If you walked into my gym and picked out the one person you’d most want to hug, the teddy bear of a man with the huge smile and the big, infectious laugh you can hear across the room, you’d be pointing at Carl. If you’ve been to Steel Gym in Palm Springs, you know exactly who I’m talking about.
I met him about a year and a half ago and we hit it off right away. We’ve had many a conversation about life and love since then, and at some point I realized he was a friend I wanted you to meet.
Here’s the thing about Carl. He’ll tell you he can be a lot. He’s the opposite.
He spent a lifetime editing himself. We all do it, and most of us start young.
For Carl it was third grade, in Española, New Mexico. He was cheering with the girls, S-P-I-R-I-T, let’s hear it, and somebody called him a joto. He was eight years old and he learned in one afternoon that being himself was dangerous. So he stopped. He began to hide the parts of him that got him hurt. A Catholic upbringing told him he was an abomination, and he started praying the prayer a lot of us prayed. Why me.
At seventeen he drove to a Navy recruiter and signed up. He needed his mother’s permission because he wasn’t old enough to enlist alone. And then came thirty-plus years of a different kind of editing. Don’t ask, don’t tell. A straight friend who found out and asked him if he was a little faggy boy. Carl decided it was safer to let his straight friendships go than to live waiting for someone to turn him in. He found his people instead, a gay brotherhood inside the Navy, and some of those men are still in his life today.
The editing followed him into love. He gave his values away in his first relationship because he wanted so badly to be wanted. He spent fourteen years in a marriage where two broken people loved each other honestly and still couldn’t grow in the same direction. And then in 2018, walking home from the clubs in Puerto Vallarta with his husband, someone shot him.
He survived. The relationship didn’t. The marriage ended, the real estate business ended, and Carl walked away from all of it.
He stopped editing. Not because anything got easier, but because he did the slow, unglamorous work of learning to love the one person he’d never really let himself love.
Himself.
He’s 55 now. A couple of years ago he prayed for someone who could actually see him, and not long after, a man named Jimmy sat down behind him at the Episcopal church. Two weeks before we recorded this, they moved in together.
We talk about his childhood, the Navy, coming out, his faith, the shooting, monogamy, and what he wants to build next. And we end with his mother Carol, who took the O out of her name to make his.
I hope you enjoy this episode with my friend Carl. A reminder to love yourself first.
Be bold, be free, and most of all, be you.
- David
A Queer POV: Friends, Loves, & Life with David
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