When Gerald travelled to India to study yoga, he discovered the books of George Gurdjieff and they changed his life. Gerald takes us through many other life changing moments, including the discovery of his biological children that came about after a few years of donating sperm to a women's clinic in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
When Gerald travelled to India to study yoga, he discovered the books of George Gurdjieff and they changed his life. Gerald takes us through many other life changing moments, including the discovery of his biological children that came about after a few years of donating sperm to a women's clinic in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This is the seventh chapter of a big story that takes up most of Rashomon Season 2. You will hear multiple families telling every side of multiple stories, all having to do with the early days of sperm banks and how it effected the lives of the families that used them. From Season 2, Episode 2 onward, it is important to listen to them in order to get the full story.
Before you listen to this one, listen to:
S2E02: Sharon and Sammy
S2E03: Emily, Cathy and Nancy
S2E04: Cara, Susan and Carol Ann
S2E05: Sammy, Emily and Cara
S2E06: Rebecca, Matthew, Colette and Laura
and
S2E07: The Families Are All Right
Rashomon is produced and hosted by Hillary Rea
Thank you to Gerald Layden and Dorothy Mauer
Music in this episode is by Paul Defiglia
Podcast artwork is by Thom Lessner
Theme music is by Ryan Culinane courtesy of the Free Music Archive
Rashomon is an independent podcast. Become a supporting member of this podcast over on Patreon: https://patreon.com/rashomonpod We have member levels beginning at $1/month
Check out our website: https://rashomonpodcast.com
Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram: @rashomonpod
Please share this podcast episode with a friend and/or subscribe to us, rate and review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!
Gerald [00:00:10] Hi, I'm Gerald, and at present I'm living in this small little community for people 55 and older, We call em Q-tip heads and various other things or the old fart neighborhood, that kind of thing.
Hillary during Interview [00:00:29] So, yeah, take me back however long you feel like beginning as far as how you're connected to the other people in this overarching story.
Gerald [00:00:42] Oh, OK. Well, a long time ago and far, far away.
Hillary [00:00:58] You are listening to Rashomon, a podcast where one family tells every side of the same story, and I'm your host, Hillary Rea. This season we are spending time with more than one family telling every side of more than one story. This is a big story told in chapters, and everything begins with Episode Two of Season Two. But of course, you should also listen to Episode One of Season Two. It's a stand alone story about electrocution and Christmas. Once you've caught up with everything, join me right now for this seventh chapter. This is Gerald.
Hillary [00:01:55] Gerald's long time ago and far, far away began in Connecticut, this is where he grew up. First Bridgeport, then Trumbull. He went to high school at a seminary. And it was just after that that Gerald remembers having what he calls an out of body experience for the first time.
Gerald [00:02:10] I had left the the seminary and I had gone through a very emotional breakdown at that particular point. I didn't know what was going on. And I was lying in my bed and I was crying. And my my father came in and tried to soothe me about tell me it's OK. And that the normal trying to help somebody that they don't really know what's going on, but something's not right and I'm trying to help. And then I went to sleep and that's the first time I went off.
Hillary [00:02:40] Gerald said it felt like he was going up and out of himself and it happened again after Gerald went to grad school for theater. He was at the Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Connecticut, and he was working as a security guard. One night he went to sleep while on the job because the place was all locked up and he could wake up at some point and do the rounds. But the out of body experience happened while he was sleeping,
Gerald [00:03:03] And that was the most vivid one in that I was lying down and I could actually feel something coming out of my body. And it went around looking at what was going on and when I went outside and did the rounds that I was going to do. But I also saw the people or the energies of the people that would normally be working there during the day. So there I saw them and they didn't see me, but but I could see their energies there and I knew who they were so I could put a shape and form to them. And then I felt something go back into my body. And I woke up and I was like, what the hell is that?
Hillary [00:03:46] After grad school, Gerald traveled around working at different theater companies across the country and then he decided he wanted to go overseas.
Gerald [00:03:54] So I went to England and it was in the middle of winter and I was hitch hiking in England and the rain was coming down was really cold. And I went up to Scotland to spend some time there and then went to Ireland. This is all during the time of the troubles that were over there. And I had long hair and I carried a backpack with me. So I was kind of interesting. The police looked at me kind of strange, but it was fine. They didn't know that I was a harmless creature and that I couldn't see them anyway. So...
Hillary [00:04:27] Gerald couldn't see them because he had been trying to cure his eyesight using the Bates method. So when he went over to the UK, he wasn't wearing glasses or contacts, even though he needed them.
Gerald [00:04:38] So things were a bit fuzzy. But at the time I was trying to make my vision better by studying. There was the Bates method for Better Eyesight Without Glasses was the name of the book.
Hillary [00:04:51] William Horatio Bates was a doctor who self published a book in 1920 called Perfect Sight Without Glasses, his techniques to get 20/20 vision centered on visualization and movement.
Gerald [00:05:03] I was reading that and I was doing some of the exercises and seeing if it would work. And at one point my vision was perfectly normal. 20/20 for about half a minute and then it all went away again.
Hillary [00:05:14] Gerald was in France when this happened.
Gerald [00:05:16] I went through France. I brought a book with me and I was doing drawings and things and I just happened to look up from drawing the church on the Mediterranean. And I looked over and I said, wow, I actually was about almost a quarter mile away. I could see people's hair. And before that, they'd have to be about maybe ten feet away before I could.
Hillary [00:05:40] Gerald ended up in France after his travels in the U.K. and in Ireland.
Gerald [00:05:44] I didn't have a visa. I didn't have anything to get there. But I met a guy who was a Frenchman and he said, come with me in my car. And he told the customs people that I was his brother and that I was a little couple of dimes short of a dollar. So they let me in. And then I spent three months in Brittany and then six months down in the Pyrenees staying with a guy who had a house down there.
Hillary [00:06:09] And at some point during his trip, he met some people at a nudist colony.
Gerald [00:06:13] A really huge nudist colony. It was enormous. It had places for camping that another place for RV's. And then there was two hotels there and condominiums there. I mean, thousands of people there. And I met some people from Denmark who were teaching yoga.
Hillary [00:06:28] Gerald had been practicing yoga for a while. He learned asanas in his theater program at the University of Connecticut. But now he wanted to study more. So when he met the yoga teachers from Denmark, he spent time learning with them and ended up going to India to the ashram of their guru.
Gerald [00:06:44] And sort of got sidetracked. I got there and they told me I had to leave. So I said, okay. In fact, I was told that they couldn't teach me anything, any any more than what I already knew. So I said, OK. And then I didn't have any money because I had had money sent there and then sent the money back. So I had to borrow some money to take the train back to Delhi. And then that in Delhi is where I met the people that were studying Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
Hillary [00:07:10] George Gurdjieff was a mystic, a philosopher and a spiritual teacher.
Gerald [00:07:15] He was a Greek Armenian man who had always been a person who wanted to understand what the spirituality was about. And so he traveled to various places, including Egypt and some places up in Kurdistan, Uzbekistan, which were at that point were not part of the Soviet Union because it was pre World War One and then during World War One, he had a group meeting in Moscow and St. Petersburg that was studying his ideas.
Hillary [00:07:46] Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic waking sleep, but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential.
Gerald [00:08:00] His ideas are that we are what he calls three brained beings. We have emotional, intellectual and moving instinctive brains that we know. We can see that because that's what we understand is how we see the world through our brains, through our emotions and through our ability to walk about in it. And there are various ways of working with that. And he calls his way of understanding the world or working with that as the fourth way. So they included the way of what he called the monk, the way of the faqir, and the way the yogi.
Hillary [00:08:36] the yogi stood for the intellectual, the monk for the emotional and the faqir, the physical.
Gerald [00:08:42] He would try to combine all three of those to create something inside of us that would last beyond our death.
Hillary [00:08:49] This concept of the fourth way was illuminated in the book in Search of the Miraculous. This was a book written by PD Ouspensky, one of Gurdjieff's students. Gurdjieff also had some books. He published a trilogy, Meetings with Remarkable Men, Life is Only Real Then When I Am and Gerald's favorite Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Gerald was given these books by the people he met in Delhi. And he still has those copies to this day. Gerald stayed in India for about a year now.
Gerald [00:09:20] Now this was in '79, '79 to '80 when I was over there. And so I came back...
Hillary [00:09:27] Gerald returned to the states and moved to a small town in New Hampshire called Bethlehem.
Gerald [00:09:31] At that point, I had purchased a tofu shop. So I made tofu up there for about three years. And I had a nervous breakdown, kind of. Because I was working so hard, not sleeping. And I just I lost it.
Hillary [00:09:47] This was when Gerald remembers having his third out of body experience similar to the one he had posed seminary and the one at the Shakespeare Theater. And after this, Gerald left the tofu shop. He spent some time with his brother in Vermont and then moved to Boston, where he got a job working in the X-ray department of a hospital.
Gerald [00:10:08] So there was a little room there and I had to take the ones out of there, put them back in the file room and talk to people who asked for X-rays. And all this I was still without my glasses and I said, you know, I think I better put them on because I can't really see all that one. So I started wearing glasses again.
Hillary [00:10:27] With his glasses back on, Gerald started reading about Chinese medicine and acupuncture.
Gerald [00:10:32] And I went to an acupuncturist and he told me to eat meat because I was too yin and I needed some yang. Before that, I have been a complete vegetarian for about 15 years or so. And so I started eating a little bit of meat again. And then I decided, hey, I think I like this, let me go to acupuncture school. So I went to the New England School of Acupuncture in Watertown.
Hillary [00:10:54] About a year into acupuncture school, one of Gerald's classmates asked if he would be interested in being a sperm donor for a women's clinic in Cambridge. She worked there as a midwife.
Gerald [00:11:04] And I said, hmm, can I think about that?
Hillary [00:11:07] Gerald learned that most of the women going to this clinic were lesbians...
Gerald [00:11:11] And needed a donor if they wanted to have children.
Hillary [00:11:14] Gerald wasn't sure if you would ever have children in the traditional way. He felt like his relationships didn't tend to last very long. And at the time he didn't see any prospects.
Gerald [00:11:24] And I'm certainly not biologically able to do it myself. So I wanted to have children, I did. And this seemed to be, unfortunately, the only way it was going to work for me. I was also told that I had to give up all parental rights and stuff like that. I would have nothing to do with the children upbringing that they could contact me once they turned 18. But before that, I was out of the picture completely.
Hillary [00:11:50] Gerald thought about it and then he decided to move forward as a sperm donor.
Gerald [00:11:55] And so we started my transference, as it were.
Hillary [00:12:20] Gerald did all of his sperm donation at home.
Gerald [00:12:23] And it was always in a film canister, so that had to be cleaned out and prepped up and then I would boil water. Once the water was boiled, I shut it off and I put in one of those little compresses, a warm compress things and so nice and warm. But it was not hot. I made sure it was wasn't hot and was warm. And then I wrapped some more blankets or something around it to protect to keep the heat in. And then I would put it in a box and send it over.
Hillary [00:12:50] Gerald didn't have a car, so he made his deliveries to the midwife by bicycle.
Gerald [00:12:54] I would have it stuffed inside my pants and next to my belly to keep it warm. And I would drive over with it. And then I started using a taxi service because it was getting a little too cold. And that didn't work out so well. Every once in a while it was OK, but a couple of times the guy didn't deliver. So I said that's it. So I just kept on ride my bicycle over there and dropping it off and going to work.
Hillary [00:13:19] Gerald doesn't recall the exact number of times that he donated, but it happened over the span of a couple of years.
Gerald [00:13:27] Once I donated, I had to wait weeks before I could do that again to build the semen up. So it was probably let's see maybe 15, 20 times, I guess something like that might be more, but I'm not totally sure how many. But she said at one point I couldn't donate anymore because of the the gene pools, I guess, out there so that I couldn't do it.
Hillary [00:13:55] At the same time that Gerald was in acupuncture school, he had joined an organization called the Fellowship of Friends. He was looking for a Gurdjieff Society. These were groups that had formed after Gurdjieff had passed away and these groups continued on for decades, but Gerald couldn't find any official Gurdjieff Society groups.
Gerald [00:14:14] So I joined another Gurdjieff Ouspensky group called The Fellowship of Friends.
Hillary [00:14:19] The Fellowship of Friends is an organization that was founded by a man named Robert Burton. He started preaching out of a Volkswagen van in Berkeley in the late 1960s and then officially founded the Fellowship in 1970 and then built a following around the world. The fellowship was at its height in the 1980s with close to 2500 members. Gerald had joined the Boston chapter, and then in 1990, he left to go to California to live at Apollo, the fellowship's headquarters. His time there had its ups...
Gerald [00:14:51] The people I enjoyed very much and being out in the in California at the at the center...
Hillary [00:14:57] And it had its downs.
Gerald [00:14:58] Some of the stuff that happened out there, I thought was very negative. I didn't like it. And some of it was was very good, very positive. And working with the system that I was studying at the time.
Hillary [00:15:10] Burton's teachings were based loosely on the fourth way, the philosophies of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. But Burton added his own philosophies as well, like his predictions for doomsday.
Gerald [00:15:22] One of the things that Robert Burton said was that when Armageddon comes or something like that, then the people from the Fellowship of Friends were going to go over with a chatre and take down the chatre stone by stone and rebuild it there out in California. How do you really believe that you could to be serious? You know, it's not possible. First, it's not going to be possible to do it. Secondly, why would you even think that somebody would be able to do something like that or that there would be caravans of camels coming up from the south bringing food and stuff up? I say, this guy's whacked.
Hillary [00:15:58] Gerald said there were a lot of other ideas and concepts separate from the fourth way, including information about body types.
Gerald [00:16:05] And what they called Center of Gravities and what they call features. Some person and they have a power feature. Some person might have a non-existent feature or some people might just be happy all the time. It could be mechanical because that's part of who we are as people in terms of the type in the center of gravity that we may have or could just be something that is thought about and then expressed.
Hillary [00:16:31] There was also a lot of talk in the fellowship about negative emotions.
Gerald [00:16:35] They would do what was called photographs of us. So if we were becoming negative, they would raise their hand in a gesture to point out to us that we were being negative of one of the big things in that Gurdijieff talks about is the non expression of negative emotions.
Hillary [00:16:51] Gurdjieff calls this the first conscious shock.
Gerald [00:16:54] If you try not to express negativity, it takes you out of what would normally be your pattern of behavior. If you find something that is happening that's negative or not good, then if you can stop yourself from being mechanical and being negative towards that, then you have an opportunity to see that and possibly change your behavior.
Hillary [00:17:22] There is a 2008 article from the Appeal Democrat, a regional newspaper that served two counties in California, one of which was the county of the Fellowship of Friends headquarters. This article has a quote from Burton that says, "I experienced a conscious birth like a woman delivering a baby. It came upon me. There was a bolt of lightning smoke and an earthquake. My higher centers, fuzed World six and 12 were there. It lasted for about 15 seconds. The smoke then vanished."
Gerald [00:17:56] Oh, it's definitely a cult, there's no question about it, because he was the main attraction there and everybody had to agree to what his thoughts were on that. One of the people told me that Robert said that if you leave the fellowship, then you go to the back of the of the line in terms of your spiritual development. I says, you got to be kidding me. Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that that's the truth? Give me a break.
Hillary [00:18:33] Even with all of his questioning of Robert Burton's teachings, Gerald grew closer to him.
Gerald [00:18:38] He also was very predatory in his homosexuality. Yeah, so he even had younger than 18 kids that he was doing. So I even I, I did it as well with him. And so I just felt very weird afterwards because I was going back. It was in this house where he was living and we went back to his apartment as a den and then he head back there was a little bedroom and stuff. And I heard him say to another young man that was there, exactly the same thing that he said to me in terms of how he felt about them. And I said, that's it. Done. Somebody saying exactly the same words, then there's something wrong here. And so I just stopped and and I stayed there for some years after that. I had interactions with him from time to time. I would even have dinners and I would serve at the dinners so I could hear some of what he was talking about. And some of it was very good. And some of it was so crazy. I was just I didn't want to. And it came to a point where there was a big to do about the young men that he had been with. And he took me on a little walk around the gardens that were there. And at the end I said, Robert, I'm not here for you. I came here for the work. I you're you're superfluous to me in terms of that.
Hillary [00:20:11] In 1996, in Fellowship of Friends, member named Troy Busby filed a lawsuit alleging that Burton had brainwashed him and had propositioned him for sex while he was a minor. This wasn't Burton's first lawsuit and like the previous one, it was settled out of court. Gerald lived at Apollo for five years. He left in 1995.
Hillary [00:20:47] Ever since donating his sperm, Gerald thought about the possibility that he had biological children.
Gerald [00:20:53] I wouldn't say it was every single day, but it was I would say at least once a week I would have these thoughts about what they were and where they were and how they're doing, what they looked like, what their moms looked like and stuff, because I had absolutely no idea.
Hillary [00:21:09] Gerald didn't know who they were or where they were because each of them had to turn 18 and then be the ones to initiate contact with him.
Gerald [00:21:17] That's the way it was explained to me. So I had no idea. And I just thought, well, maybe I don't know. You don't know if they really want to know me. You know, I didn't know that. I was a little scared that they would never contact me.
Hillary [00:21:41] Gerald returned to the East Coast from California and he got together with his now partner, Dorothy, who he had met a while back at a Fellowship of Friends event. She had been in the Philadelphia chapter. So Gerald settled down in New Jersey with Dorothy and began remodeling houses.
Hillary [00:22:09] Years go by. It's early 2008, and Gerald gets a letter from someone named Sammy, introducing herself as his daughter.
Gerald [00:22:19] Out of the blue. And of course, I was overjoyed. I was living with Dorothy at the time and I was just "Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy!"
Hillary [00:22:27] In her letter, Sammy wrote a bit about herself and her life. So Gerald wrote a letter in return and included a ton of information.
Gerald [00:22:35] What I did was I gave a pretty much of a historical chronological thing of my existence and what I did. And I sent that off with photographs of me as a kid and what I looked like through my life. And what my parents and my brothers looked like and bunch of other photographs I sent to them so that they would have a visual of who I was and what I look like, what the family was like.
Hillary [00:22:58] Gerald says he even wrote about his love of Gurdjieff and his books, and he also included information about the Fellowship of Friends.
Gerald [00:23:06] I told them about the fellowship and the my favorite book, Beelzebubs Tales to his Grandsons. It's it's my favorite book of all time. Each time I read it, I had exactly the same reaction at the end of the book, exactly the same. I just sat and I cried because it's just that that emotion for me. I've read it many, many times. It's part of me.
Hillary [00:23:26] In his letter, Gerald tried to give as much detail about his life that he could, but in a very particular way,
Gerald [00:23:33] I tried very hard to be objective in what I wrote, rather than getting well and superlative, getting hyperbole about it. I just didn't want to do that because that's not who I am. I just wanted to be very matter of fact, this is this is just what happened. In the sense it was good, because I could then write about what occurred in my life. I didn't necessarily write too much about how I felt emotionally about that, but I wanted the facts to be out there so that if we were able to meet that they then we'd be able to see what the emotional content had done in terms of how I progressed as a as a human and how I got to where I am.
Hillary [00:24:16] After Sammy reached out to Gerald, Emily got in touch. And after Emily, Cara and then eventually Matthew and Rebecca. And with each of the children getting in touch, Gerald sent out the letter and the bundle of photographs.
Gerald [00:24:28] I went back a couple of times to revise it, but for the most part, it was pretty much the same. And then because things might have changed in my life, I updated that too. The substance in the majority of it, because it was in the past was the same.
Hillary [00:24:45] Gerald said that all of the letters that he got back from the donor siblings were much more emotional than his.
Gerald [00:24:52] Sometimes I do get very emotional about stuff. Other times I'm somewhat placid. My father was one who didn't talk to us as kids and we didn't really have a whole lot of emotional contact with him. So some of that is based on that aspect of it. But some of it also is based on not wanting to prejudice somebody's attitude towards things that may have happened in my life, some negative things or some positive things that have happened, because that's my reaction to what has gone on. And I didn't want someone else to have to feel that that's what they wanted to feel like too. I wanted to be more objective than that. And I tried to keep a lot of what has gone on in my life that was somewhat negative way because I didn't want them to be thinking about negative stuff, too. I know that there's enough negativity in each of our lives, no matter how we look at it, whether it's raining out or snowing out or whether how am I going to get from point A to point B and things that people might have done to them that might have hurt them. We have enough of that I didn't want to make them want to have that too. Why make somebody else feel bad? If somebody really wants to know, I will gladly open up and tell them everything that I have have had and the goods and the bads.
Hillary [00:26:23] Gerald continued to stay in touch with Sammy and Emily and Cara and their moms and eventually the twins and their moms.
Gerald [00:26:30] And I was just overjoyed. That's the only thing I can say. They say cloud nine. Well, I was like one hundred and thirty two. And it's just way way excited and just happy. And I don't know if I ever got the smile off my face.
Hillary [00:26:44] Gerald and Dorothy and even Gerald's brother and cousin were all able to meet each donor sibling and their families and all spend time together.
Gerald [00:26:52] I could do all kinds of superlatives and things, but I think the gist is there that it's something that has been very fulfilling for me and something that has made me better as a human and knowing who the they are and Sammy and Emily and Cara and Rebecca and Matthew. Just knowing them, knowing who they are and what they're doing with themselves and the all the moms.
Hillary [00:27:17] And for Gerald, knowing them wasn't about seeing who looked like who and how he looked like all of them.
Gerald [00:27:22] I was more interested in who they were. I didn't really care about the physical aspects of them, but I wanted to know who they were as people. And the physical was something that was. And it's there it's part of how we present ourselves to the other creatures on the planet. But it's not our essence. It's who we are inside.
Hillary [00:27:53] Several articles about the Fellowship of Friends talked about Burton's philosophies on family, what role they played for him and what role they should play for the members. He referred to outsiders and family members as "dead" and "food for the moon", and he said "families are biological. They have no meaning." Luckily for Gerald, he wasn't taken by Burton's views on family.
Gerald [00:28:25] I don't know whether I could not experience them other than as part of my family, as an extension of who I am. At the time that I was doing it I think that was pretty much the zenith of of my ability to be a person in the sense of I was very physically healthy. I was doing very well in the in the intellectual part. And there was a bit of my emotional center that wasn't really being fulfilled. And I knew that that was another part of the process of one of the reasons I decided to be a donor. And now I feel that that part is a lot fuller and it's really just wonderful to have the experience and know who they are and see them. It's just outstanding.
Hillary [00:29:28] Rashomon is produced by me, Hillary Rea. Music in this episode is by Paul DeFiglia. Theme music is by Ryan Cullinane, courtesy of the Free Music Archive and podcast artwork is by Thom Lessner. Rashomon is a Patreon supported podcast, become a member for as little as one dollar a month and help us to continue to make new episodes. Patreon members get an exclusive monthly newsletter and access to bonus audio and more. The other way to help out the show is to share your favorite episode with a friend. Word of mouth helps us to reach new ears each and every day. OK, that's it for now. See you in two weeks. Thanks for listening.