My Favorite Gay Role Model, by Ricky

This should be an interesting topic for our story group.  I can imagine that there will be several gay role models written about; perhaps, one for each of the group members.  But, I can also imagine there will be some members who, like me, have no gay role models.  In which case, it will be interesting to see how those group members respond to this topic.

        As far back in time as I can remember, I only met one gay man (Jim Nabors) that might have become a role model but, was not.  The problem was two-fold.  First, I did not know he was gay until decades later and second, I did not know (or admit to myself) I was gay until decades later.

        In my pre-teen years, I did get to watch Liberace, if he was a featured guest on someone’s TV show.  I did notice his flamboyant costume and signature candelabra sitting on top of his grand piano and thought it was strange when compared to other pianists I had seen in movies or on TV.  However, no adult ever mentioned that he was probably a homosexual in my presence.  It would have been strange if they had brought up a sexual topic to me at that age.  If fact, the only people who did speak about sex were my peers when we finally reached puberty and began to share forbidden information, magazines, and photos taken from our fathers’ “hidden stashes”.

        In high school, I did not know any gay males.  In college, while I did mentally lust after a few males in my dorm, I did not act on the feelings because I was afraid of being labeled “queer” and, at that time, I was terribly shy and did not know how to make friends, straight or otherwise.  After I married, there was very little incentive to even mentally lust after males.  So, it was easy to consider myself “normal” and not homosexual.  Besides, I really did want a family.

        Like many gay men of my generation, marriage was expected by society and it became a place to hide one’s orientation and consciously or unconsciously suppress the desires.  Thus, during the marriage period for me there was no opportunity to develop a relationship with a gay person, so no role model appeared.

        At my current age, I am fairly set in my ways and I have yet to find or (in my opinion) to need a gay role model.  I obtained role models when I was young.  Not human role models, but philosophical role models. 

·       If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.  (I don’t follow this one all the time, in fact never did follow it exclusively.)

·       Do unto others as you want them to do unto you.

And then came the philosophical role models that still dominate my life:

·       The Boy Scout Oath and the Scout Law. These two underpinnings were cemented in place by my joining the LDS Church.

This is why I am the nice-guy I am.

        The Boy Scout program stopped me from becoming a juvenile delinquent.  I was already on the path to become one because I had no parental supervision and lots of time for my idle hands to find the “Devil’s workshop.”  I could say that my scoutmasters were my role models at the time I needed a role model.  It was a pity that they did not know I was sexually confused and they were not gay.  Who knows what or who I may have become if they had un-confused me at that age.

© 23 February 2015 

About the Author 

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

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

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

My story blog is: TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com 

Normal, by Gillian

Well how in Hell would any of us know about normal? I was tempted to write just that and only that, but that's taking too easy a way out. But normal, just by it's definition of usual, typical, unexpected, is just not very exciting Oh, an occasional normal, as in temperature, or blood pressure, can be welcome, but on the whole abnormal is surely more interesting.

And maybe I'm just feeling irritable today, but I'm really getting sick of the New Normal. I found it to be an interesting and quite clarifying phrase once upon a time, but it has been, and is, so overused that it has become .... well .... normal. On the internet, of course, it abounds, usually capitalized: the New Normal of globally aging populations, of a slower-growing U.S economy or those personal New Normals we must find after the birth of a child, or a recovery from cancer, or suffering grief.

The Economist magazine recently headed a section, 'America and Cuba - the new normal,' and the New York Times entitled an article, 'Puberty Before Age 10: a New Normal?' I have to agree with Harvard professor David Laibson who said that people are "a little trigger-happy with the 'new normal' label." Well, I say to myself, new things of any kind are often over-used at first.

But wait!

This phrase is apparently not new at all: rather making a resurgence. Believe it or not, and I did indeed find it rather incredible, a New York Times article in 2011* printed a graph showing the frequency of the term [new normal - ed.] in books printed over the last century. According to this documentation, it was even more commonly used in the 1920's and '30's than it is now - at least in the printed word.

Then it lay pretty dormant until zooming to it's current popularity since around 2000.

Anyway, whatever the reason and like it or not, we appear to be destined to be inundated with New Normals at least for a while, so I'll add my own.

WE are the New Normal. And, yes, I do most sincerely believe that. No, I don't mean that we in the GLBT community are suddenly going to find ourselves in the majority, but that we will become, if we are not already, normal. Looking at listed synonyms, that simply means we are usual, ordinary, customary, expected, even conventional. Of course NBC tried to suggest just that with the TV series The New Normal which aired in 2012 and '13, and more power to them, but there is nothing more powerful than the personal. It doesn't mean we will be universally loved, approved of, even accepted. But we hardly come as a surprise, let alone a shock, to many people these days. Yes, an individual coming out may still shock unsuspecting family and friends, but we, as a group, have arrived. And as more people get to know us individually we will become more usual and ordinary and, in many cases, perhaps seen as quite conventional. I believe that this will all speed up if the Supreme Court, which has finally said it will do as it should have initially, actually makes a ruling, and in our favor.

Even gazing ahead through such rose-colored glasses, there is danger. Not for any of us older folk, I think, but for the future of our community as a whole in years to come. Will we, in fact, cease to be a community if we become more integrated into society as a whole? Worse, will we find ourselves becoming boringly, numbingly, normal; adopting all the previously straight mores and strictures of society and settling for over half of our hard won marriages ending in divorce? I so hope not. My dream is that we will form relationships and love with strengths forgotten or abandoned by our hetero friends. Perhaps they will even learn from us, and together we can all find much that has been lost, or more likely never was. Or perhaps, as several psychological studies have suggested, same-sex relationships have certain integral advantages over those of opposite-sex couples. Women will always be from Venus and men from Mars and that's an end to it. And that, I guess, would make any same-sex couple, just, inevitably, normal.

*http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/the-new-normal-is-actually-pretty-old/?_r=0

© 2 Feb 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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 28 years.

The Norm by Pat Gourley

I have for years dreaded being described as ‘normal’.  As queers we are really anything but normal whether we like it or not and I truly believe that this is our greatest gift. There is that old Chinese curse “may you be born in interesting times”.  A similar curse for me would be “may you be born normal”.

I must admit though that earlier on in my HIV diagnosis I craved “normal” lab values but eventually came to appreciate the fact that one can live quite a relatively healthy and productive life and still not be in the ‘normal range’. Normal really is something that is not all its cracked up to be. I suppose too there was a time in the sixties when I was experiencing my great gay awakening that I wished I could be normal. Fortunately, thanks to a much older lover, the Grateful Dead and an amazing commie Holy Cross nun I soon got over that!

Normal is defined as conforming to a standard, being typical or expected. How boring is that! I suspect the normal ones in the human herd rarely initiate evolutionary change in virtually any sphere of their lives. I am in favor of abolishing the term all together particularly when used in medical or psychiatric settings. A sub-definition of the word if you will is “free from physical or mental disorders”. Who the hell can honestly claim that reality?

I was once again reminded of how being outside the norm can be a very powerful agent for creating change while delivering progressive political and social messages particularly in the hands of a gay man. This light bulb of “fuck normal” once again went off in my head when I saw the Keith Haring exhibit at the de Young museum in San Francisco this past January. For anyone not familiar with Haring or his artwork he was a very prolific gay artist who lived in New York City from 1978 until his death from AIDS in February 1990.

I suppose my first impression of his art that I recall was in the late 1980’s and I thought how simple, I could probably do that. Ha, well I guess that bit of self-delusion wasn’t really normal now was it! I have overtime though come to greatly appreciate the simple complexity and actually many revolutionary aspects of his immense body of work. Not only was Keith very openly gay he also was quite upfront about his AIDS and these two realities permeate much of his later work as do many themes of social justice and the corporate greed and rape of the planet.

Haring never drew from sketches but rather had the ability to just start doing it and it happened in amazing fashion. The de Young exhibit also had a short documentary with it that was quite enlightening into his beautiful soul, his politics, his sexuality, his AIDS and most amazingly his creative process. Wow, nothing normal about him. And talk about simple line drawings that celebrate the penis, often his own, the exhibit was resplendent with many phalli.

 And of course on my second trip the next day through the exhibit I was reminded that this was San Francisco and that we weren’t in Kansas. There were dozens of middle school boys and girls on a field trip viewing the many graphic sexual images and not appearing to be phased in the least. In fact many were taking notes for class and actually discussing, and not in hush whispers or giggles, the many amazing ways fucking and sucking whereon display and at the same time delivering a strong social and often political message.

For whatever reason most of Haring’s work is not titled. He as often as not addresses issues of racism, AIDS, climate change and the many societal facets of capitalist corruption and greed so rampant in our culture today in his work with simple lines. His drawings also often speak to very basic human realities of love, kindness, generosity and the constant message that we are one world and most certainly all in this together.

A short quote form the artist:

“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.”

Thank the universe that there was nothing normal about the magic Keith Haring brought to the world.

© February 2015 

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.