Faith and Fear, Repression and Resilience

I warned you in a post back in May, announcing my new historical novel, not to get your hopes up for steamy gay sex scenes. But The Ram in the Thicket does include two monks quietly in love with each other. More generally, it's a story about repression and resilience, and the struggle to maintain spiritual integrity in a sometimes unbearably flawed world. 

Polarized political groups. Religious leaders push for harshly intolerant rules. Lies and 'cancellation' hound those who don't fit in. A small minority suffering from inherited trauma are especially targeted. A charismatic outsider spreads conspiracy theories. A wise woman with influence but no power fights to do damage control behind the scenes.

If all this sounds familiar--welcome to Norwich, 1413.

You can find my book at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, bookshop.org, and other online platforms.

Holding Space for Phallic Reverence

In this guest post, Herne shares the story of how he came to hold space for "the beauty and raw power" of men's erotic ritual. As he says below, "What makes anything sacred is the intention to make it so." 

Herne is an initiate and teacher of the Unnamed Path, a pagan and shamanic tradition that works with the energetic current of men who love men. He practices an embodied spirituality and believes that authentic erotic connection can be deeply healing. You can contact him at HerneMtl@gmail.com, or through his profile on Bateworld.

Cock works in mysterious ways. 

And when we listen to its guidance, it can pull us into new discoveries. For me that has included stepping into the role of leader in cock worship sessions--something I didn't intentionally set out to do. Yet in being invited, things unfolded and evolved on their own. Much like the slow, inexorable swelling of an erection when it's pulled to something that excites us, there’s no denying the call.

Things started for me at a Montreal Jacks group masturbation event. In a room surrounded by men stroking, I exposed my bate and was seen in my practice of mindful and spiritually connected masturbation. I walk a shamanic path and commune with the horned gods of nature that embody unashamed erotic expression. So my bating is an offering and moment of immersion in this energy. It must have been palpable, because a few men around me felt the pulsing of this. The next day, a member reached out to me through Bateworld and invited me to lead a gathering of men in a mindful masturbation practice. 

And so I took on the role of a guide, creating ritual space for men to come together in brotherhood. At first I asked myself, who was I to assume such a role. I could feel myself going into performance mode, but I leaned into the current into which cock was guiding me and trusted the call. I saw myself not as an authority, but as a brother on the path, simply sharing with others what I had discovered. So doing, I could feel the desire from men who wanted to go deeper into their connection to cock and to their brothers.

It’s been a privilege to hold ritual space and welcome men in cock worship sessions--in large part simply setting the scene and creating the conditions for men to discover their own way of worshipping cock. I’ve learned that what makes anything sacred is the intention to make it so. So setting up a space with an altar that expresses appreciation of cock (a large phallus statue, cock rings, candles, popper bottles) is a good beginning. 

As men arrrive, we begin with a ritual of undressing and unveiling cock to self and others. There is a moment to release daily tensions and become more embodied--much of the time, so many of us live in our heads. I guide men to connect heart to cock and to begin charging their individual erotic energy. Then in a large circle we build the community of brothers and charge the container with our collective cock energy. I encourage mutual eye contact, seeing and being seen in our enjoyment of stroking. 

There is some form of prayer and gratitude that then trickles into the session as men are guided to say “Hail penis” or “Thank you penis” when waves of bliss overtake them. 

Through all this emerges the brotherhood: the simple, completely undefended bonding of men together, openly sharing a common experience. As we step into an integrated state of being, into connection within the self and with each other, healing happens. Bodies soften, stress and worries fall to the wayside. The primal magic of cock has full invitation to reveal itself. Beauty and raw power emerge in these moments--sometimes as vulnerability and tenderness; sometimes as the bestial parts of us allowed shameless expression at last.

I step back at this stage of the ritual into the role of sacred witness and allow things to unfold. My heart fills in seeing men shed their layers and come together authentically. And I've seen in my own life how this ripples out into the world and touches others. 

I'm amazed how simple it can be to shift into an expanded state of consciousness by going through phallus. I don’t think this experience has fully vanished from our modern world: echoes of phallic worship trace back in many cultures through time. More men are discovering this. The many mindful/tantric/spiritual masturbation groups on Bateworld demonstrate men's need for connection between the erotic and spirit.  

Cock has given me the profound gift of sharing this live, in person with other men. I’ve seen and experienced how the release of shame, being fully embodied, and connecting to brotherhood and something larger than us, benefits everyone. To those who feel called to experience this, I can only say, seek out the opportunities. Cock will lead the way.

Slouching Toward Dystopia

 This is not the cheeriest thing I've ever posted here. 

In George Orwell's 1984, the mottos on the towering government headquarters that loom over the city of London are 

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

...slogans that more or less encapuslate the spin that the Trump administration has put for the past six months on American public discourse.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale seemed, when it was published forty years ago, an impossible theocratic nightmare. That is, until the Christian nationalists came out of the woodwork, a packed Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, natalists started bemoaning falling birthrates, and Moms for Liberty got down to the business of banning books from libraries.

It's sheer fantasy to imagine we've reached rock bottom. 

Insidiously, we've often been lured into thinking that the internet is the great leveller that democratizes public discourse, gives everyone a voice, and is essential to any means of resistance. Certainly, it's vastly extended the possibilities of connection for LGBTQ people. When we can't find each other down the street, we've found each other online. This blog, which I started fifteen years ago, is one small case in point. To my amazement, it's been visited nearly 300,000 times.

But what the internet has done for us, ultimately, is a sideshow. We don't control it. To a very real degree it's already controlling us. Increasingly, we imagine our lives as unthinkable, or at least vastly diminished, without access to it. What we've come to think of as a tool for liberation and protest can easily turn out to be a mechanism of surveillance. With the rise of out-of-control AI, we're facing  further erosion of critical thinking, and an accelerated landslide of disinformation masquerading as settled truth. In 1984, every home features a surveillance screen that broadcasts Big Brother directly into the living room. Uh, dude, we're more or less there.

Will reactionary forces come after blogs like this? Political advocacy websites? The web presence of community organizations? Online information about Pride festivals and NGOs that serve sexual minorities? 

There's no turning back from the transformation of information technology over the last forty years. But it's time to ask: if unconstrained, grass-roots access to the online world ended--and that's hardly unthinkable at this point--how can we continue to find each other? How can we go on creating community? How can we keep each other alive, and safe, and flourishing?

I have no solid answer to propose. But I know it's time to ask the question. How do we build community, how do we connect with each other, how do we preserve and foster queer men's culture, how do we sustain the memory of our past struggles and victories, apart from online access? If we were to lose it, how do we imagine going on? 

Because go on we will, and must.

The gay and lesbian movements didn't build themselves online. Amidst the Lavender Scare of the 1950's, the Mattachine Society met in small, independent local cells modelled on the organizational tactics of the Communist Party, of which founder Harry Hay had formerly been a member. Early lesbian 'zines were typed a few carbon copies at a time. Leaflets and phone trees spread word of gatherings and protests. Nobody at Stonewall was texting from a cell phone.

I'm not suggesting that we can simply return to those dogged, against-all-odds analog tactics from sixty or seventy years ago. But we can witness in them the resilience and resourcefulness that we manifested at another time when the arc of history showed no immediate sign of bending towards justice. We can find inspiration for the courage and determination that we may have to muster once again in a neofascist America.