Gay guys with girlfriends: Wha’ the-?

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This weekend I accompanied a friend to a birthday party here in San Francisco.

Said party was being held at a bar, that, based on the clientele, seemed to be chiefly a lesbian hangout. Being a non-drinking heterosexual male, hanging out at a lesbian bar is very refreshing- there is nothing going on in that establishment that requires any form of action from me. Having nothing to prove, it was a pretty fun evening.

But I noticed something peculiar.

My friend and I were chatting with one of the guys there, a very nice gay boy. He mentioned something in passing about his ex-girlfriend, which I figured was just a figure of speech. Then he introduced us to his current girlfriend and proceeded to hold her hand and put his arm around her and do other things that one might do with one’s girlfriend. She was, among other things, a girl. Like born biologically, currently gender identified, socially signified, unambiguous, straight-up girl. Who was the girlfriend. Of a gay guy.

Now, let’s be clear: I’ve lived in San Francisco for over eight years now, frequently had gay roommates throughout my life, have a social circle that is about fifty percent same-sex oriented and worked for three and a half years in a company that served the gay and lesbian market. I know a gay boy when I see one- I still occasionally do false negatives but I almost never do a false positive.

This was not the guy in college who has a girlfriend because he doesn’t know he’s gay yet. This was not the closeted gay or bi guy who’s with a woman but secretly fools around with men on the side. This was not an FTM who’s dating a lesbian. Or any other ambiguous phenotypes you might name. This was, in speech, mannerisms, facial hair arrangement, dress, and any other signifier you can think to name a straight out of the Castro San Francisco gay boy. And his girlfriend.

But that’s not all. At the counter there was another blazingly apparent gay guy locked in several forms of steamy embrace with a curvy, non-draggy, non-tranny, non-MTF woman. Scattered around the room there seemed to be a few other examples.

Have I missed something? Is there a new trend? Was there an article in the New York Times about it recently that I just glossed over?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some considerable appeal to the idea of living in a polyamorous garden of delight where anybody could be going out with anybody else, regardless of gender or orientation, at any time. It does change the competitive landscape in potentially troubling ways, though. I’m not sure I can dress as well as, be as funny as, or be in obsessively as good shape as, your average gay boy. No fair re-setting the bar that high!
Maybe it’s time for me to get a Queer Eye makeover after all…

Dating

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Among the various things I did this weekend, I met a photographer to get some pictures taken.

It’s handy to have a photographer on board, since I often end up feeling like I come out looking like a Muppet in photos despite not looking entirely like a Muppet in real life. Professional help obviously is called for. It’s also handy to have some pictures for promotional purposes, since one of my goals for the New Year is to put my creativity out in public more, and some good stills to go with online publications couldn’t hurt. That was sort of an afterthought, though.

The main reason I wanted to get some pictures taken was to follow through on one of my other intentions for the New Year: to get back into the world of dating and relationships again after a break of nearly two years.

To be precise, after a nine-month relationship ended in December 2005, I briefly did what I have usually done, which is to get right back out there again. Only to find that I was still acting out my own insecurities by choosing people with whom things were certain to not work. I realized it was time to stop, withdraw, and focus on myself until I could come back to it from a different place, because if I didn’t change, then the things that were happening wouldn’t change either.

So I began this formal process of withdrawal in February 2006. Except for two brief defections in late 2006, each lasting for two dates, I didn’t date, pursue dating or respond to other people’s pursuit. Instead I focused on learning to love myself, growing my own life and deepening my connection to my creativity and my spirituality. Especially after I had finally bottomed out on drugs and alcohol at the end of 2006, this was almost my sole focus in life in 2007.

So now, two years later, I do love myself more, have cleaned up a lot of things in my life, have a much larger creative life and a deepened trust in my recovery and that the universe is conspiring to bless me. Not perfect, by a long shot. But real. And feeling the call of getting out there again, because I think some of the further growth lessons in my life are going to come from this realm.

So I met the photographer and I’m working on an online personals profile, which I’ll probably go live with by the end of the month or so. This feels momentous, and at the same time very normal and real. The one thing that I am sure of is that, like everything else this past year, it probably won’t be like I think it will, and along the way I’ll learn and grow.

Here I go….

Hillary

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So, I’m pretty much hoping that Hillary gets obliterated by Barack Obama in Michigan on Tuesday.

(Parenthetical note: I can’t believe this is the first blog I’ve written about the election. Watching presidential debates, election returns and analysis on television plays pretty much the same role for me that football season plays for most guys. And election night is like my Superbowl. Except that it only happens every four years, so it’s really more like my World Cup. (Parenthetical note inside the parenthetical note: it really doesn’t matter if Hillary gets obliterated in Michigan on Tuesday, since the delegates aren’t being recognized by the Democratic National Committee. (Tertiary parenthetical note: bravo Howard Dean for standing up to Michigan’s calendar-hoping hubris!)))

In any case, I realized today that I really am hoping that Hillary gets trounced in Michigan on Tuesday, and if not there, in Nevada on Saturday. I’m hoping it with a sort of visceral, nasty hope.

When I realized this, I was surprised- despite it being a popular pastime, I’ve never been a Hillary-basher. I certainly am not put off by the idea of a woman being president. Or a strong-willed, ambitious woman with an edge. Dare one use the “B” word, I habitually end up really liking women who are described by others (or themselves) as bitches. In fact, my favorite of all Hillaries was the pre-domesticated version who, long-hair flowing and eyes flashing, clad in a leather jacket, made a sarcastic apology on the Clinton campaign trail in 1992 for not, “Staying home and baking cookies like the other mothers.”

And yet I have felt strongly anti-Hillary throughout this campaign cycle. Thinking about it, I believe this is why: the candidate, her positions, her money, her voting for the war back when it mattered, issuing press releases that talk about Obama’s grade school essays, all of it, is pretty much part of the machine. You know the one I’m talking about- the machine that has us in Iraq, that wants us to buy a lot between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that depends on us remaining safely sedated in front of our televisions every night. It’s the machine in a woman suit, so it looks a little new and different, but at the end of the day it’s still just the machine.

This time around, though, the Democratic field has someone who not only has a non-machiney whiff about him, but also has an imaginable shot at nomination. I don’t think Barack Obama is the second coming. Compared to Dennis Kucinich, for example, he’s still clearly a pretty conventional candidate. But he’s a few degrees off of conventional enough that he’s worth getting excited about. He won’t be a boulder that crushes the machine, but he might be sand that wears it down.

I, for one, would like to see him pour.

Baby, I’m a star!

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Well, that may be overstating it a bit. As a writer, though, I figure I have carte blanche to over- under- miss- or re- state whenever the mood strikes. This blog is reality as I create it, after all, and divine re-creation is the highest human prerogative.

Here’s what I can state, with a high degree of accuracy:

I spent most of yesterday (starting with a bracing 6:00 AM wakeup) in the East Bay on the set of the short film I’m one of the writers on. Small production, so far I’m a co-writer, assistant producer, script supervisor and manual laborer. And, as of yesterday, actor.

I hesitate to use the term “actor” since I have a total of eleven words of dialogue in two brief scenes that probably don’t occupy a combined 20 seconds of screen time. I especially hesitate to use the term in comparison to Ryan Eggensperger, Aimee Miles, and Bonnie Jean Shelton, three really superb actors with the film who were on set yesterday.

Still and all, I got in to character (which mostly involved being a geek and lying around in bed- both of which were a total stretch), did my takes and took direction from (oddly enough) the director. It’s such total joy to be hanging out with all the great people involved in making this film, and working on it is a concrete form of one of the three intentions I have for the New Year: putting my creativity out there in public more. Yaay!

The film will be screening at the Victoria Theatre toward the end of the month with a bunch of other shorts, I’ll let you know when it’s coming up…

January Writing News

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Happy New Year!

January Writing news is fairly quiet. Now that the holiday season has been safely disposed of, though, perhaps things will pick up.

One thing that will definitely pick up in January is that the short film I’m a writer (and assistant producer and, very briefly, actor) on will be screening at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco at Scary Cow’s fourth screening party. Assuming we finish it in time, but it looks pretty good. It will be showing Sunday January 27th from 3:00-6:00. Information isn’t up on the Victoria’s website, but should be soon: http://www.victoriatheatre.org/ It would be great to see you there!

What with all the holiday hoopla, I haven’t written anything for Metrowize in the past month. I hope to get more active in January.

No specific plans to be reading on stage this month so far, but you never know. But I did recently exorcise my teen angst onstage in Mortified again on December 14th & 15th. I won a competition as worst teen poet. How should one feel about that? Regardless, it was really cool and I had fun hanging out with my beautiful, creative co-angsters.

As for my novel, my agent is working on synopsis materials and hopes to come up with a list of publishers to target this month. Please cross your collective fingers…

And there is always the blog. The latest postings are appearing in three places simultaneously. MySpace deletes older posts after a while, but you can find the whole history at Blogspot and Live Journal:

http://chris-west.blogspot.com/
http://chrisw-insf.livejournal.com/
http://www.myspace.com/chriswest_writerinsf

That’s it for now. I look forward to sharing the writing life with you in 2008!

All is quiet on New Year’s Day

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I believe that what I’m doing on New Year’s Eve has some kind of link to what will happen in the year ahead. We could get Jungian and call it synchronicity, or newagian and call it manifesting a vision, or just plain call me a superstitious ignorant peasant, but there you have it. I first noticed this phenomenon about ten years ago, and the fit has actually been quite good.

For New Year’s Eve 2005 I was at a party with an unavailable budding potential ladyfriend, drinking and listening to her friends spin heavy metal records all night long. Sure enough, 2005 was a year of relational mismatch, drinking, and renaissance of interest in heavy metal.

2006 began in a small neighborhood bar, with a single friend, wistful glances at women in the distance and lots of whiskey and beer. The year delivered on the eve’s promise of an increasingly small life where distance from people grew as drinking expanded.

At midnight on December 31, 2006 I was in rehab, hoisting a caffeine free diet coke aloft with a few friends from the program. The next morning I wrote that if that meant that 2007 would be a year of sobriety and focus on recovery with a few really good friends in my life, that was all right with me. Blessedly, that was exactly what 2007 turned out to be.

So this weekend I was on a recovery-oriented spiritual retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains. At 11:00 last night, I went to a candlelight meditation in the chapel. After a half hour there, I went to the main lodge where a dance was in progress and got my ass out on the dance floor. At midnight I was surrounded by beautiful, happy people, who had just spent an intense emotional and spiritual weekend with each other, all hugging and wishing each other Happy New Year.

I reckon 2008 will be filled with emotional growth, spiritual connection, active realtionships with others. And love. Happy New Year to all of you!

Happy Holidays…of doom

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Am I the only one who thinks Christmas carols are creepy?

I first became aware of this phenomenon when I was living in San Diego in the mid-90s. There’s a neighborhood there that gets so totally decked out in Christmas lights that it’s become a tourist destination. My future ex-wife had a friend visiting one Christmas, so one night we all went for a drive around the prescribed course of this (70 degree) winter wonderland. Signs up along the route advised us to tune to an AM station for Christmas carols while driving.

It may have just been problems with the ionosphere that evening, but the station sounded low volume even when turned up high. Through the echoey staticy haze you could barely make out sonorous music and an occasional line like “merry Christmas”, as “merry Christmas” would sound if delivered from beyond the grave. While the fact that I was unsettled by Christmas music that evening was clearly a matter of delivery, from that night forward I began to realize that even under the best conditions an air of the uncanny pervades holiday jingles.

Let’s look at a few examples:

The Carol of the Bells. This song has always struck me as being like the soundtrack of a nervous breakdown. Not only are the bells relentless and growing more frantic as the song progresses, but the lyrics themselves seem to celebrate this. One seems to hear words from everywhere, filling the air… Oh how they pound, raising the sound… On on they send, on without end… Upon research I learned that this song is based on a prehistoric Ukrainian chant. That actually makes sense, as it sounds like it could be used to summon the Elder Gods from their centuries-long slumber.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. This song produces a feeling that might be called “heartwarming dread”. The fact that it twice tells us that from now on our troubles will be “out of sight” and “miles away” conveys, more than anything else, the feeling that we must be pretty darn heavy-laden with troubles. And then there’s the line Through the years we all will be together if the Fates allow. It’s hard to know what’s worse- is it the crushing inevitability of our forced togetherness for all time, or the icy powerlessness of this togetherness being the plaything of fate?

Frosty the Snowman. The tale of this snow-golem is inherently fraught with peril. The song tells us he was “alive as he could be”. Well, who worked this magic- God or some demiurge? What does it mean to be alive? Though animated, does Frosty have a soul? If not, do we? Then there’s this: Frosty the Snowman/ Knew the sun was hot that day/ So he said let’s run/ And we’ll have some fun/ Now before I melt away…followed slightly later by Frosty the Snowman/ Had to hurry on his way/ But he waved goodbye/ Saying don’t you cry/ I’ll be back again some day. If you want your eight year old to grapple with questions of being and nothingness, action and responsibility in the face of extinction, and death and resurrection, then by all means continue to expose them to the existential maelstrom that is Frosty the Snowman.

Little Town of Bethlehem. Now we arrive at the dark heart of Christmas carols. This one is worth quoting in its entirety:

O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

Deep and dreamless sleep. Silent stars going by. Everlasting light shining in darkened streets. Meeting the sum of all hopes and fears on a winter’s night. This is practically a goth song!

I could go on with more examples, but I don’t want to spoil the joy of discovery for you. I encourage you to go forth and listen, and try not to shudder. And, of course, happy holidays to all, and I’ll see you in 2008!

One Year

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Last night as I was out in the Mission I realized, “Holy shit, all I have to do to have one year is go to bed tonight and wake up in the morning!” While you can’t take either one of those entirely for granted, they seemed pretty achievable. It dawned on me that I really was going to do this thing.

And lo and behold, I did wake up this morning. And now I have one year clean and sober.

I was actually out past midnight, so technically my reign of non-terror began before I went to bed. Being out last night itself struck me- I was onstage in front of a few hundred cheering people at Mortified, laughed so hard at the other performers that my face hurt, and then spent a few hours after the show hanging out and talking with beautiful, creative people.

I’ve still got my fears and insecurities. I feel frustrated sometimes with the pace of change in my life. Some things come up now, un-numbed for the first time in years, that I hardly even know what to do with. But a year ago, shaking, sweating, and scared shitless knowing that something had to change or I might not make it, I no longer knew that the kind of night I had last night was even possible.

Now it’s not only possible, it’s becoming normal. Normal that I’m losing my fear of people. Normal that my creative life is expanding, Normal that my world is getting bigger, rather than smaller. Not only that, I have a chance now to reach out to people who are where I was a year ago and tell them it will be okay. That they can make it. That there’s a way out.

I reckon all that’s worth sticking around for, and I’ll try a year and a day next.

Scene 1, Take 2

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This weekend I spent 23 hours on the set of the movie I’m working on, and got an average of four hours of sleep a night. The amount of sleep considerably increased last night, but I’m still pretty punch-drunk, so this will be brief. I loved making a movie. I loved the beautiful, talented people I worked with. And I loved that I am finally doing something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. In particular I loved this:

Have you ever been out around town somewhere and run across a group of people who were making a movie? I have before, often with a little flash of envy accompanying the “who the fuck are these people who have taken over a public place?” We mostly shot at the director’s apartment, but our last scene of the weekend was in a taqueria at 29th & Mission.

So last night I the fuck was one of those people. Jason, the director, even got a passing mariachi band to take part in the scene. I have never been happier!

I am the Lizard King, I can do anything

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Final entry ported over from MySpace! Now I am completely caught up. And all grown up…

*****************************

I know why I will never be a rock music journalist.

I might never be a rock music journalist because it’s a hard field to get in to. I might never be a rock music journalist because being over the age of thirty is a little old to be carrying that aspiration. I might even never be a rock music journalist because I have no aptitude for that kind of writing. These are all plausible reasons that I will never be a rock music journalist.

In fact, none of them is the reason that I will never be a rock music journalist. My Muse lends me to nothing more wholly and joyfully than music writing, and age and difficulty are no bar to success when your will is aligned with that of your Muse. It’s too bad that these aren’t the reasons that I will never be a rock music journalist, because, while untrue, at least they make sense. The real reason that I will never be a rock music journalist escapes my comprehension.

I will never be a rock music journalist because I like Jim Morrison.

It seems that all successful rock music journalists that I can name have an almost unnatural antipathy to Jim Morrison and the Doors. Jim DeRogatis, who I agree with musically on almost everything, personally authored the chapter skewering the Doors in Kill Your Idols, the volume he edited of a new generation of rock critics reconsidering the classics. Chuck Klosterman, who I frequently disagree with musically but so identify with in his musical and personal preoccupations and how they interweave with each other that I feel like we were twins separated at birth by a freak hospital mishap, rails against Morrison repeatedly in the first 120 pages of Killing Yourself to Live.

Klosterman and DeRogatis are pretty much the extent of my examples at the moment. Two seems like a small survey size to base sweeping general statements on, but I’ve been known to hatch major life theories on no data points at all, so this hardly phases me. Anyway, trust me, there are a lot more examples even if I can’t come up with them right this second. Rock critics hate Jim Morrison. And I just don’t get it.

The usual rap involves something about pretension and bad poetry, but is rock music really a place to get fussy about this? This is the home genre, after all, of the rock opera Tommy, Black Sabbath songs with titles like “War Pigs” and such classic lines as: a-wop-bab-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom. I think Jim actually gets zinged because he seriously presented his work as poetry, and asked that we treat it as such.

Was his writing dark? Yes. Serious? Surely. Weird? Without a doubt. But bad? Show me another writer in rock who can throw out the simple brutal beauty of a line like: The killer awoke before dawn/ He put his boots on. Name someone else who could summon forth the lyrical roll and intellectual displacement of lines like: Soft driven slow and mad like some new language. What writer with a lesser poetical sensibility could even get to that point on “Not To Touch the Earth” when the music suddenly lurches to a halt, stray guitar strings screech in ragged disarray and a voice comes out of the suddenly silent space and makes your hair stand on end as it intones: I am the Lizard King/ I can do anything?

Exploring atavistic irruptions of darkness is not everyone’s cup of tea and is certainly not a musical mood for all seasons. As often as not, I need silly doo-wop songs from the 50s to keep me regular. But on those occasions when I’m in the mood to ride with the Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car/ The engine runs on glue and tar/ C’mon along, we’re not going very far/ To the East to meet the Czar there’s no one I’d rather go with than Mr. Mojo Risin’.

Even if it means that I can never be a rock music journalist.