Category Archives: Gay Mid-Life: Musings

Ten Things to Do When Alone on Thanksgiving!

C. Foxy Belle

As a single man, I’ve on occasion found myself alone on holidays, most notably the end of the year rituals of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In our culture, these tend to be over-marketed as nuclear family-centric events, so it takes a little creativity when one is on one’s own, and can’t be with loved ones/family because of distance or whatever reason. The culture will do its level best to try and make you feel miserable, because all the images you see will be of things you’re not doing. You are unloved and, you’re a loser! So it takes some fortitude to prevail – yet I know you will – because you are a strong, independent person.

Here are some tips, from my own experience or from others who’ve shared over the years:

Feast, but with family of choice. Takes preplanning – you probably have some idea that other friends in your orbit might be solo come that day, too – so make plans to spend the day together. Dinner optional.
Volunteer – there’s always gonna be someone more miserable than you, and it’s a good thing to do, regardless. Homeless shelters and other organizations often have Thanksgiving Dinners where they need volunteers – perhaps that’s you.
Day Trips – it’s great day to go local, ‘cause nobody else is doing it, but the trains and buses are still operating. Beaches, parks, trails – mostly deserted.
Movies – Go early and often. Studios time their best hopes for the year-end holiday and awards-qualifying season – so there’s always fresh and anticipated fare the week of Thanksgiving.

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Gym – it’s usually open for a few hours, again when a lot of people are gorging themselves on turkey and football. You might have the place to yourself, or to yourself and that like-minded person who is also alone on Thanksgiving (and wants some company . . .)
Home Improvement Projects – maybe not what you want to do on your day off, but I once wallpapered the kitchen on Christmas Day.
Yoga/Spiritual Practice – meditation, yoga (podcast if there are no classes!), your church. Good to give thanks, after all, that’s what it’s for. Speaking of which:
Gratitude List – make a list of all the things you’re grateful for, and realize what a wonderful life you are living, even if you happen to be alone this one Thanksgiving Day.
Diner Delight – a lot of restaurants are closed, but a lot are open, serving up that turkey a zillion different ways. Your servers at such places probably wish they were home with their loved ones. So patronize them, and tip well for all the service they give you all year long. That glow you leave with won’t be heartburn!
Self-indulgence: It’s a day off, right? So pamper yourself – have your very own little day spa, bubbly bath at home with candles, lotions, sleep/nap, self-loving of the intimate variety (yeah, masturbation, boys and girls! That’s right!) chocolates, flavored expensive coffees or drinks (if you do that). Find out what the most expensive coffee drink is at the coffee shop of your choice, and order it. And tip the barista twice that for all they for you all year.

Happy Thanksgiving, whatever it is you’re doing!

Fifty Years Ago Today

— Underneath the chilly gray November sky
We can make believe that Kennedy is still alive and
Were shooting for the moon and smiling Jackie’s driving by

– lyrics from Andy Prieboy’s “Tomorrow, Wendy”

I can only imagine that Andy Prieboy (who is the same age as I am) lived somewhere in the Midwest, somewhere in the regional vicinity of Milwaukee, because November 22, 1963 was indeed chilly and gray, and also, at least where we were, raining.

It was a day of tears, that’s for sure.

The blogger in 1963.

I was in third grade at St. Sebastian Catholic School on Milwaukee’s west side, on Washington Boulevard. We lived just a couple of blocks away from the church and its nearly overcrowded, baby-boom elementary school. Back then, of course, our moms — everybody’s mom, basically — was a homemaker so most (though not all) of the kids went home for lunch.

St. Sebastian

I remember coming back late that day — which was really odd, because I was the Best Little Boy in the World, and certainly, never late for school. We were due back at 12:45 p.m. and I so remember looking up at that tower and realizing I was late. It must’ve been because the bells were going off, as they did every quarter hour. For years I remembered looking up at a clock on that day, but as you can plainly see in the photo, there is no clock on that bell tower. So we realize memory is an unreliable narrator. It was, after all, 50 years ago.

How is it possible I can remember things that happened 50 years ago?

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I remember hearing later on that the president had been shot in Dallas, also in the Central Time Zone, about 12:30, and I figured I was just finishing my lunch or putting on my coat or something like that (like I said earlier, it was raining/drizzling there, and it was cold).

In the third grade class I was in, we had a nun teacher in the morning and a lay teacher in the afternoon (the morning nun was ancient; I don’t think she could have gotten through an entire day — and in fact, she died later that school year!)

What they did in those pre-internet/pre-ubiquitous TV days was to put the radio on the school PA system. But it was horrible quality – you couldn’t understand much of anything they said. Static and yelling. I do remember some of the kids crying – the girls of course, because the boys don’t cry. Soon the decision was made to herd the entire school into the church for a prayer for the President, and then they let us go home, early. (November 22 was a Friday that year, as it is again in 2013.)

My parents were both home, on the couch in front of our little black and white TV. It was really odd to see my father home in the middle of the afternoon. Both he and Mom were crying, which was much more disturbing to me. I believe that’s the only time I’d ever (to this day) seen them both in tears at once.

We spent the next few days watching all the horrible events of that weekend unfold in front of the TV. I had a new baby brother, David, born just a couple of weeks before, so I remember taking my turn holding him on my lap. Without reservation, the assassination of President Kennedy was the most profound event to ever happen in my young life.

If the “60s” really ended the day Saigon fell (which was actually in 1975), then perhaps the “60s” really began that day in Dallas. Nothing was ever quite the same after that.

Actually, I Don’t Want or Need to be CrossFit

and neither do you!

Or, as Susan Powter used to say: Stop the Insanity!

I guess nothing says “maturing” so well as just looking incredulously at new fitness crazes that come, then invariably go.

But I’m indulgent, usually. The key word being usually. In a former life (like, the late 1990s) I was a certified fitness trainer and had a small side business as a personal trainer in Los Angeles. I stopped doing that at the point where I discovered that, while I really liked keeping myself fit and healthy, I had less interest in counting your sit-ups or trying to convince you to eat more apples.

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However, I continue to be greatly influenced by my training to be in that business, however briefly, and have long been an enthusiastic supporter of lifetime fitness activities – basically, exercises/activities you convince large numbers of people to do that they will actually ENJOY and make part of their lives for like, you know, FOREVER.

CrossFit is not one of these activities. A good number of the exercises I’ve seen in the list of CrossFit workouts of the day (WODs) are things contraindicated for many people, perhaps even most people other than the exceptionally fit and young. Among these are what they call burpees (which we learned as squat thrusts in high school), handstand pushups, L-sits, muscle-ups, pull-ups (which I’ve seen done totally incorrectly in the CrossFit videos, using momentum to complete the movement, a total cheat as this exercise is supposed to strengthen the back muscles that actually pull you up), deadlifts, and kettlebell swings. Any and all of these exercises could result in injury – mainly to the back, but also to shoulders and even to abs. And then there’s that awful heavy metal music they do their routines to. . . gag me.

Shouldn’t people do this if they want? Well, sure, of course! If you want to do it, go ahead, knock yourself out. Perhaps literally. But my point is that it’s not something you’re going to be able to do for very long, consistently. This is just not what the body is designed to do and sooner or later it will rebel. I’m also deeply skeptical at the level of fitness you’d acquire by doing these odd exercises, and how that would benefit you.

So what does Smartypants suggest? Get ready, cause it’s really boring, but really good for you and you can do these things forever: walking – what your body is absolutely designed and evolved to do – and it’s free; dancing – fun, think faster walking, usually involving other people, perhaps in very close proximity; and bicycling – perhaps the most efficient form of personal transportation every devised, a great aerobic and strength workout that’s also easy on the joints and, once you buy the bike, cheap. I’d also include yoga in this list, as a yoga practice can be soft or challenging, endlessly adaptable to age, body type, level of energy, etc.

LGBT and the Russian Human Rights Abuses

Gay Russian protestors under assault.

Oh what to do, what to say about this? Something, for sure. I couldn’t just not talk about it, even though it’s one of those things, not so different from climate change in that regard, where the individual feels that there’s probably little they can do on their own to mitigate or stop this horror.

I mean, I can’t just pop over to Moscow or St. Petersburg and grab a bunch of LGBTs and bring them home with me.

Yet this reminds me so much of what I’ve read about what happened in Germany in the 1930s with the Jews (and later gays, and gypsies, and . . .) — first laws restricting, ever increasing in scope, until they were legally marginalized as a group and then of course we know what happened after that. Russia is going through the same initial motions with the LGBT community there, outlawing any positive speech about LGBT under the guise of protecting children. (see this link for specific information about the laws in Russia)

What is clear to me is that we cannot stand by and not say or do anything. If not us, who? If not now, when?

There’s lots of things/ways to protest, on the table, that people and organizations and governments are doing. Let’s look at them, let’s see what makes sense for us in both groups and as individuals.

Boycott Vodka — a lot of bars and towns are boycotting vodka purchases and drawing attention to this by doing “public pours” down storm drains, etc. My take: great as an attention-draw-er, as publicity stunt without much practical impact — as I understand the vodka industry is not Russia-based. Still, it’s a cultural touchstone and this is a way to draw attention to the matter.
Boycott Olympics in Sochi – the Winter Olympics in February, 2014, will be held in Sochi, a city on the Black Sea in southern Russia. The various proposals are to boycott nationally – as in, not send a team (which won’t happen, at least from the U.S.) or to pressure the IOC to move the Olympics to a city where they’d recently been held, such as Vancouver. I honestly don’t know how effective this would be. It’s probably too late to make it happen now regardless. What lasting effects did the western boycott of the Moscow 1980 Olympics and their corresponding get-you-back boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 have? I’m not sure either was a factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a massive economic meltdown five years later. Russian LGBT have purportedly said this is NOT a good idea, they would like the world to come to Sochi to keep the spotlight on the human rights abuses of the home country.

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Ten Reasons Older Adult Gay Men Like Younger Adult Gay Men

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

For this week, the 10 reasons from the point of view of the older guy in the intergenerational pairing. *

Again, these are reasons I’ve come up with myself from my own experience or anecdotally from things I’ve observed.

So here we go, here are some possible reasons an older guy might seek out a younger adult guy:

He’s adorably beautiful: well, duh. The cynics among you will say that this is reasons 2 through 10, as well. Got to admit there is something about that dewy fresh flesh that springs back when you touch it.
He’s agreeable: from postponing dinner till nine to having a Diet Pepsi when he really prefers a Diet Coke (cause it’s all you’ve got) younger men can be more easy going. There’s that shrug: whatever.
He’s enthusiastic: younger guys will often (if not always) want to do something with a consuming passion! They don’t merely say yes; they’re all in.
He’s GGG (good, giving, game) – this comes from Dan Savage and his “Savage Love” sex advice program — he strives to be good in bed, to be giving to his partner, and game to try out something which may not be #1 on his own list (see enthusiastic, above).

He’s respectful: By the very nature of finding himself with you, he’s respectful of all the gifts an older person can give to an individual and to society; it used to be that everyone was raised to be that way, these days, not so much.
He’s trying to please: I find that this urge to please the older person is almost always part of the dynamic, often unexpected. But I’m not complaining.
He’s teachable/nurturable: Oscar Wilde famously said, “I’m not young enough to know everything.” But all twentysomethings are not that way, and often I’ve found younger men wanting to learn things that life experience has already taught someone older. (I was not this way, however, I was young enough to know absolutely everything! Now I’m trying to unlearn it all.)
He’s usually more interested in the larger cultural landscape: what I mean is that he often will have interests beyond the narrow diversions of his own particular generation. It may come as a keen interest in winemaking, or opera, or deep sea diving.
He’s accommodating: He knows he can’t have everything his own way so is more likely to compromise and enjoy the differences between the generations, and he’s authentically interested in learning about those differences.
Finally, he’s trusting, he’s expecting that level of integrity from you because you’re an older, hopefully wiser, person. In our cynical times, that’s a refreshing quality.

Just for the record, I’ll date someone of any (adult) age. It’s always an individual attraction thing for me, and there’s no specific type I’m looking for. Do you (either younger or older) date out of your own generation?

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Ten Reasons Younger Adult Gay Men Like Older Adult Gay Men

yes, of course I’m kidding.

From the intergenerational dating realms. . . *

It’s no secret among friends and acquaintances that I’ve often dated men younger than me, sometimes, so much younger (20s, 30s) that I could easily be my adult counterpart’s parent.

The usual response I get from gay men my own age to this is positive; they understand the attraction from my point of view, and many have been in similar situations. Female friends can be, well, less understanding, and in my experience, it doesn’t matter if they’re gay or straight women – they often just don’t understand it (but what do you talk about???)

The short answer to that is, of course, we talk about everything. But wait, what about the younger man? It’s easy to see why an older person would be attracted to younger, in fact, our entire society is based on youth worship! But what about the younger guy? What, in heaven’s name, does he see in the older fellow?

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Here’s ten reasons, totally anecdotal, taken from my own life or from what I’ve observed over the years:

Experience: from the bedroom to the boardroom, older guys usually, though not always, have a better sense of what’s going on. And will be happy to share it with someone younger/not in the know.
Decisiveness: After a certain age, a man usually knows what he wants or doesn’t want and isn’t afraid to vocalize that. Maybe it’s because we realize we don’t have all the time in the world and don’t want to waste it being uncertain.
Mature physicality: I’m constantly amazed that there’s so many younger men who are physically interested in a more mature body, whether it be for the hair, the salt & pepper color, a belly, those distinguishing lines in the face — whatever it may be, there are younger guys who specifically look for those traits.
Money: Let’s face it, some kids are gold diggers. Some older people are, too! An older guy is more likely to be more settled, and a mature relationship with finances can be an anchor during those restless days of youth. In my case, I always tell them I’m a sugar-free daddy.
Mentorship: A lot of young men are at a loss in terms of job and educational advice. They’re not getting it from home and they’re not getting it from the culture. Many of them may have run up against a homophobic brick wall and have no idea how to approach their future. Older gay men have already been through this and can provide some guidance and perspective.

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Kinks: OK, back to sex and not only that, but an entire way of looking at things. Lots of younger guys find they like things on a more, um, wild side. Older men are more likely to have worked through whatever issues – homophobic, shame-based, whatever – surround some kinky activities, and again, are happy to share experience and knowledge with someone younger.
Direction: Some young people honestly don’t know what to do and are happier when someone puts some structure into an otherwise scattershot agenda. Contrary to conventional thinking, total freedom is not necessarily always liberating.
Home: An older guy is more likely to have a home that he owns or has rented for a long time, along with some of the creature comforts and sense of place that come with that: patio furniture, TVs that work, matching dishes, more than one set of sheets, etc. Not everybody wants to live like a grad student forever.

History: Older men have the perspective of history from their own lives as well as (most of the time) a knowledge of the gay community and the struggles we’ve gone through from Anita Bryant to AIDS to D.A.D.T. and marriage equality (and a zillion things in-between). This kind of oral history or learned experience is priceless for someone open to learning about it. Finally:
Daddiness: That quality of protecting and being protected, of nurturing and being nurtured, that feeling that everything’s going to be all right as long as he’s around. That’s a powerful bond wherever it occurs — and has less to do with age than the personalities of the individuals involved.

I’m sure there are other reasons I’ve missed. What would you add?

For both this and the companion post, I’m referring to generations of adult men (over 18) only.

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Other New York: The 9/11 Memorial, The New WTC Building, and Zuccotti Park

The new World Trade Center tower

9/11 Memorial South Tower

9/11 Memorial, North Tower

David Angell – who I’d met

Mark Bingham, one of the SF heroes of Flight 93

and Zuccotti Park, a sleeping giant

Not that there was any theme to my recent trip to NY than to help with family matters — but I did want to see the 9/11 Memorial.

It’s free, you need to get a timed reservation which cost $2 for processing online; however, the morning I went (Sunday at about 11 a.m.) they were letting people without reservations in and I don’t think there was any wait for it.

As you can see in the pictures, the memorial pools are stunning. It’s impossible to see the bottom of the drain, so to speak, from the viewing areas around the perimeters of the fallen towers’ footprints. So for all you know, they go down to the center of the earth.

Even though there are signs everywhere reminding folks that this is a place where a mass murder happened, there were the usual groups of tourists posing for photos with the dramatic backdrop. Can’t say I blame them, really, as the very act of showing up serves to remember that day.

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I took pictures of a couple of names: David Angell, who was a writer/producer on TV shows such as “Cheers” and “Wings,” I had met and in fact interviewed when we both worked on the Paramount lot. He and his wife were passengers in one of the planes that day.

Mark Bingham was a gay man from San Francisco who is thought to be one of the people on Flight 93 who fought the terrorists back. He was well-known in the community, and was involved with the gay rugby team. The night of September 11, a community shrine went up for him (as well as for the other 9/11 victims) at the corner of 18th and Castro in San Francisco.

There’s the new WTC, now topped off and looming over Manhattan, an enormous structure. Then finally, I took a photo of Zuccotti Park, just blocks away. Now cleared of Occupy Wall Street, you’d never even know they were there. I can’t help but feel this is a sleeping giant we’ll be hearing a lot more from in the next few years – and that’s a very good thing.

Aging People With H.I.V. Struggle to Live – New York Times

Even though this New York Times story was published a couple of months ago now, I thought it was important and wanted to highlight and link to it.

As older people become invisible to so much of our youth-obsessed society, long-term HIV survivors face a special stigma. I think there’s some truth to the idea that this is something we’d rather not talk about, thank you very much, let’s just close that door and forget about it, or forget about it as much as we can.

And why is that — because these men, these women, remind us of that time we still shudder at the memory of. Reminding us of the time and of the people, the thousands we’ve lost, a reminder every time we look into an older face and remember what we were like in our 20s, 30s . . . The pain and the fear come back. That fear.

So AIDS is as treatable as diabetes — is that true, or are we fooling ourselves? Sometimes the wonder drugs stop working — does that happen with diabetes, too? Maybe it does. I still hear about mysterious complications long HIV-positive folks have with their health, which may or may not be related to the treatments themselves. And the longer these people do live, the more uncharted the territory, right?

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Still we have the almost institutionalized fundraisers in the gay community, the “AIDS emergency” — hmm, maybe we need to fund prevention more. Maybe we need to fund a vaccine. Yet all these things are being done, still. Still people get infected, now it’s mostly those too young to remember the fear.

Depression and isolation, often found with otherwise healthy people who are aging, is also part of this picture. One quote from the story stuck out at me: “as older gay men with H.I.V., they feel shut out from AIDS service organizations geared to younger or newly infected men, and from bars where they once felt at home.” That is true. And it’s not just older men who have HIV who are shut out — that ageism is pervasive.

Consumerist Pride

Ummm, gag me.

Ok, so back on the soapbox. . . You may have seen my earlier posts about Bradley Manning getting thrown under the bus by SF Pride and criticizing gay design house Andrew Christian for being body Nazis in an otherwise sexy promo video.

But still, something doesn’t seem quite right about this link, this “Shopping Party” to kick off Gay Pride. To me, this slides right back into that slippery slope where we commodify everything, as if it’s an occasion to support consumerism, in this case fracking Macy’s and the clothing industry.

The planners of such events try to make it a win-win for everyone (I know this since I used to do some of this kind of thing for a living), in this case, there’s a suggested donation of $20 for a charity that provides LGBT kids with scholarships. That part’s fine. (Although it doesn’t say that a donation of some amount is a requirement for entry.)

But why do we need to hold a Gay Pride kickoff in a freakin’ department store? Where attendees will have the chance to see the “hottest models in town” and purchase the clothes of their dreams?

I think the righteous drag queens of Stonewall and those early Pride marchers would probably vomit just a little at this attempt to conflate a human rights movement with entrenched corporate interest, such as Macy’s.

Let’s remember what it is that we remember with Pride celebrations: it was a REVOLT against police power, specifically, the NYPD’s raiding of gay bars on a routine basis. The citizens targeted in these raids finally had enough and didn’t behave. The legacy we should celebrate is the ability to speak truth to power and to claim a right as full citizens under the laws of this country and not to be harassed.

This is what we should be remembering with Pride. Not that we got some fabulous shirt we saw on a hot model at Beverly Center Macy’s.

Does this bug you, too? Or am I crabby and off base here?

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Has Pride Jumped the Shark?

Bradley Manning, c by Semino1e

or did that happen long ago? Or maybe it’s just been insidious over the years, like the proverbial slow cooking frog in the pot.

We’ve gone from being (mostly) afraid to talk about who we are to having the right to marry and the right to serve our country in the armed forces (and what could possibly be more boring and traditional than these two things?*).

The dark and dangerous area of town where the gay bars (mostly) used to be where I grew up is now a highly desired, yuppie loft paradise. (that’s Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

In recent years, my jaw has dropped further and further to the pavement with the appearance of professional street vendors, the type of guys who come to any public event in Los Angeles, with their carefully and artfully arranged carts of rainbow paraphernalia, no doubt all made in China or another far-away, lower-wage country.

Buy some Pride for yourself! Wear something with a rainbow on it, better yet, several rainbows! I was even given a rainbow Mardi Gras beads at a GLBT lit conference I was recently at. And we’re supposed to be the fashion trendsetters?

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Really?? I guess it’s the price of success, when you become, in so many ways, the status quo. I know we keep this up to show kids from Kansas and Oklahoma and Alabama and all the rest of the officially hateful places that there is an alternative, there is tolerance and acceptance and there is a place for them. And truly, I do remember, it wasn’t always like this.
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So it’s even weirder what happened in San Francisco — remember, this is the City Harvey Milk famously invited queer youth to come to if they wanted to be free — when they threw Bradley Manning under the bus.

I’m not sure if Bradley Manning is a hero or not. He very well may be. But we do know he is a gay man who had the guts to challenge power with huge, unimaginable consequences for himself for the rest of his life. Shining a light on something he felt was deeply wrong and immoral. Since his arrest, he’s been held in solitary. He’s been interrogated. I’m not sure how “enhanced” this was.

Yet he seems to have been met mostly with silence by the official gay community. Cause it might embarrass the somewhat cozy relationship we have with the current administration, or maybe it’s just embarrassing now that we have equality in this area of the military, this gay guy gives our secrets to Wikileaks for the world to know. Well, you knew that would happen once you let those queers in.

The thing of it is, the Gay Pride Movement was founded on the coattails of the civil rights, anti-war, and women’s rights movements of the 1960s, all which challenged the status quo and our definitions of what was right and what was wrong.

That we can’t even come to include Bradley Manning in our embrace of the issues really makes me wonder about the health of Gay Pride as a political force. It’s almost like, “don’t rock the boat, we’re this close guys” type of a thing.

But at what price?

(* by saying this, I’m not discounting that both marriage and the military have advantages, often huge ones, for those who participate in them. I believe everyone should have the right to marry or be in the military should they so choose. What I mean is that these two institutions have failed for many, many people over long periods of time and I question the push to assimilate in this direction, rather than being a beacon of hope and new direction for humanity, which is traditionally a gay role. )