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: Sex
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.
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
The Long Dark Seduction Of My Desire
I recently found an old journal about the first time I actually went home with a man and spent the night. The date was March 1 1982. I would have been 20 years old and we ended up picking each other up at an old video arcade that is still in existence here in Missoula today. There are not many details in the notes, but in my head I flashed back to a very vivid cold night, when my body trembled with fear. The sheer panic and confusion I was feeling floods my mind again as if I am standing in that darkness, alone again. I was a couple of years out of high school and knew that I have always had a strong desire to be with a man, but for some reason I just couldn’t quite come to terms with possibly doing it. The video arcade was a way to have encounters with others without really having to make a commitment, always somehow felt it wasn’t quite real. It was a dark world filled with black light with neon signs that glowed vibrantly in the darkness. Anyone with a white shirt took on a haunting purplish glow. You really couldn’t see the faces of people, because skin tones disappeared into in a dark haunting haze. The place was a maze of walls with hidden openings, covered by curtains and the whir and clatter of films being projected into glass screens within the little booths. You could hear a coin drop from anywhere in the places and then the muted/muffled voices of people talking. Back in those days, people actually did talk to each other in those types of films, as inane as it may have seemed then, adds a certain humanity that is lacking today. But it all happened in darkness. A touch, a kiss, someone feeling my crotch, a quick encounter and then they would disappearance back into the darkness. Once I had discovered the place, I didn’t go there very often. Perhaps 3 or 4 times over the course of a 3-year period. I remember living in the dorms on campus and after one of my visits rushing home to immediately jump into the shower and try to scour away any traces of the encounter from my skin, often my body eventually becoming consumed by sobs of grief that I had allowed myself to go back to that place of such desperate temptation. Then eventually after another 5 to 6 months I would find myself lurking outsides it’s doors in the darkness of the street waiting and watching working up my courage enough to enter its seductive labyrinth once more.
I figured something was wrong with me for wanting this desire and I began to see a counselor, not sure if I was trying to talk myself into or out of this sort of encounters. I vividly had that in my notes as well because I had to somehow come to terms with what was actually happening to me. I remember a lot of fear and dread. I remember becoming overcome with desire to explore this within myself but completely needing to reject the possibility. It all didn’t quite feel right, but sometimes our bodies and minds work in opposition with each other with the flesh often winning over and allowing the mind to either succumb and retreat. It never seemed to get easier. Was I to become a lost soul?
So eventually this night of the beginning of March in 1982, I made that leap that would somehow change the course of the life and give a new meaning to me existence. Once I connected with another man in an actual encounter, my fears were waylaid and the doubt overridden. Once bitten, I know what I wanted and continued to seek this partner. Was it love, or lust, or just an open denial of what I had been? A few days later I enter a note into the journal, “I am really starting to enjoy being with Mark and gay sex is very interesting.”
“End of the Relaionship” series
So “The Postcard from the Edge” fundraiser in New York seems to have been a huge hit. Another photographer named Steven Rosen selected my postcard and sent me a message. “It’s such a lovely image, but I have to say I was saddened when I found out the title. I was drawn to the shot because the two men seemed so in love. There were loads of images of beautiful men both alone and engaged in all sorts of sex acts, but your shot was the only one that seemed to have any real emotional content. Knowing that the relationship was ending casts a bit of a pall over the image for me, but it’s still very beautiful.” There was a huge response to my posting “Postcards from the Edge” so I thought I would follow it up with my journal entry from the photo shoot and another image from that series.
October 25, 2009
A great Sunday morning lying around the studio sipping coffee, listening to Dexter Gordon blow the sax, and catching up with myself through my journal. Color begins to fill the sky though windows above my bed and create a beautiful blue glow on the textured walls surrounding me. It’s been forever since I had such a great morning. This morning I am filled with wonder, confidence, and longing. I am finally feeling peace and in touch with the space. I am loving what I have created here. What an inspiration. Last night I had a gay couple over to work on some nude couples images. We all worked together to fixed a really great dinner of Paella, had a couple of bottles of Pinot Noir and chatted. We took and break and work on some of the most beautiful images I think I have ever captured. The first set of images was of them in the shower entwined in each others bodies. After dinner we moved into the studio and did some extraordinary images of them lying on a bed. It stirred such a longing in my soul to watch these two extraordinarily beautiful men captivated by the other. Their bodies moving, twisted, entangled, arousing and igniting sheer sensual pleasure, writhing, rubbing, caressing, tender, passion, deeply gazing into the others eyes, responding to the others soul, colliding, giving, receiving, touching, fondling, tasting the others flesh, totally in tune and turned on by the others tenderness, excitement and pleasure. I was overwhelmed and in awe of the beauty of the love and passion exploding before me. It made me realize what an extraordinary life I have had and all the experiences I have been a part of. To photograph this was one of the highlights of my existence. I recalled these moments within myself when I was that age and consumed by such passions; and now to be this age and able to step back, connect to these desires and record these feelings once again. I was caught in a hypnotic trance of reliving my own passions igniting as if I become a part of their flesh and passions exuding before me. This was the way I approached sex! How have I gotten so far away from it. Modern sex seems to be only about fucking. Modern pornography is only about fucking. Is this all we know or learn. Is an orgasm the ultimate goal and do we miss all the sensuality that leads up to and in between. Sex was never really about the actually climax for me, it was always about the building of pleasure, giving and receiving. I was flooded with old memories, thoughts, and impressions of my own experiences with these passions igniting from my past. I suddenly felt a stronger connection to Glenn and all that he means to me. Once they had left I called him and almost burst into tears still overwhelmed by my experience. I guess that’s what a great artist is, someone who delves, explores and then expresses all those emotions within his medium. It becomes my inward connection to how I present and express my feeling toward my subjects.
