GaySocrates

How I Align My Body-Mind-Life Force With Love To Make My World A Temple For Pagan Love Magic

2012-01-13T23:06:00.002Z

I invoke and feel the Essence of Feminine Love

(For me this in the Shadows of my Self -cast in the depths of the Earth)

I move my attention from the Earth, through my feet and up my legs and I focus on my anal Base chakra

The centre of my Red Lustful Love

Located with the Essence of Earth to the North

I move my attention to my cock-and-balls Sacral chakra

The centre of my Orange Love Balance

Balancing Love Lust and Love Power

I move my attention to my Solar Plexus Power chakra

The centre of my Yellow Love Power

Located with the Essence of Fire to the South

I move my attention to my Heart chakra

The centre of my Green Loving Feelings

Located with the Essence of Water to the West

I move my attention to my Throat chakra

The centre of my Blue Verbal Expressions of Love

The arbiter of Loving Thoughts and Loving Feelings

I move my attention to my Third Eye chakra

The centre of my Purple Loving Thoughts

Located with the Essence of Air to the East

I then invoke and feel the Essence of Masculine Love

(For me this is a bright light shining down on me from above)

Does the Soul Have a Neuroanatomical Basis?

2012-01-07T13:26:00.006Z

My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only recognize myself as symphony

—FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet

This quote is from the front of a book I’m just about to read: ‘Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain: The Evolution of Consciousness’ by Antonio Damasio

The author is a neuroscientist who has been studying the neuroanotomical basis of emotion. I think he may have written the book which will provide some of our alexithymic brethren with the hard evidence they require that there is more to self than flesh, blood and cerebral cortex!

Do Not Read This Poem About Men-Loving-Men Spirituality!

2012-01-02T19:41:00.005Z

Whoever you are holding me now in hand

Without one thing all will be useless,

I give you fair warning, before you attempt me further,

I am not what you supposed, but far different.

Who is he that would become my follower?

Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections? Are you he?

The way is suspicious -- the result slow, uncertain, may-be destructive;

You would have to give up all else -- I alone would expect to be your God, sole and exclusive,

Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,

The whole past theory of your life, and all conformity to the lives around you, would have to be abandoned;

Therefore release me now, before troubling yourself any further -- Let go your hand from my shoulders,

Put me down, and depart on your way.

Or else, only by stealth, in some wood, for trial,

Or back of a rock, in open air,

(for in any roofed room of a house I emerge not -- nor in company,

And in the libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)

But just possibly with you on a high hill -- first watching lest any person, for miles around, approach unawares,

Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea, or some quiet island,

Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,

With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss, or the new husband's kiss,

For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.

Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,

Where I may feel the throbs of your heart, or rest upon your hip,

Carry me when you go forth over land and sea;

For thus, merely touching you, is enough -- is best

And thus, touching you, would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

But these leaves conning, you con at peril,

For these leaves, and me, you will not understand,

They will elude you at first, and still more afterward -- I will certainly elude you,

Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!

Already you see I have escaped from you.

For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,

Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,

Nor do those know me best who admire me, and vauntingly praise me,

Nor will the candidates for my love, (unless at most a very few,) prove victorious,

Nor will my poems do good only -- they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,

For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit -- that which I hinted at,

Therefore release me and depart on your way.

Walt Whitman

From the Calamus Poems

1860

You can read the full cycle of 45 short poems at http://gaymensvirtualbookgroup.blogspot.com

Spectral Love

2011-11-29T18:35:00.004Z

Red Love Lust

Orange Love Balance

Yellow Love Power

Green Love Feelings

Blue Love Words

Purple Love Thoughts

Pure White Love

Purple Love Thoughts

Blue Love Words

Green Love Feelings

Yellow Love Power

Orange Love Balance

Red Love Lust

I Am The Whore Of Babylon And I Give You Pure White Love!

A Dream Queer Scene

2011-11-01T19:15:00.002Z

I have a dream of a scene…..

The tarmac of St James’ Street is gone and in its place is luscious green grass, trickling fountains of crystal clear water, trees, shrubs and flowers. People come from afar to hang out here because this is the friendliest, quirkiest and most original scene in the land.

The Red Roaster Café spills its tables and chairs out onto the greenery. No longer a narrow space it has expanded into the adjacent buildings on either side and is open until the early hours of the morning. Gentle music tracks pulse into the air interspersed between the sound of recorded birdsong, random chapters of audio books and cult comedy show clips.

Opposite is the queer bookshop- Bent Books- a private library club (non-members pay a quid entry fee to peruse) where readers settle down to a good queer book with a nice cup of hot chocolate by a roaring open log fire. This is a book heaven with sections on queer studies, LGBT fiction, poetry, biography and spirituality. It’s a great place to drop by and just bump into friends or make random connections with fellow-readers. There’s a good-sized meeting room here for queer book groups to discuss their book of the month. Upstairs there’s a spacious air-conditioned lounging area and luscious roof garden. Clusters of people are drinking mint tea and exhaling green-blue smoke inhaled from communal hookahs- relaxing, giggling, enjoying the art of conversation. It’s early Saturday evening and this is where we come before the Club.

The club is called -not Envy or Revenge or Spite or Hatred- but ‘Club D.U.B. [Dressing Up Box]’. Here is a club where we play with cross-dressing and dance. Here the gender binary gets a chance to be deconstructed. As you go in there’s an enormous changing area. There are clothes rails creaking under the strain of hundreds of sequined dresses and fur coats. There are Tina Turner wigs and high heels for the blokes and false beards, tweed suits and hard hats for the women- all items for sale or hire. Once dragged up the music is pumping and the dancing’s grinding. Trans is the order of the night: men and FTMs meet men/ FTMs, women and MTFs meet women/ MTFs and all the combinations in between. Men and women are even getting it on! There’s ironic femme frolicking and butch posing. In this fabulous space people are drawn to each other by animal chemistry and not because they exist within a perceived gender/sexuality box.

After the club we head to the No Talent Cabaret Bar. A drink buys the obligation to put on a 3 minute turn. Some sing, some recite poetry, some dance, some sit surreal-ly and stare. All offerings are met with tumultuous applause.

Next day we head back to the street. Next to the cabaret bar there’s the Tantric Massage Temple with massage rooms where folk can spend time growing deeper in intimacy with each other. Throughout the day there are group Tantric massage classes and meditations. In one of the group rooms queer folk are holding hands and sharing what is in their hearts. These heart circles mean we can bravely grow in emotional strength by declaring our vulnerability. We are loved and accepted by the circle because of the strength of this vulnerability.

Here there is no attitude and no bitchy-queenery. People smile, are interested in each other, are prepared to give each other the time of day.

Hmm-well I did say it was a dream....

So until the Brighton scene gets a bit closer to this I’ll need to keep going to Faerie Gatherings. The next Albion Faerie Gathering will celebrate Imbolic at Featherstone Castle in Northumberland 27 January-6 February 2012

http://albionfaeries.co.uk/featherstone2012.htm

So skip Christmas this year, book your holidays for late January and turn some dreams into reality!

A Book that Changed My Life……

2011-10-14T20:40:00.016+01:00

The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships and Other Adventures
Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy
Ten Speed Press, 2009 296 Pages

I've been practicing Ethical Sluttery for 18 months now and it's all been down to the September Edward Carpenter Community's Gay Men's Weeks

It all started in September 2009- “The Dance Between Power and Intimacy”-my first ECC experience and, there I was, all alone.

Back home I was in a long-term relationship. The erotic expression of our love for each other had stopped years before. We were maintaining a monogamous tradition fearing the potential destabilising consequences of messing with the arrangement. I had been interested in meditation as a homphobia-free means of satisfying my hunger for spiritual nourishment and, I suppose, at the time I was searching for a spiritual home.

The workshops during that week helped me to put my monogamous sexual barriers down. I explored how the experience of erotic sexual massage could combine with spiritual meditative practice and how loving intimacy was rapidly fostered between individuals who were prepared to engage in vulnerable-making self-exposure. I didn’t realise at the time that this would set a foundation for me to embark on a path of authentic personal growth and enable me to engage in loving encounters like never before. Wow!

When I returned from the week I was on fire! The stakes were high but I had to risk discussing with my partner making changes to the 12-year-old monogamous agreement we made when we’d first met. Being a naturally jealous bloke his reaction was to be cautiously OK about it. We agreed to me doing sexual things outside the relationship provided I would tell him what happened if he asked but not to tell him if he didn’t ask. I love him and I didn’t want to hurt him but I also sensed a chance to grow emotionally, spiritually and sexually. Here was a genie, which could not be popped back into its bottle.

A good friend made on this first Gay Men's Week introduced me to the Faeries and I went to three gatherings that year- Featherstone Castle, Folleterre and Wansee. As is often the case I came away from each of these gatherings with something important learned about myself. Featherstome held a mirror up to my life-long approval seeking programming. Folleterre helped me to reflect on how my father’s [patriarchy’s] disapproval of the feminine aspects of my nature set the scene for not only my internalised homophobia but also a kind of internalised misogyny of which I had been previously completely unaware. Wansee opened my eyes to how the way I presented myself to others was profoundly affected by fear of shame and social rejection.

So it was in the context of this roller coaster ride of personal growth and self-discovery that I was introduced to The Ethical Slut

I wasn’t sure if it was possible to be a Really Dirty Slut and to also be a Really Good Person at the same time. This book showed me how!

The authors reclaim the abusive term Slut in the same way that Queer has been reclaimed for marginal sexual orientation and gender identity and in the same way that Faerie is reclaimed to proudly assert our sissy natured-ness. ‘Sluts’ are those who dare to have sex more often, and in less conventional ways, than everyone else and, who refuse to be cowed into submitting to the social norms. ‘Ethical Sluts’ are those who do this openly, honestly, lovingly and caringly with the intention of harming no one.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who is stopping themselves from having, or openly admitting to having desired ethical sex out of fear that it would be immoral, socially disapproved of and because the consequences would mean guilt and social exclusion.

The authors convincingly argue that our society is geared towards regulating sexual relationships so they fit into monogamous, politically and economically acceptable hetero-imitative configurations, which provide ostensibly stable environments for habitat-living-style-consumerism and child rearing. They confront the idea that sexual relationships exist in a ‘starvation economy’-' i.e. that there aren’t enough sexual relationships to go around and so sexual relationships need to be jealously protected and safeguarded. They argue that there is an infinite potential for sexual relationships of all shapes and sizes and the key to accessing these in order to meet one’s many and varied sexual appetites is, firstly, honesty in communication with one’s partners and, secondly, negotiating clear unambiguous agreements which enable the involved partners to feel emotionally safe and secure.

Of course it isn’t all necessarily going to be a bed of roses and it would be surprising if jealousies didn’t arise in polyamorous arrangements. The authors present convincing arguments about how the working through of jealousies is a potentially very good thing both for the development of the affected individuals but also for the relevant relationships.

It could even be possible that ‘compersion’ –the emotion of joy at one’s partner’s happiness with another sexual partner might even prevail!

The interesting thing about becoming honestly polyamorous [as opposed to the conventional dishonest non-consensual non-monogamous pattern of polyamory-or ‘having an affair’- prevalent in western cultures] is that it allows you to enjoy a wide variety of sexual partners without having to lie or feel bad about it. And rather than distancing you from love and spirit it has the potential to deepen you spiritual growth too. If that isn’t enough to convince, you also get a chance to feel the full force of conventional societal disapproval and to work on your own issues of guilt shame and approval seeking!

Read the book and start to change the world!

The Faeries Taught Me How To Fly!

2011-08-29T18:16:00.004+01:00

I was sitting by my fire last night watching the flames flickering around the burning logs remembering the tribal faerie camaraderie of a blazing Folleterre campfire from just a few days before.

Two years ago the Faeries were to me, a strange, esoteric bunch of folk on the margins, gathering together in weird and wonderful places and living basically without the necessities of standard creature comforts. I now see a Faerie Gathering as a rich source of spiritual nutrition and an opportunity for physical and psychological healing. The Faeries are my community group. Better than that-they are my family!

So how did I transition from Faerie-sceptic to Faerie-sister in a mere 24 months? I suppose any metamorphosis requires a pre-change period, a caterpillar phase. My caterpillar got tired of waiting for a spiritual home to present itself and decided that she would need to become the spiritual home she longed for. Reading books like ‘The Artist’s Way’ by Julia Cameron, 'The Power of Now' by Eckhart Tolle, and ‘Coming Out Spiritually’ by Christian de la Huerta helped to nourish and nurture my nascent yet deeply conflicted spiritual nature and my creative soul.

Then my personal life reached a crossroads. I was exhausting myself attempting to sustain my partner in a kind of co-dependent set-up. I felt damned if I did something about it and damned if I didn’t!

Enter Stage Right the Edward Carpenter Community. What a lovely bunch of guys. A virtual and episodically realised intentional set of communities. During the course of a September Gay Men’s Week at Laurieston Hall [a great rambling mansion in Dumfries] I was gently encouraged to put down my defences and to make myself sexually and emotionally vulnerable in the company of loving, caring strangers.

By sharing my deepest darkest dilemmas, I was coaxed into finding solutions and galvanized into overcoming my paralysis.

Friends made during that ECC week encouraged me to attend a Faerie Gathering. Featherstone 2010 introduced me to the magical world of Faeridom. Gifted Magical Boys, Shamans, Magicians Alchemists, Story Tellers, Androgynes, Dancers, Musicians and Poets drawn together to love, to laugh, to heal and to co-create. Through the patient love generated in Heart Circles there and at four subsequent gatherings and, through some deep authentic faerie friendships I’ve grown to understand some of the unhelpful, distorting drivers in my wounded self.

At the start of my second half-century I finally recognised how my child-like desire for, and righteously indignant sense of entitlement to, my fathers crippled love kept playing out as a recurring approval-seeking theme in most of my interpersonal transactions and how this interfered with my capacity for true love and deep intimacy.

Thankfully I can now let go of shame as a guiding influence in my decision-making. Instead I embrace ethical consensual non-monogamy as a way of enriching my loving relationships.

Faeries have emboldened me to experiment with tantric meditative sexual massage practice and thanks to Tantra for Gay Men, there is now a regular monthly meet-up here in Brighton.

I am now on a Buddhist-Tantric-Pagan Spiritual path, which affords me a sense of peace and tranquillity in the noise and the chaos of modern life

So thank-you ECC, thank-you Faeries, thank-you T4GM without your existence I would never have developed my Faerie Butterfly wings and learned how to fly!

Resources:

ECC

www.edwardcarpentercommunity.org.uk/

Albion Faeries

www.albionfaeries.co.uk/The Faeries.htm

Folleterre-Eurofaerie Sanctuary in the French Vosges Mountains

http://www.folleterre.org/home.htm

T4GM- Brighton Tantra Club

www.tantra4gaymen.co.uk/events-calendar

2011-07-13T21:47:00.001+01:00

I’m not going to write about pride this year.
I’m sure we’ll all get through it in our own ways!
The day after pride I’ll be heading off to a faerie gathering to take in the sights, smells, sounds, flavours and sensations of the beautiful Folleterre Faerie Retreat in the Vosges Mountains of Eastern France
Faeries speak from the heart in Heart Circles passing a talisman, which gives the holder the fully concentrated attention of the group. This practice helps to develop a sense of authentic subject-subject relatedness to each other and to the world in general. Faeries will gently Hiss if they identify with, or wish to be supportive of, anything said or done in the Circle
This is what I will be saying.........

Right from the Heart of a Faerie

2011-06-20T21:15:00.006+01:00

Faerie friends please don’t Hisssssssss…….after this!

It will only mess with my approval-seeking issues

And it just might serve to skew my words away from the authentic voice of my heart

Big Heart Circles make my chest thump with fear

How will I speak with honesty?

Will I be heard with love?

My mind goes blank and drivel comes out of my mouth

It’s so easy to make a weird first impression

Maybe I’ve already pissed off those who find approval seekers tiresome!

I am learning that the potential for intimacy to grow in my world

Comes from honestly and bravely owning up to my vulnerabilities

So here I am! Stripped naked before you all! A crowd of loving strangers!

What is my truth?

What do I seek to become every moment?

Where am I coming from and where am I going? I’ll tell you:

I want to cultivate a sacred sexual and emotional intimacy with the people in my life

And to recognize the sterility and emptiness of a life surrounded by others ignorant of my true self

I want to find ways to have a helpful influence

But I’ll shy away from Earthly Power

I want to keep my energies in balance

And remain present to the healthiness of my beautiful body

In a kind and caring way, I am discovering and dismantling sources of homophobic and transphobic shame which, in the past, have stifled the choices I’ve made and I hope my new-found sense of shamelessness is not seen as selfish and antisocial

But instead helps others to follow my example

I have discovered that for most of my life I have been carrying a barely conscious sense that I had an entitlement to being loved, an entitlement to being engaged with, an entitlement to having people assist me and an entitlement to being approved of!

I’m not entitled to any of these things from anyone but myself

I’m trying to de-commission my ego but I want to become more tolerant of my little shrunken ego and much more tolerant of the big fat egos of others

I want to give big free dollops of love generously from my heart-just for the sake of it!

When the shadow in this community, and out there in the wider world, becomes manifest …..

I want to be able to recognize it as a part of who I am

It will be something I dislike about myself which I am trying to move away from or

It will be something I haven’t quite acknowledged in my own nature projected onto others

I’m on a quest for Joy and making lots of friends but in a binary world it is easy to make enemies- both real and imaginary…….

So-if I upset you it will not be intentional-

and so I ask you now- do not look angry or smile and bitch about me to yourself or someone else

Please please talk to me about it.

Otherwise I won’t be aware of my mistake or I’ll have to assume I’m just imagining it!

That’s probably enough for now!

An Original Albion Faerie Queen- one of Britain’s Stately Homos

2011-04-27T18:56:00.004+01:00

Just as it is inevitable, that a career in politics must end in failure, then too, perhaps, every relationship with a hero must end ultimately with disenchantment….

The enchantment with my hero began when, as a shy queer adolescent searching for affirmation in a homophobic Catholic school in the homophobic North of England, I became aware of a character so totally convinced of his inalienable right to be queer that he flamboyantly asserted his sexuality and endured the sticks and stones hurled at him by an even more hostile bygone era with equanimity and wit.

To my scared and nascent queer nature these strident personality attributes [which I would not have dared to dream of emulating] became a beacon of hope towards which I could steer my sense of ‘daring to be different’. So whilst my brothers had their posters of football and rugby players [whom I would secretly lust after] plastered on the bedroom walls, my forbidden aspirational role model secreted in the far reaches of the back of my mind was one of Britain’s Stately Homos!

Whenever I reached an important coming-out juncture in my life and was quibbling with myself about wimping out, I would refer back to my icon, take succour, feel the fear then just get on with it. So it is to Quentin Crisp that I give thanks for the proper development of my queer sensibility.

Without his existence, without his avidly read life story as depicted in The Naked Civil Servant, without his witty epithets thrown in the face of unanimous disapproval, I might never have overcome what seemed at times to be the overwhelming odds against me. I might never have been brave enough to take my first faltering steps towards the consummation of my disapproved of sexual passions. So thank you, Quentin, you were to me, at that time, a character of epic proportions, unknowingly spurring me on from strength to strength.

I have learned, however, over the years, that you were, as I am, a human being with faults and flaws and for that, of course, I forgive you. Your insufferable egocentricity might even have been the source of your immensely shameless, eccentricity! As bravely shocking as larger-than-life characters such as you can be, I have learned to be cautious around those of your ilk. I need space to express myself so I now spend time on relationships with those who are not only busy developing their authenticity but who are also interested in, and affirming of, mine.

There was a stage in my life when my co-dependency had me hanging around guys with massive egos so I could hide away by relinquishing my own. It is interesting that just as elements of Quentin’s brazen character spurred me on to become my true self, the deficits in his nature have me recoiling towards a quest for true intimacy in love. Sadly, it seems, this would have been something completely anathema to him.

So Quentin Crisp I celebrate your life and your death in me. Had you not been so unashamedly You, I would never have been so unashamedly Me!

Edward Carpenter's views on Religion, Spirituality and Science

2011-04-08T21:35:00.007+01:00

Sensing the recent raging exchanges on The ECC email discussion group about Religion, Science, the Meaning of Life, The Universe and Everything, Edward turned in his grave, smiled and began to quote from the conclusion of his book PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS: Their Origin and Meaning.....

"…..this idea of ultimate separation is an illusion, and in truth we are all indefeasible and indestructible parts of one great Unity in which "we live and move and have our being." That being so, it is clear that there remains in the end a self-consciousness which need by no means be abandoned, which indeed only comes to its true fruition and understanding when it recognizes its affiliation with the Whole, and glories in an individuality which is an expression both of itself and of the whole.

"The human child at its mother's knee probably comes first to know it has a 'self' on some fateful day when having wandered afar it goes lost among alien houses and streets or in the trackless fields. That appalling experience – the sense of danger, of fear, of loneliness - is never forgotten; it stamps some new sense of Being upon the childish mind, but that sense, instead of being destroyed, becomes all the prouder and more radiant in the hour of return to the mother's arms. The return, the salvation, for which humanity looks, is the

return of the little individual self to harmony and union with the great Self of the universe, but by no means its extinction or abandonment - rather the finding of its own true nature as never before……

"…..As a kind of rude general philosophy we may say that there are only two main factors in life, namely, Love and Ignorance. And of these we may also say that the two are not in the same plane: one is positive and substantial, the other is negative and merely illusory. It may be thought at first that Fear and Hatred and Cruelty, and the like, are very positive things, but in the end we see that they are due merely to absence of perception, to dullness of understanding. Or we may put the statement in a rather less crude form, and say that there are only two factors in life: (1) the sense of Unity with others (and with Nature) - which covers Love, Faith, Courage, Truth, and so forth, and (2) Non-perception of the same - which covers Enmity, Fear, Hatred, Self-pity, Cruelty, Jealousy, Meanness and an endless similar list. The present world which we see around us, with its idiotic wars, its senseless jealousies of nations and classes, its fears and greeds and vanities and its futile endeavours - as of people struggling in a swamp - to find one's own salvation by treading others underfoot, is a negative phenomenon. Ignorance, non-perception, are at the root of it. But it is the blessed virtue of Ignorance and of non-perception that they inevitably-if only slowly and painfully - destroy themselves. All experience serves to dissipate them. The world, as it is, carries the doom of its own transformation in its bosom; and in proportion as that which is negative disappears the positive element must establish itself more and more…….

"…….The first condition of social happiness and prosperity must be the sense of the Common Life. This sense, which instinctively underlay the whole Tribal order of the far past - which first came to consciousness in the worship of a thousand pagan divinities, and in the rituals of countless sacrifices, initiations, redemptions, love-feasts and communions, which inspired the dreams of the Golden Age, and flashed out for a time in the Communism of the early Christians and in their adorations of the risen Saviour - must in the end be the creative condition of a new order: it must provide the material of which the Golden City waits to be built. The long travail of the World-religion will not have been in vain, which assures this consummation. What the signs and conditions of any general advance into this new order of life and consciousness will be, we know not. It may be that as to individuals the revelation of a new vision often comes quite suddenly, and generally perhaps after a period of great suffering, so to society at large a similar revelation will arrive - like "the lightning which cometh out of the East and shineth even unto the West" - with unexpected swiftness. On the other hand it would perhaps be wise not to count too much on any such sudden transformation.

"Dr. Frazer, in the conclusion of his great work The Golden Bough, bids farewell to his readers with the following words:

"The laws of Nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the World and the Universe. In the last analysis magic, religion and science are nothing but theories [of thought]; and as Science has supplanted its predecessors so it may hereafter itself be superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some perfectly different way of looking at phenomena - of registering the shadows on the screen - of which we in this generation can form no idea."

"I imagine Dr. Frazer is right in thinking that "a way of looking at phenomena" different from the way of Science, may some day prevail. But I think this change will come, not so much by the growth of Science itself or the extension of its 'hypotheses,' as by a growth and expansion of the human heart and a change in its psychology and powers of perception.

"Gradually, out of an infinite mass of folly and delusion, the human soul has in this way disentangled itself, and will in the future disentangle itself, to emerge at length in the light of true freedom. All the taboos, the insane terrors, the fatuous forbiddals of this and that (with their consequent heart- searchings and distress) may perhaps have been in their way necessary, in order to rivet and define the meaning and the understanding of that word. To-day these taboos and terrors still linger, many of them, in the form of conventions of morality, uneasy strivings of conscience, doubts and desperations of religion; but ultimately Man will emerge from all these things, free - familiar, that is, with them all, making use of all, allowing generously for the values of all, but hampered and bound by none. He will realize the inner meaning of the creeds and rituals of the ancient religions, and will hail with joy the fulfilment of their far prophecy down the ages - finding after all the long-expected Saviour of the world within his own breast, and Paradise in the disclosure there of the everlasting peace of the soul."

Offered in Love

Timkerbel

Big Love to Simon Dawson for The Edward Carpenter Archive without which we might never have known.....

http://www.edwardcarpenter.net/ecpcc17.htm

Atheist to Spiritual Being- a letter to the Edwaed Carpenter Community

2011-03-17T19:24:00.000Z

It is with more than a little trepidation that I make this posting!

I will endeavour to type from my heart as if I were talking in a heart circle holding the talisman and speaking my truth in love without any malice towards any of you.

I do not invite electronic responses to my contribution.

If you want to talk to me about it give me a call . Or catch up with me at Laurieston in September.

I am a man of Science and much of what Ted, Nigel and Dave have contributed in the recent skirmishes about Spirituality resonate with the Empiricist in me.

Ten years ago [having rejected my inculcated rejecting and invalidating Christian faith] I was feeling empty and joyless yearning for the spiritual baby I had thrown out with the religious bathwater of my youth. Unfortunately there was nowhere to go with this.

I learned to meditate and found that the skill of detaching from my many and varied streams of consciousness was an invaluable first step toward recognizing that 'I' constituted more than my brain's constant chatter.

I went on a 10-day silent retreat meditating 10 hours a day and became more skilled through practice without distraction.

Suspecting there was an important link between my sexuality and the path, which would result in the cultivation and sustenance of a spiritual life I tracked down a book of daily readings ‘The Essential Gay Mystics’, compiled by Andrew Harvey.

Reading a little bit of what a Gay Spiritual person had written every day helped. Because the contributors were Gay it helped to open my mind and to trust that I might find a way to reconcile my sexuality with some form of spirituality. The messages from these spiritual voices would not be barbed with homophobia.

At around this time I was also feeling that there were untapped and underdeveloped creative aspects of myself, which needed attention.

A friend suggested that I embark on the Artist's Way by Julia Cameron- a 12 week self help programme to help kick-start an Artist's blocked and shut down creativity.

Writing 3 pages per day and giving my inner Artist a weekly treat in the form of an Artist's date resuscitated my ailing creative spirit and I started to learn how acts of creativity are unscientific-ish expressions of my own uniqueness and vulnerability. By being brave enough to tolerate the potential for ridicule I started to feel a connection with something greater than me. As if the creativity didn't belong to me but instead flowed through me.

Then on another silent retreat I read Eckhart Tolle's 'The Power of Now’, which opened my awareness to my unhelpful habit of mentally residing in the past and future, and thus being unavailable to the most powerful moment we ever have in our lives- now!

In September 2009 I went on my first ECC GMW at Laurieston. It blew my mind and opened me up to how my sexuality could be an integral part of my spirituality [and how my spirituality could be an integral part of my sexuality].

Having ordered the book 12 months before I was finally ready to read 'Gay Spirit Myth and Meaning' [Ed Mark Thompson] and this consolidated a sense that my sexuality and spirituality could happily co-exist but there was going to be no convenient group, Church or religion to support or validate me. The support would need to be created because it hasn't quite happened yet.

I was lucky enough to meet and befriend a beautiful Witch who helped me to explore the hitherto Taboo area of Witchcraft. I attended a number of Pagan rituals and recognized that there was something very real, familiar accepting and human about the practice- and not a single human sacrifice in evidence anywhere!

My interest in Pagan ritual has been stimulated by attending 4 Faerie Gatherings and I've just finished reading 'Gay Witchcraft Empowering the Tribe' by Christopher Penczac which has certainly empowered me as a strong and solitary practitioner.

As a result of attending the 2010 Laurieston GMW I teamed up with a local ECCer here in Brighton [Big Love Ian-How's your Magic Boy?] and together we're working through 'Gay Spirit Warrior-an empowerment workbook for men who love men' by John R Stowe [a book I bought ten years ago when I first started to feel spiritually undernourished but which I never had the motivation to read]

I'm writing all this to highlight that for me, my sense of spirituality could never have materialized as the outcome of an intellectual email exchange.

What has the move from atheist to spiritual being required of me? At least a temporary suspension of disbelief, a real engagement of my imagination and quite a bit of persistence.

So if you're feeling sad, joyless and spiritually hungry try a scientific experiment.

In the true spirit of the scientist aware of phenomena unexplained by conventional wisdom, take that leap of faith, suspend your disbelief, risk feeling vulnerable, meditate, read, be creative for a few months and then step back and see if you can sense something spiritual going on in your life.

Maybe we could talk about the results of your experiment when we meet at Laurieston in September

:-)

If spirituality cannot be part of your consciousness please don't shout at me because it is part of mine. I have experienced life without spirit and it didn't suit me.

I love you

Timkerbel

Anniversary of my first Pagan Ritual

2011-01-24T23:11:00.019Z

Last year my witch friend Patrick asked me if I’d like to attend a pagan ritual.

We all assembled at his flat near Brighton seafront. The atmosphere was informal and relaxed.

The ritual was to celebrate Imbolic [pronounced Im-mulk]. The mid point between the winter solstice- Yule and spring equinox- Easter.

There were eight of us. Patrick, his protégé Tara, his boyfriend Winston, Tara’s boyfriend Sam, Patrick and Winston’s trans flatmate Deborah, Welsh Alyn from London, Nick a friend visiting from Manchester and Me.

Patrick asked us to write something about what we would like to grow in ourselves and then to pick a word which summarized the intent.

We read our intentions to each other, sealed what we had written in envelopes with wax to be unveiled after a year, and then processed off to the beach.

The night was crisp. The sea was alive and welcoming our presence.

A relaxing meditation led by Winston took us through a visualization to cleanse our chakras. Base- Genital- Solar Plexus- Heart- Throat- Third Eye- Crown

Flowers opening Red- Orange- Yellow- Green- Blue- Purple and then Bright cleansing Light

A Circle was cast in the light of the late January moon.

The quarters were called

The Spirit of the East representing Air and Thought was invoked by Deborah and welcomed to the Circle

The Spirit of the South representing Fire and Energy was invoked by Sam and welcomed to the Circle

The Spirit of the East representing Water and Emotional Drive was invoked by Alyn and welcomed into the Circle

The Spirit of the North representing Earth and Manifestation was invoked by Winson and welcomed into the Circle

The God was invoked and welcomed by Tara

The Goddess was invoked and welcomed by Patrick

We were then asked to shout out our Intention Word

Patrick started and shouted

TOGETHER

Deborah followed and shouted

HUMILITY

Then Nick

CREATIVITY

Sam

TURN-AROUND

Alyn

CLARITY

PRESENCE

Winston

TRANSFORMATION

And finally Tara

DISCIPLINE

Round the circle we went three times shouting our intentions.

We danced and screamed stamping our feet on the clacking pebbles of the beech our hot breath turning to white steam in our excitement.

Wine was poured into a goblet and passed around.

We looked to the moon and it replied to us with the most beautiful moonbow the first I had ever knowingly witnessed.

We were transfixed in a magickal moment.

The Earth, The Universe, Our Bodies, Our Spirits!

All Was One for Just That Moment.

The Circle was then closed but not broken and we processed back to the flat.

When we’re settled and those present at last year’s rituals open their sealed intentions to themselves from last year, Alyn takes a poem he’s written and reads it to us

The Coming of Spring

Heard in the far distance- a rhythm pounding closer

A great white mare thrashes the bright air

Magnificent with her tail of silver fire

Galloping hard over granite earth

Sounding a drumbeat with hooves of polished steel

Over and over in measured dance.

Thud close followed Thud.

Waking the sleeping from slumber

Dark earth stirs, sap rises

And fresh green creeps skywards

Milk flows from breast to suckle new life

….And She emerges

Young vibrant and virgin white

Garlanding the day as in her footsteps tender flowers spring

It has been winter but now she smiles

And The Circle turns!

A Prayer to a Body in Need of a Good Rest Or……

2011-01-14T16:10:00.006Z

Or…… My Reflections on My Reflections on My Reflection

[Or…… What You Might End Up Saying If You Turn Your Negative Body Talk Into Positive Affirmations]

Here is a Body

Vulnerable and Exposed…..

Shameless

Sacred Holy

Totally Acceptable and Divine

Spiritually Good

Slim, Trim, Slim and Trim

Surprisingly Youthful

Young and Vital

Cuddly and Curvaceous

Smooth and Furry

Muscled

Beautifully Androgynous

Masculine Enough

Dinky Genitals- Perfectly Formed

:-)

Beautiful, Amazing, Hairy and Handsome

Strong, Adapting, Dynamic, Evolving, Growing

Wonderful Changing Regenerating Miraculous

Attractive, Sexually Attractive, Tasty

In Surprisingly Good Nick

A Great Oak

A Well-Looked-After Vintage Car

Hello!

You are Smouldering, Sensual and Sensuous

Feeling, Touching, Tasting, Smelling

The Silent Witness and Guide when Ethereal and Material Clash

The Vessel

The Instrument

The Tool

Transient, Transitory and Transitional

Indispensable Now- Yet Ultimately Disposable

Body!

Talk To Me!

Show Me How You Feel!

Why am I Gay? Lucky Me Being Me!

2011-01-08T18:32:00.012Z

The fashionable answer to the question ‘Why are you Gay’ for any self -respecting queer is that one has no choice in the matter and that sexuality, along with eye colour and shoe size is simply predetermined by genetic make-up. I’m not sure however that for me it was quite so simple!

My route towards a preference for phallic and masculine erotic stuff doesn’t seem, on reflection, to have been a process of simply following a biologically driven Fixed Action Pattern.

My parents were strange socially aloof individuals and, although my mother was loving, my father was a gruff and emotionally distant disciplinarian. My much older brothers kept each other company and successfully bridged a link into healthy male social networks. Whilst they were out playing rugby and football, processing their adolescent testosterone drives along socially acceptable avenues, I was a six-year-old baby playing with my 8-year-old sister and learning the secrets of the feminine world. I was a girly boy. I liked to roller skate and skip with the girls. But most of all I loved it when they talked about boys. These remote sweaty masculine figures with deep voices and prominent Adam’s Apples; aggressive, unreliable and unfaithful; pulsating with muscles and veins and sprouting pubic hair. What deliciously and forbidden-ly tasty creatures they seemed to me!

I remember at the age of 7 or 8 hanging out with my sister’s friends as they were talking about boys and thinking that I would end up being a most unusual man when I grew up because of the very intimate understanding I was developing about boys from girls.

My dad was a Scout Leader so summer camps meant exposure to sex obsessed adolescent lads. They were bemused by the innocence of their Scout Leader’s 8-year-old son. I’d sneak off and hang around Eagle Patrol to get my daily fix of sex education. We'd stand around the campfire, the older boys caressing their private bits under their speedos and I’d listen wide eyed as they would solemnly and graphically describe for me ‘How I was Born’, ‘What is Spunk’, 'How to Wank' and the technicality, even, of conception as a consequence of a ripped condom [‘Being Born on a Bursted Johnny’].

After this I wanted to get closer to boys but I never seemed to properly get the way they thought and so they remained inaccessible, alien and a bit frightening to me. I eroticized the fear and the fantasies followed.

I longed to become sexually mature but it seemed to take forever. My relatively delayed puberty at 16 meant that I was cruelly exposed to 5 years worth of watching boys in the school showers gradually morphing into men. When yet another member of my year group dropped his balls I’d be filled with a mixture of dread and arousal- dread that this thing might never happen for me, and arousal at the steamy proximity of yet more naked man flesh!

I then learned to internalize society’s homophobia, acted as masculine as I could pretend, had sex with a man for the first time at the age of 20 and started the very slow process of coming out. I’ve spent the last thirty years chipping away at a subconscious fear of rejection for being different. Thankfully the shame is dissipating, I’m learning the joy of openly acknowledging my vulnerability and that therein lies the secret of true intimacy.

Why am I gay? It’s just me being me! And that’s really lucky.

Featherstone Castle Albion Faerie Gathering Friday 28 Jan 2011 - Monday 7 Feb 2011

2010-12-03T13:36:00.008Z

Booking for the Faerie Gathering at Featherstone castle is now open!
For our promotional video [Thanks to PinkDalek] check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnd3erZ7cMI
For more details and booking form:
www.albionfaeries.co.uk/FeatherstoneCastle2011.htm

Come and frolic with the Albion Faeries!
Live in this enchanted Faerie Castle in the middle of the beautiful island of Albion.
Come alive as nature stirs in her slumbers.
Snuggle and cuddle by the fireside.
Gaze with friends into the flames and together let us envisage our futures!

Love
Light
Blessings
x

Faerie Sanctuary- A Poem for Fauny for Vision Circle

2010-11-28T12:18:00.007Z

This place is my heaven

This place is my dream!

A gathering place for kindred spirits from high and low, from near and far.

A place where stimulating, interesting, fascinating, challenging relationships are safely cultivated…

The fruits to be harvested as a gift to the planet!

A place to relax and relate to each other’s deity within

To affirm each other’s inner beautiful uniqueness.

A place of joyful festivity and carnival!

An escape from the divisions created by inequalities of power and wealth.

Away from orientation and identity constrictions.

A place where children are welcomed to experience a world of trust between queer adult and child

A Wild Faerieworld where the adult inner child is free and full of play.

A chance to consolidate a sense of who we are and our purpose in life.

A place to experience deep family ties

Blood is thicker than water but Spirit is thicker than both!

A place instilling strength and bravery to become who we truly are from moment to moment.

A place where the exquisite sacredness of touch is experienced and explored without fear of censure.

This place is my heaven

This place is my dream!

Where the specialness we feel which is central to our lives is ‘quite normal’.

Where our stimulating, challenging energy is revolutionary, evolutionary and ‘perfectly natural’.

Where our magick is an exciting expression of our uniqueness.

Where we are privileged adventurers having fun by simply us being us!

Feeling fresh and clean in an oasis of Faerie Wisdom

Balancing the needs of our minds, bodies and souls.

Healing ourselves!

Our emotional sacredness a sacrament to heal the world.

This place is my heaven

This place is my dream!

Where we will stop feeling awkward about being noticed as different

Where we will feel empowered to push boundaries in ourselves and each other.

Where we will foster and nurture self discovery

Where we will challenge conventional restrictions.

This is a place where there is a frisson of danger

This is a womb of safety

A place for valuing and validating

A Balanced Natural Wise Accepting Space where Fabulousness oozes out of us effortlessly!

A place for Health and Happiness and Joyfulness!

A place to explore the wondrous miracles of our sexualities and identities.

A space to tune into the understandings and ethics of our ancestors.

A space to cultivate inner peace and equanimity.

A temple where Queer Spirit will thrive

Where self understanding

Where seeking, acknowledging, and owning the light and the shade in ourselves

Is about moving away from the mirage of a unity created by agreed divisiveness.

Each of us produces a silken thread of uniqueness

In this place we find the silken thread in our own lives

And together we weave a tapestry.

This is the story of our past

The story of our present

The story of our future.

This place is my heaven

This place is my dream!

Hail and Welcome!

The Spirit of The Faerie

Ooh-I’ve come over all Queer!

2010-11-02T19:17:00.002Z

This time last year if someone had asked me how gay I was I’d have probably just said ‘Very Gay’ and not really thought much more about it. Back then I thought Queer was a useful generic term for LGBT folk- a handy passive aggressive reclaiming of an abusive insult.
‘My God you’re soooo Gay!’ can mean so many things. If it’s being said by a 14 year old school boy then you’re being homophobically insulted because, as every schoolchild knows these days, anything described as gay is-well total crap. If you’re Graham Norton it probably means you’re being seen as somehow fabulously camp, witty, superficial and flippant.
If you identify yourself as Queer however then calling someone Gay is a political jibe with the suggestion that the person has sold out or assimilated into straight society.
Back in the days when homosexuals [as gay men then referred to themselves] were fighting for civil rights as a persecuted minority, there was a split between the assimilationists and radicals. The assimilationists argued that the only way to win the same human rights as ‘normal people’ [as most straights then referred to themselves] was by asserting that we were no different from straights other than our sexual preference, and that we could prove this by joining mainstream society, settling down into monogamous relationships, getting a mortgage, acquiring a couple of cats and dreaming of adopting children someday.
The radicals on the other hand -who subsequently became known as the Faeries- took a different view. They maintained that we were not the same as everyone else, that the difference was significant and meant something and that our purpose was to discover and develop this quality of different-ness. The Faeries believed that this was what constituted our usefulness to a mainstream society overburdened with child bearing and capitalistic preoccupation. We had the gift of prizing subject- subject relationships [ie person to person love not tied in with material possessions] that for us existed happily outside of the prevalent subject-object relationships rife amongst our straight brethren. They even went as far as to say that because of our unique ability to look like everyone else whilst being dramatically different inside, we were blessed with a special healing and spiritual power which enabled us to understand two sides of conflicting perspectives making us well placed to excel in roles as therapists, shamen, diplomats and teachers.
The faeries have, over the years battled to hold on to their Queerness and have joined with others forced into the margins by virtue of their sexuality and gender differences. Queer encompasses LGB and T with an anti-assimilationist agenda.
Twelve months ago I was one of those assimilated gay men until I met the Faeries. Three faerie gatherings later I’m a lot clearer about how an unquestioned patriarchal society attempted to batter the feminine aspects of my nature out of me and although failing to process me into a closet case turned me into a straight acting gay man with a good helping of internalized homophobia desperate to be accepted by adopting monogamy and mortgage servitude
Nowadays I’m ready to accept embellish and celebrate my queerness and I can tell you it’s so much more fun than trying to fit in.
So how gay am I? 0%
How queer am I? 100%

The Intimacy of Being

2010-10-02T13:08:00.005+01:00

Last year’s Gay Men's Week at Laurieston: ‘The dance between power and intimacy’, set me off on a 12 month roller coaster journey of self healing, spiritual integration and joyfulness which climaxed in this September’s week: ‘Pleasure, Love, Joy, Light- The intimacy of being’

I’d like to thank all members of the Edward Carpenter Community for supporting this magically facilitative network of loving men. Without it I could not have allowed myself to become the person I now am!

So, what happened? Last September I felt sad and friendless. Forty-nine years old and locked into an erotic-free yet physically, emotionally and romantically close relationship with my long-term partner who had been plagued with physical health problems for 6 of the 10 years we’d been together. Prior to my relationship with him I had enjoyed a reasonably vigorous sex life but when we fell in love we committed to a monogamous life together. So by the sixth year of attempting to be sexually faithful to a sex-less relationship, always hopeful that the illnesses would remit but perpetually disappointed by his consistently absent libido, something was going to snap. I didn’t want it to be our relationship. I didn’t want it to be my mental state. I didn’t want it to be my own physical health- though preoccupation with aches and pains were threatening to colonise my consciousness and make me old before my time.

Without fully understanding why, I found myself on last year’s Laurieston September week and it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me.

By sharing my predicament in Heart Circle and Base Groups in the context of a programme of events encouraging openness to self and others, exploring the link between sexual and spiritual, I was able to discover that truth to myself lay in openly acknowledging my sadness. What had previously seemed to be a safe, powerful position of holding onto a mental armoury designed to project that I was a happily assimilated monogamous gay man, could now be seen as an obvious unhappiness-making mirage. I learned that intimacy in relationships grew from both trusting others to accept me in my vulnerability and allowing others to trust me with their vulnerabilities too!

With that important lesson learned as a foundation, I was able to return to my previously forlorn existence with a new lease of life. Could my relationship withstand some consensual, ethical, non-monogamy? Of course it could-and what a relief for both of us that we could actually talk about it! How would I develop my newfound fascination with the development of spirituality via sexuality? Why had these vitally important aspects of my personhood been perceived as mutually exclusive?

Four months later I’m experiencing the nature-bound healing spiritual Magick of a Faerie gathering at Featherstone Castle. Four months later I’m in community with beautiful Eurofaeries at Folleterre Faerie Sanctuary. Three months later I’m in Berlin for another week of Faerie frolicking in the company of queer folk allowing ourselves to be our very own unique selves! Two weeks later and I’m back at Laurieston focusing on Pleasure, Love, Joy, Light. Within days our community develops a deep physical, emotional and sexual intimacy allowing us to re-awaken an awareness of ourselves as sexual and spiritual pioneers. Learning the answer to the questions ‘Who do I want to be? What am I waiting for? What do I want to let go of?’

What have I learned in all this? Being brave enough to truly be myself (and this is not an insignificant piece of work in progress) is immensely pleasurable, gets me in touch with Spirit, inevitably invites genuine intimacy and generates joy in bucket-loads!

Thank-you to the organisers Shokti, Kevin, Adrian and Peter!

I’m looking forward to next year!

Pleasure, Love, Joy, Light!

Away with the Faeries!

2010-09-02T22:29:00.006+01:00

I’ve just returned from a Faerie Gathering in Berlin. It was my third one this year so I guess I’ve become pretty addicted to Faerie Magick! Each event was a spontaneous gathering-together in virtual sanctuary of a fascinating bunch of weird and wonderful queer creative souls with spiritual growth, sexual healing and transformational affirmation all in abundance.
I was introduced to my first gathering at Featherstone Castle in Northumberland back in February by a Faerie I’d met at a Laurieston Edward Carpenter ‘Tantric Sex Workshop’ at the end of last year. Featherstone is a wonderful, secluded, ancient castle where we celebrated the Pagan festival of Imbolic. Forty-odd gay men, a couple of bisexual women, a trans man and a trans woman came together [literally] in a ten day ecstasy of fraternal love and polyamory.
My second gathering was in June at Folleterre in Eastern France- the permanent home of the Eurofaeries. An old, secluded farmhouse in an ancient forest provided the backdrop for an intimate group of 20 of us to explore the concept of Rewilding [the opposite of domestication]. Every day for an hour we’d find our favourite sit-spot and would silently absorb the amazing-ness of nature without fear of interruption. Informal workshops on Trans-, consent, patriarchy, sex and permaculture were fitted around cooking, wood chopping, swimming, sunbathing, fire making, drumming, singing, dancing and dressing-up.
The gathering in Berlin was exclusively for male identified Faeries. Thirty-five men from across Europe and a couple of Americans ranging in age from 25 to 78 got the chance to get to know each other on an emotionally intimate level. Daily ‘Heart Circles’ allowed us to speak totally honestly from our hearts about what was happening in our lives, our trials and tribulations in general and our specific issues in the moment. What a vivid tapestry of authentic subject-to-subject relationships we found ourselves weaving together! And what a refreshing change from the less honest relationships that so often surround us.
By this third gathering I had learned to trust and be trusted by my Faerie friends. I awakened an awareness that my journey towards becoming an assimilated straight-acting gay man began with me as the sissy boy who hung around with the girls, skipping, roller-skating and talking about boys. I realised back then that the feminine aspect of my nature signalled to the bullies who policed the patriarchal status quo that my sexuality was other than totally straight. I learned to slap back any hints of femininity in my behaviour and I became a macho closet case determined not to be emotionally annihilated like the sissies in my school who either couldn’t or wouldn’t conform.
Gender role and sexuality stereotype expectations are writ large in the Sports Arena. The changing-rooms, showers and sports field have always been uniquely hostile environments to those of us who didn’t fit in.
Is this why sport and sissy sensibility don’t sit pretty together?
Write to me: gaysocrates@gmail.com

Queer Blogs- the Best LGBT News Medium

2010-06-27T00:14:00.007+01:00

When I was a little coming out chicken the only gay media around was ‘Gay Times’. Back then in the early 70s this was a rather worthy publication. Back then there were lots of injustices, it wasn’t fair, it needed to change and so it was important to share information and maintain solidarity. GT helped us to do this.

Then came my first encounter with ‘Attitude’ magazine. It was sitting there bold as brass in my local newsagent’s- albeit on the top shelf but none the less out-and-proud and unapologetic. Those first issues were full of- well- attitude and humour. Not ashamed to be frivolous and to celebrate camp gay stuff. It seemed like the gay media had reached a level of self-assuredness. Sadly in my dotage I’m now less inclined to read gay beauty magazines. I follow Baz Luhrmann’s advice as stated in his immemorable ‘Everybody’s free [to wear sunscreen]’ diatribe ‘Do not read beauty magazines-they will only make you feel ugly’.

So how do I get my information about LGBT related matters now?
I suppose it is via my LGBT friends and of course GScene magazine [tee-hee]. I’ve certainly stopped trusting the conventional mass media. For me it has become totally toxic. It seems to just pedal misinformation and induces fear and mistrust.

The media of the new millennium are email, blogs, facebook, texting and tweeting. These media have allowed us to spread our social networks further afield and to cut out these poisonous mass media middlemen.

I now take time to develop friendships via the Edward Carpenter Community and the Faeries. These friends are the best sources of information for what is happening to them, their friends and to the planet.

Through my blog I’ve met a good few virtual friends. Rory is a deeply spiritual Taoist who lives with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the North East of Scotland [blog http://lucid-exposition.blogspot.com/]. Keith is a highly intelligent writer who battles with episodic unipolar depression in Hollywood [blog http://brokenwholeblog.blogspot.com/].

I met Spanish-speaking Marco whilst on holiday in Toronto. He now lives in Mexico and we keep in touch- by emailing in each other’s language. He struggles with the closeted-ness induced by the homophobia of South American Catholicism.

In the past 30 years or so in the UK we have moved away from a focus on civil rights and rectifying social injustice. We have enjoyed a dalliance with assimilation and are increasingly accepted into mainstream society provided we shut up and fit in. Sadly fitting in involves becoming part of an empty, shallow, consumerist, cosmetically obsessed, sex focused, death denying, planet poisoning, war-torn system with our intimate relationships tied to civil partnerships, property and wealth.

Let’s break free of our ties to this oppressing system. Let’s connect to each other on a deeper loving level and generate our own information and organisation. We just need to make a bit of effort and not expect to be spoon fed with information that is anything other than toxic waste to our unique natures as queer folk.

Why watch reality when you can live it?

2010-05-03T13:12:00.005+01:00

A few years ago I was quite partial to a bit of reality TV. The early series of Big Brother were a great opportunity for us all to be educated in the complexities of Social Psychology. Getting some insights into how, in a social context, we influence and are influenced by others is no bad thing I thought.

However as the years have rolled by and the jaded palate of the viewing public has demanded increasingly grotesque and sadistic formats I have started to feel both defiled and guilty for watching, (and thereby perpetuating) these programmes. It is the same mixture of emotions I felt when Princess Diana died. My appetite for gossip and images about her relationship with Dodi Fayed had condoned and contributed in part to the frenzy of paparazzi who ultimately hounded her to her death.

And so last year I decided to withdraw myself from the hoards of reality TV junkies and to stop living my life through the televised experiences of vulnerable, narcissistically driven wannabe celebrity egos prepared to endure endless humiliation and discomfort for the prize of our attention. Instead I resolved to start living my life in reality!

My first step was to move outside of my comfort zone and sign up for an Edward Carpenter Community retreat (www.edwardcarpentercommunity.org.uk). Out in the wilds of the Dumfries countryside there is the chance to openly explore who you are in the company of complete strangers sympathetic and supportive of who and where you are, who you want to become and where you want to go.

My second step was to attend a faerie gathering (www.albionfaeries.co.uk/faerieevents.htm) at Featherstone Castle in Northumberland. Faeries create a queer magical space where you can be playful with your identity and experiment with ways of being truly yourself. Both retreats involved the co-creation of community outside of straight society meaning that conventional rules can be bent warped or broken for the sake of personal and spiritual development. Individual growth and creativity is celebrated. There is no danger here of being nominated for eviction by your housemates!

At the end of each week everyone is encouraged to perform for the community. The Faeries call their cabaret ‘The No Talent Show’ which is a measure of the standard expected of participants. There is no Simon Cowel here to savage those brave enough to bare their souls. All performances are valued because they are ours and have become part of the fabric of who we are.

Two life-changing weeks of my life away from TV. As a consequence I have become a more grounded human being. I have also become part of a living network of people seeking authenticity from life and from each other.

Why not try it? It might even cure you of your realty TV addiction too!

You can write to me at GaySocrates@gmail.com and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

Come out of the Shadows and Shine!

2010-03-28T20:23:00.004+01:00

I have been meditating recently on what is most likely to push me into remoteness from being fully present to myself and to others in the world. What is it which causes me to only half live my life, to fritter it away pining for better times gone by or hoping for a more favourable future? What are the themes that preoccupy me and push me onto the sidelines of my existence?

I’ve come to the conclusion that my ego is the greatest distraction I have from what matters to me most because it tries, and often succeeds, in convincing me that something else matters more than living my life from moment to moment, fully aware of, and acknowledging my life as it truly is!

For me there are three main facets to my distracting ego. The first I would describe as an anxious hypochondriac- frightened of death but even more afraid of existing with any of many ailments that might leave him plagued by chronic pain. The second facet I would describe as a screaming power queen- constantly considering her position within relationships and working out ways to avoid making herself vulnerable. The third facet is a craving sex fiend. He worries that I’m not getting enough and constantly plans how to get more! At any one time of the day I can pretty much guarantee that at least one of these characters will be sitting centre stage in my head reciting one of a series of very well rehearsed monologues. You, dear reader, will no doubt, have your own unique versions of these distracting egos.

You may not have noticed, but one of the tricks that our brains regularly plays on us is that they somehow get us to overlook that a brain is simply no more than a clever tool we have developed for our survival and evolution. Our brain’s thoughts are not ‘who we are’ and these ego identities, masquerading as real personality in our heads, are just so much interference and noise distracting from our true selves- or souls which simply yearn for attachment with each other. I was reflecting with a friend today on what might be the source of these distracting ego identities for queer folk and wondered whether maybe we indulge these identities and consequently find ourselves accepting a semi-detached position from life because of the bullying we have encountered over the years.

What a cruel and bullying society we live in which tells us from our earliest years that our identities and natural sexual impulses are wrong and shameful! Am I comfortable with my somatic, sexual and power preoccupations because it keeps me from the danger of revealing myself as truly different, exposing myself authentically but in so doing making myself vulnerable to attack, invalidation and ridicule?

What is it that gets in the way of us being who we truly are? If it is the fear of a bullying society which is intolerant of diversity and authenticity isn’t it time we stopped being pushed into the shadows and started shining out your truth?

Are you an Eco-Puritan?

2010-02-27T13:29:00.005Z

A new Puritanism is taking hold of us all, which is promulgated by the polluters of the planet. Its main tenets are:
1 An environmental apocalypse is nigh!
2 If we love the planet we need to do something now!!
3 If we stop driving cars and use public transport, stop taking holidays abroad and recycle out bottles and boxes we can stop feeling so bad about it.
4 We should try not to get distracted by evidence suggesting that doing these things is effectively a drop in the ocean of what those countries with obscenely gigantic carbon footprints might be capable of, but just don’t get round to doing!

Suggest to an Eco-Puritan that there might be a small problem with tenet number 4 and you might as well be denying the holocaust at a Bar Mitzvah, or depicting Allah as a cartoon character to an ayatollah.

I take my bottles cans and newspapers to my recycling point like any good Brightonian. But I’m not a believer! However, in the spirit of ‘being the change you would like to see in the world’ I have taken to regularly attempting to raise my awareness of myself, in my body, in the world

This is how it works: Every day as I drive to work, I take a few deep breaths. Then, as I’m looking out of the windscreen, I become aware of those things on the glass that partially obscure my view- things like specks of dirt, raindrops, reflections of the illuminated speedo up on the screen. And I think about how what I see is affected by these obscurants. I then look beyond the screen to the open road where I see shadows underneath oncoming cars and beneath trees. Most cars today have a metallic finish so the images of the cars are made up of reflected light and mirrored, distorted, reflected images. There are light sources too: headlights, taillights, road lights, traffic lights. I become aware that all of what I see is simply light reflected off matter. Usually at this stage I start to feel more acutely aware of the moment I am existing in and I’ll be grateful that I’ve brought myself out of dwelling in the past or preoccupying myself with the future.

I’m grateful because the present moment, ‘now’, is all we really have ever had and is all we really ever will have. Choosing to aware-ly exist within it is probably one of the few things we can truly have an influence over.

I then look at something I might conventionally disregard as boring- like the tarmac on the road. But instead I see it afresh in the present as fascinating. I’m now getting to know lots of bits of road which, in the past I would never have registered! Then I look for imperfections on the road. For me, finding an imperfection in something is a sure-fire way of rapidly disregarding it. So I find an imperfection and see it as something to be aware of now. Spots of chewing gum, drips of paint, pebbles, grit. And finally I find something that is creatively perfection. Something which, because of its complexity, I would previously have overlooked- grass, wild flowers, trees, hedgerows. I’ve made friends with lots of trees along the route into work this way!

As a society we are increasingly divorced from our present and from the nature in the world that surrounds us. Please become aware of yourself in your present and love it!

As queer folk we have a special gift to be able to do this more easily than our straight brethren. Spread the word. The more of us who are aware of our present selves, as part of nature, the less disconnected will we be from our beautiful mother- Earth. Ditch the Eco-Puritanism and connect with nature in the present moment as often as you can.

Oh- and mind you don’t crash the car!

Google the blog or email me GaySocrates@gmail.com

Equality: Ticket to liberation? Diversity threat? Or key to allowing intimacy into our lives?

2010-01-16T15:16:00.005Z

Why is it, when I hear the word ‘Equality’, I get a rush of mixed feelings? Are all of us born equal? Certainly my political instincts twitch against the opposite, Orwellian aphorism that ‘Some are more equal than others’ with its attendant divisiveness and preferential treatment for a privileged few over the masses.

For us queer folk, rallying behind the Stonewall Equality banner in recent years has served us well in our battles against oppression and invalidation. However there’s a big difference between saying that we demand equality in terms of our human rights before the law, and saying that we deserve to be treated like everyone else because we’re no different from anyone else. For some, the route to achieving the former has been by living a lifestyle attempting to demonstrate the latter! Problem is, that whilst we’ve all been busy assimilating ourselves into straight society- we pair bond, shop at Habitat and IKEA, want the right to get married and nurture children- we’ve started to loose our edge.

Historically, our greatest contribution to society has been by providing our perspective on it from its margins. In our disenfranchisement, oppression and invalidation we've grown strong as individuals by the cultivation of our uniqueness, special-ness, and strangeness. The thing is, now we have the opportunity to be card carrying members of mainstream society, we have the choice of either joining with the consumer driven frenzy of it all or, just stepping back and taking stock.

Quentin Crisp once said of the joy and hardship of the queer’s role on the margins: “Never try to join forces with the enemy! You should make no effort to join society. Stay right where you are. Give your name and serial number and wait for society to come to you”

I recently came across another aspect of equality whilst reading the Gay Blogger CrazeeBee . He made the helpful observation that a lack of equality within power relationships between people eradicates intimacy. This really struck a chord. I realized that I often find I’ve either put myself, or others have positioned me, into very marked relationship power differentials. It’s like I’m the powerful one or I’m the weak one. The dominant or the submissive. I may seek to dominate or to be submissive. Others may seek domination or submission from me. And it’s all driven by fear of intimacy. Within extreme power differentials there is both the security and the profound disappointment that emotional intimacy will be kept securely under wraps.

So I thank the Universe for “Equality” and how it has served us well in our battles to be treated fairly. However I would urge against a full-scale stampede towards a tepid, insipid, and magnolia painted lifestyle within the mainstream. Keep remembering that we queers are different and some of us are more different than others! By continuing to be our fabulous, unique, beautiful selves, out on the margins, we will inevitably transform the world for the better. And don’t forget that to equalize the power differences within your personal relationships may be the way to find a more fulfilling and intimacy rich existence!

If this is what it’s like to be nannied- bring it on!

2009-12-18T23:28:00.006Z

I’ve never had a nanny. Nannies are what upper middle class parents substitute for themselves when they’re too busy, or just can’t be arsed, to actually parent their children prior to sending them off to boarding school. I had real parents. They couldn’t afford nannies or private schools but still nevertheless somehow managed, with their unique parenting style, to fit in a fair bit of nanying in spite of everything.
Mary Poppins being the exception that proves the rule, the business of nannying has a fairly bad reputation generally speaking. Think of being nannied and you’re in a suffocating world, there’s an overblown sense of danger and you’re inhibited from playful exploration by a risk averse regime which is aimed at making everything safe. The result is a bland and unchallenging life for everyone.
Nanny States are the pendulum swing opposite of Laissez-Faire regimes. Statutory regulation proliferation is the order of the day and individuals are no longer trusted to regulate themselves responsibly. This all occurs in the context of an exaggerated sense of danger driven by the pincer movement of media sensationalist hysteria on the one arm and a whipped-up encouragement for people to complain and litigate when ‘things go wrong’ on the other. Regulation is especially aimed at powerful and respected groups within the emerging nanny society, who are perceived by the system as a threat to the process of power centralization. The net effect is that control is exerted through fear and an insistence that procedures are carried out following uniform protocols. The justification for the imposition of regulation is on the basis of a few horror stories of what happens when things aren’t regulated. The nurse Beverly Allitt. The Doctor Harrold Shipman.

The current administration is increasingly accused of nannying. And it’s true that we’re told what we should and shouldn’t be eating and how we should be exercising. Our teachers are monitored for how well or poorly they teach, and our doctors and nurses are forced to manage our ailments through protocol driven, relationship devoid, care pathways.
Yet without this nannying, which abolished section 28, it would not be seen as reasonable for teachers to talk about gay lifestyles without fear of being prosecuted for ‘promoting pretend family values’. Without this nannying plans would not be afoot for homophobic bullying to be taken as seriously as sexist or racist bullying in our schools next year. Gay and lesbian 16 year olds would still be criminalized, deprived of safe sex advice and made to feel like freaks. We would still be unequally treated regarding our rights as civil partners and as potential adoptive and foster parents.
Prior to this administration people couldn’t be trusted to regulate their bigoted behaviour and homophobia was enshrined in our society’s legislation.
So, for all the drawbacks of living in a nanny state, we haven’t really done that badly out of it. Maybe for some reason, Nanny has a soft spot for us queer folk. If it carries on being this good I could even get to enjoy being nannied. Next stop Paraphilic Infantilism! Anyone for nappies?

Enough fitting in-time for society to start fitting around us!

2009-11-29T13:48:00.002Z

It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of non-heterosexual civil unions would have been considered unthinkable. Fifteen years ago, when I was getting together with Partner the idea that a queer couple might have their partnership recognised and protected in law just like any straight couple was something that seemed an impossible thing to happen in our lifetimes. Over the years neither of us have felt a pressing desire to nail each other into a legally and financially binding agreement. However, just 4 years ago when Civil Partnerships were sprung on us- almost out of the blue- it did seem like ‘a good thing’ in terms of equality and human rights. Surely shouldn’t we have equal access to those rights, privileges and protections that our straight peers take for granted? I thought so then but now I’m not so sure!

I’ve been reading recently about the history of the Gay Liberation movement in the USA. It started in the early 1950s with the formation of the Mattachine Society, a group of gay men whose aim was to politically organise to overcome discrimination against queer folk as a minority group. From the early days of the movement there was an immediate split. There were the assimilationists in one group aiming to win equality with straight society and dreaming of fitting into society as it stood. In the other group were the radical faeries. They believed that queer folk were fundamentally different, that we couldn’t, and shouldn’t, fit in and that society needed to change radically to fit around us.

The gay political agenda ever since has been largely driven by the assimilationists and with every new milestone we become more and more equal. We now have an equalized age of consent, abolition of Section 28, equal rights to parenting as fosterers, adopters or as biological parents.

As the years have flown by since that very first CP, I’ve attended ceremonies of friends who were clamouring to be one of the first as a political act, friends who wanted to show the straight world that they could do a CP knees-up more lavish and camp than any straight wedding could hope to be, and most recently friends who are tentatively entering into legal arrangements as the only way of finding out if a relationship with a foreign national is based on love or simply their partner’s desire for British citizenship.

With equality comes acceptance and an experience of what it feels like to be part of the majority. My problem is that the more I feel like we’re just like everyone else, the less we have our vantage point of being on the margins and the more we loose our ability to hold a mirror up to straight society to help it see what it might do differently. Our different-ness has always been our most unique value and we’re now in danger of loosing it. Maybe now we’re almost equal it’s time to pull back from the assimilationist’s equality agenda and start focusing on our radical uniqueness for a change!

Why do we feel unsafe in our communities?

2009-10-24T12:39:00.004+01:00

My man has the unfortunate habit of reading The Argus and is consequently exposed to a constant litany of the aggressive violence that takes place on a daily basis in and around our beautiful city. He reads out to me the most horrific stories. Last Saturday at 2 am a couple of students were set about by a gang of 5 drug-crazed youths in the centre of Brighton. The attack involved broken bottles and resulted in facial disfigurement ‘beyond recognition’ for the two victims.

With each story I am thankful that I’m not the victim! I try to remind myself that hearing stories reported in this way is likely to engender a disproportionate sense of danger. These events are relatively rare yet hearing reports one after the other from the various corners of Sussex makes it seem like I’m practically guaranteed a good beating every time I set foot on St James’ Street.

Yesterday my man read out yet another story: ‘GAY MEN INVOLVED AS PERPETRATORS OF VIOLENT CRIME’. Two gay guys had attacked an elderly woman in Kemptown. One had held her down whilst the other did her hair and make-up! Hmmm! Funny!

When I was younger I used to feel more vulnerable to homophobic violence. Now I’m older and spend less time out in the city at night I just feel vulnerable to gratuitous drug fuelled violence. The older and frailer I become, the more I feel like a potential target when in the proximity of ‘merry’ youths. This growing sense of insecurity doesn’t really seem to be the fault of inadequate community policing. It’s more like it’s the consequence of failing to address the cultural, moral, and aspirational poverty of an ever-growing underclass of unfortunates who live in our midst.

Having said this a couple of months ago my young friend Carl was out in town with his partner. It was late and they were both a bit drunk. They were walking by the Theatre Royal towards the taxi rank. Just as they walked by Mrs Fitzherbert’s they were approached by a couple of well groomed, well spoken, ostensibly straight men who asked them where the nearest nightclubs were. Before they could answer, one of the guys, noticing my friends had their arms linked and sensing they were gay said: ‘Oh fuck-a couple of queers’ and slugged Carl in the mouth knocking one of his front teeth out and flooring him. A witness in the pub immediately called the police who were there so quickly that the assailant could be pointed out just a hundred yards down the street. But bizarrely, the police refused to pursue the attacker without confirmation from the unconscious Carl that he wished to press charges! The next day when Carl reported the attack he was underwhelmed by the police response which seemed more like politically correct lip-service- making sure the paperwork had been completed and the statistics compiled rather than there being any intention to attempt to apprehend this malignant homophobe.

We hear from our gay community police liaison officer that we must come forward and report homophobic hate crime but really with stories like this it does make you wonder what’s the point!

Our Fathers: I forgave my father and it changed my life

2009-10-09T22:19:00.005+01:00

“Shrivelled up”. That’s what I thought when I last saw my father.

He’s now 82 and his old age is starting to show. His posture is stooped, He’s shrunk a good few inches over recent years and, because of chronic back pain he’s taken to coasting round the house using the furniture to keep his balance and to support his weight. Like an oversized wrinkly toddler! He’s had trouble with his left eye ever since a botched cataract operation 2 years ago which resulted in persistent infections. The eyeball is now deflated, discoloured and completely dysfunctional. Over the years his gums have receded and his teeth have fallen out leaving just two behind in his upper palate. He tells me that his dentist is doing some work repairing his other set of dentures. The poorly fitting dentures he’s wearing now cause him to talk with a nasal quality. They move around in his mouth as he talks lending a weirdly tragic-comic air to his speech. I’m looking at him and registering his weakness and vulnerability. I’m contrasting the image before me with my memories of him as an angry, powerful and impossible man.

I would like to take you on some of the journey I have travelled in my relationship with him. The story begins with a small boy craving care, emotional sustenance and nurturing from a monstrous ogre of a man and it ends with affection from a wounded son towards a man riddled with vulnerability and pathos.

I can remember my father first coming into my consciousness as a stranger entering my world. He had returned from work and it was as if I’d never known him before.

“So who is this?” my innocent soul enquired. My bemused parents responded to my nascent awareness with smiles and reassurance and all seemed well and safe.

Now fast forward years, over a background of emotional foreboding. Pause.

A simmering, stifled, anger tinged atmosphere around the dining table. Older siblings have transgressed in some way to be warranting this frightening silent treatment. We all know at any time, for any reason, it can now erupt into a spasm of threatened physical violence and there’s nothing we can do about it. Then, Bang! His mean face crumples into what seems like a snarl of hatred, his arm is flung backwards in a full arc with his hand hovering above his head, poised for an unrestrained, abusive slap. Hard skin and bone powered by muscles and sinews against soft child skin.

He didn’t need to hit us that often. Just the threat that he might snap, just the sight of that hand hovering, just the tension of knowing that he might not be able to restrain himself was enough to tyrannize us all.

It wasn’t all bad. There would be fun times when all of this would be forgotten or at least brushed under the carpet of our shared awareness. Catch him on a good day and my sister and I can have great fun messing around rough and tumbling on the carpet.

He’s now just a pretend monster and we’re trying to wrestle him to the floor and pin him down but he’s too strong and he roars loudly then squishes us under his full weight so we can hardly breathe and we’re both squealing with delighted pretend fear…..

Every morning he’s there in the kitchen making rounds of bacon sandwiches for us to silently consume before we set off for school. He’s even baked the bread himself!

But each and every happy memory is troubled by this deeply frightening undercurrent. There is the potential for real violence coupled with a prevailing emotional unavailability. Most of the time he’s either sitting in the corner of the room behind a pile of the science fiction books that he’s borrowed- six per week from the public library, or he’s angry and on the lookout to be criticizing or chastising us.

In spite of this atmosphere, my innocent soul drives me to love and seek affection from him. Another memory comes into focus.

I’m just 5 or 6 years old and I’m tucked up in bed. I can’t sleep and wonder what’s going on downstairs. I’m going to toddle downstairs and see what they’re all up to. Tell them I can’t sleep. Maybe I’ll be allowed to stay up and watch TV. Down the stairs I go one by one. I can hear taking in the living room. I push the door open. I’m assaulted by the angry bark of a man with no love or affection for me “GET BACK UP THOSE STAIRS RIGHT NOW!” I quickly pull the door shut and cry my way back up the stairs and into my bed. Something inside begins to die. This isn’t right. Why have I got this emotionless, sergeant major for a father? Surely other kids’ dads aren’t like this. There’s something seriously wrong here!

No wonder then that we all flee the nest as soon as is respectable for bright middle class British kids and escape to universities as far away from home possible. By the time of my young adulthood, my dissatisfaction with dad has grown into a full-blown hatred. As far as I am concerned he is so not what he should have been for me that I can’t bear to be in the same room as him. So whilst friends at Uni can’t seem to wait until the end of term to spend the holidays with their families, I stay behind finding excuses not to go home. Of course I have my closeted sexuality to be busily unpacking and he gets the blame for me having had to repress my sexuality too.

Interestingly, however, as I meet more and more gay men, I find that poor-difficult-absent father relationships are the rule rather than the exception. Is there something about being a gay boy that is likely to doom a relationship with a father?

Maybe there was something in the awfulness of my relationship with my dad which drove me towards eroticizing a forbidden hitherto denied male-male bond. Maybe it was my sensitive gay temperament that recoiled from his harsh and abusive macho parenting style. Did my father have some repressed sexuality issues which my existence reminded him about and caused him to cut me out as he had attempted to cut it out from his consciousness? Did my mother unwittingly play a role? Were our gentler natures naturally drawn towards each other and united against the aggressive foe? Maybe I was just a lisping, feminine-acting embarrassment of a sissy son. More images come flooding back

I’m standing outside the locked bathroom door whist dad takes a bath. I must only be about 4 or 5. Mum always leaves the bathroom door open when she bathes and we all wander in and out talking to her, uninhibited by her nakedness. Why can’t we do this with dad I wonder? So I’m knocking and asking dad to open the bathroom door. There’s no reply….

I’m not like my older brothers. I have a pair of roller skates and my sister and I skate around outside. I play skipping with the girls….

I like to watch my mum applying face powder from her mirrored compact. I rescue old compacts and scrape the powder from the corners then apply it liberally to my face. My dad notices and is angry. Tells me to wash it off. I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong. A few years later I rub talcum powder over my face and get the same angry response.

So whatever the explanation for the tensions between us, I’m a young man and I’m vehemently hating my father and it doesn’t feel right! I learn that if you are a successful male you are highly likely to have had a good relationship with your father so I figure that I’m doomed to be unsuccessful. And then I discover that those with unresolved issues towards a deceased family member are far more likely to suffer an abnormal grief reaction in the form of anxiety, panic or depression than if there is a good relationship. This information comes as a big shock to me and I realize that at a deep level for many years I’ve been wishing him dead and I’m actually disappointed that his death won’t solve the problem. This is the turning point. I’m determined that since this old bugger has done enough to mess up my life during his lifetime-I wasn’t going to let him carry on messing it up when he ultimately pops his clogs. So at the age of 28 I decide there is only one way to deal with this hatred and resentment. If I am to avoid it consuming and destroying the rest of my life I have to somehow find a way of making things better.

Years fly by and, in spite of tentative attempts to make friends with him; his critical, aggressive, bossy manner and my dislike of it continue to erode any chance of a connection. Then my career takes me into the field of childcare. Much of my work starts to involve sitting down with parents and interviewing them in depth to get an understanding of their own childhoods in order to build a picture of why they might parent in the way they do. I become quite an expert at developing explanatory formulations for why a child’s behaviour might be disturbed based on these detailed parental biographies. One day, after completing a particularly distressing parental interview, I suddenly realize that getting an understanding of a parent’s struggles inevitably causes a shift away from judgment and a move towards compassion. I realize at the same time that I have never given my parents the chance to tell me their stories in the kind of detail I expected from my clients.

I resolve to take a detailed history from my parents to see how far that might move me towards a more compassionate understanding of my father. Next trip home I announce my plan and- almost surprisingly- they are happy to oblige. Mum is the eldest daughter of four. Her father gambled and drank away most of the family’s money. Her mother had to be strong and was able to run a small but successful retail fish business in spite of him. Mum was bright and the nuns at her convent school had high hopes for her academic success but she was removed from school before she could take exams because of family poverty and the need to earn money to feed the younger children. When she met dad they fell in love and resolved to bring up children who would be able to fulfil their full academic potential.

Dad’s story was that he was the elder of two boys. His own father had lost his mother at an early age and was brought up away from his father by an aunt so never got much of an experience of being fathered. When dad was around 8 years old this man developed severe Parkinson’s disease. The illness left in its wake a tremulous, drooling, expressionless emotionally absent invalid father at home. Dad was educated at a church school run by a Roman Catholic order of priests with a reputation for strict, sadistic discipline. Because of his father’s illness he too was forced to leave school early to earn money for the family.

On leaving school he joined the army and was exposed to those strong, hierarchical, unemotional, power relationships necessary to keep competitive male egos in check. So his whole experience of being fathered was of growing up in a household with a severely physically and emotionally disabled man who in turn had had no experience himself of having been fathered. His template for being nurtured by male authority figures came from his experience of the sadistic Salesian brothers and the army sergeant majors with their harsh and cruel discipline.

Piecing together this story from dad allowed me to no longer see him as a despicably aggressive and controlling man but instead, for the first time, as a poor, forlorn, forsaken, abandoned child desperately seeking to carry out a role for which his experience had left him woefully inadequately prepared.

Strangely, magically, and almost instantly, once I could see him for the struggling soul he was, he was able to relax with me. He didn’t feel the need to defend himself against the silent accusations of his deficiencies. We could finally relate. I had found a way to forgive him. I’d shifted from the judgement that he was a useless father and instead I had found some compassion for the hardships that had shaped him. I could conclude that in his fathering of me, he had tried the very best he could under difficult circumstances. And that really is the very best I could possibly have hoped for!

So, if you’re struggling with your relationship with your father- and there are many reasons why a gay guy might struggle- don’t just accept it as an unchangeable inevitability. Get him to talk about his childhood and his father’s childhood. What was his experience of being fathered? What experiences did he draw on for his parenting skills? If you can forgive him for not getting it right then the relationship will inevitably improve and a better relationship with your dad will most certainly change your life.

Power, Intimacy and the experience of a structured Edward Carpenter Community Gay Men's Week

2009-09-30T23:35:00.005+01:00

Ten years ago, within a few months of having moved to Brighton, a friend suggested that I should think about checking out The Edward Carpenter Community and getting up to the Gay Men's Retreat at Laurieston Hall in Dumfries. He thought it would be my kind of thing!

I didn’t know what he meant and hearing his description of what happened when he’d been there, I thought he might have misunderstood me. I was vehemently monogamous at the time and the idea of thrusting myself into a community of randy, intelligent, articulate men seemed to be unnecessarily putting myself in the way of temptation!

Four years later my partner gets ill and our sex life peters out. He feels rotten and tired out so doesn’t want to spoil the memory of the great sex we used to have together. I remain dedicated and stay, at least conceptually, devoted to a fidelity towards him. I keep reminding myself that this is what was meant by the ‘In sickness’ part of the promise grown up people make to each other when they unthinkingly really expect ‘In health’. I keep hoping the ailment will resolve and our sexual intimacy will be able to re-kindle. It doesn’t. We stop going on holidays because he can’t bear spoiling my enjoyment with his tiredness and frustration. I go off for a few lone holidays to get a break from his unhappiness but I don’t really enjoy myself. We get into the habit of having holidays in Brighton and Guy’s relentless fatigue begins gradually to relent. However our clubbing, pub-ing and partying social life became moribund and rapidly expired in the early years of illness as the fair weather friends scurried off to their next engagements. I ultimately enter a social purdah when my two remaining friends move from Brighton and relocate to London and Equador! I start a blog and make some virtual friends. During all of this I’m developing a sense of my spiritual self and realising that it’s no use waiting for some organized religion to provide me with any kind of meaningful support. I have an acute sense that our tribe is seriously lacking a connection to spirit. My ordeal is helping me to know this and is goading me into doing something about it! I get serious about writing and manage to get a regular column published in the local LGBT magazine.

This is the context as I’m racking my brain for what to do for my holiday in August/September 2009. A ‘gay spirit’ yahoo group listserv email enters my in-box describing a workshop entitled ‘The Dance Between Power and Intimacy’ run by Sunfire, the resident Spiritual Healer at Easton Mountain Retreat. It seems radically different in its approach to male intimacy, erotic touch and spirituality. I bemoan that this kind of thing only ever seems to happen in the US. Then, still wondering about what to do about holidays, I remember my friend’s suggestion about ECC and check out the website to see if I can tie my holiday in with a Laurieston week. And there it is again-this radical workshop is being run not in the States but at Laurieston Hall! I hesitate and realise that I was happy to imagine that I would be someone prepared to attend this workshop when it was out of reach but now it is within my grasp I begin to find excuses not to go. I remember my conversation about Laurieston with my friend and contact him to see if he’d be up for it. He admits he’d be nervous about getting his kit off and exploring his issues- and in any case his mum is seriously ill and he can’t commit. What to do?

I print off the application and write a cheque and then wait, hoping that maybe there aren’t enough applicants for it to run and it will be cancelled!

It isn’t cancelled and so in September I set off from Brighton in my little smart car on my pilgrimage to Dumfries.

What happens next is a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of happy images, experiences, memories and dreams. Laurieston is my kind of place. The ECC are my kind of people.

What did I find?

Open, genuine, authentic, subject-subject, relationships between good, honest men.

A good old fashioned socialist co-operative providing the sustenance and structure to our activities.

An enchanted sacred space.

Fun. Playfulness. Dressing up. Make-up. Naked wrestling. Fresh air.

Wise and caring facilitators. Chakra cleansing. Healthy scepticism. Affirmation in bucket loads. Thoughtful reflection about my predicaments and how I was dealing with them.

Onion skins of security provided by the community, the base groups, and the intimacy ritual groups.

Qigong seven pearls yoga every morning before breakfast

Mind blowing exercises exploring erotic love and its potential to provide a vehicle for spiritual enlightenment. (Really!)

A new take on bondage and spanking!

What did I learn?

I had developed a pattern of not letting people see the real me because I believed that it was a source of power to be the only one who knew my vulnerabilities. Letting go of this attitude and exposing my vulnerabilities is the route to authenticity and true intimacy.

I needed to stop my mental masturbation and remember that:

Action moves the doubt the theory cannot prove.

I needed to stop thinking I could predict what people would do or say in response to my honesty.

I’m essentially an OK person with an unrequited libido.

What happened next?

It’s just one week down the line and I’m still processing and assimilating it all. My man has been swept off his feet by the energy of it all. The spare room is now our temple of erotic love and we’re working on curing his illness through sexual healing. It’s turning out to be lots of fun.

So thank you Sunfire for bringing your wisdom to these shores. Thank-you Shokti and Vyvyan for inviting him and organising the week. Thank-you to the gang of guys who were brave enough to have a go and especially my base group and the boys in my ritual group.

You changed my life!

The Spiritual Healing of Erotic Love

2009-09-25T22:53:00.003+01:00

Last month GaySocrates went on his first ever Edward Carpenter Gay Men’s Weeks at Laurieston Hall.

It was a so-called ‘structured week’ which meant that in addition to the free and easy access to this amazing enchanted space, there was also a full programme of facilitated sessions allowing for an in depth exploration of a given theme. So there was seven days worth of walking in unspoilt Dumfries woodland, swimming in the pure water loch, body painting, dancing, naked wrestling, late night saunas. And weaving these activities together was our theme ‘The Dance Between Power and Intimacy’

Many of our facilitated sessions were led by Sunfire- the resident spiritual healer at Easton Mountain Sanctuary in the USA- and were based on the ‘Body Electric’ workshops run there. Through a series of guided techniques we grew in confidence with each other. We were able to hold each other as we explored our issues with spiritual enlightenment. We began to see how our preoccupations with power and proscribed eroticism interfere with a fulfilling life experience.

Within days, a disparate group of gay thirty- to sixty-somethings had become a spiritually connected, respectful, erotically intimate tribe of lovers; open to each other emotionally, physically and sexually. I learned for the first time how a group of gay men could be capable of deep intimate, brotherly affection for each other. And I was struck by the relative paucity of this kind of love in the outside world. I asked myself ‘What gets in the way of this kind of love spontaneously erupting in our everyday communities?’

The answer, I fear, is that we have lost our connection to Spirit. Throughout the generations, organised religion has persecuted the LGBT members of their congregations to the extent that most queer folk now have abandoned hope of ever finding a spiritual home for themselves. Starved of spiritual sustenance we have also been deprived of the wisdom of those who would have been our tribal elders. These men were taken from us unceremoniously by the AIDS scourge of the 1980s.

The Australian Aborigine tribes also lost their connection to Spirit. Their elders were slaughtered and their ancient connection to the earth was disrupted by relocation to remote settlements where they learned the sensual pleasures arising from alcohol intoxication, which they then passed to their children and their children’s children.

I see parallels with our own LGBT tribe. We need to rediscover our ancient connection to intimate erotic love through a rediscovery of our spiritual selves. We need to stop our mindless preoccupation with empty, meaningless sex of the ‘bad gay porn’ variety. This leads only to the appalling state of affairs where our elders unthinkingly infect our youth with chronic incurable illnesses for the sake of a moment of bareback pleasure.

It’s time to get radical. Rediscover and sustain your erotic spiritual selves and begin the spiritual healing required to save our tribe from obliteration!

Check out my blog: http://gaysocrates.blogspot.com

Email me at gaysocrates@gmail.com

32 Socrates was killed because he believed in the improvement of the soul

2009-09-05T14:55:00.006+01:00

I’m reading The Apology of Socrates at the moment. It’s a dramatised version of a real event-the trial of Socrates, the outcome of which was his execution.

Socrates was openly gay [as was his pupil Plato]. He was accused of being a worshiper of false Gods and a corrupter of the youth of Athens. In his defence he states that the charges are trumped up by 3 of his enemies. He is an old man in his seventies and he acknowledges that he has made many enemies over the years but never deliberately. However in his quest for those who might be wiser than him, [and he, himself believed that he was in no way wise but the Oracle of Delphi had proclaimed him to be the wisest of all men], he has systematically debunked the pretended wisdom of those who have been willing to present themselves to his scrutiny. And none have taken kindly to the humiliation of the exercise!

He says that if the outcome of the trail is that he is released on condition that he should desist with his teaching then he would prefer to die

‘I shall never cease from…exhorting anyone whom I meet…saying…why do you…care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul which you never regard or heed at all?’

‘…Fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown, since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend as the greatest of evil, may not be the greatest good’

So what is this soul, the improvement of which Socrates was prepared to die for?

I had a discussion recently with a young friend of mine about the possibility that I might be reborn as a tree

:-)

He was exasperated that a sentient, intellectually able individual such as myself might believe in the concept of the soul. It was only after much coaxing and cajoling that he was prepared to say that IF it were possible to be reborn [and this was a massive IF, relying as it did on a totally irrational and fallacious concept], then he might like to be reborn as a whale! During our debate it was clear that he drew no distinction between his intellect/thinking and who he was as a being. He literally believed that He Thought Therefore He Was. ‘My thinking is my being’

I was trying to get him to explore what happens when thinking is ‘turned down’ as for instance during the act of meditation. What happens before the development of formal operational thinking in a young child?

For me there is a clear duality in my being –the thoughts that I have and the being that I am. The thoughts and actions I am engaged in may be tools of expression for my soul or may be a chattering distraction from who I am. To imagine that my thoughts and actions constitute who I am would be like saying that the computer VDU screen IS the computer and that when it is switched off the computer no longer exists!

Ok so my advice for this week- for the improvement of your soul- is to demonstrate to yourself fist of all that it exists. Experiment a little with your thoughts and see if you can just turn them down. Take some time out, maybe 5 or 10 minutes and say ‘I will see what happens when I let go of my thinking’. Make sure that you won’t be disturbed. Find somewhere to sit comfortably. Close your eyes and imagine a very large tree by the side of a gently flowing river. As a thought arises in your mind imagine that it is a leaf on the tree falling into the river and being carried away. Each new thought becomes a falling leaf and is carried away.

Now ask: Did you cease to exist just then or was your existence enhanced?

The reason I became a total lying bastard!

2009-08-26T17:41:00.006+01:00

Why does secrecy fascinate me?

It must be to do with my decade of closeted-ness followed by years of cringingly and embarrassedly coming out to friends, family and work colleagues.

From the age of 9 or 10 my 'dirty little secret' gradually became my whole sexual identity and lies came like reflexes to protect me from the condemnation and rejection I had been trained to believe would result from its discovery. Ten years of leading a double life. Ten developmentally significant years of keeping the biggest secret ever. What you saw was not what you got! Ten years of blatant lying. Portraying myself not as I was but as I believed others expected me to be. Ten years of damped down spontaneity, growing a false self, a hard crust to defend my true inner core. Ten years of homophobically driven self imposed social sexual isolation. Inured against authenticity and deprived of sexual and emotional intimacy. Despising those who purported to like the sham person I pretended to be. Drawn to those who disliked me. They at least seemed to have a better perspective on what I was all about. What did that 10 years of duplicity and dissimulation do to my sense of integrity? By the age of 20 I’d certainly developed the capacity to be a totally deceitful lying bastard!

Well, not totally-as a good catholic boy I tried my best to be honest about everything else but when it came to my sexuality the truth was nowhere to be seen. And because my lying was all about my sexuality, it meant that not only was lying a deeply central feature of my personality but it also became powerfully eroticised. Lying and being queer had strong associations with each other and were therefore both charged with sexiness and danger.

I’m now in my Thirtieth year of coming out. Being honest with myself and bearing witness to others in various shapes and forms that I will not allow homophobia to intimidate my nature into pretending it is anything other than it is.

However I’ve recently been toying with the idea of redeveloping a secret self (regular readers will know about my totally anonymous blog www.gaysocrates.blogspot.com)

The way I see it is that generally sexuality is a mysterious and private aspect of an individual's personality. If you’re heterosexual you aren’t expected to be explicit and specify to others what your sexual likes, kinks and preferences are. So when we come out we sacrifice a significant aspect of this secrecy, which is the birthright of our straight peers.

I’m not advocating going back into the closet, but if you’ve had years of secrecy sculpting and shaping your identity then the coming out process may have forced some of your private aspects to have been more public than they ought to have been. People shouldn’t be able to access all areas of who you are and it’s really worth discovering your private secret self in a fully conscious way.

Start writing a secret journal or create an anonymous blog where only you have influence over what you write or post.

The danger we all face is that unless we own up to our ignored secret side it has a nasty habit of inhabiting our lives anyway.

This is my column for the November Issue of GSCENE-Secrets and Lies

Meditation and the Tao Te Ching

2009-08-15T17:33:00.003+01:00

The big event for me this week has been my decision to relinquish the moral high ground I’ve been adopting with regard to my conflict with my employing organisation. Not sure what allowed me to arrive at a resolution. It may have been reading the Tao Te Ching or it may have been a result of meditating on my manager as ‘my enemy’.

I can’t remember what that great Taoist book of wisdom was saying exactly. It was something about how knowing good creates bad, how one extreme is simply a function of, or is always seen in the context of the other extreme. Adopting the high ground creates the low ground. The advice was along the lines of finding the peace to let it go- and not to let it go with a vengeance so everyone gets hurt by the sudden change in direction, but to let it go gently.

Meditating on my manager as a source of evil has been helpful too because it enables me to see how ridiculous it is to attempt to locate evil intent in any individual. The evil I locate in others tends to be discovered by me and as I’m becoming increasingly aware may well have been planted there by me.

The self-righteous, blinkered ego is the enemy of peace. I am finding that, if I can cultivate the humility to recognise that I am an injured soul searching for salvation but reluctant to accept the nature and extent of my shortcomings, then I can stop griping about the splinters of wood in others’ eyes and attend to the plank of wood in mine!

I have developed a mantra for myself when meditating and reflecting on ‘myself’- that is when I am reflecting on the mental image I have when the psychological construct of ‘me’ is brought to mind.

The mantra is: ‘I’m wrong, I’m bad, I’m sorry and I forgive myself’

This allows me to acknowledge and face up to shortcomings but not to wallow in them or wait for forgiveness from someone else. It helps me to equalise the feeling-tone I experience when reflecting on myself compared with when I reflect on my friend, my enemy, or someone I’ve just had a chance meeting with recently.

I try to read a page from the Tao Te Ching every day at work. It often surprises me and helps me with n issue I’m grappling with at the time. A reading which surprised me this week concerned leadership and the dangers of praising others. Praise of others creates competition. The danger of valuing treasure is that it creates in others a desire to steal them. The final phrase was an encouragement to ‘do the non-doing’ which is the typically paradoxical advice akin to ‘don’t just do something-sit there’ as opposed to ‘don’t just sit there- do something’. It’s a reminder that the ego has a terrible habit of trying to impose itself on how things are. Things are the way they are regardless and the imposition of ego won’t make things better of worse though the ego may be the source of the way things are.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of the ego as being the source of the universe as perceived by ourselves. The idea is that we make our beds, which we are then forced to lie in. Maybe our relationships with ourselves and others are borne from our essence and we can choose who we are as a way of determining the pleasures and pains we encounter.

My advice for today is just take a few moments out of today when you’re alone and check out what you feel when you think of yourself.

Now what do you feel when you think of your worst enemy.

Then what do you feel when you think of a good friend.

Finally think of someone you had a fleeting contact with.

If you feel similarly across the range then you’re in the zone.

If you feel differently then you’ve got some work to do!

SEX, POWER, and DEATH!

2009-08-08T18:53:00.006+01:00

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!!

Thank Heaven for Our Elders!

2009-07-29T20:51:00.005+01:00

There are two certainties we can be sure of in life: death and taxes.

We can’t escape taxes. But we try to escape death.

Our elders are a wonderful reminder that no matter how we might want to primp and peel our wrinkles away, no matter how many facelifts we have to keep ourselves deceptively young looking, death is our constant companion, a time bomb ticking away relentlessly, ready to detonate at any time. Ageing and degenerative diseases go hand in hand and just as our sick society tries to airbrush ageing and death out of our consciousness so too does it try to look the other way when the arthritis kicks in, or when the heart failure and strokes begin to take their toll.

I have two friends with cancer- one a lesbian with end stage terminal breast cancer, the other a gay man with malignant prostate cancer. Their diseases seem to be particularly cruel, attacking those very organs that may well have been central aspects of their sexuality. Now, as older members of our LGBT family, they feel stigmatised not only because they are old and sick but, especially, because their illnesses are centred on their sexual selves.

So what can we do about our fears of illness and ageing? First recognize that death denial is deeply programmed into our wider society with its highly lucrative cosmetic industries and its cult for youth adulation. Next recognise that for whatever reason the fear of ageing present in our wider culture is multiplied several fold in our LGBT community. Finally see that there is a direct relationship between the denial of death/ illness in a person’s life and their levels of existential fear and anxiety. The more you deny death the more your life will be permeated by a deep sense of fear.

The antidote to our existential angst is to get a grip and face up to the reality of our mortality. If we can embrace death as an integral part of our daily life we can then be strong enough to turn toward reminders of our physical frailty and impermanence rather than wincing and turning away from them.

Only then might it be possible to look with reverence to our elders as evidencing the truth of the transience of our physical existence through their ageing and physical decline.

How often have you scowled at your reflection in the mirror as you spot the latest evidence of an older you; balding, greying, wrinkles, bags, sags? How often have you appraised an ache, pain or symptom as the latest development in your body’s decline?

Try this exercise. The next time you find yourself scanning your reflection for signs of wear and tear, focus on each element that is older than it was. Now instead of deriding these features, wishing them away and planning for their surgical ablation, look at them as badges of honour; as living proof of your mortality for you to wear as an acceptance and celebration of your imminent death. Know that your body will die but that your being, within, is beyond mortality and infinite!

Then the next time you scan your body for symptoms of ailments, marvel at the way your body has carried you this far for so long -like a vintage motorcar that is still running against all the odds.

Once you’ve made your peace with your internalised ageism you’re ready to begin to love and accept our LGBT elders. Maybe you’d be even ready to cuddle a crinkly. See how you get on with that as an exercise!

Email me:GaySocrates@gmail.com or google GaySocrates for my blog

[This is my column for the October 'Age Revisited' edition of GScene Magazine]

My Dirty Little Secret. An homage to the 'Gonzo' style of One More Nine

2009-07-19T22:32:00.008+01:00

This entry-inspired by the stories of One More Nine has been taken down by me.

Maybe I'll blog about why soon.

:-)

If you'd like a copy, email me with assurance that you are over 18 and I'll send you one.

28 Do you need to re-create a closet in cyberspace? A blog inspired by 'The Man of Walls"

2009-07-11T14:05:00.008+01:00

A few weeks ago I got involved in an email exchange with an anonymous reader who described himself as 'a man of walls' because he was closeted and enjoyed his anonymity.

This whole interchange got me thinking again about “Being who you are”.

I suppose I have grown up as a wounded soul programmed to believe by my Gay Activist brethren that the only true route to happiness is through the process of ‘coming out’. That to pretend to be anything other than who you are is simply living a lie and is destined for a future of unhappiness and despair. I dutifully came out and like most who come out of their protective shell, felt naked, vulnerable and exposed but also strangely surprised that the feared catastrophe of full on homophobic attack from all quarters never actually materialised. It worked like a self-administered flooding desensitisation programme to treat my homophobic-attack-phobia.

Although there was no overt attack, instead I found myself on the other side of a set of invisible boundaries created by the subtle institutional homophobia of my church, my workplace and my wider social circles.

In retrospect my ‘coming out’ was a self-inflicted crucifixion of the heterosexual ego handed to me by my early socialisation and falsely fashioned by me into my adolescent and early adulthood selves. For me the process involved a blatant rejection of any of the cosy comforts which continuing as a closeted guy capable of passing for straight might have afforded. So, easy acceptance in straight company, the freedom to display affection openly to my lover in public, the capacity to simply form a relationship, become engaged, marry, have children, be a conventional family. All this was the bathwater flushed down the plughole of my life at the tender age of 20. It was a political gesture. A statement that all of this was worth nothing compared with the freedom to give my gay sexuality its opportunity for full expression.

Yet 30 years on and I now find that with this blog I have created a secret gay anonymous persona, which I and only I can access! It started as a vestige of my original closet because although predominantly out to family, friends and colleagues, I found that in order to grow, to think to say, feel what I need to feel, communicate what I need to communicate, I must conceal my true identity because it just might jeopardise my employment.

This alter ego is me. It is creative, productive and enjoys the shadows.

If you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, maybe there’s something about the coming out process which, by means of ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’, you throw your solitary creative baby out with the proverbial bathwater!

Those with sexualities that are closeted may still have something magical that straight people also have by birthright- their inner, private selves that need to rest, to reflect, and to recreate in undisturbed solitude.

So if you’re going to ‘come out’ keep your sexuality separate from your soul. And if you’ve made the mistake of giving the world 'Access All Areas' privileges to your being then it’s time to re-invent a closet for yourself. But this time, since you’re designing it make sure that it’s nice and roomy with en suite facilities; give it a roof terrace and a lovely view. Oh and make sure there is easy access to the outside world so you can leave and re-enter on a whim!

For Queers-It’s a Mad World!

2009-07-04T10:15:00.005+01:00

I sat across the room from my North London psychotherapist at my first appointment and bravely asked what was her position with regard to LGBT issues.

“Ah, you should have no worries on that account my dear, she said, I treat you all exactly the same way that I treat my normal clients”

It was only on the journey back to Brighton that I stopped feeling pathetically grateful about this ostensibly benevolent stance and saw it for the patronising insult that it was!

They say what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Well, not necessarily.

Take an innocent LGBT soul. Plant it in a family ignorant about, or hostile towards, queer folk. Send it to a school where bullies can freely taunt and humiliate it. When its straight peers are taught spiritual values whilst being allowed to experiment sexually in adolescent relationships make sure that it feels excluded from access to a spiritual world and invalidated during it’s sexual awakening. When it finally makes its first faltering moves towards the stresses of adulthood and maybe requires some psychological help ensure that psychotherapists and mental health professionals have no diversity training and therefore no understanding of the lives and concerns of LGBT people. Where does a queer tortured soul turn?

Many would say that the adversity we have faced has given us the strength to exist as strange outsiders. That we have become capable of creating our own unique spiritual and therapeutic structures which contradict yet sustain and liberate mainstream culture. Maybe our own ‘woundedness’ fosters in us an ability to heal ourselves and our own kind.

But then again take a look at our communities. Give any other soul an emotionally abusive and invalidating life experience and you would fully expect an insecurely attached personality to emerge, either lacking in self esteem or with an overcompensated inflated ego, limping along in life with a clutch of co-dependent personal relationships and an unhealthy attitude to any or all of the following: food, body shape, exercise, sex drugs and alcohol. Ring any bells?

Is it any wonder that the recent ‘Count me in too’ Health Survey of LGBT folk in Brighton found that we’re all at a much higher risk than the general population for being hooked on drugs and booze!

What do we do about it? We need to take some responsibility for the formative experiences of our LGBT infants, children and adolescents. They are not in safe hands. Straight parents generally don’t know how to handle them, schools allow them to be bullied and churches torture their tiny minds encouraging them to be what they aren’t. We need to fight homophobic ignorance in families, schools and churches. We also need to insist that health workers and mental health workers in particular have undergone LGBT diversity training. Homophobia is alive and well outside of our cosy tolerant-ish gay ghettos and it is poisoning the healthy psychological development of future queer generations.

Maybe what doesn’t kill you can be so toxic that it messes with your head and makes you a lifelong psychological cripple. Maybe we just keep quiet about it and hope it will get better without too much fuss? It won't!

Email me:GaySocrates@gmail.com or google GaySocrates for my blog

[This is my column for the September 'Mental Health' edition of GScene Magazine]

27 Your Wardrobe of Self-Related Attitudes

2009-06-20T12:42:00.011+01:00

One of the more thought provoking blogs in my list of favorite GayWisdom Blogs is GayBanker.

I was reading his most recent entry a few days ago- a Dear GB column which is a regular agony uncle slot in which he provides impartial supportive advice to men facing problems coming out, getting boyfriends, etc, and invites readers to chip in with their own perspectives.

The predicament presented on this occasion was of a Gay guy who wants to find himself. The gist was that the guy was looking for 'The One', hadn't had a boyfriend for 2 and 1/2 years, and as the months were rolling by, although he was comfortable financially and socially, he was beginning to feel that he had nothing interesting to say. He was coming to feel he was boring and therefore, if 'The One' were to appear in his life he would be incapable of holding a conversation scintillating enough to capture the guy's imagination!

My initial reaction was to reflect on how Gay Culture often appears to offer so much by way of tinsel, glitter and sparkle yet after a decade or so of hedonistic pleasure it does all get to wear a bit thin and that's when there's a dawning realization that the commercial culture is spiritually bankrupt and the King isn't actually wearing any designer clothes after all!

GB's response was firstly to discourage him from obsessing over the idea that there was this perfect future partner heading his way and instead to see the business of working towards a long-term relationship more like going shopping for clothes......

Basically the idea was that you need to get out there 'trying on' relationships to see which ones suited you and which ones were disastrous. Once engaged in the process it was then possible to realize maybe something that initially appeared highly desirable might not ultimately fit into the wardrobe. On the other hand something that might not seem at the outset to be particularly enduring, might ultimately become a beloved favorite item that is worn year after year. GB also wondered if volunteering for some charity work might give the guy some meaning to his life.

I felt sorry for this guy in his emptiness and wondered just what might be able to help kick-start his soul into action.

I've been really impressed with the simple technique proposed by Byron Katie on her The Work website and I wondered if the technique could be applied to this guy's problem.

After thinking about it in the shower yesterday, I posted the following comment:

"It is amazing how powerful thoughts can be in affecting your reality. A lot of people have suggested that you should see a psychologist but the idea of sitting down and getting in touch with your emotions with a stranger may seem like your own worst nightmare. I'm also picking up some ambivalence about seeking help-maybe because of self esteem issues?

For those not ready for the big plunge into therapy there's a useful technique developed by Byron Katie-check out the website The Work.

I think it's very clever because it gives you a chance to do a bit of therapy on yourself if you're prepared to play around with your thoughts.

The technique helps you to challenge unhelpful thoughts/beliefs/attitudes.

Everyone seems to agree that the evidence from your email suggests that you aren't boring but for some reason you have come to believe that you are! By repeating and rehearsing it in your mind you can then create a self-fulfilling prophesy about yourself. 'I think I'm boring therefore I am...'

So can you focus on this attitude about yourself and ask yourself the following questions.

1 Is this thing I believe about myself true?

You might want to scribble down a page of response to that question

2 Can I absolutely know that it's true?

Write another page

3 How do I react, what happens when I believe that thought?

And another

4 Who would I be without that thought?

And another

The final bit of the technique is to turn around the statement and find three specific examples of the reversed statement ie. the opposites of 'nobody finds me interesting because I'm boring' can become

somebody finds me interesting.....

everybody find me interesting,,,,

I'm not boring.....

I find everybody boring..... etc

I like GBs analogy with finding a boyfriend and clothes shopping-you can try out lots of stuff but you eventually end up wearing gear that you really love. There's also a similarity between shopping for clothes and beliefs about yourself. You can shop around and try lots of different attitudes towards yourself on for size. If you're 'wearing' self attitude stuff that makes you feel totally miserable when you look at yourself in the mirror -it's time to get a new self attitude wardrobe and get the chance to see yourself in a completely different light. You just have to be brave enough to take someone shopping and be open to their advice about what might suit you!"

The basis of Katie's technique is that much of human suffering can be traced back to the negative beliefs we hold about the relationships we have with ourselves and others. Ultimately when we explore theses beliefs we will find that they lack a basis in reality. However we have often held onto the beliefs so long that they have come to define who we are. They become ingrained into our personality to such an extent that they feel real. However If we can recognize their arbitrariness and let the beliefs melt away, we can relieve ourselves of a very heavy burden!

I really hope the guy will try 'The Work' out because if he can drive a wedge between what he believes about himself and his true identity, which then has the option to believe the thoughts or disregard them, then he really is on the threshold of becoming a fascinatingly interesting guy. If he can trust that he is genuinely lovable then he is just a heartbeat away from finding The One.

Being brave enough to explore and subsequently express who you truly are is the stuff of deep spirituality- without the need for religion or voluntary work.

If none of this works I read a greeting card yesterday with advice which made me chuckle.......

Maintaining a positive attitude is so important because although it may not solve all your problems it will annoy the hell out of enough people to make it worth the effort!

:-)

Good Luck and here's to hoping you find your true self.

26 Serenity

2009-06-13T12:39:00.004+01:00

This week has marked for me the pinnacle of being perceived by some as an awkward old git!

I’ve been working in the same organisation now for getting on for 10 years and I’m starting to see the tricks and the sleights of hand that the organisation plays on the people who deserve its benefits but are getting short-changed.

I’ve been highlighting what I see as shoddy practice but the organisation doesn’t like it because it will involve spending more money than it has, and possibly going bust. It puts me in a dilemma because my role is to give impartial advice to all yet I’m finding that my advice is being increasingly disregarded. My obvious instinct is to move away and work in an organisation that will value my advice. Problem being that a new organisation may be more difficult for me to read and understand. Possibly my advice would be as disregarded in a new organisation.

I feel like an ancient oak tree in the grounds of an old estate. All the time that I’m not in the way of anything I can be admired and appreciated. However once there are plans for a building on my site or a by-pass road running right over me then I become a problem. Right now that’s what I’ve become.

There are big plans for developments that will save money but as these plans are being put in place people are loosing out and I’m one of the few people who can see it.

What do I do? Speak out and risk being disregarded to the point that whatever I say is automatically perceived as being unhelpful? Or do allow myself to be relocated away from the eye of the storm and survive to be appreciated by future generations?

I think I know the answer; I just have to keep on working at it!

I suppose it brings up the issue of ego and the very fundamental question ‘who am I’ and to what extent am ‘I’ forged from doing battle and prevailing or from resisting that temptation to fight so I may survive to fight on other days. It is the same calculation that those who attend AA meetings are encouraged to contemplate every week with the Serenity Prayer. Do I have the courage to fight those battles I can win? Do I have the serenity to accept those battles I’m destined to loose? Do I have the wisdom to know the difference?

The more we are able to see ourselves, not as individual characters in our own life soap operas, but as spiritual beings faced with ethical dilemmas, the more we have the freedom to act in ways which are balanced and true. Once we do this we no longer need to act in ways that are simply consistent with how we see our character or the ways others see it.

So the advice this week, my friends, is to build in a little bit of time away from the hurly-burly of life. Take a solitary walk somewhere you won’t bump into a friend, acquaintance or colleague. Just so you can be with yourself. And start to get to know your soul. Who is the true ‘you’? Not the ‘you’ you play for others. Not the ‘you’ others want or expect you to be. Maybe it’s a ‘you’ you are afraid to declare from fear of being rejected. But whoever the ‘you’ is, it is worth giving it some regular breathing space-some ‘me’ time- so when it comes to the big decisions it will be your soul which guides you through to where you need to be.

P.R.I.D.E. Time for a Radical Re-think!

2009-06-06T12:21:00.005+01:00

This is my GScene column for their PRIDE August edition:

I was brought up to be a good Catholic boy. Anything sexual outside of wedlock was sinful wrong and bad. Homosexuality was intrinsically disordered. Lust was one of the seven deadly, unforgivable sins but so also was Pride along with Gluttony, Greed, Envy, Wrath and one which I can’t remember now. In fact Pride was considered to be the deadliest of all the sins.

I’ve had a great time over the years challenging, dismantling, and then reassembling my moral framework to accommodate the truth of who I am. I’m now a big fan of ‘do unto others as you would have done unto yourself’. I have come to understand that just being who I am can’t be wrong as long as I avoid stuff which involves hurting or causing grief to others or myself. I’ve worked out that doing anything to excess is generally unbalanced and ultimately doesn’t suit me, so getting obsessed over sex, food, wealth, wanting to possess other peoples’ stuff etc is worth avoiding. The seven deadly sins have actually turned out to be a useful moral compass for me.

However as I was in the early stages of coming out in the oppressive 70s I did really like the concept of ‘Gay Pride’. By the age of 20 my religious heritage had succeeded in making me feel dirty, dysfunctional, perverted, and ashamed of my sexual orientation. Pride was a powerful antidote to all of that. But as the years have rolled by and the oppression has melted away like the memory of last night’s bad dream, the idea of being proud about my sexuality does seem now to be a bit bizarre. I don’t feel proud of my feet or even my big toe for that matter! Why pride about this other feature of who I am?

Talking with friends about all this during last year’s PRIDE festivities we decided that the position we find ourselves in these days has parallels with the women’s liberation movement. In the 50s and 60s a growing army of strong women emerged. reacting against their unequal treatment by western society which, thy argued was unfair and unacceptable. Feminists generally won their battles and protections against unequal treatment passed to the statute books. Most women then returned to being women and many fewer women would today describe their identity as being predominantly feminist. Feminism was instrumental in the history of female emancipation. In a similar way Gay Liberation and Gay Pride have been instrumental in the history of our emancipation. But as concepts they are beginning to sound just a little tired and past their sell-by date.

If anyone on the Brighton PRIDE committee is listening out there, is there any chance of dropping the PRIDE and let’s just have a Brighton Diversity Festival? If you must cling onto PRIDE for a little bit longer lets have it as P.R.I.D.E. standing for the Promotion of the Right for Individuals to be Diverse in the Extreme!

Pride has connotations of arrogance and feeling superior to others. It doesn’t make sense any more in a largely accepting wider society and is actually somewhat mildly offensive to them. I’m all in favour of Brighton’s queer community supporting each other in being who we need to be so let’s develop a festival which will help us all to focus on homo/transphobia. Simply sitting pretty full of pride doesn’t hit the mark any more!

25 Vintage GaySocrates!

2009-05-23T20:16:00.008+01:00

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!

2009-05-09T13:14:00.006+01:00

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

2009-05-05T22:07:00.002+01:00

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!

2009-05-02T12:48:00.007+01:00

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.

23 Reflections on Men in Tutus

2009-04-25T14:07:00.006+01:00

I went to the ballet a few weeks ago. I’m not a big fan of the ballet and I’ve only ever previously seen one ballet-Giselle at Sadlers Wells theatre when I was a young and impressionable 21 year-old on his first gay date with an older and more sophisticated guy. It didn’t appeal to me at the time and the whole stuffy upper class atmosphere didn’t do it for me. However the ballet on this occaision was a whole different kettle of fish!
Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo is a troupe of some 20 guys in tutus putting on a show which was in equal parts accomplished artistry and comical spoofery. Just to imagine a hairy bloke in a tutu is comical! And this performance fitted with a tradition of men dressing as women in the theatre- early actors, pantomime dames, drag queens and so on. But the very high calibre of the dancing athleticism took this genre to a whole new level.
It got me thinking about how gay men are generally constrained by societal gender norms to behave, think and feel in predefined ways which they generally, at one level or another, ultimately disregard but for which they pay the price of invalidation. The world of ballet similarly expects male dancers to move and perform as stereotypical males and female dancers to move and perform as stereotypical females. This dance troupe showed what was possible when feminine acting men [note- I’m not using the word effeminate] push themselves into female dancing roles. The effect for me was a celebration of what has been referred to as the Third Gender-neither male nor female but an equally exciting and authentic gender capable of excellence in performing either performance role no less validly.
Sadly the spoofery had to be part of the performance because, I suppose, as a society we aren’t ready to accept men dressing and performing as women unless it is done as a joke. Sadly, still, there are only two boxes to tick on the form asking about gender. Growing up as gay men there are generally only two types of gender role stereotypes for us to identify with –Straight Acting Bloke or Camp Queen.
However there were moments during that ballet performance, mixed in with all the campery, buffoonery and drag-queenery, when there emerged a powerful, capable, creative, disciplined, athletic, professional presence; mesmerising and enchanting!
Now wouldn’t that be a worthwhile stereotype for us to get to see more of around the place?
Let’s see more of Men in Tutus! Let’s stop the impulse to smirk, and instead, let us appreciate creative beauty in all its forms wherever and however it manifests itself!

True Words of Wisdom from Lucid Exposition!

2009-04-21T16:54:00.004+01:00

Check out Make the Dream Sweet-or Wake Up! if you want to make your life better!