Running on Empty

Whatever Happened to XY Magazine FlameOut, Mike Glatze?

The question of what happened to raver, former XY editor, and gay youth activist, Mike Glatze (seen on the right with former BF) is semi-answered this weekend by Benoit Denizet-Lewis New York Times Magazine article, “What Happened to my Ex-Gay Friend?”

Traveling to Wyoming, Lewis finds the still cute (like a ski instructor) Glatze, clutching a Bible, and describing what happened in the process of his turn from queer raver to gay hater (“I don’t see people as gay anymore. I don’t see you as gay. I don’t see him as gay. God creates us heterosexual.”)

Now 36, Glatze reveals himself as a bundle of walking contradictions, starting with “speaking glowingly” about conservative harpie, Ann Coulter. Glatze left his long-time partner, joined the Mormon church (lured “by promises from several Mormon men that they would help him “find a wife”), and then left after deciding that Mormons “didn’t agree with the Bible”. He took up Buddhist meditation to stop getting boners when he looked at a guy but was asked to leave the community for “talking too much about the Bible.” One wonders whether he fits in anywhere.

Mike’s zigzag journey wasn’t triggered by some Camelot search for a maiden, but a simple heart murmer: At “29, he experienced a series of heart palpitations and became convinced that he suffered from the same congenital heart defect that killed his father when Michael was 13.”

We couldn’t help but wondering: for all of Glatze’s gay issues, does he actually date girls? Yes! Two of them, in fact, and both relationship happened before he enrolled in Bible school. According to Lewis, Michael was cagey about whether they actually, F’ed, “saying only that neither had been ‘particularly godly.’” Hmmm.

If the question about Mike Glatze’s flameout couldn’t be answered by an close friend’s earnest investigation, who could solve this puzzle? Reading the article’s comments section, we came across two plausible answers to The Mystery of Mike Glatze.

The first answer was based in a reality more mundane than the article’s oft-referenced queer theory with one commentator astutely pointing out that a loved one’s death commonly trigger religious conversions and (can) reflect larger existential struggles.

However, the second comment gave the A to the Q that felt closest to the bone:

Concerned Citizen
Anywheresville, USA
June 17th, 2011
10:32 am
It no more makes sense to say that someone could not be repressing heterosexuality to fit into the gay world than repressing homosexuality to fit into the straight world. 

However, what I DO NOT HEAR here (or in most gay conversion-to-straight memoirs) is any sense that “hey! I can’t be gay because I’m always looking at women, and thinking about women, and lady-parts, and wanting to have sex with women.” THAT is what makes you straight — not theory, not religion, not intellectual analysis.

And Queerty’s theory about Mike Glatze? There was something in the Ecstasy of it all.

Tomas Mournian is the author of the novel, Hidden, available at Amazon.com and great online bookstores everywhere.

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