Ode to Santa Fe:

As you enter the state of New Mexico on Interstate 40, you are atop a ridge thousands of feet above a huge valley that expands before you. This is a giant arroyo that spreads from north to south with a snow capped mountain range in the distance west. You have entered a land of enchantment, a land where magic abounds. A land where you can travel fast: The speed limit's seventy five but most cruise at ninety.

Arriving in Albuquerque, you branch onto Highway 25 and head north. The light from the sun is a different color from what we see in the eastern United States. It's less yellow and the shadows it casts are smaller. The sky is a cobalt blue, like the skies you get with a polarizing filter. The sky is occasional blocked by thin filmy clouds, or huge thunderheads that seem to go miles high in the bright sky.

You start the climb both up and north into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. If you want, you can get off onto the Turquoise Trail, which winds through the ghost town of Golden and into the tourist trap that is Madrid. Otherwise, you stay on the highway and the altitude climbs steadily to seven thousand feet above sea level.

Now you are speeding across the highest of deserts, no cactus or sandy desolation. The mountains have some green where the snow had melted and the lowlands are bearded with wind hearty, drought tolerant pinon trees, both ancient and ragged and low to the ground – Darwinian victors – and there is the occasional vertical statement of bare-branch aspens. Millions of trees, tipped with white. This mix of trees creates an illusion of distance and size if you are used to the trees we have in the east. Pinons look like large pine trees, hills look like mountains, juniper abound. It is an alien landscape to those of us that make the east coast our home.

You exit on to Cerrilos Road from I25 and continue through the southern part of Santa Fe, which seems not much different from any other small city, with shopping centers, and auto dealers and gas stations and the type of businesses that hug highways. You follow the signs north to City Center and the Plaza and you are suddenly in a different world. Narrow, winding streets, some of them cobbled, that force you to reduce your speed as you roll by one-story adobe and Spanish Colonial building plastered in sienna, peach, dun and gold; twenty nine different shades of mud. All of them accented with the ubiquitous turquoise trim. Trees line the streets in the old town. This is a city as old as Boston but from a different country and a different time. This area was inhabited by natives before any western European’s touched the shores in the east.

On the north side of the plaza, art galleries, sculpture and glass studios, gourmet cookware emporia, purveyors of fine foods, high fashion clothing and hand-hewn furniture, custom picture framers. Cafés and restaurants never tainted by corporate logos abound, promising everything from southwester to sushi. SUVs are the steed of choice, and sinuous, happy people in jeans and suede and boots that had never known the kiss of manure, crowd the sidewalks.

The central plaza, a square of tree shaded green, set up with a bandstand is surrounded by low-rise shops. You drive past a covered breesway, where a couple of dozen down-parkaed Indans sit behind blankets of silver jewelry in front of the Palace of the Governors. Across the square is a massive blocky structure of fieldstone that seems more European and American. More restaurants and galleries, a couple of luxury hotels and suddenly you are out of the center of town and back to the broad streets and shopping plazas.

Santa Fe is both ancient and modern. It is a place out of time.

Each night that I am there, I gaze out of my bedroom window, down onto the city. I live in the mountains to the south of the city where turquoise, gold and silver were mined. Vista del Oro, view of gold, a dirt road in the hills outside of Santa Fe. This is my winter home, a place I go to, to recharge my soul. Although I am a Mainer, who loves water and surrounds himself with it, my winters are in the dry, arid climate that is Santa Fe. The land of the coyote, the land of mystery, the land where magic is still alive.

Love, Live and how I got my pride.

Well, my friends, the month of June, Gay Pride Month, has been a busy one. Since I was diagnosed with cancer and my arthritis has made a re-appearance, I have not been able to do the volunteering like I used to. I recall cooking hamburgers for the Gay Pride Festival over ten years ago. I had sun stroke after the event but I really enjoyed the experience. My ex-business partner and I handled all the promotions for pride weekend one year. We also ran the free music program in Congress Square for a couple of summers. IN those days, I certainly had much more energy. Now, I get shagged if I mow the lawn and weed the garden on the same day. Although I don't really feel any older, I just can't do the same amount of stuff that I used to be able to do. I believe my mother used to say the the golden years are not for the faint of heart.

But, what I really wanted to talk about is how much the gay community has changed. When I came out in 1969, I would have just laughed at you if you were to tell me that there would be gay marriage now. I can imagine what NYC was like on the Friday of Gay Pride Weekend when the State voted to approve gay marriage. I'd have given anything to be in Sheridan Square on that night. It's not that I didn't dream of being married, I just never could have imagined that it really would happen. Having had attachment issues when I was young, oh hell, I still have them, I have difficulty forming lasting relationships. My first love jumped back into the closet right after coming out slamming the door as he went. Something about leading a horse to water but not getting them to drink. I later that year started dating a young man. We dated for 4 years but we never lived together and as our careers grew, we moved farther apart from each other. In the end, I lived in NYC and he lived in Saudi Arabia. I don't think we could have been farther apart.

For the next twenty years, I lived and worked in NYC. Coming from a small town in Maine, I was usually overwhelmed with gay bars in the city. After my great success in relationships I chided away from men. After The Disease announced itself, I was just scared to fall for anyone. I dated a few women during that time and although they thought they could convert me, I was hopelessly a big homo and would never not be one.

At the end of the eighties, I moved back to that small town in Maine. I became involved with the gay community in Portland. I organized weekly meeting (alcohol free) for gays to meet others but I still never met the man of my dreams. I understand that to have fallen in love, real love, twice in my life was doing pretty good. Unfortunately now I just don't expect to ever have that feeling again. I guess I am in morning. Both for the relationship I never had and the fact that I am now old and sick and probably will never again experience true love.

My business partner and I started a gay night on Fridays at a large club at the end of the nineties. The community could never have supported a club this large but to do a gay night weekly, was fine. We packed the place for about 4 months. At that point, the drinks mysteriously were spiked and after several incidents of people passing out in the club or on the street, we shut down the operation. We suspected that the other gay clubs just couldn't stand the fact that one night a week, “their” customers went to our club. We used the internet to advertise our club and maintained a e-mail list to notify our club members of up coming events. We brought people into Portland from as far away as Boston and Bangor. We brought new people to town to go to our club. And it wasn't as though we keep them the whole evening, People went from club to club just as they had in the past. It was a glorious summer but it came to a dramatic end. I can remember sitting in one of the corners of the cavernous club and reflecting on how the owners of Studio 64 felt. Of course we did it without the drugs. It's really too bad that the other owners could not see beyond their own noses.

Now with my health problems, I don't get out much anymore. I get into Portland about twice a month. There are no longer any weekly or monthly meeting. I just hate the gay bars, and frankly, I wonder if their usefulness hasn't expired. Young people don't seem to need the exclusive organizations we had when I was young. Young people seem to accept each other (at least after they become young adults) and no longer feel the need to go to a gay bar to be with their own kind. This does not bode well for the gay bar as an institution and I'm not sure that this is not a good thing. For that matter, it doesn't bode well for anything gay. Since our gay children are still being bullied and persecuted in the secondary education system, how are they ever to learn that they are beautiful the way they are and that we cherish them for who they are, not what they are. I saw today that California had created a bill that forces the education system there to teach about gays in history. In a way, I am for this, but to force teachers to teach about people in history and say oh, and by the way, they were gay, doesn't seem correct. Even though we as humans have grown by leaps and bounds, I'm not sure we gays will ever be accepted by those who don't understand why we are the way we are. So, there it is my friends. How do we tell our children that being gay is not an aberration, it is not something you should be ashamed of, but instead that you were born the way you are. No, my children, you don't learn to be gay and there is no hidden agenda on the conversion of our youth.

A young friend said to me once, “you know, Wes, I think everyone is born bi.“

Another told me that they though of sexuality as a pendulum that swings back and forth. Still another, that we all were flexible, and it depended on the time and place. So what I guess what I'm hearing is that everyone has some gay in them. I once counseled a young man who was coming out. He told me that he just hated effeminate men. I told him, you know, there is a little queen in all of us. Four years later, he was competing in a drag queen contest put on by his college. Go figure.

So here I am, sitting at my computer, enjoying the time I have left on this planet as best I can. Will I ever find love again. I don't know, but I do know that I would welcome it as I would an old friend showing up on my doorstep. I would welcome him in and open my heart.