Every Easter Sunday, at two-thirty in the afternoon, we have more than 500 dogs show up dressed in bonnets and Easter outfits. It started because I wanted to do play-dates at the park. I got a bunch of friends together on a Sunday afternoon at the park, and we were having so much fun with our dogs, I thought we should share it. I said, “Let’s go parade down Second Street.” It was a spectacle, with fifty of us.
People loved it. Everyone wanted to wave at us, and pet the dogs, and take pictures.
So I said, “Let’s do it again next month.”So we did. Then I said, “Well, Easter’s coming up, let’s do an Easter parade.”I was hoping to get about 100 dogs. Three-hundred and fifty showed up! Now we’re in our sixth year.
The Tonight Show found out about our parade and wanted to bring on some contestants. The producer came down and interviewed in my apartment, with the dogs in their outfits. There were eight or nine pairs of us who talked to Jay.
While we were backstage, Rosie knew that there were people out in front of the curtain, so she was anxious to get out there. We were the first of the Easter dogs to come out. When they called for us, she ran out there with lots of energy, and the crowd just went wild.
Rosie wears a pink tutu that is her trademark. I made pink pearls for her out of pink Ping-Pong balls. I spray painted them pink and strung them with elastic. She has a white cottontail that I put around her nub of a tail. She wore bunny ears instead of a bonnet that year. Jay Leno was very impressed. He said a lot of things to Rosie, but darn if I can remember what. You put her in front of people, she just perks up. Just like a beauty queen. Right, Rosie?
There’s some common bond that Bulldog owners seem to have. It’s interesting. All of these events get a lot of gay men coming. Long Beach has a large gay population. And they’re not afraid to dress up their dog to help raise money for charity.
We see so much creativity in the bonnets and the outfits. Halloween is easy because every pet store in America now has Halloween outfits for dogs. Half the dogs in the parade will have store-bought outfits. But for Easter, there’s no place to buy one. It’s not easy, making a bonnet for a dog. People really put time and energy into these things.
I do dog photography now, and a dog poetry contest every year. I put together a dog newsletter that goes out every Thursday to 4, 500 local dog lovers. And it’s all because of her.
When I look at all those things that Rosie brings to my life, I realize that not every dog has the same fortune that she does. I want to be able to give that back to dogs that are in shelters or are part of a rescue group.
I started the Interfaith Blessing of the Animals, which I hold every fall, with 300-something animals getting blessed by various faith leaders—Catholic and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu. Every December I lead a drive called Operation Santa Paws to collect toys and treats for about 4, 000 shelter dogs and cats. We deliver to them in the days before Christmas. The idea is to make the dogs happy and healthy and generally more adoptable. We also collect cleaning supplies and beds and collars and leashes and all kinds of stuff for the shelters.
When Rosie and I went home to Alabama, HGTV followed us for a show called Going Home. They filmed the whole thirty-minute episode on us going back to Alabama—a city dog going back to the country.
Then she and I were on a show on Animal Planet called You Lie Like a Dog, helping to raise money for animal-welfare groups. The concept of the show was, there’s one dog and three people who claim to be the owner of the dog. One is the true owner. Three celebrities have to figure out who the real owner is by asking a series of questions. It was fun. Two of them said I was not the real owner. Only one said I was!
Rosie has her own Webpage on my Website. I’ve written poetry to her, which I’ve recited on her behalf at the Haute Dog Poetry Contest. I have videos of her. Each week I feature a different dog from Southern California called “Rosie’s Pick of the Litter.”
Each year on the Web site, we have an event we call the Rosies. It’s like the Oscars. Rosie is the spokeswoman, and we nominate dogs that have appeared in movies. My partner works for Sydney Pollack, the director, who has several Oscars. Rosie and I often go to visit my partner at the office. One day I took an Oscar off the shelf and put it beside Rosie and took some pictures. It looks like she’s kissing the Oscar. It’s great publicity for the Rosies.
Many gay men don’t have children in their life, so they have the time to spend with a dog. They want something or someone stable. Maybe they don’t have a partner, or even a good relationship with their parents or brothers or sisters. But a dog is there. They’re just your constant companion, your confidante, and your best friend. I think that’s what guys are looking for.
I’ve read many online articles that say that the senior years for a Bulldog are seven plus, and that the typical lifespan is eight to ten. But I know some friends who had a Bulldog for twelve and thirteen years. Rosie’s in good health. She had a cancer scare three years ago. They removed a big growth from right under her shoulder. It hasn’t grown back. She still runs around well and eats great.
All these events that I founded have continued because of my love for my dog. It is hard work. But at the end of the day, it is such a pleasure to see the smiles on the faces of the people who are coming with their pets. Or on the faces of the people who come to just be spectators.
Not only that, it’s the smiles on the faces of the dogs. That’s what I see, and that’s what I’ll always see. Their devotion to us, their spirit, their tenacity touch me so much. I want more dogs. One day, the right time and the right dog will come along. For now, it’s just Rosie and me, and we’ve got something special. Right, Rosie?
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EXASPERATING DOGS
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Kevin Andersen: THE DOG WHO OUTED ME
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Kevin Anderson hated dogs. All his friends knew that. The only person who didn’t know was his brother, Jimmy, who invited him to Vermont to climb a mountain. Jimmy’s Alaskan Malamute, Sasha, accompanied them on the climb, and his actions changed Kevin’s anti-dog attitude forever.
We’ve all heard of those valiant St. Bernard dogs with the little barrel of whiskey strapped to their collar that rescue
people stranded in the Alps. Dogs like Sasha, who Kevin calls the Wooly Mammoth, also operate in the mountains to help lost or endangered climbers. But dogs do so much
more work in our society today than most of us realize, from the cadaver dogs who helped find human remains in the ruins of the World Trade Center to bomb- and drug-sniffing dogs to scent tracking dogs that can help find missing persons.
Dogs today toil in police departments’ K-9 corps, but many human volunteers also prepare their dogs for search-and-rescue missions. These dogs must be trained by age two; by age seven their ability to scent begins to fail and they are retired. Drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs must be trained to a particular scent. Most working dogs are trained to a passive alert: The dog sits and points, for example, rather than digging and possibly setting off an explosion or damaging a crime scene.
Kevin Anderson learned one mantra that dog handlers repeat over and over: Trust your dog. Kevin Anderson did, and it changed his life. He told me about it after work in Detroit.
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WHEN HE CAME BACK from serving in Iraq for a year, my brother, Jimmy, decided we needed some sort of bonding, brotherly ceremony: On Christmas Eve—a cold day, mind you— he wanted us to climb a profoundly high mountain. The problem was, I lived in the city, wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of hiking boots, had no interest in mountains, and didn’t like outdoor air. If I needed to see some green, I ordered lettuce.
And while I was out to all my intimate friends, I was not out to my brother. He still thought of me in the sweet-and- sour terms of our boyhood, when he, the younger brother, would jump on my back and wrestle me to the ground, and I’d wrestle him. It was probably an e
xchange that meant completely different things to each of us.
We were raised outside of Detroit in a so-called normal family situation: Our father worked at a factory every day and drank on the weekends; our mother drank during the week and yelled at our father on the weekends. Dad died of a heart attack years ago, and neither one of us goes back to see Mom much. Mom never approved of anything I did, and she still doesn’t know I’m gay.
Jimmy wasn’t gay, so I thought he got along fine with Mom. It surprised me that he didn’t want to spend Christmas with her, either.
We really didn’t know all that much about each other. He’s eleven years younger than I am. And our mother always got between us.
He’d been climbing this mountain in Vermont almost every single day, and he wanted his big brother to join him. And I couldn’t say no, partly because I’d been bragging about my physical capabilities. The hospital where I work has a great gym, and I got in the habit of taking lunch at a weird hour so I could have the equipment mostly to myself and not worry about wiping somebody else’s sweat off the seat before I sat down.
Then I even bought a multisystem workout bench so I could do leg curls and biceps extensions and lateral pull-downs and power crunches in my spare time. I was lifting regularly, and working on my cardio fitness, so I’d been bragging to him about it. Probably because I was angry that he was in the Reserves and spent a year in Iraq and had all these credits on his side for patriotism and service to the country and generally good behavior that I was never going to have.
My brother’s house in Vermont was this cute, gingerbready, Victorian, little-town thing. There was an old wooden rocker on the porch, even though there was snow all around. And all kinds of Christmas wreaths and Christmas decorations and this Santa in a red sleigh and reindeer with noses that were light bulbs that lit up. The whole thing made me wince.
I knocked on the door, and it swung open, and my brother said, “Kevin!”And my heart melted because he’s my brother, he’d been in Iraq, and I hadn’t seen him in a long time. He chucked me on the shoulder, and I shook his hand. He called, “Patty! Kevin’s here!”
And out from the kitchen came his blond, busty, smiling girlfriend. I went over and kissed her on the cheek. She looked me in the eye, and I could see right away—she knew.
She was surprised, but she was sympathetic, too. I could see she wasn’t some backwoods redneck who was going to give me a lecture about the Bible. She was very warm and shook my hand and gave it this slight pressure, which meant a million things to me. It said, “I know, I know Jimmy doesn’t know, I’m not going to say a thing to him, you are welcome, you’re his brother, I just don’t want Jimmy to be hurt.”All this passed through with this one little pressure from her hand.
I realized that the two of us had the same goal in mind. We wanted to get through the weekend making sure that Jimmy had a good time. That was the main thing.
And the next thing that happened has the most meaning for this story: They opened the back door, and this giant thing came bounding in.
This gigantic mass of fur was like one of those strange, prehistoric elephants from the Pleistocene Age that I had previously seen only on Dinosaur Discovery Day at the Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor. Instead of being smooth and gray, it’s covered with long, rough hair, and it’s called a Wooly Mammoth. This beast was galloping toward me in my brother’s house.
It bounded in, and just before it hurdled itself into my groin, Jimmy said, “This is Sasha.”
I suddenly realized there was something else about me Jimmy didn’t know: I hated dogs. I hated all of them. I hated big ones, I hated small ones. I hated furry ones, I hated smooth ones. I hated ones with big eyes and long noses, and I hated ones with shiny hair and flat noses. I hated all the dogs I had ever come across. As far as I could tell, they were whiny, needy, clingy, sad creatures whose favorite things to do were mount your leg, stick their nose in your genitals, pee on your furniture, demand to be taken out even in cold and rainy weather, and generally make life awful.
So here I was with my little brother, who I was feeling all weepy and sad for, and he had—a dog. And this dog ran straight up to me, and I thought that I was going to get the big schnozz in the genitals, but he stopped an inch short of extreme pain. And he looked up at me and he grinned.
Now this was something new, because previously I did not know that a dog could grin. But the only way I could describe his face is—he grinned. I got this weird feeling that, just like Patty the girlfriend, this dog knew. How did he know? Did he care? Was my gayness going to be a problem in dogland?
It had never occurred to me that gayness might be something that a dog didn’t like. But I had never seen a dog like this, a gargantuan monolith of the dog world, and maybe his thought processes were different from the Jack Russells and Yorkies and Chihuahuas that my friends own.
So I said to Jimmy, “What kind of dog is that?”
And he said, proudly, as he handed me a beer, “Alaskan Malamute.”
I said, “I never heard of an Alaskan Malamute.”
Jimmy said, while the dog started bounding around the room, narrowly missing the furniture, that an Alaskan Malamute was a sled dog. And that Eskimos and polar explorers harnessed the dogs to a sled that they pulled through the ice and snow all the way to the North Pole. He said a dog like this was worth its weight in gold in Alaska. And I was kind of impressed.
In the meantime, the Wooly Mammoth was making me really uncomfortable. He put his head on my knee and looked up at me with these big eyes.
Jimmy started telling me how much fun we were going to have on this climb. He’d been going up and down this mountain since he got back from Iraq two months before, though never all the way to the top. But in honor of us brothers being together, he wanted us to go all the way.
Secretly, I groaned, because in my letters to him I had bragged many times about what great physical condition I was in. I told him I was bench-pressing 100 pounds. But what he didn’t realize was that I was doing it for nicer-looking pecs and a six-pack of abs and better cut to my calves. He thought I was doing it for physical accomplishment.
We sat around talking, and of course Jimmy asked me if I was seeing anybody. Patty looked at me with an absolute blank look. And I said, well, yes. Jimmy whistled and said, “What’s her name? Is she hot? You should bring her up here some time.”
I said, “Uh, Stevie.”
He started asking me more questions, and then Patty said, “Dinner’s served!”
I could’ve kissed her, because this just wasn’t a conversation I wanted to get into with my brother right then.
After dinner Jimmy dressed me. Which, in an odd turn of events, was fun for him and torture for me. He got out this thick, heavy, ugly jacket that you can wear in case the temperature drops to fifty below zero. And he pulled out two pairs of socks—“one for insulation and the other for protection.”And worst of all, the boots. I had honestly hoped to pass my entire life without ever wearing a pair of Timberland tough and rugged, tire-treaded size tens. I looked exactly like the Sta-Puf Marshmallow man, stumbling along stepping on little kids and small cars.
The dog was lying on the floor, looking at me with his calm eyes.
The alarm went off at five the next morning, and I smacked it down and ignored it. The door opened, and I thought it was going to be my brother. If he’d have come in there all full of good cheer, I would have popped and told him that I’m gay, I’m not into sports, my gym is a hangout place, I’m a complete fraud, let’s forget the whole thing.
But it was the damn dog. He came over to the bed and put his head down and snuffled my hand. And he wouldn’t stop. I moved my hand and smacked him to go away. Then I realized that’s what he wanted. He thought I was petting him. He came back again—snuffle, snuffle, snuffle—getting real close to me, and when I didn’t get up, he leapt up onto the bed, put his head over mine and started giving me these big, wet kisses. I thought I was going to be ill. I said, “OK
! OK! OK!”
I stumbled around the room and started to put clothes on. Fortunately I had only drunk half the beer the night before. So when Jimmy whistled, I screamed back, “I’m coming!”Then I realized he wasn’t whistling for me but for the dog.
In the kitchen Jimmy was putting a leather harness on the dog. Briefly I imagined a sled, myself riding in it under a blanket, and Jimmy running along behind. But Jimmy said the harness was good to grab in case you fell; the dog could pull you up. Well, maybe he could pull Jimmy up, because he sure as hell better stay away from me.
We got to the mountain. There was a glass-enclosed bulletin board with a notice that read, “Snowshoeing in the Green Mountains is exhilarating, but trips must be well planned as the margin for error on a winter hike is small.”
That made me uncomfortable. I read on: “The trail is marked with white blazes, which can be difficult to see against the snow” and “Deep snow may obscure all signs of the trail—maps and a compass are helpful.” Great. I left mine at my last Boy Scout meeting.
Paws and Reflect_Exploring the Bond Between Gay Men and Their Dogs Page 19
