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Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Via Daily Dharma: Sitting with Uncomfortable Truths
Via White Crane Institute // An excerpt from Mark Thompson’s Gay Spirit: Myth & Meaning
Today's Gay Wisdom
2017 -
Equinox/Return
An excerpt from Mark Thompson’s Gay Spirit: Myth & Meaning
What Edward Carpenter, Gerald Heard and Harry Hay recognized was the “new city of Friends” described by Walt Whitman over a hundred years ago—a sustaining place where “robust love” might thrive, a deep source of empowerment. It has been a dream asserted by a few and glimpsed by others at crucial points in our development. The early 1950s and 1970s were times when our movement howled at the moon, briefly acknowledging that this dream could be a reality. That this rude awakening represented something instinctual, wildly alive, posed problems for our leaders. Here was nature, woolly and cloven-hoofed, taking on unexpected form. Here were luminous faces peering out on the edges of accepted reality. How strangely familiar, too, for others to suppress what they do not comprehend, to fear what they’ve been taught to distrust.
Power, status, the hierarchy of who’s on top is the real currency of American culture, and so many of our leaders have been seduced by it all. These are the tactics of assimilation and they smell of panic. Thinking we have gained so much, we have been led to settle for less than we can be.
There is a tyranny implicit in any label, and certainly the label of Gay has now been revealed as much for its limitations as for its liberations. Why not consider difference, whatever its reason, in terms of function? The concept of a faerie shaman is just one idea that indicates a purposeful role, beyond that of just political or sexual identity. In times past and in many cultures, we often assumed the tasks of the shamans—wise and creative ones—and were duly honored as such. If we can but take gay beyond society’s definition—which we have internalized—and see ourselves as part of this function, our secret will be out.
I failed in my father’s eyes, and he in mind, as, I suppose, it had been fated. More to the point, few gay men ever seem to find complete acceptance from their fathers. (And even tolerance, however honorable, cannot account for true knowing.) Gay men have even less hope of being accepted by the greater father, the world of our daily existence, which, despite tolerant inroads, remains disapproving to its core. But neither can an opposite reality—that is, the matriarchy—hold any more honest place for us. Perhaps at one time, and according to the current feminist myth, the dominant Great Mother societies of agrarian, pre-Judeo-Christian times accepted gay men as welcomed sons. But I suspect, more likely, as subservient sons, in contrast to the outlawed sons of our contemporary age.
So gay men remain suspended in a horrible dilemma. Both the matriarchy and the patriarchy have, in effect, played themselves out; and the future, symbolized through an historic union of the two—has yet to fully emerge. Gay male consciousness remains stymied, unable to come of age. This is why so much of recent gay-identified culture appears to lack deeper meaning; however fresh and guileless its messages, empowered as it is by ritual dance and sex and defiance against corrupt authority.
At what point do gay boys stop finding favor in their father’s eyes? What stories are withheld, what rites of manhood lost in that uncomprehending gaze? Now, as gay men, we must begin by finding forgiveness in each other’s eyes, seek favor in stories of our own telling — our own fairy tales, the instructional fables we need to assume a mature and ever evolving gay adulthood. And for this we need to reinvest in wonder.
By learning more fully to evoke and to balance the powers of (what were once known as) the Earth Mother and Father Sky, we can set into motion our own whiling evolution as gay men beyond definition. We will no longer suffer from the constraints of living on a fraction of a life. We will evidence harmony as men who see clearly within and thus act cleanly without. We can learn to revel in our perspective, as much as our preference, and we don’t need a name. Our freedom is our responsibility. We simply need to do our work.
But first we must take the dark fantasies of our suppressed spirits out of their closets into the powerful light of reality. We can have a vision, and, thus, a culture to affirm, until one day perhaps our fathers will knowingly proclaim: “I have one of those.”
Gay Spirit: Myth & Meaning is now available at www.gaywisdom.org www.whitecranebooks.org
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Monday, November 4, 2024
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right View: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering
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Via Daily Dharma: Receiving Is a Gift
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Via White Crane Institute // ASSUNTA FEMIA
Died 
2006 -
ASSUNTA FEMIA, a San Francisco poet, actor, and political activist who admired nuns, died on this date at a friend's home in Oregon from liver cancer, secondary to hepatitis B. He would have been 59 next month. Assunta was born Francis Thomas Femia in December 1947, the son of an Italian-American father and a West Virginia mother. After growing up in modest circumstances in West Virginia and Philadelphia, and later serving time in federal prison for an anti-war protest, he arrived in San Francisco in 1975. Assunta started walking about the city dressed as a nun, which was a novel sight at the time, and began using the female pronoun for self-reference. Eventually, she changed her name to Assunta, which means "Taken Up," a title referring to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Assunta loved the nuns and the Catholic liturgy that she knew from childhood. However, she rejected the church's male-focused theology and scorned priests and the pope. She created her own special spirituality based on a sense of service to the divine feminine, traditional Catholic veneration of the Blessed Virgin, and fierce independence of spirit. Assunta's eye-popping spirituality struck a responsive chord in San Francisco's gay community in the 1970s and 1980s. She helped inspire the founding of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group that continues to this day. However, she was too independent-minded to spend much time with the Sisters, and she never adopted a mocking posture toward nuns. Assunta had made waves before coming to San Francisco. In 1968, at age 21, she was arrested, along with two other Catholic peace activists, for pouring black paint on draft files in Boston, to protest the war in Vietnam. As a consequence, she spent two years in federal prison in Kentucky, where she came out as gay. She said she preferred prison life in Kentucky to parochial high school in south Philadelphia: "Prison was a lot less brutal than high school. I never got beat up in prison." Starting in the 1980s, Assunta spent much time in southern Oregon, going back and forth between there and San Francisco. When in Oregon, she rented a small house in a wooded area outside the town of Wolf Creek, whose owner lived in San Francisco. A local homophobe firebombed the house, but luckily Femia was absent at the time. She became the butt of taunts and threats from redneck men in rural Oregon because of her feminine appearance. But her tormentors always backed off, sensing on some level that she was not someone to mess with. They were right. Tucked away in her colorfully knitted Guatemalan handbag, next to her favorite rosary, she carried a big handgun. During Assunta's tenancy, the Wolf Creek property was often visited by gay men seeking alternatives to urban life, and the land gradually took on the nature of a country refuge. Eventually, a collective of Radical Faeries from San Francisco, including followers of the late Harry Hay, came into possession of the property and turned it into a faerie sanctuary. A bitter conflict soon developed between the swarm of new faery landlords and the longstanding tenant. Things got off to a rocky start when Hay rebuked Assunta for including Catholic elements in her spirituality. The turning point came when one of the new faery occupants erected some stone phalluses on the land. Assunta regarded the phalluses as glorifications of male power in a place sacred to the divine feminine. She destroyed them all with a hammer, celebrating the feat with an triumphant poem, "i smashed the phalloi." Assunta proved to be too radical for the Radical Faeries, and a parting of the ways followed. She abandoned the land she had made safe for the new dwellers and the home that she and some friends had built to replace the one that was firebombed. "It was easier with one landlord than 200," she later quipped. Assunta performed in plays and musicals in both Oregon in San Francisco. In 1984, at the former Valencia Rose cabaret in the Mission, she played the lead role of the god Dionysos in The God of Ecstasy , a rendition of Euripides's play Bakkhai . When asked at a rehearsal by other members of the cast how she landed the lead role, she announced to all, "I slept with the director" (which was true). She was active in Bay Area Gay Liberation and also the Butterfly Brigade, a civilian foot patrol organized to combat anti-gay violence in the Castro. When the AIDS epidemic hit, she spent much time caring for the dying, both in Oregon and San Francisco, drawing on skills she had learned from a stint in nursing school. [Editor's Note: this bio is based in large part on Assunta's obituary in the Bay Area Reporter, written by Arthur Evans] | ||
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|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute "With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 | ||
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Sunday, November 3, 2024
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