Category Archives: Gay Mid-Life: Musings

WeHo 30th Anniversary Readings, Part 2

From the West Hollywood 30th Anniversary Celebration in Plummer Park June 27, 2015: Memoirs and readings at Fiesta Hall. Some pictures for you! I wrote about my first birthday alone in L.A./West Hollywood. Bittersweet, that’s what it was. Things did get better. But not for a long time.

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And Now, the Astonishing Actual History Of The Gay Rights Movement, or Look Ma, I’m Equal

photo: AARP

photo: AARP

Look Ma, I’m equal today! Today, I have the same marriage rights as my 7 straight siblings. For my first 60 years, I have been denied those rights. This is a marvelous day, which will only increase in profundity as time wears on.

I certainly don’t always agree with the writer Andrew Sullivan but I did like his great perspective on our shared gay history, and this seems like an appropriate occasion to link to it and bring it back out.

It is interesting, what he says in the piece about the average 22 year old gay male today just assuming that his right to get married to another man is a given.

Case in point: Facebook! On Facebook, whatever we might think of it, it allows the generations to mix in a way that was previously largely impossible. I have an acquaintance, a musician/writer type, who is of that age group, 20s, Millennials, whatever you want to call them. I call it young and cute, in his case.

Anyway, this guy got engaged (!!) to another young man, equally as adorable, about his age. Since that announcement, I’ve been following their various travels and insanely cute and wonderful pictures as they go about planning their wedding and reception and all that.

To a gay man of my age and generation, (OK, I was 60 earlier in 2015) this is quite astonishing. I never thought we’d see same sex marriage in my lifetime; this wasn’t even something I thought about much at all. But I’m really happy that others did think of it, and thought big. Look where we are, look where we’ve come. There is so much more to do; just because there’s now a judicial decision making marriage equality the law of all 50 states doesn’t mean that people will change how they feel inside. The work goes on. And on. Like it always has.

And — even better, I got an engagement announcement from a gay couple who are friends of mine yesterday. Yes, this was via Facebook. They’re not quite Millennials; they’re older, but still I have to say I loved seeing the relative pomp and circumstance of a social media announcement like this. How wonderful it is for them to be able to share their love with the world this way.

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WeHo 30th Anniversary Celebration and Events – June 27

Hey kids,

I’m part of this Saturday June 27 event in a small way:

http://www.weho.org/Home/Components/Calendar/Event/8252/15

Nothing says WeHo like spandex and an old California friar.

Nothing says WeHo like spandex and an old California friar.

I have a WeHo memory snippet that’s going to be hanging on the wall at this event. It’s from my birthday in 1981. I’ll take pictures and follow up by posting them.

Here’s the Facebook event from Hank Henderson:

David LeBarron and I would like to thank all of you for sending us your stories about West Hollywood.  Together, your writings create a wonderfully diverse collection of passionate, funny, wistful, elegiac, sly, and fearless entries into the ever growing canon of literary Queer history.  Congratulations to all of you.

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Your stories have been printed poster-sized and framed in custom frames created by artist Bill Cole.  Together they will hang as an installation in the courtyard of Fiesta Hall in Plummer Park through the entire day of ‘West Hollywood: This Is Your Life!’ June 27th.
The courtyard opens at 3:30pm.  The first performance at Fiesta Hall will be a homo-centric sponsored reading at 4pm (hint).  Shows continue through the afternoon & evening.  David & I hope you are able to come to see the installation and stay for part or all of the performances.  It is a free event.
The link to the event is here:
Please feel free to post comments on the event page & link to it in Facebook posts.

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The Gay Pride Parade Day Post 2015

Do you detect a bit of weariness in my title? I was going to add the word “obligatory,” but decided against it. I realized I hadn’t been to the parade in a couple of years, not since 2013, so I went to it this year.

It’s become even more corporate if that’s possible — many contingents representing companies who want gay dollars and want to show their “gay” loyalties or whatever — and I suppose that’s good. This was not always the case, not even close.

But then I do think of how evil most of these companies are, in other ways: Bank of America, Disney, Comcast, Southern California Edison – almost like a rogues gallery of evil bastards: Disney, shipping jobs out of country; BofA, complicit in the bankster and mortgage meltdown of 2008; Comcast, everybody’s most favorite gouging cable/internet company. So I’m not so sure about all of that.

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Caveat: I did miss about the first 45 minutes of so of the parade, so perhaps all the politically correct floats, etc., went by before that. So, they used to ignore us or work actively against us, now they just want our money. I guess that’s progress.

But seriously, I still go because we can. Because we’re lucky enough to live in a place that has this, whatever its myriad faults may be. We can work on those. We’re not being thrown in jail or thrown off buildings because of who we love. We’ve come a very long way in a very short time, and I know I can’t let my (occasional) curmudgeon-leaning self throw cold water on all this wonder.

So Happy Pride, everyone! And here are the pix. I tried to get some beefcake for you, results are mixed.

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Stuart Timmons’ City of West Hollywood LGBTQ History Mobile Tour

Some snaps from the tour with some of the fabulous mobile tour guides! Hugely fun and informative afternoon and a great way to kick off Gay Pride Week 2015 in L.A.

What was this? Stuart Timmons and Jason Jenn put together a mobile tour of various LGBTQ historic sites in WeHo. This includes a free downloadable map for those who want to do the tour on their own, but I actually went to the event on Saturday (June 6, 2015) and had these (and other) tour guides to tell me the stories and guide me on my way.

Stuart Timmons is the acclaimed historian and author of “The Trouble with Harry Hay” and co-author of “Gay L.A.” – a hugely informative work on the LGBTQ history of our town, if I do say so myself (I did read it, the whole thing).

This tour was/is presented as part of the City of West Hollywood’s One City One Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival, which this year coincides with the 30th Anniversary of Cityhood for West Hollywood. These kinds of things are tremendous and in short supply–and necessary, because the young ones coming up don’t know our history and how will they ever find out unless we tell them? So congratulations to Stuart and Jason for getting this up and running, and for the City of West Hollywood for realizing its importance.

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homo-centric May 2015: the photo

photo

And here’s the official post-reading photo from the May 2015 homo-centric readings at Stories Books & Cafe in Echo Park, Los Angeles.

From left, Hank Henderson, creator/producer of homo-centric, Jim Arnold, Albert Serna Jr., George Snyder.

I read from my upcoming book “Kept.” Albert read his wonderful poetry. George read from his great novel (I read it. I loved it!) “Into Deeper Water.”

homo-centric happens every third Thursday at Stories, starting at 7:30. Hope to see you at future readings!

photo: Rich Yap

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What I Learned About Leaving the Workforce Early – Some Thoughts On That

thank you CNN

thank you CNN

I’ve realized lately that I’ve read an incredible amount about early retirement, reinvention, midlife change, and related topics to probably  write a book on the subject. OK, maybe not enough for a book, but certainly enough for a blog post.

So I write this in service of anyone reading who may be contemplating these issues and the difficult decisions they often entail.

First of all, once you leave a certain level of job early, you can’t go back. It’s like going home again, you can go to the physical place, but you can’t ever recapture the feeling you think you remember. I find it’s the same kind of thing with the working world. You’ve moved on; they’ve moved on and everything is different. It’s an important choice to leave, and not one to take lightly.

I left a high paying high esteem high stress corporate type job (public relations work) in the early aughts for more time to devote to writing and filmmaking and other creative pursuits; while having that time has been great, I didn’t truly suss out the financials, whether it be self-employment or part time work or just living on savings.

While it is possible I could survive on savings, living a very frugal existence (which I have done for some of the time since I left this aforementioned job), I’m the type to get nervous at only seeing spending with no income coming in at all. So I wanted to do something, just not what I was doing before which was overwhelming (this I realized after I survived a bout of cancer while at that job).

So one of the dirty truths I’ve learned is that nobody will hire you in the same industry you used to work in at a lower level job. You can only be hired again at the same level you were at or higher. The idea that someone with a lot of experience might want a lower pressure job just for the sake of paying the bills does not really compute with the HR types or the always upwardly -driven. And it’s even more that you “marry” your job these days than it was when I left – -management employees are tethered to the company 24/7 by all manner of digital handcuffs. So, no thanks.

So if you don’t want to get back on that rat race treadmill, new opportunities will always pay less. Sometimes really a lot less. So this it another thing I’d think long and hard about: do you really need or want to leave that job so much that you’re willing to give up the salary and the perks that come with it? You’re saying “of course I do, I just have to escape it, it’s hell.” Hell is also having absurd health care costs when you have just very basic insurance; no paid holidays or vacations, no fun gadgets the corporate budget pays for, certainly no paid-for travel, food or even coffee!

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I have been greatly blessed in my life; we’re not talking about a hell of no roof over my head or no food on the table, so I’m really not complaining so much as managing expectations. But can someone tell me whatever happened to that idea of job-sharing – for instance, you “share” the job, say, of PR Director with another person; perhaps they work mornings and you work afternoons, or alternate days. You’d think in PR, which as a industry has a ton of female executives, there’d be mothers who’d want that kind of arrangement. But it seems it never took off. One person I asked told me it was around the idea of benefits, as in, who gets the healthcare. Just one more reason for national single payer, Medicare for everyone, if you ask me.

Another thing I’d mention is that age discrimination is rampant and horrible and really hard to pin down. After my last full-time job layoff at the end of 2009, I got crickets response to my resume, with its 30 years of PR experience and several more years of publishing experience. Gurus I talked to encouraged me to leave off the year of my college graduation (1980 – and that was 3 years later than if I’d gone directly after high school) but I figured when they called me in for the interview they’d figure out my age anyway. Except – there haven’t been any interviews! I’ve not been called into any interviews for full time communications jobs in the last five years. Depressing, sure. You become, in a sense, unmanageable (and I understand this now) which derives from many things – experience, age, temperament, your accumulated wisdom, etc.

So one of the gurus told me: “I think consulting is the way you should go.”

Truly, she was correct. And actually, there wasn’t much alternative. So I have become a B2B writing consultant. But this guru also said: “And then you must commit to it 3000 percent!” She was right about that, too. Passion is key if you’re going to become successfully self-employed. Not everyone is cut out for this. For most of us, clients don’t grow on trees. You need to do major marketing work to have a chance to bring in the work — so again, make sure this is something you really want to do.

Some other thoughts on early retirement/involuntary retirement: If you retire at, say, 55, that’s maybe 30 years in retirement. That’s a long time, a really long time! You really need to think long and hard about what you’re going to do with all that time. Lying around the pool or catching up on TV series is OK for a month or so, but beyond that I think most people need a purpose. In fact, I’d say you shouldn’t retire even at a traditional retirement age of 65 or 66 unless you have a plan for what you’re going to do with all that time.

I used to look down on people who were unemployed or said they couldn’t find a job, thinking they were probably doing it wrong or just plain lazy. Then it happened to me. Funny how that works, eh?

I have more pearls I hope to share in future posts.

 

 

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Clicking Through Torsos: Is this the Death of Romance?

So, a rant on this — or something along those lines. Who among you has not gotten frustrated and bored with the endless pages of gay dating/hookup apps and their lovely torso photographs? All of which look remarkably alike — they’re gay torsos, after all, so they look worked out and toned, even perhaps manscaped. Often, a buff or not-so-buff torso will even initiate a conversation or reply to a question you’ve asked it.

It’s enough to make a reasonably honest person want to pitch his smartphone off the nearest bridge.

The devolution of male/male contact from highly intricate interpersonal pairings in real time, to the impersonal meat market apps we have today, has had its own evolution – from the BBS-es I remember from the late 1980s to America Online chat rooms to IRC in the 90s and now, in the last several years, to smartphone apps such as Scruff and Grindr. Finally, after all of that, is this what we’ve become to each other, a clickable collection of torsos, penises and butts? Where are the faces? Where is the romance? You’re telling me this is progress?

I can’t believe that.

Here’s Ten Quick Suggestions on rekindling a sense of romance in our smart phone app crazy-crazy world:

  1. Dress up. Sure, probably you’re reading this at home in front of your laptop wearing your underwear and a dirty t-shirt. Maybe you go about your day – not a work day, but a free day, a day off – and dress up to look your best. Would that make you feel romantic? Works with me, and people notice. (Or maybe try a green carnation in your buttonhole, like they used to do to recognize team members.)
  2. Go out. Not as in coming out, though you should already be — but get out of the house and meet live humans. So many of “our” places have gone away because people don’t go out anymore – and why bother when you can order a torso in? So:
  3. Rediscover our gay legacy. The truth is that men were meeting each other, hooking-up and falling in love for eons before the Internet and smart phones. We’d meet in our bars, at the public baths, which became bathhouses, or at bookstores, cruisy plazas and streets where you’d “just know” to go (or some kind person would tell you). So, for those places:
  4. There’s the fine art of cruising men. In public. This is different from stalking a torso on a phone screen. I think this is becoming a lost art! There are books out there, however. There’s even a video called “The Art of Cruising Men,” while mostly tongue-in-cheek, has lots of accurate and helpful tips for meeting that man of your dreams or even just the man of the hour.
  5. Learn seduction. Related to but slightly different from cruising, as this is more intentional and has perhaps a longer timeframe to work itself out. This is all about interpersonal relations, and shouldn’t we all aspire to better at those, no matter where we start from? We’ve come to rely on technologies like texting for so much of our communications we don’t remember how to have a real conversation.
  6. Resolve to be more direct. If you are with a guy and what you really want is to have sex with him, ask directly, as in, “I would like to have sex with you.” Guys will love you for it, and you’ll get some yeses. There’s really nothing quite as sexy as confidence.
  7. The first runner-up is a winner. Don’t demand perfection, cause you know you’re never going to get it. Remember that nice, pretty good looking guy who said hello to you as you were waiting on Mr. Perfect standing there across the room? Don’t wait too long — that nice non-perfect guy is the one who is going to make you happy.
  8. Don’t be predictable – try surprising some guy you have a crush on in a really great but not necessarily sexy way. Then couple that with something you learned in Seduction 101as a followup.
  9. Don’t overlook your friends and acquaintances. We have this advantage over straight people in that our gay friends and buddies could possibly be more to us that we ever thought possible.
  10. Finally, realize that we as gay men didn’t spend decades fighting for our rights, then another few decades fighting for our lives to live faceless and safe behind a checkerboard on a little screen. There is a community out there we made for ourselves. It’s up to us to keep it.

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Artist Bruce LaBruce Thinks Gays Should Stop Selling Their Souls

Bruce LaBruce

Bruce LaBruce

I really liked this VICE interview with Bruce LaBruce. Why? It’s the old school, uncompromising vision that’s so true to what he’s all about.

It’s crystal clear he understands who he is, what he’s interested in doing/exploring. Maybe because he’s not American (he’s from Canada). He’s not straight-friendly; he’s in your face. He comes out of a tradition that’s much more DIY, much less corporate than our current art-making milieu — but then again it’s not so long ago to be unrecognizable or hardly believable — say, the Bohemian “beatnik” days of the late 50s early 60s, or the hippie era about a decade later.

No, the late 80s early 90s is an era in memory, though it sometimes seems longer ago – maybe that’s because it’s still pre-Internet, and our world has so vastly changed since then. Imagine saving all your Google inquiries to a pen-and-paper notebook and spending Saturday afternoon in a library to physically look each one up. That was life not very long ago, just one small example, now multiply that by the millions and you get some idea of how technology has changed things for all of us.

But I digress. There just is something about such artists in our gay world – such as Bruce LaBruce, John Waters, Gregg Araki, Dennis Cooper (who is mentioned in the linked article), Joey Arias, and so many others who had that clarity of vision and to be able to combine that with not caring about the business of art – that they never expected to make money or be popular even. They would just continue to put out there what they did best.

These, I think, are the people to emulate and who can serve as role models in a gay culture that’s largely pressured more and more every day to assimilate.

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Five Humble Suggestions for Yoga Teachers

not me but I look just like this when doing yoga.

not me but I look just like this when doing yoga.

So just a short rant today, on things that annoy me in yoga class. Really, I love it, I just joined a local studio as a member, making a long term commitment to yoga practice. But what would I be if not a whiner? You know better. So, yoga instructors, here are five suggestions for you:

  • don’t make us buddy up and do partner poses. Really, nobody likes that. Well, maybe some extroverts do, but I’ve never met anyone who just couldn’t wait to do this.
  • Do not teach the class from the back of the room, when all your students are facing the opposite direction! Please know that not everyone can hear you and there are many students who need to have the visual of the pose.
  • Please use the English (or whatever the local language is) word for the pose rather than only the Sanskrit version! Since all the pose terms basically end with -asana, they all sound alike to the class (well, to most of us). Honestly when you do that (use only the Sanskrit) you’re just showing off.
  • We’ll agree to Om, but don’t make us sing a yoga song. Not everyone is into the chanting or signed up for this, and again, we don’t know the words.
  • Finally, end the yoga class on time. Really. There’s probably a room full of annoyed yogis standing outside the studio with their mats in hand, while your students are still inside blissed out on their backs.

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