Monday, Jul. 29, 2002 - 11:08 p.m.
And I In Mine

The hunky young man setting up camp across the way wears form-fitting knee-length jean shorts. And—oh!—what a form. His pretty blonde wife keeps busy with their three kids—a son around six or seven, a girl a few years younger, and the youngest, toddling boy—as he hooks up the motorhome and erects a tent.

A little later, I watch her fall against his massive t-shirted chest, cigarette dangling between her fingers draped over his broad shoulders as they clasp in a long hug. The embrace warms me; I feel like crying; I am caught off guard.

When he peels off that shirt a little later, it’s altogether a different sort of warmth I feel. Built like a brick shithouse. His shoulders jut out rock-like, their majesty browed with a smattering of fine dark hair. His smooth torso—moony, insistent pecs, a flat muscular belly—reinstates a belief in God. He carries his jockish physique unselfconsciously, chasing his kids, laughing and horsing around.

My desire is complicated by this hetero campground context. I am uncomfortable. Lust doesn’t always travel well. I cannot help but look, but my gaze awakens pubescent pangs of longing that were and always are shot through with sadness. “Trapped” in straight-outdoorsville, not another homo in sight, I re-taste that old freakishness borne of unrequited longings for male flesh.

His life—that love—looks so easy.

I’ve made a gay-gay-gay life for myself; here, in this campground of families and children and man-woman couples, I feel ugly but I am merely a duckling out of water.

It grows dark; as my father lights a fire, I watch the hunky young father gather his wife and children around theirs; they are roasting marshmallows and the kids are tired but he, Daddy, talks non-stop in a teasing little-boy voice, cracking jokes, the youngest boy cuddled up sleepily between his big legs. I regret nothing about my life in that instant, and I think about the conscious effort and commitment required to make relationships—romance, friendship, sex, and all permutations thereof—work and grow. I feel a moment’s peace.

In that firelit moment I sense—really sense—that whatever our differences, however simple it looks for him, the young man across the way too has to work at love.