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
(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.
An old friend stopped by the other day, having heard through his colleague, who heard from my Gay Old Soulmate, of my diagnosis. I don’t think we have seen each other since my Gay Old Soulmate and I went down to the Schuylkill to watch him in the dragon boat races four years ago, and I, with my poor eyesight, strained in vain to figure out which figure in which boat was he. He commented that in earlier times we would hardly go three days without seeing one another. That was a different lifetime for us both.
A doctor, he asked the medical questions about staging and Gleason scores and mentioned some other numbers that I didn’t understand. It felt as though he knew more about my prognosis from my limp attempt to describe what the surgeon had told us than I did myself—which felt comforting. It recalled the time he saved my life. Fifteen or sixteen years ago. I waited for a liver transplant. One night I began bleeding internally. Blissfully ignorant, I knew only that I had not the strength to get up from the bathroom floor. My Gay Old Soulmate called him in desperation, and he came in the middle of the night. I presume he grasped the critical nature of my condition when he saw me. But I insisted they take me to a hospital across town where I knew the doctors. He advised calling the ambulance. He told me he would let me ride across town if I could make it down the stairs on my own energy. I could only go, sitting butt down, stair by stair, one step at a time. That settled it. He called 911, conveying the urgency to the operator with a host of medical terms I did not fully comprehend and now do not remember. I remember only that the ambulance came and I made it to the emergency room on time.
Now we primarily see each other on Facebook, or at times of crisis like this. It feels good to see him settled on the sofa again. We pick up with news of each other’s lives, his partner’s Ph.D. defense, my recent retirement and our celebratory trip to Phoenix to visit his ex—and cancer. The intertwining of our lives no longer brings us face to face with any frequency. But our lives remain connected. Even over the years and chasm of experience that caused our worlds to diverge, we are bound together.
We no longer promise, as we once did, “I’ll call you,” or say, “We should get together more often.” We know we won’t. Without fail, another diagnosis, another dragon boat race, or . . . . We will see each other again.
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.
Continue reading
As I become more and more a gay old soul, life’s challenges fall roughly into four themes: spirit, body, relationship, resources.
Spirit
After I first came out we dreamed of a fairy godbrother circle. A sort of gay spiritual order with its own spiritual discipline to weekly: