2009 Update: I find the glib essay below "Merely Love" to be pretty embarrassing, but oh well, that's Bob. This spring I wrote a more substantial though quite short piece that I recommend more highly as a glimpse of autobiography, Our Last, Real Estate.

June 13, 2015 Update: Gee, I'm still alive, though just barely. But I do have a couple of things to add, a page about my porn star brother Richard Locke...
Anecdotes about Richard.
... that actually has a brief recording of him doing an interview for a book about him and AIDS survivors as of 1989...
Richard and Love, on tape..


And by the way, once on a double date (yes, with girls) Richard and I were seated on either side of my date, Cordy Dimbat who was also my Senior Prom date btw, and she exclaimed as both Richard and I were holding forth on some opinion or other, "Oh, my God, stereophonic Bob Locke!" Richard's voice is much deeper than mine, I think, but I guess there is probably something about timbre or intonation that is similar. You can hear my voice at the bottom of my page on THE BLOOD GOSPELS:
Angie in the cemetery.

I'm also adding to this page a lovely, ironic, and pretty sad but funny story about some of my mother's last thoughts on this planet...
The Three Jesuses.

Merely Love
Autobiographical Essays

By Robert Locke, Pseud. Clayton Bess

August, 2007

Love is a word with a lot of heft. Or at least that is the sentence I have engraved on my tombstone. Yes, it sits up on the hill waiting for me. I'll attach a photograph. .

A little gruesome, having one's own tombstone carved? Maybe. But who else should do this job? After my mom died, June 26, 2007, I had hers and my dad's tombstone carved. She had wanted her tombstone to be joint with his, but in the seven years after his death she was simply unable to face the horrible fact of it. She and I had managed my brother Richard's tombstone together. And now, I tied all three stones together with a line of poetry from my musical Howling Twain :

Echo of centuries, remember...

...Remember, you're not here alone.

If voices are muted, words are engraved in stone.

...Oh, remember, you're not here alone.

And yet maybe I don't know a whole lot about love. I've had only one great romantic love of my life, and I certainly hope that I don't have another. Chances are slim that another will walk through the door, and that suits me perfectly. And yet here I go getting a sentence like that engraved on my actual tombstone. What nerve.

Well, there are lots more kinds of love than romantic love. And I do think that I am full of it. Love, I mean. Finally, though, who is to say? Well, finally there are the words on one's tombstone, and who is going to question those? Well...

But none of that is how I intended to start off this autobiographical intro to my several autobiographical essays. I had only one autobiographical essay for quite a long time since autobiographically I believe I am probably very dull. Even that one autobiographical essay was not so much auto as it was bio; that is that it was more about my fabulous brother Richard than it was about myself. However, since my mother's death I have been suffering tsunamis of my own mortality which cause me to sit at this damn laptop writing these damn things in these damn essays. I am utterly bereft, and I go about my mother's house organizing hers and my dad's belongings for distribution to the family, and I find myself bawling, actually bawling out loud like a lost heifer. If that's not love, what is?

But I know that any reader worth his or her salt will surely be wanting to hope that, if they do read further, I will indeed get to that great romantic love at some point, and I do promise that I will. There will be at least one chapter on that, I am practically certain unless one of those swellings of my own mortality becomes actual. But oh. And that chapter is sure to be at least a little lurid, I imagine, since it will be homoerotic, and I always think that almost everybody does like that, however much they pretend otherwise. Well, very very straight and macho men of course, but how likely are they to be reading anything titled Merely Love? Also perhaps some giggly, squealy adolescent girls. But what grown up does not relish two beautiful women or two handsome men kissing? But do I go too far over the top now in what is supposed to be merely an autobiographical intro?

So then, yes, let it be known right here up-top that I am gay, unabashedly queer—as in not normal—born gay as far as I can tell, with only the most hapless forays into heterosex, and those few and far between and hardly mentionable. I expect I will mention them, however, since I was quite heroic, and I do want the kind and generous reader to come away with the idea that at least I tried.

Probably the most important facet of my personality is my homosexuality. I think, in fact, that probably the most important facet of anyone's personality is his or her sexuality, or lack of it. I could be completely wrong about that. I'll let this imagined kind and generous reader decide for him- or herself.

When I say that I was “born gay as far as I can tell,” what I mean is that my earliest sexual memories were homosexual. I remember before the second grade—and I know this because we moved to Healdsburg, California from Oakland, California when I was in the top of the second grade, and these memories predate that move—walking home from school behind an older boy, and I just loved the way that boy's butt looked in his pants.

That was a good clue, it seems to me, even though I didn't put it all together until many years later.

Before the second grade, too, I remember those secret little meetings of the neighbor boys and girls down in the dark of the basement beneath the front steps to our old Victorian, showing each other our things, and oh, I wasn't interested in the least in those of the little girls, but those of the little boys, now, those were fascinating.

That is actually a beauty of sexuality that I cherish, that enormously broad spectrum with each person taking up his or her own individual spot on the spectrum with his or her own color and variation. My spot has been way over to the homosexual end, though I certainly can and do appreciate a beautiful woman with a beautiful body; there simply is no sexual attraction. I have heard so many people lament that about me, especially women, but I do not find it lamentable at all; it is merely a facet of my nature, and that is merely the truth.

Truth is important to me. And honesty. I'm not sure those are quite the same thing. For example, all the things I have written above are indeed truthful, but is it honest of me to write them if you, the reader—who might after all not be as kind and generous as I imagine you to be—does not want to read such things, no matter how truthful. I had a professor in college of Restoration Comedy, Mr. Dunlap, who made a big issue of differentiating between honesty and sincerity. Mr. Dunlap would insist that though I may be quite sincere in wanting to tell you these things, honestly you might rather not read them. However, how could I possibly know that for sure, and so I'll just plunge ahead with these little autobiographical essays of mine and do my best. It will be up to you, kind and generous reader, whether or not you choose to plunge ahead with me.

Fair warning: I'll probably be so honest that I'll tell you about the time I tried to kill myself. Horrible story, but not without humor, either. Don't worry, though. It's like it happened to a completely different person. We'll see how this all unfolds. After all, it is all merely love.

I guess I recommend starting with “Living and Dying and Mr. In-Between” since I wrote that one first, finishing it the day before the new millennium began. In the month after my mother's death on June 26, 2007 I wrote “Hauntings” and was very uplifted when I typed “The End” on that. Not long afterwards I wrote “Heroes” and will, I suppose, continue along for a while now. And so, good luck to us all, and amen.

Bob age 2, kissing his mom age 32, with Dicky age 5, looking on. Bess wrote on the back of the photo, “Young Love.”

2009 Update: I find the glib essay above "Merely Love" to be pretty embarrassing, but oh well, that's Bob. This spring I wrote a more substantial though quite short piece that I recommend more highly as a glimpse of autobiography, Our Last, Real Estate.

June 13, 2015 Update: I'm also adding to this page a lovely, ironic, and pretty sad but funny story about some of my mother's last thoughts on this planet...
The Three Jesuses.

July 18, 2015 Update: Leaving the Planet.

Copyright © 2007, rev. 2009, rev. again 2015 Robert Locke
All Rights Reserved