193. jigger

Now that Christmas 2013 is here and finally gone, I feel that I can finally rant to you, dear reader, about what particularly bothers me so much about the entire bloody month of December. And it’s not just because of my tempestuous history with Christianity.

Well, okay, it does have some to do with my history with Christianity.

This year, I dunno, I felt crankier than in previous years, particularly with the seeming predominance of Christmas music in places like shopping malls and on the radio. And perhaps it was because Thanksgiving came so late this year, it seemed like the Christmas music started earlier. But it also seemed so… aggressively Christian in tone. Perhaps I’m just noticing more.

I was grocery shopping a few weeks ago and heard Go Tell It On the Mountain over the PA system, and the line “that Jesus Christ is Lord.” I was at World Market two weeks ago and heard Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas with the line “if the Lord allows.” If there’d been a line in a song about how “Allah is One” or “All hail the Mother Goddess,” a bevy of angry Christians would be storming the manager’s office.

Now, I’m not trying to single out Christians here. And I’m really not trying to be one of those atheists (or, according to Sarah Palin, Joe McScrooge) who is trying to destroy people’s favorite holiday. For all intents and purposes, I enjoy this holiday season. I like the lights, the greenery, the sense of community and gathering. What I object to the blatant promotion of Christianity during the entire month of December, as if the Church didn’t already get Easter and the forty days before of Lent.

I probably wouldn’t get so cranky if we just included other religions in the cultural melange that is Christmas: if we included Pagan carols and rituals for Yule; Buddhist traditions for Bodhi day; the sharing of Jewish food and music for Chanukah; Yalda, from Persian culture, celebrating the passing of the winter solstice; and Pancha Ganapati, a 5-day festival in honor of Lord Ganesha.

Point is, why couldn’t we make Christmas a human festival, wherein we celebrate the different ways we have developed over the centuries to get through the long winter months by gathering together around fires to tell each other stories and sing songs?

… well, for the same reason that many Christians drum on about freedom of religion, but fly into a rage the moment someone else attempts to freely practice (or not practice) theirs. I don’t believe in the Goddess, or the Buddha, or any other deity we’ve invented over the millennia, but I can’t deny that belief in those things has given people hope and comfort in dark times.

On Tuesday evening, I listened to the rebroadcasting of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College in Cambridge, London. After the opening carol, Once in Royal David’s City, the dean of the college read this:

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmas Eve our care and delight to prepare ourselves to hear again the message of the angels; in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.

Let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child; and let us make this Chapel, dedicated to Mary, his most blessèd Mother, glad with our carols of praise…

… because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us at this time remember in his name the poor and the helpless, the cold, the hungry and the oppressed; the sick in body and in mind and them that mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; all who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

When I first heard this service a number of years ago, this sort of statement wouldn’t have phased me at all. But now it smacks of the most supreme in of arrogance: the assumption that because you belong to a dominant world religion that everyone agrees with your narrative and interpretation of events.

There are people who believe in, as Bill Maher quotes more liberal defenders of Christianity, the “central story” of Christmas—that is, that an all-powerful God impregnated a very young girl without the aid of intercourse in order to set right events that he himself put in motion after he had a temper tantrum after two humans he created and imbued with curiosity and intelligence went and behaved exactly how he’d expected them to. That “central story”?

So how is this a positive story, exactly? Because you can’t accept the Christmas story without accepting everything that goes along with it. Jesus shed his godhood to become human because of what went down in the (mythical) Garden of Eden? And just so he could grow up to be tortured and killed in order to atone for a crime that was an arbitrary offense in the first place. Forget the shepherds and the wise men—that’s the real meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown.

It’s a story that was the beginning of religious wars, inquisitions, genocide, mass murder, torture, witch burnings, child sexual abuse (covered up and allowed to continue as the Church and its leaders, including the rapist priest, are infallible and above reproach because religion), the abuse and subjugation of women and minorities, including the LGBT community, and a host of other crimes against humanity.

This is what comes to mind when I hear a line in a song like, “let’s give thanks to the Lord above.” I hear a huge part of human experience being whitewashed to preserve monotheism.

And damn—passing a horn of mead around a circle of friends sounds like a helluva lot of fun.

192. solstice

My breakfast this morning was two tumblers of whisky (neat), about three fingers each. This after getting up to feed and water the dogs I’m looking after for the month. No sense in them going hungry. I got an email last night from the University of Michigan at 11:10PM, which seems an odd hour to be sending emails. A bit like waiting until you know someone’s gone to leave a voicemail. The email read:

I regret to inform you that your application for admission to the Music Composition MA program at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance has not been approved. We are therefore unable to offer you the opportunity to audition. This decision is based on a careful review by the faculty committee of your pre-screening recording and your application materials. The staff of the Admissions Office and the Composition faculty are not able to provide individual feedback from student auditions because of the volume of candidates to consider. We ask your understanding and thank you in advance. As you continue your college search, I know that you will find another school at which to pursue your studies. We wish you continued success and every good wish for a career that will fully utilize your interests and abilities.

Basically, a “thanks for trying, now fuck off” email. This might not have been such a blow had my temp job not ended yesterday, a week and a half early than what I was planning on. It also might not be such a disappointment were I not single again for the holidays. Last year was the first time in a while that I’ve been employed during the Yule season, and the first time ever that I’ve been dating someone for a major holiday. Now I’m back to where I was in 2011, when I told my parents that I wanted nothing more to do with them for their bigotry, I was still reeling from heartbreak and my loss of faith, and I’d just been laid off from another temp job right after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. As in, thanks a lot. There are still two applications out there that might yield something, but I’m terrified now that the results will be the same there—that my work just isn’t good enough on its own to merit a place as a cohort in graduate school. A friend of mine tells me that it may have nothing to do with the quality of my application or compositions; that it’s more about finding a group of students that coalesce together. If that’s the case, I may never get into grad school as I’m really an oddball when it comes to music. And everything else. What I’m terrified over is the prospect of yet another year of living in purgatory. I’m tired of working these temp jobs that pay far below the skill level required for the work the client needs performed. I’m sick of being expendable. I’m sick of working with the 9-to-5ers, the workaday folk who go home after a long day at the office of doing something they ultimately don’t care about and aren’t invested in; who are planning to working long enough to cash in on their 401K pension and retire somewhere comfortable. This is not the world I belong in. Remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ofKJ6UFv60 Instead of a Shakespearean subtext, my inner voices have quite another Jungian game going on:

• Id: Running back and forth, simultaneously trying to make ends meet and bash my head against a wall to get anything artistic done.
• Ego: Uncertain about whether I’ve made the right career decision or whether my music is even good enough to pursue a career in, even though it’s pretty much the only thing I’m really good at and give a fuck about.
• Superego: Those strident subconscious voices that are difficult to shake, like Christianity:
  • Every single rejection letter or person who has rejected my music, told me that it’s too difficult, or that it’s just not very good.
  • My lack of business sense and self-promotion; of knowing how to strategize, network, who to talk to, how to talk to people, etc.
  • Frustration over my dating life and singleness; over how I haven’t found a guy yet who ultimately doesn’t disappoint me (cf, Fiona Apple); how my current scheme is to find a like-minded guy at grad school; feeling anxiety over nearly being 31 and that I’m at the age where younger guys who are into “older guys” are interested in me but not interested in a relationship.

That bloodcurdling scream the girl playing Ophelia lets out at the end of that scene? That’s the sound in my head almost all the time these days. “Get thee to a nunnery” indeed. I’ve also grown weary of the Midwest and its seemingly provincial attitude toward sophisticated art and music. I once shared the recording of my senior composition recital with a supervisor of mine, and he called it “long-haired music,” a reference (I suppose) to graduate students of the 60s and 70s being somewhat shaggy in appearance. I’ve sent pieces of mine to ensembles all over the Twin Cities, hoping to get performances, or the very least readings. No bites. If I get feedback at all, it’s usually something to the effect of: It’s really not what we’re looking for. … thanks, now go fuck yourself. It’s difficult not to think that I’m the common denominator here. What’s more probable? That hundreds of people have had the same independent reaction to my music, or that my work just… sucks? The latter is what I’m afraid of. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks as I wait to see what happens with the Eastman School of Music and with the University of Southern California. I have a little hope, but not a lot. In the meantime, Christmas is in four days and I feel like drinking myself silly to forget that I’m single and miserable, and that my entire family is fundamentalist Christians.

191. hardihood

Last night I posted to Facebook about how yesterday evening I was mopping the floor of my apartment to music written about a thousand years ago, and imagining that someday, a guy is going to find this ridiculously nerdy trait (i.e., my interest in early music) incredibly endearing. A friend commented: That isn’t pretentious at all. 😛

My immediate reaction was to apologize all over myself, realizing how snobbish and pretentious such a statement might come across as. Instead, I replied: Perhaps… but it’s unique!

After doing a little more mopping, I came back and added: Actually, no—it isn’t pretentious at all. It would be pretentious if I’d posted this to appear more cultured or sophisticated. But the truth is, I am listening to medieval music at this very moment while mopping my apartment floor.

Merriam-Webster defines pretentious: “Having or showing the unpleasant quality of people who want to be regarded as more impressive, successful, or important than they really are.”

Here I’m reminded of a passage from C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Proposes a Toast, in which the Senior Tempter and Undersecretary of his department in Hell is remarking on the importance of reframing democracy “as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power” in order to produce in people the feeling that “prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.”

Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”

The fact of the matter is that I’m a nerd—and a very specific type of nerd at that. Shortly after my family moved from Kansas to Minnesota, my father took me to a concert where the first of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos was on the program. By the end of the piece, I was madly in love with early music.

Some of the happiest moments of my teen years were when I was playing or studying Baroque music. I nearly majored in historical performance (which would’ve required going somewhere other than Northwestern).

I’m not even sure I can explain what it is about early music that so captivates me. As I’ve been musing on what it is that I love especially about medieval music, I figure it’s probably the same thing that attracts me to history—that though most of us live in a more sophisticated world than the vast majority of our ancestors; travel about in cars, airplanes, and even into space; and have access to technology and medicine that would have made us gods to earlier generations, we’re not that different from the people who lived ten thousand years ago.

Take the song I posted above. It was written sometime in the late 12th century by a woman known as the Comtessa de Dia (Die, a county in the High Middle Ages located in the southeastern part of France), or as just Beatritz. She was a trobairitz, a female troubadour. If you remember your music history, the troubadours were composers and performers of lyric poetry, usually about chivalry and courtly love. Compare this lyric from Ab joi et ab joven m’apais to any pop song written in the last hundred years:

I feed on joy and youthfulness
and joy and youthfulness content me;
since my friend is the most cheerful
I am cheered and charmed by him,
and because I’m true to him,
it’s well that he be true
to me; I never stray from loving him
nor do I have the heart to stray.

Sure, the sentiment is a little different, just as the clothes were different and people believed that demons were the cause of sickness and disasters, or that women were conceived because of weak male sperm or the direction of the wind at the time of intercourse. (No kidding on the last one. See Thomas Aquinas’ “On how a woman is to be born a woman” from the Summa Theologica. Crazy.) But it’s clear from the lyric that Beatritz is excited about being in love. It’s like a postcard from the 1100s.

In a way, I find in early music a link to humanity by composing my own music, the same as people have been composing music since the first humans joined their voices in song. I find a link to my humanity in housekeeping through images of excavated floors of Neolithic houses that show signs of having been regularly swept, or indentations in floors where someone knelt regularly enough while tending a fire to leave permanent marks.

I’m not interested in any of this because it’s “intellectual.” I’m interested because it fascinates me and captivates my imagination and my thoughts.

So it’s frustrating when I get labeled as “pretentious” for liking these things, for being a Classically trained musician, for not liking most of what’s on television or the radio or in theaters. Because I do have a love for music, for history, for good stories, for science (even though I don’t understand most of it), and for good literature.

And I’m hoping these qualities (e.g., mopping floors to mediaeval music) will be intriguing and endearing someday to the man I marry—whoever he is. That’s one of many reasons for leaving Minnesota for graduate school—wherever that is. Because having interests in obscure subjects is not a Midwestern virtue. It is something, however, encouraged in academia, where it’s becoming clearer that I belong.

As Alanis Morissette sings, “… what I wouldn’t give to meet a soul-mate—someone else to catch this drift.”

190. enormity

Ohmygoodness, has it really been fifty-one days since I last updated this blog? That’s terribly delinquent.

My world as of late has been consumed with stress, worry, anxiety, and the like. A few weeks ago my therapist asked me what’s been keeping me going. I replied that the thought of graduate school, studying music again, and having a real career in music (as supposed to the state of meager subsistence I’ve been in since graduating from college in 2004) has prevented me from being totally consumed by depression.

At the end of last month I submitted my first grad school application, this one to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. At the end of this month, I’ll be submitting two more applications, these to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Southern California. Of these three, my top picks are Eastman and the University of Michigan. USC would be a great opportunity as well, but I’m more an East Coast kinda guy than West.

The process of writing statements of purpose got me thinking a lot about my past, and since I don’t have much else to write about, I thought I’d discuss some of the music that has been most influential to me. I don’t talk about music that much here, probably because LGBT issues and atheism have been such dominating forces the last few years.

One of the first pieces of music I can remember is Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. My parents had a recording with Mia Farrow narrating that we’d listen to in the car or around the house. My early tendencies toward neoclassicism probably started here.

My early ventures into composition were largely shaped by exposure to Classical music. The first piece I ever wrote was a minuet that I composed shortly after learning to read music. One of the pieces in my lesson book was an arrangement of the menuet from Act 1, Scene 2 of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. I’d seen a production on television and skipped ahead in the book to learn it and probably drove my family crazy by playing it over and over.

After my family moved to Minnesota in 1993, we found both a church and a library to call home. In my piano lessons, I was studying a lot of Baroque music, and I probably checked out the library’s entire collection by the time I finished high school. By then, I’d listened to everything Bach ever wrote, plus a good deal of Handel, Corelli, Purcell, Domenico Scarlatti, and Purcell.

My love of Bach and the Baroque though was firmly established around age 10 when I went with my dad to an orchestra concert where they played the first of the Brandenburg concertos.

When we left the concert, I asked my dad for a recording of the complete Brandenburgs, which I still own. I was obsessed from that point on. Throughout high school I studied everything of Bach’s I could find, which were my first lessons in orchestration and counterpoint.

I also adored Mozart. My first opera was Le nozze di Figaro, and it remains my favorite to this day. A seminal moment in my composition career is at the end of Le nozze, when the Countess sings: “Più dolcile io sono, e dico di sì.” It’s ridiculously simple: a G major chord in first inversion, to C major, to d minor, to e minor. It took my breath away the first time, and still does.

Everything changed when I heard Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps. Considering the majority of my listening up until that point, it almost felt like checking out pornography. I knew that it was supposed to be dissonant and that it had caused a riot in Paris in 1913, and that I should be familiar with it as a musician, but I didn’t know what to expect.

Rite of Spring literally turned my entire world upside down. It was violent, dissonant, chaotic, and unfamiliar—and I loved it. I listened to it straight through two of three times that first day. Then I discovered Prokofiev’s adult music through his seventh piano sonata; Béla Bartók; Alban Berg; Paul Hindemith; Steve Reich; Francis Poulenc; Maurice Ravel; Samuel Barber; Benjamin Britten; John Adams; and probably most importantly, György Ligeti, whose music I heard in the film 2001: a space odyssey. And I almost abandoned writing tonal music completely.

About midway through college, after hearing repeatedly from colleagues and teachers that they preferred to hear my “nicer,” tonal work, I reversed course and delved into what my friends affectionately refer to as my “Tallis and Tavener” phase.

I got back into Henry Purcell after hearing a piece from King Arthur used at the end of Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s The Miser. I also heard an incredible “completion” of his anthem, Hear my prayer, O lord, by Swedish composer Sven-David Sandström in 2002. I actually include a chord from the penultimate bar of the anthem—a G major chord with an added fourth—in all of my own music.

I’m also still obsessed with the funeral sentences from Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.

My voice teacher in college specialized in Baroque music, and I discovered Monterverdi’s L’Orfeo. My piece for double brass choir, Elisabethan Musicke, is an homage to the opening.

I also got very interested in Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill, and in writing music for theater… especially music incorporated into productions. I don’t remember at what point, but I realized that why I liked Mozart so much was that all of his music seemed to have dramatic links, and the music I enjoyed writing the most also had extra-musical links and was spatially oriented.

Moral of story? At age 30, I’m finally figuring out who I am, personally and artistically. I’ve tried on different styles and have found what works for now. I also know there’s more to work on, and that’s what I intend to pursue in graduate school.

189. bordereau

There was a time, not too long ago, when I could never picture myself moving away from Minnesota, from my family, and from my friends who in some ways became more like family than the one I inherited.

Before coming to Minnesota, my family lived in a small college town in central Kansas from about 1986 until 1993, when we moved to Minnesota (20 years ago this past August) after my dad accepted a teaching post at a Christian liberal arts college in Saint Paul.

It’s amazing how quickly a place can become your home. I was never too crazy about living in Kansas as a kid, although in retrospect, summers of running through wheat fields, exploring creeks, and discovering “secret” places that seem forbidden and mysterious to a child’s eyes were pretty idyllic. It was in Kansas, with few other distractions or entertainments, that I first learned to employ my imagination and creativity.

Once in Minnesota, though, all of that was swept from my mind. I’d found my home in the big city. I loved both how big and how small it was. It was an hour and fifteen minute drive to the nearest big city from where we lived in Kansas, so visits there were rare. In Minneapolis, most everything was within a twenty minute distance. (It is curious how Minnesotans measure distance in minutes or hours. We all do it.)

More than that, we found a church in Roseville that was a great fit for our family. My dad quickly got involved with both the music and teaching ministries, my mom was drawn to the children’s ministry (she’d taught third grade at our church in Kansas), and my sisters and I finally found friends in our Sunday school classes. We didn’t have many friends prior to Minnesota, and we enjoyed the community and the camaraderie.

I too got involved with the music ministry at church, first singing in the children’s choir, playing piano in the youth orchestra and later with the adult orchestra, joining the adult choir at age fifteen or so, and later playing percussion with the orchestra. I was also heavily involved in the youth group, so the church was essentially my home for most of my teenage years.

When I started college, my involvement at church lessened as my community focus shifted to a new group of friends and responsibilities. My connection there lessened even more once the senior pastor left and a new cadre took over to “grow” the church, so my reliance on the friends I’d made at college for community deepened. And for a while we formed a very tight-knit group that felt more like family than anything I’d ever known.

As often happens with twentysomethings, people started getting married, having children, and moving away. Our close little family broke up, and it felt as if I’d been set adrift. During this time I’d also left the church I’d grown up in, moved to a different church, but was beginning to really question my beliefs—and my sexuality. That was in 2008, the year that I also came out gay.

It was around this time that I found myself amongst a group of friends from my old church who I’d got to know in a new context. We were “spiritual refugees,” of sorts, dissatisfied with the Evangelical fundamentalism we’d been raised with. I was still trying to get a handle on my new identity as a gay man, and they were planning to start a church geared towards gay Christians and others who’d been rejected by mainstream Christianity.

And, of course, there was Seth. That’s a story I shan’t rehash again. If you want, you can go read about it here, if you don’t already know the story.

Basically, after the events of my birthday on 2011, I felt abandoned by most everyone in my life. Many of my Christian friends stopped talking to me after I came out gay and made it clear that I saw nothing wrong with that. Virtually all of them stopped talking to me after I came out atheist and proceeded to declare war on religion. To be fair, I didn’t make it easy for anyone who had a belief in anything to stay friends with me.

After I was outed to my entire family on 16 November 2009, my relationship with them changed dramatically. I’d never been close to them to begin with, but knowing that they thought of me as broken and mentally ill (which is the general consensus of the Christian community concerning homosexuality—it’s either demonic, rebellion, or a “gender disorder”) put even more of a wedge between us.

I was driving up towards Minneapolis one afternoon when a thought popped into my head: This isn’t my home anymore. It was the same thought I’d had one Sunday while listening to the new senior pastor give a glib sermon with flashy PowerPoint slides: I don’t belong here. For years, I couldn’t imagine leaving my family and the people and places that had meant so much to me. After the Seth fiasco and being thrown out of orbit in my own world, I realized that there wasn’t much of anything holding me there anymore.

The reason this has been in my thoughts is that I’m contemplating starting my Master’s in music composition. To do so, I’ll have to move somewhere—hopefully the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The last time I contemplated this was in 2006, and the thought of moving away was terrifying. Now it excites me.

I’m tired of working dead-end office temp jobs, answering phones, doing filing and data entry, and watching everyone around me have a life, or at least what looks like a life. My passion, what truly drives and ignites me, is music. The only times I felt truly alive was college, and when I was working on music for shows.

One of my professors once said to me: “You need to go away.” For school, she meant. And I think I’m finally ready to do that.

188. formidable

Author’s note: personal disclosures ahead that might make you feel slightly uncomfortable. You’ve been warned.

Boys are an odd bunch, especially once adolescence arrives and puberty starts wreaking havoc on their bodies. Comedian Eddie Izzard remarks in one of his shows, “… you think, God, I want to get off with some of these people, I’d better look my best. And then Mother Nature says, No, you will look the worst you’ve ever looked in your life!”

This is especially true for boys, many of whom are rather gangly to begin with. But then the violent chaotic upheaval starts to resolve itself. There’s a lot of idealization of the male body that goes on amongst young men (of any sexual orientation) as they attempt to wrap their minds around what’s going on physically, particularly around muscular development. This has been true throughout human history for the guys with more muscular physiques. Women (and gay men) want them; other men want to be them.

There’s also a bizarre kind of fetishization that’s been present with men concerning facial and body hair since, well, forever. Allan Peterkin’s book One Thousand Beards: a cultural history of facial hair explores the historical record of attitudes and trends in facial hair throughout history, all the way back to depictions in cave paintings of men shaving.

My own relationship to facial and body hair growing up was rocky. I didn’t like my body very much as a teenager, which I suppose isn’t uncommon, though it seems most guys come to own their physiques at some point. They seem to exhibit a lack of shame when it comes to showing off what nature has bequeathed them, shucking shirts and pants without a second thought, either not caring who looks or basking in the attention they receive.

I was not crazy about getting hairier once puberty hit. For years I was painfully, neurotically self-conscious about this, always wearing jeans and long pants, and certainly never appearing without a shirt. Some of it had to do with not wanting to look like my dad, who is fairly hirsute himself. (Thanks, dad.) Some of it likely had to do with the anxiety from not reconciling to the fact that I was madly attracted to the developing (and increasingly sexy) teenage bodies of my male peers. For some reason I found (and still find) guys’ leg hair incredibly sexy.

Throughout high school and college I kept both my face and chest clean-shaven, which meant that I spent a lot of time doing what I later learned was called manscaping. That probably had to do with the kind of porn I was watching at the time and finding smooth guys most attractive.

It wasn’t until later in college that I began to accept my body hair, and that it might actually be an attractive feature. (Of course, I still wasn’t thinking in terms of other guys finding it sexy yet.) My first semester in college I learned about “no-shave November,” which provided an avenue of competition for the guys and a reason to complain for their girlfriends.

Several trumpet player friends of mine in college were obsessed with beards, facial hair, and in general all things manly. As far as I know, all of them were straight, but this helped move me more in favor of my own body hair. I even had a beard for most of college. There were frequent exclamations of: “Check out that guy’s beard!” or “Look at that his chops [sideburns]!”

Once I started having sex and discovered that guys found my being an otter both sexy and desirable, the more I liked how I looked that way. My first boyfriend enjoyed it when I didn’t shave my chest and encouraged me to let it grow. He was the one who introduced the term “otter” (gay slang for a skinnier, hairier guy) to me. My last boyfriend also liked that look on me, but frankly, longer that hair gets the itchier it becomes so I usually keep it neatly trimmed.

Again, boys are weird.

Yesterday afternoon I attended a Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra concert in Minneapolis. They were playing Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 4, Mozart’s Serenade No. 7, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. All in all, it wasn’t a remarkable performance, which one reviewer described as “lacking in passion” and urgency. I’d agree with that assessment.

It’s sad to say that probably the most satisfying part of the concert for me was watching one particularly handsome violist who I noticed almost immediately, partly because he was sitting next to the harpsichord during the Bach piece. (I’ll always be a keyboard nerd, no matter where the rest of my musical life goes.) I’m not sure what his name is since he was an auxiliary player, and the program didn’t specify which auxiliary violists were playing that afternoon. But he was very pretty to look at.

I’m not exactly sure what qualities made him so attractive. (My friend who was attending the concert with me also pointed him out.) It was hard to tell, but he looked to be on the shorter side, of slim build, slightly swarthy, and square-jawed. It certainly looked like he had some stubble on his face, which on the right guy is very irresistibly, devil-may-care sexy.

It’s hard to say what is attractive in another person. Some people have a “type” that they go for, or a list of qualities that they either want or can’t stand. While there are characteristics that tend to make a guy stand out more (it’s an evolutionary strategy for sorting out potential mates), for me it has more to do with their overall physical and mental attractiveness. A guy could be smoking hot but isn’t intellectually curious or interested in the arts. Conversely, he could have a great personality but I’m just not physically attracted to him…

I guess all I’m saying is that this whole business of finding a boyfriend/partner is a mess.

 

187. extol

Quick-ish thought for this afternoon.

I was reading an article in the New York Times this afternoon about the 25th annual NewFest (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender film festival) in New York City this weekend. The article’s author, Stephen Holden, had this to say about it:

The face of gay liberation in 2013 is a sanitized image of polite, smiling gay and lesbian couples parading hand in hand and exchanging chaste kisses at city halls in states where gay marriage has been legalized.

But if there’s a theme to the 25th annual NewFest … it is that gay liberation is fundamentally about sex.

At first, I inwardly cringed at these sentences, and then immediately did a mental self-check for any signs of lingering, internalized homophobia. There may be some of that left over from my Protestant days, but the main thought was one of dread. I thought:

Oh shit, now some conservative Christian bigot will get up and point to this as “conclusive” proof that gay and lesbian relationships are just about promiscuity and sex…

Then I stopped myself. Turn on the television or go to any movie these days, and you’ll see some hot, hunky guy getting it on with some voluptuous, burgeoning girl. There’s no talk of fidelity, or marriage, or children. They want to fuck. Like the animals they are.

The prudish Christians who object to sensuality in film and media today do so under the notion that humans are these exalted, divine beings who should rise above their physical needs and desires to something purer. (Never mind that this is a tenet of Gnosticism.)

Biology, however, tells a different story.

Taxonomically, we are animals. Primates, technically. But we share the same primal desire to mate and reproduce as any other life form on this planet. In fact, the only thing that seems to set us aside from our closest relatives on Earth is (1) our ability to use tools with a frightening efficacy, and (2) the awareness of our physical instincts and desires, and the ability to choose to not be dominated by them. This doesn’t make us better than other beings. Just different.

When humans experience romantic attraction, we desire to express that attractive (i.e., love) via physical means. Our genes have programmed us to respond with our genitals at the moment of sexual arousal. This is completely natural. It’s only because of the teachings of the church that we’ve come to think of this as dirty or sinful. Our ancient ancestors would have considered such a view bizarre, and unhealthy.

So why shouldn’t we have a film festival that celebrates sexual attraction between two men, or two women? Well, because it’s icky, many people (who shall remain Brian Brown) might say.

It’s true that we’ve sanitized the gay liberation movement in order to appeal to our heterosexual neighbors who would otherwise support marriage equality and LGBT rights, but find the actual reality of two men or two women expressing physical love (let alone — gasp — being sexual) towards each other (in the same way that heterosexuals express physical love) off-putting.

In doing that, however, we’ve conveniently allowed them to put away the reality that we are sexual beings, just like heterosexual couples. Yes, when we’re horny, we want to fuck. We also want to just hold each other and bask in the oxytocin-induced glow of mammalian physical intimacy. Because that’s how we’re wired.

So does that mean that we should ignore the fact that in the early days of gay liberation there was a lot of indulging in kink and promiscuity? Only if we ignore the fact of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s; of key parties, wife-swapping, and “free love.” Like a dam bursting, we threw off the moral bonds that had kept us in a perpetual state of sexual tension for centuries. However, the pendulum seems to be swinging back towards the center, as it usually does.

As Holden writes in his Times article, the early days of the gay movement “were gripped by a kind of erotic delirium in which men pursued a hypermasculine ideal and promiscuity was rampant.” We were creating new boundaries, new norms, and new paradigms to make sense of the sexual chaos that had been unleashed. Now, as we’re seeing increasing acceptance of LGBT people in mainstream American society, and coming closer to full equality, that iconoclastic boundary-pushing is being replaced by a more mature desire for emotional belonging and intimacy.

One of the final boundaries we have to overcome in achieving full acceptance for LGBT people is the depiction of physical intimacy in media — where nobody bats an eye when two men kiss (or bloody just hold hands) in a movie (and it isn’t a joke), or where there can be a sex scene on TV between two women and they aren’t trying to get male attention.

It created a stir in the 1950s when Lucy and Ricky were shown sharing a bed on I Love Lucy. We’ve been pushing those limits ever since; to moving from some whitewashed notion of a “moral ideal” to depicting reality as it is lived by actual, living-and-breathing human beings. Because it’s ridiculous that we same-sex couples have to keep pretending that we aren’t sleeping together or having sex; that our expression of physical love for each other never moves beyond meaningful eye contact, holding hands, or a quick peck on the lips.

That’s not real life.

Reality is that we do have hot, sweaty, messy sex. We also make dinner together. Go on trips. Have fights. Tolerate in-laws. Argue about money. And if any of that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what all human couples do. And as soon as everyone else gets on board with accepting that, we’ll be that much closer to having a more sane country.

And a saner world.

186. serotinal

How did it get to be September already? It seems just yesterday that it was snowing and twenty-below-zero. Now August is spent and gone and we’re running pell-mell into autumn. Soon the leaves will be changing color and falling off trees, and we’ll be digging our way out of snowdrifts and cursing the fact that Minnesotans forget how to park in the winter.

Incidentally, I learned the word “pell-mell” around age seven or eight from the Hardy Boys book The House on the Cliff: “The other boys followed, running pell-mell through the hallway and clattering down the stairway” (p. 15). These were some of my favorite books growing up, and they opened a door in my mind to literature and to writing.

One of the things that most sticks in my mind about those books was the fact that the boys seemed to always be getting naked—or at least mostly naked:

• “Tony began to peel off his clothes.” (p. 91, House on the Cliff)
• “Frank and Joe took off their slacks, T shirts, sweaters, and sneakers.” (p. 97, House on the Cliff)
• “Let’s take off our socks, shirts, belts, and sweaters.” (p. , The Clue of the Screeching Owl)
• “He stripped down to his shorts and Joe did the same.” (p. 161, Secret of the Caves)

Of course, there’s no reason to think that any of this was meant to be homoerotic. These books were first written in the 1920s. It was a different time. If anything, it’s a sad commentary on our own age that we now interpret instances of male intimacy as indicative of homosexuality. Boys and men used to get naked all the time, and enjoy being naked together, without it being erotic, or analyzed and pathologized. To be sure, there were certainly gay men forced to find each other in dark, secret places to avoid detection and punishment. We see some of this in books like E. M. Forster’s Maurice, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, and Christopher Isherwood’s I Am a Camera, which provided the basis for the musical Cabaret.

To my young homosexual mind, however, these instances in the Hardy Boys books were teeming with sexual tension, and they provided me with the material for my earliest fantasies of male-on-male intimacy. In fact, one of the first times I can remember being sexually aroused was in chapter five of The Secret of the Caves:

[Joe] kicked off his shoes and flung himself on top of the bedspread.

Too exhausted to undress, Frank did the same. The boys slept soundly for several hours.

Frank awakened first and thought he was having a nightmare. A pillow was pressed hard over his face and a powerful hand pinned his shoulder to the mattress.

Trying to cry out, Frank kicked wildly and flung the intruder away from the bed. Someone hit the opposite wall with a thud and crashed to the floor. The noise aroused Joe who sprang up, wild-eyed, and looked around the room. [p. 39]

No worries, it’s just their friend, Biff Hooper (described as “tall and lanky,” blonde, and an “amateur boxer”), playfully holding Frank down on the bed as a joke. I didn’t yet have the emotional vocabulary for why this scene excited me so much, or why it looped on virtual continuous playback in my mind. I would later discover firsthand the palpable thrill of male sexual play and wrestling, and the masculine roughness and uninhibitedness that was already such a turnon to me when I first read the above passage.

Almost all of the boys in these books are athletically inclined. Both Frank and Joe play football and baseball (Frank is a pitcher—heh), but Joe is the smarter of the two, playing with transistor radios or tinkering with motorbikes, so I always had more of a crush on Joe. It’s funny now to think that my parents were unwittingly aiding my development as a young gay man by giving me these books to read. I’m not even ashamed to admit that, as a teenager, some of the focus of my *aheh* “alone time” was Joe Hardy. At least, the Joe Hardy of my imagination.

Autumn is a time of transition and reflection. The leaves change color as the youth and vigor of spring and summer fade and shift with the tilt of the Earth away from the sun. Farmers bring in crops sowed in early spring and tended to all through the summer.

I too have been doing reaping of my own, thinking about my growing up years as a closeted teenager and trying to make sense of the time lost, both as a Christian and as a gay man. As my circle of gay friends increases, I’m coming more into contact with couples who met in their early twenties and have been together for years, their relationships deepening and becoming more knowing and intimate. They’re buying houses, adopting children, going on trips, and in general making lives together.

Many of my friends met each other around the same time that I was graduating college and just beginning to come to terms with the fact that I would never be a heterosexual man as my family and friends assumed that I was.

These relationships aren’t perfect by any means, but with every day that passes I’m reminded of the fact that I’m not getting any younger and that time is slipping by. Like the leaves, my own hair has started to change color. I’ve recently started noticing grey hair at my temples.

I don’t want to waste any more of the years that are left to me. I spent too many years trying to be someone else, and am finally getting to know who I really am. Life is short enough as it is, and I would rather spend my life getting to know a beautiful and fascinating man, and investing time and love in each other.

185. dither

A few weeks ago I met up with my friend Sarah to go see a show at the Minnesota Fringe Festival. It was Four Humors Theater’s adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 screenplay based on Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel “Lolita” about a twelve-year-old girl’s sexual relationships with two adult men.

As performed by three adult men, the actor playing the title character looking absolutely nothing like a twelve-year-old girl. It was predictably awkward and hilarious, especially at the end when the actor playing Lolita reveals that he had no idea that the story is about a “sexually precocious girl,” at one point crying out in horror to the other guys: “My grandmother was going to be here tonight! Gran! I’m sorry!”

This was the company that did the brilliant adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide at Fringe last year.

Afterwards, Sarah and I grabbed dinner in lieu of not making it to the following show that she was hoping to see. During dinner, she told me about a book she’d been reading called Attachment by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. In it, they discuss three different relationship “orientations”: anxious, stable, and avoidant.

Attachment theory has been around since the 1960s and 70s. According to the Wikipedia page, the styles break down in the following ways:

• secure: “It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I am comfortable depending on others and having others depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or having others not accept me.”
• anxious (preoccupied): “I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them.”
• dismissive (avoidant): “I am comfortable without close emotional relationships.”, “It is very important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient”, and “I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me.”
• fearful (avoidant): “I am somewhat uncomfortable getting close to others. I want emotionally close relationships, but I find it difficult to trust others completely, or to depend on them. I sometimes worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to others.”

Anyone who has followed my blog for some time will probably recognize the second category, anxious/preoccupied, as describing my relationship style spot on. I usually feel uneasy around the people in my life, and I worry almost constantly about whether or not they’ll reject me. If we have a disagreement or fight, or I do something to offend or that oversteps boundaries, I assume that the person hates me and wants nothing more to do with me. In reality, they have no idea that I feel that way and often assume that everything is perfectly find.

The fact is that I’m an affection junkie. I didn’t grow up with much praise at home, and in my early years affection was often conditional. I had to behave a certain way or meet some benchmark that my parents set before it was granted. The lesson I learned as a child was that I’m not worth loving unless I perform well enough or do enough to earn that love. I unconsciously do things for the people in my life, trying to earn my keep in their good graces, all the while a script is running in my mind: “If they really knew you and how much of a fuck up you are, they’d drop you faster than a half-way decent show on Fox.”

This causes me to see any of my accomplishments or personal victories as just a drop in the bucket that I need to fill just to begin washing away the stain of my failure as a human being. I’m constantly trying to prove to everyone that I am special, yet nothing is ever good enough to silence the critical voices in my mind that are leaping to tear me down before anyone else can get there first. The hope is that if I do a good enough job beating myself up, everyone else will leave me alone.

With lovers, I tend to bend over backwards to keep them and obsess over relationship status. Each rejection a black mark on my worthiness report, in the same way that missing a credit card payment goes on your record forever. It leads to me sticking around longer than I should, and putting up with behavior that would make anyone with an ounce of self-respect walk out at the first sign of trouble. These are things that friends will attempt to comment on out of concern, that I will dismiss like a stereotypical battered spouse, saying: “But you don’t really know him.”

My fears about turning 30 were mostly about having another reason for guys to reject me, my terror at being alone with myself, and not knowing who I am without someone to validate my worthiness, even though I don’t really believe affirmations. At the back of my mind lurks that dark voice whispering: “If they ever saw behind the mask, they wouldn’t say nice things about you.”

And the pathetic thing is that I believe that inner voice. It’s easier than believing that someone could love a flawed and insecure person like me, or that I could ever learn to rest easy in some guy’s arms and not worry that he’s going to leave me at the minute things get unpleasant. The thought of ever being happy terrifies me because I’m always waiting for the next disaster.

The cute, sexy, nerdy, intriguing guy I’m talking to inevitably ends up being partnered, or isn’t interested in a relationship.

I’m not cute, interesting, muscular, or (curiously) vapid enough to catch anyone’s attention.

In short, I’m struggling to find evidence to support the claim that friends make that I really am a terrific catch, and that everyone else is stupid for turning down such a great guy like me…

184. spigot

July was a rough month for David.

My long-term contract finally ended at the university where I’d been doing administrative support since March 2012. I’d been informed of this about two weeks prior and started sending out résumés right away in the midst of completing the project work I was doing there. I let two temp agencies I’ve worked with in the past know that I’d be available starting July 1st.

Then June 28th came around, and there was not a bite on any of the applications I submitted. Granted, that was the week of the 4th of July so a lot of hiring managers may have been out on vacation. So I kept filling out and submitting applications. The temp agencies started calling with job opportunities that sounded like a “great fit” for my skill set that they wanted to submit my resume for, only to call back a week later to say that the client had selected another candidate.

I started getting email responses like this:

After screening your application materials, you are not among the candidates who will proceed to the next step in the process. However, you may be considered for future vacancies as additional positions become available.

A couple of the places I submitted résumés to that actually responded wanted me to come in for interviews, only to call shortly after to say that I hadn’t been selected. Meanwhile, the bills kept coming in, rent was due, and I had to buy groceries to avoid starvation. A haircut still seems like a luxury, even though I do need to look presentable (read = hireable).

This has been a demoralizing month, not to put too fine a point on it. My thirtieth half-birthday just passed, meaning I’ve passed the half-way point to thirty-one, and I’m without a job and steady income. My application to receive unemployment benefits finally went through a few days ago, meaning that I have a little cushion room while looking for permanent work.

Just another first.

I did experience some relief in my contract ending with the university. While I liked the people, I wasn’t really happy with the kind of work I was doing there, or the work that I’ve been doing the past few years. It’s tough to find anything else with my skill set, however. I trained for a career in music academia, and at the $11-12/hr pay rate my degree and experience have garnered, it’s been virtually impossible to pursue additional training and, you know, pay the bills and live.

The truth is, I’ve been rather down on my experience and education since graduating with what I’ve often referred to as a “useless” degree in music composition. From a conservative Christian liberal arts college, no less. It wasn’t until talking with a friend who is a career counselor several years ago that I even saw the marketable value in such a credential. A music education is not the fluffy walk in the park that many high school seniors seem to think it is. It’s actually one of the most rigorous fields of study there is, aside from medicine or law. It requires a high degree of analytical and creative thinking, learning to work and think collaboratively, and retaining a great deal of information that you’re required to apply and synthesize into performance.

The amount of rejection I faced both in college and after led me to believe that what I had to offer was something that nobody wanted—that I’d wasted almost a decade of my life pursuing something that was only going to be decorative. Like most people, I can’t make a living doing what it is that makes me feel most alive. Yet being stuck in an office, at a desk, staring at a computer screen at spreadsheets, and formatting and filing documents is suffocating and deadening, like the gnomes of Bism in The Silver Chair, held in captivity too near the surface.

The other day I was finally able to see my therapist after over a month of not being able to afford to go. It didn’t feel like a very productive session as I was pretty low that day and felt like I was just babbling most of the time. What I did manage to get out of the visit was the reality that I’m in the midst of a crucible of renewal, both personally and artistically, and that I often fail to see the actual value in the wealth of experience that I do have.

Though I’ve flirted with pursuing other professions and fields of study, the one that has most consistently held my interest is music. Over the past couple of months, after beginning to connect again with musical friends, I’ve started composing again, and the feeling of satisfaction in putting notes to paper is palpable and intoxicating.

Another realization that came after seeing my therapist was hearing that I’m finally approaching my career, creativity and life purpose as me, as my authentic self. While I wasn’t necessarily an empty shell before, I was living my life by what I believed other people wanted for (and by their expectations of) me. It felt like being a shadow, and I had very little idea of who I actually was.

Once I started getting free of the anger and resentment that followed my deconversion from religion, I could begin to piece together who I really am and what I truly value, and live by that. I’m not entirely sure yet what that means for a career, but it does involve making this world a better and more beautiful place. For creativity, it means pursuing what deeply resonates with me (instead of what will glorify God), promoting a Humanistic worldview, and using music and art to highlight issues that matter to me and to bring people and communities together.

Life is too wonderful and short to keep my head down and work for retirement. Because there’s more to my passion than a pile a stuff.