The wish that comes true.

“I write of the wish that comes true—for some reason, a terrifying concept.”

JAMES CAIN

Theologically abused

—Fuck this, I thought, —I’m going to the mall.

Speaking of his sexual desires, the poet Max Jacob wrote, —Heaven will pardon me for the pleasures which it knows are involuntary. A few years later, Heaven killed Max in a German concentration camp.

This is the term we’ve been using lately: theological abuse. It involves adults, known or unknown to the underage victim, telling them a Lunatic runs the world, that He’s spying on them, that He’s waiting for them to break a rule.

God is here,
God is there,
God is truly
everywhere!

So watch it, kid.

Other choices included “spiritually groped,” “religiously fingered,” and “touched inappropriately by an angel.”

So now we’re blaming God, is that it? You can’t get off and somehow it’s God’s fault?

Yes.

SHALOM AUSLANDER, Foreskin’s Lament

Reader v. learner

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the onset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more human passion for pure and disinterested reading.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, “Hours in a Library,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, v.2, 1912-1918. ed. Andrew McNeille ; London : Hogarth Press, 1987.

Photo: Biblioteca Vasconcelos

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A constant dilemma

acd378, originally uploaded by haloloop.

By the time I get on the plane, he’s recomposed in my imagination. Now he’s coated with that charge of longing and excitement that makes me say yet again that I love him. This isn’t an illusion, I tell myself, merely the clearer vision of distance. As flawed as our relationship is, I’m living out a basic homosexual dream. Current gay politics have covered up the fact that homosexuality is submission to a constant dilemma. The maleness toward which our sexuality is directed is—culturally at least—defined by heterosexuality. No one admits it anymore, but successful gay couples often play a constant game of switching. Each takes turns playing “the man,” while the other temporarily enjoys this sociological projection of masculinity. Those who don’t do this seem to become denatured Bobbsey Twins, unmarried “sisters” living together. I’ve made a different choice, which some would call “unliberated.” Everything attractive about Romulus stems from his heterosexuality, and of course, that’s the very quality that prevents me from possessing him entirely. Well, maybe I’m on a more honest path of homosexual desire.

BRUCE BENDERSON, from The Romanian: Story of an Obsession. New York : Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.

Worship

Photo: Kirby, Preying Mantis

Desire, held at arm’s length

Like a young prince with the first down upon his lip, the time when youth is most charming.*

I dreamed about them at night, absorbed them with my eyes during the day, watched them at cricket, loved to press against them unnoticed in a football melly [sic], or even to get accidentally hurt by one of them at hockey, was glad if they just spoke to me or smiled; but never got a word farther with it all.

EDWARD CARPENTER, My Days and Dreams

*Homer

Immured in youth and beauty.

 

Times have changed, and changed radically, but each one of us is still trying to find the same old things: sex, love, and self-respect.

     Sex, love, and self-respect are hard enough to balance in life, period, without having to do it as a person whose biological identity seems at variance with his sexual one. How to integrate our homosexuality with the rest of our selves, our lives—our family, our society, our upbringing—was a problem a minority, not a majority of the gay men I knew were able to solve before the plague. Most of us just kept everything in compartments. Most of us led double, triple, quadruple lives, changing costumes as actors do, masking our intelligence, emphasizing our bodies, feeling our fate depended on the shape of our mustache, the size of our dick. But you can juggle the apples of discord only so long. When desire begins to burn off, like morning haze, it leaves the rest of our personalities more visible. “I’ve read all of Proust and Henry James, I just got a promotion at the bank to systems manager,” a friend wrote me in 1977. “So what am I doing at four A.M. in Sheridan Square, hailing a cab with shit on my dick?” Having the time of your life, I would have answered had we both been twenty-one. But we were not, and that was part of the problem: What youth and lust camouflage, age and abstinence bring into relief—the contradictions of being gay.

     … much like Life. Moments of exquisite boredom… are followed by breathless revelation—

     “I was a problem,” said Oscar Wilde, “for which there was no solution.”

 

ANDREW HOLLERAN, from Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and its Aftermath. New York : De Capo Press, 2008.

Sutherland & Malone. Lark. An [unnamed?] aging gay professor. Four characters forever etched in memory from three extraordinary novels that could only have been written by Andrew Holleran. The seventies gay romantic classic on the days of dark disco Dancer from the Dance, the much maligned (for its brutally bleak, unsparing honesty) The Beauty of Men, and his most recent slender masterpiece, Grief. His short stories, In September the Light Changes, a collection also to be relished. These Chronicles first appeared in the NY Native, then collected in the (out-of-print) book Ground Zero, now thankfully reissued and expanded upon. 

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Andrew Holleran

“It’s all about dick.”

(Happy Father’s Day, dads.)

Bastard angel

 
“People expect, as I did, the famous writers and poets to be just open and wonderfully giving, and they were not. They all wanted to go to bed with me.”*

The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.

HAROLD NORSE, from his preface, In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003. New York : Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003.

*Okay, maybe it’s me, but I can’t imagine anything more “open and wonderfully giving” then someone expressing their want/interest/desire “to go to bed with me.”  Thanks for the memoirs, Harold.

Photo: ChicosVegas

Breeding, mixing, stirring…

 

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

___

 

                                                                                     ‘Do

‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you re-

          member

‘Nothing?’
 

      I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

 

T. S. ELIOT, from The Waste Land

 

Photo: source unknown

We’re not in Seneca anymore.

Apollo revisited.

Though
like so many flames his torso glows,
as his glance, held back instead,

abides and shines. Otherwise his chest’s bow
couldn’t blind you, or, in his waist’s weak turn
display a smile that burns

_____

Pictured: “detsnor”@dudesnude