8 Gay Tips That Will Save Yo' Straight-Ass Marriage

I've been watching you struggle.  You come into the office with a bewildered look on your face.  It’s day three and you’re still not speaking to each other  That’s not entirely true, you’re talking but through the children, using them like little ventriloquist puppets:  “Tell your mother to pass the salt,” or “Would you please remind your father, as I have told him TEN THOUSAND TIMES, that tomorrow is the parent teacher conference?” The kids are confused and I’m tired of that mopey look on your face. 

You want to know why Paul and I seem so happy and why we never appear to fight.  I’m going to share some secrets of my marriage with you so that we can stop talking about how miserable you are and also? Because I love you.

But here’s the deal, we’re going to have fun by using song lyrics because ain’t nobody got time for boring advice.

“If I were a boy, even just for a day”

Drop the gender based roles: Paul and I are both men and therefore we don’t conform to gender roles.  We both take out the trash, we both clean and we both cook.  Problem solved.  False! Paul cooks and cleans almost all of the time, because that is what he is good at and because he works from home. I do things I’m good at, though I’m struggling to tell you what they are.  The point is, don’t ever let your gender define what your responsibilities are.  Are you both human?  Well then….

“You gotta’ have friends”

Keep the friends:   I’ve seen couples jettison their single friends when they get married.  Guess what, many of my friends could never get married.  Did that make them any less valuable?  Of course not.  My friends are every sexual orientation, men, and women, married and single.  We share our friends with each other and sometimes I need a night out with friends when Paul is not around.  Some of my best friends are gay men.  I do not, nor would I ever have sex with them.  Straight men can just be friends with straight women.  It really is that simple.

“'Cause after all, he's just a man”

Don’t blame everything on differences between the sexes: On the rare occasions when Paul and I fight, I need to talk it out and he wants to let bygones be bygones.  Does this sound familiar?  Am I a woman?  Not every difference between you is because you’re a man and she’s a woman.  The saying “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus” is crap.  You’re both Earthlings.

“Let’s talk about sex, bay-bee!”

Talk about sex!: I have access to the same equipment 24/7 therefore I must really know what turns Paul on.  Well, I do, but it’s not because it’s innate, it’s because we talk about it.  “I like the way you do that right thurr (right thurr).”  Bonus!  Two sets of lyrics.  Tell your partner what you want and sometimes, it’s OK if what you really want is quick sex because you’re bored.

“We are fam-i-ly”

One for all and all for one: Paul and I have a blended family with five children and damn if he doesn’t pick on me for not stepping up to the plate and having three like him so we could be the Gaydy bunch.  They are not his. They are not mine. They are ours.  No one’s mother or father was replaced in the process: remember that.

“You don’t send me flowers, anymore”

Don’t become a Hallmark-aholic:  Do you really need to send a bouquet of flowers and a frilly card to say I love you on every Hallmark holiday?  Paul and I are not bound by this tradition, thank goodness, because have you noticed the dearth of husband for husband cards?  Sometimes he’ll buy me flowers and sometimes I’ll do the same for him, just because.  Men like spontaneous tokens of affection just as much as women.  Not into flowers?  How about a pair of underwear?

“I wanna put on my, my, my, my, my boogie shoes”

I hope you dance-(sorry it’s a song lyric too):  We’re both gay men so you know we both like to shake our groove thing.  Wrong again!  I could dance all night while Paul would rather stick needles into his eyes.  But does he love to watch me dance and be happy? Sometimes it’s a precursor to the Best.Sex.Evah! Let her or him dance with others and once in a while get up there and make a fool of yourself.  Worried that people will think you look gay?  Accept it as a compliment, bud…

“The boy is mine”

Don’t compare yourself to previous partners: If you are straight, you probably never dated the same person as your partner. Paul and I dated two of the same men before we became a couple. I don’t compare myself to previous boyfriends, because I know; I truly know what they lacked. He or she chose you. Exorcise the ghosts of partners past.   

And here is a bonus tip, though you might have picked it up while you were reading this (God, I hope you did anyway) “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh.” We laugh at each other.  We laugh at ourselves.  Many times our children laugh at us and often we laugh at our children while pointing our fingers at them. You might have noticed that many gay men and women have a sharp sense of humor.  That’s because we developed it as a defense mechanism.  It works. It wards off anger and sadness and can bring you closer together. 

I want your marriage to succeed because there is something that I have learned.  When the marriages surrounding us are stronger and happier, then mine becomes more valuable and that makes me happy. And when I’m happy?  Paul’s up all night to get lucky.

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The Treasure We Seek

I suppose it happens to all couples after a certain amount of time.  You get to a point in your relationship where everything big has been discussed and what remains are the bits of conversation that you might have with a parrot.

 

“How was your day?”

“Fine.”

“How did you sleep?”

“Good."

“What do you want for dinner?

“I don’t know.”

Paul and I are no different, except that we added the following to our repertoire somewhere along the lines:

“How’d you get to be so cute?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your job?”

“To sit here and look pretty.”

“Who are you?”

“The big dog.”

The questions are always posed by Paul and if you were to eavesdrop on our conversations, aside from feeling terribly bored, you would perceive the passion in my replies to be comparable to your average fast-food worker and at times filled with the same contempt.  He likes to ask these questions when I am busy writing or when I have one eye open and a hand outstretched for the snooze button.

At some point he actually began to sing refrains to my replies.  For instance, he might have asked me if I was hungry and if I said “Yes,” he would sing something like “Willy is so hungrrryyy,”  in a falsetto rock star voice, no less.

He is in an interminably good mood juxtaposed to my often pensive one.

One morning recently the questions and singing reached a fevered pitch.  As I struggled to wake up and iron my clothes, I could take no more and asked Paul, for the love of God, to please stop singing.

And then there was a stunned silence. 

*********************************************************

It was the sound that made me open my eyes, like an insect buzzing but more digital.  With one eye squinting in the brilliant September sunlight I turned my head to see an old man in his seventies sweeping a metal detector in a two foot swath of beach, left and right, left and right.  He wore white ankle socks with sneakers and his head was covered with a beige brimmed cap.  He did not raise his capped head, keeping it always focused on that two foot wide path waiting for a signal.

I put on my sunglasses and looked around me.  The coastal autumn light in Maine paints the colors so vividly that you feel as if you have been lifted up close to the sky among the listless clouds. A woman stood facing the sea, her hands in her pockets and her head tilted slightly upward.  The dark sunglasses covered her eyes, but her immovable stance implied deep contemplation.  She stared out at the horizon where the water met the sky at some reflection of a memory.

She waited twenty paces ahead of her husband wrapped in her own thoughts.  They never spoke. He never looked up but would occasionally stoop down and dig a hole with his hands looking for a long lost treasure.

I thought how odd it was that he mined for someone else’s lost articles; a ring, a necklace or some coins, hopelessly searching that narrow band. I wanted so desperately for his wife to drop her ring in the sand and wait for him to find it.     

“What are you thinking about over there Willy?” Paul asked interrupting my reflection.

I thought about that question, about all of the Marco-Polo queries that he peppers me with throughout the day pinging through the emotional distance.  More than questions, they’re affirmations.

“Just thinking about how lucky I am,” I finally replied.

One more added to the repertoire; many more to be discovered.

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Life Virgins

Watching TV home improvement shows is my religion.  Specifically a show called Property Virgins, which sounds slightly offensive. Like a couple of naïve teenagers have ventured out on a first date with a realtor who strips them of their cash and sweet talks them into buying a new home.  The host will laugh when the virgins ask a silly question “Ha, Ha, Ha!  You are such virgins” and I’ll cringe, because who wants to be reminded of their first awkward fumblings in the back seat of a car when they are attempting to purchase a new home?

At the beginning of the show these virgins will list what they must have and simply cannot live without: four bedrooms, two and half baths, walk in claw-sets (which I understand is southern speak for closets) stainless steel appliances, granite counter-tops  a man cave for the TV and a big back yard for their little fluffy dander mop named Boo. Often, the final decision will hinge on whether they think Boo will have sufficient yard space to use as his toilet.

“I might could live without a three car garage,” the wife will offer begrudgingly and in the background you’ll see the husband mouthing the words “No way in hell.” 

“Our budget is $157,000,” they’ll say.  This is firm.

 “Ha, Ha, Ha! You silly virgins,” the Realtor will laugh.

She will then take them to the most beautiful neighborhood and stroll beside them smugly asking if they like the area, knowing full well that they couldn't possibly afford it.  These shows used to be based in Toronto, but apparently all of the Canadian property virgins’ cherries have been popped. Now they exist in Possum Snout, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.

“I love it!  I could see us living here forever!”  The virgins will say in unison.

When the Realtor has them in the palm of her hand, she’ll bring down the other fist and squash their dreams.

“These homes cost 1.2 million dollars!”   

The camera zooms in on the devastated faces of the couple.  Clearly these virgins have never performed any Internet research on the area.

When all is said and done the virgins choose a home that is never what they expected in the first place and always just a tad over their budget, but they couldn't possibly see themselves living anywhere else.  The final scene shows the couple, no longer virgins, sitting on their front porch smiling and entertaining friends with a nice cool glass of Riunite Lambrusco and watching little Boo pop a squat.

When I was young I prepared a list of many things I thought I couldn't possibly live without;   a McMansion in the suburbs, this person’s love, that person’s friendship, the C-level job title, designer labels, bulging biceps and the list goes on.  I thought I had them all too. 

Then one day God appeared wearing a scarf thrown back over her shoulder walking along beside me and asked how I liked the neighborhood. I told her this was everything I thought I ever wanted.

“Ha, Ha, Ha! You silly life virgin,” she said and then Squash!

Pan the camera to a look of devastation on my face.

Of course you know the final scene. I am sitting on the deck of our tiny cottage in Maine with friends and family I never thought I’d have in a place I never would have considered, but can’t imagine any other way.

 

There are some lessons to be learned from these home improvement shows.  One, Boo will end up pooping anywhere, two, your guests don’t care what you serve them (even Lambrusco) as long as you invite them into your home and three, you can plan all you want for the life ahead of you, but never forget that life has its own plan for you.  And that plan is almost always better than anything you could ever have imagined.

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The Marginal Way

When I set up the ironing board and plug in the iron in the two foot margin between our bed and the wall, I turn off the window air conditioning unit in order to avoid tripping the circuit. I gaze through the window at the peeling paint on our neighbor’s building ten feet away and ask Paul “Are you the least bit concerned that your pay cut will affect our standard of living?”

He is not yet fully awake, drifting in between the land of reality and dreams.  He lifts his head, opens one eye and scans the room. 

“Sweetie, I know you’ve become accustomed to the finer things in life, but we may need to make some cuts.  Will you iron my work clothes?” he says and then adds “Oh, I’m wearing them.” 

He steps out of bed, pulls on a pair of boxer underwear, takes one step and sits down at a desk in the corner of the room.

“That was a rough commute,” he says while stretching his arms up over his head.  When I walk past him to fetch my shirt, he reaches out one arm and without looking, gooses me.

“See that? We were meant to be together, my hand naturally falls at the right height,” he says.  Five years in and the fire is still burning.

Being eternal optimists, we are one lottery ticket away from financial freedom and one catastrophe away from destitution.  Many people, art gallery owners for example, see two middle age gay men walk into their chic boutique and think “Ka-ching!”  Those people would be wrong.  They will point out a darling little objet d’art and look at us expectantly. 

“Holy cow, we’d have to sell one of our five children in order to afford that!” Paul will say and I’ll watch the gallery owner totter off on her little broomstick heels in disgust.

When I’m finished ironing my clothes, I fold up the ironing board and carry it outside of our bedroom.  I open the closet door and our youngest child steps out, stumbling over the shoes on the floor.

“Beanie, you could have at least turned on the light while getting dressed in there,” I say.

“That’s OK Willy,” she says and flops back onto the sofa made up as her temporary bed. 

Something happened to my dream of being a millionaire, of having a big home, fast cars and healthy bank accounts and I’m well aware of what occurred. It was consumed by five children, two ex-wives and three college payment plans.  But, we’ve made our bed and now we have to lie in it. Sometimes there aren’t enough beds to go around and someone gets stuck sleeping on the sofa, but Beanie doesn’t seem to mind.

Throughout the day I think about our lives; of our 497 square foot third floor walk-up in a neighborhood on the very edge of the Boston city limits and our even more palatial cottage in Maine, nearly twice the size at 900 square feet, under occupation by two of our children.  It sits behind the Rite-Aid, but we don’t mind.  There at the edge of the tony towns of Kennebunkport and Ogunquit we get a cool ocean breeze and if we ever run out of anything, liquor let’s say, Rite-Aid has it.

We live in the margins and at times, it’s easy to get lost. But, as two gay men we know a thing or two about surviving here.  Sometimes the edges get sharp and I begin to worry. Paul can see it etched into the lines of my forehead when he picks me up from work.  “Turns out my pay will remain the same,” he casually mentions and for a minute the wind escapes my lungs.

We sit down for dinner in our tiny kitchen and I pour Paul a glass of wine, the ten dollar stuff because today’s good news deserves more than our usual seven dollar bottle.   I gaze through the window and see our neighbor sitting alone at his dinner table. 

“He’s always alone.  I wonder if he can see us?” Beanie asks. 

I look at Paul and Beanie, think about our four other children and a hundred pictures flicker through my mind.  It pauses on a picture of Paul and Beanie, lying on a blanket one early June day in the park. I think about her question and that’s when I realize that it doesn’t matter what anyone else can see, because there in the margins, I can see us.         

 

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Postcards From The Past



She sat down next to me and reached her arm across the table. I mistook this extension of her hand as a welcome and so I turned to smile and introduce myself.  “I’m just plugging in ma’ phone,” she said dismissively and turned the plug over several different ways while squinting and pursing her lips looking for all the world like a monkey trying to figure out how to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Her short grey hair was permed into tight curls and her eye-glasses rested on the end of her nose.  She wore a denim jacket.  There may have been a button pinned to her lapel.  She was the type of person who would wear a button--flair--that might say something like “World’s greatest grandma’” or “If you can read this button, back off!”  That type of thing.

“So, you’re publishing something?” she asked without looking up.  She was reflecting on my question to the leader of the seminar regarding publication and how to attract an agent.

“Yes, a short memoir,” I said.

“M-hmm, and what’s it about?”

I paused.  It wasn’t like I didn’t know what it was about.  I had labored for months on it.  I could have recited it word for word, but telling the world’s greatest grandma’ that your memoir is a story about how your lesbian aunt and her psychic girlfriend took you to your first gay bar when you were eighteen years old fell short of grandma’ material.  But I told her anyway.

“And your mother never knew?” She asked, looking up briefly and sucking the wind through her teeth as if a popcorn kernel was stuck there.

“I told her,” I said.  It sounded defensive.

“M-hmm,” she said tilting her head back and looking down her nose-tip glasses.

“This woman up front, now she’s got a story!” She said pointing to a woman in the front row.  And she did, too.  Her grandfather travelled the west in the early 1900’s taking pictures during the day and developing them at night, turning them into post cards.  She planned on retracing his footsteps, visiting all of those places he had been.

“Well, it’s more of an idea than it is a story, she hasn’t written anything…” I said and then the old woman shoved a picture into my hand.

“That’s my grandfather, my mother and that’s me,” she pointed with her wrinkled finger at an old black and white photograph.  She turned it over and pointed out her website and explained that she would be writing a story about her Greek ancestry and her mother’s recipes.

“Kind of like my Big Fat Greek Wedding.  But none of us were fat,” she said.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out my card and gave it to her.  On the right hand side was a picture of me. She held up the card next to my face and looked from me to my card and back again, smiling enigmatically.  I knew what she wanted to say, that this picture looked better than the person sitting in front of her. 

But if you stretched back the borders of the picture you would see a handsome man sitting next to me, the tilted evening summer sun painting everything the golden color of a memory and Nubble  lighthouse just up the road sitting on a rocky outcropping in the cold Atlantic ocean . If you could rotate the picture you would see five young adults laughing, one of them holding the camera and telling their fathers to smile.  

No one could ever look as good or as happy as that person in time.

The old lady waved the young woman from the front row down and began to tell her how much alike their stories were.  For the life of me I could not understand how my “Big fat Greek Wedding” was anything like Postcards from the Wild West.  But it did not matter; she could see herself in that picture just as surely as she could not see herself in the picture of an eighteen year old boy sitting in a bar on the edge of some Colorado town.

We wished each other luck and parted ways, returning to our time machines hurtling down the roads to our past. The young woman from the front row sleeping under the open sky with nothing but a big yellow moon, crying coyotes and her grandfather’s voice to keep her company, the old lady, young again, baking sweet walnut sugar cookies with her mother’s ghost and a young, uncertain boy sitting on a bar stool listening to his Aunt Sheila tell him that he was beautiful just the way God made him.

Once in a while, we'll pick up a postcard and jot a few lines on the back, letting you know we made it here or how beautiful it is, but we can never be certain who might receive our postcards from the past or if you can even understand the handwriting.  Sometimes you might recognize a piece of yourself in one of those pictures or hope to visit a place that we have been and you might tape it to the refrigerator in your mind so that it sticks with you for a while.  When that happens it’s like electricity. Because each of us is really just searching for a connection that lets us know that we are not alone, that we are alive.  And when that happens?

I hope you’ll write back.

    

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Lotus

The world outside is melting. 

News of the heat wave rises up like steam, curling through the cracks under the door and seeping into my foggy world of cold medicine and delirious dreams where a whimpering ghost wanders through the living room. My mind is trapped in a body of stone. Wake up.

The distant hum of the air conditioner gradually becomes louder like an alarm in a dream pulling me back from a mirror life, a snapshot of this one overlaid with complex plots and nonsensical characters.  I open my eyes and watch the ceiling fan spin quietly in a blurred circle, whisking away the dream.

The angled sunlight on the wall tells me that I have slept through most of the day.  Paul has disappeared on a business trip while I have languished on the sofa watching old re-runs on TV (Sex and the City and Seinfeld if you must know) and drifting through the day on a fevered cloud of Nyquil. The clock chimes as I sit up, six o’clock.

For a day, the world kept spinning and life continued without me.

After searching the kitchen cabinets and finding nothing to satisfy my craving, I place an order with the Asian woman on the other end of the phone line. 

“Ten minute,” she says.  She always says this. 

When I step outside the heat radiates in waves from the ground up. People move in slow motion once removed from life behind dark sunglasses and ear buds.

I pass in front of a shop that is in the process of becoming something else. The store front looks like all of the others, red brick facade with two large display windows and a glass door in the middle. If you were to open it, you’d hear a tinny bell ring.  It was a Russian grocery when we first moved in, selling a handful of tired looking fruits and vegetables labeled in mystic looking characters.  It was reincarnated as a Brazilian restaurant.  The wait staff would sit alone at night, like a scene from Nighthawks, under fluorescent lights casting a dim glow on the dark sidewalk—waiting—for customers who never came. The windows are covered in brown paper now, ready to be peeled back to reveal the next owner’s dream.

When I enter the small Thai restaurant, it is cool, dimly lit and bathed in neutral Zen colors. Small glass pendant lights in blue, red and yellow paint circles of white light on eight tables.  A room length aquarium in the middle splits the restaurant in two. Fish drift slowly as silver pearl air bubbles float one by one to the surface. A couple sitting side by side on a bench briefly looks up at me when I enter and then returns to their hushed conversation.       

A waitress appears, smiles and asks “You pineapple fried rice?”

I have become what I eat.

“Yes,” I whisper fanning my t-shirt against the sweat on my back.

I return to the heat and when I stop in front of my apartment building I notice a purple flower defiantly blooming in the crack between the sidewalk and the steps.  Feet buried in cement it blooms where it grows. 

Once inside the building our neighbor, who has just moved into the apartment below us, waves at me and quickly passes by with a skittish black dog.  He begins to whimper and she hushes him. 

I have met my ghost.

Up the four flights of steps, I return to my apartment.  The coolness washes over me and the airconditioner drones.  Night comes. The moon drifts in a sea of stars. The purple flower closes.

I dream.

 

 

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On Turning Fifty

 

As many of you know, I am somewhat of a late bloomer so I often worry that there are not enough days left to enjoy the second half of my life. But, I can always count on Paul to remind me that indeed, there are not.  

"Sweetie, we are from two different generations," He’ll say even though there is only three years difference between our ages.

When we first started dating he would refer to our age difference subtly.  When I joked about an old TV show, The Brady Bunch for example, he would say that he didn’t understand the reference. But as our relationship grew stronger and when he realized that I was too much in love with him to leave he became bolder.  He would no longer say I was in my forties, I was “pre-fifty.”

"But honey, from the neck down you could be in your twenties," he'd add. I could never just accept the first part of that compliment. 

"So, from the neck up you're saying I'm ancient," I’d reply.

"Well, the gray hair and the lines on your forehead," He would raise an eyebrow and start to say before I stopped listening.

This past year he has started to remind me that when I turn 50, my age will be in a different decade.  But he doesn't stop there; he'll count out the years. "When you're 50, I'll be in my 40's and when your 51, I'll still be in my 40's and when your 52.."

I have decided that joking about my age is his way of showing me that he loves me and that he must love me very much.

Lately he has started using a different tactic.  When I step out of the shower or when I'm getting dressed he'll look me up and down and say "There's no way that's 50!"

I’ll reply "It's not."

But then he goes for the jugular and says “Yet," implying that my days are numbered.

So today is the day and I must admit that I have never felt better. I have my health, the love of my life, my beautiful children, a great job and a promising future as a writer and of course wonderful friends.  I also have it on good authority from a fortune teller that Paul, myself and our children have lived many lives together in the past and we will be together in many more after this.  So, I’m not worried about a number in this lifetime.

But, if for some reason the fortune teller was wrong and this is the only life we have then I will still be content.  In my old age, I’ll have my memories and if I ever begin to forget them, I can always count on Paul to be by my side and to lovingly remind me.

Of just how forgetful I am.

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