I really hate to be told that I *should* feel a certain way or believe something that can't be proven and doesn't seem right to me.

All of my life I have had people around me, including family members who were supposed to love and support me, who indicated to me that what I think and feel doesn't matter, and that I should either agree with them or shut up.

It caused me to feel isolated and alone. I didn't feel like I could trust anyone. I didn't feel loved or appreciated. It made me feel like I was basically nothing, and that if there was anything of me of any significance, it was somehow invisible, even to me.

I sometimes wondered why I couldn't talk freely about what I thought and felt like other people do. When I was young, I actually worried that maybe I wasn't a whole person, that maybe part of me was missing and that I was just blank.

Later I realized that I had repressed and hidden everything because I was so afraid, and this caused my personal development to be stunted. I became a stranger even to myself. I didn't know who I was, what I liked, what I believed. I had only a few interests, and I couldn't talk about them in depth with anyone.

They're Coming Back

There was an old logging road at the edge of the housing development. They were forbidden to ride their bikes up there, but they kept hearing stories about people seeing strange lights in the sky while driving on that road, so one night they devised a scheme to slip away from their families and investigate. Only one came back. Search parties were unable to locate the other three. It seems they had vanished without a trace. The lone survivor was unable to give any explanations. He lost the ability to speak, and he’s spent the last three decades in a quasi catatonic state. But on the thirtieth anniversary of the terrible event, he started to show signs of becoming more alert, and that evening, he said something: “They’re coming back."

 

Photographer unknown

Subjects unknown

Short fictional story by Gary Cottle

Sex can be shallow. It can be fun. A fetish might be involved. It can be deep and meaningful. It might be spiritual. It might be messed up. What the participants do might be weird to some, creepy, scary. But as long as it’s consensual, I don’t care. Sure there are certain things that put me off, but I don’t have to do those things myself, and I don’t have to dwell on those things. People have to find their own way, and I try to remember that I’m certainly no expert in finding the right path…for myself or anyone else. Sometimes I forget and get a bit preachy about things that really aren’t any of my business. When that happens, just ping my head with a peanut and tell me to pipe down. LOL

I’ve forgotten his name, but he was in my class in second grade. Even back then I was drawn to boys who were noticeably softer and gentler, a bit femme. He just seemed like a little sweetheart, and I adored him. One day when I was coming back from lunch, he was sitting at his desk which was on the first row. I had to pass by him to get to my desk. He was alone, and he was looking down at something, a book maybe. I spontaneously decided I wanted to kiss him, so I bent down and gave him a peck on his forehead. He was stunned and said, “You kissed me.” I went on to my desk. Others started filing into the room, and he said, “He kissed me.” He was flabbergasted, and I grinned like the cat who swallowed the canary.

If life were perfect, sweet and kind, if the universe catered to my specific needs and desires, I would remember a warm summer evening right after I graduated from high school when a beautiful and tender young man came to visit me at my childhood home in West Virginia bearing a gift, a bouquet of wildflowers. He had been looking for crawdads with his daddy in a nearby creek which is why he is barefoot, and when he saw the flowers along the bank, he picked them for me. We sat outside on the porch in the swing holding hands until well after dark. Before he left, he invited me to go fishing with him, his daddy and his sister the next morning. He assured me that I didn’t have to touch the crawdads…or the fish if I were to catch any. Both of our families knew about us, and it was no more of an issue than the barking of tree frogs in the night.

 

I don’t like it when people approach me and pretend to be interested in a friendly chat, only to reveal that they’re looking for an opportunity to tell me about their religious beliefs. It makes me feel used, like their not even seeing me as a real person. Some Christians act like their fellow human beings are like fish to be caught and dragged back to their church. I think it’s akin to what some men do who go through life looking for sexual conquests. They’re not really interested in the people they put the moves on. They just want to have sex with them and move on to the next one.

Some Christians are caught up in the prideful idea that they already know everything and they’re okay, and you’re not going to be okay until you believe what they believe. They don’t appreciate people as individuals with experiences, insights and beliefs of their own. They just go about trying to collect them. Apparently whoever has the biggest collection wins a special prize.

I don’t think it’s just LGBT people who have a problem with Christians who do that. I think being treated and reduced to a potential catch turns a lot of people off. I think if you care about someone and if you’re really interested in them, you don’t initiate contact with them with the intention of changing them or with the condescending attitude that you know everything and they don’t know anything unless they agree with you.

A Summer With Rose by Gary Cottle

Kayla offered to look after her grandmother Rose the summer after her junior year. Rose had been diagnosed with cancer early in January, and everyone knew that more than likely she would need someone to be there with her full time by June. Kayla’s parents agreed to pay her the same amount of money she would have earned working the counter down at Pete’s Drycleaners. Kayla was to cook, do the shopping, clean the house, take care of the yard and do the laundry.

Rose lived in a small, rural community. The place was pretty isolated, and Kayla didn’t know anybody there except her grandmother, and she was much too busy to make friends. When the home healthcare people were in the house, or when Rose took a nap in the afternoon, Kayla would go swimming in a nearby pond by herself or take a solitary walk along the railroad tracks.

She was a little lonely sometimes, but not nearly as lonely as she feared she would be. That’s because Rose turned out to be better company than Kayla expected. Kayla and Rose became friends that summer. They began to relate to one another as fellow women and fellow human beings.

When Rose was up to it, she and Kayla would sit outside on the porch and talk while sipping iced tea. Kayla felt comfortable telling her grandmother about certain incidents that she had, up until then, kept secret. She told Rose about how guilty she felt for breaking the heart of the boy she dated the year before. Kayla broke up with him even though he was a nice young man who had been good to her. She simply wasn’t in love with him, and she came to realize that she shouldn’t stay with him out of a sense of pity or loyalty.

Kayla also told her grandmother about getting lost while backpacking alone the summer after she graduated from high school. She wandered around for a day and a half before she finally stumbled on a trail that led her back to civilization. By that time, she was in a state of near panic. She feared she would die before anyone found her. Kayla was too ashamed to tell anyone about what had happened because she had made such an issue of how she was an adult and how she should be treated like one.

Rose revealed that she had gone to Woodstock and that she had gone topless there for several hours. She was nearing 30 and she just had Kayla’s mother a few months before. She felt her youth slipping away from her, so she left her baby with her sister for a few days, and she did something fun and crazy. She also told Kayla about an affair she had with a grocery store manager in 1977.

The young woman began to have a greater appreciation for the fact that Rose had a life aside from being a wife, mother and grandmother. Rose had been young once, and for her, it didn’t seem like it was all that long ago. She had dreams, hopes, aspirations, and unfulfilled longings, disappointments, and a few noteworthy triumphs. Rose had passed through all the stages of life, and now she was at the end.

Kayla cried for Rose. She knew she was scared, and she knew she loved her life and didn’t want to let go. The girl also cried for herself because she knew she was going to miss her grandmother. She knew that she wasn’t going to be young forever, and one day it would be her turn to die.

Kayla then laughed at some of the funny things Rose had said, and when she got to her feet and began walking back to her grandmother’s house, she was filled with gratitude. She had been given this chance to get to know Rose before it was too late.

Subject unknown
Photographer unknown
Fictional short story by Gary Cottle

30 years ago in the PBS series Cosmos, Carl Sagan used his pretend starship to help us conceptualize the vastness of space. He would get onboard and talk about how if you traveled at the speed of light, it would still take you thousands of years to get from one point to another. He condensed the history of the universe into a single cosmic calendar year to help us conceptualize the enormous amount of time that has passed since the Big Bang, which took place on day one. The earth did not form until September. And human beings have only been around for the last couple of minutes of the last day in December.

We are nothing but flyspecks that will exist for a nanosecond. I think the idea that there is a supreme being out there having conniption fits about what we do with our knobby bits is born of ego. In the larger scheme of things, what the hell difference could it possibly make? I guess some people look at the world around them and they’re struck by the wonder and mystery of it all, and some look at the world around them and say, “This is all about me.”

I figured out I was gay when I was 11, but before that, I was completely uninterested in sex. Boys would tell me things, and I simply didn’t get why they wanted to talk about that, or why they had naughty expressions on their faces when they talked about that. Then I got it. It all hit me like a ton of bricks. It was like a light had been turned on.

I never really believed it was wrong in any kind of deep moral sense. I knew most people despised it, and that had a profoundly negative effect on me. I felt rejected, unwanted, unworthy. But wrong in the sense that murder is wrong? Never that.

The only person in my family who had a true interest in my inner life--my thoughts, attitudes, ideas, feelings--was my mother, but because of her mental health, her reactions were wildly unpredictable. And since everyone else made it pretty clear that they didn’t care, or that they would use personal information to ridicule me, I was already quite used to being secretive by the time I realized I was gay. It came naturally to me. I was very guarded, and between the ages of 11 and 18, I locked up almost all of my private thoughts.

As a result, I was desperately lonely. Nobody really knew me. I didn’t let anyone get too close. And even though I pushed people away, a great part of me believed that nobody knew me because I wasn’t worth knowing. I didn’t even know myself, and I worried that I wasn’t a complete human being. I was so used to holding things back, sometimes it seemed blank on the inside. I was also terrified, filled with anxiety. I lived in fear of someone finding out I was gay. I feared my home life would become intolerable, or even more intolerable than it already was, if my family found out. At school, I feared for my physical safety.

The only time I ever wanted to join a church and become a Christian is when I’d watch Billy Graham on TV, but it wasn’t the faith or the theology that appealed to me. It was the sense of community and belonging that Graham seemed to be offering. I wanted that. I didn’t have anything like that, and I desperately needed it. So I’d sit there and I’d promise God that I’d stop thinking about boys. But I never kept the promise for more than a few hours. I didn’t even try. I didn’t really want to stop thinking about boys because merely thinking about them gave me tremendous joy. I could count on that joy, and I did. I relished it.

I don’t know how I managed the stress. I’m sure it would kill me now. I’m not exaggerating about that. I think that if I had to go through a week of that now I would die of a heart attack. But despite the stress, I never wanted to give up my feelings for boys. I instinctively knew that my feelings were real and meaningful, something essential, and I found the claims of fundamentalist Christianity to be suspect.