Tag: LGBTQA

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Acceptance, by Ray S

Ever since I was old enough to reason, or maybe un-reason, my person has been split right down the middle. Picture an amorphous form waiting to take its shape of the character in this scene or act of the particular time in my life of this play. It is like going onstage when you hear your cue, sort of sink or swim, and you keep looking for direction and there isn’t any. Then a lot of directors appear, the play becomes complicated, and the form becomes an enigma.

In another scene there develops the discovery of the body and other like bodies. At this time it is taken for granted; no awareness of the condition except it is pleasurable and fun. (Boys will be boys.) It will be in another scene when labels appear—like pansy and sissy. “Queer” wasn’t a popular term at this time.

All the while the other side of this split enigma was craftily shaped into an acceptable heterosexual form. The deep seated need to fit in and be like everyone else took over and a fully, if not flawed, developed actor emerged on the stage. If there was any conflict burdening this act, it was sufficiently ignored so as to successfully convince this actor and his companions that he was a he. There never was an option if you had to play this role.

The big scene (known as chewing the scenery in theater talk) came when the subjugated enigma half rises in protest, and we see the two halves shouting at each other. The straight one screams, “I don’t want to be gay!” The gay half waits patiently through this anguished tantrum until his accomplice, Eros, rears his head.

All the while a play within a play has been unfolding. Everyone goes to college, everyone has a sweetheart—hetero that is. Every sweetheart finally secures an invitation to matrimony. The act and actors are quite convincing. It is all going well according to the traditional storyline, even to the advent of the securing or arrival of an heir and heiress.

Meanwhile Hetero and Homo carry on their secret conspiracy, and the act progresses. The final act or death scene arrives for the actor playing the role of the long-suffering wife.

According to tradition there is a play script for how to get into the sincere role and character of the bereaved.

If you look closely, the enigma halves have started to merge. Still, as a result of living a lifetime of the many roles this show has required, there remains a deep resentment from having had the guilt tacked on to the charade that this bit of theatre produced.

For a curtain call at the end of this drama, a person has emerged onstage to declare, “I am me.” I celebrate my gay place in its entire acceptance knowing that it is my life and not the lives of all those other characters I tried to fit into.

It has been a long, tedious story to relate, the play filled with regrets and joys, but the best result in this script is finally being able to be me. Like it or not!


 © 21 December 2015

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Solitude, by Phillip Hoyle

Little Tony stopped by to save me from my solitude. I actually have a lot of it even though I live with two other people. They tend to be quiet; I tend to go off to my art studio or to my computer, and sometimes I just watch TV alone.

Tony’s text Saturday evening had read, “R u and jim at the bc tonite? I could use a drink or 2.”

I responded, “Sure. What time?”

“I’m almost home. Maybe 15 or 20.”

“Ok probably just me but I will invite Jim. Park at the house. See u soon.”

At the Black Crown we discovered singers doing their best to the piano accompaniment of a player who surely was doing her best, but their bests attracted neither Tony nor me. He suggested a bar downtown, so we drove to it where he drank three mixed drinks to forget the anger a work situation had produced in him the day before. The bar was full of young people. Like so many times in my Denver years I was the oldest patron present. I drank a beer as we talked about a number of common memories.

We left just in time to avoid getting a parking ticket and drove south out of downtown. On Broadway we stopped by a bar where years ago we used to go dancing. Even though the lights were really nice and the music quite acceptable, only one lonely or independent man was dancing. Tony smoked a cigarette, and then we left.

We drove back downtown to the X Bar where I knew there would be lots of activity. The place featured very loud music, video images, and many people dancing. Tony insisted on buying another drink. I said, “Sure, a Miller Lite for me.”

We stood around listening to the music, looking at the young people, mostly gay and lesbian, a few transgender folk, probably undetectable bisexuals as well. Perhaps a few straight couples out for something different on a Saturday night. The energy of the place was high.

We talked swaying a little and finally he began to dance a little, somewhat like years ago when we went week after week to the Denver Compound to dance on Saturday nights. I saw his characteristic moves and began doing my own.

A young Hispanic guy started dancing alongside us, enjoying what I took to be his favorite song. He was cute, fun to watch, moved like the supplest of sinews, and as he danced, smiled with beautiful face and dimples. We enjoyed his movements and beauty. We danced for about twenty minutes. Then a young woman came up to me and began to dance with me, to touch me, to actually feel me up. I thought, uh oh, this one has had too much to drink, but we danced as best we could. Then I noticed my friend Tony was dancing with a young man, someone maybe his own age or close to it. I was so pleased for Tony. He needs to be dancing with someone not old enough to be his father, and he seemed to love it. I had a bit of conversation with the young woman as we kept dancing. Then the guy who had been dancing with Tony came over to me, and we started dancing. The woman started dancing with Tony. I learned some things about them, that she, a single mother, was his best friend, that he was living with his mother in Albuquerque due to the breakup of a 20-year long relationship in New York and to her disintegrating health, that he had driven up to see her and take her out since she rarely has the opportunity to do much of anything besides work and take care of her two-and-a-half year old, that he’d really like to get laid but couldn’t because he was with her, that they assumed Tony and I were a couple, and they wondered how long.

Finally Tony and I told them goodnight, left the bar, and he drove me home. I recall looking at the time as we were leaving—1:39 a.m. I hadn’t almost closed a bar for many years. In fact, I hadn’t been out dancing for several years. I realized just how much I miss the activity. I had danced a lot in my first five years in Denver, almost always the oldest man on the floor. With Tony I learned to be very expressive in the dance. He and I always enjoyed our evenings out.

Tony dropped me off at the house and said he’d wait until I got in the door. What is he? A youngster taking care of the elderly? Anyway, I waved from the doorway as he pulled away.

I hurried to the basement where my computer was waiting. There I began this story of my temporary delivery from solitude and, of course, sat alone as I typed, enjoying being alone just as much as I loved dancing with my friend and the other youngsters.

Denver, © 2013

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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Over the River and through the Woods, by Ricky

In my case, the title should be Through the Woods and Over the River. In the 1960’s no one advised me about anything not related to schoolwork. Therefore, I remained confused about my personal, physical, and mental development. I did not even know that my emotional development was deficient. I was naïve about such things and could not see my orientation because “the trees were blocking my view of the forest.”

Metaphorically speaking, I lived my life in the “woods” until the trees began to “thin out” in 1982.

I finally made it through the woods and out into the open during the summer of 2010 when I finally reviewed all the trail signs together and arrived at the conclusion that I am on the correct trail. However, I faced another obstacle – should I cross the river in front of me or remain near the woods for safety.

For the vast majority of my life, I was in denial and did not believe the signs often posted along the trail I was walking. After I accepted that the signs were correct, I pondered for several months if I even wanted to cross that wide and foreboding river.

Eventually, I did cross it when I told the members of my therapy group; I am out of the woods and now across the river. Strangely, when I looked back after that meeting, the “mighty” river appeared to be nothing more than a small creek easily walked over.

All the time I spent fearing the crossing equaled time wasted. My fears were real enough but in my case, groundless and now I am healing mentally and emotionally.

I know others will have similar experiences with woods and rivers just as I know some others will have vastly different experiences. In life, a person will face many rivers that need crossing and perhaps there will be many woods or even forests to pass through.

Different trails have varying opportunities for growth, experiences, development, satisfaction, self-awareness, and offer different or strange woods, and rivers. The trick is to select a trail that matches one’s personality, abilities, understanding of the terrain ahead, dedication, preparation, and skills, or the journey may not be very enjoyable.

I hope everyone’s journey is successful and a reasonably pleasant stroll compared to a difficult, stress filled, and dangerous climb, or with river crossings filled with turbulent rapids and packed with piranha.

© 25 June 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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Mom and Her Mom and I, by Phillip Hoyle

Just what are we to think about boys who seem as much girl as boy? I once heard a psychiatrist analyze how Freud’s laying the blame on the parents for the inability of some males to resolve the Oedipus-related developmental challenge in early childhood moved responsibility away from the homosexual child. Freud’s analysis thus called for improvements in therapy for homosexual men. That sounded nice, but then the psychiatrist I was listening to laid more blame upon the doting mother and less on the emotionally absent father. Moms! Poor moms!

I tend not to be Freudian or neo-Freudian, but I am always interested in how domestic upbringing influences any child and particularly with regard to his or her sexual needs and attitudes. So I am curious about how my parents coped with and responded to challenges of rearing me, a skinny boy whose interest in girl things was rather plain to see, whose penchant for the artistic persistent, and whose lack of physical coordination or upper body strength kept him out of sports. So I want to tell three short stories that somewhat address the theme of “Mom” but also keep me wondering.

I

One Christmas my mom’s mom gave me a baby doll as a gift. I named him Andy probably following the lead from the only boy doll I had ever hear of, Raggedy Andy brother, I assumed, of Raggedy Ann. My boy baby doll came with clothing my grandmother had made. I recall a plaid shirt and denim-like slacks. He was one of those babies made of rubber and if you worked hard enough you could pull off its arms and legs and even its head. Then if you worked even harder, you could reassemble the little thing. It was approximately nine inches tall.

Andy looked just like my sisters’ baby dolls except that he had brown skin and black hair whereas theirs had pinkish skin and blond or light brown hair—not wigs, simply hair stamped into the rubber and lightly painted. I don’t recall if the eyes were inserted or painted (probably the latter since I remember them as being black) but I do recall they didn’t open and close like my sisters’ fancier Terri and Terri Lee dolls.

I sometimes wonder what Grandma and Mom were thinking. I never thought to ask either of them. They were very bright women, both educators. Surely they had talked about the present before it showed up under the Christmas tree. I’m sure they had noticed I played with my sisters’ dolls. Perhaps they thought I ought to have a boy doll so I would somehow know I was a boy? I’m sure there was some application of logic in their decision to give me that boy doll years before Barbie and Ken appeared under anyone’s Christmas tree.

I played with Andy but have no recollection when I got him, how long I had him, or when I left off playing with him. I don’t know whatever happened to the doll. Perhaps he was adopted by a nice Black family. I don’t even know if Andy was actually a boy doll or if he was simply dressed as one. I was intrigued that Grandma had made his clothes designing, cutting, and sewing them herself just like she did for my older sisters’ dolls. I don’t know if Andy’s shirt buttoned on the girl side or the boy side, but I am pretty sure there were no boy baby doll clothes to purchase from any store in our town.

II

When Mom was a child, she was taught to sew by her mom. I loved to see mom at work using her portable Singer sewing machine at the kitchen table. I loved even more Grandma’s Singer in its oak console, iron frame, and a treadle that we kids sometimes got to pump. When I was fifteen and we moved into a larger house, Mom got her own Singer in a console that sat in the utility room. It was powered by electricity with a foot control that reminded me of a small automobile accelerator. Grandma came to see us, and I asked her to help me make leggings for one of my Indian outfits. She did it and in the process taught me to cut, sew, hem, and more. I liked sewing and bought cloth and a pattern for a war shirt and a vest. Later I sewed a Cheyenne style dress for my next younger sister and decorated it with imitation elk teeth. When I had questions about sewing, I asked Mom to help me. Somehow playing Indian allowed me to do even more girl things. I never once heard a word of disparagement or caution from my mom or my grandma. I’m pretty sure I didn’t talk at school about sewing!

III

When I was an adult, Grandma told me a story about my childhood. She had been worried about me growing up around all those sisters, but she said she quit worrying one day while she was taking care of us. I had come into the kitchen where she was working. She claimed that by the time I had walked through the house I had all four of my sisters crying. I am not sure I like the story’s idea of what makes for a real man, but it does indicate that in her eyes I had enough ego strength or whatever was necessary to carry on with my life—queer or otherwise. She quit worrying.

I’m happy for her, pleased with my own life, happy I know how to sew; but still I wonder.

Denver, 2013

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

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Preparation, by Phillip Hoyle

So many years of schooling
So many books to read
So many papers to write
So many exams to take and pass

So many programs to plan
So many choirs with anthems to know
So many sessions to prepare
So many hymns and responses

So many family things to do
So many trips to plan
So many changes to embrace
So many needs to understand

I had learned to make all these preparations for school and work and family, but nothing prepared me for being gay. One would think with so many institutions and people in my life I’d have been prepared. Education? Church? Parents? No help anywhere. The man who sexually molested me said I wouldn’t have to masturbate after I got married; even homo-he didn’t have a clue!

My parents told me nothing. I don’t know what they even knew about homosexuality let alone transgender and intersex, but I suppose my dad knew something given his over-emotional reaction when one of my sisters pointed at a guy we passed on the street and said, “He’s a queer.” Well I guess I did learn something from the event: watch what you say around your parents. But I had already learned that from years in school and church and as a result already sported three English vocabularies appropriate to various settings.

I don’t know how old I was when the queer word was spoken although I’d heard its old-fashioned usage as odd like my grandmother said and I had heard it in its pejorative use in school—well on the playground there. But the truth of the word’s meaning was obscured by silence and anger. What did I imagine? I don’t know. I was probably a sixth grader at the time.

Norms of behavior were taught everywhere. Fortunately for me, my family accepted, affirmed, and tolerated unusual persons, but their conditions were like being uneducated, of another race, from another country, in a less than honorable profession, developmentally challenged, blind, crippled, or of different religious commitments. There were no GLBT persons. The guy who my sister called queer was developmentally disabled, the second child of a family living in poverty. Who knows if he was actually homosexual or not? Perhaps he was. I never heard anything about it. The two developmentally challenged boys from that family were called any number of things, but my dad gave them rides home from church and treated them with respect.

My only preparation for my inevitable encounter with GLBT folk or culture was to emulate my parents: to be kind, to “do unto others” as the phrase goes. In my case it was also to discover that even though I generally fit in well with my peers, I myself was other. Eventually I realized my only real preparation for gay life was to love myself, to do unto myself as I had been taught to value and love the others.

Hebrew tradition explicated in ancient documents how to treat strangers within the community. The code was based on the notion—really an ethnic memory—that we were once strangers. Thus we treat others like we wish we had been treated. It’s a powerful image for social reform, one I didn’t hear a breath of in the first presidential candidate debate the other night although I heard lots of religious posturing and self-righteousness. From the point of view of being an outsider, this treatment of strangers serves as the fulcrum of ethics—at least for me.

I wonder what would have happened when my sister said queer about the kid if I had piped up and said, “So am I.” I didn’t say anything and nothing happen, but I did learn the major lesson that prepared me to successfully live a gay life: keep your ears open to language and feelings, both blatant and nuanced. It is a lesson of safety and eventually of self acceptance.

I’m pleased I came from a family that did not harbor many fears, thus my ability to appreciate and embrace others different than I and especially those different like I am different, and just as important I learned to clarify that difference within me. Lucky me, to have learned a use of an ancient and religious value that opened me to love rather than to judge others and myself.© Denver, 10 August 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

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Away from Home, by Pat Gourley

My initial thought on this topic centers around on what a great metaphor “Away From Home” is for being in the closet and that the coming out process is really a unique and one of a kind act of coming home. Not to torture the metaphor too much, but what the hell, the process of coming home is often a long and winding road but for the vast majority of us we emerge largely unscathed and powerful human beings as a result.

Coming Out is a growth enhancing and change creating process that I contend has virtually no parallel in the larger heterosexual world. I do not want to blow-off the struggles straight folk have in coming to grips with their own identities, particularly in their adolescent years, but they really are provided with many road maps and forms of social support that are simply non-existent for queers.

Unlike any other racial or cultural minority we are sprinkled throughout the entire human race and this gives us great power to upset the apple cart. Not to deny that some of us come out to less than open arms from biological family and hetero-friends, we still give even the most homophobic in our lives pause and on some level they too have to grapple with the fact that there is a queer person in their lives. More often than not this eventually turns out positive and very change creating in attitude and beliefs for those parents, children, siblings and friends we have just laid this bit of news on.

Even President Obama was able to express the power of the coming out process in his remarks following the recent Supreme Court ruling on marriage. He acknowledged that the phenomenal societal change in attitudes towards queer folk was due in large part to millions of us coming out in our own lives over the past several decades.

Though he didn’t say so specifically let me put words in the President’s mouth and state that it was not court rulings, legislation or even the political action of many groups both gay and straight that resulted in this historic shift in attitudes. It was the action of countless individuals deciding to make the brave step of coming out in their personal lives. Coming out is a necessary pre-requisite for our own LGBT activism. The personal action of coming out creates the ultimate “ripple-effect”. Let’s face it if a butterfly on the other side of the globe can flap its wings and change the weather on another continent just ponder for a moment the impact of millions of LBGT folks shouting from the roof tops “I am here and I am queer.”

In my own life it was my first sexual encounter, an extremely vanilla escapade involving mutual masturbation that created an overwhelmingly warm feeling of finally belonging. I was a high school senior being smothered in 1967 with heterosexual vapors wafting my way at every turn and having to make up the most bizarre tales to keep my cover intact. In hindsight I wonder who was really buying my bullshit.

The day after this life changing experience, which amazingly occurred with no guilt attached and for which I am eternally grateful to the wonderful man I jacked-off with, I left for a week in rural Mississippi with fellow members of my high school Peace Club. We went down to the rural south to be near and hopefully influenced by the cauldron of the Civil Rights movement. The purpose of the trip was to follow activists doing literacy work among the mostly black folks in the poor towns of the rural bayou country of Mississippi.

That sexual high and sense of finally belonging has lasted until this day. Oh there were a few months of a detour in 1970 thinking I could maybe change to being straight after all. This involved a few disastrous sessions with a straight psychotherapist who I soon realized was much more fucked up than I was. As I recall though I quickly came to my senses after meeting a sweet man in one of the college gym showers on a Friday evening and going to his home for a delicious home-made beef stew and great sex play, ah the endless joys of coming home.

© August 2015

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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Life is Experimental!, by Pat Gourley

The title for today’s group was “Any Writing is Experimental”. I guess I would say to that I hope so. Something experimental is based on “untested ideas or techniques not yet established or finalized”. Any other writing would seem to be merely regurgitating someone else’s thoughts. I would though like to expand on this theme and say that all life is experimental, especially when it is queer.

Life is quite the dicey proposition when you think about it – you only get this one chance at it, the fanciful notion of reincarnation aside. It really is all about trial and error from start to finish.

We queers though are masters at experimentation since how we are predisposed to live our lives and grow and develop in ways not sanctioned by society as a whole. We really are constantly in a test drive mode especially in our first few decades. We have to experiment since we are not given any road map and in fact constantly have to re-evaluate, sometimes even withdraw and then come at it again from an angle often more suitable to survival. You really can’t ogle your young peers in the grade school locker room and proffer an innocent wink and get away with it.

I am not saying that growing up hetero is not without its fair share of experimentation but let’s face it they have many more societally sanctioned suggestions and institutional support on how to proceed. And this hetero support starts quite early in life where as we LGBT people often can’t find the support needed to validate our life’s experiments until we at least reach late adolescence and for many of us it comes even much later in life.

That really is the role (identity validation) of Queer Community Centers like the one we are in today and that would apply programmatically right down to this very group we are sitting in this afternoon. Our experimental and often very successful efforts at creating our own institutions, that foster and support gay identity, are really quite remarkable. These efforts are fostered and sustained by our individual coming out process and then the very altruistic pay back to help others along the path. And I would emphasize how truly grassroots they are with minimal outside support financial or otherwise.

Hopefully we will bring our true sense of experimentation to the institutions of marriage and the military, which we have recently gained some tentative access to. Both are sorely in need of all the queer sensibility we can muster and bring to them.

I would close with an anecdote that I think underscores my points here. Last week was the first time I ran into an old friend named Tom at this group. We frequently run into each other at the gym and have for decades. When we spoke mid-week last week at the “Y” he related to me the sense of deja-vu he had on seeing me here at Story Telling last Monday and it made him recall our first meeting 40 years ago. I was apparently the first or one of the first folks he spoke with when he walked into the Gay Community Center on Lafayette Street back in the mid-1970’s. Though he didn’t specifically say so I hope it was a pleasant recollection that brought back pleasant memories and not a dreadful sense of “boy, are we in a fucking rut”!

© July 2015

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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Multi-Racial, by Lewis

I am actually ashamed to say that I have almost nothing worthwhile to say about the subject of racial diversity. I have heard the demographers’ predictions about the U.S. becoming a “majority minority” racial country within 30-40 years. The America I grew up with was so heterogeneously white that it was more common to see pastel linen sheets on the clothesline than it was to pass a person of color on the street. Hutchinson, Kansas, was bisected by two sets of railroad tracks. Anything south of the “lower” set of tracks might as well have been Mexico, as far as my family and friends were concerned.

One notable exception was the one black family that lived about two blocks away on the same street. Theirs was the old, white wood-sided farmhouse with the detached garage that was probably the oldest property on our long street. No doubt they were there before any of us white folk or else they wouldn’t have been at all welcome. Their kids were older and I never attended school with any of them. When I passed by, I usually paid them no mind, unless someone was in the yard and then I would stare to see what they looked like. Seemed nice enough. Had no horns that I could see.

When I was about 10, my parents paid the family’s teenage daughter to babysit me. Of all my babysitters, she is the only one I remember. I think I was feeling very uncertain of myself and stayed pretty much in my bedroom. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her other than, “Hi”.

All through primary and secondary school, I didn’t have a single friend of color. My elementary and junior high schools were all-white. The junior high was so white, I almost made the 9th grade basketball team. The first time I ever looked out at a group of kids my age and saw a black face was when I gave the invocation at a junior high school exchange assembly. Sherman Junior High was south of the color line.

I’m almost positive I was in high school before I ever passed a student of a different race in the hall. Rarely did I ever share a classroom with one. As I type this, it seems so dehumanizing to refer to human beings of a different color as “ones”, as if I were talking about aliens or primates. Yet, I never gave it a thought. That’s just the way the world was. Whites ruled and that’s the way God intended it.

Even in junior college and college, nothing happened to change my views on race. I was either a pre-med major or in engineering. Those are not majors whereby one was likely to sit next to a person of color in those days.

I was shaken by the Detroit riots in 1967, not because I thought the “niggers were getting uppity” but because somewhere, deep inside, I understood. How was it that I felt that way? Why wasn’t I outraged like most of my friends and the folks quoted in the newspapers? After all, wasn’t I a person who enjoyed the perks of “white privilege” (though white folk would never acknowledge such a thing existed)? When Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated the following spring, I wished the white on my skin would wash off. I saw my own race as filled with hate and spite and a sense of entitlement.

You can imagine how uncomfortable, how awkward it was for me not to know anything about what being black was like and resenting the color that I was stuck with. It was kind of like—shit, it’s just hitting me now—it was like knowing that I wasn’t attracted to the gender that I was supposed to be attracted to but instead having feelings of deep attraction for members of the gender that was “verboten”. If my friends and family knew that I was “queer”, a “homo”, a “fag”, wouldn’t they treat me as badly or even worse than if I were black?

The experience of knowing how badly people of color had been treated for centuries colored forever my perceptions of American history and the differences among the races economically, socially, and politically. My politics became almost radicalized, though the demands of school and then finding employment kept my activity to a minimum for a few years. Although I grew up in a state that was purple and is now deep red, I still cannot understand how any human being who has felt what I felt—the deep sense of rejection for what I held to be most true in the deepest recesses of my heart—could possibly vote Republican. All of those who have been victimized by prejudice by the powerful should stand shoulder-to-shoulder until such time as justice for one means justice for all.
© 13 April 2015

About the Author

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.

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Being Gay Is … by Phillip Hoyle

For me being gay started out as a tricky process. My childhood explorations of things sexual left me clear that I liked sex with male peers. Oh, I liked girls a lot—quite a few of them—but then I was living into societal, cultural, and biological norms that sought something more than friendships between males and females. I assumed I would take a wife, and luckily I found a superb one. Still, I knew that I was sexually somehow needy in a way my wife would never approach. I was dedicated to the marriage and to our two children and knew they would remain at the center of my life concerns

After age thirty I knew for sure my homosexual urges were not a side issue or a shadow self, but that the urges related directly and powerfully to my emotional and physical needs. I realized I was walking a rather perilous path with marriage, parenthood, career, and who knew what else at stake. I also knew I was in love with another man. So I opened myself to a bisexual world of my imagination and through a single male to male relationship and loads of reading began looking at what it might mean for me at some point in my life to live openly gay. Some years later—some twenty years later—I did just that.

Thinking that I should be living gay seemed a choice, yet the fact that I considered it and desired it seemed in no way a choice. So in essence, one might say, I am homosexual, and now in my existence I am gay. Perhaps that distinction seems inadequate, even a bit cant. I know many folk who would simply shake their heads no. But I think in this way in order to describe my experience, not to normalize or moralize it in any way.

I chose to be gay (my definition of a lifestyle) because this life most nurtures my needs. I find ironic the fact that I entered this full-time gay existence toward the end of my life, but I knew what I was doing and realized I had to do this in a loving way. My only regrets? That my life and choices have sometimes hurt other people. But my knowledge of life shows that such pains always occur in human relationships. My wife and I had a long run, produced and reared two fine and interesting people, and we all remain loving and supportive of one another.

My idea serves only as a simplistic background to what I want to tell you now—the really important things!

For me, being gay is:

          A great relief
          A real hoot
          A dubious mark of distinction I wouldn’t trade for anything
          The most sensible thing I have done in my life although I have done many sensible things
          A connection with a vast and varied community
          An experiment in life quality, and
          A beautiful, heartfelt experience.

© Denver, 2014

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

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Nowhere, by Gillian

This is going to be very repetitive for some of you who have been part of this group for some time, but I’m not going to apologize for that. When you have shared little pieces of your life story almost every week for about three years, even at seventy-something there just isn’t enough life to go round and a little repetition is inevitable! And, for all that I have had some practice, I doubt that I shall be able to express this whole thing any more clearly this time around. As far as explaining it, I don’t even try.

So …. nowhere is pretty much where I was for the first 40-odd years of my life. I was living nowhere, going nowhere. You see, you have to be someone to be somewhere. And I was not.

Oh sure, I was a human body going about it’s business on this earth. But that’s all I was. I wasn’t real. The real me, my essence, my soul if you like, wasn’t with me. At least it wasn’t part of me: in me. For as far back as I can remember, maybe the age of about three or four, the real me hovered somewhere above or occasionally beside what I think of as the faux me. The real me simply watched. Observed. The faux me went on acting a part on the world wide stage, all the time knowing she was playing a part as the real me looked on. I thought perhaps everyone felt this way, though now I know better. In fact I have never once, since I have, only recently, started to try to describe all this, had anyone say to me,

“Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean! I felt the same way.”

Never.

The moment I came out to myself, at around forty, I literally felt the faux me and the real me merge. It was like an expertly guided boat bumping gently against the old worn wood of the dock. A softly whispered thunk, and my soul was safely home.

It has never left again.

I have no fear that it will.

I have, as I said, absolutely no explanation. It most certainly was not some schizophrenic kind of thing. I never felt like two people; just two separated parts of the same one. I never, rather to my regret, heard voices telling me what to do. I am actually rather resentful about that. Why did my soul sit silently like a lump on a log instead of offering a little guidance once in a while? I certainly could have used it. Or, giving her some benefit of the doubt, maybe she did. Without her I might still be in the closet. But if so, why didn’t she save me sooner? A case of, for everything there is a season, perhaps.

No, I never will understand it.

I never will be able to explain it.

I’m just so happy we are now united.

There’s a Country song, I’m Half Way to Nowhere.

“I’m half way to nowhere but it’s too late to turn back now.”

When I came out, I was half way from nowhere, and it was way too late to turn back.

And why would I?

I was finally whole.

I have finally found my way out of nowhere. I never intend to live there again.

© December 2014

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.