Halt! Who Goes There?!

I’ve started and then junked at least three different essays about my experience with Body Electric. Much of my hesitation stems from the fact that each time I decide to write I go back to what I wrote and find it doesn’t precisely capture what I want.

Here it is anyway…

I don’t like hippy-dippy stuff. I don’t like patchouli, I don’t like batik. I don’t care at all for necklaces made of wooden beads nor do I care for pictures of swamis and gurus set upon bookcases filled with the latest screeds by Noam Chomsky and Andrea Dworkin. Ramtha is bullshit of the highest order in my mind.

I do like the scent of burning sage. That’s as far as I will go.

When I approached Body Electric it was to find and outlet for the pressures of leading an outwardly and inwardly celibate life. I’m a very isolated person. I see store clerks, my father, my dogs, the house contractor. My mother and stepfather are around about six months out of the year. Other than the occasional family get-together, I have no friends who live near me. Not one. There are no gay places either. All the gays who live here are partnered, older than I am by quite a bit. Single gay people don’t want to live here in the sleepy exurbs even if they can afford it.

The loft space, as loft spaces go, was big. Around me were men of various ages from 18 to over 70 chatting away. While I had not been technically late, getting to Brooklyn from where I live requires going through the streets, not highways, of Manhattan. There is just no other way and the traffic reflects that.

Still, nothing important had begun yet and I had my nice new gym bag with me to hold all my stuff. We were supposed to bring a towel, a sheet, and something for the altar. I skipped an altar decoration figuring my $350 check was plenty enough of an offering. It struck me that all these guys knew each other. They appeared to be regulars, laughing, at ease, and quite intimate. I, as usual, was the outsider. As I looked around I spotted it. Batik. There were batik slipcovers, batik tablecloths, even the curtains were batik. Cheezy hippy art of rainbows and flowers and the such were strewn about the walls. The whole thing struck me as a glorified college dorm room. I didn’t like it. Instinctively I checked to make sure the place was clean. It was. There was a table with bottled water and paper towels. I checked in. The coordinator, John, welcomed me and I filled out my name tag and slapped it on my shirt. As he moved on to the next person I was back to my own thoughts. In the near corner was the altar. As I had predicted, there were some flowers, some incense, some Tibeto-Sino-Indo-hippy brass incense burner doohickies and worse, a picture of Gurumayi smiling beneficently as always. I like the private Gurumayi, but I don’t want her seeing me naked so I looked around to make sure nobody was watching me and gingerly turned her portrait toward the flower vase.

I walked around some more, realized that there were no curtains on the long windows which happened to allow people across the street a very direct and intimate view of all the activity going on in this, the self-aggrandized, “Grand Space.” This did not make me feel comfortable at all, but I tried to act very New Yorkish about it and pretend this didn’t bother me. Whoever these nice people were across the street, I’m sure they’ve seen a roomful of naked men before. Right? They must be used to it by now (I hope).

In my head, I kept repeating to myself that I can leave at any time. I’m an adult, free to come and go as I please, and besides. I had PAID to do this. What I decide to participate in, or not, was my prerogative. I was in control of the situation. This little reminder would be my mantra for the day and it came at just the right time because immediately I had resolved this, Michael, the facilitator, called everyone into a group. We all stood in a circle looking around to see who was hot, who we might know, who looked to be cool, who looked to be an asshole. Just like any other group of strangers. Michael explained that this was the introductory course for Body Electric, explained how Body Electric was started by a Jesuit priest, to notify him if anyone had health problems, blah, blah, -- oh wait. Michael was telling us the principles of what was going on, how this was an intro course and that despite all outward appearances, it’s not about getting off. If you wanted a happy ending massage, this was the wrong place to be. He spoke about aligning chakras and various other Beatles-just-back-from-India stuff but I could tell he was frank and I appreciated that.

Our first exercise was to gather into groups of four and say why we were here, what we wanted to gain, and a little bit about ourselves. The one guy in my group was an unfortunately close talker. The more I moved back from him, the closer he got to me and this REALLY pissed me off. Finally he had the nerve to put his hand on my leg while talking to me and I brushed it off immediately with a very firm, “pleasedonottouchme!” If he hadn’t gotten the message before, he had now. He was English too. Ugh. The other guys were OK though and I kept repeating my mantra. I would stick this out, I would go with it; do whatever they asked me to do even if I didn’t believe a word of it. The moment I resolved that again, however, things changed.

Michael then proceeded to describe how the three members of the group were to undress the remaining one member who would be blindfolded, all the while keeping their hands on the body of the person being undressed. The moment of truth. Most happily, I was not the first guy. Michael put on some new agey music as he led us through the motions of what to take off, explore what we were feeling and thinking, and how we approached those emotions. Of course I was reticent because I’m not naturally comfortable being naked. I’m too fat and I’m hung like mouse. That day was no help either because my nerves had made all my manly bits crawl up inside me. Still, who the hell did I have to impress? It’s not like the Queen of England was there, so I told myself to do the usual routine of pretending it doesn’t bother me at all. See, if people think it bothers you then they’ll think you’re some fat loser with a tiny dick and write you off. But! If you just walk around as normal, being yourself and pretending you don’t care that there are pencil erasers bigger than the mangina you’re showing, then people will admire you for having so much confidence in yourself despite your tragic endowment. I’ve done it for years, I’m an expert. No one would be the wiser.

Undressing another man you don’t know is a bit more intimate than I like to get. I don’t like people touching me, I don’t like to be hugged by people I don’t know. I definitely do not like being fondled. Yes I’ll fuck a guy I don’t know, but I don’t want his hands all over me. I was the last guy, as the straws would have it and I felt extremely tense. My shoulders, arms, legs, my ass, my jaw: everything was locked tighter than a drum. When they pulled down my boxers (I’m the only gay man in existence who wears boxers apparently) I self-consciously adjusted my package to show a bit more; tried to coach the kid out of hiding. It didn’t work. I was an acorn. Ugh.

Once that was done, the blindfold came off and I, left standing in my socks with my name tag ridiculously stuck to the top of one, looked around. Nobody was staring, nobody said anything, and I figured there were 32 other men who people would prefer to look at so nobody would pay attention to me. That kind of thinking helped since most, but not all, of the men here were gay. We were then made to form another circle and begin our introductions, saying whatever we wanted. I followed the basic line of wording on this as I didn’t want to stick out (at least not the rest of me). After that we did some movement exercises I recognized from a high school yoga class to get warmed-up. There were other exercises too, many designed to facilitate communication among as many people as possible so that, by the time lunch rolled around, you at least had some idea who everyone was. This was good. It helped put me at ease. I had wondered about lunch. I was expecting perhaps a catered lunch but no such luck. We had to re-dress and go down the street or eat what we had brought. Fine by me, I went to a deli where the coordinators went figuring they knew the best the place in the neighborhood. I ate lunch by myself, not being anti-social, just having nothing to say. I didn’t know any of these people, I wasn’t hip, I wasn’t good-looking. It was OK though since I’m used to be an outsider and never more of an outsider than at gay social events. Years before, when I lived in a Boston halfway house, I had gone out once or twice to clubs but had always ended up at the bar pretending to be waiting for someone or looking just too aloof to care. It hurt that I didn’t feel like I fit in and I was damned if anyone was going to know it just by looking at me. So places like this were alien to me and even if I did feel lonely, I had long since stopped allowing that to get to me.