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Kenneth Felts Marries Johnny Hau After Coming Out at Age 90

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Kenneth Felts Marries Johnny Hau After Coming Out at Age 90

A decade ago, Johnny Javier Hau Dzib took a nighttime drive around his Denver neighborhood, his mind in a suicidal thought loop.

Several years later, Kenneth Wayne Felts was at home alone in nearby Arvada, Colo., contemplating death by a different means. Chemotherapy for a Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis was robbing him of life’s pleasures. “I thought, I’m 90 years old,” Mr. Felts said. “Am I going to live the rest of my life this way?” In March 2020, after four months of chemotherapy, he voluntarily ended his treatments.

When the two men met later that year, both were in better places psychologically. Mr. Felts, a Navy veteran who served in the Korean War, had recently come out as gay. Mr. Hau, an I.T. specialist for Denver Public Schools, hoped to follow his lead.

Mr. Hau is 34. Mr. Felts is now 93. He was born in the dust bowl town of Dodge City, Kan., one year into the Great Depression in 1930. His parents, Clyde and Ruth Felts, were devout Christians. A youth spent in fundamental Christian churches caused him profound guilt over two secret romances with male schoolmates before he graduated high school in 1948.

In 1950, he enlisted in the Navy despite never having seen the ocean. It was long before the era of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He recalled several men he served with being court-martialed for their homosexuality. To avoid the same fate, he said, “it was important not to even associate with other gay people.”

In 1957, when he took a job as an insurance investigator in Long Beach, Calif., after graduating from the University of Kansas with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences two years earlier, he adopted the persona of a straight man.

During that time, however, he had a secret love affair with a male colleague named Phillip Jones, who also attended the local Church of God with Mr. Felts. “He was in the choir, and I was in the pews,” Mr. Felts said.

Mr. Jones was able to square his sexuality with church doctrine; Mr. Felts was not. One Sunday, he said, “out of the blue, I was bombarded with guilt. I knew I was going to go to hell, that I would burn in fire for eternity.” Overcome with shame, Mr. Felts left California in 1958 and returned to Dodge City. He never said goodbye to Mr. Jones, though Mr. Felts was sure by then he was the love of his life.

Over the years, Mr. Felts would intermittently search for Mr. Jones in every California phone book he could get his hands on. “I called every Phillip Jones and every P. Jones I could find,” he said. The search was never successful.

Mr. Felts continued to present as a straight man. In 1962, while living in Colorado Springs and working for the state as a rehabilitation counselor for the mentally and physically disabled (from which he retired in the mid-’90s), he married Mary Guinn, a schoolteacher. In 1973, their daughter, Rebecca Mayes, was born. The marriage didn’t last — they divorced in 1980 — but Mr. Felts’s commitment to appearing straight did. His resolve didn’t soften even when Ms. Mayes came out to her parents in the mid-1990s.

“‘It won’t last six months,’” was the first thing Ms. Mayes recalled her father saying when she told him she was gay. She and her then-girlfriend, Tracie Mayes, treated his prediction as a challenge. In 1999, they were married. The couple are now the parents of Mr. Felts’s grandchildren, an 18-year-old boy and 14-year-old girl, and the family lives near Mr. Felts in Arvada. (Ms. Guinn died in 2022.)

To occupy himself during the early months of the pandemic, Mr. Felts started writing a memoir. “I got to the point where I started writing about Phillip,” he said. The memory sent him down a rabbit hole of regret. So he told Ms. Mayes about the relationship, essentially coming out. “He doesn’t open up much, but he was obviously very sad,” she said.

Ms. Mayes handled the news of her father’s sexuality differently than he handled hers decades earlier: She was happy for him. “I completely understood why it was so hard for him to come out, given the time he grew up in,” she said.

Mr. Felts was done with the secrecy and regret and ready to come out publicly, which he did with a Facebook post in June 2020. The story of the newly out 90-year-old went viral. “I started hearing from people from around the world who wanted to interview me,” Mr. Felts said. “And each day I got new messages from people saying how much they appreciated me.”

One online acquaintance offered to help track down Mr. Jones, only to learn he had died a few years earlier. Mr. Felts was heartbroken. “It is so terribly frustrating to be so close to and yet not reach my lost love,” he wrote on Facebook. “My heart has turned to stone and I need my tears to wash away my sorrow. Rest in Peace Phillip.”

Another online admirer was Mr. Hau. Like Mr. Felts, Mr. Hau was taught early that homosexuality is a sin. He grew up Catholic, the youngest of eight children born to Josefa Hau de Dzib and Nemesio Hau Poot, in Yucatán, Mexico. By the time the family moved to Colorado when he was 11, he knew he was gay.

“I tried to hide it,” he said. “I would ask myself, ‘What’s going on with me? Why am I this way?’” He was 27 before he kissed another man. He had made attempts at relationships, “but I just felt tremendous guilt creep in. The guilt told me to end it every time.”

College at the University of Colorado Denver, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2014, was a welcome distraction. But thoughts of suicide were a constant companion until the night he drove through his Denver neighborhood in 2013 and met an older man who had immigrated from Japan years ago to work in mining.

The man had missed his bus. Mr. Hau saw him crossing the street. “It was late,” Mr. Hau said, so he offered him a ride. In return, the man offered him friendship.

Mr. Hau’s friend, who died of leukemia earlier this year at the age of 90, became a mentor and father figure. He was also the first person Mr. Hau said he came out to. The friend, who was not gay, “looked at me and said, ‘It’s OK. Be who you are.’”

Mr. Hau struggled to do so until October 2020, when he got a response to a note of support he had sent Mr. Felts via Facebook Messenger two months earlier. In it, Mr. Felts included his phone number (Mr. Hau said he lived locally and hoped they could speak someday). On Oct. 16, 2020, the two met at Namiko’s sushi and Japanese restaurant in Denver to talk about their sexuality, and the trauma of hiding it.

Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.

They continued talking after the restaurant closed. In Mr. Felts’s car, Mr. Hau took Mr. Felts’s hand. “Ken was just extremely supportive,” Mr. Hau said. He helped Mr. Hau past a second source of secrecy and shame. “I’ve always been attracted to older men,” he said. “And I always felt like, how will people react if I start a relationship with someone older? Perhaps the gay community will see it as odd.” Before he met Mr. Felts, “I looked online trying to find out, Is this normal?”

A first kiss at Mr. Felts’s home the same night pushed him past that worry. “It was such a comfort,” Mr. Hau said. By the end of October, Mr. Hau, who had never before spent the night with a lover, was spending every weekend in Arvada with Mr. Felts. In the summer of 2021, he moved in.

Talk of marriage, initiated by Mr. Felts, started soon after. But the cost of legal fees for a prenuptial agreement slowed it. Then, the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, with its implications for potentially disrupting gay marriage rights, rekindled those conversations.

On May 20, Mr. Hau asked Mr. Felts to marry him in their living room. “I felt like, I had found this great guy, and the laws were changing, and it triggered this fear,” he said. “I really wanted to solidify the relationship, to make it legal.” Mr. Felts, given a second chance at marriage, was fully at ease saying yes. “I love being with Johnny, and I love being loved,” he said.

On July 8, with a prenuptial agreement in place, Mr. Felts and Mr. Hau were married in a brief, informal ceremony in their backyard. (In Colorado, couples can legally marry without a formally registered officiant.) Jason Eaton-Lynch, a friend and the director of elder services at the Center on Colfax, a Denver L.G.B.T.Q. community center, led the ceremony.

Mr. Felts donned a pink jacket over a purple button down shirt; Mr. Hau wore a tan jacket and blue button down. Their 20 guests, which included Ms. Mayes and her family, dressed casually at the grooms’ request. (Mr. Hau’s family was not present, but when he came out to them last year via text message, he said “they were very supportive.”) Before Mr. Eaton-Lynch pronounced them married, Mr. Felts read a poem he had written for Mr. Hau.

“Near the end of my days and in the heat of my night, I found a great love, whom I shall ever hold tight,” he said. “We explore our new world with breathless delight.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.


When July 8, 2023

Where At the couple’s home in Arvada, Colo.

D.I.Y. Reception After the ceremony, the grooms cut a brightly frosted cake picked up from a nearby grocery store. Ms. Mayes had organized a light lunch from a local sandwich shop. The couple skipped dancing to focus on mingling.

Handful of Stars The cancer Mr. Felts was being treated for before he met Mr. Hau is “pretty well not there anymore,” he said, though he is still seeing his doctor and getting regular PET scans. The memoir he started writing during Covid, “My Handful of Stars: Coming Out at Age 90,” was self-published in 2022.

Out There After the wedding, Ms. Mayes said her father had never seemed happier. She had started thinking of Mr. Hau as a member of the family well before. “We were suspicious of John for a while because of the age gap,” she said. “But just watching them together — John takes really good care of my dad. They continue to be just so happy.” Coming out three years earlier enabled Mr. Felts to express himself in multiple ways, she said. “He used to be such a conservative dresser. Now he wears the loudest stuff.”

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Individual + Team Stats: Hornets vs. Timberwolves

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CHARLOTTE HORNETS MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES You can follow us for future coverage by liking us on Facebook & following us on X: Facebook – All Hornets X – …

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What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem

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What went wrong with 'the Metaverse'? An insider's postmortem


It’s now two years since Facebook changed its name to Meta, ushering in a brief but blazing enthusiasm over “the Metaverse”, a concept from science fiction that suddenly seemed to be the next inevitable leap in technology. For most people in tech, however, the term has since lost its luster, seemingly supplanted by any product with “artificial intelligence” attached to its description. 

But the true story of the Metaverse’s rise and fall in public awareness is much more complicated and interesting than simply being the short life cycle of a buzzword — it also reflects a collective failure of both imagination and understanding.  

Consider:

The forgotten novel

Ironically, many tech reporters discounted or even ignored the profound influence of Snow Crash on actual working technologists. The founders of Roblox and Epic (creator of Fortnite) among many other developers were directly inspired by the novel. Despite that, Neal Stephenson’s classic cyberpunk tale has often been depicted as if it were an obscure dystopian tome which merely coined the term. As opposed to what it actually did: describe the concept with a biblical specificity that thousands of developers have referenced in their virtual world projects — many of which have already become extremely popular.

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Snow Crash.

You can see this lack of clarity in many of the mass tech headlines attempting to describe the Metaverse in the wake of Facebook’s name change: 

In a widely shared “obituary” to the Metaverse, Business Insider’s Ed Zitron even compounded the confusion still further by inexplicably misattributing the concept to TRON, the original Disney movie from the 80s.

Had the media referenced Snow Crash far more accurately when the buzz began, they’d come away with a much better understanding of why so many technologists are excited by the Metaverse concept — and realize its early incarnation is already gaining strong user traction.  

Because in the book, the Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world that’s simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools that are integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology. In other words, it’s more or less like Roblox and Fortnite — platforms with many tens of millions of active users. 

But then again, the tech media can’t be fully blamed for following Mark Zuckerberg’s lead.

Rather than create a vision for its Metaverse iterating on already successful platforms — Roblox’s 2020 IPO filing even describes itself as the metaverse — Meta’s executive leadership cobbled together a mishmash of disparate products. Most of which, such as remotely working in VR headsets, remain far from proven. According to an internal Blind survey, a majority of Zuckerberg’s own employees say he has not adequately explained what he means by the Metaverse even to them.

Grievous of all, Zuckerberg and his CTO Andrew Bosworth promoted a conception of the Metaverse in which the Quest headset was central. To do so, they had to overlook compelling evidence — raised by senior Microsoft researcher danah boyd at the time of the company acquiring Oculus in 2014 — that females have a high propensity to get nauseous using VR.

Meta Quest 3 comes out on October 10 for $500.
Meta Quest 3.

Contacted in late 2022 while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, danah told me no one at Oculus or Meta followed up with her about the research questions she raised. Over the years, I have asked several senior Meta staffers (past and present) about this and have yet to receive an adequate reply. Unsurprisingly, Meta’s Quest 2 VR headset has an estimated install base of only about 20 million units, significantly smaller than the customer count of leading video game consoles. A product that tends to make half the population puke is not exactly destined for the mass market — let alone a reliable base for building the Metaverse. 

Ironically, Neal Stephenson himself has frequently insisted that virtual reality is absolutely not a prerequisite for the Metaverse, since flat screens display immersive virtual worlds just fine. But here again, the tech media instead ratified Meta’s flawed VR-centric vision by constantly illustrating articles about the Metaverse with photos of people happily donning headsets to access it — inadvertently setting up a straw man destined to soon go ablaze.

Duct-taped to yet another buzzword

Further sealing the Metaverse hype wave’s fate, it crested around the same time that Web3 and crypto were still enjoying their own euphoria period. This inevitably spawned the “cryptoverse” with platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox. When the crypto crash came, it was easy to assume the Metaverse was also part of that fall.

But the cryptoverse platforms failed in the same way that other crypto schemes have gone awry: By offering a virtual world as a speculative opportunity, it primarily attracted crypto speculators, not virtual world enthusiasts. By October of 2022, Decentraland was only tracking 7,000 daily active users, game industry analyst Lars Doucet informed me

“Everybody who is still playing is basically just playing poker,” as Lars put it. “This seems to be a kind of recurring trend in dead-end crypto projects. Kind of an eerie rhyme with left-behind American cities where drugs come in and anyone who is left is strung out at a slot machine parlor or liquor store.”

All this occurred as the rise of generative AI birthed another, shinier buzzword — one that people not well-versed in immersive virtual worlds could better understand.

But as “the Metaverse” receded as a hype totem, a hilarious thing happened: Actual metaverse platforms continued growing. Roblox now counts over 300 million monthly active users, making its population nearly the size of the entire United States; Fortnite had its best usage day in 6 years. Meta continues plodding along but seems to finally be learning from its mistakes — for instance, launching a mobile version of its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds.  

Roblox leads the rise of user-generated content.
Roblox.

Into this mix, a new wave of metaverse platforms is preparing to launch, refreshingly led by seasoned, successful game developers: Raph Koster with Playable Worlds, Jenova Chen with his early, successful forays into metaverse experiences, and Everywhere, a metaverse platform lead developed by a veteran of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

At some point, everyone in tech who co-signed the “death” of the Metaverse may notice this sustained growth. By then however, the term may no longer require much usage, just as the term “information superhighway” fell away as broadband Internet went mainstream.  

Wagner James Au is author of Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For 

GamesBeat’s creed when covering the game industry is “where passion meets business.” What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you — not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings.

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Social media blocks are “a suppression of an essential avenue for transparency”

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In this photo illustration the word censored is seen displayed on a smartphone with the logos of social networks Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube in the background.

Once praised as the defining feature of the internet, the ability to connect with physically distant people is something that governments have recently been seemingly intent on restricting. Authorities have been increasingly pulling the plug, putting over 4 billion people in the shadows in the first half of 2023 alone

Social media platforms are often the first means of communication to be restricted. Surfshark, one of the most popular VPN services, counted at least 50 countries guilty of having curbed these websites and apps during periods of political turmoil such as protests, elections, or military activity.

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