ABC News Live 9/11

I watched this last night and remembered what it was like for me the morning of September 11, 2001. I didn’t tune in until after the Pentagon had been hit, so I had a lot to catch up on. It was shocking enough to learn that planes had deliberately hit both towers at the WTC, but to watch them collapse one after the other was horrific. But I think what really made me nervous was learning that every single nonmilitary airplane in the whole country was ordered to land as soon as possible. That suggested to me that things were out of control and our government didn’t yet have a handle on what was happening. Then came the news that government officials were being scurried off to secret locations. Air Force One flew around in the air for hours with the president on board as if no where was safe. That day it seemed anything could happen, and it wasn’t until that evening before I could believe that the worst was over.

I was surprised to hear Osama Bin Laden’s name mentioned several times. I guess back then I didn’t have a clear understanding of who he was, so the name simply went over my head, but apparently he was a suspect almost immediately.

BTW, I miss Peter Jennings. Until we got cable when I was 8 or 9 years old, we only had two channels, PBS and ABC, so I got into the habit of watching ABC News. I grew up seeing Peter Jennings regularly, and he became anchor when I was a teenager. I trusted him to tell the truth as he knew it, and thought he was very sharp and perceptive. So many of the people I see on TV news these days seem so dim in comparison.

My imaginary high school boyfriend and the story I was going to write about him.

I first started thinking about becoming a writer back in high school.  I loved the way stories took me out of myself.  I loved the way they helped me see life in different ways.  And I loved how they helped me connect to others, helped me see things from different perspectives, consider things I would normally overlook.  Even the most cruel and evil villains are driven by something, and if you know their story, you can understand them, and their villainy becomes tragedy, a tale of an otherwise good and decent person who went wrong after experiencing something that might sour any one of us.  A good story is magic.  A good story can help us make sense of life, and I was a confused, scared, lonely kid who felt left out, so I guess I hoped writing would help me find my way.
 
A lot of story ideas popped into my head, but they never went anywhere.  I could consider them for a few minutes, but then they would fizzle out.  The first idea that took root and stayed with me for a number of years dropped into my conscious mind during my senior year of high school.  I was aware that graduation was looming and that everything would be different afterwards, so I came up with a story that centered around graduation. 

I imagined that I had a secret boyfriend who went to school with me.  He wasn’t the hottest guy in class or the most popular, but I knew how kind and sincere he was, and I could relax when I was alone with him.  He was my Ponyboy.
 
We always played it cool when other people were around, especially at school.  Most knew we were friends, but we didn’t let on that we were even that close, so it would have been a shock if anyone found out we were lovers.  We met in private…along country roads outside of town, in the homes of recently deceased relatives and local parks.  As graduation day got closer, we began to talk more about what we would like to do once we were free to leave town.  We decided that we should run away together, and in the spring of 1984, we worked out the details of our plan.
 
We would go to our graduation ceremony, and then we would tell our families we were going to one of the graduation parties.  But instead of going to a party, we would meet at a nearby state park, one of our favorite rendezvous points.  And from there we would slip quietly away from all of those who didn’t understand us, those who shamed us, and those who would judge us for loving and needing each other.

I tried writing this story a number of times.  I even attempted to write it a few times after I went away to college.  That germ of an idea really resonated with me.  But I guess I could never make it work because I didn’t really know what it was like to have a boyfriend, and the possibility of having one seemed so remote that I couldn’t imagine the details.  I also couldn’t imagine what we would do after running away.  Where would we go?  What would we do for money?  Would we go to college together?  Would we be out?  Or would we continue to keep our relationship secret?  Back then the idea of telling people I was gay seemed impossibly scary.  Would we eventually contact our parents?  Would we tell them we were together? 

So many plot points tripped me up.  I had hoped that simply by getting started that the answers would come to me, but they didn’t.  I lacked the vision, and deep down, I don’t think I really believed there were any sweet and adorable boys in this world who would love me so much as to want to run away with me.  Eventually my high school years receded into the past, and my dream of having a high school boyfriend faded away.
 
But my dream of having  a high school boyfriend never completely disappeared.  I can still see glimpses of him now and then.  And I’m older and I feel a lot more sympathy for the young man that I used to be.  I believe that he did deserve a boyfriend, someone sweet, cute, adorable and sincere.  Maybe one day I’ll write that story for him and give him the happy, romantic ending he wanted.

Will I ever be an artist?

"Will I ever be an artist? Not a mere dabbler or dilettante. Not just someone who picks up a brush now and then and produces something derivative and forgettable. Will I create something that stands out, something that distinguishes me from all the rest? Something that will make them remember me? Or will I be an art student my whole life? Is that enough? Do I have to make a mark? Can’t I just appreciate what others have done? Is it pride that makes us think we have to accomplish something, something important? What if I simply observed and took it all in…with the aim of getting through it without doing much harm? Maybe someday a thunderbolt of inspiration will hit me and I won’t be able to resist making a splash. But can I really force it? Can’t I be significant without being great?"


Photographer and subject unknown
Little fictional story by Gary Cottle

Shame on the bigots who run The Boy Scouts

I’m really disappointed that the Boy Scouts have decided to continue to discriminate against LGBT people. I think the kinds of boys that are often attracted to the Boy Scouts are the ones who aren’t so much into roughhousing, boys who aren’t necessarily into competitive sports, boys who like a bit of structure, boys who like an environment were cordiality and thoughtfulness are appreciated. A lot of gay boys are like that, and I think the Boy Scouts have provided many gay boys with an opportunity to feel like they were one of the guys. And now the bigots who run the show have once again told a group of boys who want to feel like they belong that they’re defective and unworthy. Of course most of the younger boys are unaware of their orientation, but a lot of boys figure themselves out by the time they’re ten, eleven, twelve years old. Most of them won’t come out that young, but they’re old enough to be aware of the discriminatory policy. They know if they were honest, they’d be rejected. They know they’re not really wanted. The adults in charge are telling these boys that they’re not valued. And this is what these adults call leadership? This is character? Shame on these people. 

July 15, 1997

Back in the late 1990s, I was living in an apartment on High Street in Morgantown, West Virginia. Because of my mood swings, depressive episodes, suicidal tendencies, post traumatic stress disorder and social phobia, I was already on Disability Social Security. By the time I was 30, I was already very familiar with regular doctor’s visits, various medical tests, getting stuck with needles, taking massive amounts of medication, and hospital stays.

Morgantown is the home of WVU which is where I went after I graduated from high school. For a time I dreamed of going on to graduate school and becoming a philosophy professor. I also dreamed of becoming a writer. But by the time I hit my mid twenties, it looked like the only thing I was going to become was a professional psychiatric patient. The reason I stayed in Morgantown was because I was familiar with the place, living there provided me with independence, it was the most liberal town in the state of West Virginia, I was too scared and too poor to move, my parents lived a few hours away, and WVU offered great medical services.

By the spring of 1996, I was very isolated. I was no longer in school by that point, and most of the friends I had made while attending WVU had moved on. I stayed in my apartment most of the time. And when I did go out, I didn’t talk to people. I watched a lot of movies on video--the local public library rented them for a dollar--and I read books. The internet was already quite popular, and I knew this would be a good way for me to connect with people, but I just couldn’t afford a computer. So I was stuck. I couldn’t figure out a way to get out of the rut that I had fallen into. But that May, something happened that made me realize my life was about to be turned upside down.

One night I had dream in which I saw myself in a hospital bed. That image startled me so much that it woke me up, and I was so disturbed that I felt the need to sit up for a while in the living room. It was while I was sitting up that I came to believe I had a brain tumor. I don’t know what made me think this, but I knew it was true. I just knew it. But I wasn’t ready to face it, so I stopped going to the doctor.

For nearly a year, I avoided the inevitable. I knew in the back of my mind what was wrong, but I pretended I didn’t know. Then I started noticing I was having a hard time hearing my parents when I talked to them on the phone. I had always held the phone up to my left ear, so I never thought to switch sides. Holding the phone to my left ear with my left hand seemed the most natural way for me to talk on the phone, so I stuck with that.

My parents eventually caught on that I couldn’t hear them very well, and they began to pressure me to go in for a long overdue checkup. I made the appointment and went to see my doctor, my GP that is, not my psychiatrist. I told him about my difficulty hearing. I didn’t tell him that I was sure I had a brain tumor because of a dream I had the year before. The man already knew about my mental health, so I assumed he would just think I was being crazy.  Therefore, I kept my tumor dream to myself. My doctor was sure my allergies were causing congestion in my ears and that this was the cause of my hearing loss, so he prescribed a decongestant. But when I went back two weeks later, I was still having problems with my hearing. (And I knew why, but I wasn’t telling him.) So he had his nurse give me a basic hearing test while he was out of the room seeing other patients. A few minutes later, the doctor returned, and I could tell by the look on his face that the hearing test indicated something was seriously wrong. He told me that I was almost deaf in my left ear. And the fact that I was going deaf in just one ear was the thing that was most alarming. He asked if I had been exposed to any loud noises like a gun shot going off near my left ear or an explosion. I told him no, and he handed me an appointment card. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and I was to return to the hospital the next morning to see a specialist at 8:30 in the morning. I went home that evening knowing it was all about to blow up in my face. They were about to find my secret tumor, and they would want to do something about it.

After a series of tests that culminated in an MRI, what I dreamed the year before was confirmed. I had a sizable brain tumor on the left side of my head behind my left ear. The tumor had almost destroyed my left auditory nerve, and it was doing damage to my left facial nerve. It was also pressing against my brainstem. I was told that the brainstem was the most vital part of the brain because it was the most elementary. We don’t use our brainstems for brainy stuff like thought and speech. It’s not the magic part of our brains where beautiful art and extraordinary inventions are born. The brainstem is for things like the regulation of heart rate, breathing, core body temperature. In other words, fuck with it, and you die. The tumor had to come out.

I was 31 years old. I still thought of myself as a young man. I was often mistaken for a student at WVU. I was regularly asked what year I was in and what my major was. I still dreamed of going on to graduate school. I knew that my youth was slipping away, but I thought there was still time for me to make something of myself in this life. I dreamed about finding a man and living with him in a nice house somewhere. I was starting to think about becoming a father. But then I found out I had a brain tumor, and I feared the lights were about to go out.

On the morning of July 15, 1997, my parents drove me to Ruby Memorial Hospital, WVU’s main hospital. It was very early, and the sky was still dark, but you could tell that dawn was about to break. I walked from the parking lot into the hospital on my own. Aside from the hearing loss, some facial weakness, and some headaches now and then, which I was used to, I felt fine physically. There was a part of me that couldn’t accept that major surgery was necessary. I didn’t want them to cut my head open. I was terrified that they would ruin me or kill me. And the doctors didn’t sugar coat what they were about to do. They did warn that awful things could happen. I could even die. But the tumor was already threatening my life, so I went into that building, laid down on a gurney and let them do their thing. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I don’t trust easily. It’s difficult for me to ask perfectly harmless looking people for the time of day. But on the morning of July 15, 1997, I allowed strangers to put me to sleep knowing they were going to slice my head open and dig out chunks of something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

I was under general anesthesia by 6:30 AM.  A few minutes later I was connected to a ventilator and catheterized.  And my head was put into a vise.  The surgery lasted about 13 or 14 hours.  Two surgial teams switched back and forth throughout the day.  I didn’t wake up until the early morning hours of July 16. I was afraid of dying on July 15, but on July 16 I hurt so much that I wanted to die. But I didn’t. There was a serious complication a few weeks later that required more surgery. And I didn’t feel like doing much of anything for a year. I had to give up my apartment in Morgantown and move back in with my parents. I lost all of my hearing in my left ear. I had to learn to cope with a constant buzzing sound. I became balance impaired. And the left side of my face was paralyzed. I eventually regained some movement in my face, but my appearance was permanently altered. However, I made it. I survived. And fifteen years later, I’m still here.       

Jerry Sandusky Is The Face Of Conservative Christian Entitlement

Ever since the story of Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys broke, a number of Christianists have been trying to claim Jerry Sandusky is a typical gay man and that LGBT rights will lead to the acceptance of sexual abuse of children. It doesn’t matter that it’s not true. It doesn’t matter who they hurt with such accusations. They go on spreading this hateful misinformation in an attempt to demonize gay men. And they wrap themselves up in the Bible and claim to be moral authorities while doing it.

But what is their real goal? It can’t be that they’re truly interested in the welfare of Sandusky’s victims. This crowd regularly claims that the victims of molestation somehow become gay. And since they make every effort to demonize gay men, they in fact stigmatize the victims of molestation. If a boy is molested, he becomes suspect in the eyes of Christianists. And Christianists regularly rail against anti-bullying programs in schools, too. They claim that their right to foster hostile attitudes toward bullied children falls under the purview of their religious liberty. They regularly disregard, minimize and dismiss instances of abuse. They turn a blind eye to the young victims of bullying and talk about their right to tell others they’re sinful. Christianists cry foul every time there is an attempt to protect children. In their eyes, children don’t have a right to housing, healthcare or an education. And yet they want us to believe they’re the ones who care for kids.

Jerry Sandusky has never claimed to be gay. In fact he has been married to a woman for many years. No man has ever stepped forward and claimed he had a consensual, romantic, loving relationship with Jerry Sandusky. Jerry Sandusky is a churchgoing Christian. Jerry Sandusky has spent most of his life as a man of wealth, privilege and influence. Jerry Sandusky was highly regarded and well respected. And who were Jerry Sandusky’s victims? Poor boys. Boys who needed help. Boys who would be especially thrilled to have the chance to go to ballgames, go on trips, and do the things kids who come from wealthier homes take for granted. Jerry Sandusky showed these boys a good time, and then he acted like he owned them. He seemed to think they were obliged to repay him with sex. It seems that Jerry Sandusky felt he was entitled.

In the novel A Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood imagines a world in which the Christianists have managed to “win back America for Christ” in the not too distant future. In her story, the new theocratic, totalitarian state is called The Republic of Gilead, and the “men of God” are the ones in charge. Women have very little say. They are to submit to their husbands and fathers, just as God supposedly demands. They can’t own property, work outside the home, and of course having a voice in government is out of the question. Women who aren’t married and not protected by their fathers are treated like chattel and used for breading purposes.

A Handmaid's Tale spells out in explicit detail what life would be like for women in a Christianist theocracy run by men. And the trial of Jerry Sandusky tells us what life would be like for children.


　


A few thoughts on anger management.

I’ve known some people who have serious rage and anger problems, and I’ve seen how this leads to a lot of self-destructive behavior as well as unimaginably cruel behavior. For instance, I have an uncle who was a very vindictive, mean-spirited man. When my mother’s sister first married him and had a baby, they didn’t have any money, so they would sometimes stay at our house, and my uncle would sometimes pinch my cousin in his crib to make him cry. When my cousin was a little older, my sister and I caught him trying to get my cousin to put sand in the gas tank of our go-cart. Later when I was about 11, I saw him masturbating my cousin in our backyard. My cousin was about 5 at the time. My uncle saw me, and I’ll never forget the sneer he had on his face. He wanted me to see what he was doing, and he wanted to hurt me and his son. My uncle wasn’t sexually interested in his son or me. He was being hateful. I simply put the incident out of my mind for years. I never talked about it. Just like I never talked about a lot of the other crazy things that I saw and experienced when I was a kid.

My uncle is developmentally disabled. He has the mind of an 8 or 9-year-old, and he’s been mad at the world for most of his life. My father told me what it was like for my uncle when he was growing up. He never knew his father, and back in the ’50s, a kid without a father was stigmatized. His mother was also developmentally disabled. My father told me that she used to go to the outhouse without bothering to shut the door, and she was almost always sitting there doing her business as the school bus went by. The kids would laugh and make fun of her, and she would merely wave at them. My father also told me that the kids were mercilessly cruel to my uncle because he was developmentally disabled--the word was “retarded” back then--he didn’t have a father, and his mother was odd and did things people didn’t understand. And he became a bitter, hateful man. His son, my cousin, is also developmentally disabled, and he’s become alcoholic. He’s also had a couple of children by different women--women who aren’t exactly high functioning by the way--and he doesn’t have the means to take care of them emotionally or financially.

Most of my mother’s family was in some way out of it. Many of them were scary people. And my mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. I was subjected to fundamentalism from my father’s side of the family. They tended to be more stable, but their love was conditional. Lots of rules. Lots of preaching. Lots of condemnation. I sometimes felt physically unsafe when I was around my mother’s people. Most of them lived in an old coal camp outside of town, and it was a very rough place. I hated going there, but my mother insisted on visiting every Sunday afternoon for years. When I was around my father’s family, I usually felt emotionally unsafe. These people looked for fault, and they would berate you when they found it. So I saw a lot of crazy stuff when I was a kid. And most of it went unexplained. And when I went to school, I was the shy, weird sissy boy. The only person who seemed to accept me and appreciate me for who I am was my mother, and she lived in her own world most of the time.

Of course I had my own anger issues, but it took me a while to deal with it because I spent my childhood braced for the unexpected, and I didn’t have any rational person to talk to about emotions. But I was smart enough to seek therapy the first chance I got, and that saved me. I started listing all of these things that happened to my therapist, and eventually--it took more than a year--she stopped me during a session and bluntly asked me if I was angry. The question took me by surprise because I never really considered it before. Anger wasn’t an emotion I was allowed to have. Anger was defiance. Anger was accusatory. Anger was mean and nasty. I didn’t want to be angry. But my therapist told me that if she were in my shoes, she would be angry. And I learned that you have to acknowledge your anger before you can deal with it.

I can now admit that I was angry, and I still am angry from time to time. I’m even filled with rage sometimes. But I deal with it. One of the things that helps is that I have the capacity to reflect on the complexity of life. I know my mother couldn’t help being ill. I know my father was not equipped to cope with having a mentally ill wife. I know what kind of environment my mother’s family came from--the depth of ignorance and poverty. I know the Bible thumpers in my father’s family were echoing what they had heard, and the judgment game was something they learned and picked up before they had a chance to think about it.

I also know that even though I’m a mess, I’m doing a lot better than many of my relatives. I’m not an alcoholic. I’m not a drug addict. I’ve never held up a store, ran over anyone while drunk, or raped anyone. I’m also still alive, and many of them are dead. (One cousin didn’t just kill himself, he blew himself up along with his entire apartment building. Thankfully, no one else was hurt. Talk about uncontrolled rage.) I know that life is hard for many people, so hard. Unbelievably and unimaginably hard. And I know that much of the time there are no easy answers or simple solutions. I’ve also known people who some might call evil and despicable, and on some days I might agree with them, but I grew up with them, and I caught glimpses of their humanity and the enormous pain they endured, pain no one has ever even attempted to sooth.