Category Archives: Social Commentary

June 9, 2010 · 11:44 pm

Yesterday, Once More

I’ll take us back to the 1960’s one more time…

I just came across a few snapshots in time. Some “time capsule” moments on YouTube.

I keep looking back because I keep wondering where the energy for change has gone.

It’s hard to believe how much times have changed…for the better– since the early 1960’s. But I never realized how depressing the 1960’s–which I always thought of a as a decade of hope and change– could be…It’s remarkable, given the restrictive society at the time, how much hope was alive then.

I wonder if it still is…

There were so many people afraid of change then– just like now.

Today, the Afghanistan war has just surpassed Vietnam as our longest war. Bush’s personal vendetta/ war or choice in Iraq is still going on. Ghetto’s still exist. The Tea Baggers prove racism is still alive . The old “Silent Majority”, which isn’t either, is still around. Post-feminism wants to return women to the kitchen and subservience, while the Men of the Religious Right still try to take away their right to control their own bodies. I’m almost relieved we haven’t come far enough on Gay Rights to start dismantling them…

I think we need to look back to see “the way we were” to see how far we have come.

Then, maybe, we can gain the courage and the energy to keep moving forward.

Entertaining Mr Sloane

They say our pets reflect our personalities. And that over time, we and our pets become more and more alike in our personalities. I like to think we choose our pets and they choose us because of our personalities being both complementary and challenging. Our energy says we belong together.

We have three pets. Our dog is Buckley– as in Betty, not William F.– and our cats are Mr Sloane and Emily. You can see their pictures on my Facebook page. All of them are “rescued” and came to us in their maturity. I know one is not supposed to favor one child over another but, truth be told, Mr Sloane is my favorite. The minute I saw him, I knew he belonged with us.

While he loves our cats and I love our dog, my partner, Steve, is more of a “dog” person and I’m more of a “cat” person. This is probably what makes our relationship work. We are alike enough to get along beautifully, yet different enough to make it interesting. We complement and challenge each other.

Buckley is more like Steve. Wide open, excited about everything, loving and up front. You know where you stand with Buckley and Steve.

I’m more like Mr. Sloane. That is why I say he is my favorite.

I don’t mean to leave out Emily. We love her, but she is different from us both. She is willful, demanding and wide open. She is a slut. She’s anybody’s girl. As long as you scratch her ears, she’s yours. She has to be the center of attention at all times. She’s loving, exasperating and stubborn. She reminds me of some people I used to date. If you read my previous blog on Relationships, she is Category One. But she is a special cat and we love her. She balances the energy in our house.

Back to Mr Sloane.

He came to us as Sloan, the name of his recent foster family. He had to be fostered as he did not get along well in a cage or in a group environment. He was five years old. We had to adjust his name, a little, to reflect his personality. He is definitely a “Mister”. He demands his honorific. He has dignity. We chose his name, also, to make a literary allusion/tribute to the Joe Orton play.

I will readily admit I identify with Mr Sloane- the cat, not the Joe Orton character.

Mr Sloane keeps a certain distance. He is an observer. He choses what he wants to get involved in. You have to gain his trust over time and only then do you get to see his real personality. He is cautious and deliberate. He doesn’t forget or forgive being slighted.

He is a control freak…We once accidentally locked him out on the screened porch overnight. He did not have access to his litter box or his food. He did some things that cost him his dignity, but he got through the ordeal. He has never recovered from that–and I understand.

Mr Sloane dances when no one is looking.

When he becomes fascinated by something, he digs in and gives it his total focus. Nothing else matters. In his case, it’s usually his laser light. I like to think I’m a little more complex.

If you want to be his friend, you have to approach him on his terms. There is a complexity there that it took us over a year to understand. He gives hints, not confessions, as to what he thinks and wants. You have to interpret him.

It takes some effort to get to know him. But it is worth it.

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Filed under Entertainment, My Journey, Social Commentary

Tagged as cats, pets

June 2, 2010 · 9:44 pm

`Myth of Competence’ is dead -Leonard Pitts Jr.

I love Leonard Pitts. He always says what I think much better than I can. I’ll have my own say on this latter this week. I only have so much time to blog…Here is an excerpt from his column that I read this morning. I encourage you to click the link to read the full column:

Weeks later, one other consequence becomes jarringly apparent: the Myth of Competence has died.

Meaning the belief that people who engage in high-risk activities — in this case, the ones who drill for oil 5,000 feet under the sea — know what they’re doing, that they have every contingency covered, that even their backup plans have backup plans.

Surely this is what Sarah Palin was thinking when she chirped, “Drill, baby, drill!” Surely this is what President Obama relied upon when he recently proposed to open new waters to oil exploration.

Anticipating protests from environmentalists, he even promised, that “we’ll employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration. We’ll protect areas that are vital to tourism, the environment, and our national security.”

Three weeks later, the oil rig exploded. So far, that protection he promised has been nonexistent. That faith in new technologies he mentioned has proven misplaced. And “Drill, baby, drill!” has come to seem tinnier and more childish than ever — energy policy as schoolyard chant.

We have been disabused of the Myth of Competence, shorn of the belief that the people in charge are capable of handling any eventuality.

`Myth of Competence’ is dead – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com.

The Long Goodbye

As many of you know, I have been a little preoccupied lately. We have finally reached the point where my sister and I are needing to transition my mother to Assisted Living due to Alzheimer’s Disease/Vascular Dementia. Being a lifelong Republican who worshipped Ronald Reagan, she’s probably almost satisfied that she has the same disease that ultimately did him in.

This is a very strange time for me. I won’t pretend or be dishonest. My mother is a difficult woman. We have had our issues, but she is my mother and we will do the right thing to be sure she is as safe and comfortable as possible during these final years.

What I find most disturbing about seeing someone at the end of their life is looking at what they missed. But I realize I can’t force my values or judgements on her or view her life too much through my own lenses. She is a product of a different era and had her own wishes and desires and probably was as happy as she could be given her expectations.

It’s the lowered expectations that disturb me.

When I watch “Mad Men” and see Don Draper and his family- at least in season one- I see our family, but in a much better neighborhood. I was always struck by how limited the options were for women in the 1960’s– and that is when she was in her prime.

I am grateful for one thing. I knew her four years longer than my sister. I knew her when she was still young and vivacious. Something happened in the late 1960’s and she became a different woman. I think it was the fact that she was not equipped to deal with change.

My mother was born in 1932 and lived in Danville, Virginia her entire life. She was raised to be get a “Mrs Degree” and she did. She had no education after high school and devoted her 20’s and 30’s to building my father’s career. When he died in the early 1980’s, she was lost. She tried religion, she tried following politics, but she never really found herself after she was no longer Mrs. H. B. Michaels. She had never really built her own identity or developed her own interests, so she had nothing to fall back on.

I also saw her and her friends from the 1960’s when I read “The Help.” I saw so many women, when I was little, who had no purpose and nothing to do, so they became obsessed with trivialities. I saw a little of Hilly and a lot of Elizabeth as representing my mother. If you looked in the medicine chest of every woman in Temple Terrace in the 1960’s you found two new wonder drugs: Birth Control pills and Valium. They were on the cusp of freedom and change, but didn’t know how to deal with it. Many of these women didn’t even get dressed until it was time for their husbands to come home for dinner. If the husbands didn’t spend too much time at Earl’s Bar and Grill and forget dinner…

My mother could be wonderful at times. She had my father build a stage in our backyard and organized plays with the neighborhood children. I think that’s where my love of theatre my have begun. She loved MGM Musicals and, as a child, I watched them with her. That was also probably the first thing that screwed up my early perception of life. It ain’t no MGM Musical, but I’m not sure she ever had that realization. She wanted things to be simple, clean and beautiful. She couldn’t deal when it wasn’t.

She did go back to work after my sister was born. Before I was born, she had been a receptionist at Dan River Mills. When she went back to work in her early 30’s, someone younger and prettier had that job. So she went to work at Hilton Hall with hundreds of other women who were smarter than their male bosses.

She was president of every Club she over joined. If she had had the education, direction and self confidence that would come with the Woman’s Movement, she would have had a different life. But she didn’t. She never could cook or run a house, but she knew she was supposed to do so. I don’t think she ever recovered from not being able to fill the role she thought she was supposed to fill and didn’t realize she should have tried something else. She went to college, briefly, in her ’50’s, but she didn’t have the self confidence to keep it up.

She became a master at denial. I don’t know exactly what went wrong around 1969, but I have my suspicions. The world was changing and she was frightened. She did not know what to do, so she ignored it and demonized any change. My father remodeled our house instead of buying her a new house. She never recovered from that. She started gaining weight. She and my father began to behave more like George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, than Ozzie and Harriett. Anyone within earshot knows this…

But she kept up appearances and dove deeper into denial. When my father became ill with cancer, I think it was almost a relief to her. She got to take care of him, deal with doctors and insurance companies and had a purpose for the first time in years. Like I said, when he died, she was lost. She didn’t have a self to fall back on. She was used to being someone’s wife or someone’s mother and had never found herself. She was not one for a Jill Clayburgh “Unmarried Woman” reinvention. She didn’t have the skill set.

I think I may, unknowingly, have been saying goodbye since 1969.

Frankly, she never dealt well with me once I told her I was gay. Her first reaction was that people would talk and what would her friends say. Then she worried it would ruin my career. Then she told me I was going to hell, so I did the same to her. I would not speak to her for more than 6 months. Then she tried to work it out. I give her credit for that. But we were never close again.

I had moved on, but she couldn’t. I loved the way the world had changed and embraced it. She was always stuck in Danville, Virginia as it had been in about 1960. I think that was the last time she was comfortable with the world.

So, it may be a blessing that she is moving to the place where she lives in the past. She was never comfortable in the present and she feared the future.

And we’ll try to continue to say goodbye with as much grace as we can muster.

5 Comments

Filed under My Journey, Social Commentary

Tagged as aging, alzheimer's disease, gay, parents, the south, vascular dementia, women

May 13, 2010 · 6:20 pm

My Advice On Relationships

I thought I might share some of my thoughts on relationships. I’m going to try to keep this at a PG-13 level and this advice is not intended for novices. I did not settle down until I was in my late 30’s and have been in a successful relationship for the last 13 years. Therefore, I think I can speak with some degree of authority. I thought it might help to share my “wisdom” with some of you who may still be playing in the minefields of dating.

If you are young and just starting out, this is not for you. My advice to you is to make your own mistakes and learn your own lessons. If you still think some enchanted evening, you may meet a stranger across a crowed room, etc. You are starting where I started. And that did kind of happened for me. It just took 30 some years for me to meet Steve at a Gallery fundraising event. And a couple of more years before we really connected for good. Good for you if it happens sooner. However, it is very rare for this to happen early in the game. Some of us have many and varied lessons to learn for ourselves on our journey before we are ready for Mr or Ms Right. These are merely the lessons I learned myself along the way to that “Some Enchanted Evening”.

First of all, some people will tell you every relationship is unique and/or there are many types of relationships. This is not true. I found you could– and should– determine pretty early on which of three primary categories into which a relationship might fall. These categories are:

People you sleep with
People you date
People you marry

Correctly classifying new relationships is key to managing your relationships successfully and avoiding drama and unnecessary heartbreak ,on either side, as things progress.

The first category “People you sleep with” can be tricky. These are usually people you are wildly attracted to, but who are totally inappropriate for either long-term relationships or, perhaps, public knowledge or co-mingling with your friends. Face it, you really shouldn’t be messing with these people in the first place. These relationships can be lots of fun, for a while, but you have to keep your perspective. You know these people may be gorgeous, amusing and fun, but you know, deep down inside, you really have nothing in common with them. Deep down inside you also may know, or suspect, that you don’t share the same values, interests or intellect. Proceed with caution here and never let your heart, or lower regions, confuse your brain. These are the most limited types of relationships and must be recognized as such.

The second category is more problematic. “People you date” are people who you could possibly move to the later category of “People you marry”, but you have to observe them very closely. Sometimes these relationships are of a time and place– High School and College romances are frequent examples. This category also includes gay men dating straight women- or vice versa- while they work things out as to who they really are. This category usually also includes workaholics, who value career above all else, and are thus not marriage material. Sometimes this category includes people who see you as part of category 1, but whom you have incorrectly classified due to insufficient initial information. If this progression from Category 1 to Category 2 occurs for you both, good for you. That is also rare. Overall, Category 2 is a category for temporary relationships where one or both parties knows or suspects it will not be a “forever” thing. Relationships in this category may be very rewarding and may last a long time– years in some cases– but they ultimately cannot last and will not result in a committed relationship. While these relationships can be great fun socially, you must manage expectations so that it does not result in unfairness or hurt to either party. Be careful here…

The third category, “People you marry”, is the rarest and most hard to find acceptable people to populate. To be in this category, both parties must be able to envision spending the rest of their lives together and building a life and a home together. This takes a very different skill set from the previous categories. You normally progress to this category from category 2, but seldom directly from category 1. You need stringent qualifications that must be met to put someone in this category. You must never, ever compromise.

My partner, Steve, is fond of saying that, when we met, he had three minimum qualifications for this category:

The person must have a real job– with benefits such as insurance and a retirement plan.
The person must have their own, nice place to live-not with their parents, for example.
The person must have a college degree, at a minimum.

These requirements are a very good place to start. Of course, I passed the test for him as he did for me. If you want to build a life with someone, you must be practical and think things through because in these relationships, the stakes are higher as you will ultimately share finances, property, pets and perhaps, children.

Most importantly, for this category, you must share common values and interests. You have to be able to talk to each other about anything. You must be able to be honest with each other and to trust each other completely. You can’t be walking on egg shells or in fear of discussing important topics. You must be sure they have a strength of character that will get you through both good and bad times together. They must understand the word “commitment” and be willing to work on your relationship every day by making your thoughts and feelings part of their every decision making process. You have to have mutual respect. With this foundation, you can move forward.

In any event, the most important thing is to follow your heart, but never ignore your head. Sex and infatuation are wonderful, but must be recognized as such. They don’t last forever in their original form. They mutate over time.

You also have to recognize that people don’t really change and you certainly can’t change them, so be sure you know what you are getting and categorize accordingly. Then determine how to proceed.

As the old saying goes, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince. But I think there really is a prince- or princess- out there for each of us. You just find them when the time is right– usually when you least expect it.

Take this advice for what it’s worth. This is how I saw the dating game and what I learned along the way. It worked for me and I hope it might help others still out there in the trenches.

It’s better advice than you’ll get watching “Sex in the City”….

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Tagged as relationships

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