I am now face to face with dying, but I am not finished with living.
—OLIVER SACKS, GRATITUDE
Although our culture as it relates to the LGBTQ community began to evolve slowly following Stonewall, the rate of change has accelerated since the first edition of this book was published. In a hard-fought victory for the gay rights movement, on June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the Constitution guarantees the right to marry for all same-sex couples in all fifty states and that all states must recognize these unions wherever the marriages took place.1 In an article in the New York Times on the day the decision was announced, Adam Liptak noted that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, stated, “No longer may this liberty be denied. . . . No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.” Kennedy added that the plaintiffs in the case were seeking “equal dignity in the eyes of the law . . . The Constitution grants them that right.”2
This ruling by the Supreme Court overturned the bans on same-sex marriage that were being passed by individual states with increasing frequency. The ruling was a bit anticlimactic in Iowa, as Raygun, Iowa’s snarky T-shirt company, announced on one of its shirts, “26 June 2015: America is now FINALLY as gay as Iowa.” Iowa was the third state to legalize same-sex marriage by a unanimous and emphatic decision of the Iowa Supreme Court in April 2009, and by the time of the US Supreme Court ruling, Doug and I had already been married for six years. A sense of complacency had set in as people began to say things like “Now we have equal rights.”
This complacency was fed by a series of decisions that had gone favorably for the LGBTQ community preceding the decision on marriage equality. On September 20, 2011, the United States military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy was removed, lifting the military’s eighteen-year ban on openly gay and lesbian service personnel. As Dave Philipps noted in a New York Times article, as many as one hundred thousand service members were discharged for being gay between World War II and the 2011 repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Many were given less-than-honorable discharges barring them from veterans’ benefits, costing them government jobs and other employment, and leaving many grappling with shame for decades.
According to Philipps, the United States military’s punishment of homosexuality dates back to the Revolutionary War when historians report that General George Washington personally ordered that a young officer be dismissed.3 Starting in World War II, the military treated homosexuality as a mental defect rather than a crime, but still purged gays with quick discharges. As a physician serving as a flight surgeon in the US Navy, I signed several of those discharge papers. During the time I was in the service, military investigators employed long interrogations and threats of public humiliation to coerce the service members to confess and name names.
When Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed, President Obama said, “As of today, patriotic Americans in uniform will no longer have to lie about who they are in order to serve the country they love . . . Today, every American can be proud that we have taken another great step toward keeping our military the finest in the world and toward fulfilling our nation’s founding ideals.”4
Another major change preceded the decision on marriage equality by exactly two years when on June 26, 2013, the United States Supreme Court in United States v. Windsor struck down parts of the Defense of Marriage Act, giving full federal recognition of legally married gay couples. In addition, it turned away a case involving California’s prohibition of same-sex marriage, known as Proposition 8, restoring the rights of same-sex couples to marry in California.
In the ten years preceding these decisions on marriage equality, public opinion had increasingly swung in support of marriage equality, more than doubling. Although the issue remains politically divisive, support for same-sex marriage has increased among all political stripes. As Justice Kennedy wrote in the court’s opinion after Obergefell v. Hodges, “The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times.”5
On Sunday morning, June 12, 2016, I woke up planning to spend the morning writing more about how much social progress has been made for the LGBTQ community in the forty-seven years since Stonewall. After I settled in with my coffee, I opened my laptop and read that a lone-wolf shooter had killed twenty young men and women during last call on Latin night at Pulse, a gay bar that was the epicenter of gay life in Orlando, Florida. As the day progressed, I was unable to concentrate on anything else as I watched the number of dead climb to forty-nine with fifty-three others wounded—the largest mass shooting in United States history, the deadliest attack on a gay target ever, and the worst act of terrorism on American soil since the World Trade Towers were brought down in New York City on September 11, 2001.6
The scene at Pulse was described as an unimaginable slaughter, many survivors lying in blood amidst their dead and dying friends, some feigning death for hours because they believed that if they moved they would surely be shot. During the night, the victims’ families and friends helplessly received cell phone messages from those in the club who texted that they were about to die. The following morning those same friends and family members paced around in a daze waiting for the names of who was alive and who had not survived the deadly attack. Some parents first learned of their son’s or daughter’s sexual orientation when they learned that their child was present in the massacre at that gay nightclub.
Investigators reported the motive as undetermined, but in all likelihood a single cause can never explain something so complex, as President Obama suggested when he described it as “an act of terror and an act of hate.”7 Some jumped quickly to the familiar narrative that because the shooter patronized the bar previously—in fact, he had been in the bar earlier in the evening of the attack—and had posted selfies on gay dating sites, that this was a case of suicide-by-cops by a self-loathing, homophobic young man.8 One question may never be satisfactorily answered: Had he been there as an ambivalent wannabe of the LGBTQ community, or was he just scoping it out for his planned attack? Could both be true? At the time of this writing, none of that is clear, and since the shooter died in the massacre, I believe the truth will never be known.
Many of the perpetrators of hate crimes against the LGBTQ community have a history of domestic violence, and parallel factors seem to drive hate crimes and domestic violence. The shooter in the massacre in Orlando showed evidence of preoccupation with sex and violence as early as the third grade.9 Many mass killers are men who feel aggrieved by someone who has done them wrong either on a personal or on a political level. In domestic abuse the abuser seeks to control the victim’s life through violence. This same dynamic of asserting control through provoking fear appears to apply on a grander scale in the hate crimes against LGBTQ people (not only in the United States but throughout the world) as the perpetrators attempt to restore traditional norms of heterosexual-male dominance.
Hate crimes against the LGBTQ community are depressingly familiar. On June 24, 1973, an arsonist splashed lighter fluid on the stairs of the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans, set it on fire, and rang the doorbell. When someone answered the door, it detonated a conflagration inside the bar. The fire consumed the lives of thirty-two people. Some considered this tragedy a joke, and authorities, lacking motivation to solve the crime, poorly investigated the incident or ignored it altogether. No one was ever brought to justice.10
While attending the APA convention in New Orleans, I had visited a gay bar that had an upstairs lounge. Had I known about the earlier tragedy, I might have thought twice about climbing those stairs, and I definitely would have located the exits. For most of us, gay bars have been a sanctuary, and at the time I visited the bar in New Orleans I was just taking a peek out of the closet door. I saw gay bars as a safe place to have a trial run at being a gay man. For most of us these bars were judgment-free zones, safe places to shed our defenses. As an old man I have not always found them welcoming, but when I first entered those gay bars as a younger man, I had a feeling of coming home. I could shed the loneliness I had felt as I struggled to live the life of a straight man. Although I felt protected from a world that was often hostile to gay men and women, these places were not always safe.
Hate crimes in America target LGBTQ people more than anyone else. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2015, 18.6 percent of hate crimes against people were based on sexual orientation, plus an additional 1.8 percent based on gender identity, taking the number two spot behind racially based hate crimes.11 These crimes are undoubtedly underreported because some fear outing themselves and some police departments don’t classify them as hate crimes. The majority of hate crime victims are racially based, and it must be recognized that the Orlando massacre was also an attack not only on the LGBTQ community but on the Hispanic community as well.
Many in the LGBTQ community viewed Obergefell v. Hodges, which made marriage a right for gay men and women nationwide, as the crowning achievement in the struggle for LGBTQ civil rights. Although social evolution converted some wary politicians from opponents to allies of marriage equality, these cultural shifts radicalized others into becoming increasingly aggressive opponents of LGBTQ rights. As we gay people began to live more openly and proudly within a society that was beginning to accept us, our opponents felt more and more threatened and searched for new ways to oppose us. The pushback began immediately after the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality under the cleverly chosen label of religious freedom, a term that does not lend itself to opposition—if you don’t support laws under the rubric of religious freedom are you then by definition in favor of religious oppression? In the United States, we increasingly see every issue in terms of black and white, right or wrong; ambiguity and nuance don’t exist.
Some civil authorities refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, invoking religious freedom and claiming that following the law ran counter to their religious beliefs; however, signs of a counter-pushback are emerging. US district judge Carlton Reeves ruled that clerks are required to provide equal treatment for all couples, gay or straight. Judge reeves said, “Mississippi’s elected officials may disagree with Obergefell, of course, and may express that disagreement as they see fit—by advocating for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision, for example. But the marriage license issue will not be adjudicated anew after every legislative session.”12 The ruling establishes some precedent but applies only in Mississippi; individual states are expected to continue trying to pass laws based on religious freedom that resist issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.
In a Washington Post article, Everdeen Mason, Aaron Williams, and Kennedy Elliott write:
While the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community has become more visible and won more legal protections in recent years, state lawmakers have increased attempts to pass legislation that could restrict civil rights for LGBTQ people. Since 2013, legislatures have introduced 254 bills, 20 of which became law. According to data collected by the American Civil Liberties Union and analyzed by the Washington Post, the number of bills introduced has increased steadily each year. In the first half of 2016 alone, 87 bills that could limit LGBTQ rights have been introduced, a steep increase from previous years.13
According to ACLU data, legislation focusing on transgender people, particularly those known as bathroom bills, didn’t appear until 2015, when four bills were introduced in state legislatures; by the middle of 2016, thirty such bills had been introduced in state legislatures.14 North Carolina redoubled its fight against increasing LGBTQ legal protections when the state legislature hastily passed a bill limiting access to bathrooms to the gender listed on a birth certificate. Texas, along with several additional states, filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration after schools and colleges were told to allow transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity rather than their birth gender. Essentially claiming that you can’t house wolves with rabbits, the states made the spurious claim that transgender men were potential rapists and child molesters. In 2015 more transgender people were killed than in any previous year, the majority being people of color.15 The fact that laws were already on the books that protected against all of the predicted criminal behaviors demonstrates the purely political motivations of this legislation.
The exploitation of fears based on stereotypes and misinformation worked as a motivator to draw the conservative political base to the polls, but this exploitation did not begin with the US Supreme Court’s decision about marriage equality; it only exacerbated it. Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief strategist, along with Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman (who has since come out as gay), worked together with other Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives appeared on ballots in 2004 and 2006.16 These legislative issues were designed to stir up fear about God, gays, and guns and motivate social conservatives to vote. For decades the Republican party has used a “we’ll protect you” narrative. Prior to President Bush’s election in 2004, I was speaking with a family member who said, “I have to vote for Bush; I’m too afraid not to.” The campaign’s deliberate attempt to stir up his fear captured his vote, as it likely did for many others.
These tactics are operating once again in the 2016 presidential election cycle. Capitalizing on the politics of fear, James Dobson, an American evangelical Christian who founded Focus on the Family, wrote: “Would you remain passive after knowing that a strange-looking man, dressed like a woman, has been peering over toilet cubicles to watch your wife in a private moment? . . . If this had happened 100 years ago, someone might have been shot. Where is today’s manhood? God help us!”17
In Orlando, smoldering bigotry, marginalization, denigration of minorities, and politicians bent upon scapegoating created a culture that collided with a national crisis of violence. Some preachers responded to the killings in Orlando by saying it was divine justice and the real tragedy was that more people didn’t die. A Texas politician said, “God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”18 People who sought to cling to white-heterosexual-male dominance tightened their grip by exploiting rather than extinguishing prejudice. The amount of hatred is jaw dropping and appears to be on the rise.
When ignorance becomes a weapon, violence tragically and inevitably follows. Violence appeals to those who feel that it is the only answer to their concerns about social issues. Evidence of this retaliatory violence was made apparent again on July 8, 2016, with the killing of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, converting a peaceful demonstration focused on violence committed by police into an act of bloodshed targeting them.19 The mass shootings in Orlando and Dallas are only two in a series of violent events on a global level growing out of hate and hysteria in our political and cultural climate of violence.
When ignorance becomes a weapon, violence tragically and inevitably follows.
I feel guilty for times in the past when I didn’t speak up, when I rightly or wrongly thought that I risked too much; those are things I cannot change but from which I must learn. One of the advantages of age is that I have little to lose now and I have a perspective I could not have had when I was younger. Statistics don’t change minds, but stories do. My coming out at age forty was spurred by the 1978 murder of Harvey Milk, who said, “Rights are won only by those who make their voices heard.”20 The killings in Orlando have inspired others to come out, just as the AIDS crisis did in the 1980s. It would be easy for me as a septuagenarian to say this is unmanageable; leave it to the next generation. I am tempted to put activism on my unbucket list. But as a septuagenarian I have an advantage. I can speak out without the fear of consequences I feared when I was a younger man. I don’t have as much to lose. I may not have the answers, but I do have a voice.
Other advantages come with growing old. When I speak to groups about what I think I know, in the process I always learn so much that I didn’t know, and I learned a lot from a man named Don. After the release of the first edition of Finally Out, I spoke to the Houston Prime Timers, a social group for gay and bisexual men, and after I finished Don raised his hands in the air and said, “I’m eighty-two, and this is the best time in my life.” Don had been married to his deceased wife for thirty-eight years before he had the courage to step into a gay bar where he met the next great love of his life. Don was on the far side of his life, and yet his perspective was that his life was expanding rather than shrinking, while I, on the other hand, had been focusing on wrapping things up. When I met Don again about five years later, he still felt the same way. I began to wonder what Don knew that I needed to try to understand.
Death had been a reality to me ever since my father died when I was three years old and my grandfather shot himself when I was six, but I began thinking about death more seriously when I was thirteen years old. With the immaturity of early adolescence, I thought, Thirteen is an unlucky number; this will probably be my unlucky year. From the time my brother had an accident that left him paralyzed when I was nine years old, I held the idea that our bodies and minds are fragile and that we grasp life with a soft grip. As I turned thirty-two, the age of my father when he died, I wondered, “Is this my time, too?” Now in my eighth decade I can see that I had lived each moment as if I were dying instead of just living and enjoying each moment. Don’s comment challenged me to ask myself, How can I make the most of whatever time remains?
What I had arrived at without realizing it was the concept of mindfulness, a significant element of some Buddhist traditions. Earlier in my life I had thought of Buddhism as donning a saffron robe, shaving my head, begging for alms, and living with other like-minded men in some mountainous Buddhist retreat. Mindfulness, however, is simply a state of active and open attention to the internal and external experiences of each moment of the present. It means living in the moment instead of worrying and ruminating about the past or the future.21 Mindfulness tells me that instead of worrying about the deadline for finishing this chapter and the subsequent lengthy process of editing this second edition, wondering if the book will find an audience, and stressing about the reviews, I need to concentrate on the joy of discovering just the right word to complete a thought or finding a story or creative metaphor to illustrate a point.
William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” In other words, our past is always with us. Throughout this book I have examined my history to understand how I got to where I am today, hoping that relating my experience might help others understand their own, and the feedback I received from those who read the earlier edition confirmed that to be true. But we can spend too much time examining our past—even using it as an excuse to explain away mistakes we’re making in the present—because that history has already been written. I’ve often been asked if I regret not coming out sooner because I “missed all the fun of being young and gay,” but I try to live my life without regret, believing that the decisions I’ve made were the best I could make with the information I had available to me at the time. Coming out later provided me with different opportunities to experience things I would not have if I had come out earlier in my life. My past is immutable; my future is unknowable. Why should I worry about them?
But we’re confronted by a paradox: we remember our lives backward but must live our lives forward. The past is problematic because it is set, fixed in stone, immutable. We cannot change our past but only our relationship to it. The future is problematic, too. We can make plans for some of the contingencies of the future—and we should—but ultimately the outcome will be determined by fate; we can influence it but not control it. One of the concepts that comes from those recovering from addictions is to look at our lives in terms of manageables and unmanageables, a simple but not simplistic approach to sorting out what is or isn’t worth worrying ourselves about. Our history is unmanageable, so why get stuck ruminating about it? Our intentions can influence the direction of our future but not control it; worrying about things over which we have no control is wasted energy.
The source of the following saying is debated, but its truth is not: “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” Pain is something that happens to us; it is out of our control, unmanageable. My father’s death, my grandfather’s suicide, my brother’s injury, and the deaths of my mother and stepfather were painful but unmanageable. Suffering is how we choose to deal with those pains inflicted upon us. Pain is losing a relationship, being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, or realizing we’re gay; suffering is failing to accept those truths. But many of us suffer unnecessarily when faced with pain. Life will always have pain, but we have choices, we can make changes, and we can take action.
I once met a married man who was struggling with his attraction to men. In considering coming out, he wondered, Am I moving from one life of regret to another life of regret? Those same doubts bore down on me as I considered my decision to come out. It was in 1980 near the beginning of the AIDS crisis, when little was known about HIV and when I was still unsure if it was even safe to shake hands with an HIV patient. The rational side of my brain told me what I needed to do, but the more irrational side flashed warning signs about what might lie ahead. Being gay is unmanageable; I didn’t choose it. I could, however, choose to live authentically, to stop denying it.
My age is also unmanageable; no amount of Botox or Viagra is going to change the fact that I am seventy-three, almost seventy-four. I can choose to spend what remains of my life worrying about how it will end, or I can live the best way I can in the present moment. When I turned seventy-three I found myself rounding up rather than down, just as I did as a child: I’m going on seventy-four. When asked how long Doug and I have been together, I answer, “Almost thirty years,” even though we are just beginning our twenty-ninth year together. One of us will inevitably die first, or our relationship might end in other ways, but if I obsess about how it will come to a close, I will miss the joy of the moments right in front of me.
Even though I didn’t yet have a label for it when I discovered the concept of mindfulness, I subsequently learned that studies show that the practice of mindfulness relieves depressive symptoms and reduces stress and anxiety.22 Discovering mindfulness also led me to explore some other concepts from the Buddhist tradition that have changed my attitudes about aging.
It’s strange the things I hear when I tell people how old I am. The most frequent response is “You look good . . . for seventy-three.” I restrain myself from asking, “What were you expecting?” It’s as if they are saying to me, “You don’t sweat much . . . for a fat person.” I know they mean it as a compliment, but it just doesn’t feel like one. I hear another response frequently—“Age is only a number”—but I hear it as a partially expressed thought: age is only a number—but it’s a really big number. But the truth is that although the marks of decay are visible, I don’t feel like I’m seventy-three; or perhaps I should say I don’t think or feel as I expected to think or feel at this age. For example, I still think about sex. Frequently. And when I say I think about it, I don’t mean that I reminisce about it; I think about it as in I anticipate it. But this entire conversation about my age reveals that I am responding to internalized stereotypes of what aging must mean, just as those who’ve commented upon it. When I say, “I don’t feel seventy-three,” what I’m really expressing is that my experience of aging doesn’t match the stereotypes I internalized sixty-five years ago when I rightly or wrongly interpreted seventy-three years old as much older than it seems today.
Ageism is a form of discrimination and prejudice experienced by seniors. Most seniors are mentally and physically active regardless of age and have a great deal to contribute. However, societal norms marginalize seniors, treat them with disrespect, make them feel unwelcome, and otherwise generalize about them as if they are all the same. Ageism robs seniors of choice, independence, and dignity and negatively impacts the quality of their lives.
Although many of our politicians are past their own best-if-used-by date, they often see the years past sixty as a time of low or no productivity, as if all seniors do is stand in line to collect entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. That attitude is both disabling and disempowering. Many of these politicians are of my own generation, and they have internalized the same outdated stereotypes that lump those of us over sixty together as if we are a millstone around the neck of society. Few in my generation knew anyone old and gay at the time we incorporated the stereotype of old age into our psyches, so we didn’t assimilate semblances of older gay men and women who are filled with vitality. Older gay men and women are in double jeopardy: many people see us old people as a drain on society’s resources, and since we’re largely invisible, the idea that old gay people might have special needs is impalpable.
Younger generations cannot imagine the world in which we grew up, where we had no role models who lived openly as gay men and women. On the other hand, the stigma of homosexuality—the belief that homosexuality was sinful, evil, criminal, or pathological—surrounded us. Without obvious gay role models to challenge those images, we had to unlearn all that we thought we knew, and some of us succeeded more than others in reeducating ourselves.
As I researched the first edition of this book, I questioned the accuracy of my memories of what it was like when I grew up, but they proved to be as accurate as memories can be. Growing up in Nebraska and small-town America led to a great deal of naiveté and lack of sophistication. But even those who were raised in urban areas and who understood their sexual orientation at a much earlier age were forced to live in an underground society, the only place they could be semisafe from harassment and police entrapment. The African American civil rights movement began in 1955, and the feminist movement really took hold in the 1960s and ’70s, paving the way for the Stonewall uprising on June 28, 1969. Stonewall kicked off the gay rights movement, precisely at the time I was entering the gay-unfriendly world of the US Navy. I did not know anyone who lived openly as a gay man or woman until 1975 when I was thirty-two years old, and that contributed to my confusion about my sexual feelings.
This separation of the worlds of the gay and straight reinforced the stereotypes and in turn the stereotypes helped keep those worlds apart. For me the gay world wasn’t just unexplored, it was undiscovered. Many of the men in my era came out between the ages of thirty-five to forty years old, and we couldn’t come out until after we shattered some of those internalized stereotypes of what it means to be both gay and gray. Those of us who came out at an older age find it difficult to conceive that today an elementary-school-age child can come out as gay or transgender. For young people to understand what took us so long to come to that same realization is equally difficult.
Many of the men in my era came out between the ages of thirty-five to forty years old, and we couldn’t come out until after we shattered some of those internalized stereotypes of what it means to be both gay and gray.
Just as internalized stereotypes of being gay keep us from accepting we’re gay, internalized stereotypes of aging cause us to resist the idea that we are getting old. If ageism is a form of prejudice against old people, we have developed a prejudice against ourselves, another form of self-hatred. We are then not only the victims of discrimination but we are also the perpetrators of it. For me to age successfully, I needed to shed the stereotypes of aging in the same way I shed the stereotypes of homosexuality. Meeting Don in Houston and hearing him say “I’m eighty-two and this is the best time in my life” upended my negative mindset about getting older.
For too much of my life I lived with to-do lists and schedules. I lived through the stresses of getting into medical school, examinations, starting a practice, and making my professional life successful. We’re always trying to bust through another ceiling instead of realizing that sometimes roofs are over heads to protect us. It seemed that no matter what mountain I climbed I was then faced with another even higher one to climb. I never learned to play very well. I gained a different perspective of play as I traveled around the world. I discovered that other cultures value their playtime much more than we do in our American culture.
I straddle between the traditionalist and the boomer generations. The traditionalist generation, born prior to 1945, tends to follow the rules, delay rewards, and value duty and hard work before pleasure. Baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, bought into the American dream, so they are sometimes seen as greedy, materialistic and ambitious. Many of them have seen the workplace transformed from being an environment where employers and employees were loyal to each other to one where workers are treated as commodities. Many boomers have a strong work ethic and have experienced working many years in a job only to find they are being laid off shortly before their retirement age; to achieve the American dream, they have lived to work. Another part of the explanation for my committing myself to work comes from my Germanic heritage. I can explain another part of it by my need to demonstrate I was worthy of approval.
Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, includes latchkey kids who grew up having to take care of themselves and seeing their parents get laid off. It is the first generation not to do as well financially as the preceding generation. Because of this Gen Xers tend to balance work and play more effectively and place a higher priority on fun. They think more globally and are suspicious of the values of those more senior to them. As children, Millennials, who were born after 1981, were overscheduled and overprotected. They never lived without computers. They are hotly competitive but often more competitive in their fun than in their work, and they earn money to spend it.
Any time we put people in these kinds of boxes, we hear an outcry: “But I’m not like that!” Yet these descriptions have value, particularly in understanding intergenerational conflicts. They also help us to understand why traditionalists might have delayed their coming out until later in their lives and why the younger generations have been more open about their sexual orientation at a much earlier age. Perhaps cultural changes aren’t entirely responsible for allowing this to happen; perhaps generational differences created the cultural changes.
The ancient Greeks had two words for time: kairos, meaning the right time or the opportune moment, and chronos, meaning sequential time or time as it is measured. Chronos is quantitative; kairos has a qualitative nature. Another way to characterize the generations would be to suggest that the older generations lived by chronos or quantitative time, and the younger generations live by kairos or qualitative time. As I’ve grown older I have discovered that life is not shrinking but expanding, and this has given me a greater appreciation for the quality of time. We can either measure time or experience time. We measure time when we say “I’ll meet you for a coffee at ten a.m.” or “How will I get all this done by five o’clock?” I learned from Don in Houston that life is about savoring slow time, and I look forward to opportunities to experience time with people from whom I want nothing and who expect nothing from me. Don—with limited and diminishing time—focused on experiencing time.
A few years ago, I went out to dinner with some men I had just met. The eight of us sat outside at the restaurant on a night that was so perfect it could have been created for outdoor dining. The service was good and efficient but not rushed. We inhabited that patio table for about three hours, eating and drinking, but mostly talking. As we paid our checks, one of the men commented, “This has been so much fun, I hate to see the evening end.” It was an evening of unmeasured time, slow time, nothing-to-rush-off-to time. It contrasted sharply with those times I had sat at my desk eating a sandwich while doing paperwork and returning phone calls. I don’t remember what I ate; I only remember the men with whom I ate that evening. I began to see that with whom you eat dinner is far more important than what’s on the menu.
I have an old White Mountain hand-cranked ice-cream freezer that I bring out when we have guests. Making ice cream was a family tradition, and our unspoken rule was that if you didn’t turn the crank, you couldn’t eat the ice cream. In my childhood the women prepared the mixture—a tradition that has long since disappeared—and placed it in the stainless steel cylindrical tank, but then the men took over. The cylinder is placed in a wooden bucket, the churn is fastened into place, and it’s all covered with ice. Salt is added to melt the ice and draw the heat from the liquid ice-cream mix. I always remind guests of the crank-turning rule, but I’m struggling to hang on to that tradition. Making ice cream is about spending slow time with people you care about; making memories is more important than making ice cream.
With whom you eat dinner is far more important than what’s on the menu.
Once when my daughters and their families were visiting, I brought out the freezer. I explained the rule to everyone and I heard things like “Breyers makes very good ice cream,” or the truly blasphemous comment “Loren, you know they make freezers with electric motors now.” I languished on the porch, turning the crank and growing slightly irritated that I was out there alone, when my oldest granddaughter came out and turned the crank until it started growing solid. Then she sat on the freezer as I finished it off. She said with insight beyond her years, “Grandpa, I get it. It’s not about the ice cream. It’s about making the ice cream together.” I’m leaving the White Mountain freezer to her in my will. During a visit in 2016, the same daughter’s family visited and we made ice cream. Without having to mention the rule, every member of the family turned the crank. Everyone understood that we weren’t just making ice cream; we were creating memories of joyful times together.
A myth about wild and domesticated animals is that if they’re not being reproductive they’re useless; perhaps to a lesser degree, that myth carries over to humans. A recent study investigated the decision-making and cognition effects of culling the post–breeding age females in herds of elephants. Graeme Shannon and his fellow researchers found that without the ability to learn from the matriarch and other group elders, the young elephants suffered a profound loss of social knowledge that affected their ability to make informed decisions, eat, find water, and breed successfully. When the older animals were culled, the herd did not thrive.23
When Doug and I raised cattle, we found the same thing. An older cow would babysit the young calves while the other mothers wandered off to graze. The older cows protected the young calves and knew where to look for the best grass and sources of water. The herd was more easily managed with the leadership of the experienced herd elders. Although the economic success of the operation depended upon successful herd reproduction, it also depended upon making difficult decisions about culling the nonproducers.
Erik Erikson writes that aging is just another step in personal development and cannot be understood in isolation from the rest of our lives because each stage builds on the developmental changes of previous stages.24 In this context, each family member and each generation of the family must be understood in relation to developmental changes within the others. We expect parents to structure the development of their children, but we fail to realize that children also mold the development of their parents.
In elephants and cattle, in our development as individuals and tribes, and in the history of gay culture, the elders are the seat of active wisdom that leads to the thrift and survival of future generations. Marginalizing old people within our society and then marginalizing gay old people within that subgroup might undermine the fitness of our entire society. Elephants transfer their wisdom through sophisticated communication; humans have an even more sophisticated system of communication, but when we attempt to communicate with each other, we often get a busy signal.
Doug and I are what is described as a mixed-generational couple because fifteen years separate us in age. Although sociologists classify him as a boomer and me as a traditionalist, his values are enough traditionalist and mine are enough baby boomer that we rarely give much thought to the number of years that separate us. We’ve made it work, after all, for nearly thirty years. At my age about a third of my contemporaries have died, which leads me to ponder the urgency of how best to live the time I have remaining. In three mixed-generational gay couples among our friends, the younger partners have died. Pain is learning our friends were dying; suffering is ruminating about how this might play out in our lives.
If I apply what I’ve learned about mindfulness, I will not spend time regretting time I might have wasted, and I will accept that how the next ten years unfolds is an unknowable. I will realize that I am healthy today; with some luck I’ll feel good tomorrow. Sigmund Freud said, “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness,” and I will continue to love and to work, the two most important things in life according to Freud. Yet I am aware that my time is limited and with each day it grows shorter. Death is no longer an abstract concept. I have little time left for anything inessential. Pain is being realistic about my age; suffering is being defeated by it.
Being present in the moment is not always easy to do. I still have bills to pay, I have some health issues, and if I want to continue to practice psychiatry, I must meet all the licensing requirements. I want to read more and write more, and I want to travel and immerse myself in other cultures, but even more than that I want to deepen my relationships with the people I love. I want to live richly and deeply in every corner of my life so that on that last day I can say I have completed it successfully.
Erikson’s perception of aging reassured me; this wasn’t the decline of my life, it was another part of my development. For my sense of well-being, aging demands a robust and active lifestyle. I was determined that I was not going to become a depressed, lonely, prematurely aged queen who was oversexed but incapable of making love. I was not going to waste whatever time remained. I stopped wearing neckties. I decided I would never attend at a cocktail party where I was sure there would be no one there I really liked. I decided I would never finish a book I didn’t like, nor would I ever sit through a bad lecture or a boring movie. I warned my minister that his sermons had better be good. This was the beginning of a new sense of freedom. I intended to trust my own judgment; I would take charge of my own thoughts. I began to search for ways to approach this time in my life as the beginning of the next part of my life rather than the beginning of the end of it.
I once bought a book about one thousand places to visit before you die. As I glanced through the book I realized that even the wish to read the book was something I could take off my bucket list. Although I love to travel, I would rather make a list of the ten people I’d like to meet before I die. As I started the research on this book I began to communicate with and love people that live across the globe in places I would love to visit but will never be able to. I have immersed myself in their worlds via the Internet. We have touched and changed each other’s lives. I realize now that my thoughts and feelings do not separate me from but profoundly connect me to the universe.
Our bucket lists are all the things we wish to do before we die. My bucket list has grown shorter, much shorter, but my unbucket list, the things that once seemed important but matter far less to me now, grows longer and longer by the day. Even some of the causes I have always felt and still do feel passionate about have been transferred; they belong to the future. Doug and I have deep roots in the soil of our small farm in Iowa, but as I worked on this book, I realized that sooner or later—probably sooner—our declining bodies would force us to make the decision to sell the farm and move to something more easily managed.
We have lived here on the farm for twenty years, longer than either of us has lived anywhere before. We’ve planted seven thousand trees and created a prairie restoration without using chemicals and poisons. Every spade of once-depleted soil is now filled with earthworms. The silence of our morning coffee on the porch is only broken by the cacophony of songbirds; our evening cocktails, by the thunder of bullfrogs. The night sky is powdered with stars and lightning bugs. Will the next owner cherish the bass we stocked in the pond we built, the asparagus bed we started, the fruit trees in the orchard that are just coming into full production? That is uncertain. I only allow myself to think about that now as I write, to describe how these decisions burden us. I must be content to know that tonight, this night, I can sip a cocktail and watch the lightning bugs and listen to the bullfrogs. And tonight, before I go to bed, I will once again experience the pleasure that every farm boy understands: I will pee off my porch.
But I know as the evening draws late I must climb the stairs to our bedroom on the second floor of our 125-year-old farmhouse, and they seem steeper now. Somehow we must come to believe that we are moving toward something instead of away from something.
In contemporary American society, winning is everything. The consumer culture has created a demand for a mountain of stuff, stuff we never had and yet think we cannot live without. We have products that are supposed to make us happy, change our lives, and keep us young. We worship a youth culture of Botox and Viagra. George Orwell is said to have written, “At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.” Martin Amis modified it to say that now everyone gets the face he can afford. Generations of marketing culture have drained a sense of meaning from our lives. We are told to climb the ladder of success but not to be careful against which wall we place the ladder. We network in a quest that asks, “What can you do for me?”
I was suffering when I turned sixty, but much of that was my own making. As I passed through that sixtieth birthday, I began to realize that I had been caught in a culture of ambition and concept of forever-young. Striving is the hallmark for men in the prime of their lives. As I completed one goal, I replaced it with another. I wanted to climb one step higher on the ladder of success, and I had courted relationships with people who would assist me in my climb. I collected stoneware bowls, and I have so many I could break one a week and the collection would outlive me. I have a junk drawer full of brass rings I thought I had to collect on the way up. We have come to believe that our value as humans and the proof of our success depend on designer clothing labels or the number of square feet in our houses rather than see those things as the temporary fulfillment of ultimate materialism.
I climbed the ladder of success until I discovered there was no more “up” up there. I looked for a life of meaning “out there” and “up there”—I pursued social status, adopting an ideology that would satisfy my need for meaning, and in the process I adopted other people’s values. But all of this was a delusion, albeit a pervasive and seductive one. I was imprisoned by it and felt estranged from my soul. But I didn’t see an alternative. Meanwhile, of course, the clock was ticking—quite loudly, in fact. I became breathless. I had no time left for a calm and reflective appreciation of my twilight years, no deliciously long afternoons sitting with friends that I might not ever get another chance to idle with. What I discovered as I grew older was that I had made two false assumptions—that I am powerless, and that others had unlimited power over me. I discovered that the meaning I was looking for was in fact within me.
When I chose to go into psychiatry, my mother wasn’t happy about it. She didn’t tell me I shouldn’t, but she couldn’t understand it. What I found in psychiatry was a sense of meaning, something that enriched my soul. It was the place where I felt that there was something big within me that was separated by only a thin space from something bigger out there. I felt it when each of my children and grandchildren were born. I felt it when I married my wife and later when I met and married Doug.
I discovered that the meaning I was looking for was in fact within me.
One of the common threads among the patients that I see is a lack of meaning. They have no idea what will fill their soul. I see many drug addicted people, and during their addiction their only goal is to find meaningful relief from their pain in the short time that follows the entry of the needle into their vein. For some, it is their only sense of meaning, for which they sacrifice their jobs, their marriages, and their children. Others search for meaning by attaching themselves to a strong personality who defines their meaning for them. They seek approval of another who rarely gives it in order to keep his or her victims always a bit hungry, trying harder and harder to find that approval that is withheld.
I have a gay cousin who believes that he can find happiness if he just finds the right husband who loves him unconditionally and has sex with him whenever he wants it. Gradually he is beginning to understand that no perfect soul mate can bestow happiness upon him; he must find it for himself. It has been difficult for him to discover that passion has a definite shelf life and that all relationships have some measure of disappointment.
All relationships are U-shaped. If one thing exists that is fundamental to the social meaning of marriage, it’s monogamy, but passion in a relationship has a finite shelf life. Each relationship begins with the magic of Romance, a blending of lust and love. Then an aura of disappointment sets in, and try as we might, the original, unsullied attraction that drew us into the relationship is impossible to recapture. All three of the major relationships in my life have followed this course. When I was married to my wife, Lynn, we started with a strong connection and a high degree of commitment to the traditional values of marriage. Falling in love with Roberto corrupted that relationship with Lynn and it fell to the bottom of the U. Because I could not let go of my sexual orientation, our relationship just lay there at the bottom of the curve, and we could not slog our way out of it.
If one thing exists that is fundamental to the social meaning of marriage, it’s monogamy, but passion in a relationship has a finite shelf life.
When I fell in love with Roberto, the relationship started off at a point even higher than my relationship with Lynn. I believed he was my perfect soul mate, but I had created him to fill the empty spots in my life. The illusion of the perfect soul mate was ripped away rather quickly and culminated with his beating me, excising any interest I had in trying to form a new and different relationship with him.
Doug and I have followed the U-shaped curve to a different place than I did in my relationships with Lynn and Roberto. After about twenty-five years in the relationship we came to a point of considering dissolving it. We fell into a pattern of blaming each other for all the problems in our relationship without examining our own contribution to those problems. Both of us avoid conflict whenever we can so many of the little sparks conflagrated into a large wildfire. We lost trust in each other.
But at the bottom of the curve, when we were both thinking that perhaps there was someone else out there that might make us happier, we came to realize that what we had was worth hanging on to. We began to ask whether we could begin afresh and build a second relationship based on the same values we had when we originally committed to one another. Our choice was either to move on or accept that the person we loved was imperfect—but even more, to admit that we also were imperfect.
In her TED talk “Rethinking Infidelity,” Esther Perel said that relationships can achieve no higher level of development than the level of each partner’s maturity. She said that people who cheat often believe in monogamy, but they find their values and behavior in conflict when they actually have an affair.25 But instead of changing partners for that last dance, Doug and I decided to find in our last dance some of the magic we had found in our first dance so that we wouldn’t have to sacrifice all of the memories, all of the relationships, all of the life we had shared for the previous twenty-five years.
When I speak to groups I often ask the audience to raise their hands if they prefer chocolate ice cream or vanilla. Puzzled looks cross their faces as the chocolate lovers raise their hands followed by the vanilla lovers. Then I ask, “Who’s right?” Obviously neither answer is correct, but so often we believe that our own opinion outweighs the opinion of others. In insisting on the correctness of our preference, we deny the humanity of others and their right to have an opinion that differs from our own. We often make that mistake in our intimate personal relationships, as Doug and I had in ours. The more we insist that our partners satisfy our needs in a relationship, the more dissatisfied we become. Loving another is giving him the freedom to love chocolate or vanilla, and being loved is being accepted for our own choices.
As Doug and I gained control over the wildfire in our relationship, we focused on both mindfulness and meaningfulness. We began to focus on the joy of each day we shared without wondering if someone better would come along to rescue us when some days were darker. We also began to realize that the most meaningful aspect of our lives was the relationship we had with each other as well as those relationships with families and friends that we shared. The food at the family reunion potluck is not what brings us all together.
Loving another is giving him the freedom to love chocolate or vanilla, and being loved is being accepted for our own choices.
If we were to thrive in our relationship rather than just survive, Doug and I needed to make some changes. We had to begin talking with each other instead of someone else about things that weren’t working in our relationship and accepting responsibility rather than blaming. We had to let go of our anger because, as the saying goes, “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Trust, once damaged, can be difficult to reestablish but being more honest with each other than we had been allowed the trust to return. Trustworthiness in ourselves and each other was a value we shared. When Doug and I first began dating, I told him I worried that he would leave. His response was, “If I’m still here in the morning, you’ll know I’m still committed.” Another interpretation of that is to be mindful of the present and stop worrying about tomorrow. One way or another, all relationships end. Love and risk are inseparable. Tonight we’ll go to bed together, and I hope that he’s still there in the morning.
Gay men frequently have different expectations about monogamy in their relationships than heterosexual couples do. Some monogamous gay couples experience a relationship that feels too narrow, with no room even for male platonic friendships. In a New York Times article, Scott James reported that about 50 percent of gay couples surveyed have sex outside their relationships with the knowledge and approval of their partners.26 Statistics like these have been used as evidence that gay men are incapable of long-term, committed relationships. As Romance and passion diminish, love may exist without desire. New attractions cause excitement to build, judgment to fail, and trouble to begin.
Our culture socializes men to be independent, and some male couples seek to reduce their dependence on each other by seeking sex outside the relationship. Some couples consider their relationships open but run into problems when the members of the couple lack agreement about how nonexclusiveness will be managed. Nonmonogamous sex can interfere with sexual desire for the spouse, and if adventures become regular, they can become destructive in the relationship. Couples sometimes introduce a third person into their sexual relationship to add excitement, but problems result if the primary spousal relationship is already strained and one of the pair feels left out.
Cheating can be an occasional indiscretion or it can become habitual. It can lead to lying about sexual exclusivity and undermining trust in a relationship. Cheating can also become the preferred way of getting needs met or a way of acting out anger. Although gay male couples may be sexually nonmonogamous, most will remain emotionally monogamous; the emotional commitment to their partner binds them together more than the nonexclusive sex pulls them apart.
While I was seeing Roberto, we were both married. We both understood that we were cheating on our wives. We each justified our behavior with our own personal rationalizations, however weak. Attaching oneself to more than one person emotionally is possible, but loving more than one person is very difficult to do. The question “Did you have sex with that person?” is what most people who’ve been betrayed insist upon asking, but emotional infidelity is far more damaging to a relationship than sexual infidelity. Once loyalty shifts and trust is broken, it can be very difficult, though not impossible, to reestablish a solid relationship. In seeking resolution, the individuals in the relationship lock themselves into conflict if they focus only on how the other person could have betrayed them without asking what they might have done to contribute to the weakening of the relationship.
Emotional infidelity is far more damaging to a relationship than sexual infidelity.
Some people, both gay and straight, are turning to what they call responsible nonmonogamy or polyamory. Polyamory literally means many loves. No statistics are available for how common polyamory is. Proponents of polyamory believe that humans experience varying degrees of loving others. They see the barrier between friends and lovers as permeable. Polyamory follows rules of polyfidelity, or fidelity within a closed system. In polyamory, the primary relationship takes on the characteristics of a spousal relationship with a high degree of commitment; all other relationships are subordinate. Secondary relationships involve both emotional and sexual intimacy and are enduring, but the secondary relationship does not carry the power or authority of the primary relationship.
One man spoke of his twenty-five-year relationship with his partner, who became impotent after surgery for cancer of the prostate. Although he continues to love his partner, he also loves another man with whom he has engaged in a daily, long-term Internet relationship that includes webcam sex, as sexually intimate as it can be in two dimensions. Variations are seemingly endless. Many find it difficult to comprehend that a man can love a woman while preferring to have sex with another man. Many of these men claim to have a good sex life with women, all the while knowing that for them sex with a man is more satisfying. I know of several pairs of heterosexually married couples in which the two men have developed ongoing, long-term sexual relationships with each other. They sought these relationships as a way of dealing with their same-sex attractions with their other foot planted in a heteronormative world. The families are friends, travel together, and seem content. Others I know have been open with their wives about their male sexual partners; their wives have agreed to share their spouse with a man rather than accept a divorce. Even in those situations where they do divorce, these men may never define themselves as gay.
The most common problems in these relationships are predictable. When someone new is brought into the system, sexual interest focuses intensely on the newest member, and triangulation of relationships results in possessiveness and jealousy. Frequency of sexual intimacy between the primary spousal partners may diminish. Schedules and an overriding commitment to children complicate these relationships. To be successful, all relationships within the system must be respected. They must be based on honesty and authenticity rather than sex alone. Members must also be assertive to get their own needs met and boundaries and limits must be respected.
In “Morituri Salutamus,” a poem for the class of 1825 at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote:
But why, you ask me, should this tale be told
To men grown old, or who are growing old?
It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.27
The words opportunity and aging are rarely used in the same sentence, but as we age we have extraordinary opportunities we’ve never had before and will never have again. We have gained wisdom from the experience of making good and sometimes bad choices. Aging tames the limbic system, the part of our brain that controls our emotions and is the source of the dopamine that makes us crazy. We are free to think more rationally. Testosterone levels drop and lower our sex drive to more manageable levels. We can think more rationally than we’ve ever thought before and from a substantially different perspective than we did earlier in our lives. We reexamine our value system and make it our own.
We can understand our history in new ways. We can examine the value system we were given and make one of our own, keeping the best parts and discarding those that don’t work. We can learn to value the gifts we were given instead of envying the gifts of others. We can value our friends for who they are, not what they can do for us. We can make ourselves vulnerable and let others know us deeply. We can learn to make love in slow time, not because we have to but because we want to. We can be the first to say “I love you.”
We can learn to play and take a leap into the world of imagination. We have the freedom of time and the freedom from our overscheduled lives, but we must stop being frightened by the limited amount of time we have left. We can appreciate time as an experience rather than a measurement. We can establish new priorities. The clock is ticking, and as I inventory my bucket list, I’m checking some things off knowing I will never do them. What continues to rise to the top of that list is sharing deliciously long afternoons sitting with friends I love and sharing the stories of our lives. When I get ready to move to that assisted living place in my future, the stoneware bowls that I collected for years will go in the tag sale, but that hand-cranked ice-cream freezer will go to my granddaughter.
You have one possible life composed of a chain of connected moments. Savor each moment. Nurture important relationships. Be authentic. Do the things that give your life meaning. Let your past become history and the future be a surprise. Make this day the best time in your life.