The Ninth Street Center: Kim Mulcahy

*DEAN:*	Where did you first hear about the Center?
*KIM:*	From the *Village Voice* in May of 1973. I had just come to New York. It was my third year of college at Carnegie Mellon -- I was involved in set design at the time -- and I left kind of in a state of identity crisis. I felt sort of like school was a bust.
*DEAN:*	Were you majoring in set design?
*KIM:*	Yes. And Carnegie Mellon was supposed to be a very well-respected theater school.
*DEAN:*	I only finished three years of college, too.
*KIM:*	Actually, I wasn't even going to finish the third year. I was just going to leave like about a month before the end of the year. But this one teacher I was kind of close to convinced me to stay and finish for a month. He's the one that actually suggested I just come to New York. I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. He basically said, "Okay, you think that theater is a crock of shit, but why don't you go and see what it's really like."
*DEAN:*	Why did you want to make a career in it if you thought it was a crock of shit?
*KIM:*	Well, I wanted to make a career in it at the beginning, but there were all sorts of things going on at that age. I'd just come out like the beginning of that year, and without even consciously realizing it I wanted much more serious things in my life, like relationships. I wanted to be able to express love. And a lot of these things were being put into theater which, of course, wasn't fulfilling those needs at all. So I just felt very frustrated by theater. It all seemed so trite and empty and unrewarding and depressing.
*DEAN:*	I guess a successful actor is somebody who deep down is only skin deep?
*KIM:*	And maybe a successful set designer, too.
*DEAN:*	Had you known all along you were gay? Had you ever tried to court women at all?
*KIM:*	I was much more easily intimidated into doing things that externally other people could see rather than changing my inner feelings that no one else could see. In my second year of college, I felt I had to do things like make out with dates and stuff like that. But I always seemed to know how to pick girls who never really liked it that much anyway, so fortunately there was very little of *that* going on. It was all very kind of empty. I dated, as I'd done in high school, these very sort of queer women who just weren't interested in romance, even though none of us ever said, "We don't want this" or anything like that.
*DEAN:*	At that age don't we just try out what people tell us to try? It's not because we're committed to it, but just because we're invited to taste it. And if we don't like it, we just go on to do our own thing.
*KIM:*	It was a little stronger than that for me. Actually, if I had my druthers, I would never have done it.
*DEAN:*	Did you have a bitter taste afterwards?
*KIM:*	No, I felt relieved afterwards when I finally realized I didn't have to do this anymore. It was much more like I felt intimidated, like I really should try and make myself *make* this work. And, of course, the other options just weren't real. The idea that sexuality was in any way connected with romance -- like I love this person and that's why you have sex with them -- just wasn't going on. With people I was in love with at the time, it seemed impossible to express it sexually. It seemed like it would just ruin everything if I tried to make it a sexual situation.
*DEAN:*	These were gay men?
*KIM:*	They were teachers or other men who were involved in heterosexual relationships in the town. And even though I came out to some of them I just somehow felt that they couldn't handle it. Maybe I couldn't handle it at the time. It just seemed like to express it at that point would just ruin everything. I just had that feeling.
*DEAN:*	I think that's very wise. A lot of us expressed those homosexual feelings to people who only slapped us around because of it. My first real interest in a man was at the age of 16 in high school. This guy was super bright, just very independent intellectually. He was the only kid in school who was an avowed Marxist. I didn't know *what* that meant, but it impressed me. We used to take long walks home through the Botanical Gardens and Karl would talk to me about goodness, truth and beauty, and how we should make the world a better place for people to live in. I felt like a door was opening into a much larger world. But the more I showed my need for him to be in my life -- the more I wanted my world to be a better place by having him in it -- the more sadistic he got. And that's all that ever came out of it. And that was very depressing and it made me quite sick for awhile.
*KIM:*	You once tossed off something a long time ago about Marx that I liked, something like that it was fine for one hundred and fifty years ago but that anyone who still takes it seriously in this day and age is out of touch.
*DEAN:*	Whenever I meet a Marxist these days I say, "You know, this Marx was actually a pretty decent guy, and if he were alive today he'd be a Rosenfelsian." It gives me an excuse to explain who "Rosenfels" is.
*KIM:*	I find these people so silly because obviously whatever political system is going to be put out in the future doesn't exist yet. It still has to be invented or else it would be here.
*DEAN:*	Paul said that civilization hasn't yet fully recognized the inherent strength in democratic institutions and the wisdom of Christian spiritual feeling. If Christian spiritual feeling means universal love and brotherhood and that kind of good stuff, I kind of buy that. And I buy the concept of democratic institutions. But how democracy will operate in the future is very up in the air. With everybody having a home computer terminal we could make it a lot more democratic if we wanted. What shall the President do today? You could punch up a menu and the most popular agenda wins. That would be quite a different system from what we have today.
*KIM:*	When people have a psychological life that they can talk about and is real to them and is in the society, politics will just become so unimportant. People will see how just basically adaptive like 99% of all politics is. And we'll just assign computers to make decisions about where the road should be or where the money should be spent. People will just see how utterly practical it will be.
*DEAN:*	Computers can decide how to wire a building, or where to put the pipes, or international commerce. This country has more coal, that country has more wheat, so ship the coal there and send the wheat here. We don't really need human qualities to make those kinds of decisions.
*KIM:*	Think about how different the future is going to be. There won't be countries -- that will be seen as a ridiculous anachronism. All these kind of silly things won't exist anymore.
*DEAN:*	Eventually there may not even be different languages. Maybe there'll be a major language, something like English or a derivative of English.
*KIM:*	Or a richer language with lots of other languages making it up.
*DEAN:*	Last Saturday at the group I was talking about the future, and how futuristic the Center is. I was trying to explain that although most people today think that psychological knowledge about man is impossible to find, at the Center we claim that such knowledge *does* exist and that we are here to discuss it as scientists or reasonable men and to find ways of pooling or integrating this knowledge. And a lot of the people in the room said this is not what psychotherapy should be about. It should be just supportive. It's somebody there to make you feel good about yourself so that you can work out whatever information or model is right for yourself alone. I had some trouble with one Center member who does not yet understand that what we offer has an objective quality to it, and who is still very impressed with people who can just make him feel good. And he once had a woman therapist who would sit back and tell him that she once had a fantasy that his deepest aspirations would all come true. And he would feel so good hearing this that he still considers that to be the highest kind of psychotherapy. And that's what he was advocating in this talk group. Well, if somebody kicks back and tells me all about their daydreams, I'm going to tell them, "Look, I don't care about your fantasies. I want to know how to get where I'm going. If you can't tell me, you're not helping." The kind of therapy I advocate is a quantum leap from where we are today. A thousand years ago, if you were to ask the average man whether reading and writing were skills that all people could have, they would say, "Oh, no, you have to be especially talented and bright. Only kings and priests should learn it." They didn't realize that ordinary people could embody this tremendous thing called literacy. It's cost trillions of dollars to keep this skill going, but that's what civilization is about. Well, at some point we may be spending trillions on a science of human nature, and it will be taught in schools and in families and in homes, and it will be taken for granted in Congress and any place people communicate.
*KIM:*	Oh, definitely. Also, back in those days a thousand years ago, people basically had no psychological surplus. They lead the lives of dogs, except for the aristocrats.
*DEAN:*	That raises an interesting question, because the image that immediately comes to mind is that all these people must have been completely exhausted all the time. And yet we know that's too simplistic. There was art, there was culture, there was dancing. There were festivals, fools, clowns and circuses. But I think you're right in that very few people really had any real independence of mind.
*KIM:*	Or choice about where they wanted to live or who they wanted to be with. Most people lived their whole lives within ten miles of where they were born.
*DEAN:*	They were completely uneducated. They didn't know they were living on a planet or anything like that.
*KIM:*	So the world is really different today.
*DEAN:*	At the Center, we often ask people to imagine that a thousand years from now is going to be as different from today as today is from medieval times, and then to just extrapolate from that. But that's very hard for them to do. It's a skill they don't learn at school.
*KIM:*	But then again, although it's fun for us to speculate, it's probably not terribly useful either.
*DEAN:*	Well, I think it may be useful but not scientific. I don't think our images are going to come literally true. The future can't really be predicted because nothing important progresses in a straight line.
*KIM:*	That's what's so great about it, fortunately.
*DEAN:*	So you came to New York and you were looking around and you looked in the *Village Voice*.
*KIM:*	New York was like a real liberation for me. At school I still felt I was very much in my parents' world and the world of all the beliefs and things I grew up with, but coming to New York meant I was free. And I was really ready, very ready. I was really interested in finding other homosexuals. I knew I wasn't interested in bars, because they had those in Pittsburgh. And I had already, two summers before, gone to porno movie houses in Chicago. That had been really the first what you might call gay thing I ever did.
*DEAN:*	Did you have any encounters?
*KIM:*	I went home with guys about five times. The first time was wonderful, but it just got worse each time. It was depressing. So then I stopped.
*DEAN:*	Was it the typical kind of scenario where you would try to make contact and they weren't interested?
*KIM:*	No, we'd have sex.
*DEAN:*	But the day after, you weren't interested in each other?
*KIM:*	While we were going somewhere to have sex, like in their car -- I never did it in the porno theater -- or to their house, I would do things like say, "What's your name? What do you do?" I would try to strike up a friendship or something, but they wouldn't want to talk.
*DEAN:*	That's right, this was 1971 wasn't it?
*KIM:*	I couldn't have told you on the surface what I wanted, but obviously I wanted a lot of things. And one of the things I wanted was to make some kind of deeper contact with other gay men, and that just wasn't happening.
*DEAN:*	Was this in the same time frame as your interest in religion?
*KIM:*	No, the interest in religion was much before that, like starting in the 7th and 8th grades in school.
*DEAN:*	So you had more or less given up on religion by that time?
*KIM:*	Oh, completely. I've thought back on it and I don't think the religion was ever that important to me. It was the life of the priesthood I was curious about. The idea of growing up to be like my parents -- becoming married, having children, having a responsible job -- seemed sick and depressing. Being a priest was like a way out. It's kind of a funny story, because I actually went to a preparatory seminary.
*DEAN:*	I didn't know that!
*KIM:*	Yes, my first two years of high school.
*DEAN:*	So you went public in wanting to be a priest. Your parents knew about it, and it was all socially sanctioned.
*KIM:*	Thinking back on it though, my parents weren't terribly overjoyed. They supported it and they thought it was fine, but I never got huge amounts of praise for doing it. Anyway, the seminary was a horrible place. You really didn't start learning how to be a priest there. It was basically just like a Catholic high school run by Jesuits and some lay teachers. It was in downtown Chicago so I had to take a bus, which was fun. I found the seminary to be so sick, such an inhuman kind of a sick place, not on some terribly deep sensitive level but just on the most obvious sort of human decency level. There was so much sadism and cruelty going on just as a way of life. I was, of course, very frightened not to let anybody see about my homosexuality, but any of the effeminate guys there were always picked on in one way or another, not only by the kids but it would be supported by the teachers. They were just into heavy discipline. But the sickest part was when you used to periodically have to talk to these priests. And they would try to talk to you about sex, and they would try to tell you that masturbation was disgusting and that semen was repulsive.
*DEAN:*	Maybe theirs was.
*KIM:*	And they'd ask you questions and give you little tests. It's funny because at the same time I was being appalled about how horrible this place was, I was still having romantic fantasies about things. Nothing could stop my romantic fantasies. I'd always find something to feel about. But anyway, by the end of the second year of being there, in dogma class I was expressing my . . .
*DEAN:*	Did they literally call it "dogma class"?
*KIM:*	Yes, they did.
*DEAN:*	So I guess it's only outside of the Catholic world that "dogma" is a dirty word.
*KIM:*	Yeah, it's nothing derogatory to them. So we'd have these discussions about dogma with the priest. And I would always in some way or another say things like, "Does it really matter that the Virgin was a virgin? What's the difference? Like, what's the *main idea* here?" It made them nuts. And that year was actually very exhilarating for me because I felt very much more independent. At the same time, I was a little shit. I was very nasty in my mind about these people.
*DEAN:*	Did you intentionally try to make them feel uncomfortable, asking embarrassing questions?
*KIM:*	There were instances of that which came up. I just knew I had to get out. And no one gave me any problem for it, too. My parents thought it was just fine that I left. Then I went to public high school for my last two years.
*DEAN:*	So you had two years of this Jesuit stuff and two years of regular high school.
*KIM:*	And that's when I got into theater, at the public high school. And I was amazed and delighted at how much more civilized the public high school was. See, in Catholic schools they tell you in so many ways that the world is like a terrible place, that people who aren't Catholic are like nasty people and mean. And that had fed into a lot of the fear of the world I'd had growing up.
*DEAN:*	Well, had you gone to a Catholic elementary school?
*KIM:*	Yes, to parochial school. So, see, I was sort of into it. And I was also like kind of scared of getting out of this because these non-Catholics were sinners, they were nasty. What I really found, of course, is that the students and the teachers in the public high school were much more civilized. The teachers weren't allowed to treat kids the way they did in parochial school. And since they weren't being treated that way, the kids were much more decent. I mean, there are always shitty kids in schools, but basically it was wonderful. And that gave me a huge amount of confidence to try new things, and if something was horrible to leave and try something new. And I've always done that since. Sometimes it seems to have taken me a long time to move out of something that's unhealthy. But that really opened up my eyes and gave me a whole lot of confidence to sort of go into the unknown, at least in this physical sense. And that the unknown is sometimes much more preferable to the known, no matter how frightening it is.
*DEAN:*	I think Paul always had that quality, too. He said on page one of his autobiography that he was always surprised that he could treat human nature as a subject worthy of complete interest and step outside of his phobias when he was dealing with the unknown in human nature. He was always drawn towards it more than frightened by it, even though in commonplace and conventional situations his phobias would be all over the place.
*KIM:*	Yeah, but still not debilitating him. When you think about where he moved and what he did, it's the opposite of a sheltered or a reclusive life.
*DEAN:*	Apart from the idea that you didn't want to have anything to do with the kind of family you'd come out of, did your upbringing influence your ideas at this time about how to interact with the world? Were they people you could respect in any way?
*KIM:*	There were things about them I was able to respect and still am grateful that they were able to give me. The first is a large sense of self, which I got somehow from them one way or another. My family was extremely stoical, so there was a sense of workmanship and of pride in a job well done, which has been useful in some way or another. I don't think back on this stuff much.
*DEAN:*	Once you start living a real, exciting, healthy life, why bother remembering when you were sick?
*KIM:*	The things that pop in from my memory just don't mean much. There's one thing my mother did that really impressed me, just blew me away. It's one thing I've thought of that I liked and that I've used. It was when I was in high school. It was a rich school, it was a rich suburb, and there were teachers there who were trying to be progressive. So some of these English teachers who had bright kids in their classes wanted to have a much more free-form class, basically a "set your own curriculum" type of thing. Back then they were all experimenting with that. And the school administration was very against it. And these teachers organized an anti-Vietnam teach-in, they called it, which meant cutting classes and gathering outside. Anybody who was into this was going to be suspended. So I did it and I got suspended. Your parents had to come down, basically, and talk to a counselor so you could get un-suspended. So my mom went down and she gave them hell! And I was really unprepared for it. She stood up for me.
*DEAN:*	She rose to the occasion.
*KIM:*	She really did. I guess I was expecting her to not give me hell about it, but she really yelled at *them*. And she told me about it. It was wonderful how she could stand up to authority that way and get over her intimidation while it was important for her to do so. That was really nice to see.
*DEAN:*	It's wonderful to have a moment like that. I never had any moments where I could feel proud of my parents. The closest I've come to what you're describing is seeing that there must have been something creative in my father -- not my mother -- just because there were just all sorts of signs and symptoms and things that were odd. One of the things that was odd was that he was always talking about homosexuality.
*KIM:*	In what way?
*DEAN:*	You know, "I heard this actor is a homosexual," or "Is your friend, X, a homosexual?" Always disparaging, always negative, but also absolutely fascinated. He couldn't let it go. At first I didn't know what the word meant. And I didn't want to know, because he made it sound like some kind of disease that catches up with people whether they like it or not. He also was vice-president of the local Little League, which Paul found very suspicious.
*KIM:*	Well, just think: who the hell would be involved with Little League if it wasn't for latent homosexuality? Can you imagine? Who the hell would be the Scoutmasters?
*DEAN:*	So you found this public high school to be much healthier and more human?
*KIM:*	It was wonderful. It was a breath of fresh air. The big bad world was just in my imagination.
*DEAN:*	Yet when you tried to have gay lovers you found that wasn't exactly all sweetness and light, that there were going to be some real problems.
*KIM:*	Oh, definitely. But it was just totally different. In the one, you're like in a place where you're just so ignorant . . .
*DEAN:*	And there's no way to learn.
*KIM:*	Yeah, and it's just like darkness sort of everywhere, and so you just stop trying to stare into the future because it's just too confusing. But at that point I was experimenting with gay lovers. Actually, I wouldn't even say most of them got to the lover stage. It was just experimentation with romance and trying to get close to other people.
*DEAN:*	What Paul used to call "thirteen-year-old" kinds of stuff?
*KIM:*	No, I'm talking more now about like when I came to New York. You see, I never really tried having a romantic relationship where sex could be a possibility until after I was at the Center. It just seemed impossible. Although I always had at least one or two close relationships with men, they always had parameters where they could never become sexualized, just because it would upset them too much.
*DEAN:*	Why did you decide to drop out of Carnegie Mellon?
*KIM:*	It seemed to have been tied up with a lot of things. I threw myself into the work there, and so I got exhausted. I found that the results of my work were unsatisfying. I was able to design a show as a junior, which was kind of unheard of. But I just found the rewards from that being very flat even though it was a big success. On top of that, I was having strong romantic feelings for guys who were unavailable: a teacher, a friend. And it seemed rotten and like unfair or something. I was sick of it. I hated it. And I said, "This is a crock of shit. I'm leaving this place. If the future is going to be more of this, I don't want it." It reached a stage of identity crisis, where I was simply just going to solve it by just leaving and going someplace else. But as I say, this teacher convinced me to stay till the end of the year and offered this friend's place in New York. So that was the hook: that I could get to New York.
*DEAN:*	So that you could stay for awhile?
*KIM:*	Yes, I stayed there for the first two weeks. It was like on Fifth Avenue right near Central Park. It was deathly up there -- but it was New York.
*DEAN:*	Is that how you learned that there are lots of large apartments in New York that need to be cleaned?
*KIM:*	I can't remember what I did back then. I think the first kind of work I got into was window display at department stores. I worked with Paul's student Lee for awhile.
*DEAN:*	I forgot that you knew Lee.
*KIM:*	Oh, sure. I came to New York in May of '73. The second day I was at the Center we all went on the first Gay Pride Day Parade wearing t-shirts that spelled out "NINTH STREET CENTER." So my picture got on the cover of the very first Ninth Street Center Journal.
*DEAN:*	How audacious of you!
*KIM:*	Well, it wasn't audacious, it was just that the minute I walked in the door, someone ran up to me and said, "What letter do you want to be? We need a letter." So I thought, "Well, I guess I'm going to the Gay Pride Parade this year." The Center was just psychedelic to me at that time. But not for very serious reasons.
*DEAN:*	Because it was gay?
*KIM:*	I had experienced a few gay bars before that and it was like living death to me. The people there just seemed like monsters. But to walk into the Center, I was just blown away. Everyone seemed so attractive and beautiful. Of course, back in those days, we had so much more going on than the talk groups, so it just seemed like my dreams come true. My first remembrance of Paul was when I must have come down to one of those Saturday Buffet Suppers he was making. He was sitting in the back, very quiet, smiling nicely. I had walked in and had observed all the guys sitting in the front and talking, and everybody seemed so vibrant and alive. And I looked at Paul and he smiled at me, and then I thought, "Oh, isn't that nice, they have something for this nice old man to do so he doesn't have to be left out. They let him make the food, so he can be a part of this place, too." That's exactly what I thought to myself. And then I was very surprised the first talk group I went to and he lead it. I thought, "Wow! Gee, you can sure trust your first impressions."
*DEAN:*	Did you talk to him at that dinner?
*KIM:*	Sure, but just to say "Hi." He was obviously tuned into what was happening and I was just there to have dinner. He may have said things like, "Oh, you're just new to the city? Oh, that's great. I'm glad you feel so great. Isn't it great?" You know, just stuff like that. It was perfect!
*DEAN:*	So a few days later you came to a talk group and he was leading it?
*KIM:*	Yes. I was just so extremely impressed with him at the first talk group.
*DEAN:*	What he was saying made sense?
*KIM:*	No, it didn't make sense. It was just a huge relief to hear someone say these things for the first time, to have a sense of a world that was so much richer than the conventional world and conventional ideas. You see, at this time I was quite skeptical of psychology -- and psychologists and psychiatrists. As a matter of fact, I was strongly turned off to them and to the very idea of talking psychologically. Everything I had ever experienced up to that point I just found oppressive.
*DEAN:*	You mean the way cocktail party people talk about Freudian slips and things like that?
*KIM:*	Not only that. The world that psychologists and psychiatrists were trying to promote just seemed so depressing to me.
*DEAN:*	The grim specter of normalcy.
*KIM:*	I didn't even think about this clearly. It was much more subjective -- just like gut reactions and stuff. But Paul blew my mind because it was like an opening up, it was like there is a future. And not only that. You know, I take so much for granted now these days, but to think back on those days, before I was even able to talk about my femininity, just the idea of needing to present a facade to the world that had something to do with conventional images of what a man is all about was so oppressive to me, painfully oppressive.
*DEAN:*	And you felt now that you didn't have to bother with all that?
*KIM:*	Yeah. Of course back in those days, too, my ideas of what femininity was were so mixed up with "doing the dishes" and just stuff like that. This was not because of Paul but because of me and not making these things real in my own life. But it was a first step. It was a promise of a better future.
*DEAN:*	I guess he must have had a big struggle before he chose the words "masculine" and "feminine." He could have used the words "introvert" and "extrovert" and taken a lot less heat from people who can't stand it when language changes. But he really wanted to indicate that introverts and extroverts *mate*, and that's why he needed a more bonded pair of words like "masculine" and "feminine." And this is exactly where Paul goes beyond Jung. Jung didn't understand that there could be real mating between these two types. Quite the opposite, he thought that introverts and extroverts never really get along with each other.
*KIM:*	Well, you see, that's why I just never read any of that stuff. And I still haven't to this day. I've absolutely no desire to read any of it.
*DEAN:*	Do you read Paul once in awhile?
*KIM:*	I'll open it up and just read a paragraph or two.
*DEAN:*	Because you remember most of it as a living part of who you are?
*KIM:*	Yeah.
*DEAN:*	Do you find that you ever learn anything new by reading him, because you didn't understand it before?
*KIM:*	No, not because I didn't understand it before. Well, it's funny. The reason that Paul is very stressful for me to read -- almost painful to read at times -- is not because I don't understand it, but because I cannot read it just in some objective way of like, "Oh, this is what human nature is about." Like, everything I read, I'm immediately applying it to my own life. And a lot of times I have to decide how much stress I want to take on, how much I want to look at, and sometimes it's quite little.
*DEAN:*	One of the great unanswered questions -- if anyone's interested in answering it -- is how a man as subjective as Paul could create a system which to my reading seems like extraterrestrial objectivity about the planet Earth. It's as if some super-intelligent pan-dimensional anthropologist dropped by one afternoon and jotted down the whole story of human nature. Frank has the same problem with the writings that you do. He just doesn't like the writing style. It's painful for him to read it.
*KIM:*	No, it's not the writing style at all: it's the content. It's very serious. It's like talking to Paul when I do it. And I want to do that when it's healthy to do it. This is basically just the way I am.
*DEAN:*	So you don't need to use it as a didactic tool? It doesn't stimulate you in any kind of healthy way?
*KIM:*	Oh, it does. The thing is that you need to have the experience of these things a lot of times for it to be real, for it to make any kind of sense. You have to experience being separate from your defenses, so that when you read about the defenses then it means something. You've sort of experienced your defenses more vividly. I guess it's an indication of my own growth that it becomes different when I reread it, because intellectually I understood it the first time. I mean, I'm a smart boy and I know all the words.
*DEAN:*	This is sort of new information for me. I have almost the opposite experience. Every time I read it, I almost think I understand less of it because it's so broad and vast. I can memorize the schematics and become intimately familiar with the terrain, but I don't find myself always thinking in terms of these concepts. I know where he mentions different kinds of things. I know how to look things up. It's all familiar territory. But I don't always know how to apply various insights. He has a whole section on causes and effects versus beginnings and endings. It's one of the more "philosophical" sections. I've read it lots of times and yet, I don't think I really understand it. If I understood it, then I would just use it and not still be wondering about what he was getting at.
*KIM:*	To talk about "understanding all of it" is almost like a crazy thing to say, because it's almost to imply that you would be finished growing then. Use whatever you're able to at any given moment.
*DEAN:*	So you decided that you were impressed with Paul because he was talking about psychology in a way that was more real than ever before.
*KIM:*	Well, I knew that he wasn't expecting me to be something I wasn't, and that who I really was was just fine to him. And that applied to everybody else there too, even though he was very free about confronting people back in those days. It was obviously upsetting when he'd do that, but it wasn't so upsetting that I left, because what I was getting was so much more important than the hurt of being confronted.
*DEAN:*	The first memory I have of the two of you is your coming in and giving different people a big smile and a kiss. And you came to him and gave him a big smile and a kiss and he said, "Kim, it's wonderful to get these smiles and these wonderful kisses -- and I think you should start not giving them to just anybody."
*KIM:*	What he actually said was, "Kim, you have a lovely smile, but you smile at everybody the same."
*DEAN:*	And he felt very free about saying that. I think he always felt very comfortable with you, that you kind of understood him and that he wasn't going to have to fight to get his ideas into your head. Did you feel a closeness with him?
*KIM:*	I always felt when we got together that we both just implicitly understood it was work, and it was work that we both wanted to do. I'm not saying I wasn't a pill or that he didn't have to work with me to get over some of my shit.
*DEAN:*	Did he ever have to raise his voice with you?
*KIM:*	Oh, sure. He didn't do it because I was saying, "No, Paul, I don't believe that." He did it because he had just enough therapeutic experience to know how thick defenses can be and how you can justify your defenses, and how you can filter what someone else is saying to you through your own defenses to support your own defenses. So when he raised his voice to me, it was for very important things, for very important points he was making. And I remember them clearly to this day. He yelled at me the first time I counseled with him. Let me fill in the chronology a bit. A couple of people at the Center came on to me sexually so I had sexual experiences with a couple of them -- I think they were both feminine. It was boring so I never did that again. It wasn't boring, actually, it was depressing and empty. And I tried a romantic relationship with someone named John who was an actor. It kind of blew up when he was sleeping with someone else and I walked in on it and I started acting like Joan Crawford or something. I remember going back to the Center and announcing to people in general how I had been used and how horrible this was. And then Rick tried to give me some sense of how undeveloped I was and how my reaction was an indication of this. He suggested going into counseling with him. So I did. I probably saw Rick for about a year, during which time I met Lenny. Rick was trying to help me with problems I was having with Lenny. I was very rag-doll in the relationship and Lenny was very imperial. It made for a very hot romance but we weren't able to do very much else with each other. And some way or another Paul suggested, "Oh, why don't you see me for counseling?"
*DEAN:*	Was this before Paul himself became interested in Lenny?
*KIM:*	This all sort of happened simultaneously, actually. And so I went into counseling with Paul. And our first session -- to get back to him yelling at me and how I remember it -- was, he just started out by saying he was so glad I decided to start counseling with him and he thought there was a lot going on with me. And he said, "So why did it take you so long to want to start counseling with me?" And I just got very helpless and kind of rag-doll about the whole thing and I said, "Well, gee Paul, I mean, I just didn't think you'd want to see me. I can understand your wanting to see Giulio and all these great guys, but I just didn't think you'd be *interested* in seeing me." And he *screamed* at me. He banged his hand on the desk and he said, "You act like you don't have a right to exist on the face of this earth. And I'm just not going to put up with it." And he told me how sick it was, this type of thinking and this type of behavior.
*DEAN:*	Did that make you feel better or worse?
*KIM:*	Much better.
*DEAN:*	Did the violence of it shock you?
*KIM:*	It shocked the hell out of me. I can't honestly put myself back in that place, but I remember it clearly to this day. It made a big impression on me. So much of the way I was thinking about myself had that kind of sick quality to it. I just considered it like normal, even though I started to hate it when he showed me that I could separate myself from it. At that time it was just such a part of me in the way I operated and thought about things. But then he spent the whole rest of the hour being extremely warm. We talked about what a wonderful person I was, and what happens to very subjective feelingful feminines who don't develop their pride, and what I could look forward to when I did. He was kind of planning out a strategy or showing me that this is what growth would promise me. And lots of bells went off about why I thought about things in certain ways, and why I allowed myself to be put through certain things for so long. It just made a whole hell of a lot of sense. And he only yelled very infrequently after that, maybe one or two more times. You know, I began to appreciate this more years after he did it when I started being a counselor and being in serious relationships and seeing the entrenched quality of the defenses. When I'm being really defensive and someone's trying to tell me something real in a nice way, I can just turn it around in my mind. And I think Paul knew I kept a lot of things underground as well. One of the wonderful things about him was how he treated everybody differently. There wasn't like one style that he used for everybody.
*DEAN:*	I think he would have written more about therapy if he had a fixed style.
*KIM:*	Well, his style with me was he never pushed me to go faster than I wanted to, which I know he also did for other people. He always waited for me to bring up subjects. So if it would take me two years to talk about masturbation, then that was fine. I took such a stoical approach to the counseling. I'd usually have a subject picked out in my head before I'd go in there, to start out with. A lot of times I would get exhausted trying to think up something or trying to put it in some kind of focus.
*DEAN:*	Did you want to, like, "do well" in your counseling sessions -- as if it was a class in school or something?
*KIM:*	Probably that was some of it. I think I was trying to emulate his style of thinking about things seriously, to try and think about what had meaning in the week and what didn't. Of course, I was wrong most of the time.
*DEAN:*	Were you trying to be more of a colleague than a student?
*KIM:*	Oh, yeah. Well, both. It was always very clear to me I was a student, but it was cooperative.
*DEAN:*	Yet he did want us to be colleagues. He wanted us to be therapists and teachers and leaders and to understand that these functions are not closed to anybody.
*KIM:*	I always felt like we were working arm in arm together on what was going on. We both rolled up our sleeves. When I sat in that chair I was there to do work, just as he was. Sometimes I just wouldn't be able to say anything at the beginning of a session. I would have exhausted myself trying to think of something to say. He usually didn't do a lot of small talk to loosen me up or stuff like that -- I mean, he did a little bit sometimes. He would just start talking about serious things and I never knew where it was coming from. He'd just start talking about, oh, just aspects of masculinity or things he saw. He would discuss other patients with me, other students -- not for its titillation value but to make points like, "Here's submission," or, "This is a failure of submission going on." He would analyze politicians or people in the news sometimes.
*DEAN:*	I think his therapy became much richer after the Center started and all his patients got to know one another. He could really talk to us about our friends from first hand knowledge then, in the Sunday groups also. The great thing about the Center to this day is that there are very few secrets. I always tell people my life is an open book. If you want to know anything about what I'm doing with my life, just ask. And I don't care who else you tell. It's much simpler that way for me to live. And Paul had that policy, too.
*KIM:*	His insights were always deep enough that you never felt like it was just gossip. Whenever he would talk insightfully about his other students, you'd always just apply it to yourself. It would illuminate or at least help you question similar things in yourself. You'd think, "Gee, now what is my problem in this area like?"
*DEAN:*	It was always really the job of the therapy session to get the person to be honest about his own problems rather than indulging complaints about other people.
*KIM:*	Oh, completely. And that's just one more thing that was such a mind blower, to show you that your own growth had continuity and was well above and beyond any particular relationship you were in at the time. And that success and failure were equal, basically.
*DEAN:*	Did knowing this man and this therapy change your life or make you more yourself? Did it give you different goals about what you wanted to do with your life -- like what you want to see inscribed on your tombstone or something like that?
*KIM:*	It's given me much more than that. It's given me peace about worrying about what the future will be. Whenever I try to think about the future or what I will be doing in the future, it's just always been oppressive.
*DEAN:*	So you live in the here and how and deal with today?
*KIM:*	Yes, with a lot of faith. In terms of my personal relationships with people -- where I know about their growth and they know about my growth -- there is a great deal of faith that is very real to me. But in terms of what the future is going to look like or what I'm going to be doing, I don't get into it.
*DEAN:*	How about those functions that I'm always thinking about that are going to be historically necessary if his insights are to reach out into the world? We're going to have to promote a lot of teaching and leadership from within the Center reaching out into the world for that to happen. Does that attract you personally?
*KIM:*	Oh yes, very much so.
*DEAN:*	What kind of contribution do you think you might want to make as a teacher or a thinker?
*KIM:*	Well, just that. I don't know how much more to say specifically, but just that: however it expresses itself, whatever I can do and whatever is appropriate and needed at the time.
*DEAN:*	I know you have been resting from doing counseling for awhile. Is that something you feel is going to come back into the picture?
*KIM:*	Oh, definitely. See, I felt I was kind of effective, but I was very dissatisfied with how undeveloped I was at it. I'm not still staying away because of this, but I felt very disturbed when Collin killed himself. It kind of gave me a glimpse of a whole level of submission to or acceptance of who another person really is that wasn't real to me before that.
*DEAN:*	You mean that we hadn't really been facing who he was and how fucked up he was, that we were sort of toying with his life?
*KIM:*	Yeah. I wouldn't say I was ever toying with his life. But I was just very willful about making assumptions that just because a person comes to counseling once a week, or shows up at the Center, that they're capable of growing. I was counseling with him at the end. It was a very short period, for two months maybe, and I can't even remember now if he had quit. The counseling was very difficult for me because he brought up lots of issues that I just had absolutely no answer for. I found myself trying to make answers as if he was another independent Center person bringing up these issues, and that just wasn't going to work. I did a good job and an appropriate job of trying to calm him down and ease some of his exhaustion -- which was fine. But we always assume that we have to support everybody who comes to the Center by helping them cut off their conventional ties or their ties with their parents and take on more independence. And this really showed me there was just a whole level of things I wasn't looking at -- and wanted to look at. So I felt exhausted at that point and stopped counseling right then for that reason. To me this is something you can't fix just like intellectually or by thinking about it. It has a lot to do with living life and becoming involved in experiences with people and relationships.
*DEAN:*	Are you saying that in the future when you see somebody like that, you'll be more likely to say to them, "Live a more conventional life and don't come to the Center"?
*KIM:*	I may not use those words -- because *they* may not want to accept it -- but at least it's a question I'm going to be asking myself. Is this cure, this counseling, worse than the sickness? Is it just making them sicker?
*DEAN:*	I, too, don't think the Center's good for everybody. There's a lot of people who ought to stay away from it. Who is the Center good for?
*KIM:*	It's not good if insights, or being in the presence of guys who are demonstrating what's right, is simply confusing and oppressing a person -- if, rather than liberating their identity, it seems to like leave them with a void or a blank. This is a very subjective way of talking about it, but it's how I look at it. Another person I counseled briefly was very much like this. You take away their defenses -- or you try to ask them to challenge their defenses -- and it's like there's nothing there. Or you attempt to speak to what you believe in or have hope or faith in -- things like beauty or goodness -- and you just don't get a response to it.
*DEAN:*	Do you think a certain idealism about the planet as a whole has anything to do with this, the ability to be truly idealistic, or to have genuine hope, perhaps?
*KIM:*	Possibly, but I think a lot of their images of that are so tainted and colored that you have to just really start with the person. And then once they're feeling healthy and have a healthy sense of who they are, I think idealism just comes naturally as an outgrowth of their warmth and their pride. It's possible to have a future when there's something good or beautiful about *you*.
*DEAN:*	When I was a kid, I was very stoical and never had much hope for my personal life, but I always thought -- due to my study of evolution for one thing -- that if there was this continual progress built into nature that the far future would have to be a world without people like my parents. And that always gave me hope. That was my way of working around it.
*KIM:*	That episode with Collin was basically very good for me, but of course I got sick about it. I had the same kind of response at the beginning that I did with Paul when he yelled at me, the idea of "I know nothing."
*DEAN:*	It made you feel helpless and ignorant?
*KIM:*	Worse than ignorant. I like to hold on to that feeling of simple ignorance, but this made me feel like worthless or something. But I wasn't so sick that I was unable to say to myself, "You didn't kill this boy."
*DEAN:*	Do you think any good counseling is being done by the Center?
*KIM:*	Oh, see I think I did a lot of good counseling when I was a counselor, and I think people are doing good counseling now. This didn't have so much to do with the idea that I couldn't do an adequate job of counseling. It had to do with me and my needs. So much of what I was saying to people and doing with people were rearrangements of what Paul had taught me. It was like an intellectual process. "Oh, I know what this is, and I know what this is caused by, and I know how it all fits together." Like a puzzle. But what was missing was a lot of the experience. So I tended not to be very good at focusing in on how each person was different from another.
*DEAN:*	You could figure out a brilliant answer that just happened to be wrong?
*KIM:*	It had elements of truth in it, but perhaps it wasn't really the thing they needed at the moment. It's like experiencing each individual more so you see how they're different, seeing how all feminines aren't the same just because they're feminine and all masculines aren't the same just because they're masculine. And how their growths can be very different and how their problems are going to be extremely different.
*DEAN:*	I'm hearing from you a tremendous sense of pride in your ability to understand people and to help them understand themselves better, and to promote and stimulate their growth process as well as your own. How did Paul affect this? I mean, do we give Paul credit for any of this, or is this something that would have come out in you anyway?
*KIM:*	I don't know exactly, but we can give Paul credit for teaching me how to discipline my thinking -- or how to start to learn how to discipline my thinking -- so that my drives to be insightful and helpful, which I always had, might *actually be* helpful -- more than just stroking somebody or patting them on the head or commiserating with them or something like that. He was the only one who I ever got any sense of knowing that you had to really work hard, that feeling had to be disciplined, that you had to go to work. And that if you didn't do that, it wasn't only that it wasn't very good, it was that it was wrong and it was *bad. It wasn't only like, "Oh, well, so you didn't have insight. At least you made him feel better." No. Half truths, insightful feelingfulness or whatever, are damaging*. So that's what we can credit Paul for, besides being a living example that this is something that ordinary people can do, that this is something friends can do with each other, that you're smarter than psychiatrists, that you don't have to go to college to do this.
*DEAN:*	Do you feel there might have been other people like Paul in his time? Was he unique in some way? Or do we just not know?
*KIM:*	I don't know. It's funny you say that, because I think sometimes that there might be like a masculine counterpart of Paul somewhere on the planet that we don't know about -- possibly because he's not articulate or he's not literary. Probably he might not be.
*DEAN:*	Maybe a leader of a commune or some special creative community?
*KIM:*	I don't know. It's kind of like a moot point and I really don't think about it very much. There may be another person like Paul around. Other psychologists and thinkers have written books, and I know you're interested in reading lots of books by other thinkers.
*DEAN:*	I don't really believe in it that much as if it's going to enhance my own personal, psychological perspective, but Paul wanted me to.
*KIM:*	No kidding?
*DEAN:*	Oh, yeah. I get the feeling sometimes that people think that this is just Dean's hobby or obsession or something -- or sickness, for that matter. But Paul was always wanting me to be the one to place his work in a historical perspective. That was my job as his collaborator. In some ways it stood in my way for a long time, because it left little or no room for an honest confrontation with my own growth process. But the interesting thing is that he never actually gave up on the idea of my writing these books. And I never have either. We were always looking forward to it happening some day. In a lot of our phases he'd say, "Well, you know, right now you have to do these other things, so don't worry about the books." But he never said not to do it. He always seemed to think that this kind of stuff would be just the right sort of contribution a person like me could make. Maybe these kinds of books are a masculine thing. I often think this, because they're not the products of truth-seeking in the strict sense. I'm not trying to see, for example, in what ways Freud was true so much as see what part of Paul's truth Freud saw -- something like that. It's more like cataloging or archiving or being a librarian.
*KIM:*	Also, you're not focusing on the living people you're involved with when you're into this research. Truth-seeking is when you're submitting -- or attempting to learn how to submit -- to something that's real right in front of you. Paul had a lifetime of experiences of that and that's why he could abstract to a conceptual level, because he had that lifetime of experiences of a one-to-one nature. He told me so many times in so many ways about this. I was just talking with Carl about this the other night. Carl was saying something like, "Did Paul ever share his growth with you? Did he ever like say, 'Oh, this is where I have problems in that area'?" And I said, "Very little. Hardly at all, directly. More, the longer I was with him." Carl was curious about like who shaped Paul's growth, who was Paul's counselor.
*DEAN:*	Paul had a life that's so different from our lives. We have the advantage of being part of a community of growing people, but he had to do it all by himself.
*KIM:*	I still think about this submission idea in truth-seeking. He made sure I knew that it was much more than just romance. It was essential for the insights that he came up with that he attach himself to masculine personalities throughout his life. Not always masculine personalities that were developed and could *lead* him in creative ways and help him focus on his psychological problems, but just raw psychological masculinity that was real enough for him to reach a level of submission so that he could discipline his insights and his feelings. And he used this as a therapeutic tool for himself. He had to know when to break off with relationships, when they were making him sick or whatever.
*DEAN:*	Or making the other person sick.
*KIM:*	Or making the other person sick. But how do you grow when you don't have a counselor, how do you grow when you don't have a teacher or a leader? Do you need to be involved with someone who's more developed than you are in most ways? The answer is that, just knowing what you know, you can use what's real in another person -- like their essential masculinity or femininity -- to really help you focus and get out of yourself. It's something very real to measure yourself against.
*DEAN:*	Caring about the mental health of another person is a tremendous motivation, because when you care about that person you're going to find out very quickly what you're doing that's false or fucked up. And you can see it quite as clearly as if they *were* a teacher or a leader who could say with authority, "What you're doing or saying is wrong." Even though they can't spell out the answer that you're looking for, at least their reactions can tell you when you're off base. And that's an essential tool for getting somewhere, even if you have to go at a slower pace. I'm sure that we're all growing a little bit more slowly than when we had a teacher who could give us actual answers and actual insights. But we have a full-proof scientific tool by which to test our own development and make mid-course corrections -- simply because we're humans who can attach ourselves to other humans.
*KIM:*	And I don't ever judge it in terms like slower or faster. I think that just doesn't work because there is no such thing.
*DEAN:*	I guess that's school talk, isn't it?
*KIM:*	With so much of what I learned with Paul, you may soak it up in four years, but maybe you have to have twenty years of experience before you begin to see certain things -- even with the best teacher in the world focusing things for you, or perhaps suggesting areas that are richer to explore.
*DEAN:*	I think a good test of whether you've understood something is whether you can then teach it to somebody else. If you find yourself just repeating formulas, and then they disagree and repeat their own formulas, you find out real quick if you have a rich enough understanding to be able to convey it in any meaningful way.
*KIM:*	Fortunately, I'm much less hard on myself now than I used to be about what I have to be doing at a certain point in my life. I guess my faith in myself seems to have proven to be like a lot stronger.
*DEAN:*	I sometimes envy that in you. It's something I struggle with. There are a lot of people who put themselves under tremendous pressure to *achieve* things, substantial measurable quantifiable things you can put on a resume, and yet who really don't know how to open themselves up inside to honest, genuine questions about their human growth. I think *that's* got to be the number one priority. Otherwise, we're no different from, say, a school of dentistry. Yes, we can sell Paul's system like laundry detergent. We can promote it like a political campaign. We can write our books about it. But unless we're living in accordance with what it recommends that people do, or shows people that they can do, then we're going to miss out on the major benefits of the system -- in the name of demonstrating those very benefits to other people.
*KIM:*	For some reason, it's very easy for me to accept the inevitability of the world's using Paul's insights. They just seem so logical and right. Not that the work you're doing doesn't need to be done, because it does. All the work you've been doing with these histories and with the publishing is essential. I like very much the fact that you've made the literature available to anyone who wants it. What I think is perhaps not so necessary is the actual proselytizing. And I don't even know how much of this you do.
*DEAN:*	You mean approaching strangers, writing to people? I've cut that out entirely because it made me sick.
*KIM:*	Oh, that's great. It's not that we shouldn't let strangers know about Paul, but just that a lot of times people have come down to the Center who were familiar with his works and it became very clear that, once they were in the presence of growing people and their own growth was really challenged, they didn't want any part of it. They liked what Paul said because it was comforting or something.
*DEAN:*	It's possible to treat any psychological or philosophical system as an esthetic creation. And a lot of people have made very beautiful philosophical systems, like Hegel, that other people have celebrated and written about, but which have literally almost nothing to do with the real world that we live in, just nothing whatever. Gigantic volumes of just beautiful castles in the sky.
*KIM:*	Enchanting daydreams. I always felt like it's just not necessary to proselytize about this, that there's a need in the human spirit for this.
*DEAN:*	And if there isn't, then maybe they don't deserve to have it.
*KIM:*	It isn't that they don't deserve to have it, but we will just make ourselves sick trying to make them have it.
*DEAN:*	Well, is it necessary, then, that we do *anything*? What part of this can we avoid doing? I find our having to publish all this great stuff a little depressing. We're marketing treasures that people are trashing.
*KIM:*	Or stuff that they just don't value.
*DEAN:*	It's like pearls before swine, and that hurts me, it hurts my warmth. It builds up a lot of rage inside me.
*KIM:*	I guess you're asking what would be appropriate to give up or what just isn't worth it anymore, like what isn't getting results. And it's funny you're asking because you helped me so much in terms of ending the East Village Counseling Service. You just said something like, "You're only seeing like *two* people a month? Do you think this is really worth it?" I don't recall what I said to you but the light bulbs went off in my head and I thought, "Well, of *course* it's not worth it. No one who comes into East Village Counseling is sticking around at the Center."
*DEAN:*	Do you think it's time to drop the *Journal*, for instance?
*KIM:*	I've always assumed that the *Journal* was something you enjoyed doing and that's why it's there, but of course the *Journal* isn't essential to running the Center at all. Yeah, drop it.
*DEAN:*	You don't think it's encouraging people to learn how to be articulate in an objective medium?
*KIM:*	Well, sure, but that's very secondary to people's personal growth. See, I think there's one thing you don't understand -- maybe you do understand this, and if I'm off-base on this I want to know about it. But I don't think you have enough of a sense yet of how long it takes for someone who's serious to write down what's true or demonstrate what's right in some system that can be codified or rigidified or however you want to say it.
*DEAN:*	"Objectified" I think is the word.
*KIM:*	Or maybe *subjectified*. We're always talking about truth being objectified, but maybe it has to be subjectified. You have a lot of respect for what Paul did, but, you know, there is so much stuff in Paul that I haven't even gotten yet or that I'm still discovering. I honestly don't think the world is suffering, or anybody is missing out in their growth, just because I haven't written my book yet. I have perfect faith that at some point it's just inevitable. If you keep going, you will have enough to say that could actually complement or be different from what's already been said, that it would be worth someone's time picking it up and reading it. Not just another confusing dumb thing that complicates and just adds more wordy garbage to the world. And that's just how I feel about it: that it's there, it exists, it's for us to use it and to share it with people who are interested in it and want it.
*DEAN:*	I know what you're saying is true, because various people have batted around the idea of writing a "popularization" of this stuff, and I don't think that can happen. I don't think one can write a pop-psychology version of Paul. I just don't think there is any way to do it.
*KIM:*	That's funny. Someone once said to me that money should be given to universities to do studies of polarity and that kind of garbage.
*DEAN:*	That would be a complete waste of time. They don't know how to deal with the psychology of creative people at all.
*KIM:*	Universities are the last place you want to give money to for the advancement of the science of human nature. But this guy said he just couldn't understand why someone hasn't written a book that puts Paul into simple language. And what I said to him was, "If you read Paul's books, it's in simple language. You can understand every word you read in those books."
*DEAN:*	He wrote it in the simplest language he could find. I don't think anybody's going to improve on that.
*KIM:*	I said the books are a miracle of simplicity considering not only the complexity of what he's talking about but how disturbing it is to read. What's hard about Paul's books is that they're challenging for people to read.
*DEAN:*	If we believe that these ideas are universally true and that in the future mothers will be able to talk about it with their daughters the same way today they might talk about the values of, say, democracy or racial tolerance, won't there be books that those people will turn to that explain the subtleties of human nature -- not of the profound and complex level of a Rosenfels maybe, but on some other level?
*KIM:*	Gee, I don't really know. Of course, there will still be Paul, but Paul hasn't written everything there is to know about human nature: it would be depressing to think he had. Then again people will also develop tools. I think maybe this is what you're talking about more. Rather than more insight, maybe it's more tools people will develop and use. Of course they will.
*DEAN:*	At the risk of getting into areas of the unknown that we're not prepared to give useful opinions about, is this system going to be for everybody? Will the world get to be so healthy a place that everybody who's born into it can make real use of these insights?
*KIM:*	You mean that they'll be available for people to choose if they want to?
*DEAN:*	I mean will they be part of the "common sense" of ordinary people?
*KIM:*	Oh, of course.
*DEAN:*	Will everybody know most of this stuff?
*KIM:*	Sure. Of course they will.
*DEAN:*	Will everybody have to read Paul or will there be other books that they will read?
*KIM:*	So much of what identity is about gets transmitted through media other than books. I'm thinking now about what it is to be a man, what it is to be a woman, what sex is all about. It just gets handed to you. It's so infused in the culture.
*DEAN:*	Maybe books will become less important in the future because there will be other forms of information transmission.
*KIM:*	Possibly, but I think that when something becomes a part of a culture, there's just a myriad of ways that it's expressed. It's expressed in more codified scientific terms in some areas but in other areas it's just part of movies, it's part of fashion, it's part of everything. This is still just at the beginning, but just think about how women are flexing their muscles about what they want to be in life. You even hear about kid's books or TV shows and you know that now slowly boys are being allowed to get interested in cooking or having dolls. They're tiny little things and they're not terribly serious, but it really filters down. People just have a sense that there is something much better about this new point of view than the old.
*DEAN:*	So maybe not everybody will need to be an expert on everything that Paul said. They'll just need to know what they need to know to live their particular kind of life. And the science of human nature will be there for people who want to become more knowledgeable, but only on an as-needed basis.
*KIM:*	I guess I never thought about it this way, like if there will be special people who will actually specialize in psychological matters.
*DEAN:*	I would think that there would be, because there always are people who are wiser and stronger. There's a lot of falseness in the conventional world about how to find these people and what they look like, but I think there are truly wiser people and stronger people. Some of them even get to start institutions like the Ninth Street Center.
*KIM:*	Possibly. My fantasy is that it'll really be just something that's such a part of culture and what it is to be a human being. The therapeutic aspect of being your own counselor will just be like today what getting a job or paying the rent is.
*DEAN:*	Or putting on your clothes in the morning.
*KIM:*	This will be seen to be just such a natural extension of what it is to be a human being that if there are certain people like you're describing, they'll be not too different from most other people.
*DEAN:*	Maybe by that time the differentiation between the leading edge people and the conventional people will take turns that we can't possibly imagine today.
*KIM:*	For one thing, the whole concept of careers, of having to do one thing five days a week for eight hours a day in these horribly rigid ways -- well, I just don't think they'll exist in the future. Obviously, there will have to be structures of some sort or another, but they'll be flexible.
*DEAN:*	You'll have to work one hour a week or something.
*KIM:*	Well, maybe like Monday you'll do brain surgery, and then Tuesday you'll sweep the streets cause it's restful and enjoyable. And then the next day, you'll go to the beach. There will be no kind of pecking order of careers or jobs or anything like that. I think this kind of freedom will just be part of the culture. When people are more mature psychologically, they don't need to be treated like cattle. You won't have to say, "If you want that you have to pay for it, and to earn money you have to go out and get a job." People won't have to need money before they go to work, they'll just know that there's work to be done. And lots of things just won't get done then, of course, because they won't be worth doing for their own sake. So I don't think the world is going to be a shiny place. I think it's going to be much more sloppy and chaotic in lots of superficial ways.
*DEAN:*	More fun, maybe?
*KIM:*	A lot more fun.
*DEAN:*	Less crazy, less suffering?
*KIM:*	Exactly. And we'll all get to go to the beach when we wake up and we decide, "This is just the day to go to the beach."
*DEAN:*	And people like me who never ever want to go to the beach will never ever go.
*KIM:*	That's right, you'll never have to. There will be nothing like that. And they'll be no weekends, because you won't need to recuperate from anything.
*DEAN:*	Is there anything about Paul that you know or learned or think you know that you haven't said?
*KIM:*	Yes, and I'll try and think of some. But, you know, so many of these memories are connected to a specific concept or recall or memory. I don't walk around having these things listed in my head. A lot of them are specifically related to parts of my own growth. One of the most wonderful and liberating things Paul got through to me, and really that permeates the Center, is that there's something good about being queer or strange. It just seems to liberate everyone and kind of like take advantage of the wonderful gift that homosexuality can give you -- which is that you are kind of set free from the conventional world and you don't have to worry any more about how you fit in to all of those systems. There's something fabulous about being queer. This ties into when we were talking about parents and their children. Paul had such faith in people that he didn't worry about how they'd turn out, I don't believe. When he was involved in a growth process with someone, it was so different from parents worrying if their children will turn out alright.
*DEAN:*	Parents are really worrying about themselves, aren't they?
*KIM:*	Partly. It's like mixed messages. My parents obviously supported independence in me but they also supported huge amounts of intimidation in me as well. It's just that their conception of the world was so tiny and limited. Because they couldn't live a creative life in their tiny world, they couldn't conceive of how a child could live a creative life in the tiny world they think the child's going to live in. So most parents just won't tolerate any kind of queerness or strangeness or oddness in their kids.
*DEAN:*	It's almost to be regretted that gay liberation is succeeding in the way it is. It's convincing people that gays are "just like" heterosexuals. In a world where homosexuality is tolerated but not appreciated, it may not always be as much of an advantage as it is today to have to go through this kind of differentiation process.
*KIM:*	Except that it isn't really making gays be just like straights. Being "tolerated" is like such a wimp thing, you know? It's essentially useless, except for practical things like laws and stuff. The fact is that homosexuality per se is not accepted by the world and it's not going to be for quite a long time.
*DEAN:*	As Paul said in the monograph where he talks about homophobia in the gay community, even many gay liberation people are not truly what we mean by queer or homosexual or creative. And in that sense this revolution is going to be a very long process and can help people much more than any mere factional kind of effort like demanding rights for Italians.
*KIM:*	The fact is that the gay community hasn't come together the way that so many of these people claim.
*DEAN:*	Not psychologically at least.
*KIM:*	Not in many other ways too. I mean, if you think about even the biggest marches and protests they've had, or if you want to talk about voting as a block and stuff like that, there's a huge diversity in the gay community. A lot of the gay liberationists don't want to recognize that or only want to decry the fact that more gay people don't get political or don't all think a certain way or don't all vote Democratic or something. Gay people just are not coming together in this way. And I take that as a positive sign, that huge amounts of gay people still feel really disenfranchised and alienated from gay culture. They see that what's being presented to them is just another version of "We're going to tell you what to do and we're going to tell you what to say." And a lot of gay people are saying, "Fuck you. I'm going to live my own life." And *that's* the essence of what homosexuality is like.
*DEAN:*	I reveal quite a bit of myself to people I meet outside the Center, but I don't usually identify myself as "gay" because that's still just so limited an image for most people. They think it means I like sucking dicks or something, and what I mean has so little to do with anything like that that it's usually a waste of time to even get into it. If they press me for sexual information, I'll say "I like sleeping with a person who's in love with me," and let them try to figure out what the hell I mean by that. It's an answer that makes sense to me. I don't want to be stereotyped. I don't want to be ghettoized. I don't want to be defined by anything as shallow as most people's conception of "sexual preference." I think that what I am and what I represent and what Paul stands for is absolutely essential and relevant for every human being. I don't care about anybody's plumbing or education or anything like that.
*KIM:*	I've always felt that way, too. You come to accept -- and not feel bad about or depressed about -- a real kind of aloneness when you're in a growth process. You learn that you're lucky to have maybe one or two people in your life who you can really be serious with. There's nothing sad about that -- in fact, there's something wonderful about it, because most people have no one at all like that in their life.
*DEAN:*	Including Paul, for most of his life.
*KIM:*	And also I just accepted the fact that people who don't know me are just going to have wrong ideas about me anyway no matter what kind of facade I try to put out or what big group I belong to. If someone just doesn't know me personally, they're always going to have a wrong idea about me, so what's the point of worrying about it? I know that when I tell people I'm gay, they're going to have the wrong idea about it. And actually, that's just fine with me, if they're not in my life.
*DEAN:*	Because it's a way of screening them out?
*KIM:*	Not only screening them out, but in this day and age it's often useful to say you're gay because then you won't get invited to their parties!
*DEAN:*	I think this is why I sometimes like to wear my hair long. It's effortless -- I don't even have to speak to people in order for them to see I have long hair -- and yet it's a real signal. It's regarded as a flag that says, "Don't tread on me." I don't know why, exactly -- it's just hair. But this is the way the culture perceives long hair on men. This is the language of the culture, I didn't make it up. And insofar as it has that kind of effect and sends that signal to them, then it's useful to me. It keeps away the kind of people I want to keep away. And it also may attract people who are funky or queer or out of it or hip or who knows what.
*KIM:*	Actually, I find it often times more disturbing to tell people that I clean apartments than to tell them I'm gay. I'm often using that now more than the gay issue due to the current worship for money and success. You use whatever you can. I feel so good about talking about things this way and just assuming it as being so natural that you're just not part of the conventional world. And this is all Paul, you know? If you want to talk about the contribution he made, this is Paul. Rather than the conventional world being so big all around you and you being like this tiny little thing trying to protect yourself from it, he showed me the conventional world is like this tiny little thing and you are way out there, like all over the place. And the creative world you're in and the creative way of looking at life and looking at people, it's like it's bigger than the conventional. You're beyond it, you're free of it.