Biography

In 1961, when I was in sixth grade, I learned that some Asian people ate rice for breakfast. This was a revelation to me because my family and I had oatmeal, and rice for dinner. I felt as if my perception of reality had been turned upside down, and I realized that social, cultural, political, and economic customs that we took to be reality were arbitrary. I knew then that there was more to this world than the narrow-minded ways of the hidebound little town of Westminster, Maryland that was still mired in the Jim Crow era of the South.

The next morning, I cooked rice for breakfast for my whole family. They did not understand the new me who was searching for something more. Later in life, I heard a song by Steve Earle in which he sang about his grandfather saying, “Whatever you do, be a seeker.” No one ever gave me such words of wisdom when I was young, but I embarked on a seeker’s life anyway.

In 1964 and 1965, I lived in Bangalore, India. My family was academic and headquartered there for research. During that time, I was constantly bombarded with world-expanding events, exciting adventures, and stimulating experiences. Learning how to pick orchids for a school dance when I didn’t even know what an orchid looked like; walking across a moat and discovering it was there to keep the elephants away; and meeting friends born in foreign locales like the People’s Republic of China and whose first language was Tamil all changed me. I fell in love with India, and that year formed many of the foundations for my thoughts and travel later in life.

After high school, I began higher education at Beloit College in Wisconsin. There, I dropped out of mainstream society, joined the counterculture, and never really dropped back in. I became a revolutionary and a lifelong dissident, but disturbing things started to happen to me. Intellectually, the world opened, but I began to feel I could not begin to open up to others in a way that led to deep friendship, intimacy, and sexuality. Nothing terrible had ever happened to me, but I felt devastated beyond what words could convey. Instead of thriving, I began to doubt the reality of everything, not just minor customs such as oatmeal for breakfast. I became withdrawn while continuing my studies and my jovial but superficial college friendships.

At the time, college curricula tended to steep students in French existentialism, and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. There was no God. There was nothing but the material universe. And nothing was believable unless it could be proven scientifically. I believed all of those concepts.

As I held these beliefs, I also began to study the religions of India influenced by my year spent there. I discovered that 2,500 years ago a sage named Siddhartha Gotama had concluded some of the same things I learned from the French existentialists. But instead of wallowing in misery, Siddhartha had found a way to perfect peace and became the Buddha. I decided I wanted to study in India for a year and build my life around the Buddha’s teachings.

With my inner withdrawal continuing, I grew increasingly troubled by a recurring sexual script involving extreme BDSM fantasies about handsome, virile soldiers who would be captured, tortured, and castrated. At the end of my fantasies, I would merge with the victim and face the knife in my mind. Today we would call these irradicable fantasies a fetish. They were an indelible part of me. I thought I must be a psychopath. Such a troubling set of thoughts made the fact that I was gay in a homophobic world seem almost minor.

I went to India to study but did not focus on Buddhism. I felt too troubled to sequester myself in a monastery and chant all day. Instead, I studied South Indian classical music, and I focused on a musical instrument called the veena. I studied at the music school of Madurai University and Kalakshetra College of the Arts.

 In 1978, I returned to the United States to continue my study of South Indian music at the University of Pennsylvania, and I attended graduate school on a Tamil language fellowship through the United States Department of Education. The Ivy League and I hated each other at first sight. I considered that style of education to be a conscious-lowering experience. Nevertheless, I earned a Master’s Degree in South Asia Regional Studies, and then I transferred to the University’s Department of Folklore and Folklife.

There, I began doing research with African American grassroots Methodist groups called the Singing and Praying Bands. I was intensely moved by their religious services, which are a regional variant of the once widespread, early African American religious services called ring shouts. I became immersed in this study and was awarded a small fellowship from the Philadelphia Folksong Society. This turned into a lifelong project and began what became my first book several years later, Together Let Us Sweetly Live: the Singing and Praying Bands.

From the onset of my late adolescent angst until the late 1980s, I did my work with at least one hand tied behind my back, because I was in such psychological distress. My graduate school life was spectacularly mediocre. In the thick of my depression, with my friends dying of a strange, new disease called AIDS, and my mother dying slowly of ALS, I became focused on the quest to understand myself.

Also, I entered therapy with psychoanalyst Elio Frattaroli, which was the beginning of self-discoveries that would lead to my book The Flower from a Poisoned Seed: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma, Sexual Masochism, and Eventually, a Good Measure of Wellbeing.

Then, while working as an adjunct professor and writing instructor at Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, Rutgers University, and the University of Delaware, I realized that there was a larger group of potential readers for compelling non-academic non-fiction than I had ever thought of before.

Researching and writing Together Let Us Sweetly Live led to my producing and acting as project director, recordist, and grant writer for the Singing and Praying Bands’ album On One Accord: Singing and Praying Bands of Tidewater Maryland and Delaware. I was able to get the project partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maryland Humanities Council. My liner notes for the album were nominated for a Grammy Award, and the Library of Congress named it one of the ten best recordings of American folk music in 1992.

In 1995, I was hired by a professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania to research mentally ill individuals who had just been released from prison and were on probation. After that grant-funded job concluded, as I continued working on Together Let Us Sweetly Live along with my psychiatrist-guided introspection, I became an independent journalist for the progressive Philadelphia-based newspaper The Unconvention in 2000. Writing for them for several years brought me back to my roots in leftist politics and gave me an even greater purpose.

It had taken many years, but Together Let Us Sweetly Live: the Singing and Praying Bands was published in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press as part of their Music in American Life series. The book was accompanied by a second album of my recordings, and I was very honored that the bands loved the book and music. My field recordings were then pledged to the Archive of American Folksong at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

My life was briefly put on hold in 2007, just after the Singing and Praying Bands book was published, because I had a heart attack. That led to a deeper period of introspection and allowed me to gain a better understanding of what was important in life, and what was not.

After procuring a new job at the National Mental Health Consumers’ Self-Help Clearinghouse, I did research on the efforts of mental health consumer-run programs to help consumers out of group houses and day programs and be included in the mainstream of American society. I also did workshops at other mental health organizations while I continued my work as a journalist writing for the Clearinghouse’s quarterly on mental health consumers’ experiences, called The Key Assistance Report.

Then, I decided to dedicate myself completely to my first memoir The Flower from A Poisoned Seed. The book was focused on exploring the psychological roots of BDSM and fetishism, family, trauma, spirituality, and finally my own well-being through therapeutic self-awareness and creativity.

To publish the book the way I intended, I founded the independent publishing company, Pterodactyl Press, and released the book in 2023. Upon release, I was told by therapists and literary professionals that they had never read anything like it, and I took that as a great surprise and a high compliment.

The same year my first memoir was released, I was published in The Nation with a political piece. My rich writing life had returned.

I’m currently finishing work on my forthcoming book about the Singing and Praying Bands. It will be called On One Accord like the title of the first album I recorded of the bands.

Also, I am working on a new non-fiction book. I intend to fill it with many of the concepts I’ve learned in my meditation practice and my spiritual and philosophical research.

I continue to be a perpetual seeker. My belief is that you cannot have compassion for yourself without having compassion for everyone else. Any failure to engage with your challenges and the conflicts you have with others disturbs your own peace of mind. My fourth book will include topics such as these.

The search continues.

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