….And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was
on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food
nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the
next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll
slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as
directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same
cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was
inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night
I was happy. —Walt Whitman
Excerpt from “When I Heard at the Close of Day” from Leaves of Grass
I met my first lover the day I arrived in New Delhi in 1972. I had just turned nineteen, and I had come to India alone on pilgrimage, having been a student of traditional Hindu Tantra for nearly four years by that time. He was standing in a small group of fellow monks, all of them clad in ochre robes, but he stood out from the others, built solid like a wrestler with a boxer’s flattened nose and fierce gaze. When our eyes met briefly, a spark seemed to jump between us.
He was probably nearly 40, though I never knew for sure, but he could have passed easily for a man in his early 30s. He was a celibate Hindu monk, and I was in training to join the same Order, so the last thing on my mind in that brief exchange of electricity was becoming anyone’s lover ever. It is really only as I look back after all that passed between us that I can trace what we would become to each other to that first, brief, charged glance.
He was the ashram manager, second-in-command to an elderly monk who had spent fifteen years as an assistant minister of the Vedanta Society in Hollywood where I had been studying. I went to India to have more personal access to monks of the Order, to learn what I could of meditation and the traditions of the Order sitting at their feet, and to visit places of pilgrimage I had read about.
If you are thinking that this is just another story of a monk violating his vows with a vulnerable youth, you are wrong. The vow of celibacy that my monk took did not require him to foreswear love, and he demonstrated his love for me tangibly from that first day until the end of his life.
He quizzed me pointedly about my purpose in visiting India at the first opportunity, and as he became convinced of my sincerity, he relaxed and smiled. I didn’t know it then, but he would take charge of all my travel arrangements from that moment on. During my ten-week visit he took me to visit the holiest man he knew, a kindly, austere, elderly monk who lived in quiet obscurity in a small ashram in the holy city of Vrindaban, and when my monk couldn’t accompany me personally in my travels around North India, he arranged for another monk to do so.
My feelings for him developed naturally over the next year-and-a-half. At first I simply revered him for his status in the Order and for his superior knowledge of spiritual matters. Later, encouraged by his informality with me, I began thinking of him as my friend. He used to teach me his views on philosophy, and if I disagreed with anything he said, I argued with him, sometimes passionately. One day unexpectedly he asked me if I was gay, and though I feared how he might react, I told him I am, but quickly added that I didn’t consider myself sexual at all since I had decided to become a monk. He told me he was not surprised, that the abbot had told him there were many gay people in Hollywood. I had to smile at that partly because of the stereotype and partly because it was true. It was only during my second visit to India a year later, when I had returned as a student for a full year, that he began urging me to start loving him.
I can’t remember his exact words, just the feeling that he was knocking at the door of my heart, asking me to let him in. I didn’t understand why he was doing that. I thought that becoming a monk meant I never had to love anyone. Being the son of an alcoholic father, I had learned early in life to bury my feelings to survive in an emotionally chaotic household. I took Mr. Spock as my ideal. I would be logical. I had no need for messy emotions. Ask me what I thought, and I could tell you in great detail. Ask me what I felt, and there was only a gray, blank, nothingness. I felt nothing.
But he kept knocking at the door of my heart, and so I visited the old monk in Vrindaban and told him I was growing attached to my monk. He looked serious and said in his low voice, “That’s not good.” Triumphantly, I took this message back to my monk, but he just laughed at me and kept patiently knocking at the door of my heart. I was scared what might happen if I actually opened that door. I refused and resisted a while longer, but finally I made the conscious choice to open my heart to let him in.
I could not have predicted what happened next. A rush of feeling like a mighty wind swept through me, shaking me to my core. When he was near me, I felt intense joy, like I was soaring high in the air. For the first time I thought I understood a little the meaning of ecstatic love I had read about that saints feel in the vision of God. When he had to leave me to do his work, I felt crushed, as if all the air had left my lungs. I would lie gasping on my cot alone in my room, and my heart felt like it was being wrung and twisted painfully like a wet towel. For the first time I felt I understood a little about the pangs of separation saints feel when the vision of God is withdrawn. But then my monk would come to see me again, and I was soaring high again.
It is a wonder that other monks didn’t seem to notice the change that had come over me. I couldn’t imagine that the intense feelings pulsing through me weren’t plainly visible to all. Perhaps the others did notice, but as I later began to understand, they considered a sincere young man fortunate to win the love an older monk. For then he would get the guidance he needed to develop fully as a monk and as a man. Then he would learn what it meant to be loved and to love.
This relationship became my model for the intimacy that is possible between men, a relationship with a spiritual purpose that engaged my intellect, feelings, and only last of all physical expressions of affection. It was no less passionate for being non-sexual. A few years later, when I decided celibate monastic life had fulfilled its purpose for me, I moved to San Francisco looking to find a partner with whom to cultivate such a relationship without the need for celibacy. That was the summer of 1977, the peak of the party in the heaven of hedonism. Although I have experienced different kinds of relationships with different men, I have yet to find a partner as capable of sharing on so many levels as my first love.
Sometimes I wonder whether it
Sometimes I wonder whether it is worth keeping on trying to feel that "great wink of eternity" for a second time...
Thank you for sharing with us such a moving experience, using such beautiful words.
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Thanks William - that took my
Thanks William - that took my breath away. And Walt Whitman is a hard act to follow!
First Love is nothing less than majestic - I wish it could be bottled.
Thank you for sharing your
Thank you for sharing your Story with me William :) Deeply touched. The ultimate question.... will you ever experience what you experienced in your first love? What if there isnt a person like that whom crosses your path ever again? - Could you make exceptions and fall in love with someone who may not fulfil the 'criteria' but in other ways supersedes this 'criteria'? - I say this because I feel that sometimes I try and compare people to 'past experiences' and this causes me to only be disappointed because the latter wasn't as good as the previous. However this can be extended out to to other aspects of life also i.e. The older you get the more bored you may get of a theme park or some people say their first 'hit' on a drug isn't the same as the following.....
I just wanted to say this was
I just wanted to say this was a very sweet story, William. As someone who hasn't yet -- I'm 23 -- had an experience like that, it was a thrill putting myself in your shoes. Thank you.
Wow. Thanks for writing this
Wow. Thanks for writing this piece, William.
It underscores for me a particular understanding of love between men, one for which the label "sexual orientation" is entirely inadequate. We aren't homosexuals because we are men who have sex with men; we are homosexuals because we love men. Even gay guys seem to forget that. It ain't just wanting to suck cock that makes you gay; it's that drive to be intimate, to be vulnerable, on various levels, with a man.
Deke
You truly got the point I was
You truly got the point I was trying to make, Deke.
Let's hear it for good ole
Let's hear it for good ole fashioned homos - this gay thing is just not working out, on SO many levels.
We get "desire" rammed down our throats like it's the be-all and end-all, but too men gay men are just like fucked-up women who simply don't LIKE men at all. Liking can bring on loving, but you're a damned fool if you think desire and loving are one and the same thing.
The first love is the most
The first love is the most amazing feeling.... something that lasts forever in your heart no matter how many more come to your life.....
i think your first love... the day you met, is one of the top 5 moments that come to your mind on your last breath...
Thank you. I met the first
Thank you. I met the first man I ever loved at 33 - late by your standards but it was as magical as yours. As most first loves, it wasn't the love that was meant to be at my side. And now I feel lost. I'm functioning but somehow my belief in magic was lost.
Thank you for sharing your
Thank you for sharing your story with me and the other members here. What a lovely memory to have - how lucky you have been. I am in my late 50's and though I knew I was gay at 12, its only this year that I have decided to live my life as it was meant to be. I hid the fact that I was gay from everybody and as I did not want to deceive any girl - kept myself from being intimate with the opposite sex also. Reading the above, shows me what I could have missed in life - hopefully its not too late yet.
Another Thank you for a
Another Thank you for a beautifully written piece. It made me start to wonder, when was my first love? Like the last fellow I knew I was gay at a very young age. So, was it the boy who worked at Bonanza, on whom I had this powerful crush when I was in 8th grade? I "loved"him so. I'd hold my pillow at night pretending it was him. Or was it David? With whom at 23 in college, I finally crossed that magical line? Or was it ten years after that when I heard for the first time a man say I love you""? So I wonder and wander.
The Whitman piece went right
The Whitman piece went right to my old heart, bringing tears to my eyes. Especially the simple truth of the final words..."and that night I was happy."
My first love. Who was it? My best friend in high school, with whom I fell in love at age 14, although we never made it physical. Or my first lover, years later at 26 (!), with whom both the heart and the body engaged?
What made me cry was not the memory of them, but a very recent night, spent with another old codger in his mid 50's...and the feeling is just as sweet...even sweeter, really, since I am now fully aware of and at home with my love for men, my love for this very particular man, with whom I feel both a fellow wise & foolish elder and an eternally adolescent playmate.
Deke is right. "Sexual orientation" hardly covers it. And the panoply of gayness, for all its usefulness --and much of its uselessness-- does not touch it. For me, at this time of my life, it is that moment, when "the one I love most lies sleeping beside me".
On this Friday before
On this Friday before Father's Day, President Barack Obama plans to spend much of his workday promoting the importance of being a good dad.
I love the "average student"
I love the "average student"
Great stuff! This is
Great stuff! This is specially interesting for banners and ads.
Passion, Hope, Faith, are all
Passion, Hope, Faith, are all the things that time has seemingly striped from me, since that first time, so very long ago. I never wanted to be a woman, but I did want a long, loving, devoted relationship. A culture of gorillas, only concerned with getting their dicks wet, and justifing it "because we are MEN", has seemed to reduce that pure hope; to an old mop in the corner. "Love" is the operative word. I just wish there would be more of it available out there, for all of us. That first time might have seemed so magical, because real, selfless Love & Devotion were actually possible. Just try to keep that in mind the next time some mean spirited ,self-absorbed, bastard is pounding your ass, then leaves...The first time, huh?
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Today Rabbit brings you free
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Beijing Olympic organizers
Beijing Olympic organizers say they made a profit out of hosting last year's Summer Games.
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I really want to learn
I really want to learn Japanese language but the thing is I dont know how to go about it. The main problem is I dont have any disposable money due to being unemployed at the moment, therefore leaves me with alot of free time. With the free time I have I would like to do somthing productive with it (besides looking for a new job which is proving to be quite difficult at the moment) and learn Japanese.
Having lived here in Japan
Having lived here in Japan for ten years, I'd say the best way is to find a job and move here.
Teaching English is the easiest way to keep a roof over your head and it's not always the most glamorous. But is does the trick.
Good luck.
A golf resort developer duped
A golf resort developer duped nearly two dozen NHL players out of $25 million, blowing the money on gratuitous parties that were attended by former Yankees players Roger Clemens and Reggie Jackson, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.
Authorities said a man faces
Authorities said a man faces a felony charge after allegedly spitting on a police officer's McDonald's breakfast sandwich. Police said a 32-year-old man was working the drive-thru window at the southwest Michigan restaurant when an unidentified officer bit into an Egg McMuffin on June 3 and immediately realized something was wrong.
Hi All, Would you want to do
Hi All,
Would you want to do at least one of the following sporting activies; in particular which ones? Rafting, Zorbing, Bungee jumping?
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Moms are sexy. Thats why I love seeing them fucking and sucking. When an older woman wants to please you, theres nothing you cna do, except enjoy the moment: she knows what shes doing! Guys, meet Barbie!
Thank you. I've not read many
Thank you.
I've not read many blogs at all.
From the dates, we must have breathed the same air at times in SF.
There was a guy called Peter who taught TaiChi I think in the Panhandle.
He might have been a mutual friend.
Live long friend. The Good Gray Poet will always be with us.
John
Buddha on Daddy Hunt
My understanding of
My understanding of
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During a 29-year absence of
During a 29-year absence of formal diplomatic ties with Iran, the U.S. government used many channels to gain insights about the Islamic regime's inner workings, from CIA contacts and meetings with Iranian exiles to relayed information from friendly foreign diplomats.
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Hi, everyone. I have 20 days
Hi, everyone. I have 20 days to travel this september and at first I thought about going to India, but I've read that It can still be very wet at this time of the year. Is that true? Moncoes are still happening in september? Is there a part of India that would be nice to visit in September?
i remember hearing Alex Toth
i remember hearing Alex Toth absolutely hated this cartoon. i mean i like it, but the super limited animation is a bit annoying, especially when you take a look at his awesome character designs.
Wait a minute, back up.
Wait a minute, back up. There's the Democratic governor of New Jersey, the father of two daughters, standing next to his attractive wife, giving a televised press conference. Something must be wrong with the sound. Did he just use the word "gay"? In the first person?
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After re-thinking and re-tooling some of the work I've been doing to take advantage of Gearman, I've started to wish for a big file system in the sky. I guess it's no surprise that Google uses GFS with their Map/Reduce jobs and that Hadoop has HDFS as a major piece of its infrastructure. The Wikipedia page List of file systems has a section on Distributed parallel fault tolerant file systems that appears to be a good list of what's out...
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Given the current state of
Given the current state of the economy, here's a quick job plug for anyone interested and qualified. At the Drizzle Developer Day on Friday, I got to meet Adrian Otto from Rackspace. Rackspace has a cloud offering (think Aamazon EC2) that's called Mosso and is willing to employ full time developers who spend all their time working on Drizzle. Here's what he sent to the mailing list. I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned...
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President Barack Obama rarely
President Barack Obama rarely equivocates when he promises that his health care plan will let people keep the coverage they have. His vow sounds reassuring and gets applause, but no president could guarantee such a pledge.
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The new iPhone is on sale in
The new iPhone is on sale in the U.S., greeted by much smaller lines and less hoopla than previous models.
Have a videochat with mature
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A condemned prisoner gives up
A condemned prisoner gives up his last meal in exchange for a moment with the only female warder of the prison. And what a warder! This slutty, teasing, luscious, well-endowed woman loves to look down her nose at men! Only that this time she is going to be subjected herself to the humiliation she subjects
I really want to learn
I really want to learn Japanese language but the thing is I dont know how to go about it. The main problem is I dont have any disposable money due to being unemployed at the moment, therefore leaves me with alot of free time. With the free time I have I would like to do somthing productive with it (besides looking for a new job which is proving to be quite difficult at the moment) and learn Japanese.
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A couple months back I got a
A couple months back I got a Samsung NC10 Netbook. I had been on the fence for a long time, trying to decide among the an Eee PC from Asus, the MSI Wind, and the Samsung NC10. Right about the time I was going to finally do it, the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE was announced. I read a lot of reviews from folks who'd bought those netbooks and eventually settled on the NC10. The main deciding factors, in order, were:...
It still needs a bit of work,
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3) Visited all 4 oceans.
3) Visited all 4 oceans.
Moms are sexy. Thats why I
Moms are sexy. Thats why I love seeing them fucking and sucking. When an older woman wants to please you, theres nothing you cna do, except enjoy the moment: she knows what shes doing! Guys, meet Barbie!
ah--he manages to condescend
ah--he manages to condescend to and insult everyone. i wonder which "type" he was?
Would you want to do at least
Would you want to do at least one of the following sporting activies; in particular which ones? Rafting, Zorbing, Bungee jumping?
When Wladimir Klitschko steps
When Wladimir Klitschko steps into the ring against Ruslan Chagaev at Veltins Arena in Gelsenkirchen on Saturday, it will be in front of the largest boxing audience in Germany since Max Schmeling fought in the 1930s.
Seeds of Terror: How Heroin
Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda is the hot new book on how our tax money is being wasted in Afghanistan. A lot of careful reporting establishes that the opium/heroin trade finances angry Muslims, to the tune of 30 percent of Afghanistans GDP. This is not a surprising result
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