RFD 191 Fall 2022

Number 191 Fall 2022 • $11.95 Queer Relatives

So please consider times when you’ve said “Never Again”, reflect on your actions—heck show us your actions through words and images. How do we take a negative reaction like “Never Again”and shift it to a purposeful change rather than just an awful experience.

2 RFD 191 Fall 2022 Issue 192 / Winter 2022 NEVER AGAIN Submission Deadline: October 21, 2022 www.rfdmag.org/upload

“Never Again”, is a common phrase we use in everyday life like a prayer or a vow to reflect not wanting to repent an experience, a mistake or mis guided decision. But it’s also a political slogan for many movements such as anti-nuclear, anti-war, abortion, Queer and Trans rights, Black Lives Matter or other forms of reaction to racism, genocide, and the list goes on. We are asking you to consider ways of contributing to this issue which is about addressing “Never Again”. How we have to repeat our efforts to make something change, how we re-direct our personal life to try to make a change, and how we try not to be numb to the constant effort of facing the battle of “Never Again” moments be they in our personal lives or in the social climate we want to live in.

With the crisis on many fronts facing our lives— racism, homophobia, transphobia, religious bigotry, violence against women, and economic injustice— we’re all trying to shape responses to those “Never Again” moments which we’ve been facing all too often. “Don’t Say Gay” laws, abortion bans, “Bath room bills”, and the many laws affecting how we can vote, policing, and simple issues of bias which we face. Reflect on y(our) history and tell us and show us the story of how we can move ahead.

This can take the form of simple things—not leaving plants out after a frost warning, ways we are taking efforts to live healthier and safer lives, protesting and organizing for change, reviewing our choices and actions, and most importantly how we are shaping our lives after something unsavory.

Our community often is involved in many fronts to engage for change so delve into ways being LGBTQ in other causes we’d love to hear about this as well as the personal, engaging and funny aspects of “Never Again”.

Relatives

Welcome to our Fall issue of RFD. It’s our attempt to take you on a queer family reunion brought to you by other readers. Many of the pieces in this issue are about uncovering, coming to know more about queer relatives and how our relationships with family is often conflicted because we’re queer. Every person experiences family differently and we’re happy to reflect a number of perspec tives from our readers. We also share another form of queer relations, the relationship between artist Francis Bacon and his lover George Dyer as told by Bacon through his art. With this issue of RFD we begin our countdown towards RFD’s fiftieth birth in Fall 2024. We’re working on ways to celebrate and we encourage our readers to share their experiences with reading RFD, finding RFD for the first time or ways that you engaged in creating and shaping RFD’s pages over the years. Please be in touch if you’ve written or shared artwork with RFD. We’d also love to hear from folks about their favorite RFD issue or a special article that still stands out for you. With that all in mind, we’re eager to hear your ideas for future issues of RFD, please send us your ideas for themes. We also want to put out a thank you to all of our subscribers and readers for their support through subscription renewals and donations to help keep RFD online. Enjoy this family reunion, help us reflect on our big anniversary and thanks as always for your support!

With love from a balmy Vermont —the RFD Collective

Forever Dear Vol 49 No 1 #191 Fall 2022 Between the Lines

RFD 191 Fall 2022 1

2 RFD 191 Fall 2022 RFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative life styles. We foster community building and networking, explore the diverse expressions of our sexuality, care for the environment, Radical Faerie consciousness, and nature-centered spirituality, and share experiences of our lives. RFD is produced by volun teers. We welcome your participation. The business and general production are coordinated by a collective. Features and entire issues are prepared by different groups in various places. RFD (ISSN# 0149-709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302. Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302. Non-profit tax exempt #62-1723644, a function of RFD Press with office of registration at 231 Ten Penny Rd., Woodbury, TN 37190. RFD Cover Price: $11.95. A regular subscription is the least expensive way to receive it four times a year. First class mailed issues will be forwarded. Others will not. Send address changes to submissions@rfdmag.org or to our Hadley, MA address. Copyright © RFD Press. The records required by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and as sociated with respect to this magazine (and all graphic material associated therewith on which this label appears) are kept by the custodian of records at the following location: RFD Press, 85 N Main St, Ste 200, White River Junction, VT 05001. On the Cover Front: Photograph by Cotton Bro Production Managing Editor: Bambi Gauthier Production Editor: Matt Bucy Submission Deadlines Winter–October 21, 2022 Spring–January 21, 2022 See inside covers for themes and specifics. For advertising, subscriptions, back issues and other information visit www.rfdmag.org. To read online visit www.issuu.com/rfmag. Visual Contributors Inside This Issue Images or pieces not directly associated with an article. Artboydancing. 2, 10, 13, 30, 35, 39, 42, 56 Duncan Hilton .........................7, 40, 49 Michael Loren Butkovich. ........... 9, 32, 48, 55 Gregory T. Wilkins. 52 Gabby Tenda .................. Inside Back Cover Cotton Bro ............................... Cover "Money Talks Sometimes" by Artboydancing.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 3 CONTENTS Chipped Pieces ........................... A. Scott Henderson .................... 4 Uncle Joe and Fran ....................... Steven Riel ........................... 11 Ang Baklang Naging Gerilya & Ang Pamilyang Nahanap Niya sa Pakikibaka .......................... T.L.Javier ............................ 14 Appearing Normal........................ donnarkevic ......................... 16 Uncle Brud .............................. Merline D. ........................... 17 Mis tías españolas (My Spanish Aunts) Angela Acosta 18 Some Funny Stories About My Father’s Death ............... Maytag Dishwasher ................... 19 Mind Your Own Business ................. Matt Lawrence ....................... 25 Great Aunt Jo Keystone 28 Gay Uncle ............................... Scott Damon ......................... 31 lineage (or lack thereof) ................... Emerson Gray ........................ 34 My Queer Relative Aunt Mary ............. Kelvin Ray Beliele..................... 37 Great Uncle Willy ........................ Jim Van Buskirk ...................... 38 Legacy David Milley 41 The Gay Sheriff of Natchitoches Parish ...... J.L. Fletcher .......................... 43 Poem ................................... Dylan ............................... 47 Poem ................................... Duncan Hilton ....................... 49 Older Brofriend .......................... Chicken Sparklehorse ................. 50 Secrets and Time Martin Dayne 53 The Artistic Suicide of George Dyer: Francis Bacon ......................... Rob Buchanan ....................... 57

“Hello, Steven,” she said amiably. She was wearing a cream blouse and a light gray skirt (if either item had had any wrinkles, it would now be cowering in a closet). With ninety-two years of practice, her posture was erect, a straight line from her black shoes to her white hair.

“Good. Have you got your things?” A real ques tion that time.

Chipped Pieces by A. Scott Henderson

4 RFD 191 Fall 2022

Maternal folklore was the main source of my information about Waycross. My mother, her sister, and my grandmother had spent almost every summer with relatives who were scattered along an arc stretching from Jacksonville to Waycross to Charleston. In her decades-old recollections of those sojourns, my mother would carefully arrange family members like pieces in a china cabinet: the perfect ones were placed in front, while the chipped ones—an aunt who smoked cigars, an uncle who wore dresses—were tucked in back.

Larded with italics and punctuation, a sign sput tered: “Welcome to Waycross…Gateway to the Oke fenokee Swamp…Opportunity Ripe for the Picking!” I had no idea if it was the swamp or the opportunity that had lured my mother’s side of the family to Waycross. Her people were a Celtic clan of sandy hair and pale skin who left the Appalachian hollows for the scorching sun of treeless terrain—dirt-poor farmers who never questioned the Bible’s truth, a scorching sun of a different sort.

An hour earlier the roadside landscape had been populated by Tallahassee’s magnolias, but they had surrendered to pines, which soon gave way to scrub, swamp, and periodic proselytizing. A billboard in Valdosta had asked, “Have you been Saved?,” a warning as much as an invitation. As I approached Waycross, the monotonous scenery fooled me into thinking that the gauzy bolls of cotton were wildflowers. This didn’t surprise me. When I was a child growing up in seasonless South Florida, I had assumed that cotton came from de partment stores where little boys shopped for pink paisley shirts with their mothers. But cotton-field chicanery couldn’t compare to having been fooled by my own self—fooled into believing I was normal, only to discover I wasn’t. I’d agonized over whether to keep that knowledge hidden or to face the harsh consequences of telling others. College gave me a convenient excuse for cowardice. Once classes began, I became the soli tary whiz kid, a peach-fuzz freshman with his head in theMysand.weekend trip to Waycross that fall was a favor to my mother. Three years before, her great aunt had taken a fourteen-hour bus ride to visit us in West Palm Beach. During her stay, I had said nothing about girls or girlfriends, despite being a se nior in high school. Instead, I had spoken of clothes, recipes, and local theater productions. Maybe Way cross boys had similar conversations, but I knew what they would be called if they did.

The sepia-toned tedium of southeast Georgia was endless. I rolled down a window to free a fly, the map on my lap flapping its own creased wings. Scented by skunky paper mills, the air was cool and dry, though autumn remained just a rumor.

The encyclopedia volumes stacked in our humid garage provided additional clues about that sliver of Dixie, places where my mother had learned to dance, to kiss, to wordlessly prompt a light for her cigarette. Those volumes showed me other things, too—photos of bare-chested men who held my stares as I sat on that increasingly hard floor, slowly realizing I was one of the chipped pieces.

The Ware Retirement Center—a renovated hotel—was the tallest structure in Waycross. The lobby was empty except for some octogenarian armchairs and a broken grandfather clock. I pressed the elevator button until it produced a grinding, metal-on-metal sound, as if the building needed a hipThereplacement.elevatoreventually appeared and took me to the fourth floor. In a minute I was at my aunt’s door.

“Hi, Aunt Beulah,” I said. “It’s nice to see you.”

I feared there’d be an awkward and potentially in criminating pause when she might recall my campy comments during her Florida visit.

“I expect you’ve eaten lunch,” she said, her speech neither clipped nor brusque, though not effusive either.“Yes ma’am,” I responded, my voice inadvertently straying above the masculine pitch I’d practiced.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, raising a folded suit bag. Aunt Beulah nodded, as if her question had been a statement after all.

I had on a polo shirt, khakis, and penny loafers— arbitrary costuming that people like me used to identity each other, rare hints in the guessing game of is-he or isn’t-he, a game we were forced to play in the shadows of ambiguity and innuendo.

Ruth, Aunt Beulah’s daughter-in-law, took both my hands: “We’ve been looking forward to seeing you, Steven,” she said affectionately. She eased me through introductions as I tried to keep the singsong chiffon out of my voice.

“I hope this will do,” she said, giving the bath room a quick inspection. “Yes ma’am, this will be fine,” I replied.

“Wonderful,” she said in a tone of small victories. “We’ll drive over to Jack and Ruth’s house at 5:00.” Marching orders confirmed, she went back to her apartment.AuntBeulah had reasons for her reticence. The youngest among ten siblings, she was the only one to attend college, earning a nursing degree in Atlanta. A few years later, she married a salesman from Alabama who died shortly after the birth of their second child. To support the two children, she’d returned to her former nursing job at a Way crossAshospital.aworking mother in the Deep South, Aunt Beulah had been an aberration, though her differ ence was not like mine—nobody had ever suggested she might be “funny” because she’d never remarried. She could be forgiven, even admired, for her singleminded independence and imperturbability.

The TV in my room didn’t work, so I half-heart edly read a textbook I’d brought with me. Bored, I began thinking about the guy who often sat next to me in my economics class: lanky, tanned, long blond hair. Probably a surfer from Daytona or Ft. Lauder dale. He’d flop down in a desk, then nonchalantly adjust his shorts to make his lack of underwear obvious. Those interludes always incited a riot of distracting thoughts, voyeuristic silences when my desires were momentarily free of judgment. “It’s not much farther,” Aunt Beulah said. Streets named for Confederate generals and poisonous plants marked our progress into Jack and Ruth’s neighborhood.“Turnright after the stop sign,” Aunt Beulah directed with the crisp precision of someone who no longer drives, just navigates. Dusk had descended by the time we arrived. Azaleas surrounded a ranch-style house, its yard blanketed in leaves that crunched underfoot as we slowly walked to the front door.

“Then let’s get you settled.” She stepped inside, body language cuing me to wait in the hallway. From what I could see, her apartment was fairly spartan. An issue of Family Circle magazine sat under a lamp on an end table next to a green couch, beyond which a two-chair dinette faced a makeshift kitchen. In contrast to this no-nonsense simplic ity, I knew Aunt Beulah had constructed defenses, barriers that barred the entrance into her private thoughts and feelings. “Here we are,” she said, holding a key. She guided me past the elevator and unlocked the door to a modest room, an accommodation residents could reserve for guests.

Aunt Beulah’s grandson Jimmy, a high-school sophomore, was restlessly thin and exhaustingly talkative. An equal match for a hummingbird, he flitted from topic to topic, from person to person, sentences stopping and starting at random points along the “Steven!,”way.Jimmy’s sister Sara exclaimed, giving me a big Duringhug.their holiday visits to Florida, Sara and I had giggled at sequestered card tables, played board games, and mimicked the adults. As teenagers, we’d had lengthy phone calls discussing the boys who wooed her and the girls who belittled me, allaying our insecurities with commiseration and mutual reassurances.Sarahadalso lived with my grandmother while she completed an internship prior to college. We palled around and joked a lot that summer, so I laughed one afternoon when she had said I was like an older brother—but she’d been serious. The chance to see her again had persuaded me to make thisJoiningtrip. us for dinner was Sara’s boyfriend David, a Waycross native and fellow UGA student. Resem bling a sporting goods advertisement from a mailorder catalog, he had a large, solid build covered by large, solid clothing. Curiously, his eyes held mine even after we exchanged greetings. Was I missing

RFD 191 Fall 2022 5

“Come on in y’all,” Aunt Beulah’s son Jack said, his drawl an unconscious cliché, molasses on a cold day. He took us to the living room, which was crowded with a hodgepodge of furniture encamped next to an empty fireplace. Sweet and savory aromas drifted in from the kitchen.

“I don’t think he wants to hear that old story,” Aunt Beulah chided. “It’s not even really a story”— which she then proceeded to tell.

The conversation shifted to the classes Sara and David were taking next term, capped by Sara’s com ment, “Then, in either June or July, we’re hoping to announce our engagement.”

Were these time-worn truisms a way of implying that David wasn’t good enough for Sara? Whatever the case, nobody else seemed to share Aunt Beulah’s worries.“Jack and I hadn’t been dating even a year when we got married,” Ruth said, seeking to mollify the combatants.Iwondered how long it’d taken Ruth to find out about Jack’s alcoholism. Marriage, instead of end ing secrets, might create more of them, deceptions abetted by a blind eye or a lame excuse.

I had vague memories of this anecdote—some thing about a possum caught in a family vegetable garden. There was one detail I hadn’t forgotten— that playing dead was an instinctive paralysis, the lifeless limbo between fight or flight. My attention had begun to wander when I felt David press his leg, rigid and unhesitating, against mine. His eyes remained fixed on Aunt Beulah. The rising warmth of our touch continued until he moved his leg. I tried to conceal my confusion. Because I was constantly searching for signs, I sometimes imag ined things—the looking-glass illusion of seeing in others what I saw in myself, a mirage of mistaken identities. Or maybe David had been genuinely interested in that silly story and wasn’t aware of his wayward leg.

Aunt Beulah, having given the possum a digni fied burial, took a concluding sip of water.

“Are y’all ready for dessert?” Ruth was heading to the kitchen, confident of our answer. She returned with a tray heaped with slices of pound cake, the Communion wafer of the South.

I probably just wanted a different image to replace the surfer in my thoughts later that night. Because it was a dry household, there weren’t any pleasantries over beer or bourbon. “Let me sit next to Meemaw,” Jimmy chirped, wings aflutter. In the dining room, a picture window reflected our images as if we were watching ourselves in a play.“Oh piffle, I forgot that magazine,” Aunt Beulah apologized.“Youneedn’t fret, Mama—I’m in no hurry for those recipes,” Ruth said, pulling out a chair for Aunt“You’reBeulah.not getting senile, are you?,” Jack kidded, but Aunt Beulah bristled at the attempted humor. One of her sisters had been committed to the Milledgeville State Hospital, and a niece or nephew had spent six months at the Florida State Hospi tal—two of the chipped pieces in my mother’s china cabinet.Inthe crisscrossing chit-chat that followed a short blessing, I admittedly engaged in what my mother approvingly labelled a “personality act,” the artifice of scripted etiquette and excessive praise. I had been taught that white lies—those sugar-coated substitutes for candor—weren’t actual lies, only a delicate dance to avoid stepping on toes. As for the lies you might tell yourself, their color was a mystery.“Y’all help yourselves,” Ruth encouraged. Jack handed a bowl of collards to me, his face faded and lined, features fatigued by unseen demons. “Remember,” my mother had cautioned, “don’t bring up his brother.” I had been told about Jack’s older brother “Red” many times. Coming home from UGA for Easter break, he had been killed by a drunk driver. Not long thereafter, Jack quit junior college and devel oped a drinking problem, the damn-shame-of-it-all irony as unmentionable as Red’s death. Were forbid den topics simply another form of duplicity? Out of nowhere (nowhere being the backyard), we were startled by a dog’s frantic barking. “I’ll go see why that darn fool’s holler’in,” Jack said. While he was gone, Jimmy began telling the table (well, me) how their dog Buckshot continually got into trouble, but—mercifully—Jack returned before Jimmy could become entangled in a tangent. “I didn’t see anything. Could’ve found himself a possum,” Jack reported. “Meemaw, tell Steven the possum story,” Jimmy pleaded, his excitement rivaling Buckshot’s a minute ago.

Chair legs creaked. “I don’t see why y’all are in such a rush,” Aunt Beulah interjected. Our reflec tions sat motionless in the window, figures frozen on a glass canvas. “We’re not in a rush, Meemaw,” Sara said with polite firmness. I had the impression this skirmish wasn’t“Gettingnew. engaged—getting married—is serious,” Aunt Beulah persisted. “You ought to slow down and get to know each other.”

A tense silence was in the offing, but Aunt Beu lah put the matter to rest: “Suit yourselves—I still

6 RFD 191 Fall 2022 something?

RFD 191 Fall 2022 7"Skip Johnson" by Duncan Hilton from Physique Pictorial No. 22, April 1973.

Aunt Beulah rose, both of us realizing it was time to say goodbye. “I appreciate your coming to see me,” she said. The specter of mortality was suddenly apparent, though Aunt Beulah’s parting words ignored that unwelcome apparition. “Could you drop this off for Ruth?,” she asked, handing me the Family Circle magazine I had noticed yesterday. “They’ve driven down to Folkston for the afternoon. You can leave it on the back porch.” A car was in Jack and Ruth’s driveway, but I didn’t see anybody. I walked around the side of the house, half afraid that Buckshot—thinking I was prey—would attack me. I saw David lifting a shovel of mulch from a wheelbarrow next to a crepe myrtle.“HiDavid,” I called out. A loud chorus of cicadas emitted a din of mating songs. “Hey,” David answered. I wasn’t sure if he re membered my name. “Sara’s mom said you might come by. They’ll be gone until suppertime.”

“Alex and I were the last ones. He was the nicest among us,” she said, drawing to a close. “You favor him quite a bit.” My cheeks flushed from the unan ticipated compliment. “He never did get married,” she added, as if she had omitted an important fact.

8 RFD 191 Fall 2022 think you’re rushing things.” “Good morning. This is the day the Lord hath made,” the minister intoned. There’d been no question about my attending church with Aunt Beulah, though I wasn’t eager to do so. I didn’t want my smiles or hand-shaking to suggest that I condoned the congregants’ theology of easy damnations—or their hate-the-sin, love-thesinner hypocrisy. As we were walking down the aisle, an elderly woman blocked our path. “Beulah Parnell, you must introduce me to this handsome young man.” Aunt Beulah appeared irritated by this ambush, but the woman continued: “I bet you have plenty of girlfriends.”BeforeIcould utter one of my stock responses, Aunt Beulah interrupted: “Dicey Miller, you know that’sAuntpersonal.”Beulah’s vehemence surprised me. Did she suspect that I’d built walls, too—that a girlfriend would be just a stage prop for me? “I didn’t mean to pry,” Mrs. Miller said contritely, following up with a safer question: “What are you studying?”“I’mmajoring in economics,” I replied. I was tempted to add “and surfers.” After getting settled in Aunt Beulah’s customary pew, I prepared to re-live scenes from my Baptist childhood. There would be self-consciously sung hymns, offering plates piled with pocket change, a folksy sermon, and a culminating altar call. Because that morning’s service would include a reading from Leviticus, I might merit special atten tion, accused of being an “abomination” no better than the sulfurous stink those papermills spewed near Waycross. An unrepentant captive, I girded myself for a pulpit-pounding denunciation if it came. However, when the minister got to the pas sage from Leviticus, it didn’t pertain to “unnatural” acts, but the command, “You shall not deceive one another,” the prohibition against lies that ensnared others.Aunt Beulah had found the verse, Bible held close, head nodding in agreement. A few renegade crumbs were the lone remnants of sandwiches Aunt Beulah and I had eaten at her dinette table. She had done most of the talking,

I envisioned various televangelists—those fireand-brimstone lobbyists so unlike Aunt Beulah— who prescribed marriage as the cure-all for nonexistent diseases.

A wall clock ticked impatiently behind Aunt Beulah. Did I dare tell her? Tell her everything in a single, breathless sentence, everything that I kept locked inside myself? If only I could tell my story— whether it was about a first kiss or a final dance— adding it to the other family stories that were told andAsre-told.always, the opportunity quickly evaporated in a cloud of fear and indecision.

He was wearing boots and an old pair of pants that dipped below his shirtless torso. A cap—defi antly angled upward—gave him a cocky appearance. “Yeh, I do my best to help with stuff.” His voice had that tell-tale inflection I’d learned to recog nize—and to hide. He retrieved a t-shirt from the

“I didn’t expect to see you,” I remarked, attempt ing to make myself heard above the cicadas. “I guess they’ve put you to work.”

reminiscing about her brothers and sisters, a lineage of odds-and-ends claiming me as well as them.

More than that, though. Barely three hours earlier I’d betrayed Sara, if that was the right word, and I hadn’t hesitated for a minute. I tasted bile and fought back a second wave of nausea. I wanted to forget everything, but that was im possible. I could no longer live a life of never-ending lies, lies multiplying like Old Testament genealogies until I couldn’t keep track of who was who, includ ing myself. And I knew where the truth-telling had to begin.Iwiped my eyes and glanced at the kitchen clock. Both of them would still be awake. I’d talk to my mother first—maybe she wouldn’t hang up. My hand was shaking as I dialed the number.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 9 porch.Iwas sweating, my sticky clothes stuck to prickly skin. “Aunt Beulah said to leave this magazine for Ruth.” I tried to swallow. He wiped his forehead with the shirt, framing his physique for full effect, muscles modeled with an unmistakable motive. I stood motionless, unable to avert my gaze. He slowly surveyed the length of my body, stopping midway. A slight breeze stirred, causing the cicadas’ sing ing to cease. It was twilight when I got to my Tallahassee apartment. I had a couple of bites to eat, but became nauseous almost immediately. I hunched over the toilet, vomiting the meagre amount in my stomach. Afterward, I sat on the couch. I thought about David, about how quickly it had happened. There hadn’t been a need or even the slightest desire for words—only desire, which we’d satisfied soon enough.Yet,in another sense, it hadn’t been sudden. I’d seen the way David had initially looked at me, felt his leg under the table, and witnessed his coy exhibitionism. I’d casually assumed that these were insignificant coincidences. Like a possum, I’d been playing dead—not just then, but for years. Given what had ultimately occurred between us, I had few doubts about David. He wasn’t a naïve adolescent going through a phase of fumbling experimentation—nor was he an egotistical straight guy who’d made a bet with himself that he could lay a queer boy. I don’t know why I was so certain, un less it was because I had recognized a part of myself in him—his insistent longing during our feverish moments together. The tiny apartment was suffocating me. I took a deep breath, struggling to subdue my anxiety over whether to say anything about what had taken place. Would David actually marry Sara, but secretly have sex with men? Perhaps I would do likewise— marry a woman someday, then sneak out in the middle of the night to cruise parking lots and urinesoaked restrooms, a debasement accompanied by meaningless grunts and moans.

"Back in Hats" by Michael Loren Butkovich.

10 RFD 191 Fall 2022 "Proses Are Good" by Artboydancing.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 11

I found a list of the passengers on a ship depart ing from NYC for Bermuda on January 8, 1955, and both Joe and Fran are listed as passengers and pro vided the same home address on Commonwealth Ave. in Boston, so they were obviously a couple at that point. The name of the ship was Queen of Ber muda; Joe and Fran must have gotten a kick out of that, for sure. On YouTube, I discovered a contem poraneous film advertising the ship; apparently it was quite a glamorous vessel.

I got the impression that my parents weren’t particularly fond of Uncle Joe and Fran, which is perhaps why we didn’t visit them as often as we did Uncle Joe’s brother and sister-in-law, Uncle Harry and Aunt Pearl. One story that my mother tells is that Uncle Joe styled her hair for her wedding day, but he refused to take the day off to do so, because she wasn’t his favorite niece.

In 1982, when my husband Neil and I took our first vacation together, spending two weeks driving around Florida, I made sure that we visited Uncle Joe and Fran in their retirement home in a trailer park in Boynton Beach. Now that I was emphatically

My younger brother David and I were not the only gay men in our extended family. We knew of one who came before us: a gay great uncle on our mother’s side: Joseph Jolly (the family’s name was Anglicized from the French Joly). When we were young, Uncle Joe lived with his “friend” Fran (short for Francis) in the small fishing city of Gloucester on Massachusetts’ North Shore. Uncle Joe was a hairdresser.Duringmy childhood, my immediate family once visited Uncle Joe and Fran (as well as my greatgrandmother and great aunt) in Gloucester. Uncle Joe’s sister, our Aunt Eva, worked in his hair salon. She had her own apartment, which she shared with theirUnclemother.Joe and Fran lived in a substantial house. My aunt tells me that it even had a name: Rocky Mount. It was stone and had extensive gardens with white statues. There was ivy bordering the driveway. The interior was high Victorian and made me think of the Munster’s house on TV, minus the cobwebs. Uncle Joe and Fran had a piano. My siblings and I sat on red velvet couches and played with an ice crusher—a luxurious gadget I had never seen before.Myaunt also told me that Uncle Joe and Fran had a bearskin rug in their bedroom and owned a boxer dog named Ming Toy (!). Aunt Eva and Mémère Jolly lived in a wooden tenement house closer to the beauty salon. When my immediate family visited them, we sat together in their narrow, enclosed porch that looked out on the harbor. We kids ate those candies that look like raspberries and blackberries and have firm jelly inside. They are like gumdrops, but instead of being coated with sugar, they are covered with tiny candy spheres—red for the raspberries, purple for the blackberries. They tasted a little soapy. My parents didn’t discuss Joe and Fran’s rela tionship in front of us. As an adult, I made sure to find out Fran’s surname, which was DiBella, but my family never referred to it. When I was young, we just called them, “Uncle Joe and Fran,” as if it were a hyphenated unit, but no one was discussing the nature of the hyphens that linked these two men. Later, I learned that Uncle Joe had once been married to an older woman, who died, leaving him with money. The way this story was told implied that he had conned her into marrying him. One online genealogy I found states that this marriage took place in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1936, but no name is given for the bride (her name is listed as “Private”), and I can’t find an official marriage record that substantiates this event. However, when Uncle Joe responded to the 1940 Census taker, he said he was widowed, and he reported the same when he enlisted into the Army in 1941. I doubt he would have dared to lie to the Federal Government about something like this back then, so I assume that it was true. When Uncle Joe was in the Army during World War II, his job was that of cook. He served his fellow soldiers a dish that my mother’s family called “Ma Tante Josephine” (My Aunt Josephine) or, more briefly, “Ma Tante,” and it was a hit with the men. Essentially, it is what Franco-Americans use to stuff turkeys—a mixture of ground pork and ground beef, onions, mashed potatoes, Bell’s poultry seasoning, salt, and pepper. Many years later, when I asked my mother for more information about Uncle Joe, she said that prior to Fran, he had a “friend” who was a lawyer in Boston, and my mother liked him.

Uncle Joe and Fran by Steven Riel

The four of us partook in that most Floridian of social events: choosing between early-bird specials at a local diner. When Uncle Joe and I stood at the salad bar together, he asked me if I liked beets. His face lit up with pleasure and his eyes sparkled when I con firmed I did. Apparently all Jollys liked beets, and this seemed to cement in his estimation our family bond. As the evening progressed, Fran got drunker. He described people and places as “wild,” pronounced “wiiiild.” Places he described as “wide-open.” In his opinion, even Philadelphia was “wide open,” which seemed to mean the men there are gay until proven otherwise. He declared that the book of his life should be titled, Where Were You When I Needed You? He said that God was never there when people needed him to counter evil. Fran gave as examples the Inquisition, the burning of witches, and the Holocaust. He said that the priests could never explain that fact to him. He knew at eight years old he didn’t want the priests who were up on the altar telling him what to think. He said that either he was completely wrong, or they were completely wrong.

12 RFD 191 Fall 2022 out, it felt important to connect with them. When we drove up to their trailer in our rental car, Uncle Joe and Fran called to us from their front porch. They both came out and shook our hands through the car windows (“Not many cars go by, and we were waiting for you”) before we had a chance to get out. They led us to their back porch where they served us champagne on a silver tray.

The Italian-villa-style of decoration had been transferred from their stone house to their expand ed trailer; in the trailer, it looked a bit preposterous. I’m not sure if Fran did the decorating nor whether his Italian-American background influenced it. Uncle Joe said he converted “Fran’s bedroom” (as if Fran ever had his own bedroom) into a small hair dressing shop. According to the rules of the trailer park, he couldn’t advertise nor put out a sign, but word of mouth filled up his shop for eight-hour-days in theResidentswinters.of the park participated in social events together, and Uncle Joe was in demand as a dance partner for the elderly women. He was seventy and Fran was fifty-three. Both were in good shape for their ages. Fran had attrac tive brown eyes above sensuous lips and a double chin. His hair was black with gray touches. Uncle Joe had beautiful faded blue eyes magnified by reading glasses. His face resembled that of his sister, Aunt Eva. I could tell he wore a toupee, but it wasn’t terribly noticeable. He had age spots on his hands. My mother and aunt told me that Uncle Joe was handsome when he was young: tall and blond. My mother said that my brother David looked like him, but I don’t see much of a resemblance besides their blond hair. My aunt said that Uncle Joe carried himself proudly and that she believes the self-con fidence and self- acceptance he projected affected how people treated him.

Neil expressed surprise that Fran had analyzed and decided to oppose the authoritarian nature of the Church at such a young age. Fran said, “Why does the crocus come out before the snow is gone, while the rose waits until summer?”

Years later, Uncle Joe and Fran moved to Ajijic, Mexico, where my great uncle died (I believe of cancer) in 1991. His ashes were spread in either Lake Chapella or in the Pacific Ocean. The fact that his remains weren’t buried in the family plot in Ox ford, Massachusetts, grieved his brother, my Uncle Harry. Once, Uncle Harry spoke derisively of Joe’s “friends” who had sprinkled his ashes over a body of water. Uncle Harry seemed not to fathom why his gay brother may have grown closer to his circle of friends than to his own family, nor did Uncle Harry realize that I, as another gay man, understood why Uncle Joe may have found it necessary to create a more supportive replacement “family” of friends for himself apart from his biological family.

I don’t know how Uncle Joe’s family reacted when he decided to become a hairdresser. I am guessing that this happened after his wife died— that maybe he spent some of his inheritance on tuition for hairdressing school—but I do not know that for sure. When I located the page where the Town Clerk of the Town of Oxford, Massachusetts recorded births in 1912, including Uncle Joe’s birth, I couldn’t help but to notice the occupations of the fathers listed on that page: Boss farmer, Fireman, Finisher, Overseer-Mill, Box maker, Laborer, Mill hand, Designer, Clerk, Shoemaker, Baker, Engineer, Wood-chopper, Finisher, Boss finisher, Carpenter,

The visit that Neil and I had with Uncle Joe and Fran felt like coming full circle. What an amazing experience to have the opportunity as an adult to acknowledge with my gay great uncle, even if briefly, our mutual connection—to let him know the impact that his pioneering life of relative openness had had on mine, and to share our very different experiences as gay men (experiences that leapfrogged over my parents’ generation). For example, in the course of our conversation, Uncle Joe, Fran, Neil, and I discovered that we even each had visited (albeit decades apart from one another) the same gay piano-bar in Boston: the Napoleon Club.

Railroad, and Machinist. Where would someone like Uncle Joe fit into a society in which men had jobs like those? Since he left school after 6th grade, his education wouldn’t qualify him for many non-menial jobs. According to the 1930 Census, seventeen-year-old Joe was living at home in Oxford and working as a laster in a shoe shop. The next year, he resided in Worcester and worked as a baker.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 13

I recently discovered that Fran died back in Florida in 2003. Of course, because the Federal Government didn’t recognize their relationship, after Uncle Joe passed away, Fran never received any payment out of his partner’s Social Security contributions, even though the two of them had been living as a couple for decades. My aunt told me that Fran never worked, and she believes that Uncle Joe would have provided for him by pur chasing a life insurance policy. Neither my parents nor I had contact with Fran around the time of Uncle Joe’s death nor after. It was as if he wasn’t really considered family and didn’t consider himself related to us, either.

By 1940, after his wife died, he lived in Boston and worked as a hairdresser at the large department store named Gilchrist and Company across from Filene’s and Jordan Marsh at Downtown Crossing.

"My Grandma Was A Queen" by Artboydancing.

Ang Baklang Naging Gerilya at Ang Pamilyang Nahanap Niya sa Pakikibaka (Filipino Version)

Lumaki ako sa maraming babala: ‘Wag magpahaba ng buhok, Hindi pinahihintulutan ang kulay, Taas noo lagi, lakasan ang tindig ‘Wag pipiyok, ‘wag malamya, KwentongDuwagHuwag.Huwag. babala: 'ang iyong tito Maxi.'

WalangWalangHindiBurado.tunay.pulso.pangalan; nakalimutang kasaysayan. Sa mga litratong may amag, at talaarawaang naagnas sa ataul ng kaniyang yumaong ina, natuklasan ang piniling hininga. Kararating lamang ng mga militar, nawala ang mga pahayagan At imbes sa parlor na akala nila’y iyong pupuntahan, Ika’y tumungong kanayunan. Sa kataas-taasang kabundukan ng Kordilyera. Naging isa sa hamog at mga puno ng pino. Naging masigasig sa pag-aaral ng sitwasyon ng iling kapit-bahay. Ang namatay ay buhay, buhay ka sa aking isip, tito. Ayon sa iyong mga pahina, nakakilala ka ng isang kadreng ang ngalan ay Eo. Matipuno at maginoo, naging magkasintahan sa kuko ng liwanag, naging magkasama sa pakikibaka sa draconyang panukala: Marcosiyang tiraniya.

Lumaki sa costal ng Bacoor Bay Memoryado ang bawat hila at tulak ng lawang pinagtratrabahuhan. Hindi nakontento sa buhay na kinalakihan.” Ito ang epigrap ng mga tita at tito tuwing sisimulan ang parabula ng bakla. Kahit noon, ramdam ko na ang ‘di patas na tono Sa pagbigkas ng kwento ni tito. Sa kasibulan ng panahon at pamumulaklak ng bahaghari, Sarili na mismo ang tumuklas sa kwento ni Maxi palaban. Tayo ay tumatagal ayon lamang sa mga may hawak sa oras; Mundo ng kalalakihan, inisin mo sila at ika’y malalagot: Ang babae’y nagiging mangkukulam; sunog; apoy Ang Mesias ay nagiging kriminal; duguan; pako at krus Pero ang bakla?

14 RFD 191 Fall 2022

“

_______________________________

1985, isang taon bago ang EDSA 1, ika’y naglaho. NaiintindihanDesaparesido. ko na kung bakit takot ang ibang mga kamag-anak natin sa iyo: Hindi lang dahil sa baka mahawa ako sa iyong kabaklaan, pero baka sundan ko ang landas na iyong tinahak. Ngayong nagbabalik ang pamilya ng Dekada ‘70, malinaw ang iyong pinanday na daan para sa akin. Makikisali ako sa labang kinabilangan mo, dasal ko lamang na iyong gabayan kahit na ilang henerasyon ang ating agwat. Ako ang pamilyang mahahanap mo sa pakikibaka. Kalayaan. —T.L Javier

NoNoNon-existent.Erased.pulse.name;aforgotten history. In worn-out pictures and fading journals in the kaban2 of his departed mother, I discovered the breath he chose. The military just arrived, the media was removed3 And instead of the parlor4 where they thought you’d be, you went to the countryside. In the towering mountains of the Cordillera. Became one with fog and pines. Became studious in studying the life of your neigboring ili5 What died is alive, you are alive in my mind, uncle. According to your pages, you met a comrade named Eo. Brave and gentle, became a couple in the claws of light, became comrades in the struggle against the draconian herald: Marcosian tyranny.

Glossary 1 the Filipino homosexual. I decided not to translate it to ‘gay’ as to ground the local imagery of the poem.

6 An abducted person. Usually by the state to silence dissent.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 15

I grew up with many warnings: Don’t grow your hair Colors were not allowed Chin up always, stiffen your pose Don’t let your voice crack, don’t be clumsy

1985, one year before EDSA 1, you disappeared. Desaparesido6.

5 an Ilocano term in the Northern regions of Luzon that means ‘home’/’village’.

2 an old wooden trunk.

CautionaryCowardDon’t.Don’t. tale: “Your uncle Maxi”. “Grew up in the coasts of Bacoor Bay Memorized every push and pull of the lake where he works. He was not content with the life he knew.” This is the epigraph used by the aunties and uncles everytime they start the parable of the bakla. Even then, I knew the spoken tone was not fair in telling the story of my uncle. In the passing of time and the blooming of the rainbow, I took upon myself to discover the story of Maxi the brave. Our permanence is in the hands of those who hold time; Man’s world, offend them and you’ll be in trouble: Women become witches; burnt; fire Messiahs turn into criminals; butchered; cross and nail And the bakla?______________________________

3 During the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ two de cade martial law, he took control of the media.

I understand now why our relatives are afraid of you: Not only is it fear of your kabaklaan encouraging me, they also fear that I might follow in the path that you chose. Now that the family of the 70s has returned, the way that you forged stands clear. I will join the battle that you once belonged to, my only prayer is that you guide me even though we are generations apart. I will be the family you’ll find in the struggle. Freedom. —T.L Javier

The Bakla Who Became a Guerilla and The Family He Found in the Struggle

4 Colloquially understood as the workplace reserved for the bakla.

Appearing Normal

16 RFD 191 Fall 2022

Before taking my granddaughter swimming in the Arden River, I remove my toenail polish, OPI Big Apple Red. Never having been to New York, I learned survival in wild and wonderful West Virginia. In the changing stall, I strip my purple, pink, and black leopard print panties. Never having seen the animal in question, I put on a pair of baggy trunks. On shore, as I lotion her face, my granddaughter tells me, Boys don’t have long hair. Most boys don’t, I explain, but, when grandpa was young, lots of boys did. She remains silent. At first, she fears the muddy water like sleeping without a nightlight. The cold eddies around her ankles as her toes disappear, and she stares down, perhaps wondering if she will vanish if she ventures further out. But she lets go of my hand like any tightrope walker who must give way to the height as I follow in her small wake. When two other children run into the current, she moves toward them forgetting any seeming danger. As I shadow her bravery, our wet hair waves like the sound of children laughing, and for a moment I believe I could have gone further out. —donnarkevic

If I could see you, if you could see me, if we could break through death’s beaded curtain and reverse time’s erasure of your boyish face, I’d invite you to sit with me in Dolores Park. We’d drink cokes, snack on pretzels & cantaloupe, before I’d finally ask you to tell me everything; of your elation when his body first shattered into yours, of your unease and eventual conviction that, like me, our Northeast town’s brutal winters led to a dead-end, of how you and Harold from Utah, met somehow, of the daily comfort and humor joining your lives. I’ve tried to ask you before. Standing across the street from your final apartment, you gave me silence. I never really knew why I flew out to San Francisco, with my friend who wasn’t actually my friend. Maybe it was to unearth you. As a child, I could only find jumbled remnants of you in the box Harold shipped to the family in ’86. Your elderly sister kept the mementos in the attic with her melting Polaroids and porcelain dolls. Inside were water-stained Chinese restaurant menus, a Judy Garland record, and sketches of birds. No photos. A pilgrimage to San Francisco was my idea of a grand tribute to you, my ancestor, but I sat on the plane back to New York dazed by the way a ghost could be a washed away portrait, an enigmatic mirror. If only you could see me as I am now, at Ginger’s Bar in Brooklyn, defying all the constraints of my past lives I imagine your voice might finally arrive and I’d hear you telling me your one small truth; love is everything.

—Merline D. Photograph courtesy the author.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 17

Uncle Brud

Right: Victorina Durán courtesy Find A Grave.

“No he sido yo tan yo nunca en mi vida.”

“I have never been more myself in my life.” (Carmen Conde)

—Angela Acosta

18 RFD 191 Fall 2022

Carmen Conde found her authentic self by stealing away nights and days with her beloved Amanda Junquera, telling her queer progeny to live the lives she never could.

Countless other aunts wrote in anonymity, protecting identities as they made space for themselves when they were barred entry from the hallowed halls of history. My Spanish aunts have become my greatest teachers and confidants, generations removed and still full of heart for me to discover a version of myself that exists because of them.

Mis tías españolas (My Spanish Aunts)

Victorina Durán instilled generations of queer voices with the bravery to live as fiercely as she spoke, and to never forsake those closest to us.

Fond as I am of English poets and their modernist prosody, the British Isles are absent from my family tree. I reach back into a Spain my ancestors left over a century ago so I may convive with my queer foremothers and learn from their lives. In solidarity with their daily acts of resistance and creativity, I envision the advice my long-lost Spanish aunts would have for me.

Amanda showed me a life beyond domesticity, to create a whole world through short stories and let imagination yield to future journeys.

Left: Carmen Conde courtesy Biblioteca National de España.

I’d concluded, after Googling “pancreatic cancer” at the airport, that the old man wasn’t going to make it. I tell my mother they should stop chemo. She shushes me. “Don’t talk like that in front of yourSofather.”Isayit again, only louder. “Have you talked with your brother about this?” my mother asks. “And“Yes.” he agrees?”

When I found out my father was dying, I had just oneCanquestion.Istillgo to France for the summer? I call my brother, who went to medical school in the Caribbean in the 90s, for an expert opinion. “Well,” he says. “The cancer’s spread to his pan creas.”“Isthat bad?” “It’s Stage 4.” “Out of how many?” “4,” my brother says. “But I’m going to France!” I cry. “For the sum mer!”After a polite silence my brother says, “You should probably see him before your trip.”

“I “It’sam.”too late for them to make other arrange ments, I suppose.”

“I’m afraid so,” I say. The lesson there is that you can get out of any thing in a Chinese family if you say it’s for work. I should also add that, at the time of these events, I was not a teenager. I was forty-three.

“I’m teaching English,” I say suddenly. That stops her. “I’m teaching English in France.”

I clear my throat and explain that I am tutoring the children of French dairy farmers in a remote mountain village near the Swiss border. As I say this, I have a vision of myself seated on a hay bale be neath an apple tree, surrounded by freckled French children in straw hats named Luc and Elise practic ing their letters on tiny chalkboards. When in reality, I’m headed to Folleterre, the Faerie sanctuary in France, to have ritual sex all summer and read Nora Ephron by the lake. “Well,” my mother sighs. “I guess if you’re teaching.”

Some Funny Stories About My Father’s Death by Maytag Dishwasher

“It’s been very difficult this past year, with the chemo,” my mother says “And if you noticed, I haven’t called you once. You have your own life, I know. Why bother you with—”

Two days later I find myself back in the house where I’d spent my miserable adolescent faggot years reading Nora Ephron and watching VH1. My father is on the couch. He’s about the size of a finger.“Your son’s home!” my mother cries. “Oh,” my father says, then goes back to his stupor. “Here,” my mother says. She hands me a can of chocolate Häagen-Dazs the size of a menstrual cup. “See if he’ll eat some of this.” She crouches into my father’s face. “Open your mouth.”“What?” my father says, startled. “Your son, he’s going to feed you some ice cream. Open your mouth.” My father leans forward and opens his mouth. I spoon a tiny bit of ice cream into it. “Keep doing that,” my mother tells me. “I have to run to the pharmacy. I haven’t been able to leave the house for weeks.”

“But I’m going to France!” I announce. “Oh?” my mother says, gathering her purse. “When?”“Next week,” I say. She puts down her purse. “For how long?” “Two months,” I say. “Two months? Weren’t you just there?” “Mom,” I say. “Do you have to go?” she says. “It would be a big help if you stayed. It’s just been me with your father for the “Mom,”last—”Isay again.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 19

20 RFD 191 Fall 2022

My“Yes.”mother considers. “No more chemo,” she mouths.“Nomore chemo!” my father says loudly. We nearly jump. It’s like the clown doll we’d all forgotten about suddenly coming to life. “And he needs some marijuana,” I add. My mother looks at me like I’d suggested shoot ing heroin off a spoon. “It’ll help with the pain,” I explain. “They can even deliver it to the house.” “Here?” my father cries. “How do we pay?” “Cash,” I tell him. “Oh no, oh no!” my father says and lapses back into silence, overwhelmed by the thought of a cash drug transaction under his own roof.

The next day we go see the doctor about my father’sTheypain.might just cut the nerve, my mother ex plains.“They can do that?” I ask. So why don’t they just cut everyone’s nerve? Why the hell is anyone still in pain?

As I wheel my father through the hospital, I see what everyone else must see. The Chinese son. Re turning home to care for his ailing father. The very picture of filial piety. The very embodiment of duty. Well who knows. Maybe they think, Look at that aging rentboy, wheeling his next victim into the grave.The doctor asks my father how bad the pain is. My father, who’d been huddled quietly beneath a blanket, suddenly starts to moan and squirm in the doctor’s attention. First he says that the pain is bad, then he says it’s not so bad. “So which is it?” I want to ask. Seems a clear enough question. Either the pain is bad or it’s not. Either you’re in pain or you’re faking it. The doctor ends up admitting my father for over night

“I know that.” She starts to cry. “We’ve been happy, so happy since your father retired. We went on all those cruises. We went to Japan. We thought the cancer was over.”

Myobservation.fathernever comes out of the hospital. I go back to the house while my mother stays with my father. I spend the day doing God knows what. My mother asks me to pack my father’s shaver and a box of cookies for the nurses when I come back to the hospital. That night, I keep watch over the old man so my mother can go home to shower. “Don’t let him leave the bed,” she tells me. “If he has to pee, he can use the bottle by the bed. And close those blinds. People can see everything from the outside. Where are the cookies?” “I forgot,” I say. All night, every thirty minutes or so, my father wakes and tries to get out of bed. “Where do you think you’re going?” I tell him. I snap my fingers and point at the bed. “Back, back!” He whimpers and obeys. Sometimes he wakes and moans. “What a disas ter! What a tragedy! How did this happen? Who did this to me?” I have some theories, I think. My mother asks if I’m really going to France. “I really am.” “You realize this is probably the last time you’ll see your father.”

There there. There there. Is what I’m supposed to say here. My brother offers to drive me to the airport. “Go say goodbye to your father,” my mother tells me.“Your son, he’s come to say goodbye,” she tells my father.“Huh?” my father says. “Your son is going to France,” she tells him. “But he’ll be back to see you very soon!” I stand over the bed. Well, I think. If there’s anything to say, I better say it Justnow.then, my father turns to me and smiles. It’s the smile of a child, or a simpleton. A smile of pure innocence.It’sthesmile of someone drugged out of his God damned“Latermind.dude,” I say, and walk out of the hospital, into my brother’s car, and onto a plane for Paris. In Paris, I feel a strange sensation. “Is it guilt?” Chas asks. “It better not be.” “Do you want to go home?” Chas asks. “I didn’t make it all the way to fucking Paris to

My father dies at 7:30am, Los Angeles time, eight days later. I go into the garden and listen to Nina Simone. She’s drunk and she’s singing “Feelings.” Nothing but feelings. Nothing more than feelings. Feelings in my heart. Then I do the math and figure out that when my father died eight time zones away, I was in the middle of the faerie prairie giving Bonobo a prostate massage.IaskWalnut

At LAX, my brother picks me up in a Tesla mini van, and the doors open upwards like a DeLorean. “God,” I tell him, “what the fuck are you driving?”

“A week, maybe two.” Sweet. Two more weeks in France. Unless, I think. What if I don’t go to the funeral?

how long after someone dies before they hold the funeral. I don’t know why he would know that, but it seems that Walnut knows every thing.“Are they burying him or cremating him?” “Beat me,” I say. “Well,” Walnut says. “If they cremate him, the funeral could be in days.”

RFD 191 Fall 2022 21 not go to Folleterre,” I say. Cold, cold ambition gleams in my eyes. My mother calls the next day to say that my father had entered hospice. “Your aunt is here from New York,” she tells me. “So is your aunt from Australia. And your cousin from Taiwan. We all wish you’re here.” “Me, too,” I say, popping a fresh strawberry into my“Yourmouth.father’s very peaceful,” my mother goes on. “He isn’t in any pain.” “Mmm hmm,” I say, perusing the selection of Parisian bears on my phone. “We’re all very comfortable,” my mother says. “They gave us a little house to live in, with a kitchen, right next to the hospital.” She sighs, suddenly choked with emotion. “Your father has very, very good insurance.” Guilt aside, it’s all sort of thrilling. I mean, lying to my mom about France and flying to Paris while my father is on his deathbed. It’s the kind of satisfac tion that only passive-aggression can bring. Then my stupid smart friend Luna has to remind me that if I can’t be there for my father, I can at least be there for my mother. “Shut up,” I tell Luna. A few days later, my brother writes that they’d taken the old man off life support. “What does that mean?” I ask Chas. “It means they’re waiting for him to die of dehy dration or starvation,” Chas explains. “How long does that take?” “Could be days. But hell. It could be weeks.” Luna tells me that I can’t be feeling nothing. “It’s better if you just let it out.” “Let what out? I genuinely feel nothing.” “I don’t buy it,” Luna says, “If my father was dy ing, I wouldn’t just take off and go to France for two months.”“Youand I,” I remind him, “are different people.”

My brother’s house is all white. Everything in it is white. I tell him it looks like an insane asylum. I sleep downstairs in the all white guest room, and in the middle of the night I shit the all white bed. Diarrhea, all over the snowy white sheets and whiteThat’scomforter.whathappens when someone with lactose intolerance eats cheese on an overnight plane. This, I think, will be a funny story.

“But“Shit.”if there’s a viewing, they’ll need time to prepare the body.” “How long does that take?”

In the morning my brother gives me black clothes from his closet. We drive to the funeral home. I’m in a really good mood. I practically highfive all the mourners. My mother wanders into my vicinity and tries to touch my arm. Given the occa sion, I almost let her.

“You should be there for your mom,” my cousin says.“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

I call my cousin, who’s studying art in Sweden. “Dude,” he says, “you have to go to the funeral.” “Do I?” “I know you’re not close to your dad, but it’s a very, very strong message if you don’t go.” “A very strong message,” I agree. “You know the Chinese. You have to show face.” I sigh. I don’t know why I ask people for advice when they just tell me things I don’t want to hear.

22 RFD 191 Fall 2022

“Aren’t you in France?” my cousin asks. “Dude,” I say. My mother had picked out photos from my father’s life, which plays in a loop above the casket. First, a skinny, sullen baby, smuggled out of China during the Communist takeover. Then a schoolboy with drooping eyes. He grows into a young man with a malicious, sexual mouth. Then a sequence I’ll call The Joy of Fatherhood. There he is, still a young man, holding an infant—me—in his arms with all the tenderness of someone carrying a cabbage. Next, standing adjacent to my toddler self like he’d been told to stand next to a particularly large cabbage. The cabbage gets bigger and bigger, starts to wear glasses. My father remains unmoved. One by one, people go to the podium, and they all say three things about my father. “He loved to work.” “He loved his cars.” “He really loved his cars.” Then photos of my father as a grandfather. Next to my niece, he was all adoration, sloppy kisses, laughter. His eyes fairly twinkled. What a fucker. I really don’t want to look at the body but I have to. At the end of the service, my mother, brother and I bow to the casket and toss in flowers.

Cabbages, photo by NaJina McEnany, ©2007, by permission of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

The next morning we gather on the lawn of the cemetery.Mymother stands in front of everyone and an nounces that my father’s son will now speak. I freeze. She better not mean me. I poke my brother. “You’re up, dude.”

“Well, I think she might try to get into it herself,” I say.Right on cue, my mother falls to the ground, crying.“You’re up,” I tell my brother, and he trudges over to comfort Meanwhile,her. a coyote trots back and forth across the cemetery grounds. My niece hugs herself to my leg. “What does it want?” she asks. “A little girl,” I say. “Don’t“What!”worry,” I tell her, “It will only eat your hands and feet.” I spend three more days with my mother. My mother barely moves from the couch most days, next to a pile of cruise ship catalogues. I fly back to Paris. To finish “teaching.”

“You look so much like him,” she weeps. “Every time I look at you, I just see my big brother!” “Shut up,” I think. “Don’t EVER tell me that I look like the old man.”

He delivers a very eloquent speech in Chinese, which I don’t understand because I only had a first grade education in Taiwan. My brother got along with my father better than I did, but they weren’t close. They shared an enjoy ment of money. My father enjoyed that my brother enjoyed his money. When my brother’s done speaking, I say, “That was“Fuckawesome.”yeah,” he says. Instead of just lowering the urn into the ground and being done with it, the urn goes into a box. Before they close the box, my mother says, “Wait!” She kneels down and empties a duffel bag into it. My father’s favorite pajamas, a sweater for the winter, toothbrush, electric shaver, a stuffed replica of his favorite poodle, dress shoes, house slippers, a gray suit, a hat for the sun, socks, a hair brush, and his favorite tie.

Well, I think once more. This is it. This is the last time I’ll ever see this man’s face, such as it is. If there’s anything to say, now would be the time. Nope, I think. Got nothing. After the service, strangers come up and say, “I hear you’re teaching English in France.” “Did somebody say France?” my mother asks, appearing suddenly. “He’s teaching English there. In France.”“Myson teaches English in Taiwan,” one woman tells me, in accordance with Chinese law requiring comparison in all things offspring. “So you must have international teaching creden tials?” she asks. “I sure do,” I say. After the service, we drive my father to the crematorium. I ride in the hearse. The driver is an elderly Latino man. I resist the urge to lean over, unzip his fly, and blow him, with my father’s casket in the back, just for the story. We stand in the door of what looks like a utilities room in the back of a warehouse. My father burns in what looks like a pizza oven. Well that’s that. “See you tomorrow,” my brother tells me. “What? Aren’t we done?” “We still have to bury the ashes.”

“She’s not going to be able to close that box,” my brother’s wife whispers.

A few months later I have a mushroom trip. I write a long letter apologizing to my father for go ing to France while he was dying. I apologize to my mother for, basically, everything. I ask, at the end of the letter, if we can start over again. I let Luna read the letter. And Chas. I don’t send it to my mother.

Months after that I visit her for Christmas. We have a hot pot dinner at home. She tells me she hasn’t cooked since my father died. I know it’s her

My father looks like the product of a No Makeup Makeup Makeover by a drunk YouTuber.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 23

IGoddammit.spendthenight with my mother and my aunts. They’ve hauled home an entire flower shop of roses and lilies from the funeral home, as well as the poster board-sized photos of my dad from the service, which my mother puts in every room. My father is everywhere. My aunt hugs me and cries.

Sometimes I find myself screaming, “You fucker,” for no Sometimesreason. I look in the mirror and think, “God dammit I look just like him.” I find a piece I wrote some years back. It’s called “Replacements.”ReplacementsTheyfoundamass in my father’s lung. He’d smoked for most of his life, and a few months after the surgery he took up smoking Virginia Slims because, as he said, look at them. Evenings after

24 RFD 191 Fall 2022 birthday but I don’t say anything. She takes me to the cemetery. She clips the grass over the stone and cries. I stand next to her like I’m standing next to a cabbage.Myold

dinner, he stood in the yard with the ridiculous little thing between his fingers, pondering the meaning of itAall.few years later he had stomach cancer. He retired. He gave up smoking for good. He joined a senior center. He took up photography. He had a little poodle, a scruffy thing the color of oatmeal. Actually, they’d got another poodle first, but he’d been hit by a car so they went and got an identical poodle and gave her the same name, the way you’d go to Costco to replace a microwave. This poodle lived to the ripe old age of twenty. By then she was blind, deaf, toothless, incontinent, and her little legs no longer bent. Also her mind was gone. She spent most of her days walking in circles. She stared at her water bowl for hours. Sometimes, when my parents went shopping, she would get stuck behind the TV. One day she slipped through the upstairs banister. My father cradled her to the vet, who said she needed to be put down. My father refused. He nursed her, and she lived another year. When she died, my father was inconsolable. Then my brother had a baby. So they had something else. My mother thought that now I was an uncle, they’d see me more. On the way to the airport, my father told me I was a loser. He said he never wanted to see me again. My father’s whole life he’s replaced things. But I knew he wasn’t going to replace me. You only replace what you love. Later, dude. Au Therevoir.End Photograph courtesy Folletere.org.

roommate Victor calls to ask where I am. “In Los Angeles. With my mother,” I answer. “Why the fuck would you do that to yourself?” he asks.“I dunno. Guilt.” I spend most of the trip hiding in my room, watching bear porn. “People have only one way to be,” said Nora Ephron.Luna reminds me of that letter I wrote on mush rooms.“That letter,” I tell Luna, “was a fucking mistake.”

It’s Senior Awards Night 1977. Proud parents are crowded into the auditorium of our county’s only high school. Normally I’d sit with my friends, but they’re with their families tonight, so I’m on my own. I’m wishing my parents were here—not because it’s awkward sitting alone, but because rumor has it I’m favored to win Most Talented. I’ve been hoping—and it’s unlikely now—that the public recognition will move my dad to support my college plans. I’ve been a pretty good student. I’ve distin guished myself in sports and arts and—at fifteen—I even landed a job as a studio engineer at our town’s only radio station, but my big love is music. I’ve been learning to write music, studying with a composer in our state capitol a couple hours away, and competing as a pianist at the inter national level, but none of this sparked any enthusiasm from myLikefather.other chil dren whose parents were lege-bound.assumedcated,college-eduitwasalwaysIwascolEvenin our cow-town, my dad makes a good enough living with his law practice to put his kids through school, but my junior year, he had announced that the only college he’d pay for was his alma mater—the state university. “Wanna to go somewhere else,” Dad would say, “you can work your way through.” I wanted to study at a Conser vatory of Music, but these were private institutions with higher tuition. Despite Dad’s restriction, I‘d auditioned for a Conservatory. When my acceptance letter arrived, I’d done a victory dance by the mailbox. Recently, a follow-up letter had arrived: a request for payment to secure my spot. There was a box to check if I didn’t plan to attend so they could enroll some one else. I couldn’t bring myself to check it, but I couldn’t pay either, so the letter sat on my desk. My dad’s attitude might have had something to do with the fact that he was already paying for my mom’s education. Her parents had raised two daughters who studied Home Ec. and married lawyers, but a few years into her marriage, mom veered off course. Before my sister and I started Kindergarten, she taught us to read. (Research at the time warned parents that this could harm their children.) She then opened a Montessori pre-school and went back to college to study Education and Psychology. Now she’s finishing her Ph.D. As I know from many dinner table arguments over the years, she had met resistance from my father every step of the way. By the time decisions were to be made about my col lege education, she must have been battle weary. And perhaps that’s why I’m on my own at my Senior Awards Night. The academic awards completed, our class officers now take the stage to present the peer awards. “Voted Most Likely to Succeed by the class of ’77—Steven Sterling! Steve wins a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.” I imagine my dad watching me win. As the band plays, his son takes the stage amid applause and popping flashbulbs. Mothers smile at my dad, and fathers slap him on the back. The pride he sees in their eyes enters his own, and he reconsiders the Conservatory. That had been myThenhope.I hear it over the loudspeakers: “Voted Most Talented by the class of ‘77—Matt Law rence.” I jump to my feet. My dad may not be present, but people will soon flatter him with this news. Onstage, as I reach out for the congratula by Matt Lawrence

Mind Your Own Business

RFD 191 Fall 2022 25

tory handshake, the MC puts a wrapped package in my hand and announces, “Matt wins a book on…natural childbirth.” Gasps from the audience, followed by a pregnant silence. Then friendly laughter from my peers - and puzzled murmurs from their parents. I get the joke. Suddenly I’m glad my parents aren’t here. My sophomore year, I’d taken Jeanette De vereaux to prom. She was a senior and had been crowned Prom Queen the year before, so going with Jeanette gave a big boost to my high school social status. Her father travelled a lot on busi ness, and that year her mother began to join him. This meant Jeanette was often home alone, so I’d go over to keep her company. When guys asked me what we did, I told them the truth: “We played chess.” They looked at me and raised one eyebrow; they thought I was being discreet. The fact that I wasn’t bragging had convinced them. One day shortly after the prom, I went down stairs for breakfast and found my mom waiting for me. As I poured my Rice Krispies, she said, “We need to talk.” My mom has a tone of voice that nev er fails to trigger the same jolt of adrenaline I get when something sounds like my alarm clock. I first heard it in elementary school with her facts of life talk, and I’ve been wary ever since. I recognized this tone instantly and looked up, startled. “Your father and I are very concerned about the amount of time you and Jeanette spend alone together.” I rushed to reassure her. “Mom, don’t worrythere’s nothing to be concerned about.” She pushed on as though I hadn’t responded. “Nothing will complicate things for you more than a baby.”Shecould be quite frank in private, but this caught me completely off-guard. My response was not well-thought-out. “Mom!” I said in shock. “Mind your own business!” “I’ll mind my business once I know you’re mind ing your business!” she persisted, her voice rising. “Do you want to go to college in a couple years, or pay for a baby?” I matched her volume: “There’s not gonna be a baby,SheMom!”looked me in the eye and lowered her voice.

“How can you be so sure?” I looked away. Actually, I could be sure. I knew nothing was going to happen with Jeannette—not because I didn’t like her (because I did), and not because I didn’t think she was beautiful (because she was), but because I was more attracted to guys. This was something I hadn’t shared with anyone; I’d scarcely shared it with myself. Sharing it with Jeanette hadn’t been necessary: my mild romantic interest was genuine, and she seemed relieved to have a boyfriend who didn’t press for more. I cer tainly wasn’t ready to share this with my mom, so I said “Gotta go,” grabbed my backpack, and took off for school, my Rice Krispies untouched. I closed the front door behind me and caught my breath. When we carry a secret, it’s easy to feel that everything happening around us is pointing it out. In the rural Midwest, only six years after Stonewall, sharing my secret could be fatal, so I guarded it closely. Still, I felt sure people could see it if they looked hard enough. I sometimes won dered if this was why my dad gave me such a hard time. But walking to school, I realized that the talk at breakfast—as personal as it felt—wasn’t all about me. My mom had other reasons to be concerned. HER mom had been an excellent student with her heart set on college, but the last year of high school, grandma had gotten pregnant. When her daughter was born, money was needed, and college was out of the question.

26 RFD 191 Fall 2022

Not having any use for condoms myself, I didn’t catch on until he continued “Going over to Jea nette’s this weekend?”

“Well… yeah,” I replied. I learned a lot during that lunch. Sean told me about buying condoms at our small town’s only drug store. Some clerks refused to sell them to

Mom was probably wondering what I was hid ing, because when I got home from school I met that same tone of voice. “We’ve got to finish the conversation we started this morning.” My mind was flipping through possible escapes. The subject could easily be derailed when my sister came home, but this wouldn’t be for—I checked my watch - twenty minutes! Then I looked up and saw something I hadn’t noticed before: she was holding a box of condoms. I realized that if I just took the condoms, she’d spare us both. I took the box and put it in my backpack. “Mom - I understand. We’re on the same page.” She didn’t stop me when I walked past her to myTheroom.next day when I got to school, I noticed the condoms in my backpack and decided to leave them in my locker rather than carry them to my classes. At lunch, I was surprised to look up and see my locker-mate, Sean, setting his tray down across from mine. (We normally travelled in differ ent circles.) “So: where’d you get the contraband?”

Although I suspected my first clients were guys who really needed them, I soon became the regular supplier to boys who, I’m convinced, never needed them. Some (like me) seemed to have something to prove. Others, I thought, held out hope for a future adventure. It became cool to carry one in yourWithwallet.only one new box from my mom every six weeks or so, demand rapidly outstripped supply, so I used the weekly trips to the city for my music lessons to boost inventory. Clerks at drug stores near the large university campus didn’t blink when a young man purchased a few boxes of condoms. By the end of that school year, I must have sold to every boy at school (about 400 boys)—some of them regularly. When selling to guys I thought were really using them, I was careful to point out the expiration dates. “Don’t wait past the shelflife,” I’d warn, trying to muster a tone of worldly wisdom, “You don’t need any… surprises.” No one wanted to admit that they didn’t really use them, so soon all my clients became repeaters. By the begin ning of my senior year, profits from The Business had surpassed years of careful savings from my radio station job. Returning to my seat at the Senior Awards with the book on natural childbirth, I get know ing winks from some clients. Their parents look concerned. I’m glad my parents aren’t here to field their questions, or to question me.

A few days later, a final letter arrives from the Conservatory. Reluctantly, I open the envelope to check the box to give my spot away, but what I find isn’t the form… it’s a letter. I read it through. Then, without sitting down or even moving, I read it again. They’re offering me a full tuition scholar ship. I still have to pay room and board, but thanks to my job and—mostly - The Business, this is now practical.Ishow the letter to my mom. She beams, but my dad seems frustrated. An audition that earned a scholarship doesn’t earn his respect. I’m not “working my way through.”

Within an hour of opening my mail, I’m at the bank with my mom, getting a cashier’s check to pay my dorm deposit. She looks at the balance on my withdrawal slip with wide eyes, then up at me. “You’ve really made the most of the opportunities here.”For once I meet her eyes and reply honestly. “Mom—you’ve been more help than you’ll ever know.”She smiles. “Well, you’re getting away. I have to live here. So never tell those boys I was your sup plier.”That’s when I could see how much she’d helped me—how much she’d helped everyone. And that’s when I knew my mom had secrets too, and maybe I could tell her mine.

The program always concludes with class prophecies. “Matt will pass The Business on to a younger student, much to the benefit of future classes.” The students laugh. I hear parents asking, “What business?” To dodge the topic, I slip out early. I’m not too worried about my classmates handling these queries. While it’s hard to keep a secret in a small town, when it comes to sex there are plenty of things teens will never tell adults, and vice-versa.Itossmy book in the school’s dumpster and begin to walk home, relieved I won’t have to face my parents’ questions, but by the time I reach my neighborhood this feeling has been replaced by dismay. The last chance to sell Dad on my college plans is now behind me.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 27

high school students. Others did… then called their parents. Condoms could be purchased from a machine at a campground by the county park, but this was a challenging twelve-mile bike ride out of town, and by Friday it was always empty. Eventually he came around to it. Sean assumed I was going to need them, so he only asked for a few. That’s how The Business started. By the end of lunch, I’d sold Sean three condoms at movie prices ($2Noeach).advertising was necessary. The next day, ev eryone knew. By the end of lunch that second day, I had no condoms left. Not wanting to tell on myself with conspicuous consumption, I put the money in the bank ac count my mom had helped me set up for my radio stationNowjob.that she knew I had protection, Mom seemed relieved. That tone of voice was gone. So as not to cause any new concern, I waited six weeks. Then, as an experiment, I put the empty condom box in my bedroom wastebasket. Like a version of the Tooth Fairy for teens, the very next day a new box appeared on my dresser top. I understood. She didn’t mind that her son was active, as long as he was responsible, but she knew our small town—she wouldn’t have everyone talking about it (as they would if I was buying condoms myself at the drug store). And she didn’t want to have awkward con versations with me any more than I did with her.

28 RFD 191 Fall 2022

Great Aunt Jo by Keystone

The first indication that my family history wouldn't ever be available or clear came when I was seven. On a longer road trip along the Southern East Coast of the US, we stopped to visit Great Aunt Jo. This was the first time my siblings and I were meeting her. Aunt Jo, we were told never married, had lived in Florida a long time, and valued her privacy.Thefamily car was on a dirt road as we ap proached her modest house. To my memory, it wasn’t in a neighborhood, but rural without being agricultural. We were told we could not go in her house, so we visited outside on a picnic bench under the shade of a tall tree. I thought it was strange and continued to wonder as my life unfolded about why Aunt Jo didn’t want anybody in her house ... until the time of exploring the photo albums that lightfilledAuntafternoon.Jowasone of the faces I came to recognize as we went through the old albums. My Dad would say things about the images with Aunt Jo that began to catch my ear: “There's Aunt Jo and Hazel going through the Panama Canal;” “This [photo] is when Aunt Jo and Hazel came to visit;” and “They [Aunt Jo and Hazel] were on vacation somewhere, I don't remember where.” When Hazel first popped up, I asked who she was. My Dad said “a friend.” When I ask now, my Dad doesn’t even remember Hazel. When the final album was finished, I turned to my Dad and asked, “When did you find out Aunt Jo was a lesbian?” It took him a while to process the question in a way that told me he had never consider it. Then he informed me that she wasn't a lesbian and asked why I would think that. I pointed out that we'd just seen decades of Aunt Jo and Hazel together. My Dad couldn’t even process the pos sibility, but his wife uttered some words or offered a knowing look of support. She had seen what I’d just seen.One of the clues that started filling in the blanks while paging through the albums were Aunt Jo and Hazel’s hair. The cut and styles were in stark con trast to the coiffed women from that era. Also in my evaluation of was our ban from her house. Maybe Aunt Jo was a hoarder, maybe she didn't keep a clean house, maybe she had thirty cats. My imagination growing up kept trying to figure out why her house was off limits. I never found out, but I like to think it was a one-bedroom house, and Hazel was in there, waiting to hear Aunt Jo's report from the visit from her nephew and his young fam ily. A likely reality was that fear of being discovered created the odd distance on that sunny Florida day. I was in my early teens, already out and such a gay boy when I got on a phone during a call between her and my Dad. She was evacuating in advance of a hurricane and to this West Coast boy, it was fascinat ing. She said moving inland for a hurricane some thing we’ve done many times. Something about that conversation felt closer, more intimate. In hindsight, I like to think Great Aunt Jo's gaydar had gone off, and she was trying to connect with me. I think it was the last time I spoke with Aunt Jo before she died years later. It wasn't until years after that, looking at those photo albums, that it all came together: Great Aunt Jo was a queer relative. I wish I’d gotten to know her better. At least I have some photos.

Great Aunt Jo was an enigma to me until I was in my thirties and going through a photo album with my Dad and his second wife. My Dad had just settled the estate of his parents and returned with a few precious items. The three of us shared a few hours on weekend afternoon in their open floor plan, light- filled house on the central coast of California going through large albums with heavy pages. The black and white images of people in lamp-lit rooms or shady yards on the East Coast were all new to me. My Dad would say things like: “That must be the Bronx;” “Ah, that's that time in Florida;” and “My folks always got the same place when they went to Hawaii for the holidays.”

RFD 191 Fall 2022 29Photographs courtesy the author.

30 RFD 191 Fall 2022 "Kiss You All Over" by Artboydancing.

Like Uncle Ray, Aunt Mary’s son, who had the lyrical lilt of Paul Lynde and lived with her until the day he died. We all went to his funeral, but it wasn’t like Uncle Matt, patriarch and stalwart citizen, older brother and white-haired captain. Ray wasn’t like Uncle Joe, half of a pair of twins, and funny without even trying, or his brother George. Not like my own grandfather, who never gave any indication how he felt about Paul Lynde or anybody like Uncle Ray. Aunt Mary was his shield. She was his compatriot. As far as we knew, he never had a love life. Nobody asks about mine. Nobody dares to broach. Uncle Ray was a kind but remote sensitive sort of man. A confirmed bachelor. An unmarried aunt. A mystery to me. —Scott Damon

RFD 191 Fall 2022 31 Gay Uncle

If I’m somebody’s gay relative, then I’m on the periphery. Acknowledged, supported, some sort of connection. But not enough to socialize with or meet up with in Hawaii if our trips should overlap.

32 RFD 191 Fall 2022"The Tender Dawns Awakening..." by Michael Loren Butkovich

RFD 191 Fall 2022 33

—Emerson Gray

34 RFD 191 Fall 2022 lineage (or lack thereof)

You have no heirlooms. After cutting off contact with your entire family you will throw away everything they ever gave you because looking at the turtle figurine they got you in Florida just makes you think how you were sleeping in your car while they were in Florida after your mother kicked you out of the house for not cleaning the bathroom. You do not have possessions inherited— no golden edged leather bound bibles are resting on the top of your bookshelf, no handwritten cookie recipes are stored carefully in wooden boxes in your kitchen. Instead you have flashbacks: scars furrowed into the meat of your mind, burned impressions in your retinas of a hand beating time on your back, papers ripped from your fingers and flung on the floor, a belt swinging down over and over. You have no heirlooms, just likerepeatingmemories,endlesslyarecordpassed down through the years, skipping on the same carved indentations.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 35"Mother Dear" by Artboydancing.

36 RFD 191 Fall 2022 Photograph courtesy the author.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 37

Among my family photos, I have a few of my mother’s half-sister Mary. One stands out, locked into a timeless space, a black and white photo with a smiling little girl in cowgirl drag, sitting proudly on a pony holding the reins and smiling, beaming at the world. That chubby little girl has lived in my head for decades, endearing and precious. Mary’s father beat her. Her mother died when Mary was very young, from being beaten by Mary’s father. He threw her across the room, breaking a bed frame with her frail petite body: she was 4’8” and weighed little more than a feather. No proof existed, and he got away with it. Mary never talked about her mother. Her father remarried. To a woman who was large and muscular (I thought she had enormous hands, larger than any man’s) and had a fierce, stark look on her scarred face. She was rumored to have a police record in two or more places, probably had killed somebody, and probably spent time in the peni tentiary. She broke his foot with a plaster-of-Paris statuette. She gave him a concussion with a cast iron frying pan. The family laughed and said that she had finally slowed him down. That was my Aunt Mary’s childhood. She married her first husband Glen, both of them barely out of their teens. After a few years, they drifted apart emotionally (and probably sexu ally too) and divorced. Mary had a friend Darlene. The two women fell in love and became lovers, “full-fledged lesbos” she announced. They had been friends in high school; now, in another town in an other state, they had met again, moved in together. After a while, Darlene began living as a man named Jerry. Before long, Jerry got back together with his ex-husband long enough to get pregnant. Then, he went back to live with Mary. He had the baby and they named him Kevin. On a sweltering day years later, Kevin was a sullen “young adult” walking the dusty dirt road outside some cousin’s house at a funeral dinner. Angry and past confusion. He had known about his real mother for a few years now. That was the only time I ever met Kevin, never saw him again. He probably has his own children (grandchildren?) now. If he survived all that trouble and confusion. My family generally tends to be troubled and confused.

Mary scoffed at the Beatles but loved the Su premesshehad odd jobs sometimes and lovers, husbands, wives Mostly, she was a nurse’s aide, worked nights Proud of the white uniform Usually the fem even in overalls Her hair done, always in place (typically short andAndcurly)her costume jewelry from TG&Y, plenty of shiny aurora borealis and rhinestone clip-on earbobs My family taught me to be aware of the world To know people’s opinions and mockery, to be alert to the cruelty, (all directed at us poverty-ridden eccentrics with our wooden privy between the chicken house and the clothesline) and to ignore all of that Mary taught me to ignore the hostile attention we fromgot those who called us names and smirked behind their hands and to be a proud queer before it was fashionable to be “queer” At the end she merely disappeared. The last time that she phoned, she was living in Dallas with her final husband (I never met that one). And then silence, my mail to her returned “no such address” “Unknown” “return to sender.” Now she has no presence, no mention on social media, on the in ternet. A cypher, a silence. But in life, she was large, physically taking up space, a large presence, a loud voice and a louder laugh. A capacity for love and generosity. sometimes gender-fluid (her hormone problem caused her to grow a beard), bisexual, polyamorous—certainly without knowing what any of those meant. My Aunt Mary certainly did not live in any world of academic queer or gender theory. Instead, she was blundering through life with a stye and grace, a defiant confidence and self-love that I envy even now. by Kelvin Ray Beliele

My Queer Relative Aunt Mary

38 RFD 191 Fall 2022

Great Uncle Willy by Jim Van Buskirk I was able to share more with a relative stranger, than my grandmother, my lifelong confidante. In my small family there were no maiden aunts or bachelor uncles, so I was pleased and surprised to learn that I wasn’t the only queer— even if only by a brief marriage.

“Doesphotographs.Georgette know you’re gay?” Nane was asking. “I wouldn’t tell her if I were you. She wouldn’t under stand.”Baba and I had never directly discussed my sexual orientation. She had met my previous long-term partner, who was absolutely devoted to her, visiting her regularly even after we broke up. She had suggested introducing me to some of her French students, both male and female. Given her experience in the theatre, I figured she would be accepting of an “artistic” lifestyle. Baba, who knew me so well, had never broached the sub ject, while Nane instinctively understood. Nane and I could talk about seemingly anything and everything, even if it was in my rudimentary French. I was able to share more with a relative stranger, than my grandmother, my lifelong con fidante. In my small family there were no maiden aunts or bachelor uncles, so I was pleased and surprised to learn that I wasn’t the only queer—even if only by a brief marriage. Tante Nane’s recognition tightened our bond.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded immediately. “Oh, nothing,” I fibbed. “I’m just tired.” “Your friend, it’s not working out?” Her percep tive question caught me off guard.

Tante Nane was a mysterious figure. My grand mother’s only sibling lived outside Paris, indicated by the return address on the infrequent packages: Nane Dulos, 110 Rue Brancas, Seine-et-Oise, Sévres, France. Sometimes a tin of paté de fois gras truffée arrived in our beige, suburban Southern California tract house as if from another world. Other times a letter with snapshots of a strange woman sporting dark glasses and slacks, leaning rakishly against a new automobile, or cavorting with her dogs. Nane had been a singer who accompanied herself on the harp, while my grandmother, Georgette, had been a cantatrice. I dearly loved my grandmother, whom we called Baba, and shared every thing with her. Well, almost everything.ImetNane in person on my first trip to Europe in 1971. I was nineteen years old, unso phisticated, and not yet out. My many attempts to learn French hadn’t quite kicked in, and her English was even worse, so we communicated exclusively in French. I was intrigued by this creature, who had grown up with my beloved grandmother, and yet was so different. Over the next few years, I managed to get myself to Paris several times, always rendezvousing with Nane.

On one visit, I met a handsome Parisian, and some months later, in March 1979, was taking advantage of my Easter vacation and my income tax refund to return to Paris to pursue this potential ro mantic involvement. The affair wasn’t going nearly as well as I’d hoped when I called Nane one evening from my friend’s apartment. As usual, the conversa tion was conducted in French.

“How did you know?”

“Never mind,” she continued. “My first husband was homosexual. Of course, I didn’t know that when I married him—” Say what? I wondered if I had comprehended correctly. We seemed to be communicating on a level beyond my rudimentary French. I knew she had been born Henriette Jeanne Si mon on September 13, 1900. Named for her father, Henri, from an early age she used the nickname “Nane”. When she married William “Willy” Alexan der Carr, she took Nane Carty as her stage name. It also differentiated herself from her family, and she kept it even after her divorce. When she married Jean Dulos in 1937, she be came Mme. Nane Dulos. My knowledge of the intervening years were vague, due either to her jumbled recounting or my poor command of the language, or both. I know nothing more about Willy, nor can I identify any images of him amongst the many family

RFD 191 Fall 2022 39"Dear Phil..." by Artboydancing.

40 RFD 191 Fall 2022 "Thomas Lee Ghandi" by Duncan Hilton, original image from Physique Pictorial Issue No. 32 March 3, 1978

—David Milley

“Before he died,” Mom says, “Dad said he knew, that he always knew, you were gay. I’ll never know how I missed it, but he told me he always knew.” I study my coffee, knowing Mom will say more.

Mom shakes her head, sadly, and takes a gentle sip.

My childhood comes clear. Dad, remote, never held me. Dad never smiled at me. “He loves you,” Mom would say. No day passed without fear I’d be cast out, bereft, if I didn’t do things right. I grew up, came out. The others said, “Don’t tell Dad.” So, I didn’t. Of my love, Warren, left unexplained, Dad mocked, “All his talk would drive me crazy.”

RFD 191 Fall 2022 41 Legacy

“Someone in your Dad’s family was gay, a brother, a cousin? An uncle perhaps? His name was Timothy, or was he Christian? Dad said they disowned him. He left town. The family never saw him again.”

“He makes me happy,” I shot back. Dad looked away. When Dad fell ill, he wept, but he never told me why. But now I know. So many chances lost, so much left unsaid. So many kin I should have known, unknown. Empty places at the feast: generations disappeared. This is new time. I’ve lived my entire life with love. Anyone who looks can see. We shall not disappear. We’ve reached around the world and found our kin. Queer family everywhere; we’re uncles to them all. With one finger, I trace a knot of tablecloth crochet. “But, Mom,” I say, “your own sister, Henrietta, lived all her life with her friend. Hen and Mutt, two old spinsters, and you never guessed?”

“I’ll never know, I suppose.” She sets her coffee down. Across the knotted spread, I reach for Mom’s hand and squeeze it gently. Mom looks up and smiles.

42 RFD 191 Fall 2022 "Passed All The Time Inside" by Artboydancing.

Norman, his older brother, Laird, and Aunt Erie lived in a pretty, small house with a screened-in porch in front and a lawn in back that stretched down to the Cane River Lake, which before it changed course had been part of the Red River. My father was good about keeping up with his baby brother’s widow and thought his sisters’ suspicions nonsense. He often drove to Natchitoches to see how they were doing. Once when I went with him, I was flattered by the attention that Norman paid me. I was accus tomed to being ignored by jocks, of which Cousin Norman was a prime example. From my earliest school days, I was usually among the last ones cho sen when teams were picked to play some sport and had been deeply stung when one of my classmates made the loud accusation during a softball game, that I threw a ball “just like a girl.” Though I was never actually bullied, I always felt excluded from my classmates who were on track to become manly men. But Norman treated me as “one of the guys,” and it was intoxicating. I was impressed to discover that Norman had acquired a motorcycle and a nifty leather jacket to go with it. After dinner one evening, he asked me if I would like to go on a ride with him. “Sure,” I said. It was summer and the days were long and dusk had not yet arrived when I climbed on to the motor cycle’s “buddy seat” and clasped my arms around Norman’s waist. Off we went, first for a bumpy ride over the dunes beside Cane River Lake. Then Norman made a sharp turn on a dirt road through a break of pine woods. It was beginning to get dark when he abruptly stopped, dismounted, dropped his trousers. and began to masturbate. “Do you want to join me?” he asked. I was thunderstruck. I don’t be lieve I even replied before I turned and headed off in the direction from which we had come. Somehow, I managed to find the house and went straight to the bedroom where I was to sleep. Still stunned, I put on my pajamas and crawled into bed. I was not yet asleep when I heard the screen door slam shut and realized it must have been Norman returning.

When I rode Betsy for the first time under the oak trees in our side yard, Uncle Guy, a smiling presence in a dark overcoat, was watching me. I loved Betsy and rode her around the yard until my legs had grown so long that my feet dragged on the ground.

The next year Uncle Guy died of pneumonia after taking one of the newly developed sulfa drugs. Al though there was absolutely no evidence, Guy’s sis ters became convinced that his wife, my Aunt Erie, had poisoned him. The proof they found sufficient was that she was blonde and wore bright red lipstick and too much rouge. Although she never remarried, and in her widowhood led an exemplary life, raising her two sons with love, and regularly attending the Methodist Church, they never stopped believing that she was a murderess who had done away with their beloved brother.

The Gay Sheriff of Natchitoches Parish by J.L Fletcher

Norman was five years older than I. While I was still in elementary school, he was becoming the star of both his high school basketball and football teams. He was elected president of his high school class and the first “Mr. Natchitoches High School.” He was tall, rather beefy, and Teutonic looking. I, skinny and nonathletic, was very much in awe of him.

Norman graduated from high school, he got a job as a sports announcer at a local radio sta

RFD 191 Fall 2022 43

The first time my Cousin Norman was elected sheriff of Natchitoches Parish, we joked about giving him a sheriff’s badge set with emeralds, his birthstone, and matching earrings. He would not have been amused.

Norm, as most people in Natchitoches called him, was the second son of my father’s younger brother who, much loved, had died when he was only thirty-eight years old. I have a vague, sweet memory of my Uncle Guy, who, when I was four years old, gave me a Shetland pony named Betsy.

The next morning while Aunt Erie was fixing breakfast, Norman was his usual talkative self, but none of his remarks were directed at me. It was as if I were not even in the room. No one else realized that I was being ignored, but I was very aware of it. And every time I saw Norman for years after that, he continued to ignore me, even on his occasional visits to stay with us in Lafayette. He liked to hang out with me and my friends, but all his attention was focused on them. Once a few weeks after one of his visits to Lafayette, one of my friends told me, “I heard from your crazy cousin yesterday.” I didn’t ask what he had heard from Norman, didn’t really want to know.After

Aunt Erie was still alive, but Norman had built a large modern house for himself on an isolated tract of land outside of town. He had developed the first cable TV system in Natchitoches and one of the first in Louisiana and become very prosperous. He had taken flying lessons and then bought a small plane which he kept in a hangar on his property which also had an airstrip. He flew all over the country to announce at football and basketball games, and occasionally flew to places like Las Vegas and Miami just for fun. The house looked like a gym or a sports club. It was low-slung and made of brick with lots of plate Cane River, Natchitoches Parish, LA, photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction number LC-USF34-054578-D.

44 RFD 191 Fall 2022 tion, and developed a rich baritone “radio voice” that became his regular speaking voice for the rest of his life. At some point, he was persuaded to enroll in college at Southwestern and briefly lived with us in Lafayette where he continued to pay me no atten tion while cultivating my young male friends. When the Korean War broke out, he dropped out of school and joined the U. S. Air Force. After his basic train ing, Norman was sent to Japan where he became the news editor and the chief news and sportscaster of the Far East Network of the Armed Forces Radio Service. He spent two and a half years in Tokyo cov ering stories all over Asia. He did some part-time work for NBC during which he interviewed Adlai Stevenson, Richard Nixon, General Mark Clark, and other well-known personalities. When Norman was discharged, he returned to Natchitoches, picked up his job as announcer on KNOC AM/FM, and eventually became its co-own er. He soon was known as the “Voice of the North eastern State University Demons” and travelled with their sports teams broadcasting all their games.

Laird, Norman’s older brother, had married, was raising a family, and working for a local utility com pany, but Norman continued to live with his mother in the house on Cane River Lake. On Sundays he taught the Senior High Class at the First United Methodist Church Sunday School. In the mid-1970s, when I returned to live in Lou isiana with my Italian lover, one weekend we drove to northern Louisiana to see my aunts in Ruston, and I decided to stop on the way to see Norman, whom I had not seen for several decades. In the back of my mind, realizing what we had in common, was the idea that perhaps as adults we were at last going to become friends.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 45 glass. Inside there was an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a basketball court, together with a sauna and a steam room. Norm told us that players from the university basketball team often came to prac tice and use the facilities. Norm greeted us hospitably, but I soon realized that the wall that he had built around himself when we were teenagers still existed and was not to be breached. Our conversation stayed on a very super ficial level and after an hour or so of boring talk we left for Ruston. Nothing had changed between me and my cousin. A few years after this, Norm was elected Sheriff of Natchitoches Parish. He was elected three times and according to his obituary “built one of the most professional organizations in the state with empha sis on effectiveness and efficiency.” He also began to lecture several times a year at the F.B.I. Academy near Quantico, Virginia. In the late 1980s, one afternoon I went to see the movie Steel Magnolias, which I had heard good things about. Perhaps I had read that it was filmed in Natchitoches, but what I definitely did not know was that my Cousin Norman had a small part in it, and I was completely unprepared when suddenly he loomed up in front of me, many times larger than life, in the wedding scene where he was cast as the father of Julia Robert’s husband. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that I almost fell out of my seat. I had gained my composure by the time he appeared again, near the end of the movie, in the cemetery scene, comforting the handsome young widower after Julia Robert’s funeral. A few months later, our Aunt Willie passed away and I flew to Louisiana for the funeral. As our aunt was being lowered into her grave in Greenwood Cemetery in Ruston, where so many of my ancestors are buried, I looked up to see Cousin Norman on the other side of the family plot in a setting that was strikingly similar to his last scene in Steel Magnolias. Norman did not finish his third term as sheriff. When he was in his late fifties, he became involved with a twenty-eight year-old male prisoner accused of burglary and unwisely helped him escape. A fed eral grand jury indicted him in 1989 for concealing the whereabouts of the alleged burglar. He resigned as sheriff, was given a three-year suspended prison sentence, fined $12,600, and put on probation.

There was a brief item about the incident in the Shreveport newspaper, but the episode seemed not to have any repercussions on his life in Natchi toches. He was much loved and respected in the community where his spectacular success in high school had continued into years of good civic works that were recognized and honored. In 1955, he had been named Number One Radio Newscast er in Louisiana. In 1958, he had been the Jaycees Young Man of the Year, and in 1960 the Cham ber of Commerce Man of the Year. When he was twenty-seven, he became the youngest ever presi dent of the Natchitoches Chamber of Commerce. He served as the State Chairman of the Louisiana Cultural Resources Commission and the director of the City/Parish Civil Defense for eighteen years, and during his tenure the organization ranked in the top ten percent in the country. For three terms, he was also president of the state Chambers of Commerce Association. He continued to lecture at the F.B.I. Academy and earned money as a moti vational speaker. For the rest of his life, he taught Sunday School at the First United Methodist Church. And in 2010, after his retirement, he was named “a Natchitoches Treasure.”

About a decade into this new century, I made a road trip to Louisiana to see friends in New Orleans and Lafayette. I drove back to Virginia via northern Louisiana where my grandparents and so many of my cousins had lived. By then, Norman was the only close living relative I had in those red clay hills and piney woods, and I stopped in Natchitoches to see him. He had retired, sold his big house, and was living in a modest brick town house. He had been having health problems and did not look well. I did not expect anything but the superficial chats we had had over the years, and I was fine with that. As always, he spoke to me in his “radio voice,” and was for me the same public Norman who had played such an important and beloved role in his community for his entire life. I did learn more about the life he had lived, at least the parts of it that did not need to be con cealed. Many of the people he had worked with when he had been with Armed Forces Radio had gone on to important positions in the world of broadcasting and encouraged him to move to New York or Los Angeles where he could have had a sig nificant national career. “I was tempted,” he said, but he knew that Natchitoches was his home and was where he belonged. Talking about his time in Tokyo, he mentioned that among the people he got to know was Tab Hunter, who was serving in the army. “We used to go horseback riding together,” he said. I wanted to ask him more about what might have happened between him and the gay and handsome movie star, but I knew not go there. On the walls of the townhouse were several

photographs of Norman with Dolly Parton, taken when she was in Natchitoches filming Steel Magno lias. “We became good buddies,” he told me. “I was the only one in town who was invited to have dinner with her in her trailer.” She probably sensed that she was safe being alone with Cousin Norman. Norman took me to lunch downtown and several people greeted him and stopped to talk as we walked from his car to the restaurant, and once inside several more people came up to chat. I could tell that Norman was still a local hero. I could not imagine him living anywhere else, and evidently neither could he. We had a pleasant enough visit. I had long ago learned what the boundaries were and was not tempted to cross them.

46 RFD 191 Fall 2022

I had assumed that because of his immersion in the life of a small town in the Bible Belt, he had led a closeted, constrained life on his home ground, perhaps misbehaving only when he made his rather frequent trips to places like Miami, Vegas, and LosButAngeles.recently I be came friendly with a younger gay man from Natchitoches who had known Norman by reputation and what he told me did not jibe with what I had be lieved to be the case. It was well known in the small circle of gay men in Natchi toches that Norman held wild orgies for young men at his house in the woods, but that Norman’s public surprisingly,reputation,“always remained intact.” My new friend wrote: “I was sur prised that Norm was being so open with having groups of young men, of not great reputation, at his house. I was fairly closeted at the time and was astonished as to how he was managing to do these things without any negative consequences.”

He suggested that Norman’s reputation as “a pillar of the community” shielded him from being ostracized as the genial sexual predator that he evidently was. The fact that he was a powerful local celebrity protected him, a phenomenon that the world has witnessed on a more colossal scale, as in: “When you are a star, they let you do it. Anything you want.” Norman was a small-town star, and that was all he wanted to be.

About a year later, Norman died “after a brief ill ness,” according to his obituary which was long and filled with the many worthy things he had done, the civic honors he had won, and praise for the out standing citizen he had been. We were two gay men of the same generation, of the same blood, but we had very different ways of coping with that fact. Like so many others, I was eager to leave the smallish town in which I was born and where, as the song goes, “Everyone knew my name.” And I did leave for many years and relished the anonymity of large cities and foreign cities where there were no expectations to be met, where I was out of context, and could be whoever I wanted to be. Norman obviously never felt that way and wanted nothing more than to stay “rooted in one dear perpetual place.” He remained where he had been born and was able to flourish there. He did not hide in a conventional marriage, the dishonest solu tion to the problem that too many gay men of our generation resorted to. Norman remained Norman all his life, and even took the bit of scandal in stride. From the days when he was the star athlete in high school, he was always a bit larger than life, and was much loved for it.

R.I.P., Mr. Natchitoches. Natchitoches, LA, photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Divi sion, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction number LC-USF34-054708-D.

Inorganic patterns I’ll press again and again

All

RFD 191 Fall 2022 47

Signalling, inviting, regime change Holy end to holy subservience now that Guerrilla tactics are superfluous in the Bright light of one Good day

The sweet undesirable thrum panging heart string makes Mawkish that essential instrument round my stomach hollow —Dylan

My

Etched

Bouncing

Towards

That

Despite the promise scrawled there on the wall

Blinded by the iron acrylic White, red goo I thought meant Certain death and the dull ache of Time crashing endlessly onwards A future belonging to neither of us

Every

And carved in the knees from glistening turf

A single turn on another axis permits a Quick Scrape of red on white wall lead, incised, the Bio accumulation of rights and wrongs one of them counting loudly evasions stuffing themselves down my throat the delusional glugging Begging to quell

48 RFD 191 Fall 2022 "Joli Homme" by Michael Loren Butkovich.

Red and rich with earth

The resonating hum of happy songs that only ask you dance along His wine, his water goes dark and sweet and leaves a dream where night was long Grey, to white, to fading in his angular wisps His blurring lines, his grace of man constantly leaving You will find comfort in his cords of blue That tie the ocean’s echo to The fair morning at your side You will find him here any hour I finger crooks, dark sides, our old code I polish your shell to resound In depths of pink I don’t remember Taking you up Your dust is sand under my feet Your waves, love in my ear Old thing The tide has brought you back to me We who survive the flood —Duncan Hilton Written for my queer great grand father, Francis H. Zimbeaux (7/14/1913–3/6/2006), whom I loved. Drawing by Duncan Hilton.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 49

50 RFD 191 Fall 2022

Older Brofriend by Chicken Sparklehorse

My older brother, who grew up in a town thirty minutes drive from my own with his mother and step-dad, was the coolest older brother one could ask for. He was eccentric, artistic, kind, extremely charismatic (and not bad on the eyes). He was my quinicential big brother/friend! One who would play legos and dress-up in scarves and dresses with me, objects that didn’t even seem out of the ordinary in my hip pie dad and wasp-gone-progressive mother house hold. Though I know divorce has negative impacts on many, and I’m sure on my brother, we never had that sibling rivalry that many siblings have, vying for the attention of parents under one roof. One of the most significant revelations I received from my brother was the passing down of knowl edge and love of X-Men comics. If you are one who read these as a youngster, or any age really, I know I don’t have to say much. The X-Men are a superhero team of mutants, those gifted with abilities that are a genetic mutation and are shunned and hated by manyTheyhumans.arefeared for being different and constantly hunted, ridiculed, bashed, over and over even though they fight for peace and coexistence. Sound familiar? I’m straying from the point I think. Wells opened this world to me. Though when I started reading I don’t think I “knew” consciously the radi cally gay sub-narrative that was being told. I loved the stories, I loved the powers, I especially liked the skin-tight muscle-clad men (no surprise that in my early teens seeing a Tom of Finland art book would really set me off). Having something that we could both gush about to each other was a bond that kept us together for many of our formidable teen years. Though Wells was all these wonderful things, and paved the way for me to come out, I still was quite a late bloomer. I didn’t come out til I was eigh teen, I denied gay accusations from my father when gay porn was found on the computer, there were times when my brother and I would wrestle and the sexual tension was palpable! I would deny deny deny any intent when asked directly. I still think about why this is, but I honestly chalk it up to the fact that we are all different. Different nature and nurture. Different genetics. Take your pick. Our lives took different paths after high school. His the wild artist, and intellectually gifted path, rarely tied to one place and let his passions take him from coast to coast, even living in Amsterdam with a lover for many years. I went to the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and never left. I found gay friends, and slept my way systematically through them all (we may have that in common). Rarely find ing my true fam, and always missing something that I couldn’t place. In 2015 when I was twenty-seven, and he thirty-four, we consciously chose to rent a flat in downtown together. It was cute. The best, and oldest, gay bar in Minnesota was a short walk. We threw small parties with a plethora of glitter, champagne, and poppers. Wells and his friends and lover brought me into the underground queer scene in a way I had only touched upon before. I was part of a group, so acceptance and openness from other queers came quicker. He introduced me to techno music and the local techno scene, as well as molly. That year was a roller coaster of emotions, experi ences, close friendships bound together by drugs and a rejection of the gay heteronormative expecta tions of society. I dropped the “gay” and changed it to “queer”. I had my heart broken thinking we were in love on XTC. Hah!, those days when we were pushing boundaries just to see where the line was. Also, miraculously though not happily, our shared father died. The one year we lived together. It was tough to say the least. But I couldn’t have been in bet ter company (the picture included is from the hike we took after dad’s memorial service, from atop a bluff in Winona, MN). We parted ways after that year. And the very next year I went with my lover and queer fam to Kawashaway for my first Lammas celebration. I found a community of Faeries that helped me dis cover the Faery inside of me. Elders that I discovered were not that different from myself, except in years. Chicken Sparklehorse was found within and is here to stay. Though I don’t think my brother identifies as a Faery, he doesn’t disbelieve. Just like with all aspects of our lives, there is acceptance, even if it wouldn’t be

Whether I actually remember my half-brother Wells coming out to me or not, I know the impact had positive ramifications for us both. He was thirteen, I was eight, and I told him “that’s ok, I love you” or something to that effect (not even real izing at the time that anything other than love is how many respond to said information).

RFD 191 Fall 2022 51 our choice. This is a big difference between the toler ance that many LGBTQ receive from family versus acceptance. Acceptance takes work. It takes love and care and wanting to change. Wells and I have been working on our relationship for decades whether we saw it or not. What do I want to say with all this? I’m painting a pretty picture but there is still so much unsaid. Strife bubbled under the surface. Differences in how we communicate have led to disastrous fights. His bold directness frightens and astounds me, my seemingly apathetic and blasé presentation frus trates him. But blood is thicker than water, right? Especially if that blood is pulsing with homosexual ity. I think our shared love of men, and recognition of the genetic mutation we share does indeed bond us. I think if I’d been straight we still would have had a good relationship, but there is a kinship that comes from being part of the same group. A cama raderie that others don’t know because they can’t know. We don’t talk all the time. He is not my best friend. Our relationship ebbs and flows. Hey, we were both raised “only children”! I’m not that sur prised. I thank Wells for what we have though. For the work he did in my circles to help me be a better, stronger, more forth-right queer. How to be myself. For teaching me how to revel in pleasures the world has to offer. For the comics, oh the comics. When I get him to laugh it melts my heart. I hope he knows that. I should remind him. Life moves quick and we could all use a little reminder we are loved, respect ed, and impactful.

Photograph courtesy the author.

52 RFD 191 Fall 2022 "Color of Water Within" by Gregory Wilkins.

Secrets and Time by Martin

Dayne

Uncle Andy stayed closer to home. There were no DUI laws then. Drunk men made their ways home in the night and you always knew because the car would be skewed in the driveway. “Dad really tied one on last night,” you thought when seeing the crooked car in the driveway. His tiger breath invaded the house and often I would hear him vom iting early mornings before he went to work. All those men were WWII vets. They had male comradery that only soldiers know and the bars were their “man caves” despite the destruction and family collapse that occurred from drinking.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 53

His pinky finger had no nail. The bone from his fifth phalange, his pinky, protruded from his right hand, an injury he suffered on some machine in some past work where his hand lost to the mechan ics at the steel mill or in the coal mines. He scared us with that finger, digging it into us as he lifted us into the air, saying he was just tickling us, but that bony finger dug in, and it hurt. That finger was that of a monster. He held it up in a humorous threat with a growling “heh”. My uncle Andy. He was a strong, frightening man with a Frankenstein sort of stature and a wide grin. And he terrified me. We visited my aunt and uncle at least once a month, sometimes staying over with my two brothers when my mother needed respite, she, a mother of seven. My father was a great cook whereas my mother was tragically useless in the kitchen. With exaspera tion and exhaustion, she slapped together weekly dinners with hate and it tasted like it. The men in the family commanded Sunday dinners and holiday cuisine, especially Thanksgiving when my father forged the complete feast. It was his holiday from choosing the turkey to peeling wild mushrooms from the woods. It was holidays mostly that I en countered my Uncle Andy, my mother’s half-sister’s husband. He was not a cook, but attended every holiday meal. Him and his Captain “hook” finger of fear.They were all big drinkers. Alcoholics. My other uncle, Uncle Val, owned a local bar that my dad and mostly my Uncle Andy frequented. One of those air-conditioned dark taverns that smelled of spilled beer and where men hunched on their stools of eternity and self-deprecation knocking back whis key and Shaeffer beer until they returned home to face their self-forged and hated realities: their wives andThosechildren.dark bars were on every crossroad—bars with padded, torn swivel stools; the wooden bar lined with jars of pickles and beef jerky, bags of chips or pretzels for the asking, a juke box some times playing quietly, a skee-ball or pinball game against the wall, perhaps a pool table; and condom machines in the restrooms. On Saturday nights there was dancing on slick-polished wooden floors and lantern lights lit up in dusty corners. My Dad stopped at the closest bar near work or whichever bar had not already flagged him from en tering. My mother would send us up on our bikes to drag him home. She was home swimming through mountains of laundry and wondering if there would be money not spent on drink and gambling to feed the“Mombrood.wants you to come home”—to deaf ears as Dad proudly exhibited his kids to his drinking friends. We were placated with ice cold Coca-Cola when it was pumped from a gun and burned your throat going down and, given a few dimes to play pinball. We fell right into his game and Mom’s de spair remained. Occasionally he would bend to her request and bring us home, throwing our bikes into the back of the station wagon.

Probably Val and my Dad had a row and he was not always welcome at the bar. My Dad was a gambler, rarely paid his debts to bookies or others. He was a loud mouth and known to get into fights and he cre ated conflicts, even with his own brothers. I was not a masculine child. I was basically the fairy of the family. There is usually always one of us in large families. The youngest of seven, I knew I was gay from a very young age. My sisters even dressed me up as a girl for fun. I was their living doll. I was okay with that: I wanted to be Ginger Grant from Gilligan’s Island. I told a boy, a class mate named Bobby in first grade that I “loved him”. Mistake. That confession ruined what was left of my school experience and I was taunted, bullied and teased for the next twelve years. Learning that there might be other gay family members was potentially helpful, but any influence supporting my sexuality was not spoken of and

Ten years or so prior to his death, Andy emerged from their bedroom wearing one of her dresses and stockings and high-heeled shoes. He asked her, “How do I look?”

Ten years or so prior to his death, Andy emerged from their bedroom wearing one of her dresses and stockings and high-heeled shoes. He asked her, “How do I look?”

Betty told him to remove those clothes and if she ever saw him in that way again, she would leave him in a split second. This was a statement from a woman who stuck to the demands of her Catho lic upbringing: divorce was prohibited. Our grandmother, although a vixen in her own history, would never let her daughters renege on failed mar riages. My mother suffered the same fate although my father was not gay nor a transvestite, but his alcoholism destroyed their marriage, and our family overall.There was more: Aunt Betty told the story of how her and Andy were good friends growing up. He was a Momma’s boy. At nineteen, she had a boyfriend. They agreed to marry. She made all the arrangements: saved her money, bought the dress, set up the church, the reception venue. And then her intended balked. In despera tion and in order to save face in a small town of eyes, she approached Andy basically saying, “Look, I know what you are, marry me and it will solve both ourSoproblems.”hedid.She saved face, and he had his coverup, but they both entered into twenty-five years of misery as demanded by a Catholic marriage that prohibited divorce. She said he was so drunk on their wedding night, there was no chance of con summation. And they never, ever had sex from that moment forward. He wasn’t drunk: he couldn’t get an erection with a woman. And he, Andy, relied on her impeccably over a twenty-five year old mar

54 RFD 191 Fall 2022 never happened. Homosexuality was a big No, and the secrecy pervaded in those times. As the obvious fag in the family, I was not “game” for, god forbid, uncles who molested. My brothers might have other tales to tell, but those secrets remain untold. I don’t know all the story, but some said that Uncle Andy closed the bars with after-hour blow jobs and who knows what else those men did when they were drunk. I often wonder if my Dad went on the “down low” with Uncle Andy. Seemingly they were always close friends, brothers-in-law, and I remember Uncle Andy always had that crazy grin which makes me think he had dirt on my Dad. Andy always got the prime, first serve, of any Holiday dinner—and he was always the first in the bathroom after eating—something that also made me won der if his ass was simply ripped up from back-alley fucking.Ialso wonder if his behavior made me a carefully-handled misfit in the family. I could feel that my effeminacy was despised by my aunts. Other family were of little support. My four older brothers rarely included me in activities. I was tolerated and often diverted to not get “out of hand” with in nocent bantering that exhibited my gayness. I was the boy that should have been a girl. I broke the pattern: Girl, boy, boy, girl, boy, boy and…boy. They were so sure I was going to be a girl, they only picked a girl’s name (Susan). I joked I was the boy (to be ) named Sue. I came out early at age fifteen to my mother. I sat on the edge of the tub while she readied herself for her night shift at the factory, brushing her hair, adjusting her makeup. She stopped dead in midbrushing and glared at me through the mirror be fore she continued her primping. She dismissed me as if to say. “I don’t want to know about it.” We never talked about it until I was older and although she accepted it to my face, she never accepted it in her heart. This I did not learn until I read her diaries af ter she died. I know she loved me despite and there was a time when she was more liberal, yet as time went on, she reverted back into a Bible thumping old-world religious devotee who took Leviticus at word. I was an abomination. She was heart-broken that a son was gay, but I was more so heart-broken knowing she never truly accepted me.

Uncle Andy died from rectal cancer. On the night of his funeral, we all travelled to my parents’ hometown. The large family stayed with various relatives and in the local motel. My aunt Betty, Andy’s wife, whom when we asked my mother why she never had her own children, would say” Her womb was too high.” The truth came out that night as she perched in her hotel bed and called us all in as she addressed us. She was like an exhausted queen ready to promote the court with some decree. She sipped sherry and we never saw her drink, so she was a bit tipsy.

protected by contemplative life within the church. They had other reasons, mainly fear of rejection. How did one explain or answer that age-old ques tion: “Why have you never married?” Because I prefer sucking cock. Because I love other women’s tits. Frankie was also a strong man, not always even-tempered. We would run around him and taunt him until he would grab you by the collar and shake the shit out of you. You didn’t mess with him if you knew what was good for you. My father and his many sisters, my aunts, protected Frankie. We learned to, too. Frankie never missed Sunday Mass, was always praying the Rosary. His house had altars and in cense. He was a priest in his own right, but perhaps because he wanted to stay explorative with whatever he wanted to do, he avoided taking any vows that might have put him in a more deplorable light had he followed through on his inclinations while wear ing the collar. He had his own secrets. I considered entering as a teen heading toward college into the seminary when being gay in my own secret was not ever going to be accepted. Even my guidance counselor in high school promoted the seminary when I told him I wanted to be an actor. He said “The Mass is a drama in itself”. However, my family couldn’t afford it. Community college "Through the Veil of It All" by Michael Loren Butkovich.

riage—and a true friendship—so as he became ill, he must have complied as he had no other recourse. After my grandmother died and now with Andy gone, Betty went cougar and fulfilled at least a small part of her sexual needs denied after so many years. My mother knew all about this and even with this knowledge, she never offered me even a few facts in recognizance that homosexuality happens in families, and perhaps I was part of a legacy. A legacy of secrets. Wouldn’t have that been wonderful? Wouldn’t have that been much healthier to parlay to your child struggling alone in a dark secret? I always wondered about older relatives who have never married. Another Uncle, Frankie, was the odd one out of my father’s twelve siblings. He had lost some oxygen at birth and had a seizure disorder. But he was a handsome, productive man. He was not mentally-challenged. He was seemingly slow and, most of all, just goofy. We all loved him. He leaned toward the priesthood. Although he never joined an order, he hung out with the priests and brothers. Polish and Irish Catholic men and women in those days: many took the veil or collar. Why? Hmm. Some are truly called, and devoted; others: secrets. They said it was a blessing to the family if one was called into religious vocation but there was no mistaking an effeminate uncle or a butch aunt who left the burdens of society to be

RFD 191 Fall 2022 55

It’s still not talked about. Much, and perhaps my cousins have other tales to tell. Even those cousins who never married and are openly involved in same sex relationships, the topic never comes up. This, I hope to believe, is because despite the differences among us in sexual orientation, family is family. As time has evolved and more acceptance of LGBTQ rights be come even more prevalent, more truths come out. Or, the truth has become, and finally, irrelevant. The church has ruined many lives with their outdated and irrational mandates, madness. How times have changed. This is not to say that divorce should be as convenient as it is. If we approach marriage with a laissez-faire attitude, it demeans the vow. Vows are not to be taken lightly. Vegas be damned. Some of our idols in LGBTQ celebrity have irresponsibly made it just OK to divorce. During civil union opportunities, those celebrities taunted their failed “marriages” in People Magazine et al, and undermined us as a whole in obtaining the legal right to marry. I admire my mother and her sisters for sticking it out, but in some cases, sticking it out is like suicide. When my Catholic-grinding grandmother died, my mother left my father within a year. They were both heartbroken. My mother already had someone on the side, I learned later. Today, men and women can come out after suc cumbing to the pressure of a heterosexual marriage demanded on them by societal mores, religious or otherwise, and without regret. Being gay is ok now and healthy amicable divorces occur. People can pursue their dreams of true love without religion and restriction. Maybe Andy and Betty could have been happier if times now came alight long ago. When I came out completely to my family, I said “Look, you love me because I am part of you. If you can’t handle it, that is your problem, not mine.” I’ve never been rejected. Why? Because they knew and always did. I am grateful that my experi ence in family has never resulted in disownment or disgust or hatred, but to all those who have had this experience, it is best to know that not all family are of blood. My inner family remains more my friends who have travelled the same road as me. Our youth now have more command and they are brighter and more accepted than ever thanks to those who battled those secrets before them. Today, my nieces and nephews who are exploring their identities are not told to keep it to themselves, but are honored and protected in their developing decisions to be gay, or lesbian, or transgender, or bisexual, or cisgender or whatever badge they adopt. They certainly have me to validate them so there is no longer the need for secrets to make them feel isolated or afraid, nor wonder if just someone in the family supported them without it being a secret.

"The Family Rabbit" by Artboydancing.

56 RFD 191 Fall 2022 itself was a stretch. Back then, I thought, “No way, I wanna have sex!” Today I think, I could have had room and board, a great education, and as much men I could ever possibly imagine in my bed. One day, and I think Frankie knew because, as I grew, I was obviously leaning toward an alterna tive lifestyle,—he pulled me aside and, opening up his wallet, showed me some old raggedy black and white photos of him dressed in drag. He shushed at me, saying “this is between you and me.” I kept his secret for years. As an adult I remember mentioning this to a cousin who said, “Oh yeah, we never talk about that.”

sexualment.ofDyerciousdemonsreducedabilitydescribed.bruisedonredolentthesecelebratedmay-junefrancis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/triptych-UnlikeotherdepictionsofDyer,whichusuallyhisphysicalityanddominatingvirility,BlackTriptychsarepostmortemsnapshots,withremorseandpathos.Theyarehardthehumanheart,especiallythoseheartsalreadywiththetypeofrelationshipdynamicBetweenimpossiblemalelovers,theirtoactuallyconnectvialovewithacapitalL,tosimplysexualfunctions,shinydrunkhauntingeachother.Thestoryofhowthecouplemetwasascapriandunconventionalasthementhemselves.wasajailbirdburglarfromtheroughEastEndLondonwhobrokeintoBacon’sfancyapartDespitetheirtotallydifferentworldsthechemistrywasintensefromfirstsight.In

RFD 191 Fall 2022 57 [Francis Bacon's work is in under copyright and we were unable to obtain rights before publication so we suggest readers follow links provided. -Ed.]

The Artistic Suicide of George Dyer: Francis Bacon by Rob Buchanan Francis Bacon's studio, reconstructed at Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. Photo: Sailko.

Francis’ dark, dandy subconscious, was an unset tling butcher’s shop window, combining abstract aesthetics with a deep understanding of space. His figures are ecclesiastic monsters playing out visceral body-horror rituals amid delineated spaces which Hirst, or maybe Cronenberg and Caravaggio would find enviable. All earthy organic palettes. Bodily fluids and insinuations of odours, the suffocating colours ensnaring mutated bodies mid-explosion on the canvass. There is the stale scent of semen and sweat, and an atmosphere of desperate aggression in much of his earlier works. But the most interesting examples of his genius for me are his poi gnant paintings created after, and inspired by, George Dyer’s tragic death. And it is utilising these works as evidence, I will boldly suggest that Bacons in creasingly inconvenient boyfriends suicide was not only a revelation, but a guilty pleasure and release for the artist.

celebrationofparticularquasi-religiousisTheinfamouslight,amidAmsterdam’strait-george-dyer-light-groundpaintings/three-studies-porfrancis-bacon.com/artworks/HoveringbeforemeinNieuweKerktheincenseandcandleisoneofFrancisBacon’sBlackTriptychs.echoingGothicchurchafittinggalleryforBacon’saltarpiece.Thisone“InMemoryGeorgeDyer,1971”isaofthebodyandblood of Christ, in his avatar as a sacrificial lamb. But it’s also a visceral, intense celebration of the vomit, tears and semen of a suicidal and abusive gay lover. Irish artist Bacon is almost as famous for his oft-tormented life as a vanguard of modern surrealist portraiture. His obsession was with the male body, whether it be his boyfriends, his estranged father or the masculine ar chetypes that inhabited his dark sexual psyche. His chaotic studio, which served as chapel, confessional and torture chamber, was lovingly migrated piece by piece from London after his death and reconstruct ed in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery. A postmodern act which Bacon would have found satisfying, if maybe invasive. Hugh Lane is also home to some of Bacon’s other masterpieces and photographic collection. Often with artists, it is their own ego which serves as a key to interpret and decoding their work. Paradoxically, it is through the lens of the life of his late lover, George Dyer, which can perhaps best interrogate the two Triptychs described below.

May–June 1973 Memoriam Triptych

Bacon gave Dyer a father figure and some thing to brag about, plus a rock star lifestyle to suit his growing addictions and neuroses. Dyer gave Bacon physical pleasure and danger. Both were alcoholics, but Dyer was perpetually drunk. He had an air of menace about him and was seldom more than a round away from a pub brawl or a street domestic. Retire from his hobby of petty theft, Dyer still moved in criminal circles in the sleazy Soho gay scene. He socialised with criminals and misfits, whilst Bacon ladled his genius out in his studio. Dyer was undoubtedly the artists greatest muse. Even when he was physically distant he was still in Bacon’s pseudo-company, among the mas sive half-finished portraits of Dyer in the turbulent studio. The lines between their bedroom and the canvas became blurred by the constant modelling for painting after painting, in scenarios both inti mate and seemingly banal. Uncouth and vulgar, Dyer’s danger and uninten tional ridiculousness was transfigured through the medium of Bacon’s works into a type of deformed, destructive demigod. Bacchus with a switchblade and a condom in his back pocket. It would be sentimental to say that Bacon’s depictions of his lover showed what he truly perceived him to be. A powerful and self destructively mercurial force of nature. The two dimensional abstraction on the canvas frequently showed an ugly side, in the raw unpredictability of the subject and in the way Bacon unapologetically could objectify his partner. He demanded performance and submission. It was that praise, book-ended by disgust, which began to first open the cracks in Dyer’s psyche.Hewould brag about the paintings he inspired, proud of never having the slightest notion about their intended meaning . He was known to comment in his distinctive cockney accent “All that money an’ I fink they’re reely ‘orrible”. And that was entirely the point. Even Bacon, who was his intellectual and cultural polar opposite, confessed even he himself never thought too much about the works. He wanted gut reactions, not cerebral ones. Or at least that what he told his fawning buyers. Dyer to him was a type of halfway house between Mary Magdalene and Eliza Doolittle. There was a desire to educate him, but not at the risk of taming his ability to inspire. There was a need to spoil him; his appetite for alcohol, sex and luxury. But to maintain his insatiable nature. Their deeply unhealthy, though ultimately fulfilling, bond was also characterised by domestic violence, garnished with several booze and drug fuelled lazy suicide attempts.

58 RFD 191 Fall 2022 spite of the window dressing of the artistic epiphany of their relationship it was doomed by this carnal superficiality. Arguably, neither man ever saw more than a centimetre in to each other, regardless of the endless hours of contemplating and reconstructing each other’s bodies in paint. Their union in the eyes of the public was scandalous and stormy. The casual observer assumed the brutish looking Dyer was the source of all the violence and instability in their duo, but Bacon had an undeniable streak of selfdestruction too and was a serial masochistic victim of violentBizarrelyboyfriends.despite Dyer being the caricature of the rough bully, it was the posh older Bacon’s turn this time to be the dominant partner. Perhaps he was emboldened by Dyer’s relative youth and lack of sophistication, or maybe Bacon’s desire to inspire then harvest the best of his boyfriends hellfire for his art which made him step up the authority role. For all its pandemonium the pair had a relationship which was far more symbiotic than parasitical.

Exposure to an intimidating, if imperfect, intel lect and intersecting with Francis’ circle of sophis ticated artists and socialites cultivated a deepening insecurity in George. He pretended not to care, played the buffoon or the goon. But would periodi cally boil over and lash out in drunken rampages. First Bacon’s friends began to pressure him to cast Dyer aside, closing ranks and revoking invitations. Then Bacon himself began to attempt breaking away contact gradually. This made Dyer even more depressed and prompted immature reactionary Dyer to him was a type of halfway house between Mary Magdalene and Eliza Doolittle. There was a desire to educate him, but not at the risk of taming his ability to inspire.

The final panel has Dyer squeezing his eyes shut, puking into a sink. Another arrow, as in the first panel, now accuses the actor in this self-inflicted passion-play. Ecce-suicidal-homo, behold the failed man! This masterpiece was an exercise in exorcism, an attempt at exoneration and eventually catharsis. The psychological strain, the attempt to process the sense of disbelief, combined with guilt and anger, had a massive effect on all his later works. Bacon confessed he was never the same again. Whether that means he was improved or devolved by the experience is not so clear. The cruelty of it all had broken parts of him and unleashed others. Bacon often literally depicted his conflicting desires and fears wrestling on the canvas, this work takes all the previous screaming and bestial struggle and gives it a life cycle. A confession, and perhaps a warning of the cause and effect of limerence over love, and the impersonal madness of desire.

In a bizarre though characteristic bid for atten tion Dyer once planted drugs in Bacon’s flat and phoned the police on him. Standing on window ledges of hotels, threatening to jump and fighting in the streets were not uncommon ways for their date nights to end. Dyers death, or their mutual assured destruction via a murder-suicide seemed inevitable. On the fateful night of Bacon’s retrospective in Paris, which was to be the pinnacle of the painter’s professional career, Dyer carried out the passion play depicted the Triptychs.

Triptych, May–June 1973 Triptych, May–June 1973 is a headache-inducing grotesque dramedy. A stylised retelling of a scenario played out a thousand times by doomed lovers. The canvas is as monochromatically anonymous as a series of frequented lonely hotel rooms, But it could as easily have been painted in style and saturation of an exhaust filling car, or the wrong side of a motor way bridge, sans guard rail. The right panel show cases a naked fetal Dyer on the toilet. In a darkened bathroom, viewed from a lit corridor. His head is between his legs. An arrow on the carpet outside the door points towards the scene, also evoking thoughts of Queer martyr Saint Sebastian. This was the pose Dyers triumphant corpse was found in. His final modelling session for an absent Bacon on the night before the huge retrospective in Paris’s Grand Palais. An exhibition mostly featuring his body and soul yet one which he was not invited to. The timing of the suicide was intentional spite on the mentally unstable Dyers part. Bacon stoically, or nationalistically, attended anyway, having been in formed of his lover’s tragic death only hours before. The middle panel presents Dyer agonised, deformed. Mounting an almost middle aged head. Like a synthesis, an offspring, of the two men’s age. He crawls under the ominous shadowy pendulous swing of illumination, from a similar but not identi cal darkened doorway. The threshold is a comment on the liminal state between dying and death. And for a multiple suicide attempting depressive, the os cillating state of survival and surrender. This middle canvas ultimately depicts his transition from subject to object. Person to corpse.

RFD 191 Fall 2022 59 behaviour further isolating him.

In Memory of George Dyer, 1971 george-dyerfrancis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/memory-Thefirstpanelof

To learn more about Francis Bacon, and see his studio and a selection of his works visit Dublin’s fantastic Hugh Lane Gallery ie/history-of-studio-relocation).(http://www.hughlane.

In Memory of George Dyer, 1971 of the Black Triptychs shows the couple wrestling, their shadows cast back by an unseen swinging light bulb. Remorse seemingly transmuting to rage. The struggle insinuates a tactile, haptic connection with the deceased lover. They are set on an almost proscenium arch, a track which curves up unseen through the middle panel and out through the last panel.The central canvas depicts the harbinger shad ow-Dyer, retreating up the darkening hotel stairway to the bathroom where he will end his life. He over dosed on the toilet. Perhaps his terminal struggle caused that bare light-bulb to swing. A disembodied flesh coloured arm inserting a key shows an agency or perhaps desire connected to Dyer, but still out side his control. There’s a heavy sense of doubt and inevitability, like a condemned man dragging his heels on the way to the execution chamber, awaiting a reprieve that can never come. Pleading over the shoulder for intervention or at least attention. The last section of the triptych shows Dyer mirrored, Janus style, in profile like a face playing card in a deck. The bottom head seems burnt and distorted, bleeding a dark trail down to a circular blob, reminiscent of a full stop, a bloody bath drain or a bullet hole.

60 RFD 191 Fall 2022 Back Issue Sale! 20% off for Five or www.rfdmag.orgMore Advertise in RFD It really helps keep this magazine in production! We offer affordable rates and a growing subscriber base. If you have questions about advertising, please contact Bambi at submissions@rfdmag. org or visit our website at org/advertise.php.www.rfdmag. ONLINEREADRFDwww.rfdmag.org/back-issues.php Most Issues from the first to this one. Missing issues uploaded as we get to them.

Chances are, you’ve got feelings about gay bars. And even if you don’t, you probably have a good story about one. If you’ve got something to say about gay bars, RFD wants to hear it. And now’s not the time to be shy and stand by the wall. Last call: January 21, 2023. San Francisco listing from the Gayellow Pages, 1988. Photograph by Gaby Tenda.

The Spike. Ramrod. The Corner Pocket. JR’s. The Stud. CC’s. The A House. The Cock.

When it comes to well-known queer spaces, little can rival the dominance of gay bars. The first ones in the U.S. opened in the 1930s, and by the late 1980s, according to one estimate, the country was home to more than 1,700. And now? Between 2007 and 2019, some 37 percent of gay bars have closed—and that was before the coronavirus Allpandemic.ofwhich means, many of the places queer folks gathered in the past may no longer exist. But just because those spaces may be gone, it doesn’t mean our memories are. Maybe you worked in a gay bar as a barback or maybe you just worked the backroom. Maybe that’s where you performed an epic drag number that queens still talk about. Or maybe you detested gay bars because you felt ignored or unseen. Maybe you avoided them because you found it difficult, if not impossible, to enter a space that challenged your sobriety. Or maybe you think: Why would I miss those crummy hellholes when I’ve got Scruff?

Issue 193 / Spring 2023 GAY BAR Submission Deadline: January 21, 2023 www.rfdmag.org/upload

62 RFD 191 Fall 2022 a

queerreader-createdgayquarterlycelebratingdiversity