RFD 188 Winter 2021

Number 188 Winter 2021 • $11.95

PASSING THE TORCH

RFD 188 Winter 2021 1

Issue 189 / Spring 2022

GROWING, GLEANING, GIVING

RFD has a legacy of reflecting on queer’s experience with growing food, the land and reclaiming life skills. So it’s no surprise that in this era of reevaluating everything a number of readers are asking about our rural roots, queer farming, re-centering post-COVID and how to reconnect with each other in a changed world where some of us decided to return to a rural lifestyle or reshaped how we source our food. Many of our first decade had articles about sustainability, queer farming while recently we’ve done issues on queering the diet #185, “wilding” #161, queer sustainability #143 and rural gay life #124 but you can find this topics scattered throughout our pages.

So with that in mind we are asking our readers to write in about rural queer life and how it has changed since RFD’s inception in 1974. We are hoping to explore ways of how isolation, networking, skill sharing and creating a wider community has shifted or stayed the same since RFD last did a major issue on rural gay life.

We’d really like to hear about GLBTQ farmers, people shaping a life without the 2 RFD 188 Winter 2021

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electric grid, living closer to the land and how it’s been shaped by the current events, climate change, or cultural shifts. We have heard from a number of people who also want to reach out looking to make connections with other GLBTQ friendly farmers to network for finding farm hands, setting up small cooperatives and creating ways to share skills and ideas.

We are also aware of a blossoming of women, people of color and transgendered people are helping to add to the conversation about queer farming, “back to the land” and self-reliance. We welcome input from these communities. We welcome submissions from everyone who is interested in queers in rural spaces as well as living off the land as farmers, gardeners and localvores.

Please free to share this call with friends and anywhere you believe it may reach someone who may be interested. We also welcome resource information about groups, networks and coops that fit into this call so we can provide a resource guide for our readers.

Photograph: Dick Mitchell

Submission Deadline: January 21, 2022 www.rfdmag.org/upload

Relight, Forget, Dream Vol 48 No 2 #188 Winter 2021

Between the Lines In this issue we asked our readers to reflect on “passing the torch.”

We’re happy to share the various approaches people brought to the topic. Some reflected upon the relationship to the past, to a form of continuity through “elders,” myriad forms of mentoring and role modeling while keeping things real by trying to ride the fine line of evolving and maintaining a balance of traditions. Some shared passing the torch as a reflection of personal struggle as the queer community shifted and changed. Some chose to reflect upon the recognition of the spirit of others in creating a lineage outside of childbirth, a magical tendril to our queer selves. Lastly, we have a reflection on how someone’s religious life was eventually forced to be realigned to confront oppression and alight a new path to the spirit.

In other parts of the issue we have a number of poems as well as a introduction to several poets and their work. We also share insights into the struggle of LGBTQI people in Uganda after the passage of several oppressive laws and how that community is being resilient and defiant in the face of homophobia and transphobia.

Another essay explores the alchemy of the anus, delving into the archetypes and imagery to reclaim the queer anus.

A long time Faerie shares his recollections of the Third National Gathering in New Mexico in 1981, sharing several photos of that early gathering.

We hope everyone enjoys the holiday season as it approaches and we hope you’ll consider supporting RFD as part of your giving during this time, your support, ideas and subscriptions help keep RFD alive! We pray everyone is safe, prepared for the season ahead and still vigilant in the face of COVID-19.

From a cold, raining weekend in Vermont turned sunny…

—the RFD Collective

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Submission Deadlines Spring—January 21, 2022 Summer—April 21, 2022 See inside covers for themes and specifics.

On the Covers

Front: "Man Imagines" by Richard Vyse

Production

Managing Editor: Bambi Gauthier Production Editor: Matt Bucy

For advertising, subscriptions, back issues and other information visit www.rfdmag.org. To read online visit www.issuu.com/rfmag.

RFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative lifestyles. We foster community building and networking, explore the diverse expressions of our sexuality, care for the environment, Radical Faerie consciousness, and nature-centered spirituality, and share experiences of our lives. RFD is produced by volunteers. We welcome your participation.

The business and general production are coordinated by a collective.

Features and entire issues are prepared by different groups in various places.

RFD (ISSN# 0149-709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302.

Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA

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01035-0302. Non-profit tax exempt #62-1723644, a function of RFD Press with office of registration at 231 Ten Penny Rd., Woodbury, TN 37190.

RFD Cover Price: $11.95. A regular subscription is the least expensive way to receive it four times a year. First class mailed issues will be forwarded.

Others will not. Send address changes to submissions@rfdmag.org or to our Hadley, MA address. Copyright © RFD Press. The records required by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and associated with respect to this magazine (and all graphic material associated therewith on which this label appears) are kept by the custodian of records at the following location: RFD Press, 85 N Main St, Ste 200, White River Junction, VT 05001.

Visual Contributors Inside This Issue

Images or pieces not directly associated with an article.

Diego Vela. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Dean Hoy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Dudgrick Bevins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Richard Vyse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover, 26, 42 Wave. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Know Thyself/Becoming by Diego Vela.

CONTENTS

I Want To Believe In Faeries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Justin Elizabeth Sayre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Passing the Torch—My Teachers and What They Taught Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Covelo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Keeping Faerie Fresh. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ☉R△CLE and Mountaine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 The Rise, Fall, and Transformation of My Gay Community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Les K. Wright aka Dragonfly. . . . . . . . . . . . 18 De-Expurgating Whitman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William Demaree. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 The Blessings of Our Elders —Is Pressed Into Our Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew Elias Ramer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Timmy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lee Spruell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Notes from the Front . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hammer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Benediction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Glory Cumbow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Wrestling with Demons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andre Le Mont Wilson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 A Poem in Five Panels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dudgrick Bevins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 When Clare’s Not Singing.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our Little Pony. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Anus as Archetype: A Cryptogram for the Next Generation of Queer Wizards. . . Frater Guaiferius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Poetic Legacies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Franklin Abbott. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Joy Rags and Prayer Flags. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philip Hare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Poems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gavin Dillard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 SAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken Anderson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Lip-Synch For Your Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kate Meyer-Currey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Under Poplars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark A. Murphy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Death at the Door. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steven Schwei. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Spiritwood: The Third National Faerie Gathering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bob Henry (Smiley). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 St. John the Divine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dudgrick R Bevins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 In Memory of William Townsend Stewart. . . Jesse Oliver (aka Echo). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 In Memory of David Thorstad. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allen Young. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

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I Want To Believe In Faeries

by Justin Elizabeth Sayre

A

s I begin my journey into what has been called, “elder-hood,” I strangely find myself rebelling like a teenager. Wanting something truer, more honest, more sincere, than what has come before.

I find myself wanting to talk about the truth of the moment and doing all I can to change it. It seems very punk, and I’m very alright with that.

So that is why I have decided to write to you all.

My Faeries, my people, who I found almost twelve years ago, with a random weekend trip to Vermont; rented tent in hand with no idea how to set it up. I was searching for a place to finally embrace the queer spirit I knew dwelt inside me. My experience with the Faeries since that first weekend to the present has been one of overarching joy, filled equally with turmoil and bliss. I am very proud to call myself a Radical Faerie, and since I’ve legally changed my middle name to my Faerie name, I may be a lifer.

But as a dear friend always reminds me, “Every gathering is half joy, half trauma,” and over my twelve years of gatherings, I can attest that this statement fully.

Things come up when we gather, when extend ourselves past what the straight world has deemed comfortable and safe, to a place more adventurous and intimate, more queer.

I have had moments of genuine unbridled wonder at Sanctuaries, in any Fae space for that matter, even when that space was someone’s brilliantly decorated living room. The Radical Faeries and the spaces we create have forever changed the course of my life.

While I could write endlessly of the joys being a Faerie has brought me, I feel to just speak solely of 4

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that elation, would be shirking my role as an elder.

I’d much rather tell the truth, which lies somewhere in-between.

It is my firm belief that we, as the Fae, however we choose to define ourselves, are at a critical point in our experiment of living and communing together, and I believe this point has come about because we have lost our sense of belief. There’s the old joke that you can ask three Faeries what they are, and get seventeen different answers, so I’m not surprised by this problem. But I believe we have lost a sense of what it is to commune, to come together, and what coming together, as Fae, is meant to do.

Perhaps this perspective comes from the fact that for the last two years we’ve been unable to commune at all. We’ve all had time away with our thoughts and our souls to contemplate what sort of world we would be returning to.

In this reemergence, I see an opportunity to reset and reassess. So that when we do come together again, we can join hands in a new, vibrant, and deeper understanding of why we are on the land, why we call ourselves Faeries, and what is the work we set out to do?

First, I think we must look at our beginnings to know from where we’ve come. For many of you, the history of the Faeries seems locked in a beautiful box of drag. Pieces are occasionally pulled; colorful stories that get thrown about at random, boas of the lives lived and loved, sparkling adventures had and enjoyed, the most amazing dinners and performances that all came before your time, and it’s a shame Photograph courtesy of the author.

you missed them, but that’s time for you. Snippets, but never the whole. Here is what I know.

The Radical Faeries, as I have learned from so many elders, began as a response to the hedonistic 1970s, when at the end of the era, sex was a bit more transactional, and there was less of a sense of community. Harry Hay along with his partner John Burnside, and Don Kilhefner, organized the first Faerie gathering in 1979 in Arizona. From a few people I know who attended the gathering, there were no substances allowed at this first gathering.

Even caffeine was outlawed. It was an alternative to the world of bars and clubs and bathhouses, where many felt like we were beginning to see ourselves as just bodies without souls. The invention of the Faeries came from a need to hold space for one another where we could finally touch on the spirit and get close to understanding that spark that makes us unique as queer people. I say queer people, but the first gathering was solely for men, a segregation that’s anathema to me now, but understanding the divides amongst the LGBTQ community at that time, it seems like a short-sighted remnant of a very different time.

After that first gathering, the Faeries began to look for land to create Sanctuary spaces. But what none could foresee the approaching plague. I must speak of AIDS when speaking of our history, because for those of us who were alive during its ravages, even as children, the scars of this momentous and horrible time can never be denied. So many in our community lost countless friends and lovers to this terrible disease. So many stood up and fought an ineffectual and inactive government that would rather see a bunch of queers dead than treat us with basic dignity. In discussing where we find ourselves today, we cannot skip over or forget the impact AIDS has had and continues to have on our community. We cannot deny the trauma of so many of our elders, who find themselves in a world now satiated by PrEP, where what they went through and all those they lost are so often forgotten. In doing the work of healing we must continue to examine this trauma and help those suffering under its shackles to talk about what they went through and where they find themselves today.

The Faerie movement slowed under the deadly yoke of AIDS, but as queer people began to fight for their lives, so too was there a need to fight for their spirit. I cannot tell you how many elders have told me about finding the Faeries at the fabled 1993 March on Washington. Seeing this rag-tag group of glittering-drum-beating-free-spirits attracted

so many to something outside the grim reality of death and into something hopeful for a bright gay future. These merry makers, these lovers of the irreverent, did what Faeries did, and do so well; they reminded us of the wonder. It was a turning point for many, and a time when people began to rethink their roles in a straight world, and how they as queer people could live. A resurgence happened in the Faerie community then that has continued to grow ever since.

The problem, as I see it, is that we’ve never fully addressed that growth, and have never readdressed the mission or the work, we, as Faeries, set out to do. This is not some dereliction of duty for generations past, indeed the work of language and inclusion is all our work, to do in the present moment. It just often gets pushed aside for more joyful activities. We want the party to continue rolling along without care or credence as to why that party happens, or who gets invited to that party at all. I believe we’ve neglected the continual work that is set out for each of us to do; to make sanctuary, to continue and alter a vision set out for us by the elders, and to bring these new ideas of ourselves, based on the premise that we are spirit, derived from the land and returning to it, to heal and include all those who seek solace and love in our community.

Perhaps I’m being too lofty, but it comes from my sincere belief in the capability of what the Faeries can do, and in my experience, what they have done. I have seen wonders and want more of them.

Perhaps it is best here, that I speak solely to my own experience, rather than in generalities. I don’t want to negate the good, by talking about the overarching “bad,” or shall we rather say, problematic. In this vein of honesty and accountability, I lay myself bare before you, so you may understand my point of view and know why I feel the way I do.

I was born in the early 1980s and raised as a good god-fearing Catholic. I was first called gay as a toddler, and the label never left me for the rest of my childhood. I was treated as a pariah for something, that even as a pre-sexual child, I could understand.

As I grew older, and began to explore my sexuality, I was molested by an older boy at Music Camp, which sent me down a spiral of shame that lasted well into my mid-twenties. I was never or at least have never believed myself, beautiful. Always dealing with weight issues and a personality that leaves most around me thinking of me as a playful eunuch. This was at least who I was when I came to the Faeries. I considered myself a failure as a gay person because I could never see the beauty or love in gay relationRFD 188 Winter 2021 5

ships. It had never been my experience. I was a soft involved with getting one’s rocks off. boy looking for other soft boys to be soft with. After I have seen so many instances of sex going astray reading the writing of Hay, and certainly James or crossing a line in Faerie space. I, myself, was Broughton, I thought the Faeries would be precisely sexually assaulted at my second Faerie gathering; the place for me to be. pulled into a darkened room by a stranger who Almost immediately I “drank the Kool-Aid,” as humped one out on my leg and passed out on top it were, believing in the importance of Sanctuary. I of me. And there are so many stories. I’ve watched a thought subject-subject consciousness was a radical known serial assaulter, luring yet another young and reframing of the entire world, and a guiding prinunsuspecting new Faerie into a sexual play that I ciple for a life well lived. Imagine seeing people, all could see in the frightened eyes of the young person, people around you, as not just others or objects, but they were not prepared for. In this instance, and granting them the same space, respect, and freedom in several others, I’ve played the kindly old auntie. that you allotted yourself. It was this guiding prinGently but firmly pulling this young person away, ciple of equity, that fed something in my soul. These walking them off into greener and safer pastures were my people, finally, my talking about Proust. I kind of gays. For so long don’t want to spoil anyone’s I had seen the LGBTQ time, but the assumption community as the enemy; is that everyone is up for a Actual anarchy is much bouncers all at a club, where non-stop orgy and consent I was not cool enough, cute is carte blanche. The truth is harder work. Anarchy enough, rich enough, smart very different. is about personal enough or any enough you I have seen young people accountability to one could name, to enter. Now, lusted after and passed another. We are free stepping into Faerie space, I around, without any interwas and always am welest in their souls or what from authority, yes, but comed home. brought them to the land. we are not free from I bring up my sexual Watched Faeries whom I’ve each other. If anything, history, not to be overly respected and loved, talk we owe each other more vulnerable, (is there such about spirit and communing a thing?) but to simply say in one breath, then become understanding, more that I was a slow build to sharks circling the waters in listening, and more care. the outpouring of sexuality search new blood.

We are not relying on the in Faerie space. I was not “They’re boys, they know state or some heavenly then, and very often am what they want.” One of not now, a big player in the these friends once told me. rule book to differentiate sexual economy of most I immediately argued from wrong or right, we Faerie gatherings. This is back, “So boys are just are relying on each other. not to say that I’m a prude, simply subjected to their far from it, but merely to sexuality? We can’t nurput into context how I view ture people; we have to use sex as part of the whole them?” of Faerie space. I do think its vital. I think allowFor this I was called a prude and told to butt out. ing people to celebrate and revel in their desires, For this I was also told that I was thinking too desires that have for so long been villainized and much of the outside world of rules, and part of bestigmatized by a larger heterosexual world is reveing a “Radical Faerie,” was adhering to an anarchist latory. However, I think while there’s often such a philosophy. There are no rules, because rules mean push toward sexual freedom and expression, that authority, and authority means hierarchy and hierarat times we forget that not all partners are built chy has patriarchal overtones and aren’t we trying to the same, and not all people have had the best and destroy that anyway? brightest relationships with sex and desire. In our I believe it is this naïve and unthoughtful atpush toward unbridled sexual freedom, we sometitude toward anarchism that continually sets times forget the constant need for consent and that us up for failure. It’s a High School mentality of gentleness, kindness and consideration can all be anarchy, something summed up from a patch from 6

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Hot Topic. Actual anarchy is much harder work.

Anarchy is about personal accountability to one another. We are free from authority, yes, but we are not free from each other. If anything, we owe each other more understanding, more listening, and more care. We are not relying on the state or some heavenly rule book to differentiate from wrong or right, we are relying on each other. We are building a web of consciousness and agreement, strand by strand, person by person, heart by heart, that places all on equal footing and all in the realm of honor. Subject-Subject consciousness is part, indeed, a vital part of that work.

And yet what I have learned in my times with the Faeries, is that for all our radical sentiments, there is a real and genuine fear of rocking the boat. So much is swept under the rug, because people don’t want to upset the magic. Sexual predators are given free reign because they have money, or drugs, or a pool, and little to nothing is said about it. Incidents of violence are chastised perhaps in the moment, but quickly forgotten and forgiven without any real recall, and there that person is again, having yet another performative meltdown in the middle of the gathering, or curing AIDS with magnets.

Now some of this can be understood with the advent of the word, Sanctuary, which as a very wise Faerie recently reminded me. “The lands are called Sanctuary for a reason.” Sanctuaries are places of healing and solace, and who should come to a place of healing but indeed people who need healing. But Healing is work, and part of healing is accountability. There can be no healing without looking at the wound, addressing its needs, and tending to it accordingly. Without this work, we leave these wounds to fester, affecting others and causing more problems.

One of these wounds, perhaps the deepest and most pervasive, is our use of substances. When I think of the first Faerie gathering, and indeed my first Faerie gathering, both were “dry.” The use of substances was kept out of sight and away from the major activities, and I must say, it was a relief.

This doesn’t mean that I am opposed to substances.

Though I no longer drink for personal reasons, but I love an edible, and I never met a bus trip I didn't want to hop on. I have also seen their use get out of hand.

I’ve watch people fall deeper into addictions that changed the beautiful and bright souls I once knew into someone sallow and wounded who I barely recognized. I’ve watched young people ride a high with feverish abandon only to end up four or five days later, wondering what had happened, a shadow of

who they once were. I’ve watched darker and crueler drugs like meth seep into our community and wreak havoc on people already at their tether’s end and in some cases end with their deaths.

We don’t talk about this. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have the words. Perhaps it’s because we’re not equipped to deal with the turmoil of addiction, and when someone falls down that rabbit hole into a personal darkness, perhaps we all of us choose to walk away or ignore it, because we cannot face the fact that only the person in the addiction can end the addiction. Perhaps we feel helpless. Perhaps we don’t have the infrastructure to really help those most vulnerable. Or perhaps as a community faced with so much loss, we find these new losses, too hard to bear.

Or perhaps it’s because we don’t want anyone to tell us the party’s over.

I have seen so many of my lovers and friends struggle with drugs and alcohol in Faerie space. Indeed, I don’t know that I have ever been to a Faerie gathering where drugs and alcohol have not led to some sort of injury or altercation. I have seen freakouts, broken bones and burns, called ambulances, and cleaned up blood, but the root cause of this is never addressed.

So, I ask myself often, what are the purposes of drugs on the land? Are we using these substances to create visions that step outside regular consciousness and dream up new worlds together? Or are we simply anesthetizing ourselves to the work we’d rather not do? And how are we helping the healing of those in the throes of addiction, by either ignoring their use or encouraging it? And for those who abstain, for those in recovery, do we make gathering such a drug-fueled bacchanal that they can feel nothing but exclusion and shame?

I ask these questions without an answer because I know that I alone don’t need to answer these questions. I can’t set down a set of rules or practices. But I know these questions and so many more need to be asked. I know we need to recalibrate our environmental impact on the land, and certainly our waste. I know we need to continually do the work of expanding the population of Faerie space to include woman and trans people, and people of color. I know we need to question and sit with the questions of sexual health and ageism. I know we need to talk about mental health, and what we can do when people are in the throes of a crisis. I know we must be accountable to each other. I know more than anything we need to believe again.

I believe in the magic of being a Radical Faeries.

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Still. Even after seeing all that I have seen. I believe that the work of making and creating sanctuary for queer people can save the world, and we are all in a world in desperate need of saving. We call ourselves an intentional community, but is it not now time to reset our intentions and hold firm to them? Can we continue the work of elders, who we may disagree with, but expand and empower that ideal to handle our present moment? Can we not build a world where we grow more inclusive, more caring, more just and in essence more free?

I want that. In moments of my darkest dealings with the Faeries, I often think of the elders who have touched my life, and of Bee in particular. For those of you who did not have the privilege of meeting Bee in their time, I can tell you unequivocally, you missed out. She was tall and regal and wise creature of wonder, with eyes that even in her eighties glowed with excitement and whimsy. Bee, for me, was one of those great old Fae, whose gentleness

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and care always called me home. Always reminded me of why I came to the land, and why I sought out the Faeries in the first place. I’d come here to build some part of my queer soul, and by building my soul, enabling, and encouraging the souls of others.

It is that work, that precious work, that is, when done well, unmistakable and glorious. I saw it in Bee, as I have seen it in so many others.

I want to be like Bee; in my eighties, sitting on the porch, interested and excited by all the goings on, talking to people I know and meeting others I don’t. Seeing the glorious panoply of queer people coming together to expand their own understandings of humanity, individually and collectively, and knowing that I am part of it, and will be even when I return to this earth that holds us all.

I want that for myself, and I want that for each of you.

I want to believe in Faeries.

And I want to know what Faeries believe.

"Caress Your Warmth Inside" by Dean Hoy. "This self-portrait depicts the caressing of the internal glow, being warm and gentle with the self, enabling queerness to transcend."

Passing the Torch—My Teachers and What They Taught Me

by Covelo

T

he most valuable and useful lessons I have learned in my seventy-three years on this earth I have learned from women.

Anna Halprin—It wasn’t until after college that I found my first truly great teacher and that was Anna Halprin. It was 1970 and she was fresh from forming the first multiracial dance company in the United States, bringing together a group of

all-black and a group of all-white dancers in a collaborative performance called Ceremony of Us. I walked up the long, three-story staircase of her Dancers Workshop on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, a young, blond haired naif. And there she stood, small and very much alive, flanked by a beautiful Semitic man to her right and a voluptuous blond woman to her left. She wondered, “Who is this young man going to go for?” As destiny would have it, I became the godfather of the children of both of them.

The workshop was a three-month intensive meant to teach dancers to be instructors of her method. I had never taken a dance class in my life but she said, “No matter, join us!” And I did. The first thing she did was quote T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Photographs courtesy of the author.

At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is

From that moment forward, in my wiser moments, I would pause and go forward with my life as a dance.

It was twenty-five years before I was to see Anna again, performing at the Joyce Theater with the neo-Butoh dancers Eiko and Koma. After an exquisite dance about the love of an older woman for a younger man, Anna danced a solo piece in which she said, “I first started to dance when I was five and I danced like this” and she danced with the joy and abandon of a child. She danced the phases of her life, from her modern dance roots with Martha Graham to her dancing for social justice to dancing

for healing and for her life and then with the mountains and the ocean and the trees, and finally, “when I’m a hundred and two I will dance like this” and she danced as she did when she was five. Then on her knees and bowing three times she said, “I give thanks to the god of longevity, I give thanks to the god of longevity, I give thanks to the god of longevity”, and left the stage. She passed away this spring just short of her one hundred and first birthday.

Anna taught me, “Know your instrument.

Make certain that each of your vertebrae is alive and in function, and do not work with nature, be nature.”

RFD 188 Winter 2021 9

Starhawk—The first San Francisco Faery Circles held in Arthur Evans’ apartment on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the early 1970s. After attending his lectures on Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, a small group of us sought to learn more about the pre-patriarchal world where faggots were consorts to the Goddess. We had heard of a neo-Wiccan living on Cole Street and we arranged to meet her and learn from her. Now, almost fifty years later, Starhawk is still teaching—direct action, permaculture, goddess-centered paganism and Magical Activism. Our meetings with Starhawk helped us develop the philosophical framework of the San Francisco Radical Faerie family. On and off through the years I reconnected with her. We were arrested together in 1981 at the Diablo Canyon Blockade and Encampment. After a two-day trek through the mountains of the King Ranch, our affinity group, the Wild and Tackies, reached the reactor and performed a magickal ritual. Two days later news broke that the improper placement of supports designed to protect the cooling systems of the two nuclear reactors from earthquakes occurred because a single, transparent blueprint was prepared for both, and someone failed to attach instructions to flip it over. The plant was re-constructed and went online, but no other plant has been completed since.

Starhawk taught me, When creating magic, don’t wish for change in the people who are obstructing progress, rather focus on the long game, envision the world you wish to come into being.

Ana Roy was an artist, poet, mystic, feminist theologian, astrologer and organizer of an indigenous women’s collective in Marfil, Guanajuato, Mexico, and my Fairy Godmother. A bohemian ex-pat who raised two sons in Mexico, she traveled to Nicaragua to document the Sandinista revolution and to Chiapas to attend Encuentros with the Zapatistas.

Her home in Tepoztlán, Morelos, was a pilgrimage destination for seekers of women’s mysteries, antiimperialist politics and magic. She hid her power behind the mask of being the “crazy lady”. When we first met she was with the wife of Charles Horman, the young journalist who was killed by the Pinochet regime when he revealed that the overthrow of the Allende government was coordinated with U.S. ships offshore. At that time Horman was “Missing”, a word which became the title of a film starring Jack Lemon as Horman’s concerned father looking for his disappeared son. Thus began a journey of antiimperialist activism.

10 RFD 188 Winter 2021

When Ana met the generation of gay artist/activists of our San Francisco family of the early 1970s— Michael Bumblebee, Jesse Cox, Martin Worman, Tede Matthews—all of us influenced by the Angels of Light Free Theater Collective, Irving Rosenthal and the Kaliflower Commune, the Human Potential movement, “Gay Consciousness”, the Gender Fuck of the Cockettes and the Feminist, Environmental and Anti-Imperialist movements, Ana, steeped in Jungian psychology, said that for the first time she saw a new archetype. We were neither Animus nor Anima, neither man nor woman, but a wholly new Human Archetype.

Ana Roy taught me, Speak the truth in a way in which it can be heard.

Rosetta Pallini and the Chilean Women of General Agosto Pinochet’s Prisons—In 1975 my San Francisco family at 529 Castro Street, a group of pro-feminist gay men, traveled to Mexico to visit Ana Roy and to participate in the first United Nations International Year of the Woman in Mexico City as “Faggots Against Rape—With A Clenched Fist and a Limp Wrist”. We had created fake press credentials with the old technology of Letraset—Bay Area New Service (BANS)—Ban the Bomb, Ban the Bra, and Unicorn News, a news service that Michael Bumblebee had been with inside the Wounded Knee encampment. We were situated between a booth celebrating “What the Cuban Revolution Means for the Liberation of Women” and a booth of the Australian “Girls”, as they called themselves.

Ironically, as American men we had access. We used that privilege to reserve an auditorium which we handed over to Chilean women who had just been released from Pinochet’s prisons. There they gave their testimonies. I sat next to Hortensia Allende, the wife of the slain President Salvador Allende, both of us with tears in our eyes as we heard of the tortures the women endured. Rosetta Pallini, whom we had befriended earlier in the week, spoke of being raped by a German Shepherd and whipped with copper whips that lacerated her internal organs but left no outside wounds. We went away for the weekend and came back to find that Rosetta had died from the tortures. She left behind an 18-month-old child. In honor of Rosetta, we founded Gay Solidarity with the Chilean Resistance and translated and published a bilingual edition of poems smuggled out of Pinochet’s prison camps. One line has stayed with me forever.

Rosetta taught me, May the darkness be not so dark and may hatred not fill my soul.

Joanna Macy is a Buddhist scholar, a deep ecologist and author of systems thinking. To this day, in her 90s, she is active in the peace, justice and environmental movements. I met her as a participant in her despair and empowerment workshops and we became good friends. On September 11, 2001, when I saw the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapse from my classroom window at Jamaica High, Joanna and Harry Hay were the first phone calls I received when I was finally able to reach home.

Joanna gave me a set of vows: I vow to myself and each of you To commit myself daily to the healing of our world and the welfare of all beings To live on Earth more lightly and less violently in the food, products and energy I consume To draw strength and guidance from the living Earth, the ancestors, the future beings, and my brothers and sisters of all species

To support each other in our work for the world and to ask for help when I feel the need To pursue a daily spiritual practice that clarifies my mind, strengthens my heart, and supports me in observing these vows.

Her despair and empowerment workshops begin in gratitude. They then provide exercises to open up to our caring for the world, allow us to do “tantric flips” to see that the anger we feel is our desire for justice, the emptiness we feel is our capacity to be filled, and so forth. The worst thing that can happen is that we do not care.

Joanna taught me, Base your work in gratitude.

Sister Ardeth Platte—I met Dominican Sister Ardeth Platte at the United Nations when participating member states were developing and adopting the landmark 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, she rolled up her sleeves and said,

Covelo, second from right, representing Code Pink, with Sister Ardeth Platte, second from left, and others. Photograph courtesy of the author.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 11

“I’m an ex-con, I was raised on a farm and I can twirl a chicken by its neck.” She had served four years in federal prison for breaking into a Minuteman nuclear missile site in Colorado and, with Sisters Carol Gilbert and Jackie Hudson, banged

the silos with hammers and made crosses and peace signs with their blood. A Colorado rancher would drive by each day as they began their protest and admonish them. By the end of the action the rancher was saying, “Be careful Hon! Do you want some sandwiches, Love? I hope you get a light sentence, and if you do, don’t do this again!”

Sister Ardeth, the inspiration for the nun in Orange is the New Black, was joy incarnate, with a forever mischievous smile. When I arrived at the 12 RFD 188 Winter 2021

Supreme Court in 2019 as the Court was holding their hearings on whether the LGBTQ community should be included in Title Eight of the Civil Rights Act, there she was with Code Pink. I was with a contingent from Housing Works who had come to do civil disobedience. While I was busy hugging Sisters Ardeth and Carol and taking selfies, my fellow demonstrators had taken to the street and sat down. They were surrounded by DC Police. I quickly left Ardeth and Carol to join the group and a cop stopped me and said, “Sir, if you go in you are going straight to jail because unlike the others, you are crossing a police line.” I went back to Ardeth and told her the situation and she said, “You want to get in there? I live for this stuff!” and sure enough, before you know it there I was with everyone else, sitting on the street with no special arrest.

We won the case.

Sister Ardeth taught me, The female part of my psyche is not glam queen but radical nun. As a woman I am more butch than I am as a man.

Shigeko Sasamori announced when we first met, “You are King Kong. I’m Monkey Queen”. From that moment on, it was a love fest, with all the emotions love can bring. Shigeko was a thirteenyear-old school girl when she looked into the sky on the morning of August 6, 1945 and said, “Look at the pretty plane!” Several seconds later there was a flash and a boom and the rest was darkness.

She lay unconscious on an auditorium floor for several days. When she came to consciousness she repeated her name and address. A neighbor happened by and informed her parents. Years later when Shigeko asked her mother what she looked like, her mother told her that her face looked like burnt toast and was swollen the size of a football. Over a third of her body suffered third degree burns. Norman Cousins, the great American journalist and humanitarian, worked with Shigeko’s church minister, Reverend Tanimoto, to create a program called the Hiroshima Maidens, which brought twenty-five severely burned young women to the US for plastic surgery, a risky new medical procedure. In all, Shigeko has had 30 surgical procedures to regain bodily function— her fingers had been fused together, her chin had been fused to her chest. And now, seventy-six years later, she is winding down from “her mission” to spread the word of peace and forgiveness.

We brought her to New York for ten years as part of our Youth Arts New York Hibakusha Stories initiative, hibakusha being the word for

Upper left photo courtesy of the author. Lower left photo by Dudgrick Bevins.

with whom I share a terrace, had complained about my friend, the friend I met on the steps of Anna Halprin’s studio forty-eight years previous, who had stayed in my apartment while I was gone. He would go out onto the wintry terrace that I share and smoke his hand-rolled cigarettes.

Even though my neighbor never went out on our terrace in the winter and he stayed on my half, she complained. I put a note under her door

A-bomb survivor. When one first meets Shigeko one sees a woman deformed by the scars of that shameful day, and within minutes one only sees radiant beauty. She has told her testimony to tens of thousands of young people, and, like me, they fell in love with her. She often concludes her testimony talking about anger. She would perform an “angry dance”, explaining that when you are angry at someone, don’t take it out on that person, rather punch the air, “like this” and then she would feign a little punching match. And the kids would go wild with joy seeing this small, elderly woman in action. And then she would say, “See? Don’t you feel better? Now you can do a happy dance! We don’t want to hurt one another. We don’t want to kill one another. I love you. I love young people. I don’t want to see you get hurt or killed.”

Shigeko Sasamori and the women who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki taught me the power of resilience.

Betty Croonquist—I don’t ever remember my mother saying a bad word about anybody. I do remember her laughing about one of her friends who married one rich widower after another, but never did I hear her bad mouth someone in anger.

Until her very last days, at the age of ninetyeight, she was surrounded with people who loved her and she regaled us with stories. She was a joy and it was heart wrenching to lose her. She died around 1 a.m. in the morning. I had gone to my sister’s home to sleep; our mom couldn’t let go with us there. I had a flight booked back to New York the next morning and since we had decided in advance to have a memorial celebration a month or so after her passing, I took my flight.

Upon arriving, I had a message to call my apartment’s management company. My neighbor, Photographs courtesy of the author.

asking that in the future she first contact me with any problems so that I could be a better neighbor.

She slipped a note under my door saying that next time she would call her lawyer, the police, the fire department, the coop board and the management company. I slipped a note under her door, “My mother died yesterday.” I wanted to rip her head off. And then I thought, “What would my mother do?” And mom spoke to me, “Oh that crazy lady!

Laugh it off and let it go.” So I did.

My neighbor and I have had a good relation ever since, enriched by applauding essential workers from our shared balcony every night at 7 p.m. during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

My mother taught me, Don’t take the bait.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 13

Keeping Faerie Fresh A conversation between ☉R△CLE and Mountaine

M

ountaine (age 71) has been active in the Short Mountain and other Faerie communities since 1992. ☉R△CLE (age 40) discovered their Faerie tribe in 2017, and is a founder of Camp Unicorn, a community space organized in a large pavilion tent called the Fox Mahal stewarded as a comfortable, weather-protected space for all faeries to gather.

M: I found the Faeries after reading RFD for years, and then friends going to a gathering and saying I would probably like it. It wasn’t because someone told me what the Faeries were or anything like that.

I arrived during a gathering, was only there 48 hours, and it was life-changing—I knew it was my tribe. I never expected… ☉: Are you telling your story or mine?

M: (teehee!) ☉: I knew of the Radical Faeries through neo-pagan groups. My first visit to a gathering was for about three days, and it also was life-changing. I felt like I finally found people that were like me but were also in no ways like me. And where I could really be my unique self. It was remarkable, a taste of what I wanted to manifest in my own life and what I wanted to manifest around me. So much of radical Faerie is this explosion into the unexpected. So passing the torch is very different from how it’s been in the past for societies and cultures, where there’s a bunch of rites and practices that must be preserved.

With the Faeries, it’s anti-dogmatic, anti-tradition, this ever-evolving energy. It’s not all about teaching the way it’s been, it’s about teaching how to find authentic truth within yourself and connect outwards with it to this Faerie mesh that’s constantly moving over time. How do you transfer that energy to new generations, respectfully, rather than forcing dogma of “this is how it has to be” and potentially stifling their own expansiveness?

M: It’s a paradox for sure. I’d say there are definitely some rites and traditions that are worth keeping. I’ll name three for us to play with. Heart circles, drum circles, and connection with the Land. A heart circle can provide a great way to stop one’s usual activity, 14 RFD 188 Winter 2021

and really delve into hearing each other’s feelings.

At Short Mountain, for many years now the numbers who attend heart circles have been dwindling.

It doesn’t make the circles any less rich. And the gatherings have grown so big (at least before the pandemic got us to shut them down)—we couldn’t circle with five hundred people. But when gatherings were small, heart circles were considered the “heart of the gathering”. And around the world, at many gatherings there are heart circles every day, and everybody goes, and love the format of deep sharing. ☉: Lately, in Chicago, we’ve been having potlucks, but haven’t yet had any heart circles. I’m nervous about it, because I’ve hosted potlucks and they’re going really well, and I haven’t wanted to scare people. For some people I know, heart circles can be very anxiety-inducing. In a culture that can be so aggressive and hard, sitting in a circle and opening up to share may not be the vibe that everyone wants. They’re still opening up to share, around the dinner table, or sitting on the couch. It happens in its own way. But this conversation will probably get me to announce a heart circle for our next potluck!

(Send requests for info to me@shivian.com.)

M: I’ve led many, and they don’t have to be intimidating at all. I wrote an article about them for RFD in issue 141 and the book The Fire In The Moonlight in 2015, and would gladly send anyone a copy. (Send requests to mountaine@gmail.com.) ☉: I want to read that. I’ve seen their power and majesty and beauty and the amazing experience they can provide, really powerful beautiful magic.

So I would absolutely like to find ways to ensure that they continue. For me, being a part of the Faerie community has helped me self-actualize in a way that I never thought possible, by seeing other people who are in that process, and support it with each other. How can that legacy be passed on? These aspects of Faeries are so unquantifiable and often difficult to describe—I wonder how those energies can be preserved and vivified by a transference of knowledge and energy between generations.

M: Yeah. I hope that part of how it happens is through connection to the land, to the natural surroundings in the woods. For people in cities, like yourself, that’s a special opportunity. For me, a lot of what happens at a gathering is about being close to the land, going to sleep with the song of the whippoorwills, and being more in touch with nature. How is that for you, and the others at Camp Unicorn where you hang out? Is there a real love of being on that land, and tuning into the spirit of that land in some form? ☉: I love this question—very witchy! Connection to the land for me has always been something I’ve really cherished, in a spiritual sense but also reconnecting to not being around bricks and cubes and straight lines and white walls. It’s a powerful ancestral connection, not only to the way our species lived until very recently, just being in nature and not in cities, but also to the queer ancestral energy of all of the people who have been on that land before me, both still alive and who have passed, people who are memorialized and those who aren’t, the animals that have been tended there. There’s such an interesting and powerful beauty in arriving on the land. I always call it unclenching (some call it “land”ing)—opening myself up to the land energies, and feeling it connect back and welcome me home, just as much

☉R△CLE, photograph courtesy of the authors.

as greeting you or Daz’l or anyone else I see as I’m arriving. For others in the Unicorn group, there’s definitely a lot of love that comes from being on that land and on that specific little patch that we love so much. We all hang out in a big tent that’s on the ground. It’s so awesome to sit inside and see nature move through both the trees and the people.

M: So of the three “traditions” I mentioned, it sounds like that one—the land—is really being kept alive for you. What about the third—drum circles? They have been integral to my gatherings since I started going. And here’s a bit of history: In 1994 Harry Hay and his partner John Burnside came to Beltaine at Short Mountain, after attending the Stonewall 25 celebrations in New York. One evening, they were horrified to discover that there was a dance party with electronic music. To them, a gathering was supposed to be all-natural, and the music was to be made “naturally”. Even though they were getting old, and traveling across the country from California was difficult, they told me they were so ruffled by the electronics that they probably wouldn’t be coming back. And that repulsion was about only one dance party in a ten-day gathering! ☉: Personally I like to attend a bonfire or two. But now that music-making has evolved into so many

RFD 188 Winter 2021 15

other forms, and taking music with you has become so easily accessible and cheap… It still carries the same message it used to—people bringing their music into the woods. So how do you respect the space for acoustic, but not negate the space for other expressions of culture, which can include music that’s produced electronically? I’ve never seen electronic space that wants to be aggressive toward acoustic—there just happens to be conflict because there aren’t enough spaces for people to be. The acoustic almost needs a protective shell around it, to protect against external irritations that just happen to be coming out of a speaker instead of someone’s hand drums.

M: For some people these are very challenging issues, on both sides. People whose music is digital want to share that music, and be with that music. ☉: Instead of “bringing” music to a gathering, let’s speak of “producing” music at a gathering. You’re producing music with a drum or guitar as well. You’re producing the same emotions with whatever instrument you bring that you love, which I think can be a synthesizer or DJ booth.

I think the frustration some people experience comes from a challenge of perspective, because they see electronic music as somehow inherently different from hand-produced music, that it can’t be produced in the same ways with love and affection and care for a community like a hand instrument can. It almost becomes a propaganda campaign that maybe digital music is something we should restrict, because people are missing out on this unique thing you can only get from acoustic instruments. And I don’t resonate with that. I love acoustic instruments, but I don’t feel there’s something uniquely valuable about their existence as a 16 RFD 188 Winter 2021

music-producing thing, to necessitate that divide.

It’s foreign to people who didn’t grow up around it, and I respect that—it’s just a different way to produce music in a space. And I also respect “shit, I can’t hear my drums because there’s music playing over there”—I get that too. Sound barriers need to be in place in some way, or a respect for acoustic space needs to be acknowledged at a community level. Or a respectful distance away.

Part of me wonders whether the musical expression has transformed before us, and are we undervaluing what we can have now. It’s just a different flavor; it’s evolved into a new thing. And how do you excite people authentically, richly, about participating in a drum circle, when they have no experience with it, no friends to do it with at home, and no venue for it?

There’s a need for a large body of young people who are excited about those instruments to do that. I don’t see that happening—maybe because of the easy access to digital music.

M: And for me there is something extraspecial about being around the bonfire when drummers are listening to each other, responding spontaneously to the beats of others and the moves of the dancers. I do hope we can foster the appreciation of that ancient tribal communion. Workshops for beginning drummers have helped a lot when they’ve happened. ☉: I’m curious as you watch the Faeries evolve and change, what wisdom you might have about any patterns. Faerie space seems to be becoming more expansive and inclusive and weird and exotic, which can be terrifying!

M: Let’s talk about the increasing emphasis in the world and the country and among our communiMountaine, photograph courtesy of the authors.

ties on including people of color (POC), and greater gender diversity. I hear many sad stories of people feeling marginalized in Faerie space. I hope there’s been meaningful progress, including recent efforts to provide space at gatherings for POC-only space and trans/femme-only space. But fostering the healing of all this is a huge challenge—building healthy interaction among diverse people, and making gatherings a space where that’s really heightened. In the Summer 2021 RFD there’s an article about the recent Generate gathering in California that’s very inspiring—there was a group of people of color who facilitated the gathering, and it was empowering for everyone. At Short Mountain gatherings I’ve attended, women have always been a part of the scene, and in the early days most of them were comfortable with being what was called “fag hags”—finding their tribe among what we would now call cis men. But “gay men” were definitely predominant, and most of them (us) were white. ☉: So how do you deal with the fact that you joined a boys’ club intentionally, and through no malicious intent of anyone, it’s evolved naturally into something very different. I respect how insanely challenging that must be for a lot of old Faeries, because maybe they don’t feel they can connect to other gay male groups as well as with the Faeries, but the Faeries have continued to change under them!

M: The boys’ club phrase is a very interesting and provocative one. I learned in the 1970s, watching the women’s movement in its early phases, that it was really important for them to separate and have their own scene, where they could feel safe. And they would not have felt safe with any men around!

Looking through history, as groups found their own identities by having separate space, that served for people to come back out again into a more mixed space, and to keep the strength and cohesion that had been developed. This has been an argument for years in some places—about having separate gatherings for men too! And there have been trans people and women who became sanctuary residents or long-term visitors, been shocked at how badly they were mistreated, and who have left in bitter disappointment. ☉: Hopefully we’ll grow and do better! But it’s such a pervasive force that various groups feel the need to pull back.

of music, and ways of sharing other than heart circle. A lot of that is about age diversity. You and I are from very different generations. I feel you as a soul sibling, and that’s always been something that’s doesn’t need to be bound by generation. ☉: One of the many things I love about the Faeries is I keep finding more and more things to love! I keep discovering unexpected connections to people and places and moments. I’ve been in groups where that kind of magical connection never really happened—like in the boy scouts, or singing groups, or covens. I had a good bond with my coven that came pretty close, but not like this reverberating echo of love that keeps changing, so unexpected and so beautiful.

M: Yes! And in these times, another challenge to embracing diversity is that there are people who aren’t vaccinated. I see that your Chicago potlucks, along with many other social gathering events, ask the unvaccinated to stay away while the pandemic is still an issue. I totally support that. But the nature of vaccination protocols is making some people feel like pariahs, and being treated like pariahs. Obviously anyone who isn’t vaccinated by now has some reason, at least in their heads if not in their bodies.

Wow—they’re human too, and it’s sad. ☉: Yeah, and we’re using proven science in an effort to keep everyone safe. So I feel we have to lean on that science. When the pandemic ends come on over! But I understand it can be very difficult for those who choose not to be vaccinated, and crave being with others. Constant change for sure!

M: I hope this article, and this RFD issue, spurs more conversation about these and other topics.

Let’s keep Faerie fresh! ☉: For sure! And I keep fantasizing about “Faerie magic” and creating some sort of pseudo-curriculum / set of workshops / rituals to help others tap into intention setting, listening to our hearts, working with community to find a harmonic vision, and manifesting change, both as individuals and as a collective. And through it all, keeping it really open, rather than becoming dogmatic or creating boundaries.

M: Count me in !

M: So it’s similar to the inclusion of different kinds

RFD 188 Winter 2021 17

The Rise, Fall, and Transformation of My Gay Community

by Les K. Wright aka Dragonfly

L

ike nearly every gay man of my generation, I grew up knowing I was different. From nearly age I knew I was attracted to males. Growing up in the country I found other boys to have sex with, so I knew I was not the only one. My best friend was also my secret lover. I lived in fear, intuitively knowing that this was something I needed to keep secret.

Coming out at the age of nineteen in 1972 as a college student in Albany, NY meant finding my way to the local gay bars and cruising Washington Park. To be allowed to enter the Central Arms in those days, you had to ring the doorbell. Someone would look through the peephole and, if you passed inspection, you would be let in. Gay life was mostly a shadowy, furtive and danger-fraught proposition.

In 1972 the first waves of Gay Liberation were beginning to touch the shores of SUNY Albany. I saw banners in the Campus Center announcing the presence of the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance, and Gay Maoists. The first time I saw two men kiss openly (in the middle of the Campus Center) I was shocked. I found the men’s rooms on campus where I had sex and stumbled across a corner in the campus library where gay men cruised. I was too afraid to go to any of the gay activist meetings. I felt it was too risky for me. The notion of “community” did not yet exist.

O

ver the next year and a half, I found the courage to come out in a more public way. I had spent my freshman year in a heterosexual relationship, and it was clear that I had no sexual interest in women. Having grown up with the stereotype that homosexual men wore dresses, called each other “she,” lisped, and had pinched faces caused by sucking cock, I decided that if that was what I would become I would prefer that over staying in the closet.

In my senior year I went to Würzburg on a study abroad program. Having a fresh start in a new place where nobody knew me, I arrived completely out of the closet. I let everyone in my dorm know it. I quickly found my way to the two local gay bars. And as soon as I saw a poster in the student cafeteria advertising WüHSt [Würzburger homosexuelle Studenten], the university gay activist group, I joined immediately.

18 RFD 188 Winter 2021

It was in WüHSt that I met other gay men on a social basis and got to know them as people, and not just as sex partners. I started reading everything I could find about homosexuality—liberationist activist manifestos and analyses, social science research, literature by and about homosexuals. This would serve as my self-education into what I hoped would become a formal field of Gay and Lesbian Studies, following the model of nascent Black Studies and Puerto Rican Studies I had witnessed in Albany. The schwulenemanzipatorische Bewegung (gay liberation movement) in West Germany took some of their cues from what was happening in the United States, modified to make sense in German society. Rosa von Praunheim’s 1971 documentary, It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, led to the formation of the first gay activist groups and was the beginning of the modern gay liberation movement in West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Most importantly, I met another gay man who became my life partner, or as we called it in the 1970s, my lover (in English) or fester Freund [steady friend] (in German).

W

hen I transferred to the University of Tübingen in 1975—to stay together with my lover and continue my doctoral program, I immediately joined the IHT (Initiativgruppe Homosexualität Tübingen). Here I made friends among like-minded gay men, and aligned myself with the gay left. My partner taught in the American Studies department, and through him we established a circle of (mostly) straight friends. Between the two circles we created a safe and comfortable extended family and networked deeply into both the academic and local communities. I also replied to personal ads in the West German magazines.

I was drawn to gay men who had interesting ideas and alternative lifestyles, but was sexually attracted mainly to masculine gay men, in particular to leather men and hairy, bearded . Larry Townsend’s The Leatherman’s Handbook became my introduction into this subculture. I made contacts in Munich and came out into the leather scene there.

As my involvement in gay activism grew deeper,

I subscribed to all the gay publications in West Germany and the United States. I had read Carl Wittman’s “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto” in Albany. I came back to it again in Tübingen, reading it as if for the first time. I translated it into German for a discussion circle at the iht. In translating I came up against a couple of problems—there was no wordfor-word way to translate “coming out.” In the 1970s the expression used was “sich zu seiner Homosexualität öffentlich bekennen”—“to publicly acknowledge one’s homosexuality.” Wittman wrote about gay urban ghettos, hailing San Francisco as [the] “refugee camp for homosexuals,” where (among other places) gays could establish a “free territory” and establish the institutions that make what would later be called gay community. “Ghetto” is the same word in German and in English. By the time I moved to Tübingen this notion of “community” had begun to take root in the United States. Translating “gay community” into German also proved problematic. The literal translation of “community” is “Gemeinschaft.” This word still carried uncomfortable association with the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community,” which the Nazis defined as a racially pure and socially hierarchical and mystical unity, the collective racial soul uniting all Germans. Faced with the impossibility of translating I followed the practice of simply saying “community.” Over time the terms “das Coming-Out” and “die Gay-Community” became German words. The social milieus in the 1970s were die Subkultur and die schwule Szene—basically, bars, saunas, public toilets, and other cruising sites (like train stations). Gay coffeehouses, gay bookstores, gay centers, and other social gay spaces were yet to come.

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he siren call to San Francisco grew stronger and stronger in me. Coverage of the “experiment in gay community” in San Francisco in the gay press was ubiquitous. The gay exodus from the hippie world of the Haight-Ashbury over the hill to Eureka Valley had transformed that Irish working-class neighborhood into the Castro. A new gay neighborhood. Wittman’s gay ghetto rapidly transformed into Gay Mecca. Here the spirit of recent gay liberation was now a non-stop party on Castro Street. In San Francisco, even more so than in other urban gay ghettos, there was a whole, physical gay neighborhood, much like an ethnic immigrant neighborhood, replete with social and community institutions needed for new immigrants to start over. Here the sexual subculture was completely out in the open.

My growing desire to go live this experiment, fed

initially by following the American gay media, was fanned by my correspondence with Carl Wittman, who then living in Wolf Creek, Oregon. Then, a leather master I had had an affair with in Munich returned to the Castro and mailed me weekly installments of a local column called “Tales of the City,” dramatizing daily gay life there. Tad’s enticements sold me on moving to live with him in Oz. Life for my circle of friends and myself in Tübingen would not last forever—we would all eventually move on, leaving for careers elsewhere. So, I abandoned my doctoral studies to participate in this West Coast experiment.

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orothy’s landing in Oz was bumpy. Hitting the ground knocked the wind out of her and inadvertently killed a witch. But when she stepped outdoors her black-and-white world was gloriously magically in Technicolor. Mysterious and wonderous creatures that could exist only in Oz greeted her. Her life became very different.

For me landing in gay Oz in 1979 was so much more than a cliché. I had come home. Here gay men were in the majority. Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s first openly gay city supervisor, had been assassinated just a year before, so a new somberness and seriousness also pervaded the gay community.

But I was like a kid let loose in a candy shop.

With wild abandon I dove into the around-the-clock party of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Friendships were plentiful and came easily. Sex was available everywhere. It was still possible to live in San Francisco on a low-paying survival job. So many came to San Francisco to be gay.

When I left Germany, I was descending into alcoholism. My hedonistic lifestyle in San Francisco rapidly brought me to the gates of alcoholic hell.

Boyfriends came and went quickly. The constant stream of tricks became sexual junk food. I moved six times in my first year there. My drinking and drugging led to increasingly violent behavior made me an unwelcome roommate or tenant.

I saw that I would die soon if I did not do something about my drinking. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I didn’t want to live, and I didn’t want to die. And then, during one of my daily calls to Suicide Prevention, the woman on the other end of the phone suggested I go to Eighteenth Street Services, an outpatient recovery program in the Castro for gay men and get help.

I went. I joined a group of gay guys getting sober together. We were required to attend two 12-Step meetings a week along with our weekly sessions at RFD 188 Winter 2021 19

Eighteenth Street Services. I stayed sober through six months at Eighteenth Street Services and I was grounded in the gay 12-Step fellowship.

My world opened up again. I had become ghettoized, venturing out of the Castro mostly to go to work downtown. I had occasionally walked over the hill to the Haight-Ashbury (still pretty gay) or spent a weekend on the Russian River in Guerneville, which some of us called Castro Street North. (I ran into all the same guys I saw in the Castro.) The recovery fellowship offered plenty of friends and sober activities. (Outsiders observed, with no irony, that the gay fellowship was the largest private gay social club in San Francisco.)

I joined a gay-friendly church, a sober leather club, started a gay stamp collectors club, went linedancing at a South of Market bar, went to gay plays and cabarets. My intellectual curiosity came back—I got involved with the San Francisco Gay History Project. I helped create the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Historical Society. I got out into the country on a regular basis. I worked with other recovering gay alcoholics. My sexual and romantic life grew richer than ever. I was immersed in gay community as never before. My new involvements brought me lesbian and trans friends. And I resolved to return to grad school.

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erkeley was a whole other kettle of fish, nothing like Tübingen or San Francisco. While UC Berkeley was considered the most progressive university in the United States and the city of Berkeley rivalling San Francisco’s progressive reputation, my experiences there fell short of such expectations.

I returned to the study of Comparative Literature, again doing most of my coursework in German and Russian. When I had started out on this academic path as an undergraduate in 1971, a German and Russian specialist was highly employable. Both languages were important for American relations during the Cold War. And there were few candidates on the job market. I expected to easily land an appointment in a German and Russian department at a small liberal arts college.

I was completely and unapologetically out on campus. When I applied to Berkeley, I met with the Comp Lit department chair, an openly gay man who lived in the Castro. He would become my mentor, cluing me into what was happening behind the scenes. I first taught part-time in the German Department. My mentor clued me in that the supervisor of the German-language instruction program had a serious problem with me teaching as an openly gay 20 RFD 188 Winter 2021

instructor. He mounted a covert campaign to get me fired. This eventually came to nothing.

I pursued my focus on gay and lesbian authors and literature in my classes (as I had done in Tübingen). Gay faculty members in the Comparative Literature, German, Russian, and English departments (a few of them academic “superstars”) all warned me to stay away from gay-focused studies until after I had graduated and found tenure somewhere. Publishing on gay themes would destroy any chance of a career in academe, according to them. No faculty member in Tübingen had had expressed such misgivings, nor had anyone ever come after me for being openly gay in the classrooms I had taught in there. When I protested the homophobic tittering in an advanced seminar on the German poet Stefan George the professor invited me to spend a full three-hour class meeting educating the class on homosexuality.

My gay Berkeley professors led “respectable” academic lives by day at the university Most of them lived in San Francisco, though. And I occasionally ran across one or another of them in San Francisco gay bars, in gay bath houses, at private orgies, and at South of Market S&M dungeons. When Michel Foucault guest-taught at Berkeley, I would attend Professor Foucault’s lectures on campus and then observe Michel playing at San Francisco S&M parties. I never discovered the gay community in Berkeley (if there was one), only seeing Berkeley gay men cone to San Francisco to “be gay.”

By the time I completed my doctoral program, the Cold War had ended, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Soviet Union had collapsed. Suddenly German and Russian were no longer needed, and my skills were as useful as a cooper’s. My pursuit of gay and lesbian literature had been my Plan B. By the time I had completed my dissertation on gay literature, Gay and Lesbian Studies had been replaced with Queer Studies, grounded in queer theory, which rejected so much of what traditional literary studies was grounded in. While I had kept abreast of developments in postmodernism and poststructuralism, I was unprepared for what appeared to me as the overnight emergence of Queer Studies in Berkeley’s English Department. My approach to gay lo gay literature was now hopelessly antiquated, and my job prospects were grim indeed.

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eanwhile, back in San Francisco a mysterious and frightening disease was spreading through the gay community. GRID, or “gay-related immunodeficiency disease,” (later called AIDS)

was killing gay men at an ever-increasing rate and seemed on the way off killing every infected gay man. As fear of death and death spread further, the Castro became a ghost town. We feared AIDS would destroy the gay community.

I assumed I was infected from the start. I became involved in one community-based AIDS education and support group after another. I found myself the sole survivor of one support group after another.

Gay San Francisco became another world, ignored by mainstream media and society. We were on our own. Members of the gay community had to rely on each other and our own resources to survive.

When Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart was published, I taught it in my Berkeley classes. My students lived only fifteen miles away and knew nothing about what was happening across the Bay. What I was doing was apparently remarkable enough that Time magazine sent a reporter and photographer to cover my class.

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he closer I got to finishing my PhD the more unstable my life became. I had exhausted funding sources and went on welfare. When I could no longer cover rent for my Berkeley apartment, an ex-lover in the Castro let me move back in with him. Shortly after that he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and died. His ex-wife showed up and kicked me out. I turned to gay friends in San Francisco, but they turned their backs on me. When I crossed paths on the street with one of these friends, he spilled the beans—I was being avoided because they were afraid I might infect them with my “bad luck,” a fate, apparently, worse than AIDS. My boyfriend at that time had just dumped me for another guy. My best friend in London, learning of my struggle to avoid homelessness, intervened, asking a friend of his in San Francisco if he could offer me shelter. He agreed. And with his support I was able to avoid ending up living on the street. For the next year I would spend mornings at the AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital taking experimental treatments for an AIDS-related condition and afternoons writing my dissertation. My gay community had turned its back on me, but I was able to survive with the help of my gay family.

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y health stabilized and, after two years of waiting for death that never came, I was ready to go back to work. Another member of my gay family urged me to apply to Mount Ida College in Boston for a position in the English Department.

She saw to it that my application made it to the top

of the pile. That got me an interview, where I was able to sell myself to them. Once again, my gay family helped me.

In 1993 I moved to Boston and focused on my new teaching career. I also sought to make a hoe for myself in Boston’s gay community. As an outsider in Boston and a gay man over forty, making community proved challenging. I joined an AIDS support group (at the AIDS Action Committee), which folded two months later due to lack of interest. I attended gay 12-step meetings for a year and a half, making no friends there. (I was never called on to share at a meeting.)

In my last days in San Francisco some guys, who self-identified as bears, started gathering in social and sexual circles. I found connection here and began to build a new bear community. When I moved to Boston I sought out the local bear club and went to monthly New England Bear bar nights.

Connecting here was also difficult. At bar nights I found myself apologizing to other newcomers for the unfriendliness of the club’s leaders, even as I too was at the receiving end of that unfriendliness.

I met another new arrival to Boston at a bear bar night. He had just moved from Maine and was starting his career as a software engineer. We spoke with each other all evening in German. Soon, we started dating, quickly became boyfriends, and after only six months ended up living together. Realizing neither of us was likely to make a home in Boston’s gay community, we moved out to the exurbs and bought a house. We joined other, rural bear clubs in New England. We visited my partner’s circle of gay friends in rural Maine. We were frequent houseguests of an old friend of mine, who had relocated from San Francisco to Provincetown, and connected with the year-rounder gay community there. I did volunteer work at the Men’s Resource Center in Amherst in rural western Massachusetts and made friends with gay men there. My gay community was no longer in one geographical location but spread out all over New England.

When Vermont legalized gay civil unions, my boyfriend and I got married. I found myself living what is called the American Dream: I had a professional career. I owned a house in the suburbs. I married my husband. Carl Wittman had argued that “Traditional marriage is a rotten, oppressive institution” and that we need to “stop mimicking straights.”

My gay liberationist ideals had slipped away.

The security of the American Dream eventually proved illusory. I found Mount Ida a homophobic, toxic work environment. Friends thought it was a RFD 188 Winter 2021 21

conservative Christian college. I was taken aback, as Boston has a reputation for being liberal. It was a family-owned propriety college, which the family mismanaged, using it as a private money machine.

It became clear I could not spend the rest of my working life here, and I began applying for positions at other colleges. When those efforts bore no fruit, I resolved to leave, with or without a job, and eventually decided to go back to San Francisco. My husband was happy to go, easily finding work at Apple in the Silicon Valley.

the concept of gay community had expanded to embrace lesbian, bisexual, and transpeople, as they became more visible and demanded inclusion in a community they felt had ignored or shunned them.

My concept of community expanded in the abstract, though I found myself still living among gay men.

When queer identity emerged, I embraced this identity for myself, as I struggled to learn what this meant. Whereas “gay” had once been used as the inclusive term, this had proven limiting; “queer’ was much more explicit.

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n San Francisco an old friend sublet us his rentcontrolled apartment. Finding work was an almost unsurmountable problem for me—college teaching openings were nearly non-existent and potential employers for every other line of work informed me I was “overqualified and underexperienced.”

It had been twelve years since I had last lived in San Francisco. So much had changed. I found myself having to go back to the end of the line and start over as if I were a new arrival. The Castro was much changed. Most of my friends had been forced out of the city due to the ever-escalating cost of living. I went back to gay 12-step meetings, now filled with new faces. The Bears of San Francisco club was in the process of disbanding. I joined a gay-friendly church and a gay Buddhist fellowship. My San Francisco gay community was barely recognizable.

As Thomas Wolfe had written, “You can never go home again.”

Given my discovery and experience of rural gay community in New England, when I got back to the Bay Area, I turned to the internet to look for any rural gay organizations in northern California. There I found the Billy Community, a “heart-centered gay men’s community,” based in Sonoma County.

The Billys hold monthly potlucks in several places around northern California and hold Billy Gatherings several times a year, usually at Saratoga, “Billy space,” located in the hills outside Ukiah. At the center of all Billy gatherings is the heart circle.

I learned that in the nine months between the time my husband had moved to the Bay Area and the time when I arrived (having stayed in Boston to fulfill my teaching contract), he had gotten involved with another man. By the time I arrived in San Francisco he had already moved on. I divorced him. My career was gone, home ownership was gone, my marriage was over. So much for the American Dream.

During these years of starting over repeatedly, seeking connection in gay men’s communities, 22 RFD 188 Winter 2021

hen everything in San Francisco for me collapsed, the only alternative to homelessness I had was to move back in with my sister in my childhood home in rural central New York. Here I hoped to have one more fresh start. To make a long, tedious, boring, and very depressing story short, suffice it to say that after seven years of my best good-faith efforts, I could gain no traction, either in gay, LGBT, or queer community or mainstream society.

The pandemic shutdown in 2020 disconnected me from the daily practice of putting myself into social situations where I felt like I was invisible, and which amplified my sense of social isolation amplified. But the shutdown proved a blessing in disguise.

I was now able to reconnect with gay community and my gay family via zoom. I began participating in weekly Billy heart circles. I deepened some long-time friendships and renewed others that had faded over time and distance. Instead of my focus being sucked into my futile effort locally, I raised my sights started looking out at the larger world again.

As I went down this path, my sense of social isolation and sense of purposelessness dissipated. I also took myself out of retirement. (I find retirement, for myself, to be a pointless waste of time.)

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e older gay male, and all LGBT and queer, folk face numerous problems, some in common with all elder Americans, some unique to our being queer. Ageism pervades American society. Combined with lingering homophobia it I even worse for queer Americans. Ageism in the gay male world may be the harshest of all. The 2020 US census shows that 13.1% of LGBT adults live in a household where there is sometimes or often not enough food to eat (compared to 7.2% of the non-LGBT population). And 36.6% of us live in a household that has difficulty paying for usual household expenses (compared to 26.1% of the non-LGBT population). The poverty rate is even higher among

elderly LGBT folks. Social isolation is a common problem among older Americans and, of course, even more prevalent among older LGBT people.

Within the queer community individuals continue to discriminate against each other on the basis of age, body, disability, ethnicity, faith, HIV status (as a long-term AIDS survivor I am disheartened by how widespread AIDS-phobia remains in the gay male community, despite public statements to the contrary), and perceived social class. The divide between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow in 21st society.

British sociologist Eleanor Formby has argued that the umbrella concepts of LGBT community and queer community are terms that express a unity not reflected in such diverse social groups, sometimes at odds with each other. She asserts that “LGBT people” is a much more accurate phrase. I have lived through the rise and fall of the gay (male) community my generation built. I now find community with my gay family (which is more accurately my “chosen family,” as this includes lesbian, trans, and heterosexual friends) and with my beloved Billy brothers.

As the physical gay community spaces of my generation have disappeared, I am mystified as to

how social media and other cyberspaces function successfully in their place: so many of the dynamics that take place face-to-face do not happen here. As an old gay man I am usually invisible I these new spaces, and have been unable to learn how social interaction works here. I find myself left out of today’s queer community. Some of my generation have recreated that gay community in places like Fort Lauderdale and Palm Springs. The AIDS epidemic killed so much of my generation that the tradition of passing our experience and wisdom to the next generation could not happen. And as young queer folk have grown up in a world my generation made possible, taking for granted what we never believed would come to pass in our lifetime, they (you) have so many more possibilities, more resources, and seemingly less need for LGBT or queer community But I wonder about that. As we have been mainstreamed it is unclear to me what role a sexual or minority community will play, or whether it will be necessary at all.

So, I end with two open questions: Where do we go from here? And, how can we best dialog across the generations?

"Organ Garden: Lungs" by Dudgrick Bevins. Linen paper, sharpie, vintage gay pulp paperbacks, black paper, Heavy Metal magazine scraps, silver ink.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 23

De-Expurgating Whitman

by William Demaree

Modern Poetry, edited by Untermeyer: Plain title, ungainly name, both arrayed in good gray font, upright and serifed, Stark against the leaf-green cover, dark and unadorned, signifying weight and erudition.

And I, green student, majoring in myth and naivete.

Rumpled and bespectacled Felix Stefanile—poet and teacher, Brooklyn-born, Neapolitan-proud, brash as Broadway— Bustles in, cradling still-damp dittoed pages, Each sheet leaving a purple ghost on the underside of the one above.

These are, he says, Whitman’s homoerotic lines, Excised and replaced with puritanical ellipses bridging across the page, Supplanting salacious words lest reading something makes one something.

I struggle to read the violet letters, faint and dappled.

I lean my head into the page, the ink’s aroma sweet and pungent like decaying lilacs.

In time, the purple flecks—faint pointillist letters—coalesce Into words, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me, then images, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, Then meaning, And reached till you felt my beard and reached till you held my feet.

And finally recognition.

His words a mirror, beautiful but unwanted.

In the pit of my stomach, truth settles, a lump of coal in a cold furnace; A flush of shame suffuses my chest and groin.

I know, as I must have always known: I am a son of Whitman, Something to be expurgated or read furtively on damp transient pages.

I embrace that myth, that shame as my own.

That was, it seems, eons ago: many lives, many lies have passed.

My own steel-grey beard melting into white, Now I know: in those words, seeds were sown, Seeds growing slowly, slowly transforming fallow fields, becoming verdant and vibrant.

Now, I am long, lustrous, rebellious lines, unrestrained by rhyme or reason, Now, I run riot in bars, among the fragile, among the fearless, among the green and grey.

Now, I treasure his words like an heirloom—a handkerchief, a pocket watch, a rumpled hat— A reminder that the grass beneath my feet is the grass beneath his feet.

I AM a son of Whitman.

24 RFD 188 Winter 2021

The Blessings of Our Elders—Is Pressed Into Our Cells

by Andrew Elias Ramer Dear you, No matter your current age, I invite you to stop, place your hands on your beating heart, and say— I am an embodied elder, come to help to heal the world.

Because we come from all other peoples, we queer folk (whatever you call us) have the unique ability to reach cross all borders and boundaries, which gives us the amazing capacity to unite all of humanity in a way that we’ve never been united before. This message is at the heart of all of my books and teachings, and it’s at the heart of the work I feel called by Goddess to do for the rest of my life.

I never expected to be an elder of any kind.

When I was born (my parents liked to tell me) the nurses in the hospital wrapped me in a yellow blanket. It was 1951, when the only choices were blue and pink. My parents said the nurses wrapped me in yellow because I was such a beautiful baby, but all I heard was: yellow = chicken = scared = not a real boy. I remember sitting under a tree during recess with the other misfits in my elementary school class, two boys and one girl, watching the other boys play baseball, the other girls jump rope, to songs like, “Two in together, girls. How do you like the weather, girls?” (I hated the weather.)

I heard the word homosexual for the first time in seventh grade, went home and looked it up in the dictionary. “The unnatural attraction of…..” it began. Until then I thought I was the only boy who liked other boys, and all at once I knew I wasn’t just odd—but unnatural. This was externalized when a 9th grade teacher called me a fairy in front of the class, taken up by other boys who taunted me with it for the next few weeks. But along with that feeling of being cursed—came a succession of blessings.

An English teacher (Miss not Mrs.) with short gray hair, mannishly dressed, singled me out by giving me special writing assignments on subjects that I loved—Greek mythology, ancient Egypt. And an art teacher invited me and three other boys to join an afterschool art class. Many years later I ran into him and his lover (in the 70s we didn’t say partner or husband) in front of a Broadway theatre. I wasn’t sure if he’d remember me when I went up to thank

him, but he did, told me he’d recognized me as a gay boy—and created the class just to support me.

But fearing for his job, afraid to ever be alone with any boy in school, he invited those other boys to join too. Yellow. Scared. An outsider, outlier. And blessed by those first two elders.

I came out as gay in Berkeley during my senior year in college. My first kiss with another man happened in the basement of his parents’ home in South San Francisco. Dear Richard Krawetz, long gone from AIDS. Having finally come out, I thought that at last I would fit in—but the San Francisco gay world he introduced me to was one of dance clubs, cigarettes, drinking, drugs, loud music, and having multiple sex partners, none of which appealed to me. I didn’t think I could dance, and was repeatedly shamed by his friends for my monogamous inclinations. “What’s wrong with you? He’s not your possession. You’re so disgustingly hetero!”

One evening Richard dragged me off to his favorite club, upstairs somewhere on Polk Street. (The heart of gay San Francisco was still there and not yet in the Castro.) I stood by a wall watching him dancing with sexy other men, scared that he might hook up with one of them later. From out of the crowd an older man—by older I mean in his forties— came up to me, said, “Honey, all fags can dance,” grabbed my hand, dragged me onto the dance floor, wrapped himself around me, and pressed the beat of the blasting music into my body. Soon I found myself moving as I hadn’t moved since I was a boy, and when he pushed me toward Richard at the end of the song—I merged into his arms and into the next song, and I’ve been dancing ever since. That wonderful man, never seen again, was another elder, conveying instant embodied wisdom.

Place your hands upon your heart again and ask yourself— Who were my elders? What did they awaken in me that I brought with me into this life? And what did they teach me?

We all belong to long chains of elders, going back to the beginning of human history, and queer or not queer, they helped to shape you to be the elder you RFD 188 Winter 2021 25

are now, whatever your current age. If you know them and they’re still embodied, thank them. And if you don’t know them, or if they’re no longer embodied, thank them.

After Richard and I broke up I flew to New York to visit my family for two weeks, and stayed with them for a year. Single, I explored the gay world but found myself not fitting in again, in noisy bars and clubs or at the baths, so, rather than moving to Greenwich Village, then the heart of gay New York, I got an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. What was missing for me in gay life was spirituality, and that’s what I found there—among goddess-worshipping lesbians. One of the two high points of my queer life was the evening I was dubbed an honorary lesbian with a very large wooden spoon, by Joan Larkin, in the company of Audre Lorde, June Jordan—all noted poets—in a kitchen full of other women, all my olders and elders.

My friends were all women (several of whom are still good friends) and I had boyfriends on the side.

Over the years it happened a few times that a man I had sex with for the first time would say—“You’re now in the lineage of Allen Ginsberg.” Or, “Oscar Wilde.” Or, the one that gave me the most pleasure, bestowed by sweet wonderful poet Gerard Rizza, 26 RFD 188 Winter 2021

who died of AIDS just before his first book came out—“Walt Whitman slept with Edward Carpenter.

Who slept with Gavin Arthur. Who slept with Neal Cassidy. Who slept with Allen Ginsberg. Who slept with me. As I have slept with you.”

We didn’t get much sleep. But those benedictions changed my life. I was in my late twenties and early thirties, a novice writer working in a bookstore, feeling inept, insecure—and knowing that the gay men into whose lineages I had been inducted were all writers—was a blessing.

Then AIDS came into our lives, and the gay world around me changed. Dying and death opened a doorway to spirituality, which many of the gay men I knew had pushed away from having experienced religious abuse growing up. And AIDS also opened that doorway because our lesbian sisters stepped forward to support us, bringing it with them in a deep abiding way that I will be forever grateful for. Another blessing.

My life in the time of AIDS was shaped by my involvement with The New York Healing Circle, where hundreds of us met several times a week to sing, dance, pray, meditate, hold each other, comfort each other, bury each other, cry together, laugh together, and celebrate the lives of those we lost. It "Closer Look," by Richard Vyse.

was there that I first began to teach, under the guidance of Samuel Kirschner, one of the group leaders, who became a slightly older big brother elder to me. It was there that I shared some of my earliest gay writings, and there that I learned the blessing of finally being in a community that I fit into.

Around that time I began receiving the information that’s in my book Two Flutes Playing, which was largely dictated to me by two disembodied teachers. So consider the fact that some of your elders may come to you in spirit and not in the flesh.

(Thank you Yamati and Arrasu, the book’s true authors, and two of my ancient gay elders.) When I had a rough draft assembled, I made four copies that I gave to four gay men. They made copies that they shared with others, one of which was given to Raven Wolfdancer, one of the founders of the Gay Spirit Visions Conference, with Ron Lambe and Peter Kendrick, who became for me elders, even though they weren’t that much older. Raven invited me to be one of the keynote speakers at the first GSV gathering, in November of 1990, along with Atlanta poet and therapist Franklin Abbott, and Harry Hay, one of the cofounders of The Mattachine Society in the 1950s (the second known and first successful homosexual right organization in this country) and twenty years later one of the founders of the Radical Faerie Movement, from which GSV emerged.

On the last day of the conference Harry came up to me. “I’m going to bless you now, as a younger elder of our tribe.” He stepped close, put his hands on my shoulders, leaned forward and stuck his tongue in my mouth. Honored, and furious, I was about to push him away—when a cone of light appeared behind him, about twenty feet long and five feet in diameter at the farthest end. The cone entered his back, and the energy it contained filled his body and flowed out through the tip of his tongue into my mouth, filling me. The color of the cone, and the energy that poured into me?—Yellow.

That was the second high point of my queer life.

Which to this very day makes me wonder—how did those hospital nurses know, on that new spring night in 1951, that yellow was the right color for me? Yellow = different = blessed.

For the next twenty years I went off to The Mountain in North Carolina each fall to be at GSV. I spoke and taught at each gathering and met some of my dearest friends there. GSV was my primary school for becoming a mentor, an elder, and for becoming myself. My hope for you, dear one, is that if you haven’t yet found your school or training

program—that you’ll come upon it very soon, while wandering about the world, even if the world you’re wandering around in two-dimensional, on a flat screen. There’s a certain magic to that reality. For just as we come from every people and thus have the capacity to bring all of humanity together as one, for the first time in human history Zoom and other programs are able to bring us together at the same time and in the same place, while each of us is sitting somewhere else.

It’s more than thirty years since Harry blessed me as a younger elder of our tribe, and at seventy I’m now in the same decade he was then. Last year, in the midst of Covid and California fire season lock-down, I found myself crafting from old stories and poems an unexpected companion volume to Two Flutes Playing, called Two Hearts Dancing.

It will be published later this year and contains the essence of my gay/queer teachings. And as a now-older elder, I know that it’s my embodied duty to pass on to others all that I’ve been blessed with, especially to younger gay/queer elders-in-training—for you will be so needed in a future world of climate horrors and the accompanying social disruption that may be worse than anything we’ve yet experienced in our unfolding history.

Place your hands on your heart again, dear one, whatever your current age, and ask yourself as an elder (who may be one of the oldest embodied souls on the planet)— What wisdom did I bring with me into this current incarnation? What did I come back to do with it? And how can I do it, now and over time, as a blessing for all the world?

Several years ago I told a group of younger gay men the stories I just told you. One of them, in a monogamous relationship, didn’t ask me to have to sex with him, but to initiate him into the lineages I’d been entered into—by kissing him on the lips— which I did, standing in the lobby of our synagogue.

You, who are reading these words—are an old soul. You are one of the ones the world has been waiting for. Place your hands on your heart. Feel it beating. Feel your breath. Feel your sacred body.

And feel that you too are turning yellow.

Yellow = Holy = Luminous = Powerful = Blessed.

And know that I have just kissed you with these words.

Love, from me RFD 188 Winter 2021 27

Timmy

By Lee Spruell

W

hen I was a little boy, a very little boy, I had a doll that I carried everywhere with me.

I named him Timmy. He was my best friend and companion. I slept with him every night. He came with clothes, but the clothes soon disappeared and I carried him around everywhere with me…naked.

When I was in kindergarten my father moved the family to St Louis, Missouri where he was pastor of a church. We came back home to Shreveport, to stay with my grandparents that first Christmas.

Mom put luggage and presents on the floorboard of the backseat, level with the seat and then put quilts and blankets on top so my brother and I could sleep as my father drove through the night, south to Louisiana. Mom stayed up to keep Dad awake.

When we arrived in Shreveport, Timmy was nowhere to be found. My parents helped me look all through the car and we found nothing. I was distraught and sad. My parents told me they were sorry that something had happened to Timmy. Dad said they stopped a couple of times in Arkansas to buy gasoline and maybe he fell out when we boys got out to go to the restroom. They told me I was too old to be carrying around a little doll anyway, that I had to be a big boy. But I didn’t care, I just wanted my Timmy back with me.

Many years later, when I had become a man I left a teaching job, that I loved in Northeast Texas, in Pittsburg, Texas, to come to live in my grandmother’s house in Blanchard, Louisiana. My parents had given her house to me after she died so I could look after them in their retirement.

That first fall here, when it had cooled off, I started cleaning out my grandmother’s storage building.

In the family we call it the Little Green House. It’s a three-room structure behind my grandparents’ house. My grandfather used it as an office and storage area. I now call it the "bodega."

My grandmother loved to sew and do little old lady things, like making hooded rugs. She collected wool material from coats and jackets and such. She had a big green trunk in the bodega, which I think had belonged to my great-grandmother, where she stored the material. When I opened it up the material was all rotted and moth-eaten. As I was stuffing the material into black plastic trash bags, I noticed a cardboard box. On a top of it was taped a little note, “Timmy Lee’s doll.” I opened it up and there was my 28 RFD 188 Winter 2021

precious little doll. It had been over fifty-five years since I last held him. What sweet joy. My parents didn’t have the heart to throw him away.

I was overjoyed to find my old friend. I had been a happy baby and child. My father’s nickname for me was “Joy Boy.” I realized at an early age that I was gay. I didn’t have that word for it at the time, but I knew I was different. I learned somehow that it wasn’t acceptable, so I hid my true nature out of the fear of being detected and rejected. I turned my energy into playing happy and making all those people around me happy. But inside I was a deeply troubled little boy.

Over time, grew to be an adult gay man, out to the world, happy with myself and who I am as a gay man. Timmy reminded me of those happy childhood days when I could love a little naked baby doll and find some happiness for myself in that way.

I kept the note that had been on the box and

I’ve kept Timmy in a plastic shoe box. My plan is sometime this fall, 2021 when it cools off, to make a shadow box to frame Timmy in. I’ll surround him with flowers, as if he were in a glass topped casket.

I remember that during the Victorian era, families would take pictures of their dead children in their coffins, with glass tops.

Timmy is a treasured memory from my happy childhood. I have remained strong all of my life by calling on that deep well of happiness, love, and joy that I hold within me. Being gay is my supper power, it allows me to love others, find joy and empathize with all.

One of the ways I have lived my life and kept my happiness, and that loving little boy alive within me has been to make my life as interesting and joyful as possible. Not to impress other people, but for me to treasure and enjoy. When I taught school, I threw my whole being into it. And then on vacations I would go off on adventures alone. Nobody seemed to be interested too much in what I did, so I recorded my adventures in my journals. Most of my adventures were in my beloved Mexico.

One of my adventures included teaching English for three years in Tepic, Nayarit. While there I met a Huichol Indian man named Rosendo Carrillo De La Rosa. Through him I was able to venture into the world of the Huichols, or as they call themselves—Wixarika.

I became the godfather for two of Rosendo’s children. One of them has been a blessing to me during this time of the covid pandemic quarantine. Reuniting with my godson Indigo Carrillo Torres has been a heartwarming experience. He is a delightful human being now almost thirty. He graduated in the first graduating class from a little high school in his village of Nueva Colonia, Jalisco. He went on to university in Guadalajara and now has his degree and certification as a clinical psychologist. But just as he finished his academic work the pandemic hit. He as Photographs courtesy of the author.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 29

been forced to quarantine also in Guadalajara. He uses his time and energy creating incredibly beautiful Huichol beadwork. He makes me proud. He is a joy, but best of all Indigo is a happy, intelligent, caring, openly gay indigenous man. He is proud of being gay and proud of being we Wixarika. He is a blessing for me. It makes proud that he’s my godson and my godsend.

I recently found a box of slides that I took in 1992 when I traveled in the Sierras Huichol to visit Rosendo’s family. I took lots of pictures. Some of the pictures were slides which I didn’t develop into prints at the time. I recently rediscovered these treasures and had a local computer guy convert them into digital form.

When I got the thumb drive with all the pictures on it, I discovered some wonderful picture of Indigo as a little child, naked, with a little naked doll tied around his neck. I was reminded of

30 RFD 188 Winter 2021

Timmy. I didn’t surmise that Indigo was gay until he was in junior high school and I visited with the family in Nueva Colonia for his sister Rita’s quinceanera. He never said anything. I never said anything, but I knew in my heart that he was a special, wonderful human being. It was that little doll around his neck that triggered me to write this story about my little doll, Timmy, to share with Indigo.

My reconnecting, via WhatsApp, with Indigo has been a great blessing for me. I was recently the godfather for the wedding suits for him and his husband Miguel Angel and also padrino for the wedding cake. I was disappointed that I didn’t get to be there. But he made lots of videos and we will relive all those happy times, and catch up, someday when we can be reunited in the homeland of my heart… Mexico.

Dedicated to Indigo Carrillo Torres.

Photograph courtesy of the author.

Notes from the Front

by Hammer

I

recently attended the first Faerie Gathering focused on Wholism. “Wholism” is the idea that everything is deeply interconnected. A lot of these ideas come from an American philosopher named Ken Wilber, a few of whose major books include, A Brief History of Everything and Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. But Wilber is only one of many struggling with the question of our times: “Will we will destroy ourselves or evolve?”

This small gathering of twenty-three Faeries met at a hiking retreat center on Mt Tamalpais in Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco. It was a short gathering beginning on a Thursday and ending on a Sunday in October. The gathering included as wide a range of Faeries as we could include, given the limited resources and cap on the number of possible participants. It was intergenerational, interracial, included non-binary and male identified participants, and a wide range of economic class. Some folks were highly educated intellectuals, some experts in art, body movement, dancing, and party experts. Some were well-schooled in ecological models, spiritual studies, financial empowerment, and psychological and spiritual practices. Some arrived full of enthusiasm and excitement ready to dig right in. Others arrived feeling broken, vulnerable and skeptical. The range of diversity was in part intended to create a more wholistic retreat.

For me, some of the weekend was ecstatic, being with many of my closest old Faerie mates engaged in deep conversations about how are we elder Faeries going to pass on our experiences and wisdom gained from a lifetime of surviving and thriving to future queer/Faerie generations? And how can we all cope with such overwhelming daily confrontations as imminent ecological collapse of our biosphere, rising global authoritarianism, technological development running off the rails, society and civilization collapsing in front of us and whatever else gives you heartburn when you become exposed to the news.

We didn’t solve all the world’s problems. I don’t know that anyone came away more hopeful or transformed into a new age eco-spiritual warrior.

But I personally had some transformation in my consciousness, in spite of both my skepticism and my hopefulness. I don’t know if it was a spiritual experience, but it was impactful. Of course most Radical Faerie gatherings are impactful, that’s why I have attended them for over forty years. Here is a slice of my experience as best I can describe it.

Oddly the first day started on my sixty-fifth birthday. I awoke in San Francisco and within the first hour of my day I was sitting in the Haight Ashbury, alone in a room with the body of William Stewart, who had taken his own end-of-life-pill the previous night. Beautifully washed, dressed as a mystic, and laid out in his death room, facing open windows onto a manicured garden, his sudden cancer crisis was now over. The room was perfectly curated as he desired, his extraordinary calligraphy hung on the walls.

It was both a room in the Haight Ashbury and it was a timeless temple.

Five years my senior, William and I had celebrated west coast Faerie gatherings together for almost forty years. For a half hour I sat alone in meditation observing William’s corpse, the beautiful space, the smell of death, the gentle rain so desperately needed in California, and the eventuality of my own death.

I slipped out solemnly, offering my deepest gratitude to Janaia and Jason for caring for William in hundreds of ways and especially for facilitating his final transformation.

My young traveling companion Sego had waited in the car, and off we drove to Marin. Right then, all I could express about my experience was gratitude and how important a moment this was for me. After hundreds of AIDS deaths, being in the presence of a body was not new to me, but being in William’s presence at the end was different. William’s demise was not due to an invasive plague cutting people down in their prime, it was a part of the natural RFD 188 Winter 2021 31

order of life. Turning sixty-five this very same morning connected me to William as members of a diminishing club of elder Faeries.

Next stop, a hike in the rain at Muir Woods with old growth Redwoods. No spontaneous decision to walk in nature, we had made the required reservations to visit the tree museum. (One cannot spontaneously walk in Muir Woods, one must have a reservation and pay the parking and entrance fee.

Oh Joni Mitchell, how prescient your lyrics.) It was Sego’s choice to see the woods on his first trip to the Bay Area. It seemed a fitting start as a reflection for a retreat about humanities’ relationship with nature.

After hiking we headed to Bolinas for lunch with Jim Brogan, a dear friend I first met when he was a professor teaching English Lit at San Francisco State forty-two years ago. Jim was a widower now, having suddenly lost Jack, his beloved cheerful husband, to cancer three years earlier. A jovial celebration of my birthday, Jim’s generosity as a host lifted my spirits, and I was moved to tears at seeing him laughing and alive again.

Ninety minutes after leaving Jim’s we arrived to the Wholism retreat. Like most Faerie gatherings there was laughter, hugs, dancing, food prepping and sharing, cruising, cuddling, bitching, old and new friends, hesitations, worries, circles, heart shares and all. The big difference for this gathering was the invitation to also bring our whole selves and we had a fully structured retreat schedule. This was a gathering where instead of retreating from the world’s tribulations and terrors and spending our time playing, healing, and regenerating (which I have always experienced as integral to my wellbeing as a gay man), we were invited to actually look at the world’s terrors and catastrophes and share our experiences, thoughts and ideas about how to live authentically and fully in the face of deep tragic suffering and existential annihilation.

We had workshops, slide show presentations, and lectures, as well as yoga, meditation, dancing, and art play. We shared meals and cleaned up, and slept together dormitory style as Faeries like to do.

This invitation to bring as whole a perspective and experience as we possibly could was challenging, putting an edge on the weekend for me. At times I resisted the call to body work, facilitated movement and art play. It felt frivolous in the context of slide presentations with such facts as ninety percent of all the large fish in the oceans are already gone.

I was allotted seventy-five minutes to present concepts of financial empowerment to an extremely diverse group in regards to both their monetary ac32 RFD 188 Winter 2021

cess as well as their life stages. Being forced to boil down my training to core elements forced me to integrate all I knew about financial empowerment, human experience from a wholistic perspective, knowledge of Radical Faeries, etc.

One of my most important insights came after I’d facilitated my workshop. I’d felt pinned to the wall by this fully engaged diverse audience, which had included a Stanford PhD of finance, as well as ex-lovers and forty-year friends. There was no BSing allowed. Here is what came to me: Financial empowerment is increased or limited by one’s integrated self-expression. In other words, to be most financially empowered, one needs awareness and alignment of one’s heart, mind, body, and soul. To live in right livelihood with the ecology of our environments from our human community, to right relationship with nature, sexuality, ecology, and spirituality, is as essential to financial empowerment as skills with numbers, money, earning, saving, investing, etc.

This insight may seem totally obvious to other Radical Faeries who sit at different points of our circle, but to me this was a very important articulation, furthering my capacities as a financial coach to bring clarity and empowerment to those who struggle with money concerns. Of course threatened humans will eat up their natural environment to survive, but why do humans who do not lack for basic necessities continue to consume and consume.

If wealth is not an indicator of financial empowerment, what is?

William, for example, had inherited great resources mid-life and struggled with the burden of sudden wealth. But ultimately his generosity, spiritual and art practices, his humanity, and Radical Faerie values integrated into his fullest empowered self. His graciousness at letting go when the time was ready, another example of the wholeness of his being.

When I work with Faeries about financial coaching, the part about the money is often the least part of the whole.

Our next Wholism Radical Faerie Retreat is scheduled for March 3-6 at Saratoga Springs Retreat Center in California. Email me for more information if you are interested in knowing more or attending: terrypcavanagh@gmail.com.

Benediction

by Glory Cumbow

E

ven though I was raised in the church as a preacher’s kid, earned multiple degrees in theology, and spent years as a youth director and pastor, I have never been allowed in a church. Not the whole of me. That is because despite the rallying cry that the church is a “people” and not a “place”, it’s actually an institution. While an institution is constructed of individuals, in my experience, once a collective body becomes an establishment it continually chooses the well-being of the institution over the people it claims to serve.

This atmosphere of unwelcome began when I was born into the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church where the message of the patriarchal reign was preached louder than the infinite love of God. As a woman I was told that my place was beneath the decision-making of men. Questioning this system was considered sinful because any opposing beliefs were against the teachings of the Bible. Throughout my childhood I hated being a girl and prayed for God to change me into a boy. I didn’t want to wear skirts, cook and clean, or have babies. I wanted my insights and opinions to matter just as much as any boy’s did.

In college I began attending a Presbyterian church, which ordained women. I learned about a more progressive, open-minded faith that took historical context into consideration when reading scripture. I thought that meant I was welcome in this denomination, and I decided I wanted to be a leader. As a passionate, outspoken individual I had always felt like my voice had been suppressed. I saw this as an opportunity to fight back against the silencing from the patriarchy. So I went to seminary to get my Master’s of Divinity, and I served as a youth director in a few different churches.

However, the familiar feeling of unwelcome soon enveloped me again. In seminary, I realized that I needed to network to know the “right” people and find a milder “pastoral” persona that fit in with my peers. Otherwise, I would not be included in the social scene. This false persona I was expected to develop extended to my work in churches where congregation members wanted me to conform to their expectations of a minister.

It was a constant struggle living in the cognitive dissonance of preaching a Gospel of inclusion

that did not include my authentic self. I began to notice that this standard I was being held to was another way of reinforcing the patriarchy. The church had an idea of what a pastor should act like based on previous models, which had mostly been men. Women were allowed into the arena so long as they were sterilized by the ideals projected onto them.

While these denominations stand in contrast to one another about their interpretation of scripture, both are church bodies that expected me to conform to the idealized standard of the institution as defined by the patriarchy. I was not valued for my presence, for what my personhood could offer in itself, but was seen as customizable. Assimilation is the demand of churches to retain the established status quo and not to disrupt their culture.

On the most basic level, this can be seen in how congregations treat visitors upon their first time entering a new church. I have witnessed too many churches that offer greetings that claim all are welcome and that they can come as they are, but are quick to interrogate new people with invasive questions or put them on display by asking them to stand up and introduce themselves at a worship service where all eyes are on them. Even friendly gestures like hugs, back pats, or handshakes are often given without consent. An outsider coming into this environment has to accept these cultural greetings, regardless of whether they are comfortable with these interactions or not because the congregation expects it of them without deferring to the preferences of the visitor.

On a more complex level, many churches offer shallow responses to deeply-rooted systemic issues. Conferences and training sessions are held to talk about racism, sexism, homophobia, and other problems existing both in society and the church. However, progressive action is slow.

Unfortunately taking the risk of addressing these matters means congregants will get angry and leave, and their money will leave with them.

Without money, the institution can’t function.

This is where I pause to acknowledge that there are individual churches that are taking courageous action to challenge systems of injustice.

These religious bodies are mobilizing their faith, RFD 188 Winter 2021 33

at the risk of losing members and tarnishing their reputation among other faith communities, to fight back against hate and discrimination. But too often these congregations are standing on their own.

This is also where I admit that I was complicit in upholding the harmful institution of the church.

I would try to address homophobia and racism in a way that still allowed me to keep my job when I really should have been more direct in preaching against the evils of injustice. Any time I attempted to push further and be bolder, I was pulled aside by congregants or the men pastors who scolded me like a child. I was told I was being “defiant.”

Again my voice was stifled, and I retreated into the persona I was expected to have. I was a consumer of the culture created by the establishment.

Consumerism is central to the practices of the church. Communion, The Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, are all names for the sacrament of the church when people eat bread or a wafer with grape juice or wine in remembrance of the Last Supper before Jesus was crucified. This is meant to be a holy practice that reminds the church of selflessness, but this virtue is lost to the appetites of the consumers. The church kept eating away at me, chewing up the parts they hungered for and spitting out the parts that turned their stomach.

But I thought this was how it was supposed to be.

My theology, both in the fundamentalist church and the mainline protestant church, informed me that self-sacrifice was necessary because it was what Jesus did. This meant that I did not set healthy boundaries, I ignored red flags, and I ignored my intuition, all to my self-detriment. Intuition would always fall in second place to trusting in God’s calling for my life. And my theology led me to believe that God had called me to put myself last and the church first.

I wondered when the church would be satisfied with me and what I had to offer. But the consumer culture revealed to me that I was nothing more than a commodity. I would not be fully accepted for all that I am, and my beliefs would never be adequately expressed despite this being an organization based on belief. My decision to exit the church could not be avoided any longer.

Naturally, a false persona could not be sustained once I left the church, so I died. Whatever fake person I lived as for the majority of my life was deceased, and I thought I was completely lost. I waited for three months for a Savior who specialized in resurrections to come and meet me in my tomb to raise me from the dead. As the 34 RFD 188 Winter 2021

weeks passed I realized no one was coming, and I had to choose to live all on my own. At that moment I didn’t lose my faith, it was taken from me.

Soon thereafter I recognized that I wasn’t empty or lost. The shell that had been surrounding my true self had cracked open, and what was left was someone so new and tender that she was alien to me. I thought I had nothing left, but I was really free for the first time. I just needed a moment to breathe my first gulp of air and stretch my muscles. I’m now out as queer, exploring my sexual orientation and gender identity. I’m learning to advocate for myself by stating my needs and boundaries. I’m listening to my intuition and trusting it to help protect me from those who do not have my best interest in mind.

I’m sorry for my part in contributing to a harmful institution, and I am now dedicating my time to volunteering with my local LGBTQ+ community. I hope more congregations will one day stand with the same courage as the ones who openly fight against racism and homophobia. I hope the patriarchy that poisons the church to worship the status quo will crumble and fall into obscurity. I hope the assimilation and consumerist cultures transform into true communities of welcome. Until then I offer this benediction as my closing statement to the institution of the church: May you have ears to truly hear, so that you can listen and contemplate in silence the prophetic words of the ostracized.

May you have hands that reach deep, gripping evil by the root, instead of being distracted by the branches.

May your hymns and prayers not be uttered

for self-gratification, but as a reflection of work already in progress.

May you have eyes to see the individual soul, for the sake of the collective, in defiance of the institution.

So be it.

Wrestling with Demons

by Andre Le Mont Wilson

“I

t’s a good thing you decided to share your lunch with me. Do you want to know why the judge sentenced me to that group home for at-risk boys with behavior problems? I took revenge on people.”

Summer 1994. At age sixteen, Jacob Fleishman wore a wrap-around grin that resembled the Joker’s grin on a playing card. His geeky, Gumby body pulled and pushed between boyhood and manhood.

He stumbled from class to class at the Oakland day program for disabled adults. Teachers rejected his summer youth employment in their classes the moment he spoke.

At age thirty, I was the newest teacher on staff.

I was not even a Special Ed teacher. I worked as a self-care program assistant. That was a fancy term for a person who changes the diapers and feeds the mouths of adults with disabilities. There was no one beneath me in seniority upon whom I could dump Jake. Instead, other teachers dumped Jake on me.

“Andre, are you married?”

“Jake, this morning, pass out markers and papers to the clients.”

“Andre, do you have a girlfriend?”

“Jake, this afternoon, set up the bowling pins.”

“Andre, what you need is a woman!”

“Jake, this morning, I need you to . . .”

“Andre, what you need is a man!”

“I already have one! His name is Robert! We live in a condo in Hercules!”

Jake’s horror-stricken face mouthed the words What the fuck? and then turned malevolent.

One day, Jake and I worked together in drama class. Aprons filled a tall laundry basket. People in wheelchairs needing those aprons filled the classroom. I called, “Hey, Jake, come over and help me with these aprons.”

Jake ran, snatched an apron from the basket, and threw his arms around my neck in an undisguised embrace. He looped the apron over my head. I froze, speechless as he gazed into my eyes and smiled, his lips inches from mine. His hands brushed my ass as he tied the apron strings in the back. Shockwaves reverberated north and south through my body.

I gulped. “Okay, Jake, you can help the clients now.”

The teen grinned and turned away.

Throughout the class, the sucker-fish teen refused to leave my side, no matter how far I scooted from

him. He joked, “Hey, Andre? What’s Jeffrey Dahmer’s favorite chocolate bar?”

“What, Jake?” I sighed.

“Your dick!” he exploded.

The head drama class instructor, Mrs. Torres, a broad-hipped Mexican, scowled at Jake’s joke. I tightened my lips to suppress laughter. Emboldened, Jake told dirtier jokes.

At the end of class, I untied the apron strings strangling my ass. I warned, “Jake, you’re getting too close to me. If you don’t back away soon, I’ll have to cut my apron strings.”

He asked, “What does ‘cut your apron strings’ mean?”

Annoyed, I said, “Go ask Mrs. Torres.”

Jake left to ask the definition from the one woman whose back he had doused with ice water during a company picnic. I do not know what Mrs. Torres told him. Later, I overheard Jake tell staff, “I’m going to get back at Andre for telling me to bug off.”

That night, I dreamed of Jacob. I was lying alone in bed. At least, I thought I was alone. Jake’s naked body appeared. He lay face down across my blanket. His crotch pressed into my chest. His head and arms hung over the side. I began caressing his supple boy’s body illuminated by the moonlight through a window. I rolled his ass onto my face and began kissing it. My tongue darted in and out of his hole. It was the most delicious thing I have ever tasted, much like cool summer melons, but sweeter.

I awoke from my dream to my partner Rob thrusting his cock deep into my ass. I had been moaning while dreaming of rimming Jake. That woke and aroused Rob. Even as he embraced my body for his climax inside me, the taste of that boy’s ass lingered on my tongue.

In the morning over breakfast, Rob said, “Last night was the best fuck we’ve ever had. I don’t know what came over you. What made it such a ripe time for fucking?” I thought of summer melons and continued to eat breakfast.

A

t work, every teacher at our agency again banned Jacob Fleishman from their classes.

When I banned him, my supervisor promised good behavior and overrode my objections. But, the moment my supervisor left, Jake left class to talk to an orderly who mopped the hall.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 35

I called after him, “Jake, I did not give you permission to leave.”

The teen returned, chewed his nails, and spat the clippings at me.

“Stop spitting at me.”

“I’m not spitting at you.”

“Yes, you are. Stop. Can you help me play a game of Sorry with the clients?”

I set up the board. The clients gathered around the table in their wheelchairs. Jake stopped the game before it began. “Women only exist so that I can be their boyfriend.”

I asserted, “Jake, women aren’t the only ones who can have boyfriends.”

“Yeah, but you men do it hee-haw style.”

“What?”

“You know, booty busting.” Jake pantomimed anal fucking, thrusting his crotch toward my face.

Shocked to see a boy simulate the booty-busting Rob gave me the previous night, I popped an erection beneath the game table. I recalled the dream in which I had tutored the boy in analingus.

“Hey, Andre, I’ve heard a rumor that you’re a woman.”

“Jake, can we just play the game?”

“I am, Andre. You’re a woman, and I’m a man.

That makes me smarter than you. Oh, Andre! Oh, Andre!” Jake stretched his adolescent hand across the game table. His fondling fingers cupped my chest as if I were missing a breast. “See, Andre, you’re a woman who had a sex change.”

I did not know what to do. This spawn of homophobia would not accept no for an answer. My colleagues had passed him from class to class as if he were a pedophile priest passed from parish to parish. I could not turn to my supervisor for help because he was the one who had dumped him in my class in the first place. My clients gawked and giggled nervously from their wheelchairs. They could not help me either.

Finally, Jake said, “Andre, I bet you have sex with dogs.”

I lunged across the table at the teen and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. “If you have a problem with me being gay, leave because I won’t put up with this! If you can’t work with a gay teacher, leave!”

Jake tore my grip from his shirt and backed away across the room. Panting for breath, he paused at the door until certain I would not pursue him. He turned and fled the building.

Gary Akita, a Hawaiian with Cerebral Palsy, remarked from his wheelchair, “Huh, he won’t be back.”

36 RFD 188 Winter 2021

T

he next morning, I again joined the rest of the teachers and banned Jacob from my classes.

Our supervisor had no other choice than to fire him.

Jake’s long-faced job coach from his group home apologized in person. “Andre, I’m deeply sorry for Jacob’s behavior. He has had problems getting close to people ever since his sexual molestation.”

“Ha! Jake doesn’t have a problem getting close to people. He gets too close!”

“Once again, on behalf of my group home, I am deeply sorry. Oh, by the way, I have something for you. Jacob wrote you this letter.”

JULY 21, 1994.

ANDRE: I APOLOGIZE FOR THOSE COMMENTS I MADE ABOUT YOUR SEXUAL ORIENTATION. I DID IT BECAUSE I FIGURED YOU WOULD LAUGH & WALK AWAY. I GUESS I WAS WRONG. I LEARNED FROM YOU THAT IT IS WRONG TO MAKE RUDE COMMENTS AND/OR STEREOTYPE PEOPLE WHO ARE GAY OR MAKE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT PEOPLE WHO ARE GAY. LOOKING BACK ON WHAT I SAID YESTERDAY, I REALIZE THAT IT WAS WRONG TO SAY THAT YOU SLEPT WITH A DOG. IF I WAS GAY & SOMEONE SAID THAT TO ME, IT WOULD MAKE ME REALLY UPSET & I WOULD WANT TO HURT THEM. IT WOULD ALSO HUMILIATE ME TO THE POINT WHERE I MIGHT QUIT MY JOB. LOOK AT THE THINGS YOU DID FOR ME. YOU SHARED YOUR LUNCH WITH ME AND MADE ME LAUGH. I DID NOT DO ANYTHING FOR YOU. WHAT I WILL DO IS SEND YOU A MUG I MADE IN CERAMICS. IF YOU STILL WANT TO CONTACT ME, HERE IS MY ADDRESS. JACOB August 4, 1994 Dear Jacob: Since I was your age, I put up with people like you who made me the target of their hatred toward gays. After making “rude comments,” they said they were “only joking.” And, like you, they figured I would “laugh and walk away” because they assumed gay men were wimps who would not fight back.

Indeed, I would not fight back because I did not want my coworkers and clients to know I was gay. So, I kept quiet. My silence not only encouraged you to believe it was okay to harass gays but that I enjoyed it.

But after a long string of your gay “jokes” in which you said I slept with dogs (one of the worst insults I suffered as a teen), I could no longer laugh and

walk away. For the first time in my life, I stood up to someone who verbally abused me and told him to stop. Unfortunately, you were on the receiving end of years of pent-up rage, but you were the one joyfully pressing all the wrong buttons.

Please understand, Jacob, I do not hate you. In fact, I find you to be a very likable person who has a lot of potential. And I believe you do not hate me either, but letting you continue to belittle and berate me would not be love, either. And, if it means anything to you, I forgive you.

And, yes, you can send me the mug you made in ceramics. I would be glad to have it.

Sincerely, Andre Le Mont Wilson Twenty years later, I bumped into Jacob Fleishman at Berkeley Farmers’ Market. We stood as two bald men now: one White, one Black; one thirty-six, one forty-nine. Weightlifter’s muscles bulged beneath his tight shirt. His face still sported a wrap-around

grin but added a pair of wrap-around sunglasses. He called, “Hey, Andre!”

“Jacob!”

We embraced and patted backs. We released and gazed into each other’s eyes as we had done long ago in drama class. He exclaimed, “Andre, I can’t believe I’ve known you for twenty years!”

I said, “Yes, Jake, it’s been that long. So, what courses are you taking now at Berkeley City College?”

“Oh, I’m taking Critical Thinking. I’m trying to earn enough credits so I can transfer to Cal State East Bay and become a teacher.”

“That’s great news! Do you still give those talks to kids on how you turned your life around?”

“Yes, and I also mentor high school teenagers, but it’s really hard because teenagers today just don’t want to listen.”

I wagged my finger at him. “Ah, Jacob, you were that way once. You wouldn’t listen to me or anybody.”

He nodded with a half-grin. “Yeah, I know, but I learned that sometimes it is really important to listen.”

A poem in five panels by by Dudgrick Bevins. Acrylic paint, linen paper, washi tape, Polaroaids, a paper bag, gift wrap, cemetery flowers, colored staples.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 37

When Clare’s Not Singing...

by Our Little Pony

W

hen Clare’s not singing her favourite karaoke country music songs, she is one of Uganda’s leading trans activists at the LGBTQI+ Youth on Rock Foundation. I was honoured to meet Clare on day one of a recent Radical Faerie international LGBTQIA+ decriminalisation delegation where stories of hope, resilience and change were abundant.

Smiling at me vibrantly in the Kampala sunshine she said, “attending to my self-cares and needing to live my life as a trans person makes me feel fabulous.

You know Dan, advocacy is persistent, it’s not a one day thing, it is for a lifetime.”

Less than twenty-four hours after the delegation finished ten days later, the homophobic heat intensified. The Sexual Offences Bill that criminalizes consensual same sex acts and tramples on assault survivors by allowing some nonconsensual acts to go unpunished, was approved by the Ugandan Parliament on May 3, 2021.

Now the dust has settled, what can the international community do?

De-Colonise Uganda’s homophobic laws are near duplicates of British legislation; one of the British Empire’s most notorious exports. The Public Nuisance Act, Rogue and Vagabond Act, Anti Pornography Act and the Anti Miniskirt Act are all inspired by Thatcher’s deadly Section 28 law that prohibited “the promotion of homosexuality in public institutions in the UK” and still digs its claws in tightly throughout life in Uganda today.

2022 is the fiftieth anniversary of Pride in Britain catalysed by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) with “absolute freedom for all” at the pumping heart of its aim. If we are to do justice to the origins of Pride, exploring judicial, strategic and emotional community-building lessons between the GLF founders and the pioneers at the helm of the Ugandan LGBTQIA+ movements can help us get there.

In desperate circumstances with next to no money to campaign, no gays in Britain thought our awful criminal laws (shipped out to Uganda) would

be changed for another fifty years. Yet LGBT+ people and their straight allies in the 1960s achieved the amazing 1967 Act, which began the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales.

38 RFD 188 Winter 2021

Clockwise from upper left: Organizers at dinner, Nettie Pollard, Andrew Lumsden. Photographs by Corinne Cumming.

In the middle of the most hopeless times the seeds of the successful rebellion were planted!’ Andrew Lumsden, first editor of Gay Times and founding activist of the GLF. Alongside Andrew, Nettie Pollard was on the first Pride march in Britain in 1972 says, “Today I find the fightback by LGBTQIA+ in Uganda truly inspirational. Under oppression they still have joy.”

Whilst the Sexual Offences Bill criminalises LGBTQIA propaganda it cannot stop the groundbreaking emergence of LGBT+ movements safeguarding communities on the ground. Contrary to the 2012 BBC documentary, Uganda—The World’s Worst Place To Be Gay, according to Shawn, Uganda is “the best place in the world to be queer, I tell you, the story here in Uganda is beautiful.”

For the last five years Shawn has been training as a community caregiver and has pioneered a unique nature-based community self-help project in Uganda called FAMACE to support queer individuals to heal from trauma. Using Farming, Art, Mindset change, Advocacy, Collaboration and Ethical human-centered design to improve well-being and promote sustainable livelihoods and futures.

“In its current nature,” Shawn explains, “the sexual offenses bill becomes a legal tool for state sanctioned persecution against LGBTIQ persons in Uganda, even whilst we are in lockdown in unsupportive communities. Moreover, although it has not yet been signed into law, the new Anti-Gay Bill in Ghana could greatly influence our President’s decision to deepen the witch-hunting here.”

“What would solidarity from the UK activists look like Shawn?” I ask. Theresa May apologised for commonwealth laws. We laugh at the apology, what Shawn. Photograph by Corinne Cumming.

are they gonna do? It’s just a gesture. An honest call on your government to end and ban the use of colonial laws in former colonial states is the only way.’

Create A Roadmap To Freedom ‘“Never Going Underground” was the British resistance movement’s mantra to Section 28 and it couldn’t be more accurate on the streets in Uganda today.

Five years ago Shawn was part of the Pride Kampala organising team. In the months running up to Pride, LGBTQI+ spaces were constantly raided and their owners blackmailed. Nevertheless buses were organised from Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda who don’t have Pride, and there was hope in the air.

Brutal police raids resulted in the arrests of sixteen human rights defenders, journalists’ cameras confiscated and mass assaults on two-hundred people attending the pride show. Shawn was the only member of the organising committee arrested and was harassed by the other inmates under the watch of the police. Transgender women were particularly harassed by the police who sexually assaulted several of them by touching their breasts and butts to “confirm their identity.” One member of the LGBT community nearly lost his life when he jumped from a four-story building to escape from police.

After that night it would be easy to assume that everyone went underground, but it only made them fight harder.

Shawn continues, “since then we have entered murky waters. When movements started receiving international aid funding, entrenched cycles of dependency spiralled. Ultimately, we have forgotten that the land beneath us connects us all, the signposts that catalyse community transformation.

There’s going to come a time when we have to detransition from the mass queer exodus that we have seen in our community. We have seen what happens with the homophobic hostile immigration system— you could end up burnt in a refugee camp, dead in the Mediterrean sea or locked up in detention centres in Britain. We need to begin here, right now, in beginning our own queer village.”

Choose Visibility—Mobilise The Kuchus!

Morgan was there too that night, and has been crucial to queer freedom since. In 2010 he was living and working in the slums of Kampala and had a surge of anger at politicians scapegoating the LGBT+ community to cover up their corruption.

He started Youth on Rock Foundation “so we can be rocks with unshakable perseverance, because as a RFD 188 Winter 2021 39

society we have to ‘Mobilise the Kuchus!’ ‘Kuchu’ is the deliciously salacious slang word adopted by the LGBTI community to secretly identify themselves and communicate safely, much like Britains ‘Polari’.

So every Sunday Morgan held a space for the LGBT+ community to raise consciousness. The organisation grew like wildfire. Since then they have met the Archbishop demanding an end to his homophobic comments in church and a plethora of LGBT+ sexual health services, queer media outlets and international attention has gained force and their house doors are regularly knocked on by people seeking sanctuary.

One of the movement veterans along with Morgan, Bob set up ICEBREAKERS, the first LGBTQIA+ shelter and clinic in Uganda. Sitting around the social space table Bob’s arm is in a plaster as a result of a recent attack. Bob’s kind eyes struck me. I wanted to hear the thousands of stories they held. “This is not my first attack, I’ve forgotten how many have happened. But we are resilient and we have hope.

There’s a thing about activism. Our spirits have been broken already so we have to fight and to win. The struggle gives us motivation and more guts to do the work. International solidarity means people are seeing this. I tell myself I am not alone, I am not alone, I am not alone.”

Cultivate Creativity

A quiet presence with a cheeky smile, seven years ago Edgar was part of a small group of friends who started Kuchu Times. It is a online platform to provide a voice for Africa’s LGBTQIA+ community after the Anti Homosexuality Act and the seething savagery it provoked through mass media outings on the front page of newspapers.

Kasia, another founding member, thought ‘let’s give it back!’ We made the magazine glossy and incorporated local languages and included referral pathways of local support groups. We opened gates for people to emerge themselves. It’s everywhere now, they cannot burn it just like they cannot burn 40 RFD 188 Winter 2021

us. You have to do it all with a lot of PASSION POLITICS.’

On one day of distributing action they deliver the free hard copy of Kuchu Times into Parliamentarians drawers, police stations, churches, homes and high streets across the country with skillful vigilante security at hand. ‘I feel proud when I go out in the field and other journalists are like “where are you from?” and I say “I am from Kuchu Times,” said Edgar patting two salivating dogs panting in the heat.

“Meet our dogs, they are our protection here, we call them the Kuchu Times secretaries,” he grins.

Rebel

After lots of dog licks we jump on motorbikes to meet Hajjara Ssanyu Batte, Director of Lady Mermaids Empowerment Centre, the largest sexworkers and feminist network in Uganda.

Hajjara recently infamously walked the streets naked carrying the coffin of one of her murdered friends and now she sits in front of me beaming in the most incredible rainbow diamante sparkling heels.

“We, the sexual minorities, are sex workers, LGBT+ women and friends and lovers of those who have been killed. I started the Bureau and called it Lady Mermaid because mermaids are beautiful. The Torso represents all peoples beauty wherever we operate. The bottom represents fish as integral to nature and we use our natural parts to earn a living. When the torso and the legs are together this is what solidarity looks like.”

“What’s your most memorable protest?” I ask.

“I have many. Recently, alongside our male allies in high heels, we protested outside the Uganda Human Rights Commission everyday for two weeks. I

Left: Bob; Right: Morgan, the author, and Edgar. Photographs by Corinne Cumming.

proudly wore my miniskirt because it’s our bodies, we can do what we want with our bodies, it not only affects us but our mothers, grandmothers, sons and daughters.”

Uganda where people can be themselves regardless of sexuality, where we live the spirit of ‘Ubuntu’ (social unity and generosity of spirit) where all humans can shine,” whilst around the circle everyone popped grapes into each other’s mouths.

Shawn took the lighter next, “This is for David Kato, murdered by this homophobic Government in 2011, who inspired me to become an activist.

We must remember our transformation comes from ourselves; that Nothing About Us Without Us Is For Us.” By digesting the bitter tinctures of life, they all have become skilled craftsfolk for freedom and metabolised poisons into medicines to establish sacred connections between each and everyone one of us.

As I was leaving Shawn reached for my hand smiling “please come back and see us at Lavender Acres the name of our Trans-led permaculture community, by then I will have finished training a new generation of bee-keepers and will have plenty of queer sweet honey for you.”

Now back home the real work begins in weaving the fabric of these necessary relationships across the sea as Lady Phyll, Executive director of Kalei-

Become A Love Generator On our final day everyone came together in the front garden of Trans Equality Uganda Shelter for a candlelit closing ceremony to commemorate queer family, past, present and future and share their faerie names.

LGBT activist Kim Half Black was first to light a candle. “This is for Harvey Milk who said ‘If a bullet should enter my brain, let it smash every closet door.’ Then, Mona Lisa, activist and shelter resident, lit her candle and shared, “We vision a doscope Trust, a UK-based charity working to uphold the human rights of LGBT+ people across the world, and co-founder and executive director of UK Black Pride, Europe’s largest pride celebration for LGBTQI+ people of colour, reminds us, “As a community of diverse and dynamic LGBTQI+ people, we have to be aware and stay alert; we have to organise in solidarity with our siblings around the world, and we have to understand the role we can play in ensuring a free world for everyone. The activists in Uganda and around the world, who are fighting tooth and nail against homophobia and violence, deserve our unreserved and unequivocal support—and right now.”

Upper left: Sanyu; Right: ?????; Lower left: Beyonces House. Photographs by Corinne Cumming.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 41

42 RFD 188 Winter 2021

" Man Moment" by Richard Vyse. Watercolor.

Anus as Archetype: A Cryptogram for the Next Generation of Queer Wizards

by Frater Guaiferius for Twohanz

I

f you use your anus as a sex organ and have an interest in mythology and archetypes, you won’t find much joy in the extant literature (unless you’re prepared to read a double meaning into every allusion to a rosebud). References to the anus itself are hard enough to find, and what few there are outside the medical textbooks are almost invariably negative in some way.

Yet to many queers the anus is an organ of fascinating beauty—to contemplate, to desire, to penetrate, or to get penetrated. This is one of the things that makes us different from the people we might call “proctophobes”, who fear the anus and all its works because they can only think in terms of shit.

This gives us an aptitude for the alchemical process of transforming the lowliest organ of the body into the cave of hidden treasure.

I’ll pass over Freud’s treatment of anality as “infantile regression”, not just because it’s a ploy to make reprosexuality the inevitable outcome of therapy, but also because the inherent proctophobia is so widespread in “the West” that it must go back to an older archetypal model. We can find a clear manifestation of the original pattern in the cosmogony of Zoroastrianism, which originated at least four millennia before Freud.

There is a telling passage in the Zoroastrian scripture called Menok i Xrat (8:8): “And the accursed Ahriman gave birth to the demons, lying spirits and then sorcerers by committing sodomy on himself.” It is hardly surprising then that the Zoroastrian punishments for anal sex were probably the most severe in the ancient world. “Zoroaster denounces this deed as the worst crime against morality…Ahriman is its creator…There is no sin greater than this, and the man practising it becomes worthy of death…This is the only crime which entitles any one to take the law into his own hands, and to cut off the heads of the sodomites and to rip up their bellies.”

There can be little doubt that Zoroastrianism bequeathed the underlying proctophobia to the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), so it came to be integral to the symbolic structures of monotheism. The so called “pagan” religions of the ancient world were fortunate to escape much of this influence.

Admittedly, Ahriman became the god Arimanius in the religion of Mithras that spread throughout the Roman Empire, but the surviving iconography shows him standing on the World Egg with legs tightly bound by the Cosmic Serpent. Such a position would make it difficult to repeat his primal act of self‐impregnation. Once he had given birth to the Egg (which enclosed the whole temporal world), his elevation to divine status obviously depended on keeping his legs firmly closed.

It is no accident that Ahriman’s act of automous creation by means of a kind of hermaphroditic “cloacal kiss” gave birth to sorcerors. These were the practitioners of esoteric rites that fell outside the ceremonies and spiritual exercises authorized by the state religion. The sorcerors were probably

Arimanius, In Eisler, Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt (Munich, 1910).

RFD 188 Winter 2021 43

inheritors of a shamanic tradition that preceded the development of urban religio‐political administrative structures, and they could only continue to practice this heritage by going underground and becoming “occult”. Their association with hermaphroditism and anal sex in the Zoroastrian origin myth parallels what is known about shamanism in those parts of the world where it has survived openly into our own times.

Over the last two millennia, the main bearer of this underground tradition has been alchemy.

Alchemical symbolism is intentionally obscure, purportedly to guard its secrets from the eyes of the profane, but no doubt also as a veil of protection from the inquisitorial agents of the state. So we would hardly expect there to be any explicit references to the anus.

Still, there are some significant clues, one of which is that Hermes, the god who presides over the alchemical tradition, is referred to by Zosimos, the fourth century alchemist from the Egyptian city of Panopolis, as terminus ani, “the endpoint of the anus”.

More than a thousand years later, in 1511, the Renaissance scholar Fra Giovanni Giocondo published an edition of a book on architecture by the Roman city planner Vitruvius. It includes an extraordinary illustration that throws enigmatic light on the matter at hand.

To be clear, this is not from an alchemical text.

The woodcuts that Fra Giovanni commissioned for his edition of De Architectura were intended to illustrate (for the first time, in fact) the various design principles and practices mentioned by Vitruvius.

This is the only picture among them that includes any symbolism of note. It occurs in an early section 44 RFD 188 Winter 2021

of the first book (folio 9 recto), where Vitruvius discusses the siting of buildings so as to use the local wind patterns to advantage. This leads him to a theoretical digression on the origin of wind, in the course of which he mentions an instrument called an “aeolipile” or “fire‐blower”.

The accompanying Latin text translates as: “Aeolopiles are hollow bronze balls with a very tight opening, into which water is poured. Set over a fire, not a breath issues from them until they get warm; but as soon as they begin to boil, out comes a strong blast due to the fire.” The aeolipile in the woodcut actually has two openings: one at the top, for pouring in water, and one on the right hand side, for producing the vehementem flatum (“strong blast”).

The technology is ancient, but the aeolipile’s use is mysterious. There are earthenware examples from the Islamic world, but in Europe they are associated with metal‐working; and although they are not mentioned in the alchemical literature, the relief ornamentation on the 1511 Vitruvius example is strongly suggestive of alchemical symbolism.

The round vessel itself resembles the “retort” that alchemists used for distillation, minus the downward‐ pointing extension (beak or “neck”) that allows the vapor to cool and flow out. The difference is significant. Many of the aeolipiles that have survived in the archaeological record have the form of a human body or head, with the narrow aperture where the mouth would be. Some are shaped as mythical beings, which would emit a blue flame through this orifice when the steam became hot enough to turn into water‐gas. This combination of factors clearly evokes a theurgical practice intended to animate the physical representations of fire‐ breathing beings.

The Vitruvius aeolipile inverts the conventional symbolism of the dragon, in which the monster is penetrated by the spear of a saint or archangel, by having the creature penetrate the bearded human.

It is tempting to wonder if the Vitruvius illustration could be a satire on alchemy. But it has a number of iconographic features that link it to other, more archaic, humanoid aeolipiles, in particular the position of the arms, with one raised and one lowered.

Could the image perhaps have provided the basis for a set of spiritual exercises based on alchemical correspondences?

As an experiment, I undertook a series of sexual meditations, both partnered and solo, with the intent of allowing the Vitruvius aeolipile to “speak” to me. Sometimes I was lying masked in the sling, or had my hand inside a lover in that position. Alter-

Illustration of an aeolipile, In Vitruvius, De Architectura (Venice, 1511)

natively (and for variety), I worked on my carnal relationships with the mythological identities I gave to my favorite dildos and plugs. Of course, there were no words as such, so what follows is just an interpretation. It’s an account of an experiment, not a recipe. Just a way of making good use of the time during a lockdown.

The human figure—let us call him “the alchemist”—is partly outside the retort, with his right hand and his right foot on the base. This enables him to support the retort (and the dragon) on his back. With his left hand he is prising open the dragon’s jaws with a short tube. This appears to be an initiatic scenario, one that contrasts markedly with the initiation of the hero, who is obliged to kill the dragon (St George), then carry the material world on his shoulders (Atlas).

The initiation taking place here is not that of adolescence. The human figure is a bearded man, so this is a “higher” (or at least later) initiation, probably shamanic. In the first initiation, the dragon is the cosmic serpent of origin, both uterine father and phallic mother, who produces the egg from which the initiand has the task of breaking free, so that he can then kill the dragon. The initiatiand does so by means of internally generated fire, which can be likened to the process of rousing the Kundalini serpent from its dormancy at the base of the spine.

In the Vitruvius aeolipile, however, ⚚Hermes, as “the endpoint of the anus”, is not just internal. As the god who presides over all boundaries, including the bodily boundary that separates inside from outside, it is he who enables the alchemist to be held “fixed” in space and time during the process of insemination by the dragon’s phallus. Being rooted to the spot enables the alchemist to achieve the focus required for the next steps in the exercise: gestation, incubation, and emergence.

It is important to note the striking difference from the Zoroastrian symbolism, where the “birth” of the egg takes place through the anus. In the alchemical tradition, the processes that occur after insemination are all internal and move upwards through the body. The initiand needs a psychic “womb” (Venus) in which to gestate the embryonic seed, after which it has to be incubated by the warmth of the heart (Sun).

At this point the symbolism begins to resemble the sprouting of a plant more than the hatching of an oviparoid. As the seed grows, it becomes more responsive to the rhythms of the Moon (lung‐throat chakra). When it reaches the level of the third eye, before its final breakthrough, it becomes clairvoy Dedicated to all lovers of Faerie Tail.

antly capable of “seeing” what lies on “the other side”. This takes place under the aegis of Jupiter, as “All‐seeing Eye”.

At first it might seem surprising that Saturn rules over the the casting aside of the shell husk as the new life emerges from the crown of the head.

In Neo‐Tantra, this role is assigned to Mercury, and Saturn is allocated the lowest spot, in the basal chakra. In that capacity, Saturn represents old age, so rules over abjection, the casting off of waste.

But the Vitruvius aeolipile inverts the roles. Here Saturn’s function is rather that of midwife tending the new birth. He is the “mammiferous father”, and his role is to guide the newborn entity back to the dragon’s mouth, as food, so that the cycle can be completed.

And what of Mars? In Neo‐Tantra, he occupies the genital chakra. But in the interpretation presented here, he has been dislodged from the womb‐space by Venus and emanated in the form of

the wingless dragon, who keeps feeding on the substance of his union with the alchemist. This is the necessary (and inevitable) “sacrifice” that enables the dragon’s semen (the Mercury within Sulphur) and the alchemist’s “blood” (the Sulphur within Mercury) to become united and produce the “Virgin’s Milk” on which the dragon feeds. This “product”, viewed through a more anthropomorphic lens, is the hermaphrodite, who unites not just Mars with Venus but also Mercury with Saturn. The Sun, the Moon and Jupiter collaborate to create the “birth canal” through which the foetal androgyne passes.

The culmination of the exercise takes place when the aeolipile begins to speak with a steady RFD 188 Winter 2021 45

blue flame. Up to this point, it has been mainly an internal process. But the flare that “manifests” from it is merely as sign that the dross (“scoria”) is burning off. It can be quite difficult to achieve, and the experiment is not without its dangers. One of

46 RFD 188 Winter 2021

the conjectured early uses of the aeolipile was as an explosive device! So do not take the symbolism too literally. As with any alchemical technique, it’s the practice that counts.

"Faerie~lore", by Wave. From the Monumental Stage, Provincetown 400 series, 2020.

Poetic Legacies

by Franklin Abbott

O

n a visit to Paris many years ago with friends Raven Wolfdancer and Neil Adams we met a Moroccan man named Kareem standing outside a gay bar. It was closing time and Neil asked him back to our hotel. He was a sex worker, tall and handsome and became not only Neil’s companion but our friend and guide as we navigated Paris for the first time.

One night we were having a wonderful meal at a little restaurant and Kareem shared a proverb from his country. He said to be a man (and I think he meant a fully realized human being) you must do one of three things: have a child, plant a tree or write a book. The quote stayed with me for over thirty years and now in my seventies I ponder my legacies. I have not had children, but I have planted trees and written books.

These will survive me and hopefully provide shelter and comfort for generations to come.

In the spirit of sharing legacies, it is an honor to

tell you about five remarkable gay/fey/queer poets and their new books. I am lucky to know them all and even luckier to know some of them very well.

Marvin R. Hiemstra and Young Hughley have books that reflect on the arc of their work as poets.

Mose Hardin continues to chronicle his life as a gay African American man in poetry and photography.

Gustavo Hernandez writes about the gay Latinx experience and Dustin Brookshire muses about his life as a gay man in the South.

Three other books of note, Steven Riel’s Edgemere, Michael Montlack’s Daddy (reviewed by Riel in the last RFD) and Collin Kelley and Karen Head’s pop culture poetry anthology Mother Mary Comes to Me from Madville Publishing.

G

HOOKUP #1

ustavo Hernandez is the author of the poetry collection Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press). Gustavo holds a degree in creative writing from California State University Long Beach, and his poems have been published in Reed, Acentos Review, Sonora Review and other publications. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico and lives in Southern California.

[RFD will continue this review with five additional authors in the Spring issue.]

I drove the eleven miles to your house and on the way no longer bothered the chaparral or the mountain with questions. I couldn’t imagine spring as a wife. In your living room it was a small, framed reproduction of the Newport Coast, light and easy, a maze of veined marble tile under my feet.

Leading with the light head of a wounded man—more than that three days’ worth— I wanted to say I’d saved everything for you: the warmth of my truck to the things that had buckled and curved in my memory, like you have now. And I don’t mind that your name was lost to the demand of summer. I still see the warming planter, the bachelor’s button fully grown, and there we are, unlimbering the biggest thing we thought we could offer each other.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 47

D

ustin Brookshire, a finalist for the 2021 Scotti Merrill Award, is the curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series and editor of Limp Wrist. He is the author of two chapbooks—Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press,

2012). His work has been published in a number of journals and anthologized in Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012) and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writes on the American South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Visit Dustin online at www.dustinbrookshire.com.

I Should Write Soap Operas My neighbor, well technically she isn’t my neighbor since she lives on the other side of the building, two floors below, appeared with a baby a few weeks ago.

I’ve been meaning to tell Paul about the baby, but the daily hum drum of life—work, rest, write— has blocked my thoughts, but today, we were walking Daisy and turned a corner and there she was—baby strapped to chest with its legs swinging. I think it might be a boy, but I’m not sure. All the other times I’ve seen it, it’s been covered in a red blanket, which is no help since red is like yellow where babies are concerned.

Anyway, I’m losing track of my point.

I think the baby is stolen.

Paul tells me she is probably babysitting.

I say, She probably stole it. Then add, But not from another country, as if this legitimizes my comment.

Paul rolls his eyes and tells me she can steal the baby in one of my poems. I’ll admit I’m the kind of guy who enjoys a giggle when I hear about someone objecting at a wedding.

I’ll admit I’ve watched soap operas since I was eight and rooted for the villain most of the time.

I adored Vivian and Sami on Days of Our Lives.

My mother threatened to quit taping episodes when I cheered for them. You might not know, Sami stole her baby sister. Well, she stole her half baby sister, but only she and her cheating mother Marlena knew about the half part. I’m not saying this is the case with the mystery baby in my building. I’m only saying it’s OK not to accept what’s in front of you at face value.

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M

ose Xavier Hardin Jr. was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio and is the eldest of three.

The author of 11 poetic works. Mose was a thirtytwo-year resident of Atlanta, Georgia but now makes Oklahoma City, Oklahoma his home. Mose is also a music industry veteran and the author of 10 poetry books. He is an eight-year prostate cancer survivor and continues to make his health and well-being a number one priority. Mose is an accomplished and seasoned photographer who loves to shoot nature, live music and everyday people. Mose has been writing since he was ten

years old and has always been considered an ancient soul. Writing about his personal experiences as a young man growing up in the Midwest has always been second nature to him. Mose has had to overcome personal tragedy coping and enduring the loss of two partners in his early twenties and thirties. Despite his own challenges, Mose has made a name for himself as a creative and spiritual Poet on a journey to discover his truth.

He continues to live a life as a transparent human being sharing the great lessons he has learned through his poetry and his photography.

Black Man Magic Our intellect Could never be measured By our circumstances Our character Could never be determined When being judged by the melanin content of our skin Our strength Could never be exhausted Because the power within us Is boundless, endless and timeless As history has taught us Our freedom may be delayed By those who seek to destroy us Many have tried and failed To disturb the soul and peace of the Black Man Only to realize We grow stronger in knowledge Unity and Power With each generation Freedom is at hand In the words of Malcom X By any means necessary

RFD 188 Winter 2021 49

M

arvin R. Hiemstra is an Iowa native and a long time resident of San Francisco. His new book of memoir and poetry from McCaa Books is Raven Understands: A Happy Memoir . Hiemstra is author of of many books of poetry including Poet Wrangler: Droll Poems and his performance DVD French Kiss Destiny has received wide praise. He is founding editor of the Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review.

Excerpt from Raven Understands: A Happy Memoir.

Each of us deserves a fine family: the family members can be any combination you choose. Don’t sit around waiting for anyone’s approval. Always do what you can when you can! Do appreciate every minute with your family. Beginning at our Cumberland apartment we adored a deck jammed with plants: Lloyd being a trained horticulturist. Joy of each autumn , a hanging pot of Boston Ivy, blazed from orange to wine red to brilliant gold.

Always smile even when there is a mosquito flying around your balls. Relationship are a painful test in the art of compromise, but Lloyd and I shared rare priorities: spend every day you can in a museum, create a snug and lovely home, and be a family to all the gay world and beyond.

Y

oung Hughley, native of Atlanta, earned his BA degree from Morehouse College and three executive certificates from Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government as a recipient of fellowships for recognition of his community development work.

He finds time to serve on nonprofit boards whose missions embrace social equity, inclusion and diversity when not writing. He published his first book, Images Finally Focused, a compilation of poetry, essays and short stories in 2018. Young is current chairperson of the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival.

50 RFD 188 Winter 2021

The Magician Like a magician performing disappearing acts Puff Vanishing in thin air Reappearing In unexpected places In a flash The covering of a cloak Over fragile bodies sewn in half Reconnected with the wave of a wand Love thrives in the mystic region Where Imperfections are made perfect Kind acts disappear, realities clash, Enchanted moments are created Disappearing, clashing, creating Over and Over Again

"Joy Rags and Prayer Flags", by Philip Hare (Sweet Marie).

RFD 188 Winter 2021 51

How does one overcome grief?

I don’t think one does.

Grief is as deep as the cosmos is wide.

Where there are two, there will be pain. Where there is a coming together, there is a rending apart.

Only when there is no one left to grieve will grief be abated. Only at stillpoint do comets cease their trajectory.

For me, I seek no vain consolation, but that my pain murders the world, and its infernal hold on my senses.

As such I weep, as weeping is required. And may the sky fall, the earth heave, until every ocean has bled dry.

—Gavin Dillard

When I homed in Inverness, my auto mechanic was a prince Romanov.

He was arguably the most comely and perfect specimen of a man I have ever encountered.

He was also a raging alcoholic.

I think Rasputin and I would have been great friends and drinking buddies.

I have a thing for conflicted men. Their truth is relative and volatile; they question God and thus never settle for the illusion.

An iconoclast by nature, my idols are inherently imperfect, my religion fervently heretic.

Sycophants are for the lesser gods; Isness requires only uncertainty, and the certainty thereof.

God is no more predictable than life is, and as ever unknowable.

The tongue cannot taste itself; the eye cannot see itself. The soul knows only the palpable Joy of its own existence.

And from that fertile and ineffable Joy is the multiverse set into motion.

Perfection is known only to those willing to embrace imperfection.

I am that I am, and in this alone is Love perfected.

—Gavin Dillard

52 RFD 188 Winter 2021

SAM She’s wearing purple jeans, an army-surplus belt, a Ban-Lon shirt with lint, back pockets stuffed with wallets and a red bandana. She stoops, concealing breasts. Her pants ride low to slight her narrow waist. Her slow, considered moves, her gruff, slurred voice announce how butch she is or stoned, spread-eagle, on a counter stool. Been out of town, just back, already thrown from one apartment, used to work this place…. Her broken nose, her mean, forsaken glance now tell us that the strangest thing can happen when two lovers thrust upon each other’s body —call it love— as if each were the other’s other self, as if each had the other’s skin, insisting that she give it back.

“You’re happy now,” she seems to say. “I’m not.”

Her broken nose or stare remind us that the strangest thing can happen when two lovers grapple with each other’s body —call it love— as if to find what’s wanted most, to seize that prize and not give back. A greed at times becomes the only love, and you’re abandoned, violated, robbed, without a cent in some midnight café.

—Ken Anderson

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Lip-Synch For Your Life In the bottom two on Work Race: judges don’t like my look I’ve prepared my lip-synch challenge ‘Duty of Care’ by The Establishment But I’m not ready to go home just yet I’m an assassin up against the firing squad They’re the backing singers of social prejudice: their careless whispers pay lip-service to policy spin-doctors It’s the fight of my life I’ll turn it out because that song was written just for me Watch me slay, not sashay away I owe it to myself and all the other fierce children Catcalled by haters on life’s crazy runway Just because bitches hate us tall poppies So let’s claim that crown as birthright for the House of Difference.

—Kate Meyer-Currey

54 RFD 188 Winter 2021

Under Poplars

Death at the Door

i

Nobody was tending to him, the slightly twisted man sprawled on the sidewalk, so I presumed he was dead, blood around his mouth and a small pool on the ground, two doors down from a gay club.

Two cop cars there, but they were only interviewing potential witnesses.

I walked on, knowing I wouldn’t stop thinking about him.

He was young, beefy on this first day of Pride weekend.

Marriage passed in New York state.

Did someone take it out on him?

Or was it personal?

His friends didn’t seem to be around.

No shock. No sadness. Just an oddly twisted young man with nobody helping him.

A woman who has nowhere to go is a kite Gorged on the eternal discord of class, memory, cancer Flying shotgun under the black earth of sky Caught in the tall branches of poplars ii She who lives for the end of the world is a kite and a kite is a victim of wind

—Steven Schwei

—Mark A. Murphy

RFD 188 Winter 2021 55

Spiritwood: The Third National Faerie Gathering

by Bob Henry (Smiley)

M

y Dear Faerie Friends, It’s hard to believe that I waited forty years to tell you about Spiritwood, the Third National Faerie Gathering held near Santa Fe, New Mexico over Labor Day weekend in 1981. In the midst of Covid pandemic isolation I found the photos I had taken at the event and they brought back wonderful memories. I was a forty-three year old University Professor in Tucson AZ and had come out as gay a few years before.

I was dating Jerry K., a professional chemist who called himself an Alchemist. He had attended the Second National Gathering of Radical Faeries in 1980 and said that it was an exciting and enriching experience. He was unable to attend the 1981 gathering and without telling me much about Radical Faeries, he persuaded me to attend in his place.

Just before the Labor Day weekend, I drove to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I met other attendees at the bookstore meeting place and we caravaned to The Pecos National Forest.

At the campsite, about two-hundred gay men of various ages and ethnicities put up tents and prepared for a cool and sometimes rainy weekend. The air was fragrant with the smell of campfires. After forty years, detailing the events is impossible.

I published a factual report of the weekend in the 9/18/81 issue of Arizona Gay News. What was missing from that article, however, were the most striking aspects of this event. In 1981, Tucson was a college town where public gay life was limited to the bars and disco. I was not ready to broadcast just how unique the Faeries really were!

At the campground, the first thing that struck me was the diversity of the attendees and their work and living arrangements. I learned that some were 56 RFD 188 Winter 2021

farmers living in communal groups in rural areas such as Short Mountain, TN. Other faeries were teachers, artists or craftsmen; some made their own clothes. In addition to nudity, there was a wide variety in attire: some men wore a single piece of women’s clothing over their male clothes, which I learned was called “genderfuck”. I was surprised by the emphasis on Neo-Paganism. We sang hymns to Innana and other goddesses and created spiral circles in addition to the main Faerie circle where announcements were made. There was talk of raising a “cone of power” and I kept watching for its appearance.

Among the crafts and artwork for sale, I purchased a t-shirt left over from the 1980 Gathering which bore an image of the god Cernunnos. I had never heard of this God, but with his erect cock, he became my Patron.

During the day, men gathered around a campfire or in tents for a discussion led by one or another of the “Elders”. Often, someone would light a joint and pass it around while the rain fell softly on the tent. Although I heard Harry Hay speak, I most remember Crit Goin and his story about attending a Shriners’ convention while wearing his fez with the word “Faggot” embroidered on it.

Memorably, I experienced the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for the first time. They made it OK to be a child again; to jump rope, to dress up.

I never dreamed in 1981 that over the next decades they would play such an important role in attaining Gay Rights and dealing with the AIDS crisis.

During that weekend, I learned that being gay was something to celebrate; not to apologise for or hide from one’s relatives or the straight community.

Being gay is special. It is a gift!

Left: opening circle; Right: the author 1981 and 2021.

Photographs courtesy the author.

Photograhs from the gathering. Left second from top: Crit Goin tells a tale; bottom right: the legendary shawl. Photographs courtesy of the author.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 57

St. John the Divine, after we take the boy to Tom’s Restaurant, after we got him overpriced milkshakes and played Susan Vega on the phone followed by DNA, after we explain why Seinfeld was fun and what being about nothing meant, and after, too, he said, “wasn’t every-thing in the 90s about nothing,” and we told “no” in unison, and after you laughed at him we laughed because he was right — after all this we go down the street like punch-drunk or drunk-drunk faggots staggering down Bourbon St. from Oz and down towards Jackson Square to sit in the shadow of St. Louis — only you have never been there, and we have yet to take the boy. But we were on 110th and and full of pop music, ice cream, and French fries. We took him in through the western side, sun coming through the rose window, prayers in silent, tourists with selfie sticks.

We took him up to the Haring altarpiece. Pedro says, “This is called, ‘The Life of Christ.’ Keith Haring carved it with a hoop knife in clay.” His thick accent of his whisper filled the sanctuary like the smell of cigars and whiskey at the Eagle on Father’s Day night — you remember — and our boy interrupts: “those angels are just like the ones on my shirt.” We were like him once — Pedro wasn’t, too smart and kind — but we were callow and untempered. Pedro said, “yes, the ones on your shirt are just like these.” He didn’t look away from the altar: “Haring only made nine of these. He finished it just weeks before he died of AIDS. That was 31 years ago.”

The boy said, “you two measure every-thing by when someone died.” I told him, “I know we do.” Pedro said, “La Bohème.” I said, “La Bohème.”

58 RFD 188 Winter 2021

The boy laughed; he said, “and now you sing Rent!” Pedro, in French more perfect than my Spanish, sang to him, deep like an organ drowning in butter: “Je vous parle d’un temps!” Embarrassed, the boy said “stop” in a nervous whisper. The sanctuary looked towards us and Pedro sang: “Que les moins de vingt ans!” More embarrassed, then even louder: “La bohème, la bohème. Ça voulait dire on est heureux!”

I miss you most, or, most painfully when I realize I’ve forgotten to miss you, like when I let you slip from my thoughts, and then catch myself catching you, as if you needed it — as if, perhaps, you had not craved wings in ash and salt water, in sand and Hudson garbage, in clay with a hoop knife — as if you weren’t feathered and X chested in forever relief on the suction cupped tentacles of my grey matter: slosh, the splash of Cuban tides — we were tossed from St. Mark’s side doors like ugly help and singing! singing! tide: “La bohème, la bohème!

La bohème, la bohème!”

And the boy was nothing but red shame and Pedro, baritone butter churn, sea lover, boat-man, stopped, he grabbed my hand and pulls me to him, pulls us closer around the boy, made a hull around his bodies with ours, and kissed him: one body in the vessel of our two.

Pedro sang, “Qui nous servait de nid ne!” And there in the shadow of our cities largest cathedral, Pedro said to him, “You will never know how dangerous it used to be, to be, to be with bodies, men, and kids, hands, to be just a body.” He said, “La bohème, la bohème!”

—Dudgrick R Bevins

In Memory of William Townsend Stewart 5/25/1951–10/20/2021 • By Jesse Oliver (aka Echo)

“You and I and all beings are animated by the One Spirit. No parting and no meeting ever really take place.” (Source unknown, calligraphed by William Stewart).

W

illiam was a cultural worker, calligrapher, visual artist, linguist, writer, editor, inventor of languages and worlds, sustainability advocate, and queer community dreamer who was involved with the Radical Faeries and kindred tribes since 1980.

In 2014, he co-founded the queer community and retreat center Groundswell, in Mendocino County.

He was my dear friend and queer mentor.

Born in 1951, William Stewart grew up in a generation that still thought of sexuality as shameful and homosexuality as a disease. Though loving, his mother was needy and full of judgment; his father, emotionally distant, responding with standards inscrutable and seemingly irrelevant. College led WIlliam far from his childhood in Providence, RI, to Reed College in Portland, OR, where William majored in Russian (BA 1973) and developed the love for calligraphy that was to be the foundation of his work and art.

Arriving in San Francisco in 1979, he soon fell in with queer organizers and visionaries. The founding meeting of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence took place at William’s home at 151 Pierce Street in 1979; according to Agnes, it was William who proposed the phrase “Perpetual Indulgence.”

Others might have boasted about being such an influence, but William never mentioned it. He did, however, create and acknowledge the handwritten logo the Sisters still use today, and two banners

Photograph by Devlin Shand.

one of which survives with Mish.

Though he did not attend the 1979 gathering in Arizona, William knew of it and felt drawn to a post-gathering event in a Mission storefront, where, in the words of Mark Thompson (reprinted in RFD 169), “A canopy of exotic fabrics hung over the dimly lit space, sheltering the men below who were languidly piled on dunes of oversized cushions.” Mark became William’s lover for the next two years and an intimate friend for the rest of their lives. Mark introduced William to James Broughton and Harry Hay, among others; William’s next home in San Francisco, Touchstone, became a Radical Faerie crossroads of sorts, and was site of the founding of Nomenus in 1985.

In William’s handwritten journal, the years from 1986–1994 are a litany of death. Every year he lost several friends and lovers to AIDS. A dedicated volunteer at the Shanti Project, he retreated sexually during this time, the prospect of disease warding him from further exploration. He vacillated on whether to get tested, wondering whether he wanted to know. It was a time of grief, but also the time of his longest romantic partnership, with Steve Collier.

In 1996-7, William felt called back to Martha’s Vineyard. His mother Caroline had died in the early 1990s, and something about his life in San Francisco felt inauthentic. He left Steve and moved back into a small family home. There he lived for the next fifteen years, caring for his father, volunteering for Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, and entertaining visitors, often friends from the Faeries and Billys of the West Coast.

We first met in the soaking pools of Winter RFD 188 Winter 2021 59

Gathering at Breitenbush in 2009. There was snow on the ground, and deer just a few feet away under the boughs, nosing for whatever was green. We tantalized each other for rather different reasons: I him, because of my relative youth, passion for the Faeries and social justice, and years of learning Russian and studying Central Asian culture, both among William’s scholarly interests. I was struggling to find a viable path for my life without the drudgery of corporate capitalism, hopefully in Faerie community. When William announced his intention to move back to the West Coast from Martha’s Vineyard and live his remaining years in queer community, I fell in love. Here was someone who was a lifelong Faerie and a connection to figures like Mica Kindman and Bradley Rose, whom I knew only through their writing, whose dream sounded like my dream.

William had embarked on a few months of travel and exploration; he thought of this time as a personal vision quest that would help him understand how and where to settle for his next phase of life.

Our paths have wound together for much of the years since. The following summer, having lost my boyfriend and my job, I found myself sobbing into William’s shoulder at the Faerie Sex Magick Workshop at Wolf Creek.

He stayed on for the 40th Anniversary Men’s Gathering and helped us erect a Moroccan circus tent on the meadow near the Naraya tree. He would convene Heart Circle one day, and listen from the sidelines the next. By then the seed was planted: he was to move back to the West Coast after his father passed. In a solo pagan ritual under the full moon, recorded in a journal from May 2010, he wrote: “My dream is to be a generous-hearted and beloved elder in a tribe of queer-spirit folk committed to reciprocal mirroring and consciousnessraising.”

More so than most, William had the vision, connections, and resources to make this personal dream a reality.

60 RFD 188 Winter 2021

After pulling together a small circle of like-spirited queers, in late 2013 and early 2014 William started exploring properties in Northern California, finally settling on the defunct but fully-permitted summer camp now known as Groundswell. Its purchase was to be the most difficult commitment he would ever make, but it was to change the lives of thousands. Over the next seven years, through dozens of gatherings, retreats, and weekend visits, Groundswell became a home-away-from-home for Bay Area Radical Faeries and related folk, helping to expand and sustain queer community during a time of runaway gentrification and displacement in San Francisco and Oakland. William’s touch was everywhere: in guest cabins decorated with artifacts from New England; in calligraphy and vintage postage stamp art hanging in the dining hall; and in the middle of the camp’s hillside, where he would eventually take up building a stone wall, sans mortar, in an old Scottish or New England style. Though disease cut his life short, William laid plans for Groundswell’s survival, intending the forested refuge to remain a place of ecological stewardship and service to Radical Faeries and other queer peoples.

Like many of us, William had moments of profound disappointment with the Faerie movement even as he was one of our most daring and committed organizers. A trip to Short Mountain Beltane in 2014, intended as a coalition-building expedition during the founding of Groundswell, left William feeling adrift and disconnected. The trauma of JP Hartsong’s death by suicide at Wolf Creek, and related conflicts between pragmatic traditionalists from the Bay Area and anarchoprimitivists from the Pacific Northwest, finally turned him back to the Bay Area from Oregon.

Yet for me, William’s life expressed profound Radical Faerie spiritual teachings. If he struggled to accept fully his own body and desires, his strength showed in his acceptance of others. He understood deeply how the Faeries’ challenges emerge

Based on W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” (*), one of William’s works of calligraphy. Photo by Seth Eisen. For many who knew him, including early Sisters, Faeries, and community members later in his life, William indeed showed “an affirming flame.”

from generational trauma via personal instability and grow from the soil of colonialism and slavery, watered by mounting wealth inequality and a fraying social safety net. Redemption was in the space he held: in loving attention to his friends’ personal histories, in tender witness to moments of stress and sadness, in the rustic warmth and queer hospitality of his homes.

That patient appreciation was entwined with William’s experience of Heart Circle, in which he was a professed believer and eager participant.

While not himself a Thoreauvian contemplative, he admired those who were, and lamented the destruction of species, cultures, and ecosystems obvious in the late-20th century. His, too, was a remarkable celebration of life’s journey and a profound acceptance of his own eventual end, through dust into the oceans, into plants and fish and birds and all that is our shared planetary life. As he wrote in these pages in 2012 (RFD 141, “Heart Circles”): “Life arises out of stillness, and when my time comes, I want to be lovingly witnessed as I sink back down into that eternal well of silence that is always at the center of our vessel.

“With each passing moment, I come closer to my final breath. New life, new stories will be

renewing the fabric, even as I fade toward silence.

Carry me in, lay me down gently near the fire.

Here, at last, I can relinquish my failing body and wounded psyche, knowing that everything recycles, joining the earth, the ancestors, the spirits.

Sing me out, oh my beloveds! Twine me into the eternal basket, the vessel of our collective heart, the circle of the cosmos. Lower me into the well of stillness, witness me as I take my leave. I want to die in heart circle.”

On October 20, 2021, by the garden window of a hospice apartment in San Francisco, surrounded by a circle of six loving companions, William’s wish became real. May he rest in beloved friendship.

With thanks for language, fact-checking, and edits from Janaia Donaldson, Jason Patten, and Wow. Video links: Highlights from William’s wake: https://tinyurl.com/kpaamh4b.

A message from Queen Qvillhelmina: https://tinyurl.com/rb2r4v8w.

James Broughton, William, and Mark Thompson, ca. 1983, Photo by Joel Singer.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 61

For David Thorstad Memorial, Lengby, MN, August 2021.

By Allen Young

I

was saddened by the news of David’s death, immediately shedding some tears at the loss. He and I stayed in touch over several decades—sometimes agreeing on things but more often in sharp disagreement. I sometimes became angry at his viewpoints—always extreme, rarely nuanced—and yet we continued to communicate. Aside from the past, we shared something important in recent years—he moved from big city life to VERY rural northern Minnesota in the 1990s and cultivated a huge garden and rural lifestyle that resembled mine somewhat. I was aware of his very recent grave cardiac health crisis, and worried along with all of you.

And then he was gone.

I knew David as long as I have known other early gay liberationists. We were all brave pioneers. He told me that I helped him come out of the closet, and here’s the story: For some reason, probably because of my work with Liberation News Service (LNS), I entered the office of the Militant, the paper of the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist), where David worked and was NOT known as a gay man.

I had been involved for less than a year with the NY Gay Liberation Front and I was wearing one of the hot new GLF buttons that said “Freaking Fag Revolutionary.” David was almost ready to come out to his SWP comrades, and he did shortly after that

62 RFD 188 Winter 2021

incident. Our mutual commitment to gay and leftist ideas was important and long-lasting—plus the rural gardening aspect.

David liked teenage boys. Me too. And the truth is that just about every boyfriend I ever had was nineteen at the start. Even my current partner, now sixty-one, was nineteen when we met. I never embraced NAMBLA, but I was confident that David was a man of integrity and ethics. His life’s work as a gay activist, socialist, historian (with incredible knowledge of the Bolshevic revolution and its aftermath) multi-lingual intellectual (he got some paid work as an editor & translator)—all of this goes way beyond NAMBLA, in my opinion. I also would like to mention that I am the one who introduced Octavio Zuaznabar to David. I had met Octavio in Havana in 1971. We stayed in touch, and when Octavio came to the USA in the Mariel boatlift ten years later, he decided he did not want go to Miami.

He chose the more cosmopolitan New York City.

Octavio contacted me as soon as he could, and I suggested he contact David Thorstad for some possible ideas about life in New York. I knew that both Octavio and David were fluent in French, and that would be helpful. They shared an apartment for many years. Goodbye, David Thorstad. Que en paz descanse. May you rest in peace.

John Burnside, David Thorstad, Harry Hay. Photograph source unknown.

Now Available!

The 21st Century Book of Faeries 75 Faerie Portraits by Richard Price 30 Faerie Stories by the subjects Hard-cover; 118 pages Order the book directly from:

Richard Price 47 Days Park Buffalo, NY 14201-2007 rwprice13@msn.com $40.00 US, check or money order. Includes Book price, sales tax, packaging and postage.

“Two decades ago, at a Faerie Circle, Price asked for and enthusiastically received ‘Faerie Help’ in creating collab- orative portraits, asking his subjects to choose locations, settings, props, and costume – or lack thereof. Price puts his subjects at ease, conversing with them while attend-ing to camera mechanics. In the spirit of Nan Goldin or Catharine Opie’s empathetic portraits, Price’s documentary images evince an enviable warmth and companionship.” —Sandra Firmin, curator, University at Buffalo Art Gallery.

READ RFD ONLINE www.rfdmag.org/ back-issues.php Most Issues from the first to this one. Missing issues uploaded as we get to them.

RFD 188 Winter 2021 63

Spirit Dancing

Radical Faerie Ritual Chants

By Shane & Heron IS NOW AVAILABLE ON ITUNES AND YOUTUBE MUSIC! YOU CAN ALSO STILL DOWLOAD FOR FREE ON BANDCAMP.COM

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64 RFD 188 Winter 2021

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O W Issue 190 / Summer 2022

WORDS OF POWER / MAGICAL WORDS Submission Deadline: April 21, 2022 www.rfdmag.org/upload

Language is the make of reality.

Everyone has their own internal language that is a magical way of making it through the day, we make up phrases, we coin usages and we allocate ideas to things to create different ways of approaching life. In this issue, we’re asking you dear readers to consider how language, words and ideas have given you personally power in various aspects of your life—spiritually, sexually, communally, or in ways which are outside of definition, magical space, ecstasy, transformation.

Now consider how those words which you’ve chosen to assign to yourself, to your spiritual practice, to your larger circle of friends has helped widen your understanding of power. Did a disempowering word become something of power once it was reclaimed? How has that shifted recently as we’ve tended to “de-label” ourselves, take on the “I’m just me” approach while yielding away some of the power that came with associations with words of power that came with reclaiming identities, exploring understandings and taking risks with having power, yielding power and letting go.

We also would love to hear how people have had the inverse of “power of words” to “power over words” happen in their lives. How have you, the community you are in or the people you are around shifted in how they use words. Do we self-edit, are we soft peddling “who we are” so we don’t upset people or are we shifting where we use words in our life relative to specific spaces in our lives. When did my words of power/magic become power over someone else?

How can we create a space where empowerment through words is not a way to create disempowerment for someone else? How can we challenge ourselves to see we are not always on the same path but we can share in the journey?

If words are the beginnings of understanding, and understanding is the path to visioning, then where in the labyrinth have the power of words taken us?

RFD 188 Winter 2021 65

a readercreated gay quarterly celebrating queer diversity 66 RFD 188 Winter 2021