My long conversations with my uncle Thomas always make me think about male relationships. He has had an intimate friendship with a man for most of his adult life, but that is not to say that the two of them shared a sexual relationship, only that they know one another extremely well, better than either’s family members and significant others. There is a strange sexual tension between the two of them, my uncle told me about a kiss that he shared with this friend, but my uncle’s friend has been happily married to a woman for a while now and my uncle has started to date, which was uncommon in his youth and the stories that he tells me about his attempts so far would be hilarious if they were not true and made my uncle think that he was not meant for romantic and sexual fulfillment. But that got me thinking about it, the importance of romantic and sexual fulfillment, I wondered if my uncle was being frustrated by an imaginary notion of love that I never acknowledged in my life as a heterosexual male. Sure, romance is great, and I appreciate that the love I share with Valeria makes my life better, but would I be missing out on something if I’d never known that love, if I had found some way to make it work with my first wife and never got the chance to experience life with Valeria? To say it out loud it’s clear that my uncle is missing out on something, but I don’t think it was ever such a grueling pursuit for me in my love life. I have really only ever loved two women and I shamelessly pursued them both in full view of whomever may have been watching. Of course I was acting a fool to win their love, that is a man’s duty. But what I understand now is that my uncle believes that the feelings he has for the men who catch his eye are unnatural so he feels the need to be very discrete and his embarrassments stack up like skeletons in his closet, or weighs down the baggage he carries, which ever image you prefer. And I think that to him, love is such a secret thing, so secret that it exists only as the unspoken words and the suppressed desires. He is a very guarded man, and I see why; the habits one develops to conceal a secret passion will eventually bleed into the normal habits and make one seem guarded or reserved in mixed company. It’s all so fascinating to me because for a long time, I didn’t even know that my uncle had these issues and that millions of men around the world face similar issues. Not that its a revelation that homosexual men do indeed exist and have difficulties, but the social stigmas that contribute to these difficulties are rooted in the type of unfamiliarity that I experienced. Men are shown very early in life the things they should like, the things they should say and appreciate and if you are a man who happens to actually fit the prototypical masculine mold, then it can be impossible to understand why any man would feel differently than you do, unless, or until, that man can grasp that preconceived notions of masculinity are very narrow and idealized. This is the fundamental problem, this is the reason why the term homosexual even exists, a straight man’s attempt to distinguish himself from the misunderstood other. But what I know now is that its just not that big of a deal because it isn’t unnatural, just not universal, it is one of many possibilities.
I’m happy to live in a time when the proverbial man enjoys freedoms not common to men of previous generations. Despite the ills of today, it is good to be able to pronounce freely the object of one’s affections, even if there is a faction of people who believe that these pronouncements constitute the ills of today. Of course there are not more homosexuals today than existed in the past, but the climate of the country is such that homosexuals have enjoyed inclusion into mainstream culture. But all of this is old news; Will and Grace has been off the air for almost a decade, there are even openly gay public figures, including religious leaders. Homosexuals now enjoy relative equality alongside their straight counterparts; relative being a key word as the marriage debate rages in states across the country and a homosexual is smart to avoid certain places and people; places like Russia and the entirety of the Middle East. It is possible, though, to hear the details of a homosexual relationship and easily forget that the anecdotes involve two males rather than a male and a female, or, the traditional players of monogamy and romance. This should not be a shocking statement, either; how many platonic relationships between same-sex friends have you witnessed that mirror the closeness and affection of committed heterosexual relationships? I admit that I have witnessed many and when I think on my past and my time with some of my best male friends, we very clearly mirrored an old married couple, at times dysfunctional, other times so in tune with one another, almost to the point of syncopation. Man is a social animal that craves communion with others like ourselves. It is our great strength that every animal learns through evolution. With enough numbers, man is nearly unstoppable. Being social also anchors us to our setting and helps us form abstract ideas of the past and the future. And a lesson that homosexuality can teach us today is that we should all work towards one another’s preservation rather than find reasons to cleave populations from our collective. Of course, we must be shrewd about the people we choose to allow into our community. A dumb man allows a virus easy access into his body for the sake of geniality and reverence for the liberties of the virus. A very pedantic man told me that, and I agree with the statement, though he used it in opposition to homosexuality. The pedantic man believed homosexuals to be a detriment to the greater good; propagation. They cannot contribute to the greater good, he said, not to mention that they spread literal viruses that undermine the greater good. I disagree. Advancement cannot be only about adding numbers, it is necessary to create a way to sustain the numbers that we produce, to allow for steady multiplication into the future, so that our children can enjoy the privilege of their own family, their own choices, and every man, woman and child has the potential to make tomorrow brighter, even if they are not able or willing to sire children.
All of this is a very long introduction to the various stories that brought about this train of thought; incidences involving men that are not sexual-orientation specific, rather, they incorporate the common themes of love and the ways that two people can affect one another. These stories were inspired by many true stories from very generous men who shared their intimate pasts, some bearing real humiliation and loss. The names have changed to protect the privacy of those involved, but the stories are presented here with the hope that they can demonstrate the varying masculine forms that exist. The point is not legitimization, to say that I am presenting the stories of homosexual men along side heterosexual ones in order to give credence to the lives of homosexual men defeats the purpose. Homosexual men do not need to be legitimized, they are viable, strong, and important members of their communities and families. The point is to explore masculine relationships in all of their forms. The narrative perspective shifts with each new story and some characters appear in multiple stories (it is safe to assume that if a name recurs in multiple stories then it is the same character in each, though each story is meant to be self contained).
I wrote many of these stories with the help of my uncle, Thomas Livingston, whose life was the impetus for this whole endeavor. When I told him I wanted to put together this collection, he asked me why it was something that I wanted to give so much time and effort to. And I thought about it for a minute because I didn’t want to only give the sterile, writer answer, that it was fertile ground for art and I could definitely make something thought provoking and maybe illuminating, maybe change some minds. I thought about it because I knew that it was more than that, I wanted to do what I know now is pointless, I wanted to show the world, or however little of it would read the finished product, that my uncle was a good man, as good or better than a straight man so that he would know that I didn’t judge him as less because of his sexuality. I didn’t say that to him though, I only said that if it could help someone understand something they don’t already, and we can avoid unnecessary hatred and violence, then it’s worth the time and the effort.
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