A THOUSAND WORDS

This post was prompted by this trailer for a Broadway stage "opera".  Maybe you'll want to watch it first.  Maybe you were getting impatient for something that justified that red "scare warning" before the blog opens.  The strategy here is to take on something so stigmatized that it was entirely secret, then blown open by a new wave of culture.  What was hidden, intimate, accessed by only a few people who considered it evidence of a precious insight into life, is now a shallow, loud, braggadacio that must be painful to the very people who made it possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WBeEGVzyPU What it prompted is reflection on what would happen if the stigma on sex were gone, entirely gone, from every type of sex, true Bonobo abandon of standards or occasions or significance.  Many people give sex their highest priority in  life, esp. writers for crime TV and streaming shows.  it's the rationale for a million bloody stories.  I...

Finbar was a ginger man with the near-leprechaun features of an Irishman and everyone thought he might be a brawler, but he wasn't.  All his lovers were dark men, ever since he was a boy -- black, Mexican, indigenous.  Roscoe was a man so black he was nearly blue but with the fine sharp features of an American indigenous.  He wasn't a brawler either.  The men had met in college. It wasn't a special or fine place, just one generous about admission policies and too far out in the unknown to not hear about gay men in pairs.  They saw gay men only in the surging celebrations of San Francisco, or in movies with comedians flirting feather boas and saying silly things.  Two men loving each other was not seen for lack of a pattern. But they didn't stick there in that place of lawn and monuments and libraries.  The institution was over.  The keeping of intelligence had ended, because now intelligence was different, about sensing and accepting...

I have this running sequence going about two women therapists discussing their cases, what they should do, and what the client dilemmas do to them.  It's more entertaining that just describing theories.  Recently I invented a conversation about a movie they had seen that involved a small boy being molested by a bigger boy he idolized.  There was a four year gap.  These women are clinicians and so they were concerned about diagnosis as well as the effects of the situation on the boy.   My background is a little bit clinical/philosophical/moral, but my earliest context was theatre.  This saved me from the incessant narcissism of self-examination because the point was inhabiting someone else, becoming them.  Becoming a kindergarten-aged boy via imagination is a bit of a challenge, but an interesting one.  Let's look at the options. The molester is admired unconditionally and is very intense and persuasive about what he does to "me" which is ...