SOCIAL EVOLUTION

One way that evolution happens, including social evolution, is that a part separates and forms an independent stream of what let’s call the cultureome.  Maybe the reason is multiple, which I think is esp. true when science makes a breakthrough, society develops that into previously optional behaviors, and then economics fix those behaviors into place.  So the realization that a gay man has a genetic difference, women having more economic and biological options so that they were not so driven to capture a man, enough general prosperity for men to not be locked into jobs, the growth of cities that permitted differences and allowed certain kinds of men to gather and interact intensely -- suddenly it seems as though the gay explosion in San Francisco was spontaneous but it wasn't.  And it rejoined the mainstream, changing us all.

This social revolution was an ordeal and transition with a huge impact on American life, still reverberating through society in surprising ways.  Let me be the first to admit I know very little about all this, but I claim the right to have opinions in spite of that.  (It’s an American tradition -- as both the extreme left and extreme right well know!)  The San Francisco sub-group included other sub-groups.  In fact, I would suggest that this multi-centered aspect is one of the contributions, though each part of the group can’t help struggling to represent everyone who is a man who desires men.  

The SF men voluntarily gathered from the whole continent, self-selecting by knowing who they were, believing there was a place for them, and generally being unusually attractive.  When one looks at archival footage of parades and street scenes, there are few geeks, fat-boys, decrepit and elderly guys.  Rather they are in their prime sexual years, glittering with energy.  The swishy, prancing ones are there, but not out in front.  Leathersexuality (self-named) was a sub-group on the tough guy end of the scale and I have no idea who would be on the poetic elfin end, except that they probably identified as “faeries.”  I know this sounds hopelessly dumb.  Forgive me.

The festival of freedom and exploration these men found was soon followed by an ordeal, a plague that seemed to target them specifically but came out of nowhere.  It mixed with the remnants of the social censure and punishment they had felt earlier in life.  There were several consequences.  One was that gay men who had spent years developing their bodies to be attractive, now necessarily had to become very body conscious in a new way.  Since in the beginning no one knew where the affliction came from or what the symptoms were exactly, every gay man had to watch himself with a horrid fascination, suspended between denial and wanting to know for sure.

Then when the drugs began to work, every man who had previously been a pharmacist in search of the perfect mind-altering drug, now became expert on which cutting edge drugs, which regime, might be life-saving or at least life-extending.  

These men, despite being aggressively polyamorous and relating sexually to people they barely knew, often paired off into truly intimate and loving relationships, which meant that they had to watch their lovers die.  They became nurses, mothers, care-givers and sometimes mercy killers.  This is a skill set that had always been delegated to low-status people.  But now there were a large number of men who learned to give bed-baths, to empty bed-pans, to dress sores.  It changed our ideas about men.

Since formerly productive and well-employed men were thrown into poverty and dependence, gay men began to see the importance of social services.  They gradually understood that HIV -- like TB, asthma, hepatitis -- were linked to poverty, not just because one resort of the desperately poor was sexwork, but also because nutrition, education, and raw opportunity to grow and learn were missing.  For the young men of color, the temptation of stealing or drugging, the uncontrolled violent emotion, the lack of fathers or rejection by unsophisticated and resentful fathers, were always more present. The Dionysian gays had accepted lovers of color, lovers from poverty, and saw them as human beings.  These men had a high awareness of how eroding it can be to be seen as “different,” and -- in fact -- to realize that one is different.  They threw themselves against racism and structural poverty.

The whole question of families and the capitalist insistence on men’s ownership of their wives and children, the treatment of family members as though domestic animals, has become conscious and political.  Parents who control or abandon according to their own convenience call into question the value of marriage as the tent pole of family.  Households based on more affinities than just sex grew out of free-love communes.  Legal systems struggle to accommodate ownership and responsibility issues: who must pay taxes, who must maintain property, who can inherit, who has access to the very ill and can make medical decisions?  Parents who had rejected their sons in life suddenly became interested in their dead bodies -- and their estates.

In high schools across the country the “different” often had taken refuge in the arts.  English teachers accepted them as “sensitive” and in a kind of “Tea and Sympathy” impulse, gave them extra time and coaching in drama groups, choirs and art studios.  PBS was sympathetic, particularly the BBC replays.  This pulled gay men towards international cultures that had always hummed along underneath the conventional world, producing literature and art much admired by the monied classes.  Gay men had voices and the skills to describe what they were living through.

A darker impact was the realization that priests, possibly repressed gays, preyed on boys.  All the while religion was one of the refuges for the oddball, who could insist he was not “different” but rather “chosen.”  A gay man who made this choice had a different struggle with the discipline of celibacy.  This demanded understanding and restructuring that is only beginning to extend to the other boy-centered activities, including athletics and their group shower scenes.  The tentative experiment of Nambla, which claimed that men and boys should form sexual relationships as in historical cultural examples, ran into the modern corruptions and abuses and was unable to separate itself from predators.

Religious institutions responded with the gay-designated Metropolitan Community Church, or the self-studies of mainstream Christian denominations to make room for gays by erasing the barriers of moral stigma.  Beyond that, the wave of death threw open an abyss of horror and despair that demanded a “spiritual” response.  Ransacking esoteric historical and minority rituals accompanied secular exploration of how to manage a human consciousness.  Leathersexuality was one radical approach to claim spirituality.  It was no longer possible to take whatever “religion” is for granted.  

Once again it becomes obvious that a culture -- particularly one that cannot prevent itself from being invaded, diluted, misrepresented, captured by the venal -- has many parts.  If a significant part -- like gay men -- steps away from its previous role and claims both the right to participate in the mainstream and the right to stand apart from it -- even in opposition to it -- then that changes everything.  Some will call this “coarsening,” but little is more coarse than coming home drunk and beating up one’s family, particularly gay sons.  Little is more degenerate than letting poor people die from curable disease because helping them is not profit making.

Geoff Mains, Brit-born/Canadian, earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the U of Toronto in 1972 and did a B.C. post-doc in forest ecology.  Copies of his first book, “The Oxygen Revolution” are on Amazon Canada, but at $30 out of my reach for now.  I found an article at this site:  http://exacteditions.theecologist.org/print/307/308/6360/2/13  He was a genuine scientist used to thinking about physiology in a systems way.  He felt that this symbiosis of intimate use of pain was a way of triggering the release of endorphins.  When he joined the gay revolution in San Fran, a mix of male sexuality and polyamorousness which was also vulnerable to the abuses of domination/submission, and even more vulnerable to the transmission of viruses and microbes, he understood all that.

Before the internet one way of converting ideas to an economy was writing and publishing books.   Art and psychotherapy are also interested in these concepts, which draw on many realms including anthropology, religion, and sci-fi.  The ideas are intimidating, iconoclastic, and so powerful that even diluted and candified juvenile versions have a strong hold on the media where they are acted out in gladiator and space hero fantasies.  In the end, dying, Mains mourned,  “I stand, uncertain . . . The past that I believed in, the times I lived for, are gone.”  They are and they aren’t.  S/M, in its flesh grappling and invading, has become on one hand so trivialized that a chirpy young female on YouTube explains fisting, but also it remains a contributor to the radical redesign of our culture.  He says, “North Americans have yet to truly accept the animal reality of the human condition.”

There is a National Leatherman’s Association International.  It opposes domestic abuse.  If  a boy were being beaten and assaulted by adults, and no one intervened, and if a Leatherman arrived on a Harley and knocked on the door, could he make a difference?  

"URBAN ABORIGINALS: A Celebration of Leathersexuality" by Geoff Mains

I am no expert on any of the matters discussed here.  Not sex, nor homosexuality, nor porn, nor leatherlit.  I am a broadly educated former Unitarian Universalist minister and English teacher, female, old, and rural, coming at this book from no polemic nor specifically moral position.  It is the very alienness that interests me.  How close can I get to understanding?

“Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leathersexuality,” 

by Geoff Mains

This book has eight sections.

1.  ANATOMY OF A CULTURE

The first section makes the case that a group of men exist who are held together from the inside by their intense interactions, near-fusion, and from the outside by the larger culture which finds their activities abhorrent or maybe criminal.  These are big tough hairy guys like those on the American Western frontier.  Religious groups form with less affinity -- but they also erode and corrupt gradually.  Mains uses the idea of tribes, which in Canada are called aboriginals, meaning primal and earliest.  

Urbs, of course, are recent.  City people never really come to terms with what is possible and even ordinary in terms of flesh, as Mains says.  They never kill what they eat or even see it in life.  Rural people differ.  For instance, my niece has a thriving business doing bovine artificial insemination, very often thrusting her arm into another living being, feeling the guts and heartbeat.  She has only given birth twice, but I expect that’s enough.  Probably the more arduous chore was packing around a growing boy inside her for nine months.  I’m not sure the pleasures of serotonin and adrenaline from fisting compare at all with the roller-coaster of reproductive hormones in action.

But let that go.  Clearly there was (and possibly still is) a vibrant and creative tribe of mostly men.  How much of their passion is left is unknown to me.  There are still extremophiles.  “Extreme Fighting” or “Cage Fighting” is very popular in the nearest town, which is an Air Force base.  There must be a “tribe” formed around things like sport parachuting.  I don’t know whether bungee jumping is still popular.  Personally, if I were an athletic type looking for thrills, I’d take up parasailing.  But the pain would only be potential.  And there would be nothing of the intimate engagement with another person like oneself.  It’s flying alone.  I’ll admit “groups” are no longer my thing.

2.  THE FLOWERS OF PAIN

Two cultural irresolvables stand behind leatherlit.  One is the tension between individual and group.  The other is between dominance and submission, which is related to the first dyad.  I take Mains to be trying to find a solution for at least one kind of man.

There is no way that one person can be hurt by another without the hurter dominating the hurtee, and possibly the receiver being restrained.   The argument is that this is done voluntarily, with many safeguards and considerable medical sophistication.  This section is carried by reference to the military culture of obedience and endurance, which is powerful and easy to relate to prison life as well. I do understand the explanation of how pain works, how it can be neurologically fused with pleasure.  You don’t have to be a “cutter” to enjoy picking scabs, wiggling a painful tooth, little stuff like that.  We know that pain and pleasure are in the brain, though the relevant research is more recent than Mains’ work.

This is where emotion enters.  Intense emotion can etch sensation into muscles, organs and brain, imprint them.  The interaction of emotion and physical sensation can be dramatic, transforming, addictive.  Also introduced are shame, guilt, and terror.  Or euphoria and bonding.

Vicariously, virtually, our culture loves extreme pain and sex portrayed as realistically as possible:  Westerns, war films, crime films, terminal diseases.  CGI means that almost anything can be graphically depicted.  That’s mainstream or the next thing to it.  One dreads to find how what the secret culture does.  Actually doing extreme things is powerful and must be a component of PTSD.

3.  RITUAL PSYCHODRAMA

Spectatoring, analyzing, discussing appears to be part of the pleasure and the culture of leathersexuality.  This interests psychotherapists, this turning out of unconscious pockets.  One of the most seductive of experiences is going over a horizon into a new realization.  Maybe just as strong is getting someone else to understand something you’ve had to keep hidden or didn’t know was even possible to share.  Surviving an ordeal, a shipwreck, a massacre -- even one planned and scripted -- can also change consciousness.

All of this can go very wrong.  People die.  The culture overrides, corrupts and interferes.  A “tribe” can be independent and cohesive only up to a point.

4.  BONDAGE AND INNER PEACE

All these chapters quote other work, mostly mainstream and professional.  At least half are books I’ve read and used in the study of theology or anthropology or psychology.  This chapter is specifically concerned with the management of consciousness, the “connectome” as I am fond of calling it.  The actual states of mind include everything from hypnotism, to trance, to dissociation, to dream, to hallucination to whatever it is that yogis can achieve with meditation and physical disciplines such as posture or whirling.  

The chapter does not talk about external drugs. Some mind alterations practiced by traditional native peoples, like starvation, exposure. staring at the sun, are not discussed.  Nor is anything as drastic as a Plains Indian Sun Lodge that includes the ordeal of flesh bits being torn away, but sweat lodges are noted here, perhaps a bit too easily considering the recent deaths.  (It’s important to remember that Mains was writing in the Eighties, thirty years ago.)

The idea of ritual (Victor Turner and Von Gennep) is to somehow jar people out of their ordinary consciousness; while they are in a liminal fluid state introduce new ideas and evidence; then return them to a new ordinary consciousness with new understanding.  This three step process is so obvious it seems dumb, but it is an accepted and effective guide to a rebirth, an access to new energy.  It is used in both “primitive” ceremonies and religious rites.  It can happen to a person without any ritual or intent, just through happenstance.

5.  CELEBRATION OF THE HIDDEN ANIMAL

This is the chapter that discusses drugs, starvation, reward and punishment in terms of physiology and their uses in controlling consciousness.  “Feeling good is addictive and animal as well as human.  And feeling good, although not limited to these, is inexorably tied to basic functions.”  He means excretions (feces and urine) and the emotions connected to them that were installed in the earliest years, therefore at the most basic levels of the kitchen midden of ideas accumulated in the brain.  Enemas are not mentioned, though they are clearly acts of penetration and injection.

6.  SPIRITUAL EUPHORIA

Now it becomes clear that enemas were not in the last chapter because this whole chapter is about “fisting.”  So let’s be even more clear:  fisting can kill you by splitting your gut.  The gut is stretchy but needs a lot of coaxing, greasing, and relaxing.  Those who do this are EXTREMOPHILES.  They take major risks with their own bodies in pursuit of “euphoria.”  They do not do it alone, particularly if they have no expertise.  If it is unwelcome, it is not possible, and is the same as rape -- criminal assault.

I’ll approach this on physiological terms, the way Mains does, but using more recent research.  (“The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine” by Michael Gershon)  The intestines have a kind of sock or second tube around them that is a netting of neurons connected back to the rest of the neural system, including the brain.  Gut muscle is “smooth,” non-striated, so it is managed by the autonomic neural system, which directly controls emotion and response to stress.  It is not voluntary but it can convey sensation.  More than that, it operates with the same chemicals as the brain.  Having a “gut feeling,” a visceral intuition, is not just a metaphor, though in the case of things like clenching fear or stammering stage fright, the message is probably coming TO the gut from the brain, or indirectly through organ secretions, rather than the other way around.  What fisting seems to do is to use these pathways to deeply affect the brain.  It can trigger euphoria, bliss.

Some individuals and cultures call this feeling “spirituality” and consider it access to another realm of being.  Those who feel this should not be discredited.

7.  THE PRISON OF THE FLESH

The next chapter is about how to think about feeling that one has become transcendent, powerful, and not like others.  “The experience of leather is an illusion of mastery.  It pits individual against drives, capacities and gaps.  It questions and breaks down the image of status, fear and guilt.  It does not provide freedom from any of these, but it sets men face to themselves and it gives them an energy to cope with the reality that they may come to see.  Minds cleared, conscious of new tools, and free of some of the burden of superfluous gaps, these men are perhaps better able to cope.”   (He does mean MEN.)

If you read this book as an intro to just another high or a porn (and it would be easy to read the little personal scenario vignettes that way), you’d be missing the whole point.  All this domination/submission, all this top/bottom, turns out to be -- among the truly initiated -- a symbiosis.  It begs the question of how to interact with those outside the magic circle, who go right on politicizing, stigmatizing, and even criminalizing the men inside.  There may be no answer to that question.

8.  LIVING IN THE CLOUDS

Generously, Mains identifies three other communities like “leatherfolk,” not in terms of physical practices but in terms of being tight communities in a hostile larger scene.  One is ancient Greece, one is Celtic witchcraft, and the third is Gnostic Christianity.  They are all “Western.”  The biophysiological threat that has wiped out much of the leather community , including Mains, was African.

Robert Scott Antarctic Expedition

Recent Robert Scott Re-enactment

Mains quotes Robert Scott, the Antarctic explorer who is so admired today that his lethal trek has just been duplicated by a team of extremephiles.  “I do not regret this journey; we took risks, we knew we took them, things have come out against us, therefore we have no cause for complaint.”   Extremophiles do not complain.