Category Archives: Gay Mid-Life: Musings

Gay Midlife Musings: Unsung Gay Heroes in our Midst

After reading Glenn Greenwald’s book “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State” I am astounded once again that neither Glenn Greenwald nor Chelsea Manning have been written about in the gay and gay-ish media with the import and perspective they deserve.

Glenn Greenwald

David Miranda and Glenn Greenwald

Bradley Manning/Chelsea Manning

Arguably, these two people–this one gay man and this one trans woman–have been at the moral center of international secrecy and disclosure in the last year or two, yet hardly a peep from those of our institutions (the Gay Centers, the Parade Groups, the political and fundraising groups) when it comes time to lionize and defend our own.

I took a cursory look at who we (the gay community in the U.S.) have honored at galas, parades and whatnot in the last year or so, and I came across people like Jennifer Lopez, Bill Clinton, Anderson Cooper, Norman Lear . . . not to say that these folks are not deserving of awards, I’m sure they are, but there’s only one gay person among those names above and I’m not sure any of them, including Clinton, have done anything near the importance of what Manning (especially) and Greenwald have done.

Basically Chelsea Manning gave up her freedom — what would have otherwise been likely as a nice, normal life by exposing American crimes in Iraq. Greenwald used his profession as a journalist to expose the unbelievably massive and likely unconstitutional spying/surveillance program of the USA’s NSA (though the disclosures of Edward Snowden) greatly putting himself and his partner David Miranda at risk. (As far as I know, Glenn Greenwald still lives in Brazil and will not come to the U.S. because of the possibility/probability of detainment, even though he is an American citizen.)

What they have done, or helped to do, is very much in the tradition of LGBT people throughout history — we’ve often served as shamans, seers, philosophers, as well as teachers, magicians, composers artists and writers. Since we were almost always not part of the mainstream, we took that distance and reflected something back to society at large. I see that Manning and Greenwald are very much in this tradition.

Is the fact that we can’t see and honor this because we’re in the middle of history as it’s happening and don’t have perspective?

Or is it something else, as in, don’t rock the boat, people. They just gave us marriage, after all. A couple of years before that, they gave us the right to be open in the military. Hard fought gains, to be sure.

Don’t rock that boat.

But what Manning did and what Greenwald has played a decisive role in reporting on has an extremely far-reaching impact in the very fiber of our beings as well as the national psyche.

Are we embarrassed because Chelsea’s transgenderism shines a light where we’d rather not have it go? Do we not want to say we support Greenwald because then it pits us as also opposed to the NSA, perhaps the most insidious organization of our government? I’m not quite sure what the reasons are, but these are revolutionary actions by our own. Why aren’t we owning them? Honestly, what’s happened to our in-your-face-culture since the days of ACT UP, and before that, Harvey Milk and Stonewall?

Here is the one story I did see. And this one, I presume from the tone, written by a straight ally.

Link to my previous post on Chelsea Manning.

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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (from STRIKE! Magazine)

The Little People

“jobs have had to be created, that are, in effect, pointless.”

is that you? Here’s an interesting rant.

I always thought this of most jobs, they were just invented because people needed to be busy doing something. Not that everything has an inherent need or value, though. Many, many jobs are just busywork, and I’ve had a few. I guess that farming vegetables and livestock is pretty important, and up till about 150 years ago that’s what the vast majority of the human race actually did each and every day. You know, to keep from starving to death.

But is, say being a doorman (main duties: opening the door for people coming in or going out) on the same level of importance in the grand scheme of things? This is not to disparage doormen (or doorwomen) — I chose that because it’s something I actually did for awhile in my way-younger life. The easy answer is it’s no, not necessary. People can open their own damn doors, I think this was a left over from a more Downton Abbey-style world, even though it was right here in the U.S.

Another example: On a business trip to Japan a few years ago, I went shopping for family gifts in the Ginza district. In the store where I bought some items, there was one person to help you pick it out, then a cashier, a wrapper-upper, a bagger, and then a greeter/goodbye-er person. It seemed excessive even then, and that was long before the Crash of 2008. I work part-time in a store right now, and guess what — should we be lucky enough to have a paying customer in the flesh, I serve all of the above functions, and more.

I also worked for a movie studio for a long time, and our entire department was deemed “makework” by the new muckymuck who hated anything the previous muckymuck did. All of the jobs were internal public relations functions, a job category David Graeber specifically mentions. And guess what – we all lost those jobs, eventually, they really did just go away.

So it’s all interesting. I do remember being in grade school in the 1960s where we were promised a future of almost unending leisure, as the automated world would open up life for so many people in a way never seen before. Europe largely chose to invest such wealth into creating that kind of a world for its citizens; here in the U.S. the powers that be decided they needed to have all the money and so the 99% would be required to work even harder than ever. I suspect that will change, one way or the other.

What do you think? Would you rather live in a world (like the author of this piece says, totally possible with today’s technology) where people only have to work 3-4 hours a day for survival, or do you like it as it is? This is mainly a political question. Does the thought of all that free time excite you, or does it scare you?

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Ten Reasons Summer is the Best

Oh, Actually, #11: Because you don’t have to blog. Or don’t want to, or are too lazy to. Something like that. Here’s one of my favorite summer places (pictured below) and the quick ten reasons summer is the best:

Union Terrace, my favorite Madison spot.

Dairy Queen: all things ice creamy and you don’t need a reason
Evening light: you can do more outside and save on electricity
It’s hard to slip on a dry, sun-baked sidewalk
Concerts at the Hollywood Bowl (OK, that’s LA-centric, but hey)
Flowers, flowers, flowers!
The one time of year the ocean may actually be warm enough to enter
Summer Fridays – does your business close after lunch?
Perfect excuse to drink lemonade and eat strawberry shortcake
School’s out (good if you’re a kid, anyway, or getting that advanced degree)
Romance – it’s that warmer weather making you frisky!

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What’s your favorite thing about the summer months?

Is It Time To Consider Leaving Los Angeles, part two . . .

So hard to quit you.

Adding on to where I was before . . . in a post:

In the last couple of days, this came out: Los Angeles Most Unaffordable City for Housing

And then, a friend shared this link with me: The Living Wage Calculator , which is a project basically to advocate for higher minimum wages, by showing what a “living wage” actually is, in real dollars and cents, in any location you plug into their search engine.

I figured I could also use this for planning where to live frugally on a fixed income, try to figure out where my dollars would go the furthest.

So here’s the baseline, no-frills living wage (annualized) for a single adult (hey, that’s me) in some of the locations (in descending order, from most expensive to least) I’ve considered over my months of ruminating on this issue:

Los Angeles: $23,640.

Palm Springs: $22,289.

NOLA: $21,869.

Sacramento: $20,696.

Las Vegas: $20,036.

Madison: $19,843.

Milwaukee: $19,717.

Tucson: $17,400.

So, is Tucson really about 27% less expensive than L.A.? Hmmm, it’s something to think about.

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Update on what’s happening to Gays in Russia: Moscow Gay-Pride Rallies Have Been Reduced to This

In Photos: Moscow Gay-Pride Rallies Have Been Reduced to This.

images Ah June, all rainbows and boas and every day it seems another U.S. state decides that bans on marriage equality are, well, unconstitutional. Yay us! We’re so awesome.

Truly, let’s not forget other parts of the world, where living as an open LGBT-type person is either a huge struggle or plain illegal. Iran, Nigeria, Uganda . . . Russia.

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I don’t know what to do about it, but I do know that keeping silent about it is most certainly the wrong answer.

During this season of pride, lets not forget our brothers and sisters in Russia.

A Few Tips for Dating a Mature Gay Man

Christopher Isherwood (l) and Don Bachardy in the late ’70s.

The heart wants what the heart wants, as do other body parts. So, if you find yourself on the cusp of an intergenerational adult romance, here are some tips for dating that more mature gay man:

Earlier is better. When they coined that phrase, “old and tired,” they weren’t kidding about the tired part. Not quite sure why or how it happens, but most people of my age group (50s-60s) are in their jammies winding down most nights by 10. (there are always exceptions, but my anecdotal survey confirms this)
Go ahead and approach, don’t wait for him to do it if you’re a younger appreciating an older. Our culture is rife with nasty ageism, and he will be hesitant unless he knows you’re bound to be receptive to an interest. He’d love it to be approached.
Don’t make all your interactions with texts or facebook messages, please. Use the phone to, you know, actually talk. I have one friendship with a 20-something guy where it’s always text, never voice, which to me feels totally alien.

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Don’t expect him to have the same priorities or interests as you do. Expect him, at some point, to reference why it is that there’s not tons and tons of men of similar age around for you to ogle — that’s right, the Plague Years. You won’t want to hear this, it’s all very sad — but it’s a big part of his life and something you should know about your history.
Expect his friends to think of you as a golddigger or other kind of lowlife, at least at first, and you’ll have to earn their trust, even if that is perhaps unfair.
Expect your friends to think you’ve gone insane and to say things like “what could you possibly see in that old man?” which is also unfair. Have your answer ready.
He’ll likely expect to always pay, at least initially. Surprise him by not letting that always happen.
Realize that following up and actually doing what you said you were going to do will loom large in his book, in other words, don’t be a flake, it’s hard enough introducing you to everyone as his nephew.
Afternoon delight is a very good thing. They even wrote a song about it. He’s much more likely to want to fool around when he’s got the energy and that’s going to be during the day.

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So Beards Are Over – The Bold Italic – San Francisco

url I’m so glad, I say. It must be true because someone in San Francisco said it and you know they know.

Why? Well, “The field is too crowded.” Yes, I think it is. I have to agree with the writer of this piece, Peter Lawrence Kane. Beards can now be so over, please? I mean really, everybody has one and everybody should not have one.

And by beards I don’t really mean those little 3 day stubble shadow things (Ok, I myself have one of those, in a goatee shape, not exactly on trend and not really a beard, but heck, I like it and let’s face it, I’m too lazy to shave the whole face at once). I think those are sexy and I’ve decided I’ll allow them to remain, indefinitely.

No, what I don’t really care for is the overboard look. Like these folks from our past, (Lincoln, Whitman, Freud. . .) couldn’t we just. . . let them be in the past? Along with their beards? They hide you, there’s really no way to tell what a man really looks like when a big bushy beard is covering up everything. And so often, when you find out, well, you wish you hadn’t.

So that’s where I stand on this pressing issue of our day. Have at it. But don’t get any beard hairs on my blog, please.
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Top Things I Remember About NYC as a Nine-Year-Old in 1964

Times Square in the 60s.

It was 50 years ago next month: June 1964, the New York World’s Fair. I’ve talked before about being a Sally Draper contemporary, and indeed there was no Shea Stadium for me, but there was a yes to the World’s Fair, my first-ever visit to my dad’s hometown, New York. Although it’s pretty shocking to realize you can remember something that happened 50 years ago, so clearly, that subject is for another post.

Dad took me, and my older sister Kate and my younger sister Pati on this journey (to Oz). I knew instinctively that I wouldn’t stay in the place where we lived after just that one trip. But other than that, here are some of the great things I remember about New York in 1964 through the eyes of a 9-year-old:

Ice Delivery Truck – as in the block kind of ice, the kind that goes in an, you know, ice box, dropped on the ground in small business doorways in one enormous brick.
NYC’s distinctive odor! Something like a mixture of train oil and cat piss. I remembered that smell as a sense memory all these years, and still catch a whiff of it on certain streets in NYC, and nowhere else.
NY Harbor spray from the Staten Island Ferry.
The theater lights on Broadway. Richard Burton was on the marquee for his Hamlet.
Subways — and restrooms in the NYC subway — they seem to have disappeared, or I’m making it up and memory is not reliable.
All the people, the streets full of more people than I’d ever seen in my life, in all shapes, sizes and colors. All of them seemed dressed up to me.
Being in Manhattan was like always being downtown (my frame of reference was Milwaukee); there were no trees. Zero.
Carol Channing and Louis Armstrong singing “Hello, Dolly” on the radio, like once every half hour. And we sang along.
The Jingle-Jump: This weird toy that involved hopping and a ball tethered to your ankle. Google it. Was popular that summer.
My blond aunt (the only blonde in our family), her apartment, her 2 dogs and 3 cats and the 5 of us humans in her one bedroom apartment. The fact that she fed her dogs beef kidney, which she chopped up into little bite-sized pieces for them. They were poodles named Jacques and Guy.
Seeing the NYC skyline for the first time from the NJ Turnpike. It just, like, appeared. Again, like Oz. I was surprised the air was dirty.
The Unisphere at the Fair; also “It’s a Small World After All” at the Fair, the Futurama at the Fair.
Going to see the “Fall of the Roman Empire” flick, a 4-hour film starring glorious Sophia Loren and the hunky Stephen Boyd (OMG, an early crush, for sure) at an incredibly huge theater with grownups who were, again, all dressed up.
The road trip: Mostly remember the Chicago Skyway, the Appalachian mountains from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and my dad’s aged relatives in Youngstown, Ohio. They were probably 60 or something.
Finally, hoodlums in my aunt’s UWS neighborhood snapped the antenna off my dad’s VW microbus! Now that area (78th/Amsterdam) is much more fancy.

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Reasons Why I Rejoined Facebook

How embarrassing.

There I go with my anti-Facebook Manifesto, all righteous and everything, and now here I am telling you I’m back.

Go head and snicker. Surely, I deserve it.

Not that I still don’t think it’s generally a pretty bad idea, but here’s the deal kids:

basically everybody is on Facebook, and unfortunately, many of them are using the message protocol there as their de facto email. I don’t like it, but there you are.
I know many people and have lots of family in far away places. I’ve lived in San Francisco, Milwaukee, Palm Springs and have many friends on the East Coast as well. It’s unrealistic to keep up with them in person and this is really just the path of least resistance (especially for a lazy person).
I miss getting invited to things. Facebook has become the way people invite you to parties, events, personal meetings, etc. and I was missing that big love! Not that it can’t happen in other ways, but. . . see first point above.
Honestly, there were a couple of personal relationships that really blossomed in real time due to Facebook, and now those have waned. That’s the thing I liked most about this social media journey, and I want those people back in my life on a regular basis (and it wasn’t just virtual).
I do need the visibility. There’s still the remote possibility that people will look for staff or, heaven forbid, find out about books on Facebook. Again, like I said in my Manifesto, people don’t go to Facebook specifically to find books or writers, but the impression could be made. It could happen.

So I’ll rejoin, after all, it’s free. Still. Sort of. Though it’s not an equal trade at all. This time around, I’m going to try to:

“friend” or accept as friends only those people I know and like in real life.
avoid politics as much as humanly possible, though my fingers may get itchy.
I’ll just ignore the gross pictures of your food.
I’ll still share stuff, but hopefully this will be highly curated and mostly stuff from here (the blog) that I’d like to see distributed; I know Facebook will try to thwart that as much as they can, because they’d like to make money on wider distribution.
Will only share the barest minimum of digital assets — meaning photos, in particular. Naturally, I’m on Instagram as well, and Facebook owns that, so. . . any suggestions there?

OK, so now it’s Arnold 0, Zuckerberg 1. Don’t know how long I’ll be back, but stay tuned.

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Top Ten Things I Miss About Living in Palm Springs

Well, it’s Spring, and a young man’s fancy turns to . . . hot desert nights. Not that I’m, um, young or particularly fancy, but you know. . . This time of year it’s the height of the spring season out there, with the White Party and Spring Break and all the other stuff about to climax before the beastly summer heat settles in.

So I’ve been thinking about the desert recently and the things I miss. Here are ten, in no particular order:

The Hot Summer Nights. Seriously. As in seriously hot. I loved not ever having to worry about taking a sweater along (unless it was to a movie, then you needed one because they crank the AC up so much) cause you know the temperature isn’t going to go down lower than 86-88. And that’s at the “coldest” point just before dawn. And of course, perfect weather for walking around without a stitch on.
Koffi. I’m writing this blog right now in a coffeehouse in Studio City, also a great place, but there’s nothing quite like Koffi for atmosphere–not to mention the two fab locations, downtown and the south end. Different vibes and both very suited to writing. I’ve always found a spot to open up the laptop at either place. I also got a lot of writing done at (believe it or not) Starbucks at Sunny Dunes.
The Blessed Stillness. Is there another place on earth where it’s more blissfully quiet to sleep? Or is the quiet of a place like Palm Springs just the way it is if you don’t live in a huge noisy city? Whatever it is, I found it particularly conducive to a good night’s sleep. Those inky black nights.
The Camelot — movie house. Where they play unusual and art films in the middle of a low-population desert. I love that they continue to do this kind of programming there, even in the summer, when the houses are practically empty. It’s got to be losing money at that time of the year, so clearly it’s a labor of love. (This may be the real #1 on my list.)

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The Farmer’s Market (actually it’s right outside The Camelot)– Small enough to be manageable and the farmers were local, so that was really enjoyable to get to know where your food was grown (on the mountain behind you!). Only drawback to this Farmer Market is that it closes in the summer. Guess it gets too hot to grow anything!
Fresh & Easy — There’s lots of opinions about this store but it always worked for me. From their already cut up and washed fruit and veggies to the ready-to-eat entrees, and, of course, they had the bargain aisle where they’d sell totally good food a day past the expiration for basically peanuts. I hear since the chain itself went under, this location may have new owners. . .
Eddy’s Frozen Yogurt– Eddy has great froyo and toppings — if you’re in a healthy mood, there’s the fresh fruit, if not, there’s the chocolate and peanut butter cups and all the other bad sugary things. But the best part really is sitting and enjoying your frozen treat watching the comings and goings of the nearly naked men at Hunter’s next door. A favorite summer night excursion, for sure.
World Gym Palm Springs–at the corner of Sunrise and Vista Chino–one of the best gyms I’ve ever been member of. They have miles of equipment, it seems, and it never appears crowded there. Great friendly staff and instructors — I liked that exercise and yoga classes were included with the membership. Come here to find out what’s going on in Palm Springs. I found this an easy place to go to get fit – easy because it was so pleasant and non-stressful.
Mount San Jacinto–ah, the mountain. Avid hiker that I am, I loved going up the tram, especially during the horrendously hot summer days, and spending the day up on top of the mountain hiking in the magnificent forests that are up there. The last time I was there during the summer I got a pass for $60 – a great value if you plan on going up on the mountain even just a few times during the summer months.
Where Everybody Knows Your Name — which seems to be every restaurant, every bar, every store. I guess I liked this aspect of small town living — that when you go out, half the people in any one establishment are people you know. I thought that was a lot of fun. Not like that at all in the big city, where anonymity seems to rule. Sometimes that’s nice, sometimes it’s just sad.