Monday, December 12, 2016
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Maul Out the Holly
Few things bring a family together (or tear it asunder) like a holiday celebration. The gathering together of any family unit tends to bring to the fore an endless supply of emotions, and for better or worse, a single day can ignite a powder keg of hostility, forever marring the collective memory of an occasion, and as such, entering the realm of Family Legend.
One of the consequences of living in America has been the gradual disintegration of time-honored family traditions; increased access to personal motor vehicles over the past century has allowed people to finally do what had long been a secret fantasy - escape the restrictive clutches of their families' grasps. For the first time in human history, leaving one's old life behind is as easy as jumping into your car and driving as far away as your gas tank and wallet will allow.
Imagine, for example, if Romeo and Juliet could have hopped into their FIAT and simply driven out of fair Verona, escaping the tyranny of their controlling families. They may very well have avoided their star-crossed tale of woe, and spared scores of high school students the indignity of enduring any number of poorly adapted or acted student renditions.
The relative ease of fast relocation has allowed people to start their lives anew, free from the fetters of in-person familial interaction. This has spared millions of people like myself - those who would rather endure a Tommy Gun-capacity volley of Tetanus shots, rather than spend an entire day immersed in a seemingly never ending deluge of family engagements - the horror of a bland holiday feast amidst the deafening din of that inevitably accompanies large family gatherings.
As for myself, shortly after reaching the age of majority, I made my best effort to strike out on my own. To be fair, as time has passed (and elder family members, along with it), the unifying bonds that once held our families together, ensuring that all but the most far flung family members returned with homing pigeon reliability, retain little of their adhesive properties. No longer do the out-of-state family members drive six hours out of their way to spend a single afternoon languishing in nutmeggy fumes, pretending that the drive was worth the cost and effort.
My parents divorced when I was four, leaving me with two separate family holidays to celebrate. To my way of thinking, this afforded me the opportunity to make a real killing, as far as presents were concerned. Being a child of the 1980s, I wholeheartedly took up the mantle of the Me Generation, greedily accepting - nay...expecting - to be presented with gifts, as if I were, in fact, the baby Jesus.
While virtually every child attempts to manipulate their way into receiving more gifts, not many children, at the time, had the luxury of doing so twice. The further inclusion of my step-father's family meant that, come Hell or high water, I was certain to get everything I asked for, plus several things I never knew I wanted. So long as the presents continued to come, I didn't hesitate to accept them with all the grace and civility of a pig being presented with his evening slop.
The holidays were, however, celebrated differently on each side of the family. Being the least family-oriented member of both parents' parties, I went out of my way to ensure that my displeasure at being forced to attend these gatherings was well-expressed and plainly written.
My mother's family home would become the very picture of what I still consider to be the "Family Christmas." Christmas at the Ayersman household resembled, to some degree, a meeting of Branch Davidians. The guest list was comprised primarily of family - grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - no branch of the family tree was too flimsy to warrant an open invitation, and there was no end to the swirl of activity.
Devout Pentecostals, the Ayersman Family never made available an alcoholic beverage, and yet, despite the lack of intoxication, the chaos would reach a fever pitch by the three-quarter mark of the evening. Children ran throughout the house, virtually unchecked by their otherwise engaged parents, and were only brought to heel if their behavior in any way inconvenienced one of the adults.
On my father's side of the family, holiday fetes extended beyond familial ties, and out into the entire neighborhood. My grandparents were heavily invested in the First Ward community, in Morgantown, WV, and had made friends whose last names were known by every member of the Hopkins household. Come Christmas Eve, friends and neighbors would walk, drive, or fly to attend the annual Christmas Eve Cocktail Party.
More than just holiday celebrations, Walter and Mary Ann celebrated a daily Cocktail Hour; their youngest child's arrival was, actually, heralded over martinis, and I have visions of my grandmother gently sipping her cocktail as her water broke, and only surrendering it from her well-manicured hands at the insistence of a matronly nurse, just before being asked to kindly extinguish her cigarette prior to delivering the baby.
This kind of drunken revelry was a daily occurrence; that a holiday served as the reason for a gathering only meant more people were around to join the party. Regardless of the occasion, the Hopkins Residence more closely resembled a busy airport terminal, rather than a family home. Any and all comers could stand assured that, were they to stop by, they would be both fed and plied with alcohol. Guests would arrive sober, and teeter out of the house hours later having little recollection of what or how much was imbibed, over the course of the evening.
If the Hopkins House served as the den of iniquity for drunken soirees, my mother's family home served as the picture of chaotic sobriety. That said, it was expected that all guests, regardless of their age, comport themselves with dignity and a certain sense of decorum - when one attended a Hopkins gathering, it would never have done to behave as if one were at a frat party. The Ayersmans, however, held with no such pretense, and no one's behavior was censured.
Perhaps it was the greater insistence upon the family unit that kept my mother's family coming together for so many years, but for whatever reason, it was the Hopkins Family that was the first to break apart. The death of my grandfather in 2003 served as the linchpin whose pulling led to the rapid dissolution of the Hopkins family unit.
The holiday season, in particular, presented potential guests with an uncomfortable conundrum - how does one address the elephant in the room? Further to that end, for how long is it appropriate to offer condolences, knowing that each holiday is spent in the absence of the family patriarch? When one-half of a power couple dies, events that were once co-hosted become glaringly singular efforts, leaving the onus of gracious hospitality upon the sole survivor. There's truly no easy way to move forward with those types of celebratory events without someone inevitably, and usually inadvertently, turning it into a memorial service.
No one felt this awkwardness more so than my grandmother. Within a few years of her husband's passing, she effectively abandoned the practice of hosting holiday festivities. Even before his death, neither of them really had either the interest or the energy required to even erect the giant tree to which we'd become accustomed, much less to put together an in-home event for up to fifty people. Left to conduct business on her own, the monarch of the family simply stopped putting forth the effort, though never once did she turn away a friendly face.
As the tide of guests tapered out to a depressing low, the Christmas Eve Cocktail Party was the first tradition to fall to the ravages of time. Eventually, the slow trickle petered out to an intermittent drip, until even family members stopped bothering to attend. Children had become less manageable, as their parents became more permissive, and the family friends whose names had worn even treads across our lips either passed away or simply faded into memories, sending their well wishes in the form of cards, rather than dressing in their finest.
Amplifying the loss of this time honored tradition was my grandmother's relatively rapid decline into Alzheimer's Disease. But, while her short-term memory quickly eroded, her silver tongue remained rapier sharp, the serrated edges no less finely honed by the haziness of her mind. If anything, Alzheimer's gave Mary Ann the freedom to speak without her carefully tuned filter, turning her into a dagger-mouthed harpy delivering unfiltered personal jabs, each incision executed with surgical precision, every verbal slash a fatal stroke, designed to swiftly disarm what I can only assume she perceived to be a mental fencing opponent.
Family tended to be the only visitors she entertained, and so this muted sense of decorum inevitably resulted in wounded pride and deep offense. No relative escaped her overt hostility, and over time, even those most understanding eventually reached their saturation point and stopped coming around, altogether.
The last Christmas I spent at the Hopkins House was in 2010. After a decade of calculated avoidance, I finally made the effort to travel back to Morgantown to visit my extended family. My then-partner had accompanied me, because I wanted him to meet his potential in-laws; his secondary function as a support system was just a welcomed surprise.
Some of my fondest childhood memories involve arriving at the Hopkins House a few days before Christmas. Christmases at the Hopkins House were more than just neverending cocktail parties. In a community where decorating one's house was the way of the day, the Hopkins Family went out of its way to ensure that everyone in the neighborhood knew of its holiday supremacy.
The winding stone steps leading to the front door were lit by the brightly gleaming colored lights wound 'round the handrail, bulbs so big and energy inefficient that Mon Power went into overtime providing the electricity. The shrub tree around which the railing spiraled was equally festooned, so overlit, it could be seen by overhead planes. The living room's picture window, visible from the street atop a short rise, completed the picture, opening onto a monstrous tree.
The eight-foot tree was always perfectly centered in that window, and every square inch was adorned with family ornaments, collected for most of the 20th Century, each representative of successive generations, lit only by the glow of the brightly colored lights woven throughout the tree.
Gifts spilled out from underneath the tree, the first of which having been shoved so far back and up that they actually wound up tangled between the tree branches. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, every available surface served to hold the overflow, and walking through the living room had become virtually impossible. Eventually, as ever more parcels continued to pour in, piles were formed behind every piece of furniture not fully flush against the wall, and after that space had been exhausted, every room save the bathroom was used for present storage.
As a child, and well into my teen years, I would marvel at this display, inevitably giving in to temptation and rooting through the garishly wrapped presents, myopic in my hunt for any "To:" label with my name attached to it. With each new discovery, I would violently shake the gifts in hopes of dislodging the contents enough to give forth audible clues that might lead to their positive identification.
Come Christmas Day, I would tear through the hundreds of presents, collecting every gift meant for me, and wait for permission to open each one. My Fisher-Price Little People Main Street playset that accompanied my inherited Little People Play Family Action Garage playset; my first Nintendo Entertainment System; the copy of Mega Man III from my father - almost every Christmas gift I remember receiving was opened in the Hopkins House.
In the late 90s, my grandmother finally put her foot down, and insisted upon "classier" small, white bulbs for the tree, and it was then that my love of Christmas started to die. The walls and ceiling, once so softly cast in muted rainbows made from reflections of the metal ornaments, and in their place, the unforgiving glare of white light, casting harsh shadows, rather than subtle glows.
After a day of driving along snow covered West Virginian backroads, the house we pulled up to little resembled the house of my childhood memories. The house stood out against the overcast sky, not because of any garish decorations, but because of the void created by its lack of jollity. Gone was the shrub, the handrail devoid of any light. The curtains were drawn in the picture window, and through the slight gap, I could see that little remained of "my" Christmas.
In 2010, there were no mounds of presents to ransack; no hordes stampeding through the house to offer their season's greetings; just my grandmother, my partner, and me, sitting in the living room. The eight-foot family tree had been replaced with a four-foot tree placed atop the marble top coffee table, beneath which laid no wrapped boxes. The living room, once rendered impassable by the tsunami of gifts, was haunting in its cold emptiness, devoid of all, but the barest decorations, and even those seemed to be swallowed by the emptiness around them.
Despite having been forewarned of my grandmother's progression into Alzheimer's Disease, I was wholly unprepared for the reality that visiting with her presented. While I expected the frailty that comes with old age, her inability to retain new information caught me off guard, as I fielded her usual barrage of probing questions, each one asked not once, but four or five times. Having some experience working with dementia, I put forth my best effort to remain jovial, rephrasing answers I had proffered not five minutes earlier.
Shortly after my partner and I arrived, my aunt and her family joined us - the only family members who chose to visit the matriarch on Christmas Day. But, even this company served only to further divest me of my childhood memories, as she, too, had fallen prey to the ravages of illness. Accompanied by her oxygen tank, her husband and children helped her into the house, and for the first time, I began to realize how poorly our family had weathered the passage of time. Her now teenaged daughters little resembled the children with whom I'd once romped, and the only person who remained virtually unchanged in appearance was her husband.
Shortly after their arrival, I excused my partner and myself to go see the view from the back porch. He and I walked to the edge, and gazed out across the snow covered hill overlooking the Monongahela River and the Morgantown Lock & Dam.
And it was there, inundated by the systematic dissolution of my childhood memories, that I began to silently weep.
This was the last Christmas I got to spend with my grandmother, and I will fully admit that I came away from the experience looking like a complete and utter cad. My first real interaction with my extended family in a decade, and it was all I could do not to dissolve into a blubbering mess and make the occasion all about me, and my emotions.
When it came time to leave for our hotel, I didn't leave, so much as flee from the house, after which I attempted to drive the car through my haze of tears. My father called roughly fifteen minutes after I had left to tell me that I needed to go back to the house, as my grandmother had forgotten to give me my Christmas present - $200 - which meant that I had to muster together the effort to comport myself to a presentable standard.
Accepting the cash gift from my Alzheimer's addled grandmother left me feeling both humble and small, and took from me the last vestige of Christmas cheer. Having wept all the tears I could stand, I took both my partner and the cash to "the" gay bar in town. We were the only two customers, there, and we spent the evening sipping cocktails, while he listened to me speak of my devastation. That he was such a supportive partner speaks highly of him, and for that night, I will be eternally grateful.
To this day, I can't think of any Christmas outside the context of my childhood experiences, and the absence of those traditions, as well as the subsequent family skirmishes that have followed in the wake of my grandmother's death, still leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. The house that served as the center of gravity for our family is now up for sale, and there's no small part of me that doesn't wish I had the money to buy it, outright, if only to preserve, and hopefully restore the family traditions that once held us all together.
It's an odd switch, for me - someone whose idea of "family" was once an annual inconvenience. That I have this strange desire to play the family patriarch - the Fairy Poppins to my wayward family - creates in me a sense of dread, not because I fear that I'm getting old, but because I always saw a lot of myself in my grandmother.
I'm cynical, at the best of times; "curmudgeonly" is an adjective I've often heard in conjunction with my comportment. From my grandmother, I inherited my rapier wit, stiletto tongue, and baselard gaze, but managed to escape without any sense of appropriate timing. What I lack in decorum, I make up for in brutality. At thirty-two, I already behave in much the way she did toward the end of her life, and yet, I don't have the convenience of being able to blame overt hostility and acerbity on Alzheimer's.
And that, in and of itself, makes me sad. I do want to revive the Hopkins Family Christmas Eve Cocktail Party, and if I'm ever in a position to make that happen, I shall.
To this day, I can remember waking up in the middle of the night and wandering out into the living room to look at the Christmas tree, the colorful lights transforming the room into a kaleidoscope of red, orange, magenta, green, and blue. I would open the front door, and gaze out into the silently falling snow, turned pale orange by the street lights along Callen Avenue, only to turn around to find my grandmother, sitting in equal silence on the couch, the burning tip of her cigarette leaving intricate trails as she smoked, unable to sleep.
One of the consequences of living in America has been the gradual disintegration of time-honored family traditions; increased access to personal motor vehicles over the past century has allowed people to finally do what had long been a secret fantasy - escape the restrictive clutches of their families' grasps. For the first time in human history, leaving one's old life behind is as easy as jumping into your car and driving as far away as your gas tank and wallet will allow.
Imagine, for example, if Romeo and Juliet could have hopped into their FIAT and simply driven out of fair Verona, escaping the tyranny of their controlling families. They may very well have avoided their star-crossed tale of woe, and spared scores of high school students the indignity of enduring any number of poorly adapted or acted student renditions.
The relative ease of fast relocation has allowed people to start their lives anew, free from the fetters of in-person familial interaction. This has spared millions of people like myself - those who would rather endure a Tommy Gun-capacity volley of Tetanus shots, rather than spend an entire day immersed in a seemingly never ending deluge of family engagements - the horror of a bland holiday feast amidst the deafening din of that inevitably accompanies large family gatherings.
As for myself, shortly after reaching the age of majority, I made my best effort to strike out on my own. To be fair, as time has passed (and elder family members, along with it), the unifying bonds that once held our families together, ensuring that all but the most far flung family members returned with homing pigeon reliability, retain little of their adhesive properties. No longer do the out-of-state family members drive six hours out of their way to spend a single afternoon languishing in nutmeggy fumes, pretending that the drive was worth the cost and effort.
My parents divorced when I was four, leaving me with two separate family holidays to celebrate. To my way of thinking, this afforded me the opportunity to make a real killing, as far as presents were concerned. Being a child of the 1980s, I wholeheartedly took up the mantle of the Me Generation, greedily accepting - nay...expecting - to be presented with gifts, as if I were, in fact, the baby Jesus.
While virtually every child attempts to manipulate their way into receiving more gifts, not many children, at the time, had the luxury of doing so twice. The further inclusion of my step-father's family meant that, come Hell or high water, I was certain to get everything I asked for, plus several things I never knew I wanted. So long as the presents continued to come, I didn't hesitate to accept them with all the grace and civility of a pig being presented with his evening slop.
The holidays were, however, celebrated differently on each side of the family. Being the least family-oriented member of both parents' parties, I went out of my way to ensure that my displeasure at being forced to attend these gatherings was well-expressed and plainly written.
My mother's family home would become the very picture of what I still consider to be the "Family Christmas." Christmas at the Ayersman household resembled, to some degree, a meeting of Branch Davidians. The guest list was comprised primarily of family - grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - no branch of the family tree was too flimsy to warrant an open invitation, and there was no end to the swirl of activity.
Devout Pentecostals, the Ayersman Family never made available an alcoholic beverage, and yet, despite the lack of intoxication, the chaos would reach a fever pitch by the three-quarter mark of the evening. Children ran throughout the house, virtually unchecked by their otherwise engaged parents, and were only brought to heel if their behavior in any way inconvenienced one of the adults.
On my father's side of the family, holiday fetes extended beyond familial ties, and out into the entire neighborhood. My grandparents were heavily invested in the First Ward community, in Morgantown, WV, and had made friends whose last names were known by every member of the Hopkins household. Come Christmas Eve, friends and neighbors would walk, drive, or fly to attend the annual Christmas Eve Cocktail Party.
More than just holiday celebrations, Walter and Mary Ann celebrated a daily Cocktail Hour; their youngest child's arrival was, actually, heralded over martinis, and I have visions of my grandmother gently sipping her cocktail as her water broke, and only surrendering it from her well-manicured hands at the insistence of a matronly nurse, just before being asked to kindly extinguish her cigarette prior to delivering the baby.
This kind of drunken revelry was a daily occurrence; that a holiday served as the reason for a gathering only meant more people were around to join the party. Regardless of the occasion, the Hopkins Residence more closely resembled a busy airport terminal, rather than a family home. Any and all comers could stand assured that, were they to stop by, they would be both fed and plied with alcohol. Guests would arrive sober, and teeter out of the house hours later having little recollection of what or how much was imbibed, over the course of the evening.
If the Hopkins House served as the den of iniquity for drunken soirees, my mother's family home served as the picture of chaotic sobriety. That said, it was expected that all guests, regardless of their age, comport themselves with dignity and a certain sense of decorum - when one attended a Hopkins gathering, it would never have done to behave as if one were at a frat party. The Ayersmans, however, held with no such pretense, and no one's behavior was censured.
Perhaps it was the greater insistence upon the family unit that kept my mother's family coming together for so many years, but for whatever reason, it was the Hopkins Family that was the first to break apart. The death of my grandfather in 2003 served as the linchpin whose pulling led to the rapid dissolution of the Hopkins family unit.
The holiday season, in particular, presented potential guests with an uncomfortable conundrum - how does one address the elephant in the room? Further to that end, for how long is it appropriate to offer condolences, knowing that each holiday is spent in the absence of the family patriarch? When one-half of a power couple dies, events that were once co-hosted become glaringly singular efforts, leaving the onus of gracious hospitality upon the sole survivor. There's truly no easy way to move forward with those types of celebratory events without someone inevitably, and usually inadvertently, turning it into a memorial service.
No one felt this awkwardness more so than my grandmother. Within a few years of her husband's passing, she effectively abandoned the practice of hosting holiday festivities. Even before his death, neither of them really had either the interest or the energy required to even erect the giant tree to which we'd become accustomed, much less to put together an in-home event for up to fifty people. Left to conduct business on her own, the monarch of the family simply stopped putting forth the effort, though never once did she turn away a friendly face.
As the tide of guests tapered out to a depressing low, the Christmas Eve Cocktail Party was the first tradition to fall to the ravages of time. Eventually, the slow trickle petered out to an intermittent drip, until even family members stopped bothering to attend. Children had become less manageable, as their parents became more permissive, and the family friends whose names had worn even treads across our lips either passed away or simply faded into memories, sending their well wishes in the form of cards, rather than dressing in their finest.
Amplifying the loss of this time honored tradition was my grandmother's relatively rapid decline into Alzheimer's Disease. But, while her short-term memory quickly eroded, her silver tongue remained rapier sharp, the serrated edges no less finely honed by the haziness of her mind. If anything, Alzheimer's gave Mary Ann the freedom to speak without her carefully tuned filter, turning her into a dagger-mouthed harpy delivering unfiltered personal jabs, each incision executed with surgical precision, every verbal slash a fatal stroke, designed to swiftly disarm what I can only assume she perceived to be a mental fencing opponent.
Family tended to be the only visitors she entertained, and so this muted sense of decorum inevitably resulted in wounded pride and deep offense. No relative escaped her overt hostility, and over time, even those most understanding eventually reached their saturation point and stopped coming around, altogether.
The last Christmas I spent at the Hopkins House was in 2010. After a decade of calculated avoidance, I finally made the effort to travel back to Morgantown to visit my extended family. My then-partner had accompanied me, because I wanted him to meet his potential in-laws; his secondary function as a support system was just a welcomed surprise.
Some of my fondest childhood memories involve arriving at the Hopkins House a few days before Christmas. Christmases at the Hopkins House were more than just neverending cocktail parties. In a community where decorating one's house was the way of the day, the Hopkins Family went out of its way to ensure that everyone in the neighborhood knew of its holiday supremacy.
The winding stone steps leading to the front door were lit by the brightly gleaming colored lights wound 'round the handrail, bulbs so big and energy inefficient that Mon Power went into overtime providing the electricity. The shrub tree around which the railing spiraled was equally festooned, so overlit, it could be seen by overhead planes. The living room's picture window, visible from the street atop a short rise, completed the picture, opening onto a monstrous tree.
The eight-foot tree was always perfectly centered in that window, and every square inch was adorned with family ornaments, collected for most of the 20th Century, each representative of successive generations, lit only by the glow of the brightly colored lights woven throughout the tree.
Gifts spilled out from underneath the tree, the first of which having been shoved so far back and up that they actually wound up tangled between the tree branches. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, every available surface served to hold the overflow, and walking through the living room had become virtually impossible. Eventually, as ever more parcels continued to pour in, piles were formed behind every piece of furniture not fully flush against the wall, and after that space had been exhausted, every room save the bathroom was used for present storage.
As a child, and well into my teen years, I would marvel at this display, inevitably giving in to temptation and rooting through the garishly wrapped presents, myopic in my hunt for any "To:" label with my name attached to it. With each new discovery, I would violently shake the gifts in hopes of dislodging the contents enough to give forth audible clues that might lead to their positive identification.
Come Christmas Day, I would tear through the hundreds of presents, collecting every gift meant for me, and wait for permission to open each one. My Fisher-Price Little People Main Street playset that accompanied my inherited Little People Play Family Action Garage playset; my first Nintendo Entertainment System; the copy of Mega Man III from my father - almost every Christmas gift I remember receiving was opened in the Hopkins House.
In the late 90s, my grandmother finally put her foot down, and insisted upon "classier" small, white bulbs for the tree, and it was then that my love of Christmas started to die. The walls and ceiling, once so softly cast in muted rainbows made from reflections of the metal ornaments, and in their place, the unforgiving glare of white light, casting harsh shadows, rather than subtle glows.
After a day of driving along snow covered West Virginian backroads, the house we pulled up to little resembled the house of my childhood memories. The house stood out against the overcast sky, not because of any garish decorations, but because of the void created by its lack of jollity. Gone was the shrub, the handrail devoid of any light. The curtains were drawn in the picture window, and through the slight gap, I could see that little remained of "my" Christmas.
In 2010, there were no mounds of presents to ransack; no hordes stampeding through the house to offer their season's greetings; just my grandmother, my partner, and me, sitting in the living room. The eight-foot family tree had been replaced with a four-foot tree placed atop the marble top coffee table, beneath which laid no wrapped boxes. The living room, once rendered impassable by the tsunami of gifts, was haunting in its cold emptiness, devoid of all, but the barest decorations, and even those seemed to be swallowed by the emptiness around them.
Despite having been forewarned of my grandmother's progression into Alzheimer's Disease, I was wholly unprepared for the reality that visiting with her presented. While I expected the frailty that comes with old age, her inability to retain new information caught me off guard, as I fielded her usual barrage of probing questions, each one asked not once, but four or five times. Having some experience working with dementia, I put forth my best effort to remain jovial, rephrasing answers I had proffered not five minutes earlier.
Shortly after my partner and I arrived, my aunt and her family joined us - the only family members who chose to visit the matriarch on Christmas Day. But, even this company served only to further divest me of my childhood memories, as she, too, had fallen prey to the ravages of illness. Accompanied by her oxygen tank, her husband and children helped her into the house, and for the first time, I began to realize how poorly our family had weathered the passage of time. Her now teenaged daughters little resembled the children with whom I'd once romped, and the only person who remained virtually unchanged in appearance was her husband.
Shortly after their arrival, I excused my partner and myself to go see the view from the back porch. He and I walked to the edge, and gazed out across the snow covered hill overlooking the Monongahela River and the Morgantown Lock & Dam.
And it was there, inundated by the systematic dissolution of my childhood memories, that I began to silently weep.
This was the last Christmas I got to spend with my grandmother, and I will fully admit that I came away from the experience looking like a complete and utter cad. My first real interaction with my extended family in a decade, and it was all I could do not to dissolve into a blubbering mess and make the occasion all about me, and my emotions.
When it came time to leave for our hotel, I didn't leave, so much as flee from the house, after which I attempted to drive the car through my haze of tears. My father called roughly fifteen minutes after I had left to tell me that I needed to go back to the house, as my grandmother had forgotten to give me my Christmas present - $200 - which meant that I had to muster together the effort to comport myself to a presentable standard.
Accepting the cash gift from my Alzheimer's addled grandmother left me feeling both humble and small, and took from me the last vestige of Christmas cheer. Having wept all the tears I could stand, I took both my partner and the cash to "the" gay bar in town. We were the only two customers, there, and we spent the evening sipping cocktails, while he listened to me speak of my devastation. That he was such a supportive partner speaks highly of him, and for that night, I will be eternally grateful.
To this day, I can't think of any Christmas outside the context of my childhood experiences, and the absence of those traditions, as well as the subsequent family skirmishes that have followed in the wake of my grandmother's death, still leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. The house that served as the center of gravity for our family is now up for sale, and there's no small part of me that doesn't wish I had the money to buy it, outright, if only to preserve, and hopefully restore the family traditions that once held us all together.
It's an odd switch, for me - someone whose idea of "family" was once an annual inconvenience. That I have this strange desire to play the family patriarch - the Fairy Poppins to my wayward family - creates in me a sense of dread, not because I fear that I'm getting old, but because I always saw a lot of myself in my grandmother.
I'm cynical, at the best of times; "curmudgeonly" is an adjective I've often heard in conjunction with my comportment. From my grandmother, I inherited my rapier wit, stiletto tongue, and baselard gaze, but managed to escape without any sense of appropriate timing. What I lack in decorum, I make up for in brutality. At thirty-two, I already behave in much the way she did toward the end of her life, and yet, I don't have the convenience of being able to blame overt hostility and acerbity on Alzheimer's.
And that, in and of itself, makes me sad. I do want to revive the Hopkins Family Christmas Eve Cocktail Party, and if I'm ever in a position to make that happen, I shall.
To this day, I can remember waking up in the middle of the night and wandering out into the living room to look at the Christmas tree, the colorful lights transforming the room into a kaleidoscope of red, orange, magenta, green, and blue. I would open the front door, and gaze out into the silently falling snow, turned pale orange by the street lights along Callen Avenue, only to turn around to find my grandmother, sitting in equal silence on the couch, the burning tip of her cigarette leaving intricate trails as she smoked, unable to sleep.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Accepting Personal Responsibility
There is something of a victim culture in the 21st Century. Now, I'm not speaking about the people in power who abuse their authority, privilege, and financial dominance to exploit those "beneath" them; I'm speaking about this concept of perpetual victimhood that we live in, today.
Example One: "Share the Road"
Okay, I'm all about sharing the road with bikers. Hell, I was in a relationship with one for several years, one whom, I might add, has managed to total not one, but two bikes as a result of reckless drivers. But, I know him to be a safe driver, on his own.
Basically, he's not an asshole - someone who swerves dangerously in and out of traffic with only a few feet between himself and the cars through which he's weaving, cutting people off, and leaving them only a nanosecond to slam on their brakes and cause a major pileup behind them.
Why should I share the road with someone who drives like that? Just because that person has a death wish doesn't mean the rest of us do. It is, in my opinion, our duty to keep the other drivers on the road who are obeying the law and not driving like assholes safe by running them over.
Fuck "sharing the road" with those people. They're not bikers; they're a public menace.
Example Two: "Girls in Gay Bars"
My favorite argument made, today, was that girls shouldn't be in gay bars, because they're cockblocking the gays from getting with the other gays.
Really? Most likely, it's the fact that you're a fucking douchebag about it.
Listen, people - we've fought for LGBT rights and equality for over fifty years, all so we could feel safe just being out and alive; so that we could have families, loved ones, and go into any establishment without being made to feel unwanted because of whom we love.
If you're one of those assholes who turns into a bitchy queen whenever women are in gay bars, you either need to shut the fuck up or never again complain when some business or public gathering place decides they don't want you in their establishment. Ever. You can't have it both ways - either we're welcome everywhere, or people can discriminate against us. Your choice.
Example Three: "Guys on Grindr Don't Know Their HIV Status"
According to some study, 1 in 10 guys on Grindr haven't been tested for HIV and still post that they're negative. People are acting shocked and surprised, and talking about how some guy "POZed" them (conveniently leaving out the fact that they knowingly had bareback sex with them).
You know what? If you don't want to get shot, don't play with a gun that doesn't have the safety on.
That's not "blaming the victim;" it's telling people to buck the fuck up and accept some fucking responsibility for their own sexual health.
Wake up, people! It's 2013! Have we not basically learned over the past thirty-three years that you should always assume that people have some sort of STD unless proven otherwise?
People lie; they cheat; they do intravenous drugs (though new transmissions of HIV via this method are increasingly rare) - if you haven't caught on to the fact that you should wear a goddamned condom, you're an idiot.
If you were raped or drugged or someone purposely damaged a condom in order to spread the disease, you are not at fault in the slightest; if, however, you went out trolling for bareback sex without giving a fuck about your own safety enough to believe someone when they "say" they're positive, you ARE at fault.
I hate to sound like a Republican, but Jesus Christ! Have some accountability.
Example One: "Share the Road"
Okay, I'm all about sharing the road with bikers. Hell, I was in a relationship with one for several years, one whom, I might add, has managed to total not one, but two bikes as a result of reckless drivers. But, I know him to be a safe driver, on his own.
Basically, he's not an asshole - someone who swerves dangerously in and out of traffic with only a few feet between himself and the cars through which he's weaving, cutting people off, and leaving them only a nanosecond to slam on their brakes and cause a major pileup behind them.
Why should I share the road with someone who drives like that? Just because that person has a death wish doesn't mean the rest of us do. It is, in my opinion, our duty to keep the other drivers on the road who are obeying the law and not driving like assholes safe by running them over.
Fuck "sharing the road" with those people. They're not bikers; they're a public menace.
Example Two: "Girls in Gay Bars"
My favorite argument made, today, was that girls shouldn't be in gay bars, because they're cockblocking the gays from getting with the other gays.
Really? Most likely, it's the fact that you're a fucking douchebag about it.
Listen, people - we've fought for LGBT rights and equality for over fifty years, all so we could feel safe just being out and alive; so that we could have families, loved ones, and go into any establishment without being made to feel unwanted because of whom we love.
If you're one of those assholes who turns into a bitchy queen whenever women are in gay bars, you either need to shut the fuck up or never again complain when some business or public gathering place decides they don't want you in their establishment. Ever. You can't have it both ways - either we're welcome everywhere, or people can discriminate against us. Your choice.
Example Three: "Guys on Grindr Don't Know Their HIV Status"
According to some study, 1 in 10 guys on Grindr haven't been tested for HIV and still post that they're negative. People are acting shocked and surprised, and talking about how some guy "POZed" them (conveniently leaving out the fact that they knowingly had bareback sex with them).
You know what? If you don't want to get shot, don't play with a gun that doesn't have the safety on.
That's not "blaming the victim;" it's telling people to buck the fuck up and accept some fucking responsibility for their own sexual health.
Wake up, people! It's 2013! Have we not basically learned over the past thirty-three years that you should always assume that people have some sort of STD unless proven otherwise?
People lie; they cheat; they do intravenous drugs (though new transmissions of HIV via this method are increasingly rare) - if you haven't caught on to the fact that you should wear a goddamned condom, you're an idiot.
If you were raped or drugged or someone purposely damaged a condom in order to spread the disease, you are not at fault in the slightest; if, however, you went out trolling for bareback sex without giving a fuck about your own safety enough to believe someone when they "say" they're positive, you ARE at fault.
I hate to sound like a Republican, but Jesus Christ! Have some accountability.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
In Support of Violent Revolution...
Call it a knee-jerk reaction, but I have this insatiable urge to run people over with my car; or, perhaps, to beat them until they are incapacitated, leaving them forever crippled.
I know this is extreme, and as such, I never engage in my baser instincts. They are just that, however - instincts.
Much as many of my über Liberal friends might like to believe, love isn't always the answer. Sometimes, the only way to solve a problem is through violence, barbaric as that may be. Much to the chagrin of everyone who believes that people don't learn lessons from violence, other than to spread more violence, tell that to the generation whose parents beat their asses into dark blue bruises if they ever uttered the word "nigger."
Violence is sometimes the answer, whether or not we believe it to be ethical. Virtually every psychological study has shown that pain is, in fact, an excellent deterrent when it comes to associating certain behaviors with unrelenting pain. Unless you're into pain, in which case, you become more apt to repeat the behavior (for my masochist friends).
I'm certain I will be pilloried for suggesting this, but I think it's time that the LGBT community, and other oppressed minorities, stop playing the victim. I'm tired of reading about those "victims of bullying" whose bullies torment them relentlessly, and the school does nothing about it.
Don't get me wrong - I understand the psychology of abuse victims; the helplessness and often paralyzing fear of being attacked or killed. There's nothing wrong with seeking help from other people. There is no shame is saying that you are unable to deal with a situation.
What I am suggesting is that, instead of teaching victims (on a mentor/community level) to respond to bullying or violence by having someone else step in every goddamned time, that we start teaching them to defend themselves.
It's a novel idea, I know.
But, think about it. We've trained women for decades in the art of self-defense against male attackers; why not dole out the same information to LGBT individuals? I won't lie, if someone comes at me, I will not hesitate to fuck them up.
Why are gay men and women not using "Stand Your Ground" laws to our advantage? Honestly, it's very likely that this is the surest way to get gun legislation passed - standing up to our oppressors and shooting them where they stand.
Why is there, every week, yet another story of some unsuspecting gay man/lesbian/couple being gay bashed outside a bar or in a "gayborhood," but no stories about any of those people beating the shit out of their would-be attackers? Hell, a 70-year-old military vet can do it? Why the fuck can't we?
It's unpopular to say this, of course, but it's likely because we're stuck in a cycle of abuse. When assholes attempt to take our rights from us, we fret about it, rather than standing up and starting a revolution. When bigots call us faggots, instead of walking over to them and beating the fuck out of them (as we should do), we get hurt and talk about "education."
Well, fuck education. Some people simply don't learn - they are content to be ignorant pieces of shit, and as such, it is our patriotic duty to water the Tree of Liberty with their idiot blood. Yes, this is an extreme reaction, but sometimes, to quote Jason Dean, "The extreme always seems to make an impression."
If we start standing up for ourselves, rather than laying down and allowing others to abuse and victimize us, they will learn...the hard way.
I know this is extreme, and as such, I never engage in my baser instincts. They are just that, however - instincts.
Much as many of my über Liberal friends might like to believe, love isn't always the answer. Sometimes, the only way to solve a problem is through violence, barbaric as that may be. Much to the chagrin of everyone who believes that people don't learn lessons from violence, other than to spread more violence, tell that to the generation whose parents beat their asses into dark blue bruises if they ever uttered the word "nigger."
Violence is sometimes the answer, whether or not we believe it to be ethical. Virtually every psychological study has shown that pain is, in fact, an excellent deterrent when it comes to associating certain behaviors with unrelenting pain. Unless you're into pain, in which case, you become more apt to repeat the behavior (for my masochist friends).
I'm certain I will be pilloried for suggesting this, but I think it's time that the LGBT community, and other oppressed minorities, stop playing the victim. I'm tired of reading about those "victims of bullying" whose bullies torment them relentlessly, and the school does nothing about it.
Don't get me wrong - I understand the psychology of abuse victims; the helplessness and often paralyzing fear of being attacked or killed. There's nothing wrong with seeking help from other people. There is no shame is saying that you are unable to deal with a situation.
What I am suggesting is that, instead of teaching victims (on a mentor/community level) to respond to bullying or violence by having someone else step in every goddamned time, that we start teaching them to defend themselves.
It's a novel idea, I know.
But, think about it. We've trained women for decades in the art of self-defense against male attackers; why not dole out the same information to LGBT individuals? I won't lie, if someone comes at me, I will not hesitate to fuck them up.
Why are gay men and women not using "Stand Your Ground" laws to our advantage? Honestly, it's very likely that this is the surest way to get gun legislation passed - standing up to our oppressors and shooting them where they stand.
Why is there, every week, yet another story of some unsuspecting gay man/lesbian/couple being gay bashed outside a bar or in a "gayborhood," but no stories about any of those people beating the shit out of their would-be attackers? Hell, a 70-year-old military vet can do it? Why the fuck can't we?
It's unpopular to say this, of course, but it's likely because we're stuck in a cycle of abuse. When assholes attempt to take our rights from us, we fret about it, rather than standing up and starting a revolution. When bigots call us faggots, instead of walking over to them and beating the fuck out of them (as we should do), we get hurt and talk about "education."
Well, fuck education. Some people simply don't learn - they are content to be ignorant pieces of shit, and as such, it is our patriotic duty to water the Tree of Liberty with their idiot blood. Yes, this is an extreme reaction, but sometimes, to quote Jason Dean, "The extreme always seems to make an impression."
If we start standing up for ourselves, rather than laying down and allowing others to abuse and victimize us, they will learn...the hard way.
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Design Aesthetics for the Culturally Clueless (or, The Curious Case of the French Italian Tuscan Roosters)
(Follow me on Twitter @mjhopkins81! If you like what I have to say, here, please share this article)
My mother has always had her own ideas about interior decorating, and while she's very good at collecting various accoutrements that live up to her initial concepts, there's always a sense that someone has gone with a theme and hewed a little too closely to the concept.
I'm certainly no one to judge, as my idea of unique aesthetic design has, over the years, included a Beetlejuice inspired bedroom and a Murder Scene bathroom, replete with faux bloody handprints on the semi-translucent shower curtain, but whatever design choices I make, I am certain to do a little bit of research before I delve into them.
The first thing I never do when researching a theme in which I'm interested is look in "Country Homes," "Southern Living," or "Tuscan Chic and Useless Crap" magazines to inform my choices. My mother, however, gets the beginning of her ideas by cobbling together various images she's seen in these repositories of tasteless recipes for design disaster, along with those she's glimpsed while watching black and white movies with sets so garishly overdecorated that even the studio lights threatened to quit.
Every few years, or so, she went on another decorating crusade, and rather than simply retire the old idea, selling off the various objet d'art gathered together to create her one-note disasterpieces, she would relocate the theme into a single room of her townhouse. Guests, when walking through her home, would often remark on how well-coordinated each room was, to and of itself, which she took as a compliment; I, on the other hand, heard those statements for what they were - the accusations of a hoarding problem.
In 2008, after I fled Ft. Lauderdale to escape both a meth problem and a bad relationship gone worse, I briefly returned home to get my life together, reenter college, and find a new purpose for myself. When I first arrived, I was relegated to the upstairs of the condo, which was largely its own self-sufficient area, sans a kitchen.
My room was one of her abandoned design efforts - a nightmare version of a Laura Ashley catalogue. The color scheme was very simple: white with blue floral/paisley embellishment. What started out as a simple bedspread and comforter quickly turned into pillow cases, bed swags, lampshades, tea sets, tablecloths, wall borders, and, oddly enough, a matching upholstered chair inconveniently placed in the room alongside everything else. Set something lightly colored down on the bed, and you were likely to lose it in the sea of sameness, as was often the case when I laid my glasses on the sheets while getting dressed for work, leading to a ten-minute panic as I hunted frantically in the depth perception hell house of kitschy design.
It isn't so much that my mother fails at her design attempts. To the contrary, she actually does go out of her way to live up to the purity of her idea. The biggest issue is that she never knows when to stop. What begins as a good idea is ultimately doomed to turn into an obsessive compulsive buying spree. She's spent thousands of dollars on her semi-annual redecorating binges, and for what? Too much shit piled up around the house.
One of the hallmarks of my mother's overindulgent design aesthetic is her collection of worthless furniture. Each room in her condo was filled to the brim with knickknacks and useless furniture - chairs inconveniently placed for sitting; writing desks and secretaries purchased not for any functional, intended purposes, rather to serve as repositories for her various "accents" and decorative flourishes; picture frames filled not with photos, but with artistically lazy drawings of herbs and spices, seemingly taken from 19th Century apothecary manuals made prior to the advent of portable cameras. These objects are never sparsely used as accents to an overarching theme; they instead end up overwhelming the theme, turning each good idea into a serious case of overkill.
Lest it seem that my mother's attempts at design stop at interior design, I would be remiss if I failed to mention her kitchen nightmares. Her addiction to Phaltzgraff is the stuff of legend. Not satisfied to collect the basic dining set, my mother purchases entire patterns of dishes, including butter dishes, gravy boats, coffee cups, tea cups, tea pitchers - every piece of a pattern is lovingly purchased, and soon, each cabinet is stuffed to the brim with various dining sets, each used in accordance to the season they represent.
The last design attempt prior to my move to Los Angeles in 2010 was her obsession with Italy. My mother has always loved Italian food, so it should've come as no surprise that she would eventually attempt to recreate her idea of a Tuscan villa.
Somewhere along the way, she got into her head that Tuscan design was themed around roosters. Armed with this knowledge, she began her quest to collect all things rooster-themed, going to every store from the dreaded Pier One to the feared T.J. Maxx. It was at that last stop that she brought home what I refer to as the quintessential "Rebecca" moment.
"Look what I found," she exclaimed, bounding up to me with all the excited of a puppy delighted to see its owner home from work. "I found them at T.J. Maxx! Aren't they just perfect?"
The objects in question were two pictures of roosters set against a yellowed background with cursive writing lovingly scribbled all around the empty space.
"It's just the perfect Italian rooster theme I'm trying to go with for the kitchen."
It was one of those moments when I should've just let her go on thinking that she'd struck gold when, ultimately, she'd really dug up a lot of pyrite.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the writing that accompanied the rooster, its proud breast arched in the perfect presentation of its dominance, was not Italian.
"Mom...this writing is in French."
I knew that this revelation would start a fight, and perhaps part of me was spoiling for one of our epic arguments.
"No, it isn't! It's very clearly in Italian," she insisted.
"No, ma. I'm pretty sure that "vous" is the French pronoun for "you."
And thus began the row.
"Why do you have to nitpick at everything I like?"
And off she ran with that theme, berating me for criticizing every bad choice; for correcting every misunderstood perception and pronunciation.
Part of the problem with my mother's design aesthetic, from my perspective, is that she just doesn't know a lot about the period or culture she's trying to emulate. In the 90s, she tried to recreate the "English Country Cottage" feel. Having never actually been to a cottage in the English countryside, we ended up with a lot of cream-colored walls and floral print furniture. Then, she went on a sage kick, with the entire bedroom being designed around that ubiquitous "Sage Green" color. And then...and then...
Me being an insufferable know-it-all, there is a part of me that enjoys destroying my mother's vision of what she believes to be period design. Were she to design a room with a maple leaf theme, I would go out of my way to show her that she was actually using oak leaves as the basis for her design. I revel in being right, and as such, enjoy watching her explode when her beliefs are dashed against the rocks of reality.
The roosters, however, were there to stay, whether they were Italian, French, or Etruscan, and my mother went about purchasing everything she saw in any store that even remotely resembled a rooster. This is how we ended up with cups with chickens on them.
The real problem with people who design in this manner is that there are capitalists out there who know they can prey upon their weak minds. It's never enough to have a few pieces with roosters on them. No, my mother, like several other overeager self-appointed interior designers, will insist that literally everything adhere to her theme. The savvy capitalist knows that these hoarders are willing to spend any amount of money to get their hands on what they believe will complete their home, and so we end up with rooster-shaped salt and pepper shakers, all but certain to trap the granules in impossible to reach crevices in the wing.
I recently returned home to West Virginia, where my mother and step-father have moved in with her parents to take care of them in their dotage. Much to everyone's chagrin, my mother did not sell off her two decades-worth of objet d'art, and so the contents of her two story condo are now crammed into a single two-room floor. Once again, every room is filled with decorative, but ultimately useless furniture; now, it's just filled to the brim.
This morning, I went downstairs after a sound night of sleep to discover that my mother has broken out her roosters.
Proud as peacocks, they sit upon the kitchen counter, silently surveying the house around them as if to say...
"Je ne suis pas italien. Je suis dans la maison d'une personne folle."
My mother has always had her own ideas about interior decorating, and while she's very good at collecting various accoutrements that live up to her initial concepts, there's always a sense that someone has gone with a theme and hewed a little too closely to the concept.
I'm certainly no one to judge, as my idea of unique aesthetic design has, over the years, included a Beetlejuice inspired bedroom and a Murder Scene bathroom, replete with faux bloody handprints on the semi-translucent shower curtain, but whatever design choices I make, I am certain to do a little bit of research before I delve into them.
The first thing I never do when researching a theme in which I'm interested is look in "Country Homes," "Southern Living," or "Tuscan Chic and Useless Crap" magazines to inform my choices. My mother, however, gets the beginning of her ideas by cobbling together various images she's seen in these repositories of tasteless recipes for design disaster, along with those she's glimpsed while watching black and white movies with sets so garishly overdecorated that even the studio lights threatened to quit.
Every few years, or so, she went on another decorating crusade, and rather than simply retire the old idea, selling off the various objet d'art gathered together to create her one-note disasterpieces, she would relocate the theme into a single room of her townhouse. Guests, when walking through her home, would often remark on how well-coordinated each room was, to and of itself, which she took as a compliment; I, on the other hand, heard those statements for what they were - the accusations of a hoarding problem.
In 2008, after I fled Ft. Lauderdale to escape both a meth problem and a bad relationship gone worse, I briefly returned home to get my life together, reenter college, and find a new purpose for myself. When I first arrived, I was relegated to the upstairs of the condo, which was largely its own self-sufficient area, sans a kitchen.
My room was one of her abandoned design efforts - a nightmare version of a Laura Ashley catalogue. The color scheme was very simple: white with blue floral/paisley embellishment. What started out as a simple bedspread and comforter quickly turned into pillow cases, bed swags, lampshades, tea sets, tablecloths, wall borders, and, oddly enough, a matching upholstered chair inconveniently placed in the room alongside everything else. Set something lightly colored down on the bed, and you were likely to lose it in the sea of sameness, as was often the case when I laid my glasses on the sheets while getting dressed for work, leading to a ten-minute panic as I hunted frantically in the depth perception hell house of kitschy design.
It isn't so much that my mother fails at her design attempts. To the contrary, she actually does go out of her way to live up to the purity of her idea. The biggest issue is that she never knows when to stop. What begins as a good idea is ultimately doomed to turn into an obsessive compulsive buying spree. She's spent thousands of dollars on her semi-annual redecorating binges, and for what? Too much shit piled up around the house.
One of the hallmarks of my mother's overindulgent design aesthetic is her collection of worthless furniture. Each room in her condo was filled to the brim with knickknacks and useless furniture - chairs inconveniently placed for sitting; writing desks and secretaries purchased not for any functional, intended purposes, rather to serve as repositories for her various "accents" and decorative flourishes; picture frames filled not with photos, but with artistically lazy drawings of herbs and spices, seemingly taken from 19th Century apothecary manuals made prior to the advent of portable cameras. These objects are never sparsely used as accents to an overarching theme; they instead end up overwhelming the theme, turning each good idea into a serious case of overkill.
Lest it seem that my mother's attempts at design stop at interior design, I would be remiss if I failed to mention her kitchen nightmares. Her addiction to Phaltzgraff is the stuff of legend. Not satisfied to collect the basic dining set, my mother purchases entire patterns of dishes, including butter dishes, gravy boats, coffee cups, tea cups, tea pitchers - every piece of a pattern is lovingly purchased, and soon, each cabinet is stuffed to the brim with various dining sets, each used in accordance to the season they represent.
The last design attempt prior to my move to Los Angeles in 2010 was her obsession with Italy. My mother has always loved Italian food, so it should've come as no surprise that she would eventually attempt to recreate her idea of a Tuscan villa.
Somewhere along the way, she got into her head that Tuscan design was themed around roosters. Armed with this knowledge, she began her quest to collect all things rooster-themed, going to every store from the dreaded Pier One to the feared T.J. Maxx. It was at that last stop that she brought home what I refer to as the quintessential "Rebecca" moment.
"Look what I found," she exclaimed, bounding up to me with all the excited of a puppy delighted to see its owner home from work. "I found them at T.J. Maxx! Aren't they just perfect?"
The objects in question were two pictures of roosters set against a yellowed background with cursive writing lovingly scribbled all around the empty space.
"It's just the perfect Italian rooster theme I'm trying to go with for the kitchen."
It was one of those moments when I should've just let her go on thinking that she'd struck gold when, ultimately, she'd really dug up a lot of pyrite.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the writing that accompanied the rooster, its proud breast arched in the perfect presentation of its dominance, was not Italian.
"Mom...this writing is in French."
I knew that this revelation would start a fight, and perhaps part of me was spoiling for one of our epic arguments.
"No, it isn't! It's very clearly in Italian," she insisted.
"No, ma. I'm pretty sure that "vous" is the French pronoun for "you."
And thus began the row.
"Why do you have to nitpick at everything I like?"
And off she ran with that theme, berating me for criticizing every bad choice; for correcting every misunderstood perception and pronunciation.
Part of the problem with my mother's design aesthetic, from my perspective, is that she just doesn't know a lot about the period or culture she's trying to emulate. In the 90s, she tried to recreate the "English Country Cottage" feel. Having never actually been to a cottage in the English countryside, we ended up with a lot of cream-colored walls and floral print furniture. Then, she went on a sage kick, with the entire bedroom being designed around that ubiquitous "Sage Green" color. And then...and then...
Me being an insufferable know-it-all, there is a part of me that enjoys destroying my mother's vision of what she believes to be period design. Were she to design a room with a maple leaf theme, I would go out of my way to show her that she was actually using oak leaves as the basis for her design. I revel in being right, and as such, enjoy watching her explode when her beliefs are dashed against the rocks of reality.
The roosters, however, were there to stay, whether they were Italian, French, or Etruscan, and my mother went about purchasing everything she saw in any store that even remotely resembled a rooster. This is how we ended up with cups with chickens on them.
The real problem with people who design in this manner is that there are capitalists out there who know they can prey upon their weak minds. It's never enough to have a few pieces with roosters on them. No, my mother, like several other overeager self-appointed interior designers, will insist that literally everything adhere to her theme. The savvy capitalist knows that these hoarders are willing to spend any amount of money to get their hands on what they believe will complete their home, and so we end up with rooster-shaped salt and pepper shakers, all but certain to trap the granules in impossible to reach crevices in the wing.
I recently returned home to West Virginia, where my mother and step-father have moved in with her parents to take care of them in their dotage. Much to everyone's chagrin, my mother did not sell off her two decades-worth of objet d'art, and so the contents of her two story condo are now crammed into a single two-room floor. Once again, every room is filled with decorative, but ultimately useless furniture; now, it's just filled to the brim.
This morning, I went downstairs after a sound night of sleep to discover that my mother has broken out her roosters.
Proud as peacocks, they sit upon the kitchen counter, silently surveying the house around them as if to say...
"Je ne suis pas italien. Je suis dans la maison d'une personne folle."
Monday, August 19, 2013
Some of My Best Friends Have Abortions
(Follow me on Twitter @mjhopkins81! If you like what I have to say, here, please share this article)
This one is likely to be a shorter blog than I'm used to penning, largely because I just don't have the patience, right now, to go into extreme detail when it comes to my opinion on this subject. Suffice it to say that I find myself annoyed, not just with the Talibangelicals and TeaTards who see fit to exact their religious standards on America's governance, but also with the gay male community who largely sit silent about issues involving women, bisexual, and transexual citizens.
When I lived in Los Angeles, I was surrounded by a cadre of friends, most of whom were gay men largely over the age of 40. I've always felt more comfortable with people older than myself, likely as a result of spending so much time around adults and older teenagers throughout most of my childhood. I rarely had friends my own age - I often found their childish antics far too exhausting for my more erudite tastes (yes, I'm being facetious).
One of the things that horrified me, however, about dinner conversations and group gatherings with my friends in L.A. was the terrifying lack of empathy displayed for people other than themselves when it came to rights. It wasn't so much that they actively opposed rights for other groups (though that would come, later); what disturbed me, rather, was the total absence of concern for the rights of others, or how the loss of those rights have an indirect effect on our own.
Over a very nice Italian dinner, one friend said to me, "I honestly don't care about the Lesbian Community. Let them fight their own battles."
At first, I thought he was kidding, and I laughed out loud, only to be faced with stone-faced sincerity.
"No, really. I've spent several years working for the city of West Hollywood, and I am just tired of having to fight for their rights. They can just start taking care of themselves!"
I've discovered that, at times like this, I am often torn between literally or verbally eviscerating the person sitting opposite me. Most times, however, I simply choose a short retort, more concerned with repeating the story at a later date, though I never reveal their names, because such open expression of idiotic views is likely to get them booted out of a job working for a city government.
I wish I could say that this type of behavior is isolated, but in large part, it's not.
Don't get me wrong - I find myself exhausted by the neverending addition of letters to the LGBT acronym. Every other year, it seems like we need to start recognizing a different group of people under our tent. What was once simply the 'LGB Community,' quickly added the 'T,' which really isn't so much a sexual orientation as it is a gender orientation. Shortly thereafter followed the 'Q,' which by some accounts means 'Queer,' again, is more related to gender identity than sexual attraction, and by others, 'Questioning,' which really is a bit broad. And then, we added the 'I,' for 'Intersexed,' and the 'A' for 'Asexual,' only one of which describes a sexual proclivity.
Whenever I hear people start nattering on about LGBTQIA, I, too, feel frustrated that we have too keep inviting people into the fold. Why can't they fight their own battles? What does my fight for equality have to do with whether or not they can't use a certain bathroom?
I then take a step back from my frustration, breathe deeply, and remember how we got to where we are, today. If not for a drag queen fighting back, the Stonewall Riots would not have occurred - the event on Christopher Street that started the Pride movement's national recognition as a "thing," and it was all because a drag queen got pissed off and fought back.
It's important to remember that whenever we talk about cutting a group lose and letting them fight their own fight. When we make statements like, "'Gay' is the new 'Black,'" a statement with which I am apt to agree, what we are actually saying, though it may offend the sensibilities of some, is that we are all tied together. We're not fighting for special rights; we're fighting for equal rights.
THIS is why I write about issues involving abortion, lesbian safe spaces, and why religion is destroying our nation - because everyone's rights are inextricably linked. Some of my best friends have had abortions, and each of them - each and every one of them - feel, today, that they made not only the right decision, but the best decision available to them. They stand up for my rights, and I will gladly stand for theirs.
Will we offend one another's sensibilities from time to time? Certainly. But, I will always be there to fight for their rights, regardless of whether or not their issues directly affect me, because I'm not a selfish cunt.
This one is likely to be a shorter blog than I'm used to penning, largely because I just don't have the patience, right now, to go into extreme detail when it comes to my opinion on this subject. Suffice it to say that I find myself annoyed, not just with the Talibangelicals and TeaTards who see fit to exact their religious standards on America's governance, but also with the gay male community who largely sit silent about issues involving women, bisexual, and transexual citizens.
When I lived in Los Angeles, I was surrounded by a cadre of friends, most of whom were gay men largely over the age of 40. I've always felt more comfortable with people older than myself, likely as a result of spending so much time around adults and older teenagers throughout most of my childhood. I rarely had friends my own age - I often found their childish antics far too exhausting for my more erudite tastes (yes, I'm being facetious).
One of the things that horrified me, however, about dinner conversations and group gatherings with my friends in L.A. was the terrifying lack of empathy displayed for people other than themselves when it came to rights. It wasn't so much that they actively opposed rights for other groups (though that would come, later); what disturbed me, rather, was the total absence of concern for the rights of others, or how the loss of those rights have an indirect effect on our own.
Over a very nice Italian dinner, one friend said to me, "I honestly don't care about the Lesbian Community. Let them fight their own battles."
At first, I thought he was kidding, and I laughed out loud, only to be faced with stone-faced sincerity.
"No, really. I've spent several years working for the city of West Hollywood, and I am just tired of having to fight for their rights. They can just start taking care of themselves!"
I've discovered that, at times like this, I am often torn between literally or verbally eviscerating the person sitting opposite me. Most times, however, I simply choose a short retort, more concerned with repeating the story at a later date, though I never reveal their names, because such open expression of idiotic views is likely to get them booted out of a job working for a city government.
I wish I could say that this type of behavior is isolated, but in large part, it's not.
Don't get me wrong - I find myself exhausted by the neverending addition of letters to the LGBT acronym. Every other year, it seems like we need to start recognizing a different group of people under our tent. What was once simply the 'LGB Community,' quickly added the 'T,' which really isn't so much a sexual orientation as it is a gender orientation. Shortly thereafter followed the 'Q,' which by some accounts means 'Queer,' again, is more related to gender identity than sexual attraction, and by others, 'Questioning,' which really is a bit broad. And then, we added the 'I,' for 'Intersexed,' and the 'A' for 'Asexual,' only one of which describes a sexual proclivity.
Whenever I hear people start nattering on about LGBTQIA, I, too, feel frustrated that we have too keep inviting people into the fold. Why can't they fight their own battles? What does my fight for equality have to do with whether or not they can't use a certain bathroom?
I then take a step back from my frustration, breathe deeply, and remember how we got to where we are, today. If not for a drag queen fighting back, the Stonewall Riots would not have occurred - the event on Christopher Street that started the Pride movement's national recognition as a "thing," and it was all because a drag queen got pissed off and fought back.
It's important to remember that whenever we talk about cutting a group lose and letting them fight their own fight. When we make statements like, "'Gay' is the new 'Black,'" a statement with which I am apt to agree, what we are actually saying, though it may offend the sensibilities of some, is that we are all tied together. We're not fighting for special rights; we're fighting for equal rights.
THIS is why I write about issues involving abortion, lesbian safe spaces, and why religion is destroying our nation - because everyone's rights are inextricably linked. Some of my best friends have had abortions, and each of them - each and every one of them - feel, today, that they made not only the right decision, but the best decision available to them. They stand up for my rights, and I will gladly stand for theirs.
Will we offend one another's sensibilities from time to time? Certainly. But, I will always be there to fight for their rights, regardless of whether or not their issues directly affect me, because I'm not a selfish cunt.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
It's Your Party - Now Go Flag, or Something...
(Follow me on Twitter @mjhopkins81! If you like what I have to say, here, please share this article)
There must have been a point in my life when I enjoyed going out to large parties. I seem to remember a point back when I first attempted college at WVU when I just couldn't wait to get to this or that party and get wasted and dance to loud music; when I could go out to clubs and get wasted and dance, and actually enjoy myself in the process. Though I remember at one time having these longings, I can't seem to recall at what point those desires morphed into revulsion - when "I'll see you when you get here!" became, "You go on ahead. I think I'm going to stay in, tonight."
While some people will largely point to me being in my thirties as the obvious reasoning behind my lack of any desire to be social, the real cause is much more complex, and my age isn't really a factor. I can name at least twenty people right off hand who defy the culturally imposed "age limit" on having "fun." The gay male community, in particular, is rife with them (often a little much so, for my tastes). The overabundance of the Over-Forty gay male demographic at events like Folsom Street Fair and Dore Alley often leaves me feeling as if I'm missing something. Everyone around me appears to be having fun, and all I keep thinking is, "Goddamn, it's fucking hot/cold/rainy! Fuck, these boots are fucking killing my feet! If one more sweaty asshole slimes his way past my unsuspecting back, I'm going to take his truncheon and beat him unconscious!"
At this point, I have to assume that it's something internal about me that just fails to get what the big deal is with all these events. I was never a proponent of the "party" scene (as it relates to events) - events like Muscle Beach, White Party, Black Party, and basically any event that boasts about having an ostensibly famous DJ never really piqued by interest. For a while, I remember enjoying dancing in clubs, but after taking a few serious dance classes, I now just feel both self-conscious and awkward because I can hear every mean instructor (because, really...they're the only good ones who actually get results) screaming at me to be mindful of my form and carriage.
Mostly, it's that I don't enjoy the music, and I usually don't enjoy the company. That isn't to say that these DJs aren't good at what they do; it's that I hate dance music, particularly dance remixes of good songs that had no need to ever be turned into an "anthem." Because I move around so frequently and being poor tends to necessitate living on the far-flung outskirts of any major metropolitan area, few of my close friends are ever near enough to me to make going out together on a regular basis feasible. When the rare opportunity arises when we are able to make plans, I have a tendency to dread the coming outing as the date nears, greeting it with all the enthusiasm of a penile swabbing with a sandpaper Q-Tip.
If I really don't want to go out, I'll inadvertently find a way to make sure I'm unable to go. I'll pick up a shift at the restaurant without "remembering" our plans; I won't make enough money to afford gas or drinks to go out; I'll catch a cold. It's all unintentional, I think, but I can't guarantee that I don't subconsciously put myself into these positions in order to avoid being social.
More often than not, I prefer to be the entertainer. I never mind big social gatherings when they're being hosted by me, both because I kind of enjoy the attention, and because it gives me a chance to bring together people who would likely never meet one another because I tend to pick up friends from almost every walk of life and from every social group. As my mentor once told me, I will likely never really "belong" to any kind of community, so much as I will make my own.
Maybe this is why I'm never threatened by change. When the WeHo gay boys panic about the encroaching lesbian takeover (despite the fact that the one lesbian bar closed and the nearest lesbian community center/Safe Space is so far outside West Hollywood city center that they can spit into Beverly Hills and Westwood), I don't feel like anything is wrong with that. When the leather queens complain about women coming into their leather bars and "ruining the masculine atmosphere," I think them antediluvian and on the verge of extinction.
Because of my tendency to cobble together people from various backgrounds and create my own version of "family," I am comfortable in almost every situation. I am not shy, nor am I uncomfortable with my gender identity or sexuality (they are different aspects). I'm more than happy to strip completely naked in front of pretty much anyone, save for children, whereas many men feel overly exposed and vulnerable, unable to "relax" around women enough to be comfortable with nudity in mixed company.
While this may sound as if I am a very sociable person, fully able to integrate myself into the types of environments I so loathe, the reality is far different. My friends will post photos of themselves at these massive events and parties, and there's a part of me that thinks to myself, "What the fuck? Why wasn't I invited???"
And then, after I think about it, I come to the realization that I wouldn't have had a good time, anyway. If it's too loud to make conversation with the person next to you without screaming or sign language, I'd rather be anywhere else than there. It isn't that I don't want to support my friends who are go-go dancers or drag queens, it's that being in those places makes me miserable, one the one hand, and more likely to commit homicide, on the other hand.
So, while my friends enjoy themselves at Dore Alley and Pride festivals, I will be doing what I love best - sitting in my bed with my laptop on my lap, my iPad to my right, a controller in my hand, and something on the television, engaging in my own form of social engagement, all in the purring company of my wonderful gremlin, Goblin.
There must have been a point in my life when I enjoyed going out to large parties. I seem to remember a point back when I first attempted college at WVU when I just couldn't wait to get to this or that party and get wasted and dance to loud music; when I could go out to clubs and get wasted and dance, and actually enjoy myself in the process. Though I remember at one time having these longings, I can't seem to recall at what point those desires morphed into revulsion - when "I'll see you when you get here!" became, "You go on ahead. I think I'm going to stay in, tonight."
While some people will largely point to me being in my thirties as the obvious reasoning behind my lack of any desire to be social, the real cause is much more complex, and my age isn't really a factor. I can name at least twenty people right off hand who defy the culturally imposed "age limit" on having "fun." The gay male community, in particular, is rife with them (often a little much so, for my tastes). The overabundance of the Over-Forty gay male demographic at events like Folsom Street Fair and Dore Alley often leaves me feeling as if I'm missing something. Everyone around me appears to be having fun, and all I keep thinking is, "Goddamn, it's fucking hot/cold/rainy! Fuck, these boots are fucking killing my feet! If one more sweaty asshole slimes his way past my unsuspecting back, I'm going to take his truncheon and beat him unconscious!"
At this point, I have to assume that it's something internal about me that just fails to get what the big deal is with all these events. I was never a proponent of the "party" scene (as it relates to events) - events like Muscle Beach, White Party, Black Party, and basically any event that boasts about having an ostensibly famous DJ never really piqued by interest. For a while, I remember enjoying dancing in clubs, but after taking a few serious dance classes, I now just feel both self-conscious and awkward because I can hear every mean instructor (because, really...they're the only good ones who actually get results) screaming at me to be mindful of my form and carriage.
Mostly, it's that I don't enjoy the music, and I usually don't enjoy the company. That isn't to say that these DJs aren't good at what they do; it's that I hate dance music, particularly dance remixes of good songs that had no need to ever be turned into an "anthem." Because I move around so frequently and being poor tends to necessitate living on the far-flung outskirts of any major metropolitan area, few of my close friends are ever near enough to me to make going out together on a regular basis feasible. When the rare opportunity arises when we are able to make plans, I have a tendency to dread the coming outing as the date nears, greeting it with all the enthusiasm of a penile swabbing with a sandpaper Q-Tip.
If I really don't want to go out, I'll inadvertently find a way to make sure I'm unable to go. I'll pick up a shift at the restaurant without "remembering" our plans; I won't make enough money to afford gas or drinks to go out; I'll catch a cold. It's all unintentional, I think, but I can't guarantee that I don't subconsciously put myself into these positions in order to avoid being social.
More often than not, I prefer to be the entertainer. I never mind big social gatherings when they're being hosted by me, both because I kind of enjoy the attention, and because it gives me a chance to bring together people who would likely never meet one another because I tend to pick up friends from almost every walk of life and from every social group. As my mentor once told me, I will likely never really "belong" to any kind of community, so much as I will make my own.
Maybe this is why I'm never threatened by change. When the WeHo gay boys panic about the encroaching lesbian takeover (despite the fact that the one lesbian bar closed and the nearest lesbian community center/Safe Space is so far outside West Hollywood city center that they can spit into Beverly Hills and Westwood), I don't feel like anything is wrong with that. When the leather queens complain about women coming into their leather bars and "ruining the masculine atmosphere," I think them antediluvian and on the verge of extinction.
Because of my tendency to cobble together people from various backgrounds and create my own version of "family," I am comfortable in almost every situation. I am not shy, nor am I uncomfortable with my gender identity or sexuality (they are different aspects). I'm more than happy to strip completely naked in front of pretty much anyone, save for children, whereas many men feel overly exposed and vulnerable, unable to "relax" around women enough to be comfortable with nudity in mixed company.
While this may sound as if I am a very sociable person, fully able to integrate myself into the types of environments I so loathe, the reality is far different. My friends will post photos of themselves at these massive events and parties, and there's a part of me that thinks to myself, "What the fuck? Why wasn't I invited???"
And then, after I think about it, I come to the realization that I wouldn't have had a good time, anyway. If it's too loud to make conversation with the person next to you without screaming or sign language, I'd rather be anywhere else than there. It isn't that I don't want to support my friends who are go-go dancers or drag queens, it's that being in those places makes me miserable, one the one hand, and more likely to commit homicide, on the other hand.
So, while my friends enjoy themselves at Dore Alley and Pride festivals, I will be doing what I love best - sitting in my bed with my laptop on my lap, my iPad to my right, a controller in my hand, and something on the television, engaging in my own form of social engagement, all in the purring company of my wonderful gremlin, Goblin.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
All of My Worst Fears - Confirmed
(A quick reminder - you can now follow me on Twitter @mjhopkins81; if you like what I have to say, here, please share this article)
For the past three days, I've been at the ADAP Advocacy Association (aaa+) Sixth Annual ADAP Conference. The purpose of this conference is to update attendees on the current state and future of the Ryan White Act and the AIDS Drugs Assistance Program (ADAP), providing vital information about current funding levels, proposed legislative changes, and what advocates can do to ensure that people living with HIV/AIDS receive the care and treatment they both need and deserve.
I should first note that I am not an optimist. No one who knows me would accuse me of being one, which puts me in the often awkward position of being perceived as being overtly negative. Either I'm hypercritical of circumstances, or I don't "offer any solutions," this perception is often tendered by people who are either unable or unwilling to look beyond their pie-in-the-sky, eternally frustrating (to me) optimism, and confront the very real issues at play that can literally make or break even the best laid plans.
In my May post, Stuck in the Gay Pride Rut, I discussed Jonah Lehrer's January 2012 piece in the New Yorker, Groupthink - The Brainstorming Myth, in which he addressed the problems inherent to the long-celebrated approach to meetings and planning sessions. Brainstorming is a business approach lauded for its strict adherence to positivity. Within the session, no one can deride or question anyone else's idea, because that may frighten less confident people from putting their ideas forth by creating a so-called "negative" environment.
To recap the article, Lehrer discusses research showing that, while brainstorming can often provide a handful of unique ideas, having someone in the room who questions, criticizes, and uses logic to discard ideas that will be largely unfeasible often results not only in more ideas, but in better ideas. The ideas that come from what brainstorming advocates would consider a "negative" or "adversarial" environment often end up producing better, more quantifiable results than those wherein everyone's ideas, regardless of how stupid or untenable, are considered valid.
What it all boils down to is the basic fact that not every idea is a good idea; not everyone can be a star; not everyone is able to put forth a good idea. Sorry if that offends some people, but suck it up and deal in reality, not in fantasy.
Furthermore, research indicates that having someone willing to point out problems with ideas often helps to alleviate those issues by forcing others (who are willing to set aside their "You're so negative!" bullshit attitudes) to address them head on, rather than continuing forward with no sort of contingency plan or solution when those problems manifest themselves.
These things having been established, most of the conference, for me, was spent in often abject horror as all of my worst fears about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were confirmed by presenters who were experts in their respective fields within the healthcare arena. Every objection I've long expressed to the legislation, all of which have been pooh-poohed by the eternal optimists who insist "Well, this is the best we could do," were validated. While I certainly enjoy the opportunity to say, "See! I told you so!" I take no pleasure in being right; rather, I am in no way comforted by my accurate assessments of the ACA, and am honestly not hopeful for the future of healthcare in America.
From the beginning of this long, drawn out saga, I have been disappointed in the legislation that was cobbled together with seemingly little forethought as to the ramifications it may have in the future. What started out as a promising venture eventually turned
Take, for example, the mandated insurance purchase on behalf of individuals:
The prevailing thought behind this mandate was that, by forcing everyone into the insurance pool, insurance giants would be incentivized to offer drastically lower rates so that everyone could afford coverage. That sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately for the brainstormers in the room, no one thought to put a Federally mandated premium cap provision (for basic coverage) in place that would control costs.
Anyone who has paid attention to the numbers for the last 35 years will point out that, while inflation and the cost of living have risen exponentially, while average annual incomes (for single-earner households) has remained largely stagnant. Inflation increased from 1978 to 2013 by 265.48%.
By 2012, households were spending an average of just under $50k/year for annual living expenses. That's simply ridiculous - it is almost the cost of a single-family home in 1978...total.
So, what is coming down the pipe for individuals looking to purchase health insurance once open enrollment starts in October 2013? A whole lot of shit.
Insurance companies who choose to raise their rates are going to be subject to review by the Federal government, which, again, sounds great. Unfortunately for the consumer, that Federal review doesn't mean a goddamned thing, primarily because they have no power whatsoever to penalize companies who are charging their customers an arm and a leg for the most basic coverage.
"But," say the Free Market enthusiasts, "Bringing those exorbitant rates to the attention of the consumer will have a deleterious affect on the insurance companies' reputations, and they will be all but forced to compete for business with each other by lowering prices."
And to that, I respond, "Bullshit."
Insurance companies across the country have enjoyed a largely negative reputation earned for bilking customers and helping to drive up costs for operations that normally cost 1/10 of the price, and despite those negative reputations have yet to reduce their rates, still offer less and less coverage for more and more money, and the consumer is the one getting screwed in the end. What incentive do they have to lower costs when they have an entire country of people who are being forced to purchase their product?
The answer is, "None." Basically, it's everyone into the insurance pool, but the insurance companies control the water level.
Furthermore, there are no national standards of coverage set consumers, which means that what one company offers as "basic coverage" is what one company offers as "basic coverage." The consumer can shop around all they want to find the coverage they desire for the cost they can afford, but what the U.S. needs, as well as healthcare recipients, is a system where they can find the coverage they need for the cost they desire.
There is also no mandate for national implementation. The reason why every company and provider in the nation are basically stalled is that no one seems to know what's going on with the ACA. The requirements are unclear, the implementation is unfeasible, and each state is left to their own devices to figure out the rules that both fit their own statewide regulations while simultaneously fulfilling the requirements set at the Federal level.
This problem has basically paralyzed business owners and states because they literally just have no idea what to do.
In speaking with a Republican friend of mine (who conveniently enjoys military healthcare coverage), he argued that he shouldn't have to pay a tax to cover the chain smokers and fat asses who can't take care of themselves. What he doesn't realize is that, thanks to our current approach to healthcare (which really should be called "sick care"), he's already paying the cost of those people 25 times over. Were we to simply toss out our current model and switch over to a tax-funded Universal/Single-Payer option - the same kind of healthcare every major industrialized nation in the world current enjoys and manages to afford at a fraction of the cost - the amount he paid in taxes would be far less than what he currently pays for substandard (by comparison) care.
What this boils down to is one of my early points - when we needed a dictatorial approach to crafting healthcare reform, we got a democratic approach which almost always results in a terrible end result. They brainstormed and got a handful of great ideas (i.e. - ending discrimination based on gender and pre-existing conditions), but along with that came hundreds of really awful ideas.
Forgive me for coming across as "negative," but the stark reality is that we have not one, but several problems on our hands, and no one yet seems able to even begin to formulate an answer. At this point, all we can do is take an honest look at what we have and identify the problems before they come to fruition.
For the past three days, I've been at the ADAP Advocacy Association (aaa+) Sixth Annual ADAP Conference. The purpose of this conference is to update attendees on the current state and future of the Ryan White Act and the AIDS Drugs Assistance Program (ADAP), providing vital information about current funding levels, proposed legislative changes, and what advocates can do to ensure that people living with HIV/AIDS receive the care and treatment they both need and deserve.
I should first note that I am not an optimist. No one who knows me would accuse me of being one, which puts me in the often awkward position of being perceived as being overtly negative. Either I'm hypercritical of circumstances, or I don't "offer any solutions," this perception is often tendered by people who are either unable or unwilling to look beyond their pie-in-the-sky, eternally frustrating (to me) optimism, and confront the very real issues at play that can literally make or break even the best laid plans.
In my May post, Stuck in the Gay Pride Rut, I discussed Jonah Lehrer's January 2012 piece in the New Yorker, Groupthink - The Brainstorming Myth, in which he addressed the problems inherent to the long-celebrated approach to meetings and planning sessions. Brainstorming is a business approach lauded for its strict adherence to positivity. Within the session, no one can deride or question anyone else's idea, because that may frighten less confident people from putting their ideas forth by creating a so-called "negative" environment.
To recap the article, Lehrer discusses research showing that, while brainstorming can often provide a handful of unique ideas, having someone in the room who questions, criticizes, and uses logic to discard ideas that will be largely unfeasible often results not only in more ideas, but in better ideas. The ideas that come from what brainstorming advocates would consider a "negative" or "adversarial" environment often end up producing better, more quantifiable results than those wherein everyone's ideas, regardless of how stupid or untenable, are considered valid.
What it all boils down to is the basic fact that not every idea is a good idea; not everyone can be a star; not everyone is able to put forth a good idea. Sorry if that offends some people, but suck it up and deal in reality, not in fantasy.
Furthermore, research indicates that having someone willing to point out problems with ideas often helps to alleviate those issues by forcing others (who are willing to set aside their "You're so negative!" bullshit attitudes) to address them head on, rather than continuing forward with no sort of contingency plan or solution when those problems manifest themselves.
These things having been established, most of the conference, for me, was spent in often abject horror as all of my worst fears about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were confirmed by presenters who were experts in their respective fields within the healthcare arena. Every objection I've long expressed to the legislation, all of which have been pooh-poohed by the eternal optimists who insist "Well, this is the best we could do," were validated. While I certainly enjoy the opportunity to say, "See! I told you so!" I take no pleasure in being right; rather, I am in no way comforted by my accurate assessments of the ACA, and am honestly not hopeful for the future of healthcare in America.
From the beginning of this long, drawn out saga, I have been disappointed in the legislation that was cobbled together with seemingly little forethought as to the ramifications it may have in the future. What started out as a promising venture eventually turned
Take, for example, the mandated insurance purchase on behalf of individuals:
The prevailing thought behind this mandate was that, by forcing everyone into the insurance pool, insurance giants would be incentivized to offer drastically lower rates so that everyone could afford coverage. That sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately for the brainstormers in the room, no one thought to put a Federally mandated premium cap provision (for basic coverage) in place that would control costs.
Anyone who has paid attention to the numbers for the last 35 years will point out that, while inflation and the cost of living have risen exponentially, while average annual incomes (for single-earner households) has remained largely stagnant. Inflation increased from 1978 to 2013 by 265.48%.
By 2012, households were spending an average of just under $50k/year for annual living expenses. That's simply ridiculous - it is almost the cost of a single-family home in 1978...total.
So, what is coming down the pipe for individuals looking to purchase health insurance once open enrollment starts in October 2013? A whole lot of shit.
Insurance companies who choose to raise their rates are going to be subject to review by the Federal government, which, again, sounds great. Unfortunately for the consumer, that Federal review doesn't mean a goddamned thing, primarily because they have no power whatsoever to penalize companies who are charging their customers an arm and a leg for the most basic coverage.
"But," say the Free Market enthusiasts, "Bringing those exorbitant rates to the attention of the consumer will have a deleterious affect on the insurance companies' reputations, and they will be all but forced to compete for business with each other by lowering prices."
And to that, I respond, "Bullshit."
Insurance companies across the country have enjoyed a largely negative reputation earned for bilking customers and helping to drive up costs for operations that normally cost 1/10 of the price, and despite those negative reputations have yet to reduce their rates, still offer less and less coverage for more and more money, and the consumer is the one getting screwed in the end. What incentive do they have to lower costs when they have an entire country of people who are being forced to purchase their product?
The answer is, "None." Basically, it's everyone into the insurance pool, but the insurance companies control the water level.
Furthermore, there are no national standards of coverage set consumers, which means that what one company offers as "basic coverage" is what one company offers as "basic coverage." The consumer can shop around all they want to find the coverage they desire for the cost they can afford, but what the U.S. needs, as well as healthcare recipients, is a system where they can find the coverage they need for the cost they desire.
There is also no mandate for national implementation. The reason why every company and provider in the nation are basically stalled is that no one seems to know what's going on with the ACA. The requirements are unclear, the implementation is unfeasible, and each state is left to their own devices to figure out the rules that both fit their own statewide regulations while simultaneously fulfilling the requirements set at the Federal level.
This problem has basically paralyzed business owners and states because they literally just have no idea what to do.
In speaking with a Republican friend of mine (who conveniently enjoys military healthcare coverage), he argued that he shouldn't have to pay a tax to cover the chain smokers and fat asses who can't take care of themselves. What he doesn't realize is that, thanks to our current approach to healthcare (which really should be called "sick care"), he's already paying the cost of those people 25 times over. Were we to simply toss out our current model and switch over to a tax-funded Universal/Single-Payer option - the same kind of healthcare every major industrialized nation in the world current enjoys and manages to afford at a fraction of the cost - the amount he paid in taxes would be far less than what he currently pays for substandard (by comparison) care.
What this boils down to is one of my early points - when we needed a dictatorial approach to crafting healthcare reform, we got a democratic approach which almost always results in a terrible end result. They brainstormed and got a handful of great ideas (i.e. - ending discrimination based on gender and pre-existing conditions), but along with that came hundreds of really awful ideas.
Forgive me for coming across as "negative," but the stark reality is that we have not one, but several problems on our hands, and no one yet seems able to even begin to formulate an answer. At this point, all we can do is take an honest look at what we have and identify the problems before they come to fruition.
The Future of HIV Care
(A quick reminder - you can now follow me on Twitter @mjhopkins81; if you like what I have to say, here, please share this article)
At this point, there is little impetus in the House to end the sequester in the 2014FY budget; the Senate, however, paints a much rosier picture, as their budget proposal ends sequestration. Realistically, however, neither bill is likely to make it through both houses as the ideological divide is so deep that there is little room for negotiation.
At this point, there is little impetus in the House to end the sequester in the 2014FY budget; the Senate, however, paints a much rosier picture, as their budget proposal ends sequestration. Realistically, however, neither bill is likely to make it through both houses as the ideological divide is so deep that there is little room for negotiation.
What does this mean for the over 50% of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and their access to comprehensive medical care and treatment?
The answers to this most basic question are a mixed bag of mainly neutral to negative outcomes, from my perspective. As someone who is directly affected by this question, and has experienced care and treatment in four vastly different states with wildly different approaches, I must admit that I have a vested interest in moving away from the way we currently address these issues.
To better explain how we currently address the issues of low-income HIV (and the greater Medicaid/Medicare model, overall), allow me to take a few moments to bring you up to date:
Under the current model, each state and territory is basically left to their own devices when it comes to providing care for their low-income citizens. At first glance, this seems like a good way to address the myriad regional disparities in terms of each state's individual needs, allowing the state to best determine the approach that best works for them. This, however, has largely proven to be untrue for those in need of the greatest assistance.
The great divide occurs between those who work in healthcare and those who work in policy and politics. By every metric of health, the states who present the greatest concern are almost exclusively in the South. The elected representatives and executives of those states are, unfortunately, those most opposed to providing those services.
The Southern states have the highest rates of literally every disease, from heart disease, renal disease, obesity, every single STD/STI, and every single type of cancer, and yet, they are the least likely to have access to testing, care, and treatment for various reasons - sheer geography (literally not being able to get to it), mistrust if medical authorities, cultural stigma against identifying as someone with a disease...trying to address these issues requires many more resources and actions than what these states are either willing or able to deliver, and they are in no way interested in asking the Federal government to step in, nor would that be welcome by those states' residents.
So, what does that mean?
Honestly, I don't know.
Beyond the basic fear of what will happen to Ryan White/AIDS Drugs Assistance Program (ADAP) program after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) goes into effect, there is an even more terrifying fear of what might happen if we attempt to get Ryan White reauthorized after it expires in September 2013 in the current political climate.
While the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) has a vested interest in reauthorizing it immediately in order to address the crisis well into development in the South, most HIV/AIDS advocates are more wary of the high probably that, given the current influence of austerity drunk Republicans (Teatards) and their tinfoil hat(e)-wearing constituents in Congress, whatever attempts to reopen the bill to adjust the formula so that more funds could be reallocated would result in a partial or wholesale gutting of what we currently have.
Right now, the reality of the situation from my perspective is that, despite all of the hopeful optimism and worry management being done by those "in the know," there is very little good news for those low income PLWHA who fall through the cracks.
That having been said, I think anyone who reads what I write understands that I am particularly realistic/pessimistic when it comes to the direction our country and specifically our healthcare system are heading. The levels of confusion, dismay, and lack of information all combine to create a precarious path for advocates and educators to attempt to traverse.
I don't have the answers to several of these problems that will please everyone, or even anyone. When it comes to developing new ideas, Democracy has proven to be successful; when it comes to implementing ideas effectively, a dictatorship is infinitely better.
Right now, we're living in what I believe to be the waning days of theRoman American Republic - as monied interests have taken a terrifying amount of control over our politicians and political process, we are often faced, as voters, neither with choices between Good vs. Evil, nor even between the lesser of two evils; rather, we find ourselves forced to choose between candidates and constituents who are increasingly uninterested in maintaining any sort of control over our system of government and our election process.
We have entered into a frightening era when one candidate can win their primary by averring to "not being a Union guy" (thereby being a corporate shill), while another can win their primary by promising more than can ever be conceivably delivered, while really being...yet another corporate shill.
At this time, there is only one Senator in Congress who has gone out of her way to ensure that she represents actual people (Elizabeth Warren, D-MA); as for Congress, Alan Grayson (D-FL) is one of a handful of Congressmen who will actively (though not always effectively) step into a fray with the intention not of honoring his enemies, but in order to set them aflame and put them out with a bag filled with their own words.
Ultimately, we have no idea who are our allies and enemies - the old battle lines no longer apply, primarily because we are no longer playing a chessboard, but in a minefield. We cannot rely upon the vast majority of our currently elected representatives for support or opposition, because they are often so preoccupied with ensuring their own reelection that they are incapable of achieving any real positive goal.
And so...here we are. We are stuck in an unfortunate holding pattern on the ground, while those in the sky are circling the airport on quickly exhausted fuel supplies, and those most in need of service are stuck in the terminal waiting for an open seat on an overcrowded plane.
Beyond the basic fear of what will happen to Ryan White/AIDS Drugs Assistance Program (ADAP) program after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) goes into effect, there is an even more terrifying fear of what might happen if we attempt to get Ryan White reauthorized after it expires in September 2013 in the current political climate.
While the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) has a vested interest in reauthorizing it immediately in order to address the crisis well into development in the South, most HIV/AIDS advocates are more wary of the high probably that, given the current influence of austerity drunk Republicans (Teatards) and their tinfoil hat(e)-wearing constituents in Congress, whatever attempts to reopen the bill to adjust the formula so that more funds could be reallocated would result in a partial or wholesale gutting of what we currently have.
Right now, the reality of the situation from my perspective is that, despite all of the hopeful optimism and worry management being done by those "in the know," there is very little good news for those low income PLWHA who fall through the cracks.
That having been said, I think anyone who reads what I write understands that I am particularly realistic/pessimistic when it comes to the direction our country and specifically our healthcare system are heading. The levels of confusion, dismay, and lack of information all combine to create a precarious path for advocates and educators to attempt to traverse.
I don't have the answers to several of these problems that will please everyone, or even anyone. When it comes to developing new ideas, Democracy has proven to be successful; when it comes to implementing ideas effectively, a dictatorship is infinitely better.
Right now, we're living in what I believe to be the waning days of the
We have entered into a frightening era when one candidate can win their primary by averring to "not being a Union guy" (thereby being a corporate shill), while another can win their primary by promising more than can ever be conceivably delivered, while really being...yet another corporate shill.
At this time, there is only one Senator in Congress who has gone out of her way to ensure that she represents actual people (Elizabeth Warren, D-MA); as for Congress, Alan Grayson (D-FL) is one of a handful of Congressmen who will actively (though not always effectively) step into a fray with the intention not of honoring his enemies, but in order to set them aflame and put them out with a bag filled with their own words.
Ultimately, we have no idea who are our allies and enemies - the old battle lines no longer apply, primarily because we are no longer playing a chessboard, but in a minefield. We cannot rely upon the vast majority of our currently elected representatives for support or opposition, because they are often so preoccupied with ensuring their own reelection that they are incapable of achieving any real positive goal.
And so...here we are. We are stuck in an unfortunate holding pattern on the ground, while those in the sky are circling the airport on quickly exhausted fuel supplies, and those most in need of service are stuck in the terminal waiting for an open seat on an overcrowded plane.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Becoming a Homosexual in Just Six Easy Steps
There are times when, while reading essays by David Sedaris, I'm shocked at how similar our adolescent experiences were. From dressing in a manner that was more often the subject of derision, rather than adoration, to being reared in a way that often left us to our own devices, I feel a kinship with David...a sort of camaraderie that is often unwittingly bestowed upon us, whether or not we like it.
Now that I'm in my thirties, I'm better able to understand the motives behind my actions. In a small sense, I was attempting to strike out into the world - to lash out at the ubiquitous "They" who were always trying to keep me down. A hippie without a cause; a yuppie without a Beemer.
For the large part, however, my outward appearance and overall behavior was a reaction to the fact that I was simply too terrified to openly admit to certain truths about myself which had become self-evident - I liked boys. And not just boys..."men."
My understanding of my sexuality did not come in the form of a single revelation. There was no single event that heralded my sexual awakening; rather, a series of progressive events that led me to an eventual conclusion. All of these were just single parts of a larger whole, no one thing more important than another, but each new understanding built upon the information gleaned from prior experience.
These hints of my bourgeoning sexual inclinations began to make themselves manifest over the years, each of which inexorably pointed toward the truth - I was into men.
I first noticed that I was attracted to other men when I was seven. My father had just begun his second teaching job at a small high school in southern West Virginia. A farming community that had once thrived as a shipping town, Buffalo's resources had long since dried up, or burned up, as was the case with the former four-story shopping center whose charred ruins towered ominously in the field next to the school, a haunting reminder of better times.
While certainly not the most attentive parent, my father was an excellent teacher, although his methods were undoubtedly unorthodox. Several lessons included the viewing of the film Bloodsport, though why, I'll never know. But, it was this film that led me to the realization that I liked not only men, but muscular, MANLY men.
My memories of Bloodsport contain virtually no plot details other than the scenes onto which I'd glommed like a remora. I remember something about a girl...perhaps there was a big fight. The scenes that were important to me were all towards the beginning of the film:
Jean-Claude Van Damme in the middle of a forest, training with his master, getting wet, sweaty, and shirtless in the process. He is bound and has his legs splayed open to force him into what seems to be a painful split. He goes to a bar in very tight jeans, gets into a fight, and drops into a full split to punch someone in the nuts.
I would watch these scenes over and over, seeing what I believed to be the "ultimate in man" being tortured and abused, entirely unaware that what I believed to be a passing interest in some very cool scenes was actually my brain sending covert messages that I was not only into muscular, flexible men, but also something of a sadomasochist as I wanted to do and have done to me the very same tortures.
It is back to this film that I trace my adult interests in bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism. For without it, I might never have come to these realizations of my own interests. That the movie is awful never was an issue for me, as the only reason I ever watched it was to see those training scenes in the forest, hoping...praying that someday, someone would do that to me.
The second clue came about when I began the rite of passage most young boys take at some point in their pre-adolescence - I found my father's porn stash.
Every boy I knew discovered his father's titillating treasure trove. Like pigs hunting truffles, we would sneak into their rooms and sniff out the porn...at the time, however, I didn't expect to actually locate photos of things that quite so closely resembled mushrooms. We scavenged their magazines, never knowing why certain pages were stuck together while others flipped over with ease.
After we had found the objects of our pre-teen desires, we would gather together in an all-male conclave to share our bounty, saying what we were societally programmed to say, myself more often than the others. They mostly stayed silent during our perusal, occasionally commenting on one or another model's body, while I made certain to let everyone know that I was a "normal" boy.
"She has great tits," I'd offhandedly comment, unwittingly paying more attention to the prodigious penis upon which the model's gaze was so intently fixed.
While the other boys' fathers had the run-of-the-mill porn - Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler - my father's tastes were decidedly more risqué. He favored porn of the hardcore European variety, most notably Private Magazine. While my friends' magazines had photos of blonde, busty models who occasionally encountered a penis in their sex misadventures (only some of which appeared to be connected to the rare presence of the occasional hairy midsection), the women in Private couldn't even seem to go to the café without stumbling upon not one, but several penises, each of them attached to a fully grown, fully visible man.
These men, rather than being cropped out of the photos to redirect focus to the model, often served as the unwitting stars of the show, the images showing less of what the women could do with a cock and more of what several cocks could do to her. Couples, three ways, and gangbangs; every hole was filled, often with dicks to spare as the models were double penetrated in their lower extremities with an additional cock in her mouth and one or two held in hand and masturbated to keep them involved in the scene. The men in Private weren't accoutrements to dazed-eyed bimbos; they were aggressively active in giving each model what for, and they did so with gusto.
Only once during one of these gatherings did I ever make an innocent misstep when I joked, "Cock. The Other White Meat," playing upon the then-popular pork commercials flooding the airwaves, only to be gently rebuked by one of my older male friends: "Well, what if the guy's black?" To that question, I had no rejoinder other than to posit, "Dark meat?"
American pornography was, until recently, unique in the Western world only for its puritanical blandness. Sex was doled out in minuscule nibbles, whereas Private porn was a Bacchanalian feast. These European sometimes-beauties weren't just naked on the page in tasteful poses; rather, they were splayed open and brutalized not by just one, but several men, all with voracious sexual appetites. Every orifice was transformed into a gaping maw by the unabashed men, all of whom were entirely comfortable not only having sex in front of a camera, but with doing so while being close to and even physically touching the other fully naked and erect men as they ravaged the overwhelmed models whose bodies wer often lost among a sea of naked manflesh. Each woman was eventually subjected to what Private called, "the ultimate fuck," as she was penetrated by numerous gigantic cocks at the same time, even, occasionally, accommodating more than one such organ in a single opening.
It was likely this aspect of Private magazine that turned me on the most. In my friends' porn, the women were front and center, whereas in my father's European offerings, the men oftentimes received equal, if not more time on the page than their female counterparts. I developed a penchant for a few models - Frank Major, Nacho Vidal, George Uhl, Csoky Ice - these were the men whose bodies (and dicks) stuck with me long after the magazines had been returned to the bottom of the sock drawer, the top shelf of the closet, or between the boxspring and the mattress. To this day, these are the men for whom I still carry a sexual torch.
We were, my friends and I, discovering our budding sexuality. They were discovering breasts and vaginas; I was discovering my desire to be in the place of those female models getting reamed by the giant phalluses of my favorite male models. Oddly enough, I never sexualized my male friends as we looked over our skin magazines; they weren't old enough for my tastes. They were boys, and all I wanted was to be ravaged by men.
After my all too brief sojourns into the world of hardcore Euro porn, I would return the magazines to my father's collection. I did not, however, return them entirely intact. Whenever I found a photo of a man or a penis to which I felt an attraction, I would run to find our orange-handled scissors and proceed to carefully cut out that portion of the page, leaving his magazines riddled with holes where once stood proudly erect penises waiting to gain entry to whichever orifice was nearest.
This had a rather disconcerting effect on the magazines, leaving big breasted babes openmouthed and gazing hungrily not at glistening male sex organs, but through oddly penis-shaped windows opening onto the pages beneath. The lone female in a five-person gangbang was no longer surrounded by lusty men, left to fend for her own disembodied torso, the sole remnant of torrid action once so brightly displayed upon the page.
What my father must have thought whenever he would return to these magazines in search of a masturbatory aid I can only guess. He would eventually stumble upon Private's errant men whose likenesses had been so crudely excised from their pages. The had all been lovingly glued onto pieces of poster board in a collage of tumescent masculinity kept poorly hidden between my twin-sized bed and the wall. But, by that point, I had already moved onto my next odyssey of self-discovery.
After my introduction to pornography, I moved in with my mother, leaving me without consistent access to Private. In order to fill the void left behind in my father's porn stash, I ended up turning to the next best thing: the Undergear catalogue.
In the early-to-mid-90s, the American man, in print at least, was coming to celebrate not only his body, but his sexual nature, as well. Michael Jordan became famous for a Hanes commercial in which he glibly answered the question on all women's (and several men's) minds, "Boxers or briefs," with a sexily uttered, "Jockstrap."
The Undergear catalogue helped to changed that dialogue, making any answer to that simple question, "Boxers or briefs," far more complex. Men were being sexualized in glossy print in much the way women were in the Victoria's Secret catalog, though the poses were undeniably more "masculine." Not surprisingly, my favor model in these catalogues bore a decidedly masculine name: Steve Manley.
Leaning against a spartan kitchen countertop in thigh-length open robes, the models would appear relaxed, yet taut, in their spandex-cotton blend microbriefs sipping lazily on a cup of coffee or drinking from cartons of fat-free milk. Buddies fresh from their post-workout showers complimented one another in the locker room on their fetching multi-colored, square-cut boxer briefs, sharing jovial punches in the arm as they wore their towels not wrapped around their waists, but slung over their shoulders as if to say, "Hey there, guys...I'm completely comfortable with both my masculinity and my body, and I don't really mind if you take a look at my designer undergarments. In fact...I'm counting on it."
The disappointing lack of nudity aside, Undergear catalogues served as an object lesson for me that men could often be even sexier when they were only partially naked. I grew fond of seeing these scantily clad, beautifully muscled men with their manscaped bodies sometimes waxed bare - denuded of all body hair. I never knew how they achieved such unparalleled perfection, but it was something not to which I aspired, but to which I wanted desperately to dedicate myself. I wanted to worship these men as I was certain only I could do.
For the first time, I didn't have to try and mentally erase the bodies of those pesky women in order to "see" the men - there were none there to obscure from my view of that delicious male pulchritude. I was finally able to understand that I had never been interested in what the men were doing with those women, but simply with the men, themselves.
It was with these clothed models that I learned how to use my sexual imagination. I stopped simply projecting myself onto the pre-rendered gangbang photographs, and instead began to imagine myself at the whims and wily ways of these nearly naked men as they did unspeakable things to me in order to reach their own selfish Nirvana. In these fantasies, I was always the recipient of their machinations...never the aggressor.
It was around this time that I developed a habit I still have yet to break - hours-long bathroom sessions.
Unlike my father's house, my mother's had two bathrooms, giving me my own in which to secret myself for hours at a time either alone or with my step-cousin to whom I found myself naughtily attracted. Despite my unspoken longings, there were no incestuous romps in that steamy bathroom. Most often, we would literally exercise, attempting to achieve the well-sculpted bodies like those we saw in the Undergear catalogue, or practice holding our breath under the water in the tub until forced to the top for air.
In my step-cousin I found a real live object to whom I could attach my sexual daydreams. It was never upon myself that I envisioned the underwear in Undergear - I was invariably kept naked and waiting for orders from the Men in these fantasies. My step-cousin, not being related by blood, became the perfect target for my prurient fantasies.
I would imagine him scantily clad in what amounted to little more than a cock sock, his penis at which I had so often snuck clandestine glances during our mutual self-masturbation sessions on his waterbed separated from me by only the thinnest of skintight, almost transparent fabric, as he stood above me demanding that I look up at him with the respect, awe, and adoration that he, as a Man, and his cock deserved. Much to my pre-teen chagrin, however, those fantasies never came to pass.
My private bathroom sessions could stretch on for hours at a time, leaving my mother and stepfather to wonder, "Just what the hell is he doing in there?" My mother, I think, knew what was up. They both did, probably. The crunches and pushups I performed in our dual bathroom workout sessions were continued when I was by myself, sans clothing, always under the strict orders I imagined were being barked at me by any of the many manly models of whose bodies I so lovingly fantasized.
My most vivid fantasies involved me being subjugated to the will of one or several of these men. I was always the object of sexual domination, a willing focus of their physical and verbal abuse, never once believing that these desires were outside the realm of heteronormative acceptability. No one ever told me that I shouldn't be fantasizing about men, and so I never felt that what I was doing was wrong in any way. It seemed a natural fit for me to be the submissive partner in my sexual imagination, and so I grew to accept that this was what I wanted for myself, accepting the fact that I, unlike my straight peers, was uninterested in pursuing the opposite sex.
My next revelation came, again, in magazine form.
When I was in the sixth grade, my stepfather purchased a weight set in an effort to get back into shape. Before you wander into Incestland again, no, I did not fantasize about my stepfather.
In addition to his purchase of the weight set, he began to bring home exercise magazines, two of which in particular best held my interest: Men's Workout and Exercise for Men Only. Both of these magazines, which now appear to be out of print, presented muscular men not as marble statues upon which garments had been delicately sewn, but as the living, breathing, and visceral epitome of "male."
They glistened with the sweat brought forth by their physical endeavors, which served only to enhance and draw attention to the finely chiseled musculature of their bodies. Stomachs were not simply firm, they looked like a secondary set of ribs that had been mistakenly placed just below the first. Every sinew, every striation of their muscles were perfectly lit to provide the (mostly gay) readers with the best vantage point from which to view the fruits their magnificent handiwork.
Not only were these men sweaty, athletic, and gorgeous, they managed to complete their rigorous workouts in garments that only barely rose to the classification of "clothing." Spandex shorts; box-cut briefs; posing straps; the men performed every exercise wearing next to nothing, which, when caught in still photographs can be absolutely breathtaking. A good photographer could make the exercises look simple; a great photographer could do the same, but did so in a way that ensured every muscle group required to engage the motion was perfectly highlighted and contoured.
As if the pictographies weren't scintillating enough, the back pages of these magazines contained advertisements for soft-core gay, bisexual, and muscle porn, each ad clearly targeting the magazines' large gay readership. The bisexual porn was tossed in (always in the grainiest black and white low-resolution images imaginable) in an effort to address the handful of straight readers who might be heteroflexible enough to venture into the wilds of man-on-man sex. Alongside these videos were stills for muscle worship porn, a genre in which male models oil up their bodies to flex and pose for the camera in exotic or erotic settings, occasionally with a "private" video of those models brave enough to bare it all and finish by pleasuring themselves to a frothy finish.
In addition to these adverts, various "professional" services were listed in what masqueraded as a "Personals Section" - the pre-online version of Craigslist. Listings for "Masseurs," "House Boys," "Maid Services," and "Personal Trainers" littered the pages with poorly worded offerings, each one a thinly veiled euphemism for "Sex Worker." Or "Escorts," should you prefer the term.
As time went by, a pattern was quickly established: Rick would bring a copy of the newest issue home from the Ingles grocery store that was a short walk from our house, take them downstairs, read them for their supposed intended purpose, and I would sneak down into the basement after they went to bed and secret away his brand new "fitness" magazine, and abscond with my freshly purloined not-porno to my bedroom where I would then enjoy the triple thrill of finding something taboo sexually arousing, attempting to masturbate quietly so as not to awake my sleeping parents in the room across the hall, and with having successfully stolen (or so I thought) Rick's inspirational and educational literature for my own prurient purposes.
After I was forcibly ejected from middle school in the eighth grade, I was sent to live, again, with my father, and with that move ended my steady supply of exercise magazines. Whereas I had an allowance at my mother's with which to purchase each new issue of Men's Workout, at my father's, money was unspeakably tight, largely due to our shared inability to manage what little money we had.
Plato once wrote in The Republic, Book II, "...and yet a true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention." Guided by this proverb, I returned to my former process of removing from magazines the images of men to whom I was attracted. Without the aid of scissors, I was left to tear out entire pages in order to get what I want, trying desperately to hide my misdeeds from any watchful security cameras or store cops routing out shoplifters.
I would not-so-slyly slide the object of my desire underneath my shirt, tucking it securely beneath the waistband of my jeans, and make my way to the nearest store men's room, lock myself inside one of the filthy bathroom stalls, and paw my way sweatily through the magazine with shaking hands in search of the desired photos. Whenever I located a photo set that got my dick hard, I would attempt to carefully and quietly remove the page, tearing it from its binding and folding it into a much more manageable square that could more easily be concealed in the pocket of my oversized jeans or jacket. I would then take these stolen pages home and hide them in that perennial hiding place: between the mattress and the box spring.
I would spend much of my time in high school, and even now as an adult, sequestered behind the closed door to my room, and as a Freshman, I would spend those hours poring over my ill-gotten gains, furiously stroking myself to orgasm as I imagined these oiled musclegods using their prodigious pecs and bulging biceps to force me into delicious sexual servitude, unconcerned with my pleasure; using me to gratify his own desires.
At no time did I consider my fantasies of submission to bigger, stronger males out of the ordinary, even though by that point in my life, I had already admitted to my eighth grade classmates that I was bisexual. When asked what that meant, I explained that, as a bisexual, I could have the best of both worlds: big breasts and hot cocks; that I found both men and women equally attractive, and would gladly...willingly have sex with both genders.
This, of course, was a half-truth - I was no more attracted to any woman than most of my male peers were attracted to one another - and by the time high school rolled around, I had pretty much accepted the fact that had taken me seven long years to figure out:
I liked guys.
Over the course of the next several years, I would stumble upon and abandon various other masturbatory stimulants. On television, it was professional wrestling. While other teenage males watched it for the violence, I watched it for the muscles. I would watch each episode with dick clutched firmly in hand as the nearly naked men paraded about the ring, pummeling one another to a pulp in the process.
Pro wrestling is, for most straight men, an outlet through which they safely express aggression. For me, such programs afforded me the opportunity to revel in that aggression, giving rise to a host of feelings I'd not encountered since my early Bloodsport period. Instead of women being brutalized in the Euro porn in which I so aspired to star, the WWF (now WWE) brought me images of fully grown, overly muscled men being all but sodomized on the stage, staged though it was, and all this to the deafening din of cheers from the overstimulated masses.
Groups of us would gather at friends' houses to cheer alongside those fans lucky enough to have seats to the matches. They waxed rhapsodic about their favorite wrestlers, each of whom they held in unimpeachable esteem, while I sat basking in the glow of the testosterone-fueled violence flickering on their big screen televisions.
It was this way with every sport. The men whom my friends viewed as role models and idols, I saw as the objects of my unexpressed desires. Football players, wrestlers, and strongmen; each of these men provided me with yet another image to store away in my spank bank.
As the age of the computer continued to mature, so did my tastes in erotic stimulation. The rise of the Internet provided perverts such as myself access not to a wealth of information (although it occasionally may have served that purpose), but with a much more immediate way to seek out stimulative material. It was during my Senior year in high school that I was introduced to the Nifty Archives, a compendium of self-published erotic fiction, each story conveniently sorted into subcategories from Authoritarian to Athletics; Incest to Military.
Each genre opened for me a whole new world of smut. A naturally avid reader, I would allow myself to be transported into each story, regardless of how good or bad the writing may have been, and in each new scenario, I discovered a new facet of my sexuality with which I had not been previously acquainted. Each story allowed me to become someone else, and more importantly helped me to realize that I was not alone in my forbidden desires.
As the Internet improved, I gained access to videos that had never before been perused by my eyes. I had largely grown up in a straight porn world, and the revelation that pornography also game in the gay male variety stoked the fires of my teenage passion.
Like many gay men who came of age in the 1990s, Ken Ryker represented one of the most definitive examples of masculinity. A gay-for-pay bisexual actor, Ken was versatile in his sexuality, if not in his sexual tendencies. Sports fetish, bondage, and bisexual scenes - Ryker could do it all, and often did, earning him a place in the fond memories of the gay porn community.
I watched (and masturbated) as he shoved his gigantic member forcibly into even the tightest of assholes, all the while thinking, "Please, let it be me. Please, let me be the one he wants to fuck."
Whether unshaven or freshly shorn, Ken's appeal was nearly universal, and for me, he was almost always the star of my sexual fantasies. With every story I read on the Nifty Archives, when I placed myself in the role of the bottom, he would be the man I imagined as the top. For every time I was violated at the hands of the university football team's star quarterback, bound, gagged, and fucked by the unforgiving Master, or forced to submit to the straight man's desire to service him while he pleasured his girlfriend, Ryker was there every step of the way.
Now that I'm in my thirties, I'm better able to understand the motives behind my actions. In a small sense, I was attempting to strike out into the world - to lash out at the ubiquitous "They" who were always trying to keep me down. A hippie without a cause; a yuppie without a Beemer.
For the large part, however, my outward appearance and overall behavior was a reaction to the fact that I was simply too terrified to openly admit to certain truths about myself which had become self-evident - I liked boys. And not just boys..."men."
My understanding of my sexuality did not come in the form of a single revelation. There was no single event that heralded my sexual awakening; rather, a series of progressive events that led me to an eventual conclusion. All of these were just single parts of a larger whole, no one thing more important than another, but each new understanding built upon the information gleaned from prior experience.
These hints of my bourgeoning sexual inclinations began to make themselves manifest over the years, each of which inexorably pointed toward the truth - I was into men.
Step One: There Will Be Bloodsport
I first noticed that I was attracted to other men when I was seven. My father had just begun his second teaching job at a small high school in southern West Virginia. A farming community that had once thrived as a shipping town, Buffalo's resources had long since dried up, or burned up, as was the case with the former four-story shopping center whose charred ruins towered ominously in the field next to the school, a haunting reminder of better times.
While certainly not the most attentive parent, my father was an excellent teacher, although his methods were undoubtedly unorthodox. Several lessons included the viewing of the film Bloodsport, though why, I'll never know. But, it was this film that led me to the realization that I liked not only men, but muscular, MANLY men.
My memories of Bloodsport contain virtually no plot details other than the scenes onto which I'd glommed like a remora. I remember something about a girl...perhaps there was a big fight. The scenes that were important to me were all towards the beginning of the film:
Jean-Claude Van Damme in the middle of a forest, training with his master, getting wet, sweaty, and shirtless in the process. He is bound and has his legs splayed open to force him into what seems to be a painful split. He goes to a bar in very tight jeans, gets into a fight, and drops into a full split to punch someone in the nuts.
I would watch these scenes over and over, seeing what I believed to be the "ultimate in man" being tortured and abused, entirely unaware that what I believed to be a passing interest in some very cool scenes was actually my brain sending covert messages that I was not only into muscular, flexible men, but also something of a sadomasochist as I wanted to do and have done to me the very same tortures.
It is back to this film that I trace my adult interests in bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism. For without it, I might never have come to these realizations of my own interests. That the movie is awful never was an issue for me, as the only reason I ever watched it was to see those training scenes in the forest, hoping...praying that someday, someone would do that to me.
Step Two: Swiss Cheese Porn in a Penthouse World
The second clue came about when I began the rite of passage most young boys take at some point in their pre-adolescence - I found my father's porn stash.
Every boy I knew discovered his father's titillating treasure trove. Like pigs hunting truffles, we would sneak into their rooms and sniff out the porn...at the time, however, I didn't expect to actually locate photos of things that quite so closely resembled mushrooms. We scavenged their magazines, never knowing why certain pages were stuck together while others flipped over with ease.
After we had found the objects of our pre-teen desires, we would gather together in an all-male conclave to share our bounty, saying what we were societally programmed to say, myself more often than the others. They mostly stayed silent during our perusal, occasionally commenting on one or another model's body, while I made certain to let everyone know that I was a "normal" boy.
"She has great tits," I'd offhandedly comment, unwittingly paying more attention to the prodigious penis upon which the model's gaze was so intently fixed.
While the other boys' fathers had the run-of-the-mill porn - Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler - my father's tastes were decidedly more risqué. He favored porn of the hardcore European variety, most notably Private Magazine. While my friends' magazines had photos of blonde, busty models who occasionally encountered a penis in their sex misadventures (only some of which appeared to be connected to the rare presence of the occasional hairy midsection), the women in Private couldn't even seem to go to the café without stumbling upon not one, but several penises, each of them attached to a fully grown, fully visible man.
These men, rather than being cropped out of the photos to redirect focus to the model, often served as the unwitting stars of the show, the images showing less of what the women could do with a cock and more of what several cocks could do to her. Couples, three ways, and gangbangs; every hole was filled, often with dicks to spare as the models were double penetrated in their lower extremities with an additional cock in her mouth and one or two held in hand and masturbated to keep them involved in the scene. The men in Private weren't accoutrements to dazed-eyed bimbos; they were aggressively active in giving each model what for, and they did so with gusto.
Only once during one of these gatherings did I ever make an innocent misstep when I joked, "Cock. The Other White Meat," playing upon the then-popular pork commercials flooding the airwaves, only to be gently rebuked by one of my older male friends: "Well, what if the guy's black?" To that question, I had no rejoinder other than to posit, "Dark meat?"
American pornography was, until recently, unique in the Western world only for its puritanical blandness. Sex was doled out in minuscule nibbles, whereas Private porn was a Bacchanalian feast. These European sometimes-beauties weren't just naked on the page in tasteful poses; rather, they were splayed open and brutalized not by just one, but several men, all with voracious sexual appetites. Every orifice was transformed into a gaping maw by the unabashed men, all of whom were entirely comfortable not only having sex in front of a camera, but with doing so while being close to and even physically touching the other fully naked and erect men as they ravaged the overwhelmed models whose bodies wer often lost among a sea of naked manflesh. Each woman was eventually subjected to what Private called, "the ultimate fuck," as she was penetrated by numerous gigantic cocks at the same time, even, occasionally, accommodating more than one such organ in a single opening.
It was likely this aspect of Private magazine that turned me on the most. In my friends' porn, the women were front and center, whereas in my father's European offerings, the men oftentimes received equal, if not more time on the page than their female counterparts. I developed a penchant for a few models - Frank Major, Nacho Vidal, George Uhl, Csoky Ice - these were the men whose bodies (and dicks) stuck with me long after the magazines had been returned to the bottom of the sock drawer, the top shelf of the closet, or between the boxspring and the mattress. To this day, these are the men for whom I still carry a sexual torch.
We were, my friends and I, discovering our budding sexuality. They were discovering breasts and vaginas; I was discovering my desire to be in the place of those female models getting reamed by the giant phalluses of my favorite male models. Oddly enough, I never sexualized my male friends as we looked over our skin magazines; they weren't old enough for my tastes. They were boys, and all I wanted was to be ravaged by men.
After my all too brief sojourns into the world of hardcore Euro porn, I would return the magazines to my father's collection. I did not, however, return them entirely intact. Whenever I found a photo of a man or a penis to which I felt an attraction, I would run to find our orange-handled scissors and proceed to carefully cut out that portion of the page, leaving his magazines riddled with holes where once stood proudly erect penises waiting to gain entry to whichever orifice was nearest.
This had a rather disconcerting effect on the magazines, leaving big breasted babes openmouthed and gazing hungrily not at glistening male sex organs, but through oddly penis-shaped windows opening onto the pages beneath. The lone female in a five-person gangbang was no longer surrounded by lusty men, left to fend for her own disembodied torso, the sole remnant of torrid action once so brightly displayed upon the page.
What my father must have thought whenever he would return to these magazines in search of a masturbatory aid I can only guess. He would eventually stumble upon Private's errant men whose likenesses had been so crudely excised from their pages. The had all been lovingly glued onto pieces of poster board in a collage of tumescent masculinity kept poorly hidden between my twin-sized bed and the wall. But, by that point, I had already moved onto my next odyssey of self-discovery.
Step Three: Under Where the Bulges Show
After my introduction to pornography, I moved in with my mother, leaving me without consistent access to Private. In order to fill the void left behind in my father's porn stash, I ended up turning to the next best thing: the Undergear catalogue.
In the early-to-mid-90s, the American man, in print at least, was coming to celebrate not only his body, but his sexual nature, as well. Michael Jordan became famous for a Hanes commercial in which he glibly answered the question on all women's (and several men's) minds, "Boxers or briefs," with a sexily uttered, "Jockstrap."
The Undergear catalogue helped to changed that dialogue, making any answer to that simple question, "Boxers or briefs," far more complex. Men were being sexualized in glossy print in much the way women were in the Victoria's Secret catalog, though the poses were undeniably more "masculine." Not surprisingly, my favor model in these catalogues bore a decidedly masculine name: Steve Manley.
Leaning against a spartan kitchen countertop in thigh-length open robes, the models would appear relaxed, yet taut, in their spandex-cotton blend microbriefs sipping lazily on a cup of coffee or drinking from cartons of fat-free milk. Buddies fresh from their post-workout showers complimented one another in the locker room on their fetching multi-colored, square-cut boxer briefs, sharing jovial punches in the arm as they wore their towels not wrapped around their waists, but slung over their shoulders as if to say, "Hey there, guys...I'm completely comfortable with both my masculinity and my body, and I don't really mind if you take a look at my designer undergarments. In fact...I'm counting on it."
The disappointing lack of nudity aside, Undergear catalogues served as an object lesson for me that men could often be even sexier when they were only partially naked. I grew fond of seeing these scantily clad, beautifully muscled men with their manscaped bodies sometimes waxed bare - denuded of all body hair. I never knew how they achieved such unparalleled perfection, but it was something not to which I aspired, but to which I wanted desperately to dedicate myself. I wanted to worship these men as I was certain only I could do.
For the first time, I didn't have to try and mentally erase the bodies of those pesky women in order to "see" the men - there were none there to obscure from my view of that delicious male pulchritude. I was finally able to understand that I had never been interested in what the men were doing with those women, but simply with the men, themselves.
It was with these clothed models that I learned how to use my sexual imagination. I stopped simply projecting myself onto the pre-rendered gangbang photographs, and instead began to imagine myself at the whims and wily ways of these nearly naked men as they did unspeakable things to me in order to reach their own selfish Nirvana. In these fantasies, I was always the recipient of their machinations...never the aggressor.
It was around this time that I developed a habit I still have yet to break - hours-long bathroom sessions.
Unlike my father's house, my mother's had two bathrooms, giving me my own in which to secret myself for hours at a time either alone or with my step-cousin to whom I found myself naughtily attracted. Despite my unspoken longings, there were no incestuous romps in that steamy bathroom. Most often, we would literally exercise, attempting to achieve the well-sculpted bodies like those we saw in the Undergear catalogue, or practice holding our breath under the water in the tub until forced to the top for air.
In my step-cousin I found a real live object to whom I could attach my sexual daydreams. It was never upon myself that I envisioned the underwear in Undergear - I was invariably kept naked and waiting for orders from the Men in these fantasies. My step-cousin, not being related by blood, became the perfect target for my prurient fantasies.
I would imagine him scantily clad in what amounted to little more than a cock sock, his penis at which I had so often snuck clandestine glances during our mutual self-masturbation sessions on his waterbed separated from me by only the thinnest of skintight, almost transparent fabric, as he stood above me demanding that I look up at him with the respect, awe, and adoration that he, as a Man, and his cock deserved. Much to my pre-teen chagrin, however, those fantasies never came to pass.
My private bathroom sessions could stretch on for hours at a time, leaving my mother and stepfather to wonder, "Just what the hell is he doing in there?" My mother, I think, knew what was up. They both did, probably. The crunches and pushups I performed in our dual bathroom workout sessions were continued when I was by myself, sans clothing, always under the strict orders I imagined were being barked at me by any of the many manly models of whose bodies I so lovingly fantasized.
My most vivid fantasies involved me being subjugated to the will of one or several of these men. I was always the object of sexual domination, a willing focus of their physical and verbal abuse, never once believing that these desires were outside the realm of heteronormative acceptability. No one ever told me that I shouldn't be fantasizing about men, and so I never felt that what I was doing was wrong in any way. It seemed a natural fit for me to be the submissive partner in my sexual imagination, and so I grew to accept that this was what I wanted for myself, accepting the fact that I, unlike my straight peers, was uninterested in pursuing the opposite sex.
Step Four: The Prime of Mr. Jean's Booty
When I was in the sixth grade, my stepfather purchased a weight set in an effort to get back into shape. Before you wander into Incestland again, no, I did not fantasize about my stepfather.
In addition to his purchase of the weight set, he began to bring home exercise magazines, two of which in particular best held my interest: Men's Workout and Exercise for Men Only. Both of these magazines, which now appear to be out of print, presented muscular men not as marble statues upon which garments had been delicately sewn, but as the living, breathing, and visceral epitome of "male."
They glistened with the sweat brought forth by their physical endeavors, which served only to enhance and draw attention to the finely chiseled musculature of their bodies. Stomachs were not simply firm, they looked like a secondary set of ribs that had been mistakenly placed just below the first. Every sinew, every striation of their muscles were perfectly lit to provide the (mostly gay) readers with the best vantage point from which to view the fruits their magnificent handiwork.
Not only were these men sweaty, athletic, and gorgeous, they managed to complete their rigorous workouts in garments that only barely rose to the classification of "clothing." Spandex shorts; box-cut briefs; posing straps; the men performed every exercise wearing next to nothing, which, when caught in still photographs can be absolutely breathtaking. A good photographer could make the exercises look simple; a great photographer could do the same, but did so in a way that ensured every muscle group required to engage the motion was perfectly highlighted and contoured.
As if the pictographies weren't scintillating enough, the back pages of these magazines contained advertisements for soft-core gay, bisexual, and muscle porn, each ad clearly targeting the magazines' large gay readership. The bisexual porn was tossed in (always in the grainiest black and white low-resolution images imaginable) in an effort to address the handful of straight readers who might be heteroflexible enough to venture into the wilds of man-on-man sex. Alongside these videos were stills for muscle worship porn, a genre in which male models oil up their bodies to flex and pose for the camera in exotic or erotic settings, occasionally with a "private" video of those models brave enough to bare it all and finish by pleasuring themselves to a frothy finish.
In addition to these adverts, various "professional" services were listed in what masqueraded as a "Personals Section" - the pre-online version of Craigslist. Listings for "Masseurs," "House Boys," "Maid Services," and "Personal Trainers" littered the pages with poorly worded offerings, each one a thinly veiled euphemism for "Sex Worker." Or "Escorts," should you prefer the term.
As time went by, a pattern was quickly established: Rick would bring a copy of the newest issue home from the Ingles grocery store that was a short walk from our house, take them downstairs, read them for their supposed intended purpose, and I would sneak down into the basement after they went to bed and secret away his brand new "fitness" magazine, and abscond with my freshly purloined not-porno to my bedroom where I would then enjoy the triple thrill of finding something taboo sexually arousing, attempting to masturbate quietly so as not to awake my sleeping parents in the room across the hall, and with having successfully stolen (or so I thought) Rick's inspirational and educational literature for my own prurient purposes.
After I was forcibly ejected from middle school in the eighth grade, I was sent to live, again, with my father, and with that move ended my steady supply of exercise magazines. Whereas I had an allowance at my mother's with which to purchase each new issue of Men's Workout, at my father's, money was unspeakably tight, largely due to our shared inability to manage what little money we had.
Plato once wrote in The Republic, Book II, "...and yet a true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention." Guided by this proverb, I returned to my former process of removing from magazines the images of men to whom I was attracted. Without the aid of scissors, I was left to tear out entire pages in order to get what I want, trying desperately to hide my misdeeds from any watchful security cameras or store cops routing out shoplifters.
I would not-so-slyly slide the object of my desire underneath my shirt, tucking it securely beneath the waistband of my jeans, and make my way to the nearest store men's room, lock myself inside one of the filthy bathroom stalls, and paw my way sweatily through the magazine with shaking hands in search of the desired photos. Whenever I located a photo set that got my dick hard, I would attempt to carefully and quietly remove the page, tearing it from its binding and folding it into a much more manageable square that could more easily be concealed in the pocket of my oversized jeans or jacket. I would then take these stolen pages home and hide them in that perennial hiding place: between the mattress and the box spring.
I would spend much of my time in high school, and even now as an adult, sequestered behind the closed door to my room, and as a Freshman, I would spend those hours poring over my ill-gotten gains, furiously stroking myself to orgasm as I imagined these oiled musclegods using their prodigious pecs and bulging biceps to force me into delicious sexual servitude, unconcerned with my pleasure; using me to gratify his own desires.
Step Five: Gladiators Pitted Against a Starving Prostate
This, of course, was a half-truth - I was no more attracted to any woman than most of my male peers were attracted to one another - and by the time high school rolled around, I had pretty much accepted the fact that had taken me seven long years to figure out:
I liked guys.
Over the course of the next several years, I would stumble upon and abandon various other masturbatory stimulants. On television, it was professional wrestling. While other teenage males watched it for the violence, I watched it for the muscles. I would watch each episode with dick clutched firmly in hand as the nearly naked men paraded about the ring, pummeling one another to a pulp in the process.
Pro wrestling is, for most straight men, an outlet through which they safely express aggression. For me, such programs afforded me the opportunity to revel in that aggression, giving rise to a host of feelings I'd not encountered since my early Bloodsport period. Instead of women being brutalized in the Euro porn in which I so aspired to star, the WWF (now WWE) brought me images of fully grown, overly muscled men being all but sodomized on the stage, staged though it was, and all this to the deafening din of cheers from the overstimulated masses.
Groups of us would gather at friends' houses to cheer alongside those fans lucky enough to have seats to the matches. They waxed rhapsodic about their favorite wrestlers, each of whom they held in unimpeachable esteem, while I sat basking in the glow of the testosterone-fueled violence flickering on their big screen televisions.
It was this way with every sport. The men whom my friends viewed as role models and idols, I saw as the objects of my unexpressed desires. Football players, wrestlers, and strongmen; each of these men provided me with yet another image to store away in my spank bank.
Step Six: From Chrysalis to Boned Up Butterfly
As the age of the computer continued to mature, so did my tastes in erotic stimulation. The rise of the Internet provided perverts such as myself access not to a wealth of information (although it occasionally may have served that purpose), but with a much more immediate way to seek out stimulative material. It was during my Senior year in high school that I was introduced to the Nifty Archives, a compendium of self-published erotic fiction, each story conveniently sorted into subcategories from Authoritarian to Athletics; Incest to Military.
Each genre opened for me a whole new world of smut. A naturally avid reader, I would allow myself to be transported into each story, regardless of how good or bad the writing may have been, and in each new scenario, I discovered a new facet of my sexuality with which I had not been previously acquainted. Each story allowed me to become someone else, and more importantly helped me to realize that I was not alone in my forbidden desires.
As the Internet improved, I gained access to videos that had never before been perused by my eyes. I had largely grown up in a straight porn world, and the revelation that pornography also game in the gay male variety stoked the fires of my teenage passion.
Like many gay men who came of age in the 1990s, Ken Ryker represented one of the most definitive examples of masculinity. A gay-for-pay bisexual actor, Ken was versatile in his sexuality, if not in his sexual tendencies. Sports fetish, bondage, and bisexual scenes - Ryker could do it all, and often did, earning him a place in the fond memories of the gay porn community.
I watched (and masturbated) as he shoved his gigantic member forcibly into even the tightest of assholes, all the while thinking, "Please, let it be me. Please, let me be the one he wants to fuck."
Whether unshaven or freshly shorn, Ken's appeal was nearly universal, and for me, he was almost always the star of my sexual fantasies. With every story I read on the Nifty Archives, when I placed myself in the role of the bottom, he would be the man I imagined as the top. For every time I was violated at the hands of the university football team's star quarterback, bound, gagged, and fucked by the unforgiving Master, or forced to submit to the straight man's desire to service him while he pleasured his girlfriend, Ryker was there every step of the way.
Adventures in Forbidden Romance
In the process of exploring my sexual desires as a pre-teen, teenager, young adult, and as a man, a certain pattern becomes clear - I like men...and not just any men; men who are bigger, stronger, and more dominant than I. My willingness to submit to the right man have led me down several sexual avenues, and while I have yet to be successful in making my dream a more permanent reality beyond the occasional one-night romp at Fort Troff, I still have hope that, some day, somebody's going to make me want to turn around and let them make me cry.
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