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By Perry Brass
1. Hot Spirituality
The idea, the feeling—the breathing, breath-taking
reality—that religious and sexual feelings not only travel down the same
road, but are actually twinned to each other.
This has been a teaching of religious figures for thousands of years—from earliest fertility mythologies that openly embraced sexual and gender diversities to Plato, Buddha, Jesus, the Hindu Vedantists, and the poetry of Rumi, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Alan Ginsburg, and Jimmy Morrison. In more recent times, public revelations of this have been squashed with a jackboot. I'm not sure who, at the moment, is working the hardest at this: the old men in dresses in the Catholic Church; the arch-conservative Jewish fundamentalists (who will join with anyone for a round of queer-hating); the Moslem hypocrites who stone gay men to death, while screwing boys in the back alleys; the local fundies at home. Anyway, it's a world-wide effort. They want to make sure that what you do in the bedroom stays nailed into the closet, while they get away with murder in the pulpit. Although fundamentalist fanatics have been in the lead in the gelding of religion; religion, as a sellable, "brandable" commodity, has been working double-time to make the church bells ring up sales at the shopping malls. Belief is now Hallmark-greeting-cardized. It's strictly running on the Disney version. Contemporary religion has had to be shorn of any sexual component. Sexuality is sleazy; religion is holy. Any mixing of the two is dangerous, and will get you doing the perp walk on the 10 O' Clock News. Maybe it's time the real mystics among us came out of the closet. 2. The reality of the tender "MAN THING." Meaning, men—as a separate gender—are, at this point, as vulnerable as women, as a separate gender, are. Men commit suicide more and die earlier from stress. They lead more isolated, depressed, and explosive lives. They are taking more drugs—legal and illegal—to contain and smooth over the depression and anger inside them. A great deal of the violence they create is directed at their own gender, due to homophobic and class-related issues. This harm is kept in the closet, while the violence they do towards women is coming out in the open.
All men—and not just gay men—hunger for approval, affection, and closeness with other men. But as external homophobic fears increase, this hunger is denied. As a gay man who deals regularly with straight men—and who tell me, often, their deepest yearnings—I'd like to see this come out of the closet. 3. The truth that kids should NOT run the world, although their presence in it is one of the most important aspects of human existence.
One reason why anti-male, anti-gay violence is on the increase is that the playground attitude of kids now drives our shallow "popular culture"—which, by the way, is not even a culture. Culture is something that is accepted, and not pumped down your throat with a Warner Bros. ad campaign. 4. THE TRUTH that AIDS is actually a disease (okay, if you want to get techy, an acronym for a syndrome of diseases). It is caused by a virus. It is not a special "culture." It is not a community; nor an indicator of morals, nor the reason to prove anything.
I'm tired of men in the "barebacking" debate saying that they want to
prove how close they are to another man by fucking him without a condom.
We used to say in the old days, "If it ain't spit, it ain't love." Well,
sorry, but that still wasn't love.
Love is still taking care of someone, thinking about that person with sensitivity and kindness, and wanting not to do him harm. AIDS ain't over till it's over: and it's not over. That will happen when the names of gay men, straight men and women stop appearing in the obituary pages—either overtly or covertly—after dying from problems we know come from HIV-related problems. The fact that AIDS is now "handlable," doesn't mean it's no longer transmittable. So why don't we stop calling AIDS things like "a blessing," "the best thing that ever happened to me," etc. and get that out of the closet, too? A lot of gay men have told me that they got "smarter" because of AIDS. They started taking better care of themselves, they became more aware of their place in life. Well, we got smarter after World War II also. We learned, for instance, that a small bomb can kill an awful lot of people. This virus has taught us the same thing. 5. The Very Real Sexuality of Children and Teenagers, especially now in our sexually saturated, but hypocritical environment. This real, sacred coming-into-age sexuality must be honored, respected, and—finally—recognized. If this is not done—and it will only be done by speaking openly and courageously about it—kids will be victimized constantly. We are going back to a Victorian idea of youth sexuality. This is great in Merchant-Ivory movies, but it has nothing to do with the truth (something that the Victorians, under all those corsets, understood completely).
Simmons has been sentenced to 4 to 7 years jail time for a situation that was completely consensual, without violence of any sort (as opposed to Sam's own relationship with his parents—where he was subjected to beatings, isolation, and intense psychological pressure), and that Manzie has repeatedly upheld in court as beneficial to himself. Since I came out early as a teen—who survived a suicide attempt at fifteen—I understand what it's like to live in isolation and denial. I understand what it's like to have to leave home and live on the streets because of your sexuality. I was driven to leave Savannah, GA, as a kid in the mid-60s for that reason. We need to look openly, clearly, and with respect at teen sexuality. 6.We Are Getting Older. The aging gay population needs to come out of the closet. We need to talk openly about aging. Not all of us are going to be youthful till death, no matter how much gyming and plastic surgery we do. I know that in much of the "gay community" my age is a handicap. I am invisible. In many ways, this only mirrors our pitiless, consumerist society, which denies the realities (and benefits) of age all around. Older gay men will only get respect and affection when their stories are listened to and understood; when they are no longer treated like out-of-date computer parts. We cannot afford to keep any of that in the closet. 7. Real Economic Poverty in the Gay Community. We're not all David Geffins and James Hormels. We do not all have limitless, expendable incomes. Many of us have experienced homelessness and health problems due to economic duress. When I'm with gay men who live in that soap bubble of economic luxury—the one that says, "We don't have to worry. We all live in the big-spending, brave new gayboy world"—I want to slap a bunch of queers. Wake up, girls. The wolf is at the door for a lot of us—who are living over their means—and if you think you can ignore that, put a few more neurons to work. We need to have domestic partnership benefits. We need to have relationships of shared economic responsibilities—in other words, taking care of our friends in times of need. And we need to understand that most major corporations are hostile to us, despite their lip service. For instance, the number of openly gay, major corporate execs can be counted on a few fingers. So let's don't live in that fantasy that we all sleep at Bloomingdale's. You'll really be asleep then. 8. A Nurturing Sense of Gay Tribalism
For myself, I have very little, if anything, in common with the commercialized "gay world" out there—as an older gay man, it is outside my reality at this point. But my inner gay tribalism is alive and working. It brings me into contact with other gay men who are yearning for closeness with each other. I'd like to get this tribalism out of the closet, although I can't see it being sound-bited on "In The Life." 9. Our Own 'Common' Loveliness I'm sick of queers who feel they have to be glamorous, trendy, with-it. And constantly consuming every new gadget, crumb, and kink in the technocracy. Get over it. I have found after thirty or so years of a fairly public "gay life" that being "interesting" is not nearly so engaging as being "interested" in others. It would be wonderful if the neurotic, self-involvement of gay men (which has spawned an industry of gay "therapies" to tell each of us how uniquely fabulous we are) could relax long enough to realize we do have a "common" goodness. Like "common sense," which I've always said is the least common sense of them all, there ain't nothing common about that. But it would be nice if we put the mirrors down for a minute, and actually looked at each other, realistically, with humor and kindness. (My favorite example of this is, still, fifteen gay men all looking at porno magazines in a gay bookstore—and all of them totally ignoring each other.) 10. Another word for GAY that finally gets down to some bedrock of what we are. I think we're going to need this in the next century. Another word that says we are deep, involved, responsive—and even, at times, threatening. "Gay," I fear, just don't do it. In German slang, gays are called "warm," and I kind of like that, especially after living through a German winter. In Holland, we are also referred to as being "left-handed," and I can get into that, too—you never can tell what we're carrying in those left hands. But the truth is, we're not all handed that way. "Handy," though, as a word (kind of useful and butch), I do like, and, also, "serene." The idea that we can be serene, no matter what, appeals to me. Kings and queens were known as "serene" and so were great ships. Too many men and women feel that "gay" trivializes them. Queer is painful; it still reminds us of getting beaten up at playgrounds. And something like "same-sexualized" is cumbersome. I have learned that most people are described by their enemies—and the name sticks. Jews did not pick the name Jews; they were "Hebrews" or Hebraic. Greeks (the name "Greek" comes from Latin for "slave," since the Romans had so many Greek slaves) prefer Hellenic. And we still have not found a word that means something to us. No matter what name we pick for ourselves, these are some things I'd like to see out of the closet in the next century. But I think the most important thing is a feeling that we will have a place in it. No matter what the U.S. Army says, shopping mall religion says, or the braindead kids down the block who'll tell you flatly that "gays suck." Sure, kiddies. As the banner carriers of our great future market, believe all you want. Just don't step on my serene toes in the dark. Perry Brass's newest novel, Angel Lust, will be out in the first February of the New Century. It will deal with most everything he wants out of the closet, including the current mayor of New York. It promises to have, as all of his books do, something to surprise and infuriate just about everyone. He can be reached through his website, www.perrybrass.com. |
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