Category: Gay

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Bouncing Bronze Beach Bears

Today I had the beach to myself. Until the bronze furry-bellied chubs came along. Unlike yesterday’s crowd of youthful mostly slender gays and lesbians, today’s was consistently of a more mature, girthful constitution. The first one to come along made a beeline to my spot on the beach and asked for help understanding the parking meters. I willingly assisted the portly beach enthusiast-in-distress, who ultimately settled down a few feet away, and asked for yet another favor, to slather his fuzzy back with sunscreen. Is this starting to sound like a porn movie? To dispel those sorts of expectations, I’ll tell you now that there are no Happy Endings here, this was more like a 70s soft core beach flick starring someone like Raquel Welch and Oliver Reed. I was very happy to oblige with the sunscreen, and we struck up a conversation and fell into a remarkably easy and intimate exchange as we continued applying sunscreen to subsequent limbs and expanses. He told me he was in a monogamous relationship of 22 years, visiting from New York, and that he had popped down to the beach for a quick dip in the Gulf before joining his partner for lunch. I told him of my current dating life, of my former partners, we chatted about love and fidelity, of our mutual embrace of long-term entanglements. Our enthusiastic touching and conversing about fidelity stimulated a response requiring a great deal of diversionary posturing, so in lieu of public beach infidelity, I suggested that he channel the titillation towards a wonderful evening with his partner. I recommended that he tell him that he met this hot stud on the beach who, while applying sunscreen to his back, brushed delicately but suggestively against his body, making tiny little grunting sounds, “Yeah, uh-uh,” stuff like that, but that he calmly told his molester that he was a married man and was true to his one and only. I fed him more lines of dialogue, added more muscles and super-sized appendages, and asked that he think of me when welcoming his partner’s proud and excited response, that he imagine me on the headboard, performing some dance with many veils and attendant putti.

There were about four couples who settled in around us, a convergence of coupledom each consisting of a more full-bodied furry fellow and a slightly younger slimmer paler companion. Who staged this for me?

And then this motorized Spanish galleon putted past…

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A Gaggle of Gays, a Litter of Lesbians, and My Sister & Brother-in-Law

So today I snuck away to the beach with my sister and brother-in-law. To a beach full of bronzed thin guys in tight trunks—the gay beach. I sat next to a litter of baby lesbians, with tattoos, dyed cropped hair, either really big bazoombas or completely flat chests, baseball caps and piercings. They splashed around in the water, threw frisbees, drank beer and played that ball game with the velcro mitt.

The gaggle of gays on my left wore nothing but constrictive swimwear, and an occasional tattoo. Each bathing suit looked sewn onto each chiseled perfectly tanned body, with horizontal stripes that bulged elliptically and calculatedly. One guy’s bikini was vulgarly efficient in enhancing basketry that needed anything but enhancing. And fuscia to boot. Every time he promenaded by, that glowing protuberance commanded my attention like a fiery slow-motion fuscia comet about to crash into me. There was one guy whom I could not believe was real, with bubbly comic book super hero muscles and dark chocolate skin that didn’t reflect any sunlight, a bonbon swaddled in a flimsy yellow wrapper.

Okay, so there were the lesbians frolicking and laughing and having a blast in the water, but the gays limited their activity to slowly sauntering along the water’s edge—each one turning his head 90 degrees for one half second and checking me out as he passed. Or they would slowly sashay into the water, to just above the ankle, and stand there. Stand there, in the water. Like ikebana.

The prettiest flower on the beach, my sister Carol
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The Dating Game: A Date with Judy & Señor Grant


Let’s call him Mr. Right. Well, to distinguish him from all of my other Mr. Rights, for now, let’s call him Señor Grant. If the casting director of the Mary Tyler Moore Show had called for a softer, Hispanic version of Mr. Grant, this is the guy who would have gotten the job. He came up from LA Saturday night, and was back home only 24 hours later. We had been chatting online over the past few weeks, and he impulsively bought a plane ticket to come up for a quick visit. I was a little nervous, as I’ve never done this kind of thing before, that is, welcome a relative stranger into my home. Well, except for the one from Palestinia, who moved in. So yes, Señor Grant was the first person whom I had never actually met—and not already invited to live with me—before inviting to stay the night.

When I picked him up at the airport, he was wearing a black sweater and a black checkered button-down shirt, a black driving cap, dark jeans, and matching black eyebrows. Not just cute, but handsome, dapper. As soon as we got to my house, our lips were just sort of pulled towards each other, like big pink magnets. After an hour or so I pried him off of me and off we went to dinner at a basque restaurant, Piperade, which sadly was little more than a nice-tasting blur as I was so impatient to get back into a comfortable horizontal configuration.

Finally thus configured, we successfully prevented each other from getting any kind of sleep. When morning finally came, we watched A Date With Judy in bed on his iPad. Jane Powell, Liz Taylor, and Señor Grant’s furry white chest, an absolute perfect date.

He and I seem to be after the same things: companionship, substantial physical intimacy, engagement… He’s smart, well-traveled, a dapper dresser, with a job that provides access to the most glamorous of Hollywood, he articulates ideas that are complex and original, with squat hairy legs, those black eyebrows that drive me crazy, lips so soft that I keep puckering like a hungry fish…

“Be” and “let” are my magic new age hippy relaxation words for the day. And if anything, I’ll remember a really great day with a really great guy.

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Meat Rack and Manpower


Tonight the Major and I saw a vintage soft-core porn film at YBCA, The Meat Rack, a sort of cinéma-vérité style homage to, believe it or not, Who Killed Teddy Bear, but minus an Elaine Stritch or Sal Mineo. I don’t even think the actors were listed in the credits. Aside from some great location shooting in San Francisco, it was exactly the kind of movie that I expected someone to make in 1968, and disappointing for precisely that. All of the gay characters are retched people: a chubby cross-dresser moaning about having to pay for sex; renegade drag queens shooting porn at knifepoint…

The depictions of that underbelly of society have always annoyed me, primarily because there’s no balance, so few positive portraits. And this was by the underbelly! I’m reading a book now, Full Service, by Scotty Bowers, about his experiences as a hustler in post-WWII Los Angeles. He has sex with, arranges for his friends to have sex with, or claims to have had sex with all the usual cast of Hollywood characters (and Walter Pidgeon, which was a surprise for me). I got read the Riot Act this morning from a friend who said he was sick of these kinds of tell-all books and invasions into private life, but I disagree. I love hearing about gay people enjoying their sex lives during a time that we associate with so much repression, finding ways to express themselves within the restrictive structure of the studio system and the public condemnation of homosexuality. I think it exposes the hypocrisy of the time and normalizes gay experience.

I watched Manpower last night, starring George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, Eve Arden, and Alan Hale, directed by Raoul Walsh. Yes, I bet you’re thinking the same thing I thought, What a cast!, but man, what a stinker. It was interesting to see a drama centered around the men of the electric company, (“Power and Light”) which I’d never seen before—maybe this is the only one of this particular genre—but Marlene Dietrich just can’t act and Walsh unfortunately is no Von Sternberg, he gave her actual things to say, and without fuzzy closeups and smoke billowing out of her half-opened mouth. All the guys were drunks, all the dames stoic and motherly. I guess that heterosexuals, too, occasionally suffered the indignity of unsavory representation.

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The Dating Game: New Revelations

There was a new contestant on my Dating Game last week. Pablo. He’s like a slightly oversized munchkin, you want to just hug him. I want to emphasize that You would want to just hug him, I would want to roll him down the Yellow Brick Road and into a field of poppies and smother him with kisses. We had a great day together, first tea at Samovar, then walking out near the old Sutro Baths, then munching down the overpriced munchables at Louis’. He kissed me when he dropped me off, and I felt a really nice connection forming. Very easy-going, uncomplicated…

The next night he came over for dinner and a movie and after-the-first-date possibilities, and noticed a picture of my Foreign Correspondent. “Hey, do you know Blah Blah?” I answered yes, and immediately felt it coming, the moment I’d warned my Foreign Correspondent about during my several edicts of General Amnesty issued after the discovery of each successive indiscretion, the ones he wouldn’t tell me about and whom I warned him would eventually pop up. I felt no validation in having my long-held suspicions confirmed—yet again—just a profound sense of disappointment. I had tried so hard to create an atmosphere where honesty could flower, so sensitive to his issues and needs… but my own needs just kind of discarded. I couldn’t hide my disappointment. Plus Pablo and I had just watched the world end. In The Rapture, Mimi Rogers’ faith—and, let’s admit it, slight impatience to get to heaven—lead her to kill her child (who keeps begging, annoyingly, to go to heaven anyway, Pleeeeease mommy!). By the time He does come around—and it’s just like in the Bible, with the Four Horsemen and trumpets and stuff—after she’s killed her child and lost her husband (David Duchovny, in a senseless office killing), she’s so shaken by what she’s been put through, that she says No to God. She just couldn’t be with someone who could do that to her. The film ends with her alone, in darkness… forever.

I would have tried to work it out with God, told him how his behavior made me feel, see if he could change. We’d be friends for a while, but every once in a while I’d succumb to that deep voice and let him have his way with me, then we’d fall back into old patterns, Listen, God, I really just want to be friends, then he’d beg me over and over and over to stay and not leave him, that he could change, just give him once more chance…

So Pablo left, and then sent me a message saying he looked forward to being my platonic friend. This kind of annoyed me, that he couldn’t relate to what I was feeling, seeing red flags instead of potential. But what can you do? He feels what he feels. I suppose this told me more about him than I could have learned talking to him: that intimacy, real intimacy, that is, sharing what’s really going on, isn’t something that he can relate to or seems to be particularly interested in.

Giancarlo restored my faith in men in general, briefly, the following weekend, with a fabulous lunch at Camino, then a tour of the Julia Morgan-designed Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland. The columbarium is bathed in a rich golden Pre-Raphaelite light, the architecture a delightful early-modernist take on gothic themes, arrayed in a multi-level labyrinth, each room landscaped with flowers and babbling fountains. Giancarlo is a sweet man, really a treat to be around, but I can’t tell yet if there’s any heat there. He has adopted a visual style reminiscent of another time, a style that unfortunately for me conjures an image of the emasculated middle-aged man of early 60s TV sitcoms—more Ward Cleaver than Don Draper.

The Major is still around. I’ve made it clear that I’d like to just be friends, but every time we’re together I have so much fun and just want to have sex with him. In the movie of my life, we’d probably end up together. But we’d only have to spend 120 minutes together. Not being able to share Antonioni or Fassbinder with him makes it hard to imagine any real life-partner compatibility. I mean, he walked out on The Romantic Englishwoman—that kind of guy. I am very glad to have him in my life, though, as the corner that he occupies is a very sunny happy place to visit.

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7,300 Sunrises

20 years ago, around this time in the morning, Manny died. Manny was my first lover, my great obsession. We had been together for 8 years. Over the years, I’ve tended to recognize these markers on the day we met, or his birthday, rather than the day he died: Manny would have been X years old, Manny and I would have been together for X years, etc, etc… But this morning I can’t avoid observing the immense span of time that’s passed since his death, particularly since the pain associated with his loss seems, suddenly, so fresh. The whole time he was dying I comforted myself by saying that I’d forget this time, I wouldn’t remember him like this. I remember his beauty and vibrance, but I remember the horror of seeing his body covered in lesions, his legs swollen from edema, the indignity of dying so young.

Young is a relative term. He was 34 years older than me, so today he would have been 80. I can’t honestly say that I could imagine that sitcom, but I also can’t imagine loving him any less.

Every day I think of him, his voice is so alive in my head. I can still feel him and smell his hair. How can he not be here, when my sensory perception of him is so acute? Here comes the sun, just as it did after he died, just as it has every day since.

In the movies, when someone dies, it’s like the end. The music swells, the tears fall, and the screen goes black. Finis. But the theater lights come on, you dry your tears, and walk out of the theater into the blazing light of day.

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Ricky & Toby & Eddie & Liz & Me

Ricky, an old buddy from high school was in town last week. A few weeks before he sent me a cryptic note on Facebook, using a different first name and 28 years after I’d frankly thought about him, asking if I remembered him. I said I didn’t know Ricky Blah-blah, but I did go to school with another Blah-blah. He was indeed that other Blah-blah. There were only something like 30 people in my graduating class, so it’s not that difficult to remember any particular one of them. He was a sort of Totoro, hovering in the background with his big smile and jiggly belly, occasionally saying something really smart or witty. I remember entertaining a brief attraction to him, but then he had an eye operation and disappeared before graduation, and that was that.

In the intervening 28 years, he’s sung with opera companies, unknowingly lived two blocks away from me for a few years, bought a house in Atlanta, was a steer-wrestling gay rodeo star, plays countless instruments, sustained an intimate encounter with Eddie Fisher, and is now a systems engineer doing one of those jobs where my eyes glaze over and I start thinking of the laundry I have to do when being told what it is. So what he does, despite his generously dumbed-down layman’s explanation, remains a slight mystery, although it is now taking him practically around the world, a world he’s never explored despite his extensive and interesting life experiences.

When he told me his Eddie Fisher story I nearly had a heart attack. “You had intimate relations with someone who had intimate relations with Elisabeth Taylor??” (I’m paraphrasing here.) He seemed so blasé about it, yet I fired question after question about the details and mechanics, about Carrie and Debbie, if Eddie was gay or just impaired… “I met him at a dinner party at Armistead’s.” Armistead again. Again, my mouth dropped to the floor. “???” “I don’t kiss and tell.” Well, it was a little too late for that, I was already blogging in my mind. His list of celebrity encounters was impressive, the closest I’ve come to intimacy with the stars.

So then he tells me that he had a crush on me in high school and, get this, lived alone! The clouds parted and the sun’s rays beamed me back to those sexually frustrated years and I imagined having sex every day, like, every day, with a real person and not just the imagined someone of the better part of my youth. Maybe we’d be married by now and I’d be a gay rodeo star, too.

Maybe I’d have left him for Eddie Fisher.

We spent a few days together munching and touristing around the bay area, and I developed such an instant and deep fondness for him. He’s from a part of my life that’s supposed to be over, how cool to have it resuscitated. He’s still a big teddy bear, only now he carries one around with him, a real one, named Toby, who’s accompanying him on his travels. Toby is a posturpedic, or is it orthopedic?, something -pedic teddy bear designed to be both furry companion and pillow. Sort of like a mini-Ricky.

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Armistead sighting!

Dean Smith came over tonight for dinner, dish, and Silent Film Night at the CocoPlex. We walked down to Molly Stone’s to pick up some pecorino for my fava bean and basil pasta, and turning the corner to pick up some fettucine I bumped into Armistead pushing a cart down the aisle. “Hey Armistead, it’s Chris!” I said, as if we were old friends. Realizing quickly that I had only been introduced to him once about 15 years ago, I quickly added “Bob Glück’s old boyfriend” and stuck out my ice cold hand, chilled through and through by the frigid pecorino. While shaking his hand, and thinking of Bob’s advice on finding something positive to emphasize in a critique, I told him how impressed I was with how efficiently his books had been scrunched into a 2-1/2 hour musical. He was generous and sweet, and just so adorable. Why didn’t I go after HIM when I had the chance instead of Bob? I thought… Back to Dean and the checkout line, I saw Armistead again on the other side of the store and ran across and blurted, “It was the pecorino.” “Huh?” he asked. “My cold hand, I was holding this pecorino, I’m not the walking dead.” It all didn’t come out quite right and through his befuddlement did I see him glance at my crotch?

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The Dating Game: Florida and My Mister Roberts

Last week I was in Florida, visiting my sisters with my brother and his family. My parents also drove down from Alabama, and we rented a beach house on Indian Shores. The trip this time was very mellow, just hanging out on the beach and with each other, eating grouper sandwiches, bitching about our siblings, building sand castles. And then along came this dreamy bipedal humanoid cryptid whom we shall call Mr. Roberts. Mr. Roberts and I had been conversing online for several months, but having seen only one picture of his fur-ensconced upper half, I had no reason to believe that such a creature could actually exist outside of a fetishist’s CGI enhanced imagination. He lives a few hours away from my sisters, and drove over to spend a day on the beach with me and my family. He was indeed real, and as hairy as his photo suggested, no CGI enhancement necessary. I couldn’t keep my hands off of him, for in addition to looking like something that should be petted, he was just so accessible and welcoming, a 6’2″ shaggy pooch. We drove to Fort deSoto, a beautiful undeveloped island near the mouth of Tampa Bay, and waded and bobbed around and got to know each other better, before heading back to the beach house and a yummy dinner with fish that my brother and brother-in-law snatched from the Gulf that morning. We watched the sun set, one of those spectacular pastel fiery blood orange Florida sunsets, as my family danced in the makeshift cabana/disco they set up behind us. Feigning tiredness, Mr. Roberts asked if it was okay if he could stay the night, so we pushed together the sofas and tried our dangdest to bridge the gap between the two couches, but my sister, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew kept coming in and out of the room. Like, all night. An exasperated Mr. Roberts breathed “Is your family name Kockblocker??” Somehow we ended up falling asleep, various limbs noiselessly entwined, our interaction unfortunately more Hardy Boys than X-Tube, the next day coming way too soon.

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A Wedding in the Midwest

I spent a week in Moline and Chicago recently to attend the wedding of BC’s niece. And to help with the flowers, table settings, and then emergency wilted flower resuscitation. Everything came off splendidly—except the chicken, which I’ll get to in a bit—the bride swaddled in white, the groom surrounded by sexy 20-somethings, everybody dancing. I adore BC’s family, and their extended network of ex-husbands, childhood friends, and very sexually active octogenarian neighbors. It’s like stepping into a sitcom, every moment so filled with jolly repartee, bright bubbly guests, and hushed musings on So-n-so’s investment in African gold, brother What’s-his-face’s wife who hasn’t spoken to her husband in years yet still shares a bed with him, What’s-his-name’s squandering of his wife’s inheritance on the riverboat casino, the love child, the father who’s now a woman, the son without a father…

The chicken at the wedding was without a doubt the most challenging thing I’ve ever encountered in edible form. Overcooked, sauceless, characterless, flavorless and cold, accompanied by… what, I can’t even remember. Please, let me forget, but not without giving thanks to the brave chickens who gave of their breasts to our festive group mastication.

BC and I went out a few days before to dinner at the local steakhouse, accompanied by the bride’s mother and her current beau. The midwest is where you should always order steak. Mine was impossibly tender, like butter. I didn’t even need a knife. I completely ignored my dinner companions and made love to my New York strip, right there on the table, the juicy object of my ravenous appetite, slicing it into tinier and tinier mouth-watering morsels, hoping it wouldn’t end, licking my plate and knife as it disappeared forever.

Everybody in this area either works for, or has worked for, or their children will soon work for John Deere. Including BC’s stepdad, now retired, who took us on a private tour of the combine factory. We got to climb into a giant combine and were then driven through the plant in a golf cart and through the process of the combine’s creation. Most of the workers calmly pushed buttons that controlled machines that did the work that I had imagined the workers would be doing. The John Deere Company, with headquarters and factories and facilities all over the area, is hardly noticed, except that every other business is “John Deere” something or other. They’ve minimized their visual presence by integrating their buildings seamlessly, sensitively, and beautifully into the urban and rural landscape, as much a part of the community as the community is of it.

We got to see a wonderful show of chairs at the Figge Museum, “The Art of Seating,” including some of my faves—the Lavernes’ Lily Chair, Herbert Von Thaden’s Adjustable Lounge Chair, George Nelson’s Medium Arm Fiberglass Chair… I got in trouble for taking pictures. An attendant ran up three flights of stairs—perhaps she viewed me on some monitor somewhere, or someone alerted her to my violation via walkie-talkie—to breathlessly request that I please stop photographing the chairs.

After the wedding, we drove to Chicago to visit BC’s dad, who lives right around the corner from where the big Gay Pride parade was going on. We walked on over just as the parade was ending, wading through the one-foot deep mound of bottles and cups, and bumping into the drunken stumbling hooting half-naked proud homosexualists. I have never felt so old, so consciously not naked, or so far removed from anything resembling pride.