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.

Thich Nhat Hanh

 

“We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we are not doing anything, we are wasting our time. But that is not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving. And that is what the world needs most.”

• Thich Nhat Hanh

Via Lion's Roar / Quantum Potential: A Pathway to Peace

 

Is there a Scientific Basis for World Peace?   JOIN US FOR A FREE FILM & PANEL DISCUSSION   Quantum Potential: A Pathway to Peace Sunday, September 20, 2020 at 3 PM PT

Mystics have known about it for millennia. Modern science is catching up. The first to theorize about the Quantum Potential, a nonlocal field of being that “informs” everything in the universe, was a little-known scientist named David Bohm, who H.H. the Dalai Lama refers to as his “science guru.” Einstein called him his “spiritual son.”  But the scientific orthodoxy was threatened by Bohm's radical ideas and his work was largely dismissed. Until now.

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Via White Crane Institute // PAUL GOODMAN

 This Day in Gay History

September 09

Born

Paul Goodman

1911 -

PAUL GOODMAN, American sociologist, poet, writer, and public intellectual born (d: 1972); He described his politics as anarchist, his loves as bisexual, and his profession as that of "man of letters." Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of Growing up Absurd and for having been, during the 1960s, an activist on the pacifist Left and an inspiration to the counterculture of that era. He is less remembered as a co-founder of Gestalt Therapy in the 1940s and 50s. 

The freedom with which he revealed, in print and in public, his homosexual life and loves (notably in a late essay, "The Politics of Being Queer" (1969)), proved to be one of the many important cultural springboards for the emerging Gay Liberation Movement of the early 1970s. In an interview with Studs Terkel, Goodman said "I might seem to have a number of divergent interests — community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics — but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist."

Whether you agree or disagree with the late, great Paul Goodman's cheerfully, rigorously radical ideas, it's clear that very, very few public figures -- really, of any ideological stripe -- since his 1960s-1970s prominence as author/speaker/television guest have attained nearly the richness of thought or the lively way of expressing it that Goodman had.

Via White Crane Institute // From Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love

 

Today's Gay Wisdom

Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love

2004 -

From Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love

by Will Roscoe,

Originally in White Crane issue #63, winter 2005, Totems and Animal Wisdom:

In 1979, I attended a retreat where Hay passionately presented his idea concerning subject-Subject consciousness and called on us as Gay men to foster it. At that event I discovered I was not alone in yearning to incorporate a spiritual outlook into my life. For many of us, a spiritual inclination began in childhood with a fantasy life that included talking to trees and animals, and inventing rituals. As we shared these experiences at the 1979 retreat, we realized that Gay spirituality begins with reclaiming the child-like awareness we had before the crippling and stifling influence of homophobia penetrated our lives. Whitman had a similar intuition and frequently celebrated boyhood. In “There was a Child Went Forth,” he describes the child’s awareness in terms that resonate with Hay’s concept of subject-subject:

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him

But in 1979 adhesive love and subject-subject consciousness were ideals not realities. In those years, it was difficult to see anything redeeming in the way that Gay men were pursuing love. The activist, experimental era of Gay liberation was over. A grassroots movement of volunteer and self-help organizations was being replaced by agencies staffed with professionals. Gay marches had become Gay parades, and Gay social life was shifting from public and community-organized events to commercial venues.

Discussions of Gay love gave way to a narrower focus on sexuality. Self-identified sex radicals claimed that simply having Gay sex challenged the social system, while moderates claimed that sex was the only thing that distinguished lesbians, Gay men, and bisexuals from heterosexuals, and, since it was a private act, it was an invisible difference. In either case, sex was the lynchpin of Gay identity. To be Gay or bisexual was to have sex. At the same time, many Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals were rejecting the idea advanced by earlier liberationists that they might be gender different. The assimilationist mantra took its place: “We’re no different from heterosexuals except for what we do in bed.”

In the 1970s, to live up to their image as sexual athletes, Gay men began using drugs and alcohol at rates far in excess of the general population. Our sexual experiences became increasingly intense, but they occurred in contexts that attributed them with no particular significance. Gay men began referring to sex as “play”—it became a form of recreation, to be consumed much as entertainment or travel or fashion. Far from posing a challenge to the social order, it turned out that a sexual minority community whose identity was derived from what it consumed was perfectly compatible with postindustrial capitalism.

All this occurred as an organized anti-Gay opposition was emerging. In 1977, Anita Bryant’s campaign in Dade County, Florida overturned legislation to protect Gays from discrimination. Soon Gay civil rights protections were being repealed throughout the country. Heterosexual Americans were not ready to see Gay lifestyles or relationships as equal to theirs in any way, nor were they willing to entertain the possibility that Gays were different in ways that might be beneficial. Indeed, Gays themselves increasingly rejected such speculations as elitist, throwbacks to a discredited model of homosexuality as inborn and essential. Lesbian and Gay intellectuals, under the influence of Michel Foucault and the theory of social constructionism, not only decried the idea of queer differences, the very desire to explore the meaning of one’s sexual identity was dismissed out of hand.

In 1982, at the same time I was reading Clement of Alexandria, I decided to write an essay expressing my dismay at the role of sexual objectification in the Gay men’s community. Instead of healing the wounds inflicted on us by a homophobic society, we were perpetuating low self-esteem. And the consequences of this, I argued, could be seen in a growing range of health problems appearing among Gay men—from alcoholism to sexually transmitted diseases to recent reports of a new and mysterious illness that was taking Gay men’s lives.

My essay, titled “Desperate Living” (after a popular John Waters’ film), was published about the same time that I put down Smith’s book. Our extended stay with Harry and his partner John in Los Angeles was over. Brad and I were still young, in our twenties, and life flowed in strong currents. We found ourselves back in San Francisco, immersed in new jobs and new projects.

Fifteen years passed before I took up Smith’s book again. It was 1997, and I had been invited to speak at Gay Spirit Visions, an annual conference held outside Atlanta, Georgia. The theme was mentoring. As I thought about this topic, it occurred to me that Gay men needed not only mentors—teachers, guides, role models—but also some form of initiatory experience to mark their passage from the closet to community and from Gay childhood to Gay adulthood.

Then I remembered the mystical rite of initiation uncovered by Morton Smith. As I began re-reading his book, I saw connections that had escaped me before. I realized how Jesus’ secret baptism drew on ideas and images with a long history, and how it was that same-sex love could be part of, indeed, give rise to, visionary experiences. I realized as well that the insights I was having now were the result of what I had experienced in the fifteen years since I last picked up Smith’s book.

Those were the years when the AIDS epidemic swept through our lives like wildfire, whisking away acquaintances, friends, and lovers—and, eventually, my own life partner.

Excerpt reprinted from Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love by Will Roscoe (Suspect Thoughts Press) courtesy of the author.

Via Daily Dharma: Your Mind’s Potential

 All the qualities that the great masters found, we can attain as well. It all depends on our own efforts, our diligence, our deeper knowing, and our correct motivation.

—Ogyen Trinley Dorje, “Calm Abiding”

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Via Daily Dharma: Continue Taking Care

 Taking care of body, mind, soul, taking care of ourselves and each other emotionally and physically, repairing the world, earning a living—it’s endless. ... But to brightly begin, and then, having begun, to continue: that’s the great thing.

—Norman Fischer, “Saved from Freezing”

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Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History : JANE ADDAMS

September 06

Born

Jane Addams

1860 -

JANE ADDAMS, born; American social worker, and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (d. 1935) Although she would not have used the word Lesbian, she did have lasting intimate and romantic relationships with women throughout her life.

After returning from a Grand Tour of Europe, Jane resumed friendship with Ellen Gates Starr, now a teacher. A female love of Starr's had moved away and she was heartbroken. She wrote to Jane, "The first real experience I ever had in my life of any real pain in parting came with separating from her. I don't speak of it because people don't understand it. People would understand if it were a man." Soon Addams would become the object of Starr's affection. It is not clear whether Jane returned the affection. In 1889 she and Starr co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, one of the first settlement houses in the United States. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around two thousand people. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, a girls club, a swimming pool, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, a library, and labor-related divisions. She was probably most remembered through the institution of her adult night school which set the stage for the continuing education classes offered by many community colleges today.

Hull House also served as a women's sociological institution. Addams was a friend and colleague to the early members of the Chicago School of Sociology, influencing their thought through her work in applied sociology and, in 1893, co-authoring the Hull-House Maps and Papers that came to define the interests and methodologies of the School. She worked with George H. Mead on social reform issues including promoting women’s rights, ending child-labor, and the mediating during the 1910 Garment Workers’ Strike. Although academic sociologists of the time defined her work as "social work", Addams did not consider herself a social worker.

The term Lesbian was coined in 1890, one year after Addams founded Hull House. Although she would not have used the term to define herself, by today's standards, Jane Addams would be a Lesbian. Mary Rozet Smith arrived at Hull House one day in 1890, the daughter of a wealthy paper manufacturer. Over the years she became Jane's devoted companion, virtually playing the role of a traditional wife: tending to her when she was ill, handling her social correspondence, making travel arrangements.

Unfortunately, we will never know the full extent of Jane's relationship with Mary Smith. Toward the end of her life, Jane destroyed most of Mary's letters to her. Perhaps she was trying to cover up a sexual component of their relationship. "I miss you dreadfully and am yours 'til death," Addams wrote to Smith. Smith wrote back, "You can never know what it is to me to have had you and to have you...I feel quite a rush of emotion when I think of you."

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of Addams's life and the one which won her the most notoriety was her involvement in the peace movement. Addams declared herself a pacifist and spoke out against World War I. Although she would eventually win a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts, it was an unpopular stance to take in 1914.

Addams believed women had a social responsibility to work for peace because working men would never be against war. She took on a leadership role in the Woman's Peace Party. In March 1915 Addams was invited to speak at an International Congress of Women in the Netherlands. Addams presided over the event and one participant said, "She towered above all the others and again and again when she rose to speak and when she closed the audience would stand and applaud...She led without dominating and with extraordinary parliamentary skill clarified and interpreted for the polyglot congress of women."

Jane Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. True to her cause, Jane gave all her prize money away.

 

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - September 6, 2020 💌

If we live in the moment, we are not in time. If you think, "I'm a retired person. I've retired from my role," you are looking back at your life. It's retrospective; it's life in the rearview mirror. If you're young, you might be thinking, "I have my whole life ahead of me. This is what I'll do later." That kind of thinking is called time-binding. It causes us to focus on the past or the future and to worry about what comes next.

Getting caught up in memories of the past or worrying about the future is a form of self-imposed suffering. Either retirement or youth can be seen as moving on, time for something different, something new. Aging is not a culmination. Youth isn't preparation for later. This isn't the end of the line or the beginning.

Now isn't a time to look back or plan ahead. It's time to just be present. The present is timeless. Being in the moment, just being here with what is, is ageless and eternal.

- Ram Dass -

Via Apple News // Remembering Chadwick Boseman

Remembering Chadwick Boseman

How the Black Panther star created an indelible cultural legacy. Plus: the uncompromising arrival of director Chloé Zhao, how The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby became indie royalty, and Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin saddles up for the big screen. The Hollywood Reporter

 

Via White Crane Institute // "TREATMENT ACTIVIST GUERRILLAS" (TAG)

 

Noteworthy

The TAG condom on Jesse Helms House

1991 -

On this date a group of AIDS activists called "TREATMENT ACTIVIST GUERRILLAS" (TAG) accomplished one of the funniest and most outrageous bits of public activism when they literally put an enormous condom over the home of rabid homophobe and AIDS death accomplice Senator Jesse Helms in Arlington, Virginia.  The activists knew they only had seven minutes before the police showed up.  You can see the action in the 2012 documentary How To Survive and Plague. Here: https://youtu.be/Nrr0eA34CSM 

Via White Crane Institute // FREDDIE MERCURY

 

---

Freddie Mercury

1946 -

FREDDIE MERCURY, Zanzibar-born singer and songwriter (Queen) (d. 1991) Widely regarded as one of the great singers in popular music, Freddie Mercury possessed a distinctive voice, with a recorded range of nearly four octaves. Although his speaking voice naturally fell in the baritone range, he delivered most songs in the tenor range.

Biographer David Bret described Mercury's voice as "escalating within a few bars from a deep, throaty rock-growl to tender, vibrant tenor, then on to a high-pitched, almost perfect coloratura, pure and crystalline in the upper reaches." On the other hand, he would often lower the highest notes during live performances. Mercury also claimed never to have had any formal training.

Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé, with whom Mercury recorded an album expressed her opinion that "the difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was he was selling the voice." Despite the fact that he had been criticized by Gay activists for hiding his HIV status, author Paul Russell included Mercury in his book The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present. Other entertainers on Russell's list included Liberace and Rock Hudson.

Via White Crane Institute // JOHN CAGE

 This Day in Gay History

September 05

Born

John Cage

1912 -

JOHN CAGE, American composer born (d. 1992). American composer. He was a pioneer of Chance music, non-standard use of musical instruments, and electronic music.

He is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4’33”, whose three movements are performed without a single note being played. Though he remains a controversial figure, he is generally regarded as one of the most important composers of his era. Cage was a long-term collaborator and romantic partner of choreographer Merce Cunningham. In addition to his composing, Cage was also a philosopher, writer, printmaker and avid amateur mycologist and mushroom collector.

Cage always referred to his The Perilous Night (1943) as his "autobiographical" piece, and biographer, David Revill has associated it with the traumas associated with Cage's sexual reorientation, culminating in divorce from his wife (1945) and the beginning of his monogamous partnership with Merce Cunningham, that lasted to the end of his life.

Via Daily Dharma: Returning to Focus

 Each time we let go of distractions to return to our focus, whatever that is, we practice letting go. Letting go of thoughts, scenarios, judgments, conceptual thinking—little chunks of self.

—Erik Hansen, “Bartelby the Buddhist”

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