Types of Gaze – Published in sidereal magazine

written by Christopher Eckman April 1, 2020

The Funny Gays

You were never the class clown in elementary school, instead you were mostly bullied. But now that you’ve come out as gay in High School, you have carte blanche to say scandalous things about sex which will make your friends howl with laughter. You take full advantage of this, especially after you date a few people who are really into stand-up comedy and you learn about famous comedians—Gallagher, Mitch Hedberg, Margaret Cho, Lisa Lampeneilli (briefly, and offensively). You repeat the things you hear them say and you get away with it because, just like Jack on Will and Grace, gay people are supposed to be funny. And you enjoy making people laugh, though you wish you could do it without being so offensive.

It won’t be enough for you to be out. That will just be the start of it. Sure, there will be offers from those looking for not just any kind of best friend, but a gay best friend. And yes, you will receive a sudden influx of invites from every which person. But they will be specific invites, that is, they will require something of you that you may not be prepared to offer. You will accept anyway, for acceptance is the one thing you feared you’d never get.

One day after you’ve graduated college, before you’re married but with the man you’ll marry, you overhear Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me on NPR and listen to Paula Poundstone, Peter Segal, and Mo Rocca say hilarious things that aren’t all based on stereotypes or vulgar language. After that day, you only want to be funny without all the shock and scandal and stereotypes.

One day in graduate school you hear the teacher say “Rembrandt’s gays” when discussing On Looking, an essay by Randon Billings Noble. Your teacher says, “separate gays” and you think: well, that’s offensive. Then she starts talking about “the gays of the art” and you realize the whole time when you look down at the reading she’s been saying gaze the whole time and you choke back the giggles. She keeps going on about “the gays of animals” and “independent gays” and you can’t handle it. You write on your friend’s sheet of paper, “GAZE=GAYS,” and as she talks about “being under someone’s gays,” he starts cracking up. The jig is up, and when you tell the teacher about how she keeps saying things like “What do you read in someone’s gays” and “flicked our gays away” and “dropped my gays” and “gays skimming” and “outside of our gays” and “my gays is different from your gays” and “gorilla’s gays,” the entire class cracks up and she laughs so hard she has to leave the room for a moment.

You like being funny. This humor will guide you to your voice, the one that you’ll use to write an essay about confusing gaze and gays, and then gay expectations, some of which you will gladly meet, but others which will leave you feeling like you are coming up a little short on your gay agenda. It’s not your job to please everyone, even if you want to. You’ll feel better just being yourself. You’ll learn this in time.

The Star-gaze

When you graduate High School and move to a new city a fourteen-hour drive away from your old one, you’ll have to come out as gay to everyone new you meet all over again. Except your new boss at the flower shop, because right after meeting each other you’re just sort of out.

He will expect that as a gay man you know certain things. Most of which have to do with popular culture. This means you will have to admit you don’t know who Star Jones is and that you’ve never even heard of The View. He will look as if you have slapped him across the face. “Didn’t you hear she disrespected Barbra Walters?” Pretend to know who Barbra Walters is, for your sake.

You don’t really know anything, it turns out. You’ve never seen The Sound of Music (Julie Andrews sings), or The Bird Cage (Robin Williams plays a gay man), or Steel Magnolias (Gal pals and gay icons like Dolly Parton and Julia Roberts). You don’t know who Anderson Cooper or Cathy Griffin are. You watch TODAY on NBC every morning on the little TV that sits up on the shelf at work.

You make a new friend online, Sam, introduce him to Douglas, and he agrees to teach you everything he can about the gaze.

Sam tells you what to love. You learn to love the comedian Margaret Cho (who loves the gays), the youtuber Liam Sullivan (who dresses up as a woman named Kelly and proclaims her love for shoes) and the band Dresden Dolls (who do a music video with Margaret and Liam). He also gives you all kinds of quippy little things you might say if you’re out and about and feeling sassy such as:

“That boy is CFFBFFC,” (cute from far, but far from cute).

“Every time that boy opens his mouth a purse falls out,” (His voice sounds gay).

“That boy is dumb as a box of hair,” (Don’t believe me? Urban Dictionary).

Sam loves to shop for clothes; you just tell him everything he picks out is cute. You’ve learned better than to give your honest opinion. Besides, you feel insecure about your opinions around your new friends.

The Closet Gays

In High School you will be asked to help your friend go through her closet. She will try things on for you, and with a critical and discerning eye you must try and give her the answers she either is searching for or needs to hear.

Spoiler Alert: you have no discerning eye. You aren’t Tim Gunn from Project Runway. The closest you can get to him is plugging your nose and saying in a low tone “DESIGNERSSSS.”

Your friend hates your suggestions. The invitations to go shopping are now shopping for you; it’s clear you’re the one who needs the fashion advice so from now on you’ll be fashion chaperoned. You’re sort of glad about that, anyway. There’s nothing very daring about Khakis and polo shirts. You’ll get button down shirts, an expensive pair of jeans that were on sale, and a leather wristband / hemp necklace combo. I mean, you really should have been to Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle by now. Still, you start to curate a look.

One day your sister comes to visit you in Colorado and you take her to the outlet mall to buy a pair of snow pants. This should be easy, but you still feel that sense of unease as you enter the store. There, in the back, two pairs of snow pants, identical except for color. This should be easy, you think, a fifty percent chance of getting it right. Salmon, or teal? You point to the salmon colored ones, say how they’ll stand out against her black coat, say they’re bright and maybe like a fun lipstick color. She looks to you, wanting to please you as little sisters do, and then to the snow pants. She picks teal. Oh well—you’ve learned you can’t be good at everything.

The Flower-gaze

In college you go to work at a flower shop owned by a gay man. You should be able to design beautiful flowers, he tells you, it’s in your DNA. But after several failed attempts you’re relegated to washing buckets and trimming stems. Still, the least you can do is learn the names.

First you learn which flowers not to use: Baby’s Breath and Carnations. They are over-done, and the favorites of a generation long passed. Instead, you learn to use modern flowers. You trim the stems of lilies, Peruvian lilies or Alstroemeria, Anthurium the flamingo flower, purple tri-tipped irises, bright yellow daffodils, gerbera daisies (your favorite, come in every color and look great in your graphite Volkswagen beetle), big lettuce like hydrangeas, soapy smelling lavender and lilac, white and violet orchids, bright orange oriental poppies, loose-lipped snap dragons that speak when you pinch their buds together, bunches of pastel colored tulips every Easter, red and white roses for Valentine’s Day, bits of pine and poinsettias for Christmas. You measure your year in flowers.

You learn which flowers you like, learn how to describe the types of arrangements that create a “wow” factor, learn to hate the phrase “simple yet elegant,” learn that even years after you’ve left the flower shop, you still can’t design an arrangement to save your life. And what’s worse, now that you know which flowers you like, you’ll be unable to stop yourself from saying something about every arrangement your husband has delivered to you. You feel like criticizing a gift makes you a terrible person, but you do it anyway. You aren’t afraid of your opinions anymore.

The IT Gays

Tim Cook becomes the first gay major CEO. He is the head of Apple, and so you should know how to help your friends setup their new phones, decrypt their forgotten Wi-Fi passwords, and restore their failed hard drives. Luckily, you actually have this one under control since you got your BS in Computer Science and Math before you got married and stopped working to be a stay-at-home puppy Dad, which you love, for now. You still have time to figure out what you want to be when you grow up.

You can solve almost any problem, but not with the bedside manner you’d prefer. Your answers are short and frustrated, and no one feels especially flattered when you explain it to them in the simplest of terms. Your mother isn’t sure what to tell people who ask her what you do for a living (nothing), so she tells a few people you are starting your own computer repair business. This embarrasses you, and you wonder if she would say the same thing if you were a stay at home mother. Besides, she should know better; you always get frustrated trying to provide technical support for her, how would you ever do it for complete strangers every day?

The Interior-gaze

When you’re living in Denver, you’ll learn all about Capitol Hill where the gays live and, how before they moved in it was sort of neglected and not quite the shining jewel of the city that it is now. You’ll hear all about how “the gays moved in” and remodeled the homes, cleaned up the yard, gentrified the area. So, naturally, you’ll be expected to know how to do those things as well. You wouldn’t mind being able to design a space, and for a short while you even consider going to school for interior design. Why aren’t you interested in any jobs that make money?

HGTV makes everyone a little more design savvy, which just puts more expectations on you. Just like with Tim Gunn, you’ll be compared to male interior designers (they won’t even have to be gay) and half of your friends will become interested in or start selling real estate. Should you get your real-estate license too?

A friend will ask you over to help her decorate her new room. She’ll show you some colors and ask you about her curtains, and you will make a suggestion. Then, your other gay friend, who you had tag along so you wouldn’t be the only gay at the party, will jump in and start making more and better suggestions, like replacing the orange curtains which are giving the room a strange tint. He’ll recommend a floor lamp to go in the corner and some plants to give the place a more lived-in feel. You’re happy for the back-up, but also wonder if it’s not design you should be doing, then what is it? You start to feel like you’ll never find “your thing,” never have a career.

The Wingman Gays

Both your gay friends and your female friends will hop on the Craigslist / Tinder / Grindr / Bumble / PlentyOfFish / eHarmony romance app-train. You will be expected, on demand, at any moment or location, to be ready to rate an infinite number of nameless faces on a screen. You should possess the ability to identify true love between those on the app and your close friends at a glance, and more importantly, to identify any red flag suitor and help shut those down immediately.

At the club on days when you’re tired from work and just want to hang out with your friends, you will still be prepared to go home alone. After all, you can’t expect them to make time for you when they have that tall guy who they met at the bar waiting to see them. Especially when you told your friend the tall guy’s bag looked like a purse. What are friends for?

You put up with more than you should sometimes, because you feel guilty about being gay. Your church told you that you were making a sinful choice, even though you didn’t choose anything. Your parents didn’t understand at first, how could you do this to them? You apologized for coming out, for being different, for needing extra attention, for having to explain the way you are to everyone you meet. You think maybe, if you can be good at things, that will make up for the way you are. You try to be a good neighbor, a good friend, a good student. All those things are good, but you have nothing to apologize for. Your gaze is special.

The Kitchen Gays

If your friend is hosting a party and invites you to come, be prepared to show up early and have something unique to contribute. Be able to name all the cheeses, both hard and soft. Know how to make a mixed drink, because once in the presence of the gay man all your friends will forget how they ever made a cocktail for themselves and will want your signature cocktails and will want you to keep them coming.

How many shitty cocktails will you have to make before you can confidently bartend? You will make the mistake for a long time of using store-bought lemon juice instead of freshly squeezed lemons (you had it right as child eating them in the restaurant that way). For a while you’ll try new and exciting recipes, but your friends will dump them out because they’re too sweet, too bitter, or too strong. Later, when you start nailing the whole cocktail mixing thing, they’ll ask if you went to bartending school, so try not to worry too much about it.

You start thinking about cooking school, but after a move across the country you start to doubt it. Being gay, even though it hasn’t defined you, has taught you and changed you. You aren’t just one thing, you’re an entire cast of Queer Eye in one person. You sit at your desk, alone with your thoughts—but not lonely—and you see if hiding behind second person “you” will help you figure out what to do next. Even if it doesn’t, you stop worrying about it so much—you’ve made it this far, right?

I wake up in our home in Colorado, it’s abstract lines, rusted tin, and natural steel mimicking the purple mountain range behind it, on the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. I’m alone for most of the day, which is just as well since I was planning to spend the day with him. I look around the space—a house with no unfinished home improvement projects—a sight never seen when I lived at home with my parents.  

We had always lived in a house that was being remodeled. Perhaps the house wasn’t as much in need of work as my father’s constant need to be working on it. Not just small projects either, sometimes rooms remained off limits for months. I always thought he held a mythical amount of strength in his tall lank frame. I remember touching more than a few live wires sticking out of unfinished outlets with either my hand or mouth. Such is the curiosity and short-term memory loss of a child. There was always exposed dry wall in need of sanding and then painting, and once a deck that remained half-finished for an eternity. If I remember correctly, we sold that old blue house at 154 Bunny Road with a half-finished deck built from old railroad ties my Dad borrowed from work. 

It’s early February as I rise from bed and go through my morning routine. This home we have is the place my family and my husband’s family have spent summers and holidays in, coming together again and again no matter where we are in our lives. It is here that I keep his urn, on a bookshelf in view of my writing desk, a view of the ski runs on Keystone mountain in the distance. I see a few people ski down as I sit to write and drink coffee.

I talk to him, sometimes, to his urn sitting on that shelf. I like to think he is watching me write, though I’m not sure he can read the type so far away without his glasses on. It’s a strange thing, talking to an urn. 

I remember being at the funeral home picking it out, a heavy copper and gold trimmed vase. I thought—how useless it is to pick such a thing out—what does it matter? He’s not going to see it, from the inside. Anyway, even if he did I’m sure he wouldn’t care, he’d say Hey Doofus just pick one already! Looking back, I was probably missing the point—it wasn’t for him, really. It was for me. It was for me to pick out something pretty to look at to store him, or what remained of him in this container meant to bring me some kind of peace. Or joy, maybe. I don’t know. 

Regardless, it’s a strange thing to talk to an urn. I wonder—can he hear me with the lid on? When I’m talking to him? Maybe I should take the lid off, so he can hear me better—his hearing was going there at the end, when he looked more like a skeleton dressed in a suit of skin-colored-stretch-polyester. Only an awful person would think, I’m always trying so hard to lose ten pounds and he just up and lost over a hundred like it was no big deal, so I pretend not to. Now he weighs next to nothing—I wonder, as I pick Dad up and cradle him in one arm, why do the ashes weigh so much less than the body they came from? I put Dad back on his shelf and decide to ask the internet.  I find that I will weigh between 5 and 10 pounds when I too return to dust. Because only the bones remain, the organs, the fat, the fluids, all burnt away. It is while considering this fascinating research that I realize I haven’t had lunch. You’re sick! Dad says as I chow down on my hotdog, thinking that what I really want to lose is the weight of my bones. Good to know. 

I think he can hear me, with the lid on I mean. If he can hear me at all. If he can hear me at all, it’s not my proximity to the body left behind but whether enough of his spirit remains to remember me, who I am, who he was. I bet it’s killing him not to have a home improvement project to work on. He hates just sitting around. I’ve grown tired of sitting too, so I decide after having eaten lunch and contemplated being turn to ash that I would like to start the gas fire pit in the backyard. It, like myself, is currently buried underneath. It is covered in snow which I’ll need to dig out to get to it. I start shoveling, and Dad and I decide to kill time calculating how much snow I’ll have to shovel out of the pit. There is probably three or four feet around each side of the pit – a circular area about eight to ten feet in diameter. We do the math, and we calculate the amount of snow I will have to clear to light the fire. Volume = π×9²×4 = 1017³ feet. My arms, and heart, start to fatigue. I decide to take a break, sitting on the large pile of snow I’ve started, my heart pounding as I stab my lungs with the cold air I breathe in, expelling the hot air as it goes out. You’re full of hot air, Dad might have said. You’re full of shit, is probably closer. Either way, at least half the time he was right.

Hearing the wind whisper through the conifers in the Rockies is something like hearing the dead, I think. You can listen as hard as you want but the words are missing, forbidden. Their hushed secrets take no form, they are truth, but not meant for the living to know. So much of our calendars full and so much time spent being. And then one day we’ve been. Or maybe become the being. It’s hard to tell. I get up off the mound of snow (and your ass, Dad adds) and finish the stairs leading into the sunken part of the pit, and then go back inside to warm up and write some more. 

Whether he can hear me or not, it’s not like I’m not saying anything worth telling or that I haven’t said before. Sometimes I even pick Dad up and take him to the window to glance the peaks of the mountains and maybe a skier or two. Sometimes I kiss the top of his forehead, but then realize it’s just the lid of an urn, and when the cold metal surprises my lips I feel silly. I don’t know where you got that from…Mom, probably.  They should give you an instruction manual when they hand you an urn, you know. How is a person supposed to know how to interact with it otherwise? What are the acceptable actions and what are considered inappropriate or frowned upon urn activities? And anyway, when they hand you that Urn with what’s presumably your loved one inside – how do you know they gave you the right person? Maybe they mixed them up with someone else, or worse, mixed them up with someone else. Again, only a terrible person would think these things, and again, I pretend not to.

Warm and rested enough to go out and start unburying again, I head out with my shovel and take a deep breath, letting out a heavy sigh. Dad asks, what do you think you’re doing?

Shoveling snow, duh.

When did you learn that trick? You never used to be able to shovel, especially when I’d ask you to help me do it!

Uh huh. Maybe if I’d had an essay to write I would have shoveled to put it off. But I only had shoveling to put off, so I played games instead. It’s not so bad though, sometimes work feels good.

No shit, Sherlock.

I have these conversations with my Dad, when he’s on my mind. Sometimes I get so damned busy with my own life I forget to talk to him, just like I’d forgotten to call him when he was alive. At least now I don’t blame myself for forgetting, in his being absent he’s constantly present. 

He was right though, I think, as I offload a scoop of snow that makes me wonder how my back will feel tomorrow. I used to think he was wrong about so much. The shoveling – for one. It’s easier to be happy if you get your heart rate up every now and then. And reading before bed, and sometimes just the silence. I used to hate the silence, and now I find solace in the absence of sound. The slow rhythm of the dryer and the wind hitting the house. I do a lot of things now that I’m sure Dad would have wished I’d done much sooner and more often, like talk to him. 

Around 500 cubic feet into shoveling I break again. I feel the familiar chill that comes with realizing I am seeing things the way my parents did, do. It’s not like you’d imagine it, well, not like I’d imagined it. I’d think, absolutely not. I will not wake up one day and trust people less. I will never enjoy any kind of labor. I will never enjoy spending time alone. It’s so lonely. Then instead I wake up one day and realize there is value in protecting my family and there is value in myself. Why we learn these things or how —  I haven’t figured out. I only know that I still know almost nothing about everything.

I take a lot of breaks in between shoveling. I take a lot of breaks in between writing, too. When I had chores as a kid, ones I’d dodged too many times and finally had to buckle down and just do, my dad would tell us, No breaks! Probably because back then, our breaks were a way to keep putting off the finishing of the task. Like how I can’t finish my essay because of all the shoveling I need to do. I almost hear him this time, Geeze, you have an excuse for everything.  This clearing of the snow is exhausting. This grief feels heavy in my shovel.

After a few more heart pounding exertions and whispering breaks, I finally dig enough out from around the pit to be able to start the fire. I turn on the gas at the side of the garage, always a little nervous that it might explode during any step of the process, and then walk back to the line. I slowly start the flow of gas. There is something primal and intimate in fire. In lighting or making fire. Almost a kind of gift a father gives to his son, fire or knowledge. And yet, I have still burned off parts of my promethean eyebrows during the moment it catches flame and like a chain reaction ignites the gas into a rapid—fire explosion. So. I duck low, watch this Dad! as the fire gently booms into a cloud of flaming gas and a flash of heat strikes my face. I come to my feet gently and set my shovel down again to take a break and let the snow start melting around the edges. The warmth of the fire slowly fills the pit. Sometimes this clearing away gives way to more and more, sometimes the shoveling helps melt what is underneath, making it easier to chip away. 

After a moment I begin chipping away at what I’ve exposed. No time to stop now, maybe I can finish the excavation, clean it out and never have to worry about it again. And yet every time I think I’ve finished, think I’ve found some peace with its absence, I find something more. Some part I hadn’t seen or didn’t know was there. And so, I go to the task again. 

At a point in the afternoon I decide to stop. I’m fatigued, and my progress has slowed because of the ice. If I could somehow melt the rest, I might finish the job. And maybe someday I will, but not all in one go like this. The sun has begun to fall behind the clouds, and Dad has grown silent. Perhaps he smells the natural gas burning off the fire, perhaps he listens to the wind beating the pines, perhaps he gazes at the azure peaks of the mountains, perhaps he tastes condensation in the air. Or perhaps nothing.

After a time, I turn the knob to cut the flow of gas. There is more room to stand in the fire pit than when I started, but there is still more to clear. As I go inside, I hear the weatherman on the television in the living room tell the great state of Colorado there is snow in the forecast for tomorrow. 

Dear Friends,

As many of you know, for the past few years I’ve been living in Pennsylvania studying writing in hopes of earning my MFA in Creative Writing with a focus on non-fiction. During that time I sort of abandoned the idea of blogging, partially because I wanted to focus all my time and energy on the pieces I was working on and then I had no time or energy once I started on my thesis. I’m proud to say that I’ve completed that chapter, and in this past month I’ve been published twice by the food writers at Entropy Magazine:

https://entropymag.org/author/christophereckman/

It has been an incredible adventure and I’m so so so grateful to be back home in Colorado. I’d like to promise that I’ll be updating this blog more regularly, but I’m mostly grateful for this update and everything going on in my life. Thank you all for your support and I hope you enjoy my recently published work, cross your fingers there will be more to come!

 

Happy Halloween!

 

Chris