Tag: Pat Gourley

Posted on

Favorite Place by Pat Gourley

I actually have many favorite places currently and have had many different ones over the years. Implied in a favorite place for me is the component of safety along with joy and contentment. Unlike many in the world now, into the future and certainly in the past, being able to experience safety, joy and simultaneously contentment is illusive much of the time. For many of us I imagine our most favorite place often exists in our head and we find ourselves trying to go there often.

The trick for me is to make where I am at the moment, which is always an undeniable reality that should be honored, my favorite place. There is often no other choice. I rarely succeed at this but am getting better at it than I was for much of my life. Before I wonder too deep into the woods with Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now or Ram Dass and Be Here Now or the Buddha’s timeless invocation to simply sit quietly with the breath, I need to acknowledge many places cannot be called “favorite”. Like being stuck in traffic on a hot day, or on an airplane next to a screaming kid or driving across southern Wyoming or recently having to be with a good friend who has shared he may have metastatic prostate cancer, this after decades of HIV.

I also have to acknowledge that I have really led a pretty privileged life. I have never been in a crowded jail cell, tortured or worse perhaps put in solitary confinement. I have never been in an abusive relationship and my childhood was pretty idyllic despite the stifling reality of the Catholic Church. I don’t live with the constant sound of an American drone hovering above and the horrific but occasional blasting of relatives into oblivion as unfortunate collateral damage. I always felt safe with and experienced endless unconditional positive regard from my parents. I can only imagine the constant horror and struggle of trying to get to a favorite pace if you are a child in an abusive and unsafe environment.

I imagine nearly all people have a favorite place the trick is just being able to get there as often as possible. So should we all be trying to cultivate this “favorite place” as somewhere we can go to mentally rather than always be physically present there? How often have we all imagined if only I was there it would all be perfect? Once we got there however it soon became boring and we wanted to be onto the next favorite place. That certainly has been my M.O. Craving is the ultimate cause of all suffering according to some guy called the Buddha.

So I have a basket full of real favorite places ranging from the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park to my own small patio in the early morning hours with that rare east breeze carrying the scent of fresh mown alfalfa. The smell of freshly cut hay particularly when mixed with the scent of a recent rain has been and remains like mainlining Valium for me invoking my best childhood memories. So in those situations I guess that makes my favorite place an olfactory one. Another favorite place is hearing and dancing with 9,000 of my closest friends at Red Rocks as Furthur launches into a favorite tune like Golden Road to Devotion or Franklin’s Tower. Oh and of course that favorite place of savoring the taste of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Karamel Sutra on my living room couch and sharing licks of the vanilla with my one cat, Cassidy, who eats dairy. These days a favorite place are the Capital Hill neighborhoods I walk through on my way to the gym and taking in the rainbow of flowers blooming this time of the year and enjoying the daily changes in the many small vegetable gardens popping up with more frequency. And of course a very favorite place is the state of sexual arousal leading to orgasm, that one never seems to get old. It seems perhaps that favorite places vary with the senses and a key for me is to focus on the one sense being stroked most intensely at the moment.

Not to be greedy or in a terminal state of craving but how wonderful it would be to be sitting in the Tea Garden with a pint of ice cream while being jacked off by George Clooney with my ear buds in listening to a recent Furthur jam in the Fall right after a nice rain shower and the Japanese Maples in their brilliant red glory in full view. But really I suppose my head would then explode and it would all be over rather abruptly. To be fully appreciated perhaps it really is best to take my favorite places one sense at a time.

© 28 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.

Posted on

Hospitality Immigration and Asylum by Pat Gourley

I would encourage you all to make sure that you are firmly in your seats since I am going to begin this piece with a very short biblical quote. Never let it be said that I am an atheist that won’t stoop to manipulating Christians and Jews with their own theology.

“Do not forget to show hospitality to
strangers, for by doing so people have shown hospitality to angels without
knowing it”. Hebrews 13:2
I found this quote while surfing a Christian social justice sight called Isaiah One. I was at this site specifically researching this topic; it is not a site in my bookmark’s list. I do though think I have some common ground with this particular group of Christian activists who combine the necessity of good works with their faith. The current Pope does have a lot going for him and if he could just really get over the queer thing and let women have control over their own bodies we could really roll.

Just to make sure the message gets across let me quote again from this article entitled Biblical Hospitality and Asylum Seekers: “Biblical hospitality is a broadly inclusive obligation. Denying hospitality would only be conceivable in extraordinarily exceptional circumstances. Dubious character, alien culture or strange belief, or indeed other unpalatable social or spiritual qualities are not grounds for denying hospitality.”

Using this biblical interpretation of hospitality please explain to me how that would not apply to virtually anyone showing up on our borders seeking minimally an economic asylum, an escape from grinding poverty in their native land. And further more how the fuck can someone call themselves a Christian and deny legitimacy and citizenship to the people who for decades have been cleaning your toilets, cutting your lawns, building your homes, picking your food, cooking and serving your food, tending to your children and in countless other ways positively contributing to the fabric of American life? It is simply a mindboggling disconnect that quite frankly cannot be explained as anything but overt racism.

For any sensible person it seems to be a pretty easy and logical leap to extend hospitality in the form of citizenship to those already here and many for most of their lives. It gets a bit tricky for many though when we extend hospitality to include asylum. The United Nations in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states “Everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”

Which brings me to Edward Snowden who I not only view as a whistleblower but as a hero. In making his case for asylum he referenced the recent treatment of Bradley Manning the young gay man currently on trial for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks. Remember Manning was held for nine months in solitary confinement while being subjected to forced nudity, sleep and sensory deprivation and stress positions in the form of shackling. The United Nations rapporteur on torture issued a statement calling Manning’s treatment “cruel, inhuman and degrading” and then was denied a private interview with him to further explore the reality of his mistreatment. The kangaroo court currently hearing his case may reach a verdict this week and that it will be grossly unjust is a given. I have included a link to a recent piece in Salon suggesting that Manning was tortured for his gender identity: http://www.salon.com/2013/07/24/bradley_manning_was_wronged_by_a_world_where_he_was_weird_partner/

Another example of the toleration for torture in our country, though not stated by Snowden that I am aware of, are the thousands of prisoners on U.S. soil in solitary confinement. It would be another whole paper to discuss the institutional abuses around solitary confinement in the U.S. prison industrial complex but I would refer you to this recent video panel discussion from Al Jazeera where the issue is explored in depth:

My point being that I do not think Snowden is being paranoid or in any way histrionic to be concerned about torture at the hands of U.S. officials and therefore his legitimate request for asylum.

The endless propaganda trying to justify the treatment of Manning and the denial of whistleblower status for Snowden is that their actions have endangered American interests and are putting American lives in danger and therefore the “Espionage Act” is being invoked in both situations which contains the essential caveat of ‘aiding the enemy’. I’ll grant their actions may not be in the best interests of global corporate capitalism, but that may be a good thing. That the persecution of whistleblowers is motivated by concerns to keep us safe is quite frankly more incredulous than Congressman Steve King and his fears of marijuana mules with calves the size of cantaloupes streaming across our southern border by the thousands.
If our government officials, including the President and members of Congress and their corporate overlords, were really concerned about the safety and well being of Americans we might address the 40 murders per day and the over 70 deaths a day due to inadequate healthcare in this country. And if you want to discuss putting the men and women in our armed services at risk let’s discuss why no one in the Bush administration has been held accountable for the unjustifiable Iraq war that resulted in the deaths of thousands of our military to say nothing of the many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’ deaths resulting from the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. The risk of harm to me from a terrorist is much less than the likelihood I’ll die from a fall in my bathtub or be struck by lightening.
Perhaps I’ll address my opinions as to why the government is in such a tizzy about their extensive spying on us has been partially exposed at another time but please allow me to be very skeptical that it has little to do with their concerns for my safety, well being and protecting me from terrorists.
It seems only appropriate to include in this piece a quote from the great Noam Chomsky in a recent interview where he was asked directly about Snowden who he said should be honored for “telling”:
“The plea of the US government in this case for the surveillance and so on, is that it’s security against terror. But at the very same moment the US policy is designed in a way to increase terror. The US itself is carrying out the most awesome international terrorist campaign, ever, I suppose– the drones and special forces campaign. That’s a major terrorist campaign, all over the world, and it’s also generating terrorists. You can read that and hear that from the highest sources, General McChrystal and scholars and all, so on.” Noam Chomsky from a
recent interview in Geneva. http://antonyloewenstein.com/2013/07/29/chomsky-praises-snowden-and-condemns-us-hypocrisy/

I am hopeful though that perhaps a new era of national and international hospitality on the part of the U.S. may be on the horizon. Perhaps we are slowing becoming aware of the fact that it is not hospitable to spy on everyone’s everything all the time and then if we don’t like it bomb them into oblivion.

© July 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.

Posted on

Feathers on the Wing by Pat Gourley

“It has been my experience that gay and lesbian people who have fought through their self-hatred and their self-recriminations have a capacity for empathy that is glorious and a capacity to find laughter in things that is like praising God. There is a kind of flagrant joy about us that goes very deep and is not available to most people. I also think that something about our capacity to live and let live is uniquely foreign – that we have learned in the crucible of the discrimination against us how broad our definitions must be for us to be fully human.” 

Paul Monette 
(From an interview in Mark Thompson’s Gay Soul, 1995). 

My what a slippery concept “the essence of GLBTQ” is as I begin to think about it. Much of my gay adult life has been spent in pondering this but pretty exclusively from the perspective as a gay man. It was work with the Radical Fairies where cultivating our difference, our otherness, was often the stated goal. My thinking in this area has been most emphatically influenced by Harry Hay but also by John Burnside, Don Kilhefner, Mitch Walker, James Broughton, Mark Thompson and Will Roscoe along with many other Fairies brothers.

John Burnside, Pat Gourley, Harry Hay, 1983
Photo by David Woodyard

We know we are different, most of us from a very early age, but the questions have always been ‘how?’ and ‘does it go beyond the bedroom?’ Are we primarily shaped as little queer beings in response to societal pressures and oppressions or is their something much more intrinsic? Are we really “born this way” and then of course certainly flesh out individual responses to our otherness in part based on how we are received by parents, siblings, peers and the larger society? This debate today is largely mute as far as the masses of LGBTQ are concerned and occurs if at all really only in rarified academic, queer and mostly University connected enclaves. The take over of the LGBTQ liberation movement by the issues of military service and marriage equality have at least superficially provided us with an escape valve in the form of the meme “we are no different from anyone else and we’ll prove it if you just give us our rights”.

We have as a group largely abandoned pursuing the old Mattachine questions of ‘who are we,’ ‘where do we come from,’ and most importantly ‘what are we for?’ And perhaps this is OK; life does present more than enough daily struggles that can legitimately keep us from philosophizing about our intrinsic natures. The economic benefits alone that can come from marriage equality are real and beneficial for many. However, that we would need the hetero establishment to validate our relationships seems to me to have a bit of a pathetic groveling component to it.

Harry Hay would on occasion taunt those listening to him by twisting around the old bromide of “we are just like you except for what we do in bed” to and I am paraphrasing here “we need to realize that the only thing we have in common with straight people is what we do in bed”.

Hay used to talk frequently about our unique “gay windows” on the world. We see the same world as straight people do looking out of their windows but the view can be very different. This different window has the potential to provide us with outlooks and viewpoints that potentially could be very different in a beneficial way to society.

I think the above Monette quote is a great concrete example as to how that might look. I do not mean to imply that we have the market cornered on empathy as a result of the oppression we have experienced. The world seems to have lots of oppression to go around and I am sure that it can at times invoke great empathy in the compassionately oppressed. We GLBTQ are however uniquely exposed to it often in our own biological families and in our own communities. So often our oppression comes from within our “inner circle” if you will rather than from without. Ironically perhaps this is our greatest gift and can provide us with something “uniquely foreign” to bring to the human banquet, a very broad definition of what it is to be human and the great joy that can convey.

Let me venture far out on a limb with a very sharp saw. Hay had preached for many years that we are actually a separate people but in later years he began to refine this into the possibility that we are actually a separate gender. He began speaking in terms of a third gender. Not intending to piss anyone off here I think we could safely take this and run with it i.e. why not 4th and 5th and 6th genders as well. For a much more detailed and nuance discussion of the “other genders’ concept I would refer to Radically Gay and the section entitled “Our Third Gender Responsibilities”.

In being questioned by Mark Thompson in an interview with Hay published in the 1995 anthology Gay Soul the topic of third gender came up and in one partial response to a question from Thompson, Harry used a metaphor for us that is I think very beautiful and on topic for today.

“…I believe that gays are a specific development of humanity who have a specific contribution to make to the culture. We’re about multidimensionality, among other things. You might say we are the feathers on the wing.” Harry Hay, 1995.

I’d like to close by saying that coming here every week and interacting in such an intimate fashion with you all reinforces for me repeatedly just how we are all the feathers on the wing.

Denver, July, 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.

Posted on

What is the Real Spirit of Stonewall? by Pat Gourley


Stonewall Inn (Then)
Stonewall Inn 2012

White statues in park across
 from the Stonewall Inn








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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 30 June 2013

 About the Author 

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist.  I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Posted on

A Visit to the Doctor/Nurse by Pat Gourley

“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.”

Margaret A. Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 1994.
There are fresh flowers daily, AIDS Grove in Golden Gate Park
Photo by Author

I would have thought that after forty years in health care and thirty-five of them as an R.N. I could write on this in my sleep. That proved not to be the case.

Looking back on my own considerable number of visits to a nurse or doctor and the many thousands of interactions I have had where I was the nurse I do think the most satisfying and hopefully successful interactions were those that could be characterized as a partnership.
The realization, that I suppose was forced on me through my own HIV infection and then being in a caring capacity for many dying from AIDS, was that we, the medical establishment, were essentially helpless to make it all better. Our role seemed to be postponing and ameliorating the inevitable. This could obviously get very depressing in a hurry and I was occasionally asked over my 20 years of direct HIV care why I hadn’t “burned out.” I guess I never had a very good answer for that but looking back then and now I think I never felt that way, certainly not for very long.

Even in an AIDS clinic I was able to find joy in my work. On my best days I think it can be summed up with another quote from Newman: “The joy of nursing lies in being fully present with the clients in the disorganization and uncertainty of their lives – an unconditional acceptance of the unpredictable, paradoxical nature of life.” In other words always be aware that shit happens to everyone sooner or later. My own personal description of confronting this reality goes something like this. “Hey, we are all in this together and its always going to be messy, whether we are talking about the secret sauce from that Big Mac dripping down our chins or the drainage coming out of our private parts.”

A totally anecdotal observation on my part, and one certainly not applicable to all, is that hospice and oncology nurses tend to hang in there for a long time whereas ICU and ER folks tend to come and go much more quickly. Maybe that is why you see so many young ones in the urgent care settings and a lot more grey hair on those hanging your chemo. Perhaps this is due to a relationship in one setting predicated on a lot of adrenalin and the “I am here to save you” mentality while the other being more of a partnership that involves mutual problem solving around the issue for the day. Or perhaps it just takes a few decades to learn the art of compassionate communication?

I certainly am not suggesting that if you go to an ER with crushing chest pain that you should first insist on a mutual dialogue to outline a plan of care before they reach for the nitroglycerin. Give the providers all the pertinent information they ask for and then let them do their thing and hopefully they won’t have to reach for the paddles.

A key realization I came to some decades back, and I relate it to a combination of ICU nursing and the books of a physician named Larry Dossey, was that you really cannot as a provider and also as a patient view illness as bad or a failure. Margaret Newman, the nursing theorist quoted above, also planted the seeds for this in my nursing school years. I think it was Dossey who brought to my attention that health and illness are really two sides of the same coin; you cannot have the realization of one without the other.

It is, I think, when either or both the provider and the patient, perhaps even just subliminally, have the idea that someone has fucked-up that the real trouble starts. This leads to judgment and defensiveness and not an honest sharing of all the gory details that are often a part of everyone’s life. I am not implying that we don’t often make impertinent choices that have consequences, but that should not compromise the reality of the here and now and certainly does not need to define how we and our nurse or doctor will address the problem on the table at that moment. Those of us repetitive sinners can take some, rather sick I suppose, solace from the fact that a whole bunch of bad stuff happens even to those who are always doing it the “right way.”

What I think Newman was referring to as “moving to higher levels of consciousness” is realizing that we do not need to make so many impertinent choices.

As a patient if you have a truly nonjudgmental provider, not always easy to find, there is absolutely nothing you can tell them that will shock or if it does it will be only a transient reaction that is soon put into appropriate perspective. All the cards need to be on the table or an effective plan for addressing the issue at hand is often needlessly delayed. When honesty is involved many fewer mistakes get made in deciding on any intervention.

An example of this I heard once was, “I think I got this hepatitis from a bad lime in my drink at the Triangle,” when much more helpful information would have been, “Do you think maybe I got this from licking butt at the baths a couple weeks ago?” I have countless examples of this sort of magical thinking handed to me perhaps in an attempt to either not shock me or make me not think less of the person. Happily over the years of building trust with many of my clients we were able to dispense with the bullshit and cut to the chase, almost always facilitating a better outcome.

If we as both patients and providers could approach each encounter as an endeavor at caring for the soul everyone would be much better off. I’d close with another quote this one from Thomas Moore and his 1992 book Care of the Soul:

“Care of the soul… isn’t about curing, fixing, changing, adjusting or making healthy…. It doesn’t look to the future for an ideal, trouble free existence. Rather, it remains patiently in the present, close to life as it presents itself day by day….”

Gourley 6/23/2013

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.

Posted on

SPECIAL EDITION: PRIDEFEST

Today’s Special Edition presents stories from three authors.


Breaking into Gay Culture

by Michael King

It was a little over 4 years ago that I got the nerve to go to the Gay Pride activities at Civic Center. I had gone about 15 years ago and ran into someone that I knew and at that time I was so far in the closet that I couldn’t admit even to myself that I was fascinated and curious about the gay culture. Having seen someone that recognized me freaked me out. So after all those intervening years, I finally got up enough nerve to check things out again. My problem wasn’t with being gay, but with other peoples’ reactions. But now I was retired and my only concern would be my kids’ reactions. I figured it didn’t matter much at this point in my life now that they were grown. But I saw no point in saying anything unless I had a lover. I didn’t know much about gay culture and was uncomfortable with going to bars, straight or gay. And for the most part I was unaware of the gay activities and groups where I might meet others and learn about these things.

So I leisurely strolled around Civic Center Park and observed, but without much understanding of the goings on. I was approached by this elderly man who handed me a green card about a luncheon held on Wednesdays with a group of gay men called the Prime Timers. The little gentleman I later got to know. His name was Francis Acres and I credit him with opening the door for me to discover a part of myself that was yearning for expression and acknowledgement. At the time I thanked Francis for the invitation and stuck the green card in my pocket fully intending to trash it when I got home. However just as I was about to throw it in the garbage I looked at it again. Suddenly it seemed like it was the thing I had hoped for. I called the telephone number on the card and left a message for someone to call me with more information. I didn’t get a response. On Wednesday I called the 20th St Cafe where the “Nooners” luncheon was held and found out the time it started. Not knowing how long it would take by bus, I got there quite early. Don Harvey and Jim Michaels were there, greeted me and explained the procedure for buying the lunch and some information about the group. I watched as the members came in and had my first exposure to a gay activity. By the third Wednesday I joined Prime Timers and have been going to events and activities ever since. I started going to the Monday “Coffee Tyme” where last year, I met my lover. Slowly I was feeling more and more comfortable with the group activities and discovered that many older men had also been married, raised children and came out late in life. Others have always been gay while a couple of the guys I met were not only out, but still married. I was no longer the only one with a family and straight friends. I got involved in The Denver Church, later to be known as The Center for Spiritual Living-Denver. And about 2 1/2 years ago, I started going to activities at the GLBT Center. 

         When I met my first lover at “Nooners,” I finally told my kids. A surprise to me, they all said that they had always known. My oldest daughter said, “I knew you were gay before you did! Ha, ha, ha.”

          Now on Mondays we go to the Telling Your Story group, of which this writing is for this week. On Tuesdays is the Men’s Coffee group. Wednesdays is “Nooners,” Thursdays I go to The Open Art Studio and on Fridays I volunteer at the front desk.  “Nooners” on Wednesday and The Center for Spiritual Living on Sundays are the only regular activities not at the GLBT Center. Of course there are other activities now and then, some monthly, others only one time events, others a few times a year. We also belong to the Colorado Front Rangers.

          I’m now experiencing one of the most rewarding and happy periods of my life. I am very comfortable being myself and doing things I would never have done in the past. I went to the celebration of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” with my two lovers dressed in drag, fulfilling a fantasy I have had for a long time. I rode sitting on the back of convertibles in two Gay Pride Parades, waving like the queen that I have become. Last month I had 4 outfits, including 4 wigs and 3 pairs of shoes as I participated as Queen Anne Tique in The Gray Stocking Review. I am recognized by people that I don’t remember meeting because I’m almost always wearing large and often unusual gages. Gages is the name the kids use for body jewelry worn in piercings. Many of mine are 0 gage. I only wear 6 gages in my nipples. I also have a few tattoos, even though there is nothing particularly gay about that.

          A comment that I make perhaps too often is, “I was born a king, but it took me 70 years to become the queen I am today!”

          When interviewed by Channel 4 after the vote to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I looked so gay, it even surprised me when I saw it on the news. The anchor introduced the interview with this statement, “Michael King, a gay activist.” When I heard that remark, I realized that I now have a mission. I will let everyone know that I love being myself. So I guess that by now, I’ve truly broken into gay culture almost totally and feel so wonderful for having done so.

Except for Sunday, Thursday and Friday, while I am either at one or the other Centers and while Merlyn is at the Gym, both of us are always together.

About the Author

I go by the drag name, Queen Anne Tique. My real name is Michael King. I am a gay activist who finally came out of the closet at age 70. I live with my lover, Merlyn, in downtown Denver, Colorado. I was married twice, have 3 daughters, 5 grandchildren and a great grandson. Besides volunteering at the GLBT Center and doing the SAGE activities,” Telling your Story”,” Men’s Coffee” and the “Open Art Studio”. I am active in Prime Timers and Front Rangers. I now get to do many of the activities that I had hoped to do when I retired; traveling, writing, painting, doing sculpture, cooking and drag.

Exaggeration 

by Pat Gourley

In thinking about this word I realized that it is something that I have many times been accused of when acting my most “queenly” and uninhibited. I do though think that exaggeration may be an innate queer quality that has certainly in the past and continues today to serve us well. I am not sure that what is really happening in my more exaggerated moments, and this would be true for the queer world at large, would not more accurately be described as exuberance.

If I might take the liberty to use an example I see often around this [storytellers] table it would be Michael’s earrings. One could easily view these wonderful adornments as certainly exaggerated and quite over the top. I choose to view them as an example of his exuberance for life.

[Editor’s comment: Refer back to the picture of today’s first author above to see Michael’s earrings.]

Early on especially for young gay men and women it is often exaggerated tones of voice, hand gestures, clothing choices and body English that seem almost to be expressed unconsciously that attracts the attention of the straight world. It is viewed as something quite queer by our hetero parents, siblings etc. but for us most often it is something arising from our very souls and seems to us to be quite a natural expression. Something not contemplated or premeditated but simply expressed spontaneously.

What is “reparative therapy” for example in part but the attempt to squash our innate sense of exaggeration or our true sense of exuberance for life? Usually it is men who fall into these programs and are encouraged to be aware of speech and hand movements to tone it down and present themselves in more manly and subdued fashion.

A personal example of my own “exaggeration” I suppose could be the gardens I have planted over the years, often over the top and full of color. If you knew what you were looking for you could simply walk down the block and spot the queer house many feet away. I wasn’t trying to exaggerate but merely was expressing my exuberance for brightly colored plants and lots of them. Oh, and I have an extensive collection of purses that I hope I still carry most often in a very fey manner.

How else but through exaggeration do you breakthrough the soul-crushing curtain of heterosexuality that smothers us all from cradle to grave? Particularly, the exaggeration of difference becomes vital in forming our queer identities. Subtly does not get one very far.

A perfect example of productive exaggeration to refer to this month is our annual celebration of the Stonewall Riots. This momentous event of course occurred at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village NYC in the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969. This action was started and sustained for three days by the most exuberant members of our community, drag queens. Wikipedia defines a drag queen as: “…males who dress and act in a female gender role, often exaggerating certain characteristics (such as make-up and eyelashes) for comic, dramatic or satirical effect.” (Emphasis mine)

One of the most poignant descriptions of that event is in Larry Mitchell’s iconic tome from 1977 The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions.

Action Fierce Against the Men

One warm and rainy night, the faggots and their friends were gathered in one of their favorite cellars dancing and stroking each other gently. Suddenly, the men, armed with categories in their minds and guns in their hands, appeared at the door. The faggots, true to their training for survival, scrammed out the back windows, up into the alley and out into the anonymous night. The queens, unable to scram in their gold lame and tired of just surviving, stayed. They waited until boldness and fear made them resourceful. Then, armed with their handbags and their high heels, let out a collective shriek heard round the world and charged the men. The sound, one never heard before, unnerved the men long enough for the queens to get into the streets. And once on the streets, their turf, mayhem broke out. The word went out and from all over the devastated city, queens moved onto the streets, armed, to shout and fight. The faggots seeing smoke, cautiously came out of hiding and joyously could hardly believe what they saw. Elegant, fiery, exuberant queens were tearing up the street, building barricades, delivering insults, daring the men.

So they joined the queens and for three days and three nights the queens and their friends told the men, in every way they knew how, to fuck off.

(Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, 1977. The book is long out of print but a few used copies can be found and a PDF version is available on line.)

Let’s not forget this Pride 2013 as Larry Mitchell so eloquently states in his book; “it’s been a long time since the last revolutions and the faggots and their friends are still not free.”

Denver, June 2013

About the Author

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I am currently back in Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.



Gay Pride 

by Phillip Hoyle

Kalo sat cross legged watching the Gay Pride Parade on East Colfax as GLBT floats, dancers, marchers, banners, balloons, and bands made their way from Cheesman Park to the Civic Center. It was his third Gay Pride Parade, the event his dad claimed to be the best parade he’d ever seen, combining the intimacy of small-town acquaintance with the glitz of big-city resources. This time Kalo was alone with his grandpa and a few of his grandpa’s friends. It was a new adventure, the capstone to a week of art experiences in the big city. While making plans for the week I, his grandfather, told his mother we could include the gay parade. She said that was just fine. Kalo agreed, so he and I joined the crowd to see the spectacle and to visit the festival on the mall below the Colorado State Capitol building.

Ten-year-old-cool-man Kalo experienced a day of surprises that he watched with fascination, yet without alarm. His perfect visual memory recorded events and impressions that he seemed to treasure. When Kalo returned to Missouri, he told his parents a number of the highlights—the diverse crowd, the gathering of punk-rock lesbians, the woman who wasn’t wearing a shirt, the body painting, the drag queens, and more—but when his dad asked about the parade, Kalo said it wasn’t as good as the other ones he had seen.

“Why?” his dad asked.

“There were too many beer ads.”

Beer was there—everywhere—in the parade, along the route, and at the festival; everywhere folk slurping, swigging, sloshing, and spilling beer. Whether or not the kid saw all the full and quickly emptying cups I don’t know. He did notice the floats with fifteen-foot-high pitchers, enthusiastic dancers, beer banners, and loud music.

When my son relayed his son’s evaluation, I laughed and said, “He’s right. One of the main sponsors of the event is CoorsLight! They had several floats.” Of course, Coors looks at Gay Pride as effective advertising. They know how many gay bars, if not individuals, purchase their products across the West and value the important gay market. So they cooperate in order to stimulate corporate profits. They can also claim a liberal and open attitude.

I’m not proud of the alliance although I have no real objection to beer drinking. Archaeology clearly demonstrates that humans were brewing and drinking it thousands of years ago in the Middle East. They probably did so everywhere farmers raised grain. They still do, both where they have little advertising and where the market is hyped with the latest media technology combining pro-suds and pro-sports.

Yuck. I just spilled beer on my leg. The kid was right, at least to my sensibility; the Parade does have too many beer ads and way too much beer. Perhaps I am just not that much into the Dionysian revels, being too much Apollonian to simply laugh it off and lap it up. Of course, I too can down my beer even if I prefer another brand. But I don’t feel any pride over it; nor do I feel shame, guilt, or degradation.

Pride and lack of pride stem from a popularized psychology of minority concerns. I’m not into the slogans, but I do value gay pride. By contrast, I know many gay men and lesbians and others who are pleased as punch to be who and what they are but who want no identification with the rollicking groups of dancers, drag queens, leathermen, Dykes on Bikes, and such. But they do benefit from the hard work at The GLBT Community Service Center of Colorado where the festivities are planned, from the public profile of PFLAG members who proudly march for their kids and friends in this public display, and from the quiet work of lobbies for human rights within American law. We can be proud of that. I am. I’m happy to be at the festival drinking a beer or two, eating a sandwich, looking at the booths, watching performances, hearing music, and laughing with friends and acquaintances at this annual family reunion of sorts. It’s nice. I like it.

I’m proud to be here because I know at base it’s political. This mass of proud folk has a voice. Legislators and administrators admit it although sometimes with great reluctance due to their fears of not being reelected. Businesses recognize it with big buck grins. I’m not proud of the shenanigans of some of the revelers here, but I recognize the power Gay Pride represents and its balancing effects in Denver, in Colorado, and in the good ol’ USA. Show your colors, Denver; wave your rainbow flag, Colorado. Be proud enough, USA, to change a few more policies, even some in the military.

Dance, shout, celebrate. Okay, drink a few; even a few too many if you must. Take the bus home or stay over at the close-by apartment of a friend on Capitol Hill. I like our Gay Pride Festival and just hope all of us proud gays will get home safely, meaning without STDs, DUIs, ODs, or DTs.

Denver, 2010

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”
Posted on

Depravity by Pat Gourley

Depravity is defined as moral corruption or as a morally corrupt act. Christian theology calls depravity the innate corruption of human nature and ties it directly to original sin. Original sin has roots in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is quite a twisted little story involving a snake, a piece of fruit, an injunction not to touch God’s favorite apple tree and a wily woman as the ultimate temptress of a man apparently incapable of making his own decisions. Women get the comeuppance in the end for leading Adam into sin by having to be subservient in all matters to men and also get to experience childbirth as a very painful event.

In doing just a bit of research on this fairy tale of original sin I did learn that the Quran lays the blame for falling into the devil’s snare equally on both Adam and Eve and does not pin the blame on the female partner of the cohort. My sense of this is that the whole Christian version was cooked up by a bunch of old men trying quite successfully to keep woman in their place. A thinly veiled attempt if you will to put words into the mouth of god and thereby justify their power over women. I view the various interpretations of the Genesis story claiming it as allegory for human frailty in generally pretty much bullshit. I see it as a thinly disguised hetero male power play.

Something near and dear to the hearts of many LGBT peoples through the centuries that has been consistently labeled as depravity is sodomy. Sodomy including both oral and anal sex was still on the books as a felony in a significant handful of States here in the U.S. until June 26th, 2003. It was on that date the Supreme Court struck down the remaining sodomy laws on the books with their ruling in Lawrence vs. Texas. In many states this did involve oral or anal sex even between discordant, i.e. male and female, partners as well as between partners of the same sex. Oh and of course several states tossed in fellatio and anal sex with barnyard animals as a felony also.

In thinking about the strong historical connections between depravity, sodomy and homosexuals I am tempted to ask what is it that they were are actually afraid of? I suppose there could have been some argument made at one time that if everyone discovered how much fun it was to fuck your own kind that the human race might have sputtered out of existence. With seven billion souls running around the planet these days that argument certainly no longer holds any water. In fact very compelling arguments for the future survival of the human race can be made for sharply curtailing the reproductive imperative.

I am going to go out on a limb here and perhaps just make up some shit about why we came to be labeled as depraved. It’s hard to believe that the joys of oral sexual stimulation or the delight of prostate massage in its various forms between two women or two men was at the root of centuries of destructive vitriol and near universal condemnation. What is the real reason for “the love that dare not speak its name” being viewed as such a threat?

Did perhaps the hetero-male monopoly see the real threat to their hegemony in the form of men willing to abdicate traditional masculine roles and truly love one another? Maybe it never really was the sex but the threat to the status quo. Now there is something really depraved as they see it in abdicating male privilege.

Harry Hay spoke often of what he called our subject-to-subject inheritance. As I interpret this it is the ability of one human being to relate to another as subject-to-subject as opposed to how things usually work subject-to-object. As gay people we have an intrinsic leg up on being able to relate in this fashion. Man-to-man or woman-to-woman carries with it the potential for a more egalitarian relationship than say man and woman or husband and wife. Even more so I would say that brother and sister.

Will Roscoe has described our Queerness as a “profound ongoing motivation.” We usually become aware of this motivation in isolation with no cultural or societal reinforcement for the genuine beauty of it. So then that initial discovery that I am not alone can often result in an amazingly equal bonding on a very deep emotional and physical level.

This subject-to-subject inheritance is often not fully actualized understandably because we are acculturated into the dominant and all pervasive heterosexual worldview. That view is a male/female dichotomy where the power is clearly in favor of the male. Young boys are taught very early on to always beware of women bearing apples. Once these women learn their subservient role though, we are encouraged to help ourselves to the apple.

We as little budding gay folk, though, view others not as potential threats or competition but rather as desired equals. Now you may say that many queer relationships are anything but subject-to-subject but often unfortunately contain many elements of objectification. This is at least in part the result of internalized hetero-imitation. Our intrinsic nature or un-actualized inheritance though is to love one another as the same.

We are labeled as depraved as a means of controlling, isolating and extinguishing us. Keeping under wraps if you will our real threat to the status quo and that has little if anything to do with where we put our penises, tongues, fingers or objects of art. The threat is of course that if we are allowed to actualize our subject-to-subject inheritance we will really upset the apple cart.

Dec. 2011

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 am currently on an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Posted on

Prisoner C.3.3 – A True Queer Irishman by Pat Gourley

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”

Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray – 1891

     March 17th is the day many celebrate all things Irish and it has often been said that everyone is Irish on that day. It certainly has evolved for many into an excuse to get royally pissed, often on green beer. Though the exact year of St. Patrick’s death is somewhat a matter of conjecture there seems to be some historical agreement that the actual day was March 17th sometime in the 5th century.

     Snakes and shamrocks are often closely associated with Patrick. He may have actually used the shamrock to teach the mystery of the Holy Trinity, i.e. three-in-one. The shamrock was certainly a pagan symbol and as with so much of Christianity was co-opted by the new religion probably to enhance recruitment.

     The snakes are a bit more of a shaky matter. Post-glacial Ireland never had any snakes but Patrick gets credit for driving them all out of Ireland. One account relates that he may actually have hallucinated being attacked by snakes after completing a 40-day fast and then defeated them. That sounds about right to me. After a good night sleep and some real food and water the snakes were all magically gone.

     One thing historians agree on was that a young Patrick, a Brit actually and not Irish himself, was captured by raiding Irish pagans and hauled off from Roman Britain to Ireland where he spent several years as a slave. Eventually he did return to Ireland as a missionary. I think we can give him at least some credit or blame for converting Ireland to Catholicism although even this is contested by some. He certainly has become the patron saint of Irish Catholics.

     As a young Irish Catholic lad my coming out as queer was in retrospect heavily influenced and directed by that peculiarly intense version of guilt inducing religiosity, Irish Roman Catholicism. St. Patrick then for me represents in some ways a stifling religion that has done more than its share of oppressing Queer people.

     Though certainly not unique to Ireland or the Irish the whole messy and very sad kettle of fish that is clergy sexual abuse has really come home to roost in recent years in Ireland. The far-reaching tentacles of this perversion are currently in the press in the form of Cardinal Keith O’Brien and his resignation for inappropriate sexual advances. Cardinal O’Brien is Irish and was born in Northern Ireland. He recently resigned as the religious head of the Catholic Church in Scotland because of “drunken fumblings” of a sexual nature towards several other much younger clergy and students.

     This was apparently not a case of serial pedophilia and perhaps could even have elicited some sympathy for a man only able to address his gay sexual nature when drunk. An unfortunate but not infrequent manifestation of internalized homophobia still today. However, this guy’s self-hatred manifested itself only just a year ago in a public diatribe condemning the “madness of same sex unions and the tyranny of tolerance.” Sorry, no sympathy here, only pity.

     So on this St. Patrick’s Day I prefer to celebrate a different Irishman. Not one of the O’Brien’s of the Church or an old and largely mythological saint of a religion that is rapidly imploding into irrelevance. Rather I prefer to honor the legacy of a much more honest and open queer Irish man, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), dramatist, novelist and poet.

     I acknowledge that what got Oscar in so much trouble, ending in a severe two-year prison term at hard labor, was in part the result of “yielding to his temptations”. Oh yes and then taking very queenly umbrage at being implicated as a sodomite by the father of one his young lovers.

     He decided to sue this man for libel. Obviously Oscar was not openly embracing his inner queer here, but it was the 1890’s in Victorian England. At trial things didn’t go so well. Wilde eventually ended up being charged and convicted of “gross indecency” and the charge of libel against the father of his lover dropped. Sodomy in those days in England was a felony. In the English penal system Wilde was Prisoner C.3.3.

     I would like to end with a couple more delicious quotes from Prisoner C.3.3:

“ Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

“We are all in the gutter but some of us are 
looking up at the stars.”
“Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”

     Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone and don’t forget to lift a pint to Oscar! His life I think on balance was a positive way to yield to temptations in a manner that keeps one’s soul from growing sick.

For St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2013

Oscar Wilde’s grave in Paris, France
Photo by Pat Gourley

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 am currently on an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Posted on

Reflections on Bayard Rustin for MLK Day, 2013 by Pat Gourley

“The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it’s the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated.” 
Bayard Rustin, 1986.

          I grew up in an all white Irish farming community and went to Catholic schools where African Americans, or any people of color for that matter, were as rare as hen’s teeth. FYI, hens have no teeth. I did though have the opportunity to be informed and sensitized to the amazing reality of racial inequality in America in the late 1960’s by my high school government/civics teacher. This teacher was a Holy Cross nun whose enlightenment on these issues put her truly in a league of her own in northern Illinois in 1967. An amazingly dynamic woman named Sister Alberta Marie (SAM) showed me the harsh realties of racial injustice in America and the horrible folly and crime that was the war in Vietnam.

          SAM was herself very involved in peace activist work primarily, though not exclusively, aimed at opposing the war in Vietnam. She brought the great Jesuit activist Father Daniel Barrigan to our high school my senior year, an effort I always thought instrumental in getting her booted out of the Order a short time later. Important for me personally she arranged to send a small group of her students, myself included, to rural Mississippi to observe the activities of literacy teachers working primarily with poor black farm workers. This trip to Mississippi coincided closely with my own first male sexual encounters with a wonderful mentor several decades older than myself. My senior year was quite busy and many of my activities had lifelong and very positive implications.

          The harsh realities of life for the black folks I ran into in Mississippi were almost incomprehensible for a little middle class white kid. I was though aware of Martin Luther King Jr. and viewed him as the leader of the Civil Rights movement but it was this trip that started to bring it all home in a very real and substantive fashion. I knew about the 1963 march on Washington and the “I Have a Dream Speech.” Someone I was not aware of, though I may have at least heard his name, was Bayard Rustin. As it turns out this very openly gay man was not only a mentor for Dr. King, he was the main architect for the 1963 March on Washington and the person most responsible for bringing the potent concept of nonviolent action to the Civil Rights movement.

          Remarkably Bayard was boldly open about his sexuality in the 1940’s and 1950’s. It was an arrest and conviction on “morals charges” in California in 1953 that was to haunt him and in many respects diminish the credit he richly deserves for his role in the Civil Rights movement. The “crime” he was convicted of was sex with a couple other men in the back seat of a car; it did not even involve being busted in a public cruising area—the most common form of institutional terror inflicted on gay men at the time. He was throughout his life a frequent target of FBI surveillance and, I suspect, mischief meant to discredit his powerful organizing capabilities that in many respects made him such a potent target of the racist forces opposed to civil liberties for African Americans in the early 1960’s. Strom Thurmond in an attempt to derail the 1963 March made a point of publically stating that a “pervert” was largely organizing the whole affair.

          Bayard was though a very active proponent of civil rights long before the 1960’s and was pushing to sit in the front of the bus long before Rosa Parks. He was a Quaker and had been involved and active in a group called the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His involvement with this group also was curtailed by the public humiliation that came along with his arrest and conviction for the “crime” of loving another man. He was also a strong advocate of workers rights and a strong supporter of the Trade Unions. He was of course, as were most activists worth their salt back in the 1930’s and 1940’s, involved with the Communist Party. He did significant prison time in the 1940’s for resisting the draft. This activist pedigree when looked at in its totality including in part being a felon, a draft dodger, a pervert, a nonviolent disciple of Gandhi, an African American and a communist is quite impressive and really has no equal when compared with LGBT leaders of today.

          One of his most profound insights and something he stressed through sixty years of activism is that we are all in this together. Certain Buddhists refer to this as the concept of One Taste. Bayard Rustin truly grasped the essence of One Taste in the following statement: “We are all one and if we don’t know it we will learn it the hard way”. So on this MLK day in 2013 I would encourage all my LGBT brothers and sisters to remember these words from our dear comrade Bayard and be willing to expand our work and activism beyond our own, albeit legitimate, concerns of marriage and military service. What a great gift from our community if we could produce more Bayard Rustin’s fighting for income equality, world peace, repeal of the Second Amendment and a Manhattan project to address climate change.

          If you are more interested in the life of this great gay man who played such an integral role in the life and activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. I highly suggest the award-winning documentary film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003), available on Netflix. Also the very extensive biography, The Lost Prophet (2003) available on Kindle by John D’Emilio, is well worth the read.

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 am currently on an extended sabbatical in San
Francisco, California.
Posted on

The Fluffo Flotilla Revisited by Pat Gourley

One evening in the fall of 1978 I was at the Empire Baths. It was a rather slow evening as I recall and I was in the showers thinking I might head out when I noticed a bearded middle aged fellow just my type with a very impressive penis. Shower cruising is of course an ancient gay male art as old as showers themselves and it was always accelerated when taking place in a gay bathhouse. There was no need to worry about offending any straight male sensibilities in such an establishment.
The ensuing sex was great and as was my want on the occasion I tried to get the fellow to reconnect with me soon outside the bath. He was very hesitant but I was at my persuasive best and he reluctantly agreed to come by my house the next evening. And did I mention that the sex was pretty damn good!
I initially assumed, correctly, that he was married to a woman, which was the only option in those days. That however was not the reason for his reluctance. He did relate that he would look much different and when I pressed him on this he said he would have all the hair on his body shaved off when I saw him the next evening.
This turned out to be the case and I assumed it was not a part of a sexual scene at all, especially since I did not do any of the shaving. He said he was going to Texas the next day to take part in some sort of “experiment” in a sensory deprivation tank though I never got many details on this and did not push it since my main interest was getting this man in bed again.
The house I lived in and a couple of my roommates whom he met that night were I think quite foreign to him. We were that rare breed of “queer hippies” into the Grateful Dead and the communal décor of the house was eclectic to say the least, largely furnished with alley cast-offs. I do remember that he made a point of opening a briefcase he was carrying before we went upstairs. In addition to papers and a few personal effects there was a large handgun, which I remember he made a point of making sure I saw.
I elected not to comment on that probably thinking I hope he fucks me before he shoots me. The sex again was great and he was really more naked than a jaybird, not a hair anywhere to be found. He did not spend the night and I did not see him again for many months after that. I recall a few details of our subsequent meetings but they involved the cultivation and nurturing of a loving friendship outside the bedroom that lasts to this day. I learned that he was involved in a business on the Western Slope that ran river raft trips and had a wife and several adopted children. Oh and he was a conservative Republican. Remember though that conservative Republicans of that day were similar to the centrist Democrats of today. There was certainly a mutual sexual attraction but I think he thought of me as truly exotic in many ways other than in bed and I thought of his right wing worldview as quaintly misguided but tolerable.
In the fall of 1979 he persuaded me to come visit and do a raft trip down the Yampa River. I brought along several friends perhaps because I still was not totally comfortable visiting a gun-toting Republican on his turf by myself. The trip was a several day affair and very much fun. I slept in his tent and the rather unbelievable story presented to his crew was that I was his personal nurse and he was not feeling well. No one I think bought that story for a minute. The sex of course remained wonderful though I did learn the hard way that river sand and Vaseline are not a good combination.
The relationship continued albeit sporadically and the next year I met the love of my life, David Woodyard, and he moved in with me in a shared house here in Denver in the Five Points neighborhood. These were peak Radical Fairie years for me but even that level of esoteric queerness did not seem off putting to my western slope Republican friend. He loved being in the company of openly gay men and in the late summer of 1982 organized another raft trip of several days this one involving a larger group of friends. The first trip had been a gentle float but this one involved some real white water rafting through Desolation Canyon in Utah on the Green River.
I was happily partnered on that trip and not having sex with my friend though several of the folks I brought along I think accommodated his needs just fine. Being 1982 AIDS was still on the horizon especially for Denver so this trip proved to be quite the debauched event. My friend loved entertaining a large group of campy queens and there was plenty of fucking, booze, what passed for good food in those days and LSD to go around and though I was off the hallucinogens by that time many others were not.
A running joke amongst the group to the innocent confusion of the largely straight crew centered around a cooking shortening called Fluffo that was used to fry every meal it seemed. I don’t think any of us had heard of Fluffo before but we quickly incorporated it into our ongoing gay banter when we realized it was a cheap knock off of Crisco. Crisco was of course a lubricant of great renown in certain gay male circles at the time.
The final evening of the trip was a big party involving some very bad gender fuck drag and tasteless camp. This event was immortalized on our own return in a large spread in Out Front Magazine in an article called The Fluffo Flotilla accompanied by several photos. It helped of course get this sort of publicity by having the editor of Out Front at the time along on the trip.
Before eating and posing for pictures in our bad drag, and holidng a can of Fluffo strategically in the middle of the photo, my dear friend the raft company owner humored me and helped organized a group reading of selected poems from James Broughton’s just released Graffiti for the Johns of Heaven. To this day I wonder what several of the young straight crew thought of Broughton’s bawdy gay verse celebrating Nipples and Cocks, along with many other irreverent tomes, being read aloud in the Utah wilderness of the banks of the Green River. I would like to think it fostered future tolerance of gay people and perhaps even facilitated a coming out or two.

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 am currently on an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.