Singing the Body Electric

Last night, D. and I went to see “Leaves of Grass” at the cell, an off-off-Broadway theater space in Chelsea. This may seem irrelevant to the process of getting ready for the Gay Games, but bear with me.

The production is a choreographed choral reading of several poems from Whitman’s epic, including “Song of Myself,” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” in which the author celebrates the joy of the physical senses and the beauty of the human body. Appropriately, throughout most of the production, the performers, five men and four women, are nude. They occasionally wear underwear, or wrap themselves in gauzy material for effect, or, as in one scene in which a woman mimes sunning herself outdoors, sport sunglasses. But mostly, they’re naked.

The online advertisement for the performance offered free tickets to audience members who volunteered to participate in the piece. Also nude.

“We have to.” (me)

“No, we don’t.” (D.)

“Okay, fine, I’ll do it. You can watch.”

“You really want to do this?”

“Yes.”

So we did.

Our role consisted of sitting in a particular spot in the audience, clothed, listening for the line, “For ever and ever,” which appeared near the end of the show, then standing up and waiting for further instructions. After a few seconds, Kesh, one of the performers, appeared, moving toward us, his arm outstretched in a beckoning gesture. D., who was closer, took Kesh’s hand. Since there weren’t any other hands readily available, I stood frozen, looking confused. Kesh nodded to me, inclusively, to get with the program, so I took hold of D’s hand. Kesh led us offstage and down a flight of darkened stairs.

“We’ll circle around the stage two times,” he said when we arrived in the basement, encouraging us to disrobe quickly so we didn’t miss our entrance. “There’s a line if you want to say it. ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’” D. and I nodded, repeating the line to commit it to memory.

I had barely finished stuffing my socks into my shoes before we were being whisked back upstairs, arms once again linked and raised high in the air. The stairs seemed even darker on the way back up. I could barely see where I was going, and unlike during my descent, when my hands had been free, now I couldn’t cling to the banister for support. On the plus side, I was so focused on not tripping I didn’t have to time to think about the fact that I was about to walk out on a New York off-off-Broadway stage, in front of a room full of strangers, naked. Me, the guy who can barely get himself to look in a mirror.

I had figured the stage would be dim, as it had been through much of the production. Wrong. This was the finale. The climax of the corporeal celebration. Full, bright white light. No subtlety. No shadows to hide in.

As promised, we circled the stage two times, D. holding Kesh’s hand; I holding D.’s; someone else, I didn’t see who, holding my other hand. I didn’t make eye contact with anyone, neither cast member nor audience member. Instead, I watched Kesh’s feet, trying to match my gait to his, to avoid either bumping into D. or lagging behind and breaking the flow of the action.

Suddenly, we stopped. I realized people were saying the line Kesh had told us about. I managed to chime in on “large,” half-mumbling the word. But then I found my voice and, projecting out into the world, I proclaimed, in unison with the cast, “I contain multitudes.” And it was over. Kesh led us offstage and back downstairs, where he gave us a high-five and told us to dress, quickly, for the curtain call. Various other cast members wandered down the stairs, congratulating and thanking us as they passed by on their way to their own piles of limp clothing.

So what does all this have to do with training for the Gay Games?

Two things. First, it’s never easy to get up on the starting block at a swimming competition. It is difficult to explain how deeply damaging it is to grow up as a sissy in a world in which boys are expected to act like guys and are bullied mercilessly when they fail at it, continuously. For me, climbing up on the starting block at a meet, in a Speedo, is equivalent to standing on a soapbox, nude, and announcing: Yes, I’m a sissy, but my body is strong enough perform this feat of athletic prowess; I may not have the physique of some of these 20-year-olds; I may take twice as long to complete the event as they do; but I’m doing it; I’m here and I’m doing it.

So walking out on the cell’s stage, nude, was a form of vaccination. It will make standing up on the starting block in Cologne a tiny bit easier. And getting up on the starting block will be more difficult by far than swimming the 200 fly. Swimming the fly just takes good form and endurance.

The second thing is the connection to The Living Theater. Almost exactly 40 years ago, as a freshman at the University of Chicago, I went to see a performance of The Living Theater’s “Paradise Now.” I don’t remember much of the show, only that it ended in a writhing group grope that included both cast members and any audience members who cared to participate. I don’t remember whether the cast at that point was clothed or not. At any rate, dozens of students swarmed up onto the stage. This was March 1969, nestled somewhere within that long, pregnant year that stretched between the Summer of Love and the Stonewall rebellion.

I was one of the dozens. So was my friend Michael. We kept our clothes on, but we ended up near each other on the stage, touching each other’s fingers at first, then holding hands, then hugging, and finally, once the show ended, going home to his apartment, and touching, kissing, stroking, massaging, purring, holding on to one another, breathing in each other’s scent, for hours. I was 18. It was the first time I had made love to another man.

Michael, by the way, died young, 33 years ago. He was 27. Not AIDS. He was spared that nightmare, not living long enough either to die from the disease or to survive and watch his friends disappear back into the earth, one bitter funeral at a time. Michael was run over by a car, riding home from work on his bicycle. Seeing his face or hearing his voice used to brighten my day. His death left a hole inside me that has never been filled. I suspect it never will be. I'm always glad to have an excuse to think about him, even though it usually means I end up crying.

Back downstairs at the cell, after the curtain call, I noticed that Kesh was wearing a Living Theater t-shirt. (Previously I had only seen him nude.) I told him the story of my experience 40 years earlier. “It all connects,” he said, smiling. We got so wrapped up in our conversation we missed the second curtain call. Sorry, Kesh.

So walking out onto the cell’s stage nude was also a way to mark one of my first important steps toward coming out, to honor a memory, to sing the body electric. And that has everything in the world to do with getting ready for the Gay Games.