DC and Marvel superheroes and supervillains face extinction. The Anarchic Invincibility Deficiency Syndrome unmasks masked idols and Supermen fade to grey. When the world falls darker than Joker’s soul, something sharper than Wolverine’s claws will save us. Heroic Couplets, comic book duality and a touch of La Ronde from award-winning writer Neil Watkins.

This blurb is deliberately, perversely deceptive. There are no superheroes here, Batman is nowhere to be seen. However, at one stage, at the edge of my seat, mouth open, I was thinking of writing my first one-line rave review on this blog: “Go see this fucking show”. But then, I thought, “don’t get high on this intoxicating atmosphere, wait until I connect, I’m moved, until I get the story, until it all makes some sort of meaningful sense”.

It didn’t. Like an exciting trick from Gaydar, it seemed, in the poppers-rushed moment, to be an important and intense experience; but, the morning after, the room smelling of stale socks, head throbbing, tongue like sandpaper, I am wondering what on Earth possessed me.

It is still, however, required viewing for anyone interested in modern queer Irish sensibility – for playwright Neil Watkins turns out to be the man behind the drag act called Heidi Konnt, who apparently won Alternative Miss Ireland in 2005, the year before I returned to Ireland. It’s edgy, sexual, and perverse enough to set up nervous laughter in some segments of the audience, (no doubt those expecting men in Superman costumes doing something silly). Part burlesque, part Cabaret, part Hedwig, it’s morbid and desolate and disconsolate and seductive, and yet somehow strangely insubstantial for all that. Curiouser and curiouser.

It’s a while since I’ve seen such a compelling, emotionally naked, inspiring evening in a theatre, and the immediate standing ovation at the end was richly deserved. (Irish audiences rarely do this, I’ve noticed.) He is profoundly political in a way that only truly brave genderfuckers can be – out on a limb, challenging, defiant and subversive. This is but a short rave mention as I was loath to take notes which would have attracted attention, sitting as I was in the front row, which in Taylor’s plays is asking for trouble. And I was enjoying the experience of this wonderfully crafted piece too much – it was, in turns, poignant, sad, chilling, energising, optimistic and bawdy; there wasn’t a moment without a scintillating and yet tender energy, and he had us eating out of the palm of his hand. Chatting with him afterwards was a real treat, he is a real gentleman. And damn good looking. He says he’ll be back in Dublin next year, but you can catch him tomorrow in the Galway Arts Festival in Cuba at 9pm. Don’t miss him.

Click here to view the embedded video.

PAISLEY REMARKS ON GAYS

Madam, – Few people if any appear to be defending Ian Paisley jnr against accusations of homophobia arising from his recent interview with Hot Press; yet the majority of the population, north and south of the Border, are opposed to homosexual/lesbian practices. Unfortunately, this majority view is not reflected in the law, nor have there been any referendums on the subject.
Ian Paisley jnr was merely defending the traditional Christian teaching, which stipulates that a homosexual or lesbian orientation is not blameworthy in itself, but that unnatural same-gender sexual acts are gravely disordered and immoral. Most major religions support this position, which is based on the natural law.

It is one thing to show compassion and sympathy for people afflicted by these aberrant tendencies, quite another to give the respectability and approval of law to the sexual expression of these tendencies. The fact that the gay movement, which is anything but gay, is demanding marital status and the right to adopt children, shows the folly of this type of compromise.

Our Constitution defines the family as the natural, primary and fundamental unit group of society, which is the basis of social order, and indispensable to the welfare of the State. The pressures of the gay fraternity for equal civil rights are anti-family, unconstitutional and highly detrimental to the State. – Yours, etc,

PATRICK MOLLOY, Brackenstown, Swords, Co Dublin.

I’ve had a very enjoyable couple of weeks re-engaging with the notion of gay “community”, by going to see nine different plays and shows in the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, out of about thirty which were on offer over the fortnight. As regular readers of this column will be aware, the concept of gay community has seemed oxymoronic to me for many years, not least because sexuality seems to be such a volatile, often anarchic force that I am not convinced it is solid enough to form a reliable (or even credible) pillar of identity for many people, so therefore building a community on such shaky foundations can be highly problematic. But then, I have been urbanized and anonymized and atomized out of so many decent god-fearing habits in my sojourn in London that I’m open to any and all suggestions now.

The Festival is, fascinatingly, the biggest of its kind in the world, with only two or three others in the USA, and it can also claim to be the only international gay theatre festival. It has been run on a shoestring over four years, and last year’s budget, to produce 20 shows, was a mere €27,000, including accommodation fees for touring productions from abroad. This was done without any Arts Council funding, and indeed without anyone from the Arts Council having attended the event since it started, although in the last couple of days I understand a small subsidy was granted to them, on appeal. Although it’s been going since 2003, it’s my first time catching any of it, and I had really no idea what to expect. Well, perhaps that’s not strictly true. I was apprehensive. I have seen what happens when people try to create art to serve notions of ideology or political correctness, and have remained stonily unmoved when I sense I am being lectured to, or that my individuality is not being respected, or that it’s assumed that my intellectual and emotional responses should conform to a particular consensus. My stomach is especially prone to heaving when I am expected to swallow crap in the name of supporting my community. I won’t be told.

The worst manifestations of gay “art”, or indeed any ideologically driven art such as feminist, nationalist or socialist art, involve a degrading of truth, a lowering of quality, in lieu of a collusive collective “celebration”. Sometimes consciousness-raising and morale-boosting are important enough things to do that one can cheerfully turn a blind eye to the mediocrity of the content and applaud the admirable intent. But it has never appealed to me in terms of gay issues.

I remember the furore over the 1980 film Cruising in which Al Pacino’s character goes hunting for a serial killer in the leather scene in New York. The gay community despised it for its portrayal of gay people, the film was picketed in production, and boycotted by many for years. It offended the “gay community” because its portrayal of gay men seemed homophobic in intent, in that they weren’t happy and some were quite disturbed and disturbing. To my mind, however, it remains one of the most interesting and compelling films of that period, still unique in its exploration of the gay fetish scene, asking uncomfortable questions about the relationship between desire and violence. William Friedkin, the director, is currently working on the long-overdue DVD release.

Perhaps, sometimes, mutual reinforcement is necessary in a group, a sort of positive discrimination, and those who protested against Cruising were fuelled by an anger that there was so little positive representation of gay people’s lives elsewhere in Hollywood at that time. But the anger was misdirected. A mature community should welcome diverse and uncomfortable perspectives and critiques, and relish challenges to collective shibboleths that are mounted with integrity.

Of all of the art forms, however, theatre can be the most demanding, because one is trapped in one’s seat, and leaving in the middle of a performance is such a visible statement of disapproval that very few people have the nerve for it. Unlike a collection of short stories, for example, written by members of a particular community, one can buy the book and feel good for having supported the good cause, but one doesn’t actually have to sit down and read it.

However, of the nine shows I saw in the festival, (most of which I reviewed here and for Phantom FM) I really enjoyed five of them, disliked one, and the rest were interesting enough, which to my mind is a very good result. Although I heard some people complain about the quality of a couple of home-grown productions, which I didn’t see, I was drawn to the international shows, and found myself energised, enthralled, delighted, aroused, and moved by the experiences. Because what I witnessed in those plays was not a whitewash, (pinkwash?) nor a sentimental “let’s all wrap ourselves in the rainbow flag” group hug, but a challenging series of hard-hitting, truthful, sometimes difficult, sometimes hilarious, sometimes uncomfortable productions that explored the human condition, that were relevant to my experience of life as a sexual man, struggling with notions of identity and desire. Yes there were the fluffy light-hearted frivolous shows, like Gaydar Diaries, but of course they have their rightful place in any festival, and I confess I laughed. There were the traditional drag acts, of course, but when they are as astonishingly good as Rick Skye, who out-Minnelli’d Minnelli with his own voice and razor-sharp wit, you know you’re watching something world-class. There was a quiet, moving one-man show, the lovely On the Sidelines from Manchester, and there was the searing and dark experience of Jack, the Lad, a trippy X-rated fairytale about a self-loathing rent boy and his punters, that was right up my alley, and as close to the punchiness of Cruising as it is possible to get.

The festival is at an interesting stage. Born from a palpable sense of community, supported to an impressive degree (fifty hard-working and professional volunteers are evidence of a serious amount of goodwill), it’s going to have to rethink itself over the next few years, now that public money is starting to trickle in. At the moment, having listened to some people in the wider theatre business in Dublin, it appears that the Festival is seen still as a community event, perhaps a bit amateur, self-absorbed and introspective, and not something that a major theatre would want to associate itself with, i.e. by putting on a gay-themed show to coincide with the festival. It does not have a firm reputation yet of quality, in that some stinkers are allowed through the net for reasons other than artistic merit, nor has it sunk in yet that tourists are coming to the festival from abroad. The challenge for the festival will be to move away from self-absorption and perceptions that the productions on offer are only of interest to gay people, and to persuade the wider theatre community in Dublin that what’s on offer is high-quality theatre that has a particular but accessible theme that is of interest to all. On the strength of what I saw this year, I don’t think they will have a problem.

It is on a far more earthy level, however, that this production touched me, gripped me, even. While at times I couldn’t help thinking that this would be a wet dream for queeny professors of classics the world over, the fact that the naked brothers were played by real brothers, and that the youth was played by a real schoolboy, gave the production a particular edge, and made it into an enlivening, fascinating, and very thought-provoking piece. It wasn’t a modern queer play in the least; this was no modern (ie overt) subversive sexualization of classical themes. It was a gay play only in that the writer, Daniel Austin, director at the Jersey Arts Centre, made a point of listing all the male lovers of both gods, which I found a bit laboured and unnecessary. The magic was in the physical performance of the two brothers, the antagonistic, competitive, physical, loving, aggressive presence of them, pacing and strutting and fighting each other.

I loved the experience of marvelling at the human form, not in a prurient sense, but in the way one would admire the sleek lines of a cheetah or a gazelle. These were tall, slim, handsome, athletic young men, with bodies that showed no evidence of having been narcissistically worked out in any gym, and all the more natural and timeless for that. Given that the origin of the word gymnasium is the Greek word for naked, and that athletes used to train with each other naked, this play managed to convey a sense of what it might have been like back then, in the unabashed naked physicality of the performers, and the un-self-conscious (and therefore, very un-gay, un-modern) expression of masculinity.

The actors spoke in a declamatory style, like amateurs reading their lines. This enhanced the theatricality, the symbolism of the experience, especially as the performers, in particular the Liron brothers, had an assured physical presence on stage, like sure-footed elegant dancers. Although this wasn’t a dance piece, it was highly choreographed, and the pleasure I gained from the evening was akin to how I feel watching good contemporary dance. I loved, in particular, Jonny Liron’s Dionysus as clown, riding his penis as he would a horse – and Dionysus in drunken sexual reverie. As exciting as it was to watch a man masturbate in front of me, it was not in the least pornographic, a feat largely due to the striking integrity and courage of all the cast, committed totally to the production, and utterly dedicated to eschewing all embarrassment and shame. I won’t forget the frisson of the impact of their fights, skin to skin, brother to brother, and the amazing shift of energy when we saw female flesh on stage for the first time.

This is a theatrical oddity, but it is one which succeeds impressively because the potential pitfalls have been intelligently avoided. I had a sense that the actors and writer and director were all treating the magic space of theatre as if it were sacred, and such a stance can only bring a deep sense of respect from this reviewer.

Venue: SMOCK ALLEY STUDIO
Dates:- MON. 14th – SAT. 19th MAY
Time: 9.30pm
Tickets: €12 (Conc. €12)
(Sat. Matinee @ 3pm €10)
Duration: 65 mins.

But what a cold, twisted heart was beating in this show. The central storyline: a woman, suffering from post-natal depression, left her five-week-old baby, Karl, in the care of her husband, and emigrated to the US, married again, and never saw them again. We see her returning, nearly twenty-one years later, in search of the child she abandoned, who has just got a job as a security guard in McBirney’s department store. In her main monologue, set bizarrely in a church, she is bitter at how her second husband “tried to suppress her spirit too”, so she took him to the cleaners in the divorce court; despite the fact that she was still married to her first husband. But she is unapologetic. She’s glad she went to America, otherwise she’d have ended up like her – and she points with disgust at a woman scrubbing the church floor. “At least she speaks English” she says, in a “comic” aside. “These non-nationals are everywhere, they’re taking over the place”. In the reunion with her enraged husband, she sings in explanation how she walked out the door, not wanting to “live a lie”. She hurls abuse at Karl’s stepmother. When she is just about to meet her son, she says that she’s not worried that he won’t like her, it’s more that she mightn’t like him. When she sees that he’s a mawkish melancholy lad, she snaps at him, “why can’t you grow up, and think about me?” It’s a funny line, but by then I’d long ceased to see the joke.

If only this Frankenstein’s monster of a human being, this cruel, snide, narcissistic, victimy, fraudulent, self-aggrandizing, child-abandoning, xenophobic, bigoted bigamist bitch was being sent up in this show, I would have found it funny. But, to my horror, I think this heartless woman was being celebrated, in this poorly thought-out script. Or, whoever was playing her was being celebrated – for in amateur theatre, of course, the personalities of the players are known by the audience, which adds to the in-joke. The curious thing is that the character was played so defiantly and earnestly, without a hint of irony, but with a sour sort of pettiness, that it wasn’t camp. A monstrous bitch can be a fabulous comic creation, but only if she’s camp, and knowing, pace the ballsy Joan Collins in Dynasty.

There were plenty of other characters played by an energetic cast of six, and whoever played Mr Jay, manager of McBirney’s, is a little singing and dancing bundle of talent, reminiscent of Stubby Kaye in Sweet Charity. The rest acquitted themselves admirably, although they could have done with a microphone between them.

In this show, the jokes, the cultural references, were oddly, pervily, heterosexual; a leering Mr Jay sniffs the coat collar of Jenny, a woman who is hoping he’ll employ her, Karl’s buxom stepmother tries to have her wicked way with her little balding husband, Karl’s Dad, who has difficulty saying “no” to her. It’s The Benny Hill Show. Unreconstructed. From the 1970s. Please don’t tell me that I should make any allowances for the quality of a script because the writers are transgendered. And making cheap jokes about foreigners? I couldn’t believe my ears. Do I need to point out, as if it mattered, that, among others, there were Polish and Dutch people in the audience? (Including a newlywed lesbian couple from Amsterdam, here on honeymoon at the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival.) I was embarrassed.

Only two or three of the six actors would “pass” on the street in their chosen gender; the rest would raise questions or doubts, which does of course put them in danger. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a catwalk or a freak show, it was an exercise in community morale-boosting, visibility and solidarity, and it must have done them a power of good. In principle they have every right to be included in the festival, as Brian Merriman’s interpretation of the word “gay” includes everyone in the rainbow alphabet of LGBTQ. Next time, however, I’m not sure I’ll be so willing to extend my support to this group, Shopfloor Productions, unless they can at least show some heart, some irony, and the barest minimum of respect for the sensitivity of others.

The play could only have been set in London, not only because of Jack’s council-flat Estuary accent: his wide-boy handsome looks and attitude is pure London, and his class-conscious rage at childhood poverty is unmistakably English. But at heart this is an archetypal story of violation, of abuse, of theft, a darkly Freudian journey through the underworld, a young man’s search for the Giant, both within and without.

The tale is expertly told by the cast of three – Donna King playing both Jack’s shadowy feckless single mother, Dolly, and Lola, the Giant’s lacy drug-fucked moll. Giant, whom we never see, is some sort of East-End gangster figure, living in luxury at the top of Stalk Towers. Preece Killick plays a bewildering variety of Jack’s punters with aplomb, desperate for Jack’s not-so-tender ministrations. (The Irish priest character, however, worked less well than it might have in Dublin, with a curiously jarring orgasmic exclamation of “I hate the English” – but then Irish sexual darkness is a mythical journey in a league of its own.) Most touching of his scenes was as Harry, a married punter Jack plays cops with, and Jack tries to turn him into a lover, trying to kiss him, begging him to make love to him as he does his wife. The punter’s disgust at the idea echoes Jack’s own self-loathing.

“Being queer is the worst thing one can be” Jack laments. We understand something about it when he talks about his schooldays – “Girls ignored me because they couldn’t have me, the boys bullied me until they knew they could”. This brutalization is perhaps behind his fetishisation of violence – “nothing is sexier than a violent man” he says. But it’s not until the play’s hypnotic grand guignol ending that we get to the heart of what disturbs/torments his soul.

“We all make our own hell, eventually” says Jack. I’m not sure that’s true; but if, like me, you value creative attempts to portray our darkest desires and fantasies, then this haunted, pervy and gripping play, directed confidently by Phil Setren, is for you.

As the audience recovered from Jack the Lad, the set was stripped bare, and we trooped back in to experience a very different take on sexual fantasy. I felt for Jimmy Shaw, the sole performer in Dream Man, by the late James Carroll Pickett, because it was extremely difficult for him to follow the melodrama of the first half of this double bill at the Project. I imagine the reason behind the scheduling was practical, to do with the time needed to set up the first show – but I could have found a lot more to enjoy in this play if it had come first. In a way, I’d already climaxed. It’s hard sometimes when someone still wants to talk to you, after that.Increasingly I am becoming aware of how strongly culture influences our sexual tastes, what is erotic in one culture, what can get a man’s blood pumping to a particular sound or sight or scenario, can leave others puzzled and unstirred. An American friend of mine cringes when Europeans attempt to talk dirty to him while having sex – which is exactly how I feel when I am with Americans who attempt the same thing. Context is all. Shared cultural and sexual references are necessary to get a buzz going erotically. Of course I realise that’s not something others are necessarily going to agree with, but it goes some way to explain why I found Dream Man a curiously flat experience.

Set in the era in America in the late eighties, Christopher is a fantasist, a man who weaves erotic tales to order on the telephone, riding the crest of the AIDS panic, making a living of men’s loneliness. In his various conversations, he eloquently spins tales to arouse his clients, having been clued into what they are into beforehand. He has regulars, he takes pride in how well he can bring newbies to climax, and, as in Jack the Lad, we learn just how gothic and self-destructive sexual fantasy can be. In between his clients, he also has conversations with his ex-lover Billy, who is getting drunk in a bar somewhere, pleading with Christopher to come and get him. We learn of their life-long love story, of Billy’s transition from being a young “greasemonkey” of a gas-pump attendant in Kentucky, to a coiffeured self-absorbed clone, throwing his life away with drink drugs and sex.

I wonder why this play was resurrected – for all the accomplished talent that Jimmy Shaw evidently has, I felt it hard to connect with the material, emotionally or erotically. And yet I’m glad I saw it, as a snapshot of a time and a place when the “plague of despair” was at its height.

Venue: PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
Dates:- MON. 7th – SAT 12th MAY
Time: 8pm
Double Bill Tickets: €18 for the two shows (Conc. €16)
(Sat Matinee @ 3pm €14)

I’m looking forward to being in Dublin in May for the first time since the annual International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival started in 2004. There are some plays in the programme I have high hopes for.

Of particular interest to me will be Jack, The Lad, a rent boy’s journey of self-discovery, Dream Man which is set in the world of telephone sex lines, apollo /dionysus which promises to be an uninhibited fleshing out of ancient myths, The Irish Curse, which explores masculinity, The Boy Who Fell from the Roof from South Africa, and The Gaydar Diaries, a piece about the infamous dating site. (The co-founder of which, incidentally, Gary Frisch, somersaulted off his balcony and plunged to his death in February after taking too much ketamine; he’d been depressed and over-indulging in drugs since the death of his mother. His last reported word was “Wahey!”)

I reviewed the festival with Peter Crawley of The Irish Times, for Nadine O’Regan’s arts and entertainment show The Kiosk on Phantom FM.

Listen:

(Not to mislead anyone: this isn’t a poem about racism, it’s an explicit, robust, no-holds-barred 8-minute long queer performance piece.)

As the first Mass I’ve attended in years got under way, I found my stomach clenching with tension, as I realised the subtle force of being in a congregation full of believers, and going against the tide; not blessing myself, not chanting the responses. Even though I know every word. To avoid seeming childish, I stood when everyone stood. However, refusing to kneel in Mass is especially awkward when the person right behind you kneels. I sensed her devotional fervour ripple through me as she echoed every word the priest said in a whispered moan, a mere few inches from my ears. I didn’t feel she was reproaching me, though, however hard I tried to detect it in her tone of voice, or imagined it in the impact of her plosive consonants on the hairs on the back of my neck.

The priest was a simple, well-meaning man, everything was formal, dignified, just as everyone there would have liked. When it came to the Eucharist, I was, as usual, impressed with the ritual of it, the theatre of it, how effective the structure of the Mass is, to invoke a sense of the numinous, a touch of magic. But I wasn’t prepared for the sight of a trio of small portly women in their fifties, in well-worn plain suits and flowery blouses, emerging from behind the altar, trooping down the aisle, and busying themselves in the process of distributing the host. I’d not seen that before. It all felt a bit, well, protestant. Still, nobody else seemed to notice or care, and they handed out the round wafers with a sincere humble piety.

Religion works best for kind, simple people; by which I mean that kindness and simplicity are qualities I value highly, but which I often find impossible to manifest. People are generally happier if they believe in a formal religion, a codified value system, and are supported by a sense of community and belonging, that comes from sharing those values and beliefs. However, I am beyond the pale when it comes to most religions, primarily because so many of them scapegoat the sexual, and demonize the queer. And none do so more clearly than Ratzinger’s Catholic Church.

Apart from the odd time over the years that I have had sex with Catholic priests while cruising, I haven’t had much personal contact with them. My political animal, however, is outraged at the Vatican anti-condom stance, which has been directly the cause of so many people contracting HIV and AIDS in the developing world. In Ireland, still, the local parish priest holds sway on many school governing boards, and so the church line on sex education (leave it to the family, don’t mention homosexuality or condoms) is often the rule, rather than the exception, even in this supposedly post-Catholic nation. This causes untold grief and confusion among vulnerable teenagers, as well as putting them at serious risk of contracting HIV. Not to mention institutionalised child abuse and the attempts to cover it up, with which everyone is familiar. While acknowledging that, as in every profession, there are good and bad priests, my opinion of the institution remains severely critical, and have little political respect for those who remain in it.

My period of being untroubled by priests has, however, come to end. Increasingly, over the past few years, I am coming into contact with them, or other men who share an equally devout Catholic faith. The route by which I am encountering them is, to me, a surprising one: my work as a psychotherapist, interested in queer sexuality.

Firstly, the trail-blazing Fr Bernard Lynch, the Irish-American priest, now a psychotherapist based in London, who shot across my bows years ago with his appearance on the Late Late Show, and his heart-wrenching lament for how the Catholic church was treating gay men with AIDS. In the last few years, at therapeutic conferences and workships on gay/queer themes that I attended (or ran) in London, the Irish delegates would invariably include a priest or a nun. Back in Dublin, at a recent gathering of men invited to hear a gay American author and psychotherapist speak on couples therapy for gay men, it seemed that I was surrounded by priests, or former priests. An ancient unease in me thawed as the meeting went on, listening to the sensitivity and thoughtfulness of the contributions.

There I met Glen O’Brien for the first time, the pseudonymous editor of Coming Out: Irish Gay Experiences, who teased me that I “roasted” him in these pages for producing a coming out book where over half the stories were written with false names. Indeed, it was that 2003 book that opened my eyes to a profound aspect of Irish queer sexuality, how intrinsically it is bound up with the priesthood. Or should that be vice versa? So many of the book’s contributors were religious, so many stories were not so much about declaring oneself publicly to be gay, but in coming to terms with a spiritual path that involved loving members of the same sex.

Trained as I was in godless England, the gay priest-psychotherapists that I met along the way were few and far between, and tended to be Anglican, or at the very least protestant, and of course that meant that they were also, some of them, female. They were relatively content, as far as I could see, to live their lives with their partners in rural vicarages, not hiding, but not shouting either.

I am only beginning to digest the implications, however, of realising that many of my colleagues in Ireland who are gay therapists or counsellors are also (apparently celibate) Catholic priests. On a personal level, which is still quite painful, it seems that I have a dialogue to re-engage in with Catholicism, whether I like it or not, if I am to be part of a community that is interested in the mental and spiritual health of Irish gay people. On a professional level, I would have serious concerns about the ethics of a devout Catholic therapist working with a gay man or lesbian as a client, never mind a priest. Unrepentant sexually active queers are sinners, and burn in the flames of hell, as Pope Benedict recently reassured us. If a Catholic priest doesn’t believe that, then why be one? There is little room for individual conscience in Catholicism; that’s the point. Even psychoanalysis is suspect in Catholicism. Rome, and only Rome, rules.

One of the ways in which I could envisage my concerns being assuaged is of course through dialogue, debate, discussion, in which I fully intend to take part. I am open to acknowledging that there are many different ways for men to be intimate with each other, to make connections, that do not have to be sexual. Indeed I know that sex can be an obstacle to intimacy, and true soulmates are found regardless of sex. I know that the quality of sex often improves after a decent period of celibacy. But I also know that queer sex can be a route to transcendence and a deep connection with other men; I know that shame serves to exacerbate a sexual wound as opposed to heal it; I know that when on the crest of a sexual wave, I have felt at my most alive and most understanding of the complexity that is being a man. I know that some of the most soulful men I’ve ever met have been self-styled pervy pigs, who have raddled their bodies with sex drugs and rock and roll, have every disease going, and every body modification imaginable to serve the pleasure principle. I know that some of the most frightened men I’ve ever met have been Catholics, crippled with shame, using their faith as a blunt instrument to batter down their sexual impulses, frozen in a dreadful state of emotional moral and relational paralysis, petrified that they might offend their mammy (or the Virgin Mary) with their erect penis.

May God forgive the Catholic Church for teaching so many men to hate and fear their bodies so.

And may the gods protect such men from harm when they go seeking a respite from their fear through counselling or therapy.