Slouching Toward Dystopia

 This is not the cheeriest thing I've ever posted here. 

In George Orwell's 1984, the mottos on the towering government headquarters that loom over the city of London are 

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

...slogans that more or less encapuslate the spin that the Trump administration has put for the past six months on American public discourse.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale seemed, when it was published forty years ago, an impossible theocratic nightmare. That is, until the Christian nationalists came out of the woodwork, a packed Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, natalists started bemoaning falling birthrates, and Moms for Liberty got down to the business of banning books from libraries.

It's sheer fantasy to imagine we've reached rock bottom. 

Insidiously, we've often been lured into thinking that the internet is the great leveller that democratizes public discourse, gives everyone a voice, and is essential to any means of resistance. Certainly, it's vastly extended the possibilities of connection for LGBTQ people. When we can't find each other down the street, we've found each other online. This blog, which I started fifteen years ago, is one small case in point. To my amazement, it's been visited nearly 300,000 times.

But what the internet has done for us, ultimately, is a sideshow. We don't control it. To a very real degree it's already controlling us. Increasingly, we imagine our lives as unthinkable, or at least vastly diminished, without access to it. What we've come to think of as a tool for liberation and protest can easily turn out to be a mechanism of surveillance. With the rise of out-of-control AI, we're facing  further erosion of critical thinking, and an accelerated landslide of disinformation masquerading as settled truth. In 1984, every home features a surveillance screen that broadcasts Big Brother directly into the living room. Uh, dude, we're more or less there.

Will reactionary forces come after blogs like this? Political advocacy websites? The web presence of community organizations? Online information about Pride festivals and NGOs that serve sexual minorities? 

There's no turning back from the transformation of information technology over the last forty years. But it's time to ask: if unconstrained, grass-roots access to the online world ended--and that's hardly unthinkable at this point--how can we continue to find each other? How can we go on creating community? How can we keep each other alive, and safe, and flourishing?

I have no solid answer to propose. But I know it's time to ask the question. How do we build community, how do we connect with each other, how do we preserve and foster queer men's culture, how do we sustain the memory of our past struggles and victories, apart from online access? If we were to lose it, how do we imagine going on? 

Because going on we will, and must.

The gay and lesbian movements didn't build themselves online. Amidst the Lavender Scare of the 1950's, the Mattachine Society met in small, independent local cells modelled on the organizational tactics of the Communist Party, of which founder Harry Hay had formerly been a member. Early lesbian 'zines were typed a few carbon copies at a time. Leaflets and phone trees spread word of gatherings and protests. Nobody at Stonewall was texting from a cell phone.

I'm not suggesting that we can simply return to those dogged, against-all-odds analog tactics from sixty or seventy years ago. But we can witness in them the resilience and resourcefulness that we manifested at another time when the arc of history showed no immediate sign of bending towards justice. We can find inspiration for the courage and determination that we may have to muster once again in a neofascist America.

Noble Silence

(Friday, July 18)

At the San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm these few days I'm here, I eat breakfast amidst a community sitting in silence. I haven't received such a gift in a long time, immersed in the sweetness of the experience.

The silence isn't an absence. It's the womb of possibility. I'm invited to protect it for the sake of everyone else in the room. They protect it for one other, and for me, whom they've never met and likely won't see again. We all protect it for the sake of the silence itself.

As I sit here with a dear friend, I look out the window to the trunk of a coastal redwood, its bark a deeply scored record of decades and centuries. Its life unhampered by the prison of identity. Its roots buried deeply and invisibly in the earth, reaching out to communicate wordlessly with the roots of other living beings.

Contemplating its trunk, I remember my grandmother living on the edge of poverty in the 1920's and 30's with a family of seven children, yet somehow scraping together donations for conservation of the redwoods that she never saw.

This tree's roots somehow reach out to embrace my grandmother, to migrate and transmute her life into its life. She's become the tree, rooted here just outside the room where I'm starting my day, 2500 miles from where she's buried. Visible only because of the silence. 

When communal silence is reframed--when it no longer seems an arbitrary discipline but instead something we all tend lovingly and reverently together--a space of unpredictable magic opens up.

Finding the Language

I want to live in the faith that we're on the verge of something new among men creating erotic ritual community togoether.

It's been building for decades: among Radical Faeries, at queer retreat centres, in groups like the Billies and Gay Spirit Visions. On the rare website like Bateworld that feels like genuine online community. On blogs like this. Sometimes we draw on the resources of existing traditions; sometimes we create new forms and structures more or less from scratch. The emerging variety is wondrous. 

At some point, experimentation starts coalescing into continuity. Repetition creates familiar patterns and confirms expectations. We move toward consensus about what brings us together, what we value, what we reverence. Every time we gather, actions become more familiar. Every time we gather, what they mean to us changes. What they mean to you may be different from what they mean to me. The ritual is the container in which all this can flourish spontaneously--essential, but not an end it itself. 

None of it requires complete agreement. Our sense of belonging is based on things we do together, not necessarily on all of us understanding what we do in the same way.

Ritual is like a language. The objects we use in ritual are like its vocabulary: fire, water, earth; food and drink; bells, candles, incense, ritual garments; images, altars, mandalas. How we use them, what we do with them, follows a grammar that we perfect with practice. Formulas of greeting and beginning, formulas of completion and departure. Rituals of initiation; of membership in community; of gratitude; of mourning; of renunciation; of remembrance.

Before any such language is there to be learned, it has to be made up and then consolidated in the first place. This has always been true, in the case of every spriitual tradition, no matter how ancient, no matter how established. Now, it's emerging among men who feel called to reverence the sacred, transformative power of our erotic pleasure and of our desire for one another. We've been inventing the language for a long time now. We're more than ready to speak it to one another.

The internet has helped us find one another more easily, but the internet is not the magic. The magic is what we do--and did long before the electronic age. The magic is what we do in and with our bodies--together, weaving the webs of connection that transcend the isolation of the false self.

Yes, Over the Top. And I Love It

The trenchant satire of Aleksander Constantinoropolous, aka Virgin Monk Boy on Substack:

Modern wellness culture has achieved the impossible: it has fused quantum mechanics with kale.

What once began as a sincere desire to feel less like a walking cortisol ad has now metastasized into a full-blown industrial complex with the aesthetic of a Whole Foods altar and the pricing of a small liberal arts college.

As a celibate monk who once accidentally biohacked his pineal gland by eating expired tofu, I feel qualified—nay, spiritually compelled—to address this.

Dear seeker, it’s time we talked about Rainbow Diets and Chakra Cleanses.

Or as I like to call it:
“Late-stage capitalism dressed in hemp pants.”

A People United Will Never Be Defeated

 Toronto Pride, as recorded by the Toronto Star

The Light Shines in the Darkness

 

And the darkness has not put It out.

On Behalf of Our Fathers

This week following Father's Day, I know that some queer men have never experienced anything less than love and unconditional acceptance from their fathers. I rejoice for them. And at the same time, I'm somewhere between incredulous, wistful, and envious as hell.

Each of us has his own story. Our fathers abandoned us for a life elsewhere. Or were explosive, abusive drunks. Or were quiet, emotionally crippled drunks. Or told us to stop acting like goddam pansies. Or were themselves so shamed by their own bodies and desires they couldn't reassure us about our own.  Or furtively imposed their own same-sex attractions on us. Or told us we were going straight to hell if we went on experimenting with the boy next door. Or...

My own story isn't representative of anyone but me. My father was an obsessive-compulsive binge drinker, a hollowed-out emotional wreck who destroyed himself before he'd made it to 64. It's been over sixty years since he died (on Mother's Day, for God's sake) when I was eight. I've spent most of my adult life piecing together a fragmentary, indirect, conflicted relationship with him. Like reverse-engineering an onion one layer at a time, from the inside out. 

So it was a huge grace when, over a decade ago now, I experienced a flood of compassion for him unlike anything that had ever come alive in me before.  During a journalling exericse at a weeklong intensive program, I revisited the usual litany of ways he failed me. And then: thanks to a constellation of circumstances I won't rehearse here, I suddenly thought, my poor father, and spent the next fifteen minutes quietly sobbing. And knew what I had to do. I needed to say Kaddish. Non-Jew that I am.

If you're not Jewish or familiar with Jewish practice, the Kaddish is the prayer you say in memory of one you mourn, and especially in memory of parents.  The most observant say it every day for a year, and then annually on the Yahrzeit--the anniversary of the death. But notably, the Mourner's Kaddish never mentions the deceased. It glorifies God, prays for the speedy arrival of God's kingdom, and voices hope that peace from above will descend on us and on all. This peculiar disconnect between the content of the prayer and the emotionally charged intention with which it's spoken is a source of discomfort to many who fulfill their responsibility to recite it: they feel denied the chance to remember one they loved in all his or her individuality.

But oddly, in keeping the deceased out of it, the prayer can become a container big enough for the conflicted feelings you may have toward the dead. You don't have to wax warm and fuzzy toward the person you're mourning. You're not obliged to feel any one thing as opposed to something else. Instead, you speak this on behalf of the dead in the presence of the Holy. The deceased is representative of humanity. You're saying it for him. You're saying it for yourself. You're saying it for all humankind. If what's really going through your head as you pray is that the deceased was an empty emotional shell, or an abusive creep who made your life hell when your were five, there's room for that, and you don't have to fake the saccharine greeting-card sentiments that characterize (for instance, in my own experience) so many Midwestern Protestant funerals.

That unexpected space to feel whatever you're feeling can become fertile ground for the post-mortem healing of relationships. If you say Kaddish repeatedly, you'll experience it differently every time you do so. Your feelings will change over time, from one day to the next, from one month to the next, from one year to the next. 

All this to unpack my intuitive flash, in the moment that I softened towards a man I can most of the time feel very little towards at all, who died over half a century ago. I'm sometimes still bemused that a nice Lutheran boy from the Midwest felt an unhesitating impulse to borrow a Jewish prayer to mourn his father. Saying it linked me to my partner in his Judaism, as well as to the leader of the workshop--a man who over the span of several years had given me more of what one would hope to get from a father than most others in my life.

And then there's the very fact that in borrowing somebody else's tradition, we can set aside toxic associations that our own spiritual heritage has often accrued for us as queer men. We take what we need, in ways that might not always win the approval of the keepers of the tradition(s) we pilfer. But it's not only that my appropriation of the prayer might offend some, because I don't have a right to it by heritage. 

It's that I recited it  in front of a five-foot Phallus in a flowering meadow at Easton Mountain in upstate New York. Standing before this symbol of linkage between my spiritual and erotic life as a gay man, laying hands and forehead on it at the end of the prayer, I contemplated my father's woundedness as a share in the wounds all men sustain. 

In the midst of a circle that represented the infinitely fertile womb of the Mother Goddess, I meditated on the sexuality that links my father to me in a continuum with the embodied, desirous experience of all men--a message I desperately needed to absorb from him as a boy but never could. And then found myself giving thanks for the miracle of his orgasm that made my life possible. Giving thanks with my own orgasm, my own ejaculation splashing onto the charred wooden column which at that moment offered reassurance of the connection between us.

I expect to go on doing the work of repairing my relationship to my father for the rest of my life. Praying a very queer Kaddish for my father, and on behalf of my father, changed nothing of that, and changed everything.

GLORIFIED AND SANCTIFIED BE THE HOLY ONE'S GREAT NAME, THROUGHOUT THE WORLD CREATED ACCORDING TO  THE DIVINE WILL. ESTABLISHED BE GOD'S KINGDOM IN YOUR LIFETIME AND DURING YOUR DAYS, AND WITHIN THE LIFE OF ALL HUMANKIND, SPEEDILY AND SOON, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY GOD'S GREAT NAME BE BLESSED FOREVER AND TO ALL ETERNITY.

BLESSED AND PRAISED, GLORIFIED AND EXALTED, EXTOLLED AND HONORED, ADORED AND LAUDED BE THE NAME OF THE HOLY ONE, BLESSED BE THAT ONE BEYOND ALL BLESSINGS AND HYMNS, PRAISES AND CONSOLATIONS THAT ARE EVER SPOKEN IN THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY THERE BE ABUNDANT PEACE FROM HEAVEN AND LIFE FOR US AND FOR ALL MEN, AND LET US SAY AMEN.

MAY GOD WHO CREATES PEACE IN THE CELESTIAL HEIGHTS CREATE PEACE FOR US AND FOR ALL THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

In Gratuitous Praise

 Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929)

And Now for Something Completely Different

The Cloister of Norwich Cathedral

After spinning my wheels forever, I've taken the plunge into self-publishing the novel I started writing over twenty years ago. Palmetto Publishing will distribute The Ram in the Thicket: A Novel of Medieval Norwich, in print-on-demand and e-book formats. I'm hoping some independent brick-and-mortar stores might also take it up. 

What does an historical novel have to do with this blog? First of all, it's about people struggling for spiritual integrity in a complex, flawed world; about the triumph of love over dogma; and about the survival of oppressed minorities in the face of abusive power. And there's a thread of homoerotic attachment between two of the supporting characters. (But don't get your hopes up for a steamy sex scene.)

I'm a retired professor of medieval literature. So I'm used to writing books that nobody reads and that don't make any money.  I'll be happy if my story gets into the hands of a few hundred people. I'll be delighted if it reaches more. 

Ahead of the book launch, I've just published the first instalment of my new Substack--Imagining the World of Julian of Norwich. I'll post further pieces there about the story's historical background, along with reflections on the essential role of imagination in all knowledge of the past.

I hope you'll follow this link to my Substack. If you do, please consider leaving a comment there, and please consider subscribing. It's free, and there won't be a quiz.  If you know someone who might also be interested, please share the link.

Enshrining the Household Gods

Yesterday, our seasonal arrival at the "summer place." There's enormous privilege in having two homes, one in a city I've always loved, and one in a place imbued with its own green magic.

Unpacking takes only an hour or two after our long-habitual transitions. But most important this morning was setting up the garden shrine dedicated to God Knows Who. 

Placing the statue of Ganesh on the grid of a few loose bricks. The stones for the Four Directions. The bronze cross I salvaged from a house that was about to be demolished. The Shiva Lingam. 

God Knows Why I'm paying reverence here to God Knows Who. 

What I do know: when I'm lighting a cone of incense or a cube of camphor in one of the little unglazed clay lamps, I come into a state of integration. When I ring the brass temple bell that a beloved brother gifted to me last summer, my mind, my heart, my cock, my soul all work together in this little act of reverence toward the One Who Hears. I'm whole. I'm present. I'm comforted.

All I Need to Know

It's raining. Slowly and steadily. We need it--it's been a dry two weeks at a time when leaves need water to burgeon. And all I can say is, thank you, God.

Does it depend on what we mean by God? I don't think so. Maybe it depends on Who we mean by God. And the answer that I believe is wired into our souls is, who we mean, is You. That's all I know, and all I need to know.

A You who has a thousand names, but no name comprehends Him/Her/Them. Who is beyond our limited notions of human self. But who envelops us, completely. The Womb of Creation. The Sacred Staff of Life's Longing for Itself. The Luminous Void from which all things arise. If those metaphors speak to you. And if they don't, go out and find the ones that do.

It's Just a Penis

Partway through Captain Fantastic (2016, dir. Matt Ross), off-the-grid anarchist/socialist father Ben (played by Viggo Mortensen) and his six kids have emerged from their isolated, utopian life in the deep wilderness of Washington state, to drive to his wife's distant funeral in a repurposed school bus. After an overnight at a campground, he stands nude in the door of the bus with his morning coffee, to the shock of an elderly couple passing by.

"It's just a penis," he says in response. "Every human male has one."

But to be fair, it's not just a penis. It's Viggo Mortensen's penis.

Leaving that significant objection aside, "It's just a penis" is worth contemplating.

Feminist theory in the '80's and '90's was deeply influenced by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. His work is hugely and willfully cryptic, but here's somethig he said that's worth thinking about, especially if you're a queer man trying to live authentically in your erotic body--and at the same time putting as much space as you can between yourself and the toxic bullshit of the manosphere. (Jake Hawley, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, yes. I'm talking about you, and all your too-numerous friends.)

So here goes: the Phallus is not the penis.

For Lacan, the Phallus is a construct, not anatomy. It's conceptual. It signifies power, mastery, self-containment, sufficiency. It's the guardian of the patriarchal order. In other words, it's everything the manosphere dudes wanna believe about themselves.

Lacan sometimes calls it "The Name of the Father." With capital letters to make it scarier. (Thank you, Judith Butler, for that line.) 

But it can only do its job if you don't see it for what it really is--a hollow idea that bears very little relation to the vulnerable life you live in your body. 

It's a little like Toto pulling aside the curtain, and Oz, the Great and Powerful, turns out to be a bumbling old guy who's trying to hold it together. Or as Lacan liked to say, the Phallus has to remain veiled in order to maintain its authority.

Otherwise, what lurks behind the idea of the Phallus turns out to be just a penis. An organ that refuses to live up to the insane expectations that toxic masculinity places on it--sometimes by veiled implication, sometimes by smarmy, explicit frat-house boasting. (Which brings to mind a certain Access Hollywood tape.) 

It doesn't get hard on demand. Or at all. Or gets hard when you least want it to. It leaks, sometimes at seriously inappropriate moments. It's always changing. (Just look closely at your own for five minutes if you need to be convinced.) In short--it's not the reliable source of masculine authority that patriarchy needs it to be in order to go on convincing everybody to fall in line. 

As I see it, that's why queer men's sexuality is such a threat to the "dominant fiction" (thank you, Kaja Silverman, for that phrase) that guys should rule the world. Maybe it's why, in the first flush of gay liberation, in 1971, Charles Shively  called cocksucking an act of revolution. Maybe it's also part of why the the right has pivoted to transphobia as its go-to strategy for whipping up moral panic. If a trans woman can declare that the penis she was born with doesn't define her; if a trans man can lay claim to the penis nestled at the top of his mangina--then patriarchy is, indeed, not long for this world. 

And to those of us who identify as cis-gendered gay or bi or otherwise queer men, I say: love your penis. As it is, not as you think it ought to be. It's a source of joy. It's also a reminder that our lives are precious, unpredictable, and transitory. Celebrate your penis. Look after your penis. It's not a tool. It's not a weapon. It's the exposed tip of your heart. It's the wand of your soul. It's your ladder to heaven. It's your antenna transmitting its messages to your brothers, and receiving theirs. It's the key to your inner temple. It's your taproot into the earth. It's the wish-fulfilling jewel between your legs.

This, too, is an act of revolution.

Photo by Andrew Graham

In the Octave of Easter

The Resurrection of Christ, Graydon Parrish

Sanctifier of our flesh, risen from the tomb, the forces of shame and repression scatter before you. Sacred Cock of Jesus, be for us the ladder that connects earth to heaven.