new video: invisible but not alone

my nearly 60 year journey in about six minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrPDwyU5ZbI&feature=plcp

Happy and Dark Thoughts

I responded to a Facebook post this morning with this statement: "Sorry to hear you've been feeling lonely and longing for a relationship. Totally agree that it is no fun...Here's something you can try that might open up your thinking. Write the letters A-Z down the left hand side of sheet of paper. Fold it in half. Label the first column happy thoughts and the 2nd column gloomy thoughts. Then try to come up with a word or phrase or even sentence starting with each letter. It's just a way of affirming what you like or long for and also getting the dark stuff out on paper. It's helped me many times. Of course your mileage may vary. But if you give it a try let us know what you think. Hugs and good luck."

Then I decided to take my own advice and here's the list:

a - awesome / awful
b - beauty / bad breath
c - companionship / craziness
d - dependability / discrimination
e - elegance / extreme disorganization
f - funny, fun-loving people / frustration
g - green grass, freshly cut / gangrene, needing amputation
h - hello, people who say hello to you / hell, when it's a hell of a day
i - innovation, cool new stuff / insincerity, fake stuff
j - jelly, jam and buttered toast / junk that's just clutter
k - kin who are kind / kin that don't accept you
l - love, especially the unconditional kind  / leaders who are abusive
m - men who are kind and caring / men who are jerks
n - nature that nurtures, a sunny day / nature that kills, a tornado
o - opportunities that lift / oppression that crushes
p - pretty stuff, see beauty above / petty people who piss you off
q - quality that counts / quality that's just an empty word
r - recreation with loved ones and friends / rejection
s - security / stupidity
t - trust and trees / too tired, the state of being
u - understanding / underfunding
v - victory, when you get a great win / valentines, never received
w - wonderful moments, fresh and remembered / wonderbread, stale
x - marking the spot of a treasure / when you didn't want it to end
y - you make me feel so young, Sinatra / yikes, Scoobee-Doo
z - zoos and z's, snoozing / z's not enough, as in sleep deprivation

Do I feel better? Somewhat. I thought of some positives I wouldn't have otherwise. But the same is true of the negatives. On balance, though, a good exercise in counting blessings and exploring reality. I guess another things that works about this for me is finding connections. It's easy to be black and white and just find opposites. There's a place for that. But it's also great just to riff and have fun with it.

the illusive third way

Congratulations to Beck who has been out to his wife seven years and recently had a Capraesque moment with his wife. It certainly is relevant to those in mixed orientation marriages and helps put my couple of decades of being out to my wife in perspective. 

My three decade marriage to the female love of my life is wonderful and difficult. My decade of friendship with the male love of my life is also filled with wonder and challenge. 

I have sought an illusive third way as I know Beck and many others have. Perhaps we find it without knowing it, by keeping covenants yet seeking to embrace our full identity as same gender loving men married to remarkable women, as fathers, sons, brothers and friends, as men of faith and doubt.

sort of a retweet

I'm so glad a friend put a link to this on Facebook,  but if you're not on Facebook, I'm placing this here just for you:

Kent Boyd and Neil Haskell

Even though it's been viewed more than 155,000 times, if you haven't seen it I wouldn't want you to miss it. What do I think about it?  Here's what I said on FB: 

"Stunningly portrays the advance and retreat, betrayal and bonding, acceptance and rejection that are so common in the workplace, politics, religion and in our personal relationships..."

Not hungry? Just wait a while.

Beck jolted me out of my silence with his entry the Hunger that never goes away, and his question "Will it ever?" All of which prompted this reply:


Beck, my dear friend, do other hungers really ever go away?

You eat a Thanksgiving Feast and a few hours later, what do you want? More food. Another piece of pie. Maybe a cold turkey sandwich. (pun intended)

You attend the symphony or an engaging play or a great ball game. And what happens a few days or weeks or months later? You want more music, more drama, more sports.

You buy a fast new computer, or a new car, or a new suit. It's wonderful at first. Then in a while the computer doesn't seem all that fast any more. The car loses the new car smell. The new suit becomes just a suit. And eventually you hunger again for new technology or attire.

At least I do. So...

Just when I think I've accepted my MOM relationship, I find there's some new wrinkle, or some old one that returns.

Just when I think, I've got it pretty good, something comes along to show me that while I am blessed, I am also greatly challenged.

Just when I think I can swim fluently, I don't breathe right on a flip turn and a little water goes up my nose.

So yes, I relate to your hunger that never goes away. I feel it too. I do an innocent online chat with an old buddy, and pretty soon all I can think about is being in his arms.

But I also realize that most everything in life ebbs and flows. The rain--I hope, I pray, I imagine--will eventually give way to sunshine. Hey I live in Salt Lake not Seattle. And then after a while it will be too hot and I'll long for cool rainy days like today.

I have no answers. But I'm grateful for the way you pose questions. And I'm grateful for your friendship. Maybe our satisfaction in life relates more to the challenge of asking unanswerable questions rather than ease of finding questionable answers.

What do you think, Beck?

It's You I Like

Again Vic has inspired me. This time in his Gay Gospel Doctrine Class posting today. His take on God's unconditional love for all of his children reminded me of this Fred Rogers song:

It's you I like.
It's not the things you wear.
It's not the way you do your hair,
but it's you I like.
The way you are right now.
The way down deep inside you.
Not the things that hide you.
Not your toys.
They're just beside you.

But it's you I like.
Every part of you.
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings,
whether old or new.
I hope that you'll remember
even when you're feeling blue,
that it's you I like.
It's you yourself.
It's you.
It's you I like.

So the takeaway for me is that thanks to God's unconditional love for all of us, we all have multiple opportunities--I have multiple opportunities--to feel his love for me and for others. If I know I am fully loved for who I am right now; and if I know that unconditional acceptance and love is in place right now for all of us on this planet; I can feel less critical, I can love myself, others and God with greater depth and understanding.

And if not, I can at least listen to Mr. Rogers and remember that I have felt this love before and it is possible to feel it again. The problem isn't in God's always beaming sunshine, but in my own cloudy days and nights of darkness when I fail to remember that dawn is only a few hours away, that blue skies will eventually prevail. God loves us, no matter what.

Monday Morning Moho Prayer

Dear Father in Heaven, I'm grateful for this day, another day to breathe, walk, smile, work, eat, and interact with my family, associates and friends. Thank you for granting me, and so many others on this small planet another day of life. Please bless us all. The nearly seven billion of us now on the planet. Please bless my loved ones, known and unknown. My future sons-in-law and grandchildren. My wife, my children, my grandchild, my sister, and those on the other side of the veil, my mother, my father, my grandparents. Bless and help me to bless the men and women I will meet. The men and women I know now. Please bless my wonderful moho brothers and sisters. Bless us that we might feel loved and loving. That we might reach out to those we know and don't know. That the light we sometimes see in each other's eyes, will been seen in our eyes by someone who needs to see that light this day. And bless us that we might also be warmed and illuminated as we do. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

The Morning Breaks

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” –Romans 8:38-39

I love the idea that God's love is always there operating in our lives even when we don't realize it, just as the sun is always shining even though we can't always see it.

I played with dolls

My sisters had dolls and I liked to play with them. My parents gave me toys for boys like trucks, trains, Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets. I also had weapons including toy rifles, pistols and fake knives made of rubber. Some of this stuff was kind of interesting, but not anywhere near as cool as dolls.

I also liked purses. It seemed to me that guys got ripped off just having a little wallet, when girls and moms got to have these interesting and colorful compartments to keep their stuff in. Evenually I outgrew my fascination with dolls and purses. Maybe it's because my parents steered me in other directions.

I don't have any early memories of being called a sissy, pansie, faggot, queer, homo. Not when I was a little boy. But the I think I got called all of those in junior high. It's not like I was dragging dolls to school with me or carrying around a woman's purse. But I wasn't interested in sports and I wasn't good at them, and I was interested in art. I also remember that as boys my age talked about how wonderful girls were, I was noticing the guys. Everything about them seemed noteworthy: their eyes, their hands, how they combed their hair and if they could grow decent sideburns. I couldn't.

I wonder if there had been gay-straight alliances in Utah schools 40 years ago, if I would have participated. Probably not. I knew I was gay, that I was strongly attracted to the same sex. I could admit it to myself, but not to anyone else. I remember thinking I will never, ever tell anyone. I also remember the first time I made out with a girl. I became aroused and I thought, maybe I'm not gay after all. I enjoyed dating girls. I enjoyed kissing them, but I didn't want to go beyond kissing. I heard other boys talk about their sexual adventures with girls and I thought that sounds gross. Sometimes I'm amazed that I made it through junior high and high school. Sometimes it seems a miracle that I fell in love with a woman, married her, and that together we have raised a wonderful family.

When I look at this painting of the little boy sitting on the steps, I think, I know that boy. I was once that little boy. I'm glad he got so much love and affirmation for who he was. I'm sorry that he was sometimes taunted for being different, but he did the best he could with what he had, and somehow life has turned out pretty good for him.

Other little boys who liked dolls were not so lucky. Many have died from a variety of causes. Some have been murdered. Some have killed themselves. Some have lived lives of isolation and loneliness. And some have flourished. They've lived, loved and learned. Some have married women. Some have married men. All of us are human. What we have in common is greater than our differences. All of us have the need to touch and be touched, to love and to be loved, to belong to and contribute to something greater than ourselves, something that matters, something that makes the world a better place, even it it is for just one child sitting on a step holding a doll.

The Men in My Life

I don't really know when I started to notice them, the men in my life. It was probably before I could talk. The first men I noticed were my dad, my grandpas, uncles and neighbors. Sometimes they'd whisker me. That made me love my mom's soft face, but later I would hunger for their whiskers again. I would long for their whiskers so badly that any whiskers would do. Maybe that's why I loved that old song Razor Face so much as a teenager. Maybe that's why I'm still fascinated by beards and sideburns, even as my own fade from brown with a little red, to grey with a lot of white.

What I felt as a small child, as best I can remember it anyway, was safe and protected. As I grew a little older, I found that boys, especially older boys, could sometimes be mean, but they weren't men. They were just boys.

When I started to become a man myself, I sometimes doubted myself. I might look like a man. I might have a man's voice and his strength. I might even be manly to some, but am I just pretending. It took a long time for me to understand that a man can still sometimes feel like a child. That that's OK sometimes.

I've been blessed with so many good men in my life. Men who have helped me learn and grow and be myself. Even mean men who have helped me learn what I wanted to be, because they were jerks. That also took a while to figure out.

I've never had a lover man. But I sure have had some good friends. I've had a lot of crushes on men over the years. I still do. But I don't crush on everyone. Some men and just there and I'm pretty chill about it. They might be friends or acquaintences, neighbors or quorum brothers, even some bloggers I've never met. I'm comfortable around them, for the most part, because they're just part of the environment, with only a little bit more presence than furniture. I'm glad there are many of them. They make life stable and comfortable.

But then there are the men who mean something more. We may or may not know each other, but these are the men I notice. Sometimes I feel that here in the blogosphere, too. There's sometimes just something about the way a fellow writes that intrigues me. I work with some of these kinds of intriguing men, too. I go to church with some of these men. I have some friendships with some of these men. I notice when they're around, and sometimes when they're not. I notice what they wear, and whether they've shaved, and if they seem happy or not, and how they smell and what they say and don't say.

I notice their eyes and their voices. Sometimes when they talk my mind wanders. I sometimes hear the sound of their voices more than I listen to their words. This can be dangerous in the workplace. I might miss something I really do need to know.

There was a time when I thought I don't want to feel this feeling, I don't want this buzz, this attraction. I can't handle it. I don't want it. I want it to go away. I guess that could happen to me again someday, but I'm glad I've gotten used to this something, this quality that is as life affirming as water, food, breath, shelter, warmth or beauty.

And so my thoughts circle back around to shelter, safety, protection. Is that what I feel when I'm sitting alone like the guy in the Steve Walker painting, alone but not all alone, feeling the spirit of those I love and those who love me?

Visions, Hugs and Kisses

I need to draw closer to Heaven. I need to affirm my testimony that there is an unlimited source of comfort, encouragement, love, support, and inspiration. I need to realize once again that our Heavenly Parents and our Savior are as concerned about us as any loving earthly family would be about loved ones far away from home on an important mission.

I've thought along these lines several times in the last few days, and it happened again this morning when I learned of this story told by Melvin J. Ballard in 1917:

"I had been on the Fort Peck Reservation for several days with the brethren, solving the problems connected with our work among the Lamanites. Many questions arose that we had to settle. There was no precedent for us to follow, and we just had to go to the Lord and tell Him our troubles, and get inspiration and help from Him. On this occasion I had sought the Lord, under such circumstances, and that night I received a wonderful manifestation and impression which has never left me. I was carried to this place—into this room. I saw myself here with you. I was told there was another privilege that was to be mine; and I was led into a room where I was informed I was to meet someone. As I entered the room I saw, seated on a raised platform, the most glorious being I have ever conceived of, and was taken forward to be introduced to Him.

"As I approached He smiled, called my name, and stretched out His hands towards me. If I live to be a million years old I shall never forget that smile. He put His arms around me and kissed me, as He took me into His bosom, and He blessed me until my whole being was thrilled. As He finished I fell at His feet, and there saw the marks of the nails; and as I kissed them, with deep joy swelling through my whole being, I felt that I was in heaven indeed. The feeling that came to my heart then was: Oh! If I could live worthy, though it would require four-score years, so that in the end when I have finished I could go into His presence and receive the feeling that I then had in His presence, I would give everything that I am or ever hope to be!”
(Melvin J. Ballard—Crusader for Righteousness, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966, p. 65–66.)

My questions for you are: Have you had experiences like this? What were your feelings? Is such male-on-male smiling, hugging and kissing appropriate in other contexts? If so, when? The first time I witnessed two men I know kiss on the lips was only a few years ago. The kiss was between a dying father and his adult son. I later held the dying man's hand while his wife and son were out of the room. I'm not sure I would have done so if I had not witnessed the kiss he exchanged with his son. Have you had experiences like this? What were your feelings? What can we moho's learn from such experiences?