You mentioned, when you’re sitting with groups of deeply divided
people, the importance of coming from a deep sense of self. I’ve
wondered whether your early experiences as a gay man in the unsafe
territory of ultra-conservative Christian church groups developed
these capacities in you for courageous conversations? I think of when
those groups subjected you to exorcisms—20 people yelling at the
supposed devil in you. I’m amazed at how you can still speak of the
people who did that to you with insight and even humour. Do you feel
that having survived this harrowing time is part of your capacity to be
grounded in who you are and to speak from a very deep truth?
[Laughs].
“No, hang on, I need to treat the room with more respect than just allowing my mouth to
fly off. These people have come for a reason. And they have respected the room by coming
into it. And defensiveness is unlikely to let the room open up.” So one key word for me is
“information,” another key word is “surprise.” Presumably, people have a predictable set of
outcomes in their mind when they enter the room. I bet you this group or this person will say
the following thing. And they might even have their responses primed and prepared for the
thing that they’re predicting. I’m always interested in how we find the courage for something
unexpected and surprising to be said, where people might go, “I don’t know what I think
of that, because I haven’t thought of that before.” And that’s more difficult than shouting
pre-prepared insults at each other.Well I certainly look to those
experiences—the years and years of
silence, of being gay and knowing
I had no one to talk to, and then in
a very awkward way it being forced
out of me and then going through
therapy and exorcisms, so-called
therapy I should say—I suppose I
look at all of those as a profound
schooling in fear. My guess is
that a very significant percentage
of the population has a schooling in fear. So there are people who’ve said, “Oh I haven’t
suffered that much in my life,” some of that is due to luxury and privilege. Some of that is
due to disposition and circumstance. But I’ve met a lot of people who have had a profound
schooling in fear—and that teaches you an enormous amount. The thing about it is that
even though a huge amount of people have had such a schooling, it always feels isolating.
Ha! Fear always makes you feel alone. My experience with fear was certainly isolating.
Many of the people I’ve met who’ve had a profound experience of fear felt the same.I started to write poetry and keep a journal when I was young, maybe 11. But I always carried
it with me. And I kind of wrote in code. I don’t mean a code I made up but I had code ways
of talking about being gay. I once spoke about “the hell behind my eyes”—that was a way
of speaking about all the things I knew about myself. One of the things about fear is that
even when it’s lying to you, and fear often is lying, it is confronting. Therefore when there
is the safety, or when there’s at least safety enough, it can lead us to the possibility of a
conversation with it. I mean, that didn’t happen alone for me. A friend of mine said to me,
“You’re a bit fucked up. I think you need a therapist” [laughs]. It’s only a certain kind of friend
who can say that to you.So when she said that, I really believed her. ’Cause she’d been in therapy herself and I
knew her very well. And I knew she was benefitting from it. I thought, I’m going to start to
look for, what she called, a “proper therapist.” She said, “somebody who has supervision.”
[Laughs]. I did make sure that when I found a good therapist that I asked him, “Do you
have supervision?” I wouldn’t have even understood his answer properly. But I could see
that he was like, “Yes, it’s good you’re asking. Yes I do.” So for me the only way that I could
learn how to face fear was in the company of somebody else. And that was the only place of
safety I had—somebody I paid and who, for legal contractual reasons, had to keep things to
themselves. That’s an indication of how lonely I felt.43SCHOOLED IN FEARCONVERSATIONS