The scene comes back to me with dizzying clarity: a special assembly in the auditorium of S..... Elementary School; I, a gifted but quiet fourth grader sitting with my chums on the hard wooden seats, eyes wide with wonder at the strange yet, to me, somehow mysteriously familiar sights and sounds which assaulted our young senses so clangorously.  The heavy scent of the incense pouring from the censers that swung from the strong red-robed arms of the shaven-headed monks, the moaning drone of the of the bone horns and the nearly sub-aural tattoo of the huge drums was no more dissonant than our school orchestra, but it got underneath my young skin and seemed to call out to me "Al Eingang, Al Eingang, we are your destiny and your true home" it seemed to say...
 To make a long story short, I ended up on the stage somehow without really meaning to be, my lithe young body swaying and moving to the ritual sounds of these Tibetan monks who had been called by some mysterious force to our school during their world-wide search for a great tantric master who had, they said, been reincarnated  into the body of...me!
 Well my parents were kind of freaked out but, being lapsed Tibetan Buddhists themselves, how could they say no when the Abbot asked to take me back to the top-secret underground lamasary, hidden high in the scenic Himalayas for religious instruction?  All of the incredible details of this period of my life will (except of course for the sacred ritual stuff that I have sworn never to reveal) be included in my autobiography, when I get around to writing it, but I want to give you a rough outline here.
 It didn't take long for me (or my new chums the monks) to figure out that any potential I had had for tantric masterhood had been quashed by my western upbringing: I was certainly enthralled by the richness of the ritual and culture (as though, I remember thinking at the time, one could ever truly separate the two in this essentially theocratic culture) of these noble mountain people, but the agnosticism of my parents, Bobo the Rubberman, and Elastica, Queen of Flexibility had placed too deep a stamp on my impressionable young mind for me ever to truly imbibe of the spirit of any established religion (excepting, of course, the unacknowledged religion of the west, scientific materialism).
 I did have a great time, though, making new friends, and being introduced to some esoteric yogic disciplines which stood me in good stead in later years, as puberty and the western "art" construct drove me inexorably towards the historic meeting of my mouth, my penis, and the society of the spectacle.

                                                                MOM AND DAD

 I believe that my Tibetan Buddhist experience, my being the offspring of two circus freaks, and my having been kidnapped by a troop of monkeys at the age of two weeks where all important, formative childhood experiences.  The monkey story is kind of interesting.  We were on the road with the circus when I was born, and, in the confusion following the train wreck the escaped bonobos spirited me of into the depths of Central Park where we lived for three months as an extended family.  Three months isn't much time when you're an adult, but for a nearly month-old babe, still firmly ensconced in the sensorium of the polymorphous perverse, it is a small lifetime.
 Did the cheerful, non-stop polysexuality of my simian adopted family, imprinted on my impressionable new-born mind during our idyl in The Rambles influence the unabashedly erotic nature of much of my later artwork?  Probably.  I remember thinking at the time: "Norman O. Brown, you can eat your heart out"  Those chimps knew how to swing, and I don't just mean on vines.  If you point your browser at a Usenet search engine and search for "auto-fellatio" you will probably find at least one primatological reference, and while I don't actually remember seeing any of the male monkeys sucking their own dicks (it is all kind of a blur of monkey meat), I'll bet you dollars to donuts that, in light of my taking to it like a duck to water in later years, I probably did.
 Also, having been ripped from the nuclear paradigm and plunged willy-nilly into the intense communality of the lifestyle of my monkey chums for those three months must surely have influenced my subconscious sense of social organization and justice. Although we always called the monkeys chimpanzees, I have since learned that they were in fact the far rarer and much more anarchistic bonobos who have, of late been making quite a splash in primate-language-study circles (and, rumor has it, writing the scripts for many of our current hollywood blockbusters).

When Mom and Dad were released from the hospital they began to search for me in earnest. When they didn't find me in earnest, they decided to look for me in New York. That they began their search in the recherche queer bars of Greenwich Village 1960 is either a tribute to my parents intuitive sense of my later affectional preference, or a subtle hint that Mom and Dad were at least part-time Friends of Dorothy. Pop (or should I say Daddy?) decided to concentrate on the nascent leather bar scene and, after a month-and-a-half of being, shall we say "up to his elbows" in his investigations, heard rumors of some really wild scenes taking place in the rambles, and decided that a trip Uptown was in order. Mom, who had taken the name"Butch" (and had her hair cut to match the name), decided to tag along and "see if maybe you can catch some fish in the park, too".

As it happened, Mom got distracted by a field-hockey game on the Great Lawn, and Dad spent hours on his knees, searching for me, oddly, inside the boxer shorts of a legion (literally; a visiting group of foreign legion guys) of men. He was screaming something about needing more of that cheese when the Chimps and I came upon him while foraging in a pleasant wooded cul-de-sac ( and believe me: we weren't the first to come upon him). The words "Get over here Cheetah, you know I like'em hairy." had barely escaped his swollen lips when he noticed me gamboling through the underbrush and put his clothes back on.

"Oh could it be?" he cried, "Is our sweet babe returned to us at last?" Then shouting with fervent joy "Hey Butch, get your bulldagger ass over here and get maternal. Our searching is over, I've found our little Al and all his Chimp pals. Now we're free to leave this sink of depravity and return to the wholesome circus life, at some point, soonish." Mom shed a tear or two and then told us she'd meet us Downtown at the Stonewall later on, and off we went, Dad, little me, and our furry friends, on the A train, to our date with Queer History.

TO BE CONTINUED...