WC75 – Les Wright

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BEAR SPIRIT
By Les Wright

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.    Subscribe today! 

My own path to heart-centered Gay men’s tribal community has taken many circuitous side routes. I found it only after I stopped looking and allowed it to find me. My civil war is over. I am creating a place in this new Billy community, where I am seen as a Gay warrior and spiritual healer. As my heart continues, however falteringly, to heal and become free and open to the world, I begin anew, post-AIDS Holocaust, to embrace my Gay/queer brothers.

“Welcome home, Billy!” is how they greeted me. When, in a tribal drumming and chanting ceremony my remaining defenses shattered, I knew I was finally reborn, and invited to embody and give voice to the Gay archetype of bear. I have bene pondering “bear spirit” ever since.

Having always been drawn to older men, as mentors and lovers, I suddenly realize I have become the sort of older man I have always been drawn to. I now turn and face back, reaching out to my younger Gay brothers, just as I continue to reach out to my own mentors among the community elders. I’m just beginning to learn: I can leave a trail of crumbs behind me, as one elder kindly admonishes, but I cannot leave a trail ahead of me.
I am no longer imprisoned by old scripts, if I so choose. Unscripted means I have to fly by the seat of my pants. A lifetime’s preparation — of overcoming psychological compartmentalization and fragmentation, of groping blindly, backsliding and willfully self-sabotaging, of emotions frozen or out of control, of personal will paralyzed, thwarted, run amok, or liberated from — has now transformed me. At 54, I begin to take my place in my community. And I begin to understand, from a broader perspective of the evolution of queer men’s spirituality, the legacy of homoerotic community: we are perpetually engaged in liberating ourselves and each other, generation after generation.

Audre Lorde has long been a muse and mentor. When she wrote (in “Litany for Survival”) “For those of us / who were imprinted with fear / … learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk,” I understood. All my life I had been taught to mistrust — straight people, Gay people, my sense of home, my mission in life, even who I am. As I now learn to trust, for the first time, I am able to enter into tribal community.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Les Wright lives in San Francisco.  He is the editor of The Bear Book I & II.

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