My own experience of money and scarcity/abundance was indelibly colored by my early adulthood in Catholic religious life, specifically, by the vow of poverty. As a devout and fervent young brother I enthusiastically recited the formula for the vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience.

Well, it wasn’t too many years after that that I read Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts and began to think of myself as more Buddhist than Catholic, and more gay hippie than anything else. And officially those vows slipped into my past as outmoded relics of a bygone age and a youthful adventure that had really been about escaping marital expectations.

But being a hippie entailed a certain kind of poverty; living in San Francisco meant being reminded of the City’s namesake and his life of simplicity and "going with the flow." Being part of the so-called counterculture included rejecting the "middle class values" of comfort, success, climbing the social and economic ladder, and being respectable. And so underlying all my radical politics and anti-Establishment activism, were those solemn vows that in some new—and not so Churchy—ways still meant something and still colored my life.

Obedience, I understood, had come to mean being open to life and adventure, "following my bliss" as a way of obeying the promptings of my soul. Chastity, I understood, had come to mean placing sexuality in the context of spirituality and seeing divine love in the love of my partners, boyfriends, even tricks. And, most importantly, poverty had come to mean choosing meaning over riches and socially-sanctioned success.

Chastity is the vow that gets all the attention: it makes monastic life seem so restricting. But it’s really just freedom from marriage and family. Obedience is demanded of everybody in modern society; everybody has to obey traffic rules, legal procedures, and especially job-related obligations. It’s no big deal and, in practice, in religious life, it is hardly ever invoked. Poverty is the vow that really characterizes monastic life. It’s the biggie. And that is because the vow of poverty is about making money a quality, not a quantity. Poverty is what makes Catholic religious life look appealing even now. And so I have been have been pleasantly amazed at how it created a self-fulfilling prophecy and relatively pleased that I made that vow "for life."

Here’s what poverty really means: in exchange for giving up private ownership in favor of common ownership and agreeing to live simply and at the same level as those in your community, you get total security, the promise of the community’s help in times of need, financial wherewithal to do everything you need to fulfill your chosen life, often a neat to place to live (the Church has ended up owning some very interesting and wonderful buildings), and, most importantly, the freedom to choose a job and vocation that is meaningful without having to think about the salary. Poverty means never having to worry about money. Poverty means you can follow your bliss (so long as it isn’t too costly) and choose a profession because you want to, not because you have to.

Another way of saying this is that if you can live beneath the means, you can have everything you ever really need.

There’s a paradoxical nature of the universe: to live fully, you must be willing to die; to escape suffering, you must be willing to suffer; to overcome, you must give up all resistance; to have everything, you must give up everything.

Money seems to manifest rules and dynamics in the universe that, in spite of the seeming contradiction, turn out to be spiritual. This is a lesson gay men learn about sex. The society says sex and spirituality are inimical—and look at what a fucked up mess society has made of itself on account of sex. The whole gay spirituality movement is founded on gay people’s discovery of the error in the common wisdom. That same discovery seems to be true about money as well.

Money need not be about luxury and riches and excesses and squandering. These are the errors that modern, capitalist, "profit-making" society ends up making and screwing up the whole spirituality of money as source of vitality and empowerment.

Spirituality ’zine

From its inception, White Crane Journal was never intended to be profit-making, though it was expected to cover the expenses of production and to provide its editor/publisher enough income to justify the time required to maintain it, that is, it was expected to pay for itself.

White Crane appeared in the late 80s as part of a trend in popular culture and computer technology which gave individuals the facilities to print very specialized magazines, called ’zines, for a small, closely targeted readership. The ’zines were in part a reaction against the mainstream publishing industry with all its emphasis on mass popularity, advertising, and glitz, and in part an artistic creation of writers and artists through the then newly-arising desktop publishing and high speed Xerox printing technology. ’Zines were micro-businesses for activists and cultural revolutionaries that promised a little income at artist level of subsistence along with a chance to put one’s ideas out there and, maybe, save the world.

The profit in the magazine business comes from advertising revenues, not the sales of the magazines themselves. That’s why the big magazines, like Time and Newsweek or the Advocate or OUT, are always anxious to sell subscriptions at very low rates. Magazines are always much cheaper copies by subscription than by newsstand purchase. That’s because the size of the subscriber base directly determines the rates the magazine can charge for advertising space. Advertisers, naturally, want to reach the most number of readers with their announcements of the goods and services they are selling.

Little ’zines, like White Crane, seldom expect to develop large subscriber bases and so have little hope of collecting large sums from selling advertising. White Crane has never depended on advertising revenues to cover production costs. The sales of the magazine itself have to cover all costs, including whatever remuneration is offered authors and whatever surplus can be passed onto the editors (who, after all, are doing all the work of creating the magazine).

On the other hand, of course, they generally are targeted to a very specific readership, and astute advertisers can save money by focusing on their specific targets. Gay retreat centers, like Easton Mountain, for instance, know their target audience is itself pretty small. An ad in Time or even the Advocate is exorbitantly expensive for a retreat center since the great majority of readers won’t even notice the announcement. A journal directed to gay men interested in spirituality is a better (and cheaper) place to announce gay men’s spiritual retreats than a magazine with general distribution.

Additionally White Crane needs to spend some of its income promoting itself so that it can reach its own target audience. The retreat centers, for instance, don’t need to advertise in the Advocate, but White Crane itself needs to, to reach the members of the Advocate’s readership with the news there is such a thing as a gay men’s spirituality ’zine and there are retreats and retreat centers they’d be interested in.

The shoestring operation of White Crane through the years has suffered because it usually hasn’t brought in enough money to pay for this secondary level of advertising. The appearance of the Internet, of course, changed all this. The Internet allowed the journal to maintain a virtually worldwide presence and visibility so that interested readers could find it just by querying the search engines for words like "gay spirituality" or "homosexuality and God." Maintaining a web presence, of course, costs money. Indeed, it’s an example of how money translates into visibility and influence.

Visibility still remains White Crane’s major issue, and, of course, it isn’t just White Crane, it’s the whole "gay spirituality movement" that is challenged to achieve real visibility. Even with the Internet offering up thousands of links to sites about gay men and spirituality, many people will never find them because they aren’t looking. Many, especially young gay men, are so understandably alienated by the behavior of "religious" people and mainstream churches that they’ve dismissed these questions from their lives. That escape from religion (and worry, for instance, about what the superstitious and taboo-ridden Hebrew nomads thought about sex five thousand years ago) is often an important step in gay people’s psychological maturation. But there are a whole set of questions about the meaning of life and the operation of the spiritual capacities of human consciousness that still need to be faced for continued psychological motivation.

One might say an "essential" tenet of the gay spirituality movement is that getting over religion is only the first step. There’s still a long way to go in deepening and expanding consciousness so that we can experience joy fully and radiate that joy to others around us.

We have almost all complained at one time or another that the media, maybe even especially the gay media, fails to recognize or promote "spirituality" in our community. The Advocate or OUT will occasionally run stories about church-related issues, but they’re usually focused on mainstream Christianity (Kudos to our colleague and contributor/subscriber Christian de la Huerta of San Francisco’s Q-Spirit for occasionally getting the big magazines to acknowledge meditation groups and retreats centers and other forms of alternative religion). The notion that White Crane champions as a raison d’etre that (at least some) gay people possess unusual and exemplary wisdom about matters spiritual seldom appears in the gay media.

Understandably the media is concerned with matters of money and commerce more than with those of spiritual meaning. Rather than the notion that gay people possess spiritual wisdom and vision, what’s more likely to be promoted is the notion that gay people have lots of disposable income. I am occasionally amazed at the products highlighted in OUT. Maybe it is because these products are promoted to New Yorkers and Los Angelenos who expect to pay premium prices, but I’ve seen new high-tech devices like plasma TVs sold in boutique electronics shops listed in gay magazines with prices two or three times what they can actually be bought for; and the items of clothing shown in those fashion spreads in OUT are just outlandish: $500 for a pair of jeans or $125 for a six-inch piece of leather thong to tie around your wrist.

I don’t mean to knock the gay media too much. They are a foundation of the gay rights movement. Without an economically strong and stable media, the gay community would barely exist. And I don’t mean to object to certain products and services directed to gay people being priced commensurate to a population with "disposable income" because most of us don’t have child-rearing costs to factor in. Gay cruises and tour packages, for instance, cost more than their non-gay equivalents, in great part, because the gay tour operators spend lots of money on advertising and promotion in the gay media, so the costs of the cruise are subsidizing the gay media and so amount to contributions to the existence of gay community.

But the spiritual message is that living beneath your means and choosing simplicity for the sake of overcoming suffering—your own and that of the world’s poor—brings freedom and joy and surprising abundance. The message of consumer-driven culture, just the opposite, to live beyond your means more likely brings complication, dependence, and paradoxically the gnawing sense of scarcity and privation (and credit card debt spiraling out of control).

Bob Barzan and I operated White Crane on a shoestring budget. We were blessed with support from a community of spiritually-minded gay men and the subscriber base always seemed to maintain itself miraculously. But the magazine didn’t grow and the message of gay spiritual wisdom didn’t get preached much beyond the choir.

With the enthusiasm and expertise of current publisher/editors Bo Young and Dan Vera, the financial structure and, we hope, the stature and prominence of the journal is changing. We’re moving beyond the hippie poverty model to that employed by churches and other institutions of cultural influence. And here’s another paradox. By shifting from a "profit-making" sole proprietorship to a "non-profit" educational institution, we’re able to bring in and spend more money, both for the production values of the magazine and, more importantly, for the promotion of the spirituality movement itself.

To create and maintain a "movement," we have to let people know it exists, and that it addresses real psycho-spiritual needs of real gay people who have abandoned (and sometimes transcended, but not always) traditional religion as a source of meaning.

As a therapist, a gay community entrepreneur, and social/cultural service provider, I’ve always believed gay enterprises needed to pay their own way. Gay community services shouldn’t be dependent on fundraisers and contribution campaigns. We shouldn’t have to pass the hat to have a gay community center or a functioning gay bookstore or a gay spirituality magazine. But there are huge sums of money in the American non-profit system available from funding foundations. With White Crane’s newly-achieved 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, we can begin appealing for such funding.

The non-profit status is a little like the vow of poverty: it allows abundance by giving up clinging to money. And thereby, paradoxically, it allows us to fund operations at a much higher level and process more money in order to promote the magazine, offer educational events and retreats, and publicize the existence of the gay spirituality movement.

As we prosper together, raising and spending money to promote the movement, we get big enough for the Advocate and OUT to notice us and to begin to accept our appreciation of gayness as spiritual vocation as another facet of the gay consciousness and gay community they cover.

Maybe one day you’ll see White Crane in those featured product pages. (I trust the subscription price will never get as expensive as those leather thong bracelets!)