Falling Into Life: A Gay Exmormon’s Journey

Chapter Two – The Pristine Platte

It’s not that I didn’t have a life before. I don’t mean to say that Mormons don’t have lives. I did have a life. It’s just that it was very unlike me, it didn’t even resemble the real me at all.

There was a “me” that was inside all those years wishing I was someone else. I was very unhappy because of it.. It’s that my life did not match myself at all. Not in the least. Isn’t that odd? One might ask how that is even possible. Well, that was the case with me. The following represents the real me:

On November 18th, 2008, it is so warm I can’t believe it. A high of 81 degrees F, not so astounding for Denver, this place is the best kept secret for winter. I stand on the side of the Platte with my pretty green iPod and watch the candy go by and I soak up the sun. I’m wearing my awesome cool half boots and feel like a million bucks. I envision myself like a sunflower and this time of year is the hardest due to daylight savings time ending my sunshine at four o’clock in the afternoon. I pine away for the Winter Solstice, just six weeks away and I’ll get my sun back. It feels good to bake my face this way, right into the sun I stand and face it, the river runs to my right and the men run to my left.

When I was a little kid, age five in 1969, we’d drive past the Platte River going west on 270 and it was so polluted then; any time there were small waterfalls it would create huge piles of toxic foam, always reminded me of that crying Indian guy on the pollution commercials. I half expected to look over and see him there on his horse, quietly crying over the river. It’s nice to see this river flowing so clear and clean forty years later.

The candy is endless today, men running by me bare-chested in short shorts; they can’t get enough of the sun either, racing out needing so badly to feel the warm air and baking sun deep in their skin. No Mormon garments bogging them down, no worries about “modesty” plaguing their brains, I can tell they feel really free. Carefree. That illusive word that I always wanted to understand. Maybe they’d reconsider that modesty thing if they could read my mind. Maybe they wouldn’t care; most men don’t care being adored by either gender these days. I know how to make straight men feel really good in the compliments department.

I let myself think about them now, I let their images flood my mind and feel warm and free with it. It is no longer a terrible sin for me. It just is. How I ever denied myself this pleasure I’ll never know. My previous pain for even considering such thoughts was overwhelming, the fight of my life. I always found my oldest brother’s incessant attraction to women’s breasts amusing; he always noticed them and mentioned it to me when we were older men. I always wondered why he was such a freakin’ horndog. Now I get it, I am exactly like him, but gay. I can’t get enough! That’s right boys, throw it out there. There’s nothing like a guy in shape. I adore my man, my husbear, he’s the love of my life, my mojo machine, but I am a gay man and there’s a big ol’ menu out there, especially after being put on hold for thirty-eight years.

I work on Platte Street in Denver by an area now called Confluence Park, this area is so refreshingly hip now. The Lower Platte Valley has been thoughtfully designed as modern park areas where Cherry Creek joins the Platte River. I would die to live in the Flour Mill Lofts, lemme tell ya. The REI flagship store now bustles with energy where the aging Forney Transportation Museum used to stand with its massive train engines when I was a kid.  The Denver Skate Park is down the river a ways, the aquarium is upstream a bit. Modern “lofts” are everywhere. LoDo, or Lower Downtown Denver begins right here, and the lofts on Platte Street were the first new urban housing to be developed in Denver that jump-started LoDo.

About fourteen years ago I used to volunteer in the exact same space of my current employer’s building. It’s another one of those, “You got to be f*cking kidding me!” moments as I approached the door for my interview and scads of memories flooded in. Hauling my son Max (now 17 years old) on my shoulders into the Paris on the Platte coffee shop right next door when he was three years old to get something to eat was one such memory.

We left the Paris one time and Max announced to me that the “coolest” people have tattoos all over them. I reacted in major Mormon freak-out mode as I strode along with him on my shoulders speaking upwards and stating that, “Heavenly Father wants us to guard our bodies, and to keep them pristine and clean like the temple.” Now, a forty-four year old man with two self-designed tattoos adorning my own “temple”, I can’t help but smile. And what might my Mormon guides counsel me about this? “What will you tell your kids?” Hell, I waited ‘till I was f*ckin’ FORTY years old, for chryst sakes! Show me one Mormon temple that isn’t decorated with gaudy show room furniture in the Celestial Room and a plethora of gospel-related subtle messaging embedded into external designs? Please.

My Ex worked for a non-profit for kids with disabilities and their office was right in the same space, I’m talking *exactly* the same space. Oddly, my Ex’s business partner also worked for the same non-profit, also worked in this space fourteen years ago and now her husband works in this *exact* same space because I helped him get a contracting gig with my new employer about 6 months ago. Denver is a big city, this is an amazing thing!

Universal Alignment: it happens to me at lot.

These are details I can share with my Ex, and we can still reminisce about them. It’s something I think that most Exes wish they had after the dust settles from the angry divorce. There are many Ex-wives out there that had their Ex-husbands leave and never come back, abandon their daughters, move on and find new kids to slather their love on and only give their first kids sh*tty presents and limited love, only speak to them with anger and regret, bellow and snipe. Not me, that’s not the kind of Ex I am. Early on she said that my being gay, that her having to tell people about why we divorced was way worse than hetero divorces. I think she’s come to realize that she’ll never have to compare herself to another woman.

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