Talk to me darling boys!

As most of you know, I'm (re)writing a YA novel set in San Francisco's Castro district in 1978. I'm thinking of adding a brief prologue to the novel in which I show the two main protagonists of the book fifteen years before the current start of the book. One protagonist is a 14-year-old girl. The other is a gay man. The girl I'll have some cred on, having been a girl. As for the gay man, I'm perfectly capable of imagining what my character would have felt like as a 15+/- year-old kid, but it's likely that anything I write from the point of view of a gay man will be more heavily scrutinized and questioned. So it would be really helpful to me if any of you lovely men who feel like it would write (in the comments or privately to my email which is linked in my blogger profile) a little bit about what it was like for you as a (closeted?) gay teen. My character is now fully out, after all he lives on Castro Street, but his family has rejected him because their religion condemns homosexuality - which is why he moved (far) away to San Francisco.

Any memories, thoughts, comments, analysis of what it was like for you in your teen years would be so helpful. And anything I take from you would be fully credited (if this @#$% thing ever gets published!) as well as fully transmuted into the character of a fifteen-year-old orthodox jew living in Atlanta (!). Of course, I have tons of experience being a male orthodox jew, so I don't need any help with that part.......

The (straight) men in my life

OK, I admit there have been many times in my life when I was more likely to wonder, 'If they can put a (straight) man on the moon, why can't they put them all there?' than to sing the praises of straight guys. But for Christmas I made each of my brothers an album of photos -rescued through the miracle of Photoshop - that time and bad film had degraded to near unreadability. (The photo above is one of them. It was entirely varying shades of red when I started.) So I've been looking at photos of guys doing dorky guy things for the past month or so and pondering just what those alien beings mean to me.

First, and most formatively of course, was my father, who drove me f@#%ing nuts much of the time. Everything was a joke to the man. I mean, my God!, life was so desperately serious and on the brink of tragic to the poetry-reading, Joan-Baez-and Laura-Nyro-listening, unrequited-love-falling-in teen that was me. And all he had to offer me were jokes. The smart-ass quip was his native tongue. And the man was really, really smart - he spoke the language of every country we ever lived in and some that we didn't. He was the kind of man who collected facts and never forgot them. Even though he died five years ago, sometimes - if I'm wondering about something odd, like why the Chickadee hangs upside down when it feeds whereas goldfinches never do -I think, 'I'll call Daddy. He'll know.' So being super smart just made him even sharper with the punning, quipping retorts.

I, of course, am nothing like that.

Then there are the brothers. Two of them, born a year apart, what they used to call Irish twins. I was born four years after the second of them, so I was younger, a girl, and a small one to boot; there was no way I could win. But I kept trying. I followed them anywhere they would let me. Once I followed them up to the roof of our house for a peeing contest. Let's just say that having to squat to pee on a pitched roof almost cost me my life. I was hung up in trees ("elevator"), pushed down stairs ("escalator"), and exposed to all sorts of creepy crawly things as a means of testing my limits and then pushing me WAY past them. I got hurt a lot. I cried a lot. Much property was damaged. It was really fun. And it made me, well, plucky. Honestly, there's not one of you that can gross me out. I've lived through burping and farting wars, eaten any disgusting thing that was put in front of me (sea slug? No problem!), and had many a fine case of tropical parasites because of it. I laugh in the face of the grotesque, and then I eat it, and then I make a joke about it.

However, I spent most of my early life feeling deep, deep kinship with my mother, who is a sweet, gentle person and loves poetry, classical music, the theater, the opera, and Masterpiece Theater. She comes from a well-to-do, Southern family with a Faulknerian tendency toward alcoholism, depression, and suicide. Romantic stuff when you're a teenager. Much less so when you're a middle-aged woman who has lived through one nervous breakdown and thanks God for Zoloft every day. In fact, I fully expected to become my mother, but instead I married her, in male form that is. My husband is so sweet and gentle that my mother calls him an "honorary woman," and his tastes are so naturally refined that he makes me feel like a cultural poseur. So you can probably see where I'm going with this.... Because if my husband is like my mother, then..... OH SHIT.... Yes, it's sad but true, and probably entirely predictable to anyone but me. I'm my father and my brothers: I'm the annoying smart ass who makes jokes out of everything; I'm the one who hides behind dark doors late at night and jumps out shouting "Boo!" at my unsuspecting daughters; I'm the one with a faint perfume of white-trash hovering around me. Especially when I laugh, which I do too easily and raucously (I have actually been sushed for laughing in a Presbyterian Church). So, those knuckleheads, the ones who drove me crazy and tortured me, I'm them. Oh well, there's nothing to do about it except, of course, crack a joke.

I wish you....

love, and total acceptance from those who love you, of all your weaknesses, foibles, and neuroses. And yours of theirs. I wish you joy in the small things that occur always all around us, even in difficult times. I wish you compassion and kindness in your times of heartache, and I wish that those heartaches bring you deeper compassion and kindness for others. I wish you friends to hold you close when you want to give up and let go.

Thank you for being my friends and for giving me all the things I have wished for you.

A Christmas present for me

Great news. Today we found out that my husband has a fracture in his foot, which is what has been causing his pain and my worry. I couldn't be more delighted (perception really is all relative, isn't it?). So my heart is as light as a helium balloon. No clots, no surgery, no heavy drugs with bad side effects. Just a fractured foot that causes him a lot of pain, hobbles him, and might take up to six months to heal. Yippeee!

(Thanks for all the candles and good thoughts.)

Passing time with the kids: penises, guns, and beer

I'm just waiting these days: waiting for my husband's test results to come in; waiting for the docs to decide what's going on with his foot; waiting for them to decide how to treat it; waiting for generous friends to give me feedback on my book manuscript so I can get to work rewriting it. I've been keeping busy, keeping on the surface of things, trying to make the time pass as pleasantly as possible. So I've been looking over old pictures and notebooks I've kept as the kids grew. Here are some of my favorite kids-say-the-darndest-things moments of 1996.

Jan. 1996
The twins are in a penis stage. They've started drawing figuratively - circle bodies with eyes, nose, mouth, stick arms and legs, and usually a penis. S. showed me her picture today and said, "This is me with a penis." I said, "But S., you don't HAVE a penis. You could draw yourself with a vagina...." To which she replied, "But I want to draw myself with a penis!" Oh that damn Freud.

Jan. 1996
I was gossiping with a friend today about an acquaintance who's a neat freak. I said, "Her house is so CLEAN!"
R. who was nearby said, "And our house is so, so, dirty!"

May 1996
I was sitting with R & S on the sofa and R (R always brings these things up while S just listens and absorbs) said, "Miss D. is my birth mother, right? So what are you?" I answered that I was her "mother by law," which sounded to her like mother-in-law. i tried hard to explain the concept of law and what it had to do with moms and kids and love, but finally I just gave up.

At bed time, as I hugged and kissed R. goodnight, she sighed and said, "Whoever you are, I love you."

August 1996
As I was out walking with R & S up the little commercial area in our neighborhood, I noticed out loud that the local gun shop had been replaced with a hotdog & beer shop. The girls asked if the old store had sold "real guns?"
"Yes, real guns," I said.
R said, "Well that's good, because hotdogs are better than guns."
I agreed. Then she added, "And beer is better than guns."
I agreed again. The S chimed in, "And getting drunk is better than getting killed!"

The bumpy, bumpy road

(From froggyboggler's flickr file.)
Just a quick update. The husband's foot/health problems continue, and continue to worry me. And i got the nicest rejection letter ever from an agent. She said:

"...the plot is very unique and fully imagined, and I love the fact that Dorrie was able to create a loving and unconventional family for herself. I also think you did a really great job of grounding the manuscript in the Castro District – I always love when the setting is so vivid and three-dimensional that it feels almost like a character. I completely admire your imagination, and I can also tell that you have a love for San Francisco and for Asian culture – it informs the narrative and provides a nice sense of familiarity for the reader."

But....

Anyway, what with hubby-related stress topped with publishing-related stress, I probably won't be writing much for a bit. But I did want to let you all know.
xoxo

An old post for a sad day

It's World AIDS day, and, as I often do even without this official marking of our losses, I'm thinking of all the friends I've lost to AIDS. Above is the section of the AIDS quilt that has my friend Micah Sabraw's name on it. He was an early death, and his was one of the first names on the AIDS quilt. But before that, he was small, lithe, and beautiful - with dark eyes and dark curly hair. He had perfect manners- writing thank you notes after any little thing you did for him - and a tender, generous heart. I was a devastated stray straight girl at the shattered end of a poisonous relationship. He took me under his wing, took me to clubs where I could dance my grief away with gorgeous men who would never hurt me. I felt so cossetted and cared for, so safe. I wish that it had been as safe for him. But how could anyone, in those heady days in San Francisco, know what was coming, what was already there? I remember standing with him at the top of Castro Street one evening. He turned to me and said, "Poor thing, you have to worry about getting pregnant when you have sex. I don't have to worry about anything!" He was a gleeful child set free in a candy shop, in love with his amazing luck at being a lovely man in that time and that place.

I like to imagine him, now, as an old married man. Perhaps he finally settled down with that hunky French flight attendant he had the on-again-off-again relationship with. They'd live in Paris (Micah spoke beautiful French), but have a pied-a-terre in San Francisco. We would have drifted, because of geography, into only intermitent touch. But I would have visited him on my recent trip to Paris. He would have had me over to his gorgeous apartment in the Marais, for a coffee, with pastries which he bought at the "best little patisserie in Paris." I would have showed him pictures of my kids. He'd have a little dog. And we'd say things like, "Do you remember that time that silly boy got us into Studio 54 by driving us all up in his daddy's limo and yelling to the bouncer, 'We came in a limo! We came in a limo!" He'd say, "Darling, feminism is great but I'm so glad you finally threw in the towel and dyed your hair! The grey made you look ancient." He'd still look almost exactly the way he did thirty years ago. Me, not so much. But, in the way of old friends, when he saw me, he'd see the young, messed up, lovely girl I was so long ago, and I'd see the young man, off his leash in a world where he was accepted fully for the first time, and full to the brim with the drama and bliss of it all. We'd carry each other in memory through time. Instead, I carry us both, alone. So Micah, this is In Adorium (adoring memorium) to you. I wish we were dancing still. xoxoxo