National Coming Out Day 2013

I came out to my parents in my early 30s, although I had known I was different when I was very young. As early as age 4 or 5 I knew I liked looking at boys more than at most girls. And I knew when I was 6 years old that I was different for other reasons: because my father was a doctor with the Lutheran mission in India, I grew up in tropical country with a very foreign culture where most of the people did not look like me or my family. I grew up as a minority on multiple levels. When we came back to the US from India, I was thrown into elementary school, where I had literally nothing in common with any of my age-mates. Not one thing. Not even popular music, as I had never listened to American radio before, and had never even seen a television set.

I was bullied continuously from that time until 10th grade, when suddenly some of the popular kids in high school took a liking to me, and the bullying stopped. Maybe the word got around that some of the football jocks were now my friends. But I have no real idea why. I was bullied throughout school for being soft and quiet, yes, because I was painfully shy. So of course I was a sissy, though I was not effeminate. But I was equally bullied for being obviously smarter than most of the other kids, and thus for being a teacher's pet. It took me a lot longer to get over being bullied than most folks ever realize. I can still be crippled by shyness. It took me a lot longer to come out as smart than it did to come out as gay.

I knew by the time I was 14 that I preferred to look at naked boys over naked girls. Actually, it was more like 11, but I was 10 years old when the Stonewall riots happened, not they were made the news in Michigan, and I basically grew up in a cultural suburb of Lake Wobegon, so there was no context or support available as there is to young gay kids have now. I've had a couple of good relationships with women, although I am 95 percent gay.

What can I say about coming out to my parents? I did it in a very clumsy way, at a time when I was angry at them, and angry at the world, so I sort of threw it in their faces during a conversation in the kitchen that was already difficult. My mother didn't know what to say to me for six weeks, after which she made it clear that she still loved me, and always would, and nothing would ever change that, although she had hoped for grandchildren. But she didn't really want to talk about it, and avoided the topic in later years. My father, who before I came out had been sitting down with me to watch news programs on AIDS and other things, was always a very liberal thinker, which is why he became a doctor, to be of service. In India, as a boy I had no idea that missionary work was ever about anything other than what my father did: run a hospital, do surgery, teach medicine, teach doctors and nurses, teach and practice surgery and pathology and public health, and so on. We were liberal educated Lutherans, very rational, the polar opposite of religious fundamentalists. So when I came out I thought my Dad had already figured out I was gay, but he told me years later that he actually hadn’t known in advance. Nonetheless, he was always incredibly supportive and caring, wondered how I was doing, and even though we fought about some other things in life, my being gay wasn't one of them. Dad gave money to charities every year, but he quit supporting charities such as the Salvation Army, because he refused to support homophobic institutions. He did that for my sake. It was from my father that I learned that actions speak louder than words.

Still, after I came out, I never felt like it was okay to bring home a "friend" for dinner, or to meet the parents, even though it wasn't really talked about either way. I never talked to my parents about my love life, pathetic as it was, except to occasionally mention that I'd made a new friend. My parents only ever met one of my occasional lovers, and we were still so discrete that he was just a "friend" who was visiting to help me with a project.

Frankly, all this furtiveness messed me up for awhile. When something is never spoken about, it’s hard to defuse feelings of guilt and shame. My parents had been very good at using silent disappointment to discipline their toddlers, so I always wondered if they were disapoointed and unhappy with me as an adult, but I rarely knew for sure. Yes, I didn't come out to them in a very good way, but then it wasn't really ever talked about much again. Dad was more overtly accepting than Mom, but again Mom’s disappointment was partly about the lack of grandkids. I was supposed to pass on me genes, I guessed, like somme eugenics experiment. I never felt totally accepted, and not only for this, so there were years when it messed up my self-esteem and ruined my self-confidence for dating, among other aspects of life.

That's never been fully resolved. I still have basically zero self-confidence about dating. My self-esteem is very healthy in almost every area of my life, thank you very much, except for this one. It got better while I lived in San Francisco, and I even had a regular boyfriend who i fell in love with, but then my father got colon cancer and my mother had Alzheimer's, so I had to move back in with my parents to be their full-time live-in caregiver till they died. I was basically forced into a particularly frustrating celibacy, after the freedom of San Francisco. Then I was myself diagnosed with a chronic illness, and the end result of that is that I have been rejected so many times since then that I've basically given up even trying to date. Gay men can be so fucking shallow.

Being a live-in caregiver forced me to go partway back into the closet for awhile; then I became disabled, and have been rejected continuously ever since. It's frustrating. No one wants to date the guy who almost died from a long-term chronic illness, and who is now disabled.

I own that I don't always make that easy. I have always had some rough edges. I’m fiercely passionate about what I care deeply about, and easy-going about most everything else. I can be intense. And almost dying from a chronic illness sorted out some priorities for me, and left me with an increased lust for life, but also with an impatient intolerance of personal drama, even my own. I can't always help myself, I can't always just flip a switch and turn my own anxieties off, but I don't like it, and I know exactly what's going on when I'm trapped in it, and I stop it just as soon as I can. Life is too short to waste it on unimportant things. Who you love is important. Wearing the perfect clothes is not. So, I own that I can be a rough ride, if you're the sort of person who doesn't want to meet the other halfway and inhabit the common ground. I own that I have little patience, after almost dying, for people who CHOOSE to be self-destructive. I have friends with genuinely scary medical and PTSD drama, who have every right to bitch about it; but that's REAL, not "drama queen" drama.



Coming out spiritually was even harder than coming out as gay. Coming out AS spiritual. Not as religious, because in no way am I even remotely conventionally religious, nor do I belong to any church or denomination, and for the most part I find religious rhetoric to be at best ignorant and at worst hateful. But I have always been an intensely spiritual person, with a very powerful inner life, even though it's nothing like anything everyone assumes it to be.

You see, there are a LOT of gay men who have been vilified, persecuted, rejected, bullied, harassed, and condemned by friends, family, school authorities, religious authorities, and loud-mouthed asshole right wing politicians. We have been subjected all of our lives to the hateful rhetoric of the religious right. As a gay man, therefore, you are almost EXPECTED to be anti-religion, anti-religious, and even atheistic. They rejected you, you're supposed to reject them back. Your community damned you, and you're supposed to return the favor.

I've always found that to be simplistic. Hating back takes the low road. It increases the entropy of the universe by creating a sucking black hole vortex of negativity. People never seem to understand that hatred is not the proper response to hatred. Hating back is the low road. And even though I frequently fail at it, all of my life I've always known that we are supposed to take the high road.

Nonetheless, being openly spiritual is somehow suspect in many LGBT communities. It’s almost a given that we’ve all suffered some form of religious abuse, so naturally we all must be anti-religious, or atheists, or bitter and wounded no matter our calendar age.

How do you come out as a spiritual gay person when none of that applies to you?

Resisting the gravitational tide of black hole negativity can be hard work, yes, but it’s necessary if you want to have a fulfilling life that you enjoy. Bitterness is a waste of energy, although many do rehearse their wounds again and again in some form of lifelong performance of suffering. What good does it do to never allow your wounds to heal? You cannot be free otherwise.

I remember having a conversation with my father late in his life. He came to my bedroom one afternoon to ask me about my faith. He was very concerned that I didn't have one, or the support of a faith community. I told him not to worry about it, that even though I belonged to no faith community anymore, and likely never would again, I had (and have) an active inner spiritual life, and a daily practice. My father did not judge me for no longer thinking myself to be in any way Christian, and no longer following any dogma, he just wanted reassurance that I was okay. So I reassured him. And I meant it. I felt so much in that moment like the adult reassuring the child, that it was seared into my memory.

Like many other young gay men, I had left the church I grew up in because I didn't feel welcomed as a gay man. Even though my particular church didn't hate or vilify homosexuals, they also didn't openly speak out in support of LGBT persons. (Not till much later. Then they did.) Like many other gay men raised in a Christian church, I did feel rejected. But it wasn't very fierce or dramatic. It was more of a feeling that my path lay elsewhere.

But I had also grown up in India, in a region that was dominantly Hindu and Buddhist. So I can honestly say that I began studying comparative religion before I even knew what that term meant. I was socialized mostly with adults, as there were no other children my age to play with for most of my childhood. My father was a scientist. I learned critical thinking at a very young age. I learned to be skeptical of received wisdom very young, and this was only reinforced when we came back to the States and I entered public school. Being bullied for years, while the school authorities did nothing to stop it, or seemed helpless to, taught me at an early age to be skeptical, even suspicious, of figures of authority and what they might tell you about life. I learned to do my own research, and make up my own mind. Being a voracious and fast reader fed that process. Having a very good memory helped. At an early age I learned to trust my own experience, and research, about what was true over anything that anyone ever said to me was true, especially figures in authority. And this was reinforced by being bullied, because bullying is ALL about trying to get others to shut up, be silent, and above all stop thinking for themselves and do what YOU tell them to do. To this day I despise coercion, I mistrust authority figures who haven't earned my trust, and I talk back. I will always talk back. I will always speak out. I will never be silenced by anyone, even any of my friends who might feel embarassed, if I feel the need to speak out about a perceived injustice. Although I am capable of being discrete and tactful, I use discretion and tact by conscious choice rather than because of tribal cultural indoctrination. So much for Lake Wobegon.

When I was 11, I discovered in the school library some books on Navajo culture and cosmology, and I was fascinated. It instantly made sense to me, what I could understand of it. What I was reading seemed to be naturally very similar to what I had already been feeling in myself about spirituality, but had not yet put into words.

I must at this point come out as a natural researcher: I'm very good at it, and finding out things comes as a natural discipline to me. I went out and found several adult books on the Dineh, and had no problem reading even the more academic tomes. I was already reading at college level by age 10 or so. Things I didn't understand I asked about. It was a family tradition at our house to look up things we didn't know about, even bringing the dictionary and encyclopedia volumes to the dinner table. We were a family of readers. By age 13 I had already been reading extensively in comparative religion, and related fields. By age 16 I was reading depth psychology and theories of the archetypes (Carl Jung), mythology (Joseph Campbell and others), anthropology and folklore (various), and so on. By age 21 I had read my way through The Collected Works of Carl Jung for the first time. I had also read all of James Joyce by then, including "Finnegan's Wake." That's just the highlights. As I said, I read fast, and permanently retain most of what I read.

This is a story I have told many of my friends, although I rarely get any sense that they believe me. As I said, coming out as smart was a lot harder than coming out as gay; and it remains an unfinished process. When I was in high school, the Armed Forces badly wanted to recruit me, and I had no problem getting into the college of my choice, because I consistently tested in the top 1 percent of my class, with a genius level IQ. That didn't change my life though, or give me huge self-confidence. Why not? Remember that I said I had become suspicious of figures in authority, after being bullied for many years. So when adults in authority told me things about myself like this, I never fully believed it. I also did not WANT to be singled out as special or different, because that was WHY I got beat up all the time: for being different.

Yet by age 13 I had privately formulated for myself that what I was looking for was what I called the Original Religion: the oldest human forms of religion, spiritual practice, ritual, belief. I wanted something more authentic, more core, more central, than the rational dogma received from the liberal Lutherans. Nothing of what I had found in organized religion was satisfying to me. You can say the words, and even believe them, and they remain just words.

How were you supposed to connect and activate the power in the words? What caused the words to come into being? What was the original impulse that led to the founding and creation of what eventually became established religions? Where does it start? How old is it? What is left when you strip away all the accrued layers of received interpretations? What was the source and core of all this?

In later years I found books written by people who were asking these same questions, and also looking into the human experience of what we call the sacred, to discover its origins. I continue to discover new answers to these perennial questions. Divergent theories have been proposed, some of them much more convincing than others. The questions have been asked by many different seekers in many difference disciplines. They continue to be, and probably always will be. The asking sometimes is the more important thing.

For the record, many explanatory theories proposed by modern neuroscience, that all experiences that we can call religious in quality or paranormal in nature are caused by pathological imbalances in brain chemistry, are among the LEAST convincing theories offered. This is not because they offer no good ideas, but because many of them are based on a priori assumptions that in turn must not be questioned, which is not how science operates; and also because some theories are built on incomplete data sets that offer no definitive support for the suppositions made, even statistically. For all we know, there may be a lot of truth in these research studies, but what we don't know about the human brain remains staggeringly greater than what we do know. So they remain theories. Anyone who claims that science has managed to explain everything in final detail that there is to know about the universe, or ourselves, has failed to take in or comprehend relativity, theoretical physics, or the implications of string theory. Experiment is what science is about, not certainty. But I digress.

Meanwhile, at the age when I began looking for what I framed to myself as the Original Religion, I began to read everything I could find on the topic, and anything I thought might give a clue. I self-educated myself in cultural anthropology (we can if we wish think of my childhood in a very foreign culture as my earliest fieldwork), in comparative religious studies, in transpersonal psychology, folklore, myth studies, and much more. I eventually arrived at something I still view as probably the only candidate for what we could think of as the Original Religion.

Namely, those universal human experiences, found in every culture on the planet, in every era of recorded history, all the way back to the Paleolithic, and still available to anyone via the practice of spiritual technology. Something found everywhere, in every time. Techniques and tools of consciousness that date back 40,000 years, and are still practiced today. What anthropologist Mircea Eliade, in a huge cross-cultural analysis and history of this topic, called "archaic techniques of ecstasy." In a word: Shamanism. Practices of altered states of consciousness that are both Paleolithic in origin, and very contemporary. We see it in the ancient cave art found in southern Europe. We see it in Navajo healing ceremonies today.

Which is how I return to my process of coming out spiritually.

Thus, after having turned my back on all organized religions for many years, especially Christianity, I made my way back to an appreciation of what there is to be found there that is good. Notably, the thread of "green" Christianity that is life-affirming, earth-positive, and joyous. I found my way back to an appreciation of mysticism in Christianity, after rediscovering the later writings of modern mystic Thomas Merton. The writings of Matthew Fox added to that, in part by introducing me to the lineage of mysticism rooted in the teachings of Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen.

So I can no longer be a gay man embittered by rejection, rejecting in turn, for the simple reason that I am a mystic. I am a shaman. I follow no path of organized religious practice, or dogma, or articles of faith. I believe nothing but what I have experienced, and I have had mystical experiences for as long as I can remember. I have a vivid memory from age 5 of feeling exalted by the power of the sun. A dark page in my life, in my 20s, was turned around in an instant, when I was sitting on my bed, and I suddenly and for no reason fely my soul being lifted up into the Light. (I read St. Teresa of Avila years later, and recognize what I am reading.) My experience of sex has often felt like a sacrament, and has often been gifted with experiences of merging and unity felt by all involved. I may be shy about dating at times, but that's also because sex is a sacrament. It's difficult to impossible for me to be casual about it.

I have had visionary, mystical experiences my entire life. I have had déjà vu experiences that have been genuinely and verfiably prescient. I know now that my quest to find the Original Religion, begun at age 13, was a quest to understand what I had been experiencing, and continue to experience.

This requires no theology to explain, but it does support a cosmology that has been described again and again by many mystics, from every place and time in human history. If there is an origin to the institutions of organized religions, I believe that it lies in some person in a place who has a direct experience of the divine, a transpersonal peak experience, a vision, a mystical moment, then returns to his or her village to sing about it. What is our universal human birthright is this kind of direct experience. The organized religions grow out of the revelation, interpreted locally in the local language, through the worldview of that time and place. But at the core of every religion, no matter how far off course they have gone as they grew and changed, there was a vision. I know this to be true on a level that requires no faith. I believe in nothing that you, I see you sitting in the dark and doubting, would call “God.” None of that is necessary. And many of those other research sources I encountered in my years of reading back this up. The archetypes of the collective unconscious are manifest everywhere. People keep having the same kinds of visions everywhere, in every era. It keeps happening. If you have ears to hear, if you have eyes to see.

This doesn't require a divine explanation, it appears to just be a simple human birthright, accessible to all. Perhaps a bit more accessible to some than others. Nor can it be adequately explained away as neurological pathology, because its fruits are always, in the original tales of the original visions, life-affirming rather than denying. Light brings light into the world.

Of course, as Jung once said, the brighter the light the greater the shadow that is cast; and it is in the shadows that religious hatreds grow and fester. But it's easy to prove simply through textual study that those who preach hate are in doing so contradicting the teachings in their own holy books. What thrives in the shadows is fear, and the thrust for power.

But a great mystic once said: will you choose the love of power, or the power of love? If as a gay man who is a mystic I have any doctrine that I follow, that is it: the love of power, or the power of love?

Coming out as a gay man was tied up in all of this, as I am personally unable to separate the sacred from the sexual. But this inability to separate them is also found throughout the mystical literature of all times and places. It's in there, even if many would prefer to ignore it. Love and the sacrament of sex are so deeply intertwined at the roots of my being that coming out as gay required me to also come out spiritually as a practitioner of sacred technology. By whatever name we give it—magic, Eros, shamanism, mysticism, and many more that could be listed—it is a pragmatic philosophy, based on experience, but with many implications for every part of life that involves the transpersonal, the emotional, the relational, and the spiritual.

I choose the power of love.

My spirituality is of the Light, and of Love.

Green Man Project 3: Desert Colors

Green Man Project 2

•

green man gold
autumn rest
till spring

winter sleep
long snow spell
under leaves

dream cast
coat of prayers
across a sea

a sigh, a slumber
inside green crucible
life is remade

reborn
alchemy
of flesh

from brown
to awakening
teeth of mother nature

Green Man Project

Early November, warm day, clear skies.

Gathered up a lot of maple leaves from the beautiful golden tree out back, shedding its leaves in a yellow circle on the green lawn. Spirit of autumn. Put the leaves in a basket to bring indoors. Then, with the assistance of my artist friend Alex, made several self-portraits, some shamanic, others purely erotic, of myself as the Green Man emerging from the bed of leaves.





This feels like a photo shoot that becomes the raw material for a new series of digital artworks. Move the images into Photoshop, work with them to create mythopoetic, shamanic art, full of layers and complexities, all of it about life, death, the cycle, the turn of the Wheel of the Year.





Death and rebirth, the Horned One, the Green Man, the Great God Pan, dying in autumn to be reborn in spring. My own quasi-death and rebirth this past year, coming back to life now after brushing close to the other worlds.



Other photos we made are more explicitly erotic than these. I need to work those ideas some more before I present them. Images of my erect phallus emerging from a bed of leaves, like new growth emerging from the forest floor.



Symbol of the phallic archetype of fertility. More purely connected to the archetype of the fertility deity, the Green Man, the Greening itself the source and circle of life. Life and love and sex and death all intertwined. The celebration of return of life.



Leaves covering the skin and revealing the surgical scar. Return to life, victory over death, rebirth. This is all tied together for me now: even my sexual expression lately has been about affirming life over death, each sexual experience, each orgasm, a celebration of survival, of life, of overcoming the impossible.



At the end of this photo shoot, a last-minute discovery that putting the leaves up to the light of the setting sun, and photographing them with the macro lens, backlit, yields some fascinating abstract colors and forms. I made enough of these latter images to start work on assembling a stock photo set of abstract patterns from natural forms. I'll probably go leaf-hunting and do some more of these later.

Body Knowing

from The Surgery Diaries

Struggling as I have the past few days with the realization that I am living inside a post-surgery depression episode, I am also struggling from time to time with impatience and annoyance at the ostomy appliance. This morning, it’s coming loose, in a welter of itching and smells. I have been straining at its limits. Yesterday I tool the longest walk yet since the surgery, probably a mile total, in the hot afternoon. Between taking a shower, my own sweating, and my increased physical activity, of bending and walking and being more physical, I stress the adhesive to its limits, and this morning the appliance is coming off. Today is a scheduled day for changing it anyway, but it’s impatient.

So am I. I’m supposed to wait for the nursing staff to call me and show up to supervise, as I have decided to change it myself this morning, and in my impatience I’m only going to wait so long before I dive in. I’m also hungry, having slept deeply by not as long as usual, and waking up early before this dawn’s dramatic thunderstorm line rolled through. It’s been hours since I awoke, and I want to eat. But I want to change the appliance first, so that I am not excreting while trying to make the change. I’m hungry, and I’m also thinking about food, because I haven’t eaten yet, and also because today is Saturday, and I want to go down to the local farmer’s market, to buy some fresh vegetables and other goods. The best food I can make for myself, in my recovery, is made from good fresh organic produce. And I have to make an effort to go find it, on market days. So I don’t want to miss out of visiting the market, if the nurse takes too long to get here.

This morning I am reading another book about the theology of the body. That’s a recurring pattern in what I am interested to read, ever since last year’s near death experience of almost dying from anemia, the emergency blood transfusions, and the several close calls I have had since then. Five transfusions over the past year or so means that I feel gratitude to ten strangers, one stranger per bag of red blood cells that I was given, for saving my life. Literally. Some of those near approaches to dying I am still unsure how I fell about. My emotions are sometimes still numb, still uncertain, even while at other times I am flooded with emotions, grief, anger, rage, frustration, impatience, and the like, far in excess of the strength of the trigger. When I am triggered lately I overreact to an excessive degree. Another sign of depression. How I tend to manifest depression is these emotional mood swings, coupled with feelings of utility, hopelessness, despair, helplessness, and isolation. All of which have been strongly with me lately.

The book I am reading this morning is Melanie May’s A Body Knows: A Theopoetics of Death and Resurrection. The writing style, which the author herself admits comes from living too long in her head while an academic, even as her body put her through illnesses and near death experiences, to wake her up to the body’s attentive and aware reality, is discursive, and occasionally distracting. I like what May is saying throughout this book, but she is a little too fond of poetic alliteration, even in her prose sections. She does include her poems that reflect on her experience, which is wise, although they too are a bit too alliterative. Maybe that’s an unconscious Anglo-Saxon influence rising to the surface. Maybe it’s too many years being an academic wordsmith. Regardless, I overlook my small annoyance at her writing style to get at the meat of her argument, which is profound and good.

I am reading books like this because they reflect on my own ongoing experience of death and resurrection. I have died, been killed, been gutted, been stuffed, been changed, and brought back to life. Brought back to life in the full knowledge that I am going to be killed, regutted, restrung, knitted back together, and will face an even worse, more painful, more enduring recovery process. The second surgery is going to be worse than the first, I am promised. So I will die again, with no guarantee of being reborn that time. I sowed together my affairs as best I could before this first surgery, in case I did literally die; I will need to go through all that again.

Okay, the nurse is here. Pause for a change of bags, pause for chatting, pause for a meal, and for going to the farmer’s market.

In her book, Melanie May cites some other writers who have been through the forge of death and rebirth, and weaves some of their stories through the threads of her own.

I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other.
—Audre Lorde

Worthy of touch. My own body often feels touch-deprived. When I receive a massage, or a backrub, or a loving touch, it is near ecstasy for me. There are reasons I feel touch-starved; chief among them is the dynamic balance between being a very sensual, physically erotic person, and being raised in a birth tribe that was touch-withholding.

I was five years old, in India, when during nap time, I snuck out of the house and across the yard to the concrete washing area, where the servants would wash and beat wet clothing against the concrete, rinse clothes in the vat, and later hang them to dry on lines in the hot tropical sun, where they would dry quickly. I would sneak out during after nap time, and go out to the washing area, and take off all my clothes, so that I could feel the sunlight and air on my skin. I vividly remember how the hot sun felt on my skin, the smell of soap and water lingering on the concrete tubs, the quiet afternoon sounds coming from other parts of the compound off in the distance. That was the beginning of a lifetime of preferring to be naked rather than clothed. I still prefer to be nude, whenever possible. I make allowances for social niceties, of course, but most of my friends know that my home is clothing-optional, and nobody worries if they’re startled in the middle of the night by someone else up and going to the bathroom, naked.

Worthy of touch. That’s also about self-esteem: you have to feel that you’re worthy of being loved, that you deserve to be loved. That was a hard one for me to learn. My Norwegian immigrant relatives, emotionally reserved and touch-withholding, were never good about expressing true feelings. I was a sissy boy who cried easily, and that wasn’t always approved of. On those rare occasions when I decided it was worth it to put my foot down, and refuse to budge about something, no one could move me, or get past the infinite reserves of determination I could summon. I have memories from my teen years of occasionally refusing to do some form of expected participation during family gatherings, and the ripples of unrest that caused in the clan. But I would not be moved, once I set myself down. That was an early lesson in genuine self-esteem that I didn’t myself understand till much later in life, when I realized that my self-esteem was rock-solid when it really mattered, even though I felt tattered and wind-blown a lot of the rest of the time.

Worthy of touch. Another, more private aspect of that is the problematic fact that I was born with most of those psychic powers you hear about from folktales from my Celtic ancestry already switched on. Touching people meant reading their minds, and so touch was often unpleasant and uncomfortable for me. Touching objects often meant picking up impressions from them, which some people call psychometry, but which I called in my youth losing my mind to the influences of others. My sense of self was often a tattered flag blowing this way and that in every gust of external wind. Touching people caused me pain, even though I was a sensual person, and craved touch. Touching objects sometimes was just as bad. I learned to keep my hands to myself.

So there was a lot of opportunities for love that were lost in my youth. I really wanted to cuddle in my grandfather’s lap, but I didn’t always feel like I could. I really wanted to hug everybody I loved all the time, but I often held back. Few people were safe to touch.

Revealing one’s nakedness . . . is, really, our only human hope.
—James Baldwin

If you think this is some sort of repressed memory or fictionalized abuse scenario, you’re an idiot, and you can fuck off. I was never abused, never molested, I remember my childhood in amazing detail, and it was mostly a very good childhood. The difficulties I had were mostly internal, trying to reconcile my emotions and experiences against what other people told me could and could not be true. Grow up psychically sensitive in a materialistic culture and family that denies the mere existence of anything spiritual, except on an mostly intellectual level, and you’ll know what I mean. Even my parents’ church, which was a very rational brand of Lutheranism, believed that miracles did happen back in Biblical times, but such things couldn’t possibly happen now, in the rational, materially scientific, post-Enlightenment present day. One advantage my Catholic friends had growing up, despite the many dysfunctions of the Catholic church, is that Catholicism still recognized the possibility of mysticism and Mystery. That’s is Catholicism’s most positive example amongst the many sects of modern Christianity.

It is far easier, even now, for me, in the context of this culture I live in, to “come out” as gay, as sexually Other, as an androgynous male who can both lecture you about Italian opera, music history, and music theory, and also run a chainsaw, then it is to “come out” spiritually, psychically, energetically. It was only in my thirties that I began to meet other people who did not try to commit me to a mental institution when I talked about any of this stuff. At the present time, one of my most important spiritual directors and guides is a professional teacher and medical intuitive, and the other one is a professional counselor and clairvoyant. You cannot understand the meaning of the word “validation” until your deepest, most private, most innermost secret is accepted as nothing extraordinary by someone you respect and even love. Reveal your nakedness: it is the most frightening thing that you will ever do, to reveal your soul’s nakedness. Walking around the house nude is nothing by comparison. Because of my current medical situation, this death and rebirth and death and rebirth, most of my medical team, nurses, doctors, support family and friends, have seen parts of my body most people don’t who aren’t my lovers, out of medical necessity, out of medical need. But even most of them have never seen my this naked, the kind of nakedness that is revealed when I drop the inner veils.

In the beginning was definitely not the Word. . . . It is flesh that makes the words.
—Naomi Goldenberg

Melanie May includes her poetry in her book on what the body knows, because poetry was her first response to her medical and spiritual crises. The poetry came first, the academic thinking and theory and analysis came later. Flesh comes first, the body-knowing I’ve experienced myself, the wisdom of the flesh to tell you to stop and rest when in your mind you could keep going a little bit further, the intelligence of pain that warns you have gone too far already. First comes the body-knowing, and the body-prayer. The body prays in its own way; to the chattering mind, that usually looks like stillness, or emptiness. All too often we mislabel body-prayers as laziness. What the body is doing is stopping to breathe, to rest, to contemplate, to recharge. If we are wise, we listen, and go along with the body. Most people these days live in their heads, though, and don’t listen to body-wisdom or body-prayers.

Before my own first surgery, I was illuminated within to see the body-wisdom of a gay man who I know via the Internet pose nude while hiking, with a walking stick, his beautiful eyes looking out of the frame into you, his beautiful, sensual body resting while hiking outdoors—and an old, incredibly powerful scar running down his midline. Seeing his scar, which he lives with so well, nude, outdoors, loving and happy, gave me the courage to face acquiring surgical incision scars of my own. I feel a body-deep gratitude whenever I think of my friend and this portrait of his revealed and scarred beautiful nakedness.

Now, one thing the surgery has taught me is a deepening of my already-existing practice of listening to my body and its need and desires. Some days my body wants to run, is born to run, or these days at least walk fast. Other days all we want to do is lie in the sun, and let the lizard-brain achieve conscious dominance. And that’s enough.

After body-prayer comes, in order, poetry. The body precedes the words. The body exists before the words, and creates the Word. I am just enough of a classic Bard to know how the word must be rooted in the soul, and cloaked in music. You touch people through the music you drape the words in. Even the music comes before the words, and takes precedence. I feel sad for those writers so word-oriented they never experience the precedence of wordlessness and body-prayer; such folk live so thoroughly in their heads, I have noticed, that they don’t even realize they live in a gilded cage.

[Poetry is] . . . the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
—Audre Lorde

We make poems so we can think things we never thought before. That’s certainly been true of the writing of some of my own poems, in particular those which were attempts to put into words visionary, sensual, and bodily experiences I have had. Some poems are nothing but reports of visionary experiences, shamanic, mystical, whatever label you wish to apply. We constantly have to make poems to make new words to understand the new ways of thinking and experiencing that evolve throughout our lives, if we are open to body-prayer and the poetics of existence.

Old words do not reach across the new gulfs.
—Amos Wilder

Language is fossil poetry.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first body of knowing is silent, is silence itself. The next body of knowing is the poetry that emerges from silence, and from hearing the wind within the walls of the world. The next body of knowing that emerges is the fossil poetry that becomes the language we use to describe, to explain, and to explain away and rationalize, what we have learned from the preceding and pre-verbal knowings.

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[Note: I'm not posting all of these essays in order of composition, but in order of my momentary interest. This essays was written 8.20.2011.]

All I Really Wanted

from The Surgery Diaries

This was originally written a month or two before my surgery, when I was thinking about matters. The surgery has had and will have an impact on my sexuality, as well as on my spirit, body, emotions, and other aspects of self. Last week I had several days of what can only be called, in retrospect, post-surgery depression. The surgical staff tells me that's normal, and so was everything else I was feeling last week, and asked them about. Lots of internal sensations that I questioned, all of which they were familiar with. It's actually good to know that I'm not unique, that I'm feeling things other people have felt. That gives me hope that I'll recover as well those other people have.

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April/May 2011

I've enjoyed chatting with a gay friend on his blog thread about three-way sexual experiences, and the questions and issues surrounding them. As I said there, I've been involved with good three-ways a couple of times. But I was lucky to be involved with mature, stable people, who were willing to talk openly about what they wanted and expected, and were all respectful of each others' feelings. Communication being the most essential thing, as always. My experience may be the exception to the rule, I don't know, but I do feel lucky. A great discussion of the topic, regardless.

And it got me thinking.

I've posted a few personal ads in recent months, although nothing has happened. I've spent a fair bit of time thinking, therefore, about what I really want, sexually, right now—which doesn't mean forever, just right now—and I've spent a fair bit of time talking these things over with one or two of my closest gay male friends. Thinking it through out loud. Working it out by talking it through.

I cannot find it in me to judge anyone for undertaking any sexual experience that brings more love and joy into the world. Shared joy is always increased, just as shared pain is always diminished. Even those sexual practices that don't interest me, or downright turn me off, if they bring more joy and love into someone's world, I don't have it in me to judge them.

I cannot find it in me to want to spend the energy it takes to meet the expectations of others, especially their unspoken and hidden expectations, when those expectations require me to be less than I am, or to change myself to meet their neuroses halfway. I ,i>will spend the effort to meet someone halfway who is being as honest and open with me as I am being with them. I will do my best to make sure that he has the best, most satisfying, most pleasurable playtime that I can give him: his joy is my joy, and I'm other-directed enough to want to be sure that anyone I am making love with gets off, too, even if I got off first.

So, what sort of sex play am I talking about here?

Honestly, most of my sex lately has been self-pleasure. I actually really enjoy a good wank, and I get very good orgasms. Sometimes I just ooze, some other times I spurt all the way to the ceiling. It depends on how turned on I am (and my physical energy level that day, which is dictated by my medical situation's effect on my daily energy budget). Sometimes I jerk off to pics I find online—I'm not into video porn very much, I prefer to linger over erotic still photographs, and besides most porn soundtracks are awful. I really don't own any porn. Almost as often, I just pleasure myself while using my imagination to conjure from memory or fantasy who I want to be with today. Solo sex can be very fulfilling sex. It's not a "substitute" for intercourse, nor is it "second best." In some ways, masturbation is the best sex I get, because, hey, I love who I'm with, and I know exactly how to please him. Seriously, there's no better way to learn about how a partner can give you pleasure (of course you have to tell them how) then by learning how to give pleasure to yourself.

With guys, I find myself these days mostly into cock and touch and play, rather than fucking. I find myself enjoying keeping it light, horny, even just mutual oral or sitting on the couch jerking off together while we both watch each other. I also like just hanging out nude, before and after, talking, having a cup of tea nude. Showering together after. I suppose for some this is all vanilla, but for now it suits me to keep it light and fun and mostly cock-oriented and with lots of rubbing. I really like frottage, for example. Pleasure rather than pain.

I've discovered real pleasure in something that isn't exactly a fetish, but is a little kinky: Masturbating his cock with my foot. (And vice versa.) I discovered how much pleasure that could give by accident, when I was playing around with a cute guy some years ago in San Francisco. He had a partial physical handicap, a twisted arm, a limp, a couple of other things; we were lying naked on his bed, facing each other, and I just sort of spontaneously moved my foot into his crotch, and he did reciprocated, and we both liked the sensations a lot.

I'm a very sensual person, anyway. I love lots of touch. I love being naked, hanging out nude at home, or out camping and hiking when far out in the wilds where no one can see us. I like nude hiking. I like being naked even when it isn't sexual! So this foot-play thing was a pretty cool discovery.

What do I want, right now?

Well, if anyone ever responded to one my personal ads, I would love to get naked together and play. I would say yes to a three-way, probably, if one materialized, if I felt the other guys were okay to both be with, and if we talked through our parameters beforehand. (The last triad I had was a cold winter night just over a year ago, and it was good. I was staying over at a friend's place to avoid having to drive home in a blizzard, between two consecutive concert nights. He and his old lover were both nudists, and the fireplace was warm. So it was very natural to move from mutual nakedness in the living room to mutual lovemaking in the bedroom, all three of us.)

My medical situation and my music-writing work right now make it unlikely I'll get into a long-term romantic relationship. So casual but loving sex is all I need. I don't need a 'relationship" just now (although I always keep that door open), but friends with benefits, getting together for mutual release and pleasure every so often, would be great.

I have to be at least a little bit in love with every man I have sex with. The emotional connection has to be there for me. In fact, casual sex only works for me if we connect on the energetic level, too. And casual sex with repeat sex would cement that, I think.

Otherwise, I'm perfectly content, just now, with everything else that's going on, to just have sex with myself. Once a day, on average lately; sometimes again before bedtime. Depending on the medical moment, and how it affects my day. Some days I ache, and am too tired.

You see, the thing is—and I know this will sound weird to some people—I like my cock. I always have. I like its size, I like shape, I know how to play it like a piano, and it gives me great pleasure. What more could a (gay) man ask for?

Open Up the Windows

Because of recent powerful, life-changing events—my illness, first surgery, and recovery, principally—I've been thinking over again what I want to do here. I've decided that I'm going to continue to publish my LGBT related materials here, for the most part, although with a few other goodies, but I'm going to drop my reticence. I'm going to open up the windows and doors and let in all the fresh air and sunlight that I can.

I'm going to be more explicit here, and more personal. I need a place to organize some more personal writings, even some sexually explicit ones, both old and new. More precisely, some personal writings that do not censor themselves with regard to sexual and psychological and spiritual matters. I have a need, at this time, to write through my present life, with nothing held back.

For me sexuality and spirituality are deeply intertwined, and always have been. I want to write more openly and publicly about these, now. I have things to say, some of it no doubt radical and controversial, especially the spiritual materials, which are always more controversial than the sexual, but they need to be said, if only for my own benefit. This process of illness, surgery and recovery has profoundly (and predictably) affected me on many levels, and is in the midst of permanently transforming my life. That process is still ongoing, although I've already sorted out a few things that are really important to me from those that no longer seem so important. Modesty and self-censorship don't nearly as important as they used to; I don't believe I've suddenly become more courageous as a writer, rather I've become less willing to spend any effort on editing myself so as to not offend family and friends.

I need to keep writing the poems, notes, essays, and other pieces that fall under the umbrella of what I am now calling The Surgery Diaries. Last year I began with The Anemia Diaries, but these writings about my medical journey have now become a much deeper, more engaging project. i intend to include here writings and artworks all pertaining to my medical journey, the long chronic illness, the surgery process which I am not done with, and my recovery. I need to write these things for my self first. Not all of it will be pretty, but all of it will be honest. I know I don't have many followers here, yet I do want feedback on this, of whatever kind becomes manifest. I will be posting here more frequently than I have before, no doubt.

As for honesty and explicitness, it really comes from having lost any sense of privacy or personal modesty already. I've previously been a very private person, although I've never been that personally modest.

Consider this scenario: You're in your hospital room the days after surgery, wearing one of those gowns that open in the back. The surgeons and nurses all left up your hem to look at your wound, to change your dressing, occasionally to give you a sponge bath, or check your epidural. You're not wearing anything under the gown. Lots of people see you naked, scarred, vulnerable, and exposed. And you're far from the only patient the nurses and doctors see naked and wounded every hour of every day. There's no point in even trying to be body-shy. You need all your energy for your healing, so wasting energy on inconsequentials drops right off the radar.

I've never been that body-shy anyway, though. As an adult man, I've always had more of a "Body by Buddha" than "Body by Charles Atlas" thing going for me; I'm nothing special, so I don't worry about it. But even as a small boy, I'd never been all that modest about nudity, full or partial. There were summers in my early teens when the only item of clothing I wore for days on end, for as long as I could get away with it, was gym shorts and sneakers. I rarely wear clothes around the house, especially when on my own. With some of my closest friends, my apartments and homes have been a clothing-optional zone for years, anyway.

When I was first home from the hospital, and the home-visit nurses were first getting to know me, one asked me if I wanted privacy for showering, which I do during the process of changing the ostomy bag, which I couldn't do by myself at first. I laughed and said, Look, this is a process in which privacy and body modesty have already gone by the wayside, and as for dignity, well that was pretty much a lost cause right now, too. We all laughed, I dropped my shorts, took a shower, dried off, put my shorts back on, and we proceeded with changing the ostomy bag. At this point, they've all seen me nearly of fully naked anyway, so there's no point in pretending to be shy.

The process of illness and healing has re-sorted my attitudes and priorities. I'm far more likely to answer the door nude than I ever have before, although I do keep clothes on hand. I'm nothing special to look at, as I know only too well, especially now that I have to wear an ostomy bag all the time, and I don't inflict myself on the unprepared. But in truth I don't care anymore: I'm just being polite. If it were an urgent medical matter, I wouldn't bother putting the shorts on first, I'd just answer the door. It's all about priorities.

One major life-lesson that has come out of this process is that what really matters in life is who you love, how you love them, and how you live your life. Everything else is pretty much unimportant by contrast, and not worth spending much energy on.

So I plan to go back through the random notes and jottings I've been writing here and there, from last year's near-death experience from anemia, from the time right before my surgery, up to the present. A lot of these are going to be more like diary or journal entries than I've ever posted before; but I want to organize and edit and present them in an organized manner, mostly so I can keep a log of the changes I am going through. I want to collect and compile what I'm going through, for no other reason than to gather it all in one place.

I used to use my long-standing Road Journal and Road Journal podcast archives for this purpose, but I realize now that the way I write and present this material has changed. My approach has changed. I don't feel like I've abandoned the Road Journal, although I'm way behind on updating it. That's an ongoing memoir project that still has value to me. At some point I still intend to bring it up to the present date. But even the Road Journal left some things out. I was always aware that it was a public forum, with a fairly large following, so I didn't talk too personally about some topics. That's all changed now. I don't feel the need to avoid any topic, for the duration of my illness and recovery.

Still, I find myself regarding The Surgery Diaries as a separate writing project, like a chapbook of poems on one theme, separated out from the general run of writing. That's my approach, here and now. And I intend to be more honest and explicit than ever before, regarding both the good and the bad in my life. I need to do this, as I said, as a way of tracking my own progress as I go through this extended healing process. I want to be able to sort things out in my own mind, and writing about them, and making art about them, remains one of the best tools I have for that.

Book Reviews: Sex, Music & Poetry

An ongoing series of short reviews of interesting LGBT books from my personal library.



David Guy, The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the paradox of sex. (1999) This book covers a lot of psychological terrain, and asks many questions important to us all, LGBT or otherwise. About half of the people profiled, interviewed, or examined are queer or bi or openly affirming; including Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Kramer, and Alan Watts. Basically this book revolves around a key question: is sexuality the enemy that must be subdued before one can have a powerful spiritual practice? or is it rather a vehicle for enlightenment, as well as a powerful creative force in its own right? There are no simple or definitive answers to these questions—but there are long-enduring traditions of spirituality that accept sexuality and harnesses its power, ranging from Tantric rites through affirming literature. The author responds to the question by focusing on his own life and spiritual practice, and by examining the lives and work of people who were pioneers about affirming that sex and spirit are not-two, but one. Sex workers are discussed as well as poets and meditators; this is no cerebral, academic book. There is understanding that the reconciliation of sex and spirit will always be paradoxical, as is recognized in the examples of several Zen masters who were promiscuous rather than celibate; and in the Zen koan that gives the book its title: "Why is it that the most clear-eyed monk cannot sever the red thread of passion between his legs?" It's part of the paradox, not surprisingly, that there is a great deal of mysticism around sex: the sexual experience itself can be a mystical experience, with all that that entails. Very highly recommended.

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John Gill, Queer Noises: Male and female homosexuality in Twentieth Century music. (1995) One of the first of its kind, and still one of the better ones, this book looks at a wide range of composers, performers, and musicians, all queer, all famous. The book is easy and fun reading without being fluffy; Gill can be very opinionated, and ask hard questions. Some of the names covered here in the book's 18 chapters: Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Boy George, Pet Shop Boys, Gary Burton, Bessie Smith, Billy Strayhorn. Some of the chapters are studies of the impact of queer people on specific musical genres—but Gill also examines the gay cultural response to performers who were inspired by gay subcultures, or inspired them in return, by emphasizing sexual ambiguity or metrosexuality: David Bowie, Madonna, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Janis Joplin, etc. There is also extensive reporting on pop music's connection to civil rights organizing, LGBT activism, and queer political responses to social problems; the book actually grew out of political activism, which accounts for some of its tone at times. Nonetheless, there's lots of meat in this book, even as the writing style is breezy and quick. It's the sort of book LGBTs into all kinds of music will greatly enjoy, and probably learn something they'd never known about before.

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David Rees, Words and Music. (1993) David Rees was an influential critic, gay author, and reviewer in Britain until his death just as this book was published. What we have here are almost two dozen longer review-essays, most never published prior to this book, covering both music and literature. Sometimes Rees is a bit harsh in his opinions, but in many ways I think his critical assessments are right on target. (He explains just why Edmund White is overrated as a gay fiction writer; an assessment I've always shared, but could never articulate why exactly, before Rees explained the problem.) What I like about Rees is his ability to separate the artist's reputation from the quality of each individual work: where a writer succeeds, Rees can show why, and where a composer may have in fact done something completely original, you find out why; simultaneously, weak spots, weak books, bad compositions, are not ignored but called what they are. Fans of certain writers and composers will no doubt feel some ire if one of their idols is chastened in one these 20 essays; but you'll also be introduced to assessments of the artists in question from a gay perspective, which was completely new when Rees was writing, and is still a fresh viewpoint.

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Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A gay life. (1997) The first and still singular study to look at Whitman's life and poetry from an explicitly gay perspective, explaining the powerful connections between Whitman's life as a lover of men and his legacy as a landmark, paradigm-changing poet. There are four major sections in the book, roughly chronologically showing Whitman's growth as an artist and person. But there is also a personal essay from the author that tells of the impact of Whitman on the author's life; and a section devoted to exploring the similarities and differences between Whitman and Oscar Wilde, who Schmidgall has also written about. This is a very long book, citing its material rigorously if not tediously. It draws extensively from Whitman's correspondence, private journals, and poetry; there's no doubt material in here you've never heard of before. Schmidgall's argument is compelling, and well-supported by the documents: that Whitman was a very sexual man, ardently pursuing his love affairs which in turn fueled his creative energy: ecstasy pursued and achieved in worlds both personal and literary. I won't say that this is the easiest book you'll ever read about Whitman, but once you get into it, it's a real page-turner, very engrossing. Highly recommended.