Getting Naked with a Male Witch

Augustana College, Freshman Year

When I was a freshman at Augustana College, I knew a lot of guys who liked guys only at night, and spent their days arm-in-arm with women.  But I had never met a real, actual gay person.  There was a gay bar downtown, but I was too young to go to it. There were no gay organizations, no gay-themed movies playing at the Cineplex, no gay books in the college or public library.

But surely I couldn't be alone in all of Rock Island!  I did extensive research, interrogating my friends, making discrete inquiries of knowledgeable seniors, asking around at the radio station, and eventually got a few names.

 
A middle-school teacher who was discovered, fired, and moved away.
The manager of a flower shop who was discovered, fired, and moved away.
Peter, who attended Augustana for a few years, but was discovered and expelled.

Only Peter was still in town!

"Be careful!" My informant cautioned.  "He's not only a homo, he's a witch."  He went on to describe demons conjured with a Ouija board, pins stuck into voodoo dolls, Tarot cards, crystal balls, potions, incantations, nude rituals in the moonlight.

My Nazarene sensors went off.  Occult -- Evil! Evil! Evil!  Maybe the preacher was right -- maybe gays were all Satanic.

Nonsense!  I chided myself for my irrational fear.  Peter was the only gay person in Rock Island, and I was going to meet him, witch or not!  Near Valentine's Day, I called, said I wanted to interview him for my radio program, and got an invitation to visit.  He lived with his parents in small, normal-looking house near Longview Park.

 He was nothing like what I expected -- and nothing like this photo -- taller than me, very hairy, and quite chubby.   He had long blond hair and a blond beard that somehow made me think of Santa Claus.

We sat in his living room -- which looked perfectly normal -- and chatted about Augustana for a few minutes.  Then suddenly he said "Let's get naked!"

I hadn't said anything about being gay!  "Um...I'm not...I didn't come here for sex," I stammered.

"No, no, I didn't mean that -- frankly, you're not my type -- I just like being skyclad. Close to Mother Earth."

So we took off our clothes, and Peter told me about paganism: a religion of the Earth, older than Christianity, attuned to the spiritual dimension, and not oppressed by a lot of "thou shalt nots": "an it harm no one, do what ye wilt."

"Sounds like paganism is ok with gays."

"Not really.  The rituals are boy-girl-boy-girl. But I'm working to change all that.  There's a group out in California, the Radical Fairies, that's working to bring gay men into the Craft."

"Do you know any gay people in Rock Island?"

"A couple.  Mostly they move out to California.  It gets a little lonely."  He paused.  "How about a skyclad hug?"

I nodded.

I was enveloped in a warm, hairy bear hug.  It was not erotic, though we groped a bit.  It was like we were connecting on the spiritual plane.  Suddenly, without understanding why, I started to cry.

"I'm going to perform a spell for you," Peter said.  "It will help you find what you're looking for."  He chanted something about the God and the Goddess and blew on a small pink crystal, which he pressed to my forehead.  I left with the pink crystal and a book, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, which I still have.

The spell worked.  Less than a month later, my friend Mary invited me to visit her family for spring break, and try to determine if her teenage brother was gay.  And  before I graduated from Augustana, I met a number of gay people: a student preacher, an ex-priest with a pushy mom, a bookstore manager, an d little-person postal worker.

During the 1990s, Peter was a guiding force behind the Radical Faeries, and instrumental in opening the pagan movement to LGBT persons.  Renamed Sparky T. Rabbit, he became a nationally recognized writer, singer, chanter, storyteller, pagan activist, gay activist, fairy, and bear.   He died on July 9, 2014.

See also: Tony Cavalero's Magick, with a nude neopagan bonus

A Hookup with the Nigerian with the Tattooed Penis

Bloomington, May 1983

When Viju started taking me to the bars, when we were in grad school in Bloomington in 1983, AIDS was practically unknown, there was little fear of being robbed or murdered, and the West Hollywood rule against casual sexual encounters did not exist.

We had casual sex.  Quick, practically anonymous.  We called it tricking.

I think it's because we were living in a world inundated by images of men and women together, being told a hundred times a day that gay people did not exist, or if they did, they were monsters, and this was our way of rebelling, of relishing the look, smell, and feel of the masculine.

The adults are lying -- only real is real.

We made the trick arrangements with little or no prior conversation, no screening, no introduction to friends (unless we happened to be at the bar together).  Sometimes only a first name, sometimes only a nod.

We followed him home without telling anyone where we were going.

We started the sexual encounter the moment we got in the door, with no coffee, no conversation, no making out on the couch.

When we finished, we threw on our clothes, scribbled down a phone number that might or might not be the right one, and left.  No cuddling, no spending the night.

We might return to the bar that same night to search for a new trick, and see him there, in search of a new trick. "Next!"

And we never tricked with the same guy twice.  "Been there, done that."


In retrospect, it was extremely dangerous, although nothing bad happened except a case of crabs.

And a feeling of emptiness afterwards, as if we had just eaten a big meal but were still hungry.

Whatever our desire for the masculine meant, it wasn't satisfied by tricking.

One night we saw an older black guy standing by the pool table, drinking a soda: in his 40s, taller than me, very muscular and very dark.  Since I was particularly interested in black guys, Viju said that I could "have him."

He introduced himself as Ollie with a slightly lilting accent.

"That's a very Swedish," I commented.

"Short for Olawale.  I'm from Nigeria."

We drank our sodas and talked.  Ollie was from the Yoruba people -- there are about 30 million in western Nigeria,  Many African-Americans are descended from them.

He attended university in Lagos, a big, sprawling city of 5 million, and moved to London, which he hated, then to Austin, Texas; Buffalo, New York, and Little Rock, Arkansas.  He had been in Bloomington for ten years.  He worked in the library, where he was in charge of the African Studies collection, and occasionally taught courses in Yoruba.

In five minutes, I got more biography from Ollie than from a dozen other hookups put together.

I wanted to know about the Yoruba language, of course, so he gave me a brief primer:   it's a tonal language, like Chinese.

All words have combinations of high, middle, or low tones that change their meanings:

igba (middle-low): rope
igba (middle-middle): two hundred
igba (low-high): egg
igba (low-middle): nonsense

I almost forgot about the hookup.  But a grope and a kiss reminded me.

We said good night to Viju, and drove back to Ollie's house, in an older neighborhood a few blocks north of the campus.  The living room was painted red, with African tapestries and masks on the walls.

"Would you like to eat?" Ollie asked.  "In Nigeria it is very impolite to have a guest in your house without offering food.  I have some fried plantains -- they come from a special store in Indianapolis -- and vanilla ice cream."

We ate our plantains and ice cream while I leafed through his coffee table book on African art, and looked at the wide, thick, black bookcases filled to overflowing with books on ceremonial magic, paganism, the occult, ghosts, the paranormal, voodoo, werewolves -- it was like a precursor to the Bodhi Tree, the New Age bookstore I would visit later in West Hollywood.

"Are you a pagan?" I asked.  "I knew a male witch in Rock Island."

"I've studied every magical path, but my heritage is the Yoruba religion."

According to the Yoruba, the Creator God Olorun is unknowable, so we revere his emanations, the 400 or so orishas: Ogun, Shango, Eshu.  They are very beautiful, many appearing as muscular, nude men, each with his distinct personality.  Some are benevolent and eager to assist the humans who offer them the proper respect.

Others are -- well, not evil, exactly, but not terribly concerned with human affairs, and likely to get cranky if importuned.

"My Orisha is Erinle, the patron of gay people.  He breaks the boundaries of gender, and has relationships with men.  He walks hand in hand with his lover. Ochosi.  He's also the patron of physicians and fishermen.  Come, I'll summon him to bless our meeting."

He brought me into the bedroom, which had an enormous bed with a black conforter, a black-wood dresser, and a small table covered with African statues, silk cloths, beads, seashells, candles, a bottle of wine, and some incongruous items, like a can of sardines, a stethoscope, and a statue of Superman.

"Erinle likes fishing," Ollie explained.  "He blesses his disciples who eat fish.  And the stethoscope --he's the patron of physicians, right?"

"And the statue of Superman?"

"He's gay.  I thought he would find the muscles.appealing."

We took off our clothes and sat crosslegged before the altar.  Ollie lit one of the candles, bathing the room in eerie red light.  He poured a little of the wine into a cup, put it on the can of sardines, and began praying in Yoruba.

Later he told me that the words were "Fun mi agbara," give me power, a prayer for sexual potency.

He held out his penis for me to touch.  It was long and thick, with strange scarification: bumps all around the head.

"The penis is sacred to Erinle, too," Ollie said with a grin.

We moved to the bed.

Wow.

Ollie lay atop me, clamped his mouth on mine, and inserted his penis between my legs.  Several other positions followed, but what I will remember forever is Ollie's face above mine as he thrusts.  A broad open-mouthed grin.  His forehead beaded with sweat.  His eyes white with passion.

Afterwards we showered, and I spent the night.

We saw each other in the bar occasionally after that, but we didn't meet again.

But I learned something important.

If we go out searching for the archetype of masculinity, pure physique and penis, we can never be satisfied.  That is unknown and unknowable.  We must look for orishas, individual emanations of the divine, each with his own unique history, beliefs, and personality.

In other words, talk to the guy first, no matter how big he is beneath the belt.

See also: The 20 Most Beautiful Men in the World; and Encounters in the Darkroom of an American Gay Bar

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.