Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression (12 page)

Finally, he copped to it: he was ashamed when I played with his ass, even though it gave him intense pleasure. The most revealing thing he ever told me was how, when I was embracing him from behind in the shower, he fantasized that my hands on his cock were really a man’s. To my surprise, I found the thought arousing. I hadn’t known my touch was so potent. I said, “Why worry about ‘being gay’ when you like sex with me so much? I don’t care if you think about men when we’re together. It’s me who’s touching you! Just give it up!” In hindsight, I should have just pushed him into the shower again without any explanation.

Of course it was easier for me to give advice than for him to cut through the umbilical guilt. When he joined up with a famous Guru X a few years later, long after our affair, I couldn’t wait to ask him how his new religion affected his sex life. He very patronizingly gave me a list of strict rules that all the

faithful had to abide by. Masturbation was out; that was the top of the list. Guru X didn’t want to see any wasted drops. Meanwhile, Mark still had nothing but complaints about his penis. In fact, he insulted himself worse than ever; but now, instead of having someone like me urging him to break loose, he had a big papa figure to furnish all the prohibition and criticism he could swallow.

It was no surprise to me, a few years later, when a whole bunch of women started suing Guru X for rape and sexual harassment, accusing him of breaking every rule he set for his followers. Mark defended him, determined to hold on to Papa’s Rules for Clean Living and Sure-Fire Enlightenment, rather than admit that behind every erotic condemnation there’s a burning hypocrite.

I wish my old friend would come out of his fantasy closet; I wish he could accept whatever small or large percent of him is bisexual. I wish he would love his penis as part of his pleasure-giving-and-receiving body. I wish he could understand his erotic spirit as a gift to his desire for social transformation instead of something that betrays it.

My next sweetheart who crossed over into a spiritual black hole was a young woman named Mary, who came to my bed while I was crying my eyes out over being dumped by someone else. At first she was a sweet comfort to me, and then I saw that she was seeking something from me as well: she had a one-track sexual longing to give herself up, to push past any kind of resistance into bottomless erotic submission. Well, I should say it appeared bottomless to me then, because I barely knew the first thing about S/M, and I had no idea how I was supposed to handle her.

Mary liked me to fuck her so hard that it would scare me—because of the rush it gave me, as well as my fear that I would

hurt her. As is so often the case in sexual dilemmas, the only thing that was “hurting” us was our ignorance. If we’d read a chapter or two from any decent handbook on deep penetration, I’m sure I could have dissolved my guilt and worries on the spot.

One day I called her in the afternoon, and she told me in the strangest sort of monotone to come collect my things. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me she’d had an overnight conversion to join a tribe called Zendyck and that she was leaving in a few hours. I drove up to her cabin with a friend to see her looking like a magenta scarecrow, dying all her clothes pink in a giant vat, with a vicious little rat of a man doing all the talking for her.

Her bank account—liquidated for Mr. Zendyck. Her sexuality—completely under this lunatic’s lock and key. I felt like I was in an episode of
The Return of Charlie Manson.
Here I’d been worried about the consequences of tying her up to our headboards, and now she was completely ensnared in this madman’s rhetoric.

To her, it wasn’t mad. She was leaving to go tend his flock in the desert, to panhandle in the streets for more money, to lose her period from lack of eating, and to follow whatever sexual demands or prohibitions he cooked up for the day. It was Guru as Pimp all over again. A year later, Mr. Zendyck sent her out to sell their “newspaper” for spare change, and for some reason, she made a collect call to my apartment in San Francisco and asked me to wire her a train ticket. She didn’t admit she was walking out; she just said she was really tired and she needed to go to sleep for a while.

Brainwashing, along with depriving you of all your basic desires, makes you tired beyond all reason. My friend seemed to be learning how to walk again, and she was mistrustful of every

step. When she physically recovered, she moved to the country, and told me she’d met a new love. She called herself a lesbian separatist now. I was a little disappointed but mostly relieved. As New Age experiments go, lesbian separatism is pro-sex, pro-art, propelled by consensus decision making, and fortified by a wholesome vegetarian diet. As an antidote to Zendyck, it sounded perfect.

I think both of my friends’ conversions were motivated largely by fear, and one of those core fears was their sense of shame and helplessness over their sexual passion. They wanted a discipline that would silence that imagination and yearning, so they could sublim-ate—at least partially—their sexual taste for submission with the subordinations of their new faith.

Of course one does not want to be consumed with lust to the de-struction of all else, but why is that our first fear? Why do we think that if we let ourselves embrace the power of touch, we will be swept off on a tide of anarchy and disintegration? We are mesmerized by forbidden fruit, and we imagine that the first bite will unhinge us from all our duties and obligations. But any obligation that sur-renders a sexual life is an obligation to be questioned.

The truth is that sexual creativity is healthy for your mind, it is comforting and healing to your fatigue, it is an inspiration at times when things feel unbearable. A loss of libido is a sign of depression and/or illness, not an ascension to sainthood or the inevitable bow to practicalities.

So where does one find a love life that combines mind, body, and spirit, with pleasure intact? The sexual revolution in the New Age may have started with massage oils and Tantric gurus (the massage oil is a sounder proposition than the guru), but in its latest incarna-tion, the positive-sex posse in the New Age is decidedly pagan. Pagan beliefs are strained no more purely than

those of any other faith, but they do have a joyful approach to pleasure, a rejection of “sin” as well as of holy patriarchs of any sort. The connotations of paganism have always had a bacchanalian air to them; they make you think of people who are furry and fuckable and in tune with the seasons; they dance and eat and drink their ambrosia.

Why are so many spiritual movements obsessed with eradicating the sexual? Why are they transparently attached to chauvinistic displays toward women, children, and men’s own feminine side? The pope, Zendyck, the Promise Keepers, and Guru X ought to all have a big roast so they can ream one another vituperatively. I remember Mark once griping how unfair it was that I dismissed his cult leader just because I disagreed with “one thing”—the prohibition on masturbation. I’m sure I’m the only person he ever met who proposed masturbation as a litmus test. Well, I can’t imagine any test more articulate: it fingers the common point among all sex suppressors—that repression of the body is prerequisite to subordination.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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BETWEEN SEX AND THE DEVIL

God, I can push the grass apart And lay my finger on Thy heart!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I
used to have a relationship with God; I begged him to save my life on a few occasions. I do mean “begged,” on my knees and making insane promises—and when the peril passed over, and I was still alive, I thanked him for saving me. I was a child, and there were troubles in my family sometimes that made me think I wasn’t going to make it.

My biggest promise to God—now don’t laugh—came in the form of a trade with him. If he saved my life, I would become a nun and start a convent in some really deserving location. I remember, as I grew up, that I started having other ambitions for what I’d like to do, and I began to wonder if I could negotiate a time limit on that convent pledge.

What an ungrateful fantasy! The nuns I studied under warned us, again and again, not to treat God like a parachute cord: he wanted our devotion all the time, not just when we were desperate. Their reprimands guilt-tripped me but didn’t change my position much. In truth, the only time I was utterly committed to God’s existence was when I was begging for rescue. “Save me! I will turn my life over to you if you do.” When I decided, in puberty, that I no longer believed in God—and it was an abrupt decision—one of the things I felt a little silly about was that I had cried out for a savior in the first place.

Recently I talked with my lover about his experience being raised as an atheist, compared to my upbringing as an Irish American Catholic. I asked him, “If you were in an airplane going down for a crash, would you feel like praying all of a sudden?” I confessed that in spite of myself, I would probably revert to my childhood begging, because that’s my emotional last resort.

“No,” he said, “I couldn’t, because it’s never had any meaning to me. I’d probably be trying to figure out how the flotation cushion works.” But then he added, “I don’t think you should be ashamed of wanting to be rescued; someone should have saved you when you were helpless as a kid, and it should have been a flesh-and-blood someone.”

My release from God happened as an adolescent, when I was becoming more powerful, more independent, and certainly more sexual. I moved from one parent’s home to the other. My father, whom I was getting to know for the first time, told me he was a Zen Buddhist and had been since the fifties. My new friends in high school told me they were Marxists. The girls I baby-sat with in my neighborhood told me that yeah, God exists, but she is only discovered after chewing a lot of peyote. I revived

my own interest in myth and religious traditions, not because I was a seeker, but because I just couldn’t resist a good story.

The last straw came when I was invited to some sort of Jewish Unitarian service, where the word
God
never came up. The service took place in a basement with no stained glass, flowers, candles, or statues. These people had no concept of God saving their ass; they were all community activists. I walked out that night and directly addressed the stars: “You don’t exist, do you? That means I don’t have to join a convent! If I’m wrong, and you really are up there, then I hope you’re not too disappointed. There’s got to be more than one way to make a sacrifice.”

It occurs to me now that it’s odd I didn’t have an equally earnest conversation with the Devil, since in childhood I had addressed him so many more times than Jesus. I had personally asked the Devil over and over again to leave me alone. At one point, in my campaign to stop masturbating—this was the place where I really felt the Devil and I were closest—I just said, “Okay, I give up, you win. Burn me away.” As sketchy as my Catholic education had been on the whys and wherefores of heaven and enlightenment, I had the whole manual on hell.

Nowadays, although I am open to many people’s conceptions of God and divinity, I have zero tolerance for devil-mongering. I’ve tried very hard to let my own daughter see that there are a lot of spiritual traditions to learn from, and I don’t make fun of her desire to believe in something outside of our material conditions. But the day she came home in tears telling me that some girls in class told her she would “go to hell” if she didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, I blew up. “That’s crap,” I said—the first unequivocal opinion I’d shared with her on religion. “There is no such thing as hell; they’re just trying to bully you.”

What are little girls told about Hell and the Devil? The Devil is the one who tempts you; and temptation is almost always manifested as (a) mouthing off and being sassy, (b) being angry and unremorse-ful, and (c) feeling sexual pleasure.

When a young woman discovers her power, both sexual and intellectual, she unleashes her own voice, her righteousness. The first things she has to jettison are the Devil and any religious representa-tion of her gender as stained or subservient. She’s just naturally going to be attracted to Goddesses or witches or, as in my case, a scientific understanding of the body and a historical view of sexual politics. I’ve always hesitated to call myself an atheist or agnostic, because religious labels, like sex labels, change endlessly in sectarian debates. Instead, I find faith in the fact that almost anything is possible and that virtually nothing is certain. It’s easy for me to believe that there’s something bigger than we are, because I don’t think our species is that brilliant. Look at how often we find ourselves staring at the simplest things in the universe with awe. Our most truthful answer to the biggest questions is often “I don’t know.” I’m convinced of

our modest place in the universe.

The closest I get to spiritual essence is when I feel unencumbered by my everyday consciousness, and that happens most vividly in dreams, in artistic inspiration, in erotic life, and in love. I know that I’ll look back on some of those experiences as flights of fancy, especially overwrought personal indulgences. But even in its most childish and irrational expression, where did that ball of fire come from? It can’t all be an undigested bit of beef.

I also savor the idea of the temple communion, the gathering of the beloved. Even though my conventional church experi-

ences were nothing but a tedious spell of alienation, I found my own communion when I became a political animal. In demonstration, vigil, sit-in, and pie fight, I felt the power of turning an unfair battle upside down, the steadfastness of the dearest comrades, the love of a vision. That vision may have crumbled at several points, but the bonds of our community persisted.

The first time I ever went to something that could be called an orgy, I found another community. I was knocked out by the combination of sex and group ritual. Here, sexual connection was undisguised, but it was bigger than one couple, so that instead of some little blazing romance between A and B, you had the bonfire of critical mass. The feeling of sexual arousal, which always makes me feel bigger than myself, complemented the experience of loving a community, where knowing names is not as important as an unfor-gettable group experience.