avatarThe Wordsmith™🏳️‍🌈🇺🇸

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ESSAY | AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL | FOUR ENGAGING WOMEN

Be Open (More About Me) — Alex, The Wordsmith™

The four women I’ve related to in my life, female relatives excluded

The Wordsmith™🏳️‍🌈🇺🇸 — Existentialist Extraordinaire | quote on the scroll from Robert Frost | author’s registered trademark

Second Installment about me, The Wordsmith™🏳️‍🌈🇺🇸, aka Alex🌈🇺��, aka Steve Alexander.

Of the three cognomens, I like the second most. Just ‘Alex.’ It’s not unique, but it is less common and more memorable than Steve. It’s also sexier than Steve. There was a time when that meant something.

The Wordsmith™ is my little conceit. Words were my business as a litigator. That’s what I was, a smithy of words. That’s the writer I aspire to be. I trademarked it because I’d like to be known on Medium, and wider should it come to that, by that brand. The Wordsmith™.

Upon first reading, it seems arrogant, doesn’t it? And presumptuous. Who am I to brand myself “the” wordsmith when there were Hemingway, Poe, Frost, Lincoln, and Churchill? But it’s neither arrogant nor presumptuous because I don’t really believe it of myself. Instead, it’s an aspiration, a goal to be approached.

I added the two characters 🏳️‍🌈 and 🇺🇸 to make it unique and to characterize myself. I’m gay. Anyone who would know me should know that. It informs all chapters of my life. I am also American. Since Medium members are a multinational group, I thought it only correct to identify my nationality.

A Little Milestone

Today, I passed a minor milestone. I acquired my 200th follower, a woman. At the time, I thought that women are a large contingent among my followers. So, I counted them. There are only 65, but that’s nearly a third. Why are 65 women following me, I wondered — what do I, an aging, septuagenarian, gay old fart from the last century, have to offer women of today? I have no answer for you.

That’s not what I came to write. The thought of my female followers made me think more broadly about the role of women important in my life. Who were they? How did they come to be in my life? What did they mean to me? What did I mean to them?

I admit the generality that women mean and have ever meant little to me. On the straight to gay queerometer, I am 100% in the Pride-Flag zone. I have never been interested in the female form. All women look alike to me. I don’t notice things like hairstyle or eye color. Women’s facial features are indistinguishable. Rarely does my eye travel below a woman’s neckline. I don’t notice women’s clothing styles, fit, cut, or color. I can distinguish Kate Smith from Tina Turner and Dolly Parton from Twiggy, but that’s the extent of it. My eyes see; my mind fails to discern.

When it comes to minds, I’m much more attuned to the Mars minds of gay men. An interest in the female Venusian mind eludes me. That’s not to say that women have nothing to offer. They assuredly do. It’s that there’s nothing on offer to interest me, with that handful of exceptions.

I know. That’s a horrible thing to say, but I can’t help that it’s true. One can count on one hand with an amputated thumb the number of women to whom I have related to any material extent, my mother, grandmother, and sister excepted.

The first was in my early twenties, Bernie. Her name was actually Bernadette. She was a French-Canadian beauty. In her childhood, she had been somewhat of a tomboy. Her friends called her Bernie. It stuck.

She was 23 when we met. I, 22. We were in the same 14-week computer-systems training course for RCA, a mainframe manufacturer. She had a degree from the University of British Columbia in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. Something of an achievement for a woman of the time. I had a degree from Johns Hopkins University in Operations Research with a minor in Computer Science.

In 1970, RCA assigned us to its government-systems contracts branch in D.C. The manager put us on the same team. We spent a lot of time together at and out of work.

In D.C. that year, I came out; that is I had my first gay sex, my first sex ever.

By then, Bernie and I had become close. I liked her mind but had no physical interest. She liked my mind and the fact that she could be with me without having to fend off advances or suffer the numerous misogynistic jokes the other men told in her presence just to discomfit her because she’d have none of them. When she discovered that her boyfriend was having sex with the girl next door, it was I in whom she first chose to confide.

Bernie was the first straight person I told I was gay. I knew a great deal about her personal life. I felt that I knew the whole person. I wanted her to know the whole me.

When I told her, she said, “I know. So?”

“You know? How do you know? Do I act gay?”

“Certainly not,” she replied. “You’re more a man than any I know. It’s just that you’ve never made an advance toward me, despite that we enjoy each other so much. Any straight man would have tried to get me into bed months ago.”

“You mean, I’m too much of a gentleman to be straight,” I quipped.

The second woman whose mind and company I truly enjoyed was Tina, the courtroom deputy for my judge when I was a law clerk in Fairbanks, 1978-’79. We hit it off from the first. She was in her mid-30s; I was 30. She was a widow with two teenage boys. Her husband of 18 years had been killed on the Alaska Pipeline the prior year when the pumping station he was in exploded the first day they put oil in the line. All they found of him was one boot and a silver belt buckle. His was the only death during construction.

She taught me to love cross-country skiing. We went many times in early winter while the temperature was still above 10 below. Once, we stayed out too long. I nearly got frostbite on my fingers. My hands were under so little control, it was questionable whether I wwould get the key in the car-door lock.

At one point, she proposed. I had to come out to her to say why I wouldn’t marry her without hurting her feelings. She said she could teach me to love a woman like she had taught me to love cross-country skiing. I had to explain that sexual attraction didn’t work that way, that even if I did develop a sexual interest in her, I would always have an interest in men that I wouldn’t promise to deny. It would have been fair neither to her nor to me. She accepted that, though I think she never entirely understood it.

The third woman was my secretary in Philadelphia, 1979–’87. Though we spent little time together outside the office, I liked and respected her. I cared enough for her that, when the IRS threatened to take her house because her husband, who had abandoned her and their small son, had not filed their tax returns, I gave her the $10,000 needed to pay off the lien. She was in love with me but knew I was gay, so that could never go anywhere.

She lives in New England now; I live in Arkansas. We still correspond occasionally via email.

The fourth woman was June, the wife of a husband-and-wife Illinois-farming couple I represented in 1987 in a counter-claim against the bank trying to foreclose on the farm. He took care of the farming side; she took care of the business side, including the banking. Consequently, I spent a great deal more time with her than him, often late into the night in my motel room. We would have late dinners out, including several dry Stoly martinis. By dry, we meant to pass an open vermouth bottle across a chilled glass, add ice and vodka, and serve with two pearl onions.

Late one evening, holding a pearl onion on a toothpick close to her lips, she proposed that we have an affair. I had to come out to her to explain why I wasn’t interested sexually even though I loved her company. I could see in her eyes and on her face that she was nonplussed. But she reacted with the grace and aplomb I had come to expect of her.

Later, when her husband accused her of having an affair with me, she said,

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jack, he’s gay! Don’t you know that?”

He didn’t much care for my company after that and was glad to leave me to her, however much time it took.

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