Alessandro Rōz
I grew up Catholic in a small town in northern Italy, a twin, and the only gay child in a family of men. My parents were repressed and the messages I received about my own body were confused at best. My wires got crossed early. I learned, the way most of the men I work with learned, that what I wanted was the problem, so I got very good at wanting quietly.
My twenties were spent living most of my erotic life in the shadows. I had enormous access to my creative force and almost no idea what to do with it, so it pointed at my pain instead, and I put myself into a lot of situations where I let people extract from me. I am telling you this because I want you to know I am not describing a territory I have only read about.
What eventually changed it was years of being held by other people, which is also how I learned what it costs when someone holds you badly. I have been in rooms with practitioners I should have been able to trust and come out carrying something stuck in my chest for days. That experience is the reason I am so exacting about how I run a container now.
I apprenticed for years in the Peruvian Amazon, and stayed a long time. What I learned there was what the body already knows, what the unseen will say if you make room for it, and how something is properly ended rather than managed for the rest of your life.
Back in the States I spent three years as Community Director at Sacred Sons, guiding hundreds of men through retreats and trainings. I learned an enormous amount there and I am grateful for it. I also left, because the parts of me that make me good at this work, my queerness, my femininity, my magic, were the parts I kept having to leave outside the door.
So I built the rooms I wanted to be in. With Langston Kahn I co-founded Brotherhood of Lovers, which now leads queer-centred men’s work internationally. Before any of it I worked in film and television, on a queer series that was nominated for an Emmy, which is where I first understood that my life’s work would be putting the hidden thing in front of people until it stops being shameful.
What I am actually good at is this. I teach men to love other men by first teaching them to love all of themselves. I do it by showing them, in the body, that it is safe to feel rage and grief and pleasure, and that they were always worthy of being loved, of being touched, and of living a life that resembles what they actually want.
I am not a therapist and I will not pretend to be one. There are things outside what I do, and when we get near them I will say so and send you toward someone better placed. I am also not finished myself. I still go to my own practitioner when I need to be held at that depth, because I hold a lot of people through a lot of grief and rage and pleasure, and we need it more than we think.
Most of the men I sit with have understood themselves for years and have never once felt safe inside themselves. That is the thing I know how to build.
