Archive 2008

MY POLL IS BIGGER THAN YOUR POLL

July 1, 2008

As Americans, we are obsessed with public opinion polls. Gallup, Zogby, Pew, Quinnipiac, Harris, and on and on and on. We love being told what we think and why we think it. Personally, I think their value is limited and questionable. Stay with me. There’s a point. It might take a while to get there. But there’s a point.

Someone told me, a long time ago, that to understand what is really important to people, you have to read the Letters To The Editor.

He’s right. Here’s why.

Reading the Letters, you’ll find that what pisses people off is government lying, letting down their communities and failing to make tough decisions. People hate wimps. They’ll argue with anything, but they will always respect strong decision making skills. People care about what’s happening on their streets, in their schools and on their jobs. They care far less about what people are doing in their bedrooms or where celebrities are adopting their children.

If you read the Letters, you’ll find people care a great deal about the war in Iraq but not so much about the war between the Lohans. They care about gas prices, house prices, potholes, pollution, traffic, taxes, honest car mechanics, finding a plumber on a holiday and sending their kids to college. The most interesting thing about reading the Letters is the difference between the things that really matter in people’s lives and what the polls and politicians are talking about on a daily basis.

Remembering that people who are writing the letters actually have to stop what they’re doing and take the time to sit down, lay out their thoughts and then send them off shows how important they are to them. It’s one thing to be ambushed on a street corner by a pollster or to be called on the phone at random. It’s another to go out of your way to be heard.

Here’s the point.

The political season is in overdrive. The candidates are clear. The clichés are off and running. In the next few months, politicians and evangelists from every mountain, valley, plain and seashore will be coming out of the woodwork quoting every well known and obscure poll, claiming to be experts on what we all want and believe. In my opinion, 98% of them will be full of crap. They’ll quote the numbers, but the numbers fail to tell a complete story.

Polls are a dangerous and limited commodity. They ask limited questions of limited interest to a captive audience. They ask people to rank their interests and concerns from a menu that almost prevents a free exchange of ideas.

I love analogies, so here’s the analogy. You are invited to dinner with friends at an Italian restaurant of someone else’s choosing. You are presented with a menu of pasta and so forth. Now tonight, you really wanted crab cakes for dinner. But they're not an option. So, you choose the manicotti. The manicotti is tasty enough and when asked you say it was fine and everyone assumes you are full and happy. But you still would have been far happier with crab cakes.

Such is what can happen with polls. You are asked to rank education, gas prices, taxes and trans fats as the issues that most concern you. You dutifully answer the question and your opinion is registered. Unfortunately it might not reflect your true number one concern which might have been about job security, and was not included in the survey. If you try to volunteer that issue “off the menu”, you’re told it isn’t an option.

Not an option? Not an option for whom? Your true concerns are not an option? This is the problem with polls. They are designed to address political needs, not truen concerns.

I am sick and tired of being told what to think and what is important by people who can’t even ask the right questions. Don’t tell me my favorite color is green when the only choices you’ve given me are on a traffic light.

Personally, I like blue. Lapis, to be exact.

I recognize the reality of the world in which we live and the process to address large sections of public opinion. The realist in me knows this will not change and is what it is for a reason and forever. But please at least let's acknowledge that our lives are neither based on nor centered around whatever happens to be coming out of the latest Washington focus group or think tank survey. Our lives are both far more complex and far more simple. We deserve a little respect and a basic understanding of what makes lives tick outside the beltway and west of the Hudson.

By the way, with the exception of my civil rights soapbox, I try very hard to avoid writing about politics. There are no winners in a political pissing match. But I think it's time to recognize that, as a people, our concerns this year are far more complex that red state/blue state. We want to know what the vision is. We don't even need a promise of an immediate solution. Just a vision to show us that our new administration, whoever it is, will take off the blinders. I'm hopeful, but not confident.

Oh... and as for the title of this post...
My, you have a dirty little mind, don't you.

NOT GOING ANYWHERE

July 3, 2008

Now that Pride Week has come and gone for 2008, I am reminded of an important distinction that I think must be made in the quest for Equal Rights.

Tolerance vs Acceptance.

The gay community has been campaigning for, insisting on and rallying around the idea of "tolerance" since the idea of gay rights began. It is one of those favorite terms used by our supporters and opponents alike. Our best friends call for tolerance of all people. Our worst enemies are defined as textbook examples of intolerance.

I'm not sure we should want or accept the idea of "tolerance". I think we should demand nothing less than complete acceptance.

You tolerate a bunion. You tolerate your brother driving 50 miles an hour in the left lane of I-95. You even tolerate the loud frickin' neighbors upstairs. You tolerate something you really don't like and will be happy to see go away forever.

I don't think I want to be just tolerated.

There are those linguists who will argue that tolerance is a synonym for acceptance. That it is, in fact, a form of acceptance of those who believe or live differently than you do. Perhaps. However, even that liberal interpretation of tolerance still suggests that being gay is unusual, perverse, less than normal, and requiring society's special consideration.

Bullshit.

Acceptance is approval and welcoming. It is an invitation into your life and heart. There's quite a difference between acceptance of your best friend's new wife... and tolerance of her.

For some, this is a small thing. Nit-picking. A needless choice among equals. For others it will be a question of taking what we get, no matter what it is called. Kind of like settling for a scoop of store brand vanilla ice cream while the guy at the next table gets the Ben & Jerry's triple hot fudge sundae... and you both pay the same on the way out.

I don't like the option. This is a tough fight that has gone on for decades and will probably continue long after my ashes are washing up on a Pacific beach. So, if you're going to fight a tough fight, you might as well go for everything.

If all you can manage is tolerance, you're not doing enough. I demand acceptance.

The funny thing is, if you recognize and understand the difference, you're probably already there. If you don't, you're not even close.

OUT OF THE PICTURE

July 6, 2008

Nobody subscribes to Out for life.
(For the benefit of straight people, Out is a monthly magazine aimed at the Gay community.)

Unlike Time, Newsweek and even Gourmet, Out is not so much a chronicle of the ongoing history of our life as it is a chronicle of our underwear and cocktails of the moment.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because God knows every culture, class, demographic, orientation and time zone needs its own guide to hot and not. The trouble is that Out and its identity-challenged sister publication The Advocate are the only national news-like magazines we have. Except for a few struggling regional gay newspapers, there are no loud and proud gay news magazines standing up for us and staring down the nation’s bullies. There is nothing that we can own from the day we come out of the closet until the day they put us into the ground.

The Advocate once tried to fill that bill, and in their own minds, editors there might think they’re still doing that. But in reality, its little more than another version of the Big Gay Book of Bling.

The first time I subscribed to Out was when it and I were both quite young. I had just come out and was reveling in all things gay. It was my awakening, and I was going to conquer the world as a proud gay man.

Eventually I reached a point where I realized Out was becoming repetitive and my tastes were changing, so I let my subscription lapse. As a corporate gay man, I had other corporate gay people with whom to share interests, so Out was less necessary.

Then I was transferred from the very large southern city where my career had taken off to a much smaller Midwestern city and then a still smaller Mid-Atlantic community. I realized I needed to stay in touch with the outside gay world. That was also when AIDS was terrorizing our community, but our government was doing nothing. I subscribed again to Out, because I needed it to keep me tuned in to all of those things.

At some point sanity returned, I gave small town life the finger, and took a new, much better job with a much larger company in a mega-metropolis. Unlike my previous firm, my new big employer liked gay people a lot, promising non-discrimination and offering domestic partner benefits.

By that time I had also realized that Out really didn’t speak to my age group anymore, and really didn’t care who I was. If I wasn’t just barely drinking age, I was too old to matter. When it became clear that it took me only about two minutes to flip through the new issues of Out when they arrived, I decided to let my subscription lapse once again.

And time passed, until I entered my third season of Out. That would be the mid-life crisis. This is the time we want so badly to reclaim our lost youth and to do all the things we were too chicken-shit to do when we had the chance. This is an especially volatile time for gay men, since this is the time we achieve virtual irrelevance in the gay community. We might as well skip the Christopher Street stop in New York or the Dupont Circle stop in Washington. Not caring about us is one thing; not wanting us around is another, and that hurts.

So, in that effort to pretend I wasn’t as old as everyone else knew I was, I subscribed to Out for the third time. I tried to be interested in the music and the travel and the trends. I looked at the boys and sized up the clothes that would never come in sizes for me. It was a shabby fantasy at best, and one I never really believed.

So, here I am, back at the point where I can get through a complete issue of Out during a Project Runway or Big Gay Sketch Show commercial break.

My subscription will end before much longer, and I’ll let it lapse for the last time. The same for The Advocate. Everything here is interchangeable there.

It’s too bad. I won’t miss the magazines, although I’ll miss what they represented. I’ll miss the arrival of those plastic sleeves every month with the magazines that held the promise that there might be something relevant to my life. I’ll miss the hope that somebody at either magazine might realize that I still matter, and that the people who can actually afford the trinkets and toys that are advertised in the magazines are not the same ones the editorial department is targeting.

I will miss what the magazine represented in the reminders of the stages of my life that I shared with Out. I will miss the boldness of having Out on the coffee table when my (straight) brother comes to visit, and watching his face as he leafs through it and tries to comprehend what’s in it.

I know nothing about magazine marketing or Out’s market share, reach or circulation statistics. But I would take a wild guess that Out’s research shows people subscribe to Out for a couple of multi-year cycles, then go away as adulthood takes shape and they mature. They are replaced by a newer crop of readers, and the cycle continues. The well never really goes dry, but the numbers never really grow significantly. It’s a status-quo existence. And, in too many ways, that reflects how the gay community has allowed it’s political and socio-economic influence to languish as well.

But that’s a whole other subject.

Nobody subscribes to Out for life. And that’s a shame.

SWIMMING TAKES A DIVE

July 9, 2008

One of the best short vacations I ever took was going to the summer Olympics. To keep from dating myself, I'll refrain from mentioning the year. We were there the first week, which was the week of a lot of the preliminaries, and didn't get to see many medal finals. But still, it was an exciting experience. Since then, I've watched the games on television in an entirely different way.

But this year, as I watch the qualifying events on television, I am already disappointed. It has nothing to do with the performances or the athletic prowess. It's the bathing suits.

Where the hell are the Speedos????

What sick mind devised these swim suits for men that look like 1808 bathing costumes for women? Neck to ankle silicone suits?

Are you kidding me? Where are the skimpy little hankies that barely covered the goodies, and certainly NEVER hid the bulges?

Does anybody believe people watch the water events to actually see the dives or the butterfly strokes or the paddling skills? Uhhh... NO! We watch to see all the ripped boys in those too tight little bikinis diving in dry and jumping out wet, with the suits showing us as much forbidden real estate as network television can handle.

Supposedly these new Mormon suits help eliminate drag and friction in the water. Well, they may eliminate friction in the water, but they're not helping friction in the living room. If I wanted to see repressed stud boys, I'd go sight-seeing at the seminary in Yonkers. The whole idea of Olympic swimming is to feed the fantasies of women and gay men in living rooms around the world. I mean, get real... how many straight men do you know who actually watch men's diving? It's right up there with Project Runway and So You Think You Can Dance.

I'm told there's a whole international scandal about these suits, with other nations accusing the United States of trying to achieve an unfair advantage and get the upper hand on the competition. Well, while the US team is getting the upper hand, millions of boys at home have nothing to do with theirs.

If this catches on, the next thing we'll see is Superman in a kilt, Batman & Robin in basketball shorts, and Boys Gone Wild in Amish country. The Olympic team has forgotten the first commandment of competitive sports: It's not whether you win or lose. It's how good you look in the gear.

FEELING FEELINGS

July 10, 2008

A week or so ago, I was asked what I wanted most out of life. My answer was "Joy".

Then, I was asked if I had that.
I said no.
Had I ever had that?
No.

So then, I was asked to describe what no joy was like. It took me a few seconds to put it into words. But the best description I could muster was that it is an emptiness. It's like the black hole in space. I huge, dark void of nothingness. A vacuum with no light and no air where nothing can be seen, felt or touched.

I didn't realize until a little later how much I hated that conversation. It opened up a whole bunch of feelings that I work really hard not to feel.

I have spent the vast majority of my life trying to keep feelings as tied up and locked down as a pit bull at a kindergarten convention. The only way I can function is if whatever feelings I have are dumped in the ground, with cement poured on top of them.

The only thing feelings have ever brought me are pain, anger and disappointment. It isn't that I can't feel emotions or don't feel emotions. It's that nothing good has ever come of the feelings and emotions I have. The pain and unhappiness is crippling.

In the last year, I have had some very smart and caring people tell me over and over that I need to let the feelings happen, that I need to confront them, feel them, and that only by actually having them can I get past the point of pain and start moving toward joy. I tried that. I felt the feelings. I let them happen. I talked about them and I let the emotions happen. I fought back the tears and tried to understand how feeling the pain could move me out of pain.

It isn't happening. The only thing the feelings and emotions have brought me are more unhappiness and disappointment. I can't open myself up to that anymore.

I need to close the door on the feelings. The problem is, once you allow them in, it's a lot harder to force them out. So, I'm leaning hard on the door, pushing with all my might, to fight them and defeat them and make my way back to that black hole.

And while there might be no joy in a vacuum, there is no pain either.

COMPLETELY & TOTALLY

July 10, 2008

I'm not sure when I completely and totally fucked my life up.

If I could put an exact date on it, I might at least understand how things got this bad. At this point, all I can do is look at the path that got me here, and wonder how and why I ignored the signposts along the way. It's not that I didn't see them. I did. I just chose to ignore them.

The last, and perhaps only, contented time of my life was when I was 25. I was fresh out of college, had a job, living in Miami and discovering gay bars. I thought I was finally at a place that was right for me. And even though things were OK in Miami, what I really wanted to do was drop everything, move to New York, be a writer, and find the love of my life. It had been my dream since I was a kid. My job involved a certain amount of writing and people said I was good. Teachers in school had said I was good. And where else to find a man to love me, than New York. So, why not?

"Why not" happened when I started thinking about it too much... with my head instead of my heart. "Why not" happened when the voices in my head kept having this debate between doing the adventurous thing I always wanted to do... or staying where I was, in something safe and reliable. Safe and reliable was really the one thing in my life I had never had. Why should I give up safe and reliable for a dream?

So I didn't. I stayed where I was and never went searching for life and love in New York. That was a signpost.

By the time I was 29, I had moved up at work and was exploring jobs elsewhere. I was thinking Atlanta, Washington, Boston, Chicago or Los Angeles. Instead, I took the first job I was offered and went from Miami to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Believe it or not, a pleasant, livable city where I made some friends and was fairly successful professionally. I certainly didn't find love there, but I didn't go looking for it either. It was, however, the first time I began to fear my life was spiraling out of control.

It went from bad to worse. Bad life decisions took me to Virginia, back to Florida and then to Texas for the first time. The fact that I say "Texas" and "the first time" in the same sentence should be a sign of the disasters I created and the pit of despair I seemed to constantly call home. Along the way, there might have been opportunities to bring someone into my life. There might have been a time to stop being lonely. But, like everything else, I have always been too afraid. Fear of taking a chance, fear of rejection, shame, disgust, self-hating, self loathing... whatever you call it. My love affair was always with fear. Never with someone else.

I kept playing it safe. I kept pretending I was where I wanted to be, because I was too afraid or too ashamed, or both, to say "Fuck this" and start over.

My addictions (there, I said it) were getting the best of me. My life was more out of control every day, although I somehow managed to hold it together at work. There were occasional bizarre behaviors and ludicrous decisions. I pretended to be audacious, eccentric or charmingly crazy. In reality, I was out of my fucking mind. And I was alone, because it was too dangerous to let anyone else see what a mess I really was.

I made a stab at a drastic career change that finally brought me to New York (the first time). I failed miserably, because I was too fucked up to admit I had a lot to learn, and I was working for people more messed up than me. And I made the mistake of living in Chelsea. If I didn't feel bad enough about who I was already, living in the center of Pretty-Boy America made it even worse. Look for love? I was too afraid to look for the laundry room.

I ran back to safe and secure, where I have been ever since. Now, I am at an age and a point in my life where change just doesn't seem to be an option.

Someone once told me after one of my disastrous life choices "Well, you really screwed the pooch on that one". I hated her for saying out loud what I knew too well. I still do. The truth is, I started screwing the pooch back when I took that first safe road, and stayed on that course over and over, despite the gnawing, screaming desire to go in search of joy.

"Safe" is like a drug. "Safe" is addicting because it lulls you into a false sense of security. It makes you feel protected, warm and oblivious to what is happening around you. But like drugs, "Safe" is a lie. It will sneak up on you, drain you of everything that once was good, and then abandon you on the street, with no one to hold you and nothing to protect you.

Every day, I work on trying to fix what is broken. I can barely stand to get up in the morning and face my life. I'm told it will get better. The pain will pass. I will overcome the fear. I will learn to live and love in the now. I spend a great deal of time with people who like to say "We will love you until you learn to love yourself." I'm not sure they have that much time or patience.

There's no one place or one incident or one date in time I can point to where I can say "This is where it started to go wrong." I've always played it safe because I never believed I was good enough to play it any other way, or that anyone else would want to play with me.

I lot of paragraphs ago, I started off by saying I'm not really sure when I completely and totally fucked my life up. Maybe it was when I took my first taste of "Safe" and never learned how to stop.