Tag: Pat Gourley

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So Many Roads: A Great Performance by Pat Gourley

It was July 9th 1995 at Soldier Field in Chicago, a Grateful Dead concert. The second of two sold out shows with over 60,000 in attendance each night. It was the end of that summer’s concert run for the Dead and the whole tour had been plagued by troubles – too many kids wanting to see the band, too few tickets, tension between the oldsters and the youngsters and very often too much too fast for way too many. The whole scene was truly turning weird. The draw for these shows though for me was simply too strong and the chance to see family back in the Chicago-land area to good to pass up, so I snapped up tickets the minute the went on sale through Grateful Dead mail order, a service available to the truly faithful. They were reserved floor seats, now mind you the shows were in a football stadium so I guess “good seats” was rather relative.

I had come from Denver without my partner David for the shows but did take Brian my blind bother to the second show. David was not well and stayed back home. I would have been able a few years prior to get him to two shows of a run without much cajoling, getting him to see four in a row though never happened.

These were the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic with protease inhibitors still a year or so away from general availability and use. The deaths did seem to have slowed down mostly because the most affected generation had already been decimated; many of those infected in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s were already gone.

I remember little about the first show on the 8th except that the band was not at their best for sure. Garcia in particular looked bloated, tired and at times almost listless. But you know congestive heart failure, a rather significant heroin addiction and uncontrolled diabetes tends to take the wind out of your sails.

There are several memories though about the shows I recall. One was the hassle of finding parking which for both shows was available only it seemed in public lots south of the stadium in a quite dicey neighborhood. The long walk back to the car the second night in particular was quite a trip in its own, a mugging I am sure was averted thanks in part due to having a blind guy with a cane on my arm. I have always been thankful for Brian coming to that show with me. Also there was a great fireworks display after the second show and the several big screens set up for the folks in the back made the show a bit more accessible.

The music or rather the musicianship both nights was quite forgettable. My LSD days were many years behind me so if the band didn’t come though at any particular show it could be a bust but more often than not the crowd would provide me with endless entertainment. Most of the time though the band would come through for at least one good or even great set, if not both.

That night there was in fact only one song that stuck with me and that was the version of So Many Roads in the second set. It was a relatively new song having only been in the rotation since 1992 and I had heard it only once before that I could recall. It was one of a long line of soulful ballads that were almost always Garcia tunes and played usually middle to late in the second set. The thought that this would be the last time the Grateful Dead would perform with Garcia never of course entered my mind.

Despite people’s impressions, who are unfamiliar with the Dead, they were, Garcia especially, remarkably good at a soulful ballad that at times I suppose might described by some as a dirge. And the Dead were sensitive to play these longer and slower tunes later in the second set when the drugs had perhaps peaked even though they often ended their shows with a rousing couple of numbers. The encores were again often slow tunes to take the edge off before sending the masses into the night in a mellow frame of mind and almost always a single tune. They did a very rare second encore song that night, an old gem called A Box of Rain.

At the risk of loosing my Deadhead card I must say I don’t remember that either. Sorry folks it was the gut wrenching beauty of So Many Roads that has stuck with me for nearly twenty years now. I distinctly remember turning to Brian after that song and saying “well that was worth the fucking price of admission”. I am not sure he agreed. He had quite few beers that night and taking a blind guy to the port-a-potties at a Grateful Dead show is another whole story.

I do remember leaving the show singing to myself the chorus to So Many Roads. We made it back to the car safe and sound with only one stoned Deadhead tripping on my brother’s cane. The crowd was in general very sensitive to him and his needs as I swear only Deadheads could be.

A month later Jerry was dead from a cardiac arrest in the middle of the night at a rehab center in Marin County. That I had been to the last two shows was hard to comprehend. This was of course devastating to me and I will always remember David’s loving call to me at work about Garcia’s death to make sure I was doing OK. The much bigger blow though was to come with David’s death another month later.

So many roads indeed.

April, 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.

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Shopping and Drinking by Pat Gourley

If by drinking we were referring to alcohol with this topic selection I was never much of an over-the-top imbiber despite my Irish heritage but I did enjoy a frequent vodka tonic and often found the buzz very enjoyable. It also made the company of some others in my social life much more tolerable when alcohol was part of the mix. Oh and of course would gay bar cruising have been at all feasible or at least remotely enjoyable without a few drinks under one’s belt?

Not being particularly adept at the art of semi-inebriated cruising is the reason I suppose I was attracted to the bathes. Though I would certainly on occasion go to the tubs having partaken of some hallucinogen or the other in the 1970’s my preference was to be totally sober. A state I found much more facilitating for lining up a good fuck or two.

I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in the past five or so years related to my pancreatic issues. These problems seemed to have started with several renegade gallstones that found their way into my main pancreatic duct. If you have never experienced it pancreatitis is something to be avoided at all costs. I have a niece who has experienced both several natural childbirths and bouts of pancreatitis and she is adamant that she would always take the childbirth over the pancreatitis if given the choice.

Having my gallbladder removed seemed to only partially address the issue, so blame stared to fall on the years of HIV meds I have been on. The choice there is pretty clear – learn to live with and adjust the meds or slowly cash it in. Since alcohol is the greatest of all pancreatic irritants that seemed a small sacrifice to make.

Two things about my lack of alcohol consumption though have surprised me. The first is how little I seem to miss it especially the further in the past it is. The second is I have come to realize how very little sense others are making after a few drinks. When I am around friends and they are drinking, and I am not, the whole scene often becomes nearly unbearable after a few hours. Were the conversations when I was drinking as boring and banal as these discussions now seem to be by about 9 PM and a couple bottles of wine later? What is pronounced with great gusto as profound after having had a couple drinks really isn’t as erudite as it might seem sober!

When it comes to shopping this falls into the category of “didn’t get that gay gene either” for me, sort of like Opera I guess. When I think of shopping I know that can apply to all sorts of stuff but clothes come to mind. I have never been much of a clothes’ horse as any one who knows me can attest and in part I blame the fact that I am really quite colorblind. Oh and I am quite a lazy fuck really and spending time searching for clothing that matches and in fashion falls into the category of watching paint dry.

These days comfort takes preference always and that means loose fitting shirts and pants with an elastic waistband. I haven’t worn a belt in years. My work life can happen in scrubs, the greatest medical invention of all time. I really only wear scrub pants everywhere, that is except when sleeping. I have slept nude since college. I learned the freedom and joy of nude sleeping from a straight college roommate my first year in the dorms when he would most mornings wake up having kicked off his covers and sporting a delightfully erect penis – good morning indeed.

Again thanks to years of HIV meds and the resulting metabolic syndrome I have an inordinate amount of belly fat. Before you say just put down the Ben and Jerry’s I would gladly point out my skinny face, extremities and less than bubbly butt. I am not really overweight at all it is just a distribution nightmare.

In an attempt to try and further weave in the element of impermanence to this piece I am going to delve into what was truly an existential crisis I had last week after reading a piece on global warming a Buddhist writer named Zhiwa Woodbury had posted on a great site called ECOBUDDHISM : http://www.ecobuddhism.org
Despite the snow in Denver in the middle of May, not a particularly unusual occurrence actually, a long list of really unassailable facts presented by Woodbury results in his final conclusion, which is that “the great anthropocentric dying is upon us – and our condition is terminal.”

After reading his piece I was nearly overcome with a sense of hopelessness. A very unusual feeling for me since I have been at least partially successful at incorporating that whole Buddhist theme that we really need to focus on the moment and that pondering the future or even sillier the past is really just a recipe for suffering.

I have for quite sometime believed that the human race is going to be a short lived evolutionary digression but that Gaia, life in some form, would persist until perhaps the sun burns itself out in a few more billion years. Part of what bummed me out so about the ECOBUDDHISM piece was his strong case for the whole show unraveling in just a few short decades perhaps while I am still alive. Again, still a strange reaction on my part especially in light of the fact that I have lived with HIV for more than 30 years now and much of the past 25 year spent working in an AIDS clinic. I have looked death in the face more times than I have cared to and somehow managed to keep my head above water throughout it all. I need to explore and write on this further so you can expect more tortured and twisted topic manipulation on my part as a form of psychotherapy at Story Telling.

I guess I just find it incredibly sad that this beautiful planet and our incredibly unlikely existence on it are so being disrespected. Perhaps that is the inescapable nature of being human at this stage of our evolution: if we only had a few more millennia to get our act together. There is plenty of blame to go around and I’ll accept my share. My personal, really rather pathetic response to the impending sixth great extinction seems to be turning down the thermostat, driving a fuel efficient car, walking whenever I can, recycling, oh, and of course less shopping.

May, 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.
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Wisdom by Pat Gourley

When looking at the definition of the word “wisdom”  -‘having or showing experience, knowledge and
good judgment’ – I have to honestly say it seems not much of that applies to me
at age 65. Perhaps real wisdom will come in the decades after 65 if I am lucky
enough to experience them. I am though relatively content with where I am with
how I move in the world and my overall view of it despite the fact that I don’t
appear to be offering up much to the eventual survival of the species.
I do think though I have a bit of wisdom incorporated into my
nursing work and I do believe that a level of true compassion, as opposed to
the often politically correct ‘idiot compassion’, has over four decades been
slowly ripened and gets expressed in perhaps actually helping the folks seeking
health care I run into these days. This involves an approach I really started
to only hone in the early 1990’s in the AIDS Clinic at Denver Health and
supported by the philosophical writings of my favorite nursing theorist
Margaret Newman. I have I think shared this quote from Newman’s work in the
past but here it is again: “The responsibility of the nurse is not to make
people well, or to prevent their getting sick, but to assist people to
recognize the power that is within them to move to higher levels of
consciousness”.
A recent example of this in practice is offering to take
certain select friends to see the documentary Fed Up currently playing at the Mayan Theatre. Rather than
continued harping at them about how their diet is fueling their metabolic
syndromes and in certain case frank diabetes, I am simply facilitating their
exposure to this wonderful film and maybe some of it will hit home and get
incorporated into changes in their diets. Though an after movie stop at Gigi’s
Cupcakes at 6th and Grant makes me wonder if I didn’t just piss away
a ten dollar movie ticket and in the interest of full disclosure that would be
my ten dollar ticket I am talking about. Hey, when it comes to taking direction
from almost any nurse it is best not to do what we do but rather do what we
say. Or perhaps more in the spirit of Margaret Newman look at where we are
pointing to and see what might be over there for you.
I’d like to change gears a bit here and turn my focus from
cupcakes to acronyms and an application to today’s topic of wisdom. Our Story
telling Group is part of the S-A-G-E activities offered by the Center. SAGE is
an acronym that stands for “Service and Advocacy for GLBT Elders”. That is
pretty much a big snooze as far as I am concerned. I would much rather have us
referred to as “sages” all small letters and no acronym even alluded to. The
acronym, SAGE, also seems to heavily imply that we are a group in need of
advocacy and services. There is certainly no denying that some of us queer elders
are in need of both service and advocacy at least at certain times during our
golden years. However, it is much more appealing to me to be recognized as a
sage with much to offer the larger queer world than a member of a group called
SAGE focused on providing advocacy and service.
One definition I ‘Googled’ on for a sage is someone “having,
showing or indicating great wisdom”. Well I think its time we all accepted that
definition and put on the mantle of sage. Again to cop a bit to Margaret Newman
I think many of us around this table are very capable of helping our LGBT
brothers and sisters to recognize the power that is within them to move to
higher levels of consciousness.
One form this might take is embedded in idea that Phil and I
have been lightly kicking around for sometime and that might be an e-book
perhaps, an anthology of stories from this group from those of you who have
come to openly queer consciousness in your SAGE years.
There has been so much wisdom expressed in many stories I
have heard here but I am often most moved and impressed with those coming out
stories being shared by folks who have come out in the last 10-15 years and
much more recently for a few. These stories would I think be a great benefit
and succor to those other elders contemplating this same leap. There is an old
Zen saying: ‘leap and a net shall appear”. What a great gift of a net these
stories could be for someone deciding at 50 or 60 or 70 to come out as queer.
I have shared many of my own coming out experiences primarily
from the late sixties but really how much would a 60 year old today relate to
my crazy ass stories of fucking with my high school mentor in the biology lab
of a Catholic prep school on a Good Friday afternoon no less. Rather people
relating stories of coming to queerness out of long and often very happy
heterosexual unions often resulting in offspring during the swirling years of
gay liberation, AIDS, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and marriage equality would most
likely resonate much more than tales of hallucinogenic trips at the bathhouses
of the 1970’s.
So in closing I would like to anoint us all as the true sages
we are and push us a bit to start sharing our deep wisdom about the many areas
of life we have occupied, particularly the queer corners.
© 22 June
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.
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Forbidden Fruits by Pat Gourley

“ First they ignore
you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you…then you win”

Mahatma Gandhi
This famous quote from Gandhi seems to aptly sum up our LGBT history
as society’s forbidden fruits.  If you
Google the word fruit and then add ‘slang’ to the search the Wikipedia post is
quite worth the read. The word “fruit” as derogative slang for LGBT folks has a
long rather bizarre and cruel if not at times a hilarious history.  In the spirit of making these stories
personal tales I won’t go into much of what is said about the word except for
one example that is simply too delicious to not share.
Believe it or not the Canadian Civil Service used what they
called the “Fruit Machine” to detect infiltrating queers especially into the
Canadian Mounties. The “machine” would often consist of exposing recruits to
erotic male imagery or sexually charged homoerotic words and then attempt to
measure the response of prospective candidates. I think it was just nervous
twitching, sweating and flushing responses and that electrodes were not hooked
up to a penis. This ‘fruit machine’ was actually in use from 1950-1973!
It would be egotiscal thinking on my part to try and remember
when I was someone else’s ‘forbidden fruit’. I suppose though that I might have
fit that bill somewhat in the 1970’s when married men looking for a quick
noon-hour fuck pursued me at least for a few hours at the bathes. I was
certainly forbidden to them and definitely a fruit.
For me personally my tastes in forbidden fruit-like things of
a sexual nature have always drifted toward the leather and S/M scenes but I
must say I have only nibbled at the edges around those communities. I was
certainly headed that way in the early 1980’s but that whole HIV thing kind of
slowed new avenues of sexual exploration for me. Though I suspect I could be
easily seduced even today with the promise of some creative verbal abuse and a
good ass whipping, pretty vanilla I know but I am still a novice in this area
of ‘forbidden fruit’.
To shift gears here rather rapidly I read a piece recently
from the British journal The Spectator
where a London Physician, rather provocatively I suppose, said that he would
these days rather have HIV than diabetes. I think he was actually serious and
gave several examples of how well controlled HIV was actually less of a health
threat that diabetes which he described as not only a chronic but also a
progressive illness. His point overall being that HIV alone is now considered
to simply be chronic and not progressive or interfering with living a normal
lifespan. For the record I do not believe that Type 2 diabetes is necessarily progressive
either.
So what the hell you may ask is the rather loose association
I am making with forbidden fruit. Well, and bare with me here, I find it very
personally ironic and quite unjust that I am now looking at pre-diabetes with a
recent HbA1c of 6.0. That mind you after well over thirty years of HIV
infection and the resulting metabolic derangement I lay mostly at the feet of
HIV meds, even as effective as they are at controlling the virus. As the
Grateful Dead so often sang, “if the thunder don’t get you the lightning will”.
So forbidden fruit for me has left the carnal realms of the flesh and moved
into actually eating fruit, or more accurately drinking fruit juice.  Juice is now something forbidden if I want to
try and control the metabolic syndrome fueling my early diabetes with diet and
exercise rather than with medicines.
I have become in the past couple years even more of a
voracious reader of diet and diet theory related books. My heroes being many of
the leading vegans, Neil Barnard, Rip Esselstyn, T. Colin Campbell and some of
the less strident diet advocates such as Robert Lustig and Mark Hyman. All of
these authors, several being noted physicians, believe Type 2 diabetes is
reversible with diet and exercise. The diet they espouse of course is not
standard American fare and is full of forbidden items not just fruit juice.
Fruit juice, even fresh squeezed for example, has as much sugar as the same
amount of Coke or Pepsi. I needed to come to the realization that my pancreas
and liver don’t give a fuck where the sugar comes from. It is the same poisons
whether honey, high fructose corn syrup, Agave nectar or table sugar.
My personal guru around things diet these days is the aforementioned Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist from UCSF, whose excellent
book Fat Chance lays it all out in
plain English with of course rather long lists of the forbidden. His advice for
controlling metabolic syndrome and its evil sequelae can be summed-up easily: we
just need to eat real food. He suggests never buying anything with label on it.
Another of his pearls is that we have a choice in life, we can be fat or we can
fart. His reference to farting of course is related to the need for lots of
fiber in our diet, which only comes from real, unprocessed food.
So, for me now, in my mid-sixties, what have become forbidden
fruits are certainly much different than what they were in 1979. Ah, for the
simpler days when the choice was not between farting and unwanted visceral fat
but rather will it be an afternoon delight at the tubs or perhaps an evening
spent in a sling in the basement of dear friends. 
© April 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.
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Lavender University by Pat Gourley

My involvement in the Gay Community Center began back in 1976. My first volunteer duties started very shortly after it opened at its first location in the 1400 block of Lafayette. This was an old brick two story duplex that I think was owned at the time by the Unitarian Church on the corner and the Center was renting the space from them. My main duties initially involved phone volunteering and coordinating other phone volunteers along with building our database of referrals, which we kept on a single Rolodex! A majority of our calls were for social referrals to local bars and bathes and the emerging number of local LGBT organizations, and also not a few requests for gay-sensitive therapists and health care providers. We referred men frequently to the Men’s Coming Out Group still in existence today, which met early on in the Unitarian Church itself, their library I think.

1976 was the year I started nursing school and eventually did my Community Health rotation at the Center. One of my nursing student activities was participating, as a tester, in a weekly STD clinic at the Center on Friday evenings. I am not sure why it wasn’t on a Monday rather than a Friday since the business would have probably been more brisk after a busy weekend in the late seventies, the age of thriving bathhouses. These clinics involved a fair amount of counseling on STD’s and how you got them and how to possibly avoid getting them. Unfortunately, though, we gay men rather cavalierly thought of STD’s as just the cost of doing business and not something to particularly strive to avoid. We drew blood for syphilis and did throat, penis and rectal cultures for gonorrhea. HIV was still several years away.

My Center volunteer activities drifted from phone work and coordination to milking penises and swabbing buttholes to the much more highbrow efforts involved with a program of the Center called Lavender University. Where or from whom the name came has been lost in the mist but it was a queer take off at the time on the very successful Denver Free University. I was a member of the Center’s University Staff from its inception until probably early 1984 when The Center kind of imploded around a variety of issues including extreme tension between some community-based organizations, the tumultuous resignation of Carol Lease and the demands and urgency of the emerging AIDS epidemic. I do believe much of this tumult was fueled in no small part at the time by often-blatant sexism and an at times over the top focus on the perceived supremacy of the penis within the gay male community but that is a topic for another time.

Our quasi mission statement read as follows: “Lavender University of the Rockies is a free school by and for the lesbian and gay communities of Colorado. It is dedicated to the free exchange of ideas, to the examination of diverse points of view and to free speech without censorship.” In addition to being on the University staff I was an occasional instructor offering often erudite classes including one called: Evolving Queer Spirituality or The Potential Significance of Paganism For Gay Men further subtitled “might Christianity just be paganism with the gayness taken out.” In only three of the course catalogs I managed to keep I also see I offered a class on the Tarot and one year a November 1st celebration of the Harvest Sabbat. Yeah, what can I say this was certainly my “witch-phase?”

The most fulfilling repeated offering I made though was one for gay men and involved a series of writings we would read and dissect by gay visionaries including Edward Carpenter, Gerald Heard, Harry Hay, Mitch Walker, and Don Kilhefner among others. These offerings were usually weekly and involved spirited group discussion around that week’s selected piece and food. Most of the sessions were held at the Center or my house up in Five Points. Many of the attendees were budding radical fairies and some friendships were made that last until this day.

These were probably the peak years of what I will rather presumptuously and ostentatiously call my Queer-Radical-Phase. These years of my life involved hours and hours of community work and play with many other often very receptive comrades in arms. It was a very exciting and challenging time for me personally and I think for the larger LGBT community, the world was truly becoming our oyster. It was constantly being reinforced for me on a daily basis that Harry Hay was right-on that we were a distinct people and a real cultural minority.

It is my belief that it was the slowing emerging AIDS nightmare that derailed this truly grassroots revolution and really forced a refocusing of our energies into survival. The tensions created by that little retrovirus locally nearly led to the end of The Gay and Lesbian Community Center and certainly to lots of soul searching and critique of the rich expressions of much of the gay male world we had come to know and love in the 1970’s.

I like to fantasize that if AIDS had not come along we would have seen a much more radical queer community and force for seminal social change than we are today. The community might have led a nationwide revolt that would have tossed Ronald Reagan out of office in 1984 and reversed the countries unfortunate slide into oligarchy. Perhaps igniting a re-election of Jimmy Carter and a return of the solar panels to the roof of the White House. We might well have been in the vanguard of the dissolution of traditional marriage, replacing it with a much more polymorphous and rich arrangement of human interaction and loving support.

A severe curtailing and redefinition of the American military into a force truly devoted to peace on earth would have been another goal. Instead of the race to the local recruiters office for those with no other economic choice everyone would do two years or more of service to the community that would have been of great benefit to the entire world and health of the planet. But perhaps I am putting way too much on our plate or …. hmm … maybe I did do too much LSD in the 70’s.

© April 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.

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Where Was I in the Sixties by Pat Gourley

May 2014. Pat Gourley

In hindsight the sixties were clearly the decade of my most dramatic and far reaching spiritual, political and social changes. I went from being the “best little boy in the world” in 1960, a devout virginal Catholic altar boy living on a bucolic rural Indiana farm to a card carrying member of the Democratic Socialist Party, a connoisseur of good LSD, a practicing homosexual (yes, I was still “practicing” at getting it right in 1969) and a budding Dead Head intent on avoiding a trip to Vietnam.

In retrospect I guess I was lucky my head didn’t explode. My hair went from a buzz cut with just a swipe of Brylcream to a shoulder length mass of reddish brown curls. My world in 1960 had great order, comfort and certainty that was only beginning to have cracks in it due no doubt to my budding sexuality, which seemed to be very much out of step with other boys my age. There was a God in heaven and all would be taken care of in the end. Well that worldview had certainly had gone out the window by 1969.

From 1960 to 1965 the event that sticks out most was that fall November day in 1963 and the Kennedy assassination. I clearly recall the day and the event. We were let out early from class that day. I was attending a Catholic High School in Michigan City, a nearly thirty mile one-way daily ride back and forth that my parents, at great economic sacrifice, felt was necessary I suppose to keep me out of the clutches of the Protestant heathens in the local public schools. The day of Kennedy’ s assassination resulted in having to spend a few lonely and frightening hours in the Michigan City Public Library before I could catch the bus home. It was not a school bus but a greyhound bus-type of Transit Company that went within a mile of my home. I would be left off where our country road met the highway and one of my parents, usually mom, would pick me up.

The Kennedy assassination was a particularly hard blow to my parents. I mean on some level I think they thought his death was a conspiracy since an Irish Catholic in the White House really was an insult to many who had a different version of social order and that could not be tolerated. We did have a T.V. and were of course glued to it for days, so much for the Pope coming over to take on the reins of the U.S. government.

The most significant event of the decade for me personally though was in March of 1965 when my family sold our small Indiana farm and moved to another farm northwest of Chicago just outside of a small town called Woodstock. It was this move that facilitated many of the most impacting events in my life. Many of which I have written about or at least alluded to for this Story Telling Group.

It was this transplantation that would result in my first sex with another man one Good Friday afternoon in 1967 in the biology lab of the Catholic High School I was attending, the beginning of an affair that would last into the early 1970’s. It was also while attending this high school that I encountered the truly radical Holy Cross nun who would forever change my political and worldview and to whom I am eternally indebted. A decade later I met Harry Hay who was always admonishing me to look carefully at my most dearly held “unexamined assumptions”, but it was this little nun who really got me doing that in very life changing ways starting in 1966. She was my muse for sure encouraging me to “not trust leaders or put my money into parking meters” to badly quote Bob Dylan.

The move to Illinois also meant that I would attend the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and though this college was no Berkeley it was still much more progressive than many of the public Universities in Indiana. There I fell in with the Democratic Socialist Party leader Michael Harrington, the renowned author of Poverty in America, and became the dyed-in-the-wool socialist I remain today, only now with more of a small “s”.

It was in 1968 that I moved out of the dorm, discovered LSD and met a bunch of hippies with whom I lived collectively in a variety of settings for years to come including a relocation to Denver. They were the dastardly influence of course that introduced me to the music of the Grateful Dead.

And in addition to launching my sexual life as the big homo that I am the sixties probably much more importantly provided me with a strong foundation for becoming the out proud queer man dedicated to furthering the Homosexual Agenda that I became. I owe this strong foundation in no small part to my loving parents, a great civics teacher, and a philandering old socialist and not least of all my first lover a man 20 plus years my senior. The ensuing decades have really just been a building and expansion process on the values and beliefs seared into my soul from 1960-1970. Hopefully they will carry me to a peaceful and content death satisfied that in some small way I have impacted this very transient world of ours for the better.

© May, 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.

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Camping (It Up) by Pat Gourley

I am opening here today with a short read from Larry Mitchell’s iconic The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, a few personal photos documenting just a few of my own campy experiences and a quote from someone else’s work.

“… Camp itself should almost be defined as a kind of madness, a rip in the fabric of reality that we need to reclaim in order to defeat the truly inauthentic, cynical, and deeply reactionary camp – or anti-camp – tendencies of the new world order.”
Bruce LaBruce from GLR, March-April 2014

A short definition of camp I found on Wikipedia: “Camp opposes satisfaction and seeks to challenge” seems a very appropriate definition of the gay male act of being “campy”. Camp can be a form of almost spiritual acting out sometimes in private but often as public street theatre that on the surface seems to be just silly. Not that there is anything wrong with being silly. Society could use much more silliness it seems to me.

Though being ‘campy’ is certainly not exclusively the purview of gay men we really have a corner on that market and have and continue to this day to take it to new and challenging heights. I would refer you to watch just a single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Show if you have any doubts that camp is still alive and well. I would also be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge certain Diva’s male and female, past and present who have also mastered the art of camp: Cher, Lady Gaga, Mae West, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Paul Lynde and Liberace to name just a few.

For many of us gay men the art of camp starts early and often involves dress up. Much to the consternation of my parents I am sure I would on occasion grab a couple bath towels one for my shoulders, cape-like, another around my waist skirt-like and one over my head. I would then pretend to be a nun, Sister Mary-the-something-or-other, and my several siblings and cousins would be my pupils.

Really, where the hell did that behavior come from in a little farm boy in rural Indiana in the 1950’s except from somewhere deep in my budding queer soul? Trust me I was not mimicking any role models or recruiters I was aware of. My juvenile gender-fuck drag appears to have been pretty spontaneous, I had no ‘gay uncles’ to mimic in any fashion that I was aware of. Early TV with the possible exception of Uncle Milty provided only the straightest of heterosexual role models and they were often quite sanitized and asexual. Remember Ricky and Lucy had separate beds!

One of the most powerful components of ‘camp’ involves its often-loving play with gender roles. I really think we are getting in touch with our being ‘other’ and since we usually only have the male and female as culturally defined to draw from and neither really fits we tend to mix them up in an attempt to create something that speaks more directly to us, often with startling success. The often-cruel taunts of ‘tomboy’ or ‘sissy’ really don’t begin to address the reality or do the behaviors justice.

Gender-fuck drag is a classic form of camp, something that has been around a long time and continues to survive today despite the tremendous push towards ‘respectability’ in the LGBT community. This I think sometimes get confused and mixed up even within our community with the powerfully emerging Trans community and their emerging forms of identity. They are very profoundly separate issues. It behooves everyone to appreciate and to be sensitive to the difference in the worlds of transsexual and transvestite and drag queen and gender fuckers and what each very differently involves and implies. There is also a significant amount of cross-pollination between these entities and those realities a bit much to try and get into here. It can be quite the sticky wicket and I would simply refer you to Ellen’s comments at the Academy Awards show she made to Liza Minnelli as an example of the thin ice here one can find yourself venturing onto.

Again I think I can say that much of ‘campy” behavior involves a messing with gender roles as often defined as the appropriate ones by our society. It is one of the most powerful change creating weapons we have in our arsenal in implementing the ‘gay agenda’.

© March 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.

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When I Decided to Become a Nurse by Pat Gourley

I moved to Denver in December of 1972. One memory of our initial arrival in Denver has stuck with me for all of these years and I think of it every winter. I grew up in the Snow Belt of northwest Indiana and then at the age of 16 my family moved up north of Chicago so I was quite familiar with snowy winters. A scene we witnessed one snowing morning in Denver that December was a public works truck driving down the middle of Colfax avenue with two guys in the back shoveling I assumed a salt mixture out of the back of the truck onto the street. This seemed a very strange and funny way to address snow on the streets to us and we wondered if the city had any snowplows. This did not prove to be a deal breaker however and several of us close friends moved here anyway.

My first job was in the food service department at Craig Rehab Hospital in Englewood. That only lasted about six months and then I was soon employed, in the summer of 1973, on the inpatient psychiatric ward at what was then called Denver General Hospital. We were living at the time on Elati Street just behind the new Denver General Hospital building. I was hired as a Hospital Attendant, a bit of a fancier name for ‘Orderly’ I guess. All of the attendants on the unit were male and, except for me, conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War doing their community service. We were all male I assume to provide muscle to back up the all female R.N. staff. Despite being hired as “muscle” I distinctly remember three instances of getting my lights punched out by belligerent patients, one episode involving the smashing of a glass IV bottle over my head. IV bottles did not become plastic until years later.

The lasting impact of that job was not however a fist coming my way but came from the several great women I worked with. The ones who made the most lasting impression on me were R.N.’s. All were very dynamic women and my eventual philosophy of nursing was greatly shaped by these dynamic women. Several of these nurses were actually involved in a lawsuit in the early 1970’s asking that women get equal pay for equal work. They unfortunately lost that suit with the Judge actually saying in his decision that to give women equal pay for equal work would be much to disruptive to the very fabric of society.

I went from inpatient psychiatry after two years to a street alcohol detox unit down at 17th and Blake, years before it became the high-end LoDo neighborhood it is today. This street facility was pre-Denver Cares. We had ten detox beds and allowed a three-day stay to get sober with a more extended rehab-option of one month I think in our upstairs dorm. Most of the guys would leave for day labor and I suspect most often a little nip of this or that. Those who stayed behind were often subjected to lectures I pulled together on the health effects of too much alcohol with tobacco still getting a free ride back then.

This was frontier medicine at its best. No air conditioning, poor ventilation and only ten beds that really only filled up when the weather was bad. We usually did not call an ambulance until the third withdrawal seizure. Oh and we were right next-door to a liquor store. In the winter the predominately men on the streets were always hustling us for change to be able to buy a “wine-blanket” to make it through the night.

I converted my TB test in those days and ended up on meds for about a year. Relax; any cough today is not TB but just phlegm. This again was probably related to the lousy ventilation in the place. The back dorm room did have a window but to keep that open was to invite folks to crawl in or out. Also the window looked out on a vacant lot often the scene of raucous parties with small fires and occasionally the roasting of a stray dog over the fire for a late night meal.

All the guys we took in had to be at least a few hours out from their last drink. We started with stripping off their most often very funky clothes and getting them to shower with Kwell lotion and then into hospital garb. The issuing of hospital pajamas often, but not always, slowed down the urge to escape after sobering up and the shakes started to set in. The relatively few women, on what was then called skid row, would be taken to the hospital for detox.

The nurse I worked with on the evening shift, 1500-2300, was an old army nurse who drove up from Colorado Springs named Ruth. She sat at the desk facing the street with a bench on its side blocking the door to keep rowdy drunks out often trying to bum one of the endless cigarettes she chained smoked on the job – this was 1975 remember. One particularly warm summer night we had a drive by shooting. The bullet missed Ruth and the rest of us inside but I can still hear her yelling to hit the deck because of the incoming fire. The gunfire was most certainly meant for someone on the street and we were just unfortunately in the way of someone who was obviously a lousy shot.

These were also my peak coming out years and I was in no mood to take shit off straight assholes but guys still drunk did call me a fairy on more than one occasion. Our clients were often very polite and non-threatening when sober. Sweet guys lots of them really. So, despite the homophobia, having to dispose of lice infested smelly clothing, the positive TB test, getting my lights punched out on occasion, helping still often drunk men shower (nothing fun about that really!), Ruth’s endless chain smoking, another older male attendant who said he preferred taking a good shit any day to sex, and the crappy pay for nurses I decided to throw caution to the wind and enrolled in the University of Colorado School of Nursing in 1976. It only took two years to get my bachelor’s degree since I had already accumulated well over 120 hours of semester credit at the University of Illinois much of it in the sciences. No degree though to show for it, I simply could not fit that in with antiwar demonstrations, the support of Caesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union, the occasion anti-war riot and endless picketing and leafleting. Oh and of course a fair amount of sex, drugs and rock and roll didn’t help either.

So with much encouragement from the several very strong female R.N.’s in my life I decided to become a nurse in the spring of 1976 and the rest is history. To this day I can be found on many a Tuesday or Thursday working a 12 hour shift in a local Urgent Care Unit with I might add a bunch of great nurses mostly still women.

© March 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.

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Competition by Pat Gourley

Harry, John, and Pat  ( Photo taken 1983 in L.A.)

On first meeting Harry Hay and John Burnside at my home here in Denver back in 1978 one of the first of many teachings Harry attempted to impart to me was his theory of Subject-Subject consciousness. Specifically how this related to gay men but he could extrapolate to all queers when asked to elaborate. This form of consciousness was of course in opposition if you will to Subject-Object consciousness and the form of relating that invokes. This is what he considered to be the heterosexual male paradigm defining almost all of their interactions, an endless competitive game of domination and submission.

Basically Subject-Subject implies the ability to relate to another sentient being as someone equal with you and not as an object. This is something I have, with varying degrees of success, attempted to aspire to in my life certainly in personal friendships, with lovers and professionally. It is a simple idea really with rather profound implications for the human race. What sort of world would we have if we all looked on each other in a subject-subject manner as opposed to subject-object?

So why you may ask do queers have a leg up, as Hay theorized, with this subject-subject business as opposed to heterosexuals? I do think many heterosexuals do acquire this level of consciousness, but it doesn’t come quite as naturally to them as it does to us. Hay thought we had an innate tendency to this form of relating and that it first comes to fruition in our initial internal coming out process. Let me quote from Radically Gay (Roscoe,editor:1996) and a piece written by Hay in 1979: “I suppose I was about eleven when I began first thinking about, then fantasizing about, him! And, of course I perceived him as subject. I knew that all the other kids around me thought of girls as sex objects to be manipulated, to be lied to in order to get them to “give in” and to be otherwise (when the boys were together without them) treated with contempt. And strangely, the girls seemed to think of the boys as objects, too. But HE whom I would love would be another ME. We wouldn’t manipulate each other – we would share –and we would always understand each other completely and forever.” Harry could be quite the optimistic romantic.

Some might argue that subject-object relating is the natural course of evolution, the survival of the fittest. I think that this evolutionary critique can be debunked but I am way to lazy for that here. Let me just say that I do think humans are evolving, sadly probably not nearly fast enough for our eventual survival as a species, but at our most altruistic best we are moving slowly, kicking and screaming, towards a subject-subject form of relating to one another. I think an argument can be made we queers are in the vanguard of this evolutionary trend. A real test for us will be if we can bring this consciousness into the newly opened realms of marriage and military service. A daunting task since these are two institutions that are traditionally built on domination and submission.

Which brings me back to the topic of the day “competition”. I guess I view competition as perhaps the most odious form of Subject-Object intercourse. There has always got to be a looser. Nobody really believes the old adage “it not’s whether you win or loose but how you play the game’. Ask any Broncos fan.

Let me share with you an anecdote from my professional life in which I have strived, again not always successfully, to relate in a subject-subject manner. Unfortunately the doctor-patient and very much so even the nurse-patient relationship is one that is in our culture inherently subject-object. One small way I would try to counteract this imbalance was to never have the clients I was seeing be sitting on the exam table when I came in but rather in the chair next to the table so we could more easily relate eye-to-eye. Putting someone on an exam table and especially putting them there half naked, and perhaps leaving them for 20 minutes before you show up is a power move, a not so subtle game of domination and submission. This is even more daunting to do these days since many exam rooms have a computer screen on the table and the exam table behind that. Kaiser though I admit has addressed that somewhat and has moveable computer stations that do allow for more face-to-face contact, which is if you can get the provider to look at you and not the screen.

Let me close with a quote from my favorite nursing theorist, Margaret Newman, who was all about subject-subject relating when it came to the “nurse-client” relationship: “ The joy of nursing lies in being fully present with clients in the disorganization and uncertainty of their lives – an unconditional acceptance of the unpredictable, paradoxical nature of life.” I have no idea if she was a lesbian or not but I will apply my universal rule to her also and assume everyone is queer until I know otherwise. Certainly her strong nods to subject-subject consciousness and her noncompetitive approach to the nurse-client relationship give her a head start in the area.

March 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.

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Favorite Literary Character by Pat Gourley

Anna Madrigal (a girl and a man)

My first trip to San Francisco was in 1979 with a friend named Phil. I met Phil I recall through the Gay Community Center on Lafayette Street a few years earlier. His story of coming to the Center was one of the classic coming out stories I remember from those years. He had recently been discharged from the Navy and had wound up in Denver. His home was rural Ohio and his Catholic family very conservative and probably not fond of queers but totally unaware that there own son was one of those people.

Phil related to me some years later that he had first actually seen me at a party and thought I was the butchest thing he had ever seen when I walked in wearing my winter leather jacket – that was, he said empathically, until I opened my mouth and the whole masculine illusion evaporated in a Nellie mist. I loved him despite of this tacky and very snarky story.

Phil had apparently walked around the block at the Center many times before getting up the nerve to come in. There he met several others and quickly became a fast friend and member of our budding community. We remained close until his death in August of 1994 from AIDS. He died at home in the arms of his true love. I had been summoned to get there quickly but walked in just minutes after Phil took his leave.

Our trip to San Francisco was magical in that I totally fell for that City and all its magic. Phil had been there before while in the Navy. I believe several times – Fleet Week perhaps – though that I don’t know that for sure. He showed me all the sights and sounds and we sampled many different tastes.

Marin Headlands (Titled “Oz”)  2012

This year of 1979 was momentous for me for many reasons but one little thing that happened was I was introduced to the work of Armistead Maupin. Tales of the City was published in 1978 and was essentially his columns on life in the City syndicated in the San Francisco Chronicle. The stories consisted of an eclectic cast of characters whose lives crisscrossed through that novel and eight more to follow culminating in the most recent release The Days of Anna Madrigal. Good friends of mine owned the local Gay Book store and I suspect that is how I got turned onto the book.

The novel’s stories and many adventures often revolved around a straight female character named Mary Ann Singleton. She, soon on arrival in San Francisco, was living at 28 Barbary Lane in a large multi-story dwelling on Russian Hill managed by one Anna Madrigal. My initial visit to the City and my budding connection with a few Radical Fairies from the Bay area provided a modicum of familiarity with the characters, adventures and environs described in Tales of the City.

So as it turns out Anna was a male to female transsexual, pot-growing/smoking landlady who was mentor to all who came through 28 Barbary Lane. Her early years were spent growing up in a house of ill repute in Winnemucca Nevada, in an establishment run by her mother.

I was certainly very familiar with and predisposed to like her character from the first book on but this was cemented when the first three books of the series were immortalized in a PBS (originating in the U.K.) and Showtime miniseries in which Anna was played by the flawlessly cast Olympia Dukakis. These are available on DVD and highly recommended if you haven’t seen them, but do read the books first.

I think it is safe to say that LGBT literature and literature in general is bereft of positive, powerful and dynamic Transsexual characters. Though I suppose one could argue that Maupin’s books don’t fall into the category of great literature, whatever the fuck that is, they are much loved, iconic tomes in the pantheon of queer literature documenting our generation. I certainly enjoyed reading them and this was magnified and has been enhanced with my growing knowledge over the decades of the City of San Francisco starting back in 1979 thanks to my friend Phil.

What I would have not given to have my shit together enough to have moved to San Francisco in the late seventies and to then have fallen under the spell of a powerful female mentor like Anna Madrigal. I downloaded the last in the series –The Days of Anna Madrigal – to my Kindle this week and ripped through it in a couple days. Lots of loose ends about Anna get tied up and the ending is really wonderful and plays out in the only place it could really, at Burning Man in the Nevada desert.

I think Phil liked and read Maupin’s books and I am sad that he can’t be around to read the final book in the series. Who knows it might have provided the impetus for a group of us to get our act together and attend Burning Man. We would fit right in and I am quite sure that the entire festival owes a significant debt of gratitude to the Radical Fairies whose influence seems stamped all over the event particularly as it is described in vivid detail by Maupin in his latest work.

Let me close by saying that I think the only real radical juice left in the LGBTQI movement is coming from the T’s. The word radical, as Harry Hay pointed out to me about 10,000 times, means, “to the root.” If the “gay agenda” ever had a truly revolutionary component to it, it was our willingness to turn gender on its head and shake it all up real good and see what would come out on top so to speak. These days many of us G’s, L’s and B’s seem quite caught up in imitating the dominant hetero-defined roles of male and female. Perhaps more Anna Madrigals will come along to finally lead us out of the hetero-dominated wilderness and our true agenda will come to pass.

March, 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.