Category: Boys

And not falling down

June 16, 2022 /

Walking my bike through the fine sand to meet friends on the beach, Tuesday night, in an interlude of heat between storms, I found my eyes lingering on the beautiful bodies of the men and the women and everyone else around me. It made me think about one of the early entries I posted to this blog, nineteen years ago: a little scanned photo of two famous musicians, and a “joke” about having a crush on each of them. (It was also the post where I announced that I had successfully added permalinks to my homebrew software. Most of those very first entries are among the ones I have since set to private.)

I had been making those kinds of jokes since I was a teenager, attempting to forestall criticism and mockery of my own uncertain masculinity by beating my peers to the punch. As with so many things in my youth, I did not pause to consider that in my self-protective spin moves I was just enacting another form of homophobia, or what effect that might have on other people around me.

But I’m not a youth anymore. I know a little more in general than I did then, and a lot more about myself. So I thought about that old reflex, and how many gentle people have helped me move away from it, and I thought about the sweat and skin and bodies of the people at the beach, and I thought: I can call this feeling what it is, without justification or apology. The name of the feeling is attraction. I’m a forty-one-year-old man, and I’m attracted to some women, and some men, and certainly some other people too.

Here I am, a different person than I was nineteen years ago, and the same person I have always been. Happy June.

As long as I’m doing the “remember that I have a blog” thing this year

February 12, 2019 /

I’m writing here about something that happened last fall; at the time my feelings about it were varied and fraught. In the early days of this web site, when no one read it, I would write about events in my romantic life in a very granular way. As this web site approaches middle age, when no one reads it, I have learned by example to be reluctant about sharing the specific and intimate with a world where search engines are used to destroy human beings. But this feels worth recording.

I am in love with my partner Kat, and we’ve been together for over three years. We live in different cities and we date other people sometimes. Kat has a girlfriend named Sophie, a wonderful writer who wrote a wonderful book about dating people other than the (wonderful) person she married. As part of promoting the book, Sophie submitted a column about falling for Kat to Modern Love, and that is how I ended up with a cameo in the New York Times.

Kat and I were actually in New Orleans for Sophie and Luke’s wedding when the American paper of record published details about my relationship that would be readily identifiable to anyone who knows either of us. The wedding was beautiful, and reading the column the morning after was surreal. I was simultaneously very elated and very worried that unforeseen consequences of the publication would come back to hurt me or the people I love.

Such consequences have not yet come to pass. No one has shunned or shamed or exposed me, and my fear has receded, leaving the elation behind. I’m the happiest I have been in any relationship and, despite my worries about the world’s future, I’m excited about our future. And if I was going to pop up in the Sunday NYT somehow, this is pretty much the best way I can imagine that turning out.

This isn’t even counting BAX, which would technically make this year’s begin in fucking February

July 9, 2013 /

There’s this thing called con season. It is mostly called that by people who make and sell things at conventions, which are warm-weather phenomena, beginning in March of each year and winding down in the autumn. I don’t currently sell things, but I find myself talking about it anyway, because con season has been the dictator of my travel plans for several years running.

There’s Gamestorm twenty minutes north of me, in Vancouver, Washington, and then there’s a local house-sized gathering called Nemocon in May. June sometimes has a Fabricated Realities in Olympia and always (I hope) has Go Play Northwest in Seattle. This year, for the first time, I am flying to Indianapolis to go to the nerd-gathering granddaddy, Gen Con. (It’s hard to explain exactly why I’m going in much the same way that it is hard to explain why Indianapolis holds a convention named for Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.) And then there’s PAX in September, and Geek Girl Con the month after that, unless I go to Indiecade too–and then at last we rest. Until it starts again.

It’s kind of grueling. I’m going to have to cut back in 2014: I want to travel more outside the US, and save money, and this shit devours that budget. But what do I cut? The answer would be easier if “what” didn’t so easily swap out for “whom.”

There are a lot of variations on the con circuit: some people do tech conferences, some people do sci-fi cons, some people do cultural gatherings or music festivals or films and documentaries. All these gatherings have a rationale for getting lots of people together at a specific time and place, but over time, I suspect, the rationale becomes just that. I used to go to gaming conventions to play as many games as I could fit into a weekend. Now I play games at gaming conventions because that’s what my friends are doing.

Weddings, funerals and cons. You don’t get together just to do the thing, you get together because the thing you do is the way to concentrate as many of these far-flung people as you can. Many of the people I love are locative: available in a specific place at at specific time and then too quickly dispersed. Jackson and Avery and Joe and PH and Matthew and Chris and Elizabeth and John and Shannon and Paul and Tony and Daniel and Twyla and Andi and Ryan and Lily and Will and Lisa and everyone I’m forgetting and everyone I have yet to meet. We only get so many rounds of this, in the warm season of our lives, and it’s hard to think about missing any of them.