The Pit and the Pendulum
(Deconstructing Homosexuality - Advaita for Queers)
delivered to Qspirit, San Francisco, March 21, 1998
Gavin Geoffrey Dillard

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Disclaimer: I am not a guru; I am not enlightened; all words are lies.


    Advaita is a Sanskrit word which means "non-dualism". This is
the root of ancient Tibetan Buddhism - before all the gods and garbage
were piled on top of everybody. This is the philosophy of the Vedas - the
original texts of the Hindus - again, before ten-thousand and one deities
invaded everybody's shrines, homes and minds. This is the root of Jesus'
teachings, before 2000-plus canons and related dogma were lobbed on by
the gothic nightmare of Catholicism and all its Christian off-shoots

.
    Religion appears to be one of the great "sins" of humankind - and
I use the world sin in its original context: to "error" or "miss the mark".
What is the mark? The mark is Original Self - peace, bliss, freedom - a
state of oneness, openness, creative spontaneity - non-dualism.
Non-dualism because all suffering, all illusion, all derangement comes from a belief
in an "other". Suffering never comes from Self; that small self which at
times appears to suffer only does so do to the belief that an outside source is
tormenting it in some fashion.

    A baby is born in love as a pure loving being. There may be some
traumas that happen unexpectedly to the fetus; all of a sudden its
grabbed by the feet into Gestapo lights, slapped onto a cold metal tray, yanked
up into the air, spanked, sponged off by some monster in a rubber suit, and
gradually put into an isolated tank where its screams go unnoticed for
hours at a time. It you're lucky enough to be a boy in this culture, the
monster comes back and without the benefit of anesthesia scissors off a
third of the surface area of one of the most sensitive parts of your
body.
Is it any wonder you've developed a touch of misgiving? Already you're a
bundle of contractions - non-openness. And then your parents, if you're
lucky enough to have parents, alert you that what you're seeing with your
spiritual eye isn't real, that you're of a specific sex (and must behave
accordingly), that you have to act your age (whatever that is), and a
million and one gruesome axioms of modern life tie you into just so many
knots.

    Then adulthood comes. Now we're responsible for our lives -
unless something good happens, which we know is of god, or something really
bad happens, which of course is old Satan's doing. And we start to rebel
against everything our parents told us, or the church, or any other
authority figure. We have some sense that something isn't right about it
all and we want to find ourselves.

    I identified my parents with a stupid war that was going on in
VietNam, so I flocked to the church of pacifism - Joan Baez was my guru - and
all war became bad. I looked at the silly dysfunctional relationship
that my parents were wading through and I decided I could do differently;
I became a homosexual. I fought a war against Christian morality, so I made
porno movies, hustled, took my clothes off in public places, addicted to
various drugs; I became a Bah…'Ã, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a flying saucer
maven, and ended up channeling a barrage of disembodied entities. But
which of all these things was me?

    There's a marvelous guru in Marin known as Gangaji. Gangaji is a
scion from the late Poonjaji, who was a principle exponent of Ramana
Maharshi, a great Indian sage who was a modern-day master of non-dualism.
I was sitting through a Gangaji satsang - a word which means something
like "meeting with Truth" - when a woman in the audience stood up and
stated that she was compiling a book of interviews of powerful women. One
could see her pride in what she was doing and whom she believed herself
to be, and her subsequent shock and deflating when Gangaji stated simply
"Ah, but I am not a woman." In one fell swoop Gangaji had blown this woman's
important political agendas out of the water.

    Gangaji was speaking as the Universal Force, as Love itself,
which recognizes no boundaries and adheres to no definitions. You will know
where I'm going with this if I say that Love acknowledges no "ghettos" -
because our entire social fabric appears to be made up of a gazillion specific
words and catch-phrases, like ghetto, Castro clone, foot-stomping dyke,
lipstick lezzie, leather faerie... And most of us know that we're in
one ghetto or another. We choose these ghettos - these walls to hide behind -
because we feel safe there; it is how we've been conditioned - it is how
we have learned to hold that loving, mistreated baby at bay. But is this
serving us?

    It is a survival issue that as a child we come to identify with
our family unit. Once at school we believe that our school is magically
better than the school down the road. We learn from our parents that our country
is superior to others - that's why we live here. Our god is superior to
others - naturally, that's why worship there. I remember wars in school
during election years between us Democrat kids and those stupid
Republican kids. Not a one of us had any idea of, nor interest in, party issues -
who cared?

    There are very broad issues of politics that I won't get into.
We all acknowledge that human rights should be a given, that we should
all have the right to our own pursuits of happiness, as long as we're not
tromping on someone else in the process. These are big debates that will
go on as long as there is a humanity. Animals appear wiser, they just duke
it out - no philosophizing about it - the strong win, the weak are subdued,
and that's that. Nobody feels guilty, nobody feels suppressed; survival
happens.

    And it's much too nebulous a discussion regarding karma and
past-life influences. Yes, I personally believe my sexuality started
coming into play when I was three years old - or maybe about six hundred years
before. So now I've become a homosexual, or gay, or queer, or a reluctant
top, or a dubious polygamist, or a mister in search of a master, or
whatever bumfuck handkerchief I'm wearing today.

    But I am not these things.

    I remember living in Seattle in the early seventies, I was a
little hippie fresh out of North Carolina, reveling in the choices of health
food products, hairy freaks everywhere; I was always barefoot. Then I started
hanging out at the Gay Community Center. I got arrested with a bunch of
lesbians in the park - we conducted an experiment and all removed our
shirts, women and men; the women were arrested, but the men insisted we
get arrested as well, since we had all committed the same crime. I met a
fabulous transsexual who had made a pair of earrings out of her own
lacquered testicles. I was living with a handsome straight lad named Tim,
who loved to hear of my discoveries and exploits, then one day came home
to find me in the bathroom, my ponytail in one hand and a pair of scissors
in the other. I announced to him that I was not a hippie anymore, I was a
fag.

    Years later, in the pit of West Hollywood, I moved in with a
gorgeous Hawaiian woman named Kahala. We were each others' "maw" and "pa"
for two years and even got pregnant. Friends would occasionally drop by
to say hi, but it was amazing to watch how allegiances shifted. Eventually
most of my old friends wouldn't speak to me at all. I was a traitor - how
dare I? I had shifted camps.

    So, yes, I appear to have various preferences in my life at any
given time. Some change with time, some seem to not: I've always adored
cats, I'll probably always go gaga over a hairy chest, I've come to love
opera, and I appear to be a person who enjoys sushi very very much. But
must I identify with my preferences? Must I be limited by these thoughts
and dreams? Can I not step out of my cage from time to time and truly see
what's going on around me?

    Let's imagine a rhetorical society in which there is a group of
people who choose to have sexual preferences that are unusual to the vast
majority. Let's imagine that this majority then, for whatever political
or random motives, creates laws banning the sexual preferences of the
minority. The pendulum has inexplicably been drawn over to one side - oh,
let's say the Right. It might well be logical to assume that this
minority, then, eventually finagle the pendulum over to the Left, insisting that
they are special, they are gifted, even superior to the majority. This is
logical; this is where pride comes from. But pride is arrogance, it's a
cover up of pain and shame, and it is not the truth. It is the other end
of the same shackles that bind us to the realm of suffering.

    The pendulum swings: we renounce whatever we don't like - just
like the Christians do - and we coopt anything that we want: Say, did you
hear Dolly Parton's a lesbian and that Tom Cruise used to hustle before he got
famous and married that dyke comedienne? There seems a time in which we
need these stories to create our adult identities. But do they serve us
now? or do they hold us down?

    There are many politically-cool versions of swinging singles who
study what they call Tantra. Tantra is now identified as a sexual
practice with some sort of spiritual overtones. But the origins of true Tibetan
Tantric yoga have nothing to do with sexual practice. They utilize and
manipulate the sexual energy of which we are all composed, but no one
touches anyone else's body. Sorry kids. This is all cool, we all have had
many sexual issues to deal with, one way or another. But I know of no one
who has awakened through sexual practices. Again, it's worth looking at
what's being served here.

    I once swore that I was special, that I had some magical blending
of masculine and feminine that made me spiritually superior. But I've
opened my eyes and checked this out from many angles.

    Certainly those of us sitting here and participating in an
evening of spiritual intercourse are of a rarer segment than the bulk of the
world on their couches, drinking Pepsi, eating pizza and watching bad medical
dramas. But truly, I know heterosexuals who have a better grasp of the
masculine/feminine dichotomies than many of my queer friends. When I
think of all the spiritual masters that I have encountered, none of them had
been queer oriented (I deliberately use the past tense here, since I would
question the awakeness of anyone who would continue to hang onto such
overt limitation). I know of allegedly-awake beings who theoretically had
been gay identified - Ram Dass, I believe, has spoken of this, and there
is a man named John Rogers in LA that I've heard a bit about. I'm not saying
that queers don't wake up, I'm basically saying that our apparent sexual
preference is probably irrelevant altogether.

    I once conjectured that I had the edge by having not had to deal
with a marriage and kids and such, that I could pursue the spiritual life
without hindrance. But I've spent decades chasing dick, chasing dollars,
chasing status. So here I am at 43 and had I had kids they'd be grown and
I'd be free to be right where I am. Who can say these things?

    I've used the berdache theories about being natural-born shamans,
but I frankly don't think the odds of indigenous world-shamanhood are
significantly in our favor. And if you go into the Mid-West, or
small-town anywhere, and speak with Mary or Joe Queer, you'll find frighteningly
timid and ignorant quasi-Christian hysterics. Granted, being gay has been a
tremendous boon to me personally - or was it just my natural radical nature
- I've spent my lifetime questioning everything. But as much, it's drugs
and urban reality that have cracked my shell and brought me to the end of
the search. But again, who can say these things? It takes whatever it
takes, and the paths are as limitless as are the entities of the
universe.

    This deflates some bubbles, but that's not a bad thing. I'm an
iconoclast - that's my job as a poet. And I'm not saying that there's
anything wrong with sex, or with being queer, or with being anything
else. The awakened soul recognizes no dichotomies - no goods and bads, rights
and wrongs, blacks and whites. But these bubbles of pride - of identity - are
all limitations. And limitations are not a quality of Awareness. They
therefore are our suffering. They are missing the mark. These swings of
the pendulum keep us in the pit of ignorance.

    I tell a story in my memoir about having been a strict vegetarian
for some decade or more - since I was eleven and walked into a
slaughterhouse with my dad. Then one day as an adult I'm walking down
Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood and I pass a greasy spoon advertising
the best hamburgers in LA; in a moment of inspiration, or abandon, I step
inside, order a deluxe bacon-cheeseburger, chow it down and walk on. I
describe this as a great spiritual moment. The point isn't that I had
of-a-sudden become a carnivore - I have no real fondness for meat, and
subsequent meals would have been just more burgers - it's that in that
moment of unguardedness I gave up the notion of being a vegetarian.
And I was liberated.

    The first time I had a sexual experience with a man was very much
like this as well - an incredible sense of freedom. After that, it was
just more burgers.

    An awakened being continues to function normally in society,
though many of our normal activities tend to wane in interest for That One. Most
that I know don't have sex, but all feel free to, and I would imagine
with whomever they had an irrevocable interest in. Some eat meat, some don't,
some don't eat at all. It's not important. The distinction is this - what
they do is done consciously and spontaneously within each now moment. You
can't take flight with shackles on your feet. You have to die to all
that you believe you are - because what you truly are cannot be imagined.
It has nothing to do with anything you have ever done, been, or believed
yourself to be.

    To this avail I will postulate that radical politics are all
merely reactionary. Only love is radical. Radical because it destroys all forms and fancies.

    The call here, then - my challenge to you - is to give up, for
justone instant, being a queer. Give up being a spiritual seeker. Give up
being a nice person - or a bad person; give up being a person. Give up being a
feminist, a pagan, a fatty, an HIV patient, a practitioner of safe or
unsafe sex, a doctor, a Democrat, a Christian, a Buddhist, a person who
is lonely and looking for a mate, or someone with receding hair or too many
freckles. Just stop. Give up any notion that was created in the past -
and they all have been - all thoughts and all concepts are derived
exclusively from the past. Give up your dreams for the future - all
hopes, plans and dreams are derived entirely from the past as well. Then see
what's left in this now moment. Who are you now? Who are you now? And now?
And now? And now?