I was the sort of teenager who, one year, went to Mass every day for Lent. That s twenty years ago. It s also twenty years since my first shag. The fact that the two roughly coincide should not surprise anyone, but I should make clear that I wasn t running to church begging for forgiveness, hogging the confessional with florid tales of mortal sin. I didn t fall into that particular trap of ritual embarrassment. I left the Catholic Church when I heard the priest talk about the grave moral disorder of homosexuality. I walked away, rather than endure the pain of it. I didn t do it with much fuss; for I wasn t completely sure I was gay then. I just stopped going. Never been back, except for weddings and funerals.
The only sources of information available to me, then, about homosexuality, were the agony aunts in the Sunday papers, who talked about phases of development, and how teenagers often went through times of confusion . Homosexuality could only be firmly diagnosed , they said, at the age of twenty-eight, and anyone firmly identifying as such before then would be making a serious mistake. I pondered this for a while, and then decided that, since I was undoubtedly one of those going through a particularly strong phase, I would enjoy it while I could.
On one level, I certainly enjoyed myself. On the level of adventure, reckless sailing-close-to-the-wind excitement, I had a fab time. Short of doing drugs, I could not imagine a more exhilarating pastime than cruising as a teenager. Trouble is, it took over; real life (school) seemed drab and colourless compared to the technicolour passion of furtive sex. The diligence with which I had applied myself to regular churchgoing got redirected to cottaging and cruising. I didn t think there was a connection, but I m beginning to wonder, now. On an emotional level, such a lifestyle trashed me, left me raw, bruised and uncertain.
I ve been reading a book called Easing The Ache by Guy Kettelhack, subtitled Gay men recovering from compulsive behaviours . In it, he talks about the various addictions to which gay men are prone, and offers numerous moving stories of their recovery, including his own.
Recovery is one of those shibboleths that I ve only begun to understand fully recently. In every medium-to-large town in these islands, in some parish hall or convent annexe or community centre, there are groups of people regularly meeting and helping each other recover from addictions of one sort or another. Mostly alcohol, because that is the most widely-available drug in our culture, but not only alcohol.
Twelve Step programmes, so-called because they are based on the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, are adaptable to most behaviours, addictions and compulsions, from overeating to smoking to compulsive sex. What is interesting is that, at heart, the philosophy behind such programmes is not based on a psychiatric or medical model of cure , in which the problematic behaviour will be eradicated after a prescribed treatment. These programmes are resolutely spiritual in nature. And they work.
I find it difficult, even now, to write about spirituality without getting severely sarcastic with myself. I do not have the means to talk about it without getting really scared that a certain glazed look may glint in my eye, a certain missionary zeal may colour my voice, and a certain intolerance might creep into my demeanour, resistant to those who are not on my wavelength, who haven t found the way. So deep is the split in me between my sexual desires and my need to find some sort of healthy spirituality, that I flip erratically between asceticism and hedonism, and can find no stable middle ground. At the moment. But there s change in the air.
The idea of the spiritual queer is not so strange as it might appear. We all know, of course, that the Catholic church is full of priests who jumped at the chance to escape marriage, as soon as they heard anything remotely like a call from God. But there are much more positive examples out there, if we choose to look.
Edward Carpenter was a man way ahead of his time, a self-styled mystic socialist who lived openly with his male lover for over 40 years. He died in 1929. He wrote numerous articles and books on the subject of homosexuality; one, The Intermediate Sex, was published in 1908, and was in print for decades, being the only treatment of the issue that was compassionate and inspiring, as opposed to moralistic or medical.
In a later book, Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk, published in 1911, he examines the special spiritual role that many cultures reserve for the homosexual, such as the priest, medicine-man or shaman, the prophet and the diviner, the artist and craftsperson and the true scientist, successor to the tribal observer of the stars and seasons, medicine and the herbs . We ve lost sight of that, in the gay scene at the moment, preferring to go shopping and fucking instead. That s what gay liberation was all about, wasn t it? To enable people to live lives as shallow and materialistic as the rest?
Carpenter lives on in a movement that bears his name, one dedicated to a sense of community among gay men, with intentions rather similar to those I was going on about a few weeks ago. I sent away, and got a leaflet of theirs, and am seriously considering going away on one of the weeks that they organize. Imagine, I might meet a few like-minded souls. Scary. But nice scary. n
Easing the Ache by Guy Kettelhack (Hazelden 1998);
Sexual Compulsives Anonymous http://www.sca-recovery.org; Edward Carpenter Community http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~pap-aja/ecc/