Resistance
Sample ArticlesWhite Crane Journal #57 Summer 2003
Resistance
Sample ArticlesWhite Crane Journal #57 Summer 2003
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Editor's Note: "Don't Fight It" by Bo Young
Being Peaceful : An Interview with David McReynolds Dan Vera
Resistance & Gratitude Bo Young
The Art of Resistance Tim Miller
Bodhisattva Watch: No Resistance Toby Johnson
Poetry: The Job Darrell Grizzle
Books Reviews: People Farm by Steve Susoyev reviewed by Toby Johnson
The Tragedy of Miss Geneva Flowers by Joe Babcock reviewed by Steven LaVigne
Editor's Note: "Don't Fight It" by Bo Young
As I sit to write this traditional opening letter to you, the readers, Winter is resisting Spring with six to eight inches of snow in April. And it is awesome. Mother Nature will always out, which is the "nature" of things, of course. It is the persistent resistance of Nature among established religions--in particular among what my friend Charles Lawrence so pithily refers to as the "IJC Axis," the Islamic-Judeo-Christian religions, so much with us these days.
Can it really escape the perception of virtually every pundit and observer of current events, that history has shown almost every major world conflict can be traced to adherents of Abrahamic traditions? When will the Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions ever be called to task for their belligerence? When will they be reined in? When will they ever accept that the fatal flaw of their patriarchal half-view of the world endangers us all?
Each of these three brothers of faith--all related by the blood of Abraham--share common themes, but among the most dangerous of them (and there are more than a few) is a shared apocalyptic view of the world that inevitably--scripturally--rise from a male-dominated idolatry of victimhood and lead to horrific battles in a perverse kind of binary view of the world that have what I can only see as testosterone induced, psychotic divisions of male/female, right/wrong, winner/loser.
Everything about the war that is being waged at this moment reeks of the stench of the rotting character of these Nature-less religions. At their cold heart is the loss of, the domination of and utter separation from the female, a goddess, a balance to the masculine nature, rising from the maniacal adherence to a mono-theistic, i.e. "man" theistic religiosity that prizes male over female and has cut off half of creation. The lust for oil is just another rape in the history of rapes. They insist, in ways and policies subtle and not so subtle, there is something "super" natural, as though somehow there was a separation between the Creator and the Creation. The separation is theirs. I see God in an April snow storm.
Why it takes men-loving men to see this, I don't fully understand. But I firmly believe it is only in the balance and mediation of same-sex people in culture that we will ever find peace. And it is only in a self-examining ritual of reconciliation that any of these three potent, but long-barren religions will ever realize their full message and potential. Without the addition of the female to the equation, and the moderation of the "not-male, not-female," we are doomed to their shared apocalypse.
And I, for one, resist. As has soon-to-be-"emeritus" WCJ publisher and editor Toby Johnson in his newest exercise of spiritual thought, Gay Perspective (Alyson Publications), which I heartily recommend. There isn't enough discussion about what is essentially a social role that gay people are called to play. A role that Nature has persistently called us to, by the nature of our continuing presence in the world, and as Darwin so precisely established, in the order of Natural Selection. It is our differences, not our similarities, that present the greatest opportunities for spiritual growth in each of us and in the world. Resisting this, as modern gay and lesbian civil rights seems to insist we do, can only delay the inevitable and necessary conclusions that we and society so desperately needs. Toby's new book starts a fine discussion of this very thing
As does this Summer 2003 issue of White Crane with contributions from a broad range of views on the subject of Resistance. Dan Vera has done his usual outstanding job with this issue, amazingly conducting not one, but two interviews with War Resisters League founder David McReynolds and Gay Shame's Matt Bernstein Sycamore. Oh, and in his spare time he redesigned the entire layout of the magazine. No resistance to change, here, we hope you enjoy our "new look." We have the gem of a piece from Tim Miller, performance artist and famed NEA 4 "resister" of government censorship of the arts. Tennessee gardener and Radical Faerie, Maxzine Weinstock plants seeds of home-grown activism, a lovely Andrew Ramer piece, Antler's poetry and more. As usual, we limn the idea of "resistance" from as many different angles as space and imagination allows.
Read. Resistance is futile. Enjoy.
Bo Young
Brooklyn, Summer 2003
An excerpt from An Interview with David McReynolds Dan Vera
"The powerful have always been willing to baptize the status quo and name it "peace," and the impotent are regularly accused of being troublemakers when all they seek is justice." Sam Keen
"Even though it is difficult to bring about peace through inner transformation, that is the only way of establishing sustainable peace in the world." Dalai Lama
When the history of American nonviolence movements in the twentieth century is written, David McReynolds will be all over it. At 73, McReynolds has been a part of nonviolence and antiwar work for more than a half a century. His two Socialist party candidacies in 1980 and 2000 lend him the distinction of being the first openly Gay U.S. presidential candidate by a political party. Born in Los Angeles, California in 1929, he went to school at UCLA and holds a masters degree in political science from UCLA. While at UCLA he became active in student radical politics and joined the pacifist movement in 1948 and then the Socialist Party in 1951. He moved to New York City in 1956 and began working for the seminal radical pacifist magazine Liberation. McReynolds worked closely with nonviolent pioneers such as A.J. Muste, David Dellinger and Black Gay civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin. McReynolds took part in this winter's stunning PBS documentary on Rustin, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin. Indeed, it was while watching this exploration of Rustin's tumultuous life as a committed advocate for justice and closeted Gay man that I was reminded of my earlier meeting with McReynolds. We met while I was in seminary and he spoke on behalf of the War Resister's League where he worked for almost forty years until his retirement in 1999. We spoke in late April about nonviolence, his recollections of Bayard Rustin, his friendships with Quentin Crisp and Allen Ginsberg and his thoughts on living for justice today.
You've written extensively about non-violent theory. Can you explain the difference between pacifism and non-violence?
I'd use the terms interchangeably. Pacifism is, as you know is from the Latin verb to make peace. It's not from the word the Latin word passive. So I find the word pacifist the active concept of peacemaking. Non-violence is a relatively new word in some ways. I'm not sure exactly how far the word non-violence goes back. I think we have inherited it in a sense from India.
From Gandhi and Satyagraha?
Yes. Nonviolence here in the United States doesn't really convey satyagraha. It comes closer to conveying "passive resistance." I'm not sure how different the words are, or whether the differences aren't within each word. I mean you can say, "I believe in nonviolence" and that can be pretty passive or it can be very active.
I think nonviolence implied a better-organized method of resistance. The pacifist movement was fine. It was not as passive as it sounds as making peace as being peace and being peaceful. And being peaceful is an active act. It is not a passive act.
However it didn't really deal with what you do with organized institutional injustice. Nonviolence, using Gandhi's general concept for that, was very much more active compared to pacifism. So I think nonviolence direct action certainly is a new word that didn't occur in the old days. I'm not sure that you'd find a reference to nonviolent action prior to 1945.
It certainly was after Gandhi had begun it in India. It was something we borrowed from the Indian campaign very clearly.
When did you come out?
It was probably May of 1949. Although I'm not sure I was coming out when I came out. I had met someone on campus at UCLA. I had met Alvin Ailey, who later turned out to be a major American choreographer. I had a sort of backroom sexual rendezvous with Alvin and it was the only time I hadn't felt guilty about a homosexual act. After a couple of weeks I would say that I realized I was a homosexual and thought that was a good thing. I would've been nineteen at the time.
Was this about the same time as your political awakening to social justice?
Well, two things happened in May of 1949. One was the meeting with Alvin Ailey. Very much unplanned as a life-changing experience in a men's room at UCLA. But it was. The other thing was hearing Bayard Rustin. It had a profound impact on me. He'd just come back from serving a term in a chain gang in North Carolina. I found his presentation absolutely transformative in every sense. It was my introduction to nonviolence. I never read any books on nonviolence for probably two or three years. I do read books -- I'm not as bad as George Bush -- but I don't read them steadily. I'm not really on top of the academic scene. So, I didn't really read Gandhi until two or three years after my encounter with Bayard. But I sort of knew all about Gandhi from listening to every word that Bayard said. I absorbed it and integrated it into my own thinking. It would've been in May of 1949.
What's your sense about being Gay? What has changed since you first came out in the late 40s?
Well, in our society there are a lot of people who are homosexual. I think that there have been for a long time. Ever since I became aware of it. I don't know whether there's more now or less. Of course as you get older one of the things you can no longer tell who is a homosexual. Because that little flicker of eyes does not occur. You become invisible after you pass a certain age. It's an interesting phenomenon. You become absolutely invisible to a younger generation of homosexuals and often to everybody else on the street. You can walk with some impunity through hostile territory. You're an "old person" you're not "relevant." You're not part of the world anymore. But there was a time when I could certainly tell who was homosexual from a glance and be damned sure I was right. And no one else would've been able to tell. There's no way to tell because they didn't give off any of the vibrations that you're supposed to have. You know what I'm talking about. So, I think there've always been a lot of homosexuals in our society.
When I got tired of being with straight people and their complete and utter lack of understanding of how complex the world is, because to be homosexual at my age means that during the time when I was growing up, being Gay was a sin, it was a matter of shame of suicidal intent. Lot of things that you go through if you're queer and the year is 1945. It's a miserable time for many of us. So, if I got tired of being with Quaker-type people who had no idea what the world was like, I would go to a Gay bar. I found Gay bars a wonderful refuge. They were sexual hunting grounds, but more than that, they were a wonderful entrance into a world filled with sinners. People with the blessed insight that sinners have that the world is more fucking complex then most people have any idea of. Alcoholics, which I am one also, have the same profound experience of the "differentness" of the world. Alcoholics, when they talk about the rest of the world in AA meetings, talk about 'the civilians." They perceive themselves as having been "in combat" and realize that there's no point in trying to explain to a "civilian" what alcoholism is like. There isn't. You can read about it, you can write about it, but unless you're an alcoholic, you have no idea what it's like to have an addiction that overwhelms your life.
What was the Gay community like when you came out?
There was a Gay underground. I remember thinking about writing an article for Esquire back in the fifties, before the Gay community was recognized. I was going to title it "The Gay Underground." It was a parallel world of bars and beaches in Ocean Park where I was living as a student. We had a Gay beach, which everyone knew was queer. You'd have the Jewish family, because Ocean Park was a Jewish ghetto with lower income, lower class Jews. And you'd have families mingling and sitting in the sun. And then like an invisible line in the sand, you would have the next row, for about 150 or 200 yards would be all the young men. And that was the queer beach. This was in Santa Monica.
There were restaurants, bars, and beaches. All of which were Gay and the world did not know about it. The world did not see it. Did not recognize it. They had no concept. Gay bars you could always identify because they almost had no sign. All you would have outside of a Gay bar in Boston was the word "bar." You almost could be damned sure that if the bar had no windows you could see in through and the only sign was "Bar" it was queer. Other bars would say "24 Hour Lounge" or "Come In, Have a Drink." Gay bars didn't. Not in those days. But my God, there was a real Gay society in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. In all the large cities you had a large organized Gay underground with dances.
There's been a lot written about Quentin Crisp since his death. You knew him. What was he like? As effeminate as he may have seemed, although I never thought of Quentin as effeminate, he certainly almost cross-dressed. He certainly sounded wispy when he talked he to you, but underneath this Quentin had a whim of iron. If he was sitting in my apartment and we were having a party, after an ale or two he was like a guy from the Navy. Chatting with people except in a somewhat different voice.
If you called an asked him if he wanted to go out he would always say yes no matter who you were. He had a very open view of the world. Of course you were going to pay for the dinner, but that was irrelevant. The point was if you called Quentin and said, "do you want to go to a movie?" he would say "Yes" or he would say, "First, let me consult the sacred book" and that was his date book. "Yes, Thursday is fine, what time should we meet?" And he would go out with you. There was certainly a Gay society in England, which Quentin was part of -- and he hated England because of the way they treated homosexuals, including himself. He loved New York because he was treated as a curiosity but not as an enemy. He just loved New York and said he was sorry he hadn't discovered it much sooner.
You were interviewed for the recent documentary on Bayard Rustin. What was your relationship with Bayard?
He was my boss when I worked with him at Liberation magazine. He was one of the two models for my life, the other being A.J. Muste. I earned and gathered enormous insights from Bayard. I was never even sure that Bayard even liked me despite our very close working relationship.
The documentary talked about his closeted sexuality. How did you experience him?
Well, Bayard was very, very sexual. I think he was pretty driven by sexuality. He was very guilty about it.
What was the source of that guilt?
Remember, Bayard was twenty years older than I was. I met him in 1949 so he would've been forty and I would've been just twenty years old. So, this means that he lived through not only a blacker experience but also a much earlier experience of homosexuality, in which the broader society viewed us as equal to drug-addicts. Somewhere in all of this we were also assumed guilty of being pederasts. So the social sense was that homosexuality was an unspeakable sin. What can I tell you? We were unspeakable. Not only illegal, it was just something that was not talked about. You might have had an uncle who had never married, and he was an interesting uncle, but you never talked about "Oh Uncle Joe was...whatever." And if you think about the women, "well Faye and Ronnie have been together for years. They're just two old maids." Two old maids, hell! They're lesbians! They've been living together for forty years and everyone thinks that they're just friends. I mean there was an inability of society to say that these two women were lesbians. That was just not speakable. Bayard came out of that. So he was very guilt-ridden but also very driven sexually. He was a very sexual animal and he would be very happy to make it with whoever crossed his path. And he certainly took advantage of the guilt that whites felt about blacks, to use that if that would help him in making a date.
Later in life Rustin's positions on various subjects went to the right. I remember you calling him a neo-conservative. What do you think precipitated that shift?
I think where he went was due to many things. I think one of them was sort of what I'm going through at the moment in WRL (War Resister's League) on the race question. I'm going through that with the white, middle-income, politically correct people who are driving me crazy. I understand why Bayard at some point got tired of the slogans. He had stuck his neck out on the race question. He'd had his head beaten on the race question. And along comes Stokely Carmichael who -- I understand where Stokely was coming from, I'm not putting him down -- but thinks that by changing his name, that by becoming a Muslim, by saying 'Black Is Beautiful', by saying 'Black Power' he can solve the race question. Bayard knew that it had to be solved in some way in coalition with Whites who were the majority, that Blacks could not solve it on their own.
And Bayard, in dismissing Negritude, in dismissing the Black Studies courses -- I think he did some of that too quickly -- but, in general, Bayard was correct but not seen as correct when he said "the most important thing you can do for Blacks is not reparations, but doubling the minimum wage." That would be the most single revolutionary act you could do. That was not very popular at that time -- the whole phase of negritude, of Stokely Carmichael, of the Black Panthers. Bayard said at the time the Black Panthers started, "Jesus David. In ten years they're all going to be dead or in prison." And unhappily he was correct. This is what happened. Bayard knew in ways that these guys did not know that the white establishment would murder them. And they did. Fred Hampton was shot dead in his Chicago apartment. I mean the ruthlessness of the white establishment Bayard was aware of. And I think that many of the Black Radical community were not.
Did you feel anger about his switch?
I never felt bitter about Bayard's betrayal of many of the things he'd stood for. Because he had in a sense earned the right to do that. He had paid his dues in ways that almost none of his critics have paid due. I have a great deal of contempt for a young radical generation that has nothing but slogans to show and no jail time, none of the things that Bayard of the others went through.
Bayard got tired. I think he was burned out. All that he had done seemed to count for nothing and he might have just said, "Fuck it." I understand that as a reaction. The other reaction was much more important. That was the enormous temptation of power. Bayard's touching power. That I think was much more crucial to what changed Bayard. He thought he could get something for the black kids by making a bargain with the devil. Towards the end of his life I think Bayard was coming back in our direction. But I think that is what accounted for his shift. And he enjoyed the good life. I don't mean a million dollars. He enjoyed a decent life and good food and travel and he got that where he went.
When Allen Ginsberg died I remember reading your reminiscences of your friendship.
I knew Allen primarily because he was the first person in the nation to say he was a homosexual.
I never knew that. What year was that?
This would have been back in the 50s. The Beat generation had come around. Not the post-Beats but the Beats. I found the Beats very attractive. I'd taken peyote in 1958 and that had a profound effect on my life. And it did help me understand a good deal of what was going on. There was a newspaper article in the New York Daily News covering the Beats. The writer said that Allen Ginsberg was in Chicago giving a reading. A woman came up to him after the reading and said 'Mr. Ginsberg, I love you r poetry. But tell me, why is there so much about homosexuality in it?' And he said, 'Madam, it is because I am queer.' Now that was a line that was absolutely revolutionary. Goddamn! I wish I could say that. I couldn't because my admitting it would damage the political movement that I was a part of. I wanted to, so I really envied Allen enormously.
When did you meet him?
When he wrote a poem for Liberation. We paid writers by giving them five copies -- big deal -- and then sending out copies to anyone that they wanted copies sent to. And that was my job working at Liberation. So I took the five copies over to Allen's house on the East Side where I live now. And I was going to deliver them in person so I could meet this guy. I went upstairs and he wasn't there. So I was starting downstairs when up walked Allen and Peter Orlovsky, who was in his youth a beautiful guy. He was partly schizoid or whatever. His brother was catatonic. So Orlovsky was partly certifiably nuts, but just incredibly beautiful. So Allen and Peter are coming up the stairs and Allen says, "come on up." We talked and I gave him the Liberations and that's how I first got to know him. I saw him a number of times over the years. He would call me occasionally about something political or I would call him about something. So I think we were on relatively close terms. I thought that his "Howl" was wonderful. I thought that his poetry was very good. But I thought his poetry spoke to our times and our conditions in ways that an older generation didn't even begin to understand.
For more of this fascinating interview, see the Summer 2003 issue of White Crane.
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by Bo Young
I am losing my resistance.
In 1997 I was diagnosed with HIV. It wasn't supposed to happen that way. The odds were with me, or so I thought, and I took the test for the first time feeling confident that somehow, someway, I was going to escape this scourge, much as I simultaneously knew I probably shouldn't have, or couldn't have. I had convinced myself that my good health was something on which I could rely. Other, ancillary tests had always shown everything else to be well within normal ranges and I allowed myself the luxury of thinking that now, nearly thirty years into the plague of AIDS maybe I might be one of the lucky ones.
I wasn't.
I've told the story in other venues of how I first received the news. Of being in the company of Harry Hay and Clyde Hall and a circle of loving companions at the faerie sanctuary in Oregon. How I was surrounded by a healing circle of ritual and healing and the beauty of the Earth itself in the hills of southern Oregon, of a ceremonial fleshing-pieces of skin cut from my arm and offered to a tree in an ancient ceremony where I turned my whole being over to the Mother, the wholeness of Nature, in a prayer for my life. I thought I had dealt with the challenge in about as good a way as one could possibly do.
I was wrong.
The first panic attack happened about two months later. I had decided to go see a movie. I was sitting in the theater waiting for the movie to start and suddenly I couldn't breathe. I had been reading, trying to educate myself about this disease, the options, the medical insurance, the medical options. All that layered on top of the experience we have all had over the years. Of friends dying. Of wasted cheekbones and drawers filled with pill containers. Of diarrhea attacks and psychotic episodes brought on by the medicine itself. And it all just swept over me like some polluted wave of water and I went under. I left the theater before the movie started and just started walking from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, downtown, block after block, across the Brooklyn Bridge, home. Anyone seeing me would have seen a (at the time) forty-seven year old man walking down the street weeping uncontrollably. I was a mess. I was sure I was going to die; soon and young and in the most unpleasant way one could imagine.
Unfortunately, the first metaphor that rises to an occasion like this is one of war. Of fighting. This is a battle between me and a virus. One of us will win and one of us will lose. Only thing was, there was no mystery about who that would be. Everything pointed to me being the loser. That's the problem with that metaphor. War is a win-lose situation. Pick that story and someone or something has to win. And someone or something has to lose.
Another metaphor that haunted me that night, and for many nights after, is the one about the "canary in the mine." If you see the Earth in terms of the Gaia Principle, then it is a living creature, and when something of this magnitude hits, there aren't too many other ways to see it other than the Earth herself is sick. As we continue to pollute and use up and treat the planet like it was a toilet, like it was an endless source of energy and resources (despite knowing that if we did that to our bodies we would all soon sicken and die) it should come as no real surprise that something like AIDS or SARS or some other as yet un-acronymed disease will come along. There are at least two ways of looking at it that occur to me as I sit to write this. The first is that if we poison our well, we can't be surprised if we become sick from it. And the second is that if the Earth truly is a living creature, it might well generate an "antibody" that will effectively remove some of the offending organisms that live on her body. Like humans. My body's resistance - my fighter t-cells, an army of task-specific cells assigned to fight off invaders, was compromised. Soon I would be besieged and attacked by "opportunistic infections" that would slowly, inexorably wear my fragile body defenses down until there were none. Worse, the virus was using that very mechanism to advance on me. Each time my body would respond to the battle cry of disease, the very mechanism that we are given in creation to fight disease would advance the enemy's position. Battle after battle of disease and infection would call on my body's immune system and slowly, each Benedict Arnold retrovirus infected t-cell would be called into service, and as each one, each directed specifically at the specific disease that I was contracting would rise, it would fall, tricked by a Trojan Horse virus that rode on my very resistance and proliferated with each call. That's how the story goes.
Anyway, war is hell. It's just damned exhausting and it requires a great deal of resources and energy to keep it up, much less win it. You try to make a lot of deals with god when you come up against something as impenetrable as a life-threatening illness. According to Elizabeth Kübler Ross, the five stages of dying are something like denial, anger, deal making, depression and acceptance or peace. There was no denial of this. I knew better. HIV, while in my intellect I thought I "knew" better, was a death sentence. I think after watching all my friends die over the years I had expended my own anger long before this time. So anger, if it happened, came and passed quickly. Deal making became sort of a fait if not accompli, then at least quotidian. I would have to take care of myself on a daily basis and that would be the deal from here on in. Depression was a little more tricky. I had convinced myself that I wasn't depressed. After all, I was "spiritual"ÉI could accept this and be grateful.
In reality, in retrospect, I became a lot more involved in dying that living. I quit my job. I went on disability. And slowly and daily went about preparing to die more than I was preparing to live. Somewhere along the way my rational mind began to take hold and the depression left. I was one of the protease miracles (even though I have long since stopped them) and now, seven years into this thing I am still alive, still as healthy looking and feeling as any 53 year old has a right to be and for the foreseeable future, too.
And where did I ever get the idea that I wasn't somehow going to die? All this did was force me to face up to it. Death is part of Life; it is its balance. There is no life without death. Just as I discovered that "shit is sacred" because it is the nourishment of things that grow, so was my encounter with death and dying and learning that the most fearsome event in our lives is also one of the most important. And until I deal with dying, I am not really living. Everyone is going to die and I am no exception.
So I decided not to fight, not to resist. Somewhere along the line, a friend asked me "Who would you be without the struggle? And it is a question that rings in my mind on a daily basis. How would I be if I have up all the energy that I was putting into struggling and just made another story, made another decision?
If I really believed this&emdash;and I really believed in a "Gaia" principle&emdash;then I had to look on this virus living in my body as another part of the "gestalt." I had to find a way out of "struggle;" not "domination" of Nature (as I think the Islamic/Judeo/Christian traditions preach), but find coherence with it (as I believe the Earth-based religions do); not resistance, but co-existence.
Disease as War became a non-starter for me. War, like politics, is win-lose. And I wanted to find a way to create balance. I had to face up to something that everyone has to face: mortality. There's this funny way people have of dealing with death: they don't.
My trip to the Amazon was a capstone to this work. Spending three weeks drinking ayahuasca -- la vina del muerte, the vine of death -- brought the life-death connection into stark focus. The experience of ayahuasca is the experience of death. It is the experience of feeling one's connection to the whole of it all, the whole of life as a small part of it as you give over your own consciousness to the larger one. Ayahuasca, I firmly believe, enables you to do something that is almost inconceivable: it enables you to have a conversation with your DNA.
In my case, since the virus insinuates itself into your RNA, into the T-cells, I think it actually enabled me to have the conversation with the virus and strike up entente: I will not try to kill you, but you can't kill me either. I won't fight you, but you can't use me up, either.
The shaman we worked with sat with the three of us with HIV. After listening to each of us speak about our lives with HIV, he instructed us to do several things: he told us to get up every morning and greet the virus, and ask it how it was doing and welcome it into our system. He told us to cook. And he told us to sing for fifteen minutes every day. I do these things.
I took what is called a "Strategic Treatment Interruption" (STI) for the time I was in the jungle. This was more about not wanting there to be interactions between my cocktail and the medicine of the vina del muerte. Protease inhibitors are notoriously bad mixes with many kinds of medicines, and my doctor agreed with me that this would be the best time to take one of these. They usually last for a few months and then you start up the meds again. In my case, the STI lasted almost 18 months before the virus started making a significant enough appearance again to warrant it. And rather than set this up as a test, I allowed that needing to go back on the meds was not a measure of success or failure in these things. How do you fail at singing every day except by not singing?
More than striking a bargain with HIV, or god, what I believe I have done is I have struck a balance. Not fighting the virus frees up energy for other things. Even more importantly than not resisting the virus, and this is true for all of the tougher lessons in my life, I have found, I have found a way to have gratitude for it. Gratitude for the lessons that it brings. Embracing the strength that it calls me to have, fills me with a feeling of capability. Fighting and resisting only takes up energy, wastes time, postpones nothing and makes it harder. Who am I without the struggle? I am more fully me, more fully alive, more present to the now and the possibilities.
Bo Young lives in Brooklyn and is Associate Editor of White Crane.
Back to Issue #57 Table of Contents
Tim Miller
Even more than in my performances, I think I have been able to explore and dismantle the worst of our patriarchal legacy as men through the gay men's performance workshops I teach. For almost twenty years I have been leading performance workshops for groups of men all over the world. These workshops have been a place for men to resist the patriarchal legacy by physically exploring in full-color real time their most intimate narratives, memories, dreams and possibilities with one another.
While I have often done this work with mixed groups of straight, bi-sexual and gay men, the majority of my efforts have been within the diverse gay men's communities in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. A constant focus, the base note as it were, of all this work, has been a commitment to discovering a more authentic and individualized way of being present within our deeply problematized men's psyches and bodies. I have taught such workshops in contexts as varied as at the Men & Masculinities conference that was sponsored by the National Organization of Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) in Johnstown, Pennsylvania to hundreds of performance workshops for gay men in cities from Sydney, Australia to Glasgow, Scotland. .
In the work I do with groups of gay men, I have learned that finding a way to be more present in our embodied selves and open to the narratives that we carry in our queer flesh and blood is the quickest route to discovering the revelatory material about what it just might mean to be human. Claiming this kind of psychic space to explore our most queeny, spiritual or erotic selves as gay men is to me a profound act of resistance.
In 1994 frayed from the culture war and onslaught of AIDS, I made a show called Naked Breath in which I wanted to write a sexy and highly personal story about how two men, one HIV-positive and one negative, managed to connect. After several years in the late 80's and early 90's of shouting in front of government buildings or being dragged by cops down the asphalt on the streets of Los Angeles or Houston or San Francisco or New York with ACT-UP, I felt called to really honor the quiet human-size victories that are available to us.
To model the resistance to fear of each others bodies across sero-status, but also to perform the resistance to the virus' negative effects to our psychic and emotional health as we did this. I wanted to try to locate what has happened to us during the AIDS era and hold up the hopeful fact that men were still able to get close to one another there amid the swirl of blood within and the cum smeared on our bodies. In Naked Breath I am surrounded by both these bodily fluids; I wanted to get wet in this performance. I also wanted that we could do this safely and full of respect for each other's bodies.
My new show Us is full of nascent little queer boy resistance, but my show GLORY BOX has my favorite example. I tell a funny story in GLORY BOX about asking a boy to marry me when I was nine years old. He beats me up and tells me to "take it back". I do "take it back--that I wanted to marry him--but I cross my fingers behind me before I do! Maybe that was the beginning of my resistance and activism! That gave me the basic dissatisfaction with stuff that just isn't fair.
I do think though, that gay Americans are ready to submit to a basic disrespect to their humanity that gay people in other western countries would find unacceptable. We have accommodated to sodomy laws, gays not allowed in the military etc. We have that damn radical religious right in the U.S. that other countries just don't have. It infects everything. If queer folks in America would actually be prepared to resist we could change so much that messes with our community. That old devil of internalized homophobia gets in our way.
I keep trying to stay close to that little nine-year old who knew that it just wasn't fair that he couldn't marry another boy! This is very much connected to the story I tell in Us about relating to Oliver Twist in the film musical as a little queer activist. He, too, wanted some "more!" That crucial act: wanting to marry another boy, of claiming space and agency as a little nine-year-old gay boy, that resistance to the heterosexual narrative, is the place from where all my other activism around lesbian and gay civil marriage and immigration rights leaps.
Tim Miller is the author of SHIRTS AND SKINS and BODY BLOWS. In 1990 he was awarded an NEA Solo Performance Fellowship which was overturned under political pressure from the Bush I White House. As part of the NEA 4 Miller successfully sued the federal government for violation of First Amendment rights and won. Though this decision was later partially overturned by the Supreme Court, Miller continues his fight for freedom of expression and gay rights. His most recent performance piece is "Us." For more information on Tim and his performance and workshop schedule: http://hometown.aol.com/millertale/timmiller.html
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Bodhisattva Watch: No ResistanceToby Johnson
Nothing bad ever happens in a perfect world. There are two ways of understanding such a proposition. The first, the more common interpretation, is that a world can be called perfect only if nothing undesirable or untoward happens; such a perfect world is a dream and an ideal. The second, more mystical and profound interpretation, is that the world can be seen as perfect when one stops making judgments of good and bad and starts seeing that everything that happens just happens; such a "perfect world" surrounds us every day.
According to Western dualism, incorporated into Christianity as the ideas about the existence of evil and the influence of the Devil, the world really is divided into those things that are good and those that are bad. And religion is about telling the difference. According to the biblical myth, the origins of such dualism lay in the behavior of Adam and Eve, the first parents, in the Garden of Eden. The garden was a true "perfect world" and nothing bad ever happened; Adam and Eve were always happy. But then they sinned and were expelled. Their sin, of course, was eating the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Mystical traditions--from basic Buddhism to Christian esoterica to modern "spiritual classics" like The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment teach that the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a projection outward onto the world from the dualistic mind. "No resistance" urges the Lazy Man's Guide, "Love it the way it is; love as much as you can from wherever you are; love is the only dimension that needs to be changed."
And Joseph Campbell used to say: "People ask me, 'What about all the evil and suffering in the world?' And I say, 'It's great just the way it is.'" He'd stutter a little on the "g" and then shake his head as if in bewilderment that anybody could imagine any other response. "What else can you say? This is the way it is."
"What you resist persists" says the aphorism championed by the New Age. The way to solve ("disappear") problems is to become fully conscious of them. And what prevents full consciousness is resistance. Such resistance is based in fear which, in turn, is based in memories of past events AND in dualistic value judgments.
Dualism is also based in heterosexuality. The primary experience, after all, of heterosexual men is that they are compulsively (and joyously, of course) drawn into relationship with persons unlike themselves, persons "dualistically" opposite them in sex and psychological sexuality.
Homosexuality supplants the dualistic worldview: there is no polarization between lover and beloved. One might say homosexuals have access to a world prior to dualism, that is, access to the underlying unity in which everything seems in perfect harmony and there is no conflict, no polarization between male and female, between good and bad, and, indeed, between the world and God.
In such a homosexually-based vision of the world there is no need for resistance because everything IS perfect -- including, of course, one's desire to change things and correct the problems that arise from everybody else's polarization of their experience.
One might say homosexual orientation--and modern day gay and queer, consciousness--derive from an Edenic state before "original sin." For all that there are problems with gay life, if we have the vision to see, we can find we're still in original innocence. We can change the world; we can demand redress of grievances for ourselves--and for all the downtrodden. And we can do it without resisting and without making anybody else wrong. In the mythic terms of my little story, we live surrounded by people suffering from original sin. The best we can do is forgive them and assist them in becoming more conscious so that the problems created by judgment and polarization will ultimately disappear.
In a very real way, our practice of mystical "non-resistance," seeing the world as perfect and beyond dualism, actively "resists" the violence and oppression that seem to spoil the world. The way to solve the problems of the world, paradoxically, is love the world and life more and so to transform our own vision.
Our political work--from the mystic's point of view--is to change the world by freeing it from the belief in sin. We resist by not resisting.
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Buddhist monks in long robes drumming handdrums chanting
na mu myo ho renge kyo
carrying banners for peace as their pilgrimage
leads them through another small-town square
and the townfolk gather to stare at them
with amazement and confusion
as if they were alien beings from a distant shining planet
and a cashier sees them through the window
over the rows of carton cigarettes
and shakes her head with disgust and says
if those assholes had jobs they wouldn't have time for all this shit
as if the job of peace were not important
as if the job of prayer were not what holds this world together
Darrell Grizzle
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When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him. Bayard Rustin
"We do indeed have a responsibility to drum up the dawn."
Harry Hay
"THE PEOPLE! PERVERTED!
WILL NEVER BE CONVERTED!!"
chant at the Halloween Counter-Protest staged in the Castro by GHOST - Grand Homosexual Outrage at Sickening Televangelists
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James Baldwin
The human race is in danger of being exterminated by its weakest line--macho man, a physically strong, emotionally volatile, and intellectually limited creature who is now obsolete in evolutionary terms, but who is capable of causing the death of all of us through his paranoid plots and penchant for violence. He cannot be out-gunned, out-bombed, out-missled; he can only be outwitted by those of greater guile. The politics of manners goes far beyond the realms of behavior mapped by Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt.
Quentin Crisp
How will our lands be free
if our bodies are not?
Ricardo Bracho
Love is a choice --not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversation with humanity --- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is a choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life.
Carter Heyward
Remember that someday the AIDS crisis will be over. And when that day has come and gone there will be people alive who will hear that once there was a terrible disease, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and in some cases died so others might live and be free.
Vito Russo
Hope isn't a choice, it's a moral obligation, it's a human obligation, it's an obligation to the cells in your body, hope is a function of those cells, it's a bodily function the same as breathing and eating and sleeping; hope is not naive, hope grapples endlessly with despair, real vivid powerful thunderclap hope, like the soul, is at home in darkness, is divided; but lose your hope and you lose your soul, and you don't want to do that, trust me, even if you haven't got a soul, and who knows, you shouldn't be careless about it.
Tony Kushner
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Books
by Steve Susoyev
Moving Finger Press, 2003, 408 pages, PB, $18.00
Reviewed by Toby Johnson
Subtitled "A Largely True Story of Exploitation, Redemption, and Organic Sex in a Therapy Cult of the Early Aquarian Age," People Farm is a semi-fictionalized account of a troubled young man's experiences struggling to cope with bad parenting, depression, drugs, and homosexuality through an idealistic, countercultural utopian experiment in psychotherapy and intentional community.
In spite of the heaviness of that description, I found the book immediately engrossing. I read it compulsively every spare minute, occasionally horrified, but fascinated and, I suppose, a little infatuated with the engaging personality of the author. His picture, identified evocatively as a "counterfeit U.S. passport photo of the author," appears on the first page of the book. Very intense, his looks are reminiscent of the hot rock singer, Sting. I found myself frequently looking back to that photo.
Steve Susoyev was a 60s Southern California hippie, active in the peace movement, working in a state mental hospital, and feeling on the verge of suicide when he happened to meet a charismatic psychiatrist, pseudonymously called Cyrus Aaron, who seemed to offer a way out of confusion and depression. Aaron was developing a therapeutic community and drug-treatment program for disaffected youth in a wilderness setting in the Colorado mountains. Through an elaborate ruse, Susoyev got himself accepted as a patient and then as a staff member.
In the spirit of Primal Scream Therapy and anger release treatment, Aaron and his voluptuous Tahitian French wife and partner taught that the solution to neurosis, mental illness, and behavior problems lay in getting to the root of negative feelings, bringing them into consciousness and acting them out (however socially unacceptable) in the presence of the loving and accepting community. Life at the Rancho Vista commune was a constant group therapy session with every stray feeling or interpersonal annoyance or mistake discussed and analyzed rigorously. Aaron was remarkably successful; he had a thriving private practice in Beverly Hills with rich and influential clients; and Rancho Vista became a model for wilderness therapy with many successful and grateful graduates.
But within the small community of the staff, the psychotherapeutic processing was getting a little crazy. "Sexual surrogacy"--and downright sexual manipulation of clients--turned out to be one of the processes. (Dr. Aaron was impotent and needed the hard young cock of one or another of his followers servicing his wife while he kissed and "made love" to her.) And drugs and alcohol were flowing within the staff, all in the interests of bringing suppressed material into consciousness, but getting Aaron deeper and deeper in his cups and Sosoyev more trapped and confused than ever.
At the height of the group's success in the industry, Aaron's wife as replaced with a new woman whom none of the others particularly liked and who set the stage for the community's collapse when in the name of open relationship and non-attachment she included two underage kids, a boy and a girl, in her coupling with Dr. Aaron. Soon most of the staff--and Steve Susoyev in particular--are deeply complicit in the crime of statutory rape and a subsequent flight to Costa Rica to avoid prosecution. Susoyev actually saved the day, but alienated himself from the community and brought on the downfall of the therapeutic experiment (and Aaron's ten year imprisonment).
The high point of the plot--this reads like a novel--comes when all the males in the commune, including the gay ones, under Aaron's direction and with clinical documentation and cameras rolling, ritually and sequentially fuck the doctor's new wife (who's bound and gagged) to help her get in touch with her "needy pussy" and fears of abandonment. The shit hits the fan (literally, in a "psychotherapeutic process" called the Horseshit Vesuvius that makes primal scream and anger management pale in comparison).
Perhaps I found People Farm so engaging and interesting because I came close to such an experience myself during that same period of utopian enthusiasm for psychotherapy and especially small group process as the source of enlightenment, truth, health, and happiness. I was on staff for four years at a conference center in the mountains above Mendocino north of San Francisco called The Mann Ranch Seminars. I spent the summers living in semi-wilderness, cooking and serving and cleaning up after the seminarians who came to the Mann Ranch to hear lectures on Jungian and new paradigm psychologies and religions by such luminaries as Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Bruno Bettlelheim, and Stanislav Grof. Fortunately the staff were not trying to do psychotherapy on one another, and we were not all having sex with each other. (Tho' I have to admit one summer we did an awful lot of acid and there were one or two awfully curious sexual escapades I found myself in--all in the name of idealistic utopianism.)
The difference between my experience at the Mann Ranch and Steve Susoyev's at Rancho Vista is, I think, instructive, not only about psychotherapy and intentional community, but also about religion and collective belief in general. At the Mann Ranch, there was no charismatic leader or guru; we were just employees in a variation of the hospitality industry. Certainly we joined the staff because we enjoyed lectures and seminars on psychology and were seeking personal growth. But there was no personality at the center of it all. "Cyrus Aaron"'s Rancho Vista. in contrast, was centered on one man's ideas, personality, and charisma. And it apparently went to his head. The text on the back of People Farm begins "They say power corrupts. But did they warn you about the guy who claims he doesn't want it?"
People Farm is quite a book. I highly recommend it--if only for its entertainment value. It's beautifully crafted, well-written and well-plotted. And it's an eye-opener and a warning for all of us dreaming of utopias.
People Farm is available through Amazon.com and peoplefarm.com. Read it. You'll like the author and be pleased to have met him. He's a nice example of the gay man as seeker, as victim, and as redeemed and redeemer. Steve Susoyev currently practices law in San Francisco, specializing in the needs of people with life-threatening conditions.
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The Tragedy of Miss Geneva Flowers
by Joe Babcock
Closet Case Books, 357 pages, $15.95
Reviewed by Steven LaVigne
Probably the most exciting thing a reader (or a book reviewer) can discover is a new literary voice. Over the years, for me, these have included such now familiar gay writers as Ethan Mordden, George Whitemore and Felice Picano. I'm thrilled to add Joe Babcock to this list. Babcock's The Tragedy of Miss Geneva Flowers is a remarkable achievement for a first novel.
A native of Minneapolis, Babcock relates the saga of Erick Taylor, a sixteen-year-old Catholic School student who, like all other teenagers, has parents (his overcoming a personal tragedy) who don't understand him. Struggling with coming out, Erick quits school and gets a job at the Uptown Mall, working at a sunglasses franchise. His boss is Chloe, a self-described "grandiloquist' drag queen." With a new wardrobe, platform shoes and a new hair color, Chloe helps Erick toward the path to find himself. Like many impressionable people of his generation, Erick's journey includes experimentation in drugs, sex and drag, including addiction to crystal meth. A huge jolt of reality in Erick's relationship with Chloe leads him toward his responsibilities to himself and those he loves.
The angst-filled teen and young adult novel have been with us for a half-century, with J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye the best known. Still, the world Babcock's.
Erick Taylor leads us into is far removed from Holden Caulfield's. So vividly painted are Babcock's portraits of "breaking a window," and the world of the young middle-class crack addict, that he not only voices his experiences, but, for many readers he educates us as well. The realism Babcock presents goes beyond the usual movie-of-the-week style of other, similarly-themed novels. The Tragedy of Miss Geneva Flowers is also told from the point of view of a young gay man, which strengthens its prupose.
As stated previously, it's a pleasure to discover a compelling first novel, and Joe Babcock's self-published first novel, The Tragedy of Miss Geneva Flowers is the most exciting thing I've read since Stephen McCauley's The Object of My Affection in 1987. I should relate that while McCauley's follow-up works are disappointing, Joe Babcock's exceptional talent leads me to believe that his next book will be as vivid an eye-opener as his excellent first effort.
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Link to Toby Johnson's GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness Link to Toby Johnson's GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe Last update June 26, 2003
