“The years teach what the days never know.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lying deep within the human soul is an unknown land, a land with its own characters, its own laws, and its own story. Somewhere in that land is a place where we put all the rejected parts of ourselves, the parts that have been wounded and hurt by others, the parts that for some reason we haven’t been able to embrace or have been told can’t live, even parts unknown to us—both positive and negative. All the feelings and emotions that are hard for us to feel like shame, guilt, sadness, anger, and jealousy are here. Sometimes feelings of happiness, joy, and pride, even our gifts and talents that for some reason we’ve been told are not acceptable or valuable, live in this land. It is a place of shelter for all that we have pushed away and disowned. This place is where we put all that doesn’t fit into our lives yet are parts of us that long to live.
It is also the place where we often put Spirit—our connection to the divine light that lives in us. If we make the journey into the rejected places of the soul, we will find this divine light, lying there, just waiting for us to embrace it and bring it into our lives. It lives among the shadows of this place. It not only lives there, it accepts unconditionally all those rejected and disowned parts of the soul and holds them in love. To embrace and live this story is the longing of the soul.
This book has been primarily the revelation of my inner journey to find and live that story, the story of the other man living in my soul, a kind of psycho-spiritual memoir. While this inner journey resulted in shifts in consciousness, shifts in perceptions, and even major changes in my personal life, there was at the same time another story—the story of my family and the effects of my inner journey on their lives. “The years have a wisdom the days know nothing of” is a para- phrase by Hilda Studebaker, a dear friend and frequent image in my dreams, of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying that “The years teach what the days never know.” At the writing of this book, I am into my seven- ty-fifth year. My wife and I have been married fifty-four years. For our fiftieth wedding anniversary, we took our children, their partners, and our grandchildren to Folly Beach, South Carolina, staying together in a house on the ocean to celebrate those fifty years and our lives together as a family.
The years following my revelation to my wife of my same-sex attractions and my affairs with men were a devastating and tumultuous time in our lives. As I became increasingly aware that if I were to divorce my wife and pursue a homosexual life, I would end up at the end of my life knowing what I already knew intuitively and what my dreams were telling me—that my same-sex attraction was about more than being gay or bisexual. We re-affirmed our love for each other and made the commitment to our marriage, whatever that would come to mean. At the time of that decision our children were six and eight years old. During this time, our son began having nightmares for which we sought help from a therapist. In discussions with the therapist, my same-sex attractions and affairs were discussed. While the themes of my son’s nightmares didn’t deal directly with my homosexuality or my affairs, my wife and I did feel that he was picking up on the unrest, hurt, anger, and betrayal that we as his parents were feeling and what was vibrating in the unconscious of the family. After discussing our options with the therapist, we made the decision not to tell our children about my bisexuality or about my same-sex affairs at that time.
I understood his nightmares as evidence of how children often pick up on what is going on in their parents’ lives and express it or act it out in some way. Happily, the therapist was able to help our son work through the nightmares, which stopped soon thereafter. My wife and I both worked diligently to protect our children from my indiscretions, knowing the adverse effects such revelations would have in the small conservative community in which we lived and the ramifications they would then suffer. My wife and I decided to stay together and yet we also agreed that we would revisit this decision periodically to make sure it was working for both of us.
This was the mid-seventies, just a few years after the Stonewall riots. Not only were homosexuality, gay rights, and sexual and gender diversity seen in a negative light in the community in which we lived, but the society at large held a similar view. So we focused on providing our children with the safe and secure environment that we knew all children need, and we worked hard to keep their lives as normal as possible. Today, both our son and daughter look back on those years as their “happy childhoods,” and for that my wife and I are exceedingly grateful.
As I followed my journey into dreams and the story that was unfolding in the depths of my soul, my wife struggled to find her place and to make some kind of sense of what had happened, given that I had shattered her dream of our relationship. She fell into self- blame, with feelings that if she were “more of a woman” I wouldn’t have these feelings or have had these affairs with men. She also felt that she was somehow “not enough” because she couldn’t satisfy my same-sex need because she wasn’t’ a man, saying she didn’t know how to compete with a man. While I was stepping into discovering myself and this other man living in me, my wife felt lost. However, we both felt a strong commitment to each other and to our relationship and our children and to what might emerge from all of it.
During the several years after coming out to my wife, as we took on the task of repairing and re-imaging our relationship, we continued to be active in the church, the community, in our children’s lives, and in each other’s lives. We continued to have a supportive group of friends, although only a very few of them knew of the death and rebirth process that was happening in our relationship. To the outside world our lives and the life of our family looked normal—going to work, actively involved in music and church activities, going to ball games and school activities, and visiting with friends.
Internally, however, my wife and I were often involved in tense conversations; fighting and arguing over expectations, hurt feelings, and individual needs; working hard to both manage and repair the hurt, the betrayal, the anger, and the distrust that happen when a husband is not only having affairs, but is having them with men. My wife is a remarkable woman and to her credit she somehow had the ability to hold space like a crucible for the fires of transformation that would slowly occur, encouraging me, even forcing me at times to face the truth of my own soul and own the depths of who I was.
In the process we each eventually laid bare our souls to each other, began to slowly untangle our projections and different perceptions and realities, and discovered respect, humility, acceptance, and an enduring love. This certainly didn’t happen overnight. It took many years. I often say that we went through several divorces and remarriages in this process to arrive at where we are today—a loving couple who honors and accepts the best and the worst in each other.
As the images of my dreams and inner world came into conflict with the images of my outer life, I had to make changes. These changes, detailed throughout this book, not only affected me, they affected my wife and children. There had been ongoing changes in the inner worlds of both me and my wife. They included our leaving the church, closing the bookstore, and selling our home to pay off the bookstore debt. They began when our children were in middle school and high school. Since our son and daughter were active in band, sports, cheerleading, and dating, we were active supporters of their lives while continuing to work and be a part of the community. But life moved on . . . the children graduated high school. Our son went off to California to pursue his dream of becoming a model, and our daughter went off to college. It appeared that we had managed to provide an adequate container for all of us to not only get through these years but to embrace them and live them fully and successfully.
Although I didn’t frame it this way at the time, my relationship to my own feminine and androgynous natures resulted in my being open, accepting, tender, caring, and sensitive to the needs of my family. As I was learning to accept my various parts and diverse interests and learning to trust and follow my own dreams, I was able to support my son’s interest in music and sports. I was able to take the criticism coming my way for allowing him to be the first boy in his high school to get an earring. I drove him to Indianapolis weekly to attend the John Robert Power’s Modeling School. I helped him get his first car and had ongoing discussions about girls, sex, alcohol, and drugs with him.
Our daughter’s middle school and high school years were emotionally tumultuous. She suffered from severe PMS with its emotional challenges and at one point was accused by her peers as being a lesbian. Daughters often become the carriers of the father’s anima projections. Looking back I can see how she carried the unspoken same-sex issues that were rumbling around in the unconscious life of the family. These then caused her to become a target of those same-sex issues by her peers. I spent many hours sitting with her, talking to her, holding her as she struggled with the emotions associated with PMS and feelings of rejection by her peers. But even in the midst of all this, she had a good group of friends, was a cheerleader throughout high school, and reports feeling supported, valued, and loved. Certainly, being a teacher in the school our children attended, being active in many of school activities they were involved in, and teaching many of their friends threw me automatically into their lives in more ways than if I had worked elsewhere. Looking back, we all agree that those were good years.
Then 1989 rolled around. My wife, who is often the first to sense what wants to come into consciousness, sensed it was time for our children to know the story of their parents’ lives for the past fifteen years. I too had been having relevant dreams. In them, I would tell our children about my bisexuality. I also had dreams wherein they already knew about my bisexuality. Of course, knowing now how the unconscious works, our children did know at some level, that something was going on. This was confirmed later when both our children told us that especially through their elementary school years when this all came to a head they felt the tension in our relationship and felt “there was always something untold” and “feared that we would divorce.”
Now in college, our daughter was having difficulty in her relation- ships with men. She was constantly disappointed in them and always looking for something that the men she chose didn’t seem to be able to give her. My wife thought that maybe she would stop looking for a man “like her father” if she knew the complete story. There were also some people in the community who knew the story, and we feared that our children were at the age now where someone might say something to them. We didn’t want them to find out from someone else. So we decided it was time to tell them. But we didn’t know quite how to do this. After all, it had been over fifteen years since I had revealed this part of me to their mother. As a couple, their mother and I had worked through so much and were in a much better place in our relationship. How did we bring it up now and go back through all those years? Well, as often happens when we hesitate to act, the unconscious will force things upon us.
During one of the times our daughter was hurting and angry and blaming us as somehow being the cause of her distress, my wife told her that there were things that she didn’t know that might help her understand some of her pain and anger at not being able to find the man she longed for. This became known as the “secret” between her and her brother. In the weeks between this revelation and our actual disclosure, she reports that she and her brother had many conversations about the “secret,” wondering what it was.
When I finally told my son about my past, he was actually relieved. He had been afraid that I had killed somebody. He didn’t put being bisexual in the same category as killing someone (although I can certainly understand his reference to “killing someone” as an accurate description of what I had done to his mother.) Since it was now fifteen years in the past and not happening currently, and I assured him that I had no desire to divorce his mother and return to a homosexual life, he seemed satisfied and happy. However, he did confess later that he worried that someday I might decide to return to a homosexual life and he didn’t know how he would deal with that.
My wife and son had gone to see our daughter at college where she was cheerleading for a basketball game. From the stands he yelled “I know the secret.” Later that evening while sitting in our daughter’s dorm room, the “secret” came up and my daughter didn’t think it fair that her brother knew and she didn’t. So my wife made the decision to tell her. My daughter admits that she was in shock, and felt angry, hurt, and felt betrayed. After her mother and brother left, she went to talk to friends to find solace and comfort. She told them that if I called to try to talk to her, she didn’t want to talk to me. However, later that night she called me. She was still angry and hurt. I did my best to allow her to have and express her feelings. Later she told me that I had let her say what she felt and in so doing, I had honored her feelings. This was the beginning of another shift in our family dynamics—not only my own relationship with my children—but in the relationship both my wife and I had with our children.
When my daughter found out about my hidden and dual life, she reportedly went through various stages often associated with grief and loss. At first she denied it, saying she “couldn’t be a child of a homo- sexual. How could a man as perfect as my father like to touch other men?” She didn’t care that my last same-sex encounter had happened over fifteen years ago. To her it was like it was happening now. She felt betrayed. I wasn’t the man she thought I was. She learned I wasn’t perfect like she thought.
To my daughter’s credit and perhaps to our relationship, she took the risk of telling me what she felt. If she was having a day when she hated me, she told me. If she was angry and didn’t understand it, she told me. She didn’t care if I hurt, for in her mind I deserved to hurt. She found it hard to hate me and love me, understand and not understand, all at the same time. At times she would take the side of her mother and say things that she thought her mother should say to me. At other times, my daughter found herself sympathizing with me but not siding with me. It was two years of anger, hurt, yelling, coming together, pulling away, holding, crying, and yes, even laughing at times.
At the end of those two years my daughter wrote, “He is no longer perfect, actually he never was, but as a father is like no other, as a friend he is the best, as a man he is exceptional, and as a husband he is coming along nicely.” It would take several more years and my daughter’s suicide attempt before the evolution and transformation of this family would evolve into the open, loving, accepting, tolerant, and respectful family it has become.
As I have read back through my almost forty years of journals in the writing of this book, I realized that the way I interpreted my dreams and the various synchronicities determined many of the decisions I made. These decisions set the course for both my life and the life of my family. I realized that if I had interpreted my dreams in some other fashion I would have probably made different decisions, which would have had a very different outcome for me and for my family. Most likely we would have had a very different life. To that extent, I created my life and that life affected my family and eventually influenced their lives—even to some extent who they are today.
But of all the ways I could have understood a dream or have given a certain meaning to a synchronicity, what caused me to interpret the events the way I did? Why did I interpret a dream in a certain way? Why did I see specific synchronicities? Why did I see certain images in my paintings and not others? Is there some underlying presence, some transcendent function that directs it all, influencing our way of seeing? The shamans of Peru talk about “destiny lines.” They believe that each soul has certain destinies associated with it. We can fall into a destiny unconsciously and live it much like fate. We can fight against a destiny that wants to live by being in constant conflict and longing, or we can wake up to the spiritual realm of archetypal forces vibrating in our soul, cooperate with them, and co-create a destiny. I do know that looking back over my journey I see a thread that wove a particular theme into my life.
For me it was a return to earth, a return to an awareness, and the experience that everything in the world is alive, conscious, dynamic, interconnected, and responsive and that nature—including human nature and the nature of our own souls—contains within them a directing intelligence that is the source of all knowledge concerning the nature of a person’s being and becoming. We are in a reciprocal relationship with these forces in a way that we can engage them and influence them, not by mastering them or forcing them or controlling them, but by merging with them and working with them as partners in a larger story. This larger story encompasses the story of the Green Man, the story of the shaman, the story of the two-spirit soul, the story of the other man, the story of the heart—the soul’s longing.
As I came to the end of this book, I decided to step into the shaman in me and journey into non-ordinary reality to see if I could consult with the spirit of the berdache, to inquire if the two-spirits had any additional message for me.
I ask my guide, Huascar, if I may visit the two-spirit people, telling him that I want to ask them if there is any message that the two-spirits want me to share with my readers. Suddenly I am traveling deep into the Underworld through dense vegetation. I come to a clearing, like a village. Many people are milling around, working, going about various tasks. Huascar tells me that this is the place of the two-spirit people, where they live.
I am introduced to one, an elder. I tell this two-spirit that I am writing a chapter in a book on the relationship between homosexuality and the berdache, or two-spirit, and wonder if there is any message that the two-spirits would like for me to include. The elder two-spirit says to me, “Tell your readers that the two-spirits are real. We exist. We are neither male nor female, yet we are able to live from the spirits of both. Having found unity and harmony within ourselves, we live in harmony with all that is. We are returning to bring harmony and balance to the earth. While the current focus in your world seems to be on sexual and gender identity, sex with its various expressions is simply an expression of the creative energy that will eventually evolve into a creative union of spirits that will live in harmony with all spirits.”
With that I thank the two-spirit. As I turn to leave, the elder hands me a small branch with a leaf growing out of it. He says, “Plant this branch, feed it, water it, and nurture it. It is the future.” (Journal, 1-6-16)
Notes and Exercises
Now that you have finished reading the book and completing the exercises, what is the rest of your story? What is your longing? What calls to you? What longs to live? What parts of you have you gotten in touch with that need to be embraced, accepted, and loved? Where did you feel validated and affirmed? What resonated with you? What did you learn about your own erotic longings or sexual attractions? What changes might you make to live more authentically. What will be the rest of your story?
On this journey as the title of my book, The Other Man in Me, suggests, I discovered another man living in me, the Green Man. As an archetype, the Green Man represents the spiritual intelligence in nature and dissolves the split between spirit and matter. The Green Man connected me to the shaman in me. In future posts, I’ll be writing on shamanism and energy medicine and how to heal the split between mind and body, between spirit and matter and living in harmony with ourselves and the world. To get future posts sign up below.
Disclaimer
The content of this book is for information purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition or disease. You understand that this book is not intended as a substitute for consultation with a licensed professional. Please consult with your own physician, mental health specialist, or spiritual advisor for matters related to emotional health, mental health, or spiritual concerns. The use of this book implies your acceptance of this disclaimer.