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WC78 – Malcolm Boyd – Community of 2

October 29, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

A Community of Two
By Malcolm Boyd

My hefty unabridged Webster’s New International Dictionary (1960) defines community:

“A body of people having common organization or interests, or living in the same place under the same laws and regulations.”

The same dictionary defines relationship as “the state or character of being related or interrelated; a connection by way of relation…kinship; consanguinity; affinity—a state of affairs existing between those having relations or dealings.”

It seems as Gays we’ve come a long way since 1960 with both words. In Gay parlance, a “relationship” has come particularly to mean a partnership of two men as lovers or partners, living together, often constituting an extended family. At the same time “community” in common Gay experience is the Gay “world” or “neighborhood” or “culture” surrounding one’s self; an environment identified by Gay folk, institutions, bars, restaurants, publications, unofficial rules and styles.

As a Gay elder who has lived comfortably in a close Gay relationship with another man for more than 20 years, I find authentic connections between “community,” the exterior of Gay life, and “relationship” which anchors the interior.

For example, Mark, my partner, once said to me: “If I can’t tell you about it, whom can I tell?” Precisely. Yet this approach holds meaning for one’s participation in community as well as in relationship. It’s about honesty and honest communication, essential for the well-being of both. Over and over again we’ve seen a community fall apart when chaos replaced structure. God knows, the same has held true for numberless relationships.

Relationship is two persons, not one. By the same token, community is a group of persons, not one. Both move toward self-destruction whenever one person tries to establish either one-man rule or the equivalent of the Hollywood star system (with himself as star).

A key lesson for a relationship is that it is not possession. No one “owns” it or is “in charge.” Neither is any genuine, healthy community a possession that “belongs” to a dominant personality in the guise of a benevolent despot.

Gravitas enters with the emergence of serious problems. Pain and loss evoke response. This is where balance in a relationship or community can make all the difference.

“Life is what happens while we’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon wrote. Exactly. This is where commitment enters into our story. Don’t be too busy making other plans to engage life, to enable relationship, to support community and help it continue to live. But commitment is neither facile nor easy.
Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet is a startling and profound example showing us how to serve other people’s needs and work for peace and justice. In other words, how to make a commitment. Clearly, religious and spiritual communities must make a choice: either to stay locked inside stained-glass museums or else move into the mainstream, risking prestige and respectability in order to be a part of life that happens.

I ran headlong into such a choice in Los Angeles in June, 1990. The powerful County Board of Supervisors met on Tuesdays in their downtown quarters. They had not provided needed funds and services to deal with AIDS. This, despite the fact countless more lives were threatened, especially in the African-American and Latino communities. At this point the Los Angeles Coalition for Compassion asked clergy to engage in a “kneel-in” act of civil disobedience at a Supervisors meeting. This was designed to pinpoint the need and bring it forcefully to the attention of authorities and the general public. Five clergy responded positively.

I did partly from a remembrance of the significance of civil disobedience in the civil rights and peace movements. I was jailed in both northern and southern U.S. jails in the 60s, heeding the Macedonian call of Martin Luther King, Jr. and twice in Washington, D.C. for participating in peace masses inside the Pentagon.

On the morning of June 12, 1990, our group who were prepared to be arrested entered the Supervisors Building. Following the invocation and pledge of allegiance to the flag, we moved forward and read a prayer. It said, in part: “We pray that these Supervisors may this day be moved to hear the cries o the 112,000 persons with HIV disease in this community, whose lives are in their hands.” Then we knelt and sang “Singing for Our Lives.” One by one, we were placed under arrest and taken to jail.

I never “wanted” to take such a risk, subject myself to the overwhelming scrutiny of the combined media, or put up with the utter inconvenience and pain of a jail experience. Yet I responded, from way down in my conscience, to the role models of Gandhi and King. And to the sheer human need represented.

I thought about many things during my eleven-hour incarceration in jail, including four hours when I was chained to a bench while also handcuffed to another prisoner. The hours grew longer and longer, approaching midnight. I felt pain and discouragement. I meditated. I prayed. I acknowledged my total absence of any control. I asked for help because I felt helpless. And I received help—a centering, a trust—and an awareness problems are not insurmountable but solvable. Instead of being overwhelmed, we can take a leaf from A.A. and approach “The Big Picture” a step at a time. And believe. And work at it. Giving up the illusion of control, we can ask God to enable us to serve the cause of peace and justice in the world.

For me this was a great lesson about the meaning of community. I was not there as an individual. I belonged to a community. A community under duress. A community in peril and pain. This reminded me of these words by Thomas Merton about prayer: “Prayer and Love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone.” Tough words. Accurate words. No sentimentality or Hallmark sweetness here. This is about when the climb grows very hard, there is no sun in the sky, one has run out of easy energy, and faith is real. At this moment commitment becomes a stark reality.

In either a community or a relationship, a sense of humor is salvific. Always retain a quality of freshness and surprise; “Getting to Know You” is equally valid after many years. Don’t try to change people, especially in a nagging or superior way. Nothing is more damaging. Be accepting. Do your part in dividing tasks. In a community this includes showing up for meetings, avoid coming late, do the paperwork and pay dues. In a relationship this can mean take out the garbage, make the bed, see that bills are paid on time and buying milk if it’s needed.
Don’t forget, in a relationship or a community, to have fun. In a relationship sustain magic and romance, get flowers, make snuggle room. In a community remember birthdays, exchange personal stories in the mailroom, arrange some outings.

Imagination is often sorely missing in the lives of both communities and relationships. A fresh start; a renewed vision. For years I’ve immensely enjoyed these words by Murray D. Lincoln in his 1960 book Vice President in Charge of Revolution: “Because any organization, once it becomes successful, is apt to lose its original drive and vision, I’ve suggested that we have a ‘vice president in charge of revolution.’ He’d be one man not responsible for any operation. He’d stand to one side, with whatever staff he needed, to pick holes in whatever we were doing and remind us of our basic philosophy, our fundamental concepts. His job would be to stir up everything and everybody, to criticize and challenge everything being done—objectives, methods, programs, results. He’d keep us so disconnected with the status quo there’d never be any doubt of our desire to seek new ways to meet people’s needs. He’d keep us on the right track.”

The secret of either a successful relationship or a working community is shared experience. Good times, bad times, ups and downs; it all comes out in the wash. Consciously create your own memories to last a lifetime. Be a good guy. Help him be a good guy. Assist your fellow workers in community to be good guys. Honesty is the best solution. The tape of your life, and his, and everybody’s is rolling. Let it happen.

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!

The Rev. Canon Malcolm Boyd began his career in the production company of Mary Pickford and was the first president of the Television Producers Association of Hollywood. He is now, of course, Poet/writer-In-Residence of the Los Angeles Episcopal Archdiocese and an advisor to White Crane Institute. Last spring White Crane Books released a compendium of Boyd’s writing in The Malcolm Boyd Reader.

WC78 - Community

WC78 – Bryn Marlow – In Search of Gay Community

October 29, 2008 Editors 1 Comment

In Search of Gay Community

By Bryn Marlow

When I see an especially sexy man I capture and preserve him the way some people collect butterflies. Oh, I don’t dab camphor on his head, run him through with a pin and stick him to a board (though I’ve been sorely tempted). Rather, I capture his image in my mind, add a drop of mental fixative and file him away for future review. If he’s a rare specimen, unusually compelling in some way, I write a description of him, add it to the others in my red three-ring binder.

Thus I have preserved in ink the man who stood on tip toe in tank top, shorts and shapely thighs to replace a light bulb in a Pride Fest vendor’s tent, stretched muscled arms up overhead as if to bridge the gap ’twixt heaven and earth. Thus I can call up the image of a shirtless farm boy, out of college for the summer, working the roadside vegetable stand with his father, relaxed, easy among the melons. Thus I can envision the actor in a community theatre production who stumbled on stage in a tight white t-shirt and navy blue pants, barefoot, bound, bleeding. Beaten down time and again, he rose to his feet, chest heaving, shirt ripped, expression both defiant and resigned.

Maybe it’s because I don’t see many men that I hold onto the ones I do. By choice, I live in the rural Midwestern United States, work at a small production company a couple miles from home. My husband commutes to work in the city, does our shopping while he’s there. No need for me to get out. By choice we live without television, VCR, DVDs, cell phones, cable, internet connection. We turn our attention instead to each other and to various projects, plants, animals and books. There are ample pay-offs. There are trade-offs, as well. When it comes to sexy men other than my husband, I get little in the way of visual stimulation—photo books of artful male nudes, calendars featuring the work of these same photographers and the pictures I carry in my head.

For me, it’s much the same story with regards to the Gay community. Connections close to home are hard to come by in this conservative part of the country and complicated by my Luddite leanings. Concerns for physical safety, job security and personal reputation persuade many GLBT persons to remain closeted or keep a low profile. Around here, pressure to marry a person of the opposite sex is high. Many Gay persons have and do. Clandestine rendezvous for sexual expression often take precedence over other forms of community-building. These were the messages my husband and I heard during the three years we facilitated a monthly support/discussion group in our home for local Gay men. The group—never large to begin with—dwindled and eventually folded.

While our Gay friends are close to our hearts, their houses are far from ours. Once a month my husband and I drive to the capital city, a trip about 30 times that of my daily commute. There we attend a Gay discussion/support group with three bosom companions. One weekend a year we attend a Gay men’s retreat. Other get-togethers dot the year, most held far from our home. For us, Gay community is encapsulated, comes in discrete doses. It’s not something we get all the time.
I was mindful of this recently when we made a long drive to crash a party some friends were hosting for their city’s LGBT social/education/advocacy group. About 20 people attended, men and women, some single, some partnered, some with children in tow. There were retirees, professional types, working stiffs and the currently unemployed. There was the flaming queen with his encyclopedic knowledge of classic cinema, the master gardener, clerics, professors, an artist, the bartender and weekend deejay at a local Gay club. There was laughter, power tool-talk, jokes, prattle, warmth, show tunes, sarcasm. There was good food, earnest discussion and more.

I savored these moments as they transpired and pinned butterflies in my mind all the while. Two men lustily singing the Munchkin chorus from Wizard of Oz. Another telling about the office party he hosted, pretending his partner was the hired help—and the woman angling for his affection who wasn’t fooled by this subterfuge.

The obvious love and respect the gardener has for the earth. The curate “between cures” struggling to find a place he can call home. The Marlene Dietrich impressionist. The Lesbian protesting she does know something about interior decorating, that her home proves it. The kids moving amongst the hubbub with easy grace.

I store up these memories so I can take them out to look at later. To sustain me through the long dry spells when community seems a chimera, mirage, impossible dream.

I don’t think this is a feeling unique to GLBT people. We live in an era when in living memory air conditioning lured people off front porches and into secluded living rooms, when radio and television replaced community pageants and sing-a-longs, and cable cemented the deal, when increasingly, internet connections reconfigure face-to-face interaction, and do-it-yourself religion empties edifices of faith.

Oh, I know there are bonds of community that support me and keep me safe, as easy to ignore and disremember as the highway bridges I sail over without thought of those whose work carries me across the waters. I know I breathe air once inhaled by GLBT pioneers; that their labors and those of many others have sent ripples into the world whose current touches me, carries me along. I am grateful.

At the same time, I am not satisfied. I want more than a whiff of unseen community. I want the connectivity of my childhood. I want the taste of Evelyn Fox’s apple pie at potluck dinners. I want the wrinkled hand of church patriarch Charlie Hough tousling my hair. I want what I saw every summer at my grandparents’ home amongst the pine forests, bogs and lakes of northern Minnesota.

All their lives my grandparents breathed an almost palpable sense of community. They were among the many white families who bought land on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. While Grandpa scraped out a living as a farmer, hunter and woodsman, Grandma kept house, raised children, canned food and welcomed friends who dropped by. My grandparents lived seven miles out of Deer River along the road that runs up to Northome and Squaw Lake. They lived for a long time without electricity, indoor plumbing, an automobile. They lived in a time and place when everyone knew everyone else’s name—and business—for miles around.

Folks helped one another out. When Grandpa heard of nearby kids going hungry he’d shoulder his rifle and head into the woods, deer season or not. When fresh venison appeared on their step, the neighbors accepted this bounty graciously and kept their mouths shut, especially when the game warden came nosing about.

Folks made their own fun: community dances, ball games, picnics, parades and more. Grandma belonged to the Happy Hour Club, a gathering of women who lived along the same stretch of road. At monthly meetings they talked and socialized, traded gossip and recipes, worked on group projects that eased the loneliness and isolation that could otherwise overwhelm. One year they all made friendship quilts. Each woman embroidered her signature on a fabric square for each of the others. Each then pieced these blocks together to make her own comforter or quilt. Each was able then to wrap up in, feel the warmth of friendship in a very literal way.

Grandma recently gave me her friendship quilt. I asked her about each of the two dozen women whose autographs it bears, including Mary Daigle (“She was a queer one, Mary was”), Bessie Ploski (“She lived a hard, hard life”) and Katherine Juvalits (“She stood in my yard wringing her hands in her apron, saying, ‘I’ve been hungry, Violet, oh, so hungry’”).

I now spread this quilt of many colors across my lap. To me, it embodies the warmth of community stitched together from the scraps of life people had on hand, marked with their names and personal histories. These were dirt-poor women, neighbors who stood together when times were hard, who celebrated life in creative ways, marked its passage with laughter and tears.

Of necessity, many GLBT folk fashioned similarly courageous, caring communal responses to the ravages of the HIV-AIDS pandemic. While they, too, stitched together a quilt—expression and emblem of pain, loss, hope—I remained oblivious. I was married, raising children, focused on my conservative church-related career and activities.

I knew as much about the GLBT community as did my mother. Our mutual sources of information were the fundraising letters and radio broadcasts of the religious right. We imagined a vast, organized, legal, political and social conspiracy of hell-bound opportunists who recruited naïfs (like me, say) to further a hedonistic agenda to destroy society.

I turned 35 before I realized I am Gay. Before I turned 36, I realized Mom and I had it all wrong. I found no organized network of contacts waiting to greet me with open arms, offer acceptance, support, warmth and fellowship, show me the ropes, help me find my wings. I found no such ready-made security blanket.

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

Bryn Marlow and his husband live on a small wooded farmstead where they raise chickens and flowers. His last essay for White Crane ”Call Me Ennis Del Marlow” (Issue #68) was republished in Utne magazine and his piece “What Two Men Do In Bed” appeared in Toby Johnson and Steve Berman’s anthology Charmed Lives, published by White Crane Press (www.whitecranebooks.org). We’re delighted to have him in our pages (and excerpted online) again.

Dan Vera, Updrafts, WC78 - Community

WC78 – Updrafts by Dan Vera

October 29, 2008 Editors 1 Comment

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Updrafts
Edited by Dan Vera

I think that the majority of the gay press is quite bad and misleading to the intellectual and physical health of homosexuals. It betrays the historical legacy of brilliance that once existed in the gay world, of being the true guardians and keepers of intellectual and artistic brilliance. Gay people have upheld high art for years. Now, in the gay male press, there's nowhere for the opera queens, there's nowhere for the faggy snobs. It's all about youth and body image. It's very light reading, you know? And on the physical health side, there's a total glorification and acceptance of extreme drug use and sexual license. I don't want to seem like a prudish person–I believe that what happens in a person's bedroom is private–but I do believe that the press have to get a little more proactive about the health of our community. ~ Rufus Wainwright

When a flower blooms and then dies, we do not call that flower a failure. And flowers don’t so much die as go to seed. We all carry the seeds of our experience in our hearts, and we plant these wherever we go. ~ Carolyn Shaffer

The warm bodies
shine together
~ Allen Ginsberg

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. ~Antoine de Saint Exupery

We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos. The way is through daily ritual and the reawakening. We must once more practice the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I think now especially we’re misled so often. We have our eye on the horizon looking for a genius of some sort to save us. There is no genius coming. The genius is already here. It’s in the community. And our difficulty seems to be that sometimes we confuse the manifestation of genius in an individual with the notion that that’s where it resides. But it doesn’t reside in an individual. Its in the community of people. ~ Barry Lopez

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
~ William Blake

Don't listen to those who say, “It's not done that way.” Maybe it’s not, but maybe you will. Don't listen to those who say, “You're taking too big a chance.” Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today. Most importantly, don't listen when the little voice of fear inside of you rears its ugly head and says, “They're all smarter than you out there. They're more talented, they're taller, blonder, prettier, luckier and have connections…” I firmly believe that if you follow a path that interests you, not to the exclusion of love, sensitivity, and cooperation with others, but with the strength of conviction that you can move others by your own efforts, and do not make success or failure the criteria by which you live, the chances are you'll be a person worthy of your own respect. ~ Neil Simon

We all belong to the “community of life." ~ Daniel Quinn

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!

Dan Vera is the White Crane's managing editor. He is also the author of the recently released book of poetry, The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books). He lives in Washington DC. For more on Dan visit www.danvera.com

Updrafts is a regular feature of White Crane. If you have a little bit of wisdom to share with us, send it to us at dan@gaywisdom.org

Andrew Ramer, Columns, WC78 - Community

WC78 – Praxis by Andrew Ramer

October 29, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

Community Trust
Andrew Ramer

What does it mean to be held in community, held and nurtured and encouraged to grow? That was something I yearned for, as a misfit boy few of the other kids wanted to play with, who ended up most afternoons by himself in the rhododendron grove in our large backyard. When I was seven or eight I started having a dream that recurred for years. It’s night and I’m watching a group of men dancing together around a fire in a clearing in the woods, while I stand alone behind a tree, afraid to join them. While the waking me longed to be part of a community, every group I tried to join rejected me, offended me, or fell apart. Even my attempts to fit into the gay world failed. I don’t like opera, never saw a Bette Davis movie, flunked Cruising 101 and Bathhouse Etiquette. And then in the summer of 1990, I received a short letter in the mail that changed my life. The writer, Raven Wolfdancer, wrote from Atlanta to tell me that he’d read a copy of my book Two Flutes Playing and found it moving. That letter led to more letters, phone calls, and then Raven invited me to speak at the first Gay Spirit Visions Conference, of which he was one of the founders.

In those days I was living in Brooklyn, had never spent time in the South, and never spoken at a conference, let alone as a keynote. How could I ever be a presenter, especially with Harry Hay and Atlanta poet and therapist Franklin Abbott? I was terrified to go but a voice inside me said “Yes” to Raven’s invitation to spend three days in the mountains of North Carolina with 75 gay men. It never occurred to me that all these years later I would be the only person to have attended every subsequent annual gathering – because it’s my spiritual home, the community that has fed me, raised me, shaped, molded, held, challenged, and blessed me, for more than eighteen years.

Raven, Peter Kendrick, Ron Lambe and the other men who organized that first conference welcomed me into a Southern gay and faerie core community whose roots went back more than a decade. As a New York Jew I found something unexpectedly familiar about the South and its outsider tradition, a kind of American cultural queerness that I identify with and have grown to love. True, the deep and painful divisions in Southern culture trouble and grieve me, but they are part of my extended family’s history. And when people say that they are spiritual but not religious, I understand, although I consider myself both. Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco is my religious home, but GSV is my spiritual home. I’ve met some of my dearest friends there, men I rely on to keep my tent pegged to the rocky soil of a wobbly planet and a windy existence.

After that first conference Raven and I began to collaborate on a book about the sacred role of gay men in the world, his art inspiring my words, which evoked further images from his rich imagination. After he was murdered I assembled what we’d done into a desktop version, knowing that Stories of Our People would remain both the unripened fruit of our friendship, and none the less a deep expression of my life in the loving family of GSV.

What I know about community I learned from our faerie/pagan/Native American- influenced rituals, our heart circles, and from small group discussions and long walks in the woods with friends. As a recluse by nature, with a dark teal gregarious streak, GSV taught me the truth of John Donne’s words: “No man is an island, entire of itself.” Oh, and there was the year when Hurricane Ivan struck and we were up all night baling water, building sandbag walls, watching cabin roofs fly off, all the while in mourning for the recent death of one of our beloved members. Then two days later we were called upon to support the community who run the conference center we meet at, as they mourned the death of the family of one of their staff members, who were killed in the storm.

What I know about eldering I learned at GSV, from rambling conversations with Harry Hay that began at the first conference, from our other presenters, and from nearly two decades of exchanges with the devoted men who sustain the gathering year after year. We’ve grown from 75 men to 140 each Fall, adding Winter and Spring gatherings – not without struggle, pain, despair, fear, rejection, conflict, and the constant presence of loss and grief. Men have come and gone, gone and sometimes returned. Why do I go back year after year? That’s easy. When I first arrived at Little Scaly Mountain and was wrapped up in the Southern warmth of GSV, I felt that I had finally come out from behind that tree and joined the circle of men my recurring dream had foretold, and I’ve felt that way ever since.

What I know about decision making I learned from being involved in a community run by consensus, a slow and marvelous process that unfailingly creates a perfect conference every year, even its warts hairy and witch-perfect. Into this non-hierarchical space we have welcomed keynote speakers including Harry Hay, James Broughton, Malcolm Boyd, Mark Thompson, Tom Spanbauer, Will Roscoe, Don Clark, Christian de la Huerta, and Toby Johnson, to name a few. Our speaker this fall will be Clyde Hall. Not bad for a gathering of queers in the mountains of North Carolina.

The mountain we meet on is also home to a lush communities of rhododendrons, to which I always retreat for some time of meditation, comforting me as they did when I was small. And we also share that mountain with a family of ancient dwarf oaks, the descendants of survivors from the last Ice Age, whose glaciers slowly advanced from the north but stopped just before they reached Little Scaly. I’ve learned so much from that community of trees, which seeded the East Coast woodlands after the last of the ice receded, and it’s those wise ancient oaks who are the inspiration for this issue’s praxis.

Take a blank 8 ½ by 11 sheet of what we used to call typing paper, that’s now called copy paper or printer paper. On this blank sheet draw the outline of a tree with a nice broad trunk and roots and branches spreading out above and below, mirroring each other.

This tree is a map of your communities, now, in the past, and stretching out toward the future. Start by going down to the roots of your tree and writing in along them the names of the communities, good and bad, nurturing and stifling, that you belonged to in the past: family, religious groups, schools, glee club, drama club, track team, summer camps, out crowd, etc. On the edge of the roots write in the names of the groups you didn’t belong to but longed to be a part of. And beyond those groups, near the bottom of the page, write in the names of the groups you didn’t belong to and didn’t want to belong to.

Now move up to the trunk of your tree and write in, right in the center: ME. Sometimes we think of ourselves as individuals, but as Whitman said, “I am a large, I contain multitudes,” so I invite you to include the community of yourself/yourselves, as part of your tree. Above and below yourself write in the names of the communities you are most intimately connected with, family, friends, spiritual/political/educational groups you belong to, your coworkers, all the communities you are involved with on a daily basis. These can be cyber communities, and please keep in mind that your communities may not just be people. Pets, flocks, herds, parks, gardens, nature spirits, disembodied friends and angels also belong on the list of your most intimate communities.

Next go up to your tree’s branches, and write in the names of communities you are less involved in, that you connect with from time to time. The people from the annual yoga retreat you see once a year. Your dentist, doctor and the people in their offices, the people in the salon where you get your hair done, and the workers in your favorite health food store, belong on this list. And don’t forget the family around the corner who you run into at the park three or four times a year, whose names you don’t even know but who you always enjoy seeing, watching their kids grow. And your never-married Aunt Minnie, who you visit every few years, the one who tells you the truth about your family that you parents never would.

At the very tips of your tree’s branches, on different limbs, write in: the names of communities and groups you want to belong to, groups you don’t know how to get into, and groups you suspect wouldn’t want you that you still feel drawn to. People with homes in three different locations, close friends of your favorite celebrity, enlightened beings who have burned away all of their karma. Out beyond the branches, near the edge of the page, write the names of communities you don’t belong to and don’t want to belong to. Born again Wiccans, Bio-diesel fundamentalists, unrepentant Republicans, people who eat steak, may all be on your list.

When you are done, draw a line right inside the very edges of the entire page. This rectangular box represents All of Life on Earth. It includes the communities you belong to and the ones you don’t belong to. It includes all the groups you don’t ever want to belong to, that wouldn’t want you anyway, all of which we are still connected to, and must learn to live with, for we share the same small orbiting sphere and the same destiny – to live together, or die together.

This tree is a portrait of the communities of your life. It may take you several days or longer to create it. I spent over a week working on mine. I kept remembering communities I’d belonged to. That meditation group in the early 80s, those friends I used to go bird watching with, the food coop I went to with my first boyfriend in Berkeley, that class for post bar mitzvah nerds our rabbi taught in his study.

Tape your tree up over your night table, on your refrigerator door, on the wall across from your toilet. Put it somewhere where you can meditate upon it, feel your way into it, and see and sense how this tree of yours is connected to the trees of everyone else in the world, including everyone who’s done this bit of praxis – because hopefully somewhere on your tree, on a branch if not on the trunk, you have written: “The White Crane community.”

Fold your tree up and put it in your wallet. Slip it in your desk drawer at work and sneak looks at it during the day, when you’re supposed to be doing something else. Ask yourself how this tree appears to you. Is it bottom or top heavy? Is your trunk bare or filled with loved ones? How would you like this tree to look? What would you like to see upon it? If there isn’t a GSV in your life, consider joining us. And if GSV doesn’t sound like something you’d enjoy – four days in the Southern woods with men in leather and tee shirts and skirts, sharing a moldy old cabin with a view of the mountains that will feed your living breathing soul – then ponder this question – “What is my cup of carrot-celery-beet juice?” And if you’re not drinking from it, not even sipping from it – do something every day to seek out a community or communities that will feed your thirst, so that in a year’s time you can draw a new tree, one that mirrors back to you your connection to others who hold you and nurture you and encourage you to grow.

Raven Wolfdancer was an artist, gardener, teacher, and spiritual visionary, featured in the Fall 2008 issue of RFD magazine, our cousin publication, grounded too in Southern faerie culture.

For more information about the Gay Spirit Visions Conference, please visit their website:
www.gayspiritvisions.org, or write to GSV at PO Box 339, Decatur GA 30031-0339.

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!

Andrew Ramer is a writer and educator. He is the author of numerous books including Revelations for a New Millenium, Little Pictures: Fiction for a New Age and the Gay classic Two Flutes Playing: A Spiritual Journeybook for Gay Men from White Crane Books.

Ramer lives in San Francisco. Praxis is a regular feature of White Crane.

Reviews, WC78 - Community

WC78 – Review of The 99th Monkey

October 29, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

The 99th Monkey:
A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures
With Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics,
and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments
By Eliezer Sobel
Santa Monica Press, 2008
288 pages, $16.95
ISBN-10: 159580028X

Reviewed by Jay Michaelson

Many White Crane readers are, shall we say, veterans of the New Age. Some of us started in the 60s, some started in our 60s, but most of us, it's safe to say, have had some brush with "gurus, messiahs, sex, psychedelics, and other consciousness-raising experiments," to quote the subtitle of Eliezer Sobel's hilarious and insightful spiritual memoir, The 99th Monkey.

Sobel has done it all. As he says in the book's introduction, "I was massaged, shiatsu-ed, and Rolfed; took hundreds of consciousness workshops, human potential seminars, and self-improvement courses; sat with psychics, channels, and tarot readers; experienced Prima, Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Object Relations, generic talk therapies, and anti-depressants. And that's the short list." In short, he writes, "I was desperately trying to cure myself of being me."

This odyssey, though perhaps longer than most, should sound familiar to all of us who have dabbled (or more than dabbled) in spirituality and personal growth work. Sobel is straight — though in emails with this reviewer he embraced the label of "queer heterosexual" — but his journey is just the kind of long, winding road to which those of us in the gay wisdom/gay spirit world can really relate.

It started, it seems, with a feeling of unsafety in childhood: Sobel's grandparents were holocaust survivors, and fear/antisemitism/enemies lurked behind every darkened door. And it ends, 307 pages later, with Sobel still as neurotic as ever, but, again like many of us spiritual seekers, a little more okay with being neurotic.

Along the way, there are hilarious encounters with gurus famous and obscure. Ram Dass has Sobel show him his penis when Sobel complains of feeling inadequate (Sobel "had no idea at the time that he… might have enjoyed having young men take their pants off for him"). He gets so raw during primal therapy that he cries when he reads Peanuts. (I do too, but only when Schroeder is in it.) He does the "Tush Push" at a sexuality workshop (you can probably figure that one out). And he does "get it" many times: during est training, at Esalen, even in a 30-second encounter with "the Godman," Adi Da.

The 99th Monkey is hilarious, and self-deprecating, but also sincere. It's not a parody of the spiritual search; Sobel is authentically moved, inspired, transformed, even if he resists it every step of the way. (The book's title comes from the 1958 paradigm shift that took place when a critical mass of Japanese monkeys learned a new way of eating potatoes. The 100th monkey is the tipping point; Sobel, as the 99th, is the one personally preventing the paradigm shift.)

And yes, it is a queer book, sexually speaking. At one point, Sobel tosses a metaphorical coin and says "Heads, I'll get married; Tails I'm gay." He is told by a medium that at the dawn of time, he was a Star Being "pushing for one androgynous human being" rather than sexual differentiation. And there is that Tush Push. But what's interesting about the way The 99th Monkey plays with sex is not that Sobel is ambiguously gay; it's that he's a straight man with a lot of gay men's problems. I felt, reading the book, that there might be real "straight allies" out there after all — as long as they're as crazy as Sobel is.

There's much more: bad mushroom trips, encounters with the Dalai Lama, nights at the tombs of mystics in Israel. But I'll leave that for you to discover. The end of the book finds Sobel again with Ram Dass, this time "sobbing, my heart weeping with a poignant joy… seeing, that in God's infinite garden, we are each a perfect flower, even me." Now that's a happy ending we can all agree about.

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!

Reviews, WC78 - Community

WC78 – Review of When You’re Falling, Dive

October 29, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

When You're Falling, Dive

By Mark Matousek
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
ISBN-13: 9781596913691 320pp

How people who have suffered trauma find an upside when they've gone to the brink—and back again. Do survivors of life's greatest trials possess a secret knowledge? Is there an art to survival—a map for crossing the wilderness—or daily life? Why do some people blossom through adversity while others stop growing? Drawing on twenty years' experience in this field, using stories, parable, and scientific data, acclaimed memoirist Mark Matousek gives the first-ever comprehensive look at this mysterious phenomenon of viriditas, the power of drawing passion, beauty, and wisdom from the unlikeliest places. Matousek interviews hundreds of well-known survivors—including Joan Didion, Elie Wiesel, and Isabel Allende—and experts such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jonathan Kozol, and Sogyal Rimpoche. He includes extraordinary testimonials, from a Tibetan nun imprisoned by the Chinese at age eleven and the women of Calama, Chile, digging for their “disappeared,” among countless others. Drawing insight and advice from these many heroic individuals, Matousek presents a chorus of wisdom for how to survive our own lives—the vicissitudes of being human—and prevail.

Publishers Weekly Memoirist and editor Matousek (Sex Death Enlightenment) attempts to dissect the relationship between life's harshest tests and the gift of self-discovery and survival in this absorbing compendium of anecdotes. The author, who has AIDS, interviews many survivors of trauma and loss, including writer Joan Didion, mystic Andrew Harvey, poet Stanley Kunitz and Tibetan nun Nawang Sangdrol, among others, to inquire how deepest crisis forces us to re-examine our lives and move forward. After stating that "Transformation is in our wiring," Matousek concludes that the key to our survival is not cheating death but living as passionately, creatively and courageously as possible. Using scientific data, psychological research and his own life experiences, he uncovers the essentials of enduring against all odds while answering his chief question: "What force flips a falling person back on his feet, reconstitutes him after disaster, helps him prevail in the face of great challenges?" Matousek shows an uncanny skill for merging spirituality, science and common sense into practical answers for surviving our own lives.

Mark Matousek is the author of two memoirs, The Boy He Left Behind and Sex Death Enlightenment. He is a contributing editor for O and Tricycle and writes the “Big Idea” column for AARP. He has served as senior editor of Interview magazine and has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, Details, Harper's Bazaar, Utne, Out, Yoga Journal, and others. He lives in New York City.

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!

Reviews, Steven LaVigne, WC78 - Community

WC78 – Review of Zany Mystic

October 29, 2008 Editors 1 Comment

Tales of a Zany Mystic
by L. B. White
Booksurge, 211 pages, $14.99
ISBN-13978-1419681196

Reviewed by Steven LaVigne

Do you have books on your shelf that practically glow and demand your attention? These books may be a rarity, but I’d like to recommend one for your shelf that not only has a glowing cover, featuring a beautiful picture of a rainbow, but explores a heartbreaking through a personal journey that becomes surprisingly uplifting! L. B. White, also known as the Zany Mystic, shares moments from his bumpy life in his autobiographical document, Tales of a Zany Mystic.

While White’s experiences may not be as outrageous as those which Augusten Burroughs relates in his books, there are similarities. Born of alcoholic, bisexual bohemian parents in southern California, his parents never attempted to have typical lives, with a house and a picket fence. White’s mother was more Neely O’Hara than Harriet Nelson. Still, like the children of many dysfunctional parents, he found a level of normalcy with his grandparents, who shared a ranch near his hometown.

Over the years, White tries to lead the life of a “normal” person, marrying, working for a living and attempting a positive relationship with his father. This was clearly not in the stars for White. He found himself continually sinking into the world of the addict, the high points of which included dealing. Treatment programs and bouts in jail worked for a while, but before long, White was back at his old habits.

A few years ago, I reviewed Ron Nyswaner’s memoir Blue Days, Black Nights in these pages. In that volume, Nyswaner took us to the dark side, but his tome was nowhere near the whimsical, refreshing trek that White takes us on. He shares his journey with a marvelous blend of humor, spirit and authority, as he straightens himself out. and takes control of his cosmic consciousness. Taking a Kundalini approach to his relationship with higher power, White now shares his advice as the Zany Mystic with a blogspot and a weekly radio Fireside Chat.

Uplifting, readable and inspirational, Tales of a Zany Mystic deserves a place on that shelf of glowing books!

Bo Young, Music, Reviews, WC78 - Community

WC78 – Music Review of Theo Bleckmann

October 29, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

Theo Bleckmann
Berlin: Songs of Love and War, Peace and Exile/Winter&Winter 910 138-2
Las Vegas Rhapsody/Winter&Winter N° 910 116-2
Website:

Reviewed by Bo Young

Genre-bending, -skipping and -skirting vocalist and composer, Theo Bleckmann has been a force in the music scene in New York for over 15 years. Since moving to Manhattan in the late 80’s from his native Germany, Bleckmann has forged a unique sound in jazz and contemporary music, drawing from jazz, ambient and electronic music, integrating extended vocal technique as well as live electronic processing and looping.

He has performed worldwide on some of the great stages including Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, the Sydney Opera House, L.A.’s Disney Hall, The Whitney Museum and the new Library in Alexandria, Egypt. The New Yorker called him a “local cult favorite”, Downbeat a “ “mad” genius”, The New York Times “excellent” and according to OUT Magazine, Bleckmann is “a singer who has only recently fallen to earth“ and indeed Bleckmann's style has something otherworldly and ethereal.

For the past two years, Bleckmann has been voted into the small group of artists called "Cultural Elite" by New York Magazine and was recently interviewed by Terry Gross for NPR’s Fresh Air. That podcast is here.

In 1989 Bleckmann moved from his native Germany to New York City after meeting legendary jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan at a workshop in Graz, Austria, who remains an influential mentor and supportive colleague to this day. Together they can be heard on Sheila Jordan's "Jazzchild" (High Note). Since his move to Manhattan (and ultimately taking on US citizenship in 2005) he has worked with such artists as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk (whose core ensemble Bleckmann has been a member of since 1994), Michael Tilson Thomas, John Zorn and the Bang On A Can All-Stars and was a featured soloist with the Albany Symphony, San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Estonian Radio Choir, Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Mark Morris Dance. The boy moves in heady circles..

For all his vocal experimentation with electronics and ambient, his most recent recording is a virtual classic venture in tradition, again with Fumio Yasuda, Berlin: Songs of Love and War, Peace and Exile. I purchased his delightful Las Vegas Rhapsody. The name is a tad odd…the boy is queer you know…the songs are all Broadway and film classics…but the performances and the production are first rate.

I’m as enamored of the great divas (Lady Day, Sarah Vaughn, Garland, Midler, Ross, the Pattis) as the next card-carrying homosexual conspirator — but I have a preference for the male voice singing love songs. And here we have some of the most beautiful, most romantic love songs ever written, sung in Bleckmann’s Berlin insouciant alto: We Kiss in A Shadow (The King & I), Out of My Dreams (Oklahoma). The Night They Invented Champagne (Gigi) and …this is the kind of music you stay at home with someone special, draw the blinds, and cuddle up on the couch..and sip some champagne! Lush satisfying arrangements by Fumio Yasuda with the Kammerorchester Basel only add to the pleasure. There are times, he evokes Nico at her most androgynous best.

Bleckmann range, vocally, emotionally and physically (he was once a junior ice dancing champion), inspired some of today's great composers to create pieces especially for and with him. He teaches on the jazz faculty of New York's Manhattan School of Music and has been an adjunct at New York University, The New School and Queens College and teaches voice privately and in workshops and masterclasses worldwide.

Give Berlin and Las Vegas a taste. You’ll be delighted.

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!

Reviews, Steven LaVigne, WC78 - Community

WC78 – Review of Murder Most Gay

October 29, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

Murder Most Gay
by John Simpson,
Dreamspinner Press, 220 pages, $11.99
ISBN-13: 978-0981737225

Reviewed by Steven LaVigne

When John Simpson contacted me about reviewing his mystery novel, Murder Most Gay, he was concerned that it wasn’t appropriate for readers of White Crane, because its an “erotic thriller.” I assured him that I’d still like to read it, and could determine its value later. I’m glad I did, because Murder Most Gay is a delicious, entertaining contribution to the great tradition of cop and detective tomes.

The book is told in first person by Pat St. James. Fresh out of the Academy, he finds himself sharing coffee and donuts with his superior officer on nightly patrols. That is, until evidence shows up that a serial killer is targeting gay men, attracting prey at bars and cruising areas and leaving their violated bodies all over town. Finding himself attracted to Dean, a successful investment banker, Pat finds himself in the difficult position of keeping his sexuality hidden at work. That is, until he and fellow gay rookie Hank are assigned to the case. The book draws the reader deeper into this intriguing case, as the murderous rampage reaches an almost epic nature before it’s concluded.

John Simpson has a method for storytelling that keeps the reader consistently at the edge of their seat. This is tough to put down. He even pays homage to the writers of classic thrillers, by creating descriptive sequences that are, for example, reminiscent of the manner in which, Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, was discovered in Hollywood. When he’s writing erotic passages about the sexual relationships Pat has with three different men, he’s created a tone similar to the manner Judith Rossner took in her terrific novel, Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Erotically charged, but absorbing as well, I think Murder Most Gay is a sexy, intelligent and thought-provoking novel about the world we live in and the difficulties the men in blue face on a daily basis. I'm certain that White Crane readers will enjoy this.

Reviews, WC78 - Community

WC78 – Review of What Becomes You

October 29, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

What Becomes You
By Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Link
University of Nebraska Press, 296 pages, paperback, $14.95 ISBN: 978-0-8032-1642-6

Reviewed by Chris Freeman

Sometimes the most obvious observations are the most profound. Early in his memoir What Becomes You, Aaron Raz Link writes, “Being a man, like being a woman, is something you have to learn.” Aaron was born Sarah and grew up Jewish in Nebraska, the daughter of a feminist-poet-professor, Hilda Raz, who is also the co-author of the book. Aaron’s story comprises two-thirds of the volume, an autobiographical journey told by a trained scientist. Aaron’s analytical point-of-view is at times clinical, as in a discussion of taxonomy and the way that we need categories to understand things. Of course, with transsexuality, we have a meltdown of generally accepted categories.

Aaron’s intelligence and survival instincts pay dividends. He recognizes early on that the psychiatric establishment and “caring professions” work against people like him: “I learned that real is a word that means ‘whatever the person who’s bigger than you are says is true.’ I learned that you can avoid ever having to go to the psychiatrist again if you just never tell anyone anything that matters.” Imagine the isolation and confusion that comes from such a realization. In this case, too, what we have is evidence of how our culture refuses to listen to kids, to take them seriously as individuals with sexuality and with some self-knowledge.

Community is an important aspect of the becoming and self-education that Link undergoes. Moving to Los Angeles helped: “I moved to the big city and hung out in what used to be called the bohemian district, is currently called the gay community, and will probably get another name just as soon as Socially Acceptable Homosexuals finish distinguishing themselves from the queers. From watching the queers, I knew enough about drag queens to know that some of them had surgery so they could be women.” In this statement, Link’s politics become clearer: he identifies with the queers. The socially-acceptable folks have never welcomed him, so the journey toward something like community becomes part of his new becoming.

Aaron sought out a support group at the Gay and Lesbian Center in LA. What an awakening. Everyone at the meeting “looked like men pretending to be everything I knew women were fighting against. I went in and sat down anyway, staring around at the panoply of stereotypes. What I didn’t bother to figure into my righteous indignation was that these were women who had only recently mustered the courage to walk down the street and found the whole world responding to a man in a dress. A stereotype is a kind of camouflage; the eye finds what it expects to find and passes over the details. At the time, I didn’t understand the difference between meeting someone else’s expectations and meeting your own.” And that is Aaron’s epiphany.

One of his biggest obstacles in that growth is her mother. The central tension in the book—and that seems to me to be just what it is—is the vexed relationship between the two authors. Hilda Raz is every bit Sarah’s mother, so she struggles—eloquently and emotionally and intellectually—to be Aaron’s mother without losing Sarah. Indeed, if this were Hilda’s book, a fitting title would be Losing Sarah.

Hilda has to come to terms with her own training and conviction as a feminist. She likes women more than she likes men; she likes daughters more than sons. Her woman’s body becomes a site of crisis for her, as she battles cancer. So the surgical alteration of the body becomes a connection between mother and child: “I lost my breast to cancer. My ovaries and uterus, too, another illness nine months before cancer. The body Sarah changed was her own, is Aaron’s body now. Not mine. Not my body, even though it grew in my center like the very air. Not from the start. Never.”
Hilda Raz admits—and one has to admire her candor and courage—“For months, even years, I grieved hard for the loss of my daughter. . . .Now, looking back, I’m amazed that the one thing I wanted—more than anything else—was a daughter to carry on the next generation of my life as a woman. Women just want to have fun. I wanted brilliant Sarah to enlarge and expand my understanding of women and what we can be in the world, the best kind of fun for me. Instead I am learning from Aaron new uses for our story of power taken, earned and transferred from generation to generation.” A parent’s investment in a child, including the egomania and selfishness, is something Hilda has faced down, seemingly successfully , allowing Aaron his own self-determination and trajectory.

What Becomes You is an uneven book, to say the least, partly because it has an identity crisis as a text: two authors, three main characters (Sarah, Aaron, and Hilda), and a blend of memoir, theory, and social commentary and criticism. The bluntness of the confrontation between child and parent—and between self and world—may be the best element it has to offer. The understandings finally arrived at by Aaron and Hilda are clear to the reader and are illuminating and inspiring. The search for self becomes the search for community, connection, and understanding, a universal tale if ever there was one. In a short chapter titled “Men,” Link says, “If you want to survive, you must find a way to love what you are.” Learning how to do that is central to the “becoming” in the book’s title—and to everyone’s struggle to become our best selves.

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!

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