Hundreds more articles like this can be found
at the Kink Mentoring Archives… Spread the word!
The page listing all of the articles in this series can be found here,
I was interviewed on the Masocast podcast a few months back. It could easily have gone on twenty times longer. I do tend to go on and on! I talk about a lot of philosophy in relation to being kinky, and being part of a larger community.
Being a loudmouth who loves to talk, I have been asked to share memories many, many times over the years. My memory is failing, so please don’t expect perfect recall. I am doing the best that I can.
Here are a few old ones from the archives:
KPBS video
San Diego’s Gay Bar History
I show up around the halfway point. I have been told (many times by strangers who come up to me on the street) that I was the emotional core of the documentary. They interviewed my buddy Mark and me for many hours, but we only take up about six minutes of the one-hour documentary.
So, I asked the producers to donate ALL of the unedited interview footage to the local GLBTQ Archives, since nobody had ever asked us those questions before, and may never do so again.
GaySanDiego Magazine Audio
In an interview over lunch, the writer was only able to get the first twenty minutes into the magazine, ending about twenty years ago. This audio link contains all of the interview.
Trigger Warning!
This article and this one go deeper, but I have found that they tend to distress gay men who have been through the same pain of loss and grieving from living through the AIDS Holocaust. I needed catharsis, which is why I had a huge, very public emotional breakdown at the time.
I needed to give my pain to the universe so that I could begin the Elder phase of my life. It worked, and I am not as fragile as I was, before I let it all go (as much as I was able).
My Verbal History
A few years back, I recorded about 5.5 hours of stories from the 1970′s and 1980′s gay leathermen’s community, over the course of two sessions. I tell fun, sassy stories from the glory days of the gay leathermen’s Tribe in the mid-1970′s. I wrote many of the same stories down, here.
I also deal as directly as I can with what it was like when everyone was dying around me. Before doing so, I invited the local gay men’s kinky community to listen in, so that I would have an audience to speak to.
Around seventy men showed up, and the average age was in the late 20′s. They explained to me that I was the first man of my generation to TELL them what actually happened.
I have two older brothers who went to Viet Nam. To my knowledge, they have never told anyone what happened to them, due to PTSD. They didn’t want to be a dreary burden on their loved ones, so they have stayed very emotionally remote, probably until the day that they die.
I did my best to share openly during the recordings, but I hit a wall toward the end. I simply couldn’t make myself go on. The pain was too intense. I still struggle with that.
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