How Father Tam Ruined Ash Wednesday for Everybody
Part 2: The Art of Gay Fiction
My first job out of college was in Waco and I learned something: Being Yankee, liberal, and gay in east Texas is like loudly singing Italian arias in a country western bar; most people have no idea what any of your words mean and they all, politely or not so much, want you to either shut up or leave.
I also learned about the political geography of Texas. After working there less than a year I noticed a common phrase in casual conversation was "the liberals down in Austin" uttered in a disgusted tone . I imagined the city as a twinkling blue oasis in a surly red state, so I blanketed Austin with my resumes and waited. When I left, my co-workers were polite but clearly glad the bad man who called G. W. Bush an idiot was going away.
My goal was to find some friends and one thing that caught my eye online was a gay men's book club. I thoroughly enjoyed those weekly meetings except for one guy there. My God, it was the corniest of sit-com clichés; we argued about anything and everything, and everybody knew we were hot for each other except us. We fought about what good literature was, whether author’s intent was a valid part of critique, whose writing style influenced David Leavitt, paperback vs. hard cover, the nuances of semicolons. We never agreed on even the simplest text interpretation and he was completely unreasonable. E.g., for some unknowable reason he maintained that first person narrative was dead and called any writer who used it a hack, an opinion I obviously don’t share.
His name was Michael Jones and he would eventually be Obie’s first long term relationship. Almost long term. Meningitis killed Michael a few weeks before their 3rd anniversary.
I really did want a relationship with Michael, though he was the antithesis of my type. My friends were shocked. You may not know it but gay men can be way too into ‘types’. To some it's sacrosanct; if last year you only dated ginger twinks, time and space will crack if you dated a brunette bear this year. You’d think that if anybody knew the ridiculousness of stuffing people into pigeonholes, wouldn't it be us?
Michael was lanky and congenitally unable to produce facial hair; he was 12 years older (“Dating out of your decade is unseemly, Carly,” Miss Lyvinda admonished); he was apolitical; he still had 60s tie-dye tee shirts whose psychedelic colors had faded to pastels. But one July night we were at a pool party and knew no one except each other. There were 4 kinds of men there; stoned looking young men in Speedos, stuck-up flittery musclequeens, loudly happy bears, and whatever Michael and I were. We floated away from the crowd to the deep end of the pool, he on a blow up raft and I on an blue foam noodle. I remember saying something about being able to be civil as long as the topic of Quentin Crisp didn’t come up and the next thing I know, we were kissing.
I struggle to describe his kisses and only come close with a series of 'buts'. Angelic but demonic. Passionate but respectful. Urgent but reined in. Out of control but in a measured way. Exhausting but sating. Most important, he turned me on like a rave DJ cranks up the volume. We left and went to my place. I am not known for being hesitant to get naked, so as soon as the front door closed I shucked all my clothes while trying to kiss him at the same time. I wanted his lips on mine again, and there was clearly other parts of me that wanted attention too.
He stayed in his clothes but I was happy to pull them off for him. He let me strip him, kissing me all the while and moving his hands up and down my back, along my sides, down my legs, everywhere except where I wanted most to be touched. Yo, Mike. You noticed this thing straining at you like it was a divining rod and you were the ocean?
In my bedroom and I finished ripping off his pants and underwear. To all appearances, he was at least as happy about what we were doing as I was. More kissing, more hands pawing, kneading, touching every part of me except the most … er, salient.
Enough of that. I’m not writing porn here. My point was that when we did have sex, I pretty much had to prop him up and insert tab C into slot M or pull slot M onto tab C. I got no cooperation except for kissing and upper body caressing.
When it was over I wiped his DNA off his belly, swaddled my condom in Kleenex, and I asked what was up with that. He answered me clearly and unashamedly: He didn’t much like sex. He considered himself wholly gay and loved men, just not especially their penises (and definitely not the immediately accessible part of their intestinal tract).
“Wow, really? But yet you’re, um, very adept at it,” I said. True, I had done all the physical labor, but still my scalp was tingling from the orgasm.
“Well I can have sex. That’s not the issue. It’s just not something I especially enjoy. Sex is overemphasized, especially among men,” he said. “You can love one single person for the rest of your life without it.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Of course. Think about all the people in the world who for whatever reason can’t or won’t have sex.”
“Like monks?”
“Monks and things excluded. Not people who take vows of chastity, but regular people. Suppose it’s a birth defect or a psychological trauma and they can’t do the sex thing. Are they really relegated to a life of bachelorhood? Think about it. You can't be lovers without sex? I thought that's why they're called lovers and not 'sexers' or 'fuckers'. If you're somebody's LOVer what should define you is love."
"But if there's no sex, then aren't you just, I don't know, roommates?"
"So you mean true love, a real marriage can't exist unless there's sex? Can two people have that kind of intense forever committment without sex?"
"I guess so, if you don't have sexual needs."
"Sex is not a need," he grumbled. "It's a desire. No one individual ever died from lack of sex."
Sleepy, spooning there with him, his back to my front, I thought This is a special kind of man. Odd, but special. So when he told me that my taste in literature notwithstanding, he wanted to see me again, I just said, “Hmm.”
Then he turned over to look at me and said that if we started dating, any time I wanted sex, he would without hesitation and as often as I wanted, do it.
“You just saw,” he bragged, “I am pretty good at it, even if it isn’t my bag.” Undeniable. He did have an amazing embouchure.
“Even if you don’t like it? Why would you want to?”
“Because I like you,” he said. And that was a good answer.
We lasted about a year. I grew to love him but it became way too frustrating for me. Sex somehow isn’t right when you know your partner is not loving it, not getting all his bells rung and whistles blown. I hated the thought that he was doing something he didn't like just for me. First came a few pangs of resentment, then I started thinking about other men so I knew it was time to go.
You can ask a carnivore to fill up on the lushest fruit from exotic lands, but sooner or later he’ll start eyeing the gazelle in the next savannah. Feeling like a Neanderthal, I told Mike it wasn’t working. He teared up a little, went for a 30 minute walk, then said he understood. We still got together for lunch, coffee, workouts a couple of times a month though, even though at first it was almost too melancholy to deal with, but we inched into a friendship with a solid base. And of course we still debated books. Then one day he told me that he had met a man with nine syllables to his name: Obadiah Hernandez Marquez.
Joy for him and relief for myself: Michael deserved love on his terms, at least as much as any of us do, and this lessened my guilt about my inability to provide it. To introduce us, he took us to Ladybird Lake hiking trails where I pronounced Obie to be entirely worthy. I spent the first few minutes of our acquaintance marveling at his hair. I had never seen anything like it and was in awe. He said it was called a faux-hawk and it was the coolest do I'd ever seen on a man. Naturally the very next week, everybody and his Lesbian friend had one, but on that day they were too off the radar for the untrendy bear. And as if ogling his hair wasn't nerdy enough, I asked him if I could touch it. He let me.
It must have been either late September or early October, because it was hot, but waning, stirring under the sound of crickets. Michael and Obie stopped every few yards to take deep breaths of the extraordinarily sweet smell of four-o'clocks; I tried but my allgeries had my sinuses were closed for business. We followed the trail through a cypress canopy tunnel, recently strewn red caliche scraping under our soles. The cicadas chirring was eerie and beautiful, but between that and the crunch of the caliche, I strained to understand what they were saying. They were already fine tuned to a quiet newlyweds' conversation so they heard each other and I smiled and nodded. I was just elated to see Michael so content. When we cleared the trees and cicada choirs the sun was turning the same color as the trail, setting directly in front of us. In my memory there was no breeze, only all this blazing light. I had sunglasses and my Saints cap but Obie and Michael squinted into it, cupping their hands like visors.
"Will you look at that," Obie said. "It's like, another inch and the sun will alight onto the trail."
"Light unto the trail?" I misheard.
"Onto. Alight onto. Like a bird?"
"Beautiful." Michael said with satisfaction, like he'd aligned the trail and sun and tilt of the earth himself so we could enjoy the show.
"You can't see all the colors with your sunglasses on, Carl," Obie said.
I took them off, but put them right back on again; it was still too bright for my comfort. "Yes, I can," I lied. "It's astonishing."
Michael told him how we met. Obie laughed. "Seriously? The name of the book club was 'Unafraid of Virginia Woolf'? That's ... very gay." He made it sound like a compliment.
"It served its purpose," I said. "No heterosexual every wandered in without knowing who we were unafraid of."
"Who you were afraid of," Obie said neutrally. Then, the question I predicted and dreaded: “Why did y’all stop dating, if that isn’t too tender a thing to ask?”
Michael turned to me to speak, but my answer was smooth with perfect timing -- I'd rehearsed it all day. “Conflicting points of view on the art of gay fiction,” I said. “A west coast, east coast thing, totally irreconcilable. He was into Armistead Maupin and I’m an Ethan Mordden man.”
“Oh yeah. They sound familiar," Obie said.
And then I went on a rambling riff on contemporary gay literature. Michael laughed uncomfortably. Or maybe that's the slant time added to that memory. After that day he and Obie got into the whole nesting thing and I saw less and less of him until I never saw him at all.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I'll confess with limited compunction: I do have a flip streak. It's a benign, playful streak, or it's meant to be, but still. My flip non sequitors that day were supposed to deflect attention from the topic of Michael's asexuality because I assumed that sooner or later his young, faux-hawked new boyfriend would leave like I did.
But ever notice how easy it is to focus on protecting the feelings of somebody else instead of looking long and unsentimentally at your own? I guess I was sincere about wanting to protect Michael from something I hadn't even clearly defined for myself, but I was working hard to solve a problem that didn't exist. I couldn't have known it, but that was the last time I had the chance to be real and present with him. And I blew it. And here is the missing line of data that crashed my program that day: when you think you're protecting others from the truth, you're really in the end just trying to protect yourself.
Part 2: The Art of Gay Fiction
My first job out of college was in Waco and I learned something: Being Yankee, liberal, and gay in east Texas is like loudly singing Italian arias in a country western bar; most people have no idea what any of your words mean and they all, politely or not so much, want you to either shut up or leave.
I also learned about the political geography of Texas. After working there less than a year I noticed a common phrase in casual conversation was "the liberals down in Austin" uttered in a disgusted tone . I imagined the city as a twinkling blue oasis in a surly red state, so I blanketed Austin with my resumes and waited. When I left, my co-workers were polite but clearly glad the bad man who called G. W. Bush an idiot was going away.
My goal was to find some friends and one thing that caught my eye online was a gay men's book club. I thoroughly enjoyed those weekly meetings except for one guy there. My God, it was the corniest of sit-com clichés; we argued about anything and everything, and everybody knew we were hot for each other except us. We fought about what good literature was, whether author’s intent was a valid part of critique, whose writing style influenced David Leavitt, paperback vs. hard cover, the nuances of semicolons. We never agreed on even the simplest text interpretation and he was completely unreasonable. E.g., for some unknowable reason he maintained that first person narrative was dead and called any writer who used it a hack, an opinion I obviously don’t share.
His name was Michael Jones and he would eventually be Obie’s first long term relationship. Almost long term. Meningitis killed Michael a few weeks before their 3rd anniversary.
I really did want a relationship with Michael, though he was the antithesis of my type. My friends were shocked. You may not know it but gay men can be way too into ‘types’. To some it's sacrosanct; if last year you only dated ginger twinks, time and space will crack if you dated a brunette bear this year. You’d think that if anybody knew the ridiculousness of stuffing people into pigeonholes, wouldn't it be us?
Michael was lanky and congenitally unable to produce facial hair; he was 12 years older (“Dating out of your decade is unseemly, Carly,” Miss Lyvinda admonished); he was apolitical; he still had 60s tie-dye tee shirts whose psychedelic colors had faded to pastels. But one July night we were at a pool party and knew no one except each other. There were 4 kinds of men there; stoned looking young men in Speedos, stuck-up flittery musclequeens, loudly happy bears, and whatever Michael and I were. We floated away from the crowd to the deep end of the pool, he on a blow up raft and I on an blue foam noodle. I remember saying something about being able to be civil as long as the topic of Quentin Crisp didn’t come up and the next thing I know, we were kissing.
I struggle to describe his kisses and only come close with a series of 'buts'. Angelic but demonic. Passionate but respectful. Urgent but reined in. Out of control but in a measured way. Exhausting but sating. Most important, he turned me on like a rave DJ cranks up the volume. We left and went to my place. I am not known for being hesitant to get naked, so as soon as the front door closed I shucked all my clothes while trying to kiss him at the same time. I wanted his lips on mine again, and there was clearly other parts of me that wanted attention too.
He stayed in his clothes but I was happy to pull them off for him. He let me strip him, kissing me all the while and moving his hands up and down my back, along my sides, down my legs, everywhere except where I wanted most to be touched. Yo, Mike. You noticed this thing straining at you like it was a divining rod and you were the ocean?
In my bedroom and I finished ripping off his pants and underwear. To all appearances, he was at least as happy about what we were doing as I was. More kissing, more hands pawing, kneading, touching every part of me except the most … er, salient.
Enough of that. I’m not writing porn here. My point was that when we did have sex, I pretty much had to prop him up and insert tab C into slot M or pull slot M onto tab C. I got no cooperation except for kissing and upper body caressing.
When it was over I wiped his DNA off his belly, swaddled my condom in Kleenex, and I asked what was up with that. He answered me clearly and unashamedly: He didn’t much like sex. He considered himself wholly gay and loved men, just not especially their penises (and definitely not the immediately accessible part of their intestinal tract).
“Wow, really? But yet you’re, um, very adept at it,” I said. True, I had done all the physical labor, but still my scalp was tingling from the orgasm.
“Well I can have sex. That’s not the issue. It’s just not something I especially enjoy. Sex is overemphasized, especially among men,” he said. “You can love one single person for the rest of your life without it.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Of course. Think about all the people in the world who for whatever reason can’t or won’t have sex.”
“Like monks?”
“Monks and things excluded. Not people who take vows of chastity, but regular people. Suppose it’s a birth defect or a psychological trauma and they can’t do the sex thing. Are they really relegated to a life of bachelorhood? Think about it. You can't be lovers without sex? I thought that's why they're called lovers and not 'sexers' or 'fuckers'. If you're somebody's LOVer what should define you is love."
"But if there's no sex, then aren't you just, I don't know, roommates?"
"So you mean true love, a real marriage can't exist unless there's sex? Can two people have that kind of intense forever committment without sex?"
"I guess so, if you don't have sexual needs."
"Sex is not a need," he grumbled. "It's a desire. No one individual ever died from lack of sex."
Sleepy, spooning there with him, his back to my front, I thought This is a special kind of man. Odd, but special. So when he told me that my taste in literature notwithstanding, he wanted to see me again, I just said, “Hmm.”
Then he turned over to look at me and said that if we started dating, any time I wanted sex, he would without hesitation and as often as I wanted, do it.
“You just saw,” he bragged, “I am pretty good at it, even if it isn’t my bag.” Undeniable. He did have an amazing embouchure.
“Even if you don’t like it? Why would you want to?”
“Because I like you,” he said. And that was a good answer.
We lasted about a year. I grew to love him but it became way too frustrating for me. Sex somehow isn’t right when you know your partner is not loving it, not getting all his bells rung and whistles blown. I hated the thought that he was doing something he didn't like just for me. First came a few pangs of resentment, then I started thinking about other men so I knew it was time to go.
You can ask a carnivore to fill up on the lushest fruit from exotic lands, but sooner or later he’ll start eyeing the gazelle in the next savannah. Feeling like a Neanderthal, I told Mike it wasn’t working. He teared up a little, went for a 30 minute walk, then said he understood. We still got together for lunch, coffee, workouts a couple of times a month though, even though at first it was almost too melancholy to deal with, but we inched into a friendship with a solid base. And of course we still debated books. Then one day he told me that he had met a man with nine syllables to his name: Obadiah Hernandez Marquez.
Joy for him and relief for myself: Michael deserved love on his terms, at least as much as any of us do, and this lessened my guilt about my inability to provide it. To introduce us, he took us to Ladybird Lake hiking trails where I pronounced Obie to be entirely worthy. I spent the first few minutes of our acquaintance marveling at his hair. I had never seen anything like it and was in awe. He said it was called a faux-hawk and it was the coolest do I'd ever seen on a man. Naturally the very next week, everybody and his Lesbian friend had one, but on that day they were too off the radar for the untrendy bear. And as if ogling his hair wasn't nerdy enough, I asked him if I could touch it. He let me.
It must have been either late September or early October, because it was hot, but waning, stirring under the sound of crickets. Michael and Obie stopped every few yards to take deep breaths of the extraordinarily sweet smell of four-o'clocks; I tried but my allgeries had my sinuses were closed for business. We followed the trail through a cypress canopy tunnel, recently strewn red caliche scraping under our soles. The cicadas chirring was eerie and beautiful, but between that and the crunch of the caliche, I strained to understand what they were saying. They were already fine tuned to a quiet newlyweds' conversation so they heard each other and I smiled and nodded. I was just elated to see Michael so content. When we cleared the trees and cicada choirs the sun was turning the same color as the trail, setting directly in front of us. In my memory there was no breeze, only all this blazing light. I had sunglasses and my Saints cap but Obie and Michael squinted into it, cupping their hands like visors.
"Will you look at that," Obie said. "It's like, another inch and the sun will alight onto the trail."
"Light unto the trail?" I misheard.
"Onto. Alight onto. Like a bird?"
"Beautiful." Michael said with satisfaction, like he'd aligned the trail and sun and tilt of the earth himself so we could enjoy the show.
"You can't see all the colors with your sunglasses on, Carl," Obie said.
I took them off, but put them right back on again; it was still too bright for my comfort. "Yes, I can," I lied. "It's astonishing."
Michael told him how we met. Obie laughed. "Seriously? The name of the book club was 'Unafraid of Virginia Woolf'? That's ... very gay." He made it sound like a compliment.
"It served its purpose," I said. "No heterosexual every wandered in without knowing who we were unafraid of."
"Who you were afraid of," Obie said neutrally. Then, the question I predicted and dreaded: “Why did y’all stop dating, if that isn’t too tender a thing to ask?”
Michael turned to me to speak, but my answer was smooth with perfect timing -- I'd rehearsed it all day. “Conflicting points of view on the art of gay fiction,” I said. “A west coast, east coast thing, totally irreconcilable. He was into Armistead Maupin and I’m an Ethan Mordden man.”
“Oh yeah. They sound familiar," Obie said.
And then I went on a rambling riff on contemporary gay literature. Michael laughed uncomfortably. Or maybe that's the slant time added to that memory. After that day he and Obie got into the whole nesting thing and I saw less and less of him until I never saw him at all.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I'll confess with limited compunction: I do have a flip streak. It's a benign, playful streak, or it's meant to be, but still. My flip non sequitors that day were supposed to deflect attention from the topic of Michael's asexuality because I assumed that sooner or later his young, faux-hawked new boyfriend would leave like I did.
But ever notice how easy it is to focus on protecting the feelings of somebody else instead of looking long and unsentimentally at your own? I guess I was sincere about wanting to protect Michael from something I hadn't even clearly defined for myself, but I was working hard to solve a problem that didn't exist. I couldn't have known it, but that was the last time I had the chance to be real and present with him. And I blew it. And here is the missing line of data that crashed my program that day: when you think you're protecting others from the truth, you're really in the end just trying to protect yourself.
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