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ON GAY MEN OUR LOVES, OUR LIVES, and OUR DREAMS
It’s every gay man’s dream to make passionate love to himself, though I don’t mean that in the most literal of ways. Indeed, just as in our everyday lives we find ourselves living betwixt and between, so, too, is it true when it comes to understanding the language of our dreams. If you were to ask a dozen men what it would mean to be able to auto-fellate, you’d probably get just as many different responses. But the more universal symbol – that of an erect penis – and its underlying theme – one of creativity and generativity, a fount from which the seed of life itself flows – is, at bottom, what such a dream is all about. I mean, in this sense, to have your penis resting on your own tongue indicates the experience of tasting one’s own passion, your own unique nature, personal power in life. To actually chart a course with your dreams leads to nothing short of that, reclaiming along the way all the disparate parts of yourself which have been lost, or set aside as a result of growing up gay in a non-gay world. We call this Coming Out Inside. Take for example the dream of a guy in his late 20’s, who I’ll call Michael, in which he finds himself looking in a mirror – a common motif in which the dream is reflecting back something about himself. What does Michael see? His hair is styled like Davey Jones, the lead singer from that old pop-rock group, The Monkeys, and he wears hip-hugging jeans just like David Cassidy on The Partridge Family show. It’s a short, simple dream taking him back to when he used to watch these two cute Teen-Beat idols – both named David - when they were first run on TV. Michael was in the 8th grade back then, just turned 14 - a time of youthful imperatives, of pimples and puberty and things. And he had a neighbor friend from down the block. Like in the dream, his name was David, too. “We grew up together,” Michael said, and with that the dream unfolds. You see, that summer, back when The Monkeys topped the charts, Michael shared a room with his friend David at his family’s lakefront, country lodge. One day after swimming Michael made his way back to their room to change out of his dripping trunks, where he barged right in to find David masturbating, just short of shooting off. Their eyes met in one brief instant of confused, turbulent adolescent horror before Michael stepped out and quickly closed the door. No monkeying around here. Neither of them ever said a word. Yet, hiding one’s sexuality – homosexuality to be exact – doesn’t mean it does not exist. To be sure, for telling the story made him recall yet another dream – this time from that same night some 15 years in the past. Michael dreamed he was wrestling naked with David and he had his first nocturnal emission. He was, of course, wrestling with a healthy coming to awareness about sexuality and about his being gay. At 14 years of age it was an appropriate time for all of that. Yet there were two Davids on the lake that summer, just as there were two Davids in Michael’s dream, and for the month that Michael spent there, he and the other David met and spent all their time together. If they were a guy and a girl, or two guys in a different time, they would have been summer loves with all the rituals of adolescence, the rites of initiation, the normal fumbling processes of growing up. As it was, however, the closet doors were not yet opened and, as is true for so many gay men, Michael was denied his age-wise rites of passage. Lacking that, and as yet unaware that he was even gay, he was left with dating girls. Nothing against the girls, mind you, but they were always lackluster affairs, perfunctorily smashing their lips together, feebly grinding their hips. Somehow it never compared to dipping in the lake with the two Davids, the currents swirling round Michael’s penis, lurking hard, just under cover of the waters. So how come he’s having this dream, and recalling another, some 15 years after the fact? On one level, it’s about homophobia – internalized homophobia – relating the first time Michael denied his gay identity, even to himself. On another, it’s about emotional development, or the lack thereof, and the consequences of that in his daily life. For many gay men denied these rites of passage, the ripple effects can be felt for many years to come, be they the subtle fear of openly acknowledging attractions, a reticence to display affection, or otherwise posing behind a cool demeanor or defensively setting one’s self apart. We lose ourselves bit by bit in hiding from the world. Or perhaps we go to the opposite extreme - a wild swing of the pendulum - sucking and fucking everything that exists. It’s a solvent for isolation, one way of moving beyond the normal bounds to unite with someone else. Indeed, sexuality can be very effective for that – literally, “eat me.” And then you pull up your pants and move on, because it might get kind of confusing or scary if you lack the adequate relational and intimacy skills to carry on. Now, don’t get me wrong. Beyond the romantic and sexual ideal of love, there’s much to be said in favor of the impulse of desire rising to a good old nasty fuck. Physical intimacy and the pleasure thereof is a vital elixir of life. But sometimes after we’ve lost ourselves in the arms of our umpteenth lover – divine as that might be - we may find that we’re left, like Michael was in his outer world at the time he dreamed the two Davids, with nothing else, not even himself. That is, he had come apart like a teenage puppy, operating with the emotional equivalence of a 14 year old - precisely the end result of not having had the proper training, so to speak, the first time round the block. And so, he began the belated process of building his own emotional center, starting from the inside out. Soon, gone were the teenage fantasy pin-ups to be replaced by different kinds of dreams: sexy, young men of his own age, worked out and reclining “free of worries and in peace” on a dreamtime beach, including one gorgeous, pregnant young man in particular. That’s right. As Michael relates it, “I knew he was pregnant, and I sensed the fertile power in his belly and his bulging pubic area.” With this dream of the pregnant man, Michael’s seed has been planted in the darndest of places – inside Michael himself - and has now begun to take form in the creation of something else. As yet unborn, it will surely come. Indeed, once you taste the fruit of fairyland, you never come back untransformed. Your dreams, as it were, will out. All you need to do is call them forth. ________________________________________ * All dreams are authentic and are cited with permission of the dreamers. Some dream series have been compiled using dreams from different individuals as the means to depict themes and dream motifs commonly found in gay men’s dreams. * If you would like your dreams considered for discussion in future articles, pleasesubmit them to DREAMS, P.O. Box 93133, Los Angeles, CA 90093, or e-mail them to DREAMS. Please include contact information. |
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