The Martin Duberman Reader (38 page)

“Hopefully, there may be an opening in my schedule later on. I assure you that you will like André very much.”

There was a pause. Then Pierrakos took my hand and, his voice earnest, urged me not to use my disappointment that we could not work together as an excuse for retreating into isolation. “You need help. You need it
now.
There is no reason for you to suffer like this.”

As my tears welled up again, we hugged good-bye. And I thanked him.

I did call André. And I did like him immediately—he was sweet and warm—just as Pierrakos had predicted.

We worked together once a week for more than three months. The sessions continued to be powerful: floods of rage, tears, tenderness. It was enough to know that the physical techniques of bioenergetics were capable of unlocking an astonishing swell of feelings—whatever I might then be able to do with them—and was surely unlocking more than the “talking cure” had ever been able to.

Two months into bioenergetics, André told me I was “moving at a great clip” and in his opinion was ready to undertake a ten-day “intensive.” I had no idea what that meant, and he explained that it was simply a way of accelerating the therapeutic process. The Pierrakos group had a commune in the mountains at Phoenicia,
New York, called the Center for the Living Force (the name alone made rational me a little queasy) and that was where “intensives” took place. They involved concentrated “self-exploration.” “With the “guidance and support” of a five-person team, an “intensive” consisted of a variety of practices, from physical exercises to meditation to periods of isolation—all in the context of “the community's healing and love energy.”

On arriving at the Center for the Living Force—an attractive collection of unpretentious cottages and community buildings set on three hundred acres in a wooded valley surrounded by hills and crossed by streams—I was introduced to my five-person “team,” all of whom seemed pleasant and one of whom, Alex, I felt an instant, urgent attraction to.

Gradually, in an unpressured way—at meals, at a stream, in the rustic building where I had been assigned a room—I met various members of the community. Some of them were East Coast bioenergetic therapists who spent weekends at the Center; others were occasional visitors like myself. There was also a small number of year-round residents—the Center was only five years old—from whose ranks came most of the staff, including part-time farmers, dieticians, bookkeepers.

It soon became apparent to me that, as Pete had warned, the community was traditional in its views on sexuality and relationships. At dinner one night, a woman stared disapprovingly at me when, in answer to her question about my marital status, I said “I'm not married. I'm in fact gay.” She quickly disclaimed any disapproval—too quickly, I thought, as if eager to avert possible discussion.

Later on, I did meet one man in the community—and only one—who openly described himself as gay. But he was skittish around me from the beginning. And when, one day, I brought up politics, asking if he might be interested, back in the city, in attending one of our “Gays for Bella Abzug” meetings, he stammered, “Maybe—doubt it though,” and thereafter was always hurrying off on some urgent business whenever I ran into him.

Another night at dinner, Larry, one of the year-round residents,
made an offhand comment about not liking the ice cream parlor in town because it was “so gay.” I didn't say anything at the time, but the remark rankled, and I told him so when I saw him the next day. He used the word “gay,” he said, to mean “super-refined” rather than specifically homosexual, and claimed “not to be in touch with any negative feelings within myself toward homosexuals.”

But then—more believably, and with impressive frankness—Larry told me that he felt “a strong feminine component” in his nature, and that it frightened him. He, too, was a writer, and had been going through a period of “blocked creativity” that he ascribed to his inability to accept “the feminine within.” He confessed to having deliberately avoided me since my arrival in the community, and thanked me for approaching him so openly; it had helped him acknowledge more directly the inner struggle he was going through. Since I'd expected bland denial or a belligerent “What's it to you?”—the usual responses when a homophobic remark is challenged—Larry's attempt at self-scrutiny threw me happily off guard.

I told myself, the community wasn't that conventional. Though it adhered to a traditional model of coupledom, it deviated significantly from a traditional view of sex roles. Men were encouraged to develop their warm, gentle, nurturing side, and women spoke out decisively at community meetings, seemed to share equally in decision-making, and, on spiritual matters especially, usually took the lead. (That, to be sure, could be viewed as the most traditionally hallowed female role: woman as the repository of piety—whoops! I was at it again.)

Bursting with vigor, I sampled all the community's offerings, determined to do everything possible (to quote from the Center brochure) “to bring to consciousness, energize and dissolve the barriers we have created against the spontaneous flow of life.” To steam open my pores, I sat in a Native American–style hut filled with glowing coals—and then plunged into the ice-cold stream nearby. I had my aura read, my body massaged, my biorhythm chart diagnosed, my numerological prospects analyzed.

Then came the contraction: for a whole day, I felt barely able to move. My team told me that was to be expected; up to now, I had gone at “such a rapid clip, that a pause was inevitable.” They urged me to sink—for once—into apathy, to experience fully my need for inactivity and rest. I lay around, nearly catatonic, feeling I should force myself back into engagement. “That's what you've always done,” Alex said (insightfully, I thought), “forced yourself to maintain a constant level of intensity, even if that means an unnatural exertion of will, or a reliance on pills. Part of you doesn't believe in your own creativity, so you constantly, artificially, keep the flame up full blast. You lack faith in the natural ebb and flow of life. You must learn to accept an alternation of rhythms, of intense activity being followed by deep rest.”

To help me better experience my body's need for quiescence—and the natural springing back to life that would follow—the team prescribed a deep massage, all five of them working on my body simultaneously. They dimmed the lights, put on a background tape of Indian music, and began to massage me with some kind of oil—ten hands at once working every part of my body. (But avoiding my penis, I groggily noted; I wondered if that was standard policy or a precaution adopted when working on gay men, a class notoriously prone to arousal).

A sense of deep peacefulness alternated with tears and joyful laughter. After twenty minutes or so, I turned on my back. It was then that I abruptly flipped over into another reality, tripped out, entered an earlier time frame—the team's later words for it; I didn't have any.

I was back at Camp Idylwold, where, as a preteen, I'd spent every summer for some six to eight years. I was with my bunkmate and best friend, Billy Katz, with whom I often crawled into bed at night. I saw myself in my gray woolen sweater with “C.I.” sewn on the front. I saw the bumpy dirt road leading into camp. I saw—Morty Offit! And now the tears really flowed. Beloved Morty, whom I'd adored, the senior (age eighteen? seventeen?) who had taken me (age ten? eleven?) under his wing. I saw—I was back in the middle
of—our last, painful good-bye. Morty was leaving camp midway through the summer to join the army (Was it 1941?). As the taxi pulled up to take him to the railroad station, I hid behind a bush, too overcome to face him. But just as he was getting into the car, he spotted me, got back out, came over, and put his arm around me. “It's going to be all right, Marty. It's going to be all right. . . .” Then he was gone in a blur, the last time I ever saw him. . . . I was blinded by tears. . . .

As I groggily came to, one of the team members gently suggested that I could “redo” that “crushing departure,” transform it into a positive memory. I had been loved and blessed; Morty had cared deeply for me. That was what I should try to remember—not the obliterating sense of loss. It wasn't a matter of reinventing my history, the team explained, but rather relocating its essence so that I could experience it differently. I was entitled to my grief over Morty's departure, but the grief could be recalled within the original context of his love for me; to remember the caring was to soften the pain.

I felt hugely comforted, cried some more, and then started to sink back into other memories. . . .

On my last night at the Center, I had dinner by candlelight with my team, joined by a few other members of the community with whom I'd gotten friendly, and by André, who'd come up from New York for the occasion.

The next morning we met at seven for our final session. We went into the woods and sat on the rocks next to a mountain stream, at a spot where the water fell with special fullness. We held hands, meditated together, spoke from our hearts. I realized, and said, that for the past few days I had felt the occasional urge to walk farther upstream, to get closer to the source. Something had held me back. I now realized what it was: I wanted to go there with these people. It was through them that I had gotten in touch with deeper resources of strength within myself than I'd ever known. . . . As we said goodbye, I was swept by waves of sadness.

The next day, back in New York, I was desolate: punchy,
frightened, unable to stop crying. Then, toward nightfall, I started to get angry. Had I been conned? Had I yet again allowed others to pass judgment on my life, accepted those judgments as valid, put myself through needless spasms of self-doubt? Wasn't bioenergetics a greater instrument of self-torture than any of the more obvious ones I'd begun the therapy to alleviate? The anger astounded me—and the swiftness with which it replaced my sadness. Wasn't that itself a clue?

During my session with André the following day, I continued to rail against the “smug,” formulaic words I'd heard at the Center. I dismissed their “Aimee Semple McPherson certitudes,” their authoritative charts and credos, as “stone engravings on air.” I raged at the assumption that one could—at any age—radically alter one's core perspective or personality. Haven't they heard about imprinting? Couldn't they see that the path of wisdom was to accept the basic parameters of one's personality after a certain point in life and to stop pursuing the chimera of “fixing” it, making it different or better or perfect?

At the end of the session, my fury vented, I heard myself say that “at bottom” what might well be going on with me was simply desolation; after ten days of closeness, I was again alone. I recorded the session in my diary:

I made an appointment to see Pierrakos. In essence he told me, “Forget the spiritual dimension! Concentrate on
your
process.”

“Which is tantamount to saying, ‘Put aside your intelligence.' ”

“Not at all,” Pierrakos shot back, exasperation in his voice. “What you need to put aside are the categorical judgments your intelligence creates in order to distance yourself from available love and support.”

That sounded devastatingly plausible. And the stalemate might have been broken then and there. But in response to my further accusation that he and the Center were homophobic, Pierrakos insisted that he was not, and then added—fatally—that he did regard male homosexuality as “a flight from woman,” did find it “regrettable” that I had chosen to “block out half the human race.”

To which I replied, anger mounting, “I don't—other than genitally.” Why, I asked, didn't he also lament the way heterosexuals “block out half the human race”?

“I do regret,” he answered in a measured voice, “that men, men much more than women, do not relate to each other on a deeper emotional level. But I do not regret their failure to relate sexually.”

“You're applying different standards for gays and straights,” I said angrily. “I've always had strong emotional connections, though not sexual ones, with women. Why do you equate the absence of sexual desire with ‘flight'? Or if you do, why don't you say the same thing about men who refuse to acknowledge feelings of erotic desire for other men? I'm capable of emotional intimacy with men and women, and most straight men are capable of neither. Yet somehow in your view I and other homosexuals don't qualify for full admission to the human race. What does qualify one, if not the capacity for intimacy? Merely the ability to have sex with a member of the opposite gender?”

Pierrakos sighed deeply and then, a note of finality in his voice, quietly said that I was “inventing” disagreement between us in order to create needless distance. He added—to my astonishment—that he thought “overall” I was “in a very good place,” and he hoped that henceforth I'd concentrate on the physical work and continue to move ahead.

The stalemate had not been broken. I never went back. To this day, I don't fully understand why. Part of me thinks that I “came to my senses,” saw through the ersatz heart of the whole ridiculous cosmology. Another part of me thinks that I fled out of fear, that I'd
opened up too quickly to too much pain—to say nothing of hope—and needed to clamp the lid back on. Probably both explanations contain some truth—and which the greater part, I still could not say with assurance.