Musings, Rants and Ideas

...everyone's entitled to my opinion.

Index

The Bear Manifesto and the schism from the Church of Disco

Coming Out Birthday Ritual

Virtual Backrub

Unkindness of Strangers

Book Review: Between The Cracks

Why do I call him The Other Half?

Barbershop Memories

This was originally written as a response to a comment on the Bears Mailing List when the Topics of the Month were: should women allowed at, smoking/nonsmoking at, and people who wish that they hadn't come to bear events, and people who don't know where to find bear events

Subject: The bear manifesto and the schism from the Church of Disco

PhilBear wrote:
=As I recall, there is no such thing as the bear community (as defined by a specific location, list of members, specific creation date, etc). In year yyyy, a group of large furry men did not get together around a table and decide that they were going to seperate from the rest of society forming a new group which was to be know as Bears which would be open and accepting of all people of nearly all things, everyone would love and accept each other, so forth and so on.=

My smartass reply follows...

Read your Bear History, Phil.

Bears were the hidden cult in ancient times. Adherents knew each other by their hairy appearance, untoward erections and the code word "Woof!" Upon identifying another, the early bears would hug and grope each other. After sharing the hunt, the prey, and the feast, the adherents retired to a cave for secret worship.

Ruled from afar by the distant bear pontiff, controls weakened on the indivdual bear caves and their acolytes...cubs, otters, wolves and weasels. The weasel sect was all but obliterated in the Bear Crusades to the free the Hairy Land from the control of the Fashion Turks. Winning over the Turks (a very hairy race) to the Bearish point of view was not hard.

In England, King Henry VIII caused a great schism when he declared his Kingdom separated from the Hairy Roman Church of Ursa. King James I further distanced England from Rome by rewriting the Bible. Forsaking his own testosterone, he sought to emulate his predecessor Elizabeth Vagina.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Martin Luthbear was nailing his complaints to the tavern door, expounding on the evils of bar life and how taverns were full of women and smokers anyway.

By the time of the Puritan exodus to New England bearish men again went into mufti, covering their fur and marrying shrewish tightfaced sex-hating women for cover. Bearish covens sprang up in the woods, and the hairless native Americans, spying these ursine men frolicking in the forest joined their rituals and worship services, having respected the bear gods for eons. Documented in The Scarlet Letter, the harlot's boy-toy Dimmesdale, wracked with guilt for leaving his true religion for cold Protestantism, shaved the corresponding letter "B" into the hair of his chest.

The move Westward was a search for haven for the bears, open spaces, big sky, food for the taking as you needed it. Cities kept following the pioneer bears, and the bears kept moving westward. It wasn't until the bears were stopped by the Mighty Ocean Pacific and the city caught up to them that the bearish faithful had to once again don clothes and shoes and bathe regularly.

California turned to Lost Angeles and the bears inched northward up the coast to the San Francisco bay. The insidious cult of gym/disco/twinks caused to be built the landmark Churches of the Never-Ending Disco. Their sacraments of poppers and beer, along with their high-decibel hymns endlessly repeating drove the bearish faithful to suddenly throw off the chains of oppression.

In a Disco Cathedral in San Francisco in 1972, a group of pissed off hairy leathermen caused a riot, throwing anyone out the door who was wearing stacked heel sandals, high-waisted or designer blue jeans, rayon scenic shirts, or possessing whistles or large gold lamé fans. The massed disco bunnies were held at bay without much physical resistance but a great deal of complaining. Thus, with the riots at the Stone Cave Bar, the modern bear movement was ushered in.

The rapid growth and suspicious nature of bears was compounded by the fact that many of the shaven twinks that they had recently rebelled against now got a little older and started growing hair on their (eeeeee-yewwww!) bodies.

Taking a lesson from the hard-fought victories of the Bear Activists, the former disco twinks started organizing circles of self-admiration societies. Some of the less committed ones of the bearish faithful became intertwined in the social cliques and thus these social clubs became sewing circles with incidental hair.

The bearish fundamentalists are still around, still dancing naked in the woods, still hiking, canoeing, camping, fishing. They are not particularly concerned if the flannel is Sears or Ralph Lauren. They are friendly, huggy, and grreat people to know. They are often solitary, sometimes a mated pair, occasionally a threesome. Some travel in larger packs in season; some seldom leave their own caves.

To anyone who feels rejected or neglected or disrespected at an organized bear-aligned event; make an effort and try again. Locate your brothers by banging on this telephone pole...the wires will carry the vibrations around the world, and there are bears you would never otherwise know. The bear cult is worldwide, and bears of all colors, tastes and kinks are included.

Even the whiny bitchy ones who don't smoke, hate women, think that the music is too loud and wish that they hadn't come.

Pardon me now, I must go slap a salmon from the stream. Woof.

Index

This ritual was written for a friend on the Faerie Mailing List who was celebrating a coming-out birthday. This is a powerful focusing ritual.

Coming Out Birthday Ritual

copyright not reserved, distribute to anyone, anytime, free. Use it and enjoy it.

Preparation:

Buy oranges, chocolate, and bottled spring water. A single piece of costume jewelry. Go to a department store, and ask for samples of fragrances you have never smelled before.

Find a local televangelist station that you find annoying. Turn it on and watch it for an hour. The numb feeling is normal.

Go to a closet of your choice. Take a clock radio with a sleep timer. Find a radio station you identify as one that was "adult" music when you were young. Set the timer to one hour. Sit on the floor of the closet and close the door. Comfort is not an issue. Boredom is not an issue. As the numbness wears off the cramped and uncomfortable quarters are more dominant in your perceptions. If there is a little light under the door, your eyes adjust to seeing dimly. The smell is dusty, the floor is hard. Any sound is muffled, so you strain to hear anything, and can only hear the sound of the televangelist outside. You look at the timer's setting and only 15 minutes have passed.

As your senses start to power down, you will find that this has taken you into an altered state. Make a conscious effort to remember how terrified you were to think that anyone might know...the effort you spent in pretending to be someone you were not. This is powerful and may be overwhelming. Remember how this felt.

Meditate and work on how constricting and cramped and uncomfortable and muffled and dim and diminished your life is in the closet. Focus on this. Look at the clock again and think how much time elongates into lengths of meaninglessness.

When the hour is finally over, open the door of the closet and realize that you have to blink at the light. Sounds are louder, and you want nothing more than to shut off the TV. Your legs are stiff, and maybe sore. Your butt tingles as it gets some blood flow going again.

Put your favorite music on (preferably something you will want to sing to) and run a tub of hot water. Squirt some liquid soap in for bubbles. Soak a while and soften up. Use your fingers to explore between your toes, the soles of your feet and places on your body you seldom even think about. Use your hands to massage your calves, feel your thighs and up to your genitals. Feel your balls moving in the scrotum, feel under the scrotum and around your asshole. Up your belly, tits, pits, massage the tension in the back of your neck. Massage the tension you hide in your scalp.

Towel yourself briskly, concentrating on re-acquainting yourself with your body in an intimate way. Become sensual with yourself and the world around you. Put on too much of a new perfume. Shave or comb or brush whatever you need to do, but do it in an unhurried and focused way. Dress in what you feel most comfortable in. Put on the piece of costume jewelry.

Throw the oranges, chocolate and spring water in a backpack and take off. Go to a park, the woods, the back yard. Find some flowers and feel what it is like to be growing in the sun. Find a tree and feel it up close, feel the energy in slow deliberate motion, tapping deep into earth energy and reaching for the sky.

Find a spot of sunshine and sit on the ground. Eat your chocolate and oranges, focus on the tastes and the juiciness of the orange and the smell of the orange oil when you peel it. Smell the chocolate. Hold it in your mouth and let it melt.

Envision yourself as being like the new flowers, and the green grass, new in the spring and reaching toward summer. Spread your ethereal wings like a new butterfly and let them unfurl in the sun and become dry. Radiate your bright colors into the world around you. Smile at the sun and embrace the world.

Back in the Seventies, we said "You are a child of the universe. No less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here."

And I'm glad you're *out* here.

---another addition to the Common Book of Faerie Ritual, an ongoing project of mine... Any contributions of spells or rituals are welcome.

Index

This was written for a friend on the Chub Mailing List.

A Virtual Backrub

I lightly touch your shoulders, and run the tips up to your neck, just feeling the tension and mapping the nerve network underneath. Finding the nerve branches under each ear, up to the temples, spreading my fingers wide to make a cap over the crown of your head. Hold there for a bit, lightly pressuring.

Lean forward a little bit, so I may place my hands flat on your shoulders and move them down your back, around to your sides (oops, sorry, wasn't meant to tickle) and up your sides, until the third joint of my thumb is in either armpit, the fingers reaching forward to the nipple. Hold there for a few seconds.

Now I have the map and can release the tension. The muscle from the area on top of the shoulderblade attaches to the back of the skull. Most of us localize the tension there. I can feel this muscle's rigidity, and using my thumbs and a little deep pressure cause it to begin to relax. Working up to the base of the skull and back down to the upper back, I massage out to the corners of the shoulders, and back to the base of your skull.

Changing to only the fingertips, I move them in small nickel-sized circles on the scalp, moving to over each ear, to the front, to the forehead, and back to the back, then over the top of your head. About 60 seconds of this is enough.

To the base of your neck, on either side of the spine is a long, narrow muscle. It is long and thick, and is responsible for keeping the monkey inside us from dragging its knuckles on the ground. ;^)

Starting at the neck, I run the base of my thumb on each side in a downward motion, with gentle pressure down the length of this muscle. Repeating this three times, the energy is redistributed evenly down the back.

The sacrum is the large shovel-shaped fusion of the last few vertebrae into the pelvis. This joint is only minimally flexible, but is a wall against which a lot of nerves are mounted. Strong pressure with the middle three fingers on each hand in a circular motion, down the tailbone and around to the crest of the pelvis and around again in two more circles, steady pressure from the three fingertips.

Trying not to tickle, with my thumbs still pointing at the spine and my fingers pointing forward, I gently knead up your ribs, (I am NOT tickling you), I work up to the armpits. The latissimus dorsii are the fan-shaped muscles from the back of the shoulder to the mid back. Using my middle joint of the thumb against the palm of my hand I can squeeze and release three times and let this muscle release its tension.

Now stand up and cross your arms with each hand on the opposite shoulder. From behind, I wrap my arms around you in a big bear hug and lift you off the floor, feeling the pops as your vertebrae realign.

There -- your sh*tty day is laying like rags on the floor. Clean it up tomorrow.

Kisses...

Index

The Unkindness of Strangers

Eric (Topbear) had posted to the Bears Mailing List about being verbally disrespected loudly and rudely by a group of 'twinks' in a restaurant. He asked the list:

>How would you have handled that situation?

OK, guys. I'm a smartass. I've spent half my life biting my tongue around a smartass remark when it was socially or professionally inappropriate. (But I think it anyway.)

My smartass reply would have been to walk up to their table and say in my best fatherly voice, masculine and low-key:

"Hello girls."

"You know, we heard your bitchy little comments over there. And I know that your little clique of self-absorption over here obviously doesn't understand that we don't need your approval or your criticism."

"We find each other attractive for lots of reasons, just like I'm sure that you find this (gesturing at them) scrawny little hairless-Chihuahua body type attractive. The sad part is how hard you will have to struggle to maintain it."

(Screw around with their vanity)

"What do your fathers look like? Some of us, maybe?
That's where Mother Nature and genetics are taking you, regardless of how you resist."

(Make it personal)

"Just look in the mirror... You're already headed down that road."

(Plant the seed of another way of thinking)

"You know, one of the guys over with us said he liked little twinks like you boys, but some of the other guys made fun of him. I personally don't pre-judge people by the group -- you always get the lowest common denominator when you do."

(Divide the group and make them think as individuals)

"I certainly wouldn't judge the whole group of you at this table over the unkind words from a couple of the stupider people sitting here."

(Throw a $10 on the table)

"Here -- I'll buy your coffee. I can afford to be generous. Just like I can afford to be kind. Besides, we found we found your silly appearance and faggy behavior pretty entertaining. See ya, kids."

That's how I would have handled it.

Index

This review was originally published by RFD magazine, "A Country Journal for for Gay Men Everywhere" Fall of 1998. RFD is published quarterly by the Short Mountain Collective and may be reached at P O Box 68-W, Liberty, Tennessee, 37095.

Subscriptions to RFD are encouraged and a bargain at $20/year, $38/2 years. RFD may occasionally be found at more comprehensive gay and lesbian bookstores nationwide at $6.50 per single issue.

Between the Cracks, the Daedalus Anthology of Kinky Verse
edited and with photos by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard
Daedalus Publishing, San Francisco, 1996. 354 pages. Softcover. $18.95 US.

Having been a solitary partner to Gavin Geoffrey Dillard in print and video for some time, I was glad to see this book arrive for the review. As I recall, he had some poems published in a back issue of RFD. This collection of 'kinky' verse intrigued me. In the foreword, Mr. Dillard says he let the genre define itself by putting out a call for kinky and then sorting through what came in.

The artistry is in that sorting. Gavin has put together a volume which would put Oscar Wilde proud. "I do hope that everyone will find something to be offended by," he wishes the reader.

He has defined categories with subtitles that sift through these nuggets and group them by theme:

EXTERNALS (spats, chaps and tats);

Lynn Goldfarb's POEM WITH AN ATTITUDE warns us that appearances can be deceiving as she points out that what an observer may think is the nice girl, straight, polite, frigid "You've never seen me in my half-zipped black jeans writing dyke poems topless in the moonlight."
Thaddeus Rutkowski, in SOCK MAN shows the sneaky perv (and I mean that in the most nonjudgmental way) who is responsible for all those socks that you KNOW went into the dryer but weren't there when you came back for them. Charles Webb gives us a depressing glimpse of virtual facades and people who assume an alternate electronic identity and "the crash as they fall back into themselves" in 976-CHAT.

SOFTWARE (tits, pits and shits);

TRASH by Linda Smukler takes us on a breathless drive at lunch to clean up the evidence of a marital indiscretion, and a taste for memories. Surprise short pieces from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and a few gems from the editor himself about the smell, and taste and feel of various body fluids and solids grace this section also. Jim Cory's FEET is a poem that doubles as a how-to of erotic foot massage. If you get nothing else from this book but this one poem, consider the price money well spent. Read it to a partner who likes having their feet massaged, and you'll be sure to get laid.

GAMES WE PLAY (muses, ruses and bruises);

C'MON JACK, and offering from the late Allen Ginsberg, begs for a spanking and a fucking. CONSTRUCTIVE INSTRUCTIONS, by Dan Diamond, tells us that sometimes gratification is best served as the dessert course. Elissa Wald's A MASOCHIST'S LOVE SONG reminds us that role-playing is a two-way street: "I'm only what you and I made me. I couldn't be more of your whore If you paid me."

HARDWARE (bikes, spikes and turnpikes);

Beginning with love of motorcycles (HARLEY DAVIDSON by Harold Norse), eroticization of working on your car (CHANGING THE OIL by Eloise Klein Healy), this section ends with self-mutilation (SCOTT by Vytautas Pliura), menstrual blood (sang brule a la mode by Ruan Bone) and necrophilia (ANNABEL LEE by Edgar Allen Poe).

FAMILY AND PETS (dads, dugs and dogs).

Unresolved father issues (Frank's father used to take him out by the editor and DADDY by Michael Lassell), dads that did and dads that didn't. Dogs who don't care (THE FAMILY DOG by Edward Field, A DOG FOR THE KINSEY STUDY by Paul Mariah and TOUCHING YOU by DS Lawson). Cats that are annoyed (JERKED OFF by Peter Orlovsky) and cats that can turn anything sexual (COITUS FELINUS by the editor) round out the anthology.

Mr. Dillard includes 12 of his own photos interspersed in the book. Some of these photos are artistic and thought-provoking ("Anonymous Poet" page 37 - a nude figure on a windy seashore, wrapped in a wet sheet, tied with cords, face covered, genitalia only poking through a hole). Others are strangely beautiful and mildly disturbing ("Anna Bergman" page 189 - a beautiful woman with hypodermic needles sans syringes pierced through the skin of her bicep and chest skin, woven together by string). Two made me laugh: ("Jules Mann" page 101 - a laughing nude woman, lying on the floor of a shower, a pint of chocolate ice cream melting down her belly and crotch, and "The Dog" page 153 - a nude man on all fours, with a stick in his mouth).

The Biographies appendix, with a little blurb about each featured poet, was much appreciated.

If you can't find something to offend you in this book you're not trying. Some of these poems may make you uncomfortable and some may make you horny. Having them all in one place is a work of love. Thanks to Gavin for the effort and the enjoyment that this book brings.

Index

This is a response to a question asked by my friend Kevin, who lives up near Chicago. He wondered why I called my lover and partner "The Other Half"? Here is my response:

Why do I call him that?

To acknowledge that we are partners, that we each bring certain complimentary qualities to the relationship. The whole of the relationship is greater than the sum of the parts (Us individually).

I use this in the absence of a good word for a partner in a male-male relationship. "Husband" carries sex-role specific connotations, as does "wife"; while "lover" sounds like an impermanent sexual relationship, and "partner" is sanitized, businesslike and carries almost no emotional baggage at all.

We each have unique abilities and insights, and familiarity has only made us able to anticipate the other's mercurial moods. Without him I would not be a part of this relationship, but would be just me.

That's why I call him "The Other Half."

Index

This was originally a post to the Bears Mailing List , and is my musings about barbershops.

I, too have fond memories of real barbershops. The male-space atmosphere is not there in a Supercuts where all the haircutters are women. In the 60s and 70s the barbershop was a bastion of maleness and where you went to get a haircut, not have your hair styled. There were magazines your mother would faint if she knew you were reading.

When I was but a cub (and hairier on top than front and back) I loved the smells of the Bay Rum hair tonic, the drone of a TV (usually with a golf game or something) and the Esquire magazines.

I went to the same barber from the time I was about 10 years old till I went away to college. He was a wiry little guy, slim, with this amazing Porter Waggoner kind of bouffant snow-white hair-do. He was gentle and had great hands. As I got into high school and started ...ahem... blossoming I would get these erections while he was washing, drying, massaging and cutting.

In my junior year of high school, his son who was a couple of years older than me went off to barber school and came back as a partner in the shop.

Not wiry at all, the son was taller, stockier (had played junior varsity football in his sophomore year) and was furry as a bear should be...chest carpet furry. Great arms, great hands, and taught by his daddy to give good head...massages.

About this time was when I had started to come out, and word gets around fast in a small East Texas town. He started giving me these 'interested' looks and I started getting a kind of crush on him.

I would start coming in on days when it wasn't very busy and his dad wasn't there. He would make a little more body contact than his dad did. I learned that if I held my elbows out just so, he would sometimes turn the chair and it would brush his crotch.

When I tell this to The Other Half now, he says "Are you crazy? He wanted you and you wanted him! Why didn't you just DO it?"

Well this was a long time ago. Nixon was in office. Vietnam was still going on. It was a piss-ant town in East Texas cotton country and I was a virgin. Given time and nerve, I probably would have sooner or later. Now it's just a pleasant memory.

Last time I went to see my mother I saw the shop again. Couldn't tell if it was still open or if he was still there. The thought has come up that I could use a trim.

Hmmmm.....

Index