Sexual Revolution VIII- The Cost of the Closet
Is it not legitimate to point out that a lot of gay people are really fucked up? It is not legitimate, certainly, to say that because someone is gay they MUST be fucked up, but unless they have been raised in a very homo-tolerant environment, the defence mechanisms which are inevitably produced by interacting with the greater society, which is largely homophobic, often create serious difficulties when it comes to the task of forging meaningful relationships. This is a perfectly comprehensible and obvious result of living in a homophobic society, but for some reason, people, (or, more to the point, liberals) are not comfortable accepting this as a basic fact. Fromm focuses a great deal on Freud’s observation that, from the stage at which we realize any kind of self-awareness, we are aware of our dependence on our parents. As we develop as young children, hostility toward the parents generated by contradictory behaviours or the twarting of our youthful desires is, at this early stage at any rate, supressed. Expressing this hostility would be counter-productive. In the case of a homosexual with homophobic parents, (and naturally, in the case of any child whose natural inclinations fly in the face of the values of their parents) this paradigm-setting relationship is particularly exasturbated.
Of course, we also must observe that becoming a functioning human being who has authentic friendships and relationships when you HAVE been raised in an environment hostile to your sexuality (or, to continue to qualify, your creative way of life) is not only a greater achievement, but a far more strengthening one than comparable achievements by straight people.
“Consider the Bond of a cold Climate, how it maketh man a Slave; he must have Shelter and Food with fierce Toil. Yet thereby he becometh strong against the Elements, and his moral Force waxeth, so that he is Master of such Men as live in Lands of Sun where bodily Needs are satisfied without Struggle.”
-Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph
Sexual Revolution I, Sexual Revolution II, Sexual Revolution III, Sexual Revolution IV, Sexual Revolution V, Sexual Revolution VI, Sexual Revolution VII
I’ve often thought of the analogies between homosexuality and magick, particularly in terms of relationships with normal people (if anyone has to ask that snarky and pointlessly rhetorical “but what is normal?” question, do me a favour and swallow a live weasel). There is a certain something about yourself that it is simply best to keep quiet about. I know that, in a perfect world, we “should” be able to “be ourselves” all of the time (although I find that the people who frequently assert this do so because of their tragically inferior social skills) but the simple fact of the matter is that you’re probably better off shutting up and blending in unless you’re a rock star, or an actor, or living among the deluded never-wases who desperately imitate their lifestyles. In the world of adults, we accept the fact that we will have to be able to produce a certain amount of bullshit in order to have the kind of lives that we want to have. This bullshit, in its proper expression, is called civilization. The result of overturning it is absolute chaos and conflict. While I am comfortable with that to a certain degree, unless there is some sense of personal honour informing the people having those conflicts with one another, the result will be barbarism and brutality, not war and vengeance.
There are, Crowley tells us, certain virtues proper to a “Fighting Animal,” which is what the human race is. To deny this would be to contradict all available evidence, and to avoid cultivating those virtues is every bit as harmful to the Man qua Man as binding the feet to produce deformity, castration, or female “circumcision” (properly speaking, the feminine equivalent of castration, which would be a far more appropriate word to use than circumscision). And let there be no mistake: stealth, secrecy, and the ability to pick one’s battles are VITALLY IMPORTANT virtues for any fighting animal.
Ultimately, for a gay person to be “in the closet” is, in a sense, an avoidance of conflict with people in their immediate environment. The perceived consequences of engaging in those kind of conflicts are often modelled upon the behaviour of parents or the environment one is living in when one reaches sexual maturity (usually dominated by life in the public school system). Depending on the individual’s life situation, that may or may not be an accurate assessment. I think it is important to recognize, however, that all “closeting” is not illegitimate. Sometimes the consequences of exposure are, in truth, quite dire. For some people, undergoing those consequences may well be a necessary step on the path of their star. For others, with different Wills and different paths, the closet may be absolutely necessary.
The single determining factor, in my arrogant opinion, is the ability to transfigure the tension created by living a double life into something productive. All too often, drug addiction, alcoholism, or other escapist, self-destructive behaviours are all that this tension produces, but we would do well to take note of the fact that this is the case for virtually every creative drive. Without sand in the oyster, there can be no pearl.
Creativity, of any kind, is necessarily a product of tension, and creative people can easily fall into the trap of running from that tension rather than embracing it and channelling it through transfiguration.
Beginning from the basic tension between being and non-being discussed in the work of John Paul Sarte (that self-indulgent communist louse!), this primary tension created by existence is elaborated by the sex drive itself and the particular form that this impulse takes in the individual because creation implies both being and non-being. Something must first not-be in order to be “created.” In the sense of a person who wears a persona with a great degree of regularity, whether it is a persona of heterosexuality, of the socially accepted religion (diasporic Jews and early Christians certainly experienced this), or of politically revolutionary tendencies, involves themselves with “creating” a character. We all do this. Its how we grow and change as people: by forming an ideal of ourselves as we wish we were and striving to attain that. The problem is that we do this through the process of identification.
We identify with our creations of ourselves in our own mind, and by strengthening those links of identity and manifesting them through our actions and activities (in simple magical terms this would pertain to the correct assumption of a god form, and in complex magical terms, to workings originating in Bhakti yoga). The human mind is particularly comported to this activity, and unless someone has the ability to SELECTIVELY identify with their own “characters” that they create for themselves, they are going to run into serious problems. Their self-identity is likely to evolve into something which is outright hostile to their own essence. I suspect that virtually every homosexual goes through this at some stage in their personal development. I do know a few people who, in spite of the hostile atmosphere they experienced, were always fundamentally comfortable with this part of themselves, from early childhood. These are, however, rare and remarkable cases in most (but not all! socially accepted homosexuality is hardly an unheard of phenomenon) social environments.
This moves the discussion into a very interesting place. If the implication is that there is both a power and a danger behind what we hide and supress, we must ask the question of what is hidden and suppressed in normative society? Certainly not sex, or not on any meaningful level. I would be interested to observe the consequences of mass media’s sexually tolerant image on a sexually repressed environment (small town, deep south kind of thing) but in absence of that experience, I won’t speculate on that idea beyond acknowledging its relevance to the topic at hand. No, I think that the most fundamentally repressed drive in our humanist, compassion-based culture, is the Will to Violence.
There is a strong antigovernment movement in the United States at the moment, but it has a unique character which distinguishes it from virtually every successful antigovernment movement in history, namely, that it staunchly advocates non-violent protest. This makes the whole movement, in my opinion, pretty much impotent. Yes, its true, Ghandi succeeded without using violence. But the Hindus outnumbered the British, had better access to the land’s natural resources than the British, and frankly the Empire was in hot water for a lot of reasons when Ghandi won his so called victory through non-violence. This movement will not accept anyone advocating violence as legitimate. The reasons given are that human life is precious and we can win without fighting. Both of these notions are demonstrably false. Diamonds are precious, because they are rare. Human life is not rare, therefore not precious. If “we can win without fighting,” why is it that corporate interests have continued to expand their empire without interruption or meaningful challenge since the Second World War? No no. Those are not good reasons.
The consequences of violent resistance to the present government are, as we have seen in the few cases in which it has occurred, ultimately catastrophic for the resisters (in both Canada, which, despite its reputation, has seen some very intense government crackdowns on protestors, particularly int he case of aboriginal movements, and the United States). But let us state the matter plainly: non-violent resistance is the only option. Not because human life is precious. Not because we can win without fighting. Because the technological power of Law Enforcement and the Military is so vastly disproportionate to the weapons that the people themselves have that the violent conflict simply cannot be won. Legitimate resistors are forced into the same situation as the closeted homosexual. Required to mouth the position of the humanism while inwardly burning to overcome the obstacles to desire and win their prize, whether that is gaining a lover or destroying of a rival for power, the truly revolutionary among us experience the same difficulties with maintaining a double life in which the persona adopted to deal with normative values is hostile to the essential constitution of the Self. We must not kid ourselves or put on airs of moral superiority: the plutocracy is merely a rival for the power of the True Aristocracy, nothing more, nothing less. Contempt for one’s enemies, as I have so often asserted, is an expression of weakness.
There are a lot of closet Machiavellians among the Christians and Humanists. From the position of moral superiority, a lot of people who claim to ascribe to the philosophies of Crowley or Nietzsche (insincerely, as evidenced by their position of moral superiority) frequently point out the machinations of the lovers of power who have adopted the disguise of compassion with an air of dismissive contempt. This is ridiculous. There are, among these people, the keen, the proud, the royal, the lofty. And they should not be exposed or obstructed by those who foolishly believe that “not being yourself” is “bad and wrong.” If you are GOOD at not being yourself, and you know what to do with the tension created by that, you can become a true magician in the sense of a MAKER of IMAGES which have real power to manifest the Will in the existential realm.
“"the keen:" these are the men whose Will is as a sword sharp and straight, tempered and ground and polished its flawless steel; with a Wrist and an Eye behind it.
"the proud:" these are the men who know themselves to be stars, and bend the knee to none. True pride prevents a man from doing aught unworthy of himself.
"the royal:" these are the men whose nature is kingly, the men who 'can.' They know themselves born rulers, whether their halidom be Art, or Science, or aught else soever.”
-Aleister Crowley, comment on AL III:58
To work under cover of stealth is a time-honoured magical tradition. It does not prevent the keenness of eye and sword. It does not necessarily imply that a person has done something “unworthy of himself.” Such a judgement would be totally dependent on an assessment of the individual’s Will, resources and circumstances. As for people who know themselves to be rulers, why do we speak of them with derision if they are pretending to be compassionate Christians? Perhaps they ARE worthy of derision, but not for THAT reason. If they have a kingly nature, they will not let the fact that they are living a double life impede their pursuit of their true desires. We see example after example of this as people’s secret lives become exposed in the national media, but do we really know how these double lives have affected them psychologically? Our apologetic culture demands a public display of remorse when you are caught in this position, but is that remose genuine? Is the distress fraudulent, as the previous persona was fraudulent? For their sake, I hope so.
A good way to accurately gauge the power of any social group’s sexuality is by the mental health of its homosexuals. By our fruits, ye shall know us. The ability to transfigure the conflict created by a double life might be highly beneficial to homosexuals in the “cold” sexual “climate” described by Crowley in the quotation from Liber Aleph that appears above the cut, but it is not specifically related to homosexuality in and of itself. The problem is that this hostility to violence and conflict in culture not only makes certain political ideologies difficult, but it also encourages us to run from conflicts which, for the homosexual in an intolerant environment, are all around hir. To “run” with drugs, alcohol, or any other form of escapism is, as I have said, all too common.
Of course, we also must observe that becoming a functioning human being who has authentic friendships and relationships when you HAVE been raised in an environment hostile to your sexuality (or, to continue to qualify, your creative way of life) is not only a greater achievement, but a far more strengthening one than comparable achievements by straight people.
“Consider the Bond of a cold Climate, how it maketh man a Slave; he must have Shelter and Food with fierce Toil. Yet thereby he becometh strong against the Elements, and his moral Force waxeth, so that he is Master of such Men as live in Lands of Sun where bodily Needs are satisfied without Struggle.”
-Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph
Sexual Revolution I, Sexual Revolution II, Sexual Revolution III, Sexual Revolution IV, Sexual Revolution V, Sexual Revolution VI, Sexual Revolution VII
I’ve often thought of the analogies between homosexuality and magick, particularly in terms of relationships with normal people (if anyone has to ask that snarky and pointlessly rhetorical “but what is normal?” question, do me a favour and swallow a live weasel). There is a certain something about yourself that it is simply best to keep quiet about. I know that, in a perfect world, we “should” be able to “be ourselves” all of the time (although I find that the people who frequently assert this do so because of their tragically inferior social skills) but the simple fact of the matter is that you’re probably better off shutting up and blending in unless you’re a rock star, or an actor, or living among the deluded never-wases who desperately imitate their lifestyles. In the world of adults, we accept the fact that we will have to be able to produce a certain amount of bullshit in order to have the kind of lives that we want to have. This bullshit, in its proper expression, is called civilization. The result of overturning it is absolute chaos and conflict. While I am comfortable with that to a certain degree, unless there is some sense of personal honour informing the people having those conflicts with one another, the result will be barbarism and brutality, not war and vengeance.
There are, Crowley tells us, certain virtues proper to a “Fighting Animal,” which is what the human race is. To deny this would be to contradict all available evidence, and to avoid cultivating those virtues is every bit as harmful to the Man qua Man as binding the feet to produce deformity, castration, or female “circumcision” (properly speaking, the feminine equivalent of castration, which would be a far more appropriate word to use than circumscision). And let there be no mistake: stealth, secrecy, and the ability to pick one’s battles are VITALLY IMPORTANT virtues for any fighting animal.
Ultimately, for a gay person to be “in the closet” is, in a sense, an avoidance of conflict with people in their immediate environment. The perceived consequences of engaging in those kind of conflicts are often modelled upon the behaviour of parents or the environment one is living in when one reaches sexual maturity (usually dominated by life in the public school system). Depending on the individual’s life situation, that may or may not be an accurate assessment. I think it is important to recognize, however, that all “closeting” is not illegitimate. Sometimes the consequences of exposure are, in truth, quite dire. For some people, undergoing those consequences may well be a necessary step on the path of their star. For others, with different Wills and different paths, the closet may be absolutely necessary.
The single determining factor, in my arrogant opinion, is the ability to transfigure the tension created by living a double life into something productive. All too often, drug addiction, alcoholism, or other escapist, self-destructive behaviours are all that this tension produces, but we would do well to take note of the fact that this is the case for virtually every creative drive. Without sand in the oyster, there can be no pearl.
Creativity, of any kind, is necessarily a product of tension, and creative people can easily fall into the trap of running from that tension rather than embracing it and channelling it through transfiguration.
Beginning from the basic tension between being and non-being discussed in the work of John Paul Sarte (that self-indulgent communist louse!), this primary tension created by existence is elaborated by the sex drive itself and the particular form that this impulse takes in the individual because creation implies both being and non-being. Something must first not-be in order to be “created.” In the sense of a person who wears a persona with a great degree of regularity, whether it is a persona of heterosexuality, of the socially accepted religion (diasporic Jews and early Christians certainly experienced this), or of politically revolutionary tendencies, involves themselves with “creating” a character. We all do this. Its how we grow and change as people: by forming an ideal of ourselves as we wish we were and striving to attain that. The problem is that we do this through the process of identification.
We identify with our creations of ourselves in our own mind, and by strengthening those links of identity and manifesting them through our actions and activities (in simple magical terms this would pertain to the correct assumption of a god form, and in complex magical terms, to workings originating in Bhakti yoga). The human mind is particularly comported to this activity, and unless someone has the ability to SELECTIVELY identify with their own “characters” that they create for themselves, they are going to run into serious problems. Their self-identity is likely to evolve into something which is outright hostile to their own essence. I suspect that virtually every homosexual goes through this at some stage in their personal development. I do know a few people who, in spite of the hostile atmosphere they experienced, were always fundamentally comfortable with this part of themselves, from early childhood. These are, however, rare and remarkable cases in most (but not all! socially accepted homosexuality is hardly an unheard of phenomenon) social environments.
This moves the discussion into a very interesting place. If the implication is that there is both a power and a danger behind what we hide and supress, we must ask the question of what is hidden and suppressed in normative society? Certainly not sex, or not on any meaningful level. I would be interested to observe the consequences of mass media’s sexually tolerant image on a sexually repressed environment (small town, deep south kind of thing) but in absence of that experience, I won’t speculate on that idea beyond acknowledging its relevance to the topic at hand. No, I think that the most fundamentally repressed drive in our humanist, compassion-based culture, is the Will to Violence.
There is a strong antigovernment movement in the United States at the moment, but it has a unique character which distinguishes it from virtually every successful antigovernment movement in history, namely, that it staunchly advocates non-violent protest. This makes the whole movement, in my opinion, pretty much impotent. Yes, its true, Ghandi succeeded without using violence. But the Hindus outnumbered the British, had better access to the land’s natural resources than the British, and frankly the Empire was in hot water for a lot of reasons when Ghandi won his so called victory through non-violence. This movement will not accept anyone advocating violence as legitimate. The reasons given are that human life is precious and we can win without fighting. Both of these notions are demonstrably false. Diamonds are precious, because they are rare. Human life is not rare, therefore not precious. If “we can win without fighting,” why is it that corporate interests have continued to expand their empire without interruption or meaningful challenge since the Second World War? No no. Those are not good reasons.
The consequences of violent resistance to the present government are, as we have seen in the few cases in which it has occurred, ultimately catastrophic for the resisters (in both Canada, which, despite its reputation, has seen some very intense government crackdowns on protestors, particularly int he case of aboriginal movements, and the United States). But let us state the matter plainly: non-violent resistance is the only option. Not because human life is precious. Not because we can win without fighting. Because the technological power of Law Enforcement and the Military is so vastly disproportionate to the weapons that the people themselves have that the violent conflict simply cannot be won. Legitimate resistors are forced into the same situation as the closeted homosexual. Required to mouth the position of the humanism while inwardly burning to overcome the obstacles to desire and win their prize, whether that is gaining a lover or destroying of a rival for power, the truly revolutionary among us experience the same difficulties with maintaining a double life in which the persona adopted to deal with normative values is hostile to the essential constitution of the Self. We must not kid ourselves or put on airs of moral superiority: the plutocracy is merely a rival for the power of the True Aristocracy, nothing more, nothing less. Contempt for one’s enemies, as I have so often asserted, is an expression of weakness.
There are a lot of closet Machiavellians among the Christians and Humanists. From the position of moral superiority, a lot of people who claim to ascribe to the philosophies of Crowley or Nietzsche (insincerely, as evidenced by their position of moral superiority) frequently point out the machinations of the lovers of power who have adopted the disguise of compassion with an air of dismissive contempt. This is ridiculous. There are, among these people, the keen, the proud, the royal, the lofty. And they should not be exposed or obstructed by those who foolishly believe that “not being yourself” is “bad and wrong.” If you are GOOD at not being yourself, and you know what to do with the tension created by that, you can become a true magician in the sense of a MAKER of IMAGES which have real power to manifest the Will in the existential realm.
“"the keen:" these are the men whose Will is as a sword sharp and straight, tempered and ground and polished its flawless steel; with a Wrist and an Eye behind it.
"the proud:" these are the men who know themselves to be stars, and bend the knee to none. True pride prevents a man from doing aught unworthy of himself.
"the royal:" these are the men whose nature is kingly, the men who 'can.' They know themselves born rulers, whether their halidom be Art, or Science, or aught else soever.”
-Aleister Crowley, comment on AL III:58
To work under cover of stealth is a time-honoured magical tradition. It does not prevent the keenness of eye and sword. It does not necessarily imply that a person has done something “unworthy of himself.” Such a judgement would be totally dependent on an assessment of the individual’s Will, resources and circumstances. As for people who know themselves to be rulers, why do we speak of them with derision if they are pretending to be compassionate Christians? Perhaps they ARE worthy of derision, but not for THAT reason. If they have a kingly nature, they will not let the fact that they are living a double life impede their pursuit of their true desires. We see example after example of this as people’s secret lives become exposed in the national media, but do we really know how these double lives have affected them psychologically? Our apologetic culture demands a public display of remorse when you are caught in this position, but is that remose genuine? Is the distress fraudulent, as the previous persona was fraudulent? For their sake, I hope so.
A good way to accurately gauge the power of any social group’s sexuality is by the mental health of its homosexuals. By our fruits, ye shall know us. The ability to transfigure the conflict created by a double life might be highly beneficial to homosexuals in the “cold” sexual “climate” described by Crowley in the quotation from Liber Aleph that appears above the cut, but it is not specifically related to homosexuality in and of itself. The problem is that this hostility to violence and conflict in culture not only makes certain political ideologies difficult, but it also encourages us to run from conflicts which, for the homosexual in an intolerant environment, are all around hir. To “run” with drugs, alcohol, or any other form of escapism is, as I have said, all too common.