Why I left San Francisco after living there for 25 years

Sarah and the San Francisco Poster Wars by Ray Gross at American Thinker:

I am gay. I live in San Francisco. For the last few years I've had a terrible secret, one I felt necessary to hide from hateful and intolerant people. Who would these people be, and what am I hiding?

I am hiding from the Liberal Left. I am hiding that I'm a conservative.

Gay people are used to feeling the fear of backlash and intolerance. It's been a common theme for me, and I hid being gay for a good part of my life because of that fear.

But here I am, hiding again, hiding from those who have been telling me my whole life that they are the tolerant, loving and accepting ones. And I believed them, joining them in pinning the labels of hate and intolerance on the political right.

Now I fear them. They are not tolerant or accepting. They accuse others of hate and intolerance and yet, by their behavior they show themselves again and again to be the hypocrites they are. They are incapable of seeing the irony of the situation; that those who preach "tolerance" are intolerant, and those who champion "love" exude hate.

Like Pavlov's dog they are trained by the left and the liberal media to salivate at the mere mention of the words "conservative" "Republican," "right," "Christian," and "Bush". Now, they have a new favorite victim for their hate and intolerance, Sarah Palin.

The rest of the article is quite an eye-opener.

HT Gay Patriot.

More on Lincoln's homosexuality

From Is That a Stovepipe Hat or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Some Republicans have been distressed in recent years to hear that the icon of their party, Abraham Lincoln, may have been playing for the other team. It had been whispered for years that Lincoln was gay, and there is no doubt that some of his behavior would point that way today — most notably, for four years he shared a bed with his friend Joshua Speed. The intense relationship began in 1837, when a 28-year-old Lincoln — then a tall, calloused-hand frontiersman with mournful eyes — turned up at Speed’s general store in Springfield, Illinois, hoping to make it as a lawyer. Lincoln couldn’t afford the bed on sale, so Speed immediately offered to share his own mattress upstairs. From that day on, the pair became passionate and all-but-inseparable friends. When Speed finally did move out of the mattress to be married, Lincoln was shattered, sinking into such a black depression that friends removed all sharp objects from his room. For years afterward, he wrote Joshua long and tender letters signed wistfully “Yours forever.” As one biographer put it in 1926, the friendship had “streaks of lavender, and spots as soft as May violets.” At the same time, biographers had long noticed that Lincoln as a young man seemed indifferent to women: Although he eventually fathered four children, his marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln was a tortured, almost masochistic affair.

Then, in 2005, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by gay activist and former Kinsey researcher C.A. Tripp brought the whispers into the open by revealing a broader pattern of male bonding. Before Josh Speed, Lincoln had another close bedmate in New Salem: his 18-year-old cousin Billy Greene, who drooled over Abe’s muscular physique, writing, “His thighs were as perfect as a human being Could be.” Later, as president, Lincoln developed a crush on Elmer Ellsworth, a debonair assistant to his election campaign, and arranged a high military position for him. When Ellsworth was killed by a sharpshooter while removing a Confederate flag from a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, the disconsolate Lincoln began spending his nights with a studly young bodyguard at the presidential retreat outside Washington, D.C. Thirty years later, the regiment’s official historian proudly recalled that this new favorite, the young Captain David Derickson, “advanced so far in the president's confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and — it is said — making use of his Excellency’s night shirt!'' The pressures of hiding his homosexual urges, Tripp argues, help to explain Lincoln’s recurring depressions.

Post coitum omne animal triste est sive gallus et mulier

Anyone who has lived in a Catholic monastery (as I did at one time) knows that saying. It's used as a justification and rationalization for celibacy.

Usually the only part that is translated is "post coitum omne animal triste est" which means "after sex all animals are sad." Usually ignored is the second part: "sive gallus et mulier" which means "except for the cock and the woman."

(And I use the word "cock" correctly. It means a male chicken. A hen is a female chicken. Both male and female chickens roost; therefore they are both roosters. The word "rooster" was a first used as a euphemistic substitution for "cock" in the 19th century when the word "cock," which was commonly used by the "lower classes" to mean penis, was discovered by the "middle classes." When the "petit bourgeoisie" realized that "cock" was also the slang word for penis they switched to a less troublesome word, rooster, for the male chicken.)

I was taught in the monastery that the saying came from Aristotle (or maybe Spinoza) but the contributors to Language Hat disagree.

According to Wikipedia:

Sexual intercourse can sometimes lead to a feeling of melancholy called PCT, or post-coital tristesse (from Latin post-coital, and French tristesse, literally — “sadness”). This is more common in men than in women. Many PCT sufferers may also exhibit strong feelings of anxiety, anywhere from five minutes, to two hours after coitus.

The phenomenon is referred to by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione when he said "For as far as sensual pleasure is concerned, the mind is so caught up in it, as if at peace in a [true] good, that it is quite prevented from thinking of anything else. But after the enjoyment of sensual pleasure is past, the greatest sadness follows. If this does not completely engross, still it thoroughly confuses and dulls the mind."

Anyone who has had sex with women or observed chickens (as I have) knows that both cocks and women do not feel any lassitude after sexual intercourse probably because they do not expend as much energy as males. Ejaculating semen is draining for all males except cocks and probably the other lower orders of the animal kingdom.

William Morris Meredith and Richard Harteis

The poet, William Morris Meredith.

We watched the movie Marathon tonight and enjoyed it so much that I decided to Google it. It's based on the book by Harteis who was Meredith's partner for 36 years.

From IMdB:

Explores the relationship between two poets Richard Harteis and William Meredith, former US poet laureate and winner of every major American award for poetry including the 1988 Pulitzer prize.

In the 17th year of friendship, William suffers a debilitating stroke. Richard stands by his partner fighting for his right to care for him, despite the inevitable restrictions on his own life and against the wishes of William's family. The strength to overcome disability with dignity becomes a lesson in physical and spiritual endurance, hard won knowledge indeed.

Meredith died in 2007 and Harteis published a book of poems, Legacy, the same year. From Peter Klappert's review of Legacy:

Legacy is a series of poems for Richard Harteis’s lover of 36 years, the gentle, quietly elegant and rather traditional poet William Meredith.
...
If Meredith’s poems are less read today than the work of Robert Lowell and John Berryman, his friends and contemporaries, it may be because he employs his mastery more quietly and because he was, as Harteis says in “Evensong,” a “model of / civility, the ultimate good guy,” a poet who did not expose, let alone exploit, his private, most personal life. Emotion in Meredith’s poems is no less honest and intense, but it is subtle and more objectified. Loneliness is a recurring theme. The Open Sea begins with its title poem:

We say the sea is lonely; better say
Ourselves are lonesome creatures whom the sea
Gives neither yes not no for company.

The next poem is the lovely, delicate “Sonnet on Rare Animals”:

Like deer rat-tat before we reach the clearing
I frighten what I brought you out to see,
Telling you who are tired by now of hearing
How there are five, how they take no fright of me.
I tried to point out fins inside the reef
Where the coral reef had turned the water dark;
The bathers kept the beach in half-belief
But would not swim and could no see the shark.
I have alarmed on your behalf and others’
Sauntering things galore.
It is this way with verse and animals
And love, that when you point you lose them all.
Startled or on a signal, what is rare
Is off before you have it anywhere.

...
In an inspired act of matchmaking, Maxine Kumin introduced William Meredith and Richard Harteis around 1971, and despite the 28-year difference in their ages William and Richard were devoted to each other for the rest of William’s life.

Legacy opens on “Memorial Day, 2007,” as Richard keeps vigil by William’s bed “in the hospital penthouse,” “alone with / my dying lover contemplating / hospice decisions, what to hold / what to give.” Richard uses “lover,” rather than the asexual and antiseptic “partner,” to convey the depth and intimacy of their bond and to make it unequivocal that they were more to each other than simply devoted companions. Anyone who has had to make “hospice decisions” will recognize the anguish in Richard’s phrase. As he struggles, alone, with such awful responsibility, William, who had been a navy aviator in World War Two and the Korean War, breathes

steadily into the blue
oxygen mask, preparing for lift off.
What adventure awaits you? This
private mission we all must undertake.

The succeeding poems, all addressed to William in a kind of conversation Richard has with silence, record a survivor’s adjustments and the way dailiness is infused with memory, loneliness and grief.

From Wikipedia:

William Morris Meredith, Jr. (9 January 1919 – 30 May 2007) was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980.
...
He worked briefly for the New York Times before joining the United States Navy as a flier. Meredith re-enlisted in the Korean War, receiving two Air Medals.

In 1988 Meredith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a Los Angeles Times Book Award for Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems and in 1997 he received the National Book Award for Effort at Speech.

That book was about his struggle to relearn speaking.

In 1983, he suffered a stroke and was immobilized for two years. As a result of the stroke he suffered with expressive aphasia, which affected his ability to produce language. Meredith ended his teaching career and could not write poetry during this period. He regained many of his language skills after intensive therapy and traveling to Britain for treatment.

Harteis is still alive. Here's his pic from his Facebook page:



















Harteis and Meredith in 2006, the year before Meredith died:

Abe Lincoln and Joshua Speed

I've read about how Lincoln and Speed slept in the same bed before but was Abe gay?

“We are getting closer to the day that a majority of younger, less homophobic historians will at long last accept the evidence of Lincoln’s same-sex component,” John Stauffer, chair of Harvard University’s Department of American Civilization, told Gay City News, adding, “ We’re already seeing the beginnings of a trend that will amount to a major paradigm shift.”

Stauffer is one of the nation’s leading experts on the Civil War era, and in his latest — and best-selling — book, “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln,” he supports the thesis that Joshua Speed was, as he put it, “Lincoln’s soulmate and the love of his life.”

And in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Reviews of American History, Stauffer hammers home this point, writing, “In light of what we know about romantic friendship at the time, coupled with the facts surrounding Speed’s and Lincoln’s friendship, there is no reason to suppose they weren’t physically intimate at some point during their four years of sleeping together in the same small bed, long after Lincoln could afford a bed of his own. To ignore this, as most scholars do, is to pretend that same-sex carnal relationships were abnormal. It thus presumes a dislike or fear about such relationships, reflecting a presentist and homophobic perspective.”

In his groundbreaking 2005 book “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,” the late C.W. Tripp meticulously assembled the considerable body of historical evidence for Lincoln’s same-sex affinities, including his love affair with Speed.
...
A majority of Lincoln scholars dumped on Tripp’s book when it was published five years ago, but the “paradigm shift” on Lincoln of which Stauffer speaks is not only being led by younger historians like himself.
...
In a lengthy article entitled “Abraham Lincoln and the Tripp Thesis” in a recent issue of one of the oldest scholarly journals devoted to the iconic president, the Lincoln Herald, a senior Lincoln historian and author of numerous Lincoln books, the octogenarian William Hanchett, professor of history emeritus at the University of California/ San Diego, “challenges historians to either refute the Tripp thesis or to rewrite Lincoln’s biography. Hanchett believes that Tripp is correct at least in the broad outline of his work and finds it frustrating that most historians, rather than confronting this pioneering study, choose to ignore it,” as the Lincoln Herald’s editors put it in introducing Hanchett’s revealing, carefully footnoted essay on Lincoln’s same-sex affinities.

Hanchett in particular breaks new ground when he deconstructs what we know of the much-ignored secret Memo books kept by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon as he spent a quarter century intensively researching his massive “Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life,” published in 1889. The UC/ San Diego scholar details how he believes that the otherwise thorough Tripp missed the evidence there that backs up Hanchett’s view that “Lincoln’s secret” was homosexuality.

“A significant number of Lincoln’s contemporaries,” Hanchett writes, “must have known of or strongly suspected his secret. The existence of Herndon’s Memo books proves it. His rowdy friends in New Salem must have wondered why [Lincoln] declined to participate with them in their revels, and almost certainly some of them must have figured it out. They knew about homosexuality, only the word was unknown to them.”
...
One of the few traditional Lincolnists to describe — however obliquely — the lifelong Lincoln-Speed relationship as homosexual was the Illinois poet Carl Sandburg, in his masterful, six-volume Lincoln biography. In the 1926 tome titled “The Prairie Years,” Sandburg wrote that both Lincoln and Speed had “a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets.”

“I do not feel my own sorrows more keenly than I do yours,” Lincoln wrote Speed in one letter. And elsewhere: “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting.” In a detailed retelling of the Lincoln-Speed love story — including the “lust at first sight” encounter between the two young men, when Lincoln readily accepted Speed’s eager invitation to share his narrow bed — Tripp notes that Speed was the only human being to whom the president ever signed his letters with the unusually tender (for Lincoln) “yours forever” — a salutation Lincoln never even used with his wife.

Speed himself acknowledged, “No two men were ever so intimate.” And Tripp credibly describes Lincoln’s near nervous breakdown following Speed’s decision to end their four-year affair by returning to his native Kentucky.
...
Tripp’s book was remarkable and precedent-shattering because, for the first time, he restores names and faces (more than just Speed’s) to a number of those previously invisible homosexual companions and love objects of the most venerated of America’s presidents, among them: Henry C. Whitney, another of Lincoln’s law colleagues; the young Billy Greene, a New Salem contemporary of Lincoln’s and another bedmate (who admired Lincoln’s thighs); Nat Grigsby; and A.Y. Ellis. Another was the handsome David Derickson, by nine years the president’s junior, captain of President Lincoln’s bodyguard. Tripp describes in great detail how Derickson was the object of “the kinds of gentle and concentrated high-focus attention from Lincoln that Henry C. Whitney, from having himself once been on the receiving end, well described: ‘[It was] as if he wooed me to close intimacy and friendship, a kind of courtship, as indeed it was.’”

The rest of the article is the predictable Bush-bashing using former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman as punch-bag.

Lincoln and Speed:

Name-dropping: famous people I have met - the porn star edition

I have not liked most of the famous people I have met. One of the few that I liked was Alicia Silverstone who came to dinner one night in the restaurant that I owned in San Francisco. She was nice and friendly.

The first famous people that I met were Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski who were on vacation in London in 1969 and came into the drug-store at which I worked. She was lovely and very pregnant. He gave me the creeps. She was murdered by Charles Manson's ghouls a few months later.

Then in 1976 I worked in a restaurant one of whose owners was Yehudi Menuhin. He was okay but a bit distant and snobbish.

In 1979 I moved to San Francisco. The woman who had gotten me the job in Menuhin's restaurant in London also immigrated to the USA and got me a job catering a birthday party for George Lucas' daughter. I did not like him at all.

Around the same time I met then California Governor Jerry Brown at the Zen Center in San Francisco. I like him even though I did not agree with him politically but he was friendly and seemed sincere. Later I met Tom Haydn, the politician who had once been married to Jane Fonda. I took an instant dislike to him and probably would have loathed him even if I had agreed with his politics.

In 1979 and 1980 I also met two other people in San Francisco who were not yet famous. At the time that I met them they both worked as "masseurs" (a "job" that I, and many others, did at the time.) Soon after I met them, they both started making porn movies. (I was also good-looking in those days and I probably would have done so too if I'd had a bigger dick.)

I met Neal Shaw on the number 43/Masonic bus which we both used to catch at the same bus-stop. I was headed home from my job in a restaurant and Neal was headed for night-classes at City College. He was a very sweet guy; a strange mixture of natural shyness and a superficial but very boldly assertive sexual personality. I was very attracted to him but was far too shy in those days to accept his come-on.

(Also there was something about him that warned me off. I've always been the "marrying kind" which means that I usually fall in love with whomever I have sex with and I sensed a certain aura of danger about Shaw.)

One day he stopped catching the bus and soon after that I saw him in a couple of porn movies made by Buckshot or Colt. Then he disappeared altogether and I hope that he wasn't one of the 14 friends that I lost to AIDS in 1981-2.

You can see Neal's G-rated pics here and the X-rated pics are here.

A few months later I met Kristen Bjorn through a friend of mine from England. Kristen also was a very sweet guy. Again I was attracted but, as I said I've always been the "marrying kind" and, in those days, I was very into astrology and decided that he was not the right guy for me. I also did not trust my friend from England. He had played match-maker for Kristen and me and, knowing how sneaky and manipulative he was, I feared that he would intrude on my relationship.

A while later Kristen made a few porn movies for Falcon and then went on to become a famous porn movie director.

You can read about Kristen here and see his X-rated pics here.

Name-dropping - porn stars I have met: Neal Shaw

For the story of how I met him, see here. For X-rated pictures of Shaw, go here.