Passe an as

“ ldon’t want my past to
be his future,” Lyle
sighed.

Ruminations about his
youngest brother left my acquain-
tance melancholy, after a holiday
visit to his parents’ home. Lyle
had never been close to his sib-
lings, since he was already in
high school when they were
born. They had nothing in com-
mon and seeing them no more
than once or twice a year didn’t
help build a bond.

“My mom asked me to
bunk in with Gary to see if I

. could find out what’s going on

with him," Lyle reported. “His
grades have been in the toilet and
he’s not hanging out with his reg-
ular friends. She’s worried that

he’s on drugs or something.”

Turns out Lyle has more
in common with his little brother
than he thought. While snuggled
in their respective twin beds, in
thelroom that had originally been
Lyle’s but was now Gary’s
domain, Gary came out to his
thoroughly surprised brother.

 

kept questions about his age from
surfacing. Other guys have just
assumed that he was older than
his seventeen — now, 18 — years.
Gary showed Lyle his

secret stash of gay magazines. He
keeps them in the same place that
Lyle had kept his covert cache of
porn and playthings, when it had
been his room. Lyle had been
singularly sleazy in his sexual
escapades and from an earlier age
than Gary. His youthful exploits
could fill volumes of true-life
stroke stories. He rarely bothered
with boys his own age. Instead,
he preferred to loiter outside
leather bars and pick up guys

Can we save our

young gay brothers ‘-i
blood relatives

and otherwise —

from some hard knocks
by telling them

there’s more to life

than hard ons?

whose activities were more
adventurous. '

For Gary, talking with
someone in his family about
being gay was liberating. Lyle,
on the other other, found it hard
to listen to his little brother
describe the sexual fantasies that
he planned to make a reality.

“He’s not very experi-
enced, yet, but he definitely
wants to be,” Lyle related. “And
not in a vanilla way. He talked
about water sports and fisting, for
God’s sake, and he wants to get

, “Gary is the butchest of
the bunch,” Lyle related. “He
plays football and baseball and,
up ‘til last year, he wrestled,
too.” ‘
’ Since December of his
junior year, Lyle’s rough-and-
tumble brother has been pursuing
sweaty, man-to-man grappling of
another kind. Gary confessed to
Lyle that he’d gone into the city a
few times in the past year to
hook up with men for sex.‘ His
muscular build and mature-look-
ing moustache and goatee have

 

his nipples pierced!”

It was those tidbits of
information that sent Lyle into
his forlorn funk. He’d spend
years putting himself in danger-
ous situations with people about
whom heiiicnew next to nothing.
He’d been intimately acquainted
with a phalanx of phalluses but
never developed any kind of inti-
mate romantic relationships. He
flunked out of college because he
was more interested in getting
laid than getting good grades.
He’d had venereal diseases —
some more than once — and was
taking a pharmaceutical cocktail
to keep his HIV at bay.

“I don’t want my broth-
er to go through what I did,” Lyle
articulated. “He should go to col-
lege, get a good job, find a nice
guy, settle down and be
monogamous.”

- Apparently, Ga1'y didn’t
warm to Lyle’s would-be words '

. of wisdom. His warnings were as -

welcome as most suggestions of
“do as I say and not like I did
when I was young and wild.”
Gary told him to shut up and stop
being a “preachy old queen.”

Lyle seemed to believe
that Gary following in his
promiscuous path was inevitable.
He asked me how many gay men
I could name who hadn’t had a
slut phase soon after coming out.
Point taken but, still, that doesn’t
mean that Gary will reprise all of
Lyle’s self-described “mistakes of
whore-ific proportions.”

Can we save our young
gay brothers — blood relatives
and otherwise — from some‘hard
knocks by telling them there’s
more to life than hard ons? Can

we show them the way without

making it seem like we’re telling
them what or whom to do or not
to do?

I had several really won-
derful mentors but that didn’t
keep me from getting involved
with the occasional loser or put-
ting myself in situations. that, in
hindsight, I realize were unwise
and unsafe.

Lyle has a chance to be
a positive influence in a young
gay man’s life. Let’s hope he‘
makes the most of this} opportuni-
ty to offer love and guidance
instead of warnings and predic-
tions. Let’s hope we all do. V

D. Scott-Bush is work appears
throughout the country. E-mail
may be directed to him at

N akedCuriosity@aol. com.

©2003

mic: TC!

"£§l“.€.§i‘3l§€§l’i £3? V»?-.’."i‘:’i'~2.?5‘¥?

charitable foundation whose mission is to
support and strengthen Vermont's gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgendered communities
today and build an endowment for tomorrow.

  

STONE Lance

     ANDSCAPE

if;   rliaizhtenance,

 

 

.; ..Des1;grh.‘$g*rid‘[nsta1lati0n

Peter Cousineau
(802) 989-0083

20 Charming Rooms

‘Q55
‘H1 Iandg ‘Inn

P.O. Box 118

Bethlehem, NH 03574
603-869-3978
1-877-LES-B-INN (537-2466)

A LESBIAN PARADISE

100 Acres 0 Pool
Hot Tub 0 Trails

www.highlandsinn-nh.corn
vacation@highlandsinn-nh.com

  
 

BE PART oI= THE

 SOLUTION

ver wonder‘where the
Rubik's Cube really came from?

ry Budapest! In 1974, a man

_ - named Erno Rubik invented the Cube. After winning the highest prize for’
outstanding inventions in Hungary, in 1980, the Cube won top toy awards

in Britain, France, Gennany, and the U.S., and quickly achieved a univer-
a|_ resence Ima ine hovvmrnuach money could be raised for Mountain