COMING OUT IS GOOD FOR YOU.

This article was written in response to several emails I received from young men around the world who had read an interview I gave to Gay Times in the summer of 2003. For this reason it addresses the problems of gay men rather than gay women. I’d like to pretend that I could speak for Lesbians around the world, but I’d clearly be lying. Sorry.

1.Getting it straight in your head.

Being gay is not always easy and I reckon a lot of that dis-ease is caused by a distorted notion of sex that most of us – gay and straight – carry around in our heads.

Like most modern girls and boys, I grew up thinking about sex in terms of Darwin. It seemed an unconscious truism that we have sex in order to breed, to perpetuate the species. But on mature reflection, I think this notion of sex is wrong-headed.

Sex is not about making babies. Sex is about meeting people.

Without the sexual urge, human beings would stagnate in their own pool of personality. Sex pushes us out of our own stale orbit and lets us into other people’s solar systems. In this way our horizons widen, our lives get richer, life becomes meaningful. True, it also freshens the gene pool when men and women have sex, but that is just a fortunate side effect of the greater purpose.

This greater goal of sex means that it’s irrelevant who we love. The important factor is that we do fancy and love other people.

I should have got this clear in my head before even coming out to myself… Instead I fell into the trap of going out, meeting men and having sex with them, while all the time, deep in my heart, I was actually thinking : this is aberrant, this is not in the natural scheme of things, I like it but it’s invalid.

We really have to get away from this kind of thinking, because slowly and surely it will eat away the joy of our sexual encounters. It will either makes us despise the whole gay sex scene or makes us so furiously heedless of our true feelings that we start using mindless sex and drugs and serial dating to mask that deeper unease, that tiny voice that’s saying: this is not right.

It is right. And, more than that, it’s good. And with that insight firmly under one’s belt then the next stage – coming out to yourself – is going to be a whole lot easier.

2. The Beautiful Brotherhood

I went through a nominal coming out at University. It was rather cool to be openly gay and on paper I was a cool guy. I was gay but not camp. However, most of my friends were straight. I didn’t go to gay bars. In my heart I really rather despised gay people and that included myself.

I found actual sex impossibly tortured because I wasn’t really out and happy with my sexuality, even though I wore it like a badge of honour.

It wasn’t until I left the matrix of the English Motherland and headed into the warm belly of the Cold War, post-Wall Berlin, that I was able to discover guilt-free sex.

There on the nudist beaches of Wannsee and in the gay street festivals of Motzstrasse; in the plush gay clubs buried like ruby-velvet jewels in the grey decay of the East; in the clannish, exclusively male Gay Scene of that city, I found that my dirtiest dreams were pretty mainstream and for the first time in my life I could chat openly to other men about those communal sexual pursuits: flirting, fancying, sharking, hunting and getting your heart broken.

And that’s when I was able to say: yes, I like this. I like talking about it. I like giggling like a teenager about it. I like standing at the bar jawing about it. I like the other people who share this with me. And that was my real coming out: a coming home to a sense of community I never had, the brotherhood of boys.

And that sense of Brotherhood is what most gay man have missed all their lives. Left out of laddish cliques by the embarassment of fancying all the other members, stuttering and styleless around the handsome young men of their youth, most gay man just need a clique of their own, a space where it’s ok to talk about heartache and hard-ons. Ok to engage in the sort of sub-erotic banter that glues together groups of straight lads and lasses on their nights out.

So I’d say the first thing to do is to get out and meet other gay men. Talk about it. Compare notes. Launch into the delayed adolescence that most gay men have in their 20s. The Internet provides ample forum for finding gay men in your area and the gay pubs and clubs have come on a long way since the grim, dark leather lairs of yore.

3.Coming Out to Everyone Else.

However you make peace with your own sexuality at some point you need to tell those near and dear to you. This “official” coming out is famously tricky, but if you’re happy in your own gay skin, then it tends to come out a lot more eloquently.

Much of the anxiety and uneasiness around coming out is to do with the insecurity of the gay person in the centre of the event. If you feel guilty or diseased then those around you will naturally tend to condemn or cure.

If you’re feeling relatively sorted and self-assured those around you will have to react with acceptance or if they reject you it will be their problem not yours.

However, remember that you’ve had your whole life to wrestle with the issues of being gay. Your parents and friends will have only had the last few seconds to come to terms with it. Don’t be too harsh on them. For many parents – their newly outed son or daughter is the first gay person they will have encountered. You can’t expect 100% ease around a concept that – up until recently – was shrouded in prejudice and paranoia.

Don’t rush people. From my experience it took around 2 years for my family to really accept my being gay. And I’m extremely proud of my Mum and Dad for making such a major mental shift. It can’t have been easy for them.

Of course, there were lots of sticky moments, hidden resentments and not-so-hidden temper tantrums, but that’s perfectly normal. I’d say it was almost impossible to have a completely pain-free coming out, even with the most seemingly liberal parents and friends. Nothing in life is completely pain-free.

But the overall picture is almost always positive.

I was able to stop lying to my loved ones. I was able to share some of my emotional life with my Mum and Dad. I even found – heavens! – that they had some useful, kind and wise things to say about it.

I shed a few friends along the way. But the relief of having friends with whom I was able to share every emotional mood, every love affair, every broken heart was of incomparable worth.

My coming out was also the moment that I grew up and took responsibility for myself . It was the point in my family history when we stopped being “son”, “mother”, “brother”, “father” and became 4 adults dealing with this tricky proposition. It was the best thing that every happened to us all. In my opinion.

And finally…

At the risk of sounding preachy: Remember being gay is a great blessing.

It may not always feel that. It may feel a great big pain in the ass. But in end effect, we homosexuals have been granted a chink of difference that lets in a lot of light. Most heterosexuals – especially male heterosexuals – ride through life never questioning the world that seems tailor-made for them, unaware that it is actually tailoring them into a rather tight strait-jacket.

Our eccentric sex drives force us to examine the world that conditions us and forge out own way of living. Gayness means we don’t blindly follow everyone else’s blueprint from cradle to grave. And that, my friends, is a good thing.

Of course, my ponderings are far from authoritative. They come from my own, necessarily limited, experiences. However, there are several well-regarded websites and telephone help-lines specially tailored for the problems that cluster around coming-out or for just getting to know some other gay men in the less intimidating environment of the Net.

Here’s just a few:

http://gaylife.about.com/od/comingout/u/howtocomeout.htm

http://www.gayyouth.org.uk/info/coming-out

Lesbian and Gay Switchboard (UK): 0300 330 0630 (DAILY 10AM – 11PM)
http://www.llgs.org.uk/

Meeting people:
http://www.gaydar.co.uk
http://http://www.outeverywhere.com/

The funny curly A’s of my name and the just post-teenage uprightness of my handwriting on that fly leaf is touching. I was a bundle of raw anxiety and back-arching back then – but even then I was determined to be a poet – and unbeknownst to me Prynne was a big-hitter in the contemporary world. He was also my director of studies at college. I’m not sure whether I bought the volume to get some brownie points or because i was intrigued.

I remember vividly going to his rooms in Caius court with their subtle white wood panelling and odd collection of abstract art. He gave evening supervisions with a glass of port. We would listen to Tudor madrigals and try and puzzle out the words aurally. Or try and spot Irish song patterns in Larkin. Mostly we’d listen to his rainbow-coloured but barely perciptible flights of associative logic. I would drift off looking at the impressive collections of books. The complete editions of Celan in German. Ungaretti in Italian. Montale too. And we knew he was also a leading world authority in Chinese poetry. We also knew he worked through the night. How else could he possibly know so much stuff?

My dreams of being a poet didn’t survive two years of post-University reality but my love of Prynne’s writing has. It’s gone through patches of intenstity and lassitude. I occasionally write to him or see him in Cambridge. He was always very encouraging of my writing but it’s his that draws me in.

I can’t begin to explain why I love it so. There is certainly no message in his writing – there is no obvious meaning – and yet… And yet.

I once wrote a poem, probably back when I was 19, where I said:

The secret is around the words and I live there,
in the sounds around the words,

which was a pretty accurate description of my modus operandi when it came to poetry (and perhaps life). I daren’t get too involved in the obvious meaning but enjoyed the nuance. Perhaps it was growing up gay in a straight world – where the bare facts were too unacceptable and the nuances and spectral inflections nourished my hopes more. The bare facts were often too starkly uncomfortable – the boy I loved would never love me – so I hid in the aura and allusion around the facts. A penumbra of possibility.

(This is probably why I stopped writing and reading poetry when I got to Berlin aged 24 and discovered that the bare facts could be quite enough. Who needs spectral allusion when a nice German will actually get into bed with you?)

Anyway, back aged 19, and alive with the frizzing, electrical excitement of Cambridge after a life in the provinces, Prynne intoxicated my mind with allusive fumes.

That poem I wrote continues,

I live there,
in the sounds around the words,
in a Kirillian blue that haloes the Bikini Atoll
and all manner of matters, dark matter
or paler, the colour of grapefruit flesh
pale on the sand and in the sand

I think it’s a fine poem, even now, thirty years on. Certainly the type I like to read – but I also see how richly seamed it is with Prynne. This is the beginning of his poem ‘Landing Area’ from the 1974 volume, Wound Response.

The spirit is lame and in the pale flesh
we see it unevenly spread with water. Lemon yellow,
very still, some kind of bone infection, both
heroic and spiteful.

I unconciously borrowed his ‘pale/flesh’ and my poem is personal and Romantic while his is objective and biological. But there is a similar avoidance of too much meaning.

Prynne’s whole poetic is about frustrating the meaning-making mind. If you engage with it deeply it becomes an phenomenological experience – about holding oneself on the edge of meaning-making and enjoying a spray, an exuberance of possibilities which sort of add up. They add up to a glow around the words that is ‘almost too much’.

I remember him being quite impressed (or perhaps relieved) by a hurried essay I’d knocked off about the musical spray of soundplay in Wordsworth’s Prelude. I was quoting Kristeva (as one had to back then) and talking about Gertrude Stein, but the basic idea was that there is a juice and a joy in the gush of sound that excedes meaning. Wordsworth talks a lot about sounds beyond hearing and there is a sense of exhilaration in stretching oneself to hear them.

Last year, I met Prynne at a gig in Cambridge – in a warehouse with a drum and bass DJ. It was a classical / avant garde affair. The sort of thing that never happened when I was at Cambridge but seems to now. Prynne, now in his 70s, was wandering around, dressed as he always is in a corduroy suit and shirt. The music was deafening and wonderfully aggressive. I raised my eyebrows and he looked at me and said: ‘I love drum and bass’ and then told me a story about how he used to sneak into the Fridge in Brixton where his daughter used to work and skulk by the speakers where the music was at its loudest and most vast.

I love that image: his poetic mind, so attuned to so many registers of linguistic nuance, happily immersed into the brutal simplicity of very loud techno music.

Though Prynne’s poetic music is never deafening. It’s dizzying. I wanted to quote a bit but it defies quoting really. But I enjoy typing it out and patterning its sounds in my head. So, this is from the last poem in Wound Response (sadly, this blog software loses all the beautiful tabulation of the original):

Here’s the new shiny version:

It’s a film I always wanted to watch – paying tribute to that terrible period in the 80s where the plague descended on the gay community. Literally, like a Biblical plague, people dropping dead in their thousands from an unseen, inexplicable, remorseless disease that killed and mutilated a specific population.

WE WERE HERE (trailer) from David Weissman on Vimeo.

There were so many moments when I welled up. Mostly when the massed faces were shown, or when mass solidarity happened. But one phrase from one of the talking heads really stayed with me. He has lost not one but two partners to the disease and he is left, for the first time suicidal: “All my friends were dead… there just didn’t seem much to stop me checking out.” I imagined for a moment how it would be if all my friends – all the surrogate brothers and family that my gay friends represent – were dying all around me and i was the only one left.

More than 15.000 people died at the height of the epidemic in just the Bay Area. All in the space of four or five years.

What was most moving and most thought provoking was the transformative solidarity and spirit that arose in that carnage. A real community of care – not just of promiscuous fun – emerged and the gay community showed dignity and strength. I wonder whether that strength is still there or now dispersed into a more particulate community?

Most young gay men I know socialise on line, have sex on line and hang out with a heterogenous crowd that is certainly not the one Weissman shows on the Castro in 1977.

We are more mainstream now and have less need for ghettos – but I wonder how an internet generation would deal with the awful trauma of the AIDS epidemic. Has the momentous soul we showed back then become dispersed into the world or has it just faded away?

I left the film feeling more proud of being gay than usual. I missed the horror by a generation but I am immeasurably proud of the gay men and women who passed through it on my behalf. This is the first proper history I’ve seen.

George Monbiot makes an interesting statement in this morning’s Guardian. He points out that there is a myth: that the people at the top of corporations are financial geniuses who got their wealth by merit of their brilliant minds and hard work. This myth is false, he says. It is a self-attribution fallacy, a myth of election. Not only do these people not have superhuman talents but:

they have preyed on the earth’s natural wealth and their workers’ labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

I agree with Monbiot’s politics and I too believe that the unbridled greed of unregulated capitalism has put psychopathy in the driving seat of our culture with disasterous results.

But as I was running around Shoreditch park trying to shake of a turn-of-the-season cold, I was also reflecting on another myth-busting shift that is happening. It’s more subtle and slow-moving than the dynamic Occupy movements that are springing up all over the globe, but it is I believe complementary and phenomenally powerful.

It’s debunking the myth that our thinking self is the central axis of our being in the world.

More and more of the neuroscientific evidence and research in contemporary therapy point to a fallacy which is right at the heart of our psychic version of the Eurozone crisis.

Our thoughts believe they are geniuses. They too suffer from a self-attribution fantasy. Although most thinkers acknoweledge the existence of a body below the neck and are buffeted about by their emotions, the strident voice of our thoughts are like Charlie Chaplin’s great dictator shouting and shouting and shouting.

Yet our ‘being’ goes on quite happily when our thoughts blank out during sleep. While we are thinking furiously about a house we want to buy or an argument we need to win, our body goes on breathing and digesting and blooding quite unconcerned with the strutting voice of the thinking mind.

What made me think about this was that half way round Shoreditch park I found myself stuck in an angry little groove, thinking about a troublesome friend of mine and my anger at him. Round and round: a jumping needle on a record. So then I practised a trick I teach people on meditation courses: flushing. Simply bring all your attention to your senses: to what you can see, smell, feel, hear. Let the images and details and colours and tastes flush through your system and ‘dislodge’ the stuck needle.

A little voice in my head said: ah, but you’re just repressing the thought. And then it struck me: but why is thought more real than the sound of people playing five-aside-football or the colour of those leaves under the sodium street lights? It’s a brainwash to think that thoughts are at the centre of things.

They really aren’t.

Neuroscience shows that most decisions are made and acted upon seconds before the thought “I’m deciding this” shows up. Our emotions, body and energy are all enacting our lives long before we think about acting.

Just as the Arab Spring showed that one illusory system can fall overnight and something new can arise, sustained mindfulness practice can undermine the phoney dictatorship of the thinking mind to such a point that it collapses and, in the aftermath, we realise we were being duped and we’re better off without it.

I’m talking about a Copernican revolution.

We have been gulled to believe that our Being revolves around our conscious thoughts. But this is like Ptolemy’s model of the sun revolving round the Earth. It seemed commonsensical but it causes major, irreconcilable problems because it is not true. If however, we start to entertain the notion that our being radiates out from around our body and that our thoughts are (important but peripheral) satellites then things make a lot more sense. Throw in the energy that radiates out from the Body-Sun and you have a solar system of Being that suddenly functions properly.

Thoughts can be terrible wealth-destroyers when we believe they are the centre of our Being. Allow them their place in the orbit around the energetic Sun of the body and the enormous solar wealth of Being can be fairly distributed again.