Tag: Harry Hay

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Birds, by Pat Gourley

Birds, by Pat Gourley


I attended the local Women’s March on Saturday (1/20/2018) here in Denver. It was an extremely exhilarating event. I have not felt the same empowering and invigorating feeling since some of the earlier Gay Pride demonstrations back when we called them marches and not parades. Yesterday’s Women’s March, estimated by the Denver Post to be 50,000+ strong, most probably had more openly queer folk in attendance than the Pride Marches of the late 1970’s. As discouraging as things seem to be at times today we really are winning the revolution though considerable work and diligence on our part remains so as not to lose any ground.

In keeping with the spirit of powerful women so openly on display yesterday I’d like to acknowledge the work of the great pioneering environmentalist and semi-closeted lesbian Rachel Carson. Her 1962 book Silent Spring is often credited with kick-starting the modern environmental movement. In thinking about today’s topic of Birds it was her book that first came to mind. A significant part of her silent spring would involve the die-off of songbirds, dead and gone due to exposure to chemical pesticides and herbicides.

I certainly did not read Silent Spring when it came out in 1962. I was a farm boy in northern Indiana and perhaps directly involved in spraying DDT containing pesticides on anything that moved. I do remember though reading the book and being profoundly moved by it probably though not until I reached my freshman or sophomore year in college in the late 1960’s.

Carson believed that the eggshells, particularly of large birds of prey, including the American Bald Eagle, were being softened and then collapsing unable to reach hatching maturation by exposure to ddt something so ubiquitous at the time that it was practically being sprinkled on our breakfast cereal. This onslaught from DDT continued until it was banned in 1972 with the Bald Eagle in particular at that time being in danger of extinction in the lower 48 states. The ban though resulted in a gradual increase in Bald Eagle breeding pairs per an article in Scientific American and they were removed from the endangered species list in 2007 in large part due to the pioneering work of our lesbian sister Rachel Carson.

Carson unfortunately died of complications from breast cancer in 1964 and never got to see the fruits of her dedicated labor. It was in a piece from the web site http://queerbio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page that I learned details of her relationship with another woman. http://queerbio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rachel_Carson

Carson started a long-term relationship with a married woman named Dorothy Freedman in 1953. The entire relationship though apparently was rather closeted and sadly resulted in Carson destroying all of her personal correspondence before her death, presumably including that with Freedman. This was of course back in the age of letter writing and decades before Facebook and Instagram

Though the two women, again according to the queerbio piece, readily acknowledged their relationship she wanted to avoid the publicity perhaps to not detract from her life’s work and therefore got rid of their correspondence. Sad but understandable, it was 1964 after all. The queerbio piece also states in describing their relationship that there was “no certainty to the extent of its sexual nature”. This observation though screams for my often-repeated Harry Hay belief that “the only thing we have in common with straight people is what we do in bed”.

© January 2018

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Sorting It Out, by Pat Gourley

On seeing this topic for today’s Story Telling Group the
first thing that popped into my head was how often I hear the word “sorted”
spoken on the several English and occasionally Australian shows, often murder
mysteries, I watch on Netflix.  I was
left to wonder if the phrase “sorting it out” is just not the American version.
Checking the Urban Dictionary,
the number one definition for “sorted” was using it in reference to be
completing a task or an idea. For example, I have got it “sorted” mate or will
you “sort” that for me mate. I must say I much prefer hearing “sort or sorted” in
an English accent than I do the mundane mid-western American version: “I’ll
sort that out for you”.
There are also many other, some much more colorful, definitions
of “sorted” that are apparently part of British slang. For example, it can mean
to be under the influence of Ecstasy or that one’s class A recreational drugs
have arrived or perhaps my favorite usage getting fucked up but not to the
point of blacking out. I am sorted!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sorted
I will now make a sharp left turn and return to the specific
phrase “sorting it out” and how this may have relevance in my current life.
Though I am relatively comfortable with my lack of belief in a god or gods,
which I guess, makes me an atheist, I do at times get a bit squishy with this
world-view and fall back on maybe being an agnostic. The word agnostic conjures
up a phrase used by the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn “Only Don’t Know”. His use
was, I am sure, more sophisticated than my superficial view around whether or
not there is a god, but I can honestly say when pondering the Universe and how
the hell we all got here I really “only don’t know”.
To be very honest though I am still sorting this “god-thing”
out. Oh, I have absolutely no problem throwing out the overwhelming mythical
teachings of all the world’s great monotheistic religions, Hinduism and even
much from certain Buddhist schools. In hindsight it was harder to give up a belief
in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny than it was to jettison many of the tenets
of the Catholic Religion I was indoctrinated in.
Those original questions Harry Hay used in helping to
challenge and flesh-out our queer identity, that of our being a real cultural
minority he believed, seem pertinent for me today in “sorting it out”: Who are we, where did we come from, and what
are we for.
Questions it seems that can easily be expanded beyond just
coming to grips with and adding meaning and substance to being gay.
Which brings me to why I am reading two books currently. Both
are by men who have been intellectual, and dare I say Spiritual, influences on
me over the years.  These are authors I
have read seeking answers on this whole supreme-being thing or a more
sophisticated question perhaps being: Is evolution, not only of life on earth
but of the ever-expanding Universe as a whole, really spirit in action and what the hell are the implications of that,
for me of course.
The first book is by Stephen Batchelor and is titled Secular Buddhism – Imagining the Dharma in
an Uncertain World (Stephen is also the author of Buddhism Without Beliefs and Confessions
of a Buddhist Atheist among others) and the second is The Religion of Tomorrow by Ken Wilber. Wilber’s book clocks in at
806 pages with relatively small print and no pictures. So, if this tome
provides guidance for me in “sorting it out” don’t expect an update for
probably at least six months and most likely much longer.
Actually, I am most likely reading both of these books
because I am just a lazy fuck looking for a short cut – an answer to the
question of what is our true nature and that of the whole amazing Universe.
Both Wilber and Batchelor have decades of very disciplined meditative practice
informing and guiding their views. I on the other hand have spent more cushion
time than the average bear but in comparison to these two guys my effort is
like a single grain of sand on the beach. All of this reading of course may
well be folly if I am not willing to do the work. I wonder sometimes what is
‘faith’ really but a con foisted on folks i.e. no need to do the work just
accept our word for it and it will all be fine.
“Stay tuned to this space.” — Rachel Maddow
© 8 May 2017 
About the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised
on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40
plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS
activist. I have currently
returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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Connections, by Pat Gourley

Once again in writing on the early years of Harry Hay’s queer activism, the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, I am relying heavily on the wonderful collection of Hay’s writings edited by Will Roscoe from 1996 and aptly called Radically Gay. Do check out Will’s web site for further info on Radically Gay and Will’s many other books and writings: http://willsworld.org

In thinking about the topic “connections” I pulled Radically Gay off my bookshelf this morning to re-explore Hay’s concept of subject-Subject Consciousness, a profound and co-equal form of human connection, as opposed to subject-to-object. In scanning the book I came across the story of Hay’s first attempt at a call-to-arms to try and get homosexuals to begin organizing themselves. This manifesto from 1948 was rather awkwardly titled: Bachelors Anonymous (Radically Gay. Page 3.). Now that is a name describing gay men I think we can all be glad did not catch on. Two years later, with his then lover Rudi Gernreich and several others, the Mattachine movement was launched and the rest as they say “is history”. According to Roscoe within a few short years there were an estimated 5,000 homosexuals in California involved in one form or the other with the Mattachine movement. Remember this would have been in the early 1950’s in the era of McCarthyism.

Many would say that Hay’s greatest contribution to the LGBTQI movement was his insistence that we are a cultural minority. To quote Hay from Radically Gay:

“We are a Separate People with, in several measurable respects, a rather different window on the world, a different consciousness which may be triggered into being by our lovely sexuality” (Radically Gay. Page 6.)

I would contend that one of the “measureable respects” in how we differ from heterosexuals is a mode of communication, a form of connection, Hay called subject-to-Subject. In a position paper he wrote in 1976, while living in New Mexico entitled, Gay Liberation: Chapter Two- Serving Social and Political Change through our Gay Window, Hay lays out his vision of subject-Subject Consciousness (Radically Gay. Pages 201-216). I encourage all Queers to get the book and read especially this chapter.

Right out of the box he owns that this essay puts forth a Gay Masculine point of view while acknowledging that Feminine Consciousness also exists but is something quite different. I will go way out a limb here and suggest that the lesbian-feminist movement of the 1960’s and 1970’ was all over this non-objectifying form of connecting woman-to-woman.

The essence of subject-to-Subject is that of equal to equal. My very simplistic interpretation of this form of consciousness is that we gay men have a leg up on the hetero world in that we as men relating to men and women relating to women are better able to approach one another as equals without the burden of centuries of institutionalized objectification and sexism i.e. crudely put “Me Tarzan you Jane’.

However, even we as gay men, as opposed to straight men, approach relating to one another with a fair amount of objectifying cultural baggage. It may not involve the competition that comes with landing a mate for procreative purposes but we do often indulge in only hooking up with someone of the ‘right age, skin color, cock size, class background’ etc. This is an area where we need to go back in our lives to that first almost always non-sexual attraction to another boy that was so electrifying. That realization that even though I am ‘other’ so is he. A genuine sense of “equal to equal, sharer to sharer”, we are truly kindred spirits. What an exhilarating form of connecting that was for so many of us.

Gay men in particular still have as much work to do in this area of personal subject-to-Subject relating as we ever have especially once the roiling hormones of sexual attraction bubble to the surface. I am not sure that Grindr could not aptly be renamed “Bachelors Anonymous”. Though that first impulse for out of the box subject-to-Subject connecting still remains and hopefully is the essence of gay liberation. It remains our real gift to the world in this age of Trump regression and insanity.

© April 2017

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Maps, by Pat Gourley

It has now been nearly 37 years since the second national Radical Fairie Gathering here in Colorado in the late summer of 1980. That event was the brainchild of Don Kilhefner, Harry Hay, John Burnside, and Mitch Walker with logistical help from an energetic collective of gay fairies here in Denver.

There are many parts of that event that have stuck with me for these several decades but one in particular comes to mind from time to time. This recollection involves a workshop led by Harry Hay that I did not attend but that I got a first hand report on from James Broughton, the eclectic poet and film maker. I may have been too caught up in dealing with the endless stream of issues that arose before and throughout the gathering to get to this particular workshop. Pressing issues like why was only vegetarian food available and the decision to not have heated water for the showers, something of a logistical challenge but dismissed finally as too bourgeois.

Harry was always all about trying to get us to answer the question “who are we”. According to the workshop report I received from James, Harry had declared that afternoon that we were all Shamans. This seemed fitting I supposed at the time since the confab was called A Spiritual Gathering for Radical Fairies. There are many complex layers to being a Shaman but the one I relate to most is that of “healer”. I do think it is a very worthwhile endeavor on our part to explore the many traditional and contemporary roles we queers are so often disproportionally drawn to.

These often-queer related roles were explored in some detail in Christian de la Huerta’s wonderful 1999 book, Coming Out Spiritually. He delineated the following roles we are often drawn to:

· Catalytic Transformers: A taste for revolution

· Outsiders mirroring society

· Consciousness scouts: Going first and taking Risks

· Scared Clowns and eternal youth: A Gay Young Spirit

· Keepers of beauty: Reaching for the Sacred

· Caregivers: Taking for Each Other

· Mediators: The In-between people

· Shamans and Priests: Sacred functionaries

· The Divine Androgyne: An evolutionary role?

· Gatekeepers; Guardians of the Gates

So in the spirit of this week’s topic of “maps” I would like to add one more role that if I contort my logic enough could be one that underpins all of those listed above and that would be cartographer.

A cartographer of course is a mapmaker. Maps are used to find one’s way from here to there. The larger society certainly has not historically, and is only now just beginning, to provide us with any positive space to get in touch with “whom we are”. I would dare to say that of the roles identified by de la Huerta all are initially engaged in as attempts to map our way. Forms of self-expression that often blossom into roles of great benefit to ourselves and society as a whole.

How do we find our way out from under the suffocating heterosexual cocoon we are born into? I would say it is by being the very creative cartographers we have learned to be. The maps are many and varied some written down but many come in the rich forms of oral history we have developed. What is this SAGE story telling group really but a form of mapmaking and sharing?

All of our maps provide guidance in answering those initial Mattachine questions of “who are we, where did we come from and what are we for”. In whatever forms our maps really are, at their most base level, they are the means for ‘pointing the way’. They are not forms of recruitment but rather loving crumbs left along the path to queer enlightenment by those who have come before, back to our earliest human ancestors. Our job as queer cartographers of course leads to these roles that have great altruistic benefit to the whole dance that is sentient life on earth.

© March 2017

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Hunting, by Pat Gourley

I lived on a farm in Northern Indiana until the age of
sixteen. Though we were as far as you could be from the toxic reality of
today’s factory farms there certainly were plenty of animals raised that met
their demise at the hands of various family and extended family members
directly or indirectly. By indirectly I mean we sold and loaded plenty of
animals into trucks that were headed for the local slaughterhouse.
I learned to kill chickens with an axe from my mother who
emphasized not letting the headless bird flop all around and spray all the
younger siblings and cousins lined up watching the slaughter with chicken blood.
I was quite good at it. This is something I cannot for the life of me imagine
myself doing today. Any backyard chickens that I might have in the future would
live to ripe old ages dying from chicken heart attacks or falling prey to a
local fox or coyote.
For whatever reason, there were no hunters in my immediate
family. There was one Uncle nearby who did some hunting but that was mostly for
rabbits and pheasants.  I can to this day
hear my aunt complaining about trying to get all the buckshot out of the poor
rabbit before cooking it. She also made a delicious rabbit gravy as I recall
and that was worth biting down on the occasional piece of buckshot missed in
the cleaning.
The closest I can remember my dad ever came to hunting was
one winter when he had hurt his back and was told, incorrectly in those days,
that bed-rest was required to heal the sprain. The bedroom had a window that
looked out over the backyard and onto a corncrib. This crib was made of fencing
that allowed the grain to thoroughly dry out and not get moldy but still exposed
the ears of corn. From that vantage point he could see rats scurrying about and
munching away on all his hard work. So, he took to shooting the varmints out
the bedroom window with a 12-gauge shotgun missing more often that not.
I myself had a very short period of attempting to hunt
rabbits around the age of 12 or 13 with a small caliber long gun I think that
was called a 410-shotgun. Despite hours of traipsing through the snow no
rabbits lost their lives at my hand.
Once we moved from Indiana to north of Chicago there was even
less hunting by folks on our neighboring farms than there had been in Indiana.
We were really only a mile or two from being Chicago suburbanites and random
gunshots not something the neighbors would have appreciated.
There was a woman name Margaret though in the farm next to
ours who I became fast friends with due in large part to our similar political
views. We loved talking politics for long hours denigrating everything
Republican. She did though have a very efficient way of killing chickens every
spring. She would tie them up and suspend them by their feet, about a dozen at a
time, from her clothesline. She would then quickly march down the line with a
sharp butcher knife severing heads cleanly and efficiently. I know this may
sound gross to you but do remember that the burger or chicken breast you enjoy
today did not get to your plate as a result of the animal committing suicide.
As I began to get in touch with my queer nature, especially
from age 16 on, anything to do with hunting or people who engaged in it really faded
from my life. I know absolutely no other queer person I am aware of today who
hunts. There is one straight man occasionally in my life who does hunt and that
is for sport not a need for food. 99.9% of the animal killing for food these
days is done in very inhumane slaughterhouses mostly by exploited immigrant
labor far from our eyes. It then appears magically in the meat sections of
grocery stores neat, tidy and wrapped in cellophane.
Harry Hay was a very adherent vegetarian for the entire 20
plus years I knew him and long before that. He was fond of saying, when asked
about whether he ever ate meat or not, that it would only be if he personally knew
the cow. This always seemed to imply also that one really should know intimately
whom they are eating and that they had done the killing and butchering
themselves.
I think this would be a splendid plan for all meat-eaters to
do their own slaughtering. I imagine this would end much of the cruel factory
farming and vastly increase the number of vegetarians and vegans. This would
then go a long way toward saving the planet by helping to reverse global
warming. Remember there is virtually nothing we as individuals can do to impact
climate change more than to refrain from eating any animal product. Hunting
these days should really only involve looking for a good sale on kale.
© 25 Sep
2016 
About the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California. 
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Queer as a $3 Bill, by Pat Gourley

This is a phrase I can actually personally embrace. It is one that I certainly hope is used to describe me, or my posture in the world, at least once in awhile. Though I am not sure anyone has ever said to or about me: he’s as Queer as a $3 dollar bill. I am however under no illusions that it has not crossed many people’s minds after their first encounters with me.

As I have written about many times for this group I am a strong advocate for discovering and accentuating the differences between gay and straight. That is after all why, now 40 years on, I am still frequenting the LGBT Center of Colorado. I feel our greatest gifts to humanity will involve bringing unique ways of looking at the world through our queer eyes and not groveling to try and show the straight world we are really just like them.

We start throwing off clues at a very early age that we are different from our hetero brothers and sisters in so many ways. I am always fond of sharing one of Harry Hay’s favorite stories on difference. I am paraphrasing here a bit but it involved an episode where he was called out by some other boys for throwing a baseball like a girl. Female acquaintances at the time corrected him saying you don’t throw like a girl you throw like a sissy.

Harry was able, eventually perhaps, to recognize this as not a slam on his masculinity but rather an example of how gay boys are not like little girls but rather an entity uniquely all their own.

The straight world with their binary blinders on see things as either masculine or feminine. They very often confuse non-typical behaviors as belonging to the opposite gender when in fact it is a behavior neither female nor male but something totally different, totally other. Perhaps it is an expression of a third or fourth gender?

A recent documentary by the filmmaker named David Thorpe called “Do I Sound Gay” is a wonderful case in point supporting the possibility that we really are different in very intrinsic ways. Here is a link to the trailer for the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R21Fd8-Apf0

The film deals with Thorpe’s own personal journey around wanting to not “sound gay”. The film looks at this phenomenon as it effects many gay men but I suspect a similar though perhaps less impacting version of the issue could be true for lesbians. There is a tone I often subtly identify as a lesbian voice and it is always comforting when I hear it. Comforting even when the voice is calling a basketball game or trying to communicate just what it is going on with female golfers.

This business of “sounding gay” is one of those issues though that I feel is more problematic for gay men. Thorpe’s presentation seems to vacillate between the gay sounding voice being an innate characteristic or rather perhaps learned from older gay mentors and therefore something that can be un-learned. I prefer to think of it as quite intrinsic to who we are and that this simply comes through and is allowed to flower with our coming out and acceptance of our queer identity.

I am to this day frequently mistaken for a woman especially on the phone. Though I do not think the “gay voice” is common to all gay men it is certainly for many. And perhaps those gay men with a masculine sounding voice are simply better actors than the rest of us.

The only recording of my voice from the 1960’s I am aware of is an old tape re-mastered to CD a few years ago of my talk to my senior high school class in 1967 on my return from Mississippi. I was down there with several others on a self-discovery trip about American racism for a group of clueless white middle class teenagers from suburban Chicago. My main mentor arranged the trip in those days, a progressive Holy Cross nun named Sister Alberta Marie. In presenting to my classmates I actually do remember being conscious at the time to speak slowly. Perhaps this was to avoid slipping into “gay speak” and having classmates at least quietly remark to themselves: “well, he certainly is queer as a $3 dollar bill”.

You can check out the recording here and decide for yourself just how gay I sound. In the interest of full disclosure I think I was consciously trying to butch it up especially since this was recorded just a month or so after my first sex with another man. Check out the long “S’s” especially when I say Mississippi, so much for coming across as butch: http://www.pjgourley.com/MississippiTrip1967.php

Trust me I was absolutely not aware of any gay-mentors in my life to learn this queer-speak from!

I am particularly fond of the documentary “Do I Sound Gay” in part because it raises a myriad of issues around accepting our queerness and the often debilitating internalized homophobia that accompanies that journey. The film is available on several platforms including Netflix and also on You Tube, iTunes and several others.

© March 2016

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Posted on

The Men in My Life, by Pat Gourley

Good grief where to begin
with this topic? It could certainly be the title of a book with many, many
chapters. As I have written in the past it has been the women in my life who
have had the most profound impact of substance. By that I mean they are the
ones who have most influenced and shaped my intellectual, philosophical and
certainly political bent. The one possible male exception would be Harry Hay.
For this piece though I
am not going to write about Harry but rather a person who has been in my life
for the past 38 years. This is a man who is now in his late 70’s who I first
met I think in the fall of 1978 or perhaps the spring of 1979 that bit of
history being somewhat fuzzy. We met for the first time and gloriously fucked
at the Empire Baths and then got together the next night at my house for a
repeat. That first night at the tubs I had picked him up in the showers and to
be honest it was his quite ample and thick cock that first caught my attention.
I really don’t think of
myself as a size queen and have thoroughly enjoyed many penises of all sizes
and girths over the years and know from lots of experience that it is not the
size of the member but rather the skill of the partner that makes all the
difference.  It is no longer the case but
in my teens, 20’s and 30’s the sight of a large, stiff dick was irresistible
with all caution thrown to the wind and if this appendage was attached to a man
who also knew how to use it, all the better. 
I really most enjoyed unwrapping a package that came with no assembly
required.
Over the next few years
we came to know one another quite well. I learned that he was married and lived
in rural Colorado. And most shocking of all he was a Republican! Amazing how if
the sex is really good party affiliation seems to rarely be an issue.
Our get-togethers were
always sporadic but consistent over the years and I came to truly appreciate
our genuine mutual love and his no strings attached generosity. I did meet his
wife on a couple of occasions. She is a wonderful, dynamic woman who he still
lives with him in a Western, rural and very Republican state. I never asked and
have no idea what she knew or did not. 
From the early 1980’s on, at my insistence, our sex became scrupulously
safe which turned out to be a good idea after I tested positive for HIV in
1985. He was always the top though so any risk to him and or to his wife was minimal;
latex sealed that deal, even with almost all play being just mutual masturbation.
The dramatic difference
in out worldviews and every day life has been a recurrent and at times a challenging
lesson for me. Our truly loving relationship has been a reminder to not take my
own politics too seriously. I do believe if we could get a majority of the
world’s men to lie naked with one another, even just on rare occasions, the
world would be so much more peaceful and less toxic in general.  Ah, the stuff of dreams.
Though I have only an
inkling of how closeted his life may still be I have always been very
protective of his identity and his hetero life. He has described himself to me
as gay but I don’t ever try to deconstruct that too much. As a good San
Francisco friend recently said in describing another queer theorist writing’s
in the Gay and Lesbian Review: “his
ramblings sound like Tourette’s with a PhD”. No need for me to risk being that sort
of analyst with my dear friend.
We most recently got
together a few days ago on a visit to Denver. Most of our time was spent
soulfully chatting about the recent suicide of a mutual friend and deeply
listening to one another grieve and shed a few tears about this loss.
There was a bit of naked
play on this visit, nothing to compare to 30 years ago of course, but still
enjoyable and generous on his part. No, I did not succumb to lecturing him on
the fact that his dick would work much better if he could get the animal
product out of his diet.  We got to the
point years ago where the quality of our time together was not predicated on
the rigidity or complete lack thereof of our hard-ons. Something that seems to
be a real barometer of many long-lasting gay male friendships I think.
Speaking only from a gay
male perspective here I think it worth mentioning the truly amazing and
literally millions of gay male friendship networks that are enduring and often
totally non-sexual that characterize so much of our queer lives. This is
something that truly differentiates us from many of them. Let me close
paraphrasing my favorite Harry Hay quote of all time: “the only thing we have in
common with the straight world is what we do in bed”.
© 27
Mar 2016 
About the Author 

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
Posted on

A Looming Wrinkle, by Pat Gourley

I am going to approach
the topic of Wrinkles with a bit of a
wrinkle and write from a secondary definition of the word and that would be
”snag”. A wrinkle can be a snag rather than the latest distressing line on my
face or ass.
The potential snag I’d
like to address is the slowly emerging effort to take the “T” out of LGBT. I am
linking to a recent provocative piece from The
Independent, a British newspaper, entitled Why it’s time to take the T out of LGBT written by Katie Glover.
Ms. Glover is a transgender woman and editor of the transgender and drag
publication Frock Magazine: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-its-time-to-take-the-t-out-of-lgbt-10493352.html
She starts right out of
the box exposing the myth, quite prevalent even in the LGB community, that
transgender folks are gay. Most are not and in fact the percent that are is
likely no more than the percent of the general population that is gay or
lesbian. Glover goes on to point out that being gay and being transgender are
two very different things that should not be mixed up.
Historically it made
survival sense for trans folks to hitch their wagon to the larger gay movement
where they received at least some modicum of acceptance or dare I use the much
more loaded and perhaps offensive word: tolerance. Times though have changed
and with the transgender closet door swinging wide open and their numbers
swelling a tipping point has perhaps been reached and it’s now time to break
away from the LGB’s.
A poignant example from
Glover’s piece of the confusion that exists in the lesbian and gay community
around trans folks was the recent appearance of Caitlyn Jenner on the Ellen
DeGeneres show. Ellen was quite surprise by Caitlyn’s lukewarm stance on same
sex marriage.  Cait was trying to explain
to Ellen that she was a traditionalist on matters of marriage, though she has
evolved somewhat from the more strident view she held prior to transitioning.
If this movement for the
trans community to severe ties with the LGB’s continues to gain steam it may
prove to be quite the painful wrinkle. One component of why this will be
difficult for gays and lesbians to accept might be the weirdly pejorative views
straight society have foisted on us with terms like sissy and tomboy. That gay
men are effeminate and lesbian’s masculine butch dykes is still a prevalent and
false meme today. This simplistic and totally incorrect view of who we are I
think may have and still is contributing to lots of confusion around gender.
Perhaps I am wandering a
bit into the bushes here but it seems that many, perhaps most, folks who are
transitioning are like Caitlyn Jenner moving towards their true self and that
being one of the two established and traditional genders, male and female.
Maybe this potential breakaway of T’s from the LBG ‘s might prompt us to view
ourselves as third or fourth gender. Here I am of course borrowing from the
thinking of Harry Hay on such matters. 
Harry always encouraged us to view ourselves as other and distinctly
different in very fundamental ways from our straight bothers and sisters.  Only by exploring and discovering these
differences would we get a handle on who we really are.
This may be way too much
to take on these days, that would be third and fourth genders, when we as a
community and society as a whole seem so confused on the two genders we already
perceive. This daunting task aside perhaps we should just start with a
suggestion from the Glover piece again where she states: “LGB’s and T’s are
getting a little too close for comfort. It might be time to cut the cord”.
I would personably view
this breakaway of the T’s as a golden opportunity to once again retrench from
the assimilationist trips of marriage and the military and refocus on the task
of exploring who we really are, where we came from and what we are for. Maybe
we LGB and T’s really are a bunch of wrinkles lending much needed texture and
nuance to the human race, snags be damned.
© 14 Sep 2015 

About
the Author  
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
Posted on

My Earliest Queer Memory, by Pat Gourley

This is more difficult to
write on than I at first thought it would be. I believe the realization that I
was different or as Harry Hay was fond of saying “other” was a gradual process
with many little steps and discoveries along the way. This process of
realization long preceded my actual coming out which I define largely as an
internal acceptance and certainly not an initial sexual act. Again paraphrasing
Hay it took years to realize that the only thing I did have in common with
straight people was what I did in bed.
I think this is true of
queer awakening in general in that it rarely initially involves the sexual but
rather a profound and deeply real sense that we are not like our peers in some
fundamental way.  This may take the form
of what society would call gender nonconformity perhaps in dress, actions,
mannerisms and speech but again I think it can be even less blatant and more
elusive than that.  These expressions
despite their honest innocence are often met with quick and at times harsh
rebuke. For me personally it took the forms of loving to cook and garden and
when we did play cowboys and Indians I always insisted on being Crazy Horse or
Cochise, an interesting twist on being “other”.
Oh and of course there
were those times when we played school and I was always the nun.  Prancing around with a couple bath towels
serving as a shawl and headgear for a makeshift nun’s habit. This was behavior that
should have been a siren-like clue to somebody that this little kid was not
fitting into the norm.
My first sexual encounter
with another man was a spectacular bit of mutual masturbation that took place
in the biology lab of my Catholic High School with a wonderful man 20 years my
senior in the spring of 1967. This was though preceded by years of many little
messages some subtle and some others not so subtle that hey I wasn’t like a lot
of other little boys. I date my real coming out though to almost a decade
later. The Gay Community Center of Colorado and the LGBT folks I met there
playing a very significant role in cementing my comfort with my queer identity.
For years I was
fascinated and aroused especially by older men and any snippet of their naked
physiques I could spot and believe me I went out of my way to catch a glimpse
whenever I could.  My dad’s beautiful naked
ass being on rare occasions a wonderful source of inspiration! I was in some
ways sheltered from blatant homophobia in the form of overt harassment because
of my fey nature in part by the all-encompassing cocoon of Catholicism that
totally enveloped my life at home and at school. Something that I really only
broke free of when I went off to college in the fall of 1967.
Though I have no doubt I
was exhibiting less than desirable “little boy” qualities from an early age it
wasn’t until about the 4th grade that I started to respond ever so
indirectly to little cues that this could be a bumpy ride. In hindsight it all
proved pretty smooth from about 1960 until the full Monty so to speak that was
my life by the mid-1970’s. I attribute my coming out being relatively smooth
with little drama , even though it took about a decade and a half, to wonderful
parents and a host of older teachers and mentors along the way that were
accepting and even celebrating of difference and not of course only in the
queer arena.
Queer awakening is rich
with possibilities for growth that are unique to us as a people.  If we make it through this process alive, and
most of us do, we come out the other side so often strong and vibrant
individuals. Despite gains in the areas of marriage equality and military
access the coming out process for most remains initially a unique character
building solo-process with still very few societal supports and unfortunately
to this day many very negative messages. These admonitions to shun the “other”
may not be as blatant and intense as in the past but they still remain and are
quite daunting for little queer folk.
Again it is amazing how
many of us make it through to the other side stronger than ever. And this is
why continued support of community-based organizations that programmatically facilitate
the coming out process remains paramount in moving the gay agenda forward. This
Story Telling Group comes quickly to mind as one such effort.
© 17 Jul 2015 
About
the Author 
I
was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy
Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver,
Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San
Francisco, California.
Posted on

Being Gay is … by Pat Gourley

I thought for a short while I
might just copout on this one and simply write a long string of single words to
complete the phrase. The first that came to mind was: Being Gay is fabulous. That of course is true but there is so much
more to be said on the topic that I thought this the lazy queer’s way out. I’ll
close out the piece with what I think is the best word to complete this phrase.
Before I get to that
conclusion though I want to wade briefly into the thicket that is ‘essentialism verses social construction’ as
the two most prominent theories for trying to explain what ‘Being Gay Is’. Very
basically and crudely put ‘essentialism’ is a theory that purports that gayness
is inborn, an unchangeable reality or essence if you will.
“Constructionist theory” implies
that we are a cultural creation that has come about in large part because we
have been so stigmatized. The constructionists believe that if it weren’t for
this stigmatization that everyone would have queer thoughts and feelings
perhaps actualized and that exclusive heterosexuality would fade away and I
assume exclusive homosexuality would too. There would therefore be no more
Kinsey 6’s or Kinsey 1’s and we would all drift to being 3’s or 4’s. This
sounds like a disturbing ‘homogenized’ version of human identity to me. I can’t
speak from a hetero perspective but from a queer one it would take a gun to my
head to even try to perform sexually with a woman these days.
I am, being a disciple of
Harry Hay, very clearly planted in the essentialist camp historically but if I
were to apply the rather rigorous intellectual examination of these two
theories that is required I would most likely today come out as some sort of
hybrid. Though I must say in my day-to-day life it all seems pretty simply
essential to me – I am queer through and through and always have been.
The best critique of these
two theories I have ever run across for me remains Will Roscoe’s Afterword in
his biography of Harry Hay: Radically Gay.
Let me quote briefly from that Afterword: “
The fact is, for most Lesbians and Gay men homosexuality is not a construction,
not something acquired, not an accident of childrearing, but an ongoing
profound motivation. Perhaps they were born that way; in any case, it is not
something that can be changed at will, as some constructionists and Queer
theorists imply”.
I suppose it is possible that
the phrase Being Gay Is…can be
completed in as many different ways as there are gay people on earth. The
responses would of course run the gamut from describing the worst possible fate
to befall one to the absolute best thing that ever happened. As promised my
word for completing the phrase would be “Being Gay Is an Opportunity”.
In my more grandiose moments
I like to think that we as a people have been given the opportunity to be in
the vanguard of great social change, perhaps revolutionary enough to save the
whole planet and the human race. This view I have is based in part again on teachings
I gleaned from the years I was hanging out with Harry Hay. Harry was fond of
talking about the “gay window”. Being gay allows us to look at the world from a
different perspective that our straight brothers and sisters. It is the same
world they are looking out at but a distinctly different view of it.
This different view
potentially provides the opportunity
to problem solve in unique and often very queer ways. I do not believe this
potential is best facilitated when we engage in the current major efforts of
assimilation and those would be marriage equality and equal participation in
the military. We need to spend much more time exploring and actualizing our
difference and not constantly harping on our similarities. Let’s face it the
current way of doing things has brought the human race to the brink of
catastrophe in the form of climate disaster and strong arguments can be made
that marriage and the military are pathetically failed human institutions.
Hay on many occasions talked
about subject-subject vs. subject-object consciousness. He believed that we
were as queers were given a leg up in viewing others, and I would expand that
to all of Gaia, as subjects on an equal footing and not as objects. We are
able, though we don’t always actualize it, to view one another of the same sex
as equals. We get a pass on the unequal power dynamic that seems to be the
intrinsically heterosexual paradigm of the sexes. We are given the opportunity
to view relating to other humans in a profoundly different way from the
existing imbalanced heterosexual dynamic.
This Story Telling Group is a
great example of the intrinsic opportunity we so often avail ourselves to as a
unique people to explore who the hell we really are. Here is to lots more
stories giving form, shape and completion to the phrase: Being Gay Is…
(A few words for this piece
were lifted from the following web site: www.queerbychoice.com/essentialism.html)
© 29 September
2014
About the Author
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.