Fort Riley. The light show was nice, a novelty for her. Then I kissed her; she bit my ear. I thought, ‘This is something new,’ the effects of it shooting like lightning right down to my groin. I assumed she liked my kisses and maybe me. As it turned out she liked me just fine, but the bite was not a tease or a love bite; she was nervous. She would rather have only held my hand and continued liking her boyfriend back home (whom I never even heard about until years later). She’d rather have gone bowling, played volleyball, and skipped all the sexual, romantic things. But later, when I kissed her in front of several other students, right there in public, she opened herself to feelings she’d heard of in fairytales and assumed she had met her Prince Charming. In short, we married, had kids, and as a couple enjoyed living together with great intimacy—including a lot of touch, kisses, and sex—for years and years.

Still, I sought intimacy with a man. Ten years into the marriage I fell in love with him and basked in our occasional touch, our holding. Twenty years into the marriage I learned much more about my need to be held. My work partner, the senior minister with whom I’d served as an associate for seven years, died a sudden death early on a Sunday morning. I organized elders of the congregation to be at all the doors to greet folk and tell of the death as they arrived at the church. I was cast in the pastoral role for the congregation and realized that all I had learned about grief should be heeded for the whole group as well as for individuals. I didn’t have time to grieve for my personal loss. I bore the heavy responsibility, but I needed desperately to be held.

During the ensuing weeks, my wife and I kept to our normal patterns of intimacy. I held her. That was good. She remained responsive but somehow our pattern didn’t meet my needs. I eventually realized what I needed was to be held by my male lover, a man I’d been in love with for nearly a decade. He called by phone. I was pleased, but he did not come to the funeral. He didn’t come to see me in the following weeks. I didn’t think much about it at the time being too busy tending others. Still, I didn’t get held like I needed to be held. I seemed unable to ask anyone for what I needed. Eventually I did find a man to hold me. In receiving his fine care, I realized I had sought it because I was unwilling to call on my friend whose responses to me had always been unpredictable. I was needy beyond my past experiences.

I survived. I realized I needed a man-to-man relationship that would provide me more reliable and accessible contact. Eventually I found it. Then another. My needs pushed me into behaviors that spelled the ends of my marriage and career. I don’t say this as an apology for my behaviors or as an accusation against anyone. I tell it as description. I don’t expect other people to be more able to respond to life’s challenges any better than I. So I describe these experiences because the events and my responses revealed to me just how strong a need can be and how strong a pattern of behavior can be to prevent one from getting the need met.

I finally realized I needed to be held by the people I loved and who I knew loved me. I’m an old man now having entered a gay world where one can get sex rather easily, but the habits still restrict me; and of course there are the habits of other men as well as my own, habits that define asking and getting. They clarify experience, feelings, fears; mine and theirs. Sadly and stupidly I again find myself getting less holding than I believe I require.

I cannot write an ending to this story; I’m not yet dead! Who knows what the coming years may yet teach me about my need to hold and to be held?
Denver, 2012

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen practicing massage, he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists and volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot

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ABCs of Life by Donny Kaye

It seems that life is about mastery. In my mind, Mastery is not to be confused with perfection but rather the ability to actually experience life as it presents, moment-by-moment. Mastery connotes experiencing life effortlessly, without resistance and in the spirit of surrender. By surrender, I am not suggesting submission or irresponsibility.

There was a time when I experienced life in a very black and white manner, with little tolerance at all for the shades of gray that constitute actually living life as it presents. My personality needed knowledge and control to assure me that I was on some predetermined “single” pathway.

There is a part of me that would like to believe that life can be guided by a list such as The ABC’s of Life, however; my experience suggests that about the time I master A, B and C, life requires guidance from X, Y and Z!

If I were to create such a list, the wise one within would begin with ALLOWANCE. As I use the term allowance, I’m not thinking of the seventy-five cents a week for taking out the trash or cleaning off the dishes nightly from the dinner table. Allowance is a pre-requisite of being able to meet life’s challenges just as they present. Allowance is a way of looking at my life events not as obstacles to getting what I want but rather as stepping stones. Allowance cultivates trust. Trust that everything that appears appears as it must. Trust that comes through the experience of allowance, allows for certain things to fall away from my life as well as for certain things to come into my life.

The B in A, B, C, is just that, be! Being is about cultivating a capacity to be present to what is. Being allows for an informed response to what is, rather than the experience of constantly reacting with either agreement or disagreement. The constant reaction to what appears begins to lessen and a true sense of wonder serves as the lens for viewing life’s experiences.

Change is constant, becomes another critical aspect for me in understanding life. I have found that when I am able to surrender to the changes that are life, I am better able to stop resisting and instead, allow what life’s experiences bring to me. Change is constant! What must I do to create the ability to remain flexible in my thinking and my actions? To allow and be, requires flexibility and surrender to the realization that change is inevitable.

My years of experience in this lifetime, and quite possibly, previous life times, make the development of a full list, A-Z daunting and perhaps impossible to create. As an educator, I remember using excerpts with my staff from the book, Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.

As I look back on that listing of essential learning from kindergarten, I am reminded of the following ABC’s of Life, by Robert Fulghum:

  • Share everything.
  • Play fair.
  • Don’t hit people.
  • Put things back where you found them.
  • Clean up your own mess.
  • Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
  • Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
  • Wash your hands before you eat.
  • Flush.
  • Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
  • Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
  • Take a nap every afternoon.
  • When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
  • Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
  • Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.

Everything you need to know is in this list of ABC’s somewhere.

And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.

LOOK! I must develop my capacity to witness my life, without bias or expectation, and always with a sense of Wonder for what is. Realizing that “what is” is precisely the life event that is needed for a certain life lesson.

I am not suggesting a naive or Pollyannaish outlook on life but the creation of a life which when viewed by the witness within is viewing the life experience with clarity, through a lens which does not distort, nor color everything as rose colored glasses might.

In David Whyte’s poem, “No Path”, he states in his opening line, “There is no path that goes all the way. Not that it stops us from looking for the full continuation.” To exist with an expanded sense that there is no one way, be it right or even direct, but the experience of life from the perspective that everything belongs is entirely possible and practical.

About the Author

Donny Kaye-Is a native born Denverite. He has lived his life posing as a hetero-sexual male, while always knowing that his sexual orientation was that of a gay male. In recent years he has confronted the pressures of society that forced him into deep denial regarding his sexuality and an experience of living somewhat of a disintegrated life. “I never forgot for a minute that I was what my childhood friends mocked, what I thought my parents would reject and what my loving God supposedly condemned to limitless suffering.” StoryTime at The Center has been essential to assisting him with not only telling the stories of his childhood, adolescence and adulthood but also to merely recall the stories of his past that were covered with lies and repressed in to the deepest corners of his memory. Within the past two years he has “come out” not only to himself but to his wife of four decades, his three children, their partners and countless extended family and friends. Donny is divorced and yet remains closely connected with his family. He lives in the Capitol Hill Community of Denver, in integrity with himself and in a way that has resulted in an experience of more fully realizing integration within his life experiences. He participates in many functions of the GLBTQ community.

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Solitude by Betsy

The joy and the pain of being alone: for me, a lesbian, solitude is the perfect word to apply to the coming out experience. I suppose one could say coming out is a process–an on-going experience–never ending. But I am thinking of the beginning of the process. The early days.

The pain was all-consuming. The pain was around a part of me that was waking up, like the pain in a limb that has been in a cast for months and then suddenly released. I was becoming conscious of the fact that life as I was living it would be emotionally unsustainable for me. I was waking up to the fact that my lifestyle as I knew it would be coming to an end. Now some people might welcome such a happening, but for me there was a pervasive sadness about it. Because my life had been comfortable, I was surrounded by a loving family–husband and three children–friends, and I had a career which was productive and satisfying. Any and all of these things would be seriously threatened by revealing my secret and coming out of that safe, but dark, lonely place called the closet.

All of my relationships at home, socially, and at work were in perfect order. All, that is, but one. My relationship with myself was out of order, unhappy, downright painful. What a lonely place this is. Lonely because I have a secret about myself and I am the only one who is aware of it. Once I consciously acknowledged my sexual orientation, my true state of being, I found myself in a very empty, uninhabitable space even though I was physically surrounded by people I loved or just enjoyed being with. I did not really enjoy being with myself. I longed for another life so very distant from where I was in time and space it seemed. I had to make the journey to that distant place. My life depended on it. I will have to hurt some people initially in order to get there, but I had to take those first steps. Staying here would eventually be even more hurtful for myself and those I love. This is the forsaken, isolated,negative place of solitude.

Solitude is not always a negative place. In 1985 when I had just started the process of coming out of that lonely closet–I signed on to a leadership course with Outward Bound. The course took the form of a ten-day trek through the wilderness of the Canyonlands National Park in Utah. We would travel by foot a distance of about 25 miles. This would require learning some climbing techniques, orienteering, pathfinding, and hiking some days long distances with heavy packs on our backs. Some of the climbs and descents, it turned out, were life-threatening. But we all made it.

Somewhere in the middle of the trek we were to experience three days of solitude. We were each directed to our own isolated location where we would stay for 3 days and 2 nights with a sleeping bag, tarp, enough clothes to keep warm during the chilly nights, enough water for the duration, the clothes on our backs, and a pen and paper. Nothing more. No electronics, no reading, no listening devises, no food.

It was an experience I will never forget. Looking through the notes I made at the time, I am reminded of the lessons learned from the three days of solitude.

1. Even at the age of 50 something, I can sleep on slick rock and be comfortable enough to actually sleep.

2. I am “lost” for a moment upon rising in the morning when my daily routine is absent. No toothbrushing, no coffee making, the program required that I stay in this spot. All this requires a different mind set. I must think about what I am doing here in this place of solitude.

3. It is worth while occasionally to put myself in a different place, perhaps an isolated place such as this, to think about the meaning of my existence and keep a meaningful perspective on life.

4. Busying about is a way of hiding from things I don’t want to deal with and a way of hiding from myself.

5. Security and comfort do have value, but keep them in perspective. Don’t be afraid to take risks and to be my own person.

6. I have no food and I haven’t felt hungry. Conclusion: it is not the empty stomach rather it’s the stimuli (food) that causes this well-fed person to feel hungry.

7. Three days and two nights of solitude in the wilderness is a valuable and unique experience. Don’t forget it.

I normally do not write poetry, I haven’t been inclined to read much poetry.
But in solitude in the wilderness I was inspired to write this:

SOLO

Solo, stop, sit, sleep
Don’t busy about
Nothing to be busy about
It’s time for a drink
It’s time to think
Our lives are in this canyon land
We will leave them here
We will take a new route
Back to the old

So solitude can provide for a beautiful place offering a positive experience or it can be a dark, painful place of misery. In either case both solitudes had great value for me. The result was that my life improved. The lesson from those experiences for me, a person who does not spend a lot of time alone is: savor and value your time alone and use it wisely.

9-23-13

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change). She has been retired from the Human Services field for about 15 years. Since her retirement, her major activities include tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with National Sports Center for the Disabled, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and enjoys spending time with her four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 25 years, Gillian Edwards.

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A Place Just Right by Phillip Hoyle


In contrast to some other members of my family, I’ve never been over-attached to any one place, for to be so seems somehow contrary to my nature. But one time I found myself living in a place just right. It happened when I moved with my family to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There I discovered a small city large enough to explore, exotic for me in its social and cultural mix, with an Old town that took me away from the day-to-day by offering me a world of fantasy and comfort. A city of visual contrasts including mountains, deserts, volcano cinder cones, lava flows, ancient peoples, Territorial and Pueblo revival architecture, an 18th century church dedicated to San Felipe de Neri, tall modern buildings, US Route 66 running right through its middle, home of the University of New Mexico with its Lobos. A city of museums, festivals, sports, arts, and more, Albuquerque hosted the annual Balloon Festival, but more than that, hot air balloons drifted over the city whenever the conditions were just right and they often were. And Albuquerque was home to the New Mexico State Fair with all the things one might expect from a Midwestern fair plus a strong Native American and Hispanic American presence.

And people just loved living there. And I was there in the right city working in the right church. Close to the university and just a block off Route 66, that church had become more democratic than any I’d ever worked in. A liberal and educated perspective dominated, and I fit in there having found a place and job that seemed just right.

In Albuquerque I could exercise my western and Indian fantasies, view art every day, enjoy mild weather, and eat green chilies regularly. And I moved there at just the right time of my life, when our children were ready to desert the nest and fly away. So Myrna and I were left alone with a wonderland to wander and explore. And we did so: two stepping our way through a cowboy world, running around with several groups of colorful friends, experiencing a diversity of activities and relationships we had never before found. The dynamic of the two of us discovering activities together was a most important factor in my feeling that I was in a place just right.

Something fine happened to me there in Albuquerque, yes something delightful and very costly to the new camaraderie Myrna and I were beginning to enjoy. I turned and turned like a Shaking Quaker until I found a place just right for me on the Kinsey scale. I was no longer worried over the concept of the scale—you know, the science of it all—but began celebrating my position between its #3 and #4 markers. Concepts were still present, of course, after all this is my story. I looked at the scale like a preference of conscious ego states on the Jungian-based Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and in my preferred bisexual place connected with my friend Ronnie and then with another man. The affairs were meant only to be “additions to the report” of my life, certainly not “a correction” to it. But there I was feeling all just right with myself and my buddies. The affairs ended when I left New Mexico but the feelings accompanied me to Colorado and eventually to Oklahoma and pushed me into a life away from my family. I had been to a place just right and nothing else felt like home. Oh, by this I do not mean Kansas where I grew up, not that kind of starry-eyed “There’s no place like home,” but rather, some other place just right, a relationship within me and with the rest of the world. And that feeling continues in various and exciting modes in Denver, my new place just right. And even in this board room at the GLBT Community Center of Colorado where when gathered with the other storytellers each Monday afternoon, I feel just right. Yes, a place just right.


Denver, July 8, 2013

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen practicing massage, he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists and volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot

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To My Younger Self by Nicholas

Frequently, I have conversations with myself. This is one I imagined between myself now and myself prior to coming out. It’s kind of a distillation of thoughts and counter-thoughts that occurred years ago or last month or yesterday. It’s a dialogue for one person.

Remember those walks we took, long meditative walks through the leafy, green forests of Ohio where the ground was wet and the air was wet with summer heat and I felt free, I said?
We spent hours walking softly through the soft shade of the soft forest just taking in the quiet, said he.
And i: You always had an independent streak, like the day you took off on your bike to crash through the neighborhood boundary and go riding through other neighborhoods in the city.
And he: You later took that desire for independence out into the world, to get out, to seek out, to discover and explore.
And i: We went into the city, we rode the Rapid into downtown, we went places to look at books and eat ice cream.
And he: You were courageous.
And i: That was courage?
And he: You didn’t have to.
And i: You were curious. Alone but always curious.
And he: But independence turned into loneliness, unloved and unloving, on my own. Things could be different.
And i: Yes, things could be different. I came to my senses, finally coming to myself. Yes, I had to.
And he: Eager to join the world, not just travel through it.
And i: I started seeing meanings and patterns that told me who I was, why I was, and who we were. I was brought up to see meaning, to find meaning, and suddenly it was there.
And he: It was a busy time, full of thoughts and actions never before taken or taken seriously. Hush, I said, listen, don’t talk, be quiet.
And i: We went to the woods and the river.
And he: I found release. Release to be a kid and play and release to grow up and own it. To make decisions and own them and own what followed.
And i: I found love, to be loved and to be loving.
And he: And I found love where I hadn’t thought it could be found before.
And i: Coming out was really a coming into: coming into love, relationships, fun, community, history.
And he: You won’t leave me now, will you?
And i: I won’t leave you and you won’t leave me because I can’t leave you and you can’t leave me.
—An homage to William Faulkner

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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House Cleaning by Michael King

I don’t clean house! I did have a housekeeper when I was working. One of the great surprises was when my last wife and I separated and I got an apartment. It took a few days for it to dawn on me that everything would be just as I left it. No one cleaned up after me. This was quite an awakening. I had never cleaned house and didn’t know how. I’m quite capable of making a mess and do so often. Merlyn keeps his apartment almost like a showroom. I wondered why it didn’t bother him more when my place would become a mess until he told me that the woman that he lived with for twenty-eight years wasn’t a very good housekeeper.

I‘m really not as bad as I used to be, I do dishes while cooking, somewhat keep the things picked up especially in the living/dining area and don’t let the bathroom get too bad. The chair in the bedroom, however, often has coats, sweaters shirts, pant, socks, etc. piled high with a few that have fallen onto the rug. I usually get that mess taken care of when I do laundry.

In the apartment building where I live the management does inspections of the fire alarms, the faucets, doors, stove, fan, plumbing and whatever is on their list. The apartment needs to be clean, so fortunately since these inspections occur every few months for one thing or another, I usually have a somewhat presentable home. It seldom takes more than 30 minutes to whip it in place except when they do the maintenance and annual inspections where they might look in the closet where I shove everything that I don’t know where else to put them. Now that is not unclean, just one hell of a mess.

Merlyn knows better than to clean up after me. He is so wise. However when it’s time to get everything up to snuff for either a major inspection or the family coming over or some special guests, he pitches in and we move the furniture to vacuum and then I dust and tidy while he helps with the bath or moping the kitchen. It doesn’t take long. With the bed made I don’t feel like I can relax in my own home. I love to prop up a half dozen pillows and lounge in the bedroom either writing, figuring, watching TV or just relaxing. The result of that messes up the whole image.

Now I know the difference between housekeeping, house cleaning and putting on a show. I only put on a show and only then when I feel I have to. I am aware I feel more comfortable when my surroundings look lived in but beautiful and with some since of order. I want everything to fit in its place, every chair at just the right angle and so on.

Now with this cleaning thing, I only use Dawn Dish Liquid to clean everything except for Windex and once in awhile Spic-n-Span. I am very sensitive to the scents used in most cleaning products. I must use a special laundry detergent or I break out with hives. With many cleansers I have breathing problems. So does Merlyn. I like a clean environment but not the smell of one. And I definitely don’t want a bad odor. I like to air out the apartment and if I want to create a pleasant aroma I’ll boil ginger or cinnamon or cook something that smells nice.

Since house cleaning is something I wish I could afford to not have to think about once I’ve properly instructed the professional on all the peculiarities I have. But I don’t have that luxury and if I did I might lose my privacy and have to wear clothing and then I’d have to hide the toys and the porn and who knows what else.

Other than absolutely necessary I don’t clean house.

© 31 March 2013

About
the Author

I go by the drag name, Queen Anne Tique. My real name is Michael King. I am a gay activist who finally came out of the closet at age 70. I live with my lover, Merlyn, in downtown Denver, Colorado. I was married twice, have 3 daughters, 5 grandchildren and a great grandson. Besides volunteering at the GLBT Center and doing the SAGE activities,” Telling your Story”,” Men’s Coffee” and the “Open Art Studio”. I am active in Prime Timers and Front Rangers. I now get to do many of the activities that I had hoped to do when I retired; traveling, writing, painting, doing sculpture, cooking and drag.

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My Wife and Six Husbands by Phillip Hoyle

When the issue of same-sex marriage made a headline some six years ago, my partner Jim asked if I’d want to marry should such a law be enacted. I flippantly replied, “Oh, I already did that for thirty years. I guess not.” I thought of marriage as being a non-issue in my relationship with this Taurus-signed man who holds such a different take on ownership than do I as a laid-back Cancerian. I have almost no need for possessions and derive little joy from the fact that I own anything. And early on in our wooing I remember clearly stating this warning: “I can’t be owned.” In my response that day I forgot to ask him if he wanted me to marry him because I couldn’t conceive that he’d want to cede half of everything he owned to me or anyone else.

Then last month, my partner and I were invited to join another male couple who were celebrating their 25th anniversary. They got married officially under New York State law about a year ago, but for them, this May date was their real anniversary celebrating when they first got together as a couple.

Relationships without societal rules make their own sense of things. Surely this simple perception and constant insistence signals something important about marriage, about all things called marriage whether under civil law or religious tradition. When it comes to plain and simple language, marriage, wedding, and union are synonyms. It’s that simple; but of course, it’s never that simple. Nothing is that simple. In so declaring, I realize I have branded myself a liberal, an educated, sophisticated snob, and an ivory-tower thinker—one of those people who tries to confuse meanings in order to destroy the sureties of common life. Well, so be it, but I tell you I learned this way of thinking at a Bible college, a small enclave of rather conservative thinking, yet one dedicated to revisiting ancient documents (particularly the Bible) from the point of view of John Locke’s philosophy (firmly settled within the views of the Enlightenment). This task of finding ancient truth within newer structures of thinking opened a door in my imagination. Eventually I progressed beyond 18th century views opting for more contemporary ones that would present whatever truths could be gleaned from ancient traditions to inform and enrich current expressions of human life and meaning.

But back in the old days, my young adult days, I used to define marriage in this way: go to bed with one other person and you’ll wake up married. I guess back then I thought of marriage as a relationship blending sex and metaphysics. I was never very ceremonial in my approach to life. My casual take on things was almost as simple as a caveman bonking someone on the head and dragging them home to serve as a mate. For me, the issue is neither as tradition-bound with ceremonial oaths spoken before a judge or altar nor as clear cut as many folk would hope to think. Remember, I matured and married in the 1960s where ‘casual’ reigned. Now rather than argue any issues, I will simply tell my story, a story of marriages of several sorts.

At the ripe old age of twenty-one, I married a fine woman. Our personalities meshed. We were both dedicated to life and ministries within the church, which for us was a small denomination that refused to think of itself as a denomination, a non-sectarian, non-creedal collection of churches in which we both were reared. We were excited about the increasing self-revelations our marriage would entail and saved ourselves, as it were, for the marriage bed. (Of course, I had an introduction to sex years earlier from another boy with whom I had practiced kissing and intercrural bliss.) The marriage with Myrna provided satisfying experiences and opened us both to a wide range of interesting people and cultural activities. We loved one another and lived together a life rich in relationships.

Eventually I provided myself a dietary supplement to that marriage in the form of a long-standing affair with another man. I use this expression supplement because my vocabulary didn’t go beyond monogamy, bigamy, and polyandry. I didn’t have words for what I experienced. No one did. I didn’t take formal vows with my man partner but would have had they been available. I did assume responsibility in this new relationship. I deeply loved this man. I already realized what I wanted in life, what I had in my life with Myrna and my children, and honored what he seemed to want by way of a family. I kept our relationship warm but with some important distance. I soon enough realized I didn’t want to live with him. That would have been economically a disaster to say nothing of the costs to our careers, families, and dreams. Still I wanted a deep friendship with erotic communication. So I lived a kind of love that wasn’t simplistic, not love and marriage going together like a horse and carriage. What I wanted was love from him, and persisted nurturing it with him. That love has endured although its nature has changed over the years. All marriages experience such changes.

I didn’t explain all this to my wife who I judged would have found it just too odd. While open to life, she was a bit more traditional than I. Still, we had many levels of commitment to one another. When we moved too many miles distant from my husband, I realized I needed another one, actually several others. A man, who was a friend of my wife, assisted me with a deeply significant introduction into gay sex. We had fun. I had already told him I loved him (I’m sure it came across as simply the statement of a friend), but when he warned me we could play together but there had to be no feelings involved, I happily accepted his rules. Our dalliance would work better that way. I had no thought to leave my wife.

When that affair cooled down, I wondered whether he was beginning to experience too much feeling on his part or if he had already got from me what he had come for. Then another man presented himself. We developed an intensely emotional attachment, one I recognized and initially resisted. My wife noticed this affair with great trepidation. She and I weathered the brief relationship but not without a sense of loss within our marriage. My wife and I moved away to another community; my third husband got a new partner. Emotionally Myrna and I entered a time of uncertainty. We had plenty of work to keep us occupied. I did not find another man to love or play with. Sadly, we couldn’t solve the problems my affairs had raised. Eventually there was a separation. It took me a couple of months to gather my wits enough to schedule my removal from a career of thirty-two years, but that decision led to me having a short fling with a Baby Bear in Tulsa, a man I didn’t intend to get involved with. Now who was playing the games? I never felt the love in this relationship although I did assume some temporary heavy-duty responsibilities.

I escaped to Denver to become a gay man. I was inventing something new for myself although I was still legally yoked to my wife and emotionally connected to at least three other men and had one who felt emotionally and hopefully connected to me. (I was learning that the gay life could be rather complicated, but I’d always thrived on complications.) Eventually I met another man who took an interest in me. Our mutual delight helped domesticate me again. We enjoyed living together, exploring intimacy and playing house. I loved this man; he loved me. We never talked of marriage; we just lived it. He was ill and essentially owned nothing; I didn’t particularly need taking care of. I did take care of him as he died and mourned his passing with deep feeling.

Then there was another man, the one I met at a bus stop, the one who thrilled me, the one who seemed so thrilled with me. We felt deeply important to one another: he the revealer of emotions I’d never experienced, I the provider of a stable love he had never found. He was the homebuilder insisting that my apartment was my office; his apartment our home. We loved one another and built a relationship of great satisfaction. I helped him meet his death and mourned his passing. I felt adrift although I knew I would be okay.

Into the vacuum created by these losses entered my current partner, a really nice man about my age who already had a life and knew how to manage his money, who had worked for many years in his career as a salesman and did own property. He offered a kind of stability for me, the over-tired caregiver. He’s the one who asked the question about marriage. I’m the one who flung away the idea as if it wasn’t important. I’d already had a marriage, a successful one with a most interesting person. I’d already had a separation with all its decision-making and drama. I’d already had a divorce, which was amicable and uncontested (the advantage of owning very little). I had warned this nice man I had no money; I also told him I had no debt. Since he rarely comments on much, I never knew what he thought of these revelations but felt pretty sure both were important to him. We haven’t married. He’s never again brought up the subject. Perhaps living with me all these years warned him away from the idea, or perhaps he was only making rare conversation the day he did mention the topic.

Marriage? I doubt I’ll ever enter into it again formally even though this story already defines the relationship with Jim as a marriage. But in general, I’ve decided marriage seems too much like love. The word never means the same thing to the two people professing it. And the images they pursue are rarely-discussed assumptions that eventually sour the prospects of the happiness they envision. People in a marriage don’t experience the same thing either, yet they persist in thinking they are supposed to or that they want to. It’s all become too complicated for this old man.

© 25 November 2012

About
the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen practicing massage, he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists and volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot

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Mirror Image by Michael King

Looking in the mirror and seeing the image of myself I realize that what I see and what I think I should see are quite different. I hadn’t thought that I’d ever seen anyone that I would like to look like until this weekend when it dawned on me that there was someone that I wouldn’t mind looking like. What a shock if I looked in the mirror and Ben Affleck was looking back at me.

I have mostly avoided looking at myself. I would look to see if my hair was combed. I did have hair at one time. But I really avoided looking at my face. As with much of my life I was never accepting of anything as it was. I think now I am more willing to let things just be without hoping they were different.

I’ve made a point of looking at other people to find someone that I would like to look like and never did. I began accepting myself more in the last few years and started paying more attention to what I really do look like. I’m OK with both my looks and my inner self so it almost surprised me when even though I think that Ben Affleck is really a handsome and appealing man I only thought about him staring back from the other side of my mirror when I was thinking about the topic for today’s story.

With my fairly recent self-acceptance and improved self image I wonder what a therapist or some school of psychology would make over this Ben Affleck thing. Probably some suppressed sex thing. Instead of looking into a pool to fall in love with my reflection, all I have to do is get a photo, paste it on my mirror and pretend my mirror image is there.

I won’t do that. I’ll probably just see my own reflection and be glad that I’m not anyone else and let it go at that.

© 18 March 2013

About the Author

I go by the drag name, Queen Anne Tique. My real name is Michael King. I am a gay activist who finally came out of the closet at age 70. I live with my lover, Merlyn, in downtown Denver, Colorado. I was married twice, have 3 daughters, 5 grandchildren and a great grandson. Besides volunteering at the GLBT Center and doing the SAGE activities,” Telling your Story”,” Men’s Coffee” and the “Open Art Studio”. I am active in Prime Timers and Front Rangers. I now get to do many of the activities that I had hoped to do when I retired; traveling, writing, painting, doing sculpture, cooking and drag.

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Culture Shock by Gillian

After what seemed a fairly short, swift journey, I had arrived at a strange place. I could feel the mist of Culture Shock swirling as I became aware of everything around me. Many things were familiar, yet apparently seen from an unaccustomed angle. I spoke the language, but not as well as I would have liked, or felt I should. I was somewhat taken aback by this feeling of strangeness; unfamiliarity. I had never been there before but had read up extensively on the place, yet obviously had not got the vision quite right. I had maps, which I had expected to be at least adequate, but now they seemed to bear little resemblance to the lay of the land.

Old Age is a strange place; don’t fool yourself, as you approach, that you know all about it. You don’t. Culture Shock awaits.

I had expected to reach old age at a steady pace, closing in on it year by year, but in fact it wasn’t like that at all. My psychological flight arrived in this strange land and suddenly here I am. Old.

I know that these days seventy is just the youth of old age, but it is old age nevertheless, albeit the early stages. And out of the blue it hit me one day not so long ago. I am old.

I arrived in this place partly via the aches and pains of arthritis, the unaccustomed urge for afternoon naps, and the disappearance of nouns from my vocabulary. I haven’t quite accepted that I actually am this person. Who is this Oldie masquerading as me? She walks a mile and starts chuntering on about how her knee will hurt tomorrow. She falls asleep in front of the TV, in spite of that newly discovered joy, afternoon naps. She can never find her car keys no matter how absolutely sure she is of where she left them, and she blanks out on her neighbor’s name.

It’s all part of that business of familiar things not feeling exactly as they should.

Then of course there’s the visual. Some days I look in the mirror and see my father; sometimes my mother. I see a recent photo and am shocked by the wrinkled neck and baggy eyes, and again I see my mother or father, rather than me. I seem to be disappearing into some ancestral version of myself.

And it’s not just how I feel and what I see, but what I hear. I almost speak the lingo, I possess a reasonable vocabulary, but much of it doesn’t resonate with me, rather like speaking the basics of a foreign language but missing the nuances, the subtleties. It’s all about 24/7 and sexting and texting, RAMs and blogs and twitters and tweets. Nouns have morphed into verbs. It’s about the “F” word, and many other words rarely heard in my youth, scattered liberally and without purpose throughout even the most erudite of conversations.

It’s also about what I use, as well as what I feel, see, and hear.. We who suffer this Culture Shock have dealt with endless technological innovations throughout our lives. We have struggled from no phones to wind-up phones to heavy bakelite with rotary dials to push-button to cordless to cell phones. And now we have smart phones. In my opinion they should be called outsmart phones because they outsmart a lot of old folks. Or maybe, just maybe, we’re the smart ones. We know enough to know we don’t need them.

Any time I have to unplug the various attachments from my TV – cable box, DVD player, roku box – I have to photograph how it’s all hooked up, first, to protect myself from hours of frustration later; which I do, of course, with my digital camera. Yes, some unfamiliar familiar things, I must confess, are wonderful. I still have my mother’s 1930s folding camera, but you don’t have to go back much more than twenty years to remember the slow, cumbersome, expensive processes accompanying the old film cameras

Indeed, Culture Shock is not necessarily a bad thing. It challenges us, focuses our brains, and stimulates adrenaline.

But Old Age is a worrisome place. We worry not only about our own futures, but also those of our offspring, our country, and indeed the world. With the threat of climate change hanging over us, we worry about the very survival of the human race. I think all “wrinklies”, throughout human history, have had the same worries for the future. Growing up, I heard my grandparents and parents, and many others of their generations, say things like, “Even though I lived through two World Wars I’m so glad I lived when I did. I dread to think what the future holds…”

I suppose they worried over the propensity of atom and hydrogen bombs and the Cold War; the rapidly increasing numbers of unmarried mothers and divorces, the exponential increases in crimes of all kinds but especially violent crimes, and the unheralded rush of people to the ever-expanding sinful cities. But we survived everything they worried about, and more. We dealt with it, so why don’t we have faith in our grandchildren that they will handle a changing challenging world just as we did, and all will be well? This future-fear just seems to go with the territory. I bet there were oldies sitting round campfires shaking their heads over the invention of the wheel, and surely Adam and Eve knew that the Garden was going to need environmental protection from the ravening hordes of the younger generations.

We can’t see the future and so we fear no good will come of it. We prefer, more and more the longer we live in Old Age, the past. And probably we remember it through ever more rosily tinted glasses. The journey to Old Age seems shorter, more condensed, as I age. My sense of time past is a little skewed. Not long ago I chanced to refer, to some young thing, to the fact that we all remember where we were when Kennedy was shot. The look I got caused me to pause for calculation. Of course, not only was this teenager not yet born on that dark November day in 1963: neither were his parents.

But there is one wonderful, wonderful, thing about life in Old Age. I am finally, completely, at peace with who I am, relaxed comfortably in my skin, and I believe many other oldies are too. And I am not just talking about GLBT people; I think it’s true for many of any persuasion. After what for some has been almost an entire lifetime’s struggle, we can relax. We know who we are, we are who we are, and we are all done apologizing for it, even, or perhaps especially, to ourselves. It’s something of a paradox, as I have just said that I sometimes can scarcely recognize this oldie me. But I am more than simply the sum of all I feel, see, hear, and do.

Deep inside my spirit is untouched by Culture Shock. I am at peace.

© 23 November 2012

 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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.