Sacred Disorder

The New York Times has been publishing a blog, “All-Nighters,” which it describes as “an exploration of insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life.” It’s of personal interest to me since I’ve suffered insomnia ever since my mother’s death four years ago.

I found the March 19 entry, “Why We Need to Dream” by Jonah Lehrer, especially interesting because it dispatches with the argument of recent years that dreams are erratic firings of the brain’s components — sound and fury representing nothing.

Lehrer cites plenty of recent research demonstrating that not to be so at all. Researchers now say dreams are likely efforts to discover associations between all events and images. In other words, they assist problem solving and leave no ostensibly unrelated material unexamined (and thus their weirdness). Indeed, dreams are important to the creative process generally:

In recent years, scientists have discovered that R.E.M. sleep isn’t just essential for the formation of long-term memories: it might also be an essential component of creativity.

In a 2004 paper published in Nature, Jan Born, a neuroscientist at the University of Lübeck, described the following experiment: a group of students was given a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. This required the subjects to apply a painstaking set of algorithms. However, Born had designed the task so that there was an elegant shortcut, which could only be uncovered if the subjects saw the subtle links between the different number sets. When left to their own devices, less than 25 percent of people found the shortcut, even when given several hours to mull over the task. However, when Born allowed people to sleep between experimental trials, they suddenly became much more clever: 59 percent of all participants were able to find the shortcut. Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming “set the stage for the emergence of insight” by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.

This is certainly no surprise to me. I’ve told clients for years that when they find themselves blocked in a creative project, to “sleep on it.” It’s old advice, but I long ago learned that if I write the first two paragraphs of a column before going to bed, the column virtually writes itself the next morning.

It’s a great feeling to see this confirmed by neuroscience. It also validates Freud’s position that dreams are intimately connected to real-life events, no matter how other-worldly their narrative is, and have important information to impart. In my experience, dreams not only reveal the positive unseen associations the personal psyche makes. They also reveal the unhelpful associations that may, for example, underlie a repetition compulsion.

Dismissed in recent years as some sort of quackery, much of Freud’s and Jung’s depth psychology is increasingly reiterated by brain science. Depth psychology was the subject of my PhD studies and it’s quite gratifying to see its fascinations, like dream imagery, regain the attention they deserve.

(Of course, in another Times blog post, a contributor reports that sleep deprivation eases depression, leaving the question of what a depressed artist should do!)

Here’s another (infuriating) example of President Barack Obama’s failure to make good on a campaign promise. In this case, it’s his failure to suspend the idiotic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that prohibits gay people to serve in the military unless they manage to keep their orientation a secret from everyone.

In this, Obama reminds me of Bill Clinton, who made the same promise during his initial election campaign and then caved to people like Sam Nunn and Colin Powell. Their “compromise” solution was DADT, which actually resulted in more service members than ever being discharged for the nature of their love.

While it is true that Congress will have to act to abolish the policy, the President is free to suspend it for the timebeing.

It was common practice in the 1950s for police departments to issue films to scare young people into appropriate behavior. Many of these, like the ones about marijuana use, were so obviously exaggerated that they likely created more curiosity than fear.

Here is “Boys Beware,” one that typically equates pedophilia and homosexuality. Putting that absurd conflation aside, what I find particularly interesting is the narrator’s statement at one point that homosexuals aren’t visibly sick but do have a disease as “contagious” as any of the body.

This notion, that homosexuality is contagious grows out of the same conviction that makes it a sin specifically because it is so compelling. If you read even recent tirades against homosexuality by members of the religious right or those who have undergone “reparative therapy,” they almost always have this same subtext: that homosexuality is addictively pleasurable.

That’s why, as I’ve written before, Jerry Falwell marketed film of the Folsom Street Fair as a fundraising tool. He knew perfectly well that it provided a means for his good Christian followers to engage their prurience without guilt. I picture the menfolk sitting at home, with Bibles on their laps to hide their erections, while they gasp in horror at men in leather doing unspeakable things to one another.

Most gay men under 40 probably have very little sense of how inundated the culture was with this kind of message. For many over 40, films like these were literally the only place they saw homosexuality publicly mentioned. So, it’s not hard to figure why generations of gay men grew up pathologizing themselves.

Even the first semi-public gay rights group, the Mattachine Society, used to host speakers who advocated greater tolerance of homosexuality not because they viewed it as a legitimate form of love but because they thought it was a largely incurable illness.

Gay people don’t subscribe to these hateful narratives themselves so much any more — at least in urban areas — but they persist as cultural memories easily resurfacing whenever a handy scapegoat is needed.

The pope narrows down the cause of the world’s end. Gender theory!

Ted Haggard and Mark Foley are both back in the news this week, both blaming childhood experiences for their sexual behavior.

Foley told the AP that a sexual encounter with a priest at 12 is at the root of his sexual flirtation with Congressional pages:

“I loved my early life, and then along comes a priest … who forces me into a sexual relationship at the age of 12. And right shortly thereafter, I fail eighth grade, I start drugs, I start drinking, I start smoking,” he said. “My entire life … implodes.”

Foley, as everyone knows, was the Congress’ most passionate crusader against online pedophiles. He makes no real apology for his behavior, because, he says, no actual sex occurred and the boys he flirted with were not below the age of consent, anyway. He goes on to paint a sad picture of his life as a pariah.

Meanwhile, Haggard preached a sermon on the second anniversary of his own downfall and blamed his taste for sodomy and crystal meth on childhood sexual abuse too. At the same time, the former leader of a conservative mega-church railed against the clergy for not coming to his aid during his dark night of the soul. (As if he were a paragon of tolerance before his own fall.)

In other words, neither man takes full responsibility for his actions, preferring the usual psychological reduction to a childhood cause. In this narrative, the two themselves become victims — just as others became victims of their hypocrisy and inappropriate behavior. They get to exchange their own monumental moralism and hypocrisy for self-righteous indignation. Sweet.

Here is ABC’s report on Haggard’s sermon:

Ever since sodomy became legal, the police have had to dream up new harassment charges against gay men who dare to behave sexually outside the home. The New York police have been hard at work seducing gay men in video stores, then offering them money for sex and then, whether they accept the money or not, arresting them for prostitution.

Duncan Osbourne of Gay City News has the full story here. The article is linked by Joe My God.

What I found most interesting about Duncan’s report is the response of readers on both sites. While most of course object to the police action, there are the usual few who (a) question whether Duncan has reported the story in full detail (i.e. truthfully) and (b) blame the victims for even considering hooking up in a video store.

Duncan responds on Joe My God by inviting the doubters to check out the police report for themselves. He also points to the absurdity of the accusation that, for example, European visitors staying at the Astor on the Park Hotel entered a video store in order to make $20 by having anal sex.

A familiar story…

For the years I wrote a biweekly gay column here in Atlanta, I heard the same kind of thing constantly from a readers: “If gay men act out in public, they deserve to be arrested.” I always pointed out that the 1986 Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick authorized the police to arrest a man for sodomy in his own home. Arresting someone for sodomy authorizes something quite different from arresting him for public indecency or disorderly conduct.

I suspect the police are using the prostitution charge since there’s not even anything like public indecency involved in these encounters. Moreover, the definition of public space remains inexact, to say the least. For many gay men, any sexual behavior outside the the home, in a gym sauna or even in a video booth, is wrong. When you ask exactly what’s wrong with it, you usually hear something about the behavior making all gay men “look bad.” You know, like the leather guys and drag queens in Pride parades.

What it’s really about of course is closeting sexual expression, which still causes many people a great deal of shame and embarrassment. But can you really call sex between two men in a video booth as public as sex by a straight couple on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras? Nobody’s generalizing about straight people on the basis of the latter very common sight. In fact, nobody’s generalizing about heterosexuality on the basis of prostitution. You do know most prostitutes and their customers are straight, right?

Internalized what?

So these objections by gay men are really about their internal experience. I don’t like that expression, “internalized homophobia,” since I’m not sure it’s possible to go through the coming-out process in our culture without having to come to grips, painfully, with a very real double standard. The anger and judgment during this stage of coming out is unpleasant to be around, to say the least, but usually transitional.

I’ve repeatedly had the experience of people who read my gay column 10 years ago tell me that, now, they completely agree with both my indifference to so-called public sex and my refusal to believe we must serve as public relations reps for one another.

But we are never far from the reanimation of shame. The behavior of the New York police is steeply rooted in the power dynamics of humiliation. Indeed, it has a homoerotic undertone. The police know very well that most of the men are going to plead guilty to a lesser charge and, at the meta-level, they re-assert the authority of heterosexual men while engaging in psychological frottage with other men. It’s a tedious but ancient game.

(Illustration: Public domain from Wikimedia. A knight and his squire are burned together at the stake on sodomy charges. From an illustration dated 1482.)

…and Heinz discontinues airing it in the UK. Meanwhile several thousand signatures have been collected demanding its reinstatement. Let’s see who has more power — 200 tight-asses or a couple thousand people with a sense of humor. You can read more about the mayo brouhaha here.