The Velvet Rage (26 page)

Johnny didn't want to hurt his boyfriend's feelings by telling him that he really didn't enjoy spending every minute of every weekend together. It's true, Johnny enjoyed his boyfriend's company and was just as often the one who would suggest activities for the two of them to enjoy, like hiking together, going to the beach, or working out. But sometimes, he just wanted to stay in his own apartment and do things separately with his friends. In therapy, Johnny expressed his fear that if he told his boyfriend he wanted to spend time in his own apartment or with friends, his boyfriend would see this as a sign that the relationship wasn't going well. I encouraged Johnny to find a validating
way to express his need for time alone to his boyfriend, such as simply telling him that he wanted some private time and that this need had nothing to do with how he felt about the relationship. The next week, Johnny came back to therapy amazed to report that his boyfriend not only wasn't offended but stated that he wanted the same. The two had spent a wonderful Saturday together and then had Sunday apart. Johnny stated that not only did he have a great weekend, he was really looking forward to having dinner together with his boyfriend later that week.

Perhaps this may be somewhat simplistic, but as in most things in life, it is the simple things that often create the most trouble. Where is it written that couples must spend every available moment together? Or that a gay man in a committed relationship can't find another man really attractive? Or that saying “no” to your partner's request for sex is a bad thing? It's true in life generally, but particularly in relationships, that we must be free to express our ambivalence even with the small things if we are to maintain positive feelings. The denial of uncomfortable, disagreeable, or less than positive feelings is often the root from which a deeper, more malicious discontent grows. Without darkness, light has no meaning—likewise, love has little meaning when you have not experienced competing feelings.

We don't really believe the flowery sentiments displayed in Hallmark cards. Rarely do phrases on bumper stickers change our lives. Affirmations of self-worth often don't change how we feel about ourselves, no matter how many times we quote them. Why? Mostly because we don't believe simplistic statements of feelings as we instinctively know that the most important things in life trigger ambivalence within us. Embrace your ambivalence, especially in relationships, and you'll find that you reach a new,
powerful level of authenticity that ultimately makes your relationships stronger and more fulfilling.

Using these skills is a daily practice. Each new day presents new opportunities for authenticity and skillful growth. Following is a chart that lists each of the skills and provides space for you to note if you practice the skill. This chart can be particularly helpful as a tool to summarize and remind you of the skills at the end of each day and to document your progress.

Many
Velvet Rage
groups have found the chart to be a very helpful tool for each group member to complete and bring to the weekly meeting.
Velvet Rage
groups are often structured with a time for reading a section of the book and discussing the material. Afterward, time is allotted for each group member to share how he used the skills in daily activities. The chart provides an efficient tool to summarize the group member's week and to help him remember what skills he used and how those skills helped him to live more authentically.

PETER PAN

 

 

 

I
stepped out into the fog that night not quite sure of what was next. The thick soup of San Francisco dampness that descends upon the city on most summer nights was particularly heavy, and I tripped over something on the sidewalk, but this night it didn't really matter what it was. My mind was racing, yet my thoughts had not budged since I heard the words: “HIV-POSITIVE.” At least, that's what the teary-eyed nurse just told me. Like a good southern boy, I awkwardly thanked her, turned on my heels, and walked down the sickeningly fluorescent-lit hallway praying I would reach darkness before my river of tears burst its dam. I reached the bus stop—God knows how long I had wandered the streets—but only in time to see the taillights of the last bus of the night slipping into the misty darkness. I awoke slumped on the steps of the doorway to my small apartment that
overlooked the Castro with waves of fog wafting over me. I remember thinking, “So this is how it ends.”

Life changed for me that night some twenty-five years ago; but at the time, I would have no idea just where it would take me. I assumed, as did most everyone else in the late 1980s, that HIV was inevitably a terminal diagnosis. As a young man of twenty-six years, bewitched by the narcissism of youth, I had foolishly believed that my life was infinite. Now I considered that I would die, probably sooner rather than later. This, in the days and weeks after that night in the San Francisco fog, I would come to accept as fact.

And why wouldn't I? As a young therapist with a newly crafted PhD, I had already seen much devastation from the HIV epidemic. Young men were going blind, using canes to tap their way down streets lined with gay bars. Others were slipping into eternal idiocy with dementia. Still others went to work one day, fell ill the next, and were laid to rest within the same week. “Where is John?” is a question even I knew never to ask. If someone suddenly disappeared from the scene, you just assumed he had succumbed to the plague.

That was more than two decades ago; fortunately for me, a combination of good genes, perhaps a weak strain of the virus, and the invention of the “cocktail” in 1996 turned my near-death experience into a manageable chronic illness. I was one of the very lucky ones who narrowly escaped with my life.

Only now have I come to understand the profound impact that virus has had on who I was and what I have become. It gave me my life to live in a hurry. I had places to go, people to meet, jobs to treasure and quit, and many miles to travel before the darkness descended. Though it would seem the diagnosis of a terminal disease would make one grow up quickly, I did quite the
opposite and became an out-of-control adolescent-man. I left no stone unturned, no wine untasted.

For the better part of ten years, I lived under a cloud of a temporary future. Before the HIV “cocktail” of medications, no one knew how long it would take for the virus to ultimately destroy my immune system. After the cocktail, we all wondered when the clever virus would outsmart the antiviral medication and again invade our immune systems, as it had for the unlucky ones.

As it turned out, those dire futures never materialized for me, but I wouldn't come to trust this until the century rolled over. In that time, I lived in a state of fast-forward, always trying to get the very best—or at least the quickest high—out of life before the final fog descended. I demanded that life deliver everything I wanted. The clicking of my viral clock was loud and undeniable. I had nothing, neither time nor love, to waste.

It would seem that if you are facing the potential end of your life, you might turn your attention to more serious matters, such as the meaning and substance of your life. Who hasn't at one time or another played the parlor game of “What would you do if you had only a year to live?” to which most of us respond with something about spending more time with the people we love or being of service in some meaningful way. I responded by burying my head in the sand, refusing to seek medical attention for HIV, fleeing from any perceived responsibility, and doing everything I could to avoid pain and seek pleasure. The adolescent in me flourished, and the man I would become remained buried and undeveloped. As adolescent boys do, I was the center of my own world, and others were welcomed into that world only if they could make me feel good. And just as soon as the good feelings faded, so did my use for the relationship. Like Peter Pan, I reveled in my boyish ways and stubbornly refused to grow up.

With these hounds of time and mortality nipping at my heels, I dove into my own life and my work with two goals in mind: (1) make money, and (2) sleep with as many men as possible. I worked for companies like Hewlett Packard, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Dayton Hudson (now known as Target) as a “corporate” psychologist whose job it was to help manage the workforces of these corporate giants with an element of kindness and humanity. More accurately, I mostly ran a charm school for executives, which we called leadership training, and orchestrated large-scale layoffs of underperforming and/or overpaid employees. I traveled widely and made a very good living that afforded me a small taste of the high life. From workshops in Aspen, Colorado, and committee meetings on the beach in Big Sur to presentations before corporate boards in the private, wood-paneled clubs of New York City, I did it all. I hated my work—but I assumed that everyone else did, too. During these years of blowing and going, spending and spinning, there were moments of questioning myself and what my life had become; but for the most part, it would be almost a decade before I would really stand up and take notice.

My moment of clarity came in the most unexpected way. I had just landed at the Phoenix airport and had taken a taxi to the local site of the company for whom I was then working. My job, as it had evolved, was primarily designing and executing corporate layoffs. It was quite an operation, as we had to orchestrate the cutting of final paychecks, off-site counseling centers, and security escorts for the dismissed employees. All of it had to happen like clockwork, with as little impact as possible to the remaining workforce. If we did our jobs well, those fated employees seemed to just vanish into thin air—one moment you see him sitting in his cubicle and the next his desk is clean and not a trace of his existence remains behind to trouble the survivors.
As I walked into the lobby of the office building where I and my staff would be laying off employees the next day, the receptionist, whom I had never met, looked up and quite calmly asked, “Are we clubbing baby seals today?”

Within two weeks of that day, I quit that job—and I ended my corporate career. I had been trained as a psychologist, not to be a compassionate executioner. Money, achievement, success—these things didn't matter so much anymore. I needed to find something meaningful and passionate, and I had no time to waste. I was already more than five years past the date of my original diagnosis, and the accepted belief at the time was that one might have maybe seven years after seroconversion before succumbing to full-blown AIDS. If I was going to change my life, I had to act quickly.

I began volunteering a few hours a week for a local AIDS organization that provided counseling to both patients with AIDS and their families. Once a week I would veer off the highway that had once taken me to my job in Silicon Valley and drive to the cheerless halls of San Francisco General's AIDS Ward. There I would sit by the bed of a patient, and we would talk about life, love, family, and death. Even in the darkest of those encounters, there was something in the eyes of those who lingered between breath and stillness that brought me peace. I could sense their deep gratitude that someone had taken time to listen—really listen to their stories. In each hollow cheek and trembling bed, I saw myself, knowing that it was only a matter of time before I would be there, too. There was something magical about touching the pain buried within the hearts of these young men that seemed to help them, and it left an indelible impression on me.

Whatever it was that happened on those evenings, I knew that I had to find a way to get more of it into my life. To say it brought
me joy may seem too strong, but it was most definitely a humble and abiding contentment. It would be years later that I would come to understand that it was this deeply abiding feeling of fulfillment that was my best guide to finding a passionate life.