I’ve been trying, over the years, to make sense of the experience that many men have of sex, the way in which it is often perceived to be something that takes us over, that distracts us, that compels us, that erodes a sense of rationality, of being in control. I’ve come to realise that, as in most things, the judgments we make about our behaviour matter enormously, and if they are severely critical, as they usually are about sex in our culture, they serve to compound and exacerbate shame and distress instead of alleviate them. The more polarised we are inside, as a general rule, the more tortured we are, the less accepting we are of ourselves. And when we fight against self-acceptance, we alienate ourselves from others, increase a sense of isolation, and make the likelihood of forming meaningful relationships diminish. It’s a vicious circle.

Also, when it comes to sex, it is deceptively easy to apply the 12-step model of addiction to those who have a lot of it and are disturbed by it. For a number of years I believed I was a sex addict, and sought help for my problem through 12-step groups. It reinforced my shame around matters sexual (which took some doing) and for a while I believed that sex was the problem, that there was something badly wrong with me for wanting it so much. For many heterosexual men with partners, struggling with their use of prostitutes or pornography, for example, a sex addiction programme with a zero-tolerance stance on sex outside marriage serves to help them to remain faithful to the women in their lives, and so keep families together, and reinforces traditional social mores. If an entire family agrees that a father and husband’s philandering is shameful, and it accords with general cultural and religious values, then it is hard - perhaps futile - for a married man to consider his sexual adventuring in any other way. But I, as a gay man, without a partner or family, and with no interest in upholding traditional mores, had no such reinforcement. As my sexual life continued, floridly, abundantly, relentlessly, and my shame deepened, compounded by a sense of failure, of sickness, I began to wonder if it was the shame that was the problem, not the sex.
As with so many aspects of our society, homosexuality is a phenomenon that is causing us to re-examine many established norms. From property and tax law to the institution of marriage, from established religion to health education, from the military to psychotherapy, the ascendance of the Stonewall generation is testing and changing our values, challenging our understanding of human nature. And so it is with ideas around addiction.
The link between addiction and spirituality is well-established in our culture. 12-step groups offer a ritualised spiritual fellowship that encourages a relationship to God, an acceptance of the principle of surrender in the face of the inevitable, and a forensic examination and confession of character defects (read: sins) as a way of encouraging a sense of well-being. But for many gay men, we have ritualised a different route to the spiritual, to the transpersonal, and that is through sex.
In his understanding of our dream life, our unconscious, Carl Jung referred to a temenos as “a piece of land, often a grove, set apart and dedicated to the god.” For many men, cruising areas, which are as a rule invisible to the uninitiated, act as a space where age-old rituals of sex are enacted by men in search of an experience that is not connected to the love of a particular person, but for the experience of sex in all its variety, imagination, sensory pleasure, adventure, intensity and repetition, according to intuitive rules of engagement, evoking (or invoking) experiences of the numinous, the transcendent, in every encounter.
In other, especially Oriental cultures and religions, the phallus is revered as a manifestation of the divine, like Shiva’s lingam – in the west, where it is shamed, it is left to the queers communing in the parks to honour it. For, of course, it is not that we worship the six-inch piece of flesh, per se, it is that it carries a projection, a charge, a sense of power, or some may say an illusion of power. Entering a cruising area - and in this day and age it’s not only a literal grove, but a corner of cyberspace or a basement of a bar - has a frisson that is hard to explain to those who haven’t experienced it. It’s a crossing over the threshold to the unconscious realm, very dreamlike, very exciting, sometimes numbing, full of infinite possibility and fantasy, a yearning to connect to some collective sense of fraternal (paternal?) communion, a magick of sorts.
In classical mythology, the god that ruled over such sacred/profane spaces was Dionysus, the god of transgression and release, of drunkenness and ecstasy. He had his role to play, his rightful place in the pantheon. But the paradox of Dionysus is that in order for there to be some transpersonal charge to the transgression, a sense of breaking the rules, there has to be something to transgress in the first place. Which is why those of us with severe, condemnatory inner critics, who serve to dole out (Christian) shame on our animal, instinctive sexual drives, are often those for whom the desire to indulge in Dionysian rites is overwhelming, compulsive. The priest’s shadow, his counterpart, without whom he is incomplete in archetypal terms, is the rampantly out-of-control pervert; the attempt to transcend the fleshly devilish realm and live in the spirit world invokes the disowned transgressor even more strongly, to often destructive effect.
To look at the role of sex in the lives of many gay men, and our engagement with cruising, in a non-shaming transpersonal light is essential, in order to work towards a lasting, workable, inner peace. By making the desire to commune conscious, we can begin to enjoy ourselves in our transgression, and even begin to bring that transgressive queer spirit to bear in our public lives. It changes from being an experience that is driven and cold and shame-filled, to one that is less compulsive, more enjoyable, and actually quite liberating. It’s not easy; making peace, whether intrapsychic or across tribal/nationalistic schisms, is a painful, often intractable business. And many mystical traditions speak of the essentially disturbing experience of contact with the transpersonal, an eruption of the sacred. We should not accept that because we find ourselves so disturbed that we are diseased, sinful, defective. We are as God, or Shiva, or Darwin, or Freud, made us. Not quite monks of Dionysus. But differently blessed.