This morning I woke up early because I was excited to see Fort Tryon Park in a blizzard. I ran north, pretending I was a member of the "Night's Watch" (via Game of Thrones), except an openly gay version (which: how much more amazing would GoT be if some of those 'hot bears' on the Night's Watch were openly gay)? 
The park was everything I could have hoped for: the snow and wind had transformed the landscape into another world, full of silhouettes and shadows. Sometimes it's easy to forget how perfect winter can be when you're secretly/guiltily enjoying the "hottest year on record" (via global warming) and running around in shorts in December. 
As usual when I'm running, every thought felt inspired and incisive, and I was looking forward to 'putting it all down on paper,' notwithstanding the certainty that these thoughts and images, like those of a dream, would be hard to capture when I actually sat down. 
I thought about Garth Greenwell's recently published novel, 'What Belongs To You,' which this week received very strong reviews in The New York Times and many other places. This is happy news: I haven't yet read "What Belongs To You," but I did read a previous iteration called "Mitko," and I can assure you that Garth (I'll use his first name because we've met several times over coffee to discuss important things like cats and Louisville, where he's from) writes beautiful prose (he's also a poet) that falls into the tradition of gay novelists going all the way back to Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. (Highest praise.) His novel is about an American teacher in Bulgaria and his relationship with a "gay hustler" (quotes because that term barely scratches the surface of what he is) who the teacher meets in the public toilets where men go to have sex with each other. The novel, which examines the often murky boundaries of this relationship as it moves beyond the confines of the toilet stall, perfectly captures the sense of fear, desire, and intoxication we so often feel when immersed in a "foreign" culture, whether that culture is geographical or sexual or, in this case -- like twin helixes in a DNA of 'otherness' -- both. In short, the book is great and you should read it. More symbolically, it's also noteworthy that Garth is a gay person who writes gay characters (and depicts gay sex), which is still fairly unusual these days and gives those of us who are gay and want to write fiction with gay characters some hope when so often the literary landscape, especially among the 'big New York houses,' seems very cold and inhospitable, and -- in contrast to Fort Tryon Park in a blizzard, not at all beautiful. 
There was a glimpse of this inhospitable attitude in the Times review, when the reviewer (who as far as I know is not gay) says: "I cringed when 'What Belongs to You' pivoted to the narrator’s troubled coming out as a gay youth." Without distracting from the overall tenor of the review, which is very laudatory, I think it's important to focus on this sentence and specifically the word 'cringe,' because I cringed when I read it. This section of the book, I should also say, was not in the previous version I read, so I guess it's possible that it's a clunky, navel-gazing digression with no place in the story of the teacher and the hustler. Knowing Garth's work, however, I suspect that it's illuminating, carefully constructed, and sheds important light on the main character in the book (not to mention our culture at large). Whatever: my point is not to argue about whether the section is 'good' or not, but rather to showcase what is often conveyed by non-homosexuals (and even more sadly, some non-heterosexuals) as a kind of 'been-there-done-that' fatigue with 'coming out stories,' as though they are car commercials on network television. 
Even to use the phrase "coming out" in the context of a literary review is a "red flag," because it attempts to reduce what is always an intensely personal and unique (and, in our world, politically important) action into a mundane experience, at best an "after-school special" or something along those lines. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that every story about someone declaring to the world his/her/their existence beyond the confines of the sexual mainstream is 'automatically amazing' or 'unputdownable,' but it should not be automatically denigrated, either. 
I wanted to ask this reviewer: "Really? You cringed? Because I'm curious to know: exactly how many 'coming out' stories have you, a straight man, been forced to read? And how many is too many? Is five the 'absolute limit'? Or fifteen? Have you reached the end of your rope? Because as someone who's witnessed/read/digested (and even enjoyed, in some cases) approximately 15 trillion stories about non-gay people coming to terms with and expressing their heterosexuality, my guess is that your impatience is not justified." 
In the often-tragic world of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence, there's an increasing sense among the justices that being black "doesn't" or "shouldn't matter" to the way our laws are designed and enforced. If black people 'want equality,' the argument goes, then our laws should be 'colorblind.' While this theory might make sense if you were 'starting from scratch,' and the 'color of your skin was as important as the color of your sweater,' it doesn't account for the fact that we're living in a society that's so far away from being 'colorblind' that it's clearly a joke to even propose the ideal. (If this doesn't make sense to you, I'm not sure what you're doing here.) What's perhaps equally interesting/depressing is that there has long been a 'culture of silence' imposed on the politically and socially marginalized, so that people who belong to or 'identify with' these groups are taught that it's 'wrong' to point out how 'fucked up' things are. There are a gazillion examples of this w/r/t the imposition of silence on 'black culture,' and -- my point here, as a gay person -- is that it's no different with 'gay culture.' Those of us who belong to/identify with these minorities should never have to apologize or feel ashamed to tell our stories, and those in the majority, if they want to think of themselves as empathetic or artistically inclined, should recognize the idea that to be 'colorblind' (in whatever context) should not be an aspiration or ideal, but is rather something to be avoided. 
What this means is that we should not aspire to a culture of 'neutrality' but instead one of 'diversity,' which means that -- especially but not exclusively -- in an artistic context it's actually 'better' to be gay than non-gay; or non-white than white; or non-male than male, etc. In other words, the idea of a 'coming-out' story should not make you cringe, but should in fact lead you to think, "oh, here's someone who belongs to a group that has been horrifically maligned over the past two thousand years and I want to hear more." It should also go without saying that everyone should "come out" about something; it doesn't have to be constrained to non-heterosexuals, but can and should be embraced by anyone who finds mainstream convention stifling and soul-crushing. So many people are ashamed about the very aspects of their lives/personalities/desires that make them unique, and this shame -- and the shaming -- needs to stop asap, especially in literary reviews. NO MORE CRINGING. 
Anyway, I ran down to the river, where the bridge hovered magnificently in the snow and fog. 
The LIttle Red Lighthouse was a little beacon of red. 
Once again I imagined myself as a member of the Night's Watch. There are so many 'hot bears' on that show: what are the odds that they are all straight? (Nil.) 
The water was high along the riverbank. 
The visibility was not great. (The snowstorm as metaphor of our perilous times.)
I kept stopping to take pictures of snow drifts. My fingers were cold and I kept having to enter the stupid 'passcode.' 
I fantasized about living in Denmark, because we've been watching "The Bridge," which has a level of existential despair I find very comforting and 'un-American.' 
Maybe it's time to stop pretending everything is -- or can be -- perfect and to start admitting how wrong things have been. [Pick your context.] 
"Let's not relive the past, but let's not forget it, either." -- Elektra
