Notes on reciprocity

Lloyd Josephs and I exchange short digital epistles on what it means to be gay in our 40s, and about how this decade has shaped how we view connection, filters, and fireworks.

Dear Lloyd

Eish, I appreciated your poem “This is 40”. It speaks to Whitman, in a distinctly 1980s-kid modality. There’s much to be appreciated in it, but I keep returning to a specific couplet: “I am not only a log cabin engulfed by the forest. / I am not only busy streets and bustling nights.” For me, that’s the crux of the issue, the essence of being this side of 40.

Oh, sure, and still wanting to relate, to hook up. Not fireworks necessarily. Just to every now and then hold a guy’s hand in the Spar, or at the Pretoria Boeremark.