But then I got to Oberlin College, away from my abusive household, and in my Freshman year, my new friend Bob, a former student at The High School of Music and Art in New York City, an institution of very gifted music, art, and dance students many of whom were already using drugs to enhance their consciousness or just to have fun, gave me my firat marijuana. I remember listening to the Brahms F Minor Piano Quintet, which I had never heard before that night, and I was screaming at the Third Movement, quite literally sitting on the floor of his dorm room in Barrows Hall, screaming from the sheer power of this music as the piano and strings pounded out their heavy tom-ta-tom-ta-tom-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tom-ta-tom-ta-tom over and over again until I thought my head would explode with the sound of the new rhythms that invaded my cell structure. As a pianist, I loved the music of Brahms, with its darkness and melancholy and a sound filled with dreams. But, I had never heard chamber music before, and this was a revelation. The was my first marijuana. On marijuana I also discovered the music oa Guystav Mahler, who is still today a composer who speaks volumes to me emotionally and psychologically, but most importantly it speaks to me spiritually and raises my spiritual consciousness far better than the LSD did. Perhaps that is because he too, was sexually abused as a child. In any event, marijuana use became a daily occurrence during my entire Oberlin career, with a joint beautifully rolled just waiting for me to wake up in the morning to smoke before breakfast, which was always quite wonderful because of the marijuana in my body.
Then, perhaps because it was the 1960's drug culture, and perhaps because Oberlin was a place of easy drug access, culture or no, I used every conceivable hallucinogen known--mescaline, psylocybin, mushrooms, Peyote cactus, and hash shish. I had just come out publicly as a Gayman on campus, the first Man ever in the history of Oberlin to do so, I came out publicly in the class rooms even, demanding of the professors why we were not talking about the sexuality of great Lesbian and Gay authors like Stein or Melville or Poe, or great artists like Michelangelo, David Hockney, or Andy Warhol, or composers like Tchaikovsky,Copeland, Bernstain, or Britten and the professors did not know what to say or do, of course, except stand there with dumbfounded looks on their faces, because no one prior to me even thought to think about these things, let alone talk about them in class. The professors thought about how I had the audacity to talk about homosexuality at all both in and out of the classroom.
It was John Thompson, Ph.D. in the then office of Psychological Services, who taught me that I am beautiful and strong in my Queerness, and that his job was to make me love myself and throw off the dark closet of shame and guilt, and I did all of that in just one semester of my Freshman year, in the great hyperbole that my life was and is still. John was my first psychotherapist in a great long line of therapists, and I am particularly grateful to him because he was sent to me by God when, in 1965, I could have gotten any homophobic therapist in that entire office of therapists. John was a devout student of the work of Evelyn Hooker, and he thoroughly believed that Queer people were merely on a continuum of sexual expressions and that we were perfectly in keeping with the Laws of Nature (read "God"). John believed that I had very special gifts to give the world as a Queerman which straight men simply don't have, and he helped me begin my work of Teaching. I graduated from Oberlin after having lived in London for my Junior year and part of my Senior year where I explored my sexuality through my first love relationship with Richard L (he doesn't want his name known).
The 1970's and early 1980's were the cocaine years, and I stopped the other drugs because cocaine was the Cadillac of drugs back then. I suppose it still is among many. For me, on cocaine, the sex was fantastic and the rush was remarkable. And then, in 1983, when I came back to Chicago from a three-year stint in New York City that was a cocaine and sex circus, I stopped using drugs completely for the next 21 years because I was completely filled up right to the "full" line. I was not in a recovery program, I just stopped using. I was abstinent. But, in 2004, because of some unspeakable emotional and psychic pain from memories of my childhood abuse and the nastiness of a good relationship gone bad, I found the dreamland and sexual playground of crystal methamphetamine. Crystal Meth, also called Tina in the Crystal world, was like coming home to a loving family. It was everything I wanted in a drug, but had never been quite able to find before. In all my other drugs, there was always something missing, something lacking. In all my other drugs, no matter how beautiful the psychedelic meanderings, no matter how hot the sex on cocain, there was always an edge of something, an edge of the pain that I could not escape. With crystal, the sex was better than on any other drug, there is no arguing that, but for me, the edge of the pain was gone. There was no pain, neither psychic nor physical, because by now I was feeling quite ill and was in a great deal of body pain from AIDS-related illnesses. Crystal was the perfect. antidote. It made me forget my pain. It numbed out my body, and it numbed out my mind. It enabled me to have unbridled sex for days on end without stopping, beginning on a Friday afternoon in sleazy motel rooms with complete strangers, and ending the following Tuesday morning, when I would stop injecting this poison which I thought was emotional and sexual Heaven. Then, I would start again with another needle in my "golden arm" on a Friday, and spend Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday in the bath house. So, I was clean from Meth from Tuesday morning until Friday afternoon during those weeks. It never escalated to daily use. There was always the break of two to three days between the last on Monday nights and first injections the following Friday afternoon. I kept my drug use secret from my then-partner Joe who, when he found out that not only had I been using crystal, but that I was "slamming" (injecting) it, flew into a ballistic rage and essentially threw me out of the house.
Crystal brought me to my knees, "because without exception, that's what it does". I lost everything dear to me, including a lifetime partnership of nearly thirteen years and my home and family of cats, not to mention my extended family of in-laws whom I loved dearly. I entered a psychiatric facility because I finally became psychotic and suicidal from the Crystal, and that place enrolled me in a 30-day lock-down rehab center for Queer people who are suffering in their minds, either from the drugs, or from deep depression/snxiety disorder. I came out of that only to live in a halfway house for drug addicts, but in rehab I entered the world of recovery, of 12-Step Recovery Work. This time, I was not just abstinent. This time, I had entered the World of Recovery. I lived at Chicago House for the next ten months, working my Program with a sponsor really heavily, then finding my own apartment right on Lake Michigan directly overlooking the vast Lake where I lived for four yearskl, clean and sober from all drugs, with a new cat family. Murfee and Gizmo are my constant furry companions. I still work my Program, and I still have my same Sponsor, David, whom I love with all my heart, who helps keep me clean and sober through his wisdom, respect, and love.
For the past twenty-three years, I have been teaching at DePaul University in the School of Music, working there even during my short-lived but intense career as a crystal meth addict. I was a Lecturer in Harpsichord and Baroque Performance Practice. I loved my teaching. I lived for it. Today, I am clean from drugs. Today, I have a new life. Today, I can feel real joy and love, especially for my friends in recovery, my family which is my Brother and his wife Susan, my best friend Allan, and my sponsee in the program, Bryan. Recovery from Crystal Meth is not an easy road. It is painful and fraught with potholes in which to fall, always facing the specter of relapse, but this time, there are recovery friends who "have my back". They watch out for my welfare and my sobriety. They walk with me on my spiritual road in the 12-Step Program. Recovery has taught me a new way of life, a way filled with honesty and integrity, love and friendship beyond anything that can be fully expressed in words. It is a world of joy and possibility. Recovery is my new Oberlin. Oberlin was always my place of possibility. The World of Recovery, in my 60's, is now that place for me. In it, I know I can finally find humility in the face of my God who takes care of me and keeps me clean from drugs. I know that I cannot remain clean alone, that it requires a community of like-minded people, a fellowship of other recovering addicts, and it requires a powerful faith in Something Greater Than Myself to whom I can look for support and strength when I am feeling small and weak. I know that when I cannot do something, faith in my HJigher Power can help me achieve that task. I call my Higher Power God, some people call it the Fellowhip or the Group. Some people call their sponsor their Higher Power, as much as that puts terrible and undue pressure on the sponsor to be something other than he is.
For the past six years in recovery, I was a Conductor with whom to be reckoned in the world of Baroque Music. Today I am a great Spiritual Director. Today, I can love and allow myself to be loved in return in non-abusive ways. Today, I have all possibility in my life as a Queerman living in a hostile straight world. Today, I have a new-found strength to live life to the full now as a documentary filmmaker, President and CEO of my not-for-profit organization that I founded for the making of the film, laughing and crying, counseling and listening in the fullness of my humanity and divinity. Today I know a few things about God, not a lot, but a few vital things. Today, my life is rich with heathy and healthful relationships, and it is filled from a spiritual well that has no bottom, a well that will provide all the spiritual water I care to drink, from now until my soul leaves my body. When that happens, I will die, but I am not afraid of Sister Death (as she was called by St. Francis of Assisi). After all, I have already died once in 1996 while in a hard coma for ten days, I died and came back from death on my own, without resuscitation. It was not my time. I had too much work to do in the world and that work was my teaching and performing until two years ago when I was fired from my position and was guided by Divine intervention to the world of filmmaking and the not-for-profit sector, learning as I go and loving every minute of it. I was simply not ready to die, nor am I ready to die now. I have full-blown AIDS and have had more infections during this past year 2010-2011 than I have had since the 1990's when I died. But, I have a film to make, an important, transformational piece of documentary art which I hope, in all humility, will change the world for the better. I say this with no ego attachment, because I know it is not my doing that has gotten me to this place of happy delirium. Without the Divine Presence in my life, I never would have been able to embark on this new career at age 65, but I feel more creative now, making my film "From The Ashes Risen", then I ever felt as a musician during 60 of my 65 years of life (I began piano lessons when I was five). I had a respectable international career as a concert harpsichordist and teacher and made two recordings, but it never seemed to fill me up the way the film is filling me up and working with my creativity in previously unknown ways. Today, because of recovery, I have choices and I have trusted friends and a trusted sponsor who help me make my choices, guiding me through an often very toxic quagmire of old messages from my family of origin, messages that produced a self-loathing that lasted well into my late teens and into my early thirties. Recovery from drugs and sex addiction has taught me humility and how to reach out to my trusted brothers for help when I cannot stand up by myself anymore. It has taught me to rely wholly on God for help, whose help usually comes through other people in the program, and isn't that how it should be? God works through both individual and collective history, through people and not through some half-baked superstition and assholic dogma. If we are nothing else, we are definitely an embodied people, embodying the Divine Consciousness on Earth and that is the most humbling thing I have learned in recovery. I feel as if I have been let into some of the great Mysteries of life, spiritual Mysteries in which my spiritual, mystical self can revel. I can honestly say that I am deliriously happy with my life, physical pain and all that goes along with having AIDS. But, I am more content with my life than I have ever been, and all I want to do is share my joy-in-life with other Queer people. Through my film, I want to be able to tell Queer teenagers that it really does get better, and that life is precious and well worth living, even at their age and in their situation of bullying and physical/psychological abuse by their peers. It really does get better, kids. I am a witness to that truth. I know that the pain now is excruciating and you see no way out of it except by hurting yourself. But, you will grow up to be a magnificent Queer human being, giving color to the world, bringing laughter and tears to the Gay community and even, perhaps, to the larger majority of the straight world. You will shine like Venus in the heavens. You will give us your gorgeous gifts given to you by God at conception. You will come to understand that you are so blessed precisely because you are Gay not in spite of it. You will come to understand that when you were conceived in your Mother's womb, you were conceived as a Gay human being, and that is one of real miracles of life. You have been given the greatest gift you can be given and that is the gift of your Queerness in the world. You have so much to teach, because your life experience will make you very wise, very compassionate, and very empathic. People will need you in their lives, not just because you will be an extraordinary friend, but because you will be an extraordinary Queer friend.who possesses a wisdom that can only come from learning to survive in a hostile environment. You will become strong and invincible to your peers' bullying. I know this to be true, because I was exactly where you are now, and I watched my life transform slowly over time and, at least for me, it has been my life of grace.
Being a drug addict has taught me a great many things, one of which is the truth of the platitude: "This, too, shall pass." Give yourself some time and space to know that this is true and that as you grow older, everything regarding harassment because of your sexual orientation will go away, and your life will become a brilliant, shining light, lighting up the world with your Queer beauty. You have support all around you, especially in the most unlikely places.. I learned my lessons by being a drug addict both out and in recovery. You will learn your lessons of how to survive and even thrive if you are open to the possibilities of the world around you, and if you look to your tribal elders for support and love. oujr role is to be here for you in your pain, and to help alleviate it with the stories we have to tell about our Tribe of Queermen. You come from an honorable tradition and magnificent history and you are part of an age-old people who give gthe wiorld its color and excitement, its arts and designslllllllllllllllllllll
roger you are a beautiful hunk of a guy...................
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