December 15, 2024

The Girl I Should’ve Loved – In Memoriam Jane Rose Sallis

Jane Rose in Newcomb College Picture, 1963

Once again, I find it my old man’s duty to write in memoriam about a beloved spirit from long ago who has now left me behind on this plane of existence. Jane Rose Sallis (November 12, 1942-August 14, 2024) and I were students respectively at Newcomb College and Tulane University in New Orleans. We caroused frantically in the French Quarter, tremendously close friends and dancing partners, all through the spring, summer, and fall of 1962. It was her dire misfortune that Jane fell in love with me, a wild queer boy too besotted by my newly realized homosexuality to recognize this golden chance to love her back.

Many years later, I wrote in “Divine Debauch” about my dissolute youth in the sailor bars on Decatur Street, a memoir in the form of a semi-epistolary, multiple-narrator novel. The chapter covering Jane’s and my still-born romance is called “November Someteenth.” (Click HERE to read or download the chapter.) I dared to write it in her voice, telling exactly in truth how it played out, trying to understand that powerful experience from her point of view. While it’s the sordid tale of my own depravity, I believe looking at it through her eyes was as close and intimate as we ever got.

Being in a novel, her character was named Rose, and my name as protagonist was Tommy Youngblood, stolen from a real friend from high school. Tommy appeared in a cameo in my other memoir-novel “Bat in a Whirlwind.” Meanwhile, the Ben who kept watch over Rose had previously been me as the protagonist of that book, now a Tulane student. I brought him in to give Rose and Ben the beautiful romance Jane and I never had. Such is the special magic allowed the novelist-memoirist. Sadly, I can’t go back and write in a great love affair for us.

After we split up that evening in the Napoleon House, Jane retreating to her quiet, sane life and I off to debauch in La Marina, we remained friends for two more years till graduation. Once graduated, she married an aspiring writer named Jim and moved away to Iowa City for his writing career. I went to Seattle for graduate school (and profound trauma—as narrated in my memoir “There Was a Ship).”

At the end of 1965 I passed through Iowa City and visited Jane over a cup of tea, learning that she’d just had a baby boy. It was awkward, considering that I too was now married—and expecting a child. I doubt Jane appreciated my apparent reversion to heterosexuality, but I couldn’t explain how it was a terrible trap I’d fallen into. Consequently, neither of us spoke much about the past—or the present, and afterwards we lost contact.

Honest to John, I have no idea how we re-connected, but in the early 90s we did. Jane came to visit Santa Fe, and we spent several afternoons together catching up. She’d divorced Jim many years before, lost her son Dylan to suicide when he was around 15, started working in one of Seattle’s serious wealth-producing industries, retired well-provided for, and bought a house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Our talks as 50-year-olds were warm but again focused solely on present concerns and plans. I sensed her lack of surprise that I’d left my wife and family long before to resume gay relationships. After her visit, for the next 30 years we remained in close, if sporadic, email touch.

Jane Rose Sallis at her Birthday Party, 2020

When I finished the first version of “Divine Debauch” in like 2000, I sent Jane a copy, pointing out her chapter. She wrote back that she’d read that chapter, and that was indeed how she remembered our misbegotten love affair. Our time together in the sailor bars had been the most exciting experience in her life, but she tried never to think about the past. I suppose she felt hers was too boring and painful, but my gay past felt endlessly fascinating.

In our communications, I never reminisced with Jane, simply reporting on my odd plant-vendor work and progress on writing projects—and sending her an occasional piece of my weird Aztec artwork. I was pleased that her comfortable, beautiful life in splendid San Miguel was so full of philanthropic activity and blest with puppies that always featured on her Christmas cards.

When I sent my recent birthday wishes and heard nothing back, I soon learned that my “first girlfriend” had passed away. We’d never kissed.

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October 27, 2024

Innocence Intact

I’m happy to report wrapping up the third Nowlin Road segment of my childhood memoir KID STUFF which I’m calling “Playmate.” It covers my ages 8 to 10 (third and fourth grade) when I started being aware of the larger world and other people in it. What happened in that brief period wasn’t very dramatic but certainly had ramifications for my future life.

I’m also happy to advise that my innocence remained intact in spite of Catholic school, television, an intense friendship, and the overture of a pubescent neighbor girl. Read all about it.

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October 10, 2024

A Newly True Love Story – In Memoriam Dennis E. Buster

Dennis E. Buster as Halloween King, 1959

Recently I found the obituary of my best friend from high school, Dennis (January 30, 1942 – October 10, 2023), dated almost a year ago. All through this past year, I’d had a sneaky feeling he’d probably passed on. We hadn’t been in contact for a couple years—ever since I wrote that I’d always wished he were my brother. Denny replied that we’d always be brothers—in Christ. While not exactly the terminology I had in mind, I took it in the intimate spirit intended.

In those years since 1960 after we parted, Dennis now lives on only in the memories of his wife, children, and grandchildren as the Navy guy, new husband and family man, long-time worker in the paper mill in Ashdown, retiree with work-related Parkinson’s, and a happy fisherman out in the backwoods of Arkansas. May they long remember him, but I know how quickly fond family memories can fade away to ancient photographs or vague anecdotes, even in one year.

Over those years, I visited Denny a few times, first in the mid-70’s when we were both still young. At his new house I briefly saw his teenaged son (his spitting image), and at the paper mill we had a few fond moments together. Our next meeting was around our 50^th class reunion (2010) when we rode on a parade float together. Some years later, I met him and his wife Esther at a fishing camp at White Cliffs, and on yet another drive-by I stopped in at their new house. I was sorely distressed by my friend’s Parkinson’s affliction, but he seemed to be medicating it well.

We had only two early years together when my Denny was the handsome high school boy, Halloween King, volley-ball player, joker, and unspeakably sexy tease. Now that teenaged Halloween King is mine and mine alone, like the heroic ephebe on a Grecian urn, eternally young and incorruptible. With Denny’s passing one year ago, my old novella BAT IN A WHIRLWIND has now become a veritable monument to my beloved best buddy, our newly true love story. With no one to refute my blatant fictions, the adolescent passions of our avatars Danny and Ben are for all intents and purposes factual history.

Here follow some preview scenes. For our whole love story and poignant memories of Denny, please read the book.

1. THE CHASE

Along the parking area in front of the café there was this huge chain strung up between big cement posts. They were sitting on the great links down by the rosebush. I sat next to Danny so my leg pushed up against his. He threw his arm over my shoulder and squeezed my neck. It felt so good I thought I was going to faint, but then I realized it was the smelly cigar.

They were talking about Terry’s hot ’57 Chevy parked right there in front of us, all shiny and black. Naturally I myself knew nothing about cars beyond what I could read on the hood. But I felt perfectly content listening to my good buddy chatter about whatever, as long as he kept his arm around my neck.

When Terry went back inside for a snack, Danny punched me on the arm, and I chased him across the road to our Desoto, down the way to the Phillips 66 station and around the pumps, back across the highway, up past the café, and around some cars. He finally let me catch him around the corner where Melvin, the night cook, parked his new red Plymouth. We collapsed on its shiny hood, breathless from running and laughing.

2. AT SCHOOL

At school I waited out front for Danny. He came ambling up the walk under the oak trees whistling “Red River Valley.” He was so hot-looking it should be illegal. Danny’s flattop was a shade darker than mine with just a hint of a ducktail in back. That point of hair on his nape didn’t look sissy at all. Actually, it was pretty darned sexy.

He had to go to the office and get him a newspaper article for Civics class. I already had mine, a short thing about Congress passing some bill. Afterwards, we hung out by the lockers, and he leaned lazily up against one. Something made me poke his stomach. Wiggling his hips, he asked, “Want something?” Then he blushed like crazy, his cheeks the color of cherries…

Going to our regular assembly seats, now on the very first row being seniors, he brushed my face with his red sweater in passing, and I caught a brief flower-like fragrance. Waiting for the assembly to start, Danny looked over at Betty Lou with intense carnal interest. I whispered, “There’s a little muscle in your cheek that’s quivering.”

He didn’t take his eyes off of her and said, “That ain’t the only one. Boy, I could make do with just half of her.”

Deadpan, I asked, “Right or left?” Danny cracked up.

3. THE INDIAN WELL

Noticing the shallow Indian well full of leaves, Danny said it sure looked like a great place for a nap. So, I pushed him in, and he pulled me tumbling after. Wrestling around, I took to tickling Danny in the ribs, and he struggled, laughing and begging me to quit. Tears glistened in his brown eyes. When I stopped, he instantly jumped me and pinned me flat on my back, knees on my elbows so I couldn’t tickle anymore.

Danny leaned over me, grinning mischievously, and stroked my furry cheek. “I love your fuzz,” he said, laughed, and asked, “Wanna know what I wished?” I nodded. “Here, I’ll show you,” he said with a sly smile and popped open the buttons on his fly. His pecker stood right up in the air, maybe six inches from my nose, a lot bigger than mine. He moaned and said, “My balls are about to explode!”

All my blessed bliss of the day was blown away by his cock sticking out of his pants like a dark-headed snake. How could temptation ambush me so soon after being made pure again? Why did the devil use my beloved friend to lure me into sin? When Danny started touching himself impurely, I struggled out from under him, protesting that what he was doing was a sin.

“Maybe for you, Benny babe,” he said, rolling over in the leaves, and kept on moving his hand. “But I think it’s like a little bit of heaven.”

“Well, I’m not going to watch,” I protested in a fit of virtue and walked over to stare at the trunk of the white oak. Hearing Danny’s sweet groans, I had to struggle not to get hard myself. Listening to a bird singing somewhere didn’t help. Then a deep grunt.

When Danny climbed out of the leaf-well, he was handsomer than ever, his eyes brown and shining. How could I love him so much in spite of his sinful ways? I rumpled his soft hair to show I loved him anyway.

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September 29, 2024

Naughty Kitten Still Gets Pie

My latest memoir, KID STUFF, progresses slowly in between drawing for my TONALAMATL project, writing on other stuff, and seasonal gardening. (In that arena, besides the swaths of golden aspens on the mountains, we’re now well into autumn colors down here in town.)

Rocky Mountain Asters (foreground)
Maximilian Sunflowers (background)

For the memoir, I’m now posting the second mini chapter called BIG BRO which covers my few relatively idyllic years between five and eight. They were years of minor traumas, dramas, and challenges, the most serious but least impactful being a concerted but unsuccessful effort by the Catholic church to indoctrinate my heathen little head.

The most traumatic but least important experience of that period was in the first grade when, like a naughty kitten, I lost my mitten and feared I’d have no pie. In fact, I got more pie than I needed and by eight had gotten downright plump. The most painful but least meaningful drama was my first time away from the family at Cub Scout camp when I was too shy to use the latrine.

The funniest adventure in those few years of empty-headed childhood was a snowy sleighride that went terribly wrong. On the other hand, the most serious and meaningful episode in those few years was being rescued from drowning by my heroic father. That was essentially our closest relationship moment in all the too few years of his life.

Check out BIG BRO for a few minutes of old snapshots and fond, if vague, memories of a childhood well before the age of reason, if such a theoretical age indeed exists.

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August 15, 2024

More Memoir Madness

Back in 2022, I wrapped up my sixth volume of memoir, GAY GEISHA, calling it quits at the half-way point in my eighty-some years. The first half of my life (1942-1982) was unusual and fascinating enough to recall, but the latter half (1982-2022) is way too boring to bother with.

Besides, all kinds of people have written reams about the plague years and the liberated lives of youths in this new century, and I know very little about either subject anyway. These past two good years of focused artwork are at last leading to completion of my Tonalamatl project and series of trecena blogs, and now I find myself slipping back into memoir mode again.

I recently picked up an old book-awarded memoir by a late gay author and read about his tormented gay life set almost in my timeframe. Suffocated by a suburban, middle-class upbringing and rigid religious environment of elite privilege, the author called his closeted youth an internal exile, imprisonment. This is of course exactly the kind of thing that commercial publishing loves because the righteous straight world thinks we gay folks deserve to agonize.

Dickie with Toy, 1943

Well, the comparison with my own young life couldn’t be sharper. I never lived in a closet—because I grew up “normally” (though saddled at first by an insane religion). When I “came out,” it was a natural evolution, like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly—without guilt or opposition—and my gay environment was truly exciting, picturesque, and historic. Such a story is simply too positive, upbeat, and way too real for commercial publication. Not nearly enough angst.

That’s why I’m slipping back into the memoir frame of mind. We need us a good memoir of growing up normally, of a childhood without precocious agonies of sexual- or gender-identity confusion, without moral or social conflict. I need to write about the mind-boggling innocence of my childhood, dig deeper into the ancient material of MS YVONNE, The Secret Life of My Mother, and mine the primitive Arkansas years of my semi-fictional BAT IN A WHIRLWIND.

Already I’ve written several pages of an illustrated first chapter of KID STUFF called The Id-Kid, planning a clutch of half a dozen or more, and as usual posting each as it’s completed. Please be patient.

Just for reference, my other memoirs are DIVINE DEBAUCH, THERE WAS A SHIP, and LORD WIND. You’ll only find anguish of a sort in THERE WAS A SHIP. They’re all celebrations of gay life and so aren’t commercially attractive. Again, far too little guilt and grief.

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March 9, 2024

Nine Cycles – Eight Personas

Significantly, in the Aztec calendar March 6, 2024, was the day Ome Acatl (Two Reed) and my 115^th birthday in that ceremonial cycle of 260-day years. In our western calendar, I’ve recently celebrated my 81^st birthday, wrapping up nine cycles of nine Gregorian years and starting in on my tenth cycle. The nine include a first inchoate period of childhood and eight discrete personas. For lack of a better description, I’m calling this new ninth persona the venerable iconographer, researcher, and/or historical theorist. We’ll just have to wait and see how that pans out.

Here’s an illustrated summary of my nine cycles for easy reference.

Inchoate Childhood in almost rural Indiana (9 years)—Little can be said about Dickie except that he was the bright but spoiled son of Yvonne and Ray. You can read about him between the lines of my memoir-biography “Ms. Yvonne, the Secret Life of My Mother.”

Cute, clueless kid in the backwoods of Arkansas (9 years)—At 15 with a stylish flattop hairdo, Richard was an outstanding student, accomplished loner, and an avid rock’n’roll dancer, usually solo. He had the misfortune of being raised Catholic and being futilely in love with Annette Funicello. You can read about my adolescent traumas in my semi-fictional novel “Bat in a Whirlwind.”

At 21 in the House of the Rising Sun

Wild faerie slut in New Orleans’ French Quarter (5 years)—Shown here in 1963 in his apartment at 387 Audubon Street, Rick had just turned 21, was majoring in Russian at Tulane University, spent nights dancing in Latin and Greek sailor bars, and had urges to art and literature. In this photo he’s stunned by frenzied sex with a football-player named Tom. Such sordid adventures are described in my second semi-fictional novel “Divine Debauch.”

Reluctant father and Slavic scholar in northern universities (6 years)—Richie is pictured here in early 1968 at 25 with younger daughter Aimée in apartment on East Kingsley in Ann Arbor MI. On my marriage to Barbara and birth of older daughter Jacqueline, read my first real memoir “There Was a Ship.”

Hippie poet, footloose and feckless (2 years)—Photographed in December 1970 at 28 in his Bellevue apartment in Milwaukee by his mother on a visit, Richie was again stunned, first by the welcome shock of being divorced and second, by a passionate affair with a ballet dancer named Kenny. These two years of that and other love affairs are detailed in my second memoir “Lord Wind.”

Courtesan in a Victorian mansion at Logan Circle in Washington DC (9 years)—Shown in 1978 at 36 in publicity photo for performance of his translation of Tchaikovsky’s opera “Joan of Arc” by the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, Richard was now a professional arts administrator with OPERA America. My libidinous lifestyle in the 70s, DC’s golden age of gay liberation, is celebrated in my third memoir “Gay Geisha.”

Mature gay gentleman working in various glamorous cities (16 years)—Taken in 1982 when Richard was 40 at the Denver Gay Freedom Parade in a Denver Post front-page picture—with his partner Ernesto. He’d been working for the Central City Opera House and later would work in other arts organizations. Recent exposure to ancient American earthworks eventually led to my first nonfiction book in 1992, “Remember Native America!” Discovery of the Aztec Calendar in the late 80s led to my second in 1993: “Celebrate Native America!”

Grandfatherly gay character, the Used Plant Man of Santa Fe (16 years)—Taken in 2006 at 64 for an article in The New Mexican on Babylon Gardens, Richard had now become a grandfather four times over. I’d also written another nonfiction book, “Getting Get,” was still an avid disco dancer, gave shows of my sculpture (found-object assemblage), and was working on the above novels and memoirs.

Widely unknown elder writer and artist (10 years)—Pictured here in 2020 at the age of 78 in New Orleans for a new production of “Joan of Arc” (by the New Orleans Opera), Richard was retired from business and now spent his time in (Aztec) drawing and finishing the above novels and memoirs. In the later 20-teens, my show YE GODS! (Icons of Aztec Deities) enjoyed seven venues across NM before being closed down by the pandemic. It also hampered my ecstatic dance activities, but the solitude facilitated my blogging and artwork on Aztec themes.

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March 21, 2021

BREAKING FREE – Gay Life Before the Plague

Recently I’ve come to see my aged self as a writer of history, as a witness to and reporter on ancient gay history before the Plague. I just wish folks would take time to read what I’m writing.

Gay life in the 50s, 60s, and 70s of last century has only been nominally covered in coming out novels, erotic tales, and a few historical studies, mostly about the pivotal Stonewall Riot in 1969. Now I’ve fortunately found a 2018 book “TINDERBOX—The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation” by Robert W. Fieseler, another pivotal event that played a role in my life in the early 70s.

My own eye-witness reports on gay life in those decades before the Plague appear in my series of autobiographical novels and memoirs. I started writing 35 years ago about an unconsciously gay adolescent in 1957, and right now I’m into the unusual life of a mature gay man in 1976. The 25 years in these volumes span a sea change in gay life, and I was right smack in the middle of it.

My writing (fiction, memoirs, non-fiction, poetry, and plays), is all (with one exception) posted for free download on this website, and I watch the history of downloads closely to see how often they might get read. Every hit is a cause for jubilation and gratification.

I truly rejoice when somebody deigns to look at my short story, “Traveling Men,” or my play, “The Special Case,” and I cheer brave readers along from one memoir chapter to the next. Some download the whole text, but others just take a chapter at a time, some naturally getting more readers by simple virtue of their titles, like “Getting Naked” or “Hotter Than the Dickens.”

My book most frequently downloaded is “MS. YVONNE, The Secret Life of My Mother”—maybe because she was a survivor of Hurricane Katrina. (It includes my own childhood, so is marginally relevant to gay history of the 40s and early 50s.)

The erotic chapters mentioned above are in my first novel, “BAT IN A WHIRLWIND,” about that unconsciously gay adolescent in the late 50s. This book, which downloads maybe twenty times a year with chapters a few times a month, is a look into the Stone Age of gay history.

My own coming out story, “DIVINE DEBAUCH—Chronicles of a Dissolute Youth in the French Quarter,” is about a newly fledged faerie named Tommy carousing in sailor bars in the early 60s. This is the exception mentioned before. At the moment it’s only available from an online publisher. Its webpage gets hits on the link, but there’s been no indication of any sales for some years… Really too bad—it’s a fascinating look into the Mesolithic Age of gay history.

My first memoir, “THERE WAS A SHIP,” about that wild faerie getting coerced back into the closet as husband and father, is downloaded a few times a month, both as a whole and as chapters. Right now some brave soul is moving through it, having just finished “Double or Nothing” and picking up “Honeymoon.” A going-back-in story, it portrays the heavy hand of homophobic society on out gays in the Neolithic mid-60s.

My recently posted memoir, “LORD WIND,” has been looked at so far only as occasional chapters, not necessarily in logical order. The past couple weeks I’ve been amazed by the huge number of downloads of its “Prelude” (a summary of my closeted marriage in the later 60s), sometimes as many as six times a day! I hope this surge will lead to another for its first chapter “The Jaguar.” The tale of my second coming out in the gay Bronze and Iron Ages of early 70’s, be warned that “LORD WIND” contains many graphic sex scenes.

And now we come to my memoir-in-process, “GAY GEISHA,” about the gay Golden Age of the 70s in liberated (and glamorous) Washington DC. Its chapters are now being posted as completed, and to date we’re up to Chapter 12 “Shameless.” (The sex scenes here are mostly handled metaphorically but nonetheless quite graphically.) Washington DC was, of course, at the forefront of history in the exuberant 70s, and I just happened to be right in the gay middle of it.

I’m tentatively considering another volume of memoir set in the early 80s—to wind up my histories with those few Renaissance years before the coming of the Plague, a new chapter that brought much to culmination in my long gay life. A great deal has already been written about the Plague itself, and I fear any reportage on it by me would just be redundant.

As a writer of gay history, I feel like Herodotus who probably wrote his histories without concern for publishing royalties. His upper class family (like me in my privileged retirement), very likely didn’t have to worry about earning a living. Like him, I don’t want to deal with copyrights or selfish issues of intellectual property.

I just want folks to download my public domain work and read it—because I think I’ve got something rather important and special to say about ancient gay history. Anyone who can make a buck by disseminating my work is welcome to give it a shot. Naturally, I’d love to know about any such efforts, and respectful attribution would be nice….

People, especially our younger folks, need to learn about how their ancestors’ generations broke free from the oppression of straight society. Maybe my scandalous tales can help today’s fortunate youth truly appreciate their precious freedom and liberty to be themselves.

After all, there’s really no excuse not to read my histories—they’re free!

January 14, 2021

Making Lemonade

Despite historic obstacles, 2020 turned out to be a very successful and productive year for me, both artistically and personally. It started with a celebration for completing Aztec Icon #18 – XOCHIPILLI, the Prince of Flowers on the last day of 2019. I’d first drawn this sun god thirty years ago for my book of days. The black and white icon, infinitely more complicated than this old four-color image, breaks all sorts of Aztec iconographic norms and conventions. Go to the link above to see this iconoclastic addition to the coloring book YE GODS!

Xochipilli – The Prince of Flowers – (God of pleasure, feasting, and dancing)

On New Year’s Day, 2020 I posted the Flower Prince but still had much to do before adding his icon to my “travelling” exhibition YE GODS! Icons of Aztec Deities. In mid-January I mounted this show of large-scale banners at its seventh venue in a conference center—with the help of a tall French fellow I’d met during its sixth appearance.

We’d hung the show by January 18 (for my mother’s 101^st birthday), and I turned to our trip for the New Orleans Opera premiere of my new translation of Tchaikovsky’s heroic opera JOAN OF ARC on February 2 & 9. My clan gathered for the occasion at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre, and I enjoyed their acclaims, as well as those of appreciative audiences. I believe my linguistic work has turned the composer’s simply inspired piece into a masterpiece.

By Monday, February 11, I was gratefully back in Santa Fe for my comfortable retired life in my eyrie apartment, my Casa Arriba penthouse high above the world. With a gratified sigh of relief, I slipped back into my splendid routines of writing/drawing, gym, dinners out, and especially the ecstatic dancing on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.

After a couple leisurely weeks, I started on my second memoir, picking up my sordid tale of after marriage when I came out for the second time. Covering the next two traumatic and extremely sexual years of my fourth persona (the HIPPIE POET, footloose and feckless), I pretentiously included my own poetry, a device stolen from “Dr. Zhivago.” My routines and retrospective writing trance held me nicely right up almost to the middle of March.

In my Mesoamerican fascination, I consider Friday, March 13, 2020 or the Aztec day Four Rain to have been the emphatic end of the Fifth Sun, the Sixth Sun starting on Saturday. Suffice it to say that Friday the Thirteenth brought enormous turmoil into my life when my gym closed down due to a virus they were already calling a pandemic.

On March 14, 2020 everything locked down (my show as well), and since then I’ve fortunately been living safely and comfortably in Casa Arriba. The loss of gym, dinners out, and ecstatic dancing has left me with only the splendid routine of writing and drawing. Right away I replaced my gym workouts with walking/running around the nearby track, but I could do nothing about the sauna except miss it miserably. Cooking simply, I didn’t miss restaurant food—just my regular companions at meals. I was driven to solo dancing to radio reggae and salsa in my living room and to sorely missing all the young bacchantes at Paradiso.

I joked about going into solitary confinement but didn’t really feel that way. I deeply appreciated being made to step away from the world’s sound and fury, to take care of my physical needs simply in solitary peace, and to do my work on my natural schedule without distractions. I found it fascinating to watch my hair grow, now longer than it’s ever been, and I rather like it. Perversely, I didn’t feel lonely, isolated, or confined at all, but instead felt blessedly secluded, a secular anchorite. Six decades later, this new Sixth Sun feels like a confirmation and redemption of my solitary youth in backwoods Arkansas.

Staying snugly at home (except for walks at the track and to grocery stores), let me focus on the memoir, which I titled LORD WIND, alternating between writing it and drawing on Icon #19 – TEZCATLIPOCA, The Smoking Mirror. By mid-May I’d finished and posted the icon, which went much deeper into the god’s story than this old drawing for the book of days.

Tezcatlipoca – Smoking Mirror – (Lord of the Night Sky)

And by early June I’d finished the memoir. Rejoicing, I posted LORD WIND on the web as individual chapters or entire text.

On the urging of my French friend, in June I began conjuring up visions of Tlaloc, the God of Storms, and at the same time started the third volume of memoir, soon entitled GAY GEISHA, about my stylish gay life in Washington DC in the 1970s. Once again, for sanity’s sake, over the next months I switched back and forth between creative processes.

Meanwhile, a few important things happened in the solitude of October. First, I rode my bike to the Convention Center and voted early against the scumbag, whereupon I put it and its filth out of mind. Next, I finally struck my icon show after nine months’ lockdown—with the kind assistance of my tall grandson. Then, accepting that my life was utterly changed for the foreseeable future, I gave him my little red car and happily became a true pedestrian.

In mid-November I started posting chapters of GAY GEISHA serially and by mid-December had published eight covering about a quarter of the decade. The switch then back to the icon was for a final push, aiming to finish it by New Year’s. I didn’t quite make it though. Only the other day, almost two weeks into 2021, I finally wrapped Tlaloc up, though he doesn’t look much like my first fanciful drawing of him for that old book of days. Still, that goggle-eye and fangs are standard features.

Please allow me to count Aztec Icon #20 – TLALOC, God of Storms, as an accomplishment for wretched but productive 2020. (I’ll post it very soon.) I’m tremendously gratified by creating my three icons, memoirs of gay liberation, and the operatic masterpiece.

November 14, 2020

My Third Gay Memoir

What with increasing urgency in the Corona virus calamity, it has become clear to me that I’m going to have to change my mode of operation in writing my memoirs. Before, I always waited until a volume was complete before publishing (posting) it on my website—in order to have the luxury of skipping back to earlier sections to add, delete, or tweak the material.

Now that I really can’t predict how long I’ll hang around on this planet, I’m going to post chapters serially as they’re completed, adding them to the Table of Contents for individual access. Too bad for second-thought revisions, but that’s how this wretched Covid cookie is crumbling.

While writing on Chapter 6 of the current volume, I found the appropriate title for this memoir. It’s the registered name for a spectacular variety of iris I used to sell at the Farmers Market a long time back when I was the famous Iris Man:

GAY GEISHA

As I told a dear friend, these two words are the most cogent description I can imagine of who and what I was in the 1970s in Washington DC. My third real memoir (actually the sixth volume in the story of my unique life), GAY GEISHA covers 1972-80, a time of glorious gay liberation, when I lived and graciously entertained gentlemen in a grand Victorian mansion at historic Logan Circle.

GAY GEISHA provides the dramatic and often lurid details behind that old summary of my fifth persona which I prophetically entitled “Courtesan.” As possible, I’ll keep adding chapters and hopefully live to finish this volume. (As of 2/20/22, I’ve now posted twenty-four chapters covering through September 1980.)

To start reading, just click on GAY GEISHA.

June 22, 2020

Memoir of My Second Coming Out

Over the past few years I’ve switched back and forth between drawing Aztec icons for my coloring book and writing on my second memoir. At last I’ve wrapped the latter up and have just added it to the growing list of my Writings. Note that I don’t copyright my writing; people shouldn’t have to pay to enjoy my art, graphic or literary. So I post it for free download and avoid noxious commercialism. The more folks to read or see my work the better. Or to do something with it if they so feel like…

LORD WIND is the memoir of my second coming out in Milwaukee in 1970. My first coming out was in New Orleans in 1961 (in the gay Stone Age when we lived in caves of secrecy), and I’ve written about my unusual life as a gay man both in my (semi-fictional) novels BAT IN A WHIRLWIND and DIVINE DEBAUCH and in my first (also semi-fictional) memoir THERE WAS A SHIP. The latter (1964-66), was my scandalous tale of going back into the closet.

Now the purely non-fictional LORD WIND (1970-72), picks up again after years of wedlock when I escaped from my cage—and discovered that gay life had evolved into a (Post-Stonewall) Neolithic Era. As a former French Quarter faerie/slut, and now a divorced father and esoteric scholar of 28, I had to deal with the realities of the strange gay “civilization” and make a new life for myself in it.

Richard Balthazar in December, 1970–newly come out for the second time

No longer an outlaw, I still wasn’t exactly socially condoned, but in the new gay atmosphere of openness and promiscuity, I quickly found romantic/sexual entanglements to complicate life. In those two years I learned a heck of a lot about loving men and several hard lessons in maturity.

I’m trying a new format with this book on the web—for ease of access. The webpage is actually its Title page and chapter list, and each can be directly accessed through its link. No more bulky .pdf files of entire texts. I’ll try to convert the others to it too. Early on I issued each chapter of BAT IN A WHIRLWIND separately in blogposts, so that one will be easy to convert.

Wrapping up this book is a really great feeling for me. With it I’ve now built a four-volume saga (epic?) of my life from innocent adolescent through lascivious, debauched youth and responsible, though philandering, husband to a maybe more mature, but at least way more experienced, gay man of 30. This is gay ancient history according to moi… Now I can start the third memoir covering the 70s in Washington DC. In many ways that decade was a Classic Age of gay life and DC an epicenter, and I was right in the middle of it.

However, before I write a word of it, I’ve got to make some good progress on the next icon (#20) of the God of Storms, Tlaloc. While on that subject, you’ll notice that I simply had to use my drawing of Ehecatl, Aztec God of the Wind as a most appropriate title image for LORD WIND.

BTW, my YE GODS! Show is still under lockdown at the Ohkay Conference Center. There’s nothing else I can do with it, so why not?