25 Vintage GaySocrates!

I’ve just been sorting through some old journals and I came upon this bit of writing from when I was a younger man and it gave me food for thought. This is what it said:


Wednesday August 21st 1996 14.10pm
Well here we go! Let’s see what happens. What I’m doing now I’ve been contemplating for a good few months now.
Colin died suddenly- just when I was beginning to appreciate the joys of a new confiding relationship. I then started reading Alan Bennett’s diaries and something he had written in the introduction about why he had started keeping a diary made me wonder if it would be good for me too.
I used to keep a book of ‘significant thoughts and ideas’ when I was at Uni’ intending to maintain this as a scrapbook charting the maturation of my character as time progressed. But then I got Glandular Fever and then became depressed for years and when I finally got round to wanting to write in my ‘thought scrap book’ all my previous entries seemed silly and embarrassing and irrelevant. And there was this massive chunk of life that had happened in the meantime, which had profoundly changed my outlook.
If the project had been to take a time-lapse sequence of a bud bursting into flower it was as if there had been a bud and then there was a blossom and I had somehow missed the photo opportunity. And now I didn’t see the point of taking the end-shot.
But then I started to get the urge to write. To put my thoughts on paper and have them published. I can’t think why. Vivid images would occur to me, which I would find myself mentally writing about and considering for inclusion in a brief article somewhere…..

Bangkok.
Amazing city! But why?
I’m trying to locate the feelings of combined disgust and fascination.
It’s a teratoma.
Teratomata are weirdly wonderful tumours. Most cancers are mundane lumps of glandular tissue. But a teratoma is a lump of pluripotential cells. When a surgeon cuts a tratoma open who knows what will be there- some hair, a couple of teeth, a finger nail.
The sprawling mess of roads and high-rise building work that is Bangkok invokes the imagery of a rapidly metastasizing malignancy. The traffic jams and petrol fumes are stagnant capillaries struggling to perfuse the centre, which is destined to choke on its own excrement.
Hardly thrilling that- but the temples with their glistening golden spires nestle between anonymous multi-storey international chain hotels. And then there are the Thais with their serenity, cheerful acceptance and friendliness. These are unexpected and wonderful elements of the malignantly destructive process that accompanies the growth of westernisation, tourism, and the market economy in this place ………

That kind of thing. Then I started surprising myself with the things I was thinking through. I was in the shower one morning and figured something out-I can’t remember what it was but it seemed important and new at the same time; probably something to do with gender and sexuality: the sort of thing that I would have mentioned to Colin and he would have seemed like he’d thought about it ages ago but now he’d moved on to higher things. Anyway, I felt sad that there was now nowhere for these ideas to go. They couldn’t get ‘earthed’!
I was on my bike one day just enjoying my own company and it happened again. Just thoughts about cycling. How, when the weather was fine, it was a superb way to exercise and pass the time. How I felt superior to the car travellers uncomfortable and sweaty in their metal boxes. How I smirked as I imagined the guys at the gym slogging away on their exercise bikes burning off energy but getting nothing out of it, going nowhere!
The thoughts started stringing themselves together. Pleading to be conveyed.
I had this idea for a regular slot in a magazine somewhere. “Peddling Thoughts” it would be called.
☺
It would then just be a question of getting out on the bike once or twice a week, remembering the ideas that had occurred to me, committing them to word processor and hey presto! One slickly executed career move. But could that happen? Certainly never whilst I wasn’t writing. So I have to start somewhere.
I’m starting here

After this entry I made a couple more entries and then nothing. Life crashed in around me. So why did it take me the best part of 13 years to get round to doing something about it? OK I’m not a professional journalist-yet! But I am now published as a columnist in a free monthly listings magazine. Isn’t that kind of heading in the right direction?

1 I suppose the biggest obstacle was not having the discipline of writing regularly. I cracked that one once I did Julia Cameron’s Artist's Way. Twelve weeks that changed my life! Almost two years ago I got into the habit of writing 3 pages every morning and I carried on the habit until very recently. There is something about just writing ‘stuff’, regardless of what it is, that gets rid of mental blockages and ‘cocks a snook’ at the internal critic which is always ready to get you to pack it all in before you even start.
2 The blog is a wonderful thing because after getting 18 months worth of getting 3 pages a day out of my system I could then allow myself the possibility of contributing regularly to a weekly ‘publication’ which would in my imagination be the column I was writing for that magazine.
3 Then after 10 weeks worth of entries I was ready to hawk it around. Knowing I had the discipline to produce something and that I could generate ideas without too much sweat
4 Gay Times politely declined. Then G Scene declined assuming that I didn’t live in Brighton. When I pointed out I did indeed live in Brighton I was taken on as a regular columnist!

So from good idea to reality in 4 easy steps. Eleven years to think about it. A year and a half to build up to it and then 3 months to get on with it and produce the work. And finally doing it for the past 3 months.

My advice to you then young men out there is to get on and do something creative now. There’s no excuse. Just do it and keep on doing it. Don’t wait. Don’t put it off. Don’t think that you can’t. Whatever you may have thought that you’d like to do. Just do it!!

Gay Community? Virtually Gone? Or Gone Virtual!

This is my third article for GSCENE and will appear in the JULY issue.....

Brighton’s Gay Community isn’t what it was!

Like all things in this world it is impermanent and will inevitably change. But those of us attached to how things were will mourn its loss. There was something cosy and straightforward about how it used to be.

If you were queer you were oppressed. If you could find your way through into the secret underworld of pubs, clubs and meeting places there was an instant community waiting for you based on the shared experience of “persecution out there” and “acceptance in here”.

Things changed with the advent of the ‘Pink Pound’. Our consumer economy realised that we were a lucrative demographic to be exploited. Gay culture in general and the gay scene in particular became commercialised and mainstreamed.

It is probably easy to idealise the community spirit which pervaded the scene in the old days but that sense of shared oppression went a long way towards helping people overlook their differences so they could develop caring acquaintanceships, friendships and even loving relationships.

Paradoxically with the advent of freedom comes the recognition by ourselves that we no longer share much in common. We are almost as different from each other as straight people are! Finding likeminded people to share our lives isn’t now as easy as walking into the nearest gay bar.

So what do we have in common now?

At least most of us still have a shared experience of what it was/is to grow and develop within an invalidating early family and school environment. This gives us all a range of emotional wounds we can share and compare.

Maybe because of our shared vantage point we will continue to be communally outraged about homophobia and transphobia in all its forms not just in Brighton or the UK but wherever rears its ugly head on our planet.

But none of this really amounts to much for most of us, yet, as a community newly released and blinking in the bright daylight of freedom, we are still vulnerable and in need of some kind of support from somewhere.

So where will that support come from? I believe it can come from two important sources.

Firstly, we all know how the internetification of cruising has revolutionized the world for our sexually active gay male brethren. But this is just one dimension of how the LGBT community has started to take advantage of cyberspace. If you check out here you’ll see how LGBTers are seizing this means of expression and using it to come out to the world in a more intimate way than ever before, connecting with others at a much deeper level than usual.

And secondly, maybe, just maybe it is time for our community to feel confident enough to get our strength and support by just signing up to the straight world- or at least the more gay friendly aspects of it.

So reach into yourselves and develop your sense of shameless self. And with the strength that gives you reach out to the straight world and let them see just how fabulous you really are!

Gay Wisdom Handed down the Generations from GaySocrates

GScene Readers Click here to read full article from this month's GScene and make comments!

24 Dance the Dance of the Gay Shaman Youth!

I’m signed up to a web based feed entitled Gay Wisdom. It sends a regular email containing some gay friendly and affirming spiritual reflection.

As with most things I get a bit enthusiastic about these days, what starts off being genuinely stimulating very rapidly becomes a bit of a chore! So emails start to clog up the in-box unread and then become a reminder of how I’m not doing what I was initially very keen to do and then it’s time to clear your in-box and you’re deleting things that you haven’t even read yet.

Anyway- a couple of days ago I opened up one of these emails randomly and started reading. It was an extract from the writings of some gay author [Mark Thompson ‘Gay Myth and Meaning’]. He was reflecting on how, as gay men, we miss out on our initiation into adulthood because of a dislocation that occurs in our relationships with our fathers. There is indeed a stage during the development of most father-gay son bonds when the father realises that he’s got something other than a ‘ standard issue’ boy. At this point most fathers start to distance themselves not knowing how best to relate. Mothers and women generally tend to do a little bit better in relating to gay boys that is, of course until the hormones kick in. Then most of territorial heterosexual womankind- apart from mother- can feel slightly unsettled by the presence of a male-loving creature in their close vicinity. How confident can they be that their own man won’t be drawn towards this strange creature? How would it be possible to compete if he were to be?

So in this way older men fail to bond with gay boys and fail to introduce them to the usual ‘rights of passage’ into adulthood. Similarly older women subliminally spurn and reject sexually active gay young men.

The author was urging us to recognise this cultural vacuum we find ourselves in and to actively correct it by nurturing each other and by reclaiming the identity that more primitive but maybe more enlightened cultures bestow on their gay members- that of seer and shaman.

It is an interesting idea and, I suppose to a large extent that is the role I have found myself adopting in my own life. But, in a way, it is much easier for an elderly male to be recognised as having some wisdom to offer. I believe that the Western World could become a much more exciting place if it’s gay youth could rise up as spiritual advisors to the rest of us!

So, young men, if you would like to address the way in which you have been developmentally neglected by the older men and women in your life, STOP TRYING TO FIT IN BECAUSE THER ISN’T A SPACE FOR YOU.

Instead find a spiritual teaching which transcends the petty homophobic ranting of most of our conventional churches and start to dance the dance of the gay shaman youth and watch a space appear which embraces and affirms you in your unique special-ness.