mark thompson, gay body: a journey through shadow to self, 1997
“Disregard for the self, an almost overwhelming sense of being less than fully human, is a condition endemic to gay lives. It is the price we pay for being "other” in a society of calculated sameness. “It is virtually impossible to be different, particularly in this culture, and not feel deficient for the difference, because any awareness of difference inevitably translates into a devalued comparison,” state Gershen Kaufman and Lev Raphael, life partners who have written extensively about the crippling effects of shame in gay people. “First we are devalued by others, then we devalue ourselves.”
Sociologist Carlton Cornett observes that because we are continually bombarded by negative evaluations, “many gay men internalize representations of themselves as inadequate or morally bad. However, there is also a realization that there is no other way to be. The only compromise available in many cases is to maintain an alienation from the self.”
Once this damaged self is set in place, the tragedy is compounded by its projection onto similar others. We are destined to fall short in one another’s eyes because the deficiencies seen in friends and lovers are usually our own. The disagreeable aspects of one’s negated self is time and again cast onto these convenient living screens. This is why the theater of all possibility I thought I had moved to soon regressed to the haunted house of my youth. Rather than remain a land of milk and honey, mecca began to sour.“
-Mark Thompson, ‘Gay Body: a Journey Through Shadow to Self,’ 1997
[ In cleaning their own spiritual houses, however, gay men need to understand not only the reasons for their shame but where to find it. By its very nature, shame is elusive and hard to see. For this stagnant complex of unctuous feeling thrives in the most impenetrable archetype of our soul: shadow. The notion of shadow is used here in its most profound, psychological sense: to define the unconscious, split-off, and disavowed parts of a collective or individual mind.
As the poet Robert Bly reminds us, the shadow is “the long bag we drag behind us,” and different cultures fill the bag with different contents. Because queer people seem to emerge from - indeed inhabit - the realm of the shadow we personify for others the hidden ingredients of that bag, usually in its most threatening form: The shadow is unconsciously projected and queer folk become its screen.
We exist as an unfortunate mirror for those things left unseen, or wished not to be seen. Rather than deal with an inclusive reflection of itself, society reacts to us with hostility and rage. We live in a culture of extreme denial, and nowhere is this better evidenced than in the lives of those it has attempted to purge. The violence, the rejection, the sorrow, that pierce to the center of our hearts are the result of society grappling in fear of itself.
“In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior,” says Audre Lorde, a black lesbian feminist poet. “We do not speak of human difference, but of human deviance.”
Therefore, in a patriarchal society, women and those qualities deemed feminine - like open emotionalism - are oppressed. In a racist society, people of color or of “otherness” are viewed as “lesser than.” In an erotophobic society, individuals living out their spontaneous ecstatic feelings are censored. Men who are unable to integrate these alienated aspects of themselves express their repression through violent means, their bloody subjugation of women, queer people, and the disadvantaged being the signal act of our age.
That gay people display a primal link with eros threatens those who have deeply repressed their own sexuality. They project distant, twisted instincts elsewhere; the homo of their sexual prejudice is merely a pretext for unrecognized private distress. Every day in America, gay women and men are demeaned, abused, and even killed because they carry with them society’s projection of its darkest, most despised, and least integrated aspects of Self.
I have no doubt that the archetypes which speak most directly to gay men -those we tend to gravitate around - are the very ones most deeply repressed in our larger culture. Thus we are made to appear as a people without honor, and certainly as a people without a basis for being. For the soulful ground in which we find nourishment, self-creation itself, has been devalued and buried deep in icy shadow.
When we claim the shadow, integrating what society cannot tolerate, a distanced part of our self is brought near. I understood this when I was able to shed the miserable onus of being a faggot. To be a faggot, I had learned, is to be shunned. By being removed from the trust of others, I was kept distrustful of myself
Years of inner work were required before I could heal this wound, for I had internalized society’s damning views of differentness. The reclaiming of my shame taught me that there was nothing flawed in my own being. On the contrary, the problem originated with the heterosexual majority’s destructive effort to control is homosexual minority.
Jung says that archetypes are psychological mechanisms for transforming energy within us. With this insight in mind, I could now see the symbol of the faggot as an apparition of society’s collective shadow. Being perceived as this shadowy figure, and having that projection reinforced in tragic ways, even by my parents, had kept me emotionally laden. By owning the symbol of the faggot on my own terms, I could begin to release the transformative energy buried beneath.
What had been suppressed was the archetype of the Trickster,a fount of aliveness, curiosity, and risk. The Trickster became an important ally once I had rescued him from my shadow bag. Today, he enables me to find ways around obstacles - like someone’s rejection or hate - that would have previously stopped me cold.
My friend, the passionate player - he got it right, too. Barry figured his salvation as a gay man lived in the dark as much as what cursed him. In our crude and fumbling way, we played in the the dark together, even with darkness itself, in our search for light. Barry, the Trickster, at loose in two houses of many black rooms. Opening doors in one helped him find a way into the other. That, and a little luck, meant a damaged life was healed.
How I wish I’d known years ago, as a boy adrift in his own dark house, what Barry finally discovered: That the name of the thing rising up to haunt me was shame. ]
a while ago I reblogged this post and saw that @aphroditestummyrolls tagged it ‘Nicky the plumber, Joe the embarrassed cat owner’ and this immediately flashed before my eyes
