I asked the (really) cute guy who works at the local metaphysical shop out on a date the other evening. This was a bit out of character as I have never in my life asked someone out on a date. I’ve told friends (and let’s be honest, acquaintances too) I was interested in playing, but not actually asked a relative stranger out. Still, he’d been real flirtatious and neither Fire nor I had any doubts about his sexual orientation (stereotyping yes, but we were still right).

Not that I had what you’d call high hopes. To be honest, I am pushing thirty and not in the shape I was in before my injury and the eight years of reduced activity that followed it. I think I do pretty well with what I’ve got, but pretty well isn’t a lot if you’re asking a twenty year old model out (seriously, modeling is his other job).

He said “no” of course. He is seeing someone (20yr old model, I wasn’t shocked to find him taken) and not only are they not poly, he’d never heard of it, which almost certainly means us dating would have been a horrible idea. Introducing a poly-virgin to the idea of being in a secondary relationship seems challenging in a not-so-good way. I absolutely wouldn’t attempt it in someone already involved with someone else.

What was interesting was that although I was real nervous about how to ask him without coming across as an ass, which I think I managed, I wasn’t too worried about being turned down. I used to be terrified about what would happen if I asked someone out and they said “no.” I used to think it would fuck me up, and maybe it would have. Fire certainly thinks that I’ve changed and grown.

Those of you who are involved in the spirit work side of things know that in many ways being a spirit worker sucks serious ass. I’ve had a number of people recently comment that it sucks big time and there ain’t a lot of perks. It’s true. I for one wouldn’t mind if serving my Boss came with free home heating oil and HD Cable.

But I know the person that I was, I know the person that I am now, and I know the path that led from A to B. I know that most people have no problem asking for dates and the like without serving the gods on a personal basis. But without the Work, I don’t know if I ever would have gotten to that point. My physical body is a map of my journey, in tattooing, branding, and scaring primarily. Each representing an important event along the way. I can point to a great many ways in which the Work has changed my mental, emotional and spiritual being as well. To be honest, some of those changes I have ambivalence about.

However, if this path has led me to a place where I can do something I (and others) never imagined I’d be able to do, like ask someone out for a date and be alright when I’m rejected, well I’ll guess I can manage to provide the cable tv on my own.

Our background and upbringing inevitably leaves us with blind-spots in our interactions with other people. I firmly believe that one of the challenges and requirements of adult life is learning to move beyond the assumption that other peoples’ understanding of the world will mirror our own. A great example of where this process began for many of my peers growing up was summer camp. Namely the horrific realization that in different parts of the United States carbonated high-fructose corn syrup bases drinks were referred to in different ways (growing up in the northeast it was “soda”).

Of course that example immediately paints a picture of where I was coming from, at least in my pre-adolescence. While the norm for my fellow upper-middle class peers, spending the summer at camp is certainly not the standard summer for most children in this country.

My own experience as a young adult was rather the reverse of the aforementioned process however. Rather than have my worldview stretched bit by bit as I aged and prepared to leave home, I was often the one doing the stretching. The perfect storm of the onset of severe Tourette Syndrome (as opposed to the minor symptoms I’d likely had for years prior) and my coming out as queer conspired to both brutally shred my ideas of where my life was going and expose me to the worlds of people I would never had encountered otherwise.

Because of the severity of the Tourette symptoms there was never any real chance that I would attend public high school (for the record my family didn’t “agitate” for an alternative placement, my home district rightly made the decision on their own). Both of the alternative high schools I attended were good experiences and I believe that with one exception I received an excellent education. As you might imagine however, none of us at my high school were “typical.”

I had three social groups in my high school years. The first was my small high school, located an hour’s commute from home, which I was driven to and from each day by a district provided car. The second was the young adult GLBT youth support and social group that met once a week in my home town. Until I was old enough to drive myself, my parents dropped me off every Wednesday, even if it meant rearranging their own schedules to do so. The third group was my local synagogue’s youth group, which was made up of kids I’d grown up with since I was in first grade.

One of these things is not like the others. Perhaps foreshadowing my future spiritual work, I didn’t hide any of who I was, with the exception that I didn’t tell the synagogue youth group that I was already identifying as pagan. I was open about my sexuality from the time I came out (at 13) and when people talked about what was going on in school I shared along with them. Once you are at the point of involuntarily screaming out graphic obscenities, further opening up isn’t all that challenging. I distinctly remember once answering someone in the temple youth group’s funny story about something that happened in class with a humorous story from my school about a friend of mine’s ongoing recovery from heroin addiction (really it was pretty funny). I also thought nothing of going to a temple costume fund raiser in drag, where it should be noted that, as with the Tourette, I was perfectly accepted. The rabbi (a woman) gave me lipstick pointers.

As I mentioned, I was often a catalyst for expanding my peers’ sense of the world. I distinctly remember an argument with a childhood friend about prostitution that sums it up. At 17 he was convinced that prostitution was an urban legend and that even if maybe it did happen sometimes it certainly didn’t happen in the city we grew up in. I on the other hand knew guys who had turned tricks after being kicked out of home for being gay. I also knew more than one fellow student in high school who was the victim of domestic or sexual abuse, also things he believed to be urban legends.

All this is on my mind recently because I recently found out that while all this was happening I was developing at least one assumption of how the world worked that until recently I had not been disabused of. Last week I went in for my twice yearly HIV test (clear) and had my eyes opened.

If you were involved in gay culture in the mid 1990’s the thing you know better than anything else is what HIV is, how it’s spread (and not spread), and that it kills you. By the early 90’s there were treatments that kept it from killing us as quickly and there was the dawning understanding that it was possible to live with HIV not just die from it, but it seemed like everyone realized that it wasn’t something to mess around with. My sexual partners over the years have largely backed up this perspective.

As I came into my late 20’s and became involved in the Kink/BDSM/Poly scene, especially as a needle top, I found that with some exceptions, most people seemed to take blood safety just as importantly as I’d been taught back in the GLBT youth group.

My recent newsflash was that GLBT people who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s and kinky people aren’t necessarily representative of mainstream views. I know, no shit. I had just assumed that when it comes to HIV, everyone was on the same page and it isn’t true. As I waited for my test results (it was the rapid oral HIV test) I had a great chat with the director of the local AIDS services organization and one of the outreach people.

Some of their stories chilled me. College students believing that their oral contraceptives protected them from HIV and other STIs was bad. Worse was a recently infected person who was worried that casual touch could infect people that they came into contact with. Call me naive but I thought that as a country we had moved passed touching as an HIV vector before Clinton took office.

And I guess that’s the point I have been driving at. I am naive. I am much more comfortable on the outskirts of society than the mainstream and I think that there is just as much of a tendency towards an attitude of superiority among those on the edges as those in the center. I had believed that HIV awareness and prevention was a universal priority because it was such an important one in my world. I imagine it is much the way many conservatives feel when faced with people who are happy being queer and don’t feel the need of a “cure.”

Our world as it is now has really only been around since the middle of the 19th century. That’s when steam locomotives made inter-regional travel feasible. Before that it was a lot harder for people who use the term “soda” and those who call it “pop” to mingle. In the span of human history that’s not a whole lot of time. It is not longer enough to passively allow our experiences of the world to develop. We need to make a conscious effort to expand our own concept of reality, even, or especially when it’s hard to do.

That all said, for fuck’s sake let’s get rid of abstinence-only sex ed and teach kids how to avoid the gods-damned plague.

A great deal has been going on since I last posted an essay here. I do comment about every other day on my livejournal, but almost all posts are restricted to my friends list. The difference between my livejournal and BarkingShaman is that I tend to post somewhat meaningful essays here, as opposed to the “here’s what’s happening in my life” posts that livejournal gets.

However, there are a few things I would like to talk about today.

First off, my and Galina Krasscova’s article on firearms and pagan spirituality did finally run in NewWitch magazine. They changed the title sadly (from my “Boomsticks and Broomsticks”) but the formatting is beautiful. I know that there is some real fear that the article will generate angry letters and complaints to the editors, but I feel strongly in the subject matter, and I know that there are many other pagans who do too.

There have been some major changes in my life. I had a trial run of an occipital neuro-modulator installed in the back of my head (so yes, I spent five weeks with wires running out of the back of my head to a control box I had to carry/wear at all times). The results were incredible. I experienced about an %80 reduction in my pain levels and could function in ways that I had believed gone forever. Then, although happy to approve the trial to see if I was a candidate for implant surgery, the insurance company rejected me for implant surgery on the grounds that they no longer were interested in paying for the implant for any patients. It’s one of the reasons it’s been so long since I posted here. I sort of lost interest in living for a while after the rejection. We intend to fight it with the insurance commissioner for New Hampshire, but I’m just out of energy.

My home situation is not much better. Summer has decided that while he can’t really leave, because the Boss Lady would seriously fuck him up, he will end/suspend his and my relationship. He’s recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and his sexual identity shifts with his place in his bipolar cycle. He desperately wants to be heterosexual, and some times he can feel that way and others times he can’t.

Since my Prop-8 posting I have had little to say about the current state of the world (since the neuromodulator came out I haven’t been getting out much) that other bloggers and pundits aren’t saying. Everyone suggested writing about my experiences with the neuro-modulator in detail, but it is far too painful.

But now I’ve got some new things to say. Look for a new post before this Wednesday (1/21/09), and no, as of now I have no intention whatsoever to write about the inaugural.

As an aside, I will be teaching two classes at Dark Odysey WinterFire, one magical class and one sexual techniques class.

I have found my feelings about the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California complex. Note carefully that I have not said “conflicted” because I am not. But they are complex. My relationship is one of the boogy men the right uses against marriage equality. Even more so though, the gay movement falls all over itself to make it clear that relationships like mine aren’t any more welcome in the gay community (note the distinction between the movement and the community) than in the bible belt.

I was living in Massachusetts during the fight for same-sex marriage there and I remember being told by many of my gay friends and acquaintances that I owed it to my brethren to go back into the closet about my family because our existence sent the wrong message. The “right” message of course, and by “right” I mean the one on the press releases is that gay people are just like straight ones. They want to meet the right man or woman, settle down, raise a family. This is bullshit. Well the second part is.

I’ll grant that gays are much like straights. However, I reject the notion that all straight people want the wife/kids/minivan scenario. The difference between queer folk and straight folk has been that in rejecting society’s expectations that we be heterosexual we’ve also gained the freedom to reject other of society’s expectations for who we should be, from the nature of our relationships to defying gender role expectations and a host of other individual choices (my grandfather wanted me to consider business school, I wonder if I’d have been so comfortable disappointing him if my queerness had paved Disappointment Road already).

This narrowing of what it means to be queer has been by no means limited to poly folk. Drag queens, flamers, butch dykes and other “stereotypical” queers have found the movement shrink out from under them under the banner of gaining wider societal acceptance.

I’ve seen the same thing happen in the Tourette Syndrome world. Just as the gay community wants the rest of the world to know that being gay doesn’t mean that you swish your hips when you walk, there is a constant message from the TS world that having Tourette doesn’t mean that you have coprolalia (swearing tics). Just as gays I knew told me that I shouldn’t be open about Fire, Summer and my life, I recently spoke to the mother of a child with TS who stopped going to parent support group meetings because the other parents were so bothered by the fact that her child had coprolalia. She said to me (paraphrasing) “the Tourette Association spends so much time telling everyone, especially parents, that coprolalia is so rare, and that it’s not the defining feature of the condition that I feel like there is no support for me or my son. I feel like they’d rather we just keep our mouths shut!”

When I was in high school a lot of the literature for gay youth emphasized that gay kids were “ordinary” kids. That most of them didn’t swish or lisp or like musical theater. The problem was that if a kid did express themselves in that way (and I was literally swishing when I was five, although I later forced myself not to) they can be left feeling like they don’t even belong with the gays. I don’t know if that has changed much or not in the time since, although I will applaud Alex Sanchez’s Rainbow Boys young adult series for featuring a variety of kinds of gay kids.

Don’t even get me started on the way that the gay and lesbian movement and to a lesser extent the gay and lesbian community threw transgendered people under the bus during last year’s fight for federal anti-discrimination protection. I’ll get to that at some point in the future. When I can think about it without wanting to put my fist through my computer screen. Be prepared to wait.

All of this said however, Prop 8 hurt. Leaving aside for a moment all the individuals wounded personally by it’s passing, Proposition 8 sends a terrible message. It says that the people of one of the most liberal states in the land don’t believe in equal rights for queers. Worst of all, it steals away hope from people all over. When push comes to shove, California is still perceived as one of the better places is this country to be gay. If California can overrule same-sex marriage why should anyone fight for the right to live their lives in a way that %51 of people might not like.

Same-sex marriage rights can never be my victory. But the passage of Prop. 8 and the other anti-gay ballot measures on Nov. 4th certainly felt like my defeat.

It is very interesting to me what makes (or doesn’t make) people squeamish. For lack of anything better on television this evening I found myself watching “Machines of Malice- Going Medieval” on the Discovery Channel. I don’t think it takes a great leap to figure out that the program dealt with the subject of torture devices. They were dealing with the common and mediapathic ones such as finger and skull crushers, the rack, and the pear of anguish. For each device an engineer tested a reproduction to demonstrate its effectiveness (or lack thereof), often with a neurobiologist to explain what physiologically results it would have (frankly I found her redundant in the case of the skull crusher).

Interestingly, the pear of anguish is featured in almost every History/Discovery Channel documentary on torture devices even though there is skepticism as to whether it had every actually been used (this particular show concluded that it probably couldn’t have been). Despite this, it is the pear of anguish and the Discovery Channel’s handling of its segment that sparked this post.

The pear of anguish, aside from having a nifty name, is a torture device that you may have seen under a more mundane nomenclature. In many ways it is remarkable similar to a modern speculum, although in some ways it is more like an anal rather than vaginal one. The device consists of several arms that fit together to form a narrow elongated form. When a screw at the back is turned the arms spread apart to form a conical shape. Depending on the victim’s supposed crime the device could be placed in a variety of orifices.

Having already demonstrated how the finger crusher would work on an uncooked chicken bone (“you can seen how the blood and marrow are forced out as the bone breaks, if this was a finger it would be rendered completely useless”) this point is where the Discovery Channel shows its frankly bizarre squeamish point.

They first explain that the pear of anguish would be used on blasphemers by inserting it into the mouth and expanding it until the jaw dislocated or broke. They have a CGI animated graphic to explain this for people who truly lack any imagination at all. As with the other devices both before and after on the show the narrator is a bit more enthusiastic than is strictly necessary.

Then homosexuality, which one of the people on the show (perhaps an anthropologist, I don’t remember) awkwardly explains “was looked on really badly back then.” You probably don’t need me to tell you that there is no CGI animation for how the pear was used on suspected queers. Here though is the phrase that inspired this whole post: they go on to explain that “for the crime of homosexuality, the pear of anguish was inserted into the relevant orifice and then expanded.” That’s it, homosexuality portion over.

Lastly we have adulterers who they explain in almost too graphic detail (still no CGI) would have the pear inserted vaginally (and yes they use the word “vagina”) and expanded “until the delicate mucosa tissue passes its breaking point and tears apart.”

This is the part that is really bizarre to me. The Discovery Channel feels comfortable saying “vagina” on this program and describing in somewhat horrific detail how the pear of anguish would destroy one, but can’t use the term “anus” or “rectum?”

This could be a regulator issue. Perhaps “anus” and “rectum” score higher on the questionable content scale that determines a show’s rating than “vagina” does. I can’t see why this would be, but I don’t find it all that implausible.

That said, I found the phrase “the relevant orifice” to be very dismissive. As in fact was the entire mention of torturing gays for being gay. This may not be reflective of a bias against gays. In fact if I had to guess I’d imagine that there is more than one person on the production crew whose “relevant orifice” would have been endangered back when the pear of anguish was supposedly used.

Perhaps what is more interesting than the use of the term “relevant orifice” is that there was little attempt to dismiss the use of the pear on adulterers or blasphemers. It’s as if by being dismissive the producers of the show are trying to reassure us that they don’t endorse the historic view of homosexuality as a crime. Blasphemy and adultery however, are still fair game.