JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 9, Tues. 1978 9:45 PM

"G. came back today. I helped him unpack all his furniture etc."

Manhood Redo: I'm surprised that such a big event merited such little text. I don't even sound the least little excited. Given the kind of loneliness I was experiencing and have written about in earlier blog entries, you'd think I would have been thrilled, overjoyed, ebullient. But G.'s move back sounds routine, almost something to take for granted.

Sometimes I resent the hell out of masculinity - for instance, when it tamps down joy I might be feeling, and I mean a silly, happy, almost giddy joy about people and events. I've kept the full extent of my emotions - both exhilaration and sorrow - under wraps for so long that it still can be hard to not only express them but also to find a way into them. Someone at work told me I'm hard to excite; maybe that's true based on what I'm seeing today in this journal excerpt. Although it might be more the case that I have excitement bubbling up in me and am cautious about expressing it. I'm trying to think about both what forms of excitement are sanctioned by traditional masculinity and what aren't. Obviously, it's okay to get excited about sports if you're a guy. You can yell and scream and jump up and down and cry if your team loses. But had I jumped up and down and screamed in excitement about G. moving back to Lubbock, I can't help but think that people would've looked at me either like I was crazy or thought I was gay. So even in the journal I was keeping at the time, even in a personal and private space where I might have felt free to express what I didn't feel free to express elsewhere, I'm restrained.

Let me try to be a little unrestrained now. The last time I saw G. was maybe 20 or so years ago in Lubbock. I had tried to track him down a couple times over the web but never had any success - until about a month ago. He had been on my mind, perhaps because of this blog, so I just on the spur of the moment decided to try one more time since it had been quite a few years since the last time I checked the web. I had little in the way of expectations, so I was shocked when a photo of him turned up. He looked just about the same, except his hair had turned completely gray. He's in a covers band now. When we were friends years ago, he dabbled with the piano, and the two of us would sing Beatles tunes along with his car cassette player as we drove back and forth from Lubbock and San Antonio, but I never would've predicted he'd be playing keyboard and sharing lead vocals, singing anything from the Texas Tornadoes to the Temptations. I don't know if he sings lead on "YMCA" but that I would like to hear, maybe even dance to.

He's in the Southwest but no longer in Lubbock; he hasn't been there for a long while. I'm not sure what will come of our getting back in touch since we're far apart, there is a lot that's happened since we last saw each other, and we're both busy, but it's exciting to have him in my life again, even if only in a minimal way. He's someone who's had a significant impact on my life. I was best man at his wedding. We worked on a comic strip together and tried to syndicate it. We went camping for almost three weeks, driving from Texas to Oregon and back. We shared and critiqued our creative writing. We read our favorite poems to each other.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 10, 1978 9:25 PM

I want to stick with the previous journal entry a little longer, so here's another excerpt...

"I'm going to call T-- long distance tonight and see how his long-distance-love-affair is going. He is hooked on a girl named L-- S--. She is a very prim and proper girl, who is destroying his life. T-- just can't handle the type of relationship they have. He loves her, she likes him. T-- is too intense for that sort of relationship. He's going crazy. I would too. When I was in San Antonio he wrote a note and I put on her car for him. And later on he gave her a single red rose. I wouldn't do that sort of shit. I guess I'm not romantic. And I thought I was. I think he ought to dump her. He says she's really messed up though (parent's influence and so on) and he wants to help her. I was the same way with L-- S-- [a different girl, same initials] and look what happened. Nothing. I didn't help her a bit. She's married now. I don't know about happily married. I hope so for her sake. I can't talk to T-- over ten minutes because buying the cassette deck lowered my funds terribly, and I have to save enough money to quit work and go back to school this fall semester."

MANHOOD REDO: I wonder how much this excerpt had to do with something that men are generally disallowed from talking about: how T--'s interest in and intimacy with L-- cut into his and my intimacy (even though he lived in San Antonio, we still talked on the phone regularly and I would visit; when he got involved with L--, all he did was obsess about her). That might partly explain why I thought he ought to dump her.

Hetero men generally are pretty limited in how they're allowed to express fondness for another man because it walks a little too closely to the gay side of the line. It's okay if you're drunk, like in the beer commercials where one guy says to another, "I looove you, man," or on the sports field where you can slap another guy on the butt, or in times of danger and courage.

And yet I formed my most intense bonds with guys before I did with women. T-- was one of them. I'll never forget acting silly with him when we were fifteen, dancing around the pool table in his parent's house in the middle of the night, singing along with George Harrison's "I Dig Love," or all the times we spent the night at each other's houses staying up and talking about anything and everything, what we called our "bullshit sessions." When he moved away from Texas to Virginia at the end of ninth grade I was crushed. We recorded cassette tapes and mailed them to each other instead of letters.

I was talking with Abby, my wife, just a couple days ago about first learning what I wanted in a relationship with a woman through my early relationships with guys like T-- and G--; I wanted someone I enjoyed being around, who enjoyed being around me; someone I wouldn't feel like I had to put on a masculine pose for. I wanted intimacy, honesty, sharing. As a hetero guy, I was never attracted to them the way I am Abby, but the deep fondness was always there and still is.