Paul Goodman Changed My Life (2011)

 

Directed by Jonathan Lee

This is a documentary about radical writer/teacher/ therapist Paul Goodman who is mostly known for his best selling book of 1960 called Growing Up Absurd. Actually mostly just forgotten in the 21st Century.

This documentary covers his life and career and his bold and unusual lifestyle.
He was a fatherless boy of New York City who became an intellectual and radical social credit. He was anti-military-industrial complex and regularly spoke out about that and was a participant in anti-war activities in the 1960s.

He wrote books and articles of social criticism as well as poetry, and fiction, novels and short stories.

The documentary interviews his daughter Susan from an early relationship, and his second wife Sally, he was never officially married to either of the two main women in his life although they were both long relationships with children. The relationship with Sally started in 1945 and ended with his death at age 60 in 1972. 

There is some discussion about his social environmental engineering ideas such as eliminating cars from Manhattan and a plan for a communal community. He had sort of anarcho-syndicalist ideas of political and civic structuralization in which power resides in the small that then associates with the larger association of other smalls. 

Sexually radical in that he was open about his bisexuality and cruising associated with it. He lost jobs because of this. It is disturbing that in spite of all that he had retained old school double standards with Sally. She is interviewed and says that she was not permitted by him to have outside sexual relationships and she, an old woman at the time of the interview, convincingly says it made her angry.   

These dudes. Makes me think of Zappa and Gail.
Since I am somewhat involved with outside sexual relationships myself, I judge this attitude harshly and franky don’t really understand how they can live with themselves acting free while their women are restrained, enslaved, or why the women stand by them through it all.

Very interesting documentary.  

Times Square Red Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany

This one sometimes took me to the same place as reading about what can be a happier life for humans in a hunter-gatherer group. It is the place of emotional frustration for me. The feeling that things could, without a lot of effort, maybe even less effort, be a lot more pleasant. The restrictions of civilization when mixed up so deeply with global capitalism create a reality that we live in that we take to be normal. But who determines “normal”? The current situation, current meaning during my experience, does not feel normal to me. It feels empty and dark and lonely and without much hope of real human connection that is not somehow connected with money. 

This book is all about connection from the most basic to more complex. Much of it centers around sex. Sex with people in public situations and in places of business fexible enough to permit it or even have it somehow built into the business model. Delany describes these places. They were mostly movie theaters and most of them were old rundown places that had shown pornography. Delany describes himself as, for years, a frequenter of such places where he would engage in oral sex with other men. 

Delany is an urban man. Raised in Manhattan. He has the spirit of a city about him and love of the random encounter, sexual or otherwise. I can only report with a great deal of shame what this book clearly showed me about myself. I was already spoiled by the isolation of suburbia before arriving to live in NYC in my early 30s, over 30 years ago. I could just be a temperamentally shy awkward man or that could have been learned in the safety and isolation of suburban life, and this was in Ohio; a conservative place in a conservative time. I never even visited a major city until age 18 when I hitchhiked to NYC by myself. Being honest about my behavior in the city, I now see that I used it as more to escape, hide out, ti become anonymous, and not be looked at too closely since my social skills and impulses were so low. Maybe if I had grown up in the city with more variety of people about, I would not have developed such lonerism. Maybe I would have found a more welcoming community where my impulses could be channeled to play with like-minded individuals rather than half buried in shame, hiding out until it’s all over. Maybe I could have connected with others better. 

I had been to several of these movie theaters he writes about. I remember Variety Photoplays on 3rd ave and the Metropolitan a couple blocks away on 14th St.. Both sites have gone to demolition and new taller buildings some years ago. I mess them, as well as the Cameo on 8th Ave midtown. 

I wasn’t as into the scene as energetically as Delany but I’m not gay, but somewhere on the bisexual scale and from Ohio, etc.

So much of this is about The Enclosure. A major part of the story of modern civilization is about Enclosure, locking away, fencing off what was once collectively free and making it owned and somehow involving a fee of labor or currency for continued usage. First there is free land where plants, animals, and human animals roam free and live from this land the best they can. But then someone wants to own this land and the people end up having to pay some way or other to survive rather than scratch a living out of the land. Or they can still scratch a living but must give the owner a percentage of their efforts to be permitted to continue surviving.  

The sex in the book is to illustrate the varieties of connection. The prime theme is that connection is better than networking. He morns the destruction of the public sex venues in the renovation of Times Square, because they can facilitate “interclass connection” through basic human sexual interest. His stance is basically anti- big capitalism as destructive of small local business that has an intimate connection to the community and street life and that  brings the safety of people around a healthy and diverse street life. 

I think he is missing some big critical part of the Enclosure. He talks about the buildings, the difference between infrastructure and superstructure, which is the skyscrapers that replaced the small, the rundown and the local with big business national brands. 

But this didn’t happen just in the 1990s the process was already going on for decades. It seems to me that most these theaters themselves were an earlier manifestation of local live theater or whatever entertainment being destroyed by the products of the Hollywood movie business already connected to Wall Street investment dazzling us with its powerful superstructure of dreams. The theaters becoming redundant with television and later even porn theaters less in use when one could watch porn at home via VHS cassettes. By the 1980s the theaters were the realm of those interested is some same sex teasing or action or the men who situationally couldn’t watch tapes at home. Of course now this is all on the internet. 

This Enclosure was very late to the city. The suburbs were built that way, with the places the public could go almost entirely limited to commercial venues such as the shopping mall which became the only place for kids to hang out and try to connect. 

There are a lot of people now who have fled the suburbs for a better life in the revitalization cities. But they are pre-conditioned for the Enclosure that is part of the revitalization. Unaccustomed to and unaware of earlier city life, they are most comfortable with the Starbucks and other familiar brands and they bring this brand familiarity and loyalty with them. 

Delany discusses women a bit and how the open, anonymous sex venues are not used by them. He envisions a sort of hostel set up where women could bring strangers or acquaintances in a public setting safer than bringing someone into the privacy of a home. Some women can and do enjoy hookups with strangers, so perhaps that is possible some time in the future as the restrictions of the ideology of the patriarchy, and its women followers, continue to crumble. 

There is a big fat novel Delany wrote about the theater sex called The Mad Man. I read that some years ago. It is rather unique I think.

{rec-og-nize} the voices of bisexual men Edited by Robyn Ochs & H. Sharif Williams

This is a collection of testimonials from bisexual men expressing how they feel about their situation in the USA territory in which they live.
The stories vary because there are a lot of different layers of this since no one is really alike with sexual things, I mean, if they are honestly looked into, explored.

Most in the book, are happy to be bi. Some feel oppressed, unseen, by the outer world’s reaction to them and somewhat bitter about the whole thing. Many are annoyed by the bipolar assumptions of our time and see them as inaccurate, in the least, to intentionally dismissive of the variation they are. 
They express feelings of not being comfortable with either of these poles. 

I agree. The born this way gay culture is clearly not for me anymore than the exclusively heterosexual assumptions. So here is what I might write if I were involved with a book like this.

I consider myself lucky to be somewhere on the bisexual spectrum. I like to think that I am closer to basic pre-conditioned and trained, civilized,  humanness by being this way, natural and more wild. 

This is not a new concept for me. I have been like this for as long as I can remember. I mean from childhood back in Ohio where there were sexual encounters with other boys playing around doing this and that.
But even though that went on and was not unusual and really quite natural there was a sort of prohibition given USA sex attitudes and this was Ohio in the 1950s and early 60s. All this activity was done in secret, certainly away from parents. Yet it went on, not with all boys, but certainly not restricted to one or two boys. I guess I just assumed that it was what we did because it was fun and exciting with partly getting away with something.

But that period was tricky for me. There was an older boy who lived behind our little ranch style house in Ohio. I’ll call him Woody, because that was his name. I have been wondering how much older he was than me and just now did some internet poking around and found a man who kind of has to be him and who graduated from high school in 1965 which would make him at least 4 and probably 5 years older than I because I was born in November and  unusually young when I began school at age 5, too young, but that’s another issue. Well, this kid was somehow into me sexually and he was involved with an incident that looms large in my mind because it was so terrible at the time.

 There was a big apple orchard near where I lived and beyond the end of the orchard, a woods and a lake. One summer afternoon I was out with some of the older boys who I loved hanging out with. The frozen moment outside at the end of the orchard has the boys standing around me and me kneeling. I remember being persuaded to put someone’s penis in my mouth. I’m not sure how old I was then but I know it was before junior high because we had moved out of that neighborhood before I went to junior high. So I’m guessing 10 or 11, but I could have been younger since I lived in that house since age 5. And knowing what I know now it is probably better if I was 10 or younger than say 12 if the other boys were all Woody’s age 4 or 5 years older. Because then they would be getting rather old to be fooling around with this kid. And one would hope, being older, they could have come up with a more secure play area.

That day we were suddenly discovered by some girls and enough was going on and exposed that the girls had something to tell. The next thing I knew I was in the kitchen being interrogated by both of my parents regarding if I had put someone’s “pee pee” in my mouth. Honestly sitting here now I don’t know if I did or not. I remember some reluctance at the moment but that could have been added on later to support my story to my parents that nothing went on. Years later my dad told me that he had caught me with Woody another time in Woody’s family’s shed. 

Now when I look at Woody’s two Facebook photos and read about how he spent his life, I find it interesting that he has chosen male power roles being an auxiliary cop, involvement with military and some marshal training thing. And there he is as an old man wearing navy whites with 4 small children standing with him, the only other people in his photos. I not saying he went on from back then to career predator, but those guys come from somewhere I suppose. 

So is this my #metoo moment? 

It could very well be. Woody had no other reason to be involved with me. I was just a little kid who lived down the hill. He had what I wanted, which was to be acceptable to these older boys. 

Did this hurt me?

I mean I’m aware that my relationships with other men are not normal, whatever that means. I don’t have any close men friends. 

I would describe part of my reaction to others men as being somewhat homophobic. By that I don’t mean some sort of hatred but rather a suspicion that they might be interested in something or that I am and all that is just below the surface and enough to confuse the desire to get together. It’s a subtle emotional background thing. After all, little me might think, what else do I have to offer being not otherwise successful or engaged in popular male interests? 

Is this related to why I have been such an outsider with no career or anything like that when I had some sort of raw potential that is only apparent in hindsight.
I have stayed away from men professionally. I was in a band but it was with women, no men would want me in a band with them. I don’t rock!

So what goes on with me with men? I periodically seek anonymous encounters in places set up for that and maybe have a little oral or manual interaction. I don’t know maybe trying to recreate the setting at that moment in the orchard since it was loaded with such energy, emotion and interest. It doesn’t matter if they are old or younger. 

But then I think I’m not that interested in men. I don’t see that many who I feel attracted to. Not into beefcake stuff and all that. Not interested in a man being involved with my emotions and have ugly thoughts that they are simply not that sharp, bright, or emotionally sophisticated enough to bother with. Or that they have some power agendum, want to sell me on something, want to check out what team I’m on maybe even politically. (Ugly because since I don’t hang with men I’m probably talking about something within me, within my own self image.)

So there you have it. I’m rather old now. Have a really lovely open relationship with a woman who can understand, so now that sex with other women is basically over due to my age and contentedness with my friend. I can say that I’m not on team straight and have no interest in being straight in its homo and hetro variations.
Feeling more free and loved in my relationship I have been having more male sex encounters than in the past when it was dormant for long periods or really toned way down. This feels healthy for me.
I think it might be interesting to have an actual male lover appear although I’m not searching. But people do just show up in my life with no effort from me.

I was in high school in Ohio when The Stonewall Action happened which is said to have set off the Gay Liberation movement. I remember thinking then, while I was just starting to be sexually active with girls my age, that the ideal with me was bi, capable of both clearly. I was not about to pick a team and never will. 

Anyway, interesting book with writers of various abilities in self expression.
(You can deal with that if you’ve read this far.)