My new home is only a couple blocks down the street and along the park from the coffee shop where my most recent introduction to gay culture started, some ten years ago. To understand the significance of my new home's location I must go back in time to my earliest introduction to gay culture.
After I graduated from college and before I was married I hung out with several colleagues who were friends of mine. The selection of hangout spots was always determined by a couple of the gals within the group. Their choice was either a country and western themed dance club or a gay bar on the outskirts of the city limits. We partied weekly as we danced and drank together unwinding from the challenges of work.
On those nights when we would decide to go beyond the city limits and visit the bar heading up the hillside to the west of town, I paid close attention to the men who flirted with one another in the darkened recesses of the bar, typically men with men seeming very much at ease as they maintained close physical proximity with one another. Once in a while I would observe knees touching, hands caressing one another and even an occasional extended kiss. My heart would quicken and my mind engage. A few different nights I went back to that bar alone to not only watch but to be.
On each of those occasions, feelings of excitement stirred deep within me. I got what I was looking for in terms of physical connection that would lead to the parking lot just outside and on one occasion; I actually went home with someone, caressing each other as I excitedly drove down the darkened roadway. My excitement was accelerated by desire and the experience of allowing what I then tried to repress and consciously deny.
Within moments after the exchange I would be filled with guilt and shame as the awareness that within months I was to be married returned to my consciousness. It seemed so right and yet at the same time not allowable within my understandings of relationship, sexuality and my naïveté regarding models I had experienced for "doing" life, as defined by religion. There seemed to be no other choices. Being like I wanted to be seemed to also include the diagnosis of me having a psychiatric disorder! I just liked guys, why did it have to be so complex?
Ten years ago I was helping my good friend with the opening of her hair salon, immediately next door to one of the area’s leading gay coffee shops. On each of those days after my early morning work at her shop, I always enjoyed sauntering into the coffee shop ordering my coffee, watching, wondering, and considering the possibilities. I felt very much at home there and I recognized in that setting my secret wasn't of significance.
In the interim between those early days and the coffee shop on ninth Avenue there were experiences, especially when work-related travel removed me from the confines of suburban life as a married man. I frequented various theaters, on occasion a gay bar, porn stores and occasionally an extended eye contact followed by a wink, a touch and caress. My experience of gay culture was reduced to a rich fantasy life and the expression of short stories in my creative mind as I ran miles at a time, trying to control my interests in men.
The coffee shop became a weekly haunt, long after the work at the hair salon was completed. I began to relate to other gay men whom I met through a close friend who is gay. The longing to be in gay culture, at least as I had always known it to be, had started to shift from that of cruising, sexual connection and guilt, to something much different.
My desire increasingly has included wanting honest relationships with men and women who understood me; who accept my desire, passion, and longing as a man of a certain sexual persuasion. I want to be around those who seemingly understood me and who have an allowance for me being the me that I have always wanted to be AND who are like me in that they are more diverse in their sexual orientation.
The gift of my life now is the opportunity to integrate a culture rich in sexual diversity with the aspects of my former life, especially my children and grand children.
Living within the hood allows me to interact in a much more complete and authentic way than I ever considered possible. The culture is no longer someplace I visit in secret in the dark of night and the anonymity of a setting where I'm just passing through. It is no longer restricted to Thursday mornings when I would linger at the coffee shop for hours on end, dreading the return to life as I had crafted it to be.
My experience of my culture now allows not only for the expression of my natural sexual orientation, but allows for you my dearest of friends. It allows for this space, this time this opportunity to just be me.
I live just up the block and through the park. I look from my balcony onto the streets and across the space of my neighborhood, which allows the experience of my culture. No longer separate or someplace I'm passing through. It's where I flourish, the place I call home. My culture. My family. The place I rest in for this moment in time.
About the Author
Donny Kaye-Is a native born Denverite. He has lived his life posing as a
hetero-sexual male, while always knowing that his sexual orientation was that
of a gay male. In recent years he has
confronted the pressures of society that forced him into deep denial regarding
his sexuality and an experience of living somewhat of a disintegrated
life. “I never forgot for a minute that
I was what my childhood friends mocked, what I thought my parents would reject
and what my loving God supposedly condemned to limitless suffering.” StoryTime
at The Center has been essential to assisting him with not only telling the
stories of his childhood, adolescence and adulthood but also to merely recall
the stories of his past that were covered with lies and repressed in to the
deepest corners of his memory. Within
the past two years he has “come out” not only to himself but to his wife of
four decades, his three children, their partners and countless extended family
and friends. Donny is divorced and yet
remains closely connected with his family.
He lives in the Capitol Hill Community of Denver, in integrity with
himself and in a way that has resulted in an experience of more fully realizing
integration within his life experiences. He participates in many functions of
the GLBTQ community.
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