Shirt of Flame: The Secret Gay Art of War
by Ko Imani
Goko Media, 130 pages, pb, $10.00

Speaking of young gay men with good, refreshing, and stereotype-challenging ideas, the man who writes under the spiritual pseudonym Ko Imani is another example.

From the news and entertainment media, one would think all twenty- and thirty- year-olds these days are selfish, neurotic, or materialistic nerds or mindless nitwits who can't find the United States on a world map or compose a decent, meaningful sentence, and don't care about much else but shopping and consuming while they play on the Internet. This impression is furthered in the gay media as well--maybe even, especially so.

The impression is certainly false. That it is so pervasive is possibly a sign that the powers of the American Establishment are not going to let another youth revolution derail their plans (for world domination or riches or whatever it is "they" have planned) the way the hippie counterculture of the 60s did.

As liberated gay men, most of the readers of White Crane have an ongoing stake in the youth revolutions. It was out of that youth revolution of the 60s that our "liberation" came; it is young people who haven't settled down and started families and become indebted and inured to the status quo who can understand things like sexual freedom, personal responsibility, and gay liberation. And it is they who bring idealism and hope for change to the political and social agenda.

Ko Imani's Shirt of Flame is a shining example of sensible idealism and social criticism stated reasonably and without irony, rebellious campiness, or that "dumb-chic" that the popular media portrayes as stylish for young people.

Ko Imani is a 29 year old gay man, who lives with his lover Michael in Ypsilanti, Michigan. (Whenever I notice Ko & Michael's address in the White Crane database, I am always reminded of a lecture I heard many years ago about an experiment in the 1950s in group dynamics as a treatment for schizophrenia that put in the same therapy group at Ypsilanti State Hospital three men all who had the delusion he was Jesus Christ. It's written up in a book by Dr. Milton Rokeach called The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. Would the logical inconsistency that all three could not all be Jesus force the patients into sanity?)

About his spiritual name, "Ko" means "revolution" in Mandarin and "Imani" is "faith" in Swahili. The name, Imani says, is intended as a reflection of the journey toward an integral life, emphasizing the complexity and the universality of worldview demanded of such a life.

The title of Imani's book derives from T.S. Eliot's poem Little Gidding. The lines read: "Love is the unfamiliar Name/Behind the hands that wove/The intolerable shirt of flame/Which human power cannot remove."

Love then is the basis for the political and moral ethics Ko Imani argues for. And, as Eliot's words suggest, an ethics and politics truly based on love is both unfamiliar and nearly intolerable for modern society. This, of course, is in spite of the fact that this society generally calls itself "Christian" and love is the central teaching of Christianity. That it has failed is why a "new ethics" is needed.

In the introductory summary of the book, Imani calls on the LGBT community to embrace such an ethics because it is in our best interests and because it arises precisely from the thing that most clearly defines us: we act as homosexuals out of love. Citing the teachings of the Dalai Lama, he offers as a basis for a new ethic the "Universal Ethical Standard" which "defines an acceptable (ethical) act as any action taken in the pursuit of happiness or in the avoidance of suffering, and which does not infringe upon the happiness of another. Significantly, the UES is based on our sameness as living beings, not on our differences." Clearly such a standard would affirm "gay rights."

Imani then proposes that a society that embraced such a vision would be like the "Beloved Community" proposed by Martin Luther King, i.e., one that is a Just community, a Beautiful community, a Creative community, an Ecological community, a community of Easy Contact and Mobility, a Compact and Polycentric community, and a Diverse community.

He continues: "Because the true freedom and creativity of a Beloved Community is the end we desire, a mass paradigm shift toward refined love and deep nonviolence is required to transform straights' prejudice and our government's policies and to make our nation culturally sustainable." He'll also argue that a gay transformation is required as well. The reader can guess between the lines that Imani has some experience with gay community organizations and understands how we have sometimes savaged our own leaders in a way that is anything but loving. So our gay politics has to change as well.

Imani calls his book "a mosaic explanation of motivations and techniques for queer people's conscious self-transformation and for a purely constructive 21st Century LGBT activism." Personal evolution and a positively focused new activism--not reactive and not making other people wrong--he argues will make possible an ultimate cultural and legal victory for the LGBT rights movement. "If we are willing to become the embodiment of and the voice for Love, we LGBT and Ally people can lead our nation and the world on the journey toward compassionate actualization of the Beloved Community."

With such an emphasis on refined love and deep nonviolance the book's subtitle, "the secret gay art of war," seems inconsistent. It's a reference to the ancient Chinese manual of military strategy, the Sun Tzu, or The Art of War. (Ah, the Mandarin reference!) "Conflict and confrontation are necessarily implied, but the methods of a 'war' fought with a Shirt of Flame are purely constructive, not destructive. To achieve lasting victory, in addition to passing laws protecting our rights and relationships, LGBT people must open the hearts and minds of straight people." Central to the Sun Tzu is the notion of "taking whole." The way to win a war isn't to destroy the enemy but to encompass and include them so they aren't enemies anymore.

The basic assumption of Shirt of Flame is that the means are inherent in the end. Hate has never displaced hate, Imani says eloquently, and violence cannot end violence. Demanding change without embodying change will never create change. One cannot separate the result from the process of achieving it.

This is a politics of action, but one based in spiritual values and intents, responding to real needs and grievances, but not reacting in-kind to oppression and injury. The idea is to "take whole" the society in which we live and transform it with positive traits based in our experience of gay personality. Along the way of his discussion of political realities, Imani cites Gandhi's Satyagraha, Arthur Koestler's notion of Janus-faced holons, Ken Wilbur's theories of consciousness and even the early Mahayana notion of "Codependent Origination" as described by Thich Nhat Hanh. The political success comes from "revolution through consciousness change"--the technique of the youth revolution of the 60s.

One of the conclusions of the Three Christs of Ypsilanti experiment, by the way, was that if you think you yourself are Jesus Christ--that is, if you think you're right and everybody else is wrong--you're crazy. But if you come to realize you're Jesus and so is everybody else, then you're healthy and a world-savior. Nobody needs to be wrong. We only have to love one another, donning that Shirt of Flame.

That's how we take America whole.

Well, a thousand Imprimaturs! With a fresh, youthful, contemporary voice and perspective, Ko Imani conveys the elusive, but crucial, wisdom that the basis of gay community, gay activism, and gay politics is fundamentally spiritual and moral. Well-written, well-argued.