A Morning Practice

As you awake, connect with your breath. Lay the heel of your hand against the front of your scrotum, where your penis emerges from it. Curl your fingers over your scrotum. With the tips of your fingers, gently explore your perineum and inner thighs. Contract your perineum as you exhale, and feel the contractions with your fingertips.

You are cultivating your yin masculine energy: the soft, yielding, vulnerable energy that complements the hard, active, assertive yang energy of your erect penis. 

Yin and yang are not opposites of each other. They are complements of each other. They are present in all phenomena. Their presence in your sexuality is one manifestation of this--a specific experience of something universal.

As you continue, gently grasp the tip of your penis with the fingertips of your other hand: your thumb on top of your glans, your middle finger exploring your sulcus--the furrow that starts just below your meatus. Stay forward of your frenulum. Focus on the softness here, the pliability that remains even when the magic wand that is your phallus is rock hard. 

This too is the place of your yin masculine. 

This stimulation will not cause you to ejaculate. Be aware that the goal here is not ejaculation.  You can continue this for twenty minutes, breathing, exploring, massaging. 

This is a place of lucid dreaming. This is a place of masculine wisdom and compassion. This is a treasure at the heart of your treasure.

Letting Go of Shame, Opening the Heart: On the Healing Power of Queer Men's Ritual

I was delighted to sit down a while back with Body Electric instructor and podcast host Craig Cullinane for a conversation about my take on the bigger, freer life we all deserve. Craig is energetic, thoughtful, and a great interviewer. 

You can watch and listen here.

Along the way, we talk for a while about a ritual close to my heart: the Lingam Puja that I first developed fifteen years ago at Easton Mountain in upstate New York. And about the one-on-one guidance I offer on the Path of Phallic Awareness.

Holy? Or Hot as Fuck?

The answer of course can be--I'll go as far as saying should be--"Both."

But what makes it so difficult to hold the two together in practice? Everything in our culture and personal history that keeps them apart can rear its head when we're in the bedroom with a lover. Or lovers. Or alone in our solosexual pleasure.

How do you hold them together? Or maybe holding them together doesn't feel intuitive to you. But the bottom line: what is an erotic spiritual practice? What is an erotic spiritual practice that can work for you?

Throughout history and across cultures, mystics have used the language of erotic union to describe their longing for and communion with God. Generations of mystics have used the language of the Song of Songs to imagine themselves having sex with God. Lord Krishna splits himself into dozens of identical manifestations in order to give his cowgirl devotees the experience of unique bliss in moonlit dalliance with him. If we’re blessed, the best sexual experiences of our lives are also among the most intensely spiritual. 

We miss out if we leave to chance something so important to our growth. The practice of erotic spirituality deserves our conscious and focused attention. 

Take inventory. Be honest with yourself about your wounds. Even if you’ve been out for years, you may feel that your sexual life and your connection to Spirit have a great gulf fixed between them. Explore that disconnect. Sit with it, push back against it.

Pray or meditate naked. Staying in touch with your body-with your erotic body–is an excellent way to turn up the volume on whatever keeps you from bringing flesh together with spirit–and to celebrate their connection. 

Breathe! Do it deeply and intentionally. Think of it as pleasure. Imagine that the air you take in is itself an erotic force, penetrating you with each breath. 

Relinquish the Goal. Orgasm and ejaculation are gorgeous. But learn to cultivate longing and subtle pleasure for its own sake. How does it impact your emotional and spiritual state if you choose to remain aroused without immediate release? If you have issues around getting an erection, or ejaculation isn't an option for you, it's all the more reason to stay grounded in the moment and cultivate what's available.

Practice Queer Midrash. Reimagine the sacred narratives of the tradition(s) that speak to you–a practice that Jewish biblical study calls midrash. The stories of Ruth and Naomi, of David and Jonathan, of the centurion and his “boy” in Luke 7:1-10 are ripe for retelling in celebration of same-sex desire. Photographers John Dugdale and Oscar Wolfman offer rich visual resources for a practice of queer midrash. Anthony Oliveira's Dayspring is a kaleidoscopic retelling of the Gospels from the point of view of the Beloved Disciple.

Find--and create--erotic community No matter where or with whom you find your erotic fulfilment, treat your partners like the beloved of God. Hope for the same in return..

Stop “chasing the dragon.” Peak experiences don’t happen all the time. If we try to repeat them at will, we can get caught up in a cycle that’s closer to addiction than openness to Spirit.

Create seasonal ritual. It can be enormously healing to affirm the integration of your sexuality with Nature’s larger rhythms. Create for yourself an erotic ritual in celebration of the Summer or Winter Solstice, of the Spring or Fall Equinox, of the Cross-Quarters that fall halfway between them. The ever-amazing Annie Sprinkle's website has a thousand suggestions for sexy things you can do in and with nature. 

At the Cross-Quarter

Not the Solstice--the point at which darkness most fully covers the earth. Not the Equinox, when day stands balanced with night. The point when the transition from light to dark begins to accelerate, and from day to day we start to perceive it it more dramatically.

In 2025, a reminder that however dark the world, light and warmth and new life inevitably return. 

It's a season to foster connection. To shelter hope and not be daunted. To keep joy alive. Allive within us. Alive among us. This in itself is an act of resistance to forces of cruelty, indifference, corruption, and greed.

On Ritual Authenticity

 The fourth and last instalment in a manifesto. My posts to Anchorhold have always had a utopian slant. I've always shared thoughts here about a longed-for social formation: where our queer spiritual lives can find expression and supprot in conditions of full visibility and community.

Content warning: abstract, theoretical language and some long sentences. 

4. A Dodgy Road Through the Middle of the Red Sea

So, in sum--what do gay/bi/+ men's rituals need to embody, for them to offer us, for our liberation and growth? For one thing: a shameless self-awareness that we're making this up as we go along. New Age parashamanism (see the second post of this series, two before this one) often gets tangled up in its own insecurities about standing outside the mainstream of our secular, individualistic culture. 

Laying claim to lines of oral transmission from hidden traditions, in order to mystify one's own authority, is a defensive strategy: "I received this teaching while channeling a five-thousand-year-old Celtic druid named Shebugarictorix." So is making pseudo-scientific claims about a ritual: "Applying this crystal to your third eye will cure your migraines." Or else, talking the meaning of a ritual to death, instead of trusting that it can speak for itself.

In short, parashamanism defends itself from the disenchantments of modern skepticism by projecting a fantasy of wholeness, power, and unquestioning acceptance. That fantasy is especially dangerous when it refuses to consider the role the parashaman's own internal issues get projected into the ritual work–and so lay some very questionable countertransferences onto client-participants.

 

So what sets queer men's authentic ritual work apart from all this? I'd say just this: good queer ritual doesn't give into anxiety about its marginal status in a skeptical modernist world, but instead takes it as a given and embraces it. And beyond embracing it: takes it as grounds for self-reflection and deeper awareness. Our sense of irony, our ability to hold two attitudes toward what we're doing at once--these are the resources that keep good queer ritual honest. Our liminal experience of the world--not standing inside the mainstream, but not standing completely apart from it either, our constant crossing of borders--turns out to be our greatest gift for keeping ritual honest. I've already said it, but I'll say it again: our liminal status isn't just a condition of what we do. We need to incorporate it explicitly into the rituals we create together.

That's pretty abstract, so let me offer an example. Queer men's retreats often feature a communal altar, with an invitation for participants to bring their own sacred objects to add to it. The very act of doing that acknowledges that we're coming together for a limited time, and then we'll pick up our objects and separate again. But what if we deliberately heighten that awareness by making our altar-building the focus of an opening sharing circle, where each man speaks about the object he's brought, then takes it to the altar, rings a bell, and bows to the altar he's helping to create, with his object, with his words, with his actions? What if the last sharing circle of the gathering does the reverse, with each man talking about his experience of the gathering, then going up to the altar and removing his object, so that taking the altar apart again embodies the lesson of our intermittent community?

A second point: let's be honest in our ritual practice that our sexual desire for other men is foundational to the intermittent communities we create. That doesn't mean that our rituals have to incorporate orgies. But we need rituals that embody our awareness of erotic desire as the force that causes us to come together in the first place. On the one hand, using ritual as an excuse for group sex can pretty quickly tip over into all the perils of parashamanism I've reviewed. But if we're too squeamish about spontaneous erotic expression being part of our rituals, maybe we've internalized the antiierotic and homophobic attitudes of mainstream culture.

Again, an example to make this less abstract: we can set up an emblem of male homoeroticism as the focal point of a ritual; or else create that emblem in the ritual itself.

A third point: queer camp is always about celebrating the Trickster incongruities of our lives. This is what radical drag has always been about. It's central to Radical Faerie culture. It's the genius of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. And yet another example: the humour of some of the panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, side by side with grief, loss, and the longing for healing. There are hundreds of examples of this in the Quilt. One of my favorites depicts a man on a piano bench doing a high kick in platform heels with the caption, "Is this art? No! It's Fred Abrams!"

Fourth, and finally: we borrow, when we need to, from established spiritual traditions--none of which have served us particularly well on their own terms. The spiritual abuse many of us have suffered from our traditions of origin often leads to total alienation from them. Sometimes, that's the healthiest response available to us, at least for the time being. But it means we also leave behind what was life-giving in them. Sometimes, we have to go back through the wreckage to find what can still serve us, on our own terms. 

Sometimes, we have to borrow what calls to us from traditions that aren't our own--also on our own terms. Eclectic appropriation of borrowed religious traditions always involves questions of colonialism and power differentials. But at the same time, there's no such thing as a self-contained "pure"  tradition that hasn't already incorporated its own cross-cultural borrowings. 

Queer culture's genius for undercutting itself means we can reimagine the ways we pick and chose and repurpose what we find in different traditions. In the ritual actions we cobble together from different sources, we embrace a tradition and distance ourselves from it at the same time. This too, is our radical drag of the soul. Auntie may not approve of what we've done with the Dior gown we found at the back of her closet. But we know we look fabulous in it.

A case in point: there's an episode in the story of the Exodus that can serve us really well. As the Hebrew slaves take off for destinations unknown, at the command of a weird-ass god who won't even show his face, they carry with them the jewelry the Egyptians have handed over in an uncharacteristic moment of generosity. Maybe what we piece together from one tradition and another is our way of carrying off loot from the Egyptians. To borrow a provocative assertion by José Estaban Muñoz, "we are not yet queer." Meaning that we're still on our way, like a bunch of escaped slaves heading through the Red Sea, and then on into the wilderness. 

We still don't fully know what a concrete ritual community of queer men might look like: what rites it might devise; what golden calves might prove in the end an ill-advised experiment; what detours through the wilderness it might find itself taking. Sometimes the voices of established spiritual traditions have been prophets calling us out of bondage in Egypt. At least as often, they've been instead the armies of Pharaoh we have to flee. Sometimes, they've just been the Red Sea that we have to cross. A genuinely queer riff on Exodus can begin by recognizing that at one time or another, they're capable of being all three.

On Ritual Authenticity

The third and next to last instalment in a manifesto. My posts to Anchorhold have always had a utopian slant. I've always shared thoughts here about a longed-for social formation: one where our queer spiritual lives can find expression and supprot in conditions of full visibility and community.

Content warning: abstract, theoretical language and some long sentences.  

3. "Emerging Ritual"

I have more this time to say about the idea of "emerging ritual," a phrase coined by the Canadian scholar/practitioner Ronald Grimes. Grimes ran a "Ritual Laboratory" at the University of Waterloo in Ontario starting in the 1980s, where students made up group rituals from scratch, and analyzed why and how what the results worked. Grimes says a lot that speaks to our search for rituals that support our lives as gay/bi/+ men in community with each other,

First: ritual traditons are always in flux. They're always adapting to new historical and cultural circumstances. There's no hard distanction between the forms that we create experimentally and more established traditions. The rituals of heteronormative culture are no more "real," no more "authentic," than what we create out of our own shared queer experience.

Second: good ritual doesn't just express abstract ideas. It's a  practice that embodies and generates its own kind of knowledge. When we're engaged in ritual, we simultaneously know what we're doing and have have no idea what we're doing. We're immersed in it, and at the same time able to reflect on it, learn from it, and shape it in response to what we've learned. Ritual action isn't secondary to understanding and knowledge, or to the experience of community. Good ritual creates understanding and knowledge. Good ritual creates experiences of community.

Third: in response to Grimes's criticisms of New Age workshop culture, which I talked about last week. The temporary community of workshop culture presupposes that we're all free agents and will go back to a private life that doesn't have much to do with the private lives of other participants. In contrast, intermittent community among queer men draws on the depth and continuity of the bonds that bring us together. We live continuously across the threshold between a queer world and a wider heteronormative culture. Our gatherings may be temporary, but the underlying gravitations that draw us together are enduring.

We need to pay attention to this as we build a queer ritual life for ourselves and each other. The energies that repeatedly draw us together need to be directly expressed in queer men’s ritual community. Mutual erotic desire, and the shared experience of oppression, or at least the experience of living on the margins, aren't just underlying conditions of queer ritual community. We need to use them as focal points for celebration, reflection, transformation--and sometimes for critical reflection. 

At the same time, for ritual to work, it has to be attuned to a wider cultural world to which we can relate our own lives. Like all humans, everywhere and forever, we're always borrowing. The elements of authentic quuer ritual can be ridiculously ordinary. When we cobble powerful rituals together out of found fragments of daily life, we reflect the provisional, intermittent experience of queer connection.

At other times we draw from established spiritual traditions, selecting what's useful and rejecting what's proven toxic.  It's our radical drag of the soul. No matter what the source, the trickster genius of queer life lets us see both the profundity and absurdity of a ritual form. Good queer ritual always contains a healthy dose of implicit self-criticism. Our rituals at their best are informed by the radical skepticism of authority that permeates much of gay life. We have a great gift for both immersing ourselves in a profound experience and demystifying it. 

Anyone who's wept over a drag queen lipsyncing "Like a Prayer" knows what I'm talking about.

Or take two scenes from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. At the end of Part One, Prior, the protagonist, has been increasingly troubled by the visitation of angelic messengers announcing his election as a prophet--or are the visions a symptom of advancing dementia? He lies alone and desperately ill in his bedroom. The room quakes, the ceiling collapses above him, and a blinding white light from above bathes the bed and the stage around it in impossible incandescence. Gazing up into the light in terror, he exclaims, “God almighty... Very Steven Spielberg.” Then an angel descends to declare, “Greetings, Prophet. The Great Work begins: The Messenger has arrived.”

Near the end of Part Two, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg has been keeping vigil by Roy Cohn’s hospital bed during the last hours of his life: she is haunting him in revenge for his role in her execution during the McCarthy witch hunt. Immediately after Cohn’s death, the drag queen/nurse Belize charged with his care at the hospital summons Louis, a disaffected gay Jewish leftist, to say Kaddish over the body--ostensibly to give Belize an opportunity to smuggle Cohn’s private stash of experimental AZT (the time is February 1986) out of the room for distribution to PWA’s with no access to treatment. 

Louis protests, in keeping with his leftist principles, that he will not recite the commemoration of the dead for Cohn; he then adds that in any case he can’t remember the prayer. Giving in, he stumbles through the first phrases, halts, then begins limping through half-remembered tags of Hebrew blessings. Ethel’s ghost rises from her chair in the corner of the room to coach Louis phrase by phrase through the long text. At the last "Amen," Ethel adds, and Louis repeats, "You sonofabitch." Loading the stolen drugs into Louis's backpack, Belize responds, “Thank you Louis, you did fine.” Louis responds, “Fine? What are you talking about, fine? That was fucking miraculous."

Madonna, Angels in America: they share in a rich tradition of queer popular culture that sets reverence for the Sacred side by side with iconoclasm. Louis asks with astonishment, “What are you talking about, fine? That was fucking miraculous.” The miracle is revealed as unmiraculous to the audience because we see Ethel’s ghost coaching Louis through a prayer as neither of the characters onstage sees her.

Yet on another level, it remains a marvel, if not a miracle, by the sheer fact of Ethel’s paranormal presence. Most importantly, it's miraculous in a more proper sense because of Ethel's deeply forgiving recognition of common humanity with the man responsible for her execution decades before. 

Here,  the transgressive edge of queer experience is aggressively foregrounded. Louis's prayer, and Ethel's forgiveness, aren't just miraculous. They're fucking miraculous, at the deathbed of a demonically powerful, hypocritically closeted bully fallen victim to a disease transmitted by fucking and getting fucked. The queer interpenetration of reverence and parody anchors the transcendent to the ordinary, literal level of reality and to the life of the body.

"The Offering"--photo by Andrew Graham

Unexpected

 Whatever will Anita Bryant make of meeting Jesus with his arm around John the Divine's waist?

On Ritual Authenticity

The second instalment in a manifesto. My posts to Anchorhold have always had a utopian slant. I've always shared thoughts here about a longed-for social formation: one where our queer spiritual lives can find expression and support in conditions of full visibility and community. 

Content warning: abstract, theoretical language and some long sentences. 

2. The Perils of "Parashamanism"

Photo by Andrew Graham

As gay/bi/+ men, we have to figure out how to adopt best ritual practices that truly support us. We need to take seriously our liminal ("not in and not out") experience of the world as a touchstone for what we create. 

There's a sort of “classic consensus,” about ritual authenticity. Formulated by scholars like Nathan Mitchell and Mary Douglas, it presupposes that you need strong social consensus and unified group identity for ritual to work well. But maybe models like that come already  wired into heterosexist assumptions that won't serve us well. 

Consider a few examples of powerful, effective gay ritual that came out of the ghetto culture of the 1970s and 1980s: the processions following the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978; the creation and repeated display of the NAMES Project memorial quilt beginning in the late 1980's; practices included in many AIDS funerals, in the devastating period of the disease’s impact on the gay community prior to the development of “cocktail” treatments and the transformation of HIV into a more manageable medical condition. 

The AIDS Memorial Quilt displayed on the White House ellipse, 1989, by Jeff Tinsley. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 11-009, Image No. 89-20259.

I'm not trying to romanticize these examples. Doing so could suggest that medical apocalypse and social stigmatization of the dying were ideal conditions for queer ritual authenticity. But paradoxcially, we come up with our strongest ritual practices when we're in touch with our marginal "not like everybody else" position in the world. 

As gay/bi/+ men, we move constantly in and out of that marginal space. It's something we celebrate as an aspect of our ordinary experience--and yet at times something we try to elude. We come together provisionally and temporarily because of our shared marginalization as men who love men. One of the wondrous things about queer men's community is its the potential to bring us together across lines of class, ethnicity, and gender expression. (Walt Whitman knew this over 150 years ago; Edward Carpenter knew this. E.M. Forster knew this.)  But then most of us move partially and intermittently out of queer community, in order to conform to the requirements of a larger society where we often need (or choose) to make our way, as best we can.

Mainstream academic theories of ritual practice, in short, don't fit very well with aspects of authentic queer ritual life.

Shiva at Summer Camp: A Fire Altar at Easton Mountain

For decades we've accessed alternative structures to explore, celebrate, and cultivate our spiritual lives. They include the Radical Faerie movement, gay and gay-friendly retreat facilities, and regional organizations like Gay Spirit Visions, centered in the American Southeast, or the Billies in northern California. Those structures nurture individual growth and afford precious nodes of community. 

The birth of the Radical Faeries, 1979

At the same time, they provide mostly intermittent, and often tenuous, support. Despite them, we still need deeper soil for a more richly layered experience of ritual. Ritual practice in such contexts risks the limitations of what scholar Ronald Grimes dubbed “parashamanism.” He delivers a pretty brutal critque that often comes too close for comfort to the circumstances of our efforts as queer men to remake ritual. Grimes sketches a typical profile of the parashaman: a highly educated, leftist, post-Christian or post-Jewish product of the middle class, often economically marginalized, suspicious of the labels of traditional religion, and preoccupied in  midlife with the existential “themes of death, birth, violence, and sexuality.” 

Parashamanism appropriates multiple traditions without much regard for specifics of history. It focuses on ritual and myth over conceptual content, which it often just ignores. It romanticizes the appeal of "primitive" societies, but glosses over the specfiics of such cultures, including the violence and physical risk often associated with those societies’ rites of passage, healing, and insight. The parashaman is “intellectually anti-intellectual.” His eclectic appropriation of multiple traditions can show colonizing disregard for the integrity and cohesion of the cultures his practices draw from.

More than a little of what Grimes describes recalls memories of queer men's spiritual gatherings--for instance, when indigenous ritual styles and practices are appropriated in almost entirely non-Native contexts, sometimes without even an acknowledgement of the borrowing. I remember vividly being at a large gay men's gathering where the main assembly hall was adorned with symbols of multiple spiritual traditions--without real evidence of deeper engagement. The one notable absence being Christianity, though it informed the backgrounds of most men present. The devanagiri monogram of Hinduism's sacred syllable Aum was inadvertently mounted upside-down. That stuck with me as a telling index of what can go wrong with cafeteria-style spirituality.

New Age workshop culture is an easy target for Grimes's critique. Such gatherings tend to promise peak experiences for the sake of the "high" itself. Workshops aren't set up to integrate an individual’s life into a community. Instead, they're designed to enhance a participant's individual identity, side by side with others' individual identities. Workshop experiences emphasize the individual’s unique characteristics or destiny, and his right to personal fulfilment. Some gatherings are highly structured throughout, and flooded with intense experiences. Others offer a cafeteria of optional, modular experiences. All this fits easily into a  capitalist model that commodifies experience and spiritual value.

The high of finding community in workshop culture is real. It can be positive and life-changing. But it's invariably temporary, and the return to ordinary life easily leaches away the experience's ongoing resonance. Without continued supports for integration, the memory of a moment of peak intensity isn't easily integrated into the individual's return to ordinary. The phenomenon of the "workshop junkie" is real: the repetition-compulsion of "chasing the dragon," absent communal supports for a lasting, heightened integration of the spiritual self.

And yet, at the same time, despite all these pitfalls of parashamanism, Grimes also argues for the cultural authenticity of grass-roots experiments and improvisation in contexts of cultural and social flux--what he calls “emerging ritual.” Which begs the question: what distinction is he making? And what distinction can we make? That seems to me worth asking, because Grimes's positive idea of emerging ritual aligns with important aspects of queer men's culture: our love of parody; our ability both to take our lives seriously and at the same time to see the irony in them; our necessary talent for making things up as we go along. These are skills our tribe has long cultivated in order to sustain our emotional and spiritual lives. 

In other words, as we go on thinking about "emerging ritual," we'll see that it has a lot in common with the creativity and resilience of gay camp--with the skills we've developed to survive, and thrive, in our liminal, "not inside and not outside" space on the margins.

Devotional banners by Barrie Petterson