Tag Archives: Closet

Life as a Spring, or Housecleaning.

Posted on by
1

It’s not so much a post about the vagaries of housecleaning, which are rather dull, but instead the nature of the beast, which I envision as a shell-within-a-shell sisyphisian trudge. I have a plan, this plan goes hand-in-hand with my personal will towards simplification and forcing my house to bend to my designs. It is made of steps that have to be dealt with in a certain order for everything to make sense. You have to start somewhere and you need to cut out before you can reorganize.

Step 1: The Grace of Goodwill and/or the Salvation Army – This step is one of the biggest, but not the absolute biggest hurdles to my year-long plan for home order. The plan is to separate Fall/Winter wardrobes from Spring/Summer wardrobes and while selecting for that, also pitching clothes that no longer fit or are so surplus that I haven’t even thought of them in a year or more. This involves the purgation of all of our closets, which for a pair of gay men is as legendary as you imagine. There are 4 closet areas, the Walkin, Hobbiton, Hallway and Guest. All four have to be emptied and sorted, a pile heading to the charities and then the sorting of their seasonal appropriateness. The not-seasonal-now clothes will all eventually be stored in Hobbiton, as it is the largest closet I have ever seen in my life. Once the clothing is ordered properly we’ll have a clear bead on how much of Hobbiton was consumed and how much remains for secondary storage. Hobbiton is THAT BIG, and frankly speaking, I’ve never really looked very closely inside Hobbiton, so I imagine there are surprises lurking within, mayhap, even Hobbits.

Step 2: Organizing the Man Cave – Two gay men, a fully finished basement, and more electronics and gadgets than you can shake a stick at. This zone must be organized. DVD’s have to be sorted into alphabetical order and music has to be sorted into alphabetical order. The only variance to the sorting is the special thematic category of Horror/Thriller/Halloween movies, they will be on their own, sorted but segregated since they are the gory delight of every Samhain/Halloween celebration. The splatter must stand alone. 🙂 The music really ought to be digitized and the physical media obliterated, but that would be more trouble than it’s worth in the end.

Step 3: Organizing THE LIBRARY – I use all caps because the old master bedroom became THE LIBRARY. It’s where all our books are stored. Anyone who even is partially aware of Scott knows that his affection for books is beyond epic, beyond legend, it’s incredible. We don’t honor our Library nearly enough as we ought to and for this plan I can address some of it by alpha-sorting the entire structure. I need to dig deep into that room and purge off very old castaway technology and pitch much of what is my personal storage in that room. I haven’t seen it in a year, almost all of it, so keeping it is doing nothing for me, it has to go. The only thing that stays are the books, but for me personally, there are some books that will be landfill bound. Before we can address the Library we have to get our current lodger up and flying, so he can get his independence. Once that is done, the work on this room can commence.

In the end, of all these steps, our house will be more orderly and pleasant and I won’t have to feel awkward and bent about all these little nipping irritants, not being able to find the right clothes, the right movies, the right music or the right books to suit me. Also it would be nice to have a home again where I can sit where I please and do what I wish without having to contend with piles of drift-stuff that ended up malingering in corners. UP AND OUT. That’s the theme.

When will this grand plan be achieved? Maybe a year from now, maybe two. This simplification is vital and I can’t resist it any longer. All of this STUFF is stifling. When people mention this stuff, they sometimes use the word ‘trappings’ and that’s exactly what it is, stuff-based traps. I’m done with traps. Time to be simple.

The Liminality of the Moulin Rouge

Posted on by
Reply

I have been for the past year observing surreptitiously a particularly seamy segment of the homosexual population. This segment are classified under many names, the most common are ‘barebackers’, who just don’t care about risk and consequence to ‘bug catchers’ who actively seek out risk and consequence.

I’ve watched these people, and I continue to do so. It’s prurience is unwavering, these people are tired of the 1990’s and early 2000’s efforts to get the entire gay male population to stop having sex, or at least engage in safe sex with proper protection and have made bids to behave in a wholly retrograde fashion against best common sense. Driven into a madness by their libidos.

I began to ponder why this phenomena has grown up recently. I suspect people are growing weary of constantly having to be vigilant when it comes to sex, they no longer fear the most common consequences and for many people, this has become a manner of managed risk with a blasé attitude regarding the consequences for themselves. What alarms me the most is that this population exists and it’s members wander about carrying their bio-hazardous passengers  into the lives of people who are hormonally addled to the point where they either don’t care or are not aware enough to take proper precautions. I’ve read many stories where firmly closeted homosexuals, pressurized with a buildup of hormonal chemicals raging in their bloodstream have willfully suppressed their authentic cognition and allowed these people to enter their lives and infect them. The mode for this infection is not as simple as plain exposure, there is a group within the barebacking community that engage in a practice they gloat about, called ‘Stealth’. When faced with the pressure of their sex drives they seek out partners to satisfy their urges, and if those partners are determined to ‘play it safe’ then these individuals will sabotage the protection rendering it merely an affectation and not a true form of consequence protection and then engage in the act of infection to someone who is not fully aware of their situation and the risk they face.

While stealthing is practiced and is an outrage unto itself, these people willfully seek out other infected partners to engage in unprotected sexual relations and many engage in acts of profound exposure, with multiple partners, random partners, and stranger-partners. What concerns me most of all isn’t so much cross-infection, but because these people are engaged in orgiastic sexual pursuits, hyperinfection. HIV is only a single player on the stage, a terminal player but not the most damaging or hazardous – what really concerns me is the hyperinfection of Hepatitis C, which is incurable, leaves you with 10 to 20 year life expectancy and full liver failure at the end. HIV is as hazardous, but it doesn’t cause organ damage like Hepatitis C can.

Through my personal experience and what I have seen in other gay men, there is a duality building in our culture that I call the Moulin Rouge problem. We are on the public surface a ‘polite society’ and this ‘polite society’ doesn’t accept the existence of sexual depravity and amoral conduct, but along side this ‘polite society’ is a darkness in many of our cohort group that sits just beyond and has no problem engaging in such activities and in many ways, revels in it. I see the strictness and moral uprightness deepening the darkness that balances it. You then have a new liminality, on the front of the Moulin Rouge, it’s all quite innocent fun, but behind the Moulin Rouge is failed risk, disease, and the ramifications of uncontrolled consequence. You have men who carry a public image of spotlessness and a private image of orgiastic incorrigibility.

Linked together with my previous post what concerns me the most are the men who exist so far and so deep into the closet that they end up in a perpetual state of sexual frenzy, they have a raw hunger to engage in explosive exercises of homosexual intercourse, they lay there and will agree to anything so that they can achieve satisfaction, and some of them spend not a single moment considering the consequences of their actions. They then take this failure with them, as a new dark passenger, to their wives or girlfriends, where they continue the cycle of ignored risk and unfortunate consequences. I find these men, trapped in the closet, driven mad with sexual frenzy to be almost as bad as the men who willfully spread their infections to others through indolence or malicious design.

The way to avoid this is sexual education and to relax our moral indignation over sex in general. I would argue that we’ve helped create this monster by leaving men too uneducated and too tightly trussed with morality, that if we as a culture relax in regards to morality perhaps we’ll be able to shoehorn some of these men out of the closet, get them educated about their bodies and their feelings and once we get to that point, they should be well armed enough to avoid making life-altering mistakes.

As always, I welcome all comments – I can only hope this gets to a healthy boy in the closet, gets him to come out, gets him to wake up, to think, to not make mistakes – to learn ahead of making these mistakes… to save themselves. Coming out is not only good for you, it’s good for us all.

Openly Gay

Posted on by
2

If there is one singular phrase that can corral a huge batch of anger it’s reading about how someone is ‘Openly Gay’. It’s the context that gets me most of all. Context is a theme I will be exploring in the next few blog entries, so you might as well get comfortable now with my ranting and raving.

What angers me most is that there is some fundamental difference between “Gay” and “Openly Gay” – a kind of paper-based room-divider-esque closet for people to hide in while trying to appeal to the masses. The difference between “Gay” so and so and “Openly Gay” so and so makes every part of me tremble with rage. I see the phrase “Openly Gay” in headlines and it just turns in my gut like a knife – that being public and sharing your sexual orientation is in itself a newsworthy event. It is not a newsworthy event, if someone is gay, they are gay. What is the shock and awe associated with this?

Centrally this touches on a huge pet peeve of mine. People who hide in the closet, thinking they are protecting themselves when they are doing nothing more than dodging the truth and avoiding unpleasant feelings. The longer you dwell in the closet the harder it is to open the door, and if you spend too much time there, you run the risk of losing the seam where the door really is and thinking you are in a jail cell for the rest of your life.

The rest of this touches on the number of homosexuals in our world. Everyone is under the impression that there are just a really limited number of homosexuals and that we can be gleefully written off because we aren’t important enough to consider as being worth it to regard and respect. If everyone who was gay in the closet came out spontaneously, our world would change. The truth would not only set you free, it would set us all free. The truth is like light, it cleans what it touches and from my recent experiences (more on those later) that light is more needful than ever to come out and illuminate every little nook and cranny. If you don’t think it’s important for your social health, it’s vital for your biological and spiritual health as well!

I recently had the pleasure to watch this blog-entry from a fellow by the moniker of Davey Wavey. He’s quite wise for someone so young and instead of replicating his words I can just point to him and have everyone watch what he has to say on this subject. It is time for people to stop using the phrase “Openly Gay” because all Gays should be “Open” already. Hiding is bad for you, it’s bad for me, it’s bad for us all!