Andrew Ramer

WC71 – Andrew Ramer’s Praxis

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Bohemian Splendor

When I read about the subject of this issue I was stumped about what to say. Nothing came to mind at all. I was going to call Bo and Dan and ask them to assign this column to someone else. Then I remembered that some people write by design but I write by happenstance, trusting that the events of my life will give me the ideas I need, with the same random perfection as a tarot spread.

Lately my bedtime reading has been Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth Century American Literature, by Chris Packard, which I bought in hopes of grounding my dislike of Brokeback Mountain in an historical context. Several nights ago, toward the end of the book, I read about Irish-born John Boyle O’Reilly, who lived from 1844 to 1890, and founded a private men’s club in Boston based upon the ideals he wrote about in his poem “In Bohemia,” which was, according to Packard, a favorite piece to be recited in Victorian American drawing rooms. That was the first card dealt me by the Cosmic Shuffler. Here’s a bit of the poem.

I’d rather live in Bohemia than in any other land
For only there are values true,
And laurels gathered in all men’s view.

Bohemia? That region of Central Europe which occupies the western and middle thirds of the Czech Republic? No, our Bohemia reflects a false French perception, held since the 15th century, that the gypsies, those free souls, originally came from Bohemia. Hence, Bohemian: outsiders, artists and writers who live apart from conventional society and its restrictions.

The day after I read about John Boyle O’Reilly and his poem I received a postcard in the mail that said on it: “High Tea in Low Drag.” An invitation to a 90th birthday celebration for John Burnside, the four-decade partner of Harry Hay. John in elegant elder profile, is wearing a large-brimmed hat covered with flowers and plumes, a bright pink feather boa around his neck, lifting a delicate blue and white china saucer and teacup to his lips. My next card from the Eternal Tarot Deck.

Lastly, Divine Happenstance provided me with the final elements in my spread, from the book I was reading on a plane to Erie in the state I call Pencilvania, where I was going to visit my oldest friend Irmgard, who is slowly and elegantly dying of cancer. My travel book was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon, a fun romp through Comic Book Land full of superheroes, their cute boy wards, and a sad/sweet gay plotline. High above the Rockies I came upon a passage about a private men’s club located in Prague. “Prague you say? Isn’t that the capital of the Czech Republic? And isn’t it located in Bohemia?” Yes, exactly. “And who were the members of that club?” I hear you asking. Well, the club was a gathering place for the performing magicians of Bohemia, in a city that (I quote Chabon) has “produced some of history’s greatest charlatans, conjurors, and fakirs.”

Private club. Bohemian. That sounds like some aspects of gay life. But what made the literary tarot spread even better was a drawing in pen and ink that keeps appearing in the book. Done by a precocious young boy, to illustrate his opera libretto, it’s a picture of Harry Houdini, the great escape artist, wearing a dinner jacket and hurtling down to earth from an airplane, along with a parachute, two chairs, a table, and tea set. Houdini is smiling as he takes his cup of tea in the middle of the sky. 

So what can I say about Bohemian Splendor now? That there’s something artificial about it, with an emphasis on the art. And yet, by right or wrong attribution, it’s also about being vibrantly alive, creative, and counter-cultural. It’s about private clubs and what goes on in them. There’s something magical about it, alienating, that finds us in unlikely situations, doing ordinary things like sipping tea. But what the hell can I offer you by way of a spiritual practice? How can you practice something that by its very definition is supposed to be spontaneous, carefree, and unpremeditated, or at least pretending to be so?

For the first time in this column on spiritual practice – there will be no practice. But our last issue was on charlatans (a club to which you may now include me), and since the issue before that one was on eldering, please consider the following practice as being entirely separate from this issue, hurtling through space in a teacup all by itself, or riding on the back of an opalescent crane.

Harry Hay, a father of the Mattachine Society in one generation and of the Radical Faeries in the next, shared his life with a man whose Bohemian Splendor continues to inspire us.  And it is our job as their spiritual sons to see that John Burnside, in feathers and laurels, is well taken care of. Beyond his own limited resources, an additional $12,000 a year is needed to care for John.   So:

1. Get out your checkbook

2. Write a check to the “Harry Hay Fund” for  whatever amount feels right to you

3. Mail it to:
      Chas Nol
      816 Waller Street
      San Francisco, CA  94117

4. Along with a short note wishing John a happy birthday and thanking him for all of his gifts to our tribe.

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

Andrew Ramer lives in San Francisco.
He is the author of the gay classic  Two Flutes Playing
(available from www.gaywisdom.org)
Praxis is a regular feature in each issue of White Crane.

Frank Jackson

WC71 – Frank Talk – Does the Religious Right Just Need to Get Laid?

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Does the Religious Right Just Need to Get Laid?
By Frank Jackson

Riding home on the subway, after great, liberating, and joyous sex at the West Side Club (that’s the bathhouses, indeed, the nefarious bathhouses), I was reflecting on how little it takes to keep a man happy. Sometimes cliches are true — you know the one about how all that uptight guy or gal really needs is to get their brains fucked out? Well, sometimes it’s misogyny, and sometimes homophobia, but sometimes — at least for me — it’s just plain true. I worry a lot about a lot of things — my job, the planet’s climate, whatever — but right now, I could care less.

I mean, I still care about global warming, and I’ll still recycle. But you know; it’s not got quite the urgency.

Most of gay spirituality, when you look at it, is about “spirituality” instead of religion. The difference is sometimes hard to pin down, but I think it’s a lot like the difference between fucking and not fucking. Spirituality gives you the juice, whether you’re chanting or meditating or having sex. Religion gives you the rules.

This is why so many charismatic religious leaders turn out to be sex offenders (and perhaps vice versa): because the juice of religion is so close to the juice of sex that I’m not really sure what the difference is anymore. And it’s not just the ecstasy of orgasm or shamanic trance; it’s also the afterglow. That peaceful state in which you can finally reflect, calmly, over what you want in your life and what’s important to you. Reflect — as in, not panic or fret or endlessly plan. That peaceful state can come in a lot of ways. Meditation is one of them. Really good sex is another.

What is it about Ralph Reed, Gary Bauer, Rick Santorum, Ted Haggard and the rest of the Christian Right nuts that makes them seem so obviously, painfully gay? It could be the stereotypically effeminate features — none of them looks like they shave much, and they all have these boyish good looks that resemble nothing so much as a pedophile’s fantasy of an altar boy. But I don’t think it’s the girly-man thing. I think it’s how repressed they all look.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? People who don’t get fucked enough look exactly like those scary pictures of people who masturbate too much: wan and wasted. What was it Bilbo Baggins said? — like butter spread too thinly over a piece of bread. Jim McGreevey had that look sometimes, before he came out. Now he just looks hot.

And let’s take it to the next level. It’s not just that these guys need to get fucked physically (at least Haggard was getting some); they need to get fucked metaphysically also. Their whole religious outlook is one of chaste celibacy. No drugs, no sex, no pleasure, no profanity, no loud music, no long hair. What are the pleasures? Missionary sex with your wife while the kids snore downstairs? I mean, it’s nice, but everybody in the gay world knows that when your sex life is just “nice,” you need to get out more. And your partner does too.

But all they want is nice. They want nice lawns, nice houses, nice manners. Sometimes I think as though it’s impossible for people to believe the same bullshit they believed when I was fifteen and rebelled against it. But a lot of people are still at that first square. Pre-Holden Caulfield. Pre-Elvis, for Christ’s sake.

When I get fucked like I did tonight, I see things really clearly. I see how wonderful and God-given sexual energy truly is, and how obvious it is that God, who presumably designed the prostate gland and placed it so close to the anal wall, really does love us fags. I see how important it is for me personally to be “versatile,” both in the sense of top/bottom and also in the sense of playing with different people’s energies, and enjoying everything from romantic lovemaking with my boyfriend to rough sex at the baths. God bless variety.

And I see how completely wrong traditional anti-gay morality is — but without that irritating righteous indignation that one hears so often in our community; more with a sense of condescension. Of course, when I think of the violence that these idiots perpetrate, I do get angry again. But from a purely ideological, intellectual perspective — they’re just dumb.

I wonder how much religion is directly opposed to spirituality. It’s like, it’s in on the game — it knows that there is real, live, hot juice in the center of a spiritual life. It knows this. But then, instead of saying “look, people, drink from the secret well!” it builds a wall around the well so high that no light gets in, and no water gets out. Religion does to Spirit what museums do to precious jewels: locks it away so securely that no one gets to enjoy it. Unlike some of my White Crane colleagues, I do think religion does a good job at warning of the dangers of indulgence. And who knows, maybe it’s true that just like people get addicted to sex, they can get addicted to the rush of anything else, be it spirituality or drugs or music or whatever kind of pleasure really gets us juiced. And maybe it’s also true that the dangers outweigh the pleasures.

But for me at least, I know my limits. I’ve had unhealthy relationships to sex and drugs before; I know what it’s like. And I know that in moderation, both are just dandy. More than that; they’re enlightening. God blesses the orgasm, and the orgasm blesses God.

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!

Eric Riley

WC71 – re:Sources by Eric Riley

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Beats & Bohemians

The poetry of the beat generation has been something that has inspired me personally from a very early age.  I remember being in high school when people were snickering over the copy of Allen Ginsberg’s collected poems because they were so unabashedly queer.  I remember winning an academic team match by knowing something about William Burrough’s Naked Lunch (and yes, I’m that kind of geek).  But the things that were most captivating about them to me was the ecstasy of living, the joy of embodiment, and the perennial quest for spirit and meaning.  These truths were profound to me in my youth, and that spirit of pride and power is something that I’ve carried with me to this day.  Incidentally, I own every single one of these books.

BOOKS

The Portable Beat Reader {VIKING}
As anthologies go, this one is one of the best.  It includes work from all of the major players in the beat generation, and some of the people who were more “off scene” but were highly influential, like Neal Cassady.

Collected Poems – 1947-1980 
Allen Ginsberg {HARPER PERENNIAL}
This is the exact volume of Ginsberg’s poetry that my public library had when I was growing up.  I remember reading “Sweet Boy Gimme Yr Ass” when I was 17 and blushing from shame.  Now I read it and am overcome with the power of it all.

Naked Lunch William Burroughs {GROVE}
“Drugs, and sex, and sex, and sex” was how Burroughs himself described this work.  And as a summary, that’s pretty apt.  But it’s not just the drugs and the sex, but the language, and the fugue-state that you flow through in this novel.  You could literally pick up the book anywhere in the text and if you just let yourself go with it you can just dive right in, regardless of the past.  It’s that rich.  And the movie has Julian Sands, what more could I want!

On the Road  Jack Kerouac {PENGUIN}
Big Sur  Jack Kerouac {PENGUIN}
While everyone knows On the Road as the classic novel of the beat generation, and it is indeed Kerouac’s rambling benzene-induced masterpiece, fewer people know about Big Sur.  Big Sur to me was just as good as On the Road, but the image at the end of the novel of standing on the cliffs of California and hearing the crash of the waves below has resonated with me to this day.  That spirit of wildness, vastness, and power was another reason why I wanted to go to the west coast when I was younger. 

The Electric Kool–Aid Acid Test  Tom Wolfe {BANTAM}
As Whitman was the link to the past, Kesey was the link to the future.  Tom Wolfe’s book documents the journey that Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and Neal Cassady (one of the seminal influences on the beat generation) took in their bus spreading the word about the mind-opening power of LSD. 

Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poet’s Café
Miguel Algarin and Bob Holman {OWL}
In the mid-90’s beat poetry experienced a HUGE resurgence thanks to, of all things, MTV.  Poetry slamming had become so big that there were specials on television devoted to the resurgence of poetry, and specifically poetry that was influenced by the beats.  I watched all of those specials when they first aired.  I was glued.  And in there I discovered the Nuyoricans, the Puerto Rican poets of New York, who are in my eyes the children of the Beats.  Voices like Maggie Estep, Emily XYZ, Edwin Torres, and others are compiled here, and they shine.

CDS

Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs by Allen Ginsberg {RHINO}
If you want to hear a beat read, and read like it’s meant to be read, you MUST hear Allen Ginsberg.  This 4 CD box set includes some of his most powerful works including “Howl,” “Kaddish,” and “Please Master.”

The Jack Kerouac Collection {RHINO}
I personally don’t own this, but I’ve heard it and it is thrilling to hear.  When reading a novel, I always try to hear the author’s voice, but when hearing an author read his own work you just really get it.  Kerouac wasn’t necessarily the most thrilling reader, but it makes a difference to hear his voice.

Call Me Burroughs {RHINO}
Here William Burroughs, the grand master of beat, junkie, prose reads selections from some of his works.  His voice is worn, and long, and goes along in a slow, deliberate pace that sticks with you.  It’s incredibly distinctive.

Songs in the Key of “X”: Music Inspired by the X Files {WARNER}
Why?  Because you get to hear William Burroughs perform “Star Me Kitten” with REM.  A more perfect pairing of sexual weirdos I could not arrange.

MOVIES & TELEVISION

PeeWee’s Playhouse {RHINO}
OMG, are you kidding me?  Why are we watching PeeWee’s Playhouse for beatniks?  Because he has a beat puppet backup band made up of characters named Dirty Dog, Hep Cat, and Chicky Baby.  I’m not joking, and it’s pretty funny to boot.

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, 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

Dan Vera, Gay Wisdom

Wisdom – Monday, Jan. 15th

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TODAY IN GAY HISTORY

070115_moliereToday is the birthday of Molière (1622-1673).
The French playwright is considered the greatest writer of French comedy and is known for his plays "Les Femmes Savantes," "The Imaginary Invalid,"  "Sganarelle, ou le Cocu Imaginaire," "Tartuffe" and many other masterpieces of Commedia dell’arte.
Martin Greif writes that when Molière was in his late forties he fell in love with Michel Baron and brought him home to live with him.  When the playwright’s wife protested Baron moved out till Molière ordered him back.  When his wife made an ultimatum that the playwright choose between her or Baron, Molière chose.  Three years later, when the Molière died, Michel Baron was at his side.
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TODAY’S GAY WISDOM
“One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others” ~Molière

“The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.”  ~Molière

“I prefer an interesting vice to a virtue that bores”  ~Molière

“To live without loving is not really to live." ~ Molière

And knowing money is a root of evil, in Christian charity, he’d take away whatever things may hinder your salvation. ~ Molière
I assure you that a learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant fool. ~ Molière
Let us drink while we can, One cannot drink forever. ~ Molière
Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive. ~ Molière
“Things only have the value that we give them”  ~Molière

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For silly fun, check out David Lehre’s humorous & satirical "Life & Times of Moliere" below:

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