Gathering thoughts into focus, scattered from months of being unsatisfied. Mostly settling on what doesn't work, and what I don't want to do anymore. Realizing that nobody's perfect, and nothing is likely to come of it—not saying that out of cynicism, but out of exhaustion. I've been sick and tired so long that I'm sick and tired of feeling sick and tired—I mean that literally, not metaphorically. All the poems in the world don't stand up to one long musical interlude.
Of All Things Most Yielding, the album
Have to be Taoist about it. Have to realize that going with the flow means letting go. I trust that which I already know to be trustworthy, and let go of the rest.
Of All Things Most Yielding
Tired of doing all the work. Tired of looking. Tired of waiting. Tired of being overlooked.
Tired of even the good encounters that lead to nothing enduring. And there have been good encounters. One time events, one time get-togethers that led to a few ecstatic hours, never to be repeated, no matter how often it's been tried. Schedules, desires, personal needs, narcissistic self-centered impatience. The good encounters never seem to want to come back. The ones I didn't get much satisfaction out of seem to want to.
Tired of driving a few hours to meet someone for unsatisfactory sex, then having to drive home. Or, worse, pick him up then drop him off again. I'm the older, sicker one, yet I still have to do all the work? Is it worth it? Not but rarely.
Tired of men who are constitutionally unable to be honest with themselves, and so spend most of their time and energy dancing around the volcano rather than leaping in. Tired of picking up the pieces. Tired of putting up with their dances of denial, plus seven veils. Let's cut right to the bottom line, since I can see through the veils, anyway, as though they weren't there. That probably scares some men away at the start, because they can sense it on some level.
Tired of living rural and isolated. Everybody wants to just be friends.
Well, when I was trying to hang out my shingle as a bodyworker and energy worker, I never had any repeat clients, either. Lots of clients came to me once, had an amazing experience on my table, sometimes life-changing, sometimes visionary, and never came back again. Not even for a follow-up when they needed it. So I'm used to one-time-only visits, on many levels.
And you tire of it. There's no satisfaction in things that never endure.
Tired of sex without love, even good sex without love. Not going to say No to good sex, anytime soon, because in truth I'm told I give great sex. Maybe it's the energy work skills, the Tantric experience and training, and I'm told I blow minds. Maybe it's too much. Maybe it blows fuses, and is more than they want to deal with. Maybe that's why they never come back.
The energy work clients never came back, either. Maybe it's because they really weren't ready to change their lives. No shame in that: most people aren't. Most people would rather cling to the bars of the hellhole cage they know rather than squarely face the Unknown. I used to be that way, too, till the bars got taken away and I started to live for real. But maybe not that many people are ready for that. So I blow minds, so I blow fuses, so I'm intense to be around—all things I've been told.
At the end of the say, the shaman doesn't live in the village. He has to live on the hill nest to the village, because he's too scary to be around, or so the villagers feel. Too much Weird Shit happens around him.
Still, it would be nice if the occasional young men came to visit.
Tired of feeling alone, for whatever reason. Maybe it's all your fault; maybe it's an energy thing; maybe it really is that you're too intense. It doesn't matter when the end result is the same: another night alone.
Tired of being hypersensitive and hypersensory. If you could turn it off, you would. Or maybe not. There's pleasure in the extra senses, not just Work, not just Professional encounters. There's joy in being of service to others.
Tired of attracting broken men for their healing (and not my own). Tired of being the sexual healer. Tired beyond belief of being put on whatever pedestal is in season this year. Tired of being everybody's guru and nobody's boyfriend. Tired of unequal relationships. Tired of being a magnet for men who need to be fixed, who once they're fixed fall out of love with me and vanish. Tired of being the Dragon Finishing School for Men's Sexual Healing & Personal Growth.
Tired of not being with peers, with equals, with someone you could talk to about mutual interests on the same level. Tired of meeting men who are frankly cute but dumb. Tired of the lack of dinner conversation that isn't about sex or other aspects of gay life.
Extremely well-educated, but living in Coventry is getting old. Extremely willing to go out of my way to be with the right man—but no longer willing to do so without some reciprocity. No longer willing to exhaust myself doing all the work of either meeting up or being in a relationship in general. You can come to me. I have a nice private place, which is warm, comfortable, and always clothing-optional.
Tired of the offensiveness of pit given by those who think it's all about the sex, and not about the companionship. Tired of men who don't want to grow old in a relationship with any other man mostly because they're terrified of growing old, period. Tired of the narcissism of youth culture, even when it's expressed by older men, or conversely damned by them. Older men who don't get younger men aren't showing their maturity when they demand an impossible perfection. They should know better. You can't force anyone to be what you want them to be, even if what you want them to be is good for all involved. You can't make people be better than they want to be; they have to want to, and it's their choice.
Tired of men repeating their same relationships mistakes because they lack the self-awareness to notice and break their own bad habits. Tired of people who prefer to live unconsciously because they think it's easier, even when it's not. Tired of the lack of personal responsibility that people take for their own lives.
I'm just tired.
I have a lot to offer. I like what I like. I like guys who are heart-smart as well as intellectually smart. Nothing bores me like insincerity. And I usually can read your mind, because most people are transparent to me, always have been. What interests me is someone who knows who he is already, is comfortable living in his skin, and doesn't need me or anyone else to complete his life or make him feel more like a whole person. Looking for a man who's already a whole person, who already likes himself. The poet Rilke once wrote that love is "two solitudes meeting," which means leaving space for each other. I love spending time with the people I love; and I also love my solitude. An hour of silence and solitude every morning is the best anti-depressant I know; I'm better off with it than without. As much as I would love spending time with you, even just sitting reading in the same room together, not talking, exchanging few words, the sense of your presence would anchor our lives into the bedrock of Home. There's no place like Home.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Survival
I look at some of the people I know who are living with HIV, with AIDS, with cancer, who live with these and other life-threatening illnesses and situations, and I want to say to them:
You're a survivor.
You're tougher than you ever imagined you were, or needed to be. You've proven yourself to be tougher than you thought by your quiet action of living through what has killed so many others. You might not feel like a hero, but you are.
Maybe that's small comfort, some days, yet it's what gets us through. The difference between a hero and a coward is that a hero runs towards the battle, not away from it. Think about that, on those darkest of days.
Adam, from Spiral Dance
I've had some serious dark days myself, and I have had been down some similar roads. I've come close to my personal extinction, and I live with a (non-AIDS) permanent chronic illness, that takes a huge toll on my lifeforce and energy. Comparisons don't really matter, though. What matters is that we survive, and live, and thrive. Sod anybody who tries to pull you down to their sordid and sorrowful level. Those who try to drag you down do so because they can't stand being reminded that someone might get out of the black hole they call home. They've forgotten a really important lesson:
Why do we fall?
To learn to pick ourselves up again.
Beach Prayer (2005)
You're a survivor.
You're tougher than you ever imagined you were, or needed to be. You've proven yourself to be tougher than you thought by your quiet action of living through what has killed so many others. You might not feel like a hero, but you are.
Maybe that's small comfort, some days, yet it's what gets us through. The difference between a hero and a coward is that a hero runs towards the battle, not away from it. Think about that, on those darkest of days.
Adam, from Spiral Dance
I've had some serious dark days myself, and I have had been down some similar roads. I've come close to my personal extinction, and I live with a (non-AIDS) permanent chronic illness, that takes a huge toll on my lifeforce and energy. Comparisons don't really matter, though. What matters is that we survive, and live, and thrive. Sod anybody who tries to pull you down to their sordid and sorrowful level. Those who try to drag you down do so because they can't stand being reminded that someone might get out of the black hole they call home. They've forgotten a really important lesson:
Why do we fall?
To learn to pick ourselves up again.
Beach Prayer (2005)
Monday, March 22, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
The Gay Warlords
In these days when the US military's standing policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" supposedly allows gays and lesbians to serve in the armed forces, so long as they keep a low profile, we need to remember that the original form of that benighted policy included "Don't Pursue," yet thousands of servicemen and women have been pursued, discriminated against, and expelled from the US armed forces: pursued, even though they hadn't been asked, hadn't told. So now the Joint Chiefs of Staff are being told to review the DADT policy. Some are in favor of reviewing it; others are benightedly coming up with ever more irrational and arcane reasons to support their prejudices against gays openly serving. Of all the NATO allied nations, the so-called First World, all the nations allow gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military, except the United States, Russia, and China. The so-called superpowers, current and former, are the most benighted about this issue.
But let's turn back the clock a bit, to the days when the DADT policy was first into place, in the mid-1990s. Amid controversy and acclaim, the US policy was instituted with much fanfare and many attempts to claim that it was an enlightened policy.
Probably the smartest, if most ironic and sideways, response to this came from science prophet and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke was one of the most influential writer-scientists of the 20th C., with numerous visionary books and films to his credit. He was a genuine out-of-the-box thinker. He was also the last survivor of the great Golden Age of science fiction, outliving his friends, and friendly rivals as SF authors, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. In several of Clarke's novels of the future, bisexuality is taken for granted, and with hardly a comment, as the rational recognition of the truth of human behavior. Clarke was an avowed logical positivist, yet many of his most memorable short stories contain some of the most original thinking about God from the 20th C.; enough to have earned him a theologian's credit, should he have desired it.
In his massive 1999 volume, Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!, Collected Essays 1934-1998, Clarke included a previously unpublished ironic piece about DADT. The essay is titled "The Gay Warlords," and is an ironic and scathing indictment of the sense of unreality surrounding the debate. Clarke's essay is therefore worth excerpting at some length, below.
•
It is astonishing that the most important reason for keeping gays out of the armed forces has never beeen widely publicized, despite the fact that even the most casual student of history knows their bloodthirsty record. (Okay, I confess, I'm a closet pacifist, having had a very peaceful war in the Royal Air Force. . . .) [One might add that as an engineer during WWII Clarke made an essential contribution to the development of radar.]
Those archetypal warriors, the Spartans, proudly boasted how they maintained their esprit de corps, with accent on the corps. And Julius Caesar's popularity with his men, who chanted, "Every wife's husband, every husband's wife," after him, was undoubtedly enhanced by his enthusiastic swinging in both directions: vide his youthful affair with the king of Bythinia. However, like most of his coldly calculated actions, this was probably motivated by politics rather than passion.
There's very little of Caesar's ambidextrousness about the two other greatest military leaders of antiquity, Alexander and Hadrian. The seem to have been hetero only rarely, and then entirely for reasons of state. For details, see Mary Renault's The Nature of Alexander and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.
Jumping forward a thousand years or so (and with only a passing glance at the unproved allegations against the Knights Templar), we come to that amazingly well-matched pair of military geniuses, Richard I and Saladin. About Richard's predilections there is no doubt: one of the most piquant incidents in the history of British arms was the occasion when Eleanor of Aquitaine berated the aptly named "Lionheart," in front of his own troops, for his failure to give her a grandchild. (He never did.)
As for Saladin, though he did produce a few offspring, there is considerable evidence that his main interest was elsewhere. . . .
It must be admitted that England's most celebrated royal gays—Edward II and James I—hardly fit the militaristic mold. When James succeeded Elizabeth, the courtiers remarked (out of his hearing), "Once we had a queen who was a king—now we have a king who is a queen." And Marlowe has told us all too graphically how Edward's death reflected his life: I've often wondered how they stage the last act of the play, but don't really want to know. . . .
But the classic textbook specimen of the brutal, brilliant, and pathologically antiheterosexual warrior will be found not in Europe or Asia, but in Africa. During the last year of the—literally—reign of terror that created the Zulu nation, Shaka the Great executed any woman found pregnant, together with their husbands. Nice guy. . . don't know how he expected his empire to continue. But it did, even after his inevitable assassination, and us Brits a lot of trouble. . . . Much of this was self-inflicted; it was in one of these wars that the dead British gunners were found with their fingernails torn out—by themselves, in a desperate attempt to open the ammunition boxes. The storekeeper had forgotten to send the keys; doubtless he was promoted, in the best military tradition of "reward the guilty, punish the innocent."
How/why did I get involved in this grubby line of research? (Thought you'd never ask.) Well, it was triggered by recent revelations about certain multi-decorated Royal Air Force Command war heroes, which reminded me of a long-forgotten scandal here in my adopted country of Sri Lanka. . . .
At the turn of the [20th] century, the commander in chief of the Ceylon forces was a very remarkable man, Sir Hector Macdonald. Winner of his country's highest military award, the Victoria Cross, he was known as the bravest soldier in the British army and had achieved the astonishing feat of being promoted all the way from private to general.
Alas, to the great embarrassment of the local Brits (and doubtless the amusement of everyone else), Fighting Mac was caught in flagrante with some Colombo schoolboys—not the natives, by gad!—at least they were burghers (upper-class Eurasians). Whitehall recalled the general prontissimo; he got as far as Paris, and shot himself. . . .
Maybe the equally brave General Gordon (read between the lines of Lytton Strachey's admittedly biased Eminent Victorians) was lucky: he died at the siege of Khartoum (1885) and so became a national hero. Ditto the widely suspected Lord Kitchener, though his fate was somewhat less valiant; he drowned when his flagship was torpedoed in World War I.
But enough: I consider my thesis proved beyond doubt.
So—
KEEP THESE FEROCIOUS GAYS OUT OF THE ARMED SERVICES!
They're too bloodthirsty and warlike. We need gentle, compassionate soldiers, in the peaceful new world we hope to build.
—Arthur C. Clarke
•
One might add T.E. Lawrence of the Arabian conflict during WWI, among others, whose tastes were definitely towards men and boys. And several homo-warriors.
Reading this Clarke essay was a pleasant surprise; I had no idea till now that he'd ever written anything on the subject. But it oughtn't be a surprise, I suppose, as he was a great writer on a great many topics. Thank you, Sir Arthur.
But let's turn back the clock a bit, to the days when the DADT policy was first into place, in the mid-1990s. Amid controversy and acclaim, the US policy was instituted with much fanfare and many attempts to claim that it was an enlightened policy.
Probably the smartest, if most ironic and sideways, response to this came from science prophet and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke was one of the most influential writer-scientists of the 20th C., with numerous visionary books and films to his credit. He was a genuine out-of-the-box thinker. He was also the last survivor of the great Golden Age of science fiction, outliving his friends, and friendly rivals as SF authors, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. In several of Clarke's novels of the future, bisexuality is taken for granted, and with hardly a comment, as the rational recognition of the truth of human behavior. Clarke was an avowed logical positivist, yet many of his most memorable short stories contain some of the most original thinking about God from the 20th C.; enough to have earned him a theologian's credit, should he have desired it.
In his massive 1999 volume, Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!, Collected Essays 1934-1998, Clarke included a previously unpublished ironic piece about DADT. The essay is titled "The Gay Warlords," and is an ironic and scathing indictment of the sense of unreality surrounding the debate. Clarke's essay is therefore worth excerpting at some length, below.
•
It is astonishing that the most important reason for keeping gays out of the armed forces has never beeen widely publicized, despite the fact that even the most casual student of history knows their bloodthirsty record. (Okay, I confess, I'm a closet pacifist, having had a very peaceful war in the Royal Air Force. . . .) [One might add that as an engineer during WWII Clarke made an essential contribution to the development of radar.]
Those archetypal warriors, the Spartans, proudly boasted how they maintained their esprit de corps, with accent on the corps. And Julius Caesar's popularity with his men, who chanted, "Every wife's husband, every husband's wife," after him, was undoubtedly enhanced by his enthusiastic swinging in both directions: vide his youthful affair with the king of Bythinia. However, like most of his coldly calculated actions, this was probably motivated by politics rather than passion.
There's very little of Caesar's ambidextrousness about the two other greatest military leaders of antiquity, Alexander and Hadrian. The seem to have been hetero only rarely, and then entirely for reasons of state. For details, see Mary Renault's The Nature of Alexander and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.
Jumping forward a thousand years or so (and with only a passing glance at the unproved allegations against the Knights Templar), we come to that amazingly well-matched pair of military geniuses, Richard I and Saladin. About Richard's predilections there is no doubt: one of the most piquant incidents in the history of British arms was the occasion when Eleanor of Aquitaine berated the aptly named "Lionheart," in front of his own troops, for his failure to give her a grandchild. (He never did.)
As for Saladin, though he did produce a few offspring, there is considerable evidence that his main interest was elsewhere. . . .
It must be admitted that England's most celebrated royal gays—Edward II and James I—hardly fit the militaristic mold. When James succeeded Elizabeth, the courtiers remarked (out of his hearing), "Once we had a queen who was a king—now we have a king who is a queen." And Marlowe has told us all too graphically how Edward's death reflected his life: I've often wondered how they stage the last act of the play, but don't really want to know. . . .
But the classic textbook specimen of the brutal, brilliant, and pathologically antiheterosexual warrior will be found not in Europe or Asia, but in Africa. During the last year of the—literally—reign of terror that created the Zulu nation, Shaka the Great executed any woman found pregnant, together with their husbands. Nice guy. . . don't know how he expected his empire to continue. But it did, even after his inevitable assassination, and us Brits a lot of trouble. . . . Much of this was self-inflicted; it was in one of these wars that the dead British gunners were found with their fingernails torn out—by themselves, in a desperate attempt to open the ammunition boxes. The storekeeper had forgotten to send the keys; doubtless he was promoted, in the best military tradition of "reward the guilty, punish the innocent."
How/why did I get involved in this grubby line of research? (Thought you'd never ask.) Well, it was triggered by recent revelations about certain multi-decorated Royal Air Force Command war heroes, which reminded me of a long-forgotten scandal here in my adopted country of Sri Lanka. . . .
At the turn of the [20th] century, the commander in chief of the Ceylon forces was a very remarkable man, Sir Hector Macdonald. Winner of his country's highest military award, the Victoria Cross, he was known as the bravest soldier in the British army and had achieved the astonishing feat of being promoted all the way from private to general.
Alas, to the great embarrassment of the local Brits (and doubtless the amusement of everyone else), Fighting Mac was caught in flagrante with some Colombo schoolboys—not the natives, by gad!—at least they were burghers (upper-class Eurasians). Whitehall recalled the general prontissimo; he got as far as Paris, and shot himself. . . .
Maybe the equally brave General Gordon (read between the lines of Lytton Strachey's admittedly biased Eminent Victorians) was lucky: he died at the siege of Khartoum (1885) and so became a national hero. Ditto the widely suspected Lord Kitchener, though his fate was somewhat less valiant; he drowned when his flagship was torpedoed in World War I.
But enough: I consider my thesis proved beyond doubt.
So—
KEEP THESE FEROCIOUS GAYS OUT OF THE ARMED SERVICES!
They're too bloodthirsty and warlike. We need gentle, compassionate soldiers, in the peaceful new world we hope to build.
—Arthur C. Clarke
•
One might add T.E. Lawrence of the Arabian conflict during WWI, among others, whose tastes were definitely towards men and boys. And several homo-warriors.
Reading this Clarke essay was a pleasant surprise; I had no idea till now that he'd ever written anything on the subject. But it oughtn't be a surprise, I suppose, as he was a great writer on a great many topics. Thank you, Sir Arthur.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
All too easy to be smug rather than compassionate
It's all too easy to smugly mock "political correctness," and the silly excesses of cultural discourse that it can get itself into. In fact mockery has become all too fashionable these days. Everybody does it, even those who otherwise believe in social justice, the rights of diverse people to live by their own beliefs, and freedom. Everybody looks at the silliest excesses of those who act PC, and in doing so they forget that PC had at its root a desire to increase human dignity, social justice, and equal rights.
What I see all too often when people mock PC is that what they're really trying to do is hide the fact that they're deep down in their hearts full of regressive, repressed prejudices and bigotries. You can't change peoples' minds overnight about beliefs and prejudices they learned at their parents' knees. If PC fails, it's because it tries rational argument against deep-rooted emotional prejudices. Even when people want to give up those deep prejudices, and on the surface have done so, deep down they can still be present.
What happens when some people mock PC is that they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the last thing they want to admit to themselves is that they're still, in their own hearts, bigots. They do their best to conceal their shame by shaming others. That's a classic form of psychological projection: make fun of other people for what you don't like about yourself.
The hidden agenda of dismissing PC out of hand is a disguised way of saying that all people aren't created equal and don't deserve to be treated as if they were. Most anti-PC rhetoric is covertly elitist; some of that rhetoric tries to pretend it's populist and egalitarian, but it's really contemptuous of "the people" at core. It's really easy to see this happening as a hidden agenda when some right-wing pundit does it; it's more concealed when those of the left do it, too, although it's possibly more corrosive.
What all the mockery completely, willfully, deliberately wants to overlook is that we still live in a world in which people are put to death or tortured, actively and passively, for being Different, for being Other.
George Orwell once opined that we'll know that totalitarian tyranny has finally taken over the West when the totalitarian arguments all sound their trumpets about Freedom. He was right. And that's exactly what's happened to the country that I live in and love, since 9/11. I've seen civil rights being eroded right and left while people just bent over and took it up their asses about it. I've seen the gap between the haves and the have-nots gape to its widest margin in recorded history. I've seen what Benjamin Franklin, one of the Frames of our Constitution, warn us about, 200 years ago, when he said, "Those who would exchange liberty for security deserve neither."
As for the Salvation Army, fuck them: their hands won't be reaching out to any disaster areas I've ever been at the epicenter of. The day the Salvation Army funds an AIDS Hospice, I'll change my opinion about them, but not before. The Salvation Army remains one of the most regressive and political of relief agencies, with a specific list of peoples they WON'T help. They are selective not because the job of saving the world is too big, but because they are bigoted. Do they do good work? Certainly. Do they do good work evenly amongst all those who need their help? Not at all.
I give money to the Red Cross, and to other similar organizations who really do not have any politics beyond that of compassion, support, and social justice. Amnesty International is about stopping torture and increasing personal freedom and personal dignity—which are prerequisites for social justice. The Sierra Club is about preserving the wilderness for generations to come, to see and enjoy, and remember what the world used to look like.
I'll end with a personal story:
When my father retired from being a doctor, he joined Rotary, as a way to get to meet new people in the community and as a way to participate in doing good social works, which he did all his life. One thing the Rotary members volunteered to do was ring the bells for the Salvation Army at store entrances around our community during the Christmas season. Dad did that for a few years.
My father was a lifelong advocate for social justice and personal dignity. As a doctor, he went to India sponsored by the mission, to be of aid to others. He could have been a wealthy surgeon or pathologist, but he was always oriented towards helping others, even if it meant his career was neither famous nor wealthy. He always tithed part of his income to relief charities and preservation organizations, from Amnesty International to the World Wildlife Fund to the Red Cross, among others. He usually rotated among a list, giving money to three or four different charities every year.
One year, my father looked into the politics and policies of the Salvation Army. He's always been curious, and always had a real zeal for history. He found out how homophobic and right-wing the policies of the Salvation Army are, and, of his own volition, decided that he would no longer volunteer to ring bells for the Salvation Army, nor ever again donate any money to them.
This was one of the most loving things my father ever did for his gay son. I love him for this one gesture beyond what words can say.
What I see all too often when people mock PC is that what they're really trying to do is hide the fact that they're deep down in their hearts full of regressive, repressed prejudices and bigotries. You can't change peoples' minds overnight about beliefs and prejudices they learned at their parents' knees. If PC fails, it's because it tries rational argument against deep-rooted emotional prejudices. Even when people want to give up those deep prejudices, and on the surface have done so, deep down they can still be present.
What happens when some people mock PC is that they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the last thing they want to admit to themselves is that they're still, in their own hearts, bigots. They do their best to conceal their shame by shaming others. That's a classic form of psychological projection: make fun of other people for what you don't like about yourself.
The hidden agenda of dismissing PC out of hand is a disguised way of saying that all people aren't created equal and don't deserve to be treated as if they were. Most anti-PC rhetoric is covertly elitist; some of that rhetoric tries to pretend it's populist and egalitarian, but it's really contemptuous of "the people" at core. It's really easy to see this happening as a hidden agenda when some right-wing pundit does it; it's more concealed when those of the left do it, too, although it's possibly more corrosive.
What all the mockery completely, willfully, deliberately wants to overlook is that we still live in a world in which people are put to death or tortured, actively and passively, for being Different, for being Other.
George Orwell once opined that we'll know that totalitarian tyranny has finally taken over the West when the totalitarian arguments all sound their trumpets about Freedom. He was right. And that's exactly what's happened to the country that I live in and love, since 9/11. I've seen civil rights being eroded right and left while people just bent over and took it up their asses about it. I've seen the gap between the haves and the have-nots gape to its widest margin in recorded history. I've seen what Benjamin Franklin, one of the Frames of our Constitution, warn us about, 200 years ago, when he said, "Those who would exchange liberty for security deserve neither."
As for the Salvation Army, fuck them: their hands won't be reaching out to any disaster areas I've ever been at the epicenter of. The day the Salvation Army funds an AIDS Hospice, I'll change my opinion about them, but not before. The Salvation Army remains one of the most regressive and political of relief agencies, with a specific list of peoples they WON'T help. They are selective not because the job of saving the world is too big, but because they are bigoted. Do they do good work? Certainly. Do they do good work evenly amongst all those who need their help? Not at all.
I give money to the Red Cross, and to other similar organizations who really do not have any politics beyond that of compassion, support, and social justice. Amnesty International is about stopping torture and increasing personal freedom and personal dignity—which are prerequisites for social justice. The Sierra Club is about preserving the wilderness for generations to come, to see and enjoy, and remember what the world used to look like.
I'll end with a personal story:
When my father retired from being a doctor, he joined Rotary, as a way to get to meet new people in the community and as a way to participate in doing good social works, which he did all his life. One thing the Rotary members volunteered to do was ring the bells for the Salvation Army at store entrances around our community during the Christmas season. Dad did that for a few years.
My father was a lifelong advocate for social justice and personal dignity. As a doctor, he went to India sponsored by the mission, to be of aid to others. He could have been a wealthy surgeon or pathologist, but he was always oriented towards helping others, even if it meant his career was neither famous nor wealthy. He always tithed part of his income to relief charities and preservation organizations, from Amnesty International to the World Wildlife Fund to the Red Cross, among others. He usually rotated among a list, giving money to three or four different charities every year.
One year, my father looked into the politics and policies of the Salvation Army. He's always been curious, and always had a real zeal for history. He found out how homophobic and right-wing the policies of the Salvation Army are, and, of his own volition, decided that he would no longer volunteer to ring bells for the Salvation Army, nor ever again donate any money to them.
This was one of the most loving things my father ever did for his gay son. I love him for this one gesture beyond what words can say.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Becoming a Gay Artist
At what age do you become a gay artist?
Is being a gay artist something you always were, something that permeates every aspect of your being, a permanent filter through which you view the world? That's the essentialist argument, argued in the same way, and for similar reasons, that women see the world differently than men, that blacks see the world differently than whites, that Asians see the world differently than Latinos. Many of civil rights arguments are based on essentialist assumptions; many other civil rights arguments area based on our essential Oneness rather than our (essential?) differences. The "gay gene" idea, that being gay is genetic and not determined by choice of will, is an essentialist argument; however, although it is supported by documented research and scientific study, it remains controversial even in LGBT circles because it's not a definitive proof. There remain apparent exceptions. (And we don't really know enough yet about the human genome to be able to be definitive.)
Is becoming a gay artist something you choose, some stance or methodology you learn or adopt, something that is transmitted culturally via role model and learning? That's the constructivist, or cultural, or social/environmental, argument, which views every human behavior as a choice constructed by the individual, a matter of free will and elemental decision. The constructivist argument, of course, is the one that is always used to deny civil rights to LGBT people: since gays and lesbians can choose to be straight, they should. Such is the rhetoric of the religious right, and of some of the more ideologically repressive factions of the psychological profession. Never mind that those psychological theories have been thoroughly discredited, they are still cited by the "ex-gay" movement, which itself has been thoroughly discredited, yet retains followers for ideological and superstitious reasons. (Morals are inherently ideological and tend to be externally proscribed; ethics are inner-self-generated and tend to be pragmatic.)
There are elements in the essentialist camp who use their arguments to shut down discussion and dissent: "That's just the way it is, so shut up about it." As a response to the constructivist anti-LGBT-rights camp, that seems a valid response; the constructivists after all have used their argument to undercut civil rights. But when essentialists direct the "shut up" argument at their own numbers, as a way of quashing dissent, it can cross the line into ideological fascism. The essentialist argument is a strong argument for civil rights, yet it does have some limits, in that free choice cannot be entirely removed from the human equation. The truth is a mix.
In my experience, both of these viewpoints have some validity, and both also remain largely theoretical, neither completely supporting the observed data and relationships. The distinction between these arguments has often been framed as: "Are you a gay artist, or are you an artist who happens to be gay?" Endless discussions, arguments, and dialogues have gone around and around that distinction, never satisfactorily resolving it.
I'm not sure it matters.
For myself, in my own practice, it's best to just go ahead and make art, and not worry about it. For one thing, being gay or not doesn't directly matter, either way, to my making art. I make art, no matter what, whether or not I happen to be thinking about LGBT issues at the moment, and whether or not the art I'm making at the moment contains explicit or implicit elements of gay imagery, iconography, or cultural references. I enjoy photographing the male nude, and I enjoy working with nude male models to achieve the photographic and artistic elements of expression I seek. And I also enjoy making photographs of mountains, sunsets, flowers, trees, buildings, pets, typewriters, and beautifully-arranged furniture displays. Does everything I photograph filter itself through the lens of my gay experience? Does it matter if it does, or doesn't? The more fruitless aspects of identity politics all involve arguing (rather Scholastically, one might add) about one aspect of my life as if it were the only important aspect, or the dominant aspect.
Being gay may well be a dominant aspect of my life, and my art-making, but it is never the only aspect—when I make art, all aspects of my whole self are engaged, focused, involved—and sometimes not the most important aspect. At the same time, I can never fully remove being gay from my art-making, because it is an aspect of my whole self—all aspects of whom are present and engaged, focused and involved, when I'm making art, or when I'm just doing my chores. For myself, I accept this both/and way of looking at the issue as being fundamentally true; where I might typically quibble is where and how much each aspect of the whole is present, or exactly when.
Gay artists have always been able to produce non-gay art. An artist, self-identified as gay or not, who produces homoerotic art will also produce art in which gender identity and sexual orientation have no measurable presence. Is a still life drawing of a vase, an orange, and a pen an inherently gay? The essentialist argument would say, yes it is—when drawn by a gay artist. The essentialists typically raise the issue of "gay sensibility" at this point, which is basically a way of saying that, because you're gay, everything you do is gay, therefore all of your art is produced through a gay sensibility. As though even my most abstract piano music—which is much more directly influenced by Debussy, Messiaen, and Takemitsu, that entire French-Russian-Japanese lineage of influence in contemporary music; rather than by known-to-be-gay composers such as Britten, Corigliano, or Noel Coward—is still gay abstract gay piano gay music. You can see the circularity of this reasoning: the essentialist viewpoint assumes a priori that everything a gay artist will ever do is filtered through a gay sensibility, so everyting you is gay, because you're gay, and because everything you do is gay, then you must be gay. By contrast, the constructivist argument allows for the artist to be able to make a choice about whether to utilize the gay sensibility, or not. Yet I do not entirely embrace the constructivists, nor do I entirely reject the essentialists; again, the truth is both/and.
I do believe that there is a "gay sensibility"—although it's a fuzzy set, whose contents are always-changing and not always clearly known, and it has changeable boundaries that are complex to the point of being fractal. I do believe that my own "gay sensibility" is in operation when I make art that contains homoerotic themes, imagery, or other content. I do believe that my artistic "gay sensibility" probably does add some coloration or shading to even my non-homoerotic art-projects; for example, would I write the abstract piano music that I do if were not who I am, which includes my being gay/bi? There is some truth, I believe, to the idea that a "gay sensibility" leads to art-making that is often more exploratory, experimental, more tradition- and rule-breaking; in part because being gay means being a cultural outsider, or insider/outsider: when you've been positioned as non-normative to the culture, you tend to go looking for yet more non-normative ways to dialogue with and express the culture. Camp and genderfuck are all about mirroring back to the normative culture ways of being non-normative; they are ways of performing the Other, as if in a funhouse mirror.
At the same time, my own "gay sensibility" cannot account for all aspects of my art-making, nor its contents. I am not a stereotype; even within the gay subculture(s) I am not easily categorized into any of the familiar types or stereotypes. Yet I am quite certain, at this point in my life, that my "gay sensibility" of being Other and non-normative deeply affects my creative process, that it has led me to look at the world from subject-subject consciousness rather than subject-object consciousness. It is one root of my empathy, both as a person, and as an artist. In other words, my being gay affects how I go about making art. It affects my approach to making art. At the same time, it does not determine the contents or materials that I use to make art. My being gay might steer my art-making process—and indeed, it seems at times to be so innately bound up with the why of my art-making that I can't easily separate the two—yet my being gay doesn't determine what art I make, what kind of art I make, nor does it determine what genre of art-making I might be working in at the moment. (I practice crop rotation between music, visual, poetry, photography, calligraphy, land art sculpture, woodworking, etc.) So, my being gay seems to affect the why and how of my art-making, but not the when, where, or what.
So perhaps what it is true is that there are aspects of my being gay that are innate, that i was born with, that I have no choice about. At the same time, I have choices I can make about how to express those innate aspects of myself. I have the power to choose what I do with that innate part of myself; and I have the power to choose how I enact, express, present, and perform that innate part of myself, in public and in private. I am gay, and I can choose how I want to act gay, and how gay I want to act. In terms of art-making, then: I am gay, there's no doubt of that, and yet I can choose how "gay" my art is made to be.
Of course, some anti-LGBT constructivists try to hedge their ideological position of moral condemnation by claiming to, in their own words, "Love the sinner, hate the sin." In other words: we don't hate who you are in your inner nature, in your heart, we just hate your attempts to act from your inner nature, from your heart. Your soul is pure, but yet it's not pure because if you do act from your soul we can't approve of it. This variety of ideological hedging is utter bullshit; it communicates an extremely mixed message. It is not unconditional love precisely because it places conditions on loving behaviors.
And then there is Kinsey's continuum of sexual behavior, his infamous seven-position scale, which implies that most people are innately bisexual and choose an identity and orientation based as much on their ideas of who they want to be as upon clinical observation of who they really are. Kinsey's scale leaves the door open for self-delusion, in other words. It allows a man to claim to be completely heterosexual even though he had sex with other boys as a teenager, and still occasionally does so. it allows a woman to claim to be completely lesbian, even though at one point in her life she was married and had children.
Where do you find an artist on Kinsey's scale? Or are they separate axes of knowledge, as I believe they are? They do converge and overlap at points—we are whole beings, not collections of particles—but they don't fully account for one another, and neither is determinative of the other. Where do you find artists on Kinsey's scale? Everywhere.
Perhaps the known exceptions to the essentialist arguments, such as presented in the "gay gene" theory, can be explained by viewing sexual orientation as flexible and fluid rather than fixed. Conventionally, physical gender and sexual orientation may be viewed as biologically fixed, or innate, but gender expression and sexual identity are not. Kinsey's research seems to imply that fluidity in orientation may be the norm, and may change over the course of a lifetime—despite all our attempts to permanently fix an orientation upon ourselves by using a label the way an entomologist might use pins to affix moths to a bulletin board. The labels make us seem more fixed and permanent, more solid and unchanging, than we really are. Since everything is always changing, nothing is immune to change or independent of the ripple effects of changes going on around us. We change, we evolve, we learn, we develop; or we resist change, we fight against it, we deny the possibility of development or personal evolution. Some of the loudest and most repressive voices in the essentialist camp are those who want things to be permanently fixed, always just-so. (Fear of uncertainty and/or change is what often drives the totalitarian impulse.)
In my own experience, although I did not openly come out as gay until I was in my 30s, I have always been more physically and emotionally aroused (excited, if not erect) by viewing naked men than naked women. Yet some naked women do turn me on; and I have had two serious, successful (at the time) loving sexual relationships with women in my life. Nowadays I identify as gay, mostly because it's the easiest of several fuzzy gender-and-orientation categories that one might identify as, but I never forget that my identity as gay is part-innate, part-constructed. What is innate is that I am more sexually attracted, on average, to the male of my species than to the female; what is constructed is everything else. I have never forgotten the formulation of a gay/bi friend, an artist and therapist, whose life and desires and experience were similar to my own; he said to me once, in conversation about the topic of sexual identity, "I tell my straight friends that I'm gay, and I tell my gay friends that I'm bi. It's true, anyway, and it keeps them on their toes."
In some ways, it's more interesting to ask of myself: When did I become an artist? rather than When did I become a gay artist? I can honestly say that I've always been an artist, in that I've always had the instinct for art-making. Regardless of whether it was a childhood crayon drawing or a contemporary computer-assisted musical composition process, there has never been a time that I can recall when I wasn't Making, or if not able to be Making then at least wanting to on some deep level. Making is compulsory: if I'm not able to make something today, a pressure builds up deep inside me, until it can be released as art-making, or some other creative channel. I learned about myself at a very early age that I must let out that need to Make, or it will drive me crazy from the inside out. So, on days I can't make art, or music, or a poem—which are culturally-recognized and -approved, if only marginally -supported) modes of creating tangible art-products—I might peel an orange as beautifully as possible, or rake leaves with full artistic intention, or stack boxes of nails with artistic precision. The content or end-result of what is Made isn't what satisfies the need to make something, it's the process of Making that does.
There's a lot to be told about becoming an artist. At what age did I become a gay artist? At what age did I become an artist?
To be continued.
Is being a gay artist something you always were, something that permeates every aspect of your being, a permanent filter through which you view the world? That's the essentialist argument, argued in the same way, and for similar reasons, that women see the world differently than men, that blacks see the world differently than whites, that Asians see the world differently than Latinos. Many of civil rights arguments are based on essentialist assumptions; many other civil rights arguments area based on our essential Oneness rather than our (essential?) differences. The "gay gene" idea, that being gay is genetic and not determined by choice of will, is an essentialist argument; however, although it is supported by documented research and scientific study, it remains controversial even in LGBT circles because it's not a definitive proof. There remain apparent exceptions. (And we don't really know enough yet about the human genome to be able to be definitive.)
Is becoming a gay artist something you choose, some stance or methodology you learn or adopt, something that is transmitted culturally via role model and learning? That's the constructivist, or cultural, or social/environmental, argument, which views every human behavior as a choice constructed by the individual, a matter of free will and elemental decision. The constructivist argument, of course, is the one that is always used to deny civil rights to LGBT people: since gays and lesbians can choose to be straight, they should. Such is the rhetoric of the religious right, and of some of the more ideologically repressive factions of the psychological profession. Never mind that those psychological theories have been thoroughly discredited, they are still cited by the "ex-gay" movement, which itself has been thoroughly discredited, yet retains followers for ideological and superstitious reasons. (Morals are inherently ideological and tend to be externally proscribed; ethics are inner-self-generated and tend to be pragmatic.)
There are elements in the essentialist camp who use their arguments to shut down discussion and dissent: "That's just the way it is, so shut up about it." As a response to the constructivist anti-LGBT-rights camp, that seems a valid response; the constructivists after all have used their argument to undercut civil rights. But when essentialists direct the "shut up" argument at their own numbers, as a way of quashing dissent, it can cross the line into ideological fascism. The essentialist argument is a strong argument for civil rights, yet it does have some limits, in that free choice cannot be entirely removed from the human equation. The truth is a mix.
In my experience, both of these viewpoints have some validity, and both also remain largely theoretical, neither completely supporting the observed data and relationships. The distinction between these arguments has often been framed as: "Are you a gay artist, or are you an artist who happens to be gay?" Endless discussions, arguments, and dialogues have gone around and around that distinction, never satisfactorily resolving it.
I'm not sure it matters.
For myself, in my own practice, it's best to just go ahead and make art, and not worry about it. For one thing, being gay or not doesn't directly matter, either way, to my making art. I make art, no matter what, whether or not I happen to be thinking about LGBT issues at the moment, and whether or not the art I'm making at the moment contains explicit or implicit elements of gay imagery, iconography, or cultural references. I enjoy photographing the male nude, and I enjoy working with nude male models to achieve the photographic and artistic elements of expression I seek. And I also enjoy making photographs of mountains, sunsets, flowers, trees, buildings, pets, typewriters, and beautifully-arranged furniture displays. Does everything I photograph filter itself through the lens of my gay experience? Does it matter if it does, or doesn't? The more fruitless aspects of identity politics all involve arguing (rather Scholastically, one might add) about one aspect of my life as if it were the only important aspect, or the dominant aspect.
Being gay may well be a dominant aspect of my life, and my art-making, but it is never the only aspect—when I make art, all aspects of my whole self are engaged, focused, involved—and sometimes not the most important aspect. At the same time, I can never fully remove being gay from my art-making, because it is an aspect of my whole self—all aspects of whom are present and engaged, focused and involved, when I'm making art, or when I'm just doing my chores. For myself, I accept this both/and way of looking at the issue as being fundamentally true; where I might typically quibble is where and how much each aspect of the whole is present, or exactly when.
Gay artists have always been able to produce non-gay art. An artist, self-identified as gay or not, who produces homoerotic art will also produce art in which gender identity and sexual orientation have no measurable presence. Is a still life drawing of a vase, an orange, and a pen an inherently gay? The essentialist argument would say, yes it is—when drawn by a gay artist. The essentialists typically raise the issue of "gay sensibility" at this point, which is basically a way of saying that, because you're gay, everything you do is gay, therefore all of your art is produced through a gay sensibility. As though even my most abstract piano music—which is much more directly influenced by Debussy, Messiaen, and Takemitsu, that entire French-Russian-Japanese lineage of influence in contemporary music; rather than by known-to-be-gay composers such as Britten, Corigliano, or Noel Coward—is still gay abstract gay piano gay music. You can see the circularity of this reasoning: the essentialist viewpoint assumes a priori that everything a gay artist will ever do is filtered through a gay sensibility, so everyting you is gay, because you're gay, and because everything you do is gay, then you must be gay. By contrast, the constructivist argument allows for the artist to be able to make a choice about whether to utilize the gay sensibility, or not. Yet I do not entirely embrace the constructivists, nor do I entirely reject the essentialists; again, the truth is both/and.
I do believe that there is a "gay sensibility"—although it's a fuzzy set, whose contents are always-changing and not always clearly known, and it has changeable boundaries that are complex to the point of being fractal. I do believe that my own "gay sensibility" is in operation when I make art that contains homoerotic themes, imagery, or other content. I do believe that my artistic "gay sensibility" probably does add some coloration or shading to even my non-homoerotic art-projects; for example, would I write the abstract piano music that I do if were not who I am, which includes my being gay/bi? There is some truth, I believe, to the idea that a "gay sensibility" leads to art-making that is often more exploratory, experimental, more tradition- and rule-breaking; in part because being gay means being a cultural outsider, or insider/outsider: when you've been positioned as non-normative to the culture, you tend to go looking for yet more non-normative ways to dialogue with and express the culture. Camp and genderfuck are all about mirroring back to the normative culture ways of being non-normative; they are ways of performing the Other, as if in a funhouse mirror.
At the same time, my own "gay sensibility" cannot account for all aspects of my art-making, nor its contents. I am not a stereotype; even within the gay subculture(s) I am not easily categorized into any of the familiar types or stereotypes. Yet I am quite certain, at this point in my life, that my "gay sensibility" of being Other and non-normative deeply affects my creative process, that it has led me to look at the world from subject-subject consciousness rather than subject-object consciousness. It is one root of my empathy, both as a person, and as an artist. In other words, my being gay affects how I go about making art. It affects my approach to making art. At the same time, it does not determine the contents or materials that I use to make art. My being gay might steer my art-making process—and indeed, it seems at times to be so innately bound up with the why of my art-making that I can't easily separate the two—yet my being gay doesn't determine what art I make, what kind of art I make, nor does it determine what genre of art-making I might be working in at the moment. (I practice crop rotation between music, visual, poetry, photography, calligraphy, land art sculpture, woodworking, etc.) So, my being gay seems to affect the why and how of my art-making, but not the when, where, or what.
So perhaps what it is true is that there are aspects of my being gay that are innate, that i was born with, that I have no choice about. At the same time, I have choices I can make about how to express those innate aspects of myself. I have the power to choose what I do with that innate part of myself; and I have the power to choose how I enact, express, present, and perform that innate part of myself, in public and in private. I am gay, and I can choose how I want to act gay, and how gay I want to act. In terms of art-making, then: I am gay, there's no doubt of that, and yet I can choose how "gay" my art is made to be.
Of course, some anti-LGBT constructivists try to hedge their ideological position of moral condemnation by claiming to, in their own words, "Love the sinner, hate the sin." In other words: we don't hate who you are in your inner nature, in your heart, we just hate your attempts to act from your inner nature, from your heart. Your soul is pure, but yet it's not pure because if you do act from your soul we can't approve of it. This variety of ideological hedging is utter bullshit; it communicates an extremely mixed message. It is not unconditional love precisely because it places conditions on loving behaviors.
And then there is Kinsey's continuum of sexual behavior, his infamous seven-position scale, which implies that most people are innately bisexual and choose an identity and orientation based as much on their ideas of who they want to be as upon clinical observation of who they really are. Kinsey's scale leaves the door open for self-delusion, in other words. It allows a man to claim to be completely heterosexual even though he had sex with other boys as a teenager, and still occasionally does so. it allows a woman to claim to be completely lesbian, even though at one point in her life she was married and had children.
Where do you find an artist on Kinsey's scale? Or are they separate axes of knowledge, as I believe they are? They do converge and overlap at points—we are whole beings, not collections of particles—but they don't fully account for one another, and neither is determinative of the other. Where do you find artists on Kinsey's scale? Everywhere.
Perhaps the known exceptions to the essentialist arguments, such as presented in the "gay gene" theory, can be explained by viewing sexual orientation as flexible and fluid rather than fixed. Conventionally, physical gender and sexual orientation may be viewed as biologically fixed, or innate, but gender expression and sexual identity are not. Kinsey's research seems to imply that fluidity in orientation may be the norm, and may change over the course of a lifetime—despite all our attempts to permanently fix an orientation upon ourselves by using a label the way an entomologist might use pins to affix moths to a bulletin board. The labels make us seem more fixed and permanent, more solid and unchanging, than we really are. Since everything is always changing, nothing is immune to change or independent of the ripple effects of changes going on around us. We change, we evolve, we learn, we develop; or we resist change, we fight against it, we deny the possibility of development or personal evolution. Some of the loudest and most repressive voices in the essentialist camp are those who want things to be permanently fixed, always just-so. (Fear of uncertainty and/or change is what often drives the totalitarian impulse.)
In my own experience, although I did not openly come out as gay until I was in my 30s, I have always been more physically and emotionally aroused (excited, if not erect) by viewing naked men than naked women. Yet some naked women do turn me on; and I have had two serious, successful (at the time) loving sexual relationships with women in my life. Nowadays I identify as gay, mostly because it's the easiest of several fuzzy gender-and-orientation categories that one might identify as, but I never forget that my identity as gay is part-innate, part-constructed. What is innate is that I am more sexually attracted, on average, to the male of my species than to the female; what is constructed is everything else. I have never forgotten the formulation of a gay/bi friend, an artist and therapist, whose life and desires and experience were similar to my own; he said to me once, in conversation about the topic of sexual identity, "I tell my straight friends that I'm gay, and I tell my gay friends that I'm bi. It's true, anyway, and it keeps them on their toes."
In some ways, it's more interesting to ask of myself: When did I become an artist? rather than When did I become a gay artist? I can honestly say that I've always been an artist, in that I've always had the instinct for art-making. Regardless of whether it was a childhood crayon drawing or a contemporary computer-assisted musical composition process, there has never been a time that I can recall when I wasn't Making, or if not able to be Making then at least wanting to on some deep level. Making is compulsory: if I'm not able to make something today, a pressure builds up deep inside me, until it can be released as art-making, or some other creative channel. I learned about myself at a very early age that I must let out that need to Make, or it will drive me crazy from the inside out. So, on days I can't make art, or music, or a poem—which are culturally-recognized and -approved, if only marginally -supported) modes of creating tangible art-products—I might peel an orange as beautifully as possible, or rake leaves with full artistic intention, or stack boxes of nails with artistic precision. The content or end-result of what is Made isn't what satisfies the need to make something, it's the process of Making that does.
There's a lot to be told about becoming an artist. At what age did I become a gay artist? At what age did I become an artist?
To be continued.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Why We Sing
Why do I sing in gay men's choruses? Why do I like to sing in male choruses? Why do I sing with Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, in Madison, WI, the chorus I currently sing with, and have written a new piece for, that will be premiered in December 2009?
Short answer: Because I love singing in male choruses, I'm gay, I love singing in gay men's choruses with other gay men, and most importantly, we are musical ambassadors to the world. We give back to our communities, and at the same time raise the general community's consciousness about the social issues and concerns of our gay lives by celebrating them, singing about them, and sharing them. We reach out with music to heal and give hope and beauty to the lives of others.
These are all generalities, but they're true for me nonetheless. I've known for a long time that my personal form of social activism happens most effectively through my music, my writing, and my artwork. I used to be an activist who marched in the streets. I participated in the very first LGBT Pride March ever organized in Madison, WI. I did outreach to both the LGBT and straight communities in Madison; I sat on discussion panels; I participated in speaker's visits to schools and corporate offices. We had fun, and we had strength, and we knew we were helping to make the world a finer place for everyone.
We were right—and we were wrong. We did catalyze change, and yet the world stubbornly refuses to improve faster than a snail's pace. It's true that the Tribe can only evolve at the rate of its slowest members—a truth I learned later, after I had left my overt activist years behind.
So here's my really long, personal memoir answer:
I've always been a choral singer. I loved singing in church choirs, starting about age 7 or 8. I graduated from my church's youth choir to the adult choir in my mid-teens; they needed tenors, and I was gifted musically. I sang in the Michigan Men's Glee Club from my first semester in college. It's probably destiny that has led me to sing in not one, but three or four gay men's choruses over the years. I view it as part of my social outreach, my activism, and also a way to stay musically active, which for me is as necessary as breathing.
As a boy, I was a soloist, a boy soprano, and for awhile an alto. My middle choral teacher, Hunter March, trained me in the techniques of the English choral tradition, the pinnacle of which in many opinions (including mine) is King's College, Cambridge. I still listen to that group's annual broadcast of lessons and carols at Christmastide. But most boy sopranos don't have adult voices as good as their boy voices, once their voices have changed and stabilized. That was my fate. Yet I had all this training. I was recruited right out of middle school by the choral teacher of the high school I would be attending. I remember a meeting in the middle offices, before the end of my last year there—my voice had just broken, spectacularly and embarassingly, during a solo in a choral performance—in which I sat down with my current choral teacher and my future choral teacher, and we talked about my future. Plans were made. I was a little intimidated and overwhelmed by the attention of these highly musical, highly trained teachers; but I also liked it. I already knew I had some musical talent beyond the ordinary; I was already writing music, and I had already been given the chance to play with a suitcase-sized Moog synthesizer, and make a little tape music. I remember my two choral teachers discussing my situation, and what to do to make sure I continued to improve as a singer.
My voice had just changed. The long hot summer between the last year of middle school and my first year of high school was also the summer of my sexual awakening. We lived in what was at the time the outermost northeastern corner of Ann Arbor. Our subdivision was the edge of town. Behind our house was open, empty fields—fields which had been nothing but wheat for several years after my family bought that house, but which by this summer had begun to be filled in with row-house condo construction. The construction moved slowly, and took several years to cross the field from its opposite to end to behind our fence. During this long hot summer, I spent many hours in naked play with two or three of the neighbor boys. We explored how our bodies could bring us pleasure, and how to pleasure each other. It was always exciting, too, because it was forbidden and risky to get caught at it. I wrote about it, even then, as a teenage boy (my parents had given me my first typewriter for Christmas). I wrote about my fantasies, and I wrote about my memories and dreams. I'll write about that some more, here, at a later date. There's a lot of memory material from that time of my life that I want to reconsider and reinvent. Later.
There is a classic question: are you a gay artist, or an artist who happens to be gay? Does your sexuality inform your art-making? A lot of gay artists get hung up on this question, going in circles while never answering it definitely. Of course, asking the question is a matter of identity politics for many: of discovering and identifying who you are. It's an essentialist question, and an existential one.
I find it irrelevant and uninteresting. Perhaps a couple of decades ago I might have debated it. The fact is, I'm an artist who happens to be gay, and I'm also a gay artist. I'm a gay man who makes gay art and non-gay-themed art; I'm a man who makes art; I'm a man who makes gay art and non-gay art. If indeed these are separable modes, which is debatable, I work in them all. I don't make a distinction, because I don't believe it important to make a distinction. My sexual orientation is part of who I am—not all of who I am, but an important part of the whole—and as a man who makes art, all the parts of who I am are present when I'm making art, to a greater or lesser degree. Not all of my art is overtly homoerotic, or even sexual, or sensual. And some of it is.
My first year in high school was the year my voice was settling. My choir teacher, Miss Ruth Datz, who became over time one of my important mentors in life, guided me carefully through the change. For a few months I sang baritone rather than tenor, so as not to strain my newly-changed voice. (I still have that lower range.) But I was also trained in barbershop quartet, and as a countertenor. My head voice, or falsetto, proved to be very useful. I have never had the soloist's voice as an adult: neither the power, or the range, or the quality of openness prized in opera, or the projection prized in musical theater. But thanks to my choral mentors at this time in my life, I have a tremendous amount of vocal training. I am rarely picked for solo parts in the choruses I have sung in: I don't have that kind of voice. But I have three times the training of most of those who I sing in chorus with.
I also have a very good ear, and a very trained ear, for pitch. I am very good at blending. I discovered that I can control the timbre and pitch of my voice so well that I can blend with anyone. I make other voices sound better. Put me in the middle of the first tenor section, which is where you'll usually find me anyway, and I make the whole section sound more like one voice, than a group of individuals. It's a knack, an instinct. I just seem to do it, and it's not always conscious.
In college, I sang in the Michigan Men's Glee Club. I was not yet fully out to myself as a gay man, but it was clear to me that most of us in the first tenor section were either queer, bisexual, or at least open-minded. There’s an old joke on the choral circuit, that there are three kinds of people in the world: men, women, and tenors. There's some insight and truth in that, after all. Anyway, I began to get a sense of a gay sensibility, a homoerotic gathering of sensibility, a sense of male comradeship, of Whitman's "adhesiveness," during those years singing in the Men’s Glee Club. We toured Europe and many regions of the USA together during, those years; staying in a hotel, staying in homes of alumnae, being hosted and feted wherever we went. I learned things about myself, and my colleagues, on many occasions.
After graduating college, I largely turned my back on Western music for about a decade. Surviving after music school meant a period of unlearning: being a composition major, mostly what they could teach us was music theory and history, and they crammed so much theory done our throats that I was compositionally constipated for a few years, and could write nothing. (I eventually began over with Western music by learning jazz improvisation, improvised music, the arts of spontaneous composition.) But at the same time, I had discovered Javanese gamelan, and played that music for many years. One element of certain pieces of Javanese gamelan is the unison male chorus, or gérong, which sings traditional texts as one layer of the music. For example, here is a performance of Ketawang Puspawarna, a traditional opening piece for concert performances, used by many ensembles.
Listen to how the male chorus, which is members of the gamelan group, some playing instruments as well as singing, do punctuated calls at key moments in the form, as well as performing the sung unison text. Puspawarna, a classical Javanese poem, means “kinds of flowers.”
Thus I kept my vocal chops up, albeit in music from another culture. I learned I had an ear for precise pitch, for being able to match different tuning systems, for being able to sing correct intervals in more than one tuning system. I played and studied Javanese gamelan for many years. I lived in Indonesia for a year, as a Fulbright student on a grant, studying traditional gamelan. I taught gamelan as a graduate student teaching assistant, later, at the University of Wisconsin. This music has left a permanent mark on my own music, the way I write music now, even the way I improvise when playing in jazz and rock music settings.
My coming out process as a gay man was long and late and slow. I wasn't exactly in the closet, I wasn’t exactly pretending to be something I wasn’t, but it takes time to learn self-acceptance and self-esteem. I came out fully sometime in my late 20s and early 30s. That's another long story, which like my sexual awakening as a teenage boy, I have written about extensively, in my journals and in my poetry. I'll be writing more about that, later, as well.
Living in Madison, WI, playing gamelan, discovering the Radical Faeries and going to annual gatherings, being involved in the Rendezvous Reenactment circuit, being an LGBT activist, coming out to my family, taking my first long-term male love relationships, discovering what I liked about sex and what I didn't, being in grad school, becoming a serious photographer, writer, and Photoshop user. These were all happening at the same time, form my late 20s through my late 30s.
Some years later, I found myself living in the Twin Cities, in Minnesota. There are long stories in the interim, some of them related to both music and sexuality, and if I were to tell them all now, all at once, this would be a novel-length memoir, pull me far off the topic of choral music. So I’ll save some of those for another day.
I was living in St. Paul, and having a difficult time of life. I felt the need to connect with the larger gay community, as I was feeling very isolated. Just to be around gay men socially, in ways that were positive. So it occurred to me to revive my interest in singing in male choruses. I have always loved the sound and timbre of massed male voices, singing in chorus, and my years in the Glee Club had cemented that preference, musically and socially.
Here’s where why we sing begins to matter.
Singing in a gay men’s chorus is about presenting a face of the gay community to the general community: an artistic face, an ambassadorial face, a face of unity and empowerment, of reaching out with music to heal both gays and their friends and families. It’s about entertainment and having a good time, but for me it’s only secondarily about entertainment. Primarily, it’s about letting people see that we are human, ordinary, serious, fun, and genuinely part of the community. Every chorus in a community has its following. Every chorus does outreach, of one form or another. It’s about reaching out to the community, but also about reminding the community that we are already there, already people you know, already a part of it all. We are your brothers and sisters, your children, your family, your coworkers, your friends.
I sing in a gay men’s chorus because I love singing in a male chorus. I sing in a gay men’s chorus because I need to be with gay men, and making music provides me a way to be with a community of gay men in a way that I’m comfortable with, that supports me positively, that makes me feel a part of something important. I got none of that from the bar scene. I got a little of it from being an activist.
Singing in a gay men’s chorus is a quiet, artistic form of activism. For me, it’s about being part of something larger, something that is gradually, gently, slowly, almost invisibly changing the world.
I joined the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus, which was my reintroduction to singing in a male chorus, but it also provided me with opportunities to make new friends, to reach out to my community, to invite my other friends to part of something. When I moved out West, I joined the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. The same opportunities in a different place. With the exception that the SFGMC is the original gay men’s chorus in the USA; they were the first, for all intents and purposes. When they did they first national tour across the US, they sowed the seeds in their wake in many cities they visited for the LGBT choral movement to spread. Now there are hundreds of LGBT choruses of all sorts of configurations and styles and memberships and missions. The LGBT choral movement has gone worldwide. It’s mostly based in cities, but just in large cities; choruses are present in many mid-size cities, and some smaller cities. My personal preference is for a male chorus, because I like to sing in that style, and within that repertoire. And I am now contributing, as a composer, to that repertoire. Now I sing with Perfect Harmony Men’s Chorus, in Madison, WI. It’s a smaller but growing chorus. It gives me what I want, musically, and I give back to the local community via our music. We work together to make music into our message of peace, hope, and love.
And for me that is my best, most satisfying form of activism. To make art that feeds a movement towards greater unity, greater community, and outreach. We invisibly, gradually change the world by just being ourselves. We don’t always march in the streets, and we don’t always engage in political activism; although almost every LGBT chorus does engage in some form of social justice work. We use our art to educate. One of the most important ways we educate is to show how your sons and daughters are not so Other, not so alien, are regular folks who can have fun, make music, have a good time, and not be so alien to your life that we have nothing in common. If we start by having music in common, that opens the door to having hearts in common. Music is the way to the heart that bypasses the mind and all its prejudices. I’ve heard story after story about how some person who thought they hated gays and lesbians changed their minds, after actually encountering us, as singers, as people, and not as stereotypes.
And that’s how you make the world a finer place. By changing one heart at a time. That’s why we sing.
Short answer: Because I love singing in male choruses, I'm gay, I love singing in gay men's choruses with other gay men, and most importantly, we are musical ambassadors to the world. We give back to our communities, and at the same time raise the general community's consciousness about the social issues and concerns of our gay lives by celebrating them, singing about them, and sharing them. We reach out with music to heal and give hope and beauty to the lives of others.
These are all generalities, but they're true for me nonetheless. I've known for a long time that my personal form of social activism happens most effectively through my music, my writing, and my artwork. I used to be an activist who marched in the streets. I participated in the very first LGBT Pride March ever organized in Madison, WI. I did outreach to both the LGBT and straight communities in Madison; I sat on discussion panels; I participated in speaker's visits to schools and corporate offices. We had fun, and we had strength, and we knew we were helping to make the world a finer place for everyone.
We were right—and we were wrong. We did catalyze change, and yet the world stubbornly refuses to improve faster than a snail's pace. It's true that the Tribe can only evolve at the rate of its slowest members—a truth I learned later, after I had left my overt activist years behind.
So here's my really long, personal memoir answer:
I've always been a choral singer. I loved singing in church choirs, starting about age 7 or 8. I graduated from my church's youth choir to the adult choir in my mid-teens; they needed tenors, and I was gifted musically. I sang in the Michigan Men's Glee Club from my first semester in college. It's probably destiny that has led me to sing in not one, but three or four gay men's choruses over the years. I view it as part of my social outreach, my activism, and also a way to stay musically active, which for me is as necessary as breathing.
As a boy, I was a soloist, a boy soprano, and for awhile an alto. My middle choral teacher, Hunter March, trained me in the techniques of the English choral tradition, the pinnacle of which in many opinions (including mine) is King's College, Cambridge. I still listen to that group's annual broadcast of lessons and carols at Christmastide. But most boy sopranos don't have adult voices as good as their boy voices, once their voices have changed and stabilized. That was my fate. Yet I had all this training. I was recruited right out of middle school by the choral teacher of the high school I would be attending. I remember a meeting in the middle offices, before the end of my last year there—my voice had just broken, spectacularly and embarassingly, during a solo in a choral performance—in which I sat down with my current choral teacher and my future choral teacher, and we talked about my future. Plans were made. I was a little intimidated and overwhelmed by the attention of these highly musical, highly trained teachers; but I also liked it. I already knew I had some musical talent beyond the ordinary; I was already writing music, and I had already been given the chance to play with a suitcase-sized Moog synthesizer, and make a little tape music. I remember my two choral teachers discussing my situation, and what to do to make sure I continued to improve as a singer.
My voice had just changed. The long hot summer between the last year of middle school and my first year of high school was also the summer of my sexual awakening. We lived in what was at the time the outermost northeastern corner of Ann Arbor. Our subdivision was the edge of town. Behind our house was open, empty fields—fields which had been nothing but wheat for several years after my family bought that house, but which by this summer had begun to be filled in with row-house condo construction. The construction moved slowly, and took several years to cross the field from its opposite to end to behind our fence. During this long hot summer, I spent many hours in naked play with two or three of the neighbor boys. We explored how our bodies could bring us pleasure, and how to pleasure each other. It was always exciting, too, because it was forbidden and risky to get caught at it. I wrote about it, even then, as a teenage boy (my parents had given me my first typewriter for Christmas). I wrote about my fantasies, and I wrote about my memories and dreams. I'll write about that some more, here, at a later date. There's a lot of memory material from that time of my life that I want to reconsider and reinvent. Later.
There is a classic question: are you a gay artist, or an artist who happens to be gay? Does your sexuality inform your art-making? A lot of gay artists get hung up on this question, going in circles while never answering it definitely. Of course, asking the question is a matter of identity politics for many: of discovering and identifying who you are. It's an essentialist question, and an existential one.
I find it irrelevant and uninteresting. Perhaps a couple of decades ago I might have debated it. The fact is, I'm an artist who happens to be gay, and I'm also a gay artist. I'm a gay man who makes gay art and non-gay-themed art; I'm a man who makes art; I'm a man who makes gay art and non-gay art. If indeed these are separable modes, which is debatable, I work in them all. I don't make a distinction, because I don't believe it important to make a distinction. My sexual orientation is part of who I am—not all of who I am, but an important part of the whole—and as a man who makes art, all the parts of who I am are present when I'm making art, to a greater or lesser degree. Not all of my art is overtly homoerotic, or even sexual, or sensual. And some of it is.
My first year in high school was the year my voice was settling. My choir teacher, Miss Ruth Datz, who became over time one of my important mentors in life, guided me carefully through the change. For a few months I sang baritone rather than tenor, so as not to strain my newly-changed voice. (I still have that lower range.) But I was also trained in barbershop quartet, and as a countertenor. My head voice, or falsetto, proved to be very useful. I have never had the soloist's voice as an adult: neither the power, or the range, or the quality of openness prized in opera, or the projection prized in musical theater. But thanks to my choral mentors at this time in my life, I have a tremendous amount of vocal training. I am rarely picked for solo parts in the choruses I have sung in: I don't have that kind of voice. But I have three times the training of most of those who I sing in chorus with.
I also have a very good ear, and a very trained ear, for pitch. I am very good at blending. I discovered that I can control the timbre and pitch of my voice so well that I can blend with anyone. I make other voices sound better. Put me in the middle of the first tenor section, which is where you'll usually find me anyway, and I make the whole section sound more like one voice, than a group of individuals. It's a knack, an instinct. I just seem to do it, and it's not always conscious.
In college, I sang in the Michigan Men's Glee Club. I was not yet fully out to myself as a gay man, but it was clear to me that most of us in the first tenor section were either queer, bisexual, or at least open-minded. There’s an old joke on the choral circuit, that there are three kinds of people in the world: men, women, and tenors. There's some insight and truth in that, after all. Anyway, I began to get a sense of a gay sensibility, a homoerotic gathering of sensibility, a sense of male comradeship, of Whitman's "adhesiveness," during those years singing in the Men’s Glee Club. We toured Europe and many regions of the USA together during, those years; staying in a hotel, staying in homes of alumnae, being hosted and feted wherever we went. I learned things about myself, and my colleagues, on many occasions.
After graduating college, I largely turned my back on Western music for about a decade. Surviving after music school meant a period of unlearning: being a composition major, mostly what they could teach us was music theory and history, and they crammed so much theory done our throats that I was compositionally constipated for a few years, and could write nothing. (I eventually began over with Western music by learning jazz improvisation, improvised music, the arts of spontaneous composition.) But at the same time, I had discovered Javanese gamelan, and played that music for many years. One element of certain pieces of Javanese gamelan is the unison male chorus, or gérong, which sings traditional texts as one layer of the music. For example, here is a performance of Ketawang Puspawarna, a traditional opening piece for concert performances, used by many ensembles.
Listen to how the male chorus, which is members of the gamelan group, some playing instruments as well as singing, do punctuated calls at key moments in the form, as well as performing the sung unison text. Puspawarna, a classical Javanese poem, means “kinds of flowers.”
Thus I kept my vocal chops up, albeit in music from another culture. I learned I had an ear for precise pitch, for being able to match different tuning systems, for being able to sing correct intervals in more than one tuning system. I played and studied Javanese gamelan for many years. I lived in Indonesia for a year, as a Fulbright student on a grant, studying traditional gamelan. I taught gamelan as a graduate student teaching assistant, later, at the University of Wisconsin. This music has left a permanent mark on my own music, the way I write music now, even the way I improvise when playing in jazz and rock music settings.
My coming out process as a gay man was long and late and slow. I wasn't exactly in the closet, I wasn’t exactly pretending to be something I wasn’t, but it takes time to learn self-acceptance and self-esteem. I came out fully sometime in my late 20s and early 30s. That's another long story, which like my sexual awakening as a teenage boy, I have written about extensively, in my journals and in my poetry. I'll be writing more about that, later, as well.
Living in Madison, WI, playing gamelan, discovering the Radical Faeries and going to annual gatherings, being involved in the Rendezvous Reenactment circuit, being an LGBT activist, coming out to my family, taking my first long-term male love relationships, discovering what I liked about sex and what I didn't, being in grad school, becoming a serious photographer, writer, and Photoshop user. These were all happening at the same time, form my late 20s through my late 30s.
Some years later, I found myself living in the Twin Cities, in Minnesota. There are long stories in the interim, some of them related to both music and sexuality, and if I were to tell them all now, all at once, this would be a novel-length memoir, pull me far off the topic of choral music. So I’ll save some of those for another day.
I was living in St. Paul, and having a difficult time of life. I felt the need to connect with the larger gay community, as I was feeling very isolated. Just to be around gay men socially, in ways that were positive. So it occurred to me to revive my interest in singing in male choruses. I have always loved the sound and timbre of massed male voices, singing in chorus, and my years in the Glee Club had cemented that preference, musically and socially.
Here’s where why we sing begins to matter.
Singing in a gay men’s chorus is about presenting a face of the gay community to the general community: an artistic face, an ambassadorial face, a face of unity and empowerment, of reaching out with music to heal both gays and their friends and families. It’s about entertainment and having a good time, but for me it’s only secondarily about entertainment. Primarily, it’s about letting people see that we are human, ordinary, serious, fun, and genuinely part of the community. Every chorus in a community has its following. Every chorus does outreach, of one form or another. It’s about reaching out to the community, but also about reminding the community that we are already there, already people you know, already a part of it all. We are your brothers and sisters, your children, your family, your coworkers, your friends.
I sing in a gay men’s chorus because I love singing in a male chorus. I sing in a gay men’s chorus because I need to be with gay men, and making music provides me a way to be with a community of gay men in a way that I’m comfortable with, that supports me positively, that makes me feel a part of something important. I got none of that from the bar scene. I got a little of it from being an activist.
Singing in a gay men’s chorus is a quiet, artistic form of activism. For me, it’s about being part of something larger, something that is gradually, gently, slowly, almost invisibly changing the world.
I joined the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus, which was my reintroduction to singing in a male chorus, but it also provided me with opportunities to make new friends, to reach out to my community, to invite my other friends to part of something. When I moved out West, I joined the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. The same opportunities in a different place. With the exception that the SFGMC is the original gay men’s chorus in the USA; they were the first, for all intents and purposes. When they did they first national tour across the US, they sowed the seeds in their wake in many cities they visited for the LGBT choral movement to spread. Now there are hundreds of LGBT choruses of all sorts of configurations and styles and memberships and missions. The LGBT choral movement has gone worldwide. It’s mostly based in cities, but just in large cities; choruses are present in many mid-size cities, and some smaller cities. My personal preference is for a male chorus, because I like to sing in that style, and within that repertoire. And I am now contributing, as a composer, to that repertoire. Now I sing with Perfect Harmony Men’s Chorus, in Madison, WI. It’s a smaller but growing chorus. It gives me what I want, musically, and I give back to the local community via our music. We work together to make music into our message of peace, hope, and love.
And for me that is my best, most satisfying form of activism. To make art that feeds a movement towards greater unity, greater community, and outreach. We invisibly, gradually change the world by just being ourselves. We don’t always march in the streets, and we don’t always engage in political activism; although almost every LGBT chorus does engage in some form of social justice work. We use our art to educate. One of the most important ways we educate is to show how your sons and daughters are not so Other, not so alien, are regular folks who can have fun, make music, have a good time, and not be so alien to your life that we have nothing in common. If we start by having music in common, that opens the door to having hearts in common. Music is the way to the heart that bypasses the mind and all its prejudices. I’ve heard story after story about how some person who thought they hated gays and lesbians changed their minds, after actually encountering us, as singers, as people, and not as stereotypes.
And that’s how you make the world a finer place. By changing one heart at a time. That’s why we sing.
Friday, November 6, 2009
A Classic
A lesbian pop classic, k.d. lang's "Constant Craving." There was a period for awhile when you couldn't go into a lesbian bar without hearing this track at least once an hour. I suppose some got tired of it. I never have. This is an almost perfect piece of music: brilliant hook, brilliant melody, great lyrics, the entire mood of longing and loss, of unfulfilled yearning and desire. It's an erotic masterpiece, in a way most pop love songs try to be but few ever achieve.
But what also interests me about this video is that it's based on a reconstruction of the French premiere in the 1950s of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. There are several scenes from the play in the video, which Beckett fans will recognize. There is also in the video an allusion to Krapp's Last Tape, with k.d. sitting next to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, reels in motion, playing back sounds—whether the Beckett diary tapes from the play, or k.d. singing to herself, is delightfully ambiguous.
Longing.
The song is about loneliness and desperation, about yearning and longing. It's also an anthem: I want you, I want you constantly, I can't get enough of you. It's a call out into the darkness. But it's also got some humor, and some hope to it.
Rather like Beckett's play. So that's a good match.
But what also interests me about this video is that it's based on a reconstruction of the French premiere in the 1950s of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. There are several scenes from the play in the video, which Beckett fans will recognize. There is also in the video an allusion to Krapp's Last Tape, with k.d. sitting next to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, reels in motion, playing back sounds—whether the Beckett diary tapes from the play, or k.d. singing to herself, is delightfully ambiguous.
Longing.
The song is about loneliness and desperation, about yearning and longing. It's also an anthem: I want you, I want you constantly, I can't get enough of you. It's a call out into the darkness. But it's also got some humor, and some hope to it.
Rather like Beckett's play. So that's a good match.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Homoerotic Photography
I have a couple of friends who live down in central Tennessee. Last June I drove down there for several days of visiting. They live on 100 acres in the middle of the riverine limestone karst country of central TN. We drove around a fair bit, so I could do some photography and video work in the very beautiful State Parks nearby. Their land is secluded, and they're pretty much nudists. So since it was 90 degrees or more most days I was there, clothing was not much in use by anyone.
There is also a cave on a cousin's land, which we spent some time exploring inside, again nude. These are some photos from my visit.
Cavemouth
Cave Shaman
Evening Stroll
I regularly engage in outdoor nude photography with some of my gay men friends as models. I've been doing this since 2000, and have compiled a few distinct bodies of work from these sessions. I love the secluded outdoor locations involved, especially in summer's heat, and I really enjoy working with my models, all of whom have been wonderfully open and giving to the artistic process. Working with nude models is a collaboration. Things happen that I never planned, or discovered in the moment, some feature of the land or light, which I never could have found without my models' presence and input. I like working with friends because I am interested in real people, with real bodies, not airbrushed icons of advertising perfection. I prefer natural ordinariness to idealized and unreal perfection.
This photographic work is an important part of my life as a gay man in rural, smalltown Midwestern America. These connections. These dialogues. They fuel my creativity for months after each collaborative encounter. I especially find it rewarding to work with other gay men who live rurally, who share my interest in naturism, who are comfortable with their bodies and sexuality, who are open and casual in demeanor.
This is a growing body of work that is increasingly important to my visual artistry. The key elements are, of course, rural life, outdoors life, being naked outdoors, open to the wind and sun and the touch of grass on the skin. What this is really about is the beauty of the human form within the beauty of the natural landscape. The contrasts and connections between skin, stone, water, green growing things.
There is also a cave on a cousin's land, which we spent some time exploring inside, again nude. These are some photos from my visit.
Cavemouth
Cave Shaman
Evening Stroll
I regularly engage in outdoor nude photography with some of my gay men friends as models. I've been doing this since 2000, and have compiled a few distinct bodies of work from these sessions. I love the secluded outdoor locations involved, especially in summer's heat, and I really enjoy working with my models, all of whom have been wonderfully open and giving to the artistic process. Working with nude models is a collaboration. Things happen that I never planned, or discovered in the moment, some feature of the land or light, which I never could have found without my models' presence and input. I like working with friends because I am interested in real people, with real bodies, not airbrushed icons of advertising perfection. I prefer natural ordinariness to idealized and unreal perfection.
This photographic work is an important part of my life as a gay man in rural, smalltown Midwestern America. These connections. These dialogues. They fuel my creativity for months after each collaborative encounter. I especially find it rewarding to work with other gay men who live rurally, who share my interest in naturism, who are comfortable with their bodies and sexuality, who are open and casual in demeanor.
This is a growing body of work that is increasingly important to my visual artistry. The key elements are, of course, rural life, outdoors life, being naked outdoors, open to the wind and sun and the touch of grass on the skin. What this is really about is the beauty of the human form within the beauty of the natural landscape. The contrasts and connections between skin, stone, water, green growing things.
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