We are Vermonters now, my Gay Old Soulmate and I. We are not Vermonters like people who have lived here their entire lives. We hope to someday be Vermonters like those who moved here long ago. But already we are Vermonters in the sense that we want to be here and we have no other home.
I left being a Kansan somewhere early in the queer revolution. I don’t know if I left Kansas or Kansas left me. At some point my body began to know it as a hostile state. Continue reading
We,
who once discovered
in a flood that swept away
our self-hatred and alienation,
who now know that being ‘Beloved’
requires the rending
of all our sacred skies—
We,
who were driven into the wilderness,
who learned truth from wild creatures
and spiritual beings— Continue reading
Sculpture by Ken M. White
Winter gloom and darkness
turn the heart.
Blow Lent’s trumpet if you must,
and tremble.
But before you mourn in solemn assembly
remember
that these ashes
were once profligate palms
that welcomed Love.
Huddle in your prayer closet
marked with ashes as you may,
Love will see you
and prick your heart.
For February’s snow wraps the earth
as wanton Love embraces all its inhabitants.
I step off the train into Brattleboro’s darkness. It is 5:00 o’clock, but the sun had set before we reached Greenfield. I cross the road and head up Main Street. My briefcase hangs on a strap around my neck. I lift the bag of lunches (food for more than two) packed by Ruth and Beth. And I pull my suitcase behind me. What little traffic has backed up on Main disappears quickly once the train clears the crossing. I am left alone, trudging up the steep sidewalk. Dark store windows follow my progress. Even the restaurants have closed for Thanksgiving.
For reasons too tedious to enumerate, my Gay Old Soulmate and I headed different directions at Thanksgiving this year. I, back to our new home here in Brattleboro. But since I’ve only lived here a week, it doesn’t feel quite like coming home.
The sun has fallen behind the trees as my Gay Old Soulmate and I sit here on the deck in our little queer retreat cottage. If all goes well, we soon will leave behind the house we have lived in for twenty-seven years in the city we have lived in for thirty-two. We will move to a different house in a different town a few miles away from where we sit now.
Only an occasional bird call or distant dog’s bark breaks the silence. My soul has lived in unsettled quiet for some time now. Continue reading
Can I be a gay man without desire? Without a lust for other men?
Today I will be given Lupron, a form of Androgen Deprivation Therapy (ADT) or “hormone treatment.” It will block my body’s production of the testosterone that fuels the prostate cancer lurking within me–and destroy my libido.
How will I be gay then? Continue reading
At an age (many years ago) that some Millennials are now—and that Jesus was then—I strode eagerly into the wilderness.
And when the tempter told me to prove I was a child of God, by changing my queer to straight, I pulled my Bible from my hip pocket and shot Scripture right back at them. (Not to mention that they’d kinda got it bread-to-stones and not the other way around.) Continue reading
Speak to me with an ordinary voice
Ashes to ashes
dust to dust
You are dust and
to dust you shall return
Ashes to ashes
dust to dust
My life is ashes.
My world is dust.
I seek a gracious one
the self-giving one
the forerunner
crying my wilderness.
I seek the washing flood
the clear liquid pool
a new water
cleansing my nakedness
We are home, my Gay Old Soulmate and I. And there is no one to call. No number to dial. No one to pick up the phone at the other end and hear my report, “we’re back home in Philadelphia” (really meaning, “we’re safely home”). Mom is dead.
We three sons were with her when she died. Although she suffered little pain, the cancer that killed her made much of her last months miserable. She had complained several times that she didn’t understand why dying had to take so long. She was ready. And we readily released her. Hers had been a good life, a full life. I won’t say it was a good ending—but it wasn’t a bad one. And now she no longer lives there, back home, in Kansas. I find it hard to wrap my head around the absence, much less my heart.
My father died in 1992 after a long, pain-filled struggle with prostate cancer. About three months later, my Gay Old Soulmate and I were awakened by a call informing us that my uncle had also died—unexpectedly of a heart attack. Since he and his family lived about an hour’s drive from us, Mom (still grieving my father’s death) flew out immediately to Philadelphia to spend time with my aunt. My Gay Old Soulmate and I had also rushed to my aunt’s house when we heard the news. So when Mom arrived to stay in our guest room, I apologized that we had not properly cleaned the house in preparation.
“My house is always clean,” she replied. “No one lives there anymore.”
That quiet sentence, a vessel of bottomless absence, pierced my heart then. It has forever since, each time I recall the words. And now, it comes back to me more achingly deep than ever, because, we have made it home, and there is no one to call.
Urges impel me.
Eager, apprehensive,
how shall I reach
the object of my desire?
Can you be real?
I hesitate.
I might mess up,
be mistaken, be wrong
or—most devastating
—feel foolish.
Longing leads me.
Compelling energy
surges and carries me
inexorably forward
along a path.
Unable to perceive
my destination.
I project, at best,
a blurred image
—a half-imagined fantasy.
It becomes my obsession.
I tune that vision,
refining expectations
even before I breathe
its fear and promises.
Finally I release all
to emergent reality.
Soul and body,
thrust into wonder,
grasp each other desperately.
I could not know
where to follow my desire.
I dared not predict
a destination
nor even the journey.
Only by going there
could I obtain
the curse and the blessing.
Sex and the sacred,
so dearly the same.