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Bo Young, Reviews, WC71 - Bohemian Splendor

WC71 – Review of Gay L.A.

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Rvu_gayla Gay L.A.
A History of Sexual Outlaws,
Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians

By Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons
Basic Books (Perseus Books Group) 2006
ISBN -13978-0-465-02288-5
431 pages, $27.50

Reviewed by Bo Young

If you stopped the average, well-read gay man on …say, Castro Street or Eighth Avenue Chelsea or even Santa Monica Boulevard (can you find “well-read” gay men on any of those streets?) and asked them where the modern Gay liberation movement got its start, it’s a safe bet the majority of responses would be something about Stonewall and New York City. Such is the power of publicity (and urban density, according to Gay L.A. authors, Faderman and Timmons). Because, in a fair appraisal of the developments of what might be called GLBT history, Los Angeles would necessarily play a major, if not the starring role. By any measure of “apples and oranges” Los Angeles and its cultural contributions to GLBT Liberation was ahead of the curve and ahead of New York City.
This, of course, sticks in the craw of a lot of city chauvinists. But facts are facts. If you trace modern Gay liberation back to the Harry Hay and Rudy Gernreich and their circle that became the Mattachine Society, you will find yourself in the sunny climes of Southern California. And if you want to talk about “riots” that resulted in gay people organizing, we’re not in Greenwich Village, 1969, anymore, Toto, we’re on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles; and 1967 is a full two years earlier.

When the religious fundies started their goose-stepping, church-state, church-state, church-state march across the country from Dade County, it was the political savvy of Southern California that made them break their stride, at least for the time being. It was not, for example, as legend and hagio-documentary would have it, Harvey Milk single-handedly standing up to Anita Bryant. In fact, as this reviewer remembers the story (and I was, in fact, the Assistant State Press Secretary to the great Sally Fiske on the No On 6 campaign in So-Cal) the job was to keep Harvey away from microphones, so as to allow John Briggs to hoist himself by his own language petard.
Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, the co-authors of Gay L.A., have written an entertaining and fascinating history of, yes, GLBT people in Los Angeles — Gay people, lesbians, two spirits, drag queens, wayward sailors and closeted leading actors, and other assorted sexual outlaws, as the subtitle promises. In a most, for Los Angeles, unusual self-effacing way, the collective march-of-time stories make a serious argument for Los Angeles’ honored place in the history of Gay people in America.

If the time line the authors relate is necessarily limited in its depth — and it is — it is also nothing short of dazzling in its breadth. In fairness, much like getting around L.A. by highway, there is a good deal of ground to cover, and having personally lived through a number of the stories related regarding the halcyon disco days (your humble reviewer was doorman at the Cabaret/After Dark disco in S.F.) and bathhouse bacchanalia of the late 70s (every Monday, said reviewer took Sheldon Andelson’s 8709 receipts to the gay-owned bank he and others started in   L.A.) and the political and medical dramas of the early 80s (and slept with his share of the main characters…which he will most certainly not review here) this writer can personally attest to there being a good deal more to tell. But again, in fairness, probably any one of the chapters in the book could be expanded into a stand-alone book. And probably will.

Given this, the range of stories — from pre-publicist times of indigenous Chumash Two Spirit culture, (when the name of the place was translated as “the smoke” because of the environmental peculiarities of the geography), to the modern political action and multicultural influences of this smoggy Hollywood dream citym — makes the book laudable. The writing partnership of Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons offers a tasty combination of women’s stories — I suspect in her voice — as well as the men’s — in his. Rising above male/female binaries, they have made an equally concerted effort to tell the multicultural rainbow of stories, all without the feeling of forced PC-ness, feeling more like what political correctness really is meant to be: the whole story with respect to all the players. It is heartwarming to see the names of Gayle Wilson, Sally Fiske, Roberta Bennett, Diane Abbit and Valerie Terrigno brought to the worthy fore, to say nothing of better known names like Jean O’Leary, Ivy Bottini, Colt handsome Steve Schulte and Mixner with the name Scott appended to it. These were people and stories I knew personally and they are well-honored and well-served here.

Despite my own personal history there, I was…and I think most readers will find themselves…surprised, really, at the not merely important role Los Angeles has had in GLBT history, but the very central, truly groundbreaking force and fertile ground it has been. This is a much needed addition to and clarification of the national history of our struggle that should sit proudly on any bookshelf right next to David Carter’s Stonewall.

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!

Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC71 - Bohemian Splendor

WC71 – Review of Be Done On Earth

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Rvu_howardcook1

Be Done On Earth

By Howard E. Cook
PublishAmerica, pb,
185 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Toby Johnson

A stranger appears in your life. He’s attractive, but even more, he’s charismatic, sexually alluring, but aloof. Everybody who meets him falls in love with him. And he’s mysterious, suddenly disappearing and then popping back up again in the most unexpected places and times, but always with coincidental (almost magical) significance. And he’s got a message for you—and for the world. And he wants you to spread it. He gives you a manuscript, and then he disappears again, leaving you with a mission.

This is certainly a familiar theme in mythological writing. From Richard Bach’s Messiah or Myles Connolly’s very Catholic Mr. Blue to the gospel stories themselves about Jesus, one of the ways “revealed” or spiritual insight is traditionally presented is as “the book within the book.” There’s a story about meeting the charismatic message giver, and within that story is the story or teaching he gives.

This happens in real life. It’s not just a theme in literature or mythology. It’s an actual experience people have. In my own life, my nicknamesake and first collaborator Toby Marotta entered my life in an almost magical way, invited me to help him edit his masterpiece Harvard doctoral dissertation into a publishable book, and then, leaving me with a copy to rewrite (and a message about the meaning of the gay rights movement), he disappeared with his exotic Parsi lover to search for crystals in India.

I just made it sound more magical and mysterious than it really was: Marotta’s partner was a geology professor from India who imported minerals as a sideline business to teaching. This was just a business trip and I was left with just a copyediting job. But it was the start of my own writing career — and of my own understanding of gay consciousness.

So when Howard Cook relates the tale of his meeting the elusive, charismatic Bradford Lightfoot Dare in the strangest of places over a period of many years, I was ready to believe the story on several levels from the mythic to the mundane. Cook’s story of Brad Dare is quite intriguing. He first shows up in a Trappist monastery, then as a nude model for life-drawing classes in Washington, DC. He’s a dance partner to debutantes and a most eligible bachelor in the nation’s capital. Next he’s a Jesuit seminarian studying Teilhard de Chardin, and a little later, he appears unexpectedly as a housemate in a hippie household in Greenwich Village in the apartment previously occupied by the New York Queen of the Gypies — with writer Norman Mailer indirectly making the reintroduction. Then he becomes a gay porn star in San Francisco and a character in the development of West Coast New Age thought along with Ken Kesey and Alan Watts.

Especially because the tale begins in the 1950s, I couldn’t help being reminded of Fred Demara, “The Great Imposter,” (played by Tony Curtis in the movie) who beguiled the American public in those days with his story of living many identities, including Trappist monk. But Bradford Dare comes across in Cook’s telling not as a daring adventurer (though look at his name!) thumbing his nose at convention and legalities, but as a dedicated and driven seeker of transcendent truths, though no less rebel.

Dare shows up again in Cook’s life many years later, after Cook has successfully marketed a couple of books. He’s been studying and thinking and making notes all these years, and now asks Howard Cook’s assistance in articulating and promulgating the wisdom and enlightened insight he’s gained.

And that’s the book within the book: Bradford Lightfoot Dare’s proposal for how to modernize Christianity and recreate the Church. Partly tongue-in-cheek and partly with multi-layered symbolism, Dare calls his message the first encyclical of Pope John the Beloved.

Blending modern-day physics and cosmology, a little Teilhard and a little Matthew Fox, comparative religion, some Joseph Campbell, intelligent New Age thought, progressed Christianity, American political idealism, evolutionary theory, postmodernism, (and here and there what seem like loose associations), Pope John the Beloved calls for a new Church of the Second Coming—also referred to (iconoclastically) as the Church of Kingdom Come – COKC (try pronouncing the acronym).

It’s a sex-positive religion based in an evolutionary model of human nature with an openly gay priesthood (with a somewhat progressed understanding of the role of homosexual consciousness in evolution). Some of the tenets of COKC are intentionally controversial (like the proposal that genetic science will soon allow humans to reproduce in the lab, avoiding all the dangers of unregulated breeding, and taking advantage of the opportunity to improve human nature at the molecular level). But the suggestions for an updated religious model come across as heartfelt and genuine.

I’ve tended to focus on the frame of the story rather than the content. Brad Dare would probably prefer I was writing about his ideas rather than Cook’s presentation. But I will leave readers to study Dare’s “encyclical” on their own: it’s a little overwhelming to summarize in a few paragraphs in a book review. I think men in the gay spirituality movement will recognize many of the themes (like the question “Was Jesus gay?”). But some of the ideas are fresh and come from unexpected directions (like the “final anthropic principle” in quantum cosmology). And, at any rate, it’s not so much the conclusions that will draw readers into the book as the process. Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, the debate is interesting and the argumentation thought-provoking.

For me, as reviewer, the most thought-provoking was the question whether Brad Dare is an alter-ego and literary device of Howard Cook’s multi-faceted mind or a “real” person. In a way, it doesn’t make any difference.

I must say I was disappointed at the end of the book that the framing story is not recapitulated. I wanted to know what happened to Brad Dare. All we get at the end is that he is working on a follow-up about the Church of the Gay Salvation.

Be Done on Earth is a neat example of an ancient literary and mythical dynamic by which wisdom is personified in a charismatic person who inspires those caught in his magic spell to discover their own insights and to surpass him. I was pleased to suspend disbelief and enjoyed the book — just as 30 years ago at the start of my writing career I was willing to suspend disbelief and let my friend and fellow Toby be an inspiration and watershed in my own life.

I wonder if there’s something “inherently gay” in finding inspiration in a charismatic person instead of an authoritarian institution or revealed text. I think that might be one of the subjects in Pope John the Beloved’s second encyclical.

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!

Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC71 - Bohemian Splendor

WC71 – Review of Rising Up

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Rvu_perezrisingup Rising Up:
Reflections on Gay Culture, Politics, and Spirit

By Joe Perez
Lulu Publication, pb, 248 pp,  $15.75
Also available from Lulu.com as an e-book for $6.25.

Reviewed by Toby Johnson

Joe Perez moderates the Gay Spirituality and Culture blog on the Internet. With blogging having become a major force in American media and politics, Perez’s blog constitutes a major gay presence in the new electronic/virtual media world. The blog hosts columns by a variety of writers (occasionally including this reviewer) as well as linking to Perez’s own extensive writing at joe-perez.com.

Perez’s book, Rising Up, demonstrates another facet of his creativity within this virtual world. For the book is a hybrid of traditional writing/publishing and the new Internet-inspired style of blogging. It is a compilation of columns and postings Perez has written for the blogosphere, and then edited and rearranged for book publication. This is a new kind of writing and a new phenomenon in the book world.

There are several levels, therefore, at which to review this book: first, simply the phenomenon of a blog-based book, second, the “personalistic” style of writing occasioned by blogging, and third, the content.

The first level is easy: this is probably the wave of the future. The nature of posting on the Internet is that it’s fleeting and ephemeral. Electronic media demonstrates one of those Buddhist insights into existence: everything is transitory, existing like a bubble or a dream. Brilliant writers post brilliant, incisive commentaries on the web. But these exist only as electronic signals flashing round the world at light speed and getting lost in the torrent of such signals, then disappearing into the past. It’s a natural impulse of serious writers, thinkers, and commentators to want to preserve their best writing and to organize their insights to make them more accessible. And it’s an appropriate writer’s discipline to edit and rewrite one’s material. So the blog turned literature is a logical outgrowth of this computer phenomenon. Joe Perez really is riding the crest of the wave.

The second level of critique is much more complex. Blogging is almost necessarily reactive and interlinked. Blogging is a kind diary-keeping, without the confidentiality. Bloggers write in response to other blogs and postings on the web. In the electronic blog, the hyperlink is easy to create and easy for the reader to follow. In print, it doesn’t work that way. So, for instance, where traditional academic text would have a footnote, Perez’s blog text has a bracketed reference to a URL like [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/16/AR200505-1601232]. Of course, that’s actually very easy to follow on the computer—easier than to a footnoted book you’d have to got to a library to find — but it is awfully inelegant in print. What’s more, the reactive style means the reader is only hearing one side of a debate. To Perez’s credit, he generally introduces and explains the text he is commenting on. This, indeed, is what a reader would expect from a serious and academically trained writer. Joe Perez is a Harvard graduate and done masters level work at the University of Chicago.

Blogging also tends to be sequential and timely. News comes out in bits and pieces and commentators are always dealing with it in the fleeting present. Thus their commentaries can lack perspective. Again to Perez’s credit, he has organized the book by themes and not by dates. His insights then come across as thoughtful and logically interconnected, not just reactive. But this is the major problem with this style of writing. Above I referred to this as personalistic. By that I mean that the reactive quality of blogging results in lots of first person pronouns and consequent subjectivity. Joe’s personality is very present.

The third level of critique is of content. Rising Up covers a lot of territory; as the subtitle indicates, the book is about culture, politics, and spirit, ranging from “Responding to religious traditionalists,” “Fighting HIV/AIDS,” “Looking at popular culture,” to “Elevating business and society,” “Connecting sex and soul,” and “Exploring spiritual alternatives.” (These are six exemplary chapter titles out of twelve.)

Joe Perez is a student of modern psycho-spirit culture theoretician Ken Wilbur. Wilbur’s ideas and models of experience and spiritual growth pervade Perez’s writing. Wilbur uses a lot of acronyms for his wide-ranging concepts (AQAL, for instance, for “All Quadrants, All Levels” meaning “comprehensive” and “flexible.”) Perez follows suit and uses the acronym STEAM for the processes of psychological and spiritual growth. Students of Wilbur’s will find Perez’s discussions very appropriate application to gay consciousness; non-Wilbur fans may find them confusing. The concept of “rising up” through the stages of personal growth unites all the various discussions including the nature of gay consciousness itself.

The book, like Internet surfing, doesn’t have to read from front to back. It’s filled with interesting and provocative comments, most of which stand alone. I thought the section on HIV/AIDS perhaps the most heartfelt. Joe Perez deserves to be read.

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!

Film, WC71 - Bohemian Splendor

WC71 – Review of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus

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Rvu_shortbus1Shortbus
A Film by John Cameron Mitchell

Reviewed by Jay Michaelson

Shortbus is the best gay movie I’ve ever seen, and it’s not really even a gay movie. John Cameron Mitchell’s follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch is the second film I saw in as many days unlike any I’d seen before — Borat being the other. It is, on its surface, an exploration of the sexual and emotional lives of a cluster of beautiful, young New Yorkers — a description which probably fits any number of banal films, gay or straight, we’ve seen over the last few decades. What separates Shortbus from those lesser efforts is, above all, its honesty — and this is what makes it interesting to think about from a gay perspective as well.

The honesty of the film extends throughout all levels of being: body, heart, mind, and spirit. On a purely physical level, it is a naked, and nakedly honest, film.  People have sex in the movie — actual sex, with penetration, cum shots, and all the other physical intimacies omitted in mainstream cinema and fetishized in pornography.  There’s explicit gay sex, explicit lesbian sex, and explicit straight sex; explicit solo sex, explicit couples sex, and explicit group sex; intergenerational sex and interracial sex. And yet none of the sex is filmed for the erotic arousal of the audience. It’s hot, to be sure, but it’s never pornography. I remember once being told that pornography is about the moment of orgasm, but “art” is about the moments before and after. Shortbus is about both, and in so refusing to abide by the porn/art dichotomy, it is, in a quiet way, revolutionary. Yes, it’s possible to be sexually explicit and emotionally and intellectually engaged at the same time. The characters both fuck and talk — imagine that.

The film is also revolutionarily honest on an emotional level; Finally, a film in which experimental sexual practices are neither celebrated nor condemned, but explored. What happens when a gay couple, unsure of their continued love for each other, takes a cute boy home for a threesome? What’s it like to explore S/M from an emotionally engaged perspective, with a Dominatrix who tells you the truth? And how do love and lust relate, when the usual taboos around sex are no longer in operation? At times, Shortbus is like a Jane Austen novel, except one in which all the characters are sleeping with each other. I was always bothered by Austen, because once you take away the repressive social structure, so much of the dramatic tension is lost. Here, for once, my non-repressive social structure — the queer (not gay), quasi-libertine, sexually positive world of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan — is the stage upon which the emotional journeys of the characters unfold.  And, surprise, we are not all the same underneath. Thank God.

And intellectually: here is probably the most sophisticated film about sex since Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, and before that, Carnal Knowledge. There are no simple answers. There are no simple rules.  And the characters are intelligent in a way that, I’m sorry to say, traditionalists never are — they are personally intelligent, sexually intelligent, and, I think, spiritually intelligent as well. Traditionalists, gay or straight, either never question social mores, or decide to abide by them for reasons which usually have little to do with personal fulfillment. In Shortbus, the dozen or so primary characters are always questioning, always questing, and are involved in journeys of personal growth. 

Take Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee), the closest thing the ensemble film has to lead character. A female sex therapist who’s never had an orgasm, she explores the darker psychodynamics of her marriage, beneath the pseudo-therapeutic language of non-violent communication and sex-positive rhetoric. She meets with the dominatrix in a sensory-deprivation tank, trading psychological insight for sexual healing, and begins to frequent the “Shortbus” sex party for which the film is named. And she’s the traditional one.

To be a life-affirming gay man — and by that I mean one who neither “wrestles with the demon” of perfectly healthy sexuality nor retreats from messy realities into the fantasies of drug- and steroid- fueled Greco-Roman hedonism — is to make a certain choice: a choice for love, for pleasure, and against inherited constraint. Waking up out of straight fantasy into the truths of poly-sexual existence is a bit like smoking pot for the first time. After all the fear and judgment, you see that what the Squares have forbidden, labeled as “Harmful” or “Evil” or worse, is actually…fun. Life-affirming. Interesting. Complicated. And if you stay awake, you never go back. You never return to the world in which authority is right, and the old, dead, white, straight men who are supposedly so wise really know what the hell they’re talking about.

Maybe this is why queer people, throughout history, have been fools, actors, and masters of disguise. We see right through the hypocrisy, because here, at one of the most fundamental levels of human experience — there’s a lie that’s been told for thousands of years. Hell, half of America still believes it today, having their same quiet, missionary-position sex year after year after year.

Shortbus is our reality. Its world is one in which all is permitted, but not all of it is good for you. Polymorphous sexuality is presented, neither for titillation nor condemnation, but as what it deserves to be: a fascinating expression of human complexity. Absent are the usual poles of black and white: the insidiously cheerful public face of the Circuit, on the one hand, or a single character horrified by the depravity of it all on the other. Nor does the absence of a simple dualism mean that this is a nihilistic world like Cabaret.  Though there is an motif of decadence in the shadow of tyranny that marks both Cabaret’s time and our own. Rather, it is one in which intelligent, emotionally centered adults recognize the power of open sexuality to heal, hurt, and explore the energies the world presents to us, free of charge.

Obviously, you don’t show erect penises in the mainstream multiplexes of America, especially if they’re being fellated by hot young things who just dropped out of a A&F catalog (the film’s one, obvious dishonesty…but also a guilty pleasure) which means that most people who would ordinarily be scandalized by this “smut” (or enlightened by it) won’t get to see it in the first place.  In a way, that is, of course, a shame, because the matter-of-factness with which the film treats liberated sexuality is, itself, perhaps its single most revolutionary aspect. Yes, these are people who really go to sex parties, and they are trannies, dykes, queens, even straights. So what. Now that the frisson is over, the complicated, fascinating, and messy business of emotional connection begins. 

Thank God such a mature film has been made, and that John Cameron Mitchell (who, if I were to be as honest as his characters, I have to admit I’ve always had a little crush on… I’ve been too shy to tell him when I meet him at parties) had the money, as well as the creativity, to make it. And kudos to Mitchell for refusing to compromise his, and his ensemble’s, vision with commercial or political realities. This is powerful, revolutionary art, conceived of as part of an equally powerful process of sexual and interpersonal discovery on the part of the cast. It’s the most real film I’ve seen in years, and it let me sigh in relief — thank God, someone tells it like it is — at least for the sane few who’ve thrown off the chains of shame that most people mistake for religion.

So, all of you denizens of Body Electric, Burning Man, and the other islands of sexual sanity in our nauseating sea of mutually-reinforcing vulgarity and repression: go see it right away. Buy the DVD. Support the artist, and discuss the art. Because this is your world, my world, and a world that, one day, might yet come into being.

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!

Bo Young, The Magazine

Where is the Winter Issue?

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A lot of people have been calling and writing and wanting to know why they haven’t received their winter 2006 issue. We hold our writers to a fairly tight deadline (and by the way…the deadlines never change. It is always the first of the month prior to the pubdate. So winter (Dec. 21…usually) the deadline is November 1. Always. Spring (March 21)…deadline: February 1. Always. Summer (June 21)…deadline: May 1. Always. And fall (September 21)…the deadline is August 1. Always.

So…if we’re so hard ass about our writer’s deadlines, how come we’re so lax on our own publishing dates? Well, we’re not happy about it and we try very hard to get everything layed out and nice for you and do it as quickly as we can so you get it as close to the day you expect it as we can. In December that can be a particular problem, too, with all the holiday mail. But this winter issue is extraordinarily late.

Well here’s why:

We have used the same printer for the past ten years. He’s in Texas and because we’ve tried to keep our overhead to a minimum so we can keep the subscription rates reasonable, we’ve stuck with him even though he was unable to do full color, didn’t have digital capability, couldn’t do photography, etc.

There have been a lot of improvements in the magazine that we would have loved to do…but we just couldn’t. Or our Texas printer (let’s just call him TP) couldn’t. We stuck with him out of a sense of loyalty, too. He managed our fulfillment (mailing), too. And there are very few printers who would do both the printing and the fulfillment for the price we were getting it done. So despite numerous issues…like last summer’s debacle with the marvelous Don Kilhefner article "Gay Adults: Where Are You?" that were squarely and by any measure the printer’s mistake…we stuck with him. To his credit, he reprinted it (at his own expense) and sent it out to all the subscribers with the fall issue. But bookstore readers never saw the complete Kilhefner piece (except here online). Bummer.

So, with this winter issue we had some serious concerns about color reproduction. (I don’t want to give too much away here…we still want you to be delighted when you open your mail and see it)…so we called TP to make arrangements to ensure that the color reproduction was perfect.  We called him months in advance.

I’ll just cut to the chase here: TP never answered a single phone call. He never responded to multiple phone messages and never replied to multiple email messages. No "I think you should find someone else." No "I don’t want to do this anymore." Nothing.

So at the worst possible moment, we had to find a new printer, and a new fulfillment house. And we had to find them fast. And we had to find a printer who would do a good job who would take a small magazine. Most printers won’t even look at you unless you’re doing 5000+ pieces. We’d like to be that big, but, alas, we’re not. We were under the gun and a lot of printers wouldn’t even look at us.

Well…the good news is we found one. Turns out to be the same printers who print such fine publications as McSweeney’s and The Paris Review, no less! And they have been friendly and helpful and so much more capable that we didn’t mind (here’s the bad news) that it nearly doubled our printing costs (and no…this isn’t leading up to "we’re raising our subscription rates"…not yet at least.)

Not nearly…it doubled our printing costs…and they don’t even do fulfillment. We had to find a new fulfillment house, too. And that’s an added expense, too. Fortunately the good news there is the wonderful fulfillment house we found — recommended by our wonderful printers — are helping us to get the [reduced] postal rates a nonprofit publication is supposed to get. So over time…the next three mailings, to be exact…our postal rates will show a significant savings. A savings that is more than eaten up by the new printers, to be sure, but that’s a trade-up and we think you will actually SEE that difference and probably agree with us that it was a good call.

So that’s why winter is late this year.

Dan and I go through virtually the same psychological process with every issue, usually ending up with us thinking “this is the best issue we’ve ever done.”

This is the best issue we’ve ever done.

We hope you think so, too, when you see it.  That will be soon and then we’ll be back and humming along to the Spring issue, which is on Cinema.  So start thinking about your favorite movies and the way that movies enrich your life and send us your stories!

Culture, Entertainment, Perry Brass

Perry Brass on DeFazio’s “To Be Loved”

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Brassreview  “To Be Loved”
Ah, to be loved! Review by Perry Brass

“To Be Loved”

I had been intrigued about seeing “To Be Loved,” the play by Alex DeFazio at the tiny Chashama Theater on East 42nd Street because the drama is based on a famous kabuki spectacle, “The Scarlet Princess of Edo,” from 1813, and I had been fortunate to see the Grand Kabuki of Tokyo perform it on one of their once-a-decade tours of America in 1986. I remember the Grand Kabuki very well; it was headlined by Tamasaburo Bando IV, perhaps the world’s greatest inagaka actor, a kabuki term for a man who specializes in female roles, and “The Scarlet Princess,” at tale of karma, reincarnation, and the eternality of love, is a tour de force for inagaka: a priest and a young acolyte, in love in a monastery, are forced to commit suicide when their forbidden love is discovered. In the next generation, the reincarnated priest discovers his lover in a young, virginal girl and pursues her, only tragically to lose her. The actors have to show that they have other characters inside the characters they are portraying, with maleness inside femaleness; in fact, in kabuki tradition, maleness inside femaleness inside more maleness. Quite an order. In “To Be Loved,” a similar tale is told, set in a post-Apocalyptic world after the bombs have gone off (we’re never quite sure which bombs), centered on an older priest’s love for a young student who kills himself by jumping off a cliff (the same method used in the “Scarlet Princess”) leaving the priest, twisted by guilt, to depart the priesthood and try to go “straight.”

Brassreview2_1   Straight means that he, Seigen, played ably by Albert Aeed, will bed Dorian, wildly acted by Kelly Marcus, the filthy rich daughter of a bomb-making, omni-horny privateer, who is oft alluded to but not seen in the play. Dorian is man-hungry, and has a boy-toy of sorts in the gorgeous shape of Dis, Bobby Abid, a Stanley Kowalski-type (but sexually dysfunctional) hunk who is also a pimp for Anon, a young whore of a certain androgyny. So, of course you can see what will happen: Seigen will discover the lost soul of Paul, the boy, in the personality of Anon, who, played by Elizabeth Sugarman, is a pivotal character in the action; she is sensitive, tough, wily, vulnerable, and goes through the gamut of bondage and liberation, but, alas, is never really allowed to be really androgynous. In fact, it is hinted that she is hermaphroditic, although I can’t understand why, as a $20-whore, she is so popular and nobody knows what’s really “down there.” You’d think that at a certain point the equipment would come out; and with better direction, Anon’s undeniable, androgynous attractiveness would have been more evident. She is a Garbo-esque femme-fatale in a brutal world where technology has broken down, violence is everywhere, and human connections are barely tenable. (I know, you’re asking what else is new?) As a character, she could be a stunner, and I don’t think it’s Sugarman’s fault that it’s not happening here, because she’s an interesting actress.

What I liked about “To Be Loved” was that it held to some kabuki elements in its crazy-future setting: the costumes, which were inventive, especially Anon’s ratty kimono and Dis’s deliciously cartoony body armor, reflected this; also the use of red silk scarves to denote blood: very Grand Kabuki. Also the acting tended to be stylized, and the use of loud snapping sounds and other tonal devices were Eastern. Where the play soured was the author’s use of portentous speeches; the plot, or what was trying to be the plot, became so elliptical that at points in the first act I, and a lot of the audience, was lost. The first act could haven been trimmed by 20 minutes; the second, though, came together better, was easier to follow, and shows us that in the drear future, money will trump passion all the time: or, duh?, did I miss out on the last six episodes of “The Bachelor”?

Albert Aeed as Seigen is a fairly Ted Haggard character: all lust, prohibitions, inhibitions, guilt, and meanness. But he is redeemed, sadly enough, by his own true heart, seeking Paul, the Ganymede-like boy he pushed earlier out of his life to suicide, then finally finding him. This is a play about the worship of strange beauty, something I am thrilled with, and Chashama kept much of that intact. The tiny theater backs on to a plate glass store-front window on 42nd Street; the stage’s rear black-out curtains are opened at moments in the action, and life in New York pulses in. Strange beauty, always.

To Be Loved will be performed at Chashama, 217 East 42nd Perry_brass_by_jack_slomow1Street, until Dec. 23rd. For more information: www.elixirproductions.org

Gay Wisdom, Perry Brass

Easton Mountain Gathering Notes & Audio Clips

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Notes from Easton Mountain

by Perry Brass

    I was able to attend the Gay Spirit Gathering, held at Easton Mountain Retreat, in upstate New York, near Troy, from Sunday evening, October 29, until Wednesday afternoon, November 1.

The gathering was actually a “sequel” to the larger Gay Men’s Spirit Culture Summit held in Garrison, NY, two years earlier; but this gathering was smaller, with about 35 participants, and wonderfully intimate and moving. I took brief notes of some of the comments and quotes given during activities which often consisted simply of men talking about their involvement with spirituality, their communities, and other people like themselves. Some of these have speaker attributes, others do not.

    “Gay does not have a monopoly on joy, but has a real nifty corner of it.” Tim Cooley, Easton Mountain

    “The longing is the path. Heart connection is a concrete force we use. We’re all longing for something. There is a power in longing, compassion, and peace. Assertive is not being violent. I want to emulate the ferocity of flowers.” Joe Weston, California

    “Have I given people a sense of their soul?” Harry Hay, just before his death, quoted by Dan Vera, Washington, DC

    “The necessary beauty of their lives—our gift is to remind people of that.” Dan Vera

    “I spend a lot of time in the world of shadows, that dark place of fear and power.” Rosey, New York

    “I don’t believe in self-help. I believe in inhabiting the masks completely.” Rosey, New York

    “Passion comes from holding my outrage and idealism together.” John Stasio, Easton Mountain

    “Surrender to the truth of your own experiences . . . what drives me is the choicelessness of my life.” John Stasio

    “I seek the company of my fellows because I know how dangerous the world we live in is.” John Stasio

    “My passion comes from the strength to keep my innocence alive, and to honor that innocence in others.” Perry Brass, Bronx, NY

    “My passion comes from knowing God loves me . . . Lead a full life, claim your spiritual heritage.” Michael Kelly, Easton Mountain, via Australia

    "We all stand beside our own pool of tears.”

    “This thing called the body, and using it to connect with desire makes me passionate.”

    “Words—I’m passionate about things being said well. I act through the body. I’m passionate about healing through pleasure . . . To be alive in your body is to be awake in the world.” Don Shewey, New York, NY

    “I had long-term short relationships. But I did not know what love was; I was not big enough to know the fullness of love.”

Thoughts of my own:

Structure is a point of entry into each other.

The problem of people who become conduits for the Eternal is that they become aware at some point of their own emptiness.

Statements from a panel on the future
of Gay Spirituality and the movement toward it:
Audio Links to each panelist’s talk are below each summation and will open in a separate window.  Audio is in mp3 format and will take a few seconds to download.

Toby Toby Johnson (writer and therapist):
“We are part of the ‘new myth,’ a shift in consciousness. Gay consciousness sees the world from outside and above, since we don’t fit in. Homosexuality is a dynamic of psychology rather than of biology; a function of consciousness. The Gay Movement is in two forms: political and society; and gay spirituality, addressing ourselves directly.

    “Let’s change each other.

    “Homosexuality should be a spiritual gift. It is a dynamic of consciousness, and makes use of kindness and spirituality. We need to change our vision of homosexuality. Wake up the boddhisatvas!”
Toby Johnson’s Statement (mp3 audio) (first few words are missing, apologies)

Michaelcohen_1
Michael Cohen (therapist and Body Electric facilitator):
“I see lots of hungry men wanting information and permission to be in a body. Initiation is important; Body Electric is about initiation. The secret mission of Body Electric is to ‘crack open your heart,’ to make men fall in love with themselves again.”

Michael Cohen’s Full Statement (mp3 audio)

Jay_michaelsonJay Michaelson (teacher and writer):
“Gay spirituality is powerful, transformative, and limited. I am not interested in the ‘origins of homosexuality,’ the debate in pop culture. We need to bring our work out into the world.

    “Are we the alternative to Western religion, or are we trying to make Western religion more open to us?

    “Marketing is important to understand in the growing of the movement.”

Jay Michaelson’s Full Statement (mp3 audio)

DuncanteagueDuncan Teague
(performance poet and Afro-American spiritual leader):

“I want to acknowlege the ‘Lord,’ or the people who’ve made Easton possible. People are still struggling with spirituality, liberation, and consciousness. Church is home for Afro-Americans. We want to recreate a church where we can feel spiritual.

How many black gays have done Body Electric?

I’m a Unitarian because they support what I do.

    “It’s about our relationships, and that white gay men exist in their own planet.

Katrina shifted the consciousness of this country. If Katrina had happened in Connecticut, wouldn’t things have been different?”

Duncan Teague’s Full Statement (mp3 audio)

Jonstasio1John Stasio (founder and director of Easton Mountain Retreat):
“I live in a rarified environment.

Each one of us has a dimension in our experience connected to a larger experience or community. The work of this movement is help us navigate in that inner world. I had an experience as a boy of being connected to the galaxy. It made religious rules have no reality. I had that religious experience at 17. At 19, in bed with man I was infatuated with, I had a vision of Jesus coming down from a picture in my room and entering a threesome with us. So helping people have a profound experience about themselves is what my work is all about. It is irresponsible of us to look at people who can’t help us—such as organized religion—instead of ourselves. The epidemic made us ask big questions about the meaning of life. Death is a profound teacher. We need to have rich, meaningful lives together. If we can support that, we can have a community together.
John Stasio’s Full Statement (mp3 audio)

More remarks:

    “We need to be a source of action in the world.” Rosey

    “In terms of historical moments, we, the community, haven’t had that much time. We have the resources to go further.” Chris Bartlett, Philadelphia, PA

    “Not being ashamed is work, and transformative.”

    “We’re winning; things cannot go back.” Toby Johnson

    “Everyday something happens that tells me I am an oppressed person.” Harry Faddis, Easton Mountain

    “There are people who need to receive the invitation to open spaces.” Dan Vera

    “This is a fruit of grace that we can meet and be here.” Michael Kelly

    “Ask yourself: What is the next right thing to do?" David Coleman