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Dispatches From Dystopia

~ "What man by worrying can add one cubit to his span of years?"

Dispatches From Dystopia

Tag Archives: homosexuality

Cousins, Part Two.

16 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by David in alcoholism, Health Issues, Sexual Identity

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

homosexuality, memoir, Obesity

When our story left off, Annette had just come out as a Lesbian to me and my wife. This revelation would fall under the heading of Confirming Our Suspicions.  Nevertheless, it was a huge deal to come out in the mid to late Eighties.  We came to understand that her sexual orientation was just one aspect of who Annette was a person. What Annette never had was an enduring relationship. She had attractions, dalliances, affairs.  We never met her lovers.

She was a loving and caring aunt, but a realistic, observant and feisty one.  She rapidly discerned that her surrogate parenting job entailed damage control around her brother’s marital and familial escapades.  She once confided in me that Leroy had an eye for “White Trash”.  He would get married, with all the accompanying optimism.  Then the drinking and the late hours at the Safeway would erode the foundation of family life.  Finally  the once-blissful bride would depart, to “find herself”, leaving Annette with the job of taking care of her niece, then a nephew, whilst Leroy was at the store. It actually worked out fairly well, because Annette had both a sense of  responsibility but also fun. There was the pool at Aunt Lois’s for summer days.  In its quirky, near dysfunctional way, the children received nurturing and parenting.

Meanwhile, Aunt Ruby’s health was declining, in a predictable descent; diabetes, impaired circulation, nerve damage, gangrene, amputation, and heart disease.  Ruby passed, leaving Annette and Leroy in the bedlam.

The niece and the nephew, children of different mothers, grew up. Annette’s health spiraled downward, so that the house she inherited from Aunt Ruby fell into disrepair. An opossum moved into the attic through an open vent. My brother named him “Maurice The Marsupial”. Her obesity had rendered her disabled. She moved in with Aunt Lois.  Things were good at first. Aunt and niece would go to farmers’ markets, and cook for the family gatherings that occurred at the holidays.

Annette lived her lesbian life vicariously, through the internet, The Advocate, and lesbian-themed DVD’s. It was no kind of life for anybody to live. Soon the wheelchair was a necessity and the wheelchair ramp became part of the architecture of the postwar bungalow Lois and Annette called home.

Annette became Lois’s reason to live.  She took her to dialysis, the numerous other doctors’ appointments, and in January 2006, to the Medical College Hospital, where Annette lapsed into a coma, and died of renal failure.  There is a reason why they call it Morbid Obesity.

Leroy was the last of the family, Uncle Jim, Aunt Ruby, Annette were gone. About a decade before, Safeway pulled out of the Richmond market. Leroy then went back to school, and became a computer nerd, earning a good enough living to afford his own house with a swimming pool, private school for his son, and Austin Nichols Wild Turkey Whiskey.

His alcoholism captured him, isolating him from the family.  He surfaced for the principal family events, which were now funerals.  My brother, through a circuitous system, involving Magic Jack, would contact him of the passings,  Aunt Lois in May 2011, my Dad in August 2011, Cousin  Bailey in January 2012. He and his son would show up at the funerals.

One day, in March 2012, my siblings, my elder son, and another cousin  were cleaning out the house where Pop, Grandma, Aunt Lois, and finally, Annette had all lived, preparing it to sell and settle Lois’s estate. We were interrupted by a call from Leroy. He had fallen and cracked a vertebrae in his neck.  He was in the hospital.  The neck fracture came from bones weakened by metastatic cancer of the lung.  Leroy was still smoking the Marlboro Reds in the box, just like he did in High School. His son was joined by his daughter,  now an Army wife, who had flown in from Germany. His ex-wives came back as he now lay in hospice.  Within two weeks of that phone call, Leroy was dead.

After Leroy died, we learned his biological father had not died as we were told. Ruby had divorced him. The family was a family of secrets.  There were emotions, numbed by food, turned raw by alcohol.  Were Leroy and Annette ever happy? Probably not.

Cousins, Part One.

09 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by David in cooking, Health Issues, Sexual Identity

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

food, homosexuality, memoir, World War Two

They were born on 21 August ten years apart, he in 1949, she in 1959. We’ll call him Leroy, her Annette. Daddy’s brother, Uncle Jim, married their mother Ruby all of sudden.  One week, he was single, living with my grandparents, the next week he was married. He was in his early thirties, a WW II veteran, a CPA.  Ruby, they said, was a widow with a child, Leroy.  That is what we were told. Being children, not investigative reporters, that was a perfectly good explanation.  I remember playing at their house in Highland Park, a North Richmond neighborhood.  Then they moved to Lakeside, in a house near my grandparents with a gate allowing passage between the two houses.

Uncle Jim was hard of hearing. He was in the Navy during The War.  My mother told me he was based in Australia. He was a sonar man.  That was all I knew of his war service until my brother told me he was awarded the Purple Heart when he burned himself with his soldering iron while his submarine was being depth-charged.  It is fairly easy to conclude his hearing loss was attributable, in part,  to the depth-charging.   Imagine, for a while, being in a long steel cylinder, under 60+ feet of water, and people on the surface are dropping explosives on or near that cylinder with the intention of killing you..  Do you think you might be a little crazy after that experience?

So, all of a sudden Bachelor Uncle marries Aunt Ruby and adopts Leroy.  They live near Pop, Grandma and my Aunt Lois, who still lives with her parents.  We visit my grandparents nearly every week.  So we see them a lot. Sometime after 1957, they get a dog, which they name Sputnik, after the Russian satellite.  Leroy likes Elvis and The Mickey Mouse Club. Life rolls along, and they next thing we know Aunt Ruby has a baby. Everybody is surprised. I mean she had a weight problem, but hiding, not talking about a pregnancy with a family that’s pretty damn close is weird. We children were hip to the whole Women Having Babies And Being Mothers Thing. Why they would hide it from us because of some sexual inhibition wasn’t an issue.  I remember seeing my new cousin at the hospital and learning they named her Annette at the urging of Leroy.  To you youngsters out there, Annette Funicello was one of the Mouseketeers on  The Mickey Mouse Club. In the prepubescent world of 1950’s sexuality, she was the hot one to the boys.

We keep seeing our grandparents, aunts, uncle, cousins. We now notice that Annette has a weight problem just like Aunt Ruby and Uncle Jim.  We start to call them The Tank Family.  Cooking  was Aunt Ruby’s passion.  She was good at it and she expected that you eat! Having plenty of food was an obsession of Depression survivors of my parents generation. Annette’s problem morphed into obesity.

Our nuclear family moves in our own specific areas of interest. We see the Tank Family less and less frequently. They move to a subdivision called West End Manor into a typical tri-level. Uncle Jim gets active in the American Legion; Aunt Ruby participates in the Auxiliary. Leroy graduates from high school, gets a job at the Safeway. Daddy gets him in the Marine Reserve and away from service in Vietnam.  Leroy marries someone named Alice whom I never met. The constant is Annette’s weight.  Annette is home, going to high school. She isn’t much interested in boys.

The other constant is Leroy’s inability to form a stable relationship with a woman. He divorces Alice, finds some woman named Myrtle, marries her. I never meet her either. Leroy liked women. Women liked him. He also liked to drink.

After my grandparents die, Aunt Lois inherits the house.  She has a successful career as a civil servant, with a high-powered job with the Defense Supply Agency.  In the early 1980’s she puts in a nice in-ground pool..  The family reconnects at my Aunt’s, like in the days when we were young children.  My sons get to know my cousins’ sons and daughters. (It’s a rarity these days when second cousins are close.)  The next tragedy is the death from a heart attack of Uncle Jim, in 1985, at age 60.  We get even closer as an extended family.

We see Annette more and more frequently. Her obesity spins off into diabetes.   Around this time, Annette comes out to my then wife and me. I had known gay and lesbian people before this, but never had I known one to come out.  All of a sudden, a distant issue becomes very immediate.

 

LGBTQ Literature?

23 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by David in Sexual Identity

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

homosexuality

I just read a novel, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. I cannot be too enthusiastic in praising this book. There is a powerful prose rhythm in Barnes’ writing. It is a compelling story, a telling, from one perspective, of a dysfunctional relationship. The facts from which the fiction derives is Barnes’ love affair with the artist Thelma Wood. The relationship was characterized by alcoholism, sexual infidelity, and abandonment. Wood would disappear for days at a time, only to return with no explanation for her absence. While Barnes was lesbian, Wood was bisexual,but with a preference for women.

That the characters are lesbian is what, I suppose, makes this a “lesbian” novel. But wait. If I can read this book, empathize with the plight and pain of Nora  (Barnes’ character in the story), and identify with this recounting  of human experience, just how “lesbian” is it? It isn’t written in lesbian secret code, if there is any such thing.  That phenomenon of human experience makes it possible for people of varying backgrounds to understand and relate to each other, if they make the effort. I had a similar experience reading  Samuel Steward’s Parisian Lives, an openly gay book about homosexual life in Paris in the thirties and forties.  Again, here I am relating to these men, liking them, hoping they will find something akin to happiness.

If I qualify and select literature on the basis of descriptors, what a narrow world I would be living in. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest. If I didn’t care much for Catholics, not reading him would be my great loss. And so it goes for so many writers.

More about Perversion

23 Friday May 2014

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

birth control, homosexuality, sadomasochism

Perversion- 1) “The alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended.”-
2) “Sexual behavior or desire that is considered abnormal or unacceptable.” Both from Oxforddictionaries.com
Homosexuals used to be considered the archtypical perverts, distorting sexual desire for the opposite sex into desire for persons of the same sex. Until very recently, gays and lesbians lived in a shadow world. Few people admitted to knowing a homosexual, much less admitting to being one. That has all changed in the past few decades. Now, it seems “coming out” has become a staple of popular culture. Admitting to being homosexual, while a profound statement to the person making the admission, is hardly newsworthy any more. “You’re gay? Take a number and wait on line.” is rapidly becoming the response.
Other sexual “perversions” have followed this track. Granted, there are some very serious sexual deviations that are decidedly unacceptable, pedophilia to name one. Admitting to a sadomasochistic desire is now no longer a big deal. This begs the question, how can your sexual proclivity be considered abnormal if nearly everybody accepts it? And, if being kinky or different is what you’re up to, are you willing to establish boundaries or limits to that kink? What if your thrill is in the flirtation with depravity itself? If the act is no longer held to be depraved, by you or anyone else, will it continue to thrill?
Sex as the procreative act is just one of several purposes. To have procreative sex gain more significance and value over sex as recreation and pleasure is rapidly becoming a perversion in its own right. Having more than two or three chldren will definitely raise a few eyebrows. “They have six children?! Don’t they know about birth control? Don’t they know the planet can’t support so many children?” You know the remarks. I dare say many of us believe them.
I’m not saying run out and become straight, give up kink, or have sex only when you want a baby. I am saying that broadening our thinking has, in a perverse way, narrowed our thinking.

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