Underground Fire

A Exploration of Gay Shame & Sexual Desire

An Unexpected Flight

I didn't plan to be in São Paulo, but nobody can really plan death or grief. When the news came of my partner's mother suddenly passing, I found myself jetting across the Atlantic towards Brazil, not really knowing what I was flying into, but knowing I needed to be there.

Upon landing in São Paulo, I was submersed in a loud and vibrant energy. It was big and somewhat overwhelming, taking me several days to attune to. However, one thing really struck me from the time I touched down, the bustling city appeared to be far more gay-friendly than I had anticipated. Gay and lesbian couples held hands so freely on every corner, showing their affection for each other so openly and naturally. It really moved me.

In Ireland, after the marriage referendum, I felt like we'd come a long way, and I do believe we truly had. However, standing on the São Paulo streets witnessing these couples, I could clearly see how much further we still had to go on the Emerald Isle.

This led to me reflecting on the quiet calculation that happens before you hold someone's hand in public in Dublin, or the “checking yourself” as the famous Panty Bliss once described, to make sure you aren’t coming across too gay. What struck me about these couples in São Paulo was that they weren't calculating or checking anything. They were just living.

The Shadow Of Sexual Desire

When my initial intrigue and reflection on this more liberated way of gay living subsided, I began to also note the more overt presence of the shadow that came with it. The gay stare. For those of you unaware of this, within the queer community there is a well known phenomenon in which someone stares at you intently, silently undressing you with their eyes and creating an intense and palpable beacon call of desire. It has a momentary transactional nature in which a longing hangs in the air between strangers. With it, carries the weight of a fleeting sexual yearning that is often never spoken out loud.

I used to love that kind of attention. There was a time when being looked at like that held a certain type of power. But now in a long-term committed relationship, I noticed that the gay stare came with a feeling that was starkly different within me. It felt like an energetic violation. It felt like an unspoken sexual boundary was being crossed with just a look. It felt like I was a piece of meat under the watchful eyes of a predator, with no respect for what I had with the person standing beside me.

Suppression Of Sexual Desire

I took some time to really sit with the discomfort of what was coming up for me. The light and shadow of gay life on the Brazilian city streets. I reflected on the yearning and hunger that I was watching and recognised that it wasn't separate from centuries of religious condemnation of sexual desire. In fact, it was a direct consequence of it. The rise of patriarchy and the watchful and judging eye of the church didn't purify anyone when it called desire sinful. It just created shame. And shame, it turns out, is one of the most corrosive things a person can carry. When sexuality has been pushed underground for long enough, it doesn't disappear. It just learns to survive differently, in fleeting moments before anyone notices or hidden experiences kept safe behind closed doors.

The Wounds We Don’t Talk About

To help me process what was coming up, I went into ceremony and did a shamanic journey to better understand the energy of it. This one was pretty incredible, almost like watching a movie of my life play out in my mind. Decades of significant experiences that had left their mark.

The journey started with the small things. The weight of well meaning words that had landed in my energy body like subtle daggers. For example, "it's such a pity you're gay" reinforcing that my type of love was wrong and who I was was some sort of waste. The harsher words too. Fag. Said quickly and in passing, but landing squarely in the jaw like a perfectly thrown left hook.

And then came the bigger things. The insidious shame that silently poisoned platonic connections in my teens, twenties and thirties. It’s quite hard to describe, but there was definitely an undercurrent of fear or lack of safety within many of my relationships with straight men. Worry that my straight male friends would think I was hitting on them led to a constant monitoring and editing, making myself smaller so they'd feel comfortable.

But some of them actually made it worse. The ones who felt the need to announce, repeatedly and unprompted, "I'm not gay" as though simply being in my presence required a disclaimer. As though they were doing me a favour by letting me know they weren't available to me. As though every gay man they met was obviously desperate for them.

Was it my shame or was it theirs?

I revisited one of the interactions that stung the most. When I invited one of my closest male friends to a Pride celebration one year he simply said, casually and without much thought, "I'm not into that gay shit."

I was mortally wounded. What gay shit did he think happened at Pride events?

The relationship dwindled after that and ultimately fell apart. And the cruelest part of it was that my gay shame was so deep at the time that I was too scared to have an open conversation about why that had hurt so much. I couldn't say it. I was too frightened that naming it would confirm something about myself I was still trying to outrun. So I said nothing and something between us quietly died.

That's what shame does. It keeps you from speaking and ultimately festers in the silence.

Please See Me

As I observed and journeyed through all of these memories, I eventually found myself standing in a room surrounded by different versions of me at every age. Young me. Teenage me. Adult me. All of them just standing there looking at me. The energy was deeply palpable and I knew in an instant what they all wanted. It wasn’t to be fixed, it wasn’t to hear an explanation, an apology or a justification. It was to be seen. To be witnessed.

As I scanned the room, I recognised every pair of eyes burning deep into my soul, except for two. One belonged to a tall Black man, deeply bruised and body torn. And the second to a woman in ripped clothing, with blood running from her nose and ligature marks on her neck.

I asked who they were.

The Man And The Horse

The tall man was the first to take my hand. He showed me who he was, not in words, but in the full embodied way in which wisdom and understanding is transmitted during shamanic journeys.

He was me from a past life.

He provided me with a deeper understanding of the relevance of that past life in a flurry of images that followed. I quickly realised that he had been shamed within his community for his sexual desires. He ultimately met his demise when the elder of the village tied his right ankle to a wild horse that dragged him to his death.

I could see and feel his final thoughts as the world narrowed.

The absolute terror of being destroyed for what you are.

Sex Underground

The woman was a prostitute. Again, she was me in another past life.

As she took my hand, a flood of images filled my mind and I relived her final moments before death. She was ultimately strangled by a client in a back alley. Left to die alone in the dark. Violated.

I sat with her energy for some time to better understand what she came to show me. For as long as there have been religious and cultural systems telling people that desire is shameful, that sex outside of very specific, sanctioned conditions is dirty and wrong, there has been a parallel world running underneath it where that same desire is bought and sold in the dark. The shame doesn't eliminate the desire, it just drives it somewhere it can't be seen. A place that is hidden, and also dangerous.

She was living in that hidden place. However, it wasn’t her sexuality that led to her demise, it was the sexual desire of the men who came to see her. There was a deep sense that she wasn't a person to that client who killed her, she was only an outlet. A place to direct something that had nowhere else safe to go. The shame that had made his desire unspeakable was the same shame that made her life disposable.

I felt in that moment that she didn't die because the sex itself was dangerous, but because the shame made it so.

What Wants To Be Seen

As I finished my Mugwort tea and journaled my final reflections, I began to see the shadow of São Paulo with more compassion. I saw the hungry and transactional energy of the gay stare not as a flaw in gay male culture, but as a wound that religious shame inflicted a long time ago that had yet to heal.

When you spend centuries telling people their desire is wrong, dirty and punishable, you ultimately create those wounds. You create the gay stare. You create the underground. And sometimes, as the woman from my past life showed me, you create the conditions where the underground becomes deadly.

So to all those versions of myself just standing in that room wanting to be seen, I'm learning, slowly, what it means to actually see you.