Tag: John Burnside

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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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A Circle of Loving Companions by Pat Gourley

Harry Hay is best known for founding the Mattachine Society in 1950 an organization certainly seminal as far as the modern gay movement is concerned. He is also fairly well known for helping create the Radical Fairies in an attempt to redirect what he felt was the disheartening slide of the Queer movement into dreary assimilation. Hmm, I wonder how that worked out?

The Radical Fairies had a definite spiritual bent and cultivated a rejection of straight culture. As I have written here on other occasions I feel it was the devastation of AIDS and the resulting preoccupation with survival and death for so many and in so many insidious ways that took the gas out of the Radical Fairie movement. That though is not to deny that Radical Fairies are not still vibrantly around today here and there.

Another less well-known effort of Harry’s was the formation in 1965 of a queer collective that he called a “Circle of Loving Companions” an entity lasting for decades. I’ll quote a brief description of this group from Stuart Timmon’s biography of Hay called The Trouble with Harry Hay (1990): “ The Circle was often politically active, and Harry stressed the name symbolized how all gay relationships could be conducted on the Whitmanesque ideal of the inclusive love of comrades. The Circle’s membership specifications were based on affinity…”

I first became aware of the name by way of written correspondence I had with Harry and his loving companion John Burnside in the late 1970’s. The phrase “Circle of Loving Companions” was frequently the letterhead on his written correspondence to me in those days and was also stamped on the outside of envelopes as part of the return address. I still do prefer “loving companion” as a descriptor of intimate queer relationships that sits with me much better than partner, lover, significant other or the current rage “husband”.

If I didn’t at the time I should have realized that I was a part of a genuine Circle of Loving Companions that was formed here in Denver out of the intoxicating crucible that was gay liberation the 1970’s. Viable remnants of this Circle remain in my life today but significantly depleted over the years, primarily by AIDS.

I met the most significant loving companion I have ever had in the fall of 1980 shortly after the second Radical Fairie Gathering here in Colorado in August of that year and a few short weeks after returning from my father’s funeral back in Illinois. David was at the time the Methodist minister in Aspen Colorado and was a close friend with one of the roommates I had in our house up in Five Points. He was visiting this friend and staying at our house when we were first introduced. We actually had a bit of a courtship consisting of a couple of dates before we fucked, something extremely rare in the gay male world of 1980. Over the ensuing months though I realized that I did have a deep affinity for this person and he soon left his church in Aspen and moved into the house on north Downing

Street that was sort of the Radical Fairie vortex for Denver at the time. He must have felt a real affinity for me to make such a bold change.

In hindsight I think it best to have a primary loving companion when one is part of a Circle of Loving Companions and David certainly filled that role for me. Our affinity only deepened over the next fifteen years until his death from AIDS in 1995. The nineteenth anniversary of his death is this week on Wednesday the 17th, 2014.

Since his death I have been involved in one other long-term relationship. I guess you can call 11 years a long-term relationship and though it had its moments there didn’t seem to have the same sustained ‘affinity’ in so many ways I had with David. This second long term partner did not seem to fit as well into my circle of friends and this to me is something that any current partner I might fall in love with would need to accommodate. Something to keep in mind is introducing any prospective partner to your circle of companions sort of like straight folks do with each other’s biological families.

So I guess any new partner would need to be a bit of a collectivist and tolerate the coming and goings of my circle and I would certainly need to be accommodating of his companions. I also would insist on dependability. You need to always be there for me and me for you. Sex at this stage of the dance is quite peripheral to the whole enchilada and though mutual orgasms occasionally that involve seeing Jesus would be nice they are definitely not required.

As mentioned above my circle of loving companions is much depleted from what it was 35 years ago but still limping along. It has though it seems gotten much more difficult to add new members. If anyone is feeling an ‘affinity’ and is interested in interviewing for a position in the Circle we could meet over coffee.

© 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.