Interview: Joseph Kramer at Easton Mountain

Joseph Kramer will be conducting a week-long workshop called “Love’s Embodiment” at Easton Mountain Retreat Center in upstate New York August 19-25. Billed as “a 6-day journey for queer men of Contemplative Erotic Bodywork,” it will be a rare opportunity to study with the legendary founder of the Body Electric School. I will be on staff for the event, assisting Kramer along with Bob Barzan and Tg Phillips.

Last year at this time, on the occasion of its 23^rd anniversary, Easton Mountain hosted a Memorial Day gathering paying tribute to Joseph Kramer for his contributions to LGBTQ+ culture. I had the honor and the joy of conducting a public interview with Kramer at that gathering, and I’m sharing the transcript of that conversation, which has been edited and condensed for the purposes of clarity.

Don Shewey: Joseph is one of the few people I know personally who has a Wikipedia page. It says:

“Joseph Kramer is an American sexologist, filmmaker and somatic sex educator. He's the founder of the Body Electric school, and of the profession of sexological bodywork. Joe was born in St. Louis, Missouri. After finishing high school he entered the Jesuit order where he spent 10 years studying, teaching and preparing to become a Catholic priest. Although he left the Jesuits before ordination, Kramer found his vocation as a teacher and thoroughly embraced the Jesuit motto to be a person for others. His early work focused on weaving together sexuality and spirituality. In 1976, after leaving the Jesuits, Kramer moved to New York City to integrate his call to be a teacher, his Catholicism and his recent identification as a gay man. He became the head of the religion department at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, an elite all girls Catholic school and continued to practice his religion through dignity USA a group for gay Catholics. He was eventually fired from his teaching position at the convent Sacred Heart for being gay. Kramer then moved to Berkeley, California, where he finished his master's of divinity degree, graduated from massage school, and began practicing as a massage therapist. He founded two institutions, the Body Electric School of Massage and Rebirthing and Oakland (approved to train professionals by the State of California in 1984) and Sexological Bodywork in San Francisco (approved as a profession by the State of California in 2003).”

Doing the Body Electric workshop for the first time changed my life. I don't know what my life would look like if I hadn't met Joseph Kramer. Part of our history is that in 1991, we sat down for an interview for an article for The Village Voice. It was a great interview. I liked it so much that I published the complete transcript as an appendix to my new book, Daddy Lover God: a sacred intimate journey.  Today we’re going to have a conversation catching up on what you’ve been thinking about since 1991. I'm going to start with a very general question that you proposed, which is: how has your penis influenced your erotic massage teachings?

Joseph Kramer: In the United States, about 10 to 15% of boys start masturbating a lot as children. I started masturbating about three or four years old. And I masturbated a lot. And I loved it. It wasn't until I was about eight or 10 going to Catholic school that they told me this was a sin, and God hates me if I masturbate. I would go to confession and still masturbate. Masturbation pulled me into my body. It was really fun, even if I was full of guilt. When I started to teach other men erotic massage, I used strokes that I liked. So if you've learned things in Body Electric classes, they were first discovered right here (points to his crotch; laughter).

When I look back on my life, there are three things that helped me to be sane, growing up in a crazy, very rigid Catholic environment. One is that I masturbated a lot, even though I believed the value system that said this is a sin. The second thing is at age 14, I started running.  And I ran almost every day from age 14 to mid-50s. And I ran about an hour a day, maybe 10 miles. Masturbation took me into my body and running brought me into my body. And then when I came out as a gay man, having sex brought me into my body also. I feel being aware of this body has been the basis of my well-being.

DS: Looking back at it now, what was the mission you undertook in creating the Body Electric School? And how do you see its legacy and your legacy in relation to the Body Electric School?

JK: I first received a massage in Berkeley in the mid-‘70s. It was not a professional; a friend gave me a massage. It was a transformative experience. Thos were the two most important hours of my life up to that point. I go, “This is amazing. This is the path I want to follow.” So I went to massage school.

If you know anything about Jesuits, they start schools. So I started a massage school. Having nothing to do with the erotic. So that was my mission. I was a massage monk. Then in 1983-84, AIDS started in the Bay Area. And it was a really panicky and fearful time. By 1985 I had learned that HIV was not transmitted by touch. I loved erotic massage so I started teaching classes of erotic massage for gay men and bisexual men. I knew it was a small thing I could do in San Francisco. I developed a massage for people with life-threatening illness. I also gave half-off to any volunteers who worked in AIDS agencies.

But pretty quickly things started happening in these classes that I didn't understand. People were having spiritual experiences and getting insights from this erotic massage. I didn't set this up and I didn't plan this. I thought I was teaching safe sex, but something else was happening. I knew it was important. And so I just kept pushing.

The next step was into sacred intimacy. In my massage classes, people came together in erotic community. And in these erotic communities, I noticed certain men who stood out. I was the teacher, but they also took on some function of leadership. They glowed, or they just had an energy. In each class there were three or four of them, and I’d go, “Who are these people?” I started asking them, “Do you feel you have some special gift in the area of sex?” Every single person said yes. (tears) But they had no place to give this gift. So I called on my Jesuit background of service and thought, “Let me get these people together and see what we can do.” I came up with the idea that turned into sacred intimate training.

The first one was in 1991. It was by invitation only. I invited all these people that I had talked to, and they all came. And instead of just training sex educators, I realized that sacred intimates were there to help people die also. (weeps) I’m very glad that I cry about this. I hope I never stop crying about it. It was so horrible.

DS: Yes, sexual healing can take many forms, but there was also the sense of being “midwives to the dying.” That was your phrase.

JK:  Yes. So when you talk about my mission, it wasn't planned. A lot of it just it evolved.

DS: When you started the Body Electric School, you took on the huge task of healing the split between sexuality and spirituality in American culture. When you sold Body Electric and created the New School [of Erotic Touch] and Erospirit, were you continuing the same work? Or were you pivoting somehow, in the next chapter after Body Electric?

JK: In my own body, I was integrating and working on my spirituality and my sexuality. But as I left Body Electric and moved on, I stopped thinking that there was a difference. People would say something about sacred sex. And I’d say, what sex isn't sacred? That distinction left me. And it wasn't a conscious thing.

As I was leaving Body Electric, I made this video, Fire on the Mountain. I realized that I could only do a limited amount of teaching in person. But media had an effect on people all over the world. So I decided to do more. Now, I am a klutz. I don't know anything about cameras or lighting. But I knew what I wanted to teach. So I hired people to work with and I sat with them in editing, and we made videos and put things out. So you can be a total idiot in the area of media. I am. I still am. But I put out 100 hours of video, and then I don't have to teach it anymore.

DS: And you started doing that before the internet, before webinars and YouTube and zoom. How has online teaching evolved since then?

JK: It's become way cheaper. The first video I did cost $50,000. I could put out that same video for less than $5000 today. So everything is changed except fees for staff. When I was first learning massage, I got videos of sports massage, all different types of massage, and I learned from them. So that's what got me into it.

DS:  In 2003 you got your PhD. You put a lot of work into analyzing Body Electric and Taoist erotic massage in academic terms. How was that for you?

JK: One of the main influences on my life was meeting Annie Sprinkle in the mid-’80s on a trip to New York when she was a porn star. We were kindred spirits, right from the beginning. We fell in love, and we became lovers. In the ‘90s she said, “Let's get his-and-hers PhDs!” I was reluctant, but she said, “Let's go do it, it’ll be fun together.” So I spent three years at the Institute for Human Sexuality, and they were the most boring unembodied years of my life. When it came time to write my doctoral dissertation, I decided to write about erotic massage. I’ve come to understand that erotic massage is really a fancy name for sexual arousal. When arousal comes up, can we use it in a variety of ways? So that was my question. The answer is yes. Lots of people use this for creativity. And then there's playfulness. Then the biggest thing, I think, is discernment. Sexual arousal awakens a way of consciousness that you allows you to make good decisions. With Body Electric, a lot of times a couple of weeks after a workshop, people would call me and say, “I moved out of the house. I broke up with my lover. I changed my job.” Those are big things. At least 200 people contacted me over many years to say, “I've decided to become an erotic masseur.” That was a big deal to other people. So I’ve learned that erotic massage is a wonderful vehicle for discernment.

DS: When you were studying for the PhD, you applied yourself to the scientific study of arousal, and that's part of how you created sexological body work as a licensed profession in the state of California, if I understand that correctly.

JK: I studied at a California-approved school, and all these classes had no hands-on work. When I got my PhD, I went to the President and said, “You should have a class here in erotic massage.” And he goes, “Ha ha ha,” because new classes had to be approved by the state of California and he assumed it would never fly. But I knew I could make a case for it, and he said okay, submit it to me. He’s the one who said, “Why don’t you call it sexological bodywork?” I consulted different people, including my mentor Jack Morin, who was a psychotherapist (he's now passed on). He said, “If psychotherapy is going to back this, you can't have a sacred intimate do two-way touch and play. It has to be one-way touch.” I had to think about that for a while. But I said “Okay,” so we did that. I don't think that's what persuaded the state of California. At the end I said the World Health Organization -- this is 2003 -- says there are now 20 million people in the world who have HIV. And by the year 2030 it’s going to be 30 million. We need we need to be creative in our sex education. And that’s what got this one bureaucrat to give it the stamp of approval.

DS: You sometimes call what you do and what you teach “orgasmic yoga” or “the yoga of sex.” I wonder how those are the same or different from sacred intimacy, sexological bodywork, or Body Electric.

JK: Mostly I was looking for a better word than “masturbation.” Around 2008, I thought, “How about orgasmic yoga?” I Googled it and at the time there was no such thing. So I started using it. I got pushback from Yoga people about appropriating Yoga. But if you look up “orgasmic yoga” on Google now, there's like 100,000 references. All kinds of people are teaching orgasmic yoga. Names are important. And that one worked.

DS: You've made a pretty thorough study of pornography, and how we interact with it. Speaking of people getting outraged: I love that you've created something you call “porn yoga.” I wonder what you would say we have to gain from pornography and how it can facilitate one's personal erotic expression.

JK: So I'm a sexologist, and if you’re an educator, you should do some research in your field. You would think sex educators look at a lot of sex, and there are all kinds of sex that they could look at. But there’s this huge thing against porn. When I called it porn yoga, it almost destroyed my teaching. Because people hated this idea. So I've let go of porn yoga. I now call it embodied approaches to porn watching. That's what porn yoga was.

In my mid-50s, I masturbated a lot but I was never much into fantasy. I’m a very kinesthetic person. I really liked the feelings in my body. It wasn't so much about what’s going on up here [pointing to his head]. But I got older, I found myself masturbating more and more to porn. And I noticed that I wasn't paying attention to my body. Porn is created to grab your attention and to arouse you. Well, my attention was grabbed. My attention was in the porn. It wasn't on me.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I started standing up to watch porn, and I started moving. At the same time, Fleshlights came on the market, and I bought one and tied it onto my massage table. And I was watching porn, fucking the Fleshlight, and I go, “Oh my god!” This felt great! This is getting my attention while I’m using the porn. I found there were a lot of people who were watching porn, and they were forgetting their bodies. So I created some great practices you can do that really work. You can look at pornyoga.com, it'll still take you there.

DS: I remember years ago, when you just started thinking about porn, one of the first things I learned from you is the idea of positioning yourself so that your dick was between your eyes and the screen. So you're including your own body visually that way. Is there more to say about that?

JK: Well, one of the things I recommend for people watching porn is, every few minutes, to turn away, or stop for five breaths and notice your body. Notice what's going on, and then go back to the porn after five breaths. I call it the pendulum. It feels better when your whole body is aroused than when you’re just watching porn. I didn't create this so that people would stop watching porn, but to encourage people to use porn to get a little bit high and then spend way more time with their own body.

DS: Those are two key things that I've learned from you, Joe. Combining erotic energy with breath was completely life-changing to me. And it’s such a simple idea. And the other simple idea was: when you're watching porn, stand up! Until you said it, I'd never thought it.

JK: I also want to say that I have discovered the beauty of Zoom. I have buddies that I breathe with and stretch with and do embodiment practices with that I wouldn’t otherwise have a way to connect with. I know other people who masturbate with their friends on Zoom – in expansive ways, or just regular jerk-off ways. There’s now technology that allows you to create community that can be quite wonderful. I have spent 3000 hours on Zoom in the last three years. Every day I practice for half an hour with somebody, I do consultations,  I teach classes. Zoom has won me over.

DS: Thanks, Joseph. Let’s take a breath!

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For more information and/or to register for “Love’s Embodiment with Joseph Kramer” at Easton Mountain, go here.