I'm hardly a separatist, but I do believe that some of what
we need we can only find among other queer men. I'm grateful for the glimpses
of that world--for the experiences of intermittent community among us that I
get at retreat centres and in workshops.
At the same time, I'm also aware that "workshop
culture" carries the risk of turning those experiences of belonging, of
spiritual integration and social solidarity, into a commodity that we shop for.
I'm aware of the number of times I've heard men in such venues express the
desire to find community closer to home, while they lament that they don't
expect it to happen. As though the only way to find it again is to put our
money on the table, buy the plane ticket, and book the next structured package
where safety, belonging, and discovery will be delivered to us as a surprise
crafted by expert facilitators who are gifted and accomplished as we are not.
We want to feel like this back home, off the Magic Mountain, but we doubt that
could ever be possible.
The problem isn't with these courses and settings per se:
they offer precious opportunities and sometimes great blessings. The problem is
that in a culture where everything is a product we can buy, it's incredibly
challenging to remember that the magic is what happens between us, not the
container in which it happens. We have to remember that we can do this among
ourselves, because we're already doing it among ourselves.
If you've ever put effort into building queer men's
community from the grass roots up, you've maybe found out it's easier to talk a
good game and then drift away into individual agendas after the first couple of
weeks or months trying to keep together. It's one thing to express a desire for
the magic of deep community. It's another to stick around, tending and building
the container when the payoff isn't more or less immediate.
If we're really honest, we recognize that it's not just
others who fail to step up and hold space for the magic to happen. Often
enough, we drop the ball ourselves. The monthly checkin we promised a circle of
friends turns out harder to get to than we thought. The quarterly gathering we
committed to conflicts with something else that's come up.
If you're steeped in the Christian New Testament, you might
recall the parable of the rich man who prepares a banquet, only to find that
all the invited guests make excuses for why they can't attend. One has just
married. Another has to go inspect a field he's bought. Another has cattle to
tend.
Or to put it in another key, we have to remember the words
of Gandhi: we ourselves have to be the change in the world that we want to see.
It's a surprisingly difficult lesson to absorb and then act on.
Caring, spiritually engaged community among queer men--a
community where we dig deeper into the lessons of our shared experience, and
where we explore and celebrate the differences among us--doesn't have to remain
a utopian pipe-dream. It doesn't have to be restricted to the few days that we
head off to a program, providing we can afford the time and
money, while many of us can't. It doesn't have to remain a rare, happy
accident.
True community is a dance between our individual longings
and our deep awareness that we'll find what we're looking for only by being
part of something bigger than we are--something that may unsettle us, knock us
out of our preconceived sense of ourselves and remake us. Community is risk and
adventure. It takes courage, because it opens the possibility that we can't
control what will happen when we step outside ourselves.
You build community when you go to a meeting in support of a
project you believe in, even though you've had a long day and just want some
down time at home.
You build community when you walk into a nursing home to
visit an elderly friend, even though nursing homes are probably the last places
on earth you enjoy hanging out.
You build community when you respond kindly and graciously
to the flirtation of men you're not attracted to, instead of shaming them with
blunt rejection.
You build community when you let yourself be open to the
possibility that a one-night stand might become a friend--or at least deserves
a phone call to thank him for the time you spent together.
You build community when you follow through on the promise
to check in with the men you met at a gathering that opened your heart, even
when the intensity of that experience fades into the business-as-usual of your
life back home.
You build community when you keep faith with the longing
within you for a bigger, fuller, richer life: when you step up into the work of
repairing your soul and repairing the world, of transforming them both, of
making them both new.
