Gay Greek Trekker: What I Learned from all my Communities to Survive the End of the World!

By A.B. Deos

Love is love!

Eleftheria i thanatos!

Live long and prosper!

 

Parts memoir, social commentary and self-help guide, the author celebrates his first fifty years of life by detailing his journey across the communities that claim him. He is the son of Greek immigrants, same-sex attracted, and totally devoted to 'Star Trek'.

 

Driven by principles of equality, compassion, responsibility, and to keep finding the positivity in his life, which as a kid getting constantly bullied made him feel never deserving of being happy. It was only when he nearly lost it all at his own hands that the life lessons began. Moving on from his pain took a long time, as it meant acknowledging all the experiences of his life, as well as putting effort into new ones to push him out of his comfort zone. That explained moving from Sydney to Chicago for over a decade, away from family pressures and finally experiencing the gay life moments that allowed him to prosper.

 

With practical and common sense insights the author covers topics including what makes identity, not needing validation, the competitiveness of diversity, gay Hollywood, gay hook up apps, wokeness, the immigrant vote in Australia's same-sex marriage referendum, letting voices shine, taking ownership of all your memories, and thoughts on the Trek universe's new road ahead. By adding his voice it grows his communities beyond singular & stereotyped images.

 

When final preparations for the book's release were underway the coronavirus pandemic then hit, and the author had to ask himself whether this book would still work in these unprecedented times. The nurturing voice in his head resoundingly answered yes as there would be no better time to offer advice about overcoming life's challenges. The author's communities have given him hope and that's what we all need to hold onto now.

 

An honest and unapologetic look at the world, 'Gay Greek Trekker' is ultimately about inspiring others to explore all the possibilities that their own life journeys can be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arthur B
• Release date: May 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648823315

A.B. Deos

I was born in Sydney, Australia, before the internet age, and grew up with an appreciation of the rich history of my Greek heritage. I was also gay, but never ashamed of it, and kept that part of my life hidden since it was my own business. .I had reached a point in my life where I started writing down my experiences, a kind of therapy to let things out. The result was a memoir, and after the fifth & final draft, it has been one of the thrills of my life to first see the cover of my first book, IN LOVE I TRUST, jump off the screen from Amazon’s website. One of my passions is my love for ‘Star Trek’. The ideals of a hopeful & inclusive future. I believe in the simplicity of life, not the exaggerated. I use a pen name, and I’m not a fan of social media. I prefer an author having an air of mystery about them. Live Long & Prosper, A.B. Deos

Book preview

GAY

GREEK

TREKKER

What I learned from all my

communities to survive

the end of the world!

A.B. Deos

––––––––

PUBLISHER

ARTHUR B

Sydney, Australia

GAY GREEK TREKKER

What I learned from all my communities to survive the end of the world!

Copyright @ 2020 by A.B. Deos

All rights reserved.

Contact: [e-mail]

All things STAR TREK are copyright @ Viacom-CBS.

This nonfiction work is written under the pen name A.B. Deos

Categories: Memoir – Gay/Ethnic/Sci-fi fandom, Social commentary, Self-help.

First Arthur B paperback/ebook Edition: 2020

Cover artwork/arrangement by A.B. Deos

Language edition: English (U.S.)

ISBN-10:    0-6488233-0-X (Paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-6488233-0-8 (Paperback)

ISBN-10:  0-6488233-1-8 (Ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-6488233-1-5 (Ebook)

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 My Gay Life

Chapter 2 My Greek Life

Chapter 3 My ‘Star Trek’ life

Chapter 4 Am I a real Gay?

Chapter 5 Pressures of the Gay world

Chapter 6 Hooking up

Chapter 7 Australia votes yes, immigrants vote no

Chapter 8 Gay Hollywood 

Chapter 9 Star Trek Disco gets a beating

Chapter 10 Waking up to Woke

Chapter 11 Competing for diversity

Chapter 12 Identity is...........

Chapter 13 Insecurities make us human

Chapter 14 Looking for validation in all the wrong places

Chapter 15 Letting your voice shine

Chapter 16 Observations of my communities

Chapter 17 Taking ownership of all your memories

Chapter 18 Setting up your life for change

Chapter 19 Remaining positive

Chapter 20 Just one more thing

Conclusion

References

Acknowledgments

Author Bio

Other works by A.B. Deos

Introduction

"Space: the final frontier.

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds.

To seek out new life and new civilizations.

To boldly go where no man has gone before!"

Captain James T. Kirk – Star Trek (1966-69)

Fifty years ago I was born in Sydney Australia, and have spent a majority of my life there. I have also lived in the United States, for over a decade from my early thirties. It took me a long time to think that I’ve actually had a life, and full of out-of-the-ordinary experiences which I’ve never fully shared until now. It was the opposite of what I had expected as a kid growing up, when all I was supposed to look forward to was the standard son-of-Greek-immigrants’-background future of marriage to a nice Greek girl, kids, my own home and a secure office job. Gay had also been there, unquestioned from the start, but kept private for practicality. It was new territory for I thought I was the only one like that of my ethnic kind. Looking down over all of it was Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise, boldly exploring the stars, and where I wished I could be. After fifty years there’s a lot to say about the three communities that claim ownership of my youthful life.

Gay was attractions and initially fuelled only by escorts, but this secret life couldn’t be contained forever. Hookup sites, gay club scenes, men’s groups and my gay-themed writing eventually followed. During my lifetime criminalization went out and marriage equality came in, and the gay world grew into something bigger, and louder, and covering more letters of the alphabet. I couldn’t keep up with the expansions, but also the outrage and the victim status mentality that apparently I was supposed to be feeling.

Greek was life. It was bound by religion, a rich history, customs and traditions, bringing people together through parties, music & dancing, and diples. It gifted me a stubborn culture, and targeting by bullies who feared my difference.

Star Trek was my sustenance. As a kid it introduced me to the concept of fairness, and a curiosity about computers. As a teenager it became an escape to a safe space, where the differences in each of us were celebrated but weren’t defining us. It opened my mind to infinite combinations, gave me the ‘go forth and ask questions’ bug, and its illustrating of good triumphing over evil strengthened my sense of justice against ignorance.

I had grown up having high hopes for my life, spurred on by parental expectations and my naïve thinking that I could do anything. But I had never really recovered from the days of school yard bullying, and during my twenties I found myself defeated. Social interactions had been an issue, the career work had alluded me, and that final point had been reached, when I didn’t like myself anymore. It should have been the end.

It took time to get back up, and feel deserving of a happiness beyond brief unconnected moments. As the judgments of the past morphed into motivators for change I realized that I had to put effort into all aspects of my life, not just the easy ones. A chance to start again, I moved halfway around the world, and this time I would savor the journey rather than get consumed by pressured outcomes.

Regardless of the pandemic state of the world these days I know I will always survive because my life will never get bogged down in negativities again. I’m confident now, I give no regard to the paranoia’s of others, and my views & outlook are built from lived experiences in the real world not the virtual one.

For whatever you find in this book I make no apologies, and I have no regrets. In exploring how I see the world I wish to promote further conversations and explore constructive points of views. Only then can we truly come together and enlighten one another with each of our unique life experiences.

I heard it said once that ‘you do what you know’ and what I know is that I am a Gay Greek Trekker!

Love is love!

Eleftheria i thanatos!

Live long and prosper!

A.B. Deos

Chapter 1

My Gay Life

....I was born that way. I have had those feelings, those longings, all of my life. It is not unnatural. I am not sick because I feel this way. I do not need to be helped. I do not need to be cured. What I need, and what all of those who are like me need, is your understanding and your compassion. We have not injured you in any way. And yet, we are scorned and attacked. And all because we are different. What we do is no different from what you do. We talk and laugh. We complain about work and we wonder about growing old. We talk about our families, and we worry about the future. And we cry with each other when things seem hopeless. All of the loving things that you do with each other, that is what we do. And for that we are called misfits and deviants and criminals. What right do you have to punish us? What right do you have to change us? What makes you think you can dictate how people love each other?

Soren, Star Trek: The Next Generation - ‘The Outcast’ (1992)

The first gay-context words I ever heard were ‘poofter’, ‘pansy’, and ‘sissy’, with ‘faggot’, ‘homo’ and ‘gay’ following later. Growing up in Australia I would hear these words in the school yards when boys were insulting each other, as well as catching adults using such words against men they saw on television who acted and sounded more like women, as well as looking strange in their appearances.

In my early teens, when I knew I liked checking out hot guys I never went looking for a phrase, or word, or even a letter that would describe me. I accepted it, and didn’t need some identifier to cling to, but at the same time I realized that the outside world did not accept gay yet, so I decided to keep my same-sex attraction to myself. It was my business and I had a ‘not wanting to explain’ mentality. Plus it was just one thing about me, and I never thought I was pretending or had to put up manly mannerisms to hide, I was already masculine and that felt natural.

Why I mention masculinity is that in my teenage years, in the 1980’s, I recall the gay image being so effeminate on television & in movies, and that wasn’t me. Other predominate images as part of the stereotypes of gay men included: being destined for hair-dressing & interior designer careers, liking musicals, not liking sports, acting flamboyant, having female ‘fag-hag’ friends and knowing everything about women’s shoes. I never understood why these stereotypes existed in the first place.

Coming out?

For the record I never saw this whole ‘coming out’ thing as being required or even important. I didn’t agree with the concept because it has nothing to do with equality, but more on that part later. I believe in individual rights including a right to privacy. When I was a teenager privacy seemed easy, but these days, with social media, and some peoples’ inability to stop posting everything about themselves to the World Wide Web, the idea of privacy seems to be lost.

I wondered whether coming out was supposed to be either some fable-like experience where the heavens open up and some magical rainbow light rains down on you, or was it like joining a circus where you could run away to start a new life. The former would lead me to have believed that my family would welcome my confession with open arms, and the latter, an opposite view and akin to a one-way ticket to witness protection.

As a teenager I was in high school between 1983 & 1988 and homosexuality was only made legal in New South Wales, my home state, in 1984. Could I have known what my parents would think if I had confessed my gayness to them? Looking back I couldn’t see my dad’s reaction as anything else but violent, and with no support mechanisms at my side my options were still clear, keeping quiet, and moving on. The shock for my parents would have been one thing, but other school kids finding out would have been the end for me, and noting that I was already going through bullying and being picked on at school, for reasons I never figured out why.

I grew up in a first-generation immigrant household, went to a high school where the majority of students were from an immigrant background, attended Church, usually just Xmas & Easter services, attended Greek dances, and celebrated saint day parties at relatives & family friends’ houses. My parents conveyed that their dream of success was for all their children to get a high paying office job, buy a house, buy investment property, marry a nice Greek girl, and give them grandchildren that would be baptized in a Greek Orthodox Church.

Coming out as ’gay’ would have meant that all my parent’s dreams for me would have been destroyed, yes that great pain I would have inflicted, that family shame you may have heard about applying in immigrant communities. Now I could have been wrong, and me coming out to my parents could have ended positively too, but as a teenager without anyone to talk to about this, and without access to online information as it was before the internet age, keeping quiet was the only course of action I saw, and to this day I’ve never regretted it. Let me be clear, never regretted. I had assessed the situation and applied the most rational, logical and practical course of action for me, and I’ve never looked back.

Over the years I’ve come across information and other people’s experiences, talking about the expected phases prior to ‘coming out’ that every newly minted same-sex feeling kid goes through. Like a branch of science it was the talk of finding out something new about yourself, but first denying it and/or hating yourself for it, then rebelling against it, or causing harm against those who were it, as you questioned it, continuing until final acceptance, or never accepting. There is a gay men’s talking it out group in Sydney that I had attended, and at one such meeting a fellow attendee had made the statement ‘...we all went through a questioning phase...’, or words to that effect. I remember thinking how ignorant was that person to speak so collectively for others, and directly contravening the meeting’s safe space guidelines.

That was never me, never questioned it, and frankly it carries a negative connotation about finding out that you’re attracted to the same sex. Think about it, you don’t hear about people questioning their attractions to the opposite sex so why is it limited to the gay folk? In addition then you always hear about internalized homophobia starting to unconsciously grow inside of you if you don’t accept it. No questioning and no self-hatred, that’s my experience, and frankly I welcomed having a secret to hide, but I didn’t welcome someone telling me what steps my life was supposed to be taking. Also to note, that talking it out group participant who made that quote, well he had a habit of telling everyone, at the start of each meeting, how negative & depressing his fortnight between meetings had been. Way to go bringing positivity to the group!

Imagine if you will that coming out has to deal with feeling different than the majority, the straights. Well I guess another reason why I didn’t give significance to a coming out was because I had already gone through life feeling marginalized in regards to my cultural background. Knowing what it felt like to already be different, from an early age, just made me downplay my sexual attraction difference to the majority, and the promotion of the new characteristic to others was something I could control to what worked for me.

Coming out and the equality angle. There’s no coming out for straights so why is it something made applicable to non-straights. I want to be treated equally, not singled out for my differences. Perhaps some would say that coming out is only a part of a marginalized group existence, but once again you want to identify yourself to others for what? Acceptance, so that others treat you fairly. Validation, so you can feel good about yourself based on others making it happen for you. Why would I be wishing for other people to approve my life?

In a perfect world, coming out wouldn’t pose a risk to one’s life & career, but we all know that simply is not true. For example, look at people in the public eye who have come out later in life, after they have achieved their successes. Actors & actresses, sports players and other celebrity-type figures. If they had entered their chosen professions being out what would have been the likelihood they still would have achieved the same level of success. Maybe today it’s easier for people starting out in public professions, but in the 1980’s and 1990’s public gay representation did not openly exist to the scale like you see now.

Perhaps celebrity coming outs’ is not the best example. Personal authenticity versus income generation versus it’s no one else’s business. Movie studios release films to generate income and so do not want issues that can potentially influence people not to watch movies. Back when Rock Hudson (look him up!) was a movie star and had movies coming out, would he still have been a bankable property if his homosexuality was public. These days I would like to believe that it’s changed, but you never always know, for sure. It’s so easily accepted for straight actors to pay gay roles but is the opposite true to the same extent?

I cannot conclude a discussion of coming out without including reference to the label ‘openly gay’. So the scenario is that once you come out you are gay in the open hence the term. Once again it has nothing to do with equality as you don’t hear people being labelled as ‘openly straight’. Maybe ‘openly gay’ was the straight world code for watch out its one of them! Even more damaging is that it enforces a dumbed down thinking of a person by concentrating on a single characteristics as being their only feature, and in turn that feeds into stereotyping.

Why am I gay?

I remember first realizing when I caught myself staring at hot guys. My dad liked taking my brothers and me fishing to Botany Bay with our little boat. I remember this one time, while I was waiting for the boat to be taken out of the water, I couldn’t help but stare at a guy taking his own boat out. He was just wearing black speedos and his body type was fit and solid, and smooth as he had no body hair. In another memory, while obsessed as a teenager watching nighttime soap operas I remember seeing Christopher Atkins on ‘Dallas’, in a scene wearing just light blue speedos. So seeing a hot guy in speedos became my thing, my turn-on, and I always felt it was the most natural feeling in the world to know what I was attracted to. Well that attraction remained into adulthood and I never had any reason to question it or to even feel embarrassed, or ashamed, about it. I also didn’t actually think about it a lot, not before puberty hit anyway when my sexual urges started demanding attention.

It was actually fun to get away with checking out hot guys without anyone else noticing. It ensured my privacy and fine-tuned my observation skills. Sure I was always on the edge about being caught out as gay, but was there anything really wrong with just looking?

I think too much emphasis gets placed on why someone is not the majority, which feeds into that so called questioning phase. Straights would wonder since they can’t understand why you wouldn’t like the opposite sex, and gays themselves get caught up in the communities’ authenticity push to explore all facets of their new life. But is it a new life? Telling myself that I liked other guys didn’t make my life different, it was just the awareness of something new about me, like any other kid/teenager who figures out about sex and their needs. I liked men, so what, I had no reasons not to be fine with it as like I said I found it natural & organic to like other guys. If there was any question in my mind it was ‘why do people talk so negative about gays?’, and note I had started asking that question decades ago, and continue to ask it now.

Under a ‘gay non-fiction’ books search on any online book retailer site you will find plenty of entries on gay religious folk detailing their struggles between their same-sex attractions & their faith. Even though I still find myself occasionally at a Greek Orthodox Church, for Easter, Xmas, baptisms, weddings & funerals, I have never allowed myself to get drawn into internal arguments concerning the two. It’s about moving forward with life, and my same-sex attractions are as normal a function as having to eat and sleep. Unlike the struggling gay religious folk, I never asked why.

My acceptance

In my immigrant community surroundings being out means defaulting to just being seen as the gay guy. Narrow mindedness and gay go hand in hand in such communities as people can’t see beyond the offense. It’s just a phase, or the devil having taken me over. I would feel ostracized, and even if words of disapproval are not spoken to my face, the many negative thoughts against me would always be there.

So another reason why I default to self-validation and thus self-acceptance, but still it’s not like I went looking for approvals in the first place. As a kid I could see how cruel the world could be to me and decided I needed to give myself acceptance.

I live in the suburbs of Sydney, between the inner west and western suburbs, in a very culturally mixed area, but unfortunately also socially conservative. It is a safe area but I wouldn’t walk around my neighborhood wearing my gayness on my sleeve. I don’t feel the threat of physical violence, or do I, but I would expect being looked down on, and hearing the echoing whispers of commentary. The suburbs are also family areas and even though I expect parents to want their kids to be nice to others, does that also extend to respecting gay people too? People living in inner city areas, more single, hip, good jobs, law-abiding, areas more accepting of us gays, it can be a different environment and acceptance is not so much of a concern there.

In the twelve months after the same-sex marriage vote passed in Australia, about five thousand four hundred gay weddings had taken place, nearly 5.5 % of total weddings. I was thrilled to read that number.

My parents

Perceiving that telling my parents that I was attracted to men would hurt them, I thankfully was never tempted to tell them out of spite. I grew up at odds with my parents’ attitudes, explaining why I could never have any meaningful conversations with them to begin with. They wanted their kids to see the world through their own experiences, but that world was more protective than what I wanted. My relationship with my father was a very rocky one. My mother on the other hand, whether she could have accepted it or not, was supportive of her children in her own way, but would never have shared the information publicly for fear of public shame. So I have never confessed it to them, plus why should I have to, need to, or expected to, take your pick. Plus I have never thought that I have been lying to them.

My father came from poverty and ended up becoming a builder from his own perseverance and initiative. While he was still a teenager he had left his village in Greece and ended up working on ships, returning for visits from as far away places as Asia. A first cousin of mine, oldest child from my father’s oldest brother, would tell me how my father would return to the family home with exotic gifts on each occasion.

My parents had an arranged marriage where my father had met his future in-laws first, in Greece, to make the arrangements. My mother had migrated to Australia in 1962, and in 1967 my father arrived to marry my mother and gain his citizenship.

The circumstances of my parents’ marriage always intrigued me because it didn’t start with two people falling in love. After migrating to Australia, it was common for my parent’s generation to live with relatives when they first arrived. Then the match-making began as relatives sought to pair people up. With limited English skills and finances, they all had the common goal of working hard, in whatever jobs they could get. Starting families and saving up to put a deposit on a family home was the common experience as that’s what I saw in all my uncles & aunties and Greek family friends. The only marriage I recall in my circle that did not last forever from that generation was due to domestic violence issues.

My father had started in factory work but progressed to painting and eventually becoming a licensed builder and working for himself. As a teenager there were times I had helped him write up quotations, but he had progressed to learning how to use a computer, mainly for excel and for playing solitaire.

Growing up it seemed like that he was working everyday including most weekends, and made himself immediately available when relatives & family friends had any building emergency issues pop up with their residences. It instilled a work ethic into me that I have carried throughout my entire life. It also drove me to get good grades in school so that I wouldn’t end up doing laboring work as I recalled all those times my father took my brothers & me along to his construction jobsites and made us work. Lifting up gyprock/drywall sheets on scaffolding and then holding them above our heads while he screwed them in was not a pleasant experience for us teens during our school holidays, and especially since we didn’t receive any monetary reward for it.

No matter how hard my father worked he still made time for all day picnics on Sundays during the summer, as well as family & relative parties throughout the year. He also liked to take us fishing and I remember the days at La Perouse when he would hire a boat and cram my first cousins and me in it. Away from the family my father liked to take trips outside of Sydney and go hunting, and liked going via the hot springs in Moree. They soothed the aches & pains of his hard-working body.

Unlike my mother, my father had an adventurous spirit, hence leaving home in his early teens to work on boats and travel the world. However his experiences had also brought some strict rules for us kids to follow. No part-time jobs during our schooling/university years, and no tattoos.

My father had passed away in 2015, on September 11th, which prompted my return to live back in Australia six weeks later. While away in Chicago my father’s diabetes had gotten worse. He had ended up having both legs amputated, as well as continuing his three times a week kidney dialysis. I last saw him in May 2011, when I was visiting for a month, and I remember vividly the last time I had seen him alive. It was the day of my flight back to the US, and my father had one of his dialysis appointments to go to. The special taxi, with a rear ramp for wheelchair access, had come to pick him up in the morning and before he left I gave him a hug when he was inside the vehicle, sitting in his wheelchair. Not knowing when I would again return to Australia that moment could have been the last time I would see him alive. Considering the enormous change in his health compared to the last time I had seen him, in 2004, I just considered all scenarios, and since up to that point I had faced death twice in my own life, I couldn’t be naïve about it either.

My mother also came from poverty, another Greek village experience in post-WWII Europe. Like my father she had also left her homeland at a young age, at seventeen, and migrated to Australia. Her younger sister eventually followed, and they both had started out doing seamstress type work but my mother then moved into factory work.

While my father was open to new experiences, my mother wasn’t. To me she didn’t appear outwardly social to non-Greek cultural experiences. She just was simple in her outlook on life and liked simple things. So simple that she didn’t really inspire my brothers & me to go out into the world. It must have been the guilt of leaving her parents behind at an early age that prompted her to wanting to keep her own children close. But like the Greek mothers’ of her generation the extreme mothering was in full force. Anything us kids did that she found out of place she would let us know. Clothing we had bought that she wasn’t a fan of, haircuts we got that she felt didn’t suit us, were two primary examples. To this day I still think she found a way to have clothes go missing once they hit the dirty washing basket in the laundry. The Greek mother’s catchphrase ‘I’m saying this for your own good’ just became annoying to hear. Even when such behavior continued past her kids’ teenager years my father started butting in and telling her to stop treating us like children, especially when she displayed this behavior in front of other people. However, my mother’s singular goal was to provide for her family and so there was always a home cooked meal on the table and a house always cleaned.

My parents worked hard in their lives, in manual type work, and it resonated with me with my own work ethic of performing a job to the best of my abilities and never stepping over anyone to get ahead in my work life. They believed that getting an education was crucial for their sons, to get a job like an accountant or a lawyer, professions that would earn bug bucks. Nothing about figuring out what makes you happy & pursing that as a life goal. Sure I wanted a job that gave me a good income, but wasn’t it important to also like the job too?

Telling no one

I would have likely been the first gay person that my immediate group of family & friends would have known, but not telling them was never seen as a negative option. Consider the many different groups of people we interact with across our lives. School friends, university friends, co-workers, close & distant friends, friends of friends, immediate family, extended family, social media ‘friends’ and many more. We each present different sides of ourselves to different people, and we vary the levels of openness and friendship. We may not call it compromising but the same action is there.

I have however admitted to one friend that I was attracted to men. It was either 2005 or 2006, while living in Chicago, and I was expecting to still be there until close to my retirement age. From April 2004 to April 2005 I had met a guy, and for that year we had talked, we had visited gay clubs together, I had supported him, and we had hanged out. We became something, but I didn’t know what to have called it. When it was over I was feeling so very hurt, and emotionally drained and it took a long time to recover. That’s why I decided to start writing, and that experience became the basis of my first book.

Well after that experience the first year after was tough, and I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it, especially after being in a new country with only my extended family around, and I couldn’t talk to them of what had happened. So I ended up emailing a friend back home, someone who had helped me out greatly with getting employment, and who I had confided in with other personal stuff in the past. Well I