Finding the Language

I want to live in the faith that we're on the verge of something new among men creating erotic ritual community togoether.

It's been building for decades: among Radical Faeries, at queer retreat centres, in groups like the Billies and Gay Spirit Visions. On the rare website like Bateworld that feels like genuine online community. On blogs like this. Sometimes we draw on the resources of existing traditions; sometimes we create new forms and structures more or less from scratch. The emerging variety is wondrous. 

At some point, experimentation starts coalescing into continuity. Repetition creates familiar patterns and confirms expectations. We move toward consensus about what brings us together, what we value, what we reverence. Every time we gather, actions become more familiar. Every time we gather, what they mean to us changes. What they mean to you may be different from what they mean to me. The ritual is the container in which all this can flourish spontaneously--essential, but not an end it itself. 

None of it requires complete agreement. Our sense of belonging is based on things we do together, not necessarily on all of us understanding what we do in the same way.

Ritual is like a language. The objects we use in ritual are like its vocabulary: fire, water, earth; food and drink; bells, candles, incense, ritual garments; images, altars, mandalas. How we use them, what we do with them, follows a grammar that we perfect with practice. Formulas of greeting and beginning, formulas of completion and departure. Rituals of initiation; of membership in community; of gratitude; of mourning; of renunciation; of remembrance.

Before any such language is there to be learned, it has to be made up and then consolidated in the first place. This has always been true, in the case of every spriitual tradition, no matter how ancient, no matter how established. Now, it's emerging among men who feel called to reverence the sacred, transformative power of our erotic pleasure and of our desire for one another. We've been inventing the language for a long time now. We're more than ready to speak it to one another.

The internet has helped us find one another more easily, but the internet is not the magic. The magic is what we do with it--and did with it long before the electronic age. The magic is what we do in and with our bodies--together, weaving the webs of connection that transcend the isolation of the false self.

Yes, Over the Top. And I Love It

The trenchant satire of Aleksander Constantinoropolous, aka Virgin Monk Boy on Substack:

Modern wellness culture has achieved the impossible: it has fused quantum mechanics with kale.

What once began as a sincere desire to feel less like a walking cortisol ad has now metastasized into a full-blown industrial complex with the aesthetic of a Whole Foods altar and the pricing of a small liberal arts college.

As a celibate monk who once accidentally biohacked his pineal gland by eating expired tofu, I feel qualified—nay, spiritually compelled—to address this.

Dear seeker, it’s time we talked about Rainbow Diets and Chakra Cleanses.

Or as I like to call it:
“Late-stage capitalism dressed in hemp pants.”

A People United Will Never Be Defeated

 Toronto Pride, as recorded by the Toronto Star

The Light Shines in the Darkness

 

And the darkness has not put It out.

On Behalf of Our Fathers

This week following Father's Day, I know that some queer men have never experienced anything less than love and unconditional acceptance from their fathers. I rejoice for them. And at the same time, I'm somewhere between incredulous, wistful, and envious as hell.

Each of us has his own story. Our fathers abandoned us for a life elsewhere. Or were explosive, abusive drunks. Or were quiet, emotionally crippled drunks. Or told us to stop acting like goddam pansies. Or were themselves so shamed by their own bodies and desires they couldn't reassure us about our own.  Or furtively imposed their own same-sex attractions on us. Or told us we were going straight to hell if we went on experimenting with the boy next door. Or...

My own story isn't representative of anyone but me. My father was an obsessive-compulsive binge drinker, a hollowed-out emotional wreck who destroyed himself before he'd made it to 64. It's been over sixty years since he died (on Mother's Day, for God's sake) when I was eight. I've spent most of my adult life piecing together a fragmentary, indirect, conflicted relationship with him. Like reverse-engineering an onion one layer at a time, from the inside out. 

So it was a huge grace when, over a decade ago now, I experienced a flood of compassion for him unlike anything that had ever come alive in me before.  During a journalling exericse at a weeklong intensive program, I revisited the usual litany of ways he failed me. And then: thanks to a constellation of circumstances I won't rehearse here, I suddenly thought, my poor father, and spent the next fifteen minutes quietly sobbing. And knew what I had to do. I needed to say Kaddish. Non-Jew that I am.

If you're not Jewish or familiar with Jewish practice, the Kaddish is the prayer you say in memory of one you mourn, and especially in memory of parents.  The most observant say it every day for a year, and then annually on the Yahrzeit--the anniversary of the death. But notably, the Mourner's Kaddish never mentions the deceased. It glorifies God, prays for the speedy arrival of God's kingdom, and voices hope that peace from above will descend on us and on all. This peculiar disconnect between the content of the prayer and the emotionally charged intention with which it's spoken is a source of discomfort to many who fulfill their responsibility to recite it: they feel denied the chance to remember one they loved in all his or her individuality.

But oddly, in keeping the deceased out of it, the prayer can become a container big enough for the conflicted feelings you may have toward the dead. You don't have to wax warm and fuzzy toward the person you're mourning. You're not obliged to feel any one thing as opposed to something else. Instead, you speak this on behalf of the dead in the presence of the Holy. The deceased is representative of humanity. You're saying it for him. You're saying it for yourself. You're saying it for all humankind. If what's really going through your head as you pray is that the deceased was an empty emotional shell, or an abusive creep who made your life hell when your were five, there's room for that, and you don't have to fake the saccharine greeting-card sentiments that characterize (for instance, in my own experience) so many Midwestern Protestant funerals.

That unexpected space to feel whatever you're feeling can become fertile ground for the post-mortem healing of relationships. If you say Kaddish repeatedly, you'll experience it differently every time you do so. Your feelings will change over time, from one day to the next, from one month to the next, from one year to the next. 

All this to unpack my intuitive flash, in the moment that I softened towards a man I can most of the time feel very little towards at all, who died over half a century ago. I'm sometimes still bemused that a nice Lutheran boy from the Midwest felt an unhesitating impulse to borrow a Jewish prayer to mourn his father. Saying it linked me to my partner in his Judaism, as well as to the leader of the workshop--a man who over the span of several years had given me more of what one would hope to get from a father than most others in my life.

And then there's the very fact that in borrowing somebody else's tradition, we can set aside toxic associations that our own spiritual heritage has often accrued for us as queer men. We take what we need, in ways that might not always win the approval of the keepers of the tradition(s) we pilfer. But it's not only that my appropriation of the prayer might offend some, because I don't have a right to it by heritage. 

It's that I recited it  in front of a five-foot Phallus in a flowering meadow at Easton Mountain in upstate New York. Standing before this symbol of linkage between my spiritual and erotic life as a gay man, laying hands and forehead on it at the end of the prayer, I contemplated my father's woundedness as a share in the wounds all men sustain. 

In the midst of a circle that represented the infinitely fertile womb of the Mother Goddess, I meditated on the sexuality that links my father to me in a continuum with the embodied, desirous experience of all men--a message I desperately needed to absorb from him as a boy but never could. And then found myself giving thanks for the miracle of his orgasm that made my life possible. Giving thanks with my own orgasm, my own ejaculation splashing onto the charred wooden column which at that moment offered reassurance of the connection between us.

I expect to go on doing the work of repairing my relationship to my father for the rest of my life. Praying a very queer Kaddish for my father, and on behalf of my father, changed nothing of that, and changed everything.

GLORIFIED AND SANCTIFIED BE THE HOLY ONE'S GREAT NAME, THROUGHOUT THE WORLD CREATED ACCORDING TO  THE DIVINE WILL. ESTABLISHED BE GOD'S KINGDOM IN YOUR LIFETIME AND DURING YOUR DAYS, AND WITHIN THE LIFE OF ALL HUMANKIND, SPEEDILY AND SOON, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY GOD'S GREAT NAME BE BLESSED FOREVER AND TO ALL ETERNITY.

BLESSED AND PRAISED, GLORIFIED AND EXALTED, EXTOLLED AND HONORED, ADORED AND LAUDED BE THE NAME OF THE HOLY ONE, BLESSED BE THAT ONE BEYOND ALL BLESSINGS AND HYMNS, PRAISES AND CONSOLATIONS THAT ARE EVER SPOKEN IN THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY THERE BE ABUNDANT PEACE FROM HEAVEN AND LIFE FOR US AND FOR ALL MEN, AND LET US SAY AMEN.

MAY GOD WHO CREATES PEACE IN THE CELESTIAL HEIGHTS CREATE PEACE FOR US AND FOR ALL THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

In Gratuitous Praise

 Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929)

And Now for Something Completely Different

The Cloister of Norwich Cathedral

After spinning my wheels forever, I've taken the plunge into self-publishing the novel I started writing over twenty years ago. Palmetto Publishing will distribute The Ram in the Thicket: A Novel of Medieval Norwich, in print-on-demand and e-book formats. I'm hoping some independent brick-and-mortar stores might also take it up. 

What does an historical novel have to do with this blog? First of all, it's about people struggling for spiritual integrity in a complex, flawed world; about the triumph of love over dogma; and about the survival of oppressed minorities in the face of abusive power. And there's a thread of homoerotic attachment between two of the supporting characters. (But don't get your hopes up for a steamy sex scene.)

I'm a retired professor of medieval literature. So I'm used to writing books that nobody reads and that don't make any money.  I'll be happy if my story gets into the hands of a few hundred people. I'll be delighted if it reaches more. 

Ahead of the book launch, I've just published the first instalment of my new Substack--Imagining the World of Julian of Norwich. I'll post further pieces there about the story's historical background, along with reflections on the essential role of imagination in all knowledge of the past.

I hope you'll follow this link to my Substack. If you do, please consider leaving a comment there, and please consider subscribing. It's free, and there won't be a quiz.  If you know someone who might also be interested, please share the link.

Enshrining the Household Gods

Yesterday, our seasonal arrival at the "summer place." There's enormous privilege in having two homes, one in a city I've always loved, and one in a place imbued with its own green magic.

Unpacking takes only an hour or two after our long-habitual transitions. But most important this morning was setting up the garden shrine dedicated to God Knows Who. 

Placing the statue of Ganesh on the grid of a few loose bricks. The stones for the Four Directions. The bronze cross I salvaged from a house that was about to be demolished. The Shiva Lingam. 

God Knows Why I'm paying reverence here to God Knows Who. 

What I do know: when I'm lighting a cone of incense or a cube of camphor in one of the little unglazed clay lamps, I come into a state of integration. When I ring the brass temple bell that a beloved brother gifted to me last summer, my mind, my heart, my cock, my soul all work together in this little act of reverence toward the One Who Hears. I'm whole. I'm present. I'm comforted.

All I Need to Know

It's raining. Slowly and steadily. We need it--it's been a dry two weeks at a time when leaves need water to burgeon. And all I can say is, thank you, God.

Does it depend on what we mean by God? I don't think so. Maybe it depends on Who we mean by God. And the answer that I believe is wired into our souls is, who we mean, is You. That's all I know, and all I need to know.

A You who has a thousand names, but no name comprehends Him/Her/Them. Who is beyond our limited notions of human self. But who envelops us, completely. The Womb of Creation. The Sacred Staff of Life's Longing for Itself. The Luminous Void from which all things arise. If those metaphors speak to you. And if they don't, go out and find the ones that do.

It's Just a Penis

Partway through Captain Fantastic (2016, dir. Matt Ross), off-the-grid anarchist/socialist father Ben (played by Viggo Mortensen) and his six kids have emerged from their isolated, utopian life in the deep wilderness of Washington state, to drive to his wife's distant funeral in a repurposed school bus. After an overnight at a campground, he stands nude in the door of the bus with his morning coffee, to the shock of an elderly couple passing by.

"It's just a penis," he says in response. "Every human male has one."

But to be fair, it's not just a penis. It's Viggo Mortensen's penis.

Leaving that significant objection aside, "It's just a penis" is worth contemplating.

Feminist theory in the '80's and '90's was deeply influenced by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. His work is hugely and willfully cryptic, but here's somethig he said that's worth thinking about, especially if you're a queer man trying to live authentically in your erotic body--and at the same time putting as much space as you can between yourself and the toxic bullshit of the manosphere. (Jake Hawley, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, yes. I'm talking about you, and all your too-numerous friends.)

So here goes: the Phallus is not the penis.

For Lacan, the Phallus is a construct, not anatomy. It's conceptual. It signifies power, mastery, self-containment, sufficiency. It's the guardian of the patriarchal order. In other words, it's everything the manosphere dudes wanna believe about themselves.

Lacan sometimes calls it "The Name of the Father." With capital letters to make it scarier. (Thank you, Judith Butler, for that line.) 

But it can only do its job if you don't see it for what it really is--a hollow idea that bears very little relation to the vulnerable life you live in your body. 

It's a little like Toto pulling aside the curtain, and Oz, the Great and Powerful, turns out to be a bumbling old guy who's trying to hold it together. Or as Lacan liked to say, the Phallus has to remain veiled in order to maintain its authority.

Otherwise, what lurks behind the idea of the Phallus turns out to be just a penis. An organ that refuses to live up to the insane expectations that toxic masculinity places on it--sometimes by veiled implication, sometimes by smarmy, explicit frat-house boasting. (Which brings to mind a certain Access Hollywood tape.) 

It doesn't get hard on demand. Or at all. Or gets hard when you least want it to. It leaks, sometimes at seriously inappropriate moments. It's always changing. (Just look closely at your own for five minutes if you need to be convinced.) In short--it's not the reliable source of masculine authority that patriarchy needs it to be in order to go on convincing everybody to fall in line. 

As I see it, that's why queer men's sexuality is such a threat to the "dominant fiction" (thank you, Kaja Silverman, for that phrase) that guys should rule the world. Maybe it's why, in the first flush of gay liberation, in 1971, Charles Shively  called cocksucking an act of revolution. Maybe it's also part of why the the right has pivoted to transphobia as its go-to strategy for whipping up moral panic. If a trans woman can declare that the penis she was born with doesn't define her; if a trans man can lay claim to the penis nestled at the top of his mangina--then patriarchy is, indeed, not long for this world. 

And to those of us who identify as cis-gendered gay or bi or otherwise queer men, I say: love your penis. As it is, not as you think it ought to be. It's a source of joy. It's also a reminder that our lives are precious, unpredictable, and transitory. Celebrate your penis. Look after your penis. It's not a tool. It's not a weapon. It's the exposed tip of your heart. It's the wand of your soul. It's your ladder to heaven. It's your antenna transmitting its messages to your brothers, and receiving theirs. It's the key to your inner temple. It's your taproot into the earth. It's the wish-fulfilling jewel between your legs.

This, too, is an act of revolution.

Photo by Andrew Graham

In the Octave of Easter

The Resurrection of Christ, Graydon Parrish

Sanctifier of our flesh, risen from the tomb, the forces of shame and repression scatter before you. Sacred Cock of Jesus, be for us the ladder that connects earth to heaven. 

Jesus and the Beloved

In homage to Terence McNally, Theodore Jennings, and Anthony Oliveira 

And with a prayer for the deliverance of the innocents being rounded up, without due process, off the streets of the United States by the agents of a tyrant

Asleep on his chest after the dinner they’ve shared with the others, the boy doesn’t really understand what’s about to happen, any more than the rest of them. They all imagine that somehow he’ll wave his hand and the fundamentalist thugs who are coming for him will drop to the ground. Or all but one of them: the one who’s betrayed him to the authorities knows well enough that they won’t. 

His heart aches for this innocent, who’s too young to lose his first love–much less to the brutal death that's to come. His desire to spare him such anguish almost swamps the fear he feels for himself. But it’s all in motion now, and the shit’s about to hit the fan. Even if he wanted to flee, there's no chance left of escaping the net they’ve cast around him for days. He’s staked everything on blind faith that somewhere--beyond the cold, calculated brutality of those who hate him, beyond the limits of imagination--some good can come of surrender to suffering at the hands of Power for the sake of Love. 

He loves them all; has loved them to the end. This boy who slipped into his bed the first night he stayed in the house of the lad’s older sisters. The hairy, thick-chested fishermen he picked up on the shore of the lake. The one everybody still labels as a sellout to the Occupation. Even the politically correct zealot who's already revealed his whereabouts to the Temple mafia. 

In the flush of the wine, he’s behaved tonight like an outrageous, theatrical queen: passing bread and wine around the table and telling them all that he’d feed them his body and blood if he could; halfway through the meal, stripping off his robe and washing their feet like a half-naked slave in a bathhouse, his erection tenting the towel around his waist while he cradled his beloved's ankle in his hand. But he still means all of it. 

Nudging the boy awake, rousing the others from where they sit, some of them slumped and dozing, some of them gripped by silent, half-comprehending dread, he tells them, time to move on. Time to meet what’s coming next.

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.