One of the odd things about being born into the world's great tribe of homosexuals is that unlike other tribes, the rest of your family aren't likely to be members.

A second thing is that, technically, there's nothing like skin color or physical characteristics that make one instantly visible as a homosexual. Which is not to say that some people aren't rather easy to peg, given one has any kind of reasonably good gaydar, which any self-respecting homosexualist has.

But, these two facts do mean that those of us who belong to the tribe are, in a way, always searching for the rest of the tribe. As I sat, having dinner on Tuesday with a collection of business people (my clients) at a manor house in the middle of nowhere in the forests of Sweden, I wasn't surprised when the Dutch guy sitting next to me at dinner, during a conversation about racism, divulged matter-of-factly that he was gay. It was said, no doubt, as part of the whole tribe-searching bit that we all go through.

However, in a fit of perversion and, no doubt, cowardice, I did not respond in kind. I felt too exposed in front of people I know only very superficially.

It was a cowardly thing to do. The only way this old world will change is if people are forthcoming about such things, and in full view of whoever happens to be near. And I felt like I was leaving him in the lurch, as I have no doubt he expected me to say "I am gay as well."

I am shamed. I am a schlub and, I suppose, a hypocrite in one way or another.

The Swedish word for the day is mantalsskrivningsförrättningarna, at the request of a certain Christian Bolgen, who thinks it is time that I focus on some of the many peculiar portmanteau words of the Swedish language. It means something like the residential registration (for census purposes) official duties, as far as I can tell.

- by Francis S.

Swedish food is nothing to write home about. It's hard to muster enthusiasm for pickled herring and hard bread.

There are exceptions, of course, such as the sweetest wild strawberries and the earthiest tender new potatoes.

And crayfish.

The crayfish season has just begun. The Swedes honor crayfish by hosting parties where heaping platters of fish are consumed, washed down with beer and schnapps. It's my favorite Swedish food, and I don't even mind the little cuts you get all over your fingers in your greed to open the little bastards up to ruthlessly get at the tails.

Tonight, it's crayfish for us, out in the southern suburbs of Stockholm, close to the water somewhere.

The Swedish word for the day is kräftskiva, which means crayfish party.

- by Francis S.

Excerpt from an unfinishable novel:

...Boodles first met Chumley at the Brooke Boulevard Athletic and Spiritual Club.

He had woken up thinking it was a Wednesday, and rushed in at 7 a.m. to meet his personal trainer, Lorena, only to find that she was raging at a skinny and quivering man with great cow eyes, who was neither pulling on the various chains and weights in proper order, nor saying the appropriate combination of benedictions and confessions.

"There but for the grace of -" Boodles thought, ashamed and hopelessly aroused at the man's pathetic groveling, wondering who the poor bastard was. Then Boodles suddenly remembered, with a queasy feeling, a meeting he was to have later that day with his boss and realized that it was a Tuesday and not a Wednesday.

Up to that moment, Lorena hadn't seen him, but in an eyeblink, it was too late. She had grabbed him by the hair and strapped him into one of the machines, screaming the whole while in a barely coherent fashion that he better start saying his prayers.

"I believe in one God..." Boodles began wretchedly.

He would have to pay extra for this, and come in the next day as well. He couldn't afford to pay for the training as it was - he'd given up heat and hot water in his apartment to cover the cost - and he was way behind on his Mandatory Consumption Quotient on account of he spent all his money on food and, well, Lorena. Worse, he never seemed to get his puffy and pale body into shape, perhaps because he couldn't stop himself from eating to make up for his dead-end job, his inability to form a lasting relationship with a vertebrate or invertebrate of any sort, and the horribleness of Lorena every other day.

Afterwards, Boodles stood in the shower next to Chumley, the two of them trying desperately not to whimper, Boodles rubbing his wrists to try and get some feeling back into his hands, and Chumley wiping at the bloody scrapes on his shins.

"She's real good, Lorena," Chumley said at last, looking at Boodles in the mirrors that were mounted on the walls across from the shower stalls.

"Yeah, sh-sh-she s-s-s-sure is," Boodles said, trying to stop his teeth from chattering.

It was then he saw something in Chumley's eyes, his sad and watery but beautiful eyes, that made Boodles wonder...

The Swedish word for the day is trosbekännelse. It means credo.

- by Francis S.

Someone has stolen the king's sheep (link in Swedish only, sorry).

Not all the sheep, only some 20 are missing, but the 100 or so who are left are traumatized, according to the court shepherdess (how's that for a title - I'd love to be able to tell people when they ask what I do: "Oh, I'm the court shepherdess.")

I met the king's sheep one morning. I was out at 6:30 a.m. posing for a magazine photo with three other unfortunates, pretending to have a picnic with champagne and strawberries, a la Luncheon on the Grass, although we all kept our clothes on. "Pull in your stomach," the photographer yelled at me as I sprawled, propped up on one elbow, an arm outstretched with a champagne glass, a smile pasted rigidly on my face, looking desperately into the eyes of the man sitting on the blanket across from me.

Not long after, the sheep showed up, herded through the meadow by a manic sheepdog, but not herded fast enough that several of them weren't able to invade our picnic and eat one of our pears.

I wonder if the same sheep that were stolen were the ones who ate the pear?

Someone has stolen the sheep of the king. It sounds like the beginning of a nursery rhyme, doesn't it?

The Swedish word for the day is, of course, får, which means sheep.

- by Francis S.

Part of my job is to know the difference between British and American spelling, as well as to root out Britishisms (and sometimes Americanisms, which not so surprisingly I'm rather bad at).

The spelling differences are mostly straightforward - o versus ou, z versus s, er versus re. But however did it happen that the British spell it sceptic and the Americans skeptic? Maybe the Americans were influenced by Swedish: skeptiker is how you say it in Swedish.

- by Francis S.

I've somehow managed to get knocked from my usual happy orbit.

I blame the United States. I can't seem to recover from the recent two weeks in the Great Midwest. I'm all "What happened to my center of gravity?"

America seems more and more foreign. Those awful star-spangled magnetic ribbon things on the back of all the cars, waiters and waitresses telling you their names, the incredible inequity of the suburban idyll of Oak Park pressed up against poverty-stricken Austen in Chicago. The obvious things. And the less obvious things, like girls in the Meijer saying "I love your hair" to each other, as if there could be a good reason for them to actually love each others' hair and making you wonder if they also love their mothers and their nasty little brothers.

I feel so confused by the strange aura of unquestioning self-assurance that Americans have, which is part of their charm. And no doubt has been part of my charm. But have I lost it?

Sweden seems just as foreign, to be honest. Despite my Swedish passport, I'll never be a Swede, I'll always be an outsider. Which I usually find perfectly comfortable. After all, if one is aware from a fairly young age that one is gay, being an outsider is more than even second nature, it's an elemental ingredient of the self, the preferred status.

Just now, though, I feel out of sorts, rudderless and unsure and old and ugly, wondering what in hell my husband sees in me, and paradoxically, in the grip of a powerful desire to become a father.

I hate this shit.

The Swedish word for the day is oväder. It means inclement weather.

- by Francis S.

Going east to west is nearly always easier than going west to east.

We're talking what affects jet-lag, here. I'm not sure whether it's age or something else, but I seem to have more trouble adjusting than I used to when I go from west to east: We started out okay, but then we accidentally took a nap from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. yesterday, and couldn't fall asleep for the night until hours after the sun had risen. And now I'm all queasy and caffienated and head-achey. And I'm not ready for vacation to be over. I still feel stuck somewhere midway between cultures, time zones and intelligence quotients.

It's gonna be a helluva night. I'll be lucky if I get three hours of sleep.

The Swedish word for the day is sömnlös. It means sleepless.

- by Francis S.

Back from the fatherland.

Highlights: a week in a cottage on Lake Michigan (which, along with the other four great lakes, is more or less an inland freshwater sea with waves and everything, for those who don't know) with no fights, a great deck hovering on the bluff above the lake, and lots of red meat; the mind-boggling excess of the Meijer - a combination grocery and cheap department store - that is situated somewhere outside North Muskegon, Michigan; making incessant fart and other jokes with my 12-year-old nephew, who is a total goofball and never shuts up, reminding me curiously of, well, me, when I was a kid; dinner under the trees with the cat doctor at a French-bistro-type place in the old Swedish neighborhood of Chicago; dim sum at Phoenix with half the family, my sister-in-law making sure we get only the good stuff and stay away from the chicken feet.

Mostly, though, the visit was about the very low-key feting of my parents, which was the reason we were there in the first place.

As always, it's a revelation to go to America, and a revelation to come back.

The Swedish phrase for the day is hemma bäst. It means home is best.

Francis S.

Walking through lower Observatorielunden, I saw someone has painted on the roof of one of the buildings of the daycare center at the south end of the park:

"They said 'sit down'. I stood up"

Tomorrow, we're off to the Fatherland on the other side of the Atlantic. We'll be back in August.

The Swedish phrase for the day is femtio-års jubileum. It means fiftieth anniversary, which my parents are celebrating with the whole family for the next weeks. To think, my father was 21, my mother only 20 when they got married, and they're still happily married. It's a tough act to follow, but my brothers and sister and I do our best.

- by Francis S.

As we sat, drinking wine on the veranda at the house on Birds Island, celebrating the birthday of A., the TV producer, the physical therapist told a brief story of a man she knows who has an aphasia in which he is able to speak but unable to really make sense, he can only refer to things in terms of his old work life.

She asked him how his wife was, pointing to the ring on her own finger, trying to give him as much help as possible.

"Oh, my subscription?" he answered.

We laughed, of course. But I'm charmed by the idea of my own husband as a subscription that arrives every evening, eagerly awaited and alternately perused lovingly or consumed voraciously.

My husband the lifetime subscription.

The Swedish verb for the day is att prenumerera, which of course means to subscribe.

- by Francis S.

Aaron asks: "When did you first know?"

I think I probably knew already when I was five, and I couldn't stop myself from looking at an art book of my parents. A photograph of Michelangelo's David made me deliciously out-of-sorts, I wanted to be him and to have him at the same time. No one can tell me that small children aren't sexual beings somehow, which is not to say that adults having sex with children is a good thing.

But it wasn't until I was 14 that I admitted to myself that there was a real future in liking boys. It was all due to reading the book RubyFruit Jungle, which my sister had brought home from the University of Michigan. That book made me see that being gay was, in fact, wonderful and exciting. Not that I went out and announced it to the world. Or to anybody, really. I just said to myself, "This is for me." And despite a bit of dabbling in girls here and there, so to speak, until I was 22 or 23, I've never really looked back.

The Swedish verb for the day is att känna. It means to sense.

- by Francis S.

Tysta gatan - Quiet Street - is no longer my favorite street name in Stockholm; I've switched my affections to Tre liljor - Three Lilies - which is a little square tucked away up at the end of Norrtullsgatan, close to the old northern entrance to the city (both links in Swedish only, sorry). The name comes from an old hostel that used to stand there. The place, a U-shaped street curving round a small park, is called simply Three Lilies, without the appendage of "street" or "alley" or even "square" or "park."

I would love to be able to tell people when they ask, that I live on Three Lilies.

The husband used to take piano lessons in an apartment on Three Lilies from a man who would rap him on the knuckles with a ruler when he made a mistake. Not surprisingly, the husband never got very far with learning the piano.

(That's four Swedish words in one lesson. A bargain at half the price.)

- by Francis S.

When I first read a story in the New York Times claiming that the U.K. is a hotbed of Islamic terrorism, I thought to myself: Is this schadenfreude or fear or hubris talking? I was rather taken aback by the tone of blame, as if Britain got what it deserved for not curtailing civil rights enough, for not having its own "Patriot Act." Can you imagine how the U.S. would have reacted if British newspapers had written anything similar about the U.S. after Sept. 11?

If I were British, I would be profoundly offended.

(The Guardian certainly has taken note of the story from the New York Times, along with many similar stories in many of the biggest U.S. papers. Perhaps not so strangely, reading the Guardian's news blog post about these stories, the vast majority of the 80 plus comments there when I read it seem to be from Americans who seem hellbent on alienating the citizens of the only significant ally the U.S. has in its occupation of Iraq.)

The Swedish word for the day is offentligt. It means publicly.

- by Francis S.

It's Jehovah with his rank upon rank of heavenly aspirants bent on ramming God's will into the various orifices of the Devil's minions - that would be gays and members of the American Civil Liberties Union - so that said orifices can't be used for anything naughty.

Francis Strand, ranting on and on about gay marriage

For those of you who don't get enough of my bitching here, I've now got a story over in this month's issue of Sigla Magazine.

The Swedish word for the day is hundkäx. Which literally means dog biscuit, but is the Swedish name for wild chervil, and looks to me rather similar to Queen Anne's Lace, although a botanist or my mother and sister, who really know their wildflowers, would no doubt disagree.

- by Francis S.

Okay. I'm doing this only because I promised Sinéad. But, it's the last meme I do. I am unavailable for memework in the future. I'm taking the meme-baton and throwing it into the Baltic.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?
A Confederacy of Dunces - only because it would be great fun to do all the voices.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Not really. The first time I read it, when I was 10, I wanted to be the children - either Scout or Jem - in To Kill a Mockingbird - that's the closest I've probably gotten to having a crush on a character.
The last book you bought is?
Robertson Davies: The Deptford Trilogy
What are you currently reading?
Robertson Davies: The Deptford Trilogy. Re-reading it, actually. I read it probably 20 years ago, and saw it in the bookstore and thought I'd see if it still holds up. Which it almost does. I'm surprised he's not more widely read still.
Five books you would take to a deserted island
The Tale of Genji - it's so long, and full of color and adventure and eros and elegance and culture, it evokes a world like nothing else.
The Bible - yeah, okay, so a lot of people choose this one, and not because they're religious but because it's got so many great stories and poetry and wise and crazy things in it.
Ulysses - maybe I will finally finish reading it.
Portrait of a Lady - it's engrossing and bears a lot of re-reading without becoming boring; and Henry James is divine, in a fussy kind of way.
William Trevor: The Collected Stories - to have something full of the milk of human kindness (and evil), and a little less daunting to read.

And, I pass this on to no one.

The Swedish word for the day is varelse. It means being, as in a living creature.

- by Francis S.

Oh, no. Up goes the ratchet.

A.'s little sister and her boyfriend, the ex-football player are here in Sweden just now rather than the U.K. And, we've talked to the friends from London, the photographer and his wife, who are safe. However, we haven't heard back from M., the TV producer.

The Swedish word for the day is attentat. It means attack.

- by Francis S.

Walking along the Djurgården canal, just below the tiny palace of Rosendal, I heard the metalic buzzing of a propeller plane. Looking up, I saw that it was trailing a banner reading: "Grattis H.H Dalai Lama på 70-årsdagen." Which means "Congratulations to His Holiness the Dalai Lama on his 70th birthday."

There you have it, the Swedish phrase for the day.

What I want to know is, who paid for the sign, and was the Dalai Lama there to see it, or was it someone trying to recreate a sort of if- a- tree- falls- in- the- wood- with- no- one- to- hear- it- does- it- still- make- a- sound kind of thing?

- by Francis S.

This morning, on Karlavägen, that glorious street of ancient ladies, I passed a woman wearing little white crocheted gloves. I am old enough to remember the days when my mother still occasionally wore little white gloves, crocheted or plain, and a hat, and underneath, that most peculiar of garments, a girdle. By the time I was 8 or so, such things had gone out of fashion, and I have no doubt my mother gladly put the gloves and the hats and the girdles away in unused drawers and boxes in the back of the closet.

I think any woman who says she isn't a feminist has forgotten that there was a time when you weren't properly dressed if underneath your dress, you weren't wearing a girdle with all its strange and horrible white fastenings.

The Swedish word for the day is trosor. It means panties.

by Francis S.

I don't really remember what it was like when I first got eyeglasses, in the second grade. But it surely must have been like today, when I picked up my new glasses, with a new stronger prescription: Suddenly, the world is so in focus it's making me queasy. I'm born again, and the new me is seasick. (Strangely, my contact lenses, of which I have run out, have not changed in strength, according to Petra the Optician.)

"They're art director glasses," the husband said to me, approval in his voice. Which means that they are thick black plastic and very beatnik. I leave all my fashion decisions up to the husband, since when I moved to Stockholm I lost the ability to distinguish between what is fashionable, what is hopelessly 1993 and what is ridiculous on a man of, um, 44.

Now, can I make it through the walk home without either stumbling or spitting up?

The Swedish word for the day is glasögon. It means eyeglasses.

- by Francis S.

"We were not the first, but I am sure we will not be the last. After us will come many other countries, driven, ladies and gentlemen, by two unstoppable forces: freedom and equality."

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

First Canada joined the illustrious company of the Netherlands and Belgium. Now Spain, of all places.

I think you can safely say that the Catholic Church is reaping the rewards of its collusion with Franco. It just goes to show you that sometimes the church can be a force for good. Unintentionally, of course.

Go, Spain! Go, the gays!

Wait, that's me...

The Swedish words for the day are Kanada and Spanien. They are, of course, what Swedes call Canada and Spain.

- by Francis S.