My Great Experiment in Love: A Guest Post by MB

MB keeps a blog about his solosexual experience that includes some of the most articulate (and sexiest) writing I've read about autoerotic masculinity--something nearly all men have a stake in, whatever other threads run through their sexual experience and desire. I'm very glad to welcome him here.

Sometime in the Spring of 2016, I became my own lover.  

I committed myself to exploring whether I alone could take care of all the needs-- emotional, sexual, physical--that I had always relied on others to fulfill. Could I offer myself the intimacy, support and loving surprises that people say are the hallmarks of a strong relationship? My experiment had an unexpected result.  

I have been a masturbator for twenty-five years. The School Bully took a shine to me and taught me how on my twelfth birthday. Thereafter, I gravitated to masturbating in the mirror over my own reflection. This arousal at my own arousal was formative. I believe it was the closest I have ever been to the fully actualized me in all the years since.  

My subsequent sexual journey saw me split off from that self-actualization, traverse sexual encounters, and align with an identity as a gay man because it was expected of me. Coming out, fighting homophobia, advocating for rights – I did all this! In happily succeeding, I was still flummoxed to find myself ultimately unsatisfied. Something felt unrealized. 

The painful breakup of my life’s most significant relationship compelled me to take complete charge of myself. Depending on no one was easier than I thought. I took control of all my physical needs easily. I changed my diet. I grew crops. I secured fulfilling work which made me happy. I overthrew any shame associated with solosexuality and dedicated myself to my body, my orgasm and having some damn good sex. I spent great swaths of time alone, and it puzzled me why I did not feel lonely. I was so happy! And in the past when I was happy, I yearned to share that with another, as if that validated the legitimacy of it. I refused to do this. Instead I acknowledged my own happiness, and it made me beam. It sowed the seed for this further question: could I date myself and become my own lover? 

Eschewing the need for romantic partners might seem novel. It has been ridiculed as a byproduct of millennial narcissism. The idea of going against a paradigm of partnering is not new, however. It goes back to Epicurus, the Greek philosopher, who in 300 B.C. laid a roadmap for happiness that rejected romantic partnerships. He even appears to reject depending on others for sexual gratification. To him, relationships brought pain along with pleasure, and anything bringing pain should be questioned. He instead promoted the importance of community and friendships and recognizing that what you have is enough. Needing brings pain. Having is no solution. Being in this moment now, at peace with yourself, and connected to nature, is all you need for happiness. 

I believe there is something radical about being a masturbator in modern society. This act, which costs nothing and earns nothing, redefines values in our hyper-masculine, hyper-capitalist and consumerist times. Capitalism, by its definition, has many painful byproducts. Consumerism too. To devote a day to masturbating is to step outside a system which values capital as its core value. It therefore becomes profoundly ethical to masturbate. Masturbators embrace and fill our idleness with pleasure and defy pressure to spend or earn. There is no painful byproduct. We thumb our noses at masculine values to hunt and gather.  

Masturbators are at the forefront of redefining what it is to be masculine. There is a competitive, toxic strain of masculinity that has done the rounds, of which we are seeing a rightful interrogation  in society and the media right now. This is not an emasculating moment. Those who believe it is are brainwashed by the toxic paradigm. What this moment calls for is a welcome and timely redefinition of what it is to be a man and how it is we use our penises for ethical pleasure. I believe that within the ideal man, as within the ideal woman, is a coming together of characteristics of both genders. In no segment of society can I see that better epitomized than in the solosexual movement. 

Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey is held up by his aficionados as a universal paradigm uniquely giving meaning to life.  In that myth, a hero is called upon to fix the ills of his world. The hero reluctantly sets out to battle the demons and in doing so finds the elixir which will heal everything. The only way for the hero to achieve this is by facing some flaw within himself. This epic journey is inherently tied up in masculine ideals of bravery, hunting, fighting, winning, and becoming King (albeit it with a tiny amount of sensitive self-reflection). 

Maureen Murdock, Campbell's student, saw missing elements from a feminine perspective and found scope to revise it as The Heroine's Journey. In her journey to be a hero, the woman must split from her true feminine identity in order to pursue masculine ideals. The heroine finds that winning the elixir is the beginning, not the end point in itself, of her journey. This moment proves unsatisfying because she has fractured her true identity, and so she must devote herself to reconnecting with the inner goddess in order to fully actualize as a heroine. I see many parallels between the solosexual experience and Murdock's paradigm. I certainly see my journey more within Murdock’s paradigm than Campbell’s.  

I believe I was born solosexual. When I masturbated in the mirror as a teenager, this was my true self. Everything that came after has been a layering of my character, a test and deepening of who I am. Now when I look in the mirror, I see a man who is curious about life, a sensualist, a man committed to living a humble, ethical and profound life. A man who takes care of his body because he is hoping to have it for as long as possible for the pleasure receptor that it is. I find these values sexy, and I find myself physically sexy.  

You may wonder what is it like to be my own lover. To grow myself and drink from my own nectar. Key to my experience is the concept of having enough. I yearn for nothing else, whether flesh or material. I yearn to make pleasure for myself. I constantly seek surprises or sensations that will magnify my happiness in this moment. I am thankful to receive it too. It may be food or an experience. It may be the joy of planning a weekend away solo. It may be a dirty promise of sexual pleasure or the sight, smell or touch of me. I wake in the night, my hands gripping lovingly around myself or stroking my chest hair. I feel secure. I feel loved. I reach out to touch my penis, hard or soft, and I am electrified to give and receive sex. I make love to myself, and afterwards I bask, and flirt that I am the hottest lover I have ever encountered. 

I’d be lying to you if I said it was the easiest relationship. It requires as much work and dedication as any. When I set out to date myself, I had the same misgivings and foolish hope as I might have attributed to dating another. Would this work? Should this work? Will this be forever? But it has worked and there’s no reason why it should not continue doing so. 

Ultimately the end result of my great experiment in love is love.

 

A Manifesto

If you’ve never read the work of Fenton Johnson, start now.

Geography of the Heart, Johnson’s chronicle of his three-year relationship with a beloved who succumbed in the health crisis, is one of the finest AIDS memoirs ever written: passionate, wise, enraged but shot through with  a faith that love is stronger than death, and grief ultimately more fundamental to our lives, and to our getting of wisdom, than anger.


 

Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey is part reminiscence of growing up Catholic in eastern Kentucky--quite literally over the back fence from Thomas Merton’s Gethsemane Abbey--and part comparative exploration of the Christian and Buddhist monastic traditions.


 

But while you’re waiting for copies of these to arrive--if you don’t simply download the e-books--you can read “The Future of Queer: A Manifesto” in the current January issue of Harper’s.

It’s a cri de coeur for what we lost (and what we desperately need to find again) when we as queer men settled for a place at the table of Business as Usual, in a materialistic society obsessed with advancing the small, isolated selves that we misrecognize as the essence of our life. It’s a call to value friendship over the conventions of marriage. It’s a call to say no to late capitalism’s rape of the planet and cooption of our souls.  It’s an uncompromising assertion that the one best hope for the earth, and for a society that doesn’t consume itself in untrammeled greed and mutual suspicion, is for us to reject  the comfort of the mainstream and to become more truly queer. Queer in the sense that the Buddha was queer, leaving his family behind in his search for the Noble Truths of our existence. Queer in the sense that Jesus was queer, setting aside the ties of blood relations to embrace the poor and the marginalized as his true family.

It’s an exhortation to dream, believe in, and desire a world that’s not yet made. And you need to read it.

Radical Drag of the Soul

I recently published this essay in the current issue of RFD, "Finding Center," which takes as its theme the need to engage evolving standards of inclusivity while honoring long-held core values. It touches on themes I've written about before, but it offers a new take on a ritual practice dear to me heart. 

I enjoy a loose but ongoing connection with a gay men’s organization that I admire, respect, and hold in great affection. I remember years ago coming into the main assembly room at one of its gatherings to find silhouette symbols of major world religions hanging in the windows.

Notably because uniquely missing was the Cross. The Sanskrit calligraphy for the sacred syllable Aum was mounted upside down. I’m guessing there were no Hindus in the room to point that out. And then there’s the frequency with which gay spiritual gatherings get scheduled smack in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays. As for calling the directions--well, what overwhelmingly Euro-American New Age gay group hasn’t appropriated that particular ceremony from Native American spiritual practice?

I totally get the toxicity of Christianity for those who’ve suffered the homophobic, anti-erotic pronouncements that so often poison its well. And I’m the last person to fault queer men for piecing together ritual patterns and spiritual expressions we can live with from as many traditions as we find available. It’s our genius as faggots to deck our deepest selves out in borrowed fashions, our radical drag of the soul. We found something wonderful at the back of Aunty’s closet. She may not be too happy about what we’ve done with her Dior gown, but we know we look fabulous in it. Angels in America is as brilliant an example of that as you’ll find, but hardly the only one.

Still, I agonize a lot about appropriation and exclusion, twin moral perils of life as a privileged, white, cisgendered gay man. The more so when I officiate at a ritual I first created seven years ago and have been leading since--a Lingam Puja that borrows its name from Hindu practice, but strays about as far from authentic Hindu ritual as Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral parts company with a Passover Seder. Instead of the smooth, abstract cylinder that stands as the focal point in a Shiva temple, the Lingam we gather around is a very recognizable sculpture of an erect cock. Then too, I’ve developed parts of the ceremony straight out of a high Episcopalian Eucharist--though no one who doesn’t make the connection for himself needs to know that. Sometimes I include readings from contemporary Buddhist teachers, or from Rumi and Hafiz. I am, after all is said, a slut who will pray with anybody.

 

My fellow devotees and I are risking the alienation of established spiritual communities left and right in this ritual. But the centrality of an anatomically accurate Lingam isn’t potentially an offense only to Hindus who see us ripping off a venerable tradition that doesn’t properly belong to us--a formerly colonized one, at that. A twenty-inch wooden dick on the altar makes it pretty clear that this ritual addresses humans who have a penis and have gathered to own and honor the Divine’s presence in the wondrous bit of flesh that hangs between our legs--“the exposed tip of the heart, the wand of the soul,” as our Prophet St. James Broughton put it.

 I’ve spent the last sixty years falling deeper into the truth that the Sacred is in this body, in all of this body. In the specifics of this body. This heart. These hands. This cock.

I’ve spent decades striving to claim fully my desire for the tribe of those who experience a similar truth. My tribe. The tribe of penis-bearing humans who love other penis-bearing humans. Who through our experience of jacking alone and with friends, of frotting and sucking and fucking with each other, are diving deeper into how living in a body with a penis shapes our relation to the world, and our relationship to the Sacred.

None of this is unconditioned truth. It’s not the working out of some universal archetype. It’s a result of living in this body, in these bodies, with these bodies’ histories. It’s my embodied truth, not identical with, but akin to, the embodied truth of my comrades. To live out this truth in their company is the deep desire of my heart and soul. My cock is a key to the inner temple, and I long to gather with others whose cocks are keys to the inner temple. There are other keys to the inner temple. There is conceivably a point when the inner temple is opened so wide that keys are no longer relevant. But I need the companionship of those who know, from deep, embodied experience, how this key fits into the lock. Who know the feel of this key turning in the lock, the sound of this key opening the lock.

 

I don’t believe any of this this has to be viewed as an attempt at exclusion. I know some people will say this is a dodge. But I still insist on owning my experience and staying true to it. I’d be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of shutting others out of the circle--cisgendered and trans women, trans men, cisgendered men whose erotic lives aren’t focused on cock. But there’s no denying that the ritual I lead isn’t focused on them and their experience of the world. Instead, I’m open to welcoming such fellow humans into the circle as visitors, much as I might welcome a Hindu friend attending Mass as a visitor, much as a Muslim friend might welcome me to his mosque, much as the rabbi of the shul my partner attends in the summer would tell me, I’m pretty sure, that no matter how many times I come to services, no matter how many times I put on my prayer shawl, no matter how glad she is I’ve come, I’m still a visitor, and not a Jew.

People I respect have asked whether I’m not really perpetuating imperialist attitudes to world cultures by drawing on them. They’ve asked whether I’m not perpetuating patriarchy by encouraging cisgendered men to gather in celebration of the beauty and holiness of the Lingam. But imperialist patriarchy hasn’t flourished because white cisgendered men are comfortable with our bodies and bond successfully with other men. Patriarchal privilege and misogyny are founded, paradoxically, on the insistence that cisgendered men deny our own vulnerably embodied experience. Patriarchy demands that we pretend our unpredictable, permeable, changeable, leaky bodies are irrelevant to our privileged place in the world. Patriarchy wants us to see other men as rivals who either pose potential threats or can be dominated. I borrow from the wisdom and practice of as many traditions as I have access to. I reject the homophobic crap that virtually no tradition is innocent of. I claim my experience of God in my faggot body as my own and forge a community out of what I share with my fellow travelers. This is as anti-patriarchal as I know how to be.