(part one)

The giant leap in gay consciousness, the blinding flash through the gay window that would be a revelation of what that "force" might be, came - for me - in spring 1976. In a letter, I was explaining how - when we thought about ourselves as preteenagers during the bleak years when we thought we were the only ones of our kind in the whole world - we would naturally be thinking about ourselves as subjects. And then, suddenly, when we somehow discovered that there might be another just like ourselves somewhere, and we started to think about - and fantasize about - him, we would have been perceiving him in exactly the same way as we were perceiving ourselves. We would be perceiving him as if he were also subject.

In the letter I had gone on for about two more pages - when suddenly reality burst in my head like skyrockets. What had I just said? This was the link in the chain I had been trying to grab hold of for thirty years. Of course, I had perceived my fantasy love as subject - in exactly the same way as I perceived myself as subject, in exactly the same way I had always perceived my teddy bear as subject, in exactly the same way as I had always perceived the talking trees and the handsome heroes in my picture-books as subjects. Oh, I knew that all the other kids around me were thinking of girls as sex objects, to be manipulated - to be lied to in order to get them to "give in" - and to be otherwise treated with contempt (when the boys were together without them). And, strangely, the girls seemed to think of the boys as objects, too. But that was it! Writing the letter now, in 1976, I was remembering vividly how, in that long-ago fantasy, he whom I would reach out in love to was indeed projected as being another me - and the one thing we would not be doing was making objects of each other. Just as in my dream (which I would go on having for years), he'd be standing just before dawn on a golden velvet hillside... he'd hold out his hand for me to catch hold of, and then we would run away to the top of the hill to see the sunrise, and we would never have to come back again because we would now have each other. We would share everything, and we'd always understand each other completely and forever!

From that memory, which, once unleashed by that incandescent leap-into-speculation, continued seeming to validate itself ever the more strongly with each new adventure in the projection, came a new rush - a new "high," the sudden flooding from a second radiant memory. This would be the time when I actually met such an other, a boy I had been dreaming about for nearly a year. Between us at the instant of first eyelock, it was as if an invisible arc of lightning flashed between us, zapping into both our eagerly ready young bodies total systems of knowledge - instances of ethological "triggerings" such as the inherit able consciousness that Dr. Ralph Sperry of Cal Tech was, in 1979, rewarded for discovering. Suddenly we both were quivering with over powering preprograms of knowledge and behaviors of which our gay flesh and brains had always been capable of but never, until that moment of imprinting, had actually contained. Now, through that flashing arc of love, we two young faeries knew the triggered tumult of gay consciousness in our vibrant young bodies - in ways that we in the moments before would never have imagined and now would never again forget, for so long as we lived. And this - in ourselves and, simultaneously, in each other - we also knew: subject-to-subject.

In the beloved fairy stories of our childhoods, the fairy godmothers - or, if we were lucky, the handsome fairy princes - would give the chosen subject of the story a "talisman": The talisman, in turn, unlocked secret treasures or gave the person holding it the power to fly, or made visions and wonderful dreams come true. New phrases such as gay window on the world or gay consciousness and new concepts such as subject-subject consciousness seem also to be talismans, because both faerie brothers and hag sisters, upon hearing such phrases and concepts for the first time, keep constantly finding themselves brimming with new visions and spiritual breakthroughs that they'd been bottling up inside themselves for years, maybe for a lifetime - because, until the moment of receiving the talisman, they'd had no shining words to contain the image, no metaphor for the ambient new idea, no frame of reference for a new multidimensional way of perceiving. Now - all at once seeing themselves as subject-subject people in a subject-object world - they, for the first time, began to comprehend the nature of their dilemma as well as the far-reaching widths and depths of their oppression. They found themselves appreciating, for instance, how the loving care with which one's mother and siblings pursued total conformity could be absolutely lethal for their faerie selves. So we, as subject-subject people, may also begin to wonder why in the world we continue to imitate hetero behavior at all when we very well know, with every breath we draw, that such behaviors suit us not at all: After all, we aren't heteros. And when we do imitate them, we usually do it badly - we either overdo or we underdo. Mostly, to be perfectly candid, we overdo.

The talisman of subject-subject consciousness immediately explains why faeries so often have had such constructively loving relationships with hetero women. It would not be because of the hetero-male stereotype that we are half-women ourselves and so are accustomed to seeing ourselves as objects, similarly to the way hetero women know themselves to have been traditionally perceived and used by their men folk. It would be because we faeries see our women friends as subjects in the same way as women perceive themselves as subjects; and the women know this and luxuriate in the mutuality of sharing. Indeed, the women of the women's liberation movement are aching to learn how to develop some measure of subject-to-subject relationships with their men. And they wonder why we, who have known the jubilations of subject-to subject visions and visitations all our lives, have neither shared nor even spoken.

Of course, we haven't as yet spoken because we haven't as yet begun to learn how to communicate subject-subject realities even to each other, using our traditionally inherited hetero male-derived and -developed subject-object language in our traditionally inherited hetero male subject-object world. The catalyst of spiritual crisis within the gay movement has brought many gay men face-to-face with the appalling dichotomy between, on the one hand, the nurturing sensi tivity and concern for each other in a mutuality of sexual intimacy that we all profess to be seeking and, on the other, the desolation and alienation from self and from each other that more often takes place as we make sexual objects of ourselves and of each other in pursuit of the traditional and expected behavior in bars and baths. How might we apply subject-subject consciousness to gay sexual sharing?

TRANSCRIPT: [Jamison Green sitting on a couch, being interviewed by Dr. Doe. He is wearing a suit shirt and a black jacket, and has a grey beard.] JAMISON: When I first transitioned, I thought I was going to go get a sex change, then go home and mow my lawn. I did not ever imagine that my life would change at all, because already people- at least half the time, sometimes more- thought I was male. And so, I figured nothing was going to change, I would just feel more comfortable in my body. I realised that there were all these other people out there who were living in fear and shame, because of their differences. And I thought, that is not right. And so I said to them, I’m going to start using my full name in public, and I’m going to start talking about who we are. Don’t be afraid to change in all kinds of ways. Your self can change. [Jamison and the interviewer high-five.] INTERVIEWER: I’m impressed by what you’ve done. JAMISON: Thank you. END TRANSCRIPT.