I've been thinking about the song "Superman" by Barbra Streisand, yeah, I know, Barbra Streisand. . .but it's really not her or the fact that she sang the song that has me thinking about it, it's the song itself, when it came out and it's significance in my personal history. It popped up on my Ipod last week while I was hiking through the hills near my home. As I climbed up a steep dirt trail in 85 degree heat, sweat pouring down my face, Barbra started singing, "Baby, I can fly like a bird, when you touch me with your eyes, flying through the sky, I've never felt the same but I am not a bird, I am not a plane, I'm Superman when you touch me. . . "
I was no longer a 60 year old man hiking up a trail in the heat, I was a 24 year old kid, skinny and clueless standing on the bridge of a huge yacht in the darkness holding the man I loved and feeling the salt spray hit our faces as we kissed and the music boomed from speakers hidden somewhere in the magnificence of the machine we were sailing on. It was in the channel between L.A. and Catalina and all I remember are the stars and a bright moon, darkness and cold and nothing more. I loved him and he loved me and that seemed to be all that mattered. But it was a different time, love back then was something he felt he had to hide, and that always drove me crazy. What the hell, I came out just months after Stonewall and I was proud to be gay, proud and strong. Ultimately all the love in the world couldn't get past that fear of discovery he lived with and we broke up. Not that night, that night was magical, one of many magical nights fueled by innocence and freedom. It was another Sunday night, another cruise back from Catalina when I, sunburned and exhausted from skiing on the glassy early morning waters of Cherry Cove, decided to tell him it was over. We didn't hold hands, didn't kiss on the bridge with the cold spray wetting our faces that night, we sat somberly in the great main cabin and said our farewells. . . I thought I was crazy for doing it, crazy for saying good bye to a man I loved but it couldn't go on, not with the lies and the fear. We docked and I gathered my things, things that I had kept on the boat for months, things that, in some way, made it feel like I was home, and I left.
The next morning I woke up, put on the coffee and walked slowly, sadly down the walk to my driveway where the morning paper was waiting. I noticed that it was already warm from the summer sun and as I opened it, looking for some news worse than my own to make me feel better, I saw in the headlines of the View Section the words, "L.A.'s most Eligible Bachelor" with a picture of him smiling below them. He was sitting cross legged in the very same captains chair that he had been in the night before when I told him it was over. The second line read, "Ladies, he's single, he's rich, and he's looking. . ."
