by Bob Mould
Now that it was truly over, I was left with a mixture of feelings. I was kicking myself for holding on to Kevin all those times he clearly wanted to go. But mainly I was relieved that it was over. I wasn’t angry or depressed. I felt like I had a clean slate in front of me. Finally, all of these things I’d tried so this relationship could continue—moving here and moving there, going to a therapist, agreeing to have kids, putting up with a third—that was all gone. The worst had already happened. I’d watched the disintegration for nine months and most of the mourning was already done. Now it was time to start over. Oh, and I called the locksmith.
I tried to find the right way to walk away from this relationship. I’d always found running was so much easier, as long as I didn’t trip and fall. I’d been searching for the good ending. Maybe there was no good ending for Kevin and me. Maybe there was only the end.
I don’t have any animosity toward Kevin. I wish him the best and hope that he is able to find his own inner peace. I take full responsibility for my share of the problems that ended our relationship. It was an amazing fourteen years.
CHAPTER 25
Unlike in 1989, the last time I went through something like this, I didn’t want to move to another city. I decided to make a new life for myself exactly where I was. DC was a big city that brimmed with options, and I didn’t hide myself away.
It was a big step for me to open up to people I didn’t know so well. I was vulnerable and still somewhat guarded, but I had no choice. And I was also beginning to realize that I had long been putting work above the two things that were even more important: my friends and my health.
When I was younger, work always took precedent. I never took care of myself, I never did enough for my friends, and I never let my friends do enough for me. Because of work, my relationships suffered. Not just my primary relationships, but also the casual ones, the ones I took for granted until they were gone. Those small interactions, the corner-store clerk or the homeless guy selling newspapers or the snooty barista—those are the ones who act as the mortar, holding the bricks of normalcy in place.
Friendships ended up lost, disintegrating, unkempt. They were like the keepsakes that were tossed into boxes in a storage space, blending into the useless information that piled up around me. That’s what really haunts me—the friendships I lost.
I had been faithful to Mike, faithful to Kevin, and now I was single. Everything was open and new. I’d been unhitched for one month in the last twenty-one years. Now I was learning the ropes of dating and casual sex in DC. I had my freedom, but I knew I had to be somewhat cautious. I said to Rich, keep an eye on me and tell me if I start acting stupid. I don’t think I ever got too crazy.
Other than the six months of no sleep in 2003, I was working out every day, taking out my aggression and frustration in a healthy way. I practically lived at the gym. There was a restaurant that was part of the gym, and I would eat a lot of meals there, courting guys, meeting for a protein shake or a burger. I can remember one night when there was me and three guys in their early 30s sitting around a table as if it were an episode of The Dating Game.
Rich and I had a mutual friend named Paul Eley who was a Blowoff regular. Paul would remind me, “You’re single, let’s go out and have some fun.” So he’d get me out of the house to meet new people. Some nights we’d hit the downtown leather bar the Eagle. Playing pool or watching Bill Maher on the big-screen TV with two other people (including the bartender) was not great fun, but at least I was off the couch and out of the house.
The DC nightlife was new to me, and once I was out and about, I was surprised to find how gay the town was. I knew my gym, Seventeenth Street, and Dupont Circle—the old gay neighborhood. Outside of that, there was a thriving gay community made up of many different types of folks in several neighborhoods.
I was still trying to find my place in DC when early one Friday night in April of 2004, Paul and I went to a place called DIK Bar, a cozy little joint above Dupont Italian Kitchen. I walked in and, long story short, I found my crowd: the bears.
Bear culture started in San Francisco in the late 1980s. It was born from an adaptation of the lumberjack image: flannel shirts, beards, and burly bodies. Bears had descended from two other subgroups—bikers and “girth and mirth” men—that didn’t fit the urban gay stereotype of the young hairless “twink.” Eventually there were magazines like Bear, and even bars like the Lone Star, that helped define the bear culture.
The crowd at DIK Bar was made up of regular-looking guys from their mid 20s to their mid 50s, most with facial hair, flannel shirts, and jeans. Some guys were buff, some guys were normal size, some guys were heavy, but everybody was super friendly, drinking beer and giving each other hugs and being normal guys. Nondescript music played in the background at DIK Bar: old disco, 1980s new wave, current pop music. Paul asked, “Do you like this place?” I replied, “Yeah, this crowd is cool, this is a fun place. Let’s stay for a while.”
It was great to be in a bar where people dressed the same way I did. It reminded me of my punk rock days: guys in flannel shirts, T-shirts, and jeans. There wasn’t a lot of pretense, sarcasm, or campy behavior. No offense meant to those who like camp, but at this point in my life, it wasn’t my thing. I enjoyed the company of guys who were comfortable with their masculinity. At DIK Bar I didn’t feel like I had to do anything to fit in except be myself. I didn’t have to try to look or act like a bear because I already was one.
I met guys that night who are still good friends—one special guy in particular. As I was getting ready to leave, I came face to face with this inebriated yet handsome young man. I was wearing a blue flannel shirt, which he grabbed onto and wouldn’t let go of. Paul said, “That guy is crazy, we need to get out of here.” That crazy guy, Tom Joyce, became one of my best (and most stable) friends. The whole night at DIK Bar was a revelation.
I had a few friends in DC, including Tom, who blogged regularly. And at the beginning of 2004, I also jumped headlong into the online world by starting a blog called Boblog: A Quiet and Uninteresting Life. After my dearth of literary creativity in 2003, it was a great new outlet. Also, now that I had my house to myself, I felt safe enough to write again. I felt compelled to post daily, whether it was something serious, mundane, or comical. By forcing myself to write every day, I started breaking through the writer’s block that had started in 2003. And for the first time, I was revealing pieces of myself that I previously wouldn’t have felt comfortable sharing in a public forum. I was careful about hitting the “publish” button though—the internet is one big tattoo, and once it’s up there, you can’t get rid of it.
There was a fairly large community of gay bloggers, and I became acquainted with some of them, hitting it off especially with one fellow from the Midwest. Our online friendship soon became a long-distance phone relationship that turned both comical and sad.
We would arrange these real-life meetings: he’d make a plan to drive to DC, and I would be all excited, telling my friends how thrilled I was that this guy was going to come down and hang out. I really thought the world of him, and I couldn’t wait to meet him face to face. But, invariably, something would happen on his end that would nix the visit. One time he got fifty miles into the trip and his brakes went out. One time he had chicken pox. I thought so much of the guy that I called up a Chinese restaurant a mile from his house in Midwest suburbia and had them deliver chicken soup to him. One time his grandmother died so he had to stay behind with his grieving mother.
Finally I said that the only way we would meet is if I went out there to see him. He was in his early 30s and getting his master’s degree at an art college, so I chose the weekend of his graduation—“I’m coming for your graduation, I’m going to meet your family, I’m going to bring my suit.” I get there, and the guy doesn’t resemble the photographs he’d been sending. He’s a fair amount heavier than how he portrayed himself online—IRL was a lot different from URL. I’m not a body fascist, but when somebody is cla
iming to be a muscle boy, and then you get there and he’s not, while I’ve been in the gym busting my ass for months to look good—I was like, Hey, what’s going on here?
I spent five days with him. Despite a few hiccups and crossed signals, we had a good time. The last day of my visit, he blew off his graduation ceremony. Instead I went to his house to meet his family. I met his parents and sister, and sure enough, his dead grandmother was also there. My jaw was on the floor. I played along for twenty minutes, then said, “Dude, we have to step outside, I need to have a word with you. That’s your grandmother, I thought she was dead.” He was saying, “No, no, no, that’s my great aunt, that’s my grandmother’s sister. Don’t say anything to my mom because she’s still grieving.” I was thinking, OK, this whole thing is weird.
Later that night, we were driving around his town and I asked, “What is really going on here?” He broke down and explained that he gained some weight in the last three months. He had been on medication and didn’t want to tell me. I believed him, but said he should have brought up some of this stuff earlier. Your car seems fine, your grandmother is alive, and you don’t look like your photos.
And, yes, we were intimate, but once the dead grandmother came into the picture, everything was suspect. A few days later, we said our good-byes and I drove back to DC. Along the way I realized that maybe it wasn’t just him and that maybe I wasn’t ready for a relationship anyway. It was as if I’d had the typical rebound relationship, except this one hadn’t been realized. It was pretty weird though.
Later in the summer, another gay blogger was planning a trip to DC, and we made plans to get together for an afternoon. During our walk around town, I asked, “Are you seeing anybody?”
He said, “I’ve been having this on again/off again online relationship with this guy.”
I asked warily, “Does he have a blog?”
“Yes,” he said, “he’s a hot muscle guy. We’ve been communicating for over a year, trying to get together, but it never seems to work out.”
“By chance does he live in the Midwest?” I asked. He goes yeah. A bell went off in my head. I asked a few more questions just to make sure. It was definitely the same guy. I mentioned his name. My friend was startled.
“I spent five months doing the same thing you’ve been doing, and I actually went to see him. Those pictures he sent you, that’s not the way he looks now.”
The guy almost fainted and fell in the middle of P Street. Literally, like with the vapors. I said, “Get yourself together, we’re going to go eat, and I’m going to tell you what happened.” By the end of the meal, we both felt better and were laughing about it.
* * *
I was forty-three and in very good physical shape. In the bear scene, a lot of chest hair, a scruffy beard, and a worked-out body goes a long way. Being in my forties was actually an asset. There’s a very specific time-honored dynamic with some gay men, not necessarily the daddy/son dynamic, but more of a bear/cub dynamic. There are guys in their late twenties and thirties who are coming into their own, and are looking for guys in their forties and fifties. These younger guys are usually wiser than their years and are looking to spend their time with older guys. The older guys play the role of mentor, boyfriend, or long-term partner.
As my life as a gay man got fuller and more complicated, sometimes it was all I could do to look at my friends and (half) jokingly say, “Being gay is really hard.” It was almost as if “being gay is really hard” was code for “I’m really sorry I slept with your out-of-town trick, but you pushed him at me, and we both know that when he goes back to his town, we’ll be left having coffee together.”
Being gay is really hard—so many parties, so many events, so many exes, so many friends who are now split from their partners, and you have to know how to juggle everybody. It’s a difficult life. When is happy hour? Where on Thursday? He slept with who?
And if one is to be a bit of a sleep-around, it’s just courteous to keep a Costco family pack of toothbrushes on hand. That was me for a moment—always the thoughtful whore.
Kidding aside, I’ll share two pieces of advice about being gay: you can’t come out soon enough—and it’s never too late to come out.
I thought all the way back to when I was a kid, not being able to tell anyone, not even my parents, about who I really was. I never had anyone to talk to, and I never looked to anyone to talk to—because I didn’t want to talk about it. If you’re young and questioning and not able to voice it in safety, find a gay person in your community who you trust and respect, and get to know him and talk it all through with him. Find the big brother or the parent that you don’t have at home and ask him to guide you and help you sort out all the emotions.
I thought about how I’d been so disconnected from the gay community in my teens and twenties that I couldn’t find any point at which I could relate to it. I thought about the 1994 Spin article and its aftermath. I probably should have come out in 1986, when my homosexuality was an open secret. I knew that everybody knew. I had deep sadness and regret about not coming out sooner—my life would have been so different. But I’d been so worried about how people would perceive my work, not considering the impact I might have had on people for being an out gay rock guy. Still, I eventually came out; there were some rough spots, but overall I was happier for it.
In my two long-term relationships, I had unconsciously built my life upon the traditional construct of marriage. Now that I was single and exploring the full range of the gay community, I was beginning to see all the different options and opportunities in front of me. I was beginning to find my place. It was a very exciting time.
* * *
By July I was interested in two different fellows. There was one guy who worked out at my gym during lunchtime, and another guy who I worked out with in the late afternoon. So I was going to the gym twice a day just so I could check out two different people.
The late afternoon guy was a very handsome pediatric radiologist from Birmingham, Alabama, who was in town doing some work at Walter Reed Medical Center. He was ten years younger than me, with a perky personality and a big red goatee. We spent lots of time together. He told me he had a boyfriend, so it was a platonic relationship laced with heavy overtones.
The real tough one, though, was going at noon in hopes of getting a look at this other guy, Will Hiley. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, and I was completely head over heels. From moment one, it felt like that love at first sight I had heard about but never experienced. I was petrified around him. He was so gorgeous and radiant and vibrating. The relationship I was hoping for never materialized, but we were as tight as two people who aren’t involved could be—and a very intense friendship came out of that.
I also spent a lot of the summer of 2004 in the gay tourist destination of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. I had money, so I didn’t need to work. I would go to Rehoboth two or three days a week, where my dear old friend Steve Fallon and his longtime partner, Arnold, had lived since 1999. I was going to the gym, the beach, the bars, meeting new people, and having a good old time. I was a very different person in Rehoboth. I wasn’t going there for dating. I was going there to hook up with guys I didn’t know. One thing I figured out early on was that DC was a small town—everybody talks, and it was best to do my tricking elsewhere.
Very few of the guys who came to Rehoboth recognized me as Bob Mould the music guy. Joe from Wilmington, Delaware, didn’t know who I was, and I wasn’t about to tell him. Bill from Philadelphia, who rolled into town looking to get laid, I’m not about to walk up to and say, “Don’t you know who I am?” I wanted him to think, Who’s the muscle daddy standing at the end of the bar? I want to get with him for an hour.” I didn’t want to get recognized—I wanted to get laid.
Back in the 1990s, the Lure was a leather/rubber/fetish bar on Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village. Two of the owners moved to Rehoboth and opened a leather/biker bar called the Double L. One of the owners was John Meng, who was
about my age, a motorcycle collector, a former Massachusetts state cop—and the Double L is his pride and joy. On the wall behind the bar was a framed cover of Land Speed Record, and the bathroom was done entirely in flyers from the punk rock days, including some of my earliest shows. John and I yakked about the Germs, Boston hardcore, and gay life at the beach. Once again, I found a place where I felt like I belonged.
* * *
It was no coincidence that I was starting to write music again. In 2003, with the turmoil in my personal life, I didn’t feel comfortable making my own music at home. I was collaborating with Rich at his studio, and the only work I did at home was putting on a pair of headphones, firing up my laptop, and making white label remixes of other people’s work. I was just reshuffling other people’s music instead of creating my own. Now that I had my house to myself, I eased back into writing. There was a handful of good songs from the 2002 Athens sessions with David Barbe and Matt Hammon, but I had to write many more in order to complete what would become Body of Song.
I started writing songs about courtship, the false starts and missteps. It was very different from my usual prescient failed relationship perspective. I was trying to write from a more hopeful place. A lot of the newer songs for Body of Song were notes to myself about falling for people and how that made me feel. It was really inspiring for me to write about the people I was interested in from a more optimistic emotional view and boiling those feelings down into songs. I didn’t have much to lose and plenty to gain.
Ultimately, the album ended up being an interesting hybrid of all the styles I had touched on in the previous six years. There were plenty of electronic elements in the album, particularly the straight-out dance track “(Shine Your) Light Love Hope,” the swirling trip-hop track “Always Tomorrow,” and the synth/guitar marriage of “Paralyzed.” There were plaintive acoustic ballads like “High Fidelity” (a track I’d written in 1995 but never released), “Days of Rain,” and “Gauze of Friendship.” The big guitars were back on “Circles” (a song I’d written in New York in 2000), “Underneath Days,” and “Beating Heart the Prize.”