Running Away, by Pat Gourley

“I don’t make history. I am history”

Joan Baez

As with many quotes, I begin my pieces with this one is tangential. In fact, it is so tangential that I may not be able to twist it around to the topic but I liked it so much after reading it in a recent New York Times (NYT) interview with her I had to use it.

I suppose one could easily make “running away” a metaphor for staying in the closet and this may have been the case for me personally way back when. Perhaps a physical running away was what my moving to Denver in 1972 with a straight woman and three other closeted gay men was really all about. None of us on this sojourn to the Queen City of the Plains were “out” to any of the others but suspicions were running high. Give us a bit of a break though since the powerful ripples created by Stonewall had yet to make it in any big way to the middle part of America we were fleeing from.

Though I pretty much was over any running away from being queer by the mid-1970’s I have still managed to do my fair share of running away in other areas of my life. I could have for example jumped-in head first to Radical Fairie politics and I think probably have actually moved in with Harry Hay and John Burnside or at least hitched my wagon to that trip in a much more intense way than I did. Harry ever so subtly over the years was always encouraging me to do more implying that I was not living up to my queer potential.

Running away though may have its advantages at times. For me in 1980 falling in love with the man who would be my loving companion until his death in 1995 had many advantages. This choice of staying in Denver rather than picking up and moving to L.A. to be near and much more involved with Hay and the Radical Fairies worked out well. And let’s face it I think I made a much better nurse than I would have made a full-time Queer Activist even one in the orbit of the mercurial and prophetic Harry Hay.

I could go on about other areas where I have turned tail and headed for the hills but enough about me. The newspaper the Wichita Eagle first reported this past week the death in Wichita Kansas of Adrian Lamo at the age of 37. Yes, I will be quoting from the Wichita Eagle which will probably never happen again though remember the Koch Brothers are also from Wichita, with Koch Industries based there, so never say never.

Lamo was a very adept hacker. Most notably he hacked into the NYT and Microsoft among others in the early 2000’s and was convicted of computer fraud in 2004.

His greatest notoriety though came from turning Chelsea Manning into the Feds in 2010. Manning had shared with him that she had turned over to Wikileaks a large trove of classified documents pertaining to the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan including clear evidence of American war crimes.

Manning had reached out to Lamo as someone she thought she could trust admiring, I suppose, his brazen hacks into very powerful organizations. And perhaps and I am speculating here she felt she could trust someone with clear ties to the LGBTQ community. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors had in 1998 appointed Lamo to the City’s LGBTQQ Youth task forcefile://localhost/. https/::www.wired.com:story:adrian-lamo-has-passed-away-at-37:

Lamo testified against Manning at her trial in 2013 and she was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in federal prison. This was the harshest sentence ever for a whistleblower. Barack Obama though commuted her sentence in 2016. A full pardon with honors and recognition as a true patriot would have been more appropriate but we’ll take the reduced sentence.

Quoting a friend of Lamo’s, one Lorraine Murphy, from the Wichita Eagle piece of March 16th, 2018 she described him “as someone who bounced around a great deal… He was a believer in the geographic cure. Whatever goes wrong in your life, moving will make it better.” http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article205629184.html

The “geographic cure” is something synonymous I would say with “running away” and engaged in I suspect in a disproportionate manner historically by queer folk everywhere.

Lamo was quite open apparently about queer aspects of his life but he seems to have been a poor soul often running away from something. I certainly do not know enough about the man to speculate what sort of ghosts were chasing him. Unfortunately, he is now dead and Chelsea Manning is alive and thriving and running for elected office in Virginia. Maybe the better part of valor is to face things head-on and not pick up and run away.

And though she may think she is no longer making history Joan Baez has never as far as I can tell ever run away from anything and neither did Chelsea Manning. Both women are heroines I can try to emulate in my own life and invoke when the temptation to run away presents itself, as it certainly will again.

© March 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.

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

 

Anxious Moments, by Ray S

Will I be the first of us to say, “My whole life has been one blinking anxious moment for as long as I can remember”?

Instead of my 2nd birthday party, it was the awakening to someone standing over my baby bed or crib and gently, I imagine, fondling the unknowing occupant. Some moment, and I too young to be anxious. The matter of anxiety about this moment didn’t materialize for some fifteen years later.

Meantime some other more routine moments developed and were overcome, such as fainting while the children’s choir I was a member of angelically sang the “Hallelujah Chorus” for some high holiday at an Episcopal Church that my 8th grade music teacher had recruited me for. Needless to say, I resigned choir and since our family didn’t frequent Sunday services, the Episcopalians lost a dubious potential convert. But I’m sure I looked cute in that choir uniform.

Many anxious moments transpired due to becoming a high school freshman and adjusting to the surprise divorce of my parents. So much for the nuclear family.

Age 17 and the Army and my discovery of boys and men instead of the fairer sex. College days, I was too unconscious to worry about studies, I just did what I was told to do and managed a mortar board and piece of sheepskin. But, the really anxious moments came when I was desperate to be accepted by a Greek club I needed, needed, needed. And then found out myself over my head when my then lady friend announced it was time for some sort of commitment about our, or her, intentions.

You’ve heard this one before, but this was my very own “A” moment, March 31st 1951, our wedding day and all I recall is my stomach kept telling me, “Do you really think you want to do this?”

For the following years there were many more anxious times: finding a career, raising two wonderful kids, trying to make love, trying to keep the closet door closed, etc., etc., etc.

Now, the family’s grown and gone, my good and I think suspecting wife passed on, and my awakening to how very many of my new gay friends shared similar stories. Were all of our anxious moments so bad or good? Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it too?

© 12 June 2017

About the Author

Forever, by Gillian

Well of course there's no such thing. In human time, we'll all die someday. In historic time, we see that everything comes to an end; even in geologic time nothing is forever. Continents wander about the surface of the earth, joining and separating and pushing up mountains. Even our planet is about halfway through its lifespan. In another four and a half billion years, give or take time out for weekends and holidays, Earth as we know it will grind to a halt. As our planet cools, it will become, perhaps, rather as Mars is now; in the same way as Mars was, perhaps, once rather as Earth is now.

Nothing is forever. But it's tricky.

Via our own memories, or through education, we know a great deal about so much that has gone before; has not been forever. What is hard, is to grasp the current absences that will not remain forever, so many of which we ourselves have lived. We had, in our youth, no concept of the absence of a Ground Positioning System. We cannot grasp the lack of something we don't know will ever exist. Or that GPS would in turn would lead to a voice coming from a device in your car and giving you detailed moment by moment directions, guiding you from A to B. We did not dream that phones would not be forever attached to the wall or that in a relatively short time they would be capable of delivering to their users vast amounts of information. We never knew that someday we would say, there's an app. for that! And it's not just technology that shows so little sign of forever. Most of us, people of a certain age, did not know that life in the closet we inhabited was not forever. We could not dream that we would live to see, some incredible day, The White House alight in rainbow colors. Come to that, we had no vision of the significance which would one day become attached to those colors; that rainbow. Nor could we see our part in it.

Betsy and I, along with most of the world's population, watched the Women's Soccer World Cup. I remarked to her that the fact that there even is such a thing as women playing soccer at all, never mind a World Cup watched, in the U.S. alone, by almost 30-million people, is as completely incredible to me as the recent, amazing, legalizing, throughout the entire U.S., of same-sex marriage. It was little more than two years ago that I stated, in one of my Storytime writings, that I did believe it would arrive, some day, but not in my lifetime. Of course, in my youth, it was something I could not conceive of in the very best of my imaginings. All that existed was a void in thought, word, and deed, which I could only suppose would last forever.

One of the good things, I find, about growing old is that we really do get it. We really know that those good times will not last forever, so we enjoy them more intensely, perhaps more frequently, while at the same time managing not to feel that terrible sense of loss and regret when they are over. By the same token, we know that the bad times are not forever. We will get over it, and life will go on. Or we will not, and we will die. And quite honestly, I cannot believe that will be forever, either. Nothing else is, as far as I know, in the entire universe. So why would death be the single exception? What will follow I don't even speculate. It is simply another of those conceptual voids, like women's soccer and gay marriage once were to me, which will not last forever. Someday it will be filled. I just don't know with what.

© 13 Jul 2015 

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.

Vulnerable Gay Me by Phillip Hoyle

     A minister I had met just that day asked me, “Should we kiss now or later?”

     “Now’s fine,” I flippantly responded wondering if he was kidding. He wasn’t.

      He pushed me against the wall, pressed his body against mine, kissed me full on the lips, stuck his tongue in my mouth. He seemed to be boiling over with passion while I had been expecting a laugh or a nice, gentle kiss. Perhaps he sensed I would end up getting more than I had agreed to and wanted to make his claim. I wasn’t asking for anything from him, but I did get quite a lot. 

     That morning three of us, including a regional minister, a pastoral minister, and I, an associate minister, traveled together. I was excited about the trip to a city several hours south of where we lived. Since we travelers wanted to get to know one another better, we all rode in the front seat. (Obviously the events occurred before bucket seats became standard.) Being the youngest, I sat in the middle with my feet on the hump. A few miles down the road the muscles of my lower back started to tighten. There just wasn’t enough room for both feet to be comfortable so I placed my right foot in the well next to the pastoral minister’s feet. My leg rested against his. I was able to relax and was pleased that he didn’t pull away. So I rested my leg there much of the way to the town where we were to lead religious education workshops the next day. I was slated to room with this same man. 

     We checked into the hotel and had a short break before dinner at a nearby restaurant where we would join other workshop leaders. As we waited, the minister and I talked freely about his work as pastor and my as an associate. From our conversations on the way down, I knew of this pastor’s singular work in communications and education and of a literature program in the congregation he now led. I clarified some questions about his programming and also got a feel for his personality. As we talked, he complimented me on my personality and intelligence and said how much he thought of the minister I worked with. A few minutes before leaving the room to meet the other leaders, he asked if we should kiss. After we kissed, he indicated he had liked my leg next to his and took it to be an invitation for us to do more together. I knew our touch could be interpreted in that way and realized that I may have actually hoped to be accepted thus, but still I felt shocked by his passion. I may have said something corny like, “Thank you.” At least, I should have.

     I didn’t like the live music in the restaurant. It was too loud and not one of my favorite styles. After dinner we took a walk along the riverfront but due to the cool air soon returned to our room. There we opened up to one another even more, much more than kissing. There was massage and, eventually, sex. He took the lead but the next morning told me he had never shared sex with another man who was so active. I guess he thought I should simply play a role of passive bottom for him, but I was too creative, too excited by the things we were doing together. I was the most top-like bottom he had met. He told me, somewhat prematurely I thought, that he was pretty sure he could fall in love with me. 

     Now I knew about love. I knew quite a lot about sex. I knew even more about myself. And now I’m describing my vulnerability—a sexual vulnerability—a readiness to open myself to a man I didn’t even know but who I saw others trusted. Why was I so ready to kiss him with passion? Why was I so ready to have full-out sex? I was up against a new kind of gay experience like that in books I had read, one that was ready to have sex with almost any available man. Here I was opening up to a discrete, married man who was horny as a goat and who saw me as a delectable younger fruit ready for the picking. But that last perception was to occur to me only later. Here was a man who proposed we kiss. I was ready. I was aware that the kiss could lead to more.

     I had long experienced the tension between being vulnerable and defended in the sexual arena. The year before I had fallen in love with a male friend but had pledged myself not to go sexual with him. After all, he was a newly-wed. At about that same time my wife in frustration said, “I just wish you’d get your sex somewhere else.” Those conditions set me up for what happened, but I’m not looking to blame anyone. There were more contributors, for example, I had not had male-to-male sex since age fifteen. And, of course, that evening I was away from home with a stranger who desired me. I was needy and not shocked by my condition. I was also lucky. This late 70s sex without protection with a man who had lived and worked in large cities did not leave me with an STD. 

     I was vulnerable not only to the sex that night; I was also ready to have an affair. I had heard his words of maybe-love and a couple of weeks later, when I called him, I realized that he must be running scared, even experiencing guilt feelings. That didn’t suit me. I didn’t want the guilt feelings of another to spoil our relationship as it surely would have. My formidable defenses arose. I never called back. 

     Several years later when I saw the pastoral minister at a regional conference, he said, “Let’s go fuck.” 

     I responded, “I don’t have time.” 

     He countered with a smile and a chuckle, “I thought you’d say that.”

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

Read more at Phillip's blog  artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

Closet Case by Gillian

What’s the difference between a Skoda car and a Jehovah’s Witness?
You can close the door on a Jehovah’s Witness.


Doors are what closets and closet cases are all about. And one thing you can say in defense of the closet, you have closed the door on yourself; you have the key in your pocket. It’s up to you when and if that door opens. There are other doors that close from the outside, and someone out there has the key.


A very closeted friend warned me, when I announced my plan to exit the closet,
“Think about it very carefully. Remember, you can’t go back. Once you come out, you are out for ever, like it or not, for good or ill.”
And of course she was right. That closet door, like the Skoda door, is either stuck wide open, exposing your sins to the world, or rusted shut since you de-closeted. You can’t go back in, to that dark, safe, if miserable, place you once inhabited.


Slamming that closet door firmly shut as I exited, in fact did me very little harm and a great deal of good, but that is not the story for everyone. Brave GLBT people lose families, jobs, friends; practically all of life as they had known it, and are still willing to pay that price for freedom from the closet and all it implies.


Betsy and I recently watched the movie, “Chely Wright: Wish Me Away.” This woman risked all in leaving the closet, and it cost her much of her very successful country music career and some of her family and friends, but it also offered huge compensations. None of the negatives were a shock; she knew what she was risking but she had to do what she had to do: a compunction most of us know only too well.
So, for most of us, no regrets about leaving that cold dark closet. For most of us in this time and place, that is.

I spent some months in Hungary at the time they were attempting to transition from Communism to Capitalism (yes, yes, I know, I should say to Democracy!)
World War Two is very in your face throughout Europe and I felt compelled to visit Auschwitz in nearby Poland.
I gazed at the photographs. Those pink triangles; those flesh free faces with fear filled eyes.
What the hell did I know of fear?


Those faces knew fear. Real fear.
And they could not return to the closet.
“Oh but it was just a phase, I’m OK now!” wouldn’t work any better for a homosexual than for a Jew.
“Well I thought I was Jewish for a while, but …. “
No. No escape.
They died for being what they were. At what stage of their journeys to Hell did they regret being “out?” For certain by the time they staggered under that Arbeit Macht Frei sign, but by then of course it was far too late. The closet option was long gone.

Alan Turing was responsible for breaking the German Enigma code during World War Two and is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He was a brilliant mathematician, but he was also gay, and homosexual activity was still illegal in postwar Britain. In 1952 he was arrested, and chose the offered alternative to a prison sentence, that of “chemical castration.” This meant taking large doses of estrogen, which messed with not only his body, but also his brilliant mind, and in 1954 he committed suicide.
At that time I still lived in England; in 1954 I was twelve years old.
No wonder I was so deep in the closet that my sexual orientation was a secret even from me.
In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a public apology on behalf of the British government, for the “appalling way” in which Turing was treated.

Alas, not all governments have become so enlightened over time. In many countries homosexuality still results in a prison sentence, or indeed a death sentence as in Nigeria, Somalia, Mauritania, Sudan, the Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, and parts of Indonesia

So as we live with pride, with our heads held high, as indeed we should, let us spare a moment for all those who were, in the past, or are, in the present, not granted such privileges.
Yes we are brave and yes we are strong. But things come in different degrees.

If we faced the horrors that so many of us have done, and still do, I, for one, fear I would be a confirmed closet case.

Gillian November 2012

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

Queer, Just How Queer by Betsy

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

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

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

Or the dreaded scenario:

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

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

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

Or the following close-call:

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

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

Parents who suspected queerness would dread the day puberty started for their child. Of course, in this world everyone starts out with lily white skin. So the outward signs of race and ethnicity would not exist. In this world their would be no race and ethnicity. Only sexual orientation has meaning.

Of course, in the real world there is no such thing as a queerometer or purple-skinned LGBT’s. The world we know is so very much more complex than that.

In our world we have a choice. Not a choice of whether or not to be queer, but rather we choose to be in or out of the closet, we can choose to accept or deny our queerness, we choose our behaviors every minute of every day. A great raising of awareness over the last few decades has given us even more choices. At least, this is true for the most part in this community that we know so well and in most cities of this country. As acceptance becomes more and more prevalent I am very thankful, indeed. I am thankful everyday, that I have been free to choose to live my queerness with honesty and integrity and pride.

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change). She has been retired from the Human Services field for about 15 years. Since her retirement, her major activities include tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with National Sports Center for the Disabled, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and enjoys spending time with her four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 25 years, Gillian Edwards.

Closet Case by Micahel King

          Denial can be unconscious and costumed in so many different and creative ways. I look back on at least sixty some years of telling myself who I am, what I think, what I believe, how I feel, what I want, and an infinite number other adaptations to identity. Now of course I am the same me that I have always been and will always be, but my self-concept and my attachment to definitions of selfhood have run the full spectrum and back again. Wow, isn’t it fascinating what the ego can come up with? And when in full defensive mode the distortions or imaginative propaganda that we try to kid ourselves with is downright funny and occasionally quite sad.

          Many of the costumes I have worn over the years are still hanging in the back while all the newer ego outfits are easier to put on or take off. These identity outfits include those I will gladly wear to most any occasion while others I reserve for those special occasions when I want to appear in a particular way. Of course if you’re like me you will have a huge wardrobe. That’s fine. It gives us the ability to be interesting and have character. The trick over a lifetime is to have an assortment of clean, neatly pressed and just plain honest, up front outfits that cover most any situation in a somewhat suitable way.

          Now that I can wear my outlandish ear adornments with bright colorful paisley shirts and unusual patterned and multicolor sweaters that when in combination tells the world that I am a somewhat eccentric, flaming queer with no second thoughts.

          O.K. I will be fair. There was a time when I was just as flamboyant but tried to pretend that since I was a father and had girlfriends that no one would suspect my innermost desires. Well not too long ago when I finally had my first boyfriend I told my daughters. They all said that they had known since they were young. So why did I keep so many of my most interesting outfits hanging there, practically unused for all these years? I admit that I have either thrown out or given to charity (that’s a line of bull, isn’t it) many of the adornments and outfits that no longer fit. I still have more possible looks than most people I know. I do drag and had lots of fun with my grandson, daughter and son-in-law being catered to by my lover in the audience. I’ve come a long way, baby! Most of the time my closet door is wide open. It really isn’t my style to think of myself as having been a closet case. I may have been able to keep my job, get promotions, have the friends that I avoided, etc., but at the time I wasn’t feeling that I could be the me that wears whatever I want and not try to cover anything up. Since I do need a warm coat in the winter, I try to make sure I have the right color of fuchsia scarf to clash with my red coat and Tibetan bead earbobs over the purple paisley shirt and computer knitted multicolor sweater with purple socks to match. Why did it take most of a lifespan to be and do what I feel most comfortable with and that is as honest as my ego will let me be. I do think my ego is having a hell of a lot more fun now that there is no need for defenses. I often get complements on my many outfits.

About the Author

I go by the drag name, Queen Anne Tique. My real name is Michael King. I am a gay activist who finally came out of the closet at age 70. I live with my lover, Merlyn, in downtown Denver, Colorado. I was married twice, have 3 daughters, 4 grandchildren and a great grandson. Besides volunteering at the GLBT Center and doing the SAGE activities," Telling your Story"," Men's Coffee" and the "Open Art Studio". I am active in Prime Timers and Front Rangers. I now get to do many of the activities that I had hoped to do when I retired; traveling, writing, painting, doing sculpture, cooking and drag.

Breaking into Gay Culture by Donny Kaye

          My new home is only a couple blocks down the street and along the park from the coffee shop where my most recent introduction to gay culture started, some ten years ago. To understand the significance of my new home's location I must go back in time to my earliest introduction to gay culture.


          After I graduated from college and before I was married I hung out with several colleagues who were friends of mine. The selection of hangout spots was always determined by a couple of the gals within the group. Their choice was either a country and western themed dance club or a gay bar on the outskirts of the city limits. We partied weekly as we danced and drank together unwinding from the challenges of work.

          On those nights when we would decide to go beyond the city limits and visit the bar heading up the hillside to the west of town, I paid close attention to the men who flirted with one another in the darkened recesses of the bar, typically men with men seeming very much at ease as they maintained close physical proximity with one another. Once in a while I would observe knees touching, hands caressing one another and even an occasional extended kiss. My heart would quicken and my mind engage. A few different nights I went back to that bar alone to not only watch but to be.

          On each of those occasions, feelings of excitement stirred deep within me. I got what I was looking for in terms of physical connection that would lead to the parking lot just outside and on one occasion; I actually went home with someone, caressing each other as I excitedly drove down the darkened roadway. My excitement was accelerated by desire and the experience of allowing what I then tried to repress and consciously deny.

           Within moments after the exchange I would be filled with guilt and shame as the awareness that within months I was to be married returned to my consciousness. It seemed so right and yet at the same time not allowable within my understandings of relationship, sexuality and my naïveté regarding models I had experienced for "doing" life, as defined by religion. There seemed to be no other choices. Being like I wanted to be seemed to also include the diagnosis of me having a psychiatric disorder! I just liked guys, why did it have to be so complex?

          Ten years ago I was helping my good friend with the opening of her hair salon, immediately next door to one of the area’s leading gay coffee shops. On each of those days after my early morning work at her shop, I always enjoyed sauntering into the coffee shop ordering my coffee, watching, wondering, and considering the possibilities. I felt very much at home there and I recognized in that setting my secret wasn't of significance.

          In the interim between those early days and the coffee shop on ninth Avenue there were experiences, especially when work-related travel removed me from the confines of suburban life as a married man. I frequented various theaters, on occasion a gay bar, porn stores and occasionally an extended eye contact followed by a wink, a touch and caress. My experience of gay culture was reduced to a rich fantasy life and the expression of short stories in my creative mind as I ran miles at a time, trying to control my interests in men.

          The coffee shop became a weekly haunt, long after the work at the hair salon was completed. I began to relate to other gay men whom I met through a close friend who is gay. The longing to be in gay culture, at least as I had always known it to be, had started to shift from that of cruising, sexual connection and guilt, to something much different.

          My desire increasingly has included wanting honest relationships with men and women who understood me; who accept my desire, passion, and longing as a man of a certain sexual persuasion. I want to be around those who seemingly understood me and who have an allowance for me being the me that I have always wanted to be AND who are like me in that they are more diverse in their sexual orientation.

          The gift of my life now is the opportunity to integrate a culture rich in sexual diversity with the aspects of my former life, especially my children and grand children.

          Living within the hood allows me to interact in a much more complete and authentic way than I ever considered possible. The culture is no longer someplace I visit in secret in the dark of night and the anonymity of a setting where I'm just passing through. It is no longer restricted to Thursday mornings when I would linger at the coffee shop for hours on end, dreading the return to life as I had crafted it to be.

          My experience of my culture now allows not only for the expression of my natural sexual orientation, but allows for you my dearest of friends. It allows for this space, this time this opportunity to just be me.

          I live just up the block and through the park. I look from my balcony onto the streets and across the space of my neighborhood, which allows the experience of my culture. No longer separate or someplace I'm passing through. It's where I flourish, the place I call home. My culture. My family. The place I rest in for this moment in time.  

About the Author

Donny Kaye-Is a native born Denverite.  He has lived his life posing as a hetero-sexual male, while always knowing that his sexual orientation was that of a gay male.  In recent years he has confronted the pressures of society that forced him into deep denial regarding his sexuality and an experience of living somewhat of a disintegrated life.  “I never forgot for a minute that I was what my childhood friends mocked, what I thought my parents would reject and what my loving God supposedly condemned to limitless suffering.” StoryTime at The Center has been essential to assisting him with not only telling the stories of his childhood, adolescence and adulthood but also to merely recall the stories of his past that were covered with lies and repressed in to the deepest corners of his memory.  Within the past two years he has “come out” not only to himself but to his wife of four decades, his three children, their partners and countless extended family and friends.  Donny is divorced and yet remains closely connected with his family.  He lives in the Capitol Hill Community of Denver, in integrity with himself and in a way that has resulted in an experience of more fully realizing integration within his life experiences. He participates in many functions of the GLBTQ community.  

Closet Case by Merlyn

One of the saddest things about being a human being is the fact that we are taught that most things we want do are somehow a sin and must remain hidden.

I was taught at a very young age that I could do whatever I wanted to do, as long as I didn’t tell anyone about it.

That made it simple for me,;I just didn’t tell everyone what I was doing.

I don’t think I was ever in the closet but I have hidden some things there:

Gross cases of condoms 144 in each case

A box of sex toys

A box of books and magazines with the good pages stuck together

A box of x rated DVDs and VCR tapes

A box downloaded pictures and stories that I saved on DVDs from the internet

And a few other things that I don’t think anybody here needs to or wants to know about.

About the Author

I'm a retired gay man now living in Denver Colorado with my partner Michael. I grew up in the Detroit area. Through the various kinds of work I have done I have seen most of the United States. I have been involved in technical and mechanical areas my whole life, all kinds of motors and computer systems. I like travel, searching for the unusual and enjoying life each day. 

Closet Case by Bobbi

I was 14 and in love with Claire, we would kiss on the couch, then in a chair, then in the car, driven by Sis and what sister said stopped the kiss.

“You’re queer, you’re a fairy.”  These words really sounded scary.  So I decided to open the closet door and push back the feelings more and more.

At 17 I was working at my first job, in the records room at the Rose Hospital.  I met some girls from another department.  They asked me to go to lunch.  They had a car, put me in the back seat and I sat in the middle.

Connie was on my right.  When our shoulder touched my closet door opened.  Oh, oh, I was in for a fight with myself.  She was older and married, and even though my feelings weren’t buried, I never told her and never touched her.  I was there for her when she was ill and provided friendship.  That was my thrill.

I dated guys and had some fun and, hopefully, proved to my sister I wasn’t one of those words she called me.

At 19, I worked at Parke Davis Pharmaceutical Company where Betty was the bookkeeper.  She was from Kansas, had never seen a Jew, and thought I had horns.  I loved her for her innocence and told her I had corns, not horns.

Betty was beautiful, Betty was married, lived in Evergreen and my over feelings stayed buried.  My closet door was ajar but I never ventured out too far.

Three nights a week we worked late and I would take her home, up Coal Creek Canyon, as if she were my date.  I truly loved her from afar.  The distance between us on the front seat of the car.

Betty was my maid of honor when I married at age 21.  She never knew the love and lust I felt for her as we did the Coal Creek run.

A divorce, therapy, another marriage, therapy, a college degree, therapy, writing and producing theatrical shows, therapy, two children, therapy.  How many clues does one need?  I finally became a therapist with a creaking closet door. 

Estes Park, and International Gestalt Therapy Convention, I had no intention of what would happen next.

The only woman’s workshop, Wow!  “Bisexuality” was the title, wow.  It helped to open my closet door and I was never the same.

At the age of 45, I felt alive.  No more closet, no more door.  I was a lesbian forevermore. 

About the Author

Bobbi, 82, a native Denverite, came out at age 45. “I’m glad to be alive.”

Closet Case by Colin Dale

          I was helped out of the closet by a man who died in 1935—ten years before I was born—a man who never successfully got out of his own closet. In other words, this man who helped me out of the closet lived and died a closet case.

          I'm going to begin, though, in telling you how, in 1959, I became acquainted not with the man who helped me out of the closet but with his surviving brother, under totally unrelated circumstances—

          It's 1959. I am 14 years old. I'm living with my mother, father, and older brother in a second floor walk-up apartment in the East Bronx. I know you've heard me talk about my growing-up years in The Bronx a number of times before. It helps though to visualize my working-class surroundings in order to understand the improbability of a kid in the East Bronx making the acquaintance of an Oxford professor of archaeology. In my growing up years, fathers, like my father, were laborers. Mothers, like my mother, were housewives. Fathers disappeared each morning to their factory jobs on the elevated subway—the "el." Mothers led kids like me to public school. They shopped. And they cooked. I say with complete kindness my father and mother were not very well educated. They had come through the Great Depression, and in all things did the very best they could.


          I had an uncle though, a lion of a man, who, as a highly educated man, was an outlier in the family. He recognized in me a kindred bookworm. One day he delivered—to an apartment that could barely accommodate it—a 33-year-old set of the Britannica. The 1926 Britannica.

          Fourteen-year-old me wanted to be an archaeologist. I read in the Britannica every article I could find on archaeology. One article on Persian archaeology especially excited me. I decided to send the writer what today we would call a fan letter. The writer, the Britannica told me, was a "Arnold W. Lawrence, professor, Oxford."

          I wrote my fan letter. In my innocence, I had addressed it to "Professor Arnold W. Lawrence, Oxford, England," not knowing Oxford was a conglomerate of universities, and forgetting that the man who had written the article had written it more than three decades earlier.

          But months later I received a reply, from A.W. Lawrence, London. Professor Lawrence, 60, retired, was apparently stunned to get my fan letter. In 1926 for A.W. Lawrence, the Britannica article was an extraordinary credit. Professor Lawrence's reply to my fan letter--a tissue-paper blue aerogram (which I have safely at home) was the beginning of a correspondence that lasted up and down, on and off for 31 years—although (and this is another story for another Monday), I met Professor Lawrence face-to-face only once, in 1990, two months before his death.


          Now, though, to bring the two brothers together—

          We move forward, from 1959 to 1962. I'm 17, studying architecture (so much for archaeology) at a vocational art school in Manhattan, and I'm corresponding every month or so from our second floor walk-up with this retired Oxford professor in London. And, I'm still closeted. A movie opens in Times Square, David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia. I go to see it. I'm blown away. I never make the connection though—Lawrence and Lawrence—why should I? Lawrence is not an uncommon name. I want to learn more about Lawrence of Arabia. I stop in a midtown bookstore and I find a ratted copy of the Penguin The Essential T.E. Lawrence (that's Lawrence of Arabia: Thomas Edward Lawrence). On the subway to the Bronx I pop the book and read in the sketch biography: "Thomas Edward Lawrence . . . five brothers . . . the youngest, Arnold Walter Lawrence." Could this be? I think, this man I've been corresponding with for three years, could he be Lawrence of Arabia's youngest brother? I write and ask, and of course he is.


          Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in 1888. His story is generally known, thanks to David Lean's movie. Briefly: Lawrence studied at Oxford to be an archaeologist, went on a British Museum sponsored dig to the Middle East; at the onset of the First World War, he was drawn into British Army intelligence. Lawrence locked in his legacy during the war as guerilla mastermind of the Arab Revolt. At the war's end, now Colonel Lawrence returned to England, sought to influence the Paris peace talks on behalf of the Arabs--failing that, and deeply disillusioned, he spent his remaining years running from the spotlight. Finally, four months before his death, Lawrence retired to a small cottage in Southern England, to wonder, as many of us to at such junctures, What next?

          But here I am in 1962, and for me Thomas Edward Lawrence is a movie. Not expecting the life affirming discovery I would make, I read everything I can find of T.E. Lawrence's, chief being his massive, magnificent war memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom; also, his thousands upon thousands of letters—letters to such notables as Winston Churchill, Edward Elgar, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Ezra Pound, and George Bernard Shaw. My discovery, sometimes on the surface of Lawrence's writing but more often between the lines, was that this man Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia, warrior, author, scholar--was a deeply conflicted man, almost certainly over his sexuality, and possibly, if you comb carefully enough, over questions of gender. I sat in my bedroom in The Bronx reading this stuff and thought, Holy shit, this is me!

            At that time I was at a point familiar to many of us—sensing a difference in me, fearing that difference made me a lesser person, somehow sure I couldn't talk to others about my difference, and resigned to living a life of reduced accomplishment because of this difference. But here was Lawrence of Arabia . . .

          Was Lawrence homosexual? (I'll use "homosexual." It seems more fitting for an Edwardian man.) No one knows for sure. In certain of his letters, Lawrence denied any sexual experience. Yet he was certainly (what we would call today) gay-friendly. Among his closest friends were men like E.M. Forster. Cited often is a suspicious friendship with a teenage Arab boy when Lawrence was a twenty-something archaeologist. The boy, Selim Ahmed—initials S.A.—is possibly the person to whom Lawrence dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom, with its introductory poem, S.A., which opens: I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands/and wrote my will across the sky in stars. In Seven Pillars Lawrence, seeing the intimacy enjoyed by some of his young fighters, tells us here is "the openness and honesty of perfect love." In another chapter he describes "friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace." (There were few such "intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace" in David Lean's movie.) Then, too, in a letter to George Bernard Shaw's wife, Lawrence wrote "I've seen lots of man-and-man loves: very lovely and fortunate some of them were."

          Can you imagine what effect this sort of thing had on closeted me? No one—me included—can say with certainty that T.E. Lawrence was homosexual. But for me, reading his man's books and letters in my Bronx bedroom all those many years ago, T.E. Lawrence was homosexual enough, enough for me to open my own closet door. My God, I thought, here's a man troubled as I'm troubled, and he's written his will across the sky in stars!

           I will regret, though, Lawrence himself never got out of his own closet. This, for me, remains a note of sustained sadness. Having retreated to his cottage—alone—Lawrence wrote to a friend—and I have often felt this to be one of the most melancholy snapshots of a life not fully realized—Lawrence wrote: "I'm sitting in my cottage rather puzzled to find out what has happened to me. At present the feeling is mere bewilderment. I imagine leaves must feel like this after they have fallen yet alive from their tree, now on the ground, looking up, and until they die, wondering."

          A week later Lawrence, in a motorcycle crash, suffered fatal head injuries. He died six days later, never having recovered consciousness. He was 46. Lawrence was buried in a country cemetery not far from his cottage. A.W. Lawrence, his youngest brother, my correspondent, was the senior pallbearer.

_______

          Fifty-six years later, in February of 1990, I meet A.W. Lawrence face-to-face for the first time. The meeting was arranged by a mutual acquaintance. I am at Lawrence's bedside. He's 90 years of age. We reminisce about our lifetime correspondence. I show A.W. the aerogram he sent in 1959. He reads it very, very slowly, and at the end says, "Well, quite a good letter, that."

          I leave with a promise to return in the summer. But I return home one day in April to my Capitol Hill apartment to find on my answering machine a message from our mutual acquaintance: "We've lost our dear friend, Ray. A.W. passed quietly last Sunday. That's it then, Ray, isn't it, the end of an era."

          I telephoned the acquaintance to hear him say that my friendship with A.W. Lawrence—a friendship that was founded on A.W. himself and not on his famous brother—my friendship, particularly in his last years, had given back to A.W. his own identity.

______

          Although I consider myself successfully un-closeted, there does remain a pocket of silence, one that will always be there—

          What I was never able to say to A.W. Lawrence in 31 years was how grateful I was to his older brother—how this older brother, T.E. Lawrence, who had written his name "across the sky in stars" but who seems never to have made peace with his identity—how this older brother had managed to give a boy in the Bronx the gift of his own identity.

______

          A footnote in closing:

          If Lawrence of Arabia helped me out of the closet, and I considered myself fully out (the exception being the one pocket of silence I just mentioned), why then have I contributed my stories to our website under the name Colin Dale? Why not under my own name? Believe me, this is not another pocket of silence. Twenty-some years ago I and a friend were riding the London underground. We got off at a station stop called Colindale. Colindale: one word, no space. My friend said, "That's not too shabby a name, Colindale. It would make a good alter-ego." And so ever since if I write something that I send to my friend, I write it as Colin Dale: two words.

          If you were to look at a map of the London underground, you'd see that if my friend and I had gotten off one stop sooner, today I'd be Hendon Central. One stop later, I'd be Burnt Oak.

About the Author

Colin Dale couldn't be happier to be involved again at the Center. Nearly three decades ago, Colin was both a volunteer and board member with the old Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Then and since he has been an actor and director in Colorado regional theatre. Old enough to report his many stage roles as "countless," Colin lists among his favorite Sir Bonington in The Doctor's Dilemma at Germinal Stage, George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Colonel Kincaid in The Oldest Living Graduate, both at RiverTree Theatre, Ralph Nickleby in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby with Compass Theatre, and most recently, Grandfather in Ragtime at the Arvada Center. For the past 17 years, Colin worked as an actor and administrator with Boulder's Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Largely retired from acting, Colin has shifted his creative energies to writing--plays, travel, and memoir.