Walls, by Ray S

It was a grey March morning in 2007, the view looking south through my dining room window was one of frozen earth and the black remains of last summer’s garden. The thought came to me in an instant. “No, I can’t do this again.” “This” was in reference to the task of planting a new garden, of battling weeds, and tending a too-large lawn. Then too, our little 1940’s spec-ranch style house had suddenly become too much house of one ageing widower.

After engaging the service of a good family friend and realtor, the end result was a sale that required new owner occupancy by April first. “Goodbye” to forty-some years of suburbia and relocation to a small ground-level apartment, replete with sufficient essential facilities and surrounded by all white painted interior walls. It was all such a welcome no brainer not to concern oneself with color, anything works with white and, besides, this was the beginning of a new, colorful life.

The new life lasted until the bank chose to pursue the condo’s owner for nonpayment of the bank’s loan. So goes the “white walls.” And the search for more walls to hang my art stuff, memorabilia, and toothbrush. With the miraculous touch on the computer apparatus my “darling daughter” phoned me to say she had found a possible new home for the homeless and aged Pater.

Another phone call arranged a meeting with the owner of a rental condo near Washington Park; all of this having been discovered by daughter while browsing the internet and finding the listing on “Craig’s List.”

Here’s the kicker; daughter and I met the owner’s representative at the prearranged hour. I noted that the front door key and lock didn’t like each other, but it finally unlocked revealing an apartment consisting of required living spaces, all six of them including a kitchen and a bathroom replete with claw foot bath tub, and each room sported a different color on their respective walls.

Ever since that day it has been one colorful day after another within my painter’s “Somewhere over the Rainbow” palette walls.

© 24 January 2017 

About the Author 

Hero - Heroine, by Phillip Hoyle

My dad deeply respected two ministers who pastored the church I grew up in: Brother W.F. Lown and Brother Charles Cook. Both highly educated men were skillful preachers, fine administrators, and dedicated ministers. Brother Lown baptized me at a rather early age because I insisted on it. Several years later he spoke to me about becoming a minister. I was eight years old when he planted that seed. I started paying attention to what was being said around the church—sermons, lessons, conversations, and discussions. When Lown left to become the president of a nearby church-related college, I got to know Brother Cook, our new minister. I watched him carefully and was surprised (and probably disappointed) one weekday afternoon at junior high choir rehearsal when some girls were paying no attention and talking mindlessly while we were practicing. He yelled, “What in the Sam Hill do you think you are doing?” He made it clear he wanted us to work not gab. Although I was mildly shocked, I realized that ministers were people with a full range of emotions. That was probably the main experience that made it possible for me to actually become a minister. That day I realized that ministers are human beings not heroes, well all but one of them.

My hero a minister I started hearing about when I was a few years older: The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior. I paid attention to his career, preaching, and activism. He eclipsed my attraction to Billy Graham whom I also greatly respected. King’s power as a speaker got my attention, but mostly his message of equality for all people made great sense out of the old gospel message of salvation I had heard since the first Sunday after my birth. And his message of racial equality filled a void made in my life by our family’s move from the Army town where I was born to a small county seat town where there were no African Americans, no persons of Asian descent, and only two Hispanic people—a mother and her daughter. I missed people who looked, thought, and lived differently. I missed people who were recent immigrants from Germany, Japan or Puerto Rico. I missed many friends and neighbors who, thanks to Kings preaching, I realized weren’t getting a fair shake in America. I liked the practical, daily, living, moral message of his preaching. And of course I liked his oratory and forceful leadership. I had a real hero—one who was a warrior, a leader, a strategist, a public figure who served his people—the whole people of the United States of America—and who paid the ultimate price for his courage and leadership.

Years later, when my African Son whom I was visiting in Memphis, Tennessee took me to the MLK Memorial at the place King was murdered, I realized this man, unlike activists I met in the late 1970s, was not living high on the hog. He was staying in an old motel in downtown Memphis. Nothing fancy. He lived with the least of these his brothers and sisters. And he was a real human being with the full range of human emotions and experience. King became my first hero and to date my only one.

© 30 January 2017 

About the Author 

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general, he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

Sorting it Out, by Louis Brown

“Sorting it Out” for me, means tying up some loose strings.

Some other final thoughts on The Red Tent by Anita Diamant:

(1)            Circumcision: the whole ritual becomes a symbol or precursor of mass murder or genocide. Three of Dinah’s brothers – Simon, Levy, and Reuben – hire a small army of goons and invade the walled city of Shechem at night and kill almost all of the Egyptian men by slitting their throats. To please their king, Hamor, all the male inhabitants of Shechem had been circumcised and had agreed to this because King Hamor’s son Shalem wanted to marry Dinah, the Jewish Isaac’s granddaughter. Hamor and Shalem were also circumcised, which they agreed to as a peace gesture and soon after were murdered by Simon, Levy, and Reuben and their goons.

I think the author’s intent was to portray men as having a bad killing instinct whereas women are life-givers and nurturers. Men have it in their DNA to kill and, if able, to commit genocide. I think the author was being a little too pessimistic. Although I note the popularity of boxing and that of the John Wayne style of Western in which it was perfectly OK for white people to plan the extermination of the native American population, and earlier the Pilgrims doing pretty much the same thing.

(2)            The once-a-month menstrual cycle explains why all the ancient moon deities were women: Innana, Diana, Luna, etc. The monthly cycle of the moon includes: no moon, crescent moon, half-moon, ¾-moon, full moon, and it takes one month.   

(3)            In the ancient tribe of Jacob in the tents of Mamre, children with birth defects were left in the desert to die.

(4)            I asked the Librarian, Della, at the Lakewood Library if they had a gay and Lesbian book section. Della said not exactly but gay and Lesbian literature, fiction, and non-fiction, has its own Dewey decimal number so can be researched. I said most of gay literature that I had read so far was either extremely politically polemic or just plain gossipy. Della recommended:

(a)     I left it on the Mountain by Kevin Sessums (2015) – the psychological and spiritual journey of an AIDS patient.

(b)            “And the Band played on.” Starring Matthew Modine. In a word, The French (Institute Pasteur) discovered the AIDS virus first. Dr. Gallo of the American CDC claimed otherwise.

(c)     Sarah Waters who wrote the novel The Paying Guests (published 2014). This is a Lesbian murder mystery. 

© 8 May 2017  

About the Author  

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA's. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.

Queer as a $3 Bill, by Lewis Thompson

I see little in common between being “queer” (in so far as that term is used in reference to someone’s sexual orientation) and a “$3 bill”.  This room at the GBLT Center of Denver is filled with individuals of a sexual orientation that has been and still is often self-described as “queer”, that term having lost its pejorative connotation not so long ago.  As for the $3 bill, can I see by a show of hands how many of us have ever seen one? [pause]

A much more apropos expression would be “queer as a $2 bill”.  By this I do not mean to further devalue gays but simply to recognize the fact that $2 bills exist.  I enjoy carrying them in my wallet.  For one thing they are handy for tipping.

This topic begs the question as to how many of us there are—queer folk, that is.  And are there degrees of queerness?  It is related to flamboyance?  Affect?  Appearance?  Lifestyle?  In my experience, I would have to say that the long-tenured belief that queers comprised 10% of the population has long been discredited, unless you want to include men and women who admire their own bodies, in which case the number would likely be much, much higher.  Based upon my personal observations, I would have to estimate the fraction of humans who indentify as queer to be in the order of 1-2%.  I have attended every one of Hutchinson, Kansas, High School’s Class of 1964 reunions.  Out of a class of 450, to my knowledge, I am the only alumnus who is “out of the closet”.  There are a few “suspicious” characters among the lot but nothing definitive.  Based upon that unscientific observation, I would have to conclude that queers comprise about 0.4% of the general population—roughly equivalent to my estimate of the fraction of $2 bills within the wallets and purses of the American populace.

If it weren’t for our straight allies, I think we would be much worse off, both spiritually and physically.  So, allow me to raise a toast to all those “$1 bills” that have kept us safe and allowed us the freedom to show our true colors.

© 14 Mar 2016 

About the Author 

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn't getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth.

Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband's home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.

Smoking,by Gillian

“I quit smoking when I was in college”,  I say, righteously; but that is a huge distortion of the truth!

It's not exactly a lie. I have probably not smoked more than ten cigarettes since the late 1950's. But I didn't quit in the sense of the huge conscious effort of concentrated willpower the word implies. I just kind of drifted away from it and never really missed it; rather in the same way I had drifted into it. It was attractive, for a while, in the way of all forbidden things, especially to the young. We smuggled ill-gotten packs of cigarettes onto the school bus, puffing away at them huddled on the back seat while the driver turned a blind eye. He chain-smoked so why should he care if we took a few inexpert drags?

I didn't quite get the attraction, but of course did not say so. There's a limit to how much of an odd-ball one is willing to become, and holding a cigarette between my fingers for a few seconds every now and then was a cheap price to pay for belonging: not being an outcast. (Being the child of a local teacher offers many challenges.)  Nobody seemed to notice whether I ever actually placed the cigarette between my lips, much less inhaled. Life was easy.

In college, at any social gathering, I always had a drink in my hand. So did my fellow party-goers. Most of them also held a smoldering cigarette. But the drink was my membership card, so few, if any, noticed the lack of burning embers.

A few years later, at a party with several twenty-something co-workers, my husband and I both had the obligatory drink-in-the-hand when the joint came by. We both passed it on, untouched by human lips; untouched by ours, anyway. We both knew that we had enough of a challenge controlling the attractions of alcohol and had no need of another.

So, in a very strange way, booze has saved me.

But the attitude of the medical profession towards drinking and smoking which I find rather strange.

“Yes”, I acknowledge, “I probably drink more than is good for me.”

“Do you smoke?” is the inevitable response.

I think if I said, “There's a huge pink elephant in the corner of your office,” the reply would probably be, “How many packs do you average a day?'”

© August 2016 

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.

The Gayest Person I Have Ever Known, by Betsy

What does it mean to be the gayest?  Using the word gay in its generic sense and being a woman myself, I will discuss the term gayest in relation to the only woman I know about whom I can make that judgement. And that would be yours truly.  Now that I think about it I find that I do not know how to apply the adjective to anyone except myself.  How do I know how gay someone is? How do I know how straight someone is?  Are we talking about their libido?  I don’t think so.  I have heard of lesbians with very strong libidos, but I don’t consider them to be gayer than others.  On the other end of the scale I have known a few women who have a dislike and distrust of men in general, suggesting that they may have been abused in the past. These women avoid men, prefer not to associate with men, gay or straight, relate only to women and are considered by themselves and others to be lesbians. Yet they are not interested in sex with a woman either.  They are basically asexual.

 Or perhaps we’re talking about a gay person who never associates with straight people. Does this make a person gayer than one who has a more diverse group of friends and associates. Certainly not.  Could it mean a person who is more secure in his/her gayness.  Possibly.  But I reject that as well.  That just means the person is more secure, not GAYER. 

And so, I repeat. The only person whose degree of gayness I might have any idea about--has to be myself.  And to compare my degree gayness with that of others, I have to be able to measure the degree of gayness of others.  And I have just made the case that such a measurement is impossible. Hmm..This presents a problem.

But wait!  Enter the queerometer.  Just when the problem seems impossible to solve, I remember the queerometer.  I discussed this very issue once before in a piece called “Queer, Just How Queer.”  Could we not just as well have called it “Gay, Just How Gay.”  I’m going to revisit what I wrote then.

Imagine that we could measure an individual’s degree of sexual orientation by taking, say, a blood test.   This would be an ugly world indeed with a rigid caste system.  The most heterosexual would be on top and the most homosexual on the bottom. 

Newborns would be immediately tested at birth.  Here’s one scenario.

"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Jones.  You have a healthy baby boy measuring only two on the queerometer.  He will be your pride and joy." 

Or, the dreaded scenario:  "You have a healthy baby boy, Mr. and Mrs. Jones.  He has 10 fingers and 10 toes and all his parts.  I’m sorry to tell you that he tests positive on the queerometer.  He’s a 9.6"

"Oh," says Mrs. Jones, gasping for breath.   "A 9.6 !  Does that mean, does that mean?"

"Yes, I’m afraid so," says the attendant.  "At the age of eight years you will be required to turn him over to the Department of Corrections.  He will be yours until then.  Enjoy!”

Or the following close-call:

"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Jones.  You have a beautiful baby girl.  She appears to be in perfect health and all her parts are in the right place.  However, she does measure a five on the queerometer, which, as you know, is high.  The state will provide you with all the materials you need to guide her in the right direction.  If you use the manual wisely and stick to it, she will turn out just fine and I’m sure she will live a normal life and give you many grandchildren."  

Or imagine a world in which LGBT people took on a particular hue at puberty.  Say, a shade of purple.  The really dark purple ones would be the really, really, queer ones, and the light violets would be only slightly inclined to be homosexual or transgender, or bisexual, or queer.  I can see the pride parade right now.  A massive multi-shaded purple blob oozing down Colfax.

Alas, this does not answer the question at hand: who is the gayest person I have ever known. The queerometer fortunately does not exist and we hope it never will. So, the question “Who is the gayest person I have ever known” remains unanswered.   As I write, an appropriate answer comes to me.   WHO CARES!  And the more people who don’t care, the better off we will be.

© 28 Jul 2014 

About the Author 

 Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading, writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.

Where I Was When Kennedy Was Shot, by Ricky

I was in a theater watching a movie.  I think it was a western, but I don’t remember for sure.  When he was shot, I wasn’t sad at all because he was a bad man.  I went home feeling rather good about the movie as John Wayne triumphed again.  Later on in his career, Kennedy won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the movie Cool Hand Luke.  George Kennedy 18 Feb 1925 to 28 Feb 2016.

Joseph Kennedy Sr. was not shot but died in 1969 8-years after suffering a stroke less than one year after his son was elected president.  I was in the Air Force at the time and really didn’t care.

Joe Kennedy Jr. was killed in a bomber explosion during WWII.  I wasn’t even born at that time so I don’t know where I was at the time.

Robert F. Kennedy was shot dead on 5 June 1968.  I was in an Air Force tech school in Texas studying to become a Radio Intercept Analysist.  I was sad because his brother was also shot.  I learned later that Robert’s young son was upstairs in their hotel room watching the events on television and saw his father get shot and die.  I can only imagine the trauma that inflicted upon him.

Edward M. Kennedy died 25 August 2009 of complications from a malignant brain tumor and was not shot.  I was living at my current home in Lakewood, Colorado, but once again, I didn’t care very much.

John F. Kennedy Jr. was born 25 November 1960 and died in a plane crash 16 July 1999.  I did grieve for him as I still remembered him as the little boy who saluted his father’s caisson as it passed him on its way to Arlington National Cemetery.  As I noted above, he was not shot.

John F. Kennedy was shot 22 November 1963 while I was taking a biology test as a sophomore in high school.  I had not studied for the test and was struggling with the answers.  I was about half way through the exam when Mr. Al Hilldinger opened the door and shouted, “Kennedy’s been shot.”  The next day, our biology teacher, Mr. Harold Mapes, gave us all a revised test because we had all done so poorly on the previous day’s exam.  He blamed it on the Kennedy assassination.  I wish he had told us about the second text so I could have studied for it, but he didn’t and I did better but not up to my normal performance on that test.

This “story” would have been much shorter if the topic would have been just a bit more specific when referring to people.  There are way too many people named Kennedy to just be so generic by using last names only.

© 3 Apr 2017 

About the Author 

 I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach.  Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I was sent to live with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966.  After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11-2001 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010.   I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My Happiest Day, by Ray S

Where do I start? Looking back over many years the end result for me is that there were just as many happiest. Sorting them for this story was the challenge and not necessarily in any order of importance—just Happiest days as they occurred in the life and times of one who has had the privilege of hanging around this sphere so long.

Some fifty plus years ago the happiest days were marked by the arrival of several of our baby son and daughter.  Certainly, those two gifts came along with the trials and tribulations of all of us growing up together, but today the loving rewards far outnumber those trials.

Which was the happiest day? The day was one of my luckiest with the receipt of my army discharge, the little gold button disparagingly christened the “ruptured duck” and the G. I. Bill, a gift of a college education, and a whole new world to try and master.

In retrospect with diploma in hand I looked around and asked my fellow classmate, “What do we do now?” that was happy in the guise of wonder. We survived in spite of ourselves.

There was along the way a surreal wedding with an unsuspecting (I think) college sweetheart, not to be confused with any happiest day, but some did happen later and we actually survived to feast on the joy of many Christmases, Halloweens, graduations, and holidays.

For all of the above perhaps these were “semi-happiest”, but full of the excitement and comfortable routine of home and family.

“My Happiest Day” happened when I sensed the feeling of belonging to my true GLBTQ family and marching behind the color guard in my first Pride Parade. Liberation abounded for me and since then I have surround my body with a rainbow flag, kissing and hugging the members of my tribe and even more members. Stop and think about it all, right now and see if you don’t recall the heady exultation and joy of your first “outness”?

And the parade marches on!

© 31 October 2016 

About the Author 

Games, by Phillip Hoyle

As a kid I never much liked games of competition, but I did like games of simulation. The former were based on beating others—winning. My early aversion arose most likely from my lack of physical strength and coordination combined with my weak skills in strategizing. If I ran a race, I simply ran. The problem was that I ran too slowly. I couldn’t throw balls far or fast and the balls rarely showed up where I thought I was throwing them. At the shooting range I couldn’t see very well even though I had no idea of that. Then when I got corrective lenses I never could figure out how to compensate. I had a hard time concentrating on activities that didn’t capture my imagination.

I avoided football and baseball. I was attracted to basketball, but I wasn’t even a good basketball player. I wasn’t aggressive enough and didn’t care to be better than the other guys. But growing up I did like games like War, Cops and Robbers, and my favorite, Cowboys and Indians. I probably liked the costuming, props, and improvisatory acting. I was especially repelled by party games—games like Pin the Tail on the Donkey, or dropping clothes pins into milk bottles. I could play cards: War, Canasta, Gin Rummy, Pinochle, Poker, and Pitch, but I abhorred spin the bottle. I wasn’t interested to kiss anyone (well until 10^th grade when I learned to kiss Buddy).

I started working in churches fulltime in 1970 at the outbreak of the Learning Games Movement. Some of these were pretty awful and met strong resistance particularly from adult groups. I did like the Simulation Games—an accommodation of military training practices used to introduce students to strategic thinking as related to their topics of study. (It seems strange that I liked them given their origins!) Of course school teachers had long used competitive games like spelling bees and other more complicated ones like debate. Even in my high school years church youth rallies sported television game-show-inspired competitions over biblical knowledge pitting teams from neighboring churches. Although I knew the Bible pretty well, I never was interested to use the knowledge for purposes of showing off. It seemed somehow antithetical to the sense of charity or cooperation I learned from the Good Book’s best teachings. And remember, I was not very competitive.

During the 70s the New Games Movement started introducing cooperative games strategized to create community—Hippie-inspired group play that featured Earth Balls and sometimes flowers. I started developing similar games—both the New Games and Simulations—for youth retreats and elementary residential camps, ones related directly to the curricular themes and that often involved the creation of environments, for example, a simulated archaeological dig or a Middle-Eastern marketplace. These were much more related to the simulation games of childhood than they were to sporting events, and they proved effective in teaching.

To this day I fail to understand any competition that devalues human life—either that of an individual or of a group. Still I do appreciate the grace and power of athletes. I also like a couple of card games that have so little strategy as not to stifle conversation among the players. But I don’t like playing even those games with players who take winning too seriously.

Lest you think I am just an old stick in the mud, I will admit to enjoying the Christmas games my youngest granddaughters planned for our family. They involved individuals and teams. My favorite was the Reindeer Game. For my team I hurriedly blew up and tied off small balloons until I was out of breath and feeling very light headed. The balloons were then stuffed into panty hose. The team that first successfully filled the legs like antlers and whose reindeer donned them first won. Selected for the honor of being the reindeer were my son Michael and his wife Heather. They looked bizarrely cute, but my favorite part of that game was my daughter Desma’s story of trying to purchase panty hose. Suppliers have become rare. Finally she found a store that still carries them. The clerk said, “Yes, we have them. You must be going to play the Reindeer Game; it’s all the rage at the State workers’ office parties this year. You got here just in time.” Handing Desma the hosiery she said, “Here are the last two pair.”

Oh the games people play.

© 16 January 2017 

About the Author 

 Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

Resist-Opposition to Donald Trump, Louis Brown

“Resist” is the newest rallying cry for those opposed to the Trump political and social agenda.  

This gives us the opportunity to update our observations on the current political situation in Washington, D. C.

(1)          Did you notice that Colorado Senator Michael Bennet plans to vote yes for Trump’s pick for the U. S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch? I guess that means we can safely scratch Michael Bennet’s name off of our list.

(2)          According to many historians and scholars of political and economic science, capitalism inevitably grows more and more corrupt. The upper 1% of the upper 1% grab more and more of the nation’s wealth and purchase politicians and elections. And they are the only ones who benefit from this arrangement. Eventually the victims of their austerity programs try at least to fight back.

(3)          I remember when Ronald Reagan was president, the news media went on a frenetic promote-Reagan campaign, calling him one of the greatest of U. S. Presidents. This was deceptive journalism. President Reagan’s greatest accomplishment was to impoverish the American middle class. And on a personal level, he was painfully ignorant. A lot of people noticed. On the positive side, he was patriotic, and he was not as evil as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

(4)          Bernie Sanders has said that he fears that the United States is becoming an “oligarchy”; this is an extremely polite way of saying that the U. S. is becoming a fascist state.

(5)          If you compare the careers and personalities of Donald Trump and Benito Mussolini, you will be struck by the similarities. Now Donald Trump’s version of fascism is (not yet anyway) as harsh as that of Mussolini, but many of the same basic underlying suppositions apply.

(6)          In both cases, the upper classes feel threatened so put up an authoritarian leader to suppress dissent and a militaristic government dedicated to suppressing any real version of democracy. The government’s credibility declines, and the public slowly but surely stops believing anything the government has to say. This results in more suppression of democracy.

(7)          In Italy, the upper classes felt threatened by communism. In the United States now, the public not only has stopped believing anything our government says, we mostly do not support our foreign policy, and we want something radically different.

(8)          I think therefore that progressives can make deals with certain Tea Party organizations, many of whom want to “overthrow” Paul Ryan. So, do we.

(9)          Actually, morally speaking, Paul Ryan is much worse than Donald Trump, in my opinion. Donald Trump has some redeeming qualities, Paul Ryan does not.

(10)                  Progressives can also work with Senator Rand Paul who has a very appealing isolationist foreign policy. I never understood why, when someone calls him an “isolationist,” he denies it. At some points in history, it is a very good thing to be an “isolationist.” At these same moments in history, it is good to be a “pacifist” – like now for instance. The American public is deriving little or no benefit from the perpetual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Let us take advantage of the broad-based public disapproval.

(11)                  The other morally reprehensible fascistic or at least authoritarian leader on the current international scene is Vladimir Putin. Have you noticed how Mr. Putin supports far-right movements in most of the countries in Western Europe? And then there is his homophobia.

© 10 Apr 2017  

About the Author  

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA's. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.

Preparation, by Lewis Thompson

This is a difficult subject to write about.  First of all, doing something that requires "preparation" usually implies that something is about to happen that I would just as soon not happen at all, such as an appointment with my attorney, having blood drawn, restricted diets, going for a job interview (those days are behind me, thank heavens), or having a colonoscopy.  But it also occurs to me that nearly everyone occasionally has these things happen to them so it would only bore them to hear me talk about how I prep myself for them, as it likely is very close to their own groundwork. 

One exception, however--and perhaps someone will have chosen to write about this--is preparing oneself for one's own death.  And, when I say this, I don't mean wills and durable-powers-of-attorney.  I'm talking about how people choose to die--the when, where, and with the assistance of whom.  However, I haven't prepared the necessary groundwork to write about that subject, so I shall have to punt and simply describe what I see as the requisite characteristics of something for which preparation is normally required--or not.  Here is my list:

1.    My first rule on the subject of preparation is to never prepare for something that can be avoided.  Preparation is work, some of it unpleasant or tedious.  It's much better simply to change your plans to allow you to avoid any preparation and simply relax and do something you enjoy instead.

2.    Second, never make preparations yourself that you can get someone else to do for you.  I like to have a clean car when I begin a road trip.  I used to wash my car myself, which only detracted from the pleasure of travelling. Now, I take my car to the car wash and have the hard work done by someone else.  I can recoup the cost simply by driving slower, thus saving on gas.

3.    Third, I avoid potlucks.  At potlucks, you are expected to prepare something to share with others.  Since I don't cook, I usually skip potlucks--unless, that is, I take the time to take advantage of my 2nd point and buy something that someone else has made and take that.

4.    Similarly, I avoid family reunions.  I used to spend hours trying to memorize the names of my family members so I could properly greet them at the reunions.  Since I had nine aunts and uncles and dozens of cousins, that was very time-consuming.  Fortunately, they were scattered to the four corners of the USA, so it was rarely necessary.

5.    As I mentioned before, I don't cook.  The closest I come is when I make popcorn in the microwave.  Cooking is nothing if not preparation.  Now, I take advantage of wonderful cooks who do the prep for me.  They say time is money and, in this case, it is money well-spent--on such things as eating out and frozen entrees and dinners.  I won't tell you which brands I like because I'm not prepared to try to beat you all to the frozen food aisle at Queen Soopers before they're sold out.

As I'm not prepared to write any more, I'll just stop here.  If you take only one thing with you from this little missive of mine, let it be this:  preparations are for people who are either anal-retentive or control freaks.  They should think about being less prepared and more available to enjoy life fully.

© 17 Aug 2017 

About the Author 

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn't getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth.

Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband's home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.

Movies, by Gillian

I have never been a really fully-paid-up member of the movie-goers club. In fact I seem to have had, over my lifetime, something of a love/hate relationship with movies. The love side has been made up mostly of documentaries, or what they call 'docudramas', which probably makes me something of a dull person to be around; someone who prefers, for the most part, fact over fiction. Strangely, though, the opposite is true of books. I rarely read non-fiction books, much preferring to escape into the land of make-believe.

Perhaps it is in fact that very make-believe which has tripped me up. My childhood, in the time and place that it was, related little to movies. There were cinemas in the towns in the England of the 1940's and '50's but I and my family and friends had no way to get to them. There were early TV's, too, in some places, but non of us had one. So escape was down to books. And once you are accustomed to using your own imagination, making the written story and characters look exactly the way you want them, it's hard to switch happily to strangers creating the images for you.

And then, of course, there was the gay thing. Though barely even subliminal, in my youth, it was there. Reading the book, I could make Jane Eyre's obsessive love be for a somewhat androgynous Rochester. I could even, and this requires some strength of imagination, believe me, picture poor innocent Catherine Earnshaw with a vaguely unisex Heathcliff. But when, later in life, I saw the Wuthering Heights movie with that darkly menacing Laurence Olivier, he was so completely masculine that all fantasy faded. So, I couldn't really get into movies because they were so overwhelmingly, 100% at that time, heterosexual. So was literature, but anyone can take it wherever they want. These days, of course, we say that ol' Larry was bisexual, if not homosexual. But either way he's completely masculine. Books offer more options than movies.

One member of this Storytelling group, who rarely attends now, wrote one day of trying so hard to hide his infatuation with Tab Hunter. I cannot recall that day's topic, but I had written of my attempts to fake an attraction to Tab Hunter. I bought, in our nearest Woolworth's, a black and white pin-up photo of him, to attach to my school desk. Oh the sad irony of it, I thought. Two of us, sixty years ago, thousands of miles apart, trying so hard to use Tab Hunter - and why him, I ask myself - to define, or not define, our homosexuality. Thank God, those days are largely gone.

Now, when there is such vast choice of movies, I have favorites of all kinds. But I have still never fully embraced 'going to the movies', except for drive-ins which I always found to be great fun. For the most part, movies became more attractive to me when they became readily available from the comfort of my own home and my own couch.

One of my very favorite, totally fictional, movies, is 'Cloudburst', with Olympia Dukakis; the story of two old lesbians running off to Canada to be married. It is funny and sad: that perfect combination that creates fiction at it's best. I also watch 'The History Boys' every time it's on TV. A wonderful 'docudrama', which Betsy and I had somehow missed until it appeared on TV a couple of weeks ago, is ' Freeheld', the true story of a New Jersey police lieutenant, dying of cancer, fighting for her registered partner to receive her pension after her death, as would be the case with a heterosexual couple. There are endless documentaries, not to mention a full-length movie, about Alan Turing and all he suffered for his homosexuality. It's not that all I ever watch is movies, truth or fiction, depicting the plight of members of the GLBT community; but they exist.

That is an ever-amazing thing to me.

They exist.

Movies and I have followed the same path. We have been on a long journey, but we have arrived. And we will never, can never, go back. No matter what rhetoric spews from the mouths of those filled with hate, from Anita Bryant to our newly anointed vice-presidential candidate, we cannot, and they cannot, undo what we have done. I, and all of us here, now know ourselves. Everyone else know us. We tell our stories and the movies tell our stories; not the stories of us, in this room, perhaps, individually, but of us, anywhere and everywhere, collectively. We have travelled from invisibility to out and proud.

If John Cray and I were kids today, we could, at least in many schools, each embrace some modern equivalent of Tab Hunter quite openly; I with indifference and John with passion. Movies have played a huge part in our journey and we owe a debt of gratitude to those who conceived them, financed them, produced them, and above all to the many straight actors who were brave enough to act the part of a gay or lesbian in the early days, when they put their careers at risk by doing so.

In fact, As Roger Ebert, long-time film critic. stated so beautifully,

“We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it.”

Through movies, others perhaps learned not only to see us, to know us, but, just for a short time, to be us.

© July 2016 

About the Author 

 I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.