Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.

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Eleven years

aka: It's HOT.

Typically June in Los Angeles means overcast mornings, warm afternoons and pleasant evenings. Nice weather until nature suddenly decides that it is summer and everything becomes constantly overwhelmingly hot. Guess what happened this week?

Instead of a nice dull weather post, here's some of the past week instead:

Wed 06/13/01:

I was at a meeting at one of the local courthouses. Actually the meeting had been canceled, but no one had bothered to inform me, so I was standing around a local courthouse like an idiot waiting for a meeting that never happened when I saw an interesting person.

"Person" because I'm not too sure what gender they were. They were either a very overweight, fiftyish, white woman with long hair dressed slovenly and all in black, or an overweight, fiftyish, man with long hair dressed slovenly and all in black. It looked as if they had dipped their hair in various dyes, so that while it started out shocking white at the roots, it became darker and redder towards the roots. It was an interesting effect.

(Uh, yes, I am purposely making an error in number using "they" rather than using the more accepted he/she. "They" may look weird, but it "sounds" more natural to me.)

I went to the Catalyst (Pasadena area GLBT group) potluck that night. The first time in ages. Once again my food contribution was fairly lame, chips 'n salsa bought at Trader Joes literally minutes before.

I managed to catch up with some old friends and I found out that L.A. Pride was this weekend. I'll ruin any potential interest by admitting that not only did I not know that pride was this weekend, but I didn't attend either. Yup, I'm a terrible excuse for a gay boy! hehe.

I met an interesting person that night. Marco and I are the same age, but our lives have gone in decidedly different fashions. At thirty-three, he has been out of the closet for only a few months now and is in the middle of divorcing his wife. He is also trying to figure out how and when to tell his daughter about himself. He is pretty much building an entirely new life for himself and seems both excited and a little nervous about the prospect.

As the only son in my family, the expectation my entire life was that I would get married, have kids and continue the family line. As unlikely as it may have been, I can easily imagine a scenario were I didn't come out in High School and I ended up married. To a woman. It wouldn't have lasted, but I'm sure my parents would have been thrilled at having a daughter-in-law who wasn't named John ;-)

Thursday 06/14/01:

I spent the day in meetings fighting a headache as my colleges yelled at each other over obsessive policy details. I didn't take part in any of the arguments, but I did spend a lot of the day with my eyes closed thinking "You're gonna be on vacation soon" over and over again.

Not surprisingly, the high point of my day was a lunch spent catching up with some former coworkers The food was pretty good, Kailua pork and sesame chicken at Shakas. It's been a while since I've eaten Hawaiian.

I tend to think of myself as fairly calm and sedate, kind of boring even. I was reminded at lunch that to a lot people I live a wild exciting life. Of course this was coming from someone who's idea of fun is spending the entire day playing golf, but I'll take whatever compliments I can.

Friday 06/15/01:

My sister, dad and I saw The Road to Aztlan exhibit at LACMA. We got there before the museo opened, so we ended up taking a nice stroll along the tar pits to waste some time. There were a ton of elementary school kids running around the park that day, screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs.

The exhibit was interesting. When it opened, I read a review that criticized it as being "too forced." The reviewer felt that the central idea of common recurring themes occurring across cultures in Mexico and the American Southwest was artificial. They also felt that the modern pieces, that is specifically the Chicano Movement pieces were weak and unimpressive.

I would have linked the review, but I didn't bother to save the site and I don't really feel like going through the effort of finding it again. Personally, I feel that the exhibit did a fairly good job of showing how commerce and conquest resulted in shared images and icons across different cultures and tribes (Think the four Cardinal directions defining the center, feathered snake gods, fertility symbols like corn, rabbits, the moon, bells, etc...). I think that calling these connections artificial may have overstating things, but then again, I'm not the professional reviewer and my education in art and culture is admittedly limited.

I do agree that some of the modern pieces did seem less impressive compared to the earlier works of art and craft, but that may have happened no matter what the focus of the collection was. Even now after decades of conceptual and performance art, people sometimes have a hard time accepting that this type of work is in fact art.

Um, I did have an actual point, but I think I lost it.

Anyhow, I enjoyed the exhibit. Except and there is always an except with me isn't there? I did enjoy the exhibit except for a certain Mr. Know it all patron who was trying to impress his girlfriend with just how amazingly smart he was. He seemed to be everywhere that I wanted to be and he spent the entire time yammering away about how he saw a real codex in Mexico and the significance of whatever and how this was not the best example of so and so.

Apparently I wasn't the only person he was annoying that day. I heard several people whispering something about "just shut up already." I even heard a guard muttering "thank gawd" under her breath as he left the room she was working in. I don't know if he succeeded in impressing his girlfriend that day, but I did get the feeling that he impressed himself immensely.

Today was John's and my eleventh anniversary. We "celebrated" by dropping off film, running other errands and picking up some take out for dinner. Not exactly super romantic, but more than fine, since we were both fairly tired. Besides, I think the Tokyo trip can count as a big time mutual anniversary gift :-)

Saturday 06/16/01:

Kristen and I saw Atlantis at the Irvine Spectrum on one of their large oversized screens. Two word review: Cool movie. I realized this wasn't typical Disney fare fairly early in the movie when people started dying left and right. True, they were bloodless, goreless, off screen type deaths, but it did point out this wasn't a little kid flick. Despite the fact the audience was filled with preteen kids and their parents. Anyhow, it was a good flick which left us hungry afterwards.

There was an hour wait at the PF Changs, so we had dinner at the WolfGang Pucks instead. Seared rare ahi for Kristen and grilled salmon for me. Dinner was a little strange because we realized that a man and woman seated near us were staring at us. Gawking even.

I have no idea why they found us so interesting, though I would hazard a guess that they were listening in on our conversation. It was a fairly typical Nico/Kristen conversation covering everything from our vacation plans, Kristen's assorted writing projects, straight female coworkers who were married to louses of husbands type stories, local GLBT organization gossip, to anime and movies.

Maybe they thought we were the floor show?

I guess it should have bothered us more, but it didn't. Occasionally over the years, Kristen and I have noticed disapproving looks from other people in restaurants when they realized that we weren't the young marrieds they initially took us for. They didn't like being seated so close to a dyke and her queer boy best friend or something. This wasn't like that though, no sneering. Thinking about it, it has been years since something like has happened.

After dinner and "our show," we did the usual hit the anime store thing. Once again I stared at the kids playing the dancing video game while Kristen checked out the assorted merchandise. This time the best players were a brother and sister team, about twelve and fifteen or so. They were so good that they were dancing backwards to make the game more interesting. Watching them made me feel very old and tired.

Sunday 06/17/01:

John and I went to his folks for fathers day. We had sandwiches that day instead of the usual BBQ, which was ok. It was hot enough that cold sandwiches were a better choice anyway. I got tuckered out fairly quickly in the day (from watching the kids the day before?) so I ended up laying out on a couch while the rest of the family joked, gossiped and made fun of me for being so tired.

The big topic of conversation that day was trying to decide on a location for the family reunion, which was an extraordinarily boring conversation, so let me end this here.

More later,

nico

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