Anxious Moments, by Gillian

This topic started badly. I found myself humming, endlessly, that old Perry Como hit - except I kept thinking his name was Perry Mason which did give me an anxious moment!

Anxious moments, moments we've been sharing ....... finally I realized, no! That was magic moments ..... but it hasn't helped and that old tune is still going round and round in my head.

But back to anxious moments. Of course I've had them; plenty of them. You don't get to my age without them do you? Even if you're not one of the world's natural-born worriers, which I am not. You still have anxious moments unless maybe if you're some kind of psycho- or socio- path. Maybe they escape them. I don't know. I don't belong to that group either.

The thing is, I've already shared with this group many of my life's anxious moments, so I will simply touch the surface of a few. And if you occasionally get a feeling of deja vu, no it's nothing surreal, just me repeating myself - again!

Earliest memories of anxiety all revolve around my mother. Being responsible for her mother's happiness is a burdensome thing for a little girl. I used to let her win at games, always anxious lest she should spot my subterfuge. I expressed boundless enthusiasm for the latest strange dish she cooked or peculiar garment she knitted, all of which resulted from many anxious moments for my mother. It wasn't that my mother was just by nature incompetent, though there was a little of that, but simply that she had such limited resources due to wartime rationing. The World War Two philosophy of make do and mend was not a natural fit for her. Now of course, looking back, I am eternally grateful that these petty anxieties were the worst inflicted upon us at a time when so many had so very much more to worry about.

As rationing diminished after the war, new anxieties over my mother's happiness arose. Things which she remembered from the pre-war days with such excitement, began to reappear.

She was so thrilled to be able to introduce them into my life. I tried hard not to disappoint. For some reason, pop (which my mother referred to quaintly as a 'fizzy drink') and ice cream returned, at least to our neck of the woods, at the same time. Mum and I stood in line forever, she barely able to contain her excitement at this new and wonderful experience about to come my way, and finally we got a little table in the crowded cafe. I peered doubtfully at a blob of some dubious white substance slowly melting in my little flowered bowl, and the even less salubrious reddish-brown liquid in my glass. Lots of bubbles swam to the top of the glass where they congealed to form a scummy-looking foam rather like that sometimes floating on a neighboring farmer's pond; or the beer my dad occasionally drank. My mother was waiting, her face aglow with anticipation. I spooned a large helping of ice cream into my mouth and, feigning great enthusiasm, followed it immediately with a big gulp of Coke. Unaccustomed to 'fizzy drinks', the effervescence caught me by surprise. My little mouth let out a big gasp, and a mixture of ice cream and pop shot into my wind pipe whence shortly after it escaped down my nose to return, in ugly drips, to my little flowered bowl. I coughed loudly. I couldn't get my breath. I was scared and I started to cry. The anticipation on Mum's face turned to horror. Not, I understood even at that young age, for fear I might choke and die, which indeed was my fear at that moment, but because we were making a scene! Everyone in the cafe was looking. Those still lining up outside craned their necks to see and asked each other what was happening. My mother, absolutely mortified, picked me up and scuttled outside and away as fast as she could go. I coughed and hiccuped and sobbed my way home, devoured by guilt that I had so failed to bring her happiness.

Decades later, after my dad died, I had sleepless nights of anxiety over my mother trying to cope all alone in our old cold damp house with no heating except for the coal fire, and with few neighbors. It was with great relief that I finally persuaded her to move into assisted living in the local town, but even after her physical safety was pretty well covered, I still fretted anxiously over her psychological health. While she lived, I was never able to free myself of that responsibility I felt for her happiness, however illogical.

Other anxieties throughout my life have never reached anything like the strength of those concerning my mother. See, I can't even stop writing about it. I said I would skim over my anxieties and immediately got all bogged down in those tales of my strange dynamic with Mum.

The rest I really can touch lightly upon.

A pang of anxiety on my first day of work at IBM. I'd be working on bombs, they said. Ever a pacifist, from centuries of Quaker heritage, I was horrified. Who knew IBM made bombs? It was with great relief that I saw it in writing as BOMs without the second b and learned that it meant Basic Operational Memory.

All the inevitable anxieties over raising children, in my case made in some ways less and others more by them being my step-children. Endless anxieties over the eldest. I loved the boy. I loved the man. But his teenage alcoholism sent him into a fast-forward path to a heartbreakingly early death at the age of fifty. I still grieve.

Anxieties over children never really go away even if, by now, they are not only parents but grandparents themselves. Should I have anxiety for my great-grandchildren in this insane world?

I cannot. I cannot picture what exactly my anxiety should encompass. For better or worse, their lives will be so very different from ours.

A touch of the anxieties we all feel as we age and future joys such as cancer, stroke, dementia and nursing homes rear up on the horizon, looming ever larger. But I find these are in truth minor anxieties. We're all gonna’ go, sometime, someway!

In fact, as I age, I seem to have lost most of my middle-of-the-road kind of anxieties, which were mostly about others. The anxious moments which stay with me are either very small and completely self-centered, or over the Big Picture.

My tiny personal anxieties really do not loom large in my life. I don't watch Betsy's tennis matches because they give me occasional anxious moments; not because I care if she wins or loses but because I know she does. I get anxious in a way I never did in my younger days when i have to negotiate unfamiliar traffic patters. I'm always anxious not to be late so I arrive to almost everything half an our early.

If any anxieties keep me awake at night, which would be rare, they encompass the Big Picture. What can we really do about climate change? What can we really do about our President's insane 4:00 a.m. tweets? How do we get our country back onto something like a sane path?

I find I can just let it all go. I play my small part. It's all I can do. Anxious moments accomplish nothing. I hope to give them up completely.

© June 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.

Explorations, by Ricky

“Exploration” and 8-year old boys naturally go together as it is part of a boy’s job description along with: mischievousness, recklessness, inquisitiveness, disobedience, playfulness, rowdiness, loud, annoying (“Are we there yet?”, and the ever popular “Why?” repeated ad nauseaum), seekers of anything remotely fun (especially if it involves dirt or mud). But the description also contains: loveable, unlimited energy, full of wonder at new things, dreamers, and the all powerful over riding (and indefinable) “cuteness factor.” It doesn’t matter from what background or environment or race or culture a boy comes from (as long as no one has beaten such characteristics out of him) all boys share this common job description.

My story actually has its roots in 1953 with my first day of kindergarten. My grandmother dressed me in old style “baby” clothes (that in her day were perfectly acceptable girlish styles for little boys) as often as she could. My mother wisely stopped that practice when I began school. Unfortunately, her choice of shoe styles did not match the opinions of other boys of the same age or older. I had to wear sandals with wingtip style little holes punched into the leather. That day I learned the word “sissy” and I did not like it. So, I pitched a fit (mostly crying) and my dad over ruled mother and I got normal shoes that very evening. Nonetheless, “sissy” did not disappear from other boys’ vocabulary when referring to me for the next three years (K-2).

Now enter 1956, I (a newly arrived 8-year old), was sent to live on my grandparents’ farm in central Minnesota while my parents (unbeknownst to me) were arranging their divorce. Suddenly, I had a whole farm to explore that summer (and ultimately), autumn, winter, and spring in rotation. Eighty acres of new frontier for the world’s greatest trapper ever known, to bring in beautiful animal pelts for the ladies back east to wear. (Okay, so they really weren’t buffalo or bear pelts, but if an 8-year old boy squints just right under the proper lighting conditions, gopher skins can look just like buffalo or bear hides.)

1956 was the year of my awakening to the expanded world of exploring everything on the farm: the barn, milk house, hayloft, silo, chicken coop (stay away from there—guarded by a vicious rooster; Hey! I was only 8 and the rooster was “big”), granary, workshop (nice adult stuff in there), equipment shed where various farm implements were stored until needed, and the outhouse (the stink you “enjoyed” twice a day). State and county fair time brought other places to explore: animal barns (varieties of chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, horses, etc.), judging of canning, 4-H, displays of quilts, new farm machinery (tractors, bailers, rakes, manure spreaders (yucky!), thrashers, and combines), and of course the midway (yea!!) in the evenings.

As summer waned and school began I met and made a few friends: two farm kids (one even in my third-grade class); and several “townies” (my best townie friend was the son of the high school football coach). I also discovered that one of my dad’s brothers and two cousins also were townies. I had ridden school busses for three years in Los Angeles so that was not new. One of my farm friends and I were part of the “space race” as we would design rocket ships every evening and then compare them on the bus ride to school the next morning. (Hmmmmm. Could that have been early “training” to enjoy phallus shaped things?) Another farm boy and I did a bit of exploration of another type while riding the bus to school with our coats covering our crotches (use your imagination—and “No” we never got caught).

Another school-yard “exploratory” activity involved games. One favorite among all students (townies and farm boys) was marbles. Our version involved scooping out a shallow depression next to the wall of the school, placing the marbles we wanted to risk (bet) into the depression, and then stepping back a distance (which increased with each turn) and attempting to roll a “shooter” into the depression so it stayed. If more than one boy’s shooter stayed in, the two “winners” would roll again from a greater distance and repeat the process until there was only one shooter in the depression. The winner would then collect all the marbles in the hole and the betting process would begin again. Sadly, I don’t remember the name of this game.

The second game we called Stretch. I can’t speak for the townies, but all self-respecting farm boys had a small pocket knife in one of his pockets all the time (including at school). [Can’t do that today due to fear of violence in schools.] In this game two boys would face each other and one would start by throwing his knife at the ground at a distance calculated to be beyond the reach of the other boy’s leg. If the knife didn’t stick, it was retrieved, and the other boy took his turn. If the knife stuck, the other boy would have to “stretch” one leg/foot to touch the knife all the while keeping the other leg/foot firmly in place where he had been standing. If he was successful in touching the knife without moving the other foot, he retrieved the knife, returned it to its owner, and then took his turn of throwing the knife. If he could not touch the knife, he lost the game and another boy would take his place challenging the winner.

The third and fourth games were “King of the Hill” and snowball fights (obviously reserved for winter recess). I trust I don’t need to describe these. With all of these games, I (we) were “exploring” our limits or increasing our skills.

The elementary part of this school was of the old style, a “square” three story edifice with one classroom located at each of the corners of the first two floors and storage rooms on the third floor. The restrooms were in the basement and (miracles of miracles) the rope to ring the bell up in the cupola on the roof ran all the way into the boys’ restroom. “Yes,” even during a pee break (raise one finger and wait for permission) I would occasionally “just have to” “explore” pulling on that rope and then run back to class (remember the job description—mischievous).

Anyway, 1956 is when the “sissy” got lost and I became all boy.

© 26 March 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

Maps, by Ray S

I believe that along with counting all the fingers and toes and necessary plumbing each one of us is issued a map. This is a map that charts out the many roads we may or may not venture onto. There will be the inevitable dead ends, forks in the road leading to where? Most of we dreamers look for the legend marking the Yellow Brick Road, and occasionally it is found. Then there are a good number of us that don’t study our map or perhaps never open it. We just head for the dark woods and wander aimlessly through life gathering rosebuds where we may.

If there is a goal, it just happens as we trudge on through the expedient trail or path.

It can happen to a fortunate select group that broke the seal on their maps to plan their routes to health, wealth, and of course, happiness. We’ve all met one of those hims or hers.

All of the roads on your map will lead to great and small adventures, and ultimately end at the same destination.

© 25 March 2017

About the Author

Clearly, by Phillip Hoyle

My writing teachers are still trying to teach me to write clearly. That seems like quite a challenge for a teacher to take on. While most of my instructors really have liked me—I am easy to get along with—they have had little clue of how my mind works, its story-laden way of expressing truth, its constant internal argument about what this writer wants, believes, and cares about, its strange logic, and its confusion over things spatial. Now that’s a special-education brain if there ever was one. I’m neither proud of nor ashamed it, for it’s the only one I have. Many teachers have set out to set me straight. Obviously they failed to do that although they have taught me many helpful and creative processes, ideas, and the like.

When I was first given a contract for a write-for-hire curriculum resources project and sent in my first draft of the first session, it came back to me looking very sorry, dripping in red ink and words of encouragement. I made the required changes—the ones in red ink—and thought through all the suggested comments—written in blue pencil. I didn’t have to make all these blue changes. I quickly typed in the red comments and found out that my editor took my awkward, unclear sentences and with a few red-ink changes made them say exactly what I meant. I was impressed and wondered where I was when they were handing out brains. What did I ask for? Perhaps I just wanted to have a good time which might not necessarily mean to think clearly.

My patient teachers have had to slow me down, to make me read and reread everything about a hundred times, over a time period lasting several months, sometimes several years. Of course that never works in write-for-hire jobs; the editors have deadlines to meet. I gave them things on time and looked forward to their corrections to make clear just what I was trying to say. I guess for them my being on time was a higher value that first-try clarity. They kept using me for ten years. Then I was done with that kind of writing.

Unfortunately, SAGE of the Rockies “Telling Your Story” program doesn’t give me enough time. I mess around in my early morning writing and scratch a few lines or run to the word processor and peck away hoping not to compound my lack of clarity with too many typos. It’s fun to write these stories, and I hope no listeners or readers spend too much time trying to analyze my logic or even common sense. If I have logic I’m sure it’s not common. If you hear or read something funny, just laugh. If I’m around I’ll smile with you. It’s all just another story to me. Did I say that last clearly enough?

And thanks for being as patient as have been my teachers and editors. 

© 20 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

My First GLBT Acquaintance, by Pat Gourley

I saw that today’s topic was actually Dancing with the Stars. I am aware that this is the name of a long-standing television series of the same name that I think involves teams of contestants in competitive-dancing with often B-grade celebrities. And I must admit I have never watched a single minute of this show and I mean no offense to anyone who enjoys it. Really how can somewhat like me who is addicted to reruns of The Big Bang Theory and the Golden Girls throw shade at anyone else’s TV viewing habits?

I could I suppose make a big stretch and turn ‘dancing with the stars’ into a metaphor for one of my past particularly enjoyable LSD adventures but instead I’ll write a few lines on last week’s topic: My First GLBT Acquaintance. Let me say right out of the box I have no idea who my first real GLBT acquaintance was since like all of us of a certain age I was birthed into the stifling cauldron of a falsely presumed heterosexual universe. We were in many ways unrecognizable to one another until we demanded to be called by our real names. A nearly universal experience we all relate to was the question of whether or not we were alone asking “am I the only one who is this way”. Our first acquaintance would I hope for most of us be a glorious answer to that question.

As I was writing this and had Pandora playing in the background I was unaware of any tune until Lou Reed’s masterpiece Walk on the Wild Side just came on. Released in 1972 this opus chronicles the adventures of a cast of characters all headed to New York City and a ‘walk on the wild side’.

I would take the liberty to say that through transexuality, drug use, male prostitution and oral sex they may have all been looking for and perhaps found that first GLBT acquaintance. Holly, Candy, Little Joe, Sugar Plum Fairy and Jackie all seem to have been based on real people from Reed’s life in NYC back then. All of whom I would say were very queer people.

We were fortunate in this SAGE Story Telling Group to get a glimpse of this albeit dangerous but deliciously exciting world Reed describes in his song through the frequent writings of a dear friend who died recently. As he related to us on several occasions his walks on the wild side started in the tearooms of downtown Denver department stores but would eventually be played out most emphatically on the streets of NYC. He often honestly provided glimpses into this world, that like it or not, is an integral part of our collective and frequently personal queer history. Thank you, dear friend!

For the sake of this piece I am going to say that “acquaintance” implies a mutual recognition that we are both queer as three-dollar bills. When using this definition the task of identifying my first acquaintance is much easier. This first person I suppose also represents my own personal “walk on the wild side”. As I have written about on previous occasions this ‘acquaintance” was a man 20 years my senior who I had been passive-aggressively courting for a year. We took a real ‘walk on the wild side’ and had sex (my first!) in the biology lab of my Catholic High School festooned with crucifixes on the wall. It was Easter week and I was a soon to graduate Senior. I am eternally in debt to this man for launching in very loving fashion my great ongoing gay adventure.

If there has been one thing that our liberation efforts the past century have provided it is that many but certainly not all new ‘recruits’ to the queer world do not have to have that first acquaintance involve a ‘walk on the wild side’. The fruits of success I suppose though work remains to be done and for some us perhaps a sense of nostalgia for a long gone but often very exciting times.

© July 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.

Evil, by Gillian

I'm just sitting here gazing blankly at an equally blank page. I can't seem to get started with this one. The basic problem is, like all of you I try to relate the topic of the week to some personal history, and I have none regarding evil. I can't say I have ever met, or even had a passing remote acquaintance with, anyone I could ever see as evil.

Sure, I know of people who are frequently described as evil - Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Osama Bin Laden, Charles Manson, Kim Il-sung and now Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein; on and on and on. I have on not so rare occasions called The Tangerine Tyrant, and all who sail with him, evil. But I do not know any of them personally. Neither, come to that, do I want to. I must have been touched, at least indirectly, by Hitler, but I was too young to connect the dots.

And, just as I write this, it occurs to me that evil, and/or the direct results of it, seem to be creeping ever closer. With madmen on both sides of the Pacific, some kind of horrific confrontation between The U.S. and North Korea looms ever larger. Meanwhile, our country drifts rudderless on international waters with no-one at the helm. Our military, overburdened with the weight of international policy, now abdicated by Trump, in addition to traditional military decisions, flounders. While here at home the evildoers threaten ordinary hard-working law-abiding citizens - the vast majority of us, in fact - with cruel and unusual punishments: worsening working conditions, decreasing environmental protections leading, quite probably, to increased sickness at a time when they are taking away our healthcare. Utter madness. Or evil.

I suspect they are frequently entwined.

And does it matter? It is what these people we choose to call evil do which is evil. Whether the perpetrators are evil themselves, or just crazy, or have a belief system very different from our own, is not important; at least, not unless I need, for my own satisfaction, to judge them. In that case, what it is which causes them to do things which I judge to be evil might be important. I might be robbed of my righteous anger, or seething hatred, of the Orange Ogre if I had to accept that he is mentally ill, or was severely traumatized as a child. Personally, I have no intention of going there. I know, from long experience of trying, that I am incapable of getting inside the heads of those who hold attitudes and beliefs very different from mine. I no longer try. For whatever reason, they are what they are. I cannot change them. All I can do is fight back, not against the person but against the evil that they do. As Edmund Burke so famously said, all it takes for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing.

My second responsibility is to myself; my own sanity. I must not allow anger to take over. It will destroy me. It's a completely negative emotion with no positive outcome. Buddha said many wise things about anger, as he did about so many things.

You will not be punished for your anger, he says, but by your anger.

He also says,

Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

Someone - other than Buddha but apparently anonymous, maintained,

Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Evil, alas with greater odds than the peace which passes all understanding, will probably be with us and remain with us always. If I fight it every way I can while keeping myself free of the clutches of anger, I will say I have done my job. And, seeing that I have fallen once more into quotations, as I so often do to save further effort of original thought, I will try to keep Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy in mind -

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.

© June 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.

Delusions, by Ray S

A good way to begin would be “when the curtain went up on the 1st Act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Only there was no curtain. Just a dark stage that became visible revealing and focusing on the beautifully endowed—depending on how one looks at it—nude body of Brick the first half of Tennessee Williams’ couple in the play. The second half being the character Maggie who commands the whole 1st Act once the audience recovers from Brick taking a shower on stage. She too is beautiful to behold with or sans clothes.

This is not going to be a review of the performance, although it was very well done! But, I do want to point out for those of you who might not remember or have never seen or been familiar with the play that the premier revolves around the male character finally forcing and coming to terms with his probable homosexuality and that of his closest boy friend. All of this rebounding on to his wife Maggie and their dismal if not nonexistent sex life.

I am not telling how all of this is resolved. Read the book!

To add to my cultural stew, presently I am reading a book I should have read when I was a good deal younger and a good deal very ignorant. Chalk this up to a delayed adolescence, overwhelming naiveté, and not emotionally developed beyond the birds and bees lore.

Quote: “If I knew then what I know now.” Nevertheless, my literary friend D. H. Lawrence has succeeded in introducing me to Lady Chatterley at this late date, and so far there has been only one reference to homosexuality, and that was in minimal clinical capacity.

The author rewrote the book three times and was condemned for the explicit immorality, frank and descriptive adventures of the Lady and her man. So much for hetero sex.

Here is my problem: why didn’t Lawrence’s version of hetero sex even rear its beautiful head when I was misguidedly flirting with that genre?

At the cumulative age of this group of say 750 years, and knowing that sexual endeavors of many stripes have been pursued by the lot—not unlike the Will o’ the Wisp in some dark moment I wonder what the hetero road more travelled or travailed would have been like?

Rest assured like that Will o’ the Wisp it has proven unlikely, and as Mr. Webster writes it is just another “delusion,” a “false belief” and maybe persists psychotically.

Returning to reality, our road is the best road, so travel it happily and gaily.

Will-o-wisp

1 a light seen over the marshes at night, believed to be marsh gas burning

2 a delusive hope or goal

Delude

1 to mislead or deceive, (delusion, to mislead or deceive), a deluding or being deluded

2 a false belief, specifically one that persists psychotically

© 26 February 2018

 

Will O' the Wisp, by Louis Brown

I was a little surprised that so many of our authors were not familiar with this expression. When I was a child, the Will o’ the Wisp was in the category of Jack o ‘Lantern—which originally meant pretty much the same thing, flashes of light seen over swamp land—and pumpkin. It was a Halloween word. One of our authors offered “mirage, rainbow and lightning bug” as synonyms. Exactly, they all capture the idea of a fleeting beautiful object or state of affairs that you reach out for to make real, and then frustratingly it disappears or flies out of your reach.

I would offer as synonym the pop song, “Abra cadadbra, I want to reach out and grab you.”

When I was in the eighth grade, I went to science class taught by a Mr. Schiff. I blushed when I saw him. He was tall and handsome, and I wanted him to notice me. He didn’t. He was beyond my reach, a will o’ the wisp.

I am still dazzled by the John F. Kennedy White House. A handsome well-educated Irishman from liberal Massachusetts, and the beautiful, soft-spoken well-educated Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy promoted French studies and literature. She redecorated the White House with a French accent. It was Camelot, a “Utopia,” it was perfect. Then a jerk with a rifle blows him away, and Camelot disappears. A will o’ the wisp.

Now our Republican friends insist that our presidents be ignorant, backward and hostile to public education.

Mirage is more for the west (where we reside now). Betsy lived in swampy Louisiana for 3 years. I hale from College Point which is a small hill surrounded on 3 sides by swampland, where some interesting wildlife used to reside. The rather vast wetlands up and down the coast from Charleston, S. C. If you tour them, along your path you will discover little cabins that used to house the slaves that cultivated rice, another big cash crop back in those ante bellum days. Of course, nearby cotton was king. The tour guide will point out the very shallow ponds where the rice used to grow. The cypress trees, the flowering shrubs make the area even more beautiful and mysterious.

St. Elmo's fire is a bright blue or violet glow, appearing like fire in some circumstances, from tall, sharply pointed structures such as lightning rods, masts, spires and chimneys, and on aircraft wings or nose cones.

St. Elmo's fire can also appear on leaves and grass, and even at the tips of cattle horns.[5] Often accompanying the glow is a distinct hissing or buzzing sound. It is sometimes confused with ball lightning.

In 1751, Benjamin Franklin hypothesized that a pointed iron rod would light up at the tip during a lightning storm, similar in appearance to St. Elmo's fire.

2 or 3 years ago, I did a report on male or masculine dancing, and I referred to a porno flick that I now remember the name of. The porno flick was called “Males in Motion.” Actually, it was not a porno flick though it was produced by a porno flick maker.

Actually, I was wrong, I treated masculine dancing as a brand new genre. In fact, Chippendale and Hollywood in general had male dancing pretty well developed and popularized.

We can develop the theme of disappearing aspirations when it comes to establishing an international organization with enough power to impose international peace based on a fairer economic system and cooperative governments. That is not the current situation so that we have perpetual war, in part thanks to our government’s neo-con pointless bellicosity.

© 25 March 2018

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.

Curious, by Phillip Hoyle

I was curious about a book and then found myself in it. My young wife was studying to become a teacher, and a text from her ed-psych class caught my attention. There I read a developmental description of children. It seemed especially pertinent to my life in its description of boys in their upper elementary grades. Ever since that time I have looked at children in terms of their development using several schemes: psycho-sexual, psycho-social, cognitive, affective, and several more off shoots. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to observe having reared children in our home (ours and foster children), taught in churches, and directed children’s residential camps, on and on. I even taught developmental theory to workshop leaders in a denominational program to equip teachers in local churches. Now in retirement I have fewer opportunities for this observation, but when they present themselves, I look with scrutiny.

One neighborhood boy now probably ten, I first met when he was two or three. George was sitting on the step up to the neighbor’s sidewalk watching a large backhoe dig a huge hole in the asphalt street and explaining to his mother just what they were doing. The work was part of the installation of new storm sewers to replace the old-fashioned cisterns. There was little George with his mother watching the construction. I greeted his mother and met George. “He loves watching the tractors,” she said. “All last summer he made me take him over to South Broadway to see the trucks and tractors when they were rebuilding the street.”

“You certainly are curious,” I said sitting down next to the little boy. Was that a literary allusion? George’s school-teacher mother surely caught it. I did as well and said to the lad, “I’ll call you Captain Curious if that’s okay.” He didn’t say no. So during the weeks the construction was underway I called him Captain. He smiled. His mother encouraged his curiosity and now was relieved that this hole on our street was his new attraction, just half a block away.

Years have passed. He matured, became the elder brother. Their house is just far enough that I don’t often see George, his mother, dad or the younger brother, but when I happen to be in the front yard and they are going by, we stop to talk. I’ve wondered if my name-giving still holds. I now call him George, not Captain Curious. Kids do grow up. Still I watch for signs of his curiosity. What I see now is usually him whizzing by on a bicycle or a foot scooter or running by with some sort of ball to play with our neighbor boy Charley. George is more shy now, a common effect of growing up, but I believe he is still curious. He plays. He seeks out peers to play with. He practices. Also he does his homework (his mother told me). I take it to indicate he is as mentally bright as he is friendly.

One day last summer as I was pulling weeds from the flowerbeds, I noted that George was playing alone in their front yard. He had a football and was tossing and catching it. Playing center he’d hike it into the air, then turn around and catch it like the quarterback. He was passing, running, tackling, being tackled, evading his competitors and, I’m sure, barely winning a victory for his home team. He’s fun loving, physically coordinated, good looking, and according to his mom, still curious.

Of course, watching others is always as much memory as it is a present reality. I’m so glad I had friends, a rich upbringing, a noisy family and neighborhood, and the freedom to explore my fascinations in libraries, youth organizations, and an ever widening boundary for those explorations. I had friends—Keith, Dinky, Marvin, and Dick less than two blocks away. I didn’t have much time to be bored and when I was alone I’d throw baskets through the hoop above the garage door—well at least I’d try—and engage in other interests that filled my time and taught me skills and concepts. I feel privileged now to live in a neighborhood where I am reminded somewhat of my childhood curiosity. Life is grand. Old age continues to be quite bearable, for I am still curious and engaged.

I’m getting ready to meet the family with grandkids and great grandkids for Christmas. I wonder what I’ll observe this year. If it’s too much, I’ll simply grab an early plane for my return to my curious retirement.

© 11 December 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

Don't, by Pat Gourley

“ Do or do not. There is no try.”

The Buddha

This quotation, ostensibly from the Buddha, is on my current favorite t-shirt. This is my favorite shirt since it has a long tail and easily covers my big belly. The belly fat is due in large part to two things: my major sweet tooth that seems to primarily kick in between seven and nine PM every night and my HIV meds that rapidly accelerate the metabolic syndrome that leads to abdominal fat deposition. My protruding belly is in stark contrast to my gaunt, wasted looking face that makes even Keith Richards look good on his worst days. I won’t even address the current sorry state of my ass.

The above quote may remind some of you of a line from Star Wars spoken by Yoda. The Yoda version also goes something like this just with more dramatic punctuation: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” The Empire Strikes Back.

Supposedly Yoda lived to be 900 years old but the Buddha still has him beat by living at least several millennia prior so I am going with Buddha as the originator of this famous line. This I suppose could be a phrase comparable to the infamous “shit or get off the pot”. No hanging out on the throne reading the paper. For god-sakes focus and commit to the task at hand or not.

At first blush with this topic I thought I want to be a ‘doer’ rather than responding to the often-harsh command: don’t! Then it quickly occurred to me that there have been many “don’t-directives” in my life that I have to say have proved helpful. A few that come to mind are: don’t play in traffic, don’t own a gun, and don’t eat lead paint chips, don’t pick-up that snake or don’t sashay into a straight bar on Bronco Sunday afternoon and ask, what ya watchin’ fellas? And the one that I saw recently on Facebook, “don’t come out of the bathroom smelling your fingers no matter how fragrant the hand soap was you just used.”

Perhaps I was overly primed to see the following based on today’s topic but in reading a nice long article on Larry Kramer in the NYT’s from last week I was particularly drawn to several quotes by Kramer using the word “don’t”. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/nyregion/larry-kramer-and-the-birth-of-aids-activism.html

I’ll get to the quotes in a bit but for those of you perhaps not familiar with Larry Kramer he first came on the national gay scene in a significant way with the publication of his prescient 1978 novel Faggots. The novel was a rather unflattering though brutally honest look at the wild sexual abandon of gay male life in the later half of the 1970’s. Kramer as a result was persona non grata in the gay world but with the onset of the AIDS nightmare a few years later Faggots took on an air of prophecy.

Kramer also has significant accomplishment’s in the worlds of film, theatre and literature but perhaps in some ways most impacting were his successful efforts around AIDS activism. He was a seminal founder of both the New York based Gay Men’s Health Crisis and a few years later of the iconic and change creating movement called Act Up. I have included a link to this NYT piece on Kramer and highly recommend it as an important historical snapshot of this great gay man and his many accomplishments. He is a consummate example of the real life advice contained in the phrase “don’t be afraid” or to again shamelessly exploit an old Buddhist bromide “leap and a net shall appear”.

Quoting Kramer from the NYT’s article: “I don’t basically have fences to mend anymore. The people I had fights with down the line, some are dead. But even when we fought, I think we were always — I love gay people, and I think that’s the overriding thing in any relationship that I have with anyone else who’s gay. Never enough to throw them out of my life. I’ve never had huge fights with anybody. Much as I hate things about the system and this country, in terms of the people I deal with, I don’t have any.”

I have been keenly aware of Larry Kramer and his many bold and often at times very controversial proclamations and actions since 1978. He has pricked my conscience on numerous occasions shaming me actually to do more than I would have without his kick in the ass but still never achieving his level of fearless integrity. I still today in many ways lamely persist with my own at times crippled activism.

It is 2017, almost 40 years since the publication of Faggots, and as Larry reminds us, at age 81, in his last quote in the article the struggle continues: “I don’t think that things are better generally,” he said. “We have people running this government who hate us, and have said they hate us. The fight’s never over.”

© May 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.

Quirky Domestic Situations, by Ricky

Me? Quirky? I don't think so. I'm perfectly normal in every way even for a gay guy. Very nondescript, average looking, wonderful personality (so I've been told and I choose to believe it) and nothing quirky about me. So, I felt very secure in asking my oldest daughter if she thought there was anything quirky about me; knowing all along that she couldn't think of anything even if she thought more than her 30-second attention span for caring about anything I say.

Apparently, it was a case of me not seeing the forest because the trees were in the way; or (as the Bible puts it in Matthew, Chapter 7) a case of “mote” “beam” sickness. Let's see if I can remember accurately. My daughter thought for all of 3 seconds and came up with “The Lord of the Rings”.

Apparently, every time we have guests over I always ask them at some point if they like to read books and if so what type. (My daughter keeps track of these things somehow; I don't keep count.) Not long after the topic of books and movies turns up, someone, not always me, will bring up “The Lord of the Rings”; at which time a 15 to 30 minute discussion of the book and movie will follow. My daughter has grown very tired of hearing it over and over.

The last time it happened was two weeks ago. She had invited the church missionaries over for dinner. I was on my way home from somewhere and called to let her know. She informed me that the missionaries were there for dinner so I asked if I was invited or should I eat before I came home. She told me to come on home. She told us all later, that at this point she wanted to add that I could come home to eat, if I did not talk about “The Lord of the Rings” but she did not say it. I came home. We all sat down to eat and during the small talk, my daughter asked one of the missionaries where he lived and went to school. He replied, “Sacramento.” My daughter thought to herself, “Oh no.” I said, “I went to college in Sacramento.” When asked where I replied, “Sacramento State College” and I flunked out after two semesters. (My daughter is now screaming in her head, “No. No. Nooooo.) When asked why did I flunk out, I couldn't lie so I said because my English 101 teacher made us read “The Lord of the Rings.” After the ensuing 20 minute discussion, my daughter told us what she did not tell me when I called and then she said, “and I ended up giving the lead-in question to the topic I hate.” I think my daughter is the quirky one.

I'm sure I'm not quirky, but quirky things seem to go on around me. For example, my daughter's mother-in-law, Maria, was raised on a collective farm in the old Soviet Union. As a result, she has worked all her life. When she came to live with us no one asked her to help around the house but she doesn't know how to be “retired”. So, she is constantly cleaning, cooking, doing laundry (until the washer broke), and generally being every man's ideal housewife. When she does want a private time, she goes to our old tool and garden shed where she has made herself what I call a “nest”; goes in and hides. It's rather cozy actually, but she is the quirky one.

Maria's husband, Gari, who also lives with us, is a bit quirky or maybe just eccentric. He walks ¾ of a mile to the grocery store and back and generally ignores the traffic signs for walk and don't walk; at least until last month when he did it in front of Lakewood's “finest” and received a $79 ticket for walking across the street at an intersection against the don't walk sign. That's the first time I've ever heard of someone getting what is essentially a jay-walking type citation. I don't know if he is quirky or if it’s just the situation that's quirky.

My daughter's husband and Maria's son, Artur, is rather quirky. Today when I told him that our Himalayan cat was pregnant he became his quirky self. At first anger stating that he would throw her out and then a few seconds later he demanded we get the cat an abortion. When my daughter pointed out that he always had said he wanted the cat to have kittens, he responded that it was true but not by an alley cat (paraphrased). Once it was explained that the father was ½ Persian or ½ Himalayan he calmed down a bit. In a day or two he will be fine with the situation—that's his quirk. In fact, we don't know for sure who the father is. The only cat we've seen in her company was the one we mentioned. I also will not tell him that on the weekends when he and his mother are gone all day, I repeatedly let the cat out knowing she was in heat. I did it for two reasons. I got tired of listening to the cat yowling and I like kittens. Maybe that's my quirk.

© 17 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

Empathy, by Lewis T

History is replete with examples of leaders who may have been brilliant empire builders but whose lack of empathy made them brutal tyrants whose legacy was one of despicable cruelty--Genghis Khan, who was responsible for the killing of 11 percent of the world’s population; Tamerlane the Great (aka Timur, who is believed to have beheaded 90,000 people and built more than 1000 towers out of the rotting skulls); Vlad the Impaler; Ivan the Terrible; Belgian King Leopold II; and Pol Pot of Cambodia—to name but a few.

Compared to those tyrannical lunatics, our President is, thankfully, a consummate underachiever. He does share one trait with the aforementioned, however: he is totally lacking in empathy.

Empathy is a more powerful emotion than sympathy. While expressions of sympathy signify the speaker’s awareness of someone else’s emotional pain, empathy suggests that the individual shares that pain. Lesser animals than humans clearly are capable of feeling a sense of loss when a mate or offspring dies. That feeling may linger for days, weeks, or even longer. But I have never known or heard such a creature to demonstrate empathy for the loss of another of its species.

Science and art are the manifestations of humans’ great intellect. The limits seem boundless. Generation after generation, we humans achieve greater and greater means of advancing civilization. Leonardo de Vinci, who was both a scientist and an artist (and a genius at both), has expressed what I consider the most moving example of how empathy is a connection between the human and the Divine. Having created Man and Woman and seen that they were both good, the God of the book of Genesis extends his index finger to a reclining Adam in what appears to be a blessing, a sign of empathy between the Loving and the Beloved.

My gut feeling is that our current POTUS may never have felt thus blessed by his father. His older brother, Freddy, “who died at the age of 43 in 1981 of alcoholism, was apparently unable to conform to a family dominated by a driven, perfectionist patriarch and an aggressive younger brother”, Donald. [Citation: Jason Horwitz, New York Times, Jan. 2, 2016]. Instead, Donald learned that pleasing father meant being tough, never touching alcohol, and always—ALWAYS—coming out on top.

For our President, a person’s worth is determined by their wealth, fame, and influence. There is no place for empathy, the payoff for which cannot be measured in those terms. Showing empathy will not improve your golf score or get you seated at the best table at the Gramercy Tavern but it can do wonders for your human relationships and—who knows—it might even get you into Heaven.

© 27 Nov 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 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.

Changes I would like to see, by Gillian

There are plenty I'm reminded of every time I look in a mirror! This scraggly old turkey-neck could lose some wrinkles to start with. The bags under the eyes could disappear along with the gray hair, and there could simply be ... well .... less of me. Many pounds less of me. But I have no intention of buying overpriced skin cream nor coloring my hair, and seem quite incapable of taking either diet or exercise too seriously, so I suspect the changes I see in the mirror will be those I would rather not see. On the other hand, the things I don't see in the mirror, those things which make up my inner self, my soul, however you choose to think of it, I am pretty happy with. My psyche seems to be doing OK and actually going in the right direction, and I provide as much spiritual help as I can give it. I think that is why I don't worry much about the negatives offered up by the mirror. They just do not seem important.

Looking out at the world through plain glass, however, is a very different matter. Perhaps because I so love taking photographs myself, some of the memories burned into my brain come in the form of photos I have seen over a lifetime. And they mostly represent things I hope never to see again. For humanity, that is the change I would like to see; simply never to see such things again. Never again to see photos of beautiful old cities carpet-bombed in the way The Allies punished Dresden, managing to kill an estimated 135,000 people in one nightmare nigh. I hope never again to see photos of thousands of refugee children, as in post World War Two Europe. The photos were posted in the hope that someone would recognize these poor tattered, shattered, bodies and souls, and return them to someone who loved them. I would like to see a world where we don't look at photos of a little naked girl running from the napalm destruction of all she knows. The Siege of Sarajevo's 20th anniversary was memorialized in 2012. Empty red chairs were set out in the main street, symbolizing 11,541 victims of the war. 643 of the chairs were small, representing the slain children. On some of them, during the day-long event, passers-by left teddy bears, little plastic cars, other toys or candy. I hope never to see a picture like that again. At one Storytime last year I passed around a photo I think says it all about the horror that is now Syria; a tiny little child, obviously near death from starvation, being eyes greedily by a hungry vulture. I won't inflict it on you again today, but it still haunts me.

I very much want to see a changed world in which such terrible photographs represent an awful past from which we have recovered and moved on. Somehow I doubt that. In fact at this time, with two madmen with their fingers on red buttons, it seems less likely than ever. Being a political pessimist ain't easy. And so, I'm back to me again. I started out saying I was pretty happy with the way I feel inside. But should I be seeking to change, at the very least, my political pessimism? No, I don't think so. If I were a real true pessimist that might be different; it must surely be depressing always to expect the worst from life. But being a political pessimist I really believe brings me peace. It's very much the philosophy of hope for the best but prepare for the worst which I find to be very practical political advice. I found a wonderful quote from Thomas Hardy, who said, "And as I am surely approaching that infamous stage of life, second childhood, I'm sure I'm much better off sticking with child's play."

© January 2018

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.

Seashells, by Ray S

In a most quiet time I have found a treasure chest of sea shells, each one a different and radiant color.

I can reach down into their midst and pull up two handfuls with the excess falling back into a music-like pile.

Here’s the beauty and magic of each one of these shells. In something short of a century there have been or are still, a shell for each of those years, actually hundreds of little shells standing for the events of a lifetime. They are memory keepsakes, memories stored away for ever so long; some brighter than others and a number of not so bright or happy.

But like the waves washing to the shore, more shells and newly-made memories appear, to be added to our collection of a lifetime.

© 12 March 2018

About the Author

When I Knew, by Phillip Hoyle

I knew I liked sex games when I was in second grade—age 7.

I knew I liked sex games with boys in third grade—age 8.

I knew I missed sex games with boys in seventh grade, but this time the knowing was complicated by the fact that my boyfriends didn’t seem interested any more—age 12.

I knew when I was sexually molested by an older man that some men wanted sex with other men. I also knew I didn’t feel molested—age 14.

I knew I wasn’t the only teenager to get hard ons in the shower room at school. I also learned not to be distressed—age 14.

I knew some boys my age liked to kiss and have sex with other boys and that I too liked it. I also knew my friend missed his big brother who went off to university—age 15.

I knew that only some boys attracted me sexually, not all of them. In fact I knew that only a few boys attracted me; few girls as well—age 16.

I knew one guy in the dorm who attracted me by his personality, humor, and relaxed nudity—age 18.

I knew one other boy at college who liked to wrestle with me alone in my room and realized he must miss his brothers—age 19.

I knew I had unusually intense feelings for a younger undergraduate the year after I had married. He was the first person I ever lost sleep over—age 21.

I knew the new music teacher, Ted, would like to do sexual things I might like to do and hoped we’d become friends but not complicate my marriage—age 22.

I knew I had deep emotional responses to some few men in my first fulltime church job. I knew I wouldn’t do anything with them but did experience and enjoy the attractions—ages 23-25.

I knew an undergraduate at university who was gay and seemed interested in me—age 28.

I knew I had fallen in love with a fellow male student in seminary—age 30.

These when’s are only part of the story, for I kept having them—still do—age 70. The content, or what’s are, as they say, the rest of the story, and I have enjoyed these what images as I have written about my when’s. Ah, the glories of memory; but that’s another story or a million more.

© 2 April 2018

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

My favorite childhood hero, by Pat Gourley

“...he was a queer man and would go about the village without noticing people or saying anything. In his own teepee he would joke, and when he was on the warpath with a small party, he would joke to make his warriors feel good. But around the village he hardly ever noticed anybody, except little children.”

From Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

The quote I am opening with here is from John Neihardt’s 1932 book titled Black Elk Speaks and is a description of Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse along with the great Chiricahua, Cochise, was truly my boyhood hero. Crazy Horse though came out as one of my formative heroes and remains so to this day. I still read anything I can get my hands on about the great man and Native Americans in general.

I was initially enamored with Cochise largely because of the rather stereotypical presentation of the great Apache in the 1956-58 T.V. show called Broken Arrow. I was 7 years old when the series started and I did everything possible to be able to stay up past my 8pm bedtime to watch it. In researching this piece I found an old snippet of video from the show with Cochise and Tom Jeffords half naked in a sweat lodge. Talk about something that might indelibly imprint in a little buddy gay boy’s psyche. Cochise’s grey hair and very manly chest left poor Tom Jeffords in the dust. Awareness of the stereotypical and racist elements of this show as of course way beyond my pay grade in 1957 at age eight. Michael Ansara who played Cochise was not even Native American but a Syrian immigrant.

Unlike many of my peers in my pre-teen years my favorite heroes were not Roy Rogers, Gene Autry or the Lone Ranger. I have recently found re-runs of Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger on an obscure cable channel. Watching some of the Roy Rogers shows and seeing his over the top cowboy-drag through my 2018 eyes I have to wonder if Dale Evans wasn’t really Roy’s beard.

Cochise sparked my interest in Native Americans but as I got older I was able to put my hands on much more honest and realistic presentations of Native Americans. I was drawn to Crazy Horse and the Plains Indian wars against white genocidal encroachment, treachery and theft. Crazy Horse was a loner, a vision seeker who was dedicated to preserving the “old ways” before the white invasions. Though no evidence exists that I am aware of that he was a homosexual and certainly did not fit the bill of a Winkte, Lakota males who adapted woman’s roles and were totally incorporated with in the tribe he was certainly “different”.

I most recently ran across a description of him in a 2016 book tilted The Earth Is Weeping by Peter Cozzens:

“ His perpetually youthful appearance, pale skin, and fine hip-length hair imparted to him an androgynous quality. An Indian agent described the man at age thirty-six as a “bashful girlish looking boy”. Page 194- The Earth is Weeping.

Queer or not, and most likely not, Crazy Horse certainly had many admirable qualities that in many ways were those of someone different, an outsider. He was totally dedicated to the survival and well being of his people and their “old ways” up until the moment he took his last breath after being bayoneted in the back trying not to be put in jail on the trumped up supposition that he was about to again go to war with the white man.

In a 2012 piece by the great Chris Hedges, writing in Truthdig, he pays homage to Crazy Horse with this closing line:

“His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.”

I hope that all my heroes have ferocity of spirit and seek lives of defiance. Though not often successful I strive to emulate these qualities and truly belief we as queer people are given a leg up with these heroic qualities.

© January 2018

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 Louis Brown

Empathy, Sympathy and Psychological Projection.

Empathy [em-puh-thee] noun

1. the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself:

By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

Sympathy

1. the harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another.

2. the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions.

3. the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, especially in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.

Projection: Psychology.

1. The tendency to ascribe to another person feelings, thoughts, or attitudes present in oneself, or to regard external reality as embodying such feelings, thoughts, etc., in some way.

2. Psychoanalysis. Such an ascription relieving the ego of a sense of guilt or other intolerable feeling.

Let us build a new Liberal majority Party

Through “empathy” we can identify other oppressed groups that we identify with for the purpose of building a broader coalition for the mutual benefit of all the oppressed groups. And remember, if you put all the oppressed groups together, you have a majority.

(1) Blacks have a grievance:

(a) Trayvon Martin’s assassin, George Zimmerman, goes free and shows no remorse. The oppression is overt. The murder took place 2-27-2012.

(b) The massacre of 9 church goers in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. On June 6, 2015, there were nine black victims, church attendees. The perpetrator was Dylan Roof.

(c) The lack of real life-saving intervention in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. Aug. 21, 2005-Aug. 31, 2005 White supremacy became obvious.

(2) Peaceniks:

(a) The George McGovern presidential campaign of 1972 showed most dramatically that a large percentage of the American public is dissatisfied with our right-wing foreign policy.

(b) Currently there are only two U. S. Senators who see the importance of future non-intervention policies. They are Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, both are Republicans. The paucity of peace-oriented, non-interventionist representatives should be corrected. Mike Lee’s laudable isolationist policies are kept pretty much a secret.

(3) Gay men and Lesbians: us. We are mainly concerned with state legislatures passing irrational laws that discriminate against sexual minorities and are designed to intimidate us. We are concerned also with discrimination in employment and housing, for starters.

(4) Hispanics claim that lack of appropriate levels of assistance for the reconstruction of the infrastructure of Puerto Rico gives another example of white supremacy.

(5) The physically disabled claim cogently they are frequently subjected to discriminatory practices and are marginalized. See Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

(6) Women libbers claim on the work site abuse mostly by male supervisors. Also that women have been given the right to an abortion but male chauvinist conservative legislatures are taking this right away, mainly with dirty tricks. Their particular enemy is male chauvinism.

Women’s March on Washington took place on January 21, 2017, and much of their rhetoric and political positions were in opposition to the recently inaugurated Donald Trump.

(7) Muslims, Jews, Atheists all claim cogently to be oppressed minorities.

George McGovern from American historian

3. George Stanley McGovern was an American historian, author, U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election. Wikipedia Quotes

4. I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

5. The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.

6. The longer the title [of any given public official], the less important the job.

© 27 November 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.

Patriotism, by Lewis T

· "See the USA in your Chevrolet."

· "See America first."

· "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America."

· "On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and Country."

· "Duty, honor, country."

· "Loose lips sink ships."

These are all valid expressions of love and loyalty to our native or chosen country. It is natural and normal and expected that we feel some sense of obligation to the people and places that nurture and sustain us. That is why we sometimes refer to the United States as our Mother Country. It is why we usually react more strongly to reports of patricide, matricide, and, especially, infanticide than to other murders. How could anyone do harm to those who have given so much to us--freedom, opportunity, sustenance?

· "Love it or leave it."

· "My country, right or wrong."

· Manifest Destiny

· American exceptionalism

· Genocide

· Religious intolerance

· Prejudice

These are manifestations of extreme forms of love and loyalty to those places and people that have nurtured us. There is a flip side to that coin. Just as we love the nurturer (and, perhaps, question how worthy we are of that love), we tend to distrust the stranger, who may not be disposed to see us so favorably. In long ago times, it was the tribe to which we owed our loyalty. It was Arian against the Jew, the Montagues against the Capulets, the Hatfields against the McCoys. All others were with the favored tribe or against it. The "Other" was deemed less than human, disdained by God, fit only to be slaughtered and their bodies left to rot in the sun or be picked clean by vultures.

Thus, America can wage a geopolitical war on Viet Nam or Iraq on the pretext of threat to the homeland while counting only the American dead and wounded and ignoring the order-of-magnitude greater losses on the other side. We systematically and mercilessly brought the Native population of the United States down by 95% over 400 years--an estimated 11-3/4 million people, almost double the number of Jews murdered during the Nazi Holocaust. Every year we hold a celebration in honor of the white man who "discovered" America but about the near extermination of an entire race of humans we are silent. During World War II, we built concentration camps for 110,000 Japanese-Americans, 62% of whom were American citizens.

What constitutes a "tribe" these days is changing. Some Americans have figured out that there is a lot of money to be made by exploiting the very human capacity for pitting "us" against "them". Thus, the NFL has become a multi-billion-dollar industry which uses human beings as the raw material, violence as the lure, and attachment to a geographical place as the motivator. Only within the past ten years or so have we begun to understand the toll that "cash cow" has taken on its gladiators.

Homo sapiens is almost unique in its capacity to devour its own. No wonder so many are unwilling to acknowledge the fact that we evolved from the primordial slime. How, if true, could we then think of ourselves as the "chosen people"? How, then, could we call others "gooks", "slopes", "niggers", "redskins", or "chinks"?

In the final analysis, we have to ask ourselves a few questions. Why is it so important to engage in countless hours of tedious research to be able to show that our ancestors came over on the Mayflower or, still less likely, Noah's Ark? Wouldn't it be more worthwhile to really get to know our relatives in order to understand whether they were worth giving them the time of day? What I want to know about a person is what they are like on the inside, not the outside. What things were like for them growing up, not where they grew up.

What does their soul look like, not their skin. What makes us unique and wonderful cannot be seen with the eyes or learned from examining their DNA. If you must classify something, measure the temperature of their heart, the depth of their compassion, and the breadth of their wisdom. If these things measure up, then I don't care if they come from Uranus.

© 11 November 2013

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 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.