Saturday, March 9, 2024

The Football Player Who Got Unstuck in Time

New York, November 2000.

You often hear stories about people who get unstuck in time.

Two British ladies touring Versailles slip into the era of Louis XIV.

A man makes a wrong turn in a department store and finds himself in an earlier version of the store from the 1930s.

A man in 19th century costume falls out of the sky.


Here's a photo of  a hipster dude, wearing a t-shirt and modern sunglasses, looking tremendously out of place amid the old people in fedoras witnessing the opening of a bridge in Canada in 1941.

He's probably not unstuck in time, just unstuck. .

There are a lot of unstuck people wandering around on Christopher Street in New York.

It's not exclusively or even predominantly gay: the few gay bars and restaurants are scattered amid weird boutiques, kids' clothing stores, pet supply stores, and the Finnish Lutheran Church.






But it's where Gay Liberation began, a sacred place, a site for pilgrimages for gay people from around the world.

Especially those who have been traumatized by homophobic hatred.

Lost, lonely, confused.  Ghosts. Revenants. Time travelers.

Like the guy who was wearing only white shorts and a black Amish hat, on a cold day in October.

And the Man in Black who just appeared, walking next to me, one day.

And Carey from Tuscaloosa.

I saw him in Christopher Park, staring at the Gay Liberation Monument as if he had seen anything so strange: in his 20s, medium height, solidly built, a little nerdy, with a square face, dirty blond hair, and thick eyebrows.  He was wearing brown slacks, a red sweatshirt with giant letter A on it, and a brown fedora, and carrying an old-fashioned knapsack rather than a backpack.

First rule of living in big cities: don't stop to talk to anyone you don't know.  They will con you, or rob you, or both.

But I am particularly attracted to "lost souls," so I stopped.  "Pretty great, isn't it?"

"Murder!"  he said with a smile.  " I knew the Big Apple was up-to-date, but so out in the open and all!  You sure couldn't get away with that jazz back home."  He turned to me and held out his hand.  "Hiya, kid.  I'm Carey, Tuscaloosa U. of A.  Go Crimson Tide!"

Later I figured out that he meant the University of Alabama football team. "Boomer.  You're a long way from home."

"Don't I know it!  We're on field trip to see the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State.  I sort of got side tracked on the Staten Island Ferry.  Say, you wouldn't know any eateries around here, would ya, Jackson?  I could eat a horse, hooves and all!"

I took him to a Thai place, where he was amazed by both the food and the prices.

Carey said he had always been attracted to guys, but he wasn't out to anybody, and he would probably get married, because "that's the way we do things in the South."  He had no idea that there were books on gay topics or gay characters on tv: "we don't look at a lot of television in the South."

I took him back to my apartment -- yes, my roommate was that way, too --  and showed him my tv set and bookcase full of books on gay history and culture.

"What's Stonewall?" he asked, pulling a book off the shelf. "Stonewall Jackson?  Was he that way?"

"It's the bar across from Christopher Park, where Gay Liberation began."

He stared at me, blank, confused.

"The Stonewall Riots?  Gay Pride Day?"

He put the book down and wrapped his arms around me. "I'm not much for history --  I like the present.  Two guys together, right here, right now, that's all that counts, dig?"

Nothing spectacular about the hookup.  Very nice physique, smelled of cologne.  Uncut, average sized, complained about having to use a condom.

Then he got dressed and said "Thanks, Boomer.  It's been swell, but I'd better be getting back."  And he vanished into the night, leaving me thinking.


His slang, his costume, his lack of familiarity with tv or the basics of gay history -- was Carey unstuck in time?  Or just a clueless Southern boy?

I looked up the roster of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team in the 1930s -- yes, those records are available -- and found a William Cary Cox from Bainbridge, Georgia, who played center from 1937 to 1939.   He looked kind of like my Carey.

After college, he served in World War II, and then ran an auto dealership in Alexandria City, Alabama.  He died in 1991, survived by his wife and two children.

A life lived fully, excessively in the Straight World.

Unless he took a  "jump to the left" one day in 1939 and ended up in the West Village.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

My First Pridefest...I mean, Gay Pride Parade....I mean, Gay Rights March. With Mickey Muscle.



June 1982, after my junior year at Augustana College.  Thomas, the former Episcopalian priest who I met with my ex-boyfriend Fred last year, calls to invite me to Des Moines for the annual Iowa Gay Rights March.

I have never heard of such a thing.

"We march to protest police harassment, discrimination in jobs and housing, sodomy laws, that sort of thing.  We had one last year.  It's always close to June 28th, the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots."

I have never heard of the Stonewall Riots, either.  But count me in.

The full story, with nude photos, is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Sunday, February 18, 2024

The Gay Painting in My Grandmother's Room


Garrett, Indiana

The cold, snowy day after Christmas.  Cousin Buster and I have already played with our toys, and we're tired of sitting around the living room of Grandpa Prater's farmhouse, listening to the adults complain about hippies and laugh about things that happened a thousand years ago.  So we go exploring, hoping to find a secret stash of comic books.

The kitchen
The furnace room
A little room used as as a pantry.
A room with a pump in it.
Some bedrooms.
Grandma Prater's Room.  Locked.  Off-Limits.

Grandma Prater died in 1966, when I was five years, old, so I have only a few random memories of her:  a short, fat, brown woman carrying bags of groceries, frying chicken, telling me a story about a mouse, giving me the nickname Boomer.  She had a thick Kentucky accent.

In a small farmhouse, they could use an extra bed, but after she died, no one ever slept in her bedroom again.  The adults went in to clean, or to look around, but kids weren't allowed: we might "break something."

The door was always locked, but when we played in the house, we always tried it anyway, just in case.

Today the knob turns, and the door stands ajar!  Cousin Buster and I glance at each other in surprise, then push the door open and look inside.

It is a very bright, airy room, not at all stuffy, with two windows and blue wallpaper.  A four-poster bed with a blue comforter,  the covers turned down, a Bible opened to the Psalms, as if Grandma Prater has just stepped out and would return at any moment.

A wooden dresser with photos of Kentucky kinfolk.  A bureau.  Clothes on hangers visible in the open closet door.  A rocking chair with knitting stuff on it.


And a painting: in a lush green forest, a boy is leaning against a tree, playing a flute.  He is wild, savage, naked except for an animal skin. A round red sack hangs from his side.

I stare in awe.  I am looking through a gateway into a "good place," where boys can hold hands and kiss without anyone asking "what girl do you like?"  The boy is a fairy, a mystical sprite, beckoning me, offering a way to the secret world.

After that, on most Christmas and summertime visits, I asked to see Grandma Prater's room.  I became familiar with the bed, dresser, bureau, and rocking chair.  I picked up her Bible, read the annotations, examined her sewing, turned the photos around to see who the subjects were.

But my favorite part of the tour was the painting.

Who was the boy?  Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream?  A boy Hercules (was that a lion skin?).  I thought of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn in The Wind in the Willows, the painting that led to Narnia, the Road to Elfland in heroic fantasy.

And, as I learned more about my grandmother, the painting seemed more and more out of place.

She was born in 1900 in the desolate hills of Eastern Kentucky.  Although she graduated from high school, a rarity at the time, she lived in isolation and poverty.  During the Great Depression, they survived by making moonshine.  She lost four of her eleven children.  During World War II, she moved to Indiana, to another isolated farmhouse.

She believed in ghosts, haints, witches, and premonitions.  A few weeks before she died, she heard her mother calling her from beyond the grave.

She never read fantasy or mythology, or, as far as I could tell, any book but the Bible.  There was no other art in the house except for a picture of Christ on the Cross and a souvenir from Indiana Dunes.

I asked my mother where the painting came from, but she didn't know -- it had been there as long as she could remember, even back in Kentucky.

Were there art galleries in the Kentucky hills?

Et in Arcadia ego.

Grandpa Prater died in 1978, but Uncle Edd continued to live in the farmhouse until 1998, and, I assume, kept up the blue room and the painting.

 After I moved to West Hollywood, I visited my parents twice a year, first in Rock Island and then in Indianapolis, with little time leftover to visit my elderly aunts and uncles in northern Indiana.

Before I knew it, ten, twenty, thirty years had passed since I last went into Grandma Prater's room.

Indianapolis, December 2000

Yuri and I are spending Christmas with my parents.  We go into the room that they've turned into a home gym: two exercise bikes, some free weights...and hanging on the wall beside a towel rack, The Painting!

I stand speechless, staring, as memories rush back.

How did it get here?  Maybe when Uncle Edd moved out of the farmhouse, Mom claimed it.

Yuri touches my shoulder.  "Are you ok?"

"Sure...I mean...this is one of my favorite childhood memories, a picture from my grandmother's bedroom.  I thought it was a hint that gay people exist."

"Your grandmother had the Pastyr Devid?"

"You know it?"

Turns out that it was one of the illustrations in a book of Bible stories that Yuri's grandmother read to him.

"I ask for the story of David the Sheep Boy..." Yuri began.

"Shepherd?"

"Ok, David the Sheepherd.  I asked Baba to read me that story many times.  I thought he was beautiful.  Maybe this is where I know I am gay?"

A continent apart, both our grandmothers inadvertently showed us a sign of gay potential.


I looked up the painting on the internet:  it's Shepherd Boy Playing the Flute, by Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzski (1843-1902), who specialized in Biblical and classical scenes.

Leaving two questions:

1. Was Siemiradzski gay?  I don't find a lot of beefcake in his works.  There's a couple of cute guys on the curtain he painted for the Juliusz Slowacki Theater.

2. How did my grandmother get a print of a work by a minor Polish painter in the hills of Eastern Kentucky?



L

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