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Fall 2024
On Lying to Yourself
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I saw how hard my parents fought to protect my right to have fun, even though I was a boy. If masculinity is better defined by what is forbidden than what is encouraged, my parents did their best to hide the stop signs I was barrelling past as a rather effeminate little dork. And mostly, they did a pretty good job. As a five year old who loved musicals and dressing up, I had no idea how gay my Phantom of the Opera Halloween costume was.
Again and again, my parents told me something that is true; that when people said something was a boy thing, a girl thing, a gay thing, etc., that they were oversimplifying the world and hiding behind stereotypes. They told me that I could love baby dolls and purple shit and dancing and that none of that makes you gay. I still believe that that is true. But looking back, I see how many times I hid behind that mantra. I could tell myself that lots of people are big fans of Rob Lowe. It doesn’t mean anything. And besides, I’m just gazing into his eyes as a joke.
Now, most of the people in my life are other queer adults. Everybody’s parents were different, but we all have lies we told ourselves while we were still learning that we were queer; that we were practicing, that we were just very good friends, that nobody really likes their boyfriend anyway. Obviously, this isn’t exclusive to the queer community. The world is full of people who used to have a boyfriend they never really liked. But I think a lot of the most embarrassing lies I have believed can be blamed on bisexuality. Looking back on my middle school self, maybe it should have been clearer to me that all of the emotions I was feeling were not just about a geography bee. I have this horrific memory of doing laps in gym class and being so mad that this boy Paul wouldn’t stop talking to his friend Cody so I could quiz him on national capitals. Looking back, it is shocking that we remained friends at all. If someone asked me to do homework while I was running now, I would disappear in a puff of smoke and they would never see me again.
For a while, it made me pretty uncomfortable when friends would talk about the intense and confusing friendships they had before they knew they were queer. Some part of my brain was holding onto this idea of, “Why would you have a crush on your straight friend? Just like some queer person instead.” My problem was that I thought of myself as a very intentional child. By the time I was ten, I thought that I was probably smarter than everyone I knew and it wasn’t until my twenties that I realized I wasn’t. I thought I more or less knew the exact reason behind everything I did. So I was still thinking that the reason I got so mad at Paul was that I wished he cared as much about academic excellence as me. But do you want to know what? I don’t even like geography! I just wanted him to talk to me instead of Cody.
I hated Cody.
My therapist told me that if I want to have a say in what happens in my life, I have to understand the reason I do things. It is both very practical advice and almost a zen koan. But in practice, I find it much easier to diagnose in others than myself. Like this week, I was reading St. Gregory’s history of the life of St. Benedict and the whole time was like, “This dork doesn’t even know why he is doing any of this shit!”
According to the book, St. Benedict (he usually goes by Bennet in the book) saw that many of his colleagues left the church as they became better educated. Failing to take the hint, he responded by moving into a cave to avoid learning anything that might change his mind. There, he lived a solitary life of prayer until something terrible happened; a bird flew into the cave. But it wasn’t just any bird. It was a bird carrying an evil spirit.
Something important to know is that, in the world of this book, most unpleasantness can be blamed on the devil or demons. If two or three builders cannot lift a large rock while building a monastery, it probably means that the devil is sitting on the rock and St. Benedict needs to pray that dude away. If a monk keeps missing communal prayers, it is probably because a demon is showing up every third day and leading him by the hand somewhere else.
So when this bird flew into that cave, it wasn’t one of those normal birds you see flying through the sky or wandering around the garden section of a Mendards. This was an agent of Satan. And upon finding Bennet, the spirit began bedeviling our dude with memories of a beautiful woman he used to see some times. Technically, the book says that the temptation was so great “he was of mind to have forsaken the wilderness.” With these old books, a certain amount of interpretation is always required. Since this is taking place five or six centuries before the introduction of clerical celibacy, I am comfortable assuming that this passage is talking about Bennet considering whether to leave his cave to meet up with a woman he used to sleep with.
Thinking about my own life, it isn’t hard to imagine a short term solution to this problem. But remember, this isn’t a story about a lonely man missing someone with whom he used to share casual intimacies. This is a story about a man being attacked by a bird sent by the devil. And so, St. Benedict’s response has to be appropriately severe. Specifically, he threw himself into a thorny bush so he would be in too much pain to be horny. Supposedly, it worked. The book actually says that he turned “pleasure to pain,” which is the exact opposite of what Madonna music videos have been telling me to do.
According to St. Gregory, this single instance of Bennet throwing himself into a thorn bush relieved him of his sexual desires for the rest of his life. As a side note, it is strange to imagine that the church has spent the proceeding fifteen hundred years condemning, torturing, and killing people they considered perverts when, canonically, they could have just tossed those sluts into some bushes. Personally, I would hate to lose my sexual desire. But for St. Gregory, this meant that Bennet was finally ready to leave the cave and become a leader in his community.
This is where we get to the moral of the story, and where my moral will differ from St. Gregory. Because his story ends with an explanation that people should have to wait until their fifties to become leaders in their communities so that they aren’t horny anymore. And thank goodness for the long lineage of old Christian men who came after him and never did anything wrong.
But do you want to know what? I don’t believe that throwing himself into a bush cured St. Benedict of sexual desire for the rest of his life. I don’t even believe that that bird was carrying an evil spirit. I think that an isolated and self-serious man couldn’t handle his own desires and so blamed it on a bird. And that wackadoo magical thinking is why I love this story. But as fun as it might be to dump on this chump, the truth is that all of us, religious or not, are guilty of magical thinking when we aren’t ready to be honest with ourselves about what we want. We can lie to ourselves and we can run away, but that doesn’t make those desires disappear.
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling. Good luck, babe.
Amen.
Again and again, my parents told me something that is true; that when people said something was a boy thing, a girl thing, a gay thing, etc., that they were oversimplifying the world and hiding behind stereotypes. They told me that I could love baby dolls and purple shit and dancing and that none of that makes you gay. I still believe that that is true. But looking back, I see how many times I hid behind that mantra. I could tell myself that lots of people are big fans of Rob Lowe. It doesn’t mean anything. And besides, I’m just gazing into his eyes as a joke.
Now, most of the people in my life are other queer adults. Everybody’s parents were different, but we all have lies we told ourselves while we were still learning that we were queer; that we were practicing, that we were just very good friends, that nobody really likes their boyfriend anyway. Obviously, this isn’t exclusive to the queer community. The world is full of people who used to have a boyfriend they never really liked. But I think a lot of the most embarrassing lies I have believed can be blamed on bisexuality. Looking back on my middle school self, maybe it should have been clearer to me that all of the emotions I was feeling were not just about a geography bee. I have this horrific memory of doing laps in gym class and being so mad that this boy Paul wouldn’t stop talking to his friend Cody so I could quiz him on national capitals. Looking back, it is shocking that we remained friends at all. If someone asked me to do homework while I was running now, I would disappear in a puff of smoke and they would never see me again.
For a while, it made me pretty uncomfortable when friends would talk about the intense and confusing friendships they had before they knew they were queer. Some part of my brain was holding onto this idea of, “Why would you have a crush on your straight friend? Just like some queer person instead.” My problem was that I thought of myself as a very intentional child. By the time I was ten, I thought that I was probably smarter than everyone I knew and it wasn’t until my twenties that I realized I wasn’t. I thought I more or less knew the exact reason behind everything I did. So I was still thinking that the reason I got so mad at Paul was that I wished he cared as much about academic excellence as me. But do you want to know what? I don’t even like geography! I just wanted him to talk to me instead of Cody.
I hated Cody.
My therapist told me that if I want to have a say in what happens in my life, I have to understand the reason I do things. It is both very practical advice and almost a zen koan. But in practice, I find it much easier to diagnose in others than myself. Like this week, I was reading St. Gregory’s history of the life of St. Benedict and the whole time was like, “This dork doesn’t even know why he is doing any of this shit!”
According to the book, St. Benedict (he usually goes by Bennet in the book) saw that many of his colleagues left the church as they became better educated. Failing to take the hint, he responded by moving into a cave to avoid learning anything that might change his mind. There, he lived a solitary life of prayer until something terrible happened; a bird flew into the cave. But it wasn’t just any bird. It was a bird carrying an evil spirit.
Something important to know is that, in the world of this book, most unpleasantness can be blamed on the devil or demons. If two or three builders cannot lift a large rock while building a monastery, it probably means that the devil is sitting on the rock and St. Benedict needs to pray that dude away. If a monk keeps missing communal prayers, it is probably because a demon is showing up every third day and leading him by the hand somewhere else.
So when this bird flew into that cave, it wasn’t one of those normal birds you see flying through the sky or wandering around the garden section of a Mendards. This was an agent of Satan. And upon finding Bennet, the spirit began bedeviling our dude with memories of a beautiful woman he used to see some times. Technically, the book says that the temptation was so great “he was of mind to have forsaken the wilderness.” With these old books, a certain amount of interpretation is always required. Since this is taking place five or six centuries before the introduction of clerical celibacy, I am comfortable assuming that this passage is talking about Bennet considering whether to leave his cave to meet up with a woman he used to sleep with.
Thinking about my own life, it isn’t hard to imagine a short term solution to this problem. But remember, this isn’t a story about a lonely man missing someone with whom he used to share casual intimacies. This is a story about a man being attacked by a bird sent by the devil. And so, St. Benedict’s response has to be appropriately severe. Specifically, he threw himself into a thorny bush so he would be in too much pain to be horny. Supposedly, it worked. The book actually says that he turned “pleasure to pain,” which is the exact opposite of what Madonna music videos have been telling me to do.
According to St. Gregory, this single instance of Bennet throwing himself into a thorn bush relieved him of his sexual desires for the rest of his life. As a side note, it is strange to imagine that the church has spent the proceeding fifteen hundred years condemning, torturing, and killing people they considered perverts when, canonically, they could have just tossed those sluts into some bushes. Personally, I would hate to lose my sexual desire. But for St. Gregory, this meant that Bennet was finally ready to leave the cave and become a leader in his community.
This is where we get to the moral of the story, and where my moral will differ from St. Gregory. Because his story ends with an explanation that people should have to wait until their fifties to become leaders in their communities so that they aren’t horny anymore. And thank goodness for the long lineage of old Christian men who came after him and never did anything wrong.
But do you want to know what? I don’t believe that throwing himself into a bush cured St. Benedict of sexual desire for the rest of his life. I don’t even believe that that bird was carrying an evil spirit. I think that an isolated and self-serious man couldn’t handle his own desires and so blamed it on a bird. And that wackadoo magical thinking is why I love this story. But as fun as it might be to dump on this chump, the truth is that all of us, religious or not, are guilty of magical thinking when we aren’t ready to be honest with ourselves about what we want. We can lie to ourselves and we can run away, but that doesn’t make those desires disappear.
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling. Good luck, babe.
Amen.
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