Maybe if I start at the end this will make a sort of beginning. It will do something like answering questions. The straight up essay was something I never mastered. This was the complaint of a few professors and the reason I never became one. But then I don’t think many people rush to read an essay. So, oh well….
A year ago I wanted to write a book about men. Well, not only a year ago, but many times. And this would have been a book where I got many men, most of them straight, to tell the truth about many questions. But men are liars and so this never really panned out. I thought, how will I tackle this subject? But then doesn’t it make more sense to address the subject of one man instead of all men and that man be me? Doesn’t it make more sense to answer my questions and tell my story? And maybe somewhere in this story I will tell something that in time people will think of as a man’s spirituality, or a book about men. I thought, I will assemble—and I will do this with the help of many of my queer brothers, a story, or a set of stories about men. I hesitated because I thought, well this will only be about queer men. But what if through queer men we began to tell a more honest story of all men? And what if through this one queer man—this me—we began to tell a more general truth?
I type so fast there is nothing but typos in this rough draft. Things go through my mind like the dismal failure many of my brothers have in trying to date each other, like my failed almost boyfriend who, when we might have become something, some thing real, he chose to betray me and go to bed with the first woman he saw. Like a book, called The Velvet Rage where a psychiatrist goes on and on about the problems of gay men and I think, no you are describing the problems of white men with money who happen to be gay. And no fool, the problems you are describing as gay are the problems of all men, and of all people. And how unsuitable this book was, how it began, with a heavy footed naiveté to solve the problems of certain men. And I am thinking of last night, at the party, when I began to fall in love with someone who began to fall in love with me and I thought, we could fumble toward something.
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