(Photo: I’ll have fries with that…)

So today begins the last year of my youth, and I’m trying to handle it. My body has long told me that year came some time ago. Chronic pain in my right hip and the old man “Uggh!” I groan upon standing suggest a chronological age a bit beyond my newly current 39.

The last age I took so hard was 25. Back then, launching into the latter half of my twenties without having achieved richness or thinness had me feeling like a big loser. Luckily, my self-confidence has improved since then. Now launching into my final 365 days before middle age without yet having achieved richness or thinness just has me feeling old.

“You have to remember, you’re only as old as you feel,” Sole Man Donn told me this afternoon. He meant well.

“I know,” I said. “And I feel old.”

“Well,” Donn continued to the well-worn punch line, “then go feel a 20-year-old.”

Last month, when my newly arrived mid-life crisis first began its sneak-attack, I noted the fallacy of the phalluses of twenty-somethings to adequately assuage the angst of advancing age. Not that I’d throw a fresh, nubile grad-schooler with a high libido and two working hips out of bed. But he’d have to be okay with leaving by eleven–a body this old can no longer survive on six hours a night.

Besides, those youngsters have little respect for their elders these days. Eight days ago, a new friend, the recent Oklahoma-expat, Overly Frank, showed little pity for the quickening pace of my deterioration. Guys who are too young to remember the first run of Star Wars–because they weren’t born yet–rarely do. The blood was spilled in I.M. land…

10:33:38 PM Mike: I’m facing the last 8 days of my life before I begin the last year of my youth.

10:33:56 PM Frank: That is one way of looking at it. Or it could be that your youth ended 3,279 days ago, give or take.

10:36:19 PM Mike: I will, of course, remind you of that smart remark in a few months when you finally turn 30…I believe my card will read, “My condolences to your youth.”

10:38:28 PM Frank: Well, my card to you will say that “age is just a number… expressed, in your case, in scientific notation.”

10:57:27 PM Mike: Next time I see you, should I pat you on the head and sniff for that new-baby smell around your soft spot?

10:57:48 PM Frank: Are you making fun of my hair loss?

10:58:20 PM Mike: No not at all. Though I was thinking in regards to your turning 30 I could just send the flowers to wherever the hair went.

11:00:18 PM Frank: Okay. There were gloves. Not anymore.

Then again, fellow advanced-adult bloggers haven’t been any more comforting. The response from Chicago Tech News publisher Todd Allen when I told him I suspected my mid-life crisis was upon me: “You’re going to look mighty funny buying a Corvette and not knowing how to drive it.”

Rimshot. Try the veal. Remember to tip your waitress.

I’m actually grateful for the humor. I’m surprised how much of a shock the realization of 40 being just around the corner has been to my system. Age really is just a number, and I feel happier, more fulfilled, more on track, and more spiritually aware at 39 than I ever have in my life.

None of that made it any easier to suppress the urge to strangle the barista in the coffee bar where I’m writing this when an hour ago he popped a suicide-by-depressing-lyrics mix of songs by artists trying to save polar bears on late-night TV into the CD player.

The Sinatra at Lido’s Caffé in Oak Park at the weekly coffee klatsch last Tuesday night was a lot more bearable. The new rule being I’m no longer allowed to verbally refer to Doctor Dementia, instead Hoosierella, Pastry Chef Chris, and new pastry-chef-squeeze Bearoke opened the evening wishing good thoughts towards the temporarily incarcerated Gay O.J. (no FIB should ever attempt a low-speed flight from Cheesehead fuzz on a suspended license–’nuff said.)

They needn’t have worried, though. My thoughts last week were stuck on impending AARP membership. But I’d already tread that ground the previous Tuesday, so I covered up my angst by asking how everyone else was doing.

Hoosierella never saw it coming. “Hey,” I asked her, “did you and your husband ever find out if the chocolate-flavored condoms you got from Chris really tasted like they were supposed to?”

As her eyes widened to the size of dinner plates, I continued.

“Well,” I amended myself. “Really, did you ever find out?”

“Be careful how you answer,” Chris interjected. “You know where this conversation is gonna end up.”

“Um, no…” ‘Rella stammered.

“You know what?” Bearoke intervened as a palpable sense of relief went around the far side of the table. “I’m pretty sure they did. One day at work, we had a whole bag of flavored condoms, and we were pretty bored.”

Boy, was that sense of relief misplaced.

“Go on,” I said, as I sharpened my inner pencil to take notes.

“We decided to have a tasting flight,” Bearoke continued as I thanked the Universe on behalf of my byline for friends like these. “We sorted the condoms by type, blew them up like balloons, passed them around the room, and licked them to check for flavor. And surprisingly, most of them tasted just like what the package said.”

“Most of them?” asked Chris.

“Well, except for the cola-flavored condom. That just left a nasty, sweet aftertaste in your mouth.”

“You’ve gotta tell me,” I asked Bearoke, barely able to get the next words out as I descended into tear-inducing laughter. “Was it like a wine tasting? Every time you licked a condom, did you have to spit afterwards?”

“Oh my God,” said Chris to the table, “look at his eyes! He’s writing a headline for his blog as he’s sitting here!”

He knows me well. I’ll let the gang know of their most recent turn on Carless later tonight when they fête me for my birthday at Poor Phil’s prior to our regular appearance at Lido’s. The crowd won’t be as large as the surprise party my old NYC friends threw when they thought I was moving back a couple of years ago. But these local guys have my back, too.

Unfortunately, at my age, I have enough back for all of us. Besides suffering through Sarah McLachlan tunes in public places, I also often sit at my dining table to blog. Recenty, when the aches and pains of age came calling once again as they so often do now, I came to the realization I either need comfier chairs or a fatter ass.

No one should worry about quality time with the birthday boy tonight. Thanks to age’s waning metabolism (yeah, that’s it), these days there’s more than enough of me to go around.

Recently, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Center in New York profiled GLYNY Again in its monthly video features program, Out at the Center.  That’s the alumni group for Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York, America’s first-ever gay youth group, of which I was an active member from 1986 through 1990.

In this video (subscribers can click on the title of this entry to view it), some of the people with whom I shared the best part of my teen years explain what GLYNY was, how we all found each other again, and why we started the alumni group. My friend, Peter, says in the video his body clock felt programmed for him to head for the Center every Saturday at three o’clock for a GLYNY meeting.  For those four years, I felt exactly the same way.

Thanks to fellow alumnus Mark Horn for cluing me into this clip via his blogsite, Another Queer Jewish Buddhist.

(Photo: An honest look of shock as I sit amidst one-third of my surprise 37th birthday party.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

I turned 37 this month in my hometown. And while August continues to merge into seemingly one exceptionally and unexpectedly long trip to Gotham to interview and apartment hunt, it was turning 37 that I found most informative. Purely for narcissistic reasons. Essentially I was smoked.

Shortly before my birthday, I flew in to begin my interviewing process and attend a GLYNY Alumni Group Board of Directors meeting. The meeting, taking place on the eve of my birthday, was uneventful. We came, we saw, we argued. I bitched. A lesbian expressed anger. Someone hummed a showtune. It was what you’d expect from your average LGBT working meeting. The plan was that the nine of us would all go have dinner after the meeting and I’d have a quiet birthday the next day, probably spent with my best friend of 20 years, the very “Juicy” Peter Morley.

The birthday with Peter happened as expected. The birthday eve, however, had other plans. While we were walking to our regular food joint, Sammy’s Noodle Shop at Sixth and 11th, I stopped the gang for a quick drink at our regular hooch joint, the estimable old-man bar, Julius at West 10th and Waverly. I should have known by the way half the group didn’t come in to imbibe that something was afoot. I should really have known when everyone argued that we shouldn’t bag our plans and go have Mexican, instead.

Now before I go on, let me explain one thing. I haven’t had a birthday party in 20 years. I’ve wanted one, sure. Who wouldn’t want a cake, several (hopefully too few) candles, and the warmth of your close friends to share same with you. But as my teen years morphed into adulthood, my eventual circle of friends (not to mention my highly estranged family) never again was conducive to the potential for such festivities. I am not ashamed to admit that for many years, I’ve mourned that fact. An adult birthday dinner with your boyfriend of the moment is nice. But every year, come August, I became painfully aware that I would never, ever in my life be guest of honor at a surprise birthday party.

i was wrong.

I finally clued in to that fact when we reached Sammy’s. As I stood there, speechless for fear of crying if I dared open my mouth, one by one, a steady stream of my old friends emerged from the after-dusk shadows of Sixth Avenue. Twenty-six of them. Each one feigned surprise to find me there. Each one came to celebrate my birthday. And for the next two hours raucously, we did just that.

I won’t belabor the obvious. Yes, yes, now I’ve had my surprise party, dream come true, my friends totally got me–but good. You get that part. What thoroughly blew me away, though, is that, once again, it was my old-is-new-again GLYNY friends filling my heart with joy. It was also the largest reunion event we’ve had since we began to come together again last March.

The job and apartment searches continue apace. I have good friends in Chicago who want me to stay. But on the subject of returning to New York City, I’m finding it very hard to argue with 26 opinions in favor of my doing so.

And I love each and every one of the 26 people holding those opinions.

(Photo: As a matter of fact, we have been posing on this corner for 21 years.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

So I’m GLYNYing again. This past spring, I chronicled the sudden and miraculous Internet reunion of my 1980s cohort of Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York (GLYNY, pronounced “GLIH-nee”). The nation’s first-ever gay youth peer support group, GLYNY was founded in New York City in 1969 as a splinter cell of the historic Gay Liberation Front.

I attended the group’s Saturday meetings religiously from 1986 through 1990–right through my formative teen years. More than that, with my newly close old friends, I served on the group’s Steering Committee for most of that time, rewriting bylaws, organizing a bevy of events, and otherwise making sure our nonprofit I’s were dotted and T’s crossed.

Very unexpectedly, here we go again. As of this month (and as of this trip of mine to NYC), GLYNY AGAIN, the Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York Alumni Group, achieved not-for-profit status and chose its initial Board of Directors. And almost every single 1980s Steering Committee member–myself included–finds themselves at the helm of the group, once more. I’m honored to serve as the group’s communications officer and the administrator of our official discussion board.

Still, I sure hope history doesn’t repeat itself. Back in the day, it often felt like the only reason we were committee members was because no one else wanted to be bothered with helping to run the organization. That was, from time to time, galling, because we had well over 100 members all with ideas they wanted put into action but few with the actual desire to make them happen. Much got unnecessarily deferred to the Steering Committee, and the resulting stress and resentment eventually led to the dissolution of the 1980s committee membership.

We’ll see how it goes this time. I’d like to attribute our previous troubles to teenage angst, but at the age of 37, I know well the lengths adults will go to avoid acting their age. For now, I’m giving us all the benefit of the doubt.

If all continues to go well, however, in November, we’re hosting a first-ever alumni reunion meeting at New York City’s Gay Community Center in Greenwich Village, to be followed by a swank Midtown reception (sponsored by John Greco, chef of Phillip Marie, home of the best fried green tomatoes in Gotham). That meeting will culminate a summer of ad-hoc reunion dinners and get-togethers that have taken place among GLYNY alumni across the country (no surprise, we already have 112 alumni participating on our reunion forum, with more GLYNYites finding us every day).

Best of all, our reunion has extended far beyond our 1980s cohort. Actively participating in GLYNY AGAIN are several founding members of the group (originally Gay Youth of New York) from 1969, as well as alumni from the 1970s, early 1980s, and 1990s. So November’s accidentally triggered reunion is quickly turning into a once-in-38-years celebration of America’s gay youth movement.

Who expected that? In the 1980s, we certainly had no idea the historic role our group was playing in that movement. We always thought the hard work was done by our 1970s antecedents, GLYNY’s founding members. But as Mark Horn, one of those founding members, observed recently, “You were the guys who had to deal with AIDS–in some ways, you had it a lot harder than we did.”

In retrospect, I see the truth in that. I guess you never know what you’re really in the middle of until you move on. That’s certainly true about the bonds that persist in linking us all together. Four months since the beginning of our mass reunion, most of us remain in abject and happy shock that we still all, frankly, love and unconditionally accept each other. We’ve stopped trying to explain it. Our friends and loved ones have stopped trying to convince us that it’s a temporary state of affairs.

It is what it is. I mean, there’s not exactly a model of behavior to follow when you’re the alumni of a first-of-its-kind organization. Our emotions ran high then and continue to do so–especially the good feelings. I remain as perpetually thrilled as the rest of us, and that’s enough for me. So for better or worse, and very officially, I’m GLYNYing again. I couldn’t be prouder about my continued association with this amazing group of people.

And at least this time around, we don’t have to constantly worry about being carded.

(Photo: And every connotation that goes with it. Credit: Mildred’s House of Signage.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

So I’m in New York job hunting. And as usual when I’m here, I am the unofficial ringleader of the ongoing GLYNY AGAIN reunion. No surprise, then, to find me and the gang hanging out on my first evening in town at Astoria, Queens’ sloshily seminal Bohemian Beer Garden. Picture it: one outdoor acre; 100 picnic tables; unlimited hooch; and half a dozen gay New Yorkers. Somebody’s secrets were coming out that night or no one was going home happy.

Least of all me. I blame it on my iPhone. Or more properly, my fellow-alum Jimmy’s crackberry. It won’t last long, but for the moment anyone with an iPhone tends to be the center of attention, even in technology-forward Gotham. So there we were, me and Jimmy, taking a tour of each other’s devices, when I innocently accessed his calendar and ran smack into Dr. Piglet.

Now, of course, that’s not his real name. But for reasons that will become obvious, that was his term of endearment of choice. I should have handed the ‘berry back right then and there.

Instead I found myself querying Jimmy with a barrage of questions. Innocent ones, like: “Is this your family doctor?”; “What’s his full name?”; ‘Is he from the southwest?”; “Is he a redhead?”; Does he still wear all those earrings?”. And in a flash, the most emotionally screwed up man I ever dated in my life came back oinking after a 13-year absence.

I didn’t ask about the tattoos or the other piercings. I couldn’t fathom how any self-respecting patient would manage to see them. Well, unless they were having sex with each other. Ah, the things we put up with for love.

“Use the harness as a handle, Pooh Bear! a handle!”

Not to mention the nicknames. As it turned out, Dr. Piglet was, indeed, the general practitioner for Jimmy and his lover. Jimmy said Piglet has a thriving practice now. I had met the swine (you had to see that coming) when he was a first-year resident. I have no idea how he made it to year two. I remember a closet full of in-your-face gay pride tee-shirts that he used to wear to the hospital to goad the administrators (not to mention his patients). I remember a series of injudicious questions no aspiring doctor should ever ask his boyfriend.

“Would you mind if I practice catheterizing on you? You look to have such good veins.”

Let’s not, if it’s all the same with you. Which, if nothing else, men definitely were to Piglet. We dated for almost a year. We had each other’s keys. I came over one day after work and found another doctor he was working with making a house call.

“Can you come back in a few minutes so we can get dressed? This harness doesn’t just snap off, you know.”

As I later found out, the porkster had left a veritable support group of broken hearts back in the southwest before he moved to New York for med school. His M.O.: beginning his next usurious relationship before ending the previous one so that he never had to be alone. It was with some glee that I informed Jimmy about Piglet’s tendency to drop to his knees to lick leather boots on daddy bears.

Mark, our old attendance-taker extraordinaire, was more succinct. “I think you should pepper Piglet casually into your conversation the next time you see him and tell him Pooh Bear says hi.”

Staggering to the N train at evening’s end, I thought I had heard the last of the Piglet, er, tail–and for his sake, so did Jimmy. Jimmy was so lucky; I was not. The next evening, as I helped our much-loved alumni outreach obsessive-compulsive, Adam, ring-lead a dozen people into dinner at the Village Den on Greenwich Avenue, I made the mistake of recounting the porcine particulars of the previous evening.

We were sitting at Julius, the hoary old, old man’s dive on West 10th Street, having before-dinner drinks at the back tables. I had just begun my story, when Adam’s eyes grew wide. “No kidding? I dated him, too, sometime in 1995. He had just broken up with a doctor he was working with…well actually, they were still dating.”

Indeed. To Adam’s credit, he said he eventually dumped Dr. Piglet (perhaps the first time the errant bacon had even been on the receiving end of that particular shove). “I thought he had too many personal problems to be my boyfriend.”

That’s generally the outcome, my friend, when love and livestock intersect. Too much information all of this, but it was ultimately my own fault. After 20 years apart, I had forgotten the iron-clad adage to live by among the GLYNY crowd: assume everyone has slept with everyone.

It just saves time in the telling.

(Photo: A smile marking a turning point in my life, and I am forever changed.)

(This entry was originally posted to the Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York reunion message board the evening of Monday, April 16, 2007).

Well here I am, my last night in New York, leaving tomorrow to finally head back to my life in Chicago. I’ve already spoken my peace about Saturday night and seeing you all again. But my momentary anxiety got the better of me and I never did tell you at that table at Sammy’s what I thought of you all. Last night, on the spur of the moment, Barbara and Jennifer and Scott got to hear. I want the rest of you to know, too.

I never realized how important my GLYNY years were to me before this reunion of us all. I had long forgotten how much we meant to each other–and I’m sure I didn’t truly even realize it back then. But you are all a part of me. We remember the past in revision when we’re able to remember it at all. I remembered my past in GLYNY as fun, but I remembered myself in GLYNY as unpopular, and on the sidelines. I cared for you all. My shyness and, as you all recall, my anger back then blinded me from seeing that you cared for me, too.

The day before I came to New York for what accidentally turned out to be this GLYNY reunion, I was happy. I was content in my life, secure in myself, and did not feel alone or unjoyful in the slightest.

I return to Chicago knowing the lie in that. I return feeling completed, feeling whole, for the first time since I can remember. And it is you, my brothers and sisters, who complete me. I have no recollection of mourning your absence. Yet, after a few short days spent variously in your company, I cannot imagine my life moving forward without you in it.

The tender joys of interacting with each of you, the laughter, the tears, the comfort we have shared in far too short a time, has been an unexpected mercy visited upon a soul dangerously close to forgetting the worth of abandon. I am 17 again. I am joyous. I am alive. I am changed for the better.

And I have you all to thank. I am deeply honored for the fond rembrances of a youth too full of piss and vinegar for his own good. I am without words to express how much I love you all. Thank you for finding me. Thank you for finding me now.

I look forward to spending the rest of my life with you in it.

(Photo: Can you find me in this picture? It took me almost 20 years.)

Last week, I was at a loss for words. Try as I might to blog, nothing came. Nothing could. I was preoccupied with an unfolding miracle–one that continues to reveal its happy countenance, its joyous contours. Just where does one begin to describe the feeling of finding long-lost family?

In short, I have returned to the alumni fold of Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York (GLYNY). GLYNY was the first peer-run, gay-youth support group in America. Founded in the 1970s, until the late 1990s GLYNY helped thousands of young gays and lesbians discover themselves–and their self-worth–through weekly meetings, Saturdays from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m., at New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center at 208 W. 13th Street. For most of its decades-long existence, GLYNY never made recourse to adult or “official” guidance. “GLYNYites”, on their own, created a safe haven for gay teens to let go of all artifice and be themselves, vulnerable, and without fear.

We were something.

I attended GLYNY from 1986 through 1990 (ages 16 through 20), most of that time as a Steering Committee member. I forged many close friendships at the group, not the least of which was my budding friendship with myself and my acceptance of my sexuality. We were from all parts of the NYC metropolitan area, all races, creeds, and colors, all incomes. All levels of sanity and snap-happy fierceness. And, as I explained last week, except for a very few of us (unfortunately not including me), as we aged out of the group we scattered and lost touch. We forgot what we had, forgot what we meant to each other, and never expected to see each other again.

Two weeks ago, one intrepid former GLYNYite, Andrew Martin (“Miss Andrew” back in the day), decided to find out how many GLYNYites could be found, almost 20 years later. he started a reunion website and set about to do web searches for us all. He hedged his bets on whether anyone would still care.

In the past two weeks, four dozen GLYNYites and me along with them have flocked to that site. At first, we didn’t know what to expect of each other, as adults in our late 30s and early 40s. What relevancy would be left for us? Why, at this point, would we want to connect and what would we have to say?

But almost immediately, we remembered. We remembered how many of us we kept from suicide–and from sickness, by demonstrating, periodically over the course of four years, how to put very many condoms on very many bananas. We remembered how many times the press came to cover our meetings. We remembered finding homes for runaways, reporting abusive parents, holding each other until the world stopped hurting.

We remembered the dangerous truth-or-dare we played at James Ming’s party in Flushing (makes the sound of a flushing toilet), Queens.

We remembered standing on the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 13th Street after meetings at the old phone booths (long gone now), deciding which local diner we wanted to take over for the evening (“table for 50 please–yes the party room will be fine”).

We remembered that, for a very brief but intense moment, we were all we had. And that, perhaps, we knew each other better than anyone else who knew us, family included.

And as we reconnected, suddenly and unexpectedly, it happened. More than 40 people, spontaneously, remembered ourselves. Like a piece of us had slipped away, slowly, so slowly, that we never even realized it was gone, until we got the email invitation from Andrew. And we came to the website, and we spoke for a day, and we felt unmistakably whole again.

Some in our lives have likened this to nothing more than a high school reunion without the high school. Not by a longshot. No teen attends high school by choice. Yet by choice, we came together against high odds and, for some of us, at great risk, and we were inseparable.

Perhaps the greatest surprise in all of this is the reaction we’re all experiencing. We’re more than 40 people now all pushing or past 40, an age at which you might expect us to be a bit stodgier and circumspect. Yet every doctor and lawyer and waiter and writer among us has been brought to the verge of 17 again by finding each other again. We’ve all sat in our places of work, ignored our patients/clients/customers, participated in the website, and cried.

At first we privately thought the tears of joy that kept coming up for each of us were a singular affliction. They haven’t been. Many metaphors have flown among us to try and capture this feeling to communicate it to others, our friends and loved ones of today who cannot help but be outsiders in this experience. Simply, it’s like riding a miracle, one that keeps rolling along and getting better with every alum who finds the reunion website.

My experience has been life changing. I’ve found my former best friend again, Peter Morley, a fundamental part of my youth who was gone to me for ten years. I’ve found the man instrumental in my coming out to my mother and joining GLYNY in the first place, Jonathan Leff, whom I hadn’t known in 17 years. And old dear friends whose close amity I had forgotten, Tom and Andrew and Barbara and Jennifer and Mark. And, of course, the phone has not stopped ringing in two weeks.

And in the middle of all of this, I’m going home. For work, anyway. I’ll be running a focus group in New York later this week. I mentioned this on the website. I accidentally instigated a mass reunion dinner. Well color my face red. I thought maybe one or two former compadres would want to step out for a drink. I never expected half of my adolescence to want to go out to eat with me. I cannot explain how touched I am in that.

And I cannot believe that, for the first time in four years, I have begun to reconsider my decision to leave New York. Of course, I deeply love Chicago. But I wonder whether I would have left NYC if these wonderful, (on the same level as) familial connections had still been available to me in 2003. I am not saying I intend to return to Gotham, and even if I did, it wouldn’t be for a couple of years anyway. I am Devyn’s partner, and Devyn–and his under-construction new condo–both live here. But New York is Devyn’s other center of the universe…

All I can say is I have been so utterly moved by the experience of the past two weeks that all bets are off for me now. My world-view has changed–expanded really–and I’m thrilled at the way that’s happened. And the only explanation that seems to fit for the multiplicity of ways things have come together for so many former friends to become whole again is, quite simply, something higher than we are (and, boy, is there a 1980s club-scene joke in there somewhere).

As for that above photo? For about 10 years I’ve seen that photo on the Internet, posted by a former GLYNY alum. I knew that photo would go down in the history of the gay-youth movement. I was happy that my old friends would be noted among the captions. I was deeply saddened that I would not. This week, it was my former friends, back again, who quite adamantly pointed me out, second from the left, right behind the banner. I felt left out for so long. Yet as it turned out, I never, ever was. And I owe that discovery to my brothers and sisters from GLYNY.

God is in this. I’m sure of it. As sure as I am that, unlike before, at certain miraculous times, indeed, you can go home again.