I have come to realize that one of the primary purposes of my recent journey was to restructure my usual ways of handling pain and loss. To wit: instead of holing up in an apartment with a suitable quantity of alcohol and bad food, I was out on the road, pedaling from place to place. Admittedly, I did hole up in a few motels for several days along the way, and on at least one occasion this holing up was accompanied by mini-mart beer and hand-delivered bad food. That was early on, and it quickly became apparent that such behavior was not at all compatible with actually getting out the door and onto the trike. Somewhere in Oregon, I made the conscious decision to put the bottle down for good, and while I’ve slipped up occasionally since my trek ended in September, by and large I’ve been successful.

Which is a good thing, because I find myself, once again, in the kind of situation that I formerly attempted to remedy with liberal doses of hydrocarbon anesthesia. Granted: I’ve picked up smoking again, for the first time since 1996, but I’m not terribly worried about it because when I did quit, I did so out of lack of interest. I had the same half-pack of American Spirits on top of my television for two weeks before I realized that I had quit, which suggests to me that I am mercifully free of the physiological nicotine triggers that make quitting such an ordeal for most people. A couple of times since then, in times of stress, I've bought a pack, smoked half of it, and flushed the rest. It’s all in my head…a combination of nervous fidgeting with a bit of a kick from the tobacco which, when I’ve had enough, I fully expect I’ll be able to do without.

That said, I have picked up another “habit,” if it can be called such: piercings. I’ve got three at the moment, two you can see while I'm wearing business attire and one you can’t, and this evening I’ll have two more you can’t see. A common question, when I reveal this new predilection, is the basic “Why?”

In my early 20s, when I was a long-haired black-wearing pagan-style person, I had five ear piercings, three in my left ear and two in my right. My original plan, when I left on my trek, was to commemorate its conclusion with a tattoo that involved cycling-related imagery and an indication of the miles I had pedaled. I decided against that when I dropped the coast-to-coast plan, and, in its stead, got my ears re-done by a professional piercer, at the same Santa Barbara tattoo shop that did my mother’s ink. I’ve now got a 12-gauge titanium segment ring in each ear (seen here, although mine are natural, not colored), and they represent the 2,000 miles I did ride, as well as the reclamation of a part of myself I’d put aside long ago.

Then, within a few days of getting my ears done, I went a little further and got a frenum piercing ( NSFPWPANSV)*. That one was less of a reclamation and more of an expansion of self. The nature of the piercing accompanied a more fully-realized expression of my sexuality, plus a bit of aesthetic kink, and a celebration of the changes my body was undergoing as I continued to lose weight. I’d thought about doing such things awhile ago, but it was hard to decorate my body when I found it to be so misshapen and unappealing.

I had decided that when I reached a target weight of 175 (down from a high of 245), I would have both nipples done. I hit 185 yesterday morning, and although I could wait another five weeks or so, recent events in my life have made a compelling case for getting these done now.

There are really three parts to the piercing process, analogous to the tattooing process. There’s the piercing itself, which produces pain, endorphins, and a bit of blood. Afterwards, there is a period of healing, which can also be painful, depending on what sort of piercing you’ve had. Finally, there is the ongoing presence of the jewelry. For me, each part of this process serves a different purpose.

There are hard lessons I have learned very recently, about where I actually am in my personal development and what the patterns in my life have been, particularly regarding intimate relationships. I’ll be thinking about those lessons while I’m in the chair. Every time I need to clean the new piercings and the jewelry, I’ll be thinking about what I’ve learned, and renewing my determination to change. Once the piercings have healed, and I swap out the initial piercing jewelry for permanent, more decorative pieces, they will serve as ongoing reminders of the deliberate changes I have made in my life and how I live it. Nothing says Don’t ever do that again quite like sharp surgical steel through sensitive body parts.

So, in a couple of hours, I will fight pain with pain, and write intention in my flesh.

LATER:

That. Was. Amazing.

I'd read that this was one of the more painful piercings, and it was indeed...but so worth it. They look great, and, as always, Nic Ferrante did her usual precise and careful job.

She also pointed out something that I hadn't really put a name to, when I outlined the three parts of the piercing process above. The second part--the healing process--involves caring for wounds, which, at this time in my life, is singularly apropos.

I am a very happy fellow right now.

*Not safe for places where penises are not safely viewed.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (2)
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Once a son was born to Mercury and the goddess Venus, and he was brought up by the naiads in Ida's caves. In his features, it was easy to trace resemblance to his father and to his mother. He was called after them, too, for his name was Hermaphroditus. As soon as he was fifteen, he left his native hills, and Ida where he had been brought up, and for the sheer joy of traveling visited remote places...he went as far as the cities of Lycia, and on to the Carians, who dwell nearby. In this region he spied a pool of water, so clear that he could see right to the bottom...The water was like crystal, and the edges of the pool were ringed with fresh turf, and grass that was always green.

A nymph [Salmacis] dwelt there...Often she would gather flowers, and it so happened that she was engaged in this pastime when she caught sight of the boy, Hermaphroditus. As soon as she had seen him, she longed to possess him...She addressed him: "Fair boy, you surely deserve to be thought a god. If you are, perhaps you may be Cupid?...If there is such a girl [engaged to you], let me enjoy your love in secret: but if there is not, then I pray that I may be your bride, and that we may enter upon marriage together."

The naiad said no more, but a blush stained the boy's cheeks, for he did not know what love was. Even blushing became him: his cheeks were the colour of ripe apples, hanging in a sunny orchard, like painted ivory or like the moon when, in eclipse, she shows a reddish hue beneath her brightness...

Incessantly the nymph demanded at least sisterly kisses, and tried to put her arms around his ivory neck. "Will you stop!" he cried, "or I shall run away and leave this place and you!" Salmacis was afraid: "I yield this spot to you, stranger, and I shall not intrude," she said; and, turning from him, pretended to go away...The boy, meanwhile, thinking himself unobserved and alone, strolled this way and that on the grassy sward, and dipped his toes in the lapping water-then his feet, up to the ankles. Then, tempted by the enticing coolness of the waters, he quickly srtipped his young body of its soft garments. At the sight, Salmacis was spell-bound. She was on fire with passion to possess his naked beauty, and her very eyes flamed with a brilliance like that of the dazzling sun, when his bright disk is reflected in a mirror...She longed to embrace him then, and with difficulty restrained her frenzy.

Hermaphroditus, clapping his hollow palms against his body, dived quickly into the stream. As he raised first one arm and then the other, his body gleamed in the clear water, as if someone had encased an ivory statue or white lillies in transparent glass. "I have won! He is mine!" cried the nymph, and flinging aside her garments, plunged into the heart of the pool. The boy fought against her, but she held him, and snatched kisses as he struggled. placing her hands beneath him, stroking his unwilling breast, and clinging to him, now on this side, now on that.

Finally, in spite of all his efforts to slip from her grasp, she twined around him, like a serpent when it is being carried off into the air by the king of birds; for, as it hangs from the eagle's beak, the snake coils round his head and talons and with its tail hampers his beating wings..."You may fight, you rogue, but you will not escape. May the gods grant me this, may no time to come ever separate him from me, or me from him!"

Her prayers found favor with the gods: for, as they lay together, their bodies were united and from being two persons they became one. As when a gardener grafts a branch onto a tree, and sees the two unite as they grow, and come to maturity together, so when their limbs met in that clinging embrace the nymph and the boy were no longer two, but a single form, possessed of a dual nature, which could not be called male or female, but seemed at once both and neither.

Ovid,
Metamorphosis

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When the eye's rays encounter some clear, well-polished object-be it burnished steel or glass or water, a brilliant stone, or any other polished and gleaming substance, having luster, glitter, and sparkle...those rays of the eye are reflected back, and the observer then beholds himself and obtains an ocular vision of his own person. This is what you see when you look into a mirror; in that situation you are as it were looking at yourself through the eyes of another.

Ibn Hazm,
The Dove: A Treatise On
The Art And Practice
Of Arab Love

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So, thou braggart, thou sexy-headed boy…what turns thee now? What seraphim of need descends upon thy fevered brain? "Nothing," thou sayest, in a happy rhyme, with rhythm of the feet a welcome substitute for the flesh and the heart. Thy intention follows thy wounding, and, forsooth, that was the mightiest of my intentions.

Alistaire Whit,
Songs of Windy Days

Ah, yes. Ye olde Windy Day Voice. It often promises much. When I sense change bearing down on me with full blustery force, the most important thing to hold foremost in my mind is that when I answer “Yes” to the question Are you ready? I must be aware that what I’m saying “Yes” to might not be entirely pleasant. That’s the compact I’ve made with myself (for, of course, the Voice doesn’t come from anywhere but inside of me): when I say I’m ready, it means I’m ready for anything. It doesn’t mean that I’m only ready for stupendously fabulous things to happen in my life, or vast sums of unexpected cash, or perhaps a really nice sandwich. What I’m ready for is change—unknown, and unknowable until I’m in the midst of it. To restrict myself to the merely pleasant is to doom myself to both stagnation and boredom.

Change is a good thing, but it can be painful and wracked with drama, self-created and otherwise. Embracing change means stepping off into the void, with no assurances of being borne up, no real knowledge of the depth of the chasm below or of what lies at its bottom. That gives the act a certain frisson, which I find is motivation enough for performing it.

And so: having weathered this most recent bout of change—and there have been many others, over the past eleven months, brobdingnagian changes, the kind that bruise and delight and terrify—I am, once again, in a place of tottering equilibrium, walking my path along the cliff’s edge, and hearing the voice of the wind. It’s alluring, that voice, and dangerous. The allure and the danger come from the same qualities: the uncertain promise of new things, of growth and expansion, each haloed by the risk of failure, pain, and the embarrassments of sincerity.

There are perilous updrafts along the wind-borne path to the next destination, not to mention downdrafts, and some of the weird vortex-style winds that you occasionally see lofting spinning plastic bags hundreds of feet into the air against the sides of urban buildings. All of that up and down and tossing around can be disturbing, frightening, and nauseating.

But eventually I find myself back on this path by the edge, having moved a little farther along in my journey. I can look back along the path, and see the pastels of the canyon it borders, the distant mesas of my past. Progress becomes manifest, and my stride becomes more confident.

This is my life, and this is how I live it: one leap at a time.

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Selfishness is one of those qualities apt to inspire love.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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A cigarette, Oscar Wilde quipped, “is the perfect type of perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

At the risk of indulging in fatal sincerity, I have attempted, at various time in my life, to bring the aesthete that lives in my head out into the world. It’s a lot of work, and I failed consistently, which is why I have terrible furniture.

This is due, in part, to mere matters of finance. I am not as enamored of debt as Mr. Wilde was, and the era of patronage is over. It also takes more leisure time than I currently have to locate appropriately impressive bookcases, and the siren call of Ikea is strong.

So: I do what I can. I own ridiculously expensive shirts, because the fabrics and colors are unmatched. At work, I wear fashionable jackets, which everyone assumes is because I'm from back East, but is, in actuality, because I don't really do office casual, not the way they do it here in California. It's a deliberate choice, like adorning my body with various bits of titanium and steel. My mannerisms are occasionally epicene, another choice I make: not so much to be effete, but, rather, to not suppress such effects, because I see no need to.

Ultimately, like a cigarette, all of these choices may prove unsatisfying. But I won't know unless I've tried them, will I? At some point in my late 20s, I put many of these characteristics aside, and I've come to regret that. So I will spend some time being more of who I was then, because I strongly suspect that is, in fact, who I am now. And even if the choices do prove to be unsatisfying...they'll still be perfect.

Not that all of this is, necessarily, the stuff of riveting blog-style reading. But: this place has always been about me, really. Now, it is more openly so.

To the dance!

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (2)
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Dandyism is not, as many unthinking people seem to suppose, an immoderate interest in personal appearance and material elegance. For the true dandy these things are only a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his personality. What, then, is this ruling passion that has turned into a creed and created its own skilled tyrants? What is this unwritten constitution that has created so haughty a caste? It is, above all, a burning need to acquire originality, within the apparent bounds of convention. It is a sort of cult of oneself, which can dispense with what are commonly called illusions. It is the delight of causing astonishment, and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished...

Charles Baudelaire,
The Dandy

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It is, I think, impossible to be passionate and discerning at the same time. Passion, by its very nature, is an overwhelming sort of force, while discernment is staid, thoughtful, and quiet. Each is the death of the other. When the two co-exist in a person simultaneously, one must of necessity prevail. There is no hybrid that can be made, no transmutation of one into the other, not if the passion is truly passion, and the discernment truly discernment. Any attempt to balance the two will fail, with the scales tipping finally to one side or the other.

Better writers than I have crafted much finer words from this quintessential facet of human nature. In my own experience, my discernment always fails, and usually not by choice. Dorothy Parker—who was certainly in a position to know—wrote that “Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.” The same applies to passion, which is of a different order than love, although it is, for me, a required precursor to it. I have often been, to my continuing annoyance, a clutcher.

And yet: I am also an honest man. My heart is open, and, despite my occasional protestations to the contrary, I lack the cynicism that would allow me to fully veil my heightened emotions in order to achieve a particular end. I am not so deliberate, not so calculating as that. It simply isn’t within my nature.

I have found that any attempt to be calculating—intentional or otherwise—has without exception resulted in a profoundly unpleasant agitation, very much like panic, which I have come to realize is the consequence of behaving in a way that is contrary to my nature. I have never made such attempts out of a conscious desire to manipulate, but only in an effort to follow the sage advice of so many of my literary and romantic betters. To wit: “Only fools rush in.”

Sadly—and, again, much to my annoyance—I have often been a fool. An honest fool, mostly, but a fool nonetheless.

Which brings me to my present quandary: given that the end result of this openness can be so painful—a pain which is commensurate with the preceding passion—would it not be to my benefit to seek to achieve such deliberation and calculation? To hide my depths? To secure my passion, to lock it away and release it in strategic bursts?

At this point, the Reader will observe my self-portrait as that of an annoyed, wounded fool. Which is accurate, as far as it goes. However, there is also my ardor, my open heart, and my hope. These things have caused me no end of trouble in my life, and I have struggled against them, with little success.

I am, now, entirely uncertain about the wisdom of this struggle. How very great is the value of feeling! Not just passion, but its ruinous aftermath. Not just love, but its lack. Who would I be were I to stop all that up, to hide myself away from it even for a moment? I already know what the results of that are, and they are measured out one glass at a time, over the course of years.

I have often thought that, temperamentally, I am not a creature of this age. It is too fast for me, and I regret the degree to which I have internalized its speed. In matters of the heart, above all else, my resistance to modern rapidity is low.

There is only one possible mediator between passion and discernment, and that is patience. John Steinbeck wrote, “Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” I yearn for the patience required to live out that truth. Instead, I have quickness of passion without the strength required to resist it.

I see but one solution to this problem: I must be fearless. Fearless about who I am, what I feel, and the potential consequences of each. Anything less will produce only anxiety and neurosis. This is not necessarily at odds with Steinbeck’s admonishment regarding patience, for the firm rejection of my honest passion by another is as reliable an indicator as any of what it is that’s getting away. In the wake of that, I will have remained true to myself. Wounded, perhaps, and foolish, but true.

In the end, that’s the only worthwhile thing there is in life.

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I've written about damn near everything on this site, whether I knew anything about it or not.

Except sex.

That's partly because, with the exception of the past year, I was in a monogamous, committed relationship for the entirety of this site's existence. Not that I couldn't have written about the subject, mind you, but...well, it's complicated, and out of deference to my former partner and to avoid the total Reader boredom that comes with an excess of authorial navel-gazing, I'll skip the gory bits. (Then again...it's not as though I haven't been diving deeply into my belly for the past month here...no, I'll skip it. You don't need to read it, and I don't need to write it.)

Returning to the subject at hand. As I mentioned recently, there's a slew of issues surrounding the publication of the highly personal on the very public web. This has never been an anonymous blog, and given what I've been writing about lately, there's certainly no reason to make it one now. There is also the small matter of being out. You can't be out and anonymous. The two are mutually exclusive. So yeah, that's me over there on the left in the purple shades. (I have better hair now, but you go to blog with the photo you have, not the photo you might want or wish to have.)

The discerning reader will have picked up hints (or brickbats) here and there about my proclivities, and while I've never made much of a deliberate attempt to hide them in my offline life, I've never made much of an attempt to interact with any sort of like-minded "community," either. Long time readers (both of you) will know that I've always had a problem with identity politics, and defining myself by what I do with my genitalia never seemed like the proper thing to do.

I've always had gay men in my life, mostly because my mother had gay friends. In fact, as the only child of a single mother, the only male available to teach me how to tie a necktie was my gay next-door neighbor. So there was never any question in my mind that yes, some people are gay, and that's a normal thing in the world.

Except...I'm not gay, which raises a slightly different set of issues. Here, let's roll some tape and let Margaret Mead say some stuff:

What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love. Today the recognition of bisexuality in oneself and in others is part of the whole mid-20th century movement to accord each individual, regardless of race, class, nationality, age or sex, the right to be a person who is unique and who has a social identity that is worthy of dignity and respect...Even a superficial look at other societies and some groups in our own society should be enough to convince us that a very large number of human beings, probably a majority, are bisexual in their potential capacity for love...We will fail to evolve in our understanding of human sexuality if we continue to see homosexuals merely as "heterosexuals-in-reverse," ignoring the vast diversity actually represented by society's many varied expressions of love between people.

That's from an article titled "Bisexuality: What's It All About?" that Mead wrote for Redbook back in 1975, when I was four.

Quite a lot has changed since then. The generation of gay men before me--if I can call those who are ten to fifteen years older than me a "generation"--truly came of age in the time of Anita Bryant, AIDS, and a very angry Larry Kramer. The generation after me had Will & Grace, Ellen DeGeneres, and gay marriage on ballots across the country. (Yes, it was defeated...but even the idea of such initiatives was still unthinkable when the trannies rioted at Stonewall in 1969.)

As for myself, I'm somewhere in the middle. I went to DC for my second Pride march in 1993, seven months after Colorado's voters narrowly passed Amendment 2, prohibiting any "special protections" for gays, lesbians, or bisexuals. The Colorado contingent marched with an avenue-wide banner that read, "COLORADO: GROUND ZERO," and I still remember my eyes welling at the sight of it. I didn't realize, at the time, just how right they were.

Later that day, as we rounded a bend, we passed the usual band of Phelps types, with their GOD HATES FAGS signs and their bile. There was one fellow who stood out from the rest, arm outstretched over the police barricade, pointing an accusing finger at us as we walked by. So I stopped, stepped out of the march, and pointed right back at him. We locked eyes for three or four minutes, until he looked away. I won.

I have been fortunate. With the exception of one other incident, which I'll tell you about later, that's the greatest instance of homophobia I've ever experienced, and I had the weight of tens of thousands behind me at the time. I was raised in an environment where homosexuality was an accepted part of life. I've never had the slightest hint of self-loathing or doubt about my varied desires. In that, my experience is radically different from that of many other gay and lesbian folks. I have no coming-out horror stories. I haven't lost anyone to AIDS. No one I know has been fag-bashed. There's an entire range of shared "gay" experiences that, well, I don't share.

Since about 1996, I have limited my exposure to the gay community. In truth, I have more fear of being called a confused fence-sitter than I do of being called a faggot, probably because I know I'm not one. I'm not a fence-sitter, either--they've only got two sides, after all--but for some reason, the idea of being out within the gay community carries more fear of rejection for me than the idea of being out in the straight community. Nevertheless, that's the direction I'm headed at the moment, in keeping with what has become my first rule of living: go where the fear is.

All of this raises much larger issues, not just about sex, but about love. Recent experiences have stretched my mind and heart to near-bursting, and I've learned much--some of it too late, alas--about my own capacity for love outside the bounds of the narrowly-defined spectra of what we're pleased to call relationships in this culture. The birthing pains for this knowledge were intense...entirely overwhelming, in fact. I held fast, with white knuckles and tearing fingernails, to old understandings and old agonies. There's a corollary to my first rule of living: don't make decisions out of fear. I didn't quite manage to pull that one off, and I do feel poorer for it, while paradoxically feeling enriched by my newly-expanded boundaries.

So far, I've had comparatively smooth sailing on the waters of "atypical" sexual identity, but I'm well aware that this is anomalous for many people like me. I'm going to be writing more about this particular subject and other subjects related to it in the future (aren't you just thrilled?). As for why I'm choosing to do so...well, why the hell not? It's pretty much the last frontier for this small unregarded yellow blog in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the IntraTubes. Perhaps it will prove helpful to someone, somewhere, who's ostensibly gay or straight, and in hiding.

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In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates relates a story about the origin of Love supposedly told to him by the wise woman, Diotima. The gods had a great feast in celebration of the birth of Aphrodite, and among the guests was Resource, the son of Cunning. Uninvited and alone, Poverty (also called Lack or Want) hung around outside the gates. Drunk on nectar—for the gods had not yet created wine—Resource stumbled into a grove and fell asleep. In the peculiar way of Greek gods and personifications, Poverty lay with Resource as he slept, and the child thus conceived was Love.

Love, Diotima tells Socrates, takes after his mother in that he is in a constant state of need. He is shoeless and homeless, and sleeps on the bare ground or in doorways. He also takes after his father, in that he is always in pursuit of all that is beautiful and good; he is brave, high-strung, a master hunter and strategist. He is neither immortal nor mortal, and in one hour he can be flourishing and alive, the next dying, then revived again by the force of his father’s nature. But any abundance he gets is always ebbing away into want. He is driven by need, and has the skills to fill that need temporarily, but at no time is Love fulfilled or unfulfilled.

The point of this origin story was to illustrate the nature of the pursuit of wisdom, for, according to Plato, we do not truly desire what we have, but only what we lack. This lack is also reflected in the speech describing the origin of love that Aristophanes gave prior to Socrates's own: humans were originally created as creatures of four legs, four arms, and a two-faced head, then split apart at the whim of Zeus. Their component portions—man and woman—are forever trying to return to their original conjoined state.

Throughout the dialogue, love is couched in terms of need and lack. Plato intended to convey that love is the idea of good which lies at the root of all virtue and truth. What seems to have been transmitted to our culture is that love is the constant pursuit of a remedy for a bereft state. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Much the same, I think, can be said for our traditions of love.

The common and accepted expression of romantic love is as a pair, and, once paired, the individuals within it become a unit. Socially, the individuals are transformed from (for example) “George” and “Mary” into “George and Mary.” An entire array of cultural machinery moves into action, supporting this binary unit, their particular attachment to each other, and the exclusion of anyone else from that unit. Everything in our culture—religion, politics, movies, television, even advertisements—voices its support for the idea of love as a need that is met by one person.

This may seem an odd claim to make in this age of promiscuity and pornography. However, I think that the vast majority of people admit that there is a qualitative difference between a relationship that is based on physicality and one that is based on love. There are relationships that are “serious” and relationships that aren’t. Relationships that are “serious” involve love, those that aren’t do not. The boundaries between the two aren’t always clear…in fact, I would suggest that’s more often the case than not. This is one of the functions of the cultural mechanisms that surround those who have “coupled up:” to encourage them to stay coupled up and start families, even if they're not entirely sure they ought to.

This was all well and good when the Church ran society and the average lifespan was 37 years. “‘Till death do us part” was never far off, and it was certainly in society’s best interest to encourage the birth of children and the maintenance of family units that would best enable those children to reach adulthood. All very practical.

After a certain point in the development of Western culture, these practical needs began to recede into the background. But the concept of love as the fulfillment of an individual’s need still girds our ideas of what love relationships are supposed to be, and is expressed everywhere from Shakespeare to daytime soaps. Need, lack, and cunning strategies to fulfill that need. Pursuit and conquest. This country’s divorce rate alone suggests that this model of love has a high rate of failure, and of those who remain married, what percentage spend their time making each other miserable? Or staying together “for the children?” Or being unfaithful--emotionally, sexually, or both--with someone other than their supposed life partner? The number of binary “lifetime commitments” that actually live up to their promises of fulfillment, trust, and loyalty is, it seems, rather small.

I write this as someone who has quite recently run headlong into his own limitations and his own mountain of need. This is my experience, not yours, so if you’ve been happily married for two decades, congratulations to you. My point is simply this: that doesn’t work for everybody. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it doesn’t work for quite a lot of people, but they keep trying anyway, because they are bound by societal conventions, their emotional limitations, their needs, or some combination of the three.

In my case, the realization of exactly what my issues were was, in fact, sparked by re-reading Plato’s Symposium. The repeated theme of love as a salve for need resonated with me in an unpleasantly discordant fashion…there was something that just felt “off” about the concept, particularly because I recognized its ubiquity in my own life. My needs seemed so great, and the notion of having them unmet so terrifying, that they overwhelmed the foundational elements of my character: honesty and openness. I’m really not speaking out of egotism, here (honest). These are qualities that I’ve identified in myself, that others have validated, and they’re important to me. Anything that shuts these defining aspects of my self down is, by my definition, a Bad Thing.

The good news is that the only thing that is actually capable of shutting those aspects down is within me: fear. Fear of pain, fear of loss, fear of rejection, fear of humiliation, the list goes on. Every fear-based decision I have made in my life in general, and within intimate relationships in particular, has been a bad one. Instructive, of course. But bad. The internal conflicts thus created have driven me to drink, and worse. What I have come to realize is that avoidance of fear is not a need.

The defining characteristics of Love as described by Plato are simply these: he is never content, or discontent. He is never fulfilled, or unfulfilled. He is always seeking, then finding, then in need once more. That’s not love to me. That’s tragedy.

In Plato’s world, love was a seeking for the Good and the Beautiful. But these are Ideas, and are thus unobtainable. We may approach them. We may catch glimpses of them. But we will never reach them. Down here in the muck, our real needs are different. Empathy. Understanding. Acceptance. Intimacy, emotional and otherwise. The ideal—that of getting all of this from one person, always—strikes me, like the Good and the Beautiful, as similarly unobtainable. Is there any reason to place boundaries on who meets these needs, or how they do so, as long as this meeting takes place within a framework of trust and honesty among all concerned? Perhaps love should not be like Diotima’s Love, son of Poverty and Resource, shoeless, homeless, and sleeping in the dirt.

Perhaps love should be fearless, and unfettered.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (2)
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After I wrote and posted "Polyamorous Perverse?", I came across a whole slew of related material while poking around on the Big Big Web.

In particular, this article leapt out and said hi there: "Polyamory: What it is and what it isn't," by Derek McCullough and David S. Hall. It touches on many of the same points I did (without the Plato), but I swear I came up with those bits all on my own. Really!

Give it a read, if you're interested, and if you'd like to learn more, there are a few links and references at the end.

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Something I wrote on Thursday didn't seem quite right to me.

More accurately, there's a lot in that post that needs further exploration, but for whatever reason, one portion in particular seemed to want more immediate attention than the others. Here, let me quote my own damn self:

“‘Till death do us part” was never far off, and it was certainly in society’s best interest to encourage the birth of children and the maintenance of family units that would best enable those children to reach adulthood. All very practical.

After a certain point in the development of Western culture, these practical needs began to recede into the background.

The question left begging here is exactly how it is that "enabling children to reach adulthood" is less of a practical need in modern Western culture.

It remains so, of course. In this 2006 NewScientist article ("Love unlimited: The polyamorists"), Dossie Easton, co-author of "The Ethical Slut", explains what I meant, and broaches the subject of this post:

"In middle-class urban cultures, people aren't marrying for survival any more. They can get divorced, and the kids won't starve. This means we're having marriages and relationships for very different reasons than our ancestors did. We're doing it for emotional gratification." Easton sees poly as a break from the "survival strategy" traditions that created both polygamy and monogamy. "Polyamory is a cultural outgrowth of serial monogamy, or having multiple partners without necessity," she says. "Once you're released from necessity, you can start doing all kinds of original thinking."

Putting this "original thinking" into the service of "emotional gratification," however, requires a level of radical honesty that is difficult to obtain, harder to maintain, and altogether rare. Some of the first-hand accounts I've come across--particularly those of secondaries, e.g., the third partner in a triad--demonstrate a level of insecurity and chaos that, at first blush, doesn't seem worth the trouble. Punkindunkin writes,

When I went to bed last night, I was fighting a mild case of melancholy. I was sick and tired of all the alone time, tired of the highly inadequate and frustratingly garbled phone calls that I endure, and tired of constantly waiting for the next time when I will be held. I didn’t think that the ‘lonelies’ were going to last thru the night and into my morning, but they caught me off guard and roared with a vengeance when I spent yet another few minutes on the phone this morning with poor reception threatening the call, my bad ears struggling to hear, and the announcement that plans for the weekend were changing. It is quickly turning into a bad day.

I read that and thought, "Hell, I can get that with one person." Then, from Ilada's Poly Page for Secondaries, I absorbed this:

Just in case you didn’t notice, I didn’t make any comparisons between monogamy and polyamory. I didn’t because there is no need. Some problems are just universal no matter the structure of your relationship.

So while we are trying to spin our minds to think of the positive, I think we should stop trying to demand absolute separation of monogamy and polyamory relationship dynamics.

There are some differences, some major ones, but all in all the constant us and them mentality sets all of us up to be exclusionary.

By polyamorists touting how different they are, how much they are breaking the mold, etc, we end up condoning that we are somehow defective not only in the minds of monogamists, but in the polyamorist mind as well.

This reminded me of the obvious "People are people" concept. It doesn't really matter whether you're in a binary, trinary, or some exotic flavor of septupletish relationship...in the end there's you, your head, and your heart, all relating to other humans. There's no question that the degree of complexity increases with more than one intimate partner. But as a fellow who occupies a somewhat broader portion of the sexual spectrum than is generally allotted, things are already more complex for me. If I were to return to a committed monogamous relationship (in, say, a decade, when I am no longer an ambulatory pile of well-dressed plutonium), that's still going to be the case. It's not the kind of thing that can go unmentioned. And when it gets mentioned, the questions will start. "Will I be enough for you? Can you be faithful?"

In the past, that answer has simply been "Yes." Anything else seemed too complicated and, more importantly, too frightening. Right now--to indulge in a flight of wildly speculative and highly unlikely fancy--the honest answer would be, "I don't know. Are you OK with that?" That's a big leap to ask someone to make, and the risk would be that whatever might potentially be happening would stop happening, right then and there. But if it did, integrity would remain, and that's the foundation for anything good, decent, and worthy, including friendship.

More to the point--and, furthermore, as a precondition for the thought experiment I'm conducting here--uncompromising integrity is essential for any form of commitment in a relationship, and without such commitment, polyamory in particular is impossible, as far as I'm concerned. This will only seem paradoxical if you're focusing on the idea of having multiple sexual partners as the defining characteristic of a polyamorous relationship. I'm sure that for some people, that's what it's mostly about, and if it works for them, great. But those within the poly community often take great pains to separate themselves from swinging community, and there's a very, very good reason for that.

The critical difference between the two communities depends entirely upon the definition of "love." If you're attending monthly wife-swapping gatherings (and why is it never "husband-swapping," anyway?) for the purposes of bringing a new toy and a different joy into your marriage, then what you've got going on there isn't love, at least not among all parties concerned. That's Serial Monogamy Pro (Service Pack 1). If hubby or wifey falls in love with a weekend paramour, there's going to be a problem. The "seriousness" of the relationship remains reserved for the binary couple.

That "seriousness" is a quality found in genuine love relationships, and is not necessarily dependent upon the duration of that relationship. It entails trust, loyalty, and negotiation. Within polyamorous relationships, there's an extra requirement so unique they had to make up a word for it. I prefer the British term, which is "frubbles." Americans call it "compersion," and the meaning is the same: it's the opposite of romantic jealousy...the happiness a person feels when his or her partner is happy with another partner.

That's a concept that hit me fairly well upside the head. A degree of empathetic love so profound that the happiness your partner finds in another partner makes you happy? Now that's serious. That's commitment. I was Googling a half-remembered quote defining love as "the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own," and discovered that Robert Heinlein said it. This isn't surprising, as it was his "Stranger In A Strange Land" that really kicked off this whole modern polyamory business in the first place. My copy has long since vanished, but there's a shiny new one on its way to me.

It is entirely rational to ask: why is it that concern for your partner's happiness should abruptly stop at the boundaries of your intimate binary interaction? Or, for that matter, your pants?

And: if it is not rational that such concern should be so bounded...how the hell do you pull that off?

I've got some ideas about that, which I shall inflict upon you anon. Nothing new, really, except that they'll be refracted through my own particular wordlens.

But here's a teaser: don't lie. Ever. Especially to yourself.

Wacky, huh?

More later.

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I've spent quite a lot of time learning and thinking about neurochemistry. Finding out about neurocellular anatomy, the dynamics of inter- and intracellular signaling, and the particulars of neurotransmitter function has helped me to better understand what goes on in my own quirky skull. The science has illuminated many of the hitherto unknown processes that have driven my emotional life, and this knowledge has helped to minimize my fear.

My continuing research has yielded some quite practical results. For example, my discovery that pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) is a sympathomimetic amine that mimics the effects of adrenaline prompted me to stop taking the stuff for allergy relief, because its neurochemical activity was creating anxiety and other fight-or-flight nonsense.

This practice--research, and the application of that research to my life--has given me the ability to evaluate myself and my behavior objectively. I'm not always good at at it. In fact, I'm often spectacularly bad at it. But like all practices, you have to keep at it, and the longer you do, the better you get. Every so often, I'll come across a new concept that's a perfect mirror.

Most communities develop their own terminology to describe their unique characteristics, and the polyamory community is no different. Some of the terms, however, aren't necessarily unique to the practice of polyamory, and are more community slang than anything else. "NRE" is such a term, and stands for "new relationship energy." It's a concept that will be familiar to anyone who's been in any kind of romantic relationship: the sort of fuzzy, buoyant feeling that occurs when everything in the relationship is new, and you're finding out all sorts of wonderful things about each other, and everything's happy and full of cute plush animals with a minimum of rats. Also called "the pink fluffy stupids."

The unique element within a polyamorous relationship is that partners may experience NRE alongside older, more established relationships, where things have settled down a bit. How well such a relationship fares depends on how well the partners balance these two experiences. Watching your partner react this way towards someone else presents ample opportunity for jealousy, possessiveness, and insecurity to emerge.

However, NRE is not what caught my attention. Instead, a related concept sprang from the page: limerence. (I'm going to quote chunks of the Wikipedia entry, but I do recommend reading the whole thing.)

Limerence, as posited by psychologist Dorothy Tennov, is an involuntary cognitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person (the limerent object). Limerence can often be what is meant when one expresses "having a crush" on someone else although limerence, unlike a crush, can last months, years or even a lifetime. It is characterized by intrusive thinking and pronounced sensitivity to external events that reflect the disposition of the limerent object towards the individual. It can be experienced as intense joy or as extreme despair, depending on whether or not the feelings are reciprocated.

[...]

Tennov differentiates between limerence and other emotions by asserting that:

• Love involves concern for the other person's welfare and feeling, while limerence does not require it, although it can be incorporated. The theory that love is a shared emotional bond between two people also prevents limerence being a case of actual love, as the affection may not always be reciprocated.
• Affection and fondness exist only as a disposition towards another person, irrespective of whether those feelings are reciprocated, whereas limerence demands return.
• Sex with the object is neither essential nor sufficient to an individual experiencing limerence, unlike one experiencing sexual attraction.
• Limerence is much longer-lived than feelings such as infatuation, romantic passion, and puppy love, enduring for months or even years.

[...]

Limerence has certain basic components:

• intrusive thinking about the limerent object
• acute longing for reciprocation
• some fleeting and transient relief from unrequited limerence through vivid imagining of action by the limerent object that means reciprocation
• fear of rejection and unsettling shyness in the limerent object's presence
• intensification through adversity
• acute sensitivity to any act, thought, or condition that can be interpreted favorably, and an extraordinary ability to devise or invent "reasonable" explanations for why neutral actions are a sign of hidden passion in the limerent object
• an aching in the chest or stomach when uncertainty is strong
• buoyancy (a feeling of walking on air) when reciprocation seems evident
• a general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background
• a remarkable ability to emphasize what is truly admirable in the limerent object and to avoid dwelling on the negative or render it into another positive attribute.

What really caught my attention was the following simple assertion: "Limerence is first and foremost a condition of cognitive obsession."

I'm no stranger to cognitive obsession. More to the point: I'm no stranger to limerence.

I wish Will Smith was here, so I could record him saying, "I mean...damn," and put up the .MP3 for you to hear.

One of the reasons I study neurochemistry and own a copy of the hated DSM-IV is that there is a certain satisfaction in discovering that I am not the only person in the world who feels or behaves a certain way. It can be disconcerting to recognize some of my own personality or behavioral traits in a textbook. But it is also comforting to realize that these "disorders," so-called, are as much a part of the human condition as love and death.

Thirty years after Dorothy Tennov published the results of her research, limerence is a word that still can't be found in most dictionaries. But there it is, in handy bullet points in a Wikipedia article: a delineation of an experience that I have had repeatedly in my life, distilled from a psychologist's interviews with 500 people.

And in the midst of it, that piquant phrase: cognitive obsession.

Limerence isn't love. It isn't infatuation, or lovesickness, or NRE, or pink fluffy stupids. It can turn into those things, but most often it's a condition. A confluence of psychology and neurochemistry that produces an intensely dramatic physical state which is overwhelming, even devastating. Like all such obsessions...it isn't real. There is no foundation to it outside the boundaries of our skulls.

I firmly believe that it's as possible to become addicted to the chemicals produced by our own brains as it is to chemicals that we introduce into our bodies. I think it's equally possible that there are many people, polyamorous and otherwise, who are drawn to situations that will produce the cascade of neurotransmitters which accompanies that fine old limerent feeling. Sure, the lows are really low, but the highs...man, the highs...

Knowledge is power. Having put a name to this thing, I can put it to rest.

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I tend to fall in love with ideas, especially if they're transgressive. I also tend to be a bit pedantic, which is unfortunate when I'm exploring new concepts with enthusiasm, because I sometimes write with a voice of greater authority than is warranted by my knowledge of the subject. (Also known as "Talking out my ass.")

Fortunately, this medium allows me to take a couple of steps back and reconsider or expand on something I've written if I'm not entirely pleased with it. Such clarification was the genesis of this past Saturday's post ("All Frubbly-like") and will also serve as the starting point for this one. Regarding the difference between the swinging and polyamory communities, I wrote,

The critical difference between the two communities depends entirely upon the definition of "love." If you're attending monthly wife-swapping gatherings (and why is it never "husband-swapping," anyway?) for the purposes of bringing a new toy and a different joy into your marriage, then what you've got going on there isn't love, at least not among all parties concerned. That's Serial Monogamy Pro (Service Pack 1). If hubby or wifey falls in love with a weekend paramour, there's going to be a problem. The "seriousness" of the relationship remains reserved for the binary couple.

My thinking this evening is, Says who? Me?

If my straw couple has set certain rules, to wit, "Falling in love isn't allowed," then there would be a problem. But what if they haven't? It's just as reasonable to consider that these hypothetical swingers have set the opposite rule, or that they've elected to deal with such situations as they arise, or even that they've set no rule at all. In each case, I suggest that proper handling of the situation and maintenance of their relationship would depend entirely on their commitment, not to each other, but to honesty, integrity, and self-knowledge.

When thinking about the language this culture uses to frame intimate relationships, particularly with regard to marriage, the core concept seems to be "Commitment to each other." But what does that mean, exactly? We can unpack it, and discover regard for the other's well-being and happiness, a pledge of loyalty, friendship, and support, even the aforementioned honesty. But those ideas aren't really inherent in the idea of commitment to another person, as it is expressed in those four simple words. They're add-ons. What does it mean to be committed "to" another person?

You can commit yourself to an effort, such as a project at work, a course of academic study, or perhaps the creation of a sculpture or some other creative pursuit. You can commit yourself to a cause. You can commit yourself to being in a certain place at a certain time. You can commit yourself to an idea. But the primary meaning of the word "commit" is "To give in trust or charge, to consign." It seems to me, then, that our ultimate cultural ideal of commitment to another person is being expressed as a kind of transaction: I give myself to you, you give yourself to me, and we'll seal the deal with this loop of shiny yellow metal topped with a chip of highly compressed sparkling carbon, and perhaps a herd of goats for your family.

It is, essentially, a sort of joint ownership, rather like two cars purchasing each other.

What accompanies such a transaction? Ownership of each other's slippery bits, for starters. More ethereally, there is also an expectation of limited affection...ownership, essentially, of each other's roving eyes and hearts.

Forget wondering about how polyamorous people make their relationships work...how the hell do monogamous people make theirs work? Sneak on over to this page of infidelity statistics to find out.

Back? Good. The answer, it would seem, is "Very often, they don't." ("By the grace of God" isn't an answer I'm even remotely interested in exploring here, thanks.)

We live in a society that values comfort over truth. The truth is, hearts and eyes do rove. As individuals in intimate relationships with one another, we* can either accept that, and deal with it, or deny it, and deal with that. The generally accepted vows and sexual practices handed down to us by our Victorian and agrarian forebears were intended to establish patrilineal succession and the orderly transfer of property. With the passing of those needs, what modern needs are served by this cultural ideal? What is it that we seek, when we vow "'Till death do us part?" What is the purpose of this promise?

From where I'm sitting, theorizing with my laptop, there's one obvious answer: the mitigation of fear. Fear of being alone. Fear of being abandoned. Fear of being hurt. It's as though, with one ceremony, we can avoid confronting our human natures for the remainder of our lives, safe in a state-sanctioned bubble. And from this flows a host of taboos, lies, and half-truths. One partner keeps quiet about the cute new hire at the office. The other is hurt by a lingering glance after the departing waiter that lasts a bit too long. Sexual boredom doesn't get addressed. Affairs of the heart, body, or both ensue. Deception follows, with guilt hard on its heels.

All because vows were made that were supposed to take care of that sort of thing, forever.

None of this is restricted to formal marriage. But that idea forms the template for all intimate love relationships in our society, and perhaps it shouldn't. Perhaps, instead of being committed "to each other," we should be committed to ideals of integrity, honesty, and awareness of our selves. What might such a relationship look like?

What if, as one small example, the truth had primacy over keeping secrets to avoid "hurting his/her feelings?" Examine the motivation behind such an act. What's actually going on, when we stuff down a burst of emotionally intimate or erotic feelings for someone other than our partner, rather than expressing it? Ostensibly, this is done out of concern for the partner's feelings. But who is so threatened by an idea that they can't bear to hear it? And if they are so threatened...what trust is there? A whole realm of experience becomes walled off, a minefield smack in the middle of the relationship where no one dares to tread. And why? Again: fear. We don't know what will happen if we attempt to work our way through that uncomfortable, pock-marked territory. He or she might be angry. They might be hurt. They might leave.

Is it necessary to consider the feelings of another? Of course it is, that's obvious. My contention is that rather than genuine concern for another, it is often the avoidance of complication, discomfort, and fear that drives such secrecy. Weigh silence so motivated against the benefits of being totally open, and against the potential rewards of letting another person know exactly who you are, and having them accept you. Furthermore, consider the depth of a relationship where both partners can be so open and accepting of each other. Is such honesty a risk? Yes. No question about it. But so is living in fear.

Getting from the expression of such ideas to acting on them is, I think, a long journey, but the principle remains the same.

There is actually one type of relationship in which "committing to another person" makes unqualified sense to me: the parent-child relationship. That is the one place where the idea of a person being "given in trust" to another is appropriate, and the mitigation of the fear of being alone, abandoned, or hurt is justifiably paramount.

I don't think I really want my intimate adult relationships to be so closely patterned on those of my childhood.

*Yes, I'm using the inclusive "we," but this is all my stuff, your mileage may vary, etc. and so on. All of this is basically a theoretical exercise at the moment, and, like most such exercises, it could all just be a load of overwritten, overgeneralized nonsense. Perhaps, at some point, someone will step in and actually argue with me, and thus improve (or destroy) whatever arguments I've managed to make thus far. In the end, though: nothing about polyamory is necessarily superior to monogamy, and its workability depends entirely upon the folks involved and their own desires. As always, everything I write here is first and foremost from my own perspective, and any judgmental overtones you might detect are failures on my part.

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To start with, something disturbingly normal happened today: I overslept. Until 11:30 in the morning, to be exact. This might not seem like a big deal to you, but for the past two months, going to sleep and staying asleep didn't happen, and I usually gave up between 4:30 and 5:30 in the morning. Granted: I did take 1mg of Xanax before going to bed at around 1:00AM last night, but prior to last night, even that didn't help. I'd still snap awake at some ungodly hour, and be out of bed well before 6:00AM.

So: this is one of those small yet important victories. My sleep in general has improved over the past four or five days, but this...11:30 in the morning! I can now enjoy the feeling of having too much of the day gone because I'm a lazy oversleeping bastard. Happy happy joy joy!

But that's not what this collection of words is supposed to be about, that's just what happened to me a mere twenty minutes ago, and I thought I'd share it with you because I know you're all so very interested in the minutiae of my exciting and stylish life.

No, what I'm supposed to be writing about is that Santa Barbara, the "American Riviera," is actually a very Small Town, and I suddenly feel like I'm living in the outer provinces. Good weather, ocean, palm trees, and so on. But try to find a gay club. Go on, I dare you.

Can't be done. Because there aren't any. A co-worker and I were talking about that last week, and this week's Independent--the local rag with bits of news and a What's Doing In Town section--had a cover story about where to "Eat, Drink, and Be Merry." The full-page photo on the cover was decidedly full of men dancing with other men, and, sure enough, the first section of the story inside was subtitled, "Where Have All The Gay Bars Gone?" The short answer was "Away."

In fact, there is only one gay bar in the tri-country area, and it's 30 miles away in Ventura, a place called Paddy's. So, I put on my face and a decent set of clothes--not too flash, but not California casual either, because I don't do California casual--and drove down to check the place out. I decided that I would have one--count it, one--drink, and made it a gin and tonic...they never make those strong because no one really drinks them anymore.

Maybe the place picks up later in the evening. But when I arrived a bit after 9:30 there was a random queer assemblage of young men in baseball caps, old men drinking smoothies, and various gatherings of women around the bar and the pool table, with music thumping into two empty dance floors and a lot of boy booty shaking on the flat panel screens above the bar.

So, I sat at the bar and watched the video booty, sipping at my drink (not strong, as expected) and occasionally writing my impressions down in the Moleskine notebook I carry with me because I Is A Writer. After about 20 minutes, I finished said drink, got up and wandered about the place, checking out the vacant dance floors. I said hello again to a guy who probably thought I was cruising him (I most decidedly was not), and headed home.

When I was living in Jersey City and Queens--even in New Brunswick--it was easy to go where the gay was when I decided I wanted to. In fact, I think the gayest thing I ever did was grab my copy of Martin Duberman's Stonewall and head into New York to have a drink at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, the anniversary of the 1969 riots. I suppose I could've made it gayer...but was mid-afternoon and the place was mostly empty, so I just read my book about the events that happened right where I sat, drank my drink, and soaked up the history of the place.

It was the same in my early twenties in Philadelphia: find the club, go to the club, have fun. I was never a particularly cruisey type of guy, but I did enjoy the atmosphere, and yes, I did like being cruised. It's a straightforward (if I can use that term) process, very above board, and if you demur, it can turn into a fun bout of flirting. It is, in fact, my exposure to the honest, uninhibited, and unashamed pursuit of sex found within the gay community that makes what I'm discovering about the polyamory community so appealing right now. Not the "endless flow of meaningless sex" part of it, but the "direct" part of it, in this case communicated with the eyes, gestures, perhaps a touch or two. "Hey--wanna fuck? No? OK then, I'm going to take my shirt off and dance right over there, so you'll know what you're missing. Kiss!" The application of that sort of uninhibited honesty to the more intimate parts of a relationship has great appeal to me.

Unfortunately, just as I'm starting to re-explore my lavender side, I find myself in a place where the sort of atmosphere I could readily find back east isn't prevalent. I suspect that, even if Paddy's does pick up late at night,* as the only game in town it might resemble Cheers for queers more than a well-populated urban club where anonymity is yours if you want it. Not that I need to hide anything (obviously), but at a big city club you don't need to break into a clique to enjoy the place or the evening. Plenty of whatever for everybody!

At a party last Sunday I talked for awhile with S., a fellow my age who moved here from San Francisco and is a refugee from its leather/BDSM scene. He needed a place that was slower, because his social life was starting to grind him down. I need, I think, a place that's somewhere in the middle, and this town may yet provide that. S. works for the local gay services organization, and they do a monthly sunset gathering gathering atop the Hotel Andalucia, which I will attend. There are also people--mostly DJs--who organize "gay nights" at various clubs, so the scene, such as it is, may be one of rotating venues and odd nights during the week. There is, for example, Sunday night at the Wildcat Lounge, which I may float through this evening if I feel like it.

But even here in supposedly liberal California, there are issues. Some organizers complained of hostility on the part of the venues' staffs. Money is paramount: if your queer event doesn't bring in enough cashflow, you're not invited back.

It's a strange place, it really is. What I've discovered over the past six months is that if I really want something, I have the ability to make it happen. So, I'll see whether this situation in particular requires the application of that newly-found mutant power.

*I have since been told, on good authority, that it does.

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Well, that was certainly a pisser of an afternoon, wasn't it? Not that you'd know, because you weren't there. Honestly, you never call, I haven't seen you in months, what the fuck.

Anyway. I come not to abuse my readership (either of you), but to entertain it, or something. I'm sitting on the couch, fending off a needy cat who doesn't quite understand the concept of laptop and wondering just how far into the shoals of bitterness I've actually wandered. It's difficult to tell, sometimes, whether I'm producing posts as part of my regular everyday processing or I'm actually striving for something completely different. Or, perhaps, some combination of the two.

It does seem a bit of a stretch, doesn't it? I mean: one month I'm high as a limerent kite and the next I'm decrying not only my own foolishness but everyone else's. Really, it's not your fault, and I certainly don't mean to be bashing you about the head with my antinuptiality if that's what you're happily aiming for. Different fucks for different ducks and all that (is that my "fuck" quota for this post? It might be; I'll check.)

I've got three books lined up in my reading queue, one after the other: Easton and Liszt's "The Ethical Slut," Tennov's "Love and Limerence," and Lewis, Amini, and Lannon's "A General Theory of Love." This is on top of the book I'm reading for the book club I started a couple of weeks ago: Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness," which takes as its basic premise that humans are stupendously bad at predicting what will make them happy, and attempts to explain why.

See a theme here? I knew you could.

Despite having been a bit of an asocial introvert for much of my life, I am in fact an acute observer of people and their behavior, and nine times out of ten if I'm asked to explain what the hell's going on with someone, I'll get it right, even if they insist to the sky that I'm wrong. This might be the kind of objectivity that one obtains as an observer of and not a participant in the odd dance of primates we're pleased to call society, but nevertheless, it's a useful skill that I really need to value and trust much more than I do. The trouble is, I end up gathering a lot of data but fail to present it to my decision-making committee in a handy executive summary which they can then use to make recommendations to the action committee, so while they're hemming and hawing over the Powerpoint slides being projected against my frontal lobes, the impulsive bastards in my limbic system are charging full-speed ahead without even so much as a preliminary budget, and god I really do work in corporate America again, don't I? Jesus. Stop that.

The other side of this particular psychological coin is that, like Clarice on the other side of the ventilated plexiglas, I have difficulty getting the keen observer in the cell to apply his skills to himself. (Did I just compare a part of myself to a psychopathic cannibal? Why yes, you did. Have some Chianti.) The cobbler's children have no shoes, and the acute observer of human behavior has mixed success in sussing out his own motivations.

In real time, that is. I can roll the tape and see exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it, but my in-the-moment processing is often sorely lacking. Part of that, I think, is due to the fact that I'm used to being pickled, and I'm not now. It's frustrating, though, and I do occasionally beat myself up about all the time I've wasted in my life attempting to bludgeon myself into mental health with bongs, bottles, and pills.

Still: I'm better at it this month than I was last month, certainly better than I was the month before that, and entire galaxies better than I was this time last year. There is progress, and part of the lesson plan (Part III, actually) is learning to cut myself some slack and stop treating time and love alike as though they're vanishingly rare commodities in a starvation economy. Yes, yes, live every day as though it's your last, but frankly, I know what it's like to think upon waking that this day or that day might be my last, and it's not helpful. It doesn't lend daring and vim to the diurnal anomaly; it creates fear and paralysis. If I get nailed by a bus tomorrow I won't spend my last millisecond of awareness regretting that I didn't call the personal trainer at my gym who wrote her cell number on her business card after our "free session" for no reason I could identify until a week after the fact. I'll spend it getting hit by a bus. Very Zen, that.

Despite my mad skilz and best intentions, the lumpen fist of cognitive obsession still manages to put a good squeeze on my heart at least every few days, and this afternoon was no exception. From a strictly empirical standpoint, it's actually quite fascinating: Observe the monkey. Notice how, despite his accumulated knowledge, hard-won, he is powerless against the onslaught of his own desires and their accompanying neurological states. Look! He's discovered websites he probably shouldn't read...and there he goes! Let's give him a food pellet and a shock to the ankle.

From a subjective standpoint, however, it blows yak dick. It's one thing to be jerked around by someone else, but quite another to realize you've been pulling your own damn strings all along, and are still doing so. Figuring out how to disentangle yourself from your own manipulations is bloody difficult at best, and a fount of misery at worst. Yet: I see people in the same situation who've got no idea that they've got their own strings clutched in their own two fists, and are puzzled every time they kick themselves in the face. So perhaps I'm ahead of the game, even though some days it feels like I've lost it entirely.

Fuck.

(I had one left.)

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While wandering through the theoretical wilderness over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading the online and offline words of those engaged in the actual practice of polyamory. As an outsider and observer of the community, I’ve noticed a few things, which I shall now share with you on the weak premise that they might actually be of interest.

To begin with: polyamory is a big tent. There are as many ways of doing it as there are people doing it. There is not much orthodoxy, and what few principles are regarded as “fundamental” are often challenged by folks who do things differently but still claim the polyamorist label. This makes it a bit difficult to arrive at any definition of that label except a personal one of my own, and I’ve found that many people have reached a similar conclusion.

That said, there seem to be three main “camps,” with, of course, significant overlap between them, various outliers, and so forth. The first, and most easily Googled, are the free love, earthy-crunchy, Gaia-worshipping neopagan types. These I will place towards the end of the spectrum I have affectionately named Flaky. (As both an ex-Jesus Jumper and an ex-New Age Pagan-Style Person, I retain a bit of residual fondness for each clan.) Here you’ll find talk of infinite love, lots of spiritual woo-woo, and more than a whiff of the 60s.

The second camp occupies the Geek portion of the spectrum: sci-fi/fantasy/comic fanboys and fangirls, gamers, SCA types, and the Ren Faire crowd. These are my people, although I have long been separated from the tribe. You will find poly folk at almost any con, tournament, or faire.

Finally, there are the Literati, heirs to the 19th-century Romantics. Their practices owe more to the “free love” of that era and its Wollstonecraftian critiques of the institution of marriage than they do to the promiscuous counterculture that popularized the same term during the last century. I haven’t found too many of these yet…just enough to convince me that there are probably more of them out there.

There is a steady current of feminism that runs throughout, best exemplified in modern times by sex-positive Grand Dames like Betty Dodson, Susie Bright, and Annie Sprinkle. Although I don’t consider myself a feminist—I’m a somewhat lapsed humanist—I can certainly see how the claiming of male sexual sovereignty and the redefinition or rejection of marriage would be attractive.

Another common element for all involved is the professed tripartite foundation of communication, integrity, and honesty. So much so that almost any post to the LJ Polyamory blog requesting advice on one complicated relationship problem or another will invariably receive multiple replies containing some version of the chant: communicate, communicate, communicate. This is obviously a required element for any relationship, but the point made by the polyamorists is that the complexities of multiple intimacies require more of it, with a greater degree of deliberate intention, if there is to be even the slightest chance of success.

Like everything else, the definition of “success” varies, but it generally seems to involve the avoidance of having relationships that turn into smoking craters. And there are a lot of smoking craters to be found surrounding the polyamorist tent, along with a complement of wounded people staggering about, some of whom are quite clearly working out (or avoiding) serious personal and interpersonal issues. However, I remain unconvinced that these craters and walking wounded are proof of the non-viability of the practice, any more than the shattered wreckage and bloodied survivors of failed monogamous relationships prove the non-viability of that practice. Again, the success or failure of any kind of relationship is entirely dependent upon the people involved.

Pea recently remarked, “You know, you’re not in a state now—and perhaps never have been—where you can handle a relationship with one person; what makes you think you can do this? Why is this your perfect solution?” Leaving aside for the moment how grateful I am that I can even have such a conversation with her (despite the fact that she thinks this is all bullshit and that I'm out of my gourd): polyamory isn’t a solution for anything. Part of what I was alluding to in "Polyamorous Perverse?" is that I believe that love, poly or mono, ought not to be a matter of completing a partial self or resolving psychological problems. Having recently gone through a frenzied attempt at love as a life raft, that's clearer to me than anything else has been in my life.

I can’t speak for my erstwhile lover, obviously. But for my part, that experience was an exercise in the unintentional avoidance of the truth. Not just about my own emotions, but about what was driving those emotions: a desperate effort to avoid going where I needed to go. Another gem from Pea: “You can’t really hit bottom when you’re in a relationship.” She’s right. You have to arrive at that place alone.

When I peruse the well-meaning advice offered online to those in need, or read entire book chapters that are devoted to the intricacies of polyamorous communication, I am aware of the difficult, frightening depths which underlie that simple word. Drawing from my own experience, it’s just not enough to say “We shall be open and honest with each other, and create a safe space for ourselves.” You can feel as though you’re being absolutely forthright, speaking and acting from a place of integrity, but if you are not explicitly aware of your self and your motivations, you’re just play-acting. That’s why my own definition of what’s essential for any relationship—mono or poly, gay or straight—begins with acute self-knowledge. Without that, I can’t communicate, I don’t have integrity, and I can’t be honest. Worse yet: without that, I might actually believe that I can do and have all those things.

Communication involves fearless expression, open negotiation, and crystalline boundaries: what do you need to know about me? What do I need to know about you? What are you comfortable telling me? What am I comfortable telling you? What are your limits? What are mine? As you can see, none of this means a thing if I don’t know my own answers and, I would argue, why those answers are what they are. If I tell someone I need to know details about their relationship with a third party, I’d damn well better know why. Is it jealousy? If so, what’s it rooted in? Fear? Fear of what? Abandonment? Being lied to? And on and on.

This is work. Real, hard-core, mind- and heart-popping work, with no guaranteed reward whatsoever. I might express a need, only to be told that it can’t be met. Then I have to decide how important that need is and, if it’s important enough, walk away from something that’s incandescently appealing. Or I might decide that it’s worth negotiating a compromise that everyone involved is happy with. Even then, what worked for awhile might not always work, and I’d have to go through the same thing all over again.

That’s difficult enough with one other person. But to maintain communication, integrity, and honesty in intimate partnerships with two or more? The mind boggles and flops on its back, gasping for air.

So why bother?

Because radical trust appeals to me. Because every idea is worth exploring. Because it’s transgressive. Because there are possibilities here to which I have never given serious, concerted thought.

But mostly because I simply must know.

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I ventured forth to the Wildcat Lounge last night, wearing my freshly-tailored white cotton CK suit, and was rewarded with a mini-spectacle that recalled the mild debauchery of my earlier years. I arrived too early (as seems to be my wont), but after an hour or so things picked up, and by 11:00PM the dance floor was packed, the patio was likewise full, there was a matching set of low body fat dancers—one of each gender—dancing on small raised platforms, the music was loud enough to flutter my pants, and I had met A., N1., N2., and J. (girl, girl, boy, girl, respectively). Over the course of the evening, three out of these four new acquaintances inquired about my orientation. “You’re gay, right?” was the first such query, from N1. “Not entirely, no,” was my unplanned response, which was met with, “Oh, so you just like sex.” That seemed fair enough, so I let it stand.

My impression—which may or may not be accurate—was that the two women who asked had no trouble at all with the concept, while N2. seemed to find it somewhat confusing. I could be wrong, of course…it’s hard to pick up subtleties in a crowd awash with club tunes. N2. had overheard the question when J. asked it, and responded to my “weighing of the scales” hand gestures by saying, “That’s too complicated for my head right now.” Later, as the two of us sat at a table alone (and after his head, presumably, was ready) he asked again. “So, what was that? You’re gay, but not sure…?” My canned response to that question has always been some flavor of “No, I’m quite sure. Not really a ‘choose one’ sort of guy.” So that’s what I said, more or less. I found it interesting, though, that the first thing that had come to his mind was that I was uncertain about my preferences.

I noticed the same thing when talking to S., who I met at a Memorial Day barbecue. When describing the crowd at the Wildcat, he mentioned that there were a lot of UCSB students there and that, “Of course, everybody’s ‘bi,’” to which I immediately replied, “So am I.” I knew what he meant—there is a bit of faddishness surrounding the whole bi thing which tends to increase with youth, especially around college age. There’s even a term for it among women: LUG, for Lesbian Until Graduation. There may be a gay equivalent (GUG, I guess), but I haven’t heard it used. Still, S. backpedaled a bit, saying that while he was sure there were probably a few who were “really” bi, these were young folks, etc. I let him off the hook by letting him know that I knew what he meant.

I was expecting to encounter some of this when I stepped back out into the gay community: the notion that bi people are a) confused b) “really” gay or c) “really” straight. I wasn’t expecting to encounter the gender difference in terms of immediate acceptance, although it does make sense…based on what I’ve encountered while lurking in various online poly groups and through my other readings, there are many more women in primary relationships with men who take on other women as partners than there are men who take on other men. There’s a certain fluidity to attraction among females that just doesn’t seem to be as prevalent among males, and I suppose I’ll discover whether my ongoing experiences lend more support to that theory.

The problem I have with a, b, or c is the same problem I have with certain popular brands of sexual identity politics: the idea that sexual preference is necessarily hard-wired, biological, and binary. There is no doubt in my mind that my own preferences are choices. I don’t have to step out into the gay scene here, but I choose to do so. I’m currently so far off the market that I’m not even in the same building, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy flirting over the rim of my glass and watching the dancers dance. Last night, sitting at my table just off the dance floor, with the music hurtling against my ribs and the lights turning my white suit into an ever-changing kaleidoscope, I threw back my head and laughed into the revelry. The whole scene was so rich, so full of life and detail, that I could feel my Writer Gremlin™ pulling all of it in and filing it away for later use. I soaked up the sensuality of gut-thumping bass, bodies in motion, and incipient sex.

I chose to put myself in that place, to have the conversations I had, and to identify myself as I identified myself. My choice is no less valid for being a choice. I am sexually sovereign, and that sovereignty deserves as much respect as the choices of those who were born as they are. I see no reason to regard the compulsions of biology as superior to the rational pursuit of transgressive pleasures.

It is this quality of transgression that gets short shrift in today’s sexual climate. That’s a shame-based attitude, I think…the notion that whatever you’re doing has to be somehow normalized in order to be a valid sexual expression. This is what drives the search for “gay genes,” prenatal factors, and other biological determiners of sexual orientation. If such factors can be identified, then homosexuality definitively becomes a part of the fabric of Nature (or, if you prefer, Creation) and undermines arguments against it that are based upon ideas of sin, unnatural behavior, and so on. But it would still be a short step from there to arguments that vaguely resemble, "OK, maybe God made them gay...but you, you're choosing, and that's just wrong."

Furthermore: it’s certain that, should such biological factors be found, many people who have identified as gay or lesbian—perhaps for their entire lives—will discover that they don't have them. Would these people suddenly become straight? I don’t think so. The only reason to search for these factors is to normalize homosexuality because choice alone is regarded as insufficient...certainly by the Christian right and their ilk, but also, I suspect, by some supporters and members of the gay community itself. This diminishes the validity of individual sovereignty in matters of sexual practice.

It also leads to nonsense like this: "Pentagon Confirms It Sought To Build A 'Gay Bomb'". Silly or not, this is based entirely upon the idea that you can alter a person's sexual orientation physiologically. And yet, in the article's final paragraph, we find this:

"Throughout history we have had so many brave men and women who are gay and lesbian serving the military with distinction," said Geoff Kors of Equality California. "So, it's just offensive that they think by turning people gay that the other military would be incapable of doing their job. And its absurd because there's so much medical data that shows that sexual orientation is immutable and cannot be changed."

If orientation is immutable, it's biological (unless you want to argue that psychological drives are cast in stone, which you might). And if it's biological, then, at some point, our knowledge of biology might increase to the point where we can change it. Which, paradoxically, suddenly makes the idea of a "gay bomb" or some other agent of change a bit less silly.

The true investment in the idea of the inherence and immutability of sexual identity, as confirmed by "medical data," is simply this: in the more orthodox forms of sexual identity politics, you cannot choose to be a member of an oppressed minority. That's whole point. Oppression depends on factors over which you have no control, like skin color, gender, and (supposedly) sexual orientation.

As for myself...I don't like the idea of being so powerless, any more than I like the idea that my deliberate choices are evidence of a lack of self-awareness.

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Andrew Sullivan’s “Scripture and Homosexuality” post perfectly illustrates the point I was attempting to make yesterday in “Choice.” In it, he quotes from Luke Timothy Johnson’s article in Commonweal ( “Homosexuality and the Church”):

We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality-namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God's created order.

I have a problem with this. Johnson may be explicitly rejecting certain scriptural premises, but the implication is that free choice—the deliberate seeking out of sexual experience—is morally corrupt when it falls outside the bounds of an inherent, God-given orientation. I find that no less oppressive than a gang of Fred Phelps' thugs picketing Matthew Shepard’s funeral.

Paradoxically, Johnson then writes:

I will say a further word about “experience,” a term that without careful discernment may become simply an excuse for irresponsible behavior. First, though, it is important to acknowledge that terms like “sexual orientation,” and even “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are themselves distorting oversimplifications of complex human realities. One reason for paying attention to specific human stories, in fact, is that they so often prove more complex and obscure than the categories that polarize debates and block discernment.

Later, he expands on that theme, and increases the paradox:

These are significant recognitions, ones that arise from hard-fought daily experience. It is extraordinarily important, however, that those of us who base our convictions on experience do not make the category of experience a form of cheap grace, as though whatever feels good is morally acceptable. By “experience” we do not mean every idiosyncratic or impulsive expression of human desire. We refer rather to those profound stories of bondage and freedom, longing and love, shared by thousands of persons over many centuries and across many cultures, that help define them as human. The church cannot say “yes” to what the New Testament calls porneia (“sexual immorality”); but the church must say yes to the witness of lives that build the holiness of the church.

The image Johnson creates of human sexual desire is one where sexual activity is only appropriate within the context of “profound stories of bondage and freedom, longing and love.” He claims that the concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and sexual orientation itself are “distorting oversimplifications,” while simultaneously equating “idiosyncratic” expressions of human desire with “sexual immorality.” Why does he find it impossible to be both sexually idiosyncratic and moral?

Commonweal interviewed Sullivan 14 years ago, and he quotes a portion of that interview as commentary on Johnson's piece:

"(The Roman Catholic Church) defines Gay people by a sexual act in a way it never defines heterosexual people, and in this, the church is in weird agreement with extreme Gay activists who also want to define homosexuality in terms of its purely sexual content. Whereas being Gay is not about sex as such. Fundamentally, it's about one's core emotional identity. It's about whom one loves, ultimately, and how that can make one whole as a human being ... a single person's moral equilibrium in a whole range of areas can improve with marriage ... because there is a kind of stability and security and rock upon which to build one's moral and emotional life.

Thus: sex without love is immoral, and binary marriage is a means of moral improvement. This is the stance that Sullivan must adopt as a Catholic and a homosexual. I am neither, and so I seek another way.

The sticking point is the definition of love. For Sullivan, love is that which “can make one whole as a human being.” As I’ve written, I reject that entirely. I am not half a person who needs another person, male or female, to make myself complete. This idea is rooted in an ancient Near Eastern myth of binary creation that is no less ridiculous than Aristophanes’ tale of hu