Dear Diary: All the Same
In the movie that I was watching in the kitchen this evening, Little Children, Jennifer Connelly’s character tries to tell her mother that her husband is not like her father: he’s different. “They’re all the same,” counters Mom.
Are they? Are we?
On the whole, I agree with Mom. I don’t think that men understand the value of relationships until they’ve been taken away. Men don’t have “relationships.” They have loyalties. The great thing about loyalty is that, once you’ve sworn it, you don’t have to think about it. In fact, you’re not supposed to think about it. “Reconsideration” and “loyalty” are two words that barely manage coexistence on the same page, and never in the same sentence. A relationship, in contrast, is an ongoing reconsideration.
Not to be flip, I was reconsidering my approach to making hamburgers. I had actually opened the latest issue of Saveur, which is all about burgers, and learned the most amazing trick: slipping butter into the middle of a patty works makes for a deliriously juicy (buttery) burger. This turns out to be quite true! I did not actually read the article to learn how to do it, though. I’m having very mixed feelings, lately, about books and magazines on the subject of cookery. Well, about reading them, I mean. There is so little time, and food is, after all, only food. At the same time, I’m an eager collector of handy tips, such as the idea of tucking a pat of butter inside a burger.
Here’s what I did, anyway: I took my sharpest knife to the newly-formed patty and sliced it equitorially. The resulting halves were only slightly deformed by this operation. Once they were made presentable, I sprinkled minced green onion on the slightly larger half and spread the other with a bit of butter (a good deal less than what I’d call a “pat,” though).
Maybe it wasn’t the butter that made the burgers so delicious. Maybe it was cooking them in a cast-iron frypan. It has taken me forty years to learn how to maintain a cast-iron pan, but I think I’ve finally got it. Oh, I always knew what you’re supposed to do, but I just couldn’t do it. I just had to clean the pan after each use, because, well, not to clean it would prove fatal, no? (There was a trick that I had to teach myself, though: use a straight-edged wooden spatula to dislodge sticky bits from the pan. This is as effective as conventional scrubbing, but nowhere near so damaging to the patina of ‘seasoning” (grease) that renders a well-kept cast-iron skillet frypan non-stick.)
Surprisingly delicious burgers were yet another example of how loyalty can get in the way of learning, if you let it — which of course you have to do if you are a loyal sort of guy.
I used to think that gay men were different. And why not? They were certainly thought to be different by the straight men who felt obliged to spit on them. The great discovery of my fifties, though, was that gay men are men, after all. I was very disappointed to find this out, because I had high hopes for gay men to be interesting. I didn’t think that it was being gay that made gay men more interesting; I just thought that it was the massive rejection from the bastions of masculinity that charactized life in the Fifties and Sixties and well into the Seventies that, well, opened up other lines of inquiry. But while gay men are sharp critical thinkers about masculinity, they don’t, as a rule, choose to  live outside it. The sad fact of the matter is that gay men like men, even if they do, like straight men, find them to be very irritating.
On the brighter side, there’s a lot less spitting.
Is there no hope? If Mom’s right, and all men are “the same,” then there’s clearly no percentage in attempting a more decent profile. Inevitably, you’ll let your lover down, and in the same old tawdry way as a million other guys. The only way to save a shred of dignity is to be firm about one thing: don’t call Mom.