kipouros's Open Salon Blog

Gripping Seattle Drama

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:11:39 -0500

November 16 had begun like any other Monday for Alison, and she was in confident spirits. The barista had put precisely the right amount of hazelnut syrup in her double skinny latte, and the University of Washington department of whom she was an administrator was right on schedule for the completeion of its new mission statement.

But that evening, standing in the cold wet night air at the 15th Avenue bus stop, Allison got a bit more than she'd bargained for.

Through the blowing rain, she could make out the outline of her bus, its glowing orange letters shining in the night. Like clockwork, the 48 bus to Rainier Beach would glide down the hill each evening at exactly 5:15, followed by the 43 which would take her, like a secure warm womb, only with seats and no entangling umbilical cord, to her Capitol Hill home.

But tonight, something was different. Something was not right. She briefly entertained the comforting hope that it was a mere illusion brought on by the rain, but as the bus drew closer, she could no longer deny the truth. Perhaps it had been the power of her own will, of what she had desperately wanted to see, that allowed her mind to fill in the blank spaces on the second digit. But it was too late for that sort of idle speculation now. No, something was seriously wrong. She shuddered as a distant, traumatic memory struggled to surface, but as tenuous as it was, she had resolved to stop letting past traumas keep her from enjoying the present. But below her superficial bravado, she knew she was fooling herself. Her dread was like the fault line deep beneath the city, invisible and rarely thought of, but ready to spring into horrible action at the least expected moment.

It was not only Allison who had noticed something awry that evening. Gerald, a Program Assistant II from Applied Physics, was also a regular at the Allision's stop. Each evening after leaving his office, he would walk by the espresso bar on the way to the stop, and buy himself a molasses spice cookie. Gerald was a stickler for the law. As he exited the shop, he came to the red light at the empty crosswalk, and patiently stood as the raindrops stung his skin, chewing thoughtfully, waiting for the light to change. His calm was not cavalier; it was borne of nearly a decade of timely mass transit service. As long as he could remember, the confident approach of the Number 48 had served as his advance warning, the signal to place the remaining two thirds of his cookie back into the wax paper wrapper and neatly fold the opening to prevent the sugary, fragrant crumbs from spilling out into his man purse. Food on the bus was, after all, a punishable crime.

In fact, he had often noticed Allison as she waited pensively for her bus to arrive, her soft mousey brown hair blowing in the wind, the occasional strand adhering seductively to her moist, pale cheek. He'd often agonized over the thought of sitting next to her, but there were always too many empty seats remaining for it to appear coincidental. Besides, even if he did sit next to her, what would he say? He was the kind of man who would cross over to the other side of the street when he saw a woman walking alone, to spare her the discomfort of having to choose between looking at him or pretending not to notice. Perhaps he was preserving his own comfort as well and wondered if he should be a little more bold, without being forward. Yet he knew in his heart that if it were to be, his opportunity would present itself and would not need to be forced.

And suddenly, with no warning, the unthinkable had actually happened. As the number on the bus materialized through the rivulets of water streaming down the window, they both realized at the same instant, that this night was not like other nights. Frantically, Gerald stuffed the cookie into its envelope. There was no time for careful folding; he clumsily rolled up the free end enough to keep the sticky morsels out of his Blackberry, and like wedge on an arctice icebreaker, his words split the silence.

"Hey, that's not the 48."

"You're right," said Allison, "usually the 48 comes first, and then the 43."

"Yep. I wonder how that happened? How did the 43 get ahead of the 48? It has to get all the way from Ballard, you know. Well, technically, it's not the 43, it's 44 until it gets to University Way, but..." His words trailed off as he realized he had nothing else to say.

"I couldn't believe it, this never happens" said Allison, mercifully delaying - though not for long - the awkward silence.

"Yeah," answered Gerald, trying hard to keep thoughts of the sudden chaos visited upon his man purse at bay. "They really should separate the schedules, space them out a bit, to avoid this kind of confusion."

"Yes, you're absolutely right!" Allison agreed. "They really should do something."

In the space of that brief instant, they both realized that the world was no longer like it had been just a moment before. And they knew that together, with the support of their family, friends and each other, they would suvive.

Sensitive Meatballs of Adana

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:09:47 -0400

In one of the "Chicken Translation" posts I mentioned a dish that had been erroneously translated translated as "Sensitive meatballs." After a couple of weeks in Greece, I found myself with a serious hankering for food with a little spice in it, so I decided to make them.

The word köfte, with regional variations such as kufta, kofta, keftes, is not an easy one to translate. It is frequently translated as "meatballs" and that is one of its incarnations, but there are köfte that have no meat whatsoever. Greece has its "kolokythokeftedes" (deep fried fritters made with zucchini) and Turkey there are köfte made of little more than bulgur, flour and water. Of these, the king is undoubtedly içli köfte, or stuffed köfte. They consist of a shell made of fine bulgur with the addition of water, flavorings, flour or semolina, meat (or not) and sometimes an egg, and a filling based on ground meat and onion with optional butter, pine nuts, currants, walnuts and other ingredients. They are either deep fried or boiled.

To make the shells, take a couple cups of bulgur and a cup and a half of semolina and wet with about a cup and a half of water and let them stand.

While the bulgur is soaking, fry a pound of lean ground beef in one stick of butter (yes, you read right). You can use less but it won't be the same. Once the beef is browned, add four chopped onions, a teaspoon each of red flake pepper (Aleppo pepper), black pepper and cumin. You can also add some pepper and tomato paste for flavor, and salt to taste. Other optional ingredients are walnuts, pine nuts, currants... I added some dried barberries this time. Cook uncovered until the onion is transparent, them remove from the heat and turn into a shallow pan to cool.

While the meat mixture is cooling, grate an onion into the bulgur/semolina mixture, add an egg, a couple teaspoons of pepper paste, a little cumin and salt. Knead this mixture well until it has stiffened up well.

Your filling should be set up by now. "Congealed" doesn't sound very nice, but with all that butter, why mince words?

Take a piece of the bulgur mixture about the size of an egg, roll into a ball, then wet your finger and poke it into the center. Squeeze the dough along your finger, then start to press it against the palm of your hand - which you'll also want to wet with water - to start opening it up, just like a long pinch pot, turning as you go to keep it even. Put in as much filling as it will take, then narrow the end and with wet fingers, seal the end.

When the köfte are all done (you will undoubtedly have either too much meat or too much dough, it's just a law of the universe), grate a couple large tomatoes into a pot. Add a tablespoon of pepper paste and one of tomato paste, mix well, and add about 5 or 6 cups of water. Bring to a boil, add the juice of one lemon, a few crushed cloves of garlic, a few teaspoons of dry mint, salt and pepper, a healthy dollop of pomegranate molasses, and if needed, a bit of sugar (as in one cube) to balance the acid. Let boil for 5 minutes or so, then add a layer of köfte. When they rise to the surface, they're done. Remove them onto a serving plate, then add the rest to the sauce and boil them the same way.

This is actually a "lazy" way to do another dish known as Anali Kizli ("with mothers and daughters"). The authentic way is to make the stuffed köfte just a little larger than a shooter marble. The "daughters" are smaller with no filling, just the extra dough rolled into balls the size of a marble. But as that takes hours, I make mine big.

There are variations of içli köfte all over eastern Turkey. Some serve them deep fried, others boil them and serve them topped simply with butter and red flake pepper. In SE Turkey they sometimes make them flatter by opening a ball of dough into a wider cup, then sealing the edges. These are dipped into beaten egg and fried, ensuring that you'll be digesting them for at least two days.

But nothing screams "Adana" (not to mention "yummmm") like a tart hot tomato sauce with mint, so if you have a little patience and are willing to slide a bit on your cholesterol-free diet, give these a try!

Oh God, Not Another Interminable Coming-Out Story

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:08:02 -0400

I have to admit that I go through phases when it comes to coming-out stories. Sometimes I really do think, “oh Jeezus, not another one,” because under all the variation there is one central theme: freeing ourselves from inflexible, vicious-circle thinking. And yet it’s the infinite variety of ways in which humans succeed in becoming entrenched in such thinking, and the events that lead to their partial or total collapse. Even more fascinating is how, just like the proverbial old lady who refuses to leave her house that has been ruined by a flood, the mind has a tendency to cling to the skeleton of its former confines. Each one illustrates some new way of poking through the wall of rote thinking, and so I'll add mine as well. It's long. I left out a lot of information, and it's still long. Ultimately it's not so much about sexuality per se as it is about trusting in my own inspiration.

My coming out story is a bit different from those of many who struggled with religion in that I had no strictly religious upbringing. It’s also different in that I did it groundhog style – I came out, went back in for thirteen or so years, then came out again.

Our family’s religious background was quite mixed – Southern Baptist on my father’s side though I have no idea when he last went to a Baptist church, Greek Orthodox and Presbyterian on my mother’s side. We did go to the Presbyterian church for a few years while I was in elementary school, but what I remember from the classes was more about values such as sharing, kindness and mercy. Later we joined the Lutheran church and though I was aware of my sexuality then, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the fire and brimstone that rained down upon them (because they were all homosexuals of course!) left no impression upon me. I saw no reason to believe it.

Sunday school was great socially but church seemed irrelevant, and when it came to God and faith, I’d already decided when I was about eight years old that most people didn’t really believe it but everyone went through the motions because they were somehow supposed to. I remember wondering, “can I ‘make myself’ believe something that I don’t believe?” The answer was “no, but I can get so used to pretending that it becomes a habit.” This isn’t to say that I didn’t wonder about spiritual things. I remember puzzling long and hard about why it was that I was born a six year-old in 1964 in Iowa City, Iowa instead of a Chinese kid 100 years ago. I also never believed in the God that sat up in heaven, sometimes happy (when were good) and sometimes really, really angry when we did bad things. Later on I figured that with people murdering each other and being generally horrible to one another, that kind of God would not have a moment’s peace and his life would be miserable, consumed with all that anger! I mean just imagine, God gets up, on the wrong side of bed as usual, and before he can even have his morning coffee, “Rooooaaarrrrgggh! Little Johnny Stevenson in Akron, Ohio masturbated, again! I’m soo fuckin' pissed off I could...lesseee...flood Bangladesh! No...I promised I wouldn't do that again...ah, okay, no rain for three years in Somalia, that's it!” It just couldn’t be and I never dwelt on it. It also seemed absurd to me to sit in church and plead, “God have mercy upon us” over and over, as if by the pleading, we would somehow change His mind. It reminded me of the little kid who thinks if he says “pleeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaasseeeeeeee” enough times, mom and dad will eventually give in.

I also never quite understood how we were somehow “saved” by Jesus’ death. I asked one pastor, “If a man has five kids and four of them are evil while one is good, how does killing the good one help the evil ones to become any better?” His answer was “that’s a mystery we can’t ever really understand, but we have to believe it.” And that pretty much settled the question for me – I didn’t believe it and saw no reason to try and make myself believe it, since I didn’t really believe in the hell that was held up as the consequence of nonbelief.

I was a bit of an oddball kid, I hated baseball and football, and loved nature, language, plants. This was enough to make a kid unpopular. Kids in a neighborhood are always in search of someone to be at the bottom of the pecking order, and I had the honor. In elementary school it only got worse; I even acquired my own personal brand of “cooties,” which were transmittable merely by a glance. Having a funny last name that rhymed with “queer” didn’t help. It’s absurd now, but at the time I internalized it all, and by the time I reached fifth grade, had unwittingly accepted that respect, good friendship, companionship, and later love, were things that other people got, but not me. I learned early that attention, even favorable attention, just made me stand out, and standing out set me up for more trouble. So I stopped singing out in music class, began to purposely fail spelling bees. The less I was noticed, I thought, the less I would be teased. I saw my tormentors mostly as idiots and never longed to be accepted by them; but I always dreamed of having a friend who like me. The friends I was really in awe of were mostly remarkable oddballs themselves.

I am also convinced that while I had no idea about sexuality of any kind, the seeds were already there. When I was maybe in first grade, I was watching workmen at the house and was especially struck by one very handsome guy hammering away on the roof. I had dreams about two neighbor boys that I can now see were completely homoerotic but again, had no idea what it meant, or that it even meant anything at all. I look back on my longing for a friend who had moved away and realize now that I was in love with him, even though it never occurred to me at the time.

When adolescence kicked in, erotic became sexual, and I started having my first outwardly sexual dreams. They were so graphic that they left absolutely no doubt as to where I was headed sexually (they would make some very interesting science fiction erotica in retrospect!). Still I thought nothing of it. That is, I was vividly aware of what my life would become if others found out, but it never occurred to me that there was “something wrong with me.” By the time I was sixteen or so I had realized “I’m gay,” and even wrote it on a bathroom wall in high school just to see what people’s reactions would be. Interestingly, there was no response at all.

Our home environment was also not hostile – though my father did come out with the occasional talk about what he’d do if some queer touched his kids, I knew we had gay family friends and this was mostly stuff he figured he “had” to say. My parents were both professional musicians after all. My mother would visit a good high school friend who lived with another woman and once when I asked if she never got married, she said “No, I think they’re more interested in each other,” and that was that.

I came out at nineteen, and there was no great explosion. My mother told me that it had crossed her mind, and that she loved me, period. She asked how long I’d known. I said “since around thirteen,” and her answer is something I’ve shared with many people who can’t imagine a parent accepting them: “I’m sorry you thought you had to hide it for so long.” As a matter of fact, it’s the only thing that still bothers her about the whole thing.

So with all this coolness and acceptance, how on earth did I ever get caught up in any sort of attempt to “straighten myself out?”

In college, I joined a folk dance club and became very close friends with a woman in it. She was a Christian Scientist. All I’d ever heard about Christians Scientists was one statement by mother as we drove by their church one day: “They don’t believe in doctors and let their kids die of horrible infections instead of taking them to the hospital.” Well, that seemed pretty heinous and wing-nutty to me. But my friend was not a wingnut at all. She was logical, friendly, non-judgmental. I came out to her and there was never any talk of “you should change.” Of course we argued religion a lot but her answers always seemed to be grounded in logic rather than any sort of blind faith; and that we actually saw eye-to-eye on many issues. When she revealed to me that Christian Scientists believe in the non-reality of matter, I thought “now this is going too far,” but Buddhists believe the same thing and they are hardly viewed as crazy people except by the most bigoted.

She eventually graduated and moved away. One day, completely on my own, I just felt spurred to go to a Christian Science reading room and get a copy of Science and Health (the textbook of Christian Science, read together with the Bible at services, written by the church’s founder Mary Baker Eddy) to read for myself. I was completely absorbed. Though couched in rather Victorian language, the basic premises seemed so logical and straightforward. Certain passages especially moved me:

God is Love. Can we ask Him to be more? God is intelligence. Can we inform the infinite Mind of anything He does not already comprehend? Do we expect to change perfection? Shall we plead for more at the open fount, which is pouring forth more than we accept? The unspoken desire does bring us nearer the source of all existence and blessedness.

How empty are our conceptions of Deity! We admit theoretically that God is good, omnipotent, omnipresent, infinite, and then we try to give information to this infinite Mind. We plead for unmerited pardon and for a liberal outpouring of benefactions. Are we really grateful for the good already received? Then we shall avail ourselves of the blessings we have, and thus be fitted to receive more. Gratitude is much more than a verbal expression of thanks. Action expresses more gratitude than speech.

Christian Science is quite different from traditional Christianity in its view of God and man. God is not a stern judge, nor a being that intercedes if we believe hard enough. God is Principle, Life, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Truth, and most important, Love. Not a being who loves, but omnipotent, all-encompassing, ever-present divine Love itself. Man is God’s image and likeness – but as God is infinite and spiritual, then this likeness must also be spiritual. C.S. sees what appears to be a finite, temporal, material and mortal world as a limited, illusory view of reality, which fades to allow our true nature to shine through as we understand our true nature. “Sin” is not a “transgression to be punished” but rather confusion that results in more confusion and misery, “punishing itself” until one turns back to his/her essence. Grace is the reality that we can do nothing ourselves to make Truth more true or infinite Love more infinitely loving, but by faith – trust as in a loving parent – we let go of our limited thinking and allow God to be more and more fully expressed right here and now.

This was the God I was looking for, that made sense to me, and finally nobody was telling me I had to “just believe something or go to hell.” I read the book from cover to cover. Finally I decided to go to the church. A group of people who believed in the same sort of God I did! I went, and found them to be loving, friendly people. And I wanted to be accepted by them so badly that I conveniently ignored a streak of very stodgy conservatism there that was in direct conflict with the central message of Science and Health. And though there is nothing in Science and Health to support the idea of a stern, judgmental God, I’m convinced this view is part and parcel of our culture, our ideas of justice and discipline, and it’s very difficult to be completely free of.

Nobody in the church ever knew that I was gay, and I was never attacked by anyone in any way. But even though the spiritual man of Christian Science was neither male nor female but rather a complete expression of God, the official position of the church was that homosexuality was something that could and should be healed. The application form for the Mother Church even listed homosexuality as one of the things that were unacceptable for members. So I never became a member, either of a branch church or the Mother Church. I started on an attempt to heal myself of homosexuality, convincing myself that heterosexuality, though also a material condition, was somehow “closer” to man’s true spiritual state than homosexuality. I look back and see that it was all about a longing for acceptance – all the while subconsciously denying the possibility that I could ever receive such acceptance.

In 1983 I went to Greece to live for three years. There was a Christian Science church there, but as I adapted more and more to Greek life, the Christian Science church seemed so out of context that I soon stopped going. I started hanging out at a very nice and friendly gay bar in my neighborhood, and had a moderate amount of sexual experience. There was always a bit of guilt about it but it faded into the background.

Then, in spring of 1985, I got sick. A light cough, a sore throat, increasing fatigue and weight loss. AIDS was just beginning to be talked about in Greece as something more than “something you got from sex with Americans.” During the next few months, I lost nearly 40 pounds. In reality it was probably an autoimmune reaction to Athens’ incredibly polluted air; when I went to Turkey and spent a month in the clean air of the Black Sea region, my strength came back and I felt wonderful, then as soon as I got to Istanbul I was once again knocked flat with fatigue and sore throat. But at the time I was convinced that I probably had AIDS, especially when a throat swab revealed Candida albicans as the cause of the irritation. For those who don't know, Candida infection in the throat (but actually far beyond what I was experiencing) is one of the early sypmptoms of AIDS. The doctor gave me two different prescriptions, and neither worked. I had experienced physical healings before in Christian Science, and decided to trust God with this.

There were several stages but two stand out: One night I was lying in bed, sweating with fever and pain in my limbs, and I realized that I truly was frightened for my life. I asked, “Am I going to die?” I stopped and prayed – and prayer here meant that I listened. Immediately the thought came: “I have trusted my life to you, to Love, and I am safe.” And that moment, I had a powerful mental image of a filthy, plugged-up sink clearing, all the gunk and muck swirling down the drain pipe. And at the very same moment, I felt all my fear and anxiety drain away in exactly the same way. And as that happened, my fever disappeared, I felt calm and comforted, and had my first good sleep in a long time. The next stage came several days later when I was reading an article on joy. It said, “We may feel that we cannot experience joy because of something lacking in our lives; we may even believe that because of something we have done, we don’t even deserve to feel joy.” Bingo…I had left my attempts to cure myself of gayness and now here I was looking for help! But the article went on (and I’m paraphrasing): “But we don’t have to accept that for a moment, because our joy is complete now, because we are this very moment the complete expression of Love.” At that moment, it was as if a flash bulb went off in my brain. Not figuratively but literally: my vision, my senses were completely flooded for an instant with pure, white light; it was all that existed. And afterwards, a calm, pure joy. I went in and took a shower. Keep in mind that I was looking pretty skeletal by then and many people had become very concerned about me. I went out onto the front balcony. The next door neighbor walked by, took a look at me and said, “what happened, you’ve gained weight!” I hadn’t, but I did feel better. About half an hour later, an Iranian friend, a Sufi, who had been very supportive of me, came by. He took one look at me and said “What did you do, you look so good!” And so it went through the day. Over the next few months I put on all the weight I’d lost.

And I also knew I was just as gay as I ever was.

Now if I could have an experience like this, you’d think I’d wake up and realize that being gay was not an impediment to God’s love or my spirituality. But the truth was that this did not have anything to do with being gay per se. It was about having internalized all the bullying and belittling I’d received as a kid, and continuing to bully myself. Gayness was just the most convenient handle, after all I could always find people who would agree that that was bad. So rather than appreciate the real significance of that healing, I chose to view it as “one more step towards my freedom from homosexuality.”

Of course I did continue to have sexual fantasies, none of which ever involved a woman. And one of the things that disturbed me most during this period was what happened to my fantasies. Whereas when I was a youngster and would have a fantasy, it would last long after I’d had my orgasm; I would imagine being held tenderly and sharing of that warmth. Once I’d decided that my desires were wrong, my fantasies become completely physical; and the image of my imaginary partner was erased from my mind almost before the orgasm was over. This is a pattern I’ve seen so many times in people who harbor guilt over their sexuality – go out, get the sexual desire met, then flee.

I also had some real sexual contacts, but they were mostly one-night stands. One was with a man from Brazil who was so sweet, and wanted a deeper relationship. He called me several times and I always made up some excuse to blow him off. I wish there was some way I could reach him and apologize, and tell him that it really was not about him. But I suspect he knows that.

In university I also began taking some anthropology classes, and witnessing how sexual mores paralleled the demands of patriarchy and patrilineal inheritance was a real eye opener. I also became involved with the Buddhist Cambodian community and noticed how their idea of deity fit with how they saw and disciplined their children. All of this was slowly taking chinks out of the mental wall I’d surrounded myself with.

Finally, the conflict and loneliness became too much. I’d struggled for thirteen years and nothing at all had changed except that my sexual orientation had now become the single biggest thing in my life; in my mind it was the reason for every failure (never mind the many successful gay men out there) and every sadness (the happy ones must be just so entrenched in sin that they aren’t aware how miserable they are). “If I can get rid of this, then everything else will fall into place,” I would think, conveniently ignoring how well things had fallen into place and how I’d repeatedly backed away from opportunities. (After all success was for others, right?)

I’d come to a turning point and made a decision: I would call a Christian Science practitioner (a person who helps others through prayer) and either be done with this once and for all, or live my life as a happy gay man. I called a practitioner who was known to be very good. “Of course I’ll help you,” he said. And we began to pray together. It was the second or third day, I don’t remember which, when all of a sudden I realized with a start: “I have no idea why I’m doing this! I have no real idea why there’s anything wrong with being gay!” I had rationalized why it was wrong but never truly understood why it was, and in my desire for the acceptance and approval of others, I had completely forfeited my own power of judgment to them.

I immediately called the practitioner and our conversation went more or less like this:

- I was praying, and suddenly realized that I have no idea why loving a man is wrong.”

-- Loving a man isn’t wrong. But why the sex?”

- Why do you have sex?

-- Because it’s how we procreate.

- So you are saying that after you last child was born, you told your wife “Gee, thank God we don’t have to do that any more”?

-- Of course not!

- Then why do you have sex?

-- Because it brings us close together, it’s an expression of our love.

- That’s why I want to have it.

-- But at least there’s the idea of procreation!

- Well, since you haven’t been pumping out kids right and left, it seems that if there’s any “idea” about procreation here, it’s the idea of preventing it. Are you telling me it’s okay to have sex for the joy of it only as long as we keep in mind that the rubber might break?

-- Now you’re not taking this seriously!

- No, I guess I’m not, because I don’t see that you’ve given me a reason to take it seriously.

Actually I later found out that they never had any kids, and that he was himself a closeted gay man. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But just as my spirituality had continued unimpeded by my conviction that belief that gayness was wrong, so had his, and I do give him credit for helping me to see through my delusion. I even wrote him a couple years later and told him so.

For a long time after that, I had no desire to have anything to do with anything that smacked of religion. To those who are mourning the loss of their faith over this, all I can say is, “be patient, God has your answer as soon as you’re ready for it.” For me a couple years passed before I began to feel the need for a more regular spiritual practice. Going back to the Christian Science church was out of the question; I didn’t want to be somewhere where I’d have to watch my back or hide. By this point, “prayer” had ceased to have any ritual attached to it; it was about trusting. I felt that the desire for spirituality, coupled with the trust that God knew my needs before even I did, was enough. And so it was; a friend in Australia sent me a book by a local author who had had his own struggle between sexuality and Christian Science. I wrote to him, and we began corresponding. I thought, “if there was ever some personality I’d love to have lunch with some day, it would be him.” A few weeks later he wrote and let me know that he would be in Vancouver in a month, and if I had the time, would I like to come up and have lunch together? I did, and we had a wonderful conversation about our experiences that left me more convinced than ever before that I didn’t have to be afraid to trust God.

Later I put that desire out in the form of prayer once more, and that week I had conversations with four different people in completely different contexts, who seemed to share my spiritual views. It turned out that they all went to the Church of Religious Science, a congregation which embraced gay people. I went for several weeks in a row, and though I knew from the start that I wouldn’t become a member (oddly enough I didn’t find the spirituality as radical as I liked it!), it served as a sort of affirmation that it was perfectly all right to pray, listen, and trust my own answer without holding it up to someone else’s opinion for approval. I love that they’re there, and I usually stop by at least once when I’m back in Seattle.

I can’t say that it was all rosy after that. Now that I felt free to be part of the gay community, I found that gay bars and clubs were not places I felt at home in. More importantly, now that gayness could no longer serve as my smokescreen for the real issues in my life, there they were, staring me in the face, demanding to be dealt with. I had many more experiences, some of them painful, which allowed/forced me to face my fears and the self-hatred that lay beneath them. There is always something new to learn, some old assumption waiting to be blown out of the water. But it’s like clearing the dirt off of a beautiful stained glass window, each time a bit more beauty is revealed; beauty that was always there, just waiting to be seen.

To sum up, I see most of what passes for religion as little more than the formalization of cultural values, fears and prejudices. Jesus said that it was better not to marry, to come out and be separate, even leave family for the Christ if necessary, – and mainstream religion somehow uses the Bible to force the institution of marriage, conformity and a monolithic concept of “family values.” The Bible speaks of understanding and trust, traditional religion emphasizes blind belief. The Bible emphasize showing one’s faith by one’s works; traditional religion emphasizes blind faith as being more important than anything else. Jesus said “the kingdom of God is within you;” traditional Christianity says “trust the priest, the clergy, the pope, the elders, the herd – anything but your own inner voice. And the same scenario plays out over and over and over throughout history: Anyone who has the courage or conviction to go against the culture’s entrenched ways of thought is threatened with rejection and expulsion or worse. In my mind, it was just this deadening tyranny of material, mechanical, fossilized thinking that Jesus came to destroy – to “overturn, overturn, overturn, [until] it shall be no more…” And it was for this overturning that Jesus paid the ultimate price.

I think it’s quite significant that Jesus established no formal worship, no church dogma; he gave his followers no book. I suspect that he knew quite well that whatever he said, people would eventually twist to satisfy their own ends. Of course plenty was written and people have done just that. I’m convinced that we find what we need when we’re ready for it. I needed the experiences I had; there were plenty of alternatives but I had to be forced by my own misery to confront my assumptions. I don’t look down on anyone who still feels the need for traditional religion. Who knows, maybe it will come into my own life again, in another form. But I rather doubt it. The human mind has a tendency to cling to its assumptions and reinforce them; I've seen that this is often much more powerful than religion per se. But in that it takes those assumptions an puts them in a place that is then deemed untouchable and unquestionable, formal religion executes a double-whammy. It tends to say "come on in, let your guard down and believe, we'll offer you comfort," when what it's asking is that you forfeit the single most precious thing you have - your own capacity to comprehend and demonstrate your higher reality - and put it into the hands of others, whose motives are almost always questionable.

And yet as I look at the messages of the greatest spiritual thinkers throughout history, the thought that seems threaded through it all, glimmering through the doctrines, is this: “Come out and be yourself, God/Mind/Infinite Consciousness is right where you are, infinitely conscious and active, and is sufficient.”

Echoes of a Homeland V

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 09:08:22 -0400

My first view of Thessaloniki (Salonica) must have been less than breathtaking. I say that because I lived there for a year and spent a lot of time in those outer neighborhoods; places like Stavroupolis and Evosmos, populated with villagers who built their houses (or at least the outer shells of them) overnight, illegally. They were ugly places and our approach to the city must have taken us right through the middle of them, but I have no memory of them. Perhaps because everything was so new, the only picture that remains in my mind is the sweeping view of white apartment buildings lining a wide sea walk along the deep blue Thermaikos Gulf, the White Tower, and the amphitheatre of the city, topped by the old Byzantine walls. It is no accident that the Greek flag is blue and white. I was not the only one impressed; I remember a chorus of “oooooh”s in the bus.

When we finally stopped in the plaza near the White Tower, where the families of students who were staying there were waiting. Being jet lagged and exhausted, I didn’t really look forward to yet another bus ride – almost four hours back then to Kavala – and was also a bit sad that I wouldn’t have the chance to explore Thessaloniki. As soon as the bus doors opened, a local representative entered and called my name. It turned out that I wouldn’t be going to Chrysoupolis after all, as the father had taken ill and they couldn’t deal with a foreign exchange student just then. So until a new family was found, I was going to stay in Thessaloniki for a few days with a Mrs. Chasirtzoglou.

A language nerd sidenote - having lived in Turkey for nine years now, my brain automatically transforms that name into Hasircioglu – a Hasirci is a straw mat weaver; the many surnames in Greece ending with “-oglou” (Turkish –oglu, “his son”) are a reminder of the thousands of Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox refugees that came from Anatolia in 1923. The Greek counterparts are the endings “-opoulos, -idis and –akis,” as well as more local forms like “-ellis” (Mytiline) and “-atos” (Cephallonia).

As everyone in the family worked and was out during the day, I was pretty much on my own. The only person left in the house was Mrs. Chasirtzoglou’s ancient mother, a classic black-clad, toothless elderly Greek woman with deep set, beaming eyes and a constant almost manic smile who talked a mile a minute, quickly demonstrating how insufficient my attempts at learning Greek on my own had been. Well, she, and the telephone. I still have telephone phobia. That first night in Athens, I had tried to call my distant cousin Kaiti in Athens. Beep beep beep beeeeeep, click, then through the static of Greece’s then-stone-age telephone system, a woman came on. “Parakaló, anaménete sto akoustikó sas,” she said. In my best pidgin Greek, I told her I spoke only a little Greek, did she speak English? Interrupting me, she repeated the same mysterious sentence: “Parakaló, anaménete sto akoustikó sas.” Using another well-rehearsed line, I pleaded “excuse me, I don’t understand, can you please speak slowly?” And as she said, once more, “parakaló, anaménete sto akoustikó sas,” I realized I was talking with a recording, the one that came up when all the lines were busy, telling me “please wait at your receiver.” Everyone had a good laugh, but now I see it more or less like preliminary training; anyone who has ever tried to argue with a Greek telephone company employee knows that it’s not much different from talking to a recording.

In my three days in Thessaloniki, I managed to 1) get myself lost, 2) make five new friends in the course of an afternoon simply because I played guitar and knew the English words to “Ourane pou pernas” (the Greek knockoff of “Country Roads”), and 3) discover that there was a gay cruising ground right in the middle of the city (no, I didn’t go for it; I was way too chickenshit for that and in retrospect I’m sure that was a good thing). Finally a family was found, and I was even more disappointed to find that I was getting sent to the town of Komotini, about an hour from the Turkish border in Thrace. I felt like the exchange student coming to the US with images of New York in his mind, finding out he had been placed in Podunk Center, Iowa.

But though it’s not on many (any?) tourist itineraries, Komotini is actually a very interesting place; with its remaining Muslim population, it provides a picture of what Greece could be like today if the 1922 population exchange had never taken place. The Treaty of Lausanne which stipulated the exchange of Orthodox Christian and Muslim populations between Greece and Turkey, contained three exemptions: the Muslims of Western Thrace (Greece) in exchange for the Greeks of Istanbul; and the Turks on the Greek islands of Rhodes and Kos in exchange for the Greeks of the islands of Imvros (Gökçeada) and Tenedos (Bozcaada). Komotini has a Turkish population of nearly 40% and driving through the countryside, the minarets rising out of every other village bears witness to the region's Muslim population.

You might notice than when I speak of Thrace, I say “Muslim” rather than “Turk.” This is neither to deny the existence of Turks there, nor deference to the language of the Treaty of Lausanne (which has been used in Greece to prohibit the use of the word “Turk” in certain official organizations), but rather to make it clear that Turks are not Greece’s only Muslims. In addition to Turks, there are also Pomaks, who are Muslim Bulgarian speakers. The Pomaks have been caught up in lots of politics between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey; nationalist Turks refer to them as "Pomak Turks," and nationalist Bulgarians sees them as Bulgarians who have gone over to the other side (similar to how some Serbs and Croatians see the Bosnians). There are also Muslim Roma (Gypsies). Komotini actually has two separate Roma neighborhoods; the Christian Roma live on the west end of town while the Muslim Roma live on the northeast side of town on the edge of the large Turkish neighborhood. Before Greece’s break from the Ottoman Empire and the various incidences of “ethnic cleansing” that ensued over the following decades, Greek also had a large population of Greek-speaking Muslims in Crete as well as Albanian-speaking Muslims in central Greece known as Chams (Gr. Tsamides). The well-known Tsamikos dance takes its name from this group. It is also a little-known or advertised fact that most of the villages in the area of Athens originally speak a far-flung dialect of Albanian known as "Arvanitika," which is gradually dying out. In the farmer's markets in Athens in the early 80s, I would regularly hear the vendors greet each other with "Tsi bin? Mire!" (How are you? Good!).

But although they did not lose their homes, life was not rosy for the remaining minorities on either side of the border. Both peoples had second-class status in a variety of ways and during the conflict between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, each came to be used more or less as hostages by their respective states. In the end, if Greece did more of the agitation (the Papadopoulos junta colluded with Makarios to unite Cyprus with Greece), it was also their own people in Turkey who paid the highest price. Today, less than 100 Greeks remain as permanent residents of Imvros and Tenedos. Of Istanbul’s one-time population of over 300,000 Greeks, only around 1,500 remain and many of these are elderly, the majority of young people opting to go to Greece as soon as they finish high school. It’s a sad thing to me; but sometimes I have to wonder if, considering the decades of unresolved issues between Greece and Turkey and their effect on each other’s minorities, the population exchange didn’t help to avoid many more decades of suffering by even more people. The mübadil (exchanged people) lost their homelands, but at least they got on with their lives.

I came to Komotini in 1975, only one year after Turkey invaded Cyprus and divided the island in two. Although there was little in the way of outward conflict, relations between the Greeks and Turks of Komotini were strained on many levels and the two peoples lived as neighbors but separate. Still, we had no fear of going into the Turkish neighborhood, which because of restrictions on building permits, was much as it had been in 1920. These were Turks who had not undergone the reforms of Atatürk, the women wore (and most older women still do wear) the traditional black cloak and white headscarf with subtle gray design. The presence of this clearly different people, their mosques, different dress and language (which remained mysterious to me because of their habit of speaking softly) were just a new thing to become curious about rather than be afraid of. Years later when teams from Athens came to “help the two peoples live together,” many on both sides laughed at the irony of the situation, saying “we’ve lived together for years despite what comes out of Athens, and now they are going to come and teach us how to get along?”

I had no idea at the time, but the view of Greece, Greeks and Turks that I got in Komotini sowed the seeds of a curiosity that would eventually lead me to Turkey, to be the first (and as far as I know, the only) member of our family that has visited my Grandfather’s birthplace, and to eventually settle in the world of conflicts – between past and present, Turks and Other, realities and national myths – that is Istanbul.

Echoes of a Homeland IV

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:08:26 -0400

Enshrined in all of these stories, elevated (if perhaps a bit higher in my own mind) was Greece. I read encyclopedia articles about Greece and books of Greek myths, assimilating all the most exotic and images from throughout the centuries, conveniently failing to notice what belonged to the modern age. In about 4^th grade, I began teaching myself Greek from a book, with some help from my mother, who still remembered lots of the basics. I was clueless what “genitive” and “accusative” meant though. I can still remember the thrill of looking up at the dome of the Greek Orthodox church in Charlotte, NC where my grandfather was a cantor (in Iowa, we were nominally Presbyterian at the time), and actually being able to sound out some of the letters. My grandfather also gave me a small censor with the words ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΕΛΠΙΣ ΑΓΑΠΗ ΕΛΕΟΣ on it – Faith, Hope, Love and Mercy. Thinking of the fascination they held for me, I can understand why the Arabic script holds such deep meaning for a Muslim, especially in a country where another alphabet is used.

But the greatest event was the music I heard from the tiny collection of Greek records that my mother had picked up during her years as a record shop manager. Some were nice, others failed to impress, but there was one record that came out miles ahead of the others, and in particular, four songs by a group called the “Duo Stamboul.” The name of the record was ““My Greece – Music of Athens Today.” The third song on that link, starting at 5.00, is the first Greek recording I ever heard.

“Today,” it turned out, was around 1953 but a 4^th grader’s sense of history is not all that honed, and perhaps I was suffering from a bit of “immigrant’s time warp” in reverse. It is proverbial that for an immigrant who leaves the Old Country in, say, 1940, the Old Country becomes frozen in the mind exactly as it was on the last day he or she left, regardless of how much it had changed during that immigrant’s life up to that point.

And needless to say, I had no idea what “Stamboul” meant.

So, in my mind, Athens was a place that consisted of sea, blue skies, temples, people who talked like Foula and Marianthi and ate lots of yiaourti and halvah. And though I’d seen some pictures of people there dressed just like us, in the Greece of my dreams my playmates and I wore gowns just like the ancients. Because they were different, and whatever the real country of Greece was or wasn’t, the “Greece” in my mind was, above all else, Not Iowa.

One might guess at this point that I wasn’t the kind of kid that felt comfortably at home in small town Iowa life. One would be right. I was always a different kid; my almost-earliest memories are about doing things alone, watching spiders, patrolling the window wells for toads, walking down my mother’s long row of fragrant iris, smelling them and even imagining myself inside the flowers. I envied my little brother who seemed to fit in so easily, though I can see now that that was mostly my own perception. Other kids noticed the difference as well and didn’t withhold their opinions. Having a funny last name, and one that rhymed with “queer” to boot didn’t help much. It wasn’t long before I had my very own brand of cooties, one which could be transmitted merely by a look at the hapless victim. It’s almost funny now, but the effect was that I withdrew, and learned that attention just brought more trouble. So I purposely began doing what kept me from being noticed - failed spelling bees and not singing aloud in music class… I came to despise competition, especially things in which I might excel. I remember actually feeling embarrassed and guilty for getting an “A” in a solo festival. I preferred to succeed privately, and in things where I didn’t worry about being worse (or especially better) than someone else. So I learned all the songs of the “Duo Stamboul,” syllable-by-syllable, understanding nothing. (Evidently my grandfather found them a bit too hot and steamy; when I asked him to write them for me he said “those are Turkish.” And I didn’t realize that even if they were, he must have known Turkish!) Love for music and language did eventually win out over reticence, but to this day I’m uncomfortable with “competitive” music, at least when the competitive aspect is more important than the beauty of it.

I know of Greek-American families (we weren’t really one) of considerably more modest means than ours that sent their kids to summer camp in Greece. We went to Camp Wapsie YMCA Boys’ Camp, and it was always a combination of fun and awful. Looking back though, I’m convinced that it was just as well that I didn’t go to Greece when I was young. My version of Greece was almost complete fantasy but I needed it at the time. It had also never crossed my mind that Greek elementary school kids could be just as cruel as their counterparts in Iowa, and having my fantasy world shattered in that way might have been truly devastating. Since much of my personality had been trapped around concerns of acceptance or non-acceptance by others, it was better to wait until I’d begun to find myself.

My chance to go to Greece finally came in high school, when I first became aware of foreign exchange programs and the AFS program. The AFS students always seemed to be part of the popular, high-achieving crowd, and I belonged to neither. I did apply but they didn’t accept me; and besides, one question on the interview left me cold: “You’ve put down ‘Greece’ as your preferred country on your application, but if you got sent to Lower Zangalia, what would you do?” I answered “I guess I’d learn to speak Lower Zangalian!” But the whole point was to get my ass to Greece finally and to be honest, the whole AFS crowd seemed to cliquish anyway. There was still that other program, YFU, which you had to pay for but at least you could choose where you went. I was stocking shelves at our local Hy-Vee supermarket, arguably one of the most lucrative jobs an Iowa high schooler could have in 1974, so I applied and spent the next month and a half waiting in agony. And I can still remember being there in Aisle 2, stocking tomato paste, when my mother walked in and said “Hey, how would you like to go to Greece?!”

Before long a letter arrived from a high school boy in the small town of Chrysoupolis, near Kavala; he would be my host brother. I was immediately disappointed that I wasn’t going to Athens, though my first look at inner Athens with its polluted air and gloomy streets lined with drab cement apartment buildings dispelled that disappointment rather quickly. And here I can admit to a bit of shallowness – after all I was 16 and fully aware that sexuality was not the one of the majority – my disappointment at not going to Athens was also not a little assuaged by the fact that he was absolutely beautiful. Handsome enough, in fact, that it worried me just a little.

Our initial descent into Athens truly did fulfill my Greek fantasies though – a brilliant white city flowing through a valley between the mountains, and coves of such breathtaking shades of crystal clear ultramarine-through-turquoise that I could hardly believe it was real. Coming through the gates of the old Athens airport (not the new old one, the OLD old one), getting my first glimpse of the yellow and black signs in Greek characters, and expectant families crowding on the other side of the gate to meet their host students, I realized that despite the initial exotic atmosphere, it felt much more familiar than I’d expected. The next day, I gazed out of the windows of our to Thessaloniki at light gray mountains, occasional shepherd's huts, fields with mysterious spiny plants that were completely pale powder blue and distant white villages with red tile roofs. Watching this new world go by, backed by the popular laika music playing in the bus, I was flooded with a sense of having come “home.” My fantasy Greece was beginning to fall apart but in among the fantasy was enough reality - some that I'd been completely unaware of until then - that even though I had no idea what my life would be like by this time the next day, let alone in two months’ time, I knew I was in the right place.