Come Again

 2025? Awful. We can all agree. Just awful.

I was reminded of Mrs. Windsor, almost as was Mrs. Schleswig-Holstein Sonderburg-Glucksburg, aka Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, and successively Helen Mirren, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman, and Imelda Staunton. So, the other night I watched the late Queen, the actual one give that speech at the Corporation of London luncheon to mark her 40th year as head of The Firm. You know the speech, it's the one about her "Annus Horribilus." Remember? Three of the old girls four children got or were getting divorced, Princess Diana smoked her soon to be ex on the television, the very institution of monarchy -- that quaint billion dollar antique -- tottered like a Chinese porcelain on a narrow plant-stand, and then poor Lizzie's favorite castle burned down, mostly. 

Now, it can be hard to feel much sympathy with anyone who gets to have a "favorite" castle, you know? I get that. I have little to no sympathy with monarchs and monarchy as an institution. "No Kings," as the best people are saying these days! Honestly, that man who wrote The Queen and then The Crown, he made it harder to only see the proud uselessness of the House of Windsor and the world's richest white woman. He made her human, damn him. Well, him and Claire Foy and the rest. So, Liz had what she thought at the time was going to be about the worst year ever, right? Took it on the chin, she did. Rather her raison d'être, that. In a quiet way however the Queen did do something pretty extraordinary in that speech, not perhaps unprecedented but certainly rare. Basically, she said, right out loud, in public, "ouch," and she also asked in so many words if everyone might, just this once, ease up a little, 'cause it had been by any measure, as she said, a horrible year. (Honestly, it's like she had feelings or something. It was eerie.)

But we've all had horrible years, right? I know I certainly have. My own "Annus Horribilis" came a quarter of a century ago. There was a disputed election, the Supreme Court basically picked a fool. It was grim. That was also the year my best friend died, I nearly died, and then I lost my job. Damn, right? My friend Peter was in San Francisco and I was living by then in Southern California and managing a famous Gay & Lesbian bookstore. When I took that job I still didn't drive or own a car because as an adult I'd always lived in civilized communities, but then I found myself not only in suburban Orange County, California, but also learning to drive on LA freeways, and then commuting forty-four miles each way every day, which I did because I loved that job and that bookstore. I had my license for about three days when Peter called and asked me be with him because he was scared. I had to drive the length of California to get there. Happened more than once. The last time his family called me. Pete was back in the hospital and he wasn't coming out. I drove north and spent a week or better staying at my dear friend Richard's apartment and then in Peter's lonely little place, getting up at weird hours to move the car. Terrible that that is one of my strongest memories of that time, setting an alarm clock to run out in the dark and move the stupid car so I didn't get a ticket for parking overnight on the street! I stayed as long as I dared and then I decided I had to get back to my job. The bookstore was already in all kinds of trouble when they hired me. It didn't get better in the years I was there. I had to get back, go home, leave Peter. That last morning I went again to sit beside him. When the nurses clearly hadn't in a while, I gave him a bath. When he woke up for awhile he made blurry eye contact with me just long enough to tell me to "stop staring, it's rude." Sorry. I kissed him and we told each other that we loved each other and then I left to drive the six hours home. He died before I got there.

After I'd given the eulogy at his funeral in Pennsylvania I came home, went back to work again, and then had a horrible pain in my side. I had a check-up scheduled for Monday. It was the weekend, so I waited. By the time I went to my appointment I could hardly walk. The doctor took one look and ordered an ambulance. It was a big practice, a huge Kaiser Clinic. They decided it wasn't safe for me to walk back out the way I came in. They put me on a gurney and passed me through a window into the ambulance, where I may or may not have died a little (and no, I didn't see God, or my grandma, or a bright, white light -- and come on, who wants direct, bright, white light when one is not looking or feeling one's best? How cruel is that?) At one point I sat up on the gurney and the EMT's voice broke like an adolescent when he said, "Please lie down, sir!" My hands were blue. It turns out that my appendix had burst a few days before my scheduled appointment and I had gangrene! Gangrene! Can you imagine?  What a truly weird, eighteenth century disease with which to be diagnosed in the first year of the twenty first century. It was like being told one was suffering from dropsy, or scurvy, or a floating uterus. I got twenty-four staples in my gut. It was a month before I could really walk with a cane. 

And then I got fired. While I was away, the owners sold the bookstore to a guy who lived right around the corner. So he really didn't think he'd need a manager, but thanks though. Done. I'd about gone into bankruptcy, managing that place, worked nights, weekends, lived in a motel, didn't get a raise, blah blah blah. So after that wonderful meeting I drove straight home. Never went back.

So 2000 was a horrible year, my "Annus Horibilis." I mean how could things get any worse, honestly? Right? 2001 just had to get better, am I right? What else could go wrong?!

Now here it is 2025 and I'll be honest, this hasn't been winner either now has it? In fact, I feel safe in saying it turns out to be ever so much worse than we ever let ourselves think even as short a time ago as that long lost paradise of 2024. I mean... phew. 

And my mother died. In February. I went to see her like I've done for years, on my vacation in the summer of 2024 and we had a lovely visit and then she got very ill one evening when everybody else: my sister and brother and sister-in-law and our friends had all gone into town to see live music and Mum and I were home by ourselves and she got sick. And then she got sicker. And I didn't have a car because everybody had driven all the vehicles in to see the show, so I had to call them at the concert and tell them to come home which they did. We took Mum to the emergency room and spent a very long time there like you do and then finally a little doctor came in and told us there was "an obstruction" and it was probably cancer. Mum was 92. She had survived two cancers already. Even the surgery to properly diagnose the cancer would probably have killed her. Then she went to another hospital, a better one in Erie, and they told us pretty much the same damned thing. She didn't want any of it. She'd survived all that, twice. Not again. "Take me home," she said, so we did.

I stayed until autumn and then I had to get back to my job -- my job that didn't end this time, but changed, a lot. Mum celebrated her ninety-third birthday in January. I wasn't there. I made it back to her house the day before she died and she got to see me and I got to see her and we got to laugh and cry and then she went to sleep and then the next morning she died. I stayed to give her eulogy, we gave away some of her chicken collection to anyone who came by, and then I had to get back Seattle, to husband, and to work. 

Everything about this year then has been hard. Nothing so bad as when she died, but nearly all of it complicated, confusing, hard.

More than once when I was alone with Mum, when she was asleep in her chair, just as I'd done when we were taking care of my Dad at the end, years before, I'd find myself standing out on the porch, to catch my breath as it were and not smile for a bit. And sometimes with not a thought to do so, I'd sing a snatch of something just to make the moment go by a bit easier. Lord knows what I was singing. It was alright. She couldn't hear me at the best of times usually, even with her "ears in" -- meaning her hearing aids.

One song I do remember. A folk song. Only knew the chorus really, but I was wrong about that. I remembered more than I'd thought, and it wasn't a folksong actually. It was a very old song, but it was by a famous songwriter, our first really: Stephen Foster. Remember him? Old Kentucky Home and Camp Town Races and "Beautiful Dreamer, wake unto me, / Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee...," etc. 

Problematic we'd call ol' Stephen now. He wrote for the most popular entertainments of his day, Minstrel Shows. Songs of the South, so to say and this despite the fact that he was a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania boy who mostly lived in New York and as I understand it went South exactly once and did not stay. He also wrote what they called "Parlor Songs." These were rather lachrymose ballads of "pale drooping maidens," usually pining for lost love and that sort of thing. It was one of these I remembered a little and sang alone on my mother's porch.

"Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,

While we all sup sorrow with the poor;

there's a song that will linger forever in our ears, 

Oh! Hard Times come again no more."

Now this is interesting. Stephen Foster knew sorrow. He had what they might have called "a weak frame" and was frequently ill. At just 37 and alone in his hotel room he fell and either was injured grievously or cut his own throat. Very sad. Despite his great success and his lasting fame, a very sad end indeed. But what is more interesting is when I came to read about this particular song, the one I sang, Hard Times Come Again No More, written in 1855 at the height of his power and popularity. And what makes it interesting? I'll tell you. (I find comfort in reading and research. Something I've always done to escape.) 

Note that in this first verse and throughout he addresses not God, but his listeners, his audience, the people well enough off to presumably have a piano in the parlor and a parlor in which to gather round and sing. As I say, the song is not a prayer,  but an invitation to what we would call mindfulness. It is a plea not for divine intervention, but ours. 

"Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, 

Hard times, hard times, come again no more.

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

Oh! Hard times come again no more."

The composer quotes the cry of the destitute and the sufferer, it is with their voice that he calls us to witness and intervention. And he addresses us again, those better off:

"While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,

There are frail forms fainting at the door;

Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say

Oh! Hard times come again no more."

Extraordinary. When I was repeating the chorus and snatches of that first verse, it was frankly with little more than self-pity. Poor me, worried me, busy me, me losing my mother.  Shamefully self-absorbed. No wonder I was careful that no one should hear me.

My friend Nancy recently posted a brief poem, For Instance is the title, by John Ciardi and those last lines stuck with me:

"Not everything that happens / is a learning experience. Maybe nothing is." Yeah, that. Remember that.

And yet we order even our memories to make meaning where there might not have been any, or much, at the time those memories were made, yes? It is what we as a species do: we make sense when there may not be any. But the idea that we can or should desist is, I think, if not wrong then not likely. Can't be helped. We want lessons, don't we? Coincidences and meaning and uncanny scenes that foretell and summarize and distill what otherwise is just pain. We want poems.

And that's why we need art. That's why we make it, require it, enjoy it even when it is sad. Art makes the sense we can't otherwise, even if it's little more than a feeling.

"Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears." Yes, let's. There's something in that, isn't there? We can draw not only strength but joy from  what well-meaning people call "a sadness shared." More importantly, we can better remember even what is awful when it is made meaningful, given shape, set in story, song, art.  It is good to stop and think not just of my problems, my sadness, but of what it is to suffer and to live. It is good to be reminded even in mourning that events as they have happened around me, do not belong to me; as if other people's suffering, as if even the deaths of people I have loved do not have have meaning because I l knew and loved those people but rather because their lives were fully vested with meaning, with or without me, that their lives mattered simply for having been lived. I pause to remind myself that this horrible year, like the last and the others, is not happening to me so that I might draw a lesson from it.  (Remember when our mothers reminded us that there were starving children who would be glad of the food we wouldn't eat? They were right, our mothers. Often. Mostly.) I must try to remember that all the lives lost and all the living that was in them, all the life around me past and present, lived by those I loved and those I didn't and those unknown to me, had art in them, beauty. Better to be humbled, awed by how little any of it is to do with me. All I can do, all we can do, is try to relieve some of the burdens of others, ease their way: feed the poor, protect the innocent, fight the power of bad and stupid men, and remember what it is for those who know hard times as we, in fact, do not. And stand against forgetfulness, self-pity, vulgarity, callousness, cruelty. We must as best we can, also sing.

"'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,

Hard times, hard times, come again no more

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

Oh! Hard times come again no more,

Oh, hard times come again no more."

That in mind, a moment's mirth and beauty, yes? and so ... A Christmas Memory, by Truman Capote.

A Caricature

 

A Caricature

 

Witness: The great state of Oklahoma ranks 50th in education. For children in Oklahoma public schools, let me explain that there are only fifty states so that means… ? This feller wanted not just Bibles, but Trump Bibles in every classroom — and believe it or not that was not even his worst or most dangerous “idea.” Bye, buddy.

Cots and Chairs

 Charlie Kirk was a cunt and I’m not sad that he’s dead. 

I say this, but then you probably already know. You know. Maybe not the word you’d choose, but still. You knew. Didn’t need me to tell you. Trust me though, there are plenty who don’t. I’m not talking about his friends, family, collaborators, not the men who funded him or the little incel pricks who cheered him when he brought his medicine show to campus. I don’t mean the fuckwits on Fox or the NYT opinion page who nowadays are basically the same but with their flies up and with bigger words. 

I mean just people; people you may know too, friends and relations. Woman my age from my hometown talking on social media about Charlie Kirk’s “decency,” which is like talking about a quadriplegic’s ballroom dancing. And not just her: retired nurse on my friend’s Facebook page admitting she doesn’t really follow politics (!) but she admired Charlie because he was obviously a good Christian. More than a few of those I saw. Bottle Blonds Kristin Chenoweth and Selma Blair being stupid. Various well-meaning souls reposting that picture of Charlie frolicking on a beach with his wife and children, as if that photo negates everything the man ever actually said and did to make America so much worse than he’d found it. I felt some obligation to disagree where I could. Usually I’d just scroll by, maybe mute, or “unfriend.” Not sure why I felt obliged to try. Didn’t even curse! In fact I tried very hard to be respectful of the people who expressed sympathy and regret — two qualities of which Charlie Kirk himself was devoid.

When I said he was a bad man who preached hate, I was told, “what you speak reflects your own heart,” and that I was talking about myself when I said that. I was also told that I was “on the side of the terrorist,” and that I was endorsing murder.

Right about here in any opinion piece about his assassination is where one is meant to disown political violence, guns, and murder. Shall we take that as given? After-all, and unlike Charlie Kirk, I’ve never endorsed the idea of stoning anyone to death, or described murdered school children as the price we must sadly pay to maintain the Second Amendment. Just to be thorough, I’ve also never advocated the suspension of due process, using deportation as terror, espoused the inferiority of women or races other than my own, or made blacklists of supposedly traitorous college instructors. 

Safe to say then that whatever I may be, good and bad, I’m proud to not be a reactionary opportunist like the late Charlie Kirk — which is why I can’t understand pretending to be sad about his death. He was a Christian White Nationalist, or put it another way, a cracker-fascist. I don’t mourn dead Nazis, nor worry over much about their widows and orphans. The man proclaimed empathy to be a mistake. In his case, for once he was right. Pity is wasted on the memory of the pitiless.

Now do I have either empathy or pity for the idiot who shot Charlie Kirk? Nope. Not a bit. He didn’t bump off Reinhard Heydrich. He killed a loudmouth campus bully, not a mass murderer. True, I was amused to see Kash Patel and company bumbled about for days trying to find this mastermind, only to have the dude’s dad all but walk him into the police station on the end of a rope, but that wasn’t anything to do with hoping the killer might get away. Fuck him. Let him rot in prison until he dies of old age. 

It does feel however that we absolutely must challenge the recasting of Charlie Kirk into any kind of martyr. He wasn’t “an influential media personality,” nor a “representative young conservative” nor “a rising star in Republican circles,” — all descriptions in print and broadcast media I encountered this week.  Nope. Charlie Kirk was a complete piece of shit and we cannot let them polish this turd into some kind of American hero just because some simpleton with a riffle murdered him mid hate-speech.

It feels exhausting already challenging this new false narrative even if only on the social media of vague acquaintances. Not brave, telling some elderly soul who “doesn’t really follow politics” that this was a bad man. Feels a little mean, frankly, like pointing out that this or that touching photo of celebrity A weeping by the casket of celebrity B is actually just Ai. It was a nice thought, wasn’t it? Yeah, well, but it’s also bullshit. It’s fake. Have to keep saying it because that’s the truth. Remember Truth? It’s not about having the answer or being the one telling the truth or explaining anything to anyone so much as it is just refusing the lie.

No. You don’t get to call Charlie Kirk a good Christian, or any kind of good. That’s a lie. He wasn’t a nice man. He wasn’t bringing Christ back onto campus. Charlie Kirk was an ill-educated, egocentric, power-hungry bully and a garbage thinker. Charlie Kirk was a soulless goon.

No, he didn’t deserve to die for that, but he doesn’t deserve anybody’s tears either. The world isn’t going to get any better because he was shot and killed. Might get worse because of this, history shows. Definitely worse if we don’t tell the truth about what a lier he was. Have to contradict the lie that he was ever anything else. 

Meanwhile, sending cots and chairs, right? Cots and chairs.

A Caricature

 

A Caricature

 

In the Way

 

I still remember my first. At a party, beautiful Victorian house in San Francisco. Nice. We were celebrating the completion of our training course for an AIDS support network. The hosts were muckety-mucks, thus the restored “painted lady” on the park. They were lovely, by the way. There was dancing. At some point fairly late in the evening one of them took over the record player and put on some obscure minor disco single. This was the eighties so all us Acting Up queer babies were slightly mortified by the throwback. But then our host, obviously ill himself, proceeded to dance down the house, mama. He was glorious. We cheered. And then me and my friend Joe were invited out to the deck for a splash in the hot tub.

Mostly what I remember was undressing in the cold and feeling doughy and pale compared to the rest of the crew. Also? I think Joe kept his underwear on which was disappointing and odd and rather touching. Really the whole thing was terribly exciting (I’d never been in a hot tub let alone with naked men,) and in retrospect, perfectly innocent but for the booze and the pot. Sweet really. 

Not knowing quite what to do, I talked. Default setting. Chat? Hardly the point but play to your strengths, baby Bradley. Yes, like everyone else in the surprisingly generous tub I was trying to see Joe’s junk through the bubbles, but what I did was quiz the man to my left about his this that and everything. Pretty sure I did not make a good impression. Handsome man, in his forties, mustache, impressive erection, probably not looking for an active listener. At some point — and do not ask me when or how as I have clearly suppressed what I could of that conversation — he told me he was a Republican.

And that’s pretty much the end of my hot tub orgy story. Joe had a boyfriend, I went home to the beloved husband, nobody could find enough towels so I remember being damp and shivering the whole way home on the M car.

Now, is it possible that someone else in the tub overlooked that man’s moral deficiency for the sake of his impressive member? Sure. But the silence I remember was real. Nobody shouted. Nobody stormed off. The air just went out of everything, for me at least and then I went home. I don’t know that I said a thing other than to ask if he was joking. He wasn’t. 

Before we even moved to San Francisco I’d had a similar shock. A college friend (I was briefly in college then) insisted on meeting Allen, who at the time was my hot new boyfriend. It went well. Allen was and is a very good first impression. After, my friend rather than Allen gave me a ride home. Don’t remember why. I didn’t drive. Anyway as soon as we got in my friend’s car he turned on me.

“WHY didn’t you warn me?!” 

?!?!?!

“You might have mentioned that Allen’s black!” 

And — scene. 

Actually I was so stunned by both the anger and the cause that I don’t know that I did much to defend myself or call my friend out for his racist bullshit, because darling, that is what that was. I loved the guy, we’d been through a lot together, young as we were. Eventually we had a proper talk, but I never looked at my friend quite the same way ever again. When he died I missed him, but I cannot think of him to this day without hearing that “WHY”.

Years later in Seattle I met a gay author whose first book had just been published. Had an event at the bookstore. The book was excellent. He was handsome and charming. I drew him and he was amused and signed the drawing. Success. This was before the full triumph of social media, but we stayed in touch. I learned something of his history over time and when his much older partner died, I expressed my sincere sympathy. Later I found an obituary online. Republican. Washington insider and minor big deal in the Conservative Movement. Closeted, obviously, though not entirely. I seem to remember the partner’s name in the obit.

Weird, right? I mean it’s not just me, it is genuinely weird that these fuckers still exist, isn’t it? Back in the day, there was always the strong possibility that one was a Republican from birth. I still have friends like this. It was like being Baptist or bow legged; not your fault really, just genes and generational loyalty. Maybe an inadequate diet? 

And then there were those sad sack simps in the Log Cabin Republicans. Remember? Jesus, what a pitiable collective of masochists and mental deficients. Year after year, election cycle after election cycle that tatterdemalion little troop would suck up to one minor candidate or another, just hoping their new Daddy wouldn’t, in the end, take their money and then kick the shit out of them like their last Daddy did. We laughed at them, those white socks with suits gays, like flat-earthers and the queens who couldn’t let Donna Summer or Gloria Gaynor go when those girls told us straight up that we were dancing straight down to Hell.

The mugs I’ve included above belong to some of the gay Republicans profiled in the NYT yesterday. These men are part of the Trump administration. They are none of them your old school, fringe fags. These bitches are all right in the thick of it, and they evidently represent a statistically significant sample of this new, out and openly fascist faggotry who think Donald has always been perfectly cool to their boyfriends, that trans and nonbinary people are, I don’t know, —  not us? — and that it’s actually cool to collaborate.

But then they aren’t actually anything new, are they? Ernst Rohm had a boyfriend until his comrades killed them both. Gay Mike White’s gay dad wrote sermons for Jerry Falwell. That Quisling in pearls, Tim Miller now sits on CNN like a legit person despite having quite the past as a proudly poisonous Breitbart toady. The old gay chant, “we are everywhere” could not have been more true. 

So what’s so different this time? What rates the New York Times profile?

Everything is different now, surely? (And please feel free to call me Shirley.) There has never been anything like Donald Trump in the whole history of the Republic. (In the history of the world however his type has always been common as muck.) This isn’t peril. This is present danger. This administration sent a gay makeup artist to be raped and beaten in a foreign prison. They kicked out serving LGBTQIA military and banned medical care for trans people and and and and and — none of that matters to these gay men. None of it. In the old days, the Log Cabin Losers would all have made sad-face while jawing on about “change from within.” Not these boys. Laugh? Why they nearly died. SUCH fun, such parties. 

(Not a lesbian in the mix? Did I miss one?)

These white men are having the time of their lives. And all the “leftist gays” who pick on them in DC bars and swipe left whenever they learn that Dick works for Don? Well, these gay Republicans will just throw their own party, thank you and so what if the cater-waiters spit in all their drinks? Maybe they dig that.

I used to think that we should collectively and consistently shun these assholes. The minute you learn that some queer is queer for the GOP? No drinks, no dick, no quarter. At one time that felt pretty harsh. I had friends back in the day who would have disagreed and argued for engagement and talked sympathetically about other people’s “journeys.” 

But all these men are out. This is the post Lindsey Lilly Graham generation. Out, proud, and absolute pricks. Not one has the conscience science would assign to a flea. Not one could be made to give a single shit about anyone literally, actually, in any way unlike themselves. They all willingly agreed to pose for the national paper of record as poster boys for queer political cuckoldry: they like to watch the rest of us get fucked.

So maybe the whole idea of just shunning these people is kind of quaint now. Maybe we need to try something different. After all, how can you shun someone without shame? 

I’m never going to advocate violence. I don’t know that I’m capable myself and I don’t want anyone going to jail for wasting a slap on all of that Botox and lip fillers because who knows if these queens would even feel it anyway.

What I will suggest is that maybe it’s time we stop being polite and start getting real with these men (generational Easter egg.) don’t shout next time. Don’t scream at them in restaurants or try to throw them out of bars. Maybe just go Gandhian. 

Stand. Stand right in front of them. Everywhere they go. Wherever they are. Don’t let them just go about their business. Don’t molest or harass them, but don’t let them pass. Let everyone know who they are and what they are doing. We may not be able to stop them collaborating with the enemies of progress, but there are enough of us, we are the overwhelming majority after all, so perhaps it’s time impede their physical progress through the world. Stand in their way. At the gym. In the street. At a bar. When they visit their awful mothers or meet their despicable fathers at the golf club, stand in their way. Make them see us. Make them try to get around us. Make them, if just for a moment, stop. 

At the Kennedy Center, stop him.

At the dry cleaners, stop him.

On the steps of congress, at the gate of the White House, when he gets out his keys to go get in his car, when he tries to hit on your friend, or buy you a drink, or get to his flight — stop him. 

Don’t be rude. Don’t be violent. Just be in their way.

That is after all what we are. We are in the way. Decency, civility, kindness, altruism, democracy, all just obstacles to these men. 

Be an obstacle. 

Get in their way.

Remind them that the path to power is not always open, that what they expect need not always be straight ahead, that in the end we will not be moved.

Fight.