Adam Phillips

Well said, Mark. It's struck me as the years have gone by: Back in the days of On the Mark there were three of us who were doing roughly the same thing--telling a story that was essentially autobiographical. Of those three, I'm the only one who has stayed with it. The other guy working on his ultimately abandoned it, for reasons that are almost identical to Mark's. As for me, I've walked away from my story twice. One of those two times, I actually had it removed from the places that were hosting it. And as it stands, it's been three years since I've added a chapter. That's all going to change this year. You'll be able to find my story here, and I'll finish it this year. It's hard, is all I'm saying, when you commit to writing your story. And there are certain places that get really tough to get through. You go back and you have to face your demons. The only reason I didn't totally cave is that my past wasn't quite as traumatic as either Arbour's or Walsh's were to them. I can go back there without feeling like I'm crawling naked across a room full of broken glass. I've harassed Mark to finish this story a couple of times. I harass him a lot about things. Like killing off Jeff, LOL. But I love him crazy mad, and I totally get why he can't finish, and I totally got his back on that. And one more thing: People need to tend to their own shit. How other people play out the hand that is dealt to them, sexually, is their own business. And if the religious, self-righteous types need a biblical reference for inspiration, here it is: "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 3Why do you see the speck in your neighbor

Okay, I'm done with all this. Sorry for the distraction, ladies and gents. I love Mark madly and at this point I'm just yankin his chain. I said my piece and I'm ready to get on to the next story in the set. I figure I'll be current by the middle of next month. --Adam

Yeah, but when your creator is effing determined to kill you off, little things like realism don't matter. It's a hard Calvinist universe in here, Jeremy, and the God of Cramptonworld elected that Jeff Should Die. You and I, we gotta get with the program and eat the troubling details.

I started this whole damn thread, or rather a thread I started at my Yahoo group started this. I hadn't intended to belabor the issue. I already bashed Mark enough for it the first time I'd read through the story and he and I have been e-buds for years. I was just trying to get current on his writing because his output is so hard for me to keep up with, and I realized that to have any sense of what was going on in future stories I'd have to start from the beginning of the Cramptonworld series. I knew 1968 would be tough on me, but I was already hard enough on Mark about it the first time around. I figured I'd just bear up, grit my teeth, and get through it and on to the next "novel" in the series. But it effed me up (it's so ridiculous that we have to censor ourselves at this place) again, as badly as it did the first time, and quite frankly I was mystified about why my reaction was so strong, and so strongly negative. I'll concede that I have no experience of dealing with people who are decades-long addicts, and I "hear" and register the words some of you write about the toll that addiction takes on non-addicts in the family. I hardly think that makes JP a much more redeeming character, and personally I think Sam's intent to go murder Jeff, and his decision to let a deranged person make a life-and-death decision, and to sit idly by while his life slips away, doing nothing, is reprehensible, if not criminal. However, as I was forced to concede by a near-lifelong friend at my own group (damn his sorry ass!), the extremes of my reaction come from some of my own personal history with a personal friend, who experienced nothing like what Jeff experienced, but who was a football player himself and who had a horrible childhood trauma. I hadn't even considered the relevance of all that to my reaction to Jeff's pitiful end. It's not only Jeff I'm seeing there circling the drain and finally slipping through, and that's why it's especially horrifying to me. Anyway, it's time for me to get on to The Land Whore if I have any hope of getting current with his stuff any time soon. Sorry to have distracted the lot of you. I know that for you the story's over and done. And it really was my personal hangup much more than Mark's viciousness as an author. Nevertheless, I still wish he would have had Sam raped with a broken baseball bat and given JP AIDS and had him die a miserable, excruciatingly painful death. Alone. I would have enjoyed every grisly scene. --Adam P

Lord. Why bring up facts at a time like this? I'll deal with you later. Once I've made it to the chapter in question and managed to figure out how to hold JP responsible.

I've just read Chapter 9; I didn't really remember this chapter and its relevance to the whole story. Jeff's emotional indiscretion with Stefan is certainly a complicating factor, and it's difficult to fault JP for feeling emotionally betrayed. I'm not sure that you as an author have me convinced, Mark, that Jeff would have actually been torn emotionally between JP and Stefan. That strains credulity just a bit, given that there hasn't been much of an indication that anyone but JP is Jeff's emotional anchor. To me, the fact that Jeff didn't want to see JP while he was in treatment but was willing to see Stefan was testimony to how important the relationship with JP was to him...he wanted to get it right on his own so he could be worthy of JP and strong enough to stand with him. However, if I'm going to buy into your premise, I'll go ahead and pull back from my conviction that JP is totally at fault here. As for what ultimately happens, well, I don't think there's anything that can redeem that scene for me, but I suppose JP's reaction to Jeff's emotional indecisiveness at this point is natural and understandable enough. I still don't like Sam, though. --Adam

Okay, Sharon, you know I love ya too, but I beg to differ. There's a point at which, in drug addiction, questions of volition and free will, in my opinion, are really irrelevant. Of course Jeff made those decisions himself. Nobody held a gun to his head and forced him into drugs. But the pernicious thing about drug addiction is that at a certain point it co-opts your will. And given Jeff's background, you know he's damaged goods already, just ripe for the pickings. That he was born into the family he was born into was not his fault. JP, the child of privilege, appears to be utterly unable to appreciate the gravity of Jeff's predicament except insofar as it inconveniences him. And as far as danger to the family, at what point has Jeff's presence with any of the family members ever stood as a threat? Best I can tell, when Jeff's at his worst, he stays away from the kids. And even he were a threat, does that justify seeking to exterminate him? And as for your "at what point"questions, I'll throw it right back at you: At what point do you decide it's okay to give up on someone you've committed to spend your life with? At what point do his personal problems become larger than your commitment to stand by him? I think that's not a question with an easy answer, and anybody who's ever had drug addiction problems in their family knows that it's an intensely personal question with answers that can't be set in stone ahead of time. But, well beyond Chapter 6, I think JP shows his true colors in this thing's ugly denouement. Surely you wouldn't commend that solution--which, as far as I'm concerned, is sociopathic, self-serving, and not even recognizably human--to family members as a Final Solution to the "inconvenience" of being saddled with a dangerous drug addict, would you? God help us all if that's what "family" is all about.

Naw, man, you got to keep the hate alive. Where's your humanity?

1968. Just gotta be.

I turned thirty on the 20th. I told members of my Yahoo group that I was going to write in my blog about what I've learned about love in 30 years. That sounds waay too effing pretentious. And boring too. And that's not exactly what I meant to say anyway. What got me to thinking I'd like to post something on love is that there's a lot of cynicism about the whole romance-thing-over-the-long-haul. It seems as though a person's belief in the whole "in-love" or "romance" thing is inversely proportional to the number of years he or she has been in a relationship. The longer you've been in a relationship, it seems, the less likely you are to believe that that "in-love," "romantic" feeling is anything more than an initial insanity that quickly fades and leaves you with...well, with "comfortable." Which disappoints us. Disenchants us. Discourages us. And more than occasionally destroys the relationship. The thing is, a lot of people--maybe even the people who don't believe in the staying power of "in-love" and "romance"--don't want comfortable. They want want freakin ecstasy. Right along with the "long-termness." But they don't believe it's possible. What I have to say doesn't amount to proof. It's strictly anecdotal evidence. But what I have to say is that it is possible. I have it in my life. I think anyone can. I've been married for four years and have a son who'll turn three next week. But I have been in love with my son's mother (aka "my wife") since I was 17, and have been in an intimate relationship with her from that time, excluding part of 1998, 1999, and part of 2000, where we were both off making sure there wasn't something else out there for us that didn't include each other. And I swear: She takes my breath away as much as she did when I was 17. She can still make my head spin. Just looking at her can make me feel like that kid who first nervously asked her out. And she'd say the same thing about me. Of course, it's become much more than that. I'm not that nervous kid anymore. And over the years we've built something much deeper and closer. But it's still exciting. Sexually and romantically. And it seems that doesn't happen with a lot of couples. How does it happen with us? I honestly don't know for sure, but I have some suspicions about why it hasn't gone away for us. So I thought I'd make a list of things that seem to me to contribute to it. 1) We don't need each other. Oh, hell, I've used that kind of language before--you know, the "you complete me" thing. And there's some truth to it. But we're each complete individuals on our own. What excites me about her is that she's this amazing, vibrant, sexy woman who doesn't need me, and has yet chosen to make a life with me. Being needed can be very flattering at first and might give the relationship some initial mileage...but a person who needs you--daily--to make them whole isn't, over the long haul compelling, sexually attractive, or even particularly interesting. It gets to be a burden, in fact. 2) We know we can trust each other. This is particularly important in our relationship, because it...well, there are some aspects of our relationship that are not at all traditional. I mean, c'mon. Here I am, married to her with a son, and I'm posting to a blog at a gay stories site. But my point is not our unconventionality. My point is, to delineate it further, that she knows I post to a gay stories site, and that I write erotic narrative with gay themes. Hell, she's read them. We don't hide things from each other that we know would be relevant to the relationship. People get too reactive over the whole "lying" thing. There's lying and there's lying. Everybody does some of it every day. Our social fabric seems to depend on certain small lies. When your wife asks you if she's starting to look overweight, she doesn't really want you to tell her if you think she is. That kind of "lying" is benign. Everybody knows the kind of lie that can sow mistrust. The easiest way to evaluate it is to ask this question: "Does it seem scary to the relationship to bring this truth to her/him?" If the answer is "yes," that's a sure sign you have to tell her/him. That is, if your goal is intimacy. I add that last qualification because I'm not judging people who withhold aspects of their lives from their spouses or significant others. There are all kinds of ways to configure a relationship. I'm just saying that if one of your goals is that whole romance thing, significant withholding of important truths is incompatible with that kind of relationship because lack of trust and lack of full knowledge can eat away at romance. Where there is doubt or uncertainty or an awareness that there are areas of the signif other's life to which you're not invited, that's a buzz-kill for romance. Conversely, there is a kind of freedom in being able to trust your significant other that, in my opinion, is in and of itself romantic; erotic, even. There's nothing too out-there about me to share with my wife. And trust me, I got some out-there shit goin' on. I'm here, right? 3) We keep an eye open for those traits that originally attracted us to each other. If you're not careful, you can take those for granted. But they don't go away, often; we just get ungrateful. We take those things for granted. We shouldn't. Sometimes I look at my wife and see the blond cheerleader/AP student who mesmerized me back in the day. She was fiery, determined, confident, soft, alluring...the mixture was intoxicating. And it's still there. Oh, it hides now and then under the time-demands of her residency requirements, our mutual schedules, the challenges of parenting...but it's there. And I make it a conscious practice to look for it. 4) We know ourselves and keep examining ourselves. I think that for a couple to really stay giddy in love, each one has to know what it is about himself/herself that made the other person giddy originally, and has to know what there is about himself/herself that's a liability to the relationship, and each one has to work to bring the good stuff and has to work--hard--at not subjecting the partner to the bad stuff. We'll each fail at that last part. And we'll fight, and get angry, and get annoyed, etc., from time to time. But because we've been consciously trying to bring the good stuff--the stuff the other fell in love with--there's a bigger picture, and we get over fighting, being annoyed, being angry...and anyway, makeup sex is pretty damn good! If you think all that sounds really artificial and forced, all you have to do is think back on when you were on your way to becoming "a serious item," and you'll have to concede that you did just that: You brought your best stuff and held back your worst. So you snagged the prize; and you show your gratitude for her/his choosing your lame ass by getting lazy and not doing that any more? Hell, no wonder romance has died! 5) We work on keeping it fresh. I've been in love with my wife for 13 years, give or take a couple years' off a decade or so ago. That's a long time to know someone intimately...and yet she still surprises me sometimes, and in good ways, in amazing ways! I try to be the same sort of person for her too: Someone who brings some creativity, some spontaneity, some of my inner joy, to her in ways that catch her offguard from time to time. In that way we sort of inspire each other to bring that kind of thing to each other regularly. Surprises. I'm confident I won't have exhausted the mystery which is my wife even when I've drawn my last breath! All that being said, we've had some significant fights. We had one last spring. I spent a couple of nights on the couch! But those five things prevailed, and got me off the couch. And, as mentioned above, the makeup sex was fantastic. Anyway, your mileage may vary. But if I had to say why we still feel crazy in love with each other after 13 years, I think those five things have a lot to do with it. Adam

Thanks for the comment. And actually in my own life I have arrived at a resolution. I was speaking kind of hypothetcially.

I don't really want to open up a can of worms, but I'm going to. It seems as though the topic of bisexuality always does. For gay people and straight people alike. There's a popular sentiment that's so widespread it's made its way into the world of entertainment TV. A specfic example is found in the lyrics of one of the songs of Friends' adorably dippy Phoebe. Check out this clip: Or, for those of you who can't/won't go there: "Sometimes men love women, Sometimes men love men; And then there are bisexuals, But some just say they're kidding themselves." Yeah. Funny. Haha. As a root canal for some of us. Here's what irritates some of us about that sentiment: (And, no, it's not "hits a little too close to home; right, buddy?") It's insulting. The owner of that sentiment, when he directs it at me, presumes to know better than I do how my body responds, how my brain and emotions are configured. Granted...for some men, declaring yourself "bisexual" is a safe first stepping-stone on the way to coming out as a gay man. It's as if they can't fully admit even to themselves the full truth. I think that probably the most vehement "bisexual-deniers" out there come from this group of men, who assume that, because it was true for them, it's true for every man who labels himself "bisexual." But this isn't the experience of all of us who call ourselves "bisexual." And you know, you can posture all you want about labels...but dicks don't lie. If, when you look at beautiful women, you get hard...if you jerk off thinking about them...if you have erotic dreams about them...if you have had sex with them and enjoyed it intensely...it seems to me that by definition it's not accurate to call yourself "gay." Likewise, if, when you look at beautiful men, you get hard...if you jerk off thinking about them...if you have erotic dreams about them...if you have had sex with them and enjoyed it intensely...it seems to me that by definition it's not accurate to call yourself "straight." I have had both of these sets of experiences. So tell me that, as Phoebe says, I'm just "kidding myself." About what am I just kidding myself? Another misconception--one that comes from people who are willing to concede that there are, in fact, bisexuals--is that for bi people, male and female are interchangeable, and that in the search for a life-partner, it makes it so much easier to be bisexual, because you can be fulfilled by making a life with either one. I can't speak for all bisexuals, but that hasn't been the case for me. And here's why. There's a difference in the...I don't know, the nature of my sexual responsiveness to each gender. In women, what I desire is the soft, sensuous curves, the wickedly seductive softness of the female form, inviting you in. It's the difference, the mystery, the yin-yang of the whole thing that makes it so compelling. To be explicit, and, I suppose, somewhat crass, when my penis is sunk deep into a woman, there's this incredible merger of hard and soft that is absolutely sui generis. Equally compelling is the slight mismatch in the tempo and the contours of male and female desire. Learning to make love to a woman is an art that opens up the most intuitive aspects of me. You have to come to know the enticing differences in a woman's body and in her desires to fully and successfully make love to her. That's amazing to me, and utterly compelling. There is no experience of sex with a man that is in any way comparable, in my opinion. In men, what compels me is the toughness, the strength, wrapped up in a beautiful package. The rhythm of desire is no mystery; it is as familiar as my own libidinous interior. In my experience there's a no-bullshit quality to men coming together. And lovemaking is, in one way, actually more violent--although that's not quite the right word--because there's muscle involved, contending with muscle. And the tender element of making love to a man...it blows me away. The concatenation of tough and tender is an incredible turn-on to me. And with men, to run your hands over the hard contours, to feel the power thrumming under your fingers...juxtaposed with the incredible softness of the skin covering backs, faces, lips, asses...to look into the eyes of this strong, wild being and to realize that he's given himself over to you...that is nothing like what I experience when making love to a woman. How could this possibly be an either/or? How could it be a matter of indifference which gender I partner up with for life? For me, the difficult part of being bisexual has been that in choosing one, I am denying myself the other. And the choice, regardless of which way it falls, is for me unbearable. And in this paint-by-the-numbers culture, resolving that in a way that meets society's approval is difficult; very difficult indeed.

I think that's right, Celia. I think we label because we want some conceptual aid to help us through our confusion. I think of the people who have encountered my tale, or Sam's, and written back mystified. They didn't understand. How could Matt have allowed Andy to make love to him? He likes girls, doesn't he, and for that matter, what's up with Andy? Or, how could Brian say he's in love with Sam? Is he just gay and in denial? Life and love are huge, and messy, and they confound our expectations and frustrate our intellects and give the lie to the tidy pictures we create of reality for the purpose of controlling it better. It only makes sense that in the minefield of sexual attraction--where it's not beyond the pale that people can be murdered for loving the wrong person--we'd be driven to get a handle on all of that by seeking to control it conceptually. To figure it out. To manage it. What better and more efficient way than by attaching a label? And sure, sometimes labels do help us understand. What makes me sad is that sometimes labels create problems and blind us from understanding. Andy and Matt had their hearts broken by that label-induced blindness. So did Sam and Brian. But you're right. The labelling obsession, I think, comes from being confused and bewildered by a phenomenon, and it represents an attempt to understand.

The people who've e-known me for a while, from looking at this entry's title, are already either grinning or rolling their eyes: Here we go again. I'm sorry, I cain't hep it. Tell you a little bit about how I got onta the Internet as a dirty-story-writer. Long time ago, I ran into a story at Nifty that was pretty weak technically, but absolutely compelling--at least to me--from a "story" standpoint. That story was called Fraternity Memoirs, and it was based on the college experiences of its author, who went by the screen name of John Walsh. The story tells of how a college freshman decides to pledge a "renegade" frat, and tells the story of his friendship with his frat Big Brother and of his...uhhh...relationship with another kid in his pledge class. One of the things that was masterful about his storytelling was his ability to convey the palpable sexual tension between him and his straight Big Brother. I was much moved by the portrayal of that friendship. I emailed John thanking him for his story. It was the first time I'd ever written to a "Nifty" author. I told him a little bit about myself: Bisexual, if I had to put a label on it, but in a serious relationship with a woman. We got to corresponding via e-mail, and he became a very good e-friend. He asked me to tell him the story of my first time with a guy. I wrote him a reply that took 3 emails from me. Somewhere along that time I had joined his Yahoo! group, a little reluctantly. He'd created it mainly because the lag time between his chapters was pretty significant, and he wanted to let his readers know when new chapters were coming out. But, as these things often go, his group became a hangout for his groupies, who lavished praise upon him (aka "licked his ass"). You wanna talk serious hyperbole, though--he had people comparing him to Norman Friggin Mailer. That was just over the top for me. I told him, jokingly, that hell would freeze over before I'd ever participate in the asslickfest which was his group. He laughed and replied that it was pretty over the top. After I'd been hanging out at his place for a while, though, it struck me that I had a story of my own to tell. I was a senior in college, and it was the spring of my senior year, and I was about to graduate and move south to go to graduate school. My gf--no, by this time she was my fiancee--whom I'd known since we were elementary school kids, attended college in a different city, but she was going to be entering medical school in the same city where I'd be going to grad school. Life was about to change for me, and I too had some things from my past that haunted me a little. I was feeling the need to put some closure--or some something--on my past, as I moved into my future, and I was feeling a little pensive. But there weren't many people I could talk to about it because it wasn't easy for many people to understand me. See, the thing was, I was a mostly-straight-guy who nevertheless noticed guys, and who had fallen in love back in high school with his best friend. That friendship was intact in college, after a 2.5-year period of alienation, but it was a little strange, and I had a sense that he and I were about to walk the proverbial diverging roads, and that before too long we'd hear from each other twice a year at best--then once a year--then once every two years, etc., and think of each other once in a while as "someone I used to know." God, it was killing me. But what was to be done about it? We were walking different paths. He'd gotten married that year--I was best man--and we weren't living in the same city anyway; and I was about to move even farther south. I needed to talk to someone about how it felt for me. How I'd loved him so much, and how it seemed as though there would be this dark and empty place in me from then on, even in the midst of the joy I was feeling as I began to make a life with the woman who'd agreed to marry me. But who can a guy talk to about loving a man and a woman? I got to thinking about how much I'd been touched by Fraternity Memoirs. I decided I'd like to write the story of myself and my best friend, talk about what happened, and put it up there at Nifty. In a way I just needed to talk it out, to Say It, as I put it sometimes. I guess, too, it was a love song to my high school buddy. I also had hopes that I might touch some reader as Fraternity Memoirs had touched me. I thought that maybe--just maybe--there might be a reader or two out there who knew what it felt like to be torn between the love of a woman and the love of a man; and maybe those readers might contact me and we could talk, compare notes, stuff like that. You don't feel like such a freak when you can talk to other people who can relate. So I took the three-email writing I'd sent John telling him about my first time with a guy, and I began expanding it. I entitled the story Crosscurrents and I submitted it to Nifty. I thought the name was perfect, because it described how I felt. Out there in the surf, pulled in two different directions, by two strong currents that came together at the same place--the place of me. I started getting emails almost immediately. From gay men who loved the story; and from bisexual men who got it on another level entirely, because they'd lived versions of it. That was tremendously gratifying. By the fifth chapter, Nick Archer from the Archerland gay-fiction site had contacted me and asked if he could host Crosscurrents at his site. I knew nothing about all this, but I liked Nick from his email contacts, and after some further inquiry with him, I agreed. Archerland is no more, but I'm now hosted here at Gay Authors. In any case, for the most part, I've enjoyed the reader email in response to Crosscurrents over the years. But from time to time I get letters either lecturing me, or confused as hell, because they don't know why "Andy" doesn't come out as gay, or why he's trying for a straight boy. I've also gotten letters telling me that straight men cannot be with gay men, can't love gay men, can't make love to them, would be repulsed by it, so the "Matt" character must be a gayboy in denial. And I've gotten letters ripping me a new one for telling a story about a "bi" man falling in love with a "straight" man. Somehow by telling a story like that, apparently I'm betraying the entire gay community (funny; I didn't think that as an author trying to talk about real-and-true things from my life I was accountable to any "community."). My point is, the only negative email I've ever gotten is from indignant readers who don't want to accept that a man's sexuality could be multivalent. Many of these indignant readers insist that bisexual men are just confused and/or scared gay men. And they neither concede the possibility of, nor approve of, a "straight" man loving--intimately--a "bi" man. And then there are the readers who want to know why I don't make it more clear that "Andy" is gay and that "Matt" is at least bi. What is this about? Why are people so determined to tell me what makes my body respond sexually, as if they know better than I do? I mean, I'm the owner of said body, right? I guess I know what gets my engine going, and I guess I know better than people who aren't me. I've also gotten this in response to a story I helped complete that's not even mine: Dan Kincaid's It Started With Brian. The story has been an intriguing one. It takes 26 chapters for Brian to admit to Sam he's in love with him. But in that very same conversation Brian makes clear that he's straight. Or, rather, he doesn't deny it when Sam says "but you're straight." Rather, he counters with, "But I love you." And this in fact is part of the dilemma, part of what keeps Brian at arm's length for years until he finally decides, to hell with the labels, I want Sam. But I have readers who have emailed me and they seem utterly unable to just let the story tell itself. They want to know why it took so long for Brian to accept his gayness, or they tell me they knew all along Brian was gay, or they figure he must be at least bi, or yada yada yada. I've received more email asking questions about the sexuality of these guys than I've had commenting on how cool it is that Brian is finally making an attempt to get the two of them where they should have been years ago. It mystifies me. Why does a label have to be attached to these guys? What's wrong with accepting the description that they give of themselves? Granted that some gay men have tried not to face their "gayness" and have hidden under descriptions that aren't accurate, why does this need to label have to attend the reading of the story? Can't the story just be the story? It's a love story, and it's a love story that happened. Why the urge to dissect and label? I ask this with some urgency, first of all, because everything I've experienced in my own life, and in hearing from some of my readers, and from research and reading I've done, suggests that sexuality is much too complex and nuanced to be adequately captured by the labels "gay," "straight," and "bi." Secondly, and maybe more importantly, in the story under consideration, it's precisely the oppressiveness of these labels that keeps Sam and Brian from opening up to each other, thus wasting years, and causing both of them years of pain. Both of them were attracted to women, Brian almost exclusively so; but both of them were in love with each other. It was an awful thing that the labels shamed them into wasting years apart that they could have had together. I should clarify that I'm not pissed at any of the people who've responded in this way to It Started With Brian. It does mystify me, though. I don't understand why so many people feel compelled to rush in and proclaim that a person is gay. Or straight. Or bi. It doesn't alter the fact that the story is a love story, and it only insults the characters involved by telling them they don't even know their own sexual responses. Okay, I'll shut up now. Some of my readers characterize my occasional rants as Adamic Blasts. I think that's unfair. I am warm and fuzzy everywhere. I do trim, though.

I got a use or two for that. Stop by later tonight.

I didn't even know it was your damn birthday. So happy f**kin birthday. Also, your "rantings in the Soap Box" and your "blunt style on the other forums" ain't something you should apologize for. God help us if we should all have to go around being insipid just so as not to scare people with thin skins. Oops. Did I say that? Surely not.

Damn, I love that song. Although isn't it "into this house we're born/into this world we're thrown"?? Man, what was it about your generation that produced those amazing guys who made such amazing music? Anyway, you got the sentiment just right.

Thank God. You had me worried. It gets lonely here on the Dark Side. Seriously, I know what you mean. It's one of those "on the one hand/on the other hand" kinds of realities. I try to be understanding, though. There's a lot of free-floating pain out there and likewise in these various online gay/bi venues. I can usually tolerate most of the stuff that results from human foibles, but...well, I was going to say that I don't go nuts except when somebody else is unrepentantly mean. But then I reminded myself that I have a low "inanity" threshhold as well, lest you call me out LOL. That's what usually causes me to get unrepentantly mean. Anyway, I hear ya. And, ya bastard, when you left the Yahoo groups I haunt, it would have been nice if you'd have sent me a note saying you were taking a sabbatical. I missed your sorry ass during that time and would not have accused you of melodrama. So if you ever decide again to drop out of Planet Cybergay, I expect a note.

I have a hi-quality rip of that episode in .avi format. It's 350 MB in size. If you're interested, I can make it available to you. Contact me and we'll work out the details.

I guess everybody who writes narrative, from the Pulitzer Prize-winner to the hack, has a niche. Granted, some writers demonstrate a wide range of narrative interests and can treat a lot of themes, but there are also very very fine writers who spend most of their literary careers exploring a fairly clearly circumscribed plot of land, so to speak. I've been tremendously fortunate in my life. I grew up in a great family, I have a decent set of personal resources and abilities, I always had a lot of friends and I always fit in well with my peer group, in school and professionally. I made good grades; I have my own family now, a wife, a kid, people who love me, a good job, and my health. I can't think of a thing I want, or at least a thing that I need, that I don't already have, although there are many things I'd still like to do. But all they way back since I was a grade-school kid, right up to this last year, I've seen tragedy and loss pass right nearby. And it's always struck me, even when I was a little kid, that things don't always work out for many, many people. In fact, it seems to me that more often than not they don't. Little things, of course, don't always work out. But all too often even the big things, the really important things, don't. I've seen people who deserve love miss out on it; I've seen families break up and I've heard the heart of a kid howl with loss and the pain of abandonment over his daddy bailing on him. I've seen people die young and their loved ones driven to the edge with grief. And I've never had it happen to me. That makes me react in this oddly torn way: I'm grateful beyond measure; but I wonder from time to time when or if the hammer's gonna fall, and how I'd respond if it did. I've had a near-miss or two. The life I have now I nearly missed out on because of some fear, some stubbornness, and some stupidity. Fortunately for me, the difficulties that might have led to me missing out were resolved. But it could have gone another way. Easily. And I can't experience the blessings of my current life without shuddering over how close I came to f**king it all up. This haunts me for some reason, the radical, frightening contingency of good fortune during our threescore-and-ten. And I find myself pulled toward stories--as a reader and as a writer--where things don't always quite work out. Because what we invariably discover is that, yeah, things often don't work out, but we go on anyway. And somehow it has seemed important for me to hear and to say that again and again. I guess, then, to return to what I was talking about in my opening paragraph, that's my niche. Stories that deal with loss and with things not-working-out. At least until I can get that theme to leave me alone. That doesn't mean that in treating that theme I'll never write a happy ending. Sometimes explorations like that damn well need happy endings. I can only hope that as I treat that theme as a writer, I can manage it with some dignity and some sense of understatement. It's pretty easy to get mawkish with that kind of stuff, and I sure as hell don't want that. In my largest story in progress, Crosscurrents, you can see elements of the things-don't-always-work-out theme in there. Given that I done already admitted that it's about my life, a person could infer that it's those experiences that have cooked up in me this interest in things that don't work out. In fact, I guess I pretty much said as much above. Which is not to suggest--or deny--that things are not gonna "work out" for Andy in Crosscurrents, lol. And, coincidentally or not, my work on Sam's It Started With Brian deals with many of the same elements. These two stories narrate real lives, so I guess one thing that could be inferred from that is that themes of loss, longing, unfulfilled love, desires that never went fulfilled, tragedies sustained, those things aren't just the elements of weepy (and not-so-weepy) pieces of fiction. They probably make it into fiction because we experience them in our real lives. If we're lucky, we get at least elements of a happily-ever-after, or at least elements of a happily-until-some-undetermined-future-point. I don't think I could handle never reading about good stuff happening; but I never resent it when an author takes me to a sorrowful place, at least if it's not a gratuitous trip. Usually those visits seem more real than the ones that end us up in Happyland. On a related subject, I was looking for some photos on some old DVD-Rs today when I came across a video of an episode of Cold Case from December of 2006 called "Forever Blue." Many of you have seen it, I'm sure. The case being worked on was that of the murder of a young cop in 1968. The story was told through a series of black-and-white flashbacks focusing on two young police officers, Jimmy Bruno and Sean Cooper ("Coop"). Partners at work and best friends, they come, through a situation of conflict with each other, into confrontation with the fact that they love each other. You know, like that. After a period of, I don't know, days? weeks? where the guys allow themselves to experience this love, Jimmy ultimately can't handle it, and pushes Coop away, not realizing that that moment will be the last time he'll see his partner alive. Coop's death turns out to be a homophobia-fueled hate crime, and the story closes with the solving of the case and with the now-elderly Jimmy returning to the scene of his partner's murder, where he experiences...what? A ghost? A memory? The healing of a decades-long sense of guilt? The story doesn't make that clear, but I defy you to watch the closing scene without reaching for the box of Kleenex. Trust me, there won't be a dry eye in the house. Shane Johnson, the actor who plays Coop, is a young married straight guy with a child of his own; he said in an interview at AfterElton that seeing the episode made even him cry, and he knew how it was going to turn out! Anyway, as I said, I just stumbled onto that video again while looking for something else, and I've had trouble shaking it all day, both it and the final song from the soundtrack as an elderly Jimmy Bruno stares back into his own history: The Byrds' "My Back Pages." It's made me think again about how many people there are out there who have huge hurts and tremendous regrets. Especially those of us who have been wired to love in ways that society still doesn't completely condone. And it makes me come back again to the conviction that whatever our own struggles, we just gotta be kind to each other. I really suck at that sometimes. I have a good friend who's a total role model to me in this matter, and years ago he said to me that there was enough hurt in the world already, and we didn't need to add to it. He would have known, because he'd sure had a boatload of his own. But I've never seen him add an ounce more of it to the world. It's my goal to be like him in that regard when I grow up, lol. Just curious: Do any of you share a similar attraction to stories, songs, screenplays, etc., with bittersweet themes? Or is that my own unique psychopathological quirk?

Interesting questions. Regarding the first question, I think I'd be okay if the person e-mailed me and said, "There are things about this story that make me think I know you. Can we talk about this some more or would you prefer for me to just leave it alone? I don't want to intrude and if you don't want to tell me any more that's fine; I'll continue to read your story with enjoyment and you don't have to worry about me being some crazy stalker." You know, something like that. I think it's fine to be honest with an author you think you recognize, but you should leave it up to the author to take the next step, in my opinion. As for the second question, the only e-mails that annoy me are the ones "encouraging" me to post another chapter, and the ones who totally flame my work. It doesn't bother me to receive constructive criticism. I may take it to heart, or I may ignore it, but it doesn't bother me to receive that. The ugly rants, though, piss me off. Similarly, I don't mind readers guessing about where the story is headed. I won't always confirm or deny to a reader the accuracy of their prediction...but then again sometimes I will. That's a different thing than telling a writer how he should write the story.

Yeah, but it was such a great post, it was worth repeating. I mean, how often does a reader get bitchy goats and stroking perverts in the same narrative? And couldn't you work that motif into one of your stories? Oh, the possibilities...

Those of us who have any kind of authorial presence on the Web clearly have the expectation that our stuff is going to be read. We want you to read our stuff, and we love it when you e-mail us about our stuff...usually...and we even enjoy getting to know you. Well, some of you. Sometimes, though, I get taken by surprise. I've had two readers whose presence in my e-mailbox has caused me some discomfort. Several years ago, back when the "author's notes" at the beginning of Crosscurrents admitted that the story was autobiographical, I started receiving these very short and cryptic e-mails from a reader. The first one said, simply, "I know who you are." Gradually, over the course of a couple of weeks, I'd receive an e-mail every few days in which he'd tell me--correctly--some additional factual detail; my real last name, where I went to high school, my parents' home address and phone number, and the correct full name, address, and phone number of the other main character in the story. Needless to say, this freaked me out. I had a wife and a new kid on the way, and my best friend from back in high school had a wife and a kid. Had my story exposed my family and friends to some psychopathic freak who might stalk us and do us some real harm? Eventually the guy revealed to me that he was a college kid who had gone to the same high school I had. We were never in high school together because of the age difference, but from certain details in the story, he'd gotten a strong impression I was writing about the high school he had gone to. A trip home one weekend was all it took for him to go to the gym and see the pictures of previous football teams hanging on the wall, complete with full names of the members of those teams. He hadn't been trying to scare me; he was just a lonely, nerdy college freshman trying to impress me. So...no harm done. But it was enough to cause me concern. If it was that easy to discover my identity from clues in my story, some not-so-benign psycho could easily do the same thing. And it wasn't just about me; I had a friend with a wife and a kid, and I had my own wife and child on the way. Was it fair to subject them to danger because of my narrative exhibitionism? Was that something I remotely wanted? I tried to get the archivist at Nifty to take down my story, but he was reluctant. He offered to remove my email address from the story, and in the back-and-forth between me and him, I decided that I was overreacting. But I asked him to let me edit it and resubmit, changing the first names of the main characters (only those two names were real, and only their first names; the rest of the characters were pseudonymous. Plus, I'd changed the gender of one character, split one real-life person into two "narrative" characters, and combined two real-life people into one "narrative" character), and removing the author's note at the front of each chapter which admitted that the story was true. For a long time, even at my Yahoo group, I treated the story as if it were fiction. Once in a while, I'd admit the truth in a private e-mail to a reader who'd taken the time to e-mail me, and of course all my long-term readers knew it was a true story, but if my new readers just figured I was writing a fictional tale, that was fine with me. Last fall I accidentally outed myself to my group, and I finally decided, to heck with it. I'm not playing this game any more. I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on the factual nature of the story, but if something comes up, I'm not dancing around it any more. You can walk through life always afraid of freaks and taking extreme caution to keep yourself out of situations where people won't go berserk on your ass, but that's no kind of living. So I've settled down and gotten over it. I changed the names, and I went back and changed my parents' vocations, and introduced a few other distortions-of-fact. Beyond that...screw it. I had one other weird encounter with a fan. A pretty nice guy. Very intelligent. Significantly older than me. About my dad's age, I guess, but a really unhappy, troubled guy. Gay with children and married and working in an occupation where he couldn't come out. For some reason he started pretending to other people online that he was me, or that I was him. Telling them that he'd written Crosscurrents. I didn't understand it. I confronted him when I found out, and he came clean and 'fessed up. He explained that he was so desperately unhappy he was trying to live vicariously through me or something, even though....well, it's a convoluted mess, and on the outside chance that he reads this I don't want to be harsh. We don't have a relationship anymore, understandably, and I haven't heard from him in ages. He never did me any real harm, and he was a nice guy who was hurting a lot. It's terrible what homophobia has done to people over the years, forcing them into closets and creating pain and misery for themselves and their loved ones. Still, he definitely crossed a line with me. I'm not excusing him; I just felt bad for him. Those were the only two really odd encounters I've had with readers. There are two other kinds of reader e-mail, though, that annoy me: First are those readers who tell me how I should write my story; you know, how to plot the damn thing. This happens mainly with readers who assume it's fiction, and I figure most readers assume that these days. But even if it were fiction, how effin' presumptious to tell an author how to write his tale! One guy wrote me a really rude letter because the Nifty archivist had put Croscurrents in the "gay male" section, when it's a story of a bisexual guy. He read my prologue, decided that the protagonist would have a love-relationship with another guy, then leave him to get married. He had huge political objections. In his opinion, nobody should write a story like that, because gay guys get the shaft often enough from life, and he wasn't going to read another chapter. Obviously he didn't get to see that my story was nothing like that, and anyway, even if it were, what the hell? Doesn't that kind of stuff happen? And if it does, why forbid chronicling it in narrative? We exchanged a series of e-mails, each one more heated, and finally I told him to go screw himself. Then, of course, there are the readers who harangue and harrass because I've been so slow in my production schedule. These range from the "beggers" to the downright abusers, people who accuse you of high crimes for not making their next drug fix available to them. I feel like saying, "I'm sorry I have a life, but I can't factor your need to have a new chapter into my life decisions, at least not at the level of priority you seem to want me to give it." Still...I can't help feeling guilty. I've followed stories that the author walked away from <cough> <cough> Mark Arbour <cough> <cough>, and man, there's nothing quite as depressing--well, except for the idea that Republicans exist --as investing yourself in a story and its characters and having the author bail on the story. Still, I know from personal experience that guys who write stuff for no compensation and post it to the Internet have things that come up in their lives that make it impossible to continue. I don't hold that against them even though it disappoints me. Okay, that's off my chest, so I feel better (I just got one of those e-mails about Crosscurrents). Republican readers, of course, are welcome to flame me for the smartass remark above. After all, some of my best friends... --Adam

Yeah, that's right...go ahead and heap the guilt on. Thanks for your reply and your interest in Crosscurrents. I'll return to it soon, I promise. Adam

Nah. Tramps like me, baby, I was born to run.