Pat Gourley – Sage Telling Your Story

July 20, 2018February 26, 2019

Escape, by Pat Gourley

Ah, escape, the act of breaking free. This word could well be one more synonym for “coming out”. This does seem to be a recurring theme, if one chooses to so interpret, for many of our Story Telling topics. It may be stretching a metaphor, something I seem at times to excel at, but I think we can view our LGBT Community Center here in Denver as an escape hatch and participation in this group for many as an accelerant. For me personally it has not been so much an accelerant as a re-fueling station. Story Telling has been a validation for me that what started in the mid-1970’s, thanks to the hard work and dedication of a small cadre of like-minded queer folk, was certainly worth the effort. I was not part of that initial group but did hitch my wagon to the Center in 1976.

Areas many of us LGBTQ folks have had experience trying to escape are the mental health issues we face in significantly greater proportions than the non-Queer community. Many of us have had very significant issues with depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide. The suicide rates remain, for LGBTQ youth in particular, disturbingly high even in this supposed age of post-liberation. The Trans community in particular is at grave risk for both suicide and murder.

Mental health issues among LBGTQ people are complex and in need of contextualization, intersectionality analysis and exploration with knowledgeable queer professional providers. It would be nice to see these issues addressed with the same depth and vigor that the sexual habits and health of gay men have been addressed in the last 40 plus years. Yes, certainly HIV was and remains a strong incentive to address how we fuck and the potential consequences of that but I must wonder about the very significant current and historical carnage from unaddressed mental health needs. These issues were prematurely thinning our numbers centuries before HIV came along and continue to this day.

A word of caution though in addressing depression in particular involves you and your provider not simply reaching for a pill or pills to address the problem. I am in no way saying that anti-depression medications do not serve a role and have been actual lifesavers for many. Do though proceed with caution, often easier said than done in our extremely fucked-up health care system so dominated by Big Pharma.

I read an interesting article in the NYT Sunday morning about how hard it is for many people to get off of antidepressants. They focused primarily on the difficulty some people had specifically getting off of Zoloft and Cymbalta. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/health/antidepressants-withdrawal-prozac-cymbalta.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

I’ve included a link to the article since I think it is important that the whole thing be read by anyone considering stopping their antidepressant or for that matter whether or to start one. This might be a great article to take to your mental health provider or primary care person if you think issues of depression are something that need to be addressed for you personally. It might piss them off a bit but they will get over it or you will hopefully find a new provider, though admittedly not an easy task in the current health care environment in this country.

Another piece I ran across in writing this was an article in The Guardian from May of last year by a fellow named Alexander Leon. He argues that we should be and I quote “ defiant in our acceptance of mental health problems in the same way we would about our sexuality or gender identity”.

A link to the piece: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/12/lgbt-mental-health-sexuality-gender-identity

Rather than describe our mental health issues as weakness, or perhaps a reason to seek out conversion therapy, a healthier and more spot on way to look at these issues is as “battle scars” to be addressed, a term used by Leon in the Guardian article. What is really remarkable is that so many of us have survived an at times unrelenting societal onslaught since an early age as a result of our budding identities. I am a firm believer that pharmaceuticals may sometimes play a role in addressing these battle scars but they should always be used in conjunction with strong Queer community support. So welcome one and all to SAGE Story Telling at the LGBT Community Center of Colorado and a grand escape from the often at times suffocating “hetero-normative” world we are born into.

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 6, 2018February 26, 2019

Running Away, by Pat Gourley

“I don’t make history. I am history”

Joan Baez

As with many quotes, I begin my pieces with this one is tangential. In fact, it is so tangential that I may not be able to twist it around to the topic but I liked it so much after reading it in a recent New York Times (NYT) interview with her I had to use it.

I suppose one could easily make “running away” a metaphor for staying in the closet and this may have been the case for me personally way back when. Perhaps a physical running away was what my moving to Denver in 1972 with a straight woman and three other closeted gay men was really all about. None of us on this sojourn to the Queen City of the Plains were “out” to any of the others but suspicions were running high. Give us a bit of a break though since the powerful ripples created by Stonewall had yet to make it in any big way to the middle part of America we were fleeing from.

Though I pretty much was over any running away from being queer by the mid-1970’s I have still managed to do my fair share of running away in other areas of my life. I could have for example jumped-in head first to Radical Fairie politics and I think probably have actually moved in with Harry Hay and John Burnside or at least hitched my wagon to that trip in a much more intense way than I did. Harry ever so subtly over the years was always encouraging me to do more implying that I was not living up to my queer potential.

Running away though may have its advantages at times. For me in 1980 falling in love with the man who would be my loving companion until his death in 1995 had many advantages. This choice of staying in Denver rather than picking up and moving to L.A. to be near and much more involved with Hay and the Radical Fairies worked out well. And let’s face it I think I made a much better nurse than I would have made a full-time Queer Activist even one in the orbit of the mercurial and prophetic Harry Hay.

I could go on about other areas where I have turned tail and headed for the hills but enough about me. The newspaper the Wichita Eagle first reported this past week the death in Wichita Kansas of Adrian Lamo at the age of 37. Yes, I will be quoting from the Wichita Eagle which will probably never happen again though remember the Koch Brothers are also from Wichita, with Koch Industries based there, so never say never.

Lamo was a very adept hacker. Most notably he hacked into the NYT and Microsoft among others in the early 2000’s and was convicted of computer fraud in 2004.

His greatest notoriety though came from turning Chelsea Manning into the Feds in 2010. Manning had shared with him that she had turned over to Wikileaks a large trove of classified documents pertaining to the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan including clear evidence of American war crimes.

Manning had reached out to Lamo as someone she thought she could trust admiring, I suppose, his brazen hacks into very powerful organizations. And perhaps and I am speculating here she felt she could trust someone with clear ties to the LGBTQ community. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors had in 1998 appointed Lamo to the City’s LGBTQQ Youth task forcefile://localhost/. https/::www.wired.com:story:adrian-lamo-has-passed-away-at-37:

Lamo testified against Manning at her trial in 2013 and she was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in federal prison. This was the harshest sentence ever for a whistleblower. Barack Obama though commuted her sentence in 2016. A full pardon with honors and recognition as a true patriot would have been more appropriate but we’ll take the reduced sentence.

Quoting a friend of Lamo’s, one Lorraine Murphy, from the Wichita Eagle piece of March 16th, 2018 she described him “as someone who bounced around a great deal… He was a believer in the geographic cure. Whatever goes wrong in your life, moving will make it better.” http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article205629184.html

The “geographic cure” is something synonymous I would say with “running away” and engaged in I suspect in a disproportionate manner historically by queer folk everywhere.

Lamo was quite open apparently about queer aspects of his life but he seems to have been a poor soul often running away from something. I certainly do not know enough about the man to speculate what sort of ghosts were chasing him. Unfortunately, he is now dead and Chelsea Manning is alive and thriving and running for elected office in Virginia. Maybe the better part of valor is to face things head-on and not pick up and run away.

And though she may think she is no longer making history Joan Baez has never as far as I can tell ever run away from anything and neither did Chelsea Manning. Both women are heroines I can try to emulate in my own life and invoke when the temptation to run away presents itself, as it certainly will again.

© March 2018

About the Author

June 20, 2018February 26, 2019

Utopia, by Pat Gourley

The first thing that comes to my mind with the word Utopia is the Chinese café in San Francisco’s Chinatown located at 139 Waverly Place aptly named the Utopia Café. I stumbled on this sometime in the early 1990’s I believe though I could not find a date when it was first opened as a café despite a rather extensive Google search. I am quite certain though that I was there at least once with my partner David who died in 1995 and many times since. Any trip to OZ, and there have been many, almost always entails a trip to this eatery.

David and I may have happened on Waverly Alley trying to escape the crowds on Grant Street the main tourist drag through Chinatown. We were probably cruising through Chinatown one day killing a few hours before we headed south in our rental car for a Grateful Dead show down the peninsula in Mountainview at the Shoreline amphitheater.

Several of Chinatown’s most interesting alleys are just to the west of Grant, between Stockton and Grant. Or perhaps we ended up in Waverly Alley following a tip gleaned from Amy Tan’s wonderful novel The Joy Luck Club that was published in 1989.

The Joy Luck Club is the story of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their four American born daughters and their often-complex relationships entailing the dynamic push and pull between old world China and west coast America. The mothers formed their group and called themselves the Joy Luck Club in 1949 and began meeting at the First Chinese Baptist Church located at 15 Waverly Alley. They obviously met for camaraderie and emotional support but also for conversation, to eat good food and play Mahjong. All activities relished by concerned immigrant mothers raising daughters in post WWII California.

A simplistic description of Mahjong would be to think of dominoes and that would not be the pizza. Playing for money was often involved. Many of us Sage folk may know what dominoes are all about and may have actually played. My father had a set and I think they were made of bone and not Ivory, at least I hope that was the case. Though growing up in conservative rural Indiana in the 1950’s concern for African elephants or artic walrus would never have crossed my mind.

Mahjong was also popular particularly post World War II among Jewish American women. Both Jewish and Chinese women were seen as using the game as a vehicle for bonding and community building. Similar I suppose to men playing poker but without I assume the beer and cigars and I’ll bet the food was considerably better than you would find at most card games.

When walking up from the south on Waverly Alley on one’s way to the Utopia Café you will pass the Tin How Temple. It is the oldest Taoist temple in San Francisco. It is located 3 flights up from the street. The temple provides a sensory burst of stimulation in the form of many colorful displays of tribute to Mazu the Chinese Goddess of Heaven all enveloped in shrouds of pungent incense. On the several visits I have made to the shrine it seems to most often be tended by elderly Chinese women who smile pleasantly especially when you drop a dollar or two into the donation box, with no words spoken. They do seem though to exude the three treasures of Taoism: compassion, frugality and humility.

It took me several trips up Waverly over the years to correctly identify the clicking sound I would hear often in conjunction with animated Chinese dialects I certainly could not identify. It turns out the clicking sound, often emanating from open basement doors, was the sound of clicking Mahjong tiles.

On my most recent trip to San Francisco, the last two weeks of February, I again made my pilgrimage to the Utopia Café; sadly no clicking Mahjong tiles were heard. It seems to have changed hands and undergone a modest remodel in the last year or so but the menu changes, primarily to a variety of noodle dishes, did not disappoint. Per usual I was the only non-Chinese person in the restaurant and had to wait a bit for a table to open. Shortly after being seated at the two-person table a young handsome Asian man was seated across from me. Other than quiet nods we did not speak throughout the meal. He actually never looked up from his phone except very briefly even when scooping up steaming noodles. As he was getting ready to leave, having eaten much faster than I and being more adept at chop sticks and spoon I noticed a Bronco decal a on the back of his phone. I was left to ponder whether or not he was from Denver and maybe visiting family. However seeing him in the Utopia Café was further validation that this was a restaurant worthy of even out of town Chinese clientele.

Though it would be somewhat over the top to describe this modest café and its simple fare as ideal perfection it has on several occasions come pretty darn close. A warm bowl of noodles nestled in a tasty broth and topped with greens served with hot jasmine tea on a cold rainy San Francisco winter day sounds pretty Utopian to me.

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June 15, 2018February 26, 2019

What is the Real Spirit of Stonewall? by Pat Gourley

[Editor’s Note: This story was posted on this blog five years ago. It is showing up now as a reminder that Pridefest Denver is this weekend.]

“Despite his enduring commitment to gay rights and lifelong
dedication to queer scholarship, Duberman is deeply disappointed in the
contemporary LGBT movement, noting that for the last 20 years it has been
focused on marriage equality and repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. In
Duberman’s view, the gay agenda is grossly myopic and its goals of assimilation
counter the spirit of Stonewall and Gay Liberation, which sought to affirm,
rather than obscure gay differences.”

http://slanthere.com

The above quote referenced from the online entity, The Slant, is from an
interview done recently with Martin Duberman. Duberman for those perhaps
unfamiliar with the name is a queer, radical activist with a very long and
impressive academic background and the author of numerous books and countless
articles. He is on faculty as a professor of history emeritus at the City
University of New York. The interview was published online June 5th, 2013 and is
commemorating the 44th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. His most recent book
is titled The Marin Duberman Reader.

In reading the Duberman interview I found myself hearing similar ideas I was
frequently exposed to in the late 1970’s as a result of my budding relationship
with Harry Hay, life long gay activist and founder of the Mattachine Society in
1950 and very instrumental in birthing the Radical Fairie movement. It was
through contacts at the Gay Community Center of Colorado in 1978 that I was
able to connect with Harry and his partner John Burnside who were living in
northern New Mexico at that time.

An activity I was involved in during the spring of 1979, through The Center for
the week of activities commemorating the Stonewall Riots, was the 3rd annual
Lesbian/ Gay Symposium held the Saturday before the Sunday March. We were still
marching back then rather than having a pride parade or at least still hotly
debating whether it should be a “March or a Parade”.

The symposiums were part of Pride Week activities starting in 1977 and
continuing into the early 1980’s working with the support of the Center. They
consisted of a single daylong program of workshops. Presentations and
discussions were of topical interest to the LGBT community and often fairly
broad in scope. Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell was of course not even on the distant
horizon yet and marriage equality not even a figment of anyone’s imagination.
For many early LGBT activists participation in the military was not consider a
desirable pursuit for anyone gay or straight, and marriage was thought to be a
rather unsuccessful heterosexual construct meant to primarily control women and
property, definitely not something to strive to emulate.

Since I had gotten to know Hay and his loving companion John Burnside in the
previous year the awareness of his rich queer activist history led me to pursue
him as a keynote speaker at the 1979 Symposium. They were at that time both
heavily involved in the planning for the first Radical Fairie gathering that
was to take place in the Arizona desert outside Tucson later in the summer. In
personal correspondence dated 6-11-79 in typical Hay fashion he agreed to come
up for the event. Written letters in 1979 were a viable and frequently used
manner of communication and Harry was a master at writing long letters.
Regarding my request that he and John be keynote speakers he wrote: “…being
‘keynote people’ scares us. We love to rap with people but we don’t take kindly
to the old hetero-imitating formalisms of speeches or addresses.”

Though I have many pages of personal correspondence with Harry in particular I
unfortunately never saved my responses back to him. I apparently responded that
that would be fine and they came to Denver for that Lesbian and Gay Pride
weekend of 1979 and participated in several workshops at the Symposium. He
spoke briefly at the rally at the end of the Pride march that Sunday in Civic Center.
Harry with bullhorn graces the cover of the July 6, 1979 issue (Vol. IV, #7) Of
Out Front Magazine. I do not remember any of his remarks at the rally but the
theme of the march that year was “We Are Family” so I suspect he spoke to that.

Much of Hay’s thought on queers at the time focused on the three questions
originally raised by the Mattachine society; who are we, where do we come from
and what are we for? If we were to be pursuing these questions in earnest at
the time, and they are still quite relevant today, assimilation into the larger
hetero society with marriage equality and open military service were unlikely
to facilitate that exploration.

In the Duberman piece referenced earlier he describes the current “gay agenda”
focus on marriage and the military as very myopic and Hay would certainly
agree. In fact I heard Harry dismiss both as sadly hetero-imitative and nothing
we should be serious about pursuing if we were intent on getting to the root of
our difference and bringing our unique gifts and contributions to the larger
human banquet.

When Duberman was asked specifically about the influence of queer culture on
mainstream America he responded in part: “So far, I don’t think the effect of
mainstream culture has been significant, and I think that’s the fault of both
the gay movement and the mainstream, which is willing to accept and tolerate us
to the extent that we act like good middle class white people”.

If I can be so bold I would say that both Hay and Duberman firmly believe that
our real strength comes from being “outsiders”. Perhaps the potential for at
least some of the change humanity desperately needs at this juncture can come
from queer folk and that will only come about if we relish and explore our
differences as possible keys to viable solutions to our immense problems today.
Not to throw too much of a burden on us but we really do need to be in the
vanguard of a radical restructuring of the entire social order or we are pretty
much screwed both as a species and a viable planet.

How wonderful if every June we could renew out commitment to being “other” and
recommit to using our unique worldviews to tackling some of the greatest issues
we will face in the coming year.

© 30 June 2013

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 12, 2018February 26, 2019

Losing Touch, by Pat Gourley

I suspect when it comes to losing touch sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes not. Facebook for example seems to be a very powerful tool for reconnecting and staying in touch with folks and not just old school friends but often extended family members. I have used social media to reconnect with long lost friends and relatives and I would probably not remember even my own birthday without a Facebook notification.

For me this reconnecting with especially cousins I have lost touch with has at times been very interesting. I soon realized based on some of their posts that a few of them are bat-shit crazy. In part this seems very possibly related to the fact that they never got the hell out of rural Indiana. Though I rarely post anything to Facebook it has been for the most part fun to reconnect with relatives even the ones who I deeply suspect are Trump supporters. What is the old saying? “Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.” I am not saying any of my relatives are enemies but a few of them are I am sure not on any gay wedding guest lists.

Actually not wanting to offend any of my more conservative friends and relatives does act as good censoring barrier as to what little I do post on Facebook. For example I thought better of posting one of the better signs from the recent Women’s March here in Denver. It was a photo of a sign that read: “I am more pissed off than a Russian hooker.” That is a sentiment I am totally in agreement with but one that would not have gone over too well with my southern Indiana cousins I suspect.

The Internet, Facebook and Instagram all seem to be conspiring to keep us from losing touch whether we want that to be the case or not. Think for a minute about what Facebook knows about you simply based on their lists of “suggested” friends or ‘tagging” someone you may know and suggesting you should really become friends with all their friends ASAP. Remember when it might have taken years of getting to know someone before calling him or her a friend and now that status in your life is simply a click of your index finger away.

A recent example of various unsolicited entities being aware of my business in a rather eerie way was my online search for a new garbage disposal. I had searched through Google for a particular brand of disposal and in a matter of hours an ad for this same item had appeared in my Facebook feed.

It probably does not come as a surprise to many of you that when cleaning house or doing dishes I will go to You Tube for a music video by the Grateful Dead or the current incarnation Dead and Company. This has resulted in my Facebook feed again being clogged with many ads for the latest Dead merchandise and trust me it is endless. And just because of clicking or liking one article about one band I really don’t need to know what every jam band on the face of the earth is up to.

Though I think there are many reasons we should be concerned about the deep state, i.e. FBI, NSA and CIA being the ones we know most about, it really is corporate America that is in our business a thousand ways to hell every single minute of every hour of the day. It would be nice to research garbage disposals or listen on line to the umpteenth version of Dark Star without it resulting in an obnoxious marketing barrage.

So this rant on how everyone on earth is really always in touch these days, and I haven’t even gotten to our cell phones, could go on much longer but let me close with a concern I have. Are we really just lowering the bar as to what constitutes staying in touch in a meaningful manner and debasing many of our relationships with just the latest emoji?

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June 6, 2018February 26, 2019

I Call It Bullshit, by Pat Gourley

“I have talked so much in the past few days that sometimes I feel like I might have used up all my words and I’ll never speak again. And then I hear someone say something really stupid and I can barely keep myself from snapping in two.”

Emma González from Harpers Bazaar

February 26th, 2018

Our topic for today is “Your Favorite Childhood Hero”. For some inexplicable reason I wrote on this topic back in January of this year. I must admit though that being off a month or two is not all that unusual for me these days. So I’ll just chalk it up to the vapors of early dementia perhaps and rather write on my current heroine.

That would be the 18-year-old dynamic self-identified bisexual woman of Cuban heritage, Emma González. The opening quote of this piece is from an article Emma wrote for Harper’s Bazaar in late February of this year just a few short weeks after the deadly shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School in Parkland Florida where she is a student.

That this woman is someone to be paid attention to and emulated was further cemented yesterday at the Washington D.C. March For Our Lives. She held the podium for a few short minutes and the last four of which were in total silence with tears rolling down her cheeks. Leading over 800,000 thousand Americans in 2018 in four minutes of reflective silence is powerful medicine indeed that must be reckoned with.

There were many moving and heart-wrenching speeches yesterday, including a few here in Denver. I’ll admit it may be a sign of my own poorly evolved sense of “identity politics” but the fact that Emma identifies as bisexual has me attracted to her and her bravery even more strongly – no apologies.

The vile and psychotic vitriol being directed her way from the slimy corners of right wing nutville is only further proof for me that she is totally right-on in calling bullshit. Attempts to photo-shop her tearing up a copy of the Constitution is so desperate as to be truly pathetic. It is a doctored photo taken by Teen Vogue where Emma is holding and then tearing up a shooting range target. It is hard to pull off this crap in this day and age of instant response and in particular trying to smear a woman with 1.44 million twitter followers as of March 23rd, 2018.

I attended and participated in Denver’s March For Our Lives yesterday in Denver. As with the recent Women’s and Immigrant Rights Marches I have found these events to be very invigorating and they do seem to be prompting me to get off my ass a bit more. Yesterday’s event in particular seemed to be a great example of “intersectionality” finally becoming part of the overall progressive movement though much work needs to occur for this to become an actualized reality.

Intersectionality is a relatively new concept to me, admittedly a bit late to get on the bus here, and I think to many since it has yet to make it into my spell check. It is defined though as: “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage: through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us.” Credit for this concept and analysis goes to a woman named Kimberle Crenshaw an African American civil rights activist and academic who developed it in the late 1980’s. She is currently a professor at UCLA.

I have been impressed with many of the MSD High School student activists urging the mainstream press to talk with kids of color from urban areas where gun violence is endemic and a 24/7 daily fact of life. The intersectionality of race, class, gender and so often gun violence is so striking as to be beyond doubt.

The diversity of people and their often-poignant signs at yesterday’s march were ample evidence of the reality and power of intersectionality. Let me close with my favorite sign from yesterday as proof positive that we are all in this together. A woman a few feet ahead of me in the march was carrying a sign that read: “If I put a gun in my uterus will you regulate it then”.

That women’s reproductive rights and health are so ardently regulated and guns are not is truly bullshit.

About the Author

May 28, 2018February 26, 2019

Springtime and Suicide, by Pat Gourley

It is well documented that suicides spike in the spring and then again in the fall but less so. A popular myth is that it is the holiday season when suicide is most likely but this is simply not the case. As to why this happens in the spring is pretty much speculation with one theory being that it is all the pollen in the air that is the root of this increase. This rather sketchy theory suggests that the increase in pollen causes an increase in inflammation and this leads to irritability and suicidal ideation I guess. I would suggest that further study is needed or perhaps more Claritin. file://localhost/. https/::www.cnn.com:2016:05:16:health:suicide-rates-spike-in-spring:index.html

“Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help.” David Buckel – from the NYT 4/14/2018

The above sentence is from the suicide note left by David Buckel the well known LGBTQ rights lawyer who self immolated himself in a Brooklyn park early on Saturday (4/14/2018) morning. I must admit I had never heard of David Buckel but he is perhaps most well know for his work on the Brandon Teena murder, a transgender person from Nebraska. Buckel was the lead attorney in a case that found a Nebraska county sheriff guilty of liable in Teena’s murder. Hilary Swank played Teena in the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry for which she won an Oscar.

David Buckel also was a prominent activist in several other areas of LGBTQ rights particularly in the area of marriage equality. For the past ten years however his focus was environmental issues and he was the moving force behind a major recycling/composting effort in the Brooklyn area.

Quoting further from his suicide note per the NYT:

“Pollution ravages out planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather …Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuel, and many die early deaths as a result – my early death by fossil fuels reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

I have been unable to find the entire suicide note as of today but this is a further piece of the note in addition to those quotes above:

“I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide,” read a handwritten suicide note, according to the New York Daily News. “I apologize to you for the mess.”

Despite the fact that there were 44,965-reported deaths by suicide in the United States in 2016 they often receive little press coverage and this may be out of legitimate concern for impulsive copycat action by others. The one thing that is hard for me to reconcile around David’s protest suicide is the anguish this is causing for his loved ones, co-activists and undeniably his partner of 34 years. I am not at all sure though that this pain and suffering should distract in any meaningful way from the power and perhaps even the legitimacy of his protest.

Many of us may have first heard of suicide by self-immolation by Buddhist monks in Viet Nam. Visual images of these acts were certainly a slap in the face to me to wake up to the unbelievable tragedy that war was. More recently the self-immolation again by Buddhist monks this time in Tibet as a form of protest to Chinese genocide continues. There have been at least 148 reported suicides in this manner by Tibetans since 2009.

Deaths from the potential catastrophic effects of climate change may far out strip deaths from all the wars in human history. Apparently roll backs to climate protections by the Trump administration and in particular by that selfish weasel Scott Pruitt had been causing David Buckel considerable consternation.

I do hope this raw and powerful form of protest on his part will not detract but rather enhance the legacy of this great gay hero. Though he was definitely a strong and successful proponent for issues of marriage equality and Trans rights maybe his last ten years and death are pointing us toward even more important issues facing all of humankind including the LGBTQ communities.

Though this has been perhaps the most painful piece I have written for Story Telling I’d like to close with just a few more paraphrased words from David’s suicide note, words for me personally to ponder: “Privilege is derived from the suffering of others”.

This a link to NYT article on David’s suicide – one of many I have read this past weekend and referred to in this piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/nyregion/david-buckel-brooklyn.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

About the Author

May 18, 2018February 26, 2019

The Truth Is, by Pat Gourley

The truth is I am a very lazy writer when it comes to putting fingers to keyboard and coming up with something for our weekly SAGE topics. I genuinely feel that my story, at least from a historical perspective, has pretty much been shared with the group. The format we use though has been very stimulating for remembering many past events and antics from my past particularly it seems from the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The truth is though I have much less to write about particularly from the mid 1980’s to the present. I seem to have experienced a diminution of involvement even in activities that seem to land right in front of me and ask for active participation on my part.

The truth is I am not exactly sure why this has happened but I can speculate I suppose. Maybe it is just a matter of getting older. I am getting older like it or not. As I rapidly approach my 70th birthday the truth is … that seems quite amazing to me. I know I am speaking to many folks here quite a bit older and am perceived by some of you as just a youngster. However, I do appreciate how remarkable it is really for someone infected with HIV in the early 1980’s to still be around and often griping about what are really first world problems. An example of a very vexing first world problem for me would be my bemoaning the fact that my neighborhood Whole Foods Market closed last fall and moved to LoDo. I mean really how I suffer so having only a King Soopers, a Safeway, a Trader Joe’s and a Natural Grocers all within easy walking distance.

The truth is I have been infected with HIV for at least 33 years, having tested positive in the summer of 1985. I strongly suspect though I came in contact with the virus and it set up shop in early 1981 making it 37 years, more than half of my life on Earth.

What is my secret to this longevity you may ask? Well the truth is I have no fucking idea. Beyond just maybe being one lucky son-of-a–bitch I can quickly rule out a few reasons right off the bat. It was most certainly not any sort of strong religious faith or conviction. I am an atheist and a half-assed Buddhist practitioner on my best days. Diet and exercise have always been important to me at least on an intellectual and philosophical level if not in my daily eating habits. Saturated fat and high dose sugar input in the form of gourmet ice creams indulged in freakishly often have done little I suspect in keeping my immune system in tip-top shape.

There is no doubt the HIV meds are the main reason I am still here and I do take them religiously. The truth is though that they are slowly accelerating many of the health problems driven by the dietary-fueled metabolic derangement so endemic in American life today with diabetes, stroke, dementia and heart disease being several prominent ones.

One possible current saving grace when it comes to my many dietary indiscretions is that the grocer closest to me is Trader Joe’s and their absolutely crappy ice cream selection. Talk about a first world problem, hey?

The truth is really when looking at my long-term HIV/AIDS survival that it is clearly related to my privilege. I am a white guy in a part of the world where the problems I face are really first world ones. I have been the beneficiary of many forms of privilege that have allowed me to coast for much of the past 37 years with relatively easy access to cutting edge HIV treatments and medications. That white privilege does unfortunately still play a huge role in HIV disease even today in the United States as reflected by the disproportional rate of new HIV infections. African American gay and bisexual men face a one–in-two chance of being infected in their lifetime. The same risk for white gay men is one in eleven.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/magazine/americas-hidden-hiv-epidemic.html

The truth is I am skating on pretty thin ice needing to continue toxic but necessary HIV chemotherapies and having numerous metabolic derangements undoubtedly accelerating my inevitable demise. So what keeps me going? Well not to in any way be pandering this group has been one. I find great solace in participating in a group whose existence is facilitated by the same organization I became involved with in 1976. The truth is where would I be without you?

About the Author

May 2, 2018February 26, 2019

Finding Your Voice in the Dark, by Pat Gourley

For many of us in this Story Telling Group I imagine that “finding your voice” could easily be a metaphor for our individual coming out, an emerging from the dark. A truth is implied in finding one’s coming out voice and that truth is unable to flower until we start to let our queer flag fly. Of course, for many of us coming out is in some respects a lifelong process. It is hard to imagine that we simply woke up one day and said: “I am out.” Rather the coming out adventure often has many fits and starts. We eventually find ourselves in a space where we can easily find our true voice in nearly any situation. It is though something, even today, not always spoken out loud since a protective common sense often dictates whom we tell and whom we don’t.

I’d like to share an example of a lesbian friend in San Francisco finding a voice in part through her poetry. This woman’s name is Tova Green and she is a Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC). In addition to her many teaching and administrative duties at the SFZC she was the co-founder of Queer Dharma an offering of the Zen Center since 2009.

During most of my extended sojourns to the City by the Bay I attend the Zen Center when I can made easy by the fact that it is located at the corner of Page and Laguna literally out the backdoor of the B&B. I most often participate in the evening Zazen session and occasionally the monthly Queer Dharma gatherings. It was at a Queer Dharma session that I encountered and struck up a budding friendship with Tova. On my most recent visit in September she again related her love for poetry over brunch, a wonderful trait it seems very common with many lesbians. Also shared was one of her own poems written about an event we were both made very sadly aware of that occurred on the night of January 9th 2015.

I was staying at the Inn that night with a dear friend from Denver named Clark. Clark and I have been friends since 1989 and share an unbreakable bond having been present for each other at the deaths of our partners from AIDS, his dear Phil in 1994 and my David in 1995. I had invited Clark on this trip to see the engraving of Phil’s name up in the AIDS Grove in Golden Gate Park. I had already had David’s name put up there the year before.

As was the case so often I was asleep early in the evening that January night but woke to the sound of what I first thought was firecrackers. It was a rapid staccato of noise that just didn’t really seem like firecrackers soon eliciting a sense of dread and quite frankly an emerging fear deep in the pit of my stomach. My worst fears were soon confirmed with the sound of many police and emergency vehicles arriving on the scene at the corner of Page and Laguna again right out the back door of the B&B and very visible from the first-floor bay window facing west.

What had occurred was a shooting, thought to be gang-turf related that left four young men dead at the scene. The probable semi-automatic weapon that was used allowed the perpetrator to snuff out four lives in a matter of seconds. An event that barely registered outside of San Francisco, since the cut off for significant media attention for a “mass-shooting” in America these days is five murders not just four.

We watched with disbelief and numbness as at least one of the victims in a body bag was loaded into an ambulance. Knocks at our front door and short interviews with police and homicide detectives soon took place. We were only able to offer after the fact partial accounts. The shooter or shooters were gone from the scene before we got to the window and realized what had happened.

By the next morning a makeshift memorial of flowers and candles had appeared at the lamppost directly out and across Page Street from the Zen Center. Living at the Zen Center, Tova was very aware of the tragedy that had occurred that night. She recently shared with me the poem she had written about that night. I am quite moved by how beautifully she was able to find her voice to acknowledge that very dark event on a dark winter night right on the doorstep of a place dedicated to compassion and meditative solace. Her poem in remembrance is titled “Prayer”.

Prayer by Tova Green

For Yalani Chinyamurindi, David Saucier, Harith Atchan and Manuel O’Neal

When my car was stolen
I remembered the four
young men, shot and killed
in a stolen car double parked
at our corner. It was nine
on a cold Friday night.
One was on his break
from work, catching
a ride with friends
to cash his paycheck.

The four had grown up
nearby, I learned,
when I joined their mothers
in a candlelight walk and saw
the wilting bouquets, photos
taped to a lamppost,
flickering flames enclosed
in glass on the sidewalk.

A girl gripped the lamp post
wailing—I want my brother back.
The next Mothers’ Day I stood
again with those women
on the steps of City Hall
and heard them tell their stories.
I’ll never know who
stole my car or what they
did with it before they left it,
wrecked, across the Bay.

I pray it wasn’t used
in an act of violence. I pray
for the safety of those
who stole it, knowing
their mothers pray for them
night and day

About the Author

April 24, 2018February 26, 2019

My First GLBT Acquaintance, by Pat Gourley

I saw that today’s topic was actually Dancing with the Stars. I am aware that this is the name of a long-standing television series of the same name that I think involves teams of contestants in competitive-dancing with often B-grade celebrities. And I must admit I have never watched a single minute of this show and I mean no offense to anyone who enjoys it. Really how can somewhat like me who is addicted to reruns of The Big Bang Theory and the Golden Girls throw shade at anyone else’s TV viewing habits?

I could I suppose make a big stretch and turn ‘dancing with the stars’ into a metaphor for one of my past particularly enjoyable LSD adventures but instead I’ll write a few lines on last week’s topic: My First GLBT Acquaintance. Let me say right out of the box I have no idea who my first real GLBT acquaintance was since like all of us of a certain age I was birthed into the stifling cauldron of a falsely presumed heterosexual universe. We were in many ways unrecognizable to one another until we demanded to be called by our real names. A nearly universal experience we all relate to was the question of whether or not we were alone asking “am I the only one who is this way”. Our first acquaintance would I hope for most of us be a glorious answer to that question.

As I was writing this and had Pandora playing in the background I was unaware of any tune until Lou Reed’s masterpiece Walk on the Wild Side just came on. Released in 1972 this opus chronicles the adventures of a cast of characters all headed to New York City and a ‘walk on the wild side’.

I would take the liberty to say that through transexuality, drug use, male prostitution and oral sex they may have all been looking for and perhaps found that first GLBT acquaintance. Holly, Candy, Little Joe, Sugar Plum Fairy and Jackie all seem to have been based on real people from Reed’s life in NYC back then. All of whom I would say were very queer people.

We were fortunate in this SAGE Story Telling Group to get a glimpse of this albeit dangerous but deliciously exciting world Reed describes in his song through the frequent writings of a dear friend who died recently. As he related to us on several occasions his walks on the wild side started in the tearooms of downtown Denver department stores but would eventually be played out most emphatically on the streets of NYC. He often honestly provided glimpses into this world, that like it or not, is an integral part of our collective and frequently personal queer history. Thank you, dear friend!

For the sake of this piece I am going to say that “acquaintance” implies a mutual recognition that we are both queer as three-dollar bills. When using this definition the task of identifying my first acquaintance is much easier. This first person I suppose also represents my own personal “walk on the wild side”. As I have written about on previous occasions this ‘acquaintance” was a man 20 years my senior who I had been passive-aggressively courting for a year. We took a real ‘walk on the wild side’ and had sex (my first!) in the biology lab of my Catholic High School festooned with crucifixes on the wall. It was Easter week and I was a soon to graduate Senior. I am eternally in debt to this man for launching in very loving fashion my great ongoing gay adventure.

If there has been one thing that our liberation efforts the past century have provided it is that many but certainly not all new ‘recruits’ to the queer world do not have to have that first acquaintance involve a ‘walk on the wild side’. The fruits of success I suppose though work remains to be done and for some us perhaps a sense of nostalgia for a long gone but often very exciting times.