Chapter
3: MY SECOND COMING: 1973-1992
E-commerce
links for hardcopy of book containing this chapter (DADT 1997). The hardcopy text is slightly more explicit
in a few places.
Narrative summary link
for this chapter
See
Consolidated footnotes,
including notes added since original publication
Note: This file is slightly
edited for compliance with the 1998 Child OnLine Protection Act (which,
however, is now enjoined). For details see adult access.
See Section_01 "Shaved Mountains"
See Section_02 "Straight"
See Section_03 "A 'Free' Gay Talk Group"
See Section_04
"The
See Section_04B "Stay Home a Bit More"
See Section_05 "To Men of Earth"
See Section_06 "What We Don't Hear About Religion and Homosexuality"
See Section_07 "AIDS Is Seen as a Result of Too Much Freedom"
See Section_08 "A Paradox of Meaning"
See Section_09 "Real Families and Potential Idols"
Shaved Mountains
My throat felt
funny, numb, just as it once had in second grade. I had to swallow to stay in
control. I just didn’t know what to say. Right in front of me, as a former
roommate’s Chevy Nova chauffeured me around a hairpin turn on
“So this
is your strip-mining,” the math graduate student screamed. He had once
phlegmatically characterized his pursuit of a Ph.D. as “giving it a
whirl.”
I had
grown up knowing that the most imposing mountains were “out West,” where my
father had thought I should spend my life and raise a family. The
While most
Washington-area residents are still content to satisfy themselves with trips
along
These
lofty horizons were vulnerable, fragile, and expendable. Real people lived
here, and people constituted a threat. The land was needed for income, to raise
relatively self-sufficient families; and these requirements were much more
basic than mere aesthetics. So people mined coal, both by excavation (with
shortening of the lives of the men who did this “real job”), and by shaving
down the ridges with their draglines, their Big Muskies.
Shortly
after I left the Army, newspapers had printed “rumors of war” regarding the
stripmining problem, and had claimed that eventually earth-moving “forklifts”
would be able to cast away 2000 feet of overburden to get at our fuel. A
congressman from
A good friend,
“Mark,” was already “gone.” Friday had been his last day at my workplace, still
the main source of social contacts. Before driving out to the mountains to
celebrate “The Last Day of Mark,” an independence day for me, I had consorted
with him and his other buddies in some suburban pool-hall. Mark’s body was in
good form, despite (at 26 years old) a
year of “responsibility” for his
“instant family” through his third wife.
Family life, with the two kids bobbing on the steps of his rented townhouse,
deprived him of the time he used to take for weights and
----
About ten
months before, in July 1971, I had desperately scampered down an eroded ravine,
as I carried a little Instamatic of contraband snapshots I had taken of acid
lakes and hollows hardly as shocking as the countryside around Norton and
Clintwood. I fell. A red pickup truck aimed at me. This, until now, was
probably the only time in my life I thought my life was in danger, or at least
that I could really get arrested. After all, the repeated signs read, “No
Trespassing.”
I was no
dedicated reformer yet. I cared about what my countryside “looked like.” I
cared little if I incurred local resentment thorough my voyeurism.
I got off
easy. Douglas Coal Company trapped me inside the smoke-filled cab of the
pickup, gave me a forced ninety-minute
tour of the strip-mine back country, and goaded me to take pictures of all the
hydroseeding equipment, and backfilling. Twenty years later, the ridges really
would be reclaimed and grass-covered, and look like green Mayan pyramids.
I drove
home self-satisfied, even satiated, because I had confronted the system and
chiseled off a souvenir.
---
I can
fast-forward to a winter freeze frame, December 1972, after I had spent a
middle-class day taking a
I was
attending because I “liked” the founder, a guest at a Sierra Club meeting. He
had articulated the gradual demise of public transportation, while people who
couldn’t “afford cars” lost access to their jobs. Later, he would attack the notion of “profit”
as a morally valid human motive. His girlfriend was reeling off, “why do we
have to have capitalism?” They babbled about how people got rich by exploiting
workers, blacks, women, and “gays.” We
were all oppressed. Someone had been called “a girl” by her boss, to her face. “How many people in this room make over $5000
a year?” the girlfriend demanded, without the authority of Jane Fonda. I raised
my hand, not exactly in shame. For being part of the “system,” I was making
$14K. I couldn’t possibly have been earning it. But I could be of more use to
any liberation movement if I made enough money to take care of myself first.
They
planned their protests, starting silly little pranks such as a “lettuce
boycott.” They started going over their platform. One provision was a maximum
legal income for anyone at $50,000 a year. The “people” would confiscate the
rest. There would be only a “single tax,” a national income tax; all other
taxes, especially sales and property taxes, were intrinsically regressive.
Lotteries were seen as the most regressive “tax” of all, since they fed on
mentally weaker (as well as poorer) people. Then the rhetoric got nastier.
First, they talked about forcing a national constitutional convention. Then
they said stuff like, “we will not hesitate to use any means available to
achieve justice.” I asked if that meant
violence. I was not reassured.
Plotting
to overthrow the government by force is still a crime.
That
“party” would mark my closest approach to “left-wing” radicalism. The
“capitalists” raped the environment with unreclaimed strip-mining and, like the
Army, held some poor people like migrant farm workers or coal miners in
essentially forced servitude. It had
always seemed government should be expected to do something about this, because
these situations amount to violence against people. But, come on, was I part of
“the problem” because I lived in reasonable comfort?
The
political Left is so moralistic!
Straight
I was
going down some moderately dangerous paths in my renewed search for “meaning,”
for ideals to believe in and the friends that would follow. William and Mary
was a dim memory, a red dwarf. I would never let that happen again. I wouldn’t
throw that away.
But there
had evolved these “crushes” on “straight” friends, such as Mark. I would feel
more “alive” when around them, or just thinking about them. These attachments
developed as perhaps useful, if self-limited, exercises in sensitivity and
emotion, at first for their own sakes. I would cling to these pals, and
suddenly construct the freedom and adventure for myself that I had admired in
them.
I had not
quite recognized how I was using many workplace colleagues as foils, how I
conversed with them compulsively out of my own need for attention. This had been
always been common under “the system.” People could be friendly, and even
honest when it came to business transactions; but to anyone who was not
“family,” I sensed I really did not matter too much, whatever my hidden gifts.
Since I had left high school and the dorm at W&M, good friends had vanished
through a process of attrition; they now had wives and children, and moved
away. It seemed when they got married they were captured and carted away,
almost drafted; they knew they were needed for the rest of their lives, whereas
I enjoyed no such reassurance. They would hint I needed to find my own purpose
the same way: meet the “right” girl, marry, produce little Boushkas. Sometimes,
I did envy their home commitments as paradoxically freeing. To avoid facing
feelings of desertion, I would split and wander the wilderness myself.
I had
tried to deal with this by dating girls, without really (beyond a most
superficial curiosity) wanting (or feeling turned on by) girls. I guess I
looked upon them as James Fenimore Cooper’s “females,” about whom I had
hand-written a term paper in junior English. Like Tchaikovsky, I imagined the
validation of “marriage” without a wife.
At most, “family” sounded like a domain or accomplishment, not a reason
to live.
The first
baby step was joining an
I had met
Melanie at church, and one early autumn day simply made a cold call, to have a
date to one of the singles’ club’s tacky Friday night dances. She accepted. The
first date, I picked her up at her parents’ modest frame home in Silver Spring,
Md.; and, even though I was taking her to dinner, her parents wanted to make me
a sandwich! She picked the restaurant, a local Holiday Inn, for the feast that
I would pay for, for the “irrational” purpose of showing I could “provide” (we
did not go “Dutch”). I drove her around the Beltway to the Friday night dances,
and saw she really enjoyed the Virginia Reel with its allemandes, and the
square dances with their partners and corners. Much of the crowd, however,
practiced gender segregation: shop-talking, relatively young men were
uncomfortable chasing older, probably divorced (or abandoned) idle-looking
women, none of them sexual princesses and many of whom would never marry again.
We were all tormented by an obnoxious, bellicose, ornery, potbellied bartender,
who screamed and laid down a smoke screen with his cigar.
One of my
co-workers mocked my need to join a singles club. I replied that I needed some
less pagan, money-changer-oriented places to meet (girls).
I took Melanie out several
more times, once to the visionary gay British film, Sunday Bloody Sunday (and I deliberately annotated my walking
closer to the street as I escorted her from the theater). I took her to my
I dated
one other woman, a legal secretary, and once got to see her pad, just a tiny
basement efficiency. She, too, expected to be supported one day. The “future
wives” I was attracting seemed to have few preferences; they were obviously
more interested in my stability than in ability to provide excitement. Indeed,
my early male-pattern baldness was probably an indirect green light, a sign of
successful survival through the weeding out of early manhood. Still, after a
few months, the dating simply stopped. It had nowhere to go.
A “Free” Gay Talk Group
On
I had,
however, journeyed a long way from my old perception of “overt homosexuals” as
pitiable, rejected old men giving testimonials, their faces hidden and voices
scrambled, for black-and-white television news specials.[1] Just the previous summer, I had taken a trip
to
I needed a
main event, a ritual to reaffirm my faith in my own (still officially “latent”)
homosexuality. I saw a one-liner for a “gay talk group” on the
I
celebrated my “second coming”¾my anticipation of exploring
intimacy and perhaps sexual defrocking¾with a bit of a retreat. I
made a business trip to
Shortly
thereafter, I would tell my father in the 8th Avenue Howard Johnson’s when he
made a post-retirement business trip to
My NIH
patient records, however, contain the following startling passage about that
first-tell with the Dean at William and Mary, and the lingering attitudes of my
parents. “As mother expresses it, ‘Bill was man enough to tell the Dean he
thought he was a latent homosexual, and explained the fact he had arrived at
this conclusion after reading a book in high school.’ At this point, Mr.
Boushka interjects anxiously that this episode is over, that Bill was mistaken,
and that (the first psychiatrist) and their minister had assured them that Bill
was not a homo. I mentioned that if Bill had problems in this area, the
healthier thing would be to tackle it rather than to evade it. Mrs. Boushka
agreed, but Mr. Boushka insisted on dismissing the subject.”[2]
That is, my mother had virtually accepted that session with the Dean as my
“coming out”; but I hadn’t looked at that incident this way until now! The government wanted to have it both ways:
to exploit the sexuality of young men, and then to tell the public to “drop the
subject.”
I had
reached the age of 29 without any substantive, physically intimate experience
my whole life. I thought I had come to know psychological intimacy that last
year in high school, including the following summer¾a “first coming” that would melt down at
William and Mary. I had awakened on a bright, late-winter Saturday morning with
the sun streaming though the venetian blinds, sheltered in my own garden
apartment for the first time, with my own car outside, at 26, now old-man
enough to be exempt from the draft. I had lived at “home.” In the Army, I had lived in the barracks even
if I had stayed out of the Bay. In graduate school, I had stayed in the dorm,
on campus. Just being “my own boss” had been a novelty, and now I guarded my
personal independence jealously.
The
“You have an
excellent opportunity to use your homosexuality,” Dean Hannotte counseled me
one weekday evening in April 1973 as we talked in a cozy East Village
apartment, which looked more like a library than a residence. It even sported a
table chess set with playable,
I had seen
the right ad in the Village Voice,
something like, “homosexuality is more than sex.” I could go to a new social center on
Soon, I
would take a new job in
Many
nights I would step down into the basement “loft,” cheerfully carpeted and
painted in oranges and yellows, with chairs arranged in a circle for talk
sessions and a kitchenette in the back. A “secret” passageway led to a second
room for simultaneous counseling sessions.
Several nights a week, various Center students facilitated Open Talk
Groups. The Center sponsored a male nude drawing class, an acting class, and,
for a while, a creative writing class. Saturday nights, each week reached a
climax with the pot-luck supper, an incredible spread containing many of Paul’s
unusual dishes, like chicken aspic, which he and his pupils spent entire
Saturdays preparing. “Homosexual,” as opposed to “gay” or “lesbian,” was the
Center’s way of describing a deviant aspiring to personal growth.
Paul had
been self-publishing his ideas in a number of didactic books, the most
important of which is Homosexuality, The Psychology of the Creative Process
(1972).[3] Paul organizes his material into a highly
structured message, with sections called “The Nature of Polarity,”[4]
“The Psychological Defense,” and “The Creative Process.” His writing style
consists of alternating paragraphs precisely stating and expanding his
principles from “feminine” (roughly
speaking, introverted) and “masculine”
(extroverted) viewpoints. His prose balances itself as if it were verse. He
speaks of “men” generically, without the political correctness of inclusive
language. He superimposes over his
notions about the cultural and psychological significance of homosexuality a
determination to use the scientific method to fully explore human nature and to
develop, in a grassroots, communal setting, a more human world. He gives no references or footnotes; he
writes naked truth developed using his own inner resources over a lifetime. He
would speak in talk groups of a definitive science of human nature, with his
own relatively sheltered community as a kind of lab. Philosophers had, however, often alluded to
this polarity concept. For example, Plato spoke of personality “splits” and
“double sort.”[5] Goethe, in Faust, had referred to “the eternal feminine,” in a passage which
Liszt used in the triumphant male chorus ending his Faust Symphony, and Mahler, likewise, when ending his Symphony of a Thousand.
The
polarity theory, in fact, quickly attracted underground notoriety among many
Polarity, for
Rosenfels, became a vehicle to develop and define inner identity, that which makes you “who you are.” Psychologist James Hillman achieved a
comparable body of science with his notion of a germinal personality “acorn,”[7]
the underlying will to express oneself with some singular purpose and avoid
activities which contradict that purpose. Sometimes identity has a collective
components, as when scientists like Carl Sagan note that our search for
extraterrestrial life is part of our search for who “we” are, considered
together.
The notion of “femininity,” or of a “yielding”
personality, seemed like a godsend to me. Love between men could be more than
just the “mutual respect” my Army buddies had once mentioned. Men did not have
to stop at shaking hands. [Masculinity
could outgrow collective loyalties and the recklessness of ignorance without
selling itself out.] I had already found
the prospect of submitting to a great man (almost as if I were a “woman”) incredibly titillating. I scoffed at
religious prohibitions against “yielding to temptation.” Another Center student would relate that
he had "been fucked" (++ experienced penetrative sex ++) and that had been the most liberating
event in his life, except... then what? In “yielding,” I sensed an indirect, if
perverse, source of personal “power,” the absolute right to choose the person
to whom I would “submit,” and to hold him accountable to living up to my
“ideals” of him. I wanted my ideals to look like men; I took after my father, who used to scream in revulsion when seeing
young men (ungrateful hippies, he thought) sporting “long hair,” like women’s.
Carried too far, however, I could soon resent my feeling of living in another
man’s shadow. I would just be draining
another person as if I were a vampire, and ought to feel ashamed.
Paul Rosenfels soon developed his polarity
paradigm by adding a second linearly independent component, “subjectivity” versus “objectivity.” These concepts describe
how the personality operates and
approaches achieving its inner goals in a practical world.
“Subjectivity” refers to intuitive and sensory facilities, the ability to
“sense” the importance of things or undiscovered connections between them;
“objectivity” refers to manipulative capabilities, actually motivating or
managing other people. Center students
now tell me that this second duality of character confused a lot of people over
the years, but I think this second basis component helps to give a perspective
on what makes actual, “live” people tick. The masculine-feminine and subjective-objective
axes formed a system of coordinates appealing to a mathematician like me; the
intellectual precept could quickly get in the way of deeper understanding
through personal experience. Other concepts of personal character, expressed as
analogues, were: love (or “charity”) v. power, faith v. hope, thought v.
action, insight v. mastery, truth v. right, teacher v. leader, honesty (or
honor) v. courage (integrity).[8]
Much more
important, though, is what Paul means by “creativity,” which in our culture now
closely correlates to self-motivated deviancy. To get at this, Paul talks about
psychological surplus as a benefit
from civilization; surplus is a unique attribute of human beings. People use
their capacities first to meet adaptive
needs, such as providing food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their
families. In an advanced society, there is more cooperation and more
“efficiency” in meeting survival needs, and in providing political stability
and security from outside threats. Surplus even allows people the luxury of
emphasizing the processes they are best at performing. This is called character specialization. Technology
does not have to be an evil that destroys the planet or magnifies inequities in
wealth. It frees people to live their own lives as they see fit. Rosenfels has
structured his “moral psychology” as a kind of Jeffersonianism, even if
Rosenfels (unlike today’s political libertarians) would have favored sensible
use of the political process to deliver essential services such as clean water
and safe bridges. Telecommunications and self-publishing technology, perhaps
facilitated by corporate restructuring, now facilitate the expression and
debate of daring ideas and the search for truth, to the discomfort of many
people who don’t like seeing old notions of men and women challenged. (Well,
male homosexuals like me like the old notions of what men should look like!)
Technology, though, if not accompanied by spiritual and character growth, can
lead to a society’s incineration, or slow, almost Mayan death through
desecration of the planet.
Paul
viewed as creative the development
of psychological surplus (one’s own feminine or masculine inner identity) in mated relationships, motivated by a need for
intimate romantic fulfillment, whatever the social support of others. “Inner
identity” means, to me, what makes me tick, how I communicate what in other
people turns me on. Later, during the military ban debates (Chapter 4), the
writings of Steffan and an interview given by Meinhold (among others) would
reinforce this idea of identity achieved through emotional attachments, to
ripen as “self-image.” Creativity and personal growth give one importance to
other people. But one becomes significant to other people by actually caring
about them or motivating them. One does this with close personal friends and
with the achievement of a mild level of earthy, erotic feeling or action. The
ultimate expression of creativity is to be found in a lifelong mated monogamous
relationship with another loved one, with the full expression of sexuality.
There is tension between the ideal of lifelong fidelity and the practical
likelihood that two self-actualizing individuals will, in time, “outgrow” a
particular courting relationship. Beyond a single mated partnership (whether
same-sex or not), there are other friends in a close-knitted community with
whom one interacts out of inner identity. For the creative process to be
fulfilled, one must be open to homosexual feelings and drives, even if they are
not directly acted out. In Paul’s world, any person capable of growth will
eventually face homosexual needs; homosexuality is in some sense “chosen”
through a greater personal need for romantic attachment and peak experience (a
term popularized by Maslow), rather than a biological inevitability. Although
personal growth implies eventual self-expression in homosexual intimacy along
the way, it is much, much more; so a “gay identity” (if we look ahead to the
military ban problem) need not, clinically speaking, suggest a propensity for
frequent expansion into sexuality. But there is a continuum between affection
and eroticism.
Surplus is
a uniquely human capability. A stray, self-adopted cat drops a bird at my
apartment door in gratitude, or a mockingbird repeatedly circles around me
after chasing starlings out of his territory, seems to want to tap into our
world where there are real problems beyond surviving. Creativity is enhanced
when intimacy is openly recognized as possible, but kept in restraint. Boswell
relates that the ancient Greeks recognized a continuity between friendship and
love and sometimes valued homosexual “relationships” precisely because they
were experienced for their own sakes, beyond procreation and even beyond
physical sex.[9]
Since
becoming more intimate with other people is indeed a scary experience, people
develop psychological defenses,
short circuits to temporary satisfaction through pseudo or surrogate dominance
and submission mechanisms. These came up in talk groups, when some men would
claim a kind of psychological, perhaps sequential hemaphroditism, with
vacillation between yielding and power (“yang” and “yin”, selfhood v. unity)
impulse. I, for example, can gain a
certain power over others by my developing secret insights through my talent
for relating various problems and then sharing my “intelligence” with others in
a selective way knowing that they will behave in certain ways because of their
limiting predispositions combined with incomplete, and therefore misleading,
knowledge. This is called sadism.
Politicians indulge in it all the time[10]. Defenses are invoked because growth really
does cause one to change, to molt and to cast away an “old sense of self,” to
give up a lot of baby play and childish things, in order to blossom out as reborn individual. Other important
defensive patterns are (for feminines) compulsiveness,
associated with easy intimidation and a sensation of being “driven,” and (for
masculines) obsessiveness. My own NIH psychiatric records, on one page,
suggested a diagnosis of “compulsive personality,” but elsewhere rather inaccurately
described my “obsessive thought patterns.”
Activities
that conventional society regards as “creative” - writing books, plays, and
music, or acting, or hairdressing - may in this “human world” be seen as
adaptive. These private pursuits or “hobbies” may be good, because people need
to be alone sometimes, but they fall short of real, direct interaction with
others. Likewise, conventional family responsibilities ¾ baby-making and parenting ¾ may also be seen as adaptive; and this is a
shocking (and perhaps offensive) notion. Don’t people grow by taking care of
their children? I thought parenting was
something “everybody” did; how could it be special?
By now, I saw
how the language of our social interactions, with family (not person) as its
atomic unit, affected the way most adults saw themselves. Referral to marital
spouse and kids in everyday society, especially the workplace, gave conforming
adults an innocent way to refer to their sexuality. Society, through both the
government and church recognition of marriage and the corporate policies built
upon this recognition, conferred a permission for sex which most heterosexual
adults no longer recognized as such. Moreover, society conferred a legitimacy
to the totality of a whole adult life, as factored by the obligations of
family. The comforts conferred to
conformity claimed their price. People were so used to familial identification
that they never questioned it. They held opinions about political or
psychological issues according to what immediate benefit followed the issues
for them and their families, not for what would be true or right in the long run. They would surrender
some of their capacities to think for themselves, and let their politicians,
their labor unions, or employers’ political action committees tell them how to
vote (when they voted at all). A certain measure of mandatory, immoral
ignorance and hypocrisy was required to get along and take care of your own
“kind.”
At least,
by this time of the 1970’s, discrete homosexuals like me were generally left
alone and usually allowed privacy. They still didn’t want us to “talk about
it.” You didn’t interrupt a business conversation with the announcement, “I’m
gay”; nor did anyone say “I’m heterosexual” when she had spouses and kids she
could mention. I liked it that way; my otherness and aloofness, almost like
that of an alien fallen to a reasonably hospitable earth, made me feel special.
I knew “them” better than they knew me. The “privacy” that enveloped my life (the mystery of my anonymity as viewed
by others, and my total control of my personal life) became itself a public
expression of a certain indifference and antipathy to the self-suspension of “normal”
family life. Perhaps this autonomy was a
bit of an illusion, abetted by government programs that often relieved me of
having to deal so much with difficult or impoverished people myself. Homosexuality would sit at the center of this
new independence; it would become, as one 1973 Ninth Street Center monograph[11]
put it, “civilization’s secret,” a psychological Rosetta Stone for what really
made things work, but a knowledge “of good and evil” too dangerous for the
ordinary world dependent on fidelity to gender roles. Officialdom, the
Nixon-Kissinger world, simply never got around to mentioning it, as if to
derail the credibility of homosexuality with benign (if intentional) neglect.
The “outside world,” including most youth, would simply not be let in on it.
During this time, I cherished my own separatist attitude, that this secret
world open to peak-experiences of romantic fulfillment through sexual intimacy
with an “ideal man,” was the only
universe that really mattered. I rather
liked the idea of homosexuality being elite ¾ even effete ¾ rather than spoon-fed to all on the theory
that we could so easily stop “discrimination” by mass coming-outs.
"Masculinity"
- as mediated by family adaptation - indeed experiences a double twist in our
culture. We used to expect young men to risk their lives out of ignorance of
the consequences of their own recklessness. Then, in the workplace, we want
them to use their "masculinity" to peddle other people's products and
ideas. They are supposed to experience a sense of "power" in their
salesmanship or superficial supervision. They often don't see how their power
gets channeled into false submissiveness.
I became
very jealous in my choices of my own goals. I would resent exercises like
teamwork pep-sessions in the workplace, with group singing and fun that I saw
as false excitement over goals chosen by others. I could never be a salesman
(like my father), because I hate the idea of using my own “publicity” to peddle
other peoples’ ideas (true or not).
Likewise, I would come to see workplace promotions, while financially
rewarding, as hardly fulfilling in personal terms since conventional “career
advancement” wasn’t (for me) related to providing for a family. I eschewed
participating in organizing workplace social life, or even “daughters’ days”
where fathers would ask their colleagues to show their daughters their corners
of the work-world. On the other hand, my
own private goals, to somehow make my own upward-looking sexuality more real to
others, might be completely inappropriate and unwelcome. This dilemma grew out
of my subjectivity and the unbalanced[12]
nature of my personality. I sensed my
visionary potential but lacked the focus to achieve the little things. The unbalanced person is particularly aware
of the opportunity to select his own goals without the approval of others and
he may see enforcing his own choices as a key component of his identity or
acorn. The balanced person may be more in tune with actually reaching
others. I would return to material
possessions, private special things that had always provided “highs” - my
record collection, for example - to exercise my “feeling” capacities. This
backsliding away from attention to others, in the eyes of some at the Center,
brought into question whether I “could” grow - that is, outgrow this
fundamental inertness of my own private world of feeling. I think my churlish behavior reminded the
others of their own discomfort with the paradox of their “creative world”: they
could not develop greater wisdom and freedom without simultaneously dealing
with the humility of really serving others. Yet, the easy shelter provided by
periodic withdrawal into my private world gave me a certain toughness.
Feminines do not have to be marshmallows.
In later
years, I have become more in touch with my own desire to build a complete
intellectual model of my world, to explain everything, and leave nothing out,
the way I would write a final exam. It doesn’t matter so much how many people
listen; it may matter who listens. An
unbalanced leader might want to specify the rules for everything, regardless of
whether people could follow them. A balanced person would be much more concerned about what idea-segments and
presentations could work in a practical way, get things done, so such a person
would probably feed people what he thinks they can absorb where they are. A
balanced person might make more money!
Center devotees developed the notion that “adaptive” needs
should be made as minimal as possible.
Their view of survival focus stands as a curious antithesis to Luddism:
while Center students welcomed the discipline of simple life, Luddites (as well
as our pioneers in the nineteenth century) regard primitive survival mechanisms
as an actual experience of personal freedom and human identity (as clumsily
stated in the “Unabomber’s” notorious “manifesto”).[13] Many Center students lived in the immediate
East Village (more “human” than Hell’s Kitchen and not so “upper-class fag” as
the West Village) and did simple jobs, like cleaning apartments or bookbinding.
Asking somebody “What do you do?” to find out who he is, was a no-no. People
would brag that they had not traveled north of 14th Street in perhaps the last
year. Learn to live on very little, they lectured. “Give up!” Liberation was,
for the indefinite future, to be a “grass-roots,” local neighborhood exercise,
where you stayed around people who cared about you. Liberation was also a “selfish” thing from
your immediate community; there was no reason to sell it to the “outside” world
yet. The outside world already provided a reasonable measure of stability;
admission that national politics really matters was taken as a sign of
powerlessness and intimidation. There was no need to be politically “radical”¾that is, openly gay on the job or even with
original family members. It was more important to help others in one’s own
immediate environment than to volunteer in socially approved projects that met
needs (for example, feeding impoverished children) recognized as socially or
morally important but less immediately relevant. An unstable, or at least neutral, equilibrium
between psychological self-interest and giving to others (a bit different from
service to others) was developing in our discussions.
I was put off by this and wanted to grow a foothold in the
“real” world, to assimilate. Paul would say, OK, but I didn’t need to become
president of a company (other than my own). I should help others discern the
difference between creative action and adaptation.
I had first felt relieved to find Center students as “normal”
guys I could identify with; now, some of them came across as men who really
couldn’t adapt to the “outside” even if they had to. If I mentioned their heavy smoking (the air
at the Center sometimes got unbreatheable), they would call me a “health nut.”
In my earliest days, I had felt relieved
by the easier things I heard, like “the sex was great, but the head was
nowhere.” I had expected a soft approach
to sexual intimacy, but quickly found my overtures and prattle a bit
unwelcome. I felt constantly compelled
to “make progress” towards a “first experience”; yet, even as I “knew” I was
less “attractive” than the men whose looks aroused me, I was often unaware of
my own personal appearance and thought very little about my own body.
Paul had
reassured me that he was very ‘fond” of me. So I went to Paul for a single
therapy session, a “diagnostic interview,” to determine whether, as he put it,
“you can take the pressure I would put on you.” He challenged me with, “what do
you do?” His prescription was to get
out and do things for other people, like wash the dishes after the Saturday
night potlucks. Well, I volunteered to
do that - Dean even hugged me once I started to “help”; but I did it when I
felt like it, not every Saturday. Later, Dean would admit, “yes, Bill, we were
trying to feminize you.” Today, he says that, despite my gawkiness, I have a
lot of “warmth” and commends my independent (rather than “passive”) femininity.
I knew intellectually what this meant: I would get in touch with what made me
tick and come alive, which would not stop with a conditioned visceral and
visual response to sexually attractive young men, or even with “platonic”
crushes on them, but evolve into the real experience of surrender. Paul had,
after all, characterized himself as “earthy”; otherwise, his mental
preparations would level off into defenses.
Therapy-giving was supposed
to be an experience at giving tough love, not just in cool, distant,
professional “competence.” The distrust that Center devotees held for
“credentials” carried far beyond the mental health profession (which, after
all, had just reversed its stand on homosexuality in 1973). It was commonly held that statements about
psychological truths from the position of academic or otherwise recognized
authority, loyalty and accomplishment, were inevitably tainted. Human science
behaved like quantum mechanics; the observer tended to get in the way with his
psychological defenses. The “establishment” came to be seen as part of an
“evil” and “immoral” world. Truth and
right could only be found among one’s immediate community of true students; the
Center came to be seen as a refuge for social Ludditism. The conventional
“mental health” world that had captured me, however, seemed only capable of
focusing on pathology. Even other gay psychologists of that period had fallen
for it.[14]
I interviewed to join a
“closed” talk group sponsored by a gay couple. I snowed the “masculine” guy by
reporting my process of feeling (for imaginary icons) and the inner intensity
this process generated. The “feminine”
partner, who, like me, had emphasized in the open talk groups that he had never experienced sex with a woman, scolded me for hiding my feelings behind
abstract, inquisitive banter. My compulsiveness had driven me back into
sheltered conventionality and
“automaticity.” I needed to think about whether I really could grow at
all, and get outside of myself. People who can’t grow are much better off
straight! “Look, Bill, you fool a lot
of people, and I’m not going to let you get away with it!... Would you support
another person so that he could compose a piano sonata?” No, I want to do that myself! “Don’t you
understand what the guy washing the dishes is doing; you think he’s dull, but
really he is very disciplined. So, Bill, where are you going with this? …Have
you cried about it yet? Why not?... You need to be sponged off of,
and have somebody to make a home for besides yourself.” (OK, I needed to learn
to give and not worry about what I would get.) I remember walking home shaking
in the chill October evening to my sheltering loft in the Cast Iron Building
after that one. I had been as shocked by the chewing out as I had been by the
nurse after that gym class incident in ninth grade. I had always sensed my own
tremendous potential, and it seemed to grow out of my deviance, my need to find
not just romantic fulfillment but a kind of musical cadence in a “lover.” I liked the idea of being on my own, and that
my homosexuality forced me to absorb the world on my own; in personal life,
difficult problems and ambiguous goals created the opportunity to have a space
to cover my grandiose intentions that one day would seduce the outside public.
Conversely, the need to achieve something special had practically forced me
into homosexuality; the NIH psychiatrists had already figured that out. There was an expanse to all of this, from the
beatnik, crowded Village where an adolescent, virile excitement loomed
everywhere, to the manicured, proper but sheltering and isolating suburbs where
real grownups pretended to live. It could all fit together in one whole, some
day. But it wasn’t working! I just wouldn’t focus. One horrible Sunday afternoon,
a millstone who had collared me at the Center took me to the Ninth Circle
Tavern for dinner and confronted me with, “the way you look, how do you think
you will find a lover? The people who find somebody for life are all
straight.” But I had already noticed that some people seemed really
“alive” and others, who sometimes created confrontations resulting in their
being asked to leave the Center, came across as pedantic, repetitious, and
inert. In a couple of years, the Center had a reputation “on the Outside” (such
as at a larger counseling center, Identity House) as a cult with Paul the guru.
The Center had turned itself into a non-residential, evening-only commune;
perhaps the whole group constituted a virtual ashram.
January
1975, almost two years after my “second coming,” I finally gained my “first
experience,” at the Club Baths. It was nearly impossible to nightwalk the orgy
room, bathed in astral violets, without having at least a passive incident. So
what if I were a fallen male! [note Y2]
Living six
blocks from the popular West Village bars, I had looked forward to the ritual
of going out into the night and looking for intimacy and vicarious perfection,
in men whose looks excited me. I would stop into Julius’s and one man would take
a whole night play-acting Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.
Another would lecture on why he thought Asian men always preferred
Mediterranean Caucasians like himself. It was almost another year, a New Years
night, until I brought home a “trick.”
Again, I got another lecture, this time about the “abuse of the media,”
but I enjoyed the tenderness; the young man tried to contact me again and
turned out to be quite unstable. In the
next seven years I would sometimes have another man in my bed for the night. A
few of the “experiences” were really good. One man, after sex, excused himself
to the bathroom to freebase heroin; but most of the men I met seemed to be
stable and productive. One would go on to become a Broadway actor. Still
another friend, and capable chess player, related to me a story of sexual abuse
against him as a juvenile in a New York State welfare facility, not unlike the
events depicted in the recent film
Sleepers. In Dallas, the saloons and discos were much grander, sometimes
guarded by men riding shotgun next to flamboyant signs warning the public: “GAY
BAR.”
There is
an even more disturbing moral lesson to all of this. You won’t have a
meaningful life and matter to other people unless you can meet their real
needs. You should be selective, but objective, too. In the Center talk groups,
caring about other people was put as a foundation of creativity. But this isn’t
just the cheap talk of caring; it is the work that follows the initial feelings
or drives. People get turned on¾infatuated¾by the superficial trappings and swagger of
others (the projections of their own imagined ideals), as if these external
things are really what matter and “make a man” (or woman) after all. Real love,
say the clinical psychologists, comes with being able to give the other
person’s best interest top priority.[15]
How facile! Even so, it matters whether one can maintain a sense of real
passion[16]
for another person as the visual or other sensual and imaginary fascination,
however naughty, fades. It takes a real “man” to keep an intimate relationship
together for a lifetime and really care
about it. A recent radio ad claims, “it takes a real man to be a dad.”
The hidden phobia attracting the pundits of Kulturkampf is the possibility of not being able to get it up if
your “beloved” rings your intercom after falling from grace. I know the
feeling. After one brief relationship in New York ended, an acquaintance at
Julius’s cynically told me, “when you fall in love, it’s because the person
fulfills a fantasy. Love is in you, never your lover.”[17]
My stares of admiration create even more uneasiness in others if they realize
that I’m mentally placing them in some imaginary hierarchy.
In time, I
found myself talking circles in the groups at the Center, and decided to stop
going. Indeed, I had clung to the place as a shelter from the brutal,
competitive and sometimes untidy world of "fucking and sucking" (++ overt male homosexual acts
++.) Yet, I made several good friends
there, some of whom I would stay in contact with for years, even today. For
example, only a few weeks after moving into New York I met a sculptor who had
his own studio on the Upper West Side. He reported an adventurous life, of
having been wounded as a civilian combat photographer in Vietnam, and then
having traveled alone through Nepal and India. “I needed to be alone,” he said
more than once. We did a barter deal: I gave him an old Miracord turntable and
speakers in exchange for a sculpture of a Siamese-twin hive-owned
extraterrestrial, which still hangs in my living room today. In time, I learned
that a certain tension between me and any friend I really cared about gave me
more sense of life than would any sexual release; often, sex would just spoil
things. Another friend would move with his lover to San Francisco; when he
picked me up at the airport during an October 1987 visit he melodramatically
pulled his car over to the interstate highway shoulder to tell me the stock
market had crashed!
I would
revisit the Center sporadically over the ensuing years. Going back for an
evening would seem like a psychological homecoming from my Star Trek lifestyle.
It would lose its own space in 1991, although it still sponsors occasional
discussion and study groups in rented spaces and members’ apartments in
Manhattan.
“Outside”
the Ninth Street Center, gay organizations in the 1970’s seemed juvenile.[18] I would hear speakers boast things like,
“let’s list the ways gays are oppressed,” or “I didn’t choose to be the way I
am.”
During the
same time period, conservative writer George Gilder was publishing his own
counter psychological theory of “polarity” in Sexual Suicide (1973)[19]
and Men and Marriage (1986).[20]
His proposition is that women are biologically superior to men because
childbearing and nurturing provide natural satisfaction without the help of men
(after insemination). But men do need
women, who tie them to their own progeny.
Marriage tames men, after they have been brought up to protect society
as hunter-gatherers or warrior-barbarians. (An accurate restatement of Gilder’s
idea would be, “love tames men.”) In Gilder’s world, men don’t become
“individuals” - and break away from collective hunting and warrior activities¾until they marry and father. A married
average Joe, because he has real people
(his own family) who need him as he ages,
lives longer than a singleton. The importance of marriage for raising healthy
children is almost secondary. The breakdown of gender roles¾through the expansion of workplace and even military opportunities for women and
perhaps the decline of male requirements such as the draft¾and particularly of the importance of
connecting sex to procreation in marriage, all make marginal or “average” men
feel expendable. Furthermore, the breakdown of monogamy ¾ the inclination of a “sexual princess” to
steal away a successful “older man” as a rich, proven husband with the ease of
divorce ¾ means that it is harder for
less talented men to find wives. Gilder even believes that the breakdown of
marital monogamy causes homosexuality through the same mechanism that works in
prisons. Other, less polished writers, would contribute cheap refrains moaning
the erosion of “masculinity.”[21]
Much
later, in 1993, Warren Farrell would combine the ideas like those of Gilder and
Rosenfels in The Myth of Male Power: Why Men are the Disposable Sex.[22]
(Actually, one of the students at the Ninth Street Center, Jack Nichols, had
written on a similar theme in 1972 with Men’s Liberation). Farrell
travels the country and gives seminars in the dynamics on expanding
psychological roles (such as nurturing in men) in heterosexually married
couples. He describes a progression between “Stage I” and “Stage II” societies[23]
where individual fulfillment (balanced against responsibility) gradually
replaces survival, where the technology that facilitates fulfillment actually
requires changing male warrior conditioning, and where new notions of
individuality can be taught to couples.
Even more
“political” writers would gradually weave psychology into their principles.
Jonathan Rauch would characterize the derivation of truth and right through a
process he calls “liberal science.” Rauch criticizes, first, the authoritarian
(“fundamentalist”) model where
“absolute” truth gives its original owner not just right but might, and then
the “humanitarian” threat which suppresses disturbing or “offensive”
discussion. Liberal science can go astray when it winds up deciding truth by
popularity or financial results. Rauch concludes, “Competitive and consensual
public checking of each by each through criticism and questioning is the only
legitimate way to decide who is right.”[24]
That is, everyone should join in the debate and search for truth and right.
Other progressive writers would apply these
ideas in practical human relations.
Charles Murray would comment on the psychological rewards and benefits
that accrue from caring for other people (rather than just supporting them),
first with family but also with friends.[25]
Stay Home a Bit More
One brisk
November 1973 night, I sat on a comfy Holiday Inn mattress as I waited for the
Redskins to appear on Monday Night Football, and watched President Richard
Nixon come up with an amazing duality. Really high quality color in TV was
still a little bit of a luxury.
“We’ll
have to cut down on our driving, so I’ve ordered that gasoline stations shut
down on Sunday. We’ll all have to stay home a bit more, the President
included. We might have to ration
gasoline,” he counseled. Then, just a few sentences later came the incredible
juxtaposition. “Now, I want to respond to the calls that I should resign. I’m
not going to resign from the job I was elected to do.”
We were perhaps five years into our
experiment with Consciousness
Young
adults began to live “for themselves” with a deliberation that they hadn’t
considered before. Vulnerable people, who were supposed to be protected by
moral notions and especially “family values” (the naive notion that everyone
needed to settle down and get married) were really hurt by their often abusive
personal relationships, and were at most indirectly affected by the more
visibly “selfish” behavior that was setting new examples. A Metropolitan
Community Church minister, the late Reverend Larry Uhrig, would write an
editorial “There is No Better Half,”[27]
and urge people to get their own acts together in life before living through
the visuality of relationships.
The tools
used to achieve higher “consciousness” - highs produced by chemicals to
transcend reality, could kill and wreck lives by short-circuiting chemical
circuits in the brain for temporary effect and would soon be recognized as
counter-productive for individual self-awareness. A person who stays off the
stuff can learn from his REM-sleep dreams. People started to recognize the
benefits of more healthful living. Cigarette smoking, our high fat and sugary
diets loaded with preservatives, and sun exposure - all of these behaviors that
were not an issue when men had been preoccupied with winning wars, are now seen
as leading to premature aging and death, particularly for men. Yet these
behaviors were associated with the rough male culture necessary in the past to
survive. The high fat and protein diet is controversial because it does make
young men look bigger and stronger, but they then burn out and die earlier,
like blue giant stars. [Steroids really make young manhood explode!] People
began to want to look better and feel better, perhaps for a succession of
mates, so the health spas boomed; men no longer routinely developed love
handles and guts once they got married. Yet, the sexual revolution grew unabated.
We began to notice the irony of an earlier generation’s motion picture code,
where married couples smoked cigarettes from twin beds!
Nixon’s
termination of the draft in 1973 had further weakened the hold that the
military owned on the conservative, adaptive gender-associated values of the
general population and, in the eyes of many people, the influence of the
military’s official contempt for gay people. With no conscription, the idea of
living for “self” became more credible even within the volunteer military,
which created incentive pay schemes and had to focus more on individual
excellence at some expense to group values and even to “unit cohesion.”
The rapid
success of women in the military would encourage their gains in the civilian workplace.
Women had already discovered during World War II that their social pedestal,
supposedly intended to protect “Miss Scarlets” for childbearing and keep them
out of dangerous work and combat, often constricted their own personal
outlooks.[28] Companies, after Betty Friedan’s protest in
1959, had already dropped the prohibition on married women’s return to work
after pregnancy. Univac, the “second” mainframe vendor, aggressively promoted
women into management ranks of its software development teams while I worked
for them in 1972-1974, and traveled often to their development centers in
Minneapolis. The one-parent family quickly became a disadvantaged option. The
idea that a man should, on his own, support a wife and children began to
wither. The presence of two-earner families would start pushing up the price of
housing and cost-of-living in general, even before the oil shocks. Nixon had
already experimented with wage and price controls in 1971. Home ownership would become like a pyramid,
with people feeling compelled to borrow as much as they could get away with,
because of both the tax deductions and expectation of rapid appreciation; home
was no longer a “castle” in which to raise a family. Renters were considered as
transient, second-class citizens;[29]
respectable people went into debt! Single people like me would indulge.
Eventually, after the real estate bubble burst, I would find myself ironically
in a position where I had to “support” another person with mortgage payments on
a home she had assumed (without qualification) from me.
But the
greatest threat to the new freedoms would not be internal conservative
politics, not even Nixon’s dirty tricks and hit lists. Watergate, in fact,
would add credibility to the idea that people should strike out on their own,
regardless of the example set by government. But the oil shocks, gas lines,
Sunday station closings and even-odd “rationing” of 1973 and 1979 at least
brought up the possibility that the rest of the world (not just the Soviet
Union and Maoist China) really would tolerate our materialism - even if we
later learned that the oil companies had indeed been party to this, “to get the
price up.” Islamic countries screamed
that our “freedoms” had been achieved by exploiting their people, their natural
resources, and their religious values (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was
only one part of this). Coupon gasoline
rationing was not the most draconian idea; more intrusive would have been a
sticker system that made it a crime to operate vehicles except on certain days
of the week.[30]
Personal mobility, for me a kind of pseudo-power, would have to be severely
curtailed. Innocuous, palliative Band-Aids, like daylight savings time in the
winter (which made the mornings of my January business trips to Minneapolis invoke
Alaska) were tried. By 1974, mass-media
magazines were conjuring “the end of affluence” and “the new poor.” I wondered
if we looked forward to a future in the 1980’s where a Carter-like
administration monitored people’s private lives to control energy consumption
and pollution. It seemed I had been very fortunate to grow up in society
suddenly wealthy enough to afford lifestyles like mine.
In 1975,
New York City experienced its brush with financial default. Again, all sorts of
rumors, about possible general strikes, wage garnishment taxes, martial law,
and curfews emerged. A nasty undertone developed, that people like me who
wouldn’t settle down in the world but kept roaming the world for psychological,
if not sexual, excitement were a real burden on the rest of the “adaptive”
world. My father would get after me for living in New York, “a hell of a place”
for “selfish” personal fulfillment rather than in the more settled “real
world,” the “outside” of suburbs, good school districts, manicured laws, and
tricycles. Even as mainstream people
explored their freedom, a subsurface paradigm emerged: work, support your
family, have kids, stay home with them (in a secure, sheltered residential
community), and be happy with whom you’ve already got. Staying in New York, I thought,
let me look forward to an everyday chance to find an even “better” man. I
already felt uneasy about my lifestyle “choice.” Security had become an
obsession for me; in New York City, no one left a window near a fire escape
unprotected by burglar bars, and everyone used Medeco deadbolts to lock up
their apartments. These days, the suburbs have the same problems.
Employers
seemed to catch on to this. Even given the energy crisis crimp on auto-driving
habits, they deserted the urban downtowns and moved out to the ‘burbs where,
they said, their somewhat segregated employees would be happier and have better
school systems for their kids. In Dallas, for example, companies tried to
locate far north of downtown, where parents could shelter their kids in the
superior Richardson and Plano school districts; after all, raising kids was
“your whole life” - that, and working, that is. The near-downtown areas, like
Oak Lawn in Dallas, were left for re-gentrification, often by singles and,
especially, gays (and just relatively recently, senior “empty nesters”).
At the
same time, companies slowly began to chip away at the protections of “loyalty.”
Older managers with inflexible skills were being let go about the time of the
oil shocks, perhaps as a result of recession; really, however, the trends
towards automation, restructuring, and downsizing were already starting. The
workplace gradually became more darwinian. The mantra became “produce, produce,
produce!” ¾ even for Village guys
writing (that is, assembly-line manufacturing) pornography.
I have
grown up with the notion of steady advancement, that a promotion meant perks, a
relief from drudgery and “undignified labor,” and a chance for travel and (“adaptive”)
excitement. In the 1960’s, a computer programmer gave up the meticulous
desk-checking and scheduled time at night for a “higher” job as systems
analyst, writing specs for others to code.
I once programmed a system (called “Big Brother”) to scan a mainframe
audit log and collect statistics on how many compiles and tests it took
individual “coders” to get their jobs done. Soon, I learned a pure analyst’s
job carried a lot of unknown risk. You couldn’t prove your ideas, however
modern. I once left a job when I could not sell the idea of a generic report-writer,
controlled by users; my colleagues thought I had failed in my job to get
precise customer requirements, when today this notion of client-controlled
computing (often by high-level Structured Query Language [SQL] statements relating different data files the
way I “relate” social and political ideas), driven by menus and options, is
commonplace. But industry started combining jobs giving back more control to
the individual; so I could become a “programmer-analyst,” do the analysis and
coding myself and prove it with productivity tools before publication.
As my
career plateaued, I learned what “the big leagues” really demanded of me: total
personal accountability for my own work, as it ran in production, with huge volumes
of millions of transactions, 168 hours a week.
My father’s (and the Army’s) old-fashioned preaching about “learning to
work” and “formation of proper habits” gradually became real to me. A senior
programmer-analyst often had to arrange much of his own life around response to
problems and personal guarantee of results. One manager said to me, “anybody
can code, but few people can really implement!”
I couldn’t keep a job like this and go away on excursions every weekend
or to talk groups or political rallies every night. Yet, a sense of honor meant
trusting my own work when I promoted it, and not having to hover over it later.
Eventually, professional maturity would also mean developing a real business
understanding beyond the technical details and communicating this well to customers,
a calling that demands more manipulative faculties that many rather introverted
programmers are comfortable with. I had
to learn to pitch with men on base, and to absorb and retain infrequently used
skills to help others besides myself become productive.
I have
sometimes worked at inconvenient hours (nights) to save an employer on
computer-time costs. On one occasion in 1989, when working for a small
consulting firm, I solved a problem by looking at some code a counterpart (with
the same project involving Medicare finances) in the federal government had
written, and was able to give a client correct results from a simulation model
in a few hours. Had I not solved it, our company would have been put out of
business the next day. I would learn how easily an undetected programming
mistake or procedural error (from not paying attention to instruction) might
nearly put a company out of business months later.
As a
result, I felt put off by the pedestal that we “systems people” had built.[31] Popular vernacular called us “hot shots,” yet
I was once asked by an interviewer, “do you really like programming?” For me, the field exercised my “femininity”: I
could usually afford to look for the “truth” about a business problem so that
my solution would work time after time; marketing - peddling - trying to
convince people to buy something that maybe they really don’t need, struck me
as almost dishonest. In one interview with a vendor, management tried to
impress me with the fact that the customer didn’t know what he was doing and
that I had to behave with authority while still making serving the customer my
highest personal priority. Everyone
assumed our lives were sheltered by the quickly growing job market and clean
working conditions. In fact, sometimes I have worked in cold computer rooms,
around noisy printers and listened to operators claim they were going deaf.[32]
We were told that working accurately in front of the customer without sleep was
an intrinsic part of the job on benchmark trips. Programmers would sometimes be
abused into eighty-hour weeks by management, which was trapped by the
unpredictable cost and reliability of new systems and which quickly recognized
that computer people tended to become too inwardly independent to band together
in unions, to go on strike for somebody else’s wages. Once, during a
technicians’ strike while I worked for NBC, I got a chance at a “real job” - as
a scab, replacing a union worker operating a microphone boom while filming soap
operas in Brooklyn, for double pay. One two occasions, I witnessed minor
disorder as I crossed the picket lines. I have never had much sympathy for
“people’s” solidarity.
Quickly,
companies wised up to the reality that unattached, single (often gay) employees
offered certain advantages, particularly in shops still located in or near
major cities. Single employees often had fewer home responsibilities and could
put in more hours (and apparent “dedication”) on the job. They could often walk
or ride subways to work and not become dependent on suburban bus schedules,
carpools, or “slug lines”; however, the increase in telecommuting by modem will
probably make the demographics of getting to work less important. Early in my
career, my major preoccupation was staying gainfully employed in New York City,
without commuting, and having the City remain viable enough that I really could
tap into this infinite supply of potential lovers while I finished “coming
out.” Later, I would become preoccupied
with just staying competitive, particularly after putting almost three years on
a Medicare project that failed in the early 1980’s. Recruiters always stressed
the buzzword skills, having to do with the culture of specifically
Obviously,
this would create predicaments and resentments. Sometimes, I would be expected
to provide “nightcall” when the regularly scheduled programmer was suddenly
unavailable. We would imagine military “barracks for programmers” and invent
computer viruses coming out of the home terminals, causing epidemics in people
as in horror movies. I could request compensation or leave ”with management
discretion” but this was discouraged, by unwritten rules; furthermore, forcing
the employer to pay all expenses would, in the long run, undermine my own job
in this “entrepreneurial” economy. I would see the capacity to follow a system
for twenty-four hours, without sleep and with considerable physical discomfort,
as a feminine kind of machismo and perhaps as my turn at slightly hazardous
work, my sacrifice or “service” to keep the modern world and its possibly
vulnerable infrastructure working. Management would take this kind of problem
into account at raise and annual review time. But some colleagues would remain
unaware that their absence from the job was actually affecting the personal
lives of others like me; that others were sometimes actually supporting them
out of their own pockets. Management would often discourage discussion of these
matters, even in team environments, and prefer to keep the rules loose because
it is forbidden to intentionally compensate people differently according to
family status. Their attitude became a
kind of a transposed “don’t ask, don’t tell” about workplace-family
conflicts. I would come to understand,
however indirectly, the demands that raising kids make on most “normal” people.
I eschewed
promotions where people reported formally to me. I sensed that managers who
couldn’t do themselves the technical tasks they delegated would become vulnerable,
even before the corporate downsizings and mergers (ironically increasing after
the unexpected oil price collapses of the mid 80’s) made my perceptions
credible. I hated the hypocrisy of over-dressing[33]
just to placate the sheltered values of others. I did not want to deal with
“discipline” problems of people with much greater family responsibilities than
mine.
The lot of
gay people in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations has come a long
distance from the days when the New York Gay Activists’ Alliance would, in its
notorious SoHo “Firehouse,” write utility checks to “New York Telephone
Bigots,” shortly after we were reassured in 1973 by the American Psychiatric
Association that we were no longer to be considered “sick.” (Yes, William and
Mary and NIH psychiatrists, I am personally exonerated.) Companies, commercial landlords, and mortgage
companies, by now generally were no longer interested in prying into the
private lives of people who remain “singletons,” because doing so is no longer
in their best business interests.
Only
gradually did the importance of becoming “open” grow on me. Once a Ninth Street
Center talk group was televised on a New York City cable channel. I hesitated;
I felt my employer, then a software vendor that sent me to customer sites,
might claim my appearance would antagonize its customers, but I relished the
idea of going on television. (I never heard about it.) Later, the workplace
conflicts over overtime and family leave would convince me that silence just
left me feeling like a second class citizen, and, while letting others remain
comfortable, actually let some people overlook responsibility for their own
choices.
One time,
an African-American colleague who had “figured me out,” said, “Bill, you can
pass. I can’t.” An African American
related in a televised debate that he was already teaching his son to expect to
have some avenues closed off to him because of his race, black. I recalled, the
Northern Virginia apartment complex in 1972 that had bragged that blacks never
qualified for the rent, or the singles club that had rationalized that blacks
have their own clubs. Wanting to assimilate with something one is not just to
make life easier, struck me as odd at best. Another time, a coworker
characterized professional football to me as, “proving your blacks are better than
my blacks.” I thought we had progressed
farther than that, but the past few years have proved me wrong.
To Men of Earth
As I
ambled out of an 86th Street theater where I had just watched Sorcerer one fall Saturday in 1975, I picked
up a silly little magazine called Fate,
and became intrigued with a picture-story about an Arizona commune whose
founder, Dan Fry, made public claims about having been picked up by a UFO.
Living in Manhattan was like that; you were always finding silly little clues
on the streets about how to expand your life and start a new episode. A few
weeks before, as I staggered out of the subway towards an “adaptive” day at
work, I had seen a newsstand proudly displaying a National Enquirer edition, “Arizona Man Captured by Flying Saucer,”
as if this were headline news in the New
York Times.
I decided
to check this one out on my next vacation, in the fashion of the clue-in-a-vase
game on the 1950’s Howdy Doody show. I
drove my rental car from Phoenix up an escarpment called the Mogollon Rim, from
desert in to plateau and pine tree country, not too far from the Grand Canyon.
I visited the little towns of Snowflake and Heber, where the protagonist of the
Enquirer story had supposedly lived.
In Holbrooke, I talked to a reporter who had interviewed Travis Walton and his
companions, and believed with all his heart that they “told the truth.”
I drove
back to Phoenix, and then west on I-10 for about forty miles, and sure enough,
once I passed irrigated cotton fields, I saw the “city” of saucer-shaped houses
stretched out along a dirt service road parallel to the Eisenhower Interstate.
When I got there, I found an interesting cast of characters. There were two
young men who both claimed to be divinity students. In the main house, Dan Fry
and his spacey wife, Florence, were giving the regular Sunday reminiscences. In
fact, Dan didn’t start out with the gee-whiz stuff. He talked mostly about his
political plan for world peace, his Area
of Mutual Agreement, to be implemented by his umbrella organization,
Understanding. This was to be another grass-roots process where people, without
the help of government, would get together in chapters on their own, all over
the world eventually, and brainstorm on moral or political principles on which
everyone could agree. Such a
statement might be something as primitive as, “everyone has the right to
breathe.” But, unlike the approach of the Ninth Street Center, truth was to be
disseminated world-wide almost by a new “great commission.” These agreement
statements would filter up as these chapters combined and sent messengers to
higher congresses, and eventually “the World” had a kind of English
constitution or Magna Carta. Then, when quizzed
by the elderly tourists, Dan would tell how this story had come about:
how he had missed a bus to El Paso for a weekend pass while in the Army; how he
had wandered into the New Mexico desert, and been abducted, and given sort of a
Code of Hammurabi by this totally human extraterrestrial, “A-lan,” which meant,
“messenger.”[34]
This does sound like Joseph Smith receiving the tablets! In the ensuing years,
he claimed, he housed A-lan in a spare bedroom for perhaps five years, got him
a green card, a job, even a driver’s license. Then A-lan just went home, like
the ET.
In the
next five years, I went to three Understanding conventions in the desert, and
stayed in one of the saucer-shaped dorms. I met a young Californian, Eddie, at
a book bar at the first convention, and would correspond with him for years
(and meet him for vacations on the west coast several more times); eventually
he would “come out” to me in a letter. We would ride around in the California
Mojave Desert, and visit other saucer freaks who came to the conventions. Most
of them were “libertarian” conservatives who had supported Ronald Reagan for
the 1976 nomination, but what they liked was his “less-government,” not
moralizing. Once we bushwhacked away into the desert, and came upon an adobe
cabin that would come apart in your bare hands.
The conventions
were filled with bizarre speakers (one of whom, all of 300 pounds, lectured on
how one coke [the soft variety] would destroy all of one’s psychic abilities
for a month), meditations, and workshops developing the Mutual Agreement process.[35] The last convention was organized by a gay
man and his lover who were trying to set up a private school for Accelerated
Christian Education!
What this
all meant, was that people would seek out anything, however fantastic, that
would give them something miraculous beyond their mundane adaptive worlds, to
look forward to. They all felt, if Dan’s stories were really true, or if a new
President of the
I remained
“scientifically” skeptical, as much as I enjoyed Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
This could all be true only with some fundamental change to our reality. I
found one book that gave me some hope, by asserting that information, as opposed to matter or energy, can travel faster than
light and reconstruct itself virtually, or affect perceptions, in another
location.[36]
From 1976
to 1978, I actually formed and ran a little Understanding chapter in New York
City. On one occasion, Dan and Florence actually spoke to about thirty people
crammed in to my efficiency apartment. Dan resembled Paul in his manner of
speech and even his bluntness in counseling other people. He believed he was
being “creative” but he needed to “see” a larger reality outside of his own
character; he was a bit of a “doubting Thomas.”
Florence told me, as she stood outside the inexpensive George Washington
Hotel near Gramercy Park when I met them, that the City was “dying.” One woman
tried to recruit the entire group into fighting nuclear power.[37]
I let her have her say, but I insisted I would always refuse to become a foot
soldier for any other’s particular interpretation of right and wrong. (So, do
we trust technological civilization? In 1982, I would actually visit the Glen
Rose nuclear plant, still under construction, in Texas while on a Sierra Club
camping weekend!) I would make my
official contribution to Mutual Agreement
when the Understanding journal, in
1978, published my little essay on personal responsibility (similar to my
Introduction).
Understanding
would fall apart around 1980, as rather unscrupulous persons tore the toy city
apart (setting some of the buildings on fire, literally). One irony is that
Paul Rosenfels had written, “understanding without love is a potentially
destructive tool in human affairs.”[38]
I would
find several other New Age groups. I joined the Rosicrucian Order and began to
study their monographs and meditation exercises (carried out with candles and
mirrors), and even attended one of their New Year’s (spring) “Feasts” (a
lengthy and “secret” but benign ritual, rather like a communion service) in a
New York City hotel ballroom. I recall writing a membership application letter in
which I said I needed to find something more than “living for myself.” I could
join an “invisible empire,” a secret cultural fraternity and gain access, not
just to the operations of karma[39]
and reincarnation, but to this larger “Cosmic Consciousness” and miracles, the
substance of a “larger life” that escapes from the planet. But I had to give up
these neurotic “attachments.” At a
Columbia University gay dance, I met one guy who claimed his father was a Rosicrucian,
and he summarized their whole philosophy in one word, “Do!” Some versions of this esoteric philosophy
suggest that you learn the ultimate “truth” about the “Unknown Region” (life in
the rest of the universe) only by giving up your “individuality” and becoming
part of a beehive group-mind, possibly at “death.” I read some of the writings on karma,
reincarnation, and “Great White Brotherhood” and the surprisingly upbeat
personal moral philosophy of Richard
Kieninger, and actually visited his upper middle class “commune,” Stelle, 70
miles from Chicago. Until the mid 1980’s, only one-earner families (where the
husband supported the wife) were allowed to live there. Kieninger saw marriage
as the commitment that kept one from becoming a passive vessel, captured by
possessions.[40]
Twice I visited the Lama Foundation, a spiritual retreat and foundation 8600
feet up on the slopes of Mt. Wheeler, near Taos, New Mexico. I would approach
the central wooden kitchen-house (the word “Remember” on the door) and hear
women chanting as they cooked delicious vegetarian meals for their all-faith
(Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Islam) feasts. The second visit was a “Spring
Work Camp” to which people came from all over the country; it was a kind of
local Habitat for Humanity. I would volunteer to cut shrubbery, plant, and lay
adobe brick on a new dorm for two days, and feel reminded of my femininity.
This beautiful place was destroyed in a forest fire in 1996.
There have
been scores of these personal betterment, New Age groups that promise to
enhance self-concept. Many of them work for some people. What sometimes ruins
them is what ruins governments and churches and organizations: bureaucracy and
politics.[41]
Once they become preoccupied with worldwide organizational discipline, they
just come to be perceived as “cults,”[42]
ripe for deprogrammers. As I ran around throughout my country in rental cars, I
enjoyed being alone, and I relished creating red-letter days in my own mind,
without the official celebration of society. One of the Understanding speakers
had taught us, “the essence of witchcraft is creating your own reality.” Growth is foremost an individual process.
Don’t Hide Your Skin;
What We Don’t Hear About Religion and
Homosexuality
"The Lord wants your life, the Lord wants your being, the
Lord wants your mind. The Lord wants you
to lay everything down and walk with him."
This is not some pronouncement from Jerry Falwell or Pat
Robertson. This was an Assistant Pastor,
Joan Wakeford at Metropolitan Community Church of Dallas, in the fall of 1980.
She had journeyed to Dallas to escape the horrific apartheid regime in the
pre-Mandela South Africa. When she was announced as an associate pastor by
Reverend Don Eastman, the entire congregation cheered.
I had never realized how seriously some people took their
faith. In my first year in
“The Lord wants you to turn over everything to him, so show your
complete Faith in him,” she would continue, walking between the pews, without
her microphone. What bothered me
about the "faith" I was seeing was, of course, that it was sometimes
presented as a cover for personal failure, or for hard times beyond one's
control, whether illness, economic reversal, job loss, or even
discrimination. [I felt frankly annoyed
by the spontaneous calls of “Amen” and
“That’s Right” from the participative, if hypnotized congregation.]
I had always dreaded failing, and losing
control of my own life. Faith to me was
like keeping a lover: I had to have myself before I had either. A Christian is
supposed to recognize that he is saved by Grace, not because of what he does.
I am a Christian. I neither apologize for nor boast about this.
Unlike the hapless missionary of the film The
Ghost and the Darkness, I’m not trying to convert anyone. But religion does highlight some principles
bearing on personal autonomy. Faith implies
most of one’s works will be good, or at least well-intended.
Reverend Don Eastman, Pastor at
It
would get even more personal.
Six months after moving to
I became quickly convinced
The
most inspiring evening of church for me ever took place in August, 1979, just
after I moved to
My home First Baptist Church had mentioned a rite of
“reaffirmation of faith,” with the comment, “we hope you never have to go
through this.” My father had encouraged me to attend regularly, or else people
would wonder if I was “sincere.” Later, when I was on my own in New Jersey, I
visited a Presbyterian church, and got a call from a woman on the outreach
committee, and she would remark, “It’s good to meet a young man who is used to
going to church.”
But
There are
a couple of levels on which I relate to my own admittedly tenuous faith, which
is a bit rebellious in the spirit of the monologue opening Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony. I admit to a primal
fear, that I might have to answer for myself someday from some other time-space
coordinates within the universe. For a judgment to come down to save those that
merely “believe in Him” - show a simple faith - sounds simultaneously like a
riddle and a tautology. For, what could tantalize any male homosexual more than
the notion of a “perfect” 33-year old man walking among us (barely old enough
to have retired from the military before the Pharisees caught up with him) , in
a pre-tribulation period. Of course, this can degenerate into the gee-whiz
stuff of UFOology ¾ literal depictions of the
Rapture (which Don Eastman approached seriously, if unexpectedly, in one Sunday
night sermon just before the AIDS crisis broke), or horror-movie scripts like
the “Return” of the 144,000 "Beheaded" from Revelation (nobody’s done
this yet ¾ I’m surprised!). Some
people seem to want the Rapture for the spectacle of calamity, which they feel
would give their now uneventful lives a special penultimate “meaning.”
I listened
to a lot of “fundamentalist” preaching on my car radios during my nine years in
Texas. Some of it was fascinating, like a by-minute account of how angels escort
you when you die! There was a preoccupation with finding ultimate “truth” in
religious faith, and an authoritarian assumption that all moral values should
derive from faith. The faithful were obligated, not just to follow The Great
Commission and to “convert” (that is, save the souls of) others with the “Good
News,” but to force religious versions of morality upon the “civilian” public
at large. People of the faith trust the priesthood with their money! Protection of freedom of religion can mean
protection of the right to discriminate, proselyte, boycott or even harass
others who do not meet one’s religious standards. The Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of 1993 has been criticized for giving “special rights” for the
practice of religion, at the expense of other interests.
At times,
this naive mantra, “the Lord provides,” sounded like a childish attempt to
close off debate, to keep the world simple. It relieves the believer of
responsibility for knowing “why” his postulates may or may not be valid, or
even for understanding how he got to be who he is. In different ways, gay
radicals and religious “fanatics” are equally “guilty” of this intellectual
laziness. The Rosicrucians called this attitude “churchianity.” The political result of such “blind faith”
may be authoritarianism. Religious authorities may hit back at attempts to
arrive at a more practical, non-sectarian notion of ethics and even personal
self-empowerment, with charges of “secular humanism.” The end result of blind religious obedience,
when the general population doesn’t want to read and think more (like we had to
in William and Mary’s English class) is continued war and tribalism. Of course,
in this country, the most “conservative” denominations hardly match, say,
Shiite Islam for total control of daily life; but there are some scholars in
Pat Robertson’s empire who want to make this nation (again, they say) a
religious republic, governed not by a constitution but by the laws of
Leviticus.
Questioning
of authority had always been in my blood. I would challenge my father (but not
military cadre later) to know “why” I had to do something that he had demanded
of me. At its best, faith should be like that; “a hallmark of Baptist identity
is the affirmation that each individual is competent to interpret Scripture
according to the dictates of conscience and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.”[43]
But it takes a certain sentience (the kind that the intellectual stimulation of
music, chess, and mathematics helps develop) to sort through all the
ambiguities and surface contradictions of scriptural moral teachings, as
reflected in the tremendous changes (and uncertainties) of our culture, toward
individuality, since the 1960’s. So various “conservative” theologians have
developed the notion of “inerrancy,” the literal infallibility of scripture as
a foundation for all truth; they would arrogantly promote this concept through
the media during the 1980’s. Freedom in theological thought, fundamentalists
maintain, amounts to the arrogance of gnosticism, salvation or exaltation
through “secret knowledge,” the kind subjective feminines like to wield! [“Freedom” for the fundamentalist translated
into opportunity to “walk with the Lord” and to obey a collective moral and
cultural code, designed to protect community welfare by limiting certain
individual expressions, as an experience of faith.] From inerrancy it is easy
to jump to political control and hate-mongering. On the other hand, conformity
to a certain authority in doctrine seems to help members of religious
communities get along and live productively. For the faithful, there is also a
tension between the authority of church leaders who interpret the Bible, one’s
own reading of the Bible, and one’s sense of truth and right derived from
broader personal and secular experience.
I would
sometimes engage the conservative religious community in personal debate. One
Presbyterian pastor tried to discourage my coming out with the claim that “homosexuality
is a form of immaturity.” Another said I knew I was denying my own “walk with
the Lord.” Both claimed they had
suspected homosexuality as my reason for wanting to see them.
I can see
religious faith can also be a source of reassurance that I am on a constructive
path that is uniquely my own, and tied to my deepest notions of inner identity.
We all need faith and hope in order to keep going. We need faith in ourselves in order to achieve anything, because we can never prove
everything that is worthwhile in advance, let alone anticipate criticisms and
rejection. Sometimes it’s easier to give
in, to get lost in emotion, and join the cult, for its collectivist language
(God’s plan for “us”) to work back
into a renewed appreciation of “who I am.”
Joining up can bring relief from the rather dishonorable sin of worry or
anxiety. Well, cults like the Moonies
carry this process way too far, with their “no more concepts.”[44]
When enough of the right uncanny and improbable coincidences occur during my
life, I start to have the faith that I can do what I was meant to do.
After all,
Christianity teaches that you just get one chance to be an individual, on only
one planet. Whatever is the ultimate truth about the rest of the universe, it
will never add to self-expression; we all find out the answer after death, when
we forever give up our individualities (and impact on others) for “cosmic
consciousness” -- or perhaps remain the same person forever; we still do not
know. Christianity begs to deal with the apparent limitations of the
“scientific method.” as we learned it in high school, to uncover deeper layers
of truth. The great mystery, that our universe exists at all, that all the
constants of physics are perfect to allow us freedom if we simply heed the
laws, and that so many billions of us are all unique individuals -- certainly
urged me to embrace faith and heed hard science at the same time. The discovery
of extraterrestrial life early in the next century would not really matter to
me, because we would always remain special as individual intelligences. Perhaps
Christianity is the religion of individuality! There is no contradiction
between special creation and evolution.
----
The "controversy" over homosexuality and the Bible has
been covered by many sources, and there are facile explanations for most of the
"clobber" passages. Many of these relate to the notion that
homosexuals supposedly enjoy intimacy without the receptiveness to creating
new, dependent human life, so homosexuality must somehow be contrary to nature.[45]
Much is made of gratuitous homosexual acts committed by essentially
heterosexual people. These ideas get covered in these all-day Saturday
Probably the simplest concept is that "God's love is for
all people," as so often preached by Reverend Don Eastman at
There are a few passages in Jesus's teachings and in the
Epistles, which, although they do not specifically mention homosexuality, bear
much on the issue of identity so important behind the politics of
homosexuality.
But over the years, I have noticed a few other passages which
seem to bear down on the politics of homosexuality, creativity, and personal
freedom.
For openers, in the
Epistle Galatians, Paul talks about a
“new” kind of freedom; the Law is not a spiritual end in itself, but our
inability to keep it invokes both a need for Christ, and a need to recognize
the benefits of personal honor and character. In Christ there’s no east and
west, black and white, gay and straight. And 1 Corinthians 13, the “Love Chapter,” the Apostle Paul invents the
vocabulary of personal growth (love, faith, hope) for a modern Rosenfels, but
puts the “eternal feminine” as the ultimate endpoint of spiritual growth. The
temptation story teaches a lesson about reality and its limits, that some
self-gratifying experiments - the testing of “good and evil”[46]
have consequences that will permanently confine us.
A more challenging
passage is the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25). What is interesting, is that the servant
receiving the fewest talents fails to show faith. The point seems to be that God has different
places for us in life, and that we may very well be unequal in gifts on earth,
but that in Christ we are made whole and equal.
I am surprised I don’t hear this Parable mentioned more often. In the
“wrong hands,” it could sound like an excuse from “conservatives” to let the
rich get richer. The more subtle message
is that everyone must learn to recognize both his or her unique gifts and, at
the same time, the limitations and discipline (and even risk-taking) necessary
to develop those gifts. Perhaps the parable is a bit of a jest: what matters is
not outcomes or winning, but a willingness to play. As in Disney’s So Dear to My Heart,[47]
it’s what you do with what you’ve got. A related story is the Parable of the
Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20), where workers are paid the same total
amount regardless of hours worked, and which looks forward to “libertarian”
(Chapter 5) notions of use of private property with personal charity and
self-interest simultaneously. I love the phrase, “are you envious because I am
generous?”
Probably the most provocative story is the Rich Young Ruler
(Matthew 25:16; Luke 18). This parable
got impressed upon me in after I had indulged myself in an encounter
group. This took place in the spring of
1972, at the “Church”, after I had stopped “dating.” I hadn’t yet broken away
into my new lifestyle. This non-gay talk group, sponsored by the Assistant
Pastor, was supposed to give an opportunity for us to “let our hair down” and
we weren’t supposed to speak in “intellectual abstractions.” I looked out at the dogwood blossoms on 16th
Street, and then gave a monologue about “the body,” and how hard I found it to
love someone who didn’t have a “good body.” And, speaking rather like the
subtitles of a French film (Wild Reeds),
I also expressed the fear that good bodies wouldn’t last forever.
“What about the body?” the reverend asked. I mumbled something
to the effect that only good-looking people receive admiration, as if that were
the same as love. Then, the husband of
the organist admitted, “well, Bill, I really don’t have any great love for
you.” Everybody was uncomfortable at how this was going. I wanted to say it: a
body was something more than ectoplasm, something you could look, even stare
at, remember later, and cathect, want yourself to be like. You could hang your feelings about someone on
something you could see, and this seemed to give the other person privileges,
even Capricornian “honors and position.” At this juncture, Melanie, whom I had
stopped dating six months before broke down and cried about her feeling
“trapped in a box” and a lack of openness with people.
Then the reverend made his own intellectual jump, and let us
all, particularly me, off the hook. “You’re all a bit like the Rich Young
Ruler,” he said, as he finally opened his Bible.
The
spoiled man addresses Christ as "Good Master," and Jesus retorts,
"why do you call me good? Only God
is good." To paraphrase, “don’t
pander me!” Or, worship the message, not
just the messenger. The "ruler" would only be satisfied with an idol
that would gratify his fantasies, or at least his pre-conceived notion of what
an ideal man was to be like. He had
indeed lived his life according to the “first normal form” of morality; he had
kept the commandments. He had harmed no one. But he was dying, like a leaf in a
drought well before an early frost. To learn unconditional love, the ruler was
required to give away all of his possessions, and then really follow Christ.[48] The ruler seemed to have little faith that
Christ would really live up to his expectations, that Christ would not desert
him. Had I lived during the time of Christ, I would have schemed to meet him,
and would have “followed him around,” and grown wary of my psychological
dependence. I would have felt strange about connecting an almost sexual
attraction with “love.” I would have
dreaded the personal test of watching the mayhem of a crucifixion. The notion
of a resurrection would have seemed like a fantasy; yet, at least once with a
person With AIDS, I really had come to believe it.
The following Sunday, the associate pastor
gave a didactic sermon on this parable, which he developed into a contrast
between a mother's love and a father's love: the mother instinctively loves her
child because it exists and it is hers; the father's love stems from the
expectation of what the child can become, what he or she might achieve as and adult,
the unknown regions he or she will open for the world. The mother’s love is innate, and the father’s
love is learned, but perhaps has the greatest potential for transcendence. This
gets to be elaborated in a family-values debate: the father teaches the child
risk-taking and rough-play; the mother, caution, expression, and consideration
for others.
The church had always softened the purely psychological demands
of “love” by extolling non-erotic, “Christian” love, which simply has the best
interests of the “other” person as its aim.
There is one more “controversial” New Testament passage that
makes a tangential, but provocative pass at homosexuality. In Chapter 19 of
Matthew, Jesus defines the significance of marriage and puts the bounds on
divorce. In marriage, he says, two
become one flesh, and undergo a fundamental change of identity. The text of
Jesus’s teaching gets pretty explicit:
“Haven’t you heard that at the beginning the Creator made them
male and female and said, ‘For this reason, a man will leave his father and
mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become {one flesh}. So they
are no longer two, but one.”[49]
In modern Western culture, marriage has
become the rite of adulthood. The ability to commit oneself, not just in sexual
intimacy but in shared daily living, eating, sleeping, and biorhythms, to
another person (of the opposite gender) is an unwritten requirement to
first-class World citizenship. And, until perhaps twenty five years ago, this
commitment was to be for life, “in sickness and health”, for “richer or
poorer.” Taken literally, this passage,
so far, would suggest that no man should leave his parents and live the
independent life I have for 26 years (counting from the day of my discharge
from the Army) without at least some commitment to poverty (but not to
martyrdom). The Mormon Church (whose members have always impressed me with
their individual honesty and generosity toward their own neighbors) carried
this idea of “eternal marriage” into the afterlife; singles like me were to
remain psychological slaves.
Divorce is a denial of
this rite of commitment, and stems from a “hardness of heart.” My roommate at William and Mary had spoken of
“adultery in the heart.” Yet, Jesus then
says, this passage applies to those “for whom it was intended.” He speaks of
“eunuchs” as a priesthood who can reach some sort of Godhead (say,
self-actualization) without surrendering themselves to the tribunal of
matrimony. We can debate whether instead of “eunuchs” he could have said
“gays,” but Jesus definitely says some people “make themselves this way” for
the Lord’s purpose.
Christianity confronts us with paradox, with exceptions that
swallow their own rules. Lust leads to “unnatural” indulgences, but one loves a
buddy in combat as one loves oneself.
Maybe it’s best never to marry, to save oneself for Faith, but it’s
better to marry than to burn. Raising a family today sounds like the most
morally compelling personal objective, but it would hardly make sense if
Judgment Day occurs tomorrow. Reward or judgment occurs in the hereafter, but
expressive individuality is confined to this small planet and demands that one
keep oneself regardless of relationships. The Law must be fulfilled but it sets
one free. For it is disciplined dedication to human elements outside the self
that brings one closer to both “the Spirit” and to the new self, which in
modern society is supposed to be constructed by family.
---
The gay community and religion continue to react in big and
small ways. For example, for a few years in Dallas, I attended home meetings of
Evangelicals[50]
Concerned, a small study group of gay self-defined evangelical Christians.
Founder Ralph Blair visited once in 1986, and commented on how the teachings of
Paul Rosenfels (Paul himself had just died of heart failure) had been keeping
most members of the Ninth Street Center alive during the AIDS epidemic by
encouraging monogamous relationships.
Then, just after I left
Harvard University Preacher Peter Gomes has provided a modern
conceptual overview of the proper interpretation of the Bible and
homosexuality.[51]
The Levitical laws, he stresses, concerned ritual impurity. Sodom and Gomorrah
dealt with a generic wickedness, including inhospitality. The passages in the
Epistles dealt with idolatry, perhaps more of sexual practices than of the
persons cathected. (The Tenth Commandment, however, reads, “thou shalt not
covet.”) Gomes provides a moving account of his own public “coming out” at a
rally at the Harvard Yard in the early 1990’s.
Just as the established church presents problems of conscience
for individual homosexuals like me, homosexuality provides mainstream
denominations with serious practical questions about discipline within the
church, and the credibility of scripture as a cohesive element among believers.[52]
Homosexuality brings out the paradox of the individual faith experience, in
that it demands openness to truth and introspection; yet, in almost
Rosenfelsian fashion, it denies the defense of intellect.
---
In 1980, two years before AIDS would start to test the stamina
and forbearance of the gay community, the churches presented the gay community
a smaller, now forgotten challenge: to house thousands of refugiados cubanos fleeing Castro. Many of them were said to be
homosexuals, who quickly found their way to both establishment churches and gay
churches.
I signed up for a refresher Spanish course at a community
college in Dallas, and I made an appointment to interview as a sponsor at
Catholic Charities, housed in a WWII-era brown brick building, somewhat out of
place in the glittery Oak Lawn neighborhood. I walked in to see a Mr. Perez,
and challenged him immediately by “telling.”
“The fact you say you are gay ends this discussion,” he said,
without standing up. He quickly denied the stories about the refugees.
I then went over to one of the small gay churches (not
A few weeks later, at one Wednesday evening
I was glad to live alone again after he left. I preferred to concentrate again on
interacting with people I respected, not just people who told me they had “real
needs.”
AIDS Is Seen as a Result
of “Too Much Freedom” and Lack of
Marital Commitment
My doctor had finished cutting out two moles, and my employer
would pay for the excisions. He leaned over my trunk as I lay psychologically
“etherized” on a gurney, and swabbed a small area with iodine. I sat up to
look. “Let’s check this one little spot.”
This moment, as I lay next to the doctor’s full tray, was my
knife edge, separating “before and after,” as Shilts had described the personal
moment AIDS would change everything.[53]
I was shocked that he would yank away some tissue from me, and
tell me in a few days whether I had long to live. I had thought of him as an
“easy” doctor; though, recently he had given up our lifestyle and
This was a
---
Even though the Supreme Court’s majority opinion to allow state
sodomy laws (Hardwick v. Bowers,
1986) made no explicit mention of AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases, the
panic over AIDS in the three years preceding the decision certainly must have
produced a psychological effect on the justices. Indeed, from perhaps early
1983 (when Newsweek came out with its
scare issue “Epidemic, the Public Health Threat of the Century” and
subsequently Geraldo Rivera described AIDS as the plot of a horror movie) until
perhaps the end of Reagan’s terms, commentators seemed to want to connect AIDS
to a particularly moral weakness in homosexuals. Commentator Pat Buchanan wrote
of those “poor homosexuals” who had earned the “awful revenge” from nature for
violating it.
My own indoctrination was
gradual. I saw the first stories about Kaposi’s Sarcoma on the Texas TWIT (This
Week in Texas) as I went into the TMC (Throckmorton Mining Company) bar in
Dallas. A week later, I would watch a resident doctor friend pore over the
early medical articles on the coffee table in his Oak Lawn apartment. In early
1983, gay doctors at an emergency information forum (I had almost skipped it to
play chess!) would tell us that few
people seem to survive, that we were riding an iceberg, and that already we
were asked not to donate blood. As recently as early 1981, blood banks had
visited Dallas Gay Alliance meetings to court gay men to become “superdonors”
(through plasmapheresis) for the new hepatitis B vaccine (which I took in
1982). Going into 1981, we had naïvely thought hepatitis B (also bloodborne) to
be gay men’s last big health threat.[54]
The early numbers were shocking; over 70% of new cases were in
gay men (over 90% in many cities including Dallas).[55] A popular, misleading colloquialism spoke of
the “4 H’s” (homosexuals, heroin addicts, hemophiliacs, and Haitians). The
Haitians would soon prove to be a misconceived amalgam of other at-risk
persons; the hemophiliacs (and, soon, direct blood transfusion recipients)
were, if anyone, truly the “innocent bystanders” of a disease explosion.
I was shocked. I had
heard rumors of clusters of “contagious” cancer (such as Hodgkin’s Disease in
1978), and, even in the late 1970’s in New York, of bizarre diseases appearing
in the gay community. But I could never have conceived of anything so diabolical
as AIDS; any new disease, I had thought, would spare most “stronger” hosts, as
does hepatitis (several forms). Now, I would go through a one-year panic of
looking at my trunk and legs for lesions, after one horrifying moment in a
shower when I noticed a red spot on my trunk; then I had never heard of “senile
hemangiomas.” Would I ever have to watch myself become massively disfigured
like the hapless Kaposi’s Sarcoma victim just shown on ABC “20-20” in May
1983? Later, a gay doctor would tell me
a simple rule as we walked on Cedar Springs: “if it goes away, it isn’t
AIDS.” For a while, it looked like I
would have to go to war with the AIDS epidemic, when I had maneuvered my way
out of combat in Vietnam.
I spent a number of Saturday mornings at the Texas Health
Sciences Center Library, desperately looking through medical journals for signs
of hope. While trashy theories about AIDS (“poppers”) circulated in gay
periodicals, I quickly encountered discussions of a retrovirus (HTLV-1)
connected to a bizarre lymphatic cancer that seemed like a mirror-image of
AIDS.[56] I was seeing critical studies comparing the
immune systems and T-helper counts of heterosexual men and (even
non-promiscuous) homosexual men. Men who go through their tribunals and get
married really are healthier, I thought. I felt personally slandered. Lesbians,
however, had fewer sexually transmitted diseases (
At work (at a
Very quickly, on the basis of epidemiological evidence, authorities
would conclude that a new virus had to be involved, particularly from the
observation that the disease had gone from almost zero occurrence to a pattern
of geometric doubling, and from the fact that specific chains of contact would
be shown, from a “Patient Zero.” Even today, conspiracy theorists (Duesberg and
Ellsberg) come up with all kinds of pseudo-science to play the game of denial.
The medical establishment, they claim, has a vested interest in finding new
germs (as it once had with scurvy).[57]
Although questions of scientific integrity and government cover-ups would
surface (most notably in the New York
Native), the evidence that the cause was a retrovirus quickly became
overwhelming. The Reagan administration sounded pretty smug when it announced in
April, 1984, that it had “discovered” the cause of AIDS, then called HTLV-
I corresponded extensively with the CDC, health departments,
researchers such as Anne Fettner and Alan Cantwell, and Charles Ortleb, editor
of The
I even traveled to investigate. On vacation, I drove a rental
car to Belle Glade, Fl., and saw squalid tenements with outdoor laundries,
until I was followed out of town in a low-speed
“car chase.” On the plane, I met
an anti-AIDS activist from the “religious right” (carrying his “National AIDS
Prevention Network” literature) and actually corresponded with him later. I also visited the iron-gated New York Native office fortress.
The Dallas gay community quickly organized education forums. The
early advice was to “limit the number of sexual partners,” although it soon
became apparent that even this was denial; even one “exposure” [through
“exchange of body fluids”] could transmit a death sentence. People would speak
of tricks, “is this one worthy dying for?” and ask potential partners in bars,
“Are you clean?” We would quickly urge the use of condoms, or, better, fidelity
to one partner. We had hushed conversations with CDC’s James Curran in Dallas
hotel rooms, and agreed we had to get our acts together.
On the surface, it would seen that, once the panic over AIDS had
become public, self-righteous "conservatives" could have gone after
gays with the same fervor that they chased drug users. And, indeed, they
tried. It is important to depict the
"theory" they constructed. “They,” of course, included the notorious
Paul Cameron and Gene Antonio (now somewhat discredited even among
conservatives), and various other groups, such as the “Dallas Doctors Against
AIDS” that surfaced in 1983 (with which I actually corresponded “secretly” in
the Spring of 1984).[58]
[Their rhetoric threatened a lot more than the silly sermons of Jerry Falwell,
ignorantly linking “herpes and AIDS” as the almost the same disease.]
Sex acts outside of monogamous marriage, they claimed,
facilitate transmission of disease and affect others for two reasons. First, society has to pay the financial cost
of
Furthermore, male homosexual sex, they claimed, was
qualitatively even more dangerous to "society" than (multiple
partner) vaginal sex because, first, the rectum (and perhaps mouth) were more
easily damaged in intercourse (because of lack of lubrication and thinner
rectal wall, making minor tears more likely) and, even more important, because
among male homosexuals, the same individual who "receives" can turn
around and "give," and propagate a chain letter or pyramid of easy
transmission. (At least with vaginal sex, the difficulty of transmission from
female to male, when there are not other diseases around to facilitate
transmission, putatively makes sustaining a long chain of infection less
likely; this analogy does not hold with true “venereal,” as opposed to sexually
transmitted, diseases like herpes and venereal warts.) In just twelve years since Stonewall, they
claimed, the gay community had incubated a horrible epidemic with its defiance
of "nature," and now the survival of the species might be every much
at stake as it had been with the threat of nuclear winter. They would claim that anal and oral sex could
not be made safe (because condoms break and leak), and that gay men, without
legitimate procreative outlets, therefore had become human vermin. They got
carried away with talk about feces and golden showers. Even moderate commentators remarked that had
AIDS not come along among promiscuous gay men, some other horrible disease
would have. The "experts" traveled the country in lecture circuits,
spreading images of scatology and rumors of casual secondary transmission of
AIDS through the “interstitial cells” in the lungs,[60]
while they characterized gay men as effeminate “sophisticates” contaminating
normal men. They published books calling for mandatory national HIV testing,
exclusion of “carriers” from many occupations (even food handling).[61] Talk-show callers would ask, “WHAT IF... a
flight attendant has a nosebleed into your luncheon lasagna; sitcom scripts
would claim, “there’s always a first time!” Gene Antonio, at a public forum
held in a fundamentalist church in Carrollton, Texas in 1986, suggested that
all employers should “ask.” Proposals were advanced to quarantine all AIDS
patients and even all gay men, perhaps in camps like those for the Japanese
Nisei in World War II (how gay men would be identified was never clear - maybe
by the pupilometric machine from a 1974 movie, The Parallax View, or the penile plethysomograph of sex offender
“rehabilitation” in prison). National Review editor William Buckley
sarcastically proposed tattooing persons testing positive on the buttocks; The New York Native fired back that this
was another “Final Solution.” Worse still was the psychological scar associated
with male autonomy and disinclination for marriage, now associated with likely
disease and a short life span. Certainly, the notion that one has absolute
moral dominion over one’s own body (previously also an underpinning of a “pro
choice” position on abortion) had suddenly been gravely eroded; even if a male
homosexual quite properly refrained from giving blood, one could say he had
removed himself as a significant community medical resource. For women, not bearing children was discussed
as a cancer risk! CDC would remind the homophobes in forums that lesbians, as a
class, have the lowest level of sexually
transmitted diseases among all combinations of sex and orientation.[note Y3]
Generally, public health officials saw this
chain-letter theory as “opportunistic” political crackpotism. Responsible clinicians
would remind people at AIDS education forums of several facts. First, one can meet all the political
proscriptions against anal intercourse: while the contention that rectal sex
more readily transmits disease (than vaginal sex) sounds like “common sense,”
there are, in fact, no complete studies to back up that assertion.[62]
The explosion of AIDS within the gay community may have been the result of
promiscuity spreading a new agent within a concentrated, circumscribed
population; the same “blast crises” seem to occur among heterosexual drug
abusing populations here and general heterosexual populations in poor
countries. While hepatitis B had also been associated with unprotected male
anal sex,[63] other
bloodborne diseases such as HTLV-1 and hepatitis C have never shown a
particular affinity for the male gay community. In less developed parts of the
world, HIV seems as readily explosive in heterosexually active populations,[64]
and even in this country, there are now numerous tragic cases of heterosexual
transmission with no other risk factors.[65] Second, using AIDS as an excuse to shut down
the gay community and then walk away, would send a message to reckless young
heterosexual men that "fucking" (++ sexual intercourse ++) is OK as long as “boys are
really boys”; in fact promiscuity is dangerous for anyone, including
heterosexuals. How would the world’s
Paul Cameron’s respond if there were a new form of herpes that affected mainly
heterosexual women (after being carried by men), and then led to gradual
senility over ten or so years (or perhaps to immediate sterility)? How much
damage is done by largely heterosexual diseases like chlamydia? How many cases of cervical cancer can be
traced to papilloma (wart) virus from promiscuous vaginal sex?[66]
Could the next sci-fi 12 Monkeys
scenario for a deadly virus require the female reproductive tract for part of
its life-cycle before amplification? Modern encroachment onto the remote turf
of nature stirs up new bizarre and horrifying diseases,[67]
like Ebola and “mad cow,” but probably none of them will ever pick selectively
on homosexuals again.
A very recent Wall Street
Journal piece, discussing how the risks for heterosexuals have been
exaggerated,[68]
may inflame this kind of debate again. This piece assembles the statistics from
several separate studies by different entities. Supposedly vaginal intercourse
results in one infection per 1000 unprotected acts with an infected partner
(male-female and female-male are not differentiated), whereas unprotected
receptive anal intercourse carries a risk of 5 to 30 infections per 1000 acts.[69] Unprotected vaginal intercourse carries a
risk one infection in 5 million acts. This would seem to reinforce the putative
state interest in hammering down on, at least, male homosexual acts, until one
remembers there is no danger at all with an uninfected partner, and much less
(though not zero) when condoms are used; further, homosexuals are discovering
non-penetrative forms of sexual enjoyment with little or no risk. A recent
piece in Science suggests that
strains of HIV found commonly in the Far East may be more easily transmitted
heterosexually, in a conventional venereal fashion, through “langerhans” cells
in the vaginal mucosa.[70] A recent CBS “60 Minutes” segment[71]
counters Wall Street and suggests
that spread by heterosexual contact, even among non-drug users in the developed
world, is increasing rapidly. In the
early days of the epidemic, Dr. Redfield at Walter Reed Army Hospital published
articles claiming spread among military heterosexuals, although one wonders if
this was motivated by military denial of the significant presence of gay men in
the military, even during the “absolute ban” (next chapter).
I remember going to a party of the Oak Lawn Softball Association
one night in April 1984, when someone said, “they just closed the baths in San
Francisco.”[72]
And soon, everywhere, sex-club operators were accused by health departments of
selling “disease and death,” like drug dealers or even tobacco companies. But,
at least, we could still meet socially. That was protected by the Constitution.
“They’ll close down the
The predictions that gays would be excluded from much of the
mainstream workplace (and not just the military) would appear quickly. I recall
the media reactions in 1983 as the “ban” on male blood donations continued (as
it does today for all men who have had sex with other men since 1977, even if
HIV negative). “Tomorrow, they will tell us we can’t work in hospitals,”
lamented one man. It seemed that one’s blood belonged to the community, not to
oneself. Nathan Fain, from the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, wrote to me
of the “current controversy concerning the employment of gay men.”
I wondered if the gay
community would survive with “life as we know it.” For a while, I started buying into this
guilt. I bought a private insurance policy specifically against AIDS, paying
first $250 and then $500 for 6-month periods of protection. I imagined that I
was taking financial responsibility for my own past “conduct.” Would the Reagan administration indulge in
its own rounds of political fag-bashing, as if homosexuality were suddenly a
moral outrage, capable (like drugs and abortion) of dividing and then
mobilizing a 1980’s version of the Crusades? The publicity surrounding cocaine
abuse in professional sports and the military, and then some tragic accidents
(such as a train wreck in Maryland in the mid 1980’s) in which crew members had
used drugs, was already being met by the presidential bully pulpit (Nancy
Reagan’s “Just Say No!”), tougher laws and by widespread testing in private
industry. Reagan had already written his little book, Abortion and the
Conscience of a Nation.[73] In the mid 1980’s, I was, of course,
disturbed by the statues with whom Reagan had surrounded himself (like Meese,
who actually tried to ask Justice Department employees about their sexual
habits), and was unaware of his own rather libertarian nature. At one point, in 1987, Reagan finally said,
“I must say, that on this issue, medical teaching and moral teaching say the
same things.” Yet, that left open the
notion that he was talking about promiscuity, not homosexuality. He never went
before the public to announce some kind of initiative or vendetta to put away
“homosexuality” as another social cancer like cocaine. CDC, in 1987, actually
did send a relatively benign information pamphlet about AIDS to every postal
address in the United States.
History, moreover, provided a little-noticed break for our
community. In 1982, a federal judge, Jerry Buchmeyer, had declared the Texas
"homosexual conduct" law unconstitutional. This decision (though later vacated in 1985
by a federal appeals court)[74]
was still in force during the days of panic in early 1983, during the
horror-movie media panic. At that time, the
Dallas Doctors Against AIDS (by now, obviously, the Dallas Doctors
Against Homosexuality), who would talk gleefully about the “food chain” and the
“dental chain”[75]
as well as the obvious “blood chain” in television interviews, defied the Buchmeyer ruling and goaded the
Judiciary Committee in the Texas House of Delegates to introduce a very
draconian bill which aimed to put the gay community out of business. “There is
no such thing as a right to privacy,” one of their attorneys actually told a
public forum! (As one Dallas gay activist put it, “the Texas legislature passes
unconstitutional legislation all the time!”) Besides making sodomy a felony
(since penal code revision in 1973, sodomy had been a minor misdemeanor
carrying a maximum $200 (now $500) fine and had been defined as criminal only
for homosexual acts), it made it very easy for police to arrest patrons of gay
bars (for the slightest demonstration of physical affection) and close the bars
down, and probably would have required holders of professional licenses from
the state, as well as teachers, law enforcement, and food handlers to swear
they were not engaging in homosexual conduct.[76] I corresponded surreptitiously with the
Dallas Doctors Against AIDS (to the dismay of Bill Nelson, then the president
of the Dallas Gay Alliance), as I was trying to extract some kind of lowest
common denominator out of their logic. I wrote strong letters to the Judiciary
Committee of the Texas House of Delegates reporting on my correspondence with
them. Because of the Buchmeyer ruling,
we were able to persuade the Judiciary Committee not to report the bill out; it
lost in committee, 7-2. But had it come up for a vote, it would have been very
difficult for assemblymen to vote the bill down, because they would have been
viewed as promoting homosexuality and AIDS.
But had this bill passed the Texas legislature, no doubt it would have
been imitated in many other states.
The spirit of such public policy would have been much meaner
than the much maligned “don’t ask, don’t tell” of today’s notions of
“toleration” (short of acceptance). Indeed, even the appearance of homosexual
association was not to be tolerated at all. This position maintains that
private lives are very much public business, and would normally be the subject
of scrutiny of anyone intending to have a place in society. In a local
Republican party caucus in Dallas in 1986, one woman actually suggested a
resolution that it be a crime for two adult members of the same sex to live together! (It actually is a crime, never
prosecuted, in nine states). One Dallas attorney actually told me, incredibly,
that cohabitation (though legal in Texas) could be used to justify a sodomy
conviction.
Should HIV infection, perhaps through some Trojan Horse
mechanism, mutate into something more "contagious,"[77]
or should some other disease get inseminated in the gay community ¾ both are unlikely ¾ or should radical right congressmen and
assemblymen decide to run the anti-gay gauntlet after all ¾ what could they do? Remember, once a
"private act" has been defined as a "crime," then speech or
assembly which suggests an intent or propensity to commit the "crime"
is no longer automatically protected under the First Amendment. Theoretically,
patrons of a gay bar could be indicted for "conspiracy" to commit
"sodomy." Immunity could
conceivably be granted to adults who would “name names” of others guilty of
“sodomy,” as in the military or during
some of the purges of McCarthyism.
Cities could stop issuing permits for gay-pride parades. Tax-exempt
status could be withdrawn from "gay churches" like
Actually, "conspiracy" or "racketeering"
charges are accepted ways for government to intervene in other areas, even when
no harmful act has yet been committed, if law enforcement officials believe it
will be. Terrorists can be arrested
before they start making their bombs. In one case, pedophiles in Richmond, Va.
were arrested and convicted for planning "snuff" killings before the
crimes took place. Of course, in all
these cases, there clearly would have been people harmed had intervention not
happened. But, once an act (such as homosexual sodomy) has been declared a
crime and "immoral" in law, the same right of government to intervene
pre-emptively would apply.
In the earliest days of the epidemic, I was critical of others
in gay leadership for practicing denial. Many still wanted (even to this day)
to deny a virus could be the cause, when actually its discovery probably made
eventual political control (and distinction of actual disease from homosexual
orientation) plausible. Others would say, “it’s just bugs!” ¾ never mind that this bug is like an organic
computer, a “screamer” or intelligent robot-cockroach from the “X-Files” ¾ and that bugs are spread by promiscuous sex.
When the first tests were introduced in 1985, gay writers quickly warned about
use of the test to screen people and
not just blood. “Don’t take the test,” would be the battle cry in 1985 and
1986. The Dallas Gay Alliance would produce pamphlets proclaiming “gay is
healthy” and linking AIDS and cancer as diseases that have common prevention
methods. Some on the gay “left” sounded as though gay men shouldn’t have to
answer for their own behavior if it led to disease; wasn’t sex a basic right?
The Supreme Court had already said (with Hardwick,
in 1986) that, outside of procreative marriage, it is not. So, I wondered if we
would have a choice about taking the test if we wanted to remain reasonably
employed; screening would be better than outright exclusion for being gay (or,
middle-aged, male and unmarried). Specifically, would employers screen job
applicants for HIV, to foreclose a health insurance risk, the way they were
starting to for drugs? A few companies, such as self-insured Circle K, tried to
adopt policies not covering “behavior-based” diseases.
But the community would organize quickly, as it organized
frequent education forums. With my own physician, I helped the Oak Lawn
Counseling Center write one of its first information brochures in 1983. My doctor suggested that the blood issue
would eventually be defused by the development of artificial blood, possibly
first in the military. I developed notoriety by asking probing clinical
questions at these forums, which sometimes buried AIDS in the larger question
of good health, as did one Saturday “health fair” at the Dallas Village Station
disco, where electrocardiographs teased the men on stage. The community quickly
developed notions of “safer sex,” and,
indeed, men can have physiologically and emotionally satisfying interaction
without penetration. Some AIDS activists promoted the questionable idea that
almost all sexual transmission of HIV could be prevented by proper use of
condoms; classroom forums would show blowing condoms up as balloons and putting
them on as Halloween masks. Don Eastman preached at sermon at
The
gay community rebutted and buttressed its moral stature with the enormous,
altruistic volunteer efforts to take care of people with AIDS. I participated, somewhat at the limits of my
convenience, as an “assistant” or “baby” buddy. A couple of the clients were
shocking to me, having withered to perhaps 70 pounds, covered with sores and in
almost constant nausea until they died. One had been a Vietnam veteran (and the
Oak Lawn Counseling Center chose me to see him since I had been in the military
myself), and lay in a coma for three days in a hot apartment until he let go. I
did my share of toilet-cleaning after putting on talcum and hospital gloves.
His “primary” buddy, a carpenter, gave up his freelance income to stay with him
most of the time, and had difficulty letting him go emotionally; while I
witnessed this continuous spectacle of devoted, agape love (like I had never
seen) I maintained a certain detachment.
Another, a piano teacher for whom I bought Chopin cassettes, died three
days after I was assigned to him. But
another became a hero, evoking a reverence from me for having made a comeback
from Kaposi’s Sarcoma that made him a legend and example for others, then to go
back to work with a long sleeve to hide his catheter for pentamadine
infusions. He drifted away as I got
involved in my own job and got lost again in overtime to meet “due dates”; he then went downhill, as much from the
medications as the disease, and died. Another buddy from the Oak Lawn
Counseling Center would tell the story, that when the parents of his client
came the night the client died, their reaction was, “now, don’t you see what
you’ve done!” When I took communion at the Garden Grove, Cal. Crystal Cathedral
during a 1986 visit and shared my experience with the deacon offering me
“bread,” he prayed for my “safety” as I undertook a special “ministry.”
But the changes of behavior in gay men have been remarkable.
Today, younger gay men (in their twenties) in large cities tend to become
infected at 2%-3% per year. But many more men are remaining uninfected, and the majority of gay men today are actually
HIV-negative. The media will report on the number of young gay men being
infected, without reporting that the rate of case increase may be actually
dropping. When I go to a gay club or
event, most of the men appear healthy; I am not constantly reminded of the
epidemic just by visual senses. There is still another irony: had there been no
AIDS epidemic, and resulting moderation in the behavior of gay men, the issue
of enteric (bacterial,[78]
protozoan or viral) diseases spread by infected food handlers probably would
have resulted in even more intrusive employment practices (like those proposed
and then reversed by Enserch in Dallas in 1985, that would have screened
executive food-handlers even for worms!)[79] Now, younger gay men have the luxury of
knowing that they do not have to let themselves ever get infected; the more
attractive men can actually relish in their pleasure of extreme selectivity. In
the long run, the political as well as medical well being of gay men may depend
on the determination of enough of them to remain uninfected. Again, an
individual gay male may avoid
penetrative sexual acts (at least with infected partners), protect his own
health and own moral karma; yet he must endure the public’s political
connection between his lifeline (and the apparently “logical” conclusion that he will probably
become infected eventually, because he participates in a culture that results
in many of its “vulnerable” members getting infected) and “sodomy.”
The
response of the best in the gay community, both men and women, did help
ultimately to contribute to a climate that, even with the conservative Reagan
and Bush administrations, would allow reasonable funding for research (some say
it’s inadequate, but the progress with this virus was amazing), gradually
encourage reasonable, compassionate and voluntary behavior by most mainstream
employers, even in the face of potential customer fears, and even before Congress
legislated reasonable protections for the rights of HIV-infected people
(through the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1992). The worst fears of
the “don’t take the test” crowd have
generally, outside the military and possibly some areas in medicine (where
invasive procedures are practiced)[80]
not materialized. But even the military has been willing to retain, treat, and
reassign many HIV-infected soldiers (and in 1986 the Department of Defense
issued a memo prohibiting gratuitous discrimination against and discharge of
HIV-positive soldiers, in some contradiction to its otherwise anti-gay ban).
The gay community lived through this tornado and gradually, by around 1990,
seemed to grow stronger, just as the free world seemed to pull through the
worst threats of the Cold War (and of shortages), as communism would collapse
between 1989 and 1991.
In 1988, I volunteered to be evaluated for NIH’s trial of the
GP160 vaccine. I felt a bit like a prodigal son returning, this time, I
thought, for a much more uplifting purpose. I spent a morning giving blood in
vacutainers, taking electrocardiograms and undergoing other “embarrassing”
examinations. I was accepted, but declined to be vaccinated because the
followup required so much presence during workdays. NIH did warn all
participants that vaccination would result in a positive test, and that
although NIH would provide explanations that participants are not infected,
yielding a positive HIV test “may not be acceptable to some employers.” The GP160 vaccine turned out to be
ineffective.
There are several areas that give real hope for managing AIDS.
First, combinations of medications (especially the new protease inhibitors) may
make even advanced HIV infection manageable indefinitely, like diabetes.[81] Suddenly, men who had expected to die within
a few years are told they could live almost a normal lifespan. Some of the new
drugs will be difficult to administer, and paying for them lifelong will become moral and political, as well as
personal, issues. It is still unclear
whether these drugs will ever be able to clear HIV completely from all hidden
sanctuaries (such as the brain). Second, a significant number of HIV-positive
persons progress into disease only very slowly, possibly because of infection
with defective or weak strains of HIV, or (probably) because their lymphocytes
happen (through fortunate genetics) to have geometrically unfit receptors for
HIV. In one case, a (HIV-positive) man whose partner died in 1982 is still
asymptomatic. Some partners of AIDS victims never become infected, or, at
least, sero-positive.[82] Finally, the possibility of an eventual
vaccine, if sounding like manned space travel, is very real. Vaccination with
core-antibody proteins, or, more effectively, a live but defective virus (with
certain genes deleted) should have a real chance of success, even if their
vaccine trials pose enormous ethical and public policy questions. I would
consider volunteering for such a trial.
There has always been a tendency in society to rationalize bad
things as “moral failures.” We equate
obesity with the “deadly sins” of gluttony and sloth (to be discovered in
decrepit apartments by Brad Pitt-like or Mulder-like role model detectives in
the movies), and blame the “victims” not only of AIDS, but of cancer, stroke,
and heart disease on bad lifestyle habits, the cost of which is borne by the
public. Likewise, we blame earthquake or flood victims for flouting nature and
then forcing everyone else to pay the bills. In time of war, we might blame civilian
and military victims of “cowardice” for unwillingness to sacrifice themselves.
So, AIDS becomes equated to the “moral failure” of non-commitment, of a
narcissistic sexuality that refuses to accept limitation and commitment. The
gaudy, charismatic young gay man is viewed as a white-hot, blue giant star,
burning itself out before it can grow old and wither. Then, the moralists can
quote their “statistics” on gay longevity from the obituaries of gay
newspapers.[83]
But their insistence on blaming the epidemic on gay men’s sexuality is a bit
like blaming overpopulation or even nationalistic “manifest destiny” on
heterosexuality.
We don’t like to
recognize that bad things can happen to good people. People, like the Biblical
character Job, get sick and suffer for reasons totally beyond their own
personal controls. At some point, any humane society, however determined to
venture in the “libertarian” direction of personal responsibility, must look
for appropriate levels of compassion and social responsibility. Cheating on a
faithful spouse with unprotected sex (same sex or opposite sex) and then
exposing the spouse is, by any moral reckoning, a crime. It may be difficult to
prosecute, but a deeply immoral act it is, just like driving drunk. It’s
reckless endangerment. However, it is a wrongdoing by an individual; not an
excuse to exile a whole community.
Unlike Sodom, the gay community is as good as its best men.
A Paradox of Meaning
Twelve of us Adventurers, myself included, enjoyed a delectable
Saturday night feast of Moroccan chicken and western salad, French bread and
homebaked pies, served family-style around an early American dinner table.
Although the early December had been quite mild for West Virginia mountains, we
enjoyed the crackle of the fireplace across the cabin living room.
The eight of us unattached peons in the larger building actually
enjoyed more luxury during this temporary weekend of roughing it. We had the
kitchen and snacks. The trip leader and his social elite occupied the more
intimate quarters up the road. Denny had made the communal weekend really work.
Everyone had been expected to cook something; he had asked me, “tell me where
you shine,” and that had been to make the turkey sandwiches (roast, not turkey
roll) for “On the Trail.” For runs to the saloon for beers, we were on our
own.
We had spent the day hiking, as professional if participating
tourists, through the “Ridge and Valley Province,” safely east of the coal
measures. There would never be an economic incentive to tear these nearby
mountains down. I fell behind on an uphill climb to a 3700-foot ledge, and a
vagrant cocker spaniel met me on the trail and followed me up.
We enjoyed a camaraderie that was not the same as cohesion, nor
was it the navel-inspecting clique that considered itself a psychological
elite. We were explorer-scouts; we would “see the world.” We were at once grown
men and boys. We biked, winter-camped, rappelled cliffs, rode hot air balloons,
and arose for dawn bird-watching. And,
generally, we were healthy. The worst of the AIDS epidemic seemed to be moving
on, to neighborhoods I honestly cared less about; my own immediate friends were
no longer falling ill. The survivors were those who had modified their private
behaviors in time.
Adventuring, for me, represented a resurgence among gay men in
healthier lives and less compromising ways to meet people. Founded in 1978 (and
one of similar outdoors groups in many cities) it had long avoided possible
legal complications for its participants (some who had applied for security
clearances) by remaining a “non-membership” corporation.
Denny had brought a geo-political board game, “Global Pursuit,”
and the world-map, Macerator Projection, already lay open on the cabin floor
like a Christmas present. I had already said something like, maybe we should
arrange a cabin trip for some future Begin-Sadat-like talks that the Carter
Center might cook up; this rustic place looked perfect. Against Sadam, of
course, only the use of force would work. The discussion turned somber for a
few minutes. The breezes of war were rising quickly. If Sadam really could cut
off 50% of our oil, Adventuring might have trouble arranging all these
ambitious weekend trips. Someone made the comment that we were defending our
“freedom” ¾ that is, personal mobility ¾ by supporting a patriarchal regime that
recognized no human rights, vetoed women’s working or driving cars, and
decapitated gays like us. We were in the same position as college students and
engineers who had prospered by sending young blacks to Vietnam to do their
fighting, sacrificing, and dying. We were depending on a military that did not
simply discriminate against us but also “banned” us. We had rationalized the
exclusion by believing that the military was no place for people who take their
own lives seriously anyway; nobody had to serve. There was no draft anymore,
was there? We were glad there were 400,000 “straight” people who would let
their lives be uprooted and spend months in hot, sandy super-tents.
Second-class citizenship could carry its own hidden advantages.
In the first few hours of confusion after his invasion of Kuwait
earlier in 1990, Sadam (George Bush had named him “Sodom”) had missed his
chance to capture the Saudi oil ports, as if they were properties on a Monopoly
Board. The men around this dinner table knew that the outside world very much
mattered, and very little of this had to do with direct discrimination against
us.
----
You can’t take it back. You touch a piece, and if you have a
legal move with that piece, you move it! That is one of the Laws of Chess. In
speed, you make an illegal move, you lose automatically.
Here’s another one: no matter how strong your opponent, even if
he’s Kasparov, only your own mistakes can beat you. It works both ways, just as
it does on Monday Night Football.
We all get tempted. It feels good to have a pawn in your pocket;
it’s comforting.
With some creatures, whom I think are beneath me, there are no
values. They take what they want because it feels good for the moment, and
because somebody will probably steal it from them tomorrow. The darwinian
character of the world sifts down to denial of permanence or futurity; there
are only gratifications. We call these people predators, sociopaths, or
criminally “insane” and try to keep them caged in prison, even with
post-sentence “hospitalization.” As a variation, some persons wish to get
attention by complaining about some social injustice (often caused by
government) but cannot see any way to express their own views, apart from those
of peers, except through violence or, perhaps, authoring and planting computer
viruses. A few of these criminals are gay people; not many, I hope. Still, the
reports of child abuse by priests and even sports figures, all “forced” to
hide, disturb me.
Why have character, anyway? Beyond the threat of earthly
punishment or eternity in hell, or even a naive sense of faith, the most
important reason is to be valued by other people, to feel good about yourself,
or even to be in a relationship that reinforces that goodness-of-self. In
short, you have to “be somebody.” But you have to earn these things.
Dictatorship obfuscates character formation. Tyranny teaches
people to relish in the glory of collective gain or victory (however convincingly portrayed in art and
music) to the point they lose sense of personal culpability. Nazism, particularly, dealt with the personal
discomfort of dealing with and caring about “different” or disabled people, a
process which should conform to the best of Christian tradition, by simply
declaring all difference and disability (whether mutable or not) to be subhuman
unworthiness.
You can think you have character and still give in when you know
you don’t have to. This comprises the essence of compulsiveness. I cringe at
some stupid things I have said and done, and wondered how I could have not
known I was insulting others. Perhaps I really did know. But I was too
preoccupied with my own comfort, what I would get out of some kind of
manipulation. And I could believe that some perverse erotic moment really had
meaning. Similarly, others find
“purpose” in their own achievement of power, when they have no ideas except
perhaps the undermining or even destruction of others through manipulating
their adaptive loyalties.
The simple idea of
personal responsibility doesn’t cover everything. You can simply have
the wrong goals. Or perhaps they are the
right goals, and you just won’t work hard enough; you won’t take the necessary
chances.
In my own
workplace I have long noticed a divergence in priorities between singles and
people with kids (married or not). But
our social tension over personal motivation is more general than that. There is friction between those who see
themselves as capable of controlling their own lives, and those whose believe
self-concept comes from the direct reassurance of being needed by others. This
latter group is easily manipulated by politicians, even jurists, as well as
preachers and peddlers. It tends to appeal to simplicity in moral beliefs and
in articles of faith, and value loyalty to established authority over
independent thinking. This crack in social cohesion had started around the time
of Stonewall and Moonwalk. Maybe my own work history reinforces this
perception; programmers typically generate their own job satisfaction (by
making things work) without the constant social reinforcement of others.
----
People disagree in basic
outlook whether the lone individual, the team of one, can make a real
difference in the system, without giving in on principles, at least, and paying
for influence. The “conventional wisdom” is to “get a life” first and
experience “identity” through your own family first. That’s easier if you’re
attractive! For gays, in the heydays of the Ninth Street Center, this required
confining yourself in a protected environment where you could be left alone to
explore “creativity” in human relationships set up for their own sakes. Indeed,
the dynamics of personal relationships, between spouses and between parents and
children, are not valued publicly today, relative to “accomplishments,” like
they were before the “sexual revolution.” The marriage choice (compared to the
arranged courtships of other cultures) and consummation was supposed to lead to
appreciation of both the domain-enhancing and nurturing “careers,” but the
taste of power (grown out of autonomy) took over.
In the meantime, the “feel good” mechanisms, starting with the
“open marriage” and “I’m OK, you’re OK” paradigms of the 60’s and 70’s, grew
rapidly in the warehouses of popular culture. Once, in on vacation in Montana,
I heard a seminar about “feeling good about yourself” advertised on the rental
car radio, right after I had been thinking about that very subject; I changed
my plans and drove 100 miles to the motel in Helena to attend it.
But all of these
paradigms for self-fulfillment are really inadequate, as well as
“conventional.” We simply can’t take our adaptive stability today for
granted. We could face collision with an
asteroid, a resurgence of Communism or Islamic fundamentalism, domestic
terrorism, or progressive destruction of the environment. Science has only
begun to suggest our place in the universe; sudden revelations can come whether
we want them or not. All of these things call for outstanding leadership (and
statesmanship). Even in areas like the military, which we used to associate
with giving up individuality, twenty-first century challenges require the honor
and freedom from hypocrisy and double standards that are possible only if
people have the freedom to know and tell who they are, as long as they have the
character that goes with this freedom. In the new millennium, mere survival may
depend on “creativity,” in its best sense.
People who rise to these occasions usually build on some success
in interpersonal relations, but they hardly would succeed without their own
independent ambitions. “Creativity” grows in many venues, from family to
individual psyche, even to politics; the most critical pre-requisite is
discipline, and a willingness to prioritize. One must learn to distinguish
among short-term satisfactions and their contribution to, or interference with,
long-term success ¾ indeed, that is a broader
interpretation of “character.” One must also know, through both discipline and
a feedback loop with others, when one simply seeks recognition at the possible
expense of others, or when one’s goals are valuable. Some people with no access
to productive interpersonal relations have recently turned to crime and
destruction just for fame and notoriety, to be taken seriously and be noticed
by others, often with enormously tragic results.
I have always resented the idea of joining another Army and
letting it do my thinking for me. I won’t even let “family” do that. I resist
pleas from others to keep the distracting details out, to keep “our” “campaign”
message (of, say, “libertarianism”) simpler. Truth is not always Benjamin
Britten’s “simple truth” as in Peter Grimes;
the whole truth needs to be unstrung.
---
I came out, the first time, to step on toes, to draw attention
to myself, so the doctors said. The second time, it was out of a need to find
romance, a worthy aim if I would do the love-work that goes with it. I grounded
myself, like a short field-goal attempt.
There was a third time.
In the 1982 Dallas Chess Club Championships, I, playing White,
had battled the Club President (and usually better player) to a draw in the first
game of a Sunday “doubleheader” in my Oak Lawn apartment. Ahead by a rook for a
bishop, he had fought me off the ropes to a tie. “It takes a lot to win,” he
joked. I took him to the Bronx, a popular restaurant on Cedar Springs, between
games. He took note of the local ambiance, and suddenly, reacting to his
own “fundamentalist” background,
exclaimed, “you aren’t gay, are you?”
“If you haven’t figured that out by now, you aren’t as smart as
I thought you are,” I came back at him like a line drive come-backer to the
pitcher.
He hesitated as he munched on some meat loaf, and then said,
”you chose to be gay, you know. You chose it.”
I didn’t argue with him. We went back to the apartment, and in
the nightcap, he got a quick opening advantage against my Closed Sicilian. But
then, still distracted by his day on the road, he stumbled, and allowed me a
cheap shot that quickly turned the game into a rout for Black. I had pulled, in
“sports” terms, another upset.
Two months later, at a membership meeting
over in our East Dallas storefront, he nominated me for the Board, out of the
blue.
Finally, my unusual, if private, tactics for gaining recognition
had really worked, with constructive results (victory). I had learned how to
use “home team advantage.”
I even came out a fourth time, to a judge during a voir dire
for a rather phony medical malpractice trial in 1986. I told him (and the other
jurors) all about my efforts in organizing AIDS education forums and buddy
activities. I was not pre-emptively struck, and the next day heard one day of
testimony before both sides settled. Outside on the streets of downtown Dallas,
a defense attorney told me that my “presence” (once the plaintiff’s attorney
found out who I was) had helped force a settlement.
That little trial had encapsulated for me the schizophrenia and
discordance of my treating my own homosexuality as if it were some Mexican
jumping bean in my psyche. The first day, I had noticed a slender, mustached,
colorfully dressed young man with platform shoes as I sat during the juror
vetting. Suddenly, after the session, he came up to me in the hall and
complained, “quit staring at me and following me around!” Had I really been
doing that? I was unaware.
During the worst panic of the early days of AIDS, I had
sometimes teasingly condemned myself for having “been involved with homosexual
activity.” Would I believe my behavior
had been wrong only because I might get “caught” by nature? Is that why I
enjoyed toying with our enemies with these little secret letters, trying to set
up some kind of reconciliation with my own guilt? Then I could look back
further, to around 1979, when I moved to Dallas - a move that delayed my
potential exposure to AIDS (for the putative “two year waiting period”) and
probably saved my life - I had wanted to get away from a personal situation in
New York, a possible relationship that, had it unfolded, might have challenged
my ability to feel sexually at all. As that partner divulged his past medical
problems (not AIDS) to me, he editorialized about the futility of “friendships
based on sexual attractiveness,” a phrase which suddenly came across to me as a
moral no-no like no “sexual intercourse before marriage.” He would comfort me with a pigskin field
goal: “I like you as a person,” which impressed me about as much as a
colleague’s saying he saw in me a “friend for life.” So much for the self-therapy; now, I saw that
my homosexuality, while disturbing to others if improperly expressed, could blossom
into a source of special knowledge and influence, in unexpected situations.
This I felt good about.
After I moved back to the Washington, D.C. area, I would meet a
very nice young man, indirectly through the workplace, who was in some program
to “give up the gay lifestyle.” He spoke quite a bit about his volunteer work
with Love and Action, which is the conservative community’s group to help
people with AIDS. Once, he took me to a benefit at the National Presbyterian
Center (near American University in Washington), where Bach’s Magnificat was performed, but rudely
interrupted before the last chorus by a prayer.
He never tried to pressure me to follow his example, which would be not
just going back into the closet but giving up all the feelings that make me
tick! But news accounts of the ex-gay movement are heavy indeed; one group in
Kansas confines program participants in a “halfway house” and never lets them
leave “on pass” alone.[84] (Thankfully, accounts of emetic “aversion
therapy” are rare indeed).[85]
If anything, contact with him helped me decide to expand my activities back in
the community, with the hiking group and volunteering at Whitman Walker Clinic
(where I participated in safer-sex and “Dating 101” forums) and Food and
Friends (the donation can program) and, on one occasion, food deliveries to
homebound patients). The ex-gay movement
certainly does not have a good reputation for success, although in opposing the
proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), Senator Ashcroft claims to
know of thousands of ex-homosexuals who have “changed.”[86]
I never gave up the “gay lifestyle” or anything close to it,
despite cyclically “coming out” and then going back, if not into a coal mine,
at least into obscure, if aggressive privacy. My feelings about my
homosexuality indeed have pulsated. I did give up oral and anal intercourse.
Between 1976 and 1983, I had gotten used to having men share a twin bed or, at
least, a whole apartment or condo, occasionally. After February 1983, I just
stopped. That helped settle the anxiety for me. I would just return to fantasy,
and then build back social interactions. I have probably “known” about
thirty-five men in my life,[87]
which may seem outrageously promiscuous to a moralist. I did have some
companions for varying periods of time. I would find I appreciated the
qualities of people, even their physical beauty, if I stopped trying to make it
with them.
I found it still was satisfying to be around men I admired. The
tension of restraint, sometimes explored with affectionate massages, would be
more pleasurable than sex itself, because it could be sustained and extended.
Imagined perfection (and anticipated surrender to it) always excited me more
than blatant nudity. I suppose my technical “abstinence” could end
tomorrow.
---
So, did I “choose” to deviate (to be “gay”), to satisfy my need
for intimacy and attention, when I couldn’t get it through socially approved
ways? Do we choose to “be” who are, or just to express it? Is the choice only
just to “come out”?
According to Chandler Burr, at least, science is rapidly
accepting the fact that sexual orientation, at least in men, may be
substantially genetically determined,[88]
rather than imprinted by juvenile (or even pre-natal) environment. In contradiction to old (1940’s) Kinsey Study
ideas of men’s varying in sexuality on a sliding scale from 1 to 6, Burr
reported than men, in their personal arousals, tend to be either sharply
heterosexual or homosexual; women do run a continuum, however. The nutshell of
his most interesting argument suggests that a “gay gene” would simply stop the
brain from becoming “defeminized”
before birth; so a gay man is a “creation” with a male body and a
simultaneously male and female brain. (Masculinizing and defeminizing are
independent events caused by different hormones requiring different cell
receptors as catalysts). The gay man has
extra neuro-chemical assets which could be seen as an evolutionary advantage,
if enough gay men somehow reproduce (or if the women who passed the genes
actually reproduce more)[89];
the gay man can use this “feminine” facility or not. This XQ28 thing may be a
great gene to inherit! Perhaps it leads to greater retention of visual and
other stimuli, and attaching significance to them, and then to a greater need
for “romance” for its own sake.
Zoology has found interesting comparisons in studying our
closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees. Though most chimp societies are
organized in small competing groups centered around combative, dominant males
and use sex for procreation only, the bonobos live in large communes and can
use sex for enjoyment and friendship.[90]
Burr provides a similar discussion of the bizarre, matriarchal African hyena.
All of this shows an interplay between genetics, environment, and
gender-associated social behavior throughout nature.
My dual brain takes me down an interesting road. Other than
setting up a fleeting curiosity, women mean nothing to me erotically; what have
I to gain from “conquest” or domination? I just give up commitment to ideals or
truth. Were I psychologically “masculine”
(that is, defeminized) however, women could offer me expression of
domain. I don’t suggest any conscious control over my erotic “choices”; they emerged
in tandem with my psychological self-interest. I did not “choose” to be gay.
Yet, the moralists have always come up with moral theories to
make me eat sexual “spinach.” One, for example, was “aesthetic realism,” the
notion that I could have “learned” to love someone who would “need” me to
support them for a lifetime, so that I would feel needed myself. I did not
choose my imprints (let alone my genes), but I can choose a lifestyle.
Masculine,
mentally defeminized men feel aroused around sexy women before they know what
is happening. A couple of conflicting processes evolve, however. Men may lose
interest and grow tired of their sexual partners, unless they learn or develop
on their own a deeper commitment to others. But, they may sense that their need
for the approval of others undermines the integrity of their commitments and
the value of their loved ones. In such circumstances, a same-sex relationship
may make more romantic sense even to a biologically “masculine” (defeminized)
man. People will then argue that the “common good” (expanded in Chapter 5)
requires that society (whether schools, government, or just parents themselves)
make it difficult for young “waverers”[91]
to find out that homosexual attachments actually make psychological sense. In
fact, young men allegedly need to learn that homosexuality (whether acts or
latent propensity) is a bad thing. The modern interpretation is “we’ll leave
you alone if you don’t talk about it.”
This sounds like an improvement over the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. But
this sets up the circular situation where in sports, the Boy Scouts, fire
departments, or, most of all, the Armed Forces, the presence of men who do talk
about it is supposed to upset or distract other men who really need to stay
focused on their roughshod aggressiveness. I have previously thought that being
left alone was enough, to excuse me from joining in silly “we win, they lose”
behavior. Now, it seems no one will believe me if I have to pretend to be
someone I’m not. I will be “insignificant”[92]
and powerless, like the piglet Babe
when he is told “your job is to stay at home and eat your food.”
In 1993, conservatives took delight in studies that claimed the
number of men who would admit in surveys to having engaged in homosexual acts
was under 2%, not the old Kinsey 10%.
These same studies suggested that the proportion of men reporting
lifelong abstinence was more like 4%[93].
The number of “gays” as a purely political or cultural block cannot be stated
precisely. I like this notion: count a person (regardless of internal
attractions as Burr describes) if he or she has “come out” at least to the
self, if that person at least seeks out social contacts of others he believes
to be homosexual. Do not count someone if she remains heterosexually married or
socially active and avoids, not just homosexual sex, but any intentional
contact with the gay community. Done this way, I think a good survey would come
up with about 4% (slightly higher for men). Politically, gay Americans are
about on par with Jewish Americans.
Real Families and Potential Idols
Am I less of a man
because I have not raised a family of my own? I would say I have missed a great
experience, and I take full responsibility for it. Perhaps NIH is right, I
prefer a private astral world of fantastic ideals rather than surrendering
myself to a self-compromising intimacy, which must grow more functional as I
and a potential partner grow old together. (This is just as true with a
potential male partner; I hate to watch the ultimate meltdown.) [If I can really achieve and contribute a
personal expression from my own private resources, I can skip out on being
rejected, and on the fear others have of being left alone; I have more or less
outgrown that.] But I will not know the self-transformation that is supposed to
occur with the wedding vows, the rice throwing, the father-of-the-bride’s
generosity, and the subsequent “deep sexuality.” I will not know, beyond intellect, the
feeling that wedding marks as the beginning of an adult life that is indeed
“one’s own.” I will not personally know the mystery of (or take the possibly
burdensome responsibility for) a new life that I could have created and of
nurturing it into its own autonomy and unique identity. I will not know the
change in heart that being a dad (especially without deliberate preparation) is
supposed to bring. I feel uncomfortable around small children, yet I was,
myself, once a little kid who couldn’t feed himself. On the other hand, no one will tell me that
roots planted like sessile tunicates in a coral of wife and children are
supposed to become my “life” as a man. Once, a colleague circulated an
ill-conceived eMail urging people facing personal loss to turn to their
children for support and for evidence that they matter! I have contributed to an international
children’s charity since 1977. This is conscience money, to be sure; that is
better than nothing. As Buckminster Fuller mentions, I’m not contributing to
the perceived 50% of child deaths due to abuse and neglect.
But sometimes, I have
internalized the notion that, since I don’t have a family to support, I should
step aside rather than push too hard for my rights or well-being; this has led
to some self-handicapping behavior. Not only have I eschewed promotions that
would have people reporting to me and perhaps juggling their family problems; I
actually resigned six weeks after my own promotion that had people formally
reporting to me (in a critical period before a merger).
Maybe even this is all right. I pay the additional taxes, and
take no personal offense. If I pay school taxes, I ought to have a say in the
curriculum, to know that it is evenhanded when respecting diversity - and this
opus feeds a good book report. I object
that it doesn’t occur to others with families that perhaps I am subsidizing
them, as when I take an unreturned nightcall when a workplace colleague
suddenly has a family responsibility, or when I am looked at with suspicion by
a potential employer because I can’t claim to be married-with-children on a resume,
as if I were an AIDS risk.[94]
I agree that I have perhaps not played completely fair. Now, I’m in a mode that says: forget about
relationships, just go out and accomplish something! (Why is propagating genes -
vicarious immortality - whether by sex or “cloning” an “achievement” anyway? It
isn’t such; it makes people needed.) I
like to live in fantasies constructed of little pieces, of part-objects, with a
continual chance of winning the lottery and dating a Christ. In 1978, a date
tells me, “Bill, you don't seem to need a lover.” A man carpooling with me back from an
Adventuring hike appoints himself to
pass judgment: “Bill, at least you shouldn’t be living alone.” A
married-with-children workplace colleague mistakenly states that I still live
with my mother. Neither is blunt enough to voice a suspicion that I have stayed
alone much of the time and lived a “virtual” life because I am unattractive.
(That’s true. Sometimes it’s simplest to let the masculines go free!) Marriage and “family values” ¾ even gay family values ¾ means settling down and accepting one person
as having a special place in your life, for eternity ¾ and then not secretly ogling other people.
It demands giving up those pleasurable, naughty, guilt-bearing fantasies, the
way I once had to give up an imaginary playmate. Accepting one’s own degrading
or vulnerable body image, getting closer to people nonetheless, crawling out of
The Box and then staying tied with one other person for a lifetime, and then
relating to inhibitionless kids (enough, in many families, to want the kids
sleeping in the same beds as their parents) - all these things demand a
dissolution of the walls of self and an abdication of intellectual
independence. One gives up the moral
right to make others uncomfortable with new truth, even when one is mildly
wronged. Family is like Mother
Country. As I moved back from Texas to
the D.C. area, closer to my mother, I had come to see my homosexuality as a
private thing, that, given the AIDS crisis, could hardly be argued in the
political process. I could withdraw, and recreate my feelings and mental
sensations in others through art and music, and curiously gain recognition from
an otherwise second-class status. Only the winds of war - another military one
- would wake me up and get me fighting for myself again.
Sexual pleasure, and later just sexual fantasy, had for so long
looked like the “peak experience” to which everything else was subordinate.
What mattered about someone - could he turn me on? Sexual fulfillment seemed like the musical
climax toward which all other culture
worked. Sometimes what it transcended
was nothing more than hero-worship - idolatry - and left me feeling eclipsed,
ready for a new bout of independence. If
it could be channeled into marriage and family - or a lifelong homosexual
commitment (not just “serial monogamy”), that made it healthier. I saw this as
somebody else’s experience - somebody else’s feelings and even identity superimposed
upon me as a mask! - while I kept the freedom to roam within my celibacy. My
unbalanced personality, after all, requires me to choose my own ends, and not
just to satisfy the goals defined by others. You mattered to someone else,
hopefully to kids. But your commitments cut you off from the truth, at least
your own construct for it. Politics became, what’s in it for me. Adaptive
problems, like gas lines, could perhaps be covered up with healthier family
life. Others, like crime, really mattered, because of loved ones, your kids --
and if you really had grown up out of childish things they really counted more
than anything else. Social justice and discrimination mattered if you were
discriminated against or bullied by police. But higher politics ¾ generalizations about human rights ¾ these seemed to belong to those people who
walked in the clouds because their own personal lives didn’t quite click. Why
worry about it, if you can do what you want and get away with it? Get a life.
That’s most people’s attitude!
I am fortunate to have had loving parents (who were married for
forty-six years until my father’s death) and a stable environment so that I
didn’t fall over (or jump off) that cliff, even if I understand how it can
happen. People need to form good partnerships
as adults before they can provide stable, loving homes for children.
Psychologists say people will remain committed to relationships or marriages
that reinforce their feeling good about themselves, although this isn’t a good
enough reason to start a relationship. One enters a marriage because one has
something to give. Yet, in “mainstream” culture we remain drawn back to the
idea that creating and parenting life is supposed to be the ultimate
“actualization,” and I don’t believe it.
Providing for the kids becomes a whole life, one’s highest priority, a
reason to build castles in the suburbs and to pay attention to politics only
“when there’s something in it for my family,” and even to oppose some political
simplifications out of “loyalty” to family.
I didn’t buy into this fatherhood motive, and my generation,
despite its best intentions, couldn’t offer much more than trying to shaming me
into “change.” Once I had knowledge of what it meant to care “creatively,” I
wasn’t quite ready to leap. But I did without the immediate personal intimacy
without which life, for many, would be unimaginable. Most of the time, I
actually feel good, although this is hard for many people to believe. My
difficulty with organic, earthy sexuality ultimately leaves me with more
opportunity, and incentive, to spill out the entire truth about an issue,
without snitching on anyone personally. Friendship becomes a distant, yet
mentally active, kind of love - that can respect someone’s best interest by
waiting and leaving him alone. Most of my Christmas cards come from old
“family” friends who have no concept of what my life could have been like.
There is another mystery, however, that matters as much as would
fathering life. That is, the potential of a man to be his own person and to
achieve maximality, regardless of the immediate approval of the society or of
others, even in a marital relationship. Any son (or daughter) I might have
begotten and raised probably would not have turned out as well as some people I
have befriended. I feel proud of the men
I have known and who have gone on to do some great things after I knew them;
and at an astral level, they are in a sense, a family. I had been right at
William and Mary; many men shared my erotic fascination and could cash it in.
When a gifted person is gay, there is something special, which I can’t quite
define. I would want to take some of them in my arms, and the experience would
feel sexual even though there is no sex; it’s all wholesome. If “love” means having another’s best interest
at heart,[95]
then I take comfort in having concern over whether a friend finishes college,
stops smoking, or remains otherwise “healthy” regardless of whether the person
is mine to have. It’s too bad, that I’m
not willing to feel that way about any but a select few. I definitely relish
holding the power behind a throne. But I’m not comfortable with the idea of a
“relationship” (“marriage” or not) unless I have definite accomplishments of my
own first. But my friends, and my connections to them, do help make me feel
proud of who I am.
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[1] Edward Alwood, Straight News: Gays,
Lesbians, and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),
p. 69 describes the CBS special “The Homosexuals,”
[2] As recorded by an NIH social worker in my medical files, Sept. 1962.
[3] Published by Libra in 1972; Republished by
The Ninth Street Center in 1986.
[4] Psychological polarity
theories have been published in Germany, by various psychologists associated
with the Humboldt Society of Mannheim. Other writers include Carl Jung,
Geoffrey Sainsbury and Alan Watts.
[5] Andrew Sullivan, editor, Same-Sex
Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader (New York: Vintage, 1997), Plato, “The
Speech of Aristophanes,” p. 5.
[6] Dean Hannotte, “Rosenfelsian
Semantics,” lecture notes for Ninth Street Center Study Group, New York, 1986.
[7] James Hillman, The Soul’s
Code: In Search of Character and Calling (New York: Random House, 1996).
[8] Dean Hannotte, We Knew Paul, (New
York: Ninth Street Center, 1991), Introduction p. 16.
[9] John Boswell, Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980), p. 23, p. 46.
[10] Some Center people used to refer to Richard Nixon as a “subjective feminine.”
[11] The Ninth Street Center Journal, published from 1973 until 1991.
[12] Feminine-subjective and masculine-objectives are “unbalanced”; other two combinations are “balanced.”
[13] “Industrial Society and its
Future,” The
[14] Martin Hoffman, The Gay
World: Male Homosexuality and the Social Creation of Evil (New York:
Bantam, 1968). Hoffman describes pretty well the old-fashioned ideas of Freud,
as exploited later by Bieber and Socarides.
[15] M. Scott Peck MD, The Road Less Traveled (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
[16] In a critical scene in Making Love (1982), the wife of the gay physician, after he “come out” to her, cries about his thinking he could fake a whole lifetime without “passion.”
[17] In the Hitchcock 1958
masterpiece, Vertigo, the whole plot
is built around the retired police detective’s falling in love with his own
female fantasy.
[18] For another account of the
Center and other gay groups during this time, see Ian Young, The Stonewall
Experiment: A Gay Psychohistory (London: Cassell Wellington, 1995). Rosenfels’s
work was discussed from time to time by writers such as John Hudson (Gay Magazine, 1974) D.F. Lawden (Psychoenergetics: The Journal of
Psychophysical Systems, Vol. 4, #1m 1981), Judy Chicurel (Gay
Magazine, 1983), Jay Bolcik (New York
Native,
[19] Published by Quadrangle in 1973.
[20] Published by Pelican Books (Louisiana) in
1986.
[21] Patricia Cayo Sexton, The Feminized Male:
Classrooms, White Collars and the Decline of Manliness (New York, Vintage,
1969).
Aybrey P. Andelin, Men of Steel and
Velvet (New York: Bantam, 1982).
[22] Published by Simon & Schuster (New York:
1993).
[23] Farrell, op
cit., p 355; compare to Reich’s levels of Consciousness (subsequent note).
[24] Jonathan Rauch, Kindly
Inquisitors: The New Attack of Free Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), p. 159.
[25] Charles Murray, What It
Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (New York, Broadway,
1997, p 34.
[26] Theodore Reich, The Greening of America
(New York: Random House, 1970), p. 225.
[27] Larry Uhrig, advertisement in The Washington Blade, sometime in 1990.
[28] Remember, Scarlet O’Hara’s
friends in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind complained they
would be left as “old maids.”
[29] In 1979, National Car Rental denied me a credit
card, partly because (at the time) I rented my residence.
[30] But in 1979 I once made a
motion at an
[31] Companies like
[32] Another example of high-tech
employment dangers was documented on NBC “Dateline,”
[33] John Molloy, Dress for
Success, (New York: Warner, 1975, 1988).
[34] Dan Fry, To Men of Earth (Portland,
Ore., Merlin Publishing, 1973).
[35] I sometimes heard mention of Heaven’s Gate
cult founders “Bo” and “Peep” but I do not recall meeting them at these
conventions.
[36] Jeffrey Mishlove, The Roots of
Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1976).
[37] In fact, there is plenty of
evidence that nuclear power poses average citizens to less risk than fossil
fuels, or even than radon in many homes. Some infrastructural items are safer
in collectively controlled and regulated (even though privately) hands.
[38] Rosenfels,
op. cit., p. 115.
[39] Under the karma concept, a person can reap the rewards or penalties for his conduct even within the same lifetime.
[40] Richard Kieninger, The Ultimate Frontier (Stelle, 1970).
[41] Russ Baker, “Clash of the
Titans: Scientology v. Germany,” George, April 1997, p. 94. Other self-development
groups have included Est and Experience Weekends.
[42] Jean Elshtain, “The Hard
Questions” Heaven Can Wait,” The New
Republic,
[43] Molly T. Marshall, “Exercising Liberty of
Conscience: Freedom of Private Interpretation,” to be published in 1997 in an
anthology Baptists in the Balance: The Tension between Freedom and
Responsibility, compiled by Everett Goodwin (
[44] One gay acquaintance, after losing a teaching
job in New York, actually spent a weekend camp trying out for a teaching job
with the Unification Church; he talked about hours of “group singing.” He may have been looking for an army as an
employer of last resort.
[45] Boswell, op. cit. describes how the intolerance for gays did not develop
until the 12th Century under the authoritarian theology of Aquinas.
[46] Visiting pastor David Day gave
some stirring sermons at the Dallas Metropolitan Community Church in 1981,
starting with “the biggest sin was wanting the knowledge of good and evil,”
followed by “ET Phone Home” and “It’s Friday but Sunday is Coming.”
[47] Buena Vista Pictures, 1949.
[48] Ted Koppel’s “ABC
Nightline,” on
[49] NIV Bible, Matthew 19:4-6.
[50] The term “evangelical” emphasizes salvation
through grace and unshaken belief
that Christ is the risen Son of God. Often, it also emphasizes witnessing to
others about one’s conversion or “born again” experience. It does not imply
fundamentalism or homophobia.
[51] Peter Gomes, The Good
Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (New York: William Morrow,
1996). Gomes provides a lot of
commentary on Boswell’s historical research on religion and homosexuality.
[52] Everett C. Goodwin et al, op. cit.
[53] Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On:
People, Politics, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: Penguin, 1987-1988).
[54] Hepatitis C now rivals
Hepatitis B for causing chronic illness and liver cancer, and its transmission
is not fully understood.
[55] By 1994, the “gay male” percentage of new cases had dropped to 58%. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now defines “AIDS” as HIV seropositivity with a T helper count < 200. By 1993, over 1,000,000 persons were HIV positive, with 350,000 deaths. The average lifetime cost in caring for HIV disease is $60,000; this will go up as patients live longer and new drugs are developed, but may come down as technology improves. See James Patterson and Peter Kim, The Second American Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1994), pp. 201-204.
[56] HTLV-1 can cause immature
T-helper (T-4) cells to proliferate malignantly; HIV causes T-helper
populations to shrink and eventually vanish.
[57] Since I was a rather sickly child, my father once said, incorrectly, “birds don’t get sick from germs!”
[58] Their letter called me a “thinking member of my community” but then went on to gross comparisons of rectal mucosa and vaginal linings.
[59] But they could have said the same thing about
women (including lesbians) who don’t have children or have them later, since
they have higher risks of breast cancer. “What You Need to Know About Cancer,” Scientific American, Sep. 1996, p.
127.
[60] On
[61] James Mckeever, The AIDS
Plague (Medford, Oregon: Omega, 1986). McKeever plays games with the idea
that AIDS is a plague sent from God.
Another right-wing book is Gene Antonio’s The AIDS Cover-Up (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 1986).
[62] Gabe Mirkin, M.D., Talk
Radio, WRC-980,
[63] As have some other forms of hepatitis and
even squamous cell carcinoma of the anus. Breast and ovarian cancers occur with
some increased frequency in older women who have never had children or had them
later; so the religious “right,” when it chooses, can make a health issue of
women who won’t submit to men!
[64] John and Pat Caldwell, “The African AIDS
Epidemic,” Scientific American,
March, 1996, p. 62. The lack of male circumcision seems to encourage
heterosexual spread.
[65] Good
Housekeeping, March, 1996.
[66] Condoms are notoriously
ineffective in preventing venereal warts.
[67] Laurie
Garrett, The Coming Plague, Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of
Balance (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994). Ebola is, despite the
rumors, still spread only by direct blood contact; but caring for an Ebola
patient is much, much more dangerous than buddying for HIV. Mad cow could be spread by bone fertilizer!
(NBC “Dateline,”
[68] In June, 1985, a Life
magazine issue featured the scare cover, “Now, No One Is Safe from
AIDS.” The debate over heterosexual AIDS certainly tracked the debate over the
underlying moral acceptability of particularly male homosexuality - or,
perhaps, non-heterosexuality.
[69] Amanda Benttett and Anita
Sharpe, “AIDS Fight is Skewed by Federal Campaign Exaggerating Risks,” The
Wall Street Journal,
[70] Luis Soto-Ramirez et al,
,“HIV-1 Langerhans’ Cell Tropism Associated with Heterosexual Transmission of
HIV,” Science,
[71]
[72] Rep. ‘B-1’ Bob Dornan,
Congress’s incarnation of Paul Cameron, proposed giving the Surgeon General
authority to close bath houses and require federal contact tracing.
[73] Ronald Reagan, Abortion and the Conscience
of a Nation (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1981).
[74] In 1994, the Texas State Supreme Court
refused to rule on the state sodomy law because there had been no prosecutions;
in some other states, such as Kentucky, sodomy laws have been overturned as
violations of a state’s constitution or bill of rights.
[75] The Bergalis case, in which six patients of
the same dentist all developed AIDS with the same substrain of HIV, was almost
certainly caused by insufficiently autoclaved dental instruments, unless it was
spread deliberately.
[76] Chai Feldblum hypothesizes such an oath being
required of Virginia law students in her paper “Sexual Orientation, Morality
and the Law: Devlin Revisited,” Georgetown University Law School and University
of Pittsburgh Law Review, 1996.
[77] Robert Gallo, Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer,
and the Human Retroviruses (New York: New Republic Books, 1988). The
argument is presented that thet virus would have to change radically in
character to become more contagious. HIV still is transmitted only by direct
introduction into the bloodstream, through sexual contact, injection or
needlestick, birth, possibly lactation and very intense oral sex. Transmission
by infected lymphocytes (usually T-helper cells) appears more efficient than by
raw virus.
[78] The dangerous, even lethal, forms of E-coli can probably be spread by food-handlers.
[79] Private letter to me from Nathan Fain, Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Fain, in 1984, would be the first person to warn me, “the virus is mutating.”
[80] Generally, doctors and
dentists are not required to take HIV tests. There was one dental office in
Dallas in the 1980’s that advertised the fact that the dentist and all
employees had been tested!
[81] Andrew Sullivan, “When
Plagues End,” The New York Times Magazine,
[82] The typical “window” until sero-conversion
still seems to be about three months; a very small number of infected persons
may never develop a positive Elisa or Western Blot test, but will still show
infection with advanced techniques like
The blood virus-load is high for a brief
period before antibody (although perhaps not antigen) can be detected. For
years, the virus reproduces rapidly (and is resisted vigorously) inside the
lymph nodes but is usually found in lower levels in circulating blood. Possibly
it is less transmissible during this period. During end-stages, the circulating
virus levels go back up as lymph nodes explode. See Time article mentioned
above.
[83] For example, Jeffrey Satinover, Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), p. 69 claims that even apart from AIDS and even with monogamous partners, gay men live three decades less than “normal” married men. According to Satinover, AIDS shortens lifespans by only 7%. Hardly!! Notice the accidental irony in the title of Satinover’s book. It is sold by the notoriously anti-gay Lambda Report, discussed in detail by Chris Boll and John Gallagher in Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990’s (New York: Crown, 1996), pp. 219, 268. Cameron also used these obituary statistics, eventually to the embarrassment even of his religious clients.
[84] “Anti-Gay Group Counters PFLAG (Parents and
Friends of Lesbians and Gays): PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays) Launches
to Dispel ‘Pro-Homosexual’ Viewpoints,” The
[85] In 1971, Irving Bieber had
actually proposed using heterosexual
pornography to “change” male homosexuals! The ex-gay movement loves the
“change” metaphor; at least one child-molester bragged, before his execution,
that he enjoyed doing evil and didn’t want to “change.” Why would someone have
to change to stop enjoying hurting people?
[86] “ENDA: Pro and Con,“ Congressional Quarterly, Nov. 1996, p.
285.; K. Vickery “Fundamental Change: A
Virginia ‘Ex-Gay ‘ Minister Talks about
his Transformation from ‘Homosexual’ to ‘Saver of Souls’ ” Our Own Community Press, Richmond, Dec., 1996
[87] One “trick” stole my wallet,
one freebased in my bathroom while I waited, and one jokingly confessed to a
bombing; although I didn’t believe him, I was relieved that he disappeared. On
the beat side, one took communion at
[88]
[89] This is an example of pleiotropy, in which a trait which
generally increases reproduction or survival has artefactal side effects.
[90] Richard Wrangham and Dale
Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), reviewed by Daniel Pinchbeck in The Washington Post, Book World,
[91] E.L. Patullo, “Straight Talk
About Gays,” Commentary, Dec. 1992, p
21.
[92] So Rev. W. A. Criswell
called gays in a vitriolic Sunday night service at the First Baptist Church in
Dallas in the Autumn of 1980.
[93] P. Rogers, “How Many Gays?” Newsweek,
[94] I really ran into this when
interviewing in
[95] M. Scott Peck, MD, op. cit.