My friend, Thomas Ouellette, is currently directing The Laramie Project: Ten Years After at the Annie Russell Theatre at Rollins College. It’s about the murder of Mathew Shepard, but it’s also about the way time alters perception. The vivid becomes fuzzy. The painful becomes less so.
Like the focus on a pair of binoculars, two activities recently reminded me of a life I’d long forgotten. On Sept. 11, I went to see Steely Dan at the Hard Rock Live concert venue at Universal Orlando. And the following weekend I trekked up to Gainesville for the Florida-Tennessee game.
Both were fun, but they were also blasts from a trippy and tortured past.
I was alone at Steely Dan – long story – so I had ample opportunity to observe and reflect. Most of the people there were my age: men and women in Hawaiian shirts and Fedoras that screamed, “I haven’t forgotten how to party!”
The concert featured two of the least charismatic performers I’ve ever seen – Walter Becker and Donald Fagen – playing some of my favorite music from college. I loved Steely Dan so back then that my fraternity brothers called me “Steely Dyer.”
The music took me back to a time when I drank and got high just about every day, feigning high spirited college high jinks to cover a growing disconnection to my closeted and wholly unfulfilled life. As I listened to “Reeling in the Years” and “My Old School,” I wondered if I’ look like my fellow concertgoers if I hadn’t been gay and – just as importantly – hadn’t gotten sober first 25 and then again 16 years ago.
I both relished and wallowed in memories from that time, and left the concert feeling grateful. Steely Dan had never sounded so liberating.
Even though there were serious signs of trouble, I remained closeted – and continued partying – while I attended law school at the University of Florida. The high jinks continued, most especially during football games at Florida Field. Back then it was party central, and a bastion of testosterone driven heterosexual posturing.
Still is. The warrior several rows up from our seats in the south end zone mightily resisted being escorted out of the stadium – even after he’d thrown up all over the people in the row in front of him.
I’m sure I was often just as obnoxious. There were many games whose second half I didn’t remember. By then I was on an emotional spiral, trying to be some twisted version of an enviable law student, unwilling to grab hold of the truth that would be my life raft.
That was long ago. I was with good friends at the Florida-Tennessee game and we had a great time. But as I looked around the orange and blue stadium, I felt an undercurrent of wistful melancholy for wasted years.
And again I felt grateful – for the honest and much richer life I have claimed.
This issue is my annual turn as guest editor while Steve Blanchard takes a well-deserved vacation. It always brings back memories – of sleepless nights while we put out early issues with a staff of three, and the excitement of landing interviews with the likes of Gloria Steinem and Billie Jean King.
Watermark will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year. It’s clear to me now, in a way that it wasn’t back then, that my purpose in founding the newspaper was to create an appealing life raft that would help readers – including me – pull themselves to their glorious LGBT truth.
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This is my favorite time of year. The weather cools while the social calendar heats up.
On the west coast, the Tampa International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival fills early October with wonderful movies at an extraordinary venue-and with a new sound system this year.
And in Orlando, Come Out With Pride beckons close to a hundred thousand to a beautiful downtown venue – usually with accompanying beautiful weather. This year COWP is bringing John Waters to town. In this issue, read Stephen Miller’s hilarious and thought provoking interview with the legendary director.
And here’s a tease: Billie Jean King has just agreed to let me interview her again – for the first time since 1997 – for our Oct. 24 issue.
Like I said, I’m grateful.
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