Tag: Will Roscoe

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Connections, by Pat Gourley

Once again in writing on the early years of Harry Hay’s queer activism, the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, I am relying heavily on the wonderful collection of Hay’s writings edited by Will Roscoe from 1996 and aptly called Radically Gay. Do check out Will’s web site for further info on Radically Gay and Will’s many other books and writings: http://willsworld.org

In thinking about the topic “connections” I pulled Radically Gay off my bookshelf this morning to re-explore Hay’s concept of subject-Subject Consciousness, a profound and co-equal form of human connection, as opposed to subject-to-object. In scanning the book I came across the story of Hay’s first attempt at a call-to-arms to try and get homosexuals to begin organizing themselves. This manifesto from 1948 was rather awkwardly titled: Bachelors Anonymous (Radically Gay. Page 3.). Now that is a name describing gay men I think we can all be glad did not catch on. Two years later, with his then lover Rudi Gernreich and several others, the Mattachine movement was launched and the rest as they say “is history”. According to Roscoe within a few short years there were an estimated 5,000 homosexuals in California involved in one form or the other with the Mattachine movement. Remember this would have been in the early 1950’s in the era of McCarthyism.

Many would say that Hay’s greatest contribution to the LGBTQI movement was his insistence that we are a cultural minority. To quote Hay from Radically Gay:

“We are a Separate People with, in several measurable respects, a rather different window on the world, a different consciousness which may be triggered into being by our lovely sexuality” (Radically Gay. Page 6.)

I would contend that one of the “measureable respects” in how we differ from heterosexuals is a mode of communication, a form of connection, Hay called subject-to-Subject. In a position paper he wrote in 1976, while living in New Mexico entitled, Gay Liberation: Chapter Two- Serving Social and Political Change through our Gay Window, Hay lays out his vision of subject-Subject Consciousness (Radically Gay. Pages 201-216). I encourage all Queers to get the book and read especially this chapter.

Right out of the box he owns that this essay puts forth a Gay Masculine point of view while acknowledging that Feminine Consciousness also exists but is something quite different. I will go way out a limb here and suggest that the lesbian-feminist movement of the 1960’s and 1970’ was all over this non-objectifying form of connecting woman-to-woman.

The essence of subject-to-Subject is that of equal to equal. My very simplistic interpretation of this form of consciousness is that we gay men have a leg up on the hetero world in that we as men relating to men and women relating to women are better able to approach one another as equals without the burden of centuries of institutionalized objectification and sexism i.e. crudely put “Me Tarzan you Jane’.

However, even we as gay men, as opposed to straight men, approach relating to one another with a fair amount of objectifying cultural baggage. It may not involve the competition that comes with landing a mate for procreative purposes but we do often indulge in only hooking up with someone of the ‘right age, skin color, cock size, class background’ etc. This is an area where we need to go back in our lives to that first almost always non-sexual attraction to another boy that was so electrifying. That realization that even though I am ‘other’ so is he. A genuine sense of “equal to equal, sharer to sharer”, we are truly kindred spirits. What an exhilarating form of connecting that was for so many of us.

Gay men in particular still have as much work to do in this area of personal subject-to-Subject relating as we ever have especially once the roiling hormones of sexual attraction bubble to the surface. I am not sure that Grindr could not aptly be renamed “Bachelors Anonymous”. Though that first impulse for out of the box subject-to-Subject connecting still remains and hopefully is the essence of gay liberation. It remains our real gift to the world in this age of Trump regression and insanity.

© April 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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Competition by Pat Gourley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 2014

About the Author

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

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Gay Music by Pat Gourley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© February 2014



About the Author

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

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Depravity by Pat Gourley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec. 2011

About the Author

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