Tag: Phillip Hoyle

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SPECIAL EDITION: PRIDEFEST

Today’s Special Edition presents stories from two authors.


How Queer Is Queer: Just Being Me

by Donny Kaye

“SOME DUDES MARRY DUDES.  GET OVER IT”
“I HAVE A PHD. Pretty huge dick”
“BEST LICK ON A STICK”
“I LIKE GIRLS THAT LIKE GIRLS”

     These were some of the t-shirt messages I enjoyed while interacting with participants in this past weekend’s PRIDE celebration.  And the t-shirts?  The t-shirts don’t hold a candle to some of the titillating visual experiences of viewing participants in various costumes throughout the weekend.


     So, just how queer is queer? Can you ever be too queer? Is there an option to be or not to be? How Shakespearian!

     Yes!

     I am! Queer that is!

     It’s Friday night of PRIDE weekend and I’m walking down Colfax headed into the action, as it were. My youngest daughter has just text me saying “it’s your first dad” referring to it being PRIDE weekend. Actually last year [2011] was, she just didn’t know it!  Then, that is. And yet when I came out she was the one of my three children who said “I’ve always known dad”. In that instance I must’ve been too queer.

     That warm sunny Sunday afternoon in April over a year ago when I had my “I can’t stand it any longer” conversation with my life partner, she said “I wondered when I first met you”.  There must have been something there, I mean, like over-the-top in too queer.

     When I had breakfast with my dearest friend Grett who I’ve known since she was two years of age, amidst the tears and in the sense of shame in revealing to her that I kept the secret for far too long, she said “I’ve always known”. 

     There seems to be a pattern; partner, daughter, best friend, all seemed to have known. In fact when I consider the many coming out conversations I had with my “then” circle of friends” not too many were surprised. It was the confirmation that sent them scrambling! 
I don’t know if that was about me, or them, but definitely it was too much!

     And so this Friday afternoon as I walk through the cloudy streets in Denver headed into Friday night PRIDE celebrations I wonder about too queer and it being too much! In the question of too queer it seems more about them than it does about me, after all, I’m just being me.

     Yes, I do have an eye for design and color. I’ve always searched for just the right things to put together, like in clothing-wise and decorating-wise and in every-other-way-wise!

     If not HGTV and the shows on design always (or most of the time) presented by recognizably gay men, I enjoyed the food channel. Could that possibly be a tip-off, in terms of being too gay?

     Yes, I’ve always been on the sensitive side as my mother used to say. Even when I announced to my mom that I was getting married her response was, “Why do you want to get married? There is so much of life for you to experience!” I have an ability to listen to people and to intervene on others behalf as they need me. I sit and cry with them. I’ve always been able to put my arms around someone consoling them in their upset, doubt or grief.

     So, there you have it; my attention to design, my interest in food, the emotional sensitivities and then you add the fact that I’ve never liked sports, and I happened to choose a profession where I worked with women all the time–what else could you expect. Even before I began my career in education when I worked in the factory, I was one of the only stockmen who could keep all of my dyke female machine operators happy!! 

     Certifiably queer! I am just me! 

     The questions and the discomfort around my possibly being too queer really do rest with everyone outside of me and not really with me.  As I exist in that realization, I wonder if the pushback is about their doubt about themselves and the possibility that they are too much, in one way or another. Possibly at some point in their lives they’ve considered a variant sexual experience too! One thing for sure, I’ve certainly gotten their attention, if gaining attention is what the t-shirt slogans and the unique dress (or undress) are all about.

     When considering the question of “too much,” the actual realization is that the quality of being too much exists in the eyes and mind of someone outside of myself and then gets projected back onto me, making me wonder if I am too much!  Those dirty rascals!

     And so I ask you my dearest of friends am I “too queer” or might I just be BEING ME?

[The above story references PrideFest 2012.)



About the Author

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


Queer, Just How Queer
by Phillip Hoyle


      I love to use the word queer, the term brought into gay prominence in political and academic queering movements of the 1960s through the 90s. I also like it for the memories it raises of my grandma Pink, who in old fashion used the word for anything odd. I like it for its political symbolism and for making positive a word too long used as a pejorative. I like it for its strength. I like it for its inclusive quality covering the bases of LGBTandQ concerns. I like it for its exclusive quality, as in not too many people I run into want to be called by this moniker. I especially like the discomfort its use raises among some of my gay friends! It’s a word of wide potential and great humor. So just how queer am I? It’s a fair question. I’ll try to answer it once and for all.


     This morning I looked through the photographs on my digital camera that included those I took last summer at Pridefest Denver 2012. I was surprised to find there quite a few more images, ones I thought had been erased when I uploaded them into my computer. I flipped through frame after frame and saw so much of my life there, even photos from Pridefest Denver 2011. First I saw a photo of my partner’s 90-year-old mother, sitting at the kitchen table drinking her morning coffee. I often kid her about all her gay sons although only one of her offspring turned out to be gay. Her multiplicity of gay sons is made up of all of Jim’s and my gay friends. I call them her growing family of gay kids. She smiles for me and takes delight in these others who bring her presents of chocolate, humor, and unaffected affection. She represents in this picture a nine-year connection I have with her son and the growing numbers of her other gay sons. The photo reveals layer after layer of queer experience and relationship, but it’s just the beginning. I did mention two sets of photos taken at Pridefest, but I haven’t yet told of the hundreds of photos of the family of plastic pink flamingos that live in our yard shown standing alone and together among a variety of ferns. I took these and many more in the past couple of years, the queer obsession of a queer artist! I also haven’t mentioned many photos of flowers, of my artwork, of self-portraits, of extreme Christmas decorations at a local gay bar, of the bunch of men I run with at parties, in restaurants, and on the street. I haven’t told you of pictures of an art display, of drag queens, of small, large, and supersized lesbians, of gay architects and engineers, of employees of Chipotle restaurants, of young people polling for the Obama campaign, of great arches of rainbow colored balloons, of a guy wearing fairy wings, of a barely-clad muscle man standing by a muscle car, of the model in a platinum blond wig and red bikini sitting in a red convertible advertising At the Beach, of a parade on-looker smoking a huge stogie, of people dancing, of a young drag queen posing sexily for me, of a young man in shorts sitting on the curb with his little dog watching the parade, of political signs urging the election of sane officials, of leather studs, of a drum and bagpipe band in their smart kilts, of religiously motivated anti-gay protesters, of two young guys in interestingly revealing slacks, of Senior Citizens doing a dance routine with their walkers, of youngsters calling attention to Rainbow Alley, of the prominent landmark The Center makes along the route, of the partiers on its roof sometimes watching the parade passing by below, of the poignant reminder of the ongoing presence of AIDS among us, of wild hairdos, of the Imperial Court, or of the leathery Uncle Sam who stopped to ask me, “Where’s the free beer?” I haven’t said a word of many other pictures of musicians, dancers, activists, on and on. These photos are my people whom I celebrate with my little digital camera as passionately as Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century celebrated the democracy of America, the endless variety of life, the human body, his own body, and his sturdy comrades with whom he liked to lie in Leaves of Grass. 

     So just how queer am I? Really, really queer. I’ve been trying to tell you just how queer in my stories! In summary of all I’ve said to you in the past, hear this: 

* I’m as queer as the little boy who wanted to wear both cowboy and Indian costumes in public.
* I’m as queer as the boy who donned his great aunt’s wig and sister’s skirt and went to the family grocery store to show himself to his dad.
* I’m as queer as the teen who used to lie in bed next to his dad, not only to read alongside him but also to smell him.
* I’m as queer as the teen who bragged to another boy about marking his friend with hickies.
* I’m as queer as any teen boy singing in the school choir and more than most of them.
* I’m as queer as the high schooler who looked forward to each issue of House Beautiful.
* I’m as queer as the boy who ordered prints from a NYC art print company and treasured the company’s catalogue with its variety of homoerotic images.
* I’m as queer as the young man who discovered the striking 
International Male ads and catalogue.
* I’m as queer as the young man whose first male friend in adulthood was homosexual.
* I’m as queer as the young man who read all the homosexual-theme books in the public library.
* I’m as queer as the young man with wife and children who at age thirty fell in love with another man.
* I’m as queer as the young man who reveled in the idea he was bisexual.
* I’m as queer as the young man who discovered that his homosexual proclivities lay at the center of his sexuality.
* I’m as queer as the middle-age man who had sexual affairs with other men.
* I’m as queer as the writer who when he was asked to include cultural diversity in an adult religious education resource anthology quoted gay writers and HIV-related themes alongside many other cultural writings.
* I’m as queer as the middle-age man who left his wife to live as a gay man in a large city.
* I’m as queer as the old man who snapped photos at Pridfest knowing he was as queer as anyone there and loved the notion and the reality of it.

     I am the old man who says all these things proudly and with love, deep love for all my companions:
* Male and female
* Educated and uneducated
* Professional and worker
* Wealthy and dirt-poor
* Crazy and sane
* Chic and tasteless
* Laughing and crying
* Hale and exhausted
* Living it up and overwhelmed
     
     So, how queer am I? Pretty darn queer and happy as a lark about it.
     And now, if you’ll pose, I’ll take even more pictures with my camera, snapshots of the folk who add so richly to the queerness of my existence and the joy of my gay life. 

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

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Proud to Be by Phillip Hoyle

My Gay PrideFest begins when Jim and I meet two friends at their Congress Park house. The four of us make our way through Capitol Hill, walking down Thirteenth Avenue with a side trip into Cheeseman Park where the parade is lining up. The air is cool, the sun warm, our feelings high. At the park, queer life pulses with enthusiasm as gay men, lesbians, cross-dressers, transsexuals, children of gay couples, elderly, young, Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and more make ready to ride motorcycles, scooters and roller blades, to wave at the crowd from floats and convertibles, or simply to walk carrying logos, banners, and signs explaining their commitments.

At a park-side mansion we attend our first party of the day. Our tie-dye-tee-shirt-clad hosts welcome us and encourage us to meet other revelers. We eat sweet rolls, bagels, and more continental fare washing down our choices with coffee or Bloody Marys. I make conversation with folk I haven’t seen for months and, in one instance, years, conversations that feature great intensity and loads of laughter. When we say goodbye about an hour later, our hosts encourage us to return for brunch after the parade.

We hurry to Sixteenth Avenue to find the address where the second party we hope to attend is in progress. Our companion who most wants to attend this bash also most dreads it saying he’s afraid we might walk in on an orgy or a drug fest. I suggest that if it is either, he doesn’t have to have sex with anyone or take drugs, even if they are free. Laughing, we find the restored townhouse, enter, and greet our host who is genuinely happy we have stopped by. Our friend’s fears are unfounded. Still, a couple of people there are seriously drunk. One greets me a second time with open arms, not realizing he has already done so. It’s fine with me; I like his hugs.

We haven’t been there long when someone shouts, “The parade is underway.” Moving down the alley, I am pleased to discover we have missed the Dykes on Bikes, my relief not due to prejudice but, rather, because of the racket! We cross Colfax to get to the shady side of the Avenue just as PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), this year’s honorary parade marshals, are coming down the street. As always, I appreciate their friendly smiles and good cheer. Chapters from around the Denver area wave signs that read, for example, “I’m the proud mom of a proud gay man” as they graciously receive the crowd’s enthusiastic affirmations of their important work on behalf of the community.

We join a fifth companion near Charlie’s of Denver, a long established gay club that serves as the parade’s official center with bleachers and an announcer introducing each group as it approaches. I turn my attention to the parade watchers, snapping photos of interesting hairdos, outfits, facial expressions, and of course, my companions. But I itch to join some other people I know at another location and eventually excuse myself. My friends agree to catch up with me later.

Taking pictures left and right I move west along the sidewalk dodging people coming east, dogs on leashes, and dense knots of parade onlookers. I click my digital record of a Black angel whose right wing looks like it may have broken when he fell to earth. I see a bear of a man on a motorized cart, my attention drawn by his garb, a profuse white tutu that strikingly contrasts with his worn out black leather shoes. He sits there topless except for a black leather dog collar and leash, black sunglasses, and a black and white Holstein bull motorcycle helmet sporting real cattle horns. I stop to take several shots of this man who is thoroughly enjoying the parade, shouting his delight as floats, cars, and marchers pass down the street. He cheers loudly for some dancers spinning by as if he remembers the days when he, too, could shake his booty at The Broadway, The Triangle, or Denver Wrangler.

When I look up from my snapping mania, I see my destination looming over the street ahead: the high towers, nave, and transepts of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. I take pictures as I approach the proud building with its high arches, elaborate spires, stained glass windows, triple entry, and prominent location near the Capitol building. Watching the parade from my vantage point just across the street clarifies for me values so important for gays and for all Americans. I watch the interaction of the crowd of onlookers along the street, gay marchers in the parade, protesters against gays, protesters against the Catholic Church, protesters calling gays to repentance, and the police who are alert to the possible need for crowd control in the dynamic environment. I greet the folks I hoped to meet there. They seem to be enjoying the parade. I snap their pictures and watch the drama.

I feel like I’m attending a medieval European Feast of Fools as the parade passes in front of the Gothic façade of the Cathedral. The juxtaposition of worshippers inside and revelers outside sets the scene. Folk inside searching for salvation, showing contrition, and carrying out pious acts seem such a contrast to folk outside enjoying the expression of liberation and impiously displaying pride. But the situation is much more complicated than that. I know that in the Cathedral gay worshippers gather alongside straight worshippers at every mass. I know that not all worshipers are pious or contrite and that not all gays are proud show-offs. I recall that religious leaders of Jesus’ time found him intolerable, given that in their opinions he was drinking too much and eating with the wrong sorts of people. I know that today the most intolerant and puritanical of church leaders often praise the ministries of gays in their choir lofts. The spirits of Church and Pridefest do contrast but not in a simple right and wrong sense. Both reveal great diversity; both reveal tolerance and intolerance. Well, of course, for both spirits are expressed by groups of people. We should expect friction when they rub shoulders on Gay Pride Sunday.

And here at the Cathedral corner come gays parading their diversity: a dozen or so royal families of drag queens and kings; the bars that have been oases for gays and lesbians for many years; the largely Gay churches such as the pentecostal Pillar of Fire and the almost mainline Metropolitan Community Church; several gay-affirming Unitarian, Lutheran, and United Church of Christ congregations; the domestic beer companies; a huge group of young people encouraging the parade watchers to get tested for HIV; the leather men; the dog owners; the bicycle riders; the club bunnies; the leathery skinned, sunburned old man in his thong and sandals; the politicos who affirm gay rights and seek the gay vote; a group of students from Denver Metro area’s Vantage Point alternative high school; the Stonewall Democrats whose presence reminds us that Gay Pride events across the country this year commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riot that gave such willpower to the gay liberation movement; the Transsexual community; the Gay Band; the Gay Choruses; the Gay square dancers; the Gay football league; the Gay swim team; the Gay Indians; and of course, Nuclea Waste, the drag queen on her high stilts, this year complementing her usual ensemble with a multi-color backpack of long balloons in neon colors exploding from her shoulders like a star burst. She is accompanied by several cute gay guys in tennis shoes and Speedos, each one also sporting a similar, but monochromatic, neon backpack—blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and purple—a cavorting rainbow of the brightest colors in the parade. But that colorful claim is challenged soon by a huge rainbow arch of balloons, a monstrously large rainbow flag, a Carnival of colors displayed by the Hispanic court of drag queens with their headdresses of dyed ostrich plumes, their supreme ruler surrounded by hundreds of peacock feathers, and finally, near the end of the parade, a hot pink feather boa measuring at least a quarter of a mile in length carried aloft by a couple hundred young people dressed in matching light blue shirts. The parade’s prismatic array surely stands as the ultimate symbol of Gay Pride and human diversity.

And me: I am here snapping shot after shot of diversity, enjoyment, exuberance, serious intent, history, love, and pride. And I do so proudly while myriad thoughts buzz through my consciousness.

Here, I think, power seeks to assert itself: secular power, religious power, democratic power, hierarchical power; powers moral and visionary. For years I heard the adage that politics and religion make strange bedfellows. Today I think the saying points to religious institutions vying for power within political structures. For example, maneuvering within the Republican Party resulted in a strange mix of secular and religious power brokers. Perhaps the coalition has now run its course, but one must understand as its background the establishment of religion in most of the Colonies and the history of assumptions of political power within the old Congregational churches—both Trinitarian and Unitarian. The eventual compromise necessary to unify colonies into a national government necessitated the separation of church and state but did not end the power of religious assumption. For Congregationalists, American democracy was an instrument of God, one that gave them community responsibility. Their mission was a pious and puritanical assertion of democratic power within their towns, states, and nation. We shouldn’t forget that the nineteenth century vision of Manifest Destiny had its origins in the preaching of biblical images. When religious conservatives in the late twentieth century began to assert political power with their values, religious liberals who had long done the same got worried, some even resentful. But what did they expect with the continuing success of several conservative denominations and the emergence of new evangelical independent churches? The neo-com religious powers’ interest to improve the country shouldn’t surprise anyone. Me? I’m liberal. I value the secular state, but I also realize the country has to guarantee both freedom of religious practice and freedom from religious tyranny.

The open sexuality of some dancers on a float going by reminds me of other strange bedfellows connected to American churches and to American political institutions. Sometimes such folk sleep over, and when the press reports it, American gays as well as American straights respond as if each affair is something original. We cluck-cluck and tsk-tsk shaking our heads at the impurity and hypocrisy while relishing and continuing the gossip. Like children taunting their siblings, American political leaders sometimes say “Shame on You” to American Presidents, Senators, Representatives, Judges, and Governors while the accusers are guilty of the same misdeeds. I hope that American attitudes will someday catch up with changes in American activities.

So here I am watching the parade—another dramatization of American life that for all its color is no more and no less sinful or righteous than any other public demonstration for civil rights based on truths self-evident. Its educational and celebrative purposes are noted, sometimes appreciated, and of course, derive their power by contrasting democratic principle with hierarchical assumption. Thus I love my corner view at Logan and Colfax where edificial security watches a free flow of traffic, of contrasting protests, of subcultural celebration, and of so much more that daily passes by its doorway.

The march goes on. One float invites onlookers to join them at the Civic Center PrideFest where they can get married! I don’t know what the legal outcome of their actions will be, but I do know what it symbolizes—the striving for civil rights. I applaud something I don’t seek for myself but do believe should be available in this American democracy even if the Roman Catholic Church, and many others, will never allow such ceremonies to be held within their hallowed walls.

I applaud. “Yes, America, march.” I want to shout, “March on, you Revelers for freedom.” I feel so Walt Whitman-ish but finally calm down when the parade ends. My four other companions join us here across the Avenue from the church. We enjoy more talk and good times. Then the five of us leave and return to the first party to have our fill of food and drink, and the good feelings of friendship, love, and pride—all in gay style. I tire of my picture taking and when I get home realize why. I have taken nearly 250 photos of my people, of my celebration, of my life.

Denver, 2009

About the Author



Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Cookie Monster by Phillip Hoyle

     During my rather long life I have tasted an endless assortment of cookies. They cause me to smack my lips, salivate, and obsess, so much so that I freely identify with Cookie Monster of Sesame Street. I smell cookies; I see cookies; I want to eat cookies. I do eat cookies, way too many of them. But every so often I seek to stem the cookie tide in order to gain control of some little part of my life. Then I quit eating cookies along with other wonderful desserts in hopes of stemming my appetite. Cookies, you see, serve me as a stimulant for further eating. Cookies turn me into a ravenous food monster that isn’t pretty or couth or sharing. So every once in a while, Cookie-Monster-me wants to give it a break so I can enjoy some other possible satisfactions such as easily fitting into my clothes, having more breath, saving money, and not getting so exhausted when simply walking through a day.

     After feasting on cookies all year long and sometimes using them as a substitute for getting anything done, I have, this year, set aside my cookie pleasures. I’m doing well but my thoughts sometimes turn towards cookies. I’ve asked Ruth, with whom I live and who herself is a Cookie Monster albeit a dainty one, to quit leaving cookies in plain sight. Too often they sit in translucent boxes on the round table in the breakfast room. When I see the box, I have to run upstairs to fetch some chewing gum to keep my mouth busy and cookie free. Also, I shun buying cookies at the 7-11 across the street from work or the tea shop down the block or one of the many coffee shops I tend to visit. I’m cookie free (for several days) but my mind has turned towards them with such great force, I am going to list the cookies that have most preoccupied my eating habits during the many years from childhood to older adulthood. Perhaps the imagination of their flavors and textures will suffice for me, at least today. Here, according to my taste buds, are some of the very best, both commercial and homemade:

Hydrox cookies
Pecan Sandies
Wedding cookies (with pecan bits and covered in confectioner sugar)
Toll House cookies
Black and white sandwich cookies (the cheaper the better)
Macaroons
Peanut butter blossoms (with their big chocolate centers)
Snickerdoodles 
Shortbread cookies
Raspberry filled sandwich cookies with chocolate drizzled on top
Myrna’s Power Cookies (big oatmeal cookies with raisins & chocolate chips)
Ruth’s frosted sugar cookies
Ruth’s Cry Babies (soft ginger cookies with icing)
Lemon bar cookies
Seven layer bar cookies
Key Lime bar cookies (I used to get at Alfalfa’s bakery)

     In conclusion, I must admit I always return to Toll House cookies when my taste changes. I like cookies. I hope to lose enough weight to make a moderate return to cookies, but being the Cookie Monster I am, I find it hard to imagine life with such advanced self-control. If you ever see me reaching for the cookie jar, simply clear your throat and raise an eyebrow or, better yet, join me for an ultimate cookie pleasure.

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

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Mother Goose by Phillip Hoyle

“Peter, Peter pumpkin eater
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her,
Put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he …”
          uh, uh, something
“… very well.”
          Two syllables, what was the word? words? Sure.
“Kept her very well.”

These days I still recall several Mother Goose rhymes because some of the names like Peter are answers for clues in one of the crossword puzzles I work each day. They’re stored deep in an obscure folder in my mind and reside in the culture although we rarely think of them as important except for children’s language development.

“There was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile,
And found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He had a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse
And they all lived together in a crooked little house.”

I recall one of my grade school teachers explaining sixpence and stile just like my college literature professor years later explained odd words and expressions in Shakespeare and John Milton. So these rhymes were an introduction not only to poetry and vocabulary but also to literary criticism.

Most important for me, though, was that Mother played the role of Mother Goose in our house. She introduced us kids to the large volume that had a picture of a bespectacled and bonnet-clad Mother Goose on its cover. From it she read aloud to us endlessly. She quoted even more poetry from memory, she told stories of the family, she researched and relayed her findings about Gypsies, about cooking, about Girl Scouts, about history, and sometimes about movie stars. Mother introduced us to literature: children’s literature, classic comic books, tongue twisters, and so much more. She danced with her cats as well as with us. She entertained. She played. She challenged us to look. She wanted us to engage in life. And, like those of the literary Mother Goose, some of her tales were tricky. We had to figure out just what they were about. Of course, in the meantime, there was always the rhythm, the characters, the word play, and her charm. She never let the characters wander too far away from our conversation. She’d suggest the spider walking across the kitchen floor was just like one that so frightened Miss Muffett, point out Peter Rabbit in her mother’s large garden, or identify me with the little boy Georgy Porgy who so liked eating his puddin’ and pie. She made literature live for her children.

Father Goose lived at our house too. He read to us, usually from the Eggermeier’s Bible story book. He pronounced each character and place name correctly having listened to countless sermons from educated preachers and consistently following the code of his self-pronouncing King James Version Bible. He played the piano to our delight. He sang and taught us to sing. He also entertained, occasionally doing an old high school cheer—he had been a cheerleader—or dancing to an old jazz tune he put on the record player—he’d played for years in a dance band. He employed and discussed difficult words and taught us generosity with vocabulary as well as with other resources.

And we, too, all lived together in a little Cape Cod house where the children’s world of old Britain was brought close to us in our Kansas town. So was the world of the ancient Hebrews, Egyptians, and Sumerians. It’s no wonder I started devouring book after book of historical fiction on my own beginning in the eighth grade. And thanks to the creativity of my mother and father and of the effectiveness of the education I received, Mother Goose stills reigns supreme in my world of literary fantasy.
   
Denver, 2012

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Communications by Phillip Hoyle

Communications involve much more than words, a fact that to me seems especially true of communications made in the context of love, sex, and romance. In those contexts I feel uncertain what anyone is communicating to me. Why? Perhaps because I live too much in my own world. Perhaps I don’t hear anything except the words. Perhaps I just don’t get the emotional content of things said. Perhaps I didn’t get to practice love talk as a teen because I didn’t feel impelled toward girls and assumed boys were not interested. Perhaps I just cut off any expectation of falling in love so as to keep from getting hurt. Perhaps I married too young. I really cannot settle on any of these possibilities. 

A psychiatrist challenged my over use of ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe.’ He would say, “There you go again, waffling. Just tell me. Make up your mind.” That’s a problem. In my own defense I could have appealed to my scores on the Myers-Briggs inventory with its use of Jung’s conscious ego states (I was a strong perceiver and weak judge), but then maybe the psychiatrist wasn’t interested in Jung! Setting that aside, I will try to make a synthesis of these ideas—all my perhapses—and that synthesis begins with a story.

When I was in my mid-forties living in Albuquerque, Teresa, a pastoral counselor, attended the same interdenominational clergy support group I did even though she was not clergy. I liked that for I had always thought the clergy/lay distinction rather meaningless given my background. It seemed good to have present in the group the experience and perspective of someone not trained so thoroughly in theology and congregational life. Pastoral counseling is a category of psychotherapy alongside, for instance, family-systems counseling and other specialties. In addition to psychotherapeutic techniques used in other approaches, Pastoral counseling employs spiritual and religious themes as they seem appropriate to the counselor and counselee. (I say this to be as precise as possible.) Pastoral counselors offer pastors and parishes a referral resource for cases that go beyond the training of local parish pastors.

I liked Teresa. She liked me. When my high-school age daughter needed support in a particularly tough time, I asked Teresa if she’d be her counselor for about two months. Teresa told me it was not her practice to work with children of colleagues, but she trusted me and agreed to talk with my daughter. They met on two or three occasions and helped pave the way for Desma’s decisions to be successful. Teresa told me how impressed she was with my daughter.

Some months later Teresa opened up to me about her frustrations with work. We developed a caring and trusting relationship in which our communications always interlaced mutual respect and humor. She asked me about how I dealt with the dynamics of being an associate minister. I saw she needed help thinking through how to deal with some kind of power inequity in her own work. We talked informally over several weeks as she met whatever was her current crisis. Then she told me, “Phillip, you’re the best defended man I’ve ever known.”

I really didn’t know what she was saying to me but decided to take it as a compliment. After all she had said ‘best,’ and mom had taught me to say ‘thank you’ to compliments, even those I thought I didn’t earn or didn’t quite understand. For years I mulled over Teresa’s evaluation. I knew she was an astute observer of human behavior. I knew she took a woman-oriented point of view. I knew she followed current trends in psychoanalytic perspective. I knew she was kind. So I accepted her comment as I tried to understand its insight in order to better understand the dynamics it could reveal both in my personality and in my work relationships.

My musings eventually went far beyond work and landed me back at the point in my teen years when I must have been feeling the juices of sexual yearning churning in my system. I had watched my older sisters fall in love with guys and get hurt over it. I reasoned if you didn’t fall in love, you wouldn’t get hurt. I have no memory that my homosexual proclivity entered into my reasoning. I simply wasn’t interested in being hurt. I liked both boys and girls. I got hard-ons over both girls and boys. I liked both a lot. I decided that was okay, of course, even quite enjoyable. I dated girls. I sometimes had sex with a boy. I kept busy with music, studies, art, reading, various church and school groups, and my part-time work at the grocery store. I took care of the lawn at home. I was a nice kid who fit in well. I lived into my life. I defended myself from love’s potential pain.

When from my old age perspective I look most searchingly at my young self, I realize that probably something homosexual was at play, but it was deeply submerged. I liked the same boy who broke my sister’s heart, but I didn’t want the hurt she experienced. I wasn’t able to picture a social price for being gay because I couldn’t imagine two guys living together into adulthood. I pushed down what I didn’t even know. I feel fortunate my parents had not taught me guilt feelings or self-loathing. Those would have been destructive. As a teenager trying to figure out life and desire, I took my practical approach and set aside the potential of same-sex love. My defenses were sure and served me well. I didn’t reject my interest in other guys, just watched it. I enjoyed the feelings but didn’t pursue them into any kind of institutional form.

When I was twenty-one, I married a fine woman. When I was thirty, I fell in love with a nice man. I saw what was happening and was thrilled to my toes with the feelings. Eventually an affair began. It was controlled by distance and the uneven needs of my buddy. Some fifteen years later, our on and off occasional contact was not sufficient for me. I wanted to simplify my life, to find something that seemed more natural. Teresa’s comment which was made at around that time may have helped facilitate my changes. I opened myself to more feelings and to acting on them with people who lived nearby. Of course, it was a costly decision that ripped apart the stability of my life. I found thrills, but some twenty years later, even with all my new experiences in love, I still don’t catch onto the emotional content of what may be pick-up lines. I really still need folk to speak to me in simple, straightforward English. I need a hand to reach out and touch me before I am ready to shed my defenses. My settlement these days stands in great contrast to what I did as a fifteen year old, or a thirty-five year old, or even a forty-five year old.

I am so glad this sixty-five year old man had all these experiences. I continue to shed my inhibitions but still don’t want to hurt anyone else with the shedding. I recall when at fifty-five years I was so thrilled over meeting Rafael. I really was. I told a friend about him and wondered aloud at my surprise and at my elation that anyone would be interested in me. My friend Tony laughed and said, “Phillip, you just aren’t paying attention.”

Now I listen more carefully but still am not sure what I am hearing. Does this mean my closet door could open even wider? Does it mean I could become even more gay? I’m listening for the deepest levels of communication in my effort to overcome my own residual defenses—you know that ‘best’ stuff in me—and in my effort I hope really to hear what others are trying to communicate to me.

Whew.

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

Read more at Phillip’s blog:  artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Tinker Bell by Phillip Hoyle

     Come with me to the past, not the far distant past of ancient winged gods, not that old era of medieval European romances with its cherubs, not even the Victorian age with its fancy furniture and tiny winged creatures. Come with me to my own past, to a time of enchantment, to a realm of magic and mystery. Journey with me to meet a fairy, one who traveled about in his white Toyota he affectionately called Tinker Bell. Follow us to the restaurants, pool halls, bars, apartments, homes, and mountain tops where my fairy with earthy humor and habit lived. Hear my fairy tale if you can spare the time.


     He was short, pudgy, and round-faced; his black hair thinning, his black eyes pushed a little too close together, and his black cowboy boots neatly polished; his smile broad, his voice medium-high pitched, and his wit quick; his rhythm perfect, his movements efficient, and his hopes tricky. He had no wings, he couldn’t fly, and his fairy wand wasn’t very long. Still it worked magic; I mean he worked magic on me.

     I saw him first at the restaurant where my wife worked, where they both waited tables. I sat in her section. She introduced me to several employees. She introduced me to Ronnie, my fairy. We went dancing, my wife, my fairy, several other employees, and I, out for an evening of two-stepping after their shift was over. It happened several times. My wife kept both of us guys busy. When one of us tired, the other one took over to help her achieve a spinning fix to supplement the Diet Cokes she drank. I had my one beer or two beers or rarely three beers. Ronnie had his. We danced under a neon moon, beneath howling coyotes, in the subtle light of ads for Budweiser, Miller, Tecate, and Coors. I learned never to waltz after one beer; I couldn’t keep my balance with the turns. I also learned I could still do the two-step, the Schottische, and the Cotton Eyed Joe even after two beers, not that I could do any of them very well. And there were the more challenging line dances. We laughed and danced and laughed at ourselves. We three occasionally ate breakfast after the bars closed. We loved being together.

     One afternoon at the restaurant I overheard Ronnie say, “I love to shop.” I later called to ask if it was true. “Yes, it’s my favorite activity,” he assured.


     “Clothes?” I clarified.

     “Especially clothes.”

     “Then I need you next Wednesday afternoon.” A friend had sent me several hundred dollars to spend on clothes so I wouldn’t embarrass my daughter at her high school graduation. I dreaded shopping sprees, forays that always left me depressed and with few clothes. I couldn’t imagine spending that much money in one day. They’d have to dial 911 and haul me off to lock up in University Hospital.

     On Wednesday he picked me up in his car Tinker Bell, and we began to shop. Ronnie was a shopping wiz.

     “What’s your favorite color?”

     “Grey,” I responded.

     “No, that’s not good. It washes out on you; not enough color given the silver in your hair.” Not waiting for my protests or ideas, Ronnie quickly walked down a rack of shirts. He pulled out the bright colored ones: turquoise, deep purple, red. “Go ask for a dressing room,” he instructed all the while piling his arms higher with selections for my new non-embarrassing wardrobe.

     I tried on many shirts and several pants. To my amazement, everything fit except for one pair of trousers. Perhaps they were mismarked. I was amazed, impressed.

     “I need a sports coat.”

     We went to another store and finally found a silk jacket he approved.

     “I want a belt I saw down in Old Town at the Pendleton Shop.” We drove there but they didn’t have it in my size. Ronnie tried on a black cowboy hat. It looked neat. He looked adorable, handsome, even luscious to me. “I’ll get it for you.”

     “No you won’t; it costs too much.”

     “That’s okay.”

     “No, but I will let you buy me some swimming trunks and a tee shirt.”

     We left without a hat but made our way to another store. We both got swim trunks.

     In weeks to come, I ran around with this fairy in his magical car as he wooed me. He’d call to see if I wanted to go play pool. “Sure,” I’d say. He took me to big pool halls where the lights shone brightly. We would share a pitcher of beer and play terribly to one another’s delight. He always took me to very straight establishments. I wondered what folk thought of us. Our friendship grew on these outings. We talked about interesting details of our lives.

     One day he called. “We need to go to the park for a picnic.” So he picked me up. We stopped by a grocery store for bread, cheese, a bottle of wine, and a copy of World News, that tabloid that always features ETs and UFOs. I’d always scoffed at tabloids, but that day in spring, sheltered from the sun by newly leafed trees, I found it utterly delightful. Oh well, alcohol mixes well with sunshine and silliness.

     I recall so clearly the night I was driving my fairy north on Wyoming Blvd. I reached over and rested my hand on his rotund belly. We talked and laughed. Soon we started having sex together. He made me pledge there would be no feelings. While I had already declared I loved him, I had said so in a non-sexualized context. I readily agreed to keep a damper on the feelings. Doing so was a relief for me in that it removed the threat of a complicated, destructive relationship that could ruin my marriage and career. Still, it’s really not nice to have an affair with a friend of one’s spouse.

     As my tutelary spirit, he was a thoroughgoing latex queen, surely the result of having a brother who was HIV positive. We must have had the safest sex any couple of guys had, yet still it was hot, demanding, giving, creative, passionate, and satisfying. In some ways he was a demanding bitch; he was also the funniest man I’d ever known so well. Taking off his shirt he said, “I’m Indian up here, but from the waist on down, I’m just a damn Mexican.” His torso with its smooth bronze skin and dark little nipples sported hardly a hair, but south of his belly button border, he had rather dense black hair. I liked it all.

     He taught me well. His instruction was direct, thorough, and thoughtful; he interpreted his actions, taught his philosophy, and provided adequate safety. He flavored it all with his fine humor. And he was interested in my whole life. I was a good student. I astounded him with the magic of my own directness. I’d never been so clear about my sexual needs. I urged, commanded, improvised, and pleased. Our relationship seemed pure magic as I discovered the gay sex I’d long read about. I was utterly delighted, felt like I was flying, on and on.

     He asserted that any man will do anything in sex as long as it doesn’t cost him financially or socially. His life goal was to show this truth to as many straight men as he could. “All men are pigs,” he gleefully oinked as he sought his next relationship.

     Did the affair free my imagination? I suspect so. Here’s why: My fairy liked my wife. He liked to play with me. He offered me many new experiences. He seemed insatiable. He messed with me; I with him. We developed an honesty of desire with one another. We laughed our way through it all. He was a metaphor as well as a real experience!

     So what better fairy for a tale? Boy-like, feminine, free, and facile, he flew me into a world of stardust and dreams. Together we sailed on ragwort stems and soared on the backs of birds. Often we flew on one another’s backs. Then we cooled down and moved on with our lives, still liking one another well but eventually losing touch. But the magic and mystery in the utterly open presentation of ourselves to one another have rarely been matched in any relationship I have found.

     One evening Ronnie and I flew to the top of Sandia Mountain. We looked at the array of city lights that increased as the sunset faded; the turquoise and purple tones of the mesa and mountains lost their brilliance and eventually turned black. We talked and laughed as usual. Then Tinker Bell carried us down the mountain onto the high plain at its eastern foot. We pulled off onto a side road for sex play. Ronnie amazed me; I amazed him. Our affair developed. He kidded me about my age promising to push me off a cliff at the top of the mountain when I began losing my mind. I suggested he’d get arrested for it; better that he should wait until winter and leave me up there to freeze. He could claim I simply wandered off and he couldn’t find me in the dark. Our intimacy may have grown too intense for Ronnie. I accepted his need to distance himself from me. He had warned me that if I got enough man-to-man sex, I’d want a lot more of it. I agreed that such was true and wasn’t upset about the prospect. He cooled it. I found another interested party. But Ronnie still was the magical and mystical one, a combination of nutty and practical, of entertaining and instructing, of passionate and cool. Fairies appear and disappear. So it was with Ronnie. He didn’t completely disappear. He still lives in New Mexico, and I still fantasize his being involved in my eventual exit. I hope I’ll have enough memory to find my way down there when my mental grasp starts to slip. My imagination of the scene suggests being carried once again to the top of the mountain by Tinker Bell, kissed by my fairy, embraced in his latex grasp, and gently left behind to my own fate some winter night. It would seem a kind and gentle way to say goodbye; and one could say he and I already did that. Should we ever meet again, I’ll insist that he take the gift of a cowboy hat to wear at my sendoff and to remember me by.


Denver, 2010


About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com


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I Did It My Way by Phillip Hoyle

     The hit song from old Blue Eyes made a new impression on me the first time I heard it played at a gay bar. That night at the Bailey Street Where House the song caught my attention due to its stylistic contrast with several disco songs played, pieces by the Village People, Bee Gees, and Donna Sommers. In the context of a gay bar, the song seemed an anthem or hymn of those gathered. I duly noted its inclusion as one among many indications of community for the qualitative research project I was pursuing in a course “Community Contexts of Ministry.” In this way my theological education at Texas Christian University’s Brite Divinity School brought me closer to the gay world and to my eventual inclusion within that community. 

     I had chosen the gay bar setting from a suggestion list, noting at the time that one other person had indicated his intention to do the same, a guy I had recently met at a gathering sponsored by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the Southwest. Four seminarians went that evening to observe and, of course, to drink a few beers. I got my hazel eyes full of interesting sights, signs of community as I interpreted them in my field observation report, and my ears full of other indicators that something fine and interesting was going on in this bar. I made several return trips that semester and learned things I wanted to know about gay life and, furthermore, came away with the impression that while my friend seemed defended against what the place represented, he also seemed comfortable and interested. I had no plan for his and my interests to converge at a personal level but was acutely aware of the attraction of gay community I observed there and my own comfort within the setting.

     That semester I also observed a community organizing project and reported it with the same fascination and detail as I did in my description of the gay bar. I didn’t feel like I had to cover myself. I already knew my interest in men, my feelings of sexual attraction to some men. I was fine with the feelings. My life was headed in a family and career direction that I was not going to forsake. But like a cat, I tend to be interested in what is going on around me. I’m curious and entertained by happenings in my peripheral vision, especially if they seem novel. Seeing lots of guys dancing together in a bar certainly was novel and having the luxury of a plausible excuse for watching the show let me feel its deep fascination. The date: fall 1978, before the AIDS crisis, a time of nearly unbridled passion that was easy to see revealed in that bar. I saw and liked it, but I saw more.

     I was watching the world in which my good gay friend Ted lived. He too, had a career in music and church but lived single. I knew he was sexually promiscuous. His attempts to marry had ended in disasters to both the intended relationships and his mental health. I filtered my observations through what I knew of his experience. I also had my own gay feelings in a couple of developing friendships, feelings I knew I wouldn’t pursue. Still I wanted to know these things for myself: the actuality of man-to-man love and sex; the possibility of men loving and living together; the acceptance of such persons in society; and the embracing of same-sex love within a religious community.

     At that point, some churches had declared homosexuals should be guaranteed equal civil rights related to the United States Constitution and to a general sense of morality. The arguments of the details were under scrutiny and becoming a dividing issue in most denominations and the larger community. I saw that churches were entering an era of anxiety when that question and others would be faced openly within congregations. Gays would expect inclusion in the local churches and would want leadership. Then there was the larger issue of relationships. Already marriage as an institution in America was showing severe weaknesses. Parental fears and warnings did little to prevent young couples in college from living together and having loads of sex without the convention and support of marriage. Free love had been a counter-cultural doctrine for over a decade. Eventually the issue of gay marriage would split the churches and become a problem for general society. 

     I felt I needed to know and understand. I had experienced sex with males. My closest adult male friend was gay. I was sitting in a gay bar enjoying myself. I was writing reports of my excursions. I was learning not to fear. I was hoping to learn to be an effective minister. I was evaluating myself at age thirty, in my tenth year of marriage to a loving woman. What would be ‘my way?’ I really wondered.

     By the end of the semester, I had seen a lot of city life and written a short book of field observations and reflections. I’d witnessed gay bar life. I’d sat in the county hospital emergency room late on Friday nights. I’d attended quite a few meetings of a community organizing effort. My professor returned the report congratulating me on my work, both observational and written. He also warned me about the problem of writing candidly and subjectively about my experiences. “One can lose control of a written document,” he warned. His sensitivity to my personal process led me eventually to destroy the manuscript, but I didn’t lose the impressions or self-realizations that arose from the experiences. I came away from the semester with a knowledge of gay bars, but also with the perception that gay folk had lives away from bars, that they often lived in fear of police, that they had great fun together, that they sometimes partied too much, that they helped out friends in crises, that they experienced life with the same grace and awkwardness as anyone else in society. I’d gained a glimpse of a life with traditions, institutions, and history; a community of importance and, for me, appeal.

     I had no idea I’d ever be meeting on a weekly basis with a group of gay storytellers in a gay community center, that I’d be going to happy hour every Friday night at local gay bars, that I’d regularly circulate with quite a few gay couples and their single friends, that I’d survive two gay lovers who died from AIDS-related causes, or that I’d live over nine years with the gay man I’m paired with now.

     But these days I tell my gay story and have to conclude, that even in embracing this new gay life: “I Did It My Way.” 

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

Read more at Phillip’s blog  artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Snowstorm by Phillip Hoyle

     “We sure used to get a lot more snow than we do now,” is a sentiment I’ve heard many times, but I am cautious of the claim which seems akin to the old timer’s story of how many miles he had to walk through the snow to get to school. The main way to know about weather—how it was—is to study weather records. Still, to tell a story about the weather is to reveal more than the weather. It exposes a person’s feelings, a yearning for an experience of old, a desire to touch again some past season of delight or dread.

     My story celebrates my favorite stage of childhood development—that cusp of so many changes often called pre-pubescence. What I like most about the phase is the way the child is open to dream, ready to believe, full of play, and living in the now—at least that’s how I experienced it that winter of 1959, the winter of the big snow. We used to have snows in my childhood and celebrated them with snow angels, snow balls, snow forts, and snow men. But that winter the big storm brought new big snow adventures.

      Our gang, with our hideout in the rafters of my folks’ garage, hung out together at every opportunity. Gang travel had originally taken us to each other’s houses, then to the high school football field one block down the alley, then to the public swimming pool one mile away, and eventually to the hills and valleys several miles west of town.

     The summer before the storm, we hiked or rode our bicycles out west to a farm where we were allowed to play in the pastures. My best friend Keith took us to where a small spring flowed from the hillside. There we refilled our canteens. Downstream we would set up camp, build a small fire, cook whatever food we’d brought from home, and generally enjoy one another. That fall, we brought along our bows and arrows and hunted cottontails. We pursued those elusive hoppers for hours, stalking, chasing, shooting, running, screaming, and never once making a kill. We laughed raucously, imagining ourselves hunters, adventurers, and we slept deeply upon returning home at night.

     Then the snow came. It wasn’t a dusting; it wasn’t a snow that covered your shoes; it was a real snow, you know, like those we used to get in the old days, one that brought the town to a halt, a two-foot snow with wind, drifts, more snow. But Saturday dawned sunny. We gathered with sleds and plans and trudged west, out to the hills to make the best of it.

     The big snow came in the best year of my life, the one in which I lost track of time, the one I celebrated friendship along with country adventures. I was in the sixth grade, the year before I started sacking and carrying groceries at the store. Keith and I, probably Dinky and Dick too, went sledding in the deep snow. We had Boy Scout training and felt older-elementary-male confidence. We hiked west of town to a hillside where we could sled down to a ravine of woods where we could then get out of the wind. We spent all day for three Saturdays in a row out there having our winter adventures. Each week our Imaginations soared, our plans got bolder. New snow fell each week and although we nearly froze hiking through snow often over our knees, we laughed our way like fools or kings or warriors. In the woods we built a fire, and when we had warmed ourselves and dried our clothes, gave ourselves to snow play like never before.

     After two Saturdays out, Keith remembered seeing some old skis in his dad’s workshop. They were simple things, not long, but short skis with only a single leather strap across the midpoint, a place to insert the shoes. They must have been used on the farm when chores had to be completed but the snow was too deep for easy walking to the barn, at least that was our Kansas winter fantasy. The skis certainly were not meant for downhill skiing, but we were boys with great imaginations and enough snow to make a ramp.

     We reasoned if we let the old German sled with steel covered wooden runners glide down the hill on its own, it would show us the best route for skiing. So we climbed the hill, and turned the sled loose, trusting in good luck and gravity. Following the sled, we tramped the area between the runner marks for our ski run. We had no poles but along the ravine found sticks to serve. With them we hurried back up the hill to try out the skis. We were pleased with our few successes and gleefully took turns trying until one of the brittle leather straps broke. Our disappointment led to more ideas. Keith thought we should go down the track on our sleds. When we discovered most of the sleds sat too low to make any speed, he brought the old German one to the top and sat on it, aimed downhill and went hurtling down our well packed run. Having forgotten his sixth grade science lessons on gravity, he’d made no plans for how to stop the sled. This was no drivable sled with flexible runners, no way to guide or stop it except by dragging a leg behind. But Keith wasn’t lying down. He was sitting tall and speeding down the hill towards the woods. He stopped when the front of the sled hit a sapping and broke the metal brace. He stopped when his crotch met the rough bark. He stopped when the tree knocked the wind of him and threw him to the ground. We ran to his rescue, dragged him over to the fire to warm up. He finally got his breath and described his feeling of elation on his brief trip from the top. We shared our snacks with Keith, our athletic hero, my best friend. Then, like good Scouts, we put out the fire and dragged home our sleds and packs. We trudged through the snow, laughing, making big plans for the next big snow.

     A year lapsed before it came. By then, I was helping customers get their groceries to their cars. I never returned to the slopes, but fortunately I did get to sled as an adult, then being pulled by ropes behind an International Harvester Scout up Highway 90 in western Colorado and sailing free back down the steep slope of the road’s switch backs. That ride took me back to my childhood and extended my thrill from a ride of a few feet to one of nearly a mile. Such a thrill. Such a fine reminder of the big Kansas snows and our small sixth grade adventures.

     I’m still amazed when the snow piles up. I have such fond memories, but now I also think about driving in blizzards and inconveniences such as the loss of work. My enthusiasm is dampened by adult concerns. Still, I say, “We used to get a lot more snow years ago,” and let my memory slide down the hills of yearning. I smile. I love my friends. I love my life. I love the snow.

Denver, 2011

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com
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Three Little Words by Phillip

Love and marriage
Love and marriage
Go  together  like  a
Horse and carriage

     So we heard in the fifties; archaic expressions to bolster old-fashioned values. We didn’t think how the song was a commercial jingle rather than a poetic and musical reflection on human activity. It was show music for comedy. The simplicity of the words belied the complexity of the relationships, even the ones being portrayed on the screen. But this fanciful appeal to the medieval literary tradition of romantic love with its Lords and Ladies, royalty and riches, princes and princesses, troubadours and trouveres, lutes and loyalties, knights in shining armor riding trusty steeds and hoping to win the attention of the most important Lady of the realm; scenes from movies with white dresses, tiaras, and happily ever afters. It’s a dream of Edenic idealism based on the combination of three little words: I love you.

     Back when I was nineteen, my girlfriend manipulated me into saying those words to her. Of course I had heard the words in movies, but not in the house in which I grew up. I had no doubt I was loved appropriately by my parents and that they loved one another. Their actions showed these truths. Still, they didn’t go around saying it. In fact, few people I knew said the words which were were groan words for us boys watching movies. We so hated that romantic syrup, and thus I was unprepared to say it to my girlfriend. With great difficulty I played my part in the fantasy and finally stuttered out, “I love you.”

     Analytical logic demands that I was unprepared because what I felt for her was something other than love. Oh to understand the relationship between words and feelings, something that’s always been difficult for me. Anyway, I did learn to say the three words in combination to my girlfriend. I believed them although the feelings I had were more related to sexual hopes than falling in love.

     So I married the woman who taught me to say “I love you.” I practiced and practiced. I loved her in practical ways that made for a fine marriage. We liked and respected one another. We treated one another with kindness and love. I didn’t use the words to manipulate, but I did employ them daily. I taught them to my children. I was judicious in their use, and when I fell in love with a man, I didn’t use them with him for quite a few years. Eventually, I signed my letters to him, “Love, Phillip.” He never fell into line with my practice; so I noted. We never talked about love. I came to love other people as well—women and men. I said the words to a few. One young man said them to me. I explained my perspective, that these words can never mean the same thing to two people. Feeling meets feeling. What fantasies arise from such feelings need to be handled with caution should a couple of people want their sexual attraction and deeper affection to grow into a lasting relationship.

     Gay male romance may focus more on “Harder, deeper, faster,” than on pledges of “love and marriage”, yet even “Harder, deeper, faster,” is a convention not original to gay men. It surely became a focus due to the combination of two testosterone-laden individuals getting together sexually. These days modern gay experience does play with hopes of love and marriage in a growing movement for equality before the law. Perhaps American gay men want to say to one another “I love you harder, deeper, and faster.” Still love, words of love, and that potent combination of I, love, and you have a long history, and most American relationships want it to become personal.

     Words have creative potential. It’s an old tradition from any number of cultures. The ancient Hebrews believed in such creativity. For them, Yahweh called into existence the moon and stars, earth and innumerable varieties of life forms. God spoke. It’s a metaphor with great power in the imagination.

     Shall we not sing the possibility of creative love? After all St. Valentine’s Day falls tomorrow and creative love is a romance, one to pursue in both feelings and thoughts. Perhaps we need to approach “I love you” with the realism of my late mother-in-law who advised her daughter about sex in marriage: “You’ll get used to it.” Yet even this practicality didn’t mitigate her daughter’s fairy tale fantasy about marriage. The advice probably did help her survive the separation and the divorce that ended it.

Denver, 2012

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends
his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage
practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers
and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he
now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice.
He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

Read more at Phillip’s blog: artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Holding Hands in Church by Phillip Hoyle

          When I was a kid, Buddy and I held hands in church. We didn’t do it just once, but often. I’d cross my arms with my hands underneath, then lean against Buddy’s shoulder. He’d do the same, and we’d interlace our fingers. Although the act usually occurred during the sermon with us sitting in the back of the congregation, our leaning into each other was clearly visible to the preacher. He didn’t see it, I suppose. Perhaps his eyesight was poor or he simply didn’t want to deal with what may have been happening between two boys in his congregation. 

          The touch surely indicated that we were special friends. At least, we were friendly. Buddy was an outgoing jock; I a skinny weakling with personality. He was humorous, fun to be with although sometimes arrogant. Still, we had a great time, especially when we spent nights together, evenings full of sexual exploration and pleasure. 

  I learned from him more than just how to kiss and have sex. This young teen shared his ideas about girls, a recommendation of the underarm deodorant I still use, the need for exercise and sports I never followed. A wise teen myself, I realized I was somehow a replacement for his older brother who had left home. I had no brother. 

  We became more than friends. I don’t think either of us experienced infatuation, a crush, or puppy love, but we had sex. Enthusiastically. The experiences began with back rubs, progressed to kissing, and then to more explorations. Like most boys, we were not cautious. We didn’t think much about what we left on sheets or blankets, didn’t think about our moms or about the social ramifications of discovery. We just had fun together. 

  That was about it. Ten months into our affair, Buddy’s family moved away, and I went on with my life. I dated girls and really liked some of them, but I didn’t fall in love or hold hands with them in church. 

* * * * *
  Things changed in college with the young woman who would become my wife. We prayed together in the privacy of the prayer chapel, leaning into one another there. I taught her how to kiss when we made out in the car or in the cloak room of the administration building of the Bible college we attended. We liked each other and realized we were in love. Finally I had found someone to hold hands with again. 

  For many years we learned from one another, shared the rich experiences of a full life with children, friends, family, and congregations. We kept up a sexual exploration that increasingly brought satisfaction. Even with the richness of our relationship, its shared values and work, and its serious commitment to one another, I seemed to need more. 

* * * * *
  I met a man while attending graduate school. We couldn’t get enough of each other’s company, walked across campus sharing ideas and hopes, talked endlessly while sipping warmed-up coffee in his apartment. I knew I had fallen in love with this man. I wanted to hold him, to do the things I had done with Buddy, but I did not. Sitting alone on his living room couch, we sometimes did touch, rubbing each other’s feet and, you guessed it, holding hands. That was the extent of it. Neither of us verbalized our feelings although we both recognized that they were strong and loving and, we both hoped, lasting. 

* * * * *
  Years later I separated from my wife and soon after that from professional ministry. I moved to Denver to live as a gay man. During my first months living alone, I attended the Metropolitan Community Church. Each Sunday I would weep during some part of the service perhaps when I glanced across the faces of the many gay men seated there or when the singing roused a feeling of solidarity with gay believers or when the preacher’s words challenged the wider church to be loving, supportive, and open to gay people. Eventually I achieved a modicum of healing. I quit crying but then became annoyed with the language of the liturgy. I sought religious community elsewhere, looking for a church that would accept me and make sense to me. Perhaps I didn’t try hard enough for eventually I quit attending services altogether. My recovery continued outside the church: my community place, a coffee shop; my support group, friends I met there; my ministerial service, massage to clients who came to my practice. With these non-church groups I built a meaningful life and a purposeful career. 

  In Denver I have lived with three different men who provided me good relationships. Two of them were lapsed Catholics, the other a back-slidden Methodist. We kissed and had sex many times. We held hands but not in church. We never went to church. They felt no need, and I didn’t want to be irked. Sundays come and go with little thought of attending service, but I wonder if my religious healing will ever be complete until I again hold hands in church and this time openly. 

  “Hey,” I guess I could ask my back-slidden Methodist buddy, “what are you doing this Sunday?”

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

Read more at Phillip’s blog  artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com