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    Our Legacies: Writings from Chicago’S Older Gay Men
    Our Legacies: Writings from Chicago’S Older Gay Men
    Our Legacies: Writings from Chicago’S Older Gay Men
    Ebook207 pages2 hours

    Our Legacies: Writings from Chicago’S Older Gay Men

    By Allen Brown, Joe Kenney, Ralph Conrad and Randy Gresman

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    Together, the six authors in this anthology paint a diverse and multivocal portrait of gay male aging, gay history, and gay culture. Through a collection of poems, prose, and essays, these men examine and narrate the experience of being an older gay male in the new millenium. As members of Chicagos gay community, the words of Allen Brown, Ralph Conrad, Randy Gresham, Joe Kenney, Tom Stabnicki and Dion Walton offer layered, heartbreaking, and humorous perspectives on the meaning of gay and gray in the year 2010. The collection is edited by Dustin Bradley Goltz, PhD, Assistant Professor at DePaul University, whose research explores the gay youth obsession and the discursive production of gay male future in contemporary popular culture. From activism and loss, to relationships and hope, this edited anthology works to both preserve and pass on their legacies to gay cultures of the present, of gay cultures now past, and for the ones that are yet to be.

    The writers and artists, Allen Brown, Ralph Conrad, Randy Gresham, Joe Kenney, Tom Stabnicki and Dion Walton, each live in Chicago and are members of The Center on Halsteds SAGE Program. Dustin Bradley Goltz, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and Rhetoric at DePaul University in Chicago, in The College of Communication.

    This book was published though the support of DePaul Universitys College of Communication.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateMar 8, 2011
    ISBN9781450291699
    Our Legacies: Writings from Chicago’S Older Gay Men

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      Book preview

      Our Legacies - Allen Brown

      Copyright © 2011 by The College of Communication DePaul University

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-4502-9168-2 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4502-9169-9 (ebook)

      Printed in the United States of America

      iUniverse rev. date: 02/22/2011

      missing image file

      Center on Halsted Writing Workshop, 2010

      Contents

      Editor’s Introduction

      Group Acknowledgment

      Our Histories

      1995? 1996?

      Belle Époque

      Cousins

      A Distinguished Visitor

      Double Dutch

      Shaking Your ‘Can’ For Jesus

      Fishnet Hose

      A Bright Shining Moment

      After Whitman

      When Gay Culture was an Oral Tradition

      (or, Where Have All the Aunties Gone?)

      Our Activism

      We Were in It Together

      A Legacy of the Heart

      The Kleenex Man

      Wake Up Call

      Real Histories

      Snapshot

      Sour Grapes

      Barry G. Friedman

      Our Age

      Springtime and the Garden Begins

      Passing of Time for the Garden

      Aging: An Old Book

      Youth: New Wine

      Panting

      Young SAGE

      Old Text

      Yes, Yes, Yes

      Young Birds

      Our Loss

      What Got Lost

      The Old Courtesan’s Lament

      A Waste of Time

      Four-Letter Words

      Poem About Loss

      Poem Two About Loss

      Grief

      When Then Was Now

      And So, Forward!

      Vulnerabilities

      Our Bodies

      Invisible, Yet Forever Present

      Aging Is Just a Number; Here Are Some Multipliers

      A Conversation with My Body

      Wave Goodbye

      My Body and I

      Aristotle and My Body

      2010 Audi R8

      1956 Thunderbird Classic: An American Automotive Icon

      Our Relationships

      Brass Rings

      The Reunion

      The Perfect Holiday

      Blanche Dubois and I Are Blood Sisters

      Afterwards

      That Holiday

      Our Song

      Our Culture

      Costumes

      We Are In The Future

      That’s the Time I Love You Best

      Future Stud

      The Wiz of Oz

      Where The Boys Were

      Gentry

      Coming Together

      Whores and Hustlers

      Ode to a Grand Young Queen

      Our Families

      Flowers for My Fa-Tha

      The Name Game

      Meet Rafael

      Mama Number One

      Light in the Loafers

      Y’all In The Family?

      Greg’s Family

      Pal Promo

      Our Hopes

      Hope: A Fable

      Yvette Marie Stevens

      (Who Does She Think She Is?)

      Gay Piety

      The Street of Hope

      BIOGRAPHIES

      & Personal Acknowledgments

      Editor’s Introduction

      During the first week of January in 2010, I walked into Chicago’s Center on Halsted terrified, anxious, excited, and uncertain. A few weeks prior, I had agreed to organize and run a weekly creative writing program for the SAGE (Support and Advocacy for Gay and Lesbian Elders) Program. As a professor, I know all too well the nerves of walking into class on the first day, but this was very different. What if no one was there? Or even worse, people pop their head in the door, take a look at me, and then walk back out? Although my research has always focused on gay aging and performance, I suddenly questioned my credentials to be running this group. So much of my work has been about intergenerational tensions in gay male communities, fears of age and aging, worship of youth, and predatory mythologies mapped onto the older gay males, and yet my actual work with elder gay males has been very slim. I could talk about how discourses of youth and age circulate in gay male spaces, and how time is often constructed as a punishing force for gay males, but in this new space I didn’t know what to expect. I was suspicious of my own anxiety as I walked into the building.

      It has been a year since that day and through that time I had the pleasure of working with over a dozen different participants who floated in and out of our Thursday afternoon workshops. Six gentlemen kept coming back and slowly built a community over the last twelve months. I met Randy, Dion, and Ralph on my first day. Tom, Joe, and Allen each walked in one day, and to my great joy, kept coming back week after week. These six men are the authors of the work complied in this thematic anthology before you.

      I walked in the class on the first day with a series of plans and activities to structure the meeting time. I had timed writing activities, mini lectures, and a variety of approaches that had worked well in my college classrooms. Those, however, quickly went out the window, and we talked for most of that hour about what each person was hoping to get out of a creative writing class. They wanted a structure, and they wanted assignments. I generated a quick, on the fly, writing prompt for the next week and wrapped up class right on time. From here, we moved forward. I supplied the prompts; they went off to write and brought back pages the next week.

      Imagine you have been invited to give a speech at a gala event celebrating hope for the future. Write that speech.

      As you move through the world and meanings are assigned to you, what parts of you do you feel people do not see?

      In considering how LGBTQ histories are written, and considering your interactions with other generations within LGBTQ communities, what stories of experiences from your life are not represented?

      Norms were developed quickly. Writers would make copies to pass out to the entire class. We would take turns reading and discussing each piece, and I would budget time to ensure everyone was able to present. It became apparent that we needed to put word limits on the writings in the interest of time. Soon after, we realized we needed to extend each session an additional thirty minutes to provide discussion space. A process was in motion, ideas were being generated, and slowly a collection of smart, tender, challenging, and eloquent writings began to develop.

      Write about your relationship to a song or piece of music.

      Before actually entering a queer or gay space, what fears, hopes, or expectations did you have of gays and lesbians?

      In your life, and through the process of aging, what got lost?

      The writings revealed different understandings of what gay community did mean and could mean, as each of the men came to gay identity at different times in their lives, in different geographic spaces and economic conditions, under unique circumstances. Where some of the men celebrated their age with pride, others found age to be a more punishing process. When reflecting upon the role of age in the gay community, thoughts and experiences greatly varied. Each of the men had differing opinions, and embodied histories that refused to neatly line up alongside one another. Rich, layered, textured, and often contradictory, the narratives, poems, and prose they began crafting shed light on the many different dimensions and facets of what it means to be exist within gay communities. Stories of activism and triumph emerge in their writings, from the national and highly visible to the local and undocumented.

      Think of a time in your life you wish you had a photograph to preserve the moment. Write that picture.

      Put yourself in a situation with a younger gay male and write an interaction that you wish could take place.

      Write about how gay communities do family

      This anthology brings together some of the major themes that emerged in our year-long writing process, in an effort to document and preserve the stories, hopes, fears, and perspectives of six very different gay men living in Chicago. Their voices counter limited or tragic stories of gay male aging as isolated, miserable, or depressing, and write of loves, obstacles, successes, and families that offer hope, complexity, and humor.

      As a gay man in my thirties, it was an honor and a thrill to have the opportunity to read and engage with their voices, stories, and experiences. More than that, it was extremely helpful and hopeful. I, myself, have struggled with my own vision of future, my own anxieties and fears about what it means to be an older gay male. My own interactions with older members of the community were always limited to bar spaces, which came to dictate and restrict the types of interactions in potentially limiting ways. To have the chance to share space and time with these elder men, and these men, in particular, is something I will always be grateful for. My hope is some of our experience translates on these pages, so you too can have encounters with these amazing gay males.

      The anthology begins with writings on history, both the individual and collective histories of these men, ranging from the Massey Girls of the South in Fishnet Hose to the imagined queer reclamation of Abraham Lincoln in A Distinguished Visitor. Our discussions of history often overlapped with the theme of the second unit, which looks to record different forms and moments of activism, ranging from the boycotting of a local AIDS-phobic grocery store in Legacy of the Heart and the silenced anger of The Kleenex Man at the Names Project AIDS quilt presentations, to the personal memory of Chicago labor and gay rights activist Barry Friedman. The next three units deal more directly with the topics of aging, specifically meanings of age, experiences of loss, and the relationships one has to the aging body in gay male culture. Unit three examines the meanings of age and youth through a series of metaphors and encounters that speak to the ways the aging gay male body can be a site of celebration and great accomplishment. Reflecting upon aging and loss, the men present tales of grief, mourning, and gay widowhood, such as Four Little Words and the uncertain future of Old Courtesan’s Lament. Unit five, Our Bodies, looks to the experience of living in a body that no longer signifies the valued youth and vitality of gay male culture, and the relationship one renegotiates with one’s body as we age.

      In the second half of the anthology, the sixth unit spotlights a theme that runs throughout the entire collection: gay relationships. The relationships range from old flings and lost lovers, to the songs that continue to remind us of times and love now past. Our Culture, as a unit, casts a wide net, reflecting and recording moments, spaces, contributions, and sensibilities that have come to define what it means for them to be a part of gay culture. Our Families, the eighth unit, moves back and forth between the biological families we are born into and the gay families these men have formed or witnessed over the years. The anthology ends with four pieces that reflect on hope and the future, often looking to the past, as in Street of Hope or Yvette Marie Stevens to locate and rekindle a faith and a hope that sometimes is difficult to muster in the present.

      Perhaps, in the stories and works arranged in this text, you might find some hope, some identification, or maybe some pride. Their voices and experiences, for me, provide different maps and blueprints for a life I am working my way through. Where the gay male future was often a space of fear, uncertainty, and loss for me, I now find Allen, Dion, Randy, Ralph, Joe, and Tom tracing and retracing the contours and parameters of unlimited possibilities. For this, and for the experiences we have shared that are partially

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