On late December days, when the anemic afternoon light becomes evening early on and evening erodes quickly into night, the winter stars take flight across the vault of the velvet black sky. Oh, it is a beautiful thing, but darkness is oppressive and inspires a strong inwards bent. I am retrospective and reflective in the absence of the sun.

It amazes how much I can remember! I've heard it said the eyes are a window into the soul, but I find them more of a window for the soul. The little fellow trapped somewhere between my ears and behind the window of my eyes is hardly different now from how he was twenty years ago. He's seen a lot more things pass by his window since then. He's a bit better, now, at predicting the future, because he's viewed so much of the past. Other than that, he's still the same.

I assume you'd like to meet the little guy? Well, this picture gives you an idea of what he looks like on Christmas morning. He takes on many other forms, which appear throughout this website, but this is one of his most essential forms. There was a way I was going to introduce you readers to him, by telling more of his story.

I wanted to create a "Way Back Pages" section. It may yet happen, but just keeping up with current events takes most of the web-time I have available. My "Way Back Pages" were going to document some of the things that the little guy in my brain saw out of his windows a long time ago, and what he thought about it. The darkness of winter and the cyclical (read: traditional) nature of the Holiday Season rekindle old memories. I don't have time to write a complete "Way Back Pages" right now, so I'd like to tell you about on particular memory that the little fellow both cherishes and despises.

It begins in a time before some of my readers were born, 1978. It was the height of the disco era, there were no mobile phones, microwave ovens and VCRs were only for the very rich, TV had only three networks and PBS, and brand names like Windows, Macintosh, and Netscape were years in the future as Al Gore hadn't yet invented the internet. In September, I started at a new school for the first time in my life. It was exciting because my new school, Walter Colton Jr. High, was too far to walk to - I was now a school bus rider! Riding the bus everyday was going to be boss because I loved airplanes, cars, spacecraft; anything that moved.

My first day I walked two blocks from my house to the bus stop through our tract neighborhood and into a little public playground on the edge of a meadow. I was looking forward to the bus ride, and imagined that the bus was a DC-10 and that I was on my way to an important business meeting somewhere. Two more blocks past the bus stop would have taken me on to my elementary school and the route was quite familiar. It was easy to daydream. The wait for the bus was less than ten minutes, but I was completely unprepared for how much my world would change in the next 600 seconds.

Several other kids were already there waiting. A few more ambled up a minute or two after me. Most were older kids, eighth and ninth graders. They frightened me because they were so BIG! Some of them were practically adults and looked like they were already shaving! Their oversized frames seemed to radiate a field of malevolence. None of them talked much. I knew some of the kids from my grade, but they weren't talking a lot either, and not at all to me. In fact, even some of them seemed to be caught up in this new aura of disharmony.

Not Bart, however. He seemed as positive and cheerful as always. Not that he was talking to me either, he never had said as much as five sentences to me since I'd first laid eyes on him three years before. I had always wanted to be his friend because he was so good at everything in school and he was never mean to anyone. Whenever he came by, I would give a pleasant inward sigh to myself and felt a strange happiness mixed with a vague sense of longing.

Bart had a look about him that I had always liked too. Actually, I noticed he had grown a little taller and thicker over the summer and there was something about him that kept me looking at him. He was wearing dark blue corduroy pants and a light blue Hang Ten T-shirt. His sandy, parted-down-the-middle hair was a little longer in back than it used to be, but his eyes were the same intense blue that I had remembered.

I idly gazed at the way his pants fit him as he moved. Without really thinking about it, I was studying the way his butt filled out his cords and for some reason I enjoyed the way that looked. Moreover, when he turned around into profile, my eyes locked onto a certain fullness in the front of his pants a little below the belt line. I'd never seen that on anyone I knew before, and I quite liked the way that looked on Bart too.

Now, let me pause the story here for a moment. You readers all know that I'm gay and many of you are too. You know exactly what was going on inside my twelve year old brain. But, I didn't. It was all new to me. I was innocently soaking up the view of a very cute, smart, athletic, popular and generally attractive boy my age and I noticed his penis evident through his tightish pants. (It was the 70's, folks! That's what kids wore then.) It was only as the bus pulled up and Bart turned away that I realized what I'd been doing. It horrified me.

I was familiar with the word 'gay'. I knew it synonymous with the word 'fag', the worst possible insult that could be hurled at someone on the playground. I had learned in the last year that both words weren't simply insult words on their own, but that they referred to guys who want to have sex with other guys - homosexuals. I had also learned from my parents, church and TV that homosexuals were sick, pathetic, losers whom God reviled. The words 'fag' and 'gay' were insults simply because they compared the insulted person to this heinous underclass of monstrous, disgusting people.

I quickly averted my eyes from Bart's nether-regions with the stark but undeniable comprehension that my attraction to him was, in fact, gay. In an instant, it had all connected in my brain. I had been wondering when all those wonderful feelings that my sixth grade sex-ed class promised me about girls would kick in. But, as the bus noisily came to a stop with the squeal and hiss of airbrakes and the churning noise of a big diesel engine, I realized that they had kicked in some time ago, but that I was feeling them for boys, not girls.

The epiphany left me in a state of silent shock as I rode a bus to school for the first time. I was taken completely by surprise. I didn't expect to be gay, nor did I want to be gay. Fags disgusted me, didn't they? Yes, they did. But then why was I checking out Bart's package and feeling all warm and squishy around him? I was confused and afraid. Something would have to be done about this. Fortunately, the immediate mental demands of surviving my first day at a big and frightening new school took my mind off worrying about my homosexual tendencies. At least until a boy I'd never met before appeared in the door of my second period class, locked eyes with me, and then walked up the aisle to sit down next to me. His name, I discovered in a few minutes when roll call was made, was Paul. But his is another story entirely.