Wednesday, February 24, 2010 | by nathan

On Being Safe To Be Unsafe

My latest piece is up over at OpenSalon. I like to call it my "origin story." Also, it features Treehouse of Horror.

Let me be as clear as I know how to be:

I.Am Not. Okay.

And I LOVE being good at things.

I may have accidentally, a long time ago, confused the accolades I got from my parents and teachers with – and I’m just saying it’s possible that I did this – love. At six years old or so I might have unintentionally started to think that being good at things would mean that I wouldn’t have any problems whatsoever, and, conversely, that the way to avoid having problems was to avoid doing things I was bad at.

Well, you can see the problem.

All the pieces I’ve published at OpenSalon up to this point were written just about a year ago; my next piece will be of brand new, 2010 vintage. I just have to … you know … write it. Anyone got some ideas for me?

Monday, February 22, 2010 | by nathan

A Little Pee Shy? Miss Coco’s Here To Help.

As a man, there are few things to me more upsetting than peeing in public. Ladies might have to endure the momentary, temporary pain of childbirth, but men? Men have to use urinals OUR WHOLE LIVES. You never feel so much like some kind of barnyard animal as when you’re standing in a public bathroom, in front of a porcelain fixture, trying to go. And when you’re at a sporting event – the long troughs at Oklahoma Memorial Stadium are especially cruel – it can be like torture. Especially when some dude you don’t know wants to talk to you, like, "Hey, did you see Bradford throw that 47-yard pass?" and all you can say is, "Yep!" The whole time your mind is spinning, praying you can squeeze out some little stream of pee lest the other guys realize that a mixture of stage fright and social anxiety disorder have stopped the whole works cold. Your body is begging, BEGGING you to pee, but your mind is like, IN FRONT OF THESE JAGS? I DON’T THINK SO.

…until you’ve been to a gay bar. Specifically, until you’ve been to the Copa in Oklahoma City. Now – I haven’t been there in a couple years, but back in my day there were swinging saloon doors opening more or less into the line for the bar. So even after you go inside you can still see all the patrons lining up for their swill vodka with diet tonics. Occasionally the bar line backed up into the bathroom; that was when you just learned to hold it. Sometimes a sweet girlfriend would invite you into the ladies’, but that was rare. So, into the mens’ you go. And crammed into a seven-by-two foot space are four urinals without dividers. You find yourself standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and almost every time something like this happens:

You could sorta be okay if you managed to get the urinal on the very, very end; then you at least could pretend the wall on your left was a divider and that things would eventually be Okay. But more often than not you were at one of the two middle ones. The walls in there were painted purple, and over the middle urinals there was a frame with some ads in there, because what else is one thinking about while peeing other than, "Gosh, I wonder who has the best limousine service in this city? And does anyone know of a good, gay-friendly plumber? AND IT’S POSSIBLE I MIGHT BE GETTING A DUI LATER – COULD SOMEONE WRITE DOWN THIS PHONE NUMBER FOR ME?" 

What I remember about standing at the Copa urinal is that I was usually standing there next to some giant drag queen or leather daddy, and in my most authoritative, deep-throated, mentally-ill sounding growl, repeatedly saying, "EYES FORWARD. EYES FORWARD." 

So now, peeing in public doesn’t really phase me. Not if I can just close my eyes, picture a purple wall and a limousine ad and think to myself, "If you can pee in the Copa, you can pee ANYWHERE." And it works every time.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s stories like this that won me Runner-Up for Best Writing in the Okie Blog Awards!

Thursday, February 18, 2010 | by nathan

Growing

My latest piece is up at Open Salon. Here’s an excerpt:

I want to put a seed in the ground, throw a little water down, and then have steamed zucchini on a plate. I don’t want to wait, and I certainly don’t want to tend. I’m hungry now! And no matter how much compost I throw down, no matter how much I crouch on the ground waiting for the little green shoots to crack the dirt, I have absolutely no control over the timing.

This is why you’ll find me, in the coming days of early spring, with the seeds in the ground and all the life happening where I can’t see it, four or five times a day staring intently at my little two hundred square feet of tilled-up dirt. I squat, I stand, I get down on all fours and squint, then stand back up again, wave my hands over the whole business, and shout, “GROW!”

There you have it: a picture of my spiritual life in action.

And as to the identity of the "friend" I mention in the story – all I will say is that this is the most highly-fictionalized piece of creative nonfiction I’ve ever written. No essayist tells the entire truth; David Sedaris, Anne Lamott, all my literary nonfiction heroes pepper their personal narratives with changes of detail, meant to protect the innocent*, as it were. All I’m saying, kids, is don’t litter my comments section or my Facebook wall with guesses, mmmmkay?

* The person(s) in question are hardly "innocent," but they didn’t ask to be written about and certainly don’t deserve to have me shouting their names from the rooftops, even if such a thing weren’t legally questionable.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 | by nathan

A Proposition

Whoops – I posted this on OpenSalon late last week and forgot to tell you about it! 

…it seems to me that this nation’s parents have a lot more than homosexuality to worry about when it comes to what their kids are learning in school. After all, most of us spent a whole lot of time trying to recruit ourselves – and having other people recruit us – out of homosexuality, and that never worked. What makes anyone think we could recruit pre-pubescent kids in, even if we wanted to?

WHICH WE DON’T. Just for the record.

Have a read. Let me know what you think.

Monday, February 8, 2010 | by nathan

The Loop

From my latest post over at OpenSalon:

If you want to see hypocrisy in action, just catch me behind the wheel of a car. I’m like a maniac. A maniac who drives like a little old lady and gets really, really self-righteous about it. I don’t speed, I don’t cut people off in traffic, and I don’t do that really terrible thing that some of you do where you know – you know – that your lane is about to end, but instead of merging over you speed around the rest of us and expect the person at the front of the line to let you go ahead of them. All I can say is that someone in your car better be having a baby. The head better already be out, too.

You can read the whole thing – about how my road rage is really just a symptom of a much deeper condition – over there.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 | by nathan

Just Imagine It In Neal Conan’s Voice

I was driving home from lunch today, listening to Talk of the Nation like I always do in the car at lunchtime. They started talking about President Obama’s recent outreach to the LGBT community and the question was put to the callers as to whether Americans feel that their political leaders’ publicly (and loudly) expressed views really reflect the feelings on the ground about gay marriage. I tried to call and couldn’t get through, and by that time I was back at work anyway, so I ran inside and fired off a quick e-mail. Then I threw in my headphones and had a listen, and sure enough! "Here’s an e-mail from Nathan in Oklahoma City," said Neal Conan, who then read the words I’d punched out literally 60 seconds before:

"I live in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and despite my state’s reputation as one of the most conservative areas in America, despite the fact that we are the home of such foaming-at-the-mouth anti-gay characters such as Sally Kern and Anita Bryant, I have to say that my husband and I have had almost no trouble with anti-gay sentiment. Even people who disagree with us on religious grounds are generally friendly – the attitude around here is that it’s no one’s business but our own. I would say that in Oklahoma, our politicians are very out-of-step with the populace. Most of the people I know could care less about anyone’s sexual orientation or whether gay marriage is legal or not.

As to President Obama, while I’ve been disappointed so far in the slow steps the administration has taken, I think we have to remember to keep in mind that only six months have passed since the Inauguration. I think we should remember that there are a lot of things going on right now. Gay people will still be here and ready to marry once we’ve tackled some of these more pressing issues."

I wanted to add in about how Clinton’s failure to pass health care in his first term, and the Republican resurgence of 1994, is occasionally attributed, in part, to the huge amounts of political capital he wasted on both sides of the aisle with the battle that eventually gave us "don’t ask don’t tell." Nothing irritates me more about the gay community than when we start acting like our issues should be at the top of everyone’s agenda, and damn everything else to hell. It doesn’t do anything for our image as a community except makes us look selfish and myopic. While it’s good to remind the President that we’re here, to keep ourselves on his agenda, let’s not pretend like we should be the top priority right now.

Monday, June 29, 2009 | by nathan

Beauty Queen

Oklahoma City Pride was yesterday, and though Brian had taken off for a week’s business in Washington, D.C., I decided that I’d rather be out doing something – anything – than sitting at home and being sad. And though I did have a great time taking photos and killing a six-pack of Red Stripe while watching the floats go by, it wasn’t the same without my husband there. Still, I got a highly respected local politician to buy me a shot and got to reconnect with someone from high school, all of which was great craic, as they say in Ireland. I don’t go out very often at all anymore, and the majority of my friends are straight married couples, but on days like that I really enjoy being around my gays. See you queens next year!

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 | by nathan

Bridging The Gap

This post is a part of the Bridging The Gap Synchroblog, wherein over 50 bloggers try to answer the question, "How can we embody mutual honour and respect in our conversations and relationships with those with whom we may disagree on the topic of homosexuality?”

As a writer, I regularly find myself irretrievably mired in some writerly muck or other, stymied by some untenable next plot point or struggling to overcome some barrier of language. More often than not I come to these roadblocks because I have written myself into a corner, or into a nice, crazy frenzy. I think that this is paydirt for Jesus. I think that when I get all good and frustrated is when Jesus rolls up his sleeves, rubs his hands together and says, "Good. Let’s get to work." 

They say that you can’t heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, and so when I’ve reached some crazy-making bad place with my writing, I get up. I push back from the desk, stand up, and get out of my own head space for a little bit. I walk the dog. I weed the garden. I think of these as my "lifelines;" I phone a friend. I bake something. Then, if I find that I’m out of the rhythm of writing, I start by writing a letter to someone I haven’t seen in too long. I step back in, slowly, carefully, playfully.

Case in point: this is my fourth draft of a piece for the Bridging The Gap Synchroblog. Since my last draft I stood up, walked around in the summer sun, went to get some lunch.

Those of us on either side of this supposed "divide" over homosexuality can often feel like we’re beating our heads against a wall. Stubborn and convinced we’ve got something to prove, a mission to accomplish, we plant our feet and go at it, hurdling arguments across this great yawning chasm like cannonballs. "You’re trying to justify sinful behavior!" "You’re ignoring the Bible’s message of radical acceptance!" 

I don’t know how we reconcile our theologies of sexuality together. Maybe we don’t. But here’s what we can do: we can stand up, step away, and get out of this space for awhile. You can go ahead and think I’m wrong, and I can go ahead and think you’re wrong, and maybe in the meantime we can go feed the poor together. Maybe we can get together and take a carful of groceries to a hungry family. Then, if that goes well, perhaps we could go register some people to vote. If that turns out to be a minefield, then it’s okay; we just hit the reset button and find something else productive to do – cleaning up our neighborhoods, our shared space. Help some latchkey kids with their math homework. Volunteer at a food bank.

Let’s start there. Let’s leave our little verbal bombs and facial tics at home and just go do something good, together, that has nothing to do with this thing we think makes us enemies. Let’s promise not to browbeat each other, just for today. I’ll bring a sack lunch if you’ll bring some water, and we’ll work to alleviate just a tiny little soupçon of suffering, just for today.

I think what we’ll find is that we share more than we think. We share a basic faith in the value of showing up, for one, because at the end of the day it seems we will have done something. We share a faith in God, and we call that God Jesus, and, as Rich Mullins said, "If faith is all we’ve got then maybe faith is all we need." We’ll have dirt on our faces and sweat on our backs. We’ll have the sandwiches and the water, and this thing that we will have built – this good work, conceived together. Those things will be our sacraments, the holy things we share. Those will be our bridge. You can go live on your side of the "gap," and I’ll live on mine, but I’ll bring sandwiches if you’ll bring some water, and we won’t keep the world waiting for us to agree on this one thing before we do something amazing together.

Friday, April 17, 2009 | by nathan

Warning You Now: This One Is Long

This website has never really had a defined mission statement; most personal blogs don’t. Insofar as I have had a mission statement for Okay City, it’s been as a sort of repository of creative work I wouldn’t really put out anywhere else. Making fun of Sarah Palin and keeping notes on the garden; stuff that’s fun to share, especially when the few of you who comment here get in on the fun, too.

But I’ve never thought that a blog would be the place where I did the majority or the best of my writing, and this expectation has borne out. While I’m not really ashamed of anything I’ve written here, it’s not like I’ll be applying for a job with it anytime soon.

That’s my way of prefacing this: of late I’ve been doing some of the most difficult writing of my life. I’m returning very, very soon to GCN – I’ve got about 5 columns in various stages of completion. It was important to me to get ahead before the re-launch of the column – which won’t be called "Queer As Faith" anymore because I truly despise that title – so that I don’t get in danger of falling behind.

I’m telling you this here now in an expository way, a way that I’m not going to edit, because that’s what this blog is about for me; sort of me, unedited, unpolished. I’m going to find a better way to say this over at GCN, and you should put more stock in what I say there, because it’ll be more well-thought-out.

I haven’t written a "Queer As Faith" in almost three years. I had to stop, for awhile, because – I didn’t realize this consciously at the time, but – I had no clue what it meant to be a "gay Christian." My first real column is about how I still don’t know what that means. I felt I’d lost my voice and my joy for writing those kinds of pieces. I was worried that I wasn’t writing from a genuine place. Also, I was working on a novel – a different novel than the one I’m currently working on (and yes, I still am) – and it was taking a lot out of me, along with going to school full-time, working 30+ hours a week at one job and 15+ at another; writing anything not related to school or broadcasting or higher-ed P.R. was really not a luxury I could afford.

Those sound like excuses; perhaps they are. In the pitch and yaw of grad school and newly-married life I had to give something up, and QAF was the easiest, most obvious choice, and, frankly, letting it go for awhile kept me sane.

But God’s been perched on my shoulder since last summer, chirping at me to have another go at it. Telling me that what I do is unique and good and useful, and – Jesus help me, I believed it. And so I took a stab at writing something for GCN.

And it was awful. Everything about the experience. The writing was terrible, and saying what I was trying to say was really, really hard on me. It pulled on my heart in all the right ways, though, so I knew it was a kind of difficult that was worth persevering through. So I wrote everything I had to say, and it sucked out loud. So I tried again. And again. And finally I had something I liked. Then, I went back over and polished it. SIX DRAFTS LATER I came to something I felt like was "finished," whatever that means.

I thought, "Fine. Clog out, on with the process." So I came up with another topic and went through the exact same process again. Horrible, difficult, emotionally jarring first draft. Same basic thing on the second and third drafts. But in there I found some things to say that sounded correct, inspired even, and some things that really made me laugh. Six drafts later, something like a "final" piece emerged. Something I’m proud of.

Those two are done. Three more, plus an introductory piece I’m hoping to premiere next week, are in varying stages of this process.

Before QAF I wrote a column for the Wake Forest newspaper. In both instances I would literally just dash off whatever I was feeling or thinking about, spell-check it, then send it off: poof, done, gone. These pieces feel different than anything else I’ve ever written. They don’t sound entirely different, and the subject matter is mostly the same – my quirky little blessing of a life – but the process around them feels very, very different than any writing process I’ve ever been through. More measured, but more difficult. I feel less like I know what I’m doing but more confident that I’ll figure it out and get there.

I’m both excited and fearful about sharing this new work with the world. But because of how much I love the people who read this website, I’m going to share a little early taste with you now, because you guys really rock:

"…it’s off-putting when a person’s entire self-definition seems to come from being gay, as if that’s the only aspect of their existence that matters in any appreciable way. I think it’s off-putting because being gay is, at least in part, about sex, and really, most of us spend so little of our time actually having sex that to orient our lives around it seems maybe a little backward. At the very least, I think it’s fair to say that you don’t want to think about most of the people you know having sex any more than you want to think about them going to the bathroom.

Oh, I’m off to a ripping start, aren’t I? WELCOME BACK!" 

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 | by nathan

Okay, So I’m In A Movie…

So, I want to tell you that I’m in a movie. A documentary called "Through My Eyes."

It was created by my friend Justin Lee, who also is the creator of gaychristian.net, commonly known as The Gay Christian Network or GCN. Justin started GCN almost a decade ago as a resource for GLBT people struggling with their faith. I used to write a column for them called "Queer as Faith." I’m getting ready to debut a new column for them that won’t be called that, because I always sorta hated that name, and anyway the new stuff I’m writing feels different than that old stuff. More on that to come. Back to the movie.

"Through My Eyes" is a whole bunch of young gay and lesbian people telling their stories of coming out in churches and communities of faith. It’s heart-wrenching and funny stories told in our own words about wrestling with Jesus and ourselves, coming to terms with what we couldn’t change, and, finally, what we could (hint: the thing we could change is not being gay. See the Serenity Prayer for more.)

The interview I did for with Justin was taped in January 2005 in Dallas, which is why I look significantly different in the film than I do now – i.e., redder hair, no glasses, probably a bit thinner. Right now the film is the #1 GLBT Documentary on Amazon, which is pretty cool.

Here’s the trailer. I’m at the end:

Anyway, you can buy the DVD at Amazon, though they keep running out of copies, so the delivery time might be a little slow. Despite the fact that all of your eyes on my face like that sorta freaks me out, I really think you guys should watch this movie if you get a chance. And if you’re one of those people who doesn’t think I’m all that great, well, don’t worry, I’m only in the movie a little. Either way, check it out.