Judy Grahn – Sage Telling Your Story

December 27, 2016February 26, 2019

Mark Thompson, by Pat Gourley

Mark Thompson (August 19th, 1952 – August 11th,
2106) a pioneer and chronicler of gay men’s lives with particular focus on the
phenomenon of gay male spirituality, defined and given direction in part by the
Radical Fairie movement, died this past week on the 11th of August.
Mark was 63 and just a few days short of his birthday with plans to celebrate
with friends in Palm Springs. Mark’s contributions to the Queer Revolution are
legion and extensive. He was preceded in
death by his long time partner Malcolm Boyd, the well-known gay activist and
Episcopal priest who died in February of last year (2015).

Do check out Mark’s web site to get a flavor of his broad
insights and talents: http://www.markthompsongayspirit.com/author.html

I did not know Mark Thompson well having met him briefly only
a couple of times dating back to that first Spiritual Conference for Radical
Fairies in the Arizona desert. At that time Mark worked for the Advocate, a publication he was associated
with for over 20 years culminating in 1994 with his editing Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History
of the Gay and Lesbian Movement (St. Martin’s Press).

I got to “know” Mark best through his trilogy on gay
spirituality:

Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning (Lethe Press-1987)

Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature.
(Harper San Francisco-1994)

Gay Body: A Journey Through Shadow to Self. (St
Martin’s Press-1997)

Gay Soul in particular was a very loving and
reinforcing work for me coming at the darkest time in the AIDS nightmare in my
own life both professionally and personally. It was a time when in my darkest
moments I was questioning the whole gay liberation movement and wondering what
had we wrought here. These bouts of anguished questioning occurring most often
late at night usually resolved themselves by morning with the returning sun but
twinges did often linger. It was truly juice for my “soul” to read Mark’s
conversations with 16 prominent gay men several of whom I had gotten to know.

Though I would not have self-identified as an atheist (were
there any atheists working in AIDS Clinics in the 1980-90’s?) in 1994 as I do
now I definitely found succor in these great gay mentors discussing Gay Soul. As I have re-perused some of
Mark’s writings from Gay Soul in the
past few days they remain soothing in spite of my own current skeptical views
on many things spiritual. I find that Judy Grahn’s words from the back jacket
of Gay Soul taken from her review of
the book in the Advocate still resonate strongly for me: “What Thompson has given gay men in Gay Soul is an outpouring of
much-needed love-from new kinds of “fathers”.

I’d close with a few lines by Mark Thompson from the
introduction to Gay Soul:

“My soul is the repository of all that I
feel: my appetites and my ambitions, sadness and joy. It is the place where
inspiration germinates and from which vitality grows. It is also the place of
perplexity and unfathomable fear. Above all, I sense that my soul is the inner
arena in which life’s combustible opposites collide, creating dissonance and
upheaval as well as new harmony and stasis. Somewhere in this great container
of ceaseless death and rebirth lies, too, the mystery of my being gay.”

Mark Thompson.
Los Angeles. Vernal Equinox, 1994.

© 15 Aug 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.

July 12, 2016February 26, 2019

Purple by Pat Gourley

The first chapter of Judy Grahn’s wonderful tome Another Mother Tongue from 1984 deals extensively with the color purple and its historical meaning and connections to gay people. She posits both current and ancient connections to the color for us as a people.

Whether or not there are legitimate historical connections to the color purple and queer folk it certainly has appeared repeatedly throughout the ages in association with those of us often seen as “other”. For example we have continued to own and quite liberally use the word lavender, with lavender of course being a pale shade of purple.

I was involved with a project of the LGBT Center of Colorado called Lavender University in the late 1970’s. Interestingly one of the more successful gay male hook-up Internet sites is called the Lavender App first appearing recently in 2015. There are many other examples of the use of the word lavender in describing our organizations and us.

The color purple can be created mixing shades of red or magenta that have a more feminine association with blue and its male connotations. Though I prefer to view us as a distinct phenomenon rather than a hybrid of the straight male and female I can live with purple being attached to us as an expression of the ambiguity and mystery we present to the larger hetero society. It is to our advantage to keep them guessing as to who we really are. It is of course also a color historically associated with power and royalty. For years I had a wonderful flouncy silk purple shirt I would wear for special occasions that required that I appear as royalty.

Sadly it was the color purple in the form of skin lesions that began to strike fear in many gay men at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The rather sudden and mysterious appearance of purple skin lesions on gay men over 35 years ago quickly became a dreaded hallmark of the disease. I am referring of course to the lesions of Kaposi Sarcoma (K.S.) which we now know is caused by a herpes virus, the acronym for it being HHV-8, human herpes virus 8.

I would add that the lesions appear most purple on white skin. When K.S. lesions are an issue for darker pigmented folks the lesions can still appear purple but also often have a reddish or brown hue.

K.S can cause problems other than just skin lesions with the sarcoma able to involve internal organs as well. It was the facial lesions though that I personally feared the most. If one wanted to be on the down low with your HIV infection it was often hard to mask the facial lesions. I was never one to be shy about my HIV but I was certainly vain enough to fear a lesion on the tip of my nose. There are limits after all to ones love of the color purple.

HHV-8 is most commonly transmitted through saliva. There was apparently a fair amount of this virus among sexually active gay men in the 1970’s and as HIV began to spread, and severely compromise immune systems resulted, HHV-8 was able to take advantage and in many the result was Kaposi Sarcoma. Fortunately with the advent of effective AIDS drugs that restore pretty good immune function this virus, though certainly still around, causes dramatically less K.S.

HHV-8 can now I suppose be viewed as just one more little virus that uses us humans as transport media but kept in check if our immune systems are in good working order.

I’ll end with an interesting antidote I heard Sunday at the gym watching television coverage of Nancy Reagan’s death. She was a close friend of Rock Hudson. It was apparently a photo taken of the first couple that also caught the back of Rock’s head while he was visiting the Reagans in the White House that showed a suspicious lesion on his neck.

As incredulous as it might sound the photo catching this lesion supposedly alerted Hudson to the fact that perhaps he was also at risk for this new and devastating illness. Being quite familiar with how AIDS would present and progress I suspect there must have been some major denial in old Rock’s life to not notice any other symptoms before a K.S. lesion showed up on the back of his neck. Or perhaps it is just one more validation of the strength of the color purple, a hue capable of often grabbing one’s attention.

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.

June 29, 2016February 26, 2019

Queer — A Defining Word, by Pat Gourley

It is quite amazing to me
really how little of my childhood years I remember beyond vague, though some
significant, generalities. I suppose I could view this as suppression of lots
of terrible stuff but I really think it is more a matter of not much out of the
ordinary or worthy of sublimation ever happening. Lord knows my rather intense
at times Catholic upbringing and schooling might have been a source of great
consternation and resulting psychopathology, but for whatever reason I think I
sailed through those years queer as a three dollar bill and largely unscathed.

As I have written before
(my apologies for the repetition) one episode though that has stuck with me was
when I asked my mother what the word “queer” meant. I think I was about 12 years old when I first
heard it used. She said it was a bad word and I should never use it. I then
went straight to the dictionary but the only definition provided that stuck
with me was that it meant “odd”. I went back to her with this piece of
information but she persisted that it was not a word to incorporate into my
vocabulary. I suspect that I or someone near me had been called a “queer” and
being totally oblivious to any homosexual connection with the word thought this
to be a weird choice especially delivered in less than loving fashion.

Queer
to this day remains a loaded and offensive word by some LBGT folks, despised as
much as the “F” word. The “F” word being “faggot” of course and not “fuck”. I
could have written about “Faggot” as a defining word but thought I had enough
to tackle on my plate with “Queer”. And I actually thought for a fleeting
minute of writing on the word “fuck” one of my favorites but decided to keep it
closer to home. And besides other than this little phrase I ran into on Facebook
the other day I don’t have much more to say about “fuck”: “I have been told I
am going to hell for my excessive use of the word FUCK. I have rented a bus if
any of you fuckers need a ride.” From Fsensitivity Web Site

Back to Queer. Certain
words used to describe us are ones that we have simply and innocently appropriated
like “gay”. Others are words that have
been used to denigrate and belittle us, some of which we have reclaimed and
others not so much. The use of language to offensively describe some folks as ‘other’
has often been used as a means of control. Though for a minority struggling for
self-definition and empowerment the re-appropriation of often-derogatory words
is I think a legitimate exercise that can enhance identity and liberation. And
such is the case I believe with the word “Queer”.

In looking for the
origins of the word I kind of fell down an Internet rabbit hole. The use of it
as a derogatory term aimed at homosexual folks may well date back to 16th
century Scotland. The actual roots of the word seem perhaps lost to time.
However, my go to person, for meaning of the Queen’s English if you will, remains Judy Grahn and her seminal
work from 1984 Another Mother Tongue. Grahn
states that the original word was “cwer” (c-w-e-r) without directly attributing
any tribal or national origin to that word. After an hour or so of floundering
around the ether a possible source for “cwer” I stumbled on is that it was old
Welsh in origin. However, don’t take that to the bank.

Let me quote Grahn’s take
on the possible meaning of this descriptive moniker:

“
‘Sinful,’ ‘of the devil’ and ‘evil’ are all expressions that have been used
very effectively against gay culture, as has ‘queer’, which derives from cwer,
crooked not straight, kinked. Perhaps the difference between queer and straight
originated very simply with the difference between the straight-line dance of
male/female couples and the Fairy round dance”. From Another Mother Tongue. Page 276.

So perhaps it was a word
used originally to acknowledge that we were different from straight folks in a
rather kinked or crooked sense and that the evil or sinful associations were
added later. Maybe we were the ones who preferred to dance in circles rather
than in straight lines and this bit of nonconformity was one thing I hope,
among many, that set us apart. And of course anyone set apart from the norm was
often then fair game for ostracism that could become nasty.

I suspect there is a rich
history to this word “Queer” that is lost to the mists of time. I am choosing
to reclaim it as a defining word, one that helps set us apart from the
hetero-hordes. A word that hints at our uniqueness and the valuable
contributions we bring to the human tapestry by way of our otherness.

About
the Author