Sunday, January 7, 2018

Radical Drag of the Soul

I recently published this essay in the current issue of RFD, "Finding Center," which takes as its theme the need to engage evolving standards of inclusivity while honoring long-held core values. It touches on themes I've written about before, but it offers a new take on a ritual practice dear to me heart. 

I enjoy a loose but ongoing connection with a gay men’s organization that I admire, respect, and hold in great affection. I remember years ago coming into the main assembly room at one of its gatherings to find silhouette symbols of major world religions hanging in the windows.
Notably because uniquely missing was the Cross. The Sanskrit calligraphy for the sacred syllable Aum was mounted upside down. I’m guessing there were no Hindus in the room to point that out. And then there’s the frequency with which gay spiritual gatherings get scheduled smack in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays. As for calling the directions--well, what overwhelmingly Euro-American New Age gay group hasn’t appropriated that particular ceremony from Native American spiritual practice?
I totally get the toxicity of Christianity for those who’ve suffered the homophobic, anti-erotic pronouncements that so often poison its well. And I’m the last person to fault queer men for piecing together ritual patterns and spiritual expressions we can live with from as many traditions as we find available. It’s our genius as faggots to deck our deepest selves out in borrowed fashions, our radical drag of the soul. We found something wonderful at the back of Aunty’s closet. She may not be too happy about what we’ve done with her Dior gown, but we know we look fabulous in it. Angels in America is as brilliant an example of that as you’ll find, but hardly the only one.
Still, I agonize a lot about appropriation and exclusion, twin moral perils of life as a privileged, white, cisgendered gay man. The more so when I officiate at a ritual I first created seven years ago and have been leading since--a Lingam Puja that borrows its name from Hindu practice, but strays about as far from authentic Hindu ritual as Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral parts company with a Passover Seder. Instead of the smooth, abstract cylinder that stands as the focal point in a Shiva temple, the Lingam we gather around is a very recognizable sculpture of an erect cock. Then too, I’ve developed parts of the ceremony straight out of a high Episcopalian Eucharist--though no one who doesn’t make the connection for himself needs to know that. Sometimes I include readings from contemporary Buddhist teachers, or from Rumi and Hafiz. I am, after all is said, a slut who will pray with anybody.

 

My fellow devotees and I are risking the alienation of established spiritual communities left and right in this ritual. But the centrality of an anatomically accurate Lingam isn’t potentially an offense only to Hindus who see us ripping off a venerable tradition that doesn’t properly belong to us--a formerly colonized one, at that. A twenty-inch wooden dick on the altar makes it pretty clear that this ritual addresses humans who have a penis and have gathered to own and honor the Divine’s presence in the wondrous bit of flesh that hangs between our legs--“the exposed tip of the heart, the wand of the soul,” as our Prophet St. James Broughton put it.
 I’ve spent the last sixty years falling deeper into the truth that the Sacred is in this body, in all of this body. In the specifics of this body. This heart. These hands. This cock.
I’ve spent decades striving to claim fully my desire for the tribe of those who experience a similar truth. My tribe. The tribe of penis-bearing humans who love other penis-bearing humans. Who through our experience of jacking alone and with friends, of frotting and sucking and fucking with each other, are diving deeper into how living in a body with a penis shapes our relation to the world, and our relationship to the Sacred.
None of this is unconditioned truth. It’s not the working out of some universal archetype. It’s a result of living in this body, in these bodies, with these bodies’ histories. It’s my embodied truth, not identical with, but akin to, the embodied truth of my comrades. To live out this truth in their company is the deep desire of my heart and soul. My cock is a key to the inner temple, and I long to gather with others whose cocks are keys to the inner temple. There are other keys to the inner temple. There is conceivably a point when the inner temple is opened so wide that keys are no longer relevant. But I need the companionship of those who know, from deep, embodied experience, how this key fits into the lock. Who know the feel of this key turning in the lock, the sound of this key opening the lock.
 
I don’t believe any of this this has to be viewed as an attempt at exclusion. I know some people will say this is a dodge. But I still insist on owning my experience and staying true to it. I’d be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of shutting others out of the circle--cisgendered and trans women, trans men, cisgendered men whose erotic lives aren’t focused on cock. But there’s no denying that the ritual I lead isn’t focused on them and their experience of the world. Instead, I’m open to welcoming such fellow humans into the circle as visitors, much as I might welcome a Hindu friend attending Mass as a visitor, much as a Muslim friend might welcome me to his mosque, much as the rabbi of the shul my partner attends in the summer would tell me, I’m pretty sure, that no matter how many times I come to services, no matter how many times I put on my prayer shawl, no matter how glad she is I’ve come, I’m still a visitor, and not a Jew.
People I respect have asked whether I’m not really perpetuating imperialist attitudes to world cultures by drawing on them. They’ve asked whether I’m not perpetuating patriarchy by encouraging cisgendered men to gather in celebration of the beauty and holiness of the Lingam. But imperialist patriarchy hasn’t flourished because white cisgendered men are comfortable with our bodies and bond successfully with other men. Patriarchal privilege and misogyny are founded, paradoxically, on the insistence that cisgendered men deny our own vulnerably embodied experience. Patriarchy demands that we pretend our unpredictable, permeable, changeable, leaky bodies are irrelevant to our privileged place in the world. Patriarchy wants us to see other men as rivals who either pose potential threats or can be dominated. I borrow from the wisdom and practice of as many traditions as I have access to. I reject the homophobic crap that virtually no tradition is innocent of. I claim my experience of God in my faggot body as my own and forge a community out of what I share with my fellow travelers. This is as anti-patriarchal as I know how to be.
 
 

2 comments:

  1. Amen. Well said. Elegantly said.

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  2. An honest and valuable piece of literature. I believe being mindful and devoting one's self to mankind via a sexual channel is the most one can give. Through a Phallic brotherhood is the way to the new world we are heading for. Thank you.

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