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Birds do it. Bees do it. Only humans take workshops
about it.
"Want
to see a perfect male body?" Stan Dale asks the sixty-odd
participants in his
"Sex, Love, and Intimacy" workshop. Sixty
heads scan the room. An equal number of men and women -- most
of them naked or nearly
so -- sit, lie, or sprawl on the carpeted floor of a cozy
wood-paneled resort lodge in
northern California, wondering which specimen of virile
pulchritude the teacher will anoint. Could he be thinking of
the curly-haired surfer from Santa Cruz? The long-haired,
multiply-tattooed, blissed-out hippie
child?
"Here
it is!" Dale struggles out of his seat and stands in
front of the room with
his arms outstretched. He does a slow spin so everyone can
take a good look at his
pale, round, 63-year-old body. His beard is gray, and so is
what's left of his hair. He has
watery blue eyes behind thick bifocals. His teeny
weenie practically disappears underneath the flabby belly that
hangs down from his hips.
Anne
Watts, Dale's co-teacher for the weekend workshop, beams up at
him from the next chair.
Big bright eyes, big smile, big gleaming teeth -- she reminds
me of some Disney cartoon animal, maybe a goldfish. She's got
little hands and little
feet, and in height she's tiny, not more than 5-foot-3. But
her breasts are huge, her thighs
are immense, her buttocks positively elephantine.
Okay,
I'll admit it. At the beginning of the workshop, I take one
look at these two, and
here's what goes on in my mind: "Colonel Sanders and Miss
Piggy are going to teach me
about sex, love, and intimacy? I don't think so."
Yet
at the end of the weekend, I walk away convinced that she's
The Goddess and he is
Love Personified.
Of
course, by then I've had a few adventures of my own. I've
inspected four different
vaginas. I've definitively established where the clitoris is
located -- for a 38-year-old
homo, better late than never. I've spent the night
with a married couple. And I've made friends with a 350-pound
woman in a wheelchair.
Not
bad for a weekend's work, n'est-ce pas?
Birds
do it. Bees do it. Only humans take workshops to find out if
they're doing it right.
That's at least partly why 30,000 people have taken some
version of Stan Dale's
"Sex, Love, and Intimacy" workshop since he first
started doing it in 1968. Back
then, Dale was a Chicago DJ ("Stan the All Night
Record Man") and talk-radio personality dabbling in
transactional analysis.
Chalk talks in hotel conference rooms led to weekends in
private homes where the
clothes could come off. But the workshop really took root when
Dale moved to California, Land
of the Hot Tub, with his wife Helen and their four
sons in 1974. For the last 14 years, Dale's Human Awareness
Institute has presented
its workshops at Harbin Hot Springs, a 1100-acre
clothing-optional sanctuary
two and a half hours north of San Francisco. This year the
staff of HAI --
pronounced "Hai," like the Japanese word for yes and
the Hebrew word for life
-- will put on 27 workshops at Harbin and another 20 or so in
Los Angeles, Michigan,
New England, Australia, and Japan.
The
workshop draws an audience almost entirely through word-of-
mouth, which is
how I learned about it. Over a long catching-up-on- our-lives
dinner in San Francisco,
I regaled my hard-boiled writer friend Sandra with tales of
hanging out with Robert Bly and
the Radical Faeries, my yoga meditation retreats
and my all-male trainings in tantric sex. She surprised me by
confessing her own "shvindoo"
escapades, including this nude workshop for men and
women exploring the overlap between sex and spirituality. My
friend Chuck, a flight
attendant and former Mormon missionary, confirmed the
spiritual bent of the
Stan Dale workshop and recommended it highly, though being a
diehard cocksucker like
myself, he added, "After about six hours, I wanted the
women to put their
clothes back on."
Trekking
through men's gatherings and communing with seekers for the
last few years, I've noticed the
same questions popping up again and again: what
does it mean to be a man? how do I find purpose in my life?
how can I make peace with
my spiritual yearnings if organized religion makes me want to
hurl? I've also noticed that
sooner or later all these roads lead to sex. Sex as
a source of power, of pleasure, of divine mystery. Yet in the
Wonderful World of
Workshops -- that all-purpose paradise for baby boomers who
have considered suicide
when cable TV was not enough -- sex is still the last taboo.
Actual
hands-on sex, that is. Of course, you can talk about relationships
'til you're blue in the balls. You can giggle at Dr. Ruth. You
can get into massage and all
kinds of bodywork -- O Feldenkrais, yes! Qi Gong, right
this way. That stuff is as acceptable and ubiquitous as
healing the inner child
and swimming with dolphins. All major credit cards accepted.
But sex work is off the
map, just past where it says "Here be dragons." Why?
You can talk circuitously
about centuries of Judeo-Christian puritanism and capitalist
society's need to control citizens through sex-negative
conditioning, or you can cut to
the chase: AIDS.
A
few brave pioneers have refused to accept AIDS and erotophobia
as insurmountable
obstacles and hung out shingles as sex educators. Betty Dodson
has been teaching women the fine
art of pleasuring themselves for a couple of decades
now. Former pornstar Annie Sprinkle has recently joined the
field with her
"Sluts and Goddesses Workshop." Ex-Jesuit Joseph
Kramer founded the Body Electric
School in Oakland, which offers classes to men in erotic
massage and sexual
healing techniques. But those classes are all segregated by
sex. What intrigued me
most about this Stan Dale person was that, outside of the
radical leathersex
community, his were the first ongoing sex workshops I'd come
across that were coed.
When
I spoke to Dale on the phone, he was quick to reassure me that
the workshop was
"not an orgy." First disappointment. Slap horns on
me and call me satyr, but
as a veteran of the New York gay safe-sex underground and
partner in a 14-year
non-monogamous relationship, I'm always down for getting naked
and sweaty in groups. Willing to
expand my skills, too. Something Sandra told me
suggested this workshop might be an ideal opportunity for a
game fag to acquire some
expertise in eating pussy. Second disappointment. "No
tongues, no lube, no
penetration" would be one of the weekend's unspoken
mantras.
Since
I'd never read anything about Dale or the Human Awareness
Institute, it didn't surprise me
to find him hungry for publicity. After extracting
a promise not to reveal names of participants or specific
exercises, he said, "I
trust that you'll write favorably about the workshop."
"Actually,"
I said, "my interest is in writing honestly about
it."
"If you
write honestly about it, I'm sure you'll write
favorably," he said.
This man is dangerously naive, I
thought.
"SEXS
OK" reads the license plate of the white Subaru that pulls up
to the conference center
in front of me on Friday afternoon. Two smiling roly-poly
people get out. They remind me
of my Midwestern aunts and uncles. I correctly intuit
that this must be Dale and his wife Helen.
"Are
you a hugger?" are his first words to me. Like I'm going
to say no, right? He gets
a perfunctory I'm-friendly-but-I-don't-know-you squeeze from
me. Helen takes my money and
assigns me a numbered plastic coffee mug for the weekend.
I have a couple of hours to kill, so I tour Harbin Hot
Springs, soaking up the
last few rays before the sun disappears over the hill and
thinking very spiritual thoughts
about the callipygian gentlemen climbing in and
out of the hot tubs. I pass the spa's general store, where a
couple of young Deadheads
listen to reggae tapes while selling snacks and New Age books;
on the bulletin board are posted
Polaroids of new residents with names like Cat,
Barnacle, and Dugbunny.
When
I get back to the workshop site, the first order of business
is dinner, which is like
a college mixer. What's your name where ya from howdja hear
about the workshop. It's an attractive group, regular folks in
their thirties, a few men
in their 50s or 60s, one woman with salt-and-pepper hair
and the kind face of an ex-nun.
One mainland Chinese, one Native American, no Negroes.
The $300 fee (for two days and two nights) undoubtedly plays
some part in explaining
who's here. Every second person seems to be named Susan or
Michael.
I
chat with shy Jenny, whom I assume to be a dyke only because
she looks like an even
prettier k.d. lang, and a vivacious, super-Californian couple,
kinky-haired blond Miranda and
swarthy Sam, who teach workshops on racism to kids
in the East Bay. Tatiana, a tall, tan woman with feathers
braided into her hair,
turns out to have taken all six levels of the "Sex, Love,
and Intimacy"
workshop and keeps coming back for more. Only two other queers
I can spot, white-haired
Jay and his baby-faced Israeli lover Rennie. An engaging
young woman named Joanne who can
rival Al Gore for smart talk about sustainable
communities turns out to be an elected official in a chic
north-coast town who, for political reasons, has to keep quiet
about going to pagan ceremonies
and nude workshops.
After
dinner the two facilitators introduce themselves. Stan gives a
precis of his radio career and
the history of the workshop. Anne started out as
a participant in the workshop nine years ago. But in addition
to teacher training, she
has a prestigious background of her own; her grandmother was
the first American woman
to be ordained a Zen priest, and her father was the philosopher
Alan Watts, whose writings brought Zen Buddhism to a wide
American audience. That
must be why she waves her little hands and says "Yay!"
a lot.
Together,
Stan and Anne lay out the ground rules for the weekend. Trust.
Risk. Keep your sense of humor.
Be present. Include yourself; don't isolate. Park
your "comfort zone" at the door. Use the workshop as
a lab to try on new behavior.
Ask for 100% of what you want 100% of the time; be willing to
hear no; negotiate for a
win-win solution. Most of all, Anne emphasizes, "This
workshop is about choice."
Don't do anything you don't want to do.
"You're
here," Stan advises, "to be revered."
Without
further ado, we form a big circle and plunge into the first
exercise of the workshop, making
maximum use of our primary sex organs.
I'm
talking, of course, about our eyes. Once
we're standing so we can see everybody else in the room, the
selection process inevitably
kicks in: who is The One for me? And all the judgments
begin. Ugh, he/she's way too fat. Bag that face. She/he's
never going to look at
me, so don't even bother looking that direction. Some enchanted
evening....
We
form two circles facing each other. We put one hand over our
hearts, then open it to
our partner palm up. Clasp hands, and kiss the other person's
hand, making eye contact -- then
step to the left and begin again with a new partner.
So simple. So courtly. So corny. The most rigid rule-followers
stand at attention, hand
over heart, like they're about to say the pledge of allegiance.
And
yet -- diving into this sea of eyes is like slipping into
another dimension.
Something ancient in there reflects something ancient in you.
You get a glimpse of
stuff that doesn't necessarily show on the outside. Animal
grace. Mountain wildness. Sheer
terror. Mischievousness. Each pair a little different.
"The eyes are the landing strip of the heart," Stan
coaches. I keep thinking
of that dreamy Laurie Anderson song where she keeps repeating,
"Your eyes...it's a
day's work just looking into them." Is this sex?
It's
not too much of an exaggeration to say that this exercise is
the cornerstone of the
workshop. Direct eye contact, especially with strangers, is
always loaded. You look, they
look, you both look away quickly. Even when there's
mutual attraction, it's sometimes hard to tell lust from
hostility. Permission to
look in someone else's eyes, what the Sufis call "the
glance of love," is
definitely the beginning if not of sex then certainly of
intimacy, which Stan Dale
translates as "Into-me-you-see." All weekend long we
do exercises in groups of
two, three, four, and six with different levels of closeness
and touching, but all of them start out from and return to the
eyes, 'til you think
you're going to get dizzy and fall down.
Stan
tells a story about a truckdriver who delivers a huge block of
marble to a sculptor. A week
later he returns to find a magnificent stone angel
in its place. "How did you do that?" asks the
truckdriver. "Easy," says the
sculptor. "All I had to do was brush away the bits and
pieces that weren't the
angel."
As
we move around the circle, Stan urges, "Look for the
angel behind these
eyes." He defines angel as "a messenger of
love" or "a servant of God." A
little trendy, this angel talk, but it doesn't bother me too
much. I'm not that
cynical or I wouldn't be here, would I? But when he strays
farther into New Age
bibble-babble and starts talking about "the Star
Child" in each of us, even
my gag reflex kicks in.
If
the first night's eye-gazing gives us a sneak preview of the
angels in our midst, the
next day when we get naked the room really fills up with
spirits -- angels and demons
both. At the first invitation to strip down, everybody
does except for one woman who bursts into tears and won't drop
a stitch. Cool, babe.
There's plenty of card-carrying nudists and exhibitionists
to make up for the modest. I
don't mind baring my hairy butt. I notice, though,
that by the end of the workshop more and more people have
retrieved some shred of
cover-up, most but not all of them women.
The
atmosphere is innocent and fun. Still, judgments run riot.
Only this time the
critical eye looks inward. If someone's looks makes it hard
for you to relate to
them, chances are you've got issues about your own body. At
this workshop all the
standard forms of self-loathing rear their ugly heads. Danny,
a handsome, bearded folksinger
who everyone can see has already fallen madly in
love with a quiet waif named Kwan-Chi, stands up and confesses
that he's always felt
like his dick was too small. Karen, the quintessential
fat-girl-with-a- nice-face, weeps at her inability to look at
herself in the mirror below
the neck. Before you can say "Get over it,
girlfriend!" the facilitators thrust
upon her a hand mirror and have her practice saying "I
love my belly! I love my
thighs!" in front of the whole room.
Body
hatred -- it's the pink elephant in the corner that you're not
supposed to notice. As if that
very metaphor has occurred to him, Stan Dale suddenly
gets up and walks to the back of the room where Sue-Ellen
sits. This enormous woman
with long brown hair, blue eyes, and a sweet smile has been
parked in her wheelchair,
wearing a loose blue dress, all day long without saying
boo.
"Look
at this woman," he says to the assembly. "This
person is in this body
for a reason. She may not know that reason. You may not
either. But I want you to
come close. Look at her. Touch her."
The
room moves in waves to surround Sue-Ellen, sitting or kneeling
at her feet, standing
behind her, standing in front. There's an awkward sense of
circus sideshow here -- here we
are, staring at the freak. This is not exactly who
you expect to meet at a "Sex, Love, and Intimacy"
workshop. If you're shopping
for a mate or a model of successful sexuality, this is
probably the funhouse
mirror opposite of what you think you're looking for. At the
same time, this feels
like a scene out of some cartoon fable where all the members
of the animal kingdom --
squirrels, rabbits, foxes, deer, owls -- come out of the
woods to gather in worship around The Mother of Us All.
Sue-Ellen
starts bawling. Her sobs grow raw and rattle the room. Then
they subside. "I've never
felt more loved in my life," she says. "And I've
never felt more wounded."
"How can we give you what
you want?" Stan asks.
"This
is it for now," she says. She composes herself and says,
"I've had a lot of
near-death experiences, and I know that the only thing that
matters is what's inside,
under the surface. And I have a lot of rage at the media for
not even suggesting that you
look below the surface."
"I'd
like to do something," Stan says, "that I do with all
my teachers."
He
gets down on his hands and knees and kisses her feet. That's
when I realize that only a teacher who looks like Stan Dale
could perform this kind
of healing.
Stan
Dale was born in the Bronx and grew up fat and friendless on
23rd Street in Manhattan.
At 16 he played Louis Braille in a radio drama and got hooked.
By the time he was 21, he had
regular gigs as announcer for some of the top-rated series on
the air: The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, Sgt. Preston of
the Yukon. In the course of his
19-year career as a disk jockey in Chicago, by his
account he launched the phenomenon of talk radio when, in
1968, he started putting
callers on the air during his midnight-to-5 shift. Along the
way he earned degrees in
psychology and sociology from Roosevelt University. But none
of his book-learning or
professional back-chat contributed nearly as much to his
training as a sexologist as his apprenticeship in a geisha
house.
As
a 27-year-old PFC stationed in Japan during the Korean War,
Dale spent his free time
exploring the local sex scene like any red-blooded American
male away from home. "There were places in Tokyo that
were called Sex Drugstores.
They were the sexologists of their time, generally older men
and some women," he
recalls one afternoon after the workshop when I visit him at
home in suburban San Carlos.
"I thought I knew everything about sex. I just went
in out of curiosity. You go in and sit down, they give you a
cup of tea and talk to
you. If you have any problems, you talk about them, and they
have these wonderful
erotic toys to play with it -- dildos and vibrators and
potions and aphrodisiacs. I'd
never heard of these things. So I learned a lot.
That's
where I learned more than I dreamed I could know about female
reproduction, male reproduction,
and pleasure. I didn't know about clitorises. This
was the '50s, after all."
Meanwhile,
he and his Army buddies patronized an establishment called
Miyoshi's, "a beautiful
geisha house, not for real geishas but prostitutes, who
by the way had the right to say yes or no. When I went there
with my major, he wanted
this woman to give head. And she screamed and hollered. He
forced her: 'Suck my cock, you
bitch!' Well, she virtually bit it off. She threw
him out of that place and caused a furor. I'm in the next
room, and he says, 'Dale,
let's get the fuck out of here.' I was with this wonderful
woman who was gentle and
kind, so I said, 'Sorry, sir, I'll see you tomorrow.'"
Dale's
speaking voice has that ingratiating radio-announcer's
resonance, and his
personality oozes the milk of human kindness, so it does my
heart good to hear him
talk dirty once in a while. He's not a vulgar man in the
slightest, but I wouldn't
mistake him for a wimp, either. He drops enough hints
from his background ("teenage street gang...Mafia
connections...trained sharpshooter")
to make it clear that he plays sweetness-and-light by choice.
Because
his Army job entailed news reporting for the Armed Forces
Radio network, Dale got
invited to the wrap party for an American film called Joe
Butterfly shot on location in a
first-class geisha house called Hakunkaku. He spent
three hours in intense conversation with an old Japanese man
who turned out to be the
proprietor and who invited the young G.I. to come live in the
house. He stayed seven months
and left a changed man.
"It
was a marvelous turnaround from what I was learning at the Sex
Drugstore and my experience as a
27-year-old American male, knowing it all, fucking
like everybody else fucks," Dale says. "A true
geisha has no sex. You'd
have an audience with them. They were like queens, and you
were there to be treated
like kings, to be revered. They did it with the realm of the
senses. The smells. The colors.
The geisha would perform, would sing, would pour
tea for you, a tea ceremony that would last maybe 45 minutes.
She would listen to your
conversation. Might not understand your language but was
trained from the age of 5 to
understand the intonations.
"The
geishas would say, 'Look. Look. What do you see?' They'd make
me do
this
for what seemed like hours. Suddenly I'd see something, and
she'd say,
'What
do you see?' I guess my eyes were darting all over the place
because I'm
an
American and we're always in a hurry. This was about slowing
down. They
gave
me this stone just to be with for hours, to get its pure
essence. At
first
I thought it was crazy. But as you sit there and meditate with
the
stone,
something magical happens. Everything comes alive because
you're
focusing.
You're blocking out everything else. I learned to have a
thousand
times
more fun and more body orgasms in the realm of the
senses."
He
returned to Chicago burning to open a geisha house but
"there wasn't
anything
to make it from." It took him ten years to build enough
momentum to
do
his first sex workshop. Even that was a two-day conference on
transactional
analysis
held in a hotel function room, with a mini-lecture on
mechanics.
"People
would laugh. I'd pull out the blackboard and draw stick
figures:
'Penis
A goes into Vagina B. This is where the clitoris is.'"
For a while, the
Stan
Dale Sex Workshop was a spinoff of the Sex Drugstore in Tokyo:
Get to
Know
Your Sex Toys. "The next step was showing movies from the
Institute for
the
Advanced Study of Sexuality. People would talk about their sex
lives, and
we'd
answer questions. The next one after that was in a private
house, where I
had
the balls to say, 'It would be best if we could do this in the
nude.'"
At
the time Dale was a long-haired hippie. He'd covered the 1968
Democratic
convention in Chicago and lost his radio job for describing it
as
"a
police riot." He knew firsthand how fiercely the battle
lines were drawn
between
the mainstream and the counterculture, so naturally he had
heebie-
jeebies
about the legal ramifications of a butt-naked sex workshop.
But he was
lucky.
The closest he got to trouble was lecturing to 250 Parents
Without
Partners.
"I said to them, 'If you're hung up on the word fuck,
chances are
it's
fucking up your fucking.' It was supposed to get a laugh. This
woman
bolts
out of her chair and says, 'If there was a man in the
audience, he'd
punch
you in the mouth and throw you out for using language like
that in front
of
us ladies.' And six or seven other women stood up to say,
'Yeah, I didn't
come
here to hear that kind of filth.' From the back of the room,
this guy
shouts,
'Shut up, ya bitch. Let him talk.' Pretty soon they're shoving
chairs
out
of the way, and they're ready to come to blows. I go, 'Whoa!
What have I
created?'"
Ultimately,
what Dale created was his own version of sex education for
adults.
Vibrators 101. Intro to the Kama Sutra. Advanced Sensuality.
Rub the
aureole
of the breast. Can you say "fellatio"? When Dale
moved to California
and
started teaching in resort centers where people could stay
overnight, the
workshop
moved away from the stiff, clinical, oh-so-adult tone and took
on
more
playful elements of summer camp, albeit with explicit lessons
in anatomy
and
safe sex. Over the years it has continue to evolve -- or
rather, de-
evolve.
By now it's practically a sex kindergarten.
It's
partly the morning warmups ("Do the hokey-pokey!"),
partly the
gung-ho
attitude of the interns (they walk around during breaks
tinkling bells
and
saying "Five minutes to workshop!"), and partly the
saccharine-tinged
language
of the teachers that makes us all feel a little bit like
five-year-
olds.
When the room gets chatty during an exercise, Stan or Anne
will say,
"Pass
the shush, please," which signals everyone to go "Sssshhh"
until silence
returns.
In other words, "Pass the shush" is a kinder,
gentler New Age way of
saying
"Shut the fuck up."
All
this kid stuff gets a little icky for my taste. What hath John
Bradshaw
wrought? I guess that's my Punishing Parent talking, though.
My Wise
Child
speaks up and says, "Can you give me a tiny little break
here? Do you
have
to be so serious all the time? Don't you ever get tired of
being so
sophisticated,
so knowing and ironic? I don't even know what those words mean
and
they bore me to tears. Can't we just play?" Maybe he's
right. Maybe I'm
being
a jaded New Yorker, overly accustomed to the Robin Byrd show
and
watching
aspiring Jeff Strykers get their buttholes shaved on cable TV.
Maybe
I'm
just anxious because I don't know the same nursery rhymes as
everybody
else.
Okay, little guy, this one's for you: "Do your boobs hang
low, do they
wobble
to and fro?/Can you tie 'em in a knot, can you tie 'em in a
bow?/Can
you
throw 'em over your shoulder like a continental soldier?/Do
your boobs
hang
low?"
The
workshop has evolved in other ways, too. "What we did was
always
reverential,"
Dale explains. "But early on it was more sexually
oriented, more
tinged
with instructing people on what could pleasure them. As I
became more
aware,
I learned that sex has very little to do with genitals. It
became more
and
more sensual. I think what became apparent to me is that true
sex is some
sort
of vehicle to the spirit. There was a spiritual evolution
happening
alongside
the sexual revolution. People were looking for something more.
"I
was so opposed to the concept of God," he admits,
probably thinking
of
his first wife, a born-again Christian fanatic. "Even
saying the word God,
I
choked. So the concept of anything spiritual eluded me. Then I
kept watching
people
in the workshop, looking in each other's eyes and stroking the
face,
and
tears would come. What was that? The more I observed, the more
it became
apparent
that we human beings are more than our bodies. We are energy.
We are
angels,
messengers of love. How do we know? The clinical mind looking
for
spirit
can't find it under a microscope. It's like the three blind
men at the
hind
end of an elephant trying to figure it out. But you can find
it in
feeling.
That's why I thank the heavens for the geishas. I was locked
up like
a
typical 27-year-old soldier, and they opened up my feelings
for me."
Halfway
through the workshop, and I am in pain. I came here as a
journalist,
to
watch and take notes. I came here as a sex expert, a sacred
slut, an erotic
know-it-all
to see how the other half lives. Now all these feelings are
coming
up,
and I don't want to deal with them.
I
like to think of myself as sexually free, frisky,
affectionate. But
outside
of a gay social context, I'm surprised at how locked up I
feel. One of
the
most impressive teachings Dale's workshop offers has to do
with getting
over
homophobia. You do all these touchy-feely exercises with the
other gender
and
then you do them with the same gender. The facilitators make
it very
clear,
"We're not here to change anybody's orientation."
What they're after is
increased
awareness; for men to understand women's experience, for
instance,
they
should know what it feels like to touch whiskers and muscles.
Dale
himself
advocates abolishing "gay" and "straight"
in favor of "naturosexual,"
or
naturally sexual. "I'm your actual naturosexual," he
confides to me during
our
interview. "I love sucking cock as well as I love sucking
pussy. To me
they're
both just delicious."
In
my head, I'm going, "This'll be great for those straight
guys to get
over
their hang-ups." But here I am sitting face-to-face with
this sweet,
mustachioed
Southerner named Jess, and I can't believe how uptight I am
about
touching
him. I feel like the whole time he's sending out signals:
Don't touch
my
cock don't touch my cock don't touch my cock. Everybody here
knows I'm
queer,
and that just raises the stakes. A gay man touching a straight
man
lives
with this fear: "He's not going to like this, and he'll
punch me out." A
straight
man touching a gay man lives with this fear: "I'm going
to like this,
and
then I'll be a fag and have to leave with rings through my
nipples."
I
realize that I've built picket fences marked "Don't
Touch" around all
the
men in the room -- partly because I'm a horny bastard, I do
want to dive
onto
their dicks, and I'm ashamed of my capacity for
compulsiveness. I also
notice
that I've drawn similar "Hands Off" signs around the
women. I'm totally
aware
that women are physically invaded by guys all the time, and I
don't want
to
add one iota to that legacy. So here I sit all by myself,
pretending to be
carefree,
while inside I'm screaming for contact. Why does this feel so
familiar?
Some family drama is replaying itself. When did my parents
ever
touch
my face with affection? When did I touch theirs? When I review
the
history
of touch in our household, 99% of it is punishment. No wonder
I'm so
love-starved
and locked-up at the same time.
I
guess my angel consults with the other angels in the room,
because at
bedtime
Miranda and Sam invite me to share their sleeping bag. We
snuggle all
night,
my face buried in her golden curls, his hairy hand on my hip.
In the
morning
we fool around. His fist surrounds my hard cock while she
holds his
throbbing
rod. Three tongues meet. The teachers have recommended that we
abstain
from sex during the workshop. We get a secret thrill at
breaking the
rules.
Is this sex? For me it's a sweet fantasy of cuddling with sexy
daddy
and
undemanding mommy. It's very healing.
It's
a function of how psychologically safe the workshop is that
all
these
deep-rooted feelings float to the surface. I'm hardly the only
one it
happens
to. Clearly, many women have some history of abuse and come to
the
workshop
hoping to work through their mistrust of men. One woman
exorcises a
startling
amount of animal rage at the doctors who performed a
succession of
unnecessarily
invasive surgical tests, telling her all the while, "This
won't
hurt."
A very young, tall and thin redhead named Sylvia tells about
her father
raping
her when she was 4. Just the memory makes her tremble and
weep.
Stan
Dale gets out of his chair and stands in front of her.
"As
a father," he says, "I'd like to apologize for what
your father did
to
you."
This
statement sends powerful shock waves through the room.
Apparently
it's
extremely healing for women to hear a man say such a thing.
Almost
unbelievable.
When does it ever happen?
Anne
engages Sylvia in a therapeutic dialogue and encourages her to
speak
to Stan as if he were her father. This unleashes a torrent of
emotions.
"I
hate you!" she screams. "You've ruined me forever! I
hope you rot in hell!
I
hated you for going off on your pot trips and not paying
attention to me!"
I'm
moved by this tableau and impressed at Stan's ability to
absorb
Sylvia's
wrath. It takes a very clear channel to let that poison go
through
you
without stinging. But then he's been doing this for many years
and has
been
the target for his share of personal abuse, as I learn over
lunch the
next
day with him and his wife Janet.
Not
his wife Helen. His wife Janet. Did I mention he has two
wives? This
guy
is a real character. Are you keeping track? Lone Ranger, star
DJ, talk-
show
pioneer, American male geisha, sexologist, man-with-two-wives
-- Oprah
Winfrey,
where are you?
Actually,
it's a sweet story. Yes, Helen has been his wife, his partner,
the
mother of his children for 35 years. Then 17 years ago he met
Janet at
another
workshop. Stan and Janet fell in love. Stan didn't stop loving
Helen.
Helen
loved Janet, too. So rather than play out the familiar scene
of man-dumps-wife-for-younger-woman,
they all lived together. Then ten years ago, as
a
gift of love, Helen surrendered her marriage license; a legal
divorce made
it
possible for Janet to have an official status other than
Stan's mistress.
But
spiritually they consider it a three-way marriage.
For
a year or so they did go on all the talk shows, proud of their
unconventional
love. But the hosts asked sleazy questions and the audiences
called
them sinners. Worst of all, workshop enrollment took a dive.
People got
the
idea that "Sex, Love, and Intimacy" was a front for
"swingers,"
proselytizing
for open marriage and free love. So they bowed out of the
freak-show
circuit. But Dale still introduces his two wives at every
workshop, as
living
proof in favor of asking for 100% of what you want 100% of the
time.
Nibbling
bowtie pasta and salad nicoise at a swanky hotel on Twin
Dolphin
Drive, Stan and Janet agree that their workshop would be more
financially
successful without the nudity. And while at the beginning
people
were
titillated by a workshop with "sex" in the title,
now more people are
likely
to be turned off. Times are more prudish. AIDS is a big
factor, and so
is
the hyper-awareness about incest and abuse. It's easy to blame
the sex-
negativity
and body-hatred of fundamentalist Christians. The media is
also a
handy
scapegoat for overwhelming us with soft-core porn to sell us
products
while
making us feel like shit unless we look like Cindy Crawford or
Marky
Mark.
Much harder, more uncomfortable to talk about is the abuse,
self-destruction,
and self-violation that occurred over the last generation in
the
name
of sexual freedom.
"At
the beginning, the workshop attracted hippies, people willing
to
push
the limits," Dale says. "People in their 20s and 30s
are much more
damaged
now by the fallout from the sexual revolution. In the '60s and
'70s
they
talked a big game, but there was no sexual freedom. People
were getting
pregnant,
getting diseases, breaking up marriages. All the horror
stories. The
mattresses
on the floor, women lying there and letting every guy just
come and
fuck
'em in the name of free sex. The heroin addiction -- 'Come on
baby, shoot
up.
Have some coke.' At almost every workshop we get people who've
been hurt
by
the 'debauchery' they went through in the name of being
liberated. They
don't
have permission to talk about it except in a protected
environment."
The
workshop ends the same way it began -- a double circle,
connecting hands,
hearts,
and eyes with a kiss. Into-me-you-see. Then there's dinner.
It's way
after
dark. Most people have a long drive back to the city. Still,
the
networking
goes on. This is community building in the '90s.
I
can't resist taking one last soak in the hot tub. We don't
have these
on
the Upper West Side. Poolside is deserted except for a
wheelchair. I join
Sue-Ellen
in the almost-scalding water.
I
feel awkward at first, avoiding the question "How'd you
get so fat?" I
figure
the answer is some out-of-control eating problem or glandular
disorder
best
left to the imagination. Fat people know what you're thinking,
though.
Sue-Ellen
doesn't hesitate to blurt out her story. Yes, she was always a
big
girl,
but then there was the car accident, the year in the hospital,
the
kidney
failure, the misprescribed drugs -- a medical nightmare that
made her
balloon
to 450 pounds. At 350 now, she's practically svelte. She has a
boyfriend
who likes her the way she is. She lives in the country with
her cat.
Solitude
has made her level-headed.
Rather
than being pathetically grateful for the attention she got
this
weekend,
she has her own critique of the workshop. The teachers'
armchair
psychology
betrays the weak side of Stan's background as smooth-talking
radio-shrink.
Their eagerness for instant transformations, she points out,
reduces
the
process of healing to a hand mirror and an affirmation. But
she got what
she
came for, a step out of isolation toward human contact.
A
silhouette on the patio joins us in the pool. It's my Southern
partner
Jess.
For him the workshop's been a roller-coaster. He's pooped but
pensive.
He
brings up the awkwardness of our touching. It wasn't
homophobia, he
explains.
(Not just homophobia, I think.) His mother once said something
that
made
him feel his cock was dirty, so for someone to touch it
brought up buried
shame
he's ready now to discard. His confession surprises me, clears
up a
piece
of the puzzle, and knocks down some of that
straight-guy/queer-guy
barrier.
The
three of us compare notes about the weekend. After a while we
fall
silent.
Sharing the pool is enough. The night seems bright. We look
up. It's a
full
moon. Our eyes meet it. Is this sex?
First
published in Steam Magazine, 1994
For more information on the Human Awareness Institute and its
workshop, see here.
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