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I am of a “certain age” that remembers prank phone calls, heavy phone books, payphones (do any exist anywhere these days?), and calling the operator.

And, gasp, rotary phones. We had two rotary phones, one on the kitchen wall, and one down in the basement. You had to obtain phones ONLY from the phone company at that time. If you screwed up a number, redialing could be quite painful. I wonder how many people just dialed the operator and had her (yes, they were invariably of the female gender) to connect them.
 

I worked at one place, before the days of voice mail, where the switchboard was required to page people they could not put through. The woman who worked evenings, Helen, used to be an operator for the phone company, and I could swear her voice was exactly like the female voice you used to hear when you dialed a disconnected number: “The number you have reached, 555-555-5555, has been disconnected. No further information is available.” I wonder if they used her voice for that recording …

Now, prank phone calls are still alive and well and have adapted to the new technology (check out the Judge Judy and Dr. Phil soundboards), but ironically, such technology, especially caller ID, makes it quite easy for such calls to be traced. In the days before caller ID, it was open season for bored suburban kids whose parents were not home. Once my mother started working in order to make up for the loss of income that occurred during the rampant inflation of the seventies, we were sometimes at home, unsupervised. Supposedly too old for a babysitter.

We didn't do the usual, “Is there a John there? No. Then where do you go to the bathroom?” ones. One of my brothers and I prided ourselves on our geeky esoteric knowledge of Star Trek and Greek mythology. We would call people (and organizations; for some reason, we liked to call The Church of the Nazarene) asking for characters in Greek mythology like Zeus and Agamemnon or obscure Biblical figures like Miriam the sister of Moses.

We found a guy who had an answering machine (still a rarity at that time) and left messages that Troy was falling or that Lieutenant Uhura was trying to obtain a signal from his number. Nothing obscene (I did call someone once and make a farting noise into the phone, and one time we held the phone up to the flushing toilet, if that qualifies).

At least we weren't doing drugs or having sex or going to the bathroom outside (a major social evil in our house) when Mom was at work. I consider our activity, actually, quite creative, though I'm sure, to our prankees, incredibly annoying.

One time we almost got busted. On one episode of The Brady Bunch, Jan, poor Jan, is trying to fake she has a boyfriend, George Glass. In order to orchestrate her ruse, she calls the operator and asks her to ring back the number, claiming she though something was wrong with the phone. The phone rings (no one is there; I would think it would the operator), and she fakes conversations with George.
 

My brother and I decided to duplicate this ruse. My brother was always able to pull off the more elaborate ones (I would tend to start laughing). He put on his “sexy woman voice” (hear Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island, but slightly deeper and huskier) and dialed the operator. Instead of compliance, the operator began asking questions. I could hear my brother saying, “Well … um … it's not just working properly.... I think it is the bell.” My knees felt weak. I asked him after he completed the call what had happened, shaken. He looked perturbed, his face flushed. “She was asking me all these questions, like, what seems to be wrong with it?” For God's sake, it worked on The Brady Bunch!

No more prank calls that day. I thought the operator would call back when Mom got home. We would be so totally in deep trouble. Deep. Mom got home from work, in her usual crabby mood, and about ten minutes later, the phone rang three times, then stopped. She looked at both of us. “Have you two been fooling around with the phone?” she barked. “No,” I replied, trying to sound perplexed. Mothers always know. She had no evidence to convict us, other than a certain look in our eyes (she always claimed she could spot liars that way).
 

In hindsight, I dread to think what we would have concocted if we had been able to use youtube or other media for our outlandish pranks. I laugh about the incidents now, but then I think also about the horrific harm caused by cyberbullying and the like, in many cases, by unsupervised kids.

For unsupervised men who want to have sex and use pre-cellphone technology to contact other unsupervised men who want to have sex, check out some of our classic porn films.

I've seen them on television and the movies, and I've even been in them (well, when you're from Cicero, Illinois, you've got to do something), but what exactly is a dive bar? Or more specifically, a gay dive bar?

The ones I have seen on television and the movies sometimes seem like parodies of these places which in some cases are identical with what used to be called neighborhood taverns. You know, the place where working class guys like Archie Bunker and Ralph Cramden would hang out at; remember Kelsey's on All in the Family?
 

Or the one in Valley of the Dolls that Neely O'Hara (on a booze and pills binge in San Francisco) gets kicked out of; this scene (starting at 1:17:16) pretty much parodies the “dive;” tacky or nonexistent décor, which sometimes involves dark wood paneling; aggressive, bawling customers who begin with beer and end up doing shots; lots of smoking; and a jukebox, all as a backdrop for the inevitable fight.

In some neighborhoods of Chicago, in the early part of the last century, there were often three of these places on every block to accommodate thirsty workers from various manufacturing jobs who wanted in to delay going home to overcrowded two- and three-flats filled with screaming children and nagging wives. They weren't necessarily dives, but they weren't doing a high-class clientele, but the local “average Joe.”

Now gay bars, of course, for the greater part of the last century, had to take often extraordinary measures to just survive. The couldn't exactly be open watering holes for Mr. and Mrs. Bunker. (Well, other open holes existed there, but that's another blog.) And to survive often meant being a dive (or pay off the police or the Mafia), because that's all you could afford being, plus looking “rough,” though it could attract a less “classy” clientele, often kept away bigots.

Early leather bars like the Gold Coast certainly were dives physically, but in cases like that, the “dive” look was a deliberate part of their appeal: rough sex, rugged guys, bikers. The old Touche bar in Chicago on Lincoln Avenue perhaps was more strictly kink and leather (think piss trough), but the beers stacked up by the entrance and the generally seedy surroundings (I remember the floor was dirty, and it was caked in; no comment on how I would know such detail) certainly proclaimed “dive.”

The Glory Hole on Wells Street when that street was the gayborhood was perhaps more of the pure “dive:” not only the totally rough, thrown-together look, but the backroom (and bathroom) for quickies and more. Perhaps some of the bars that used to bill themselves as “leather and levi” rather than strictly leather (with a dress code) could be defined as more strictly dive, like the now-closed Rawhide in Chelsea, or still thriving, the Second Story Bar right off the Magnificent Mile (yes, it is still there!) and the Granville Anvil on the Far North Side of Chicago, somewhat distant from the trendy, touristy Boystown.

In fact, the Granville Anvil bills itself as a dive bar. From what I gather, based on their Yelp reviews and Facebook page, they've “spruced up” the décor. Did the owners take out the paneling and the plastic flowers covered with dust hanging in baskets from the ceiling, I wonder? I know, because I was there in the nineties, and yes, there was a jukebox playing Cher's song “Half-Breed,” and also, there was a fight in the bathroom. I was indirectly involved. The friend I went with was in the fight. I found out he was pissed because some guy would not leave me alone (those were the days), and then started bugging my friend as well. That night, I also won some lottery tickets as a prize for getting Bingo. I didn't win the lottery.
 

I wonder, in these days when other “divey” places like 24-hour grills and diners have disappeared and were replaced by big box stores and chain restaurants, if the authentic dive bar can survive. Neighborhood taverns evolved into sports bars, and hipsters have set up “divey” places as part their deconstruction of retro; but what will happen to the gay dive bar? I have a feeling it's been replaced by the seedy underbelly of craigslist, minus, so sadly, the both fun and dangerous social interaction in a place where ultimately, a gay man could both hide from and enjoy himself. And share that identity struggle with others over a shot of whiskey while listening to Judy Garland singing “The Man That Got Away” on jukebox that still played vinyl.

“326 BCE – Gay/bisexual military leader Alexander the Great completes conquest of most of the then known Western world, converting millions of people to Hellenistic culture and launching the Hellenistic Age.”

I found this on a gay timeline someone sent me, and it caused me to wonder.

No doubt Alexander managed to conquer most of the known world in record time (and he couldn't have done it if he didn't exert a special charisma over his male army), and he apparently did enjoy a close relationship with his friend, general, and bodyguard Hephaisteon.

Apparently his grief when Hephaisteon died was boundless, and the writer Aelion compared it to the grief of Achilles upon the death of Patroclus (another male couple whose relationship has been interpreted as sexual).

But, here's the rub. Gay sex or no gay sex, Alexander married twice: Roxana , daughter of the Bactrian nobleman Oxyartes, out of love; and Stateira II, a Persian princess  and daughter of Darius III of Persia, for political reasons. 

He apparently produced two sons, Alexander IV of Macedon of Roxana and, possibly, Heracles of Macedon from his mistress Barsine. He lost another child when Roxana miscarried at Babylon.

He also kept a harem, Persian-style, perhaps more for show. He was more concerned with consolidating his newly vast power base. But it was part of the culture, a culture where a conqueror was entitled to the women previously owned by the conquered king.

The parallel with Achilles exists, even though Achilles dates from a much earlier period. Achilles wanted Briseis, a captured woman, as concubine. He couldn't have her, because she was the pick of Achilles' superior, the general Agamemnon. Achilles, insulted by this affront to his status (and he may have actually fallen in love with Briseis, but that's unclear), decided to sit out the war sulking in his tent (with his “friend” Patroclus). Yet, par for the course, women were deemed property, essentially child-producing livestock.

It's interesting that in the case of Alexander, there is mention of a love relationship with one of his wives. Why? It seems that the deeper emotional (not necessarily sexual) relationships in Greek culture in the period before Alexander were male on male, especially in both Athens, where married women were confined to the home (at least in aristocratic circles), and Sparta, where the sexes were rigidly kept separate because of its birth to death military culture. Sanctioned female-male relationships in both cultures were directed toward one end: procreation.

And to add a possibly Freudian twist to Alexander's relationships with both men and women, his mother, the formidable Olympias, insisted her son was the son of the king of the gods, Zeus, not her husband. Olympias later ordered Eurydice and her child by Philip II to be murdered, in order to secure Alexander's position as king of Macedonia.  She did not get along with her husband, Philip of Macedon, Alexander's father, and supposedly had him murdered. That is one Greek woman who managed to wield power, but only by denying that her connection to it was via a man.

Alexander may not have been totally gay in the sense we know it (perhaps more bisexual), but he seemed to understand the fraught relationship between sexuality and power, and in his case, his intense emotional reaction to the death of his beloved Hephaisteon may have contributed to his early death.

You can't conquer the world like Alexander did if you are guided not only what makes you hard, but the feelings that produce and enhance that sensation.

“They all do it... “ And in so many different ways!

Male squirrel monkeys display their penises and urinate in each other's faces during the mating season.

A small percentage of seagulls pair up as lesbians (observed on the Santa Barbara Islands, California). They go through all the patterns of mating, and lay sterile eggs.

Jacking off has been observed among deer, lions, apes, moose, boars, porcupines, dolphins, and elephants (who use their trunks; now, that must be one exciting and long experience).

Some species of animals and plants are hermaphroditic; they possess male and female sex organs.

The hermaphroditic European sea mollusk mates in chains of three or more; the front animal acts only as a female, while others acts as males for those in front and females for those behind.

The male sea horse and pipefish (same family of fish, Syngnathidae) carry the brood, and because males are occupied with prenatal care, the liberated females end up being able to compete for males.

Gulf pipefish mate according to the "classic polyandry" system, where each male receives eggs from a single female per pregnancy, but females can mate with multiple males.

Female hyenas are the leaders of their families; she also has a penis — well, sort of. Female hyenas have a pseudo-penis, basically an enlarged clitoris, that can become erect! She will expose this member to males to demonstrate her willingness to mate.

All in all, not exactly the rigid gender binaries certain narrow-minded and small-hearted groups proclaim as “natural!”

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When ABC premiered his first prime time special, “The Barry Manilow Special” in 1977, one would have thought the second coming of Christ had occurred in our house.

(By the way, Barry is Jewish. I found out his name was originally Barry Alan, the son of Edna and Harold Pincus. Harold deserted the family when Barry was two. Manilow was his mother's maiden name, which he adopted at his bar mitzvah. )

My poor mother. She didn't now that so many of her favorite artists were/are gay. As I said above, Barry never came out as gay, but she was quite enamored of the openly gay Village People. (If youtube had existed at that time, I am certain her YMCA dance might have gone viral.) She also liked Saturday Night Fever. Yes, John Travolta … still in the closet.

Now, I am not trying to denigrate the very talented Manilow (I just don't get his music), but what I find fascinating is the attraction Manilow holds for women of a certain age. I don't know of any girl going to high school at that time who liked him (or admitted to liking him). It was always someone's MOTHER who loved him.

I remember reading somewhere that Barry's most fanatic “fanilows” or “Maniloonies” are British homemaker types. Manilow himself proclaimed his “love affair” with the United Kingdom fans, lauding them for their loyalty.

There was even a 48 Hours special on these fans, but I found out that Manilow himself was not thrilled about it; he wanted to ensure people knew younger people liked him too, not just the Mums.

I wonder if my mother still likes Barry Manilow.

I know I'm not about to confess, like on the show Family Guy, a secret love for him.

And congratulations to Barry, who is also doing his final tour this year.