Writing and Reading to Discover Our Gay Humanity During a New Era
The first time I remember feeling happy was when my mother, Penny, took me to the Highbridge Bronx library with other kids at 7 or 8. My parents, as lower-middle-class Jews having survived the depression, and my dad as a WWII vet, weren't avid readers. They didn't have high intellectual hopes for me rather because they didn't quite know me yet. But when I entered the library, and came upon hundreds of books, and started to smell them as if I would inhale the knowledge, they discovered that they had a special child in their midst. I felt seized by a separate spirit I had yet not discovered and that was not derived from heterosexual procreation. This uncanny Ariel lifted me out of the depression I had been feeling since I could remember and took me soaring, like Ganymede on the wings of Zeus, to a new realm.
All my life, and I thank the gay gods and goddesses, reading and writing seemed married to my sense of being different long before I had the word gay. I retreated from the terrors of sports, bullying, and little league — by reading and writing. I made friends with the characters in novels and books. I fell in love with Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Who was the dark youth in Shakespeare’s sonnets? What the heck was going on with Achilles and Patroclus? I even started to learn about astronomy and geography. I imagined I was the assistant to Alexander and Napolean. I even figured out how to read the Five Books of Moses not as liturgy but as literature. Oh, Joseph, in his rainbow coat.
This energy that seems like a rainbow ribbon colorizing my DNA, wrapped up with my passionate for my people, has guided me my entire life to men, to love, to journalism, to publishing, to activism, to performance art, to teaching writing classes at Highways in the 1990s to fighting AIDS through journalism, to becoming a psychotherapist, to founding the nation's first LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology, to my third book almost finished — and now to you! I have always felt that being gay was not just a way to have sex with the same sex or even to party like the world might be ending tomorrow—all good things. I always felt that being gay contained within it the seeds of a new kind of human being, a human of higher consciousness, one that I would only fail to attain in this lifetime. I would learn that I possessed my own lineage, stretching back in recorded time to Plato and many eons before. It's not for nothing that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote the ground-breaking book, "Gay Science."
Something has been calling me since I entered the realm of being 60. I had spent my entire life as an activist fighting for social change. I came of age during the first days of the AIDS epidemic. I buried a dozen close friends and knew of hundreds of others. I dropped out of Ph.D. School to become a street activist and a journalist. Then, when I found that the injuries in queer people predated AIDS, I decided to go and fight in the underworld to address the anti-gay homophobes in my psychology and in the psychology of my brothers and sisters.
Because my love of reading and writing saved me from a fatal fare as a shy gay boy growing up in the South Bronx in the 1970s, reading, and writing has been a significant tool for change for me. In the therapy room, I use my body, of course, but also words. The client and I rewrite our histories together. As a professor, I use my knowledge, but only as a tool to recruit into learning how read about your psychology. I have always felt very strongly that we gays have our own Gay Humanities, our own Core Curriculum, and we have mentors and role models; we have Sappho and the bum that crashed the drinking party in Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades. Damn, we have Virgina Woolf and Langston Hughes. We have it all, and yet none at all is accessible.
Let’s increase access. I am called now to leave all the institutions I created, including the Antioch Univeristy LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology, and to do something new. I want to get back to the grassroots and give those who do not have a LGBT Specialization to go to, their new gay voice.The classes I am offering are part psychological uplift, part creative process, part finding a voice, and part grassroots activism. They are a synthesis between the world of the academy and the consulting room, to the real world, the world of you. Will you come join me? Can I come to join you? If you would like more information on this process, please click here.