The loving power of attraction

I am a pervert impeded only by my respect for those I am attracted to.  I want to consume them like a delicious meal whose intense scent makes my tummy rumble, but it has to be voluntary.  It's really not fun unless the intimacy is a mutual desire to know each other, to protect and nourish each other.  There's nothing wrong with a bit of exuberant sweaty sexiness when everyone understands and is comfortable with its meaninglessness, but I'm reaching for something deeper.

Why am I sexually attracted to straight men?  Some masochistic desire to deny myself?  Some dangerous idea of a challenge?  Or maybe I know that when a straight man allows me to gently graze my fingers down the tender sides of his torso, or lightly touch my nose to the open pores of his neck in naked embrace, then the purpose of our encounter really is to communicate, to open ourselves, to touch another human being across the tortuous divide of our individual incarnations.  It is not enough for me to find someone whose peculiar fantasies match my own so that we can get each other off pleasantly for an hour or three.  I'm looking for something else, but I'm still letting my sexual desire guide me.

Perhaps our attractions, momentary though they often are, are deeper and more profound than we usually acknowledge.  Maybe our beings are interconnected in ways that we cannot fully know or comprehend.  Maybe beauty is a form of communication, and when someone is beautiful to us they are demanding our respectful attention.

I have the utmost respect for the messages my body sends me, surely the only reliable source of information about how to exist in this world.  When someone's beauty draws me towards him - I don't know why I am mostly attracted to men in this way - I feel an empowering surge of energy, love and focus.  I give this man a focused attention I would not bother with if my attraction had not drawn me towards him.  I try to breathe into the intensity of this feeling, to not scare him away in his civilised vulnerability, and whether I like it or not I respect him enough to not leap on him and consume him like an overripe mango or a stolen block of chocolate.  I look into his eyes and wait to see if he's brave enough to match my gaze.  I move towards him to see how proximity feels.  I want to touch him, I want to talk to him, I want to smell him, but what I want is not important.  What's important is that which moves between us.

During the summer, when I was strong, confident and full of lusty joy, a young man smiled at me at a festival and I was instantly in love.  I saw him leaping around like a big dumb kid, two metres tall, 19 years old, surely as horny as me.  One day I finally approached him, I gave him a head massage, he relented further into a back massage before we finally spoke.  That night, with my heart pounding and my genitals filling with warm blood, we snuggled together and talked.  He had a lot to share with me and for some reason I was the exact right person to tell.  For hours we talked and I listened joyously in the warmth emanating  from his clothed flesh.  He allowed me to press up against his unspoken but unambiguous boundaries and I was happy to give every particle of love that my attraction provoked.  When the conversation was finished he said goodbye and rushed off into the night.  Though I was still so horny I had to masturbate to relieve the tension, I felt totally satisfied that our connection had been completed, that the mutual moment that my sexual attraction had drawn me into was fulfilled.

Apparently we had a mutual need that his beauty made apparent to me, I confronted that beauty, uncertain of what would be required of me, but comfortable in our mutual ability to see and hear one another's needs and feelings.

So what if I develop a trusting friendship with a straight man with whom I am sexually attracted, whose painful and delicious beauty compels me to give him the attention I would otherwise not bother with?  Is my love real or am I just trying to get him naked?  Will he trust me that my love is stronger and more real than my perversion?  That my respect and desire are totally indistinguishable?  Can we fully embrace each other and what is emphatically real between us?  Or must we fear the confusion of moving beyond the cultural roles that are supposed to define our relationships, as if every needy, joyous and sacred moment we share can be correlated to a series of distinct categories?

I cannot relate to any of these categories, so if my behaviour disturbs you you have to tell me.  To me, every moment of genuine connection is something new, a step beyond a culture that separates with words from the world of experience.  It is entirely unknowable, rather it is tangible, we can smell it, and feel it in our belly.

If we feel safe, if we feel so inclined, we can draw closer together.  We can find a place where the state will not charge us with obscenity and we can enter fully into the surrender of trust and intimacy, whether sexual or emotional or linguistic.  In this moment, my perverse sexual fantasies are profoundly irrelevant, and yet it was my insatiable sexual attraction that drew me towards you initially.

Why do I call myself Faggot or Queer in this lifetime?  "Faggot" comes from the fagus tree, branches of which were used to burn witches or heretics at the height of European theocracy.  At this time "heretic" was indistinguishable from "homosexual" and so it is that faggots like me are the heretics of a culture that seeks to homogenise our diversity.  Even gays are supposed to get married and get mortgages now.

Having failed to destroy homosexuality the theocratic culture we all continue to perpetuate is seeking to draw all faggotness into its narrow bubble of normal.  They tell me my faggotness is supposed to separate me from the luminous beauty of your relative straightness.  I refuse.  I am not gay, the opposite of straight, I'm a faggot, which has no opposite.  Perhaps I'm lucky to not live in a time when the stake is my opposite and burns me at the state as a heretic.  Perhaps for this reason we need not be so brave to reach across the divide and touch each other.

Why do I call myself Queer?  Because my role in my tribe is to queer the straight, bend the rigid and blur the boundaries; to confuse the rational, to embody the ambiguity and to kiss you if you want me to.  I won't tell anyone.

sexual predator

When I was sitting next to a strong young man this afternoon it was not just his thighs expose below his shorts, but the heat and indifference of his presence that made my penis drip, as if it was salivating.

What does a man do with such a passionate experience of life?  Smoke weed and eat until those feelings are veiled in a bloated detachment, a borderline infirmity?

That's what these drugs are for, otherwise us men would be fighting and fucking each other constantly, am I right?

Or am I peculiar?  Merely a horny faggot or perceptive in the depth and intensity of my masculinity?

I saw the best minds of my generation numbed by electronic media, unable to escape their culture or their parents' nagging faces on the other side of the planet; who for one full year experienced life in all its undiluted intensity of confusion and clarity, only to fly thousands of kilometres in mere hours to the same adolescent bedroom where they began.

I want to drag them away one by one, as they fearlessly approach me.  I want to take them, through the natural path of their curiosity and their tendency towards ecstasy, into a world where their beauty is their currency and their strength and love and need for self-expression is their vocation and where I abandon them to fend for themselves in a world they are strong enough to navigate.

I want to selfishly consume their semen and in the process provoke them with the unavoidable intensity of a love that expects nothing.  I want to take their mind on journeys through media fundamentally different in intention, an antidote to alienation and distraction.

I want them to lead me out of intellectual caverns into bright open wilderness where we rediscover the experience of the human body and the terrestrial environment.

I demand communication in full honesty, with its complexity, its rejection and its earned calm peace.

I don't know when it's safe to be brave in rooms shrouded in etiquette, chatter and electricity.

For the last year I have insulated myself in my private paradise, with food, with literature, with philosophy, with denial of life, denial of the intensity of life, denial of the imperative nature of this moment, that this moment demands to be confronted, that we know what to do in this moment.

I do not want to be entertained anymore.  I do not want to be distracted.  I do not want comfort or convenience.  I do not want to have my own space in which I can develop as an individual.

I want to be violated.  I want my body to be violated.  I want my space to be violated.  I want my persona, my ideology, my habits, to be violated.

I want to possess the confidence to violate the beautiful men who beg me silently to violate them, if only so they can push me away, reject me, make me realise I am safe in rejection because rejection is real and when I am rejected I know I must leave and find a place where I am valued.

I am not an individual and I never have been.  It is clear to me now that my life is meaningless except in relation to my tribe.

I feel strong and confident.  There are still barriers to be broken, but I am ready.  I have nothing further to wait for.  We know what to do, because here we are doing it.  We need each other, we cannot do it alone.

I experience this world only through the conduit of my body, because this is the extent to which I am manifest in this world.  My body is like a glove of total immersion in a world of total darkness.  In this darkness, as this form moving through space, I encounter warm bodies and realise that I too am a warm body.  Nothing is more compelling than this moment we discover each other in the darkness.

The moment overwhelms me with intensity and the scope of its possibility and I choose whether to eat myself out of this moment, or breathe into it.

I'm no monk.  I'm not citizen living in a constructed universe.

My universe is chaotic and divine.  The divinity of the universe I inhabit is blurred and messy and beyond my powers of comprehension.

From here I know anything is possible, but right now only the next thing is possible.

Only what is necessary and appropriate.

My undeniable hypocrisy and the closing limits of my ignorance draw me back into the real world from this linguistic world in which I can hope for perfect clarity.

Listen to an audio recording of my performance of this piece at Voices in the Attic, Ferdydurke, Melbourne, 2015-04-28.

A New Heaven and a New Earth in Sydney

I seem to be more attractive in a state of complete detachment.  As I brisk walk down the street plugged in to my mp3 player I am completely immersed in the Swedish lessons I am listening to.  I am listening very carefully and repeating the language they are introducing me to.  I barely take a few quick moments to direct my attention out into the world to make sure I know where I am going, or to keep half an eye out for the street down which I should turn.  I pass hundreds of people and barely notice their reactions.  Perhaps they find it amusing or confusing that someone is speaking clear simple sentences in some foreign language with a tone as if they are speaking to an idiot.  But the day is hot and I am wearing only a pair of shorts, no shoes or shirt.  My body is exposed to the weather and the world.  A young woman whose beauty deserves more than the attention I give her is trying to elicit donations for the Red Cross.  When she approaches me I assume she will ask me for money, but she asks me if I am going to the beach and then admits that she would love to come with me.  I invite her silently with my hand as I brisk walk away and we both smile and we both know that she's not going to come with me.  Again I am completely immersed in the world of abstract Swedish language until I am stopped again by a couple of guys who tell me they are making a video for a Christmas party and they need me to perform for it.  I give them two minutes of attention and enthusiasm, receive their brief thanks, and continue walking at the same pace as before.  I finish the "tape" and begin the same lesson again.  I am profoundly excited at how fast it is possible to learn a new language.

I am a part of this capitalist world but not so identified with its seriousness.  I am a hypocrite for criticising it with such moral superiority and then desiring its objects.  I desire its food and literary objects.  I am not one who is pathetic enough to be defined by my low economic status.  The fact that I have very little money and currently have no income whatsoever does not mean that I have to buy house brand noodles and white bread for nutritional support.  I desire these superfoods like chia seeds, goji berries, unhulled tahini and New Zealand manuka honey.  I don't see why I would muck around with anything else simply because it is cheap.  There are ways of shopping, of course, that many people are not aware of.  There are now cloth bags which are reused and increasingly common.  One can simply shop with one of these green cloth bags, putting all their items into the bag with the most expensive items on the bottom.  When one reaches the checkout one simply digs as deeply into the bag as finances allow.  Sometimes only the cheapest two items are scanned through the checkout and the rest simply remain in the bag.  Life is more simple than people are telling us.  Of course I would never do this because it is against the law and I face the prospect of an awkward confrontation; and it is morally evil to enjoy the pleasures of the Earth's nutritious plants without financially supporting multinational corporations.

Whatever the city, I can behave in as unusual a manner as I like, and it is only my shame or self-consciousness that will attract negative attention.  If I perform my strangenesses with complete self-confidence I will radiate an attraction that will draw all sorts of beauty into my life.

The city is a place where we live so violently close to one another that at any moment we can create the experience we want and need by finding precisely the right person to share this experience with.  Perhaps this is the real deep-seated reason for the modern tendency towards urbanity.  The world is speeding up, time and space are expanding and we all need to contribute to the exponential increase in novelty in human society.  This tendency we are all manifesting will lead to a collective catharsis because as a universe we need an eschaton in order to be reborn.  Together we will create the global experience we need to experience.  In exactly the same way that individuals carefully subconsciously select each other because we know the experience we need, so the collective mind of all life is bringing about the experience we all need to share in order to destroy the veil of separation and bring us back to our god.

This brings me to my favourite Australian city, which only exists for two weeks per year; one week over Easter and one week over New Year.  I don't see Confest as a festival so much as a city.  A festival is a temporary distraction from life, an amusement or an entertainment.  Confest, however, can be seen as bringing you intensely into the reality of your life in a deeper and more immediate manner than is usually experienced.  As an "alternative" event, Confest is not an alternative to society at all.  Confest is a city, Confest is what a city can and should be, Confest is practice for what the cities will become, once we have achieved the catharsis that will bring about the manifestation of our joy.  The intensity and delight of this world is available now for those who want it and for those who somehow know that in the years to come they will be ready for the inevitable.

A New Heaven and a New Earth have been promised to us and the city is making it happen.  Thank you, Sydney.