My Life is Going to China.

I was at our little church supper club yesterday. God. Damn it. I wish I could drink.

Booze and I are not compatible. Straight people will never know what it is like to be gay. The same goes for non-alcoholics understanding drunks. The rest of you dullards,leading dismal lives, being responsible, obeying laws, and engaging in sexual intercourse only after marriage for the sole purpose of having children are very lucky. You see, I'm both gay and a (recovering) drunk so I could let you in on what happens in both worlds.

I know plenty about straight people and their sexual quirks, for sure. My main source for accurate reporting are my breeder boyfriends, Richard, who recently celebrated the second anniversary of his third marriage and Robert who got married 40 or so years ago then immediately went to sea and never looked back.

One evening while on Center For Disease Control business at The Holiday Inn SeaTac on SeaTac International Boulevard in Seatac,Washington I watched pay per view. The Holiday Inn offers a wide assortment of instructional videos on how to engage in heterosexual sex. I pressed a couple buttons on the remote and boom! Boobs were flailing all over the screen. Uhm. Ewww.

The ingenue had a french manicure. I watched her sitting on a cheap and classic clunky Pottery Barn sofa (when will PB re-think that look?) pleasuring guys to her right and left. In between bites of my Snickers Bar I thought, finger nails making a nose dive into my scrotal sac? Those wacky straights! I'd rather have a colon-oscopy sans anesthesia.

A a more medically oriented video, "Paging Doctor Finger" was on the menu but after you've seen one episode of "Medical Center" starring Chad Everett you'll never settle for less so, no Dr. Finger for me.

Chad Everett was my first crush. He had that great Glen Campbell blow dried and sprayed hair. His TV relationships with women were invariably doomed. The female patients fell in love with him while he treated their illness but they always died. The guy patients managed to survive at an alarming rate. But Chad, he always went home alone to his impeccably decorated penthouse for a slurp of bourbon from a cut crystal high ball glass.

Bill Bixby was another crush when he was Mr.Eddie's Father. Again his relationships with women typically tanked. He would return after a tragic date to his clone of a Chad Everett apartment to cavort with Eddie, his son, and their adorable and impossibly wise and asexual female Japanese housekeeper.

The waiting room at my doctor's office in San Francisco was the perfect blend of Bill and Chad's places. I needed to find a doctor because I had my first health plan and I knew I wanted a gay doctor after I had a little VD episode.

I noticed a bit of a pus colored discharge from, well you know, uhm like down there. That I hadn't yet actually engaged in any act of love that dare not speak its name or any act didn't keep me from panicking. I called my late dad's navy buddy doctor who had a clinic in Oakland. The exam didn't go beyond a paternal grin, his writing a scrip for penicillin and telling me to wear a rubber when I got together with that sort of woman.

That was how I landed in a waiting room fine enough for a photo spread in Architectural Digest.The walls were covered with mocha ultra suede.Two brown leather wing back chairs each with a patina flanked an antique cherry game table where a backgammon board sat open. A large ficus was tucked into one corner of the room where an armless, down filled sofa sectional, the color of crimini mushrooms hugged the wall. Brass floor lamps and sconces gave off ambient light. The stereo sound system was locked at the one and only disco radio station.

The practice catered to a gay clientele. The two docs and staff were practicing homosexuals. It was the seventies and everybody was having a terrific time even at and with the doctors.

But that waiting room was terrifying. It was difficult enough walking into the A- List Sweater Bar of all times, The Alta Plaza located in Pacific Heights. Sitting on that sectional with the muscly men in tight fitting Levi 501s waiting their turn to see the doctor was excruciating for skinny,awkward me.

The men in that waiting room are gone, so are the doctors and their staff. One by one as each of the gay men on staff died he was replaced by an over weight black or Hispanic woman. The ultra suede faded. The ficus was eventually taken away. The robust patients became feeble and resigned. The waiting room wasn't fun any more.

Well a lot of that stuff has been re-created on made-for-TV movies so lots of people know about the drama, the epic drama, that was occurring when AIDS was a disease of gay white men. When I look around, on the internet mostly, it is a lonely world for guys my age. There aren't many of us left, an entire demographic was wiped out.

This evening I'm sitting at my white oak mid-century Italian-design computer table. My house was built in 1979 by Hap,the old Norwegian whom the neighborhood kids thought was God or Santa Claus. He and his wife moved in a year later. She died but her memory lives on by the bulbs she planted. They have returned in greater numbers each year. Purple iris and hyacinth, white snow drops and yellow crocus. Hap shot himself in the mouth just outside the window of my office under an old lilac bush on Valentine's Day. He was 82 and had cancer. We still get his mail from The RNC and NRA and Rush and those guys.

Paul and I are the left-overs of the time when unbelievable numbers of people were popping off in just the smallest corner of our world. We've become, as the gay pundits have written and said, "virtually normal", fitting into our suburban enclave, like fairies we worked our magic and re-created Hap's house and garden.We eschew clubbing for Netflix and go to mid-week church supper clubs rather than a Circuit Party.

Straight people, you're gonna have to Bing or Google Circuit Party. Gay people, start laughing as you imagine the expressions of the heteros digging on Circuit Parties info, yes do please pass the X. Either way, we have a lovely life doing it the way we know how, giving it our best shot. I believe the souls who died before our eyes during an entire decade would approve.