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]

27 Your Wardrobe of Self-Related Attitudes

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

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!

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!

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gay Community? Virtually Gone? Or Gone Virtual!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do we have in common now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gay Wisdom Handed down the Generations from GaySocrates

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

24 Dance the Dance of the Gay Shaman Youth!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23 Reflections on Men in Tutus

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!

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