Being included as one of MLR’s authors is an honor, a privilege that places me within a coterie of iconic brilliance, amongst the legends of M/M writing. I bask in that brilliance with the clear recognition I have earned only a place at the table, not worthy of a meal. I sit before a place setting. I am pleased simply to be here.

An introduction of sorts is required. Or so I see it that way.

My path to this place, this bevy of practiced and prolific authors, began when I was eight or nine. Perhaps typically for those whose passion is words, the urge to get to the guts, to the core of the meaning and application of words, and to use those words to give substance to the roil of my developing personhood, I began to write. Risking cliché, the onerous weight of my youth besieged by a most Catholic mother-equal parts Italian and Irish (not a good combination under any circumstances)-and a father whose religion was the job, a cop who stomped the way of the grizzly through my childhood, I delved early into an understanding and expression of myself through words on paper. By fourteen or fifteen, my words hidden from the scrutiny of, firstly, my parents, secondly, the rest of the world, I scribbled often, feigning homework if asked. This passion for words so secret, so guarded, that I came early to an understanding that exposure of my passion would surely be seen as blasphemy; a sin against God, surely a sin against the perception of what my father believed a boy should be. You see, at fourteen or fifteen, black words on white paper exposed me for what I was: indubitably queer, (yes, that moniker, queer, acknowledged early on); I was essentially different, undeniably alone in an unkind world.

The tortured artist? Not really. Just the luck of the draw, I suppose

Words. Words. Words. Words bloomed from seeds planted, nurtured, scrutinized for their worth, savored for their… Well, savored as gems, diamonds, a currency that purchased the course my writing would take; coveted coin that served only to exacerbate an arousal of wonder and desire as I slip-slid into adolescence.

***
I recall sitting on the passenger side of my father’s huge Chevy as we went somewhere, through the center of Denver, up Colfax Avenue, crossing Broadway. Camelot destroyed by then; the promise of JFK lost in Dallas a year or two before, the world had become a harder, less fantastical place, a place less filled with wonder and possibility, a place, like Denver, suffering the inevitability of that singular loss of wonder that occurred on cold day in November, 1963.

“There,” he said, pointing to a marquee that rose above a doorway amongst many doorways on that stretch of Colfax Avenue, east from Broadway where, across the street, the Colorado State Capitol squatted, gold-domed and imposing, “is a queer place. Better you be found dead in that place than alive.”

The message, the warning from my father was not lost to me. I understood. A warning from a father to a son-Better dead than queer!-that conjured a planting of a significant seed that begged words, secretly written, hidden away. Words that served only to exacerbate my interest, my blooming lust, the carousal of hormonal imperatives that fed on the extraordinary notion that a queer place was there-with a marquee for Christ’s sake-just across the street from the Capitol of Colorado.

Did I realize then that my father’s admonition revealed only that I was not alone? Did I understand that only time was my nemesis? Did I recognize my determination that, upon majority, I would pass through that doorway, with the telling marquee above-The Court Jester-and see for myself what this queer thing was all about?

And, yes, I eventually passed through that doorway. But, by that time, the dimly lit interior exposed only a dearth of good men who had seen Stonewall as a thing of disquietude, encompassing the discomfort of an enforced intimation that no longer would their queer comfort be hidden from the light of day.
***
I was left then, at fourteen or fifteen, with only the smell of the boys after the track was rounded for the tenth time and, with the blow of a whistle, the herd, the white cotton gym-shorted herd of red-faced, quick-breathed boys turned toward the building, toward the steel door through which a flight of concrete stairs was bounded down to the subterranean, steamy, cavernous, steel-lockered and stone-walled, nakedly utilitarian phantasmagoria of water and soap, skin and catcalls, damp towels-the sound of the snap of towels against smooth, muscular asscheeks-and the bang of locker doors upon their steel casings and the hiss of the showers and the smell, the aroma of the boys when I myself was a boy. I remember it. I remember the boy who would always display a hard-on, proud, smiling, there, at those times when I was imploring the Sweet Virgin and all the Saints in Heaven to control my dick and my eyes so that no one would suspect, so that no one would catch me staring at that hard-on or an ass so lovely, so smooth, so tightly-muscled that even, yes, Sweet Jesus and all the Saints in Heaven would have envied my glance…me, a human male child so alive with the hot blood and the heady stuff of youth carousing through myself; and they, all the Saints in Heaven, only wisps of… What?

Yes, those seeds, those images begged words, encased in adamantine shells, as photographs that never pale with time, that never cease to have the intensity of the significance of the moment. How else to do that but with words, secretly written, hoarded against the scrutiny of those who would not have understood?
***
I read John Updike, “The Centaur,” at fifteen. A curious endeavor for one ensconced in the essentially parochial existence that Denver offered. Updike’s words opened chasms of possibilities. A reading of Whitman followed. Oh, with Whitman, the chasm evolved, erupted as an affirmation of what, by that time, colored inarticulate hunches to certainties. Struggles of self-awareness through black words on white paper were nothing new, nothing unusual, even for a young man hemmed in by the purple jut of the Rockies to the west, the vast spread of open prairie to the east.
Through matriculation at the University of Colorado, through a two-year intimacy with Uncle Sam, I sought not the offerings of writers of sultry detail encompassing the perambulations of man on man. No, I sought Edmund White, Andrew Hollinghurst, Felice Picano, Isherwood, Andrew Holleran and so many others. I suppose it is important to admit it was not the friction of the fuck that fascinated then, it was the stories behind the fuck, the words and images that led to the inevitability of the fuck that captured my interest, my passion.

I must admit also to a foray into the delightful grunge of Hollywood in the mid to late 70s that resulted in my first short story being published by a slick-backed magazine, “In Touch,” edited by another icon, Roger Margason, aka Dorian Gray.
Writers are, of course, an amalgam of seeds planted early in their lives; some nurtured, some eventually discarded. I have discarded a great deal. I’ve also nurtured some fabulous, some painful but nevertheless precious plantings that still, after all these years, serve the writer in me much as a potter’s fingers give form and substance to an otherwise useless lump of clay. How could it be otherwise?

And yes, I still lovingly grasp the seeds planted, those revelations from a time and place where such things, such images, such nutriment for the insatiable appetite of a boy’s imagination, provided the black words upon white paper that-so much more worthy than the truths gleaned from a therapist’s couch-gifted me with an insight into myself, lavished me with a caring muse who still, thankfully, sits upon my shoulder, licking his finger, pointing at a word or phrase brightly lit upon the screen and says, “Yes,” or “No, that simply will not do.”
So, I sit at the MLR table, expecting nothing other than the honor of sharing space with those whose lives perhaps somewhat mirrored mine. I revel in the company of such men, women; of those who will be served that meal, while I salivate with the specter of actually becoming worthy of joining their feast; a celebration of their words that, if nothing else, give voice to the urge upon urge to reveal the truth of ourselves, the essential truth of what it is we have all become: chroniclers of the joy, the singular fascination of man for man.