Clubs, by Lewis T

I was never a bridge player.  My parents played bridge but they never made an effort to teach me how (and I never asked).  Poker, yes, bridge, no.  I seem to remember that clubs were the runt of the litter when it comes to suits.  Maybe that's why the symbol for clubs was the three-leaf clover, something that constantly gets stepped on, unlike diamonds, hearts, and spades (the latter of which can be used to uproot clover).

Clubs could also be a weapon in the olden days.  In fact, they were the weapon of choice of the cave man and were often used to find a suitable mate — or, at least, a compliant one.

There used to be something known as a "club foot".  I don't hear much about them anymore.  Perhaps they went away as spinach became more popular.

The GOP used to be a party.  Now, they seem to me to be more like a club.  Political parties used to be fairly welcoming, as long as you were old enough to vote and have an opinion.  To join a club, you needed something more--a characteristic that branded you as an "insider".  My dad used to be something called a Kiwanian--a member of the Kiwanis Club.  Unlike Moose or Elk, Kiwanians did not have to drink a lot of beer and learn to make strange noises in order to be accepted.

Judging from the list of potential presidential candidates among Republicans these days, I would guess that among those traits that make one a stalwart is the belief that conviction is more important than knowledge.  Texas Senator Ted Cruz demonstrated this marvelously recently when he made his announcement as a candidate for President of the U.S.  Raising his right arm in the air and gesturing toward heaven, much like the Nazi salute but without the starchy uniform, he said, "Our rights do not come from man, they come from God".  I have no doubt that the God he had in mind was the Old Testament God.  I'm pretty sure it wasn't Thomas Jefferson's.  Cruz's club would not be a safe place for liberals, gays, scientists, non-believers, intellectuals, philosophers, people born in the U.S., and members of the middle class.  All others would be luke-warmly welcomed.

© 26 Mar 2015 

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.

Clubs, by Betsy

In 1950 when I was 15 years old our family moved from New Jersey to Louisiana.

I have often said a comparable change would be moving from Earth to the moon.

In this case, however, the moon would have been populated with humanoids who had their own culture and language--very much different from anything I had ever encountered in my young life. However, I was young and I had much to learn and experience. 

The first difference that I noticed in my new home was the blatant discrimination and racist practices carried out against people of color. I’m not so sure the same thing was not going on in New Jersey. I suspect I just didn’t see it. It was hidden. In the deep South, it couldn’t be hidden because of the large population of African Americans.  Almost every household in my new hometown had at least one black person working for them. These family servants had to have their own toilet facilities usually outside or in the garage, their own private glass from which to get a drink of water (never would a white person want to drink from the same glass!) We all know about the public drinking fountains.

Of course, the schools were segregated as was everything else. I left the South to attend college in New York State in 1953 never to return except for visits with my parents.

After federal legislation made segregation illegal in the 1960’s nothing changed much in Louisiana. These southern people are slow moving indeed.  It was not until the late 1970’s that they finally were forced to allow black people to use public facilities such as restaurants. On one occasion when I returned to Hammond for a visit, my high school friend suggested we go out to dinner. She assured me they had solved the problem of integration by making the city restaurants into private clubs. Most whites belonged to all the clubs and there were many of them. We would have to take our own liquor since it was no longer a public place. The private clubs could or would not get licenses to sell liquor. 

White folks continued for decades to claim that the culture of segregation is justified because everyone is happy with the status quo including blacks. That’s how we want it and that’s how they want it, was the claim.  People want to stay in their place and keep to themselves. Keep to themselves, maybe, but stay in their current place--please!

The last time I visited Hammond, Louisiana was in 2003 when I attended my fiftieth high school reunion. I had no family there except in the cemetery in the church yard.

I was happy to see that the public places that had had a brief existence as private clubs--they had all become public places again, businesses now open to all people. The college in Hammond--a branch of Louisiana State University--included many black students, and many higher paying positions previously unavailable to people of color were now occupied by African Americans. Change comes slowly but change for the better had indeed come to Hammond Louisiana albeit at the expense of the lives of many good people and many hard-fought battles lasting for decades.

It saddens me more than I can say to watch the evening news and see that racism is alive and well today in the United States of America--land of the free and home of the brave—and not just in the South.  At the same time, I am happy to see that public places are not changing into private clubs in order to avoid the law of the land. The law of the land has made segregation in public places illegal as it should be. In spite of this institutional racism is prevalent. A young law abiding African American or Latino male in some locations is suspect simply because of who he is. Racial profiling is common practice in some areas. Our prisons are filled with men and women of color in numbers disproportionate to the population. In recent years, we have witnessed the passage of laws in some states designed to make it almost impossible for certain people to vote. Those laws, in my opinion, target low income people of color. 

While being white, I have not had to experience the horrors of decades of discrimination I have described here. I have, however, experienced on a very few brief occasions the hatred felt toward a person who is perceived as being different and a threat to the power structure. We have seen that progress against discrimination and hatred can come quickly when our leaders pass laws making discrimination illegal.

I want to believe there is a basic innate goodness in all human beings on this planet--our leaders, law enforcement officials, even the wrong-doers and criminals.

Let us step back and consider our place in the universe--so small, so isolated, so seemingly vulnerable.  At the same time, we must consider that we are creatures who have the capacity to love each other and to love this tiny speck of rock we live on.  Love is the means to peace on Earth, I believe.  Let us look beyond our egos and other constructs of the mind. It is our egos that drive us to create clubs so we can segregate ourselves from each other. Let us all look inside beyond our egos and awaken to our very core, our being, which is love. I do believe love is the answer for us humans.

 © 23 Mar 2015 

About the Author 

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

Clubs, by Phillip Hoyle

For me clubs have always been about responsibility: treasurer, president, secretary, vice-president, committee chair, on and on. I am sure I learned this from the outset when we neighborhood boys formed the Ark Club. But that was play, kind of like Cowboys and Indians or Army but with paperwork. Then adults began to organize us in a moral effort to control kids and their activities: Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, choirs, and youth groups. These clubs attracted me for their activities but not their group pride, personal recognition, or promised advantages. I don’t say this as a matter of criticism but simply as a description of my introverted preference and deep independence. I liked having things to do if they matched my interests, I got along well with peers, and I was respectful to adult leaders. Often I became some kind of leader although I didn’t seek such leadership preferring simply to help and to enjoy. I didn’t care to beat a drum for attention. I could tolerate
responsibility for short periods of time, but mostly I wanted to learn and to experience.

Around age thirty, my career was on the line demanding of me a choice between doing church work and teaching music history. I gave myself six months to figure out which way I’d go. In so doing, I realized I needed to give the church career a better chance. So I attended some religious education events, first, an intense training program organized by the Regional and General levels of the church and second, the meeting of a professional association of religious educators. Over-all the groups did not do much for me, the former seeming too much related to the status quo of congregational life, the latter seeming just a bit too embarrassing to me to make a strong identification. Still at each of these meetings I met some nice people and at each event a couple of very impressive individuals. Furthermore I observed interactions that attracted me, not relationships I wanted but ones that revealed these leaders were as complicated as I was and as bright or brighter. Certainly some of them were living life rather largely (a term I will not address in this story).

I compared these religious educators with the professors I knew, that other professional group I was observing, and found as much or more creativity among the church educators. Plus for me, I realized, I needed the stimulation of working with people of all ages rather than the small age range of undergrads in college. Church offered more freewheeling educational leadership opportunities. I opted for a career in congregations.

Some years later I was recruited to run for president elect in the professional association, a group that still slightly embarrassed me. Beyond the embarrassment I had friends in the group and annual meetings had become an important time away from work and family. I thought over the offer and realized it came with a four to five year sentence: attendance at annual meetings for running for office, serving as president-elect, serving as president, serving as immediate past president whose responsibility it was to oversee the next elections, and my requirement to show up at the following meeting unlike almost every past president I had known in the group. Did I really want to do this? I thought I saw an opportunity to help the organization become less an in-group and more open to the paraprofessional educators most congregations were hiring to organize and oversee their programs. There were fewer and fewer full-time jobs for seminary-trained educators on the horizon. Still the nomination promised mostly a bunch of work.

I did that work and stayed through my sentence. I didn’t regret it and learned so much during the five years, but I also got too close to the bared emotions of people for whom such a position was seen as a great honor that took them on a power trip. Yuck. This work was important—okay—but to take oneself so seriously in its execution seemed hopeless to me, too much like what I observed in some pastors, preachers, and evangelists. Worse than embarrassing!

Clubs: for the most part, I’m not interested. Still today I am leading a program and attend several gatherings of artists, writers, and storytellers. And I go out with a gang of guys for happy hour every Friday night. But the real attraction in these groups is the interesting people I see and the new things I learn as we write, read, tell stories, and make art together.

Denver, © 30 March 2015

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

Clubs, by Will Stanton

Joining a club sometimes can be a good fit, sometimes not.  DPMC, or Denver Professional Men's Club, is a euphemism.   I suppose that, if the club were located in a more cosmopolitan area with a reputation for having a large gay population, such as San Francisco, the club might have been named “Denver Gay Men's Club.”  Also, to me, “Professional Men's Club” sounds rather presumptuous.  All it really means is that a member is supposed to have enough money to host and cater large gatherings of around one hundred men, has an elegant home large enough to accommodate such a group, and money to hire bartenders.

A few years ago, Dr. Bob persuaded me to join DPMC and sponsored my application.  After all, “Not everyone is suitable for admission.”  This reminds me of the quotation attributed to Groucho Marx, “I wouldn't want to be a member of any group that would have me as a member;” for I do not have a very large, expensive home, and I cannot afford to cater food for a hundred men or to hire professional bartenders.  I did join DPMC, albeit only briefly.  My rationale was that I needed to get out more, meet more people, socialize more, because I had been so isolated living alone and running a home office after the death of my partner.

I generally am open-minded, enjoy people's company, and give people the benefit of the doubt unless proven otherwise.  Eventually, however, I realized that I was not particularly happy in DPMC.  So many of the members seemed so full of themselves.  Everyone stood about, shoulder to shoulder or occupying the various chairs and couches, chatting to their few  selected friends to the exclusion of others.  Most of the members drank, some drank heavily.  There was plenty of catered food, although the heavy drinkers often ignored food or merely nibbled at it.  The gay bartenders were kept very busy and made a lot in tips.  I never have been big on alcohol.  If I ever had a drink, it was only one, and that was for the taste, not to get a buzz or to loosen up.  One egotistic member, known to give private cocaine parties and popular with those who attended, tried to give a recovering cocaine addict some cocaine as a birthday present.  Those factors alone set me apart from most of the members.

I made a point of circulating among everyone, trying to get to know them.  I discovered, however, that the long-established cliques tended to stay together and were little interested in getting to know new members.  Also, although ages ranged from early twenties to, in one case, early eighties, most were at least a generation younger than I and clearly preferred to remain within their own age group.  This certainly was true in one particular case.

Long enough ago when brick-front stores sold CDs and DVDs, as opposed to generally buying on-line, I used to frequent Tower Records.  That large store had a separate room for classical music so that those of us with sensitive ears would not be accosted by the sound of pounding drums and screeching pseudo-singers blaring from the speakers in the main part of the store.  Naturally, I found few, more discerning shoppers in the classical room.  That is where I was surprised to find a boyishly-young shopper sorting through the opera recordings.  We struck up a conversation, and he mentioned that he was studying opera and sang tenor.  We found that we had a lot of interests in common.

I later discovered that this young tenor was a member of DPMC.  I found him chatting with a small group of twenty-somethings.  I greeted him and spoke with him for a moment; however, I quickly felt that I was regarded as an intruder, my being older and not a member of their clique.  It also became apparent that another in that group had taken the young tenor as a partner and preferred not having any strangers talking to him.  So, regardless of having similar musical interests with the tenor, I did not fit in.

I found that the older members of DPMC were more courteous and accepting of newcomers, yet I had little in common with them.  The eighty-two-year-old multi-millionaire, who made his money in Texas hogs, sheep, and most likely some oil, lead an ostentatiously flamboyant life, as evidenced by his owning a pink Rolls Royce, a much younger, former drag queen, and a large home decorated in a style that would have embarrassed Liberace.  Yes, they were kind enough to invite me to their Christmas party, but our interests were so different that we did not make socializing together a regular habit.

The most unusual member whom I met was Jimmy.  (I am leaving out his surname.)  I was puzzled by his arrival at a DPMC party one evening, his appearing to be no more than fourteen-years-old and in the company of a tall man in his mid-forties.  I dismissed the idea that the older man had the indiscretion to bring an underage partner, so I wondered why this man was bringing his son or nephew to an adult party.  Later in the evening, I noticed that Jimmy sat alone, abandoned, ignored, and obviously very sad.  When I witness people feeling hurt or sad, that distresses me.  So, I approached Jimmy to see if I could cheer him up.

During our conversation, Jimmy revealed that he had an off-again / on-again relationship with the tall man, and was living with him.  I sensed that Jimmy felt that he was being used but had no practical idea how to find an alternative life.  I was interested to hear that he loved classical music and owned a grand piano, although it had been placed in storage because the tall man had no room for it, leaving Jimmy without the opportunity to play.  He also enjoyed opera and cooking.  I was able to observe very clearly that he never smiled, that his apparent sense of sadness and loneliness were disturbingly deep-seated.  He surprised me when he mentioned that he was employed.  I also noticed that, contrary to Jimmy appearing to be too young to shave, he sounded much more mature than a mere fourteen.  I said to him, “I don't wish to be too personal in inquiring, but how old are you?”  He stunned me when he replied, “Forty.”  Trying in my mind to reconcile the dramatic difference between his age and his appearance, I quickly concluded that he must be an extremely rare case of Kallmann syndrome, an affliction of the hypothalamus and pituitary gland that, at the very least, prevents puberty.  I then understood Jimmy's sense of alienation and isolation, his being a forty-year-old man who looked fourteen.  He being so different, he did not have a sense of belonging.  

My having been working for many years in behavioral health, I wished that there were some way that  I could help Jimmy and offered to be available to talk with him if he desired.  He seemed thankful and provided me with his full name and phone number.  The next weekend, I phoned Jimmy a few times to see how he was doing and if he needed someone to talk with.  I received no answer, and he did not call me back.

At the next DPMC gathering, Jimmy again appeared.  I spoke with him, saying that I hoped that he was OK.  He puzzled me when he stated that I could have phoned him.  I replied that I had but had received no answer.  About this time, a DPMC member with camera came around, taking pictures for the next newsletter.  The moment Jimmy spotted him, he bolted from his chair and hid behind a large fish tank, refusing to have his picture taken.  The cameraman tried to persuade Jimmy to come out from behind the fish tank and to have his picture taken, but he adamantly refused.  I interpreted Jimmy's action as having been so self-conscious and unhappy with himself that he would not allow his picture to be taken.  I never saw Jimmy after that.  I wonder what became of him.  I hope that he has found happiness.

I did not stay in DPMC much later, either, mostly because I was not impressed with what this club turned out to be, and I did not find people with similar interests who could become friends.  Another contributing factor was that the events coordinator must have thought of himself as a twenty-something, slam-dancing, hot club-guy; and he arranged events to suit himself, despite the fact that most of the members were more mature than that.  He arranged for a Halloween party in a huge warehouse and hired a DJ to play ear-splitting, pounding noise.  Literally, I could not remain in that warehouse, even though I had stuffed paper napkins into my ears and stood in the farthest corner away from the towering speakers.  The decibels must have been about twenty points above the level that causes hearing damage.  I was forced to flee to the parking lot, finally deciding that I might as well leave.  There was no way I could go back inside and be comfortable, let alone protect my hearing.

When I was about to leave, a long limo with a bunch of queens and driven by a Russian émigré came into the parking lot.  It just so happened that my costume was that of a KGB officer, with a KGB general's hat, black-leather coat, trousers, boots, and gloves.  The Russian noticed me immediately, came over, and addressed me in Russian, which, obviously, I did not understand.  He turned and walked away when he realized that I was not Russian and that my apparel was merely a costume.

The events coordinator arranged another gathering at a bar that was built like a concrete box.  Apparently he had hired the same DJ, who played ear-damaging noise.  Several of us fled to the rear of the building and finally left the event early when the bar needed that area to set up for another event.   Later, when I politely inquired of the events coordinator why he arranged extremely loud events, he gave me a very snotty reply.  I increasingly became disillusioned with DPMC.

There was one annual event that was supposed to be very chique, the Christmas black-tie dinner.  Formal tuxes were expected and an extra fee charged.  I did not attend.  Friends, who are no longer members, have told me that they found the event rather artificial and ostentatious.  They, too, became disenchanted with DPMC and quit.

The very last gathering I attended consisted of several cliques that clung to each other and ignored everyone else.  At that point, I finally concluded that DPMC had almost nothing to offer me.  I let my membership lapse and ignored membership-fee notices mailed to me.

Since then, I was introduced to the Story Time group.  Here I have found people who have something worthwhile to say, who have had interesting lives, and who are interested in hearing about other's experiences, thoughts, and feelings.  These members are genuine people who share without pretense and who provide a welcome atmosphere of trust.  These are the people I look forward to seeing each week.

 © 4 March 2015      

About the Author 

  

I have had a life-long fascination with people and their life stories.  I also realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual ones.  Since I joined this Story Time group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group.  I do put some thought and effort into my stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.