AUGUST 2011

Have you read Society of the Spectacle by Situationist Guy DeBord?  It is written in an at times incomprehensibly turgid style, but is an important document if we want to understand the culture we move in.  To wit:  we have managed to put life itself, especially our social lives, one, two, three steps removed from ourselves as we exist on a daily basis.  So the blood, sweat and tears of a football game would not be the thrill it is if not for the spectacle, if you will, of the halftime show.

I find strange the notion that what happens to us needs to reach some level of fabulousness before being received into consciousness.  I have seen this pattern repeatedly, been caught innumerable times on a social tipping point of acceptance, usually considered too much of an embarrassment for inclusion.  In a bizarre twist of fate earlier this year, just as I was beginning to surface from years of poverty and isolation (though still in ill health), the social collective unconscious reared its head in a memory of me as I had existed in a maelstrom of public notoriety decades ago in a vagabond, fugitive albeit celebrated existence in lower Manhattan.  Immediately I was expected to choose one end of the sexual preference polarity over the other, and once that was settled, produce a Spectacle.

The requirements for this spectacle included:  1) having a posse of friends, the old configuration of The Beatles often being referenced.  (In the meantime, my cancer survivor friends the Hebranks, several years older than me remain my for the most part my only social contacts.) 2) Immediately make excursions to cultural and night venues in order to make pickups for sex.  3)  Somehow overcome the devastating public humiliation of my sex life as it appeared on highway billboards and as made accessible on some Satanically produced Internet.  For the third time in my life I was caught up in a cycle of vilification for having enjoyed sex.  But it wasn’t good enough.  I was pilloried both for not achieving orgasm and for enjoying the act of going down on men.  I needed to agree to be a skank, a woman devoid of dignity, stripped of accomplishment and respect coming from other areas of effort and involvement, including but not limited to my role in the beginnings of women’s liberation.  I would then cat around bars looking for sex, one night stands, anything that made itself available, all the while enduring the vilification society feels entitled to inflict on a sex-positive woman journeying through life without a man.

So while I am on a sorcerer’s production set, complete with camera and sound system, I’ve yet to produce an acceptable film.  Instead my life continues on in an at times devastating isolation, while I use whatever resources I have at my disposal to continue both a creative and social life, jealously holding together whatever shreds of privacy remain.  But yet I cling tenaciously to my encapsulated philosophy that everything happens for a reason…

Perhaps the reason the Universe kicked me in the ass one final time was for me to assemble a settlement for myself in the Hudson Valley.  I’ve come out as bisexual, and that has led to a curiosity in polyamory.  Certainly the desperation of being a heterosexual racehorse are over.  I’ve given up the oppressive judgment of patriarchal Christianity and the suffocating boredom of sitting in pews, reciting ancient creeds, making repeated and futile attempts at establishing relationships, and have followed a beloved activist woman into exploring Unitarian Universalism instead.  I’ve parted ways with a microsociety of nudists in which I no longer belonged all the while being introduced to the bisexual nudist community  There is loss, there is difficulty, but these changes once made, have astonished me with the hindsight of understanding they’ve been necessary all along.   In my resistance struggle to defy society’s pressure to fill it’s endemic emptiness, boredom and exploitive relationships with the spectacle of sex, I have in the meantime opened up and surfed some wondrous wormhole into an alternate universe where there is exitement, joy, community and the possibility of love.

JULY 2011

When I listened to Alec Baldwin make his pronouncement on her performance in John Huston’s The Misfits as ‘Bad Marilyn’, I knew I had to exonerate her.  Until this movie, we haven’t known who she is, now we have her apotheosis.

                Here we have a stone feminine interacting with three masculines, all cowboys.  This premise gives the movie a classic feel and serves to frame Monroe’s performance.  She, never surrendering her bedroom eyes, loves each in turn.  Her character’s remarkable ability to live in the moment brings a sense of the marvelous to each of the men who in turn find their own words to confess how moved they are by her capacity to respond to them.  Misfits, we learn at the end, is an appellation for the Mustangs hunted by the Gable character and the other men; but in time we come to understand that the misfits are really the characters we’ve been observing all along in Arthur Miller’s screenplay.

                What makes both Monroe and her character so appealing in this movie is her unselfconscious seamless movement from one man to another, loving each in turn without capitalizing on their affections.  Although she settles for Gay Langland, the Gable character, she can comfort Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift) on his broken childhood and his desperate participation in rodeos, as well as Guido’s regrets at having been a bomber pilot in the war.  All this, however, does not come without a price, and when the helpless horses are rounded up at the end, we have a breathtaking moment where this actress throws aside the “jello on springs” trope that first made her famous in exchange for a physically contorted expression of despair.  Running away from the truck where the tire anchors and other trapping paraphernalia are kept, we see her against the background of the barren desert in a desperate effort to express the betrayal she feels:  what exactly is it there is to love in the callous enterprise of trapping animals intended for slaughter?

                The ending, of course, with Gable reconciled to Monroe in his pick up and driving towards the moon that signals the location of the highway, is a much touted ending to a film that is the last for both of them.  Gay Langland thereby agrees to the responsibilities involved in accepting Roslyn Taber’s love, for the horses have now been set free.

∞

            Now for what originally intended to elaborate upon in last month’s post:  the importance of the bisexual community.

                The pressures we all experience in a polarized society to be one thing or another expose all of us to a kind of sad, akmost inevitable mismanagement of our lives.  Back and forth we go, and back and forth I’ve gone in wanting to belong in one world or another so terribly separated from one another.  But perhaps the truth lies in recognizing the fluid, gray areas that lie between.

                Last night I rocked out in maybe the first rollicking good time I’ve had this year at a blues performance, but before long I’ll be back at The Loft, seeking support for the personal autonomy I insist on.  As a proud bisexual woman, I am committed to the search for a feminine response to my own masculinity.  To do this, I need to move freely between gay and straight.  The concept of what I call Interpersonality comes into play in the Bi community in a way it does not in conventional culture, liberating a spectrum of possibilities all involving developmental growth and an exploration of the nature of sexuality, play, intimacy and the right we have to contract for our own relationships.

                I sent out an email this morning, excited at the idea that’s been floated recently of secession into a Bi Nation independent of the LBGTQ sandwich that poses relentless, ongoing problems in recognition. There are extraordinary possibilities inherent in our insistence on risk and exploration, on the need for skin to touch skin, on the fact that, as I once heard it framed “bodies matter”.  We have the capacity to find the masculine and feminine in each other free of the elaborations of cultural norms.  We are free, we are fluid, we are bisexual.

MAY/JUNE 2011

Progress in alleviating anger and isolation has been slow, but with notable breakthroughs.  In early May, I made my second trip to the designated nude area in the Mohonk Preserve known as The Rock, but my idyll in the summer sun was disturbed by a young couple clearly there with the sole intention of provoking me.  They were not nudists, and rather than positioning themselves somewhere in the vast expanse of granite that was available to them, they set up camp not two feet away from me.  Using the colloquial, I 'went off on them', rather brutally, but without apology, urging the young man to slit his throat.  "Have you decided yet whether I'm straight or gay?" I asked in my rage.  I spit on the ground.  He taunted me as to whether I wanted him to take off his clothes.  His companion was busy laughing.  My rage was quite apparently hilarious.  I packed up my things and left, leaving behind the one relaxed moment I'd been able to eek out of the year.  But everything happens for a reason, and that same week I attended the bisexual support group at the LBGTQ space known as The Loft, in White Plains.  FINALLY, after decades of being taunted by an entirely unwanted public as to which conventional sexual orientation I was, I CAME OUT FIRMLY AS BI!  A standing ovation is called for here.  Thank you, thank you.  Calls to mind Lou Reed's memorable encapsulation:  "Between thought and expression lies a lifetime."
I found the facilitator of the support group, a clinical psychologist, entirely sympathetic and the first two times I attended the group, I was the only person in attendance.  "I like your rates," I declared.  Thus far in what can be called in an understatement a ‘difficult’ year, The Loft is the one place I feel safe and welcomed, after having been cast out of two "Christian” churches in Newburgh, both boldly displaying signs indicating All Are Welcome Here.  Rage and adversity can bring blessings, and in a wonderful Sunday morning talk by a lesbian clergywoman at the local Unitarian Society, she even declared that malice can be welcomed in by way of ‘clearing the decks’.  I guess that’s what happened to me.  So slowly, very slowly, I am forging a life for myself.  Since I am making an entry for two months, I offer you the following column I wrote in October of ‘09 while still president of the local Mensa chapter:

A prolonged summer illness led me into the enjoyment of one of the most memorable vacations of my life, all spent at home on my property.

                The relationship between illness and creativity is a topic still under discussion today.  For the most part, it deals with mental illness; yet physical illness sometimes provides a delicious interval that provides us with  an opportunity to re-evaluate our lives, to go deep and rethink everything that up until that moment had remained unchallenged. 

For four weeks I medicated on pain killers, putting in place a daily routine that included a de rigueur sunbathing on my back patio beginning at 12 noon until mid-afternoon when the trajectory of the sun no longer allowed it.  The morning included a trip out to my porch with my laptop, where I would make my journaling entry for the day.  Too, in the evening I would return to my porch to watch the never-ending lightshow that would begin just after the sunset.  One visitor said my house was like an aerie, an eagle’s nest overlooking the entire West End of Newburgh.

There are gifts that befall us in life, that once we are in their possession, we wonder why we hadn’t lay claim to them sooner.  It took me nine years to engage an enjoyment of my property that included the use of the patio and deck that were included in it.  Why I’d never done so sooner is a mystery.  But I suppose that begins my litany of the blessings that came to me as a result of being knocked on my ass by an illness that resisted diagnosis.

The view from the rear of my house, while I relaxed in the nude and listened to music, was of trees and the passing of clouds.  A summer idyll to be sure, but I think the central theme of having relieved myself of work responsibilities and social commitments was that it was more than OK for me to do nothing and be at peace with myself.  There were no relationships that required urgent elaboration, nothing I needed to prove to myself or anybody else in order to be reconciled to myself and my life.  This began a long process of peacemaking—with Newburgh and with all the people and involvements in my life.   The conviction I had that there were no close relationships in my life proved a hoax.  The simple truth is that the majority of close friends are at distances, including Lee who is 5,000 miles away in Hawaii.  In making renewed contact with St George’s Episcopal church, I explained to Rev Dresser that it wasn’t true I didn’t have any relationships there.  If nothing else, I cherished my association with her and her husband Bob.

I suppose that 260 Gidney became a kind of Walden for me for that time.  Even while inside the house, I would go from room to room, satisfied with the order I’d created for myself, both with the organization of the utilitarian as well as the appointments of a very lived-in living room.

I would wish all of you the recognition of the simple peace available to all of us.  There is a deep, unending compassion in the universe that some call God.  Welcome adversity as opportunity, await blessings in disguise.

April 2011

You all know who I am, and make my sexuality into a sports game.  Am I gay or am I straight?  What do YOU think?  Truly, I’d like to know.  Am I not good enough to be heterosexual?  Or am I just an inveterate liar, a lesbian who just can’t face up to herself?  Periodically, you get to relieve the boredom of your lives with parlor games of double entendre conversational exchanges.  It’s like the old blues lyrics, everything has a sexual connotation, undertone.  Well I haven’t eaten yet.  Maybe that’s why I’m angry.

The truth is, I’m gifted with a philosopher’s mind, tend to tilt at windmills.  After my three year sojourn in the lesbian feminist community, I got bored, decided I was bisexual.  Moved from West to East Villages and actually got to act on that principle.  But that was the hothouse period of notoriety in lower Manhattan, the years of Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Talking Heads and Television.  As with others like me, I took the risk of living on the edge, the only location where life exists.  And with the experimental, nonjudgmental community around me, it seemed only natural to go where desire led.

And now, in utter isolation, in the no man’s land of Newburgh, I ponder the locus of any social life I’ve yet to construct for myself, outside of cyberspace that is.  Can I move into Facebook, in some weird sci fi Hollywood phantasm be sucked into my computer screen and be happy at last?  In my philosopher’s mind and masculine adventures, I know I am seeking a feminine counterpart.  Are there any feminine men who have not already been absorbed into homosexuality?  I can assure you they are not readily available in straight social circles.  So even though most of my recent amours have been male, I’m wondering whether as a masculine woman I can find a greater receptivity in the women’s community.

But I can assure you I wouldn’t be going through this enormous soul searching if you had not imposed it on me.

So with insect eyes hidden in every corner, and my most intimate moments made into highway billboards, I must clear everything with you, and life slows down almost to a standstill.  I cannot risk anything social, even a phone call, without being exposed to the way in which you would choose to process it.  I had been watching the acerbic Chris Matthews, but then decided that Wolf Blitzer was more benign.  I can assure you I’ve enjoyed some hysterical moments thinking of myself as Muammar Khadafy or even more recently Osama Bin Laden, with a close friend being alluded to as the deserting Moussa Koussa.  (Just the name itself is funny.)

The truth is, there’ve been only two moments in my life when I was genuinely happy.  Most of my life has been an accommodation to ostracism and mental illness.  St Jude should welcome me into a partnership for all I’ve invested in lost causes.  In my quarter century sojourn in Mensa I’ve consistently tried to inject vitality into its social calendar, with no enduring success.  Too, I’ve been active in church communities for even longer, and as a return on my investment, was greeted with glares and avoidance the last time I attended Sunday worship.

So this is a little longer than my vowed 500 word entry and I could go on even longer still.  I had wanted to make an intellectual argument for bisexuality, but it turned into a rant instead.  Good.  In the absence of friends and psychotherapy, it’s probably exactly what I needed.

March 2011

OK, if I waited a day longer to make this post, I would've violated the agreement I made with myself in establishing this blog:  one post per month, 500 words per post.
     At any rate, I thought I would commit myself to some thoughts regarding freedom, as the expansiveness we associate with that word is really quite masculine in nature.  "There's no freedom in a desert", is one of the aphorisms I knew Paul to use in his work with his patients, or students, as he preferred us to be known.  Macho notions of the word abound in our culture:  the freedom to judge the social contracts of other nations, to condemn their version of democracy if it does not match out own; the freedom, as Ron Paul once alluded to, to "bomb those who don't agree with us."  Freedom is not free, is a favorite saw among some, with its distinct allusions to military engagements, necessary or not.
    But the freedom I concern myself with as a masculine personality is an inner autonomy.  In the interior landscape we all somehow navigate, I've learned to identify different versions of myself, not all agreeable or even acceptable.  Referring back to my initial post on my struggle with isolation in my relocation out of The City, I've had to parse the personalities available to me in my new home in the Hudson Valley, and have not found all or even many of them palatable.  In the war of compromise with integrity, I've abandoned or bailed out of some of the mistaken offers of charity I've received from those perceiving me not in possession of the resources necessary to maintain relationships.  I value self-awareness, not self-consciousness; spontaneity, not inhibition; authenticity, not artifice.  Somehow in the social phenomena of the gay male vanguard settling many abandoned communities, there has established itself here in Newburgh a very self-congratulatory clique of individuals, all somehow participating in the life of the community.  I suppose this is a survival mechanism:  cling to what is known.  You have taken an extreme risk in relocating to a dying city, hold on to what is already established for dear life.
     I've found more freedom driving up to nearby Mohonk Mountain, or the Shawangunk Ridge.  Driving alone, with the few hits of hallucinogen I've learned to use medicinally to both elevate and process, I find renewal in nature.  There is truth in Nietzsche's dictum of having one’s branches in heaven and roots in hell.  While alone, I can reaffirm the pattern unique to my life, throw away the dross of all that undermines who I already am or want to become.
     I do not find convention helpful, but this year I did formulate a New Year’s resolution to abandon desperation.  This is more difficult than it sounds, as much social interaction in our culture is desperate in nature:  desperate, conspiratorial, self-congratulatory.  If I accept the challenge of growth as I’ve come to understand it through my work with Paul Rosenfels, I cannot about-face and walk out that developmental door once I’ve opened it.  The ability to access inner autonomy involves acceptance of aloneness, and yet there is no freedom in utter isolation.