Starts gay, ends up old and incontinent

I date my official coming out to a journal entry I wrote when I was fourteen. It had the exciting title of "Confession" and began with many sentences of dramatic preparation: what I am about to say is so deep, so dark; whoever finds this confession will discover a great secret, and I pray they will come from a time more understanding and accepting than my own; please prepare yourself, reader, for anything, because the shock will be greater than you could ever dream, and so on. And then I eventually used the H word and the G word and even attempted to describe my physical attraction to men, ending with this very scandalous statement: "And then there's the organ."

I wrote the journal entry in late December, not too many days after I had seen Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands. I had been trying to figure out why the fairy-tale movie was haunting me, and I eventually realized I had fallen in love with the title character. A robot, yes, which might make me automatosexual, but a male robot and -- incidentally -- a Johnny Depp robot.

Of course, it wasn't just Edward. I had even written entries before where I discussed homosexuality, occasionally inscribing soft prayers that homosexuality was not the reason for that deep-down feeling of strangeness or otherness or unbelongingness. I heard the whispers about Tchaikovsky and Liberace and felt a kinship that I resisted: "Please don't let me be like you, Peter Ilyich!" I whispered while racing my bike through the tunnel on the way to Lake Peachtree.

This was sixteen years ago. Sixteen years ago. And fourteen years ago my first kiss. I am getting old. I am waiting to see what kind of old person I will become. Will it happen overnight or gradually? I am waiting for hair to turn gray and fall. I am waiting for happy expressions to turn into wrinkles. I am waiting for aches and pains.

I do not exercise, and my metabolism is letting me down, but I've sworn to keep walking. I've sworn to take stairs two at a time. I've sworn to keep moving. The body won't know it's old if it doesn't have time to mull.

This is not vanity; this is the dream of immortality. And it is biological . . . and senseless. We really are incredibly well programmed to want life. I want to live forever, but what a cage! Do I really want to live in this meat for eternity? No; instead, I must spread my consciousness as far as it can go, mingle and mate it with -- you know -- the stars. It little matters how limber my bones, how regular my bowels.

My parents' visit

More pictures of my parents' visit to the Bay Area are here.

Review: Libby Larsen's Every Man Jack

"OK, I admit: if the baritone hadn't been perfect, the opera would have been intolerable."

All the same, I enjoyed Libby Larsen's new opera, Every Man Jack, based plotlessly and schizophrenically on the alcoholic life of Jack London. Philip Littell's libretto is overly psychoanalytical and heavy-handed (the London onstage alternates between the big, strong adult who wrote about wolves and a young weakling of a boy -- played especially weakly by a tenor who, it was announced, was suffering a cold and desired our indulgences -- whose early and nearly-accidental experiment with alcohol in childhood would incline him for life), but it is also full of beautiful words: "I have been dying, I have been dying," London gasps, "since the day I was born: a skeleton in my skin."

So much is overwrought and pretentious (even this). Larsen and Littell could have followed the polestar of simplicity in this opera of an American frontiersman, but perhaps they felt that would be too easy. Instead, they gave us a hiccuping fantasy of London's life: scenes from his childhood, his marriage, the local bar, the local vaudeville, the local whorehouse, and nightmares of noseless, grinning skulls. Larsen's music (as she states in the program notes) is a pastiche of the musical styles that would have surrounded London, but the orchestration is a touch too deliberate, too virtuosic.

What was wonderful? What made me sit up? Being in an intimate theater in the modest frontier town of Rohnert Park, California, ten feet from Rod Gilfry, who may in fact be an actor with gorgeous pipes and the seemingly carefree know-how to use them healthily and beautifully. Gilfry performed subtleties with his face -- mouth, tongue, teeth, cheeks, eyes -- and body that created more of a character than Jack London ever could have been. Words and song that easily could have been rendered as melodramatic buffoonery became sensitive and human in his care. Even the lonely call of the wolf, which Larsen and Littell beat us over the head with by sending howling singers out into the audience, was chilling and sad from his lungs.

This little American opera, this psychotic little frontier piece, will not likely survive in big halls and big towns. But it brought Rod Gilfry to a little town in Sonoma, and for that I'm grateful.

Homosexuals

There's much to talk about, but for now I simply give you a line from Jean Genet's sexy Querelle of Brest:

They are peace-loving citizens of irreproachable outward appearance, even though, the long day through, they may perhaps suffer from a rather timid itch for a bit of cock.

Casual Recital

Again, we clock out for a few hours to bring you . . .

A Casual Recital
November 5, 2006
4 P.M.
Berkeley, California

Trio No. 1 in d minor, Felix Mendelssohn
I. Molto allegro ed agitato
II. Andante con moto tranquillo
III. Leggiero e vivace
IV. Allegro assai appassionato

Four songs, Henri Duparc
L’invitation au voyage
Lamento
Soupir
La vie antérieure

pause

Sonata No. 1 in D major for violin and piano, Ludwig van Beethoven
I. Allegro con brio
II. Andante con moto
III. Allegro

Four songs, Claude Debussy
Beau soir
Nuit d’étoiles
Il pleure dans mon coeur
Mandoline

Songs to be announced, Gabriel Faure

Valse triste for violin and piano, Jean Sibelius