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Friday, April 14, 2017

April 14, 2017 - A curious married man finds sex with another man, but who pays when they're discovered?

A married man curious about sex with another man cheats on his wife and daughter …and who pays when his long-term sexual affair moves from the shadows into the light?

By Christopher Turner

A man’s libido – his sex drive – is sometimes tamed by age when his sexual experiences become numerous enough that he can look back and ask if he left anyone injured or damaged in his quest for sexual fulfillment.

Another observation – just as relevant – is how his sexual conduct reflects on his ideal of being a man.

What are the costs, and who pays, when a man who conducted himself as heterosexual into adulthood caves to his curiosity about sex with another man? Are both men complicit in a deception when the curious one is married and has an infant daughter? And who is to “blame” for the fallout when the deception comes out of the shadows into the light?

It had been an especially rough work week for one of the men he pulled into a city park on an early Saturday morning more than 22 years ago. The park was popular and frequented for its extensive and scenic wooded area and forestry – and also had a notorious reputation as a hot spot for gay cruising and anonymous sex carried out under the cover of thick foliage. But the man that morning had no plan for sex and instead needed some time for solitude before the cruisers arrived for their search for sex.

The man barely noticed and gave no mind to another man sitting alone in his half pick-up truck, the only vehicle parked in the early morning hours. The man who just arrived parked his car, got out and walked into the forested area to begin his walk to solitude. He was about a half-mile into his walk and sitting on the trunk of a huge fallen tree when he heard the snap of a stick breaking beneath someone’s foot. Turning, he saw the man in the pick-up truck following some 50 yards behind.

“Good morning,” he said to his follower. The man moved closer and returned the greeting as he crouched into a stooped position near the man he’d followed into the woods. The men exchanged surface talk and pleasantries briefly – beautiful morning, early enough in the day to have some quiet time before the weekend park crowd descended. The talk took on significant meaning when the man who was followed into the woods asked the other, “So what brings you out so early?” ‘How about a blow job?’ the other man answered with a nervous edge to his voice.

Assured that the man who solicited him wasn’t an undercover cop, the man being asked had the other man lean against a tree and watched as he lowered his pants and underwear. It was very evident the man seeking relief needed it. He left the park sexually satisfied and complimented his server: “You do that very nicely – better than a woman.” When it was done, the men did not exchange contact info, and the man who relieved the other left with the assumption that this was just another episode of random sex and that he would never see the other man again.

But he did, just a week later at a service station. As he had a week earlier, the man who solicited the other man whispered discreetly in the cashier line, “How about again?” That time, the two went to the apartment of one of the men. The one who the week before sought oral gratification was named Ron and it was his first same-sex encounter, he said, after “years” of “wondering” what sex with another man is like. There would be uncountable ones to come between the two men over the next 12 years as they entered into a long-term relationship that, initially, was agreed to be only for the purpose of “s**king and f**king.”

Six years into the arrangement, Ron announced after sex with the other man that he’d gotten married a year earlier. After some discussion, both men agreed to continue their sexual relationship with precautions: Ron, when he needed sex with a man, would be the only one to initiate contact. Two years later, when both were to have sex for the first time in the new house Ron and his wife had built, Ron hesitantly said he had a 2-year-old daughter in the house and that they “had to be quiet” if the other man didn’t have a problem having sex with a married man. The daughter was upstairs asleep. Again the men talked about the risk to Ron of being “caught,” what and how much he had to lose and the urgency of absolute caution and discretion. And again both men agreed to continue their sexual liaisons.

The measures of safety and precautions worked effectively the following six years – until Ron entrapped himself. Drunk one night, he dialed his wife’s cellphone instead of calling the other man and blurted out an invitation for “some s**king and f**king.” A day later, Ron, panicked, called the other man with a plea not to talk to his wife if she called him.

She didn’t.

The call, more than 10 years ago, was the last contact between the two men. Just as Ron had arrived in the other man’s life so unexpectedly, he was just as unexpectedly gone.

In the ensuring years, the man Ron initially approached was naturally anxious – with some degree of fear and shame – about what happened to Ron, if his marriage survived or if he lost both his wife and daughter.

Little more than a year ago, to try to find some reconciliation and peace, perhaps closure, the man launched a public records search of Ron. He found some hope – some redemption – by verifying and then confirming that Ron’s marriage apparently survived what had to be a crisis of love and commitment. Ron, his wife and their daughter are now believed to live in a small rural community in another state, away from the pace – the temptation? – of the large cities that Ron always detested.

For Ron’s former sexual partner, his role in deceiving a wife and child with a 12-year relationship has been defined by indefensible conduct. Ron clearly was duplicitous in not disclosing his roles as husband and father to his male partner. But the latter was equally liable in the deception by continuing the affair even after Ron came clean. On a deeper level, Ron’s old “f**k buddy” has speculated that his part in the affair was a shameful disservice to the ideal of what a man should be.

But, as there predictably was to Ron’s wife and perhaps entire family, an injury is indelible to the man who gave sex and accepted it from Ron. From the start of their relationship, both men understood without saying that the only reason for their affair was sex. There would never be declarations of love or dreams about a life together.

But for the man Ron first approached more than 22 years ago, the sweet of the memories is bitter with the reality – perhaps selfish – that he came to love Ron somewhere along the way and that he misses the man who made him feel wanted and needed. No one has replaced Ron since.

Author’s note: This non-fiction essay is based on the personal experience of the writer.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

March 19, 2017 - A homophobic gay man, alcoholism and their fatal consequences

By Christopher M. Turner

Freelance vlogger

Jim died in August 1993 at age 29, his decomposed body found in a closed garage where it lay for a week during a sweltering Midwest heat wave. His tortured life over, Jim was believed to be the second victim of years of his heavy drinking that his ex-wife has always maintained was “caused’ by her husband’s shame and refusal to acknowledge and accept himself as a gay man.

In 1988, five years before his death, Jim was driving drunk in a nearby county and struck and killed a 30-year-old mother out for an early evening bicycle ride. She is the first known fatality on Jim’s road of destruction. Jim served four years in prison for drunk driving resulting in death and was on parole less than a year when he died. With his death, Jim was thought to be the second casualty of his own making.

But a third victim was identified weeks after Jim’s death as the stifling heat of summer yielded to a cooler autumn and as relatives assimilated to their lives without Jim. The third of Jim’s casualties met a violent and bloody end in his own bed that he shared with Jim one night, a 35-pound dumbbell crashed repeatedly into his chest and skull, a murder that police said Jim carried out in a drunken rage after a night of sex with his victim.

Jim’s relatives vehemently decried investigators’ conclusion that Jim was a bloodless killer and accused police of targeting a dead man simply to get an unsolved murder case off their books. Family members also rejected a coroner’s conclusion that Jim died by his own hand, a suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in the closed garage of a sister’s house. The keys of a car in the garage were in the ignition switch and still in the start position and the car empty of fuel when Jim’s body was found.

Jim’s relatives instead attributed his death to a heart attack despite the lack of medical evidence.

Today, nearly 24 years after Jim’s death, one of his acquaintances cannot remember when or how the two met. But the acquaintance remembers well two impressions that were quickly formed: that Jim was never really serious about not drinking and that he was either dangerously homophobic or, possibly, so tightly closeted that the extremity of Jim’s self-loathing bordered on the psychotic.

Jim and his friend sometimes went to the same meetings of a 12-step recovery group for alcoholics, and Jim occasionally suggested after meetings that the two go drinking at nearby bars, one of them a known gay establishment. The friend always declined. Riding with Jim in a car was sometimes a drive of paradoxes for the friend. Jim often singled out men walking on the street as “f**king faggots” while, other times, Jim noticed other men and speculated about their sexual endowment.

The acquaintance’s suspicion that Jim might be a self-hating gay man who had not come to terms with his sexual preference was validated one day when Jim, drinking but not yet drunk, made a sexual advance. The friend wasn’t interested. By then, he had become alarmed at the the seriousness of Jim’s drinking. Jim, his sexual move rejected, reacted angrily. “F**kin’ p*ssy. Whadda ya’ think friends do?’

Jim’s wife was older with a teenage daughter from an earlier marriage. She sounded genuine in her hope, a desperate one, that her husband stop drinking before he “kills himself or someone else.” Some two years after Jim’s wife and friend first met, Jim was in the county jail’s drunk tank for driving while intoxicated. That night Jim’s wife shared for the first time her theory about the “cause” of her husband’s drinking and the toll it had taken up to then. “He’s either bi or gay and can’t stand himself,” she decreed. The toll of Jim’s drinking up to then was his job for excessive absenteeism caused by severe hangovers and crushing credit card debt from charging bar bills and motel rooms he used often to sober up and took men for sex.

While he was on probation for the drunk driving conviction, Jim – drunk again and in violation of his probation – finally came out to his wife, or so he thought. He’d found a man with whom he wanted to live, and Jim argued that being honest with his sexuality and living with the man he loved would stop his drinking.

Despite her own despair of losing her husband, Jim’s wife gave him her blessing and cooperation in his effort to begin his new life. She was better than her word: not only did she find an apartment for her husband and his lover, she furnished and decorated it.

Jim’s new life as an open gay man living with a man he loved did not “cure” his alcoholism, of course. In short time, Jim’s lover was a frequent overnight guest at the ex-wife’s house because he could not endure another endless night of fighting and cleaning up Jim’s vomit.

Less than a year into his relationship with his lover, Jim drove to a bar in another county. It was that night that Jim, too drunk to see and drive, struck and killed the cyclist. Little was heard about Jim during the four years he was in prison. But, after being paroled, Jim resurfaced in his hometown, seen frequently in public parks and bars notorious as gay hangouts and cruising places for anonymous sex. A rumor, later confirmed, was circulated that one man known as a people user took Jim into his home for a place to sleep and drink in exchange for sex on demand.

Despite the arrangement, Jim was a regular patron at gay hook-up places. A bartender recalled weeks later that Jim had been in the bar, “half-drunk” and left with another man. The bartender assumed the two were going someplace for sex. No one had reason to connect Jim or the other man to a newspaper account a couple of days later of the discovery of a man’s body in his bedroom, presumably blugeoned to death by a bloodied barbell found at the scene.

But the connection was made by police in their investigation of the killing, and their findings were detailed in a Page 1 story in the city’s afternoon newspaper some two months after Jim’s death. According to police, Jim and the stranger he met in the bar went to the man’s home for consensual sex. At the man’s home, Jim got progressively drunker and, after the sex and for reasons unknown, crushed his victim’s skull and chest with no fewer than eight blows with the 35-pound weight.

Only days before Jim is believed to have died – based on the extent the decomposition to his body when it was found – he was hauled in by police. It was reported that police informed Jim that officers would have sufficient evidence within days to recommend a charge of murder. Jim avoided that accounting with his death. In closing their murder case, police pointed to the coroner’s ruling that Jim died a “probable suicide” by carbon monoxide poisoning, his death Jim’s way to cheat a sentence of life in prison.

Jim’s ex-wife remarried years after Jim died and is now permanently disabled by a degenerative muscular disease. The house she shared with Jim is occupied by other residents now although the structure has fallen into disrepair and some decay after years of neglect. Jim’s friend passes the house often and plays back memories he has of Jim. He seldom talks about Jim and has declined to answer a couple of people who have asked if he thinks Jim died a killer.

Instead, the friend answers that the circumstance of Jim’s death was a metaphor for a brief life that was a profile in tragedy and violence, a life that was lived in the dark shadows of denial and addiction. The sacrifices they exacted were Jim’s life – and probably two others.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

March 15, 2017 - Commentary: Divided we fall

by Taboola

Sponsored Links

By Kevin Hogan

Founder, Healing Stigma

for HuffingtonPost.com

To be clear, I was born and will die a proud American. But lately, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is feeling more like the Divided States of America. From the moment the 45th President of the United States of America was sworn in, the word “united” has increasingly become an inaccurate description of our country. Muscling reality-TV-style into headlines, the President has issued a spate of stigmatizing executive orders targeting and isolating specific groups in our society and around the world.

In the name of protecting Americans from “terrorists” and “illegals” who would either kill our citizens, take our jobs, or both, countless families have been torn apart. People who put their own lives and those of their loved ones at risk to support our troops overseas have been through the emotional, legal, and financial wringer. And undocumented immigrants who came to America as children, paid taxes, and contributed to the economy even throughout the recession are being detained as their own children look on helplessly.

During the nationwide outrage and protests fueled in part by these xenophobic policies, the Jewish community was rocked by a wave of vandalism and hate crime. Hundreds of gravestones in Jewish cemeteries were toppled, while a rash of bomb threats targeted Jewish community centers and schools.

After significant achievements under the Obama administration, including marriage equality, workplace protections, and the right to serve openly in the armed forces, the LGBTQ community has witnessed several of their hard-fought rights challenged at the federal, state, and local levels. Recently, White House officials confirmed that a far-reaching “religious freedom” executive order is still in the works. Once signed, it would provide exemptions for religion-motivated denial of service to LGBTQ individuals in the broadest possible sense, including when providing education or seeking a job.

In the Texas Supreme Court, conservatives challenged the city of Houston’s decision to extend spousal benefits to married same-sex couples. The state of Wisconsin withdrew insurance coverage for gender reassignment surgery for transgender state employees. And after two years of being allowed to march in Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, OutVets found itself temporarily stonewalled by the South Boston Allied Veterans Council, which claimed that OutVets’ rainbow flag violates its rules because it’s an “outward symbol of sexuality.”

Transgender students, arguably some of the most vulnerable individuals in our society, witnessed the federal government roll back its guidance for the protection of their public restroom rights. Just days later, the Supreme Court balked at hearing Gavin Grimm’s case concerning his gender identity and rights as a student.

Sadly, the President’s ongoing attempts to undermine the credibility of the press are choking most meaningful avenues to respectfully debate these issues. Without respectful debate, we’re inundated with ever-louder opposing voices that battle for our attention and seek to polarize us. The danger is that many of us, regardless of our political beliefs, are increasingly succumbing to the use of stigma to label those who aren’t “with us.”

By its very nature, stigma fosters oppression, divisiveness, and fear. When a government or elected official promotes stigmatization, it becomes a weapon that can cause mass suffering, destroying lives and decimating communities.

Most importantly, stigma is the sworn enemy of the empathy it takes to build bridges between diverse groups of people. At its worst, it leads to hatred and violence. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded nearly 900 post-election hate incidents with anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-Muslim cases topping the nationwide list in that order.

This is the current state of our union. We are, to put it plainly, a nation divided by stigma. And if we don’t take action against our own stigmatizing beliefs, more hatred and violence will follow. Soon, we could be fighting an internal war, instead of fighting for tolerance, freedom, and diversity—the core values that I believe should shape our nation’s identity for generations to come.

Fortunately, every time we witness stigma walling off an individual or group, we’re given an opportunity to challenge it by building a bridge. By looking beyond stigmatizing stereotypes and labels and getting to know our fellow Americans, we can recognize our similarities, reduce our fear, and learn to celebrate our diversity. And when we do that, we can make America more than great: We can unite it.