It's A Hard

It’s A Hard
Part 2 – The Feelings

As I re-read what I wrote on the plane, I realized there was a flow, a natural breaking point. Again I offer the transcription, not edited, not reflective of the days since my return. There will be time for that, but for now:


I am ahead of schedule, standby on an earlier flight. You might wonder, so much invested in a weekend, why not squeeze it for every last hour. The reason is simple enough, explained in a comment, one not solicited, one with no thought.

I go to the ticket agent for an earlier flight, inquire about standby. She nods, asks if I am on a connecting flight. Without thought I volunteer “I am going home”; and as I write these words again, my eyes are filled with tears. “I am going home” My sexuality has come to define my life and maybe that is what must be. But id does not feel good, it does not feel just or right.

Can I walk in the door and say, honey I really am straight. I think not. Would it have been a lot fairer if the life I have built was consistent with all of my sexual orientations, absolutely.

But given a choice between incredible sex with a man or chatting quietly with Carrie, young ones scampering about, I would need but an instant to respond.


[I lied, I cannot let what I have written stand without comment through my eyes today. The last sentence fascinated me then and now. My pad indicates the next paragraph started, moved and finally abandoned. The sentence says I would need only an instant to respond, but the response is not actually stated. And what is clear through many of the conversations this week is that if you make a “minor” change to the sentence – replace “incredible sex with a man” with “an emotional bond with a man”, well you see where this is going. Back to the regularly scheduled programming.]

Way back when, I raised the sister questions – what I want and who I am. The answers seem strangely clear to me this late afternoon. I want to spend my days and my nights with Carrie, with my family. I am a queer floating around the sexual continuum north of the mythical three on the scales.

Strange knowing what I want and who I am seems so simple and so impossible to implement.

There is the question of Carrie and her wants and needs and it is time for me to respect them. There may have been a point where a celibate queer would have been fine with her, and maybe there will be a time for that in the future.

But for now it is time to accede to her wishes, her reality, to live in the basement and devote myself to being the best friend, “husband”, father that I can imagine. It is a time to speak through deeds.

It must have been forty years ago when Dylan wrote:
It’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain that’s gonna fall

Maybe, just maybe the rain will wash away the tears and the pain and maybe, maybe there will be a rainbow somewhere on the other side of this all.



I wrote this and do not retract my words, I never really do, but I understand them better now. I wrote of “celibate queer” – celibate in sex, celibate in love: easy to write hours after receiving sexual and emotional gratification, but really. I once asked Sam how many months he thought I could be celibate and he just laughed – he was thinking in weeks, at best.

More to understand, other posts to explore with; but if re-reading my words has left me with any one edit, it would be the wish that the rain wash away the greatest of all my obstacles, the fear I am first beginning to acknowledge.