Fall arrived with all its fiery pomp and pizzazz, but I’d rather go the blushing and bashful route in our first weekly recap of the season, framed by these pink-tinged chrysanthemum blooms. It was a week that saw summer wrapping itself up in wonderful fashion, setting the stage for a fall that’s going to be red-hot. Join me for the first look back…
Tangled in his sheets, my body, tanned from the summer – a last summer of innocence now that I can look back with such distance – is dark against their whiteness. His broad shoulders are freckled by summer too, and the heat is such that our actions leave us both a bit damp. He is the first man who has been naked with me, and it is maybe our third or fourth night together. I am nineteen years young, and not one day of those nineteen years has prepared me to be in this bed, in his arms, in his thrall. How could I be anything but terrified?
It was September – the September I discovered Marianne Faithfull’s ‘A Secret Life’ album – and the track so perfectly titled and timed played in my mind as we laid there in shadow.
The summer dying,
September lives in flame,
The sisters dancing
No happy ending to the game.
Don’t bother to call me – Think I’ll stay here just the same.
I’ve already talked in great detail about what happened between us. Read that here if you’d like. For now, for this one moment, I am going back to that one moment – and it may not even be one moment anymore – maybe it’s an amalgamation of two or three moments, settling and coalescing into one single memory that haunts but no longer hinders my journey. This song takes me back there, to his bed – the bed of the first man I ever kissed – and to this night, just another night in his life of nights, a life that was already double the length of mine. And again I wonder how I could be anything but terrified?
Flaming September, what can you give me that is true?
Do you remember? Do you remember, do you remember… all the life I gave to you?
The summer dying
September lives in flame
My youth lies bruised and broken
No happy ending to the game.
Don’t bother to tell me – I’ll live on here just the same.
That September was hot and stifling one moment, chilled and stormy the next. That’s how it felt in his bed – hot and cold, push and pull – we were each alternately powerful and entirely powerless. Who held sway over whom? The perfect lithe and unspoiled canvass of a nineteen-year-old young man could instantly disarm a thirty-six-year-old’s jaded experience. We weren’t on opposite ends of some human spectrum. We were closer to each other than we realized. I also understood that we could not find our footing outside of his little room. And I knew that it was more than that too.
Flaming September, what can you show me that is new?
My heart remembers. Do you remember, do you remember… all the life I gave to you?
In his watery blue eyes, I looked for answers to my questions. I had so many, and I was so young. How do you know if you’re in love? How and when do you reveal it? I’m not saying I’m in love with you. I only just met you. How can you love someone you barely know? He stopped my questions with a kiss, or a bite, the same way some animals put an end to play, both a tease and a warning. When he had me beneath him, when I could barely breathe, and when I wouldn’t have it any other way, I wondered at whether his warning would deliver some ecstatic death blow to the person I hadn’t quite yet become.
Flaming September, what can you show me that is true?
My heart remembers. Do you remember, do you remember… all the life I gave to you?
While things heat up here, I give you this blue-hued break to douse the flames and give soothing relief. This may very well have been my last swim of the year, though I’m still holding out for a stretch of warm days to inspire Andy into kicking on the heater for one last romp in the water. We shall see. For now, this is a respite for the slow burn this site is going to be taking from here through the holidays.
Water and fire will come together in a long-lost project that will be posted next month, so this post and the one before it, as well as the one coming up tonight, make a lovely lead-in to such a juxtaposition.
A little soul-searching and a little swimming – such was how the summer was largely spent. We shift away from the pool to the inner-sanctuary of home as the nights grow colder and the days dimmer. There will be other methods of relief then, different ways to metaphorically cool down when the fires of this site burn too hot.
“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” ~ Frederick Douglass
One of the ways we are instructed to safely extinguish a fire is by burying it. Suffocating its access to oxygen is one effective way to stop the burn. That doesn’t work quite as well for the human heart. For far too many years, I made a habit of burying things that bothered me – hurt that went unreconciled, forgiveness that never found the air to flourish, and those messy emotions that only served to trip me up. It was the only way I knew, the only method I’d learned to deal with something that might otherwise derail the tidy life I tried so hard to assemble and keep.
Maybe that’s one of the setbacks of being in the closet. For my generation of gay people, we made a habit of burying things – secrets, desires, attractions, feelings, emotions – and we became adept at living out various lies and masquerades until it was difficult to tell the difference between what was real, what was in our hearts, and what the world perceived.
Looking back over the decades, I pause and wonder at how much I’ve truly addressed, and how much still needs to be exhumed before I can genuinely claim to have let it all go.
My mind returns to the fall of 1994, when I met a man who would inform so many of my experiences with men that would follow. He was the first man I ever kissed, the first man I was ever naked with, and the first man who pulled whatever capacity he might have had to love entirely away from me. It all happened within the span of a couple months, and there is a journal of those days which I recently removed from its bookshelf, blowing the dust off its cover and returning to the words I wrote when I was only 19 years old.
It’s largely an embarrassing and painstakingly detailed account of mostly nothing, given the import and drama of an average teenager. One phrase struck me, pointing out how young and naive I was then: “Am I doing something wrong?” The moments of doubt and uncertainty, because I had never been with a man before and there had been no examples or guides or the merest whisper that what I was feeling and going through wasn’t wrong or sinful, feel keenly raw, even to this day.
There was so much innocence to what I wrote, as much as I tried to protect myself with a jaded attitude and prickly disposition. There was haughtiness too, and the college kid’s typical bravado in the way we thought we knew it all. The writing is stilted and clumsy, but it was only a journal. The magic was in the process of writing it all down.
I read another passage:
…I asked if he was falling in love with me, and he had said, “Not yet, no.” Neither was I, if I could help it. He also said he couldn’t wait to spend the whole night with me, and wake up and watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat cereal. I wasn’t so sure. If I wanted that. Or of anything…
So many words, and so much emptiness. When I read what I wrote all those years ago, the overriding sense is one of incredible loneliness, which is strange, because I rarely recall feeling lonely. Yet that’s the essence of all those words… and they’re only words unless they’re true.
The journal goes into the days after we met – from September into October – and the eventual dissolution of our ‘relationship’ – something that I didn’t even realize I was in. Near the end, all I focus on is the collection of his own words. I don’t think I’ve really listened to them since that year. Seeing them there, in print, an exact quote of what he said, I’m somewhat shocked.
In one entry, after I’d tracked him down after he ghosted me, I was invited to walk with him while he picked up dinner. He asked if I wanted anything from the store to drink – he was getting a Coke. I told him no.
“Oh that’s right, you never want anything.”
We went back to his place, where he sat down and ate his dinner of Chinese food, drinking his Coke. I blurted out a question on whether I was a major or minor part of his life. A rookie mistake, but I knew no other way to communicate other than in the most direct and honest way. He didn’t really answer. He said it was hard to get to know me, that I was so quiet and I had this double-level. One part was the small bit that I let him and the world see, and the other part was this hidden, secret life. He said I was always having an internal conversation and thinking it through in my head and that made it very difficult to get to know me. He said maybe it was because I was alone so often, and that he knew, he was weird too. He said more, but I wrote down that it had already escaped me.
This was actually the next to last time I would see him, but I write as though it will be our final encounter. Playing a game I was just starting to learn, I drew back.
“So this is the last time,” I said.
“That we’re going to see each other?” he asked.
“Yeah, at least that’s what I gather.”
“No, I mean, I’d like to see you again.”
I rose from the bed and picked up my back-pack.
“I have to go now,” I said – and then I left.
Reading that now, I feel confused. I didn’t remember this part of our story. In all my tellings of it, I focus on the end, on our last meeting, when he says it’s not working out, that our age difference is too much and we are incompatible. I forgot that there was this moment when he wanted to see me again, and I pulled away. The startling way a written record brings the past back into focus, no matter how many times you have tried to retell it.
There is a photograph of me in my dorm room at the time, glued to the back of one of the journal pages. The sunset is coming in through the windows, and it looks like the room is on fire. I hold a pillow in my arms, looking upward into the light. I remember that room. I remember that light.
What I don’t remember is how close I came to destroying myself during that stretch of time. It’s there on every page, the danger and the desire for danger, just to prove that I was alive. I don’t think I realized how badly I was burned by the whole experience, how deeply the wounds went.
Fall always brings me back to that place, but I usually resist its pull. This year I’m going to stay there a while, looking at it from the safe vantage point of the life I’ve made for myself, allowing the feelings of loneliness and fear to wash over me. It’s time to acknowledge the past.
When things turn incendiary, and the world burns up around us, I find it wise to step away from the fire, and hold the world in the single flame of a candle. In that one source of light is the focal point of an evening’s meditation. Andy used to do a candle meditation, where he would stare intently at a candle for a while, then lose his eyes and work to picture the candle in his mind. It was another exercise of focus and concentration, of using an object to hold the attention and train the mind to forego all other distracting thoughts.
There will always be nagging distractions competing for notice. They are not easily banished or relegated to the back of the mind. The goal is to quell them for a moment, and to discover the peace when they are held in such abeyance. When you feel that, when you develop the knack to breathe deeply and slowly into the moment, letting the distractions and worries go, you find the magic of mindfulness. If you consistently focus on finding that, the rest of life feels a little calmer, a little less manic. And if you make it a practice that informs most of your day, life can be quite pleasant indeed.
Stalwart ornamental guardians of the season of gourds, these pumpkins look ready to stand sentinel at entryways and porches and anywhere that needs a dose of fall splendor. Andy and I don’t do much decorating with pumpkins, and I don’t think we’ve carved a Jack-o’-lantern since 2000, maybe 2001. I’m fine with that, as my memories of pumpkin-carving are messy and gross and never quite worth the effort.
When one crosses the threshold into fall, it doesn’t always feel like fall. There are days when the sun is strong, and the heat builds like it does back in summer. The idea of a heavy and musky cologne at such a time feels as out of place as a wool cardigan on a hot July day. This makes fragrance a tricky thing, as I tend to be seasonally oriented when it comes to choosing what to wear on my skin.
The solution is to find something that straddles both summer and fall, and for me that has been the fig. As much a part of high summer as it is the harvest season, the fig is a transitional fragrance that can swerve to sweet and fruity, while being reigned in with something more sharply aromatic. That marriage can be found in Diana Vreeland’s ‘Staggeringly Beautiful’.
A little bit of background on how I came to be in possession of such a glorious gift: I’d had this on my wish list for a little while. It was an impulse add, an extravagant and lavish wish of high-hopes that I never quite expected to receive, as much as I would have liked to receive it. It was also a risky blind-non-buy selection – I usually don’t ask for something I’ve never tried, fragrance-wise, because that can be crazy dangerous. Notes and scents listed out on paper are often nothing like the actual aroma that the final combination might produce. (Luckily enough, some previous blind-buys have turned out to have very happy endings, such as Viktor & Rolf’s ‘Spicebomb’ and Tom Ford’s ‘Oud Minerale’ – still, it’s a risky business.)
I wasn’t expecting anyone to choose such a lovely item for this year’s uneventful birthday, so when I opened up the pretty bag that Sherri and Skip had bestowed upon me and found this spectacular item, my heart jumped – as much for the perfume itself as for the touching generosity and thought that went into it. Sherri always knows the perfect gift to pick out, when even I’ve forgotten what I really wanted. She has a sixth sense about such things, the way she can pick out a pregnant woman practically on the morning-after. It’s also a testament to my friendship with both Sherri and Skip that they were kind enough to deliver this magnificent present.
As for the fragrance itself, it joins a small but beloved collection of Diana Vreeland perfumes on my shelf: ‘Vivaciously Bold‘ and ‘Absolutely Vital‘. This third jewel in the Vreeland crown is the missing piece to a glorious triumvirate. ‘Vivaciously Bold’ is the bright spring awakening that often accompanies us to our Memorial Day adventures in Ogunquit; ‘Absolutely Vital’ is the winter sandalwood that has been present at holiday gatherings; and ‘Staggeringly Beautiful’ is the summer/fall beauty that will now remind me of happy power dinners with friends, planning what is going on with this very website.
‘Staggeringly Beautiful’ carries some of the same gorgeous threads that weave their way through the Vreeland perfume line, but avoids the cloying florals that some of those offerings fall prey to (which is why I will only have three). It opens sweetly with fig and citrus – a blast of fruity rich decadence – which is the perfect summer celebration. There is a green freshness that carries through, keeping things from going too sweet, and after an initial blast of some potent sillage, it dries down to something much closer to the skin – perfect for those days that are hotter and more humid than you think fall could ever be. Elements of bergamot and daffodil temper the ripeness of the fig with spring-like elements, hanging onto a bit of the sunnier seasons the way fall sometimes does. This is a beautiful transitional scent for the tricky time between summer and fall – many thanks to Sherri and Skip for bringing it into my world.
The newest addition to the Ilagan family, Jaxon, has already mastered the art of the pose. Mostly though, he is content to sleep and it is in this peaceful state that we usually find him. (I am all for a sleeping baby.)
Dad has even taken an interest in him, which is a feat in and of itself. He’s made a connection, and the very ends of our family have come together, generations already bound in love. There’s something reassuring abut being sandwiched in-between them – a sense of history being carried on, life continuing its beautiful path forward.
As for Jaxon, he won’t remember any of this, and who knows what sort of remnants of our time with him now will remain. I’ve written him a few letters to have something physical on record of these days, and they say the internet lives forever, so maybe some search engine when he’s an adult will bring up this post in garbled form, and remind him of how precious he has always been to us.
Andy makes his pies from scratch, crust included, and that’s something I simply can’t/won’t do. It took almost everything out of me to master this dough recipe, and that’s enough for now. As for Andy’s apple pie, this is the first time he’s made it in several years. He used the original recipe handed down from his Mom, and whenever he makes one of her recipes I know he feels closer to her. There’s something about baking with love that makes things taste better.
He put together the dough and rolled it out, assembling it in rustic form, then popped it all into the oven to make the magic happen. The kitchen and then the house filled with the aroma of fall and comfort and warmth – it signaled the changing of seasons, and a return to the cozy food one conjures at such a time. A freshly-baked pie brings back childhood holiday memories for both of us.
We served it to some dear friends with freshly-whipped cream, and it was heaven.
Fridays feel better in the fall – perhaps it’s a residual relief from years of being back at school at this time of the year. For this Friday, we’re offering some frilly feathers in keeping with the fiery theme of flames, and they align beautifully with the fabulous fable spun in the fantastic musical ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ (sadly his name didn’t start with an ‘F’, thus ending our little alliteration moment). In the fantastical opening number, our protagonist dreams of a better place than the classroom in which his teenage-self is stuck.
There’s a clock on the wall and it’s moving too slow
It’s got hours to kill and a lifetime to go
And I’m holding my breath ’til I hear the last bell
Then I’m coming out hard and I’m giving ’em hell
I’m a superstar and you don’t even know it
In a wonder bra and you don’t even know it
You’re so “blah blah” and you don’t even know it
I’m like, “au revoir” and you don’t even know it
To a certain extent, life is all about finding out how to turn feathers into fire while making them fly. When you’re just a kid in school, it’s hard to find the fire or the feathers, and even if they’re at your disposable, a kid doesn’t usually know how to use them. It’s hard enough to ignite the passion and strength to go through an average day as an adult – when the weight of the current world rests on a kid, it must feel overwhelming.
There’s a path I’ve planned (And you don’t even know it)
To the promised land (And you don’t even know it)
You won’t understand (And you don’t even know it)
Cos you’re my backing band (And you don’t even know it)
Whenever I think back to my days in grade school, it is usually fraught with the anxiety and dread that being in school and around other kids always produced. Once comfortable with a group, I could relax and shine, but there was so much work and energy required to get through the nerve-wracking first few days that the trauma would linger and be inextricably wound into any enjoyment I might have found. When you’re a kid, life should be mostly about that joy.
I’ve got the dreams, I’ve got the style
I’ve got the moves to make you smile
So kiss my ass goodbye
‘Cause I’m gonna be the one
Instead of finding joy in the present moment, I began to craft a world in my imagination, a world that could be fully accessed from anywhere at any time, but only reaching its fullest form when I could be alone, in solitude, conjuring scenes of fantasy and play and beauty. On my walks home from school I would inhabit this secret world, which was more exciting and grand and dramatic than the boring trappings of school and the dull doings of my classmates.
You’re in my lane, you’re in my light
Get out my way, I’m taking flight
And I ain’t coming back
‘Cause I’m gonna kiss the sun!
For my entire schooling stretch, even into college, I would maintain this secret world. Though I made some decent strides to integrate the imaginary dreams and wishes into the mundane reality in which I so often found myself, I wouldn’t fully merge the two until I was well into adulthood. Some days it’s still a struggle, and on those days I put on a song like this and feel the inspiration to be my authentic and genuine self for all the word to see. Dragging it into the brutal light of day, and allowing all the plumage and fire and majesty to assert itself, I listen to the music, do a little twirl, and make my merry way. In defiance there is power. In self-proclaimed majesty there is might. In the imagined world of a scared kid, there is a way out.
Many people feel that we come closest to magic during the holiday season – when Christmas carries its enchantment and sprinkles Santa dust throughout the land – but I’m more of a believer in magic in the fall. This is when the spells of the year are cast, and Halloween only adds to the eerie belief in contacting other realms. The veil between here and such places feels thinnest in the fall, when smoke rises from burning leaves, and the air is fit for carrying such entities as witches and warlocks. Travel between worlds seems more possible at this time of the year.
The pointy hat seen here is a nod to the season. I will pair it with a copper-colored woolen cape, to ward off the wind as well as any other ill-intending-spirits. When you open up your mind to such possibilities, the bad can enter as easily as the good. One wants to be careful, as with any invitation. The days of inviting the entire world to my parties are done.
A candle of bitter orange & cardamom burns, its spicy scent a balm for the cooler nights we’ve had. Who knows what it might attract? In the attic, rain sounds on the roof. Closer to the sky, and whatever hides above the clouds.
Rarely is there ever a distinctive line between summer and fall, other than the calendar we as humans have assembled to demarcate the shift by the precise date and hour. Nature is more nuanced about it, slipping a bit of fall into the cooler nights we’ve had of late, while letting the heat and sun linger on a bit, giving the scents of fallen leaves and drying acorns more pungent resonance. That subtle shift has been in the works for weeks – this is merely our official proclamation that autumn is here, and summer is done, so let’s get on with the show.
In my head I hear a million conversations
I’m spinning out, don’t wake me up until the end
The rivers flowing in denial I can’t fake it
I’m paranoid that all my thoughts are all my friends
Fall has been aptly named in my lifetime of falls. It used to be the time of the year when I would fall madly, defiantly, and foolishly in love with someone – anyone really – who didn’t love me back. The battle of unrequited love was one I fought every autumn, kicking away fallen dried leaves as I felt my heart jerk against such perceived injustice. It’s been many years since that happened, and while there is mostly relief in that, I no longer look back with bitterness over those lost gentlemen, or my idiocy at pursuing them. That kind of passion and excitement is the province of the young, and without having experienced it, I wouldn’t be able to find the sense of calm I can usually locate these days.
The province of the young – that feels more like spring than fall. Yet fall has a freshness that often gets forgotten. It gives the sort of jolt that time sometimes uses to remind us that it’s constantly in motion. It lights the fire that impels us to prepare for winter, that gives the warning there isn’t much time left. And so we bolt and hasten to our tasks, work and school alike imbued with a new urgency, household tasks given immediate deadlines, as we prepare the outside for the long march to and through the slumbering months.
I was broken from a young age
Taking my sulking to the masses
Writing my poems for the few
That look at me, took to me, shook to me, feeling me
Singing from heartache from the pain
Taking my message from the veins
Speaking my lesson from the brain
Seeing the beauty through the…
Trying to light it
This fall there are big burning plans for this website, as we are about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. The lead-up to that (occurring in early 2023) will include metaphorically burning this place down, with a never-before-released ‘lost’ project going up next month, one that almost say the light of day in 2009 but was used at the last moment in a rare moment of conservative judgment on my behalf, and ultimately it was for the best. I think it’s ready for its close-up now, and all the incendiary shit-storms that usually rage upon the release of a new project can light it all up.
All (pain) these thoughts I battle
Creeping up my skin, creeping up my skin
Fears (pain) they try to rattle
Who I am within, where do I begin?
It’s (pain) one of those days, my world is crashing everything
looks on fire
It’s (pain) one of those nights, I’m dreaming but I’m walking on a wire
All (pain) these thoughts I battle
(believer) Creeping up my skin, (believer) burning from within like
Fire
The song chosen for kicking off the fall season here is a mash-up of ‘Fire’ by The Score and ‘Believer’ by Imagine Dragons. An epic collision of emotions, the kind that happens when someone has reached the point where there are no more fucks to give, when they have been pushed to the edge where it’s jump or die, and the only thing left to do is see whether they have wings. There is beauty in that space… danger and treachery too… and it will be up to us to make the choices that bring us closer to the fire. Whether salvation is there, or something worse, we can never know.
Third things third
Send a prayer to the ones up above
All the hate that you’ve heard
Has turned your spirit to a dove, oh-ooh
Your spirit up above, oh-ooh
I’m a fighter, lighting fires, knock ’em dead
Falls of the past contained a multitude of mixed feelings, and amid the best-laid plans were failures and falterings that I originally viewed as marring the season. Looking back, everything that happened turned into a bit of destiny – lessons and triumphs could only come from mistakes and losses. When you begin to view the world in such a way, it becomes much easier to cope. Because this is not an easy existence. Even the most charmed lives contain their own heartache and misery, and absolutely no one gets out of this alive.
Blood in my chest
Fight in my step
No sleep no rest
No sleep no rest
Sparks in my brain
Am I insane?
Trying to light the flame
Trying to light it
All…Pain!
You made me a, you made me a believer,
Believer
Fears…Pain!
You break me down and build me up, believer,
believer
Pain!
Oh let the bullets fly, oh let them rain
My life, my love, my drive, it came from…
Pain!
You made me a, you made me a believer,
believer
burning from within like
Fire
Let it rain, let it rain
Through the pain like
We summon the fires of fall, with all of their burn and vicious bite, and we take that energy and light and transform it into warmth and sustenance, into the drive and impetus to ignite a new chapter. Setting it off with the frisson of promise, using the kindling of hope, and feeding it with the fuel of memory and rage and right, we send our fires into the sky. Limitless suddenly with the wonder of the realization that we burn together, we meld into everyone else’s fire, enjoined with everyone else’s spirit. In the frightening nights where it can feel endlessly dark, a lone candle flickers, and from one single light so many more can be lit. We raise our little candles in unison, in a collective conjuring of whatever magic and enchantment each of us can cast.
Last things last
By the grace of the fire and the flames
You’re the face of the future
The blood in my veins, oh-ooh
Clench my teeth, I need to end this
conversation
Strike a match cause now it’s time to hit reset
No more doubt, no more running from the half
truth
(and rained down
And rained down, like)
Fall brings out the fight still left within us. The fight we are not yet resigned to lose or leave behind. It lights the fuse of one more hidden bastion of explosive energy, illuminating those parts we may have forgotten about in the dark. Once lit, it will carry us to greater places, to greater understanding and compassion, to acceptance and glory – where glory is the simple state of existing in calm and contentment. There are times when one must rage to find peace.
I’m a fighter, lighting fires, knock ’em dead
All (pain) these thoughts I battle
Creeping up my skin, creeping up my skin
Fears (pain) they try to rattle
Who I am within, where do I begin
It’s (pain) one of those days, my world is crashing everything
looks on fire
It’s (pain) one of those nights, I’m dreaming but I’m walking on a wire
All (pain) these thoughts I battle
(believer) Creeping up my skin, (believer) burning from within like
Sometimes you have to burn it all to the ground to start again. As we lead into the winter that will mark this website’s 20th anniversary, it’s time to do just that. Burning the past, burning the memories, burning the hurt and pain and suffering… and beginning again like some phoenix seemingly lost to the flames. Are you ready to burn, or are you ready to rise?
Continuing the Summer Renaissance we started here, another Beyonce track lends dance pop history and celebration to the scene, the perfect backdrop to a summer that came scented with nostalgia and hope, for the first time in a long time. Andy and I embraced the sun and the pool and the friends and family who could stop by, and we embraced each other at twenty-two years into our relationship. It was a summer of celebratory gratitude, of exhaling and releasing, of leaning into the loveliness that we can sometimes, at our best moments, create for ourselves and our loved ones. And now, before the summer leaves until next year, let’s dance.
IT’S SO GOOD, IT’S SO GOOD, IT’S SO GOOD, IT’S SO GOOD…
By the time August arrived, we were riding the happy rest of summer, and it showed no signs of abating. It doesn’t always work that way, so we took advantage and made the most of each day.
Some summer days, when one can’t be by the ocean, were spent making plans for future trips, even if that meant the arrival of fall. On this day we planned for Ogunquit again.
A historic farewell to a wonderful summer, we took one last wild ride on the high seas, and there was enough good behavior that I may bring them back to Boston for the holidays.
Who else but Beyonce could have provided the soundtrack to this past summer? With her incredible ‘Renaissance’ album, she gave us the beats to move our feet, and the melodies to move our hearts. A celebratory return to the sunny and hot summers that I remember from my childhood, it was a season steeped in happy nostalgia and future hope. On this last day of summer, let’s recap the glorious few months that came before, backed by this killer Beyonce beat.
A corrupt Supreme Court decided to strip women of the control they once had over their own bodies in a move that some of us called way back when certain people were hemming and hawing over Hillary Clinton. You reap what you sow. Vote Blue in November to see if we can right this ship, or we may have more decisions like this.
For my final act this summer, I give you this magical case of the disappearing suit, because this fall I am metaphorically burning all my past trappings to ash. That begins with the onerous albatross of forty-plus years of fashion and sartorial splendor coming off, an exercise in revelation that has been one of the greatest lessons I’ve tried to glean through this blog for the last two decades. Taking it all off here has never been about gratuitous nudity, all category names to the contrary; it’s easier to be physically naked than emotionally so, but this summer we let go of all inhibition – something that could only happen at this mid-stage of life.
Climb up the ‘H’ of the Hollywood sign, yeah
In these stolen moments
The world is mine
There’s nobody here, just us together
Keepin’ me hot like July forever
‘Cause we’re the masters of our own fate
We’re the captains of our own souls
There’s no way for us to come away
‘Cause boy we’re gold, boy we’re gold
And I was like…
Take off, take off
Take off all your clothes
Take off, take off
Take off all your clothes
Take off, take off
Take off all of your clothes
When I was a kid, I’d have no problem running through the neighborhood in my underwear, and even came off a brutal pantsing relatively unscathed. Once our teenage years hit, and adolescence and puberty piled shame upon shame for nudity and nakedness, I was supremely self-conscious, not even wanting to doff my shirt for a summer swim. It was the descent of societal propriety, ending the God-given freedom of the natural state of being nude and putting in its place the buttoned-up armor of my ultimate mask: a wardrobe. That ‘robe’ and ‘war’ should play such pivotal parts in the mixed-up way I was pursuing my path in the world seems oddly fitting now, even if it never really fit me then.
They say only the good die young
That just ain’t right
‘Cause we’re having too much fun
Too much fun tonight, yeah
And a lust for life, and a lust for life
And a lust for life, and a lust for life
Keeps us alive, keeps us alive
Keeps us alive, keeps us alive
Through the ensuing years, my wardrobe took many varied forms, and eventually skin itself would provide just another guise, another layer of armor. Sometimes it would prove the most potent outfit of all. Nothing set more tongues wagging than a peek at what was underneath. It became a study of human nature, and a treatise on what a gay male could get away with – the power balance, the disconnect between reality and perception, the crux of supreme insecurity and almighty confidence. It was more than a battle within myself – it was setting up to be a lifelong war. Only now, as I begin to look back at the totality of the past forty or so years, in the way that middle age and the slow acquisition of a modicum of wisdom reveal such things, can I see faint glimmers of the long arc of these travels – and the journey I’ve been taking in front of the whole world, at least the little bit of the world that decides to visit me here. We cannot truly know where we are going until we figure out where we have been.
Then, we dance on the ‘H’ of the Hollywood sign, yeah
‘Til we run out of breath, gotta dance ’til we die
My boyfriend’s back
And he’s cooler than ever
There’s no more night, blue skies forever
‘Cause we’re the masters of our own fate
We’re the captains of our own souls
So there’s no need for us to hesitate
We’re all alone, let’s take control
At the closing curtain of this wondrous summer, I’m doing a reverse Gypsy Rose Lee act. Taking the damage off and leaving it behind. Letting it burn. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” We hang onto things for too long, storing up our hurt and heartache, waiting to wield them in some other form, to make us feel better in some harmful way, when really we should be letting it all go. That’s a frightening concept to embrace. Old habits become sources of comfort, and no one wants to be uncomfortable. But even the brightest of summers must come to a close, and the fiery opening of fall must begin…
