on comparison

(or the thief of boys)

Because of my life being my life I find myself spending weekdays divorced from analog socializing with other queer people. Though slowly changing after adjusting my work hours this year, I have to get my fill of socializing while gay over the weekends. Social media went from being this way of chatting with friends and finding out about each others’ shows to “HOW ARE OTHER PEOPLE LIVING???” and as I hit the iceberg of midlife, I would scroll my phone feeling like every gay person in New York City is having a grand old time and I am the only idiot who didn’t figure out it was supposed to “get better.” Everyone’s hooking up, has an OnlyFans, lives on Fire Island, PTown or PuertoVallarta, and they look SNATCHED. This is not necessarily news for most of us in 2025. We all know social media just has this side effect…. similar to cigarettes having a side effect of cancer. My particular tendrils of envy lately have extended to just how everyone seems to know about THE PLACE … whatever the place is they know about it and I feel like a newb. Be it a show, a club, a bar, a sex party, or the fact everyone went to the Kesha concert and I was like wait why didn’t you all invite me? I like Kesha! And then there’s my old favorite … why does everyone have a man … and a really busy sexual side hustle? How did they get romantically lucky AND genetically lucky to be able to have enough sex for a Scruff grid?

Trying to connect to the outside world from my sterile office, I’ve moved on from the Instagram feed to podcasts. I’ve discovered the thing about podcasts I love the most is not the subject but rather the hosts. At work surrounded by nothing but graphs and charts and metrics, I’ve listened to people discuss the X-Men, gay porn, cults, drag, questionable queers, the internet and Carl Jung. I’ll just dip in to these for a while and enjoy the hosts’ having friendly conversations about stuff I find engaging they happen to be highly engaged in. This is what I thought adult life would be like. Connecting and talking over these topics we all find really interesting, but it kind of isn’t.

Recently I discovered Dads and Daddies, where two middle aged gay men in Brooklyn discuss being in happy longterm open relationships … among other things. Often gay podcasts can get tricky … particularly if sex is involved because I immediately start to take out all the rulers and scales and sensors to see what they got and what I don’t. Dads and Daddies was like two guys I would realistically know here in the city. One is my age and we have all the same Gen X icons and reference points. Although they are in the unrelatable position of being in happy long term open marriages, their candor about navigating the world of casual sex outside their relationship felt highly relatable to me. They didn’t know everything either and they were often in as much of a place of discovery as I have found myself to be at my age. I appreciated that. Additionally, Brian and Judson, the two hosts, exude a genuine sweetness, charm and warmth that makes them ideal podcast hosts.

And yet …

I began to wonder why it was these men who were around my age had found wedded bliss, a strong social network and the ability to have hookups on their terms that were fulfilling to them and I have been in therapy since I was 19 throwing every modality I had at my life to make sure I was dealing with every self-sabotaging thing I had in my makeup and I was single, friendless, careerless, and dealing with a sexual frustration so byzantine I tug at it one end and it just goes haywire on the other. Things I related to Brian over, like his love of Madonna and Broadway, turned into … how come he gets to see more shows than me AND can travel several times a year AND has two kids (not that I ever wanted kids but still time management envy) AND has a husband AND AND AND AND AND …. until I heard him make a comment that sounded like having friends with benefits is a thing you do when you’re young because by the time you’re older the assumption is you have a “real” relationship.

Or that’s what I think I heard.

My intimate life consists of friends with benefits all of whom are in open relationships. I am not young and have no “real” relationship. So what does this mean? Am I immature? I failed at adulthood? At life? Boy did I feel like a loser and boy did I go on Instagram to let Brian know.

Thankfully I have been in therapy since I was 19 and I have learned a few tools. I immediately realized I had no business dumping my projections onto this poor man in public. I deleted the comment and began to wonder … WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME?

When the pandemic happened and I saw I had to face each lockdown with just two cats and a Zoom account to keep me company, my journaling practice got feral. I am surprised I did not break my fountain pen I was pressing down on the page so aggressively. My journals seemed to do what humans could not … not buckle in the face of all my bile.

In lockdown, I committed to using Midori MD unruled paper. I could use it in a variety of sizes but all my notebooks were to be on this paper making sure if I could only carry a pocket notebook one day it was this paper making each notebook more of a means to access this particular experience of journaling. I decided to save them and have a box with my lockdown journals ready for the day I can look at them. I came to this era of documenting my life having had pretty much every thing I had put faith in let me down in a major way. My identity was a hollow thing assembled from bits of lighting gels and washi tape. I gave up trying to be A WRITER. I just made sentences. One after another because I was lonely, because my boyfriend’s dad was dying and I was in lockdown alone while I had no word from my boyfriend as I was anxious about what was going on with him and his dad on top of dealing with the isolation. I wrote because if I tried to explain my situation to people I invariably got “everyone is going through something.” I wrote because I kept loving making art more and more and more and I didn’t know what that meant or what I wanted that to develop into and I had one to talk to about that. My art friends didn’t think about their art like that. They drew male nudes and sold them at art fairs. I wanted to discuss form and aesthetics. I went page after page because after my boyfriend’s dad died he came back to New York and we promptly broke up. I kept writing because I lost the relationship that had probably gotten into my heart the deepest and the indifference I received from friends and family was baffling. I wrote because I couldn't seem to make them acknowledge I was suffering and frankly I needed hours of hugs more than platitudes about how “everyone is struggling right now,” but what can you do? Fill another notebook. Order another one on Amazon.

Getting triggered by a podcast isn’t all that surprising given last week was a trigger fest so fortunately I was in the journal a lot. I was meditating, I was doing breath work … all part of my new ADHD management routine. I was pulling tarot cards … interestingly they kept coming up with generally positive imagery that I couldn’t quite understand given how dark my mood was getting Lastly my mindfulness app had me doing something every day that turned out to be the lynchpin in this insane moment of resentment I found myself in when I heard Brian’s innocuous comment about friends with benefits. I was writing down three things I was grateful for on one of my mindfulness apps. How could I 100% believe I was a defective human being (as I was writing in my pages) and cursed for the amusement of the universe (that bike collision got my fatalism UP) and at the same time have days and days and days of stuff I was truly grateful for?

I’ve done time in 12 step rooms. Having had more than my share of headaches with sex and relationships I found myself in sexual recovery and in Al-Anon rooms. I have complicated feelings about 12 step sexual recovery at the moment, but what I learned through working the 12 steps taught me how to work with my set of issues in a compassionate and productive way. The concept of powerlessness is the core of the 1st Step and it came up for me last week when I saw that I paradoxically could be grateful and still believe I was utterly broken and failed. In the middle of a workout, mid bicep curl, I thought “I wonder if I feel like if I’m grateful, Catholic God will be all like ‘That’s all you get, Little Man. It’s the best someone like you can expect.’” It stunned me that I had come to believe that being satisfied and happy would leave me stunted. Of course my concept of my smallness, my extremely limited vessel, has always been one of frustration. My body is a symbol of a hard boundary set by the cosmos. Those beautiful things you envy in others, they will never be for you and you have to find your treasure among the junk surrounding you. This is your place. This is where you were fated to end up.

I know this is a bad tape. I know if this tape is playing, it’s not telling the truth even if it sounds like it. I know I can resist the tape even if I can’t tell when it’ll ever stop playing.

Part of this entry is meant as an amends to Brian and Judson for leaving a nasty comment on their socials. The other part is just taking one more action in this process. I’m always going to have this belief about my size because I can’t even envision all the nooks and crannies this particular issue has permeated in my brain. Like I said I’ve been in therapy since I was 19 and pretty much always really doing some serious work on myself and I still had so many things elude me. There’s a lot that’s nice about my life, but what gets me is for someone who had been so concerned all his life with being liked and loved … but also being safe to like and to love … it does not feel good to have suffered the relationship losses the last few years have brought. The parts of the Dads and Daddies podcast that sting the most is when I hear either host express deep love for someone in their lives. My ex boyfriend and my two ex-besties were people I have all the gratitude in the world I was able to love and I am able to hold on to the success of my having that love even when the relationship ended. Hearing these men in decade plus marriages still be in love with their husbands and have all these great friends and connections outside their marriages, however, was like the canker sore on the inside of my mouth I can’t help but poke with my tongue or gnaw on. See? See what other people get to have? Other people who got their lives together more than you even though you’ve been at this forever? See? See? See?

Writing last week’s entry was the first time I had felt good about writing I had put up for public consumption in a long time. There wasn’t anything particularly exceptional about the entry itself except it felt effortless. Thankfully committed to naming things I am grateful for, I immediately seized on that feeling of satisfaction. I didn’t do much but acknowledge it … and use it as inspiration to get my creative life out of this limbo its entered from the days I was being workshopped at the Public Theater to … well whatever we’re doing these days.

In my journaling last week, the following statement came up “all my life I have felt defined by what I was not rather than what I was.” There was always this … thing I failed to be: straight, tall, hung, white, masculine, practical, popular, chill, fun, represented by an agent, produced on an off-Broadway contract, reviewed by the New York Times, a professional, married, a father, privileged, educated in an MFA program … I can keep going, but I think we all learned how to get the picture in grade school. I think starting in 2020 I began to start asking myself well … if I’m none of those things … who am I? Because I do exist. I am taking up space on this planet so I have to be something.

As I get to know myself sometimes I discover there are things I like about me that sadly make me a niche flavor in social circles. I received many messages from my mother about my uniqueness and none of those messages were positive. I believe my mom was never quite secure in herself and depended on external validation. I was in my first drama class in 9th grade and we learned some basic stage makeup which required mom and dad to go to the drug store and get me some … yes folks, cosmetics for a class assignment. When the big show came up and I was onstage with my classmates dressed very much as a boy (wearing the bit of foundation and rouge our teacher demanded) singing a show tune medley my mother demanded I keep the entire thing a secret lest my grandparents found out she let me wear makeup. It’s not easy being yourself when someone’s insecurity is imposing its own narrative on you. Being my own little 5’ tall weirdo self ahas a part of me hanging its head in extreme embarrassment. To bring it back to the 12 steps, on this I am powerless. I may always have to handle that embarrassed mother inside me.

My journals full of all their insane psychodrama made some real healing happen. Part of it was assigning parental energy to heroes of mine that taught me the life lessons I wish my parents had. Stephen Sondheim and Garcia Lorca have been big daddies to me and Madonna, Joni Mitchell and Maria Callas have held up the mom end. However, when I started going to Mexico a couple years back, I reconnected with Frida Kahlo, an artist I realized I had discovered and loved as a teen before I knew a lot about art. I read all about her and marveled at the immense audacity she had considering she was afflicted with bodily issues that would have driven me to suicide. I began to joke whenever I felt like having a successful sex life at 5’ is an impossibility I just remind myself Frida was heavily scarred and walked with a limp and slept with Josephine Baker AND Isamu Noguchi AND Leon Trotsky AND Chavela Vargas … AND Diego Rivera. If I ever imagine what Frida Kahlo would say to me it would involve handing me a glass of mezcal and telling me to get over it and realize that I too am an eyebrow icon. Frida also has been instrumental in one other thing. Despite misgivings towards the end of her life that her painting had not been sufficiently political to enable the Revolution, I am grateful she was so obsessed with her own face. This substack and an ongoing experiment in my current sketchbooks with the idea of self-portrait has given me permission to follow my muse. Kahlo’s final painting had the words VIVA LA VIDA written on it and she turned her life into art including walking around in a look that was as much a part of her oeuvre as her paintings.

What better way to have gratitude for my life than turn it into the art?