I read in the NY Times magazine section today about how increasingly middle-school students as young as 11 and 12 are declaring their sexual-affectional identities to friends, family, and teachers. This is a welcome evolution of gay liberation that has resulted from decades of gay activism and the gradual inclusion of more accurate images of LGBT people in media. It is significant that young people with no sexual experience recognize their sexual-affectional identities at such young ages because being gay is more about whom and how we love and how this colors our experience of the world than about sex only. The article points out that parents never question their children when they admit to opposite-sex attractions at a young age, but they nearly always do with same-sex attractions. The common question, ”How can you know for sure at your age?“ is just another form of denial of their gay child’s reality that they would never think to impose on non-gay children. The article goes on to describe some support programs for gay youth, but it also reports what we all assume, that anti-gay bullying and harassment is still pervasive in schools and almost never challenged by teachers or administrators even in relatively liberal school districts.

In this article I invite the reader to a depth and breadth of philosophical reflection than is unusual for this forum. I hope that readers who accept the challenge of this invitation will be stimulated to think about themselves both as individuals and as a community in possibly new and transformative ways and thus be rewarded for the effort.

“For our own liberation and for the benefit of the world.”

….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.

I have worked as a mental health counselor for gay men for 24 years both in private practice and in public clinical settings. For the past twelve years I have offered pastoral counseling as part of my role as spiritual director of Ashram West, a gay spiritual community based in traditional Hindu Tantra. What follows is a distillation of decades of experience both personal and professional, during which time I have corresponded with gay men all over the world from whom I have heard essentially the same lament expressed in numerous variations: Why can’t I find a man serious about forming an intimate relationship? I write this with the full understanding that casual sex has been and continues to be a norm in gay society, so I expect some readers will disagree with my characterization of casual sex as a curse. I admit I have participated in this aspect of our gay culture from my very first sexual experience 34 years ago, though always with reservations, if not always with restraint.  I believe my considerable experience over the past decades qualifies me to share my observations and judgments about what I have found to be the net negative aspects of casual sex despite the inherent pleasures of sex, about which there is nearly universal agreement. I ask only that the reader consider my points carefully before forming any conclusions.

One of the special advantages a gay identity confers is kinship with other gay-identified persons all over the world. I consider ours a spiritual kinship because it transcends biological, national, ethnic, and socio-economic boundaries. As Homo sapiens we are all distantly related, of course, but we normally trace our biological kinship only as far back as familial memory or historical records permit. While some of us may lament the lack of biological offspring as a common consequence of choosing to honor our same-sex attractions, many more may celebrate our freedom from the financial and emotional costs of rearing children. Not only can we choose to remain free from the burdens of biological family, but we are also free to form our own intentional families, including sons or dads, if desired, by choosing relationships with individuals based on genuinely shared values, interests, and aspirations.

I saw a photo of a particularly attractive young man on a gay dating site, and I sent him a brief message saying I found his photos attractive and his profile appealing. He responded in a polite, friendly manner, and after some exchanged messages, he agreed to join me for dinner. Before we hung up he informed me that I am “much too old” for him to consider dating me, but he was interested in me for other reasons. When he arrived we discovered that we share the same alma mater, although he had only just graduated from UC Berkeley, and I graduated in 1975, several years before he was born as it happened, and we also had other common interests. After some polite conversation I felt obligated to inform the youngster that men my age (55) don't consider themselves much too old for anything.  He barely remembered the remark he had made on the phone and seemed embarrassed to have it repeated while sitting in my presence, and I gently told him that I was not much offended, and that young men frequently say insensitive things without even realizing they might be giving offense.

Men all over the world sooner or later confront notions of what it means to be a ”real man” and inevitably compare themselves to some ideal(s) constructed by the societies in which they live. Although different societies sometimes hold up seemingly contradictory ideals of manhood, Mahatma Gandhi in India versus Rambo in the United States, to cite extreme examples, we tend to accept our own society's ideal as normal unless our understanding gets broadened by exposure to other ideals that seem to resonate better with our inner experience.

Gay men everywhere tend to find ourselves excluded to one degree or another from inclusion in the category of “real men” because of our same-sex attraction and because many societies view gay men as effeminate (like a woman).  For a man to be like a woman means he is not, in some sense, fully a real man.

The late Harry Hay, arguably the father of gay liberation, inspired by examples of “third-gender” or “two-spirit” concepts he encountered in some Native American cultures, developed a theory of gay identity apart from the prevailing notions of male versus female prevalent in non-gay society. Hay believed that most gay men learn to imitate gender-polarized, heterosexual norms of male/female as a way to survive in homophobic societies and that this imitation distorts their authentic gay identities. He theorized that if gay men could get away from heterosexuals completely, preferably in natural settings, their authentic gay natures would manifest with a little encouragement.  The Radical Faerie movement came into being to test and develop Hay's theories.

Hay broke down the different ways of being as “subject-object consciousness” (heterosexual) vs. “subject-subject consciousness,” (homosexual).

Aside from my years of involvement with weight training and other fitness activities, I have been practicing meditation in one form or another for over 40 years. Although meditation techniques and the philosophies that underlie them may differ greatly, meditation in general involves quieting the body and mind to achieve a state of peaceful alertness in which one can experience deep insight into the nature of self and the universe. However, the peace, clarity, and sense of meaningfulness of life that come with regular practice of silent meditation can seem to evaporate as soon as you open your eyes and enter the workaday world.

When I started teaching public high school back in 1984, I also started exploring ways to carry the benefits of silent meditation into my work life that often seemed stressful and hostile to serenity.

Two ancient traditions that in general have regarded meditation as an important spiritual practice for millennia are Hinduism and Buddhism. Both traditions offer us various models for bringing greater serenity and centeredness into daily activities. You need not subscribe to any dogma or belief system to benefit from some of these techniques. You need only possess an open mind and the willingness to use your own body and mind as laboratories for experimentation and discovery.

It doesn't require too much imagination to think of situations where greater flexibility would confer a great advantage. (I'm thinking of myself on my back with my feet next to my ears, for example…) Men often avoid flexibility training either because they hold the ridiculous notion that it is just for women (Remember Jane Fonda in tights?) or that it is just not as sexy as pumping iron or sweating on a treadmill. Stretching does involve a certain degree of sustained discomfort, however slight, and without the sex appeal of cardio and weight training flexibility training is all too easily skipped over.

This is unfortunate because one cannot claim to have a complete fitness program without doing some flexibility training. This kind of training is important for everyone to speed recovery from other forms of exercise, reduce the duration and severity of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), and improve your versatility in a variety of situations. It becomes especially important as our bodies age because greater flexibility means less likelihood of injury in even normal, everyday activities.

We used to think that stretching should be done before weight training as part of a warm-up routine. However, research has shown that deep stretching of muscles actually reduces their ability to contract strongly, and this effect is definitely not desirable when you are trying to build some lean tissue.