Recently I read a post by someone who used to admire my old blog (The Gay Recluse) but was now criticizing this newer blog for being too flowery and apolitical. I’m not here to say he’s wrong, or that I can’t understand where he’s coming from: as The Gay Recluse, I often used a caustic, acerbic voice that in certain ways I’m sure was more entertaining or riveting (or whatever else it is that keeps you on a blog) than the one I tend to adopt here, or at least more entertaining for some percentage of readers. The fact is, I received a lot more comments on The Gay Recluse and regularly ‘got into it’ with people whom I felt were stupid or bigoted or just ‘assholes.’ Nor will I deny that to this day, The Gay Recluse still gets more traffic than this blog, even though I haven’t posted on it for roughly 18 months.
But the anger and venom I brought to that blog, while thrilling at times — particularly if, like me, you grew up trying to ‘please’ just about everyone — nevertheless got to be very exhausting. I began to get dispirited when, for example, I would receive a gazillion comments telling me I was a ‘fucking idiot’ for pointing out some obviously homophobic advertising campaign or political drivel or what have you, and I in turn would feel compelled to address each one of these comments because they were on my site and it’s really hard to manage a site and not have ‘the last word,’ so to speak. And even if these battles got ‘picked up’ and publicized — I’m sure you know what I mean, how bloggers are to controversy like flies to shit — I would end up feeling kind of hollow and empty, or sometimes wanting to immerse myself in an even bigger fight so that I could get even more traffic, and so on and so on. But a lot of the traffic I received (and still get) for things like ‘hot gay’ (a term I was starting to basically ‘own’ by way of the statue competition) is not exactly the kind of traffic that leads people to click through and buy a literary novel about opera (even if the novel does include a lot of stuff on nonheterosexual identity and so forth), so I’m not really sure what the point was, anyway, because I definitely didn’t have it in me to be a ‘professional blogger’ or anything along those lines. Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I understand why some people miss The Gay Recluse, but it’s not something I’m about to bring back, and for the time-being, I’ll continue to meditate on flowers and clouds and other such things, which while perhaps kind of superficial and trifling (and not big traffic generators) at least don’t leave me seething with anger or wanting to slit my wrists, which I think is pretty much inevitable if you follow ‘mainstream’ culture in any level of detail and start noticing the horrible ways in which almost everyone (and not only gays, but this is the group or ‘community’ with which I ‘identify’ for obvious reasons) is ‘shit on’ and ‘marginalized’ and stereotyped and so on and so forth. I mean, there’s only so many ways you can make the same point, and unless you’re getting paid $$$$$ by the NYT to make this same point over and over and over again on the Op-Ed page (which is basically an industry over there, in case you haven’t noticed), it gets kind of stale after a while, or at least it did for me.
On the other hand, I never get tired of looking at clouds or flowers or even the cats, because they’re all fundamentally at peace with themselves, which in a way I think is basically impossible for any person to achieve, even if certain people are better able to appear that way, and usually exploit this appearance for financial gain or political power, because they seem to have the very trait so many of us crave, even if it’s only on an unconscious level (actually, that’s where it can be very dangerous). But to be conflicted about things is certainly one defining trait of humanity — though I’m sure there are many others — just as the desire to end this conflict (i.e., to be ‘at peace’ with yourself) is something valid to aspire to, even if it means less traffic.
