It is one of the warmest afternoons in the Castro this past October. On Hartford Street, a gray cement staircase leads to a below-street level room and it is quiet and there is a faint smell of incense. A strong ray of sunlight shines through the open door onto the wooden floor and behind a center shrine. Buckley, a big black household cat, is the only one making sounds in the room. Buckley walks past the 30 pairs of shoes near the entrance, then makes his way into the room, past the men whose eyes are closed. They sit with erect posture on 3x3 foot dark-blue mats lined against the walls.

Buckley has been the household cat since the opening of the Hartford Street Zen Center. Some say he is a reincarnation of Issan Dorsey, the first abbot of the center. Today the Gay Men’s Buddhist Sangha is holding “Everyday Dharma." GMBS is a community group that meets in different locations regularly for meditation and discussion.

Buckley walks past men who are seated on three rows of chairs. Then he makes his way past Lar Bryer, who today, gelled the top of his short, salt and pepper hair. Bryer’s eyeglasses hang on his navy-blue shirt and beads, the same color as his sweater, wrap around his fingers.

Bryer has creases on his face that run from the outer corners of his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. In many angles, he resembles Richard Gere. And often, when engaged in personal, abstract and philosophical dicussion his life and his personal path of Buddhism, his deep-set pair of blue eyes go off into a distance.

“It feels wonderful. There is a real feeling of brotherhood,” said Bryer about the group. “Sangha means community and that is the sense about it.”

It is within the community’s sharing of personal experiences that Bryer finds the answers to questions that resonate in his life.

A few days later the Sangha is meeting in a living room of an Edwardian home in the Castro. 53-year-old Bryer is leading an evening book study. The wind blows through the window bringing with it the sound of busses and cars and people. There are about ten men here tonight.

For the next hour, self-reflections from the book’s passages unveil topics of health, relationships, pity, death, suffering, and the Iraq war.

These topics and self-reflections flow from one man’s voice to another. Some men have their fingers on cheeks or chins. They take turns listening intently, sharing, debating, and laughing at each other’s perceptions and observations of the world.

The group’s discussion peaks with laughter and gradually settles. Bryer tells the group that he is still stuck on the topic of “fear of death.” He takes a moment. Then he shares with them that for many evenings after GMBS meetings, he would exit the West Oakland BART station with immense fear.

It may be natural instinct that Bryer’s shoulders tense and pull forward; that his keys are clutched and ready in his hand; that his eyes sweep around him as he walks briskly away from the well-lit train station and into the dark parking lot.

Bryer explains how deep this fear of death reaches, or rather, how his practice of the Buddhist principle of impermanence eases a suffering he experiences because of this fear of death.

Impermanence is something he looks at every morning in the mirror.

In 1987, a misdiagnosis of Chiron’s Disease prompted the removal of his large intestine. He needed blood transfusion after the surgery. At the same time, many people around him were “dropping like flies” from HIV.

Bryer’s blood transfusion was contaminated with HIV.

Then in 1999, he was again diagnosed with Chiron’s disease – this time for real.

These mounting conditions put his practice as a psychiatrist, his “purpose in society” to a screeching halt.

“At some point in this (Buddhist) practice for me, I took a look at this fear and thought you know, I am most certainly going to die, someplace, sometime. There is no question about it,” Bryer says to the men back at the GMBS book study group. “What makes me feel that here and now would be so much worse than forty years from now in a hospital bed?”

With this realization, Bryer says he is more mindful of his surroundings and its characters. He finds comfort and ease with a sense of death that goes beyond time and place, rather than suffer with a fear of death- of not living for the time that he is alive.

Here and now.

Back on Hartford Street, on the warmer than usual Sunday, the men are settling in upstairs after their meditation. It’s break-time. They form in groups and scatter about, sitting on the couches in the living room, standing around the dining room, or eating snacks and drinking tea in the kitchen. It is as if they all know each other, even though there are many new guests.

A trip around the room during break reveals conversations such as, “I often thought about becoming a monk,” or, “The brownies are good. It has peanut butter in it.” The break-time circles split to form new circles with different conversations such as a trip to Asia, or how one learned about the sangha, or an invitation to a group dinner.

A gong signals the end of break and Albert Kaba, a medium-framed man, whose left brow points slightly upward, calls everyone back to the room downstairs. The men are still engaged in conversations, some in laughter, as they return to their mats or seats. They introduce themselves by first name then direct their attention to the scheduled speaker.

Through speakers, meditation and discussion groups, the Sangha draws men together into a community. The GMBS website lists gay men’s Buddhist groups in major cities, but that leaves many who live in between, out of a group. For Albert Kaba, 57, this is his sixth year with GMBS. He sees hundreds of members join their main online Yahoo group.

“We have about 600 members worldwide. We hear this all the time, just how grateful they feel, how lucky they feel, when they found a group like ours. That they have nothing like it anywhere else,” says Kaba.

On a Thursday evening walk toward the Castro MUNI Station after Dharma Book Study, Bryer shares what it feels like to be a part of Gay Men’s Buddhist Sangha.

“It feels like home.”