Coming Out on Top

I was an Englishman, stoked with inhibitions, but when a male nurse tells me my life will change when dust spurts around my ankles, my heart is set to open.

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Guadalupe Peak - photo by Benoit Lamarche

Some gay men, taught to disassociate from the impulses of their body, turn mystical. That is not the theme of this essay, but I did turn out to be mystical, and this is a love story about being brought back into my body.

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I met James back in 1991, on the German doorstep of the Indian holy woman, Mother Meera. He was on his way to Tibet, but instead chose to stay. On each of my return visits to the German village, our friendship grew. On an outing to the cathedral in Limburg some energy pierced my skull and brought with it a silent command. “Hug this man.”

In my mind I argued back. I’m English. This is a cathedral. Male hugging is not what we do.

“Hug this man!” this silent voice repeated.

And so I wrapped my arms around James and held him close.

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James resumed his life in America. Suddenly I felt spurred by the need to talk to him, right now—our first trans-Atlantic call together. He was on a visit to Washington DC, so it took a while to track him down. He had just got back to his friend’s when I called, somewhat shaken. He had been queer-bashed near Dupont Circle. His face was cut and bruised, and his glasses were smashed. My call was a surprise and a comfort.

He had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was considering buying some land there to build a home. On the night before Easter, to get the feel for the place, he rolled out a sleeping bag within a grove of ponderosa trees. A silent message entered his head. “This is your hearth. Bring Martin here,” it said.

He argued back. That’s not how it is with Martin, we’re simply friends, he doesn’t even know if he’s gay.

“This is your hearth,” it repeated. “Bring Martin here.” The same message, again and again till James relented and said OK, I’ll consider it.

Immediately, at last, he was allowed to fall asleep.

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Back in England, I was renting a coastguard cottage at the inland end of a terrace whose other end had fallen off the white chalk cliffs and into the English Channel. James came on a visit. We strolled out to a picnic spot looking down on Cuckmere Haven, the bay where Kevin Costner dressed as Robin Hood set foot on English soil. My head suffused with energy once again, that inner voice was prompting me, and I suggested to James that we sleep together.

That became a way of our relationship—I’d honor some infusion of energy, an impulse to loving action, quell my rational mind that tells me what not to do, follow the body and let the mind catch up when it can.

James was following another route, one of infinite patience. ‘How do you tame a wild horse?’ he asks. ‘Build a paddock with fences so wide the horse can’t see them.’

Here’s some of what happened next.

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I have a dream. A spiritual festival is underway, and an audience is gathered inside a large marquee. They are here to watch the festival’s closing film, but the soundtrack has failed. Will I narrate it for them?

I agree to do so and take my place on top of a stepladder so I can view the film and my voice will carry.

It’s simple at first. The film shows a lake and I explain that this is Nirvana. A tall man of shining ebony skin, adorned with brightly coloured strings of beads, stands, and looks across the lake. This is the Spiritual Warrior, I explain.

And then the scene shifts. It’s now an aerial shot of a tall and narrow mountain, its top sheared off at an angle. On this sloped summit is a city of white buildings.

I don’t know what to tell the audience so wait while the credits roll. There I find the mountain’s name: Guadalupe Peak.

I left the coastguard cottage on the crumbling rim of England and moved inland to a block of flats. A gay male nurse in his fifties lived there, a guy with psychic flashes. I was set to head for New Mexico and a summer with James. ‘You’ll find your future there,’ the nurse said, after closing his eyes and peering into my future. ‘There will be a spurt of dust around your ankles, and your life will change. You will know it when it happens. I can tell you no more.’”

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James was renting a tiny adobe guesthouse in Santa Fe. Preparing for my visit, he had bought a book: National Parks of the Southwest. My thumb pressed into the wedge of the book’s pages and pulled it open. It revealed a chapter heading: Guadalupe Peak National Park.

“Can we go there?” I asked.

It became our first journey. Head to the State’s southern rim and the Park bridges New Mexico and Texas. On the New Mexican side, the range includes Carlsbad Caverns, from which thousands of bats stream at dusk.

We pitched our small tent in the park’s campground. I had told James my dream, and the one logic of the following morning was to climb Guadalupe Peak. A garter snake lay across the footpath, like a starting line. James veered left for a while, bouncing high across shrubbery to chase the blue of a flying scarab beetle. He peered into a mountainside, from where a canyon wren is calling. And we began our climb.

It was a fine, steep walk, but nothing remarkable was happening. We trod through a forest of Douglas Firs and as I stepped out on the open path I walked backwards. “I can’t see why I’ve been brought up here,” I told James, “So I expect it’s for you.”

As I turned around and dust from the path spurts up from my ankle. There, below me, was the exact mountains of my dream. The whoosh of a swallow’s flight crossed my head and arrowed toward it. The mountain’s top had been sheared at an angle to catch the morning light. I could not see the white buildings of the mountaintop city but knew they were there.

I folded myself to the ground. James saw the import of what was happening and sat on the slope behind me.

This city in white, I utterly know, is where I came from before I was born and where I will go when I die.

It took time for me to stand again, and we continued to our own summit. A path forked and we wondered which way to go. A fleet of dragonflies arrived to make our decision, leading us up the path to our left.

The summit was alive with sound, like a soft wind of clicks. I looked down at my knees. They were encrusted with what I call ladybirds and James calls ladybugs. This was ladybug emergence, the ground and the rocks and the branches of the thickets all alive with the insects enraptured in a mating frenzy.

The summit looks down on the peak of my mountain. To take a break we sat and faced down the other side, chewing at our picnic. A scarab beetle appeared in front of us. It entered a wild dance, skipping and twirling, and then it lay still. It had just died. We fetched small stones and built a tomb around it.

“Sing it out,” James suggested as we made our way down and I settled on the rocks, facing my mountain. I opened my mouth and let sounds come out. My singing was spontaneous, but if it had a model, it was Native American chants.

The next day we were set to leave but I didn’t know how to. I sat in the campground and stared up at the mountain. It seemed like the mountain was flowing. An eagle flew as though from its summit and words were pressed into my chest. “Be like this eagle,” they said. “Ride the waves of energy that come from the mountain.”

But what is the point of leaving when I have found my ultimate home?

The mountain pressed more words into me.

“All you need is love.”

“That’s just a Beatles song,” I said. “And James and I are just starting out together. We don’t have that kind of love.”

“All you need is love,” it persisted.

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Mont Canigou

James flies to wintry England and visits me in my rented flat. It sometimes seems as though the inhabitants of the neighboring psychiatric home moved in here when the home shut down. A face keeps appearing through the flap of my letterbox, a neighbor come to tell me that her son is on his way to kill her.

These are passing moments in what are often lucid and interesting tales of her life. Part of which is buying a small property to do up in the French Pyrenees. She has notions of it becoming the base for a spiritual community. The task is now beyond her. Would I like it?

No, I keep saying.

Yes, James says.

I sell and give away those of my possessions that won’t fit into the back of my car, which already holds my futon, and we drive to the ferry. We hit the Mediterranean, turn right, and one peak stands out among the Pyrenean chain: Mont Canigou. It’s the highest on view, its top slivered in snow. Guadalupe Peak was not a one-off for me: I have journeyed around the world’s sacred mountains and written a book about those encounters. This peak attracts me with a related power, and indeed I will learn that it is the sacred mountain of the Pyrenees.

We drive a road that is lined with flowering cherry trees and then ascend through Pyrenean flanks. Ancient Roman watch towers and bridges stud the new landscape. We plunge into a valley and drive a single-track lane to the new home. Monks made their way here five centuries ago, and as part of their new monastery built themselves a goathouse. The village has grown organically around it, and this former goathouse is the home we now enter. Its walls are bare rock, its floors are sodden and wires hang loose from its ceiling. Bats reside in its outer walls. Stand in the kitchen window you can watch trout in a bend in the river far below.

This home becomes a refuge. I have no work visa for the USA, gay relationships are illegal in many states, and whenever I enter the USA, I am placed in secondary detention, often for many hours, my suitcase opened and searched, my journal entries read.

Sometimes I’m here in France alone and at other times James can join me. Villagers are puzzled that we are staying around, and then finally understand. “Aah… nôtres écrivains! Our writers!” and we are accepted.

We are poor. These are years without cheap flights but overnight trains, waking to the shock of flamingos in lagoons. End stages of the journeys in and out of the mountain village are timed to coincide with the school bus. The house is shaped like a boat, thirty-five feet long with a bedroom above and the living space below, connected by a curved and open staircase. Our inner lives were intense. Books were being written. How do you create some privacy in a shared space?

Not having physical space in which to do so, we created space out of time.

Each day we took it in turns to host the other.

One would cook for the day, starting with evening dinner and then breakfast and lunch. The person who cooked would also wash up. James is inordinately tidy. I am not. Our deal? The place would be turned over clean at 5:30. If things got out of control before that, at least know cleanliness would be delivered shortly.

And 5:30 was the time, too, when we would pour a drink and share what had just happened in the day. Until then, through breakfast and lunch, we could stay silent. Neither had to show interest in the other.

We created time to be private and time to share.

Our small house and the surrounding hills have enough space for us both.

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We had a winter rental in a Santa Fe home we called the ice house, whose underfloor heating had failed. I’d been alone for a week, doing some deep thinking. A florist stepped into her cooler and emerged with a vast bunch of yellow roses. I drove them down to Albuquerque’s airport to welcome James home. And carry the flowers myself, for he was too bashful to hold them.

And too wary.

What had changed in me, with this sudden blooming into being a romantic? Why trust such a change?

The next morning, I was reading The New Mexican. A front-page article prompted action. The New Mexico Senate was voting to make sure that any legal recognition given to LGBT couples in other States would not be honored in New Mexico. In protest, gay and lesbian couples were set to gather on the steps of the Capitol building. For a mass protest wedding.

“Quick, James,” I said. “Put on your best dress. We’re getting married.”

Together we made thirteen couples for a multi-cultural ceremony. Catholic priests merely looked on, but rabbis and priests of other faiths took part. Taking her turn, a lesbian Navajo medicine woman lifted her hands toward the sky and called in the power of the eagles to bless us. Snow started to fall, onto our small gathering and not beyond. She drew down her hands and the snow stopped.

At the ceremony’s close we were asked to seal our weddings with a kiss. James and I shared our first kiss in public. Stepping aside from the gathering, Reverend Rusty led us through the full Anglican marriage ceremony—a February 13, 1995, for gay marriages to come. That evening the film of our kiss headed the ABC news bulletin.

Our wedding, of course, had no legal basis. But as Reverend Rusty spoke his words a flood of energy flooded in through the crown of my head, and all was right with my world.

James (left) and Martin.

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