Number 191 Fall 2022 • $11.95 Queer RelativesIssue 192 / Winter 2022 NEVER AGAIN Submission Deadline: October 21, 2022 www.rfdmag.org/upload “Never Again”, is a common phrase we use in everyday life like a prayer or a vow to reflect not wanting to repent an experience, a mistake or mis- guided decision. But it’s also a political slogan for many movements such as anti-nuclear, anti-war, abortion, Queer and Trans rights, Black Lives Mat- ter or other forms of reaction to racism, genocide, and the list goes on. We are asking you to consider ways of contribut- ing to this issue which is about addressing “Never Again”. How we have to repeat our efforts to make something change, how we re-direct our personal life to try to make a change, and how we try not to be numb to the constant effort of facing the battle of “Never Again” moments be they in our personal lives or in the social climate we want to live in. So please consider times when you’ve said “Never Again”, reflect on your actions—heck show us your actions through words and images. How do we take a negative reaction like “Never Again”and shift it to a purposeful change rather than just an awful experience. This can take the form of simple things—not leaving plants out after a frost warning, ways we are taking efforts to live healthier and safer lives, protesting and organizing for change, reviewing our choices and actions, and most importantly how we are shaping our lives after something unsavory. With the crisis on many fronts facing our lives— racism, homophobia, transphobia, religious bigotry, violence against women, and economic injustice— we’re all trying to shape responses to those “Never Again” moments which we’ve been facing all too often. “Don’t Say Gay” laws, abortion bans, “Bath- room bills”, and the many laws affecting how we can vote, policing, and simple issues of bias which we face. Reflect on y(our) history and tell us and show us the story of how we can move ahead. Our community often is involved in many fronts to engage for change so delve into ways being LGBTQ in other causes we’d love to hear about this as well as the personal, engaging and funny aspects of “Never Again”. RFD 191 Fall 2022 1 Relatives Forever Dear Vol 49 No 1 #191 Fall 2022 Between the Lines Welcome to our Fall issue of RFD. It’s our attempt to take you on a queer family reunion brought to you by other readers. Many of the pieces in this issue are about uncovering, coming to know more about queer relatives and how our relationships with family is often conflicted because we’re queer. Every person experiences family differently and we’re happy to reflect a number of perspec- tives from our readers. We also share another form of queer relations, the relationship between artist Francis Bacon and his lover George Dyer as told by Bacon through his art. With this issue of RFD we begin our countdown towards RFD’s fiftieth birth in Fall 2024. We’re working on ways to celebrate and we encourage our readers to share their experiences with reading RFD, finding RFD for the first time or ways that you engaged in creating and shaping RFD’s pages over the years. Please be in touch if you’ve written or shared artwork with RFD. We’d also love to hear from folks about their favorite RFD issue or a special article that still stands out for you. With that all in mind, we’re eager to hear your ideas for future issues of RFD, please send us your ideas for themes. We also want to put out a thank you to all of our subscribers and readers for their support through subscription renewals and donations to help keep RFD online. Enjoy this family reunion, help us reflect on our big anniversary and thanks as always for your support! With love from a balmy Vermont —the RFD Collective2 RFD 191 Fall 2022 RFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative life- styles. We foster community building and networking, explore the diverse expressions of our sexuality, care for the environment, Radical Faerie consciousness, and nature-centered spirituality, and share experiences of our lives. RFD is produced by volun- teers. We welcome your participation. The business and general production are coordinated by a collective. Features and entire issues are prepared by different groups in various places. RFD (ISSN# 0149-709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302. Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302. Non-profit tax exempt #62-1723644, a function of RFD Press with office of registration at 231 Ten Penny Rd., Woodbury, TN 37190. RFD Cover Price: $11.95. A regular subscription is the least expensive way to receive it four times a year. First class mailed issues will be forwarded. Others will not. Send address changes to submissions@rfdmag.org or to our Hadley, MA address. Copyright © RFD Press. The records required by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and as- sociated with respect to this magazine (and all graphic material associated therewith on which this label appears) are kept by the custodian of records at the following location: RFD Press, 85 N Main St, Ste 200, White River Junction, VT 05001. On the Cover Front: Photograph by Cotton Bro Production Managing Editor: Bambi Gauthier Production Editor: Matt Bucy Submission Deadlines Winter–October 21, 2022 Spring–January 21, 2022 See inside covers for themes and specifics. For advertising, subscriptions, back issues and other information visit www.rfdmag.org. To read online visit www.issuu.com/rfmag . Visual Contributors Inside This Issue Images or pieces not directly associated with an article. Artboydancing. ........2, 10, 13, 30, 35, 39, 42, 56 Duncan Hilton .........................7, 40, 49 Michael Loren Butkovich. ...........9, 32, 48, 55 Gregory T. Wilkins. .......................... 52 Gabby Tenda ..................Inside Back Cover Cotton Bro ...............................Cover "Money Talks Sometimes" by Artboydancing. RFD 191 Fall 2022 3 CONTENTS Chipped Pieces ...........................A. Scott Henderson ....................4 Uncle Joe and Fran .......................Steven Riel ...........................11 Ang Baklang Naging Gerilya & Ang Pamilyang Nahanap Niya sa Pakikibaka ..........................T.L.Javier ............................14 Appearing Normal ........................donnarkevic .........................16 Uncle Brud ..............................Merline D. ...........................17 Mis tías españolas (My Spanish Aunts) .....Angela Acosta ........................18 Some Funny Stories About My Father’s Death ...............Maytag Dishwasher ...................19 Mind Your Own Business .................Matt Lawrence .......................25 Great Aunt Jo ............................Keystone ............................28 Gay Uncle ...............................Scott Damon .........................31 lineage (or lack thereof) ...................Emerson Gray ........................34 My Queer Relative Aunt Mary .............Kelvin Ray Beliele .....................37 Great Uncle Willy ........................Jim Van Buskirk ......................38 Legacy ..................................David Milley .........................41 The Gay Sheriff of Natchitoches Parish ......J.L. Fletcher ..........................43 Poem ...................................Dylan ...............................47 Poem ...................................Duncan Hilton .......................49 Older Brofriend ..........................Chicken Sparklehorse .................50 Secrets and Time .........................Martin Dayne ........................53 The Artistic Suicide of George Dyer: Francis Bacon .........................Rob Buchanan .......................574 RFD 191 Fall 2022 The sepia-toned tedium of southeast Georgia was endless. I rolled down a window to free a fly, the map on my lap flapping its own creased wings. Scented by skunky paper mills, the air was cool and dry, though autumn remained just a rumor. An hour earlier the roadside landscape had been populated by Tallahassee’s magnolias, but they had surrendered to pines, which soon gave way to scrub, swamp, and periodic proselytizing. A billboard in Valdosta had asked, “Have you been Saved?,” a warning as much as an invitation. As I approached Waycross, the monotonous scenery fooled me into thinking that the gauzy bolls of cotton were wildflowers. This didn’t surprise me. When I was a child growing up in seasonless South Florida, I had assumed that cotton came from de- partment stores where little boys shopped for pink paisley shirts with their mothers. But cotton-field chicanery couldn’t compare to having been fooled by my own self—fooled into believing I was normal, only to discover I wasn’t. I’d agonized over whether to keep that knowledge hidden or to face the harsh consequences of telling others. College gave me a convenient excuse for cowardice. Once classes began, I became the soli- tary whiz kid, a peach-fuzz freshman with his head in the sand. My weekend trip to Waycross that fall was a favor to my mother. Three years before, her great aunt had taken a fourteen-hour bus ride to visit us in West Palm Beach. During her stay, I had said nothing about girls or girlfriends, despite being a se- nior in high school. Instead, I had spoken of clothes, recipes, and local theater productions. Maybe Way- cross boys had similar conversations, but I knew what they would be called if they did. __ Larded with italics and punctuation, a sign sput- tered: “Welcome to Waycross…Gateway to the Oke- fenokee Swamp…Opportunity Ripe for the Picking!” I had no idea if it was the swamp or the opportunity that had lured my mother’s side of the family to Waycross. Her people were a Celtic clan of sandy hair and pale skin who left the Appalachian hollows for the scorching sun of treeless terrain—dirt-poor farmers who never questioned the Bible’s truth, a scorching sun of a different sort. Maternal folklore was the main source of my information about Waycross. My mother, her sister, and my grandmother had spent almost every summer with relatives who were scattered along an arc stretching from Jacksonville to Waycross to Charleston. In her decades-old recollections of those sojourns, my mother would carefully arrange family members like pieces in a china cabinet: the perfect ones were placed in front, while the chipped ones—an aunt who smoked cigars, an uncle who wore dresses—were tucked in back. The encyclopedia volumes stacked in our humid garage provided additional clues about that sliver of Dixie, places where my mother had learned to dance, to kiss, to wordlessly prompt a light for her cigarette. Those volumes showed me other things, too—photos of bare-chested men who held my stares as I sat on that increasingly hard floor, slowly realizing I was one of the chipped pieces. The Ware Retirement Center—a renovated hotel—was the tallest structure in Waycross. The lobby was empty except for some octogenarian armchairs and a broken grandfather clock. I pressed the elevator button until it produced a grinding, metal-on-metal sound, as if the building needed a hip replacement. The elevator eventually appeared and took me to the fourth floor. In a minute I was at my aunt’s door. “Hello, Steven,” she said amiably. She was wearing a cream blouse and a light gray skirt (if either item had had any wrinkles, it would now be cowering in a closet). With ninety-two years of practice, her posture was erect, a straight line from her black shoes to her white hair. “Hi, Aunt Beulah,” I said. “It’s nice to see you.” I feared there’d be an awkward and potentially in- criminating pause when she might recall my campy comments during her Florida visit. “I expect you’ve eaten lunch,” she said, her speech neither clipped nor brusque, though not effusive either. “Yes ma’am,” I responded, my voice inadvertently straying above the masculine pitch I’d practiced. “Good. Have you got your things?” A real ques- tion that time. Chipped Pieces by A. Scott Henderson RFD 191 Fall 2022 5 “Yes, ma’am,” I said, raising a folded suit bag. Aunt Beulah nodded, as if her question had been a statement after all. “Then let’s get you settled.” She stepped inside, body language cuing me to wait in the hallway. From what I could see, her apartment was fairly spartan. An issue of Family Circle magazine sat under a lamp on an end table next to a green couch, beyond which a two-chair dinette faced a makeshift kitchen. In contrast to this no-nonsense simplic- ity, I knew Aunt Beulah had constructed defenses, barriers that barred the entrance into her private thoughts and feelings. “Here we are,” she said, holding a key. She guided me past the elevator and unlocked the door to a modest room, an accommodation residents could reserve for guests. “I hope this will do,” she said, giving the bath- room a quick inspection. “Yes ma’am, this will be fine,” I replied. “Wonderful,” she said in a tone of small victories. “We’ll drive over to Jack and Ruth’s house at 5:00.” Marching orders confirmed, she went back to her apartment. Aunt Beulah had reasons for her reticence. The youngest among ten siblings, she was the only one to attend college, earning a nursing degree in Atlanta. A few years later, she married a salesman from Alabama who died shortly after the birth of their second child. To support the two children, she’d returned to her former nursing job at a Way- cross hospital. As a working mother in the Deep South, Aunt Beulah had been an aberration, though her differ- ence was not like mine—nobody had ever suggested she might be “funny” because she’d never remarried. She could be forgiven, even admired, for her single- minded independence and imperturbability. The TV in my room didn’t work, so I half-heart- edly read a textbook I’d brought with me. Bored, I began thinking about the guy who often sat next to me in my economics class: lanky, tanned, long blond hair. Probably a surfer from Daytona or Ft. Lauder- dale. He’d flop down in a desk, then nonchalantly adjust his shorts to make his lack of underwear obvious. Those interludes always incited a riot of distracting thoughts, voyeuristic silences when my desires were momentarily free of judgment. __ “It’s not much farther,” Aunt Beulah said. Streets named for Confederate generals and poisonous plants marked our progress into Jack and Ruth’s neighborhood. “Turn right after the stop sign,” Aunt Beulah directed with the crisp precision of someone who no longer drives, just navigates. Dusk had descended by the time we arrived. Azaleas surrounded a ranch-style house, its yard blanketed in leaves that crunched underfoot as we slowly walked to the front door. “Come on in y’all,” Aunt Beulah’s son Jack said, his drawl an unconscious cliché, molasses on a cold day. He took us to the living room, which was crowded with a hodgepodge of furniture encamped next to an empty fireplace. Sweet and savory aromas drifted in from the kitchen. I had on a polo shirt, khakis, and penny loafers— arbitrary costuming that people like me used to identity each other, rare hints in the guessing game of is-he or isn’t-he, a game we were forced to play in the shadows of ambiguity and innuendo. Ruth, Aunt Beulah’s daughter-in-law, took both my hands: “We’ve been looking forward to seeing you, Steven,” she said affectionately. She eased me through introductions as I tried to keep the sing- song chiffon out of my voice. Aunt Beulah’s grandson Jimmy, a high-school sophomore, was restlessly thin and exhaustingly talkative. An equal match for a hummingbird, he flitted from topic to topic, from person to person, sentences stopping and starting at random points along the way. “Steven!,” Jimmy’s sister Sara exclaimed, giving me a big hug. During their holiday visits to Florida, Sara and I had giggled at sequestered card tables, played board games, and mimicked the adults. As teenagers, we’d had lengthy phone calls discussing the boys who wooed her and the girls who belittled me, allaying our insecurities with commiseration and mutual reassurances. Sara had also lived with my grandmother while she completed an internship prior to college. We palled around and joked a lot that summer, so I laughed one afternoon when she had said I was like an older brother—but she’d been serious. The chance to see her again had persuaded me to make this trip. Joining us for dinner was Sara’s boyfriend David, a Waycross native and fellow UGA student. Resem- bling a sporting goods advertisement from a mail- order catalog, he had a large, solid build covered by large, solid clothing. Curiously, his eyes held mine even after we exchanged greetings. Was I missing 6 RFD 191 Fall 2022 something? I probably just wanted a different image to replace the surfer in my thoughts later that night. Because it was a dry household, there weren’t any pleasantries over beer or bourbon. “Let me sit next to Meemaw,” Jimmy chirped, wings aflutter. In the dining room, a picture window reflected our images as if we were watching ourselves in a play. “Oh piffle, I forgot that magazine,” Aunt Beulah apologized. “You needn’t fret, Mama—I’m in no hurry for those recipes,” Ruth said, pulling out a chair for Aunt Beulah. “You’re not getting senile, are you?,” Jack kidded, but Aunt Beulah bristled at the attempted humor. One of her sisters had been committed to the Milledgeville State Hospital, and a niece or nephew had spent six months at the Florida State Hospi- tal—two of the chipped pieces in my mother’s china cabinet. In the crisscrossing chit-chat that followed a short blessing, I admittedly engaged in what my mother approvingly labelled a “personality act,” the artifice of scripted etiquette and excessive praise. I had been taught that white lies—those sugar-coated substitutes for candor—weren’t actual lies, only a delicate dance to avoid stepping on toes. As for the lies you might tell yourself, their color was a mystery. “Y’all help yourselves,” Ruth encouraged. Jack handed a bowl of collards to me, his face faded and lined, features fatigued by unseen demons. “Remember,” my mother had cautioned, “don’t bring up his brother.” I had been told about Jack’s older brother “Red” many times. Coming home from UGA for Easter break, he had been killed by a drunk driver. Not long thereafter, Jack quit junior college and devel- oped a drinking problem, the damn-shame-of-it-all irony as unmentionable as Red’s death. Were forbid- den topics simply another form of duplicity? Out of nowhere (nowhere being the backyard), we were startled by a dog’s frantic barking. “I’ll go see why that darn fool’s holler’in,” Jack said. While he was gone, Jimmy began telling the table (well, me) how their dog Buckshot continually got into trouble, but—mercifully—Jack returned before Jimmy could become entangled in a tangent. “I didn’t see anything. Could’ve found himself a possum,” Jack reported. “Meemaw, tell Steven the possum story,” Jimmy pleaded, his excitement rivaling Buckshot’s a minute ago. “I don’t think he wants to hear that old story,” Aunt Beulah chided. “It’s not even really a story”— which she then proceeded to tell. I had vague memories of this anecdote—some- thing about a possum caught in a family vegetable garden. There was one detail I hadn’t forgotten— that playing dead was an instinctive paralysis, the lifeless limbo between fight or flight. My attention had begun to wander when I felt David press his leg, rigid and unhesitating, against mine. His eyes remained fixed on Aunt Beulah. The rising warmth of our touch continued until he moved his leg. I tried to conceal my confusion. Because I was constantly searching for signs, I sometimes imag- ined things—the looking-glass illusion of seeing in others what I saw in myself, a mirage of mistaken identities. Or maybe David had been genuinely interested in that silly story and wasn’t aware of his wayward leg. Aunt Beulah, having given the possum a digni- fied burial, took a concluding sip of water. “Are y’all ready for dessert?” Ruth was heading to the kitchen, confident of our answer. She returned with a tray heaped with slices of pound cake, the Communion wafer of the South. The conversation shifted to the classes Sara and David were taking next term, capped by Sara’s com- ment, “Then, in either June or July, we’re hoping to announce our engagement.” Chair legs creaked. “I don’t see why y’all are in such a rush,” Aunt Beulah interjected. Our reflec- tions sat motionless in the window, figures frozen on a glass canvas. “We’re not in a rush, Meemaw,” Sara said with polite firmness. I had the impression this skirmish wasn’t new. “Getting engaged—getting married—is serious,” Aunt Beulah persisted. “You ought to slow down and get to know each other.” Were these time-worn truisms a way of implying that David wasn’t good enough for Sara? Whatever the case, nobody else seemed to share Aunt Beulah’s worries. “Jack and I hadn’t been dating even a year when we got married,” Ruth said, seeking to mollify the combatants. I wondered how long it’d taken Ruth to find out about Jack’s alcoholism. Marriage, instead of end- ing secrets, might create more of them, deceptions abetted by a blind eye or a lame excuse. A tense silence was in the offing, but Aunt Beu- lah put the matter to rest: “Suit yourselves—I still RFD 191 Fall 2022 7 "Skip Johnson" by Duncan Hilton from Physique Pictorial No. 22, April 1973.Next >