Tag: Pat Gourley

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My Happiest Day/Leaving, by Pat Gourley

From
the Pali Canon:

The Buddha was speaking to a
group of monks. He said, “Monks, suppose that this great earth were totally
covered with water and a man were to toss a yoke with a single hole into the
water. A wind from the West would push it East; a wind from the East would push
it West; a wind from the North would push it South; a wind from the South would
push it North. And suppose a blind sea turtle were there. It would come to the
surface only once every 100 years. Now what do you suppose the chances would be
that a blind turtle, coming once to the surface every 100 years, would stick
his neck into the yoke with a single hole?”


And the monks answered, “It
would be very unusual, Sir, that a blind turtle coming to the surface once
every hundred years would stick his neck into the yoke.”


And the Buddha replied, “And
just so, it is very, very rare that one attains the human state.”

My happiest day was
January 12th, 1949. This was the day of my birth and it took place
in La Porte Indiana.  Based on the
Buddha’s thoughts above I was one lucky fella. Putting blind turtles aside and
relying instead on actual current knowledge of the development from a
fertilized egg to viable fetus your chances are probably less than 20% of
making the grade. A very significant majority of embryos never make it beyond
the first couple days or weeks following conception.
If according to the most
extreme “right-to-lifers” human life begins at conception then heaven is
overwhelmingly populated with embryos. Or do embryos have fully actualized
souls with developed human personalities? Sorry but that is a bit beyond my
comprehension. And if you do believe in God having a direct hand in inflicting
his will on all sentient life on the planet then that would make him by far the
world’s leading abortionist. There really are a lot of holes in this whole “God
thing” when you start to critically ponder it, which of course is why the whole
business of “faith” was cooked up. To quote Dana Carvey’s SNL character the Church
Lady; “how convenient”!
 And the gauntlet doesn’t end with a live birth
but the odds of making it to at least the age of reason, which the Catholic
Church tells us is age seven, is certainly much better than in ages gone by.
If, however, you are born in many of the poorer countries of the world your
chances of dying in infancy are still considerable.
So I must say that the
happiest day of my life came with the added bonuses of being born a white male
in the United States. This could only have been better if I had been born white
in a western European democracy, post 1945 of course.
I suppose I could also say
the happiest day of my life, the one with the greatest long-term daily benefit,
was the day I came out. Only problem there is pinning down the exact date. My
coming out was certainly a process with at times fitful starts and stops, a
gradual evolution lasting from about age ten until my mid-twenties. I was
certainly much happier at the end of this process than at the beginning. There
was though no particular day filled with bolts of lightening from on high and a
choir of angels singing to usher me to the promised queer land.
I therefore must return
to my day of birth as my happiest since this provided the opportunity for all
that was to follow. I am very happy that I was not one of the millions of
embryos that inadvertently wind up getting flushed down a toilet or expelled
into an open sewer. I truly am one lucky son-of-a-bitch.
I am now left to often
ponder what it will be like to take my final leave. Let’s face it all the other
leaving one engages in life is really small potatoes compared to the final
exit. It is often the paralyzing and at times incomprehensible fear of our vaporizing
into nothingness after we take our final breath that has spawned the very many
human creations of an afterlife and higher power. If only we aren’t really
leaving but rather transitioning to something better and eternal, the ultimate
bit of delusional thinking. The idea that I am so great that the Universe can’t
possibly go on without me is now in my mind simply deluded human hubris.
Though I am convinced
that the human dance on this planet is a going to be limited and very short in
the grand scheme of things that does not in any way diminish how fucking
amazing it will have been. In growing into the label of humanist, or atheist if
I am in a particularly ornery mood, I want to be able to say that when I do
take my final leave I will have left things a bit more conducive to other
sentient beings able to experience and enjoy the wonder of being one of those
lucky blind turtles.
© 29 Oct 2017 
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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Hunting, by Pat Gourley

I lived on a farm in Northern Indiana until the age of
sixteen. Though we were as far as you could be from the toxic reality of
today’s factory farms there certainly were plenty of animals raised that met
their demise at the hands of various family and extended family members
directly or indirectly. By indirectly I mean we sold and loaded plenty of
animals into trucks that were headed for the local slaughterhouse.
I learned to kill chickens with an axe from my mother who
emphasized not letting the headless bird flop all around and spray all the
younger siblings and cousins lined up watching the slaughter with chicken blood.
I was quite good at it. This is something I cannot for the life of me imagine
myself doing today. Any backyard chickens that I might have in the future would
live to ripe old ages dying from chicken heart attacks or falling prey to a
local fox or coyote.
For whatever reason, there were no hunters in my immediate
family. There was one Uncle nearby who did some hunting but that was mostly for
rabbits and pheasants.  I can to this day
hear my aunt complaining about trying to get all the buckshot out of the poor
rabbit before cooking it. She also made a delicious rabbit gravy as I recall
and that was worth biting down on the occasional piece of buckshot missed in
the cleaning.
The closest I can remember my dad ever came to hunting was
one winter when he had hurt his back and was told, incorrectly in those days,
that bed-rest was required to heal the sprain. The bedroom had a window that
looked out over the backyard and onto a corncrib. This crib was made of fencing
that allowed the grain to thoroughly dry out and not get moldy but still exposed
the ears of corn. From that vantage point he could see rats scurrying about and
munching away on all his hard work. So, he took to shooting the varmints out
the bedroom window with a 12-gauge shotgun missing more often that not.
I myself had a very short period of attempting to hunt
rabbits around the age of 12 or 13 with a small caliber long gun I think that
was called a 410-shotgun. Despite hours of traipsing through the snow no
rabbits lost their lives at my hand.
Once we moved from Indiana to north of Chicago there was even
less hunting by folks on our neighboring farms than there had been in Indiana.
We were really only a mile or two from being Chicago suburbanites and random
gunshots not something the neighbors would have appreciated.
There was a woman name Margaret though in the farm next to
ours who I became fast friends with due in large part to our similar political
views. We loved talking politics for long hours denigrating everything
Republican. She did though have a very efficient way of killing chickens every
spring. She would tie them up and suspend them by their feet, about a dozen at a
time, from her clothesline. She would then quickly march down the line with a
sharp butcher knife severing heads cleanly and efficiently. I know this may
sound gross to you but do remember that the burger or chicken breast you enjoy
today did not get to your plate as a result of the animal committing suicide.
As I began to get in touch with my queer nature, especially
from age 16 on, anything to do with hunting or people who engaged in it really faded
from my life. I know absolutely no other queer person I am aware of today who
hunts. There is one straight man occasionally in my life who does hunt and that
is for sport not a need for food. 99.9% of the animal killing for food these
days is done in very inhumane slaughterhouses mostly by exploited immigrant
labor far from our eyes. It then appears magically in the meat sections of
grocery stores neat, tidy and wrapped in cellophane.
Harry Hay was a very adherent vegetarian for the entire 20
plus years I knew him and long before that. He was fond of saying, when asked
about whether he ever ate meat or not, that it would only be if he personally knew
the cow. This always seemed to imply also that one really should know intimately
whom they are eating and that they had done the killing and butchering
themselves.
I think this would be a splendid plan for all meat-eaters to
do their own slaughtering. I imagine this would end much of the cruel factory
farming and vastly increase the number of vegetarians and vegans. This would
then go a long way toward saving the planet by helping to reverse global
warming. Remember there is virtually nothing we as individuals can do to impact
climate change more than to refrain from eating any animal product. Hunting
these days should really only involve looking for a good sale on kale.
© 25 Sep
2016 
About the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California. 
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Setting Up House, by Pat Gourley

Having moved many times in my adult life and once while still living at home with my parents I am quite familiar with setting up house. The first move in my teenage years was when my family left Northern Indiana and relocated to NE Illinois in 1965, I was 16 years old at the time. This was as it turned out a great change getting me out of rural Indiana. Unfortunately, Mike Pence is really not an anomaly back there, and into a new home and school. At Marion Central Catholic High School, I was taught by a great radical Holy Cross nun who to this day influences my world view. Oh, and there was the older gentleman I met in my new surroundings who became my first queer love.

Though I have been very fortunate for never having to “set up house” after any sort of natural or manmade disaster I think this move as a teenager really set a tone for me later in life making frequent moves much easier. All but one of my moves since age 18 has involved setting up home with other folks and a wide variety of individuals at that. Two moves in the last 50 years, totally 28 years, have involved setting up shop with a male lover. Having a loving companion in your life with whom you decide to share living space with is always a bit different than moving in with people who are just roommates.

My most recent move, now a little over three years ago, is unique in my adult life in that it has involved no one else – not a lover or any roommates. I really do yearn for more companionship in my day-to-day living situation and would prefer this be somebody or somebodies on site. A lover at this time is fraught with hurtles and unlikely to happen. My HIV status complicates this certainly but really the big issue is finding someone who could stand to share a bed with me. I get up to pee at night an inordinate number of times and my propensity to fart in bed occurs often enough each night to be a contribution to global warming, a form of methane one step from being weaponized: the one and really only drawback to a largely plant-based diet.

Even my cat has had to adjust to these frequent nightly wind emissions. He will only sleep spooning my belly even though it is just as cozy in the crook of my leg. The leg position however puts him directly in the line of fire and is avoided it seems at all costs.

So, if I am to avoid one of my greatest fears of aging, living out my last years alone, it will need to be with roommates and individual bedrooms. I have many years of experience living communally and do hope that these last few years of going it alone have not made me into such a fussy old queen that sharing living space is now out of the question.

Though I have certainly learned to never say never I find the prospect of any sort of assisted living very unsettling and something I hope to avoid at all costs. Let’s be honest “assisted living” has become the politically correct euphemism for nursing home. Oh, sure a few assisted living situations come with a supported modicum of independence but these often involve significant financial resources. Ending up in such a place is something I personally dread more than dying alone and being eaten by my cat before someone finds my body. I am therefore in support of ballot initiative 106, the medical aid in dying proposal on the November 2016 ballot here in Colorado. [It passed.]

I have, I think, walked a fine line in this writing group acknowledging the reality of my HIV status while trying to avoid weaving it into everything I have to say. It is far from everything I have to say and I feel stating it too often can really be disingenuous to say the least. Having said that my options for finding like-minded individuals these days to set up house with has been severely limited by the many individuals l have lost out of my life from AIDS. I would therefore find it a bit cathartic to have us write some time about taking down a house after the death of a lover, parent perhaps or simply a roommate. This would I think be something most if not all of us could write about.

© 11 September 2016

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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The Solar System, by Pat Gourley

“If the Universe doesn’t care about us and if we’re an accident in a remote corner of the Universe, in some sense it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us; we provide our own meaning.” 

Lawrence M. Krauss

The last sentence of this quote, from the controversial physicist and atheist Lawrence Krauss, I think could be viewed as a synonymous description of the actualized queer person. We have had to, through our multitude of unique coming out paths, provide our own meaning. Many of us have started on our path of self-actualization feeling very isolated and alone wondering what is wrong with me. Most of us though eventually realize how precious we really are. We are the golden threads in the tapestry of humanity.

As modern astronomy has proven beyond a doubt our solar system is phenomenally insignificant in our own very insignificant galaxy. Best estimates from data provided by the Hubble Deep Space Telescope is that there are between 100 and 200 billion galaxies in the ever-expanding Universe. Our own galaxy the Milky Way is estimated to contain between 100 billion and 400 billion stars.

If there is a God, or sole initiator of this whole phenomenon, that entity surely must have a bit more on their mind than whom we, inhabiting the third rock from the sun in this miniscule solar system, are fucking. I mean really get a grip and begin to try and comprehend the mindboggling immensity of the Universe. It really implies an extremely exaggerated sense of our own importance to think the initiator of the Big Bang leading to the creation of 200 billion galaxies is preoccupied with our drama. If there were a hell this over the top human hubris alone should get us sent to hades for eternity.

I will admit that perhaps I have a very immature and un-evolved sense of the spiritual. I will concede there may exist an omnipotent source of direction running through the evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to date, call it God if you want. Sorry but the comprehension of such an entity at this point in my life is way above my pay grade. It would require an amount of faith-based belief I find really unthinkable and quite frankly a lazy copout. Maybe I could be further along in actualizing the possible reality of this wonder and not having to rely on faith alone, if I spent more cushion-time but I don’t think that is going to happen either.

I actually am quite content thinking we really are the result of a bunch of lucky evolutionary “accidents” that have occurred since living things first appeared on the planet 3.8 billion years ago. When you look at all the countless evolutionary steps and cross roads traversed and we still made the cut it is really something. It is quite precious really.

I was at a very wonderful event recently when two dear male friends decided after 27 years of living together they should get married. Though the words marriage and God were spoken several times during the event it was actually billed on the program as a “Celebration of Love”. I think the institution of marriage was cooked up to control property and women and then their reproductive capacity. I do believe we queers are really bringing our own meaning to it all, to this age old and until recently heterosexual institution.

I was asked to participate by doing a reading or two lasting no more that a couple minutes. It did cross my mind that if there is anything to this God business my stepping into one of his churches might unleash a meteor strike ending the human race right then and there. That did not happen. I was able to read a poem by Walt Whitman and another by Rumi with no detectable dire consequences resulting.

So even if God doesn’t exist and the Universe doesn’t care a twit about us and we are just a happy evolutionary accident in an isolated solar system on the edge of an in significant galaxy it sure is still amazing. As gay people we also get to provide our own sense of meaning and that creative self-realization adds immensely to the human dance on this third rock from the sun.

© October 2016

 About the Author

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

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Mark Thompson, by Pat Gourley

Mark Thompson (August 19th, 1952 – August 11th,
2106) a pioneer and chronicler of gay men’s lives with particular focus on the
phenomenon of gay male spirituality, defined and given direction in part by the
Radical Fairie movement, died this past week on the 11th of August.
Mark was 63 and just a few days short of his birthday with plans to celebrate
with friends in Palm Springs. Mark’s contributions to the Queer Revolution are
legion and extensive.  He was preceded in
death by his long time partner Malcolm Boyd, the well-known gay activist and
Episcopal priest who died in February of last year (2015).
Do check out Mark’s web site to get a flavor of his broad
insights and talents: http://www.markthompsongayspirit.com/author.html
I did not know Mark Thompson well having met him briefly only
a couple of times dating back to that first Spiritual Conference for Radical
Fairies in the Arizona desert. At that time Mark worked for the Advocate, a publication he was associated
with for over 20 years culminating in 1994 with his editing Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History
of the Gay and Lesbian Movement (St. Martin’s Press).
I got to “know” Mark best through his trilogy on gay
spirituality:
Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning (Lethe Press-1987)
Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature.
(Harper San Francisco-1994)
Gay Body: A Journey Through Shadow to Self. (St
Martin’s Press-1997)
Gay Soul in particular was a very loving and
reinforcing work for me coming at the darkest time in the AIDS nightmare in my
own life both professionally and personally. It was a time when in my darkest
moments I was questioning the whole gay liberation movement and wondering what
had we wrought here. These bouts of anguished questioning occurring most often
late at night usually resolved themselves by morning with the returning sun but
twinges did often linger. It was truly juice for my “soul” to read Mark’s
conversations with 16 prominent gay men several of whom I had gotten to know.
Though I would not have self-identified as an atheist (were
there any atheists working in AIDS Clinics in the 1980-90’s?) in 1994 as I do
now I definitely found succor in these great gay mentors discussing Gay Soul. As I have re-perused some of
Mark’s writings from Gay Soul in the
past few days they remain soothing in spite of my own current skeptical views
on many things spiritual. I find that Judy Grahn’s words from the back jacket
of Gay Soul taken from her review of
the book in the Advocate still resonate strongly for me: “What Thompson has given gay men in Gay Soul is an outpouring of
much-needed love-from new kinds of “fathers”.
I’d close with a few lines by Mark Thompson from the
introduction to Gay Soul:
“My soul is the repository of all that I
feel: my appetites and my ambitions, sadness and joy. It is the place where
inspiration germinates and from which vitality grows. It is also the place of
perplexity and unfathomable fear. Above all, I sense that my soul is the inner
arena in which life’s combustible opposites collide, creating dissonance and
upheaval as well as new harmony and stasis. Somewhere in this great container
of ceaseless death and rebirth lies, too, the mystery of my being gay.”
Mark Thompson.
Los Angeles. Vernal Equinox, 1994.
© 15 Aug 2016 
About the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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Movies, by Pat Gourley

Unlike many of my gay
male brethren in particular, I am not a great fan of the big screen.  A consistent theme in my life has been to
almost exclusively read non-fiction books and that spills over these days to
rarely seeing any movie that is not a documentary. I am fond of anything
dealing with political themes but in rather cowardly fashion I suppose I do avoid
films on the climate crisis. I find them very valuable but so disturbingly truthful
and realistic I can’t watch. I suppose I do watch documentaries because I am
lazy and it’s easier to just sit back and have it all laid out for me. Reaching
for the popcorn is easier than reading and having to continually turn the page.
Perhaps this avoidance to
film dates back to the first movie I ever saw in a theatre and that was
Disney’s Old Yeller. A quick
refresher: the movie takes place in Texas in 1869 and the star is a loveable
yellow lab, who would put Lassie to shame any day. Yeller of course had the
advantage of being teamed up with a much more relatable friend in 15 year old
Travis. Lassie was burdened with Timmy who seemed destined in every episode to
make really stupid choices that only his dog could save him from. What of
course so seared Old Yeller into my
psyche was that he gets rabies fighting off a predatory wolf and has to be shot
by Travis. I never really got past this despite the Disney attempts to soften
the ending with a new puppy for the family. Sorry, the damage was done. I
actually don’t think I saw any movies after that until the James Bond movies
came out and the obvious draw for me to these films was James and not any of
the Fox-News-personality-type female sexual partners central to every Bond
film.
I do though appreciate
how important film is to the LGBT community and the tremendous impact this can
have in both very positive ways and damagingly negative reinforcement of out
internalized homophobia. So much of our early coming out is the struggle to find
the “other”, a soul we can relate to. The search to find someone else like us
is often relentless. The game-changing realization that I am not alone is
certainly a recurring theme bringing us back again and again to celluloid
escapism as a way to soothe our pain. Gay men in particular may want to be fucked
by the leading man but it is the strong female leads that have been our succor
for decades and we grasp at any hit of a queer character or theme.
Perhaps the singular
patron saint of the tortured history of Queers and their portrayal in film was
Vito Russo. He is best known for his landmark book the Celluloid Closet, still easily available and I suspect or hope a
copy or two is in The Center’s library. Russo
was one of the founders of GLAAD in 1985; previously know as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
In recognition of bisexual and trans-persons the organization is now just GLAAD
and no long an acronym.  GLAAD was
initially formed in response to the hateful and vile portrayal of persons with AIDS
by the New York media particularly the New York Post. Vito Russo himself died
from AIDS in 1990.
GLAAD remains quite
active today keeping a watchful eye on all forms of media for inaccurate
portrayals of Queer folk. They have developed their own criteria for analyzing
how LGBT characters are portrayed called the Vito Russo Test. This link is to
their web site: http://www.glaad.org
This Vito Russo Test is
patterned after the “Bechdel Test” which is used to look at how women are
portrayed in film. I have included the criteria for the Russo test and they are
as follows:
1.The film
contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or
transgender.
2. That character
must not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or
gender identity. I.E. they are made up of the same sort of unique character
traits commonly used to differentiate straight characters from one another.
3. The LGBT
character must be tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would
have a significant effect. Meaning they are not there to simply provide
colorful commentary, paint urban authenticity, or (perhaps most commonly) set
up a punchline. The character must matter.
These criteria are taken from GLAAD’s 2016
Studio Responsibility Index. Unfortunately, this year out of 22 films with
significant LGBT characters only 8 or 36% have met these criteria and that is
apparently a significant decrease from recent years. http://www.glaad.org/sri/2016/vitorusso
Our struggle continues; so to the
barricades brother and sisters or at least to the theatres with a
discriminating eye.
© 25 July 2016
About the Author  
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California. 

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Lavender University, by Pat Gourley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© April 2014

[Editor’s note: This story was published previously in this blog.]

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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The First Person I Came Out To, by Pat Gourley

Strangely I find myself vacillating a bit on this topic. I
assume I would ordinarily not consider the first person I had sex with since
that would be a situation that would seem obvious to both of us. However in my
case it was with a man I sought out initially seeking an answer to the question
was “I gay or not”. More accurately what I was asking at the time was am I a
homosexual or not?
The person I sought out to help clarify whether I was really
a big homo or not was most certainly not an openly gay man.  This was after all 1965 in suburban Chicago
and he was on the faculty of a Catholic High school. It was a diocesan school
staffed by Holy Cross nuns and though several of those nuns were progressive in
the extreme there was no Gay-Straight alliance as an option for extracurricular
activity.
Initial contact with this man would have been in late 1965 or
more likely sometime in early 1966. Though I am not totally clear about this I
do think I was genuinely seeking him out, as one of my high school counselors
and a person 20 plus years my senior, to help me answer this perplexing
question with no pre-existing assumptions about his sexual preference. Even at
age 16 I was not seeking a cure but would have probably been very reassured to
be told it was just a phase and that I was actually quite a masculine straight
arrow.
There had certainly been lots of enjoyable nude swimming with
male siblings and cousins to say nothing of the nearly obsessive urge to see my
dad and the occasional uncle nude. These preoccupations proceeded by several
years my seeking out my guidance counselor for help and advice.  So I may have been drawn to him
subconsciously hoping he really was like me. And of course his Old Spice
shaving lotion and hairy physique I assumed, an assumption later validated, and
his being bald may have all helped to create a situation I would often in
future years find irresistible.
Minus the Old Spice aftershave, which thankfully faded from
the scene sometime in the 1970’s, I think the hairy and bald aspects are quite
accurate physical descriptions of both of my long-term lovers, both named David,
and they combined to occupy 30 years of my adult life. Why I remain today still
hard-wired to pursue the mature and preferably quite hairy older male is
interesting and a bit of mystery to me. So many of my queer male peers prefer at
least in their dream worlds something younger, thinner and less hirsute.
Some months into that year of counseling sessions before
fruition so to speak I decided this guy was really on my side and very sexually
attractive. Long story short we did it eventually and it was as I recall the
Friday before Palm Sunday after school in the biology lab. I absolutely did not
fall into spasms of guilt post orgasm but rather was on cloud-nine for days and
spent most waking hours relishing the thought of our next get together. I guess
when one has ejaculated all over another man you have then come out to them
certainly as someone with homosexual tendencies if not as full blown GAY.
The coming out process for many of us though is a recurrent
theme that we are required to play out repeatedly since the attitude of society
in general is that heterosexuality is always the unexamined assumption. I have
for years though preferred to always give everyone I meet the benefit of the
doubt and assume they are queer until proven otherwise.
© May
2016 
About the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Posted on

Strange Vibrations, by Pat Gourley

“Just because you are
seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with gods and
goddesses is no reason to forget your zip code”
Ram Dass
For me strange vibrations
have usually involved bouts of anxiety, which fortunately have been short-lived
and really quite rare in my 67 years. My first experience with being anxious in
an uncomfortable fashion was in my early teens and can be directly related to
buying into the bullshit being foisted on me by the Catholic Church and its
minions.
In hindsight I do think
that my budding awareness that I was a gay little kid was just beginning to
come into conflict in so many ways with the Church’s teachings. The cognitive
dissonance created by what I felt in my core butting up against the relentless
brainwashing could be quite anxiety provoking.
It was the most insidious
form of child abuse legitimately sanctioned by society and the Church and it created
lots of strange vibrations. By my Junior Year in high school these religiously
induced anxiety attacks were quickly abating in large part thanks to my first gay
relationship with a loving queer spirit guide in the form of an elder loving
mentor.
I wonder sometimes if
what I view as the relentless child abuse from all organized religions, often
in an extreme form of psychological coercion and intimidation, doesn’t in some
ways provide the cover or rather the rationale then for actual physical abuse
both sexual and non-sexual to take place. 
If you are willing to foist on young impressionable minds all sorts of
bullshit succinctly laid out in the Baltimore Catechism for example does that
make it easier to then extend this form of mind control to involve the
physical? All of us are born atheists and really should be left alone with that
universal view to eventually sort things out on our own.
I must say that my
current spiritual view, which can best be described as Buddhist-atheism, is no
longer a source of any sort of anxiety. I have finally learned the amazing
calming effect of sitting quietly and focusing on my breath especially when the
current fucked-up state of humanity begins to impinge, usually due to too much
Internet surfing. Amazing how this can also be remediated by a walk to the Denver
Botanic Gardens and a few hours of soaking up that energy.
After extricating myself
from the Catholic Church in 1967 my next real bout with anxiety did not occur
until the fall of 1979 and involved a bit too much psilocybin and a trip to the
Empire Bathes. The resulting moderate freak-out was anxiety provoking enough
for me to essentially swear off all drugs for the past 35+years with one
accidental episode this past winter – details to follow.
My next strange
vibrations did not occur until the fall of 1995 following my partner David’s
death from AIDS related stuff. For many months after his death I would have
nightmares often ending with waking up in panic mode with the sheets often
drenched with sweat.  This did stop
eventually after about six months of talk-therapy with a great shrink. No, I do
not think I was experiencing untreated sleep apnea.
My most recent bout of
strange vibrations occurred this past January when I was out in San Francisco.
I was being Innkeeper and mentoring a new 14-week-old puppy.  It was a rainy evening with only a few guests
and as is my want I started craving something sweet about 7 PM.  The pup and I were ensconced in the library
catching up on Downton Abbey episodes.
Wandering into the
kitchen I spied a Christmas tin on the counter. Upon inspection I found cookies
that I remember being very similar to ones made in large quantities around the
holidays. I quickly made short work of 6 or 7 of these cookies. I thought they
had a bit of an odd molasses taste but still hit the spot. About 30 minutes
later I began to experience very strange vibrations. This was odd I thought
since I was in one of the safest places I can imagine on earth and to have waves
of anxiety sweep over me rather relentlessly soon had me wondering if these
weren’t perhaps the infamous house pot cookies. Several folks in the house have
medical marijuana cards and made use of the herb on occasion often in the form
of baked goods but usually only ¼ to ½ of one cookie imbibed at a time. 
Long story short I was
able to determine that the cookies were “loaded”.  After several calls to Denver friends with
questions about HIV Meds and large quantities of THC I was assured there were
no physical interactions. I clearly recognized the anxiety as familiar ground
and was able to weather the storm with the help of a good friend who came home
from work early and some conscious breathwork. After about six hours I was
pretty much back on earth with the strange vibrations fading away. I was left
to ponder a line from an old Grateful Dead song: “Maybe you had too much too
fast”. 
I was able throughout
though to remember not only how to operate my cell phone and walk the dog but
also I could easily recall my zip code.
©
May 2016 
About the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
Posted on

Hail to the Watch Queen, by Pat Gourley

Just when I think I can’t stumble on anything new in the queer world I discover an old name for a sub-genre of gay men I was not aware of. This occurred last week when I happened on the phenomenon of the “watch queen.” Richard Black posting in the Urban Dictionary back in 2005 offered three common definitions for the Watch Queen: 1st somebody who just gets off watching others have sex, which I assume could now apply to any Internet porn watcher, 2nd the lookout who watches for security or the vice squad while others are having sex in Public Spaces and 3rd the gay men too old (his words not mine) to engage in sex but still enjoy watching.

I am certainly familiar with the voyeuristic joys of watching other men have sex but I had never associated the descriptive phrase, “watch queen” as someone who is a lookout while others have at it. Watch Queen I think could be another archetypical gay male role that should be enshrined in out pantheon of identities – The Noble Protector has a nice ring to it.

As it turns out being a Watch Queen was something that Laud Humphries was accused of being when doing extensive research for his groundbreaking 1970 observational work on gay men having sex in public restrooms called The Tearoom Trade. His work is considered seminal in many ways about the sub-group of homosexually inclined men who cruise specifically public restrooms. This work has also been severely criticized as unethical since he never revealed his true purpose to those he was observing and subsequent publication of his findings was done without participant consent though no one’s identity was ever compromised near as I can tell. The role he would often take when in the field doing his research apparently was as the Watch Queen. Now he was a gay man himself, married and a former Episcopal clergyman who came out only after the publication of Tearoom Trade. Humphries died in 1988 in his late 50’s.

Though I do think public restroom cruising is no longer as widespread as it once was it is still alive and well. A form of almost totally non-verbal communication through a series of subtle and sometimes not so subtle gestures, postures and eye contact leading to sex, if not on the spot then onto a nearby hookup in a car or bushes, so much for the necessity of the spoken word.

In one of the better pieces I found describing and providing an analysis of Humphries work was by Tristen Bridges titled Laud Humphries’ Discussion of Space in “Tearoom Trade”. Quoting from Tristen’s article: “He {Humphries} found that a large percentage of the men participating were married {to women}, many were religious (mostly Catholic), a large percentage were either in the military or veterans, and perhaps most interestingly of all – a large majority of the men who did not identify as gay were socially and politically conservative. In fact, Humphries found that only 14% of the men in this study could be said to be a “typical” gay man.” https://inequalitybyinteriordesign.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/laud-humphreys-discussion-of-space-in-tearoom-trade/

An extremely sophomoric interpretation of Humphries’ work would be to conflate his findings with the current unbelievable flap around transgender bathroom access. Such use of his work for justifying this form of blatant discrimination misses the mark on so many levels it really does not deserve to be addressed at all. In no way is gay male use of public space for sex predatory. The vast majority of predation happens in secret, non-public space, offices of congressmen and churches come to mind.

If anything, taking Humphries work to heart it should be a clarion call for gay liberation. Let me say though that the fine art of the silent, public cruise for mutual sex can be engaged in by the truly liberated if that is their cup of tea so to speak. It could be viewed as preserving a uniquely queer and time-honored form of human interaction and communication.

I would venture to say if you really want to protect kids in public restrooms we should hire a Watch Queen for every public restroom. These are gay men who truly know how to keep public spaces safe not only for mutual consenting hookups but for peeing and pooping unmolested.

© June 2016