Yesterday a received an email from Facebook saying they would reinstate my profile. They had me review the conditions for posting nudity and showed me the picture they found objectionable that caused the shut down in the first place. Surprisingly, it really didn’t have to do with the blog or my Facebook, but an image I had posted to a closed group I had joined some time back. The funny thing is that many of the images on that sight are full erections or hard-core images of men having sex. The image I posted was actually quite tame by comparison. It was the picture of Lucas sitting in a big chair, with his junk exposed but not erect. I used this image for the post Has Porn Become Homogenized? This leads me to the assumption now that someone on that closed sight actually turned the image in as being offensive, it was traced back to my account as being the original poster and in turn my account was deactivated. Gianni originally suggested this might be the case and it turns out he was right. So folks beware of even posting your images on what may seem to be a private group because you never know who might want to intentionally harm you.

I was ecstatic that my account was restored because, since the beginning of this project, I have begun an amazing network of artists and other supporters of my sort of work all around the world. I did not back up any of that information and all those contacts I thought would be lost. It had taken me three months to make many of the connections and, though I have a lot of friends, I have had some kind of correspondence to most everyone in my profile. In a sense Facebook in and of itself became an individual’s own work of art, exposing our identities to those we befriend. I learned from my friend Gilbert the importance of archiving who we are and I think I am fairly good at keeping a record of who I am and what I am doing, part of which you are becoming privy to by following these ramblings. I do not know if any of it is or will ever be of value to the future, but I definitely have a feeling that somehow keeping a record of it is essential. I know I have lived a remarkable life. Not all of it good and not all of it bad either. It is my core nature to explore my identity and plot how I have grown as a human being. I have learned a lot of lessons the hard way and have a lot to share with the next generation. I feel that my life has extended over a period of time that has seen remarkable changes in gay culture and humanity in general. In many ways I feel like I have lived in oblivion not always aware of my surroundings in the social/political climate. I do know when I was growing up gay is completely different than growing up gay for this generation. To me it’s important to understand the history of our roots. I remember seeing a movie years ago when I was a film student called Night and Fog about what was actually happened in the Nazi concentration camps. It left me with the feeling that those who do not know the reality of history are doomed to repeat such atrocities. On the other hand I am a dreamer of a future from the Star Trek movies, where we live to better ourselves, where knowledge rules supreme. To me Facebook is sort of out portal into achieving that sort of humanity. It is a place where we can coexist with people of any kind of culture, race, religion or sexual orientation. Granted it is not perfected yet, but we are on the brink of something so extraordinary that evolving though our access to all this technology. This is why I tell my story and history and to put this time I live into some sort of perspective. One of the drawbacks to so much technology is that we can so easily loose an identity of ourselves. I have lived my life filled with passion and followed my heart and this is what I bring to the humanity of my story; to quantify the value and beauty of that existence. Facebook is a vital piece of that journey I thought I lost; this is why I am ever so grateful to have it restored.

I have retreated within myself the past couple of days to mostly focus on the design of my new website. What a process that is to fall into and become lost. I am using the new Adobe Dreamwaever 5 and wow is it a fun process; I was completely absorbed and spent the bulk of yesterday working on the layout. This morning I have the shape and look of it fairy well in place. It’s kind of a learn-the-program-as-you-go process so it’s a little slow in some areas. I have been planning this phase of the project from the beginning and it’s taken me three and half months to actually begin to put it together. The images are working fantastic with the design; it’s totally me. I think it will become quite interactive when I am done. It seems marketing myself has always been my weakest point; I think most artists have a great deal of difficulty with self-promotion. It’s the hardest part of being creative, especially in the beginning of your creative life style. Though the creation of art can become difficult and time consuming, you see the direct results of the process when it is complete. Marketing, on the other hand, always seems to be a bit of a gamble. Trends and tools to interface are changing so rapidly that you constantly have to adapt and the process becomes an on going process you are trying to win. Therefore when it is all said and done, all the effort of energy doesn’t necessarily mean you have something to show for the effort. Yes it would be nice just to hire someone to do all this work for you, but in the beginning stages, artists never quite have the funds for this kind of self promotion. Pre-established or group sites on the internet may become a viable means of getting your art out there, but it has become so saturated and not all sites sell or have the means to distribute what you are producing. When they do, they generally want to take a big percentage of what you would make. The artist really walks away with very little if anything, but their artwork can become known or lost in the scores of other artists trying to produce the same types of materials. Photography is particularly bad that way because the entire internet is loaded with free images for the taking. If you don’t mark or ID the images nobody even know they’re yours. I see so many people trying to sell or pass off other artist images when I go to look at artist profiles. I am beginning to wonder if we have become so saturated with the media that there may be nobody out there that really wants to collect artwork anymore. I do, I must admit, have some very valuable stuff still stowed in storage that I have not yet or don’t have a place to hang. Perhaps the only thing that retains any kind of value is after we are dead. So you might be asking what is the purpose of going to all this time and expense of putting together a website? I am not entirely sure yet. Perhaps it’s to validate myself as an artist and allow others to share in the remarkable beauty of the world as I see it. Perhaps there is a market out there for some of the stuff I do. Only time will tell. Meanwhile it is a way to explore myself and find a meaningful way to interact with others.

My life changed drastically when I came to the University of Montana. I was suddenly in the place I knew my talents could flourish, but being the only artistically inclined kid living in isolation in a small town had not given me any skills for social interaction in the larger circle of others. I somehow ended up in a dorm floor that was mostly filled with athletes, which I really didn’t relate to much. The scholarship I had paid for the tuition and some of the books, but nothing else. I came from a poor family and my father let it be known early that if I was going to follow such a foolish path he was not going waste any money to help so I would have to do it on my own. I ended up finding work to support myself but most of those jobs meant I would have to work all night, go to class in the day, sleep when I could, so there wasn’t much spare time for socialization anyway. I was a bit too intimidated entering the Drama/Dance program. It was almost like everyone already had a defined personality or style and I seemed too ordinary. Though we were all there for the same reasons I didn’t really feel like I quite connected with anyone specifically. At this point I wasn’t quite sure of my sexual orientation, in fact mostly feared it. There seemed to be a lot of gay people in the program and hanging with them actually terrified the hell of me. With all this I become even more isolated.

The theater department was nothing like I thought it would be; there was no real glory, but become a lot of hard work. Constant hard work! I had to learn to use tools and build sets. I learned about electricity and lighting, I worked on making costumes. We were mostly the work force behind all the production. Since I was working evenings and or nights I really couldn’t get involved in productions. The acting classes I had seemed bizarre and so irregular with strange exercises that seemed completely unrelated. It seemed that we spent weeks connecting to invisible dots in the air and try to find our relationship to them. Stretching, movement, voice, a basic connection to others via “Hi, may name is…” exercises. Clearly I was beginning to buy what my father had told me that this would become a waste of my time. The final straw on the camel’s back was after doing an acting workshop scene when one of the teachers commented, “He has a pretty face, but no talent.” I was devastated and broken. The dream was shattered. I had just spent half a year and clearly did not belong in this universe. With my head hung, heaving a heavy sob, I gave up on school and withdrew from the program. I finished out the rest of the year with just general studies, barely squeaking by with the process. I remember how completely lost I was. Had no idea what I would do or what I should pursue with my life and I had felt like I had become an utter failure. I wasn’t doing all that well with general studies and ended up dropping out of school after that first year.

Looking back this experience was quite harmful to my self-image, esteem, and human dignity and became a huge obstacle I would eventually have to overcome. It fractures an already fragile relationship with my father and family and I had not developed any friends, and so slipped into a quite oblivion. Could it possibly get any worse? Yes, I was about to discover my sexuality!

My friend Billy is coming this weekend to stay for a week. He is a brilliant Mime artist and just a great person deep down. He is bringing a show he produced several years back called “It Goes Without Saying” he breaks the silence and tell the stories of his journey as a gay artist. I had designed a traveling light plot and cue book for the show many years ago and will be adapting and setting it for his run in Missoula. This morning, I met the producer and went in to look at the theater space. It was like stepping back into another period of my life so very long ago. There is a part of me that completely misses the world of the theater. It feels like every phase of my life I become so entrenched in what I take on or become involved in; the world of theater is such a magical place to work. It is living a life of an illusion; it’s constantly changing and always adapting. I guess it’s kind of like I my Project here. I am not quite sure what drew me into this life. As a kid I was not really exposed to it at all. Growing up in small communities in Montana there really wasn’t any theater at all. My school didn’t do plays, but somehow I got it in my head and knew I wanted to become involved. I remember when I was in the third grade I organized my classmates to tell the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, to play it out for the class. My parents told me it began long before all that when I would bully my brothers and cousins to perform shows in the barnyard. How is it we know we are drawn to certain things? My freshmen year in high school I began a drama club, which consisted of only me. I put together a small performance piece from an article in read in one of those scholastic readers about commercials taking over the subconscious. It was silly, but I managed to pull it off. A teacher and I took it to a near by city where I entered it in competition. I actually did quite well with it. Later that school year we moved off the ranch to a town called Superior. A teacher there was trying to put together a play and I was instantly cast in the lead of “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” I was suddenly playing a middle-aged man. It must have been horrible, but I was bitten. The first time I ever drank or got drunk was at the cast party for that play and I got so sick that it become the joke of the entire school of maybe 200 kids. I had finally found a place I seem to belong. Though I was so different from everyone else, they all accepted me for that difference and could see my passion and aptitude for such creative endeavors. I began to write little plays that we could do. I remember one particular piece that was a parody bawdy shameless exploitation of the Cinderella story, in which it was a gay fairy godfather instead. My teacher read it in horror, and pronounced it as trash and that I should make better use of my talents. To me it was hysterically funny. Ah my first exposure to censorship. I somehow ended going to a recruiting trip at the University of Montana and, of all the kids applying, got one of two scholarships for the Drama/Dance Department and become the first kid in my family to go to college. I think much to the chagrin of my parents who feared I would end of wasting my life to follow unobtainable dreams. Well here is it 30 some odd years later, and I do mean odd, and I have followed my passion and my heart. Yes, there has been a lot of struggle, but I think in the end, so far everything has turned out all right and this weekend I will get to step back into that dark world of the theater and hopefully reconnect to a passion long lost.

Have I forgotten the truths, which motivated me to begin this project in the beginning? It feels like I have been on a long arch of a journey and I am beginning to question my motivations. The other day I was a bit harsh on Facebook and accused them of censorship and that has been weighing heavy on my mind. I fully understand the functionality of Facebook and I recognize I was pushing the boundaries a bit too much. A friend sent me a link to an interesting NEWSWEEK article about Facebook’s “Porn Cops.” Ultimately in the end I am the only one to blame for being booted. I don’t know why suddenly I have such a compulsion to shove my style of imagery down others throats. It is not my nature and therefore has remained hidden for all these years. These are becoming desperate times and I have become a desperate man to think I could sell the soul of my self for mass consumptions. In this seemingly soulless world is it I who have become soulless? I have felt a sort of frenzy building every since I began to connect to so many different people on Facebook, a mass of often unrecognizable strangers. Expecting acceptance from a world I don’t know or understand? I think in the beginning this project was very good. It had potential and best of all it had my heart. There were only a few people looking at it then and they were people I knew and wanted to let into my world. It was about them, gaining insight into a man who felt he had reached the end of his potential, but still had something to say. It was all, pure me, raw, exposed to core, vulnerable, isolated, alone. I miss that part of me and I feel with this Facebook shut down it is time to get back to the core of who I am and what brought me here in the first place. I am about to hit 50 here in about a month and there is a terror so deep inside of me gripping and holding on to me. I fear age, because I fear becoming incapacitated. Having faced cancer, which was limiting it gave me a taste of what that fear may become. My mind will never cease, I am a doer and have always been a doer: so what happens when my mind is pulsing with ideas of creativity and body says no more. I had a dear friend Gilbert, who was my greatest mentor, I witnessed slowly die from a brain tumor many years ago. I could look into his eyes and see it as alert as ever and his body slowly succumbed to paralysis and eventually ceased moving all together, eventually needing help with the basic functions. I devoted the last six months of his life to maintaining every ounce of his dignity throughout the process. I still look into his eyes and see the struggle of his brilliant mind, trapped in a decaying body. This is the most fearful truths we face within ourselves. Tears fill my eyes this morning as I think back to Gilbert, the man who has given me everything, a man who restored my dignity when I felt I had fallen. Who has given me this precious dream of becoming an artist. Who saw a vision in me when I couldn’t quite grasp it for myself. Today my heart aches as if it is about to break again.

Perhaps this is too much to examine ones self every day? I know I have changed and not necessarily for the better. I wanted the glory of the dream to come true, so I no longer would have to struggle. But looking back now I see that I have been consumed and tainted by this journey I have been on. I am actually a bit ashamed because I feel I have lost my vision. It’s hard to continue to examine oneself every day and find truths. In fact I am not even sure it’s healthy any more. There is no easy path.