newly released in September 2024:
The Soul's Red Thread
Memoirs of a Guide
The Soul's Red Thread
Memoirs of a Guide
An Excerpt from the Book
|
No Place That'll Keep You
I don’t know if I’ve ever been happy if we’re talking straight. I don’t consider myself happy and I don’t consider myself unhappy. I’ve just never thought of life in terms of happiness and unhappiness. It just never occurred to me . . . I tell you what I do think, though, that you never stop anywhere. There’s no place to stop in . . . Whenever you get to a plateau, that’s not it, you got to go on to the next one. You can’t stay nowhere, there’s no place to stay, there’s no place that’ll keep you. Bob Dylan, 1984 Westwood One interview |
Midway through this post-graduation summer, Dave and I went on a camping trip to the Lakes Basin area in the Sierra, an hour north of Lake Tahoe. During the drive there, Dave told me he had brought a baggie of psilocybin mushrooms. Once again, I began hearing the siren’s call.
As bright as I was, as stupid as I still was . . .
Immediately, the bargaining began: It’s okay, psilocybin is gentler than LSD. And to be extra safe, just take half a dose.
The setting surrounding the Lakes Basin Campground was stunning, but the campground itself was little more than a big parking lot crammed with cars. We settled in for the night, determined to find a better place in the morning. The next day we discovered an isolated campsite in a forest of pine trees alongside Goose Lake: a pristine pond with little foot traffic. That night we sat quietly by the lake, drinking beers as we watched the sun setting over one side of the lake and the full moon rising over the other. When the moon first crested, its light shimmering across the water, we gave each other a high five.
We had found our own private Sierra heaven.
Early the next morning—a gorgeous day destined to be hot but not too hot—Dave and I hiked two miles to Silver Lake, another of the area’s many lakes. There we found an isolated spot on the opposite shore, away from the main trail. With the help of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, we downed the dry and rubbery mushrooms. Dave took a full dose. I took a bit more than half.
As we previously had agreed, we went our separate ways an hour later. I returned to the main trail and started the rest of an eight-mile loop that would go around the backside of Long Lake, one of the area’s largest lakes, and then return to our Goose Lake campsite. I wouldn’t see another person for hours. Two magical mushroom memories from the day have stayed with me.
I’m ambling through dappled light in a grove of pine trees. As I walk, an extraordinary feeling is blooming inside of me. A colorful mix of ease, delight, and awe.
It’s all about set and setting, and a third “s”: size of dose. The three have come together in the most beautiful way. The easy friendship with Dave. Finding Goose Lake. The exquisite beauty of a summer day. The enchanting Sierra landscape. Psilocybin instead of LSD. A half-dose, not a full one.
I’m high, but not too high. Altered, but not too altered.
Ease, delight, awe.
Bliss.
An hour or so later, I’ve gone off trail and found a sit spot atop a massive slab of granite, hundreds of feet across. The great rock plummets at a forty-five-degree angle, way down to the dark blue waters of Long Lake. From my perch, the magic of Lakes Basin is on full display. The lake, a mile-wide and a half-mile-across, is much bigger than the sloping rock, and bigger still are three rows of mountain ridges beyond the lake. I marvel at the jaw-dropping view before me: a beautiful view both outside and in.
Outside: glorious Long Lake and mountains beyond.
Inside: Blue Sky Mind as vast as the scene before me.
As I sit and gaze, words from an essay I recently read come floating across the Great Inner Sky: “Being Gay means relating to other people without a need for power over them, or a fear of revealing yourself to them.” The line comes from a chapter in the book Men and Masculinity: this one a gay coming-out tale by Michael Silverstein, a former sociology professor. When I read Silverstein’s line days earlier, I was astonished that the foundation for his gay identity wasn’t physical sex or physical attraction. It was emotional intimacy and vulnerability.
Yes, by this definition, I’m gay.
As I continue to sit—looking out, looking in—the truth of Silverstein’s words ring like a clarion bell, over and over. All the while, the easy bliss inside never waivers.
A simple truth revealed.
Just accept it.
Nothing needs to be done.
Sometimes a person’s life thread gets revealed in one special experience that seems to lie outside the bounds of normal time. That’s what happened for me on that life-changing day in the Sierra.
The experience calls to mind the early Greeks and two words they had for “time.” Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is chronological time: the quantitative, sequential unfolding of events in the physical world. Kairos is soul time: those numinous moments when time opens to reveal a depth dimension.
“When one is stunned into consciousness,” writes the Jungian analyst James Hollis, “a vertical dimension, Kairos, intersects the horizontal plane of life; one’s life span is rendered in a depth perspective: ‘Who am I, then, and whither bound?’”
So, Scott, what now?
On this remarkable day, I finally found the beginning of an answer. I still didn’t have a clear destination in life, but now I had a direction. I was moving away from a crippling fear that had me hiding from the world and toward a more open expression of my true self. This first self-naming--I’m gay, relationally if not sexually—was massive. As big as that great slab of granite sliding down into Long Lake. This self-definition would be the very foundation for a lifetime to come.
Numinosity in nature.
The spirit of the depths revealed.
A true Kairos moment.
Perhaps a central measure of each person’s life is not whether Kairos moments ever occur. They happen to us all. But when a deeper realm of your psyche suddenly opens in this way, do you take heed? Do you follow a signpost that points toward a more authentic life?
For me, the answer was “yes.” Finally.
During the drive back to Berkeley, I told Dave about the Silverstein essay. Dave was a straight man—quiet, gentle, and kind, but decidedly straight. Still, I trusted him. I trusted him deeply.
“By this guy’s definition,” I told Dave, “I suppose I’m gay.”
Our conversation was another flashbulb moment: a lighting up of my psyche almost as important as the Long Lake epiphany. For the first time ever, I was saying out loud to another person these life-altering words: “I’m gay.” For the first time ever, I was peeking through the door of my own closet of conformity.
“But according to Kinsey, to some degree we’re all bisexual,” I said later during the drive home, wanting to retreat to the safety of the closet. “It’ll be so much easier if I just partner with a woman.”
But try as I might, there was no turning back. There was a whole other world, I now understood, and it had an enchanting name: “Gay.” I wasn’t ready to leave my own comfortable closet, not just yet, but a call had been sounded.
Sounded and, deep inside, received.
The Jungian James Hillman offers an "acorn theory" to explain how a young child grows into an adult. According to Hillman, each of us is born with something unique inside: an acorn, an essential self. This acorn is more than just an interplay of genetics and environment, because that omits “something essential—the particularity you feel to be you.” This theory is best exemplified by people with extraordinary gifts that are made manifest early in childhood, an uber-talented musical prodigy being the most obvious example. But what about the average Jean or Joe?
Hillman concludes that even ordinary folk, people without uncommon genius, do have a calling or destiny. “There is no mediocrity of the soul,” says Hillman. “The two terms do not converge. They come from different territories: ‘soul’ is singular and specific; ‘mediocrity’ sizes you up according to social statistics—norms, curves, data, comparisons.” For those of us who are more ordinary, perhaps real genius is to be found in becoming a singularly authentic human being.
You become “you” and I’ll become “me,” each of us to the fullest.
“There’s a thread you follow,” says Stafford. “It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change.”
Before I could seek out anything as grand as my own true destiny, I first needed to grasp hold of this life thread of mine. Enough with all the projections onto my stepfather or Mateo. It was time to ask and answer: Who am I, really, and whither bound?
To do this, I would need a new kind of role model.
I met Dean three months later, just after I had turned twenty-two. I was sitting in a café in Berkeley when he struck up an impromptu conversation and then took a chair at my table. He didn’t leave for another hour. He was a sweet, outgoing man, bordering on effervescent, which was such a stark contrast to the ruminating introvert that I still was.
I liked him at once.
(Was this love at first sight? No, not really. Dean wasn’t my type, even if I didn’t yet know that I had a type.)
Dean was an inch or two shorter than me, slightly pudgy, with a round, pasty face edged by a close-cropped brown beard and equally short brown hair. Though he was living in North Oakland, he sported the cliched Castro clone look of the time: plaid shirt, tight Levis, and a message-sending colored handkerchief peeking out of his back pocket (which color and pocket, and therefore which message, I don’t recall). At twenty-six, he was just a few years older than I was, but in gay years he was truly my elder. He had come out a decade before, back when I was a twelve-year-old boy obsessing about men on the moon. And on this day, mid-conversation, he came out to me.
Wow! An actual gay man.
(No, this wasn’t love at first sight, but it was certainly fascination at first sight.)
Even after the life-altering Sierra insight--yes, by this definition, I’m gay--I still wasn’t ready to admit that I was really gay. Not just “a man who relates to others in an egalitarian way,” but also “a man who lusts after other men.”
But Dean knew. Dean could smell the gay pheromones that I was emitting.
Our first date came the week before Christmas, a half-year after my college graduation. Dean took me to downtown San Francisco to share in one of his greatest joys: nighttime holiday window-shopping in and around Union Square. The two of us were proverbial kids in a Christmas candy store: prancing down the street and then stopping to marvel at different windows framed by blinking lights. A tableau of sleds and reindeer. A collection of tinseled trees. Over-sized gifts wrapped in gaudy holiday paper.
As the intoxicating swirl of the evening reached its peak, Dean pulled me into a dark alley and planted a long, salty kiss. First lips, then a vortex of tongues while his hand was cupping my crotch. An ancient wildness exploded in my mouth and groin and went coursing through my entire body.
Oh. My. God.
I never knew!
No, Dean was not my type, but on this night that hardly mattered. The kiss and the groping rocked my world. An enormous earthquake. A great cracking open of the old bisexual façade. The releasing of molten passions from deep within.
I was kissing another man, any man.
I was beyond elated.
I awoke the next morning to rumbling aftershocks from that seismic kiss.
I’m not heterosexual.
Damn, I’m not even bisexual.
Never was, never will be.
Wave after disturbing shock wave kept coming.
Early during my college years, the niggling feeling inside, something isn’t right, had turned into there must be something more. Finally, I knew what that something was. In the language of Timothy Leary, I tuned in with Silverstein’s essay, I turned on with Dean’s kiss, and now I would have to drop out. I would have to leave behind an ordinary life in conventional society.
A massive viral squall settled inside me, first as a terrible head cold and then gurgling congestion in the chest. The cold front refused to pass, sending me to bed for days. As I kept coughing up great gobs of phlegm, I fretted constantly about my future.
This really is me.
So, what do I do now?
Who can I even tell?
The Bay Area in late 1978 was an inauspicious place and time to be coming out. Unbeknownst to me—to everyone—the AIDS virus was spreading fast. People were already dying, each one of them mysteriously so. But there was another illness already well-known and even more pervasive.
Homophobia.
In November of that year, California’s Proposition 6 was on the ballot, triggering a national debate over a great cultural question: Are gay people worthy of basic human rights? If it passed, the proposition would bar lesbians and gay men, as well as supporters of gay rights, from working in public schools. Despite campaigning by the religious right, most notably Florida’s orange-juice queen Anita Bryant, the measure did fail. Still, the debate was a visceral reminder of the world’s long history of despising gay people. For centuries, faggots, dykes, and fairies have been ridiculed, incarcerated, and beaten up. Even killed.
On November 27, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk was shot and killed by Supervisor Dan White. Milk’s murder came three weeks after Prop 6 was voted down, the day after my twenty-second birthday, and two weeks before that first meeting with Dean.
Years earlier, Milk had left behind a closeted life in New York, coming to the gay mecca that was San Francisco in the early 1970s. He set up a camera store on Castro Street, which later he turned into campaign headquarters for two unsuccessful runs at a city supervisor seat, during which he took on a self-given title: “The Mayor of Castro Street.” Finally, in 1977, he was elected to the Board of Supervisors. As an impassioned defender of gay rights, Milk had become more than a major political figure. He was a gay icon.
A gay icon who now was dead.
How do I respond to all this? Prop 6. The murder of Harvey Milk. The salty kiss with Dean. All the anxiety rumbling inside. What the hell am I supposed to do?
As days turned into weeks, the terrible cold went away, while the overwhelm remained. But there was no turning back. Not with this crackling energy, this ancient wildness, coursing through my body. If my own coming of age was a great quest, I had finally found The Holy Grail. The Pearl of Great Price. The very beginning of the Soul’s Red Thread.
I was a gay man.
I was relationally gay and lustfully gay.
No turning back.
Late in February, Dean picked me up at my Berkeley apartment with his VW van. It was now two months after that seismic kiss in a dark alley off Union Square. Today, we followed the Yellow Brick Road back to Queer San Francisco, this time heading over to the Castro District.
(As I now write, I can imagine Dean saying to himself: Yeah, another date. Maybe the date.)
On a brisk winter afternoon, a Saturday, we started our tour of the Castro with a pilgrimage to the site of Harvey Milk’s camera store: 575 Castro. From there we went popping into shop after shop, eyeing what was on display: both in the stores and out on the streets. Mostly we were just browsing, though Dean did buy a few tchotchkes in a souvenir store, while I got myself a new novel from the local bookstore: A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, the gay English expatriate who now lived in LA.
Hours into the tour, we sat in a café at a window table with a view to the sidewalk outside. As we each nursed our coffees, we surveyed throngs of people passing by, most of them young to middle-aged men dressed in tight-fitting clothes. A crackling sexual energy filled the late afternoon air, but all of it was out there on display, not right here between Dean and me. As twilight started to descend, the inevitable argument erupted.
Dean stomped off, never to return, leaving me stranded in the city.
An hour later, I boarded an East Bay Transit bus heading to Berkeley and took a window seat on the left side of the bus, halfway back (to this day, I can still see the very seat). Joining me in the adjacent chair was a handsome, middle-aged man dressed in formal evening clothes: a gray cashmere topcoat with a salmon-colored scarf wrapped around his neck. After this dapper fellow eyed the newly purchased Isherwood book on my lap, he struck up a conversation.
“A great book you’ve got there. How far into it are you?”
“I haven’t even started.”
“My name’s Gene. And you?”
(Was it love at first sight this time? Maybe. Just maybe.)
Gene was an opera singer who was going to a vocal concert on the Berkeley campus, where he would be performing. He had a loquacious, bigger-than-life personality, which soon enveloped me in the best of ways. He was old enough to be my father and a gay sugar daddy, but more importantly, he was a true gay elder: what I so desperately wanted and needed (even if I didn’t know it yet). The two of us talked non-stop, and by the time we were halfway across the Bay Bridge, I was totally smitten. When we arrived in Berkeley a half-hour later, we exchanged addresses and said our goodbyes.
The next morning, I went shopping for, and found, the perfect card to send to Gene. The cover of it featured orange-crate art with a smiling little boy standing before a Florida orange grove (thank you, Anita Bryant!). The same day, Gene wrote me a message of his own, though his was on formal letterhead.
The two love notes crossed in the mail.
The following Saturday I was back in the city, visiting Gene in his top-floor Noe Valley apartment with its bird’s-eye view of downtown San Francisco. It was there, in Gene’s huge king-size bed, that I lost my gay virginity.
A month later I was back in the Castro District, there to meet Gene and three of his friends for Sunday brunch. Gene had a prized eleven o’clock reservation at Fanny’s: a popular second-floor restaurant on 18th Street, just off Castro Street.
Sunday brunch was a gay cliché of the times: a way many gay men survived a hangover after a late Saturday night. But our own table of five was a more conservative group. The night before, Gene and I had gone to bed at a reasonable hour so that he could get up early to go sing at St. Mary’s Cathedral. In the morning, I wandered alone about the Castro and then went to Fanny’s to meet up with Gene and three of his choir friends: Peter and Steve, a couple, and Bill, a single man. All three looked to be a decade younger than Gene and a decade older than me.
Gene sat down at the head of the table and immediately took on the self-appointed role of conversational conductor. Gene invited his first soloist, Bill, to speak about his recent trip to Saudi Arabia. Bill had just returned from a six-week job training there, where he was working for Bechtel, a large engineering construction firm hired by the Saudis to build an entire desert city, Jubail. He was back in San Francisco for two months to close out his apartment, before he would return to Jubail for a two-year assignment.
By now, I knew well what my type was. Older, classically good-looking men who appear to be gentle and kind.
Bill fit this to a tee. Twelve years my senior. Clean-shaven face. Tortoise-shell glasses resting on a thin nose, framing gray-blue eyes. Auburn hair sweeping across the forehead. A non-threatening patrician bearing: soft-spoken, gracious, polite. Dressed in the role of a blue blood: pink button-down shirt, burgundy sweater, gray slacks, and cordovan penny loafers. But despite the understated elegance, Bill displayed no upper-class posturing. No haughtiness, no hubris, no sense of entitlement. It was this gentle bearing, as much as his age and good looks, that made him so attractive.
(Was this love at first sight? Yes. Absolutely yes.)
Bill, with Gene still coaxing him along, began telling us about an essay he’d read during the flight home from Saudi Arabia. “The Power and Meaning of Love” was a chapter in Disputed Questions, a book by the Catholic monk Thomas Merton. In the essay, as Bill described it, Merton speaks about how truly loving another requires that we grant the person full autonomy. We must learn to love the person for what he is to himself, not for what he is to us.
My eyes and ears opened wide, as my heart began to swell.
“Makes me think of an essay I just read,” I said. This was my first time saying anything to this table of five.
With my eyes focused mostly on Bill, I spoke about Silverstein’s definition of gay: relating to others without a need for power or a fear of self-revelation. I followed that with questions for Bill about Merton and his essay. Soon, the two of us were tunnel-visioned in our own private conversation, as Gene’s disgruntled face disappeared, and the din of the restaurant faded away.
I was captivated by all that Merton was saying. All that Bill was saying, too. They were speaking a Christian language, a dialect of the soul, which was foreign and mysterious. I was a seriously lapsed Catholic, baptized as a baby, but never inside a church after the age of two. And yet, somehow, I understood this foreign language.
Bill, I learned, was a former Catholic seminarian whose current life plan was to take the Bechtel job in Saudi Arabia, which would give him both money and extended vacation time for frequent visits to his mother who was dying of brain cancer in her Kansas hometown. After she was gone, he planned to enter Monte Oliveto Maggiore, an Italian monastery near Siena, joining Manolo, his dear friend and spiritual mentor.
As counterpoint to Merton’s treatise on love, I told Bill about Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, my own personal bible throughout the latter part of college. As an unhappy physics major, I often felt trapped by the sterile objectivity of the science world, but Pirsig offered a philosophical bridge to a new way of thinking. Perhaps even a new way of living.
Pirsig’s great obsession in the book, I explained to Bill, is to define where and how Quality is to be found in human experience. To do this, Pirsig looks to reconcile a classical view and a romantic view. The classical view is objective and scientific, like a guide for the maintenance of a motorcycle. The romantic is subjective, like a motorcycle rider’s private experience of going with the flow. Quality is found neither in the objective, nor in the subjective. Rather, the subject-object split arises immediately after a person’s cutting-edge experience of Quality.
Quality is a non-dual experience, found only in the present moment.
“I wonder if Merton’s Love and Pirsig’s Quality are actually the same thing,” I told Bill. “Merton sees it from the subjective camp of the religious, while Pirsig points at it from the objective view of a philosopher-scientist.”
It was there in the middle that Bill and I met.
For Bill: in a great flash of Love.
For me: at the cutting edge of Quality.
Already, in just our first hour together, the two of us had found a shared language, a dialect of the soul. We already had a way of connecting that was more meaningful, more lasting, than any still to come. More important than our first salty kiss. More important than the first time we made love.
The two of us were soulmates.
(We still are.)
After brunch, Gene invited us all for a passeggiata: a stroll about the Castro neighborhood. Along the way we stopped and browsed in the same gay bookstore where I’d found the Isherwood book a month before. This time, I bought the Merton book and Bill bought Pirsig’s.
That same evening, Bill and I went on our first date together: dinner and a foreign film. The following Sunday, I asked him to take me to a Catholic Mass: the first of many weekly services we would attend over the coming months. Each time I found the grand theater of it to be inspiring—truly a great mystery—but whenever a priest opened his mouth to sermonize, the magic spell was broken. Ultimately, I didn’t return to the Catholic fold. I wasn’t saved. Still, I came to understand Bill so much better.
And, along the way, I fell deeply in love with this remarkably soulful man.
Together, Bill and I arrived at another great life transition.
Two weeks after Fanny’s, Bill told his boss he wasn’t going back to Saudi Arabia (and so he was fired).
A month after Fanny’s, I ended my relationship with Gene (or rather, Gene painfully ended it for me).
Two months after Fanny’s, Bill and I moved into a redbrick apartment on Page Street in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district (just a short walk from that hidden glen where I’d taken LSD with Andy and Dave).
For me, these were the last steps of a great rite of passage: my own sexual coming of age. A year before, I’d been just another straight boy, like all my Berkeley male friends. Next came the in-between time of being bisexual, where all was still possible. Now, finally, I had arrived at the truth: I was a gay man.
But the coming out didn’t stop there. A new life, a whole new identity, was being born—for both of us. Each of us was becoming one-half of “Scott and Bill.”
(Over four decades later, we’re still together.)
As bright as I was, as stupid as I still was . . .
Immediately, the bargaining began: It’s okay, psilocybin is gentler than LSD. And to be extra safe, just take half a dose.
The setting surrounding the Lakes Basin Campground was stunning, but the campground itself was little more than a big parking lot crammed with cars. We settled in for the night, determined to find a better place in the morning. The next day we discovered an isolated campsite in a forest of pine trees alongside Goose Lake: a pristine pond with little foot traffic. That night we sat quietly by the lake, drinking beers as we watched the sun setting over one side of the lake and the full moon rising over the other. When the moon first crested, its light shimmering across the water, we gave each other a high five.
We had found our own private Sierra heaven.
Early the next morning—a gorgeous day destined to be hot but not too hot—Dave and I hiked two miles to Silver Lake, another of the area’s many lakes. There we found an isolated spot on the opposite shore, away from the main trail. With the help of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, we downed the dry and rubbery mushrooms. Dave took a full dose. I took a bit more than half.
As we previously had agreed, we went our separate ways an hour later. I returned to the main trail and started the rest of an eight-mile loop that would go around the backside of Long Lake, one of the area’s largest lakes, and then return to our Goose Lake campsite. I wouldn’t see another person for hours. Two magical mushroom memories from the day have stayed with me.
I’m ambling through dappled light in a grove of pine trees. As I walk, an extraordinary feeling is blooming inside of me. A colorful mix of ease, delight, and awe.
It’s all about set and setting, and a third “s”: size of dose. The three have come together in the most beautiful way. The easy friendship with Dave. Finding Goose Lake. The exquisite beauty of a summer day. The enchanting Sierra landscape. Psilocybin instead of LSD. A half-dose, not a full one.
I’m high, but not too high. Altered, but not too altered.
Ease, delight, awe.
Bliss.
An hour or so later, I’ve gone off trail and found a sit spot atop a massive slab of granite, hundreds of feet across. The great rock plummets at a forty-five-degree angle, way down to the dark blue waters of Long Lake. From my perch, the magic of Lakes Basin is on full display. The lake, a mile-wide and a half-mile-across, is much bigger than the sloping rock, and bigger still are three rows of mountain ridges beyond the lake. I marvel at the jaw-dropping view before me: a beautiful view both outside and in.
Outside: glorious Long Lake and mountains beyond.
Inside: Blue Sky Mind as vast as the scene before me.
As I sit and gaze, words from an essay I recently read come floating across the Great Inner Sky: “Being Gay means relating to other people without a need for power over them, or a fear of revealing yourself to them.” The line comes from a chapter in the book Men and Masculinity: this one a gay coming-out tale by Michael Silverstein, a former sociology professor. When I read Silverstein’s line days earlier, I was astonished that the foundation for his gay identity wasn’t physical sex or physical attraction. It was emotional intimacy and vulnerability.
Yes, by this definition, I’m gay.
As I continue to sit—looking out, looking in—the truth of Silverstein’s words ring like a clarion bell, over and over. All the while, the easy bliss inside never waivers.
A simple truth revealed.
Just accept it.
Nothing needs to be done.
Sometimes a person’s life thread gets revealed in one special experience that seems to lie outside the bounds of normal time. That’s what happened for me on that life-changing day in the Sierra.
The experience calls to mind the early Greeks and two words they had for “time.” Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is chronological time: the quantitative, sequential unfolding of events in the physical world. Kairos is soul time: those numinous moments when time opens to reveal a depth dimension.
“When one is stunned into consciousness,” writes the Jungian analyst James Hollis, “a vertical dimension, Kairos, intersects the horizontal plane of life; one’s life span is rendered in a depth perspective: ‘Who am I, then, and whither bound?’”
So, Scott, what now?
On this remarkable day, I finally found the beginning of an answer. I still didn’t have a clear destination in life, but now I had a direction. I was moving away from a crippling fear that had me hiding from the world and toward a more open expression of my true self. This first self-naming--I’m gay, relationally if not sexually—was massive. As big as that great slab of granite sliding down into Long Lake. This self-definition would be the very foundation for a lifetime to come.
Numinosity in nature.
The spirit of the depths revealed.
A true Kairos moment.
Perhaps a central measure of each person’s life is not whether Kairos moments ever occur. They happen to us all. But when a deeper realm of your psyche suddenly opens in this way, do you take heed? Do you follow a signpost that points toward a more authentic life?
For me, the answer was “yes.” Finally.
During the drive back to Berkeley, I told Dave about the Silverstein essay. Dave was a straight man—quiet, gentle, and kind, but decidedly straight. Still, I trusted him. I trusted him deeply.
“By this guy’s definition,” I told Dave, “I suppose I’m gay.”
Our conversation was another flashbulb moment: a lighting up of my psyche almost as important as the Long Lake epiphany. For the first time ever, I was saying out loud to another person these life-altering words: “I’m gay.” For the first time ever, I was peeking through the door of my own closet of conformity.
“But according to Kinsey, to some degree we’re all bisexual,” I said later during the drive home, wanting to retreat to the safety of the closet. “It’ll be so much easier if I just partner with a woman.”
But try as I might, there was no turning back. There was a whole other world, I now understood, and it had an enchanting name: “Gay.” I wasn’t ready to leave my own comfortable closet, not just yet, but a call had been sounded.
Sounded and, deep inside, received.
The Jungian James Hillman offers an "acorn theory" to explain how a young child grows into an adult. According to Hillman, each of us is born with something unique inside: an acorn, an essential self. This acorn is more than just an interplay of genetics and environment, because that omits “something essential—the particularity you feel to be you.” This theory is best exemplified by people with extraordinary gifts that are made manifest early in childhood, an uber-talented musical prodigy being the most obvious example. But what about the average Jean or Joe?
Hillman concludes that even ordinary folk, people without uncommon genius, do have a calling or destiny. “There is no mediocrity of the soul,” says Hillman. “The two terms do not converge. They come from different territories: ‘soul’ is singular and specific; ‘mediocrity’ sizes you up according to social statistics—norms, curves, data, comparisons.” For those of us who are more ordinary, perhaps real genius is to be found in becoming a singularly authentic human being.
You become “you” and I’ll become “me,” each of us to the fullest.
“There’s a thread you follow,” says Stafford. “It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change.”
Before I could seek out anything as grand as my own true destiny, I first needed to grasp hold of this life thread of mine. Enough with all the projections onto my stepfather or Mateo. It was time to ask and answer: Who am I, really, and whither bound?
To do this, I would need a new kind of role model.
I met Dean three months later, just after I had turned twenty-two. I was sitting in a café in Berkeley when he struck up an impromptu conversation and then took a chair at my table. He didn’t leave for another hour. He was a sweet, outgoing man, bordering on effervescent, which was such a stark contrast to the ruminating introvert that I still was.
I liked him at once.
(Was this love at first sight? No, not really. Dean wasn’t my type, even if I didn’t yet know that I had a type.)
Dean was an inch or two shorter than me, slightly pudgy, with a round, pasty face edged by a close-cropped brown beard and equally short brown hair. Though he was living in North Oakland, he sported the cliched Castro clone look of the time: plaid shirt, tight Levis, and a message-sending colored handkerchief peeking out of his back pocket (which color and pocket, and therefore which message, I don’t recall). At twenty-six, he was just a few years older than I was, but in gay years he was truly my elder. He had come out a decade before, back when I was a twelve-year-old boy obsessing about men on the moon. And on this day, mid-conversation, he came out to me.
Wow! An actual gay man.
(No, this wasn’t love at first sight, but it was certainly fascination at first sight.)
Even after the life-altering Sierra insight--yes, by this definition, I’m gay--I still wasn’t ready to admit that I was really gay. Not just “a man who relates to others in an egalitarian way,” but also “a man who lusts after other men.”
But Dean knew. Dean could smell the gay pheromones that I was emitting.
Our first date came the week before Christmas, a half-year after my college graduation. Dean took me to downtown San Francisco to share in one of his greatest joys: nighttime holiday window-shopping in and around Union Square. The two of us were proverbial kids in a Christmas candy store: prancing down the street and then stopping to marvel at different windows framed by blinking lights. A tableau of sleds and reindeer. A collection of tinseled trees. Over-sized gifts wrapped in gaudy holiday paper.
As the intoxicating swirl of the evening reached its peak, Dean pulled me into a dark alley and planted a long, salty kiss. First lips, then a vortex of tongues while his hand was cupping my crotch. An ancient wildness exploded in my mouth and groin and went coursing through my entire body.
Oh. My. God.
I never knew!
No, Dean was not my type, but on this night that hardly mattered. The kiss and the groping rocked my world. An enormous earthquake. A great cracking open of the old bisexual façade. The releasing of molten passions from deep within.
I was kissing another man, any man.
I was beyond elated.
I awoke the next morning to rumbling aftershocks from that seismic kiss.
I’m not heterosexual.
Damn, I’m not even bisexual.
Never was, never will be.
Wave after disturbing shock wave kept coming.
Early during my college years, the niggling feeling inside, something isn’t right, had turned into there must be something more. Finally, I knew what that something was. In the language of Timothy Leary, I tuned in with Silverstein’s essay, I turned on with Dean’s kiss, and now I would have to drop out. I would have to leave behind an ordinary life in conventional society.
A massive viral squall settled inside me, first as a terrible head cold and then gurgling congestion in the chest. The cold front refused to pass, sending me to bed for days. As I kept coughing up great gobs of phlegm, I fretted constantly about my future.
This really is me.
So, what do I do now?
Who can I even tell?
The Bay Area in late 1978 was an inauspicious place and time to be coming out. Unbeknownst to me—to everyone—the AIDS virus was spreading fast. People were already dying, each one of them mysteriously so. But there was another illness already well-known and even more pervasive.
Homophobia.
In November of that year, California’s Proposition 6 was on the ballot, triggering a national debate over a great cultural question: Are gay people worthy of basic human rights? If it passed, the proposition would bar lesbians and gay men, as well as supporters of gay rights, from working in public schools. Despite campaigning by the religious right, most notably Florida’s orange-juice queen Anita Bryant, the measure did fail. Still, the debate was a visceral reminder of the world’s long history of despising gay people. For centuries, faggots, dykes, and fairies have been ridiculed, incarcerated, and beaten up. Even killed.
On November 27, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk was shot and killed by Supervisor Dan White. Milk’s murder came three weeks after Prop 6 was voted down, the day after my twenty-second birthday, and two weeks before that first meeting with Dean.
Years earlier, Milk had left behind a closeted life in New York, coming to the gay mecca that was San Francisco in the early 1970s. He set up a camera store on Castro Street, which later he turned into campaign headquarters for two unsuccessful runs at a city supervisor seat, during which he took on a self-given title: “The Mayor of Castro Street.” Finally, in 1977, he was elected to the Board of Supervisors. As an impassioned defender of gay rights, Milk had become more than a major political figure. He was a gay icon.
A gay icon who now was dead.
How do I respond to all this? Prop 6. The murder of Harvey Milk. The salty kiss with Dean. All the anxiety rumbling inside. What the hell am I supposed to do?
As days turned into weeks, the terrible cold went away, while the overwhelm remained. But there was no turning back. Not with this crackling energy, this ancient wildness, coursing through my body. If my own coming of age was a great quest, I had finally found The Holy Grail. The Pearl of Great Price. The very beginning of the Soul’s Red Thread.
I was a gay man.
I was relationally gay and lustfully gay.
No turning back.
Late in February, Dean picked me up at my Berkeley apartment with his VW van. It was now two months after that seismic kiss in a dark alley off Union Square. Today, we followed the Yellow Brick Road back to Queer San Francisco, this time heading over to the Castro District.
(As I now write, I can imagine Dean saying to himself: Yeah, another date. Maybe the date.)
On a brisk winter afternoon, a Saturday, we started our tour of the Castro with a pilgrimage to the site of Harvey Milk’s camera store: 575 Castro. From there we went popping into shop after shop, eyeing what was on display: both in the stores and out on the streets. Mostly we were just browsing, though Dean did buy a few tchotchkes in a souvenir store, while I got myself a new novel from the local bookstore: A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, the gay English expatriate who now lived in LA.
Hours into the tour, we sat in a café at a window table with a view to the sidewalk outside. As we each nursed our coffees, we surveyed throngs of people passing by, most of them young to middle-aged men dressed in tight-fitting clothes. A crackling sexual energy filled the late afternoon air, but all of it was out there on display, not right here between Dean and me. As twilight started to descend, the inevitable argument erupted.
Dean stomped off, never to return, leaving me stranded in the city.
An hour later, I boarded an East Bay Transit bus heading to Berkeley and took a window seat on the left side of the bus, halfway back (to this day, I can still see the very seat). Joining me in the adjacent chair was a handsome, middle-aged man dressed in formal evening clothes: a gray cashmere topcoat with a salmon-colored scarf wrapped around his neck. After this dapper fellow eyed the newly purchased Isherwood book on my lap, he struck up a conversation.
“A great book you’ve got there. How far into it are you?”
“I haven’t even started.”
“My name’s Gene. And you?”
(Was it love at first sight this time? Maybe. Just maybe.)
Gene was an opera singer who was going to a vocal concert on the Berkeley campus, where he would be performing. He had a loquacious, bigger-than-life personality, which soon enveloped me in the best of ways. He was old enough to be my father and a gay sugar daddy, but more importantly, he was a true gay elder: what I so desperately wanted and needed (even if I didn’t know it yet). The two of us talked non-stop, and by the time we were halfway across the Bay Bridge, I was totally smitten. When we arrived in Berkeley a half-hour later, we exchanged addresses and said our goodbyes.
The next morning, I went shopping for, and found, the perfect card to send to Gene. The cover of it featured orange-crate art with a smiling little boy standing before a Florida orange grove (thank you, Anita Bryant!). The same day, Gene wrote me a message of his own, though his was on formal letterhead.
The two love notes crossed in the mail.
The following Saturday I was back in the city, visiting Gene in his top-floor Noe Valley apartment with its bird’s-eye view of downtown San Francisco. It was there, in Gene’s huge king-size bed, that I lost my gay virginity.
A month later I was back in the Castro District, there to meet Gene and three of his friends for Sunday brunch. Gene had a prized eleven o’clock reservation at Fanny’s: a popular second-floor restaurant on 18th Street, just off Castro Street.
Sunday brunch was a gay cliché of the times: a way many gay men survived a hangover after a late Saturday night. But our own table of five was a more conservative group. The night before, Gene and I had gone to bed at a reasonable hour so that he could get up early to go sing at St. Mary’s Cathedral. In the morning, I wandered alone about the Castro and then went to Fanny’s to meet up with Gene and three of his choir friends: Peter and Steve, a couple, and Bill, a single man. All three looked to be a decade younger than Gene and a decade older than me.
Gene sat down at the head of the table and immediately took on the self-appointed role of conversational conductor. Gene invited his first soloist, Bill, to speak about his recent trip to Saudi Arabia. Bill had just returned from a six-week job training there, where he was working for Bechtel, a large engineering construction firm hired by the Saudis to build an entire desert city, Jubail. He was back in San Francisco for two months to close out his apartment, before he would return to Jubail for a two-year assignment.
By now, I knew well what my type was. Older, classically good-looking men who appear to be gentle and kind.
Bill fit this to a tee. Twelve years my senior. Clean-shaven face. Tortoise-shell glasses resting on a thin nose, framing gray-blue eyes. Auburn hair sweeping across the forehead. A non-threatening patrician bearing: soft-spoken, gracious, polite. Dressed in the role of a blue blood: pink button-down shirt, burgundy sweater, gray slacks, and cordovan penny loafers. But despite the understated elegance, Bill displayed no upper-class posturing. No haughtiness, no hubris, no sense of entitlement. It was this gentle bearing, as much as his age and good looks, that made him so attractive.
(Was this love at first sight? Yes. Absolutely yes.)
Bill, with Gene still coaxing him along, began telling us about an essay he’d read during the flight home from Saudi Arabia. “The Power and Meaning of Love” was a chapter in Disputed Questions, a book by the Catholic monk Thomas Merton. In the essay, as Bill described it, Merton speaks about how truly loving another requires that we grant the person full autonomy. We must learn to love the person for what he is to himself, not for what he is to us.
My eyes and ears opened wide, as my heart began to swell.
“Makes me think of an essay I just read,” I said. This was my first time saying anything to this table of five.
With my eyes focused mostly on Bill, I spoke about Silverstein’s definition of gay: relating to others without a need for power or a fear of self-revelation. I followed that with questions for Bill about Merton and his essay. Soon, the two of us were tunnel-visioned in our own private conversation, as Gene’s disgruntled face disappeared, and the din of the restaurant faded away.
I was captivated by all that Merton was saying. All that Bill was saying, too. They were speaking a Christian language, a dialect of the soul, which was foreign and mysterious. I was a seriously lapsed Catholic, baptized as a baby, but never inside a church after the age of two. And yet, somehow, I understood this foreign language.
Bill, I learned, was a former Catholic seminarian whose current life plan was to take the Bechtel job in Saudi Arabia, which would give him both money and extended vacation time for frequent visits to his mother who was dying of brain cancer in her Kansas hometown. After she was gone, he planned to enter Monte Oliveto Maggiore, an Italian monastery near Siena, joining Manolo, his dear friend and spiritual mentor.
As counterpoint to Merton’s treatise on love, I told Bill about Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, my own personal bible throughout the latter part of college. As an unhappy physics major, I often felt trapped by the sterile objectivity of the science world, but Pirsig offered a philosophical bridge to a new way of thinking. Perhaps even a new way of living.
Pirsig’s great obsession in the book, I explained to Bill, is to define where and how Quality is to be found in human experience. To do this, Pirsig looks to reconcile a classical view and a romantic view. The classical view is objective and scientific, like a guide for the maintenance of a motorcycle. The romantic is subjective, like a motorcycle rider’s private experience of going with the flow. Quality is found neither in the objective, nor in the subjective. Rather, the subject-object split arises immediately after a person’s cutting-edge experience of Quality.
Quality is a non-dual experience, found only in the present moment.
“I wonder if Merton’s Love and Pirsig’s Quality are actually the same thing,” I told Bill. “Merton sees it from the subjective camp of the religious, while Pirsig points at it from the objective view of a philosopher-scientist.”
It was there in the middle that Bill and I met.
For Bill: in a great flash of Love.
For me: at the cutting edge of Quality.
Already, in just our first hour together, the two of us had found a shared language, a dialect of the soul. We already had a way of connecting that was more meaningful, more lasting, than any still to come. More important than our first salty kiss. More important than the first time we made love.
The two of us were soulmates.
(We still are.)
After brunch, Gene invited us all for a passeggiata: a stroll about the Castro neighborhood. Along the way we stopped and browsed in the same gay bookstore where I’d found the Isherwood book a month before. This time, I bought the Merton book and Bill bought Pirsig’s.
That same evening, Bill and I went on our first date together: dinner and a foreign film. The following Sunday, I asked him to take me to a Catholic Mass: the first of many weekly services we would attend over the coming months. Each time I found the grand theater of it to be inspiring—truly a great mystery—but whenever a priest opened his mouth to sermonize, the magic spell was broken. Ultimately, I didn’t return to the Catholic fold. I wasn’t saved. Still, I came to understand Bill so much better.
And, along the way, I fell deeply in love with this remarkably soulful man.
Together, Bill and I arrived at another great life transition.
Two weeks after Fanny’s, Bill told his boss he wasn’t going back to Saudi Arabia (and so he was fired).
A month after Fanny’s, I ended my relationship with Gene (or rather, Gene painfully ended it for me).
Two months after Fanny’s, Bill and I moved into a redbrick apartment on Page Street in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district (just a short walk from that hidden glen where I’d taken LSD with Andy and Dave).
For me, these were the last steps of a great rite of passage: my own sexual coming of age. A year before, I’d been just another straight boy, like all my Berkeley male friends. Next came the in-between time of being bisexual, where all was still possible. Now, finally, I had arrived at the truth: I was a gay man.
But the coming out didn’t stop there. A new life, a whole new identity, was being born—for both of us. Each of us was becoming one-half of “Scott and Bill.”
(Over four decades later, we’re still together.)