CO-WRITER

Over the years I've often written about my co-writer, a man to whom I owe much.  I will risk talking about him again though it will sound narcissistic.  Strangely, we have a lot in common though much of my writing about him has been to note his brilliant and achieving side in the context of the boy lives he has changed while his own writing emphasizes darkness, secrecy, and stigma.  Even failure and death.  The truth must be somewhere in between, but it is nothing like what the public assumes.  Anyway, it was a construct meant to destroy him while enriching his attackers.  It's time to push back in spite of the possibility of old attacks being renewed.

His protection of boys has been moving constantly through a vast system of underground protectors, survivors and patrons who understand his goals. He has never taken much of anything for himself, which is so foreign to persecutors that they never figure it out.  For the boys themselves he has meant release from self-attack, freedom to love, social consciousness that supports other needy people, and help in the struggle to survive one of the most deadly and insidious diseases to afflict the planet.  He feels alone and represents himself as alone, but in truth many are with him, not least the boys who have become men instead of dying.

My tactic has been opposite: staying in one well-loved low-cost place, the highest education I could manage, celibate solitude in the interest of thinking, and always seeking, helped by the Internet but always guarded.  My paternal grandmother grew up near where this man spent his first eight years in a tightly knit farm family near a river where he became a champion swimmer, boater, and fisherman.  Then he was in a place changing after WWII into an industrial machine, much affected by Eisenhower's determination to build a continent-wide system of highways.  In some ways the internet is a world-wide echo of that industrial automobile culture of continental travel in a private way, except the internet is planetary.  

My co-writer has confined himself mostly to a segment of the culture defined by stigma -- boys pushed out of families and reduced to selling their last possesions, their own bodies.  What little safety they had was due to being hidden.  Therefore it was mostly covert but present in culture through academia, literature, and politics over millennia.  It has become various, even opposing one part to another, but always present.  Some are extreme and other parts have been drawn into public life.  But as the secrecy that stigma enforced has recently pulled back, it becomes more dangerous.  Some people cling to old ways and become furious.

My own interests have converged on the newest knowledge about ourselves and the universe.  I easily left the rigid Christian assumptions of the immigrants to the Old Northwest around Lake Michigan and accepted the ideas of the indigenous people, particularly in Montana.  I dared to read everything, even what I had to chase for meaning by using Google or a geology dictionary.  I haven't tried to become prominent or popular.  This has relieved me from distractions.  Sex was unknown territory at first.

Sexworkers, whatever their private orientations, deal with people of all kinds and are themselves keepers of secrets.  They have always been distributed on a spectrum from desperate and passive street walkers to the most elite and expensive weavers of dreams, secret consorts of kings.  Their clients, gender-inclusive just like the providers, include cops, priests, legislators, military and royalty.  In lowest regard are those who treat youngsters as consumable -- abused and even killed-- only objects to be used.  In highest regard -- and this has always been true -- are those who develop true partnerships in a complex world.  Some sexworkers have been castrated, eunuchs.  Some may not be either male nor female but on a continuum between.  

The worst tricks are those who become so alarmed by surprise that they try to kill.  Some tricks conflate sex with violence and punish their sexworkers with beatings and other abuse.  This is one source of the stigma, along with the necessary evasion of government control.  My co-writer knows all about these things because he's survived them.

Print, when developed into literature with meaning, notes all of this and hopes to find the meaning or at least experience. The next step is the beauty, terror and meaningfulness of reading it.  Like poetry.  And after that comes the visionary video, abstract as a painting, full of passion and puzzlement.

Writing can be more invasive than psychotherapy, more diagnostic than a blood test, more subtly damaging than infection or inflammation.  To be seized by writing in its most extreme forms is far different than composing rhymed couplets on Valentine's Day.  The rhetoric can be far from pretty, and the sentiments can praise death.  If I wrote like that, I wouldn't let you see it, but my co-writer would.  It's a long tradition, esp. in cultures full of war, suppression, and money as entitlement.  Like ours.  Some dare to paint it or morph it into music.   Some say a wound is a speaking mouth.

My co-writer has also been a publisher of magazines and books, some of them tender and scientific stories, if not exactly mainstream.  He knows about the price of paper and how to "lunch" with power brokers who wear shoes of great price, spike heels which they kick off when they are back at their desks.  Publishing is not like a girlie movie where Jo Alcott or Anne with an E take their ribbon-tied stack of manuscript to a grumpy old man who transforms their lives by publishing their first effort.  It's all swaps and deals and maybe seduction.  Hard-core stuff.

Striving to see life clearly, without prejudice or advantage, depending on modest living and openness for protection, and loving people I've only met in print has worked.  But it would have been a curse without knowing this other writer.  I'm a danger to him, but maybe it's worth the risk.