Summary: The 30th Annual East Coast Gay Men's RC Workshop
This was a fantastic workshop. A personal breakthrough, really. I kept thinking about those early, clumsy attempts at teaching sexuality that were initiated by my friend, Charlie Kreiner. It's clear, some thirty years later, how they were hamstringed by Charlie's and to some extent - Harvey Jackins' - need for Charlie to remain in the closet so long as he was the ILP for Men. Those early men's workshops (which included heterosexual men) were trailblazing in the sense that they outlined the idea that that men's oppression is largely enforced by homophobia. And, those early demonstrations involving straight-looking, masculine, manly-men crying openly and in the arms of a masculine, manly man like Charlie were powerful contradictions to the prevailing models of RC men sort of plodding along, mostly in it to keep their girlfriends happy.
Charlie laid a great foundation, but, I have to wonder if it was at the expense of his identity as a gay or bisexual man? I ask that because I was pretty close to the situation as someone who knew him since college and my sense is that he was pretty vigilant about preserving a certain mystery about his private life. He never used the term "bisexual" to describe himself or anybody else as far as I can ever recall. In his mind, being completely reemerged as a human being meant being fully capable of loving anybody. But, at the same time, I never heard him take a session on the heartbreak he clearly experienced at the separation from the love of his life who, IMHO, was his college roommate of four years.
I think his circumspectness made him secretive and rigid in his relationships with other cocounselors, including me and I think it eventually led to Harvey removing him as ILP for Men, a cruel example of someone's defensive patterns engineering the very thing they were trying to avoid.
Enter Jeanne d'Arc and David Nijinsky.
Jeanne and David were far from charismatic people. Neither of them had Charlie's academic cool and upper-middle class mien (which is kind of ironic because no one came from a more working class background than Charlie), but, what they did have was a clear sense of where the gay movement was headed at a crucial time in thenation's history (the AIDS crisis) and it was decidedly not toward an accomodationist stance with the prevailing oppressive society.
The result, IMO, is that over the space of the past thirty years, lesbian and gay RCers have put themselves at the center of women's liberation, recovering early sexual memories, raising pornography as an issue of addiction and, in many ways, keeping RC a hospitable place for social justice activists.
I say all this by way of prologue to what, for me, was a culmination of everything I know about cocounseling: That it is, when stripped to its essentials, about reclaiming our ability to achieve closeness and connectedness to other human beings. All of them. The "Eureka!" moment for me came after about two days of hanging out with Israel and the non-PGM young men had arrived. I was restimulated by the latter presence and by what was to me the clear possibility that Israel would be completely assimilated by the other young men.
So, you can imagine my shock and surprise when early Friday morning, Israel sat next to me (actually, leaving his perch on the couch), pulled the back my hand (not the palm) so that my knuckles were just brushing his stomach and while keeping them there, said, "I think I'm beginning to get the hang of this. It's about connectedness; it's about closeness."
That might have happened on Charlie's watch, but, I don't think it would have happened ever so quickly or elegantly as it did on David and Jeanne's.
Charlie laid a great foundation, but, I have to wonder if it was at the expense of his identity as a gay or bisexual man? I ask that because I was pretty close to the situation as someone who knew him since college and my sense is that he was pretty vigilant about preserving a certain mystery about his private life. He never used the term "bisexual" to describe himself or anybody else as far as I can ever recall. In his mind, being completely reemerged as a human being meant being fully capable of loving anybody. But, at the same time, I never heard him take a session on the heartbreak he clearly experienced at the separation from the love of his life who, IMHO, was his college roommate of four years.
I think his circumspectness made him secretive and rigid in his relationships with other cocounselors, including me and I think it eventually led to Harvey removing him as ILP for Men, a cruel example of someone's defensive patterns engineering the very thing they were trying to avoid.
Enter Jeanne d'Arc and David Nijinsky.
Jeanne and David were far from charismatic people. Neither of them had Charlie's academic cool and upper-middle class mien (which is kind of ironic because no one came from a more working class background than Charlie), but, what they did have was a clear sense of where the gay movement was headed at a crucial time in thenation's history (the AIDS crisis) and it was decidedly not toward an accomodationist stance with the prevailing oppressive society.
The result, IMO, is that over the space of the past thirty years, lesbian and gay RCers have put themselves at the center of women's liberation, recovering early sexual memories, raising pornography as an issue of addiction and, in many ways, keeping RC a hospitable place for social justice activists.
I say all this by way of prologue to what, for me, was a culmination of everything I know about cocounseling: That it is, when stripped to its essentials, about reclaiming our ability to achieve closeness and connectedness to other human beings. All of them. The "Eureka!" moment for me came after about two days of hanging out with Israel and the non-PGM young men had arrived. I was restimulated by the latter presence and by what was to me the clear possibility that Israel would be completely assimilated by the other young men.
So, you can imagine my shock and surprise when early Friday morning, Israel sat next to me (actually, leaving his perch on the couch), pulled the back my hand (not the palm) so that my knuckles were just brushing his stomach and while keeping them there, said, "I think I'm beginning to get the hang of this. It's about connectedness; it's about closeness."
That might have happened on Charlie's watch, but, I don't think it would have happened ever so quickly or elegantly as it did on David and Jeanne's.