Hope and the Flesh

Every four or five weeks since the summer, a group has gathered online for a Heart and Lingam Circle. In the midst of the pandemic, we've gone on buidling erotic community with the creative energy, imagination, and playfulness that queer men have manifested through times of oppression, health crises, anxiety, and isolation since--well, since queer men have been queer. (I send the invitation out a couple of weeks in advance. If you'd like to be on the blind copies list, let me know by e-mail.)

We've taken as a touchstone the words of James Broughton: "The penis is the exposed tip of the heart, the wand of the soul." What happens when (instead of just getting off online) we use our erotic energy to expand our consciousness, and to speak and listen more fully from the heart? What happens when we bring our heart energy to our erotic expression?

Can masturbating together, while we share the traditional structure of a heart circle in virtual space, make us more open-hearted, more compassionate and generous toward one another and toward ourselves?

We've found out that it can, and does. Without being able to reach out through the screen to touch one another physically, we've reached through the screen, and across continents and time zones, to touch each other's hearts. It's been sweet and rich. And sexy. Did I mention sexy?

Still, it's not the physical touch of another's hand. It's not skin on skin--the contact that all primates thrive on, and which we alone of all higher primate species live in want of, even in ordinary times, for the sake of civilization and its discontents.  It's what we can have, for now. Paradoxically, it's brought the gift of connection despite distances that would keep us ever from being able to do this face to face. We aren't just settling for second best. Like everyone whose lives have moved onto the Web since March, we've discovered new modes of community.

It's what's been possible in 2020--a year that nearly all of us will be glad to see the end of. It's a sign of hope, like the final words of the Passover Seder, "Next year in Jerusalem." Like the words of the Passover Seder, not an expression of a desire to move back to what we've known, but forward into something yet to come. A hope lived out with, through, and in our queer flesh.