God of Biscuits

Remember the old gang? The misguided papist preteens (probably graduated from high school by now—they grow old—but not up—so fast) from the Pacific Northwest—and at least one of their parents here every so often squiring sophomoric sophistries (sometimes soporifically) around as True Faith Words of God?

Morals are Absolute. God Said So. Relative anything was bad. Moral Relativists (whatever they are), like yours truly, were the Absolutistly Absolute Evilest of them all because we (I) were so slippery, for we denied our very selves in denying the existence of Absolutes in the first place.

It’s not easy being greenish.

It almost feels quaint these days, the back-and-forthing, the tilting at little kids whos were raised like family petmas to fight like catmas and dogmas and to slap labels on things as quickly as possible, a sort of old-school, pre-laser-barcode-scanner-at-checkout days thing where Lenny the stockboy could be found in aisles firing sticky price labels onto each can or box or bag in the store.

But now god speaks in less mysterious ways and is the lesser for it, and we have to ask, can diminution as applied to god Aquinus itself into something new? Or will the hoodies and bloghoggers of the world still capitalize god into God in the way they speak of him as Him as they unplug the powerstrips from the wall for those parts of their brains they no longer leave even on standby in the name of conserving energy in the name of Lord Jesus Christ and His Holy Roman Church?

Abortion doctors killed and anti-abortion extremists call it a blessing. No surprise. But it’s the anti-abortion moderates. The ones who are so far removed from ever having to ever be faced with the real life gritty choice of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy (mainly because they’re sexually repressed and male and pre- or mid-adolescent) that they can’t be anything but moderate on just about everything. You know the ones, viewing the world through sepia-tinted lenses….

They’re the ones who’ve finally surprised me. They can’t condone what the murderer did to Dr. Tiller. “Can’t condone”!

It’s one of those double negative beige-y, wimpy, sloppy, non-committal flibbertigibbety (at best) phrases that can’t even commit to itself that itself can’t even bother to close its gown or zip up its own fly, inviting in, setting up, waiting for…..a “but”.

Waiting for a butt.

Gays and repressed catholic boys from the Pacific Northwest and Hoody all waiting for a butt. Ok, ‘but’, but I’m making a butt joke and you know how anal those guys are, so it’s fun to poke at them.

(c’mon, these jokes killed in the Castro! Literally….wrecked ‘em!

Anywho.

These anti-abortion, anti-choice, anti-privacy, anti-woman, pro-state, pro-fascist folks “can’t condone” a murder. Do they ever use this language for those “murdered babies” that are the result of abortions, as they like to call ‘em? “We’re vehemently not condoning the murders of these unborn babies!”

Has a certain not-ring to it, no?

Wait, though, I’m not done.

These “moderates”, while they “can’t condone” the murder of another human being, the murder of Dr. Tiller, they “can’t condemn it, either”.

Anti-abortion people can’t condemn the murder of another human being.

Let that sink in to your heads.

A man walks into a church and murders another man, and a bunch of people who’ve convinced themselves that social, legal, personhood should be bestowed upon pre-born biologically human individual organisms not yet physically or mentally fully formed and therefore the termination of the continued development of those pre-born organisms is fully equal to Murder 1 can’t find it within themselves to condemn a cold blooded murder of a thinking, feeling man who has friends and family who love him and who has not acted illegally or extra-socially and who has, from a particular point of view, given helpful medical care to women who have sought it out.

Hoody? Little Bloghogging bastards? Anyone else who is anti-choice or anti-abortion or whatever you want to call yourselves on that side of the fence? Short of a full, riotous, impassioned condemnation at least equal to the fervor you display in your (IMHO misguided) rampages to make abortion illegal towards the killer of this Dr. Tiller, you are hypocrites to be reviled and judged as by me and every other thinking person as manipulators and hijackers of a cause (“Pro Life”) for personal reasons as yet undiscovered.

My advice? Stop the rallies and try therapy.

There are better outlets for rage or fear or repression than to attack others.

Ask Dr. Tiller’s family. They’ll tell you.

I just looked it up, and the traditional gifts for a 6th wedding anniversary are Sugar, Iron & Candy.

I shit you not.

Who thought up those things anyway? First anniversary is paper. The only reason I remember that is from a Will & Grace episode (Karen got a million dollars in cash for her first anniversary). And growing up we all learned about silver and gold anniversaries, but I thought those were just appellations and not to do with gift-giving.

I wander.

Sugar and candy seem mundane. Six isn’t a notchy number, not one that a slider in your typical app might stick to or one that a smaller knob might print a stop for. If you hear someone use the number six they’re being specific and not approximate. Isn’t it strange how the numbers we round to are also the numbers that are important? “About 10” is an approximate figure but 10th anniversary is a Milestone.

I list.

So today marks six, count ‘em, six years since I started this blog, and while I could single out any one year or quarter or day, for that matter in this blog as having any more or less impact than any other, it’s the very fact of this blog, the very existence of it that deserves the nod for having steered my life is so many very pointed directions. Not all good.

I’m on point, finally.

But at six years, enough time has passed that whatever sea-changes (thank you for the bazillionth time, William Shakespeare) have come from it are beginning to show themselves…

…And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where [it] has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

In Salon.com today, I read an advice column which I rarely read. It was the title which drew me in, a reader asking what to do about having feelings for a married coworker.

With the recent Prop 8 business in California, why would married people be of interest to me right now? Well, don’t we all really know at some level that love transcends whatever the government or the state or the city or your neighbor or the guy standing next to you thinks of your relationship?

So it’s not about the married-ness that interested me, but the feelings of the reader, and what to do about them.

Too often I’ve seen gay men do whatever they feel like doing in the moment, living often in an ever-present, like many other forms do—though it’s been recently demonstrated that even king crabs have a rudimentary understanding of pain and a sense of a past.

One man sees another he’s interested in—I’m being polite here—he sees another man he wants to have sex with ASAP. Perhaps even right there at the bar.

A man he’s seen before. A man he even knows. Knows is in a relationship, boyfriended or partnered or “married” or even married—in one of the lucky 18,000 marriages that still exist. Doesn’t know if “playing” (always beware of cartoonish slang words, they’re the leafs and branches that cover the pit-traps of dangerous behaviors or dangerously foolish notions) is permitted or not and more importantly it’s of no concern or priority or obstacle, not even something the man would stumble over as he walks the path between wanting and getting what he wants.

There’s very little respect among men for the relationships between men and that, I believe, is primarily because there’s no respect for single men—their persons, their feelings, their humanity, their personhood, their equality—by those men in the relationships defined as “open”. Those men in open relationships (another cartoonish jargony slanguage construct) are easily spotted once you know what you’re looking for because they look a lot like the man I just described above.

Or did you think I was just talking about a single man who was out in pursuit of whomever, willfully or worse—obliviously—ignoring ramifications of the fulfillment of his own desires?

Point this Escheresque handjob-sketching-handjob is the deterioration of high-minded and principled human qualities, the drawing on and honoring of a storied past and the contribution to and sense of obligation toward a brighter future eventually collapsing into an eternal now, perfectly suited to the cruising suitor who has no thoughts of obligations or consequences or honor or respect or restraint.

But out there in the world of the Rest of the World, there’s a man who writes in, worried because he doesn’t know what to do with his own feelings for a woman who’s married, where there’s a glaringly tacit assumption that he has as at least an overall goal, to keep respect the woman, to protect the woman by not disrupting her life, by respecting her marriage, by standing apart, by putting someone else first.

Imagine a world like that.

Interested in what the columnist had to say? Here it is, reprinted without permission. Pay special attention to the last paragraph:

Dear Sam,

It is OK to have these feelings. But you must not let these feelings cloud your view of what is real. One learns to handle such things — not to kill them or obsess about them but simply to hold them in the container of one’s chest, to carry them lightly and let them be, for as long as they are there. And then one wakes up one morning, or one is walking dully along and discovers they must have vanished.

Your job until then is to contain this and live with this and let it be. Enjoy it but do not build expectations on it. It is a crush. It happens. You must not allow it to cloud your thinking. There must be your thinking on the one side and your crush on the other. Know the situation: She is married and loves her husband and wants to have babies with him. That means she is not available to be your girlfriend or partner or anything more than a workmate and someone to talk to.

Picture her as a gate that is closed. Picture her with a sign on her that says Married. Unavailable. Will Be Your Friend Only. Picture this sign on her every time you talk with her. Married. Unavailable. Will Be Your Friend Only.

That does not mean you can’t have these feelings. It’s a crush. It happens. It can be pleasant. Just know what it is. It is not a sign that you should pursue her. It is precisely the opposite.

Is the prospect of a life where you don’t get everything you want such a horrible, horrible thing that you must traipse over everyone else, take what you want and not care that the consequences you create might not only befall you?

I envy straight people. Often.

And today, right now, that envy has nothing to do with their ability to obtain a legal marriage.

I’ve been spending the last few weeks researching, “researching” and re-searching for a short story that I am writing—some might say “am intending to write.”

It’s that, too.

It’s been so long since I’ve written fiction.

Let me say that again: it’s been so very long since I’ve written fiction. One could take that more than one way. This blog contains no fiction and never has, not true fiction.

Allegory? Yes. Allusion? You betcha. Illustration? Copious and frequent. All things that never have happened, sometimes never could happen, but all things that are lies and not truly fiction. Lies in the service of the illumination of Truths. That’s not fiction; that’s the real world using words to do end runs around the limitations of words in order to get points across—in the real world.

Fiction is that where we participate in the act of creation, that which has no moorings to anything in the real world and therefore much create its own moorings or be clever enough to make your forget the story is floating away, or stolid and rigorous enough to keep the fictional geography in place long enough to finish the story.

Keeping the pieces of it pinned down until you can fit them with springs and struts and linearize them into a story. That’s the hard part.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a fictional piece. My life has been a piece of hyper-, supra-, meta-, megalo- unfortunately-non-fictional rough-draft. Stuff you wouldn’t want to muddle through—stuff that I don’t want to have to go back and muddle through, but alas, I have to.

I’m the only copy editor who can. But no one would publish the final results.

The good news? My friends these days—friends, not “friends”—are self-publishing and seem to be making a healthy go at it.

When I’m ready, that book—likely more tomes than the full OED, will find its way back to its Way.

For now, my short story is finding its way—because I’m saying so, doing so, writing so.

Running the world is fun. Adding to and subtracting from it, at will? Even funner.

If the world is a biscuit, I am God.

How can someone can simultaneously blame and erase a person from his own history, or successfully declare bankruptcy and mortgage a house in the same week?

In the Lord, all things are possible.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Maritoriousness (uxoriousness?) is a lovely idea, but make sure he’s deserving of it is all I’m saying. But then again, if he’s deserving, it’s not excessive and it’s not maritorious, it’s just keepin’ it real.

Privacy is a one-way filter and a subjective one: the small-minded insist on tarting up secrecy and parading it around as something noble and assign it rights (right, Fred?).

Secrecy isn’t privacy, it’s a dodge and a cheat. It’s getting away with something. It’s ignoble and it’s cold proof of cowardice.

Privacy is a right and so it doesn’t have to be earned, but shouldn’t it at least be respected? Shouldn’t it be treated with respect and kept safe and far and away from a slatternly concept like secrecy?

This is about as close to a litmus test for, well, for anyone I’d want to be around: sacrifice your advantage for the ethic or squeeze the ethic to give up its drop of sweetness in order to improve your position.

And I’m speaking here only in small ways, in moments here and there, just in conversational postures: friends tell truths and opt for candor and allow themselves to be exposed because that’s how trust and love and friendship work when let them.

And I’m hurting because I’ve seen too many people throw all of this to the ground for gains that that aren’t even gains. I’ve been kicked to the curb because I was in the way, ignored by people simply because they were in the habit of ignoring others, dismissed because I went off-script (there was a script?) unceremoniously.

Everyone’s been kicked to a curb, everyone’s been ignored at some time or another and everyone’s been dismissed and dissed.

But by the people they called their “friends”?

By their boyfriends?

Colluding social automatons rush in to resect people who speak out of turn (I’m an out-of-turner, by the way), rewrite any overheard dialog and re-ice the urinals (they’re quite thorough).

Spend enough time with bruises on your flanks, with rolling to the curbs, with being ignored, with being dimissed and with rolling all of this into part of the reality of a night out with your “friends” and it’s clear your initiative is already dead and you’ve become a follower.

And followers are terrible, terrible creatures. They can do nothing but mutate and multiply the mediocrity at the center and introduce a sort of leveling drift that results in an environment with no ups and downs, no coordinated beat, just a fibrillated quivering mass where there are no boundaries, no individuality, no originality. No questioning, no inspiration, nothing.

There’s just sameness and reveling in it.

And I’m Hurting, like the title says. Because I somehow ended up as a follower. I don’t know how I ended up there, how I lost the initiative, how I let “friends” shush me up so often, how so often I went with the crowd or at least didn’t protest at the direction when I could/would/should have, but I did.

And then I ended up making terrible, terrible choices and then there was the stupid and terrible choice to remain in my situation.

I don’t know exactly where I am right now, situationally. Sometimes, I think I’ve fallen through one step on a dozen-step stairway and left for dead. Sometimes I feel completely fungible.

“They” like to tell us that it’s not good to hold a grudge, but not all feelings of antipathy are grudge. And I’ve come to realize that sometimes the byproduct of a lesson is something ethereal. Like antipathy.

And while I have joked and cajoled and attacked and chided and bantered and basically have been all over the map about the Bears—the Gay Bears, I mean, of course—that’s pretty much all over. Any reference I use in the future can be taken quite literally critical, and if there are constructive elements to the critcism, then take it as a serendipity and nothing more.

Because there’s simply nothing worthwhile to identity-smothering, boundary-ignoring, variation-hating, lookist, quasi-racist, sexually-disrespectful, fatuous self-identifying subgroup of fat hairy gay men known as Bears.

Of all the bitchfesting, of all the whining by the gays who blamed EQCA for their own lack of participation pre-election in the whole Prop 8 debacle (yes, Lesbette Amy Balliett, I’m talking to you), of all the post-gay, neo-post-gay, out of touch gays, who didn’t like the No On 8 ads because they weren’t aimed at themselves, not aimed at the choir and aimed instead at the touchy, tetchy Others who understood equality but were uncomfortable with words like ‘gay’, there’s finally an ad that shows and not tells (thus avoiding words like ‘gay’, or at least putting those words way down on the priority list) and showing people in situations that those touchy, tetch Others can understand, there’s an ad that isn’t snarky, isn’t bitchy, isn’t making fun and isn’t just for the the post-gay, neo-post-gay, out of touch gays, isn’t just for the choir.

And here it is:

This is what’s become of The Toll.

Today their albums live in an iTunes Library that live on a ginormous HFS+ (Journaled, Extended) (1TB) that’s attached to an AirPort Extreme that stands sentry between my home and the internet. It also happens to share several large volumes (also HFS+) to all the other machines that live in my house.

And thanks the MobileMe, those volumes are also available to all my Macs that I take Out There into the big bad world.

I digress.

There’s a Mac mini which runs my business which also happens to run a copy of iTunes and shares its view of the ginormous iTunes Library that lives on one of the ginormous volumes that’s shared by the AirPort Extreme. So the home network can see an iTunes Library that’s being shared as Godboek, or a Dutch neologism meaning Godbook, or your God of Biscuits’ version of The Bible.

And my AppleTV lets me browse, display and control any shared iTunes Library from the comfort of my cheap Ikea leather sofa on my HDTV.

So some of the works of The Toll now live within my version of the Bible, as its own Boek. Though hardly a place for saints to tread, there’s been plenty of wisdom vended from those pages, those sounds, songs, evenings, shows, sessions, conversations, drinks, drunks, shots, slugs, pile-ons, no-tells, walks-of-shame, cumulative-thousands spent on alcohol…

windchimes sang of agony on my father’s porch

Yes, thousands spent both home and abroad (where abroad would be Pittsburgh, PA and perhaps one or two other Pennsylvanian venues, various eastern Ohio, central Ohio, SW Ohio, NW Ohio, SE Michigan NW, NE and Central (the other CMU) Michigan and even Illinois, if I recall correctly.

My recall, not so good, which makes me smile. Damn you, Jack Daniels, Sambuca (Bartram’s fault), Yukon Jack, Wild Turkey, Iron City Beer, Rolling Rock Beer and at certain times, things whose only redeeming value was that the alcohol content was high enough to kill whatever it was that gave it its bizarre flavor.

And I was the so-called, ironically named Verbose, the Good Child of the bunch. It was my apartment that was home base for Pittsburgh shows and there was always a rectangle of floor at least for me when not in Pittsburgh (the more you drink, the less you care about sleeping conditions).

But it was never really The Toll who showed up at my house after the shows, as it was never The Toll that existed outside of the shows themselves.

The Toll was purely phenomenological, and if you think that’s anything but highest praise, ecstatic revery at its finest, then you need to go back to first principles and come back when you’re ready to read the rest of this (yes, I’m talking to you, pink-lip-glossed girlies who Molly Ringwalded merrily during Anna-41-Box at the Decade twenty years ago, you stupid bitches).

Because after nearly sixteen years in San Francisco, I know what Magic is. Come to it, after that first Toll show I knew what Magic was, but now I have the words for it, and I have the wisdom to slap you down sometimes and tell you that sometimes there just are no words for some things.

The Toll knew that; The Toll is so much more than words, so much more than any words I might lay down to describe how ill-equipped words are.

But no, it was Brad, Rick, Greg and Brett who walked up onto that stage—any stage, every stage—and then very quickly you could almost, almost see the coalescence and then the Change. Then it was Brad and Rick and Greg and Brett and The Toll. Five of ‘em up there.

Altogether.

If you squinted, or you just fucking stopped looking for it, or you retired your mundane senses it was there for you to witness. Everything made a kind of sense in a completely irrational, hyperrational way. How did Greg, with his back to it all, know to get out of the way by millimeters and milliseconds when What Was flung Brad into a column next to the stage?

all the trees bow down before the wind
paralyzed by the frost and the fear
shall I shed my skin?

When “The Price of Progression” first came out in record stores (remember those?), Lisa Yalen and I bolted to the Century III Mall in West Mifflin, PA after work. We’d already heard the album, of course, but we hadn’t bought the album. We hadn’t yet had what Mac folks would, a decade later, come to call the “out of box experience”. We purchased the CDs and went running out of the record store.

Tearing at the packaging—it wasn’t human-proofed like it is today—we finally got it open. I was savoring the jewel box and the real CD with the real printing on the one side. Hell, the fact that the music was actually on a CD instead of a cassette!

Lisa went for the liner notes. Some time later, be it moments, seconds or minutes, a shriek from Lisa: Oh my fucking god! Yes. From the second floor of a wide open suburban, 300-store mall.

There we were, our names anyway. Listed in the Thanks section. What a hoot! I thought it was pretty damned cool and of course later I thanked them for the thanks, for which I got a “you’re welcome” for the “you’re welcome”. Odd, yeah, I know.

But being mentioned in the liner notes was a lot like capturing the phenomenological Toll in a static recording: it’s like trying to capture all of Living Time and History in its Rich and Brilliant Pageantry using a Bic pen and a short stack of Cahier Pocket Ruled Journals. Best you can do is notch a few scratchings that remind you of something you had a shared experience with with someone else. Nothing more.

Did I ever get a chance to thank those guys? I’m sure I did, at least for most things. Those wordless ways that friends—good friends, proper and genuine friends—make sure that all is appreciated, all that was done. We spent time together. I went to Columbus any number of times just to hang out with the guys not related to The Toll, they were always at my place in Pittsburgh, etc. etc. blah blah blah.

But there were other ways, too, big ways I think, in which I never did thank them.

Those of you who’ve known me for awhile, or who’ve read this blog for a long time know the high regard I have for my family, know how there was never even the smallest moments when they were not there for me when I came out to them, after I came out to them and since then.

They had a lot to deal with, were you to put things into a list, from the get go. I came out to them and within the year I was partnered to a man who was not only HIV+ but was by any measure a man with AIDS. In 1993, even asking a trained medical professional to deal with that (mom is a nurse) was a big deal, but asking a mother, a father, brothers, to deal with that on top of still coming to terms with a gay family member and that’s something.

Before all that, though, I wasn’t out to anyone. Not anyone at all, not really. It was just me, alone. Dealing. Not dealing. I had my friends, good friends. And I was lying to them. And not just that lie of omission by not trusting the friendships by not telling them. They presented me with plenty of opportunities. Plenty of times they set up situations where I had to do little more than just nod my head yes or just say “no, I like guys”. And I knew that Lisa, Stork, Felicia, all of them would be more than fine with it. I knew they’d be downright happy about it because they knew they would have helped a friend they loved.

But there I was, in a self-imposed place far and away from everything real, everything important, everything human. Everything human about myself, a creature held together with little more than gravity and the momentum of willpower and sheer force of will.

A functional equivalent of a human being, empty and dead, cold and dark and lost, too far away from that which fuels and fires us into lives worth living. No access to my own emotions, my own feelings, my own internal world in any significant way save one: the music of The Toll. Am I putting too much on just them? I don’t think so, because I made no demands on them. They were doing what they were doing without thought of me, but that they were there, that they affected me as they did.

That they transcended language and labeled emotion was sort of a feral EMDR that let me slip past the whatever was walling me in (or walling me out) and go along for their ride, which made it my ride, too. And the ride was always about humanity. Profundity rode shotgun.

I look back at those years and I sometimes it frightens me how close it seems I came to losing everything. I’m fairly certain I don’t mean I would have died from it, but I’ve been left asking myself the same question all these years later: how long can a human being go on being so very far away from his own humanity and remain sane? Remain human? Remain something relatable at all to other humans with any sense of warmth?

I shudder when I consider what could have been, how far afield I could have gone, how damaged from “learning” to live without my own humanity I would have been were it not for the experiences of all those Toll shows, and all those friends who never let me slip too far away.

Some of the weirdest intellectual conversations I’ve ever had were with Brad Circone; some of the most dangerous artistic conversations were with Rick Silk; some of the most humbling exchanges of wit with Greg Bartram and some of the most bizarrely paradoxical with Brett Mayo. The details of all of them lost to ethanol damage, of course, but perhaps that’s how these things must be.

I hate nostalgia. Rest assured what I write here has not so much to do with the past as it does the present. My Here and my Now.

Very much of What I am I Owe To and Blame On Lisa Yalen, Dale James, Stork, Felicia, Judy and Dave.

And, of course, Brad, Rick, Greg and Brett.

And The Toll.

My friend Rex Wockner received the note below from novelist Edmund White today. As Edmund notes, any of you with a blog out there should re-publish John Irving’s letter as well!

Dear Rex—Here is a letter to me from the famous (straight) novelist John Irving (The World According to Garp) about the marriage bill in Vermont. He would like you to make it widely available. Thanks, Edmund White

Dear Edmund:

It’s interesting that, as you and I are comparing our calendars to see when we might get together in Vermont — and while we are both engaged in overseeing the editing and copy-editing phase of our new books — my fellow Vermonters are deciding the fate of a gay marriage bill, which I very much support, and which has been supported by the Vermont State Senate (by a wide margin).

Some years ago, I was an outspoken opponent of my fellow Democrat, Sen. Peter Shumlin — then and now, the President of the Vermont Senate — on an issue having nothing to do with gay marriage. (It was a tax issue, and a school issue, called Act 60, and the disagreement between Sen. Shumlin and myself was very public. It was unfortunate, too, because we were friends — formerly neighbors in Putney —and the issue was very divisive.) Not so now, when Sen. Shumlin and I are allies on the gay marriage issue; Peter Shumlin’s statements in support of gay marriage have been clear, fair, and admirable — and I’ve told him so. Gay rights have long been the “new” — as we both know, truly not so new — civil rights. It is heartening to see that the Vermont Senate thinks so.

I don’t need to tell you that there are many people outside Vermont who are watching to see what my home state does about the S.115 legislation; I believe that gays, and all Americans committed to equality, are looking hopefully at Vermont right now. As a country, don’t we lag behind Europe and Canada on the acceptance of gay people? I am proud of the Vermont Senate for passing this bill by such a commanding margin.

But wait a minute; I mustn’t overlook our governor, Jim Douglas (R.). Around the state, I hear rumors that our governor has national ambitions of a conservative kind. Indeed, Gov. Douglas’s threatened veto of this important and timely legislation puts him on the wrong side of history; people opposed to gay marriage will soon belong among such dinosaurs as those who stood in opposition to African-Americans in Martin Luther King’s time, or those other dinosaurs who once denied equal rights for women. (I know you know about my support of abortion rights — made clear enough in “The Cider House Rules,” not only in my novel but in the film I adapted from that book. Well, I feel no less strongly about my support of gay rights.)

My question for Gov. Douglas is: Why should it matter to straight couples if gay couples want to be married? How insecure must heterosexuals be in order to feel threatened by gay marriage? Civil unions aren’t good enough — they’re not equal enough! Is Gov. Douglas so deaf to history that he cannot hear the most obvious and painful echoes? To say that civil unions suffice, or that they’re good enough for gay people — in lieu of marriage — is akin to telling black people where to sit on the bus, or that they must use separate toilets.

And when people lamely say that marriage was “intended” to be between a man and a woman, we need to remind these unquestioning souls that our founding fathers “intended” a separation between church and state, about which our constitution is very clear. By whom (and back when) was marriage “intended” to be between a man and a woman? That isn’t an argument; that is religious dogma, and it has no place in legislation, which is (or should be) about equal justice for all. Heterosexuals are not hurt by gay marriage; to not allow gays to be married hurts gays.

By passing S.115 into law in our state, Vermont will take leadership of an issue that has embarrassed our country in the eyes of the world; by vetoing S.115, Gov. Douglas will demonstrate that he is opposed to equal rights for all. Gov. Douglas should be encouraged to stand on the right side of history, and not stand instead in history’s way. But, as I said, the governor may have his own political agenda; he may be thinking beyond Vermont — possibly, he’s imagining what Gov. Palin would do!

Gov. Douglas’s explanation of his threatened veto is bizarre. He says the legislature shouldn’t be troubled by this distraction right now; he says we have more important issues to tackle — namely, the economy. Is he just insensitive to the feelings of gay people, or is he ducking the issue — or both? Is he really saying that gay rights are light fare in comparison to the more serious business of the legislature? As for labeling the gay marriage bill a distraction, the governor’s announced intention to veto the bill is what’s causing the distraction!

Vermont Senator Dick McCormack (D.) said in today’s Rutland Herald that the governor’s stated reason for his veto “is based on a complete misrepresentation of the legislative process, and it expresses a smug disrespect for a class of his fellow humans.” (I think you and I would agree with that.)

I’ve sent emails to certain members of the Vermont House of Representatives — not just thank-you notes to some of my fellow Democrats, but also heartfelt thank-yous and encouragements to a couple of Republicans who support gay marriage. (Among them, my local Dorset member of the House of Representatives, the only Republican I have voted for in recent history. Patti Komline has said she will vote in support of gay marriage and to over-rule the governor’s veto of the S.115 legislation; to her I gave the biggest thanks, because I know she must be taking some heat from her fellow Republicans — if not from Gov. Douglas himself.)

It’s discouraging, isn’t it, how long certain fights endure? I remember how some of my friends in the abortion rights battle thought the issue was over in ‘73, with Roe v. Wade; I doubted it — mere wishful thinking, as it turned out. And now this gay marriage business. Sometimes it feels that the gay rights battles are only beginning — which is true in one sense, though the struggle itself has been going on forever; this one will continue to be fought long after our lifetimes, you would probably agree.

Well, on that depressing note — I hope to see you soon!

Fondly,
John

Click on the image to make it larger/legible.

Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see
My black and deep desires;

I am commissioned by my doctor to write a short story, something which captures in one tale a pattern which has formed and then reinforced and then defined and then redefined the way that I have come to perceive the world around and about me.

No small task; no mean feat, and something surely worthy of a form of more grandeur and bearing than the mean and vulgar short story. Who even gives the short story any credence, much less respect these days?

Well, she does—my doctor, I mean—and to her I give credence, and respect, and grandeur and bearing for that matter, for her tasks and feats, applied both to me and to him who I loved in some ways more than I loved myself and therefore I set myself upon the task and things comes to me. Some stay, some are now and then. Some paint themselves vividly: a cobalt blue bus in an Italian seaside town navigating narrow and harrowingly twisty streets fifty years ago or patterns of friendship setting themselves beside and apart from patterns between us two lovers.

The specific and the general, the floridly vivid set in pigments upon Time’s Canvas; dessicated husks of words barely holding onto the pages of they are impressed upon in texts among the stacks in libraries few visit anymore.

And then there are some words that pop and refuse to be ignored and those I know I’ll keep, but I don’t know yet where they’ll end up:

I gave him everything I had.
He gave me everything he had left.

It’s a frontispiece and a throwaway line, a title and an item on a grocery list on a day like any other day.

But it has staying power.

As do I.