This Is A No-Freeze Zone

Well, my flyover state friend has stopped speaking to me. Actually, he doesn't answer the phone when I call and he isn't calling me back. He's obviously pissed, and thinks his passive aggressive retaliation will teach me a lesson or hurt me or make me a nervous wreck.

What he doesn't know is that I grew up with the worldwide champion of passive aggressive. My mother was in a league of her own. Nobody before her or since could even come close.

My mother's way of dealing with anger or frustration or disappointment was to freeze people out. I was her number one target. If we argued, if I did something wrong or if I said or did something that was not in keeping with being the best little boy in the world, she stopped speaking to me. Sometimes for a day. Sometimes for a few days. But she could go indefinitely.

Once when I was 19, she and I got into a big fight over something fairly small and ridiculous. I refused to back down. She couldn't win the argument, so she stopped speaking to me. That wasn't unusual. But this time she didn't speak to me for six weeks. SIX WEEKS. That's 42 days.

It was an interesting existence. Life in our house continued in silence. I knew it was dinnertime by the banging of plates on the table. I sat at the table. She sat at the kitchen counter. If I moved to the counter, she moved to the table. If she went to the supermarket, my cue to bring in the bags was the garage door opening and closing and the car door slamming. On Sunday mornings, she would go down to the garage and sit in the passenger seat of the car and just wait until I got there, to drive her to church.

In the first few days of the freeze-out, I tried to defuse it all. I did extra things without being asked. I joked. I made idle chat in the car. No response. After a few days I realized that the harder I tried, the colder it got and the more she felt like she was hurting me. So I stopped trying. I went about my routine of cutting the lawn, taking out the garbage and doing whatever I would usually do. I realized that it would continue to bother me as long as I allowed it to bother me. This was her problem, not mine.

What broke the freeze? I don't really remember. I think we had to take a trip somewhere... New Jersey, Indiana, or somewhere else. I needed to be involved in the planning (since I would be doing all the driving). So some dialogue began.

In the end, neither one of us won this battle of silence. And, just to be honest, I am no saint. I certainly have more than my share of passive aggressive behavior in my past. I have pulled that crap on more people than I can count. I've also paid the price in shattered friendships and personal relationships that were doomed to failure before they had a chance to develop.

It's interesting looking back at it. The passive aggressive freeze outs started when I was a young child and continued for years. As a child, they terrorized me. I felt abandoned and very alone. As I got older, they became as much a part of my life as my father's drinking and violent rages. It was very hard as a child to be suddenly invisible. As a teenager, it was sometimes a welcome break from the insanity. Looking back, being invisible as a child was probably great training for being invisible as an adult.

Except for the damn addictions. And the fear. I still live in constant fear that the slightest mistake or wrong word or misunderstanding will cost me a friendship, or force someone I care about to drop-kick me out of their life. Self-confidence is an unknown quantity in my head. It's like astro-physics. No concept.

So... back to my flyover friend and the passive aggressive.

I don't do that to other people anymore. And, I won't accept it from other people anymore either. That means today I'm leaving him one last message telling him this is the last time I'm calling him. If and when he wants to call me back, I will be here. He will always be my friend and I will always be here for him. But I can only be his victim as long as I allow myself to be. And those days are over. Now, its up to him.

I will love my friend until he learns to love himself. Even if he doesn't believe it. But right now I'm trying to learn how to love myself. And neither he, nor anyone else, is going to get in the way of that.

Part Of The Process

What do you do when someone you care about seems bent on self-destruction?

I have a dear friend in a flyover state, who has taken the first step toward recovery, but seems unable or unwilling to go any further. He's an amazing man who can light up every room he enters, but who seems determined to remain in a dungeon of darkness.

One of the things I have learned, perhaps the hard way or perhaps through time, is that recovery and emotional peace won't come looking for me. My journey means doing the work to look for them, recognizing them when I find them within my own soul, and making sure I have opened my heart and mind to accept them.

Recovery and emotional peace are not Jehovah's Witnesses. They don't come ringing my doorbell.

My friend took a very first, difficult step. He recognized the depth of his depair and the severity of his problem, and he went to rehab. He spent more than a month learning the tools he needed to deal with his addiction. He came out of it seeming stronger and ready to deal with life on life's terms. But in recent days I have heard the same despair return to his voice. I am hearing the same detachment, and the same self pity that was so common before he finally asked for help.

I hear the sadness in his voice when he says that he has nobody to talk to and nobody to turn to. How can I make him understand that he has a whole fellowship full of people to turn to and who will listen? But they can't read his mind. And if he doesn't show up to take the journey with them, he can't complain about not having a seat on the bus.

I've also learned that I get back what I give out. If I show up, if I'm a positive influence, if I recognize someone else's pain, if I'm willing to listen, then I will get all those things back. People want to be with me and help me when I am open to them being there, and when I show I can be there for someone else. I'm not the only one feeling lost and alone. Even when I want to run and hide, I need to remember that by showing up and sharing and being available, I might help someone else in need.

There is no entitlement option in recovery. This is a cooperative process. I need to do my part. So, I do my best to help others. I care about others. I do service in the way I can. I share. I'm honest. I make recovery a priority and not something else on the list after cleaning the kitchen and going to the store. All those things are part of the process. And inevitably I get back more than I gave.

Recovery is like a chicken pot pie. Someone brings the chicken. Someone else has the flour for the crust. Other people have the potatoes and the peas and the carrots and the gravy and the salt & pepper. The only way you get to have pot pie for dinner is if everyone contributes what they have to make the recipe work. Then everyone gets to share dinner, and everyone leaves with a smile on their face.

Unless everyone shares, all you've got is a bunch of bland ingredients, rotting alone on a kitchen counter.

I'm learning that the things I seek are within my reach. The hardest part is accepting they are there and being willing to do the work to make it happen. Recovery is hard. But the alternative is even harder.

I love my friend, and will continue to love him until he loves himself. Even if he doesn't believe it.

Character Defect #1B - Fear of People/Social Situations

If my character defect list could be three dimensional, this might not be second on the list. While it is certainly a major fear, it is not actually my second worst character defect. But I'm not ready to "go public" with that one yet. I have already written about it, to myself, and will post it when I have the courage to say it to the world. Or at least to the people who are reading these pages.

So... back to the matter at hand...

If my number one fear is Rejection, then it is makes sense that my fear of other people and social situations should be in the same realm. Therapists I have had (too many to mention) blame my people fears on a violent alcoholic father who was almost never around, at least sober; and my mother who loved me, but was cold and distant and rarely showed affection. I grew up without friends, always feeling inferior or self-conscious, and with almost no ability to strike up a friendship with a stranger. I could create work friendships, which came about out of convenience and necessity. But other relationships were non-existent.

I could be notorious for being the "Yes" RSVP who never showed up. It didn't matter whose party or wedding or event it was, I would promise to be there and be the guaranteed no show. I used to make up excuses. (The most outrageous was telling someone my car was stolen. Then I had to come up with a good excuse about how I had it back to drive to work on Monday.) Then it got to the point where people just expected not to see me. Why they kept inviting me, I don't know.

On those rare occasions when I did actually show up, I was never more than the 20 minute guest. I knew before I walked in the door exactly how long it would be until I left. I made sure my car (if driving) was in an easy escape position and that my coat was easy to grab. My first minutes would be spent scoping out the geography, and creating the best excuse for getting out. I would hope and pray for a bathroom near the front door, so I could pretend to be heading for the john, and then just slip out. The very worst situation was a backyard party, where escape meant leaving the patio, walking through or around the house, and then down a driveway, without being stopped by the host wondering why I was leaving so early. Again, the 20 minute rule.

The absolute perfect situation involved cats. I have a pretty severe allergy to cats. So, if the host had a cat, even if it was locked away, I could claim a terrible allergy attack coming on, make apologies and leave. Not only did I get out fast, but the host would feel bad. Bonus points!!

It wasn't like I had somewhere else to go. I was scared to death of having to talk to other people. And I was always careful not to get hammered in front of other people. That was reserved for being home alone.

The system wasn't perfect. As time went on, I realized I had nobody in my life. There was nobody I could call who could or would listen to my pain, and nobody to call if there was a brief moment of glee. Nobody to share the sudden second ticket to a show with. Nobody to even call and say "I can't believe who got voted off Project Runway". For a long time, I pretended not to care. Eventually I realized that the solitude I had created for myself had become an abyss of isolation and loneliness, and I didn't know how to escape.

I still live with this fear everyday. I'm starting to talk about it, and I'm finding out I'm not alone. I've been able to make friends and develop relationships with other people in the program. But I still haven't been able to venture out into civilian life. I go to some events now... some, not all. And while the voices in my head are still screaming the 20 minute rule to me, I manage to try and stay and be social. Still... I always notice the people who are first to leave. I'm rarely far behind. Progress, not perfection.

I hate this fear. It's one that I can't smile through, or pretend around and hope nobody sees. Everybody sees this one. It's an infuriating enigma. By trying so hard to be invisible, I become the most visible.

It sucks.

Character Defect #1: FEAR

After a whole lot of procrastinating (Character Defect #17) I have finally approached the point of addressing my many character defects. Number one on the list is my old friend Fear. Since I have huge issues talking about fear out loud and listing all the things I am afraid of, my mission is now to write about fear and my fears. Certainly no easy task, but also certainly easier than talking about them out loud.

It's hard to list the first of the worst, but if I had to decide between the top three or four, I think my top fear is a fear of rejection. It's almost paradoxical that this is my top fear, because I also have a huge fear of people and social situations, and because I have become so accustomed to being alone.

Like a lot of other things, I think this traces back to my childhood.

For the majority of their marriage, my father ran around on my mother. He had one specific very long relationship with a woman who had two children a few years older than me. From the time I was five years old, I know about them. He spent nights, weekends and at least part of every holiday at their house. There was never a school event of mine, other than my high school graduation, he ever attended. And the few times he was home, he was drunk and abusive. One of my very earliest memories is kneeling on my bed, looking out the front window toward the street corner, waiting for him to come home, and wondering why he would rather spend time with Garrett and Martha instead of me. What had I done wrong? Why wasn't I good enough?

My mother was too wrapped up in work to spend much time with me. She'd come home and make dinner for me, then go lay down on the sofa and fall asleep. I'd eat dinner alone, then watch TV. I knew my bedtime and would wake her up to kiss her goodnight when I went to bed. Eventually, as I got older, I would wake her up to tell her she needed to go to bed. Even though I knew she loved me, she was never particularly affectionate. She wasn't into hugs or outward displays of emotion. When I told her I loved her, she would tell me "Talk is cheap. Don't tell me. Show me.". As an adult I wouldn't know what to do with that now. Imagine being 8 years old and trying to figure that out.

In my first few years of school, we lived on the wrong side of Radecke Avenue, so other kids at Hazelwood Elementary didn't want anything to do with me. Sitting here writing this, I suddenly remember the Valentine boxes we used to have on Valentine's Day for kids to drop cards in for other kids. My biggest year was two cards.

When I was 11, we moved across the state to a small town in the mountains. There, I was the fat outsider who nobody knew, who didn't go hunting or fishing or camping. Kids there kept their distance. As a teenager, I didn't have many friends because we didn't have anything in common, and I was too afraid to have anybody come over, for fear they would see my father. And my mother didn't like anybody I tried to be friends with anyway. So it all evened out.

Because I took a few years off, by the time I was in college for real, I was older than everyone else. Friends were hard to come by. And being a gay man in Miami who wasn't a Coconut Grove or South Beach model was nearly a crime. Men were not flocking to my side. I remember one night after work cruising Biscayne Boulevard until almost 3AM. FInally I made eye contact with a guy in another car enough times that he followed me home. I got out of my car, walked over to his car to take him inside, and instead, he drove off.

Good times.

So, my number one fear is rejection. All the others have a whole lot to live up to.

When I started writing this entry, it was supposed to be all encompassing about all my fears. After 721 words (thank you Microsoft Office word count), I've only managed to get through Fear #1. I guess there are more to come.

Is this fun or what?

North Carolina: Insanity Personified

I have been working to better control and moderate my sarcasm and outrage at obvious stupidity and insanity. But sometimes circumstances defy all attempts at keeping it civil.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole is proposing an international AIDS initiative be re-named to include the name of recently deceased (but not soon enough) renowned bigot and hate monger, Jesse Helms.

In the comment I sent to the Senator's office, I asked if her next bright idea was to include Adolf Hitler's name in the name of the Holocaust Center.

Here is the excerpt from the July 14th Congressional Record:
SA 5074. Mrs. DOLE submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by her to the bill S. 2731, to authorize appropriations for fiscal years 2009 through 2013 to provide assistance to foreign countries to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows: On page 1, line 5, strike ‘‘and Henry J. Hyde’’ and insert ‘‘, Henry J. Hyde, and Jesse Helms’’.

Included among the funding initiatives the late Senator Helms opposed in his years on the Hill, was the Ryan White Act. In opposing that measure he wrote that that people with AIDS do not deserve life saving research because AIDS was caused by their “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.”

His criticism of AIDS prevention literature included the opinion that it was “so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up.” He stupidly and arrogantly opposed AIDS funding in 1988 by saying “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.”

But Senator Elizabeth Dole, who once pictured herself as First Lady, now believes Senator Jesse Helms was such a friend to the fight against AIDS, that an international treatment program focusing on AIDS and other serious illnesses should carry his name.

My e-mail to the Senator also suggested that she is not just out of touch... she is out of her mind. I suppose her next brilliant idea will be to name a pediatric AIDS clinic for Ronald Reagan. Maybe they could donate funding for that to Iran.

No anger or sarcasm from anyone can beat the sheer stupidity, insanity and complete cluelessness of Elizabeth Dole. This is a person who should know better, but doesn't know anything. So, I hope you will take keyboard in hand and drop the Senator a strongly worded, but still respectful e-mail. I'll simplify things for you by providing a link:
http://dole.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactInformation.ContactForm

Resist the urge to remind her that reality might take a little getting used to, but it's a world she really should be spending a little more time in.

A Paradox And A Puzzle

Here's a paradox. Pain is easier to write about than gain.

I felt a little better yesterday. It's hard to write about that, because it isn't like I have joy or happiness to write about. It's that the unhappiness was a little less. Because I love analogies, here's an appropriate one. It's like having an excruciating headache. Every shooting, throbbing pain is easy to describe. So you take the Advil, and 20 minutes later, the pain has subsided some. How do you describe that? All you can say is that it doesn't hurt as much. There are no beams of sunshine to describe and no magical orchestras playing Disney tunes. It's just beige. Sometimes beige is OK, but who ever wrote a love song about beige?

The escapist in me doesn't want to think about why yesterday was better. The fatalist in me will say that, if yesterday was better, than today is going to suck. The realist in me says that whatever I want today to be, it won't be. The optimist in me ran away when I was 6, and hasn't been heard from since.

But the part of me that is trying to be an active participant in my own life wonders if I feel better because I've written stuff down in the last couple of days, and talked about it with one or two people. People in the program say that's what you have to do. Like an abscess, you have to open up the wound, let the infection drain, treat it gently and it will eventually go away. I've been hearing "talk about it" for months. But I'm not a "talk about it" kind of guy.

As a kid, there was one cardinal rule about everything. Don't talk about it. Don't talk about your father's girlfriend or his drinking. Don't talk about your mother being cold and detached. Don't talk about being alone day after day and night after night. Don't talk about not having any friends and your parents not liking anybody who tries to be your friend. Don't talk about the fact that you aren't allowed to bring Coca-Cola into the house, but at 13 you can share after-work cocktails with your parents.

Don't complain. About anything. Because in our house, the standard method of dealing with unhappiness was: "You don't like it? Just shut up, or I'll really give you something to complain about."

So for me, talking about anything so personal does not come naturally or easily. Writing is a good substitute, and can help me find my voice. It helps when I eventually talk to my sober friend R, who has become my very closest friend, and the one person I can say anything to. And it helps that I now have my friend B, who shares my understanding for writing about feelings. That he shares so much, so well and so candidly in his words, gives me the strength to write my own.

So I guess that's why I feel better. It frightens me that I am telling more people about my writing. No ads on buses or late night infomercials. But I've given a few people here and there the web address. It frightens me that more people know what I'm thinking and why. I like having secrets and knowing secrets. I like never, ever revealing secrets. Opening up the closet door to all this stuff scares the hell out of me.

I started with a paradox. I leave you with a puzzle.
Up is the opposite of down.
Go is the opposite of stop.
So, what is the opposite of pain?
Caution: "No pain" is not an acceptable answer.
Pain is a feeling. No pain is not.

So... What is the opposite of pain?

The Hell In My Head

I'm trying to figure out when the insanity in my head is going to end. It feels like zero hour on a battlefield. Noise, screaming, bombs going off, dirt, stench and general mayhem. It's a never ending blitz of fear, confusion, anger, disappointment and emotional pain.

People tell me that in order to find peace, I have to walk though this Hell, feel it, experience it, face it, and learn how to turn it back. I am told that peace and serenity will come, but not until I confront my demons. I don't know if I have that much strength.

Last night I was reminded of one of my most basic fears. I am terribly afraid of people. Specifically, I think I'm afraid of rejection, and afraid that people will see the total failure I feel like. On the one hand, I'm craving human contact and friends and relationships, and at the same time running away from them, and shutting them out of my life because I'm afraid I can't measure up.

There was a time I shut people out of my life because I was afraid they would disappoint me or abandon me. I expected only the worst. That became a convenient excuse for not allowing anyone in my life. But the truth was I knew they would see through the act on the surface and discover my weaknesses, my flaws, my addictions and the truth that my life was nothing but lies. And then when I discovered I was all alone, it was easy for me to blame others, and say people can't be trusted.

I find myself reaching out and pulling back at the same time. I want desperately to be accepted and wanted, and just as desperately to run back to my safe, dark den of isolation, keeping everyone at a distance. Alone, I feel lost, desolate and empty. With people I feel like a fraud, frantic and afraid that they're going to see the loser I feel like I am.

Right now I feel like I'm standing in the middle of that battlefield. I don't know which way to turn or which way to run. All I want to do is drop to the ground, cover my eyes and ears and wait for it all to just go away. I have that picture in my mind, and as I think about it, I remember lying in my bed as a child late at night, while my father was on one of his drunken rampages in the living room. I was trying to do the exact same thing. Under the covers, pillow over my head, eyes tightly closed and hands over my ears, waiting for it to stop. The silence was at one time both a relief and terrifying, because I never knew if the madness was at an end, or if it was just re-charging for another assault.

I used to think the hardest thing I could ever do was admit my problems, my weaknesses and my dependencies. I used to think the hardest thing I could ever do was to ask for help. But I was wrong in such a big way. The hardest thing for me is not the asking for help. The hardest thing for me is accepting it. I'm like the animal who is starving to death, but is too afraid to get close enough to the outstretched human hand to accept the food. The pain I already feel is one I understand. I don't know how to accept or deal with relief. I know how to live in Hell. I don't know how to function without it.

Why is it that the thing I want the most is the thing that scares me the most? Why is it that I fight the cure so defiantly, when the disease is so exhausting? Why can't I fight the sickness with the same intensity I drive away the cure?

I want to cover my head until it all goes away. The problem is, when the noise is all internal, there's no way to escape it.

Completely and Totally

I'm not sure when I completely and totally fucked my life up.

If I could put an exact date on it, I might at least understand how things got this bad. At this point, all I can do is look at the path that got me here, and wonder how and why I ignored the signposts along the way. It's not that I didn't see them. I did. I just chose to ignore them.

The last, and perhaps only, contented time of my life was when I was 25. I was fresh out of college, had a job, living in Miami and discovering gay bars. I thought I was finally at a place that was right for me. And even though things were OK in Miami, what I really wanted to do was drop everything, move to New York, be a writer, and find the love of my life. It had been my dream since I was a kid. My job involved a certain amount of writing and people said I was good. Teachers in school had said I was good. And where else to find a man to love me, than New York. So, why not?

"Why not" happened when I started thinking about it too much... with my head instead of my heart. "Why not" happened when the voices in my head kept having this debate between doing the adventurous thing I always wanted to do... or staying where I was, in something safe and reliable. Safe and reliable was really the one thing in my life I had never had. Why should I give up safe and reliable for a dream?

So I didn't. I stayed where I was and never went searching for life and love in New York. That was a signpost.

By the time I was 29, I had moved up at work and was exploring jobs elsewhere. I was thinking Atlanta, Washington, Boston, Chicago or Los Angeles. Instead, I took the first job I was offered and went from Miami to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Believe it or not, a pleasant, livable city where I made some friends and was fairly successful professionally. I certainly didn't find love there, but I didn't go looking for it either. It was, however, the first time I began to fear my life was spiraling out of control.

It went from bad to worse. Bad life decisions took me to Virginia, back to Florida and then to Texas for the first time. The fact that I say "Texas" and "the first time" in the same sentence should be a sign of the disasters I created and the pit of despair I seemed to constantly call home. Along the way, there might have been opportunities to bring someone into my life. There might have been a time to stop being lonely. But, like everything else, I have always been too afraid. Fear of taking a chance, fear of rejection, shame, disgust, self-hating, self loathing... whatever you call it. My love affair was always with fear. Never with someone else.

I kept playing it safe. I kept pretending I was where I wanted to be, because I was too afraid or too ashamed, or both, to say "Fuck this" and start over.

My addictions (there, I said it) were getting the best of me. My life was more out of control every day, although I somehow managed to hold it together at work. There were occasional bizarre behaviors and ludicrous decisions. I pretended to be audacious, eccentric or charmingly crazy. In reality, I was out of my fucking mind. And I was alone, because it was too dangerous to let anyone else see what a mess I really was.

I made a stab at a drastic career change that finally brought me to New York (the first time). I failed miserably, because I was too fucked up to admit I had a lot to learn, and I was working for people more messed up than me. And I made the mistake of living in Chelsea. If I didn't feel bad enough about who I was already, living in the center of Pretty-Boy America made it even worse. Look for love? I was too afraid to look for the laundry room.

I ran back to safe and secure, where I have been ever since. Now, I am at an age and a point in my life where change just doesn't seem to be an option.

Someone once told me after one of my disastrous life choices "Well, you really screwed the pooch on that one". I hated her for saying out loud what I knew too well. I still do. The truth is, I started screwing the pooch back when I took that first safe road, and stayed on that course over and over, despite the gnawing, screaming desire to go in search of joy.

"Safe" is like a drug. "Safe" is addicting because it lulls you into a false sense of security. It makes you feel protected, warm and oblivious to what is happening around you. But like drugs, "Safe" is a lie. It will sneak up on you, drain you of everything that once was good, and then abandon you on the street, with no one to hold you and nothing to protect you.

Every day, I work on trying to fix what is broken. I can barely stand to get up in the morning and face my life. I'm told it will get better. The pain will pass. I will overcome the fear. I will learn to live and love in the now. I spend a great deal of time with people who like to say "We will love you until you learn to love yourself." I'm not sure they have that much time or patience.

There's no one place or one incident or one date in time I can point to where I can say "This is where it started to go wrong." I've always played it safe because I never believed I was good enough to play it any other way, or that anyone else would want to play with me.

I lot of paragraphs ago, I started off by saying I'm not really sure when I completely and totally fucked my life up. Maybe it was when I took my first taste of "Safe" and never learned how to stop.

Feeling Feelings

A week or so ago, I was asked what I wanted most out of life. My answer was "Joy".

Then, I was asked if I had that.
I said no.
Had I ever had that?
No.

So then, I was asked to describe what no joy was like. It took me a few seconds to put it into words. But the best description I could muster was that it is an emptiness. It's like the black hole in space. I huge, dark void of nothingness. A vacuum with no light and no air where nothing can be seen, felt or touched.

I didn't realize until a little later how much I hated that conversation. It opened up a whole bunch of feelings that I work really hard not to feel.

I have spent the vast majority of my life trying to keep feelings as tied up and locked down as a pit bull at a kindergarten convention. The only way I can function is if whatever feelings I have are dumped in the ground, with cement poured on top of them.

The only thing feelings have ever brought me are pain, anger and disappointment. It isn't that I can't feel emotions or don't feel emotions. It's that nothing good has ever come of the feelings and emotions I have. The pain and unhappiness is crippling.

In the last year, I have had some very smart and caring people tell me over and over that I need to let the feelings happen, that I need to confront them, feel them, and that only by actually having them can I get past the point of pain and start moving toward joy. I tried that. I felt the feelings. I let them happen. I talked about them and I let the emotions happen. I fought back the tears and tried to understand how feeling the pain could move me out of pain.

It isn't happening. The only thing the feelings and emotions have brought me are more unhappiness and disappointment. I can't open myself up to that anymore.

I need to close the door on the feelings. The problem is, once you allow them in, it's a lot harder to force them out. So, I'm leaning hard on the door, pushing with all my might, to fight them and defeat them and make my way back to that black hole.

And while there might be no joy in a vacuum, there is no pain either.

Swimming Takes A Dive

One of the best short vacations I ever took was going to the summer Olympics. To keep from dating myself, I'll refrain from mentioning the year. We were there the first week, which was the week of a lot of the preliminaries, and didn't get to see many medal finals. But still, it was an exciting experience. Since then, I've watched the games on television in an entirely different way.

But this year, as I watch the qualifying events on television, I am already disappointed. It has nothing to do with the performances or the athletic prowess. It's the bathing suits.

Where the hell are the Speedos????

What sick mind devised these swim suits for men that look like 1808 bathing costumes for women? Neck to ankle silicone suits?

Are you kidding me? Where are the skimpy little hankies that barely covered the goodies, and certainly NEVER hid the bulges?

Does anybody believe people watch the water events to actually see the dives or the butterfly strokes or the paddling skills? Uhhh... NO! We watch to see all the ripped boys in those too tight little bikinis diving in dry and jumping out wet, with the suits showing us as much forbidden real estate as network television can handle.

Supposedly these new Mormon suits help eliminate drag and friction in the water. Well, they may eliminate friction in the water, but they're not helping friction in the living room. If I wanted to see repressed stud boys, I'd go sight-seeing at the seminary in Yonkers. The whole idea of Olympic swimming is to feed the fantasies of women and gay men in living rooms around the world. I mean, get real... how many straight men do you know who actually watch men's diving? It's right up there with Project Runway and So You Think You Can Dance.

I'm told there's a whole international scandal about these suits, with other nations accusing the United States of trying to achieve an unfair advantage and get the upper hand on the competition. Well, while the US team is getting the upper hand, millions of boys at home have nothing to do with theirs.

If this catches on, the next thing we'll see is Superman in a kilt, Batman & Robin in basketball shorts, and Boys Gone Wild in Amish country. The Olympic team has forgotten the first commandment of competitive sports: It's not whether you win or lose. It's how good you look in the gear.

Out Of The Picture

Nobody subscribes to Out for life.
(For the benefit of straight people, Out is a monthly magazine aimed at the Gay community.)

Unlike Time, Newsweek and even Gourmet, Out is not so much a chronicle of the ongoing history of our life as it is a chronicle of our underwear and cocktails of the moment.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because God knows every culture, class, demographic, orientation and time zone needs its own guide to hot and not. The trouble is that Out and its identity-challenged sister publication The Advocate are the only national news-like magazines we have. Except for a few struggling regional gay newspapers, there are no loud and proud gay news magazines standing up for us and staring down the nation’s bullies. There is nothing that we can own from the day we come out of the closet until the day they put us into the ground.

The Advocate once tried to fill that bill, and in their own minds, editors there might think they’re still doing that. But in reality, its little more than another version of the Big Gay Book of Bling.

The first time I subscribed to Out was when it and I were both quite young. I had just come out and was reveling in all things gay. It was my awakening, and I was going to conquer the world as a proud gay man.

Eventually I reached a point where I realized Out was becoming repetitive and my tastes were changing, so I let my subscription lapse. As a corporate gay man, I had other corporate gay people with whom to share interests, so Out was less necessary.

Then I was transferred from the very large southern city where my career had taken off to a much smaller Midwestern city and then a still smaller Mid-Atlantic community. I realized I needed to stay in touch with the outside gay world. That was also when AIDS was terrorizing our community, but our government was doing nothing. I subscribed again to Out, because I needed it to keep me tuned in to all of those things.

At some point sanity returned, I gave small town life the finger, and took a new, much better job with a much larger company in a mega-metropolis. Unlike my previous firm, my new big employer liked gay people a lot, promising non-discrimination and offering domestic partner benefits.

By that time I had also realized that Out really didn’t speak to my age group anymore, and really didn’t care who I was. If I wasn’t just barely drinking age, I was too old to matter. When it became clear that it took me only about two minutes to flip through the new issues of Out when they arrived, I decided to let my subscription lapse once again.

And time passed, until I entered my third season of Out. That would be the mid-life crisis. This is the time we want so badly to reclaim our lost youth and to do all the things we were too chicken-shit to do when we had the chance. This is an especially volatile time for gay men, since this is the time we achieve virtual irrelevance in the gay community. We might as well skip the Christopher Street stop in New York or the Dupont Circle stop in Washington. Not caring about us is one thing; not wanting us around is another, and that hurts.

So, in that effort to pretend I wasn’t as old as everyone else knew I was, I subscribed to Out for the third time. I tried to be interested in the music and the travel and the trends. I looked at the boys and sized up the clothes that would never come in sizes for me. It was a shabby fantasy at best, and one I never really believed.

So, here I am, back at the point where I can get through a complete issue of Out during a Project Runway or Big Gay Sketch Show commercial break.

My subscription will end before much longer, and I’ll let it lapse for the last time. The same for The Advocate. Everything here is interchangeable there.

It’s too bad. I won’t miss the magazines, although I’ll miss what they represented. I’ll miss the arrival of those plastic sleeves every month with the magazines that held the promise that there might be something relevant to my life. I’ll miss the hope that somebody at either magazine might realize that I still matter, and that the people who can actually afford the trinkets and toys that are advertised in the magazines are not the same ones the editorial department is targeting.

I will miss what the magazine represented in the reminders of the stages of my life that I shared with Out. I will miss the boldness of having Out on the coffee table when my (straight) brother comes to visit, and watching his face as he leafs through it and tries to comprehend what’s in it.

I know nothing about magazine marketing or Out’s market share, reach or circulation statistics. But I would take a wild guess that Out’s research shows people subscribe to Out for a couple of multi-year cycles, then go away as adulthood takes shape and they mature. They are replaced by a newer crop of readers, and the cycle continues. The well never really goes dry, but the numbers never really grow significantly. It’s a status-quo existence. And, in too many ways, that reflects how the gay community has allowed it’s political and socio-economic influence to languish as well.

But that’s a whole other subject.

Nobody subscribes to Out for life. And that’s a shame.