Tag: Life Stories

Posted on

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.

Posted on

The Long Wrong Road by Gillian

My mother thought it was the wrong road, anyway, this railroad rushing us off in the wrong direction. And I knew, in the way only a child can know these things, that it was all my father’s fault.

I was about four and we were leaving our comfortable home in a quiet village in the genteel gently rolling south of England for the untamed and unsophisticated rugged sheep farming hill country of the Welsh border, where my dad grew up. His parents were no longer capable of living alone, he was an only child with no one else to share the responsibility so he was doing the only thing he could do, as they categorically refused to move south to live with us. We had to go to live with them.

So Dad quit his job, something that became quite a hobby with him over the years, and we moved to another world.

My mother was not happy.

I was perfectly happy. Too young to have formed attachments to any place, I was simply reveling in this new train ride experience.

Travel having been severely restricted during World War Two, which had recently ended, I had never met any of my grandparents. I don’t think I quite grasped the concept. I certainly had no storybook image in my head of the classic rosy-cheeked plump and cuddly grandmother beaming over her flowered apron and offering fresh-baked cookies. Just as well. I would have been sorely disappointed. My grandmother was as eaten up with resentment towards my grandfather for years, as my mother was towards my dad on that train ride.

My mother’s ground to a halt not long after we arrived at the end of our wrong road, she adjusted as people do, but my grandmother kept her anger well fed and it flourished.

My grandfather was what we would call these days a recovering alcoholic. In those days he was just one of several local drunks. The fact that he no longer touched the booze seemed to be ignored and he was still thought of as a drunk by neighbors and family alike. Certainly my grandmother never gave him any credit, nor even acknowledgement, for having quit.

He had drunk his way out of a good job, lost the lovely old house that they had owned when my dad was a little boy, and had to settle for moving to the cold dark damp dreary dwelling I now found myself living in.

My grandfather rarely spoke, or moved for that matter. He sat in his armchair beside the fireplace, which rarely had a fire in it, hour after hour, doing nothing. For all the attention he paid us, we all might as well not have been there. At least he was harmless, unlike my grandmother. Far from showing even a spark of gratitude for my parents’ sacrifice, she acted as if she hated us all. She never spoke a civil word to anyone, but droned on with an endless litany of complaints. She walked with the aid of a cane, and any time I was foolish enough to get anywhere near her she took a vicious swipe at me with the thing. I learned very fast to stay a good cane-length away!

You might possibly think that she and my mother, both resenting having been forced down that long wrong road by their husbands, might have bonded a little but this was most certainly not to be. That house was not a place of bonding.

Looking back after I had come to know my maternal grandparents I can certainly appreciate how hard all this was on my mother. Her parents were very different. Her mother actually did approach the storybook image, and my Irish maternal grandpa was one of the delights of my later youth. He was a stonemason, creating gravestones from the local marble. I loved to sit and watch him, and occasionally I was even allowed to help. He sang while he worked, or regaled my fascinated ears with endless fantastical tales in which I doubt there was an ounce of truth.

They lived in a gorgeous rambling old house, built in 1742. It was light and warm with welcome, and different in every way from that of my other grandparents, the one in which I was to grow up. But I was just a kid, and I was oblivious to all the negatives of our new life. With the exception of that flailing walking stick, I loved it all. We had dogs and cats and chickens and pigs and a goat. Surrounded by farms, I was free to wander wherever I chose as long as I carefully closed all farm gates. I made friends with staring-eyed sheep and slobbering cows and hairy-hoofed horses. What did I care if the house was dark and cold, had no running water, no electricity, no indoor toilet? Having to shiver my way to the far end of the yard, stumbling in the waving flashlight beam, to the rickety old outhouse, was all fuel to the fire of my new life adventure.

My grandfather died not long after our arrival and my mother commented that she rather expected my grandmother to dance on his grave. I couldn’t imagine this at all and quite looked forward to it but in the event she did not even go to his funeral.

My grandmother, I never called her grandma either out loud or in my head, died about two years later. I could well imagine my mother dancing on her grave, and she did attend the funeral but simply looked suitably somber.

Now we were free to return to the civilized south. I lived in terror of this announcement for some time, life was much more fun on the wild Welsh border as far as I was concerned, but eventually I realized I need not worry. By that time, my mother had returned to teaching in the nearby elementary school where she taught before marrying my dad. My dad had a good job not too far away, we made improvements to the house, and we stayed. But somehow it felt as if my grandmother’s misery had invaded the very walls. She would not go away.

Years later, home for Xmas from college, I was helping my parents clear out the old cellar and what should surface but that gnarled old walking cane. I held it up and we all started to laugh. My dad took it from me and calmly sawed it into four short pieces, which he handed solemnly to me. Without a word, we went back upstairs into the living room where these days a hearty fire roared, and I equally solemnly placed the lengths of wood on the fire. Silently we watched until they were completely consumed. My grandmother was gone.

© October 2011 

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.

Posted on

Goofy Tales by Will Stanton

When it comes to goofy, I suppose that all of us act goofy at various times and to varying degrees. If each of us were to document all of our goofiness and write it down, it would take up as many volumes as the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Goofiness may become a problem only if it is extreme or if the number of goofs outweighs the more constructive behaviors. Sometimes, we become so used to our own goofiness that we fail to notice it. We become more aware of behavior and situations that appear to us to be goofy when they are from other people or from different cultures.

Speaking of different cultures, it used to be said in Britain, “The sun never sets on the empire.” I once saw in a movie a character of a patriotic teacher pointing to a large world map on the wall, and she said, “Here’s a pink bit. There’s a pink bit. See all those pink bits? That’s all ours.”

Well, it isn’t any more. Yet for years, patriots stubbornly clung to the illusion of empire long after the Victorian age, long after the devastating Great War. My being a Yank in the U.K., I saw much evidence of this fact when I was attending university there in years gone by.

Apparently, all universities and colleges harbored Oxbridge delusions, tattered remnants of traditions long outmoded. For example at dinner in our all-male dormitory, we were obliged to wear cap and gown. What for? Did doing so make us any more scholarly? Any more mature and well behaved? Well, I suppose that traditions might have their place, but I thought that this one was goofy because it did not.

In this country what we refer to as “RAs, dormitory residence assistants”, the Brits called “tutors.” One such tutor had, what we might call, a “special friend” who frequently was in his company. Their companionship was not unobserved among the students. All it took to reveal the lack of gravitas and decorum among the gown-clad scholars was for the tutor to enter the dining hall, to be pelted with buns, and be subjected to catcalls of “Batman, where’s Robin?” Those scholars could act goofy at the drop of a mortarboard cap.

The antiquated concept of social class remained ingrained in many people’s minds, including the college hierarchy. There was in the dining hall, what they called, “high table” which literally was built to be higher than the main floor where most of the groundlings sat. The dorm proctor there was called by the ominous title of “warden.” He always sat right in the center seat at high table. In descending order of importance on either side were any guests of rank, followed by a few selected students (who naturally felt obliged to show their deep appreciation for having been invited), next the tutors, then Miss Prem the resident nurse (yes, the dorm had a nurse, just like British public schools such as Eaton and Harrow), and finally the woman who ran the “buttery,” that is, the little shop of sundry supplies.

Of course, the residence porter, who carried luggage and whose tiny office guarded the dorm entrance, and the maids who made up our single rooms, never were invited. To have included them would have been terribly déclassé.

If any student received a cherished invitation to sit at high table, he soon found that the evening’s fare was of higher quality and greater variety than the that of the lower tables. If the students were eating cod, then high table was served better haddock. Those at high table afterwards walked with a sense of entitlement to a special room upstairs that was referred to as “The Senior Common Room.” Once inside, one was confronted with trays of fresh fruits and cheeses. And of course, any English gentleman would expect to have sherry on hand, and it was…in several varieties from sweet to dry.

I discovered why the Brits refer to dessert as “pudding.” It often was just that, pudding poured over a bit of sponge cake. And do you know why they called their sausages “bangers?” Their contents consisted of so much fat and grain filler, rather than meat, that the contents would expand when heated, and the natural casings would explode. At first, my being used to American food, I thought that they tasted like a combination of fat, dryer lint, and sawdust. By end of term, I actually looked forward to having them for breakfast because they were not too bad in contrast to some of the rest of the food served to the students. At times, I felt like Oliver Twist regarding Mr. Bumble at high table and wondering what he was being served. That’s why I occasionally made the trek to the nearby fish-and-chips shop or the Chinese restaurant for a welcome variety. I never did understand why the Brits were proud of their cooking; but, then again, I never did eat at a five-star restaurant in London.

To borrow a word that, over time, has become less shocking to Brits, everyone and everything was so bloody formal. When we attended lectures, we sat in 19th-century halls usually limited to the viewing by us Yanks when portrayed in period-piece films on “Masterpiece Theatre.” Seating consisted of ranks of increasingly elevated rows. The professor (or “don”) would arrive with only a curt “good afternoon,” formal in his cap and gown, walk in a dignified manner to a podium, grandly open a folder with his prepared lecture, and read it to the students in impeccable English. (Actually, it would be nice if American teachers would learn good grammar and diction in addition to their own subjects.) Then he would close his folder with finality and stroll out of the room without a further word. The don did not expect the students to ask questions or to engage in any dialogue whatsoever. So much for an exciting, motivating lecture session.

In retrospect, I recall one day when I must have appeared to be goofy because of my ignorance of English culture and terminology. One local lad invited me to “tea.” I did not understand that, at the time he designated, he meant “high tea,” that is, dinner. Had I known, I would have brought a small gift for his mother, as was traditional. I would have been more at ease and better prepared for table conversation. His father was absent, and I sensed that he had been lost during the war. I later realized why the student had invited me and also why he had been rather quiet and self-conscious during the dinner, which did not help my own unease. He was attracted to me. I wish I had known better how to have handled that situation. For some time afterwards, I did feel inept and goofy.

I recall looking out the window of the main common room to the street below and seeing preparations being made for some minor construction project, perhaps for patching a pothole. In the U.S., that would have been done in five minutes and the crew gone. Instead, I saw a couple of workmen set up a work shack to store supplies and to provide shelter should the infamously frequent English rain occur. To my bafflement, that shack and, at times, one man were there for several days without obvious evidence of progress. I did see on one occasion, however, the lone workman, wearing a threadbare, cheap black suit and vest, preparing a pot of tea. No wonder it took so long to get anything done.

I imagine that a good percentage of university students prefer to drink and to drink a great deal, whether or not it technically is illegal, as it is in the U.S. for underage students. Well, the scholars there certainly liked to do so during their off-time. They might be serious in their studies, but when they came back from the local pubs, they put a new light on goofy. It was quite a site for me to see two sloshed scholars, arm-in-arm, dancing an Irish jig around and around on the commons green, singing at the top of their lungs.

The first student whom I met and one of the most memorable for me was the fellow whose room was on the floor above me, Ian from Edinburgh, Scotland. He said that he was a descendant of Cromwell. I first met him when he came flying through the French doors from the upstairs balcony into my room and gave me a hardy, “Hello!” He had just climbed down the face of the building. He took for granted the fact that he was a natural acrobat and the most lean, limber person I ever have known. That must have attracted his round-faced, pudgy girlfriend (that seemed to be a typical appearance of many local girls), because they spent every weekend together in his room, and they kept busy the whole time. I guess that opposites do attract. Ian was shocked and dismayed when Gupta, the East Indian student, read his palms and declared that Ian already had used up his sex life. His palms did look terribly old and creased, which was in marked contrast to his otherwise boyish looks.

I suppose that, somehow, the students I met did spend enough time and effort to acquire their sought-after degrees and, perhaps, make something of their lives. They could be quite serious when they wanted to, but at other times, their behavior suddenly could change. My whole time in Britain and at college provided me with many memorable experiences. Some of them were significant. Other experiences were just plain goofy; and, in some ways, I must have fit right in.

© 11 January 2013

About the Author


I have had a life-long fascination with people and their life stories. I also realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual ones. Since I joined this Story Time group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group. I do put some thought and effort into my stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.

Posted on

First Times by Ricky

A person has multiple “first times” in their life: first car, first bicycle, first breath of air, first fight, first argument, first joke told that was actually funny, first kiss, first kiss not from mom or dad, first romantic kiss, and et cetera. So, here are a few of my “firsts.”

My First Scary Dream at Age 0-1 Years

I see solid pale-green; like a “green screen” television screen which fills my entire field of view regardless of direction of looking, but I don’t look around and remain fixated on that pale-green. Then, I get a “funny feeling” in me; I don’t like it and tense up. I recognize the feeling as that of falling and I panic but don’t awaken. (I have heard that Freud equates “falling” with fears of sexual failure, which is stupid, as babies don’t have sexual knowledge sufficient to fear to perform correctly.) Years later, I learn to apply this dream to the times my father would toss me up in the air and catch me on the way down. To this day, I have much stress and fear of the negative gravity feelings brought on by roller coasters or other amusement park rides.

My First Girlfriend (Age 5)

Her name is Sandra Flora. With her curly hair, she looked like a 5-year-old Shirley Temple. I carried her kindergarten school photo in my wallet for many years into my adulthood before I finally managed to misplace it.

My First Boy Friend (Age 5-8)

His name is Michael Pollard and his sister is Joan. They both were near the same age as me and both are redheads complete with freckles. Mike lived across the street from my house on Mathews Avenue in Redondo Beach, California. We played together quite often. His father was a roofer and the family pickup truck always smelled of tar due to the “puddles” of dried tar in the truck bed. At age 6, Mike and I caught the city bus alone and rode it to the beach where we went into the roller-rink and played a game of pinball or two before we rode a bus back home. I don’t think either of our parents even knew we were gone for that 1 ½ hours.

My First Scary Movies in a Drive-in Theater (Age 4 or 5)

It was at a drive-in theater somewhere in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. There was the usual a double feature. One movie was “Rodan” and the other I think was titled “Them.” “Rodan” was a flying-dinosaur-type creature and regardless of the actual title, “Them” was about giant ants that made a nest in the sewers of Los Angeles. In that movie, James Arnes played an army colonel ordered to destroy the ants and the nesting queen. In any case, the monsters scared me so much that whenever one was on the screen, I would hide in the back seat and not look until one of my parents said it was okay. I guess I should say that I actually started to watch the first movie from the front seat between my parents. I guess I wasn’t very macho. During the intermission between movies, I walked to the refreshment “stand” to buy myself a piece of pie. The teenage attendant could not understand me very well and after explaining that they only had pizza pie sold me a piece placing it into a small box to take back to the car. Naturally, as I left the building I saw all the cars in front of me and wasn’t sure how to find my family’s car. I was lucky and found it after only a very mild panicking. When I got inside to eat my pie, I started to cry because it wasn’t pie. My parents ate it instead. I guess I didn’t understand the teenager either focusing on the word pie rather than the modifier “pizza,” which I didn’t know what it meant anyway.

My First Scary Visit to the Beach (Age 2 or 3)

The family went to the beach several times I’m told, but I only remember this one time and only then this one event. I was really cute in my blue little-boy bathing suit. You know the type; the ones that squeezed the front so tight whatever size “package” a toddler might have was squashed into not showing a bulge. I was playing in the sand right next to the water line where the waves would reach. Earlier, dad had taken me in deeper and we bobbed about and I played while safely held in his arms or hands. I must have decided to play in the water a bit so while my parents relaxed on their beach-towels a couple of yards away, I moved into water that was up to the middle of my lower leg (about 5 or 6 inches deep) during the maximum reach of the wave on the beach. A series of unexpectedly larger waves arrived and the first one knocked me down and rolled me along towards the shore. As I tried to stand, the retreating water kept pulling the sand out from under me and I went back out into the deeper 5 to 6 inch water. The next three waves did the same thing and then dad arrived and picked me up. Naturally I was crying because I was scared but I don’t know what of. To this day I am very uneasy around large deep bodies of water, including swimming pools. It took years before I could pass my First Class Scout badge by swimming 50 yards.

My First Award (Age 1)

During the summer of 1949, my family was living in Lawndale, California. The city parks & recreation department held a “Baby Show” that mother entered me into. I won a couple of 2nd place red ribbons and one blue ribbon. Mother questioned the judges about the red ribbons as I was clearly the first place baby in those two categories. The judges told her that they just could not award me all the blue ribbons because the one I did win was the “King of the Show” award for being the “best baby” overall. I still have the cardboard covered crown with gold foil and stick-on stars as well as the photo of me wearing the crown. Mom and dad must have been very proud to have a child to brag about. Interestingly though, my future wife was crowned “Queen” of her baby show that same summer in Ohio.

Crowned 5 August 1949
My First Crush (Age 10)

After living with my mother’s parents for 2 years, mom and my new step-father came to Minnesota to show off the newly-born twins and to bring me back with them to California; south shore of Lake Tahoe to be precise. I turned 10 two weeks later. When school started, puberty had already begun for me, but no one had any idea it had (there were no outward visible indications). I was assigned to a 5th grade class with a brand new teacher, Miss Herbert. Until I was picked up from the farm in May of 1958, I had not seen my mother in about 2 years so I missed her and my dad for that long. Now I was living with her and yet by October I was madly in love with Miss Herbert. She must have known or suspected because one day she arranged with my mother to take me to her house after school to work on a project for our classroom bulletin board. To say I was in overjoyed mode would be a gross understatement of how I responded to the situation. Miss Herbert offered me cookies and milk and then we got to work. Nothing sexual of any kind happened, but if she had tried to seduce me, I would have been putty in her hands. Then the forest ranger entered into her life and I told the other boys in my class that she was going to marry him, but they didn’t believe me. We started Christmas vacation and left the school leaving Miss Herbert behind and returned to Mrs. Walksdahl (the ex-Miss Herbert) as our same teacher. I also returned after a case of laryngitis had healed over the Christmas break. When it was over my voice had permanently changed, so I never went through the “squeaky” stage.

My First Time Sex (Age 10)

During the autumn of 1958 or the spring of 1959, I was alone playing bus driver in an old 1935-1940 style bus, which someone had turned into what we would call a motor home. I had done this during several weekends for about ½ hour each time before I got bored and quit for the day. One day, the second to the last time I ever went there to play, another boy showed up. He was 8 or 8 ½ as I recall. We took turns driving the bus and being the passenger. At one point, he told me that his older brother, who was 11 or 12, would make him suck his brother’s dick. I thought, “You can do that?” followed by “I want to try that.” So, I asked him if I could suck his dick and he refused my request at first but I kept asking so he gave in. I made him promise to not pee in my mouth and began to suck. It was a wonderful. About 2 minutes into the act, he saw an adult heading our way so we stopped.

My First Scary Movie on TV (age 40ish)

You may think that I would have seen many “scary” movies in the theater and TV by the time I was 40; and so I had. The difference was that by this time, my emotions were sufficiently “blocked” that my mind kept telling me its all fake so nothing was really scary. However, this movie got to me because I was now the father of four children, three of them girls, and in this movie there was a little girl (8-10) who was in danger throughout the movie. You may have seen it, the second Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver.

My First “Scary” Book that Unsettled My Mind for 3 Days (Age 62)

The book was titled, “Lost Boys,” written my Orson Scott Card a rather famous LDS author. It was one of his earliest works and according to him was inspired by Steven King’s “Pet Cemetery.” The story was rather slow to develop but all the elements were in place by the end. The story revolved around the family’s oldest boy; an 8-year old “perfect” child who became very sullen when the family moved to a new small town. The townspeople did not realize until well into the story that young boys were being abducted by an apparent serial killer. The ending had an unusual twist that totally unhinged me. I had wanted the boy to live and figured that he would be the one to expose the killer; and in fact, he did. So there was a partial happy ending but not one that I would have expected.
My First “Scary” Porn Story that Really Got to Me.  
(Age 57)

This one bothered me for a day or so because I could actually imagine that it could really happen unlike the story I related above. The premise of this story is that scientists actually identified a gay gene in human DNA. As a result, laws were passed that all male children reaching age 10 were tested to see if they carried the gene. If so, the child was either castrated by a doctor or nurse or a “clam shell” was fitted over the boy’s scrotum which could not come off as the opening was too small to pass the testicles. The “clam shell” device contained a small radioactive particle which eventually killed the testicles and they shriveled as they died until they were shriveled enough for the device to fall off the scrotum. Boys thus altered were sent to “summer” camps where they were all instructed in the details and methods of gay sex. At the completion of their training each boy was partnered with a known pedophile. As long as the man only interacted with his assigned boy, he was not prosecuted. If he strayed, nullification and life imprisonment awaited.

As I said at the beginning, I can actually see where this could happen if a gay gene is actually found. Thus, it really bothered me for a day or two.

© 23 January 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

Posted on

Flying by Ray S

So what’s flying?
Well it’s a word for starts.
It’s what birds do and Icarus did.
Never fly close to the sun or temptation.

Some people do it in airplanes as transport.
Sort of like skipping on board in steerage class like the folks on the Lusitania; but now they only have three classes.

One can have worldwide war by flying.
The Walendos do it all the time; and so do the Cirque people.
There are two commonly used expletives that are flying all the time.

Didn’t you ever have fleets, as in flying of fancy?
Flying from reality, sorrow, lost love, and lovers’ unmet expectations.
Freedom when you fly out your worst nightmare, your dark little closet, ad infinitum. 

See how love flies at your heart and other vital body parts.
Sometimes I fly with you when your memory is close to me.
Those sweet moments we shared: our first Christmas, your tears when I showed you our first apartment in a basement with US Army surplus bunk beds, the two times we went to meet our social worker and collect our new family; first Jimmy and then Carolyn.

Flying can be the way we feel when the music of the symphony envelopes us.
Or the home team wins,
Or when a wrong or injustice has been righted.
Do you see that star flying across the midnight sky? I wonder if it is one of our loved ones. They say the soul is forever and when it wants to, it makes itself known to you.
When is the last time you flew into a rage?
Usually that amounts to a pointless solution and a lousy flight.

Flying is what I like to do on my magic carpet. Come on board with me, there’s plenty of room.
To quote Margo Channing of cinema fame: “Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a rough ride.”
But that’s what flying through our respective lives is all about.

—Happy Landing! 

9/30/2013

About the Author

Posted on

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

Posted on

Remembering by Betsy

I can’t remember if it’s always been like this, but lately “remembering” issues are cropping up all the time. I’ll think of something I have to do and two minutes later I’ve completely forgotten it and I’m on to something else. Often I’ll list in my head a number of chores and tasks that are absolutely necessary and important to get done right away. So important that I decide that I simply MUST make a list immediately of all the items. Then within minutes I have forgotten to make the list, I have forgotten most of the chores and I’ve been completely distracted by a totally unrelated activity. When I’ve completed that activity, I can’t remember any of the other items that I was going to write on a list that I can’t remember if I have written and if I have written it I certainly can’t remember where the list is.

Having described this state of affairs, I am left scratching my head and saying, “This person lives in a state of constant confusion.” But it’s not like that really. It’s because I am very focused on what I am doing that the other things are forgotten–until I’m finished with what I’m focused on. Again I can’t remember if it’s always been like this.

They say that in our old age we forget things. But I have to wonder if it’s not just memory overload. After all an 80 year old has four times as much to remember as a twenty year old. Shouldn’t that alone make it harder to recall things

When it comes to remembering the past, I often wonder why it is that we have a clear picture in our memories of select incidences. What is it about those particular happenings that make them memorable. For me, it could be a good experience or a bad experience or a rather bland experience. But, for some reason, that memory is the one I access. For some it seems memories of the past are readily available and for others never available.

Perhaps it is a basic talent of sorts for some. I see this in my 3 children who all are of normal intelligence, but one has ready access to memories the others do not.

Then some are predisposed to remember numbers, others remember names, some remember music better than others. 

Then there is inherited memory. An all-consuming topic for the modern psychologist interested in the study of memory. On that subject: someone once suggested to me that I have a phobia for snakes because when I lived in a tree, in a past life, a snake got me. Yikes! I’m glad I don’t remember that!

Most of what I think about memory is based on observation or belief. I have very few facts. The human brain being the complicated “animal” that it is will be the enigma that it is to the lay person for many years to come–at least I believe it will.

Enough rambling about remembering. It’s time to check “write about remembering” off my list and start a new list of what to do next.

© 11 March 2013

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.

Posted on

Summer Camp by Ricky

I went to a Boy Scout summer camp only six-times: twice as a camper, once as a staff member, and thrice as a substitute adult leader.

The first three times were all at Camp Winton along the Bear River Reservoir near Jackson, California. Two of the last three were at Camp Sol-Meyer (near the Fort McKavett Historical Site) and the last at Camp Fawcett (on the Nueces River near Barksdale), both camps in Texas.

I was 15 the first time I went to camp. Our Scoutmaster, Bob Deyerberg, was there the whole week and two other adults took half a week each to be with us. We worked on rank advancement, crafts, swimming, canoeing, relaxing, and enjoying a week away from home with many friends at once. It was like an extended weekend campout. I bought a moccasin kit and assembled it before I went home.

The next year I was 16 when we went. One weekend before the camp opened, myself, our Scoutmaster, and three other members of our troop were there for a three-day work detail to prepare the camp for opening. The we were there because at the previous Spring Camporee, we had all been “tapped out” (pushed violently from behind) from a council-fire circle to be inducted into the Order of the Arrow (a BSA honor society). The induction ceremony is held at the summer camp pre-opening work detail weekend. It was called The Ordeal. And so and ordeal it was. But also mostly fun.

When our week to arrive at camp that year was upon us, none of our adult dads could stay at camp with us, so a rather new to our troop 19-year old assistant Scoutmaster stayed with us. We enjoyed the same activities as the previous year except it was not quite as fun when back at our campsite due to the assistant Scoutmaster. He was rude and obnoxious and most of us were afraid of him because he carried a large knife of the Jim Bowie style but not as large. Unfortunately, he liked to brandish it and would poke our backsides with the point, if we were not watching. When our Scoutmaster and other fathers came to get us, myself and the boys in the car I was riding in all complained about him and at the next troop meeting the other adults told him that he must leave the troop. He was disappointed but we all were relieved.

I did not go to camp when I was 17 because the dates conflicted with my father’s 30-days in the summer visitation rights. My Scoutmaster did mail me a postcard from camp, which came in the mail while I was gone. I always thought it was a very nice thing to do. He really liked me.

At age 18, I was on the staff of the camp. I worked in the commissary section making sure each troop received and turned in all issued cooking gear. I also ensured that each troop received the correct amount of food for cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if it was not their turn to eat in the dining hall. I also taught the motor boating merit badge.

The staff members designed and made a large wall plaque on which to record our names to hang on the lodge wall as long as the building lasted. It was my idea to spell “staff” as “staph” and all the other guys agreed it would be funny. So we did.

Staph of  ’66 Plaque

As you look at the photo of the plaque, you will notice on the left side a circle with what looks like two “X’s”. That is the symbol or logo brand of the Winton Brothers logging company which donated the land for the camp to the Boy Scouts of America. The “X’s” are not “X’s” but to “W’s” back-to-back representing the two Winton brothers. Because I was teaching the Motor Boating merit badge and because the current TV show, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, featured an Admiral Nelson, I printed my name around the circle as “Admiral Nelson”. I also wrote it normally somewhere else on the plaque, but I don’t remember exactly where.

While undergoing training with the Air Force at San Angelo AFB, Texas in 1968, I volunteered to be a temporary adult leader for the base troop and two other Texas troops because no troop adults could get off work for a week to stay with the boys. The first time I was still 19 and the last two times I had turned 20. The second event was the time I was seduced by the 16-year old senior patrol leader. All in all, those week-long camps were enjoyable because it got me out of three-weeks of “base details” while waiting for phase two training to begin or transfer orders following my being molested by the base psychiatrist which I wrote and posted on my blog under the title of Visits with the Doctor on Summer Afternoons.

In 2011 I visited BSA Camp Winton again after it closed for the season. Fortunately, there were five people there doing some pre-winter repairs and completing the camp shutdown activities. I was able to enter the lodge and wander the grounds reliving some memories and taking photographs. The camp was essentially the same, but the reservoir was significantly lower from when I was there as a boy.

This topic brought back many pleasant memories.

Hiking Trail to Camp Winton












Camp Winton Lodge/Dining Hall


Camp Winton Dining Hall Interior














Dining Hall Fireplace



© 19 August 2013



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.

Posted on

Holiday by Phillip Hoyle

Holiday: an old word arising from the elision of holy and day back in the years of Middle English. Often the word connotes in modern usage a break from the usual, its old religious origin often forgotten. Philosopher Josef Pieper’s essays on Festivity bases holidays as a break in schedule, a change from the norm. The European origin, and probably others, is located in setting aside time and activity in honor of the Gods and in some Christian groups to the Saints who afford access to God.

I can ask: What holy things are found in the American Christmas Holiday? Of course there is always the theme of deified incarnation, the reading of holy stories from a holy book, the cult of midnight mass, Christmas communion, and a vast array of holy songs sung. But I often attend a family Christmas Eve function of my partner’s clan in which not one word of religion or prayer is spoken. There is a tree in each of the houses through which the celebration circulates. There may be Christmas music on the stereo system, but movies watched are not religious in nature. No word of piety is breathed. If there is a religious symbol present, it is the family itself or a bauble on the tree.

My guess is that my partner’s father, the one who died over ten years ago, did lead a prayer before the meal. He was pious in some sense related to his Holiness Methodist upbringing and may have led a prayer with and for his family at such gatherings. When his voice ceased, no son or daughter took up the task.

Well, back to the philosopher Pieper. The clan does leave work and gather on such days as Christmas and Easer. Some of these folk do go to church—two Catholic families, one Lutheran, and one wife in another who is Pentecostal. Most grandkids and great grandkids seem to have no current religious connection. The concept of civil religion seems to have triumphed in my partner’s Scots-Irish derived clan. The day off is sacred in itself; family responsibility rules the gathering; and thankfully, individuals in the group generally like one another.

But this analysis begs the question of our storytelling group. I’m supposed to be telling my story. I do retain a meaningful relationship with holy notions and practices. I attend the annual confab as the gay partner of a son of the family.
They are kind of my family now—well, one of them—these past years.

But what about me, about my Christmas? I pulled away from the church, professionally; a dozen years ago I left the planning, programming, and pastoring aspects of church life. I attended a number of churches after that but didn’t find a home. I began to work on some Sundays. I ended up with gay partners who didn’t attend services or otherwise identify with a congregation.

So Christmas comes. Do I want any part of it? (I analyze so much I can’t stand it), but I do like the gatherings, the giving, and the great gobs of goodwill, to say nothing about the generous portions of food. I like the decorations. I like the specials on TV and radio. I like the music although I tire of its incessant use for sales promotion.

I like the music but don’t believe literally the mythology of births, Santas, elves, Saints, shepherds, kings, and angels. I loathe the content of the well-meant sentiment of putting Christ back into Christmas as if he were a commodity to be manipulated. I laugh at statuettes of ol’ Santa (that means holy) Clause kneeling before a manger that cradles a holy baby. I accept that such symbols may be meaningful, sacredly meaningful, to others, and I don’t sneer publicly. I simply groan inwardly and think how relieved I am that I don’t anymore work daily in the task of religious education!

I want to keep Christmas, so my Cratchet asks Morley for the day away from the office. I want to keep the day holy. It’s in the Big Ten to remember certain days to keep them holy. So I do keep a holiday in which to recall a divine idea that lets laborers and working animals rest as the old myth asserts of the creator who rested on the seventh day.

I try to relax, sing a song, laugh, tell a story, give gifts, receive gifts with gratitude, take stock of the human condition as I understand it, have sex, read a book, tell a joke, hug and kiss my partner’s relatives, and say “Merry Christmas” in a polite and warm manner. 

So on this day of days I say “Merry Christmas to you, too.”
Denver, 2010 (revised 2013)

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. He worked in churches for thirty years, and for fifteen years kept a massage practice that funded his art activities. He has retired and now focuses on creating beauty in art and writing. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

Posted on

Letter to My Younger Self by Pat Gourley

My goodness where to start? Perhaps Dan Savage has written the ultimate short three word letter for many of us: It gets better!

If I ever needed to hear that advice it was probably around the age of eleven or twelve. For several years around that time, the late 1950’s, I was really tormented with the whole concept of sin and that I was certainly going to hell for being the major league transgressor I was sure that I was. My weekly confessions to the local parish priest were affairs I would agonize endlessly over for hours. I often felt they were not complete and that I had left some major heinous sin out of the litany for that week.

One might think this had to do with newly discovered joy of masturbation but I was nowhere near that, not for a few years yet, I was a late bloomer really. No it was more a vague persistent ennui, a sense that I was not quite right but different from my peers in not a good Catholic way. I distinctly remember around that time hearing or perhaps being called “queer” and looking this up in the dictionary. The definition given was “odd” and when I decided this was a great word to hurtle at my numerous siblings and cousins I was reprimanded soundly by my mother to not use that word because it could mean something besides “odd” though I was never provided with other meanings until several years later.

There was never much overt bulling in my Catholic School. The nuns were very good at enforcing order and beside they and our other non-clergy instructors were too busy enforcing a much more insidious and blanketed psychological form of bullying under the guise of shaping and forming the minds of young Catholic citizens.

Because of this nagging worry and guilt that my confessions did not include every sin committed I would often not take Sunday Communion. The injunction was that you needed to have confessed all outstanding sins on your books before partaking of the flesh and blood of Christ in the form of a miraculously transformed little wafer.

I don’t want to venture too far into the weeds of self-psychoanalysis here but I do think it was my fledgling queer awakening that was at the root of much of my sense of not being worthy to ingest the body and blood of Christ. It would of course attract much unwanted attention from family and fellow parishioners when I would not go up for Communion many Sunday mornings. My parents were aware of my ongoing angst and my dad even tried to address it one evening in a car ride we took together. In hindsight this was a very loving gesture but tended mostly to cement even further that there was something different about me. I now am reminded of a favorite caveat from Harry Hay one where he would say that straight fathers could smell a gay son. We actually smelled different was his conversation evoking meme. Perhaps my dad smelled something distinctly different about me.

My mental and physical agitation around trying to be the “best little boy in the world” would often take the form of behaviors now easily labeled as an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). My actions were called “scrupulous” at the time and though I am not sure of this I think the parish priest reassured my parents that I would outgrow it. My OCD was of course really the result of buying into the Catholic Religion and its not so subtle forms of child abuse and trying I thought to respond appropriately. I am not referring to the really rarer than you might think forms of overt pedophilia some clergy excelled in but rather I feel the much more widespread, serious and damaging psychological terror inflicted by the relentless indoctrination. Applying the word ‘scrupulous’ to me was of course incorrect. The correct word to use would have been “temperamental” a code word for a gay fellow in the 1950’s. Is he ‘temperamental’ men would ask of one another when discretion was appropriate?

The Baltimore Catechism to call attention to one such codified bunch of superstitious baloney from my childhood was a daily part of our school lives. This catechism was a set of questions and of course the absolutely correct answers, which we were repeatedly, told we needed to accept on Faith. Talk about a recipe for mental strife if ever one existed particularly those who are not prone to being comfortable with simply being a quiescent blob of protoplasm. It is I now feel one of the worst forms of child abuse to begin fostering on young innocent emerging minds while still at their mothers breast that they are sinners right out of the box and in need of salvation. Later on in one who is beginning to sense a profound difference from all those he encounters around him this can be quite the obstacle to overcome! A brief quote here from the late Christopher Hitchens on “Faith:”

“ Faith is the surrender of the mind,
it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes
us different from other animals.”

So my letter to myself at this time in my life of great mental turmoil would really just be advice to hang in there and it will get better. In a few short years you will run into a nun who will challenge many of your most firmly held beliefs on how the world really works. You also will meet and begin having an ongoing sexual relationship with one of your high school teachers and the first such episode will be on a dissecting table in the school biology lab with Jesus looking down from a crucifix right behind you. Wow, did it ever get better.

© October 2013

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.