The remaining six of us stood around the bonfire, trying to warm ourselves from the dying embers. We were the last six guys awake. It was our annual gay chorus retreat, at a lodge 90 minutes north of Manhattan; the weather had been beautiful all weekend, bright orange leaves contrasting against the bright blue sky. (One reason a sunny fall day is so beautiful is because orange and blue are complementary colors.)

The retreat began Friday night, when most of us arrived. We spent much of Saturday rehearsing, and after dinner and the final rehearsal of the retreat, it was time for the bonfire. The annual Saturday night bonfire is always the culmination of the retreat before we all head back to the city on Sunday.

Last year I drank too much at the bonfire and wound up feeling depressed and alone all night, so this year I decided I was going to limit the drinking. I was glad I did. At the bonfire, I had one beer and one Captain Morgan’s with Mountain Dew, and that’s it. (The latter drink might sound gross, but it’s actually tasty. A friend of mine introduced me to it in college.) Being clear-headed was much better, I was finding.

There were eight of us remaining, and then two guys went to bed, leaving six. Eventually the conversation took a turn, as conversations do, and we wound up going around the circle, each of us describing our first time with a guy.

The other guys’ stories involved sex with a friend, or sex with an acquaintance, or sex with a romantic interest.

I’ve always felt sad that I don’t really have a story. Not including childhood experimentation, which was with two different friends in first and second grade (both of whom I lost touch with years ago, and I’m pretty sure they’re both straight and married now), my first adult encounters were with strangers. I never had that experience where you’re friends with someone and you both turn out to be gay and you wind up fooling around together. I wish I’d had that.

It was the night of August 14, 1994, at the end of the summer before my last year of college. I was 20. I’d been living in the Glee Club house that summer, having sublet the summer portion of a fellow singer’s year-long lease. The turnover date was August 15, and some of the house’s new residents had already begun moving in and were painting their rooms. I was going to be driving home to New Jersey the next morning, where I would spend a couple of weeks at my parents’ house before returning to the dorms for my final year of college. There was beer, and I had a few of them and got a little drunk.

I had come out to my parents about a year earlier, at the end of the previous summer, and I’d been completely unprepared for their negative reaction: anger, disbelief, non-acceptance. “I cannot accept this,” my mom actually said to me the next day. Terrified at making my parents angry, worried about what they might do, I’d responded by going back in the closet. That was easy, since I hadn’t told very many people about my sexual confusion anyway; the few who knew, I lost touch with on UVA’s big campus – except for my bisexual friend, who soon realized that I no longer wanted to talk about anything sexual with him. I became, for all intents and purposes, asexual.

A year later I was sitting in my room the Clubhouse drinking beer. I was packing the last of my boxes.

At around 1:00 in the morning, I stood up and my legs began walking.

They were taking me out of the Clubhouse, across a nearby parking lot, and up to Cabell Hall, where, it was rumored, guys could find other guys for sex in the restrooms. My brain wasn’t involved in this. I wasn’t even thinking. I was just… walking.

I went into the building and up to the men’s room. There was a guy in one of the stalls. I went into the next stall and his penis appeared underneath the divider. I was soon in his stall. He was an overweight black man and appeared too old to be a student. He didn’t smell very good. I kneeled down and sucked him for a little bit — not very long at all; I didn’t really feel like it. Then he sucked me until I came.

As I pulled up my shorts, he asked me what year I was. I lied to him. Then he asked me my major and I lied again and I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

As I went up the stairs to the main floor, I passed two university cops chatting with each other. I walked past them, nonchalantly but quickly, and then left the building.

My heart raced in the humid summer nighttime air.

When I got back to the Clubhouse everyone else was asleep. I went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, stripped down, and took a long, steaming hot shower, trying to wash the filth away, wishing I could have taken back the events of the past hour.

The next day I packed up my car and drove back to New Jersey, worried that I might have gotten AIDS. After a few days, I forgot about it, and then I was absorbed in the new school year and it left my mind completely. The fear reemerged over Christmas break, disappeared, and then reappeared the following year, after I’d graduated. It wasn’t until April 1996 that I finally got tested and found out that I was negative.

A few months later, during the fall of my first year of law school, I visited the restrooms again. This time I met a white guy. Not bad looking. He might have been a grad student, maybe around 30. We went to a separate building and fooled around for barely a minute before I came. I just couldn’t last.

And that, as they say, is that. The following year I occasionally went to the restrooms in a different building, the main library building, and someone and I might watch each other through a small hole in the wall between stalls. But nothing actually happened with anyone else until the summer of 1998, when I finally decided I was gay and started meeting people online.

I wish I had a heartwarming, funny, or romantic story that I could look back on fondly. But I don’t.

Last week my therapist told me that I don’t express enough anger about how I was treated growing up. This was coincidentally a couple of days after I read Joel’s entry about anger and therapy.

My therapist has often returned to the theme of actions versus feelings. The two are separable, she says. You don’t have full control over what you feel, but you do have full control over your actions. Once you realize this, it’s apparently easier to acknowledge your feelings, because you can own them without worrying that they’ll cause you to do something stupid. You are in charge of your actions.

I tend to repress most of the anger I feel toward my parents, because I haven’t found that anger productive. My parents weren’t being evil – they were just being themselves, trying to do what they thought was best for me. And they’ve changed greatly for the better, so there would be no point in getting mad at them today.

But it’s there.

And it goes beyond the gay thing. It goes to the core of my identity. No matter how well I did in school, nothing was ever good enough for them. It was expected that I’d do well, so when I did, I didn’t get much praise, but when I underperformed, I got blame. During my junior year of high school, I got second place in a multi-school pre-calculus contest, a written test that was given to math students in several different high schools. Second place – out of everyone who took the test! I got mentioned over the PA system during the morning announcements at school. I was so happy. But when I told my parents about it that night, they were angry. They told me it was typical for me to get second place and not first. They told me I’d sabotaged myself because I didn’t want to succeed.

When I received the last of my college rejection forms, meaning that I hadn’t gotten into Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown or Amherst, my mom went into her bedroom, slammed the door behind her and cried — when I was the one who needed consoling.

Yeah, I’m fucking angry at them.

It doesn’t feel right to be. It doesn’t feel useful.

But my therapist says that I need to acknowledge those feelings and express them to her, because they’re getting in the way.

The night after that therapy session, I went up to the chorus retreat. And on Saturday night the six of us stood around the bonfire and I told the bare bones of my story – in nothing like the detail above — and someone said my story was depressing.

The evening went on a little longer and the six of us stood around and talked and laughed. And then it was 3:00 in the morning and we all went to bed.

I climbed into my bunk. It was late but I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay there thinking about my story. I lay there thinking about my parents and about how much they’d fucked me up. If they hadn’t tried to make me so perfect, if they hadn’t tried to live through me, if my dad hadn’t verbally abused me as a kid, if my parents had just let me be who I was, if they’d butted out of my goddamn life – then maybe I wouldn’t have wasted the years from age 19 to 24. Maybe I would have had sex and dated guys. And maybe I wouldn’t be such a perfectionist. Maybe I would actually be able to accomplish something in my life, instead of thinking that everything is pointless because I’ll never be good enough at something to justify trying it. And maybe I’d like myself more.

My parents fucked me up. I don’t care if there’s more to the story, I don’t care if they were just doing their best, I don’t care if it’s unproductive to dwell on the past. It’s true. They fucked me up.

There’s more work to do. But this is a start.

Deborah Kerr has died.

This makes me sad. I watched An Affair to Remember a few years ago, in which she starred with Cary Grant – it’s a real weepie.

Came across this on YouTube: Judith Light’s legendary courtroom breakdown on “One Life to Live,” from March 1979. It was listed some years back by TV Guide as one of the 100 most memorable moments in TV history. I’d never seen it before – it’s pretty riveting.

(Don’t mind the interruption by Reba McEntire – this was from a rebroadcast back in the 1990s.)

The last few days it’s finally started to feel like fall. Because I’m an adult without kids, it hadn’t really hit me that summer had ended, despite the new TV shows and the new choral season. But long-sleeve shirts have gradually reappeared in my work wardrobe, and when I leave therapy or come out of the subway for chorus rehearsal now, it’s dark. Somehow I thought that with Daylight Savings Time not ending until November this year, the day wouldn’t actually get any shorter until then.

Yesterday afternoon we took the subway up to see the neighborhood of our new temporary digs. Matt’s going to be working for Barnard starting next month, and his new boss has managed to scrounge up a temporary apartment for us until May while we look for a more permanent place. It’s really going to be a godsend.

So we got out of the subway at 110th Street and Central Park West. It was chilly – I was cold for the first time in months. After checking out the outside of the temporary building where we’ll be living (we didn’t acutally go in), we went for a walk. The area around Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues was a little depressing – not much besides some scattered bodegas and cheap take-out. But then we walked over to Broadway and the area came alive. Restaurants, coffee shops, pastry shops, a library, the Columbia bookstore, a couple of supermarkets. We also walked past Suite, a gay bar we’ve been to a few times, which we’d forgotten was there. That was reassuring.

We don’t know if that’s the neighbhorhood where we’ll ultimately look for a lease – we might want something further downtown, at least below 59th Street. But in the meantime, it’s nice to know that the temporary neighborhood is decent.

In which direction is this woman spinning? Clockwise, or counterclockwise?

Freaky.

I thought I was over my love of comic books, but this makes me drool. It takes me back to fifth grade, when I first discovered DC Comics and began exploring the history of Batman.

Rare Batman Comic Is Discovered

“It started with a phone call,” said Todd McDevitt, 38, the owner of New Dimension Comics, a chain of five stores in Pennsylvania. He is now also the owner of a copy of Detective Comics No. 27, which in 1939 featured the first appearance of Batman. The seller, who Mr. McDevitt said asked to remain anonymous, discovered the comic while cleaning out an attic. “A lot of times I get these calls, and it’s a reprint of some kind,” Mr. McDevitt said. “I was pretty sure this was the real deal.” A near-mint copy of the comic is valued at $485,000; Mr. McDevitt’s copy is in fine to very fine condition, but he would not disclose the amount he paid, saying only, “I kept a little bit of my soul.” The opportunity to buy the comic was “the kind of deal that people say is once in a lifetime,” he said. “Truly, it’s my third.” Mr. McDevitt previously acquired several 1960s Marvel comics and a copy of All-American Comics No. 16, with the first appearance, in 1940, of the Golden Age Green Lantern.

Sigh.

I’ve deleted one of yesterday’s blog entries because it was a bit too emotionally raw.

Now, blog world, Matt and I need your help. We need to find a new apartment that we can move into by November 1. Preferably in Manhattan and preferably no further north than Morningside Heights. The further south the better. Our rent budget is about $2000/month tops. If any of my readers have leads, please let one of us know. We’d be ever so grateful!

[Update: it turns out Matt’s new job can provide us with a temporary apartment for a few months, so it’s not as pressing a concern now. Still – leads would be great!]

Jonathan Chait has an op-ed in the Times today about how the true Republican religion isn’t Christianity; it’s tax cuts. Republicans are allowed to dissent on social and cultural issues, but they’re never, ever, ever allowed to dissent on tax cuts. Coincidentally, just last night I finished reading Chait’s new book, The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, in which he fleshes these ideas out. The first part of the book is about how the tax-cut loonies took control of the Republican Party; the second is about how the Republicans took control of the national debate.

As this chart shows, under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 91 percent – can you even imagine that? – and the economy thrived. Throughout most of the 1980s, the top tax rate was 50 percent, and the economy boomed. It then went down to 28 percent, then up to 31 percent. Then Clinton raised the top tax rate to 39.6 percent – and the economy began thriving again. (More historical tax information here.)

Chait makes the point that tax cuts are not the only factor in economic growth; there are many factors. There’s a business cycle, growth and recession, but Republicans don’t believe in the business cycle; they believe everything is controlled by tax levels. The tax-cut theocrats predicted that Clinton’s tax increase would wreck the economy. When the economy actually boomed instead, they changed their explanation and said that it was really the aftereffects of Reagan’s economy that were causing the boom. As Chait points out, if you have to change your explanation after the fact, it’s not science. Anyone can come up with a cause-and-effect analysis after the fact. The true test is if you can accurately predict the results. The tax-cutters’ predictions failed. Supply-side economics is a joke.

As for Reagan, whom economic conservatives have deified, he was never as unbending as they say he was. He agreed to tax hikes in 1982 and 1983; in 1986, he lowered the top tax rate but raised the proportion of taxes paid by the rich. And “deified” is accurate, because tax-cutting really is a religion. Conservatives love certainty. Chait (pp. 235-36):

Most of us tend to think of liberalism and conservatism as clashing ideologies, with the former preferring more government and the latter preferring less. What separates the two sides, though, is not just goals but epistemologies. Conservatives do not simply believe that government ought to be limited vecause it is the best way to achieve certain goals. They believe it as a matter of philosophical first principles…

Liberal support for bigger government, on the other hand, is entirely rooted in what liberals believe to be its practical effects… Increasing the size of government does not, in and of itself, serve any greater purpose….

Conservatism thus has a certainty about it that rarely can be found in liberalism. In this way, the ideological style of conservative discourse resembles that of communism much more than liberalism. It has an air of totalistic ideology. It’s no surprise that a disproportionate number of conservative intellectuals were once communists… They simply exchanged the primacy of the state for the primacy of the market.

There’s more to the story — I’m simplifying Chait’s argument a bit. And no writer’s arguments should ever be swallowed uncritically. Nevertheless, the book is intriguing and well worth reading.

I give up. Really. I don’t know what else to say.

Two months after insisting that they would roll back broad eavesdropping powers won by the Bush administration, Democrats in Congress appear ready to make concessions that could extend some crucial powers given to the National Security Agency….

Although willing to oppose the White House on the Iraq war, they remain nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence.

Pissant Democrats. Spineless, ineffective losers.

Nothing’s changed.

I hate writer’s block.

So my goal, as I’ve stated, is to become some sort of writer. I recently had a session with a writing coach, and she gave me some assignments. One of those assignments is to keep a list of possible ideas of topics to write about.

I’m having such a hard time with it.

If I could sum up my problem, it would be this: I want to write political and cultural polemics, but I’m not a polemical person. I want to advocate for something specific, but it’s too easy for me to see both sides of an issue and not be able to decide where I come down.

This isn’t much of a blog entry or even a complete thought… but I wanted to vent, because I’m frustrated. How am I ever going to get out of a 9-to-5 office job if I can’t get anywhere with my writing?

Following up on my post last week about transgendered people and ENDA: John Aravosis further explains his opposition in the lead article on Salon.com today.

Key paragraph, about the importance of political pragmatism:

Conservatives understand that cultural change is a long, gradual process of small but cumulatively deadly victories. Liberals want it all now. And that’s why, in the culture wars, conservatives often win and we often lose. While conservatives spend years, if not decades, trying to convince Americans that certain judges are “activists,” that gays “recruit” children, and that Democrats never saw an abortion they didn’t like, we often come up with last-minute ideas and expect everyone to vote for them simply because we’re right. Conservatives are happy with piecemeal victory, liberals with noble failure. We rarely make the necessary investment in convincing people that we’re right because we consider it offensive to have to explain an obvious truth. When it comes time to pass legislation, too many liberals just expect good and virtuous bills to become law by magic, without the years of legwork necessary to secure a majority of the votes in Congress and the majority support of the people. We expect our congressional allies to fall on their swords for us when we’ve failed to create a culture in which it’s safe for politicians to support our agenda and do the right thing. ENDA, introduced for the first time 30 years ago, is an exception to that rule. It took 30 years to get to the point where the Congress and the public are in favor of legislation banning job discrimination against gays. It’s only been five months since transgendered people were included in ENDA for the first time.

I think Aravosis protests too much about not “passing judgment” on transgendered people, but his point is still sound.

Liberal hawks have been quick to swoop down on dovish critics of the American military — condemning in particular MoveOn.org’s criticism of Gen. David Petraeus. Quickly, it has become conventional wisdom that liberals should never disparage the military.

But why not? Soldiers have to respect generals. Civilians don’t.

Game, set, match.

Dunder-Mifflin, Scranton branch: the floorplan.

Not long ago a popular writer on electricity made this startling prediction of coming wonders: “Lovers conversing at a great distance will behold each other as in the flesh. Doctors will examine patients’ tongues in another city, and the poor will enjoy visual trips wherever their fancy inclines. In hot weather, too, Alpine glaciers and arctic snows will be made visible in sweltering cities, and when piercing northeast winds do blow, we shall gloat over tropical vistas of orchids and palms.”

This is no dream. The new “telephotograph” invention of Dr. Arthur Korn, Professor of Physics in Munich University, is a distinct step nearer the realization of all this, and he assures us that “television,” or seeing by telegraph, is merely a question of a year or two with certain improvements in apparatus.

And then it will surely be possible for the eminent surgeon in New York to see a bullet embedded in the body of a patient in Chicago or San Francisco…

– The New York Times, February 24, 1907.

Evolution of a Hip, Ironic Catchphrase.

Homer writes about a piece by John Aravosis on transgendered people vs. gays. Aravosis opposes gay groups’ efforts to get gender identity included in ENDA (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act), because (1) the bill is never going to pass if transgendered people are included, and (2) when did transgendered people become part of the “gay community” anyway?

Homer takes issue with Aravosis on this, as well as with Andrew Sullivan (who agrees with Aravosis), calling it the opinion of some “well-to-do white men. Enough said there.”

The thing is… I understand where Aravosis is coming from, for a couple of reasons.

One, being transgendered is not the same as being gay. The former is about gender identity, and the latter is about sexual attraction. They’re different. Lumping the two groups together just plays into the misconception that gay men really want to be women and gay women really want to be men. It brings to mind the uninformed straight guy who asks a gay couple, “I don’t get how your relationship works. Which one of you’s the woman?” Um, neither of us. We’re both men.

Granted, sexual identity is not totally separate from gender identity. There are the studies showing that gay people’s brains are more similar to the brains of straight people of the opposite gender, and many of us certainly have characteristics that are more stereotypical of the opposite sex (whether this is learned behavior or has a biological basis isn’t clear).

But some of us are comfortable with this and some aren’t. Among gay men, for example, there’a a whole range of behaviors. On one extreme, some embrace hyper-feminine stereoypes, either as a big fuck-you to society — for example, Chris Crocker; as a way to show gay pride; or for other reasons. On the other extreme, some embrace hyper-masculine stereotypes, searching themselves in fear of any trace of femininity — for example, “I’m lookin’ for other hot dudes.” And then there’s the majority of us who are somewhere in the middle. How you feel about including transgendered people as part of the “gay community” probably has a lot to do with how comfortable you are embracing opposite-gender stereotypes.

Furthermore, all groups that work for change have an inner divide. Do you try to accommodate and compromise, or do you brook no opposition? Do you try to change the majority’s attitudes, which takes longer, or do you accept that attitudes are hard to change and work for what you can get? There are advantages and disadvantages either way.

(I do get embarrassed when I hear people at rallies speaking in support of the “lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered community,” or “the LGBTQ-identified community,” or whatever, because it sounds like a parody of early-’90s university English department political correctness. I’m not saying the concept is unworthy; I’m just saying it’s unfortunate how it comes across.)

So it’s complicated, as everything always is, and I think both sides have some points. I love ya, Homer — but I think it’s a bit simplistic to say that Aravosis’s opinion arises merely from his being a “well-to-do white man.”

R.I.P., Herbert Muschamp, the baffling former New York Times architecture critic.

When I die, I hope my death isn’t announced by my lawyer.

* * * *

Update: Okay, this is interesting. I wrote about Muschamp once. If you google his name, my post comes up on the first page of results.

My post includes a quote from a Muschamp piece. And Nicolai Ouroussoff’s obituary of Muschamp in the Times includes the exact same quote.

The obituary was posted on the New York Times website at 1:42 p.m. In my website stats, I have two hits from an IP address belonging to the New York Times. Both hits were from Google searches for “Herbert Muschamp,” one at 12:29 p.m. and the other at 12:58 p.m., before the obituary was posted online.

I think Ouroussoff used my blog to research the obituary!

How frickin’ cool.

“If there were a private-sector solution to the problem of 9 million uninsured American children, the private sector would have found it.”