Come out of the Shadows and Shine!

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?

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?

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!

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!

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?

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

“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

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

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

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?