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Public Service Announcement

If you’ve been considering visiting the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, think twice before plunking down the $12 admission fee.

First of all, when we went this past weekend none of her iconic works were on display, and only a few very bland paintings of her famous flowers were seen. Photography is prohibited in half the galleries, and the few pieces that you might want to photograph in the rooms where you can take pictures are all marked “No photography.”

I guess the museum doesn’t realize there’s something called the Internet, where I can get pictures of what I wanted anyway.

However, if you want to see lots of black and white photographs of the artist, by all means, go and knock yourselves out.

Thankfully, this wasn’t the only reason Ben and I decided to skip town for the holiday weekend. We both needed to get out of Denver and a road trip with a couple nights in a nice hotel was the perfect antidote for funk that both of us had been feeling.

But yeah, the museum was a big disappointment. We were expecting so much more.

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Worlds AIDS Day

As I do every year on December 1st I take a moment to remember the men who have touched my life and sadly are no longer with us…


Kent Kelly


Ken Cohen


Steve Golden


Dennis Shelpman


Jim Hagen


Chuck Krahe


Marty Kamner


Michael Nelson


Jim Nye


Kevin Ohm


Rick King


Ron Aiazzi


Grant Neilsen


Ric Hathaway


David Koston


Kim Holstein

Ben Walzer
Ken Borg
Harold Gates
Jim Girard
Keith Roseberry
Tom Farrel
Peter Whitman
Chuck Mayer
Richard Gulliver
Scott Woods
Bobby Farina
Brian Lea
Fred Sibinic
Steve McCollom
John Trapp
Philip Ruckdeschel

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To Absent Friends

A lot of people have asked why, after all these years, I still blog. I mean, it’s not really much of a thing anymore since so many have moved on to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a multitude of other venues, but for me it remains a comfortable and familiar vehicle to express myself. I will freely admit that since Obama came to office, I’ve had much less political opinion to express, and Voenix Rising has become little more than a place where I bitch about work, repost funny pictures I’ve found online, and share lots of images of handsome men in various stages of undress. But every now and then I get the bug to actually sit down and write.

As I lay in bed in the dark this morning, after waking up at my usual ungodly time, I reached over and slipped on my headphones and started listening to Röyksopp’s The Inevitable End, an album Ben had been listening to the night before but one that I hadn’t heard from beginning to end.

Almost immediately—and don’t ask me why because I have no explanation—memories came unbidden of a long-departed friend…

Ben Howard Walzer, 1958-1987

It was early summer, 1986. After a rather tumultuous 18 months together, my second partner and I decided to go our separate ways. It was a friendly parting, and nearly 30 years later he remains one of my dearest friends. Even then we knew we couldn’t shut each other out of our lives completely, and since I loved the complex we lived in, when the time came for me to move out, I simply got my own place a few doors away in an adjacent building.

Shortly after I got settled, a very handsome stranger moved in across the courtyard and immediately caught my eye. I’d often see him out walking his two dogs, and we’d exchange pleasantries whenever we passed.

At this point I don’t remember the exact circumstances that led up to it, but one afternoon he showed up at my front door after a run, drenched and smelling of fresh sweat—probably following up on a general invitation I’d thrown his way to stop by sometime (no doubt hoping to get into his pants, but never expecting that anything would ever come of it).

He came in and sat down and we chatted for a few minutes. He asked to use the bathroom. Still not completely sure of which team he played on, I panicked as I had a framed sketch of a naked man in an obvious state of arousal hanging over the toilet.

When he came out a few minutes later I asked if he wanted something to drink. While I don’t remember his exact words now, as he stood there grabbing his crotch through his nylon running shorts, it was something along the lines of, “No thanks, but I would like to fuck.”

Alrighty then!

We were both 28—young, horny, and obviously attracted to each other. We wasted no time getting to it.

Though that initial hot, sweaty afternoon of monkey sex was never repeated, we became good friends. Like myself, he’d recently split up with his partner and had moved into a place of his own. We had much more than our recent separations in common, so it was an emotion-filled goodbye only a few short months later when my ex and I decided to follow through on the plans we’d made when we were still coupled and move to San Francisco.

Shortly after we left Tucson, Ben and his ex reconciled and moved back in together. Naturally we stayed in touch, and when the group of us who’d moved to San Francisco returned to Tucson the following Christmas, I made a point of seeing him.

They’d bought a townhouse and had completely remodeled it. To this day I remember how beautifully it had turned out—and how happy he was.

Several months passed and the calls and letters abruptly stopped. I didn’t think much of this (as I had become horrible at keeping in touch as well, what with a new city to explore and all), but then in August I received a call at work from his partner. Ben had passed away from AIDS complications a week earlier.

I was devastated. Another friend of mine who lived in San Francisco—whom I’d known since my days at the University of Arizona ten years earlier—had also passed only a week before, and I was still reeling from that.

I don’t have a single photo of Ben, and to be honest I have only the vaguest recollection of what he looked like. Tall, dark and fuzzy is how I remember him; a NJB I would’ve loved to have brought home to mother. Shortly after he passed I asked his partner if he’d send me a photo, but I never received one. Years later I followed up with his family with a similar request and also never got a response.

The only tangible record I have of that sweet man was the photo above that I took of his memorial quilt when it was on display in San Francisco a year or so later.

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Looking Back in Time

When we look up into the night sky, we are also looking back in time. The light from the stars we see with our unaided eyes left those stars sometimes hundreds—if not thousands—of years ago. The arrival of Sirius in the winter skies always causes me to pause a moment and remember where I was and what I was doing nine years ago (the approximate time the light I’m now seeing left that star).

But if you look to the majority of bright, blue-white giants that form the Orion constellation, that light left well before you, me, our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and in fact, this country were even born. I’ve marked up my photo from yesterday as a thought experiment.

As always, click for full size.

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Oh Sah-NAP!”

Stolen from the ever-fabulous Towleroad:

The change.org petition asking The Learning Channel to cancel 19 Kids and Counting over the Duggars’ “LGBT fear mongering” that caught fire on the internet earlier this week also managed to catch the attention of right-wing Christian activists who are concerned with (but don’t actually understand) first amendment protections. 

American Family Association, Alliance Defending Freedom, and other anti-LGBT organizations and websites helped spearhead a #DefendtheDuggars tweetfest today. But like NOM’s Twitter warning last month that marriage equality would lead to people marrying themselves, the campaign quickly started backfiring in spectacular fashion.

Here are just a few highlights of what’s rolling in over on Twitter:

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Wingers Go Ghandi

Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo:

Yesterday, Sen. Tom Coburn suggested that President Obama’s immigration executive order might lead to “civil disobedience”, “anarchy,” or even political “violence.” I asked just what that civil disobedience might look like and TPM Reader FS has an idea of what anti-immigrant forces might have in mind …

My suggestion for what civil disobedience should look like is to move to Phoenix, trade their imitation Army rifles for shovels, and do a protest march through the residential subdivisions, pulling weeds as they go.

They should march into restaurant kitchens, offering to wash dishes for free. Or volunteer to man the drive through at any of a hundred fast food joints. Maybe ask a California cabbage farmer if they have anything needs harvesting. Those are the jobs illegal immigrants might be taking away.

A little background. I lived in Phoenix for 13 years, the last eight as a homeowner. Ours was the fourth house completed in our neighborhood and I’d often sit on the porch drinking beer and watching Hispanic workers build our neighbors’ houses. For a few bottles of Pacifico, I learned most of the workers were from Mexico or Guatemala, and none were employed directly by the builder.

For all the anti immigrant bluster for which Sheriff Joe Arpaio is famous today, he could’ve effortlessly rounded up 100 immigrants a day in any new subdivision being built anywhere in Maricopa county, from about 2000 to 2007. But that would’ve really inconvenienced the real estate developers, so Sheriff Joe found other stunts like making prisoners wear pink underwear. He didn’t come to hypocritically discover anti immigration fever until the bubble burst and people turned on each other.

My time in Arizona made it really hard for me to get mad at a man who wants to work in 110 degree heat, for cash. But those are the jobs in question. Anyone who wants to protest should start there.

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This is Awesome

What would happen if today’s movie trailer standards were applied to a classic like The Empire Strikes Back?

Cameron Arrigioni decided to take a stab at it, and except for the “A George Lucas Film” part, I have to say the results are phenomenal.

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Quote of the Day

“Sometimes, you win the life lottery and the thing that you do for 40 hours a week in a nondescript office building somewhere in the city you live in is not a soul-crushing exercise in managing disappointments. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to really, truly, love what you do. If you are one of these people, I’m very happy for you. . . .” — Megan Reynolds, introducing her new every-Monday column on work issues on “The Frisky”

Unfortunately I cannot claim that winning ticket at this time…

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