What I really liked about Paul was how he was willing to grant that psychological growth was for anybody who really wanted to take themselves seriously. It really cut through some of my fear of this being just another pretentious mumbo-jumbo set-up.

He was able to confer upon me the status of being an analytic thinker, before I had really learned much about that process. He would show me that there was a connection between some statement or insight I'd made and the process that got to that point, and that I was capable of doing that on a very sort of refined level if I calm myself down and take myself seriously.

How long were you in New York before you came down to the Center?

What gave you the first idea that there was something special about what Paul was teaching?

I don't ever recall him discussing personal histories in the groups the way there is a tendency for I guess some people these days, because I know he knew it was off-putting to many people. It just closed too many people out.

It imparted to me a sense that Paul knew very well that a person grows because they take insight or they take mastery and they make it work, they apply it in some real way in their lives. It isn't some intellectual superstructure. And also that there are people who benefit from the same insights and the same mastery in ways that don't have creative implications.

You spoke about Paul bragging that he was a con artist. When I was living with him, I didn't like the way he would use terms like that because it sounded like he was bragging about tricking people.

Were you in counseling with anybody else before you went to Paul, or did you just approach this independently? Did you start to read any psychological material?

This seems to be what my idea of being alive inside is about: being in the presence of somebody that you are attracted to.

You can come up with lots of images of this, but it clearly was a very dangerous prospect. Plus, I didn't know whether I could learn to feel sexual with a man and all that kind of stuff. But like you and Patrick, there was just no comparison between the heterosexual relationship that I'd had and this.

I also struggled with the fact that I'd gone to an all-boys school, and I had trained myself not to hear their references to me. I wasn't particularly athletic, and I had a big mouth even then. It was that kind of stress you get into when you're in an all-boys school.

That was really a good deal of the business of my coming to the Center. A good deal of what Paul was saying directly talked about how fucked up we get when the best part of our personality is not being used appropriately, or is being used in places where it's not needed. And that this is really the cause of all our difficulties, and that you really have a love orientation or a power orientation, and that basically the sooner you accept polarity, the faster you're going to be on the road to health. You realize that you have big goals out there now -- not like getting a job and being successful in New York City or anything like that.

Did you feel that liberation when you heard that you were feminine?

It's the same old story that happens all the time when new people come to the Center and people want to be automatic about the business of polarity. You can't be automatic about it. It does not lie on the surface. Some people think it does, and those are the ones who I think don't work very hard at understanding what's going on with people.

One of the things that I liked about Paul was his capacity to pick and choose where it was necessary to state his point of view firmly. If the people walked out the door when they heard it, then it was no loss. And if they came back again, then maybe they would know the next time that we have something to tell them as opposed to them having something to tell us. I'm sure at times I've gone overboard with this, but I've always felt that this is the primary business of what the Center is about. It is not to sit back and allow ignorance and immorality their day in the hopes that in a hundred years they'll die out, because there's just a tremendous backwash. The world is full of the backwash of ignorance and immorality when good men do nothing.

I had a lot of trouble with a Center member two weeks ago. Some kid came in off the street who was raving about how nice his therapist was, and I said, "Fine. What has your therapist actually taught you?" He said, "Oh, well, you know, he lets me teach myself. He just sits back and makes me feel comfortable."

Everything is everything. Well, maybe I should just put this as a question: Are people right to feel the Center is dogmatic and authoritarian?

I think it's a skill born in actual experience to be able to be street smart and make a judgment call of when it's necessary to let yourself be clear. And Paul sometimes would make it very clear. He'd just say, "Well, that's gobbledygook." I love that expression! Or, "Everything is not everything in the world." At the same time, he was very, very careful in the language that he used, so as not to induce helplessness or recklessness and undermine the warmth or pride of the people who he wanted so much to reach.

Paul's writing I think is an experiment in how one person puts down ideas that reflect this parallel universe, and of what masculinity is and what femininity is, in some purely elemental form. Even he knew very well that there was a limitation to his work that was relieved greatly when the Center came into focus, because masculines then began to articulate their own world and their own style. The earliest of his writings and a good deal of his understanding of polarity is very truncated in the area of experience. In a lot of ways, he really did use analytic thought to extrapolate, I guess, from the basic insight, without really having that much actual material as a reference.

Not until we landed on the moon were we finally able to say that, yes, it's a real physical object and not a smudge on our telescope lens. I guess being involved with the Center was like landing on the moon for him. He could really touch and feel and see the whole thing come to fruition in a reality that was bigger than he had ever dreamed it would be.

I think this is one of the things that Paul always had quite a bit of disappointment about concerning his books. I think he really believed somehow that there were people around the world who could focus on this system at his level of intellectual clarity and respond to it and give him feedback and teach him things in return. It was initially almost a way of looking for teachers as much as students.

On one hand the conventional world wants all of the trappings of clinical analysis and everything that goes along with what's considered to be scientific journal writing. I think he sort of made a fleeting concession to that when he did the Freud monograph, as if to say, "Well, I guess I know how to write a footnoted essay, too." And, as we've seen, that one is received very well in all kinds of official publications because it has such an official-looking annotation to it.

He really did always for me disdain the notion that there was a big world out there that people think is the important place to go with your ideas or your abilities. He said that's a fallacy. The only important place to go is to find the individual or the individuals who really need and want to grow. Those are the ones that you attach yourself to for however long that event can take place.

But he said it was purely a product of a lack of growth. It was not an intrinsic distinction. I think maybe it was too specific, analyzed at a level of specificity that Paul realized afterwards got in the way of people understanding the basic business of their polarity.

There were a few things that he was adamant about, and he was very much against intellectualizing the growth process and making something that's alive dead.

He said he had tons of material like that all over the place, but as far as being in some way useful to people, it just proved itself not to be. So he let it drop from his concern anymore. And he said, "This is really how a thinker has to think. He's got to be able to read from the surface down, and when you start finding that it's just not reaching people you better realize not to dig in the spurs and try harder but start looking at something else."

I'm just too busy living my life right now.

People like to think that serious relationships happen because people walk through the door of the Ninth Street Center. They want to think equality happens because ten people sit down in a room once a week and maybe you see them once a month or something, and then that somehow makes everybody psychological equals. Paul was real clear about that: that's just not true. And you exhaust yourself in some ways trying to deny this or trying to cover it over or trying to pretend it isn't happening. People grow based upon experiences, but they grow at many different rates and some people stop growing.

I think it's inevitable because it's based on some very basic psychological truths about the need for people to love and care for each other, to bring insight into the world, to discover what's true.

They didn't read Paul, for sure. But it means there's a fundamental truth here that's lying in the open for anybody to find who's willing to step back a little bit from their preconceptions and their dogma and authoritarianism and their degrees and look at it with some kind of love for what's true or what's right. So I think it's inevitable that this kind of thing is going to go someplace.

But I think most gay people, and probably many non-gay people who have eyes in their head, will know it's not true that homosexuality is just like heterosexuality. And maybe there will be some kind of depressive reaction because of that. But I think that's the way it's going to work if anything is going to happen within my lifetime. That may be the direction it's going to take.

I mean, I'm going to Acapulco. You couldn't look more conventional than that. I work a real job, I don't do anything unconventional in that department. But nobody has a picture of what's inside my brain.

I like the idea that symptoms are little things that can be controlled. It puts it right where it belongs.

And you've got to do it as often as necessary in order to begin to feel some sense of freedom from that again, instead of this kind of seduced obligation that somehow you are the carrier of some great message to the world. In many respects, it's the thing that stands between you and other people who were Paul's students.

Who has a crystal ball about these things? There are people who are out there living and working their lives and running experiments. We may not have the fruition of their observations yet, but I have some faith that this is what's going on. People who take themselves seriously certainly know what's going on with me. I know what's going on with everybody who's in my life in any substantial way, otherwise they wouldn't be there. That's the whole basis for people being in my life. I think you can make yourself crazy worrying about something that sort of isn't real.

I think the practical level of it is being taken care of fine, but that's it. And the rest of it is exactly how he lived his life. And he even said his first book was written from the vantage point of only one serious relationship. The vantage point, mind you, not even that it was going on at the moment, but after it had been over with. And that encompasses all the stuff that happened to his life, all of his relationships and his marriage and all of that. And he wrote a book based on one serious relationship. So who knows? Maybe none of us have had that one serious relationship yet, or that one particular experience that's going to suddenly cause this crystallization of all kinds of things that are going around.

You're born into the time and the place and the year and the physical abilities and disabilities that you have. This is the life you've got to live.

As long as I find one person once in awhile that I can do that with, I am relatively content. And when I get tired, I go to Acapulco.

I took a few days off in Boston once and, instead of visiting the historical sites, I spent this long snowy afternoon retracing the steps of the heroic mother duck from this true story that was written up in the children's book Make Way for Ducklings. My father had read it to me in an old run-down library in the Bronx one quiet summer evening when I was a boy and we were still friends. Paul had remembered reading this same story to some children he was once helping to take care of.