Emptiness and Grace
William Stewart
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WAS THE SENSE of scarcity there all along? I can’t say for sure, though I know that I was an insecure and lonely child. Dependent on my mother’s overprotective love, with a socially awkward father and no siblings to butt up against, I spent much of my time in solitary fantasy. I was fascinated by the elderly, and preferred the company of adults to that of other children, spouting voluble monologues to the grown-ups whenever I wasn’t lost in moody withdrawal. I largely avoided playing with my classmates, shunned anything rough-and-tumble, and was sufficiently uncoordinated that my worried parents sent me to various doctors to see if there was something diagnosibly wrong.
In hindsight I feel sure that body-shame was embedded in my psyche from a very early age. I was a chubby child, teased for my weight and ungainliness, and from my parents I absorbed a visceral certainty that the body was basically a regrettable encumbrance, whose primary function was to cart around a brain.
The one physical activity that I eagerly embraced was sex-play. I started playing doctor with a couple of other boys from my neighborhood when I was eight or nine years old, and soon thereafter formed a “club” that met in a windowless bicycle shed in our back yard. There, with flashlights shining on our little erections, I knew that I was where I wanted to be.
Puberty hit fast and hard, and by the time I was twelve pimples were erupting across my face, chest and back. But soon I found a way to escape the unpleasant aspects of physicality, while also experiencing previously unimaginable pleasure, after a classmate told me the secret of masturbation (“you rub it”). Here was a place I could go to escape my feelings of scarcity and isolation, my body-shame and awkwardness as an incarnate being—paradoxically, by engaging an aspect of my physical self with an intensity that I’d never experienced in any other realm before. This koan, of how masturbation enabled me to both connect with and dissociate from my embodied self, is central to this narrative, and is with me still.
During adolescence, my need for refuge grew in response to my mother’s neediness. Her understandable concern for my psychic health was compounded by the emotional impoverishment of her own life, and she routinely invaded my private space in her search for reassurance. Furthermore, perhaps in resonance with the pressure of her anxiety, I had conjured up an “internalized parent” in my head who was far more judgmental than either of my indulgent real-world parents ever dreamed of being. As a result, the only place I could go to escape my mother’s worry, on the one hand, and my own self-censorship, on the other, was into solitary sexual arousal, where sensory pleasure was so intoxicating that it trumped my fretful mind.
Boarding school brought me much-needed distance from my mother’s invasiveness, but other sources of angst surfaced soon enough. After a summer sleepover when I was fifteen—my first experience of actually sharing a bed and bodily intimacy with another, as distinct from show-and-tell sex play—I developed an obsession with a classmate named Burr, which was to persist for many years. Henceforth my burgeoning sexuality would be tightly entwined with emotional fixation, as other aspects of reality became subsumed in the black hole of need that I experienced at my core.
Burr’s breezy dismissal of my adoration and sexual hunger, coming soon after our initial electrifying connection, reinforced my sense of being innately undesirable, and I became morbid and maudlin with unfulfilled longing. Eventually I transferred my dependency to other objects of desire, but the dream of romantic fusion remained the same, as I yearned for someone, anyone, who could fill the emptiness inside. Not surprisingly, my fumbling attempts to find affection and sex never offered any but the most unsatisfactory results, presumably because my need was so all-consuming as to scare potential partners from a mile away. My only solace lay in solosex—but even though I turned constantly to this precious and tightly-guarded secret pleasure, it provided only transitory respite from my underlying sense that life would be an endless hollow purgatory unless I could find
a lover who would somehow make me right.
I spent the first half of my twenties in a fog of melancholy and marijuana smoke, groping feebly for ways of coping with my sorry state. After hearing some of Alan Watts’ brilliant and insightful lectures on the radio, I decided that I was a “spiritual seeker,” imagining that my loneliness and despair would somehow be transmuted into wisdom with this new identity. I told myself that I would practice non-attachment, and bummed around Europe for the better part of a year, lusting after beautiful unattainable men and feeling like a Joni Mitchell song (“so this is how I hide the hurt, as the road leads cursed and charmed…”). Finally I decided to go to art school, on the premise that being a calligrapher would fit well with my self-image as a vaguely monastic artist-scholar in the classical Chinese mode. By day I honed my lettering and graphics skills, by night I retreated into a lavish lair of masturbatory escape.
Much as I tried to embrace this solitary path, I knew that I hungered for something more. One day, browsing in a leftie bookstore, I stumbled across a few back issues of RFD, a magazine created by and catering to counter-culture queers, and realized that I might actually have spirit-kin, somewhere out there in the larger world. I decided to move to San Francisco, in order to immerse myself in the gay community fermenting there. Leaning on a tenuous thread of long-distance friendship, I secured a place to live, and arrived in June of 1979, when I was 28.
This was just a couple of months before the first “Spiritual Conference of Radical Faeries,” organized by Harry Hay and his associates, and announced in flyers that my housemates brought into our shared home. All three of them went to the Arizona desert to attend, and even though I chose to stay behind and have my long hair cut short in hopes of feeling more sexy, I was soon immersed in the faerie culture that was springing up in San Francisco. I savored the sense of community, and felt as though I’d found my tribe at last.
Still, sexual intimacy continued to elude me. A new and troubling awareness had arisen alongside my generic body-shame and insecurity about looks, making connection seem more problematic than ever. As I learned more about what my peers were seeking, a powerful sense of stigma surfaced in my psyche, because I didn’t want to do what everyone else seemed eager for. In a culture where anal sex was the ultimate desideratum, with fellatio as a kind of second-best alternative, I realized that I was deeply resistant to the idea of penetration, and really only wanted to masturbate with other men. I developed a deep-seated fear that, if and when reciprocal attraction actually showed up, I would have to reveal this shameful truth so as not to get caught up in something I didn’t want, and would experience humiliation as a result.
Naturally, this anxiety reinforced the old familiar patterns, though I continued to seek out intimacy all the same. Eventually, despite my inhibitions, I managed to forge a couple of reasonably satisfying relationships that lasted for a few weeks or months apiece—but more importantly, from the perspective of my overall trajectory, I discovered anonymous sex.
I came to it late, in comparison with many of my generation who created the gay counterculture of the 70’s: it wasn’t until I turned thirty that I began exploring the possibilities in earnest. So I entered this arena, too, shadowed by scarcity consciousness, because everybody else had already had more than I would ever get, or so I believed in the dark corners of my psyche, where I was sure that
I was hopelessly undesirable.
Of course my squeamishness about hot and sweaty physicality was operative here as well, but parks and sex clubs offered a freedom of movement that incipient relationship didn’t. In the cruisy venues that I frequented, I could adopt a pose of aloofness, and mostly watch from the sidelines. After all, how better to anticipate rejection and avoid unwanted interaction than to feign indifference? Such places always offered an escape route, so that if the man I desired wasn’t available—or wanted to do what I didn’t—I could quit the scene and maintain my sense of control. In effect, my forays became voyeuristic masturbation sessions, where instead of looking at photographs, I could watch living, breathing pornography. No need to risk disappointment—I’d hide my insecurity under a cloak of nonchalance, watch the pretty boys until they hooked up with others, hopefully get my orgasm at some good moment, and tell myself I wasn’t craving more.
As it happened, my first ventures into the world of casual sex coincided with the appearance of HIV in our midst. My experience during the early years of the epidemic was paradoxical: whereas many found their reality completely up-ended, for me it was in some ways more of the same, in that what had previously felt scarce now felt simply scarcer. Of course I was dismayed by the stories of gruesome deaths, and the mix of homophobic vitriol and willful blindness that they provoked in the larger world; but since the evidence indicated that HIV was transmitted through bodily fluids, and since I was turned off by sucking and fucking, my own habits were largely unaffected. Indeed, ironically enough, I owe my survival to those very biases that felt—and still feel—shamefully jejune in a community that prides itself on sexual adventurousness. For me, being “good” entailed no sacrifice of pleasure; the penalty lay in feeling deficient as a gay man, on account of my narrow range of tastes.
My tastes may have been narrow, but I certainly indulged them deeply. Still, even as I spent untold hours in tranced-out cruising, I continued to dream about relationship, convinced that only a significant other could ultimately fill the aching void within. The real shift away from that fixation didn’t take place until circumstance intervened, through what in retrospect feels like the agency of grace. It wasn’t a move away from sexual compulsivity, but at least I was able to liberate myself from the visceral belief that romantic love was the key to happiness. How I came to be freed from that illusion is one of the archetypal stories of my life.
It revolves around two primary relationships that I had in my thirties and early forties, the first with John and the second with Steve. John, when I met him, seemed like my dream come true, and I fell for him hard, though our time together was anything but smooth. All my neediness came out when we started seeing each other: I always wanted more, he knew it, and began to pull away as a result, even as we were getting closer. My possessiveness scared him, and when we broke up, after two years of addictively emotional tug-of-war, I experienced the most devastating grief of my life. We said that we’d stay friends, but every time I’d call him, hoping for a little contact, I got the message that he wanted less, not more. I’d beg for a half a loaf, and he’d grudgingly offer a quarter; I’d wait for what I considered a sufficiently long interval, and ask for just a quarter this time, only to discover that I’d have to settle for crumbs.
Finally, in desperation, I surrendered: it was the one and only time in my life when I’ve truly bottomed out, as the twelve-steppers say, and come to a place of saying to the universe, I cannot do this any more. No matter how painful the alternative may be, it cannot be worse than the pain I’m in now. I put myself in your hands, do with me what you will. And what came to me was a vow: I will never initiate contact with this person again. If he contacts me, that’s a different story; but if he doesn’t, I’m prepared to go to my grave without attempting further connection, because I know that
I cannot will it into being. It’s out of my control; I put it on the altar, and turn it over to the cosmos, whatever that may mean.
My grief remained, my emptiness remained, but I’d done what I needed to do in order to reclaim my life. And then, when the backwash from this turbulent journey had hardly begun to settle, I got involved with Steve. This new relationship seemed to offer everything I’d yearned for with John but hadn’t gotten. It felt comfortable and effortless, there was none of the drama that characterized so much of my time with John. We settled into an easy coupledom, and for the first time in my life, I moved in with a lover, and made a home with him. Perhaps the sense of scarcity at the center of my being would finally meet abundance, and be stilled.
I’d been with Steve for a year or two when John resurfaced in my life. By this time, friends were dying all around, and memorial services were commonplace. At one of them, I looked across the room and realized John was there too. I gulped, and tried to remember to breathe, especially when, after the service was over, he approached and asked if we could talk. I hadn’t vowed to avoid contact if he initiated it, so I listened with pounding heart as he recounted his news. He’d gotten an AIDS diagnosis a month before, he’d broken off his relationship with Robert (someone we’d both known through faerie circles, and paradoxically, even more prone to possessiveness and jealousy than I), he’d gotten together with Brian (another mutual friend from faeriedom, whom I’d always liked and trusted) and with Brian’s support, he’d realized that he had unfinished business with me. “I want to bury the hatchet,” were his words.
Whereupon began a fragile and tentative process of reconciliation, which gradually gathered momentum as we reestablished trust. Or rather, as we built a trust that had never existed between us when we were lovers, because I’d been too needy, and he’d defended himself against me in response. But during the interim, I’d renounced the impulse to possess, and so was simply available for whatever happened, without expectation of outcome. Luckily, he had a few years of reasonably good health, so that by the time he got really sick, we’d developed a deeper intimacy than we’d ever had before, even though we were both with other partners, and there was no breath of sexual energy in our friendship. Of course I was saddened when he died, but I was also grateful that I’d ultimately found grace in the most pivotal relationship of my adult life.
But this was only half of what led to my recovery from love addiction. During the years of John’s decline, I’d felt my relationship with Steve growing increasingly hollow. As the joy of new connection wore off, I watched his temperamental preference for certainty over adventure come to the fore. My seemingly happy marriage was turning into a simulacrum of success: no fights, but likewise no exploration, just the anodyne comfort of the known. And so, over time, I came to see
that I needed to get out.
It took me a couple of years to initiate the breakup, because I knew that it would cause a lot of hurt to Steve, but there was no question in my mind that it was what I needed to do. Making this decision completed an arc that began with my infatuation with Burr, back in boarding school, and reached its climax in my renunciation of John. Having found with Steve some version of what I’d always wanted with John, then having been rewarded for my renunciation by John’s unsought return, and finally having viscerally realized that I’d rather be single than in a lackluster partnership, I was finally free of the belief that I needed relationship to make me whole.
But this story has a paradoxical corollary. Even as I embraced my single status, eager for a future without the scaffold of coupledom, I pursued my secret life as a solo sex junkie as obsessively as ever. Throughout my years of partnering, whether with Steve, with John, or in the handful of other relationships I’d attempted along the way, I’d never abandoned it, and had kept it hidden from everyone except my therapist and a couple of trusted friends. I did attempt a stint at Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, but soon realized that I wasn’t ready to change my ways, so it made no sense to continue.
It was a well-controlled addiction; my assessment was that it neutralized maybe ten or fifteen percent of the energy that I’d otherwise have available for other things, but aside from that, it didn’t seem to have a lot of a negative impact. I’d pursued my calligraphy career until the frustrations outweighed the rewards, whereupon I’d embarked on a master’s program in linguistics. When I was still with John, I’d become a volunteer with the Shanti Project, offering emotional support to people with AIDS and their loved ones. I’d also done a bit of faerie organizing, though I’d disengaged from that reality when I’d gotten involved with Steve—in part because of the drugs and drama, in part because he wasn’t interested and I was attempting a bourgeois marriage. But I still did artwork, maintained numerous friendships, and generally had a more or less reasonable life.
Indeed, a big part of my habit’s seductiveness lay in its constraints: it offered both escape and control. Whereas in my teens and twenties my malaise had seemed to permeate everything, by the time I turned forty I was doing a very good job of compartmentalizing. Even as I liberated large tracts of my psyche from inadequacy and dependence, I was sweeping my remaining messy unresolved stuff into the quadrant of sex addiction, where the toxins in my psyche were effectively compressed.
The conundrum of this situation was never clearer than at gatherings. I had reconnected with a subset of my queer-spirit tribe as I was leaving Steve, having been steered towards a group called the Billies who were reputed to be more grounded than the faeries and thus seemed like a good fit. And indeed it felt like a wonderful homecoming, when in heart circle I announced that I’d broken up with my partner of six years and had come to the gathering in order to reclaim the thread of my authentic life. But I felt disinclined to engage with sexuality there—in part because I still had a goodly amount of insecurity about my appearance, but more significantly, because I’d fetishized dissociation, and also because I felt that if anyone really knew what I liked, they’d see it as repressed, twisted, defective, and/or laughable. Thus, unlike my many brothers for whom gatherings were spaces of erotic possibility, I experienced them as rare extended periods when, through some combination of resignation and preference, I put sex-obsession on the shelf, and focused on heart connection instead.
Though I still savored opportunities for anonymous public cruising, these became dramatically rarer when I moved back to what had been my childhood summer home on Martha’s Vineyard in the mid-late ’90s, a few years after I broke up with Steve. Once setted there, I became a virtuous citizen, served on the board of the local environmental advocacy organization, worked with the oral history project, made art, gardened, and maintained a chronic masturbation habit on the side. I continued to travel cross-country once or twice a year to attend Billy gatherings, but for a long time I was uncertain as to whether I would ever again make my home in community with others of my queer-spirit tribe, as I had done during my early years in San Francisco.
Finally, late in 2008, I came to the realization that if I was ever going to pursue that dream, I needed to begin the quest, because otherwise inertia would win. I renewed my ties with the larger faerie tribe soon thereafter, at the winter gathering at Breitenbush, and in doing so initiated a chapter in my life which continues to this day. It’s full of rewarding new friendships, including several with men twenty, thirty and even forty years younger than I am, which I treasure despite the heartache that they sometimes entail. There’s been a certain amount of relapse into patterns of love-addiction, as well as lots of swooning over youth and beauty, but overall I feel like I’m right on track with my life—and I know that I still have work to do around my quirky sexuality, as it’s evolved over sixty-odd years.
Which brings me back to the paradox that I’ve already mentioned, of how my particular flavor allows me both to inhabit my physicality and to escape it at the same time. Much of its power derives from the fact that when I focus exclusively on genital sensation, I can ignore body-image, loneliness, and the complexity of real connection. Embarrassed and shamed at an early age for being a moony, maladjusted kid, I became fixated on self-constraint: put it all in the lock-box, and savor the intensity. In a kinesthetic corollary, I’ve eroticized a preference for keeping my clothes on during arousal and orgasm, and also for holding my piss at the same time. The pressure of an erection in snug jeans with a full bladder is now a primary source of pleasure, as is postponement of ejaculation for as long as possible.
No doubt my fondness for remaining clothed for sex—both public and solitary—relates to a desire for invisibility. I’m happy enough for my arousal to be seen, but my body is something I’d rather keep hidden, even from myself. Let me fantasize about the beautiful young, let me watch from behind a screen, let me look at ever more porn, but keep the risk of exposure at bay. I’ll act cool, squirt semen down the leg of my jeans when no one is looking, and walk away as if nothing had happened.
The pattern began when I was a lonely adolescent, and felt like my penis was my only friend. Over the decades it’s hardened into scar tissue, both sustaining and constricting the movement of my life. It’s my secret room, where nothing can reach me. Sometimes I feel like the dragon in the children’s tale, sitting on my hoard of treasure: it’s mine, I gloat, all mine, and I don’t want to share it with anybody.
All the sickness that I’ve absorbed from the larger culture is concentrated here. The consumerism and exploitation that I condemn with every ounce of my intelligence and heart have free rein in this sterile room, where I rip through vast swaths of glossy virtual anatomy, always wanting more.
Racism, elitism, looksism: all by-products of rapacious exploitation, and as someone committed to dismantling empire, I strive to purge them from my psyche. Yet in my secret bunker, I swoon for Hitler Youth—not for Nazi paraphernalia, which does nothing for me, but for the arrogance of the runway model, whose attitude mirrors the disdain I feel for my own corporeal self. This is how internalized homophobia still has its claws in me: deep in my subconscious, I can’t believe that anyone would want to be with me in this dumpy, hairy, doughy body for which I never could imagine feeling love.
In truth, at this stage of my life, part of me believes that it’s not appropriate for me to be sexual with other people—on account of my age, but even more, on account of my being too enmeshed in my familiar ways. In some ways it seems like the universe has offered me a bargain: relinquish any expectation or hope of sexual intimacy, and in return, have rewarding friendships and a vivid erotic relationship with myself. I know it’s self-limiting and defeatist, but to some degree, I’m invested in this schema nevertheless.
And so I vanish into neverland, where I can lose my sense of physical encumbrance in a miasma of engorged genitals. Here, I’m as haughty as the objects of my fixation. I examine and discard them, one after another; there’s always the chance of a better specimen in the next frame. It’s materialism gone so far as to become its opposite: I’ve so tightly boxed and fetishized my lust that I lose connection with the only material that really matters—our all-embracing mother earth, and this imperfect incarnation, in which I am part of her.
So, here’s my koan: how do I honor who I am, while also recognizing how my habits have and haven’t served me? What, if anything, do I want to change, and what do I want to keep? My self-centered, tightly-torqued, dissociated eroticism has been a precious ally over the years, and yet at the same time, I know it’s a delusion, to think that I can escape the confines of my animal embodiment. And for all my messed-up shadow stuff, that’s where I really want to be—in the blessed ache of being alive in this ever-dying, ever-a’borning world of transient matter and eternal spirit. My journey with sexuality is a key part of that quest, and I pray for the willingness to embrace it fully.
