Gaining Momentum Part I

It has to be said that I am often slow. Not in general, but certainly on a social level I’m like slow glass. It takes awhile for the light to pass through and reveal itself to me. Especially when it comes to relationships and sex.

I’ve written about this here before. I have a running joke that I could be in a dark corner/room/anyplace with a woman and she would be tearing my clothes off, covering me with passionate kisses and begging me to take her to bed/the wall/someplace/anyplace and in my head I’m thinking “I wonder if she likes me”.

Yeah, okay, that’s an exaggeration. I’m not quite that slow…but sometimes I’m close. Also that scenario rarely actually happens, when it does…I’m generally way more on the ball….so to speak.

But last April, when I attended MomentumCon (thanks very very hugely to my friend @dangerouslilly), I began to learn and realize just.how.slow. I actually am and have been.

Let me explain, if you’ll be kind enough to indulge me and read on.

My whole early life, I’ve been giving myself hints about what my desires were and are. What I like, what I don’t like what I want. My subconscious would give me ways of thinking looking and thinking of things. But I wasn’t getting it. I think the reason for this is because I grew up in a fairly repressed household…you know, the classic “stop touching yourself” kind of thing when you’re a kid…subtle if unintentional parental messages of shame. You know the drill…It was the 60s and 70s and my parents were young and children of the 40s and 50s.

So I never asked myself certain questions and I managed as I grew older to squelch my darker ideas about sex and thus left them unexplored.

In my early teens I read books by gay men, knowing that I wasn’t attracted to men. I was fascinated by the sense of being “other”. I was mystified by this. Why was I so interested in the thinking of struggling gay men when I was clearly attracted to girls. I didn’t realize this then…but I was drawn to reading about people who struggled with self and societal acceptance. I think I was trying to tell myself that I had desires and attractions that I wasn’t accepting. It certainly was what I was doing. And since there were no ready books for me out there yet (Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty was completely out of my radar until I was in my 40s) Merle Miller was what I had to go on.

In college I became frustrated with the plethora of books on women sexuality and the absolute lack of books on male sexuality. Other than a book by Bernie Zilbergeld, I could find nothing. This is the very early 80s. No internet. And oddly, though I was in a very liberal college with lots of artists, I wasn’t encountering the kind of “dark play” that still crept in the back of my mind. In high school I would role play with my girlfriend, but she would only go so far and since I viewed myself as being unusual I simply let it go as far as she was comfortable and resigned myself to not going further.

I simply had no awareness of any other option and I think, being partially on the spectrum, or at least the way that I was on the spectrum, things just didn’t occur to me. So…suppression continued…it went on through my brief marriage and even further.

A couple of years after my separation from my wife, I discovered online role play…you know…the old Yahoo chat rooms. I just went early on to meet people but eventually learned there were people creating their own “worlds” and stories.

I was in my 30s and this is where things, still slowly, began to come alive...



To be continued

My Savage Fandom (in which I recommend podcasts)

A few years ago I finally broke down and got an iPod nano. It wasn't my first mp3 player, but I had gone a long time without one and I was working at a job where sometimes you needed the music playing in your head to help focus. (Later I learned that that is a classic ADD behavior...but that's a different point).

Through the iPod I was exposed to iTunes and through iTunes, podcasts. I now rarely listen to music on my nano, or my iPhone. It's all about the podcasts.

My listening range goes from the podcasts of Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann to fanboy podcasts for Fringe, Lost (two favorites), Joss Whedon to Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me and This American Life. Other favorites include Polyamory Weekly and I Want Your Sex and more.

One of my big favorites is Dan Savage's The Savage Lovecast, which is the audio version of his sex advice column. I've been reading him for years in The Village Voice and Time Out Magazine and watch him whenever I hear he is going to be on some show or another.

Savage is the kind of writer that I wish had been around when I was a teenager. We are about the same age so I assume part of why he does what he does is because he was aware of the same vacuum.

Dan has a great mix of humor, patience, outrage, compassion and tough love. He's not afraid to tell a caller that they are being selfish, or stupid or some general ass...but he is filled with understanding no matter the situation. He's also snarky as hell, and I love snark. But his advice, I have found is 99% spot on. There's no dogmatic approach to anything. His only agenda is to get the best information and most helpful advice and resources out there. Invariably my mind and heart will be changed by the points he makes. Without revealing details left by a caller he will research resources in the areas they are calling from and give them hints...sometimes he will even call someone back and broadcast the actual conversation on the cast.

We are where we are in life and generally I tend to believe that "the universe unfolds as it should". But for so long I was flying blind when it came to sex and relationships and at the less than tender age of now 48 I cannot tell you how many "aHA" moments I have listening to this podcast. I don't dwell on it but I am keenly aware of the very different choices I would have made in my life had there been someone like Dan to read and listen to 30 years ago. Oh sure there were resources, but you had to go to them..and the things I was thinking about were less obvious.

Having gone to the High School of Performing Arts I experienced many friends "coming out" during that time. But I'm not gay, my thoughts and "theories" and ponderings were different. My desires were different and I was too shy to express them or explore them at that point and I wasn't learning from watching my gay friends as they braved the waters of a more public life. (Remember that 30 years ago, even in "Liberal" New York, coming out as gay could get your ass killed or at the very least seriously beaten. Yes it still happens, but not nearly with the kind of frequency or general acceptance as it did then.)

My daughter's generation is so much more aware of what is out there and in there than mine was. They're more informed, in general, than we were. Oddly in this "post AIDS" environment, I think that people coming of age have more understanding, more education and more awareness of sex, sexuality, it's rewards and dangers than human beings have had in a long time. They aren't perfect, there's plenty of mistakes going on. But it all stems from ignorance (cough, Bristol Palin, cough cough). Dan's on the frontline of that war.

He is fun, funny, forthright and clear. He begins every cast with a rant of one kind or another, generally at Right Wing hypocrisy, and that is always massively enjoyable. And lest you think he's a partisan hack, you should hear how he lays into President Obama on Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Listen to it, tell your teenager to listen to it , tell your friends to listen to it. Spread the word.

As an addendum, when I tweeted about writing this entry yesterday I was tweeted by someone recommending Dear Redhead. I'll check her out. Apparently she's been described as Dan Savage with a vagina. The more the merrier I say...I'll let you know.

Sex is who we are and how we got here. We need to embrace it, own it and feel good about it. And that's why I listen to Dan.