This is the fourth and final in our series of pieces on the theme of Holidays, Spirit and Me.
When Pleasure asked me to write about “spirit, the holidays, and me,” I didn’t know (and still don’t) that I would have anything much to say (without being completely cynical). Over the next few weeks, I meditated on my somewhat tumultuous relationship with spirit and ended up writing several short fragments, several of which, I collected into the poem, “Spirit(s)”. I hope you enjoy it! Love you, siblings!!
Spirit(s)
Sugar le Fae
Sugar le Fae
1.
Meaning “to breathe” in Latin,
cognates of spirāre include:
respire to breathe again inspire to breathe into expire without breathing
and, of course, from spīritus, spirit breath.
2.
He and I are reincarnated
spirits of little old ladies
who speak what they think
who dye their hair purple
who smoke and drink
and don’t give a shit
what other people think.
Who are we to argue fate?
3
Listen to “Spirit in the Dark”
by Aretha Franklin
and tell me that
“getting the spirit”
can’t mean in the same breath
“touching God”
and “in the mood.”
4.
When one of my best friends
finally got approved for her
knee osteotomy, we kept
our spirits up over her winter
recovery by making silly
videos of us singing Christmas
carols in wigs and dresses.
Years later, no longer needing
a walker, she could finally
accompany me to the faerie
mountain, where in faerie
tradition, she named herself
Felda Spirit and was welcomed.
5.
Just last week at a teddy bear party,
I played impromptu duets with Blue-
bird, who, topping my Heart
and Soul, turned every note blue.
Spirit can perhaps be conjured,
but tastes best when it’s not lured.
Sugar le Fae (aka Zach Matteson) is a poet, teacher, song writer, photographer, and Radical Faerie. Dozens of his poems have been published by journals in the States and Canada. He currently resides in Nashville, TN
This is the third in our series of four pieces on the theme of The Holidays, Spirit and Me.
Doug Emerson
The Christmas Heart
Doug Emerson
I believe I first really got in touch with Spirit on Christmas Eve 1982. My roommate, a handsome man with such unbelievable eyes that his nickname became Blue, or Your Royal Blueness, and I were trying to manage to make it through the season. Money was short and friends were dying from AIDS. It just looked dismal.
Blue came home Christmas Eve in the afternoon with an unexpected bonus from his part time job. That led to the development of an event that became legendary. It began simple enough, we went to see if we could score a Christmas tree cheap. While we walked we chatted about how we could somehow give all of our friends a memorable holiday.
The scheme was hatched. I was sent to get champagne and snacks. Blue started calling friends with an invite our “First Christmas” party. By that we meant guests showed up at midnight to a party that was the first one on Christmas.
[pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]About 4am, all of my beautiful brothers began to go home. Blue and I were ultimately left exhausted cuddling on the couch. [/pullquote]
We didn’t think we could pull it together and when it was midnight had come with no visitors, we had resigned ourselves to drink until we were out of our minds with cheer. Then the door buzzer went off. The first of over 60 men entered our small apartment to share love, humor and memories of friends here and gone.
About 4 a.m. all of my beautiful brothers began to go home. Blue and I were ultimately left exhausted, cuddling on the couch. Holding each other in that wonderful embrace of love and companionship that touched the spirit and gave the room a wonderful special feel and light.
That was the night that I really understood the meaning of family and the spirit that touched each of us that blessed night.
Aho
Doug will be spending this Christmas in Atlanta, GA. He hopes to share time with GSV family and renew and expand the circle of love and service. And says, “I continue to be grateful to you all in allowing me to shine.”
This is the second in or series of four articles on the theme of The Holidays, Spirit and Me
Uh oh, It’s Majick
Whispurring Pussy (Joe)
I remember when it was magic…
Joe Kiser
The time of year for which days were marked off the calendar. There were two of these times-of-year. Summer break and Christmas. Now I’m not talking about the Twelve Days of Christmas countdown. This was different. As I sit here today, I can honestly say that I do not know what other little boys got excited about around Christmas. Perhaps watching football games with their dads. Perhaps going hunting with their dads. None of that for me. For me, the countdown was to the day my mom and I pulled out the boxes of Christmas decorations and began turning our mundane living room into a magic kingdom.
As time pushed me into the realm of puberty and eventually adulthood, I found a bitterness for the Holidays. Oh, the magic is gone. During this time, I often found myself depressed and feeling very alone. I now know it was, in part, bi-polar depression. I was also struggling with the self-acceptance of being a gay man. During this time, I dreaded the Holidays. I longed for a way to escape, a way remove myself from life for two months or so. I hated seeing family during this time. I felt guilty for not feeling happy. I began to resent the Holidays.
I began the process of coming out as a gay man in my thirties. I experienced anger from family members for coming out. I was told I was selfish for coming out, that I was being influenced by the devil. Holidays became even more difficult. There were times I refused to visit family during the Holidays.
[pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]And with this new-found self-appreciation, I have found, dare I say it, happiness. Happiness within myself.[/pullquote]
Today, my bi-polar depression is well managed, thanks to those fine folks at Pfizer pharmaceuticals. And with lots and lots of therapy, I am downright happy to be gay. I am gay in every sense of the word. I am 51 years old and have the highest sense of completeness that I have ever had. And with this new-found self-appreciation, I have found, dare I say it, happiness. Happiness within myself.
I no longer dread the Holidays. I find joy in celebrating the Holidays with my family of choice. I now spend time with my biological family without dread. Though some of them continue to struggle with my being gay, I now know that struggle is theirs and not mine. I have begun to regain a sense of wonderment, a sense of hope.
If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
In mid-December, Whispurring Pussy will be vacationing with Santa in Key West for some last minute naughtiness. Upon his return, Whispurr plans to spend the Holidays with family and friends lapping up vast quantities of Egg Nog while watching his favorite Holiday classics ‘Home for the Holidays’ and ‘Sordid Lives’.
We asked some GSV folks to write whatever came to mind on the theme of “Holidays, Spirit and Me” and share it in Visionary. Jason Buchannan, Doug Emerson, Joe Kiser, and Sugar le Fe agreed. Jason’s poem is the first of these contributions that will be posted on each on the Wednesday’s in December.
“Like most of my work, the topic of spirit and self is apparent, but the concrete (holiday, Thanksgiving) has been heavily abstracted.”
Fully grounded
Jason Buchannan
Jason Buchannan
She speaks to me of grounding, like I need it,
all wrapped up in shrouds and veils
of otherworldly mysteries and delights.
Living without limits takes more
discipline than my airy whims suggest.
The hounding of those voices of reason
in every niche like wind through cracks
in the old wooden door on which
we model the future from our past
do not deafen these ears.
Your Old World malice and refuge
across seas glittering arrive on me
wet and washed out, like this mother
was made to make you her children.
Take her, take me, take this
and that bristle pine down and shelter
your selves on land that isn’t yours.
Maybe these stones remember,
and if we but lower our resonant tones,
we’ll be swimming in their heart songs
cold and slow like the night sky, moving.
Maybe this Old World dream like rain
soaks into those older bones, receptive
to the altercating alterations of melodies
pregnant in the whispering of trees.
When we open a space between,
does that synapse give us life,
or is that vitality found in the death of form
in the trails we blaze through Her?
I am open; I am closed.
I am the window you can’t latch.
I am the curtains billowing,
drawing your attention, distracting
you from yourself to find you.
I am the wind, rippling
the objects you’re strung taut against.
So what anchors my divine vessel down to solid earth?
What orients my constant maiden voyage?
I am the welding of worlds. The crux of creation.
Sound, light. Silence, shadow. I am everything.
And being so drunk on all of existence,
where is my firm footing? What is my next step?
My compass ion, charged with universal meaning
I readily recreate constantly.
Is there solidity on my course? When I leave the Earth,
am I still walking my path? When I return,
am I where I always was?
She says, bend your knees. Send your light down
through the legs, and through your coccyx.
Make that pyramid and send your sacral stream
straight through into Mother. Feel her
heat your heart like blanket love,
and let Spirit above surrender you. This, she says,
will ground your path and center your soul.
But will this sufficiently join Jai’s spirit to the Earth
and keep him from losing himself in the ethereals?
If this doesn’t work, find another. If that doesn’t work,
keep searching. You will know by the way it feels.
Trust your body’s sensations. It knows love,
even when the mind fails to recognize.
Really feel your flesh again for the first time in ages.
It is there; you exist.
Immanence.
Jason can be found organizing young adult resistance movements that work to reclaim self and divinity in Raleigh, NC, when he’s not working in consumerism with plants.
This is the fourth and final in a series of articles about Bliss republished from the Visionary archive.
WHAT IS MY PASSION?
– Roger Beaumont
Roger Beaumont
My typical response to this question would be to say that my passions are my dressage horse, Coty; gardening; cooking; wine; entertaining; blah, blah, blah. In my new life, I am compelled to be more honest.
A few years after coming out as a gay man in 2003, I was at a men’s spiritual conference in Albuquerque, NM. I heard a speaker describe how he had to return to his wife because her doctors just told him that her cancer had returned and the prognosis was not good. He was distraught, not knowing what he would do to continue living without his beloved wife.
I turned to a friend who had lived his gay life for many years after an experience of straight marriage, children and a successful law career. I asked him, “Jim, what is the difference between what the speaker and I feel about our respective wives? I loved my wife of 43 years but not in the same way he describes his relationship with his wife. What’s the difference?”
Jim said, “Roger, you may have loved your wife and may have experienced joy and a certain happiness, but there was no passion in your marriage.”
What a breakthrough moment.
I was married in the same era as Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, when being openly gay was hardly an option. I lived in unconscious denial for more than 60 years. I was youngest of 12 children, born in Canada after The Depression. My father moved us to the Maine woods to a miserable camp and worked as a lumberjack when I was three. Two years later, he abandoned us all by succumbing to alcoholism and took his own life. I’ve always kept the death certificate which attributed his death to “alcoholism aggravated by drinking lemon extract.” Except for his tainted sperm, I can’t think of any other inheritance.
My French-speaking mother and her children lived in a foreign country, away from the support she had known in Quebec. Fortunately, my father had qualified for benefits in that new system called Social Security. This gave my mother a meager income that helped support the family until the children could work. (Guess how I feel about the current illegal immigrant issue?) I and a couple of my sisters went to convent schools, then cold and heartless institutions. I survived somehow, learning to be the perfect Enneagram nine, self-effacing, knowing I didn’t matter much, hoping that no one would ever guess the self-loathing turmoil in my heart.
After leaving the seminary in Bucksport and Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1955, (I wasn’t good priestly material because I jerked off too much) I found the warmth I craved by marrying the second woman I ever dated and the only one I had ever had sex with. She had the strength and common sense for both of us. Soon, I had purpose in my life as a teacher, a father of a beautiful daughter and three handsome sons. I finally had a home and a family where I belonged. I was, however, disappointing as a husband. From the twin bed honeymoon to the years of not knowing or sharing my feelings, I lived a straight life that saved me from facing what was deep in my heart – a longing and a craving for beautiful men. I denied my addiction for gay porn until 2001 when I was 62. By then, my daughter had come out as a lesbian 12 years earlier. That was a gift to me because it allowed me to start exploring my hidden life and start facing the possibility that I was gay.
When I attended a rite of passage in the New Mexican desert with Richard Rohr, I finally had the courage to know myself. Richard sent us out into the beautiful valleys and mesas with two questions. The first: what is your greatest fear? I was bowled over by the answer I wrote in my journal: “I’m afraid that someone will find out that I am gay.” That was my real birth as an authentic human being. The second question: “What will you say to God when you die and He asks ‘Who are you? I don’t recognize you. You never lived the life I gave you. You denied a whole part of yourself. Who are you?’” Since I’d gone to the retreat to better know my God, this question was just as disturbing as the first.
And so began, finally, my acceptance of who I am, a gay man who has half-lived a good life, full of comforts and much joy from a good woman, four children and 17 grandchildren and a satisfying career. But where was the passion?
I’ll tell you passion. Passion is enjoying the intellectual and the sensual company of beautiful men. [pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Passion is living in the moment, surrounding yourself with people who know who you truly are and love you because you are you.[/pullquote]
Passion is living in the moment, surrounding yourself with people who know who you truly are and love you because you are you.
Passion is attending a Body Electric weekend. Passion is looking into the eyes of honest and brave men, regardless of age or size, and loving unabashedly what you see. Passion is feeling the full embrace of another man, skin-to-skin, simply enjoying the closeness, the warmth, the love. Passion is greeting each new day without guilt and shame. Passion is belonging to your tribe, knowing that you can ask anything of your brothers and that they support you with love and understanding. Passion is being able to face the end of your life, knowing that you celebrated every gift that God gave you, most especially the gift of your sexuality. Honoring others and yourself, openly and without holding back, that’s passion.
Caress me beloved, I cried out then. And now, ten thousand years later, I see a world about to
happen where men can answer me. And only when a man has played flutes with the presence
within him can he play flute with a man of flesh. Two flutes, echoing, echoing.
—Andrew Ramer, Two Flutes Playing
Baby, that’s passion. And a whole orchestra of men, flutes playing. That’s passion!
Roger Beaumont, happily plays his flute in Asheville, NC, and surrounding areas.
Wow! I highly recommend that everyone keep a journal. Nothing like reading one’s thoughts/beliefs/passions nine years later. Here I am in my 80th year and I am still talking about Passion? As we say at Jubilee!: Oh yeah! I still can’t keep my eyes off any attractive man of any age over 18 (an age limit being very important for “Mature” gay men).
The first person I shared the above article from the Visionary with, just last week, was my beautiful lesbian daughter who got married to a marvelous girl friend in a Napa Valley winery in October. If anyone had read it previously, no one had ever commented. Her reaction was very complimentary and accepting. She requested a copy immediately.
Nine years later my passion really hasn’t changed. It may have evolved but it still is my celebration of life. A celebration of being a healthy old man and living out his passion by being open and vulnerable. And by telling someone what I feel when I connect with them, be it by touch, word, or simple eye contact. I always prefer an honest hug to handshakes.
I do admit that as I move along in years and find myself alone, I occasionally have regrets. How could I let my orientation be more important than staying close with my wife and spending the last few years of my life sharing our feelings and our memories? That thought only lasts a few moments before I revert to my honest embrace of my continued passion for my gay world. I guess what I’m saying is that what this gay guy enjoys to the fullest is honest communication with any authentic person regardless of gender or orientation. Oh Yeah!
Of course that eliminates most presidential candidates.
