Tag: AIDS

More Than This

Monday and back to the office with me today. Lovely lazy day just recuperating and laying around, doing things when I felt like it, and basically just had a marvelous time being lazy and resting without feeling any guilt, and did feel worn out all day, like my batteries needed recharging. We had an early dinner with friends I’d not seen in almost a decade, if not more–which was marvelous. Paul is in the final stages of whatever crud he had last week, which is an enormous relief, of course. Yesterday just thinking about getting up this morning and my end of the month duties at the office and had no concept of having the energy to do everything–but this morning I feel rested, awake and alert, which is a very good thing. Yesterday was also the first day of Nonfiction November; so I read the introduction and forward to She Kills by Skip Hollandsworth (I keep wanting to write Hollingsworth!), which whetted my appetite to dive into it some more. I also need to get back to work on writing. I plan on working on a short story every week as well as a chapter of the book; it’s ambitious, of course, and probably overly so, but that’s fine. I don’t berate myself anymore when I don’t deliver on my own plans. I’m also disappointed with myself for not getting pictures of Halloween decorations around the city again this year, but…the weather has changed now, so I can start taking my walks in the evenings and mornings of the weekend to try to get my stamina built back up again so I can walk to the gym. I did get my headphones synced with my phone over the weekend, so I can either listen to books, podcasts, or music while I am walking and/or lifting weights, which would be absolutely awesome.

I was saddened, as so many others were, by the death of Sir Patrick Stewart, a brilliant actor and a longtime queer ally. One of my favorite Stewart performances will always be his supporting turn in Jeffrey, a rom-com-in-the-time-of-AIDS movie; he literally stole the film right out from under his co-stars effortlessly. After the movie came out, people were asking him, fairly regularly, if he were gay and his response was perfect: Why does nobody ask me if I am really a starship captain? I always enjoyed him in everything he did; oh, those classically trained British actors are so remarkable, aren’t they?

Saturday night I really didn’t pay much attention to the college games that were on and didn’t watch any of them, and am not actually sure who all won and who all lost–or who they actually played. I do know, however, that USC beat Ohio State. Aw, what a shame. I blame Vivek Ramaswamy. The Saints were off for the weekend, but this coming weekend is Alabama-LSU in Baton Rouge, which is always daunting. LSU has only beaten Alabama four times since 2008–twice in Baton Rouge, twice in Tuscaloosa, so home field advantage doesn’t really apply in this instance. There aren’t many teams who play Alabama regularly and have a winning record against them; the few teams that do have winning records against the Tide usually only play them in the post-season, and even amongst those there aren’t many. I am just hoping for a good game, honestly. I need to see who else is playing this weekend, too.

I cannot wait for this election to be over because I am so sick to death of campaigns and elections…will we even get a day respite before the 2028 campaigns start? Please note: elections were never supposed to be a billion dollar plus industry. a lot of people make a lot of money off campaigns, which just adds to the utter corruption of the entire process; US politics has become an embarrassment of bribes, corruption, and dirty back room double-dealing. The system has alwys been a morass od bigotry, slander, and smears masquerading as policy–and our uneducated voters will decide to vote based on emotion rather than careful consideration every single time. Imagine being so racist and ignorant that you will vote for inflation, higher gas and energy prices, and a Nazi-like purge of brown people from this country happily because you’re so arrogant you think none of it will blow back on you?

And man, did Michigan dodge a bullet with that piece of shit Haley Stevens or what? Congratulations, you ignorant bitch, for accomplishing something I didn’t think possible: uniting the Democrats behind a Muslim. When even Chuck Schumer calls you out for Islamophobia–girl, you done fucked up in the worst possible way, and blew up any chance of a political future for yourself. People are speculating she wants to torpedo el-Sayed so she can run again against Mike Rogers when he comes up for reelection; that’s never going to happen now, bitch. You can run against him in the Republican primary if he somehow manages to win this race, but the only vote you’ll ever get, you skank, in a Democratic primary will be your own. Although she can always try to run against el-Sayed in six years as a Republican, I suppose–but when you’ve exposed yourself to the world and ripped off your mask to show the craven opportunist that was always there. Fuck you and your fiance, bitch, and for the sake of the rest of the world do not breed. Your outsides, while ugly as all fuck, isn’t as ugly as your inside.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, everyone, and of course I will be here again in the morning.

The rape of Persephone by Hades. Art, with titles like this, is why I thought “rape” meant kidnapping when I was growing up…

When I’m Sixty-four

For the first time in decades, I am not taking my birthday off.

That’s why I am up at this ungodly hour, swilling down coffee and consuming coffee cake like it’s going out of style. I need to conserve my PTO, because I am going to the panhandle (barring unforeseen circumstances) for a week with my dad in October after a weekend in Alabama for Dad’s and Mom’s birthdays. I also have to take some time off during Bouchercon–there’s no way I can work all day and then host Noir at the Bar that Thursday, and probably not going to be able to do much work that Friday, either. I think I’ve managed to get it all planned out so that I will have just enough vacation time left to do the family thing in October, and then let things start building back up again for the new year. It’s going to be weird going to work on my birthday–I generally take the day off because I don’t need or want the attention that comes with it–but I will survive, I am sure.

Sixty. Four.

Christ on the cross.

I never planned for my future because I never thought I would have one. When I was a kid, I was certain I wasn’t going to have much of an adult life; I always had nightmares about not only dying but how I would die; either in a car accident, or a fall from a high place. This is why I am always, to this day, a little bit tense when I’m in a car and a LOT tense when I am the passenger. In my early twenties, I thought I was going to seroconvert and die from AIDS–why would I ever think that I would survive that pandemic? The next thing I knew I had somehow made it to fifty, then sixty–and now I am sixty-four, with another milestone birthday just a year in my future, should I make it till then. I am woefully unprepared for retirement, so most likely will continue to work for another few years to at least try to get my debt down to a manageable place. Ha ha ha ha, I’m so adorable, aren’t I?

I guess the ship has sailed on me dying young, hasn’t it?

But it’s been a pretty good life thus far, I have to say. I’ve written and published a shit ton of work, which can never be taken away from me, and neither can the awards I’ve either won or made the shortlist for…how many authors never make a shortlist of any kind? But the childhood conditioning that celebrating myself and things I’ve accomplished is a hubristic tempting of fate; how many stories and myths and fables are there about hubristic humans who anger a god? Like I often say, I live in the city I love with the man I love doing work that I love. All of my dreams came true, no matter what happens in the future.

My sixties haven’t been easy on me, and I don’t have the energy I used to have so recovery from physical, emotional, and professional blows doesn’t happen as fast as it used to; but I’m still pretty pleased and happy with my life. I try not to worry about future outcomes that I can’t control, and can only prepare for the things I can. If my thirties were about getting myself mentally healthy so I could have the life I wanted, and the forties were about getting started in my career and the fifties were about getting further along and getting better as a writer, my sixties have been a time of revisiting and rethinking my past, finally getting to understand myself and where a lot of my neuroses stem from. The anxiety medication has helped me enormously in that regard, too. Realizing how emotionally crippling my anxiety was when I was a minor also has enabled me to remember, and those memories aren’t painful anymore because so much of my misery was directly attributable to said anxiety.

So now I am sixty-four. I am older than my grandparents were throughout my childhood, which is also a staggering realization. It’s also weird to think that I was born sixteen years after the end of World War II, the country was sinking into the depths of the Cold War, and President Kennedy hadn’t even been in office for a full year yet. I never imagined what it would be like to be this age, mainly because I, as stated earlier, never thought I would live this long. I’m trying not to be that old person–you know, “When I was your age” or “We used to call it” and that sort of thing, because no one really wants to hear it. I’ve seen a lot in my life, witnessed all kinds of events (the Challenger explosion, 9/11, Watergate hearings, on and on), and lived through all kinds of things. I’ve lived in Alabama, Chicago, Kansas, California, Houston, Tampa, Minneapolis, and New Orleans. I went to two high schools in different states, and two colleges in different states. I went to Italy for a week over ten years ago. I’ve had so many jobs, but being a writer/sexual health counselor were the only things that took with me.

Life’s been good to me so far.

After work, I am going to head home and just hang out with Sparky. If I had to hazard a guess, Paul will probably get us Hoshun for dinner tonight. But I got my vacuum cleaner last week, and that’s all I really cared about.

Happy birthday to me! And may my next year be a lovely one!

The only picture of my face as a baby, my first day home from the hospital.

Nothing’s Going to Stop Us Now

Ah, Starsky and Hutch.

As I have been reviewing things that helped confirm to myself as a child that I was a big old homo (for my book The Summer of Lost Boys), I found myself remembering a lot of things, memories from the darkest dusty and cobwebbed chasms of my memory banks.

But as a kid, realizing that I was drawn to men more than women was difficult and weird, and not in the least because I didn’t understand what women saw in men; their sex symbols, to me, left a lot to be desired. I grew up on the cusp of some societal and cultural changes, and not the least of which was the fact that in the 1970s, men finally began being sexualized and held to a kind of male beauty standard that gradually changed that standard–which for a burgeoning young gay boy, was perfect timing. I never understood, for example, what girls saw in teen idols–sure, Bobby Sherman and Davy Jones and David Cassidy were cute…but I didn’t think of them as sexy or sexualized; the Tiger Beat crowd was very into guys who were not sexually threatening–these weren’t guys they wanted to fuck but rather ones they wanted to hold hands with and go on dates to malt shops and movies with, and chastely kiss good night. I never really got the sense that women ever wanted to fuck their sex symbols, either–there was an odd chasteness to women (the old madonna/whore paradigm) in their fandoms. You never heard a woman saying she wanted to fuck Paul Newman or Robert Redford or Burt Reynolds; there was more to it than just sexual energy.

But “Women’s Lib” began taking flight in the 1970s, as did queer rights, and a gradual shift in the paradigm of what is sexy in a man and what isn’t began changing. It was the decade Playgirl launched (more on that later), Jim Palmer began doing underwear ads, and the poster of Mark Spitz and his gold medals wearing a speedo sold like cheap beer on a payday.

And it also began the rise of the himbo shows; the male equivalent of all those jiggle shows with big breasted girls without a bra jumping up and down; those shows were almost guaranteed ratings in the Top Ten. Starksy and Hutch was the first real himbo show that I can remember; David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser were very good looking with great bodies that were very masculine as well–and the show showed them shirtless as much as possible, or in towels, or–you get the idea. They drove a fast car with an odd but distinctive paint job (cars were also stars that decade) and the show also not only was a hit but a part of the zeitgeist, too. I watched every week–as did my sister and almost every girl I knew–but it being a macho cop show, it was okay for men to watch, too.

And if there was an Internet and fan fic, a lot of people would have been writing erotic romances about the two of them.

Their closeness as characters as well as their chemistry, and their willingness to appear half-naked at the drop of a hat certainly made the show popular with gay men–and the stars also didn’t mind playing into the gay interest in the show, as you can see by the picture of them running hand in hand on the beach.

They also did a lot of those kinds of promo photo shoots.

Glaser’s wife later contracted AIDS from a blood tranfusion, and the two of them spent a lot of their time and energy working for AIDS treatment, education, and a cure.