esrosedotblog

It is gay pride weekend here. We don't celebrate it when everyone else does, around the middle of June. June is the beginning of the dead season here in the desert so the gay resorts who are the ones supporting the festival see that date as a lost business opportunity. The first weekend in November is the beginning of the "season" here and so it is also the weekend that we will be the proudest of being gay. I am not too cynical about this. I wouldn't much be involved if it were in June around Stonewall time. It is not that I am un-proud. I am proud enough of my gay life and the gay "movement" as it has evolved so quickly in the last several decades. There is a huge difference today in every realm of gay rights. For example, it is hard to find much "coming out" literature or movies or other activities which highlight this momentous event from all our lives. Most gay people now are quite familiar with the existence of other gay people at an early age. Television, movies, school. The news. There is certainly an adjustment to the way we are brought up which is still resolutely heterosexual. They don't know how to bring up a gay baby after all. But it is a smoother path. No one pays much attention to their parents anyway. Besides, sexual identity is not a matter of rebellion so much as a recovery from the inevitable influence of the same false values that young straight people have to contend with particularly if the family is religious or strongly traditional. Now, the gay twist almost eases the path for gay kids. Personally I am proud of my earned identity as a gay man even though I have been gay from the beginning. As basic as my other genetic stuff. The way I acted it out was different throughout my life. I became actively homosexual, really did it, as a college student and then tried to put that aside and to have a conventional life as a straight man. Such were the Fifties. Hard scrabbling for a gay boy. While I had a great time with a great woman with great kids and am still proud of that too, it became inevitable that the gay gravity would bring me back to my own reality. I had to make a second life, this one out in the open. Much sooner than I planned, I met a man that I wanted to share my life with and so I went from out and about to out and in a relationship which, as it turns out, was a model for many other gay men. I speak proudly as humbly as I can about that. We started to work on the marriage thing very early together and finally were able to get married and to still retain our families on both sides. It was hard work but we had the advantage of loving family members and friends. Now, here we are not so much marching in a rights parade as to basking slightly in the pride of having made it up and out of the old, now more passé social ostracism that a lot of gay men had to endure. Proud. And, most of all, happy. And I don't much "buy gay" which is what I see a lot of gay pride celebrations have become.

Andre Gregory is a moderately well known stage actor and a not so well known occasional film actor He, most notably, appeared in a reality film with Wally Shawn a number of years back. They had dinner together. Neither Shawn or Gregory got over its success and they continued to work together over the years. And still are. The biopic Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner made by Gregory's wife is a bit pretentious and, in the early parts of it, boring and not very illuminating. Somewhere in the second half, through Gregory's monologues, we hear the story of his father and how Dad influenced him so much. I am a sucker for this kind of thing and sort of enjoyed it even with some of the posturing and over exposure. I am glad I saw it but once is enough and when someone's wife has made a film about them it might be best to take a pass. A 2 out of Netflix5. I did watch to the end and did not FF. Even when I wanted to. I did RW a few times to recapture parts where I found I had dozed off for a bit and lost the thread. Not good. Dozing or the problem picking up when something doesn't quite get across.

Labels: coming out, films, gay identity, gay life