I had an analogous problem to the one you had. I felt that I was very talented: I was musical, I was mathematical, I played chess, I was interested in the great books of the Western World. I felt fucked up, yes, but I wasn't prepared for anybody to just come out and say, "I know you're fucked up but I love you anyway because I see what you can become. That's what I'm good at." I think people who learned to use Paul's influence had to trust the fact that they didn't have to be wearing their medals in his presence. They could just be simple.

I went to Paul once to see whether he would counsel me, and he asked about this relationship with Jim. I was giving a lot of details and he stopped me and said, "Was there love in that relationship?" And I thought to myself, "I don't know. I haven't thought about that. Why is he bringing this up?" It was just like him to cut through the crap.

Questions like that were asked in open talk groups, too. And not only by Paul. I don't remember them all. There was all this undermining going on: that's the way I would look at it. I kind of look at this now, when new people come in, in terms of How do I undermine here? And if I'm good and at my best, I do it with a lot of warmth, so they can swallow it. And if I'm not, they get my brittle pride.

I guess anybody who does any kind of work as a consultant, as you and I both do, wants to work in a situation that's comfortable. If you have a choice, you'd rather work with something that's esthetically more pleasing than just whoever happens to want to hire you, even though that's going to annoy the people you turn down.

But I also feel qualified -- because I award myself the qualification, not because I have academic credentials -- to have the opinion that this very pure system is on a higher level and has a wider scope than the other systems available as yet. I haven't read more than one or two books on any one period of psychological thought, but it's clear that Paul evolved a very eclectic and very sound system. He didn't care who he learned truth from. It's heavily influenced by the Greeks, by Christianity, by the humanism he was exposed to at the University of Chicago. Some of his prescriptions for avoiding being overstimulated by the so-called real world come right out of hospital psychiatry.

But it's not a sloppy kitchen-sink kind of "everything you always wanted to know about human nature" system. He's thrown out all of the conventional magical baggage that doesn't work. And he doesn't pretend to tell people how to be more masculine or how to be more feminine, he merely says what happens when you do. And that's really a different kind of presentation than you might get, say, from a self-help book.

When we first got together, I had trouble with Paul's personality because he could get moody and cranky. But even when I was fed up with him, I never doubted the truth of his system. I conducted a thought experiment after we had lived together for six months. I had actually broken up with him and moved out. I took a look at Love and Power or something and said, "Yep, it's still true. It's all true. I'm never going to 'get over' this stuff. Even if I never talk to Paul again, I'm always going to be using these ideas." Once I saw how true it all was I knew his irritability and recklessness were just noise that I didn't have to take seriously.

Another thing that told me that there was something both wonderfully true and yet almost entrapping or at least captivating about this system was that whenever I was angry with Paul and we were not getting along, I would use his concepts to think about our problems. I would say the relationship is too passive-aggressive, or "That was a sado-masochistic moment." And I would stop myself and say, "Think of how you're seeing this. You're still using his words. You're being the loyal student even when you're fed up with him personally."

When you mention the incompleteness of this, I always have an underlying feeling of irony that this should be taking place at all, that this should exist: a place in a basement on Ninth Street, a community in the East Village. And the fact that most people who run into it reject it, or don't even hear it let alone reject it.

Most people don't even get to hear anything coming close to the truth that is in our words. I used to be so disappointed with that -- as you get at times -- getting caught up in proselytizing, in really not understanding why someone won't hear it. But nowadays it's very clear to me why people won't hear it. Truth is not something that can be force-fed. Somebody has to be looking for it or they're not ever going to see it. Never. You can't shove it. You can't force-feed it. That's why their dissatisfaction with where they're at is so key.

When I go to groups, what I try to ask is, "What level of dissatisfaction is being expressed here?" Often I can pinpoint this by asking a question like, "Well, why did you come down?" If somebody says, "Oh well, there was nothing else to do tonight," that tells me at once that I'm there to entertain them. Well, I'm not going to be entertainment. But I am going to shut up.

Maybe what a masculine historian does is draw lines from one thinker to the next or one event to the next without having to ask himself whether there actually was a causal link between the people or the times or whatever it is he's connecting. I'm sure I'll find these lineages to Paul if I go looking for them.

I'm going to give a talk in June at the Center on the history of polarity theory, just as an experiment -- really jumping off the deep end to see if I swim. I have a number of books that I can draw from which refer to polarity or constitute early versions of polarity theory. Jung really deserves a lot of credit. He wrote a book called Psychological Types in which he talks all about polarity. He really is talking about the real polarity, but he doesn't understand a lot about it. He doesn't understand how friendships evolve or why people mate, for starters. He's usually talking about a level of culture that's very shallow and superficial. It doesn't relate much to the kind of lifestyles that people at the Center have chosen, lifestyles of honest inquiry and real experimental courage, establishing new forms of truth and right at a human, simple level. But at least he would have wanted to understand this stuff, unlike Freud who was happy being cynical and famous.

Where Paul goes further is in saying that not only are goals like truth-seeking or loving people regardless of gender imprints good, but that they are connected. One really depends on the other. And if you're not good at loving people in the face of gender prejudices, then you are not going to be very good about studying what's really going on in the human psyche.

The question is, can one say without looking any further back than where you are right now, "I choose to live this way, to lead a homosexual lifestyle."

This woman psychologist who was doing a study that I volunteered for asked me, "What does the word gay mean?" And I said I had some problems with that word. I really don't object, but I like the word "homosexual" better. She said, "How would you define a homosexual?" And I said, "Somebody who's chosen to lead a lifestyle of trying to love or take responsibility for someone of the same gender for clear and rational reasons that they can talk about."

If a feminine doesn't have faith, there's nowhere to go. I'm real good in talk groups and I know I do that well. But here I was in this situation with this other man that failed. And that seemed much more important to work on than to be able to go down there for the sake of boosting my pride up for an hour or two by impressing all these people. I saw the falseness of it, that it would be really detrimental. These people might even benefit from my participation, but I wouldn't. I'd get intimidated into thinking that it was really important.

I'm seeing a guy who lives in New Orleans who I met while traveling last summer. I was down there the last time at Christmas. He was supposed to come up but he got sick. It's wearing thin because you can't do too much long distance, but I'm still considering going down there for an extended period of time.

Well, we just don't know where he is. He might be in a very much better place for him. We can't really know about things we're not in contact with.

I just don't know if a lot is really going on at the Center that "lives up to" the kind of stimulation we were offering one another ten years ago. I don't know why this is. There may be very simple sociological factors. Maybe if you want more stimulation you have to have more people than just the same old twenty faces after ten years.

If I could talk more about my shame in open talk groups I'd say, "Now, here I was trying to love a man. And, when he was involved with someone else sexually, I let my own understanding of what was going on get in the way of being able to assist him because I knew 'the answer' and therefore couldn't ask the questions. All I could do was give answers. And he had to really turn to somebody else for counsel, someone who could basically just objectively ask the questions. I couldn't be objective. I carry a certain amount of shame for that."