MA #3

Monthly Aspecterian Article 3
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 <health

This month I want to explore the connections between immune competency, the social issue of gay rights, and the necessity of personal/collective inquiry among gay men to overcome diminishment by shame. Very often in the body/mind field we forget the impact of social factors on healthcare outside of the more economically obvious, i.e. people without money not only don’t have access to services but usually also don’t have the education to make use of the services that are accessible. As Jonathan Mann of Harvard pointed out at the XI International Conference on AIDS, healthcare cannot be separated from issues of human rights and freedom, and that in the last 50 years, only 1/6 of public health improvements in the US came from medicine. In addition, according to a recent report from the World Bank, the factor that will make the biggest impact on global public health is increasing the educational level of attainment by girls.
I am increasingly interested in understanding how the social environment impacts on our psychology and health. Recent research by Cole, Kemeny et al (1995)1 in a study lasting 9 years has indicated that closeted gay men have a higher incidence of cancer and other infections than "out" gay men. The same holds true for HIV+ closeted gay men, who were more likely to die of AIDS 1.5-2 years earlier than those mostly or completely "out". (1)
1. Cole,SW; Kemeny,M; et al, "Accelerated course of HIV infection in gay men who conceal their homosexuality", in Health Psychology: Vol. 15, #4 (1996)

Interestingly enough, another study related the negative consequences for health of coming out of for those men who are especially sensitive to social rejection. It is not particularly surprising that cultural repression is a co-factor in immune suppression!
I was born in 1954, the year that Rosa Parks refused to be moved on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, instigating a year-long boycott of the busses by the local black community. This event has been regarded as the opening salvo in the civil rights struggles of the 60’s and was an auspicious symbol for my life path as a rebel in search of freedom and self-determination. (I feel very strongly that the current gay rights movement has alot to learn from black liberation. I have included, in italics, the powerful writings of black poet Audre Lorde throughout this column to highlight the similarities of our collective personal struggle.) (2)
2. "Eye to Eye", from Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde, The Crossing Press (1984)

I encountered early on in my life the limitations of gender-appropriate behavior; the shaming by Catholic dogma/education; the fear of an alcoholic and controlling father; and the conformity of post-WW2 America. My adolescence coincided with the anti-war years, a time of collective discord, questioning, and confrontation, justifying the explosion of my suppressed personal rage. This began the process of asserting a separate self from the culture. The blessing of this era was that it gave me support to assert my creativity, to question the dominant paradigm, to feel righteously. The curse was that I projected my anger/shame out on the System rather than examining its roots in myself, and felt the weight of my isolation without understanding its source.
My dedication to freedom and individuality, being the rebel, generated alot of power for me, yet undermined my ability to connect. The protective narcissism that I developed to unconsciously guard against the emergence of my shame, rage and sadness also erected a barrier against the surrender to love. It took a loving relationship in my 30’s with a man who believed in me and subsequent therapy to begin to unravel the layers of maladaptive coping strategies that inhibited me from fully participating in my feeling life. In freeing up the fullness and expression of my feeling/bodily life and transforming old patterns of inhibition, I feel that that this inner shift stopped the HIV virus from continuing its damage to my immune system. In these last 8 years, my CD4 cells (the major target of destruction by HIV) have not changed substantially from their holding pattern of 150. (We are beginning to realize that the expression of feelings generates a natural pharmacoepia in the body that creates a primary line of defense against illness. I will review this fascinating literature next month.)

It is easier to be angry than to hurt. It is easier to be furious than yearning. For each of us bears the face that hatred seeks, and we have each learned to be at home with cruelty because we have survived so much of it in our lives.

We are a community of outsiders searching for inclusion. Even many gay men who are actively involved in, and respected by , the queer community, will privately admit that they too feel like outsiders. This quality of "outsiderness" is not only interpersonal yet intrapersonal as well. We exist a little removed from our own experience, our own bodies and feelings because to stand in our center is to be bombarded by the intense shame, rage and sadness of our identity. And these feelings feel like they have the potential to annihilate us. As gay men and lesbians, we have been "sexually abused" by the culture. Our sexuality has been wronged, punished, disavowed, held contemptible by invasive and destructive social programming. If we look at the psychological and somatic symptoms of survivors of sexual abuse they can teach us a lot about the wounding of the gay psyche.

Even after years of self-examination, working through the shame and empowering my identity as a man who loves men, I find myself many times cringing, averting my eyes in shame, withdrawing into myself, feeling that I have done something wrong. I cannot ignore that I am still surrounded by the collective death-wish, that I go away and not exist so that others may be comfortable. "Your homosexuality is OK as long as you don’t rub it in our faces", i.e. don’t express affection in public, don’t express. My last boyfriend would go into distress very often if I would put my arm around him on the street because someone from work might see him. The incredible necessity of vigilance, staying alert to the environment, censoring our spontaneity, relegating the natural movements of affection to "safe spaces" demands a high activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight syndrome, the chemistry of fear. The fear becomes like a low-grade fever, always present but out of awareness so that we don’t even know we are afraid anymore. Even in the privacy of our homes we are liable to carry the critical, condemning eyes with us into our relationships, having internalized so well the voices of the past.

As much as I intellectually understand the unconscious power of homophobia that infiltrates all levels of society and can maintain a certain inner equanimity, I still live in this toxic field of condemnation and hatred which requires that I split off from my inner experience many times to survive with some shred of self-respect. I can understand the plight of women living in the field of misogyny; people of color in the climate of racism; Jewish people in the atmosphere of anti-Semitism. And yet we freely acknowledge these bigotries/injustices in a way that we have only begun with homophobia. We are still condemned by the world’s major religions, can be fired from jobs without legal recourse, and live each day with slurs freely. It is not surprising that we internalize our "otherness" and struggle with it intrapsychically.

Kaufman 3 has written extensively about the place of shame in distancing us from ourselves and each other. (3)
3 "Coming out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives", Kaufman, G. and Raphael, L. , Doubleday (1996)

He maintains that there are principal defending scripts that develop in response to shame: rage, contempt, perfectionism, striving for power, transferring blame, internal withdrawal, humor/sarcasm, and denial. These scripts have the function of burying the awareness of the original traumas, so we live in a state of reactiveness and diminished aliveness. For to resurrect the awareness ends up becoming another source of shame, which feels unbearable, and we re-double the efforts of our "boundary patrol". We become prisoners of our own shame and take other hostages with us, especially those with whom we are closest. And as is common with survivors of childhood abuse, it is safer to hurt our loved ones than to confront the actual perpetrator, who still holds power. Yet in this case, the perpetrator is the systemic, hard to touch disease of "institutionalized homophobia" which permeates all aspects of our culture.
We reduce one another to our own lowest common denominator, and then we proceed to try and obliterate what we most desire to love and touch, the problematic self, unclaimed but fiercely guarded from the other. This cruelty between us, this harshness, is a piece of the legacy of hate with which we were inoculated from the time we were born by those who intended it to be an injection of death. But we adapted, learned to take it in...yet at what cost! In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest.

Silence=Death...the habituated silence is the death of the feeling life, of the body’s integrity and strength of expression. To risk speaking invites annihilation and death, the old shame spiral to be activated; yet to speak is also to connect, to come out of the paralysis of feeling, and to sense the bigness of our being. To settle for less is collusion with our own oppression and the repetition of that pattern, especially with those we are closest to. Speak to me darling...let me in on your heaven and hell, your joy and your suffering...with words, phrases, sounds, images...let the mind wander through all of its changes. Set the ghosts free by speaking the pain and letting it go.

The fear of therapy is a fear of self-revelation. If someone is unwilling to be seen by a neutral witness, such as a therapist, they certainly are unwilling to see themselves and to be seen by the intimate other. Without self-revelation, there is no true loving connection intrapersonally or interpersonally, only the illusion of love. That illusion can be maintained for awhile but ultimately it crumbles without other bases of support. The reality of love requires work and caring attention to heal all the years of wounding and neglect, the distrust and the fear of surrender. And yet why would we want to risk exposure, even with our loved ones, when we have a legacy of shame that we would rather bury? And given the long-standing use of therapy to pathologize and try to change our sexual orientation, is it any wonder we distrust this venue?

Often we give lip service to the idea of mutual support and connection between Black women because we have not yet crossed the barriers to these possibilities, or fully explored the angers and fears that keep us from realizing the power of a real Black sisterhood. We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for parodies of self-love. We cannot continue to evade each other on the deepest levels because we fear each other’s angers...

We all know that acting is different than truth. In so many circumstances as gay men we've learned to act, to be straight acting, to fit in, to not be noticed, as acts of survival and self-love. Unfortunately, these strategies of invisibility also carry with them duplicity and disassociation. How can we mobilize our full power as human beings if we feel obligated to act? How does this acting interfere with our immunity and the production of white blood cells which are the guardians of identity, differentiating self from not-self? Do we even know that we are acting anymore, especially in our intimate relationships?

Straight men are mediated by the sensibilities of women in relationship. They are continually confronted with having to face tenderness and other vulnerable feelings - and it is usually quite uncomfortable for them. Because as men we have been shamed for feelings of tenderness, fear and distress. To be vulnerable, to surrender, threatens our very survival as very often we equate it with powerlessness. And to be powerless is not to be a man. The gay community is one of men with men and very often we end up overcompensating for what we perceive as a lack of maleness. In a funny way our homophobia can be even more extreme than that of straight men! As men, we have been conditioned to be competitive and "go it alone". No wonder we are guarded, suspicious, and untrusting with one another! The rejection that many of us have experienced with our families and society very often becomes transferred onto the gay scene. And very often this translates into aloofness, uncaring behavior, bitchiness, and sexual/emotional misuse of one another.

Given all this it is truly a miracle that we can even get close to one another at all and begin to build sustaining relationships. And it is the curative power of love and sustainable relationships that we all need to support and cultivate that will redeem us, lead us to the Promised Land of our freedom and actual pride, not the marketed commodity pride that is sold in every gay ghetto. What very often masquerades as "gay pride" is a superficial and naive attempt to bolster our self-esteem against the destructive tide of homophobia. It is superficial because it only deals with the surface of our oppression, of our longing for belongingness without the deeper confrontation with our hopelessness, despair and shame. It circumvents real dialogue of feelings, the openness that is attained through honest self-evaluation and expression. Even the concept of pride has little to do with healthy self-esteem. As Steven Levine has pointed out, pride is the most painful of the Seven Deadly Sins because it keeps us separate from one another. Pride carries with it the baggage of not allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and truly empathic, not able to fully give and receive love.

To grow up metabolizing hatred like daily bread means that eventually every human action becomes tainted with the negative passion and intensity of its by-products - anger and cruelty.

We can only blame society for so long for our oppression as gay people. Just because we are oppressed by the joint forces of society and our conditioning is no justification for acting out our pain on one another. Totally understandable, but no longer acceptable. As Malcom X pointed out, we are not responsible for our oppression, but we must become responsible for our liberation. It is important that we become accountable to ourselves and our brothers, and stand together. This requires that we heal our individual wounds, our relationships, that we do the hard work of coming forward and making ourselves visible and vulnerable to one another so that we can move out into society with more support and strength. It certainly is unrealistic to expect homophobes to change if we are unwilling to change; we certainly have a larger investment in the outcome. A political movement of human rights has no inner foundation of support if we are not willing to simultaneously examine and transform our own "human rights abuses"...in ourselves, our intimate relationships, and with the community at large.

To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies’ arsenals. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.

This month I want to explore the connections between immune competency, the social issue of gay rights, and the necessity of personal/collective inquiry among gay men to overcome diminishment by shame. Very often in the body/mind field we forget the impact of social factors on healthcare outside of the more economically obvious, i.e. people without money not only don’t have access to services but usually also don’t have the education to make use of the services that are accessible. As Jonathan Mann of Harvard pointed out at the XI International Conference on AIDS, healthcare cannot be separated from issues of human rights and freedom, and that in the last 50 years, only 1/6 of public health improvements in the US came from medicine. In addition, according to a recent report from the World Bank, the factor that will make the biggest impact on global public health is increasing the educational level of attainment by girls. I am increasingly interested in understanding how the social environment impacts on our psychology and health. Recent research by Cole, Kemeny et al (1995)1 in a study lasting 9 years has indicated that closeted gay men have a higher incidence of cancer and other infections than "out" gay men. The same holds true for HIV+ closeted gay men, who were more likely to die of AIDS 1.5-2 years earlier than those mostly or completely "out". (1)	1. Cole,SW; Kemeny,M; et al, "Accelerated course of HIV infection in gay men who conceal their homosexuality", in Health Psychology: Vol. 15, #4 (1996)
Interestingly enough, another study related the negative consequences for health of coming out of for those men who are especially sensitive to social rejection. It is not particularly surprising that cultural repression is a co-factor in immune suppression! I was born in 1954, the year that Rosa Parks refused to be moved on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, instigating a year-long boycott of the busses by the local black community. This event has been regarded as the opening salvo in the civil rights struggles of the 60’s and was an auspicious symbol for my life path as a rebel in search of freedom and self-determination. (I feel very strongly that the current gay rights movement has alot to learn from black liberation. I have included, in italics, the powerful writings of black poet Audre Lorde throughout this column to highlight the similarities of our collective personal struggle.) (2)	2. "Eye to Eye", from Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde, The Crossing Press (1984)
I encountered early on in my life the limitations of gender-appropriate behavior; the shaming by Catholic dogma/education; the fear of an alcoholic and controlling father; and the conformity of post-WW2 America. My adolescence coincided with the anti-war years, a time of collective discord, questioning, and confrontation, justifying the explosion of my suppressed personal rage. This began the process of asserting a separate self from the culture. The blessing of this era was that it gave me support to assert my creativity, to question the dominant paradigm, to feel righteously. The curse was that I projected my anger/shame out on the System rather than examining its roots in myself, and felt the weight of my isolation without understanding its source. My dedication to freedom and individuality, being the rebel, generated alot of power for me, yet undermined my ability to connect. The protective narcissism that I developed to unconsciously guard against the emergence of my shame, rage and sadness also erected a barrier against the surrender to love. It took a loving relationship in my 30’s with a man who believed in me and subsequent therapy to begin to unravel the layers of maladaptive coping strategies that inhibited me from fully participating in my feeling life. In freeing up the fullness and expression of my feeling/bodily life and transforming old patterns of inhibition, I feel that that this inner shift stopped the HIV virus from continuing its damage to my immune system. In these last 8 years, my CD4 cells (the major target of destruction by HIV) have not changed substantially from their holding pattern of 150. (We are beginning to realize that the expression of feelings generates a natural pharmacoepia in the body that creates a primary line of defense against illness. I will review this fascinating literature next month.) It is easier to be angry than to hurt. It is easier to be furious than yearning. For each of us bears the face that hatred seeks, and we have each learned to be at home with cruelty because we have survived so much of it in our lives. We are a community of outsiders searching for inclusion. Even many gay men who are actively involved in, and respected by , the queer community, will privately admit that they too feel like outsiders. This quality of "outsiderness" is not only interpersonal yet intrapersonal as well. We exist a little removed from our own experience, our own bodies and feelings because to stand in our center is to be bombarded by the intense shame, rage and sadness of our identity. And these feelings feel like they have the potential to annihilate us. As gay men and lesbians, we have been "sexually abused" by the culture. Our sexuality has been wronged, punished, disavowed, held contemptible by invasive and destructive social programming. If we look at the psychological and somatic symptoms of survivors of sexual abuse they can teach us a lot about the wounding of the gay psyche. Even after years of self-examination, working through the shame and empowering my identity as a man who loves men, I find myself many times cringing, averting my eyes in shame, withdrawing into myself, feeling that I have done something wrong. I cannot ignore that I am still surrounded by the collective death-wish, that I go away and not exist so that others may be comfortable. "Your homosexuality is OK as long as you don’t rub it in our faces", i.e. don’t express affection in public, don’t express. My last boyfriend would go into distress very often if I would put my arm around him on the street because someone from work might see him. The incredible necessity of vigilance, staying alert to the environment, censoring our spontaneity, relegating the natural movements of affection to "safe spaces" demands a high activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight syndrome, the chemistry of fear. The fear becomes like a low-grade fever, always present but out of awareness so that we don’t even know we are afraid anymore. Even in the privacy of our homes we are liable to carry the critical, condemning eyes with us into our relationships, having internalized so well the voices of the past. As much as I intellectually understand the unconscious power of homophobia that infiltrates all levels of society and can maintain a certain inner equanimity, I still live in this toxic field of condemnation and hatred which requires that I split off from my inner experience many times to survive with some shred of self-respect. I can understand the plight of women living in the field of misogyny; people of color in the climate of racism; Jewish people in the atmosphere of anti-Semitism. And yet we freely acknowledge these bigotries/injustices in a way that we have only begun with homophobia. We are still condemned by the world’s major religions, can be fired from jobs without legal recourse, and live each day with slurs freely. It is not surprising that we internalize our "otherness" and struggle with it intrapsychically. Kaufman 3 has written extensively about the place of shame in distancing us from ourselves and each other. (3)	3 "Coming out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives", Kaufman, G. and Raphael, L. , Doubleday (1996)
He maintains that there are principal defending scripts that develop in response to shame: rage, contempt, perfectionism, striving for power, transferring blame, internal withdrawal, humor/sarcasm, and denial. These scripts have the function of burying the awareness of the original traumas, so we live in a state of reactiveness and diminished aliveness. For to resurrect the awareness ends up becoming another source of shame, which feels unbearable, and we re-double the efforts of our "boundary patrol". We become prisoners of our own shame and take other hostages with us, especially those with whom we are closest. And as is common with survivors of childhood abuse, it is safer to hurt our loved ones than to confront the actual perpetrator, who still holds power. Yet in this case, the perpetrator is the systemic, hard to touch disease of "institutionalized homophobia" which permeates all aspects of our culture. We reduce one another to our own lowest common denominator, and then we proceed to try and obliterate what we most desire to love and touch, the problematic self, unclaimed but fiercely guarded from the other. This cruelty between us, this harshness, is a piece of the legacy of hate with which we were inoculated from the time we were born by those who intended it to be an injection of death. But we adapted, learned to take it in...yet at what cost! In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest. Silence=Death...the habituated silence is the death of the feeling life, of the body’s integrity and strength of expression. To risk speaking invites annihilation and death, the old shame spiral to be activated; yet to speak is also to connect, to come out of the paralysis of feeling, and to sense the bigness of our being. To settle for less is collusion with our own oppression and the repetition of that pattern, especially with those we are closest to. Speak to me darling...let me in on your heaven and hell, your joy and your suffering...with words, phrases, sounds, images...let the mind wander through all of its changes. Set the ghosts free by speaking the pain and letting it go. The fear of therapy is a fear of self-revelation. If someone is unwilling to be seen by a neutral witness, such as a therapist, they certainly are unwilling to see themselves and to be seen by the intimate other. Without self-revelation, there is no true loving connection intrapersonally or interpersonally, only the illusion of love. That illusion can be maintained for awhile but ultimately it crumbles without other bases of support. The reality of love requires work and caring attention to heal all the years of wounding and neglect, the distrust and the fear of surrender. And yet why would we want to risk exposure, even with our loved ones, when we have a legacy of shame that we would rather bury? And given the long-standing use of therapy to pathologize and try to change our sexual orientation, is it any wonder we distrust this venue? Often we give lip service to the idea of mutual support and connection between Black women because we have not yet crossed the barriers to these possibilities, or fully explored the angers and fears that keep us from realizing the power of a real Black sisterhood. We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for parodies of self-love. We cannot continue to evade each other on the deepest levels because we fear each other’s angers... We all know that acting is different than truth. In so many circumstances as gay men we've learned to act, to be straight acting, to fit in, to not be noticed, as acts of survival and self-love. Unfortunately, these strategies of invisibility also carry with them duplicity and disassociation. How can we mobilize our full power as human beings if we feel obligated to act? How does this acting interfere with our immunity and the production of white blood cells which are the guardians of identity, differentiating self from not-self? Do we even know that we are acting anymore, especially in our intimate relationships? Straight men are mediated by the sensibilities of women in relationship. They are continually confronted with having to face tenderness and other vulnerable feelings - and it is usually quite uncomfortable for them. Because as men we have been shamed for feelings of tenderness, fear and distress. To be vulnerable, to surrender, threatens our very survival as very often we equate it with powerlessness. And to be powerless is not to be a man. The gay community is one of men with men and very often we end up overcompensating for what we perceive as a lack of maleness. In a funny way our homophobia can be even more extreme than that of straight men! As men, we have been conditioned to be competitive and "go it alone". No wonder we are guarded, suspicious, and untrusting with one another! The rejection that many of us have experienced with our families and society very often becomes transferred onto the gay scene. And very often this translates into aloofness, uncaring behavior, bitchiness, and sexual/emotional misuse of one another. Given all this it is truly a miracle that we can even get close to one another at all and begin to build sustaining relationships. And it is the curative power of love and sustainable relationships that we all need to support and cultivate that will redeem us, lead us to the Promised Land of our freedom and actual pride, not the marketed commodity pride that is sold in every gay ghetto. What very often masquerades as "gay pride" is a superficial and naive attempt to bolster our self-esteem against the destructive tide of homophobia. It is superficial because it only deals with the surface of our oppression, of our longing for belongingness without the deeper confrontation with our hopelessness, despair and shame. It circumvents real dialogue of feelings, the openness that is attained through honest self-evaluation and expression. Even the concept of pride has little to do with healthy self-esteem. As Steven Levine has pointed out, pride is the most painful of the Seven Deadly Sins because it keeps us separate from one another. Pride carries with it the baggage of not allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and truly empathic, not able to fully give and receive love. To grow up metabolizing hatred like daily bread means that eventually every human action becomes tainted with the negative passion and intensity of its by-products - anger and cruelty. We can only blame society for so long for our oppression as gay people. Just because we are oppressed by the joint forces of society and our conditioning is no justification for acting out our pain on one another. Totally understandable, but no longer acceptable. As Malcom X pointed out, we are not responsible for our oppression, but we must become responsible for our liberation. It is important that we become accountable to ourselves and our brothers, and stand together. This requires that we heal our individual wounds, our relationships, that we do the hard work of coming forward and making ourselves visible and vulnerable to one another so that we can move out into society with more support and strength. It certainly is unrealistic to expect homophobes to change if we are unwilling to change; we certainly have a larger investment in the outcome. A political movement of human rights has no inner foundation of support if we are not willing to simultaneously examine and transform our own "human rights abuses"...in ourselves, our intimate relationships, and with the community at large. To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies’ arsenals. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.