Eric Massa, Baba Ram Dass and...What LSD Could Have Done

No gay stereotypes here

I've been speculating that my friend Eric Massa has been having a nervous breakdown because he spent his life so tightly closeted that he had never had to really confront the possibility that he was... bisexual or something. When he was outed, his entire world came crashing down around him, including his inner world-- all in the bright, unforgiving klieg lights of cheap national notoriety. Then a few days ago Noah raised the possibility that Eric's erratic behavior is caused by Rituximab, a genetically engineered chimeric monoclonal antibody used to treat non-Hodgkins lymphoma. a drug whose side effects sometimes include psychosis.

Eric's from a military family, went to Annapolis and has led a pretty regimented life. One of his kids remarked offhandedly that he always seemed angry.

I'll bet Eric doesn't read Out magazine. The newest issue has a short blurb about another man from our generation who had some trouble coping with his homosexuality, Richard Alpert. Never heard of him? How about Baba Ram Dass?

Both were important names-- of the same person-- when I was growing up. Alpert was a professor ay Harvard who worked with an old friend of mine-- the person who gave me my first acid trip-- Timothy Leary. I worked for Leary, briefly, in Millbrook, NY, where he and Alpert were doing LSD experiments. Soon after, Alpert went to India, immersed himself in spiritual Hinduism and came out the other side as an important teacher and the writer of one of the books most important to me in the world, Be Here Now. I never did ask Eric if he'd read it; I never thought he had. He should have-- that and maybe taken some acid.

The Out blurb riffs off a new book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin, and it addresses Alpert's/Ram Dass' coming to terms with his sexuality.

Out: Entwined in Alpert's part of the story is that he was having relationships with men from a young age.

Lattin: At boarding school he was caught rolling around naked with another boy-- he described it as "wrestling." Coming of age, he wasn't sure what to do with [his sexuality]-- it was the '50s. He danced around it for a long time. He called himself a bisexual in the '70s and '80s. He had a steady girlfriend. But he was basically gay.

Out: In the book, he says of his first trip, "For the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me."

Lattin: Psychedelics break down the barriers we construct around our sexuality. People really open up on them-- not necessarily in a sexual way, but in an emotional and spiritual way.

Out: What did his colleagues think about him being gay?

Lattin: Leary didn't want him to come out. He thought it would be bad for their reputation. That reinforced Alpert's internalized homophobia. Leary did an interview with Playboy in 1966 where he said all kinds of crazy things, and one of the most ridiculous was that LSD was "a cure for homosexuality."

Out: You write that Alpert decided "he was more homosexual than bisexual, but that being gay would never be his central, defining characteristic." What eventually led him to this resolution?

Lattin: He was on a spiritual quest-- another reason he didn't want to come out. It wasn't what he was about. The AIDS epidemic got him comfortable with dealing with his sexuality. He'd been doing grief counseling before [the crisis] and later saw himself as a counselor for people dying of AIDS, and many of them were gay. That really opened him up. Ultimately, he came to a reconciliation of his sexuality and his spirituality that's really beautiful.

Eric isn't taking my phone calls. I hope he's reading DWT, and I hope he's unwinding and relaxing and coming to grips with who he is in the context of his family and the rest of his life.