I opened my laptop this morning and linked to my friend Elizabeth’s blog and saw that her post today was about the recent great news she received from a doctor visit. Her MS is beginning to dissipate as the lesions on her brain are shrinking and beginning to disappear. My heart leapt for joy to hear such news as she describes it as getting an early wonderful Christmas gift. Elizabeth is one of the most extraordinary people I have never actually met, because despite having been diagnosed with MS several years back and it completely disrupting her life, she has somehow managed to reclaim her life. She is the mother of two children yet still manages to become a writer. She takes us into the steamy heart of male on male romance, maintain a blog and non-stop helping me with the editing of The Naked Man Project. This is a woman of extreme vision and fortitude to overcome all odds and defy what probably should disable her.
It brings to light how close we become to strangers we have never met except through cyber space and how blogs become the backbone of entering the extraordinary lives of others. What a remarkable place we live in, to be so honored to enter those worlds and to really explore ourselves though other people’s images and words. I was really not a fan of blogs until I began this one because many of them I had looked at followed people that didn’t engage me. I feared in doing my own blog, I would say a lot of meaningless stuff that would also bore everyone else. But, it has brought me to a place of finding myself as I realized I had a lot of life experience to share with others. This blog has connected me to so many remarkable people that now influence and have an impact on my everyday existence, helping me to overcome my own fears and anxieties and recognize my own creative expression. Yet, here is a woman I have met as a stranger, whom I cannot examine the lines of her face, who has so deeply moved me and shared her soul. Her blog also features some of the most extraordinary images of beautiful naked men that stirs yet another part of me.
When I first approached her romance novel EXPOSURE earlier this summer, after it was first published I was a bit skeptical, first of all to read such a thing; it was such a foreign concept to me that a woman could or would write about gay romance. The story was of an aging photographer who falls in love with a beautiful young man with a secret. At first I was a bit threatened that someone might be poking fun at who and what I was. But within the first couple of pages, I was sucked into the story and have to admit some of the sex was quite graphic, even for me. But the story was filled with so much love and heart that I immediately fell in love with Elizabeth’s style and flair for capturing the essence of the relationship, and in a sense helped to renew my own relationship. Then, when I began to understand who this writer really was and her daily struggle with MS, I began to see how much she opened and shared her own heart. Elizabeth today is for you. You are a beacon of inspiration that shines so brightly on my life and gives me strength each day. I could not have done this project without you. Thank you and congratulations!!!!!
I’ve had many great loves in my life, most of them ending so badly that I learned to put up a protective barrier around myself in which I could contain my emotions. It doesn’t mean that I gave up on loving it just become more cautious with it. I am a person who leaps with all of his might and I still believe in the magical power of romance. I have always believed in loving hard and when it was over recognize the differences and move on. The first one is always the hardest and as I think back it had the most impact on shaping the person I have become. First of all to be gay and live in a place like Montana, to love a man meant we battled a host of odds just to dare being together. We met in Montana in the cold of winter in a porn shop. It took us to Illinois in the spring and Dallas in the summer. Ironically Dallas is not noted for its cold winters, but the coldness between us grew to a devastating icy chill that became one of the hardest winters of my life. Eventually I was abandoned in a strange city, left alone with nothing but a heap of debt and a broken spirit. I was foolish enough to believe in a dream and while the dream lasted I floated on a sort of heaven. They always say find them in a porn shop, lose them in a porn shop. I was too naive to know any difference. He loved sex with everyone but me, and the pain of not being good enough caused an emotional breakdown that still aches in the back of my heart. One cold morning I abandon everything and jumped on a Greyhound bound back to my home in Montana.
For some reason I have been thinking lately about the lonely death of the American writer Tennessee Williams. Here is a brilliant man who has crafted some to the greatest plays of all time for the American Theater. Things like A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. He choked to death on the cap of some eye drops he was trying to open with his mouth on February 25, 1983. How is it that a man with such a great mind for creating some of the most fascinating and complex character studies can pass away from something so insignificant as a bottle cap? Tennessee Williams is probably one of the most influential people on my life and work. As a young theater student in my twenties, when I had finally entered his remarkable world, I felt like I had finally found a home. He wrote about all the things we as culture in Montana like to keep hidden and considered taboo: alcoholism, homosexuality, addiction, beauty, the loss of beauty, fear, doubt, and self-loathing. A world where people were trapped by their often-brutal existence. Nothing seemed sacred to Tennessee. He himself grew up in a shattered world, feeling closest to his sister Rose. She was schizophrenic, in and out of hospitals, eventually becoming lobotomized; she became the wellspring for much of his characterizations. He used the dysfunction of his life to add life to those remarkable characters of Blanche, Brick, Laura, or Alma. Everything he wrote seemed to plummet into the heart of darkness whether it was a play, novel, or even a short story. His writing was filled with passion, honesty, and above all humility. When I entered this world I somehow knew most of these characters and could see so much of his despair and depression within myself. I became addicted and spent a year reading everything consumable about the man. Eventually I directed a production of The Glass Menagerie for my senior project at the University. I still get a giddy feeling when I read anything written by this master and am still captivated by the ground away versions of the Hollywood classics. That scene with Elizabeth Taylor blurting out the truths of Sebastian using her for procurement of young boys leading to his cannibalistic death before she is about to be lobotomized by his mother, Katherine Hepburn, who will do anything to keep the truth hidden in 
I saw a video on Facebook that actually moved me and got me thinking about this whole concept of gay marriage. I have been very mixed on the subject, not sure where I stand on either side of the debate. I sense my own security in my own relationship seems to be enough to bind us. Everyone around us on both sides of our families acknowledge and respect our relationship and know what our ultimate desires are if something happens to the other. Being gay and growing up in Montana I had never even considered the possibility of being able to marry someone of my same sex. Working for UPS, they have a strong policy supporting same sex partnerships, and though I only work part time in the evenings for the company they acknowledge Glenn as my partner and give him full benefits along with me. Of course we have had to prove our relationship and actually establish we were in a partnership. But over the years as we have attended the weddings of all our straight friends our age, joining in union, and photographing the marriage of all my nieces, and then to see my father at one of the happiest moments I have seen him in decades remarry after my mother’s death, there is a tug in my heart to unite with a man I have adored for so much of my adult life now that I can’t imagine a life without him. We committed in our early thirty something’s to watch each other grow old and that we have done. This video captures all the stages of our relationships, with warmth and tenderness and told the story of my own life. It reminded me of where I have been and I must say brought a tear to my eye to see the reflection of my life and know in the end I have been loved.
I am strongly becoming empowered by other artists’ images. I have been working with several other artists from around the world who have submitted images and writings that I have been creating galleries of for this project. It means spending a great deal of time with each image to build page by page and the more I study others work and talk to them the more I somehow become connected to their worlds. There is such strength in the impression they impart on their works no matter the style of medium they work. Each piece needs to be studied individually to really understand its power. In many ways it’s unfortunate to show such a large body of work because it forces us to skim through it as a collection without really paying attention to the detail. Where as each piece is a single moment suspended in time, which has often taken hours, days, some times even months to create. I am beginning to realize the images should be looked at individually. Unfortunately, we live in a world where we are inundated with so much imagery that we often just spend a few moments working our way through the vastness of it all. In olden days, images were hung on a wall of a gallery, museum, or salon and you were forced to interact and respond to the pieces that hung before you and when something really caught your eye you could linger and try to unravel it’s mysterious influence. I don’t think this happens so much anymore. We may bookmark or download an image and it becomes part of a vast collection, we may never even get back to again, because there is something new to see. And often times when we do go back and look at an image it will not have the same impact it had in the first place because we have changed and now see it from another perspective. But if we linger long enough, the power of the artists’ vision begins to take hold and influences the way we see ourselves and our own sense of our own creation and we see the artist as a mirror to ourselves. In the 1972 version of the film “Cabaret” the director Bob Fosse borrowed an idea from the original script in which the play ends by dropping a large mirror down so the audience can literally see the reflection of themselves revealing and asking us to examine the judgmental racism of Nazi Germany within ourselves. It is a powerful moment of the show. Though it doesn’t quite work on film the mirror is still there and becomes a reflection turning our focus inward. Art dealing with the still taboo subject of male nudity still has that impact and I am delighted to be and adoringly enamored to the be the in company of such amazing talents.
