We grow a set of teeth. We lose a set of teeth. We grow a set of teeth. We lose a set of teeth.

A careless spill stains a new sweater.

Think of all the things we throw away. Cans, papers, unread mail, detergent bottles, love letters, medical bills, kleenex, spoiled food, youth. Enough trash to fill our homes and graves, carried away in unseen trucks.

Years ago I saw a boy fight with his mother in a theatre. He was ashamed of her maternal status, her womanhood, her aged conceptions. They left without seeing the film. I realized that night that my life had been wasted.

Lost socks. Saved schoolwork.

The very idea that to build muscle, we must tear it first. That to grow stronger, we must eat more. That to grow leaner, we must eat less. That we must run, but then must stretch, so as to slow the inevitable decay of our knees and our slow collapse into the streets.

In chastity we fight our will to lose. In orgasm we lose our will to fight.

I hem an old pillow with a trash bag twisty tie.

There is nothing to create anymore, only things to tidy and clean. Our motherhood fallen from bringing life into light to simply washing and scrubbing and making old faces look new again.

Crumbs are everywhere, little chunks of pleasures past. No matter how many times I sweep beneath the sofa.

I see you and I smile. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. I know you still think of me and cry.

Death comes in pieces, one heartbeat at a time.

Are two separate lives crossing
Like narrow lines across a page
Like straight lines with but one direction
Regardless of the pass of age

Touching together for a moment
As small and sharp as shards of sand
Passing once on gridded planes
And never connecting again

Or do instead we twist and turn
Like a tempest on the sea
Passing, wearing, pulling, tearing,
Until I’ve nothing left to be

and in my waking moments of deepest forlorn,
I realize those asking these questions are lost already to the storm.

My weekend routine.

It’s either here or the art museum. This being a long weekend, I did both. The museum yesterday, the mall today.

I came for the cinema, but arrived two hours early to read and walk. A mistake, given my intent not to make any purchases.

Last week, at a life-changing sale at Saks, I had seen my disposable income for the month of January come and go. I had walked out of the store with a Burberry trench coat, a new credit card, a man’s phone number, and a self-imposed directive not to shop again until spring.

Why do I come here, I wonder, to this magical land called Cherry Creek, to this haute hideaway of Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s, and Hermes? Perhaps it is the same reason I go to the museum – because I love beautiful things. Not only the paintings on the walls or the shoes on display, but the men (and occasionally women) who catch my eye. As a coworker once put it, regarding a shopping trip I took just to browse, “There is certainly plenty at the mall for you to look at.”

But the thrill is not just to see – it is to be seen. There are times one fails to exist without the other.

The children are abandoned at the indoor playground. The men are abandoned in front of flat screens showing the game. Seeing them huddled here, detached from their credit cards but not their masculinity, I can’t help but laugh.

Meanwhile, the women shop.

Women in religious scarves, reminding me of my time in Dubai and the ladies for whom malls offered an escape from the heat.

Women in knee-high boots, reminding me that in Colorado heat is rarely the problem.

Women with $500 bags and $30 Adidas sweatpants, reminding me of the fallibility of even the highest plateaus of our society.

Women who refuse to be defined by one label, and who instead seek them out by the dozen. And me, the observed, at once above and below it all.

Yesterday at the art museum, somewhere between the British portraits and the Bamboo room, I became struck by the way we label artists: just their name, their nationality, and their years alive.

“French, 1826 – 1884”

“Dutch, 1598 – 1647”

“Brazilian, Born 1963”

Of all the things with which we choose to identify the creators of universal works, it is the place of their birth and the moments of their life. Staring into one man’s vision of hell, I was acutely aware of how little I knew of him, despite how keenly he had shared his perceptions of the human race’s greatest fears.

Maybe nothing is timeless. Not the Chanel suits at which my eyes linger. Not the stigma on my credit report of opening yet another Mastercard. Not the bodies of the models in the storefront windows, or the bodies of the model-like men I glance at through them.

And maybe not even ideas. Be we godly or godless, perhaps we all are reduced to a place and a time that all too quickly pass.

My coffee is finished. The light from the windows high above depletes.

Before, there had been dancing, dining, a resort… The half-forgotten problems of the those nights – something involving a fat man and a sauna? – were now stripped of their serious façade and revealed, alas, to be but trivial bumps in what was once an easy road.

After the disaster, my aunt’s semi-Southern home had turned into a shelter of sorts where people gathered to piece together the remains of their lives. My family did not seem to be greatly affected, but countless others were, and she opened her doors to them (though only proverbially, as we stayed steadfastly outside).

We were seated at wooden tables, beneath a canopy of lush trees and creeping vines. It was almost like a party, really – like a slightly white-trash, tragic version of a Renoir patio soiree.

There seemed to be dogs everywhere. Some with owners. Some abandoned. Some mangier than others. All triggering my long-standing phobia, and causing me to cringe, turning away from them with an apologetic “hi” that was anything but inviting.

Adele was the star of the show. He was three years old, blonde, and beautiful. You could tell that his mother must have been beautiful, as well, although she wasn’t here. My mind flashed back constantly to black and white photos I must have seen of him at some point, of his innocent face captured wide-eyed and still. Now shaded with tragedy, the images seemed all the more lavish and intriguing.

We all hoped that his parents had survived and would find their way to him in good time. They lived somewhere like Ohio, but not Ohio, I was told. What did that mean? My aunt tried to explain it to me, but her words fell foreign to my ears, my own trite sense of relevant geography unfamiliar (and uncurious) about places such as those of her description.

At some point Adele was handed a gun. He pointed it nonchalantly at my face while the adults, one holding him in their arms, chatted over-indulgently about their misfortunes. “Who gave the baby a gun?” I asked in frustration, but no one responded. Instead, as they bounced him up and down, the gun swung wildly about, as literally a loose cannon as I had ever faced.

He switched the safety off.

“Adele, could you please put the safety on if you’re going to point that at me?”

He complies. “Thank you, Adele.”

“Ya welcomed,” he responded in his three-year-old style, so sweetly that I felt guilty for having gotten upset.

“Sorry,” I began, “I didn’t mean to be…” Bitchy? An asshole? I could think of no child-friendly language with which to brand myself as someone whose concerns were too self-centered, too regional, too utterly short sighted to have been taken seriously. None of the other adults seemed concerned; children will be children, they likely figured, accidents will happen; you can’t get mad at a three-year-old for almost shooting you in the face. If he had fired, it would have been unfortunate, but any reasonable person would recognize that his or her life was casually expendable.

“I didn’t mean to sound sad,” I said, finishing my sentence awkwardly. For a moment I thought that I hadn’t conveyed my intended meaning at all, but in a strange way it made sense. Besides, Adele wasn’t listening at this point. His attention was focused elsewhere, and I was talking only to myself.

Later on we were seated again as the sun began to set, all of us drinking iced tea and keeping the conversation light. One man’s dog, who had the porcelain-like face of a human girl, was seated with us. Her owner was proudly showing us what she was capable of – waving, dancing, flashing gang signs – all things that he had taught her.

“Pretend that you’re sleeping,” he instructed her.

“What?” she asked (for she could talk), a little distracted by all the attention.

“Like this,” he responded, putting his hands together like a pillow, leaning his skull down towards them, and making a quiet snoring sound.

“It’s hard!” she cried out with a sheepish smile, attempting now to bend her paws as he had his hands and to lay her human face against her beastly arms.

“She has trouble moving her paws like that,” he explained to the crowd. But they kept encouraging her to try. Soon all the adults around the table were pretending to be asleep, as if the en masse repetition of the movement would somehow allow the dog-girl’s mismatched body to be able to follow suit, as if she could be exactly what they wanted her to be if only she’d try her best to be them. Something about old dogs and new tricks drifted through my mind.

“Why is this how you pretend to sleep?” she asked to no one in particular, and was responded to by particularly no one. They were all lost in their hypnotic movements like worshippers drowning in their own projected beliefs.

How absurd, I thought, that the dog-girl was the only one aware that no creature – human, dog, or otherwise – actually sleeps with their hands folded beneath their head, with cartoon snores emitting from their noses and mouths. It was just a symbolic imitation of sleeping. And thus, I realized in a moment of harrowing clarity, the dog-girl was made to mimic humans merely mimicking themselves.

I awoke abruptly, sweating, disturbed. My bed was still there; my apartment was still there; my body, in all its mismatched imperfections, was still there.

The illusion having vanished, I was suddenly very much alone. And despite all my noble imitations, of that fact I was unfailingly aware.

1: The Low-Key Lesbians

Upon the announcement of their engagement, we all kind of said, “Huh?” Not because – you know – but just because we didn’t think they were the marrying type.

She said a YouTube video changed her mind. Welcome to romance in the digital age.

In the car one afternoon, I couldn’t stop asking questions. “Where do you want to have the reception?” “What are you doing for music?” “You aren’t going to have a bridal party?!?”

They are thinking of just wearing jeans for the ceremony. I said, so long as they’re white.

They said they aren’t going to register anywhere. I threatened to give them a gift basket of all the things they hate. “Better make it a big basket,” she says.

“You’re not making this wedding any fun for me. Aren’t I an equal partner in all this??”

The answer is no.


2. The Hasty Hetero

On Sunday afternoon, she was wedding dress shopping.

When I returned Monday from Boston, there was a gold box outside her door. “What’s this?” I asked. “Mom’s wedding dress. And it’s hideous.”

Thursday was New Year’s Eve and I was spending the remains of 2009 texting at my friendly neighborhood casino (America’s second largest – and I have the cigarette smell on my Armani shirt to prove it). I was texting a friend about how I’m worried about the wannabe bride. She’s 20 months younger than me. She’s not even engaged. I don’t want her to get hurt.

The second half of my bitch-fest text accidentally got sent to her and not the friend with whom I was bitching. Oops.

I saw her later at the poker table. The faux-fiancé was two seats down. By that point in the night, the incident was already a year old (an advantage of getting in a fight on New Years Eve). Maybe I had been forgiven. Or maybe she’s just learned a good poker face.


3. The Homo Come Lately

He’s only two years older than me. But he was married. To a woman. For six years.

I have hardly been able to handle my own baggage from the years B.C. (Before Coming-out). And mine mostly entail having shopped at Old Navy.

“We’re still best friends,” he texts me. It’s New Years Eve and this is his first alone. Pretty soon, a texting error and poker table showdown distract me from our conversation. But at midnight, I send him a kiss just before the phone lines all jammed up.


4. Love (Doesn’t) Take Flight

Plane. Providence to Nashville. (Only a connecting flight.)

Southwest Airlines. Tacky but reliable – like a Volvo, or stucco siding.

Lukewarm coffee. One Equal. Heart-shaped stirrer.

It dawns on me that I’ve never been in love.

As I packed to head home to the east coast, I questioned whether I should bring a jacket from what I call my “vintage collection” – the clothing I still own from before I came out.

It is strange returning to things that we’ve left.

The blizzard brought on many adventures. The longest for me came on Sunday, the day after the storm, when nostalgia took me hiking all over the District of Columbia. My friend and I walked for hours, and I – ill-prepared in my dress, and particularly my footwear – felt that death could not be far off by the end of the night.

We caught the last train of the evening on the snowed-in remnants of the Metro system. After a series of unfortunate events, we thought we might have to spend the night homeless.

But my friend reasoned that we’d keep the good memories over the bad, that we’d remember dancing on a steamy manhole cover by the FBI building, or asking an innocent bartender if a stale loaf of bread on the counter was for sale, or ringing out my drenched socks over the sink of a quaint French bistro.

I believe that time will prove her right, but for now, my body still aches.

Was it really only a year ago? Just such a small sliver of my life in which we’ve lived in truth? I am loathe to think of the years spent in lies, the nights that I – that we – have cried with blinded eyes. For how many Christmases was our strongest, most lustful wish only that we could escape being ourselves?

Sometimes, when we talk on the phone now of loves and lies and rights, the regret is palpable, as if the knife has been removed but the blood still flows.

Was it really only a year ago? I have forgiven you; but I have not forgotten.

It was strange being back on campus. It feels at once as if but a moment has passed and as if a whole life has passed. Life before sexual lobotomy comes back in flashes; the grounds are frozen from the storm, as our my memories in time.

I felt like sitting in the library for a while. I felt like walking through my old office, and running my hands over binders of filed papers. If the lawn was not covered in feet of snow, I might have lied down in the grass and fallen asleep, and waited for the cold night air – for reality – to wake me. I might have, I might have, I might have…

The past – like proverbial rain, in its pouring exclusivity – seems always either impossible to remember or else impossible to forget.

“So Solitary is This Night Air”

Remember when I told her
I could pack in half an hour
And be half a world away
Before the sun set on the day

Remember years in hooded sweatshirts
Cut-up jeans, ignored directions
Nothing lost and nothing gained
Having nothing to explain

Now pounds shed and money earned,
Lovers loved and lovers spurned,
Weathers weathered and wet feet burned
Tables set and tables turned

Leave me worn by winter winds
My legs left limp, my life shut in
The earth so small and cold and grey
My sweet surrendered youth now half a world away


“The Exile”

In Barnes and Noble on Saturday night
We shop facetiously for fashion magazines
And upon seeing the latest coverage of Jon and Kate
Declare that some people have nothing to live for

You say maybe we should euthanize those who dare
Sit around and read of that shit
(Or was that me? Either way, I agreed.)
People seemed to stop and stare, but neither of us cared.

The next week (or was it two?)
I’m there alone (having nothing to do)
Avoiding being tackled by swarms of little kids
Watching a parade below from the window sills

I search in vain for some kind of art section
Amidst pills of cookbooks and Christmas gifts and cartoons
Shelf after shelf of fucking “Twilight” paraphernalia
And a few rows of Shakespeare in the back next to the cliffnotes.

I almost stumble over two men in dirty clothes
Sitting on the floor of the crowded, busy store
Eating a pecan pie out of the tin pan
With a shared, plastic fork

And I, an exile in this cold, absurd land
Walk home in the snow and cry…
In this city of half-baked dreams and cash-insulated jackets,
I fucking plot my swift return.

People who speak of the secularization of Christmas perhaps have a near-sighted view of humanity. Yes, much of “the holiday season” lacks a clear relation to the religious ideals upon which it was founded, but the fact that it defines an entire season of American life, and the fact that it is the holiday season, and not just one among equals, give it a conspicuously prominent place in our culture.

It may not always be theological, but it nonetheless reeks of religion.

This weekend, I went to see the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of A Christmas Carol in Boulder. The friend who accompanied me, a Jew, and myself, an Agnostic, were perhaps not the likeliest pair to go see this together. In fact, it being the evening of Black Friday, I was probably the only homosexual with a shopping addiction who wasn’t out hunting down discounted coats and designer jeans.

Nonetheless, we went to the show, which has always been among my favorites. My friend had never seen it or any of its variants – strange, I thought, even for a Jewish girl. Seeing A Christmas Carol performed in its intended century and location is almost as rare as a similar sighting of a Shakespeare play, what with the American public’s preference for such things being readapted as a high school basketball drama or some kind of space odyssey. As someone who once saw an African tribal version of King Lear at Yale, I consider myself jaded in these regards.

So it was nice to see the story told as it was intended and performed by a cast who let the power of Dickens’s narrative do what it was written to do. I believe that the story is intended to be a fable, not a realistic portrayal of the changes of a human heart; that is why so many adaptations of the work fail to capture the meaning of the original. The play, as performed by this ensemble, did exactly what it was supposed to do: end abruptly, unrealistically, with a sudden swing to a happy ending that can only come from a British novelist.

Having said all this, seeing the play made me nervous. Over the past few years I have gone from being quite religious to being quite thoroughly agnostic, and as this change has occurred, I have grown more and more alienated in America’s Christian culture. I felt like an alien in that audience – more alien, even, than the five young men in front of me in XL basketball jerseys and backwards-turned hats who we believed were there on some kind of juvenile parole program. Surrounded by white, heterosexual, God-fearing Christians in matching holiday sweaters and their Sunday best (despite it being a Friday), I felt as though their was no part of their experience that night with which I could relate.

Scrooge, on the other hand, was a character with whom I could suddenly feel a connection – another fact that worried me. Like Ebenezer, I had yet to turn on my heat this year, despite the fact that Colorado has had several blizzards; like him, I wear my peacoat around the house some days to keep warm and (right now, for example) hide under my blankets to get work done. The only difference was that I had sprung for Ralph Lauren bedding, and used my heating savings to buy the Burberry scarf on which my heart was set.

The point is that I felt close enough to being a Dickens villain as it was without facing an impending dilemma that hit me as I sat in the theatre: was there any way for me to enjoy the Christmas season? Or was I too removed from mainstream American culture, too detached with (and angry at) the conservative Christian conversation, to do so? And if that was the case, would I become a younger, gayer version of Scrooge, and spend the next month isolated and bitter?

I certainly can’t be the only one who feels at odds with this month-long Jesus jubilation. The holiday has long isolated many American Jews, who responded by over-emphasizing Hanukah beyond its traditional, theological importance so as to have a counterweight to the United States’ Christmas fetish. As I told a Jewish friend over brunch this weekend, the attempted parallelization of Hanukah with Christmas is itself indicative of the latter’s cultural muscle.

And following that line of logic, I can’t help but think that Christmas is essentially a white holiday, as well. Jesus is portrayed as being white; all of the Middle East is portrayed as being white; Santa and all his elves are portrayed as being white… It has even been suggested to me that the term “Black Friday,” the epitome of the commercialization of Christmas, has racial undertones – as do all negative days that we deem “black” – especially when contrasted with the traditional image of a “White Christmas.” I don’t know if I really believe it, but the fact that some black friends of mine felt that way suggests a sharing of my cultural isolation. (Let’s not even get started on Kwanza.)

There I sat, in the University of Colorado Theatre, getting teary-eyed (as always happens when I see Tiny Tim), but all the while wondering if I could find meaning in a season that is so detached from my reality, or if I would simply find myself too at odds with the predominant culture to enjoy the next four weeks.

Things didn’t get any better when I avoided donating to two charities this weekend because both invoked God in their Christmas campaigns; “Sorry,” I thought to myself, “but surely I can find a secular charity to whom to give.” And it didn’t get any better today when, sitting inside my friendly neighborhood Starbucks, I saw a deranged preacher screaming at truant teenagers as they jumped off the trolley, or yelling at women with baby carriages that “Jesus is coming back.” It’s funny how only “moderates” see a difference between themselves and an “extremist”; to an extremist, the moderates might as well be heathens, and to an outsider, they’re all fairly equally insane.

But I suppose time will tell. Meanwhile, even as an agnostic the idea of being “home for the holidays” rings true, and – ironically, perhaps – my feeling of isolation during this season has made me miss being home for it even more. Out here in Colorado, I miss my family, I miss the east coast, I miss Sundays being for hangovers and brunch and not for going to church. I miss knowing that an October day wouldn’t see two feet of snow, and that even a Scrooge like myself could stay warm through the winter.

The queer marriage should begin by the age of 24, when – exhausted from 2 or 3 years of the woes of gay dating – two partners decide to settle and settle down.

The queer marriage needs by default to be tacky and unseemly, for while one gay might mean good taste, two almost always means a mess of uncompromising positions.

The queer marriage should not take place in a church, or other house of worship, because how fucked up is that?

The queer marriage should not seek to redefine the word “marriage”; after all, to redefine suggests something stable and concrete. Rather, the queer marriage should seek to tinker with the institution and settle on whatever definition sounds good at the moment.

The queer marriage should make single gays envy your life and married heteros hate their own.

The queer marriage should scare heterosexuals, except for wedding planners, divorce lawyers, and politicians who use the civil liberties of others as a wedge issue.

The queer marriage should feature a great amount of drama, for drama keeps things interesting and yields that indefinable tension, that je ne sais quoi that keeps things fresh. It also yields unspecified sums of makeup sex.

The queer marriage should not, however, feature infidelity. That just makes me sad.

The queer marriage should be just that – queer – because what good has “normal” marriage done the world?

The queer marriage should not seek to reincarnate the characters of Norman Rockwell. The queer marriage should be its own piece of installation art, a constant performance of contemporary poise, unnerving, and subtle grotesqueness.

The queer marriage should not be a one-time thing. The queer marriage should encapsulate the idea of, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Gays can make up for centuries of being denied the right to marriage by using that right many, many times over the course of their life when the right eventually arrives.

The queer marriage should be over, in its first act, by the age of 30, for relationships should almost never cross a decade line in one’s life. Having begun the queer marriage at the age of 24, one will have spent more than enough time fixated on one individual; and having the aspiration of being married several more times by the point of death, one had better get to work finding new mates.

For how could someone spend a lifetime with one person? It seems altogether as horrid and unrealistic as spending a lifetime alone, hence the need to get married to begin with. Getting married is like buying a car; you will probably have to do it at some point in your life, but you’d be an idiot to keep the same one running for fifty years.

The queer marriage should be celebrated with a wedding of lots of whites. Nothing too bright, nothing too dark.

Age seems to me a strange thing.

I am told that I am young –
Too young to expect to find love,
Too young to know what to do with life –
And, in some ways, I agree

After all, I cannot help but wonder
Seeing an older man at a restaurant or a bar
What we could possible have in common
His life so different from mine

And yet I feel my time spinning.

I can recall what it was like
To have never been kissed
To have never traveled far
To have been told I’d soon miss childhood

And now youth has come and gone
And this adulthood in its place
Is a strange, cold beast
Awaiting its own death

And then I get asked about children.

Do I want them now?
Would I ever want them?
And I think, maybe someday
When I’m old and gray and pine not for sex

When I have nothing left to live for,
Nothing left to accomplish or seek,
Nor the strength to declare life not worth living
Instead bringing another life under my traveled wing

Age seems to me strange thing,
The future dead, my youth deceased.

Halftime in America

At halftime, there was a hip-hop performance on the court. Apparently it was a fairly well-known act – this was, after all, opening day in a city with little else on its mind. But I had never heard of them, the result of iPod OCD and my desire – nay, my need – to know profoundly each album on my hard drive before I’d move on to a new one. The radio, of course, was thus out of the question.

About two minutes into their act, however, my father erupted into a fury that could not be cooled by our cheap Coors Lights, a fury directed at the idea that the entertainment desires of old, white men might not be exclusively catered to at this – HIS – sporting event. He rushed up the stairs, knocking over our food along the way, and waited in the bathroom of the promenade for it to end.

I myself could not hear the performers. My head was instead filled with what I imagined to be my father’s enraged inner dialog, his supposed futility of life in this modern age.

Confessions of a Teacher

A few weeks ago, my co-teacher was out sick and we had a substitute for her. I basically lead the whole class and he just kind of stood around… But at one point when I was trying to get my presentation to work, he had all of the students stand up. “None of you said the pledge of allegiance during the announcements,” he said to my surprise, “so we’re going to practice now!” And he made them all say it. Which, in addition to being against school policy, is also against the law.

I didn’t want to be rude to him then, and I was caught off guard… I was also being observed and evaluated in about 20 minutes, so my head was elsewhere.

But the next morning, when all the students rose and recited the pledge, I knew I had to say something. After they were done I said I had an announcement to make. “I know that our substitute yesterday said that you had to stand up and say the pledge of allegiance. With all due respect to him, that’s not true. You don’t need to stand and say the pledge of allegiance if you don’t want to. I didn’t say the pledge today, I have never said the pledge, and I will never say the pledge. That’s my choice. I respect people who choose to say it, and I hope that they respect me for not saying it. As long as you respect that other people will make different choices than you, it’s a decision for you to make.”

I don’t think I’ve ever held their attention like I did during that little speech. Looking around the room, I saw a few faces smile for the first time in my recollection. I didn’t have to tell them why I don’t say the pledge – I didn’t add that I will never pledge allegiance to a government that denies me full citizenship, and that acts so unjustly in this world. But I don’t think I had to.

For the next day, the room was silent as the pledge was read over the speaker. I sat quietly but defiantly at my desk, slowly sipping my coffee, and trying not to grin.

Missed Connection

I told a gay, white friend that I was writing a column on privilege. He proceeded to tell me about perks he will receive on a first-class cross-country flight. But I told him that’s not what I meant.

To “trust” is to abandon common sense in the vain pursuit of shared humanity. To trust someone who wants to sleep with you is to simply be a fool.

Trust is something I never learned very well. As a child, I did not trust those around me. I would tell relatives who attempted to influence me that “they weren’t my mom,” and I never totally trusted her, either. (My father, being a man, has fared even worse.)

I never trusted sources of authority. I did not trust that adults knew best. I started riots on the school playground, and leveraged myself out of suspension.

I trusted then-President Clinton for a little while. You can guess how that went.

In my neurotic compulsiveness, my trust with men today comes and goes like the rise and fall of the tides. The speed with which I take trust away is matched only by the speed with which I gave it to begin. Looking back on things now, I realize that there was a period in which I trusted every man with whom I’ve slept; I trust none of them now.

And in case you were wondering, I especially don’t trust you. I never have. And not for the reasons you think. In fact, it’s precisely because you think you know yourself so well – think you know all your perfections and flaws – that makes me distrust you so.

You are not the neat, medicated package you imagine yourself to be. You are a bizarre, staggering pile of contradictions. The ones of which you are aware, which you think make you quirky and intéressant, are only the tip of the iceberg. Your vain confidence in your own self-awareness is what upsets me most about you, even now.

Even in my moments of foolishness, when I thought that maybe I could trust you – that maybe you were honest and good, at least on some level – your lack of doubt in yourself let my doubts about you linger. For how could I trust a man who so deeply trusts himself?

Sometimes I dream that I am there in your arms. I wake in the frigid sweat of self-loathing.

“Lovers.”

brilliant
and beautiful
and broken
and bizarre

after your moment has arrived,
what didn’t come is uncharted.

“Hard Feelings.”

when i think of how you twisted and lied
how you only thought of you
i can’t help but pass on blame
though i said I fucked up, too

when i think of how you kissed my lips
and the sweet taste of your skin
i can’t help but have hard feelings
even if i won’t give in

“Anxiety.”

and if the cold doesn’t kill you
the fear of freezing will

boy one

“When’s the last time you washed the sheets?”

I’m not entirely sure, so I say, “If I had any idea when I was going to see you, I’d wash them before you came.”

It is entirely possible that we both dislike each other immensely, and just really like sex.

boy two

“You’re so hot.”

I’m not entirely sure, so I say, “Am I? I’m pretty sure you’re hotter.”

We cannot come to a consensus. He is too drunk to argue and I am too sober.

boy one

I have boxers and a t-shirt on before he is awake. In the kitchen, I’m trying – unsuccessfully – to get a quiet start on making breakfast. Since I’ve already woken him up, I figure I might as well put on some R&B and break out the electric whisker.

“I made breakfast,” I tell him a while later. “It’s going to get cold fast.”

He turns from me and groans.

boy two

I have my ultra-skinny jeans and Calvin Klein loafers on before he is awake. In the kitchen, I’m trying – unsuccessfully – to splash some water on my face and lost that walk-of-shame look. I walk quietly into his room and put my hand on his arm.

“I think I’d better get going,” I tell him a moment later. “It’s getting late fast.”

He turns towards me and sighs.

boy one

and after, still close as a hand in a glove, he said “if i didn’t know you better i’d have sworn i’s in love”

I got my first pair of 2(x)ist briefs as a “saw-it-at-TJMaxx” gift from my grandma. Presumably she didn’t know of their iconic gay status, much less of my iconic gay status. But she did always have fabulous taste.

“I hear you’ve switched teams,” my aunt called to me from across the restaurant where she was working and I was enjoying a glass of wine. I guess I hesitated in horror for a second too long, because she suddenly added – panicked – “I meant because you’re supporting Obama!”

Later that week, she said that she understood why I had hesitated, and that she’d never loved me more.

I went to see Brokeback Mountain with a gay relative back when we weren’t quite out to each other. Around the anal sex scene I thought to myself, “This will be the worst drive home of all time.”

Never come out in the post-script of an email. Not even your family reads that shit.

Like most confused young homosexuals with psychological disorders, I go back and forth between living for sex and wondering if sex is even worth pursuit. How much time do we put into our search for a feeling that, in but a fleeting moment, is no more?

But knowing that most of us seek out this feeling regardless, perhaps a better question is: what happens to the emotions and feelings of sex long the act itself is over? What do we hold onto that makes it all worth it? And what do we lose?

I find that the locking of eyes, the locking of lips, and the touches of skin are all too soon forgotten, lost in the endless parade of opportunities and mistakes that this world has to offer. But the aspects of sex that stick with me – those that make it all worth it – are those strange and unsure moments… Those seconds in which I realize that beneath their facades and clothing, all people are brilliantly fucked up and startlingly human.


“Sexual Retrospect”

Sometimes I wonder,
Is straight sex so strange?
So awkward, so weird,
So wild & wonderful?

In sexual retrospect,
Where the orgasms are over,
Where the warm body is gone,
Where the bed is left empty,

What do we have but the memory
Of the good, the bad, and the ugly
Those moments where we have to bite our own lips
To not laugh and ask, “What the fuck?”

Those strange requests, strange fetishes,
Strange sentiments that make sex seem so real
And make all those long lost lovers at long last
Appear so terrible and beautiful.

The contemporary queer experience is largely one of discovering one’s self. We discover through desire, we discover through dreams, we discover in memories and stories and imaginations. We discover, in short, through life.

As someone who grew up writing, one of the most frustrating things for me was the exclusion of queer experience in the narrative of this world. Our stories, poems, artwork, advertisements, textbooks, and tall and short tales are all void of real queer voices and imagery, with a few notable exceptions. So even before I knew for sure that I was gay, I found myself writing and singing and talking endlessly as a means of sorting out who I was and how I fit in.

In this new series – named “Little Black Book” for the Moleskin journal in which I’ll write it – I will take a more abstract and creative look at life as a queer person in America today. As was true from my days writing TNG’s singles column, there will be sex and dating and all of those lovely things. But for today, I wanted to share a story I wrote in high school that put me on the road to self discovery through writing.

“Farmholme Road,” circa age 17

I swear loudly and then pretend I had used a less enraged word, instantly rewriting history in my worn and tired mind; if I’m going to swear, I suppose that I might as well lie about it, too, if only to myself. The rain is coming down hard, but I can hardly see it through my tears.

The indicator light goes on in my dash, and a bell starts to sound. I swear again, but this time I don’t censor it; I don’t even think about it. I’m too busy thinking about the indicator light, my shattered love affair, and the fact that every time things start to go right something comes along and screws it up.

I’m driving down Farmholme Road, a place that I had never called home but that felt like it nonetheless. It’s how I get onto the highway and out into the world, and, of course, how I get back. Suddenly I shiver. The heat has kicked out, and I am left in the cold. My hands start to ache, dying in the chill. I vaguely recall that same feeling that one gets from a burn, and point out the irony to myself. But I am ignoring me at the moment, and the point that I made is lost in the commotion.

I start to cry a little, but I don’t remember what for
I don’t remember much these days, but I sure do
cry a lot

Or maybe there’s nothing to remember. Maybe it was all just a dream. A good dream gone bad, a dream that started out with cool gazes and led to warm embraces and ended with the ironic, burning chill.

I begin to dig through the annals of my mind, trying desperately to remember something. In the process I forget what I’m looking for, and so I search about indiscriminately for anything that can be found. If our memories are pictures – snapshots of our past, of our lives – we like to think that we have them stored away in a capsule, systematically organized and labeled, and protected against the elements and against time, but we’ve really just thrown them into a shoebox. It’s a damn good thing we buy so many shoes.

I found a memory:
We had just gotten back from New York state,
the Catskills or someplace thereabouts
It was late, and I had fallen asleep in the back seat
that little sister of mine resting her head on my shoulder
our lives, crammed into luggage, all around us
I woke up and sleepily looked around
knowing that I had known this place
and I whispered, Where are we
Almost Home, my mother responds -
Farmholme Road

A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, so I’m talking to myself for quite some time without paying attention to where I’m headed. The thing about a road with no turn-offs is that though you may never get to where you want to go, you at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you were doomed from the minute you started down that path. No amount of good decision-making or thoughtful planning could make a moment of difference, so there was no point in worrying.

It dawned on me, as things sometimes do, that I spend more of my time searching for excuses to not try than I do actually trying. I think of my lost love again, about all of the times that I heard I Love You, and about how it was ruined with one Fuck Off. Kind of unfair, really, that our most positive words are like junior-varsity lightweights compared to the negative stuff we have kicking around.

Here’s another postcard from the past:
I’m stumbling through the woods
pretending that I’m not lost just to muse myself
I see a clearing up ahead
and I Pray it’s the way Out
and it is…
So I’m back to pavement
back to municipal highways department territory
back to a place that looks a lot like
a friend I use to have…
So I walk down a bit
beginning, as it were, to notice that I’ve been there
before
and that its so close to home
that I can hear the call of those I love
beckoning me back…
I pass a sign, look up,
and smile
You’re Almost Home, they whisper
as I read those words -
Farmholme Road

But back in reality, where I left my body and my speeding ’92 Ford Ranger and my racing blood and my aching muscles and my freezing hands with those snow-white knuckles, back in that place I missed a sign of a different sort, which (interestingly enough) was the one time all day that I had been told to stop and the one time that things had kept on going in their usual fashion. Between the pouring rain and the falling tears I don’t see a thing, over my wailing throat and my crying heart I hear not a sound, and even the feeling that something is immediately wrong does not overshadow the feeling that everything is wrong, that the world is crashing down around me and my time here is running short. When I do realize it, it’s too late, and I’ve lost all control. I’m spinning, tires are burning, breaks are squealing, engines are collapsing, keys are being misplaced, flowers are dying, couples are getting divorced, friends are parting, ice cream is melting, babies are screaming, bills are going late, roofs are leaking, banks are being held up, the sinful are being martyred and everything everywhere is going to purgatory and sending me straight to hell. I want so desperately to scream, either despite the fact that it will only add to the noise or perhaps because of it. Regardless, I can’t find it in me – I can only remain still and whimper, thinking about my wretched, mourning heart and how hard it had fallen.

But then I go back to that time I had remembered
Back to that drive home from those illusive mountains
Back to when my little sister, that sweetheart of mine,
fell asleep on my shoulder
and I sleepily watched where we were going
as we passed beneath the distant stars…
Back, my love, to
Farmholme Road
where I whisper Almost Home
and fall back asleep