I read Chris’ narrative today (3/1/23) and thought it appropriate to send kudos in his direction. My own narrative is long and a bit complex but at age 85 forthcoming this summer, I thought it would be helpful to shine a bit of light on my own story. There aren’t a lot of men in their 80’s and 90’s. We die off just like the rest of humankind. But it is certainly helpful to decades of younger people to have some grasp of what we oldsters went through during the decades of interest and thereafter.
It is not shameful to grow old. Wisdom comes with age IMHO. I’m past the point of seeking companionship because there is no sensible way to reach out if I’m not willing to buy into a mixed metaphor LGBT religious institution and if,as certainly is the case in Minneapolis, there is no ready way to meet other age peers unless one is distinctly middle class and can afford the occasional mixers founded on a prosperous subset. The younger crew who run our ongoing outreach organizations are mesmerized by their own immediate age aspirations and quite literally have no time for the oldest of us all.
We have, according to the Wilder Foundation, more than 3,000 youngsters that have no meaningful sense of place in my city of nearly 500,000 souls. The bars do well once the kids are old enough to drink, but the great American dream of home ownership is increasingly a dream inaccessible for great swatches of individuals who at best locked into expensive rentals whatever their sexual or gender realities.
I am chagrined, of course, but too old to start another cultural variant. My time is increasingly taken up with the vagaries of advancing age. Later this month I’ll be fitted with some mighty pricey hearing aids at no cost to me. That’s great, because musical performance kept me sane as the adults in my vicinity charted a career path for me in which I had only a child’s willingness to give great deference to adults. Once puberty intruded on this halcyon time, I was pretty disturbed.
At that point, I lost my super treble voice, had a student environment comprised of the most promising aspirants to the Roman Catholic priesthood at a papal seminary unique in North America. Bad fit, that’s for sure, and by the fall of 1955, I knew that my grand scholarly expectations were both irrelevant and irreligious — a lousy mix for a senior in high school in a cloistered institution. No peer support at that early age and no welcome at home once the aspirations of others were brought down in a catastrophic ruin.
A few months of public high school went by readily enough, although my drinking career got off to quite an enthusiastic start. I played a lot of cards with my buddies, but no notion of sexual hanky-panky ever crossed our inebriated minds. Great minds, smart kids, destined to have careers far from a town that didn’t let the Catholic kids ride the school buses. I intend to write a memoir that will be much more systematic. I had many disjointed adventures over many years and had to build a new life and lifestyle once I sobered up in August, 1984, just shy of my 50th birthday and right at the emerging scenario that had younger guys dropping like flies compliments of the Aids virus.
I was too chicken to get my rocks off in the local bathhouse - fortunately. I eventually came to chair a board of recovering folks who knew enough to steer clear of this terminal disease. Not everybody. We lost a treasurer who collapsed into the distant arms of a horrified highly religious family of origin. Not a happy time, and the nascent activist arm of our erstwhile community had other objectives on their minds.
I’m grateful for this literary outlet. I certainly have a story to tell and it’s great to notice others who understand the power of the pen. More from me later — there’s a book of sorts in the offing while my faculties are still intact, I guess.
Fred Markus
