I Won’t Last a Day Without You

Good morning! For me, at least, today is the midpoint of the work week. I am delighted to have a four day weekend, and it will be glorious once it arrives. Yesterday was another odd one, to be honest; I felt fine when I got up, but gradually grew more tired until by the time I came home I was pretty exhausted. We did watch House of the Dragon–which felt like more filler than anything else, yet again (this series we’ll show the aftermath of the battles instead of the actual battle!) and I did some reading, but other than that the evening was pretty much wasted for the most part. I slept really well last night, and this morning I am awake and feeling good. That hasn’t happened in the morning for a while, so here’s hoping the energy and the good mood and the feeling good lasts all day, shall we? I am going to run errands after work tonight and go to the gym on the way home.

I also got a bit unhinged yesterday because someone on my Facebook feed posted one of those namby-pamby, we-can-disagree-politically-but-still-be-friends bullshit, and I will not apologize for seeing red. I unfriended and blocked so fast my keyboard was literally smoking. That level of privilege nauseates me, because it reduces me–and others who don’t fit the white nationalist/American Nazi definition of a real American–and my existence, my rights…to nothing more than a “political opinion.” This is what I mean when I talk about casual cruelty–and what posting bullshit like that means to people like me. Do any of you have any idea what it feels like to be dismissed so completely in this manner by someone who has never, ever had to wonder “I wonder if I didn’t get the job because I was too gay-presenting” or “was that person a homophobe or just an asshole in general” or “what is this carload of young men acting like idiots up to?”

And really, isn’t that the primary problem we have in this country? People who just want to put up their hands and surrender because it’s difficult and bigotry against you doesn’t really harm me so why should I lose friends because they think you’re not human? Ha ha ha, can’t we all just get along? and the answer, for the record, to that is always no. You see, I have no problem with homophobes being homophobic. I don’t care if you’re homophobic. You want to leave those braces on your brain, be my guest. But you don’t get to pass laws that make me not a whole American citizen.

It was also ironic that after a lovely Pride Month on-line for the most part, this shit-bird decided to turn into a good little German on July 1. “Okay, Pride’s over, time to shit on the gays some more! You should be nicer to the people who tell you you’re going to Hell and you’re a pervert and an abomination and a groomer and a pedophile because it’s just a political opinion.”

Sorry you had to feel a little discomfort there, Mr. Straight Ciswhiteman! Good thing you don’t have to deal with it every fucking day, or have to worry every election season that you’re rights are going to be voted away (or stolen by a corrupt, illegitimate Supreme Court), right, since you have so much trouble dealing with discomfort…and then ask yourself this: how would I feel if someone told my queer daughter that her entire existence is reduced to being considered simply an opposing political opinion?

That should make you feel extremely uncomfortable. But most Americans tend to avoid things that make them uncomfortable. Imagine being told to “straighten up” because I am making some straight person squirm.

Well, it’s not my fault that you immediately think about gay sex whenever I am around or I am talking to you. I don’t think about straight sex whenever I am around or talking to a straight person, so maybe you should take a long hard look at your own obsession with sex, and maybe start working through that on your own, or with a therapist if you can afford it or your insurance will cover it. Who’s the sex-crazed pervert in this instance, freak?

And I don’t want to be friends with anyone who thinks that way, or can rationalize things like “Well, I’ve known Jimmy since we were kids and he’s a good guy. It bugs me when he says he thinks all homosexuals should be killed, but I’ve had good times with him before and I know he just says that for a reaction, so we just don’t talk about politics.” I am “white” but I refuse to be friends with racists, or with misogynists just because I also have a penis. But then I know what it feels like to watch your friends die while ‘christians’ cheer about the fatal disease “because it’s killing all the right people.”

Evangelical Christians were perfectly okay with letting us die in the 1980s and laughing about those deaths, like their cohorts in the Westboro Baptist Church. Why would I ever believe they’ve changed their minds when they still are out there advocating for stripping us of our full citizenship and would actually like us all to start dying again?

Ugh. It’s sooooo tiring. And it’s always, always the same old “what about the children” bullshit. Groomer, pedophile, “they need to recruit” on and on and on, lather, rinse, repeat. What’s even worse is that the current crop are really in it for the grift and attention. I honestly believe that Anita Bryant, horror that she was, actually believed what she was saying and she wasn’t doing it for money, power or attention. She did evil while thinking she was doing right….but the present day professional homophobes are all about money and power and grifting less worldly religious freaks out of what little money they have left.

And on that bitter note, it’s off to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Tuesday, and I may be back later. I do need to write another Pride post, and I need to write my entry about Horror Movie. Sigh. Onward and upward.

The Show Must Go On

Ah, Monday the first of July, and a very short work week it is, too. Huzzah for my four-day weekend! It was very nice this morning to come downstairs to a clean workspace. It does make a difference. I feel like I slept very well last night and feel very awake and alive this morning, at least so far. I was tired all weekend, which was odd but probably had something to do with the daily pills issue I was talking about yesterday. My biggest wish is that the situation with that would work itself out within my body while I slept last night and I’d be back to (what passes for) normal this morning. So far, so good, and my coffee truly tastes amazing this morning, too–always a good sign.

I forgot to mention this weekend that the awesome Barb Goffman selected my story, “Housecleaning”, to spotlight this week at Black Cat Weekly. You can order it here! How cool is that? This is my second story to be picked and featured by Barb, and it’s such a thrill–particularly given how little confidence I have in short story writing.

I also submitted my story yesterday to that anthology; we’ll see how that turns out. It probably needed to wait another day and reread another time, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. I didn’t do any actual writing of fiction this weekend, but I did make a lot of notes and think about what I am working on; hopefully tonight after work I’ll settle in and get back to work on the book. I have to write my entry on Horror Movie at some point, too; it was a really terrific read that I do recommend, and I started Hall of Mirrors yesterday, which I am also really enjoying, at least so far. While I was working on the files this weekend, I also started paging through my old journals–which will always survive purges–and it was very interesting. I don’t really go back and look through them as often as I should (I do when I’m looking for notes on something I am currently working on) and what was interesting was seeing, in some places, where books and short stories I’ve published actually began–a scribbled title, a theme, what I want to explore in it–and of course, other ideas that never progressed further than that page in the journal. I am still missing some of the ancient ones–going back to the 90s, when I started using bound blank bound journals–but I’d love to see those sometime, especially since I am now writing about that period. I imagine they somehow got put in a storage box….and since the goal of the summer is to get rid of as many of those as humanly possible from the Lost Apartment and the attic, I am sure to find them again this summer, which will be great. I also worked out yesterday how to rearrange the books in the living room. I decided I no longer need a “vanity bookcase”, overstuffed with copies of my own work, for one–properly labeled for ease of discovery, they can go in the storage boxes while I fill the bookcase with the books stacked on the floor and on top of the bookcases, making the whole place look a little less cluttered and opening up more space.

This morning’s hurricane check shows that Beryl is a massive monster already but it looks like her course hasn’t changed, and Chris went ahead and developed into a tropical storm and came ashore in southern Mexico. There’s a D storm in the Atlantic heading towards the Gulf, too. Hurray! When we watched the weather report last night, Paul said, “A category 4 in June already?” and I seriously asked in reply, “Gosh, where do you want to live after New Orleans is wiped off the map this year?” And y’all ain’t seen a recession like the one we’ll have this time if New Orleans ceases operating as a port and oil hub. It’s also supposed to rain today, and we’re in a heat advisory where it will “feel like” 114. Yay. It’s going to be a brutal summer by all accounts here. Guess I better start saving to pay the power bills. But Beryl doesn’t appear to be a threat to us here, although she will impact our weather, so the second named storm of the year–and a big one–is a bullet dodged for New Orleans.

Unfortunately, that means the bullet hits someone else, which always makes me uncomfortable. I never want it to seem like I’m hoping other people’s lives get disrupted and/or destroyed, because I would never wish that on anyone else, under any circumstance.

And on that rather dreary note, I am heading into the spice mines. Should you have a moment today that is upsetting or depressing or knocks you down–remember, Steve Bannon is now behind bars and it’s just one step in the right direction.

Life Is Just a Fantasy

One of the best places for a young gay kid to see almost naked, really muscularly developed men was on the covers of fantasy novels, like the Conan books and others of their ilk. There were also a lot of fantasy cartoon magazines, Heavy Metal and others like it, that often had scantily clad, beautifully built men and women…and the occasional full frontal male nude.

Did these magazines play a role in my love of muscles (and society’s adaptation to sexualizing men for women and gay men), or did the magazines just give me something to look at that played into said obsession with muscular male bodies? I was very desperate for that sort of thing when I was in high school–and my interest in this kind of fantasy art wasn’t a giveaway clue to my sexuality. Because of the naked big breasted women, most boys liked looking at them too–and the artists and more intelligent of them loved the artwork itself and the stories– there was more going on there than just gratuitous nudity and sex.

The books, of course, were called “sword-and-sorcery” books, as were the few films that came out of them (or were inspired by them), that had a time in the sun during the 1980s, thanks to the Conan movies that made Arnold Schwarzeneggar a star, and also influenced every sword and sorcery movie that followed. S&S books were always a successful niche market, and the success of Conan as a film led to a lot of S&S movies in the 1980s.

Two of the biggest names in the S&S fantasy art field were Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. I absolutely loved their work.

Boris Vallejo’s “Egyptian Warrior”

As an Egyptophile, I love that image and would love to have it hanging on my wall.

Heavy Metal magazine launched in the late 1970’s, and even was made into a great animated movie in the 1980s–its soundtrack includes Stevie Nicks’ “Blue Lamp.” We used to get high and watch it when I was in college, and just got sucked into the vividness of its art and color and style and music.

A work by Frank Frazetta

I don’t know if S&S ever went out of style in books and magazines, but you don’t see many book covers with this type of art on them anymore. It’s a shame; they were very fun tales of treachery and betrayal and magic and vengeance. I never read any of the Conan stories, or any of the other fantasy S&S type books, but I did watch a lot of the movies–those scantily clad musclemen are lots of fun to look at. These movies also don’t get made much anymore–John Carter‘s failure at the box office (which it didn’t deserve; it’s much better than critics and audiences thought it was when released) pretty much killed any interest in these style movies.

Ironically, Game of Thrones was really another one of these style stories; the primary difference being it was done on a much grander scale than the classic S&S genre usually permitted.

And it might be fun to try to write a gay one…..

Science Fiction Double Feature

Lips! Lips! We want lips!

The first time I went to a midnight movie1 was when I was either eighteen or nineteen. I still lived in Kansas then, and the midnight movie was playing at the old movie theater on Sixth Street that was rarely open other than for some special occasion. They’d been doing midnight movies for a while before I went that first time, and I was going with a co-worker who promised me I was going to have an amazing time. I wasn’t so sure. The line outside the Granada Theater was a bizarre sight–many of them dressed up freakishly, and a lot of them were carrying paper bags full of stuff, which I also thought was odd.

I was about to watch, and experience, The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time.

I had no idea what was to come.

At the late night, double feature, picture show…

The crowd started chanting for “lips” as the lights in the theater went down, and then I saw what they were chanting for, as two bright red lips appeared on the black screen and started singing as everyone cheered….and started shouting responses to the opening credits.

And I liked the song.

What followed was ninety-eight minutes of insanity. I had never heard of an “interactive” movie before, and it really caught me off guard. How did people know what to yell, and when to yell it? They sang along with the movies, and I soon was caught up in it; getting sprayed with water, ducking out of the way of flying pieces of toast and toilet paper and tampons, and it was all so delightfully subversive in terms of questioning gender and sexuality. You still couldn’t swear on prime time television shows, and you definitely couldn’t say “sex” (I always hated the coy and cheesy ways television writers came up with as a workaround).

And then of course, there was Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-n-furter.

I’d never seen anything like that before in my life…and I howled with laughter as he removed his robe to reveal what he was wearing beneath, and several people shouted in unison, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Liza Minnelli!”

And after ninety-eight minutes of madness and mayhem, I was a convert. I walked out of the theater with my head still reeling from all the subversion a still moralistic 1970’s American culture had taught me was wrong on every level, disgusting sin and decadent morality, and I wanted more.

I bought the soundtrack shortly thereafter, both vinyl and eight-track, and it didn’t take long for me to have the entire thing memorized. I don’t remember seeing it again while I lived in Kansas–we moved to California shortly thereafter–but I did discover the theater in Fresno that showed it, and I started going weekly. It was more of a production in Fresno–people dressed up and acted out the parts in front of the screen (they tried to recruit me once to play Brad, but I said no; it would be over another decade before I was comfortable enough to wear only underwear in public; I was really uptight). Eventually, after memorizing the film and soundtrack, learning everything there was to know about the movie and play, I finally stopped going to the midnight movies. HIV/AIDS ripped a lot of the joy out of life in the 1980s for me, and once I was out of the habit of the movie, I was out of the habit and looked back on it as a past experience with nostalgia and joy.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the perfect amount of subversion at precisely the right time for me. It opened a world of possibilities to me, but at the same time, it made me very aware that I needed, more than anything else, to get out of Kansas. Much as I loved the movie, those memories of seeing it that first time–and the self-actualization and realization that came in its wake–are also tied up with my growing misery and dissatisfaction with living in Kansas. It’s also tied to discovering actual queer people in Fresno, and recognizing that even this little bit of subversion, something I could go see with the straight friends without any questions or fears, kept me going through the early 1980s as everything started turning even darker than they had ever been in Kansas.

Watching it on television just isn’t the same, either.

But the movie always holds a special place in my heart–and I imagine it does with many other queers for whom it proved an awakening of their true freak selves–and I became a lifelong fan of all the stars, whose careers and successes I followed…but one is now dead to me forever, and Her Name Must Not Be Uttered….and her being in the film has also kind of tainted its legacy with me.

But seriously, what a great movie. I may write an essay about the movie someday, you never know!

  1. I’m not counting the night of the senior prom, when the school districts got together and got the Twin Theaters (I think that was the name) to show a midnight movie to keep us all out of trouble. It was Smokey and the Bandit, by the way. ↩︎

If You Want to Get to Heaven

Nothing gives me greater pleasure than flaunting my sin in the face of hypocritical Christians who don’t understand their own holy book. I love using their archaic language on them, too–fornicators, adulterers, heretics, apostates, blasphemers, the Lake of Eternal Fire, etc.–because there’s nothing I despise more than the self-righteous apostates who think they are better than everyone else because “they’re saved.” Are you? Are you so sure?

I’ve always thought the proper response to the question of whether you were going to heaven or not was simply, “I don’t know, that’s God’s decision and so I hope he views me and my life with grace, charity, and compassion.”

And when I was about eight or nine, my grandmother bought me a copy of The Children’s Bible, which was filled with illustrations (amazing how all those Middle Eastern Israelites were white, and even some had blond hair and blue eyes)…and maybe (probably) it wasn’t the intent of the publisher, but there was some seriously homoerotic imagery in the book. About ten years ago I was thinking about The Children’s Bible and wondering whatever happened to my copy…and remembering some of the illustrations in it, I thought no, you can’t be remembering that correctly and so I went on eBay and bought a used copy.

And when it arrived, my memories were actually correct.

I mean, look at the muscles on Goliath. That image was burned indelibly into my brain, and it’s entirely possible my appreciation of muscles comes from….The Children’s Bible.

Perish the thought!

Grooming!

Indoctrination!

And of course, my favorite story in the book was David and Jonathan.

I mean, look at how they drew David!

I mean, it may not be Michelangelo, but damn.

(I also love that a Bronze Age Middle Eastern Jew somehow had pearly white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight.)

I think my parents really liked that I was so devoted to The Children’s Bible, but they definitely had no idea why I was staring at the pages every day.

When I was a kid, I’d always reread the David and Jonathan story (can’t imagine why it was my favorite…). I wanted a best friend like David–I always saw myself as Jonathan, the supporting player, the way I always did–gorgeous and charismatic and beautiful and beloved of God. I would think about the story and while I was too young and innocent to conceive of it as anything other than friendship–the same way I thought of the “friendship” between Achilles and Patroclus in tales of the Trojan War–when I got older, whenever I thought about the story I wondered about how deep that friendship between Prince Jonathan and David son of Jesse was. Why include the story at all? It really doesn’t add a whole lot to the tale of David’s life, and did it really matter for King Saul to have a son who was David’s friend and great love? Jonathan dies–not even the Bible was immune from bury your gays–and David mourned him with a great grief that seemed a bit more than “my best bro died.” I wanted to write the story myself, despite my lack of historical knowledge of the period or even when it was actually set, but I wanted to write about their love, their falling in love–and let’s face it, God didn’t really seem to have a lot of problems with their relationship, did he? He didn’t come to David and tell him to stop giving it to Jonathan; God didn’t curse the two of them or punish Israel for it; and yes, Jonathan is eventually killed…but even then God doesn’t come to David and say, did you not read Leviticus? I could hardly let you go on fucking him forever, you know.

So, I guess I am supposed to read it literally and just think they were best friends and loved each other as brothers. Yeah, no. There’s absolutely no reason for this story to be included in the David story in the Bible; none, unless of course there’s a kernal of truth in the story (don’t come for me, I’ve never bothered to find out if the Bible’s Old Testament kings of Israel were real people; I do know that real people turned up in the Old Testament that existed in history–Babylonians and Assyrians, for example, as well as Egyptians)but the mystery for me of why this story was included, why it was included if its merely legend or why was it included if they were real is the real question. There’s no moral lesson to be learned from the story of their friendship; their love and loyalty to each other was an issue for Jonathan because his friend’s greatest enemy was Jonathan’s own father, a king anointed by God–despite God capriciously turning His back on Saul for really such an insignificant reason that it really just boiled down to God just liked David better; I always felt sorry for Saul–how much would it suck to lose God’s favor for no good reason? Just because God found someone He liked better? (And considering the things God forgave David for, or just overlooked, really makes the hard turn away from Saul that much more petty and bitchy.)

God’s kind of an asshole in the Old Testament, frankly.

But yes, I’d love to write this story sometime. (Because I don’t have enough else to do, right?) I’d also want to write it from Jonathan’s perspective, although the death would be hard to do (Madeline Miller managed it with Song of Achilles quite beautifully) story-wise; but is the kind of challenge I love. Maybe someday, and maybe writing it will help me in my constant and never-ending life quest to come to terms with the religious grooming drilled into my brain as a child. I even have a great title for it, too.

I also have a novel in mind revolving around Michelangelo’s statue of David, too; maybe I could combine research and do them at the same time. THAT would be a challenge, would it not?

Paging through it again this morning, I see that there are a lot of sexy men in little clothing in the illustrations, so I have to wonder, if like all the statuary and paintings in European churches and cathedrals, the artist was a gay man so he slipped in imagery for the viewing of other gays. Here are some of those images, culled from just flipping through a few pages.

Okay, maybe Samson isn’t a fair comparison as he was a strong man.
Apparently, ancient Egypt came up with a great exercise and diet plan for Joseph.
Again, Hebrews looking healthy, and Pharaoh’s milkshake brings the boys to the yard.
I also love that they went with daddy/twink for Cain and Abel.

And no need to worry about my blasphemy–“christians’ have told me all of my life that I’m going to hell, so as a friend says, “might as well grease up the hell-slide.”

(I’ve Been) Searching So Long

Sunday morning and I slept late. I’ve been off both days this weekend, not really sure what that’s about…but this morning when I saw the clock and the time, I remembered that either yesterday or Friday, I was confused about taking my daily pills and I may have taken them twice…and a double dose for one day of my daytime anti-anxiety medication definitely would have led to exhaustion. Lesson learned. I am usually a lot more careful about these things, and so I need to better about paying attention.

I was sleepy for most of the day yesterday. I ran errands and came home, and then started working on things again, which was terrific. I had low energy, obviously, but I cleaned out the two remaining file boxes in the living room, thus clearing out the corner where the boxes stood, and which will now be taken up by the vacuum cleaner and the crate of Sparky toys, which opens up the living room still further. I started clearing books out of the laundry room and am on pace to get that shelf emptied and used for pantry items. This overhaul of the downstairs will obviously continue Thursday as I begin my four day weekend. I also managed to finish reading Horror Movie yesterday, which was sublime and wonderful, and started John Copenhaver’s Hall of Mirrors, between breaks so I could rest. I took a lot of those breaks, I might add–and during several of them I started to fall asleep. I did nap for about half an hour in the late afternoon, which is weird–and today I still feel a bit sleepy. All I need to do outside today is go to the gym and make a very quick grocery run, and then I get to come home and hopefully shower and get some writing done. Stranger things have happened, you know.

But the house is a mess and I am working very hard not to chastise myself for the way I left the apartment looking when i went to bed last night, barely able to stagger up the stairs. It won’t take long, really–the majority of the mess in the living room is the donation pile, which simply needs to be stacked properly and loaded into boxes. Likewise the kitchen won’t take long to look orderly again, either. There’s a lot of stuff to be put away for sure in the kitchen, and I’m not done with the laundry room, either–but it’s not a priority and can wait until the holiday weekend if necessary.

Sigh. I’m also very behind on my Pride Posts, which will defiantly continue to run through the Independence Day holiday weekend as I celebrate queer independence, and pray for our gains not to be lost to the current joke of a Supreme Court. I will never forgive anyone involved in “but her emails” or “benghazi” or anything else that smeared and slandered the most qualified candidate for president in decades so we could get fascism instead. Thanks, privileged white liberals for thinking she was corrupt or too shrill or not charismatic enough. And don’t think I won’t keep bringing that up until we’ve survived (if we survive) this election. We lost Roe v. Wade in no small part because that arrogant, narcissistic Hollywood she-bitch sneered on national television that she “don’t vote with (my) vagina.”

I hope to either spit in her skank face or piss on her grave before I die, and thank you again for making any number of films I enjoy unwatchable again because all I think about when I see her face or hear her voice is “we lost our rights because you’re an arrogant bitch who thinks she is a political expert when the truth is you don’t know jackshit and learned NOTHING from the 2000 election when you helped elected Bush.”

There’s a direct line from her performative progressivism to every justice who overturned Roe. I wish someone would bring up Nader to her in an interview. 2016 was a repeat performance of 2000. And for the record, she is not an ally. AOC is, and understands how to get things done and has evolved and learned how to work for progressive causes in Congress. She is an actual hero.

And my inability to write my Pride Post about The Rocky Horror Picture Show is because I don’t want to mention her or use any of her images, which is difficult.

Hurricane Beryl apparently is now a Category 3, with the potential for becoming a 4 once it enters the Caribbean, which is rather early maybe for a storm this size, which doesn’t bode well when we’re kicking off the season and the B storm will come ashore as a 4. It looks like the most likely path means a Yucatan landfall before crossing the Gulf again to come ashore close to the Mexico/Texas border. There are also two other potential storms out there, one in the Gulf (what if Beryl consumes this one? YIKES) and one out in the Atlantic. I guess I need to start looking into hurricane supplies and get the house stocked up again.

Okay, that’s NOT helping, so I think I should head into the spice mines for now. I am going to eat something and start working on this mess while writing another entry. I may also be back later, since one never knows what I will be doing at any given time.

Daydream Believer

Ah, Saturday morning. I have to make a brief errand run today, nothing major or horribly annoying, but it still means going outside. Tomorrow….tomorrow I am not leaving the house. We did all our errands last night, including a Costco run (we made it out for less than $300! It’s been years), and then we just hung out and watched television–the gymnastics Olympic team trials–and called it a night relatively early. I also managed to get some things done around the house, too–the bed linens laundered, the dishes put away and another load washed, cleaning up the kitchen–and was in a pretty good mood almost the entire day. I realized something else, too; I also bought the new car and took on all that additional monthly expense right around when Mom had her first stroke, too–so there was the Mom subconscious worry on top of monetary stress; something I hadn’t experienced in a very long time and I. Did. Not. Like. That. One. Bit. I am finally beginning to see a distant light at the end of a very long dark tunnel in that regard, but still. I don’t regret the car purchase; I am very pleased with the car and intend to hopefully keep it until I die. It’s hard to believe that I’ve had it now for almost eight years. That’s INSANE.

It was strangely cool and beautiful yesterday–granted, it was 86 degrees, but after the last few weeks it felt heavenly, and the damp in the air was cool not hot. I imagine that was the aftermath of Thursday night’s downpour, but regardless the reason it was lovely. The sun wasn’t out as much, either–there were a lot of clouds, so no endless punishing direct sunlight was also a pleasure to experience this close to the 4th. I am also going to have to keep watching Tropical Storm Beryl. Ah, hurricane season is already revving up for a long and busy summer.

I was also exhausted after we did the errands. I fell asleep in my chair for over an hour after getting back home, and the place is a mess. I was too tired when I got home from Costco (the last errand) to put everything away properly, and I’d also intended to do some work on the workspace, but…tired. I slept later this morning and feel better now that I am up and swilling coffee, but whew, it was hard to get up this morning and my joints all ached. The joys of being an elder, I suppose, but sheesh. I literally thought when I woke up (when Sparky woke me up) that I was too tired physically to get out of bed, but I got there eventually. I do have some errands to run today, but it shouldn’t take very long and then I can come back home and work on the house more. I also want to write this morning (and maybe this afternoon) and hopefully today I won’t get sidetracked or distracted.

The gymnastic trials were fun to watch; I always forget how fun it is to watch athletes trying to reach their dream goal of the Olympics–but of course the thrill of victory also carries with it the agony of defeat or worse, injury. It’s also hard for me to conceive that it’s an Olympic year and I’ve heard so very little about the Olympics (other than Parisians treating it all as a horror and inconvenience; I do sometimes think the Olympics will eventually die because they are too expensive to host) because naturally the election and the horrors that the Christofascists’ puppet SCOTUS are inflicting on our country are sucking all the energy and air out of the room.

I was too tired to make a Pride post yesterday, so I will definitely have to make up for it today by doing perhaps two? I am going to continue Pride through Independence Day, haters be damned, because Pride is about freedom and so is the 4th and therefore Pride should lead into a celebration of everyone’s freedom. And if straight people don’t like it, they can literally just fuck right off. I am so tired of being told how to behave and how to be an adult and how to “not upset the heteros” and you know what? Fuck the heteros and their delicate sensibilities. They’ve been tiptoed around and catered to more than enough, thank you very much. You know what offends me? Abused children, adultery, deadbeat dads, racism, transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny. Clean up your own fucking house before you come for queers, thank you very much. But it’s easier to blame us than take any responsibility for the messy world you’ve created, isn’t it?

And may no one else ever have to fear about their rights every election cycle–although SCOTUS has already delegitimized itself and we know they are coming for marriage equality at some point, too–and sooner than we think. And just remember–there is no divine right of Republicans to rule. How are they any different from the Jacobean Stuart kings of England? Claiming a God-given right, or a “divine mandate”, to be in power is hardly a Christian thought; Jesus said very clearly (if you believe the Bible) that his kingdom was not of this world, and coerced religious conversion isn’t what the Jesus I read about and studied would have wanted for anyone. (I still don’t believe that, if Jesus were real, that he was sent here to start a new religion, but rather to teach by example what a life devoted to good works and godliness looked like.

Funny how all they care about is the Word and not the Deeds.

Well, that got feisty for a bit, didn’t it? I guess I am more awake than I gave myself credit for! I also managed to finish reading Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay, which I really enjoyed (he is a masterful writer, and the language is superb). I am still digesting that book today, because it was a lot of ideas and intense creativity, which is why he’s one of my favorite writers and I am saddened to realize I am running out of his backlist to read, which means postponing reading more of him because I never want to be out of things to read by authors I really enjoy. I am planning on starting the new John Copenhaver today as well, which is exciting. I have quite a recent-release TBR pile–Kellye Garrett, Amina Akhtar, Angela Crook, Angie Kim, and Scott Carson, to name a few glittering names from the stack–and more just keep getting released every month. Sigh. I also need to do a book purge this weekend, too. Heavy heaving sigh. It never ends, does it?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday wherever you are, Constant Reader, and I’ll definitely be checking back in with you later.

Midnight at the Oasis

…so put your camel to bed.

Work at home Friday, and I am delighted to have made it through another week, which was at the least bizarre and at most a really screwy one. Next week will be screwy, too, because of July 4th, but oh, well. I am taking the 5th off too so I can have a four-day weekend next weekend, which means more organizing and getting rid of things. I am going to do some more book pruning this weekend, and am going to dump more files, too. My end goal is to stop using the shelves in the laundry room for book storage and turn it into an overflow pantry, with extra stuff moved in there to clear out cabinets and so forth. I have some errands to run later today and more errands to run tomorrow; but I am hoping to make progress.

Paul was late getting home last night–he had meetings, and then stayed at the office during the massive thunderstorm that rolled through here last night. I didn’t get much done last night after I got home because I got very tired in the late afternoon and after getting the mail, I just basically collapsed into my easy chair and played with Sparky. Again, I couldn’t focus on reading, but I am hoping to finish Horror Movie this weekend and start Hall of Mirrors. The US Gymnastic Team Trials for the Olympics are this weekend, so we’ll be spending some time watching that, of course–I keep forgetting the Olympics are this summer–and I had another breakthrough on the new book last night, so I guess I can claim that I wrote last night–thinking and planning counts as writing, after all, and am getting a bit more excited about what I am doing with it, and the imposter syndrome seems to be taking a back seat at long last. I also have to do one more pass on that short story, which is due on Sunday.

I also need to bang out some more Pride Posts, which will finally come to an end on the 4th of July, and I have some plans and thoughts for that final post, too.

Something I just realized last night during my thinking session in my chair was that this weird nostalgia kick I’ve been on since Mom passed was naturally triggered by that (and all the conversations I’ve had with Dad about their early life together and his childhood) and of course, by the fact that I am writing two “historicals” in a row, both set in periods I lived through so I am trying to remember what it was like; how it felt to be gay in New Orleans during the early 1990s, and of course a lot of immersion into the early 1970s. I’ve already decided to set the book in 1994–the year my life actually truly began–so trying to remember what was where and what the city was like back then has also been flooding me with memories. The kids at work have also been asking questions about my life and past.

That, along with some other things I’ve been noticing lately, also has had me thinking deep thoughts. There was a social media post about becoming a daddy, and how people in my generation and the one right after…well, we didn’t really have a lot of men a lot older than me that were out in the 1990s to serve as mentors and/or guides to the community. HIV/AIDS had killed off a good number of them, leaving a void amongst the survivors without that oral history of the community being passed from generation to generation. There was a conversation about “role models” somewhere the other day, which is something I never wanted to be or ever thought I could be, and I’ve actively avoided it. Hanging out with and bonding with the Queer Crime Writers at conferences over the last few years was marvelous, and I actually started feeling like a part of the queer writing community again. That has also made me realize that while twenty years or so may have passed since my first publication–twenty-four in August, actually–I have done a lot, written a lot, and been nominated for a shit ton of awards, both queer and mainstream. (Hell, next year will be the twentieth anniversary of Katrina; which means it’s been almost as long ago as Betsy was when I started coming here) I’ve lasted a long time, if nothing else, and that longevity has to count for something, right? I don’t think I am the most prolific queer writer (I think Neil Plakcy and Mark Zubro are more prolific than I am, at least with the crime writers, anyway), but I have been around for a very long time, with minor breaks of a year or so here and there. Like it or not, I’ve become a community elder, and I intend to try to be better about helping out queer writers and lending a hand when I can.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll most likely be back later on.

Be Thankful for What You’ve Got

Well, it’s Thursday AND it’s National HIV Testing Day! Know your status!

I feel good this morning, so I am back to the normal-yet-still-bizarre routine of being tired earlier in the week and being more awake later, apparently. I was tired after work yesterday, but I did do some writing (not much, really) before finishing the laundry and making dinner–shrimp fajitas, and they were amazing–and we settled in for the next episode of Presumed Innocent, in which Jake Gyllenhaal continues to shine but Rusty is such an unlikable prick that I forget that it’s gorgeous Jake I am watching and get repulsed by his behavior…but it makes sense for his character, and it’s a terrific performance. I didn’t get to read anything last night, but it’s fine. Tonight I need to clean the kitchen once I am home from work. I have lots to do at home on Friday for work, so hopefully it’ll be a productive day. Next week is of course the 4th holiday, and I did take Friday off for another four day weekend, which will be lovely.

And I get to have leftovers for lunch today! Huzzah!

One of the most fun things about being a writer is imposter syndrome. I do experience this (a lot) but it doesn’t mean I don’t have confidence in my writing or what I’m writing; what I experience is more along the lines of things like should you even be telling this story or are you sure you are structuring this book properly? ` But that’s the great thing about editing and revising; you can always restructure and move things around once you move on to the next draft. I don’t believe the story is too complicated and complex for me to write, by any means; i know I can write this and it will be a terrific book when finally finished. I love writing, and it’s lovely to be back in the weeds with something new. I’m writing again, and while all may not be right in the world, at least it feels like it is in mine.

I hope to finish reading the Tremblay novel this weekend and get started on another. I also have to revise and proof my story for that anthology deadline this Sunday–it’s been so long since I’ve submitted anything anywhere that I am not entirely sure how that will feel. But if I get rejected, I get rejected. Rejection is all part and parcel of the business, which can be very brutal on a fragile ego laced with insecurity. Why do I still have those insecurities? Why do I still need to get validation as a writer? I’ve written over forty books. But instead of looking at the shelves of my bookcase and feeling satisfaction (which I did do several times during the malaise), I tend to think about the books I’ve not finished, and feel like a failure because I started and never finished something. I am a completist, alas, and so as long as those unfinished novels still are hanging out in my files, it’s going to bother me that they aren’t finished. I particularly want to finish a horror novel I started writing in my twenties–can you believe I still think about that book? And what I originally wrote is absolutely terrible–and that’s not me being self-deprecating. I’ve always been able to write stories and come up with ideas, but the things I wrote weren’t good. I wasn’t very good at dialogue and I was prone to melodrama (the soap opera influence), but the raw ability and talent was always there–some were just able to see it while others weren’t. Rightly or wrongly, I was always able to write coherently; it might not have been good but the sentences were grammatically correct and my writer’s eye was sometimes able to spot something so true and honest and real that my stories stood out. The one thing I could always count on was writing a cohesive story or paper for any class, and I never feared writing papers.

I actually preferred essay tests to multiple choice, frankly.

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Happy Friday Eve!

Hollywood Swinging

Everybody is a star in Hollywood!

Or so the song by the Village People would have us believe, at any rate.

I’m not sure what it is about Hollywood, movies, and stars that draws gays like moths to an outdoor night light, but there you have it. We’ve fallen in love with movie stars and made them into icons–and interestingly enough, we always seem to like the same ones for the most part–Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Judy, Liza, Barbra, Cher, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and so on; almost like there’s some kind of weird genetic link between the majority of gay cisgender white men that draws us all to the same things, so much that even straight people know who the women are that we idolize.

Why this is the case, I have no idea. But gay men have also significantly impacted how we as a society and culture look at men’s bodies, too–see previous post about how what was considered sexy in a man began changing in the 1970s, and continued evolving until what gay men (theoretically) found hot was what everyone considered hot for a man.

When I was a kid it was also believed that bodybuilders were mostly gay, too–because only gay men had the free time to develop and work their bodies…so the gay male attraction to muscular fit men was enough for society to say that about bodybuilders. (I have always appreciated bodybuilders aesthetically, but they leave me cold. They are so not sexy, despite the skimpy bikinis they pose in (gay men were also, for a long time, the only ones who weren’t competitive swimmers who wore speedos), and they never really have been.

But gay photographers began making bank in the late 1940s and 1950s by launching “physique magazines” as a cover for gay eroticism; they would find incredibly handsome men with worked out bodies and photograph them in “classical” poses. This dodge was how they got around pornography and postal obscenity charges; no visible penises, and the men were always posed like classical paintings or statuary to “show off their physiques”. Some of the men who posed for these photographers often did so early in their careers (Yul Brynner was one of many who did these kind of photo shoots to pay the bills), and never really hid their past as physique models–but they also didn’t bring it up much. Nudes for a male (or scantily dressed at least) weren’t as big an issue as they were for women; but male nudes weren’t exactly a boost to one’s career.

The gorgeous Ed Fury, who did some Hercules/hero type roles in movies in the 50s/60s

These old photos–and 8 mm physique films that were sold to private viewers–are astonishing to come across in the modern day and leaves so much to be explained1. Hollywood has always done a great job about covering up the same-sex attractions and predilections of movie stars; look at Randolph Scott and Cary Grant’s five years living together, or any number of other male stars. I’ve started looking into this a bit more because it’s all research for Chlorine, and it’s a plot point in the book. (It also gave me an idea for another noir, called Obscenity.) It’s very fascinating to me. The more I learn about Hollywood, and how things worked, and how rife with homosexuality that the studio assiduously kept secret, the more interested I am in those decades when studio bosses held all the power, when their fixers went around cleaning up after their stars, and the secret homosexuality just out of view there. Tab Hunter, Rock Hudson, and of course, the agent who represented all the beautiful boys: Henry Willson, who more than anything else is a tragic figure that I can’t help feeling sorry for, despite how awful he actually was…I am more willing to give queers forgiveness because of the toxic times they lived in and how they had to survive. (Roy Cohn, on the other hand, can burn in hell right next to J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson) Reading The Man Who Made Rock Hudson, a very well written biography of Willson, really made me feel sorry for him in many ways and understand perhaps why he was so damned awful.

It was also the times.

William J. Mann, by the way, has done some excellent queer Hollywood history non-fiction, if you want to a good place to start reading up on it.

I’m really looking forward to doing more research on physique magazines.

  1. This was the birth of gay porn, really, which makes it all the more interesting to me. ↩︎