Pride

It's Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco. Down the street are thousands of shouting, dancing revellers and the music and the speechmaking is pretty loud. I had to move my car a mile away today before I could find parking.

I am sure it is my age, but there is a lot of the public expression of gay culture that no longer appeals to me. Some of it never did, but it at least did not bother me and I would even stand up for it. I am less inclined to do so now. It is a younger man's world in many ways. Fine with me. And so much of it plays with gender-bending in a way that puts me off.

But I wrote to friend today:

I will forever be grateful to have been born

at a time where I could learn, at a deep level,

that my passion for other men is not a crime

or an illness, but a gift. And I owe that to

so many people who have formed and fought

for the gay community. I did my share, too.

I am watching William Friedkin's very dark 1980 film, "Cruising". A view of the gay male leather and S/M scene in New York in the 1970s. Post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS. Sex and bloody murder and Al Pacino. Dionysos and Hades.

If I hear one more rant about gay marriage, I will start drinking heavy liquor.

The man who has become my magnetic north is far away this weekend. Last year, he was here for this weekend and we were together, doing what this is all about.

He just called me from Istanbul, across the street from Hagia Sophia. Joked that he could still read the Latin graffiti I carved into the door in 1973. Meant more to me than the speeches down the street.

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