Rebranding, creating

I'm kicking around rebranding myself on a different account that isn't gainer motivated and giving patrons an opportunity to stay connected in that way.  Being at home in my body, making friends with my desires and liabilities. Finding balance. This little corner of the world has done really well in the past six months and it's no secret that "sex sells." It also makes people act out in shitty ways (like stealing and reposting content). And I'm not entirely sure that I want the apex of my life's achievement to be how many orgasms I've launched (though that's not entirely a terrible thing).

For those of you who know me well, I'm a musician, particularly, an organist. I started piano lessons at age 8 and started playing the organ in 1982 at age 12 when I rode my bicycle to a neighboring town in Harford County, Maryland and the Rector of its Episcopal church let me play their 4-rank Möller pipe organ (that's a very tiny pipe organ, as shown in the second picture). I joined the choir in that church (they wore choir robes and sang really well together) and that was my first strong connection between music, community, and belonging. I felt a far greater sense of belonging in that church choir than in any school choir I'd ever sung in. We chose to be there together and miss DYNASTY on Wednesday nights for rehearsal. I loved that choir.

I was riding home with the choir director one night and asked her if a person could be an organist full-time and make a living at it. She gave an example of one of her colleagues in Baltimore who was doing just that. He played at the Episcopal Cathedral and had a synagogue job and also played recitals. It was in that moment that I decided that's what I wanted to do. I had no idea all the pitfalls and skirmishes that could happen in the years that followed: the fact that she and several other teachers and mentors could be fired on a whim from their jobs by narcissistic, psychopathic clergy had never occurred to me.  I was drawn to the music, drawn to the community.  

 It is no small irony to be a gainer and an organist: those 10,000 hours of mastery you spend on pedal technique becoming progressively irrelevant as your buttocks blossom and lift your dangling feet further and further away from the pedal keyboard. Your growing belly pushes you further away from the manual keyboards and suddenly you find your gut playing errant notes and accidentally setting off pistons. What was once your prime instrument of expression increasingly becomes a tonal minefield, with certain repertory, manuals, and even entire instruments (in remote and compact places high aloft in balconies only reachable by dozens of steps in narrow corridors) inaccessible.

And then there's organist culture: there is a certain gay mafia aspect to it and it's been that way for decades. And gay men are just terrible, vain creatures.  They hold the same values that most gay (as opposed to Queer) folk hold: beauty is exemplified by slenderness. And being slender certainly doesn't hurt in being more physically accessible to your instrument. There are a couple of plus-sized organists of repute: Carlo Curley is the most celebrated figure I can think of. He died at 59 years of age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Curley 

The gentleman in Baltimore my first choir director told me about had a pot belly and was 67 when he died. It's not to say that skinny organists don't die young: I know of at least two classmates who were dead before 40 due to HIV and drug related issues.

Thanks for taking a peak into what had been my primary life before I came online in 1996 and discovered the rabbit-hole of the gainer universe. I want to share this incredible sermon I heard when I was the 2014  Convention of the American Guild of Organists in Boston with 1700 of my colleagues. Here's the part that really resonated with me:

"What a joy to have been, oh, I don’t know, a brick, or a pipe, or a flying buttress, something that holds the edifice together and makes it glorious. What a pleasure it has been for me to be here with you, musicians, hundreds and hundreds of them. People who have made my life in the church a glory, who will sing and play me to sleep when my life in the church is over, and will continue to nourish and challenge those who come after me. How blessed we all are in our increase, and even more blessed in our decrease."

https://www.agocleveland.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Crafton-Sermon.pdf