Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Via White Crane Instiitute // SIR ROGER CASEMENT
1864 -
SIR ROGER CASEMENT is born in Kingston, Ireland (d: 1916). A former British diplomat he was knighted for his services to the crown after exposing the horrible working conditions of worker in British colonies in the Congo and in South America. This made him a hero to workers suffering from colonial hardship throughout the British empire.
However, the Ulster Protestant became an ardent Irish nationalist and was captured and tried for treason after returning from a trip to secure Germany's aid for the Irish Revolution of 1916. What sealed his doom was the admission into evidence of Casement's diaries where he meticulously detailed the names and descriptions of his numerous sexual partners. That he was on trial for treason and not for buggery did not matter.
When he was found guilty, protest was world-wide. Among the voices William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw spoke out in his defense. But then the British government leaked word of the contents of Casement's "black diaries," all protest suddenly stopped. Typically, the diaries were examined and re-examined looking for "proof" of the man's sexuality. The case against him was shaky – as his alleged treason had taken place in Germany and not the UK – and in the end, his guilt was determined by the placement of a comma in the Treason Act of 1351, which was written in Norman French. Casement famously wrote later that he was to be ‘hanged on a comma’.
Putting aside how difficult it is to prove the negative, the historical presumption that someone is, of course and by default, heterosexual unless proof certain is obtained otherwise, assumes that to come to that decision is a de facto smear on the man. In this era, it was, of course. And it proved critical in the undermining of his wide public support.
No less a supporter than Mario Vargas Llosa presented a mixed account of Casement's sexuality in his 2010 novel, The Dream of the Celt, suggesting that Casement wrote partially fictional diaries of what he wished had taken place in homosexual encounters. Dudgeon suggested in a 2013 article that Casement needed to be "sexless" to fit his role as a Catholic martyr in the nationalist movement of the time. Dudgeon writes, "The evidence that Casement was a busy homosexual is in his own words and handwriting in the diaries, and is colossally convincing because of its detail and extent."
Research published in 2016 again casts doubt on the Black Diaries. In The Casement Secret, it is argued there is no evidence of the existence of the diaries during Casement's lifetime since only typescript pages – allegedly copies – were circulated; no-one was shown the diaries now in the National Archives. An official memorandum by the British Secretary of State dated March 6, 1959 states: "There is no record on the Home Office papers of the diaries or the copies having been shown to anyone outside the Government service before Casement's trial".
This argument reflects the question raised in 1955 by Bertrand Russell concerning their existence at the time of Casement's trial. The argument proposes a paradigm shift – the diaries were fabricated after Casement's execution as forged versions of the original typescripts. Anatomy of a Lie, another research essay, purports that the homosexual dimension was largely the invention of British Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary Mansfeldt Findlay in Christiania, Norway (now Oslo) in a false memorandum on October 29, 1914. The rarely-seen document containing the first innuendo has never been analyzed before and is unmentioned by all Casement authors save one. It is posited that, in the following months Findlay amplified his allegations because he feared exposure of his written bribe through a threatened lawsuit against him by Casement; a subsequent diplomatic scandal which might have destroyed his career.
Such a lot of bother. Roger Casement was hanged on August 6, 1916. A good man who'd been knighted for his service to humanity had become a martyr to men who love men everywhere.
Esteemed historian Martin Duberman has a "biographical novel" about Casement Luminous Traitor: The Just and Daring Life of Roger Casement being released on October 1 of this year. It promises to be a real pleasure read.
Via Daily Dharma: Don’t Fear Yourself
When
we bury a feeling, we hold it inside and it festers, but if we develop
our ability and courage to feel, we can come to a recognition that our
inner feeling-world is not something we have to fear and run from.
—Scott Tusa, “How to Be in the Body (Without Jumping Out of Your Skin)”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - September 1, 2021 💌
I think in relationships, you create an environment with your own work on yourself, which you offer to another human being to use to grow in the way they need to grow.
-Ram Dass -
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Via White Crane Institute // Noteworthy: A SPIRITUAL CONFERENCE OF RADICAL FAERIES
1979 -
The first day of the first Faerie Gathering that called itself "A SPIRITUAL CONFERENCE OF RADICAL FAERIES," was on this date, held in Benson Arizona, on Labor Day Weekend, 1979. Harry Hay, the "father of the gay rights movement" began the Mattachine society in 1950. In 1970, Hay moved to New Mexico in a quest to find a living berdache (a Native American Gay male spirit guide). In 1978, Hay, along with life partner John Burnside, and Don Kilhefner, and Mitch Walker, issued a Call to a group devoted to ecology, spiritual truth and Gay-centeredness. In 1979, the first gathering of Radical Faeries took place in the Arizona desert with over 200 gay men in attendance. Kilhefner continues to make slanderous statements about John Burnside's participation in a vainglorious attempt to claim for himself the title of "Founder of the Radical Faeries". But anyone claiming to have "founded" the Radical Faeries simply doesn't understand the core beliefs of the group. The Radical Faeries was the product of nothing less than a zeitgeist moment in the Gay men's liberation movement. The ideas that are core to the movement had been circulating widely in San Francisco, the Midwest, Los Angeles and no doubt elsewhere for a long time.
There had been earlier usage of the term "radical faerie" employed in San Francisco by author ("Witchcraft & The Gay Counterculture") and Gay philosopher, Arthur Evans, which a group of men who met regularly including Murray Edelman. The desert Gathering seemed to create the "tipping point" for the movement which is now spread internationally, with Radical Faerie groups and sanctuaries in Europe, South America, India and Australia.
The text of The Call for the first gathering:
THE FIRST CALL:
To share new insights about ourselves; To dance in the moonlight; To
renew our oath against patriarchy/corporations/
Via Daily Dharma: Why Do We Practice?
Music,
art, and meditation are all means of accomplishing deep mental
targeting of our feelings of interdependence and compassion.
—Fredericka Foster in conversation with Philip Glass, “Music, Meditation, Painting—and Dreaming”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Be With Your Body
When
we are exactly where our body is, we are in the present moment. The
body isn’t in the past or future, it’s not conceptual or imagined; it’s
part of nature and contains all of nature’s elements.
Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History
1844 -
EDWARD CARPENTER, English socialist poet anthologist, early gay theorist, activist, and socialist philosopher, was born on this date (d: 1929); Perhaps Gay Pride ought to consider claiming another week, this one. Ulrichs and Carpenter, both born this week, are two of the founding philosophers of the LGBT Rights Movement.
A leading figure in late 19th and early 20th century Britain, Carpenter was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Labor Party. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore, corresponding with many famous figures such as Annie Bessant, Isadore Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, James Keir Hardie, J.K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E.D. Morel, William Morris, E.R. Pease, John Ruskin and Olive Schrener. In this writers humble opinion, along with Walt Whitman, this man’s date of birth should be a recognized holiday in the LGBT community.
As a philosopher Carpenter may have been the original Radical Faerie. He is particularly known for his publication of Civilization, its Cause and Cure in which he proposes that civilization is a form of disease that human societies pass through. Civilizations, he says, rarely last more than a thousand years before collapsing, and no society has ever passed through civilization successfully. His 'cure' is a closer association with the land and greater development of our inner nature. Although derived from his experience of Hindu mysticism, and referred to as 'mystical socialism', his thoughts parallel those of several writers in the field of psychology and sociology at the start of the twentieth century, such as Boris Sidis, Sigmund Freud, and Wilfred Trotter who all recognized that society puts ever increasing pressure on the individual, which can result in mental and physical illnesses such as neurosis, and the particular nervousness which was then described as neurasthenia.
A strong advocate of sexual freedom, living in a Gay community near Sheffield, he had a profound influence on both D H Lawrence and E M Forster. He was also the first person to introduce the wearing of sandals into Britain.
In the 1880s Carpenter developed an intellectual passion for Hindu mysticism and Indian philosophy. During this period, Carpenter received a pair of sandals from a friend in India. "I soon found the joy of wearing them," Carpenter wrote. "And after a little time I set about making them."This was the first successful introduction of sandals to Britain. In 1890 he traveled to Ceylon and India to spend time with the Hindu teacher called Gnani, who he describes his work "Adam's Peak to Elephanta". The experience had a profound effect on his social and political thought. Carpenter began to believe that Socialism should not only concern itself with man's outward economic conditions, but also affect a profound change in human consciousness. In this new stage of society Carpenter argued that mankind would return to a primordial state of simple joy:
"The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon.” Edward Carpenter (1889), Civilization: Its Cause and Cure.
This brand of "Mystical socialism" inspired him to begin a number of campaigns against air pollution, promoting vegetarianism and opposing vivisection.
On his return from India in 1891, he met George Merrill, a working class man also from Sheffield, and the two men struck up a strong relationship, eventually moving in together as lovers in 1898. Merrill had been raised in the slums of Sheffield and had no formal education. Two men of different classes living together as a couple was almost unheard of in England in the 1890s, a fact made all the more extraordinary by the hysteria about homosexuality generated by the Oscar Wilde trial of 1895 and the Criminal Law Amendment Bill passed a decade earlier "outlawing all forms of male homosexual contact". But their relationship endured and they remained partners for the rest of their lives. The love of the two men, not only defied Victorian sexual mores but also the highly stratified British class system. Their partnership in many ways reflected Carpenter's cherished conviction that homosexual love had the power to subvert class boundaries. It was his belief that at sometime in the future homosexual people would be the cause of radical social change in the social conditions of man. Carpenter remarks in his work "The Intermediate Sex",
"Eros is a great leveler. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies". p.114-115
(Note: The term "Uranian", referring to a passage from Plato's Symposium, was often used at the time to describe someone who would be termed "homosexual" or "gay" today.)
The 1890s saw Carpenter produce his finest political writing in a concerted effort to campaign against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. He strongly believed that homosexuality was a natural orientation for people of a third sex. His 1908 book on the subject, The Intermediate Sex, would become a foundational text of the LGBT movements of the 20th century. It can only speculated why Carpenter felt compelled to embark on such an unpopular and even dangerous subject in such hostile times, but one theory is that Carpenter's moral courage was ignited by the death of the gay scholar and middle-class radical John Addington Symonds. In the 1880s Symonds had composed a number of works in defense of homosexuality, which were distributed among a small group of people, including Carpenter. On Symonds' death in 1893, Carpenter perhaps saw the political mantle passing to him and within a couple of years made his first attempt to write on the subject. While engaged in this campaign Carpenter developed a keen interest in progressive education, especially providing information to young people on the topic of sexual education, and was a good friend of John Haden Badley, the social reformer and educationalist and would regularly visit BedalesSchool when his nephew Alfred Francis Blakeney was a student there.
Sexual education for Carpenter also meant forwarding a clear analysis of the ways in which sex and gender were used to oppress women, contained in Carpenter's radical work "Love's Coming-of-Age". In it he argued that a just and equal society must promote the sexual and economic freedom of women. The main crux of his analysis centered on the negative affects of the institution of marriage. He regarded marriage in England as both enforced celibacy and a form of prostitution. He did not believe women would truly be free until a socialist society was established. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, however, this led him to conclude that all oppressed workers should support women's emancipation, rather than to subordinate women's rights to male worker's rights. He remarked
"...there is no solution except the freedom of woman-which means, of course, the freedom of the masses of the people, men and women, and the ceasing altogether of economic slavery. There is no solution which will not include the redemption of the terms free women and free love to their true and rightful significance. Let every woman whose heart bleeds for the sufferings of her sex, hasten to declare herself and to constitute herself, as far as she possibly can, a free woman"
He continued to work in the early part of the 20th century composing works on the "Homogenic question". The publication in 1908 of his groundbreaking anthology of poems, Iolaus - Anthology Of Friendship was a huge underground success, leading to a more advanced knowledge of homoerotic culture. In April 1914, Carpenter and his friend Laurence Houseman founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. Some of the topics addressed in lecture and publication by the society included: the promotion of the scientific study of sex; a more rational attitude towards sexual conduct and problems and questions connected with sexual psychology (from medical, juridical, and sociological aspects), birth control, abortion, sterilization, venereal diseases, and all aspects of prostitution. At this time, he also lectured to the Independent Labor Party and to the Fellowship of the New Life, from which the Fabian Society later grew.
In May 1928 Carpenter suffered a paralytic stroke rendering him almost helpless. He lived another 13 months before he died on a perfect summer afternoon, Friday June 28, 1929. On December 30, 1910 Carpenter had written:
"I should like these few words to be read over the grave when my body is placed in the earth; for though it is possible I may be present and conscious of what is going on, I shall not be able to communicate..."
Unfortunately the existence of his request was not discovered until several days after his burial. The closing words form the epitaph engraved on his tombstone:
"Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped — to reach it. For so, surely you will cast a light of gladness upon his onward journey, and contribute your part towards the building of that kingdom of love which links our earth to heaven."
He was interred in Mount Cemetery at Guildford in Surrey. At the time of his death, Carpenter was largely forgotten, but his books were stocked in many libraries' "restricted to adults" sections and proved inspirational to Gay people searching for solace. One such man was the Gay Rights activist Harry Hay. He was so inspired by the work of Carpenter and his prophecy of the coming together of homosexuals to fight for their rights that he decided to put the words into action by founding the Mattachine Society which started advancing homosexual rights in America.
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - August 29, 2021 💌
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Saturday, August 28, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: What Is a “Great” Mind?
If
you can regard all people, the bad as well as the good, without
grasping or rejecting, free of any clinging, your mind will be like
empty space. Thus, it can be called “great.”
Friday, August 27, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Don’t Fear Your Mind
We
do not need to be afraid of our mind. We can go on a journey of
discovery and experiment. Then we are able to play with our mental
processes and develop our mental ability in wisdom and compassion.
—Martine Batchelor, “Meditation, Mental Habits, and Creative Imagination”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via White Crane Institute - ERIKA MANN
1969 -
ERIKA MANN died on this date. Who was Erika Mann? Mann was the daughter of Thomas Mann and Katia Mann and led one of the most eventful lives you've probably never heard of. She was born in Munich and had a privileged childhood. The Mann home was a gathering-place for intellectuals and artists. She was hired for her first theater engagement before finishing her Abitur at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. On July 24, 1926, she married German actor Gustaf Gründgens, but they divorced in 1929. In 1927, she and Klaus undertook a trip around the world, which they documented in their book Rundherum; Das Abenteuer einer Weltreise. The following year, she began to be active in journalism and in politics. She was involved as an actor in the Lesbian film Mädchen in Uniform (1931, Leontine Sagan) but left the production before its completion. In 1932 she published the first of many children's books. Shortly thereafter she became involved in several Lesbian affairs in her private life. Her first noted affair was with actress Pamela Wedekind, whom she met in Berlin, and was engaged with her brother Klaus. She later became involved with director Therese Giehse, and journalists Betty Cox and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom she served with as a war correspondent during World War II. As was later written, her relationships were both sexually passionate and intellectually stimulating. Mann enjoyed being in the company of women who were intelligent, and with whom she could converse with on any number of international topics.
In 1933, she, Klaus, and Therese Giehse had founded a cabaret in Munich called Die Pfeffermühle, for which Erika wrote most of the material, much of which was anti-Fascist. Erika was the last member of the Mann family to leave Germany after the Nazi regime was elected. She saved many of Thomas Mann's papers from their Munich home when she escaped to Zurich. In 1936, Die Pfeffermühle opened again in Zurich and became a rallying point for the exiles. In 1935 she undertook a marriage of convenience to the homosexual English poet W. H. Auden, in order to obtain British citizenship. She and Auden never lived together, but remained friends and technically married until Erika's death.
In 1937, she crossed over to New York, where Die Pfeffermühle (as The Peppermill) opened its doors again. They lived (with Therese Giehse and her brother Klaus Mann and Miro) in a large group of artists in exile with people like Kurt Weill, Ernst Toller, and Sonja Sekula. In 1938, she and Klaus reported on the Spanish Civil War, and her book School for Barbarians about Nazi Germany's educational system was published. The following year, they published Escape to Life, a book about famous German exiles. During the war, she was active as a journalist in England. After World War II, Mann was one of the few women who covered the Nuremberg Trials. Following the war, both Klaus and Erika came under an FBI investigation into their political views and rumored homosexuality. In 1949, becoming increasingly depressed and disillusioned over post-war torn Germany, Klaus Mann committed suicide. This event devastated Erika.
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