THE GREAT AMERICAN PASTIME

Last summer, while at a day’s retreat at a nude resort in New Jersey, I looked up from reclining on my beach towel and saw, in the look of another guest, the wry look of ridicule that I’d become accustomed to over the course of a lifetime.  Over a year previous, a familiar cycle of sexual innuendo had begun, something I had never thought would once again assail me so late in life.  The public review of my sex life had begun, with clever, sly references everywhere on the media.  But what I’m trying to say in the leading sentence of this blog entry is that I now knew with finality that my public pursuit and persecution had become encoded into the national DNA, a periodic American recreation.

The ideology of this public humiliation goes back decades.  The psychopath who was my neighbor on a crime ridden block in the mid ‘70s East Village could not let alone the fact that an otherwise unidentifiable single woman had compromised his standing in the drug-running mob world organizing the lives of the inhabitants on 9^th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A.  The result:  I was run out of my home, became first a vagabond, then an outcast, then a mental patient, this over the course of five years.  During this time, I was in the grips not only of a sneering public opinion, but of powers and principalities beyond my control.  Could I possibly be a prostitute?  Try it on for size.  Or, to reference a previous blog post, The Gay Octoroon, was I gay or straight?  The vector of public humiliation was an attempt to out me, way before bisexuals enjoyed any comfort zone in the gay community, at a time when gay liberation was not more than half a dozen years old, and I no more than in my early 30s.

This time, however, as the all too familiar oblique references began to play out in the work place, I made the determination to step down from my job, put a handle on my torment for the first time with the twin vows that:  1) this time it was my script; and 2) this time I was not going to be destroyed.  As the cornerstone of my personal/political philosophy is ‘everything happens for a reason’, and as the end result of having been stalked to a long familiar nude retreat in the nearby Mohonk Preserve, I ran home to research bisexual resources on Facebook.  I realized that the first step in my strategy for untying my chains had to be a firm commitment to my sexual orientation, shrugging off any compulsory identity as a monosexual, rejoicing in the both/and rather than the either/or.

I slowly came to an understanding of some of the routine slang:  batteries.  Yeah, OK, I needed public injury and insult in order to become the life of the party.  Yeah, sure, this makes perfect sense as people who are abused, including myself, want for nothing but to retreat and withdraw.  Makes for a good party, tho’.  Then, sadly, I realized that everything I said and did was instantly committed to public record; the aperture and the microphone imposed an aberrant lifestyle on me, and even now, at the start of the third year of this cycle, I carefully script and edit everything out of my mouth.  It’s too painful to speak too freely and expansively since this can only lead to social approbation.  Consequent to the realization that I was under unrelenting surveillance, it became a matter of simple determination that I had to “bolt” down everything I’d become committed to in life to prevent it’s being destroyed by ‘fear and malice’.

But I suppose the sum total of all of this, and what made it the Great American Pastime, is that the lights, camera and action of public scrutiny led to the concept of ‘auditions’.  In fact, I’d become the all American whore, with my brief sexual adventures in the halcyon days of the lower Manhattan culture of the mid-late ‘70s turning into folklore and legend.  I was the eternal Jezebel, born into life to be a lecherous woman, held simultaneously in contempt and in awe and watchfulness till the time of another performance. 

I came up to Newburgh and the Mid Hudson Valley now almost 14 years ago to go on yet another venture, becoming a homesteader along the way.  I was aghast at how all the apparatus and public expectation of almost 40 years ago were exhumed, taken out of mothballs in a bizarre dislocation of urbanity.  I was expected to stop traffic, have lines waiting to see me in public spaces.  This painful misunderstanding continues to this day.  Once again, I’ve taken refuge in the psychiatric community for understanding and hopefulness, but every time I venture out to do simple errands, I am jarred with the realization that I may never be seen by the world for who I truly am, will always be expected to accept the coin of the realm in bypassing my own interest in forming relationships and instead bowdlerize myself into obligatory sexual encounter.

No Soap, RADIO

I’d forgotten what it was like to listen to David Rothenberg’s Here of a Saturday Morning on WBAI, a radio show I religiously tuned into every weekend while still living in The City.  Suddenly, I’d turned the TV off and some of my old habits began floating to the top of my mind.

When I’d first made the determination to tune into FM radio and screen out the static and commercialism of television, I vacillated back and forth between NPR and listener sponsored WBAI, a station taking a more militant stand on matters of social change.  The problem seemed to be one of holding my attention, which wandered rather recklessly back and forth between the airwaves and the activities of the nearby fish tank.  Many I know keep TV, and perhaps also radio on as an aural backdrop, but I’ve always resisted the thought of doing this.  Even now living comfortably with myself involves a process of clearing away the energy of one activity and then moving with peace and intention on to the next.  In this context, background noise could only be a distraction.

Maybe what this blog post is about, rather than the choice of media, is making more unconventional and inventive use of leisure time.  We’re supposed to mainstream our leisure time, with television as a cornerstone.  I do admit I remember how pleasant it once was for me to think of coming downstairs from a nap to  the reassurance of a human face, but now I listen to WAMC’s All Things Considered, dismissing Wolf Blitzer and CNN’s Situation Room.  All this might seem somewhat severe, except that in the evening I sometimes take in a YouTube or Al Jazeera documentary.

People I know in the City of Newburgh have long since given up TV.  One couple watches DVDs, another tunes into Hulu if they get the urge.  I suppose my life has taken a more Spartan or stoic turn in this decision of how to structure my leisure time, but it’s taken on advantages in steering me away from the tiresome drone of advertising and into an at least occasional exploration of the Internet.  Not so bad, spending an evening delving into all the videos you’ve sequestered away from Facebook and into your YouTube Watch Later folder.