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Cultivating Sacred Sex

by John Ballew

Our North American culture is goofy when it comes to sexuality. On the one hand, sexuality and sexual information is suppressed, perhaps because we confuse ignorance with innocence. On the other hand, sex is everywhere--used to sell toothpaste, brain-dead television sitcoms, soft drinks and cigarettes.

Our culture is also goofy when it comes to spirituality. The scientific age in which we live has us satisfied only when we have broken everything down into the smallest parts possible. "Mystery" has come to mean a failure to understand or research thoroughly enough. Mainstream religion - meaningful for many, but a compromised resource for lesbians and gay men - seems equally uncomfortable with the puzzles of life's meaning at the end of this millennium. Despite all our knowledge, we find ourselves adrift.

Sexuality in America is more often associated with entertainment (think "movies") or medicine (think "Viagra") than with spirituality. This reflects our nation's Puritan Protestant roots. We have a prurient but ambivalent attitude toward sex, and we may find it unimaginable that other traditions take a very different approach. Tantra, for instance, understands the cultivation of erotic energy as a pathway to the Divine. Taoism views the raising and cultivation of erotic energy as a pathway to health. A Cherokee friend told me once that in his language, the phrase for masturbation means "to pour honey on the heart." Most of us did not grow up in families that talked about pouring honey on our hearts, if they talked about sex with us at all!

Where is the mystery in our sexuality?

Gay folk may have more insight into the potential sacredness of sexuality than others. For us, the journey into our sexuality has often resulted in growing in our self understanding, acknowledging our identity, taking action in the world, finding our place. We experience revelation in our sexuality as well as the potential for communion.

Many of us have felt the touch of the Divine in the touch of another. Whether simply the joy of connecting with another eager body or the sharing of intimacy and passion with our beloved, we can acknowledge the mystery involved in the erotic. Despite our cultural conditioning, we intuit that something uniquely powerful is upon us.

As children we explored our bodies with joy and without inhibition. Left to their own devices, kids play doctor and touch one another without shyness. Boys bathing find their hands travel predictably to their genitals, there to explore sensations and the body's delights. Judgment is not a part of this process unless an adult is around to shame the child.

As we enter puberty the sensations of the body and the meaning of our exploration changes. What is erotic becomes more powerful. In this culture, it often becomes more dangerous as well. Boys anxious about their own bodies may project their fears on each other and wound one another. For queer kids, the simple delight of sharing touch with another boy may be replaced by taunts and name-calling. Our bodies and our sexuality become problems for us and we learn to dissociate ourselves from our sexuality. Some of us disdain our bodies or turn our physical selves or those of others into mere objects.

Many of us enter adulthood with a high degree of ambivalence about our bodies and our sexuality. Joys of earlier years are replaced by disconnection between our spirit and our physical self. Sex becomes a performance or a test of our manhood. Any sense of the sacred is fleeting or gone completely. When erotic joy is gone, we wither and fragment.

The alternative is to seek pleasure in our own selves as a way of reconnecting with the mystery of our bodies, the mystery of Creation. Similarly, deepening our capacity for lasting physical intimacy with others requires us to look to our relationship with our selves first.

Consider making a date with yourself. Imagine touching your body the way you would want a lover to touch you. Experiment and explore with yourself as if you were touching your body for the first time, not the ten thousandth time. Instead of focusing on sexual release, make pleasure your only goal. Light candles. Burn incense. Warm some oil. Put on beautiful, sensual music. Perhaps start with a warm bath. Run your hands over your body. Touch your skin. Allow the oiling of your skin to be a sort of anointing--one of the oldest ways we humans have of honoring one another. Explore yourself with a mirror. Then close your eyes. See with your hands. Relax your breathing. Move your hips. Stretch. Let your hands travel to your genitals without hurry.

Imagine sex without a goal other than self-enchantment. How much pleasure will you allow yourself this time: 30 minutes? An hour? Maybe a second hour? Let the honey come to your heart in its own time. Breathe. Relax and smile. Savor the moment. Can you take your body by surprise, catch yourself off-guard with some little happiness?

Another process I like is something I call meditative masturbation. As you slowly pleasure your bodyself, focus on each sensation. Let go of thought and fantasy. Be present to yourself. Breathe consciously. Follow sensations around the body. A client of mine who uses seven-syllable mantras in his meditation chants, "This pleasure is my birthright." Let your touching slow to stillness if you would like, conserving your ejaculate in the Tantric or Taoist fashion. If you choose to ejaculate, take your time and allow yourself to do so in a state of total relaxation--not tensing your body, which restricts the sensation. Savor the stillness afterwards. What sensations drift into your consciousness? Is there a revelation here for you?

Gay Spirituality

by Tobias Schneebaum

[The following is an edited excerpt from Tobias Schneebaum's lecture, delivered to GSV at the Atlanta Friends Meeting House on May 29, 1997.]

It is no wonder that male American Indians who preferred marriage to men over marriage to women, lived as women, dressed as women and did all the chores associated with women; it is no wonder that they were considered to be spiritual beings, transmuted from humans to a higher state because they believed their sexuality allowed them insights into another world. It was a world of magic and mystery, one of clairvoyance and intelligence, as well as one with an instinct for life connected to both the heavens and the earth itself. It was (is) a way of seeing that ordinary men cannot approach....

These few examples [from Burma, India, New Guinea, etc.] give some idea of what many tribal people felt in the past about same-sex love and sexual intercourse. Some groups forbade it, others extolled it; still others felt it necessary to apologize for its existence and came to it through the back door (if you will forgive the allusion), excusing the lewdness and licentiousness of the spirits. Yet, it was tribal people who allowed me to come to the freedom I now feel about relationships with lovers and friends. I have passed the three-quarters of a century mark and am an old man. Even so, I continue to love the taste of cock as much now as I did fifty years ago.

I suppose I started out life as an ordinary queer, a fairy, a nancy-boy, whatever you want to call me. I lived in terror of being discovered in a compromising position, although I never believed there was anything immoral or sinful about what I was doing. Still, I knew enough not to declare myself to anyone except for the rare man with whom I found myself coupled. I thought that whatever my feelings might be at the moment, they would eventually go away so that I would naturally grow to a feeling of sexual love for women instead of for men. Of course, I would want to get married and would want children. Didn't everyone want these things? Isn't that what life is all about? Didn't I want to rid myself of loneliness, of finding my bed empty every night? Who ached more than I did when waking in the middle of a nightmare of the great void between me and the rest of the world? I was separated by an emptiness so deep, a chasm so wide it could not be bridged. I was wanting someone close to me, someone to touch and be touched by.

Those wasted years! Oh! those terrible times when I yearned for a man to come to me! Why was that peace and acceptance not permitted to me? If only I had known of tribal peoples who for centuries, for thousands of years, lived the life I needed. Why did no one ever tell me of an existence elsewhere where it was possible to fuck and be fucked, to hold and be loved? Why was it all hidden? Why was homosexuality considered an affliction, a disease, a cancer to be despised, rooted, out and punished?

I know that I was not alone in facing the world. There must be thousands right now who are slowly coming to the realization that we must accept ourselves for who and what we are. Those primitive people, those people, who were looked down upon, were my saving grace. It was they who lived the simple life, who encouraged my need for men, who took me out of the closet, gave me the world, saved me life and love. They gave me their whole body, their whole spirit and their spirituality in ways that still startle me when I think of it. I am no longer afraid of the world; I am no longer afraid of myself. I am free. They made me free, not necessarily by what they said but by their attitudes towards sex in all its varieties....

It was only among the Asmat that I was able to fulfill my expectations. The kind of love that I sought was right there to be had if only I had the courage to accept it. It was not the same love, compassion and passion that someone of the western world might offer. It was a whole other thinking process between two partners in an alliance, who shared lives, whether it was among the Navaho, those who practice Tantra, among the Asmat, or between two New Yorkers. In one sense it was the formal coming together of a pair of men committed to one another. In another sense, it was a spiritual affair, as well as one that is a down to earth affinity that is natural between them. I was enthralled, exalted by the discovery, spiritualized, if you will. The teacher's house or men's house in which I stayed turned into the altar of a great Renaissance cathedral right before my eyes. It was heart-breaking. There was then a special bond that Aipit offered me, bringing tears to my eyes at night as I lay thinking of how all this came to pass. It happened because I was in a society that gave me spiritual guidance and spiritual love.

Early on in my friendship with Aipit, a ritual took place that I see in retrospect as the beginning of my encounters with spirituality. I was in the men's house, asking questions of the carvers who were secretly working on seven huge ancestor poles for a feast soon to come to climax. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a group of what turned out to be fourteen men, all naked. I was wearing shorts at the time. The men came to me and lifted me up horizontally. They had begun to chant and yelp and grunt in unison, "Uh! Uh! Uh!" They carried me to one end of the men's house, turned, carried me to the other end, then carried me to the central fireplace, where they stopped, still grunting "Uh! Uh! Uh!" The man at my right bent down and began to suck my nose, moved to suck my earlobes, sucked my fingers one by one, sucked my nipples, opened my shorts and sucked my penis, sucked my toes one after the other. No sooner had that first man sucked my nipples when the second bent over me to suck my nose and proceeded down my body to suck the other extensions. I wasn't aware of the details of what was happening. I could see the basic structure of the men's house as I looked up. I was chilled; I was hot. There was darkness, with shafts of doorway light streaking through. Maybe I was in that cathedral with the elders naked before me, carrying me, sucking me. I envisioned the future and the past, all passing before me like a drowning man's life passing before him. In time, all fourteen men sucked upon my body parts. One after another, they were absorbing the essence of myself into their bodies and blood, licking the sweat, too, to fill themselves with my strength, smelling my body odors, wiping more sweat from my chest and rubbing it onto their own faces and chests. They were taking in my spirit and, in the taking, I found my own spirituality.