Tag: Pat Gourley

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Revelation–The Key to Our Revolution by Pat Gourley

Yes, Dorothy, there is a homosexual agenda. It is not, however, fueled by the paranoid fantasies of the homophobic that we are in the business of recruitment. No it is something much more powerful than that. Our true agenda is one of personal revelation and the ripples of awesome change that naturally occurs as a result.

If you pull the religious mysticism crap out of the definition of “revelation” what you are left with at the root is “the revealing or disclosing of some form of truth or knowledge.” It does seem to me that the coming-out process is one of the purest and certainly most powerful forms of revelation.

Another “R” word that I think is closely tied in here with our true agenda is revolution. A lesser definition of this word but one quite applicable to my beliefs here states that revolution is “a dramatic and wide-ranging change in the way something works or is organized or in people’s ideas about it.”

Homosexuality it seems is certainly undergoing such a major paradigm shift in how it is perceived by the larger society. Oh sure Neanderthal pockets of reluctance to accept the inevitable still exist as very dramatically demonstrated by certain members of the state legislature’s of Kansas and Arizona and a couple of African nations to say nothing of the Russian State. The crazies in our neighboring state to the east are certainly being motivated by a sense of desperation. They have to invoke a convoluted sense of victimhood; we queers are impinging on their religious freedoms by asking them to bake us a cake. How ridiculous is that? They can play with poisonous snakes all they want just keep them away from the kids and I’ll bake my own damn cake, thank you.

The desperation of these folks is indicative that they now realize they have really lost the battle. The reason the scales have tipped so much in our favor is very clearly due to “revelation” on our part. I am firm believer that is has been the individual coming out process repeated and repeated millions of times over the past nearly fifty years that has created this tipping point. The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the acceptance of gay professional athletes, queers on TV and all the favorable marriage equality rulings are the result not the cause of this dramatic national “sea change”. And let me add I am not speaking about the coming out of the famous sports person, politician, TV or movie personality as the fuel that has sustained this change, but the coming out of the very average queer in every corner of the world. Revealing often with gut wrenching courage their true selves to friends, co-workers and family.

I wrote a piece in August of 1983 titled “Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are”. It can be found in its original form on my web site www.pjgourley.com, in the Radical Gay Politics section. In a moment of laziness this weekend I thought I might just bring that piece to read but I have rested on my laurels perhaps a few too many times in this group by reading old shit and besides I kind of felt the need to rant a bit.

This article from 1983 was a feeble attempt on my part to try and rally the troops if you will and goose along the need for continuing our waves of revelation that had marked the 1970’s in particular. This was the early days of the AIDS epidemic with fear starting to really creep into the core of the gay male psyche; doubts in the minds of some that maybe the homophobes were right all along and nature was finally going to take care of this “homosexual problem.”

My exhortation was not to retreat into our closets but to start coming out in even greater force. I open the article quoting a Gallop Poll cited in Newsweek magazine from August of 1983 back in a time when Newsweek was actually read by large numbers of people. One question asked in the poll was “Do you have any friends or acquaintances who are homosexual?” 26% answered “Yes” while 74% answered “No.” There was clearly still lots of revealing to do on our part. With AIDS just beginning to creep into the national consciousness and no causative agent yet identified, Jerry Falwell was calling for the quarantining of gay men and I quote “like cattle with brucellosis.”

As it turned out though the community didn’t need my feeble cheerleading with the LGBTQ response to the epidemic being in the long run phenomenally community building and empowering, tragic and horrific as it was.

Harvey Milk
Photo taken in SF Public Library in2010

My personal efforts at “revelation” in this area of my own queerness started in 1967 and after several fitful starts and stops really took off in 1976 with my involvement with an organization called the Gay Community Center of Colorado located on Lafayette street just a block and a half from our current location. So here I am 38 years later still hanging out in this local community center. I ask myself what at this stage of the game I could possibly still have to reveal? Well you see my own personal growth and the ongoing ripening of my own queerness continues to be enhanced by listening to all the revelations here each week and sharing a few of my own. Love and hugs to you all!

© February
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.

Read more of Patrick’s blogs at www.pjgourley.com

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Gay Music by Pat Gourley

Well where to start with this one? I am gay and I do listen to music but I don’t think that imparts any element of queerness to the music I listen to or that any of that music is making me into any bigger queen than I am already. Other than many Furthur CD’s from the past year’s shows that I listen too sort of endlessly in my car I am a frequent user of Pandora.

My current favorite artists on Pandora are anyone Motown connected, Warren Zevon, Van Morrison, and Bob Dylan, despite his recent obnoxious commercial during the Super Bowl for Chrysler. Dylan has always admonished his listeners not to ascribe any beliefs or agenda he may or may not have in regards to his music so I take this as license to attach whatever meaning I want to his tunes and I do.

Jerry Garcia was once asked why the Dead did so many covers of other people’s music, often Dylan songs, and his response was “because we are lazy.” I also am basically pretty lazy and Dylan’s music has always provided me over the years with a cheap high to get my politically correct righteousness up and running.

I have said on many occasions that I am missing the gay gene that one needs to appreciate Opera for example or even much of classical music though I do listen to a modest amount of classical music on Pandora. Listening to Opera however requires coercion and medication to happen, my apologies to all the Opera fans around this table.

I have been influenced greatly over the years though by several Opera lovers. This includes Harry Hay who is described in part by Will Roscoe in the introduction to Radically Gay as “an opera queen who has mastered Marxist dialectics…” More than his apparent love for opera I was aware of Harry’s research and genuine fondness for European Folk Music and his numerous attempts over the years to get me to try and introduce the singing of folk rounds into our Denver Radical Fairie activities. He was certainly aware of my fondness for the Grateful Dead but I think he assumed this was just a phase I would eventually outgrow. Or perhaps he had at some point heard my extreme inability to carry a tune of any sort and he thought best to leave well enough alone in this regard.

An interesting queer historical tidbit I will share is that Roscoe, in Radically Gay again, attributes Hay’s research into folk music as a direct contributor to the development of his ‘gay folks are a cultural minority thesis’ that helped launch the Mattachine society. Hay believed that a folk song could convey information beyond just the lyrics. The songs could also serve as vehicles for communicating about repression when the cultures and people involved were under someone’s heel.

Pat Gourley & Will Roscoe
Photo by Alan M. in October 2009

Harry’s favorite example of this was a folk tune used in 1622 by Dutch freedom fighters to help recruit and organize disparate villagers who did not speak the same language. The name of this tune was “Bergen op Zoom.” The Dutch resistance in World War II used the same song also. Harry brought this folk tune to the fledgling Mattachine [Society] in 1950 and the group adapted it in their membership initiation ceremony. I have not had much luck in finding an English translation but have brought a copy in Dutch I believe and perhaps someone here can help. For those who might have more interest in this connection Hay made between folk music and queer identity I would refer you to Radically Gay (Will Roscoe, editor: 1996) specifically the chapter titled “Music…man’s oldest science of organization”.

Harry never gave up though on the potential power of music, folk in particular, as a form of dialectics in action. A way to facilitate communication between Fairies that could lead to further exploration and discovery as to our true natures. In fact he was sending me copies of Rounds for gay men to use when getting together socially well into the 1990’s as I recall. I will refrain from launching into the many discussions I had over the years with Harry and his partner John that addressed the dialectic method of discourse as a means of eventually reaching consensus. Harry was always about consensus and shunned the rule of the majority. He thought queer folk and fairies in particular were potentially very adept at consensus and that one way to set the stage for such communication was to gayly sing Rounds, something I think he felt was an intrinsic form of gay music.

© February 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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All My Exes Live In Texas by Pat Gourley

Actually none of my exes live in Texas, are from Texas or to my knowledge ever had any significant connection to Texas. I have been there only once. That was an overnight stay in Dallas for teaching purposes on a new HIV drug called ddc. We were beginning a study with it at the AIDS clinic where I worked. I believe the year was 1990 or 1991. I seem to recall that this overnighter was in August and other than staying in a very plush hotel it was the throat grabbing heat and humidity that I remember best. The short trip from cab to inside the hotel made me think ‘so this is what hell is like.’

For those of you who have not seen the Dallas Buyers Club, currently playing at the Esquire Theatre one of the drugs they were trying hard to have access to early was ddc. AZT was all that was available early on and many thought it was poison. Ironically it was the high dosage of AZT that was the big problem and in the long run it proved less toxic than ddc. AZT is still in use today in combinations with other drugs and ddc nowhere to be found.

I believe the first buyers clubs were in New York City and on the west coast a direct offshoot of ACT-UP organizing and efforts. They did not originate in Texas.

I strongly recommend the movie which I feel is great validation for folks not sitting by quietly waiting to be saved (or not) but rather taking matters into our own hands and strongly and forcefully demanding change and action. This is something we queers are quite adept at when we put our minds to it. There has been some controversy in the gay press about the movie and after last night’s Golden Globe awards where the best actor and best supporting actor awards were won by the stars of the movie some minor bitching continues. I won’t get into the controversies here other than to say I think it is perhaps a bit “much ado about not much.” Everyone does agree the acting was superb.

In retrospect I do feel bad that I was attending a drug company teaching session on ddc in Dallas in the early 1990’s rather than spending my time visiting their buyer’s club. We of course had to be properly trained on the drug before we could be designated a study site for it. I never got to meet the infamous Ron Woodroof and the charismatic Rayon, the lead characters in the Dallas Buyers Club.

In the movie the main protagonist is a man named Ron Woodroof played by Matthew McConaughey. The other main character is a trans-women played in quite dramatic fashion by Jared Leto named Rayon. A strong subtext throughout the movie is the genuine bonds that developed between her and McConaughey a supposedly straight man. The Dallas Buyers Club itself as an entity doesn’t really take off until Rayon becomes involved and brings in many customers. It needed a bit more legitimate queer street cred, which Rayon brought to it, countering the McConaughey character and his early on really vicious, drug addled homophobia.

Buyer’s Clubs became a quite widespread phenomenon in the late 1980’s and were a force even locally here in Denver until the late 1990’s when protease inhibitors came on the scene. The flawed but immensely better new drugs that actually worked to keep the virus at bay tended to take the desperate energy out of the sails of the various PWA coalitions and the often loosely affiliated buyers clubs.

Locally there was a strong PWA coalition and a loosely associated buyer’s club. I was never involved directly with either though I did on occasion contribute educational pieces for their newsletter called Resolute, my most infamous piece being one titled “Its Chemotherapy Stupid.” I might read it here some day.

I do though recall that our buyer’s club was run in a bit more egalitarian fashion than the Dallas Buyers Club was. Less profit motivated for sure and really queer run here. I only accessed them once and that was the day before my partner David died at Rose Medical Center on September 17th, 1995. His AIDS was quite advanced by this time and David had just been home a few days from a rather lengthy and traumatic hospital stay. He adamantly did not want to return for another stay or to die there if at all possible.

The big issue was controlling pain. All we had at home were morphine tables and plenty of them but they didn’t seem to be working and were a sustained release version. I thought a quicker acting liquid form might be more helpful but it was late in the evening and accessing it through his doc at Rose problematic. So I picked up the phone and called one of my friends, a local buyer’s club member. Within less than an hour our doorbell rang. No one was at the door but there was a small paper bag on the stoop with two bottles of liquid morphine.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work either. So we gave in and went back to Rose for IV pain relief. That did help immensely but David died the next morning at 9 A.M.

I am reminded constantly how lucky I am to be alive today. I turned 65 yesterday. I know that makes me a youngster in this room but in the AIDS community I am an old man. I do think I owe a great debt of gratitude to all the AIDS activists of the 1980’s and 1990’s for speeding up the process of drug development and access to these drugs for people with AIDS. If not for a lot of loudmouthed and uppity queens, including many in Texas, I might very well not be here today.

© January 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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Road Trip by Pat Gourley

I actually have several memorable road trips in my past that I remember with varying degrees of fondness. My first trip west to Wyoming in my late teens is still a vivid memory. The first time I saw mountains outside of pictures, movies and T.V. was quite breathtaking. I simply had trouble grasping that they were real. The parts of northern Indiana and Illinois where I lived are really quite flat and I guess I grew up assuming the world was flat. That the world might be flat was a view of the world not uncommon among many Europeans in centuries past as I recall.

Then there were the trips to Florida in the late 1960’s with college friends. These were most remarkable for the fact that they provided my first views of the ocean. They were also noteworthy for the fact that we were frequently trailed and mildly harassed by various Florida state troopers. Being longhaired hippies we really stuck out. If it weren’t for our nearly invisible car, an old Dodge Dart slant six, we would have probably been stopped much more often. There was absolutely nothing cool about that car and a vehicle many of the frat boys going down to Ft. Lauderdale on spring break in those days would never be caught dead in but the cops largely ignored.

Probably my most memorable road trip though was one I took in the spring of 1989 with Harry Hay and John Burnside. Harry as many of you know is considered by some to be the founder of the modern American gay movement since he was instrumental in the formation of the Mattachine society in Los Angeles in 1950. Harry and John had been mentors and queer spirit guides for me personally since first meeting them in 1978 and our history together was after more than a decade quite rich really.

Our personal dynamics were actually emerging from a period of stress as a result of internal and very fractious Radical Faire politics. I was at the time becoming quite immersed both personally and professionally in the exploding AIDS epidemic. I often wondered why Harry and John both did not seem to me at least more involved with the AIDS epidemic but perhaps it had something to with the fact that Harry had lived through and survived the great influenza pandemic of 1919. Perhaps this created a different worldview of the inevitability of illness and death.

At any rate they were in Denver that spring of 1989 at the invitation of a group of local Fairies I was heavily involved with called the Moonroot Circle. This was a spin off of the local collective that sponsored the second large national Radical Fairie gathering in the foothills west of town in the summer of 1980. It was group important to me not simply because of the deep friendships involved but also it helped me keep my bearings in the choppy waters of AIDS and HIV politics boiling over at the time.

Among several activities we had them participating in during this visit was a well-attended public talk we sponsored featuring both Harry and John at the local Metropolitan Community Church on Clarkson, which is still there I might add. Harry was always a riveting public speaker and had a wealth of personal experience he was willing to share that always seemed to stir the radical juices in many who would come to hear him.

They were staying with my partner David and myself in our little house on West Center Street in Denver spending their nights sleeping in the back of their ancient Datsun pickup truck with a camper shell. This was their preferred mode of travel shunning airplanes whenever possible. They had driven to Denver in this rickety bucket of bolts from Los Angeles.

They planned to return to L.A. by way of Northern New Mexico visiting old friends there and reconnecting with a part of the country they had lived in for many years in a compound nestled in the San Juan Pueblo. In the early 1980’s Harry and John had shown a group of us around the Northern New Mexico Pueblos they had come to know and love and introduced us to some of the indigenous queer folk and culture.

Photo of a Radical Faerie ceremony provided by author.

In one of the late night discussions during this Denver visit in May of 1989 the topic of Chaco Canyon came up and surprisingly despite years of living in northern New Mexico they had never been there. David and I had actually been there a few years earlier so the opportunity to travel with them and introduce them to a piece of the country they had never been to was too rich to pass up. David had work obligations and could not go with us but I volunteered to follow them in my own little Toyota pick-up and I would be their guide to Chaco Canyon.

John Burnside in addition to being one the most wondrous fey individuals I have ever know was also a master mechanic though he didn’t drive. In fact I don’t think he had a current driver’s license though I could be mistaken about that. This mechanical ability frequently came in handy since their vehicle would break down several times on nearly every road trip they took. As I recall they had had some trouble coming into Denver from L.A. so I volunteered to follow behind on our journey. Harry was the driver and believe me following behind him was always a bit harrowing. Traffic lanes, stop signs and the rules of the road in general were to Harry merely suggestions most often ignored.

And of course about an hour out of Denver on Highway 285 their water pump went out. John very astutely remembered that we had passed a Napa auto parts some miles back so after diagnosing the problem he hopped in my truck and we drove back for the needed items. Harry stayed behind. He often would go into a bit of a sullen funk especially around car problems it seemed.

The remainder of the trip to the San Juan Pueblo was uneventful. We spent the night there with friends and then proceeded the next day to Chaco Canyon. They were of course duly impressed with the ruins. It was during our walk through the ruins that my most memorable moment of the trip occurred. That moment was when we were seated together in a meditative silence in the great Kiva. Harry was tearful as I recall. I had seen him tearful before but meditative silence in the presence of the father of modern gay liberation was a totally new experience for me and one I will always cherish.

After several hours we were on our way back to San Juan though I do not remember very clearly the return trip at all. Nothing apparently broke down. I think H. and J. spent a few more days in New Mexico before retuning to L.A. I drove back to Denver the next day with the great memory of having had the opportunity to introduce Harry Hay to a part of New Mexico he and John had never visited.

A great little gift back to the men who had introduced me to so many, many different and exciting things queer. A big part of who I am today and my worldview I owe to Harry and John. I still frequently find myself invoking one of Harry’s greatest teachings and that was his frequently saying, “Now that is an unexamined assumption, isn’t it” and thereby prompting a totally different way of viewing the world!

February 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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Mushrooms by Pat Gourley

My experiences with mushrooms have been varied over the years and for the most part quite wonderful with one exception, which I will address further on. I love to cook with them and in the past thirty years my use of these wonderful and diverse fungi has been limited to those legally sold in supermarkets or a couple edible varieties found in the foothills near Denver. The types I have harvested mostly in the hills surrounding South Park have been a variety of Boletes and the sinfully delicious Morels or as we called them when I was growing up in rural Indiana “sponge” mushrooms. Morels in particular are often found in burn areas the year following the blaze and occasionally in the caterpillar tracks left from post-fire cleanup.

My childhood contact with mushrooms outside of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup in a green bean casserole almost exclusively served at Thanksgiving was nonexistent until in my early teens when I started mushroom hunting with one of my uncles. Our trips to the woods looking for these delicacies happened in the spring and the morels we most often found were growing under small shrub-like plants called May Apples. We also harvested in much larger quantities something we called a button mushroom from decaying logs, these may actually have been a forest Bolete of some sort. My uncle would sauté the button mushrooms in butter and serve them in heaping piles on toast. In the interest of full disclosure these mushrooms were fried rather than sautéed, trust me nothing was sautéed in rural Indiana in the 1950’s. The morels were again lightly fried in butter and served alone. Their earthy and very funky taste would later in life come to mind when sampling certain varieties of semen.

Probably my most noticeable and life impacting mushroom experience though involved what most, myself included, would call a bad trip, though in hindsight with a bit of historical revision might be described as a prophetic visionary experience. Needless to say this trip did not occur as the result of eating the buttons and morels of my childhood. Rather it happened in the fall of 1979 with a variety of homegrown psilocybin or as they were known at the time “magic” mushrooms. I was no stranger to hallucinogens by this time in my life and had used mushrooms to very positive effect on numerous occasions though LSD was always my drug of choice. I was perhaps initially drawn to hallucinogenic mushrooms through the music and iconic art of the Allman Brothers Band- sorry, no, not the Grateful Dead.

This adventure also involved the Empire Baths, now known as the Denver Swim Club, and a rather torrid, at least in my own mind, affair with a very sweet, straight-acting Mormon, local emergency room doctor. I had met this man at one of the queer health care provider support groups popular at the time. I am still not sure what my attraction was to this guy but it was consuming. He was my own age and I strongly preferred older men. He was very conservative around things queer, into electronic disco music and in many ways still tied deeply to his large Utah-based Mormon family. There was some reciprocal interest on his part I suppose perhaps an attraction to the exotic, me being a queer rolling in things radical fairie and addicted to the music of the Grateful Dead while living with numerous other eccentric types in a communal situation. It certainly wasn’t the sex, which was mediocre at its infrequent best.

I’ll refer to him here as Hank since he remained tied to those Mormon roots until the time of his AIDS related death in 1991. His death was attributed to cancer on the death certificate I was told by his twink lover at the time and not HIV. I am cognizant after all that the big NSA spy building nearing completion is in Utah and though I expect my hum drum and really boring life is not of much interest to our homegrown extensive International spy apparatus I would not want to risk causing any existential anguish to his large and I am sure still very Mormon family in some indirect and convoluted way.

Hank’s drug of choice was always pure pharmaceutical grade cocaine and snorted in large quantities. A drug I never appreciated, I mean really where was the bang for the buck. Though I must say there was a time or two with another lover who would fuck me with powdered coke under his foreskin that I do have rather fond memories of. This was of course a bit selfish I suppose on my part since the head of his penis would get very numb while I got off a bit high.

Where Hank’s interest in psilocybin came from I am not sure but he became obsessed with growing them in his small Capitol Hill apartment. The spores were actually available for sale legally in head shops at the time. The spores were inoculated onto sterilized rye in quart size mason jars and then coaxed to grow under artificial light in a warm dark closet in his apartment. A much safer and environmentally friendly endeavor than cooking meth would have been. After several unsuccessful attempts, one of which involved an exploding pressure-cooker being used to sterilize the rye, he was able to inoculate the spores into the grain and was able to grow quite a nice large crop. I imagine that apartment may still have remnants of dry rye on the ceiling despite our repeated attempts to get it all off. The harvest was nicely dried in a toaster oven. We never sold any of these but they would make nice stocking stuffers.

Our maiden voyage with these mushrooms was a few weeks before my infamous bathhouse experience and involved a quick trip to the Grand Canyon. There, while hiking to the bottom of the canyon on a full moon night, we nibbled a few each and were as high as kites for the next 24 hours with no sleep that night. We were I think hiking the Bright Angel Trail and our destination was a waterfall that begged for nude moonlight bathing underneath it. Photos were taken but it was only moonlight and we were totally fucked up so little good evidence remains. I relate this merely to establish that the mushrooms were pretty good and not apparently one of the poisonous psilocybin varieties. Our drive back in his little sporty Volkswagen mostly at 100 miles an hour with obnoxious disco music playing was uneventful and for some inexplicable reason I was still very smitten with the guy.

My rather voracious sexual needs at the time were certainly not being met by Hank so a week or so after our return to Denver I decided that a trip to the bathes was in order and it would be nice to do a few shrooms to enhance the whole thing. Now being at the tubs in an altered state was not new to me though I tended most of the time to be a more utilitarian user often going at noon on no substances whatsoever to catch the butch middle age, often married guys, who could be great sex if the stars were right. I was looking for tops so spreading HIV to unsuspecting suburban women never really entered the picture and of course was not on anyone’s radar at all in 1979.

Shortly after arriving, I had dosed before leaving the house on my bicycle, things started to get strange. And to paraphrase the Grateful Dead things only got stranger as the evening progressed. Freaking out while tripping was something totally new to me. The bathes were busy that night and the potential ripe for some great fucking. I was quickly over come though with great anxiety and a sense of dread, my death seemed immanent. I left the cozy, moist and sexy confines and ventured outside to the pool. It was a cool night in late October so no one else in his right mind was out there. I of course was not in my right mind and soon felt the concrete gargoyles on the surrounding walls were threatening me and urging me to get out of there as soon as possible or I would surely die.

I left the bath on my bike in a frenzy to get somewhere to tell anyone I was sure I was dying. Long story short I ended up in an Indian boutique on East Colfax where the family running the business was cooking a curry dish in the back. I was unable to eat any sort of curry for years. Things kind of got lost in translation with the proprietors of the shop. How does one say I took a hallucinogenic mushroom, went to a gay bathhouse to fuck and proceeded to freak out? So when they kindly called me an ambulance they related that I had food poisoning from a bad mushroom.

The ambulance drivers soon discerned this was not food poisoning and that I would be OK soon. In fact they offered, since it was apparently a slow night, to take me home and they would love to buy some of these mushrooms from me. I was incredulous at this and insisted on being taken to the nearest E.D. There I received a lecture from a rather judgmental physician on duty about growing up. I wasn’t sure if the message was to quit taking drugs or quit fucking my brains out in gay bathhouses – probably both.

Dear friends soon rescued me from the E.D. and delivered me safely to my soul mate Don. Don was an expert at helping people calm down in general so he put me in a warm corner with a couple of oranges and told me to peal and eat them and I would soon be OK. About two hours later and only one orange gone I was good enough to leave and head home.

Just to wrap up I did get my bike back the next day from the wonderfully kind folks at the Indian store who kept an eye on it for me. For some inexplicable reason I had been able to securely lock my bike up before entering the store and announcing to all that I was about to die. I also have often thought that the Universe aided by a bit of psilocybin was alerting me that night to the impeding AIDS nightmare and that a gay bathhouse even as early as 1979 was not the best place to be, certainly not with one’s legs in the air. I of course did not heed that advice but doubt I was infected at the bathes but rather in the rectory of a Protestant church in Aspen Colorado about a year later but that’s another story.

December 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.

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Patriotism by Pat Gourley

“The
owners of this country know the truth…its called the American dream because you
have to be asleep to believe it” George Carlin

When I was in grade school in the 1950’s I attended a predominately Irish Catholic institution called St. Peter in LaPorte, Indiana. We would start each day with Mass and then once we had left the church and reached the classroom we would begin the rest of the day with the pledge of allegiance. In hindsight I now recognize both of these activities for the not so subtle forms of child abuse and indoctrination that they were.

I escaped the clutches of this myopic worldview I feel in no small part through the transformation that occurred with my getting in touch with my queerness. The idea of a person who calls themselves a patriot to me is someone who often unthinkingly is a member of a tribe and this results all too often in a blind and selfish xenophobia. A working title for this piece could have been “Patriotism- Tribalism Run Amok”.

You could view ‘patriotism” as a particularly perverse manipulation of our innate hard wiring to belong to a tribe. Quoting Edward O. Wilson from his great new book The Social Conquest of Earth: “People must have a tribe. It gives them a name in addition to their own and social meaning in a chaotic world. It makes the environment less disorienting and dangerous.” It is a bit ironic I suppose that I escaped the white, insular, Irish Catholic, lower middle class and very “patriotic” tribe I was born into by discovering and joining another tribe. For many of us our initial realizations of being ‘different or other’ were very disorienting and dangerous. The early coming out process is a struggle to give ourselves a name that will create meaning for us in what we correctly perceive to be a very chaotic and often hostile world.

Was Mother Nature though handing us little queers a truly change creating gift in the form of our ‘otherness’? Was this a possible genetic gift to the human race with the potential to allow us to actualize a more constructive way of relating to one another as human beings? Quoting again from The Social Conquest of Earth:

“…homosexuality may give advantages to the group by special talents, unusual qualities of personality, and the specialized roles and professions it generates. There is abundant evidence that such is the case in both preliterate and modern societies. Either way, societies are mistaken to disapprove of homosexuality because gays have different sexual preferences and reproduce less. Their presence should be valued instead for what they contribute constructively to human diversity. A society that condemns homosexuality harms itself.”


I would follow this by saying ‘take that’ all you queer theorists who think we are nothing more that social constructs resulting from societal oppression. A question I have often asked myself since the late 1970’s is have we abdicated our birthright or legitimate power to contribute constructively to human diversity in our often craven desire to be accepted and to emulate the straight world by insisting that we are no different than they are except for what we do in bed. Rather is our true purpose to be the valuable expression of some of humankind’s most altruistic impulses?

I was first introduced to the writings of Edward O. Wilson through none other than Harry Hay who turned me on to Wilson’s 1978 book “On Human Nature”. For those unfamiliar with Wilson he is a professor Emeritus of Biology at Harvard University. Wilson wrote in 1978: “Homosexuality is normal in a biological sense, that it is a distinctive beneficial behavior that evolved as an important element in human social organization. Homosexuals may be the genetic carriers of some of mankind’s rare altruistic impulses.”

Well you can just imagine what sort of manna from heaven this prominent biologist’s theories were for an activist like Hay who had been running around for years saying we were a ‘separate people whose time had come’. It was actually through an email I recently received from Don Kilhefner that I was alerted to Wilson’s most recent work. Kilhefner along with Hay, John Burnside and Mitch Walker birthed the Radical Fairies in 1979.

It is certainly my contention that we are a separate people who time is here and that many of our great queer thinkers long ago saw through the manipulative jingoistic, sense of exceptionalism that passes for patriotism as something beneath us as a people. We are the guardians and hopefully proponents of some of mankind’s rare altruistic impulses and certainly we must know in our hearts that as Oscar Wilde so succinctly stated ‘patriotism is the virtue of the vicious”. Patriotism simply does not suit us if we bother to own our revolutionary potential.

Having said this I certainly own the fact that we often as a people do not live up to our potential as change creators for the better. I do think we veer off course most frequently though when we try to emulate straight society and particularly certain qualities most often seen in the heterosexual male of the species.

American patriotism seems to have a very dangerous component of exceptionalism – we are God’s chosen people. What could possibly go wrong with a worldview in which might makes right especially when driven by a sense of manifest destiny? I think much of the social unrest and sharp disconnects between segments of our U.S. population today are caused by the fact that many folks are realizing that America is not particularly exceptional as a country creating a cognitive dissonance that is truly unsettling. In fact we are responsible for much of the grief inflicting the planet from climate change to drones and kill lists to tapping everyone’s phone on the entire planet to name just a few examples. The war against terror and certainly our last two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been made possible in part by the unscrupulous manipulation of our misguided sense of what true patriotism might be.

I am aware that we are reading our pieces on patriotism on Veterans Day. It seems particularly crass of me I suppose to be trashing patriotism on such a day but I have no problem separating the men and women in the armed forces from the puppeteers manipulating the strings of false patriotism. Chelsea Manning as a young, frail, tormented teenage queer from some God-forsaken part of rural Oklahoma saw military service as the only honorable way out of hell. I am sure she felt she was also doing her patriotic duty. But you see the playing field is not level. The interests of corporate America are really not the interests of the 99%. The corporate oligarchs have no compunction when it comes to playing the patriotism card in order to sustain their empire. A recent example was sited in a piece in Salon today called “Stop Thanking the Troops for Me: No They Do Not Protect our Freedoms” by Justin Doolittle.

(http://www.salon.com/2013/11/11/stop_thanking_the_troops_for_me_no_they_dont_protect_our_freedoms/).

Doolittle pointed out the patriotic stunt from the opening game of the World Series where Bank of America pledged to donate a dollar for every posting of a troop supporting video to an agency or group helping veterans. No mention was made of the many, many homes of active duty personnel and veterans foreclosed on since 2008 by the Bank of America.

It was either in one of his more provocative moments, or perhaps something I just dreamed up, that Harry Hay once said something to the effect that there are really only two races on earth – gay and straight. I certainly can view queer folk as change creating seeds sprinkled throughout the globe in every country and among every people. This it seems to me lends a compelling element of universality to the human condition that gives lie to the false concept of patriotism. If you buy, albeit, this rather fanciful picture of the human family which I guess I do then our responsibility as queer folk is too pursue in every country on Earth that wonderful and subversive change creating Homosexual Agenda. We truly are all one people on one planet, One Taste.

© November 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.

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For a Good Time by Pat Gourley

If I were to take the high road with this topic I suppose I would explore my options for a “good time” by discussing my friends and time spent with them sharing a movie or a meal I have prepared especially to accommodate their particular dietary idiosyncrasies. Or perhaps relate my anticipation for seeing a couple of Furthur shows next month at Red Rocks with 10,000 of my closet associates. Prowling a Farmer’s Market, taking in the latest vegetative creations at the Denver Botanic Gardens or curling up with my kitties, a good book and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s are also things that work for me when it comes to a good time.

I will dispense however with the “high road” for the remainder of this piece and look at the tried and true completion of the phrase which would be “for a good time and hopefully a happy ending” call 555-5555. In decades gone by this exhortation was often seen scrawled on public toilet stalls along with the requisite phone number. For the extremely bold the phrase might appear in a personal print ad, though the “good time” was often just implied as was the “happy ending”.

Throughout the 1970’s a “good time” for me involved heading out to the bathhouse. I do believe that as gay bathhouses evolved in that decade they were a truly unique space created by gay men. There certainly had for millennia been public bathes that often had a homosexual cruising element but the gay bathes as manifested in large American and European cities largely after Stonewall had no pretext or subterfuge about them. They were gay male space created for the express purpose of getting laid in a relatively safe place often catering to and facilitating a variety of gay male sexual fantasies.

The amenities were simple but plentiful including safe lockers, clean towels, private rooms, slings, suitable lengths of plastic douching hose with hookups right next to the toilets, orgy rooms, steam rooms, lots of hot water, reasonably priced poppers and buckets of free cheap lube, usually whipped up like cake batter in big batches by the employees. This lube was often a mix of baby oil and Crisco or some other vegetable shortening on sale that week at Safeway I expect. Johnson & Johnson was almost always the source of the baby oil. Condoms were certainly not readily available and if so their use was at best frowned on.

Though in hindsight the baths may have initially fueled the AIDS epidemic after that horse was out of the barn I always felt they were more a form of quarantine for the already infected than really significant vectors. Certainly before AIDS the tubs were I think overall very conducive elements to the building of the potent queer liberation movement of the post Stonewall era. I mean what could go wrong in these ultimate palaces of testosterone fueled gay male bonding where fucking with as many or as few men in a single visit as you could accommodate was easily facilitated, the ultimate male fantasy.

Some unfortunate drawbacks did exist and in some forms persist today. Many bathes were mob owned and often enforced very racist and ageist door policies though in their heyday there was a variety of establishments that accommodated nearly everyone.

The tubs still exist today but after a severe curtailing in the 1980’s due to the AIDS epidemic they have never fully recovered to their 1970’s glory. Perhaps though even more significant than fear of disease in their decline has been the Internet. In case one forgets for a moment the importance of this when you type “Internet” and neglect to capitalize the “I’ it spells checks to remind you to do so.

For myself personally as having been a child of the tubs decades ago and fortunate enough to have had a couple of relatively good long term relationships, I now am occasionally at a loss really as to where to go for a sexual good time. I do though rely on my left hand (I am right handed but go figure), a tube of Vaseline and my computer. And FYI the word Vaseline also insists on being capitalized on my Apple product.

Gay men though being the masters of the “hook-up” that we are have evolved quite well with the times. An example of this would be Grindr – spelled G-r-i-n-d-r – which is a geosocial networking application available for download from the Apple App Store and Google Play. This can best be described as making use of GPS and your computer, tablet or iPhone to find other men near by specifically for sexual hook ups. This can happen in an instant of course and eliminates the tediously time consuming efforts involved in the past for meeting up with partners at bars, parks, parties etc. and very little social chit-chat is required. Simply to initiate a “good time” text to xxxxxx.

The Grindr app provides an interface that displays photos of men arranged in order of proximity to your current location. Tapping on a photo of interest will provide you with a brief profile hopefully not a total pack of lies. Needless to say this award winning social networking tool has been a wild success all over the world. And thanks to Edward Snowden we now know that all of the personal information provided on this platform is and will be carefully stored for possible future retrieval at the large and ominous NSA facility nearing completion in neighboring Utah. The old vice squad of yesteryear must just be wetting their pants with jealously.

Again for me personally I must confess that Grindr is not an option I am willing to explore and not for any fear of the NSA though it is none of their fucking business and a violation of my 1st, 4th and 6th amendment rights but I digress. Rather it is difficult to teach an old queen new tricks or how to find new tricks. I am for the most part quite content with my computer and a couple dear old comfortable and reliable (and I use the phrase with the greatest of love and affection) fuck buddies. In a concession to the times though they are contacts on my iPhone and I call them with a simple touch most likely unable to actually dial their number form memory.

© August 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.

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Letter to My Younger Self by Pat Gourley

My goodness where to start? Perhaps Dan Savage has written the ultimate short three word letter for many of us: It gets better!

If I ever needed to hear that advice it was probably around the age of eleven or twelve. For several years around that time, the late 1950’s, I was really tormented with the whole concept of sin and that I was certainly going to hell for being the major league transgressor I was sure that I was. My weekly confessions to the local parish priest were affairs I would agonize endlessly over for hours. I often felt they were not complete and that I had left some major heinous sin out of the litany for that week.

One might think this had to do with newly discovered joy of masturbation but I was nowhere near that, not for a few years yet, I was a late bloomer really. No it was more a vague persistent ennui, a sense that I was not quite right but different from my peers in not a good Catholic way. I distinctly remember around that time hearing or perhaps being called “queer” and looking this up in the dictionary. The definition given was “odd” and when I decided this was a great word to hurtle at my numerous siblings and cousins I was reprimanded soundly by my mother to not use that word because it could mean something besides “odd” though I was never provided with other meanings until several years later.

There was never much overt bulling in my Catholic School. The nuns were very good at enforcing order and beside they and our other non-clergy instructors were too busy enforcing a much more insidious and blanketed psychological form of bullying under the guise of shaping and forming the minds of young Catholic citizens.

Because of this nagging worry and guilt that my confessions did not include every sin committed I would often not take Sunday Communion. The injunction was that you needed to have confessed all outstanding sins on your books before partaking of the flesh and blood of Christ in the form of a miraculously transformed little wafer.

I don’t want to venture too far into the weeds of self-psychoanalysis here but I do think it was my fledgling queer awakening that was at the root of much of my sense of not being worthy to ingest the body and blood of Christ. It would of course attract much unwanted attention from family and fellow parishioners when I would not go up for Communion many Sunday mornings. My parents were aware of my ongoing angst and my dad even tried to address it one evening in a car ride we took together. In hindsight this was a very loving gesture but tended mostly to cement even further that there was something different about me. I now am reminded of a favorite caveat from Harry Hay one where he would say that straight fathers could smell a gay son. We actually smelled different was his conversation evoking meme. Perhaps my dad smelled something distinctly different about me.

My mental and physical agitation around trying to be the “best little boy in the world” would often take the form of behaviors now easily labeled as an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). My actions were called “scrupulous” at the time and though I am not sure of this I think the parish priest reassured my parents that I would outgrow it. My OCD was of course really the result of buying into the Catholic Religion and its not so subtle forms of child abuse and trying I thought to respond appropriately. I am not referring to the really rarer than you might think forms of overt pedophilia some clergy excelled in but rather I feel the much more widespread, serious and damaging psychological terror inflicted by the relentless indoctrination. Applying the word ‘scrupulous’ to me was of course incorrect. The correct word to use would have been “temperamental” a code word for a gay fellow in the 1950’s. Is he ‘temperamental’ men would ask of one another when discretion was appropriate?

The Baltimore Catechism to call attention to one such codified bunch of superstitious baloney from my childhood was a daily part of our school lives. This catechism was a set of questions and of course the absolutely correct answers, which we were repeatedly, told we needed to accept on Faith. Talk about a recipe for mental strife if ever one existed particularly those who are not prone to being comfortable with simply being a quiescent blob of protoplasm. It is I now feel one of the worst forms of child abuse to begin fostering on young innocent emerging minds while still at their mothers breast that they are sinners right out of the box and in need of salvation. Later on in one who is beginning to sense a profound difference from all those he encounters around him this can be quite the obstacle to overcome! A brief quote here from the late Christopher Hitchens on “Faith:”

“ Faith is the surrender of the mind,
it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes
us different from other animals.”

So my letter to myself at this time in my life of great mental turmoil would really just be advice to hang in there and it will get better. In a few short years you will run into a nun who will challenge many of your most firmly held beliefs on how the world really works. You also will meet and begin having an ongoing sexual relationship with one of your high school teachers and the first such episode will be on a dissecting table in the school biology lab with Jesus looking down from a crucifix right behind you. Wow, did it ever get better.

© October 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.

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My Favorite Fantasy by Pat Gourley

I suppose some might say my fantasy life is sorely lacking in imagination and creativity and my opening lines to this piece might just reinforce that since it begins with yet again another Grateful Dead reference. The phrase that might be thrown at me here would be along the lines of “get a life”. Sort of like the bumper sticker that appeared shortly after Jerry Garcia died in 1995: Jerry is dead, Phish stink, Get a job. Despite the validity of this self-criticism here I go again. The topic of fantasy was brought to my mind as the result of the current four night run by Furthur at Red Rocks and their opening the second set on the 3rd, Saturday night, with the old Traffic tune Dear Mr. Fantasy.

Dear Mister Fantasy play us a tune
Something to make us all happy
Do anything take us out of this gloom
Sing a song, play guitar
Make it snappy
You are the one who can make us all laugh
But doing that you break out in tears
Please don’t be sad if it was a straight mind you had
We wouldn’t have known you all these years

Traffic – Winwood, Capaldi & Wood, 1967.

These are lyrics from a song made popular by Traffic in 1967. Their music was certainly within my sphere of listening influence if not when it actually was released certainly a few years later. This tune though made no lasting impression on me until the Grateful Dead resurrected it in the mid- 1980’s. The tune was brought to the band for then keyboardist Brent Mydland, who was one of a string of key board players for the Grateful Dead over thirty years. Several of them met untimely deaths, Brent included, who did himself in with a speedball in 1990. I suppose shooting a combination of cocaine and heroin is one way to attempt creation of a fantasy or perhaps facilitate fanciful escape. Several other much better known celebrities, based on an Internet search, have blasted out of this life with speedballs most notable perhaps were SNL greats Chris Farley and John Belushi.

What is music but one way to make us all happy and to take us out of our gloom? I am going to veer away from music as facilitator of fantasy though and take fantasy into the realm of Queerdom. Particularly the role fantasy plays in the lives of gay men. The proposition here will be that the creation of fantasy worlds is one of our special powers, one of our great gifts to the larger society and ourselves. We hone our skills at fantasy often in our early masturbatory and sexual daydreams, which we often have to create on our own since the dominant society, provides us with very little sanctioned sexual guidance.

                             

Our fanciful thumbprints are all over many facets of societal escape well beyond the sexual realm from personal grooming, art, film, classical music, show tunes and theatre to fashion and drag of all sorts to name but a few. I am not meaning to say that lesbians, bisexuals and trans folks are not also fanciful just that gay men seem to have really cornered the market on escapism. Fantasy I suppose has a downside as well as its many up sides, especially the social safety valve it provides. An example of the downside, and I am making this up pretty much as I write, is that our desire for escape often goes beyond harmless fantasies and too often gets goosed along with drugs and alcohol. Jerry Garcia once said people do drugs because they make them feel good. Going back to the Traffic lyrics again many of us gay men have certainly used substances to take us out of our gloom.

In order to fulfill many of our adolescent and pre-adolescent fantasies of being swept off our feet by Mister Right and then sexually ravaged until we nearly explode, drugs and alcohol are often used to help us to get over the initial and very powerful societal taboos involved. There has been some speculation over the years that gay men are perhaps more prone biologically to an over use of tobacco, drugs of all sorts and alcohol. I would argue that we are more prone biologically to fantasy.

Certainly not every gay man is into getting fucked though it is something most at some time or the other do fantasize about. This has got to be first explored in the realm of fantasy. Nobody wakes up one morning and out of the blue says ‘gee I think I’ll get some dude to fuck me today’. Any form of physical and emotional intimacy with another man is still so taboo that this remains a real test of character to get over it and move into the realms of positive gay intimacy despite the current minimal societal sanctioning of gay marriage.

There is much more run up psychologically, emotionally and physically to letting a man screw you than for a straight guy to have his first sexual encounter with a woman. The sexual signs posts are everywhere in our society for heterosexuals but don’t exist for gay men outside the realm of fantasy often times. Our sexual fantasies these days are and for decades really have been supported by gay male porn. Inadequate access even in 2013 to peers knowledgeable about the ins and outs of gay sex make the often totally fanciful world of gay male porn very attractive. Gay male sex education even in the world of the relatively tolerant Public Health environment rarely goes beyond the vapid message of “play safe –use a condom.”

In answer to the original question what is my favorite fantasy I am left at a bit of a loss on how to pick one. I sometimes think my entire life is a fantasy or perhaps worse a total illusion. I do think though that one’s favorite fantasy should be something that gets the blood running. I suppose I do also at times confuse my dreams with fantasy or maybe my dreams are pure fantasy. I dream of a socialist utopia where everyone is treated equally, has adequate food, clothing and shelter, the planet is healthy and the whole world is infused with a queer sensibility.

Well enough with taking the high road around my favorite fantasy. Being brutally honest I am going to base my favorite fantasy simply on how often I engage in it. That hands down would be my nearly daily masturbatory fantasies. These are often ignited with a bit of Internet porn but usually reach fruition by recalling a past sexual encounter that ends in my imagination the way I would have hoped rather than how it actually did. I must say though that most days that works just fine.

In closing I’d like to say that in doing these writings for this group I occasionally stumble on a thought that I think deserves much more exploration than I give it. For example the whole idea that the nonsexual fantasy worlds of gay men are actually great safety valves for society in general. I don’t think many would argue that without show tunes the world would be just a bit sadder place. Being the lazy fuck that I am though I rarely delve deeper but too often of an afternoon get distracted into the fantasies at hand.

©
October 2013

Photos from Author

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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Coming Out Spiritually by Pat Gourley

“If you are too busy to sit in meditation
 for twenty minutes a day
 then you need to sit in meditation
 for an hour every day.”

Paraphrased Buddhist Wisdom

I am not sure that my spiritual coming out over the years has not really been more of a shedding of things rather than the cultivation of any particular tradition or significant growth and development on my part. If I try to put it on a life trajectory I guess maybe as my queer and political identities blossomed my religious/spiritual side seems to have waned significantly over the decades, with the exception perhaps of a resurgence in the last 20 years of my often helterskelter Buddhist practice and an ever evolving atheist ethos.

I am aware that it is trendy these days in certain circles to say, “No I am not religious but I am spiritual.” The spiritual part of that is often for many defined in very vague terms involving some sort of unity with the whole Universe. One person though who has thought through this “one with the Universe” thing is my current favorite atheist Lawrence M. Krauss:

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way to get them into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.” Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing.

The root motivation for all religious or spiritual seeking seems to me to be very succinctly summed up in the following phrase, which I am quoting from Stephen Batchelor’s great work Buddhism Without Beliefs; “Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?”

The Catholic Church teaches that one reaches the age of reason at seven and then real sinning becomes possible, a rather rigid view of child development. My spiritual journey from this age of seven until about age seventeen was certainly laid out for me, no thought required, just a lot of something called Faith. The indoctrination in the Catholic religion though started in my Irish family much earlier than age seven of course. My adolescent discovery that sex with another man could be simply divine and that much of what the establishment had taught me about how the world worked in general needed to be seriously called into question. This was in large part thanks to a wonderful rogue Holy Cross nun and resulted in a rather rapid jettisoning of my early Catholic upbringing and beliefs.

Much of the 1970’s where spent in the proverbial lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and then lots more sex with no particular spiritual bent. I did hook up with the local chapter of Dignity, a group of mostly Catholic gay men, who I think in hindsight were desperately trying to square being queer with being a good Catholic. Not sure that all worked out so well for most of them. I attended more to cruise than anything else really.

In the late 1970’s I entered my “pagan/earth mother” phase and this was fueled by contact with many feminists and the Radical Fairies many of whom also shared this spiritual worldview. I was influenced by the writings of a wonderful witch named Starhawk. One of my dearest possessions from those years is the first stained glass piece my loving companion David made for me, a beautiful and very colorful pentagram.

The eighties were probably my least ‘spiritual’ in any fashion with delusion setting in that Goddess worship may not have been all it was cracked up to be. The struggles with mortality were also coming home in a big way as many started dying from AIDS. Nothing like a lot of death around you to force the question “What should I do”? Chanting, however fervently, to the Goddess didn’t seem to help much.

In the early nineties and up to the present I guess my “spiritual trip” can best be defined as Buddhist. A ten-year stint with the Kwan Um School of Zen and work with great teachers cemented my practice or at least I learned how to better sit still and be quiet.

In pondering coming out spiritually I think it must be an ongoing process, as most coming out is, and I am drawn back to the Stephen Bachelor’s injunction I quoted earlier and that is “What should I do?” This question presented itself in rather stark fashion this past Friday on my walk back from the gym.

Around 11:00 in the morning walking down Logan Street heading south toward 13th I was approaching a favorite panhandling corner. I noticed a body lying on the sidewalk, unusual placement for those with signs and in pursuit of the very hard work that is surviving as homeless in our big cities today. I could already see a couple folks stepping over the prone figure or walking around and no detectable movement. On approaching I saw it was a man and he could have been any street fellow, way over dressed for the weather but layers are important when you are on the street 24/7, and desperately in need of a shower. He was strategically sprawled in the shade of the only tree on that corner. I quickly started trying to process what was going on and whether or not I needed to try and intervene here. I did not have my phone with me.

I stepped around him as several others had already done and I kept walking. I continued walking across the street and down the block looking back and thinking, “What should I have done”. That is a really totally bogus and useless question, and not what Batchelor asked, his question was “What should I do?” On my next look back I saw two guys with leaf blowers work their loud obnoxious machines right around him and this disturbingly seemed to elicit nothing from the prone body.

What I should do then became obvious and I walked back to where he was. I saw more clearly then that he had his arm curled under his head, a good sign, not a pose for someone in extremis. I then tapped the bottom of his foot with my shoe and said in a loud voice: “Hey man, are you alright?” To my great relief he immediately responded partially sitting up and trying to focus on who was disturbing what was obviously a nap in the shade, a break from being on a very hot, exposed corner asking passing motorists for change. His crumpled and very poorly lettered sign stating ‘anything helps’ and invoking God to bless whomever was serving as a makeshift pillow on the concrete. Our society has substituted the time honored Buddhist begging bowl with a begging sign.

I then said that he should think about moving before someone stepped on him. This seemed to register a bit and then he responded that he would as soon as he finished his hamburger. I then noticed, what quite frankly looked like garbage, on a small cardboard container with some sort of scraps, salvaged from the garbage perhaps and showing the wear and tear of being in the 90 degree heat. This had been strategically placed on the sidewalk right under where his chin had been on the pavement. Right wing conservative ranting’s aside I was sure he was not finishing up a serving of crab legs purchase with food stamps. And a lecture on food poisoning would have been way too middle class and certainly of little benefit.

Satisfied we were not in any sorts of 911-territory I said again “Don’t get stepped on,” and headed home, once more convinced the question should always be “What should I do?”

June 2013
Photo by author

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.