The garden at the end of winter is not exactly a joy to behold: branches are bent or broken, evergreens are pale, and even the ground — littered with dead leaves and twigs — seems inhospitable.

But a closer examination reveals signs of life: the first photo above is a Sycamore Maple (Acer pseudoplatanus “Eskimo Sunset”) and this is a tree peony. If all goes as expected, they will both be in full bloom within a a few months.

Even the climbing hydrangea is prepared for the warmer days ahead; one advantage of being a plant, it seems, is that you are less deterred by circumstances beyond your control, and simply welcome the change you know is going to come.

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.

Today in my office I hung up a color print I recently made to test out a new printer we recently bought after the old one died. The photograph was taken a long time ago, if you measure time in hours.

It was Friday afternoon and difficult to concentrate on “real work.” Instead of launching into a new project, I decided to spend a few minutes making up imaginary quotes by Andy Warhol. Still considering the photograph, I decided to focus on sunset quotes.*

*I won’t pretend they’re very good! This is more a game “for fun” than “results.”

“I love to watch the sunset, but only on television.”

“I’m always relieved after the sun sets because I can finally go out without anyone noticing my bad skin.”

“Each day when the sun sets I call my banker to make sure I still have enough money left to go out that night. If I can’t get hold of him, my friends always end up paying for me!”

“I never paint sunsets, because the ones I buy at the flea market are so much better than anything I could ever do.”

“Candy Darling always said she hated sunsets, which is how I knew she was going to die very young.”

Photographer Dino Dinco sent us an announcement for his art opening on Wednesday night, and — hey! — if we were in San Francisco, we’d totally go. Dinco’s show (click here for gallery info) includes shots of the desolate “cruising trails” in L.A. (somewhat ironically located near the police academy); we ponder the haunted light and the unkempt litter-strewn paths, where — like so much in the gay world — the overgrown bushes and weeds offer both danger and maybe a few seconds of salvation for those desperate enough to seek it.

Recently we heard from Mike, an American expat (and blogger!) living in Denmark who writes:

I didn’t know about your blog this summer when I went to Florence, but now that blog-whoring’s brought us together, here’s a humble contribution:

Though we’ve already covered Florence — and this statue specifically — we wanted to take the opportunity to demonstrate a fundamental point about hot gay statues that has been missed by some of our less enlightened readers. Anyway! Here’s the shot of Hercules and Caucus (courtesy of Wikipedia) from the original post:

A lil hot and def gay, but kinda whatevs.

Now let’s compare with Mike’s shot of the same statue:

Whoa. Smokin’ hot. Srsly gay.

Need we say more? We think not!

Thanks again to Mike for his most excellent submission.

The Hot Gay Statue round-up:

• Rules and Guidelines
• Dan Savage Endorsement
• Washington Heights (New York City)
• Washington, DC
• The London Eye Clarifies an Important Issue
• Florence (Italy)
• The Park Avenue Amory (Upper East Side/NYC)
• Murray Hill (New York City)
• Madrid (Spain)
• Los Angeles
• Philadelphia
• The London Eye: “In Your Face”
• The J-Man Inspires
• George Washington
• Georgia (Republic of)
• New Orleans
• Columbus Circle (New York City)
• Two Davids (Florence)
• Franco Harris Statue (Pittsburgh)
• London Firefighters and Other Heroes
• Columbus Circle Mall (New York City)
• Miami
• Paris
• Grand Central Station (New York City)
• Albany, New York
• Chicago
• Albany, New York (Hot Gay Statute)
• The Metropolitan Museum (New York City)
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles)
• More Getty Villa (Los Angeles)
• Union Station Centurions (Washington, DC)
• Hot Gay Ladies in Washington Heights (New York City)
• Honolulu
• Stockholm

To visit Europe in 2K9 is to understand that we have a new lingua franca; to say it’s English, however, would be something of an exaggeration.

Whatever. We want new hair, and we want it now.

1 Cat +  1 Sunset =

The Catset!

Friends! Not every cat is a lolcat.

Yesterday we read about Alton Dulaney, who won the gift-wrapping championship of the world in a wrap-off at Rockefeller Center. Watching Alton’s performance, we couldn’t help but regret all the hours we spent growing up watching football and hockey and baseball on teevee, when we could have been watching wrap-offs (assuming they showed that sort of thing, which they obv didn’t)! Except that would have been way too gay for a closet-case like us, right!? But fine, like so much in our life, let’s just file in the better-late-than-never folder.

What’s depressing interesting is how many people — mostly men, but not always! — seem to assume that because sports like football, baseball, basketball and hockey (hereafter the “Big 4,” and let’s leave aside women’s professional leagues for purposes of our observations here) are dominated by men, and because 100 percent of current participants at a professional level in the Big 4 are not openly gay, that to watch these men somehow transmits to the viewer an inviolable shield of straightness, i.e., watching “the game” on Sunday afternoon is never considered gay, whereas watching a gift-wrapping competition maybe probably most definitely is! But why?

It seems to us — and we’ve probably spent more time watching sports than even being gay — that short of having a cock in your mouth, for men, watching professional sports on teevee (or really anywhere) — especially the Big 4 — is pretty much the gayest, most homoerotic thing you can do! After all, what exactly do you think is going on while you’re sitting around for hours and hours and hours ogling and drooling over a bunch of young, athletic guys with hot, firm asses, bulging shoulders/arms, and — especially in baseball, thanks to the cups they wear — enormous-looking cocks? Plus all the steroids they take make a good percentage of them look like Tom of Finland! Srsly, you might as well be cruising the internet.

Or perhaps you’re fascinated by the announcers, those big macho daddies sitting around exchanging nothing but the most vapid cliches but so in love with each other it doesn’t even matter?  Oh, so you played sports in high school and that’s why you need to spend ten hours every weekend watching it? Umm, yeah ok, whatever.

It’s not even an argument, but a conclusion: watching football (or baseball, etc.) is definitely gay. Which is not a bad thing! We just want people to start admitting it, i.e., so that “gay” won’t so often be associated with “stupid” as it will be with something closer to “homoerotic,” which is an impulse that everyone should acknowledge, whether you’re totally gay like us or not. We envisions conversations around the country going something like this (and ladies, we’re counting on you to instigate!):

Wife/GF: “You’re watching the game again? That’s so gay!”

Husband/BF: “I know, but I can’t resist because these guys are so smokin’ hawt! Get me a beer, would you?” [Farts]

Ha ha, ok, we’ll stop this stupidity now. The truth is, to see gift-wrap champion Alton Dulaney — who was the only male contestant among what appeared to be nine or ten other ladies — reminded us of when we were like ten years old and loved to spend an inordinate amount of time gift-wrapping our family’s presents and adorning them with stark, angular ribbons — or perhaps a single loop — for reasons that were not really ever explored beyond attributing the behavior to any number of other similarly obsessive ones (e.g., reading bird books, making thousands of paper snowflakes, our pencil collection, etc). And how one summer around the same age we signed up for art class and were the only boy out of about 20, because somehow without noticing, we had reached the age where the idea of art was “gay,” and so most boys didn’t do it. The same thing happened to us in seventh grade when art became an elective, and we were the only boy in the class. But in a way it was easier for us, because we played travel hockey and were already on the junior varsity high school team — the only seventh grader! — and we watched a lot of sports on teevee, so how could we be gay?

It’s pretty safe to say that growing up like this almost destroyed us, because underneath our easy athleticism and somewhat inexplicable — and to some, exasperating — interest in art and music, we were filled with an implacable loneliness that came from the certainty — although we couldn’t acknowledge this — that we were completely alone in the world. It was quite painful to realize that our older siblings would never really understand us, and the day this occurred — although again, we didn’t understand what was happening — we spent hours staring out the window in tears, but with no idea of exactly why we were crying beyond a vague sense of disappointment over something quite trivial. We hated crying, of course, because that was gay, too.

This is also why — more than anything — we used to hate it when people assumed things about us. There was a period of time — like most of our twenties, by which we mean some of our thirties, too — when we pretty much tried to throw our life away, just to prove them wrong. But we weren’t really even capable of embracing that role, which also felt like a cliche. This sort of explains how we graduated from Cornell and watered plants and then NYU Law School before becoming a record-store clerk. Basically we wanted to replicate the unresolved, ambiguous conflict of our youth. Had we been straight, there’s not much doubt we would have been trapped forever, doomed!

All of which brings us to the bridge, which on this cold December afternoon beckons with the certainty of taking us to places we’d rather not go.

When we first read about The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, we were excited! Not only was it short-listed for the Booker Prize, but it was rated the #1 Editors’ Pick for Best Book of 2008 by Amazon.com.* And oh yeah, Hensher is “openly gay” — kinda hate that expression, but whatevs — and has written trenchantly about the lack of gay actors in Hollywood, so without knowing that much about the book, we expected some insight into what we tend to think about as gay identity, or the gay voice.

The first quarter of the book is stunning. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Hensher describes the interactions among and between two families in a northern British suburb, one that has lived there for some time and another that is relocating from London. It’s the early 1970s, and as Hensher easily shifts perspective — at his best, reading him is really like getting wrapped up in a good teevee series — from the mothers to the daughters and the sons, he perfectly captures a sense of suburban ennui on one hand, and a kind of crushing terror of adolescence on the other. There are a few scenes — e.g., one of the mothers sort of loses her shit after her husband goes A.W.O.L. and kills her son’s pet, another in which a boy’s leg is broken during an elementary school recess — that are shockingly disturbing and brutal and ultimately heartbreaking, because we are taken back to the inexplicable cruelty and horror of youth as it plays out under the tranquil sheen of the suburbs.

Moreover, we are left with the sense that one or both of the youngest boys in the families are — or will be — gay, because they are nervous and obsessive and uncomfortable in ways that resonated with our own 1970s suburban upbringing, and so as the first section of the book ends, we look forward to learning more, not only about the boys, but about their older siblings, each of whom has appealing quirks and charms and less-appealing faults.

At this point, however, the tone of the book completely changes as we jump the shark lol ahead perhaps a decade into the future. We briefly meet the boys  — both are out of high school — but they are now beyond our empathy: one is sort of a freakish communist/Marxist who now hates his parents and agitates with some snobby leftist students on behalf of the local union, and the other has dropped out of college and moved back to London, where we don’t learn much about him except that he occasionally dates women (but without success), likes classical music and works a boring job. In short, we kind of suspect that he’s probably gay, but we don’t really get any insight or exploration into his condition, just a kind of blanket denial — at one point he sort of holds out that he’s asexual — that ultimately fails to hold our interest. Meanwhile, none of the other characters are developed with greater resolve, so that as we trudge forward, we find ourselves longing for the beginning of the book.

Also, instead of focusing on his core characters, Hensher allows the plot to seriously drift and instead offer pages and pages and pages — to give what is perhaps the most pointlessly egregious example — of a subplot involving a drug-dealing/money-laundering scheme. (We cannot help but wonder: did anyone edit this book? It could have easily been 200 pages shorter without losing anything.) True, the mother had an affair with a man in the scheme, but do we really need to follow him to a country house and meet his mafioso boss and family, when all we’re interested in is the fact that the woman had the affair and the ways it has impacted her relationship with her husband (i.e., the father of one of the boys)? If Hensher’s objective was to elevate the mundane into the dramatic — and he does this brilliantly at the beginning — why introduce a cheesy teevee plot device like this?

Which — i.e., the drug-dealer subplot — may have been forgivable except the rest of the book never recovers from similar digressions — e.g., an Australian we meet on one page kills himself in act of auto-eroticism ten pages later! someone starts dating a working-class girl, whose parents of course are sweet and lovable and dance the tango and earnestly offer tea in their best china — so that by the end, we don’t really have much sense of — or feelings for — any of the characters (much less insight into questions of gay identity).

We’re not saying that Hensher — or any gay writer — has a responsibility to explore these issues, but after setting them up so beautifully, he seemed to miss an opportunity to explore the truth as it’s so rarely done.

If the book at its best feels like it was made for teevee, this is also its flaw; it’s like one of those series that starts out with promise, but quickly drifts into hackneyed melodrama, leaving us with a longing — even if we choose to watch — to change the channel or perhaps fall asleep, where we can dream in images that while at times blurry at least hold some sign of our true selves.

*Despite our mixed feelings, we still encourage everyone to buy this book and judge for yourself.

So guess what? We now have a Twitter and a Tumblr and a Facebook!

Sometimes we feel like the oldest person in the blogosphere.

If we were a bird, we’d probably just fly away.