Finding My Voice, by Ricky

When I was a baby, I had a voice and I used it often when I was awake and hungry or wet and hungry or smelly, wet, and hungry. Did I mention that I used it often at that age? The wailing I used as my voice was rewarded with attention, dryness, and food. It served me well for a few months when I realized that I needed a new voice. So, I switched from simple wailing to irritating screaming combined with sobbing, sniffling, and whimpering. I was well on the way to training my parents to cater to my every whim.

I accelerated their training schedule when I added cooing, giggling, and laughing to my repertoire of sounds my voice could use. These were most effective in keeping my parent’s attention when combined with smiling.

They seemed easier to train when I began to teach them some of my language. It is truly amazing just how fast they learned to repeat after me words like: goo-goo, gaa-gaa, didy, wa-wa, ma-ma, da-da, and poopy. My greatest failure in their training program happened when I was two-years old. For some reason, my parents just could not understand the concept of “NO!” when I said it to them. I noticed just how frustrated we became when we realized that they just did not understand the meaning even though I tried to teach them the meaning at least 20 or 30 times a day. By the time I was three-years old, they finally understood and the level of frustration between us nearly disappeared.

After their training disaster when I was two, as I turned three I realized they were to long out of the womb to learn any more of my language. Since I was smarter and younger than mom and dad (no brag, just fact), I decided to just give up and learn their language instead of keeping myself frustrated by their failures. Communication between us then became clearer and life at home became more fun.

I became increasingly comfortable with my voice and everyone I interacted with seemed to like it also. That is, until I attended first-grade at the Hawthorn Christian School. Don’t religious teachers of non-religious subjects in a private Christian school have to obtain state certification to teach children? I guess not, because my first-grade teacher apparently had no understanding of child development and curiosity and desire to avoid doing things to displease adults. One day, a boy said a word the teacher did not like and had him come up to the front and put a small square of soap on his tongue. She then called two other boys up and did the same thing. Now, I had heard the word but did not know if that was the problem word. I wanted to know what the word was for certain, so I could be sure not to say it and get in trouble at school or at home. Therefore, I raised my hand and when called upon I asked, “What word was the problem word?” The teacher said to never mind. (I guess she did not want to teach, just for us to listen and obey). I then responded, “Was it ‘shit’?” (Not my smartest question.) Whereupon, she had me come up and put the soap on my tongue. I was so scared of my parents finding out and of the soap, my mouth went completely dry. Thus, the soap never dissolved on my tongue and her lesson was lost on me, much to my relief. Fortunately, after second-grade, I was off to public school in Minnesota and out from Christian school domination. This event marks the precursor display of my innate, and soon to be developing, smartassyness.

Since my father had taught me that human excrement was called “ish”, it was several years later that I learned the correct meaning of “shit”. Even when I was living on my grandparent’s farm for two years, I never heard that word. Grandpa and my uncle always referred to cow manure. My grandma did use the word “ish”, but I could tell she was giving it a completely different meaning.

In December of 1958, I did lose my voice for two-weeks due to laryngitis. When the soreness departed, I found my voice was a new voice. It was different, and I did not like it at first. It felt a bit rough due to the laryngitis I suppose, and I wanted to “clear my throat” all the time, but it didn’t help. I seem to be caught between a low tenor and a high bass when I sing, and I don’t do much of that. So, this is my voice now and I’m sticking to it.

© 23 October 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 began living 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 terrorist attack.

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

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

Reading, by Phillip Hoyle

Mom read to us kids with expression she had developed in high school drama. The five of us liked our introduction to children’s literature and to poetry—especially the poems she had memorized—and others she read out of books. It took a long time for me to start reading much on my own although I did like books, studying the pictures, reading the captions, and sometimes reading paragraphs. Still I didn’t read many books for myself until 8th grade when I discovered historical fiction, chapter books in story form. I soon became addicted to reading stories, a practice that continued uninterrupted until about age 42 when I went on a book fast. For a year I determined not to read any whole books.

My confession: During my fast I did re-read one favorite novel (perhaps Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony) and then allowed myself one new novel (probably on a gay theme).

My success: I turned my free time into piano practice.

My practicality: I still consulted books when I had to teach a class or preach a sermon.

My learning: I already knew enough about the topics I was teaching so began relying more and more on my memory.

Perhaps I had read just too many novels beginning in junior and senior high school, during five years of undergraduate school, during three years of graduate school, and during two and a half years of graduate seminary. None of these books were required reading but they probably did help me keep balance in my life. I read many international books in translation thus broadening my view of the world. I read novels between semesters and years of schooling. I read on family vacations. Plus I read every assigned book and textbook and many more related to my studies.

I’m still at my reading although my practice has changed. I’ve added memoir to my list, also books about writing. I read quite a few books about visual arts as well, but now I spend more time writing and doing visual art projects. (Well I AM retired.) I’m reading books I borrow from several libraries, buy at bookstores, receive from family members, or find at ARC; and I keep reading and revising stories I have written. In my retirement I don’t read five books a week anymore but I often am reading five books at a time. In short, I continue my almost life-long practice of reading, and I love it.

Over the past several weeks I have been reading and re-reading Phillip Lopate’s To Show and To Tell, a fine book on essay writing. Lopate teaches non-fiction writing in the graduate program at Columbia University, NYC. On Tuesday I read through his very long suggested reading list and noted Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. On Wednesday I stopped by a used books store and was surprised to find the book on their shelves. Now I’m reading it, tickled by its style, intrigued by its information, analyzing its writing given what I’ve been learning from Lopate and other teachers, and taking note of how one of the founders of our country understood what he was doing. I never expected to read such a book but am so pleased I knew about it, stopped to look through it, and paid the five dollar price. I’m still reading. This book may take awhile.

© 6 November 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

GLBT Hopes, by Nicholas

According to my records, with this piece, I am starting my seventh year of coming to tell and listen to stories on Monday afternoon.

It seems odd to think about hope in this grim start to what may be a long and grim year of frustration, setbacks and bad news. This is not a very hopeful time we live in. But maybe this is when we most need to remind ourselves that hope is possible, hope is what keeps us going, hope is what gets us out of bed each morning. And hope, no matter how irrational, is good to have.

So, my hope for the lesbian, gay and trans community is that we learn to turn to each other more for joy and less out of necessity. I know that fearsome problems still haunt our world and community. Violence and bullying is a daily fact for many of our youth. Discrimination still runs rampant in many areas. Determined gay-haters, like the soon to be vice-president of the United States, persist in their work to undo the dignity and security of LGBT lives and generate hostility toward us. There is still plenty of inequality and prejudice out there.

But in many ways, our world is getting less frightening and our grasp on basic rights is growing more secure. It is no longer acceptable to openly degrade gay people—which is why our enemies have to resort to ever greater subterfuges to try to harass us. They’ve lost the sanctity of marriage so now they are reduced to fighting for the sanctity of toilets and who shall be allowed to do their business in which ones.

We still have battles to fight, but my hope is that we will seek out each other’s company less out of a sense of a need for protection, less out of desperation, and more because we just want to be around other L, G, B and T people. We come together not so much because we need to seek shelter in a hostile world but more because we can best express ourselves with each other.

I have many non-gay friends and love them dearly. It’s not that I sense any barriers between us. Yet, there is still more I sense in sharing with queer folk. We share experiences that we’ve all known and don’t have to explain. We share a humor derived from being outsiders. We share spiritualities, arts and a sharp sense of just what community is—or is not. We have been forced to make up our own culture and so we have. We are different and we should relish opportunities to engage those differences.

Most of us come out of a time when lesbians and gays could never take anything for granted. And we shouldn’t. Above all, we shouldn’t take each other for granted. You can find very fulfilling relationships with non-gay people but I do believe that there is one thing we can find only with our own kind—happiness. I do hope that organizations such as the community center we are in continue to thrive—not out of fear and self-defense but from joy. We still need to find each other. I hope that we continue to come here because we want to, not because we have to.

Even in a world more tolerant and open, there is still that special depth of connection that we get to see only in each other. Call it love or desire or a magical ability to coordinate colors and a flare for decorating, you won’t find it outside. You may be welcome to watch football games with legions of Broncos fans, but you won’t get much of a response by commenting that Eli Manning is so much better looking than his brother Peyton. They just don’t get it.

© 8 Jan 2017 

[Editor's note: This was first published last year. It still seems so pertinent. Enjoy and be moved.]

About the Author 

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.

My Diploma is Green and White, by Carlos

Almost fifty years have passed since I graduated from Technical High School, and as I recall those years of innocence and impertinence, frames materialize like a strange harvest in a room long abandoned and musty with disuse. Being introspective by nature, I am ambivalent about pulling back the curtain of time. Nevertheless, as soon as I activate my memory banks, endless frames of quasi-like silent-era flashbacks emblazon the darkness. In my mind’s eye, we, the young people from a former time, beam with the radiance of youth and expectations, anxious to discover our horizons, to journey down the gurgling eddies of time.

From a historical context, 1968 was a cataclysmic year in American history. Most of us were well aware that our fates were changing. Our nation was in the throes of war in Southeast Asia, and many of us could no longer bury our heads in denial. Soon, we would be called to fight in foreign shores, forfeiting our innocence, and in some cases our lives. Our duty done, we would return to the States to face averted eyes and whispered silence due to the war’s unpopularity. By 1968, the civil rights movement was roaring. America was burning, citizens were taking up the call for righteous causes, and democracy was being tested. Only weeks before my graduation, a great prophet for justice was assassinated in Memphis, prompting a renewed awareness to activism, to an acknowledgement that a democracy of the few and the privileged is but a Portuguese man-of-war ensnaring with its venomous tentacles. Furthermore, in 1968 feminist protestors targeted the Miss America Beauty Pageant as sexist and demeaning to women, further highlighting a civil rights movement that continues to this day. Unfortunately, our last vestige of hope withered on the vine when the hopeful rhetoric of Robert Kennedy was silenced and our disillusioned with American politics germinated in full. Thus, we, resplendent in our graduating colors, green and white, recognized that due to changing social norms, the world we were inheriting was a powder keg. We found ourselves confronting realities over which we had so little control and conflicted about the role we would ultimately play in the annals of history. We were being catapulted headlong into a microburst of epic proportions.

In a sense, my diploma was a rite of passage. For one moment we allowed ourselves to believe that we were stepping forward into a new America. We were idealistic and naïve. After all, most of my classmates were first generation Americans or newly arrived immigrants whose fathers slaved long hours to keep afloat and whose mothers struggled with day-to-day economics as homemakers or underpaid laborers. Nonetheless, our parents had placed their hopes for the future on our generation, yet within a year most of us would recognize we were small fish thrust into a deep and turbulent sea. The fact is, this was Texas in the late l960’s. Although I had wanted to attend a college-preparatory high school, my advisor felt I would be better off going to a vocational school. My parents, in spite of their acknowledgement that I was gifted and capable, deferred to the counselor since they, my parents, could not navigate through the shoals of English. An unspoken atmosphere permeated society that people from the barrio were better off goaded into the future by benign agents acting on our behalf. Thus, I accepted my fate. Although I was on the “college trek”, I recall reading Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my senior English class, and it wasn’t until years later that I realized it wasn’t a play about a foolish donkey, but a metaphor about how love often deludes and eludes so many. At Technical, I never grasped calculus or physics, nor did I ever interact academically with the best of the college preparatory students from other high schools. Most of us were struggling with English, with citizenship, with self-validation. At graduation, we were appropriately attired in a white and green cap and gown, tassel to the right; no deviation to the norm was tolerated. Most of us simply accepted the realities of our lives with stoic resignation, or more tragic yet, with blind obliviousness. In spite of the reality that the late sixties ushered in a generation of malcontents and politically active young people, for the most part we accepted our reality. Only with time would we become conscientious warriors, gay and lesbian activists, feminist advocates as we rebelled against the constraints that bound us. Unfortunately, by then, our numbers had been culled by war, by AIDS, by poverty, and by the bitterness of life on the fringes. Nevertheless, some of us remained true to our zealous ideals in our attempts to forge a new world of inclusiveness. Speaking for myself, being resilient and tenacious, I burned the midnight oil and rolled up my sleeves and lived to tell my tale.

It goes without saying that I struggled, and continue to struggle, with my being gay after high school. I had no mentors nor role models to inspire me. I was weaned on misguided, homophobic values by ill-informed proseltyzers of morality. Even after I became an adult, I retained the shame of condemnation, feeling tainted, miserable, and lost. So much of our LGBTQ history has been a divine comedy as we journeyed into inner circles of hell. Too many have died from the ravages of AIDS; too many have committed suicide, often brought about by alcoholism and drug abuse. Too many have struggled to find a niche, disappearing into the shadows like the characters in John Rechy’s City of Night. So much has changed; so much remains to be done. Just last semester one of my students, a gifted 19-year-old man, committed suicide when he could not come to terms with his identity. Thus, we the survivors and the sages of our society, need to continue to provide direction, being that we have accrued a litany of survivors’ tales and remain standing nonetheless.

As I return from the journey of my youth, I recognize the timelessness of memories. The flickering images capture a moment in time that becomes my on-going narrative. The fact is that like Dorothy, Kansas or Texas or wherever will always be our foundations. In spite of Thomas Wolfe’s admonishment that we can’t go home again, we need to return if we are to recalibrate our navigating sextants. The journey into my green-and-white past reminds me that life must be lived without regret, since there is no point in wishing the pilgrimage had been different; it is what it is, but if I choose to do so, I can glean the knowledge that it has served me well. Therefore, though in retrospect I might have preferred a different map, the map I was offered was, in fact, a cartographer’s masterwork. Thus, guided by that blueprint, I look forward to the golden days that remain with the same fervor and curiosity as I did the green days now accomplished. Any regret is nothing more than a bowl of warm, curdled milk.

© 8 August 2016

[Editor's note: Although this story was published here previously, its message is an inspiration and needs to be heard.]

About the Author

Cervantes wrote, “I know who I am and who I may choose to be.” In spite of my constant quest to live up to this proposition, I often falter. I am a man who has been defined as sensitive, intuitive, and altruistic, but I have also been defined as being too shy, too retrospective, too pragmatic. Something I know to be true. I am a survivor, a contradictory balance of a realist and a dreamer, and on occasions, quite charming. Nevertheless, I often ask Spirit to keep His arms around my shoulder and His hand over my mouth. My heroes range from Henry David Thoreau to Sheldon Cooper, and I always have time to watch Big Bang Theory or Under the Tuscan Sun. I am a pragmatic romantic and a consummate lover of ideas and words, nature and time. My beloved husband and our three rambunctious cocker spaniels are the souls that populate my heart. I could spend the rest of my life restoring our Victorian home, planting tomatoes, and lying under coconut palms on tropical sands. I believe in Spirit, and have zero tolerance for irresponsibility, victim’s mentalities, political and religious orthodoxy, and intentional cruelty. I am always on the look-out for friends, people who find that life just doesn’t get any better than breaking bread together and finding humor in the world around us.

Hope, by Gillian

In my early days of working for IBM, on the bottom rung of the jobs ladder, I had a sign hanging by my workstation. It read,

I FEEL MUCH BETTER NOW THAT
I'VE COMPLETELY GIVEN UP HOPE.

I don't know why I found this so amusing, but I did. Of course, as soon as I advanced to the next rung of the ladder I had to trash it, but I and my co-workers enjoyed it at the time - indeed it became quite a catch phrase for a while.

Perhaps it seemed funny at the time because I was, then, so far from giving up hope. I was full of hope and dreams. It was 1966; the midst of the swinging sixties with their promise of change and freedom. I was twenty-four and had a job which paid more than I had ever dreamed of making - eighty-four dollars a week. My future was awash with wonders! I was not to be disappointed. My life became awash with wonders, as it still is.

But the words from that silly little sign have never left my head. They pop up from time to time. There are certain circumstances when I find them to be true. Hope is not always your best friend; certainly not when it morphs into denial. On one visit to England to see my parents, I noticed a certain confusion of thinking in my dad. Oh well! I shrugged it off. He was, after all, in his seventies. It was only to be expected. (He was, of course, the age I am now - something else I would rather not think too much about.) Filled with false hope I returned to Colorado, only to be summoned back across the Pond after a few months, to deal with the reality of Dad's dementia, which had worsened rapidly. My mother and I were both forced to abandon our hopes that he could remain at home and I set about learning my way through the bureaucracy of the British National Health Care System. I felt much better then, having abandoned all hope. Dad ended up in a facility for those with dementia in what was once the work-house in a local town. It was a very grim-looking building, but inside they had done everything possible to make it bright and cheerful, and the staff was wonderful. And it was free. I don't think Alzheimer existed back then, and we didn't have the knowledge of dementia which, sadly, we do now, but I knew enough to know there was no hope; that he would only get worse. The next, and last, time I saw him, he had no idea who I was. That was hard, but nothing like the shock it would have been had I been harboring false hopes.

One of my stepsons suddenly developed juvenile diabetes when he was eleven years old. Out of the blue, no more Xmas cookies, no birthday cake, no more of most of the food he loved. On top of that came the prospect of having to give himself an insulin injection every day of the rest of his life, and having constantly to measure and adjust his sugar levels. He cried. He raged. He threw things. He punched out at any of us who tried to hold him. Then suddenly, after a few crazy days, everything changed. He had given up hope and accepted his new reality. Of course he was not happy about it, but he had stopped fighting it. He is now retired from a lifetime at the post office, living happily in Nevada with his wife and large extended family. He told me once that the only time his diabetes really upset him was on a few occasions when he heard of the possibility of some big medical breakthrough, and felt a surge of new hope only to have it dashed. He had learned that hope was better avoided.

I have known people, and heard of many more, who, on receiving the terrible diagnosis of a terminal illness, were able to be at peace with it once they truly accepted that there was no hope. That is really living in the now, as our spiritual teachers would have us do. Hope is one of many things which prevent our doing that. We can never be fully in the present moment if we are forever dwelling in hopes and dreams of some future moment.

On the other hand, hopes and dreams of that better future can help those who see nothing to be grateful for in their ugly now. We recently watched a TV program, doubtless on PBS, about children growing up in poverty in this country. It was striking how many teenage boys found an incentive to stay in school, and more than that, to do well in their studies, because they hoped to get a football scholarship to college and go from there to professional football. It offered them at least a hope of a way out. What happens when they find they are not to belong to that tiny percentage of footballers, I don't know. Has hope set them up for a mighty fall, or have they by virtue of that very hope, found some other way out?

What the Tangerine Tyrant did to his voters is nothing short of cruel. (See, I just cannot get through one story without him creeping into it!) He gave gullible people hope; but false hope.

By now most of theirs must be crashing down. Where are the re-opened mines and factories they were promised? Where is the nice clean swamp? And now, certainly, what has happened to that tax break? Oh, it suddenly became a tax increase. And they are about to lose their healthcare. No, he has taken away what hope they had and left them much worse than they were before.

You just have to get your mind off all this stuff, so thank goodness for football season! I don't care that the Broncos are having the worst season in over fifty years. At least they know how to do it right. They are not only bad, they are spectacularly bad. Every week they fail to disappoint.

Yesterday they managed to have not one but two safeties scored against them. No team has done that since 1961. I mean, how good is that at being bad? Very clearly, they will not turn this season around.

I FEEL MUCH BETTER NOW THAT
I'VE COMPLETELY GIVEN UP HOPE.

© December 2017

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.

Fingers and Toes, by Ricky

I'm pretty sure one of the first things my mother and father wanted to know just after I was born was how many fingers and toes I was born with. Apparently, back in the 30's and 40's there was much talk among mothers about how someone they knew told them about someone else who knew someone who told how a child had been born with too many or too few fingers or toes. Perhaps the gossip included those who were born with webbed fingers or toes and other birth defects. So, parents were concerned about having a “normal” baby. Nothing about that has changed although the “rumors” about how common those type of defects are seeming to have faded. Nonetheless, when my children were born, I was in the delivery room for each birth and either the doctor or nurse would tell me the finger and toe count without my asking.

Looking back with my senior citizen point-of-view, I can say with confidence that it is not all that important how many fingers or toes one has, or even if they are different from the expected norm. What is truly important is, what one does with the fingers and toes he is given. Many people use their fingers to: create beautiful artwork; construct buildings; drive taxis or buses; win medals as Olympic victors; compose or play outstanding music; write stories based on their life after being given a weird keyword to jog memories loose, and et cetera. Unfortunately, there are also those who will use their fingers and toes for unpleasant or evil purposes, examples of which I won't bother to list.

I played toe games with my urchins until they became too big for baby games. My two favorite toe games were “Toes to Your Nose” and “This Little Piggy”. Both resulted in smiles and giggling, except the little piggy one which ended up in uncontrollable laughter as the foot was tickled as the piggy went “wee, wee, wee, all the way home”.

Even those with “unusual” fingers or toes can have productive and positive impacts upon their cultures. While serving as a deputy sheriff in Tucson, I had another deputy as my best friend. He was involved in a shotgun mishap as a teenager; losing two fingers on his left hand. Yet he didn't let that stop him from achieving his goal of becoming a deputy.

It is our reaction to the challenges life places before us that grow our character traits and make us the people we are. Sadly, all too many people fail to grow towards the light and instead emulate the stereotypical ostrich by sticking their heads in darkness and following roots down away from sunshine; their talents and skills either withering away or being used to weaken and destroy.

It is never too late to grow towards the light. Which direction are you growing?

© 30 Apr 2012

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 began living 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 terrorist attack.

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

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

Shades of Winter, by Ray S

During the past thirty years archaeologists have reconstructed important areas of the city of Ephesus in what was Asia Minor, now western Turkey. Although ranked a secondary discovery by comparison to the major art work, the so called Winter Shades have an importantly obscure presence to a small group of art historians. These scholars are referred to by their academic name of Winterous Shaditis.

This small group of long-buried paintings and mosaics are remarkable due to their very limited palette of neutral to very dark colors. There is little evidence of any warm hues. Theory has it that it is the celebration of the pagan Autumnal Equinox. A very cool time of the year.

Beside the almost colorless landscapes there is pictured a series of erotic celebrants surrounding a large fire pit—only instead of red hot flames there appears an ethereal cloud against a pale blue sky. The flesh tones of the nude women and men stand out against the soft gray and blue shades. Thus, the name Shadites.

Since this discovery, the temple of Winter Shades has become a very popular tourist attraction, to rival the other majestic remains of the city Ephesus, especially at the Autumnal Equinox when hotels and other accommodations are fully booked by new celebrants of the “Winter Shades of the Goddess Artemis”. There are many smoking pots now and luxurious warming rooms segregated for all persuasions. The holiday lasts for about ten days and then the ethereal clouds subside and collapse from exhaustion.

Make your reservations at least a year ahead for the Shadite lecture series to be followed by the circle celebration.

Temple of Artemis, Ephesus, 6^th Century BCE

This concludes my Winter Shades lecture; but review your notes and do further research as there will be an exam next week.

Anyone interested in a practice circle may attend rehearsal on next Saturday at the university gym, 8 to 12 pm. Clothing not optional.

© 13 March 2017 

About the Author 

Stories that Shaped My Life

Early on the nursery rhyme “Georgie Porgie puddin’ and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry, when the boys came out to play Georgie Porgie ran away” spoke to me because my mom sometimes called me Georgie Porgie. I may have been that little boy. But in my version he liked looking at the boys he sometimes ran away from. He learned to play with them also. Well you can imagine more parts to that story.

James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans grabbed my attention in 9th grade. I little understood it except to know that Indians were living where whites wanted to live and that Indians had Indian enemies and used the whites against them just as the whites used Indians against each other. While Cooper was a white, he opened the idea for me of becoming friends and benefitting from the Indians who knew the land so well and had their own ways of understanding and relating to it. Back then I understood little of the real conflict except to realize that these native people were being manipulated in ways I judged immoral. I was fascinated by the tribal ways of perceiving the world and appreciated their familial and tribal loyalties.

At church, missionaries told stories of carrying the gospel to other lands. I didn’t want to be a missionary but I did want to meet the people who understood the world so differently. This story structure challenged me to be open to others from far-away places and to appreciate the otherized perspectives of those who lived nearby. Dr. Victor Rambo’s story of finding a true and useful medical mission in India made sense to me. Son of missionaries, he wanted to help Indian people. His first attempts were unsuccessful. He earned a specialty in ophthalmology and returned to be very helpful for many years. Emulating him, his determination and courage, I realized his practical approach could help guide my own personal and ministerial development. I realized I needed to see real people with real needs.

For a long time the David cycle in the Bible, those stories about the boy, the young man, even the older man who became King of Israel, helped shape my moral life. I liked the David stories of loyalty, bravery, friendship, love, sin, and most important, of being a person one biblical author described as “a man after God’s own heart.” I liked that and its great flexibility. I was able to pattern myself somewhat like David (although I had little power and never murdered anyone for personal or political reasons), and I often used his stories in religious education resources I developed.

The stories of my Cambodian friend Narin Oum inspired me with his collecting and valuing of various religious traditions, seeing their connection in his own life journey. His conversion model was very tolerantly Asian Buddhist as he studied and became a Muslim and later a Christian. Hearing his story opened my imagination to new outcomes for my own life. I learned to value all my experiences and to let them instruct me how to understand my new life.

Ethan Mordden’s series of books about gay life in Manhattan with titles like I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore, Buddies, and How’s your romance? helped shape my gay life. These stories, some of them extreme, opened me to a vast world of information that exceeded what I’d learned from other writers and from my gay friend Ted. I got a view of the diversity of what is sometimes called gay identity and community. I realized my own experiences would be a tiny part of what actually takes place. I did find my own space within this diverse world of my own people, one that embraces GLBTs and many other queer folk.

I’m sure I still little understand how all these stories came together even in my mind. Still they help me navigate my life and open my eyes to possibilities that were never directly part of the curriculum of any school I attended or any theological or philosophical approach I encountered.

I love stories and their power to transform. I hope to keep learning in my maturity and plan to keep listening to your stories told here at The GLBT Center of Colorado.


© 2 October 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

Tears, by Pat Gourley

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government, I can not remain silent.” 

April 4th, 1967. Martin Luther King

More often than not these days when trying to write something for this group I am stumped with little coming to mind. Perhaps in part this is due to my having exhausted my “story”. And to be sure these days at my age I find myself doing many fewer things that might be worthy of repeating to anyone.

However, with this topic as I have pondered it over the past week I am struck with how many things actually do come to mind to write about. This may be related to the fact that through cable news, the Internet and social media in particular all manner of bad crap from the world over is continually barraging us and much of it is tear inducing.

I am a believer though that we live in the best of times and the worst of times. Not falling for a false romanticizing of ages gone by I do believe that for most of Earth’s people things were much worse in the not so distant past. Much work of course remains to be done however. I hope for worldwide Democratic Socialism and the death of Capitalism. That will require great effort, much more than just a Resist t-shirt, the occasional demonstration or a bumper sticker. To quote Oscar Wilde on the difficulty of the individual effort involved in creating change: “Socialism is great but it takes up too many evenings”.

Thinking about my own tears I am aware that it seems much easier for me to cry these days than it did several decades ago. For me the years 1985-1995 in particular were filled with so much death and suffering that perhaps I had become numb and immune to it and stopped being able to muster any tears. The death of my partner David in 1995 from AIDS related issues did however break the dam open and the tears began to flow again. Are the most genuine tears always personal?

Now it seems I can cry around a whole variety of issues. Things I see on TV often trigger tears. Rescues of abandoned pets or animal shelter adoptions that go well that are dutifully recorded on video and most often posted to Facebook prompt the waterworks.

Seeing people return to their burned out homes in California is particularly tear inducing. Also footage of refugees in boats is almost always a trigger for tears. The cholera epidemic in Yemen fueled in no small part by U.S. support of the Saudi inflicted violence raining down on that country is a very sad case in point and speaks directly to King’s statement above.

I was though most recently brought to tears reading a piece by Glenn Greenwald he had posted to the Intercept (the intercept.com): https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/

It is a multilayered and long story that is a very difficult read because of the content and the numerous photos of pigs being horribly abused in a factory farm in Utah. It is the story of two rescued piglets named Lilly and Lizzie and the draconian measures carried out by the FBI at the behest I assume of the factory farm in Utah that breeds and slaughters over a million pigs a year.

The piglets were rescued by an animal rights group called Direct Action Everywhere: https://www.directactioneverywhere.com

The FBI was enlisted to track down the piglets since animal rights activists on occasion have been designated as terrorists and numerous states now have AG-GAG laws which criminalize whistleblowers photographing and exposing the horrors of America’s factory farms. Good news on this front is that Utah’s AG-GAG law was recently ruled unconstitutional based on the First Amendment by a Federal judge. Stay tuned however since the First Amendment is under attack from many corners these days, very possibly including the Supreme Court.

So your tax dollars were at work when a caravan of FBI agents accompanying a veterinarian descended on an animal sanctuary in Erie Colorado to collect DNA samples from the suspected escapees Lilly and Lizzie even though the sanctuary itself had nothing to do with the piglets’ liberation. As of this writing Lilly and Lizzie are thought to be safe and both have recovered nicely from their horrific beginnings.

So for me I guess my tears are often painful but cathartic. But is crying about anything ever enough?

I don’t want to end on a preachy note but oh well what the hell. Addressing the carnage in Yemen will require many necessary evenings of activism, sorry Oscar, but helping Lilly and Lizzie and their millions of kin is much easier: just quit putting so much animal product in your mouth.

© October 2017

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Empathy, by Gillian

Hmm ... tricky. But so wonderful. Empathy eliminates hate, resentment, envy, in fact most negative emotions you can name. It replaces them with peace for the soul. But it's not easy.

Perhaps some people are just naturally given easier access to it than others, but I believe we can all improve our capacity for empathy no matter the starting point.

Empathy requires the ability to see through another's eyes, to feel what they feel and to stand in their shoes. For me, that requires some commonality with that person. In general I find a more intuitive empathy with a woman, for instance, than with a man. I frequently am able to find that empathy with men but it requires more work; more of a thought process to get me there. I easily empathize with the poor and dispossessed. I know, as many of us do, that my good life has come to me purely by chance. We look at the sad people on the street corner and say, there but for the grace of God go I. Most people can feel empathy with a child; we have all been one. All of us in this room, by our age, find easy empathy with grief. We have all felt it. Surely the entire LGBT community feels a kind of collective empathy, it's one of the reasons we like to be together. We don't have to explain ourselves to each other.

There is a great deal of talk of sexual harassment/abuse in the last couple of weeks. I immediately empathize with the woman, but have a struggle with the man. I can honestly say that I have never ever grabbed at or fondled any man or woman in any way inappropriately. Nor have I ever had any urge to do so. But if I think as honestly as I truly can about the lesser varieties of what we now term sexual harassment, I begin to see it through the man's eyes. Men of our generation have lived in confusing times. I honestly think that most, certainly many, who acted incorrectly, really believed that women wanted what men wanted. We had to put up some token objection because our mothers said we should, but we didn't really mean it; that old no really means yes syndrome. All too frequently, our protests did perhaps lack conviction. We were in a quandary. If we came on too strong with an ego-deflating rejection then the man, almost inevitably in a position of power over us, might take revenge. We would lose our job, or fail to get that deserved promotion or starring role. Or the man held some respected position in the community: priest, schoolteacher, doctor, lawyer, who would believe us if we spoke out? So we kept quiet. Other women were bribed into silence, leaving others open to the same abuse. Not that I blame the women who got bought off. Oh no, empathy with them comes easy. Which would you choose? Door #1, behind which lies nothing but screaming tabloid headlines and endless character assassinations, or door #2 which opens onto an easy life with everything that twenty million dollars can buy? No contest. And so, sadly, in different ways, we women were complicit in our own demise while men, lacking much evidence to the contrary, convinced themselves that we really did want what they wanted.

Don't get me wrong, I am talking here of the relatively benign offenses causing perhaps more discomfort and embarrassment than true trauma. Anything remotely approaching physical violence, rape, or pedophilia lies way way beyond the scope of my empathy. Which leads inevitable to that incredibly revolting excuse for a human being, Judge Moore of Alabama, who lies somewhere in the outer reaches of darkness millions of light years away from that little flash of illumination coming from any feelings of empathy from me. He is triply out of reach to me because not only is his behavior reprehensible, but he continues to deny it, and then wraps it all up in the cloak of religion and The Bible. I make no attempt to see what he sees; it would be of nightmare ugliness.

Those who support him are every bit as bad; possibly worse. The Alabama State Auditor, for example, sees nothing wrong with Moore making sexual advances to a fourteen year-old.

“There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here...,” Ziegler stated. "... Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

Hello-o out there! Did he miss the memo about The Immaculate Conception and The Virgin Birth?? Honestly, all you can do is shake your head in amazement. To raise one spark of empathy for these people I would need to think about it all for a very long time, and I have no stomach for that.

Every week when I start writing, I swear to myself that I will stay away from any mention of Trump, but somehow Agent Orange manages to insert himself. I have no empathy for Trump because I am not a sociopath, so cannot begin to stand in his shoes. But because he is, I truly believe, a sick man, I do not hate him either. Though when he so smugly promises us that ''big beautiful tax cut" for Xmas while in truth planning to raise our taxes and destroy our healthcare, I think just maybe I could.

Alas, empathy, like so many things, is a double-edged sword. The Orange Ogre (did I say I did not hate him??) stood in the shoes of a section of the country's voters and saw what they saw. He felt their anger, resentment, and fear, and built it up to the fever pitch of "lock her up". It was his very empathy with them, which he used with great cunning, which won him the election. (Though not without a little help from Putin and a shove over the line by the Electoral College.)

With the Trump voters, my empathy goes about half the distance to the goal. (Excuse the expression but we are in the midst of football season!) I can see the world through their eyes. I can feel their fear and anger and disillusion over a future of ongoing white male supremacy which they once felt was promised and which now seems to have been taken away. But I cannot accompany them into the divisiveness, bigotry, and hatred which accompanies their fears.

Since last year's election our country seems to be enveloped in a stinking dark miasma of Trumpian vitriol. Yet I, ever the political pessimist, do feel some hope. And it comes to me via empathy. We call it Resistance, but what engenders that but empathy? Sure, we all have our own personal fears which propel us to resist the horrors of the Trump agenda, but the vast majority of American people demonstrate great empathy. We feel the terror of refugees denied sanctuary, the despair of deportees and their destroyed families, the terrible fears felt by the families of the nine million children who will lose the healthcare provided under the C.H.I.P. program unless Congress acts before year-end. We see through the eyes of those abandoned in the devastation that is Puerto Rico, and the 60,000 Haitians who learn they must abandon their lives in this country and return to Haiti.

We empathize. We get it. We resist. If Robert Mueller doesn't save us, maybe our own empathy will. The bright light of empathetic resistance will dispel the threatening clouds of darkness. Maybe. Maybe that is our best hope. Maybe that is our last best hope. But then, I'm a political pessimist.

© November 2017

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.

Family, by Ricky

Families are forever. When we look back down our family tree through our parents’ linage, the roots dig the soil descending to the dawn of prehistory. Looking forward, the branches will produce the leaves of our posterity, assuming that nothing awful happens to prevent our offspring from reproducing. My personal family tree shows periods of good fertilization, cross pollination, reseeding, decay, and pruning. It is very interesting to me as the information I’ve been able to collect turns my roots into very real people with all the hopes, dreams, foibles, vices, and courage to risk all for a better future; and not just a list of names.

According to my side of the family, my great grandfather, John Charles Nelson, at the age of 15, immigrated from Sweden to the US by stowing away on a ship leaving Denmark for the US (or possibly Canada) to live with his older brother in Minnesota. Upon arrival, he probably worked in odd jobs, but in the summer, he was a “migrant” farm worker on various farmsteads. In his twenties, he married Bertha Nordin (pronounced nor-dean) and produced several children by her of which the oldest one was my grandfather, John Leonard Nelson. When John Leonard was 9 years old, his father died in a farming accident but no one recalls how. Bertha’s photograph shows her posing in the style of the mid 1800’s; sitting, wearing a dark full-length dress, hair held tightly up in a “bun”, and with a very stern or “no nonsense young man, thank you” look on her rather plain and unadorned face; no painted hussy this lady.

According to my great uncle’s side of the family, John Charles did indeed emigrate to the US but not from Sweden, but Denmark as they were citizens of Denmark. The only other difference in the story is they report that John Charles died in Cummings, North Dakota, of exposure (hypothermia) during an alcoholic stupor. Many civil records in Cummings were destroyed in a courthouse fire in the early 1900’s. Unfortunately, the local newspaper accounts of the day were also destroyed in another fire around the same time. I have not been able to prove either version correct, yet.

As a rather amusing aside to this story, I was in Bismarck, North Dakota, trying to find an obituary for John Charles as Bertha was living there about the time of his death. While reading an old newspaper, I stumbled across (how does one “stumble across” something while sitting down reading anyway?) a “letter to the editor” containing a complaint directly related to today's society.

The letter was written by a male shopkeeper, in about 1896, who was walking home after leaving the shop for the day. He wrote he was walking down the sidewalk and decided to take a shortcut through an alley. As he turned the corner into the alley, he noticed several boys, ages running from 6 thru 12, further down the alley. The older boys were paring up the younger boys and having them fight each other with the winner given a cigarette to smoke. He then wrote, “Now I don’t have anything against boys fighting; it’s a healthy form of exercise, but we have laws about tobacco being in the possession of minors and their not being enforced.” In over 100 years our society can’t seem to keep tobacco out of the hands of children. The more things progress, the more they stay the same.

I am sure all my immigrant forefather and foremothers (is that really a word?) were elated to arrive in America and begin building a better life for themselves and their eventual offspring. The result for John Charles, Bertha, and their children was rather tragic whether he died in an accident or due to alcoholism. That event greatly impacted future generations.

I once saw an old black and white photograph of my grandfather, John Leonard, when he looked about 9 years old, standing in snow in front of a farm style shed. He was wearing a parka, pants, and ¾ length boots. When I first glanced at it while searching a box of family photos, I thought it was a picture of me at age 9 on my mother’s father’s farm where I was living at that age. I did a double-take and looked at the photo and realized it wasn’t me or my dad or my uncle. I finally figured it out that it was my grandfather (his features closely resembled his adult photographs). I first thought it was me because the expression on his face looked like I imagined my face looked when my dad told me about the divorce and then left the next morning; a total depressed look of internal sadness.

John Leonard grew up supporting is mother and siblings, also by working odd jobs and as a farm worker. In due time, he married the rather pretty Emma Sophia Unger and fathered 7 children; five boys and two girls. The oldest boy, born on June 13th 1914, is my father, John Archie Nelson. In another tragic event, my grandfather died when my father was 9 years old. I never asked how he died or if I did, I don’t remember. When I was in my teens, I did ask my father if he worried about dying as I turned 9 years old. He said that he did indeed. Fortunately (or perhaps not considering later events involving me), he lived into his 70’s.

My father had to support his mother and siblings with only an 8th grade education acquired in a one-room schoolhouse. He went to school in the daytime and worked odd jobs, one of which was as a “house boy” (according to the US Census), until he was old enough to stop schooling and work on farms as a laborer.

He related to me the following story while driving us across a bridge he helped build during the years of Roosevelt's “New Deal” (or perhaps after WW2). The bridge was along US Hwy 101 near the California border with Oregon. It crossed a river in a not too deep but wide ravine. To construct such a structure a cofferdam had to be built first to divert the river around the foundation construction site so the concrete pillars could be made secure in large holes below the river’s bottom. One day as he was getting into the “elevator” to be lowered into the hole with the rest of the work crew, the foreman called him out and replaced him with another worker. He was then sent to work on a different area above ground. Later that morning the cofferdam failed and all the men in the pit were drowned. Lucky break for him and indirectly, me.

As WW2 progressed, he was working as a civilian construction worker at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, when the Japanese air force attacked to provide a diversion for their main attack on Midway Island. At the time, he was driving a truck in a sort of convoy along a road by the harbor. The truck three places in front of his was hit by a bomb with the normally expected results. So, once again we were lucky.

Sometime after that incident, he joined the army where he was sent to the European Theater of war. Once there, he was assigned to escort/guard German Prisoners of War (POW) on their voyage to the POW camps in the US. Once the war was over the prisoners by and large did not want to go back to Germany, he said, but they were returned anyway. Finally, he was sent to a base in Texas to await discharge. While waiting for his turn to get out of the army, he had time to obtain a civilian pilot’s license. After discharge, he returned to Minnesota to resume his civilian life. After marriage he worked as some type of factory worker and then as a postal worker and eventually retired from there very gruntled and not disgruntled.

My mother, Shirley Mae Pearson, married him in the Lutheran church in Cambridge, Minnesota, during November 1947. I was born to them 8 months later. That’s right I attended their wedding, but out of sight. Mother was born in her mother and father’s farmhouse in May of 1927 (the same year the first color television transmission was sent and received). She also was educated in a one-room schoolhouse thru the 8th grade and then attended high school in Cambridge. She was “confirmed” into the local Lutheran Church (the same one married in) and kept her faith although not practicing it openly; usually reading the Bible in private. She met my father in Minneapolis where she was working as a (I forget). For obvious reasons, after the wedding, they moved to Lawndale, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.

Mother had a job working for a company that made glues and foam rubber products. In fact, I still use the same pillow she made for me as a child. It has new ticking but still has the original shredded foam rubber inside. I think the company may have been a division of 3M. Anyway, the company’s claim to fame at the time mother worked for them was they made an artificial fluke and the glue to attach it on a whale that lost one off her tail. The whale was named Minnie and ended up living at Marine Land. The slogan was, “Minnie the whale with the detachable tail.”

Tragically, for me, if not for them, they divorced when I was young. During the process, I was sent to live with my mother’s parents on their farm in Isanti County in east-central Minnesota, just a few miles east of Cambridge.

Mother died in her 40’s while my twin half-brother and sister were only 14 (another tragedy) from the effects of liver cancer caused by smoking. I was married by then.

The lesson to be learned from all this; family trees can be blasted by life’s lightning, stressed by heavy winds, damaged in tragic fires, and wounded by lack of water; but still continue to live and prosper when nourished by frequent periods of love.

© 1 January 2011

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 began living 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 terrorist attack.

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

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

I Still Get a Thrill, by Ray S

As usual my mind drew a blank when the idea of a thrill was confronted.

It occurs to me that the word thrill, like many other descriptive terms, is a matter of relativity. I suppose it depends on how easily one is excited and that of course depends on one’s frame of mind at a given time.

How thrilling was a sunset? How thrilling was last night’s romance? Or how did that hot shower feel this morning? How much of a satisfying semi-thrill was it to find you hadn’t run out of dry cereal or toothpaste and hadn’t forgotten to feed the canary?

I would have preferred to “thrill” this assemblage with some sensational revelation about whatever would prove thrilling to you—this if you were even the least bit interested, much less thrilled.

But in retrospect I do need to acknowledge to you that I am just a wee bit thrilled to be here with all of you today and have you share my pretty un-thrilling trivia.


P.S. just remembered how thrilled I was with the chocolate cup cakes I made and how they tasted. It is another semi-thrill, give or take.

© 25 September 2017

About the Author