Midway Through Lent

When I was twenty-one, with one foot out of the closet, there was one lean, mostly naked man that no one could fault me for gazing on in adoration.

The German crucifix I wanted as a birthday present--yes, I was that fucked up--offered me a very male, and very dead, Jesus. I can only imagine what friends thought of it, hanging on the wall of my first apartment.

Fifteen years later, I wanted nothing more to do with Christianity.

Twenty-five years later, I was ready to return, but on my own terms. I hung this artifact of who I'd once been over the Korean rice chest that I'd bought as my altar.

Thirty years later, it freaked my Jewish boyfriend right out, and I tried to give it away. In any case, the glorification of suffering it represented had become completely foreign to me. 

Forty years later, it lies inside the rice chest, a relic I still respect of who I once was, and what I once needed. 

Gracias a la Vida.

Everything that arises is subject to dissolution

At Equinox

I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the starlit heaven,
the glorious sun's life-giving ray, 
the brightness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free, 
the whirling wind's tempestuous shocks, 
the stable earth, the deep salt sea,
about the old eternal rocks.

(From The Breastplate of St. Patrick)

At the Corner of Fourth and Walnut

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

The Sense of an Ending

I spent just over half an hour yesterday watching a stunningly sexy video on XTube: a beautiful man tied to a door frame, and later to a bed, edged by a friendly, playful expert, babbling all the while, eventually exploding into a prolonged, shattering orgasm, then emerging back into the world of ordinary time and space in the last two minutes of the clip. 

I'm all for voyeurism and exhibitionism. I'm unhappy about the bad rap they often get. Witnessing the helpless, undefended pleasure of another, allowing oneself to be witnessed: if the heart is opened, these are potentially acts of erotic generosity and transpersonal love. As such, they're sacred, not profane. Miraculously, a streaming service for homemade erotica can become a vehicle to invite the viewer into those luminous depths. 

In the clip, we don't see the beginning of this ritual--for in my book, it's clearly a ritual. We do see the ending. Both men move from total immersion in the erotic energy flowing between them, gradually detaching from the experience. They exchange comments that begin to distance them from the experience even as they rehearse it:

"I've never seen you orgasm like that on film," the dom says playfully.  

"Yeah, that was intense." 

"I love what I do." They both laugh.

The dom wipes his hands on a towel, attentively wipes his boy's belly, undoes the restraints on his wrists. Boy lays his freed hands on Dom's forearms. There's more laughter, a little more banter. It's over. Boy rises off the mattress onto his elbows, looks briefly toward the camera, says again, "That was intense," and then, "Good stuff." End of clip.

Why was I so drawn in (aside, duh, from my own arousal)? I loved watching the two of them interact. The video stood out from a gazillion other bondage/masturbation scenes because of what passed between them emotionally. Fetishized body parts and money shots, on their own, don't measure up. (In fact, given the lighting, you only know for sure after the fact that Boy has ejaculated, when Dom holds his semen-slicked hand up to the camera.) I felt invited in as a witness, not only to the man in restraints, but to their shared experience--both the rapport between them throughout the scene, and the beginning of their transition back into Life As We Know It. 

And yet, I found myself in the last seconds longing for something subtly different. I wanted  them to emerge from sacred time and space back into the ordinary while still acknowledging the profundity of what had just happened between them. I wanted them to affirm together that what they'd created was way beyond "good stuff." It was pure sexual alchemy. I wanted an erotic equivalent of "The Mass has ended. Go in peace." 

In a sense, that's exactly what they were doing. But I've experienced my share of powerful sexual encounters that end with one or both (or all) of us feeling nervous that maybe we've been changed a little too much for comfort, so we'd better stuff the magic back in the bottle, label it mere fun, and put it back on the shelf. "Wow, that was hot" can be a way of reassuring ourselves, and stressing to each other, that it was No Big Deal.

How might we transform our erotic experience of ourselves, others, and the world, if our encounters could end with a shared recognition of the depths we've just plumbed? How much of what gets dismissed as "just sex" could we recognize as something deeper, more integrated into the wholeness of our lives, by mindful shared attention to the way we end the encounter?

Judith Butler says in the opening pages of Undoing Gender, "Face it, we're undone by each other. And if we're not, what's the point?" Transformative erotic experiences, like any sacred acts, have to be fenced off from the ordinary, or we might run the danger of never going back to our daily lives. We have to give them the sense of an ending. But an ending, ideally, that still gives us access to their power.