About Having a Boyfriend
Reviews by Perry Brass
Finding the
Boyfriend Within: A Practical Guide for Tapping Into Your Own Resource of
Love, Happiness, and Respect , by Brad Gooch. Simon and Schuster.
ISBN 0-684-85040-0, Hard Cover, $21.00, 171 pages.
When It's Time to Leave Your Lover, A Guide for Gay Men
, by Neil Kaminsky, LCSW. Harrington Park Press, an imprint of
Haworth Press, Inc. ISBN 0-7890-0497-6, 274 pages, with Resource Guide and
Bibliography. Hard Cover 24.95. 274 pages
 I learned several things reading Brad Gooch's very quick read,
Finding the Boyfriend Within: Gymbos are the new gay take on
"bimbos,"— muscle-bound gymtroids that you tire of fast.
Also, it is possible, like Brad Gooch, to spend 20 years in therapy
and still not be able to accept someone else on the same terms that you'd
like to be accepted yourself. And, also, that Brad leads a very with-it
life.
Although at 51, with moments of almost ridiculous happiness, having
been involved with a lover for 19 years, I still know very little about
the world that Brad Gooch inhabits. In fact, aside from its basic premise,
Finding the Boyfriend Within is really a document about gay
urban life of a certain type in New York and other cloned cities through
the U.S.
Gooch drops names of trendy restaurants, dishes, movies, movie
stars, boutiques, designers—the whole "beau monde"—constantly. It seems
that this is what the book is really about, although its main premise,
that despite (or in place of) the vicissitudes of love, developing a real,
intimate, working relationship with ones deeper, inner self—the "Boyfriend
Within"—is a very good idea.
Gooch personifies this personality, but as an imaginative concept
the "Boyfriend" is simply a slice of what we might call the Soul and what
I refer to as the Male Companion; that is, that incarnation of the place
where one's deeper personality, sexuality, and spirituality meet.
| The
Boyfriend can be found within you. Or, if you'd like, even be
created so that he actually expands or supports your own inner
qualities.
If you feel you're creative at heart, but can't create, the
Boyfriend can create for you. If you're a slob, the Boyfriend can
lead you to neatness. If you hate to shop, the Boyfriend can help
you with that as well—and then, when it's all over, you can sleep
with the Boyfriend, too. |
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This section I wish had been a bit ballsier. Gooch (and his
publisher, probably) had a fear that the book would be taken to be solely
a "one-handed" guide. So the author demurely skims over masturbation as a
meditative technique. This it is, in Taoist practices. It is certainly a
gateway from some loneliness, as well as a possible connection with
others.
(In other words, if you have masturbatory images about men and
don't censor whom you masturbate about, it's amazing how large your erotic
world can become . . . leading to some very interesting connections.
Personally, I've masturbated about riding naked on a zebra with
Tarzan; sucking off big old centaurs; WWF wrestlers; Van Gogh—red hair,
one of my weaknesses; fat men swimming in chocolate syrup; skinny men
pissing Koolaid; Jesus kissing John; John with and without Bo Derek;
Aztecs tongue-kissing, and God knows how many Boyfriends Within
that I've had to do without. )
Gooch's general tone is fairly genial, puppydoggish, and easy to
take. He lets you in to what seems like a glossy life—his stylish Soho
apartment, his personal trainer, his attractive past Boyfriends Without
(who never quite seem to get off themselves and onto Brad) and you hang on
like a window shopper, or one of those people who never get past the
velvet ropes.
He gives us exercises to do, such as list our most exterior
qualities (apartments, bods, bank accounts) and inner ones (being nice,
sensitive, honest), our reasons for being alone (personal ones and
environmental ones, such as AIDS, careers), and gives us sample dates we
can have with the resultant Boyfriend Within: making dinner with
him, going out for walks, going to movies. And also what to do when you
and your BFW have problems. In other words, issues.
What this basically amounts to is not being alone with yourself,
not feeling so isolated in our isolating world, being your own Best
Friend. Then taking him out for dinner. In the long run, this is cheaper
and easier than dealing with most other people and I certainly wouldn't
kick my own BFW out of bed, especially if I have a real BF in there with
me.
Now, if I can just get that lazy Boyfriend Within of mine to go out
and get me a discount at Armani's, maybe we can actually get something
permanent going.
If Brad Gooch's Finding the Boyfriend Within is
genial, Neil Kaminsky's When It's Time to Leave Your Lover
is clunky, poorly written, and "authoritative." Kaminsky, a
licensed clinical social worker, has been working with a certain set of
gay clients.
 I found much of what he writes here to be so ridiculous it was
embarrassing. "Being with a lover," Kaminksy states, "should never be a
'settle for' experience. The man you are with should be the man of your
dreams. . . . There is much in life we must settle for, because it is the
card we are dealt. Such is never the case with a partner. 'First class' in
love is the only class you should ever embrace."
I am afraid much of the book follows in this fashion, and sounds
like a 1950s Debbie Reynolds movie. Kaminksy hammers out the differences
for gay men among being "married," "single," "divorced," "dating," and
"tricking."
He is a stickler for categories. He admits, in the last chapter,
that he has had a hard time with relationships, and I can understand this.
In no place does he say that the one thing that keeps gay pairs going is
the desire both men have to make one another happy—and to find their lives
opening up and getting larger in the process.
As Gooch has a hard time with the M(asturbation) word, Kaminsky is
flummoxed by the M(oney) one. He skitters nervously from it, but money,
and the power behind it, is often the reason why relationships, gay and
straight, fall apart.
Instead, he often blames "fidelity," and holds up monogamy as the
standard flag. Monogamy, to him, is "trust" physicalized. "Trust is a
prerequisite for intimacy," he affirms, but, at what point are two men
relieved of having to expose 100% of themselves to each other?
This seems to be a gay conundrum: gay men often still don't
understand that there may be of some part of themselves that they
cannot—and perhaps shouldn't—share. That, as the writer Samuel Delany put
so well, they may have a "secret life" they want to and need to keep
secret.
It may be one measure adulthood among gay men that you can allow
this secret life to exist without belittling it, or trying to crash into
it. But Kaminsky keeps his "No-Prisoners" attitude. "Nothing merits
lying," he orders. "And no excuse for dishonesty will prevent the loss of
intimacy both of you will suffer."
The book, though, has its merit. Kaminsky is good on clinical
ideas, such as looking rationally at damaging feeling. And his section on
the importance and power of forgiveness was eye-opening. For gay men who
cannot forgive their families, forgiving lovers is difficult.
Neil Kaminsky has tackled the large subject of our relationships
from the angle of their break-ups and the need to heal adequately
afterwards. He compares a break-up to a death, which is understandable.
But just as there are no "dream partners" in real life, I think you
need a more embracing attitude than he shows in this book to keep from
leaving the same lover, with a different face, over and over again.
 Perry Brass's book How to Survive Your Own Gay
Life was a finalist for a Lambda Book Award in Spirituality and
Religion—his fourth nomination. This fall, he will publish Angel
Lust, a novel about time travel. He can be reached through his
website http://www.perrybrass.com/.
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