A GAY CHILD MENTORED

(from the series:Gay Emancipation)

Despite the heartache of being an abused child, and the constant feeling that "there must be something that I do wrong because daddy doesn't like me;" there is a life-force so strong in a child that he or she will persevere until that day when someone comes along and gives that child a sense of hope and a knowing that they are loveable.

My hope and sense of worthiness as a boy was given to me by a man who was not my real uncle but who I always thought of as my uncle, and who I often wished was my real father. He was a Gay Spaniard who lived in my grandmother's boarding house in Patterson, California, in the mid-1940's. His name was Domingo Dominguez. And he was the most masculine, loving, caring, fun, smart and daring man I was ever nurtured by. He was attractive, a success at business, and liked by many people. He was seen as a gentle man of character and integrity. He made me feel like the best little boy in the world. And despite all the abuses of my father, I discovered courage and the ability to discern the complicated natures of people, like my father, from Domingo. Where there was impatience in my father, there was patience in Domingo. Where there was intolerance in my father, there was tolerance in Domingo. Where there was the ability to give love freely in Domingo, there was distance and a coldness of heart in my father. Or a broken heart.

My mother's family were Spanish immigrants. My father's family came from Portugal. Domingo got along so well with everybody, I thought of him as a citizen of the world. But mostly, I thought of him as my hero. I would spend summer's at my grandmother's and that meant I would spend day after day roaming the rich golden hills of Patterson's West Side, near Mt. Oso (the bear). Domingo leased a large spread, encompassing thousands of acres of range land, where he provided both sheep and cattle to the army during World War II. It had made him a "rich" man by local standards and I was always very proud of the way people seemed to know about him and admired him as we would walk the main street of Patterson after the war.

It was Domingo who taught me to ride a horse. It was Domingo who taught me to stare down a bull by the way I held my body and looked into his eyes. But it was only Domingo who would stand in the middle of the corral with a bull and kneel to the ground as the bull prepared to charge him. Domingo taught me the ways of the land and he taught me that I could be at one with the things around me.

Domingo was old enough to be my father's father. And my tiny eyes were always studying the way my father behaved around Domingo. Most of all, Dad respected Domingo. Domingo knew much more about handling cattle and sheep and horses and people than my father did. Domingo taught my father how to break horses and he wanted to teach him how to run a large and successful ranch operation. Domingo saw the woundedness and wildness in my father. And he tried to help my father. But I believe my father was already far too wounded, psychologically, after the war to be capable of accepting Domingo's love and mentoring. Beyond a certain point. my father was afraid of being perceived as a man needing help from anyone, especially from another man.

When I couldn't have been more than about seven years old, I remember asking Domingo why he wasn't married. He was good looking and women were always flirting with him. He seemed taken aback by this question from a child, but he became very grave and said,"I was to be married but she died of the plague in Spain when we were very young." This could have been true; I will never know. But it sounded defensive.And it didn't explain the absence of women friends in his current life, nor the many men friends that he would often visit over the next twenty years. And the two men that he lived with until each died, before Domingo's own death. I would learn more about Domingo's life as I grew older and, most important, I would learn about the unmentioned code that people who never acknowledged Gay people would use inorder to help them survive their isolation while in the very midst of the straight world. My favorite was my grandmother's loving cackles directed toward Domingo when she asked him how he would be spending his weekend, away from the boarding house. She would smile, smirk and laugh while saying, "Well, Domingo, are you going to San Francisco this weekend to have a high time?" He would grin back at her and say something very softly and quickly in Spanish so that I wouldn't understand. And my grandmother would laugh wickedly and uncontrollably. Like all good catholics, they drank heavily from the river of "denial." I would learn that denial was a means to survival, until the day it killed you, or you set yourself free from it.

What a difference just one person can make in another persons life. That person can make the difference in you seeing yourself as "good" or "bad," as feeling confident about yourself or doubtful, as believing you aren't really worthy of any acknowledgement, or that you have a rightful place in the world and that people will welcome you, rather then shun you. At or near the end of each summer, my mother would me at gradma's and say,"Richard, are you ready to come now?" MY answer was always something like: "Mom, can I stay another week?" One time she got so frustrated and hurt she said to me,"Richard, why do you like it there better than home?" I already knew it would hurt her more if I told the truth, so I just said I wanted to do some more horseback riding. But the truth was that I was experiencing being and enjoying my own self-hood with Domingo. I could open up and express my own happiness and I could ask hundreds of questions without ever being criticized. When I returned home, I knew I would have to shut down, to remain quiet and not ever too expressive. I had to monitor my father's every mood, to make certain I didn't annoy or anger him. And where i would be nurtured by Domingo every day, I could count on being ridiculed, mean-fully teased, and generally disempowered of any self worth on a daily basis from my father. I was afraid of my father. And my mother was afraid of my father, although she still loved him very much. So I could live in what I now consider a "healthy" home with Domingo and my grandparents, or I could live with a brooding, angry,traumatized,sometimes drunken,sometimes violent father when I went home. But I always felt guilty staying at Domingo's too long. Because I knew that my mother missed me and that I brought some happiness to her that made it easier for her to endure my father's woundedness.

It wasn't until years later, as I studied psychology, that I learned how family members align themselves with each other in-order to protect themselves from abusive family members. I was about nine years old when the alignment with my mother became steadfast. It was done to protect both myself and her and my sister from his out-of-control behaviors. So, in many ways, I stopped being a child at nine, in-order to participate in a dysfunctional family dynamic so that I might survive. I will return to episodes of "survival" as I make my way through this journey that we're on to discover how to discern the alignments and realignments we need to make in ourselves and in the world so that these things stop destroying our humanity and our empowerment.

But I want to return to Domingo and the things that were so good about the way he gave me hope and courage and a belief that I could always figure things out no matter how scary they got. If you're a kid reading this, and it seems like you don't know what to do when things feel dangerous. You must know that you need to find somebody you can trust to talk to, and you need to know that you can always call the police. And you need to be able to "think on your feet." Always give a troubled person, an angry person, plenty of space and never say anything that will get them even more worked up. When I was a little boy my mother said to me, "Richard, don't ever get your father angry." She knew his anger was dangerous and she knew he was capable of violence.

But I want to end this chapter with a memory of an incident that happened with Domingo and me, and how he taught me courage in the face of danger. And how he taught me to "think on my feet." And how he--by his very relaxed and natural demeanor--taught me to deal with danger as best as I could, regardless of not knowing what might happen next. I want you to know that when you find a mentor in your life---Gay or Straight, young or old---you will have a connection with that person at the level of your heart and you will be able to flow with the energy of that other person to a place a great understanding, and deep compassion, and boundless trust. And when you have walked through the darkness and the danger with someone who knew how to find the light and the quiet and the peace on the other side, you will then be able to walk the next darkened path on your own. And someday you will do this for others. Because just as there can be a cycle of hate and violence, there is also a cycle of love and peace. And you already know this or you would't have found these words.

The words Domingo gave me were, "Follow me, Ricardo....." I had become so frightened I had curled up in a ball, my knees pressing against my chest. I was under the covers and I could hear what sounded like a giant lion screaming in the darkness somewhere on the mountain behind the cabin. It was a hot summer night and there was a moon bright enough to illuminate the inside of the ranch house and the horse corral that was just beyond the back door. "That damn lion," Domingo roared. And I remember thinking that a mountain lion sure must think he was tough stuff and in charge of everything, if he could simply walk around in the middle of the night and scare the holy hell out of animal and folk alike. Here I was just in my bvd's and Domingo was butt naked as he reached for his rifle and walked across the wooden bedroom floor and toward the back door. "Be very quiet Ricardo, and you stay on the porch. If anything happens you come back inside and close the door. You go for help in the morning.You ride Pinta." What was he talking about? Did he think the lion would eat him? Was something else going on out there? I remember him walking across the porch as I stood in the open door and heard the great cat scram in defiance of everything within ear shot. The sound of the cats voice bounced off both the northwest and northeast ridges behind the ranch cabin. Pinta and two other horses were circling in the corral and I thought they would jump the fence, but Domingo called to Pinta and she came to fence post where he was standing. He tied a rope around her neck and anchored her to the post. The other horses continued to kick and buck and snort through their nostrils as they circled the corral.

I remembered that Domingo had been talking to one of the sheep herders earlier in the week about two lambs that had been found up the valley. The sheep herders believed that a lion had gotten them. There wasn't much left.

Domingo picked up his rifle and headed down the fence line to a place beyond some trees that would have blocked his view of the high mountain ridge-line that abruptly rose beyond the ranch property line. Once again that cat let out a magnificently arrogant shrill scream that sent a chill right down my spine. I wanted Domingo to come back into the cabin and shut the door. But I knew he was concerned for the animals and I could hear the sound of cattle moving on the other side of the cabin where the larger live stock yard was located. Domingo cocked the Winchester rifle and placed the barrel on the top of a fence post. With the gun steadied, he pointed the barrel upwards toward the sound of the screaming cat. This was in a rocky region of the mountain ridge and when he began firing in rapid succession, I could hear the sound of ricocheting bullets as they bounced from boulder to boulder. He emptied his rifle and then reloaded. He emptied it again. Then he and I waited for the next cry from the lion. It seemed like we waited forever, but when it did come it was much farther North and much more difficult to hear. Domingo turned back toward the cabin, stopped to untie Pinta and petted one of the sheep dogs before coming back to the porch. "I think we scared the cat enough where he will head up toward Mt. Oso. He has a big range so it could be awhile before he circles back around here.You O.K., Ricardo?" "Yea. Did ya wanna kill him?" "Oh, not much chance of that from this distance. Let's go to bed.Enough gato loco for one night," he smiled.

He was still butt naked with his manhood dangling between his legs and his matter of fact ease at dealing with his circumstance. I'm certain he felt fear and had concern for the livestock and me. But what he communicated to me--and at many levels--was that he just figured it out as he went along and he kept making the moves that redirected the danger to some place where it no longer was a factor. He might have to deal with this cat on another day, but the cat knew he had been communicated with, and that there were boundaries to be respected between living creatures. Domingo taught me what the boundaries between people and between child and adult should look like. He revered life and the living things around him responded to the Spirit that was within him. When I woke up the next morning, the cabin was chilly and I had curled up close to him to keep warm. I needed to go pee, but I stayed close, with my arm at his waist, for a little longer. I knew I wouldn't have this sense of safety and manly love when I went home. I clung to Domingo for as long as I could. And it must be abundantly apparent to you by now that I cling to his memory to this very day. He was the first man that I ever knew that truly loved me--like a real father. And now I must say to the Spirit that is watching me write this: "Domingo, I hope I have not messed up this recounting of history through the eyes of a child too much. It is just that things have to be said so that no one is left without love and a place to belong in the future. Thank you, for a beginning."************************

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Gay Adolescence

(from the series: Gay Emancipation)

The volume of sound and fury in my life got turned up when I entered adolescence. I would have hoped that my father mellowed with age and that I became more adept at circumventing his dissatisfaction with me. But my young, blossoming manhood seemed to upset him even more. It seemed to irritate him that he couldn't stop me from becoming who I was. My very presence seemed to be a threat to the very way he would have the world, and me, be. This period in my life started with a small incident, but one of significance to me because it revealed to me that my very essence and manner of being had become of significant concern to my father's way of thinking.

I was aware that late Saturday morning that my father seemed restless. It had been raining for several days and the ground was still too wet outside our Jacksonville, California, home for him to do much work outside. I had intentionally placed myself on the floor at the distant end of the living room while he was drinking coffee in the kitchen. I was reading a Mark Twain book and my head was swimming in all the folklore and wonderment that Twain described, just beyond my front door, in Tuolumne and Calaveras counties. I loved to read and I felt it was a safe activity that my father would not find fault with. But I was wrong.

I was in the middle of a paragraph and was startled when he came up behind me. He grabbed the book out of my hands and looked unappreciably at its pages. He threw it across the room and it slid under the couch. I did not move because I knew it would provoke him. I looked up at his eyes,that seemed filled with disgust, and he said in a voice of command, and not of suggestion, "Go outside and play--Like a Real Boy--and don't come back into this house until sunset." I got up slowly from the floor and backed away from him. I glanced at the book under the couch. I wanted to take it with me but he saw where my eyes went and he stiffened. I knew that to approach the book would enrage him further. I went out the front door of the house, with my eyes filled with tears. It had now come to the place where I couldn't even sit quietly exploring the world of ideas, without igniting his disapproval. I walked across the driveway and towards the oak filled woods. Blacky, the family dog, followed me and sensed that I was upset. We must have walked for at least a mile, to a point where I could look down on the tuolumne river and hear the distant roar of its rapids. Blacky nestled his head in my lap as I sat there crying, trying to figure out what to do next. I was a disgrace and a failure in my father's world of hunters and woodsmen. The "sissy boy" was an embarrassment. I had thought of running away from home many times in my young life. I was thinking that this was as good a time as any to do it. Except I knew that if he found me afterward, my life would become even more volatile and unpredictable. I felt I would be like a prisoner who, once returned to prison, is watched doubly closely by his captor. And then I thought of my mother and my little sister and how they would be left to deal with him on their own. All I could do was cry and wonder why I was so deplorably despicable in my father's eyes.

I stretched out on the damp grass with blacky at my side and literally cried myself to sleep. When I woke up the sun was only an hour away from going down. I told myself I would go back to the house and lay low (like a kicked dog, I thought in disgust to myself) until this blew over. I told myself the old man was suffering from cabin fever from all the recent rain and he would lighten-up just as soon as he could return to his regular routine of outdoor labor. But I knew that that would have nothing to do with changing the very nature of the man, who despised my way of being. I thought I needed a plan to run away. I needed to do it when he was at work or hunting with his buddies. I needed to have plenty of time to put a lot of distance between him and wherever he might have thought I would go. He might think I would run to nearby Sonora or Oakdale, but I told myself I would lose myself--and maybe find myself--amongst the humanity of San Francisco. I had my plan. I thought of Mark Twain and that he would approve of my escape from my father's tyranny. I was Huck Finn, except that I wasn't a "real boy." Blacky and I headed back to the house after the sun went down and nothing more was said about the event. Mom served dinner in quiet apprehension and my little sister looked at me with concern but she knew better than to show any sympathy to my punishment for being me. The prison warden--that was the way I now saw my father--just scowled, satisfied that he had won the day. He would not let up on me until I conformed to his expectations.

Adolescence was turning into a nightmare. Sure, I had the wonderment of watching my body grow into an adult man, with all the hair and erections and wet dreams that went along with it. But I had the terror of realizing that I was an "abnormality," growing up in a sea of so-called,"normality." And that I had to conceal my differentness or I would be ostracized by my clan, the herd. I already was outcast by dad. I told myself that I would not allow myself to be attracted to boys, because the world of wise men told me that that was for "queers." And I didn't want to be something that was "disgusting." I had no reference point other than the culture I lived in. And at that time, the word "gay"; didn't exist in my vocabulary. And the word "pride"; could never be used with the word, "queer." I would prove myself a man and somehow train myself to get sexually excited about girls. I would suppress any feelings I had about boys. Boy did I lie to myself about that one. And the karma of wrong thinking came right back to confront me, soon enough, in an incident with a boy who lived down the road.

I was waiting for the school bus that would take me from Jacksonville to Sonora, a distance of about sixteen miles. Steven was standing beside me and it was just the two of us, all alone, along side the highway. I kept trying to avoid looking at Steven's body. He was on the wrestling team and had the most developed pecs, arms, and shoulders of any of the country boys I knew. He was drop dead cute with sandy brown hair and hazel eyes. Next to my Mediterranean olive tone, dark hair, and ethnic features he seemed like the heroic white, American athlete. I would lose my breath if I permitted myself to look at his good looks too closely. I knew what was taboo and I was avoiding it.

"Hey Rich," from Steven. "I have a match today. We got some time before the bus gets here. Will you wrestle with me so I can practice a couple of moves on you?"

"Is he crazy?" I thought to myself. Did he realize what a challenge this would be to my psyche? And what about my body? I couldn't even look at this guy without getting turned on." "Ah, O.K; I guess we could 'practice,' but take it easy. I don;t want my arms or legs bent off."

"Nah, nothin' like that. I just need to get the mechanics of the moves right. Get down on all fours and I'll assume my position." God, I loved the sound of that. But little did I realize the impact it would have on me later.

I soon found myself on my back, on top of his chest and pelvis. The weight of my body pressed my butt into his package and I soon felt my own package begin to swell. I had to get out of this. His legs wrapped around me and rubbed against my growing awareness that I could not restrain or repress my hormones and inclinations. I was embarrassed that while he was remaining "mechanical" in his practice moves, I was becoming sensual and sexual in my uncontrollably natural moves. I felt great shame at this moment. I felt I was observing a "real boy" being "natural" in his gym practice, while I was an "unnatural" boy having feelings of lust for his body. And I knew that this encounter was teaching me that I could never be "normal" as I had promised myself and the world that I would be. I was queer and it was showing right through my pants.

Steven rolled me over and got up and dusted himself off. I was now on my stomach with my package concealed. I stayed there and regained my breath while talking the wrestling talk that he was emersed in. I was relieved that he didn't seem to know what was going on with me. I let the whole incident slip from my mind for the rest of the day at school. But that night as I lie in bed thinking about Steven, I knew that this thing of me--being me-- was bigger than me. I wanted to be like Steven. I wanted to be able to "play" with boys without having feelings--sexual feelings--for boys. I knew what I was and I had been taught to be intolerant of what I was. Just for an instance, I wanted to kill myself. But I let that thought pass and turned to thinking about how I was going to avoid my sexual nature and feelings in the future.

The war with myself had started with adolescence and would continue for many years, into late adulthood. But the self-confrontation of my teenage years would humiliate and torment me. GLBT people can identify with the feelings of isolation and bewilderment that accompany an experience of feeling lost, without the hope of finding yourself and others like you. And each new incident that occurred, seemed even more threatening to my safety and my identity than the last one. As I said earlier, I was determined to be the "good son," who would not become some "bad person," lost to the purgatory of homosexuality. I was taught "those people" couldn't be good people. So when I experienced an incident where I might have been endangered from a gay man, it completely confirmed to me that gay people must, surely, be the predators they were made out to be. This incident probably set me back a decade, in my acceptance of feeling safe and comfortable with other gay men and becoming sexual with other men.

I had finished my workout on the Sonora High track, showered in the gym, and was standing by the roadway , hitch-hiking my way home. In the mid-60's, and especially in a rural community, it was no big deal to thumb a ride with the local people. I had the school's green and gold varsity jacket on and it would have been easy for folks to identify me as one of the high school kids.

A battered,white ford pick-up with a drooping front bumper pulled along side me. In the back there were cans of gas, chain saws, and axes. I lived in the heart of the Sierra Nevada and this told me a lumberman, a logger, was behind the wheel. He had wood dust on his jeans and there were wood chips and sawdust on the floor of the truck. He was a young guy, in his early twenties. He had probably changed his shirt, because his t-shirt was clean and I remember thinking that he really looked like a nice guy.I didn't have any thoughts of him not being safe. He was hot, and I mean in looks and body. I suppressed whatever desires I knew were wrong and got in the car. But I will wonder, for the rest of my life, about what impression I really telegraphed to this young guy.

He looked at me while putting the truck in gear and asked,"How far are you goin'?" I responded, "Jacksonville." The truck headed down the road and he found a pop song on the radio. "You into sports?" he asked."Track," I responded. "That's good. I used to run track in school...." We bantered about high school for several minutes and then I noticed that the truck was picking-up a lot of speed. We were going nearly eighty miles an hour on a mountain road that my parents would travel at about 50. I felt my first apprehension. "You got a girlfriend" he asked. "Nah," I said shyly, "not right now." "You ever fool around?" I didn't know how to respond. Nobody had ever asked me this question before. "Ah, what do ya mean?" "Ya know, have some fun with the fellas..." His right arm and hand was brushing up against my left leg now and a bolt of electric,erotic excitement flashed from my head, through my heart and into my groin. I was flush and aware that my breathing was different. Oh, he was such a hot guy and I wanted him. I looked over at his tight jeans and thick legs, at his muscular arms and bulked-up chest, at his glowing bronzed face and his blue eyes and brown hair. I wanted him. And I was terrified of him. I thought he was Adonis and the devil in one. Now the truck was going eighty-five and he took my hand and rubbed it across his crotch. I pulled away. He said,"It's O.K..This is just between us. We can have a little fun. He reached over and put his hand gently on my package and began to rub. My mind was swimming in an ocean of fear, fantasy, and longing. This felt so good. Somebody finally "recognized" me and said it was "O.K.." And I really wanted to be "seen" and I wanted it to be "O.K." I let myself go with my feelings for about 15-seconds before I started to panic. I just wasn't ready for this even though I wanted it. I told myself I would be destroyed by this. "I tell ya what," he said, "I know a little side road up hear where we could pull over and go into the woods and have some fun." "I really gotta go home," I said. And I think he heard some fear in my voice, as he replied, "Hey, don't worry. I won't hurt you. I didn't mean to scare you. I can see you're turned on. You haven't done this before, have you?""No, I said." That was a lie. I had played around with other boys. But never in this way, never with a stranger, an adult. The truck was still racing down the road and he was still rubbing on me."I really gotta get out of here," I said, as I began to open the door with the thought in mind that I would jump from the vehicle. "Easy, boy; I'm not gonna hurt you, ever. I didn't mean to scare you. I'm really sorry if I scared you. Close the door and I'll drop you at the turn-off to Jacksonville."There was something genuine and careing in his voice that told me this was going to be all right. He seemed to regret that he had pushed me beyond my limitations and that he had freightened me. This made me want him more, while knowing that I wouldn't have been able to feel right at this time about going any fuirther with him. I started to cry and he rubbed the back of my head and my neck to comfort me. "I'm really sorry. The road is just up ahead. Please don't tell anyone what happened. I really would never hurt you. I'm sorry." "That's O.K.," I said. I certainly wasn't planning on telling anyone. It was an indictment against me, I thought. I was the one "guilty" of being so obviously queer that a guy would hit on me in a matter of minutes of meeting me.

I was humiliated, frustrated, confused, angered, and frightened as I got out of the truck. "Are you gonna be all right?" he asked. "Yeh. I'm fine. Thanks for the ride," I said, as I wiped the tears from my eyes and darted across the roadway. He put the truck back in gear and bolted down the road. I never saw that young man again. But I fantasized about him and I had sex with him in a series of dreams. The experience told me he wasn't a bad man. He was a hot guy who wanted to have sex and he didin't realize all the triggers of fear and internalized homophobia he had sparked in me with his advances.I am not defending his actions; preying on a child who is not yet a legal adult is wrong.This would cause me to really shut down for quite some time. I quit hitch hiking. I could barely look another young man directly in the face. I felt ashamed. But at the center of my being, I also felt the wonderment of the intensity and power of my feelings. Night after night I would swim in a sea of erotic dreams, peopled by him and others like him. I realized a truth: This was not a choice. This was the fabric of my being. This was the chemistry of my mind and heart. This was the Soul and Spirit of my manifestation as one of God's creatures.

I may have been in harms way on that day, despite what he told me. But there is still a part of me that wishes he had gone into the woods with me and I had learned more about being my-Self. I was afraid to be my-Self. I had been punished at every turn, whenever I attempted to be my-Self as a child. MY mind was polluted with a fear-based, corrupted belief system that had made me afraid of my very own nature. I went home miserable that night. I wanted to kill myself. I said nothing to anyone about what had happened. Like always, I was in my personal isolation chamber of angst and agony. "Why won't somebody help me? Why can't I help myself?" I screamed in my thoughts. "I am worthless to my father and to the world. If I was a real man that guy in the truck would have never hit on me." And so it went. All my Self talk. In psychology, we refer to this as my growing ego dystonia--my growing un-acceptance of my Self. I would eventually have to break my-Self from the way the world would tell me I was supposed to be. I had to rid my Self of the social indoctrination that told my mind not to think.They would do the thinking for me.I would have to find the courage to accept the integrity of the being that was ME.

Fear has been my greatest enemy. The fear that comes from abuse is one of the most debilitating factors in a child's development. It makes us weary of approaching the world. It robs us of our vitality and our curiosity. "Better not go there," we tell ourselves. So do we go anywhere? Sooner or later, if this doesn't get the better of us, we get the better of it. We break out of the tyranny that would close us in. We Come Out. Maybe only a little bit at first. Maybe only in our minds, and then later in our actions--We Come Out.

STOP MESSING WITH MY IDENTITY!!!!!

The more I review the formation of my life and my identity, the more I become aware of how both the force of my father and my society was constantly at work to make me conform to a limited set of parameters for how I saw myself and how I interacted with the world. Identity formation is at the core of childhood and adolescence. Identity is at the core of adulthood and social acceptance. What is permissible and what is not, drives the engine of social interaction. I was being told, on a daily basis, that I would not be on the guest list to society's table. And if you're not at the table you're not going to find yourself very well nourished by life.

It wasn't just my sexuality, it was also my ethnicity. I remember being shocked in the seventh grade when my two classmates at school refused to let me play basketball with them. "Go play at the other net," Victor said to me. "Why can't I play with you guys?"I responded. Bob looked at me and burst out,"Cause you're a Spic and we don't play with Spic's." What was a 'Spic? I had never heard the term before. What part of my identity was this thing? Why was something that seemed completely alien to my basic humanity now getting in the way of my acceptance by my peers? I was ignorant of what was happening to me and I didn't know how to resolve it. Now someone had found another reason to tell me, "you don't belong at the table." I was angry. I kicked the basketball out of the court, picked up my jacket and started the long walk home. Bob retrieved the ball and the two of them went on with their game. Once again, I felt shuned. I didn't belong. I didn't fit.

When I walked into my mother's kitchen, she could see I was angry and hurt. She was washing lettuce at the sink and said, "What happened?" I looked at her and I didn't soften my hard question: "Mom, what's a 'Spic?'"......She looked at me in disbelief and I thought her knees buckled a little bit when the full impact of the question hit her. "Who called you a 'Spic?" Her question and inflection was in the form of a directive to respond. "Bob and Victor say I'm a 'Spic' and they wouldn't let me play basketball with them."My mother inhaled a deep breath of desperation and responded with a sigh."Those boys wouldn't know that word. They heard it from their parents. Now I know what my neighbors think of us." She slammed the head of lettuce into the sink, dried her hands on her apron, and walked away from the sink. I couldn't understand this. Were we, as a family, deficient in our very nature, our innate humanity? Why were people with lighter skin better than us? My mother spent a long time trying to explain why people separated each other through their identifications of each other. But all I knew was, once more, my identity was not a good thing and I would be punished for having it.

In the movie, Angels in America, Al Pacino is waxing about the pathology of human society to his black, "faggot" nurse. Pacino is commenting on the persistence of the HIV virus, as he lays in his hospital bed with it, and says something like,..." the thing knows itself....and do you know how hard it is to kill a thing that knows itself?...it keeps changing to survive...." This is a paraphrase but it goes to the crux of a human mind-set that would "keep a thing, a human from knowing its Self," to dis-empower it. It is a hard thing to control something that knows its Self. Roy Cohn, Pacino's character, is a control freak and a power monger. He manipulates people and institutions to keep them in-line with his right wing ideology. His power is not derived from his own personal "queer" integrity, but from the facade of his own social engineering of what is acceptable social identity to the status quo. He is a hypocrite of the highest order. Much like many "successful" politicians who are failures as human beings and who have no personal integrity that comes from expressing their true Selves. "Be as I say," he commands the world," not as I am."

"I have to BE as they say," I kept telling my teenage mind. "I am worthless if I am not like them."

STOP MESSING WITH MY IDENTITY !!!!!

Today I watch politicians wrap themselves in the flag, or hide behind the pages of their Bibles, while they tell the crowds, "Be as we say, for it will prove that you are a good American." Priests, politicians, and power-brokers, all in the Closet, pretending all sorts of things, in-order to maintain their power, while dis-empowering the rest us, who have become too frightened to challenge their authority. What happens when everybody's identity becomes polluted, when every social institution's identity (or mission) is manipulated? What happen when a thing or a person no longer can trust in itself--because it has been told not to? It becomes schizophrenic. And doesn't this definition from Webster's match what we see happening in our society? : "...a psychotic mental illness that is characterized by a twisted view of the real world, by a greatly reduced ability to carry out one's daily tasks, and by abnormal ways of thinking, feeling and behaving." All one has to do is look at the U.S. Congress or the White House in 2006 and witness the behaviors we're talking about.

STOP MESSING WITH OUR IDENTITY!!!!

Shall we have our "Identities" formed by such as these? Or shall we follow the form of our own Identities? When do we--all of society--admit that we ARE WHO WE ARE--and learn to embrace our complexity and our diversity and our eclecticism. We are NOT a black and white conformity, called "literalist," or "fundamentalist" who must subscribe to the pathology of prescribed behaviors outlined by a status quo, populated by hypocrites, manipulators, and the psychologically impaired.

STOP MESSING WITH OUR IDENTITY!!!!

And stop the daily intimidation of our people! Stop the daily manipulation of our words! Stop this daily massage of "new-speak," of Orwellian double-speak, such that "freedom" becomes "tyranny" and "I've got God on my side," has become "I do the Devil's work." And we have all become too intimidated,or frightened, or ignorant or dis-empowered to do anything about it.

STOP MESSING WITH OUR IDENTITY!!!!

If we don't fight this schizophrenic social pathology with our own, clear expression of genuine Identity, then we are lost to it. We must speak Truth to power. We must collectively define and separate healthy discourse from confused delusion. We must dis-empower those who would manipulate social wellness and our individual sanity. In 2007, we are aware that we are manipulated by profiteers that would condition our thinking in-order to control our life experience.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I was manipulated into submission. As a Gay--or Straight-- adult, do I continue to have my Identity manipulated? Do I continue to follow pathological thinking? Do I make myself as sick as the people who have the power to manipulate me?

STOP MESSING WITH MY IDENTITY!!!!!

STOP MESSING WITH OUR COUNTRY'S IDENTITY!!!!!****************************

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Gay Adulthood: Living A Lie

(From the series: Gay Emancipation)

To my fellow human beings--Gay or Straight--who are Living-A-Lie, I ask you to take a deep breath into your lungs and know that you are not alone. You have worried and you have felt exhausted by having to work so hard to cover the tracks of your own reality. You know that you are not a "bad" person, but somehow your very being, or perhaps your behaviors or beliefs, place you in a precarious life situation. You cannot be your-Self without damning or feeling damned for being who you are. The thing you now hate the most about yourself is that you lie to the world. You lie to your-Self, you lie about the very nature of your reality. You and I have both made excuses for our lieing: "I have to protect myself." It's a vicious world, people will use anything to destroy you.""They don't understand and I can't change the whole world.""It just wasn't the right context to reveal myself and tell them the truth--maybe next time." And each day that we play this game of obfuscation it undermines our sense of self worth and dignity. Young adulthood to me meant graduating from college, getting those all-important first professional jobs, having a relationship and making whatever marks I might make upon my corner of the world. What happens when you realize that doing these things--the things that are most important to you--are in contradiction to being honest with yourself and the world?

"Everyday, I pretend I'm a heterosexual so that the people around me will feel comfortable and will want to work with me."How many days, how many years did you do that? Are you still doing it? The two strongest motivators for my facade of straightness were: "I don't want to be poor and not employed."And, "I don't want to be ostracized, outcast, by my peers." The cruelist thing I did to my Self--and to the social reality around me--was pretend I wanted a woman in my bed when I really wanted a man. Women are beautiful beings and some of my dearest friends. And I apologize in my reflections now, on a daily basis, for all the times I used women as shields to protect my elaborate facade of heterosexuality. It wasn't right to go on "straight" dates and develop a relationship that wasn't genuine. I was being selfish and devising a cover of acceptability to a hetero-centric world. Yes, I was capable of performing the sex act. Yes, stimulation is stimulation and I gotoff. But this wasn't where my truest desires were. And I believed these behaviors might guarantee me some security in an otherwise insecure world. And, yes, a part of me kept hoping I could "fake it 'til I make it."I believed if I just kept having straight sex I could become straight. It was the most blatant of denials. "It will just go away."I lectured to myself. "With every climax, I will find comfort and appeasement in 'acceptable' sexuality.I will be a good citizen." And so I became a good liar, a good hypocrite, a dishonest survivor in a culture of conformists.

When do you finally break? When does your psyche come apart and tell you, "I can no longer live my life between the contradictions of these two true statements: LIVING A LIE IS HELL."AND "THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE.'' At some point, unless you decide to live with the tension of hypocrisy, you snap out ot it. You just refuse to be feel like a dirt bag any longer. You go for Freedom, no matter if it means being outcast, or poor, or a social reject. You can see that the clear majority of the human race is peopled by children, in adult bodies, whose hypocrisy proves that they are afraid to behave as thinking adults. You begin to think of when you were a child and of when you first began to know that people were lieing in-order to conform to adult "reality.""All right,"you say to yourself. "They're going to call me faggot, and homo and queer. I WILL LIVE WITH THAT. It's better than remaining in an adolescent Neverland; never growing up, and never experiencing my real person-hood. It's sad that Michael Jackson appropriately named his place in life.

"I don't want to live in Neverland. I want to be truly loved and love truly."That is when you set yourself Free. I have several confessions to make. Catholics, don't get too excited. I am Spiritual and post-Christian. But confessions are useful in cleansing the Soul. And I want all of us cleansed of the social insanity that is holding back humanity. I have made several "mistakes"in my life. New Age thinkers argue that there are no "mistakes," that each behavior and decision or indecision has it's own consequences, it's own lessons; that through my mistakes, I learned my lessons and got to this place. I hope they're right. But here is what I did:

I carried my Pretending about myself to it's logical end. Before I gotwise enough to let pretending go, I GOT MARRIED. Was it a "mistake,"or the lesson I needed before graduating to adulthood? I feel I married a very good person. She was genuine in her feelings to me and she loved what she knew of me. It was my fault that I wasn't genuine with her, that I didn't dare tell her the feelings that I had for men. I could become a part of this marriage without the "guilt" of knowing I had been with other adult men. I had not. I had repressed every desire to be with men ever since high school. I was celibate to men and so I told myself I surely was "safe" in my approaching embrace and confirmation of heterosexuality. My paradigm of American conformity held fast until the death of my mother in 1984--an Orwellian year. Then the Crack in the Cosmic Egg (a very good book) occurred in my life and I realized that I had been conforming to a child's version of "I'm a good boy 'cause I behave real good." I began to ask my-Self questions about what I was doing and WHY? I began to realize that my life to this point was still configured by my early childhood alignment with my mother (see gay emancipation series). That I was still protecting myself and the rest of my family via this alignment. But it didn't mean anything now. She was dead. And so the psychological and social and interpersonal configurations of my life began to unravel and I began to walk down a different pathway of life, toward a different way of being. But, still, the Lying was there, as I made my way from one temporary way station to the next. To think on your feet, to reconfigure yourself and the world, as you go along, is not simply resolved. We are all doing it, right now, as we read these words. And so a new adventure began. And it has been with great difficulty, and with a loss of significant income and professional status, that I have exchanged significant conformity for a challenging Freedom. And I would not exchange my Freedom to tell you these things for all the gold that comes of conformity.

But this chapter is about all of us, living the lies we live....."inorder to survive..."we tell ourselves.While, all along, we diminish the realness of living a genuine life that is true to our Self. I guess that made me a "whore."And to the extent that I still don't confront the lies, I am still prostituting myself in the name of social acceptance and, usually, material gain. So I am a whore still working to be free of my "working girl"status in a land of lost children who haven't figured out how to grow up. I grew up in a dysfunctional family, and all I have to do is look at the White House or the Congress to see that I am living in a dysfunctional country. How do you stop dysfunction? First, you "identify"it (notice how close this is to the word "identity." Second, you confront it. But don't attack it with violence. It is a defensive child and it will summon its military to destroy you. Like a lost, abused inner-child, you must explain what has happened to it and describe its options to free itself from its prison of misinformation. The human psyche knows the truth, beyond the lies with which its ego has learned to live. And there is a great hunger that the psyche has to be a whole, integrated being--without lies. If I offered you a better life, wouldn't you want it? Don't you think society's dysfunctional children want a better life? You bet they do--we all do. And so you begin the work of pointing out the contradictions, the lies, the mistaken behaviors and faulty belief systems that are catapulting us all to a sure oblivian if we don't stop the childlike histrionics that are killing human maturity. "Histrionics,"Webster's says is a "deliberately affected display of emotions....(much like)...actors in a theater..."Carl Rove and the Republican majority have played this card, to all of our detriments. So have Democrats and anyone who WE allow to persist in the theater of their own pathology. When a child "acts out,"we summon our maturity and we re-direct his/her misbehavior. Why are we so afraid to redirect the childlike behaviors of adults? Is it that we look at their mature bodies and think, they ARE adults. But are they? Or is the mind and the actions we are dealing with that of a child, who only "wears" the body of an adult?

TEACH THE CHILD TO STOP LIEING TO HIMSELF/HERSELF!!!!!!!

Yes, "Johnnie,"we realize we made the mistake, along the way, of letting you believe it was "good," to go along with our lies---the social and personal lies---about being a human being. We, like you, thought the lies would protect us and make us successful in our fellow humans eyes. We didn't realize we were going to get ourselves into this hugh psychological and sociological mess--this nightmare--by not addressing our own incompleteness, our own misunderstanding of how to get to human adulthood. We lied because we felt we had to make something up to sustain ourselves. We lied because nothing is more embarrassing to a "knowing"being than to admit that he doesn't know the first thing about himself. And then we continued to lie to sustain the mythology of our "adulthood." We are sorry, Johnnie, for putting you and God knows how many generations after you into this fix. And the only way we can see of getting you---and us---out it is one Truth at a time. We have nurtured a pathology of lies. Pathological liars. We have nurtured our own immaturity in order to appear "adult."We continue to nurture a personal and political facade that is killing us and our planet. "There is no global warming," our leaders have told us. And we are aware of the child-like motivations, for more candy from the corporations, that have sustained their childhood and suspended adult reasoning. They are lying to us. We lie to ourselves. We lie to each other in a pathological dance that leads to Neverland.

Some people stand up and say,"We have a President who is in over his head. He is a danger to our society."

But where are the adults to re-direct him?

Some people say,"The People are no longer in charge here. The Corporations buy the agenda that suits them."

But where are the adults to re-direct our agenda?

Some people say, "Bush is destroying the Constitution and replacing it with an autocracy of 'signing-statements.' "

But where are the adults to re-instate the Constitution?

Will you be Free of someone else's tyranny? Or will you conform to someone else's madness? Will you live your lie? Or will you suck in your gut and face the vulnerability of acknowledging your own childlike incompleteness? Will you ask for help from those who have achieved adulthood? Or will you stand, stubbornly, and pretend that you have all the answers while hoping that you, fake it 'til you make it?" And will all of us let you go on pretending---perhaps to our own destruction--so that you can continue to "play" with grown-up toys that can kill us all? In 2006, we all observed a circus of our own social pathology. Are we truly adult enough to say, "STOP...WE HAVE GOT TO GET THIS RIGHT....SOMEBODY PUT THE CHILD IN HIS CRIB....SOMEBODY FIND THE ADULT READY TO WORK WITH ALL OF US TO CONFRONT OUR IMMATURITIES AND TO GROW INTO OUR MATURITY....WE MUST FIND SOMEONE WHO ISN'T AFRAID OF THE WISDOM OF OUR COLLECTIVE ADULTHOOD....WE MUST FIND SOMEONE WHO WILL STOP OUR COLLECTIVE DENIAL OF OUR CHILDLIKE BEHAVIORS....WE HAVE TO SAVE OURSELVES FROM OUR IMMATURE SELVES.....IS THIS NOT A DEFINITION OF ADULTHOOD....?

To my thinking, Webster's dictionary is dangerously incomplete in it's definition of being an "adult." It says, simplistically, "to grow up... fully developed and mature." That could simply refer to a human body. It says nothing of the psychology of that body. To me, an "adult" is psychologically mature, free of pathology, and unable to lie in any manner that is in contradiction to its nature and to the nature of reality in its environment. We get away with lieing, individually, because we know that we are still lieing collectively. But what we now know is that we have very little time to lie collectively, or individually, if we are to survive.

Will you help people return to the honesty of an innocent child, and the maturity of honesty? It's still all about having the guts to live a Truth that sets you Free. And not allowing any child--old or young--to get away with lieing at the expense of his or our humanity. When a child is blind to his own incompleteness, it is up to the psychologically mature around him to redirect his ignorant, immature acting out. He knows not what he does. But there should be enough around him--we are all around him---who know better. Or else, we are all to blame for not guideing our own journey into wisdom.

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