Via Daily Dharma: Beginning Meditation

 If we wait until we are saints, if we put off meditation until our [ethics are] perfect, then we will never meditate! Whatever our moral situation, we must begin.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “The Seal of Sila”

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Via White Crane Institute // 3 Heros

 

Died

9-11 hero Mark Bingham

2001 -

MARK BINGHAM, passenger on United Airlines Flight 93, died (b. 1970) Bingham is believed to have been among the passengers who attempted to storm the cockpit to try to prevent the hijackers from using the plane to kill hundreds or thousands of additional victims on September 11, 2001. He made a brief cell phone call to his mother, Alice Hoagland, shortly before the plane went down. Hoagland, a former flight attendant with United Airlines, later left a voice mail message on his cell phone, instructing Bingham to reclaim the aircraft after it became apparent that Flight 93 was to be used in a suicide mission.

Bingham was survived by his former boyfriend of six years, Paul Holm, who says this was not the first time Bingham risked his life to protect the lives of others. In fact, he had twice successfully protected Holm from attempted muggings, one of which was at gunpoint. Holm describes Bingham as a brave, competitive man, saying, "He hated to lose — at anything." He was even known to proudly display a scar he received after being gored at the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

A large athlete at 6 ft 4 in and 225 pounds, he also played for the San Francisco Fog, a rugby union team. The biennial Gay Rugby tournament is named in his honor (the Bingham Cup).

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2001 -

 FATHER MYCHAL F. JUDGE, Chaplain, FDNY died (b 1933) a Roman Catholic priest of the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor, Chaplain of the Fire Department of New York and first officially recorded victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 

Following his death, a few of his friends and associates revealed that Father Judge was Gay — as a matter of orientation rather than practice, as he was a celibate priest. According to fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen: "I actually knew about his sexuality when I was in the Uniformed Firefighters Association. I kept the secret, but then he told me when I became commissioner five years ago. He and I often laughed about it, because we knew how difficult it would have been for the other firefighters to accept it as easily as I had. I just thought he was a phenomenal, warm, sincere man, and the fact that he was Gay just had nothing to do with anything." Judge was a long-term member of Dignity, a Catholic GLBT activist organization that advocates for change in the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality.

Since October 1, 1986, when the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith issued an encyclical, On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, which declared homosexuality to be a "strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil", many bishops, including Cardinal O’Connor of New York, banned Dignity from Catholic properties. At that time, Judge welcomed Dignity's AIDS ministry to the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi. At Judge's memorial service, Malachy McCourt said that he had heard "if Mike got any money from the right wing, he'd give it to the Gay organizations. I don't know if that's true, but that's his humor, for sure."

Ironically, Judge's firefighter helmet was presented to Pope John Paul II in memory of his death. Although there has been call within the Roman Catholic Church to have Mychal Judge canonized, there is no indication that this process is being seriously considered by the Church hierarchy. Several independent Catholic and Orthodox denominations, most notably The Orthodox-Catholic Church of America, have already declared him a saint. A film, The Saint of 9/11 portrays Mychal's life as a spiritual adventure and an honest embrace of life, where alcoholism and sexuality were acknowledged. Inspired by his life, the documentary embraces Mychal's full humanity.

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Arthur Evans

2011 -

ARTHUR EVANS, gay theorist, philosopher, activist died on this date (b: 1942). Evans was one of the founders of the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) that coalesced after Gay people and supporters protested a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village Gay bar. He and others founded the organization when they became frustrated with the tactics of the Gay Liberation Front, which he felt were not assertive enough. Based in New York, the alliance became a model for Gay Rights organizations nationwide, pushing in New York for legislation to ban discrimination against Gay men and Lesbians in employment, housing and other areas.

Mr. Evans wrote its statement of purpose and much of its constitution, which began, “We as liberated homosexual activists demand the freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings.”

To attract attention the alliance staged what its members called “zaps,” confrontations with people or institutions that they believed discriminated against gay people. Among other incidents, they confronted Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York, went to television studios to protest shows perceived as anti-Gay, demanded Gay marriage equality rights at the city’s marriage license bureau, and demonstrated at the taxi commission against a regulation, since abolished, requiring Gay people to get a psychiatrist’s approval before they could be allowed to drive a taxi.

In the fall of 1970, Mr. Evans and others showed up at the offices of Harper’s Magazine in Manhattan to protest an article it had published sharply criticizing Gay people and their lifestyle. It was Mr. Evans’s idea to bring a coffee pot, doughnuts, a folding table and chairs for a civilized “tea party.” When the editor, Midge Decter, refused to print a rebuttal as the group demanded, Mr. Evans erupted.

“You knew that this article would contribute to the oppression of homosexuals!” he yelled, according to the 1999 book “Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America” by Dudley Clendinen, a former reporter for The New York Times, and Adam Nagourney, a current Times reporter. “You are a bigot, and you are to be held responsible for that moral and political act.”

While living in Washington, Mr. Evans had spent his winters in Seattle researching the historical origins of the counterculture. After settling in San Francisco, he wrote “Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture,” a 1978 book tracing homophobic attitudes to the Middle Ages, when people accused of witchcraft, the book contended, were being persecuted in part for their sexuality, often their homosexuality.

He was among the first -- if not the first -- people to coin and use the term "Radical Faerie" beginning in a regularly circle that met in San Francisco. 

He went on to write The God of Ecstasy, a reinterpretation of the Dionysus myth and Critique of Patriarchal Reason (1997), a dense treatise arguing that misogyny and homophobia have influenced supposedly objective fields like logic and physics.

Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History: D.H. LAWRENCE

 

September 11 Born D. H. Lawrence 1885 - D.H. LAWRENCE, English novelist, born (d. 1930) A very important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behavior. Lawrence's unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E.M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Despite his long marriage to Frieda Weekley, it was during the years in which Women in Love was being written that Lawrence developed a sexual relationship, in the town of Tregerthen, with a Cornish farmer by the name of William Henry Hocking. The affair, brief though it was, seems to indicate that Lawrence's fascination with themes of homosexuality, which he would explore further in Women in Love and Aaron's Rod especially, related to his own, personal sexuality. Indeed, in a letter written during 1913, he writes, "I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not…" He is also quoted as saying, "I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about sixteen." Lawrence is perhaps best known for his novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women In Love (adapted for film by AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Within these Lawrence explores the possibilities for life and living within an Industrial setting. In particular Lawrence is concerned with the nature of relationships that can be had within such settings. Though often classed as a realist, Lawrence's use of his characters can be better understood with reference to his philosophy. His use of sexual activity, though shocking at the time, has its roots in this highly personal way of thinking and being. It is worth noting that Lawrence was very interested in human touch behavior [the science of haptics] and that his interest in physical intimacy has its roots in a desire to restore our emphasis on the body, and re-balance it with what he perceived to be western civilization's slow process of over-emphasis on the mind.