CarnalNation

I still remember a conversation I had with my boss Sonja Blaze a dozen years ago when I served as a manager at the house of domination Arena/Blaze. While discussing the polyamorous relationship she once had with her former husband and a live-in boyfriend she suddenly, fervently exclaimed, “I mean, I can do monogamy, but, like, what’s the point?” I wanted to jump up and hug her. With no-nonsense simplicity Mistress Blaze had taken the thoughts right out of my brain, defined my sexual credo to a T.

So as someone who has never desired nor even understood the appeal of monogamy in the first place (and who spent nearly six enlightening and loving years as the personal slave to a married, gay-for-pay hustler, the first year of which I chronicled in my own memoir Under My Master's Wings), and who has yet to discover my own sexual hang-ups, perhaps I’m the wrong critic to review The Workshop, Jamie Morgan’s documentary that chronicles a 10-day sexual seminar in the woods outside of San Francisco led by a British spiritual guru named Paul Lowe. While participants are shown the way to enlightenment via getting naked and fucking like rabbits, it’s nevertheless a brutal course for Morgan and his fellow polyamorous newbies, filled with conflicts about body image and fidelity, the playfulness giving way to tears of pain, and proclamations of feeling “vulnerable.” Yes, as someone who would answer the question, “Wanna go to an orgy?” with “Sure, if there’s gonna be bodybuilding strippers there, preferably Latino,” I guess I’m just too shallow to relate to all these emotional “issues.” What’s with all the bitching and moaning? I wondered. I wanted to scream at the screen, “It’s only sex, people! Get over yourselves!”

For there’s a load of egocentricity inherent in the embarrassment the workshop participants feel (Morgan even worries narcissistically to his own lens that his penis might appear too small). And that’s the point. It’s what allows the Dennis Hopper-like Paul Lowe to make a career out of stripping his followers’ bodies (literally, the participants introduce themselves by getting naked) and minds (endless group “sharing sessions” go along with the orgies). Lowe wants to demystify sex, take away its importance as a controlling factor in people’s lives—yet he only ends up transferring the importance from the act itself to himself, as the “enlightened” have a habit of returning to the sex guru cult-like again and again.

So who is this man Lowe? What’s his past? How long has he been leading these workshops? How did they start? And why is this free spirit the only one who’s always clothed? (Not to mention, why the heck did he even allow his workshop to be filmed?) These crucial questions are never remotely touched upon by Morgan, as the director prefers to keep his camera mostly on the endless, soap-opera superficial drama of his fellow Brits Maddy and Laurel (best friends torn apart reality-TV-style when Maddy’s American boyfriend Ryan—yoga instructor to the stars!—decides he wants to screw Laurel) and—yes!—himself as Morgan phones his French girlfriend Sophie to admit his infidelity. (Which made me recall John Waters’s exasperated admonition to all those bears moved to confess to their parents in intimate detail their gay subculture lifestyle: “Don’t do that!”)

Which also happens to be the appropriate response to unsafe sex. For the other sticky question left lingering in the air is, where are the condoms? Morgan never films people actually copulating, yet his sidestepping of sexual protection speaks volumes to Lowe’s equally tactful avoidance of responsibility. Lowe preaches absolute freedom and no boundaries, but neglects to address the uncomfortable truth that actions have consequences—and that every person is a unique individual with his own set of limits, interacting with another unique individual who also has his own set of limits. In other words, boundaries are healthy to some extent; everyone must figure out for himself where he wants to draw the line. Swingers manage to have happy relationships not because they have “no boundaries,” but because they’ve negotiated healthy ones; having no sexual hang-ups is positively not the same as having no sexual boundaries!

“I don’t know whether I can be vulnerable in front of the camera ‘cause I’ve always hid behind it,” Morgan says in the first of many addresses to his own lens (the monotony of this first-person bellyaching broken up only by predictably straightforward interviews and cheesy “tricks” like capturing sunlight’s distortion on a lens while discussing aliens, or jump cutting through an audience of eager listeners as Lowe grandly pontificates, heavy metal music playing triumphantly on the soundtrack). That Morgan, by his very own admission, was once a 15-minutes-of-fame pop star known as Jamie J. Morgan in the 80s—even treats us to the footage!—makes his confessional dubious at best. But I suppose that’s no more disingenuous than a seminar full of self-proclaimed “vulnerable” people happily mugging for Morgan’s lens. “As soon as you think you withdraw from life—you’re in your head,” one participant explains. I guess for those on this particular path to enlightenment (mostly white and middle-class, save for the sole black guy, the first to be forced to strip for the crowd) ‘tis better to let Lowe do the thinking instead.