UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

A year or two after deciding that I shouldn't act on half my desires, I was walking down a small street in the Big City and passed a lamp-post with a flyer glued to it. In retrospect, I think it was probably my first encounter with Tom of Finland. I definitely remember the pecs that looked like they had been inflated with a bike pump, the magnified (not to say inflamed) nipples, the infantile face behind the hyper-masculine five-o-clock shadow, the incredible, glistening musculature, the bulging crotch. In the first flush of living by the law, I reacted on a conscious level with anger and scorn, though I am sure that the degree of revulsion had something to do with a connection to what is charmingly referred to as the "reptilian brain", a connection I could not then really take on board and live. Around the same time, I remember getting a kind of electric shock at a college posting featuring a cartoon of a lion mounting a goateed hunter from behind in the savanna, so it's not like I was in a state of grace.

Ten years after my conversion experience, six years after my wedding, and some three years after the birth of our oldest son, I was far from home on a business trip, wrestling as I always did with all the old demons that rose in full force as soon as I was on my own. There, in a discount book store that I had to pass every day on the way to work from my apartment and on the way home, I found the Taschen Tom collection, and realized that this was dynamite -- for me at least. At the time I thought I was doing pretty well not to go at it right there in the store, or buy the book and go home and eat it page by page. But if I had had any illusions that my conscious decision was not at war with nature, they were stripped away that day. A year later, and another extended stay out of town brought me face to face with my overwhelming desire for a man I had to watch at work day after day. Visiting an old friend on a break, I said that I was being faced with what a terrible person I was in the most painful way; she refused to accept it. She knew otherwise, she said, and said it in a way that made it clear to me that she knew otherwise without in any way questioning whatever it was that had opened up my own shortcomings to me -- she just knew it wasn't the whole story. Over time, I have found that a very comforting thing.

Fifteen years later, twenty years married, with three teen-age children, I found myself back in the first far-away city, revisiting old haunts and walks from the months I had spent there. Almost everything had changed -- a sleepy town with a small high-rise financial district had become a booming metropolis -- but there, incredibly, was the same discount book store, and, incredibly, there was the same Taschen Tom collection. [Tableau.]

I didn't buy it. By this time, however, I had come around to the idea that I may as well be slaughtered for a sheep as for a lamb, and was ready to say "yes", though not to ask the question myself. I ran across, and actually brought myself to enter, a bondage supply store in the basement of one of the buildings of the gay ghetto near my hotel, marveled at 3" red tape guaranteed to stick to itself and not to you, straps, cock-rings, harnesses, and things frankly I wasn't sure how to use. I bought a Kake comic and headed home in a loop that brought me back by the store several hours later, where I saw one of my co-workers leaving with a LARGE bag of bulky supplies. In spite of everything, I still had to maintain the distance between us rather than see how close we stood. So much for Christian candor...

In the meantime, however, I had spent nearly a year back in the Big City, alone in a furnished apartment and driven slowly mad by isolation, yet too tired to go out in the evening and meet the friends gay and straight who might have kept me sane. I joined a local video store with an amazingly varied selection, only to discover that the breadth of the general selection was eclipsed by the pornography inventory, which was organized by categories starting with what color of whom and working their way down to the smallest details of what into where. And there was a Tom of Finland video with the somewhat off-putting sub-title of "Daddy and the Muscle Academy"; I rented it with my heart in my mouth. It was a revelation in many ways: I had not made the immediate connection to leather, or thought about my own love of suede in that light; I couldn't bear the rituals, much as they fascinated and attracted me; and I was horrified by the "Daddy" theme. All of this forced to look long and hard at what might have gotten me to where I obviously was. And what else didn't I know? This was the genesis of the "No More Fool's Paradise" mantra. (I have pursued it less than I have recited it, and while the internet is a copious supplier of at least potentially informative material, today I do not know much more of what makes a man into what I am than I did that night. I have a lot to learn.)

I have to say that I can't see "living out" what I have to accept is hard-wired into me, either by blood or experience or an unfortunate combination of the two, but I can also see that it is worse than useless to deny it. I think I can see how some of it came to be, but I can't be sure that the memories that surface now to inform my questions are not just a selection that fit what I am trying to establish. As a practiced hand at self-delusion, I feel I need to distrust most of my ideas. There is certainly no question what the reptile is up to, however it came to be.

So here I stand, on the threshold of telling everybody some things, and some people everything, and fighting for my right to do it. I want to be careful of other people's feelings, something I do not have a great track record with, but I can't shake the feeling that the truth will in fact set me free, though to what remains to be seen.

I just ran across the startling and terrifying line from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that whenever Christ calls us, he calls us to death. If I didn't believe in, if I hadn't experienced, the reality of resurrection, that quote would stop me in my tracks, but I know that there is life after death. The question is the price of it.