Thank Heaven for Our Elders!

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

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"

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!

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]