The other day I had some friends over, we partied a little too late, and everyone was getting a little drunk. At the end of the night I was taking a friend home who is slightly disabled to the point where he can no longer drive. Several years back he had been stricken with a brain disorder that paralyzed one side of his body, making it difficult for him to get around. He has been recovering in the past year or so since I have gotten to know him, but the recovery process is slow. He is a single man who lives alone, in his mid 30’s, and extremely attractive. On the drive home we began to talk about relationships and what the modern sense of dating is like in this time. My heart was filled with such agony as he began to describe his constant connection to others online, and how painful the loneliness of his life has become, just trying to connect with others. Connecting for sex is not the problem, but connecting for any kind of intimacy seems to be elusive. I made an off handed remark that this seems to be the way of our modern gay culture. This idea has really been haunting me the past couple of days as I have been thinking about that loss or lack of intimacy in our modern world. I don’t think his disability plays much of a part in his loneliness, because he is a good communicator, has a great personality, and is very easy to hang out with, but lies more with our culture becoming so disjointed that we have become desensitized to personal interaction. I know we live in a time where everyone is so busy trying to live their lives that fitting others into their world can become difficult. Do they actually need someone to share their lives with? When you can readily have sex with people you meet on the internet, hook up for a half hour and move on, it seems to make life easier. Many of the younger gay people I talk to are not even looking for any kind of relationship because they don’t want their lives to be complicated by others. They can get what they need and move on without any kind of entanglement. I guess it surprises me how uncomplicated the basic needs of a person becomes as the world we live in becomes so complicated. When I was a young gay man, it was intimacy first that sex came out of when I was with someone. It always seemed to heighten the encounter. I don’t think the fact that people are picking each other up has changed from my earlier days, then now. Perhaps it was even easier then because you could do it anywhere. The gaydar would go off, you would make the connection in public place, and follow each other to private spaces. But again it was the height of the sexual revolution, before HIV. There was a thrill to be able to be this intimate with another person and you often lingered in the afterglow of what had just happened because it was so sensational. But this whole connection online or texting, through minimalist words or phrases, with glimpse of a dick or ass taken in the mirror from a cell phone, in a padded profile, seems to remote and distant. Now the act of sex is mistaken for intimacy and nothing is really shared other then the body. And Now my heart is broken for a friend who feels so isolated and alone and living on the edge of others actions and words that never come. I think the real disability here does not lie with my friend but in what we have become because we are too afraid to let others into our worlds.
Category Archives: Personal
Growing Beyond False Expectations
Our first love and/or relationship often define who we become in the future. My first relationship actually turned out to be quite awful and in many ways set me back socially for many years to come. A product of being born in the 60’s and reaching my maturity in the 70’s in small town Montana, I had different expectations of what I thought a relationship should be. Through American television, we had all bought into the idealism of a perfect family unit where there were no major issues, and the ones that arose on the surface were solved at the dinner table like in shows like Leave it to Beaver or The Brady Bunch. Everything was always portrayed as happy and normal. This creates a false sense of normalcy and really led to a really fucked up way of looking at reality. There were no role models with good examples how of we really should interact with each other and how to deal with situations that were beyond the norm. Not all families where as healthy as those portrayed on the small screens in our houses we where becoming addicted to as our evening programming. During this era my mother and father were perfect in my eyes. They were the epitome of what we had seen portrayed by these television families. My mother stayed at home, tended us kids, took care of the house duties, and kept us fed. When I left home this was also my expectation. So when I hit my first relationship, and it turns out to be with a man, I had no idea of what to do, but follow what I had been taught. I lived in a fantasy world that I would soon learn was far from perfect. When I slept with someone for the first time, it somehow meant something more and I felt an obligation to hold on. I expected to be loved in return and that somehow we would live in a perfect world and be happy until the end together. But my sexual awakening was happening at the beginning of the 80’s in the height of the sexual revolution where most of the world was finally finding a freedom of sexual expression they had never known before. As you now know I picked up my first partner in a porn world of anonymous casual sex and this should have been my first indication where the relationship would end up. I now look back at my journals from that time and see that though I was having fun and, though I thought I was falling in love with this man, I really was not satisfied with the actual relationship because there are lots of notations of fighting early on, breaking it off, and then coming back together again. Looking back I don’t think I was in love at all but became obsessed with fitting into that idealistic world I thought I belonged. Perhaps I tried too hard to fit into that mode and this is what became the destruction of the relationship. I believed in a monogamous world where we where true to each other. What I didn’t realize or was blinded by my rose colored glasses and refused to see was that he did not. I did not discover this until it was too late. I quit a great job and followed him first to Illinois and eventually ending up in Texas, where once we began to live together, it become quite apparent. That year was probably the hardest and most painful year of my life. Once ended took me years to get over and I think has impacted me ever since.
I learned early not to put to much expectation in others. What people say is what they rarely do or are doing. I have learned over the years to not put trust in a false expectation. As a gay man those expectations are harder then ever to be bound to and in the end can only lead to hardship. We cannot possess or possibly own another person; you have to learn to accept them for who and what they are. You are also not going to change them. These have been lessons learned through much hardship. Since those early days I have actually found love and been loved. I have had some really great relationships that are healthy and strong. I am a no non-sense sort of guy who says what he feels and communicates directly without innuendo. I have learned to love myself first and live my life with as much dignity and pride as possible and have found this is what leads to a healthy relationship with mutual respect and adoration for others. After all we are all human.
Evolution Of A Culture
I am completely obsessed with building the website now and I seem to work on it non-stop. I reached out to many of the talented people whom I have gotten to know over this past year and the whole project is becoming a wonderful collaboration of so many wonderfully talented people. Ideas are abundant, and the possibilities unlimited. I see now that this will grow well beyond myself and am coming up with a vision for the future where part of it will become a platform for others to come together. I have been searching the web for a long time trying to make some sort of connection to others who do what I do, and it has been very scattered. It seems once I find something that is working it suddenly disappears. I am not creating just a website, but a Joomla interface which becomes a dynamic portal engine and content management system that can be shared by many and has the potential to become quite interactive. In a sense, this can become a sort of space that becomes a clearinghouse for gay arts, written, and visual. However, that is many steps and stages away: but it is my long term vision of what The Naked Man Project will eventually become when the blog part of this project ends at the close of this year. Right now I am having a blast just putting myself together as The Naked Man Project and learning the process.
I realize through my many years I have been obsessed with finding my identity as a gay man and the evolution of its culture over the past 30 years. It has changed so drastically from one extreme to the other: being apprehensive and filled with self-doubt and self-loathing now to the point where we can be married in many states. Montana not included. There is so much that has captivated me along the way, wondrous things that can very easily become lost in the shadows of our evolution. Much that the new generation has taken for granted and probably doesn’t even care to know from which its origins spring. But it really begins with the naked self and how we look at ourselves in that mirror each day. I feel a lot of being gay has been a projection on what we wanted to become and a rejection of the values from which we come. We can so easily become paralyzed by our own internalized homophobia. Our safety and security jeopardized by our inability to communicate with each other. Sure, the social networks are creating a web of friends we can interact with, but our decreasing lack of skills toward communication seems to be minimalized to a mere tweet that now must be deciphered to understand its value. Manhunt and Craigslist still rules supreme for anyone wanting to hook up, often without even getting to know their names, merely for a moment of gratification, and then moving on. Why do we still live in a world that values being anonymous? I do have to say the images and profiles on Manhunt are becoming captivating and creative from an artist point of view, as we try to express the core of our sexual/sensual selves as it becomes the new calling card which we hang our identity. But it is a world where a man of my age is shunned from even being acknowledged no mater how creative or witty I become. Perhaps we no longer need relationship or companions. Perhaps our lives have become so busy that we no longer need that interaction. It’s like art, have we become so saturated with it that it no longer contains any intrinsic value. I always envisioned a future where as we evolved as a gay community that we would somehow become closer to each other as a culture. But it has become the opposite, that vastness just grows wider and more distant.
But I also find a vast richness and body of friends on the Internet that are enriching my life and helping me move toward a greater understanding and vision of myself. In many ways it is awesome to stand here at this moment and look out over a magnificent world of possibilities.
End Of Summer
Something in the air changes and it suddenly feels like fall. Labor Day is somehow that turning point weekend in the United States where the day after summer seems to disappear. It was the first football game of the season, the final family campout, and the last days of the rodeo. This morning I began putting together my fall schedule that will take me through to the end of the year. The University in back in session and I begin a new season of working on their shows tomorrow night. It is also the season when all the new students are back in town and I can begin my process of recruiting some new subjects. I need to get back into my studio again and begin shooting. It feels like I have been distracted the past month or so getting ready and going on the trip that I have not had much time to work on my imagery. I spent most of my spare time throughout the weekend pulling things together for the upcoming new website. It is progressing very well and we should begin putting it up on the server the next couple of days and then begin refining it. I am hoping to have something running by the end of next week, well at least the initial home pages and some of the galleries.
I still have so many images to work through that have piled up. It feels like I start a series and never quite get through it and then never quite get back to it. I have still only worked half way through the images of the trip to Europe and the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo images I took before I left. So I am really going to try to focus on getting caught up today. I have had a few jobs that I needed to complete last week that put me in delay on my personal stuff. I want to work on my yard now that it has cooled outside, but could not even seem to find time for that. The rest of this week I will be slammed but next week it will all begin to open up and I will get back to my fall creative work.
Autumns for me are the times that I accomplish my greatest nude image projects. Everything else begins to slow down as I put the gardens to bed and tie up loose ends from the summer. Glenn typically goes to North Dakota for several months to work on a soil-sampling project and I can totally get into sync with my own rhythm and work at a pace completely uninterrupted. I can work late into the night and often get up early to catch the morning light. Though with this blog project it does seem to eat a good chunk of my day. But there is something about the fall that I feel most focused. I somehow feel this one is going to become on of my most extraordinary ones ever. After beginning this project I felt I have a genuine focus this fall. There are now goals to accomplish and a standard to rise up and create. In a sense I feel like this year of my life has begun to go backwards. It’s like that movie where the guy reverses in aging. I am excited to my core again about who and where I am. It seems the age issues that I have been dealing with have somehow vanished and my life has taken on a greater purpose that is beyond myself.
The Boys Of Fall
It’s a beautiful Sunday morning. We about 30 guests over to the studio late yesterday to watch the opening of the Griz football game on television at the studio. They were playing an upper division team from Tennessee. Needless to say we didn’t win, but it really wasn’t expected. Sometimes you just have to compete with others that are better than you to push yourself to a new level. I have not always been a football fan; in fact when I was in college I never attended a game. But when I started dating Glenn he was a huge football fanatic. Our hometown University of Montana team are known nation wide as the Grizzlies. They had been on an amazing winning streak for the past 20 years working their way to several national championships. So when I first met Glenn he said if we are going to be together you are going to have to buy season tickets to the Griz games, and we did. We have the most remarkable seats at midfield just a couple of rows above the home team. Conversely I told him we would also buy season tickets to the theatre. There is a nearby town that brings the National Tours of musical productions to our region. That year he saw Les Miserable, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Showboat, and Annie. Probably some of the best shows to be introduced into the power and spectacle of theater and I donned the apparel and entered the realm of college football. I can’t say how utterly captivated I became with going to football. At first I didn’t know much about the sport, in fact nothing. I saw them toss a coin at the beginning and then they would scramble and bash into each other, everyone yelling “get the quarter back, get the quarter back,” and I thought what a lot of fuss for twenty-five cents. No seriously it was not quite that bad but I love that story. There was something about football that rocked me to my core. There is a collective patriotism that fills a sea of people that utterly overwhelms your senses. It becomes a visceral reaction of the most primal nature as bodies collide in a test against strength and strategy. To see men, so well tuned in body, mind and spirit to put every once of their being into a team effort to come out of top as a winner. I realized my life has been this focused in mind and spirit but not body. Football for me also appeals to my core erotic psyche that is also very stimulating. Hot men in overly tight uniforms that show off all the greatest assets of their youth and manhood, out there struggling with each other. I very quickly became obsessed with the sport and fell in love with football. Eventually learning the strategy of the game. I actually bought a book on Football for dummies that I read in secret to bring myself up to speed of all the various positions, rules and plays. I remember Glenn found the book in my office and came out with a sheepish grin. I guess he knows it was love as he found my closet desire to learn more about something he was so passionate about. Football has also brought me closer to my father, because along with our seats I added another for my father. I knew he was very passionate about the sport playing in high school. Suddenly we had found a commonality and it was one of the things that broke that ice between us, opening the world of communication between us. My fascination with football has waned a bit over the past couple of years because as I have begun to put my focus elsewhere, more into my art. But there is defiantly a raw, venerable sensuality that exudes and inserts it’s way into my work and gives me a fearless strength to boldly pursue it.
“Standin’ in the huddle listenin’ to the call
Fans goin’ crazy for the boys of fall”
Kenny Chesney The Boys Of Fall
