SEX, POWER, and DEATH!

I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to my Dirty Little Secret posting. What possessed me to post it in the first place and then why did I take it down?

The GaySocrates blog is the fruit of having completed Julia Cameron’s Artist's Way 2 years ago. To those unfamiliar with the process, it’s a 12 week self-directed course which involves doing a bit of reading, writing 3 pages every morning and, every week finding something you want to do to cultivate your creative self-called the ‘Artist’s Date’. The purpose is to unlock your creativity. As a life long scientist I had been pretty much trained out of doing any non-scientific creative stuff and 2 years ago I’d felt that it was time for me to release my inner creative energy. At the end of the 12 weeks I decided that I wanted to write and this blog has been the vehicle for my writing output. An opportunity to put into the public domain what started out as a hypothetical weekly spiritual advice column for young gay men. Once the blog was up and running I was accepted as a regular contributor to Brighton’s monthly LGBT listings magazine GSCENE.

In order to protect the whole process from potential attack and to allow me to freely write without inhibition I’ve kept everything secret from everyone I know.- friends, family, work colleagues, my partner-everyone. For a gay man who had remained closeted until his early 20s, it’s been a fascinating experience to develop a secret alter ego. It’s a bit like reclaiming the secret part of yourself, which you sacrificed when you revealed your true sexuality to people when you first came out.

As time went by I noticed another process too. Initially when the work involved just me and the written page it was easy to write straight from the heart. It stayed that way when I first started to blog and believed that no-one was reading me. But then I started reading other gay blogs, started linking to them and had them link to me, got emails from some readers and started corresponding with others. Then I figured out how to install Google Analytics and was getting feedback about how many hits I was getting, I got drawn into the idea of increasing the blog’s popularity. I was interested in promoting what I was writing maybe more than the writing itself. I realized that with each communication, with each link, with each analytic report, my sense of anonymity was being slowly eroded and my ego was playing a much greater part in the whole thing.

That was when ‘Dirty Little Secret’ reared its head. Just a short, graphic story about sex in a gay sauna. I’d written the story as an exercise in creative writing and wondered about posting it. It didn’t really fit with the character of the blog but then again it was an aspect of who I was so why should I self censor? A couple of weeks ago I posted it in a fit of recklessness.

Once it was posted it didn’t feel right. I started to worry that it was an obscene publication which, if brought to the attention of the authorities would be found to contravene some obscure archaic anti pornography law resulting in me being prosecuted and ending up in court!

:-)

I also worried that in spite of my ‘over 18’ blog filter, the material could still be accessed by minors. I wouldn’t have left a hard copy version of ‘Dirty Little Secret’ lying around a family home, not even in a folder marked ‘Please do not read if you are under 18’, so why am I leaving it on a public site accessible by kids?

Lastly, I felt that there was too much of a clash between my purported aim to corrupt Gay Youth with Love and this piece of writing which might be seen as an attempt to corrupt them with lust- which was something I didn’t want to do.

So I’ve taken it down. It’s still available by email, on request, but no longer as easily accessible.

So what has all this taught me? There’s something in there about how, for me, as I move away from matters of the soul towards concerns of the ego then sex begins to play a much bigger part. I’m lucky, in that, as I get older, my ‘sexual imperative’ has become more of an ‘optional extra’. Nevertheless sexual concerns remain with me as an indelibly influential aspect of my ego. In my meditations this week I’ve been reflecting on those aspects of my ego that seem to have supreme and executive authority over me -unless, of course, I can spot what’s going on before it happens.

For me the big three are: SEX, DESIRE FOR POWER, and FEAR OF ILLNESS.

None of these aspects are ever explicit but they constitute a set of implicit features of who I am. It’s great that I have begun to recognize them because I’m now working on gradually chipping away at their influence. Funny too how, as my sex drive dwindles, the other two aspects grow to plug the gap.

My ego is so good at playing tricks on me. For instance, with the recognition of my ego’s desire for power, I have deliberately avoided seeking a management position in a recent structural reorganisation at work, happily conning myself that I am eschewing the trappings of power in order to weaken the pull of my ego. In reality I know deep down that I’ll be more influential as a dissident than as a line manager! Similarly I’ve been kidding myself that because I welcome death I'm kind of somewhat enlightened yet my preoccupation with aches and pains and potential ailments belies any sense that I’ve come to terms with my mortality. Maybe I’ve developed a kind of emotional detachment from life caused by or as a cause of my illness worries. So I restrict myself from doing a whole range of things because I feel a bit ill or because doing something might make me ill. Consequently I never engage in life to the full which then makes it easier to think- Wow life is pretty hard work-so bring on death!

My challenge with this fear of illness is to see if I can engage more fully in life regardless of what my illness worries might be. Having discovered this aspect of myself this week, I challenged myself to attending a 2 hour 5 Rhythms dance meditation with excellent effect! More of this next week!!

Dirty Little Secret CHAPTER 2 is available on request Email me -just convince me you are over 18!!