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
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.
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
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.
When queer was odd
and gay was happy
and no vocabulary contained the word
homosexual . . .
Before my parents read to me
of Susie’s babies
and I learned that grown up men and women
did the same repulsive things
that hamsters did . . .
In a time when every boy
married a girl,
but that felt okay because
marriage really was just living together . . .
and I was too young to know
that my fascination with shirtless men
and bare-chested farmers
was anything more than fascination . . .
I had already discovered
the secret of human flight
and could make myself invisible.
I disarmed the world
by invisibly transporting
Russia’s and America’s atom bombs
to my factories of destruction,
because Mennonite—pacifist—boys
must do that first.
Only then did I secretly save
high-school basketball players
(in those revealing uniforms)
and the handsome neighbor
(who mowed the grass t-shirt off)
from evil captors.
And they were not the only ones.
You would be surprised how many villains
conspired to lock away hard-muscled men
in secret basement dungeons
under the buildings of Goessel, Kansas
—a town of just three hundred or so people.
After I rescued them—,
naked, cold, and lonely
—and nursed the wounds on their strong chests,
and on the exquisite skin of their arms and legs
and fine-looking faces,
they would come to live with me
in my not-so-Mennonite mansion
with many bedrooms
just outside of town.
There we lived together
in chaste contentment
in a time before I knew that
something more super was possible.
Bare chest to naked back
skin pressed hard to weary skin
one arm awkwardly squeezed
to the mattress below
the other wrapping him tight
Silence, mostly silence
we turn, reverse position
his arm now wrapping me
in duration proportionate
to the burden of the day
Sometimes hanging on
is simply hanging on
sometimes it is survival
the one reliable embrace
the world can offer
Darkness of heaven,
beyond the moon’s painting
over my pale weariness,
I rest my fading body into your night.
I lay upon you
the sheer force of will
by which I hold together
this patched, unpainted frame.
How easily I could fly apart,
abandoned by gravity,
into a thousand pieces,
just glassy shards of flesh.
Must I then
be swept away
as shattered debris
of dust and ashes?
Or might I,
from every glinting fragment,
each threatening splinter,
still glitter persistently?
(two months and twelve days after legal marriage)
Love of my life,
how redundant it felt
to make vows of marriage
having traveled
a thirty-one year road.
Did we not take vows the night we
set out on this journey:
anointed by coffee at Perkins
sanctified on a sofabed alter?
Neither of us anticipated then
that a day would come
when force of law would bind us.
But court rulings do not define the heart.
On our thirty-first anniversary of love,
I undertake this vow:
No “I do” shall supersede
our queer covenant:
to be friends and lovers first
and married second
to value spiritual growth
above conventional relationship
and create “family”
intentionally
to dance across the lines
of social respectability
and seek justice
promiscuously
to celebrate sexuality
spiritually
and sex
playfully
to risk adventure
flagrantly
and seek joy
recklessly
So that whatever life may throw in our path,
our world may be renewed
just by our traveling
together.
I never imagined—
back when, before I can remember,
I learned to “hold it”
and “go” at my own command,
or when, even in recent memory
control seemed simply natural (complex and unnatural as it was)
—that a day would come
when, with constant self reminders,
I again would need to learn to “hold it”
and wished I would go only at my own command.
It feels so unnatural (as it is)
to have to will oneself to continence.
I entertained no notion—
back when, with teenage hormones rising,
my awkwardly positioned hands covered
inconvenient evidence of unconfined libido,
or when, even in recent years,
stamina alone limited me
—that a day would come
when, with wearying desire,
I would strive to manifest that libido
and would hope for its unbidden evidence.
It seems so unnatural (and it is)
to have to train one’s body for arousal.
I failed to see—
in youth and even naïve older age
before thought-less acts
lost their second-nature;
before they demanded
constant thought
—this day,
in which divided attention
yields unpleasant consequences,
and pleasant consequences require undivided attention.
It feels weirdly natural now
to think my body through its urges.
I pass the sign on the way to the upper swimming hole at the Rock River near Newfane, Vermont. The sign doesn’t say it, but optional should be in quotation marks. From this point on I will feel more exposed with clothes on than with them off.
So I strip as soon as my feet touch the gay beach. That only shifts my sense of exposure. Is it really possible to feel more naked in the midst of a crowd of naked men? In my youth we would have called this skinny dipping. Dipping, of course, hardly describes even the secondary purpose for our activity. Although I hold no expectation of a side trip into the woods with a handsome stranger, a palpable energy pervades this place no less than the fresh smell and sound of the water rushing over the rocks on its way to the West River. I feel the little arousals in me prompted by the bodies surrounding me. I compare my own skinny, aging, untanned body to theirs. Does every other gay man hold a gym membership and spend all his days lying naked in the sun? Few, if any, tan lines show. My dermatologist would be appalled even as I am enthralled.
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