EDGE Miami

Chris Nutter is positively radiant, a fact that comes across even though we’re talking via telephone. "I’m sitting beneath palm trees with rays [of sun] behind them and all around me," Nutter says from his perch in Miami, where the New York City based writer is in town for a book signing, while in the Boston area his interlocutor from EDGE glances out the window at a gray and chilly April morning.

I have prepared a careful, linear list of questions relevant to Nutter’s book, putatively a self-help guide for gay men called The Way Out. The book itself is less a linear argument or a Cartesian coordinate system for a map to happiness than it is a memoir-based illustration for how to live consciously and make choices in life accordingly - a means to step outside of habitual thoughts that cast the self as an unwitting and powerless victim of circumstance. The author himself is less linear in conversation, speaking from a free-form, holistic mindset. In the end, the list of questions is set aside and EDGE simply holds on as Nutter holds forth.

"Can I call you right back in two minutes?" Nutter suddenly asks. "I know this is really strange..."

Stranger than this perplexing phenomenon we call life on Earth? Mais non! It is perfectly reasonable to ask for a two minute break. While waiting for Nutter to call back, I turn on iTunes and sing along with Janice Carnes. Her rendition of the Hoagy Carmichael song "Irresistible" is better than mine by light-years, and upon hearing my performance recorded on mini-disc later on, I fire up the incinerator in the basement. American Idol material I’m not. Or is that simply a matter of projection, and an example of the ways in which I, like just about everyone else, subconsciously sabotage myself, as a means to duck taking responsibility for my accomplishments and choices? It’s a tough question and I contemplate another gander at Nutter’s web site Go There! while I await his return call.

Before I move out of my Zen state of rumination and onto the Web, however, the phone buzzes. As promised, it’s Nutter getting back to me, and he jumps in at once, asking me about myself, my job, my background. I find myself being interviewed by my interviewee. "Are you freelance or do you work on staff?" he inquires.

A thirteen-year veteran of the freelance writing life himself, Nutter outlines a brief history of how The Way Out had its roots, improbably enough, in a completely different project: a book that proposed to explore, long before Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or the rise and fall of the "metrosexual," the effect gay culture had on straight men. "I think the challenge in being a writer is to find a way to navigate the business and create your own voice within it," Nutter muses. "Which I think only a small percentage or writers manage to do, because the business will tell you what’s right, and will do your writing for you."

The other end of the spectrum is the ability to write in one’s own voice and follow one’s own interests. "When you write on a subject," Nutter says, "you have to become an instant expert. What’s amazing about it is that, in a way, it’s like a Ph.D. course, especially when you start to specialize," as Nutter had done with his investigation into how gay culture affects trends and styles among straight men. "Nobody was talking about it; nobody was writing about it," Nutter says of his original book proposal, the subject of which he’d begun to write about and to research in the late 1990s. "It wasn’t even anything that as culturally accepted. Editors were, like, ’What are you talking about?’ People were shocked by the idea, but I saw it all around me." Nutter wrote three articles on the subject, one of which appeared in The Village Voice ("The first article on this subject; you can Google it," Nutter offers), and shopped his book proposal around. "By the end of five years, I [felt as though I’d] gotten my Ph.D. and this was my thesis." Though publishers did not express sufficient interest in the idea to allow Nutter to turn his "thesis" into a book, the young writer did catch the attention of an editor who was looking for someone to undertake a self-help book for gay men.

The book that resulted from that opportunity reads like a cross between psychotherapy and Eastern philosophy. But in this case, Nutter says, he did "zero research." Rather than making a research project of his new thesis, Nutter was living it. "I don’t want to use spiritual terms," Nutter says, as he sorts mentally through what he wants to say. "They’re so empty, and they have so much baggage. So let’s see if I can describe it without using any words like ’awakening,’ or ’spiritual.’

"I found myself around 2000 and 2001 feeling like I had been thrown out into space. I didn’t really fully know who I was any more. I found myself compulsively, addictively, scarily chasing after sex all the time. It was like I had been hit by a truck - I hadn’t seen it coming, I hadn’t even seen a buildup to it. I was doing it before I even knew. There was a passion and an excitement that was missing from my life that had been missing for a long time. I had always felt extremely passionate and enthused about my life, especially in New York; and it was gone. I felt loss. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t a 20-something bartender playboy. That was my thing. Then I was in my 30s, and I didn’t want to press on [with] that. I wanted to bow out gracefully and get off stage while the getting was good."

"Getting off stage" seems like more than a casual metaphor here, because in his book, Nutter talks about this phase, and describes his life as a kind of play-acting in which he had begun to inhabit a "character" borne of his ideals: strapping, aloof, and sexually desirable.

"I then had an instinct that rose up in me to seek out something different as an answer, and just that instinct is what led me to Eastern philosophy and then to classical [Western] philosophy," in the form of books by The Dalai Lama, The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz and, in due course, a course at The School of Practical Philosophy. "I became very passionate about discovering information that could help me understand what was going on with me. Why was I distraught? Why was I bereft? I knew everything I had chased after since I was a teenager, all of my values - to look amazing, to be incredibly popular, to have a ball partying, all those wonderful things that drove me - they weren’t working any more. I felt like a train wreck." Feeling a need to take action for the sake of his physical and emotional health, Nutter began "consuming self-help books," but it was meditation that he cites as having opened the door to self-knowledge, and to conscious living.

"As soon as I started meditating in the fall of 2001, I became dedicated. I don’t have a life without meditating," Nutter says, going on to describe how meditation allowed him to "calm my mind, and observe my emotions" - two crucial elements in The Way Out, in which Nutter asks the reader to observe the difference between the self and the emotions, thoughts, and beliefs that a person carries. "I was discovering who I was underneath the whole previous thirty years," Nutter says. "Imagine living on the top floor of a five-story building all your life and never knowing there are any floors underneath. I walked below, and there was another floor - and there were more stairs and another a floor even below that! I started not only to understand and navigate my pain and see the source of it, but to identify other emotions. What are they? This is fear. This is love. This is awareness, this is a belief, this is knowledge. I started having moments of what I would now call states of higher awareness - I was aware of substantially more in a moment than I had been ever in my life. In those moments, the entire cosmos was revealed to me in a second: at least, that’s what it felt like. I saw beauty everywhere! I was leaving my body in dreams, and on these kind of learning courses in dreams, about physical reality, non-local reality, time and space... meanwhile, nobody’s directing me in any of this. I’m reading and studying and I’m completely self-directed. I was absorbing this information and applying it."

So these flights out of his body in his dreams - they were a form of integration of this new knowledge into the framework of his life?

"Yes. And also, I would have incredible moments of higher awareness when I was awake. I write about one of them in the introduction [to The Way Out], which was, I think, the first one that I ever felt. It was late on a Sunday night and I was walking with a friend, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with a sense of awe at the unbelievable beauty of everything I looked at. That was like getting hit by a truck, too! I couldn’t shut my brain down. Everything that I thought about or looked at was clear to me - all the mysteries were revealed. I knew who I was, what I was doing, what the meaning was."

Then Nutter had another epiphany. "All of this was happening, and I realized that all of the traditions [of ancient knowledge] I was looking at all assumed that the reader was straight. I never thought about it, because I was constantly transposing the information to apply to my life as a typical modern, contemporary gay Western male. I didn’t think anything about it; you’re so used, as a gay male, to transposing that you don’t even thinking about it." This experience coincided with the proposal that Nutter write a gay male’s self-help book. "It was like floodlights went on over my head," Nutter recollects. "How did I not realize that this was the book I was writing? What was really brilliant was, because I never set out to write a book about awareness, [I avoided the trap of] writing something about it that was artificial, when you have some project you’re trying to do or you’re trying to prove something."

Instead, says Nutter, "I wrote about what I had just gone through, and then tried to shunt it and dissect it, and break it down in a way that would have been the ideal guide book for me. What if there had been a guide book in 2001 when I had been going through these changes, that told me everything I needed to know and broke it all down? What would that book read like? That was [how I approached] The Way Out."

Not that Nutter wrote The Way Out solely for a gay male audience. The title suggests a way out of the closet, certainly, but what sort of closet do we mean when we make that assumption? "The idea that The Way Out is just for gay men is like, say, The Seat of the Soul, or The Four Agreements are just for straight people. That [perception] is because we are still living in the dark ages when it comes to sexuality, and there is [and idea that there’s] an inherent difference between gay people and straight people, and there’s no difference. I think the other big thing about it is - you know how the dominant group in a society projects qualities onto a minority? ’Look how violent Arabs are!’ Right? One of the qualities that gay people are scapegoats for is being in the closet, as though only a gay person could be in the closet - and only about their sexuality. Every human being is deeply closeted about who they truly are. And the level of closetedness so deep, that just as there are gay people who are in the closet so deeply that they truly have no conscious knowledge of it, there’s not a straight person on the planet that can tell me how they got here. ’Because my parents had sex?’ That still doesn’t explain anything, even about your DNA. Where did the energy come from? How did your body design itself? How does your consciousness work? Where does thought come from? What is emotion? None of it! Not a single person can explain even how their heart works, nothing!

Next: Who is John Doe?