I Come Out to the Gay Cult Member

Rock Island, April 1981

My goal during my junior year at Augustana College was to find one gay student.  Lots of guys were willing to do things in the dark, in secret, like Haldor who challenged me to a "dating contest," or the fratboys who cruised the levee, but in the daylit world they chanted "girls! girls! girls!"

I wanted just one guy out of the 1,036 male undergraduates who dreamed only of men.  (It didn't occur to me to look for lesbians.)  But with no organizations, no meeting places, and everyone pretending to be straight, finding gay men required research.  You look for a rote recitation of the desirable traits in girls, as if they had memorized a list; a glint in the eye when a cute guy passed; a reticence about evening and weekend activities, or else too glib an answer.





Through assiduous research, I found three "probably gay" undergrads: the first was a freshman Asian Studies major named Corey: tall, slim, very handsome but not very muscular.  I sat next to him in Eastern Religions class in the spring quarter of 1981, and noticed that he never gazed at or flirted with any of the girls in the class -- my first clue!

One day I saw him and a friend having lunch in the Student Union Snack Bar -- a male friend, my second clue!  I grabbed a sandwich and coke and joined them.

Corey glanced at his friend, who suddenly remembered an appointment and split, leaving us alone.  My third clue!

We chatted about classes and clubs -- never once mentioning girls.  Corey was from a small farm town in Illinois, forced to come to Augustana because his parents were Lutheran, but he was into spiritual exploration -- Krishna Consciousness, Zen Buddhism, Nichiren.  Next year he was transferring to Maharishi International University!

Maharashi Mahesh Yogi, Hindu mystic and founder of Transcendental Meditation, ran a university in Fairfield, Iowa, about a hundred miles from Rock Island. His followers had been widely accused of brainwashing, mind control, and miscellaneous deviltries, so locals were up in arms about the "cult" establishing a base nearby.

 A cultist! But I kept my cool.  "I've always been interested in meditation," I said.  "Maybe you could teach me sometime."

"That's just the first step,"  I want to learn how to fly."

Apparently the most adept of the Maharishi's followers could "fly," or actually levitate a foot or two off the ground.

This was a skill I wanted to learn!


So that night after dinner I went to Corey's room in the freshman dorm -- no pictures of girls on the wall, another clue -- and he showed me how to sit cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, and clear our minds of distracting thoughts.

"Surrender your worries, your concerns, your desires.  Especially your sexual desires.  Don't think about girls."

Girls?  Uh-oh.  "Is it ok to think about guys?"

He didn't know what I meant.  "Sure, think about all the guys you want."

"What if they're a distraction?"  I maneuvered so that our knees were touching, and stared into his eyes.

"How can a guy be a distraction?  It's a guy!"

Not only was Corey heterosexual, he didn't even know what gay people were! Time to enlighten him. "Some guys find guys a distraction.  You know...if they're like...into guys."

He blushed bright red.  "Um...oh...well, they didn't have sexual perversions in Vedic times, but I'm sure Transcendental Meditation has a cure."

Great -- as if I don't get enough homophobic nonsense from the Nazarenes.  Now I have to hear it from a cult!

We had a few more conversations about religion, and at the end of the year he transferred to the University of Iowa to study Chinese.

But the story has a happy ending.  If you hang out in front of the French Quarter in West Hollywood long enough, every gay person in the world will walk by, and one day in the 1990s I saw Corey.  He and his partner were living in San Francisco, where they were members of the Gay Buddhist Sangha.

Most Western Buddhists are, in fact, gay-positive.  And so is Transcendental Meditation.

36 Hours of Cruising at Lambert International Airport

St. Louis, January 1982

I don't hook up in public, period.  No parks, no nature preserves, no secluded hotel restrooms, no booths at the Pleasure Palace.  No way, no how.

But back in college in the Midwest in the 1980s, I didn't know much about gay culture and history, and I thought that the only possible way for gay people to meet was in bars and public places.  So I wasn't so picky.

January 30th, 1982, my senior year at Augustana College.  I applied to the Ph.D. program in Spanish at Tulane University in New Orleans.  They flew me in for an interview, and now I was on my way back to Rock Island.

The three hour flight to St. Louis was uneventful; we flew above the clouds in brilliant sunlight.  Our descent was a little bumpy, but we landed at Lambert Airport right on schedule, at 5;15 pm.

I went to the monitor to check on my connection, a 6:30 flight to Moline, Illinois, and home.

Cancelled.

The board was lit with dozens of flickering "cancelled" lights.

I had never flown alone before -- my flights to Switzerland, Colombia, and Germany were in supervised groups.  What was I supposed to do?

Finally I found the American Airlines help desk.  The line was endless.  Forget it!

I called the American Airlines telephone number.  On hold for half an hour.  Forget it!

I walked through the terminal.  Stores and restaurants were closing.  I grabbed dinner -- a burger and fries -- at the Brewmaster's Tap Room just before it closed.  No one explained what was happening.

Later I discovered that St. Louis got 14 inches of snow overnight, the biggest blizzard in history.  They closed the airport and sent most of the staff home, stranding thousands of travelers.

All of Saturday night, no flights came in or out, and none of the stores were open except a nacho place and Hudson Books.  I had nachos and overpriced candy bars for breakfast and lunch.

Food services began Sunday morning, and flights started going out around noon.  But there was such a backlog that I couldn't get out until 6:30 pm.

Get a hotel room?  No credit cards, not enough money.

Stuck all night and all day at Lambert International Airport

In the era before smart phones, laptops, wifi, and DVDs.

How I passed the time:

1. Reading three best sellers from the meager selection at Hudson Books: The Hotel New Hampshire, Gorky Park, and Red Dragon.  They were all terrible.
2. Calling my parents and asking them to come pick me up, but they were snowed in, too.
3. Vowing never to go to St. Louis again.
4. Vowing not to go to grad school in Spanish.
4. Walking up and down the concourses, looking at the cute guys trying to sleep.

5. Having sex with strangers.

About 11:00 pm Saturday night, I was sitting in a stall in an out-of-the-way restroom at the end of an abandoned concourse, when someone went into the stall next to me.

Great! I'm too shy to perform now!  I'll just have to wait it out!

So I waited and waited, and he waited and waited, and before I knew it, things were happening under the partition between the stalls.

Wait -- do people actually do these things in public restrooms?

I had lots of time to research the matter, and it turns out that they do.  If you wait in a secluded stall long enough, things just happen.  Or else you make eye contact with someone you like, head into the restroom together, and go into the same stall.

That night and the next day, I hooked up with several other stranded passengers and airport employees.  The ones I remember are:
1. A middle-aged businessman in a suit and tie
2. A young dad whose wife and kids were waiting outside
3. A guy who worked in the nacho shop, and took me to the store room to finish the hookup.
4. A flight attendant who said he cruised there often
5. A cute college boy from Minneapolis who liked to kiss, and gave me his phone number.
6. An African guy from Zambia.

About as much action as you'd get at a bath house.

But don't try this at home.  Undercover police officers are on patrol, hoping to make an arrest for "lewd behavior."  It's gross, it's uncomfortable, and it plays into the stereotype of gay men as sexual predators.  Besides, in the era of Grinder and internet chat rooms, who wants to be with someone so closeted that he resorts to pick-ups in public restrooms?

But in 1982, it made for a memorable layover at Lambert International Airport.

See also: Cruising at the Levee; The Darkroom at the American Gay Bar; I Pick Up a Boy and His Daddy at an Airport

Tomor the Mongolian Shaman of Paris

Paris, July 1999

I spent the summer of 1999 in Paris, ostensibly researching French social thought, but really just...well, being in Paris. Every day I took the metro to the National Library to do research for a few hours.  In the afternoon I visited the parks, churches, and museusm, and in the evening, just after work, I dropped by a gay bar or bath house.  The Parisians were very friendly, very willing to talk. More often than not, they invited me out to dinner.

The tourists were not so friendly -- they came to Paris to meet Parisians, not Canadians with bad accents (I always claimed to be Canadian to avoid the hostility).  So one night at the Duplex Bar, , when I saw an Asian guy holding the wall up, I kept my distance.

He was cute though, slim, hard-torsoed, golden -skinned, with dark eyes and a beard and moustache.  And there weren't a lot of Asians in Paris.  So eventually I thought "What's the worst that can happen?" and approached.

"Bonjour.  Je suis Boomer, dans Toronto," I began.  

"Tomor.  Dans Mongolia."

"Mongolia!"  I repeated, thinking of all that I had heard about Silk Road, the empire of Genghis Khan, the stately pleasure dome of Kublai Khan, the semi-nude wrestling competitions; the penis statues. the men.

"I'm not Khalka, I'm Baad," he said in fluent French.. "From the Uvs Province, near the Russian border."

"Ok, ok.  My friend Yuri is Russian.  He loves Mongolian guys.  Especially if they have a lied grand."  Yuri had never expressed a particular interest in Asian men, but he was into super-sized lieds.

"Et moi aussi."  

Tomor told me that he had come to Paris to study history at the Sorbonne, and to get away from the homophobia at home.  It was the Khalkha, the ruling tribe of Mongolia, that instituted homophobia, he said.  And the Buddhists and the Communists.  In the early days, before the Buddhists came, same-sex relations were honored.  They made warriors brave.

"Wait -- the Buddhists?" I asked.  "Aren't most Mongolians Buddhists?"

"Most, maybe.  Not me.  I worship the old gods.  Tengri the Sky Father.  We journey in spirit to the other worlds."

With a start I realized that it was 8:00 pm, early for dinner for most Parisians, but late for me.  We walked down the street to a Vietnamese restaurant near the Rambuteau Station, and then took the Metro to Tomor's apartment, which he shared with another Mongolian

"Is he Tengrin, also?" I asked.

"Oh, no, Buddhist.  I'm not out to him.  Well, I'm out as gay, but not as Tegrin."

In his bedroom, instead of a statue of the Buddha, he had a photograph of a mountain he called Burkhan Khaldun.

I thought of Ibn Khaldun, the famous Medieval explorer, but Tomor said there was no relation.

Tomor said that the shamans of his religion were all bisexual, because they could look beyond the physical gender to the beauty of the soul.  During their spirit journeys, they usually changed gender, men becoming women, women becoming men.

Then he showed me a mask called a Tsam, a demon who could scare off the forces of darkness, including the force of homophobia.

I could use one of those back in my apartment in New York.

Suddenly I looked at the time.  It was 11:00!  I had been so busy talking that I forgot about our hookup!

"My apologies!" I exclaimed.  "I'm sure that you did not invite me here to talk about your religion!"

"But I did," Tomor said.  "Every guy wants sex, but nobody wants to hear about what is really important, the world of the spirits.  But what good is a physical act without the spiritual?"

"Sorry, I don't understand."

He touched my shoulder.  "Sex is one of the gate to the other world.  Your lover takes on the spirit and becomes your guide.  Otherwise it's just recreation, like going to a movie."

This sounded a lot like Tantric Buddhism, in which sexual acts of various sorts lead to enlightenment.  But I wasn't going to tell Tomor that, and offend him with more Buddhist contamination of the old religion.  I wanted some enlightenment.

He had a nice physique, and a surprising Bratwurst+ beneath the belt.  But the activity itself was unconfortable, a lot of jabbing and twisting, and weird pretzel positions.

Still, how many guys can say that they've been with a Mongolian shaman?

See also: The Ten-Foot Penis of Mongolia; 20 Preachers, Priests, and Religious Guys on My Dating List.