It all happens within a benign universe: A fiery orange rests above a deep, alluring blue.
Two movements: one in, the other out. A deep and ponderous blue, and the fiery orange of action, speech, life. The latter rests securely on the former, the former draws energy and life from the latter.
It's how a world gets created.
He's a gay man in his mid-fifties, slightly arthritic, and 20 pounds overweight. He takes Viagra and testosterone shots, is HIV-positive, and for many years assumed he would be dead by now. But Michael Tolliver is very much alive and in a solid relationship with a man 21 years his junior.
He's got more going for him than simply rearranging the vases on the mantle. He's not following the script that consigns fifty-something gay men to the shelf.
Good for him--and for Maupin for telling this partly autobiographical story that replaces the deadening cultural script presently available to middle-aged gay men with one full of life and love. And thank Maupin for illumining other corners of gay life, including the lives of transgendered people and the occasional surprises within the lives of seemingly homophobic parents and relatives.
Maupin has crafted his story with insight, humor, and compassion. He's just the kind of guy you'd enjoy having over for dinner. Chances are he would feel very comfortable with you, too, perhaps especially if you don't fit the enervating scripts of our cultures, whether gay or straight, whether because of circumstance or choice.
A few weeks after finishing The Kite Runner, I still get chills remebering one line: "For you, a thousand times over." It is spoken by the narrator, Amir, to his newly adopted son at the end of the novel. The two of them have just won an Afghan style kite tournament by cutting the string of the rival kite and setting it adrift. "Do you want me to run that kite for you?" Amir asks his son. "Running" a kite means retrieving it as a trophy. The son nods. That's when Amir says these words to his son--"For you, a thousand times over"
When he was a boy, Amir had often heard these words from Hassan, his childhood friend and the son of his father's Hazara servant. Hassan would say them to Amir when performing one or another menial task for him--or when Amir would ask him to run a kite: "For you, a thousand times over." Even despite the two boys' seemingly vast differences of class and race, Hassan's words carried enormous love and loyalty.
But this story is about more than Hassan's devotion to Amir. It is also about Amir's cruel betrayal of Hassan. The guilt from that betrayal haunts Amir--comes to govern his life, really--and is finally purged only at great cost in one explosive scene.
Eventually, Hassan is murdered by Taliban thugs, Amir adopts his son, bringing him home to California where he shows him the same love he himself had received from Hassan. "For you, a thousand times over," Amir says to the boy just before running the kite, then adds:
I ran, a grown man running with swarms of screaming children. But I didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lips.Amir's memories of his childhood friend have taught him how to love. Amir is now the kite runner. This story of redemption makes me want to love more fully as well--the highest praise I can give any book.
I ran.
Over 20 years ago, when AIDS was mowing down friends left and right, I came to St. John's for the first time. I was meeting a friend who had asked me to join him for the funeral of an Episcopal priest whose name I can't remember. At the time, I was a Catholic priest, a Jesuit, and, after several years of parish work in the Northwest, was plugging away at a doctorate in Berkeley. Shortly before my coming to Berkeley, the Vatican had issued another of its searing letters about gays, one that had left me fragmented and weary and wondering where my own life was heading. Finding my way through the red doors of St. John's with my friend, I slumped into the last pew.
To my surprise, that liturgy, with its many stories about this gay priest, gave me a glimmer of hope that my own disparate life could become whole again.
Fast forward several years: I have left the Jesuits and become an Episcopalian, and my partner, Rob, and I have been together five years. A friend, learning we are moving to San Francisco, suggests we check out St. John's.
We did, and we stayed. In time, we were married here. Later, I was received as an Episcopal priest and began assisting here. Later still, perhaps best of all, our son, David, was baptized here.
I remain at St. John's for three reasons.
A gay Jesus freak stalks a secularist, straight, middle-aged man. You can tell right away it ain't gonna work. But as you watch this crash in slow motion, you experience all the textures, shadows, colors, and sounds of a dysfunctionality that is both sexual and religious.
It starts with a tragic accident in the Chilterns where science writer Joe Rose sees a hot-air balloon tossed by the wind; there's a boy trapped in its basket. Joe joins the effort to bring the balloon to safety, as does a young loner, Jed Parry. Quickly obsessed with Joe, Jed mistakes his uncontrolled feelings as a divine calling to bring Joe to God. That destructive, pseudo-religious mission tests the limits of Joe's beloved rationalism, threatens the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drives him to the brink of murder and madness. It's goodbye real love, hello Fatal Attraction--but with a religious twist.
In an appendix, McEwen reflects: "It is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology." He got that right. And these days the pathological forms of both sex and religion are hard to miss. Think of the heart-breaking stories of domestic violence and child abuse. Or the many pseudo- religious "missions" that end up crushing both bodies and spirits--Bush's war in Iraq, for example, or the crusades against gay equality.
But here's the amazing thing: Given the many possible distortions of both sex and religion, most of the time we still manage to get them right. Despite its pathological forms, as San Francisco writer Mark Morford states, sex still "shoots huge gobs of endorphins and raw divine energy" into our ids, raises our kundalini, inspires awareness of the cosmos. It reveals "the interconnectedness of all things from all time in all places everywhere." And despite the many religious nuts running around these days, the genuinely religious missions of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and the slain Jesuits in El Salvador still inspire our own smaller efforts to make the world a little kinder and lovelier.
We don't always get sex and religion right as McEwen so vividly observes. But sometimes we do. And in those moments, we humans are nothing short of magnificent!
In India, Arundhati Roy writes, "Love Laws" define who should be loved, and how, and how much. Defy these laws and you may lose your life; conform to them and you are sure to lose your soul.
These laws take their toll on Ammu, a young mother and divorcee, who returns with her children to her family home. Life there is poisoned by Baby Kochamma, the ubiquitous aunt whose youthful, unrequited love for an Irish priest has left her bitter, overweight, frightened of the world, and glued to the TV. Baby Kochamma has, by plight of circumstances, conformed to the Love Laws, and lost her soul.
By contrast, Ammu falls in love with Velutha, a gorgeous carpenter employed by the family business. The relationship is sensuous and powerful, but doomed. Velutha is an untouchable; in loving him, Ammu is breaking the Love Laws and publicly disgracing her family.
To preserve the family's reputation, Baby Kochamma trumps up charges that Velutha both raped Ammu and caused the death of a little girl, Baby Kochamma's grand-niece. (Does Baby Kochamma secretly envy Ammu's love for Velutha since her own equally forbidden love for the Irish priest could never bloom?) Velutha is hunted and brutally killed by the police.
Ammu must grieve Velutha's death silently and alone. Broken and embittered, she alienates her own children, is driven from the family home, and, despite desperate efforts and wild dreams of rebuilding a life, dies alone in a hotel. The church refuses to bury her. She is wrapped in a dirty sheet and fed to the incinerator in a crematorium for beggars, derelicts, and police-custody dead. Defying the Love Laws has cost both her and her lover their lives.
The theme is familiar to us gay men. It is echoed in films like Brokeback Mountain, dances like Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, many gay novels, and the lives of untold numbers of gay men like Matthew Shepherd whose love never had the chance to be spent. Like Ammu, many a gay man has grieved the loss of a lover silently and alone.
This story taps into the profound sadness so many of us gay men feel; but it also energizes our resistance to the Love Laws--whether in South Asia or here in the US--that constrict our hearts and crush our spirits.
She looks like an eruption of Kilauea, this dowager with her flames of red hair. "May I tell you something?" she asks politely, then leans forward and whispers: "This is not my hair's natural color."
No one is surprised. Red hair or not, the woman looks her age.
She's Lady Kitty, a zany, delightful character in a Somerset Maugham play. She may also be one of my subpersonalities, or at least I think so.
Because I have my own zany moments when I'm like her, wanting to pass as younger. Like a Jew changing his name to pass as a gentile, or a black lightening her skin to look more white, or a gay guy butching up to appear straight. We so want to resemble the cultural idols--young, gentile, white, straight--we fail to notice our own richness, our own inimitable joy.
Remember the guy who traveled land and sea in search of a treasure, only to find it was in his own home all along, right under his own hearth?
So, dude, why give in to those stupid idols that distract you from your own joy? Why not celebrate the fullness that comes wrapped with your wrinkles, the glories of your ethnic and spiritual heritage, the sensuous color of your skin, the utter fabulous-ness of being gay. Why not savor--and live--every dimension of who you are, as you are, right here, right now?
Why wait another second to unearth the treasure under your own hearth?
This is what I say to myself today, the day before my 57th birthday.
My nose is running from a bad cold, my hands are freezing from the January weather, and now my loins are stirring from ogling the cute thirty-something lad next to me. We are both looking at Anselm Kiefer's "Book with Wings" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Just the right thing to do at a moment like this.
This book of ancient tales and secrets is anchored to earth. Made of lead from the roof of the Cologne Cathedral, it is ashen and slightly rumpled, the survivor of devastations.
But just look at those wings, so powerful and magnificent: 13 feet wide, strong and athletic, ready to ascend effortlessly, gracefully!
This book is like me--with my running nose, cold hands, and hard on; with my own tales and secrets, devastations and dreams--a border creature, made for both earth and sky.
Tuesday morning, 6:05 AM, I'm out the kitchen door for a brisk run. Ooh, it's cold. I lean against a neighbor's front porch to stretch my hamstrings, then my Achilles tendons. (Yep, I'm 56 all right.) I can see my breath as I start chugging. The street lights on Dolores are still on, the sidewalks are empty, the only sound the humming of an occasional car of an early bird heading to work. It's quiet, solitary, brisk, a lovely morning for a run.
I could not do this a year ago. I would huff and puff after only a few steps. Couldn't figure it out. Was I out of shape, or just getting old? Then the doctor mentioned "sick sinus syndrome", bradychardia, only 40 heartbeats per minute and declining. "Stop driving before you pass out behind the wheel. I'm serious." I would need a pacemaker. Gulp. "A pacemaker? No way. At my age? I've always been in good shape. You've mistaken me for someone else."
A few days later, I relented. Now I carry a thousand strangers close to my heart.
They include the doctor and his surgery room retinue with their calm, professional swagger, and the array of cheerful nurses who vigiled throughout my 24 hour hospital visit. And computer programmers who created the software for my new medical device, tech writers who explained how it works; business execs, marketers, investors who kept the manufacturing business running; insurance adjusters, and probably a few lawyers, who argued back and forth about whatever. Then there are the legions who fed all these folks, dusted their workspaces, answered the phones, mailed them their paychecks. And their families: husbands, wives, partners, perhaps little boys and girls waiting for them with big grins at home, or elder sons and daughters cramming for exams and finagling for more money.
Some of them know the significance of their work to people like me. For others, it's just a paycheck. No matter, they're all here with me anyway, just under my left collarbone. And this morning, so perfect for a run, I thank them, each and every one, with every beat of my heart.
