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If You’re Not Outraged You’re Not Paying Attention

I don’t think I’m alone when I say I think we were all a lot happier in the pre-internet world. That’s because most of us went through life, blissfully unaware of the majority of atrocities and the outright stupidity occurring in the world. I know that knowledge is power, and yes, while we have now have the collective wisdom of humanity at our fingertips,  at the same time we are also exposed to things that no one in their right mind needs to see. (Two Girls, One Cup will forever be burned into my consciousness as prime example of this.)

Just this morning, while going through my Twitter feed, I came across these items. Perhaps ignorance is bliss, because I would’ve been a lot happier never having learned of any of it:

She was jailed because apparently stoning her to death would be bad for international relations.

Maybe—like most toddlers think—if he stomps his feet and threatens to hold his breath until he turns blue he’ll get what he wants.

At least he didn’t use the N-word.

Stalin would be proud.

Don’t worry, it’s all okay because at least he’s not gay!

And on that subject, here’s another one for whom I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until he’s caught tap, tap, tapping his way into scandal in an airport mens’ room.

There are dozens—if not hundreds—of more examples, but just posting these was exhausting enough. There are times I truly regret that the Mayans were wrong about the end of the world, because this planet really needs an enema.

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GSO, Jekyll’s, and Louie’s Lower Level

Apache Hall, 1977

Shortly after I came out to David, I decided it was time to start telling the rest of the world, and one momentous night in January of 1977, I made my way to what would be the first of many meetings of the University of Arizona’s Gay Student Organization, or GSO. Nervous as hell when I walked in to that room on the third floor of the Student Union, what stuck me most was how normal everyone looked. Until that point my exposure to gay folk was what the media had fed me. I remember my mother coming in my bedroom one night and turned on the television, announcing, “I want you to see what a homosexual looks like. (Mothers know, even if they don’t want to admit it.) On the television Truman Capote was being interviewed. No one in that room looked—or acted—like that. They were just regular people.

I grabbed a soda and sat down. Right before the meeting started a one older guy (and by older I mean 28—I was 18 at the time) came up to me and introduced himself. Phil Oliver was the first person (other than my grandmother, whom I had lied to at the time) who had ever asked me point blank if I was gay. “Yes,” I said, stuttering. “Yes I am.” He smiled and said, “Well then, welcome!”

And thus began a friendship that spanned more than a decade.

I returned to the dorm after this first meeting and was bubbling over with excitement. David was less than enthused, and as the days passed, it turned out that in spite of having a transexual uncle, David didn’t take the news of suddenly having a gay roommate all that well after all. The Friday night after my first GSO meeting, David—who hadn’t touched a drop of liquor in his life until that point—went out and got shit-faced drunk, returned to the dorm at 3 am, and apparently went door-to-door telling anyone who bothered to answer, “Mark is a queer!”

Thanks, buddy.

He moved out shortly thereafter, and began rooming with an Iranian student down the hall who—in his words—didn’t bathe for the remainder of the semester.

It was probably after the second or third GSO meeting I attended when someone in the group suggested we reconvene downstairs in Louie’s Lower Level—one of the union’s many eateries.

It was then I discovered “the table.”

I’d eaten at Louie’s a hundred times during my first semester on campus, totally oblivious to the fact there was one particular table where all the gay boys on campus congregated. Really? It had been there all that time?

Like I said, oblivious.

It was through GSO that I met John McGuire, another freshman who ventured into that GSO meeting for the first time the same night I did. I don’t think either of us was really all that attracted to each other, but we were both virgins (yes, hard to believe at this point, but it’s true) eager to find out what this whole gay sex thing was about, and less than a week after David had vacated our shared room in Apache hall, I had my first play date.

It was a disaster.

John didn’t kiss, and the extent of our play was some mutual masturbation.

This is what we were being condemned to hell for? That hardly seemed worthwhile.

Turns out we weren’t doing it right, and very shortly thereafter I met someone who showed me how it was supposed to be done. Rick Hathaway was not a member of GSO, but he was a regular fixture at Louie’s and there was more than a little flirtatious chemistry between us. One Friday night a group of us were sitting around the table and Rick turned to me and asked what my plans were for the evening. “I’ll probably just go back to my room and watch television,” I said. “Nonsense! Tina and I are heading over to Jekyll’s. Come with us!”

Jekyll & Hyde’s, 1977

Jekyll & Hyde’s—billed as Tucson’s “Newest and Gayest Disco” had recently opened and it was apparently the place to go. Nervousness swept over me; my first gay bar? “Um…okay,” I said.

Rick gave me his address (a few blocks west of campus) and told me to come by around 9 pm. Tina would drive.

Butterflies in my stomach don’t even begin to describe what I was feeling as I walked over to his house, and when we got to Jekyll’s itself…what can I say? It was amazing.

I’d never been to a disco—much less a gay disco—before, so this was a totally new, alien environment. The lights, the music—OH MY GOD—the people. I met my first drag queen. Rick and I danced. I met more souls than I had during the entire previous semester. We closed the place down and then went for breakfast at the adjacent Denny’s.

They dropped me off at my room around 3:30 am that morning, and it was all I could do to force myself to go to sleep. Adrenaline was coursing through my system like never before.

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Welcome to the University of Arizona

My disappointing, short-lived college career began one hot August afternoon in 1976. When I entered high school I had initially dreamt of becoming an astronomer, but harsh reality forced me to admit that I would never be able to master the mathematics involved in securing a degree in the field. A newfound love of architectural design coupled with the much less stringent mathematical requirements for such a degree sent me following in my father’s footsteps with intentions of becoming an architect. Both Arizona State and the University of Arizona had excellent architectural schools, but the reason I ultimately chose U of A instead of ASU was more practical than anything else: by going to U of A, I could move out of my parents’ house and have the freedom to start taking those first tentative steps out of the closet—and freshman calculus (see mastering mathematics, above) was not a requirement for admission to the architectural college there like it was at ASU.

I moved into a room on the third floor of Navajo Hall, a reinforced concrete relic from the late 1920s built under Arizona Stadium. It was obviously not one of the newer residence halls, but it had the largest rooms of any dorm on campus, and that was important to me. It was also one of the few at that time that had central cooling.

My first roommate was an Asian gymnast, whose name completely eludes me now. I knew from the beginning it wasn’t going to work. While I can now look back and say that undoubtedly some of my gay contemporaries might’ve jumped at the chance to room with a ripped 18 year old athlete, our class schedules were completely different and we had absolutely nothing in common.

Within a few weeks I had transferred to another room. My new roommate Karl, was a tall, blond, civil engineering major who had an enormous penis and wasn’t at all shy about it.

While I was still deeply in the closet, our next door neighbor, Andy, was most certainly not and from the very beginning he read me —as they say—like a cheap dime store novel. He knew my story even if I wasn’t quite sure of it myself, but was never cruel or malicious about it. If anything, I remember Andy being genuinely interested helping me come out, but I stubbornly refused to give in.

That changed somewhat beginning one Friday night in October. For some reason I found myself at the Flandrau Planetarium, touring the exhibits, when I made eye contact with a handsome boy on the other side of the room. I finally got the nerve and started a conversation. His name was David Miller, a guy from a small town in West Virginia.He too was a freshman, and we immediately hit it off. Despite my hopes, it was obvious he wasn’t gay, but we became good friends. He even came back up to Phoenix with me for Thanksgiving with my family.

I don’t remember exact details at this point, but David and I started hanging out more and more, and once Andy got wind of it, he started ribbing me about having finally found a boyfriend. That wasn’t the situation, but one thing led to another and Karl eventually got word of it. That began the end of our friendship and my time in Navajo Hall.

While the timing is fuzzy at this point, sometime around Thanksgiving David’s roommate had unexpectedly quit school and moved out, leaving David with the unpleasant prospect of having to pay for a single room. When he suggested I move in, I jumped at the opportunity since the situation in Navajo was rapidly deteriorating. He lived in Apache Hall, another older dorm (in the 1970s, all the dorms at U of A were “older”) that sat immediately west of Arizona Stadium. It was a 3-story red brick structure built in the late 1950s with cinder block interior walls and uncarpeted polished concrete floors. It reminded me of a prison minus the bars.

Shortly after the start of the spring semester, I decided it was time to stop kidding myself and everyone else around me. It was time to come out, and I felt my friendship with David was solid enough at that point that he would be the first person I told.

He took the revelation well, and after a long pause confessed he had a secret too. My heart fluttered. Was David about to come out to me?

No, but it was almost as good. His mom’s brother was Christine Jorgensen. “We don’t talk about Uncle George much any more.” I had no reason to doubt him; very few people really knew about Christine so I took it at face value.

We stayed up that night talking until nearly dawn, truly surprised he’d taken the news as well as he did.

(To be continued.)

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Great Idea, But…

The other day I got this awesome idea to begin writing my autobiography. I was thinking of My Wholly Unremarkable Life as a title.

This was prompted in no small part by reaching the age where I really should start writing some of that shit down, lest it slip from my memory at some point in the future. While my dad retained all his mental faculties right till the end, my mom suffered with Alzheimer’s, so I probably have a fifty percent chance of losing my mind at some point, and I’d really like to retain the written memories if nothing else. While the events themselves remain clear, with each passing year, pinpointing exactly when things happened gets a little bit fuzzier, and I know I’m in trouble when I look at my music collection and ask, “Was that 1978 or 1979?” (There was a time I could tell you which season songs were popular, but that is long gone.)

From late 1987 until my cancer diagnosis, I had been religiously keeping a journal of my life adventures. I can’t stand to read through any of it at this point because it’s painfully obvious from my own words what an asshole I was for the vast majority of my time in San Francisco—but it does come in handy when I’m faced with trying to recall exactly when something happened.

I gave up journaling with the cancer diagnosis. I didn’t want to wallow in self-pity and be forced to read it after I came through the ordeal, and it just seemed like it was a perfect time to stop. I also thought that my budding blogging career would take up the slack, and in many respects it did—until I systematically deleted my blogs not once, or twice, but three times total. I wish I’d at least kept a backup of the most recent one (the one I wiped before moving to Denver), but alas…

We move forward.

Anyhow, I’ve tried to start writing down some of my experiences, but I’m finding it difficult. I start on one thing and before I know it I’m off on some tangent. But I’m not going to give up, even if it means “publishing” individual chapters here.

Stay tuned, and I’ll try not to disappoint.

 

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Late to the Party

So I just started watching The Walking Dead.

Yeah, I know. Late to the party as usual.

The past few days AMC has been running a pre-season 4 marathon, and since there was nothing else on, I thought what the hell…find out what everyone’s been raving about.

Now my DVR is full, goddamnit!

Love the story, even though I’ve never been a big Zombie fan. But the characters are engaging and I got sucked in. Trouble is, it’s so intense I can only take about 3-4 episodes at a time before I have to turn it off.

Speaking of sucked, Hello Rick!

But with all Zombie stories, I have one question to ask: What happens when everyone who is not a zombie is eaten and/or converted? The ecology just isn’t sustaining. If Zombies can’t eat Zombies, what happens when their food supply runs out? And won’t they all just eventually decompose anyway?

I guess it’s kind of like parasites or bacteria that kill their hosts.

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Some Thoughts on the NSA “Scandal”

I would like to believe in magical things. I think it’s hard-wired into human DNA that we’re predisposed to believe in things we can’t see. I also think that’s why humanity has the need to create gods, goddesses, nymphs, fairies, trolls (not of the internet variety), ogres, monsters, and aliens who travel light years to insert probes into our rectums. It’s why 6000 year old myths from the Middle East continue to hold sway over a huge portion of the people who live on this spinning rock in the middle of fucking nowhere.  “Christianity is the one TRUE religion!” “Islam is the one TRUE religion!” Um, okay. Travel back in time to Dynastic Egypt and tell the average man on the street that in 4000 years Osiris, Anubis, and Isis will be historical footnotes. The same thing will happen with the Abrahamic god. That’s why science has been fighting an uphill battle from the very moment some of us started saying, “Wait a minute! What you’re telling me doesn’t explain what I’m seeing. Let’s see if it can be explained rationally.”

I would like to believe that anally probing aliens intentionally committed suicide and crashed their ship in the New Mexico desert sixty-five years ago because they knew the clever apes who found it would reverse engineer the integrated circuits contained therein and years later make their society so completely dependent upon that tech—and their people so completely enslaved to it—that their eventual invasion will simply be a matter of switching it all off and walking in. Or that our governments have already been thoroughly and completely infiltrated by shape-shifting reptilians from Zeta Reticulii who are now monitoring and cataloging each and every one of us with a computer or cell phone under the guise of national security to—once again—facilitate an easy invasion and the takeover of our precious resources and bodily fluids. (It’s amazing what you read on some of the walls in the dark alleys of the internet.) That would be so much more fun than accepting the mundane, real-world reasons we’re being “monitored.”

While there are probably some nefarious elements (We are human, after all, and history has repeatedly shown that we can be truly vile toward our fellow beings.) behind the NSA and alphabet soup of governmental agencies that have been spying on us, I think for the most part it is because since 9/11, the people who run this country (and let’s be clear: it’s not just the US who have been involved in this) have been terrified of being caught with their pants down and allowing another terrorist attack to happen. Over-reacting? Probably. But I can understand—if not necessarily agree with—their desire to err on the side of caution and be safe rather than sorry. Another major attack on the United States in particular would crash the entire world economy—on  shaky legs as it is—giving the Koch Brothers a very big sadz. (Sorry, I went down another dark alley there.)

I gave up all pretense of believing in internet privacy shortly after I first started blogging and put my thoughts online for all to see. A few months later I received a rotting box of meat in the mail  with a return address in the abandoned Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls. (Yes, that Love Canal.) Apparently some right wing loon took offense at something I’d written back in the day about his precious smirking chimp and decided to send me some kind of message. Um, yeah… (I’m still trying to figure out the symbolism.)

So the NSA revelation comes of no surprise. If the powers that be want to know how often I overdraft my checking account, the balances on my credit cards, my medical history, what I buy at Target, or my taste in porn or music, I say “Knock yourselves out.” Index and cross-refence to your heart’s content and sell it all to the marketers. I’m still not gonna buy the crap they try to sell me unless it’s something I want to buy. Yeah, at some point something in all that data may prevent me from getting something I want, but I’m not going to live my life in a state of fear because of it. As a whole, nothing about me is that much different any other internet-connected American. I think if anything, it’s going to show the watchers how much more alike we are than anything else.

And one thing to keep in mind even if all the paranoid right-wing ranting about data collection is so the US—or more likely, their favorite bugaboo, the shadowy One World Gub’mint—can weed out “undesirables” does actually turn out to be true and we wake up one morning to discover jack-booted thugs breaking down doors and making people “disappear” because they watched a video of a girl shooting ping pong balls out her cooter, bought a big purple double-headed dildo online, or called a sitting President, “Mr. Poopy Pants” on Twitter instead of actually apprehending people who mean to do this country harm…it won’t last. It never does. Repressive regimes are always so blinded by their own egos they think they’ll last forever and yet history has shown again and again—as we celebrate ourselves on this July 4th—that they never do. Every tyrannical government has its breaking point where the people refuse to bow any further and they rise up, sweeping those governments into the dustbin of history.

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