Thoughts of a Tribal Elder

Thoughts on Loneliness and AIDS: "The onliest person in the world."

2011-07-09T23:03:00.000-07:00

The title of this piece comes from the theatrical masterpiece by the great American author/playwright, Carson McCullers, "The Member of the Wedding", and is spoken by 12-year-old Frankie, an adolescent tomboy who is terribly jealous of her brother's wedding. In the horrible loneliness in which Frankie lives her awkward life she declares that she is "the onliest person in the world." (Frankie was played by Julie Harris, the extraordinary American actor) Can anyone be lonelier than that? Can anyone feel so alone as that? Being "the onliest person in the world" is the worst sort of loneliness, a loneliness I feel tonight and have felt in years past..

Indeed, that kind of darkness and despair of thick, viscous loneliness is not so difficult to get to. and in fact, growing old with AIDS is one of the very loneliest lives one can live, and I, like Frankie, feel like "the onliest person in the world" tonight. (McCullers, "The Member of the Wedding," Houghton, Miflin, 1950) Frankie has no friends, but desperately wants to be part of something larger than her small self. She wants desperately to be part of the group of girls who have passed puberty and have their own clubhouse and who will not allow Frankie to join, because Frankie is such an awkward tomboy and she belongs to the wrong class of people. Frankie is poor, unlike the middle-class girls of the clubhouse. . She has no friends except her housekeeper, an African American woman named Berenice (played by the incomparable Ethel Waters) and her younger cousin John Henry (played by Brandon DeWilde). The film, of course, is in black and white. Color would have removed the poverty, the desolation, the loneliness, the jealousy, and Frankie's out-of-control imagination regarding the wedding, going all the way to the point of thinking she is going on the honeymoon with her brother and his new wife. At the end of the play, they leave for the honeymoon and Frankie, completely devastated, cannot go with them. She is thoroughly confused by this turn of events because it goes against her very lively imagination. It is one of the most heart-rending pieces of American theater in the history of American theater. The drama is high, indeed.

Tonight, I feel like I cannot get any lonelier and the drama is also very high and cannot get any higher. Having HIV since the late 1970's and diagnosed with AIDS in 1995 has created tremendous drama in my life, The worst thing about having AIDS for such a long period of time is that the body ages quickly, far beyond its chronological years. I am 65 on the outside, but internally, my body is that of an 80-year-old. My arthritis in my knees is terribly advanced, my peripheral neuropathy is about as bad as it can possibly get, fracturing all the bones in my left foot because all the nerves in my bones have died along with all the nerves in both my feet. When the nerves in the bones die, the bones become very soft and fracture easily. All the bones in my left foot have fractured and I have to wear a CROW Walker on my left foot and left lower leg for the rest of my life. It is a huge, 7-lb, rigid, black plastic, knee length boot that is in two pieces and is held together with velcro. It is ugly as hell, but I have been wearing it now everyday for nearly 2 years, and it feels just like a part of my body now. The only time I am aware of it is when I want to have sex, and then I am aware of my entire AIDS body. Having COPD now with it's chronic bronchitis and penumonia, kidney disease, constant eye infections. severe general body aches and pains which are different each day so they cannot be anticipated nor prepared for, the headaches, the lack of libido (that's one of the worst parts of this disease), and the generally grotesque being I have become with my 30-lb. weight gain from medication, the depressions and manias controlled with bi-polar medications, the anxiety controlled with Lorazapam and Buspar, the general depression controlled by Abilify and Lexapro, my high cholesterol controlled by Lipitor, all the heavy duty narcotics for pain management (225 mcg. of Fentanyl changed every 72 hours plus hydrocodone for the break-through pain), gives me terrible constipation and bowel impaction which can only be alleviated by fist fucking myself and taking the impacted stool out of my ass with own my hand, and as my body was not made for that particular sex game as a bottom, this process is very painful. I am an extraordinary fisting top and am sought after as a teacher for both tops and bottoms , and one of my biggest dreams sexually is to get fisted, but my body has two bones that block easy access to the colon. I feel grotesque, ugly, thoroughly unattractive, and terriblhy, terribly old and invisible in the Queermale community.

Talking about this with my friends is an impossibility. None of them want to hear about it, because I frighten them. They are all HIV+ with no opportunistic infections yet and, because of the medications which purport to control the disease, they believe they will never get sick (utter delusion, that). I get sick on the average of every other month with one kind of infection or another somewhere in my body and I require hospitalizations every two months, sometimes for 3 weeks at a time. So, I get no support from my friends because I represent their own possibility to them and that terrifies them. They look at me and the CDC statistic of 18,000 Gaymale deaths from AIDS each year rears it's very real and very ugly head, and I am the symbol of that death knell. I make them face their own mortality, and the truth that the anti-retrovirals don't really stop the progress of the disease. They slow it down, but they don't stop it.

I am also afraid of growing old alone and getting sick alone with no one to take care of me, and I will not go into a state nursing care facility. No nursing homes for me. Fortunately, my homemaker Sully, who is a wonderful woman and who helps me three days a week, said she would take care of me and would never allow me to go into a nursing home, even if that means working for no remuneration. I must take comfort in that. State nursing homes are notoriously dangerous for elderly Gaymen, with rapes by orderlies being quite rampant, not to mention the physical abuse that is done very carefully so that no bruises show. This is not some morbid imagination of mine. The statistics are clear regarding nursing home abuse of elderly Gaymen. We are much hated and are at the mercy of the homophobic abuse by the orderlies.

I just want a person with whom to spend the rest of my life. Now that I know how to be in a healthy relationship, I am a pariah, a leper, damaged and used goods. I would like to find a man my own age. I am tired of youngfags who have the whole world in front of them and only want to be assimilated into the larger majority of boring straight people, who want to look just like everybody else so that straight people are not intimidated by us. I say, let them be intimidated. Let them be afraid; let them be very afraid. I am not like them, and I don't want to be like them. I have special gifts that come directly out of my Queerness, and I treasure those gifts. I don't want them shoved into the consumerist, materialistic, 6-figure salaries, condos on the Lake, the best gyms, only the best designer men's wear, summer houses in Michigan after living in their suburban homes with white picket fences and 4 bedrooms with lots of property for a back yard, two SUV's in the driveway, and 2.5 adopted Chinese baby girls. So, the question of the week is: Who is Queer and who is non-Queer? I certainly can't tell anymore, and that makes me feel even more lonely, more aching for community, which is what much of this book is about.

When one has AIDS, one might as well be living like an anchorite just like The Desert Fathers and Mothers in the 11th century outside Alexandria in Egypt. They went off to live by themselves because they were searching for God, and they knew they were not going to find a peaceful, serene, loving God in the midst of that consumerist, materialistic, and hedonistic society of Alexandria. So, they went out into the Desert to live as a community of anchorites and anchoresses. Dame Julian of Norwich was a 14th-century Anchoreess, mystic, who lived by her wits and the goodness and generosity of the village near which she had her Hermit's Hut. It is Julian's mantra that keeps me sane most of the time: In her writings (Showings: "All will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well." In other words, no matter how much bad happens to a person, no matter how dark life becomes, in the end, "all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well." Dame Julian had a powerful faith in an all-knowling, unconditionally loving God. She, along with George Herbert, Hildegaard of Bingen, Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Aelred of Rivaulx, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Palamas, and Thérèse of Lisieux are some of my favorite mystics, and when I get terribly lonely in my walk with AIDS, I read their work and feel a connection to an ancient spiritual community of mystics, a connection to an ancient tradition of which I am a part. I remember when I told my Spiritual Director (with whom I worked monthly for 23 years) that I lived such a lonely life and that I had visions and was prone to revelation, rather than mocking me or making light of it, he took it very seriously and he said to me, "You were born in the wrong century, Roger. You should have been born in the 11th to 14th centuries, People would not have found you strange or off-putting. You are a classic mystic, and mystics lead very lonely lives, because you, like them, are completely.misunderstood.by the larger majority of people on this Earth. You must get used to it, because it will be with you for the rest of your life. For you, the only thing that is real is Spirit." So, I have my choice, very few friends, but lots of visions and revelation ("more will be revealed", The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous"), or lots and lots of friends but no visions, no revelation. Having AIDS doesn't help the situation at all. I am alone most of the time, and I am usually very open to my visions, but when I feel a real lack of community, my visions disappear. When the Fathers and Mothers went out into the Desert to live alone, they were not completely alone because they knew that another hermit was somewhere quite near. These people were the first Spiritual Directors. Lay and religious both would go out into the Desert looking for an anchorite or an anchoress in order to have a conversation around things spiritual, and discuss their own spiritual journeys. Much like what I do with my own clients, and because I see people so infrequently I feel like an anchorite and an ancient Spiritual Director whose community is spread far and wide, and there are not very many of us in that community, because this is not The Time Of The Mystic. Having AIDS has only sharpened my ability to receive visions and revelation. I guess when I have to rely on the only real thing their is, which is Spirit, my vocation (filmmaker, writer, author, Spiritual Director, musician, friend) can only become more pronounced. Only the spiritual is real. The material, consumerist world is not real!! This truth has really been brought home to me since I was diagnosed with my opportunistic infections. Living with KS (Kaposi's Sarcoms) for 2 years, HSV Encephalitis, which put me into a 10-day coma and in which I died but came back because I had work to do in the world, many varieties of Pneumonia and chronic Bronchitisl, eye infections, sore throats, fevers of unknown origin, night sweats, general aches and pains all help to increase my mystical experiences. ''

12-Step Spirituality, when approached with a fully open heart, indeed brings about visions and revelations. It is not a euphamism when the Big Book says, "more will be revealed". Igt is saying that we will receive revelation the closer and closer we get to God, because God speaks to us through revelation and visions. The trick is, though, that we need to know that there is no boundary between us and God. If there is some kind of boundary between us and God, then we are having an "object relationship" with God because we are always seeking to get closer and closer to the object, but as in all object relationships, the more we try to get closer, the farther away the object moves. The only way to have more revealed is to realize that there is no boundary, hence, we are the embodiment of God on Earth and often our revelations come through other people who are also the embodiment of God, and who also have no boundary between themselves and God. The less the boundary, the more the revelation and the more the visions because we are open to them. God is no longer some big, unknowable object in the sky, but an energy, a force of which we are very capable of tapping in.

I have to say that as I have been writing this piece, I have lost much of my loneliness. To write of community is as good as being in that community, as good as being present to that community, and thereby present to vision and revelation. Entering recovery from substance abuse piques our mystical selves and, indeed, "more will be revealed", but not in our time, not in Chronos (calendar time, clock time), but, rather, in Kairos (God's time, proper time). When God is ready to self-reveal, God will do just that, and not a minute before. And, the only way God can self-reveal to us is if we are completely open to possibility, completely open to what can be in God's good time. Therefore, being open to possibility means being open to the possibility that I represent, that is, one's mortality. If, in fact, there is no boundary between us and God, then we need not fear Death at all. Without any boundary, we go, upon the death of this unreal thing called the body, back to the source. We go home, because there is no boundary to try to stop us.. We cross the space that is no space, and become who we really are. We become God!!!

Writing this book has been a deep mystical experience for me. I have had revelation after revelation, epiphany after epiphany, and vision after vision. I would stay up until 4:00 AM writing in the soft quiet in the beauty of the night when there was no traffic noise and the city was asleep. Unlike New York City, which never goes to sleep, Chicago shuts down by 2:00 AM, especially further south from where I live in Rogers Park. Rogers Park late at night is like a sleepy little town. Writing this book has not only been a mystical experience for me, it has also been a prophetic experience for me. The life of the prophet is even lonelier that the life of the mystic. The mystic is not in contention with anybody. S/he lives out her/his solitary life as an anchorite or anchoress, or a nun or a monk, but there is no tension with the people. In fact, the mystics chose the solitary life for themselves. The prophets of the Hebrew Scripture, on the other hand, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Micah, were always in contention with the people and so lead solitary lives not by their own choosing but by the circumstances in which they found themselves. The prophets always told the truth, trying to be "mouthpieces" for God, letting the people know what was displeasing to God and how they needed to change their ways. This put them in tension with the people. Because of that tension the prophets' lives were solitary and built on “argument”. The mystics led a much quieter life, a much more peaceful life, whereas the prophets lived with noisy, confrontational lives as they tried to show the people the error of their ways. My Spiritual Director of 23 years, of whom I spoke earlier, told me that not only was I a classic mystic, but that I was also a prophet, because prophets see the trajectory of history, past present and future, all at once and acting as “mouthpieces” for God they were always at odds with the people. This gave them a very solitary, very lonely life.

It seems that after the Stonewall Rebellion, when we achieved our political, spiritual, and sexual liberation, we all lived isolated and lonely lives. We spoke of our community, but the community was formed through drugs, sex, and disco dancing, and Donna Summer was the queen of that world. There was no real conversation or connected interaction between us. We simply danced together, took drugs together, and had disconnected and alienated sex together. Sometimes the sex lasted 2 to 3 hours and sometimes the sex lasted for 10 min., but we never knew the name of the person we were having sex with because we really didn't want to know their name. All we wanted were their bodies and the less we knew about the personal lives of our sex partners the better. Life was extremely lonely during the 1970s and early 1980s. It's out it only seemed like there was a community after the Stonewall Rebellion, but in fact we all live lives of quiet desperation searching for our next lover, or our next fuck buddy. I have a particular recollection of a sexual encounter I had had an annual “ Black Party” at the Fillmore East. Everyone dressed in black, mostly black leather, but also black underwear, black T-shirts, black jockstraps, black sneakers, etc. Pornography and the 1970s had real man in it, men with facial hair and hair on their chests especially hair on their asses. They were utterly beautiful men, not like this shaved, hairless, chiseled, blonde, children that are touted as porn stars today. My pornography hero in the 1970s was a beautiful man named Richard Locke. I was very beautiful back then having a gym routine of five days a week four hours a day until my body was ripped and rockhard and my face shone with an unearthly light coming out of my eyes and I could have any man I wanted whenever I wanted him. I had such high self-esteem that I walked up to Richard who was at the black party and sitting by himself in the bleachers resting from dancing. I sat down next to Richard and told him who I thought he was in my eyes and how much I loved watching him fuck on screen. He took the compliment very well and was most humble. I then asked if he would like to get high on cocaine back at my apartment, to which he said an absolute yes. We walked back to my apartment which was only four blocks from the Fillmore, did the cocaine (a lot of it), took off our clothes and had sex all night long until the sun rose in the morning. This was some of the best sex of my life because Richard understood Tantric Sex, as do I. We took ourselves into states of spiritual ecstasy and other bliss, connecting with each other on a different plane altogether, moving our brain waves into this Theta mode, the mode of deep trance and meditation that allows for sex to go on for hours. I felt like he and I were one body/spirit, one entity, and in that mystical space of ecstatic sex we felt the presence of God as we created Him to be in the room with us and bless our lovemaking. Richard just love my body, my mind, and my spirit, as I love those things in him and we connected on the deepest levels. That was a sexual encounter I will never forget because I wasn't lonely in the sex act, whereas throughout the 1970s most of my sex was incredibly lonely with little to no connection between myself and my sex partner. I remember crying with incredible joy as Richard and I made love and after hours of “edging” (bringing oneself to the brink of orgasm and stopping it over and over and over again until finally when we have the orgasm hits like great fireworks going off in the body mind and spirit simultaneously and we move onto another plane of existence. This is Tantric Sex, sex that is connected and never lonely, sex that opens each of the men up to the spiritual realm and to the possibility of ecstatic response to the sex act. The sex with Richard was extraordinary and I will never forget it for as long as I live. Richard Locke is dead now along with most of the other porn stars in the 1970s. They died slow horrible deaths that AIDS complications produce Period the sex with Richard was one of the few times in my life in New York City when I did not feel lonely or cut off from my community. Indeed, the community was built on superficiality, but I was able to cut through that and make some extraordinary connections during my time in New York City in the early 1980s.

Oddly enough, even with all the death around us, the 80s was not a time of loneliness but, rather, a time of intense, loving, compassionate, and empathic community. I discussed this earlier in the book and there is no need to rehash it here. I will close by just saying that my life has been one of terrible loneliness for 65 years, especially in the 12 1/2 year relationship I had with a former partner in which I was lonelier than I've ever been in my life. It was my diagnosis of HIV and then my 1995 diagnosis of AIDS that began the destruction of the relationship. From those times of diagnosis the relationship deteriorated more and more until it became impossible to live with. Now, even in the intense loneliness I feel tonight, I can honestly say that I am happier and more content with my life than I have ever been before. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing which is writing a book and making a film. Music is out of my life now, except as something to listen to with great joy and great passion. My primary passions, however, are my book and my film and I am thoroughly content.

"From The Ashes Risen"--A Study in Matanoia

2010-06-04T23:03:00.000-07:00

Ostensibly, my documentary film "From The Ashes Risen" is about illness and death, about the terror of a holocaust of unspeakable proportions, about a genocide against Queermen in the 1980's and 1990's in America, but it is so much more than that. It is about metanoia--a Greek word which means "spiritual conversion through repentance". The film takes us on a journey into the darkest places of the spirit, places of sickness and fear, places of oppression and hatred, places of bigotry and war, places of deprivation and chaos. It then moves us through these things as we face them and feel them through the voices and imagery of the Queermen and nurses presented in the film to a place of repentance of the heart, into spaces of wellness and compassion, liberation and love, celebration of difference and peace, abundance and orderly non-violence. We listen to the men in the film as they struggle with their illnesses and the isolation and dislocation those illnesses produce. HIV/AIDS is a sinister disease. It rips the soul to shreds, and without the intervention of grace, breaks apart whatever semblance of community their may have been before the illness hit that community. Something happened during the AIDS War, during the Death Years, that was an intervention of grace that produced a new community of compassion in the midst of a nothingness, a depersonalization, a deathmarch.

Back in the 1980's and 1990's, AIDS produced daily life that was imbued with daily death. In one AIDS unit alone, three to four Queermen a day died horrible, ugly, painful and, with grace, sometime even peaceful deaths, but invariably death no matter what. HIV was a death sentence. Cytomegalovirus, Kaposi's Sarcoma, Toxoplasmosis, Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia, Dementia, Lymphoma, Hodgkins Disease, fungal infections of the rarest and most deadly kind, bacterial infections previously only seen in four-legged animals, viruses that could kill by themselves, wasting, unstoppable bloody diarrhea, blindness, all these and so many more illnesses killed like a plague, wiping out over 100,000 Queermen in America alone in fifteen years. Queermen were slaughtered by institutionalized homophobia being vomited forth from the minds, hearts, and mouths of a Presidential administration that hated Queermen with a rabid passion and wanted to see us all die. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush saw to it that as many Queermen as possible died, clearing out their country of Christian Family Values of all that was abomination in their minds and spirits. For the first six years of their administration the word AIDS was not uttered by them. All mention of it was blacked out of the media, with only a few articles of great significance creeping into the major newspapers like the Freedman-Kein article on Kaposi's Sarcoma in the New York Times which I remember reading on the morning it came out and how utterly frightened I was by what the doctor said and predicted. But other than those occasional articles that seemed to sneak through the wall of silence, there was no mention of this disease that was wiping out an entire generation of beautiful young Queermen in their prime in the most horrific and terrifying ways. No funding at all was given for research into finding treatment for this blackest of diseases which produced a politics all its own.

I remember that during the years between 1984 and 1995, when I was diagnosed with AIDS myself, I facilitated funerals and memorial services as a chaplain everyday of the week, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for that entire eleven year period. I remember the tears, the wailing of loved ones who were left behind. I remember the wrenching keening of the bereaved. I remember the blackness and darkness that pervaded the very core of our existence back then. I remember the bitterness and hatred of families of origin when they found out that not only did their sons have AIDS and were dying, but that their sons were also Gay. I remember families disowning sons, leaving them to die alone without family, but only surrounded by dear friends and lovers. No family of origin in so many cases ever set foot in the hospital rooms. I remember when landlords would evict tenants with AIDS leaving them to die on park benches and on the sidewalks throughout all seasons of the year. I remember when, in the beginning, there were Emergency Rooms that would not take us in for treatment. I remember when cab drivers would not drive us to our doctors appointments. I remember when straight doctors particularly would not take us a patients. I remember when dentists would not go anywhere near our mouths, even though so many of the infections were oral and needed the care of skilled dentists and oral surgeons. I remember when People WIth AIDS were the "unclean", the "untouchables", the "lepers" of society who were shunned and without food or shelter. I remember the fear that lurked behind the eyes of every Queerman that lived back then as we walked down the streets afraid to look at each other for fear of looking death in the eye, not just the sick ones but the well ones who were just waiting their turn to sicken and die.

I also remember an extraordinary thing that happened back then. I remember that out of this fire and ice a community of compassion grew up, a community of care for the other that grew up among ourselves, because it certainly was nowhere else to be seen for such a long time. We formed our own organizations for the care of PWA's (People With AIDS), organizations like Open Hand Chicago which brought hot meals to shut-in PWA's who had no food and could not cook for themselves, or the AIDS Alternative Health Project in Chicago which provided free of charge every conceivable kind of complimentary health treatment such as acupuncture, Thai massage, Bio-energetics, deep tissue massage, Swedish massage for relaxation and stress release, meditation classes, nutritional counseling, and there is still today Test Positive Aware Network also in Chicago, founded by a wonderful man named Chris who later died of AIDS-related complications, that provided a community of support socially, politically, and spiritually for PWA's.

As members of this community of compassion and love, we went into the homes of PWA's to clean and do their laundry, to cook their meals, to clean up their vomit, to change their linens that were soaked in urine and diarrhea, to read to them and talk with them, to hold their hands and laugh with them when they felt like laughing with that wonderful joy that is an inherent part of the human spirit even in the face of excruciating pain and death, to hold them and rock them to sleep wherein they could find some temporary respite from the torture, to comfort them in their loneliness and isolation with our own spirits of love and even the warmth of our bodies laying on the beds with them holding them as they shook from the horrifying side effects of the toxic medications that were used to heal the infections, medications like Amphoteracin B and Gancylovir, that caused shaking and chills with unearthly high fevers and pain. I remember the candlelight vigils and choirs of Queer angels and Allied angels singing songs of love and healing in churches and synagogues during the memorial services and funerals. I remember a community that lived simultaneously in fear and love. It is said that "perfect love casts out fear" (New Testament), but back then fear and love were lovers, living side by side, body to body, spirit to spirit and one did not cast out the other, but only softened it, quieted it for awhile.

I cannot forget that in the midst of my still very present bouts of grief over the loss of my Brothers and especially my Queer family of men who loved me unconditionally and who were my best friends and my lovers, there lived a community that was surrounded by the Light of the Divine, the Light of Grace that brought into the AIDS War a spirit of peace and took away the violence of the trench warfare. I cannot forget that in the midst of all that chaos, fear, and darkness, there was a community of Love and Light that was so blindingly beautiful that I still weep for that incredible beauty, but mostly I weep because that community is no more. I saw back then that as the Queer Body died Queer Spirit thrived. Now, today, as the Queer Body is living because of new medications that keep us alive, Queer Spirit is dead and my work in the world is to bring that spirit of love and compassion, of peace and non-violence back to life. I intend to do this with "From The Ashes Risen". My own battle in the AIDS War, living with HIV since the early 1980's or even late 1970's, and fighting for my very life from 1995 to 2002, has taught me well what my work in the world is. It is to enliven that spirit that lived in the midst of death now in the midst of life, and it is not just a spirit for the Queer community anymore, but a spirit for the world. My work is to drive the Dark Masculine that covers the Earth today away from the world, and help usher in the Light of the Divine Feminine. War, poverty, famine, oppression, disease, bigotry, hatred, deprivation, depersonalization and dislocation, everything that makes our world a place of darkness can be melted away when the community of compassion and love rises up again and we have peace, non-violence, abundance, liberation, wellness, celebration of difference, relocation and a world of Light wherein the Dark Masculine is driven out and the new Masculine as is danced in by Queermen who know these mysteries is invited in through a knowledge of the Divine Feminine.

My dream is to have a world of relationship again, relationship that is filled with justice and peace. No more power-over but power-with will reign. My dream is that "From The Ashes Risen" brings us truly to the reality of that darkness as it existed back then in its incarnation as the AIDS War and exists now generally in the world, and moves us powerfully into a new reality of Light and Grace. My dream is that "From The Ashes Risen" will produce metanoia, a spiritual conversion through repentance for the pain, suffering, and terrible isolation that we have brought upon each other, thus bringing about a world of Embodiment and Incarnation wherein Light and Life are embodied in our very beings. My dream is that "From The Ashes Risen" with give rise to a world of justice and peace, of love and harmony, of compassion and empathy wherein the Darkness is dispelled and the Light flashes forth with new Life and new Love. I want a "new Heaven and new Earth" to be birthed through the imagery and sound of "From The Ashes Risen", through the stories of the Queermen and nurses who fought and continue to fight with courage and resilience from a place of death and destruction to a place of life and re-birth. I want "From The Ashes Risen" to transform consciousness to a place of Higher Self, a place of respect and celebration of the other, a place of Light and Love that can only come from a journey through metanoia. I just want "From The Ashes Risen" to make the world a better place in which to raise children, both Queer and straight, and in which to live our lives and be in relationship in peace. This is the work I have been given to do as I have been given my life back from the jaws of death. I hope to do that work with devotion, grace, and humility, and also a whole lot of Queer Faerie Majick.

Soli Deo Gloria

To All The Acid Bettys and Cyons and Epiphanies of the World Who Know

2010-05-13T22:37:00.000-07:00

Ageism is an ugly truth in the world of Queermen, except the ageism was not coming from other men as much as it was coming from myself to myself tonight. I was in a Gaybar tonight called Hydrate to celebrate the launching of "50 Faggots", a video series on the web in which I play a prominent part. The film is a documentary about effeminate Gaymen (Oddly enough I am not one--I am just very Queer), and all the famous Transvestites and Drag Queens and Divas were there like Epiphany and Acid Betty and JoJo and Bizzy, not to mention the gorgeous Cyon Flare from Detroit. They were all there because they were all in the film, and they loved me. They treated me, this 65-year-old Queerman with a rich and fabulous story to tell, with respect and even love (I think!). But, I am disabled and have AIDS and I had to sit in a chair down on the floor, not on a bar stool, and I could not walk around because of the CROW Walker on my left foot. I tried and kept tripping over stools and stage platform legs, So, there I sat, feeling completely disconnected from everyone there because they were all in their 20's and 30's and I am going to be 65 in 9 days, and I was sitting at their feet practically, their tall, slim bodies swaying above me.

I saw my image on the screen conducting the DePaul University Baroque Ensemble with my silver mustache and bald head, and noticed the utter beauty of Epiphany and the outrageous glamour of Acid Betty, and I thought "I don't belong here. I am not of these people, but these are my people, so how do I fit???" I fought at the Stonewall Rebellion so that Acid Betty can be 7 feet tall with her 18 inch Frenchified mohawk and 4 inch platform heels, looking for all the world like something out of a very avant garde fashion magazine. There was the magnificent Epiphany, blond and beautiful in her face, young and radiant, talking to me about Fire Island, and I thought "you never knew the Fire Island I knew. You didn't lose all your FIre Island Men to the Plague the way I did, and you will never know my history. You will never know my pain."

I felt like a relic of a time gone by, when Gaymen were beautiful Men with hair on their bodies, dark chest hair, dark hair on their legs, dark hairy asses, Men who were Men in the hottest sense of that word, not shaved and chiseled and spray-tanned and blond with not a hair to be seen anywhere on the body except for a small, closely cropped mound of pubic hair that isn't really hair at all but some kind of absurd decoration that I find utterly unattractive. So, there I was among Gay youngmen, young Transvestites, young Drag Queens, the only person in the entire three rooms of the bar over the age of 40, and I am 65, and I HATED MYSELF!!!

I became physically unwell sitting in that throne for the aged Queerman on a cushion so that my no-butt from HIV would not get sore. There I sat, an ancient Elder of a Tribe that did not know the rituals or the symbols or the history, that lacked the Presence of the Queer Fe/Male God/dess. Queer Spirit as i knew it has changed into something foreign and even dangerous to me. I was not of that Tribe. I was from a time and a Tribe long forgotten and long gone, and I felt old and useless and very much a freak among what most people would call freaks. They were not the freaks, though. I was the freak. I was the different one, the one with a silver beard and black mustache, the one with the CROW Walker on my left foot, the one with AIDS in my body, the one who, because of a very toxic medication, is 30 pounds overweight.

A Tribal Elder is only a Tribal Elder when there is the esteem of the Initiates, the respect of the Initiates, and though I felt that respect and esteem last night at Roscoe's, it was not there tonight at Hydrate, and I just felt like an Old Fag, lost and forgotten in a world of head pounding, body slamming, nerve destroying mega noise coming from mega speakers, surrounding mega Drag Queens and mega Transvestites, in a mega Queer world of youth and beauty that is not my Queer world, and I think I have never felt so alone in all my life.

There I was in a Gaybar filled with Gaymen of all sorts (well......not my sort certainly) and felt like I was not part of the ocean. They were all the salt water and I was the fresh water, or maybe they were the fresh water and I was the salt water. Either way, I was a different kind of water than they were, although I felt my wateriness very much. I felt my Queerness. It was just not their Queerness. It was a Queerness that was not of a tribe but of isolation. My Tribe is dead. All dead. Every last one of them dead. And perhaps that's one of the strongest reasons I have to make my film "From The Ashes RIsen" so that I can bring my Tribe back to life somehow, if even for 90 minutes. Bring them back to life, like that heart-rending final scene in 'Long Time Companion" where all the dead Men come back to the beach on Fire Island to hug and dance and love and be the Tribe again. Indeed, perhaps that's why I must make my film. I must bring back the Tribe to do all those things that we did and that got so sadly lost, even among those that survived the holocaust and lived. They, too, lost it.

There are a few left who know who we are, but they are very few and very far between. There are a few left who ache in their Spirits for the Rituals and the Rites, for the Symbols and the Myth. There are a few left who metaphorically nod their head in deference and respect and with their eyes say, "Good evening, Father", and I know that in some the Tribe is remembered in the blood, that in some the Tribe is remembered in the collective unconscious. Those few are sometimes around me and help me know who I am, because tonight at Hydrate, I didn't have a clue. I just knew that my aged AIDS-ridden body was aching and that my left foot was throbbing in pain and that I could not sit there anymore in the midst of the über Queer world that was so macrosocmic when I felt my own microcosm in relation to that larger cosmic structure. I left, making my excuses to Acid Betty telling her that I was not feeling well and would she please relay that to our friend Randy whose night it was, but that I could not stay. My body pain was my Tribal pain, and I felt so alone that I had to go home and really be alone. At least in my aloneness I would not be lonely. In my real aloneness I can at least re-member the life of the Tribe, the joy of real liberation, the Dance that only the Elders can tell. I can re-member it all,and just be alone. Ageism is an ugly truth in the world of Queermen, especially when it is internalized and mine was internalized big time. I got out of there and went home. I cried myself to sleep, mourning the loss of the Myth, mourning the loss of my family of Queermen who were my true companions, friends, and lovers, all taken by the genocide, mourning the loss of the Tribe as I knew it. I think I have not felt so bereft of a community since the holocaust wiped out my entire generation of Queermen in Amerika in just. Where will I go now? Who will hear me now? Who will understand my loss now? Who can know the depth of pain that we all experienced when we were dying like flies on flypaper? I don't know what will become of me now. Now. Now it is time to make my film, to attempt to resurrect the Tribal Consciousness. Acid Betty, Cyon Flare, Randy, and Epiphany are all the face of the Tribe now, and beautiful faces they are, too, especially Cyon who knows the deeper meaning of community, how hard it is to re-make that which died a horrible death. Ageism is a nasty thing, an evil, horrific thing, and those three Drag Queens don't possess one iota of it. They love me, but it is a different kind of love than I have known before. It is my vocation to find more of that love, more of the new face of the Tribe and re-envision community where, for all practical purposes, there is none. I will do it. My film will do it. "From The Ashes Risen" will do it. I swear on the souls of my dead brothers that I will bring the Tribe back to the beach on Fire Island so that we can all dance the Dance together once again.

The Mysticism of Queermale Sexmajick

2010-01-08T22:11:00.000-08:00

This poem expresses the spirituality of Queermale Sexmajick, the mysticism of Man-on-Man sex. It is a vision I had during a particularly powerful sexual encounter with my then-Master, Jack, who was my lord and god, who, "in pitch black room, in pitch black womb" did appear to me as Shiva Lord elevated one foot off the floor with the Kundalini Serpent coiled at his crown chakra. Avalokitsvara, the Buddhist bodhisatva of mercy and compassion, sat in the room with us, keeping watch and blessing the Sacred Rite. The poem was written in September, 2003, but I wanted it to be in the blog revised with one clarifying line in 2010, because it speaks so much to who I am as a Sexmajician and Tantric Mystic perhaps even more now than it did then, although I am no longer a slave, but a Queerman of my own making. The time of the slave is ended. As I had to be a Master in years gone by, so I had to be a slave as well, so that now there is no need for either, but both as Yang and Yin, to be neither one and yet both and bigger than both, as one makes two makes One, and the Totality of Queer Spirit Dances in my veins, my semen, and my sex. I laugh with joy at such a blessing. I laugh the laugh of the great horned male god as He Dances with His Queermale children, laughing with the joy of Queer Spirit.

And Not A Candle Lit (A Hymn for Jack in Praise of the Mother)

Pitch black the room it was,

and yet a brilliant light to flood

the naked body there,

and not a candle lit.

Pitch black the room it was,

and every inch of Sir I saw

in naked splendor there,

and not a candle lit.

My god, my lord who lay supine

whose scent, whose taste was only mine

to praise, and sing, and magnify

I saw in naked glory there,

and not a candle lit.

Pitch black the room it was.

Pitch black the womb it was,

the womb of Kali Ma who births

with skulls of death around her neck,

and God lay on the bed,

and Light abundant showed Him me

as I saw Him, an ancient tree

of life, of love, of ecstasy,

and not a candle lit.

And yet each hair and each fine line,

each crevice by divine design

in God's great Work of Art

who lay supine upon the bed,

who shot into my heart a dart

of ancient make and Mystery,

and not a candle lit.

Incense burning in the air,

a soft yet keening cant

for Brothers dead who knew our Truth,

from AIDS and HIV,

who knew the hidden Mysteries

of Atum and The Mother She,

who sang and praised and glorified,

who danced and leapt and magnified

the Cosmic Dance of Shiva Lord,

and our two bodies' blended spirits,

two but One, and yet the same,

and each just like the other,

yet one is Master, one is slave,

but both bound to The Mother.

Avalokitsvara sits and watches

in the dungeon black

which floods with tears of mercy,

of great compassion for the boy

who's now a Man, a slave, a toy

and yet a Man and still a boy,

a boy with life and soul abounding,

loving, feeling more astounding

than he's ever felt before.

Pitch black the room it was,

Tibetan chant of Buddhist lore

did spin around and spin around

in still black air that hit the ear,

and hit the walls, and hit the ground,

in still black air that touched the nose

and taken into lungs as black

with darkness as the room of pitch,

and from the lungs a Light forth shown,

breaking out through muscles rich,

through sinew, organ, blood, and bone

to light the room as black as pitch,

and not a candle lit.

And then the light of Light

flared forth from Heart to heart,

from lord to slave and back again,

a golden bridge between two hearts,

creating majick, birthing life,

blue Shiva with the coiled snake,

the Kundalini sitting there atop his crown,

my lord thus sits in lotus full.

God's Light descends on slave bowed down.

A golden bridge between two hearts,

my Lord's and his disciple's.

Sweet lord is raised above sweet slave

by just a foot to show the Way,

but just a foot, for Lord and devotee

are but split by inches high

the one above the other.

Yet face to face,

and breath to breath,

all three eyes to all three eyes,

each looking deep in self for Self,

each searching god for God.

And then I knew that I, the slave,

my Lord I found, the one I've craved

who gives me life until my grave,

a life in Light, in pitch black room,

a Light which floods the naked One

who's lying there as if the sun, as if the Son

Transfigured was in pitch black room,

who births a slave in pitch black womb,

Ma Kali's womb, Lord Shiva's room,

God's Light so bright, it blinds my sight,

and not a candle lit.

soli Deo gloria

One Door Closes and ...........

2009-11-19T23:12:00.000-08:00

A number of months ago a door closed with a very loud bang, a bang that rang in my ears and shattered my nerves and I thought my life had come to an end. Notice that I did not say my life as i have known it had come to an end, but just my life. I was no longer the Director of the DePaul University Baroque Ensemble, my job being given to a young Queen fresh out of graduate school with little life or teaching experience, but certainly a new energy than what I had brought to the school for 21 years. Then my proposal for a new course called Baroque Performance Practice was rejected by the full-time faculty and I was left with nothing at all at DePaul. No more music. At first there was tremendous despair and a great deal of fear, but in my depression, my sweet 12-Step sponsor David G. took me to something to shift my attention away from the darkness that surrounded me. I went to a rally for children of incarcerated parents and I met two fabulous Queermen, Jim B. and RIcky S., and we became immediate friends. They have been an inter-racial couple for many years, both of them have AIDS. They invited me to lunch in their mobile office and we talked for more than two hours about my life and the needs of the Queermale community as the three of us understood those needs. They were hard Men to talk to because they had so much passion and fire of their own, and they had so much to say, that there was not much time for me to talk really, but talk I did. I talked of my passion and love for Queermen, and how I live in an ancient and mysterious myth, The Myth of the Queerman. They insisted that I had a great deal to say and encouraged me to do something with my journey as a veteran of the Stonewall Riots and a veteran of the AIDS Wars, surviving both with courage and brilliant flames. They told me to make a movie called "Project Elder Wisdom", because they said I had so much wisdom and I was clearly an Elder of the Tribe. They told me I had a responsibility as a Tribal Elder to carry the story, to tell the tale, to speak the Tribal Memory, to carry the rituals and symbols and dreams of a people to the people who had forgotten all those things. This is not the first time I had been told this, but each time I was left with nothing to do except hear those words ringing in my ears with no means of accomplishing my given work. I told them that I knew nothing about making films, but they insisted that the film would get made. A film......a film......I am not a cameraman, an editor, a soundman, an artistic director, a director, a composer. I am a harpsichordist and teacher, a spiritual director, and a Gayman with AIDS who was, at that moment in great pain over losing his vocation at DePaul.

Slowly, something began to grow in me. An energy. A light in that terrible darkness. A flash of insight., and I had a revelation of Biblical proportions. It says in "The Big Book" that "more will be revealed", and that which was revealed was so enormous, it knocked me to my knees as I wept with gratitude for all that my life has been, all its pain and all its joy, all the experiences which had thrown me into pits of despair and on to pinnacles of ecstasy. I would make a film about the AIDS War, told by those who fought it and are still fighting it, Queermen who were diagnosed with HIV in the 1980's and later in the 80's and 90's by AIDS, Queermen exactly like myself. Where would I get the Men? Where would I get the money? Where would I find the support? Where would I find the people I needed to help me get this "Project Elder Wisdom" started? I prayed. I meditated. I listened so hard to my inner voice and felt all the darkness of the rejection by DePaul slip away and a new light that was a primal energy at once both creep and slam into my life until I felt as if I were on a roller coaster, moving from the heights of excitement to the depths of fear, from the ecstatic connection of community to the alienation of loneliness and despair that goes with the creative process.

I knew, I just knew, that everything would come if I just opened myself up to the goodness of God and the Mother, to the Universal source of Love and Light, opened myself up to not just my own possibility but to all possibility. All the possibility of what had been for me just days before an impossible universe, to the most exquisite possibility of Love and God, and possibility of Possibility. Again, slowly, things began to happen, and I spoke to my dear friend Randy J. who is, himself, a documentarian videographer. He spoke with me as if this were not just some pipe dream, but a reality of what was to come. He gave me the name of Yoni G., a camera operator with a tremendous amount of documentary experience, and the triumvirate got formed. I became the Producer/Director and main Interviewer, Yoni the Director of Photography (he jumped at the chance to work on such a project), and Randy the Artistic Director and Production Assistant. Well. The foundation had been laid. Now what??? Money!!!!

We decided to approach Modesto "Tico" Valle, Executive Director of Center On Halsted, the LGBT Community Center in Chicago, our home, to try to elicit his help with the project in whatever way Tico thought that might be possible. I first went to Tico myself and presented him with my very unfocused but passionate vision of Possibility, and Tico's eyes danced with glee. He saw how important such a project could be not just to Chicago, but to the entire country, and I told him of my wonderful film crew and their experience, our individual and collective visions, our powerful commitment, and I wanted more than anything else for him to hear the need in my voice, the need for his support, his love, his guidance in fund raising, his help with networking. I left Tico's office with so much more than I had come in with. I came in with an idea and walked out with reality. I started corresponding with my dear friend Sheldon A. a brilliant Queer Chicago composer who I just knew intuitively could produce a magnificent score for the film, even though I knew he had never written for film before, and even though we had only renewed our friendship just a number of months before after many years of separation and no contact. I just knew that Sheldon would make the perfect partner artistically. After a great deal of correspondence, and a lovely dinner with Sheldon and his partner Terry, and after I told Sheldon what I envisioned in my ear to be the underlying sonic aesthetic of the film, Sheldon enthusiastically said yes.

So, now I had my film crew, my mentor and helper at Center On Halsted and a composer who would write a newly commissioned score for the film. Randy, Yoni, and I put together a line-by-line budget, a treatment plan for the film, a time-line for the making of the film, and I wrote a flyer to be copied by the hundreds that would be placed in medical practice waiting rooms asking for possible film subjects. I also called three nurses who were my nurses in Unit 371, the dedicated AIDS Unit at Illinois Masonic Medical Center during the holocaust of the 1980's and 1990's, and asked each of them if they perhaps had an interest in being part of the project. All three agreed wholeheartedly. Within 14 days of putting out the flyers, we now have eight Men and three nurses.

One of the Men who wants to be in the film, Joe E., said that he had some connections to a medical practice in the suburbs that might be interested in our work and that he would approach them with the workings of the project to see what kind of help they might be able to provide. They thought they could provid us with a great gift, which is the use of their 501C3 not-for-profit status so that those who wish to donate money to the making of the film, who share our vision, can do so and be able to take tax write-offs. This is vital if we are to receive any donations of any kind. This was a pearl beyond price. Today, I bought a website domain for my production company Tribal Elder Productions that will be the company that makes the new film "The Elder Wisdom Project" (working title)

For the past 30 years, Queer People have been the initiates for the world. In the 1980's, just like tribal youth among indigenous peoples, we were removed from the "village" (the larger structure) to go into the forest (the years of illness and genocide) with our Initiators (the medical practitioners and alternative medicine practitioners who helped us live) to learn what it was to enter into our Adulthood. The thing that made this ritual process different from Victor Turner's paradigm of the classic ritual process, was that we had to become our own Elders and teach ourselves Adulthood, because no one from the structure, from the larger community, would come near us to help us. We were the lepers. We were the unclean. In that liminal space of anti-structure we grew up, matured, went from the individualistic, consumerist, materialistic partying unproductive youth of the larger structure, to the compassionate and loving, kind and altruistic people that became a community of peace and non-violence, of care and helpfulness, and we brought our Adulthood back to the structure when protease inhibitors hit the world and we were not in such a powerful liminal space anymore. Death began to subside for the most part and slowly, over the ensuing years, the community of Adulthood began to disappear. We slowly unlearned what we had learned in our time in anti-structure, our time of initiation. We had become again the consumerist, materialistic, individualistic, disconnected people of the larger structure. We were and still are mirroring the old structure again. The film, "The Elder Wisdom Project" will re-member the initiation rites, the ritual process, by re-telling the story of the Death Years, by re-membering the genocide and making it a part of us again, by reminding us of where our Adulthood lies so that we can take it back to the larger structure and bring peace and non-violence to the world through Queer Spirit. This is the purpose of Queer People after all, isn't it?

We are the peace makers, the bringers of non-violence, the connected through compassion and love, through altruism and volunteerism. "The Elder Wisdom Project" will be a vehicle for the in-breaking of our Adulthood, our compassion and love, our kindness and generosity, our concern one for the other. For 90 minutes we will move back into our ritual process, from the structure we have prior to witnessing the film, into the anti-structure brought about through the lived witness of the participants in the film who will bring us back to that place of Great Initiation, that place of anti-struture, and back out after the film into the structure changed and able to change the world for the better, as Queer People are meant to do. God and the Mother have put us here for a purpose, and we cannot carry out that Great Purpose without having gone through the Great Initiation which we did in the 1980's. Only now it is time to re-create the Great Initiation in order that our Adulthood be achieved once again and Queer Spirit can flood the world with love and compassion, kindness and altruism, connectedness-in-community that only God and the Mother can give through Their Great Initiation. The filming has begun. The idea has become an entity. The story is getting re-told, and the Myth of the Queerman grows ever bigger.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Body With Spirit: A Queer Theology of Community

2009-09-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

It is very sad, but it is also very true, that Queer Spirit is as dead as dead can possibly be. There is certainly no desire anymore in the Queer Community to have a sense of that Spirit, because Spirit implies that there is something called Creation, and Queers have long-ago distanced ourselves from Creation as something made by a Creator. Creation smacks of God. God smacks of the Church, the Synagogue, and the Mosque. God smacks of organized religion, and that smacks of heterosexist homophobia and unspeakable spiritual torture and pain, so Queers in general have disengaged themselves from anything religious, but wrongheadedly have also disavowed themselves from the only thing that can hold us together as a People--Spirit. Oddly, the one place I have found Queer Spirit is in the Queer recovery community of Crystal Meth Anonymous. One of my meetings consists of practically all Queermen with a few occasional women and some Transgender people. Although those wonderful people in recovery would not like to admit it, our Queerness has a great deal to do with the bond we feel toward each other. It is the bond of spirituality in Queer Recovery. It is a bond of Queer Spirit. There is no doubt in my mind about this.

It is a funny thing, but when the genocide was happening during the Death Years of the 1980's and 1990's, during the AIDS Crisis Holocaust, when an entire generation of young, beautiful Gaymen were being slaughtered in their prime, Queer Spirit was so alive and so well, so enormous, so all-encompassing, it boggled the mind. As the body died, the Spirit came to life. No one would touch us, us "lepers", the "unclean". Except for the few Gay medical practices, most physicians wanted nothing to do with us. Landlords threw us out on to the street to die on park benches and sidewalks. Cab drivers would not take us in their cabs. Restaurants refused to serve us. Store personnel refused to wait on us. Airlines refused to allow us to fly. Funeral Homes refused to bury us. Emergency Rooms denied us care. We were denied the use of public toilet facilities. EMT units refused to treat us. In such a world of no services, we had to make our own community of care, our own community of services.

Something happened back then to the so-called Queer Community that was not really a Community at all. Before AIDS, we were just individual Gaymen and Lesbians who were living out our oppressed lives, going to work and coming home at night, some to partners, some to empty apartments and houses, going to bars with friends, and going to parties where there were lots of drugs with letters for names and of course, cocaine and crystal meth, and there were the bath houses that were a great social/sexual attraction for Gaymen. But, there was no community. We were just individuals living out our everyday, individual lives, detached and disenfranchised. Then, when we began to disappear into the darkness of AIDS-related opportunistic infections to die, a Spirit began to grow in us because no one wanted to have anything to do with us. No one would take care of us. No one would feed us. No one would come to our homes with in-home care services, so we had to make all that happen for ourselves. We formed support groups for the dying and for the grieving. We founded hospices so that the dying could dye with dignity. We started soup kitchens, meals on wheels for the shut-in sick, and free food pantries for People with HIV/AIDS. We had fund raisers and benefit concerts to help financially those services which we had to make for ourselves, because no one was doing it for us. Queermen, Lesbians, and allied straight women became an army of care and comfort. Out of death came life abundant.

Suddenly, there was a Community of Compassion and the individual Gay and Lesbian people coalesced into a Queer and Queer Allied Community of Compassion. Queer Spirit built up among us, and there was Love, not just love, but a Divine Presence, Divine Love that came from our Queerness specifically. We became a People of God. It was the fact that we were Queer and we were dying that empowered us to find that spiritual wholeness. Even many atheists, upon their deathbeds, became believers in Something Greater Than Themselves because of the care they were receiving from their Brothers and Sisters who were perfect strangers, because of the outpouring of a love previously unknown. Queer Spirit was alive because we felt ourselves to be very much a part of a Creation that was dying, and in feeling part of that Creation, especially a dying Creation, we were able to feel part of a Spirit that was Life Giving. This was paradox indeed. It must be stated here that this was no Golden Age of Love, but, at its core, a world of horror and death, terror and pain. It was what came out of the horror, what came out of the the terror that made it at least bearable.

It was this Community of Love that helped dispel the messages of terror, those messages of eternal damnation from the Biblical texts of terror. The Community of Compassion helped my Brothers know that, as they were dying from the very thing that defined them as Queer, i.e. sex, they were not only beautiful and worthy of human love, even as they were being abandoned by their families and called pariahs by the media, but that they were Loved by this God whom they were told found them to be an abomination. They discovered the lie under which they had been living. They finally found that they were loved by this God who is Love, and that not only was their illness not a punishment for their sins, it was something from which to grow and learn of themselves in deep and profound ways if they allowed it to be that.

My sweet Brothers found the ineffable Love of God through the love of the Community of Compassion. They found what little good their was in the evil of AIDS. We all found that little good and made it a Very Big Good. We formed those cadres of helpers who cleaned the homes of the ill, who changed their diapers and cleaned up their vomit, who washed the piss- and shit-soiled sheets, who cooked them hot meals and carried them to the Emergency Rooms that would take them in, who sat with them in the dark, lonely hours of those long, long nights of pain breathing with them, holding their hands, and desperately trying to take some of their pain on to ourselves in order to ease their own. As they took their final breaths we held them in our arms and caressed their brows and kissed them on the lips and told them that "all will be well" as our own tears of sorrow and grief poured from our eyes. God was certainly working in us and as the bodies died, Queer Spirit sprang to life. Queer Spirit abounded. We had a love for one another and for ourselves such as we had never known before. Now, in the midst of death, there was Love; there was Life. There was a Community of Compassion where there had been none at all.

Now, today and for the past number of years, AIDS is not killing people anymore, at least not as noisily or in such numbers. It is quieter and less noticeable now, although it is still happening. Indeed, a friend just died from an opportunistic infection only a few weeks ago. Another friend was recently diagnosed with Kaposi's Sarcoma and AIDS-related Lymphoma. So, it still exists. Don't let anybody tell you it doesn't. People with HIV/AIDS are having terrible side effects (really just effects) from HAART--Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy--sudden heart attacks, strokes, osteonecrosis, peripheral neuropathy leading to Charcot Foot, renal failure, liver disease, etc. But, AIDS qua AIDS is a politically incorrect concept now. "There is no such thing as AIDS anymore", we hear. So it is said in the medical communities, anyway, and in the substance abuse recovery communities anyway. "AIDS is a thing of the past". Well, in fact, that's not true, and I am a living witness to that fact, being a Person With AIDS myself who suffers from AIDS-related conditions, but I am not dying anymore. That's for sure. I am not dying. I am very much alive, not always very well, but always very alive. There was a time, though, when the Death Crone was my closest companion and I had just 4 T-Cells. She came for me and She led me by the hand into the Light, but then She decided to let go and I came back. It was just not my time. I had more work to do.

What is certain now is that bodies are not dying from AIDS-related complications anymore, at least not in anywhere near the numbers that we were. And, along with that certainty of life now comes the same and tragic certainty of death of the Community of Compassion. AIDS has become so mainstreamed that only a very few AIDS service agencies still exist. Here in Chicago there is still BE-HIV, Test Positive Aware Network, Vital Bridges, and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, the largest direct services provider in the Midwest for People with HIV/AIDS. There is the Trinity United Church of Christ AIDS Ministry on the Southside of Chicago which is very large and does major service work in the African American HIV/AIDS community. There are the great medical practices such as Northstar Medical Center that provides the largest HIV/AIDS practice in the city. But, in general, the respect for life and for each individual Queer person, both ill and well, no longer exists as it did during the Holocaust. The Community of Compassion that was so far-reaching no longer exists. As the body lives now, so the Spirit dies now.

Now we have everything we want---better HIV medications, Queer Marriage in a number of states, Queers being more public and even seen as politically correct friends to have in one's circle, better generalized medical care for Queer People with Queer and even not-so-Queer physicians, dentists, and psychotherapists, Queers on TV and in the Movies, Queer Studies courses in colleges and universities, condominiums on Lake Michigan now, 6-figure incomes now, Mercedes Benz's, Accuras, memberships to the best gyms now, pugs, dining in the finest restaurants, season theater and dance tickets now, season opera and symphony tickets, friends with whom to drink and party, everything that makes "life worth living" now. (Although to re-phrase Harvey Milk, he said that only hope makes life worth living, "because without hope, life is not worth living", but I say you can't have hope without Spirit and we don't really have Spirit, so do we really have hope?). We think we have it all now and people are not dying anymore. We have assimilated into the heterosexist corporate world of competition and one-upsmanship, of Madison Avenue and Wall Street, of the Fortune 500 and Who's Who. And so, the Community of Compassion has become a Community of Work and Play, and AIDS is "a thing of the past". Sprit has died as the body has come back to life. We have moved so easily from the spiritual to the material. But, our Queer Brother Jesus has something to say about that, doesn't he? "What does it profit a person to gain the whole world, if he lose his soul?" We have the whole world now (we think and fantasize it anyway), but we have lost our soul, our Queer Soul, our Queer Spirit.

Without Queer Spirit, there is no Queer History, and without Queer History we are not a People, for what makes a people a People is its History. We are simply back to being individual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people leading our individual Queer lives in a corporate world of individuals competing for the best jobs, the best properties, the best friends, the best of the best, and let the Community of Compassion, let Queer Spirit which bound us into that Community be damned. But, if we as a People let Spirit die, we will as a People surely die and lose our voice in death, the voice that helped make the larger world what it is today, the voice that has sung songs of power and liberation from time out of mind..

It is a sure and certain fact that among the young intellectual elite of this country, in Queer communities on college and university campuses everywhere, there is a deep hunger for Queer Spirit, for Queer History, for the great Queer Myth. This hunger can only get fed with the food of the Story that is ours, the Story that comes out of the Community of Compassion during the Death Years, during the genocide, the Story that comes from the lives of our ancestors, the great artists, writers, composers, dancers and choreographers, architects, and designers, actors and even scientists, the story that is of the Ancients, the Sacred Band of Thebes, that army of Sparta with Lambdas on their shields that was 150 pairs of Warrior/Lovers who won the Trojan War against unthinkable odds, Gaymen all, Men who Loved Men, who fought by their lovers' sides to keep them alive, not just for the glory of the city-state but for the glory and sanctity of their love, Achilles and Patroclus among them, and it was just this sanctity of their love that won them the victory at Troy ("An army of Lovers cannot lose!" "Troy was won by Queers with spears"). It is the powerful Story of the Warriors of the Stonewall Riots in NYC in June, 1969, those enraged Drag Queens and Street Youth, and average ordinary run-of-the-mill Gayman and Lesbians who were in the streets in front of the Stonewall Inn tossing Molotov Cocktails at the police who we barricaded in the bar while we overturned police cars, starting fires, ripping up parking meters and using them to smash police car windshields, getting our heads cracked open and ribs broken by cops' billy clubs, with fire hoses turned on us and dogs and riot gear and it lasted for many nights. It is the spiritual Story that is of the great Lords Shiva and Vishnu who, as two male Hindu gods, had a deeply loving sexual relationship with each other, the Biblical Stories of the same sex love of David and Jonathan in the Hebrew Scripture, and the Gospel Story in Mark of the same sex love between Jesus and "his beloved," "the one Jesus loved best", his disciple John, the one to whom Jesus gave his Mother upon his death, much like one lover would give his parents to his partner upon his death from Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia during the Death Years. It is the Story that is of great love affairs, the passionate partnerships of the ages--Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Walt Whitman and his Civil War soldiers in his "city of comrades", Alexander the Great and his lifetime partner Hephaestion from childhood unto death, and all the other great same sex lifetime partnerships to which we can look for our history, for our Queer Spirit. Such love can only be Love, i.e. Divine Presence, which can only exist in Creation, in God's Creation. Once we recognize that there is something called Creation and that we are part of the Great Story of Humanity as Queer People in Creation, we must recognize that something that is called Spirit, for Creation is nothing if it is not Spiritual.

Such a metanoia requires transformation, transformation from the quotidian to the exotic, from the general to the particular, from the terrestrial to the other-wordly. It does not require a transformation from the body to the spirit, for such a dichotomy does not exist in reality, and one is not more exalted than the other. Body and Spirit are the same thing theologically, at least in my theology they are, my Queer Theology, my reality. Certainly, that is a paradox, but then God and spirituality are nothing if not Paradox. So, the great paradox is that as the body dies the Spirit lives, and as the body lives the Spirit dies. This is not how it needs to be now, however. It was so during the Death Years, during the Holocaust that was ours, because that was reality as we understood it at the time, that Augustinian reality of the body/spirit split, where body is bad and spirit is good. It was the common paradigm for body/spirit connectivity, i.e. separation, but now that the body is living, the Sprit, if seen as the same and not as other, can live as well. When that happens, we can live in a state of ecstatic bliss, in the great Community of Compassion that does not require death for it to survive. The Living Body is the fecund soil of the Living Spirit. Each requires the other in order to survive. We do not need to remain in our mundane, competitive, corporate, capitalist, individualistic, materialistic lives. We can live in the Community of Compassion again and be part of Creation again. We can feel the life of a God who does truly have only the very best intentions for us alive in our Community, and as we feel the Sprit moving, we can grab on to our History, because it is the story of Creation, but, more than that, it is the story of our Creation, and we can become a People again, dancing the Great Dance.

We don't need to die in body anymore in order to live in Spirit. We can live in body very well, and celebrate the body and our sexuality very well, and live in Spirit equally well simultaneously. And so, my Queer Theology is not one of body or spirit, or even body and spirit, but, rather, body with spirit, a unity not a dichotomy. We are body/spirits. As our bodies live now with these miraculous, although highly toxic, medications, so can our Queer Spirit live now in a symbiotic Community of Compassion, simple compassion for our Brothers and Sisters as we live our simple lives trying desperately to connect to one another while not yet having a clue as to how to do that. My dear Brothers and Sisters, have the courage to engage our magnificent Queer Myth. It is ours by birthright, ordained by God to be our core definition, to be that which gives us the Community of Compassion in a world of wellness now. To re-engage the Myth means to revive the Tribe from a Community of Compassion that came out of death, out of mourning, to the Community of Compassion that comes out of Life, out of celebration. And then perhaps, indeed, we can have our Golden Age.

Soli Deo Gloria

What It Is

2009-03-25T19:13:00.000-07:00

I continue to be a [spiritual] revolutionary who pursues ideals,

growing in the understanding and learning that what is desired is not always possible.

Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua

This is just a blog of thoughts and, hopefully, some wisdom gathered through the course of my life, not just my life as an out Queerman since 1965, but my life since childhood. It also consists of my life with hiv/AIDS, a close companion since the early 1980's, although not clinically discovered until 1991. In 1995, I had my first opportunistic infection and was diagnosed with "full-blown" AIDS. My entire brain , every millimeter, was covered with Herpes Simplex lesions, and I lay in a hard coma for ten days. I woke up. There were more infections during the ensuing years. I know I have been infected with hiv since the early 1980's though, because of the profligate sexual life I led in Chicago in the 1970's and then in New York City in the early 80's and the safe sexual life I led after 1984 back in Chicago. I am sure, actually, that I contracted it in New York where I had sex with seven to ten Men a day seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year for three years, a rather common way for Gaymen to have lived back then, and we were passing the virus around like the common cold, never knowing, never having any idea, that we were infecting each other with a deadly virus, a sexually transmitted virus that can kill and which did and which still does, only a lot more quietly now.

This blog consists of essays containing some politics, some spirituality, some music critique, some theology, some sexuality, some sex, some Queer culture and history from my own experience and perspective, some loss and pain and, since 1995, a great deal of illness, both psychiatric and physical, from AIDS and the horrifically toxic medications that purport to control the virus, and the relatively good state of my health for the past eight years. I live in a world of archetypes, a Queer collective unconscious and my Queer myth, and it is from this world of wonder and delight that these essays take their form. This is not like the usual blog wherein the posts are "300 words or less". I suppose that I am not a blogger, but, rather, an essayist who writes with no constraints on length or content, and that I choose to publish these essays in blog format. Be prepared. These are not going to be sound-bytes in written form, no fast food on The Myth Of The Queerman in these writings. Be prepared to take time, to be focused, to be interested, and, if you are not, then be interested in the fact that you are not interested. Be prepared to be present when you are reading. I require that of my readers. I am certainly present when I am writing. I require that of myself, so why should I not require that of you? Read mindfully and write to me your comments at the end of each post. I want to know your reactions to this Tribal Elder's thoughts. We are all of one tribe, and I am an Elder of our Tribe. I carry the story. I am a keeper of the majick, of the pipe and the drum, and I speak our oral history and traditions, our culture and our Myth. There are no written sound bytes in the way I tell or explore the great story. There are only tales to be told, a Myth to be explored, a tradition to be honored, a culture to inculcate. This takes words written with melody, rhythm, and harmony, and I offer this music so that we can all learn to sing the great Queer Song together, living in the lives of those Queers that have come before and from whom we are descended.

I have lived an extraordinary life as a political revolutionary, street queen, Stonewall rioter, child prodigy, international concert harpsichordist, teacher, recording artist, midwife to the dying birthing them into death, pastor, spiritual director, counselor, and budding Episcopal priest. The ordination never happened, though, because the final approval committee was terrified of my Queerness, of how I interpreted Scripture through my experience as an oppressed Queerman in a hostile society, particularly a hostile Church, and how I understood a loving and redemptive God through that oppression. They trembled at how I would talk about the intrinsic connection between spirituality and sexuality, the importance of the body as Body, and sex as a Way to union with God long before any Gayman was writing, talking, or even thinking about this from a Queer perspective. I talked on Sunday mornings in full vestments about erotic spirituality, and made the powers tremble. Immediately after the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago slashed and bloodied my Queer soul and left it to die in the streets, the next openly Queer candidates were ordained with little question. I was the first such to run that gauntlet. I led my Brothers and Sisters to their promised land of ordination in the Chicago Diocese. I, however, was not meant to cross the river, because my priestly vocation lay elsewhere, in other things, in the life of my Tribe. It is not so much that I, like Moses, was not permitted into the Promised Land, because I had done nothing against my fellow human beings to be denied such a joy. It is that ultimately, the Episcopal priesthood was not my Promised Land, so there really was not anything from which I was being kept. It just was not where I belonged, and, sadly, because of the workings of a rabidly homophobic and heterosexist church, I had to experience some awful pain in order to find that out, as well as many awe-filled moments of awakening around that pain. Today I belong to no church and have no connection to organized religion at all. It's better that way.

The quotes at the beginning of each essay are wise words for me and may, or probably, have nothing whatever to do with what is in the essay. The words are an important part of who I am, and so I in include them simply because I like them. They are windows into the Myth. The whole blog is a window through which you can look and see who I am and see who you are, see the intimacies and intricacies of my soul. I have no secrets. Incest survivors who have worked on themselves to recover that which was lost usually don't, the wounds created by the secrecy having closed. My life in the Myth Of The Queerman is ultimately that which helped my wounds to close, and which, ultimately, allows me to live a life with no secrets.

I do not speak for any Queer person but myself. I can speak for no other Man, and certainly no woman. I have ideas about how we can be a Queer people in this world, because I know who I can be, who my friends have been and can be still and are yet to be even more, and I have a vision. That vision is, I well know, utopian. I know that there is no one Queer community but, rather, many Queer communities. I do believe, however, that there is Queer Spirit that binds all our communities, and there are certain Queer characteristics that we need to recognize in order to make the world a better place, in order to be the majicians who change society for the good, majicians who need to work very hard on ourselves so that we can work very hard on straight society, majicians who need to look deeply into what Carl Jung called our shadow, that part of psyche that we would rather not acknowledge but in which acknowledgement and understanding we can grow in our wholeness, our fullness as Queer human beings. I am well aware that Gayness, in all its beauty, has its shadow, it dark side.

Also, using the language and work of Carl Jung, I speak of male and female archetypes, those symbols and images that are buried in our instincts and which belong to all peoples no matter what the culture. They simply take different shapes, different forms depending upon that culture. We find them in myth and story. For Gaymen, the archehypes of majician, warrior, king, and lover are paramount, but so are the archetypes of the mother, the maiden, the whore, and the crone. We possess them all. There are archetypes of light and archetypes of shadow. As Mark Thompson in his book "Gay Body: A Journey Through Shadow to Self" (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1997) writes on page 13 about archetypes he says:

"Archetypes are structure-forming elements within the psyche, a treasury of crystalline seeds which give rise to the fantasies and mythological motifs informing our lives. When activated, they release a great amount of creative energy. However, archetypes are not the actual contents of the symbols or myths themselves; they are the imprinted forms or parameters in which psychological material is organized and channeled. Thus, any given archetype can find numerous expressions. The mother archetype, for example, includes not only our real mother but all mother figures ranging from positive to negative--from the Virgin Mary to Medusa."

It is partly through my own inner work with these archetypes that I know in the depths of my soul that we are here exactly because we are Queer, and it is from that deep understanding from which I write.

Spirituality is a tricky business at best. As a word, the depth of meaning has been so terribly lost because it is so overused and overworked, and even used in such completely wrong ways and contexts, that it oftentimes can have little meaning at all. So many people say, "Well, I'm not religious but I'm deeply spiritual." What does that mean, I wonder? Certainly what it means to those who say it is not what it might mean to me. We might be poles apart. Spirituality is colored by one's own experiences, sufferings, joys, epiphanies, sorrows, celebrations, and upbringings in religions of origin. Spiritual paths are myriad. True spiritual paths lead us to lives of justice, lives of politics, that is, the interaction between people, and my own spirituality has informed my political life also since 1965 when I had the courage to come out of my dark and terrifying closet when there was no real support system in place, when very few LGBT people anywhere in the country were publicly out.

It was my coming out in 1965 and my work in the Civil Rights Movement, a movement in which I knew my own civil rights were being denied, that led me perhaps in my karma to be at Sheridan Square, in front of the Stonewall Inn, on the night of June 27, 1969, perhaps one of the most spirit-filled and glorious moments of my life, that night of riot, as were the days and nights of passionate rage and solidarity of spirit that followed. My radical political action of coming out at age 18 in the face of rampant opposition from my Queer friends and peers in 1965, and the political acting out of 23 years of Queer rage at the Stonewall Riots in 1969 were not political for the sake of politics, but for the sake of spirit, for the sake of divine justice, not just for others, but, finally, for myself.

We cannot live in this world without being touched somewhere by teachings of at least a few of the world's great spiritual paths, including Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Taoism and, I must admit reluctantly, the fast food, quick fix spirituality of New Ageism, and even some of the more mystical esoteric ones the come out of those such as the spirituality of the Sufi or Wicca. Even the alleged atheism of the Queer communities is a valid spiritual path. It is spiritual because it is alive and lived by those who breathe, and, I believe, if we breathe, we are by definition spiritual. One's spirituality can also be informed by the inner work of individual psychotherapy, group psychotherapy, spiritual direction, 12-step programs, and support groups of all kinds, For myself, I have spent decades studying the great religions of the world, reading their holy books, talking to devotees who have practiced their spiritual inner work throughout their lives and were kind and gracious enough to share their wisdom with me. I have sat, albeit at time in physical discomfort, at the feet of great teachers, listening and trying to take in their wisdom and lived experience. I have been through the ritual process of initiation into Queermanhood, living in some eternal moments of timeless Time with some of my beloved Brothers, feeling enrobed and molecularly filled with the divine love and blessing of the Mother and the Father, surrounded by and filled with a thoroughly Queermale love and sexuality in tribal nakedness, a classic tribal process which I as a Western man never thought I possibly could experience but did by divine grace, and in which I forgave my father his sin, sitting for a while in a sweat lodge with my naked Brothers during my full forty-eight hours in liminal space wherein there was for me no sexual charge or trigger of my addiction in any way. This was ecstasy.

Since my childhood in a nominally Jewish household, searching for a truth which was present neither there nor in the religious teaching I received at the synagogue once each week, I began reading about religions of the East in high school and found great wisdom and understanding of a Way in the "Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu, and buy using the "I Ching" to put some order into my emotionally and psychologically chaotic and painful life as an adolescent Queerboy, suffering the inner torment of internalized homophobia, of that fear and self-loathing, trembling in a world filled to the brim with hostility. Had it not been for my brother's inquiring mind, these books would not have been available to me as the gift they were. I would sit on the floor very quietly in my bedroom , after hours of tedious practice at the piano, initially using coins for the work, but then using sticks, gathering them in one hand, counting them off with the other, dividing them, counting them off, dividing them, and counting again until I cast the Kua for the day. I would read the associated text, and feel all the blame laid on me just for being alive lifted off my shoulders by the words "no blame". Looking back on it now, I know that I understood very little about this ancient text, but between the two, the "Tao Te Ching" and the "I Ching" and living the life of seeming insanity in a house of monsters, I understood paradox very clearly as an adolescent, and that has served me well during the course of my spiritual journey into and through my Queer adulthood.

As a consequence of this understanding of paradox, I have a firm faith in God/dess and if God/dess is anything, God/dess is the simplicity of the complexity of paradox. Light in darkness, darkness in light, separate but indistinguishable, yet transcending both. Masculine in feminine, feminine in masculine, separate but indistinguishable, yet transcending both. Heat in cold, cold in heat, separate yet indistinguishable, yet transcending both. Not one, not two, but One that is two that is neither. This is the spirituality of the Mother, the One who is both Mother and Father, and yet thoroughly non-dualistic, non-polarized. This is Queer consciousness which comes from before polarity began in the creation myths of so many cultures. For me, not the either/or spirituality and psyche of the incest victim, but the both/and spirituality and psyche of the incest survivor, and yet neither because both are One. I speak of this when I write of mystical sex and erotic spirituality, and the complete and utter union that is possible, even attainable, between our Queer Body/Spirits and God/dess, not just a place centered in body, of peace and prayer, but of ecstatic, blissful bodily/spiritual oneness with the One wherein we become that which we seek and there is no boundary, no identifiable distinction between human and divine, sacred and profane, because there is nothing between which to distinguish. This kind of ineffable love can only come from the Mother, can only come from being in the Mother, can only come from becoming the Mother, and I would suggest that the purpose of Queer people here on Earth is to bring back to this dangerous, dark, war-torn, environmentally raped world of the shadow of the masculine, the light of the divine feminine, the light of the Mother, for it is only in being in harmony with Her who is all harmony with all things and contains all things that this world can be saved from destruction and annihilation. I continue this observation and unpack this powerful conviction later in the body of the blog.

Though born a Jew, I was baptized a Christian on the third Sunday in Advent, September 12, 1976, by the Rev. James Edward Avery of the United Church of Christ, a holy Queerman of whom I speak later in this work. The world lost a glorious light, a brilliant Queer light, when James died an untimely death from an asthma attack at a very young age ten years ago in Chicago. A dear friend, confident, mentor, and teacher of Queerness and spirituality, a teacher of the esoteric words of the Great Lover, Jesus, I found, through Jim, the rich words of Jesus regarding justice and my own humanity, regarding right relationship and mutuality, regarding healing and peace, and finally regarding redemption through divine Love, which is, after all, Justice. Certainly, these things are not uncommon in other spiritual teachings, but Jesus' words spoke to me in a very organic way that required little translation into my Western experience and consciousness.

My spirituality is also informed by both the processes of psychotherapy and spiritual direction, having been engaged in the latter with one spiritual director as his directee from 1983 to 2005 and the former on and off since 1964 with a number of brilliant, wise and loving psychotherapists, and then in my own private practice as a spiritual director with my own directess since 1989. My nine years of focused recovery work from incest in the 1980's shaped me spiritually in profound ways, as did my grace-filled work with my dying Brothers in the AIDS community during the Death Years of the 1980's and 1990's, and ultimately my own experiences with the Death Crone in AIDS-related illnesses during the last five years of the 20th century and into the first two years of the 21st. AIDS is both the worst thing that ever happened to me and the best. Through it I have come to know the truth of my own mortality, a truth only those who face terminal illness can come to, and we are, relatively, rare. The lived knowledge of my mortality has changed me profoundly in ways that bring me into a place of greater compassion and understanding of my fellow human beings. I bring that profound change into my work as a spiritual director and counselor.

Like the expatriated Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh whose writings have taught me so much, I find that the connections between the teaching of Jesus and the teachings of the Buddha are not dissimilar on many levels. Both the Gospels and the Buddhist Sutras speak of justice, understanding, compassion, loving-kindness, humility, awakening, and right relationship. It is thought by many scholars that the years of Jesus' disappearance , in fact, were spent in India and Tibet where he studied Buddhism. If I have to label myself anything, which I don't like doing but do when I have to, when the world needs me to for its own need to clarify my belief system in their own minds, I would say the I am a Buddhist Christian Jew who takes great comfort in the Tao and who moves all of those teachings through my understanding of and life in Queer Spirit, which is to say in the Mother, which I hope is the justice-filled, humble, compassionate and now simpler life of a teacher, although I am told by those I trust that in my feelings and in my psyche, I am anything but simple. But then being Queer in a world where the larger majority is not, is not a simple thing, so, I suppose, that hose I trust are correct in the assessment.

One weekend I was on a retreat called "Gay Spirit". When it came time of me to tell my story, the room silenced and the Men, both younger and older, were, again I am told, "enraptured and adoring", and after I spoke, one of the older Queermen in the group said, "You are a tribal elder, Roger, carrying with you an oral tradition and history, a spirit which you feel and live, which cannot be found in any textbook, and you love who you are with a great love. You teach us to love ourselves. You teach us about life as Queermen as you live yours in Queer Spirit. You need to be heard". My friend Kerry had been telling me to write for a number of years now, because, he said, I have some very important things to say. Perhaps I have. Perhaps i have not. I think I have, but to know I have would be a spiritual arrogance that comes close to hubris, and the gods never like hubris. Often, in my knowledge of my knowledge which is that I have none at all really, I ask God to keep me from hubris, from being arrogant. Regarding these written thoughts, as is said in 12-step programs, "Take what you like and leave the rest". After 62 years of Queer life, I am finally able to write.

The opinions and beliefs expressed here are perhaps often quirky and radical and even somewhat siliy or outlandish, but I hold them dear, and I am passionate about them. I hold who we are as a people dear, and I am passionate about us. I know in the depths of my soul that we are here exactly because we are Queer, that we are utterly loved by the divine exactly because we are Queer, not in spite of it, and it is from the deep understanding of and passionate conviction in Queerlife from which I write. I am, hopefully, expressing much of who I truly am through these ideas and the experiences that informed them. My job on this Earth has always been to gather community and create change, to teach inner awareness of feelings and the fullness of self, either through my musical performance since the age of twelve, or through my speech as a music teacher, public speaker, and former preacher. In this way, I have always been a teacher/priest. I hope that my writing now carries on that vocation of teaching through compassionate self-revelation, a vocation that was given to me by my Great Lover, and by her holiness the Mother, and one for which I am eternally grateful.

Thoughts on Ageism and the Death of the Myth

2009-03-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

I am 62 years old. I have seen and experienced a great deal of Queer history in my life, a lot of it undocumented. I have researched and cultivated a finely tuned Queer spirituality based a great deal on our own mythology, as well as our history of spiritual violence at the hands of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic cultures. Our spirituality goes all the way back to the Minoans, and even further, to the Bull Dancers in the temple of the Snake Goddess and the great white Bull God, those Queeryouth, male and female, chosen and glorified, who faced the fierce live bull in the arena as it charged, grabbing the gilt-tipped horns of the bull with inverted hands and, as a gymnast on a vault, then flipped over the horns and on the the bull's back, balancing (dancing) until s/he is thrown. Often the youth were considered sacrifices to the Goddess if they got gored and killed by the bull. The mythology of the Great White Bull from the sea is Queer mythology.

Our Queer mythology is in the creation stories that come out of ancient Egyptian texts, for instance, which speak of the One that was before the dualistic split between body and spirit, one story of which speaks of the Totality existing in single thought, single consciousness becoming the god Atum, who was called by different names at the different cult centers of pre-dynastic Egypt. Atum was at Heliopolis. The name "Atum" also translates as "totality", that is, both the male and female principles existing in one consciousness. Atum copulated with himself, thus producing creation ex nihilo. One of the "Pyramid Texts" has the following:

"I was the one who came into being as Atum. It was at Heliopolis that

my phallus became erect. I grasped hold of it, and came to orgasm.

Thus it was that the siblings Shu (form) and Tefnut (matter) were born"

This is a particularly Queer mythology of creation, a mythology that is non-dualistic, that comes from before Eden and Adam and Eve, and one that has been denied to us as a People with a history, mythology, and spirituality that is uniquely ours.

In India there is the powerful story of the love relationship between the great gods Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu. According to Hindu tradition, when Lord Shiva is not meditating, he is having sex, and in the religious sculpture depicting this king of all Hindu gods, he is often seen with an erection. The Shiva Lingam are in front of nearly every house in India. The story, our story, is that Lord Vishnu was in love with Lord Shiva and wanted to have Lord Shiva's child. Lord Vishnu, a shape-shifter, shape-shifted into a female body, made love with Lord Shiva as a female, conceived, carried the child to term, and delivered the child. This child is Lord Ayyappa, the child god to whom millions of Hindus make pilgrimage each year. After the birth, Lord Vishnu shape-shifted back to being a male. The two male gods then raised the child themselves. This is Queer mythology, Queer spirituality. It expresses the sacredness of Queer family that is not tie heterosexual nuclear family of a male and female and 2.75 children, touted to be the "norm" by the fundamentalist, radical Christian right in this country. It is a different kind of family, one that is not only sanctioned by the gods, but lived out by the gods themselves, in the spiritual tradition of an entire people. Can so many millions of people be so wrong, when they say that there are different kinds of family possible?

In the Judeo-Christian tradition there is the magnificent story of the love between David the shepherd boy and Jonathan the son of King Saul. David's lamentation over the dead body of his beloved is one of the most beautiful pieces of lyricism-in-death in the history of world literature. David weeps with a grief so heartfelt when he sings of a love that "surpasses the love of women", that it rips our own hearts and minds open when we read this most famous of Lamentations. In the great Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the acknowledged great masterpieces of literature in the entire history of world literature, we are given the powerful and heartbreaking story of King Gilgamesh, a mighty hero and warrior, and his heart-companion Enkidu, created by the gods specifically to be the warrior/lover and co-adventurer with Gilgamesh, but, more importantly, to be the heart-love of Gilgamesh's soul. It is, in fact, the death of Enkidu that drives Gilgamesh into the second great adventure that comprises a large part of the text. Without the same-sex relationship between Gligamesh and Enkidu we would not really have the great "Epic".

I remember that in High School, when I read The Iliad by Homer, my hero, the Man who told me that my attraction to Men was not an aberration, was Achilles, because his relationship with Patrolus was so much more than friendship. I knew in my gut and in my heart, and in my deepest intuition, that in this powerful Greek epic, there were Men attracted to and in love with other Men, and they were warrior/lovers, coming out of a great tradition of warrior/lovers, among whom were Alexander the Great and his lover of eighteen years, Hephaestion to whom Alexander was devoted throughout his life, even when married to women. So, there are these marvelous and empowering stories of the warrior/lovers, The Sacred Band of Thebes that included Achilles and Patroclus, and of David and Jonathan, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Alexander the Great and Hephaestion and even the great gods themselves, Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu. These are our stories, our mythologies. These are stories that our Elders can tell our youth.

Our story, a story I can tell because I was there, and one which has become mythic in proportion even within relative recent history, is the story of the Stonewall Riots and the radical, nascent Queer politics of the Gay Liberation Front in the ensuing years of the early 1970's, years filled with class struggle, gender struggle, racial struggle, feminist struggle, all lived out by Queermen and Lesbians who had a consciousness of how different and how much better society could be when the sexual politics of the human struggle for liberation were seen as fundamental to that struggle. Because of the genocide against Queermen, conducted by the Reagan-Bush administration during the 1980's, there are few of us Gaymen left alive and who lived those wonderful heady years, and that powerful history. So many of us who fought that sometimes violent revolution of the early 1970's, died of AIDS-related complications during the Death Years. We were slaughtered by institutionalized and societally sanctioned homophobia that was murderous, slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands. It was our Holocaust.

There is a powerful story to tell regarding the genocide against our people. Those of us who lived in the trenches of The AIDS War, who battled for our lives and who came to know the Death Crone intimately have a vital oral history to tell, and we are the Elders in the Tribe whose job it is to tell the story. There are few eye witnesses left to tell this bitter and compassionate tale of death and life in the midst of death. There are few eye witnesses left to recount our mythology to our youth over the contemporary campflres of latte, mocha, and croissants.

In the Queermale community, unlike in the Lesbian community, there is a terrible "ism" which plagues the psyche of all Gaymen, no matter what their age. It is ageism, whose locus is in a youth and beauty culture, which cares nothing for history and sees no need in having one. There is no hunger for the story. It is often seen in the Adonis Complex of so many young Gaymen who spend uncountable hours at the gym and spa, who live only for the next conquest, the next party, the next dance, where those of us who are older than forty are seen as having nothing to offer because we are not perhaps sexually attractive enough anymore (although I have to say here that I find Men over forty to be far more sexually attractive than Men younger), and sexual attraction is, after all, the basis of so much of why and how we relate to each other, thus denying younger Gaymen living in ageism, their history, their mythology, and their spirituality. Such stories as we can tell can only come from the Elders of the Tribe, who, like all tribal elders who came before, no matter what the tribe or culture, were the carriers of the tribal wisdom learned over the ages of time, a wisdom that was not written down because it was a wisdom of the spirit that came through lived history, and, necessarily had to be passed on orally, because spirit cannot be contained in the written word.

Unlike Gaymen, Lesbians tend to revere their older sisters. Younger Lesbians form loving, lasting, sexual and emotional relationships with older Lesbians, listen to their stories, sit at the feet of their elder sisters absorbing the history and spirituality of those wise-women who have lived full and rich lives as out Lesbians, and even who, for a while could not be out, but who struggled valiantly with the truth of their sexual identities, to live with integrity even in the face of open hostility. The elder-women are lifted up for their wisdom and their contribution to Lesbian culture, but in the Gaymale cultures, this is not so. Older Gaymen are invisible, are really quite transparent on the street and in social settings because we are not "buff", we are not "ripped", our bodies are not shaved smooth as a baby's ass. We have lines around our eyes and the corners of our mouths. We have lived rich lives and our faces tell that story. Our bodies, in their older beauty, are not seen as beautiful because they are not rock hard, and we are not glowing in beautiful Queermale youth.

And yet, we are the carriers of the history, of the culture as it was before these youngmen were born. The lines around our eyes and mouth bespeak a wisdom and power that we need to share with our younger brothers and sisters. The glow in our eyes that saw the struggle, our minds that tried so hard to grasp our strength-in-identity, glowing as the possessors of spirits that soared with passion as we lived out the newness of self-proclamation. There is a magnificent beauty in this inner passion and strength, this depth of self-love and unfathomable conscious knowledge of being created intentionally as Queer by the Creator, as having a purpose on this Earth exactly because we are Queer, not in spite of it.

There is a beauty in Queermale age that younger Queermales do not see because far too often their eyes are looking for something else, and thus they miss the glow that comes from the inner work of finding self and finding Self. There is something wonderful here that Queeryouth take for granted, something which only came with great struggle. It is a light of passion, a halo of pride-in-identiry as Queer that is a different halo than that which surrounds younger Queer heads. Our halo is much, much bigger and brighter, and shines with a certain blinding light of dignity, integrity, and power because we had to fight for it; it was not handed to us. We had to struggle in a world of hatred without mass support, without a community behind us, and there are those of us who are still alive who fought that struggle and can tell that story, which is, by definition, so much more interesting in the telling, than in the reading of it in a textbook.

As for Queermale history, so many of our Elders passed during the Death Years, that those of us who survived and can tell not only the much older story of who we are, who have studied our history to a great extent, who have plunged ourselves into our innate spirituality that is our birthright, but can tell the more recent story of death and tragedy and grief and rage in this country that is less than twenty-five years old, but which is kept a dark secret because of fear, both that of the Queer community and that of the larger straight culture. We, now I have a responsibility to do jut that, to tell the story.

Sadly, it seems that as the years pass, and as Queers are more and more assimilated into the larger straight society, blending in and losing our unique, extraordinary identity, our voice, trying to be just like everybody else, becoming more and more an undefined part of straight, consumerist, materialistic, corporate America, our story becomes unimportant and the Elders are not seen as vital. The story that the Elders can tell is seen as irrelevant, and the terrible invisibility of ageism takes over the minds and spirits of those who are younger. In Queer ageism, there is a loss of continuity that is history and culture. In Queer ageism, there is a patent disrespect for a wisdom that can only come from living an outrageously out Queer life with a passion for identity and a passion for justice. In Queer ageism, particularly by those who were not even born during the Death Years or who were just infants, there is an unspeakable disrespect for those who fought so valiantly in a War that produced the medications that keep those infected with HIV alive today, those same Queer youngmen who have no desire to know their history.

Had we, both the sick and dying and the healthy and well, not "raged against the dying of the light" (Dylan Thomas) during the terrible genocide years against Queermen, the anti-retroviral medications that hold opportunistic infections at bay now may not be where they are today, and in this country, hundreds of thousands might still be dying. The story of the Death Years, the politics of AIDS, is an important part of the larger story of Queer history, not only in this country, but in all the world, and, it is not just Queermale history but also Lesbian history. The face of Gaymale/Lesbian relationships changed during those years of terror, grief, rage, and death. It is this story, and the larger story, that I and my elders in the Tribe carry, the story that must necessarily be told, an oral tradition that is uniquely ours, that we cannot lose or, surely, we will lose our very identity as Queers in the world, because it is the continuing story of victory and triumph in the face of unspeakable oppression. It is the story of Heroes and Martyrs in a War that slew hundreds of thousands of Queermemn in our own holocaust. It is the story of life in the face of death.

Ageism will produce a death of the culture, a death of the Tribe, because it will produce a death of the story being told again and again and again to generations of younger Queer people who need to hear it in order to know from where they come, who they are, what their spiritual, mythological, and historical legacies are. The history of a tribe can be told in a history book, but the life of the Tribe, in it's lived history, in its spirit, can only be told by the Elders of the Tribe, can only be spoken to those who come after, and, in so doing, the Tribe flourishes not only in body, but in spirit as well. The only way to keep Queer Body and Queer Spirit alive is to tell the story.

This is my work now as a Queermale body/spirit in the world, who was brought back from death in 1996, 1997, and 1998 for a purpose. My work is to tell the story, to speak our unique spirituality that is thoroughly non-dualistic, a spirituality radically different from the traditional Western Judeo-Christian-Islamic spirituality and theology, and to tell our mythology. My work is to proclaim the story of victory and triumph in the face of horrible adversity from the Church and society over the ages. To go to College and University campuses and corporate places of business where Queer organizations exist, to go to Queer social service agencies in cities across the country, to speak as a Veteran of The Stonewall Riots and The Gay Liberation Front.To teach classes in social justice theory and gender studies, to facilitate workshops on Gaymale spirituality, ritual and symbol, to speak on Queer mythology, to be a Spiritual Director for Queermen in intimate one-on-one relationship, helping them to walk their often circuitous but most often grace-filled paths...this is my work now. And, of course, there is also the writing of my blog, which comes along slowly but inexhaustibly, and which will speak of so many of these things as it unfolds.

My life is full and rich, filled with wonder and delight, and I am a proud and life-filled 62-tear-old Queerman, one who wants his younger brothers and sisters to listen to him, but to listen with awe and wonder at the grandeur and the majick of the Queer Epic, an epic that compares with those of ancient Greece and the great civilizations that have come before, because we were there in those very epics, a living, breathing part of them, a vital presence, sometimes hidden and covert, but sometimes more openly as with Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaestion, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, as we were in Queer Egyptian pharaonic stories, as we are in the epic of our own relative time which includes such great figures as Michelangelo, DaVinci, Frederick The Great, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, Percy Byshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Lord Byron, Osdcar Wilde, Willa Cather, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Bessie Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Benjamin Britten, Robert Mapplethorpe, Christopher Isherwood, Peter Ilyetch Tchaikovsky , Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, John Coregliano, Rita Mae Brown, Paul Monette, Michael Cunningham, Paul Russell and the rest of the countless thousands who have peopled the epic of our own time with their color and brilliance, filling the world with truth and beauty, but perhaps none more so than those of us who have lived our quiet, courageous lives inexorably, who do not have recognizable names, and who continue to do so in this very difficult world, a world that has always demanded from us a resilience and love of life in order to survive, a resilience and life affirmation the history of which is held powerfully in the hearts and minds of the Queer Elders who have a wisdom about who are as a people on this Earth, this glorious planet which could not survive without our own particular Queer gifts to Creation, the Elders who can speak of an unquenchable Queer Spirit in the face of terrible adversity, an unquenchable Queer Spirit which can still dance and can still Dance. We only ask that you listen.

First completed on January 21, 2005, revised and re-worked on January 7, 2008, final revision on March 21, 2009.

We Are All One Piece: The Three-Faceted Diamond

2009-03-18T19:26:00.000-07:00

When we experienced our own oppression in our places of faith--churches, synagogues and mosques--where we could not be who we really were sexually and, therefore, spiritually, we left those institution in droves. Some chose, and still choose, to stay and fight for the recognition of their wholeness as full human being in all their Queerness from within their painful religious structures. These are courageous Queers of faith, those who stay in the spiritual and emotional bondage of unenlightened religion knowing that only their spiritual and physical presence will make institutionalized religion change. There are certainly, however, Christian denominations that celebrate Queerness as God's gift to Creation. The United Church of Christ is one of these, as are The Quakers. Within Christianity and Judaism, there are pockets of liberation and justice ministry centered on total inclusivity particularly as it relates to Queers, churches and synagogues that don't just lovingly accepts us, but celebrate the gift that we are intrinsically as Queers. They celebrate the consequent gifts that we bring to the ongoing spiritual lives of their communities. They celebrate us with great celebration. One of these is within the United Methodist denomination, a Protestant Christian denomination that is rabidly homophobic but which, much to their hierarchy's chagrin, has some communities of sanity and liberation--Broadway United Methodist Church in Chicago of which community I was a member for a number of years in my Christian incarnation, as well as all those churches in the Reconciling Ministries Network of that denomination.

I am not a Methodist, I never could possibly be, but that community was so prophetic in its ministry and outreach that I had to sit in those pews and listen to their former pastor, the Rev. Gregory Dell. He was selflessly committed to complete justice and nothing less for Queers. There are also pockets of liberation within the Presbyterian and Lutheran Churches as well as the Episcopal church, but they are, still, only pockets. There is also The Metropolitan Community Church, which was founded by the Rev. Dr. Troy Perry specifically to provide a safe Christian worship space for Queers. Within Judaism, we are celebrated in both the Reform and Reconstructionist traditions. Within the Hindu tradition , much of the mythology of the gods and goddesses, particularly Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu, is particularly Queer. Buddhism speaks of world justice and liberation for all of Creation and says nothing negative spiritually about Queers. Within the Muslim world there is no safety whatsoever.

It is unfortunate that for those of us who are equally courageous and did not stay in our original places of worship, who went into a spiritual desert leaving our own personal Egypts, we left our innate Queer spirituality behind in our lands of bondage. Like the Children of Israel, we fled our own spiritual places of outright hatred and pain where we couldn't hear the Voice for which we searched and yearned. We knew this was our birthright, and to our great loss, we left our innate Queer spiritualities behind in the pews. We equated religion with spirituality even though often there is little if any connection, although sometimes there is. And, because were never taught from were we come, what our spiritual legacy is, because we are consistently and consciously denied our powerful spiritual history in this world, we wandered spiritually alone in our deserts, the gift of Queer spirit left behind, something that not only connects us one to the other, but also connect us to all of life in all its forms. Queer Spirit has a reverence for all of Creation, with which we are in relation and with which we are at peace.

Queer Spirit is nothing if it is not relational. Queer Spirit is how we care for each other, how we treat people, most especially other Queers. During the holocaust of the 1980's and 90's when we were all dying, Queer Spirit was powerfully alive in how we cared for each other. What we learned back then was that wemust love ourselves first before we take it out into the larger world to be care-givers, teachers, peacemakers, prophets, and a people of non-violence, a compassionate peoples, a volunteering peoples, an altruistic peoples, a peoples of loving kindness and understanding, a peoples of both a soft voice and a loud-voice-screaming when oppression is near. When universal peace is threatened or forgotten or, worse, purposefully denied or destroyed, our voice can be a roar.

Remember that Jesus our great Queer brother and one of the teachers of the Way said, "There are only two commandments---love God and love your neighbor as yourself." That means that loving God comes first, then yourself which is necessary in order to feel that love returned, and then to do the next which is to love neighbor, not the other around. Jesus was very clear about that!! For Queers, this is vital if we are to live outside of the shame and darkness of the closet. Loving ourselves in all our Queerness is Jesus' commandment to us. No matter what our relationship to the Christian tradition, the esoteric words of Jesus are words of justice and right relationship, words to which we can look for understanding of our own stories. They are words of humanity, not necessarily words of a church.

In a statement on the fifth anniversary of the Lhassa Uprising, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said,

"I believe in justice and truth, without which there would be no basis for human hope."

Justice, truth, and hope are the essence of Queer Spirit. These three keep us in right relationship with each other and with our own selves. The Buddha said.

"See yourselves in others,

Then whom can your hurt?

What harm can you do?

These are the words of justice and peace. These are the words of Queer Spirit.

The great spiritual teacher Ramakrishna teaches us the same thing regarding the adoration of the Mother, the One whom we as Queers embody on Earth. The first thing he teaches is to adore the Mother in all things, to let Her magnificence and love pour through you and flow out of you. The second is to adore each being as Her child, to honor the innate goodness in each individual, but not just people, honoring the innate goodness of the individual things She created in this world as well. The third is to adore the self as the Mother's own child, because it is She who birthed us as Queers in her non-dualistic image. As Queers, we go back to a pre-Edenic time when there were no polarities, no dualities, as there are none in the Mother who contains all things and is all things and yet transcends all things, just like the Father. We go back to a time before the creation myths split us and the world into two separate parts, a time before counted time, the time of the Mother of Us All.

As Queers, embodying both the divine masculine and divine feminine in all their fullness and yet transcending both, we are the Mother Incarnate in the world, and it is through this fact, this lived truth, that we as Queers have been called to heal the world, by bringing back into world consciousness the divine feminine, thus destroying the horrific work of the dark masculine in the world, by doing the work we have been given to do in a most humble way. That is, to bring back the presence of the Mother through our embodiment as sexual beings who most easily embody both the divine masculine and divine feminine, a presence and consciousness necessary if the world is to survive. If we are to create the Kingdom of God/dess on Earth, this embodiment is absolutely requisite. Jesus was very clear about this in his teachings as well. He knew the importance of the divine masculine and divine feminine and the need to embody both, which is exactly what we do as Queers. This combination embodiment is our very being. In the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic gospel that is not in the canon of Scripture but is extra-canonic, when asked by his disciples how to enter the kingdom of God, Jesus said:

"When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and

the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make the male

and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be

female..then you will enter the kingdom".

These are the Queer words of Jesus, words that tell us that who we are as sexual beings, Queer Sexual Beings. These are also the teachings of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching and in the Sutras of Buddhism. When we enter into consciousness of exactly who we are, we can create a world of peace, justice, and prosperity for all of Creation, not just for people, but our entire environment in which we live---all of Creation. If we are to survive as a created world, as a planet, we must bring our message of Queer Spirit to the world at large.

Strength of Spirit cannot stand on its own in one individual. It must be made manifest in community, in relationship. It must be made manifest in understanding and compassion. It must be made manifest in sexual expression that honors the Queer Spirit in each of us, a sexual expression that honors both body and spirit as the one thing they really are, rather than as separate dualistic entities that we, in our ignorance fostered by traditional Jewish and Christian theologies, somehow need to re-make connected. In truth, the two have always been connected!! They are part of our fullness of incarnation, of embodiment of the Mother and the Father, that fullness of who we really are in the larger scheme of things, our place in the Universe, in the larger Cosmos.

We are like magnificent three-faceted diamonds of body, mind, and spirit--all one piece--not three separate things that somehow we must learn to connect, as the New Ageists would have us believe, but, rather, we are one piece that cannot be separated. Through that one three-faceted piece, the diamond light of Queer Spirit breaks into forth prismatic rainbows of color, the Rainbow that we are, illuminating the world with the sexuality and eroticism of Queer Body, the fecundity of Queer Mind, and the inextinguishable power of Queer Spirit--a sexual, erotic, fecund, inextinguishable Queer spirit.

LGBTQ/QAIA....What's That Again?

2009-03-13T21:45:00.000-07:00

I love being Queer, you know. I love living everyday in the Myth of the Queerman, a Myth I have struggled long and hard to find within myself and with which I thoroughly identify. The more I have watched the Myth shift within the Queer community over the decades, the more I grasp onto it passionately, with a quiet desperation that is sometimes not so quiet. It was not so quiet at Oberlin a number of years ago when I had a fire-filled discussion with a flaming red/yellow/orange/purple/blue haired youngman who insisted that my understanding of the Queer community was far too narrow.

One of the ways I have watched my Myth shift is through our terminology, what we call ourselves; it is this terminology over which I was not so quiet at Oberlin over dinner with this youngman. I have watched the terminology shift and change and the common parlance become something other over the years. I have seen it go from the "Gay Community" to the "Gay and Lesbian Community" to the "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Community" (GLB), and then when the Lesbians felt disenfranchised by their placement in the term, we moved them of the front of the line at their insistence to create the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Community" (LGB) in order to appease them, and because we were afraid to say no, putting Lesbians before Gaymen out of respect, and perhaps also a little out of fear. Then, when Transgender folk began to feel some kind of empowerment, they were added to the mix, and we became the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community" (LGBT) (I don't believe that we ever really liked that, though...we only went along with the tide of unspoken opinion).

Then, it was decided by someone (only God knows who), that we needed to add a "Q" for those Queer youth and Queer adults who were struggling with their identities and questioning who they were, so the "Q" went on the end. Now, we had the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning Community" (LGBTQ). Then, along came some people who decided that the "Q" actually stood for "Queer", so that changed the wording yet again, and just to be clear, we added a second "Q". Now we were the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning/Queer Community" (LGBTQ/Q)

Then, along acme the straight Men and Women (along came the spider who sat down beside them and ate all the Queers) who really liked us, who really, really liked us ( just like Sally Field said she was liked by the Academy upon receiving her Oscar--do you recognize a similarity here?), and they became our "allies". That word was then added to the long, disempowering list: "Lesbian, Gay, bisexual, Transgender, Questioning/Queer,. Allies" and we became the LGBTQ/QA Community.

Then, lo and behold, along came those people who were born with both genital organs in their one body, who insisted that they, too, were Queer and part of my struggle, so we added an "I" for "intersexed", and we had the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning/Queer, Allied, Intersexed Community" (LGBTQ/QAI). But wait!!! There's more!!!

So, there I was at Oberlin College, a bastion of all that is politically correct on the radical Left within the great American Small College community circuit, and I hear "LGBTQ/QAIA" There was another "A"!! That was a big surprise, to say the least. "What is this?", I thought. "Surely this is a mistake, a slip of the tongue. Perhaps it was the person stuttering the "A". Where did that come from?" I asked the many-tinted hair youngman, and he was a very nice young Gayman, and he had the nerve to say to me, in all seriousness, "Oh, Roger, haven't you heard? That means asexual". "That means what?", I asked incredulously, disbelieving what I had just heard. "WHAT??? (asked more loudly)", being struck deeply by the homophobia of such a terrible thing as asexual people declaring that they, too, are just like me and are Queer, and they are part of my struggle and the struggle of millions of people over the centuries.

Now, understand, that I know my Queerness centers on my sex. That's blasphemous to say, I realize, and politically incorrect as Hell. I'm supposed to declare loudly "Oh, but I'm so much more than just my sex" in order to not frighten straight people (who are the ones who are clearly not "allies") away from us, but what I say is true, and it's true for most of us, I believe, if we are honest about it. The true fact is, sex touches everything we do and say, every relationship we have, even the sexless ones. So, I engaged this youngman in a conversation about this asexual thing, and, of course, he and I disagreed vociferously about such nomenclature. He insisted that asexual people have as much right to make a sexual choice as I do and call themselves Queer. He did not get that mine (and his) is not a sexual choice, and that declaring asexuality to be on a par with Queerness in terms of liberation and the struggle over the centuries is a thoroughly homophobic thing to do. I asked him if people who chose to be racist had a right to their choice and should be allowed the freedom of such a choice, and be allowed into the Rainbow Push Coalition or the NAACP? He insisted that it is not the same thing. So, now, in order to be politically correct, and to honor my sexually repressed brothers and sisters in this very sexually repressed and hate-filled country in which I live, I am now informed that there is a community of asexuals who feel themselves to be very Queer and very oppressed by society. Now I have to refer to my community, the community for which I have fought my ass off and had my head cracked open by a policman's billy club, a community for which I have shed my blood, as the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning/Queer, Allied, Intersexed, Asexual Community".

Ah......there it is folks. The final say by the asexuals. LGBTQ/QAIA. How dare they?? How dare they throw such an insulting twist into the already muddy and disturbing mix? How dare they say that people can legitimately be asexual and be put in a label with my Tribe? THEY ARE NOT MY TRIBE!!! They are not Queer!!! Let them make their own fucking tribe if they are so inclined, but get out of mine. I don't believe, by the way, that a human being can be innately asexual. At least, he/she cannot be whole and be asexual. Perhaps one might choose celibacy as a legitimate expression of his/her sexuality, but one cannot be a human being and not be sexual. It goes with the territory, so to speak, perhaps more than anything else, in fact. Even celibacy is sexual. Celibacy is not asexuality. It is a conscious choice to not engage in sexual behavior, to sublimate the sexual urges into something other. It is this "asexual" business that galls me no end. In actual fact, this nastiness should knock all our Queer socks off. It not only knocked mine off, it turned them inside out in outrage.

I never liked the "Q" for "questioning" either, by the way, because I always thought if someone is "Q", they are really Gay or Lesbian or they would not have to be thinking about it or "questioning" it. Do really straight people ever question being straight, question whether they are straight or not, or why they are straight? Not in my experience do they do that. Only nascent Gay or Lesbian people question whether, in fact, they are or are not Gay or Lesbian. So, the question for me remains, why the "Q"? Get rid of it, I say. It's demeaning to me as a Gayman. Those that question whether or not they are Gay or Lesbian or Bisexual or Transgender do not question whether they are straight or not, so put them into the four basic sexual food groups of Queerness, and get rid of the "Q".

I also have to say here, that because I think bisexuality is a political choice, usualy made by women to a large extent, I believe, they do not belong there either. Most Men, certainly, are not bisexual, even those that claim that title. Straight Men may like to get their cocks sucked by a willing male mouth or have it encased in a warm asshole, be it male or female, but that does not make them bisexual. It simply makes them horny and an easy lay, and exploitive of Gaymen as sex objects and toys to be played with and then thrown away when the boredom sets in. I know that I am putting my head in a politically incorrect noose here, and will probably enrage some people, but I am beginning to think powerfully that I can no longer be Queercentric, as I have deeply believed I am over the past forty-six years or so. I am Gay/Lesbian centric (in that order, please note!), but here's the corker. I am supposed to joyfully embrace asexual people, who, by definition are lacking something very important in their very being and who can easily claim homophobia as part of their political bent, and legitimately at that. "Well...I just don't believe that homosexuality is right, because I'm asexual. I don't believe that heterosexuality is right either." Ah.....heterophobia.

I do not really care about this latter bias, but I certainly care about the former. Did the fact that I had my head cracked open on June 27, 1969 in Sheridan Square in New York City mean that because these asexuals CHOOSE not to screw, they are somehow part of my struggle? Absolutely not!!! They might as well be choosing Nazism or racism, and I'm supposed to embrace that because they, like I, have the right of choice as human beings I was told over dinner at Oberlin College, and I am supposed to fight for their right to choose. Because the right to choose is so tenuous in this country, whatever they choose sexually is now supposed to be part of the Queer struggle. My question is, if asexual people come out as asexual to their bosses at work, can they be fired, and who, in their right mind, comes out and says, "by the way, boss, I need to be completely honest with you and tell you that I'm asexual." Who in the world comes out and says, "I'm asexual and I'm oppressed"? I am so angry I could spit. Again, I have to ask, "How dare they?", and how dare that you Gayman with the colored spiked hair who is in a position of some, at least, small amount of political power on the Oberlin College campus, and whose voice is listened to with some respect and even, perhaps, some authority, how dare he tell me that I am politically incorrect to not include "asexuals" in that very large and now quite meaningless label. Well, come to think of it, if I am so angry about this, it must still have some meaning to me, or at least its earliest form has some meaning. In order to stop the conversation, because it was getting quite heated and our voices were getting tense, and he was clearly getting uncomfortable with me, he said that we needed to "just agree to disagree". Now there's a powerful stand, don't you think?

The power of a community label is gone. It has been watered down to mean absolutely nothing. Even the LGBT Center On Halsted in Chicago, which cost millinos to build and which received incredible national publicity and acclaim for what it symbolized in our community has merely that emblazoned on the front of the building, an innocuous name at best for such a nationally famous Center that is supposed to be the model for other cities in the country to emulate. What, in God's name, was it going to say, "The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning/Queer, Allied, Intersexed, Asexual Center On Halsted"? How absurd is that, after all? And anyway, the way it stands now, it could be a center for anything...a center for the homeless or street people or African Americans or Native Americans or Latinos or housewives with strollers. There is nothing about LGBT anywhere on that building. How much do we dishonor the work of our forebears? How much do we laugh at the jailing and bloodied heads at The Stonewall Rebellion (the Stonewall what??...I'm not familiar with that event.")

I am thoroughly disenchanted with my people, because I am no longer sure who my people are. I can honestly say that I only think my people are Gaymen, and mostly Gay Leathermen at that. Even that community, however, is fast disappearing as well, but that's another essay completely. I know that I am probably going to lose speaking engagements over this. I have certainly lost references and recommendations, but I will never stop writing, and I will never stop speaking my truth, because I know my truth is true. In this 21st century, the Tribe is dying off. That's the truth. That's a fact. We are losing our identity at its very core. The "gayborhood" is nearly gone. We want to look like straight people now. We want to act like straight people now (read "straight acting/straight appearing" in the personal ads). We want to have everything and be everything straight people have and are, when, in fact, we are not like them. We are fundamentally different from them. We are glorious. We are colorful. We are interesting. We are majickal, and we are losing our history and our legacy; we are losing our Myth. We are losing our majick. Most of all, and most tragically of all, we are losing our Queer Spirit. Without spirit, the body dies. Will we die? Will our body die? Will our Queer Body die? The central fact is this and nothing more. We are already dying, and we are allowing it to happen all around us. We are even celebrating it as it happens, and hoping that it gets even more real. Are we crazy? Are we somehow twisted because we want to die and be "just like them?" Quite frankly, I am not just like them, and I do not want to be just like them. I am a Gaymen. Proud. Real. Alive. I am all possibility in a world of nothing but possibility. My sexuality not only informs who I am, it is who I am. Is that not the most extraordinary and remarkable thing?

The watered down alphabet soup of our community is very telling regarding the ongoing life of Queer Spirit. Asexuals cannot, absolutely cannot, know the power or the reality of Queer Spirit because they are not Queer, and that's a fact!! I say, stay off my turf you heterosexist, homophobic monsters. Stay out of my Center on Halsted. Stay out of my life. You are not wanted here, at least I don't want you here. By saying that one should not be sexual, as asexuals do say, then they are telling me that I should not be Queer. How dare they make such a hubritic statement. The gods hate hubris, and the price gets paid one way or the other. Icarus' hubris, when he flew too close to the sun, produced his horrible death when the feathers melted and he tumbled thousands of feet into the sea, all because he thought he was a god, and because he, like the asexuals, was arrogant and self-serving. The true facet is, for me, that I am Queercentric and I can be nothing else. I am a Queer nationalist, believing that Queer people should have Queer physicians, Queer dentists, Queer lawyers, Queer bankers, Queer hair stylists (that's not at all a stretch, is it?), Queer business partners, or, at least, Queer friendly business partners who respect my Queerness and the Queerness of those with whom I work, Queer psychotherapists, Queer police, Queer firefighters, etc. I people my world with Queer people, or, occasionally, with Queer friendly people, but asexuals need to stay away from me, they need to not come near me, or they just may get bitch slapped in my rage and pain.from this travesty of justice. Get our of my world, asexuals, and leave our struggle to us who have a struggle because we didn't choose our sexual expression. We were given it as a great gift at conception. Asexuals were not born asexual. They were born sexual, as every human being is born sexual, whether heterosexual or homosexual.. Asexuals have just chosen to live in fear of their sexuality and thereby choose to not deal with it at all and declare themselves to be asexual.Just get the Hell our of my struggle, boys and girls. Make your own community, and create your own world of unreal oppression. Stay out of my reality. You have no right to be there.

Thoughts on My Life as a Junkie and How It Gets Better

2009-03-08T14:37:00.000-07:00

As I look back, I see that I did not become a drug addict at Oberlin College. I started using drugs in High School as early as my Junior year. It was my Brother who gave me my first LSD25. Oh.....it was good stuff, alright. Pure. Clean..It came in a glass ampule, the top of which had to be cut off with a small knife blade, and then I drank it. The first time, I listened to The War Requier by Benjamin Britten, and I just watched what seemed like an enormous globe of white light with the most intricate, kaleidoscopic, laser-like patterns moving, undulating all over the surface of the white globe. It was the chandelier in my Brother's Living Room. I was convinced that I understood the secret meanings behind all of Britten's mystical, musical designs. I was convinced that there even were any mystical, musical ideas behind Britten's piece Now, in my adult life, I do think The War Requiem is the finest piece of choral/orchestral music of the 20th century, and, I believe, even in the entire history of Western music, and perhaps my adolescent LSD experience with the piece has informed my adult bias. Back then, though, it was 1962 and I was a frightened, shame-filled., overweight, Jewish, musical genius who was so frightened of my life in The Lie regarding my sexuality , that the drugs helped me to forget the fear and the shame. Certainly, even disregarding the palliative effect the LSD had on my psychic pain, the psychedelic experiences were great events in my small life, events that helped form my spiritual journey in my adult life.. After much psychotherapy, I know now that I was also a child of sexual abuse, and I suppose the drugs helped me to forget that it had only recently happened to me also. Between the sexual, emotional, and physical abuse, by all rights I should be dead. I would wager a large bet on the fact that my music and my few LSD experiences kept me alive. Given the death world in which I lived starting in my childhood, it is no wonder that all the death and beauty of The War Requiem spoke so powerfully to me.

But then I got to Oberlin College, away from my abusive household, and in my Freshman year, my new friend Bob, a former student at The High School of Music and Art in New York City, an institution of very gifted music, art, and dance students many of whom were already using drugs to enhance their consciousness or just to have fun, gave me my firat marijuana. I remember listening to the Brahms F Minor Piano Quintet, which I had never heard before that night, and I was screaming at the Third Movement, quite literally sitting on the floor of his dorm room in Barrows Hall, screaming from the sheer power of this music as the piano and strings pounded out their heavy tom-ta-tom-ta-tom-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tom-ta-tom-ta-tom over and over again until I thought my head would explode with the sound of the new rhythms that invaded my cell structure. As a pianist, I loved the music of Brahms, with its darkness and melancholy and a sound filled with dreams. But, I had never heard chamber music before, and this was a revelation. The was my first marijuana. On marijuana I also discovered the music oa Guystav Mahler, who is still today a composer who speaks volumes to me emotionally and psychologically, but most importantly it speaks to me spiritually and raises my spiritual consciousness far better than the LSD did. Perhaps that is because he too, was sexually abused as a child. In any event, marijuana use became a daily occurrence during my entire Oberlin career, with a joint beautifully rolled just waiting for me to wake up in the morning to smoke before breakfast, which was always quite wonderful because of the marijuana in my body.

Then, perhaps because it was the 1960's drug culture, and perhaps because Oberlin was a place of easy drug access, culture or no, I used every conceivable hallucinogen known--mescaline, psylocybin, mushrooms, Peyote cactus, and hash shish. I had just come out publicly as a Gayman on campus, the first Man ever in the history of Oberlin to do so, I came out publicly in the class rooms even, demanding of the professors why we were not talking about the sexuality of great Lesbian and Gay authors like Stein or Melville or Poe, or great artists like Michelangelo, David Hockney, or Andy Warhol, or composers like Tchaikovsky,Copeland, Bernstain, or Britten and the professors did not know what to say or do, of course, except stand there with dumbfounded looks on their faces, because no one prior to me even thought to think about these things, let alone talk about them in class. The professors thought about how I had the audacity to talk about homosexuality at all both in and out of the classroom.

It was John Thompson, Ph.D. in the then office of Psychological Services, who taught me that I am beautiful and strong in my Queerness, and that his job was to make me love myself and throw off the dark closet of shame and guilt, and I did all of that in just one semester of my Freshman year, in the great hyperbole that my life was and is still. John was my first psychotherapist in a great long line of therapists, and I am particularly grateful to him because he was sent to me by God when, in 1965, I could have gotten any homophobic therapist in that entire office of therapists. John was a devout student of the work of Evelyn Hooker, and he thoroughly believed that Queer people were merely on a continuum of sexual expressions and that we were perfectly in keeping with the Laws of Nature (read "God"). John believed that I had very special gifts to give the world as a Queerman which straight men simply don't have, and he helped me begin my work of Teaching. I graduated from Oberlin after having lived in London for my Junior year and part of my Senior year where I explored my sexuality through my first love relationship with Richard L (he doesn't want his name known).

The 1970's and early 1980's were the cocaine years, and I stopped the other drugs because cocaine was the Cadillac of drugs back then. I suppose it still is among many. For me, on cocaine, the sex was fantastic and the rush was remarkable. And then, in 1983, when I came back to Chicago from a three-year stint in New York City that was a cocaine and sex circus, I stopped using drugs completely for the next 21 years because I was completely filled up right to the "full" line. I was not in a recovery program, I just stopped using. I was abstinent. But, in 2004, because of some unspeakable emotional and psychic pain from memories of my childhood abuse and the nastiness of a good relationship gone bad, I found the dreamland and sexual playground of crystal methamphetamine. Crystal Meth, also called Tina in the Crystal world, was like coming home to a loving family. It was everything I wanted in a drug, but had never been quite able to find before. In all my other drugs, there was always something missing, something lacking. In all my other drugs, no matter how beautiful the psychedelic meanderings, no matter how hot the sex on cocain, there was always an edge of something, an edge of the pain that I could not escape. With crystal, the sex was better than on any other drug, there is no arguing that, but for me, the edge of the pain was gone. There was no pain, neither psychic nor physical, because by now I was feeling quite ill and was in a great deal of body pain from AIDS-related illnesses. Crystal was the perfect. antidote. It made me forget my pain. It numbed out my body, and it numbed out my mind. It enabled me to have unbridled sex for days on end without stopping, beginning on a Friday afternoon in sleazy motel rooms with complete strangers, and ending the following Tuesday morning, when I would stop injecting this poison which I thought was emotional and sexual Heaven. Then, I would start again with another needle in my "golden arm" on a Friday, and spend Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday in the bath house. So, I was clean from Meth from Tuesday morning until Friday afternoon during those weeks. It never escalated to daily use. There was always the break of two to three days between the last on Monday nights and first injections the following Friday afternoon. I kept my drug use secret from my then-partner Joe who, when he found out that not only had I been using crystal, but that I was "slamming" (injecting) it, flew into a ballistic rage and essentially threw me out of the house.

Crystal brought me to my knees, "because without exception, that's what it does". I lost everything dear to me, including a lifetime partnership of nearly thirteen years and my home and family of cats, not to mention my extended family of in-laws whom I loved dearly. I entered a psychiatric facility because I finally became psychotic and suicidal from the Crystal, and that place enrolled me in a 30-day lock-down rehab center for Queer people who are suffering in their minds, either from the drugs, or from deep depression/snxiety disorder. I came out of that only to live in a halfway house for drug addicts, but in rehab I entered the world of recovery, of 12-Step Recovery Work. This time, I was not just abstinent. This time, I had entered the World of Recovery. I lived at Chicago House for the next ten months, working my Program with a sponsor really heavily, then finding my own apartment right on Lake Michigan directly overlooking the vast Lake where I lived for four yearskl, clean and sober from all drugs, with a new cat family. Murfee and Gizmo are my constant furry companions. I still work my Program, and I still have my same Sponsor, David, whom I love with all my heart, who helps keep me clean and sober through his wisdom, respect, and love.

For the past twenty-three years, I have been teaching at DePaul University in the School of Music, working there even during my short-lived but intense career as a crystal meth addict. I was a Lecturer in Harpsichord and Baroque Performance Practice. I loved my teaching. I lived for it. Today, I am clean from drugs. Today, I have a new life. Today, I can feel real joy and love, especially for my friends in recovery, my family which is my Brother and his wife Susan, my best friend Allan, and my sponsee in the program, Bryan. Recovery from Crystal Meth is not an easy road. It is painful and fraught with potholes in which to fall, always facing the specter of relapse, but this time, there are recovery friends who "have my back". They watch out for my welfare and my sobriety. They walk with me on my spiritual road in the 12-Step Program. Recovery has taught me a new way of life, a way filled with honesty and integrity, love and friendship beyond anything that can be fully expressed in words. It is a world of joy and possibility. Recovery is my new Oberlin. Oberlin was always my place of possibility. The World of Recovery, in my 60's, is now that place for me. In it, I know I can finally find humility in the face of my God who takes care of me and keeps me clean from drugs. I know that I cannot remain clean alone, that it requires a community of like-minded people, a fellowship of other recovering addicts, and it requires a powerful faith in Something Greater Than Myself to whom I can look for support and strength when I am feeling small and weak. I know that when I cannot do something, faith in my HJigher Power can help me achieve that task. I call my Higher Power God, some people call it the Fellowhip or the Group. Some people call their sponsor their Higher Power, as much as that puts terrible and undue pressure on the sponsor to be something other than he is.

For the past six years in recovery, I was a Conductor with whom to be reckoned in the world of Baroque Music. Today I am a great Spiritual Director. Today, I can love and allow myself to be loved in return in non-abusive ways. Today, I have all possibility in my life as a Queerman living in a hostile straight world. Today, I have a new-found strength to live life to the full now as a documentary filmmaker, President and CEO of my not-for-profit organization that I founded for the making of the film, laughing and crying, counseling and listening in the fullness of my humanity and divinity. Today I know a few things about God, not a lot, but a few vital things. Today, my life is rich with heathy and healthful relationships, and it is filled from a spiritual well that has no bottom, a well that will provide all the spiritual water I care to drink, from now until my soul leaves my body. When that happens, I will die, but I am not afraid of Sister Death (as she was called by St. Francis of Assisi). After all, I have already died once in 1996 while in a hard coma for ten days, I died and came back from death on my own, without resuscitation. It was not my time. I had too much work to do in the world and that work was my teaching and performing until two years ago when I was fired from my position and was guided by Divine intervention to the world of filmmaking and the not-for-profit sector, learning as I go and loving every minute of it. I was simply not ready to die, nor am I ready to die now. I have full-blown AIDS and have had more infections during this past year 2010-2011 than I have had since the 1990's when I died. But, I have a film to make, an important, transformational piece of documentary art which I hope, in all humility, will change the world for the better. I say this with no ego attachment, because I know it is not my doing that has gotten me to this place of happy delirium. Without the Divine Presence in my life, I never would have been able to embark on this new career at age 65, but I feel more creative now, making my film "From The Ashes Risen", then I ever felt as a musician during 60 of my 65 years of life (I began piano lessons when I was five). I had a respectable international career as a concert harpsichordist and teacher and made two recordings, but it never seemed to fill me up the way the film is filling me up and working with my creativity in previously unknown ways. Today, because of recovery, I have choices and I have trusted friends and a trusted sponsor who help me make my choices, guiding me through an often very toxic quagmire of old messages from my family of origin, messages that produced a self-loathing that lasted well into my late teens and into my early thirties. Recovery from drugs and sex addiction has taught me humility and how to reach out to my trusted brothers for help when I cannot stand up by myself anymore. It has taught me to rely wholly on God for help, whose help usually comes through other people in the program, and isn't that how it should be? God works through both individual and collective history, through people and not through some half-baked superstition and assholic dogma. If we are nothing else, we are definitely an embodied people, embodying the Divine Consciousness on Earth and that is the most humbling thing I have learned in recovery. I feel as if I have been let into some of the great Mysteries of life, spiritual Mysteries in which my spiritual, mystical self can revel. I can honestly say that I am deliriously happy with my life, physical pain and all that goes along with having AIDS. But, I am more content with my life than I have ever been, and all I want to do is share my joy-in-life with other Queer people. Through my film, I want to be able to tell Queer teenagers that it really does get better, and that life is precious and well worth living, even at their age and in their situation of bullying and physical/psychological abuse by their peers. It really does get better, kids. I am a witness to that truth. I know that the pain now is excruciating and you see no way out of it except by hurting yourself. But, you will grow up to be a magnificent Queer human being, giving color to the world, bringing laughter and tears to the Gay community and even, perhaps, to the larger majority of the straight world. You will shine like Venus in the heavens. You will give us your gorgeous gifts given to you by God at conception. You will come to understand that you are so blessed precisely because you are Gay not in spite of it. You will come to understand that when you were conceived in your Mother's womb, you were conceived as a Gay human being, and that is one of real miracles of life. You have been given the greatest gift you can be given and that is the gift of your Queerness in the world. You have so much to teach, because your life experience will make you very wise, very compassionate, and very empathic. People will need you in their lives, not just because you will be an extraordinary friend, but because you will be an extraordinary Queer friend.who possesses a wisdom that can only come from learning to survive in a hostile environment. You will become strong and invincible to your peers' bullying. I know this to be true, because I was exactly where you are now, and I watched my life transform slowly over time and, at least for me, it has been my life of grace.

Being a drug addict has taught me a great many things, one of which is the truth of the platitude: "This, too, shall pass." Give yourself some time and space to know that this is true and that as you grow older, everything regarding harassment because of your sexual orientation will go away, and your life will become a brilliant, shining light, lighting up the world with your Queer beauty. You have support all around you, especially in the most unlikely places.. I learned my lessons by being a drug addict both out and in recovery. You will learn your lessons of how to survive and even thrive if you are open to the possibilities of the world around you, and if you look to your tribal elders for support and love. oujr role is to be here for you in your pain, and to help alleviate it with the stories we have to tell about our Tribe of Queermen. You come from an honorable tradition and magnificent history and you are part of an age-old people who give gthe wiorld its color and excitement, its arts and designslllllllllllllllllllll

Internalized Homophobia and the Archetypal Feminine

2009-02-23T22:41:00.000-08:00

There was always, back then when I was seven or eight, my "good" clothing and my "street" clothing, and my mother said that I looked good in both, but my mother really liked the way I looked in my little boy's camel hair knee length coat and camel hair pants, along with a matching camel hair cap with a little camel hair peak at the front, and a little camel hair button right on the top. I hated that coat and pants, and I hated that cap even more. She always dressed me up in it whenever we went "out", which usually meant into Manhattan, and I knew that it made my secret less secret, and that people would know that I was different. They would know that I had something terrible to hide at all costs, and the camel hair ensemble gave it away, I thought, especially the cap, because I was not wearing my button-fly Levi's for kids. By then, age seven, I knew what my secret was. It had a name.....sissy. I actually knew it, like so many of us, at the age of five, and I also knew I was one of them. From ages one through four, I was aware of being different somehow from other human beings, afraid of other boys, not wanting to play their games mostly because I had no interest in them, but also because balls of any kind coming toward me, especially toward my face, frightened the shit out of me. But, I had no name for it until I was five, and I knew that this thing that made me so different, that thing called "sissy" was the thing which was the terrible secret which shamed me the most about myself in the whole wide world. I knew I was a sissy. I knew I was despicable, at least back then I knew that.

I know where this shame, self-loathing, called internalized homophobia, came from in me, where it comes from still in Queer youth as well as Queer adults. When I knew I was "different" at age three, and at age five knew I was "gay" (called sissy and faggot), how could I have known that pain of internalized homophobia, how could I have known when certainly no one, especially my parents, sat me down one day and said to me, anything like "You know, Roger, there are people in this world called homosexuals, and they are disgusting people and really don't deserve to live. They are men who act like women and women who act like men, and that's not only only wrong but also immoral. It is against God's will and God hates them. They are always miserable, these people, never finding happiness nor love in life, effeminate boys and men and mannish girls and women who do absolutely disgusting things in bed together, always the men with men and the women with women, and I pray to God that you don't ever become (sic!) one of those horrible men." No one ever said anything like that to me.

I remember hearing my aunt and uncle talking about what to do on a Saturday afternoon in the summer, and they decided to go see "the dykes and fairies" play softball on Fire Island at Cherry Grove, and I knew that I wanted to be there with those people, and I also felt very ashamed because I thought my aunt and uncle knew that I was one of those fairies I remember when I would spend summers at their home with my beloved cousin and friend Peter, sleeping in his room, and my uncle would say, "watch out for your cousin Roger during the night, Peter....he's a faggot, you know, and he also needs a brassiere" (I was, after all, a very fat Queerboy-child). No one thought much about lesbians back then. So, anyway, getting back to internalized homophobia, I know that no one ever said any Queer-violent words to me. Who even talks about any kind of sex at all to any child either Queer or straight at age five? So where did I learn this homophobia? Where did it come from?

I cannot prove my theories, but I believe that we learn our internalized homophobia in the womb. We experience through psyche our parents' homophobia, eat our mothers' homophobic amniotic fluid containing our fathers' homophonia as well. We are born not only homosexual, but also homophobic. If this were not true, how could I have known that my difference must be kept quiet at all costs when no one had said anything to me about that? I just knew it somehow. I knew it in my cell structure. I knew it in my unconscious and lived it in consciousness long before I even knew what being Gay was. Queers know only too well what homophobia is---we have it in us.

There have been some studies done by fascist right-wing so-called Christians to figure out if being Queer is a choice or if it is God-made, and they decided, of course, with their biased and bogus so-called scientific methods, that it is a choice and therefore changeable. Interesting, isn't it, that there have been no studies to figure out if straight people made a choice to be straight or if they were created that way by the Creator? It seems to them that we are all born straight and that somehow at a very young age we make a conscious decision not to be, at least in their minds, and the absurdity of this form of rationalization of hatred makes my mind boggle and split into pieces with utter disbelief that people could be so self-deluded. And, of course, those "Christian" studies decided in favor of "nurture" not "nature". According to them, God could not possibly make us purposefully. Most every Queer knows, however, that it is not a choice to be made, that it is not even in consciousness until maybe three years old, and how can a three year old make such a choice? But those fascists? They think they were just born that way, the "way God wants it." It is very dangerous thinking. Mostly fundamentalist thinking, fundamentalists from any religion think we made a choice to be Queer, of course. How do they know? Did they make a choice? Who would choose to be Queer in such an oppressive society and culture, filled with venom, hatred, and violence toward us? Thanks be, that there are countless hundreds of thousands of us who would make that choice if there is any Queer Consciousness at all, if there is any kind of real understanding of what if means to be Queer. If I, like so many of my Brothers and Sisters, were told to swallow a pill that would make me straight or that if I didn't I woujld be shot, I think I would rather be shot.

To be Queer is such a vibrant gift, to be drawn to the "softer" things like the arts, textures and textiles, writing, colors and patterns, poetry, design, the theater, the auditoriums and museums and galleries, to nature in its stunning splendor, to composed sonic grandeur even at its quietist, to asceticism, to the "hard" sciences,and "soft" sciences in special Queer ways, to the so-called "menial" jobs of labor and manufacturing, drawn to the professions of law and medicine, drawn to the social strands of non-violence and peace-making, to compassion and loving kindness and understanding without any strings attached, to volunteerism and altruism, and these are only a few examples of that which is Queerness or, at least, all those things that can be Queerness, that of which we are capable, although not even often nor necessarily do we live that out. In fact, in our internalized homophobia, in our Queer communities, we often treat each other in terrible and pain-filled ways, ways that separate us one from the other breaking down community rather than building up, which is politically just what the straight bigoted world would have us do, that is, divide us and conquer. But, building is our work: to fly with great speed to those things which make community among strangers, things of which we are naturally capable as Queers, things for which the larger society must work very hard, things which are foundational to our identity as Queers and are, therefore, easier with which to connect, without so much external noise telling us how to be on top, how to succeed and even telling us what success is, to be selfishly consumerist, materialistic, and power-hungry at other peoples' expense, to be greedy and unjust.

As Queers, we can see the world differently than the larter majority. We can look over and beyond the seeming reality to what is really real, to non-djualistic structures. Our Transgender Brothers and Sisters in their wisdom have shown us and the world that even the basic former dualistic assumption of only two genders does not bare close scrutiny anymore, that there is so much more possibility than that. Queers have shown that truth to the world. We Queers can look like the yin/yang symbol, fully balanced with its even and seductive sweep of line between the dark and the light, with a solid, dark circle in the middle of the light mass, and a solid light circle in the middle of the dark mass, and all of it making a serene circle as a whole, indivisible and filled with an early Truth, a Truth to which we have better access than the larger majority, a Truth of balance, a Truth of balanced relationship that if we want to survive as a Queer culture, with our own language, rituals, symbols, and mythology, we must hold fast to and not let go of these things in the tidal wave of public opinion and public hatred.

If we want to survive, if the entire world wants to survive, we must remember the Eternal Feminine, the Female Archetype embodied in Goddess, the nurturer, the Earth, the Mother, the compassionate One. She who brings life, the One who makes us feel safe, the One upon whose shoulder we can cry and know that our tears and our pain will be lovinglyreceived with no recrimination. She is the One, along with the Father, who loves us unconditionally. She is the Hebrew Scriptural El Shaddai, the large, big-breasted eternal woman who holds the world to her bosom, protecting it and us in Her Wisdom. She is the Shekhina, the Sabbath Queen, in the Jewish tradition. She is Inanna, the Goddess who lives in the light on the surface bringing life. She is Kali, the giver of life in the Northern Hindu tradition of Tantra.

But, we must also remember the shadow side, the dark side, of the Eternal Feminine, of Goddess, the seeker of revenge, the jealous One, Erishkigel the dark sister of Inanna, that dark sister who lives under the surface of the Earth in the darkness, the dark sister who would tear off our skin and cause us pain but in the process re-skin us to make us able to return to the surface, to the light. She is Kali, not just the giver of life, but also the bringer of death and destruction with a necklace of skulls around her neck and a sword in her hand, the One with words of low self-esteem and the feeling of being nothing, no-thing, and the consequent fright, abandonment, and emptiness we feel inside our hidden wounded little children whom we carry into our adult lives. How many of us remember the harsh, embarrassing, shameful worlds of our mothers when we were children, words from her own shadow? Words of death, words of destruction. I suspect that most of our childhoods contained even some pain from our parents and siblings and even our extended families. For those of you fortunate enough to have never experienced such a childhood, you are blessed indeed. Among other things, it is the pain of the little boy or little girl who was homosexual and homophobic, and all the terror that brings. I believe it is important to allow ourselves to feel that pain and walk through it, not around it, and not to just put our foot in it to test the temperature of that particular water, but to walk right into the fear of the pain, believing that "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18) and thus regain the yin/hang balance of it all, all of Creation of which we are a most important part--light within darkness and darkness within light. The perfect circle of the Universe.

I knew this truth about who I really am at age 18 in 1965, one semester after I set foot on the Oberlin College campus in my first year. It was a Truth about myself as a Queerman, a Truth about the yin/yangness of it all, the wholeness and beauty of it all. I had to come to love myself on this Earth particularly as a Queerman with a Queer identity, or die by my own hand. I had to come out of my imprisonment in a very deep dark and terrifying closet, and find a Truth about my innate goodness and lovableness, a Truth that all of us who have ever made the liberating move out of our secrets knows, and that Truth is that as Queers we are lovingly crafted by the Great Lover with a purpose on the Earth as teachers, as teachers of life and all of its possibilities. In 1965 I had to pierce my ears. I had to make a visible sign during that time of general rebellion that I was not like all other men. There were no men on campus who had pierced ears. Were there very many anywhere back then? I had to make a strong statement. I was absolutely public in my sexuality, the first man at Oberlin in it entire history to be so. When I was in a course in American Literature and we were talking about Gertrude Stein and her writing, I would raise my hand and push the professor to explain why we were not talking about stein's sexuality as a Lesbian woman and her very long term relationship with Alice b. Toklas. Why were we not talking about how their relationship effected their salons where so many great writers and artists and dancers would gather to discuss beauty. In Art History when we were having conversations about the David Hockney paintings of beautiful young men in the skimpiest of swim trunks,diving into the crystaline, chlorinated water of the pool while other equally near-naked youngmen languidly lay around the pool sipping cocktails, I would ask assertively why we were not discussing Hockney's homosexuality and how it manifested in his magnificent paintings. We are here to teach. That is our purpose in Queerlife. We are here to teach peace0making, compassion, generosity, understanding, loving-kindness, altruism, and mutual relationship wherein no on has more power than the other. We are here to declare with all celebfation who we really are. Indeed, politically, economically, militarily, and socially we are here to teach a kind of life that is not based on whose cock is bigger, about who can wield dit as the greater weapon, about who can piss farther (the Whie House had been have that contest with the world for the past eight years). This can occur easily among straight men, Gaymen, straight women, or Lesbians, bisexual, or Transgender people, whomever has bought into the great lie of what it means to be on top and have more at the expense of people who have less, and are forced to stay stuck on the bottom of the quagmire of a classist, racist, ageist, homophobic, heterosexist, and sexist world.

The good news is that Queers are here to teach, to fan the flames of justice, but first we must learn to love ourselves as unashamed Queer peoples, a Tribe of many tribes with a Queer history made up of many Queer histories, a Queer spirituality consisting of many Queer spiritualities, and one unique Queer legacy before we can even begin to love our neighbors and make then not our enemy. All the great spiritual paths have taught this: the idea of no-enemy--the wise child-prophet Micah said it in the Hebrew Scripture. Jesus taught this as primary in the "Gospels", Mohammed taught it in the Koran, the Buddha taught it in the Sutras. We find it in the various Gitas of Hinduism, in the Tao Te Ching of Lao-tzo, and the Inner Chapters of Chuang Tsu. They can't all be make the same mistake. Thousands of years of wisdom can't be all wrong. We are deceiving ourselves if we think they are.

Levi's 501's By Any Other Name....

2009-02-23T20:30:00.000-08:00

In my childhood, there were no jeans back then where there were no so-called jeans at all. Oh, there was certainly blue denim clothing, but there were no jeans, not even blue jeans. What there were, were Levi's, boot fit for the cowboys who normally wore them on their ranches in the West and also for rodeos, or straight legged for the few civilians who wore them such as my family. There were only two fits but many sizes, any size that was needed, from enormously large (obese) to very small. Levi's for grown daddies and grown mommies, and Levi's for little toddlers like me, although the mommies fit was not the same as the daddies fit. Mommy's Levi's were rounder on the ass and had a little more fabric around the tops of the sides to work with mommy's wider hips. The ass on daddy's Levi's was more square and allowed for the comfort of the beautiful man's side-sunken, high-riding butt, for daddy's chiseled glutes, and ever since I was taken to my first department store to buy some Levi's (my parents has always bought them for me through the Levi Strauss catalogue, but even as a three-year-old, I wore them) I knew that I could not stop staring at the men's butts in square cut lines as they came out from the dressing rooms onto the floor to look ever so vainly at themselves and ever so surreptitiously but clearly at the other men in the mirrors, and I knew what I wanted. What I wanted was that I wanted to feel those butts through the majick of the Levi's. I look back now on my Queer childhood, and I realize that the desire gave me some sense of power. I wanted to put my face against the men's asses in the Levi's and just nestle there and rest and feel something good. Levi's made me feel somewhat less self-conscious, more boy-like back then when I knew that only boys wore them, never girls. I felt, even at three or four, more attractive, more grown up in my Levi's.

I never played with boys back then, always girls. Boys games were too rough, and there was something about those boys that terrified me. I did not like them. There was only one boy whose name was Alfred, Alfred of the fire-red hair, who I am sure is now a Queerman, with whom I ever spent any time, otherwise it was just me and the girls. Later in my life, I understood that it was the boys' straightness and everything that means to me as a Queerman back then when I was just a boy that kept me away from them. Always the last to be picked for a team in gym class (weren't we all???), always getting laughed at with terrible derision because I would drop the baseball or that strangely shaped thing called a football which is no ball at all really, out of fear or simply not be able to catch it at all---they laughed at me, those boys, and I was humiliated. I remember them playing dodge ball with me against the far gym wall and all the other boys trying to slam me with the volleyballs from the opposite wall and middle of the gym, and I was the only boy on that side of the gym getting pummeled by twenty-five other boys whom I hated. I tried not to, but I cried anyway.

I remember Dennis, baseball-bat-dick Dennis is what we all called him, the son of a cop, and in the locker room in High School he asked me if I wanted to touch his cock. It was the biggest, most beautiful penis I had ever seen in my life. God!!! What an invite!!! I was in my teens and very hormonal, so I did, and he immediately started screaming all through the locker room, "Goodman is a faggot, Goodman is a faggot". From then on I always had a doctor's excuse to not have to take a shower after gym class, because the fat, clumsy, effeminate faggot was too embarrassed to be seen without the armor of his clothes. Even at that age, I was easily triggered sexually, and I was always embarrassed by my fat body. But, I was good in music class, choir, and orchestra where I played the tympani, which made me feel like A Very Important Person, and Mr. Yegello the orchestra conductor, used to give me tympani solos to begin marches or large classical pieces we played. The audience attention was just on me and those large kettles with animal skin stretched around the whole top, and I remember how I used to tune them with a tap of my finger, my ear down to the drum heads, and a push of a pedal to raise or lower the pitch. I felt so knowledgeable and real and important. I felt like no one could touch me then. No one could ridicule me. No one could tease me. No one could call me faggot. I was too good, too respectable, too accomplished, and I was where other students wanted to be---in the spotlight.

My mother and all my relatives told me from a very young age that I looked like a girl especially my eyelashes and my mouth and certainly should have been born a girl because "you are so beautiful, and such beauty is wasted on a boy"---their words.

So, to get back to denim, I began my sweet secret love affair with button fly Levi's so I could feel more masculine. Remember we did not call them that, just Levi's when I was five and was told such things, and they were never called "button fly" because that was the only kind there were. But even then, I was told, I wore them well, whatever that meant for a child. Levi's always gave ma a hard-on, and I would jerk off smelling the aroma of denim in my nose, and envisioning all those beautiful men trying them on, and what they must have looked like in their underwear in the dressing rooms.

Because there were only button-fly Levi's, Levi 501's were not even a twinkle in Levi Strauss's eye. But then, blue denim caught on in the marketing world, and there were Lee Ryder's afterward called just Lee's, then called "Lee blue jeans" and I would not wear them because they did not fit as well, and did not make me feel more like a boy (they would never give me a boner) as I always did feel in my Levi's. They made me feel more masculine, and that was in the 1950's, and along came the 60's with the beginnings of designer "blue jeans" with bell bottoms and they were pre-faded, and then came the nascent designer "jeans" which were truly ugly with all their piping designs on the back pockets in orange thread, and no brass grommets, designers like Sasson, and Ralph Loren, and then DKNY and The Gap making their own which were not quite so ugly, but those horrible designer labels and logos to me denied any sense of what Levi's were, so I just kept wearing my button-fly's with no underwear all through the 60's, 70's, 80', 90's and then stopped when I got sick in 1996, because they didn't fit me well anymore. I had lost too much weight. It is now 2009, and I have been wearing them since 2003. I still do not wear underwear.

A Gayboy's Childhood from the Ninth Circle of Hell

2009-02-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

In my childhood, I learned well the pain of abandonment, homophobia, incest, two consummate narcissists for parents, a brother who was as fucked up as I was when we were kids, and I learned my beloved music. Daily practicing at the piano three hours per day, and two two-hour piano lessons from 7:30-9:30 twice a week, and four times daily jerking off, seeking in these activities some refuge from the pain of not being able to express pain nor anger and rage nor sadness and certainly no crying--that was my life. I expressed it all at the piano. My parents seemed so proud of me, because I played so expressively. Little did they realize that it was their daily torture, which empowered me to do that. I remember that one night, after I had played a competition when I was eleven and won, my piano teacher at a lesson read to me the comments of one of the adjudicators. He was not supposed to do that, but I was so frightened by my tears when I played sad pieces of music, especially that of Brahms, and frightened by my raw rage when I played Beethoven, that he probably thought I would feel better if my feelings were validated. The adjudicator wrote something close to this: "No child this age should be able to express such deep sorrow and anger. His playing is not of his age, but that of a much older man who has experienced much of life and its pain. His performance was magnificent, and it is sad to hear such deep pathos in one so young." My piano teacher must have known that there was something terribly wrong in my house, because he kept me for four hours per week, and he loved me as if I were his own son. He kept me safe and sane, at least for my time with him. Thank you, Mr. E, for having saved my emotional and physical life, for loving me and teaching me to be the musician I was and continued to become. I will be forever grateful.

My parents, Florrie and Gerry, constantly accused me of "turning tears on and off like a water faucet" and, therefore, they were not real, thus my feelings were not real. Florrie accused me of being fat and ugly (and she kept feeding me and feeding me and feeding me some more like the wicked witch in Hansel and Gretel until I was, indeed, fat and, I thought, ugly, and she would say "get out of my sight, you fat, ugly pig. You disgust me"), of not ever amounting to anything, ending up living on the streets "like a bum", being useless (except for my piano playing which I came to understand many years ago to have been a narcissistic projection of both my parents. It had nothing to do with me). In Green Rooms after concerts when I was a teenager, my mother would stand directly in front of me with her arm extended and greet audience members who wanted to meet me and have some time with the young man who gave them so much pleasure for two hours, and she would say even before I got to shake hands with them, and have a word with someone, "How do you do. I'm Florence Goodman. I'm his Mother". She never said, "How do you do. This is my son Roger". She never introduced me. She took up all the time there was with the audience talking about the wonderful teacher whom she "found" for me, how many hours she made me practice so that I could be the musician I was, how she was "the proud mother". It was all about her and her narcissism, never about me. They both would praise me to other people, but never to me. Through decades of psychotherapy and countless psychotherapists, I understood their narcissism and that I was just a mirror for them of themselves. Two consummate narcissists getting married!!! Can you imagine what that was like for my brother and myself?

Gerry was my boy scout troop scoutmaster, and he treated me like shit, especially when we went on camping trips. I am not saying that lightly, he really treated me like he would his own shit, just useless waste to be disposed of, to be flushed away, to be scraped off the soles of his shoe. He was a tyrant, constantly smoking his fucking pipes with his breath foul from his tobacco, which was his own "private" blend, of course, and I was utterly miserable. When the other boys cruelly teased me, the fat and ugly weak Gayboy, he never stopped it. He never came to my aid. There was no justice in him, no love. I had to chop the largest logs for the fire, and I did not wield axes too well. They frightened me, and they were terribly hard on my hands, my soft and beautiful piano hands. I had to pitch not only my tent but also the tents of the other boys, and it was exhausting. I had to go into the woods by myself to cut kindling for the fire. I was terrified of the darkness of the woods, especially at night, I had to haul ten gallon water buckets from the fountain to the campsite, which was very painful to my hands and shoulders. None of the other boys had to do any of this. He criticized me harshly in front of them, and when I finally got home after a particularly painful camping trip and told my mother about his treatment of me he said, "But Rog (he always called me Rog, which I hated and still hate....my name is Roger!!), I have to bend over backwards to not show you any privilege or favoritism". Bend over backwards, for Christ's sake??? Bend over backwards my ass!!! He could have treated me just like he treated the other boys, but he had to be hard and mean to me. He was a pig.

And then, Gerry introduced me to his enormous and, I must say, magnificent cock. A memory---my mother went away for a long weekend to the "milk farm" (I still do not have any idea what that was nor what she did there but it had something to do with "women's things"), and my brother was spending Saturday night at his friend Dominic's house. Gerry and I were alone in the house, and he asked me if I wanted to go to a movie with him, and I loved, and still love, movies, so I said yes. We saw a terrifying film called "The Cult of the Cobra", which my dear friend Patrick was knows film tells me was made around 1954-55, starring Maria Montez (do not ask me how I remember that name) in which this frightening woman who wore very tight silk sarongs and had a wasp waist and big breasts was the leader of a religious cult where she would turn herself into an enormous King Cobra, and they would worship the Cobra with drums and dark singing and torches, and afterwards, the Cobra would slither through open windows especially at night and slay people in their beds by slithering under the top sheets. I could see the Cobra's motion undulating, and I cannot ever remember being so frightened as a child as I was that night. When we got home, Gerry and I went in our separate bedrooms. I lay there trembling, completely terrified that the Cobra Woman was going to come through my window to kill me. I went shaking from fear into Florrie's and Gerry's bedroom and asked if I could sleep in his bed, because I was so afraid. Of course, Gerry let his Gayboy-child sleep next to him. Even though I had not told him I was Gay he sure seemed to know it. He turned to me with an enormous erection, and I was frightened even more, but I was also fascinated by that big thing that was so incredibly beautiful. That perfect pole and perfect big head with its mysterious slit where piss came out. It was magnificent to me even in all my fear of it. He told me to lick it and suck it and that that was what "real men" did for each other, and I did, and he ejaculated in my mouth. We did it again the next morning with clear sunlight pouring through the windows, and I could really see this thing, this beautiful thing that had so much power for me because it belonged to Gerry, my father, and I finally felt loved. I inherited his cock which is really the only thing I can honestly say I actually inherited from him, except sometimes I catch his voice and intonation coming out of my mouth and I hate it. I am convinced that Gerry planned the whole incest thing in advance. After all, who takes a nine or ten year old child to such a terrifying film, except someone who has a very clear and hidden agenda. Gerry knew I would be scared to death from the film, and would want to sleep in his bed. I am sure he planned the whole think from the beginning. Floirrie and Gerry are both dead now.

I do not miss my father at all (incest perpetrator, strutting peacock of a man who could, in his eyes, do no wrong, always talking very loudly and abrasively using enormous words which no one understood and adding a spattering of French--"real men always pepper their conversations with a little French, Rog"--thoroughly lacking in love, and rabidly homophobic. I so miss my mother terribly, though, because in the last fifteen years of her life, our relationship was wonderful. It happened after I told her I was HIV+. That changed everything between us. The last five years were the happiest she had ever had, and our relationship was deeply loving. With all her sarcasm, control issues, and narcissism almost completely dissipated, now vulnerable and old, she became a fine human being. Her lifelong depression, panic, and constant snxiety disorder just went away because of medication and because she was in a happy living situation finally, an assisted living facility in Santa fe, where she made friends and went out to concerts, movies, and plays. Finally, she was happy, and was able to love her sons fully. She even had some friendship with Gerry who divorced her when they were both 65, and she spent years afterward being bitter; bitter, that is, until we moved her from Miami to Santa Fe where my brother's family lived. She lived to see her grandchildren. She lived to see her great grandchildren. In her late life, we made a good pair my mother and I, and even my brother and I who violently hated each other as adolescents (again we have my parents' narcissism to blame for that) love each other more than I ever thought possible. I don't know what I would do without him. My brother Len and his partner Susan, his children and their children, and my dear friend Allan are my family now, and I am content. Florrie is a bittersweet memory, and Gerry is nothing more than an unimportant whisper in the wind.

Life In The Midst of Death: Communities of Compassion

2009-02-22T12:59:00.000-08:00

Something happened back then. Countless thousands died horrible deaths. Countless thousands lost their families of origin to fear and their chosen families of Gaymen to AIDS. Countless thousands came out both as having AIDS and being Queer, shocking relatives and loved ones through simultaneous disclosure. Countless thousands were slaughtered in the genocide against Gaymen by the institutionalized homophobia of the Reagan-Bush administration in the White House back then. Countless thousands died in our Holocaust. I was one of those countless thousands who died. I was one of the relative few who came back from death and who live to tell of those Death Years, those Years Of The Great Plague. I remember the endless memorial services I facilitated and the funerals I conducted. I remember my beloved chosen family of seven Gaymen all of whom died and left me behind to tell the story so that we would not forget the Terror. I am a Tribal Elder, telling our oral history which must be told and passed down to younger generations of Queers.

I began my practice in Spiritual Direction with the forty or so Geymen who came to me for love and support during their spiritual journeys and consequent spiritual crises through illness and death. I remember holding many of those beautiful youngmen in my arms as they took their last usually excruciatingly painful, final breaths. But also usually, those breaths were taken in peace and spiritual comfort because of my work. I remember that those men were initially terrified in their confrontation with the Death Crone, believing that they were, indeed, going to Hell and Eternal Damnation as they were told in their childhoods by their priests, rabbis, and pastors. They had, for the most part, put away those childish things, but when facing their mortality, those childish things became adult horrors and mortal terror. The demons of internalized homophobia raise their ugly heads when given the least opportunity.

Something else happened back then. Something happened that was grace-filled. A community of love and support, of compassion and care grew up in the midst of that most horrible community of death. In the midst of death, there was a community of life. We cared for the stranger, for the other, thus making the other one of us. We cleaned up dirty diarrhea- and blood-soaked diapers and we cleaned up vomit. We changed sheets soiled with urine and feces. We cooked meals. We carried dying Men to hospital ER's when cab drivers refused to pick up the Queermen with the deadly Plague, with purple lesions all over their bodies, and eyes sunken and yellowed with jaundice. We formed organizations that brought meals to the sick. We founded hospices so that those who were dying could die with dignity when they were thrown out of their apartments by landlords who were terrified that their ill tenants would infect the rest of the tenants in the building with "the plague". Many who could not get into the hospices often lay dying on park benches, while those of us who were well or, at least, well enough if we, too, were ill, cradled their heads and held them closely while they shivered in the cold, not only of the winter winds and frost of the Chicago streets, but the cold of opportunistic infections ravaging their bodies, wasting them away to shadows of their former selves. We took care of our own, because no one else would take care of us. "Our own" also consisted of the medical practices of Gay physicians who were the only physicians who would take care of People With AIDS, because they were caring for their Brothers. "Our own" were also the nurses in AIDS units in hospitals in the major cities of Amerika, such as Unit 371 at Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital in Chicago. It was a time of grace. It was a time of courage. It was a time of love and community in the midst of death and destruction.

Then, the miracle of miracles happened and protease inhibitors appeared along with classes of medications that put the opportunistic infections at bay, and Gaymen began to live instead of die. But, as the body lived, the community of compassion-in-death quickly disappeared. Gaymen separated one from the other, fearing each other as carriers of disease. The community was broken, the fellowship shattered into fragments of fear and separation.

The dissolution of community is still seen today in terrible and oppressive ways in the incessant online cruising where letters like undergraduate and graduate degrees began to appear, and the fear of Queermen for each other took the form of "d/d free, u b 2" or "clean and healthy, u.b.2", the "d/d free" meaning "drug and disease free" which clearly means that if a man is infected with HIV, he is anathema online. As he desperately tries to make connection with his Brothers for some kind of intimate touch, he is shunned as the leper was shunned during Biblical times and in the Middle Ages, as they were forced to ring bells, walking the streets among the well, having to say "unclean, unclean", announcing a perceived danger that had no basis in reality, much like the perceived danger of HIV/AIDS has no basis in reality. HIV is very difficult to contract, only by blood to blood or semen to blood. There is no HIV in saliva, which makes even the deepest, sloppiest kissing perfectly safe and "clean". There is no HIV in the ancient art of Fisting, unless there is a cut on both the hand of the Top an the rectal wall of the Bottom, and such a scenario would be rare indeed.

So, today, there are the "unclean", and the ones who do not fir into the letter after the upiquitous screen names. These letter do not refer to any other sexually transmitted disease or any other illness. It is clear to me and to all who write such painfully oppressive divisive letters of "better then you", "more moral than you" after those screen names that they are referring to HIV/AIDS, not Syphilis nor Gonorrhea nor Chlamydia nor Herpes. They are referring to what is still considered to be The Plague.

The odd thing about this division is that while there is a radical split between those who are HIV+ and those who are HIV-, those who are negative make it clear that they are somehow better than those who are positive. There are those who are negative who not only think the virus, in this world of HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy), is nothing to fear anymore, there are also those who purposefully seek it out in order to become part of the new "community" of Brothers who are positive.

So it is that a community of Brothers has formed again, perhaps again in a state of grace. This is the community of the unclean, the community of those infected who will only have sex with others who are infected, and, as one who is himself infected, I have to say here that I do feel a powerful kinship with my HIV-infected Brothers. As politically incorrect as it is for me to say, I even engage in what is called "unsafe" sex, condom-less sex, with those of my Brothers who are already infected. According to Dr. Daniel S. Berger, one of the pioneers in HIV/AIDS treatment protocols, in his article "Sexual Encounters with Undetectable HIV-Positive Men: a controversy about HIV transmission", in the November/December,2008 issue of "Positively Aware", contrary to common viral mythology, there is little more I can do to someone who is already infected, as least as far as super infection may or may not occur.

There is a powerful force between Gaymen. It is the force that pulls us into the world of condom-less sex because it is, while perhaps killing the body, a force that enlivens the Spirit. Gaymen have a powerful, innate need to ingest great quantities of semen, either orally or anally, and thus consummate the "marriage", but in the deepest sense it is not the marriage of the Earth that we seek, although that is the common thought, but "marriage" with the Divine. Queermen have a deep-seated need to "impregnate" and be "impregnated" by other Gaymen by absorbing semen into the rectal capillaries. There is a deep and generative quality to condom-less sex. "Generative" comes from the Latin "gene rare", meaning "to beget, "to procreate", and goes even further back etymologically to "genus" meaning "stock" or "race". To generate offspring we say that we breed, and it is not uncommon to read in online profiles and ads, "breed me" or "breed my ass", or "seed me", or "seed my garden". Seeding the garden is an evocative, provocative, and most eloquent metaphor. To bring new life forth from the earth of the rectum and colon is indeed "marvelous in our eyes". We need to procreate ourselves as a great and ancient Tribe of Gaymen. We need to increase the "stock" or the "race". We do this not by procreating new Gay Body, but, rather, new Gay Spirit through condom-less sex. During the Divine Marriage, latex is a foreign body, unwanted in the flesh to flesh consummation of the relationship between two Gaymen. This is a holy act indeed, a Mystery of which we know very little, but of which we feel a great deal. This is a Eucharist in which the Holy Bread is the Kiss, and the Holy Wine that we ingest is the semen.

This "holy act" must be distinguished from "barebacking". This seems contradictory, but it is not. Barebacking is a profanation of the holy act. Barebacking is sex for the sake of sex and is an abomination. Condom-less sex has do to with flesh against flesh, impregnation, Man with God, ingestion of semen for the sake of procreation of Queer Spirit. Barebacking is merely a sexual act, a game that is risky behavior at best.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are indeed a race of people, we Gaymen, and I believe that as such we contain a deep and powerful collective unconscious, a collective unconscious like that written about my Carl Jung, the eminent Austrian psychoanalyst. Our collective unconscious comes from ages of genocide against us, terrible slaughter in the forms of burning at the stake, impalement and disembowelment with red-hot pokers, hanging, being beaten to death, torture with the rack and foot-crushing boot, being drawn and quartered, and imprisonment with starvation and dehydration being the outcome, and finally the gas chambers of Hitler's concentration camps. The utterly horrifying use of the red-hot poker as an instrument of torture and death is particularly compelling, because it is a complete killing off of the place of procreation, of generative sex with other men. Such torture was the equivalent of a male hysterectomy without anaesthesia. Murder by impalement is a horrible forn of torture and death indeed, and a powerful statement of fear and hatred on the part of the heterosexist men who committed these ubiquitous crimes against our Tribe. Much like the Jews, or the Gypsies of Northern Europe and the People of the Flamenco in Southern Spain, the collective unconscious is formed through pain and death, slaughter and outright genocide. We even have our own form of Cante Hondo, the "deep song" of the Flamenco, wherein the singer goes into trance, into cell memory and sings from a consciousness that is not of this world.

The latest genocide, one that we experienced only a generation ago and one which wiped out practically that entire generation, was the genocide of the 1980's and 1990's in Amerika. The power of that in our collective unconscious forces us into the need to "generate", to "breed", to "procreate" anew the Queer Spirit which has kept us alive as a Tribe throughout the ages, but which the then current White House administration and radical Christian Right and White Supremacists wanted desperately to extinguish. This is true even today with the previous Bush administration and its foundation in the homophobic movement among Evangelical Christians. So it is that the sex that can perhaps kill the Queer Body enlivens the Queer Spirit and vice versa. Although I have no statistics to support this hypothesis, I would say that Gaymen engage in condom-less sex and swallow semen in far greater numbers than do heterosexuals among themselves. Gaymen seem to have a deep-seated need to ingest the life-force of other Gaymen in order to survive, and this need is so powerful that we are willing to defy Death in order to do this.

So, there are two communities. There is the community of the positive and the community of the negative, but both communities engage secretly in the same behavior, and the letters "d/d/free, u b 2: and "clean, u b 2" become meaningless. Somehow, though, they remain a way of dividing us and making us live in a fear that our behavior would deny. The community of compassion that existed during the Death Years has shifted to another kind of compassion, one of desperately trying not to save the body, but an equally desperate attempt to save the Spirit. In the midst of that community of compassion there is also the oppression that exists between the 'clean" and the "unclean".

This is paradox at its most powerful. This is paradox at its most eloquent. There is a certain kind of lyricism to this paradox, but it is a lyricism that exists in an environment of violence, both the violence of oppression and the real violence of procreation, for, indeed, procreation, in its power and strength, the power of Creation itself, is a violent act filled with upheaval, yet an act of love by Love itself. Again we are looking at the paradox of the fear of Faggots fearing other Faggots. But, in that fear, there is a seeking, a passionate yearning from the depths of the Spirit to make that Spirit bigger. In that fear there is a yearning for Love and connection, a Love that is larger than love, a Love that is Divine. Paradoxically, we seek that Divine Union through the very thing that could kill the body, "unsafe" or condom-less sex. In the midst of death there is, indeed, life, no matter how oppressive the world of online sex may be.

The question is then, does the procreation of Queer Spirit outweigh the possible death of Queer Body? I believe it does. I believe that, for me, generative sex, that is, "unsafe" sex among "unclean" Queerrmen is what I am called to do in order to carry on the race, the "stock", the Tribe of Warrior/Lovers and archetypal Heroes from the line of Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaesteon, The Sacred Band of Thebes, Jonathan and David, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and even the gods Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu. This is our heritage and our responsibility. If we do not engage in this holy act of possible bodily death and illness, we court Spiritual death and illness, and I must ask which is the worse. For me, the answer is clear. Spiritual Life and Spiritual Health at all costs is what is needed. Spiritual Life over the possibility of bodily death is the greater good and will produce greater good in the world by increasing non-violent Queer Spirit, the Spirit that is the bringer of peace in the world, for is not that what Gaymen are...the bringers of peace? This is our task as a race, as a stock, and I believe that condom-less sex among the "unclean" is generative and procreative. As Gaymen we cannot procreate other human beings, but we can procreate Queer Spirit in the world, and thus help bring about the Greater Good for a more peaceful world. The Holy Eucharist of condom-less sex, the Living Sacrifice of our bodies, the Bread (Kiss) and the Wine (Semen) is what is needed for the continuation of Gaymen as a race.

Thoughts On Pain and Our Collective Unconscious

2009-02-21T20:20:00.000-08:00

We cannot deny that as Queers, we are a people of pain, and that through pain that our collective unconscious as a people is informed and shaped.

The excruciating pain of the perhaps Lesbian "witches" at the stakes in Europe, found guilty by the heterosexist men who were threatened both politically, theologically, and spiritually, these women feeling the fires on their legs, started by Gaymen, who were equally threatening to the heterosexist political and religious structures, tied to the faggots of wood which were used to start the fires, is our pain.

Perhaps they were witches. In fact, they probably were, living within the cycles of the moon and the seasons of the Earth, knowing that the deity is both male and female and, by transcending both, is neither, living outside traditional theology and ecclesiology. Perhaps they were in sexual and emotional relationships with their sisters. Perhaps they did not need men nearly as much as the men would have liked. Surely they knew the Mystery of which the men were not and could not be privy. Their pain is our pain.

The pain of the women at the Salem witch trials is our pain.

The pain of the women burned in the witch hunts of Europe is our pain.

The pain of the burning of our sister and martyr Joan of Arc is our pain.

The pain of the humiliation and death of Gaymen in colonial Amerika in the 17th century simply for being gay is our pain.

The pain of the horrifying torture and death of Queermen during the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions is our pain.

The disemboweling and rape of Gaymen with red hot irons in early Britain is our pain.

The pain of the Queermen who were incarcerated and experimented upon, raped, and killed in the ovens of Nazi concentration camps because of how they loved is our pain. That pain of having to wear an upside down pink triangle is our pain.

That same pink triangle that made the Great Plague of AIDS of the 1980's and 1990's visible through our prophet Larry Kramer and the organization called Act Up which he founded in a world which would rather not have it so, particularly the Reagan-Bush administration in the White House who were really the murderers , not the disease, that same Nazi pink triangle that symbolizes the pain of the concentration camps that is our pain today became a symbol of at once rage, life, and hope.

Our slogan "silence equals death" was true. It was so during the Jewish Holocaust and it was so during our Holocaust. For too long we were silent as we died horrible deaths, and it was our public screaming and media actions that finally began the change, but it was also their silence, the Reagan-Bush silence, which did, in fact, equal our death. The institutional homophobia of the administration which wanted as many of our Tribe to die off as possible is what kept us from breathing. For six of their eight years in the White House, they never once uttered the word "AIDS", and they successfully kept it out of the media. They gave no money for funding research to try to find medications that would control the disease. They just wanted us dead and out of their world, as many of us dead as could possibly die. It was our genocide, our Holocaust, and the pain of the approximately 500,000 beautiful Gaymen in their prime of life who died of complications due to AIDS in the 1980's and 90's and who continue to die today in a more quiet way, is our pain.

The pain of a Queer person being bashed on a street corner in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles or Denver or Dallas or any city in Amerika, or tied to a fence post left to die in Laramie, WY is our pain today.

The pain of Lesbians or Gaymen who get beaten and bashed in so many different kinds of ways, especially through domestic violence, is all our pain.

The pain of an African American Gayman being dragged by a car and finally run over three times in the South is our pain.

The grief over so many horrible anti-Queer death throughout history is our grief.

The terror, isolation, and pain of a Queer person struggling with coming out is our terror, isolation, and pain.

We cannot escape it.

This pain and grief are powerful parts of our Queer collective unconscious, the cell memory of pain and grief as we have lived it throughout the history of humankind, but most especially since the advent of Christianity. It is a pain that the Spanish gypsies, the People of the Flamenco, would call jondo, a deep pain in the cell memory. We are all connected in that pain, but we are also a resilient people, and that ties us to each other as well. We bounce back in the face of every obstacle, and we still dance the Dance. We are still here, no matter what has been done to us, no matter how much hatred we face, and we will continue to be here until the end of all things.

As well, we are all connected in our great joy when we dance together, laugh together, bond with each other, make friends with each other, have sex with each other, make love with each other, eat a meal together, go shopping with each other, celebrate life together, worship with each other, tell our best Queer friend our deepest most secret secret. In our lives, surrounded by too much hatred, we strive for life.

"Live in joy,

In love,

Even among those who hate."

This, from that great books of wisdom "The Dhammapada", this tells us how to survive in the face of the hatred that is still spilled on us, particularly from the radical Christian Right and White Supremacists. In the name of Jesus, they would have us dead. But the words of the ancient text teach us that we have life to live, and we are peoples of the Cosmic Dance, dancing, dancing through all our pain and all our joy. dancing the Cosmic Dance of Lord Shiva and his consort Lord Vishnu, dancing the Cosmic Dance with God/dess, dancing ecstatically with the Mother whom we incarnate and embody on Earth.

Keep Dancing, my Brothers and Sisters. Keep Dancing, for it is this Dancing through the pain that is also a deep part of our collective unconscious. We Dance for Life; we Dance for Love; we Dance for all that we are and all that we can be.

Keep dancing, my dears. Keep Dancing.

More on Antony--a Queer theology

2009-02-18T18:13:00.001-08:00

So.....what is it about this music of Antony and the Johnsons other than it's connection to my Queer collective unconscious that makes it so enthralling, so beguiling? Certainly, the poetry is remarkable, lyrical and filled with imagery and majick, a mysticism of darkness and flames, of water and earth, of light shining in the darkness, but it is the music qua music that fascinates me as a musician as well as the profound connection which Antony brings to my soul through his poetry. The music is thoroughly triadic and melodic, something altogether too infrequent in contemporary noise and scream bands. There is a wonderful weave between the major and minor mode that is smooth and seamless, the repetition with slight variation each time there is a repeated line of poetry, the tone painting on words like wind where we hear the wind whistling in the trees or on the rocks ("Another World). There are the exquisite timbres of cellos, violins, harps, gongs, keyboards, clarinets, saxophones, violas, flutes and even sung quarter tones. Certainly the rhythmic structures are quadruple and duple, for the most part, but within those thoroughly square and masculine rhythms, there is a litheness, a suppleness, a winding and breathing, a certain fluidity that is thoroughly feminine in the round lilt of triple meter, a rare occurrence in contemporary pop music. There is also the use of polyrhythms like in "Hitler In My Heart" where the group uses the jagged patterns of fives and sixes one after the other, and the magnificent drum riffs of "Kiss My Name", that capture my musical imagination. But it is Antony's poetry, combined with his remarkable musical gifts, which pulls at my mind, my heart, my soul, my Queer spirit.

One day I'll grow up I'll be a beautiful woman

One day I'll grow up I'll be a beautiful girl

One day I'll grow up I'll be a beautiful woman

One day I'll grow up I'll be a beautiful girl

But for today I am a child, for today I am a boy

For today I am a child, for today I am a boy

One day I'll grow up I feel the power in me

One day I'll grow up of this I'm sure

One day I'll grow up I know the womb within me

One day I'll grow up I feel it full and pure.

But for today I am a child, for today I am a boy

For today I am a child, for today I am a boy

This is the Warrior Cry for our time in the Queer World. To sing a paean to the child, to the boy and to the great possibility of growing up to live in the beautiful eternal feminine, gender Queer, gender bending, neither male nor female and yet both. It is the fulfillment of the Gospel of Thomas wherein Jesus, when asked how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, said, "when you make male and female into a single one, so that male will not be male and female will not be female." (Saying 22) It is this ancient Eastern truth about the "is" ness of things, "when the upper is like the lower, when the inner is like the outer" (Saying 22). These are the things of which Jesus spoke, of which the Tao Te Ching and Inner Chapters speak. These are the things of which we read in the Sutras and the Vedas. This is an ancient knowledge, and, I would suggest, an ancient Queer knowledge. This is the knowledge of which Antony's poetry sings.

When I was in seminary in the 1980's, working on Queer Liberation Theology before there ever was even a glimmer of such a field in any credentialed theologian's eye, I learned to bring my own Queer knowledge to things such as The Hebrew Scripture and The New Testament. I understood the love between David and Jonathan better than I ever thought possible. I recognized well the relationship between Jesus and "the beloved" John for what it was, and saw, decades before the "ground breaking" book on this subject was written by Theodore Jennings, just what the Gospels told us about that relationship and why it was most definitely sexual in nature. I was trained well by my feminist liberation mentors who taught me how to recognize that John was privy to the Mystery and to certain secret teachings of Jesus of which the other disciples were not, that the words Jesus spoke to John and Mary from the Cross are the words one lover speaks to his partner and his mother upon his own death. I learned this from my Queer knowledge, from my own experience in the Death Years during the Genocide, when dying partners would "give" their partners to their mothers and vice versa. "Woman here is your son...[son] here is your mother." (John 19: 26-27, NRSV) My understanding of the importance of sexuality and spirituality comes directly from my Queer knowledge. When I read, "if the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is amazing, but if spirit came into being because of the body, it is even more amazing. I am amazed, though, how such great wealth has settled into such poverty." (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 28), I know that my sexual body is the thing that created my sexual spirit, not vice versa, that they are both Holy and it is, because they were created in that order, "even more amazing.". In me there is no "poverty" of knowledge of "such great wealth". It is my Queer knowledge which allows me to understand so well the Mystery of things, and I am unafraid to speak the truth of my knowledge. Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew, says that I "am the light of the world" I will not "hide [my] light under a bushel" (Mathew 5:14) just because that light makes people, both Gay and straight, uncomfortable.

So it is now that I bring that Queer knowledge to the Holy Books of the other great religions of the world, which, in their turn, taught me about Queer Spirituality. I bring my spiritual understanding, that came from projecting my Queer knowledge onto conventional spirituality, to my listening and to the world of Antony who lives in the Faerie of The Divine Feminine, with its correlative Divine Masculine. Antony, who lives with Athena and Ceredwon, Lilith, Kali Durga, and Morgan Le Fey also lives with the Queer trickster gods Mercury and Loge, the Druid priests and Lords Shiva and Vishnu. He lives in the world of non-dualism where Queer is paramount, where masculine and feminine are not those which separate, but those which bring together. He lives in the world of Queer Spirit, a Spirit of peace and life abundant, of harmony and the circle, a Spirit where fire and water live side by side in symbiosis, wherein the masculine and feminine are bound together in unity, a Spirit of co-operation, consensus, and creativity, a Spirit of everlasting Life. As Jesus so clearly teaches, I know that my Queer Spirit is born first and foremost by my Queer Body.The Body comes first and births the Spirit. Antony's music and poetry concretize this theology. It is in the wideness of that Queer Spirit and Queer Theology that the world will find its saving grace. Antony opens the door to such grace, and it is in the truth of "Aeon", "Divine", and "One Dove" that we will be set free. Thank you, my dear, for the great gift you give us--the gift of non-dualism and oneness, the gift of self-awareness and examination, and the gift of paradox that is God/dess. You give us the realm of the Divine, Feminine and Masculine, and allow us to live in it in the fullness of time and with great joy. Your music is the door to that realm. Your music and poetry are a Holy Gift, indeed, and I will treasure that gift for the rest of my life. Bless you, sweet Man.

A Good Beginning

2009-02-17T21:12:00.000-08:00

This is the beginning of my blog. It will contain my thoughts, criticisms, opinions, etc. I have not written for four years, when I was writing prolifically. Now, I am not sure I can even write a coherent sentence. Living with the confusion of AIDS is no easy trick. I cannot read a paragraph anymore. That's gone, I'm afraid. I am hoping that I can, indeed, write however and that my thoughts are coherent and cohesive. There was a time when writing was my passion, although I know now that it came from my need to escape the pain of a 12-year relationship-on-the-rocks. I would stay up until 4:30 or 5:00 AM writing the most insightful stuff in beautiful prose, quite frankly, but now I am not sure that such things exist in my mind anymore. When I send emails, though, all the people who receive them say my writing is very musical, with rhythm, melody, and even harmony. They say there is a "sound" to my writing. Perhaps that's true. Perhaps not.

The one thing that is in my mind tonight regarding sound, though, and about which I feel compelled to write is the music I recently discovered to my great delight of Antony and The Johnsons. The quiet and mournful "I am a Bird Now" and "The Crying Light", as well as the powerful first album "Antony and the Johnsons", is some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard during the course of my 62 years involved in music as my own life-force. I never listen to contemporary bands anymore, not since the 1970's, and have little experience at all with alternative music except for Sigur Ròs. Antony's music is celestial and mournful, yet filled with an eternal power in a way that puts me in contact with my Queer collective unconscious, the collective unconscious of despair and death and even a certain hopelessness. The grief in "I am a Bird Now" and "The Crying Light" is palpable, and makes me think of the Death Years in the AIDS Wars, the genocide of the 1980's and 1990's in Amerika. "River of Sorrow" from the first album makes me feel again the death of my lover Christopher with whom I walked in New York along that same "black river.....between the piers", the Hudson, where we watched that final Summer sunset sitting on those same piers in 1983, the last time I saw Chris alive. I have my own "river of sorrow, river of time", and it flows with both death and life, but certainly the quantity of death is sometimes overwhelming. In "Rapture", Antony sings of falling, of watching his friends falling in silence like leaves to the ground, just like his "mama" and "papa" whose fall is taking "quite some time". I watched my Brothers, all my friends, and even those who were not my friends, falling silently to the ground in death during the genocide. Even in the screaming and noise of the final pain in the hospital death rooms, in the end it was always fully silent, "like leaves falling in silence to the ground". We all fell, myself included, some to die and some to still live on, but we all fell to the ground just the same, and Antony helps me live with AIDS and uncertain life through the power of his Queer knowledge of what it means to fall, but what it means to fall in a perpetual tombeau, a perpetual memorial to triumph over death. "Is this the Rapture?", he asks plaintively, over and over again growing bigger with each repetition of the question. There is a pervasive pathos throughout this perfect, passionate paean to our Queer history, Queer culture, a Queer knowledge of death that throws us into its power and performance. He ends this hymn to life-in-falling with the beginning and ending lines of the Lord's Prayer. It is a most eloquent and appropriate statement of faith in eternal hope.

In his music and poetry, Antony appears to know our Queer history of love and life, of tears and death. In "The Atrocities" he sings of our history in the never ending Queer blood bath, and of God's tears over "the atrocities of our story", over "the atrocities of history". God weeps great big tears of grief over the atrocities done to us, God's own people, and Antony tells us that we must "eat our fill" of God's tears. The piece is not violent by any means, but rather soft, sad, and then filled with quietly forceful disbelief in the extent of the atrocities near the end, although it ends ultimately in spiritual peace, the same peace that is brought by the "one Dove that came from the other side" in the song "One Dove". The dove offers us mercy. Antony's music and poetry offer us that same peace, that same mercy.

In "Cripple and the Starfish" he sings of sex and of his darkness that is a particularly Queer darkness. He is unafraid to be completely vulnerable, opening his truth to us his listeners as he confesses his sex with beautiful "Mr. Muscle", probably a hustler, who engages Antony's masochism, as Antony the "cripple" is willing, in his need to be loved, to cut off a finger for this unnamed sex-Man in order to prove Antony's own love after screaming that he "completely loves you" because it "will grow back like a starfish" to continue to be cut off and continue to grow back. He tells us that he "always wanted love to be hurtful, to be filled with pain and bruises", but even in the violence of the "forcing, bursting, stingy thingy" of Mr. Muscle, who is, in fact, bored with Antony's masochism and looking at his watch to see the time, the cripple begs to feel the "ripple" of gentle love. In his happiness in the sex ("happy bleedy, happy bruisy"), he wants to be hurt, punched, bruised, begging to the hustler to "please hit me, please hurt me" because he is "so very very happy." He begs to bleed. This is not a darkness nor a shadow that is pathological, but one that is, for Antony, as it is for me in my own experience in SM, filled with the life of re-generation as he triumphantly repeats his words and victorious music about the "starfish" and constant generative re-birth that he experiences in his masochism. This time, however, he sings not of his finger that will grown back, but he himself in his fullness that will "grow back like a starfish." Even in the subtle violence of the beginning, in the menacing tone as his "jaw dropped to the ground" at the shock of painful penetration, Antony's voice warms and sweetens, as does the music, as he sings "smile, smile" in a gushing, rushing joy. This is an utterly Queer cry of self-disclosure that no straight poet/musician would ever dare attempt. In the victory at the end, as the starfish triumphs, Antony tells us that SM, including my own, need not be a pathology, but a Way to life.

Antony is, for me, a hero of emotional triumph and self-knowledge, courage, self-awareness and self-love, especially in his "dark shadows that swallow". He loves the sound and image of the word "swallow" and uses it throughout the poetry of all three albums. His songs are often of darkness and shadows, but "darkness of the shadows that glow", shadows and darkness that are filled with light and life. There is paradox throughout Antony's work. He knows that the shadow is a vital force for all of us, but certainly for Queermen whose shadows are bound up with our human need to be in powerful sexual love relationships with other Men. We cannot grow in ourselves, we cannot become bigger without our shadow. There is, in this overwhelming "darkness and shadow", a lovely femininity to Antony's music, to his poetry and his musical architecture. Yet he can never be mistaken for a woman when he is singing, even in his high sweet registers, which are ethereal and sublime, but always powerful and rich in their unique masculinity. In its exquisite beauty Antony's voice is thoroughly androgynous. He is absolutely a Man who is indeed feminine. This is utterly Queer music, and Queer poetry.....Queer art, created by a Queer musician/poet. The blend of the masculine and feminine is delicious.

And yet, even though the pervasive melancholy is so palpable, we are thrown into a feeling of life and mostly hope as he sings of light in the darkness and shadows and always wanting to be taken into that light. The difference between the music of Antony and The Johnsons and Sigur Ròs, another alternative band, is that the latter not only presents us with melancholy and sadness, it also with a sense and power of the Warrior Lover, of Achilles and Patroclus, of Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, of the Amazon Women. When I listen to this latter music, I am pulled into my Queer rage, not just my Queer shadow, Queer grief and hope. I feel the Queer Warrior in me. I am no longer just the hopeless mover within shadows and darkness and fire, but the mover in grief who is filled with the power of the survivor. With Antony, I sit mostly in melancholy and softness, even while filled with his and my own particular power. It is the softness of the of the "flowers that grow on the corpses" of the death camps of Hitler's Third Reich. It is the softness of the flower that in "[his] mother's power [he] chose from a garden." Soft power. What could be more Queer than that?

Sometimes, I cannot decide which one of the bands I prefer. Perhaps there is no need to decide. Perhaps I can listen to each as I need to, and float in the arms of the Queer God/dess as S/He carries me into my collective unconscious of lives lost, of burnings, of impalings, of hangings, of the drawings and the quarterings, of the boots and the racks, of the violent experiments, rapes and beatings in Nazi concentration camps (Antony's "Hitler in My Heart"), of the internal drowning in one's own lung fluid from Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia, of the agonizing death from the purple lesions of Kaposi's Sarcoma in the lining of the lungs, of the diseases of sheep, and of the various Lymphomas all from AIDS during the genocide. I can also float on the arms of the Queer God/dess as S/He carries me into the lives of the Warrior Lovers of ancient times that grew into the community of compassion for the dying during the Death Years where self was sacrificed on the altar of Love, Man for Man, translated from the gymnasiums of ancient Greece where Men were taught to Love Men with honor, respect, sex, kindness, and a powerful masculinity that was built from the great poets, playwrights, and philosophers, a masculinity that was both powerfully male and also imbued with the feminine of the Goddess. This was our community of compassion during that horrible time of the 1980's and 1990's. What I learned in our Holocaust was that death is both masculine and feminine, that the fight for life is a thoroughly masculine thing, while the surrender at the end can be soft and thoroughly feminine. Death, fully experienced, is, after all, the ultimate Queer experience. It is of this that Antony sings in "Rapture".

So, this is the Queer aesthetic that we receive as a gift from Antony and The Johnsons. One need not be Gay to be Queer, although it is certainly preferable. The musicians of Sigur Ròs may not be Gay, but they are certainly Queer. Antony, however, is most definitely Gay, as his passionate love song to Aeon attests. I assume from the imagery and metaphor as well as the incredibly the tight sound of the band that his musicians are Gay as well. If not, they are certainly Queer without a doubt. I know a few straight Men who embody the Divine Feminine in their lives and who are, therefore, Queer, and I also know a lot of Gaymen who are not really Queer at all, because they are so thoroughly masculine without any trace of the feminine, that all Queerness leaves them. They are caught in the dark masculine. Such, however, is the stuff of another posting. This one is all about the mystery and power of music and poetry that is at once sublime and Earth-bound, light and dark, soft and hard, hot and cold, thick and thin, consonant and dissonant, wet and dry, minor and major, triadic and quartal, triple and duple, feminine and masculine, yin and yang. This post is about music and poetry that is thoroughly Queer, made by musicians who are thoroughly Queer, and will serve as a definitive introduction to my blog that will also be thoroughly Queer.