Vulnerability

I recently had a renewed contact with a man, whom I will call Ted. I had an unusual relationship with Ted nearly twenty years ago. I had met his partner in a social situation. His partner and I became intimate friends for a couple of years. Then the partner died of AIDS.

I met Ted when he came to the hospice where I was working. His partner, my friend, came there to die, as one of my patients. Ted visited nearly daily for short periods. I was told he was incapable of caring for our dying friend, even though they had lived together for about ten years. This struck me as odd at the time, because Ted, who was perhaps in his late thirties, seemed healthy and was still working at a high-paying job, which entailed travel. In fact, Ted was a weight-lifter and sported a very muscular physique. He seemed to be socially popular and had many friends.

As a hospice nurse, I had learned that institutional care is better than home care in some circumstances. I simply accepted that this was one such situation. Our dying friend was blind and demented from his disease. He was gentle and childlike. He died in a matter of weeks. I last saw him just hours before his death.

I contacted Ted recently when I saw his ad on line for volunteer help to read to him. Ted too is now blind and lives alone. When I responded to the ad, I revealed who I am and how we had previously known one another. I suggested that I could read for him, if he needed help, as his ad indicated.

Ted's reply stunned me. He said he had no memory of who I had been in his past. His partner, our friend whose memory is still very present to me, had died so long ago, Ted said, that he really doesn't remember much about it. Ted explained that his life had been so busy and active since then. In fact, he had a regular group of readers who read for him. Finally, he said he had several other respondents to his recent ad, but he was willing to consider me as a helper. He recommended that I call him another day. I suppose I may be interviewed and rejected.

This interaction is not unusual to me, as someone who has worked for many years with people in distress and their family systems. Yet, each time it happens I am astounded at the willingness of people to remain invulnerable to intimacy or human connection, even when they themselves are in great distress and need. Their need to be in control trumps their need for mindful intimacy and compassion.

As a male in a society which is violent and alienating much of the time, I have had to struggle with my own resistance to vulnerability. Letting people in is very difficult when you have been conditioned to value self-control over intimacy. Learning to walk the middle path between co-dependency and invulnerability in relationships has been part of my practice in life. It requires mindfulness, compassion and a measure of meditative detachment. The result, I believe, is the development of healthier relationships with other human beings and a healthier relationship with myself.

Courage

In the materialist and hedonist American culture, we are bombarded by stories in various media about people facing adversity by continuing to live "active" lives which often entail trips to exotic places, bicycle tournaments, cross-country treks. The media, owned by corporations who sell things, like trips, bicycles and motel rooms, have a vested interest in portraying the "brave" survivors of adversity as determined consumers.

Some who survive adversity become businesses, like the segments of the breast-cancer-fundraising industry, which has been exposed as a cash cow for some indiscriminate entrepreneurs while yielding limited net funds to cancer research. Parents of afflicted children, with the help of media promotion, have started non-profits which have become their full-time job, yielding much higher annual salaries than they ever expected in their original occupations, while yielding relatively little money to help others.

I am sorry to say that many of these trends are modeled on the example of the so-called, non-profit AIDS industry. By diligently pursuing Federal grants, running trendy fundraisers and setting up highly specific non-profits, some in the AIDS industry have made huge salaries, bought second homes and retired early on large pensions. They have traveled the globe on tax-deductible money under the pretext of attending conferences. AIDS transmission has not been impacted commensurate to the cost of funding these agencies.

What about the courage of those who live with adversity humbly and responsibly without participating in corruption, tax-evasion or manipulation of public sentiment? Millions of people live these lives day by day without resentment or selfishness. Yet, they are not held up as role models for those who may some day be confronted with a life crisis. Their wisdom is considered weakness by many. By the materialist and selfish, they are seen as losers.

What a sad state our culture is in! Despite the recent failure of greedy capitalism, our government struggles to prop it back up. People who come here illegally and reap the benefits of the hard work of native-born and legally immigrated Americans are seen as victims. Our Congress argues over billions of dollars to keep rich war contractors happy. Millions of people are losing their homes in foreclosure, while real estate experts joyfully tout increased sales and higher prices of property, as the banks resell the properties they have taken back.

It takes courage to live a simple and responsible life. To fulfill daily commitments to those we love requires consistency and routine. Flying off to a beach in Thailand at will is not on the menu of someone who loves and cares for others with a limited income. But we seldom hear the story of those who do the washing, the dressing and the feeding of those who cannot function by themselves.

I applaud and admire the courage of those who care responsibly and humbly for their fellow human beings throughout their lives. They are the unseen fabric which holds a society together. They often enable others in family systems to live more colorful and recreational lives without ever getting acknowledged for their contribution.

Elements

I sometimes like to look at my own life's development in terms of the elements. When I was growing in the womb, I was like the amniotic fluid in which I resided. I was unconscious, flexible, fluid, malleable. After being born, my body gradually hardened and stiffened. From rubbery newborn, I became a dynamic and aggressive toddler.

Growing from baby to child to adolescent is a hardening process, a process of individuation and forming of more rigid boundaries. More like stone plow than water, as a young adult, I learned to fend off rejections and other assaults on my self image. I plowed a path into a work life. I honed the blade of my plow against the rocks of prejudice, materialism, class and ignorance.

It was familiar and easy to continue to harden as I approached middle age. A certain amount of financial stability made me less dependent on social supports and networks. I had a fixed idea of where my life would go as a plow in the secure, walled field of my life.

The AIDS epidemic represented a boulder far stronger than my plow. It shattered that hardened me. The resulting congregate person, pieced together initially from the old hardened me, fumbled along for a short while. No straight furrows through the intense, changing morass of the epidemic could be plowed. So, I dissolved into it, became part of the soil of the epidemic itself.

By working within the devouring beast, which was decimating my community and my own life, I gradually learned that being more like water than stone worked better for me. Working my way back to the fluidity of my pre-conscious, amniotic self has been a form of liberation. Rebirthing, perhaps.

My practice is leading me gradually to that end point at which I will concretely become like water, like air...simply water vapor, dust and dissipated electromagnetic energy. I believe that approaching that end point, awake and alive, without struggling with the elemental realities of being is perhaps the height of what is means to be human. I also believe that any person who does this will inevitably become a mindful and compassionate creature.

Ronny

hey, chimp-loving actor man

are you resting in peace alone?

no crowds there in the ground.
cameras are all turned off now.

remember me? could you now?

your big feet walked all over us.

that hollywood '40s wave smile

under your red-dyed white hair.

are you mingling with my pals?

killed by your anti-gay bigotry
killing the chance to kill a virus,

killing us sooner, you had hoped.

what do you say to quilt people?

do you charm them with a joke?

do you blame the darn russians?

do you cry "mommy'' to nancy?

your own gay son is born again.

jesus-loving son of rightist god.

the fanatics mass to your image,

print it on the fifty, they chant.

you are their addled golden calf,

elevated as the neo-cons' idol

in the face of any human justice,

false liberty's proud demagogue.

Anger

As I see the U.S. wend its way to the Right, I do experience a fair amount of anger. Some readers have offered their opinion that my anger is non-Buddhist. They may be correct. But I seek here to explain not myself, but that anger which is evident in my writing at times, when I see things in society or politics which push my buttons.

Most of this anger comes my frustration from spending the last forty years defending myself and other gay men against homophobic discrimination, denigration and outright violence in this society. Those who are identified with the heterosexual mainstream cannot understand this fully. Just as a white man cannot fully understand the weight of being non-white in a white society. Just as a man cannot fully understand the problems of being a woman in a sexist society. Most heterosexuals, whether white or not, in my experience, simply do not even want to try to understand it what it means to be a homosexual in heterosexual society. The word 'tolerance' is used routinely by even liberal heterosexuals when they talk about their attitudes toward gay men.

A secretive holocaust, a form of intentional cultural cleansing, occurred in the U.S. from 1983 until 1990 under the Federal government of the Republicans, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and Congress. Gay men were shunned during the course of one of the worst modern epidemics. The government condoned the worst scapegoating of gay men. It withheld resources intentionally. It spoke of gay concentration camps for the infected.

Yet, society expects gay men now to deny this ever happened...to forget about it. AIDS in the gay community, due to well-earned compassion fatigue, is 'old' and 'tired'. Few of us with the political consciousness of Gay Liberation of the 1970s have actually survived AIDS. Those who conducted the cultural cleansing, the Reagans, the Bushes and their cohorts, who are now the bulk of the Neo-Con movement, succeeded in crushing Gay Liberation as a political movement. The symbolic assassination of Harvey Milk was a portent of things to come.

We endure being forgotten whenever a Holocaust memorial is erected to memorialize the Nazi victims unless we scream loudly. No Mossad searches out and brings to trial those who tortured and killed the gay men of Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary. The killing of gay men was not mentioned noticeably at Nuremberg. There is no gay country, like Israel. And so, when gay men are stigmatized, beaten, ostracized, experimented upon by therapists and regarded as toxic in homes, in jobs, on streets and in hospitals, as during the AIDS early epidemic, very few heterosexuals cry out.

We are expected to be satisfied with the spectacle of the AIDS Quilt. A fun, arty day out for those who were untouched by the epidemic. A stabbing, recurrent grief for those who lived the epidemic. And we still suffer and die from AIDS. We watch as the fundamentalists and Neo-Cons bemoan AIDS in Africa, while condoning the persecution of gay men in Africa. We know that the millions spent in Africa also serve the purpose of bleaching the blood stains from the hands of those who ignored us.

So, pardon me if I decry the earliest glimpses of fascism, especially when they are ignored by others who should be shouting as loudly as I am, based on history. Pardon me if I think anyone who would deny human equality in civil law by withholding marriage rights for gay men is a heartless bigot. Pardon me if I do not try to excuse my own humanity because I carry a socially inconvenient disease. Pardon me if I seem angry, because, about all this, I am and will be until it stops.

In my daily practice, this anger is a perpetual threshold, over which I try to step to remain open to life and all humanity. No amount of meditation or New Age or religious hocus-pocus or therapy or pharmacology. will erase this anger. This anger is as much a part of my survival as the many medications I must swallow every day. Yet, I have become an expert at living with anger and grief. Amazingly, I can still learn to love and nurture other human beings for their goodness by nurturing the embers of love in my heart. I credit this to my practice, perpetual study and endless attempt to seek the good in the people I meet.