Listening to

70 Gay People

Talk About Their Lives

LIFE, LOVE, SPIRIT -- An Introduction

Poem: "I hand to you all that is within me..."

PART 1 --

Emily, Tony, Bill, Sheila, Mark and Matt, Susan and Betsy, Peter, Rick and Tommy, Jim

Poem: "A Gull's Cry"

PART 2 --

Harry, Virginia, Jay and Dave, Helen and Margaret, Al, Karen, Wayne, Alice, Paul and Gene

Poem: "Etchings"

PART 3 --

Walter, Alex, Kate and Marie, Wayne and Brian, Jean, Brad, Mark, Shirley, Buddy and Ron

Poem: "To Have Known"

PART 4 --

Barb, Scott, Catherine, Skip and Walt, Natalie, Bob, Sharon, Ken, Jen and Elizabeth

Poem: "Alone"

PART 5 --

Anna and Nancy, John, Chris, Steven and Henry, Maggie and Thelma, Sidney, Pete and Terry, Emma, Hank

Poem: "The Lamb Released"

PART 6 --

Ted, Jim and Tim, Janice, Tom and Phil, Sarah and Debby, Keith, Carol, Courtland, Joe

Poem: "My world is known to but a few..."

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWS

For Further Reading

Undertaking this book would have been a far more daunting task without the support and encouragement of key people in our lives. In this regard, we gratefully acknowledge the continuous support and enthusiasm of our families and friends throughout the duration of this project.

In particular, we wish to thank John's mother, Ruth Sherblom, for her insightful reading and comments on both an early draft and the nearly final draft. We also thank Liz's children and their wives/partner: Bill and Alyssa Gause, John and Phoebe Gause, and Rick Gause and Kristen Anderson for their belief in the book from its inception and for their invaluable suggestions as it progressed.

Thank you also to John's sister and her husband, Becky Sherblom and Mark Goldstein, and to John's brother and his wife, Donald Sherblom and Martha Carpentier for their reading and helpful comments on an early draft of the book. We also want to thank Liz's father, Daniel Cotton, for his careful reading and thoughtful feedback on the overall presentation of the stories. Our friend, John Silvernail, made many valuable suggestions and comments on this undertaking from its inception to its final draft, and we thank him very much.

We also want to thank Kristin Langellier, Karen Foss, and Ray McKerrow for their interest and helpful discussions on a number of issues raised during the course of work on this book. In addition, we want to express our appreciation to Sarah, Diane, and Krista at the University of Maine Bookstore for all the help and guidance they so graciously gave us throughout this process. And to the many other colleagues, friends, and family members who encouraged us along the way, thank you very much.

We can never thank enough Julie Zimmerman and her assistant, Will Nesbit of Audenreed Press for their tireless work on the final editing of this manuscript. Without their enthusiastic vision and commitment to this project, this manuscript might have remained too unwieldy for any but the most dedicated readers.

We dedicate this book to Al, Gordon, and David, each of whom was a catalyst in its development. Al's story is included. Gordon became too sick to tell us his story before he died, but some of his poetry is included between each part. David died in July of 1989, but his spirit runs throughout the book.

Additionally, we dedicate this book to all of our interview participants who so generously shared their stories. We would also like to acknowledge the lesbian and gay friends and acquaintances who have influenced our thinking but whose stories are not included in this book. Thank you for your friendship, wisdom, and understanding. We further dedicate this work to gay people everywhere who live lives of quiet dignity and courage amidst our society's lack of understanding and acceptance of homosexuality as a natural part of the human experience.

LIFE, LOVE, SPIRIT:

AN INTRODUCTION

It was Christmas, and we were standing in the living room at John's parents' home. We had had to celebrate without John's brother, David, being present; and now the call came confirming what each of us had privately feared but hadn't dared discuss. David had pneumocystis pneumonia and we, as a family, for the first time had to openly discuss not only his AIDS, but his homosexuality.

Prior discussions of sexuality had been so uncommon in our family as to be virtually non-existent; but over the next two and a half years, we raised questions and talked more openly and acceptingly about sexuality, homosexuality, and AIDS. Out of the emotions and thoughts surrounding David's illness and eventual death, the seed for this book was germinated.

This is a book about human lives and spirit, about love and joy, about sadness, grief, and fear, about children, family, partners, friends, sexuality, homosexuality, and occasionally about AIDS. The stories told here are first-person accounts of being a lesbian woman or gay man in the United States today.

The origin of this book stands against a background of social and political debate about, and discrimination against, gay people as being somehow "different" or "other." At times in our lives, many of us have felt the pain of feeling different, other, or in some way unacceptable. Seeing ourselves falling short of the ideal or the expected is painful. How much deeper that pain for someone whose "difference" is officially stigmatized.

We each know ourselves as multi-faceted, complex individuals-- the products of the myriad of influences that have shaped us from birth to the present. We are each unique personalities interacting with our environments on a multitude of levels. Most of us would not describe ourselves as fully explained by any one of those characteristics, although a particular characteristic may form a more or less dominant focal point in our personal or social development. Each of us is more than "the sum of our parts."

From the time we are young children, we are subtly, and not so subtly, guided toward male-female pairings. Children and adults who cannot or do not conform to this expectation often find themselves estranged from the people closest to them and sometimes from themselves. They are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to figure out what's "wrong" with them and why they don't feel the way everyone else apparently feels. It is hard to assess the personal and social costs of the loss of this energy that could otherwise be directed to discovering and developing the many other aspects of self. Much of this lost energy could be avoided if we, as a society, developed a constructive social norm around which to build a gay identity.

Each of us is influenced by, and in turn influences, the society in which we live. Human beings are created in many different ways, and we need to celebrate our diversity, rather than use it as a tool for divisiveness. We need to open ourselves to the multitude of possibilities for living positive, creative lives, and we need to teach our children the basic values of love and tolerance on which to build their lives.

Much More Than Sexuality offers an introduction to 70 very different people, many of whose only common characteristic is that they happen to be gay. Our intention in putting this book together is to facilitate a small step in the direction of re-examining people as fellow human beings, rather than as part of a group defined and stereotyped on the basis of one or another innate characteristic. In that respect, we hope that it adds to our oneness.

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