New Age Lesbians and the Lesbophile

John is not his real name. He is generic. He is one of those gay men who do not hang out with other gay men but with lesbians, mostly new age lesbians. He still wears beads, loose cotton, raw and organic, pants and shirts, also worn by the new age lesbians. They are sort of leftover hippies: love and listen to repetitive drum trance enticing music and dance to it in native peoples’ circle dances. John is a new age lesbophile. He also wears Birkenstocks.

What makes John a lesbophile is not what drives straight guys who are sexually turned on by women with women sexuality. John is after the energy and the balance created by the other, not the significant one only but the different other. In spiritual terms they are not different at all. The lesbophile and the Birkenstock wearing lesbian are extensions of each other. At gay men only activities you would rarely see John since he is more inclined to attend group gatherings up in the Catskills Mountains or Vermont where the guests include gay friendly, straight followers of alternative medicines and progressive trends. He is never to be seen at the Pines in Fire Island as he avoids those flamboyant, fashion conscious gay men. He refers to them as hysterical queens.

Like so many of those Birkenstock wearing lesbians, John the lesbophile does not believe in any of the traditional one God-centered religions or follow the traditional religious doctrines. Energies, flow, centeredness, mother earth, father sun are some of the words that characterize his new religious discourse. They see themselves on a continuous creative flow, completely interconnected with the rest of the world, known and unknown. They are not created in God’s self image. There might not be one god in their conception of the spiritual; many deities, perhaps. Only God knows how many! Some might combine diverse belief systems while others formulate theirs as they move along.

John believes in the idea that there is a dual spirit in a homosexual body as formulated by the original peoples of the Americas and follows the mantra: “don’t push the river, it flows by itself”. John and the new age lesbians burn incense to tranquilize the universal energies, spread smoke from all other kind of herbs while sitting in big sixties cushions, smile all the time and follow the flow.