White Crane - Gay Culture & Wisdom

WC81 - Thompson & Kilhefner on 1st Radical Faerie Gathering

 

Mark Thompson &  Don Kilhefner On the
30th Anniversary of the First Radical Faerie Gathering

Authors and community elders, Mark Thompson and Don Kilhefner have been collecting memories from radical faeries around the country to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first Faerie gathering this year. A book collected from these memories is in the planning stages as of this writing edited by the two of them. Mark and Don sat down and talked about it for White Crane:

Mark Thompson: The Radical Faeries at 30. Wow! Who among us standing on the reddish sands of a remote desert ashram in 1979 could have imagined that?

Thirty is such an archetypal age for gay men—youth is over and what awaits each of us as the road narrows and thickens in the years ahead is unknown and in many cases cast away. But that first gathering was a seminal event that deeply marked the lives of each of the 200 men who had gathered there. It was a queer inner initiation by a sacred fire—and then by some wet earth and water, too!

Don Kilhefner: Thirty years later, I still get goose bumps when I think of the closing ceremony of the first Radical Fairy gathering in the Sonora desert night. For a brief moment you, Mark, saw a bull with two large horns on a hill overlooking our ceremony. I felt the presence of benevolent, helpful spirits during the entire gathering. And you are right, it was an initiation—a profound initiation—in the true sense of that word as in beginning something new, initiating a new way for us as gay men to be with each other and think about ourselves. The wet earth and water to which you refer must be the Mud Ritual.

Like much of the gathering, there was a spontaneous, in the moment feel to it, as we co-created with Gay Spirit. After lunch one day, someone just announced that a Mud Ritual was taking place and the Fairies carried buckets after buckets out into the desert where the water was mixed with the red earth.  Then chanting sacred songs, each Fairy present was lovingly and gently covered from head to toe with red mud. As the chanting continued, they formed a circle which slowly moved in on itself until every one was embracing every one else—with OM reverberating over the whole gathering.  It was truly magical to the bone. When people say to me that the Radical Fairies are ‘New Age,” I always correct them by saying actually we are Old Stone Age and to the Radical Fairies—Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam are New Age phenomena.

Mark: So much was ignited in the immediate aftermath of that initial gathering.  Can you tell us some of those results? And then about some of the dissipation that happened after that? And then the cycle of re-imagining we seem to be in today—at least in some places in the world.

Don: In the Spring of 1978, when Harry Hay and I sat along the Rio Grande as it flowed past San Juan Pueblo in New Mexico and first discussed the possibility of such a gathering, we could not see where it all might lead. What we did know is that it was time for visionary gay men to meet and talk with each other as we saw the original, white hot creative energy of the Gay Liberation movement being vampirized by more conventional gay bourgeois politics and unimaginative gay assimilation.

There were three national gatherings. The original gathering in Arizona in 1979, the second gathering in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado sponsored by the Denver Fairies; and the third gathering in New Mexico. At the same time these national gatherings were happening, regional and local gatherings were springing up everywhere and decentralization has characterized the Radical Fairies every since with each region and city taking on its own unique features—most are for gay men only, some heteros and homos, and some men and women.  But initially the Radical Fairies were created by Hay and me as an rare opportunity for gay men to come together in spirit, brotherhood, and purpose in a natural setting.

Mark: Still, for most gay men today, the Radical Fairies appear more mythical than real.  What happened to that original genesis spark and what can we do to reignite it in ways that would make sense for us today.

Don: I see the Radical Fairies, now as then, as both mythical and real at the same time. From my training in and practice of gay shamanism, I know that it is sometimes difficult to know where one world ends and another begins. Cutting edge contemporary physics also has this challenge with string theory and its extension brane (as in membrane) theory which says that multiple, parallel worlds (branes) exist at the same time. In other words, reality is multidimensional. Radical Fairies often experience this—the mythical realm and the middle world realm at the same time.

But getting to the root of your question, what was the original genesis of the Radical Fairies. It was more or less threefold. First, was a attempt to bring together gay men with second sight to talk about the direction of the Gay Liberation movement, to open up the next stage of development for us as gay men. By that I mean to explore the meaning of being gay and what do gay men contribute to society. We know from evolutionary biology that we would not be reappearing generation after generation, millennium after millennium, until we were contributing to the survival of our species.

This questioning has been complicated by the identity than has been laid on us by our oppressors—homosexual—and we carry it around like a ball and chain around our ankle. We have had the tail wagging the dog. And the Radical Fairies, in part, were created to ignite an exploration and manifestation of a new gay man self-defined outside of the slave name “homosexual.” Harry and I were encouraging gay men to make a jail break.

Secondly, we saw from that new understanding of who were are and what we are contributing, we saw the Radical Fairies as being political but not using the old paradigm of left and right and the old political descriptors. But the next stage of Gay Liberation would be gay-centered in a way that would allow us to communicate to the dominant culture what it is we are doing in society. Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, and Hay in the Purpose Statement of the Mattachine Society were dancing around the same question. We are yin to their yang. E.O. Wilson, the dean of American evolutionary biology at Harvard, in his On Human Nature states: “There is a strong possibility that homosexuality is a distinctive beneficent behavior that evolved as an import element of early human social organization. Homosexuals may be the genetic carriers of some of mankind’s most altruistic impulses.” Joan Roughgarden, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford, has written Evolution’s Rainbow: Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People in which she suggest we are the carriers of “cooperation” wherever we are found in nature.

Finally, the Radical Fairy gatherings represent the kind of larger, and healthier, gay community Fairies want to create and live in. A community in which we can be visibly and openly “gay” in the widest sense of that word; we value the gifts of each person and weave those gifts into the fabric of community life; we feed each other both spiritually and literally; we honor ancestors, require elders, depend on adults, and invite youth; we assume our responsibilities not only to the gay community but to the larger community of beings; we are environmentally conscious and work to protect and heal the planet; we perform the necessary rituals and ceremonies that keep a community sane and healthy; we are culturally aware and creative; and we play and have fun.

Many Radical Faerie gatherings today have become social gatherings with little connection to the original roots and vision of the Radical Faeries. What is needed today is a national gathering of Radical Fairies to again allow gay men the rare opportunity of coming together in spirit, brotherhood and purpose again. If such a gathering were to be organized, at least a thousand would show up, many of them younger gay men looking for an alternative to the empty calories of gay assimilation.

The Radical Faerie Reader, edited by Mark Thompson and Don Kilhefner will be published sometime in 2010.

For more White Crane, become a fan on Facebook and join us on Yahoogroups.

Subscribe today and keep the conversation going!  Consider giving a gift subscription to your friends who could use some wisdom!  If there's an article listed above that was not excerpted online, copies of this issue are available for purchase.  Contact us at editors@gaywisdom.org

WC79 Steve Susoyev Interviews George Birimisa

A White Crane Conversation 

The Caffe Cino

Steve Susoyev Speaks with the Pioneering
Gay Playwright George Birimisa about his Journey to Love. 

George Birimisa turned 84 in February of this year. A Caffe Cino pioneer, he is recognized as one of the first American playwrights to write plays featuring Gay characters who were full-bodied people, not merely victims or villains. Still writing, and working as a writing teacher, editor and activist, George took time out from work on his memoir, Wildflowers, to talk with Steve Susoyev.

STEVE SUSOYEV: I had the honor of being present in 2006 when you won the Harry Hay award in San Francisco, for your work in Gay theater and as an “inspiration across the generations.” Among your students you’re known as a role model of Gay pride, but I understand your history is a bit more complex than that.

GEORGE BIRIMISA: When I got involved in theater in the late nineteen-forties, I went around trying to act like Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, in a leather jacket, always with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. I was living a contradiction, out of the closet to only a few people. Some of my plays are full of homophobia. In the early sixties I wrote my first Gay play, Degrees, but it was very mild and didn’t reflect me or my life at all. Inching my way out of the closet. But then, in Georgie Porgie, in 1968, I put it all out there, so the world would know I was Gay.

SUSOYEV: Georgie Porgie was a breakthrough for Gay theater. Tennessee Williams wrote, “Bravo! A beautiful, courageous play. I loved it!”

BIRIMISA: Under the surface I was still ashamed and very guilty. I felt filthy, as if I should be exterminated. I didn’t know about Harry Hay, Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin. I think New York was very homophobic then, or maybe it was just me, looking at the world through the murk of my own self-hatred. And I had plenty of it.

SUSOYEV: You were in New York during the Stonewall riot, weren’t you?

BIRIMISA: I get a lot of mileage out of my image as a radical, a revolutionary. So it’s painful to admit this today, but I looked down on those brave queens at Stonewall. They were sissies and they embarrassed me. I think one of the pernicious things about homophobia is how it isolates us from the people we need most for support, and who most need our support.

I had been arrested and brutalized by cops. But when the queens were brutalized, I just wanted to distance myself from them. That was 1969. I was getting a reputation in the avant-garde Gay theater. But still in that leather jacket with the constant cigarette, still viewing the world through my self-hatred. I don’t know if I’m completely over it yet.

SUSOYEV: You’re describing a very complex process that we try to simplify. “Coming out” seems to have taken place in stages for you.

BIRIMISA: Baby steps.

SUSOYEV: Did you make an effort not to be Gay?

BIRIMISA: Oh, God, in 1951 I got married to a woman named Nancy, thinking that she would make me straight.

SUSOYEV: And how did that turn out?

BIRIMISA: Well, we had three-ways with straight guys, so in some ways our relationship deepened my homophobia — tough straight guys were my drug of choice. I remember many times, walking down the street with Nancy and feeling powerful and straight — at least hoping to fool people into thinking I was not a queer. Once a Gay man walked by and cruised me and Nancy said, “See, he figured out you were Gay.” “He did not,” I said angrily. “Anyway, most Gays are attracted to straight men. They don’t want another fuckin’ fag!”

But there were some hidden blessings. Nancy was the first “intellectual” I had ever known. My father had been a communist whose nickname was “Rough Rider.” When I was six, he gave a speech in the park in downtown Watsonville, California, where I was born. The fire department turned their hoses on him and threw him in jail. He gave his bunk to an old man, slept on the concrete, caught pneumonia and died. I had a love-hate relationship with him. He was nearly illiterate, and like so many things in my life, I was ashamed of him. But I have his fierce spirit inside me and I have been a rebel ever since. My mother ran off with a music teacher and I ended up in an orphanage at age seven. I was deeply ashamed of my poverty, and joined the Navy at 17 so I could have decent clothes to wear.

Nancy got me to read Das Kapital by Karl Marx and Anti-Dühring by Engels. Suddenly I had a language to explain how I felt in the world.

SUSOYEV: So your wife woke you up to politics?

BIRIMISA: Absolutely. She opened my eyes. I began to understand, slowly, that Gay people were oppressed just like blacks in the South and Jews during the Third Reich. And like poor people all over the world. And I wrote that anger at the unjust world into my plays.

SUSOYEV: So the political understanding moved you closer to self-acceptance?

BIRIMISA: Oh, God, it was a long, twisting road. It didn’t take me long to learn that the commies hated Gay people as much as the right-wingers hated us. For almost a year in New York I attended a group that was dedicated to turning guys like me into straight, God-fearing men. So painful to dredge this up today. When I quit the group I was disgusted. I told myself, “You're condemned to being a fucking fag for the rest of your life.”

SUSOYEV: You don’t look like a condemned man today. To anyone looking at you now, it’s obvious that at some moment light began to shine into your life. When was that?

This is an excerpt.   Subscribe today and keep the conversation going!  Consider giving a gift subscription to your friends who could use some wisdom!  This is anIf there's an article listed above that was not excerpted online, copies of this issue are available for purchase.  Contact us at editors@gaywisdom.org

WC79 - Harry Hay on the Need for Sanctuary

The Heartline
that Connects

Harry Hay on the Need for Sanctuary

When the first Faerie gathering had been held in Arizona in 1979, Harry, John and some of the other organizers had hoped that a group dedicated to the establishment of Faerie sanctuaries would result. Even though that did not happen, the Colorado Faerie gathering in 1981 offered an opportunity to put forth that idea once again. A large workshop on the subject was held in which Harry explained the urgent need for these sanctuaries.

Harry: when we are talking about sanctuaries, we are really talking about planting ourselves in places where within the sanctuary we are inviolable. We’re talking about places where…this we need…this we know we need if we are going to grow. This we know we need if we are going to get rid of the scar tissue which stands between most of us and our feelings. Because these are the damages we have suffered in this life. And if we’re going to find out who we really are. If we’re going to find out how much we can contribute we’re going to have to get rid of that stuff. And we’re going to have to find out who we are…and we’re going to have to relate. And we’re going to have to do that in places that are secure and safe.

Thus the sanctuary in the country. Thus the sanctuary in the city walls. These are what they must be: they must be places to which you can go and feel safe. Where you feel safe, where you are loved, where you are trusted and where you can relax and simply be yourself. This has to happen.

Voice: Like this?

John: Yes…like this.

Harry: It’s important for us to be doing work together. One of the things we learned from the last gathering, last year…We hadn’t been…we personally, hadn’t been home for 24 hours when our telephone was ringing off the hook. People were calling “We have to get back together again!” But the problem was, in getting back together again, all we were doing was remembering what we had brought back with us from Arizona.

Now, you can only remember for so long and then the memory gets dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. And then pretty soon, you’re strangers to each other. You either grow together or you grow away from each other. There is no living on the razor’s edge. So either you undertake projects together, and in so doing you come to know one another even better, and then the intimacy, and the easy relaxation you all had together go on being a part of your experience. And you go on applying them and growing. And this is what must happen. And this is what must happen in Faerie families. You do grow together. You do come to really love each other and trust each other and you move from level to level to level and new dimensions.

The subject-Subject world is a whole brand new world, and there’s no leadership in it yet, and you are going to be its body of experience, if we’re going to have any at all. And so there are wonderful experiences ahead and fine experiments to be tried, but they have to be done in safe places. And we have to feel that we are within groups in which we are totally safe and loved and trusted. We can’t pretend this. If we pretend this, it won’t work. It has to be true. It has to be real.

Voice: This idea is very inspiring, and this gathering for me has been a first experience where I realized the possibility of a truly different way to live, and to share with each other. I would like to hear from Harry, and other people, more about the specifics, which I realize will evolve. But there probably has been more thinking than has been expressed so far, about empowerment of each other, in this community, and accessibility and what modes in subject-Subject community we will be able to establish that will be different than the subject-object ones. I know there have been precedents throughout most of our history, people have lived without owning land and they have lived in a much better way of empowering each other and relating to the Earth. But I would like to hear more of your thoughts about the structure. Because even anarchism is a very important structure. We need structure.

John Burnside: I think there’s something around “structure” that would be interesting to say here. As I see…and dream…the feelings that we recognize in ourselves is a great gift that we have, relating to one another, subject-Subject, in Faerie ways, could become, back home, the means for establishing Faerie families. See whether or not you live together or live separately…but if you have this sense of being, of connected, of connecting with one another, in the sense of the best meaning of the word “family” means here. We have done that in Los Angeles and there are four in our family…because we could not find a larger house in that city. We are connected, you see, by that Faerie feeling which extends to each and every one of us a maximum of freedom of movement, of choice. I have not once felt oppressed by the collective. I’ve felt very free within it. And the Faerie feeling makes the collective possible. I don’t want to use the word “commune” yet…let us say “living together” possible. What it required of me was that I lay aside something that no longer has the meaning or value it once had to me, and that was the wonderful Gay dream of your own place, in the city, your castle, full of beautiful things, [laughter from the circle]…oh I’m not laughing…it’s possible to laugh at it, but that’s a beautiful conception, and many of us must carry that out for ourselves before we can actually think of a collective life. Because collective life may not allow this to the same extent. However there is an element of Faerie individuality, which in our collective is very important and is maintained…each of us has his own room, which is his space, in which is his altar and little things that he has, and the beautiful things and the important things. Things that have magic for him. And in which he can be completely to himself. And we give very deep Faerie respect to these spaces.  And I don’t see why in a collective, such as we’re thinking of in the country, that each one of us could not have his own Faerie space.

Voice: It’s really hard for me to get over that American, you know, whatever I grew up with, of having a private space. And for me that doesn’t necessarily include a kitchen, but it does include a living room a bedroom and a studio. [laughter from the circle.] And it’s real important to have a workspace…a studio. I’m a weaver so I have to have a workspace. But when I do my art, I have to be alone. So that’s why I include a studio.

Harry: The people who will be coming to these sanctuaries, as we see it, are the people who have been through these experiences that you are talking about now. And are willing “to slip the ego”…willing to slip…voluntarily giving up a number of things, in order to move to a new dimension, a new way of seeing. A way that will require a new way of living. If we’re going to explore new ways of being together, if we’re going to explore new ways of relating to each other, if we’re going to discover the new world of subject-Subject, this has to be a commitment and this has to be a way of moving and seeing. And in the process of doing this, we want to be, we want ourselves to be self supporting. And, for instance, in our own sanctuary now, we have what we would call a life of voluntary simplicity. And we have given up quite a number of things which in our lives before have been quite important. But what we are doing now is far more important to us than what those things were, and the commitment was very easy to make. And these are the things we have to do; this is how we’re going to have to move. And the Call that we are sending is not a call for everyone. We send out the call. Those who hear will answer. Those who do not here: the message is not for you. We are simply saying this is a way of moving and a way of seeing. It is a way of reaching out to new dimensions and a way for the Faerie people to be tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. When I am gone that community land trust that I have put all of myself into, is there for you to go on in perpetuity. It isn’t just a way of living together comfortably as Faeries, this is not the point at all! Not at all. I am calling for a new way to move. I am calling, among other things, to say to you: fascism is coming. And we are going to be the pink triangles again. And unless we are prepared…I’m quite serious about this. And I’m simply saying that we have to begin thinking in those terms, and for those of us who are ready to make the move and make the change and make the leap…let’s leap together!

Covelo: I don’t know…I feel like I have a lot to say, but I don’t exactly know what. Because from my experiences I have a lot to teach. But maybe what I want to say is that the process of this circle, the process of living on the land, with love and respect for the land, with voluntary simplicity really solves a lot of problems. Like we had a lot of really macho people. They would walk around in leather with guns and kill deer and stuff like that. And they all left. None of them could handle the process of the circle. The circle was stronger than any of that. And another thing that I want to say is, I understand the need for Faerie sanctuary. I don’t want to question that. That’s what we’re talking about. But I feel a little bit disturbed by the “mean and them”…I’m a human being…more than anything else, I’m a human being. And I have found that some of the people in the leather chaps are really, sincerely my friends more than some of the other people. And I just wanted to bring that up. And I give all of my blessings to this project. I don’t know…I just wanted to say that it was the most vital and creative and exciting experience of my life. And that it works. And I give you all my blessings…and let’s do it!

Harry: One of the things that I don’t think we think about quite so often as we might…and we Gay people certainly should be thinking about it all the time, is that the world that’s coming will be a plural society. The Korean people who are coming here…the Thais in southern California, the Asians who are coming into Florida, have no intention of joining our “melting pot.” They’re going to be Haitians living here. They’re going to be Koreans living here. California is going to be a place of multiple minorities and in a very short time – multiple minorities who will far outnumber the original “natives” who were part of the melting pot, in the 1920s. That particular image of America is going…in fact it is already gone. And we must take our place. We Faeries must take our place as an equal minority among many minorities. And this is what we’re heading for. But we cannot become a minority until we know who we are!

The Korean people and the Haitian people know very well who they are. But we don’t know who we are. Because we have been so busy…as an act of survival…we have been so busy pretending we’re exactly the same as everyone else [laughter from the circle]. And now I am saying to anyone who will hear, that now we must begin to maximize our differences between us and them. And there are multitudes. There are even far more differences between us and them than even we know about. What we must begin to do is …what I mean is…we have not allowed ourselves to see all the differences there are.

If we would meet together in groups…if we begin a Faerie sanctuary by meeting every week, and maximizing the differences between ourselves and them, telling how we have been invaded and intruded upon every day, telling about how our face has been walked on every place we’ve gone, little by little we sensitize ourselves, to finally realizing that we are vandalized far more than we know we are. And, the point is this, that as we maximize these differences between ourselves and them, we will find at the bottom of the Grand Canyon between there, the heart-line that connects us. The one we’ve always known was there, but didn’t know what it was. As we begin to find out who we are, we’ll find out who they are. Now…they don’t know who they are…they’re “it.” [laughter from the circle.] They assume that’s all there is! [laughter] You know better. So that we will be doing everyone an enormous service. I say we are maximizing the enormous differences between us and them as an act of love. A love for ourselves and love for the society in which we belong. Because I am not suggesting in any way that we separate out and forget it entirely. We need them; they need us. We love them and they love us…if they knew who we were! But they don’t.

And this is our job now. We must begin to define ourselves to them as we wish to be defined. And refusing any longer to living up to their definition of us, which is what we’ve been living with all along. We must define ourselves as we wish to be defined. We must begin to show ourselves as we wish to be seen. And we must speak as we wish to be heard. And when we make our contributions back to the parent society, we will do it on our terms. But we cannot do this until we are a confident and self-assured people that speaks a language which communicates to all of us. This we must do.

Voice: Talking about differences, I came from a very un-different family…white, middle class, small town. Everyone was “normal.” And then, I found out I was Gay. Then I found out I was a pagan. And then I found myself in a wheelchair. And now I’m a Faerie. [laughter from the circle.] What’s next?! I’m not sure where I’m headed, but I’m pretty “fringy”…pretty far out. And I don’t think it’s anything like you set yourself apart. You can be called an elitist, I suppose, but I see it as an artistry in my own life, having done all these things. And I think we all have something that we can be proud of because it takes a lot of effort and a lot of shit to go through to get here.

Harry: I don’t want to sound like a kill-joy…and I don’t want to sound negative…and I don’t want to sound prejudiced or “iron-bound” but I’ve had the experience of talking to many people at this gathering who talk about the holocaust as being something in their past. You forget that it was my life. I have lived a long time. I have seen many things happen. And I do know this: that when a time of reaction comes, and I have seen times of reaction. And I have fought anti-Semitism in the streets of Los Angeles. And I have chained myself to lampposts and been beaten down, with my chains broken by the police and my arms broken, too. And I want to say this: that do we at any time join ourselves with the straights, no matter how tolerant they may be, no matter loving they may be now…when the time for reaction comes and all of a sudden it becomes necessary maybe to “haul in” and maybe don’t show yourselves quite so much and maybe don’t be quite so blatant, because we don’t know what they neighbors are going to do, and all of a sudden there’s a reactionary politician in the area and we’ve got to be concerned about our tax credits and so on…We are in trouble. We have to have a Gay sanctuary. With straights next door. Friendly people over the street is fine. But a place that is inviolable and OURS. So that when the shit comes down we have a place to come home to and we don’t have to hide within our own particular households and within our own particular lands, if we don’t choose.

Voice: I get excited every time you talk about that and I also get a little twinge of fear. It seems to me one of the key ingredients of what you’re saying is visibility. Being out there. And if and when the fascists come, our visibility…we make such delightful scapegoats, you know? We’re different. And we’re not macho. What is going to make our sanctuary inviolable?

Harry: Two words: Faerie invention. What I am really saying is this: whether we are macho or whether we are not, when fascism comes we are the scapegoats, make no mistake. The thing that we have to be concerned with is how we react, and how we relate, and we’re going to relate far better if we are all together thinking. We will finds ways and means to survive. Our visibility and our growth and the new dimensions of consciousness which we raise, will carry forth. And maybe the ones in this room will not survive. But Faerie brothers elsewhere will see what we have done. We will not die. You Jewish people know this. We will not die. This is what we’re involved with. This is the commitment I am asking a number of you to make: to carry that dimension forward. To carry that consciousness forward. Not for those in this room, but the ones who may meet here fifteen years from now. These are the ones I am talking about. And I probably won’t be here at that time.

These are the things I’m concerned with.
And so consequently, we will come together and we will find our ways.
And we will invent.
We always have.
And we do it very well.

 

Subscribe today and keep the conversation going!  Consider giving a gift subscription to your friends who could use some wisdom!  If there's an article listed above that was not excerpted online, copies of this issue are available for purchase.  Contact us at editors@gaywisdom.org

WC74 - Dan Vera speaks with Gay Egyptologist Greg Reeder

A WHITE CRANE CONVERSATION

Uncovering
Our Past

Dan Vera chats with Egyptologist Greg Reeder about the  Importance of Honoring the Past of Same-Sex Love.

In 1964 in the ancient necropolis of Saqqara, the Egyptian archaeologist Ahmed Moussa discovered a series of tombs with rock-cut passages in the escarpment facing the causeway that lead to the pyramid of Unas. Soon after, the Chief Inspector Mounir Basta reported crawling on his hands and knees through the passages, entering one of the Old Kingdom tombs. He was impressed with its unique scenes of two men in intimate embrace, something he had never seen before in all the Saqqara tombs.

Meanwhile, archaeologists working on the restoration of the causeway of Unas discovered that some of the stone blocks that had been used to build the causeway had been appropriated in ancient times from the mastaba that had originally served as the entrance to this newly discovered tomb. The archaeologists reconstructed the mastaba using the inscribed blocks found in the substructure of the causeway. It was revealed that this unique tomb had been built for two men to cohabit and that both shared identical titles in the palace of King Niuserre of the Fifth Dynasty: “Overseer Of The Manicurists In The Palace Of The King.”

Inside the tomb the names of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep are inscribed as one name over the doorway. In the deepest part of the tomb the identical pair are shown in the most intimate embrace possible within the canons of ancient Egyptian art. The tips of the men’s noses are touching and their torsos are so close together that the knots on the belts of their kilts appear to be touching, perhaps even tied together. Here, in the innermost private part of their joint-tomb, the two men stand in an embrace meant to last for eternity.

The scholar Greg Reeder has done a great deal of writing about the importance of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. White Crane spoke with him about these ancient forebears.

Dan Vera:
What do you think the significance of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep is to Gay people? What can we learn from the ancient world?

Greg Reeder:
It is important for Gay people to know that love between two men was beautifully portrayed in an ancient tomb of the 5th Dynasty in Old Kingdom Egypt. We need to understand that family could be more diverse than so-called normative, present day definitions. Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were both married to women and had children, but they were still able to share a degree of intimacy that in other circumstances was only shown between husband and wife. Their family not only included their wives and children, but each other. The images of them embracing and kissing are stunning reminders that the ancient world has much to teach us about where we have come from; the ways people adapted to the rules of society and yet were still able to express their same-sex devotions.

Vera:
How did you get involved with his area of study?

Reeder:
In 1981 I made my first trip to Egypt with my friend Michael Crisp. We spent two months there in the hopes of gathering material for a book on Egypt’s “sacred geography” – a book that never happened. Before I went to Egypt I was interested in the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep because I had seen it referenced in a travel book, which declared that there were scenes of two men embracing each other. We tried unsuccessfully to visit the tomb in 1981. Sometime in the year or so following our visit, I approached Mark Thompson about the possibility of doing a story for the Advocate about the tomb. He was enthusiastic in reply and I set about writing the article and gathering some photographs. The article was published May of 1983. So Mark Thompson gave me my first opportunity to write about the two manicurists.

Vera:
You’ve also written about Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in KMT, the modern journal of Ancient Egypt. Have other publications carried your research?

Reeder:
My friend Dennis Forbes, who also had worked for The Advocate, started KMT in 1990 with Michael Kuhlmann.  I was involved as staff photographer and then as a contributing editor. Dennis asked me to write a piece for KMT on Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, which was published in KMT in 1993. I also published a paper on the tomb in World Archeology titled “Same-Sex Desire, Conjugal Constructs, and the Tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep.”

Vera:
Do you think the case for Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep as lovers is a solid one?

Reeder:
I think it a good one but one that needs to be discussed and debated. The ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom had a canon of art they used to depict the conjugal relationship between husband and wife.
My paper for World Archaeology goes into much detail about this. But, simply put, the ways the two men were portrayed embracing has its best parallels to those scenes of husband and wife embracing in other tombs of the period and I use examples from these other tombs to make the case. No matter what the biological relationship of the two men, there can be no doubt that they were expressing a profound intimacy and attraction that may best be described as “lovers.”

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!

For more on Greg Reeder and to see more images from the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, please visit www.egyptology.com

WC74 - Poetry by Jeff Mann

Achilles and Patroclus
by Jeff Mann

Tomorrow. 
Tomorrow, Patroclus.
It is fine armor, and you shall wear it.

Now, though,
do as you have always done.
Roast me the meat of the ox,

warm the rough bread,
dapple it with wild honey.  Pour
into goblets, gifts of my father,

the piney wine you brought
from home.  Bathe later,
I will bathe you. But now I love

the musk of courage,
the weary scent of you,
black hair like waves as yet unbroken

about your face, across
your breast.  How many years
have feasts meant only you and I? 

Our couch in firelight,
limbs intwined, drowsy
weight of you, beard brushing my back.

There is blood
on your brow.  Kisses
of my mouth will cleanse you.

No, no more
weapons today.  I promise
tomorrow.  Must the son of a sea goddess

say Please?
Strength loves strength.
Who can stand against our arms?

After meat
and wine, close the tent flap.
What is sweetest is your sweat,

fur-salt I lap,
dark sea-way that leads
a warrior home. Such thick arms,

such small wrists.
Inside you I feel blood-
honey, blossom, stone.  One day

these partings will depart. 
Someone will chant our names,
remember our oath to lie in earth together—

leg bones, ribs
and skulls, these fingers
clasping your still-warm wrist. 

Our wedding waits in the dark,
stained with fire, stained with wine. 
Bone-urn befitting heroes, forever’s graven gold.

Jeff Mann is a poet, writer and teacher. 
He recently won a Lambda Literary Award for his book History of Barbed Wire (Suspect Thoughts Press).  White Crane interviewed him on his memoir/poetry collection Loving Mountains, Loving Men in issue #68. 
He is the author of numerous great books of poetry including On The Tongue, Bones Washed With Wine, Flintshards from Sussex and Mountain Fireflies.
He teaches in the writing program at Virginia Tech.

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

WC72 - Remembering Vito Russo

Gays In/At The Movies:
An Appreciation of Vito Russo

By Arnie Kantrowitz

I dreamed about him again last night. It’s been more than sixteen years since he died, but still he is a part of my every day. Vito Russo was the most life-loving person I ever knew, and it’s not like him to let a little thing like death stand in his way.

In this dream, he had just opened a fabulous new restaurant, and people of every sort were there while he hospitably nodded and conversed — a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other — gliding through the crowd in a black and white caftan I remember from our summers on Fire Island. Vito loved to entertain as many guests as he could crowd into his small apartment. He mixed doctors and film critics, academics and street drag queens, Lesbian activists and society matrons, and everyone had a good time.

Whenever I ride down Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue, as I pass Twenty-Fourth Street, I look at the building on the northwest corner and remember entering it to the smell of the superintendent’s cat box and climbing up the well-worn stairs to knock on Vito’s door. There was a sort of magic inside, but it was certainly no Disneyland; it was a working-class place, which Vito had dolled up by redecorating along with each new man in a successive line of boyfriends, but whatever changes he made — repainting, refurnishing, even tearing down walls — a picture of his beloved Judy Garland remained in every room.

His kitchen — he loved to cook — was spare, but boasted a collection of French copper pots and a few discreetly placed mousetraps. His bedroom, which had room for little beside its large platform bed, opened onto his narrow office space, where he worked on his many essays and film reviews, along with his masterpiece on Gays in film, The Celluloid Closet. (His original title was "Gays In/At the Movies" until a calmer head prevailed.) His living room was dominated by a movie screen, permanently affixed to a wall. He owned a small collection of feature films and Judy Garland TV specials transferred to film, and a reel of Bette Midler at the Continental Baths. But he borrowed and traded films and always had something new to project when company came, which was most of the time.

He employed his sparkling charisma to excite anticipation in his visitors about whatever he was going to show because he loved to watch people watching movies. His favorite film was Caged, featuring Eleanor Parker as a naïve young newcomer to a women’s prison who catches the eye of Lesbian Lee Patrick and grows into a hard-bitten ex-con. He loved its opening words: “Pile out, you tramps. It’s the end of the line.” And he loved the comeuppance of Hope Emerson, the sadistic matron who ends up with a fork stuck in her breast. He had a predilection for films featuring noble women or African-Americans, Gay themes, or camp, which I think he took quite seriously, but he was at home with all movies, doting on a message, a performance, a plot twist or a significant moment. Those moments — sharp dialogue, covert glances, bits of action — collected since he was a boy, had laid the foundation for his encyclopedic knowledge of film.

His mother, Annie, told me he was always running off to the movies as a kid in New York City. She and I found it easy to talk to each other. She had a limited education and a brash New York accent, but she knew the truth when she saw it and wasn’t afraid to say so. She told me that when the family moved to suburban Lodi, New Jersey, Vito said that when he was 21, he was moving back to New York, the capital of glamour, where he belonged. Sure enough, on the morning of his 21st birthday, he came downstairs with his suitcase packed and left for the hardscrabble land of his dreams. The glamour would come, but not until he worked his way to it.

Not long after he arrived in New York and secured a job as a waiter at the Omnibus restaurant in Greenwich Village, the Gay liberation movement exploded in the wake of the Stonewall riots. Just before the end of 1969, a small group of twelve activists split off from the Marxist-oriented Gay Liberation Front to form the more reform-minded, militant, but non-violent Gay Activists Alliance, and soon I was swept up in the movement. A few weeks later, a new friend told me, “There’s a guy you absolutely have to meet,” and we went to the Omnibus for dinner. Vito joined the new group immediately, and in short order, he and I and the organization’s president, Jim Owles, were friends for life. As far as Annie was concerned, his friends were her friends, and his cause was her cause. We were always welcome at her home. When we weren’t at GAA meetings or demonstrations or Sunday brunch, we were running over to each other’s apartments or talking endlessly on the phone. Vito told me, “You can say anything to me, and I won’t go away.” The agreement worked both ways.

The Gay Zeitgeist of the early 1970s was focused on visibility. It created a binary division of straight and Gay for political purposes. Of course, some of us knew from our own experience that sexuality is malleable, but we had chosen the model of a pluralistic political minority, containing middle class white boys, black drag queens, Asians and Latins from Manhattan and the outer boroughs, macho leathermen and Lesbians bent on self-determination. We were seeking equal rights as a voting bloc, and in the name of identity politics, as it came to be known, everyone was either Gay or straight and either in or out of the closet. Bisexuals (though many were among us) were considered semi-closeted Gays, and sleeping with the opposite sex was looked on as a form of treason. When academics began to question the validity of that world-view and spin post-modern theories about the meaning of desire and what that meaning means, Vito had little patience for such ivory tower pursuits, even though he had a Master of Arts degree in film from New York University.

Vito’s roots as a Gay activist informed his criticism of film. For him the questions were about fairness and accuracy, more political than aesthetic issues. Here is an excerpt from a speech he gave at Yale University in 1987:

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!

Arnie Kantrowitz is professor emeritus of English at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. He is the author of Under the Rainbow: Growing up Gay, an autobiography; Walt Whitman, a Gay biography; and many anthologized essays. He lives in New York with his partner Lawrence Mass.

WC71 - David Carter on Ginsberg's Howl

Poetics and Consciousness
Or Why Howl Still Matters Fifty Years Later

by David Carter

In August of 1955 a young gay writer in San Francisco sat down at his typewriter, stuck in some scratch paper, and began to improvise on a single line he had scribbled in his journal about ten days prior. He was determined to just start writing what he was feeling without worrying about how it would sound to anyone who read it. He wrote primarily for himself, for his own pleasure, although as he warmed up to his task he began to have in mind a writer friend who might enjoy his new creation, for the friend had told the young man not to worry about his abilities but to just get into a rhythm and keep going with it and trust himself.
To trust himself. To let go.

That was how the young man had tried to live and had largely done just that since his first year at Columbia University when a friend by the name of Lucien in his dormitory who read Rimbaud had introduced him to two other friends of his named Jack and William he thought the sensitive and literary young man would find interesting. To describe Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs as interesting was understatement, as the two friends gave Allen Ginsberg a fast education in literature and life. In a period of conformity and repression, the three friends sought a new consciousness. Burroughs pointed to William Blake as a possible alternative model to contemporary values, and Ginsberg had a vision of Blake’s poetry that, while transcendent, pointed to the earth and our physical surroundings as the ground for that transcendence. Young Allen showed literary promise and Kerouac praised his writing, while urging Ginsberg to push it further.

But while Allen had found his calling in poetry, his life had also become a series of disasters and traumas. His friend Lucien Carr had killed a friend of Allen’s who had become obsessed with Carr, and had stabbed him twice through the heart. Tortured by his homosexual feelings and tremendous longing, Ginsberg had been thrown out of Columbia University after Kerouac had come over to visit and ended up staying the night. The youth’s schizophrenic mother had been institutionalized. She had been throwing herself into walls so violently that the psychiatrists who cared for her were afraid she would seriously injure herself and so had requested Allen to authorize a lobotomy. He had done so and felt guilty about it. Bill had introduced Allen and Jack to Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler who was also a junkie. When Huncke had shown up years later at Allen’s door at a low point in his life, Allen had taken him in. Herbert started stealing and stashed the loot in Allen’s apartment, and Allen had been arrested and only missed going to jail by agreeing to undergo psychiatric treatment. The psychiatrists told Allen that he should reject Huncke and Burroughs. He met another new friend, Neal Cassady, who was wild about literature and Allen fell deeply in love with him. When he finally found the courage to confess his homosexuality to his father, he concluded that Allen was going crazy and told him that he should not see Neal. Then Burroughs accidentally shot his wife in the head, killing her. Ginsberg wrote anguished letters expressing the terrible anxiety these and other experiences put him through.

As the pressures built on him, not only Kerouac, Carr, and Burroughs were afraid that Allen might go insane but so was William Carlos Williams, the New Jersey poet who had tried to help and encourage the young Ginsberg. And so in 1954 Allen Ginsberg moved to San Francisco and determined to make a go at “normal” life.

He got a job doing market research for an ad firm and was successful enough to have two secretaries and a nice apartment on fashionable Nob Hill. He met a woman and got involved in his first serious heterosexual affair. The “straight” life seemed good at first and Ginsberg decided that he wanted to get married, have kids, and continue to work in advertising. But it was not long after starting the routine job and becoming involved with a woman that he found that he was depressed. One night, walking the city streets after ingesting peyote, he looked at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, which seemed to take on the aspect of an inhuman monster, robotic in its cold impersonality. In November, 1954, the month after the vision of the city as a modern Moloch, he re-entered therapy. The next month he met a youth he became smitten with, Peter Orlovsky.

A few months later the young therapist he was seeing asked Allen what it was he really wanted to do? Allen replied that he wanted to quit his job, write poetry, and move in with Peter. This therapist did not try to make him abandon his dreams but instead asked him, “Well, why don’t you?” It was a total revelation to the youth.
By February of 1955 Peter and Allen started living together. By May, Allen had managed to get laid off from his job so that he could collect unemployment. That summer he completed some new poems and sent them to Kenneth Rexroth, the dean of San Francisco poets.  Rexroth didn’t care for the poems and wrote back to Ginsberg, “Do something original.” It was only a few weeks later that Allen Ginsberg rolled the scratch paper into his typewriter and began to write the poem that would change poetry forever. It made Allen Ginsberg famous, enabled him to get his friends’ works published and launched the artistic, social and consciousness movement known as the Beats, and thereby laid much of the foundation for the 1960s and all that grew out of that turbulent, creative decade.

That one poem and one poet could ultimately bring about so much change directly and indirectly would be an amazing thing in and of itself. What is more wonderful, however, is how simple the essential ideas were that found expression in the Beat writers.
But if the ideas were simple, the road to finding them had been complex, both for the young men who were the beneficiaries of these insights as well as for the older theoreticians and poets who worked hard to arrive at those theories and insights in the first place. What is perhaps most amazing is that the ideas were not merely simple, they were almost beyond simplicity: breathe naturally, listen to the sounds and rhythms of words and human speech; pay attention to the tone leading or length of vowels.

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!

David Carter is the author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution and editor of Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews with Allen Ginsberg. He lives in the West Village in NYC.

Woodcut of Allen Ginsberg by Justin Kempton — more portraits of progressive writers available at www.writersmugs.com

WC71 - Stuart Timmons on Bohemian LA

LONG-HAIRED MEN AND SHORT-HAIRED WOMEN
Hidden Bohemia in Los Angeles
by Stuart Timmons

"The City Council yesterday passed an ordinance forbidding street speakers from holding forth on ‘Radical Row’…The long-haired men and short-haired women have thirty days to make welkin ring in that locality, after which the nation’s problems will be settled in the Plaza." Los Angeles Times, 1923

Every city has them. Those short haired-women and long-haired men who make the skies echo with their public opinions and rooms glow with their aesthetic visions. Artists, writers and their ersatz communities provide an age-old refuge for those not bound by society’s moral- and especially sexual-conventions. Free spirits have existed in every era, from the Lost Generation to the Love Generation, but many generations have simply called them Bohemians.

These communities were not “gay ghettos” and rarely part of an organized gay rights movement. Though an overlap with gay life was frequent-to-inevitable, they were defined more by a devotion to aesthetics over conformity; sexual expression did not necessarily take precedent over artistic expression. An actor in 1840 described Bohemians as persons “located nowhere and whom one encounters everywhere, who have no single occupation and who exercise fifty professions…[who are] ready to live honestly if they can and some other way if they can’t.” Though Bohemia is not an overtly protected zone for gay people, it is idealized for a reason: it is often the most fulfilling part of their lives.

The two are often linked; one recent gay history, by Daniel Hurewitz, is called Bohemian Los Angeles, and the very words were even synonymous, as a 1910 article, “The Gay Life of the City,” about Bohemian haunts at L.A.’s beaches. Indeed, L.A. has a long avant-garde tradition intertwined with its gay people. Sitting at the edge of America, it’s a land of sunshine where cheap rents seemed (‘til recently) endless. Aside from its climate, Los Angeles has always offered the resource of space; as a city of some 450 square miles, its valleys, canyons, and mild beaches, form many neighborhoods that have welcomed odd ducks for years.

As early as 1887, a newcomer to L.A. named Harry Carr found an area near the central Plaza that had turned from “the first fashionable apartment houses” in town, whose tenants were mostly attorneys, to “the Greenwich Village of Los Angeles,” where impoverished artists and writers “contested as to which could wear the funniest looking hair and talk the loudest.” Carr later moved to the real Manhattan but returned soon. What he came back for, he rhapsodized, included seeing “mountains changing from a delicate salmon color to scarlet to rose…and then to violets and blue….and we go to sleep with the odor of orange blossoms mixing into our dreams.”

By the turn of the century, L.A. began to boast a Bohemian colony in its newspapers. In what had been so recently a cow town, artists stood out: Paul De Longpré, the renowned flower painter who left France for Los Angeles to become “art’s most impassioned flower lover;” miniaturist painter C. Albert Browne, a British ex-patriot, who created tiny masterpieces on ivory and porcelain. Both were profiled, along with half a dozen other artists, in the L.A. Times. By 1901, L.A.’s Jonathan Club held a Bohemian Ball, proclaiming, “If joy unconfined defines Bohemianism, who would not be one at least one night a year?” A year-round colony of artists and writers who preferred society’s margins lived in Bunker Hill. A fashionable housing district in the 1870s, its stunning views, by the turn of the century, gave way to apartment buildings, often catering to single men. By pure coincidence, the market in the heart of this gay neighborhood was known as the Budget Basket.

By the teens the district was known for its concentration of men who appeared employed and “decent” by day, but haunted Central Park (noted even by Hart Crane) and various clubs and bars where they could find one another. Bunker Hill was eventually described as a “secondary Skid Row” by the Los Angeles police, with bars on Hill and Third Streets that were “notorious as hangouts for undesirables.” Some of these “undesirables” plied the straight sex trade, like the Madame, “Mumsie” McGonigle of Bunker Hill Avenue. Even local bars with such names as the Gay Inn and the Gayway Café were known spots for female prostitutes — and were also popular for gay men.

The Bachelors of Bunker Hill

The queer anchor to Bunker Hill was Central Park, renamed Pershing Square during World War I. World famous as the first stop for homosexuals who lived in or visited Los Angeles, the Square, as its devotees called it, was Free Speech Central for the city, more even than “Radical Row” on Los Angeles Street. Radicals and reformers of all varieties spoke to crowds of people, pigeons, and pervs in the lushly planted park. In the 1930s and ‘40s, activist Harry Hay recalled cruising the grounds there at night; others have recalled cruising and carrying on even during the day. Banana trees had become so overgrown that Jaime Green remembers finding the Square shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles in the early ‘40s, and learned that “sucking and fucking went on 24/7 in those bushes.” Hay once recalled mischievously that he’d run into actors and musicians in the foliage of the Square. When referring to one handsome artist, he quipped, “I didn’t know him well, but I knew him often.” With its surplus of bachelors’ apartments and bars like the Gayway, Pershing Square served as the take-off point for what many gays referred to as their “rounds,” which included area t-rooms and bars, as well as a secluded pick-up area known as Vaseline Alley. Historian Jim Kepner noted in the 1940s that the Square already had a gay culture that was decades old.

Bunker Hill even had its own radical  politician, Utah transplant Parley Parker Christensen, called “the bombastic bachelor of Bunker Hill” by the L.A. Times. Christensen, an advocate for women’s suffrage and the International Workers of the World, ran for President in 1920 on the Farmer-Labor party. He stood six foot four, favored white linen suits, and was known as a “flamboyant character” down to his flowing locks and his fluency in Esperanto. Neither his politics nor appearance, however, prevented his serving three terms on the Los Angeles city council. (Christensen was insightfully radical; he announced during a campaign that if the Republicans or Democrats won the White House again, “the government will remain on Wall Street.”) The certain sexuality of Christensen (like many of this period) is unknowable, but the milieu they lived in emerges as a free spirited bohemia.

Beer and Ether

If communities of the artistic and open-minded germinated in the first decades of the new century, they flowered and multiplied by the 1920s due to the growth of the film industry. As the creative, the beautiful, and the ambitious poured into the Southland, the Bohemia and its lavender fringes swelled. Simultaneously, Prohibition ushered in the era of speakeasies, with their underground culture of sensuality, excess and giddy lawlessness. L.A. speakeasies were known for serving beer and ether as a masculine alternative to gin and orange juice; their clientele regularly giggled to drag performers, some of who even served the sandwiches.

Some drag performers even hit the big time, like Fred Covert, who during the teens and twenties performed under the sly stage name of “Ko Vert” and re-spelled his first name “Freddric.” There was little hidden about dancer Ko Vert, however; the papers noted his Vanity Dance and his Peacock Dance. An extravagant costumer, for his “Evil” dance, he applied gold leaf to his body. Ko Vert appeared in numerous films, including the silent Wizard of Oz (as the Phantom of the Basket) and once, in drag, opposite Rudolph Valentino. Ko Vert declined a New York offer to replace the aging Julian Eltinge, the nation’s foremost female impersonator, preferring to stay in L.A.

While Hollywood attracted Bohemians, its welcome proved mixed. The conservative and exclusive studio system was a magnet for artistic dreamers of a sensitive nature and boasted of its sophistication in matters gay, but that did not equate to acceptance or even tolerance. Malcolm Boyd, who arrived in L.A. in 1940 and became a publicist and producer, called it a “walled kingdom.” Once inside he learned, “if you wanted to stay, the rules were quite clear,” and fundamental to them were “never express yourself; never stand out.”

Though high-earning actors found some protection, free-spirited queers usually found themselves outside the wall, as did Harry Hay, whose 1930s attempts at acting and screenwriting amounted to little more than extra work and ghost writing. He even engaged in making a short film that featured him as an actor as well as a co-director, and spoofed the Surrealist art movement of Europe. His collaborators came from an art collective just off of Hollywood Boulevard called the Hollywood Film and Photo League. Because of its Depression poverty, the group jokingly called itself the “Filth and Famine League.” It was the only place in the film capital where international and experimental film was available to the public.

A quiet gay infrastructure continued to foster the arts at the compound of painter Grant Beach, who renovated a decaying Victorian on the outskirts of downtown L.A. from the late 1940s through the ‘50s. Beach, who was quietly homosexual, mounted exhibitions of paintings and ceramics (often featuring artists as far-flung as Europe and Japan), and offered classes. Though his gallery was small, his exhibits were startlingly visionary. In 1956, he exhibited Mexican art featuring work of Rivera, Siqueros, Orozco and others, four decades before a comparable show was mounted in L. A. He also played landlord; among his tenants was Evelyn Nesbit, whose beauty caused art and murder in 1906, but by the mid ‘50s was an eccentric cat lady (she had three). The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing taught sculpture at Beach’s School of Arts and Crafts.
Homo Beatniks

The national acquaintance of Bohemia was so entrenched by the 1950s — and so associated with queer sensibility and sexuality, that the only gay magazine in existence ran a cover story linking the two. “Homo Beatniks” proclaimed ONE Magazine in the summer of 1959, offering a five-page cover-story titled “The Homosexual and the Beat Generation.” Homoerotic details of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsburg would leak out for years, but Ginsberg proclaimed to the New York Post that year, “I sleep with men and with women. I am neither queer nor not queer, nor am I bi-sexual. My name is Allen Ginsberg and I sleep with whoever I want.”

The author of “Homo Beatniks,” who was familiar with L.A.’s Bohemian center at Venice Beach, broadened that idea. “The beat-homo has no inhibitions.... He doesn’t give one goddam what the world thinks of him.” Recounting case studies of homo Bohos he had known, he captured the rebel nature of the demographic by quoting one of them: “The only reason I’m a Beatnik is that none of them try to pry into my personal life… I can get along with the other Beatniks because they don’t ask ‘personal’ questions.” ONE may have found particular interest in them because Beat writers Kerouac and Ginsberg often cited their mission as spiritual seekers, invoking the “wise fool” — which was the exact archetype adopted by the Mattachine Society, the group that gave birth to ONE, during the same era. 

The simultaneity of the Beats and the homophiles poses a fascinating juxtaposition. The Beats fought for — and won — greater social and personal freedom, including freedom of sexual expression. Ginsberg’s landmark poem, “Howl,” elicited the legal term “redeeming social value” when a judge declared the poem not obscene, even though it railed against the corporate world and praised explicit gay sexuality in the guise of a Beat banshee. Homophile activists, ironically with their corporate personas and buttoned down rhetoric, made similar gains by winning a court case the same decade that allowed the words and ideas about homosexuality to be distributed through the mail. The publication of “Homo Beatniks” marks an unusual intertwining of two courses of action and activism for sexual and cultural expression. This resonance is increased when remembering that the homophiles had their own spiritual definition of homosexuality: The motto for
ONE was Thomas Carlyle’s quote, “a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.”

The inheritors of the Beats, within a scant decade, identified as love children and flower children who trusted no one over 30 and created not just an enclave but an entire counterculture. One crown prince of the hippies was Robert Opel, an artist, writer, and activist whose handsome physicality were part of his merry prankster repertoire. Opel became most famous for streaking the 1974 Oscars, running past Liz Taylor and David Niven, who sniped about Opel’s “showing off his shortcomings.” In reality, Opel was an endowed exhibitionist, who frequently wore a transparent vinyl jumpsuit to parties; for more modest occasions, he wore only a G-string and body paint. Opel was part of L.A.’s queer hippie scene, which included other such artists as Buddha John Parker, actor Harry Frazier, and filmmaker William Moritz. (Among Moritz’s diverse and ingenious works stands out a satyr play, “Midas Well,” based on the premise that the first thing King Midas touched and turned to gold was, of course, his cock.) Opel not only streaked the Oscars, but also appeared nude in the Los Angeles City Council during a debate on banning nudity from L.A. beaches. “I thought the Council should see what an actual nude person looks like,” he said, as he stood less than an inch from the seated Chief of Police, Ed Davis. Darkly-tinged homoerotic culture flourished in Opel’s San Francisco art gallery, which hosted Robert Mapplethorpe’s second west coast exhibition and Tom of Finland’s first U.S. exhibit. But darkness closed in when, in 1979, at Fey Way Gallery, Opel fell victim to an assassin’s bullet.

On a recent call-in radio show discussing gay life in Los Angeles, the only call came from a young man who asked about the homogenization of gay culture and why it seemed that, if you didn’t have a specific view, one felt left “out of the community.” I was an on-air guest, and was haunted by this question. The great legacy of gay life, long before the movement for rights, has always been freedom from social conventions and expectations. While the movement has succeeded in what used to be unimaginable — making homosexuality respectable — there seems to be some discontent about what respectability has sacrificed.

Can gay men live on wedding cake alone? Can a small square sticker express a full range of political views? Another queer model exists besides uniform consumerism. The radical, the lyrical, the flamboyant and even the bombastic are a part of gay expression that should be eternal, despite the recommended public image counsel of polls and non-profits. More than a century ago, a “staid” visitor who “lost his cares for five hours” articulated this elusive lavender homeland:

Bohemia, in its purest sense is the intimate meeting and commingling of minds without false conventionalities, where one thinks, does, acts and speaks according to his individual capacity, impulse and mind… Where one for pure love’s sake and enjoyment gives, and, in giving, enjoys, and for like love and fellowship receives, and in receiving, enjoys.

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!

Stuart Timmons is the author of The Trouble With Harry Hay and with Lillian Faderman Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws,Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians reviewed in this issue of White Crane.