Category Archives: Musings

How Drag Queens and Sizzler Changed My Life

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I remember a handful of instances where I had contact with gay people, gay culture and my own latent gay emotions when I was young.  Before I had a shred of understanding of the true nature of who I am, these moments were frozen in my memory with crystal clarity and generated a profound emotional response which resonated within me.  I didn’t fully grasp then what it all meant, but later in life when I came out, they were a saving grace.

The most powerful moment I remember took place on one of my birthdays when I was probably around the age of 10.  Though I don’t remember which birthday it was, I will remember the details forever.  My brother and I have birthdays which fall within two days of one another and for our birthday dinner, my mom took us to Sizzler which was a very special treat at that time.  We had waited in line and made our way to the counter to order when I noticed the boy behind the counter.  This wasn’t the person taking our orders, just an average guy who was filling glasses to take to people’s tables.

He was skinny, average height, medium length hair and something about him completely entranced me.  I was watching him as he was emptying the dishwasher behind the counter and stacking the glasses, I couldn’t tell if it was how he was moving or looked or what but I couldn’t look away.   I watched him grab the last glass from the dishwasher, setting it under the soda dispenser to fill it and watching the glass suddenly explode.  He apologized to his superior, looking startled and upset, and began cleaning up the mess.  The trance was broken in that moment and I was completely overwhelmed by this unidentified emotional response and a desire to reach out to him.  Not because the incident had been upsetting but because in an unknown way I felt like we shared something in common.

Another strong moment I remember was the first time I watched To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar starring Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo.  The characters are men.  Men who like men.  Men who have the audacity to live out their lives the way they see fit in the face of mainstream culture.  The story takes these amazing drag queens (and drag princess), a subset of the gay minority, and throws them into a situation where they couldn’t possibly be any less discordant with their environment.  In spite of that they go on to promote the values of self-worth, strength of character, respect and true compassion.

By looking at them as queens, not just as gay men, it took the concept of being gay and made it appear to be incidental to the process of living a life you are proud of and choosing to be real and true to yourself.  The first time I watched this it took everything in me not to bawl, the whole damn movie was a religious experience for my young teenage self.  I felt this emotional response which told me I was less alone than I felt and that I would be able to find comfort and greater personal understanding if I could only figure out what I was missing.

Later in life I found myself.  I connected with all these feelings which had been laying dormant for all those years.  I can’t describe to you the sense of calm, comfort and strength I felt when I realized I was gay because I knew that I was not alone.  There were real people doing real things in real places who were gay.  There were stories written by and about people like me and people with dreams beyond my own which gave me reason for hope and happiness.  There were a multitude of other emotions and fears and worries that bombarded me in the following days and weeks but in quiet moments I still felt the calm, comfort and strength in understanding that I was not alone.

One Quarter Century

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Tomorrow I will be 25 years old. It’s kind of shocking to me because in some ways it feels like it has been much longer than that. The last four and a half years alone have been so full they could fill 25 years on their own. At the same time that timeframe is the primary context in which I see my life, so it doesn’t feel like I am very old at all.

My life pretty much rebooted four and a half years ago when I came out and the events which took place over those first months left me in a state where I had to start my life over from scratch. I had almost literally nothing. My car was totaled, I had no job or money, I was living in a new and unfamiliar place, and I felt very much alone in this world. All I really had were my laptop, cell phone and a month of rent paid up front. This was the beginning of my very literal renaissance, my rebirth.

Four and a half years later I have a lovely home that is my very own. I have a great job which I’m now beginning to see as a career. I have a reliable car which is something I’ll never take for granted. I have good friends who I love dearly and have been there for me more times than I can count. All of this adds up to make my full and satisfying life which, in many ways, is still just getting started.

Tomorrow I will be 25 years old and as implausible and extraordinary as that seems to me, taken in the context of my implausible and extraordinary life, I suppose it makes sense.

In the Beginning

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I think I was early to the scene as far as reading and hunting for blogs went.  I started back in around 2002-ish and was addicted.  I remember my mom rolling her eyes at me whenever I would start to talk about my “Internet people”.  I guess to her it seemed like being a blogger meant living your life in a fishbowl. I saw it as something else.  In just the same way my siblings and I were told as kids to shut the blinds at night “Because we don’t live in a fishbowl!” bloggers have that same ability. They get to choose when they open the blinds and what they are going to show you inside.

The ability to be reading the thoughts and experiences and day-to-day narratives from regular people out there in the world with such diversity and a dash of bravery for sharing basically melted my brain.  I was hooked.  It was a liberating moment to find ridiculously creative people out there with wit and humor to boot!  And though these voices I kept coming across were older than I was, I felt connected.  I felt like I had found a tiny niche of my own in a world which was hurtling through so much conflict and confusion.

I remember my first recipe site which I was totally just tickled pink with.   Bitchen Kitchen just made my day with its playful colors and retro-influenced design.   It would still look quite snappy if it had survived past late 2005/early 2006.   I going through some crap at the time so I lost track of it and when I remembered it just this last year, it was dead and gone.  Apparently a victim of one of the less awesome parts of the web: the vanishing.  Domains can expire, interest and resources can wane, time moves on and things vanish.

mp3.com.  I found some of my first indie music there, which I loved, by The Secret Band.  The album was called “Special Little Devil” and I downloaded the four tracks that I liked the best with the hope of buying the CD eventually.  mp3.com was purchased by CNET and the catalog was dumped unceremoniously and I couldn’t locate any of their work again.  The Velvet Teen emerged from that group and I contacted a band member for details on where I could get a copy of their earlier work but he said he wasn’t sure they still had it.  My favorite song of theirs, Rivena, has a great sound to it and somehow over the years it was corrupted in the shuffle between computers and is now truncated awkwardly.

I also remember, quite fondly, Beth from Crazy Us and her stories about her sons Kyle and Eli.  I’m dying because I had printed out a short story she posted once regarding a conversation she had with her kids over breakfast which I may have lost in my last move.  The whole thing was just ridiculously amazing, but my two favorite lines which I think I have down to memory verbatim go: “I am a bunny rabbit!  A poisonous bunny rabbit.  I will poisonous you! Hisss!” and “We play animal friends simply every day!”  It was at that point that the concept of having children, which had been totally icky, gross and foreign to me suddenly popped into focus as something I may be interested in doing.  That was a landmark moment for me.

Crazy Us has popped in and out of existence since then.  It wasn’t a daily read for me but I checked it frequently enough to kindof put together that Beth had difficulty dealing with some of the feedback and criticism she would get from visitors to her site.  This particular issue has actually been always there in my mine.  There are the dooce’s of this world who have gone so far as to monetize negativity, but that takes a LOT of energy and a lot of patience and a lot of self-confidence. Then there are really awesome people like Beth who get worn down by it and I don’t blame her one tiny little bit.  I’ve always wondered how I would fare in the same situation.

I guess the moral to this story is that the internet is very much a living, breathing thing in its own way.  It evolves and grows and things are lost in the shuffle.  It’s a double edged sword.  The amazing ease with which content can be shared and people can connect with one another also lends itself to the rather quick loss of that same information if not actively maintained.  I think that is why I love physically published media.  It doesn’t go anywhere for the most part.  It’s a lot harder to delete and repurpose the constituent parts of a book or photo album or a handful of letters than it is to delete a website or flickr profile or email to free up space.  That being said, I love the power of the internet as it enables me to share what I can, unless you know of a publisher who is just dying to deal with me and publish my crap incrementally!

A Question

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This morning I did what I always do on Sunday mornings and I started reading today’s secrets from PostSecret.  Today the routine was different because of the addition of a short video.  People on the street were asked to share their secrets and the result was different from what I expected.  I had expected something very dark and dismal exposing what lies behind the social masks that I had assumed the subjects wear.  I don’t know why I would have thought that, as I never wonder what lies beneath with the people I meet day to day.  This is a thought-provoking concept which I could fill an entire post on but I want to keep this focused on secrets.

I read PostSecret and I’m amused and shocked and made uncomfortable and moved and, most significantly, I feel connected.  The movie was very much in keeping with this.  We all have secrets, some of which seem more obvious or less secret-ey than others and some which do reveal a darker side to all of our lives.  I share a lot of things here which may at one point or another fallen anywhere on that scale for me.  I don’t think that they necessarily always things that I have thought “Oh! I must keep that a secret and not tell anyone!”  however.  Today I will share a secret though.  One that I’ve had since I started this blog or even the one or two predecessors to this site.

I’m afraid that my writing isn’t good enough and that I won’t achieve what I set out to when I first started writing.  I’m afraid that I won’t be able to express or share the thoughts and experiences and emotions I had when I was coming out.

I definitely have to be level with myself and just say that by not really following through with that goal, I will fail by default.  Pure and simple.  I had a rough start earlier this year which stalled out and died after only a few posts and part of the standstill is this secret fear I’ve held.  Growing up is messy work, coming out is even more difficult.  Combine the two and you get a superfund disaster which, when even I look back on it, makes me cringe and feel critical and criticizing our own work, let alone your own life is ridiculously hard.

Anyhow, that is my secret this week and I may post more or I may not, so there it is.

Choose and Make Not Seek and Find

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I recently received an email from a former friend.  The message was a brief apology regarding the circumstances surrounding our parting.  Though I had quite a few more negative emotional responses to it, more than any of those I appreciated it.  As a simple gesture, it was well intended and that was the most important thing.  I had to really think about whether I was going to respond to it at all.  I eventually decided to reply and just moments after sending it, I began to wonder If I really got across what  I wanted to.  I am a rambler after all.

What this is all leading to is a small part of what he wrote at the very end.  “I’m sure you’ll find what you’ve been blessed to receive.” This is a really welcome sentiment and I greatly appreciate it.  What I say here isn’t to nitpick, deride, or invalidate this well-wishing at all.  The concept of finding existential, emotional or other intangible things has come up in a number of conversations lately and I want to talk about my views on this common phrase and concept.  I don’t believe in finding things.  I believe in making them.

This is a hard one for me.  It’s not something I want to seem like I’m being preachy as it is a life lesson I’m still working on.  A lot of people communicate that “I need to find myself” or that “I’m looking for happiness.”  I really strongly believe that this will only set the stage for invalid findings and fruitless searches.  It seems like it’s one of those lazy/hard things we do to procrastinate or avoid more daunting ideas or situations.  Those actions which look or seem easier as they are less complex, but in the grand scheme of things just increase the sheer volume of work in the end.

If I were to seek out who I am, I will find a great many things that resonate or reflect what I am and even more that I am not.  The problem is that this really only creates a great Venn diagram of things which coincide with the best impression I have of myself.  It isn’t a one-to-one expression of exactly who I want to be and much more importantly who I am willing to be.  Sitting down and deciding who I am and making that a reality through my actions is a far more daunting task than mapping out which circles out there coincide with who I think I might be.  I think too many people settle for a pattern circles which are beneath them, which I don’t think is necessarily weakness so a simple failure to harness their own potential and unique opportunities.

That one I think I have down well enough, things get tricky when it comes to stuff like “looking for happiness”-type situations.  I lose track of that CONSTANTLY and must remind myself of time and again.  Happiness is an emotional state which comes from within myself.  Very often we are inclined to look to external factors as a barometer of our happiness which is one of the most sad mass-delusions in human history.

Of course there are many raw emotional states which are triggered by outside sources.  If a stranger were to walk up to me off the street and kicks me in the shins I would immediately feel anger, confusion, and hostility.  What happens next is usually the product of habit and conditioning, though anything I feel or do at that point is actually a choice.  The trick is breaking that down the facts of the situation and choosing what I want to do.  I could choose to feel vengeful and react with further aggression.  I could chose to feel hurt and mope about it all day.  I could even chose to feel special for having the unique experience of this very bizarre event and laugh about it the rest of the day sharing the absurdity with my friends.

The lazy/hard way to handle this is to just live with the conditioned responses I have built up and accept the consequences as fate.  The harder path is choosing to stop and make choices about how I will feel and respond to situations in life.  It’s not hard because you have to stop and think, that is quite easy once you figure it out.  The hard part is remembering to keep it up.  It’s easy to get lax and start to let things slide.  My recent conversations have reminded me of this and it’s time to get back at it.