QED

A few years ago, I bought The Complete Idiot's Guide to Overcoming Procrastination.

Never got around to reading it.

Really.

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Get a clue

Scrolling through a website I kinda like, where men of maturity :) hang out, I came across a profile with an attractive set of pictures and then read in the text (I paraphrase):

Since Election Day, I have taken down my rant against the appalling GW Bush and congratulate all of us who voted for President Obama. To my surprise, I had gotten angry messages from rabid gay Republicans. I still don't get them."

Ok, so you can post a "rant" against the "appalling" Bush, but when like is met with like, your opponents are the "rabid" ones?

I have certainly become very one-sided in my political views over the last several years. Hey, that's why I rant here with such articulate charm. But it seems to me, in my humble opinion, that the gay herd is so lock stepped with the liberal left that they truly cannot imagine another point of view. It really is beyond them to conceive. Their effluvience of outrage is just, I don't know, natural, and their opponents are diseased, evil or stupid.

Do you not "get" the blackness of the pot re the kettle?

Of course you don't.

There's a guy who has always smiled and said Hi to me as we pass in the street. Little fella, moves well, always dresses in leather, nice deep voice...but often enveloped in a cloud of cologne....go figure...so no interest from me. I happened to see him on TV during the Prop 8 campaign. He was beside himself, raging and practically spitting venom at the other side. Rabid. Now when I see him, I just nod. Scary.

Not to drag (sic) out the Perez Hilton vs Carrie Prejean thing, but if a straight conservative (or even worse, horrors, Christian) judge asked that question of her and got a pro-gay marriage answer AND then flunked the contestant because of it AND then went on to publicly label her a bitch and cunt...Any clue as to the response? We'd have civil rights hate-speech lawsuits up the wazoo.

What galls me is that La Hilton, who embodies a hemisphere of repulsive gay stereotypes, gets an almost total pass from the "LGBT" community for behaving in a way that, were he on the "other side", would have had the usual suspects screaming "Nazi!" in a heartbeat.

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Piety and holiness

What?

I know this is a blog about politics, sex, and religion. But after a few posts on male/male eros, you post on piety and holiness? What could you possibly know about that?

Well, I have a rich (aka, checkered) past.

Example of the difference between piety and holiness.

Father A., a man of advanced years and the well-honed carapace of monastic style --slight unconvincing smile, eyes largely downcast, body contained but not tense-- was a long-time resident of a house I was visiting and I was assigned a seat in the refectory next to him.

I was informed informally, sub rosa and sotto voce, that it was my job to make sure that he ate enough. Here's why. Father A. had let it slip somewhere that he had made a private promise never to ask for seconds. He would eat what was presented to him but not ask for seconds. However, if seconds were offered to him --a sign of Divine Providence-- he would humbly and graciously accept.
And accept.

So the other brothers in the house, when seated by him, had to make sure that he was offered seconds and that the pious old man had enough to eat. Even then, my eventual fall from grace was beginning to show, when after a few months of this charade, I may even have "forgotten" to offer seconds to Father A and, I blush to admit it, may even have enjoyed watching the subtle signs of consternation on his benign face when the accustomed offer failed to materialize at lunch. My internal dialogue may have been something like, "Get your own damn food, for Christ's sake, you old pain in the ass." Mea culpa. Sorta.

(For an amazingly insightful celebration of the obsessive pettiness of monastic life*, check out The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, by a man who never spent a day in a monastery, Robert Browning. As a study of shadow projection and hypocrisy, applicable to any situation, it is pretty damn good.) *or a bad marriage or dysfunctional workplace, etc.

What sparked this post is a word that I see a lot lately in conservative writing to describe the behavior of the currently ascendant left: preening. It certainly paints a vivid picture of the kind of moralism that I have found so irritating in liberals --although I find it irritating in anyone--, that disconnected-from-outcome and often disconnected-from-self-criticism high-mindedness.

My current beef is the paroxysms of appallment about Gitmo and waterboarding and torture.
In order to preen, one's own countrymen can be betrayed and one's own country's security can be threatened. Just to show how moral "we" are. Yeah, right.

Holiness --back to the title topic-- is another matter. I admit that I have less experience of holiness than I do of piety, but I think I can tell the difference . So I'll have to go away and think about it some more.

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MaleMates

Finding the right word for bonding between two men, the bonding that is physical as well as emotional...not easy for me. My first partner insisted that I stop calling him my boyfriend and refer to him as my lover. My second partner and I used "partner". (That once caused a funny moment when we were introduced to a female friend's father. When we told him that, no, we were not in business together and it slowly dawned on him who he was meeting....). In conversation now, he describes himself as having been married to me, but also says of our eight year cohabitation, "When we were going out..." Not simple.

Jack Donovan and Nathan Miller are finishing a book about rites of blood brotherhood, a study of the indigenous ways men ritualize intimate connections.

I have yet to find a single word for what I intend. Friend, though true, smacks of the bowdlerized closetry of yesteryear. Friend, wink-wink. Companion is generic and Husband seems too heterosexual. Spouse, as well. Mate...well, two men cannot mate in the typical way, in the procreational way, even if they can in a soulful way. Partner seems too bloodless and Life Partner too pompous. The appellation Husbear, among Bears, reeks of cute. "My guy"? "My man"?

I have settled on three words: Men who bond with each other in a committed and intimate way seek to be friends, lovers and family to each other.

And up popped Aquinas and Cranmer. What a pair. God, my head is an intellectual garage sale waiting to happen.

Aquinas saw marriage as a unique kind of friendship. And Cranmer's beautiful vow, without much stretching, seems to contain these three meanings.

If marriage is friendship,
then With this ring I thee wed
is a declaration of friendship.
With my body I thee worship
is the declaration of a lover.

And if family is created not only by blood
but by common wealth and dwelling,
then it is incorporation in families that is meant by
And with all my worldly goods I thee endow.

I am not a huge fan of gay marriage as a civil or religious institution. But I cannot deny the similar impulse between some men, to bond themselves to each other for life, body and heart.
Friends, lovers, family.

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Malesoul 25

Matching lenses

With the possible exception of one sentence, I find myself agreeing with everything Mark Levin has written in Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto. I am only on Chapter 3, but so far he is right on target as far as I am concerned. Apparently he has struck a chord, since the book is #1 on Amazon and the New York Times bestseller lists.

The dichotomy he uses in not Conservative vs Liberal, but Conservative vs Statist. Big overlap, but it makes the issue clear: the egalitarian drive of contemporary liberalism is expressed in a commitment to the dominance of the State in all areas of life. As I have opined before, a society of equal outcomes must be a virtual police state, since humans, left to their own devices, will not move in that direction.

(The "Justice and Peace" fetish of Vatican II Catholicism, for example, does not include "Liberty" in the headline. And for a very good reason. It's not important.)

I have listened to Levin on the radio in the past, when I used to drive to and from work. He has a voice not meant for radio. Not pleasant at all. And he is hardly the grand statesman in attitude. Very scrappy or worse. But his writing is a pleasure to read, not only for its ideas but for its style. Hard to hear, easy to read.

Reminds me of Gregory Baum. He is a very liberal sorta Catholic theologian, now in his 80's. His 1970 book, Man Becoming, had a big impact on me. He wrote in a self-consciously non-jargoned style and I liked the humanism of his articles and other books. Then I took a class from him. Although I don't recall that his voice was unusual for a German-speaker, he revealed himself to be a prickly, testy, short-tempered, dogmatic and self-righteous little tyrant. (Neither the first or last time I found an icon of liberalism so charactered.) Easy to read, hard to hear.

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Paradise, lost

Many men, whether it be their fate, or fond opinion, easily perswade themselves, if God would but be pleas'd a while to withdraw his just punishments from us, and to restraine what power either the devill, or any earthly enemy hath to worke us woe, that then mans nature would find immediate rest and releasement from all evils.

But verily they who think so, if they be such as have a minde large enough to take into their thoughts a generall survey of human things, would soon prove themselves in that opinion farre deceiv'd.

For though it were granted us by divine indulgence to be exempt from all that can be harmfull to us from without, yet the perversnesse of our folly is so bent, that we should never cease hammering out of our owne hearts, as it were out of a flint, the seeds and sparkles of new misery to our selves, till all were in a blaze againe.

John Milton
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
1644

Internet Uroboros

The recent exchange between Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean and gay gossip columnist Perez Hilton has provoked some dust. And in me, disgust.

I left a rather heated comment about it this morning at GayPatriot.com. This afternoon, on Facebook, a friend of mine listed some mentions of his book, Androphilia, in some blogs lately. I went to read one of them, by a conservative Catholic Republican from Palo Alto, and found that it was a reprint of my comment at GayPatriot.

My immortal prose here:

After 30+ years of being out and mostly very proud, my sense of connection to “the gay community” over the last several years has been thinning to the point where –to my utter amazement– I don’t like to refer to myself using the G word that much anymore.

Lord knows my sexual orientation is as happily focussed on Humans Living With Testosterone as it ever was. Even more, if that’s possible! But the antics of the “LGBT” leadership and media and the herdlike ways of the tribe have worn me out. Jack Malebranche’s spot-on manifesto “Androphilia” really ripped a Titanical hole in my social identity when he ranted on, very articulately, about the unholy trinity of anti-male feminism, leftwing politics and group victimism that now shapes the gay worldview.

Then this…flesh-creeping troll, Perez Hilton…an eerie part-boy, mostly drag-queen in PMS creature…whom I had barely heard of before…shreds this poor woman for having the audacity to hold a view of marriage universally assumed in the West for two millennia. And he uses really vile language in public. The whole scene disgusts me, both for narcissism and for rank cowardice.

If she had been black, you know for sure that Miss Thing –a stupid gay phrase that in PH’s case really fits– would not have been making videos with the B and the C words in it.

Why would I want to be part of a group that has such human trash in it…and, unless I’ve missed it…let’s him go on his merry way unchallenged!

If the scenario were reversed and some beauty queen in favor of gay marriage was trashed by a conservative judge like that, she’d the the Queen of Martyrs by lunchtime and we’d be hearing the calls to man the barricades against the imminent concentration camps of the “bigots” and “haters”.

The gay community is full to the brim with bigots and haters. I am almost out of patience and am wondering where I send in my Q Identity card for a refund.

I was peeved.

Miss Prejean was interviewed civilly by veteran gay journalist Rex Wockner. She was clear but polite once more and asked pointedly why she should be treated so vilely when her position was the same as President Barack Obama's. Good damn question. If that homely faggot Hilton can call her a bitch and a cunt for her point of view, why is the Beloved O not a nigger or a coon for his quite similar position?

On the way home from the laundry this afternoon, I spied a byline in The SF Bay Times, another of the LGBT papers here. Something about "Another Beauty Queen Goes Awry." Checking the online version, I find this editorial by owner and publisher Kim Corsaro. Don't feel the need to read the whole thing. The message? It's just fine to publicly call a woman a bitch and a cunt if she fails to espouse the correct line on gay marriage. By stating, rather politely if not superarticulately, that the bimillenial idea of marriage as between a man and a woman (astonishing!) is her preference, she "hurt the feelings" of LGBTs, especially the young, and even contributed to the atmosphere that brings about violence and suicide. She should come in for re-education sessions.

Like dirty kaffirs in Muslim societies, whose very existence hurts the feelings of the believers and who must therefore be humiliated and marginalized, those who do not kowtow to the utter obviousness of gay marriage are now not only wrong, but hatefully violent. Their evil thoughts lead magically to death. The rule: you can't disagree with me because it hurts my feelings and that makes you a criminal.

The American ideal of free speech has never seemed to me a natural ideal. A splendid, really splendid one, but as we can see from the responses of these victimized tyrant Americans, not a value worth keeping when compared with our hurt feelings.

And to think that men have died to protect people like that.

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More faux blogging

In appreciation of Humans Living With Testosterone.

Just came across this fella's pictures this morning, half-consciously cyberlinking. As far as physical attributes go, I could not ask for more. A 5'9" furry mesomorph. His stage name, Cole Ryder.

Had a funny set of internal discussions with myself about this. I was going to post his picture because he embodied, literally, pretty well everything I most like in the male physique. But the shot which best shows him off has an at least partly erect penis in it. I suddenly felt an attack of modesty. If that --the penis, not the modesty--is going to offend you, don't scroll down to the bottom of the post. If that is likely to offend you, though, my guess is that you don't ever read this blog.

Then, linking around some more, I discovered that he had died last summer. His real name was Mike and he was only 36. Friends who have put up tributes to him, some of whom were at home with him when he passed away, have been at pains to deny that he had HIV or was taken by a staph infection. And they are equally clear that he was a very loveable, good-natured and decent guy. A dog-lover, which is usually a sign of good character.

Always sad when the young are taken before their time.

But, his own website is still up and this is an act of appreciation for me, not a pornographic event, So, here he is, as he was in life. A beautiful man on the outside for sure and, as his friends relate, on the inside, too. Rest in peace.

Cranmer, appalled

As far as I know, it was Cranmer's 16th century Book of Common Prayer which first framed the marriage vows to include this:

With this ring I thee wed,
with my body I thee worship,
with all my worldly goods I thee endow.

Aside from his beautiful language, I am no fan of the old Prot. But this language is starkly beautiful, really quite extraordinary, simple, direct, poetic, stunning.

"With my body I thee worship."

His Grace would not be happy with my reflections today.

Worship comes in many forms. In my Catholic background, the catechism taught three distinct kinds: latreia, dulia and hyperdulia. Latreia is the worship owed only to the Trinitarian God: the Father, the incarnate Christ, the Holy Spirit; to give it to any creature was idolatry. Dulia is reverence and honor, given to saints, God's special creations of grace. Hyperdulia is the strong reverence and honor given to the Virgin Mary, the most completely deified creature.

I am sure that Cranmer, of all people, was not asking his marrying couples to worship each other idolatrously, but that he was so frank about the sacred physicality of marriage balances some of his other theological obsessions for me.

In Catholic theology, too, the marriage sacrament is incomplete until the couple have intercourse. Without that sexual act to fulfill what took place before the altar, annulment is possible. People do not often make the connection: one of the seven sacraments instituted by Christ requires sexual intercourse. If I can make a limping analogy with the Eucharist. The consecration of the bread and wine by the priest at the Mass makes the Eucharist real. But only when it is eaten and drunk by the congregation is it really complete, achieving its purpose. With marriage, however, the bond created by the marriage partners in the vow rite requires that they physically enact it in sexual intercourse.

I am by nature a religious man. Not pious, really. And certainly not spiritual. But the world is full of God to me, sometimes full of gods. And in the meeting of two bodies, with carnal knowledge, I can feel that call to worship.

We have different religions. In the sexual realm, my religion is not The Woman but The Man. And as my symphonic capacities grow richer with age and I am able, quite naturally, to inhabit realms of sheer sensuality and epiphanic soulfulness at the same time, I am aware of the worshipful dimension of sex with my own kind for me. Like all worship, it is mixed with ego and desire. And for this worshipper, even when I feel the draw most powerfully, I know by instinct that it is not merely the human in my arms who draws me, but something soul-stirring in him that is larger than he is, vast and ancient, enveloping and untamed, within which we both "live and move and have our being."

And like divine worship, what appears to be humble reverence, the exaltation of the other at the expense of the self, is in fact the most dignifying and ennobling of actions. To offer reverence and honor and awe to another is not to humilate the self, but to humble it, to let it know the truth of its value, its wonderful value.

Certainly not all sex has this religious dimension. Regardless of the genders of the participants, it can be empty, or worse. And this worshipful experience between people who will not be partners for life, though real, remains, in a sense, unconsummated by intention and time. With the "wedding" of souls through the body, so much more is actualized and possiblie. But the divine spark is there, if welcomed. The experience is there.

My Catholic soul knows without question that overwhelming sensual experience and worshipful contact with the Divine is not only possible but the most natural of things. Looking back on my life, I realize that when I was a child, I saw more unveiled male flesh in the art of the local parish church than I saw in all the rest of my young life put together. Whether it be through a solemn High Mass or the contending of man with man in a private sanctuary of desire and affection...worship, awe, gratitude, power, timestopping bliss, peace, the sinking of souls one into the other.

I know that the Great Church does not have the ways and means to sanction this or let itself understand it. And my comparison is, on the surface, blasphemous for many. Not my intention. I am no iconoclast and have no agenda, at least today. Today I simply say what I have experienced. I have some sense of what those beautiful old words mean:

"With my body I thee worship."

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