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July, 2001There's a little story about a yuppie who steps out of his Lexus SUV and almost trips over a bum. The bum tells the yuppie that he is broke and begs for a small amount of cash to buy dinner. The yuppie looks with anguish at the bum and says, "You're broke?! You don't know the beginning of broke! I've got a $300,000 mortgage, owe $25,000 on my car, have a wife to support and will have to pay $200,000 for my son's college education just ten years from now. You aren't broke. You're even! I'm broke!"
Funny story. Fortunately for me, I'm a little closer to being even today. As of this morning, my car is all mine. The bank no longer owns any of it! What a nice feeling. I even get a virtual raise, now that there will be no monthly deduction from my pay to go to the car. I'm proud of paying off my loan more than a year in advance, plus it saves me quite a bit of interest. Now I have to go to work getting my credit card paid down. That will take a few more months, but I could be debt-free by the end of the year. Whoopeee!! (Unless I decide to accept an opportunity to climb a couple of mountains in Mexico this fall which will cost a lot of money.) I don't think I've been debt free since starting college.
My time during the last two weeks as been very busy. I have finished all the writing for my alumni magazine. The copy is now with the layout artist. At a campus open house, I gave an hour lecture to the public on what our alumni are doing in space these days.
A week ago, Brent and I used a rare coincidental weekend (one in which we both don't have work) to go to San Francisco for the opening of the new movie A.I. Monterey doesn't have any high quality movie theaters with large screens. We thought that A.I. was going to be special enough that we wanted to see it in a truly great theater. I booked us a 28th floor room in the San Francisco Marriott with a fantastic view of the bay and city. I chose the hotel for the view and also because it was directly across the street from the
Sony Metreon,
a huge ultra-modern entertainment complex that includes movie theaters. Our showing of A.I. began at 6:00 p.m. and we both loved the movie, as difficult as it was to watch at times. Here's the text of a review of the movie I wrote for the
IMDb .
(They like the review so much that they
used it
as their lead review this week! )
|
It is fitting that A.I., Steven Spielberg's monument on film to Stanley Kubrick, is a shoo-in for Best Picture in 2001. A.I. is cinematically beautiful, and tells a wrenching emotional story of a child's quest for maternal love. In A.I., Spielberg masterfully adopts Kubrick's hard, bare-essentials style of direction, letting the photography tell the story, rather than the dialogue. This style allowed Kubrick to develop an enormous scope of ideas, stories and emotions in his movies. But it often left casual moviegoers behind. He had difficulty finding the right treatment for A.I. so he handed the project to Spielberg before Kubrick's death last year. Spielberg textures A.I. with obvious dollops of his own soft-as-whipped-cream touch. It is Spielberg's great skill that blends the two styles together with mesmerizing results. This blend allows the emotional story of a young robotic boy to come to life, and Kubrick fans will be able to enjoy one last film made by the master -- with the respectful help of another great artist. The Kubrickian style demands the very best from actors, who must appear unapologetically real, and must, in long sequences with no dialogue, convey strong feelings and emotions. The A.I cast, especially lead actor Haley Joel Osment, meet every measure of the demands. Despite his youth, Osment will surely receive a nomination for Best Actor. A.I. will rank high among the best movies ever made, but viewers should come prepared for an intense emotional and intellectual work-out. If you want to take in a quick flick to escape life for a couple of hours, this is not your movie. If you want to explore the cinematic depth of a master artist like Spielberg, A.I. will take you places you've never been before. |
I won't tell you any more about the movie (other than go see it!) so I don't ruin it for you.
When we left the theater, I was struck with the odd sensation that it really was the year 2001 now. Sure, we still don't have flying cars, but when I looked out of the greenhouse-like glass of the Metreon into the evening sky above the ultra-modern San Francisco skyline, I really felt like I was in the future. Everything seemed fantastic and new. It could have been the movie, which struck deep at my psyche from many angles, might have tweaked my perception of things a bit. The tie to Kubrick's 2001 is patently obvious. But still, it just seemed that the architecture and technology around me was worthy of the year. We really do live in the future, right now!
The rest of our time in San Francisco involved eating at two great restaurants, a visit to the Exploratorium, shopping, and generally walking all over the place. We also enjoyed some time alone soaking in the amazing view out our hotel room window together. Although not nearly an identical experience,
Bryan's
June 8th entry should give you an idea of how much Brent and I enjoyed our time. On the 28th floor, even an open picture window offers privacy!
After returning from San Francisco, I had a short work week and then spent five days working even harder at Laguna Seca Raceway, doing my part for the United States round of the World Superbike Championship. Once again, I was back in the control tower directing operations around the 2.4-mile circuit. The 14 hour days get long, but it's really satisfying work. I'll have to write more about all that when I get another opportunity.
Wednesday, July 11 2001
My review of the movie A.I. from earlier this week has generated several emails from random people! (Three out of four random people thought A.I was boring crap and my review was misleading.) I'm quite happy about that. I like to be recognized. When I was writing a monthly column for Oasis I used to get a lot of random mail.
I enjoyed it very much. I'd get mail from a mix of interesting people with a broad range of things to say. Sometimes, fifty year olds would assure me that being gay wasn't so bad, and I'd find happiness. Other times, high school students who seemed to be miles ahead of me despite being ten years younger, would give me advice on how to deal with my parents. I met some good friends through Oasis that I still have, and I lost track of a few whom I now miss.
Eventually, I decided that I was just too old to keep writing for Oasis. Jeff Walsh's web magazine is designed for gay and questioning youth to express themselves, and provide countless more youngsters with exposure to nice queer people just like them. "Written by and for Queer Youth" is one of their slogans. I stopped writing for Jeff when I could no longer honestly call myself 'queer youth'.
When I was a teen in the 80s, coming out was not something good, normal, conservative guys did. Not if they wanted to keep their friends and avoid being beaten up. Being a closet case looked like my life's destiny until the early 90s. I started to come out then (for reasons well beyond the scope of this entry), and that's when I started writing for Oasis. Even then, I was an older writer by Oasis standards, but in the 90s young people started coming out at much younger ages and I found myself as a 20-something experiencing the same things teens were going through in high schools and colleges all over the country.
That's when the email was rolling in! Every time I'd log into AOL there was that friendly voice saying "You've got mail!", and it wasn't all the junk porn advertising you get on AOL today. It was mail from real people who were touched by something I had written, or wanted help and more information with each of my new experiences. The biggest of these was that fateful day I came out to my parents.
I am very proud of the effort I put into coming out to my parents. I think I did it the right way and for the right reasons. A lot of people seemed to agree with my methods and sent me comments and questions. I helped a significant number of young people deal with this particular challenge unique to gay folks.
I solved the big three problems of being gay (coming out to one's self, coming out to one's parents, and meeting the first steady boyfriend) and wrote about it all in my columns. But all that took time, and I got older and became more comfortable with just being me. It made more sense for me to volunteer with a local group for queer youth and leave the writing on Oasis to the younger people that it was intended for.
That's when the email dried up. I hoped this web page would be a public enough forum that I'd hear from random and new people reacting to what I'd written. Indeed, I have made some very dear friends through this site, but it has turned out that a journal doesn't provoke the same response that essays do. I don't get nearly the exposure by writing one of a zillion available web journals that I got as a published writer on Oasis.
This week, being the featured reviewer about a movie with a lot of buzz on IMBd has put my writing and opinion back into wide circulation. In this case, it's just about a movie, nothing so deep as the story of willing away the pain of thirteen years in an internalized homophobic hell. But it is good to be back. I'm no drama queen, far from it, but I'm learning that I like having an audience.
Robb, I guess I've caught your disease, or some other similar but rare form of Desidementia.
Friday, July 13 2001
I don't know if I've ever done a Friday the thirteenth entry before, but for the record, I am not superstitious. Friday the thirteenth is merely an arbitrary label placed on a packet of time and has no intrinsic meaning. If humanity had created a decimal calendar with ten days in the month, there would be no thirteenth, but today would surely be here no matter the name given.
It's time for one of my political tirades again. No, I'm not going to go after President Bush in this one. (That would be too easy, even my parents who excitedly cast their votes for him, have come to realize that he's as dumb as a box of rocks and wish we had a better president now.) Today, I'm going to write about the latest proposal from anti-gay marriage activists and then go a little deeper into the issue than they have probably thought.
For the record, here's some excerpts of text from a news article announcing a proposed constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage.
NEW YORK (AP) - Worried that courts might open the door to gay marriage, a coalition of religious leaders and family-policy experts wants to amend the U.S. Constitution with a declaration that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Opponents of gay marriage predict that increasing numbers of those non-Vermont couples will turn to the courts in their own states, seeking recognition of their union.
As drafted, the amendment would be just two sentences:
``Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.
``Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.''
My reaction to the proposed amendment is a mix of fear and outrage. I respect the right of any U.S. citizen to oppose the concept of same-sex marriage and to politically oppose it's codification in law. I disagree with their point of view, but in a free country they have every right to be wrong.
My strong reaction to this proposal is because it is presented not as a law, but as a change to the Constitution of the United States. The constitution is literally what constitutes our nation as a social entity. There is no provision presently in the constitution designed to limit the liberty of a specific class of people. Instead, our constitution is expressly designed to limit the State's powers and reserve all other rights for the states and the people. An amendment like this would fundamentally change what the U.S. is.
Thus, my fear and outrage isn't so much based on the religious group's personal attack on my sexual orientation, so much as it is out of fear that my country is dying. The U.S. isn't geography, it is a set of ideals surrounding the notion of individual liberty and freedom. In 1759, Benjamin Franklin, a man who's signature is on the Constitution, said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The religious group launching the amendment campaign is fearful that homosexuality could become widely acceptable and sanctioned by the state. They want to fundamentally change the idea of liberty in America to be safe from a society where homosexual families are commonplace. The U.S. is a land where the majority rules, but the rights of the minority are protected. This proposed amendment would forever change that.
In the past, I've been opposed to an amendment banning the burning of the U.S. flag for the same reasons. I would oppose an amendment that specifically defined equality for homosexuals. We already have a 14th amendment that guarantees equal protection for all under the law. The constitution is not flawed in this area, the flaw of marriage equality resides in the minds of unjust judges and bigoted law makers.
My proposal to the situation is simple, but radical. There should be no legal marriage of any kind. Marriage is essentially a religious concept and as such has no place in the confines of law. The U.S. government must recognize every citizen strictly as an individual, regardless of their social and filial arrangements. Bluntly put, I don't think our government has any need to interfere in the private associations of the people. (If, for income tax reasons, people sharing a dwelling must be recognized, then the tax definition of a domestic partnership could be something like "any two or more people who declare themselves as sharing income and expenses within their domicile.")
The religious groups are, I think, dialectically opposed to that idea. They want to clearly define what constitutes a family in America and ensure that social structure does not change. They want to codify the idea of the nuclear family (i.e. Mom, Dad, a few kids). Such a restriction of the freedom to change social paradigms is a direct attack on the ideals that the U.S. was founded on.
An inscription inside the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. was taken from a letter that Jefferson wrote to George Washington, dated January 4th, 1786. In it Jefferson provides excellent insight into why a definition of marriage in the constitution is an affront to freedom, and to pass it would be to spit on the graves of our founding fathers;
| I am certainly not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. |
The wisdom and moral courage of the men who founded the United States is astonishing, especially considering that they lived 225 years ago. They risked their lives to offer individual freedom to the generations after them, ourselves included. We owe them our respect and gratitude.
Friday, July 20 2001
32 years ago today a human stepped out onto the surface of the Moon for the first time. In my mind, I have never known a Moon that hasn't been visited by men from the planet Earth. Despite that, it still amazes me that people once actually had the technical capability to do something that difficult and that inspiring. It is sad that humanity has lost the ability to go to the Moon, and worse, the noble sense of adventure and shear nerve required to do it. Pity, that.
I've been having some strange dreams lately. A lot of them involve me being back in the Navy and on the bridge of a ship. I wonder what that is trying to tell me?
I'm off to Washington D.C. next week. I'm throwing a little after work gathering for all of my school's alumni in the D.C. area. It looks like about 75 grads will attend. I bought a new handheld PC to help keep things organized while I travel. It's made by Hewlett Packard and is called a
Jornada 720. It is cute as a puppy, so I gave it the network name of Sirius, after the Dog Star. It is also a powerful little handheld, so the name is a double entendre. It runs Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access. It has Yahoo and AOL messengers. It has Internet Explorer. I've got 256 Mbytes of ram for it, and can expand it to a Gbyte. With a VGA out card I'm ordering, I can attach it to a computer LCD projector for presentations. Oh, and of course it runs Outlook and synchs to my mailbox, contacts, and tasks. Pretty cool for something the size of a thick checkbook. I love gadgets!
Tuesday, July 24 2001
The afternoon was all business. It was less than a 72 hour trip, so there was no sense in adopting east coast time. I savored the luxury of sleeping until 10:00 a.m. on a workday. I needed the sleep. The day before had begun 19 hours and 3000 miles from where it began. In Monterey, with Brent, who drove me to the airport early in the morning and kissed me in public for the first time before he left me there. (For unexplained reasons, the boy loves me.) With Scamp, the bear, I clambered aboard a throw-back to an earlier era in aviation, a twin propeller airliner, and rode to Washington, D.C, by way of LA.
I was traveling to promote my school, and perceived a golden opportunity to promote the school in the form of one Leon Panetta aboard the small aircraft. Panetta, a former White House Chief of Staff and Chairman of the House Budget Committee, was easy to intercept on the tarmac, walking into the Los Angeles International Terminal building. "If you are on your way to D.C., Mr. Panetta," I said, thinking it was a sure bet, "I'd like to invite you to an alumni meeting I'm holding for our school at the Pentagon tomorrow." Scamp, dangling from my left hand, opposite my roll-aboard luggage, looked incredulous. Panetta was staying in LA and could not accept my invitation, but was interested in hearing my five minute patter on the Alumni Relations Program, and about our 19 astronaut graduates and two service secretary (Air Force and Army) graduates. Scamp was surprised that the veteran Washington insider would listen to a guy traveling in the company of a bear.
We parted company with Panetta in LA and proceeded to Chicago, which was an air traffic controller's worst nightmare, due to weather. The line for take-off was 50 aircraft deep. As Scamp and I gazed out of the D.C. bound airplane's window at the United maintenance hangar for second hour, Panetta's final words to us echoed in our minds, "when I leave San Francisco or LA, I always make sure the plane is headed for Washington D.C. and nowhere else." Some politicians are very wise.
My arrival at Washington's Ronald Reagan National Airport was so delayed that the rental car agency I had signed with had closed for the night. I hired a cab to my hotel. Scamp was silent while I talked with the cabby about the weather, which was hot. We checked into the DoubleTree Hotel, on Scott Circle, not too far from Dupont Circle, also known as the fruit loop. Although too late for airport employees to be working, it was just about the right time arrive at one of D.C.'s best little gay bars (on 17th and P St.) where, no doubt, many of the airport employees would now be.
My faith in humanity was restored at JR.'s I know humanity exists, it hardly requires my faith, but this is how I felt seeing perhaps one hundred or more happy, normal, young guys having a good time together. This wasn't a sad dive filled with inebriated husks adorned in various costumes of leather, Las Vegas showroom glitz, or track suits. The Pagliacci drag queens were nowhere to be found. I, a silent fly on the wall, observed nothing more than normal, every-day guys, and by this I mean Dockers and Polos and baggy jeans and T-shirts kind of regular guys, who were fawning all over each other. It was beautiful. I felt at home. It was just the way I always imagined the world to be, a world where guys like guys, girls like girls, and all else is held equal.
For a while, I was happy to see it all happening around me. I soaked up the atmosphere along with several gin and tonics. As time went by, I was more heartened and warmed by the number of very cute, unaffected guys who were gay. They simply don't exist in Monterey. I wondered what their stories were, where they had come from, how they came to D.C., what their high school and college friends knew and thought of their sexual vector? Of course, lest Heisenberg foil me, I couldn't actually approach anyone and begin a conversation. To ask the question would change the answer. I drank in the scene and the gin with equal parts respect and fervor.
The mix was heady and eventually I succumbed to the strain. A very cute blond recent high-school grad tumbled out of the closing bar and down the steps before me into the arms of his boyfriend. The bright blue collar on his knit polo shirt was turned up in the tumult, in a style that he could have no way to remember. He and his boyfriend somehow held each other up, preventing a fall, embraced, kissed, and then ran/walked/skipped hand in hand into the warm night of residential D.C. I felt sick.
I felt the same nausea that comes when you realize you have forgotten a major test that day, or perhaps have done no preparation yet are walking into an important presentation. Here were two nice young men beginning their lives as adults by enjoying the fun that dating and romance can bring, without a care for shame or even an apology. Their affection for one another made perfect sense to me, yet I felt sick and tears welled in my eyes, distorting their progress into the night and out of my life with not a trace of contact.
My post high school summer, could have been idyllic like that too, but I was forbidden to express my same-sex attraction in any way. My family forbade it. My friends forbade it. My community forbade it. The only people who had permission to practice same-sex dating were a group of reviled radicals in the Castro, a sub-culture of strict conformist rules, that were rapidly going extinct due to the AIDS epidemic. Being gay then meant being one of the Village People or a drag queen and I wanted no part of that. I just wanted to be able to dance with my friends, and maybe to touch and hold hands and make out with some of them too.
Now cute kids all over America can do that with a growing degree of safety and comfort. I continue my volunteer activities with youth groups to keep making being gay easy for young America. But I'm doing it because I didn't get to be young and gay. Spending an evening with young, gay Washington restored my faith that things are improving, the march for civil rights goes on, but left me sick and grieving for my own lost youth. Life is not a rehearsal. We only get one shot at this. I blew it big time by being born a decade too early. It makes me sick knowing there is no way I can ever get the time I spent in the closet back. No mulligan, no do-over, no extra lives.
Life is joy, and life is loss. This afternoon was all business, but it had little to do with the significance of the trip.
Thursday, July 26 2001
It's all Zup's fault. A nasty row of thunderstorms over his part of the country yesterday left Scamp and I sitting in a hot, stuffy, airliner on the side of the runway in Washington D.C. for four hours! Finally, after the midday sun had sun had grown lower on the horizon and the Midwestern weather settled down a little, we rode a rough and bumpy flight to Chicago. Of course, our connecting flight for California had long since left. Since Zup didn't do his job of keeping the weather nice in Ohio, I had to use all my skills as a seasoned traveler to get us home.
The first trick is to take care of yourself mentally and physically, just like you might on a mountaineering expedition. Stay hydrated, eat regular meals (no unhealthy snacks just 'cause you're bored in the terminal and 31 Flavors looks pretty good!) and no booze until all the problems are solved. A good attitude is essential too. Remember that even the pressure of the modern air-travel system is far, far easier than trying to cross the continent in a covered wagon. If the airline can get you there in less than three months, with no danger of bandits, starvation, wild animal attacks, and the need to relieve yourself in public, then they've done a great job!
Next, you should bring your smiling face and your positive, humorous attitude to the nearest gate agent who doesn't have a line at his or her counter and looks helpful. Which gate you choose doesn't matter, as they all have access to the same computer system. What matters is that you get into the computer system to make alternate arrangements before the other 200 people who just got off the very late airplane with you make theirs.
Any gate agent without a line can get onto the system immediately, and will have the time to be creative in finding alternate routes. But not just any gate agent will do. You need to find one that looks helpful. A helpful gate agent is easy to spot because he is either gay (easy to find), or she is young and single (more difficult to find, because the single part is hard to determine from far away). Sometimes an older lady, say a brand-new first time grandmother, will do (more difficult to find because they're aren't many of them working airline gates).
The rest is easy. Simply place your teddy bear on top of the (in yesterday's case, gay) gate agent's desk in a cute pose while you crouch down to dig in your bag for your now useless tickets. Come up to greet the agent with a hopeful but beleaguered look in your eyes. Explain to him that you and your bear are very tired, and that you would very much like to go home, if at all possible. Offer a lopsided smile and let the guy work his magic for you on the terminal. You'd be surprised what a helpful gate agent can do when confronted with the chance to help a distressed young passenger and his teddy bear. (Although beyond the scope of this entry, I should add that buckling your teddy bear into the empty seat next to you is almost always good for free drinks during the flight - if you can find a helpful flight attendant. See the above definition of helpful.)
Sometimes, as the case was yesterday, the helpful agent isn't skilled enough to get you what you really want. Take what you can get, then thank the agent profusely (you might need his help again later), and make sure to wave your bear's paw at him as you leave. What I got from the helpful agent in Chicago yesterday evening was a flight to San Francisco that arrived there too late to make the last connecting flight of the day to Monterey, where I knew Brent was waiting for me.
The solution to this is to proceed to the newly assigned gate for check-in, and repeat the entire process there. I was fortunate in that the helpful agent at the new gate was smiling and making eye contact with me before I even approached him. He was college aged, and his aplomb with the computer system was as apparent as his delight in helping a bereft boi and his bear. He found a stand-by seat open for us on a flight to San Francisco that was leaving an hour earlier and, moreover, would arrive in time for me to connect to Monterey.
An hour later Scamp and I were seated next to each other, winging our way through the evening skies of Iowa. We sipped on the complimentary Bailey's which the helpful steward had brought by, and watched the lightening flicker between the clouds, brashly illuminating the gloaming with a rapid rhythm, like a strobe in a dance club.