Issue 197 / Spring 2024
DO IT YOURSELF
Submission Deadline: February 15, 2024
www.rfdmag.org/upload
One of the core memories of RFD is its emphasis on self-reliance, finding one’s own way and working collectively to find solutions. As we click closer toward our fiftieth year, we ask you to consider ways you “do it yourself,” ways you learn skills, ways you transform yourself or react to a problem with ingenuity.
Many of us find ways to recreate skills lost to mechanization. We pick up crafts or skills in the garden or kitchen, and we manifest a fix-it yourself approach to things. Please consider sharing an acquired skill, a lost art, aW technique that helps you every day. WAlso, consider how we take up the task of “doing it ourselves” as part of a collective response to being part of the larger queer/LGBTQI+ community.
How have we learned to share in the task of collective response? How has the age old act of skill sharing spread to our political/social lives as we react to oppression, unjust laws and merely mean spirited people around us.
The art of doing it yourself is a way of saying, “doing it for one’s self” or one’s community. So dig into your toolkits, your recipe boxes, your crafts or skills and see how they apply to your personal life as well as the larger world. Show us the simple sign you created at an impromptu demonstration or how you come together to share ideas like organic gardening, timber framing, making jewelry, creating clothes, and making music.
Just do it for us! Share your stories, artwork and poetry as we explore the varied ways we do it for ourselves.
Jim Jackson timber framing at Faerie Camp Destiny.
Photo by Matt Bucy. Wood chip photo by Lignum Group (CC SA 3.0)
Red Frequency Drift
Between the Lines
Welcome to winter! As we all cozy up on the couch to settle in to read this issue about Queer Icons / Queer Iconography keep an open mind for the varied approaches people take to assigning value and significance to people, images and ourselves. We’re so appreciative of the reflection people put into this issue and we had an overabundance of submissions. We want to thank everyone's take on icons in our lives.
We include in this issue an interview about Michael Mason’s new book, In the Blood of My Ink. We hope everyone will consider buying this wonderful collection of poetry. Speaking of poetry, we had many poems submitted for this issue, we hope you enjoy them in all of the myriad ways the poets contemplated icons and imagery in their queer lives.
RFD flourishes with your interest and we’re gearing up for our fiftieth anniversary so please help out if you can. RFD turns fifty next year and we are reading all past RFDs to select ‘the best of” for our upcoming book and we need your help! We need more readers for the prose and poetry that has graced our pages these past fifty years. You can be part of the team determining what we print in this anniversary salute to our community and contributors. We offer as thanks a two year subscription to RFD. Are you free to read? If so, please contact Rosie Delicious at rosie@ rfdmag.org.
Meanwhile, the crew here in New England that put together the magazine hustled back from holiday fetes to work on this issue right after Thanksgiving. In a world of turmoil, war and struggle, we hope everyone was able to reach into their own sense of family or merely happy place to celebrate coming together even as we reflect on our heritage and histories.
From a chilly clear day in Vermont!
—the RFD Collective
Submission Deadlines
Spring–February
15, 2024
Summer–May 15, 2024
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.org.
RFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative lifestyles. 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 volunteers. 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# 0149709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, PMB 329, 351 Pleasant St., Ste B, Northampton, MA 01060-3998. Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD Press, PMB 329, 351
Pleasant St., Ste B, Northampton, MA 01060-3998. Non-profit tax exempt #62-1723644, a function of RFD Press, Inc., 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 RFD four times a year. First class mailed issues will be forwarded. Others will not. Send address changes to submissions@rfdmag.org or to our Northampton, MA address. Copyright © RFD Press, Inc. The records required by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and associated 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.
Production
Managing Editor: Bambi Gauthier
Production Editor: Matt Bucy
Visual Contributors Inside This Issue
Artwork not directly associated with an article. Front Cover "Smoking" by Gordon Binder
Cover "Horizontal" by Duncan Hilton
Hilton ................. Back Cover, 55
Vyse 11
Beach ..................... 31, 39, 58 Victorien Biet. 34
"Cherub" by Oscar Zamora Graves
Winter Gathering Fare
We will run a full gathering calendar in the Spring issue for the rest of 2024.
Dec 27, 2023 – Jan 1, 2024
The Billy’s, Upper Lake CA www.radfae.org
Dec 28, 2023 – Jan 1, 2024
Hail the New 2024 Easton Mountain, Greenwich NY www.eastonmountain.org
Jan 11 – 15, 2024
Bear Your Soul: Winter Hibernation Easton Mountain, Greenwich NY www.eastonmountain.org
Jan 12 – 14, 2024
Winter Meditation Gay Spirit Visions, Highland NC
gayspiritvisions.org
Jan 15 – 18, 2024
Queer Magic Winter Breitenbush OR www.radfae.org
Jan 18 – 28, 2024
Asian Faerie Gathering Koh Yao Yai, Thailand www.radfae.org
Feb 15 – 19, 2023
Breitenbush Gathering Breitenbush OR www.radfae.org
Feb 16 – 19, 2024
Winter Gay Spirit Camp Easton Mountain, Greenwich NY www.eastonmountain.org
"The GreenMan in Autumn" by Patrick Gracewood. Carved wood model for bronze fountain.
Pantaleon" by Dmitry Bitjukov. Watercolor.
In The Blood of My Ink: Michael Mason’s Poetic Legacy
An interview with Franklin Abbott and Billy Toth
RFD is thrilled to be able to publish Michael Mason’s In the Blood of My Ink. Michael’s poetry graced the pages of RFD and he was an early poetry editor as well. From his roots in North Carolina to his various homes in Florida, Washington DC, New York as well as Tennessee, he always brought his poetic vision and worked on producing work along the way. He shared his poetry in small newsletters, regional literary journals as well as in the pages of RFD itself. He also read his work aloud, which is helpful in reading his poetry. It was meant to be read aloud by a fire at a gathering or at a coffeehouse poetry reading. He was a poet but he also was a stonecutter who created many memorial stones while he was at Running Water that are now at Short Mountain. With the release of the book, we thought we would reach out to two people who knew Michael well to get their impressions of the book and of Michael’s legacy as a poet. Franklin Abbott was RFD’s poetry editor and knew Michael from gatherings as well as corresponding as friends and fellow poets. Billy Toth was Michael’s partner and witnessed Michael’s process of gathering together his poetry into a typed manuscript before he died from HIV in 1990. The typed manuscript was copied and shared with a few friends and with the intention that a chapbook would be produced. Then it lay dormant until the new RFD crew in New England came across it and worked with Charles Simpson to produce the book.
to print the book.
RFD: Franklin can you reflect on Michael’s poetry and his engagement with writing? It seems from the typed manuscript he left behind that he was prolific in writing poetry right up to the year of his passing; did he share his poetry and ideas with you?
Franklin: Michael and I met at the first Running Water gatherings in the late ‘70’s and we often read poetry in the heart circles. A third poet who read with us was Aurora Corona, a member of the Louisiana Sissies in Struggle. We were very different people and very different poets. Poetry flowed from Michael who was prolific in his writing. Many of his poems were published in RFD. Some were lyrical (he loved Joni Mitchell) and some were longer almost Ginsberg like rants. We saw each other many times at gatherings and always read together. He was a letter writer and there were always new poems in his frequent, thick letters.
RFD: Billy how did Michael come into your life? How was it like to be involved with such a creative force? Can you share anything about Michael’s process of working on his typed manuscript?
We are grateful to everyone who helped in the process most especially Charles Simpson, Billy Toth, the many hands who helped proof and lay out the book—Multiforme, Matt and Kwai. We also want to thank Michael’s family for allowing us
Billy: My memoir in the book tells how Michael and I met at Running Water. When I was in Michael’s company there was never a dull moment. He had an easy joyful laugh and loved drama— he was creative, curious, optimistic, stubborn, trusting, adventurous, and loving to the point of obsession.
Michael’s poems were his main obsession— writing them and toward the end organizing them—long hours into the night with coffee and cigarettes at hand.
RFD: Franklin what poems in the book stands out to you that our readers should read?
Franklin: “Yes” and “What Holds the Poem Inside.”
RFD: Billy did any poems that Michael produced stand out to you?
Billy: The poems “Manhattan” and “Unsoiled” capture the intensity of our relationship at a challenging time in both our lives—two high vibration lovers pulled in many directions in the maelstrom of NYC.
RFD: Franklin & Billy, I only met Michael once before he passed away. So I did not get to hear him read his poetry. What was it like to hear him read his work?
Franklin: He sang his poems. He had a mellifluous voice and quite a charismatic presence. All eyes and ears were on Michael when he read.
Billy: Michael was a natural performer and loved being the center of attention—his twinkling amazing blue eyes, deep sexy voice and animal magnetism made for very entertaining readings of his poems.
RFD: Michael’s poetry seems to surround a love of sound; he used a lot of words, which evoke a sound, as well as a word. He seems to be using his poetry to share his voice as a gay man. Can either of you talk about how his poetry as way for him to reflect his identity as a gay man?
RFD: Franklin—AIDS took a number of creative people from us, how does Michael fit into the pantheon of others like Essex Hemphill, Tim Dlugos, Walta Borawski, Assotto Saint, Steve Abbot and Paul Monette.
Franklin: It was and still is heartbreaking to think of all the creative gay men who were lost in the epidemic. Many, like Michael, died young while they were still developing their craft. I have great sorrow over what we lost in losing these voices and visions.
RFD: Billy, can you share your favorite moment with Michael?
Billy: My favorite moment with Michael? Was it when we first met at Running Water and fell hopelessly in lust? Or my first visit to Short Mountain and got to share his world and sleep in his bed? Or the march in DC when he came to live with me in NYC to share my world and sleep in my bed? Or when we had our wedding party at a gathering at SMS? Every moment with Michael was precious or maybe I only want to remember the joyful ones. RFD: Franklin is there anything that Michael shared with you that sticks with you?
Franklin: The Radical Faeries emerged in the late ‘70’s as a marvelous departure from “straight acting” conformity. Michael was not just gay but fey. His work is infused with his insistence on being gay and fey and one of a kind.
RFD: Billy, family was a large part of Michael’s identity, his roots in North Carolina and he worked on genealogy. Can you talk about how important family ties were to him?
Billy: He loved his family—His mother Mary and sisters Sheree & Tootsie in particular—he kept in close touch and talked about them often.
Franklin : We had lots of deep conversations; we were creating a new world as emerging Radical Faeries. Michael spoke not only in words but in stone. He, true to his name, was a stonemason. I remember one of his carvings from Running Water. It was a line from a Phoebe Snow song, “have mercy on those men with no feelings.” Michael was angry at times (lots of anger in his poetry) but was also terribly tender and compassionate. As with others I know who died young, I think he had an intimation that he might not live to be old so he lived fully, plumbing the depths and soaring to new heights. No one who knew him could ever forget him. Bringing him back to light with this new anthology is such a great gift.
Thank you RFD.
RFD: Thanks to you both for sharing your insights about Michael and his passionate voice in your lives.
Photograph by Billy Toth.
Yes
Yes, please, if you will. Yes.
Yes yes yes you yes yes.
Rest yes yes rest yes yes.
Yes yes yes yes.
Yes yes yes yes yes.
Yes, yet!
In fin knit yes-yes
Yes yes yes.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
Yes Yes! Yes. Yes? Yes.
Yes Yes.
Yes—most emphatically. Yes, and no doubt about it. Yes, and no stone not unturned. Yes, for all things.
All things come to those who yes.
Yes all things.
Say yes restively. Rest yessingly.
While resting also saying yes. Saw logs say yes.
Sew logs. So long. All sew saying Yes Yes. Logs.
Yes baby yes!
Live by the yes die by the yes. Yes yes yes.
Yes.
Yes. I said I said yes. Will see yes.
Will see yes in my office in ten minutes. Yes=a=rama.
Rest-a-rama-. Designated slots off interstates With marked yessing spaces. Rest in space.
The Great Anti-American Yes Off. The rest is up to you. Thank you!
YES!
What Holds The Poem Inside
The tongue forms curious Babylonic attempts at universal Terms unravelled; the mind sifts through Vocabularies and languages, weighing, Testing, discarding for a trimmer fit the Form expression can take. The eyes become a Literal door, looking outside and yet in. So deep there are no words to name These boundaries.
The hand holds a pen to make record of What the struggle really is: To word the deepest In the best way.
For the way to be made plain. The tongue clicks on in assessments As the mind arranges then changes again The outward form the words must take. Faced with the spirit and the raw desire To feel the impulse on ambrosia, What holds the poem inside is the struggle to And the inability of Stating in precise terms the soul’s decree Of that which is felt so strongly it can not Be denied, nor undersaid. What holds the poem inside Is only this.
Manhattan
Manhattan
You come off like a Sage who occupies the Street like a Stage, Begotten of our love and Rage.
The images fairly Switchblade Across the page: Slicing their way through. You are a city with no pity And no mercy. No innocence Rehearsing For a lead.
Manhattan, You feed off desperation And ambition. Your blood runs hot and
Cold in young and Bold measures of
Neglected circumstance
Betrayed in hollow eyes. The truth is on the Bowery No matter how he Might other be said. Peddlars and the peddlees Lean into doorways And vend their wares In darkness
Veiled in shadows In their heads.
You, City, steam up and broil On your nest of subways, you Alert me to your coming. Sirens on the night sky, And I am hearing it music Like song. Well-drawn-out, Xhaled with Xhuberance Of all your values. In the final dance
All of us will have the beat And keep it With our own feet Tapping Out our own time
In our own ways. You, City, you blister Like a hope on fire— And just as brightly. Manhattan, you breed men like me Who have come to dance This way.
Unsoiled
The clothes go around and round, Like all our lives, Billy. The driven air, the driven heat: This is a process like all The others.
You turn to me with a multitude Of possibilities In your eyes. And I wonder what you’re Thinking.
The dryer needs another quarter, Billy, Like our best defenses— Need another way to barricade.
Like silence piled on top of Silence, like troubled quiet Between us-like
Questions converging; I get changing views Of my blue jeans wrapped Around your flannel night shirt. I get a feel of What life can be like with you. Your ‘Hanes Classics’ and my ‘Fruit of the Looms’ Touched and intertwining. The silver in your hair, The almost-black of mine. Your wool socks and mine merely cotton. The dryer keeps up a frantic pace, Billy, And I am seeing All our lives twisting and tumbling. All our lives grasping and groping For meaning, together and apart. I am finding little islands Where I go to launder myself And my shadowed heart.
The dryer stops and I am wrinkled And hardly can I breathe. I need folding, I need ironing: I need more starch, I do believe. I need tender touch, but just as much I need heavy duty action. I seek a melding Without seam or division. All my buttons sewn on tight, Holding my flaps closed; And finding the Other inside, Unsoiled.
—Poems from In the Blood of My Ink, by Michael Mason, RFD Press, 2023. Available at https://a.co/d/h8bTcif.
Harry Hay—Queer Icon
by Dragonfly (Les K. Wright)
At the recent (2023) tenth anniversary Bear Your Soul gathering at Easton Mountain, I participated in a workshop led by Wildflower (Tyler Wansley) called “Queer Icons.” Wildflower asked us to think about who had been influential in our experience of being gay. The icon could be living or dead, of any gender or sex, real or fictional. And we were asked to explain how that icon had affected us.
I quickly made a list—Auntie Mame, Allan Bérubé, Edith Piaf, Audre Lorde, John Waters, Harry Hay. I ended up talking about my friend Allan Bérubé, primarily because he had been my mentor, demonstrating to me how to do grassroots history. That had been what guided me when I did the Bear History Project and edited two books on early gay bear history. My work remains seminal because, instead of sifting through materials and extracting what I thought was important, I had done the radical thing of “letting the natives speak for themselves.”
Wildflower spoke briefly about Harry, glad I had mentioned him. Wildflower gave a quick overview of Harry as the founder of the Mattachine Society and the father of gay liberation. I added to that the fact that Harry had been a card-carrying Communist and when the Mattachine Society broke with its original radical roots and switched to assimilationist politics, Harry distanced himself from them. Sadly, no one else in the workshop had ever heard of Harry. Harry himself had expressed deep regret the that gay people didn’t know their own history. (They still don’t.)
When I saw the call for “Queer Iconography/ Icons” in RFD I was still in the blissful afterglow of the Bear Your Soul heart space. I was rereading Will Roscoe’s Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of It Founder as the result of a conversation I had had with Billy Community elder Bill Blackburn about Harry’s concept of “subject-subject consciousness” and its manifestation in Billy space. I had experienced it again, in spades, at the Bear Your Soul gathering. This was all just as I had first experienced it at Radical Faerie gatherings. I recognized that Faeries, Billys, and (to coin a term) “spirit bears” are all part of the same tribe of Gay men Harry had engendered at the first Radical Raerie gathering convened in 1979.
Harry had an essentialist understanding of gay men--as having always existed. (“Essentialism” is a very bad thing in current Queer Theory thinking.) He understood us as a not-male-Hetero “third gender.” Our “third gender” defines us in terms of socially acquired roles and identities, not as a biological sex. (Here Harry anticipates today’s queer turn to socially constructed sex and gender identities.)
Harry conceived of us as a cultural minority, not merely a sexual minority, where what we do in bed is the only thing that sets us apart. We are a tribe with a unique way of perceiving the world, having unique gifts for and responsibilities to society as a whole. All this, Harry said, are things Western Judeo-Christian religion successfully obliterated for 2000 years. Ours is a “collective sexuality,” replacing dialectics, the law of the unity and conflict of binary opposites, such as Hetero-females and Heteromales.
Harry was a visionary whose Radical Faerie vision was of an international network of Gay men involved in spirituality and the grassroots politics of community- and consensus-building for broad social change. Indeed, Harry saw us as playing a integral role in society. Gay consciousness is a multidimensional consciousness not conveyable to “Hetero-male-evolved two-dimensional, or Binary, language.” Harry wedded together the political with the spiritual.
Faeries are not a “movement,” in Harry’s words, but a “development.” Our consciousness is “spiritual consciousness” and we “enjoy each other’s enjoyment.” Faerie space, and by extension, Billy space and spirit bear space, is spiritual space for our community of love and compassion, where we listen without judgement, share with each other in “great respect and affection.” In our space we embrace the goodness, rightness, and beauty of ourselves. We wrestle with “interpretive questions to be judged in terms of the ethics of the world we now live in.” We are Mediators between the seen and the unseen, the make-believe and the real, the Spirit and the flesh. We experience life with awe and wonder. Our sexuality is a gateway to Spirit.
Harry remained a radical to the end, never willing to accept how gay and lesbian history has been made to confirm to a “neat closet-to-liberation,
accommodationist-to-activist, homophile-to-gay model that ignores the radical roots of early the Mattachine society days.” He once wrote, “What passes for ‘theory’ today–clever essays in arcane terminology with the word ‘Queer’ in the title—rarely offers points of articulation with daily life struggles.” For me, Harry bridges the gap in my life between the world of academic thought experiments and the lived reality of my Gay life. After a long, circuitous path, I eventually found my way home to what I had
been missing along the way—the spiritual dimension of my Gay existence and the existence of a Gay spiritual community. This is also the necessary ingredient I have found missing in assimilationist identity politics, middle-class materialist values of “success,” and academic theorizing. As the adage in 12-Step programs, where I had my spiritual awakening, puts it, “This is a million-dollar [spiritual] Program, and most people are willing to settle for nickels and dimes.”
"In the Pink," by Richard Vyse.
Uncle Sydney
by Allen Klein
It was that Saturday. The one where my father would drive us to see Uncle Sydney.
It didn’t happen often. Maybe three or four times a year, maybe even less. I don’t really remember since I was only seven. I think he lived in New Jersey but, again, I don’t really know. All I know is that it took about an hour-and-a-half to get there.
There was a big gate with a guard to let us in. As we entered, directly in front of us was a block-long four-story brick building. All the windows had vertical metal bars on them. Some had people looking through the bars silently staring into space; a few had people violently shaking them while screaming through the openings.
I never asked why the windows were barred or what the people were screaming about. It was years later that I learned.
As soon as we entered the building, I saw Uncle Sydney seated at a long table with some papers and pens on it. I ran over to him, got a great big hug and a kiss that he would always give me on the cheek. His kiss made a kind of whistling sound which made me laugh. He also had a slight lisp, which amused me.
All though not apparent when seated, Uncle Sydney was very tall when he stood up. An imposing handsome figure with slicked back black hair. He was always well dressed, looking perhaps like some swashbuckling hero from some 1930’s movie.
I liked visiting him because it was fun. He always bought me an ice cream. Sometimes we would go bowling. Often, he would show me the colorful posters he made that were hanging in the main hall lobby. Some pointed the way to the bowling alley, others showing what events would be coming up, or what the rules and regulations were. I didn’t understand what they said but I really liked the drawings he did.
After an hour, or so, we would leave as Uncle Sydney continued sitting at the long table in the lobby checking people into the building who were visiting a family member or friend.
Years later, I found out the building was an insane asylum. I was told that the reason Uncle Sydney was there was that he was engaged to be married, that he broke it off, and soon after tried to commit suicide. Apparently at the time, being incarcerated was what happened to anyone who tried to take their own life.
When I was dealing with my own gayness, I asked my mom and my cousin Bernice, if Uncle Sydney was gay. Mom was his sister and Bernice was his niece. Since she was nine years older than I am, I thought she might know more about him than I did. But they both denied it.
I, on the other hand, disagreed. He had, after all, many of what society sometimes thinks of as the earmarks of someone who is a homosexual. He was artistic. He was tall, handsome, and well dressed. He also liked to wear costumes to parties. The few photos I have of him are from the twenty’s costume balls. And, to top it all off, he had a lisp.
Whether Uncle Sydney was gay or not, I will never know for sure. My heart tells me that he was. My heart is also saddened knowing that it caused him to attempt suicide and be incarcerated for life for it.
Mixed with my sadness is gratitude. I am grateful for his creative talent which validated my own and led me on a path to become a scenic designer. I am also thankful that he was part of my family and for being part of my gay heritage.
Uncle Sydney no longer lives in a building with barred windows. He now lives within me as I carry his memory, and his spirit, around with me every day.
Assotto Saint As Icon
by Franklin Abbott
Before the ascent of RuPaul and Billy Porter there was a performance poet living in New York City who went by the name Assotto Saint. His name was Yves Lubin and he immigrated to the US from Haiti as a teenager. Beautiful and brilliant as a writer, performer, editor and organizer, Saint was very well known in New York’s queer community. He was part of the Other Countries Collective that encouraged Black Gay Men to write and publish. He was a presence at many events including funerals of gay friends who died from AIDS and were being lied about at their funerals. Assotto would stand up and call out the lie. Saint was gender fluid before we had the term. With his partner, Jan Holgrem, he founded the band Xotica and their performances could be outrageous. Saint was as comfortable in leather or lace and often wore a little of both. Jan died in 1993 from AIDS. Assotto/Yves died a year later at the age of thirty six. Sacred Spells: Collected Works, edited by Michele Karlsberg was published this year by Nightboat Press (ISBN: 9781643621562).
Hosanna for reverend Charles angel, jr
birds of a feather coo spread their wings at the edge of the world they soar stetching themselves to god
—Assotto Saint
Publicity photo of Assotto Saint.
The Sims
by Eric P. Mueller
A life-size cardboard cutout of a gay attorney placed outside the athletic trainer’s office haunted my physical therapy sessions. Not the full 5’11 it was supposed to be, but at long last, a gay man had crawled out of my computer screen and started haunting me on my college campus midway through my endeavor to walk (and, hopefully, play football) again.
He looked familiar because I’d seen his picture online. His name was Brian K. Sims, and was set to speak on campus as a part of the Year of Global Citizenship. Today, Sims is known for being an active figure in politics for the Democratic Party and Pennsylvania. Back then, he was a lawyer in Philly known mostly for an article written about him on Outsports.com.
Imagine being a gay, closeted football player just putting the pieces together in college. Now, imagine the existential crisis that one might go through upon finding out one of the few known out gay football players was stopping by your campus.
The 2009 article is titled “Former College Captain Was Openly Gay.” It’s safe to say I was looking for porn when I found it. I didn’t read the piece at first, I looked at the pictures, loved that he wore crop top shirts. He looked like a linebacker, but I was surprised to see he played defensive line later—ironically the biggest bullies on the field. Something about him, maybe his sexuality, said “linebacker” to me.
Had I not injured myself at the time or felt more at ease at home, maybe I too would have been secretly hooking up with guys at the time. I wasn’t ready.
Physical therapy forced me to keep crossing paths with the cutout. It was with the athletic trainer in the campus gym, right next to the weight room. That offseason was like no other of my knee injury. My knee ligaments were plucked in half like the strings on a harp after a harsh strum. The Athletic Department funded the event along with several student organizations. Sims was speaking at colleges in the area, most likely priming and practicing for political greatness.
This was the height of “It Gets Better” activism. Queer suicide was all over the media, and people were just trying to do…something. My adult self
thinks it’s great that they brought in a gay man who worked a white-collar career as opposed to service industry jobs, nightclub gigs, and other aspects of gay life that feel redundant.
He was speaking at the campus center auditorium, our biggest stage. No wonder they were promoting it so much. they wanted to fill as many seats as possible. This was on March 7, a few weeks before Spring Break. At school, winter started in October, by March, the campus had been a stained white blanket for five months. I was cold and feeling alone.
My differences from the team were becoming clearer to me. College football was the first time I ever had people my height and weight to cohabitate and coexist with. With the team, I felt at ease physically. I didn’t drawf anyone and while I was still one of the heaviest, it wasn’t a drastic difference. But I didn’t like the same things they did—girls, shooter games, sports stats, and girls.
Falling deeper into my English courses, I found myself saying things like, “wow, all these blockbuster ‘epics,’ I want to see a live action Paradise Lost,” and no one would know what I mean. I preferred scripted TV series to watching sports over and over, learning all the different names and numbers. And by scripted TV I mean the best queer trash: Glee, Gossip Girl, weird anime like Gundam Seed or .Hack//Sign.
To feel less alone I logged into online dating sites focused toward bigger men. The gay world, like the English Department, preferred skinny and muscular men, but there were some who liked and celebrated human beef and all sorts of sizes. I connected with hundreds of people who were thousands of miles away. That’s how common I thought we were.
Then, this piece of cardboard has the nerve to start popping up and making me feel threatened? By this point, I knew I was gay, but had no idea how to reconcile that with the life I’d built for myself. Some people would not give a fuck what I was, but I know that some of them did. I wanted to feel safe, I wanted to feel wanted. I wanted to feel like I was part of something greater, the way football made me feel. I was more worried about my dying father than my own sexuality at that point. How much insult to injury would it be to learn your only son is gay while
on your deathbed?
While I was not ready for the “point of no return” that I could only see coming out as, I knew enough that I had to go to see him speak. A real gay football player, in the flesh. Sure he was handsome, but I wasn’t longing to sing promiscuous Nicki Minaj verses at him the way I wanted to do with other football players at the time like Tim Tebow or J.J. Watt. It felt like I knew him already. Guys I played with felt more like brothers than lovers, and his vibe was more home team than away. This hasn’t changed since I’ve watched him grow into a prominent figure in politics and as an LGBTQ icon.
There was food outside of it, coffee containers and grocery store quality cookies. None of it was opened, so it must have been for after the talk. I wondered if I’d make it that long or if I’d dip out early.
The auditorium was dark and I could pick a nice back row to sit in. The chairs were small. My basketball shorts rode up my legs and my love handles made themselves at home underneath both armrests, peaking out of the bottom of my sweatshirt. No one sat near me and I hardly recognized anyone there. That doesn’t mean that no one recognized me. A body as big as mine had proportions that are so unique and custom that I never really had the privilege of being discreet while I was in the closet. It was all or nothing.
In the dark, open room, I could not distinguish all of the young petite brunette women and skinny hipster boys looked like a Where’s Waldo that’s full of Waldo’s and you have to find the Waldo with the missing shoe.
There was such vulnerability in my attendance of this. I was prepared to say, “oh, my thesis advisor encouraged me to go. It’ll help me write better.” Or use my academic advisor as an excuse, she had a rainbow sticker that said “safe space” on her door years before the ‘Safe spaces on college campuses” debates started up. But I knew that I had to be there, if not I would have regretted it forever.
I had my own row, close to the back. The auditorium wasn’t a full house, but was impressively filled for a weeknight toward the end of the year. In front of me, another guy had his own row and was talking to the guy in his row one up. One of them mentioned that they were an RA and were using this to meet the quota of community events they had to do each semester. Forced filled seats.
It felt like I was risking my life by being there. I was already weird, out of shape, not thriving
academically or professionally. I could have run into someone I met online. Talking to faceless profiles based on geographic proximity, anyone you walk passed on the street could be the person you’ve been talking to online. Being gay was still risky in the 2010s, but the risks one took to pursue their truth were starting to shift. What if someone from the internet recognized me?
On stage, the same one that Bobby Kennedy and Michael Pollen gave campus-wide talks on, Sims introduced himself and went over the basic points of his story outline in the sports article. He secretly hooked up with men, including like, a track player or something. This felt like a betrayal to football players, to not hook up with our own kind, but I don’t think I could ever hook up with a teammate, they felt like brothers. But, had I made an All-State team, it would be a different story. He first came out to his friend during a party-heavy weekend that involved mud wrestling. Someone asked him, “Sims, you gay?” He said, yeah, thanks for asking, and hit himself over the head with his microphone.
He mentioned he lived with all offensive linemen. He referred to the position grouping as “the island of misfit toys.” I took offense to this, but knew where he was coming from. I was an offensive lineman living with defensive backs, I didn’t think I could get away with anything, but linemen kind of expect each other to be weird.
The reaction to the Outsports was what was most interesting to me. He mentioned that as soon as the article was published, his Blackberry’s inbox had stuffed to the brim with two different types of messages. One was simply, ‘hey, read you’re story, great stuff. By the way, you’re very cute.” What Sims was not expecting was to connect with people who had similar experiences. He even cited one wrestler who sent him a long, multi-page email about being closeted and not knowing what to do. He concluded his email with, “I just emailed my article to my parents.” I felt like a bad person for not finding this courage. Even after learning that I could do such an act of bravery, I chose to come out in my own, quiet little way. Nothing wrong with that, but this is an instance where I wish was bolder, forthcoming, and fearless. It makes ripping off the band aid much easier, at least in most cases.
At one point, he asked if there were any football players there that night. I did not see any of them but I saw one hand go up. It was Max, a tight end. I was shocked to find my hand raised, only halfway. It
felt like every eye was on me, looking for more than one other hand. I’m not even sure if Brian saw me.
Sims segued into his life as a lawyer, that worked in statistics, that’s why he was there today. As an example, he mentioned that after 1995, the number of mixed-race babies born in the U.S. went up exponentially. Another stat that’s changed exponentially? The public’s opinion of anything related to the word “gay.” We weren’t even a decade out of a Presidential election that George Bush II won because the American public did not approve of gay marriage.
The difference, he said, was us. He pointed at the audience. We were the catalyst that was going to change the future. Sims mentioned that we were the first known generation to really have friends and relatives that were out and lived as gay. He asked for another show of hands: how many people in the room had a gay friend or family member?
I had to think hard. All the gay people I knew of in high school all did theater. That department was led by the Latin teacher, a man who may not have exceeded five feet in length and notoriously disliked football players. I never felt welcome, and felt a cathartic release upon learning that Latin doesn’t actually help many people with their SATs, it’s just aesthetics at this point. I only associated with football players in college, none of which were out to be at the time. My dad did mention that after my grandparents died and their house was lost, a bunch of magazines with naked men were found in my uncle’s old bedroom. He said not to bring that up to my mom, who refused to discuss or acknowledge the potential of his queer identity, a monster in the closet.
Almost every hand in that auditorium was raised. I put my hand halfway up by the time he said, “if you don’t have any gay friends, ask yourself why.” He didn’t sound mean but I felt scolded.
My brain flashed again to a party from that last fall when I was still on my crutches. A friend from the area held a party at the off campus apartment he lived in, brought his high school friends out that night. One of them was blonde, kind of reminded me of a bulldog. Kept going on and on about how cool I was. Eventually, we ended up in the kitchen by ourselves. He asked how much I weighed, went on about my coolness a few inches from my face. The dude was blonde, reminded me of a pitbull. There’s no way I can reenter the memory without the utmost certainty that he was flirting with me. When I mentioned it to Drew, he chuckled when he said his name. A bunch of twenty one year olds said they were going to the bar and could get everyone in
but me. I wanted to die that night, too.
Little did I know that in a few months, one of my teammates would try to kiss me in the basement at a party. A few weeks after, another teammate tried doing the same. There were so many chances to cross this line in the sand but I didn’t know how to overcome the fear I couldn’t let go of.
At one point, in the Q and A section, he mentioned almost losing his ear in a football game, and that he’d talk more about that during the reception after. I so wish I had the courage to wait around and shake the man’s hand. Following him on social media during the politically volatile 2015 and onward would have to become the next best thing.
I was so ready to come out, move forward, and be another circle in the ripples of change that were happening around us. Sims is not a motivational speaker, but I felt challenged and compelled. At least, until Spring Break.
What awaited me in my hometown? Death and nautical imagery. It was nice to have me around for a week because I could drive my dad to and from chemo sessions. He said I would be bored if I stayed there for a long time, and I can take a hint, so I’d just get a sandwich and park in a lot that had an overlook of Long Island Sound where I could be sad.
I did go on a date that break, with the newfound urgency from Brian Sims. This dude on one of a bear-focused dating site went to school about forty five minutes from my family’s home. Mr. Perfect never thought he’d meet another college athlete, but he found me, and I was a bear. He loved bears.
It did not take long to get jealous of him. This guy was perfect in every way I was not—he was from California and went to a prep school that cost more than my college, excelled at the sport he played and even went on to play it semi-professionally, was out to his family, had a healthy father, and already had a boyfriend.
With no idea of what to actually do on a date with a guy, we went to get a sandwich and looked at the water. He asked me something along the lines of, “is this…all you do?” I was discouraged. Maybe if I was actually good at my sport like Mr. Perfect and Brian Sims, had I gotten into good enough shape that I wouldn’t have hurt my leg, I too could be an inspiration, or, at least, appear to be living a happy and fulfilling life.
Coming out would be a slow process for me. One toe in the water at a time, nearly walking on the surface until finally submerged myself. Of the boulders I pushed up the hill every day, my under-
cover gayness and fear of coming across gay was one of the heaviest, especially since it was optional. My deep voice aiding and betraying my cause every step of the way.
Later that semester, I’d see Max. He asked what I thought of that talk. What talk? The gay one. I said it was okay, my thesis advisor really wanted me to go. We never discussed the matter further, he left the college after the first semester of our senior year.
I wish I had the courage to send a book-length email to Brian Sims when I learned about his article. It never occurred to me that I still could, that would just be copying. I wish I was kinder to myself. It’s so
hard to move forward when you’re the one paving paths
Sims went on to skyrocket to political infamy, becoming an even more visible influence beyond the identity of a gay football player. I’m not quite there yet, in part because people look at me and say, “you must have played sports. Wrestling? Football?” But also in part because you can still hold on to something, even with a gripless latch. What comes forth from the soreness of holding is a simple reminder to take action. Nothing can so often be the worst thing, and everyone deserves more than that.
Tiresiasif you cum upon two snakes copulating off a mountain trail you might find yourself transgendered and if years later you cum upon some more you may find yourself wiser and still trans
—Lupine Cottontail
My Queer Icon
by Gordon Binder
Many years ago, the late 50s, in the fourth and fifth grades in a northeast Philadelphia neighborhood, a number of friends from school lived nearby. We’d hang out together, play games, ride bikes, shoot the breeze. Out of custom and culture at the time, in decent weather we’d be wearing blue jeans or shorts and white T-shirts. In the mid 60s well into the 70s, black, grey, the full spectrum of color T-shirts became widely popular, many emblazoned with logos, slogans, images, and so on. Ever so today.
As I started going to gay bars and clubs in the
early 70s, in Washington, San Francisco, Chicago, New York (the Saint for sure!), from time to time in the crowd I’d see guys in blue jeans or shorts and plain white T-shirts. I’d think, WOW, HOW ICONIC!
As I get on in years, in bars, cafes, on the street, I occasionally see cute gay men, some straight guys too, in jeans or shorts and well-fitting plain white T-shirts. Today, it’s not just how iconic, I’m thinking, it’s SEXY BOY DRAG! I get a real charge out of the look, my queer icon. See my artworks for some of what gets me going.
"Bar Scene" by Gordon Binder. Oil painting with collage.
"Young Lovers" by Gordon Binder. oil painting.
"Boys at the Bar JRs" by Gordon Binder. Oil painting.
The Kiss
by Jeff Marsh
It all started when Nick and A.J. decided to meet for a meet and greet with hopes of an evening of no strings attached fun fueled by lots of Viagra and a healthy dose of low self-esteem. A.J. was in town on business, staying at the Colony Square Hotel, Atlanta, and Nick, a cut above southern gentleman was making an exception to A.J.’s naughty invitation.
Nick walked into the lobby where A.J. was waiting and politely extended his hand. A.J. immediately felt an attraction and intuition told him there is more to this. He was taken back. He wanted more from this interaction than a quicky. Nick’s polished disposition commanded attention and respect. AJ was out of his league.
Nick suggested a walk and A.J. jumped on it, no pun intended. As they made it down the steps leading to Piedmont Park, A.J. took Nick’s arm. Nick pulled A.J. close to him. To A.J., it was a brightlight surreal moment that would stick in his mind forever. He was unexpectedly humbled and felt like a gentleman.
Small talk was simple yet intoxicating. The only priority was to turn the world off and stay in the moment.
It goes without saying that when two gay men interested in each other see a gazebo on a lake, that’s where they’re going. As they crossed the bridge, A.J. didn’t know whether to have a panic attack, pee in his pants, or stop talking. Out of the ordinary for free spirited A.J. It was always a good thing for
A.J. to stop talking and luckily, he made the right choice. The chatter in his head was off the chart yet he managed to envision the two of them resting in God. Where did this thought come from? What happened to the joyful anticipation of debauchery? This was not a Silver Daddies moment.
Just like in a sappy movie, they turned to each other without losing eye-contact. It was the first second in what would be a forever adventure. There was tantric emotion flowing thru them from lifetimes lived, past, present, and future that made these two extraordinary men who they are.
The intense energy around them created what seemed like Glenda’s s bubble. If anyone happened to notice they would see reflections of calm water, vivid expression of sunset, and lights from the towers waking up for nighttime bouncing off the imaginary sphere. What they wouldn’t see is guardian angels ascending upon the two men, wrapping their wings around A.J. and Nick to protect spiritual and sensual intimacy.
Then the kiss. The five-minute kiss that would tell these soulmates everything they need to know. Their trembling elevated passion from the masculine and feminine chambers of the soul that God has blessed us with, and the part of heart that we keep for ourselves. Sounds corny? I guess it would if you were expecting a different type of happy ending. Instead, it was a lifetime lived in a once in a lifetime first kiss.
The Psychedelic Art of Ralph Hall
by Ian Young
New York City in the 1970’s was not at its best. Its public services were rackety, its parks neglected, its subways dangerous and covered with unattractive graffiti. But for gay men, it was a time of emergence, enjoyment and hope. The Stonewall rebellion of 1969 heralded an upsurge of gay visibility, especially in the visual arts, literature and theater. Gay art galleries sprang up, gay cinemas and bookshops, and professional theaters like TOSOS and The Glines.
In those days, Christopher Street was the heart of the “gay village,” vividly chronicled by novelist and playwright Wallace Hamilton in his book Christopher and Gay. On any evening the street would be alive with gay men, cruising, shopping, bar-hopping and hanging out. Specialty stores catered to gay men and bars like Peter Rabbit, Ty’s and Boots & Saddles were crowded every night. Around the corner on West Street, the Ramrod served the “leather & Western” interests. If you joined the throng, you might well come across a tall, lanky, long-haired hippie with a sweet, mischievous smile and friendly manner, sitting on the curb with a stack of brightly colored mimeographed magazines with names like Gay Post, Faggots and Faggotry and Ain’t It the Truth, sold cheaply or given away to interested passers-by. This was Ralph Hall who with his lover and partner Bob “Flash” Storm and a small gang of helpers, produced the striking, home-made publications with the aid of an electric stencil-maker, colored inks and a hand-cranked mimeograph machine.
The magazines were gaudy, funny, iconoclastic and probingly critical not only of the authori-
ties but also of the emerging gay establishment, the “gaycrats” like the Rockefeller-funded Bruce Voeller and the National Gay Task Force who the anarchistic Gay Post gang regarded as elitist and racist, professional self-promoters, pushing aside those who most needed help – gay youth, Blacks, drag queens, the poor, the homeless and prisoners. (Flash was a regular visitor to the notorious “Tombs” on Riker’s Island). The group also sponsored various unauthorized events like the Gay Walk for Freedom, a counter-cultural alternative to the Mafia-dominated Christopher Street Parade.
The home-made magazines were the most most visible and striking feature of the Gay Post group. Edited by Flash Storm, they exposed otherwise-ignored scandals like the highly suspicious burning of the Gay Activist Alliance Firehouse, and were always adorned with Ralph Hall’s astonishing artwork. Years before the street art of SAMO, Wojnarowicz and Haring, Ralph’s unique drawings, decorating magazines, posters and flyers, brought beauty, humor and color to the city streets. The magazines were distributed by hand and mailed free of charge to prisoners (though many were rejected by prison authorities). Allen Ginsberg, Harvey Fierstein and J.Z. Eglinton, author of the classic Greek Love, were among the contributors.
Ralph had no formal training. Always poor, he often had trouble buying supplies. He made the most of the materials at hand, inking colors inside the drum of the Gestetner machine to created rainbow effects, something no one had done
Ralph Hall, photo by Ian Young.
before. Involved in the gay movement from the beginning, Ralph participated in the Stonewall riots and helped form the Gay Liberation Front. But the Gay Post group were often refused admission to organized gay meetings and events. “Maybe,” Flash suggested, “they thought we’d eat all the hors d’oevres!”
Both Ralph and Flash were involved in theater and in 1978, Ralph won a Village Voice Obie award for his theatrical designs for the Donald L. Brooks production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His art also appeared in RFD, Fag Rag, The Body Politic, Gay Community News and several poetry chapbooks including the classic The Divas of Sheridan Square by “Jimmy Centola” (Jimmy Camicia). Like so many gay men of those days, Ralph Hall contracted AIDS. In his last years he moved to Florida where he died in 1988 at the age of forty three. He was survived by Bob Storm who died in 1997.
The psychedelic art of Ralph Hall is an elusive reminder of the talent, the commitment – and the sheer fun – of the hopeful Gay Liberation years of the Seventies, after Stonewall, before AIDS.
Artwork by Ralph Hall, clockwise from top: Gaywalk For Freedom poster (1977); Standing Nude; Floating man (study for a mural).
VeronicaMother’s hands measured wide, fingers thick with excuses. She aimed at the needle’s elusive eye with saliva-stiffened thread, DNA sewn into the hem of every dress I wore.
She accompanied me in stitches, while I spun my feminist critique of her sad, embarrassed marriage. Her shoulders slumped, her lungs chary of breath from cigarettes and implausible explanations.
Still she sat in later years for photographs amid a democracy of sagging sofas and misaligned chairs, ethereal as Eleanor Roosevelt, optimistic.
She had repaired the damage to her simple canvas, with me to bear the “V” for Veronica— her patron saint, her awkward mark.
—Kae Chatman
The 12th Station of the Cross
by Agat & Chicken
This project began after a conversation I had with someone, who got me thinking about death as an orgasm. Especially Jesus’s death, who at the moment of passing shook the earth, split rocks, and tore open the curtain inside the temple. This language in Matthew describing Jesus’s death such as cried, breathed, loud, shook, opened, etc. could easily being describing an orgasm. Like an orgasm, Jesus’s death comes after a buildup of tension inside his body finally arriving at its moment of release. “Released” was a physical exploration that asks us to visualize the twelfth station as synonymous with orgasmic release.
The body in these images is not meant to be Jesus. Rather, I wanted to visualize the moment of Jesus’s death in our bodies, a queer body feeling pleasure. Hence the literal projection of many Jesuses onto the model. With help from myself, the model explored feelings of pleasure, tension, and release, while keeping in mind the shape and quality of the image or images being projected. The images being projected were meant to remind viewers of the
countless times this image has come before them. I wanted to ground their gaze in the familiar, while showing them something unfamiliar and intimate.
The use of light allowed us to see different feelings of this release. The red offers a more intense feeling, reminiscent of being inside a dungeon or a BDSM club. Green keeps us cooler and in a calmer state. The question about color became “what kind of feeling do we often see in Jesus’s final release?” and “what colors represent the feeling that the Son of God felt when he took his last breath?” The lighting was the first element we had for this project, as I knew I wanted to implement shadows. The shadows became a way to explore the visual of one’s spirit leaving their body at the time of death or the time of an orgasm. The shadows helped decide the angle of each shot.
This image series began by asking “how do shadows and light help us to discover something new about the twelfth station?” and “how can we use our own bodies to make those discoveries.” There are more images if anyone is interested.
Screaming Queen and Drag as an Icon
by Jim Jackson
When I was beginning to be aware I was gay, I was not comfortable with effeminate men. This was pre-Stonewall. Drag queens were a turn off and an embarrassment. Then in the 1970s, after the gay liberation movement began in earnest, I watched the dramatization of Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant on PBS. Crisp’s moving story about his gender non-conforming gay life in England helped me be more understanding of truly queer people. I grew to appreciate the guts it took to live an authentic life when the dominant culture stood against you. Personally, I never had an urge to cross-dress. My mother ruined that for me when I was a teenager. I needed a Halloween costume for our Baptist Church youth party. As I didn’t have any good ideas, she suggested I go as a girl. She did such a fine job dressing and making me up that when I arrived at the party I passed as female. I was horribly embarrassed and just sat in an out-of-theway corner. Years later I tried drag once or twice at a Faerie gathering in my forties, though it felt totally false to me.
So drag wasn’t for me. Still, I did enjoy others doing drag and putting on shows and joining parades. I really grew to appreciate what drag meant to the LGBTQ+ revolution and the power behind it all…. like Marsha P. Johnson at Stonewall and Divine in John Waters’s films. When I finally began taking painting seriously back in the 80’s, I wanted to use the experiences of my own life to tell stories with the paint and canvas. I made a number of fantasized drag queen paintings in my rough and ready expressionist style. Sometimes I cut gashes and holes into the canvas to reveal a second canvas behind, in order to draw attention to certain parts of the work such as painted nails, lips and eyes. My intention was to
create a sense of mystery and curiosity as well as to maximize the drama. The Screaming Queen was one of my favorites of the series. I showed slides of those paintings at a Harvard Square Adult Education Center in Cambridge, MA. The show was titled “Coming Out to My Art.” Surprisingly, in 1988 it got a standing room only turnout in the small lecture room.
When the original Faerie circles started in the Boston area, one of the first gay men I met was Bruce Goldstein. We went to the first gatherings together at Blue Heron Farm and were involved in a number of local gay events. He once modeled nude for me for a small sculpture inspired by the classic image of Pan playing a recorder. He appreciated what I was doing artistically and bought the Screaming Queen from an open studio show. His purchase was the only one of the drag queen series to sell. Over time, Bruce moved out to the Berkshire Mountains and my partner Jay and I moved to Vermont. We did not see Bruce and his partner Cliff very often. Sadly, a few years ago Bruce was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He offered the painting back to me and I went to pick it up in one of our last meetings together. I was sad that neither he nor Cliff wanted to keep it but was delighted to see it again and currently have it hanging in our dining area. I deeply grieved Bruce’s passing and the painting has evolved to have even more meaning for me as it illustrates my own need to scream.
Ok, yes, there is the very famous Scream by Edvard Munch which might have been an influence, but I have no memory of being conscious of it when I did the Screaming Queen. After all, there is plenty to scream about under the cloud of gender conformity.
Leaving Berlin
“…it is a city with no virgins.” —Stephen Spender, The Temple: A Novel.
I have always left Berlin believing I’ll return, have stayed and never lived, sexed but never loved. I have always known my way— could always find men in the Tiergarten as long as I could find the Lion Bridge, gateway to that world where, if you drop to your knees and stay still in the late Prussian darkness, fuzzy, furry body parts might appear, brush your cheeks or stop for a brief, breathless … snap— as you reach to grasp the urgency, the immediacy of working class youth looking for the chance to cage another meal or buy some cigarettes.
My last visit, German rusty, told the bridge is gone, I spent an upright afternoon in the park, so much of life, the many men, behind me. Yet when I closed my eyes a second or two, the Weimar sounds of Isherwood’s Berlin— all those boys—returned.
This trip I left them there as memories, took only my rucksack, a book or two of history, and headed home, wherever that might be.
—D.
Scott Humphries
Anal Iconography
by Frater Guaiferius
On the horizon of post-human sexual democracy we find the anus, an orgasmic cavity and nonreproductive receptor muscle, shared by all…The anus is a bioport. It is not simply a symbol or a metaphor, but an insertion port through which one body is left open and exposed to another or others.
—Paul Beatriz Preciado, from Terror Anal (translated from the Spanish by HRS)
The anus is the most democratic of all organs –every animal species necessarily has one. It’s also a supremely versatile organ, which nature has put to a multiplicity of clever uses. In birds it’s called a “cloaca” (or “clacker” in the vulgar tongue), which is used not just for voiding piss and shit but also for sex and reproduction.
Quite aside from its biological role, the anus also plays a part in mating and dominance displays, so it has an “atavistic aesthetic” that is missed when humans focus on its function of expelling waste. Think
of the peacock, who turns his pretty white feathery bum to any bird of his kind who might be courting him, so that they feel free to approach. Then, when the moment is right, he turns to face them, tail spread. It’s an image of Zeus revealing his true form to Semele (with fatal consequences), or Krishna putting on a similar act for Arjuna (who survived).
It’s hard to know why the connection between the peacock and the anus is so widespread. The poet Vik Shirley has written a classic ode devoted to the subject, entitled “On the Rectum of Peacocks”. This extract gives you a sense of the (w)hole.
Peacocks have one rectum in common which they pass among them from peacock to peacock like a relay baton. Some people think that talent is like that but it isn’t. Talent is not like the butt-baton of peacocks. Any community has a surplus of talent and is unlike the community of peacocks which has an insufficiency of rectums.
There’s a point here, but it’s not necessarily a
biological factoid.
Preciado calls the anus a “post-identitarian organ”, which gives a nice feel for its universality among our fellow creatures on the planet, and this is one of many reasons for “identifying” with every individual among them. This concept of planetary democracy is revolutionary in its potential for restoring equitable relationships between our species and others.
In certain ritual traditions, veneration is given to the image of a specific part of the body that can be invoked for guidance or protection, typically the head, the hand and the penis. These are, of course, the organs through which humans “control” the world. But to make such an icon of the anus would imply quite the reverse. It is that bioport over which, one is obliged to admit, one’s control of what exits and what enters is very limited.
Civilization implies maximising control of the anus – a syndrome that could well be at the root of the global lunacy we’re currently experiencing. There are times when the gales of history are blowing so hard the only smart thing you can do is give up control and trust in the power of . . . your anus?
But how to symbolize what is basically just a hole, a gap, an emptiness? The “black sun” suggests itself, of course. But this is too static a symbol, especially when the anus is such an animated organ (with musical connotations, even). There’s something about its positioning at the end of the digestive tract that suggests the mouth of an upsidedown snake. It doesn’t have any literal fangs, but it can be a dangerous beast even without them, with a mind of its own.
The phallus of Shiva is sometimes used as a symbol of “infinity” – but the phallus, like the digestive tract, is just a tube, with an inside and an outside. Shiva’s association with snakes, which twist and turn like the colon, suggests a different image for “eternity” – that is, as a never-ending Möbius tube through which time or history passes.
At the same time, this serpentine tube is the “axis of the world”, so it must have two “poles”. Astrologically, the north celestial pole is a dog, and the south celestial pole is a hydrus-peacock. But if we go beyond this three-dimensional image, the tube becomes circular, since the poles eventually meet. When this “universal reconciliation” happens, it often takes the symbolic form of the uroboros – the snake that “bites its own tale” (in the conventional image of eternity).
But there’s a tiny “seam” between one end and the other, between the serpent’s mouth and the tail
it’s consuming – and there are other ways of imagining that seam. Picture, for example, two serpents enjoying a “cloacal kiss” that joins them at the anus and allows them to generate the blue flame that completes the circuit – the local “pole star” in a big universe.
Icons are associated with candles and incense, so we mustn’t forget to include the sense of smell in our iconography of the anus. This is why the northern pole star is a dog. The dog is known as “Lord of the Nose”, both because of the extraordinary power of his sense of smell, and because his nose is what he uses to recognize other beings – notoriously, via the fragrance of their posterior orifice.
When we say that the dog is a man’s best friend, “man” can perhaps be taken here to refer to male humans specifically, rather than to humans in general. The anus is a “special friend” to males because it is only through this organ that men can experience the kind of “practice run for death” that women undergo during childbirth: the sense of being overwhelmed by something that’s far outside human control.
To a male who surrenders to penetration, whatever enters him becomes the entirety of Otherness – that is, everything that lies outside the skin. Not only is resistance futile, he also finds that yielding to the experience can be ecstatically pleasurable . . . And perhaps the most intense memory it leaves is that of the brief moments when it was impossible to distinguish between inside and outside, between “self” and “other” – those timeless seconds when
there was no cosmic loneliness.
There’s also a transmission of “spiritual paternity” that happens in this way, which is why anal intercourse was commonly part of ancient initiation practices. Through rites of this type, the “junior” (or uninitiated) partner is symbolically affiliated with a particular lineage, fraternity, or Arkadian cult.
In later myths and rites, the anus is euphemized as the side or as a part of the leg – typically the knee, the thigh, the calf or the loins. Moreover, the “fertilizing” or penetrative component of the scenario can be similarly disguised as a different part of the male body (that is, aside from the penis), such as the arm (by way of the hand), or the head (by way of the tongue).
The transmission becomes totally spiritualized when it relies only on the upper body – receiving
the logos spermatikos or “seminal word” through the ears, for example, or laying hands on a person’s head for the sake of healing. But such rejection and neglect of the lower body saps most of the real “juice” from the transmission. When a rite that was originally “consociative”, linking disparate parts of the social body, becomes restricted to one half of that body, there’s a slide towards “dissociation”.
“In the end”, it’s about kin-making – about meeting a “brand new friend” if you need one, or about going deeper in your relationships with the other members of the international network of fellow hole-istic pilgrim-pioneers, all of us seeking a better understanding of the genuinely spiritual (or perhaps rather “alchemical” or “tantric”) nature of our visionary journeys to “the Center of Uranus” (to recycle a quip that originated with the Cockettes).
"Yukio Mishima" by Denison Beach.
Ken and Me or iKENography
by Alan N. Yount
Barbie’s having a moment—again. But, for me, it’s always been about Ken. Ryan Gosling just deepens my crush, shiny plastic doll that he is. Ken and I were both born in 1961, so we’re age appropriate, unlike Barbie, who is two years older than Ken. While our relationship goes back to my preadolescent years, when I ‘borrowed’ a Ken from my babysitter’s daughter, it really blossomed when we both turned fifty, in 2011.
As our milestone year approached, I wrote to Mattel, the makers of Ken and Barbie, suggesting that they create a ‘Peace Corps Ken and Barbie’ set to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps and Ken’s 50th birthday that year. In part, my letter read:
What better way for Barbie and Ken to celebrate Ken’s milestone than by joining almost 200,000 other Peace Corps Volunteers in serving their country and the world? At the same time, you will be introducing thousands of girls and boys to a dream of service through the Peace Corps.
I had been a Peace Corps Volunteer and thought the concurrence of my and Ken’s birthdays with anniversary of the creation of the Peace Corps rather auspicious.
In a sort of reverse Adam and Eve story, Ken’s creation two years after Barbie’s was only to be her boyfriend. He really is just an accessory to Barbie—her ‘boy toy.’ To be worthy of that title, Ken has enjoyed a fabulous array of fashionable clothing—from his debut red swimming trunks to Mod Hair Ken in the ‘60s, Disco Ken in the ‘70s, Exercise and Rappin’ Rock Ken in the ‘80s, and Baywatch and Harley Davidson Kens in the ‘90s. And, now, there are all the gorgeous Kens from Barbie’s movie—Ken in Faux Fur Coat and Black Fringe Vest and Ken in Black and White Western Outfit, just to name two worn by Gosling.
My personal favorite, though, is Earring Magic Ken, who makes his appearance in the movie, in his mesh shirt and purple leather vest, at Weird Barbie’s house. Earring Magic Ken was introduced in 1993— and recalled that same year, after becoming known
as ‘Gay Ken’ or, to those in the know, ‘Cock Ring Ken,’ for the metal ring hanging around his neck.
As Earing Magic Ken came out and retreated back into the closet, I was doing my own evolving, too. Alongside thousands of other gay men (and a lot of gay women, too), I entered the gay ‘circuit party’ scene, a hedonistic backlash to the darkness of the post-AIDS 1980s. Circuit parties were big, over-the-top, weekend-long affairs that raised money for AIDS causes, which is how I first found them. By 1995, however, I was fully into the party aspects of the scene—a ‘circuit queen’—and working on sculpting my own body into a shiny plastic clone of all the other men on the dance floor.
In 1995, I made the rounds of the circuit on the East Coast—the Winter Party on Miami’s South Beach; Philadelphia’s Blue Ball; Montreal’s Black and Blue Party; New York City’s White Party; and my hometown DC’s first circuit party, the Cherry Jubilee. These parties led me to another, darker, sexier, circuit—leather circuit parties. I bought leather accessories, including a harness, leather armbands, and a leather cap and gloves and attended Washington’s Mr. Mid-Atlantic Leather and New York City’s Black Party.
I now see that all those parties were just ways for me to numb myself from the trauma of AIDS. At the end of the ‘80s and the beginning of the ‘90s, I was working as a nurse with AIDS patients. I saw a lot of people, including friends and family, suffer and die during those years. Circuit parties seemed like a way to get away from all that. Of course, there was no getting away from AIDS then, and circuit parties became their own way of suffering with rampant drug use and indiscriminate, unprotected sex.
Earring Magic Ken would have worn his cock ring at the leather circuit parties, just as I wore mine. For the uninitiated, the Urban Dictionary defines a cock ring as a “constrictive . . . device placed at the base of the penis, to prevent blood from escaping and to strengthen erection.” They’re big in the leather scene. Besides their use for erections, chrome ones, like the one hung on the chain around Cock Ring Ken’s neck, were worn on jackets by leather men and, later, on chains around the necks of party boys at the mainstream circuit parties. So,
in 1993, Ken may have been ahead of me on this curve, but I caught up.
On May 23, 2003, I was preparing to go to the International Mr. Leather circuit party in Chicago. In addition to its dance parties, IML draws contestants competing for the titles of International Mr. Leather and International Mr. Bootblack with attendees from all over the world. IML takes over a hotel in downtown Chicago with its contests, dances, a leather market, and, other, private, parties in the rooms upstairs from the main events. I hadn’t been, but I’d been wanting to go, and in 2003, the stars aligned for me. My partner and I had moved from DC to New York City, and I was between ca-
dren of their creator, Ruth Handler. Ken Handler is reported to have grown up “embarrassed and humiliated by having an anatomically incorrect boy doll named after him with no hint of genitalia.” In Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel, Jerry Oppenheimer tells us that Ken Handler led a closeted gay life and had contracted AIDS, before his death from a brain tumor in 1994.
I walked out of my doctor’s office into a new reality on that day in 2003. No longer would I have to worry about the results of an HIV test—I was HIV positive. I cancelled my trip and settled in for a long weekend of shame and self-pity. In the years since, I’ve cleaned up my act, and I am a healthier HIV
reers, having left behind lawyering in DC to become a fifth-grade public school teacher in New York, my third career. Ken was way ahead of me here, too, with over forty careers in his lifetime so far.
To become a public-school teacher, I had to have a physical, which I did the week before my planned trip. As I was packing my bags—with all my leather accoutrement, including, of course, a cock ring or five—I got a call from my new doctor’s office asking me to come in to discuss my test results. From my previous career as a nurse, I immediately knew that something was wrong.
Ken and Barbie are both named after the chil-
positive man than I was an HIV negative one. The parties and all that went with them, along with the leather gear, are all in my past now.
Mattel never responded to my letter about a Peace Corps Ken and Barbie. I don’t blame Ken, though. He and I are still close. He even came to my 50th birthday party, dressed in a tee shirt emblazoned with the year of our birth, 1961, across his chest. Earring Magic Ken was there, too. Like me, he’s settled down now and is back in his box, sitting on a shelf in my house, soon to be joined by Weird Barbie. She’s a Barbie who, I’m pretty sure, gets Ken and me.
Photo courtesy author.
"Jesus Freak" by Victorien
Somewhere
by Ed Madden
Austin, 1992. We were supposed to meet at a boys-in-briefs party in a big condo overlooking the Colorado River. Instead, we cruised each other on a corner on our way back from classes, just north of campus.
Later, he gave me some pride rings on a chain.
He was my first real boyfriend, back then, at the beginning of coming out. The rings were on a metal chain, as if they were the key to something I had yet to unlock. Or a long pull chain for a light just out of reach. Six rainbow-colored rings, symbol in an ongoing struggle, the Olympics for defeating shame.
~ This summer, a bunch of us were discussing what images we wanted to use for publicity for the LGBTQ+ history exhibit that’s going up in the university library this fall. Feels timely, given the don’t-saygay gag law in Florida schools and the anti-trans and anti-drag bills coming up all over like a bad rash on the body politic. We were on teams. Someone was trying to get the folder of queer images to load so that they would show them to the rest of the committee.
It was mostly organizational logos: various state and community pride logos, a few bear and bar logos, youth groups, a trans group. But there were also some amazing images from early Pride marches, drag queens, that first South Carolina state march in 1990 when they marched up the capitol steps, claiming the state house as ours too—though no one broke windows or stole furniture from legislative offices.
Lots of rainbows in the folder, of course, but the logo that first year was a pink triangle on a grey stone wall. The marchers carried pink balloons. The north side of the state capitol was a tableau of pink balloons, faces, handmade banners.
~ One year when my partner and I were on the state pride committee, we went to the capitol grounds early that morning to place rainbow flags on poles along the steps, post a few potted plants— stage backdrop for the speakers and pictures later that day. Then a typical South Carolina summer storm crashed through, soaked the park where we were to meet, blew all the rainbow flags down. We missed the beginning of the march, rushing back to
the capitol to raise the flags again.
~
For so many years, the state pride march was a scrappy affair, run by volunteers and sustained by drag shows and bar fundraisers and the scarce but inevitable sponsors—mostly lube and vodka in those early years, an unknown energy drink. This feels symbolic now. This was before the march with an agenda became a parade with an audience. This was before city funding. This was before we moved the march from June to May, the midsummer heat too often too brutal.
Still, through it all, it was a party. And through it all, there were drag queens. I later learned that one of discussion of the early organizers was whether or not to allow drag queens in the march. Acceptability and image and all that. They decided yes, of course they should be there.
One of the reigning favorites, Nicole Roberts, had this purple flouncy minidress. She was (and still is) known for her dizzying twirls in heels, as well as her seamstress skills. As Nicole twirled during the number—usually Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” blending seamlessly into Alicia Bridges’ disco hit “I Love the Nightlife”—she did some trick and the skirt released rings of color, blue, then green, yellow, orange, red. The short skirt became a hoop skirt of rainbow colors, a rainbow flag of drag. Everyone in the bar, even if they had seen this before, roared with joy.
~
One year, just before Pride, a donor told us he knew a gardener and he would pay for that gardener to do some landscaping at our little community center. While everyone cleaned up the center one Saturday, he planted flowers down the front walk. We mowed. We hung a rainbow flag from the front porch. He planted bunches of flowers in rainbow colors. None of them perennials, none of them resistant to the Southern heat. He popped them from the garden center boxes and dropped them in the ground. He didn’t break apart the roots so they would grow. The gardener was not a gardener. He was a cute boy from the donor’s bar.
The flowers all wilted within the week. Even the marigolds. I hope the donor paid him.
Later that summer, we planted some more resil-
ient things, hardy, drought resistant.
~
In April 1989, a group of activists from ACT UP in New York and Atlanta joined local activists in South Carolina to protest a law that would quarantine people with HIV. They marched around the grounds of the state capitol. They carried a banner with a pink triangle. They had a kiss-in on the capitol steps, to make the point that HIV could not be transmitted through casual contact. They held a die-in at the intersection of Main Street and Gervais, on the north side of the capitol, in the center of downtown in the middle of a workday. Traffic stopped. The police arrested forty one people.
That fall, a local PFLAG mom and some others walked around a private community picnic with clipboards to sign people up. If we have a pride march in Columbia, will you participate?
~ One year—I think it was the same year that Greenville County passed an anti-gay ordinance and the Olympic torch bypassed the county on its way to Atlanta—the state pride march moved from Columbia, the capitol, to Greenville. Businesses in downtown Greenville supporting gay rights displayed little rainbow flags of support on their doors. The city asserted its difference from the county. It was business, not bigotry. Someone went through early that morning and jammed all their locks. Before the march began, police and locksmiths went down the street, unlocking all the doors.
~ When we look at photos of past pride marches, we can always tell the first one. After it, the rainbow took over, but that first year it was a sea of pink. It was about resistance.
~ One of the first dissertation committees I was on in South Carolina was about sexuality and first-year composition. The student—now a brilliant professor—wrote something that now seems obvious but at the time felt like a revelation. Faculty who want to signal their support for queer students can do so by posting small stickers or images on their office door, a pin on a backpack. A rainbow flag. A labrys. A pink triangle.
A friend in Austin (okay, to be honest, the last girl I dated) told me once that she just thought all those rainbow flags over the antique stores were pretty. She didn’t know they were a symbol, a signal.
~ In my introduction to queer studies class last spring, we always started class with the latest news.
Lately it seems it was all about book bans and Florida and drag queens and anti-trans laws. Sometimes Sam Smith. Sometimes Lil Nas X.
Every year I give a little quiz at the beginning and again at the end of my queer studies classes to assess what queer history they know and what queer history they have learned. They all know what a dead name is. Hardly anyone knows who Matthew Shepard is. They all know Stonewall. Hardly anyone knows a Supreme Court decision affecting queer rights. They all know the rainbow flag. No one knows what the pink triangle is.
Near the end of the semester, I asked who had seen Ted Lasso. It was season 3, episode 6. AFC Richmond player Colin Hughes (played by Billy Harris) came out as gay to journalist Trent Crimm (James Lance), who also happened to be gay. The whole team was in Amsterdam. At the end of the episode, the two men sat talking at the Homomonument, 3 slabs of pink marble—pink triangles—memorializing the gay men and lesbians killed by the Nazis and commemorating all those persecuted for their sexual identities. It’s just around the corner from the Anne Frank house.
No one in my class knew about the pink triangle.
~
My husband says he likes this color on me, a tomato red, the color of the soccer shirt I like to wear when we go to the gym together. We walk around our yard, the side lot we bought after the house next door was condemned and razed. We turned the scraped lot into a garden. When we feed the koi in the pond, they rise to the surface like small suns. Bert has named them all. The big fish, Punkin. Bozo, with his orange nose. There are flower beds and raised beds for veggies, but at one end I got to keep the wildflowers that were already growing there— indigenous, resilient, the goldenrod that will soon soar into bloom.
We planted things so that when you sit beside the koi pond, you can’t see much beyond the edge of the lot, just the surrounding green. Bert grins as he feeds the fish. I love his pale blue eyes, the wrinkles he treats at night with eye cream, wrinkles I love for the way they crinkle when he laughs. Or that time he didn’t want me to see him cry. The native thistle that we let run under the pines has all bloomed, now just dark and prickly reminders of the spring, but the pickerel weed in the pond is blooming, the purple powder brush of the huge cardoon.
All summer, in the ridiculous heat, the pink roses keep blooming on the trellis.
~
By the time this appears, the exhibit will be up in the library.
When we were talking about an image to use for publicity, someone suggested that first South Carolina pride march logo, the pink triangle, the stone wall. We wanted a visual image that would capture student interest. I suggested we use the rainbow instead, because most students would not recognize the pink triangle. But all of them—even the anti-gay
ones—recognize the rainbow flag. Someone suggested a display case on the issue of queer symbols.
One of the archivists suggested that we use the rainbow on publicity, but that they install a huge vinyl of a pink triangle on the floor at the entrance to the exhibit. To see the history, you have to walk across the pink triangle.
I hope that’s the decision.
Gone
She flew in on a B-17 bomber. A Hell’s Angel and a bicycle she thinks is sexy. 60-mile-a-day-rides just to be comfortable in her own skin.
She’s a B-17 bomber fueled by neurons firing. Like there are so. many. twinkle lights in her brain just being alive gives her migraines. I wish. I had a lower wattage. I want to be the 20-watt bulb planted at the center of her brain.
Flowers bloom in her mind. Photos blossom onto contact paper. She is clematis, ranunculus, picking off all her own petals. I run after her collecting them in jars like lightning bugs. I want to be the lit firefly glowing in the middle of her thoughts.
I have.
Her passion, but not her firepower. I have. The B-17 Hell’s Angel she showed up on.
But the bicycle she rode around town with me. Is already. Gone.
—Liana Kapelke-Dale
Queer Iconography
by JN.exe
I’m…unsure of any kind of…present, solid queer iconography. The exchange of information and incentivisation of being “seen” as iconic seems to have been co-opted or…muddied by…everything?
“Only those with Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent will make it to the top!” These words ring true even outside of Rupaul’s Drag Race for those who’ve been ordained as queer icons.
But who do we ordain as the arbiter of these icons?
Our reality and understanding even of our own identity is heavily influenced by what we are surrounded by everyday. In this current age algorithms and peer groups define what we can see and warp our beliefs and sense of self. If we all have an “individualized” online profile, via our internet/ social media consumption, that force feeds us what it thinks we want, how can we really say a symbol means something. Or if we believe in it. Or should believe in it.
Commonalities that I have (historically) observed between those that have been deemed by the community as icons, are that they are those who have been very emphatic about living their lives as themselves, on top of their advocacy of the queer community. This does not mean they themselves are queer, but that they have lived their idea of their own truths without stepping on others’ to achieve their visions. This is what I felt was the criteria for people who hold that status.
These days, it seems all that matters are trends rather than icons or even people. The hyperspeed of information transfer almost doesn’t allow for anything (or one) to stick around long enough to be impactful or iconic, outside of being a totem to be worshiped or discussed.
I think that there is not the same…streamlined understanding of any imagery, symbol, or moniker for identity anymore.
In this day and age where we live in a world
where every visual symbol, icon, and now even video content is not only able to be “Remixed” (read: and/or co-opted) but incentivized to be so; How can these constructs have any true or lasting meaning, especially in the context of us understanding ourselves and our own identities? Much less those of each other and…others?
That being said…I realized that my own confusion is part of the conversation. But here is something I do know—there is no limitation on how someone out there can feel unsure of themselves. The different varieties of people ensure our feelings are not out of place in this world. Who can I say is not an icon (to a community)? Who can I say is not meaningful enough to someone? My own experience was with SOPHIE. As a queer transfemme electronic music artist, one could say “she’s just a musician.” She rarely granted interviews that were not a filtered version of her voice because she wanted her music to speak for her. During her final years, she opened up more with her presence, voice, and fashion. As an equally private person, I was so happy to see someone like that be appreciated for their work and talent without being marketed just for their public antics or only by how they look. Like any person who has stood out in the past and present, someone will look up to them or to them for guidance and hope for what may come.
No matter what time nor place—the idea of someone who fully embodies and represents unbridled confidence in their humanity and sexuality shall make indelible marks on us. This is especially a point in the queer community. I may not be sure of exactly how or why but I am sure it is beyond my own personal experience and understanding. Whether that be Judy Garland, Cher, Donna Summer, or John Waters, Divine, Boulet Brothers, and so many others—they encompass the different flavors of expression and existence someone feels.
"The Ascension of Saint Laura (Nyro)" by Denison Beach.
who haunts lonely roads
There’s no green light across the bay
I sit, feet dangling just above the waterline
Air tinged with salt and the roil of navy clouds above,
And darling, I never believed in love -
If I snatch a firefly out of the gloom, Cupped gentle in gentle palm, gently, gently
Flicker in and out of a certain glow
You would whisper “crush” and my fingers would twitch—
Uncurl knuckles, uncurl ribs, uncurl the ribbons and tongues you talk around me
Your eyes are toffee honey brown except at night,
When they turn black and catch the moon like an obscura,
You can be a beautiful liar with your make believe toys,
Shaping me to be one of them -
And your envy shades you, treats you to your ether, and you, you, moth to flame and expecting me to follow— I will always lag behind, girl, always drag my feet in the sand
I can’t love you, you know?
Thesis statement, now explain
You tell me funhouse mirror fables across radio static
And I mutter, no, no, no, not quite
Sinking below the surface into deepest blue
You paint me every colour you’d like me to be -
So certain, so certain -
That when we collide, we will be ultravioletAnd shine
And I,
I watch you steal with trapped tongue
Ghost upon ghost
Pale young something boy and draining colder
There’s no green light across the bay -
But you say there is, anyway.
—charlotte amelia poe
"Watercolor sketch of the GreenMan" by Patrick Gracewood.
Puja
O Krishna, TikTok famous for your cerulean skin, dad bod sex appeal, has anyone, deprived of divinity, ever felt the ocean of your mouth, nipples excited into sapphires, the constant coming of night?
—Daniel W.K. Lee
Elegy for Jack Twist
If I could say, but words don’t— (There you’ll be in the pauses between sentences— never quitting me)
—Daniel W.K. Lee
A Vocation—or, Self Portrait as a Young Novice
by David Derbin Nolta
Embolism, Ohio. 19601
Among the students and faculty of St. Norbert’s School, the principal, Sister Rose Redunda, was famous for her tendency to adopt a sphinx-like stillness that only a fool would mistake for inactivity, much less calm. So now, seated at an ample mahogany desktop supported by androgynous angels guarding overstuffed drawers, with her black sleeves stiff as though pinned to the leather-edged blotter before her, staring intently at or through the wall, she had the paradoxical air of one pacing, a thing she never actually did. As a child she had been afflicted with a mild case of polio; since then, walking was never a favored option. Even when taking over the classroom of an absent colleague, she tended to remain seated at the front, hardly ever rising, and then only to head off the perennial rumor among the younger students that she couldn’t, or worse, that she had no bottom half.
When at last Sister Rose turned her head to the window, it was not to take in the beautifully landscaped grounds, the lawn sloping gently upward to the convent where rain-glazed asphalt drives converged and separated and reconverged to form the outline of a chalice, over which hovered the rose window of the chapel façade, the Eucharist (as Sister Martha archly phrased it) in grass and glass. With all of this prettiness Sister Rose was abundantly familiar, as she had played an important role on the conventual committees whose function was to conserve and maintain the property. But though real, her interest in such things was as peripheral
1 Unusual name, even for a Midwestern American town, upon which history throws some light. At its incorporation in the 1840’s, when it was little more than a muddy wagon-stop on the road West, the town had been called Carter’s Crossing, by and after its biggest landowner and first, self-elected, mayor, a man so corrupt and unpopular with his fellow citizens that, when he died, they joyfully re-christened the place to commemorate the cause of his death and their deliverance.
as those things themselves—peripheral, that is, to Sister Rose’s even more real priority, which was the school.
After twenty-seven years at St. Norbert’s, seventeen as its mother superior and principal, Sister Rose now faced a new challenge in the form of an inquiry into the financial viability—more bluntly, the fate—of the school. The news of this inquiry had not been foreseen, had come from afar and with the suddenness of a well-planned raid, though the raiding party consisted of only one person, herself a nun with a graduate degree in business administration from an East Coast university, sent directly from the motherhouse of the order in Springfield, Illinois.
German as much by inclination as by ancestry, Sister Adelthwide was positively Prussian in manner. It was all Sister Rose could do to remind herself that her well-trained and industrious colleague was as American as she was, and, despite having many relatives in the old country, had been an exemplary citizen and nun throughout the last war. Nevertheless, when she arrived at Saint Norbert’s, with nothing but a small, black leather valise hardly larger than the elaborate adding machine it contained, and a curt, official request to examine the school’s financial records, Sister Adelthwide had struck a wary and unwonted chill into the heart of Sister Rose, upsetting her no less than if she had broken down her bedroom door with the spiked point of a helmet. This image of Sister Adelthwide as a storm trooper recurred with irritating frequency, and Sister Rose had spent many dark and sleepless hours during the past week reproaching herself for unkind and inhospitable ideas, and praying to be forgiven.
Not that Sister Rose had any apprehensions when it came to the accuracy and integrity of her books. These were kept by Sister Elizabeth, as scrupulous and honest a creature as Sister Rose had ever known. Sister Elizabeth taught math to the seventhand eighth-grade students, and since, beyond that level, all math subjects were taught by lay persons retired from local high schools and junior colleges, she was the most appropriate in-house member of the religious community to handle their financial records, which she did for both the convent and the school. Sister Rose herself, whose early career
had been spent teaching basic botany, had no head at all for figures, though as the books would show, she was a fairly good fundraiser. The books would also show that her successful efforts to increase the school’s endowment were erratic and need-based, deriving not from any business acumen nor plan, but from a confluence of patience, diplomacy, and luck. In combination, these rendered her formidable. When as on occasion she played bridge with the other nuns, Sister Rose never managed the tally, but won most of the time.
If, then, the precise numerical details of her school’s finances were not uppermost, nor even present, in Sister Rose’s mind, she was nevertheless uncannily conscious of the conclusions to be drawn from them. And inescapable among these was that for at least ten years now, the supply of nuns to the order, and consequently the supply of sister-teachers, had been dwindling at a pace which far exceeded the ability of even as charismatic a leader as Sister Rose to bring in the funds necessary to replace those teachers with more expensive labor from the outside world. Enrollments had risen, and the reputation of the school at all levels, from the first through the twelfth grade, had risen with them. But costs had risen at a faster rate; students whose parents before and during the war might have sent their children to parochial school for all twelve years, now tended to send them only for the first six, or, in order to better their chances of getting into a selective college, for the final one or two; the local public schools had improved considerably over the past decade, and with their large swimming pools and other sports facilities, St. Norbert’s was not yet able, nor perhaps ideologically prepared, to compete. The upshot was that for some time now, the school was running slightly, as Sister Elizabeth sheepishly put it, in the pink, by which of course she meant the red.
And so, engrossed in the problem, Sister Rose turned to the window as a prelude to prayer. She had invoked only two of the three persons of the Trinity when there was a peremptory knock on her door. As most knocks lately brought nothing but news of Sister Adelthwide—or worse (God forgive her), Sister Adelthwide herself, with her raised eyebrows (how high they had risen, and by no means approvingly, during the tour of the rather expensively renovated classrooms!)—Sister Rose looked out the window for a few more seconds’ reprieve. “And of the Holy Ghost,” she murmured half aloud. But the door opened all the same.
Sister Anciline bustled into the room. A big
woman in late middle age, she seemed the least likely of all twenty three nuns of this particular branch of the Order of the Sisters of Saint Norbert—the “Norbertines”—to be a nun. Ungainly in her gait, pausing constantly to stuff her graying locks back up under her wimple, with a voice like that of an army nurse, her appearance, even after so many years of living with her in close quarters, never failed to cause Sister Rose a mild if momentary surprise. But she was a great personality at the school, popular for gentleness and humor among thirty years of thirdgraders, both firm and a favorite, hardly an easy blend to achieve. Most importantly, she was not Sister Adelthwide, upon whom she had been noticed to smile inscrutably and always from a distance.
“Just as I suspected. Wool gathering,” barked Sister Anciline, as though assessing a patient at a field hospital. But her current smile was quite scrutable.
Sister Rose smiled back wanly. “With wool I could make something.”
“I wonder what you’ll make of this: you have a visitor.”
“Oh goodness, is it by any chance Sister Adelthwide?” Sister Rose almost crossed herself again.
“Nope. It’s a young man. A former student in fact.”
Sister Rose made a sarcastic face, indicating that now was hardly the time.
“Martin Xavier Gonfundus,” announced the other nun, reading the name from a slip of paper on which she had written it down.
Sister Rose’s reaction made it clear that, despite their impressive sound, this particular sequence of syllables meant nothing to her.
“I didn’t recognize the name either, but his face looked familiar. Apparently he was in my class, but it’s been a while—eight years.”
This much math Sister Rose was able to do. “So he’s fifteen or so now? And you said he’s ‘former’. What does he want?”
“He wants to see you! On some ‘business’ he said, and he made it sound urgent, though he wouldn’t explain at all what it was about. I will say that he’s fairly polite, and from his eyes I would guess that he’s honest, though I’ve been painfully wrong before.”
Sister Rose remained quizzical. Students sent to her for disciplinary action were relatively common, but students asking to see her were somewhat less common, and former students returning to see her after eight years were a genuine rarity.
“Well, I’m busy of course. But I suppose you’d better bring him in. By the way, how is it he found
you? I mean, why are you bringing this boy to me, and not Mrs. Simmons?” Mrs. Simmons was the secretary, whose own seven children were all currently enrolled at Saint Norbert’s, with a discount on tuition which must at all costs be kept from Sister Adelthwide.
“I’ll tell you. We were finishing elementary choir in the chapel, and several of my pupils saw him at the back in the dark and thought he looked—well, like a criminal come to steal the candlesticks. Anyway, that’s how Mary Mars and Lawrence Baker expressed it. But Mary Mars is a very precocious reader and has an overactive imagination which she uses to ensnare the boys. Anyway, when they pointed him out to me—you know I can’t see beyond the third pew without my glasses, and my glasses don’t really work with our headgear—all I could make out was this strange sort of paper cutout of a person, a mere shadow of a boy. I have to admit, he was a bit spooky. But also, I could easily see, troubled.”
Sister Rose discreetly pinched her own hand as a punishment for hoping that this spooky, troubled boy wasn’t here looking for money. Sister Anciline went right on.
“Well, he was kneeling there in the last pew, occasionally raising his forehead from the backs of his hands—bobbing up, looking around, then back down in what looked to me like despair. So I walked over and said, ‘Can I help you?’ And he said he needed to talk to someone ‘about the convent’. ‘On business,’ he said. Well I didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t explain, but instead told me that he used to be a student here, and he knew me. He’d been at Saint Norbert’s till the fifth grade, when his mother died and his family took him out of the school. And then he told me that he wanted to talk to you—he said exactly, ‘I think I should really talk to Sister Rose. Do you think I could?’ And, well, if you’d seen his face when he said that, I’m sure you’d have done the same thing in my shoes.”
Sister Anciline looked down at her feet, heavily shod in the ugliest manner conceivable, another fact of the conventual costume she had had to contend with. “I said, ‘Of course. Sister Rose will be delighted to see an old pupil.’ And then he told me his name, and it didn’t ring a bell, and I brought him along. Mrs. Simmons is just outside with him.”
“About the convent?” Sister Rose mused aloud, increasingly willing to be at least momentarily distracted from the larger, less mysterious, and more daunting issue of the school’s financial crisis. “Well, by all means send him in.”
“There was one more thing,” Sister Anciline
halted with her hand on the doorknob. “He used the word ‘sent’ That is, he said that he’d been ‘sent’ here to the convent on business.”
Sister Rose raised her own brows in reaction. “‘Sent’?” By way of answer, Sister Anciline drew up her shoulders and hastily opened the door.
“Come in Mr. … Godfundus?” Sister Rose began, straightening her back a little wearily behind her desk.
“Gonfundus,” interjected Sister Anciline. “Martin Xavier Gonfundus.”
In the doorway, stooping slightly like one accustomed to duck or scuttle, stopped a young man who was clearly at the peak—which is, more accurately, the nadir—of adolescence. Seeing him, one could only pray that it wouldn’t get worse. But this hope, which Sister Rose felt instinctively and strongly, had to do with more than the young man’s actual physical attributes.
At fifteen, Martin Gonfundus was neither large nor small; in fact, like so many adolescents, he gave the impression of being both at once. He had a broad chest and narrow middle such as one might expect from the well-developed and compact, from lightweight wrestlers and circus acrobats. But his legs were long and skinny, and his large hands hung by delicate wrists from the tight cuffs of his insufficient sleeves. His over worn, outgrown clothes, and a rather elegant neck—for he tilted at the waist, but did not bend his head—made him look almost lanky. His face was a pale and tentative oval, still in the process of finding its final shape. It was marked with the usual signs of male puberty, a constellation of mild blemishes and the faintest beginnings of a beard along the upper lip and jaw. His hair was a crown of thick, medium-brown locks of the intractable, and not overly clean, variety. He wore metalrimmed glasses, no belt and no tie. All of this Sister Rose took in, but none of it explained the complex blend of intense sympathy and antipathy she felt. This could only be traced to the boy’s expression, which was ambiguous and eventful, an open field where anxiety waged a battle with resolve. There was sadness, too, in his eyes, of course—that is a primary feature of adolescence among even the most swaggerful, and Martin Gonfundus was no swaggerer—and a suggestion of courage about the mouth, and, over all, that aura of the “troubled” that Sister Anciline had noted, if not quite the criminality inferred by Mary Mars.
Sister Rose had seen poor children before. She had known suffering children who had lost a parent or sibling and as a consequence were themselves
lost. She was all too familiar with the biological chaos of adolescence, its lack of finish, the way the transition took the child apart and rearranged him as though in some cruel medical experiment, the result a shifting collage of mismatched limbs and features, of gangly arms and enormous feet and puny torsos—and this to speak only of the males. But Martin was for her a new case, a young man who seemed supremely conscious of the messy, transitional state in which he found himself, and was fighting to turn it to account. Despite his posture, he did not appear sheepish, nor embarrassed, nor even, for that matter, awkward, as most adolescents do, especially when confronting adults. His demeanor, his whole appearance, seemed to stake a claim, to declare, “I know, isn’t it horrible, but there’s power to be mined from this natural disaster.” There was a kind of zeal about him, an energy not entirely under his control. If he was troubled by something, he was also activated by it. All of which made Sister Rose think of images in the illustrated Bible, of Joseph arriving in Egypt, or Saint John the Baptist returning from the wilderness. For a fleeting moment, Sister Rose would have preferred Sister Adelthwide. Things with her would have been so much clearer.
“Well now,” the nun gathered her own energy together, adopting a voice suffused with interest and kindness, for though she was a mother superior, she spoke as any mother to any child, “Sister Anciline tells me you’ve come on business? Won’t you sit down?”
Martin crossed the shallow space with alacrity, and seated himself in the chair opposite Sister Rose’s desk, while the latter signaled with her eyes to Sister Anciline, “Stay.” Happy to take the hint, but deciding against taking a chair, Sister Anciline remained at a little distance behind the new arrival.
“Well, it’s kind of business,” said Martin. He spoke quickly but clearly and with decision. “It’s about my future.”
“Do you mean you’re looking for a job?” Sister Rose forced a light but non-critical chuckle. “You know, you’re rather young.”
“Well, you might say I’m looking for a job.”
“Martin, even if we had a job, you would be too young.”
The boy seemed not to have registered this remark. At least, his expression remained the same, one of intense thoughtfulness, as though he was listening for something, or watching for an opportunity. It was an expression Sister Rose had often seen, but usually it was in the school gym, among boys waiting on the bench for their turn in the basketball
game. After a moment more of silence, Sister Rose felt oddly as though she had given the wrong answer to a question, and decided on a different approach.
“Sister Anciline tells me you were a student here. It’s always nice to see an old boy.”
Martin spoke as though he had practiced this part. “I’m fifteen. I was here for my first five years, through the fifth grade. My mother died that year, and I had to beg my father to let me stay till the end. He says it was the money, but I never believed that. And my older brothers were all on his side. It was only my mother keeping me here. But,” and at this point, perhaps breaking from the script, the boy actually beamed, “even dead, she was a match for them!”
Sister Rose considered the delicacy of the situation, which, like the gist of Martin’s speech, was not entirely new to her. “I’m so sorry that your mother passed away. And she sounds like an extraordinary woman, and very courageous. And I’m sure your father, too, has suffered a lot since she’s been gone, and your brothers. And though I didn’t know her very well, I’ll bet your mother would want you to be patient with them and help them out in any way you can.”
Martin seemed to consider the proposition. After a moment, and for lack of any other inspiration, Sister Rose continued, “So you’re the youngest in the family?”
“Yes. But about my father: I don’t think he’s suffering so much now. He has a new lady friend. And my older brothers—there’s five of us; I’m the only one who went to St. Norbert’s—have all moved on.”
“That sounds rather lonely for you,” Sister Rose said soothingly. She was feeling more confident now about this strange boy, who wasn’t so strange at all. In fact, already she felt that she knew him quite well, could identify him quite precisely. Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. He was like a plant that one doesn’t perhaps see every day, but one finds occasionally off the beaten track. Basking briefly in her insight, Sister Rose went on a little absent-mindedly, while Sister Anciline shifted on the periphery.
“And you miss St. Norbert’s. I certainly understand.”
“Yes, I was pretty happy here,” Martin admitted. Sister Rose, who was already getting to know something of the boy’s range of expressions, also noticed something else about him. Unlike most young people, he did not fidget, but remained, like herself, rather unnaturally still.
“And that’s why you’ve come back? To see if
there’s some way to arrange something? You want to go to school here again? You thought perhaps you might work for us and that would help pay your tuition.” Sister Rose was genuinely moved, even more so because there was nothing to be done. Especially now, in what people were calling the “current climate”.
“No, that’s not it exactly. I mean, I do miss the school.” Martin clenched his teeth slightly, and his fingers were coiled in his lap. Clearly he had more to say, and Sister Rose was happy to help him along, for her own sake as well as his, for she had many more things to do.
“Where are you now? At school I mean.”
“I’m at the Fountains School,” the boy responded automatically.
Some of the complacency drained from Sister Rose’s face. Fountains Academy was a secular school, one of the best private high schools in southwestern Ohio. It certainly cost more to go there than to Saint Norbert’s. The fact that Martin was a student there did not match his story any more than it matched his clothes. But then, Sister Rose reminded herself, the boy had not claimed he was poor; it was his father’s claim that money had been the reason for Martin’s removal from Saint Norbert’s. And even that was only Martin’s version. And fifteen-year-olds were naturally peculiar about their clothes—one of the best arguments for wearing uniforms.
“Oh, I must have misunderstood.” Not wanting to pursue the private and perhaps changeable financial situation of the Gonfundus family, especially with its youngest, juvenile member, Sister Rose paused, then said, a little blandly, “Well, that’s a very good school.”
“That’s what everybody tells me,” responded Martin, and there was neither impertinence nor sarcasm in his tone, a fact that struck the experienced Sister Rose as almost miraculous, given his age.
“And are you doing well there?”
“Not so well. If you want to know the truth, Sister, I hate it.”
Aha. If Poverty and Need had proved a dead end on the way to explaining young Martin, she would take the post road, the one with signs reading “Rebelliousness” and “Scholastic Difficulties”. The nuns of Saint Norbert’s were famous for recognizing and setting right such things, for creating a well-rounded and happy child performing at the peak of his intellectual and moral capacity. Sister Rose found herself silently quoting the school’s new brochure, which had been printed in color at great expense.
Perhaps she should give one of these to Martin, to take home to his father…
“Do you have friends there?” Sister Rose asked, again rather absently, while measuring in her mind the wisdom of taking any practical steps to assist the boy in his plan to return to Saint Norbert’s.
“None.” This was dropped with such leaden finality that Sister Rose felt quite unequal to picking it up. And then she remembered something that Sister Anciline had said, that had seemed so curious.
“And so you’re unhappy, and you want to come back to Saint Norbert’s. Is that what you meant when you told Sister Anciline you were sent? And is this the business you were sent to do?”
Martin brightened at what for Sister Rose had been a potentially awkward subject; she was well aware that whenever a Catholic claims to have been sent, it could of course be intended and interpreted along the lines of Joan of Arc. If that was the case with Martin, Sister Rose would be forced to consider the possibility that he was mentally unsound.
“Yes, in a way I guess. But I wasn’t sent back to the school! I was sent to the convent.”
Sister Rose made a face like a fish bumping into the bowl. Martin was only too happy—he seemed in fact relieved, unhitched—to run with the conversation at this point.
“You see, I have what I believe is called a ‘calling’,” he began. “Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. My mother used to tell me that when she was a girl, she thought she had a calling. She said she was quite convinced, in fact, right up until she met my father. As I told you, she’s the one who first sent me to Saint Norbert’s, to the school I mean. My father was against it all along. Every August he would bring it up again in front of me and my brothers, Frank and Paul; the oldest ones had already moved away. But my mom insisted, and so I went. And now I know—I mean, I feel—” and here he cast down his eyes, as though to subdue or compress his own confidence, “that I’m being sent back again, after all this time. But not to the school, to the convent. To live there, with you and the nuns. It’s my calling.”
Sister Rose was not at all relieved to see that the boy’s face bore no trace of humor or mockery when he repeated his claim; it would have been easier for her to handle this if she suspected he was simply making fun of her, or testing her patience. She turned to look at Sister Anciline, who all of a sudden yelped, “Good heavens! My students! I’ve got to get them back in from recess!” And with no more than a cursory nod in the direction of the two seated
figures, she was gone.
Feeling deeply her abandonment, Sister Rose went on.
“Well,” she hemmed.
Martin wasn’t finished.
“Don’t worry, I’ve looked into it, and I know that you can’t join a convent until you’re sixteen. Even though Saint Theresa of the Little Flower, the one who lived in France a while ago, got special permission. But it would just be a waste of time in my case. I’ll be sixteen in January—that’s three months from now. I thought I should at least let you know that Saint Norbert’s was naturally my first choice. I mean it’s really my only choice.”
Sister Rose’s brows lifted; her eyes advanced slightly out of their sockets; the corners of her mouth came closer together. She waited to be sure that Martin was not merely pausing for breath, but had come to a full stop, before detaching her hands from the blotter and folding them under her chin. With a great effort, she returned her features to their rightful positions.
“Martin, it is quite possible that … I mean to say that I would be delighted for you if it turned out that you have a calling, or what we call a vocation. Though as you realize yourself, you’re still very young. But even if you do have a vocation—and as I said, I’d be delighted if you have—it would not lead you to a convent, but to a seminary or a monastic order.”
Martin interrupted. “But those are for men.” And as if this were sufficient to explain his meaning, he blinked twice, and was quiet.
“Yes, exactly.” Sister Rose could not suppress a little sigh, not so much of impatience but of vague apprehension and discomfort. “A young man has a calling to be a priest or a monk. A convent is for women. Women become nuns.”
It was on the tip of Sister Rose’s tongue to say next, “What, do you want to be a woman?” But she realized in time how cruel and absurd that might have sounded, especially to this apparently confused young man. She studied him again, in a somewhat new and questioning light. For all the tricks played by hormones on the victims of puberty both male and female, for all the traits and manners that she could make out in the particular specimen before her—the childish flutter of his long eyelashes as he spoke, which was clearly a result of excitement rather than embarrassment, and the delicacy of his wrists and neck—there was nothing distinctly or even noticeably feminine about him. His voice, soft and expressive, nevertheless fit into the range com-
mon to fifteen-year-old boys. And yet, she allowed herself to ponder, the very fact that he was expressive, if erratically so, made him something of an anomaly. But did that make him unmanly?
Into the mind of Sister Rose wandered an image of Father Robin Thurlo, who, up till the last year of his life, had spent his summers taking over at Saint Norbert’s the Mass duties of Father Barnard, who spent those months in retreat. With a dazzlingly white and immobile coiffure and a face as smooth and pink as a piglet’s belly, Father Thurlo was decidedly dainty. His favorite pastimes were baking and embroidery, and though there was never a hint of scandal about him, he was the subject of a great deal of giggling among the nuns. Sister Rose was relieved that his schedule kept him away from the schoolchildren, though for his own sake alone—his innocence seemed almost a form of autism. In any case, Sister Rose could see no overlap between Father Thurlo and Martin Gonfundus. As the latter had yet to respond to the clear and concise formula she had proffered for the way in which Catholics with vocations are separated according to gender, she continued, with infinite care and precision.
“You see, Martin, to live in the convent you would have to be a woman. As a man you might become a priest, like Father Barnard, and come to say Mass, and even live nearby as he does. In fact, I think you might want to have a talk with him.” There was a gentle prodding in her tone.
Martin bit the corner of his lip and looked out the window. Because, up until this moment, he had been so still, the movement seemed dramatic, a gesture, though, as it turned out, not of escape. When he spoke it was with barely restrained impatience.
“But I don’t want to be a priest. I want to live with the nuns, and be one of them.”
The fact that she had foresensed the possibility of such a statement, though she had never in her life actually heard of such a thing before, did little or nothing to help Sister Rose right now. She was at last truly speechless, and felt as she might have felt watching at close range while doctors performed an operation on this strange (because she accepted that now; he was indeed a strange) boy, looking over the edge and into him. To see him thus opened and exposed, and by his own choice, made Sister Rose tremble with a kind of indignation.
And yet, was it so outrageous? Not wanting to be what you were? A man wanting to be a woman, or a woman wanting to be a man? The case of Father Thurlo aside, the idea was hardly new to Sister
Rose; nuns are never as naïve nor debauched as their reputations alternately imply, and Sister Rose was at once a more world-wary and open-minded example than most. Though she herself had never suffered from the least confusion, much less ambiguity, in that way. For example, she had never, like Sister Clothilde, dreamed of being the first woman priest—Sister Clothilde, with the lovely hands, who had left the order years ago, and was now married to the owner of a truck stop on Route 80, with four grown children and, it was rumored, cirrhosis of the liver. Nor did Sister Rose have anything in common with those athletic nuns, the ones who walked with a noticeably heavier tread than their sisters, who seemed to enjoy the masculine jobs, fixing the station wagon or playing football with the boys. Poor Sister Edwina had a mustache and often left off the final ‘a’ when writing her name. No, Sister Rose was, and was perfectly happy to be, a woman modeled after the most feminine saints, a Lucy serving her own eyes on a plate with the panache of a housewife passing round the hors d’oeuvres, a Catherine stepping up to the wheel with the grace of a grande dame getting into a limousine. Thorns and all, was there anything on earth more lady-like than a rose?
But her own womanliness, she reminded herself now, was not at question here. And this boy, whom she regarded with a deepening curiosity but also with a new, slight but very definite, distaste, had not said that he wanted to be a woman, only that he wanted to be a nun. To this she would cling while she could.
“My dear boy,” she began again, as though to a classful of eighth graders on the first day of the term; as though she was about to explain something as elementary and vital as photosynthesis. “There are some things we don’t have control over. You are a young man already, and with God’s help you’ll grow up to be an ever finer one—stronger, smarter, and capable of doing His will. That’s a calling we all share—to take what we are, what we’ve been given, and to make something even better out of it, a good life, to give as a gift, the gift of our very selves, to others and to God. You seem to be going through a bad time right now, but I can promise you, that is altogether normal for a person your age. I hate to think how confused I was when I was fifteen!”
Martin sat rigid while Sister Rose, with a tone sweetened to cover the sour taste that had insinuated itself into her actual attitude, ran through her brief repertory of consoling syllogisms, promoting now resignation, now the beatific prospect of a mutually enriching community of men, conveying now
sympathy, now empathy made more enticing by a nostalgic and cajoling self-mockery. All of which clearly left Martin unmoved.
“Are you saying that I can’t join the convent?” he said at last. “Not even when I turn sixteen?”
“What I am saying, Mr. Gonfundus, is that you can never be a nun!”
As often happens directly after the plainest dealing, a vacuum arose between the two speakers, invisible but impenetrable, and growing, like a glass bubble, threatening to blow them both out of the room.
But that did not happen, because Martin, for one, was not ready to leave.
“I don’t care about what you call me, ‘nun’ or nothing at all, or ‘a special case’. All that matters to me is that I’ve been called to be like you, to live the way you live, with you.”
In reaction to the new hint of defiance in Martin’s voice, some of Sister Rose’s delicacy fell away, so that she sounded almost sarcastic when she asked, “And your father? What does he say about your vocation?”
If she had anticipated, and possibly even hoped for, defensiveness, she was disappointed.
“He doesn’t understand yet. Except maybe the problem is he understands too well.”
“Oh, so you have discussed it with him?” Sister Rose swallowed hard. “Your calling, I mean? And you admit it is a problem.”
Now, at last, Martin became shy. This boy, who hadn’t scrupled to come bothering her in the brickyard of her day, buried under her own business of saving the school from the blitzkrieg that was Sister Adelthwide, and many other tasks beside, this absurd young man—confused, obviously, but no less absurd for that—who hadn’t blushed at all to say that he wanted to join a convent, now, finally, when asked about his father, balked. His face went bright red, “as a young bride’s,” thought Sister Rose unwillingly, because somehow, this troubled, troublesome boy had forced her to entertain such an image of him, which she fought to reject, but which she couldn’t keep out. It was as though a third person had joined them in the dark-paneled principal’s office, seated himself on Martin’s side of the desk, and waited suspensefully. And that person, that creature, was the future Martin as Martin imagined himself, a cropped and garlanded novice clutching a wooden crucifix in his arms. What a holy card he would make! Sister Rose was pierced with sympathy for the boy’s father, about whom Martin now spoke slowly and with some effort. She was by this time so
distracted she hadn’t even registered the tentative, opening words of his reply.
“… Of course I love him, but I make him mad a lot, especially when I talk about religion. He whacked me when he heard from my brother Paul that I thought I had a calling. I don’t want it to ruin my chances, but I’m pretty sure my dad doesn’t even believe in God.”
“Your chances!?” thought Sister Rose to herself, but she said nothing. She felt out of place, unequipped, like an unlucky young priest hearing, for his first confession, a sin not merely problematic but perhaps illegal. And the irony of this analogy, her consciousness that she was like a confessor, added to her growing irritation. But she continued to listen in silence.
“My Mom,” Martin went on, apparently oblivious to the emotional havoc he was wreaking in Sister Rose, “believed for everybody, my father, and all my brothers. That must count for me, the fact that I am my mother’s child. She sent me to Saint Norbert’s, against what everybody else wanted. My oldest brother Mark said it would just finish making me a sissy, and my father believed him—I guess he believes in some things.”
Martin blushed and smiled weakly, pausing for Sister Rose to appreciate his deduction. When she remained blank, he went on.
“My mother laughed at that idea, which only made my father madder. So they would fight, my mother could yell when she wanted to. They would fight and I would cry. That was my way back then. And she knew what was best for me, if he would just leave it alone. They fought, terrible fights, and even I know it wasn’t really, or only, about me going to a Catholic school, but because she believed, and he didn’t believe. But she was stronger, though she was sick, so that in the end, he couldn’t not believe as strong as she did, or else, I mean, she believed stronger than he didn’t. And then she died.”
Apparently moved and fascinated by his own complex version of his life up to now, Martin’s chest heaved once, but his eyes, wide as they were, were perfectly dry.
Sister Rose, relieved that she was not alone in her growing sadness, for that’s what, rather than real anger, it turned out to be—but not all that it turned out to be, because she felt again the combination of contradictory emotions which were virtually this boy’s medium, the clay with which he worked and the finished product, too—drew herself up, physically as well as mentally, she did the rare thing and stood up and pointed an index finger at the boy, not
accusingly, but in deep recognition at last.
“What made your father angry? What did your mother believe?”
Now Martin’s lip did tremble slightly, but it might have been in frustration more than anything else.
“My mother believed that I would be safe here.”
“Safe from what?”
“From the world.” Martin lowered his voice slightly. “From men.”
Sister Rose, still standing, still pointing, though less … pointily, took great care with her next words.
“Martin, a man living among women who have chosen to live apart from men—and I know you are old enough to understand what I mean: nuns love all men and women equally, but have followed a call not to become wives and mothers and so do not associate with men in those ways—would not be removed from the world. Nor would such a man ever be welcomed among such women. Nor could that ever be what you mean by ‘safety’. Your mother sent you to the school, and she was right to do that! But I don’t think,” Sister Rose was trying so hard to tread lightly, “I can’t believe that she sent you to the convent. Because I think she would have known that was impossible.”
“She didn’t send me. Not this time. I was called.”
“That’s what you say, but you’re mistaken. Nobody is called out of the world for safety. There is nothing in the world to be afraid of. And you don’t have to be a nun or a priest to know that.” Thus Sister Rose proclaimed aloud, and it was the capstone to her arguments, though in her mind, she heard the nagging voice of the outside world telling her that to be a nun, according to that world, was very odd, so to be a man who wanted to be a nun was perhaps not so much odder—again, in the eyes of the world.
Martin, with his by now maddening candor and lack of guile (if only he would slip, and let show some ulterior motive, some mockery or conceit) considered and then replied with all the effect of bluntness.
“Who said I was afraid?” At this point, at last, he did seem like other boys.
“You just said that you were afraid of the world, of men...” Sister Rose was struggling.
Martin cut her off.
“I’m not afraid of men. Or if I’m afraid of them,” Martin spoke slowly, and Sister Rose could watch him finding the words, “it’s because I like them. In a way that I know is wrong.”
This clarification, which Sister Rose could not pretend she had not anticipated and dreaded, at
least had the virtue of simplicity.
Martin continued with a logic and calmness that chilled Sister Rose to her core. “I mean, I’ve lived my whole life surrounded by men. So now I’m choosing not to anymore. A priest is the last thing someone like me should be!”
Studying her straight black sleeves, Sister Rose asked, “Have you told anyone about this? “No, I couldn’t tell it to anyone but you. This is my business.”
Now Sister Rose was ready to give up. She supported herself with both hands on her desktop, and prepared to sit back down. She felt weary, and that she was now wasting her time. But she also extrapolated from the boy’s mature capacity to maintain her curiosity that Martin sensed her weariness and futility. He too stood up as though to leave. Was she right to let him do so?
“So you say it’s impossible?” he mused more than questioned, and he clearly felt that this could not be the only option.
Sister Rose nodded definitively. After another moment she spoke again.
“Martin, before you go, can I ask you a favor? Can you ask God to help you to know your true calling, and to give you patience, and to help you to grow in understanding, and to help you at school, to make friends with others, and to get to know a little better the world you seem to fear? And if you have room, Martin, in the midst of all these prayers, can you pray for me, too?”
Martin was visibly deflated. “Yes,” he said with strained politeness. And again the nun worried that there might yet be an angry, perhaps a tearful scene, and then when he was gone she would still have him to deal with. She made a rash decision, for the sake of the now.
“And you’ll come back, say in three months or even sooner if you need to, and talk to me, and tell me how you’re doing.” Sister Rose was generous— that was her greatest charm, not to mention one of the top five reasons for Sister Adelthwide’s visit.
Martin’s face registered the offer of a return, but afterward remained still for another long moment. Then, “Yes, I’m leaving,” he said, and turned his back to her slowly. “I’ll do everything you say. But I have a favor to ask you, too.”
“Of course, Martin! If it is anything in my power.” She was so glad he was going.
He pressed his manly fingers over the wrinkles in his shabby trouser pockets.
“What is it you want, Martin?” She was settling stiffly back into her chair, she heard the radiator
buzzing softly, she reemerged into her normal world of tangible difficulties.
“‘One thing I have asked of the Lord,’” said Martin in a mechanistic tone, utterly devoid of emotion; the sound was like that of a wind-up toy, and terrible to Sister Rose’s ear, “’this I seek, to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.’”
Thus, in parting, this unnatural boy with the unbelievable name “whacked” her, as he might phrase it, phrasing his intentions as she had done in taking her own vows all those years ago. So a psalm can fall like an axe. Sister Rose rose again, suddenly, as though called herself, and this time to battle. But Martin only showed her a darkly radiant face before bowing—he actually bent at the waist—and deftly backed out of the room.
II
A few minutes of unexpected evening sun set fire to the host hovering over the still damp chapel lawn. Even non-Catholics traveling the main road beyond St. Norbert’s reverently noted the sight through the trees. Near the knop of the cup-shaped drive, two nuns paused to appreciate the little show. One, Sister Anciline, the tendons of her strong ankles just visible above her fallen wool socks and heavy shoes, was pushing the other, her Mother Superior, Sister Rose, in a wheelchair. Unusually, Sister Anciline had removed her headdress and held it now between her right thumb and the handle of the chair. With her taut, mottled skin and her thin lips and her shoulder length, coarse gray hair unpinned, she looked, smiling with something akin to pride at the flashing symbol, like a pioneer woman contemplating the West, like any other woman wearied but unconquered—in fact inspired—by hardship. Sister Rose Redunda looked as she always looked: restrained, concentrated, waiting for the world to make its next move.
The last move that the world had made in her regard had left Sister Rose in this wheelchair. Four months earlier, anticipating daily the final recommendations from Sister Adelthwide and the Mother General of the Order as to the financial state and future prospects of the school, on the very day, in fact, that the news had been delivered by special post, in a fat padded envelope topped by a letter with the Cardinal’s seal, Sister Rose had collapsed. The envelope had contained only good news, the letter was an enthusiastic and congratulatory one, with guarantees of low-interest diocesan loans to continue the expansion and improvement of Saint
Norbert’s. But Sister Rose had her stroke all the same, proving to herself at least a theory she had long held, that the cost of experience is independent of our judgments as to whether it is good experience or not.
The stroke had in no way altered affairs at Saint Norbert’s, nor Sister Rose’s control over them. After a two-week hospital stay, she was back at the convent, and doctors who had originally expressed grave skepticism were amazed and delighted by her progress. They now expected a complete recovery by Christmas, three months away. Really the only obvious effect of the attack was that she continued to need the wheelchair, hardly surprising given her history of infantile paralysis. And Sister Rose, by nature averse to any extraneous aid, most of which she considered in the light of interference, was in this case content to accept the mobility and companionship the wheelchair provided. The companionship, she was startled to find, proved her priority. In the aftermath of the great jolt to her system, it touched Sister Rose’s shaken but undamaged heart to have her sisters vie for the honor of wheeling her around. When they saw how it affected her, the sisters in their turn were affected; thus the stroke, as Sister Martha archly phrased it, had proved a general strike for solidarity.
“How is the digging coming?” asked Sister Rose, looking from the chapel to a place just beyond a spiky row of pines.
“The men seem to have stopped for the day,” answered Sister Anciline, hand up to her eyes. “I’m surprised they came at all, what with the pouring rain...”
“Some men don’t mind the rain,” offered Sister Rose, a little wistfully. “My father gardened rain or shine. My mother said he preferred the wet weather. Made the weeds easier to pull.”
Both nuns looked toward the trenches that marked the outlines of the new gymnasium, and both imagined, if a little differently, the new swimming pool, Sister Anciline picturing it as a great but shallow pond filled with loud and splashing third graders, and Sister Rose conjuring up a large, clean rectangle of water hosting an orderly race among upper level students whose proud, well-attired parents watched in dignified admiration from the bleachers. It was in either case a pleasing prospect, and each nun was content to hold onto her own vision while together they rounded the widest crescent of the drive, a course which led them away from the chapel back through the trees to the convent.
Along that route, opening up like a secret in an otherwise straightforward narrative, was a little circular grove of struggling holly and hardier yew, a pocket of plain lawn overseen at its edge by a life-sized statue of Saint Francis, hands and bare feet stigmatized, standing now with a real bird on his stone shoulder, seeming to preach to the three empty benches arranged in a half circle before him. Well, they were usually empty. As Sister Anciline, following their custom, turned into the grove, pausing as always to gather the extra energy needed to push the wheelchair over the thick root of a tree, both nuns were confronted by a young male figure, seated with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Due to the enclosed nature of the space, he was only a few yards away when they noticed him.
“Sisters,” said Martin Xavier Gonfundus, matter of factly, looking up and smiling a shy smile, but without apparent surprise.
If he had fallen from the sky, if he had risen up from under the ground, if he had struck them down, stolen their rosaries, and flown laughing away, his appearance could not have had a greater or more obvious impact on the two nuns. Wide eyed and ready and as unselfish as ever, Sister Anciline had turned immediately to Sister Rose to ensure she had not suffered another stroke, and to protect her at all costs. Sister Rose, caught off guard as she certainly was, nevertheless collected herself quickly, in her old manner.
“Martin?” Already there was no trace of alarm in her voice, although her gaze had visibly narrowed. The young man continued to smile and looked at his shoes, which were shiny and new. She asked again, “Martin?” as though she was not certain it was Martin, or as though she insisted he confirm it.
It was true that he had changed in some little ways since their last, extraordinary meeting. He was a bit longer, slimmer, neater. And there was a little white scar, like a comet, curving around his right eye—she was sure she hadn’t seen that before—and a bit of dried blood in the middle of his lower lip. All in all he looked a tiny bit tough, if for that more typical of boys his age. Sister Rose, silent again, pondered this development.
“It’s me,” said Martin, grinning, but both nuns saw that it was forced. After another soundless pause, Sister Anciline laughed out loud at the situation, simultaneously pulling her hair up and under her headdress, which she hastily reattached to her head; as awkward as it always made her feel to wear it, she felt far more awkward for anyone other than
her fellow nuns to see her without it.
“And how are you doing, Martin?” Sister Rose finally brought out, and it pained her to hear herself sounding so like the school principal she inescapably was, like the eternal teacher waiting to judge a pupil’s recitation of “O Captain! My Captain!”. And then it crossed her mind how this particular pupil, so strange and elusive and ill defined, might find some new and problematic meaning in those lines... But she was wandering, and she couldn’t risk that.
Martin, now standing up, remained silent and quite still, suggesting that he hadn’t changed altogether. But no, there was something unnatural and more than mere adolescent awkwardness in the new stooped posture. He looked physically uncomfortable, not, as before, serene, but stiff and sore. So we’ve both been through something thought Sister Rose.
“Well you do pop up at odd times,” rang out Sister Anciline, in order to fill at least one of the gaps. “You’re like a penny—a lucky one I hope!”
“I hope so, too,” replied Martin, though it was obvious he wasn’t promising anything. After another pause, Sister Rose spoke.
“I’ve been hoping to see you again. You didn’t come back as you promised. And as you can see,” and here she gave a quick glance, just with her eyes, down at her lap, “I couldn’t come looking for you.”
Martin gave her a look that seemed almost surly, as though to say, “Not even a stroke would have stopped me.” And then he blushed to the roots of his fine brown hair.
Sister Anciline, who was famous for preempting hints, bent to whisper into Sister Rose’s ear. Sister Rose answered aloud with mild authority.
“I think that’s an excellent idea. And as you have other things to do, I don’t think you’ll need to retrieve me. Unless I’m badly mistaken, Martin will be happy to accompany me back to the house.”
Martin, still red in the face, nodded, and in a moment, with a parting, searching look at the young man, Sister Anciline was gone.
Sister Rose wheeled closer to Martin, stopped in front of him, and beckoned him to sit back down. Looking him full in the face, her instincts were confirmed. It had doubtless been, for both of them, a very busy ten months.
Since that time, and especially during the period of her recuperation, Sister Rose had thought of Martin with some frequency. Fraught with pressures at first financial and then above all physiological, she had nevertheless regularly returned
to his “case”. Tempted at first to dismiss him as an unworthy distraction—an idiot, or an actor desperate for attention, or even a devil in the making—the scientific side of her brain soon won out. And so, with the intention of educating herself on the topics of adolescent sexuality, not to mention homosexuality, she had visited the public library (something guaranteed to gain the notice of her community) and spent some time reading and discussing such things—discreetly of course, but with her habitual determination. She had spoken in general terms to the other nuns and to a few of the more engaged health workers at the hospital, and then more specifically and confidentially to her friend, Father Barnard, whose great experience in and out of the world she respected, and whom she knew to be not merely wise, but sensible. They agreed, for obvious but also for unspoken reasons, that Martin probably didn’t belong in a seminary. But where, then, did he belong? And what, practically speaking, could it have to do with her? The upshot of her efforts was that, while he had never been far from her thoughts, she was still at a loss as to how she could help him. His sudden presence now was only a restatement— a more urgent restatement, she was sure—of the problem.
“How is your family doing? Your father, and your brothers?” she asked, for lack of any instinct as to how to proceed.
“They’re great. My dad’s getting married again. He can’t wait.”
Sister Rose was again struck by the boy’s straightforwardness, which had so impressed her at their first meeting. He simply didn’t do sarcasm, evinced no selfish pride, and since those were the things she was trained and best equipped to combat in the young, she was left without recourse, like a gardener or a builder with the wrong tools. He was impossible. Though she was neither theologian nor church historian, Sister Rose found herself wondering what the early Christians would have made of a Martin Xavier Gonfundus, those first of the faithful who accepted the impossible on the sole condition that it be true.
“And you, Martin? Have you made any progress? Any friends? Any plans?”
Martin looked away from her. His face was a pale oval turned upward against the black trees and the sky slowly relinquishing its light.
“No real friends,” he said. “And my plans are the same, they never change, though I’ve tried to change them.” Then, after another moment, “I’ve got to live with you. Isn’t there a way... I mean... Couldn’t you
maybe hide me somehow?”
That’s what the Early Christians would have done. For a split second Sister Rose wondered if Martin could read her mind. Then she almost laughed out loud. Hide him! Perhaps she could dress him in a habit—he was still young, and there were numerous theatrical precedents. And when he was found out? She could just imagine what the other nuns, much less the local clergy, would say: that her mind was gone—and that’s if she was lucky. And the boy’s father and brothers; she pictured them circling the school by torchlight. A tear of amusement gathered in one eye as she pursued the fantasy almost against her will. The final scene unfolded with Sister Edwina discovering Martin hidden asleep in a cupboard in the convent attic, the other sisters baying behind her, Sister Edwina, like a trapper of old, barking over her shoulder, not cruelly but in triumph, “We’ve got a live one!” No, it was impossible.
“I’m sorry, Martin, “ she began, but he cut her off.
“So there’s nothing you can do? Have you thought about it at all?”
It, not him, she reflected. He had a calling, that was beyond doubt. And, Sister Rose felt with equal parts confidence and fear, his calling was stronger than hers. In the face of it, she replied, “Yes I have, Martin—if you only knew!—and I think to begin with you should probably see a doctor...”
But her voice trailed off, because as she was speaking, Martin stood and raised his hands somewhat, and she realized, even in the gathering dark, that they were both red and swollen, the fingers strangely bent, and under one of his cuffs was the edge of a bandage. He followed her gaze, but didn’t otherwise move, at first.
“Oh Martin!” It sounded more like a deep sigh covering a multitude of sad things than the calling out of a particular person’s name.
In a moment, Martin was on his knees, with his head in her lap, though after the initial shock of contact she seemed hardly to notice. He rocked slightly, and with her own worn hands she gently and mechanically patted his back. He sobbed, and she thought.
At first she thought of her own vocation, some vital part of which always seemed, lately, to be, like her spirits, on the brink of collapse. Her mind traveled back as it had done so often over these past weeks and months to her own youth, and her first recognition of her future life and purpose. She had been born Kathleen Elizabeth Flynn, in Detroit, Michigan, and was raised a good Catholic by loving parents in a small town not far from that city. She
was a smart girl, outgoing and popular, but when she was in her last year at the local Jesuit college she had come home from a particularly inspiring week of lectures on plant behavior—specifically, on phototropism, the way that plant hormones regulate the building of cells against the sun’s light, those cells sacrificing themselves to bend the plant toward it. And at dinner that wintry Wednesday evening, as though in the damp aftermath of a feverish dream, she had calmly announced to her parents what she had been contemplating at intervals for at least two years, that she would enter the convent upon graduating. She was going to be a teacher and a nun. Her parents were so happy for her, if silently less so for themselves, because she was an only child and they had always looked forward to grandchildren. She knew then, and she had never doubted since, that the children she cared for and educated must make up for that. And besides, if God had written her full name in the stain-infused filaments under her microscope, it could not have been clearer: she had been called.
She looked in the direction of the tangible proof and symbol of that call, and of its reality, and even, if she might be allowed, its success: the school. Though it showed myriad signs of unstoppable expansion, the large structure seemed to shrink before her now. And looming up beside it was the problem personified by Martin, who was still heaving quietly in her lap. Sister Rose blushed deeply when it flashed across her mind that this—these postures, this intensity of emotion—must be a tiny bit like what it was like to be made love to. Something she had, by her own firm decision, never been. The irony of it struck her. And what was love for Martin, an abused homosexual teenager who had been called to safety? Afraid as he must be of love in an unsympathetic and unscientific world (Sister Rose never questioned that the world was, at best, a frightening and illogical place, and needed first and foremost and forever to be fixed, hence the great model, Christ, was for her above all the Great Fixer), she was sure that Martin nevertheless felt the trust from which all love is born in ways the nun could hardly understand, though with a need that she could not ignore. And to his vocation he responded with a passion that had nothing, in spite of Sister Rose’s original assumption, to do with youth, but with a deep conviction that he must break with nature to be with God. She was surprised to realize that for some time now, to her own calling, ever harder to hear, she had wanted to call back, “Now what?” She had her answer at last, and it was Martin.
Finally, feeling a bit crumpled but forgiving herself for that, she made her decision. Martin would push her back up the hill to the convent, where he would sleep tonight. She would call his father and explain that she had a job for his son, and that she was willing to have him back at the school tuitionfree if he in return might serve her in the aftermath of her illness. On a trial basis, he would become a sort of helper scholar, or at least someone to wheel her around. If necessary she would even suggest that a little responsibility might make Martin a better man, accent on the last syllable, not to mention a healthier one. The father would not be at all happy at first, but she knew that she could eventually make him see the wisdom of this arrangement—she had no doubt that the prospective stepmother would see
it. Then they would turn to Martin’s real education, beginning, as all things do, with nature, after all the mother of God’s order. And some day, perhaps not far off, when the gymnasium was completed but still new, Martin would see beyond the illusory safety of Saint Norbert’s, and recognize that a calling is the easy part, the answering is the difficulty, and always fraught with suffering, uncertainty, and danger. And yet
“It’s impossible,” she breathed aloud. But she didn’t believe it.
It was dark. Martin had apparently stopped crying. He might even be asleep. In any case, she continued to hold his head in her lap, and to stroke his soft hair, as any mother of any child would.
by Duncan Hilton.
Pink Triangle Escapade
by Gregory T. Wilkins (a.k.a. Equus)
It was summer 1990 and I had just graduated from Warren Wilson College where I had created the inaugural LGBT student organization. Coming to Washington, D.C. to work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, it was powerful to thrive in a city where being out and queer was celebrated. I became an activist with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) and attended marches, rallies, kiss-ins, and die-ins.
I spent considerable time in Dupont Circle, a gay neighborhood in D.C. There were cafes, restaurants, and thriving queer businesses. Lambda Rising (a gay bookstore in Dupont Circle) sold magazines, books, cards, and paraphernalia. Not having a lot of expendable income, I remember buying my first queer button—a large, pink triangle that was approximately three inches wide. I wore it proudly on my jacket to work, social activities, on the Metro, and at queer events across the city. It attracted attention from other “family” members as an identifier.
One late night after attending a march at the Army Navy Barracks on Capitol Hill after some marines beat-up a gay man after he left Remington’s (formerly known as Equus), I was wearing my pink triangle button on the Metro as I made my way home. It was late for D.C., after 10 p.m., and the Metro was relatively quiet. I was one of a handful of people on it, when a group of men entered several stops from where I got on earlier. They walked down the Metro car aisle as if they owned it. I shrank into my seat.
Pulling my jacket lapel up to keep the autumn chill away from my neck, I prayed a silent prayer they would not bother me. I kept to myself and buried my head in a book.
I kept one eye on my book and another on them just in case they were looking for trouble. Periodically glancing upward, I hoped they would remain where they were and leave me alone. A few stops later, one of them caught my eye. He and his buddies got up from their seat and walked toward me. I went back to reading my novel and hoped that if I ignored them, they would lose interest.
As they came toward me, one of them pointed directly at me and said, “There’s one”. I glanced upward and looked behind me to another seat in case they were talking about someone else. I was the
only one there. It was me and them. Survival flashed through my brain as I began to think of an escape. I had no idea what they were talking about and why they felt the urge to bother me. I said to myself, “There’s one?”
He and his friends continued to come toward me. I sat frozen and glued to my chair not knowing exactly what to do while also noticing the emergency call button should I need to make a run for it. They stood in front of me, blocking my path, and stared angrily. He pointed at me and said, “You! Are you some kinda faggot?”
“Me?” I asked. “What are you talking about?” Now I knew why they were after me.
He replied, “Yea, you faggot. Where are you coming from”?
I said, “What are you talking about? I’m not a fag”, knowing all the while I was lying through my teeth and hoping they could not read my mind or my fear in the bottom of my belly.
He stated forcefully, “That button you’re wearing means you’re a fuckin’ homo”.
I played stupid and grimaced. “It does? I thought it meant I liked urban, rap music”.
His buddy stated, “Nope. It means you like cock and gettin’ fucked in the ass”.
I replied in a deep baritone voice, “Really? I had no idea.” Reaching toward my jacket lapel, I unbuttoned the pink triangle and buried it into my backpack. “Thanks for letting me know”.
The guys slowly backed away from me and took a seat half a car’s length away. They forgot about me. I took a deep breath. I was ready to skedaddle.
As the Metro approached the next stop, I gathered my things and quickly left the car without glancing back. I decided I would wait for the next one. It was probably safer to be out of their way then to potentially have them beat me up or get further harassed.
As the car doors closed and I watched it pass through the tunnel, I took out the pink triangle button and proudly placed it back to where it belonged—on my jacket lapel.
This lesson taught me there is a time to be loud and proud. There is also a time to slip into the shadows to be safe. Today, there is no hiding the person I am.
"The Saint" by Oscar Zamora Graves.
RFD 196 Winter 2023
"The Rapture of Saint Derek" by Denison Beach.
Biograph Theater, 1978
Judy and Tom went with me the first time, in the spring, before it had caught on, not yet as contagious as the common cold. It startled us when one of the ten people at the midnight showing talked back to the screen. Others joined in, but we stayed quiet in our row, unsure of where to focus our attention; the screen or those screaming at it. Feet stuck to the sticky floor, so we couldn’t do The Time Warp in the aisles with the rest of the audience members. By early summer, I was addicted. But I wasn’t the only one. Like a friendly neighborhood dealer, I introduced Rolando and Heidi and DeDe and Aaron and Lia to The Rocky Horror Picture Show experience. Lining up every Saturday night outside the Biograph Theater with the rest of the “jump to the left” junkies dressed like Brad or Janet, Columbia or Magenta, Frank-N-Furter or Riff Raff. Aaron, with his gym body – six pack abs and pecs for days – was always Rocky in gold lamé Speedos. Too shy to join my friends in dressing up or dancing on stage in front of the movie screen, I brought supplies. Decks of cards, slices of toast, squirt guns, rolls of toilet paper, a box of rice, newspapers, and uncooked hot dogs. I lip-synched along with the giant red lips in the opening credits. Rolando and Aaron are dead. Heidi moved to Bath, England. Lia is born again. I still talk to DeDe, a grandmother living in Northwest Indiana, a couple of times a month. We reminisce about the lost weekends of that “don’t dream it, be it” season.
—Gregg Shapiro
The Water Wheels of Hama
You stare at me smoking on the river’s bank, the cry of wood too heavy even wet in times of water.
The only zigzag across your skull is jet-black bangs, sharp valleys upon the tight summer sunset of your skin; you wiped
your lips free, first moustache free, the explosion of your teeth beneath dry lips lies seconds from fire. Hama
where we slept, Hama where we dreamed but forgot what we dreamed like any other day.
The insignificant weight of boy body scooped up in the overflowing skyward troughs grabbed onto, the tonnage of wet jeans, the tonnage of wet t-shirts, the times of water, tiny worlds upside-down dripping from your face
meant nothing to the gargantuan wheel. Whatever the hell we were doing there, baffled by your courage, baffled by your beauty,
is clear now. You shot manhood feigning death off the screaming monster and froze into the future; smoking that first cigarette they give you in heaven.
—Craig Martin Getz
"Boys Jumping Off Water Wheel" by Craig Martin Getz. Syria 2006.
Cranbrook, 1979
This is for Donna Olendorf Whose husband was on his way. She was thirty-five, and I Much younger, let’s just say, A duckpond: all you do to win is play.
This is for Donna Olendorf Who told me, “You’re okay.” I was a promising suicide, She, like a nurse, knew what to say, And her husband was on his way.
“Be quick!” “I’m sorry.” “I’m sure.” “You’re sweet.” “It doesn’t matter if you’re gay.” I could have wept, she cared so much, By thirty-five she knew the lay. I couldn’t see the fountain for the spray.
Then came her husband, handsome blond, Polite and like the day Threw light upon this desperate pair. Was I ashamed? I’ll say. My goal is one day to be fond.
This is for Donna Olendorf.
— David Derbin Nolta
Split
Tell me now, after the blast —
Tell me we had no quiet days, That everything always unfolded this fast, And the trouble we took to prolong our past Was the surest proof of a childish phase. Make the case that our love was an idol unworthy of praise.
Deny we ever met. Allow Weeds to reclaim the wider path
Our paths converged to create. Somehow
Help me to see that it’s best for us now
To be strangers, unfettered by want or wrath — Not to fathom, but each to rise into his own aftermath.
Then we’ll turn (from separate heights)
To watch the dwindling world, and see All the old shrines to memory And bridges burn, like tiny lights.
And when we land, with the other debris
Back where we began, I beg you, don’t look for what’s left of me.
— David Derbin Nolta
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Issue 198 / Summer 2024
TRAVEL & COMMUNITY
Submission Deadline: May 15, 2024
www.rfdmag.org/upload
Summer means travel. Travel originally came from “travail,” to struggle. As we enter into summer time, we’re asking you, dear reader, to look at your travel through community. As you head off to your dream vacation, or your home away from home, or your sexy snuggle zone, ponder how community is created over distance and how we come together, close differences and distances to be in community together.
Packing up for a journey means choosing to leave things behind, pack new items, unravel new outfits and places for ourselves as well as bringing along that piece of vintage that everyone will ogle over. How do we bring these experiences into our sense of building and being in community?
We’re as ever interested in how you, our readers, interact with your world, places you are traveling to— what challenges did you face, what gifts did you bring, what new dreams did you pick up along the way? Part of being alive is lurking into our experience to find the best postcard from the trip. Tell us, show us, your favorite postcards from your journey into creating community.
We all come from diverse places and experiences and we welcome hearing from everyone. We also welcome hearing about experiences in other parts of the world, from other voices that you know might want to be heard on our pages as well as you perhaps reflecting on what you learned from being a traveler.
We’re also happy to hear about the traveling that is happening in our own backyards, places that need to be explored more fully, a community story that needs an update for our readers and to also reflect how the challenges to community have been fruitful, evocative and ripe for change.
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a reader-created gay quarterly celebrating queer diversity