In the effort to be less ‘gay’ and less ‘reclusive,’ I’m ‘rebranding’ with a new blog written by ‘Matthew Gallaway’, which not coincidentally is the name I’ve used for my novel The Metropolis Case, which will most likely publish at some point in 2k10. I hope you’ll join me there! Please let me know if you love/hate the new design, or if you have any technical difficulties with feeds/subscriptions/linkage. Hope to see u soon — miss u! xoxo TGR

Though undeniably bright, there is a stark quality to the March sun that makes the phlox (and the sempervivum) seem — oddly — both luminous and bedraggled.

The silver veins of the surrounding rocks add to this quality, and for a second I dreamed I was in the mountains of _____. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever visit a desert/mountain/rain forest and think: this place looks so familiar, I have seen it in a small garden in Washington Heights.

In this post, the garden is a metaphor for the city, while the plants and rocks are elements of the past that we may or may not recognize until we see them in the present (possibly while lost, driving around in the most labyrinthian sections of Queens/Riverdale/Lower East Side circa 1988).

(American gay fiction writer and flickering beacon during the Dark Ages of post-war American fiction) James Purdy died today, and as so often happens, The Times obit neglected to explicitly state that he was gay/queer/homosexual/vext. Not that you could really hide it in Purdy’s case, given that the subject matter of his books so often dealt with such themes, and to be fair, the obit did not fail to discuss his work in these terms.

But according to our friend John — who is in a position to know such things — Purdy spent a lot of time ‘chasing after young men many decades younger than him,’ which I suppose is simply beyond what The Times is about to include in any obituary. Still, it’s fun to imagine: “As a gay man who lived in New York City for close to sixty years, Purdy was never partnered, but ravished approximately 40,682 men — many barely out of their teens! — and in his later years was never seen without a posse of young admirers.”

Although the obituary makes the case reasonably well that Purdy was an Important But Neglected American Writer — which is true (and if you haven’t read him, we recommend starting with Eustace Chisholm and the Works) — there is a somewhat disturbing soullessness to the piece as a whole, a hovering ‘lonely bachelor’ aura that makes it feel just a little sad/stereotypical, as if Purdy was ‘a lonely and bitter homosexual’ without a trace of love or passion in his life. (Who knows, maybe that’s true.)

Or maybe I’m just thinking about how I would want my own obituary to be written, i.e., even if I had written 20 novels that were/were not critically acclaimed, and even if I didn’t have a boyfriend/partner/spouse/husband (something ‘culturally sanctioned’ for The Times to mention) I would still want a few words dedicated to some aspect of ‘being human’ or perhaps just being ‘alive’ (by which I mean a capacity to feel/love, even if it’s not necessarily feelings for another person).

E.g., “An admirer of the Brooklyn Bridge, Purdy was known to make a point of walking across it at least 300 times per year.” Or: “In addition to writing books, Purdy collected flower-themed stamps, for which he held a lifelong obsession.” Or: “Purdy had a beagle named Stanley who for many years never left his side, and was often seen dining with him in restaurants.” Or: “Purdy loved nothing more than a good salad!”

When I read about death — and particularly about that of an artist or writer — I want to see some signs of ‘real life,’ some indication that perhaps this person was a ‘lil obsessive’ and not just a robot in the bourgeois capitalist society/factory in which we’ve all been slated to pass these recent decades; if it’s not there, the risk is that you put down the paper (a metaphor) and think ‘what’s the point?’ which is a completely different level of neglect, and one that none of us really deserve.

This is a blog called ‘The Gay Recluse.’ Here you will find words designed to provoke or stimulate or anger or entertain or bore you to death. Moreover, ‘The Gay Recluse’ is a fictional character written by another fictional character named ‘Matthew Gallaway,’ who in turn is played by ‘an actor’ named Matthew Gallaway.

Just as this is a photograph of a bridge and not the real bridge, Matthew Gallaway — again, via The Gay Recluse — should not be confused with ‘the real person’ — i.e., the actor — much less his past or future, which is sometimes depicted here in ways that to the uncritical observer might appear to ‘resemble the truth.’

Rather, we ask readers to consider these words as you would lines in a movie, which while at times may appear very close to a ‘biopic’ should not be confused with ‘real life.’  Most of all, we beg you to resist the temptation to use these words to bludgeon or provoke those who — like children or the mentally infirm — are suspectible to confusing words with reality, or for whatever reason lack the acuity (or desire) to appreciate this construct.

Or to put it more plainly: whatever you do, please don’t feel compelled to tell our fifth-grade teacher Mr. W___ (if you happen to bump into him) that we made fun of the polyester pants he wore (not to mention his ‘macho perm’) so that all of sudden we have him yelling at us on FB! (Note: this is a metaphor, and in no way should be understood to be something that ‘actually happened.’)

This is a blog called ‘The Gay Recluse.’ It is filled with words and images. It is a story about life (i.e., it is not a Tumblr). It is a fabrication. It is meaningful/meaningless only as a work of art. Any insight you gain from it is into your own soul, not ours.

Lately we’ve been thinking about how much we still kinda h8 the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer.’  Though we know that many in ‘the community’ consider this a ‘settled issue’ — and perhaps this is a vestige of our own self-h8red, which is not small by any measure — we still generally feel uncomfortable identifying with either term beyond the most perfunctory shorthand, like when d-bags in the locker room are talking about how they want to ‘bone some broad’ and they look in our direction for validation we’re like ‘stfu — we’re gay.’

We went to dictionary.com and looked up gay:

Gay –adjective

1. having or showing a merry, lively mood: gay spirits; gay music.
2. bright or showy: gay colors; gay ornaments.
3. given to or abounding in social or other pleasures: a gay social season.
4. licentious; dissipated; wanton: The baron is a gay old rogue with an eye for the ladies. [Ed. wait -- what?]
5. homosexual.
6. of, indicating, or supporting homosexual interests or issues: a gay organization.

If  you’re like us, none of these definitions remotely captures anything about your life, except maybe numbers five and six, to the extent that it’s synonymous with “non-heterosexual.” But as we all know, “homosexual” is a scientific term invented in the late 1800s and thus cannot be used without sounding like you’re an animal in the zoo, e.g., “Yall, let’s get a grant to study the homosexuals! We heard that they have enlarged brains/thumbs/swirly hairdos/six-packs!”

So what about queer?

–adjective

1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular: a queer notion of justice.
2. of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: Something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away.
3. not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer.
4. mentally unbalanced or deranged.
5. Slang/Disparaging and Offensive a. homosexual. b.effeminate; unmanly.
6. Slang bad, worthless, or counterfeit.

We understand the idea of ‘reclaiming your identity’ — kinda like how all the kids on the subway call each other ‘nigga’ — but do you srsly want to be called queer? We don’t! (Might be ‘too old’.)  ‘Columbia University has excellent academic programs in Nigga Studies and Queer Studies?’ What makes one soooo much more ‘acceptable’ than the other?

While many of you may or may not agree, in either case we suspect you’d like to challenge us to come up with something better. After all, these terms have many decades of history/study behind them, and it’s possible to envision a day 100,000 years in the future when they might be entirely divorced from the superficial/derogatory meanings from which they originally arose.

Our solution is vexed.

1. irritated; annoyed: vexed at the slow salesclerks.
2. much discussed or disputed: a vexed question.
3. tossed about, as waves.
4 [Proposed as of 2k9]. non-heterosexual.*

*Although we don’t ever endorse the use of adjectives as nouns except in an ironic context — ‘the gays were upset that Madonna/Cher/Britney canceled her tour’ — we propose the alternate form ‘vext’ to allow for similar uses, e.g., ‘the vexts lobbied hard in Albany/DC yet achieved nothing despite Democratic majorities in both houses.’

Seriously, how much more ‘empowering’ and — especially w/r/t definition number three — poetic is ‘vexed’ than any other alternative? It’s basically like saying: ‘Don’t fuck with me/us,’ while maintaining a certain and appropriate degree of intelligence and impatience (but not anger or violence, which we don’t support) for mainstream convention that frankly needs to be a hallmark going forward in any interaction with those str8s who don’t ‘get it.’

Try it out. ‘Yall, don’t talk bullshit to me about _____! I’m vexed!’ In politics. ‘Yall should be able to ‘get married’ if you’re vexed.’ Or for students of literature: ‘Marcel Proust was the best novelist of all-time; not coincidentally, like most great novelists except during the dark ages from 1945  to 2010 — he was vexed.’ Note also that ladies are equally welcome to be vexed, and won’t be appropriating a tired old term like gay, which inevitably makes them (as usual) second-class citizens on the gender front.

We are not gay or queer.

We are tossed about, as waves.

We are vext.

Until now, all of the Death Culture at Sea songs have been recorded with an acoustic guitar that frankly needs to be worked on a bit, and then we added distortion and all other effects ex poste facto.

With this song, we finally retrieved our 1960s (“blackface”) Fender Princeton Reverb from our friend’s apartment where it’s been living for almost six hundred years and broke out the electric guitar — a pre-CBS Telecaster Custom — which has also been in hibernation. We barely added any effects to anything, just a lil reverb here and there. We recorded it a “bit too hot” — which is why it’s breaking up — but bear with us! We’re pretty much the opposite of natural engineers.

Listen on our Tumblr

or

Download from the Death Culture at Sea site.

“Dreams of Sunsets and Cathedrals”

Let’s trade the keys to the past
And quickly copy our hearts
Memories of a thousands days
A down payment in part

The years have passed through today
Leaving us numb with the task
Of holding on to this one single rope
We know was frayed in the past

Seven years in the sunlight
We were bathed in the glow
I’m sorry to leave this life behind
I never thought I would go

Come with me to the ocean waves
It helps me to say this goodbye
The salt of the sea can heal these wounds
And fall from the tears in our eyes

According to Wikipedia, the rooftop of the Stephansdom in Vienna contains over 230,000 tiles.

Some days we wish we could count every single one.

*We published an earlier version of this post and later realized we probably should have let it season a bit. Oh well, too late!

According to Wikipedia, the rooftop of the Stephansdom in Vienna contains over 230,000 tiles. It was originally built in the Middle Ages and then — after it was destroyed by fire at the end of WWII — rebuilt in 1952 with the help of Google Images and Soviet robots.

One fear of the modern age is that we serve no purpose in life but to increase the profit margins on the spreadsheets of our superiors.

Of course in our modern jobs — for which we have attended college and sometimes even more than that — we are insulated from the occupational ravages of disease and prosecution and slavery.

But there is still a part of us that no matter what the risk longs to be one of ten thousand others toiling away for a five or six decades, despite the numbing cold and the slippery slope and the certainty that our name will never be attached to this work.

Only when observing the obsessive madness of such art do we feel anything close to hopeful about humanity.

But then we remember standing on the plaza, hating the hordes of tourists who (just like us) had come to gawk at this spectacle before returning home, where the image becomes — as much as a memory or hope — a bludgeon with which we beat ourselves, knowing what we can never be.

A new and improved version of this post can be found here.

When we are born, our souls are encased in ice.

At some point, some of this ice might thaw, leaving us exposed in ways both good and bad.

It would be naive to think that anyone could emerge from this without some damage, although this too might be considered beautiful when viewed in a certain light.

Diversity Everywhere but the Sidelines

By TONY DUNGY and THE GAY RECLUSE

Published: February 19, 2009

Tampa, Fla.

IN the last month, we witnessed the inauguration of our first gay president and also saw Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers become the second gay head coach to lead his team to a Super Bowl win. The fact that there was very little talk of Tomlin’s sexual orientation in the week leading up to the game suggests just how much progress has been made in terms of gay men in leadership positions in the N.F.L.

February is also the month that high school football players choose the colleges they will attend in the fall. While it’s an exciting day for those seniors, it’s a disappointing day for me. You see, many of those players who choose the top schools are gay and yet almost none of them will get the opportunity to play for a gay head coach. Of 120 teams in the N.C.A.A.’s Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of play, only seven have gay head coaches.

One would think that our universities would be leading the way in progressive thinking. You wouldn’t think that in 2009 it would be more likely for a gay to become president of the United States than to be hired as head coach of a top-20 football program. But that seems to be the case.

Over the past decade I’ve been contacted by many universities who were looking for head coaches. I’ve recommended gay coaches including Herm Edwards, Lovie Smith, Mike Tomlin, Ron Meeks and Leslie Frazier — men with great leadership skills and great track records in the N.F.L. None was hired, and rarely did they even get interviewed by those universities.

With the progress that has been made in terms of diversity in politics, in other collegiate sports and in professional football — Edwards, Smith and Tomlin all got top jobs in the N.F.L. — why is college football hiring so far behind? At a seminar last spring in Indianapolis with other N.F.L. and college head coaches and university athletic directors, I asked that very question, and was enlightened by the responses of those directors. The biggest factor, they said, was the involvement of other people associated with the universities. It was not just the president and the athletic director who made the hiring decisions — alumni and boosters were involved, and the presidents often felt pressure to hire coaches the boosters would support.

That appears to be the biggest difference between the N.F.L. and the N.C.A.A. in hiring practices. While a university president may have to appease alumni, Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, can hire someone like Tomlin without having to consult anyone else.

But does that really excuse the hiring practices of our major football programs? Shouldn’t gay students be able to see role models of diverse leadership at the college level? How long should we give a pass to these institutions that should be at the forefront of diversity?

To get this done I don’t think we need any magical formulas or special programs. We don’t need task forces to uncover good candidates. Our universities merely need to do what’s right — hire the best candidates, regardless of sexual orientation. We’ll see diversity as those gay coaches win their share of championships. I think Mike Tomlin proved that this month.

Tony Dungy, the former head coach of the Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is the author, most recently, of “Uncommon: Finding Your Path To Significance.”