Tag: Pat Gourley

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Believe It – Death Started at the Big Bang by Pat Gourley

So since I have missed the past two sessions and I have had thoughts on the three most recent topics I am going to write a single piece addressing all three: “Believe it or not this really happened to me…”, “Death” and “The Big Bang”.

My human birth is by far and away the most remarkable thing that has ever happened to me. The chance of that occurring was so infinitesimally unlikely and remote as to be more than mind boggling.

I have always liked the way the Buddha addressed this amazing reality. Speaking to a group of monks he said: “…suppose that the great earth were totally covered with water and a man were to toss a yoke with a single hole into the water…and suppose a blind turtle was in that great expanse. It would come up to the surface only once every 100 years. Now what do you suppose the chances would be that a blind turtle coming to the surface every 100 years would stick its nose into the yoke with a single hole?” The monks thought his very unlikely to which the Buddha replied: “ And just so, it is very, very rare that one attains the human state.”

Another little factoid, that is well worth pondering if you are wondering about being here at all or perhaps looking to expose the absolute ridiculousness of the “personhood amendment’ on the ballot again in Colorado this year. The reality is that a significant majority of all conceived embryos are simply flushed out totally unnoticed in normal menstrual flow without anyone being aware. Embryologists estimate that 60% – 80% of all conceived embryos by day seven have already gotten the bums rush out the vagina if you count back to the moment of conception. This occurs naturally and is unrelated to any form of birth control. Remember this “personhood amendment” states that ‘life’ begins at conception, however not very often as it turns out.

It is very amazing and truly hard to believe that the cellular beginnings of my embryonic conception did not wind up in the septic tank buried outside our rural Indiana farmhouse. The fact that I was born alive and healthy on January 12th of 1949 is quite spectacular really and its all been down hill from there. The successful conception nine months prior was the beginning of my death dance called life on earth for Patrick J. Gourley, though if you take a big picture look it more likely began at the moment of the Big Bang, estimated to have occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.

My profession as a nurse, work for several decades in an AIDS clinic, my own HIV infection and the loss of many friends and lovers have all significantly informed my own personal relationship with the inevitability of my own death. Being in the presence of someone dying can be a very potent moment of clarity. For me personally over the years these many moments of clarity have in part pushed me to a firm atheist perspective on it all. This is it baby and since you were extremely lucky to get the chance to live a human life at all do try to make the most of it everyday. Though I now describe myself as an atheist I am open to spirituality and more on this further in this piece.

Trying to ponder what it means to die and not be “me” any more has always been a challenging meditation for me personally. A striking and certainly very plausible explanation for what it may be like to be dead, i.e. not ‘me’ anymore, came my way by some of the work of the great philosopher Ken Wilbur. Wilbur pointed out three states of consciousness waking, dreaming and deep dreamless sleep. He also acknowledges the possibility of other more advanced states where one is able to be “aware” if you will of what’s happening even while engaged in deep dreamless sleep. That would be a level of consciousness I certainly don’t possess and don’t ever expect to. For the vast majority of us deep dreamless sleep is really quite similar to death. No recollection of this state at all and we go there most every night, most of us ‘die’ then at least once every twenty-four hours.

This can also occur for example when under anesthesia for various medical procedures. Most recently this happened for me during a colonoscopy I had last week. Once my IV was in, oxygen on, pulse oximetry on my finger and lying on my side butt to the doctor he introduced himself and we shook hands, a truly odd formality it seemed given the situation. I would think a playful pat on the butt would have been a more appropriate physical greeting than the handshake.

The doc then said I am going to give you some medicine to relax you and his next statement was now I am going to do a rectal exam. My next conscious memory was the nurse saying you did great and everything looked good. This was at least 20 minutes later. So not only did I miss a good rectal exam while high no less I also sort of died. I mean my heart kept beating and I continued to breathe but these were not actions I was aware of on any level I could comprehend. I didn’t “exist” for those twenty minutes and if my heart had stopped that would have been the end. Oh maybe there would have been a tunnel with a bright light at the end but that would just be few synapses sparking and freaking out from a lack of oxygen I suspect and the doorway to heaven. Not a bad way to dance out I might add but not usually how it occurs.

Since I have been lucky enough to “be” it raises the question where did I come from. Looks like it may very well have all started with the Big Band some many billions of years ago. My physical makeup is literally stardust that coalesced into this majestic planet and one thing led to about a billion trillion other things and here I am babbling on.

I was recently gifted Sam Harris’ new book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by a dear friend. Harris has been in the news of late around his recent appearance on Bill Maher’s Real Time and for his controversial views on religion and Islam in particular. This book doesn’t really step specifically into those waters but it is a great exploration of the reality of self as illusion and how one can cultivate a genuine spiritual perspective with no need of any organized religion. Reading Harris’ book has pushed me back to the cushion. He sums up the reason to do this quite eloquently in the last two lines of the book: “However numerous your faults, something in you at this moment is pristine – and only you can recognize it. Open your eyes and see.” (Sam Harris/2014.)

I do not however spend every waking moment pondering the illusion of self, my pending death or how the hell I got here but often of an evening I engage in much more mundane activities. After a day of work in a local Urgent Care Clinic having the infinite suffering of humanity thrust in my face repeatedly or absorbing the mind-numbing onslaught of the current mid-term elections, or the latest ISIS beheadings or the current Ebola hysteria and realizing I am still not enlightened I often seek solace and escape by watching, often several times over, reruns of the great hit sit-com The Big Bang Theory!

© October 2014

About the Author

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

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Pushing the Buttons by Pat Gourley

A response to Denver Pride 2014 


“Went to “Pride Fest” today.

SORRY but found it fairly bland, insipid, Un special – a major sin, and overly ordinary. Could have been People’s Fair or Taste with rainbow county fair junk-goods. Listening to some of the vendor’s conversations, they knew nothing of the LGBTQQI struggle and history and didn’t care.

Such a let down. With success comes failure quickly!
– Quote from an anonymous friend.

The above quote is one lifted yesterday from the Facebook page of an old friend of mine. Someone I would describe as a commie, pinko faggot with strong pacifist, socialist and Wiccan leanings, definitely my kind of queer. A description I do not think he would in any way try to disown. His bit of a rant is in response to this year’s Denver Pride 2014. In fairness it should be noted that this was a post done yesterday after visiting the event on Saturday, the vendors are all the same but the crowd significantly smaller and dare I say less gay.

This friend has been an activist around many progressive causes all of his adult life and an out gay man since I have known him dating back to the 1970’s and for whom I have significant respect. For those reasons alone I can not easily dismiss him as being some old crank yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. And actually his criticisms are nothing new and quite frankly ones I have shared in the past and to some extent still do.

My experiences with Denver Pride date back to its inception in the mid-1970s as an event involving several hundreds tentatively inching our way up Colfax to one that now extends to the hundreds of thousands sashaying from Cheesman Park to Civic Center in a sea of rainbow colors. The main attraction at the end of those early marches, not parades back then, were often political speeches from activists primarily and the rare politician. There were no vendors to speak of and if representatives of Coors Beer had shown up they would no doubt have been driven from the temple as the homophobic moneychangers and purveyors of alcoholism they were and perhaps still are.

Times have changed and overall for the better I think at least regarding Pride, which I’ll get to in a bit. All of the large community events from Taste of Colorado, to People’s Fair to Cinco de Mayo etc. have grown dramatically and at the same time probably lost a lot of their uniqueness and certainly some of their grassroots cache. Whether this is an inevitable evolution or a tragic devolution I’ll leave to another piece.

I remember attending what I think was the third People’s Fair in the early-to-mid 1970’s the exact year escapes me. It was held in its entirety in the playground of the old elementary school at 8th and Downing just south of Queen Soopers. I remember it because I was working at the time as a psychiatric attendant at the old Denver General and we had taken several of our patients, not yet referred to as clients, to the fair for an afternoon outing. The most notable part of that adventure was having to explain to my charge nurse on our return why we came back with fewer patients than we had left with.

I would certainly agree with my cranky friend quoted above that there has been a tremendous amount of corporate cooptation of the Pride event and frequently a nauseating acquiescence’s to local politicians trying to curry favor all the while looking for votes. One positive change around the politicians though is we no longer grovel and jump for joy at their approval but rather have come to expect it. The same can be said for media coverage, which is shallow and often banal in the extreme, but everything they cover is. We do though now expect them to acknowledge our existence, which is something pretty hard not to do when several hundred thousand of us cavort in public occupying many city blocks.

It is this mass cavorting, sweaty shoulder to sweaty shoulder, often cheek to jowl that makes the whole thing still worthwhile for me. Though I do at times wish that the Stone Wall riots had occurred in May or September when the weather is much more civilized.

There is something that remains for me, the quintessential jaded old queen, a gut reaction that is very exhilarating and empowering to be in public literally pressing the flesh with this vast queer mass of humanity. I really don’t give a rat’s ass about any of the vendors, politicians or dignitaries and that includes the gay ones but I do still get a wonderful warm rush by slowing circumambulating with the crowd around Civic Center often encountering old friends who I don’t seem to see but once a year at this carnival.

I can’t help but wonder what the reaction must be of someone just coming out, no matter what their age, who is perhaps watching from the sidelines or has maybe even dived in to swish with the fishes. For many I would think and hope that this experience would do more to water their queer roots than decade’s of trying to come to grips with a queer reality was for many of us in the 40’s, 50’s or 60’s just to pick a few random decades from the past couple millennia.

I don’t really think that folks necessarily have it so much easier coming out these days than I did forty years ago. But I must say it would have been really cool and reassuring and saved me years of angst to happen on several hundred thousand like minded individuals dancing in public on a warm sunny day in 1965.

These Pride days, once I have completed my swim around the park in a sea of queer flesh, it’s often nice to sit under a tree and watch the many really very interesting very diverse trips pass by. I still think there is plenty that is unique and potentially truly change creating about how so many of us move in the world. Vendors be damned, I still plan to attend next year.

© June 2014

About the Author

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

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Clothes by Pat Gourley

I really was never much of a clothes person. Growing up on a
farm did not lend itself to high fashion and certainly not in rural Indiana in
the 1950’s. My family could certainly be considered lower middle class even in
the heady economic postwar years and clothing budgets were always tight. Also
attending Catholic grade school and continuing on with the Holy Cross nuns
through high school dress codes if not uniforms were required. I wonder in
hindsight if perhaps my parent’s real motive for insisting on Catholic
education wasn’t that the dress codes really cut down on clothing expenses?
I often did farm chores in the morning before catching the
school bus and the most important thing on my mind was not my regimented
clothes for the day but making sure I did not smell like pig shit going out the
door. As soon as I got to college my hippie days started in earnest and we know
what fashion mavens’ hippies can be.
Thanks to some rather ironic and unfortunate body changes due
to HIV medicines where one wastes extremity fat but seems to pile it on in
one’s mid section viscerally I have become a total fan of scrub pants, which
often come with an elastic waste band. The elastic waistband is one of the
great inventions of modern civilization. 
And nurses bless their hearts have made this the primary mode of work
dress. That has meant for years now that I can live almost 24/7 in relative
comfort. I have in fact incorporated wearing black scrub or chef’s pants to
nearly any social outing I participate in. I do own a few sport jackets but
these most often get paired with a tasteful t-shirt and the subtlest black
scrub pants I can find. T-shirts are of course another modern clothing
invention worthy of praise.
As far as shopping for clothes go I would really rather watch
paint dry. They just need to be baggy and loose fitting and of course comfort
rules always over fashion. This is a fashion statement that also endeared me to
the Radical Fairies. Especially when Harry Hay put out with the first call for
a large national gathering and in that call said something to the effect that
if clothing was to be worn at all it needed to be and I quote “flowing
non-hetero garb”. Since this first Radical Fairie gathering was in southern
Arizona in late summer the nudity won out over even the flowing non-hetero garb.
The opposite option to clothes I suppose is no clothes or
that wonderful word ‘nudity’. This option was truly reinforced for me in my
bathhouse days primarily in the 1970’s. The bathes were such a great gay male
creation. I mean lets all get together in place where clothing is truly frowned
on and actually considered rude. Nudity even if a bit of towel is involved
really does throw all pretexts for why we are here out the window. The lack of
clothes in the bathes really was a great facilitator for the main course if you
will, a great time saver.
The bathes though took a real hit in the mid-1980’s with the
AIDS epidemic beginning to really pick up steam and for me personally they were
no longer a legitimate avenue of play. I did miss the communal nudity with many
other gay men and perhaps that is why I was briefly attracted to a group called
the DAN-D’s, an acronym for “Denver Area Nude Dudes” that described itself as a
“nonsexual, social naturist club” in the early 1990’s. I did though only attend
a couple of their events the most memorable being a nude bowling outing
somewhere up in Northwest metro Denver. Trust me even the most buff individual
can look a bit strange pitching a bowling ball down the alley and jumping for
joy at a strike.

I was though delighted to find the DAN-D’s current web site
and that they seem to be thriving almost 25 years after being founded in 1990.
They actually have an event this evening if anyone might be interested. It is a
nude shopping spree at a local men’s underwear store on Broadway. Clothing
apparently not optional but a purchase does not seem to be required. It is
between 5 and 8 PM and I assume the store will be closed for this “private
event”. There is a modest membership fee to join the DAN-D’s but if you hang
out in front of the store you might be able to tag along in as someone’s guest
for the evening.
© September 2014
About the Author
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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Being Gay is … by Pat Gourley

I thought for a short while I
might just copout on this one and simply write a long string of single words to
complete the phrase. The first that came to mind was: Being Gay is fabulous. That of course is true but there is so much
more to be said on the topic that I thought this the lazy queer’s way out. I’ll
close out the piece with what I think is the best word to complete this phrase.
Before I get to that
conclusion though I want to wade briefly into the thicket that is ‘essentialism verses social construction’ as
the two most prominent theories for trying to explain what ‘Being Gay Is’. Very
basically and crudely put ‘essentialism’ is a theory that purports that gayness
is inborn, an unchangeable reality or essence if you will.
“Constructionist theory” implies
that we are a cultural creation that has come about in large part because we
have been so stigmatized. The constructionists believe that if it weren’t for
this stigmatization that everyone would have queer thoughts and feelings
perhaps actualized and that exclusive heterosexuality would fade away and I
assume exclusive homosexuality would too. There would therefore be no more
Kinsey 6’s or Kinsey 1’s and we would all drift to being 3’s or 4’s. This
sounds like a disturbing ‘homogenized’ version of human identity to me. I can’t
speak from a hetero perspective but from a queer one it would take a gun to my
head to even try to perform sexually with a woman these days.
I am, being a disciple of
Harry Hay, very clearly planted in the essentialist camp historically but if I
were to apply the rather rigorous intellectual examination of these two
theories that is required I would most likely today come out as some sort of
hybrid. Though I must say in my day-to-day life it all seems pretty simply
essential to me – I am queer through and through and always have been.
The best critique of these
two theories I have ever run across for me remains Will Roscoe’s Afterword in
his biography of Harry Hay: Radically Gay.
Let me quote briefly from that Afterword: “
The fact is, for most Lesbians and Gay men homosexuality is not a construction,
not something acquired, not an accident of childrearing, but an ongoing
profound motivation. Perhaps they were born that way; in any case, it is not
something that can be changed at will, as some constructionists and Queer
theorists imply”.
I suppose it is possible that
the phrase Being Gay Is…can be
completed in as many different ways as there are gay people on earth. The
responses would of course run the gamut from describing the worst possible fate
to befall one to the absolute best thing that ever happened. As promised my
word for completing the phrase would be “Being Gay Is an Opportunity”.
In my more grandiose moments
I like to think that we as a people have been given the opportunity to be in
the vanguard of great social change, perhaps revolutionary enough to save the
whole planet and the human race. This view I have is based in part again on teachings
I gleaned from the years I was hanging out with Harry Hay. Harry was fond of
talking about the “gay window”. Being gay allows us to look at the world from a
different perspective that our straight brothers and sisters. It is the same
world they are looking out at but a distinctly different view of it.
This different view
potentially provides the opportunity
to problem solve in unique and often very queer ways. I do not believe this
potential is best facilitated when we engage in the current major efforts of
assimilation and those would be marriage equality and equal participation in
the military. We need to spend much more time exploring and actualizing our
difference and not constantly harping on our similarities. Let’s face it the
current way of doing things has brought the human race to the brink of
catastrophe in the form of climate disaster and strong arguments can be made
that marriage and the military are pathetically failed human institutions.
Hay on many occasions talked
about subject-subject vs. subject-object consciousness. He believed that we
were as queers were given a leg up in viewing others, and I would expand that
to all of Gaia, as subjects on an equal footing and not as objects. We are
able, though we don’t always actualize it, to view one another of the same sex
as equals. We get a pass on the unequal power dynamic that seems to be the
intrinsically heterosexual paradigm of the sexes. We are given the opportunity
to view relating to other humans in a profoundly different way from the
existing imbalanced heterosexual dynamic.
This Story Telling Group is a
great example of the intrinsic opportunity we so often avail ourselves to as a
unique people to explore who the hell we really are. Here is to lots more
stories giving form, shape and completion to the phrase: Being Gay Is…
(A few words for this piece
were lifted from the following web site: www.queerbychoice.com/essentialism.html)
© 29 September
2014
About the Author
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
Posted on

Reputation by Pat Gourley

It has been some months at least since I have quoted Grateful
Dead lyrics in one of my written pieces here so I think it’s about time. A line
from one of their classic songs, Uncle
John’s Band – a tune by the way covered by the Indigo Girls, states “all I really want to know is are you kind”.
If I address “reputation” from a personal perspective I would most want to be
known and remembered for being kind.
While watching a 60 Minutes piece last night that featured a
few of the Dallas nurses who cared for Mr. Duncan the first Ebola patient in
the U.S. I was actually moved to tears by their genuine empathy and kindness
toward this man who was dying a horrifying death while at the same time at
considerable risk of infection themselves. As a nurse myself I can attest to
the fact that while we are not necessarily immune to the sight of human
suffering we are not often easily shocked either. This disease apparently is an
exception to that rule. Large amounts of human secretions are often part of the
game with nursing in certain settings. Ebola though seems to take that to a
whole new level most often in the form of voluminous amounts of vomit and
diarrhea. In the end stages of the disease even small droplets of these
secretions are teaming with literally millions and millions of viral particles
and it only takes one to pass it on.
They interviewed four nurses and all four seemed to exude
genuine kindness but I was most impressed with an African American woman and a
portly man with a definite and beautiful fey-air about him. Though not the case
anymore gay men were at one time a preponderance of the male nursing population
and we are still quite well represented. I will remember these nurses not so
much for their bravery but their dignified and uncompromising acts of human
kindness, wiping his tears and holding his hand albeit through multiple layers
of protective gear among many such acts in his last days. I would like to have the
epithet “he was a kind queen” attached to my tombstone or rather an urn full of
my ashes before they get scattered in San Francisco bay.
I suppose there was a time in my distant past when I did not
want the rather large “queer’ part of my being to be sullying my reputation in
anyway. I do think though I was lucky and got over that one quickly. One sort
of throws caution to the wind in that regard when you enter certain health care
professions and nursing in particular as a male in the 1970’s. I was probably
at my most flamboyant professionally in the 1970’s and I am sure had the
“reputation” as being the flaming homo nurse. Only once though in 40 years of nursing,
when working ICU, did a patient openly verbalize that he didn’t want the
“queer” touching him. My co-workers were much more upset about this than I was
at the time and it’s probably safe to say that the amount of kindness directed
this man’s way may have been severely curtailed during his intensive care stay.
Efficient and appropriate medical care does not necessitate kindness but it
sure goes down a lot easier with that in the mix.
As I alluded to I was quite out of the closet during both
nursing school and on the job in the 1970’s. I think my ‘homosexual-reputation’
if you will was solidly cemented one night in the ICU at University Hospital when
I had just returned from recovering from a bout of hepatitis. Hepatitis was
being discussed by a group of us including some docs and folks were speculating
whether or not I may have gotten the hepatitis on the job, something not
uncommon for nurses in those days before the advent of “universal precautions”
and good hepatitis vaccines. As I recall without missing a beat I quite
flippantly said that it was much more likely I was infected at the Empire
Bathes with my legs in the air. That was the end of that discussion.
As Andy Warhol so famously said everyone gets at least 15
minutes of fame, which I suppose you could say, then becomes a significant part
of his or her reputation. For me personally though I certainly hope that is not
the case. In early 2000 a writer with Westword came to Denver Health wanting to
do a piece on the current state of the AIDS epidemic. I had always shunned the
press wanting to do AIDS pieces because they so seldom got it right and what
could be worse for one’s ‘reputation” than to be grossly misquoted. The
reporter, a fellow named Steve Jackson, was a frequent freelance contributor to
the paper often doing long feature pieces. He apparently became bored with the
usual AIDS talking heads, mostly docs, at Public Health and was steered in my
direction by someone in the building.  He
and I actually hit it off having some sort of Grateful Dead connection as I
seem to recall and I spent quite a few hours telling him my story.
A long story short I became the entire focus of the piece and
wound up on the cover of the next issue. My own fifteen minutes of fame if you
will. The piece was insufferably long as it appeared in print and I was still
the case after the editor, Patty Calhoun, had cut a full third of it before
publication. I have never posted it to my web site in part because I found it
to be embarrassing, not because it affected my reputation at all but it really
seemed to focus on my own personal drama in a very over the top fashion. If any
good came out of it though I hoped it might have persuaded some folks at risk
to finally get tested and get on meds. I was, as was graphically laid out in
the piece, probably twenty years into my own HIV infection and still walking,
talking, working full-time and posing for Westword cover stories.
One might think, and I suppose I did too, that such exposure
would have major repercussions but it actually had virtually none. For one
thing it was too long for most folks to get through and secondly I attribute
this lack of fallout to the strength of coming out. If all your secrets are
already out their in your personal and work circles and most folks are already
bored with the old queen’s story and simply adding a few thousand more Westword
readers to that mix doesn’t much effect one’s life or reputation and it did
not.
In fact the response at least that blew back to me was quite
muted. Oh a few mostly gay positive men came up to me in person and were very
supportive but most responses ranged from “oh is he still alive” to my personal
favorite “I thought they only put convicted felons on the cover of Westword”.
The lesson for me seems quite obvious. One’s reputation
hopefully is not in anyway significantly influenced by any particular 15
minutes of fame but rather by a lifetime of being kind or at least trying to be
to all you encounter. In that respect I am great believer in Karma and what
goes around eventually, despite frequent bumps in the road, comes around.
© October
2014 

About the Author 

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

John Burnside–Sweetness Personified by Pat Gourley

I was first introduced to John Burnside in the 1978 classic queer film The Word is Out. John was Harry Hay’s loving companion from 1962 until Harry’s death in 2002 with John to follow him in death in 2008. The documentary is still available in DVD format today and for those not familiar with the movie it is a series of talking head interviews with twenty-six gay men and lesbians that are very brave, raw and captivating in their honest presentation. What struck me the most about the movie was the segment featuring Hay and Burnside. They were interviewed at their place of residence at the time a compound nestled in the San Juan Pueblo in Northern New Mexico. The image of the two of them walking hand-in-hand through a meadow along the banks of the Rio Grande has stuck with me since first seeing it on film thirty-six years ago.

At that time I don’t think I knew that Harry was the founding spirit behind the seminal queer Mattachine Society decades before in Los Angeles. One had to be quite the earnest, independent, gay historian in those days to get to this piece of history. The roots of the modern gay movement just weren’t taught in American history classes much in those days. The film’s images of these two older very political gay men obviously in a loving relationship for years was startling to me and I thought I need to meet these two. Thanks to a powerful lesbian woman named Catherine I knew through the Gay Community Center in Denver at the time I was able to connect with them and the rest is history.

My first impressions of John at my house on Madison Street in the fall of 1978 were that he was the most gentle, fey person I had ever met. His dedication, unwavering support and love for his partner Harry were at all times evident. The meaning of ‘fey’ often conjured up these days I think is effeminate but the definition is really “other worldliness”. This quality seems to best be summed up by his own words. A short bit of poetry from John:

“Hand in hand we walk, as wing tip to wing tip
our spirits roam the universe, finding lovers everywhere.
Sex is music.
Time is not real.
All things are imbued with spirit.”

John and Harry were at the time I met them deeply involved in the creation of the phenomenon that would become the “Radical Fairies” along with a couple other souls named Don Kilhefner and Mitch Walker. Planning for the first Radical Fairie gathering in the Arizona desert was already roughly taking shape and would happen the following September in 1979.

John and Harry were an amazing couple. Amazing in how different they seemed yet how wonderfully they melded almost into one. Harry while almost always spouting very right-on analysis of almost any situation could be at times intimidating, combative even and most certainly prickly though a real teddy bear under it all. John on the other hand was always flashing the warmest and most welcoming of smiles that often belied the acute insights he could bring to almost any dialogue on a wide range of subjects. And boy could he talk, often well into the night long after I was able to hear and absorb much and I am sure rudely nodding off in his presence.

For me personally John was often great at taking Harry’s more erudite and dense pronouncements on the state of gay men and their liberation and translating them in very warm and understandable ways. Sort of like taking raw queer theory and serving it up as warm apple cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on it, mmm good, yes I want more of that, please.

John’s power was on display for me personally on several occasions when Harry would get himself into meltdown mode and John would quietly and skillfully step in and make things all right again. I mean you could not have the father of modern gay liberation be non-functional for too long, he was needed. John knew this and was always available to provide the salve to whatever wound had just been ripped open.

One small example of this comes to mind around the trip the three of us took to Chaco Canyon in the late 1980’s. We were in separate vehicles since they planned to head back to L.A. after we visited Chaco. Their truck broke down along highway 285 just a few miles outside of Denver and this threw Harry into a major non-communicative funk, probably because it was a frequent occurrence for their 20 plus year old Datsun pick-up. John stepped up immediately and had me driving him down to a Napa auto parts store for the fix needed that he had very skillfully diagnosed. This all done by a man without a driver’s license and someone I never in over thirty year had seen behind the wheel, but was always quietly and firmly in control.

I have reams of correspondence much of it hand written from Harry but only a couple of letters from John. One I received just a few short months after meeting them here in Denver and it was John very kindly reaching out to me about a frustrated love affair I was involved in at the time we met. The bottom-line for me was I should have avoided a relationship with a closeted Mormon E.D. doctor with a bad cocaine habit but live and learn. John however approached my torment with loving advice based on his obviously complex and mercurial relationship with Harry and a couple of their New Mexico friends who as he described them were a foursome but without shared sex beyond the two dyads involved.

I won’t quote from the philosophical part of the long hand written letter but rather share a bit of the queer theory he laid on me towards the end of the tome:

“Heterosexual false assumptions are based on taking their beliefs about themselves (mostly false, for them, in truth) as absolutes. We Gays start with a different set of possibilities and the power to deal flexibly with our feelings and hopes. We must not allow ourselves to become frozen when those hopes are frustrated.” John Burnside-March 15, 1979. Sage advice from a great gay Sage.

I seriously doubt the Radical Fairie movement would have come into being without John Burnside’s loving and continual ongoing massage of the message. Not to be too trite here but if Harry brought the ‘radical’ piece to the trip then John certainly brought the ‘fairie’ piece. I’ll end by quoting Bob Dylan: “I like my sugar sweet” and John Burnside was certainly sweetness personified.


© July 2014

About the Author

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

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A Circle of Loving Companions by Pat Gourley

Harry Hay is best known for founding the Mattachine Society in 1950 an organization certainly seminal as far as the modern gay movement is concerned. He is also fairly well known for helping create the Radical Fairies in an attempt to redirect what he felt was the disheartening slide of the Queer movement into dreary assimilation. Hmm, I wonder how that worked out?

The Radical Fairies had a definite spiritual bent and cultivated a rejection of straight culture. As I have written here on other occasions I feel it was the devastation of AIDS and the resulting preoccupation with survival and death for so many and in so many insidious ways that took the gas out of the Radical Fairie movement. That though is not to deny that Radical Fairies are not still vibrantly around today here and there.

Another less well-known effort of Harry’s was the formation in 1965 of a queer collective that he called a “Circle of Loving Companions” an entity lasting for decades. I’ll quote a brief description of this group from Stuart Timmon’s biography of Hay called The Trouble with Harry Hay (1990): “ The Circle was often politically active, and Harry stressed the name symbolized how all gay relationships could be conducted on the Whitmanesque ideal of the inclusive love of comrades. The Circle’s membership specifications were based on affinity…”

I first became aware of the name by way of written correspondence I had with Harry and his loving companion John Burnside in the late 1970’s. The phrase “Circle of Loving Companions” was frequently the letterhead on his written correspondence to me in those days and was also stamped on the outside of envelopes as part of the return address. I still do prefer “loving companion” as a descriptor of intimate queer relationships that sits with me much better than partner, lover, significant other or the current rage “husband”.

If I didn’t at the time I should have realized that I was a part of a genuine Circle of Loving Companions that was formed here in Denver out of the intoxicating crucible that was gay liberation the 1970’s. Viable remnants of this Circle remain in my life today but significantly depleted over the years, primarily by AIDS.

I met the most significant loving companion I have ever had in the fall of 1980 shortly after the second Radical Fairie Gathering here in Colorado in August of that year and a few short weeks after returning from my father’s funeral back in Illinois. David was at the time the Methodist minister in Aspen Colorado and was a close friend with one of the roommates I had in our house up in Five Points. He was visiting this friend and staying at our house when we were first introduced. We actually had a bit of a courtship consisting of a couple of dates before we fucked, something extremely rare in the gay male world of 1980. Over the ensuing months though I realized that I did have a deep affinity for this person and he soon left his church in Aspen and moved into the house on north Downing

Street that was sort of the Radical Fairie vortex for Denver at the time. He must have felt a real affinity for me to make such a bold change.

In hindsight I think it best to have a primary loving companion when one is part of a Circle of Loving Companions and David certainly filled that role for me. Our affinity only deepened over the next fifteen years until his death from AIDS in 1995. The nineteenth anniversary of his death is this week on Wednesday the 17th, 2014.

Since his death I have been involved in one other long-term relationship. I guess you can call 11 years a long-term relationship and though it had its moments there didn’t seem to have the same sustained ‘affinity’ in so many ways I had with David. This second long term partner did not seem to fit as well into my circle of friends and this to me is something that any current partner I might fall in love with would need to accommodate. Something to keep in mind is introducing any prospective partner to your circle of companions sort of like straight folks do with each other’s biological families.

So I guess any new partner would need to be a bit of a collectivist and tolerate the coming and goings of my circle and I would certainly need to be accommodating of his companions. I also would insist on dependability. You need to always be there for me and me for you. Sex at this stage of the dance is quite peripheral to the whole enchilada and though mutual orgasms occasionally that involve seeing Jesus would be nice they are definitely not required.

As mentioned above my circle of loving companions is much depleted from what it was 35 years ago but still limping along. It has though it seems gotten much more difficult to add new members. If anyone is feeling an ‘affinity’ and is interested in interviewing for a position in the Circle we could meet over coffee.

© September 2014

About the Author

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

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Reframing Reality by Pat Gourley

“There’s a quality of exultation in our differences. 
We just have it and
its part of our nature. 
There is a kind of flagrant joy that goes very deep and 
it’s not available to most people. 
Something about our capacity to live and let
live
 is uniquely foreign.”

Paul Monette

Quoted in David Nimmons’ The Soul Beneath the Skin

Reframing reality seems to be the heart and soul of being queer. In fact we could as easily substitute “I am reframing reality” for “I am coming out”. If we don’t create our own queer reality we often live very unhappy and sometimes tragic lives. This reality-reframing can be perilous and the odds stacked against us are formidable which may in part explain our rather inordinate amount of suicide, the use of mind-altering drugs, tobacco and alcohol or our preoccupation with Broadway musicals, opera, show tunes and/or women’s basketball and golf.

My own early coming to queerness in my late teens in rural Illinois while attending a Catholic prep school involved seeking out one of the male high school counselors, there were several, for “guidance” around my budding sense of difference. ‘Gay’ was not a common word in the vernacular at that time, certainly not in Catholic High Schools in Illinois, but I was possessed with the thought that maybe I was a homosexual.

Looking back with a bit of honest hindsight I sought out this particular counselor not because I wanted to be re-assured that I was really as straight as the next guy but rather because I was drawn to his masculine looks, demeanor, large hands and the intoxicating smell of his aftershave, it was Old Spice, which can to this day still conjure up an olfactory hallucinatory hard-on. I really wanted to just have “flagrant sex” with him!

That of course did happen and after that first encounter which was essentially a mutual masturbation session resulting in an orgasm that was so intense I am sure I saw Jesus winking down at me from the crucifix on the wall over our heads. I was then able to leave town the next day for Mound Bayou, Mississippi in a state of “flagrant joy”.

One of several things plaguing my adolescent mind in those years was why I was not experiencing the same excitement and obvious obsession in exploring relations with girls that my male peers were. What was wrong with me? Was my life to be a series of very unsatisfactory experiences with the opposite sex ending in a joyless marriage perhaps further complicated with offspring? Remember this was 1967 and there was no local LGBT Center in town to provide guidance.

Well that first orgasmic encounter with my counselor in one burst of “flagrant joy” totally reframed my reality. Life was not going to be a joyless, sexless drudgery after all.

I did have another lapse into self-doubt about my newfound queer reality a couple years later at college when I again sought out counseling to address the ‘homosexual issue’. This probably followed a couple of frustrating experiences with other men – I mean reframing reality is not all endless flagrant joy. This counselor was also male but not someone I found attractive physically and we ended our therapeutic relationship after the second session when he insisted that I start with incorporating more masculine behaviors into my life including ending our time together with a manly handshake. I guess the logic was if you wanted to be a man for Christ-sakes act like one – now that is a futile attempt at reframing reality if there ever was one.

It was shortly after the sessions on manly behavior that the opportunity for heterosexual sex presented itself. Perhaps it was simply a reflection of the power of the all-pervasive and suffocating reality of the heterosexual dictatorship or more likely my own well-honed neurosis but I made one more very short stab at the straight male thing and had sex twice with one of the woman in our circle of friends. Despite my obnoxious sexual performances this very strong woman was in many other ways very influential in my life and my own development of a feminist sensibility. She went on to have a great life and family obviously unscarred by my sexual ineptitude. She was very sweet and patient but in the end honestly told me that I was really bad at sex. Both times involved trying to perform with my eyes being tightly closed, relying on her guiding hand to find the entrance and thinking the whole time this is so wrong and unnatural to boot! I won’t even get into how it felt to me physically and that when my orgasm did actually occur it involved a very intense, albeit transient, reframing of reality.

The sexual part of my queer reframing of reality has been only one small part of my life however. My innate sense of difference I really do think has freed me up to reframe all sorts of realities. Realities foisted upon me by the politicians, priests, pundits and really society in general. The great life adventure that is being queer is all about reframing reality and you know it really never ends. When the world attempts to lay their realities on to us though we can always wiggle free because we have the great gift of “flagrant joy that goes very deep and is not available to them ” (Paul Monette).

© June 2014

About the Author 


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

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Boredom – My Evolution With the Erotic by Pat Gourley

A pet theory
of mine around the widespread use of penile erection-facilitating drugs
(Viagra, Cialis etc.) and the apparently millions of Medicare dollars spent on penis-pumps
has as much to do with boredom as it does the ravages of aging and
atherosclerotic disease affecting penile veins. I am extrapolating here from my
own personal experience of course and exceptions for some would be the real
nerve damage often related to prostate surgeries.
When I was
twelve a hard-on seemed to be virtually a permanent waking and often sleeping
state of being. The slightest friction or even the most innocent male image,
genitalia not even required, was enough to get there. Organisms once I began to
indulge in them regularly were easily a several times a day pleasure requiring
only minimal effort and stimulation.
To say that
that level of excitement today is a rare thing would be an understatement. What
now can take literally an hour or two of perusing internet porn or 45 minutes
of foreplay with a friend, at times I’ll admit aided by a bit of Sildenafil,
used to take only 10 minutes to reach an explosive climax.
Now there is
definitely something to be said for the longer and certainly more intimate
cuddling and foreplay leading up to fruition. I would love to think that this
is related to maturation on my part and an appreciation for the art of true
lovemaking and genuine care and concern for my partner. Being male though and
believing that our true imperative may really be a lifelong drive to “fuck it
or kill it” (h/t Ken Wilber) I am forced to wonder what is really going on
here. Do I think for a minute I wouldn’t like to return to the sexual
excitement of forty years ago? Oh and of course to the same firm ass and flat
belly of those days.
As mentioned
above I certainly think that the accumulation of atherosclerotic plaque, not
only in our coronary arteries but also in our dick veins is a culprit here.
Looking back though at my own sexual history if you will I have to say that
over time I could quickly get bored with what turned me on. Is a mediocre
ejaculation with a half assed hard-on after thirty minutes of effort more a
function of ennui or ageing? For me personally I am going with the boredom. Not
that I am in denial here, I am sure my arteries are as sludged-up as the next
aging American male.
Is it boredom
that really is the goose if you will that allows someone to progress from
getting off with a bit of print porn or just the simplest of visual images to
hours of S/M bondage with endless aides and props? Or why do so many go from
getting satisfaction from a finger to a fist? I mean does your prostate really
care about the “size’ of the stimulus?
For example if
the image or time spent with another real human is just right then things seem
to work just fine for me. So much of what precedes this though seems to hold
little erotic interest and I seem to think this is not related to anything more
complicated or mundane than boredom. Perhaps the task at hand for me is to
appreciate more the long periods of boredom during sex for the often-genuine
expressions of love they can be. I mean I am now semi-retired with much more
time on my hands
The examples
of men getting into trouble at all ages in search of what is described as
excitement or risk are of course tediously endless. Pick up any newspaper, turn
on any TV show etc. 24/7 and the examples are rife of men doing stupid things
in pursuit of a happy ending. Risk of course could be the default mechanism we
have honed to deal with boredom. Have gay men in the past been “forced” through
oppression to seek sexual gratification in very risky situations or on a more
mundane level have we simply been seeking to tackle a crushing boredom?
Let me close
by saying that women, especially lesbians, are much more evolved in these
areas. They seem to have, and perhaps this is my own ignorance and not true,
replaced boredom with the rewards and satisfaction of true intimacy integrated
both in and out of bed.
For us men
though perhaps this is all a testament to the fact that most sex is for us
crudely physical with our limbic system connected directly to our cocks, but
what does that really say except that maybe the average male, gay or straight,
has the attention span of a gnat?
© April 2014

About the Author

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

It was often noted in my teens and twenties in particular that I had quite the Irish temper. This seems to have greatly diminished over the years and now is an emotion I rarely indulge in. Much of the anger I have expressed over the years has really been not much more that self-indulgent bravado. Often the sort of flash in the pan display that passes quickly usually followed by regret and at times an appropriate apology.

There have however been at least two instances in my life where my anger was sustained and in one of those seems at times to persist to this day. Both of these involve the suicides of two people close to me, one professionally and the other a dear friend of many decades. Today I will address the suicide of a co-worker from over twenty years ago. The other death will be the focus of an upcoming piece.

Even this anger, at a tragic death, certainly seems to have a quality of indignant rage – ‘how could you do this to me’ which in some respects seems quite silly since they are the ones who are dead, but then so much of my life has always really been about me.

This first suicide involved a psychiatric nurse who worked in the AIDS Clinic at Denver Health in the early 1990’s. She was a lesbian woman who on the surface seemed very strong and as put together as anyone I knew. Unbeknownst to me, but not to several others in her life, she purchased a handgun I believe in late 1992, saying she feared for her safety around the passage by referendum of Amendment Two by the voters of Colorado which read as follows:

Neither the State of Colorado, through any of its branches or departments, nor any of its agencies, political subdivisions, municipalities or school districts, shall enact, adopt or enforce any statute, regulation, ordinance or policy whereby homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships shall constitute or otherwise be the basis of or entitle any person or class of persons to have or claim any minority status, quota preferences, protected status or claim of discrimination. This Section of the Constitution shall be in all respects self-executing.

I thought after the fact that if I had known about her gun purchase and the stated reason for it I would certainly have confronted it for the bullshit it turned out to be. Even back then I was sort of the resident out radical queer in an AIDS Clinic no less a place full of ACT Up members in 1992 and I would have said “oh honey all they are doing is finally being honest about how they hate us”. The statewide vote on the referendum was something like 53% in favor of literally codifying discrimination across the board based solely on sexual preference and 47% opposed. We were simply being put on notice to a fact that had always been the reality. This was of course challenged in court and overturned eventually by the United States Supreme Court in the case Evans vs. Romer in 1996.

I would in hindsight have been right to call her on this purchase since she used the gun along with some alcohol and prescribed medications as lubrication to drive up to St. Mary’s Glacier in early January of 1993 and blow her brains out. I would hope I would have insisted on a better reason, than homophobes run amok, for buying a lethal weapon by a person who was in many instances a very out and proud queer woman.

You must remember this was in 1993 and the peak of the AIDS nightmare. So many of our clients were valiantly struggling to often just stay alive for one more day and this crazy-ass women who I loved and admired, in excellent physical health as far as we knew, goes and kills herself. It was a great blow to many of my staff and her clinic patients to whom she provided psychotherapy. It was difficult for me to even speak her name for many months but we did finally put up a plaque in her memory when our own unbelievably raw feelings subsided and perhaps I personally better appreciated whatever the mental anguish she was suffering from. There were apparently major relationship issues in her life and perhaps these involved anger on her part or maybe it was simply an overwhelming depression made worse by well intentioned use of psychiatric medicines that unfortunately proved to be disinhibiting in the long run and maybe even direct facilitators in pulling the trigger. Suicides seem to often to be impulsively facilitated in our society by the criminally easy access to guns along with alcohol and certain psychotropic medications most often legally prescribed.

My feelings around suicides of people in my life are not however universal and do not always involve anger. In those days in particular end of life decisions to speed the dying process along by many suffering terribly from the ravages of AIDS were not uncommon. For those unfamiliar with this time and its nearly unbearable realities I would encourage you to see the current HBO movie version of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, visually at least it is much more riveting and intensely in your face than the play ever was.

The best suicides as I recall from those days were well thought out and often involved much support from lovers, family and friends. The act was rarely impulsive, rarely to my knowledge involved a gun and rarely if ever done in isolation. News of these passing when they would reach the clinic often invoked great sadness and sometimes a sense of relief but no anger.

If this is to be an act with integrity it seems to me it should never occur as a result of subterfuge and certainly not as an expression of anger toward others or one’s self. That itself seems to be a very angry last dance that certainly does not affect in any positive fashion others in your life, many of who may care deeply about you. It strikes me as not only very angry but selfish. I appreciate that deep depression can often set the stage but a common caveat about suicide is that it is mostly the choice when one is coming out of depression.

As mentioned above I will again explore suicide in a future piece, one by a dear friend of many decades and my own personal feelings about it. Most days I tend to take a Buddhist approach that suicide will only result in another reincarnation something to be avoided and continued samsara on the wheel of death and rebirth, which could go very wrong with one perhaps returning as a banana slug.


June, 2014

About the Author

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