Reading "Howl" in the Men's Room

Evan J. Peterson reads Howl in the men's room of a Seattle gay bar. What better place for a poetry reading?

Writing Eros 2

whichever way the wooden lathe
turns from roller to printer
the emergent wave of light
returning text to line
image of love in words and paean
torso and sigh and simple passion

in word and sigh the end of love
beginning of forever

New Music 2012

I'm overdue to announce that I have been commissioned to write a new piece of music: for Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, of Madison, WI. Perfect Harmony is celebrating its 15th year next season, and the commission is both a celebration of that anniversary, and to be presented at the next GALA Festival in 2012.

I've been involved with PHMC now since 2007, when I joined after my Dad died, to find some social contact with other gay men, and to get back into choral music. I needed both musical and social reconnections, at that time. I am an alumnus of two other GALA choruses, the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus, and the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. Perfect Harmony is a much smaller chorus than either of those, but it is full of men deeply committed to making music together, and to supporting each other. I knew from my previous experience with other choruses that I would find what I needed, in singing together with other gay men.

TTBB male chorus repertoire (tenor, tenor, baritone, bass) is my preferred choral configuration purely for matters of personal taste. I just like the sound of massed male voices. I sang in the Michigan Men's Glee Club when I was in college, a male chorus of some distinction at that time, and found many rewards there. I fell in love with male choral music, both the social and musical aspects, and for me, that changed my life. I'm a lifelong musician, singer, composer, etc. I've sung in every kind of chorus configuration that there is, and male chorus is still my favorite.

San Francisco is the flagship gay men's chorus. it was formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the first phase of the gay rights movement. They did a concert tour of the USA in 1981, spending a long time on the road, giving concerts in city after city, town after town, after which LGBT choruses sprang up all over the place in their wake. Now the GALA movement has become international, with several hundred choruses around the USA and the world. Every four years there is a GALA conference held in a large city, where several thousand singers gather with their choruses to perform for each other, to share their stories, to enjoy life, to party, to gather together in music that binds us all together. I attended the last GALA conference, in Miami in 2008, with PHMC, and it was for me, as it is for many other people, a life-changing and life-affirming experience.

GALA is one of the most positive faces of the national and international LGBT communities in our time, in our culture—which remain oppressed communities: politically, socially, financially, in terms of civil rights, and in many other ways. Singing together, we function as ambassadors of culture to the world, spreading positive messages of acceptance, diversity and inclusion.

Before some cynic points out how my last statement here sounds like the "politically correct party line," let me state for the record that I genuinely know all of the above to be true. It is based on my experience, and on years of observation.

I have been singing in choruses, first in church, then in high school and college, since I was 7 or 8 years old. I've been playing piano since I was 6. I've played every instrument in the symphony orchestra except the brass instruments, which I have no ability for. I'm a composer, a lifelong musician, a performer, a creative. Music is central to my life.

I have seen the same story time and time again: Making music together, in LGBT choruses, singing together, has changed peoples' lives for the better. It's given people a reason to go on living when life has become hard and difficult for them. Lesbian and gay people often have to fight for their lives, for their very right to exist; the GALA choral movement has given many a sense of community, of life, of affirmation and validation, beyond anything they'd ever had before. I've seen people choose to live, rather than give into the pressure to remove themselves from daily life, go off into a corner, and die.

And that is source and purpose of the new music commission I am undertaking.

The nature of this 15th anniversary commission for PHMC is to tell the stories of the members of the Chorus. Through interviews, writings, and other means, I have been gathering their stories, to turn into a suite of songs that will be premiered in Madison in spring of 2012, then performed at GALA 2012 in Denver, CO. The nature of the commission is to tell the stories of the men of Perfect Harmony: what it is like to live gay in the Midwest; what it was like to group up gay in the Midwest; and how we, as Midwesterners, with our own unique culture, are different from the usual gay stereotypes, which are based on the urban gay ghettoes of New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the other big cities of the two coasts. Our culture here in the heartlands, what some of the urbanities of the coast call the "flyover zone," is indeed from that of the coasts. Calling the Midwest the heartlands is accurate on so many levels. The music will in the end reflect its sources, and reflect, I hope, some aspects of what living gay in the heartlands is like.

As for my personal feelings about this new music commission:

I am gratified, grateful, and pleased beyond what words can say to have won this commission. I was not the only candidate for doing this commission, and it was not a sure thing that I'd be offered the work. My gratitude extends to the point where I want to do the very best job that I can do. I will go far beyond the usual requirements to make this new work be the best that it can be.

I am doubly, triply pleased to be working as a composer, actually being paid to write music. It's what I've always wanted to do, ever since music school. And I hope this is only the first commission of many, in the future. This is how I want to spend the rest of my career: earning my living from my creativity. Writing music. Writing choral music, for that matter. If this commission leads to other GALA choral commissions, well, nothing would make me happier.

More on this project at it develops. I'll keep you posted. I've already started writing, but it's still early in the process.

There is a challenge in that I still have a major chronic illness I am dealing with. That will be resolved by some pretty big surgery this summer, which I am doing my best to prepare for without letting it freak me out. (Don't ever let some asshole tell you to "Think positive" when they don't know what the fuck they're talking about it.) I have a lot of work to do. I will be writing music and preparing for surgery at the same time. I plan to get as much done as I can beforehand, because the recovery time will be at least a couple of months.

So I'm working hard on the lyrics and music already. I'm writing the lyrics as well as the music. I recently picked up Stephen Sondheim's marvelous book of collected lyrics, Finishing the Hat, not because I want to be influenced by Sondheim's lyrics but because this is a graduate school level textbook on how to do it. His commentaries are what I'm focusing on, and his principles, all of which are being very useful to me so far.

I have a lot of work to do. This is a really great opportunity for me, personally and in terms of my creative career. I am going to do my very best with it. And then we'll see what happens next.

That Loneliness Thing

So, in this small town I live in now, pretty much nobody really knows me, or wants to. You get to feel so lonely at times. I do have friends here, but most of them were friends of my parents first, and only became my friends when I moved back here to be my parents' live-in caregiver for their last years of life. Only one or two of those is really someone I can count on as a real friend. Most of the rest have grown casually distant. People are generally friendly here, but not very intimate.

In moments of crisis, I'm almost always in the role of caregiver. When I'm having a crisis, it's almost always impossible to find anyone to turn to. It's like they all evaporate. Some are no doubt uncomfortable with seeing moments of vulnerability, weakness, and doubt in someone who they have turned to, who they rely on: the illusion of invulnerable competence is what they cannot bear to see disproved.

That has been a lifelong pattern: People turn to me for support, but don't usually reciprocate. I have one friend I can turn to, when I need a shoulder, but it's almost always on the phone, not face to face. Those late night things, from across a few state lines.

How do you define success? Is it happiness? Wealth? Having fun? Love relationships? Surviving one more day? Being married for decades with your partner? I define success in very small terms: I survived one more day. Most of the time that's all I can manage. The truth is, there are lots of times when I get so alone that I don't feel like there's any reason to go on living. Some nights you don't care if you live or die. Yet I've always been stubborn. Even if it hurts, which it can, a lot, I'm too stubborn to give in. It's not that I have any hope that "things will improve." I have no faith in that at all. I just go on enduring. Most of the time it's not much fun, just to go on enduring.

Lots of people think that their love relationships, or their religions, or their work, are the solutions to all their problems, all their difficulties, unhappinesses, and sorrows. They flush themselves with pride in their connections. They rely on their partner for all things emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical. Many such relationships crack under the strain of trying to carry too much in one container. Marriage is a container, but not necessarily a good container for all things.

Whenever I post a personal ad looking for some physical contact, sex, jerking off, massage, with another man, in this small rural area I invariably get a majority of responses from married men. Guys who want boys on the side. It gets annoying, after the first few rounds. You end up not wanting to post a personal ad, because of the predictable responses, which tend to make you feel even more alone. Some of them are recognizably from the same men, time after time. That can get boring, which can also add to the loneliness.

I'm not a sentimental person, not even slightly. I don't drown by choice in the romantic fantasies of blissful married life (no matter who you're married to) that seem to be the stock fantasies of most. I'm romantic, actually very romantic, but it takes awhile to get there, so if you were to come digging for it, you'd have to dig awhile before you struck gold. Mainly I don't like clichés of romantic love, etc.

That's one more thing that sets me up to be alone: Not conforming to the mass fantasy of romantic love. Not caring much about the painstaking reaction in real life of such fantasies. Caring even less for reenacting fantasy scenes from novels and poems and movies.

Although I can be swayed with flowers. Or a kiss on the back of the knee. We all have our erogenous zones.

I don't confuse loneliness and solitude. Most people are afraid of solitude because they're afraid they'll feel lonely. Frankly, most people are pack animals. I'm not afraid of solitude. I seek it out. I do enjoy sharing my favorite places of solitary sojourn with one other, on occasion. You like to share the places you love, hoping that your lovers will love them, too. But as an artist I'm used to be alone a lot of the time. Alone and in silence is how best I hear those voices that lead me to poetry, to music, to visual art.

Loneliness is yearning in a way that solitude is not. Being solitary is complete of itself. Being in solitude is recharging, for people like me. When I'm alone, I usually don't yearn. I yearn more for company when I've had a recent fight with someone I care about, perhaps; and I yearn more for comfort when I'm suffering; and I yearn sometimes when I want to engage in something other than solo sex.

Loneliness is part of the spectrum of life, though. If it comes over you, savor it, experience it to the hilt, don't hold back. It's one of the bitter, more alkaline emotional flavors. Savor it. Don't try to mask it, or cover it over, with sweeter flavors. That does neither justice, and makes both hollow, in the long run. People who pretend to be happy all the time when clearly they're not do not serve themselves.

If I need to weep, for my own sake I must let it rain. And sometimes you get so filled with unspeakable joy, so full of feelings, that you can't say anything, words fail you. Don't hold anything back. It's only in letting it all happen, clean and honest like rainstorms and summer winds, that you cleanse yourself, and keep yourself from becoming mired.

I have to relearn what I once knew: Let it all out. Get it out of the body. Don't stifle it, and don't let it fester. Let it flow, in the moment, of the moment, and then when it's done, it's done. Harbor nothing. Save nothing. Just spend it all.

I know that lots of people in the rural culture I live in view that as impossible for themselves, that emotional flow, and they spend most of their lives suppressing their deepest feelings, especially in public. Not too much salt, never too much pepper. I know that I'm a heretic of deep feeling and intense living, here where I live. I've learned that I can't be any other way, and survive. For my own sake, I have to let it rain. And even when I'm feeling lonely, I have to feel lonely with every fiber of my being, knowing full well that I'll feel differently later, tomorrow, or some other day soon arriving.

Are you a Gay Poet or a Poet who happens to by Gay?

And why does it matter?

These questions keep coming up. They are questions asked both by LGBT poets about each other, and themselves of course, and also asked by heterosexual readers, writers, and critics. The question is, perhaps, an attempt to define the nature of identity in art.

My reflections here were prompted by something poet Stephen Mills wrote recently: He had recently received a packet of poems and critiques from his last year of MFA in Poetry studies in Florida:

As I was ending my MFA, I was being nudged to write poems that didn't focus so much on gay identity and the domestic life of a gay couple, which was a lot of what I wrote during those three years. In the moment, I often took a bit of a offense to these comments and I partly chalked it up to the "heterosexual male factor."

Among the packet was a last comment by his workshop teacher, commenting that, yes, he did write a lot of gay-themed domestic poems at the time, and people would indeed get tired of it—but mostly because any one theme that ones writes about over and over and over is going to loose some readers, simply from monotony. To be clear, Mr. Mills adds that he did not feel any homophobia was in these critiques, nor does he feel any homophobia was in effect during or after the workshop period. Mr. Mills continues:

I still write mostly about sex and identity, but more of the outside world has entered those poems. The biggest difference between [his mentor] and me is that I don't see sex and identity as a narrow topic. It is a topic filled with things to explore and I could write poetry about sex and identity for the rest of my life and still have things to write about. There is always that notion that if you write about issues related to your minority that somehow you are being narrow. This may never change, but I hope to continue to push people to think beyond that notion.

It's an interesting issue, this opening out of subject matter, beyond a "narrow" topic, which is a topic tangled up with sexuality and identity. I've found that the line between "personal" and "universal" content in my own poetry moves around a lot. I write about everything; I write a lot of poetry that isn't "personal" or "confessional" but which can be considered impossible to separate from my self and my sexual identity. I began to write explicitly gay poems beginning in my mid-teens—and some of them were very explicit indeed—but I hid them from everyone till years later. I wasn't open about this poetry till much later in life. I've never done an MFA degree or workshop process, although I've been involved in poetry groups and private writers' workshops for several years; some other poems that do not hide the homoerotic nature of the relationships of the people in the poem have been through those workshops, but not those early, gay poems.

I feel that when my sexuality appears in my poems, it's most often in celebration, rather than overtly about issues political or psychological. Most of the gay-themed poems I've ever written have been celebrations of one kind or another. Not really political or issue-based—except of course that any gay-themed poem is still a political act in the current cultural climate of only partial acceptance of LGBT people and the art they make. Robert Mapplethrope and David Wojnarowicz and james Broughton are all still controversial, and not only because they were explicit in their art.

The three or four longest poems I've ever written are of this gay/erotic type: very sexual, very sensual, full of celebratory, life-affirming eros and ekstasis, written on a sustained level of white heat, and explicit about the acts involved in making love. Maybe it's the Midwestern reserve in me still, and it still seems daring to be explicit about who I love in a poem. These poems were explicitly, ecstatically sexual—that is, homosexual, pansexual, polysexual, panentheistic: erotic in the sense of life-force not just sexuality. Emphasis on the ecstasy. I have since published two or three of these poems as limited-edition chapbooks, for private distribution to friends and a few interested others. That's mostly because I just didn't think anyone else would be interested in such poems.

One thing I've never expected is that anyone would ever accept or like my poems; they've always been too outside the current poetic fashions. To non-poets and poets alike they break all the "rules," and not only in terms of content. To this day I mostly share these more explicitly homoerotic poems with my gay friends, rather than the general public. There are two reasons for this: They're very personal poems, not confessional but personal, and I didn't necessarily write them for anyone but myself. (In two cases that I can think of, in which the long poems accumulated lines over a few years, a bit added at a time, the poem set aside for a time then returned to later, the writing was also interrupted by self-induced orgasms: is it masturbation when your own sexual writing turns you on? I don't care. One difference between eroticism and pornography is that pornography turns into a job, and like any job, isn't a turn-on after awhile.)

The idea of what is universal in poetry is at the heart of the matter.

Does every poem have to be universal, or have universal appeal? No, not at all. But just because you write in a poem about gay relationships, sex, and community, does not mean you're not touching on universal human themes—quite the contrary, as can be seen in poems by Thom Gunn, Constantine Cavafy, james Broughton (a celebratory poet if ever there was one!) Dennis Cooper, Federico Garcia Lorca, Kenneth Pitchford, and many others, to name only a few.

Mr. Mills also writes: There is also a notion that if you write about gay issues you are automatically writing "confessional" poetry. Confessional has many other issues and is really grounded in a particular period and moment in poetry. I don't personally consider my work to be confessional.

The post-confessional lyric has become one of the dominant genres of contemporary poetry, in competition with Language Poetry and neo-formalism—in part because of the lyric poem's dominant place in poetry workshop teaching. Yet writing about the personal need not be "confessional" poetry. I tend to view confessional poetry as that which puts one's own personal biography of wounds on display, publicly revealing personal and private issues, be they psychological or sexual or whatever. There is always a feeling of the poet airing his or her dirty laundry in public in "confessional" poetry:—public "confession" always contains a hint of private "shame."

The usual argument heard from poets on the "poet who happens to be gay" side of the question is that they don't want their poetry to ghettoized, or limited in any way. They write about more than just being gay, they write about universal human concerns. Even gay poets who don't want to be identified solely as gay poets carry the assumption, it seems, that sex and identity are narrow topics: There is always that notion that if you write about issues related to your minority that somehow you are being narrow.

That I’m gay and a poet (and composer, etc.) is not hidden. It’s self-revealing in my writing (and even more so in my photographic work). This also opens the question of "gay sensibility," the idea in identity politics that no matter what you write about, your essential self as a gay person affects all the art you make, even the art not overtly about gay themes. There is some truth to this gay sensibility concept, although it is contested terrain.

I tend to agree with those artists who admit that no matter what there art is about, it is infused with their life's experience of being different, of being Other, of being gay. When you're a cultural outsider, you learn at a younger age than most how to step back and observe your own culture objectively. When you're bullied for being different, you learn to "read" people and situations very quickly, and you develop a survival instinct. Those instincts go deep, even if they don't rule you in later life.

Thinking all these questions through again, at the moment, I find myself on the side of “gay poet” rather than the "poet who happens to by gay." Yes, that's an explicitly political statement—although it's not necessarily myself who politicizes that statement. The presumption that a “poet who happens to be gay” might write more universally-appealing or universally-ranging-in-topic poems is based on the assumption that gay-themed poetry is somehow inherently less “universal” in scope than non-gay-themed poetry. I object to that strongly, now, because it feels like just another form of ghettoization, even of internalized homophobia—even when it comes from openly gay poets who want to present themselves (perhaps to win wider acceptance among the more conservative masses?) as “poets who happen to be gay.”

What makes a poetry universal is the shared human experience involved. We all love, we all suffer, we all live and die. The universal experience of falling in love, and living with someone, and dying, well, it doesn’t matter who that is. So a gay-themed love poem doesn’t have to be less “universal” somehow than either a heterosexual love poem or a love poem in which the genders are all indeterminate.

And why would readers want to know if I’m a gay poet anyway? I mean, I am, and it’s no secret. But if a straight person wanted to know, I would want to know why they wanted to know. To just put the poet into another categorical box?

Yes, this is personal/political, definitely, for me to declare myself a "gay poet" in many circumstances. The "poets who happen to be gay" have a different politics than mine—bluntly, a seemingly more conservative, assimilationist politics. I think of writers who have explicitly stated that they prefer to be thought of as "poets who happen to be gay"—Michael Cunningham, Mark Doty, John Ashbery, etc. Others come to mind as well, some of whom are still in the closet, perhaps because they fear loosing work opportunities if they come out. Well, that remains a valid fear, even decades after Stonewall. Many of these writers are people I respect as artists, if not for their stances on this question.

Maybe there's something generational to this, as well; one thinks of the generation of avant-garde composers of the mid-20th C., many of whom were gay, but never publicly said so. An earlier generation, even after Stonewall, never felt comfortable about publicly coming out.

Therefore I sometimes feel that this question can be used as a marker for figuring out an artist's political leanings, since in several examples I can think of, “poets who happen to be gay” also have taken more conservative and assimilationist stances on other LGBT issues. A lot of their political stances are "don't rock the boat" stances, or otherwise anti-radical stances. For example, the fight for gay marriage rights is an assimilationist program, because most of the rhetoric breaks down into "we want to be just like you, only different." I am all for equal rights, but gay marriage is not now our most important issue, and never has been, except to the more assimilationist gays among us. DADT was more important. Far more pressing and important is the prevention of gay teen bullying and suicide. What causes we choose to give our time to is a political choice itself. Just to be clear, I'm glad that LGBT activists are working for all of these various civil rights, including gay marriage—I want everyone who wants to get married to have the choice available to them—and make no mistake, these are civil rights issues. My problem with gay marriage is primarily that the entire institution of marriage itself is problematic and anachronistic.

I can also see some situational aspects to the question of "gay poet." I could foresee myself not objecting to being announced, in certain venues, as a "poet who happens to be gay" rather than a "gay poet." I can foresee public performance and/or reading situations where that would be appropriate; not because of fear, but because sometimes you have to pick your battles. And because in other performance ventures, my sexual identity just isn't necessary to the performance—say, when I'm playing a jazz gig. I do feel that my gay sensibility does permeate everything I do, including my jazz gigs, but that's partly because my muse is a male, not a female. I play even jazz more intensely, more personally, if my muse is present in the listening audience.

Then there is the related issue of opportunism. Perhaps, to get an artist's award or grant, or to be even considered, you have to not "advertise" your LGBT status. Perhaps on some occasions you end up not talking about it because it torpedo your chances of getting recognition, or reward, or an award, or something similar. I sincerely feel that some "pots who happen to be gay," like some artists of earlier generations, have chosen their stance because being more "militantly" gay would deny them opportunities, or lose them gigs. This is an understandable fear. We all need to make a living.

But how far dare we go to (mis)represent ourselves in order to get something? How far does having an open identity go towards living and integrated and authentic life, and where would we sell that in order to gain some kind of advantage? In other words, this is at root about prostituting oneself in order to get ahead in one’s artistic career.

For my part, I'm perfectly willing to prostitute my art: I like getting paid for my creativity. I've had grunt jobs where I was an interchangeable cog in the corporate machine. And I prefer to be paid to exercise my mind, my creativity, and my sense of humor—because it's more fun and interesting for me. (I'd say that's pretty "universal" a sentiment.) But while I am willing to prostitute my art, I'm not willing to prostitute myself, my identity, my essential nature, just to get a gig. If they can't deal with me being gay, I probably don't want to work with them anyway. It's a big ocean, and there are always more fish to be caught. So I might not make a grand announcement that I'm a gay artist; but if it comes up, I'll quietly and proudly affirm that I am gay.

Honestly, in artistic situations that has mostly come up when my coming out in that artistic venue was a matter of setting the record, ahem, straight. Of being true to myself, and not being hidden. I recall one poetry discussion panel where I came out because the discussion was about an Allen Ginsberg poem, and to make a point, I needed to let people know my take on the poem. (Which was "A Supermarket in California.") I already thought everyone knew I was gay, who was there, so I didn't even think I was coming out to anybody there; although it turned out I was.

So I affirm that I'm a "gay poet." I may not broadcast it all the time. I make plenty of poems, and photographs, and music, that is not explicitly about being gay, or has openly gay content. And I do feel that my gay sensibility is never absent in anything I do, because it's an essential part of whom I am. My muses are other men. My inspiration in my art, the life-force energy that is the power under life, that supports and enables life, that life-force, which I often explicitly discuss in my art, is eros, is life-force itself. Or call it prajna, ki, ch'i, the Tao. There are many names. What I do know is that it is always in my art, whether or not my art is about it or not. And because my eros is directed towards same-sex affiliation, I am a "gay poet."

Not that it matters. And not that anybody should care.

An Anti Personal Ad

WARNING: Vitriolic, mean, and spiteful, written out in a moment of frustration and annoyance after yet another bit of online coitus interruptus thanks to Craigslist.org and the people who use them. Actually tried to post this, but CL's new log-in and password policy is so bloody opaque and hard to use, that I didn't get it out there. So, here it is. A bit of creative snark. Mind the gap.

•

An Anti Personal Ad

Don't bother.

I'm tired of being accomodating towards others when they're not towards me. Guys only want to get together with me when they feel like it, not when I do. So when I don't feel like it, don't bother. Your timing and your schedule are not actually more important than mine.

Don't bother with those responses to Craigslist ads when you're married and want me to be "discreet." Even more so, don't bother when you didn't tell me that up front, but only revealed it later on. And don't expect a repeat visit. I don't play with married men. Even if you ARE the only men out here in the wilds of Wisconsin who bother to reply to personal ads, I'm sick of you.

I may be horny, but I'm not desperate. Certainly not as desperate as you are. Why did you ever get married in the first place, if you still want boyz on the side? Live honestly, or don't expect me to have anything to do with you. You need to grow up, be honest, and live with some shred of personal integrity about your sex lives—or I can't be bothered.

And if you haven't been out of the closet for at least a few years—long enough to have gotten through the "kid in a candy store" phase and the "finding myself" phase—then I don't want to date you. I don't want to be your teacher, your therapist, your guide, your guru, or your one-night stand. When you get past those early stages of coming out, when you've found some balance, when you've settled down a little—call me then, and we'll talk.

While I do indeed enjoy men who are exploring their gayness for the first time, while I do enjoy younger men, oh yes indeed I've had some great sex with younger men, I'm nobody's daddy or sugardaddy, nobody's guru, nobody's therapist. While indeed I've done my share of sexual healing while having sex—both mine, and yours—and had a good time opening up that way, I'm not your healer. I want to be your partner. It has to be mutual, and reciprocal, and it has to go both ways.

See, I have the same problem with most gay subcultures: most of them, with only a couple of rare exceptions, even now remain appearance-based. Even Bear culture is appearance-based, it's just a reversal of the usual buff or smooth gay stereotypes. Most of the worst aspects of gay culture—those ways which we beat each other up—remain shallow and appearance-based. Not liking what you see, and being too fucked up to be tolerant of it because of your own internalized homophobia, is the root of sissyphobia, of ageism, of looksism, of every little discriminatory snipe and snark with which you deride each other, mercilessly and without compassion. In a community supposed to be tolerant of diversity, intolerance is the rule. And it's alll very shallow.

It's ALL drag, whether it's boy drag, or girl drag, or businessman drag, or naked drag, it's ALL drag. That's the most profound truth of gay life: Everything is a performance. You can perform whoever you want to be, and you can change several times a day, and nobody has the right to tell you you're wrong. But neither do you have the right to tell others they are wrong—because if you demand respect for yourself, for just being who you are, then you must offer the same respect in return. Or it's ALL meaningless.

So if you don't like me because I don't look like your ideal fantasy image of what you want, fuck you. Or rather, UNfuck you. Who'd want to fuck you, anyway, if you're that shallow? So if you don't like the things I have to say, or how I say them, unfuck you. If you're so self-centered that you only want to nookie when it's convenient for YOU, and you can't be bothered caring about the feelings of your partner, then you're only in love with yourself, you narcissistic little wanker, so unfuck you.

The definition of love that works pragmatically and practically, all romantic and sentimental bullshit aside, is this: You love your partner if you care more about their feelings and their highest good then you do your own. Real love can even mean letting them go, so they can be free to be themselves. Yes, it hurts to let them go, and when will it ever be YOUR turn to be happy and fulfilled? Yes, that can suck. But that's what love is: The heart that is open to risk, and to being hurt, and to taking chances with your own feelings. take a chance! The closed fist can never hold onto anything anyway.

It may all be role-play, it may all be drag, but the drag that I want to role-play, and have done so for years, is to be the most authentically myself that I know how to be. I won't pretend to be anything other than myself for you, and I won't offer anything other than everything I have to give, honestly and totally and completely with full authenticity. I won't hold anything back, I'll give you everything that I am, and if that freaks you out or intimidates you or makes you run away, that's YOUR problem. Accept me as I am, just as I accept you as you are, and no games, no bullshit, no headgames of mindfucks, and we might make something magical between us. I give as good as I get, just you wait and see.

Lose the dirty talk during sex. It pulls me right out of my body and into my intellect, and shuts me right down sexually, when you're being verbal like that. Grunt, moan, tell me it feels good, tell me to keep going, but that dirty talk shit is major turn-off. I love hearing what pleasure I'm giving you. I love hearing the animal sounds that men make when their ecstasy has taken them past all words. You can roar, and moan, and sigh. But enough with the dirty talk. Enough with the narratives. Enough with the porn dialogue. It's all bad dialogue when it's porn dialogue. If you think what you see and hear in porn is real and not just some fantasy, I pity you.

If you're easy-going about most things in life but passionate about those things you really care about, and passionate in bed, then I want to hear from you. Because I'm an intense, passionate person myself. I've scared people with my intensity, I've intimidated them with my unintentional wacky Zen brilliance, I've freaked them out with my weird sense of humor. I don't care. Take me as I am, or don't expect the same in return. Make it mutual, or piss off.

If all this was too long for you to read, or get through to this far, you have the attention span of a gnat and I don't want to meet you anyway. If you DID make it this far, gimme a call, and we can take it from there.

AIDS Sutra (Vajrayana)

(sections of the AIDS Quilt, Madison, WI, 1989)

AIDS Sutra

and I remember the one and only time I ever visited The Quilt,
laid out in partial display, less than a quarter of its total weave,
but still enough panels to cover the floor of the Field House in Madison,
     temporarily displacing the basketball team,
     whose players stayed away that weekend;
it was a Sunday. The day before we had marched through downtown streets,
a blustery afternoon’s hike, shouting slogans and singing—
some of us had drums despite the cold, and the living procession
throbbed with noise—and I remember how warmed I felt
by the outpouring of strength and love from all those queers, and from all
the friends and loved ones who marched with us, in sympathy and kinship;
and I remember how I still felt different, alien,
     more queer than queer,
alone even when immersed in the throngs of shouting, different folk;
and I remember the quiet people walking amongst The Quilt’s bright panels,
quietly reading, taking photos, talking in low funereal voices;
and I remember the white-clothed Quilt attendants walking on patrol,
bearing kleenex tissue boxes, swarming in on private griefs
     whenever some wanderer broke down in tears,
white-clad leeches like intrusive psychic vampire vultures feeding off the pain
and leaving our grievings sucked out, shallow, and diminished—
and I just wanted to tell them to go piss off
     and leave us all alone;
     can’t a person just have a good cleansing cry without you horning in?
And I was afraid of all the loose emotion in that space,
so I shuttered down my nascent impenetrable walls, bearing silent witness,
playing the dispassionate ethnographic observer, until,
finally,
the purity of one graceful message
struck through my shields and split me open:
the simple remembrance of a man
who had sown his lover’s favorite blue jeans to a panel—
faded denim on pink—and a simple “I miss you”
with a name;
and I broke down and cried,
and took a photograph—the fish that finally caught me—
and wondered if the war would ever end;

and I remember how alone I felt all through the years of public school,
and I hated that bitter loneliness,
     when I felt so different and unknowable,
     more alien than “queer”ness alone could encapsulate:
     I was doubly queer because I was a smart kid, and triply queer
because I had grown up without radio or television, in a foreign land;
and I remember lusting after every barechested
     adolescent boy I ever saw—
     myself still adolescent, shy and scared—
and never got to touch or kiss;
and I remember swimming naked during boys’ gym class
     in the junior high school pool in 7th grade—
all the boys who didn’t have their suits on any given swim day
     swam naked for an hour—
and sometimes I’d deliberately forget my suit at home,
passing nude from locker room to shower to pool
     to shower to locker room again,
and never wanted to get dressed, I felt so comfortable
     in my skin;
and I have come to forever love the water,
     the healing of the waves,
     the river’s flowing kiss,
     the envelope of liquid grace on my naked skin;
but I never got to kiss or touch or lick or suck
     those other naked boys,
even the ones who probably wanted it as much as I did
     but were just as scared of the ultimate rejection
as I was, scared of being so alien, so queer, so unloved,
instinctively knowing we’d be hated and scorned and branded forever;
I thought I was the only boy who’d ever had these feelings;
and I remember being afraid of getting beat up again—
     this time not for being a sissy, a weakling, a four-eyed
     pale-bodied book-reading teacher’s-pet goody-two-shoes,
     but because I was the queer little faggot—
by all the boys who were bigger and tougher than me,
     which was nearly all of them,
if they ever found out what I felt inside;
and I never got to love them all,
never got to lie together close and naked
     and make love;
and so I both hated and loved those gym classes,
     because I was ashamed of my puny little body,
but I loved going shirtless and rubbing shoulders with the other boys,
or going naked in the pool, pretending I couldn’t swim
     so some bigger boy would hold me by the hips
     while I flailed at the dark, warm, chlorine-flavored water;

and I’m still angry, angrier than ever,
     at all the missed opportunities that echo through my life,
     all the times I was too timid,
     all the times I was too shy to seduce or be seduced,
     all the times I seemed to choose the wrong man to love;
and now I’ve found the bottomless volcano of my anger,
     the dragon rampant on a darkling plain,
     the shapes of the warrior inside me rising like the wind;
and I still get pissed at the thoughtless cry of the sheep,
     the autonomic rage against bigotry and banal, brainless hate;
and I am just angry as I ever was, and I don’t suppress it anymore,
but my tactics have changed: now,
     I turn my anger into these hard words,
     I fling it at the world in packets of knife-edged music,
I put myself out in little flames—
I change it into heartfelt art and dance and song;

and I remember my activist days, still believing we could make a difference,
     the meetings, the arguments, the discussions over ice cream,
     the plans to change the world, to educate our enemies,
     the endless endless talk, the speakers’ bureaus before dim prejudice—
and I am just angry as I ever was, and I don’t suppress it anymore,
but my strategy has changed: now,
     I live the life I’ve chosen, I am walking the good red road,
     I live as the visions lead me to live, and otherwise
I live my life just as I wish, and harm no-one:
being true to yourself is the best revenge.

And I remember the worst violation, the final pointless insult:
     just as I was ready at last to go out and experiment with sex,
     just as I felt ready to endure the hate and look for a lover,
     just as I felt strong enough to have a relationship with some other boy,
          or at least have sex,
AIDS appeared on the horizon, looming like the rats of the plague,
frightening us all into retreat or death, exacting a mounting toll
     that grew to rival—then surpass—the deathcount of boys
     destroyed by the Vietnam war, which thank the gods had ended
     before I was old enough to have to choose between the draft or dodging.
AIDS, you terrified me,
AIDS, you gave me a reason to retreat back into my shell in fear,
AIDS, you gave my long-standing fears their final torch—
just as I was ready to come out and act like a man, a queer, a full-bodied fag,
AIDS, you gave me an excuse to be celibate and timid again.
And I remember falling for it, hell,
     I fell for it completely, retreating with my tail between my legs,
     not Lee at Appomattox but the baffled generals in ‘Nam,
falling for the ultimate black hole joke:
     the game is rigged, folks, you don’t know the rules,
     the dice are loaded, you haven’t got enough to stake you in,
     and there’s no way in hell you’ll ever win, or even leave the table alive,
so why even try to play.
That’s what AIDS said to me.

But that’s no more rich or rare than any other curse.
I’ve lived through too many days of dislocation,
too many words of hatred flung my way,
     to miss how nothing’s really changed:
life must kill you in the end.
It’s how we choose to live—
keeping to the rules we’re given, or breaking them if we can search them out,
or making up our own, or playing—not to win
but to keep the game in play—

that’s the only way,
the only way,
the only way
to play this game.

•

Originally written circa 1994, and revised a couple of times since, this poem is part of the book Sutras: Spiritual Exercises. It's an unpublished long book, more a personal credo than a book of "fine art poems." I long ago decided, after presenting some of the Sutras to a workshop critique group, to mostly negative responses, that it was more important to me that the Sutras are honest, spiritual, and reflective, rather than "perfect" poems. So I make no apologies for the emotion in this poem, or its anger. I write these Sutras as, indeed, spiritual exercises; some are in poetic forms; some are more like prose-poems; and some are not defined in terms of form.

This Sutra on AIDS speaks for itself. At some point you have to look around, and express your grief. Sometimes grief can seem like anger, but really it's grief. Don't try to block it. Just let it rain. As Paul Monette once wrote, "Grief is a sword, or it is nothing."

World AIDS Day

I wanted to write something for World AIDS Day, yet I find that my friend prairiemary has already said almost everything I might want to say. So I'll just encourage folks to go read what she wrote.

And I'll leave my own silent comments via my artwork:


Sacred Heart Labyrinth


Burning Phallus Labyrinth


Shiva Dancing in the Labyrinth (from Spiral Dance)

Against Bullying: Some Resources

Still think bullying is the victim's fault? You really need to get over that. Anyone, particularly any gay man on a gay men's website, who denies that LGBT youth are in peril in today's society needs to have their cranium removed from their rectum. Yet I have seen plenty of such comments in recent weeks. That's either denial or veiled self-hatred, or both.

I heard more via email from friends in the gay men's chorus in San Francisco about the bullying/suicide connection. One of them passed on information about The GLBT National Help Center, support website with helpline phone numbers. Even though they're based in San Francisco, they are a template for many similar regional support services.

•

Some relevant facts to be found via The Trevor Project:

Additional Facts about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth

• Nine out of 10 LGBT students (86.2%) experienced harassment at school; three-fifths (60.8%) felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation; and about one-third (32.7%) skipped a day of school in the past month because of feeling unsafe (2007 GLSEN National School Climate Survey).

• Almost all transgender students had been verbally harassed (e.g., called names or threatened) in the past year at school because of their sexual orientation (89%) and gender expression (89%) (2009 GLSEN: Harsh Realities, The Experiences of Transgender Youth In Our Nation’s Schools).

• LGBT youth in rural communities and those with lower adult educational attainment face particularly hostile school climates (JG, Greytak EA, Diaz EM – Journal of Youth & Adolescence 2009)

• Lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents are 190 percent more likely to use drugs and alcohol than are heterosexual teens (Marshal MP, Friedman MS, et al – Addiction 2008).

• It is estimated that between 20 and 40 percent of all homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (2006 National Gay & Lesbian Task Force: An Epidemic of Homelessness). 62% of homeless LGB youth will attempt suicide at least once—more than two times as many as their heterosexual peers (Van Leeuwen JMm et al – Child Welfare 2005)

Living as I do in a rural area, I see that third bullet point all the time. Most gays in my rural area are not out. Every time I post an online personal ad hoping to make a date with someone, fully half of the respondents are married men who want "boys on the side." I delete those responses without replying, since I don't want to tangled up in that kind of drama. (Nor am I interested in being part of someone's coming out process, being their therapist or guru, or whatever. Once they get past the initial few years of being out, maybe we can talk.)

Living a gay life in rural America is living in a mostly hostile environment.

•

California supports bullied young people. In early October 2010 a bill was signed into law:

SB 543 — Mental Health Services for At-Risk Youth — is an historic bill that allows youth 12 to 17 years old to receive mental health care without requiring their parents’ consent. LGBT youth across California who are fearful that their families could become abusive or kick them out if they come out—or refuse to consent to their obtaining mental health services—will now be able get the help they need, before it’s too late.

Equality California and Senator Mark Leno made this bill a priority to address the hostile environment too many of California's young people find themselves dealing with everyday, the kind of environment that has led to bullying, hate crimes and several recent tragic and heartbreaking suicides. This bill is one critical step to provide support for LGBT and questioning youth. But we have a long way to go to end the climate of terror that those who oppose equality and promote hatred have created.

I hope this law does start a trend. I hope that it does go federal, eventually.

But of course there will be the usual wingnut outcry against it from the right, which will no doubt label it as creeping socialism. Which of course it is not. But that's what keeps happening when the extremist ideology of individual liberty trumps the desire to maintain the social fabric. In fact, of course, the idea that kids can go seek help without their parents' consent is a triumph for individual liberty. But how many will perceive it that way? Wait and see.

•

I'm all about stuff we can DO, not just talk about, to counteract the effects of bullying and prejudice and hate. And sometimes words are the tools we can DO something with, too.

If you're a queer writer, or a queer artist, here's something else to do, to make it better: The Better Book Project, edited by Eric Nguyen:

Deadline: 30 December 2010

I think for any living queer (past high school) this is very hard to deal with. Our community is falling apart here. Our tribe is dying. It is definitely better now to be queer than in the past: but it’s still hard (I can go onto a whole sociological analysis of all this…but that’ll be like dissertation size, with a lot of unanswered questions [until I can get research done ] so I won’t). Obviously.

I am not part of any nonprofit organization. I can’t say that I’m an activist in that I stay in an office and do work to help past laws. (After many interviews, I don’t think I can truly be an activist in an office). But what I am is a writer. I am a part of culture. I am culture. (All writers and artists are). As a writer, I am doing what I can. I’ll do the only thing that I can do. Write. And edit.

Thus, my Better Book Project.

Inspired by Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, this is a project for the queer literary community. It is our chance (it’s our duty), to use our words to their full extent–to save lives, to communicate to our distant selves.

Think about yourself as a teenager. What story, what poem, what words would’ve made things better, in the face of bullies and unapproving family members, in a small town without a car perhaps, with no visible community? What would you tell them?

I am looking for words– stories, poems, essays, short memoirs–for an anthology tentatively titled BETTER: Stories, Poems, Essays, Words for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Teens About Growing Up, Surviving, Living, and Thriving. Publication is set for Summer 2011. Publication will first be through Lulu. All profit from this will go to a nonprofit that supports queer youth. Therefore, sadly, no payment. Think of it as a literary donation. No word minimums or limits, but remember that this is an anthology. Will seek publication through a publishing house for larger distribution (I’m thinking about where this book can be physically avaliable to kids, and public libraries don’t buy self-published titles), but we’ll see then.

Send all submissions to betterbookproject@gmail.com by December 30, 2010.

More (but not too much more) info at: www.betterbookproject.blogspot.com.

•

The genuinely positive side of the Internet: ending isolation for people who have no other easy way to connect with like-minded people, or others who are going through similar problems. The supportive connections are powerful and very helpful.

Here's something extremely cool:

An anti-bullying website for and by youth, gay and not, focusing on telling their stories, making a positive message, providing help, telling it like it is, and even a poetry contest. I've often said that making art is the best revenge, meaning that it's the best way to talk back, to stand up and be heard, and to survive. In my own darkest hours, making art, making music, is what has kept me alive.

This is one very good way to start making a difference, and getting out the anti-bullying message:

A Million Miles from Anywhere

•

A message from Sarah Silverman on bullying, and she just about says it all.



•

From The White House: It Gets Better

From The White House Blog, video clips of President Obama and Vice President Biden addressing the recent spate of suicides caused by bullying. It impresses me that the President spoke out on this, with his own view that it does indeed get better. There are also several links provided on the blog to resources about the suicide and bullying of gay issues.

It's good to see The White House throw their weight behind this issue. No matter what anyone thinks politically about whoever inhabits, will inhabit, or has inhabited The White House, it's really good that the Executive Branch has taken notice and said something about bullying and suicide, because this is an issue that affects every citizen, one way or another, beyond all political posturing and debate.

•

Ft. Worth, TX, City Councilman Joel Burns speaks out that It Gets Better. I found this video deeply moving. Maybe there's hope after all, if the younger generation of politicians, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum, can be more like Joel Burns.

Pass this clip on to a troubled LGBT kid if you know one. It's sure to be helpful.



•

My Son Is Gay

What a super mom! Her attitude is the best anti-bullying tonic possible. What a great mom.

Some of the comments are shocking, though, in context. But these serve only to speak better of Supermom, who by contrast with those benighted souls is a shining light of heroic love.

Bullying & What It Leads To

I have not been an activist about any LGBT issues for some time. I used to be an activist for LGBT rights, marched in the streets, went and gave presentations to groups for the purposes of education, participated in and led forums and seminars and open classrooms. All of that and more.

For the past several years, I've been letting my artwork be my activism: my writing, my visual art, my other creative work. Everything I did was infiltrated with my sense of social justice, of human community, of equal rights. Some people noticed, most did not. Yet even my more personal, spiritual art has occasionally been recognized as political for merely existing: some topics, some issues, some imagery, by merely being addressed in art, and acknowledged in art, becomes political. If not overtly, than quietly.

There have been a lot of articles in the news in recent weeks and months about suicides by kids, gay and straight, who have been bullied. I find this horribly upsetting, and infuriating, and want to do something about it.

For example, the suicide of Tyler Clementi has galvanized gay rights grouped, and received significant coverage in the press. ironically, most press coverage of gay rights issues for the past few years has been mostly negative, reporting the erosion of rights or the ascendance of various homophobic religious and political groups, not excluding the so-called Tea Party.

Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog has also been active on this subject, which is great, since that's one of the most-read blogs out there, especially by conservatives.

This current run of suicide stories tells me that this is the issue we really need to be working on.

People are dying. People are getting bullied for being gay, or just for being different, for being suspected of being gay, and there have been several suicides. For every one that reaches the attention of the national media, you can correctly assume there were several others that got no attention at all. And in the current political climate, which has swung far to the political right, many people who might have kept their prejudices silent before now seem to feel empowered to loudly broadcast them, and to act on them.

In my opinion, gay marriage comes a distant second as a gay rights issue—not that it shouldn't also be worked on diligently. But people are dying out there. We need to keep gay rights issues in perspective, that there are other issues besides gay marriage that are really more necessary, more urgent, and potentially more outright life-threatening to our people. (Don't even get me started on assimilationist vs. diversity movements within gay culture, and why they've become the way they are.) As long as kids are killing themselves for being different, gay marriage is frankly irrelevant.

I applaud Jon Savage and his It Gets Better project, and everyone else working to let the younger generation know that it does get better. That's where I'm going to be putting my limited activist energy, for now. I am working on a video and musical contribution, which I hope to complete and post soon.

And I strongly feel that the gay men's chorus that I sing with, and all such LGBT groups that present a positive public face to the world, have a real powerful message of self-acceptance and self-esteem to present, and keep presenting, and keep building on, till suicide is no longer the option taken by so many of the younger generation still being bullied just for being different.

I was severely bullied when I was a kid and well into my teens (and have written about it several times), and I made it through that hell to where I am now. Sure, it left some scars (chief among them being an innate distrust of most authority figures), but overall I've overcome it. Nothing would please me more than to see an end to bullying, not only against LGBT kids but against any kids who are seen as different. It does get better.

And don't try to tell me that the cultural environment in general, and the culture in school, are innocent in all this. At best, they're ignorant about bullying; at worst, they're complicit. Anyone who is willfully ignorant of the effects of bullying, because they can't be bothered, or because they think they're helpless to do anything about it, is complicit, even guilty of tacit support of bullying. That was the truth of my experience, and I see no evidence it's changed.

And the bullies will do their best to convince you that it's not happening, that there's nothing going on, and that we should all just "move on." This is also the message coming from many elements of the political right wing, who would like to see this all just go away. Is this merely coincidental, or a symptom in kind of the social environment that empowers bullies?

I remember Matthew Shepard at times like this. I've stood at that fence line overlooking Laramie, WY, and thought long and hard about what to do about it.

What groups like the gay men's choruses and other groups do, simply in being ambassadors of diversity and self-acceptance, goes a long way towards healing this horror. May we all continue to do so, as best we can.

•

Addenda:

There's a lot of denial about bullying still out there. It shows up even on gay online forums and dating sites, among those gay men who also tend to express anti-sissy, anti-femme preferences. The one thing bullies never do is take personal responsibility for what their actions and words do to others. When to comes to talking about bullying there's usually a ringing silence.

I am supportive of the gay marriage rights push, of the right of those who wish to get married to do so. I support the repeal of the military's ridiculous Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy—although since the US military is an institution riddled with bureaucratic homophobia, I'm not holding my breath. (Meanwhile, the militaries of several of our allied nations in Europe are laughing at our military's policy, and rightly so.) I support the rights of gay parents to adopt children, to participate in the Boy Scouts (another case where I'm not holding my breath), and to openly go to as parents to PTA conferences.

The priority, however, is to stand up against the forces of hatred, no matter where they turn up, no matter when. To stand up to them and to tell them that they're wrong. No more children need die because of being bullied.

Young people being bullied, being targeted. Think about it.

At that age, who isn't confused and "overly emotional" most of the time. It's a very tough and turbulent time of life, and getting pushed over the edge is not just a matter of personal choice, it's a matter of being pushed by circumstances beyond what you can stand anymore.

At that age I was definitely living in fear. And the loneliness. Which can be so powerful, so hard to overcome. And which, if not relieved by finding a supportive community in which to counteract the effects of feeling isolated and lone, can become fatal.

Blame is not easy to fix. Yet there plainly does exist a hostile social environment that makes kids feel bad about themselves. Those forces that create such a hostile environment are what the fight is against, in the long run: that's the social-justice level of the fight, which cannot be overemphasized, even while we deal with the individual level of the fight and do our best to help those who have been put in our paths to help.

I've said for many years, in many ways, that we will only have achieved our goal of equality when it becomes true that being gay is No Big Deal in any way, shape, or form. We've a long way to go, still, before that's true.