A WRITER’S BIO

Phillip Steven (“Alex”) Alexander

Three personas ensconced in one person

Our response to Dr. Mehmet Yildiz’ challenge to Illumination writers to provide a ‘writer’s bio’

That’s me, all three of me.

● Phil (“Pheeel” to his four-year-old, younger sister using her whiny voice when she wanted something of him), the dutiful son and brother, always loved despite the self-imposed, extended distancing of his late teens and twenties.

● Steve, an independent, perversely contrary, thirteen-year-old determined no longer to be “Pheeel” but a man of his choosing who ultimately grew into an aggressive, fierce lawyer in constant combat with evil forces, and

● Alex, the nascent man, so nicknamed by his college mentor when he took their relationship to a personal level, came to use that moniker exclusively with those gay men he desired to know and wished to remember him.

Three personalities ensconced in one person. Phil, known as that, and that only, by his immediate family, none of whom ever knew or wanted to know either of the others. Steve, the contrary boy who would be his own man, a man who eventually morphed into an unforgiving, hard-ass litigator merciless to those of his opponents, both lawyers and principals alike, who were Goliath opposed to David, his client. And Alex, an even-tempered, sweet, kindhearted, spiritual gay man who spent half a century seeking Diogenes-like that other man who would love him as fiercely, determinedly, and passionately as he would in return.

We thank Dr. Yildiz for including us in his challenge to Illumination writers to provide a “writer’s bio.”

Though I intend here to give glimpses into the three, I, Alex, the dominant survivor of them, am the one taking up the mantle.

Born tongue-tied, it was questionable whether Phil would ever speak correctly. The old country doctor, typical of the GPs found in the rural, western plains states of the later 1940s, made the appropriate snips and nips but remained doubtful. He told Phil’s mother that the best hope was for her to read to him. So she did. She read to him from the headlines and articles in the little local newspaper and from the children’s books she bought by the dozen. She read from the obituaries and wedding announcements and from the pages of the Montgomery Wards catalog. She read from the Zane Grey novels his father sometimes read and from the poems and short stories of Poe, O. Henry, and de Maupassant. In his first five years, she read countless words over thousands of hours.

That is the wellspring of Phil’s constant love of reading, of words, and of the English language. It accompanied Phil in his metamorphosis into Steve and carried Steve on his lawyer’s sojourn. And, also, if Alex has any now, it is the wellspring too of his talent at writing.

At thirteen, in 7th grade, the contrarian Steve emerged from the chrysalis of Phil’s teenage rebellion. Identify for Steve the seven pillars upon which civilization rests; he will immediately attack three of them as impostures. Tell him he has seven book reports to write during the semester; he will delight in the prospect. Tell him he must choose the seven from your list of ten; he will determine to read not one of them but choose from his list of Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning literature. Tell him that if he sees but one movie that year, it must be Cabaret; he will determine not to go.

As years churned away, he became a constantly serious man nearly bereft of humor yet strangely imbued with empathy for men and mankind so immense that it physically hurt. He despised his father and consequently hated and always confronted bullies. He sometimes wept for the subjugated, persecuted, and tyrannized. Silent and isolated, he suffered recurrent bouts of depression.

Steve’s formative years were uniformly unhappy, a tedium of his involuntary making that held him captive. Then, at twenty-seven, he discovered the law and the law school that birthed him in his profession. He found not just a career, but a calling. Pursing them with passion and dedication, he found purpose. He became a formidable man.

Meanwhile, in 1970, at twenty-two, Alex arrived fully formed, fully functional, and entirely determined to satisfy lust and find love in his homosexuality. Alex came out!

I told you it is I, Alex, writing this, so you might reasonably expect that I will write eloquently, purposively, and persuasively of that man barely out of college who had spent seventeen years so tightly closeted that light scarcely reached him.

Yes, you did the math correctly. Twenty-two minus seventeen is five. From age five, and though he hadn’t a term for it, the boy Phil knew he was gay.

He knew instinctually that it was shameful and, too, that it was undeniable. He knew it was as much a part of him as was his gall bladder. He knew it was just as bilious to the rest of the world.

You might think that I will, here, convey to you how momentous that transition from dark to light was for him, what joy in living he discovered, and why the migraine headaches that had frequently crippled him since puberty in fifth grade suddenly disappeared that day, never to recur.

But, at the moment, I cannot. So, I will leave it simply that Alex came out. The nascent man, whom his college professor took to friendship and to whom he gave that nickname, became openly gay Alex.

The world changed for him. The world changed him. To some degree, over the next fifty-one years, he changed the world. He brought emotiveness, kindness, and grace to many of the lives he touched. He took the pain and grief in others upon himself. He was the source of those things to some who loved him but he did not love. But, whether in virtue or misfortune, he touched people, changed their lives, and so changed the world to that slight degree.

That sounds Messiah-like, but he does not view himself like that. He’s neither so arrogant nor so narcissistic. That is the way he saw his job as a litigator, and the way he aspired to conduct himself.

For twenty years, until they were forty-two, Steve and Alex persisted in parallel, living two people’s lives in one person’s skin. If walking behind him down the sidewalk, you hollered, “Hey, Alex,” the man turning to you would be bright, cheerful, and trusting. He would be anxious to pull you into his personal space, the better to draw warmth from your body and bathe you in his light. If instead, you called out, “Steve,” the serious man who turned upon you with furrowed brow, with burning embers where bright, blue eyes ought to have been, and with a grim-set, pursed-lip mouth would be unwelcoming, withdrawn, and aloof to the point of appearing arrogant.

Steve would as soon advance upon you with rapier drawn as he would disdain to turn back and walk on. Alex would rather hug you than shake your hand since he knew you were gay, for no one else called him that, and knew too that you remembered him.

That was me, all three of me.

These days, Alex dominates. He keeps Steve’s remnants tightly bound, vampire-like, in silver chains, in the closet, as it were. It is mostly Alex who writes in the publication

One Gay Man’s Perspective

though he released Steve to write the two pieces

and

It was Alex who wrote with levity of

It was Alex, too, who spent a magical moment

where he found himself at one with the cosmos in a long night of

In

which left him unrequited; Alex concluded that love is always costly for the one, yet to the other free. But, in

Alex found the coin’s reverse when it was him imposing the cost, not paying it.

These days, Phil and Alex occupy the one body in harmony. It has been so since 2006 when Alex returned to the fold to help his sister care for their mother in her advancing Alzheimer’s. She died an ugly death in 2009. He remained in the now reduced fold. It’s just him and his sister. They live together in the home where they cared for their mother. His sister knows only Phil, whom she loves.

Of Alex, she cares to know nothing. She accepts him as she always has, him and his few lovers and string of friends whom she treated as if family members.

Acceptance and knowing are not the same. If he should try to talk about what being gay means, she grows distant and withdrawn. Suppose he should try to speak of what it meant to him to love another man; cold sets in. She doesn’t care to know the chemistry, physicality, or mechanics of the love that dare not speak its name. She has read nothing he has written in Medium so far as he is aware, though not for want of invitation.

It’s Phil alone whom she remembers and cares to know. Steve, she never knew. Alex is a strange thing, a wispy fog on the horizon that she would the more prefer the sun disperse than that it should coalesce into a phantom too near her. Acceptance? Fine. Exposure? Knowledge? Intimacy? Not so much.

So, Alex keeps himself to himself, confined to his thoughts and writings here on Medium.

Phil has reemerged, a seven-decade-old version of the big brother once known as Pheeel. Phil, whom one once determined to deny, has come yet again to be who one is, at least in part.

Steve, the independent man one once determined to be, is long gone, drowned in a fourteen-year spasm of constantly recurring, oppressive depressive episodes. The next, always the more so. Alex and his psychiatrist took the scalpel to Steve, slicing him here, dissecting him there, intending to expose yet another of his most profound, mostly dark mysteries.

They exposed enough that Alex, always before the least secure, is now the strongest, knowing well who he is, where he has been, and why. He knows too where he is and why. Though he might have preferred a different outcome, he doesn’t lament this one. It is what it is. There’s no profit in distressing over it.

Passing strange are the stages of life. The great wheel turned. One wound up where one never thought to be. One survived in circumstances and to an age one never imagined for himself. In half a lifetime, one found and lost the calling of a lifetime. One had at 22

and lost at 25

the great love of a lifetime.

Again, at 39, one found his soulmate, just the man for him, and lost him at 47.

Near the end, one discovered, as never he thought he would, the meaning of life — the journey. The journey and how one lived it are what matter at the last. Impart some kindness, a little love, and a touch of grace to the lives of those whose lives one crosses, and the journey has become the meaning.

Thus so, Alex thinks. Thus so, The Wordsmith™🏳️‍🌈🇺🇸 often writes in this a writer’s Medium.

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