by Dan Savage
I was on a long, unauthorized break during Thursday’s hike when I saw GM coming down the trail, so I let go of my balls and joined him. He was by far the wealthiest person in our group, so I figured I’d hike a ways with him. I’d overheard one of the other Ashram veterans, the real-estate lawyer, telling the other women that GM owned newspapers and a publishing house and, inevitably, horses. “He’s worth,” she said, lowering her voice two octaves but speaking just as loudly, “an awful lot of money.” I’ve always enjoyed Germans, rich or poor—heck, even German senior citizens—so I endured the misery of my sweaty balls moving back and forth between my bloody thighs to spend some time with GM. In this case, there was the added incentive of learning something about the absurdly affluent—namely, why someone with the money to go anywhere and do anything would go to the Ashram to be starved and marched through the desert.
This time I played it cool, refraining from making any airy-fairy comments about the curtains and bedspreads back at the Ashram. I told GM that I lived in Germany for two years, and soon we started talking about WWI, WWII, the Cold War, the wall, and German reunification. GM met JFK, and as a young man advised LBJ during the Vietnam War. (“My advice? I told him to get da hell out.”) He was friendly with the Reagans. We walked; we talked.
“Why pay for this?” I asked GM as we rounded a bend in the trail. “You’ve been walking these trails for years; you must know them by heart. Why not come get a cheap motel room for a week and walk them alone. You’d save, like, twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“Wouldn’t work. I’d be sitting in my room making phone calls and watching cable TV, and if I ever did get out on the trails, I’d quit before I was halfway up. It’s the psychology of the place that keeps you walking.”
The psychology?
“Yes. You keep walking when your feet and legs are aching because everyone else is walking. You keep walking because you don’t feel like you have a choice. The others are walking, so you are walking. You cannot quit.”
I wasn’t going to argue with a German about the psychology of a forced march—not even a guiltless German. We walked on in silence for a few minutes.
“If we were women,” he suddenly said, “this is probably the point where one of us would say, ‘You will come and stay with me, yes?’ It is something I will never understand about women. How do the nine know each other a day or a week and decide, oh, we are best friends now?”
I can read between the lines, especially when they’re drawn right in front of me in thick, black strokes: No invitation to spend the holidays at GM’s country place (a castle outside Munich, as I later learned) would be forthcoming. An hour talking on the trail together barely qualified us as acquaintances, much less friends. We were sensible, stoic, unfeeling men, after all, not mushy, effusive women. Unlike “the nine,” as GM called the women in our group, we discussed only what we had in common: our opinions about German history (his were somewhat more informed than my own), our opinions about forced marches (ditto), and our time together at the Ashram. We didn’t discuss our lives, wives, kids, hopes, dreams, diseases, or traumas.
Long, painful hikes through the desert weren’t the only way the rich people at the Ashram lost weight. We were starved, too. We were fed three times a day, like any other prisoners, but we weren’t fed much: one egg for breakfast, a tiny salad and two pieces of vegetarian sushi for lunch, a bowl of soup for dinner. We were taking in a lot fewer calories than we were burning out on the trails in the morning—to say nothing of the calories we were burning in the yoga sessions (in a geodesic redwood dome), pool exercises (in the teeny, tiny pool), and weight training classes (in a gym with a sloped floor and rusty equipment) that filled our afternoons. On the trails, people stopped sharing stories about breast cancer and divorce and started sharing stories about restaurants and snack foods.
The rich folks seemed to take the deprivation in stride—deprivation was, after all, what they were paying for. Their normal lives were filled with too much: too much food, too much free time, too much money, too much freedom from want, too much luxury. Here at the Ashram, they were paying good money to experience too little: too little food, too little control, too little comfort, too little luxury. Our days were filled with hardship, deprivation, and hard physical labor. It’s impossible to overstate the misery of hiking a long, steep trail in the desert. You look ahead and see the trail disappear around a bend. You push on, hoping that just around the bend the trail will level off or—please, God—the blessed descent will begin. You force your legs to pick up your feet, you round the corner, and . . . up the trails goes, until the trail rounds another bend, and you round that one and still the trail goes up.
We were powerless to do anything about our predicament—a point driven home one day on the beach. One of the seven hikes took us from the Atlantic side of the Santa Monica Mountains all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The hike was a killer, so the distance between the pack leaders—Movie Mogul, German Mogul, Motion Sickness, and me—and the stragglers was considerable, so Randy loaded those of us who finished the hike early into a van and drove us to a beach, where we could lie in the sand and while the rest of the group finished the hike. (I got to ride shotgun—yes!) The four of us were wearing Ashram T-shirts and sweats and carrying water bottles. We looked like, again, the members of some strange cult when Randy dropped us off on a crowded beach. Halfway through our week at the Ashram, we were all starving, all the time. All along the beach vendors were selling hot dogs, ice cream, and soft drinks . . . and there we were, a wealthy German, a wealthy movie producer, a wealthy tech businesswoman, and me, without a cent between us. Our clothes, ID, credit cards, and cash were all back at the Ashram.
It had been a decade since I was broke and hungry and exhausted and powerless to do anything about it. The joke was on me: I had gone to the Ashram to envy the rich up close and personal only to discover that the rich go to the Ashram to live like the poor. For a mere five hundred dollars a day (which is more than the annual per-capita income of 33 percent of the people on the planet), the Ashram’s guests are bossed around, fed starvation rations, marched through the mountains, and coerced into various yoga positions. GM, MM, and The Nine came to the Ashram to enjoy what may be the only perk of poverty: It’s slimming, darling.
There is power and status in freely giving up your power and status for a set period of time. Pretending to be poor and powerless has always been an option for the rich and powerful. Marie Antoinette dressed up like a milkmaid and sat on a silver stool in a twee little farmhouse she had built on the grounds of Versailles. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the Emperor Nero would disguise himself as a common citizen and carouse in Rome’s slums and taverns; the Emperor Commodus liked to fight in the Coliseum as a gladiator (his opponents were given swords made of lead). At the end of the day, though, Marie Antoinette left the farm and returned to being Queen of France. While the rich can afford to live like the poor for a day or a week, only the rich can experience how the other half lives. The wealthy can go slumming, but it’s not so easy for the poor to go mansioning.
The thirteen of us at the Ashram were guilty of a kind of conspicuous nonconsumption—there was certainly something hedonistic about our week at the Ashram. We were paying five hundred dollars a day for a shared room, starvation rations, and forced marches through the desert in one-hundred-degree heat—all so we could lose a little weight. (I lost ten pounds, coming in second place; only the woman about to get married lost more than I did.) Even hardship is a commodity in America, a product that is packaged and sold to the wealthy. Want to get away from luxury? Treat yourself to a week at the Ashram. Hardship is in such short supply in our rich, comfortable country that the ability to purchase a little poverty has become a thoroughly modern status symbol. Everyone at the Ashram that week was a spiritual descendant of Marie Antoinette, I guess, but I unfortunately didn’t get to tag along when everyone joyfully returned to their palaces—much to my sorrow.
Jake and Ke
vin and the Queen of Sin
Nothing’s more offensive than flaunting sexuality in public, and the most offensive spectacles of all are Gay Pride events. Bearded, paunchy guys prancing around in bras and high heels do not impress the straight majority as an act of political liberation. Dykes on Bikes? Take a hike! Can’t you “express yourself” without throwing it in our faces!
—Bill O’Reilly, The No Spin Zone
But the liberty to pursue happiness means that each of us pursues whatever it is he may desire. We are to move away from the restraints in pursuit of we know not what. Such a person leads a precarious existence.
—Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah
Kevin and Jake pursue happiness in Los Angeles.
Kevin is in his thirties and so is Jake. Kevin makes a lot of money and so does Jake. Kevin looks much younger than his actual age and so does Jake. Kevin has a gym-built body and so does Jake. Kevin is deeply tanned and so is Jake. Kevin is clean-cut . . . and so it goes.
Kevin and Jake are one of those enviable ubercouples upscale gay magazines will occasionally profile. (“Meet the guys who have everything—including each other!”) Together three years, Kevin and Jake had just moved into a new home when I invited myself over for the weekend. The previous owners of their home, an older straight couple, did a lot of damage to the fifty-year-old house before selling it to Kevin and Jake. It was late June when I came to visit, and this pair of all-American homos were dividing their summer between the beach and Home Depot.
While they showed me around the house, Kevin delighted in describing the design sins of the home’s former owners: window treatments, flower beds, and wallpaper choices so offensive that he shuddered when he described them. Kevin and Jake had undone most of these sins by the time I visited; windows were bare, flower beds mostly empty, wallpaper stripped away. After the tour, Kevin handed me a small photo album. “The before pictures,” he said with mock gravity. The pictures were appalling; while I personally don’t care how many times bell-bottoms and skin-tight T-shirts cycle in and out of fashion, may God protect us from the return of cork walls, shimmery wallpaper, and swag lamps. (Still, before-and-after pictures of a house you’re redecorating seems like a peculiar form of boasting; it’s a way of saying, “Look at how much better my taste is than the taste of the people who used to live here.” In Kevin and Jake’s case, considering the age of their home’s previous owners—and the design-challenged era in which they lived and decorated—better taste isn’t much to boast about.)
Kevin and Jake are one of those only-in-L.A. gay couples: ridiculously successful, absurdly handsome, deeply tanned, sexually adventurous, and, uh, very well accessorized. During the tour of the house, Kevin showed me a spare bedroom that the men were turning into a “playroom.” What’s a playroom, Mr. Bork? Well, picture a home entertainment center devoted to energetic, athletic sex rather than lethargic, sedentary TV-viewing. Most playrooms have padded floors (the better to kneel on), no windows or blacked-out windows, mood lighting, shelves filled with sex toys, and—for the main event—a black-leather sling supported by chains that hang from hooks in the ceiling. Kevin and Jake did some house-sitting for a gay friend who had a playroom, and they had such a great time that they ran out and bought a sling. Since they didn’t want their friends to spot—or tease them about—telltale hooks in the ceiling of their bedroom, they decided to build a playroom of their own.
Spending the day with guys like Kevin and Jake always makes me wish I were richer, handier, and better looking. Good-looking, rich, fit gay men fill me with envy, and in this particular case, I had a definite touch of sling-envy. Compared with these guys, my boyfriend and I are lazy, average, boring—in and out of bed. Like Kevin and Jake, we live in a house we bought from an older couple. Unlike Kevin and Jake, we haven’t done anything about the appalling window treatments, flower beds, or wallpaper left behind by the previous owners. We don’t have to haul out a photo album to make visitors shudder at the previous owner’s horrifying wallpaper selections; all we have to do is just open the doors and turn on the lights. And while we own a sling (it was a gift, Mom, I swear), we’ve never actually used it. Our sling sits in a box in our basement, gathering dust. While my boyfriend enjoyed his one ride in a sling (in an kinky, upscale boutique hotel in Amsterdam that I was writing up for a design magazine), he doesn’t see himself as the kind of guy who has a sling in his house, much less a playroom in his basement. There are hooks in the ceiling of our bedroom but, alas, only to support the swag lamps installed by our home’s previous owners.
As I watched Kevin and Jake hammer a new window frame into place, I tried not to feel too bad about my walls, windows, floors, and the sling rotting in a box in my basement. Kevin and Jake have to be trendy and edgy; they live in Los Angeles, after all. Kevin owns an extremely successful, high-end home lighting fixture and design business. (Madonna and Janet Jackson are clients.) Jake is a big-deal exec at a movie studio. As an up-and-coming gay power couple in status-conscious Los Angeles, Kevin and Jake’s home has to scream success. They have to tend to their abs and cultivate a sexual edge; with so many good-looking, available men in Los Angeles, gay men who have boyfriends either keep the home fires blazing or lose their lovers to someone younger, hotter, and hipper. Thankfully, my boyfriend and I don’t live with the same pressures. Jesus Christ himself is likelier to drop by our house unannounced than Madonna; and Seattle falls somewhere between Dubuque and Buffalo Grove on the sexual energy scale.
When I told a friend that I was looking for a hip gay couple who were planning to attend the gay pride parade in Los Angeles, he gave me Kevin and Jake’s phone number. I called, and they invited me to come down and spend the weekend at their place. It was a hot Saturday afternoon in late June when I arrived, the day before the pride parade, and Kevin and Jake were working on the patio behind their sprawling, one-story, wood-frame house when my cab pulled up. I was offered something to drink (“Beer?”) and something to smoke (“Pot?”), and I accepted a beer. Then I sat scribbling away in my notebook as Kevin and Jake strolled around shirtless, digging up some plants, watering others, and answering my questions. While the men walk and talk and look and dress alike, Kevin, originally from the Midwest, was more talkative, more willing to entertain my questions than his boyfriend, Jake, who is originally from the East Coast. I had only one basic question for Kevin and Jake, however, one I asked them over and over again for the next two days: Why on earth were they going to the pride parade?
“The pride parade is about seeing your friends and having fun,” Kevin said, hosing down some strange plant. “And it’s fun to laugh at the freaks.”
Every June, American cities with large gay populations host pride parades to commemorate the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969.
The Stonewall Riots in a nutshell: Once upon a time, on a humid night in June, the New York City Police Department conducted a routine vice raid on a routinely sleazy little gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Instead of meekly filing into paddy wagons, some sweaty, angry queens decided to resist. Judy Garland’s funeral had taken place earlier that day, and the queens just weren’t having it. With Judy gone, what else did they have to lose? A crowd gathered as the cops tried to drag the kicking, screaming queens out of the Stonewall. Someone in the crowd began pelting the cops with pennies. Ten minutes later a dozen of New York City’s finest were barricaded inside the gay bar they had come to raid while an angry mob hurled stones, bricks, bottles, and parking meters through the bar’s one small window. Someone tried to set the bar on fire with the cops trapped inside. Thus began the Stonewall Riots, which went on for three nights and heralded the emergence of a more militant, confrontational gay rights movement.
The Stonewall Riots are often made to sound like the big bang of gay politics—the beginning of gay time—which isn’t entirely accurate; a handful of gay activists had staged small protests before the riots, to little effect. Even if Stonewall wasn’t the beginning of gay politics, it did change
everything. Pre-Stonewall, meek gay groups issued pleas. Post-Stonewall, noisy gay groups made demands. Pre-Stonewall, gay men in ties and lesbians in skirts picketed politely, at considerable risk to their private and professional lives. Post-Stonewall, gay men in short-shorts and lesbians in painters’ pants marched constantly and rioted occasionally, at ever-less risk to their private and professional lives. Ironically, archive footage of the few pre-Stonewall gay rights protests are in black-and-white, like Dorothy’s Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. Post-Stonewall footage of gay rights marches are in blazing color, like the Land of Oz itself.
Early gay pride marches had two missions: First, let the straights know the gays weren’t going to hide anymore; and, second, let closeted gay people know that it was safe to come out. (Of course, it wasn’t safe; it still isn’t entirely safe. The certain misery of being closeted, however, is so far outweighed by the potential for happiness outside the closet that most gays and lesbians are willing to risk it.) Pre-Stonewall, gays and lesbians were made to feel ashamed of themselves; post-Stonewall, gays and lesbians were instructed to be proud. Like the women’s movement (“Equal Rights Now!”) and the African-American civil-rights movement (“Black Power!”), the gay movement chose a slogan that laid aggressive claim to the very thing the wider culture had denied us. Women didn’t have equal rights when they took their slogan, and blacks had not much in the way of power. Likewise, few gays and lesbians took pride in themselves back in 1969.