Magic is real. Why else would David Copperfield chuck himself over Niagara Falls locked inside of a barrel? Yes, there may be some sleight of hand or an optical illusion at play, but it’s more the feeling you get when you believe something is possible despite the odds and historical data that point to the expected, boring old outcome. Magic is about balancing two worlds. Maybe with some magic the center would hold.
-G.V
Editor’s note: I had accidentally used the word “motherfucking” twice in this e-news, so I edited to include only one instance.
Derek and I met pre-pandemic, but the most noteworthy of our meetups to date occurred somewhere smack dab in the middle of COVID (you know the one). You might say we were stuck together, gabbing for hours — our conversations running the gamut from Barbie dolls in Brazil to the long drives we’d made in the past for an internet hookup, he from LA to Long Beach and I from New Haven to Providence. This was back in the earliest of gay.com times, when we probably all should’ve been murdered multiple times. Thankfully, Derek and I lived to tell our tales. Derek had a knack for capturing times and places that didn’t require names or faces for vivid mental images and gut-busting laughs — his personal narrative memoir worthy, like a slap-happy take on sick and twisted in the style of Dennis Cooper.
One particular night’s reminiscing wound its way from a Miami parking garage where Derek had found the flattened head of a jumper the year Trump became president to a San Francisco leather bar in 2008 where a Master named Morlex sporting an eyepatch took a liking to me on my birthday. Waxing nostalgic was usually our thing, trading witticisms and travelogues and factoids up until the very end — but this time, Derek suddenly fell ill, heave-ho-ing his way to the toilet where he just yacked and yacked. I sat on his bed, trying not to listen but knowing I needed to just in case. In my mind, I resolved to stay until he was feeling better, at least until he could keep some water and/or food down and if he ever emerged from the throne room. Finally, he did. It’s then that he confessed to me his deepest, darkest fear in a moment of shared humanity.
Derek was the owner of two Siamese cats — regal creatures who mostly occupied the guest bedroom, which in truth was very much the primary. Occasionally the walls would shake when the felines tousled around being the wild animals they were. I’d only seen them a couple of times, and each glimpse I recollect as unsettling to say the least. When Derek told me his biggest fear was dying alone and being eaten by his cats, I could understand why. Then he asked that I stay until he felt well and safe enough to fall asleep, so I did.
“Everything will be okay,” everywhere said. The murals, the social media posts, the garbage-art installations, and the e-newsletters from brands and friends alike all spoke of this future certainty that someday we’d be able to reflect upon a time when (poof!) “normal” would suddenly return, like some knight in motherfucking shining armor. But I liked taking an even more optimistic approach. “Everything IS okay,” I’d retort under my breath — sometimes to others if I felt they’d be into this line of thinking.
“Not okay is also okay” also came onto the pandemic scene harder than it had ever before, representing a shift in the way we’d been talking about mental health on a mass level for years, even decades prior. Aimee Mann released Mental Illness several years before the pandemic, but her true ode to the mind’s tragic, poetic unraveling was her album Queens of the Summer Hotel, which she put out in 2021. Yrsa Daley-Ward’s poem “Mental Health” also preceded the pandemic by half a decade but couldn’t have been a better salve for reconciling the trials and tribulations of Life in Ye Olde Covidtimes. Rethinking how the brain works, I have spent much of the past three years becoming a new person who values his capacity to change into who he was meant to.
Below: a story — first in words, then in pictures.
The middle of the road is a scary place to be. An easy mark, you’re all but guaranteed to be picked off (or up) by the left or the right, especially when aggressive horn blowers are the revenue drivers of media jockeying for eyeballs and clicks. So you move to the suburbs for safer streets and better schools and try to live under the radar, but your salvation is plastic-wrapped — nice to look at but too perfect to open lest the fantasy be ruined. So you let your hopes accumulate an eternity’s worth of dust. The promise of the American Dream goes unfulfilled as you wait inside a vestibule with a broken buzzer and no cell service to speak of. Kind of like that Primitive Radio Gods song, only not at all.
“Canada’s Gay Oprah,” says Buzzfeed. I want to pretend like I don’t know what that means, but I’m a gay who grew up watching Oprah’s meteoric rise to superstardom through her endless skinny-fat-kinda-skinny-really-fat-not-too-fat cycle. Regardless, Oprah’s a big deal. And Buzzfeed is a real thing, so you could color me intrigued by this guy in Toronto with whom I had only tentative plans before boarding my flight there in January 2020. Needless to say, we met and spent some of the best time together I’ve ever had on this planet. I haven’t seen him in person since the pandemic, but he’s remained a formidable and much-needed figure.
Just enough new agey woo woo and with a storied past in high finance, this ex-husband to a porn actor hits different than most. Emotional and rational, this thinker and feeler has touched many with his kind and generous spirit, good vibes, and practical advice that forces you to see the good in something, to seize an opportunity, or to just be more gentle with yourself. Because he’s likely to have felt the same way or been through whatever it is you’re going through, he can shrink your insurmountable mountains back to their appropriate molehill size.
He has presence. At 6’4” with a flawless platinum coif, he always commands attention but never has to demand it. He’s a vision board extraordinaire, manifesting an interview with Oprah herself, who’s been instrumental to his successful pursuits in media and publishing. In short, he’s a magician (and my fiancé).
The Magician may sound familiar because he’s also The Sage, whom I highlighted last week. There have been many in my four-plus decades, so covering only one would be inadequate for such an influential archetype in Jung’s pantheon of personalities.
The Magician is the bearer of knowledge both ancient and new. He is wise, thoughtful, reflective, healing, contemplative, and transformative. His omniscience gives the magician enormous power, allowing him to manipulate elements to create and world-build. And because he has knowledge of energy flows and patterns in nature, humans, and societies, he can contain and channel deep unconscious forces for the good of all. I call him anytime I need some sparkling, quick-witted conversation or a really juicy affirmation.
We’re registered at Holt Renfrew.
If your reflection was a digital strawberry made of light: