Newsflash from the 30th century: There is life and sex after death, scientists say

Thanks to a number of breakthroughs in the last ten centuries, scientists are now sure that our consciousness survives death and that we live on in a kind of perpetual lucid dream state. They say that since all conflict has been resolved, the dead create for themselves an ever changing world that they find blissful and exhilarating. They claim the dead visit one another in their dreams and that death is not lonely. They also claim that the dead experience vivid wet dreams that reflect their wildest fantasies.

After death, you might hike in the Alps in the morning, spend your afternoon sunbathing on a Caribbean beach with your best friend from grade school, dine with your favorite aunt in a Parisian restaurant, and share your evening with an adoring and attentive young man who looks remarkably like Taylor Lautner in a remote cabin in the Berkshires.

Handyman

88-year-old Mrs. Pennington allowed him to park his camper in her backyard. She told everyone that he helped her with her chores and that he was very handy to have around. Not many approved. People said he was a drifter and that he wasn’t to be trusted. But the summer after graduation, I found the nerve to go over and introduce myself. He offered me a glass of wine and read me some of his poetry. I was shocked when most of it turned out to be about men together. I was expecting him to be coy. I thought we’d have to dance around the obvious for a while. But he got right to the point.

I got home late, and when Dad asked me where I had been, I told him I was looking at the stars. I think he knew what I really meant. After a long pause, he said, “Nice night for it, I guess. Are you okay?” I smiled and answered, “I’m fine.”

Photographer and model unknown

Little story by Gary Cottle

Pride In A Small Town

"So why are we sitting out here?"

"It's June and we're celebrating Pride."

"Why?"

"Because I'm gay. There won't be any parades for me in this little town for a very long time, but I wanted you to know, and I wanted you to celebrate with me because you're my best friend."

Photographer and models unknown
Little story by Gary Cottle

Second Stonewall

Back when I was in high school, I saw The World According To Garp on HBO. In fact I saw it a number of times. I kept watching it every time I’d come across it. I couldn’t get enough of it. It may have been that locker room scene early in the film that drew me in. Seeing the naked butts of all those athletic young men really fired up my teenage libido. (Still does, actually.) Then the coach came in and said, “Gay wrestlers, no beating the meat before the meet,” or something like that. His casual reference to both homosexuality and masturbation got my attention. And then there was that boy Garp talked to, that dreamy, dark-haired boy with the soft, sweet voice… We only caught a glimpse of him, and he spoke only a few words, but that was enough for me; I was in love.

The story seemed quite epic because we were introduced to Garp as an infant, we watched him grow up, we watched him fall in love, get married, start a family, and then we saw him die. I was fascinated by every minute of it, and so much of the story dealt with outsiders and people who didn’t quite fit in--I could relate--but it was the way Garp died that seemed especially poignant to me. Through a series of coincidences and random events, Garp became the enemy in the eyes of a woman he grew up with, Pooh. Garp had no idea that Pooh hated him so much. He, in fact, had done nothing to deliberately incur Pooh’s violent hostility, and he seemed utterly bewildered when she shot him.

The story made it clear to me that if you stand up in this world, you’re going to make enemies...no matter if you intend to or not, and no matter if you like it or not. And sometimes those enemies will do you in. Life is an adventure, a marvelous mystery, but it’s not always fair. You don’t always get what you deserve, or what you expect, or what you hoped for or planned for.

Garp has been on my mind a lot lately. I thought of him when North Carolinians passed an anti-gay amendment to their state constitution. I thought of him when I learned that a pastor advocated the physical abuse of toddlers who don’t conform to gender expectations. I thought of him when another pastor advocated that people like me should be put in death camps, and another said he thought the government should kill us, and another admitted he would like us all to be dead. I also thought of Garp when I learned politically well connected Tony Perkins--who, despite being president of a hate group, is regularly invited to share his bigoted opinions about us by major news outlets--gave an award to still yet another hateful pastor who compared us to murderers and called us maggots. Perkins gave the man an award…an award.

I’ve known for a very long time people hate us, so I wasn’t shocked when I found out Matthew Shepard had been murdered by homophobic thugs. Saddened, yes. Of course I was saddened, heartbroken even, but not shocked. I was, however, shocked when his funeral was picketed. I’d never heard of anyone picketing a funeral, least of all someone who claims to be a minister. And I found it especially troubling when so few Christians spoke out against it. In fact many began using Fred Phelps’ outrageous stunts to claim their own homophobic rhetoric is moderate. Now more Christian ministers are catching up with Phelps, and even though we have seen some protests, it’s hardly commensurate with the level of hate being directed at us. And one of the offending pastors actually got an award. How insane is that?

Yes, I know that we’ve gotten some good news lately: President Obama declared he supports marriage equality--but he stopped short of stating he believes we have a constitutional right to marry--the Ninth Circuit refused an en banc reconsideration of their Prop 8 ruling, and DOMA was declared to be unconstitutional. But all that good news is more of an unfulfilled promise than something we actually have in our hands. What if Mitt Romney is our next president? What if the Supreme Court decides against us? What if all we’re left with is one major political party that gives us lukewarm support, another that deliberately works against us, and the well organized, well funded homophobic Christianist hate machine?

The recent CNN/ORC poll that shows 34% of Americans still believe that homosexuals can change their orientation is very troubling because that number has been fairly steady for five years. I believe that most of the people in this intransigent camp are religious extremists, and they simply aren’t interested in the truth. We have made great strides in the last 40 years, but it seems the majority still aren’t prepared to stand up and fight for us. And the opposition… They’re led by people who claim we’re sex maniacs who want to turn kids gay, and that we’re incapable of love, that we lead lives of depravity and that we die before we reach middle age. They claim we’re out to destroy the family and the country and that God will punish America if LGBT people are treated with anything other than disdain. That was the message of Billy Graham’s daughter, Anne Graham Lotz, to North Carolina last month when they voted on their hate the gays constitutional amendment. She didn’t even offer an ounce of compassion or understanding for the LGBT citizens of her state. She talked about us as if we were totally other, not even human, and it seemed she hoped the amendment would get rid of us like a great big gay bug bomb. She warned that God may stop blessing North Carolina and America if the voters didn’t set off that bomb. And she is none other than the daughter of the most famous Christian pastor in America.

I know that young people are far less likely to go along with the homophobia of their elders, but somehow I doubt we can count on all of them. I suspect a large percentage--maybe not the majority, but a sizable number--will adopt the irrational fears and hatred that have been pushed on them all of their lives. I suspect that these young people will eventually take the helm of the homophobic Christianist hate machine and soldier on. So what if we’ve hit a stone wall? What if reason and compassion and our shared humanity have taken us just about as far as they’re going to take us?

We have seen a certain pattern in Western Civilization. From the beginning extremists have persecuted demonized minorities while most have stood by and done nothing: the killing of the so-called heretics, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of women accused of being witches, the subjugation of women, slavery, the Holocaust, the oppression of sexual minorities…  So I’m afraid the excessive irrational loathing of LGBT people is something that could, if we’re not very careful, progress toward wholesale slaughter. It’s happened before. It’s likely to happen again. And I don’t want to be among the next group who is slated for extermination.

Despite all the warning signs and the bloody history of our species, it seems many don’t want to take the extremists who are against us seriously. I hear a lot of comments about how it’s only a matter of time before we achieve equality, and how eventually all the haters will take a dirt nap and that’ll be the end of the culture wars. But bigotry has a way of sustaining itself, and since we’re always going to be in the minority, our rights and wellbeing probably will never be a priority in our society.

As most of my friends know, I have severe social phobia, and a great deal of it is rooted in the homophobia I’ve encountered. I’ve never been quite sure of who I could count on, and it has just been easier to retreat than to face possible abuse and rejection. But I’m older now, and I know I’m not going to be around forever. So in my own quiet way, I want to stand up for myself and people like me. I can’t wait for the world to grow up. And if some crazy person comes along and blows me away, then so be it. If I never speak out, then the crazies will have won anyway.

By and large, LGBT people are good and decent people. We do not deserve to be treated like second class citizens. We shouldn’t have to plead and beg fellow Americans for our rights, even if we’re never any more popular than we are right now, or even if we’re never better understood than we are right now. It is in America’s best interest to give us our due because the people who would deny us would deny just about anybody if the notion came to them.  No one can count on their compassion and rationality. They’re prepared to hold onto their fears and misconceptions no matter what anyone says. They define themselves by those they hate, and they call it their religion. Standing up to them for ourselves is to stand for a principle that will drive humanity forward.  We are worth it.  LGBT people are worth it.  The whole of humanity is worth it.  We all deserve to live in a society founded on mutual respect as apposed to fear and ignorance.

Me objecting to the prudery, arrogance, and homophobia of someone who thinks Pride Parades are “indecent” and “lewd”.

C.D.: This is essentially why I so often don't get along with GLBT people: they have polarized from the religious right so far that they have wound up in a totally morally ambiguous territory.

Gary Cottle: I find this statement to be very troubling.

C.D.: "Gary, excuse me if the grammatically ambiguous phrasing there is what is throwing you off. If you read on, I state that I am gay and accepting of homosexual relations given the right ethical conditions. Given that, you should be able to see that I was [not?] intending to make a blanket statement about GLBT people. I was referring to a common subset among us."

Gary Cottle: There isn't anything throwing me off, [C.D.]. I found your comment to be offensive, and your comment here does nothing to restore my assessment of you. Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean that you can’t be an intolerant prig.

Like so many fundamentalist asshats, you don't seem to make a distinction between your opinion and fact. So let me set a few things straight. You don’t get to decide for the rest of us what is “the right ethical conditions” for anything. You don’t get to decide for the rest of us what is decent, and you don’t get to decide for the rest of us the definition of prudishness. You may offer your opinion, but that’s all. And if someone disagrees with you, that doesn’t mean they’re immoral, amoral, morally ambiguous, or lacking a “strong rational faculty.” They may see something you don’t. They may have experienced something you haven’t. They may have different values, deferent beliefs.
And before you launch into your speech about the “chasm of ethics and worldview” that separate us, let me say that I am merely offering you my opinions. I don’t pretend to have everything figured out. I don’t know if there’s a god or not. And I’m not interested in accepting anyone’s dogma, least of all yours. If you want to call this moral ambiguity, then so be it. But I see value in reminding myself that my opinions are only my opinions. I see value in not being very strict in judging others because I know I don’t have all the answers, and I know I don’t know what’s going on in the lives of others or exactly why others do what they do. I try to stand up and speak out when I think someone is being harmed, but I know I have my blind spots and limitations. I also know what it’s like to be judged by self-righteous people who don’t understand me.

Unlike some people, I don’t expect to walk out my front door and only see things that I understand and agree with. And I certainly don’t expect all gay people to be like me. I know that they’re all over the map in regards to beliefs, temperament, attitude…just like straight people.
I figured out I was gay when I was 11 years old, but I couldn’t tell anyone until I went away to college seven years later. And one of the first gay people I met at college was a boy named Nathan. He’s the first boy I had sex with in college. Nathan is also the one who took me to a gay bar for the first time in my life. He’s the first boy I ever danced with. And one Saturday afternoon, Nathan led me into a parking garage, took me to the top floor and we fooled around right there in that public place. Other people have judged me when I’ve told them this story, and I lived through it, so if you want to judge me, go ahead. I really don’t care. It’s not something I would repeat. It’s not something I would generally recommend. I realize that what we did was foolish and thoughtless. We could have been caught. We could have been arrested. Thugs could have used our indiscretion as an excuse to physically attack us. And I would have been mortified if some sweet little old lady had seen us. But we weren’t caught, and on that day, the experience was liberating. After hiding and living in fear all those years, I was finally, at long last doing it with a boy, and we were doing it in a public place.
Nathan and I didn’t become boyfriends, and the sex soon ended, but we were very close friends for years. Nathan was always much more adventurous than I was. And he had numerous sex partners. He was one of those people who could step out for a breath of fresh air and come back an hour later and tell you he just did it with the guy who mows the grass. Nathan went around the world and slept with different guys all along the way. Those stories you hear about gay men who have sex with hundreds of partners…Nathan was one of them. If Nathan had been in a Gay Pride Parade, he would have worn a Speedo and simulated sex acts with his fellow revelers. But anyone who thinks Nathan was all about sex would be mistaken. He was a kindhearted, witty, funny, intelligent young man who spoke French fluently, loved art, travel, and he was someone who had survived a great deal of abuse and rejection because he was one of those boys who was obviously different from a very early age. He taught me a lot about following your own light regardless of what others think. He taught me a lot about courage and self-acceptance.

When he was about 24, he met a man and fell in love. He’s been in a monogamous relationship with him ever since. He also became an Episcopal priest. We lost contact for a long time, but a couple of years ago, he called me up and we talked for several hours. We talked about how his life had changed so dramatically. He said that when he found his partner, he knew he was the person he wanted to be with and playing around with other men just didn’t interest him anymore. I asked him if he regretted his youthful escapades, and he said he didn’t. And when I asked him why he felt compelled to sleep with all those guys all over the world, he basically said that he was finding his way.

I understand this and accept it. I was finding my own way when I fooled around with Nathan in the parking garage when we were young. And all these years later, I’m still finding my way.

I’m Not Impressed By Prudery

Back when I started middle school the boys I had grown up with went through a startling transformation. The innocent little guys I had known for years suddenly seemed to have an edge to them. They were more aggressive, they used words that used to be forbidden, and many of them talked about sex in the most graphic detail imaginable. During those years I was regularly exposed to comments about dicks, pussies, fucking, sucking, cum eating and pussy licking. I eventually got over my shock and the salty comments became ordinary. But I never joined in, and I suppose some of the boys thought I was something of a goody-goody. However, that was far from true. I had went through the change just like the other boys. I was having all kinds of “dirty” thoughts, too. Only I was having them about other boys, not girls. But I couldn’t admit to this. It just wasn’t allowed. I was sure that my existence would become a living hell if I divulged any of my sexual thoughts. However, I couldn’t bring myself to pretend to like girls, so I simply remained silent while the boys around me talked like proverbial sailors.

By the time I got to high school, I was almost ready to explode. The straight guys I knew felt free to talk about sex. Some of them were having sex. And a few had girlfriends. In one way or another, they were expressing an interest in the opposite sex openly, and this was accepted. By then I had been having sexual feelings and romantic longings for years, and, unlike my straight peers, I had kept it all bottled up. And when I was about 15 or 16, I began to have a recurring dream. In this dream I went to the restroom of the Montgomery Ward store in nearby Beckley, West Virginia. I went into one of the stalls as was my habit because I was too shy to expose myself at the urinals, and while I was relieving myself, a man broke through the stall door, pushed me to the floor and raped me. It was frightening at first, but eventually I relaxed and stopped fighting this man, and the experience became blissful.

It disturbed me that in my dream I enjoyed being violated, but nevertheless, I had that dream over and over again for years. The dream finally faded away when I started college. I started seeing a therapist during my freshman year, and eventually I told her about the dream. Even though I hadn’t had the dream in a while, it still worried me. We talked about it, and in a short while the pieces fell into place. Even though I knew I was gay from the age of 11 and enjoyed a rather rich sexual fantasy life, the circumstances in which I found myself demanded that I do everything in my power to prevent anyone from knowing about that fantasy life. And there was a part of me that simply didn’t want to hide my thoughts and fantasies about men. It took so much effort. It’s bad enough to be a horny teenager who isn’t getting any, but on top of that, I had to pretend I wasn’t interested. That was enough to almost drive me over the edge. So the rapist in my dreams wasn’t a real rapist at all; he was a liberator. He was someone who knew what I wanted despite my subterfuge, and he gave it to me even though I couldn’t admit I wanted it. He was there to break through my defenses so that I could experience the freedom of doing it on a dirty restroom floor, a public place, a place where one of those men I was so afraid of, one of those disapproving men who didn’t like boys like me could walk right in at any moment and see me being used by another man and liking it. The dream ripped apart my prim, sexless persona and reminded me that I wasn’t just a gay boy, I was, at least in part, a whore, an animal, a wolf.

When I got to college, I met gay guys who took delight in their inner wolves just like those smutty 12-year-old boys I used to know. It was great that I finally got laid in college, but simply being able to talk about all of those forbidden thoughts was just as great, and often even more fun than actually doing it. Ah, to be able to sit somewhere on campus with a friend, point out some cute boy, and admit that I wanted to bend him over a table, rip down his pants and shove my face into the crack of his behind. And then to laugh at how crazy that is, how wild…

There is a part of us that is wild. We are part of nature, and sex in nature is rarely as romantic and tender as it is so often depicted in the movies. And although most of us have our romantic, tender feelings, too, including gay men of course, there is that primitive part of us, and many of us are aware of it. Many of us know how to have fun with it.

There are a lot of gay men who are accepting of their inner wolves. Many allow themselves to talk about their wolfish desires with their gay friends, just like straight guys often do with their buddies. Some allow their wolves to come out from time to time and do their thing. And a few let the wolf run free.

But there are some gay men who pride themselves on how clipped and circumspect they are. It’s true that some may simply have a lower libido, or perhaps their desire for romance simply overwhelms their desire for raw sex. That’s fine. Some probably would just rather not talk about it freely and openly, and that’s fine, too. But, it annoys me when I hear gay men trying to place arbitrary limits on not just themselves but on other gay men. Just like the Christianists who demand that sex is only for heterosexual married couples and we should all strive to be modest in our day to day lives, there are gay men who insist that sex is only for those in committed relationships, and sexy talk, dress and horseplay should be avoided. Some of them give themselves all kinds of brownie points for not being like those gay man who don’t play by their rules. They’re so sure they’re better because they’re right and properly offended by “smut”.

Well, my sex life has never been too adventurous, I’ve never had a thing for leather, and I’m just as modest about my own body as I was back when I was a teenager and afraid to flash my willie in the men’s room, but I can remember all too well the horrific pain of having to pretend I didn’t have sexual desires. It was very much like being in prison, and I’ve never fully recovered from that. I spent 7 of my formative years denying who I really am, and the terror and the shame and the loneliness and isolation that I endured day after day after day ruined me. So now I feel hostility toward anyone who would try to shame me because I accept the fact that there’s a part of me that isn’t wholesome, safe and sanctified in the eyes of the self-appointed guardians of sexual morality. And I have very little desire to banish anyone to the hell that was my teenage years just because some think how they express themselves sexually is dirty or gross.

I crushed on the cute, boyish, nerdy guys.



I had a crush on both of these guys back in the 80's.  There were guys who I thought were sexy and hot, like Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon, but then there was this group of guys who never quite made it as sex symbols--Jonathan Silverman, Andrew McCarthy, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Dempsey... (I guess Patrick became something of a sex symbol when he got older.)  They were all boyishly cute, not very imposing or traditionally masculine.  There was something soft and gentle about them, and I adored them.  The guys who were generally thought of as hunks never seemed quite real to me, but I could picture myself spending time with these cute, sweet boys, and I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I imagined finding a boy like this and spending my life with him.  That didn't happen, and I think that's mainly because I was too screwed up to really know what I wanted, and I also didn't believe in myself.  I didn't think anyone would want me, least of all someone I thought was cute and sweet.