An old facebook post about a dream I had....


Funny, weird dream last night. I'm rehearsing in a dance studio which you can look into from the street because the front wall where the door is is all glass. I've got shorts on I can't button at the top and my big fat belly is hanging over and I'm busting out of my t-shirt. Just then Debbie Allen ....yes Debbie Allen.... walks by and looks in and there is this perplexed expression on her face. So of course she going to get into my business cause she just sees me messing about looking frightful. She walks into the studio with shopping bags in her hands, walks right up to me, looks me up and down, and asks "Honey, don't you work out? Don't you dance?" I said "I'm dancing now." And she pursed her lips and opened her eyes wide at me. "Ok, no I don't...not anymore. not in years." She dropped her bags. Rolled up her sleeves and from out of nowhere she has in her hands that wooden stick she used in Fame to bang the beat on the floor. And she says to me "Ok, here is where you start paying in sweat." I guess if I can't do it for myself I've got to do it for Debbie.

Moment of Truth

I had two of the most difficult conversations in my life, one with each parent, years apart, in regards to my being gay.
1.

First my mother who was not the 1st person I came out to, but the first family member. I was 19. Unchartered territory. And my belief was that I was about to lose my entire world because as much as she loved me, I had no idea how she was going to take the news.

My purpose was selfish. To stop living a lie and confront the consequences of being honest. Because that is something all LGBT people face: consequences for trying to just live in the same world as anyone else. worrying about the same things as anyone else. your kids' scraped knees, the mortgage, the job, the heart break, the dream, the disappointment.

For years I had to do all of it alone. Until my family caught up to where I was. And I made the difficult sacrifices. I took, yes, the higher road because these people who raised me mattered to me. so i took the hits and the jabs from friends and some family. until time the great leveler just evidenced that I was who I had always been. A funny, insecure, passionate person with a red hot temper who cried during happy endings and really, just really only wanted love.

Well, that conversation with my mother wasn't as bad as I thought. But it was for a few short years a painstaking evolution. And ultimately my mother surpassed even her own expectations. She witnessed how I fought and wouldn't back down and held my ground. And what started as a negative reaction for fear and worry of her child, turned into her own blossoming.

When my mother died I packed up her whole apartment and all her belongings and momentos. It was years later that I opened an envelope full of cards she was sending back to my step-father, her ex husband, at a time they were considering getting back together. And I found this letter she had planned to send back with all the cards he ever gave her and she had kept. I keep this as a note in my cell phone to look at it whenever I need reminding that I can have an impact on a person's life. (I have taken liberty to edit for structure but content is intact):

From my mom to my step dad: "I am writing this not for my sake but yours. I want you to think about something I have come to understand. Maybe I am wrong but I feel that I have accomplished an immense soul searching in the past four years and for that I'm grateful to my son. He has opened vast horizons for me and I want to get to this world before I depart it."

She went on to explain that this was why she wasn't going back to him. It was time for them to let go because she found her own strength to live life for her.

2.

Since coming out I have had many many difficult conversations with my birth father, and we oscillated many times and years between being close or completely apart. The hardest conversation I had with him wasn't coming out to him. It was telling him for the first time what I really believed about God and religion. I listened for many years about his, in my view, fundamental beliefs about religion. I never challenged him. I didn't think I had enough Bible learning to have an academic conversation about scripture and interpretation.

I constantly felt apologetic. "Gee, my poor minister father's older son is gay. let me keep a low profile. let me bow my head when we pray in public even though I never would at home. let me agree where I can and swallow what I refute. let me be as dutiful and compliant a son even though no amount of love would rub the stain of the sodomite off me as he quoted to me Leviticus, Romans and Corinthians."

After a few years living as a gypsy following the deaths of my mother and maternal grandmother, I found myself living with my father's mother. Living with his mother gave my father opportunity to leave me pamphlets on my bed about transitioning from gay to straight. It was literature aimed at younger people discovering their sexuality (I hate the phrase "questioning their sexuality"). I had just turned 40. I was never doubtful of who I was. And certainly not at 40. I had already been through so much in my life, including my mother's fight with cancer and having the bitter privilege of giving her permission to let go and leave her suffering and have her pass away in front of me as I closed her eyes - as I told her that she brought me into this world and I helped her into the next one. I DID THAT. I own that. For the same woman who unbeknownst to me at that time was grateful to me for her self growth and awareness and was ready to get to the world she unfortunately never got to explore.

But damn it all if she didn't get to posses her own self discovery before the end. So no, I had no doubts of being gay and those transitioning pamphlets couldn't have made me more angry than any bible verse or literature thrown at me. And that was when I told my father to meet me in a park, on neutral ground, so I could tell him that I didn't believe what he believed. That I didn't subscribe to any literal translation. That I believed the true Godliness in living is being kind to other people. That was my only holy scripture. And after years of being tolerated I told him that loving me was not enough. And I had no doubts that my father loved me deeply. But I couldn't ask for anything less than acceptance. I couldn't ask him to give me any less than I expected and received from my friends. I was through with allowing him the exception because he was my father. If anything, I deserved it all the more from him because he was my father. And I know it hurt him to say it as much as it hurt to hear it, but he said it all the same with the full confidence of his beliefs - acceptance of my being gay is something he could never give me. And that was the day our relationship ended. And all my sense of obligation, pacification and subjugation with it.

3.

Why am I writing about this now? These two relationships? Because oddly enough, I find myself having to defend myself for being gay because of the election. Because the subjugated son became the dutiful friend trying to appreciate everyone's point of view. The Libra in me balancing the scales. And I realized that I was reliving the dynamic of allowing people who say they love and support me to live the illusion that voting for the Republican ticket in 2016 isn't exactly the opposite of loving and supporting me. And I can't do it anymore. Just as I needed to come out to my mother so that I could live an honest life - and just as I needed to confront my father so that I could be free of a self-effacing life - I tell you now, either I inspire you or for my own self preservation I free myself of you. I just won't allow you to pretend that you are just voting for strong borders and bombing ISIS or repealing health care. You are voting for one of the most anti gay tickets and platforms in our modern history.

A Note from Nerd Nirvana

This was originally a draft from April 2014 that I never posted.  I no longer remember how I was tying the last paragraph back in to the Avengers franchise but I just like my enthusiasm over it.  So I am posting it now:

I was watching Captain America:  The Winter Soldier, which in of itself is a cornucopia of comic book geek goodness.  I understand general audiences are enjoying the Avengers franchise, but I can't help but feel you don't get the full geek gasm unless you are a bonafide comic-book geek (CBG).  Not since the Avengers appeared in my 1978 view master have I drooled over seeing the Cap with the Falcon and the Black Widow in audio/visual action.

     Add to that what I believe is an unprecedented moment (fellow geeks please correct me if I am wrong) that a a franchise with both product in a movie and on television are sharing the same universe and story line.  The same week that Hydra took over S.H.I.E.L.D. in Captain America, the ramifications of the story were played out in full in Marvel Studio's TV fare, Agents of Shield.  In the past you may have seen a TV series follow the success of a movie franchise, such as the Planet of the Apes, but it wasn't the same universe.  ("The same universe," is prime geek speak.)

      But along with the CBG goodness, I had an unexpected sci-fi movie geek moment as well, one that made me audibly squeal in the theater.  When I saw the close up of the council woman I had immediate facial recognition of the actress but I was too scared to believe it could be true.  Is that....?  Could it possibly be....?  It was Jenny Agutter from Logan's Run and An American Werewolf in London.

     One of my obsessions with movies and b-movies, and geek movies, is recognizing actors that for the most part have become obscure but never really stop working.  One of my favorite examples is Veronica Cartwright, an incredibly prolific actress who has been - just to name a very short few - in Hitchcock's The Birds, Alien, the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Witches of Eastwick where she played a similar witch-hunt character as she does right now on Resurrection.  I love to see her pop up in dozens of films and sci-fi TV shows. This pleasure could only be eclipsed if Roddy McDowall, the original Cornelius/Ceaser in the 60/70's  original Planet of the Apes movies were still alive to play a cameo in the current franchise.



   

   

Profile Pioneer Winter: Four Years On, 10/12/16

every year I drag out the same profile and cover photo on 9/11. In the grander scheme of things, a very impotent act. There are current tragedies happening right now, today. Acts of violence of man against man. We can't do anything for what happened in NYC on 9/11 except remember. But let's not waste the memory. Use all that anguish and anger and disbelief and shine the light on every foul deed. And scream into that darkness and say "I refuse you!" It's not any divine power that allows or prevents the tragedies of the world. It is only us

9/11, 15 years later...

As a little boy in my microcosmic world of Miami I learned of the outside world from movies. I watched ferociously whatever my mother allowed me to see on TV and in those days before VCR and movie rental places, movies from all periods were shown on TV. And my earliest memory of seeing New York in film, and the Twin Towers, was Godspell (1973) on TV around 1974 or 75.

Then when I was 8 I went to movies to see King Kong (76) with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges and I saw the Twin Towers featured prominently as they replaced the Empire State form the original 30's movie as Kong's last stand. Then came The Wiz where the WTC plaza was the scene for their emerald city and of course dear to my heart, Superman: The Movie where NYC stood in for Metropolis while Reeve flew by the Twin Towers. I fell in love with NYC proper through many movies, like Arthur and Fame and so many I can't count.

When I finally got to visit the city as a college student in Boston (ironically now, I flew on the long defunct Trump shuttle regularly between the two cities) I felt as if I had come home. And when I finally moved there in 1996 I followed Jessica Lang 20 years later to the top of the tower. My generation is the one that barely knew a NY before the Twin Towers and is the generation that can barely imagine a NY without them, except that it's our unforgettable reality. Sept 11, 2001, was our "where were you when Kennedy was shot" moment. It was our Pearl Harbour.

I moved away from New York shortly after my mom died. I couldn't separate the memory of the one from the experience of the other. And I left in 1999. But still I visited from Boston where I spent the longest day of my life on Tuesday, 9/11/01.

This past spring I went back to WTC for the first time since I went to Ground Zero in December 2001. In my trips to NY after I moved away, I just couldn't go down there again and then I was gone for ten years.

April 2016 I went back to visit NYC and went down to the new One WTC and the memorial pool footprints and the memorial museum and my old favorite Winter Garden. and I just felt numb. Like someone just painted over the blood stained walls and I was the only one who knew what was behind the veneer. I thought I could feel jubilant as if the area grew like a phoenix out of the tons of dust and concrete and mangled steel. But toast can never be bread again.

But still I love you NYC (even if I can't live there). You held so many of dreams once. Maybe one day, once again.

Village Voice Review by Jowitt, 9/6/05