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 helms 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 elected 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'd survived two cancers already. Even the surgery to properly diagnose the cancer would probably kill her. 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 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 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 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 in 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-indulgent. 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.

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 sand 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 a sadness shared. It is good to stop and think not of our problems, not of events as happening to me, as if other people's suffering, as if even the deaths of people I loved have meaning because I loved them rather than being fully vested with meaning for having been lived. Remember life and all the living in it, past and present, loved and unknown to me, and be humbled, awed by how little it is to do with me. All I can do, all we can do, is try to lesson 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.

"'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.

Harm

 “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones” 

What good? Surely that’s the question. 

Another ghoulish pervert has just gone down to dusty death. Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is dead. Took his sweet time, but at least he’s dead. Best thing for everyone. Not a moment too soon. Really the only reason to regret his passing would be if it in any way ended his suffering or that of his family and friends. Almost worth it to bring him back if it would keep that going.

He was an evil-minded, ignorant, hateful, harmful bigot and he devoted his adult life not as he would doubtless tell you “to Christ,” but to the persecution of innocents, the perversion of scripture, the promotion of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and in a relentless pursuit of influence and power. He deformed every tenant of his profession — psychology not theology by the way, not that he made any such distinction — and used his credentials as cudgels with which to brutalize at least two generations. 

He actively promoted beating children. He absolutely believed women were inferior to men and all men inferior to lipless white Southern Christian crackers like himself. 

He spoke not to or with his God but for Him, all but as Him. This is what God wants, as divinely revealed in scripture to — wait for it, Dr James Dobson Jr. Lil’ Jimmie Lee knows just what He likes. More often though, this is what He hates, and so should you.

He craved celebrity and political influence and was one of the leading architects of the submission of the Republican Party to the fanaticism of the Christian Pharisees and the unrepentant Confederacy. 

He created and promoted much of the material used in conversion therapy and homophobic reeducation camps, collected and spent millions of dollars to deny and repeal gay and women’s rights legislation, and used his considerable influence within his evangelical community to turn them from witness and charity to far right activism and violence.

He was yet another mild white monster in an ugly suit and a bad haircut who hardly ever raised his voice even as he lowered the morality of his time and ruined countless lives in the name of Gawd and James Dobson.

If anybody reading this should wonder why so many of us of a certain age have been on social media celebrating his death, let me just remind those of our friends untouched by his dry, icy influence that this is one of the many who put us here, where we are today. If the world is more hateful, it’s because of Dr. James Dobson Jr. and men just like him.

I wish I believed in Hell, if just to see him in it.

May his memory bring the shame it deserves and all his words, works, and deeds follow him down to the grave and be forgotten.

The Triumph of the Yahoos

This is a book.

Recently read a long piece by the chief political analyst for The New York Times. In it he reviews all the data that is finally all in from the last election. I’ll summarize: she would have lost even if everyone who didn’t vote had voted. You know the refrain: “We show up, we win” etc.? All the versions of “Just VOTE!”? Turns out that’s not true anymore. Not this time. We didn’t just lose. He won. Put that the other way ‘round because it is worse, he would have won not despite the numbers but because. Because we chose him. Not just those people, not just the red hats and necks: people of color, white suburban women, Pennsylvanians, Lithuanians and philatelists and dishwashers and Star Bellied Sneetches— you name ‘em, we picked him. Turns out we were wrong this time about the whole “just show up” idea of the liberal majority. Even when we didn’t vote for other Republicans? We voted for him. Even if every registered whatever had shown up? He won. Because we like him. The majority of voters, the majority of Americans genuinely like the vibe. White people mostly, overwhelmingly, but not exclusively plus, you know, Cubans. We dig the WTF of it all. We love Trump. 

Who now?! Who does?! How?! Who could look at him, at this gibbering, yam-tittied, moron and think, “Yeah, gimme some more o’ that! Four more years, daddy!”?

Be honest, you know who.

Not talking about his faithful. Not MAGA, or not just MAGA. This is not just about them, just as this time it isn’t only about the religious right, the isolationists, or the defense hawks. It’s not just about the billionaires and the tax cheats, or that ghastly crowd at Bezos’ rented Venice nuptials, where Popeye the human thumb got hitched to a flotation device.

This isn’t just about the racists, and the fanatics,  or corrupt elites or the power mad or the greedy or the cruel. Like they themselves so cynically say of the poor, the genuinely evil are indeed always with us, but it’s not always about the villains even when it is clearly nothing to do with heroes.

Nope. We know the bad guys here. No secret. They are all black hat, guns blazing, maniacal laughter in front of helpless captives — they are the enemy we know. Right? They hate us, we hate them, supposedly there’s an equilibrium. We support X they support Y. Blah blah blah. As a species we progress and regress. Blah blah blah. Maybe we don’t blow it all up. Fingers crossed. Pendulum swings and balance and the drift of history? Blah blah blah.

No more.

Remember, not just those people this time. The majority, and again by a pretty long chalk.

I know it wasn’t me, or you if you’re reading this, so who was it then?

Who? Who was it? Whose fault is this?

You know. Be honest. Don’t play dumb.

It’s simple. It’s so simple it’s stupid. It’s STUPID, people. 

It is stupid people.

Turns out it is not the economy, not the price of eggs, not those pesky agendas; gay, liberal, reactionary, religious, or the control of the courts or borders or women’s bodies or trans rights. It’s not the failure of the Democratic coalition or the success of conservative media. 

Now admittedly, you listen to Joe Rogan or Theo Von, you are fucking stupid. Not just wrong, ill -informed, or naughty, fucking stupid. Every bit as stupid as your grandma forest-bathing in Fox News, volume all the way up,  24/7. Because who does that?!

You know. Just admit it.

It’s stupid people. 

Stupidity is what’s wrong with us. Who knew?!

Not us, evidently. Or we would rather not say. We were raised better. Maybe that’s the problem. We don’t want to act like that. They go low, we go disdainfully quiet. (That’ll show ‘em. The fascists have always had such an ear for irony.)

And we don’t want to say that word, “stupid.” It ain’t nice. It’s judgmental and archaic and historically misapplied to populations educationally disadvantaged, misdiagnosed, oppressed. Besides, what does it help, calling people a word like that? 

Yes, people make what we consider stupid choices, we make stupid choices. Stupidity is one of the great levelers, yes?

But my oh my, my dears there is a lot of it about these days, isn’t there? So very much more stupidity than is normally expected, wouldn’t you say? And so bold! Shameless. For heaven’s sake it is all over the map, isn’t it? All over the airwaves and the internet, painted and proudly displayed on every available surface from the town square both virtual and real, to brimming over in the White House, and Congress, pouring out of the State Houses, spreading across the lawn, out in these streets, and up the creek. Stupidity in the amen corner, stupidity all over the floor. Right next door, don’t you know. Hell, the call may be coming from inside the house.

Shocking. That’s the word for it. Embarrassing. Like I said, we are all capable, culpable. No wonder we hesitate to call it out. 

But there it is. There they are, are they not? So maybe it’s time to stop calling shovels potentially dangerous if otherwise useful, usually large hand tools for breaking and moving earth, no? Spade-a-spade-time.

Because it turns out there are a lot of stupid people who made this colossally stupid choice willingly, proudly, publicly, and with or without hesitation fucked us all not in any good way.

Margaret Atwood said, “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” The results are in and it is really bad, ain’t it? Yeah.

Kind of a breakthrough. One of those historical pivot points, almost a revolution in stupidity.

I mean here we are, finally moving beyond the traditional definitions of left and right, rural and urban, crossing educational levels, and religious and secular differences, and even — at last — the question of race! Yeah! Because if you didn’t notice, despite the constant stream of regret clips, and profiles of deported Trump voters, and follow-ups on his Arab supports in Detroit, etc., there are stupid humans, stupid Americans of every race, creed, and color. Huzzah!

That’s right, Right. We have finally achieved the fantasy of a colorblind, absolutely equal society — if only in this one complete fucked up way. 

The single most well represented population in the last election, the majority whose will is now being expressed by every shitty, greedy, short-sighted, destructive, arbitrary and false move of this corrupt and venal new regime? The stupid.

You thought they would only arrest the “bad” immigrants? No, you weren’t so much misled as you are just fucking stupid. 

You didn’t think that after they destroy transgender rights that they’d come after marriage equality? Why would you think that? Oh, that’s right, stupid and gay! Could happen to anyone, gurl.

You didn’t think the Trump-rigged majority on the Supreme Court would actually let them dismantle the media, congressional oversight, separation of church and state? What’s left of the Voting Rights Act? Oh I see the problem. You’re fucking stupid.

You didn’t think they’d actually cancel your health coverage and kick your disabled son off Medicaid? That they were only going to go after fraud and cheaters? Yeah, you thought that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary because you’re fucking stupid. 

The federal government was just wasteful and full of lazy bureaucrats and — of, fuck it, you’re just fucking stupid. 

This isn’t an ideological debate. Nobody’s winning here. If you’re posting videos dancing in your flag panties and cheering for ICE, you’re contemptible. If you can’t stop saying you didn’t think it would go so far so fast, well you’re every bit as stupid as those Yahoos. In fact, you’re worse in a way, because we don’t expect much from my people of origin, the rednecks and the dentally challenged, them gals still sporting curly perms and them fellers in bibs. (Look at me. If you’re unfamiliar, bibs, beard, missing teeth… without the glasses I’d pass for a Trump-lovin’ beer-soaked corn hole player, without books, I look just exactly like my fellow Saltine Americans.) 

If you voted for him, you are no better than that hooty trash on TikTok. Simple. Don’t flatter yourselves that your boots and hands are clean. You voted for Trump, you’re trash, you stupid motherfucker. (And yeah, we talk like this everywhere but church and car shows.) Welcome to the Yahoos.

Who are the Yahoos, you ask? Gulliver’s Travels? Jonathan Swift?

Spoiler alert: the Yahoos are us. 

They are not in the cartoons and animation and the adaptations for children, the Yahoos. Lilliput and Brobdingnag — the little people and the large — that’s as far as most adaptations go, as far as most of us remember. Nowhere near the whole story, and the story, remember, isn’t the point, (or shouldn’t be after nine or ten.) Satirist, Swift, not a children’s author. (Remember his suggestion of what to do with all those hungry babies? Eat ‘em. Again, with all the stupidity around, I’d better mention: satire.)

The author didn’t really kick all our asses until after Gulliver goes to Japan. (That’s right, he goes to Japan. Also not in the classic comics I should think.) Swift saves a good part of his shot until we meet the beautiful, articulate, philosophical horses, the Houyhnhnms, and the two-footed beasts who serve and plague them.

Traditionally the illustrators of Swift’s immortal classic have tended not just to the literal but to the frankly racist when it’s come to drawing the Yahoos. When Lemuel Gulliver is confronted by them in the Fourth Book, the Yahoos are naked, hairy, filthy, violent. They fight over shiny stones. They bite.

 So… us. Us, unwashed, uncombed, naked, howling — reality tv us, monster truck rally us, Trump rally us, angry mob, warring, thieving, raping, us — without pants, dentistry, deodorant, shame.

The Yahoos could not provide a greater contrast to the truly noble Houyhnhnms:

“I know not whether it may be worth observing that the Houyhnhnms have no word in their language to express anything that is evil, except what they borrow from the deformities or ill qualities of the Yahoos.”

That’s the point of them, the Yahoos, if anyone’s missed it, that contrast, that supposedly absurd inversion. 

“For who can read of the virtues I have mentioned in the glorious Houyhnhnms, without being ashamed of his own vices, when he considers himself as the reasoning, governing animal of his country?”

Reasoning? Governing? Indeed, not so much anymore. Unfashionable. One might say, un-American, anti-Yahoo.

Swift, an Irish clergyman, had been in the very center of politics, power, and literary London, but when the government he supported fell, he returned to Ireland, an exile in his own country, a bitter, disappointed man. Such he was when he wrote his masterpiece: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. 

It is one of the highest achievements in English comic writing and an absolute abattoir of human pretensions, and nowhere does the bald, bitter Dean of St. Patrick’s wield his wit with deadlier brutality than in his portrait of the Yahoos.

Reminder: us.

And should it still need saying, he knew whereof he wrote: 

“Therefore since money alone was able to perform all these feats, our Yahoos thought they could never have enough of it to spend or to save, as they found themselves inclined from their natural bent either to profusion or avarice. That the rich man enjoyed the fruit of the poor man’s labour, and the latter were a thousand to one in proportion to the former. That the bulk of our people were forced to live miserably, by labouring every day for small wages, to make a few live plentifully.”

And here:

“… they were usually the most ignorant and stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed enemies to all knowledge and learning; and equally disposed to pervert the general reason of mankind, in every other subject of discourse as in that of their own profession.”

Us. 

Fellow Yahoos, you will I hope forgive me for mixing my satires when I say, while all animals are equal, some are indeed more equal than others, and we are at this moment witnessing yet again the Triumph of the Yahoos.

The worst of us have won, not for want of resistance, but because it would seem too many of us are simply too stupid to notice any difference, or care about consequences, or because we genuinely enjoy being bestial and cruel.

I think it time we stop insisting that somewhere there is some sense of the noble Houyhnhnms in even the most obvious, grubby, ignorant asses all around us; some lingering, redeemable humanity in even the worst Yahoos. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. 

Time though we called a spade a spade, and hit these Yahoos with it right in their smug, ugly faces, at least metaphorically. 

When that pumpkin spice would-be dictator lies and babbles and talks like just exactly the Yahoo he is, time the media and the rest of us stop trying to make sense of his word salads. He’s stupid. He says stupid shit. All there is to it.

My neighbor who thought illegal immigration was just “getting out of hand,” presumably right here in almost perfectly lily white West Seattle? Well, that’s stupid. Shut up, Karl, you’re embarrassing yourself. You sound like a Yahoo.

If you voted for Trump because “something needed to change”? shut the fuck up, Yahoo. You are too stupid to express an opinion in public. Your people, if they aren’t all as fucking stupid as you are, need to take you back inside and keep you there.

Grandma thinks “the transsexuals” are — doesn’t matter what she thinks or why. Shut the fuck up, old Yahoo. Whatever you were going to say was going to be hateful, and stupid. Nobody wants to hear that shit. Sit your old ass down and shut your slack mouth.

Your priest said what?!

Yahoo. Fuck ‘im.

Your Dad said what?

Yahoo. Tell him to shut the fuck up.

That dude said what in your Uber?!

Yahoo. Let him walk.

If this doesn’t seem much of a solution, perhaps it isn’t meant to be. So, what is this? This is a refusal, not self-reflection. Fuck self reflection. Not in a meditative mood. Could be studying the example of better animals, but right now?

I want to bite someone. 

I want to howl. 

Yahooooooooo!!!!!

You

A Caricature

 

toute la vérité

 Not but a week or two ago I opened a satchel from the back of the closet and found twenty years worth of correspondence, drawings, posters for marches long past, writing, notebooks. I was meant to be cleaning out the closet. I did not. I sat on the bed and read letters from friends living and dead and then I ate my lunch and read a one act play I wrote when I was twenty two. Time and forgetfulness had not improved the thing at all. It was still not a very good play. When I was done I sent it to live on a farm with the not very good novel I wrote when I was thirty. 

Just today I opened a drawer in my dresser and I found for no reason a nude photo of me. I was looking for something else — it really doesn’t matter what — and there it was -- there I was -- under all the other junk, the keepsakes and whatnots: myself naked on someone else’s bed, smoking, frankly carnal or more probably postcoital. Rather startling there amidst the antique valentines, stopped watches, and old eyeglasses. How did that get there?! It is an actual print, this nude, not a Polaroid, which means, for anyone too young to know or care that it was taken with a camera and the film was developed by someone else, probably at a camera shop or drugstore in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There’s a time-stamp on the print that tells me that the photo is roughly forty years old, so I was not exploited in any way when it was taken, in case that was anyone's first thought (Nobody made Coco take her blouse off this time, honest.) Still, it was a daring thing to have done then, take a nude photo and get it developed commercially. Lucky no one noticed or reported it. We could have been arrested, me and the photographer.  From the pose it's pretty obvious I did not take the photo, and just as obvious that I didn't mind it being taken. 

Bless whoever did, or rather his memory. I confess here and now to not remembering the gentleman's full name. Pretty sure he's long dead so it frankly does not matter now to anyone but me. Frankly I'm glad to have it. It’s not like I posed for a lot of nudes. Wish I'd posed for more! Interestingly, I don't remember being given the photograph and I don't actually remember posing for it, though that looks like a lot of consent right there. Of course I remembered the photo as soon as I saw it, but it's not the sort of thing one keeps by the bedside or framed in the guest room. I don't remember putting it in that drawer either. As for where else it may be in the world, I rather doubt I was his only model. Perhaps there is somewhere a whole album or shoebox extant of like mementos. So old as to be of historical interest now, I should think. Still, if anybody finds that negative and wants to exploit that windfall, have at it. The hair and glasses cause my only blushes now, and they date it almost as accurately as the time-stamp. Not sure who the audience would be, but you never know. Turns up on some vintage porn site, you let me know. I'd be thrilled.

It is not the photograph in the photograph I made to go with these words. The picture above includes another photo I found in that drawer, a snapshot of my late friend Peter on a beach in San Diego where he lived at the time. Peter died of AIDS a long time ago/yesterday and will always now be young. I really like this photo too. Don’t remember the dogs. Dogs four and two footed simply found Peter. Dogs, children, cats, people bumming cigarettes, friends, strangers with no reason to confide in him other than his smile, they all found Pete. He had an open face, very attractive, easy to love. Lord knows I did. I chose this picture of my friend because he was so beautiful and we were young then together, if not so young as I was in that nude shot. Still, Peter is youth, forever. 

He can be that here as well.

We were something, once, the pair of us -- which is just another way of saying we were young together.

At the time of Peter's death there were still a handful of stunning Polaroids that I dutifully, regretfully destroyed as he'd asked me to some time before. He was breathtakingly beautiful in some of those. At best in my one nude, I look young. I might even go so far as to say cute. Happy. In Pete's he always looked deadly earnest; determined, concentrated, poised. I look damp. Pete looked dewy. I looked sated. He looked insatiable. Comparing those remembered photos with the one in my hand, I'd say the primary difference is that he was a dancer and completely in his body and I was only very briefly forgetful of mine.

Just so you know, I’m not showing anybody my nude — not that anybody’s likely to ask, but just to be clear. I’m not ashamed, not of having posed for the picture, not of anything in it, not of keeping it. Actually I'm thrilled to see how good I look in it, how unselfconscious. I nevertheless decided not to share it. Not online. Not at all.

A few years ago I posted a black and white picture of my young father holding his firstborn baby, my older brother. Clearly taken at a summer picnic, my father was shirtless in the picture. My brother is in a blanket. Facebook took it down for nudity “not meeting community standards.” 

Primitives, these commercial censors, these algorithmic aunties, prudish and lazy and dumb. Homophonic too. Fuck ‘em — yeah, but maybe not pick that fight again today. Can't win. More important battles now anyway, some in the streets.

The other reason not to share my nude isn't anything to do modesty or embarrassment, or even privacy as some abstract absolute, come to that. A retired acquaintance who has recently taken up writing and started his first novel asked me if, in my opinion "great writing" needs to be "ruthlessly honest." Don't entirely remember my answer but I hope I had the sense to back away as quickly and as gracefully as I could from any suggestion that "ruthless honesty" was among either my virtues or my vices, or that I had ever aspired personally to "greatness." Maybe that sort of thing is necessary to art. I could not say. In my small experience though all art isn't necessarily about ambition or expectation, just work. To my mind, that's where the ruthless honesty might best be applied. Nobody said your novel has to tell all the truth, honey. It just needs to be better.  As for integrity, there's more than one may to measure that too. Everything I've written, most of it now in the first person? There are still other people, living and dead that I would rather not hurt. If that's a curb on  my artistic integrity, well so be it. Why not tell all? Show my ass? Shit, who am I still trying so hard to impress? My parents are dead. Doesn't mean all my business needs to be in the street. My ass, honey, is my own.

When I was stretched out on that stained duvet in my all together, you can be sure I was very much not thinking about posterity. I pretty clearly hadn't so much as a thought in my shaggy head. If I had to guess, I'd bet I was hungry. Who knows? My only responsibility to that earlier version of me is to maybe remember him less harshly than I am usually inclined to do, perhaps forgive him everything. How's that for a start? Truth is I barely remember him most of the time -- until I am reminded by something he wrote or something someone else remembers him saying or doing or until, as happened today, he stumbles ass-out into the present day and actually puts his junk right in my face.

Who are these people who seek to preserve their own youth? What really is the point of that? My own is as extinct as the Pharaohs, sweetheart. I'm not saying that I am as old as all that, just that who I once was or might have been is not indeed who I've turned out to be and that is fine. Honestly, in many ways it could not have gone better. 

Because my youth was scary as Hell. People were scary. Sex was scary. Politics, strangers, family, my quaint, charming little hometown were all scary as fuck. I made it to a city, more than one, and men died all around me anyway. Some friends succeeded and others failed and some died before they had a chance to do either. Some of it was fun -- witness the existence of my one sexy nude -- and some of it was wonderful, and much of it was just shit. So what exactly would I be looking to preserve? 

Was my skin ever flawless? Does anyone remember me dancing? Did I change the world?

Some of us survived. I did. All the evidence of that is sat right here in this chair. Count me: present. That is actually something.

My memories are slim enough to slip between the pages of books other people wrote. My past is in envelopes, under embroidered handkerchiefs, tucked up behind souvenirs, tangled in a string-tie I wore exactly once and a jet necklace I used to wear with a black silk blouse I bought in a thrift store when I was sixteen. I used to wear that blouse with high-waisted, wide-legged gray pants, cuffed and creased and sharp as fuck, baby.

Honestly, I remember that outfit I haven't worn in better than forty years better than the sex I had forty years ago commemorated in that photo. Who knows why? At the time I’m sure I was convinced I looked better in my clothes than out. Maybe that's why. Thinking about it nowI realize that I wish I had a picture of me in those clothes!

My memory could be better. I used to learn whole roles, I memorized poetry, Shakespeare. 

But what's more tedious than some old bugger expecting sympathy for not knowing why he walked into a room? Forget about it. Who cares?

And clearly this is not how memory works anyway. That was work. Mostly this is just chat. Very different stakes. Besides, who knows what one used to know? Don't care. Maybe a sonnet, still, or two. That's something. I'm convinced that this disorderly preservation of irrelevant specifics and the not very interesting detail is all but entirely random. It is just stuff for making stories even if the only person to whom one is telling them is one's self. So far as I can understand it memory is constantly recasting even things as seemingly set as photographs into whatever narrative may suit present purpose. That's Clio who makes sense of the past, that's history's business, not memory's. Memory doesn't rate a muse, it's not an art. Forgiving the self-indulgent pun, there's no Craft in it either. It just is. "A thing of rags and patches." 

As I write I am anticipating a period of adjustment in the circumstances of my employment. Not going to lie, scared. Also? Missiles are flying. There is new/old war, and rising authoritarianism and grave and great injustice all around us every goddamned day and the very worst people for the very worst reasons are making all the very worst decisions and it is awful, as you know.

Just this week, the Souther Baptist Convention, that bulwark of deep-fried idiocy and home-canned hate, announced plans to prioritize the repeal of Marriage Equality -- and why not? Fuckers are on a roll. 

And it's June, so it is also Pride.

And Edmund White died. Some of my memories aren't so much mine as his. He wrote parts of my life for me. No other writer took me further in the acceptance of my self, taught me more of how to navigate the world as a gay man, gave us collectively a better appreciation of our sexuality as both the means and subject of our revolutionary movement, as well as better fucking fun than the Baptists, and the Larry Kramers, and the Andrea Dworkins could ever imagine. He literally wrote the instruction manual. No one amused me more, moved me more, directed more of my reading. No one I can think of, not even his hero Genet, did more to make us interesting to ourselves as sexual beings and with better reason than we'd ever known or assumed.

I believe he made Foucault laugh. Imagine that.  

As a reader of his work since the year I graduated high school, it feels like he has always been here. And -- AND -- No aging writer in my lifetime more fully embraced his full, final, glorious, hilarious, monumental and complete disregard for discretion, decorum, and bullshit. No other writer, particularly of his generation that I know of so absolutely gave up a giving a FUCK about other people's embarrassment and discomfort and affectations of dignity. In his seventies and eighties he wrote a whole new shelf of wicked little wonders and fabulous fare-thee-wells: comedies, criticism, memoirs, interviews, and sex, sex, sex. 

Of what other writer am I likely to say that his very last book may well be my favorite?!

Holding what may be the only hard evidence of me naked at twenty one, I can't say Ed White made that picture possible, though maybe he kinda did, but he certainly comes to mind as the only major American writer I'm sorry to have missed the chance of showing it to. 

That's the story today for Pride, for me, my tribute to the great and good Edmund White. I wish he'd met Peter. I am grateful for the work and his example. I wish I'd shown Ed White my ass at twenty-one. 

And in his memory?

Let's show ALL these fuckers our asses tomorrow.  

Quietening

 

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” — Eleanor Roosevelt 

I'm working today. I always work weekends. Retail. Done it for decades. Don't remember the last time I was off on a Saturday. So no protest march for me today. Sorry. Can't be helped, or rather it probably could be -- just for today -- if I'd had the foresight to ask for the day off. I did not. Only heard about today's national action yesterday. Not really connected as I once was with this sort of thing. Can't call in sick anymore unless I'm genuinely sick because one do actually get sick more at sixty-one and I don't have much sick-time available just now. Used what I had for that last trip to urgent care, for which I just received my second bill in as many weeks; this one for $1099.41. Two thousand dollar deductible still not met for this new year. Among other things, my insurance provider is about to change again -- and I'm pretty sure my available paid sick-time is going down to three days a year. Three. If I'd known about today I could have submitted a vacation request (though that's supposed to be done two weeks in advance.) Not that my vacation is what it was. I've only just begun to build it back up again since I used it all when I was in Pennsylvania helping with home hospice care for the late, beloved mother earlier this year.

So, yeah, no mass protest on a Saturday for me. My heart.

Here's another quote while I'm at it, this from Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine: “How pitiful is an intelligence used only to make excuses to quieten the conscience.”

Ouch. That's hard to hear and I'm the one quoting it. But then I am also the one who led off with all that personal information to explain why I can't go today. 

I have a friend who has posted photos from the protests at the facility where she lives  -- hilariously she insists on calling it "the home," in a throw-back to those sad institutions from our rural youths. I've seen the menus where she lives now. Nice. I could eat there. Proud of her and her fellow "inmates" for getting out on the street and making good trouble.

Another friend lives in a community so isolated from anything like civilization I'd expect the attendant at the gas-station to warn "outsiders" not to be there after dark. My friend is protesting with other hearty souls today, whatever the Spring weather that still looks remarkably like Winter there. Proud to know her.

Nowadays I work at the bookstore with a pretty small crew. Another sign of the times.  All of them but me are intelligent, politically engaged, resourceful and very vocal young women. Admirable humans to a person. Some of them had to come to work today too. Less options, some of them, even than I had. They work or they don't make rent, some of them. I would not presume to speak for them. I would take this moment to remind all my friends and all the marvelous strangers protesting today that we are with you, and would actually be with you if we could.

Myself, I married into the middle class roughly forty years ago. Without the beloved husband, and even after more than two decades at my present employment, I don't know that I would ever be able to so much as think of taking a Saturday off to go to another protest. Maybe I'd still be more committed to the struggle. I can't honestly say. (I have been. I hasten to add that not to excuse my absence today but just to attest that I am not an asshole. I may be somewhat diminished by time and changing circumstances, but I'm still not that guy. I've been. I would be right now if I thought I could.) 

Some of the people who are being most effected by what is happening in this country right now won't be there today. Some have to work and can't get the day off. Some are quite rightly concerned about ICE agents and deportations. Some won't have the means, or the access to transportation, or the mobility to participate in a march and rally. There are people very much at risk to whom the idea of protesting would not occur.

No shade. I'm not trying to make anybody there feel bad for showing up or not, or that I'm not, or that there are many who would be that can't. Nothing but gratitude for all present. Again, thank you. 

I don't get to speak for anybody else who isn't out there today. In offering my thanks to everyone who did show up today, for whatever that is worth, I also want to remind everyone marching that more follow than you can see. 

Years ago when I went to my very first candle-light march for those we were losing every day to the plague, I was particularly struck by a couple of unexpected things. First, that neither the solemnity of the occasion nor our seriousness of purpose prevented us from quietly laughing, smiling, whispering, embracing our friends, probably in some cases even cruising. We were there to mark and remember the dead, not to imitate their regrettable silence but to protest the very injustice of it. So even when for once we were not loud, there was still the hum of life all around us; words, breath, cries, above and in a kind of rhythm with those thousands of marching feet. That is what made our silence, when it came, so powerful.  "Media vita in morte sumus," indeed, but what I think I learned that night was that even in the midst of death, of mourning, of loss, we were in life. 

Remember, it is no exaggeration to say that the people we were protesting then? They wanted us dead. At best they were indifferent to our deaths. Staying alive was not only necessary to our protests, staying alive itself constituted a protest. It still does.

The other thing I learned a little later, and this was a very hard lesson indeed, was that we are often called to witness for those who cannot. When I marched on Washington, DC, or across the Golden Gate Bridge, or for choice, or in support of the Farmworkers Union, whenever and wherever I was able to show up in my admittedly rather spotty efforts at activism, I was there not just for myself. I was there for my friends, for the ill, for the dead. That was usually about all I was actually good for. I was never an organizer, never a committee member, or a regular volunteer. I was just there. I represent my losses. I held a place for my betters, occupied some small corner of their absence.

So do that for me too today if you can. Not dead yet. Still fighting. Still defying these fascist sons of bitches. Thanks to all out on the streets today from one who couldn't make it out there today. I am with you. Untold millions follow behind. Our strength is in our numbers, our ancestors, the memories of all who came before and fought as you fight today for the dignity of us all.

I offer my thanks, and again, my thanks. And again. Again. Again.

Mum Says (a eulogy for my mother)

 

Beginnings and endings are never so simple as we would wish. Few things are, are they? We wish for simple things: a simple solution, an easy answer, an easy birth, an easy death. We are seldom granted any such. More’s the pity. 

Instead life is harder - and richer  - than we could ever have imagined when we were young. Even the simplest life; the most honest, straightforward existence is fraught —and full. And yet, “No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year,” said Cicero. We hope to die, when we come to it at last, “in a good old age, full of days.” Another wish not often granted. 

And even when it is, it is seldom enough. It is not enough now. How could it be? How can we be satisfied when life is all we have, all we’ve ever known, all we leave behind when we go?

Ninety three years our mother was here. Full of days. Still, not enough. How could it be? If you knew her, if you loved her as we all did, as she loved all of us, present and absent, how could it be? 

I’m grateful for the time we had.

What would she want me to say now? That she looked good. She’d want me to mention that. That she has her eyebrows on. A nice outfit. Her hair done. This was not vanity. She was proud, but not vain. There was effort put forth, right to the end. It mattered to her, the effort; that she looked good, that her clothes looked pretty, not expensive but nice, that her husband was proud to be seen with her. She liked color, pattern. She had taste. 

She would want someone to say that she didn’t look ninety three years old — even now. That she couldn’t possibly be that age. That delighted her every time it happened and it happened a lot.

What else?

She loved flowers. She arranged them beautifully. She made pretty things from paper, scraps, paint. It mattered that there was beauty, all around her pretty things, even as her world grew small, her eye was on all of it — that things were… so. “Not where that goes. That looks better.” It mattered. What she couldn’t find that was bright or cheerful or right, she made, made better, made brighter, made right. In a long life she’d seen enough ugliness, hurt, pain. She fought against the dark with the tools she had to hand: color, pattern, scissors, paint, furniture. And of course she could see in the dark, couldn’t she? ”Owl lady.” She needed but a very little light. She used what there was.

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.” - Garcia Marquez

When the love of her life died after sixty two years together, she knew a new solitude. To be so alone at last was hard. They had been everywhere and always together. One never thought of one but with the other; Jerry and Stella — almost one word for 62 years. And then not. She filled the quiet as best she could. She was never left entirely alone — and for that she would want me to thank again and always my good brother and my amazing sister-in-law who between them made her life and home possible, and kept both my father and mother alive for years longer than either might otherwise have lived. I will never be able to thank them enough.

What she knew best was love, in which she was lucky and knew it. And what she had she gave away, always: food, affection, care, kindness. In this above all else she fought against not just the dark but the false light of being seen to do good. She despised the lie of public piety and ostentatious good deeds. She said once of a neighbor of my grandmother’s, “She’d be happy to stop and help — but she had to get to church.” Wicked little woman, was Stella. Funny.

“I guess I wasn’t very nice,” she’d say afterwards — when she’d been a bit sharp. Sometimes I’d agree. Didn’t much like that. “You not supposed to agree, damn you.” And then she’d call me a “smart ass,” and we’d giggle.

What she did mostly she did because it was right, because it was what you did, how you do, because that’s what you do if you aren’t awful. She could not fathom people being awful. “What on earth do they get out of it?!” she’d say with hurt astonishment, genuinely mystified by evil. Knew it when she saw it though it might take her a very long time, and even then she’d shake her head at what must have brought someone to be so cruel. 

She intended us all to always do better if we could, when and where we could. She did not understand people who wouldn’t or don’t. She always felt the need to see good in others. She was often disappointed. Never stopped her. 

To love is to help where help is needed.

“You don’t have to like it, and they don’t have to deserve it. Just do it anyway.”

From when we were very small and she was our world to when in the end she was small and we were hers, she never didn’t pay attention. There was great humility in this, and a greater good. “Do what you can.” She never claimed to know the answers to large questions. She could not explain much of the wider world, or why people did as they do. She knew we all might do better, and that she might, and that that was not always enough — to know that and to keep trying — but that it would have to do.

When I was mourning another loss she told me, “Just do what you can, then see if you can do a little more.” She said, “That’s all I know to do, all I know to tell you.”

And a hundred times she’d tell me she was done. Very seldom true. She just might try again.

And so she did. And so we do.

But then all our mothers are saints when they die, at least in the newspapers. She laughed to see so many perfect marriages memorialized, such stainless reputations and sterling characters — if only in the obituaries she always read first in her newspaper. She was particularly amused at the idea of everyone automatically becoming a sweet little old lady if they lived long enough.

She’d read or hear about someone having been “a blessing to all” or “a gift to all who knew her,” and she’d say, “Not really,” or “not that I ever noticed,” and smile. Wicked little smile.

She told me years ago, “Whoever you are already, old age just makes you more so.”

Old age took much from her; her husband, a grandson, but it left her nearly all she had always been, to very nearly the end. She was funny, sharp tongued, self-deprecating, kind.

“If you can’t do anything else,” she told me time and again, perhaps because I particularly needed reminding, “you can at least try to be kind.”

I try. I will try. 

She also taught us what it was to be useful, to work, to help, to be proud, to fight, to survive, to defend one another, and to laugh — specially at ourselves.

She’d say, “Don’t you laugh at that,” when she was mad or foolish — and then she’d laugh.

“That’s all I know to tell you,” she’d say. “It will matter more,” she told me, “that you tried.” Even if it mattered only to her, if only for her. “That’s for you, not for anybody else. You do that for you.”

“You’ll want to know you tried.” 

And so we do, don’t we? We try. I am trying. And so we shall.

Thank you, my sweet, tough little mother, our Stella, our North Star, for all you taught me, all you gave all of us. I promise. We will try.