Flesh of the Gods:

Culture is a collective agreement to which we adhere both consciously and unconsciously. It binds us together and facilitates a flow of goods & services, ideas about power, connection, transcendence, and possibility. Our survival is contingent on our group participation, and although we are active players, we may have never considered the game that is actually playing through each one of us.

Think of culture as the scaffolding around which we contain and build our interconnected lives—from genesis into fruition. The choices we make are subtly guided by that domain of inherited possibilities. We are at once restricted as we are also liberated: the lifeboat that keeps us afloat is also the sea that directs every aspect of our voyage. 

Dominant American culture has been heavily influenced by Greek ideology in origin, and many of the values we prize nationally are remnants that have been excavated from layers of bloody conquest and dominion. All cultures prioritize some values over others; however, the remaining non-conforming aspects of our human experience are then necessarily suppressed, managed, or channeled somehow into expression—an impact that can be positive or negative depending on context. 

At the personal level, each of us carries within our psyches a spectrum of characteristics, but the majority of our publicly interfacing personalities have been shaped by the cultural frames in which we were reared. What is not front and center must be pushed into the corners of our minds or even outside the scope of our abilities to truly know what lives within us. We carry blueprints—archetypes—that dictate our behaviors and shape our destinies: some are inborn and some are acquired, but these blueprints are the DNA of our psychic expression as it makes its way into our physical forms. These codes of human possibility transcend cultural barriers and geographic demarcation, though their expression is filtered through the cultural expectations that bear down upon each of us. 

The ultimate project of personal authenticity is to uncover one’s innate archetypal narrative and actualize it whether or not it aligns with our specific cultural molding. As we dig into our collective past, we uncover more of the blueprints that have spawned our experiences and we bring personal choice to how we integrate these ideological relics of antiquity into a modern gay journey. 

In Greek mythology, Procrustes, son of Poseidon, leveled social individuality so that collective culture could be contained to Greek ideals. On the way to Athens, travelers were required to pass his ordeal: they were fastened to a bed of calculated dimensions. What did not fit The Procrustean Bed was tailored violently to fit the cultural lean; he chopped off portions of their bodies that were too large and stretched other areas to fit where they were lacking. No one could or would ever fit his bed exactly, as it is a myth—humans can only approximate the archetypal mandates of the mythical dimension of our experience. 

As gay men, we may have been dismembered, but we are not broken. We journey through progressive stages of our lives, and we reclaim lost aspects of ourselves, reassembling them toward personal wholeness—emboldening us to cast off the cultural restrictions that do not support our personal integration. In so doing, we become the gods that we have idealized, and we plunge into the archetypal currents of a human experience that have been moving us since we have become flesh. 

It is my hope that you find yourselves among these characters; invite their wisdom into your reassemblage and learn from the follies that have ignited wars and spread desecration across the globe.