“My head knows moving on is best, but….”

“My love for my husband was so great that I am having a very difficult time considering another man,” Jean, age 74, wrote to me. “My head knows moving on is best, but my heart puts up a very good fight. Yes, it gets very lonely at times and then, at other times, I appreciate the solitude. I do believe that at this age, finding someone with whom you are compatible from a distance is best. His and her homes with visitations rights, perks, and genuinely being there for one another sounds like a plan to me! Easy to say and difficult to find!”

Jean’s email came at exactly the moment that I was trying to make sense of similar feelings. I had a “date” with a man with whom I had shared an intensely sensual relationship 27 years ago, when I was 40 and he (get ready) was 23. We had enjoyed each other immensely, then both of us had gone on to other relationships, and he had moved many states away.

Suddenly we discovered that we would be in the same city last Saturday. With anticipation and fantasies abounding, we made arrangements to meet.
How lovely, I daydreamed. Here’s a smart, gentle, witty man from my past, who gloried in giving me pleasure, and we were always able to talk candidly. Surely the 27 years apart could be wiped out for an evening of sensual nostalgia, couldn’t it? I needed to rise from grief and rediscover my sensuality with a live person rather than with sex toys. This sweet man could be the one to take my hand and lead me there.

We met, we hugged, we talked excitedly about where our lives and loves had taken us in the past decades. But then… when the time came to kiss and discover… I couldn’t. I felt myself sinking into sadness. His kiss wasn’t Robert’s. His body type wasn’t Robert’s. I pulled away.

“I really hoped I would respond sexually to you,” I told him, “but I’m not.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, cradling my head against his chest.

“I even packed condoms and lubricant, and chose my underwear with care,” I added. He laughed with me at that last revelation. “But it’s just not happening. I still miss Robert so much.”

“Tell me about him,” he said, maybe the sweetest comment he could have made.

I am grateful to my friend for his understanding, although I didn’t know whether to laugh or cringe when I read “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be” on his Facebook page early the next day. I decided to laugh and post the comment, “Here’s to nostalgia.”

So when Jean wrote to me just after my friend and I parted, I had to agree with her sentiment, “My head knows moving on is best, but my heart puts up a very good fight.”

A Birthday Without Robert

11/8/2010: Two days from my 67th birthday, and I miss Robert terribly. He always made such a fuss over me on my birthday, cooking me a special meal (vegan mushroom stroganoff and vegan chocolate mousse, for example), writing loving messages in carefully chosen cards, and either buying or painting something special for me.

He painted a wooden cigar box to create a beautiful jewelry box to hold the earrings he delighted in gifting me. He decorated little boxes for me. He was moved by a story I wrote and painted a folder to hold it. He even decorated a cane when I was injured and couldn’t walk unassisted.
Whenever he painted something utilitarian for me, he always included a heart, sometimes easy to find, like the box above, sometimes needing a concentrated hunt because he hid the heart in the design. He would watch me search for it, sometimes shaking his head because I was blindly missing it.  
The most wonderful gift was this Kimono painting he created for me for Christmas 2002. The hanging parts are painted on muslin; the “sleeves” are on canvas. He became well known for these kimono paintings and was able to sell as many as he could paint.

 

Then, having learned he had cancer and didn’t know how much time he would have to work, he decided he would do no more kimonos, no more “pretty paintings,” in fact.
 
Instead, he delved into his soul and his drive to develop as an artist and painted some of his best work. See it here:  
 
I know I’m moving forward after two years and three months wihout Robert — new experiences, new friends, new accomplishments, even dipping my toes into dating. I can’t bring him back, so I must live my life without him.
 
But anyone who has grieved knows that special days like birthdays and holidays pack such a punch that our gut recoils, our heart fills with holes, and the healing seeps out. Grief isn’t linear, it’s cyclical. Each time, as my uncle Larry Leshan tells me (he lost Eda LeShan, his wife of 58 years), “Although the knife is as sharp, it doesn’t cut as deep or as often.”
 
“To my wife on her birthday,” Robert’s final birthday card to me said. “Every day with you is more special than the last. All my love to you, today and always. Robert 2007.”
 

Prayers for Bobby today: Gay kids committing suicide

Gay teens are killing themselves — two 13-year-olds due to bullying (see this terrific blog post by Sue Katz), and a college student whose tryst was videoed and put online. It sickens me that young people just discovering their sexuality feel so vulnerable that it’s easier to die than to live. Those of us who have lived long enough to know ourselves, accept ourselves (including our sexuality — whatever its stripes or colors), and find or create a community that lets us live fully and honestly have a responsibility to pass this along to young people.


That’s how Leroy Aarons felt at age 61, and that’s why I’m repeating the following post from January 2009. I don’t know if you can find the Lifetime movie now, but the book is as valuable now as the day it was written. Please read it, then pass it along to someone who needs it. A life may depend on it.


Here’s what I wrote in January 2009:

At age 61, prizewinning journalist Leroy Aarons discovered the true story of Bobby Griffith, a story so gripping that he devoted himself to retelling this story in novel form.

His book, Prayers for Bobby, has inspired a movie premiering on Lifetime TV, Saturday, January 24, 2009. It is the riveting true story of teenager Bobby Griffith, who back-flipped off a freeway overpass into the path of a tractor trailer at age 20 because he could not accept his homosexuality. Prayers for Bobby chronicles Bobby’s angst at growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian family and an anti-homosexual social and school environment. Aarons gently and lovingly pieces together Bobby’s life, fears, hopes and, finally, hopelessness, with the help of the five year diary he left, his legacy.

Prayers for Bobby (subtitle: A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son) is also the story of Mary Griffith, Bobby’s mother, played by Sigourney Weaver in the Lifetime movie. A staunch, one-tracked fundamentalist, Mary was convinced that if she and Bobby just prayed enough, and if Bobby tried hard enough, God would cure him of his homosexuality. She prayed, she nagged Bobby relentlessly, she shamed him, she put Bible quotes on the mirror for him to see when he wakened. Too late, Mary finally realized with a thunderbolt of insight that the reason God had refused to cure Bobby was that there was nothing wrong with him.

What does this have to do with our age group? Plenty. Think about how we had to discover our own sexual and sensual natures despite the mores of our restrictive society in an era that condemned what seemed our most natural feelings and desires. Imagine being trapped in a world that didn’t understand you at a time you couldn’t even understand yourself. And reach out.

If you think you don’t know any closeted gay teenagers, it’s only because they are closeted. Maybe your “Bobby” is your grandson, or your granddaughter’s best friend, or the neighbor kid, or the quiet boy at church. We’ve learned a lot about life and about sexuality in the decades we’ve been living on this earth, and part of it is to accept ourselves and open ourselves to younger folks who might need a role model, a listening ear, and a warm “so good to see you today.”

Please see the movie, and read the book, which goes into much more detail and will haunt you in a beautiful way.

I am proud that I knew Leroy Aarons until his death four years ago, called him my friend Roy, and still enjoy a close friendship with Joshua Boneh, his surviving spouse. Please check out the website that Joshua and Roy’s friends have constructed in Roy’s memory and to celebrate the movie that he always hoped would be made about his book.

(photo of Leroy Aarons and Joshua Boneh)

Betty Dodson at 81: “out loud and sex-proud”

Betty Dodson has influenced my thinking and my sexual self-acceptance for decades. Her 1974 book, Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self-Love, morphed into Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving. At 69, Betty met a young man of 22 who arrived for a weekend and stayed ten years, inspiring Orgasms for Two: The Joy of Partnersex. Her most recent book is her memoir, Betty Dodson: My Sexual Revolution, available as a Kindle edition.

Betty, with sidekick and business partner Carlin Ross, runs a website where she answers sex questions  from readers, posts articles and videos, and displays the famous Genital Art Gallery, which aims to show all of us that we’re just perfect the way we are, “a research project where both women and men can share as well as appreciate the vast diversity of our magnificent sex organs.”

I am deliriously happy that this icon of candid sexuality wrote the foreword to my new book, Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex! In it, she talks about how her sexuality changed through the decades, and how, at 81, she’s still “out loud and sex-proud.”

I have to admit it — I got shivers when I read the latest email from Betty, where she addressed me as “Sister Warrior.” It doesn’t get much better than that!

(To be notified when Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex is available, please email me and I’ll put you on the notification list. I will not spam you, sell or share your information, or in any way abuse your trust.)