Pisscopals

Former Episcopal minister Ann Reddings, who converted to Islam and maintained she was still a Christian, was deposed from her orders in early April. Yet she apparently took part in the vesting ceremony for new Episcopal deacons in Seattle.

I am watching The Tudors these days. The Prior of the Carthusian monastery in London was hung, drawn and quartered by order of Henry VIII simply for refusing to accept him as head of the Church. Now a Muslim ex-priestess gets to vest deacons. Quite the evolution for Henry's Church.

One of the commenters on this story, reflecting on the 21 month period of discussion and discernment that preceded the defrocking, had a humorous thought:

In the Catholic Church the period of discernment would have been shortened to a period of about 10 seconds which would have given the priest time to formulate an answer to the Bishop’s question “Are you nuts?”

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Faux blogging

Actor Chris Bruno.

On TV now, playing Beowulf in a bad production of Grendel. With that mug, and a full short-cropped beard, all is forgiven.

He has a lil bro actor, Dylan. Quite the gene pool the Brunos swim in.

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Manning up

"Man up." "Grow a pair."

Invitations to a male to take responsibility, face the issue and address it courageously. Put more colorfully.

I can't think of a parallel appeal for females. If true, telling.

I live in a "community" where atypical gender behavior is the norm. Regardless of style, most of the folks in my neighborhood are interested in hooking with fellow members of their gender. That in itself is atypical. And then the styles of presentation are all over the map. I know I do not live in a normal environment.

So one of the things that fascinates me is the way that men handle realms that are often normally the province of women. In male couples, especially. I was talking to a guy the other day about his partner. After several years together, he still found it very difficult to be directly affectionate outside of sex or to speak how he felt outside of some very standard phrases, despite knowing how crucial his mate had been to his surviving and thriving. Laudable though that may be (Saying "I love you" to another man's face is quite a task for some of us), it seemed to me that it was time long overdue for him to be clear about his appreciation for his man, who deserved to hear what he was worth. I found myself saying, "Be a man about it. Stop being such a pussy and tell the guy the truth to his face, for God's sake."

Interesting, even to me, that I put it that way. Most often we understand the expression of feeling through words as a feminine undertaking. Or the work of poets (who are often* feminized males, regardless of sexual interest). Guys are gruff and mute. And often that's just fine. But here it seemed to me that it was not a question of anything other than the respect one man is due from another, and especially when they have cast their lot in life together. My appeal was not to his feminine side, but precisely to his masculinity, his sense of honor and justice.

My own experience of this has changed, too, as I get older. I remember the first time I tried to tell a man I loved him. Well, we were both 18, hardly more than boys. I could not say the words, hard as I tried. Since then, I have said them shyly, with hesitation, with trepidation.

The man I say those words to these days, I say directly and with feeling. Often, when the context drives me to it. It makes me feel strong when I say them. Not always, though. There are times when I feel I have given away the store. Sometimes he responds with the same words, sometimes not. Sometimes he even says it on his own. And today I framed them in a way that I suspect rarely happens between men and women. It felt much like guy-love to me...passionate, erotic, close, as true as I know how to be, and from the heart. Something like this:

"I love you. God, I do. But you are such a fucking asshole. Really." We both laughed.

I think it is a special gift of men that we can express affection for each other by insult, and the more exaggerated the insult, the deeper the affection. Now you don't have to include vulgarity and a put-down to "masculinize" the exchange, but I guess what I am claiming here is that there are naturally male ways, ways you don't have to learn from Oprah, of being open-heartedly direct about love between men.

Speaking for myself, I find that if something I say or do feels natural to me and naturally good to me, feels like it's just me being myself, then there's a good chance it's what shrinks call "integrated." Without a doubt there is a tenderness, a gentleness, an awe-struck reverence, a breath-taking sweetness in the kind of love I can have for a man. But if it ever felt feminine, it has not felt that way for a long time. On the contrary, it comes from the same place and lives in the same heart that can look a much-beloved mug right in the eye and say to the buttheaded moron who makes the world light up for me, "I love you. Fuck, I do."

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*A clarification, lest Jack Donovan, author of Androphilia, correct me. Masculinity includes the creation of high culture. I confess a definite affection for certain kinds of traditional American blue-collar maleness, --the most convincing local variety, frankly-- but I am very well aware that it is men who make culture. Only certain kinds of poets fit the bill I am talking about.

Attractive opposites

Reading through a book called Dynamic Duos, by Keith Swain. He uses evolutionary psychology and a survey to make the case that gay men mate most successfully when there is an Alpha & Beta coupling: the alpha being the more traditionally masculine and the beta with a higher dose of the feminine. His advice is to conform to this pattern rather than to try to resist it. Not finished yet --it is strangely and, to me, poorly laid out-- but it covers territory from a social science point of view that I have seen elsewhere from archetypal and a psychoanalytical ones. He uses the figures of the Hero and the Sidekick to illustrate the point.

Heroes and Sidekicks, from Gilgamesh and Enkidu to Holmes and Watson, to Batman and Robin, are a fascinating study in male love, even where the pairing is not sexual. Jesus had his Peter, Buddha his Ananda. It is a natural and necessary part of the larger male soul for some to serve others. How else could an army be maintained? Alphas and Betas need each other, precisely as men.

The Canadian Jungian analyst Graham Jackson wrote two books in the early 90's in which he makes the case for two basic kinds of male coupling which somewhat echo the masculine/feminine polarity. Whether the dyad is on the brother-brother model or the father-son model, Jackson saw in both fiction and his cases an attraction between sun-identified thinking types and earth-focussed feeling types, on the one hand, and dominant fact-oriented hierarchical men of duty and submissive intuitive artistic men of passion. The Yellow Man with the Green Man, the Blue Man with the Red Man.

Jackson had himself been inspired by the little known psychoanalyst Paul Rosenfels, who investigated the psychological mating between assertive and yielding males. Roselfels puts this in stark terms:

True psychological mating is not only possible between individuals of the same sex, it is actually the rule in human interactions (whether sexual or not). How can two men, biologically alike, find a true difference between them through which mating can occur? The answer is simple but profound in its implications: through character specialization. What this book says in effect is that character specialization is dominant over biological identity, and that therefore two men (or two women) can have a masculine-feminine interaction which can lay the basis for a true romantic union, pregnant with possibilities for creative self-development.

The complex ebb and flow of "masculine" and "feminine" energies in a same-sex couple is fascinating. My own experience suggests that it can alter both with time and with the character of the partner. And it can express itself surprisingly in both integrated and unintegrated ways and with varying degrees of intensity.

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The decline of the North

In Canada now, part of being a "right-wing doorknob" is also being called a "free speecher".

A "free speecher".

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The argument from design once more

Existence of God highly likely.

An inquiring reader

Asks himself, when this blog "grows quiet":

"Has ExCathedra finally resign'd himself to accepting incoming tide of Islam, affirming the prevailing version of blue state "liberalism," and celebrating the gay culture decree that a male with a homosexual orientation is neither a man, really, nor capable of gravitas in his personal manner or in understanding human nature?

Hmmm.

Good Friday 2009

Some of the most telling elements of Christianity come not only from its great and fundamental doctrines but from its folklore and legend.

In this Slovak image of the crucifixion, there is a skull at the bottom. It is a frequent theme in extra-canonical texts that the hill of Calvary where Jesus was crucified is identical with the ancient hill where Adam was buried. In the image here, the blood of the Second Adam, Christ, drops down onto the skull of the First Adam and brings him to life again.

In the great dogmatic narrative, on Easter the divine Father brings his dead Son to life; and in this minor and popular narrative, the Son, in dying, brings life to his long-dead human Father.

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Male nature and the kiss

"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth."
Song of SongsOpening line

A friend gave me one of the Mary Renault novels this past year.

A lot of male-male erotics, but all within a societal assumption

about male honor and dishonor.

A classical notion liberal society finds laughable,

living now only in the military, I suspect.

I provoked a lot of on-line yelling this week

by going to an "independent" gay site

and asking rather combatively

why transgenderism is now included canonically

in the LGBT community.

What has same-sex desire got to do

with wanting to be chemically and surgically

altered into your contra-corporal gender?

The least hysterical and non-tactical answer

was that LGBTs all transgress normative

gender behavior expectations. By sexual object

choice or gender identity, LGBTs break the

norms of male/female gender rules.

When I asked if hetero males who get a

thrill from cross-dressing should be included,

I got a loud Yes.

So it appears that the larger ideology is about

gender, not about sexual desire.

And the underlying Evil Dominator was,

of course, masculinity, aka, patriarchy.

Surprise!

More than ever I cannot identify anymore

with LGBT thing.

Although I am aware of the challenge involved,

and the prima facie unlikelihood of cocksucking

and buttfucking as vehicles for this,

it seems to me that my experience of male-male

eros has mostly always been a celebration precisely of

masculinity.

And symbolically dense as those two

items on the erotic menu may be,

my own sense of where the center of gravity

lies in male-male eros is

the kiss.

To me, everything else is already there

there.

This is the alchemical gesture.
Once the mutual recognition,

invitation, exploration,
challenge, intimacy

is established there,

then all the apparently more

explosive symbolic sex acts

and the whole rhythm of

physical and emotional power exchange
between two males

is set in its right archetypal context,

be it the love of the older man and younger man,

or the love of comrade brothers.

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Male nature

Continuing my random thoughts about the finality of sexual acts...Seems to me that if anyone is or were interested in developing a purpose-driven (!) theory of homosexual sex, they'd have to separate male-male sex from female-female sex. What you often have in traditional circles is a theory of male-female sex and then another one about non-heterosexual sex.

But the specificity of the gender, which is crucial to heterosexual theorizing, is no less important for homosexuality. Maleness, the engagement of a male with a male in sex. Same thing for women with women. They are not interchangeable.

So what goes on, specifically, in the sexual dynamic between two men?

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