MY OWN WALKING - June Journal 2025

In my teenage years, as the acceptance and the consequences of being gay began to fully dawn upon me, an opened ended question came to my mind - So what will your life be all about now?  

Living in a small market town in North Lincolnshire, I was many miles from whatever passed for 'gay culture'. How was I ever to find out what that was like and whether I even liked it? It wasn't until I moved away to Art College that my limited horizons suddenly broadened massively. The decriminalisation of 1967 and gay liberation had brought freedom, but to be what? Every gay man now had to decide for themselves what the answer to that question was. Be fully yourself, we vaguely generalised, but what on earth did that actually mean or entail?

In the early years post 1967 there was much talk within the gay community, about gay lifestyles and the need to create a uniquely different way of relating and being gay. Marriage and children was something few thought possible, and many believed it actually to be undesirable. That even the idea of gay marriage would be playing the game of doing what is acceptable to hetero-normative models of relationships. Yeah, very hefty use of words there. This did, however, downplay the significance of some underlying huge human emotions, the desire to belong, the desire to put down roots, and the desire to feel accepted, included and loved. 

For many gay men, despite all the positive changes in wider societies views on homosexuality, there was still the need to refuse to conform to 'straight' narratives of what is normal and acceptable. That they saw themselves as the perpetual outsider, rebelling against the enforcement of 'straight' paradigms. And, as we are currently seeing in the US, a government's liberal permissive attitudes and supportive legislation can be changed literally overnight, on the whim of the Tangerine Emperor. The liberal democratic principle that gay people have as much right to live their lives as they chose as everyone else, has revealed itself as being conditional on tolerance being actively in the room. And tolerance, though its not necessarily wholehearted acceptance, it's still preferable to active hate or vengeful moral opprobrium. Ask the trans community for what that feels like.

Hubby and I have now been in our relationship well over twenty years, thirteen of them married. Neither of us has ever wanted to play the perpetual rebel outsider, and neither have we wanted to play happy nuclear families either. Having children, whether biological or adopted, well, that is an investment we have never had enough money to even consider a possibility. Even if we'd wanted to, which we didn't. I'd certainly ruled out ever being a Father, early on in my adult life. What has been crossing my mind of late is what happens to those impulses for 'fathering'  where do they go in a gay man's life?  Its not that they necessarily disappear completely from conscious view. Do they focus on channeling themselves into something else, if so, what into?  And don't say, a dog.

So way back in my late teenage years in the 1970's what did I envisage my future would be? What areas did I focus my attention, ambition and youthful drive upon?  I wanted to 'father' a career in the arts, some vehicle for self expression and a desire for status, success, even fame, floated around in it like fortune telling angels. Though I'd no idea how to go about that, nor if I had sufficient talent, ambition or luck to achieve any of it. I had the rather vague but lovely idealism of a young man, who wanted to make the world a better and more beautiful place, through anything I was involved in or created. There was always in the background the fervently imagined dream of meeting someone who I'd spend my entire life with. Again with no idea how that might come about, nor what the first steps towards that might be. I wanted eventually to have a home on the coast or at least in the countryside, filled with beautiful objects and spend time doing the sort of things I loved, in the company of the aforementioned man. I wanted to be able to enjoy the arts in all its forms. Hence much of my time spent outside of work in my mid twenties, was taken up with being a 'culture vulture' soaking up as much of our capital's artistic activity I could afford to go and see. All of these imagined from a tiny one room bedsit, with only a two ring Baby Belling cooker for company, off The Great North Road in East Finchley, North London. 

Now all of those things I describe above are the type of thing any inexperienced young man might imagine for himself. They are all focused on achieving various forms of self-gratification. Now, some of those things did actually happen, some I had a stab at, but eventually they came to nothing. By my early thirties I'd reached a sort of personal impasse. I saw myself as having in some way failed in my early life ambitions. Who I was, and what I wanted from life required a thorough overhaul. I needed to locate some sort of refresh button. The various disappointments in life, and in the sort of person I discovered myself to actually be, are what eventually led me to Buddhism. Where on some unconscious level I, initially at least, spiritualised self-gratification, and transformed it into a transcendental form of self-realisation. The focus in any 'fathering' is what it is we want to give birth to through our life. And understanding 'the self, though important, it shouldn't stop there, because your 'self' is fickle and not a fixed thing. So you can't build the meaning of your life entirely around its gratification.  

These days the pursuit of self gratification has almost become the default religion of our social media age. But back in the 70's the sort of technologically vain world we now inhabit 24/7 would have been impossible to imagine. Gay culture knew all about the life long pursuit of individualistic self gratification from much much earlier on. It is almost the chapter and verse joyful indulgence in it. And I was not immune in the pursuit of that. I think that it bred in me, not quite a narcissistic selfishness, but certainly a selfish focus that constantly tried to get what I individually wanted out of life. To find pleasure and success, for me and my self expression. Now none of these ambitions are necessarily exclusive to gay culture. Individualism, self expression and an entirely selfish focus on what you want from life, are what late stage capitalism thrives on, and has consequently become extremely widespread in Western Civilisation. But untethered from them from the very start, from any need to form a nuclear family and hence have children etc etc, its just 'The Gays' you see, they arrived there first.

And even though I now know myself better, and am a much more rounded and contented man than I was as a youth. I can still find myself slipping into a default selfish mode of thinking only about my needs and the gratification of them. It's as though way down in some hidden depth of my soul, there is one small corner that is forever living in an impoverished state, still feeling hungry for a self expressive creative urge to be scratched, gratified and fed. 

TEACHING OF THE WEEK

"We can't explain our lives; we can only live them. There is no end to the ways in which we try to define or grasp an understanding of this life. If we try to explain our lives, we just end up walling it up into an ingrained set of conditioned beliefs. All we can do is exercise the gifts we've been given in this life. Our lives are wide open. They are like mountains playfully splashing their toes in the waters that flow down their sides and collect in lakes."

Zoketsu Norman Fischer

Taken from Mountains & Rivers Sutra
Teachings by Norman Fischer
Pub The Sumeru Press In