mark thompson, gay body: a journey through shadow to self, 1997
[“To be wounded is not enough. We can claim our shame, count off each infraction against the Self as we would list souvenirs from a once-in-a-lifetime trip around the world. We can exalt that martyrdom, to, festooning the flesh with new wounds to better declare the one festering inside. But it is not enough only to see and then say what happened. There comes a time in every man’s life when he must ask: What is to be done about it? The hurt and betrayal, the feelings which exist as facts, those time-blasted pinnacles of memory as real as any monumental rock.
Our wound is not the soul’s germinal seed, but merely the gateway to that which grows beyond its other side. It is a point of entry, a way through to where that plant of eternal life we know as gay love takes root and prospers. Our gay wound is the gods’ gift to us surely, but in itself is nothing to either celebrate or covet. It is the means toward the creation of a Self rather than its meaning.
Creation requires sacrifice, and what is gained stands in proportion to what of oneself is given up. Certainly, one must relinquish past insult and injury in order to spiritually grow. That is the hero’s way. But we gay men have to sacrifice our attachment to the wound as well. What, at birth, seems inevitably fated, cannot alone be our destiny.
For, at some point on the journey, the hero’s work is done. The heroic myth itself must be sacrificed before self-creation can continue. From Gilgamesh to the Grail knight, to the gay shaman-warrior of today, each must finally put down the sword and let that part of himself which clings to the wound die. In other words, we must die before death itself, sacrifice what is most prized in order to truly live.
The choice is ours to make, and I look in wonderment at when and how it is made by some and avoided by others. Often it is the circumstances of literal dying that determines the question of how we gay men die inside. Whatever the case may be for each individual, there is no denying the wholesale fact of our physical leave-taking. Stories about final moments abound, with dizzying proximity, in my life and the lives of those close around me. On either one level or the other, sometimes both, we gay men have become pros in the necessary act of dying.”]
