Essay | LGBTQ | Gay Companionship

I Miss Another Gay Man’s Mind

Gay Men Need the Companionship and Mental Stimulation of Other Gay Men

In gay cultural Hell

Through no fault of mine, I wound up in a Deep-South region of the United States called Northwest Arkansas in a city called Fayetteville. This is rural, Ozark-Mountain country. Here there be Republican bubbas with open-carry permits and God in all His many brick-and-mortar manifestations and even a couple of virtual ones that broadcast daily over the airwaves. This country is home to some of the most conservative, right-wing, Republican religiosity I have ever had to endure.

I am an atheist, a very liberal Democrat, an urban-centric Northerner, a cosmopolitan Washingtonian, a veteran of 1970s San Francisco’s free love hedonism, a gay man, and an existentialist extraordinaire. I have never felt nor been so out of place. I have no business being here. Yet, through a seemingly random series of serendipitous though inevitable events, here I have been for sixteen years.

My mother retired to Fayetteville from D.C. in 1987. My sister moved here from rural Tennessee in 2004 to care for her when she first began showing Alzheimer’s signs. Drawn against my will, out of love, respect, and filial duty, I moved here from Palm Springs in 2006 to help care for her when the job became more than my sister could handle alone. I moved into my sister’s house as an evident economy. Together, we were mom’s sole care and support system through 2009 when Alzheimer’s finally took her.

We get along well and enjoy each other’s company except for politics, which, for the sake of preserving the sibling bond, I have ostracized from our collective consciousness. I insist that she kill Fox News when I enter within hearing distance. In return, I abjure CNN and the New York Times other than within the privacy of my bedroom and my silent mind.

Gay life here revolves almost exclusively around the local- and university-Pride organizations geared toward the young — the high school and university teens and twenty-somethings. To be 35 is to be so far over the hill that one can not just see but is actually on the horizon. Indeed, by 35, any gay man with any sense of self-development and self-preservation has long since fled the state.

For the 40+ gay man in Fayetteville, gay cultural life is dead — dead, dead, dead. Indeed, gay life generally, with or without culture, is dead — dead, dead, dead. For the severely aging 73-year-old, urban-centric, atheistic Baby Boomer, gay life here is not just dead; it has gone to Hell taking the poppers, the black leather cock ring, and the orange, green, and dark blue hankies with it.

The conservative, Republican, evangelical, religious faction is happy for that but fears Pride is corrupting the souls of the minors.

I miss a gay man’s mind

For sixteen years now, what exposure I have had to a liberality and cosmopolitan mindset attuned to mine has been limited to three of my sister’s friends, all divorced women of elderly age but young (35–40-ish) in mind. They are intensely opinionated Democrats, not cherry about announcing their beliefs. None is native to Arkansas. They come from uninhibited, liberated, urbane, and worldly backgrounds. They know I’m gay. It makes not one jot of difference to them, except that they may be the more attracted to me because of it. Don’t ask me why. The mind of woman is passing strange to me.

Still, theirs are the minds of straight women, however liberal and gay-accepting.

I miss being able to make a gay-related pun and have the person not just laugh at but relate to it. I miss turning my head back to ogle a man who’s just passed me by on the sidewalk, all the while wanting him to turn back and look at me and having the man I’m with doing the same for the same reason. I miss seeing the knowing smile on my companion’s face and the flash in his eyes that says, “I know what you’re doing. Been there; done that.”

I miss the shared knowledge and implicit understanding of what it meant to have been forced into the closet from an early age because one believed that he was anathema to his family, was a perversion of God’s plan, was a rude stain on His otherwise pristine landscape. However accepting, however caring and concerned, however empathetic, the straight mind is simply unable to comprehend the magnitude and lasting effect of the psychological injury that does to one.

I miss the company of others of my kind. I miss the touch of another gay man’s mind.

I did not realize how much until the visit this week of a friend from long ago. He came to Fayetteville from his home with his partner in Dallas to help his father after his mother’s death. When I lived here for the six years from 1985 through 1992, with my soulmate Loy, Bradly was our roommate. We were 25 (Loy) and 37 (me); Bradly was barely 21. It was Bradly, now 57 but still nearly 17 years my junior, who came to help his father.

I had neither seen nor spoken to him in the 23 years since1998 when he and Marston visited me in San Diego, although we have corresponded by email for the last year. He wrote to say that he would be in Fayetteville this week and wanted to meet for lunch.

We spent a lovely two and a half hours together. Our discussion ranged from reminiscences to the state of “gaydom” in Fayetteville and Dalla to the current political scene. We talked of his current partner and my now dead one. I knew what it is for him to love another man so completely. He knew what it was for me to have had and lost a soulmate so perfectly attuned to me that we finished each other’s sentences. We each knew what the other had endured as he negotiated life in an un-accepting at best, condemnatory at the worst, straight world. As we sat there, we each felt the other’s experiential influences and knew them because they were our own.

It was on his departure that the realization that I miss the in-person interaction with another gay man’s mind that is of an equal capacity and disposition to mine struck me with flash-flood force.

Bradly will be coming here with some regularity for the foreseeable future. On each occasion, we will get together. Still, and despite our continued email correspondence, I will, in the interim periods, be in the gay-mental-wasteland that I have inhabited for 16 years now. Email, however revealing, however personal, however open, approaches neither the intimacy nor the symbiotic energy deriving from close, personal presence. It is the spontaneity and interaction of two like minds in each other’s intimate company that I find so gratifying.

Twelve to 20-ish more years in gay cultural impoverishment

Inertia being the force that it is, and there being no pull from any other place, I will likely stay in Fayetteville for the remaining twelve to twenty-some years of my expected life span.

Understand my purpose in writing here. I do not wallow in self-pity. I merely state facts. The future of a cultivated, urban-minded gay man is less than attractive under these facts. Nevertheless, it is what it is. One deals with it and moves on.

In part, I do that by writing here in Prism & Pen and in Medium generally — I move on.

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