Am I Andrew Pendergast?

'Oh no, a fag...' shot through my head, forcing me to put down James Howard Kunstler's latest novel, A History of the Future. The appearance of a gay male character came as a complete shock - the horror arose just a few sentences in, as I realized the portrait to be painted was a probable future of mine and one I will surely have difficulty swallowing.

I say will because I've yet to pick the book back up again, lest it interfere with what I want to say here - so, no, this is not a book review. But it does include a brief review of these past eight years since reading my first Kunstler book, The Long Emergency, and my attempt to incorporate these sorts of perspectives into my life and relations. I write this only because I've yet to read anything like it, or even hear of other gay men who've followed a similar path.

Like many turning points in my life, it was baptismal by fire... Manhattan was sweltering the week I read my first peak oil tome, which was also the week of Hurricane Katrina and its wretched aftermath. My boyfriend was out at Burning Man and there was no work on, so I literally did nothing all week but watch horrific footage of unfolding urban disaster while mapping it directly to my own future. It didn't take much googling to realize my little island was also quite vulnerable to hurricanes, as became evident once Sandy hit.

Needless to say, I was in low level panic by the time the boyfriend returned from his desert escapades and therefore unable to deliver the kind of cool headed explanation I might provide today! It was a rough few weeks and months, but to his credit, he stuck with me and followed the links I sent and eventually came to share my outlook on the long term future.

As for many couples though, this recasting of the future brought challenging questions to the surface, as we both individually grappled with our gut responses. He worked pretty closely with folks who later became known as the one percent, and felt these connections and his salary offered him adequate protection in an uncertain future. My ties to these folks were more tenuous as a freelancer, so the question of whether or not we were truly partners in a practical sense mattered. If not, I wanted out of the city and into a smaller, more resilient community focussed on farming and such.

Here is where my story diverges from its straight counterpart, since gay male community mostly exists in urban settings. Like other minority folks, gay guys, and especially single gay guys, can be singled out in small rural communities for some pretty irrational harassment. Local laws are not always on our side either, potentially making it difficult to form community institutions or even a small family unit. And nowadays the general public is better able to spot even discreet gay guys, so the option of living a closeted life has mostly expired.

For these reasons, suggesting to a gay man he may be happier outside a city is usually met with laughter - many already escaped country life and have zero interest in returning. I grew up in a small beach town which ultimately became a first class gay resort, so the idea seemed less outlandish to me. And luckily my boyfriend had always been an urban creature so was more amenable to the bucolic fantasies I spun.

The following summer we rented a house in the Hudson Valley, to see if living together in a small town was feasible. The together part worked out great, but he decided city life suited him best and ultimately moved to San Francisco to enjoy the good life while it lasted. I stayed and spent the next couple years researching places to settle down and saving up for a house. The idea of going it alone was daunting, but friends and family said that if I just built the life I wanted to lead then someone would surely turn up to share it.

So I did just that - choosing a small, working class village in SE Vermont with hydro power, a still functional downtown, small farms nearby and easy access to the supercity via train. The state had just become the first in the nation to vote marriage equality into law and I knew at least a handful of gay guys called the area home, so I crossed my fingers and went for it just as the housing market fell to its current level. Whew...

In the intervening half decade world events have provided both hard evidence of the general unraveling as well as evidence of status quo's resiliency. So some small percentage of folks choose to believe the former while most others put faith in the later and perhaps hope they aren't next. What's astonishing is the overwhelming number of gay guys taking the later route. In fact, I know only a few who are willing to even entertain these ideas and exactly zero who have premised any decisions on them. In most cases just suggesting that progress, especially our cultural progress, may not endure is simply a conversation stopper.

This is particularly true of folks in my generation (I'm pushing fifty now) who came of age in the early days of AIDS. We had to witness the decimation of the generation before us and know the effort it took to turn that around in our own community, barring any help from the government or health services. I suspect many of us feel we've already experienced our collapse and want no part of a more generalized one, so long as we can avoid it.

Only the youngest of guys can appreciate the life I've built - usually from the vantage point of their parent's couch after failing to integrate into the failing economy post college. But even these outliers hold dear to the idea that things will eventually return to normal so they can make good on their student loans, or that collapse will come fast enough to bring the whole mess down so they won't have to.

Unsurprisingly I'm still single, even after building this super, solar powered, permaculture inspired doomstead complete with chickens, friendly neighbors and walkable community. And I'm close to giving up the effort out here, though I still believe this life offers unparalleled resiliency compared to any urban existence I could muster. But it won't actually be very resilient for me, if there's little chance of partnering up with anyone at any point in future.

I hope when I return to A History of the Future I'm greeted with a narrative I want to aspire to, but won't be surprised if I don't find it. Kunstler does like to demonstrate how our progressive ideals could easily fall by the wayside and gay culture is a ready target. I will be disappointed though if the narrative is simply unrealistic, and was saddened to learn right up front that our gay male character was celibate and pretending to be asexual. Given current US stats, in a community of a few hundred people we might expect a dozen or more guys to outright identify as gay, and a healthy number of the straight identified folks might be up for playing around too. Obviously a far cry from gay urban living in the age of hookup apps, but probably not the life of a monk either.

Clearly, folks will only adopt narratives with which they can identify. So those wishing to build small, strong communities should take care to construct narratives that are purposefully inclusive, or risk alienating the very peoples most skilled in building these communities. Our past struggles have not been identical to the struggles we all face now, but the tools we utilize to overcome them are the same.

Hello World

What else would a programmer call his very first blog post? I'm surprised by how long it's taken to start one and unsure if I'll want to stick with it, but here we go…

I'm a gay guy who was raised by hippies in Provincetown, MA, USA - a small beach town on Cape Cod that's since become a thriving gay resort. I'm pushing 50 now so I remember when it was more an art colony nestled within a Portuguese fishing village, before wave after wave of gentrification forced most of those folks out.

Gentrification has followed me my whole life. The apartments rented during my teen years in places like Cambridge and San Francisco are now million dollar condominiums. The neighborhoods in London, Amsterdam and Manhattan I once called home are now swarming with bankster types and their attendants. While most folks in this world have seen economic stagnation or worse, I've watch this gang of thieves grow and prosper and reorganize communities to their liking.

In many ways, the move out here to Southeast Vermont was an attempt to escape that monied culture. And after half a decade I can call this effort successful on several fronts. Certainly the big corporations have less of a hold on the zeitgeist here - we don't even allow them to post billboards! And while Vermont has the largest number of one percenters per capita, they can be safely avoided by staying out of the ski towns. I was lucky to find a small, working class village right on the river with a functional downtown and local farms all around.

From this placid and wholesome vantage point, the wider culture looks quite insane... The American Empire seems to be unraveling now and responding like a wounded animal that's cornered itself in for the fight of its life. I don't zoom in on much of it, but television offers many caricatures of the psychological traps folks are falling into - the widespread denial, bargaining, scapegoating, etc. that exposes our collective failure to come to terms with our new situation. Hard to know where it's all ultimately heading, but it doesn't seem a healthy or balanced place.

As a double Libra, balance could hardly be more important to me. I also rank as an INFJ on the Meyers Briggs personality test so am particular sensitive to injustices and generally protective of what I see as wholesome and authentic. So I guess it's no surprise that I recoil from much of what I see in this world and seek to insulate my life from its ill effects. It's also little surprise that others don't feel the same since I am a rare bird, statistically.

What might be surprising is that I stuck in there for as long as I did, living in big urban centers and filling my awareness with all that entails. But that's where the other gay guys were, so I had to wait until the sex drive waned a bit and other matters could become more important. I'm thankful that day finally arrived and like other men my age I've since focussed on building a life and career more closely aligned with what I value and enjoy most in life.

For me it was small town living, like I experienced growing up in that funky seaside village. It was getting my hands into some dirt, tending a small flock of chickens and taking a hike in the woods each morning with the pooch. It was programming a browser based video editor, but then giving the code away open source so as to build a consulting business around it. It was sacrificing my place in the gay urban community for the joy of knowing my neighbors and having a vote at town meeting. It was taking a few steps along a path I'm still following, curious where it might lead...