James Broughton, Mentor

The very week I met James Broughton, I had complained bitterly to members of my writing group that I had no mentors, that the older writers who had encouraged me when I was in my 20s had died. Then a close friend, with no idea of my sense of loss, invited me to join him for a weekend at the woodsy Port Townsend spirit house inhabited by James Broughton and his partner Joel Singer.

That weekend changed my life. James and I shared instant rapport; I found in him a friend, a mentor, a playmate, a muse, a shamanic clown. I also saw how Joel’s loving devotions enabled James to blossom into the sage he’d become.

Actually, I’d met James’ work before. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York one day, I stumbled upon his films. In an almost-empty theater, I sat enraptured for hours. I watched a California cowboy in “The Pleasure Garden” befuddle the fuddy-duddies who tried to rout out joy, sex, and spontaneity from people in a park. I watched a little boy born from a tree chase a red ball around his neighborhood while a gentle voice resounded:

This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That…
(1968)

And years later I heard him read his poetry—or was it sing, or playfully preach to the choir?—at a Sunday morning service at a Radical Faerie gathering, where men meditate on connections between spirituality and sexuality:

I had learned a lot from his work—lured in by its deceptive simplicity only to be surprised by its resonant and sometimes disturbing complexity. But it was different going to his house, and having him ask me, a recovering journalist, if I would help him write prose. He was writing his autobiography,Coming Unbuttoned. “Only if you help me with poetry,” I said.

We began a series of conversations, visits, revisits. I watched him get up at 5 a.m., when he was in his late 70s, to write poetry, work on his journals, and struggle with prose. He critiqued my work, sometimes very subtly, sometimes not so. Sometimes not at all. He read me his drafts, and we talked about what worked and what didn’t.

It became the mentorship I’d prayed for. James wrote prose like this: “My mother once confessed that giving birth to me was the orgasmic highlight of her life. In fact, she and I got along better in her womb than we ever did after I came out of it.”