RFD 147 Fall 2011

Issue 148 • Call for Submissions

SHORT MOUNTAIN SANCTUARY

In celebration of its over 30 years in existence, RFD will dedicate the Winter 2011 issue to Short Mountain, and seeks words and images to reflect this community’s experience and all it has done for the extended Radical Faerie collective worldwide.

Called “Witch Mountain” - “Hippy Holler” - “The Mound” - “Hickory Knoll” - “The Mountain”“The Sanctuary” - “SMS” - and “home” to a cast of characters known as sanctuarians over its threedecade-long existence...a place of myth and legend that has physically, psychically and spiritually fed thousands who have alighted down its steep drive for Spring and Fall Gatherings.

Known by some as the “Mother Ship,” Short Mountain Sanctuary has spawned an extensive “feyborhood” of radical queers wishing to create sustainable homesteads in the middle of rural Tennessee. Rising above the surrounding countryside, Short Mountain is a temperate rainforest on a unique geological formation with watersheds that feed river systems on three sides, and has its own species of freshwater crayfish. It was also the home of RFD for over two decades.

Its history includes Cherokees, the Underground Railroad, radical free land Hippies and yes, you! Please send us your reminiscences, reflections, as well as hopes & dreams for this very special land and community as it enters the next phase of its ongoing story.

Submissions for this issue are due no later than November 1, 2011. Submissions can be sent electronically to submissions@rfdmag.org—please send them as attachments preferably in plain text files. We love to see our readers images and artwork, it can also be sent to the same email. Please send image files with at least 300 dpi resolution (2100x3000 pixels for a full page). Small files intended for the internet do not reproduce well especially now that we have switched to color.

Rebellious Fervent Daddies

Vol 38 No 1 #147 Fall 2011

Between the Lines

Whitman & Carpenter

a proud history of evoking the voices of queer poets in it’s pages (and thus the voices of the larger gay community). In this issue we focus on Walt Whitman, one of America’s best known poets along with one of his early disciples and one of the English speaking world’s first gay rights activists. Both writers were working within the confines of a Victorian era of homophobia and sex phobia in general. So it’s with pride that we laud them and see how their words, deeds and lives have impacted our own.

RFDhas

Although some of the pieces are “long” we hope you’ll read them through as many of the authors insights into Whitman or Carpenter struck a cord with us and we hope they resonate with you our readers as well.

We encourage interested readers to check the following websites which focus on the life and work of these two pioneers of gay life: Walt Whitman: www.whitmanarchive.org. Edward Carpenter: www. edwardcarpenterforum.org and www.edwardcarpenter.net.

We’re pleased as always to hear from our readers and whenever we hear “you should cover this” please understand our mantra in response is “sounds great send it in!” RFD is a reader created experience. It documents what you as readers want to see. Sometimes it may seems biased or skewed but that is because other “readers” chose not to send something which represents their views, lives, or experiences. So please, please consider that when

you see the deadline for the next issue...

We’ve been on a steady course for the last several issues and we appreciate your support in keeping our pages flowing!

Speaking of support, we feel the need to send out a few words of healing and encouragement to Sister Soami (Sister Mish to many folks). He was a constant spirit in bringing RFD to you for many years while the magazine was produced in Tennessee and news of his resent illness and recovery is on our minds. We wish him well and take this opportunity to thank him again for his years of service to RFD.

With that we also want to reach out to other former RFD contributors through the years and thank you as well. In this issue we hear from one of the early collective member from the days when RFD was produced in Oregon. It’s wonderful to hear from folks. Please write in!

Our next issue will focus on the thrity year history of Short Mountain Sanctuary, please send in your recollections, photos and stories from “the Mountain.” The Spring issue will deal entirely with all things FASHION. Gussy up and send us your photos and stories!

For folks who have put in requests for back issues - please bear with us. We installed new shelving and we’ve been slowing setting things back up. It’s a one person affair and it often sadly falls by the wayside as we face another issue deadline looming.

With autumnal hugs from the land of Fall foliage

—The RFD Collective

Submission Deadlines

Winter–November 1, 2011

Spring–January 25, 2012

See inside covers for themes.

RFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative lifestyles. We foster community building and networking, explore the diverse expressions of our sexuality, care for the environment, radical faerie consciousness, and nature-centered spirituality, and share experiences of our lives. RFD is produced by volunteers. We welcome your participation. The business and general production are coordinated by a collective. Features and entire issues are prepared by different groups in various places. RFD (ISSN# 0149-709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302.

Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302 Non-profit tax exempt #621723644, a function of RFD Press with office of registration at 231 Ten Penny Rd., Woodbury, TN 37190. RFD Cover Price: $9.95. A regular subscription is the least expensive way to receive it four times a year. Copyright © 2011 RFD Press. The records required by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and associated with respect to this magazine (and all graphic material associated therewith on which this label appears) are kept by the custodian of records at the following location: RFD Press, 85 N Main St, Ste 200, White River Junction, VT 05001. Mail for our Brothers Behind Bars project should be sent to P.O. Box 68, Liberty TN 37095.

On the Covers

Front: Kyle photographed by Dot

Inside Front Cover: Cathy Hope and Dimid Hayes at Short Mountain; Photo by Joshua Smith

Inside Back Cover: Ophelia by Matt Bucy

Production

Bambi Gauthier, Editor in Chief

Matt Bucy, Design & Typography

Eric Linton, Editor

Paul Wirhun, Editor

Jason Schneider, Editor

Myrlin, Prison Pages Editor

Ian Waisler, Proofer

Don Perryman (Dawn), Proofer

Photograph by artboydancing

LETTERS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

CORRECTIONS

We neglected to credit Rink for his photo on page 7 of issue 146. Many apologies.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

A former RFD collective member shares memories and a poem

Hello. I once was a contributor & member of the RFD collective back when it & I were living at Magdalen in Wolf Creek. I worked on issues #10-16, as typist, proofreader, lay-out, paste-up, etc., as well as contributing poetix, articles, photographs & graphics to most of the issues at the time. Although

FB rules, go figure). You will also see there my pics of the Walt Whitman Brigade, which was a group of Eugene poets & artists I was a part of who produced a one-time cultural journal called Hundred Flowers, around the same time I was doing RFD. We were going to use the photos in the second issue but I moved to Magdalen & it never appeared. Anyway, I am happy to see that RFD has survived & hopefully flourished, throughout all these years! I hope you love working on it as much as I did for the time I was involved with it. All good things.

—J Elliott

Where is the GLBT Community Support?

As an inmate at Oskosh Correctional Institution, I must ask myself this all the time. Being in prison is hard enough, but if you are gay it is even harder. I see many support groups but no support groups for GLBT inmates – especially Wisconsin inmates, or the support groups don’t exist any more. As a GLBT community we must stick together for one another no matter what. Yes, I’ve made a big mistake to get into prison. But I still think we need to stick together for one another. We all make mistakes, some bigger than others. But does that mean the GLBT Community should ignore the GLBT people who are in prison? We don’t want you to buy us things; we ask only for a few letters of encouragement, maybe even a visit. But what it all comes down to is a simple friend. Is this too much to ask from our own community? I don’t think so. As an inmate, I don’t want to come back to prison; but to succeed on this mission, it always helps that I have support from my own people. Please support GLBT inmates.

I no longer live in the country, I still have a wonderful memory of my time in the Wolf Creek area (I lived at Magdalen, Woodford Creek & Golden!) & still feel a huge attachment to the land & the spirit of the place. I moved from the country to Portland many years ago & have felt comfortable & energized enough here to stay...lately I have met a few folks connected to what is now the Sanctuary at Wolf Creek & have posted a few items there on the Wolf Creek Sanctuary page. I have also posted some of my photographs from my time on the farm on my Facebook page. When I lived on the farm & worked with RFD I went by Jai Elliott, now I am known as J Elliott (tho my FB page is under XJ Elliott because of

—James J. Hinkle 253820, OSCI, PO Box 3310, Oshkosh, WI 54903-3310

Walt Whitman Brigade, Eugene, Oregon. September 19, 1977. Left to Right: J. Elliot, Incas Wickham (Luke Berlin), Roan Simone Vaughn (ponoi mon dada), Gary Morgret, unknown, unknown. Photo by J. Elliot.

Partial frame from Mitchell Gould’s animated Walt Whitman film, To the Soul

Sanctuaries and Faerie Friendly Organizations

Amber Fox

McDonald’s Corners, Ontario, Canada akaamberfox.blogspot.com

Breitenbush (Cascadia Radical Faerie Resource) www.radfae.org/breitenbush

Edward Carpenter Community BM ECC

London WC1N 3XX United Kingdom

contactecc@edwardcarpentercommunity.org.uk www.edwardcarpentercommunity.org

Faerie Camp Destiny P.O. Box 517 Chester, VT 04143-0517 802-376-5772 info@faeriecampdestiny.org www.faeriecampdestiny.org

Faeryland P O Box 495

Nimbin, N.S.W. 2480 02 6689 7070 ozfaeries@yahoo.com www.ozfaeries.com

Folleterre

Ternuay-Melay-et-Saint-Hilaire France info@folleterre.org www.folleterre.org

Gay Spirit Visions

P.O. Box 339 Decatur, GA 30031-0339 info@gayspiritvisions.org www.gayspiritvisions.org

IDA

904 Vickers Hollow Rd Dowelltown, TN 37059 615-597-4409 idapalooza@gmail.com www.planetida.com

Kawashaway Sanctuary

c/o Scott Schroeder (Scooter) 3007 Oakland Ave S Minneapolis, MN 55407 www.kawashaway.org

Midwest Men’s Festival http://www.midwestmensfestival.com

Nomenus (Wolf Creek Sancturary)

Wolf Creek Sanctuary

P.O. Box 312 Wolf Creek, OR 97497 541-866-2678

nomenus@hughes.net www.nomenus.org

Santa Cruz Radical Faeries www.santacruzradicalfaeries.com

Short Mountain Sanctuary

247 Sanctuary Lane Liberty, TN 37095 615-563-4397 Messages only

Starland

Yucca Valley CA www.starlandcommunity.org

Zuni Mountain Sanctuary

P.O. Box 636 Ramah, NM 87321 505-783-4002

zunimtn@wildblue.net

www.zms.org

Corrections? Send them to submissions@rfdmag.org with “corrections” in the subject. Announcements can be sent to the same address. Please be sure to list “announcement” in the subject line!

Gatherings and Such....

Fall Gathering

Short Mountain Sanctuary, TN

Sep 23-Oct 2, 2011

Fall Foliage Gathering

Faerie Camp Destiny, VT

Oct 6-10, 2011

Great Circle

Wolf Creek OR

Oct 8-10 , 2011

Lumberjane’s Gathering

Folleterre, France

Oct 14-22, 2011

Samhain Gathering

Wolf Creek OR

Oct 27-Nov 2, 2011

Samhain

Zuni Mountain Sanctuary, NM

Oct 28-31, 2011

Asian Faerie Gathering

Thailand

Feb 2-12, 2012

Breitenbush Gathering

Breitenbush OR

Feb 16-20, 2012

Sleeping with

by Talorgan Elliott

In my small rural high school, where my graduating class was only thirty-six students, Walt Whitman’s work was not included in the English curriculum. In college I took English Literature, not American Literature, and so missed out again on experiencing Whitman. To be honest, I really did not come to know Walt Whitman’s work until much later in life. Certainly, I knew his name and perhaps a famous quote or two, like those of Dickinson, Longfellow or Emerson. But, I had never read or comprehended an entire piece or even a passage of his written work.

It was just a little over year ago, when I began having a series of dreams in which I was sleeping next to a different man every night. Although quite intimate, they were not sexual in nature. On the first night this happened, I found myself lying in bed next to a fair-haired man who was in his thirties. As I lay beside him—spooned into him—I wrapped my arms tightly around him. As I began caressing his chest, I became him. I entered his mind and body; I entered his dreams. The experience that followed was one in which I began to sense the man’s life through this dreaming connection. His work day, his fantasies, his reality and of course, his actual dreams all became known to me.

This continued on each night for four nights and each night I experienced the dreams of a different man. There was the blond teacher, followed by the brown-haired businessman, the teen sleeping on the streets and the soldier in the desert. These were that type of dreams that when you wake up, they linger with you and are never erased from your mind; the type of dreams that feel so very real. So real in fact, that you question if they were dreams at all. Perhaps they really were more than ordinary dreams. Perhaps they were some sort of ethereal experiences. In our ordinary world, the ability to retain the memory of a dream within a dream seems improbable, especially when one considers that the second

dream is a dream of another man. But in the extraordinary world, all things are possible.

Shortly after having these experiences, I was searching the internet for quotes to be used for a blog post, when, as only synchronicity would have it, I discovered this:

I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn, I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, And I become the other dreamers.

Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers,” Leaves of Grass

It was there, glaring at me from my computer screen, where I was properly introduced to the works of Walt Whitman. This stanza so succinctly described my experience and resonated within me the understanding of both the power and compassion associated in the deep connection with these other men. This connection is not just in this world, but also in another realm where the consciousness of all beings is equally accessible and equally valuable. So personal, so intimate, and also in its own way, so erotic was this act of dreaming the dreams of other dreamers.

Since finding The Sleepers, I have explored more of Whitman’s poems and his writings on nature. I also continue, from time to time, to experience the dreams of other men. And each time this happens, I am humbled at the deep connection that the universe provides. However, it will always be these first experiences and the first reading of that particular stanza in The Sleepers that will remain foremost in my heart and memories. Yet even so, perhaps tonight, if we both think of Whitman as we lay down to sleep, you and I may dream…and in our dreams, we may dream each other’s dream. w

Bill Duckett in Rooms of the Philadelphia Art Students League by Thomas Eakins

Collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art

In Paths Untrodden: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems, Gay Consciousness and the Radical Fairies

by Joey Cain

Walt Whitman is one of America’s foundational poets. During the last one hundred and fifty-five years his vision and voice has inspired artists and readers around the world with its humanist celebration of the body, the world, and “Democracy.” For decades his sexuality was shrouded in “indirections” and deliberate misleadings, starting with the poet himself and continuing through generations of biographers. As we begin the twenty-first century there is a consensus that Whitman was a man who deeply loved other men, both emotionally and physically, and that his desire profoundly informed his life and his work.

In 1860 Walt Whitman published the third edition of Leaves of Grass and included for the first time a cluster of poems he titled “Calamus.” In the words of the first poem of the sequence their goal was

To tell the secret of my nights and days, To celebrate the need of comrades.

For Whitman the “manly love of comrades” was something that sprang from deep within the soul of the man possessed of it. Its nature had an enormous potential to transform society in the direction of affection and cooperation, a transformation he saw necessary if America was going to survive its culture of greed and gross materialism.

I want to trace out some of the qualities Whitman ascribed to same-sex loving men and show the influence he and his ideas had on the earliest Gay freedom pioneers. Walt’s continuing influence on a radical and visionary Queer/ Gay consciousness is explored through the pairing of the “Calamus” poems and writings and documents from the

contemporary Gay men’s political/spiritual movement, The Radical Faeries.

Walt Whitman and The Calamus Poems

Sometime in 1859 Walt Whitman wrote a series of poems which scholars have come to call Live Oak With Moss. It was a poetic cycle delineating the coming into self-consciousness of a same-sex-loving man through his falling in love with another man. It followed the relationship from its first flowering to its eventual break up. The work was a breakthrough for its daring and original articulation of a queer man’s inner world. But Live Oak With Moss was never published.

Whitman had been developing a vision, first hesitatingly articulated in “The Child’s Champion,” of how the deep emotional and sexual love he felt for other men, his “fervid comradeship”, could be the basis for a political and spiritual movement that would be “the counter balance and offset of our materialist and vulgar American democracy and for the spiritualization thereof.” He declared:

“I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown…I say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.”

Under

the

influence

his vision Whitman transformed Live Oak With Moss from a personal story of love gained and lost into a moving

of

Collage by Joey Cain & Ann Corrol, San Francisco Public Library Exhibits Department

prophetic proclamation of the powers that the love of comrades engendered. Grown to a sequence of 45 poems, it was published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass and given the tile of “Calamus.”

The “Calamus” poems celebrate many aspects of comradeship or “adhesive love,” a term Whitman’ borrowed from phrenology to describe male same-sex attraction and affection. This affection is presented in its political, spiritual, metaphysical, and personal phases in the poems. Whitman offers “the love of comrades” as the backbone of future nations, the root of religious sentiments, the solution to the big questions of life, and as a source of personal anguish and joy.

The Child’s Champion

In November of 1841 Walt Whitman published “The Child’s Champion” in the literary paper The New World. It tells the story of a 12-year-old boy, Charley, who lives a life of poverty and toil as the bound apprentice to a rich farmer, an “unyielding task master” and “soulless gold-worshipper.” One day, on his way home from visiting his impoverished mother, Charley stops and looks in the window of the village pub. Inside are men engaged in a “drunken frolic”, including six drunken sailors dancing with each other. But what “excites” the boy’s attention the most is the sight of a fashionably dressed and intelligent looking young man of “twenty-one or twentytwo years” named Lankton “who, though enjoying the spree as much as if he were an old hand at such business, seem’d in every other particular to be far out of his element.” His dress and whole aspect “a counterpart to those which may be nightly seen in the dress circles of our most respectable theaters.”

One of the sailors pulls Charley into the tavern and tries to force him to drink alcohol against his will. Lankton finds himself drawn to Charley:

He felt anxious to know more of him - he felt that he should love him. O, it is passing wondrous, how in the hurried walks of life and business, we meet with young beings, strangers, who seem to touch the fountains of our love, and draw forth their swelling waters. The wish to love and be loved, which the forms of custom, and the engrossing anxiety for gain, so generally smother, will some times burst forth in spite of all obstacles; and, kindled by one, who, till the hour unknown to us, will burn with a lovely and pure brightness.

Charley knocks the forced cup of brandy out of the

sailor’s hand who then flies into a rage, grabs the boy by the collar, bends him over and delivers a severe kick. He is about to deliver a second blow when the Lankton jumps up, punches the sailor, and saves Charley. Lankton invites the boy to sit with him and Charley proceeds to tell Lankton about his life and his apprenticeship to the greedy farmer.

Being now past midnight, Lankton informs Charley that “on the morrow he would take steps to have him liberated from his servitude.” He invites the boy to stay and share his bed at the inn—“and little persuading did the child need to do so.”

As Lankton drifts off to sleep “all his imaginings seemed to be interwoven with the youth who lay by his side; he folded his arms around him, and, while he slept, the boy’s cheek rested on his bosom.”

As they slept in each others arms an angel entered the room and

taking a stand by the bed, the angel bent over the boy’s face, and whispered strange words into his ear: thus it came that he had beautiful visions. … Bending over again to the boy’s lips, he touched them with a kiss, as the languid wind touches a flower…

The angel bends over to kiss Lankton but worries that he may be too impure and corrupt to kiss, however …

At that moment a very pale bright ray of sunlight darted through the window and settled on the young man’s features. Then the beautiful spirit knew that permission was granted him: so he softly touched the young man’s face with his, and silently and swiftly wafted himself away on the unseen air.

The next day Lankton pays the boy’s bond to the farmer to free him and he provides for Charley’s mother. Charley moves into Lankton’s New York Westside house and the “close knit love of him and the boy grew not slack with time.”

In this story Whitman begins to articulate some of the themes he would later more fully develop in the “Calamus” poems.

• Lankton ( and “Comrade Love”) crosses class boundaries by being both comfortable in the poor working class pub of the village drinking with sailors yet is also of “a counterpart to those which may be nightly seen in the dress circles of our most respectable theaters.”

• The love Lankton feels for Charley and which

Charley returns bridges the gulf of their two very different worlds and creates an instant rapport and affection. That love frees Charley from the “soulless gold-worshipping” farmer who incarnates the greed and heartless materialism

Whitman saw threatening the great Democratic experiment that was America.

• The passage of the angel visiting the two of them as they sleep in each others arms is one of the most strange and beautiful passages in all of Whitman’s early prose. The “beautiful visions” Charley experiences with Langton hints at the spiritual power engendered by “comrade love.”

The 1860 Edition of Leaves of Grass and the Calamus Cluster

Whitman conceived of his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as “the Great Construction of the New Bible.” In some respects the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass looks like a Bible. It groups poems into clusters, numbers the clustered poems, and individually numbers stanzas in a way that resembles the book, chapter, and numbered verse divisions of the Bible. This Bible-like appearance amplifies the 1860 edition’s increased thematic emphasis on religion. In “Proto-Leaf,” the program poem that begins the third edition, the poet invites his comrade to share with him “two greatnesses”—love and democracy— and also “a third one, rising inclusive and more resplendent”—“the greatness of Religion.”

An important inspiration for the “Calamus” poems was Walt’s relationship with a young man named Fred Vaughn. The two lived together from 1856-1859, and the poems express the ecstasy and pain of their three-year relationship. The sequence combined some of the darkest and most personally self-revealing of Whitman’s poems with others of intimate joy and happiness.

Whitman called the “Calamus” poems his most political work. In them he was articulating a new kind of intense affection between men who, in the emerging capitalistic system of the 1850s, were being encouraged to become fiercely competitive. Whitman countered this movement with a call for manly love, embrace, and affection. In giving voice to this new affection, Whitman was also inventing a new language for same-sex-loving people.

Over the next twenty-one years Walt changed wording, rearranged and removed some of the “Calamus” poems so that by 1881 they numbered thirty-nine poems instead of the original 45. Many reasons are proposed for the changes including increased policing and criminalization of homo-

sexual acts, Whitman’s desire to further universalize “comrade love”, and esthetics.

Calamus: A Series of Letters Written During The Years 1868-1880 By Walt Whitman to a Young Friend (Peter Doyle)

While a passenger one evening on horse-drawn street car, the 45-year old Whitman met the twentyone-year old conductor named Peter Doyle. Doyle described their first encounter:

We felt to each other at once…The night was very stormy…He was the only passenger, it was a lonely night, so I thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it and something in him drew me that way. He used to say there was something in me had the same effect on him. Anyway, I went into the car. We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip—in fact went all the way back with me. From that time on we were the biggest sort of friends.

The romantic friendship that sprang up in 1865 between the streetcar conductor and the poet spanned the years immediately following the Civil War and continued nearly up through Whitman’s death in Camden in 1892.

Peter Doyle was described by his niece as “a homosexual.” This capacity in Doyle—“to love as I myself am capable of loving,” as Whitman put it in his “Calamus” poem—cemented the bond between the two men. For the next eight years (until Whitman’s stroke in 1873 caused his removal to Camden, New Jersey), Walt and Pete were constant companions. (From Pete the Great: A Biography of Peter Doyle by Martin G. Murray at waltwhitmanarchive.org)

John Addington Symonds and The Calamus Poems

John Addington Symonds (1840 - 1893) was an English poet, art historian and literary critic. He was the first modern historian of (male) homosexuality, and the first advocate of gay liberation in Britain.

Symonds had been aware of his intense desires for other boys as a child, but the shame-based Puritanism of his class and family made him recoil from any expression of “physical lust.” As he grew older he discovered the same-sex lovers of Greek and other mythologies and learned about homosexual lovers in ancient Greece. In 1867 Symonds read Leaves of Grass containing the “Calamus” poems for

the first time and wrote of Whitman, “This man has said what I have burned to say…”

Whitman’s poems transformed Symonds’s perception of himself as a same-sex loving man, revealing his deepest self to himself as nothing before had. Their celebration of the body, spirit and sex enabled Symonds to begin down the path of accepting himself, his love and his desire in all its aspects.

Symonds established a correspondence with Whitman that lasted until Walt’s death in 1892. Many of Symonds’s letters prodded Walt to make explicate the deeper meanings of “Calamus” and if it meant physical sexual relations between men. The late nineteenth century’s increased policing and criminalization of homosexual acts, Whitman’s natural furtiveness and desire to further universalize “comrade love”, and perhaps a bit of annoyance with Symonds badgering, led Whitman to write him one of the most famous and downright untruthful letters in American literary history. Whitman, then 78 years old, falsely claimed to have fathered 6 children, (none of which have ever been found despite 100 years of intense biographical sleuthing). He also disavowed the “morbid inferences” that Symonds was placing on the poems but then hedged by saying that the great difference between himself and Symonds is restraint and each poem can only be “construed by and within its own atmosphere and character.”

Most of John Addington Symonds literary and historical writings became part of a great magnum opus on the love of man for man, and much of what he did was devoted to the cause of homosexual liberation. Symonds wrote one of the first essays in defense of homosexuality in the English language, A Problem in Greek Ethics, in 1883. A follow-up essay from 1891, A Problem in Modern Ethics, includes proposals for reforming anti-homosexual legislation. These essays were widely read by an underground of homosexual writers and continued to be secretly published and distributed decades after his death. During his life he had helped to organize a network of gay writers and intellectuals who quietly worked behind the scenes to educate society and to reform the laws against homosexuality in England.

The last book John Symonds wrote, Walt Whitman: A Study, was published after his death in 1893. Despite Whitman’s feigned antipathy to the inference, Symonds openly discussed the homosexual nature of adhesiveness or comrade love.

(Thanks to Rictor Norton at www.rictornorton. co.uk).

Edward Carpenter

Born in 1844 to a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, Edward Carpenter attended Cambridge University. He took orders in the Church of England but eventually quit because of its hypocrisy. He became a lecturer for the University Extension Movement, created to bring education to the poor who had been denied access to it. Carpenter’s movement away from upper-middle-class privilege and towards resisting the social and class system was driven by something in his own soul that he had found when, in 1869, he read a collection of writings by Walt Whitman that included the “Calamus” poems. He later wrote:

From that time forward a profound change set in within me. I remember … feeling all the time that my life deep down was flowing out and away from the surroundings and traditions amid which I lived. ….. What made me cling to the little blue book from the beginning was largely the poems which celebrate comradeship. That thought, so near and personal to me, I had never before seen or heard fairly expressed;

In 1877 Carpenter set sail for the United States to visit Whitman. While staying with him the two made love, a result of which was to intensify Carpenter’s desire to create a loving band of comrades that would change the world. He wrote to Whitman:

For a long time I have cherished the thought that if I came to know you and be known by you, I might be the beginning, or at least one, of a small band of followers who by force of personal intercourse and attachment might have the strength (which is so hard to have alone) to move the world, or rather to form the nucleus—you being at the heart of it all—for that great vitalized organization of human love and fellowship which must be—without which modern civilization will be merely nothing.

Carpenter returned to England and became a leading writer and activist in the visionary socialist/anarchist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1882 he bought a farm in the north of England and moved there to pursue market gardening and his belief in the simplification of life. He had a series of love relationships with men who were for the most part straight or bisexual

with wives. Then in 1892 he met a working-class man named George Merrill who had cruised him on a train. The two would become loving companions and live together in a non-monogamous, open relationship for the next 30 years.

If Whitman created the soul language that enabled same-sex loving men to speak to one another, and Symonds recovered our place in history, it was Edward Carpenter who took that language and history and used them to explore and articulate the role of “comrade lovers” in the world. Under the influence of the “Calamus” poems he declared:

the Uranian (a term for same-sex loving men and women) people may be destined to form the advance guard of that great movement which will one day transform the common life by substituting the bond of personal affection and compassion for the monetary, legal and other external ties which now control and confine society.

After the death of John Addington Symonds in 1893, Carpenter took up the mantle of fighting for Gay liberation in Britain, writing pamphlets and books advocating for same-sex love. Some of his books include Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women and Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folks: A Study in Social Evolution He also published an account of his visits to Whitman, Days With Walt Whitman: With Some Notes on His Life and Work and a pamphlet, Some Friends of Walt Whitman: A Study In Sex Psychology. w

Acorus Calamus

The title “Calamus” comes from the name of a large grass plant that has a distinctly phallic shape. It grows in marshy areas, the “intermediate” area between the liquid water of pond and solid earth of dry land. It is also known as Sweet Flag. In poem 4 of the sequence Whitman gives his reason for the title:

And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side, (O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me—and returns again, never to separate from me, And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades—this calamus-root shall, Interchange it, youths, with each other! Let none render it back!)

Spot The Sperm!

Throughout the 1860 edition Whitman uses spermatic imagery – “a spirt of my own seminal wet”, “love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, / Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice.” The words of the poems were meant to penetrate and fertilize his reader’s minds and imaginations to produce new ideas and conceptions of life and democracy. Whitman designed his title page to turn the very letters of Leaves of Grass into sperm. Look closely. How many sperm tails can you count? The period after the title is a good example.

(Thanks to Professor Ed Folsom and his book Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary, Iowa City, 2005.)

Worshipping Whitman at Destiny

by Endora

Thispast Memorial Day, Faerie Camp Destiny hosted our annual Walt Whitman Birthday Bash, but this year we went old school: Whitman 101. We were blessed with two prominent Whitman scholars, Joey Cain and Michael Roberston, who gave talks on a variety of topics, including Whitman’s relationship to Carpenter and the many connections between Whitman, Carpenter and the Radical Faeries. Michael Robertson, author of Worshipping Whitman, particularly focused on Whitman and Carpenter’s utopian spirituality and sexuality, while Joey Cain focused on the queerer aspects of the two. In addition to these talks, complete readings were held of the “Calamus” poems, “Song of the Rolling Earth,” and much of “Song of Myself.”

Ever since Whitman’s later life, groups of people, particularly gay men, have gathered to commune with the good grey prophet spiritually, and even religiously. We continued this tradition on Saturday evening, when we held a ritual to honor our queer ancestors. All texts were by Whitman or Ginsberg. The ritual began at our Crone Circle with the reading of “A Supermarket in California,” which begins: What thoughts I have of you, tonight Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. Up we went to Destiny’s primary ritual space, the Hecate Circle, and there we passed through gates with a challenge from Whitman:

Whoever you are, holding me now in hand, Without one thing, all will be useless, I give you fair warning, before you attempt me further, I am not what you supposed, but far different. Who is he that would become my follower? Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

…and…

Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you, With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss, or the new husband's kiss, For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.

We invoked spirit with Whitman’s “Be Ye My Gods,” and the elements with excerpts from “Song of Myself.” After a brief meditation of Whitman guiding us, we visited several altars to our ancestors, communal and personal, choosing excerpts from Whitman poems as a form of divination. The ritual ended by raising energy to Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl,” with the circle of faeries stamping the earth in a circle dance, chanting “holy, holy, holy, holy, holy.” In our ritual circle, holy indeed are the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas! Whitman visited us in the form our beloved Bambi and offered:

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

Continues on Page 58

Left: “Pan” portraits by artboydancing

Above: Bambi at Destiny photographed by Wally Telford

Stranger, If You Passing Meet Me

by Jory M. Mickelson

Two weeks into our relationship, the first man I dated gave me a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. One of the poems in the collection, “Sunflower Sutra,” was rumored to be inspired by auditory hallucinations of William Blake reciting his own poems to Ginsberg. In my own mind, I confused the myth of the Blake vision and instead envisioned Walt Whitman appearing to Ginsberg.

Whitman, watery and transparent, leans over a gawky, youthful Ginsberg, who has just jerked off after smoking a joint. Some of the marijuana’s acrid smoke still hangs in the air, twining with Whitman’s spectral beard. Whitman floats forward until he is face to face with a red-eyed Ginsberg. Whitman kisses Ginsberg and dissipates into the afternoon light. With one kiss, Ginsberg becomes the new spiritual father of American poetry. Or something like that.

I was nineteen and studying studio painting at Montana State University. In the cold light of late October, I was working my way through the novels of Kerouac, packs of Camel Wides, and my first heartbreak. By week four, the relationship was over. For months, I turned the words left on my answering machine by my ex into brooding abstract paintings. I repeatedly drew the words of the last message until they became patterns, great shadowy landscapes. “I will not forget the night we…” buried in hundreds of layers of blue India ink washes. All the while, the words of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” ran through my head, “I’m with you in Rockland / in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea…”

In the book, Gay Sunshine Interviews, a collec-

tion of interviews conducted by Winston Leyland from 1973-1977, Harold Norse, a queer Beat poet, mentions another myth of literary men kissing. He outlines a group of British writers known as the Uranians who wrote about pederasty from 1858 to 1930. Oscar Wilde, George Ives, and Edward Carpenter are occasionally considered members. In the Sunshine interview, Norse goes on to describe a literary tradition that was passed from author to author through erotic union. He further states that the line of transmission crossed the Atlantic with Walt Whitman.

I thought this was a nice idea, at best a beautiful myth of queer writers loving queer writers. However, when I began to look into the story, small pieces of history suggested that it might not be farfetched. A photo of John Addington Symonds, the poet to give the Uranians their name, is inscribed “to Walt Whitman 1889.” In fact, Symonds’ memoir, published in 1893, one year before his death, is the first autobiography of a homosexual in modern times. Symonds’ photo whispers across more than a century to those who can hear it, “Dear Walt, thanks for everything…”

When I was a sophomore in college living in a largely rural area, queer culture remained hidden. There was no gay and lesbian student group on the campus of MSU in 1996. Although the Internet was slowly creeping into the lives of college students, it wasn’t used as a social networking tool. Homosexuality was still a love that “dare not speak its name,” at least out on the streets during daylight. Even more

Above: Still from Mitchell Gould’s To My Soul

than a decade later, there is still not a gay bar in Bozeman, Montana.

I met my Ginsberg-giving boyfriend at a biannual dance sponsored by a statewide gay organization. A lesbian from my studio art class thought that I might enjoy “that kind of dancing.” My exposure to queer life was by word of mouth or from friends of friends. The history of gay culture in rural areas remains largely an oral one. Older friends tell younger ones what it used to be like before gays and lesbians lobbied for same-sex marriage or met one another in online chatrooms.

In 1995, sodomy was a felony crime in the state of Montana. An Associated Press article written by Bob Anez ran nationwide with the opening lines: “Homosexuals, like murderers and rapists, are criminals in Montana and should be required to let authorities know where they live for the rest of their lives, the Senate decided Tuesday.”

Senators agreed to include homosexuality as one of the crimes for which a convicted person must register with local law enforcement under a lifetime mandate.

The bill failed to pass in the House by only two votes. In 1997, six months after my breakup, I got involved with a statewide effort to decriminalize homosexuality. The Montana Supreme Court eventually determined that the sodomy law was unconstitutional and struck it from the law books.

At the victory dance

dubbed “The Felon’s Ball” in Helena, two elderly women from Kremlin, Montana, danced together publicly for the first time. The septuagenarians lived alone on a wheat farm 20-some miles from the Canadian border. One told me that when she wanted to dance with her partner, they would extinguish all of the lights in their house, draw every curtain and lock the doors before doing so. Their nearest neighbor lived over five miles away. Although they never wrote about women, I imagined the ghost of Walt Whitman waltzing with Allen Ginsberg next to these women as they danced for decades in their darkened living room, surrounded by miles of heavy-headed wheat.

Walt Whitman didn’t settle for making it with only John Addington Symonds. There are the writings of Edward Carpenter to consider. Mark Doty notes in his 2005 essay on Whitman, “Form, Eros, and the Unspeakable: Whitman’s Stanzas,” that

Carpenter also had a visit with Whitman. Carpenter wrote about his meeting with Whitman in 1877, “I never met any one who gave me more the impression of knowing what he was doing more than he (Whitman) did.” Carpenter wasn’t talking about Walt’s verse.

Most academics state that the period of Uranian poetry ends around 1930, between the World Wars, even though members of the group lived into the 1940s. Hart Crane, often considered the spiritual successor to Walt Whitman in American poetry, is not considered a Uranian poet. Strictly speaking, the Uranians idealized pederasty, the Greek ideal of homosexual relationships between older men and adolescent boys. Looking back, modern historians would divide pederasty and homosexuality into two separate behaviors. But no such distinctions existed among late-Victorian homosexuals.

Crane lived semi-openly as a homosexual in the early 1920s at a time when few others dared. (In the same way, few people came out in Eastern Montana in the early 1990s.) He also considered his sexuality to be intimately bound up with his vocation as a poet. In my habit of reimagining queer history, I would like to believe that the end of the Uranian period and the death of Hart Crane had something to do with one another.

Crane suffered from alcoholism and bouts of depression. On April 27, 1932, he was traveling from Mexico to New York on the steamship S.S. Orizaba. Crane had spent a year in Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Rumor has it that a male shipworker beat up Crane for making sexual advances. Just before noon, an intoxicated Crane yelled, “Goodbye everybody!” and leapt overboard to his death in the Gulf of Mexico. In my imagination, Crane drowned the Uranian line of transmission with him.

It wasn’t until the afternoon of Ginsberg’s vision in the 1940s that Walt Whitman’s ghost roamed Spanish Harlem in search of someone to give his gift to in the form of a kiss. Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, just three months shy of the Montana Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalize homosexuality. I would like to believe that Ginsberg’s ghost was in that courtroom, whispering lines from “Howl.”

Fourteen years have passed since Allen Ginsberg passed away, and for 14 years, I have been waiting for his ghost to kiss me. w

The history of gay culture in rural areas remains largely an oral one.

WE TWO BOYS TOGETHER CLINGING

We two boys together clinging, One the other never leaving, Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making, Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching, Arm’d and fearless, caring, drinking, sleeping, loving, No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening, Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing, Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing, Fulfilling our foray.

Frank Serafino collects old photographs and he’s sent us his pairing of images to go along with some of Whitman’s poems.

ca. 1920

AS I LAY WITH MY HEAD IN YOUR LAP CAMERADO

As I lay with my head in your lap camerado, The confession I made I resume, what I said to you and the open air I resume, I know I am restless and make others so, I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death, For I confront peace, security, and all the unsettled laws, to unsettle them, I am more resolute because all have denied me than I could ever have been had all accepted me, I heed not and have never heeded either experience, cautions, majorities, nor ridicule, And the threat of what is call’d hell is little or nothing to me, And the lure of what is call’d heaven is little or nothing to me; Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination, Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.

France, ca. 1918

The Other Moses

by Raymond Luczak (after Walt Whitman)

Walt Whitman, you walked among men and women, breathing in all their unfettered breaths. You performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, daring them to feel your tongue swirling more passion, shuddering there on the loam, a bed filled with earthworms and ants and rot. Rain drops of sweat fell from their bodies, watering so much that they too drowned. They were mere houseplants. You were a redwood tree!

You interviewed one soldier after another on the horrors of the War against Slavery, a gut-wrenching squabble over color. You saw their gaping blunted amputations, the blood-shot madness in their eyes. You heard their babble of whiskey and pain. You smelled their chloroform of defeat. You held their hands and made promises. You loved them all. The Potomac tided crimson.

With long hair and flowing beard, you waded like Moses in a sea of these men, some dismembered, amidst the infirmary abuzz with flies and cries. Everywhere the burning bushes whispered morphine. Your eyes spoke commandments of tenderness, aching to make love to these mortal gods, but instead you took dictation on your tablets, your pen dipped in blood from their inkwells. Each day when you left, the Red Sea parted before you.

Should I go, Walt, before I’m ready to depart, one look I but gave, which your dear eyes return’d, please cradle me as you would another soldier, one touch of your hand to mine, O boy, reach’d up so I could look up into your eyes tender, on the earth partially reclining, sat by your side. For if die alone I must, there must be someone in the night reliev’d, to the place at last, where men sing eulogies of heaven-sent orgasm.

Carpenter and Whitman: The Subjective and the Objective

by David B. Wright (Street Candy)

Idon'tremember now how I first became aware of Edward Carpenter. Maybe I'd seen his picture: he was handsome, and that would have piqued my interest. Finding out about queers wasn't especially easy in 1979. There was no internet. The New York Times wouldn't even use the word "gay.” In college, the only book on homosexuality in our extensive library was Tearoom Trade, a sociological study of gay mating habits conducted in public toilets. ("Oh, don't mind me, I'm just doing research" )1. I shuddered, "Was this what my future would be? The sordid setting? The secrecy?" To a boy fueled on Joni Mitchell, hell, even gritty ol' Laura Nyro… that didn't sound a like very romantic prospect.

So natty Carpenter, with his organic farm, tweeds, togas and sandals ploughing the plowman in the utopian sunshine was much more appealing. I, myself, had recently returned from England in love with a barefoot working-class hash dealer. I was convinced that queers would forever be outlaws and needed a world of their own, if not Forster's fictional greenwood or Carpenter's former farm, then a cozy bank of squats. Here in Manhattan, where to learn more about him?

Was it ignorance (because, after all, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop was operating then) or a sense of adventure that lead me to the Homosexual Archives Library run by The Church of the Beloved Disciple? How did I even hear of the place…the back of a bar guide? All I remember is that one sultry afternoon I was trudging westward, past the huge YMCA, to learn all I could about Carpenter. I'd made an appointment, so was buzzed in. I walked up stairs to a man behind a desk. "Brother Keith" he called, and a gray-robed, black-skinned monk emerged from the shadows. A helpful librarian of few words, Brother Keith led me to the Archive. It was a small, square room filled with books of all sorts, from leatherbound volumes to lurid pulp paperbacks…and all about us. I read for hours.

My diary says little else about that day. Since then, I've learned more about Carpenter...and myself. While I can't say that he became an actual role model (most of mine are living) he did show me that it was possible to be open and upright, loving and literary, and not class-bound. A toilet needn't be the

sole arena for meeting gladiators. Thirty-five years later, the former barefoot dealer and I live together. We wear sarongs and sandals, we pound nails, we grow vegetables, we bake bread, write books and sing songs in a sort of greenwood of our own. We have met the Faeries, busy building their world, and joined hands in a circle. I think Carpenter (and Forster) would approve.

I do recall my first exposure to Walt Whitman. A sweet, recent Vassar graduate (Sugardrops, we called her) introduced us to him in the high school poetry class she taught. After reading “Song of Myself,” I'm afraid my jejune response was ,"Buddy, you got that right.” The exhaustive catalogue of body parts, the triumphant me me me…what a blowhard! Since then, I've learned the importance of Whitman's ground-breaking, singularly American work. I appreciate that he was writing for the common man and his egalitarian focus. I see where O'Hara and Ginsburg come from. I understand that when he's singing about himself we are supposed to see ourselves in his song, and I have been moved by him. Still, it's hard for me to ignore Whitman's tremendous ego, self-promotion and the cult of personality around him. In the modern world, a writer may not have to praise gods and goddesses or speak a language only eggheads understand, but he sure as hell will have to hawk himself. This has become an art in itself. In this sense, too, Whitman is thoroughly modern and American.

About both men this can be said: Carpenter and Whitman were men of principle. They were unconventional and bold in their thinking, and tried to live their lives according to their beliefs. They were expressive men. They were nurturing men, Carpenter teaching night school to laborers and Whitman nursing the soldiers. Both were proudly affectionate toward other males. They were democratic visionaries. They were Nature lovers. And both wore hats very well. Carpenter and Whitman can rightfully be seen as forefathers of the Faerie movement, as I understand it, and important links in the inspiring chain of queer culture. w

1 Laud Humphreys, the author of Tearoom Trade, has since come out.

The Case for Reading Carpenter: Am I–or You–the Reincarnation of Edward Carpenter?

By Toby Johnson

EdwardCarpenter was born in 1844, long before what we think of as the modern age. I want to make the case for why modern readers, especially gay men, should be interested in Carpenter’s writings and how his words offer an insight into the deep meaning of homosexuality, gay/queer consciousness, and, indeed, universal consciousness itself.

Though Carpenter’s prose is typically 19th Century—overly polite, oddly punctuated, quaintly phrased, exceedingly run-on and circumlocutious— his ideas are surprisingly contemporary. The arguments he makes about homosexuality and associated morals sound like a manifesto of 21st Century sexual (and human) liberation.

Partly this tells us that as an individual Carpenter was ahead of his times. It also tells us that Victorian times were not nearly as stuffy, conservative, and repressed as we’re likely to think. The great changes in human consciousness that have been wrought in the latter part of the 20th Century had been well prepared for even a century before.

Carpenter articulated precocious and idealistic ideas about sexuality and culture and spiritual meaning that sound very much like the mid-twentieth century counterculture, with its hippie revolutionary efflorescence that inspired and supported gay liberation.

Carpenter died on June 28, 1929—exactly forty years to the day before the anti-authoritarian Stonewall Riots that initiated that countercultural phase of the homosexual civil rights movement. Might we consider—mythologically!—that that worldchanging upwelling of gay identity consciousness in beat/hip/peacenik Greenwich Village represented Carpenter’s Uranian spirit arriving, like the Hebrews into the Promised Land after forty years of sojourning, to recreate the face of the Earth?

A Wide-Ranging Thinker

The “Women’s Movement” was already beginning in Carpenter’s day, and it helped introduce him to the changes that flow from transcending gender role conventions. Carpenter was perhaps originally “politicized” into sexual liberation as a boy observing the lives of his six sisters. In his autobiography, My Days and Dreams, he commented that because

his family, though not especially wealthy, was in England’s upper-middle class, his sisters were doomed to lives of genteel boredom. They were “above” working or even doing household chores; practically everything beyond dressing and dancing were “unladylike.” Women obviously needed to be liberated from their “fortunate” status he saw. Growing up with six sisters may also help explain Carpenter’s own freedom from rigid sex-role conformity and indoctrination into patriarchal male identity.

Carpenter wrote books and pamphlets about a wide variety of topics: science, industry, art, religion, music, economics, minimum wage, anthropology, evolution, sex, marriage, women, the British Empire, imperialism, war, police, prisons, the nature of pain, pacifism, nature, gardening, pollution, Eastern religion, anarchism, vivisection (experimentation on live animals), nudism, and utopian communitarianism. His masterpiece was Towards Democracy, an extended prose-poem about modern utopian political and economic theory composed in the spirit of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and offering the same kind of mystical populism and evolutionary idealism.

Carpenter wrote positively of sex—“with a sense almost of religious consecration”—speaking of it as a positive force in human consciousness, an experience of oneness with divinity, not a sign or cause of human frailty and sinfulness.

Sex is the allegory of Love in the physical world. It is from this fact that it derives its immense power. The aim of Love is nondifferentiation—absolute union of being; but absolute union can only be found at the centre of existence. Therefore whoever has truly found another has found not only that other, and with that other himself, but has found also a third—who dwells at the centre and holds the plastic material of the universe in the palm of his hand, and is a creator of sensible forms.

Notice that in that paragraph from Love’s Coming of Age, a book written about sexuality in general (i.e., heterosexuality), though explicitly about male-

female bonding in marriage, the pronouns are so impersonal as to include—even to suggest—homosexual bonding. And the aim he proposes for Love, “non-differentiation,” is clearly something much more homosexual than heterosexual. Men in love with women hardly think of themselves as becoming non-differentiated from femaleness nor of themselves as becoming womanly, certainly not the same way that homosexual lovers think of themselves becoming one another and sharing and reinforcing each others’ lovable qualities. So it is a kind of homosexual connection, generalized to the point of including male-female connections, that Carpenter offers as the immense power of Love (capitalized, perhaps, to accord it that “religious consecration”).

Carpenter’s ideas on monogamy sound like hippie freelove ideals. In Love’s Coming of Age, he notes that while in the long run people tend to settle down into one deep permanent union, along the way they ought to be experiencing a variety of interpersonal relationships and sexual adventures. And, describing what we today would call open relationships, he observes affirmatively that “[t]here are cases of Uranians (whether men or women) who, though permanently allied, do not object to lesser friendships on either side.” Though he continues that sentence to observe: “and there are cases of very decided objection.” He warns that the ideal of exclusive attachment can lapse into a mere stagnant double selfishness. That is, like today’s sexual liberationists, while honoring stability and longevity, he calls for love and devotion between individuals without the quality of their love being defined by exclusiveness based in jealousy, a petty sense of private property in the other person, social opinions, and legal enactments. These, he says, suffocate wedded love in egoism, lust, and, meanness.

Precocious Ideas about Homosexuality

As exemplified in The Intermediate Sex, it is in his ideas about homosexuality—and, in particular, about homosexuality and spirituality—that Edward Carpenter offers ideas that resonate with modern

consciousness and that claim our present interest:

• Unlike most of his contemporaries, including the relatively gay-positive ones like Richard von Krafft-Ebing whose book on the subject, by contrast, was titled Psychopathia Sexualis, Carpenter included homosexuality as part of a discussion of general sexuality and not as a pathology. He treated homosexuality as one of the natural forms in which sexuality manifests itself. If you’re going to talk about human sexuality, you have to include both heterosexual and homosexual examples. That is a perspective that has come to seem obvious, at least to conscious gay people who experience themselves as perfectly normal, if with somewhat different interests, concerns, and priorities than the majority. Indeed, Carpenter predicted that homosexuality would be accepted as normal in human life. Though, of course, there’s still much contention about this, his prediction has effectively come true.

• Carpenter defended homosexual lifestyles as natural forms of controlling population and warned of the dangers of overpopulation pressures. A hundred years or so before Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age, Thomas Malthus’s ideas on overpopulation had been published in 1798, when world population was at about 1 billion. By Carpenter’s time, it had doubled. (And here we are at the beginning of the 21st Century, only another hundred years later, but that billion has been multiplied by seven, and the warnings are still not being heeded.)

• Carpenter argued that the problems associated with homosexual behavior are not internal pathologies of homosexuality itself, but are caused by ignorance and repression, due to socially promulgated and perpetuated negative judgments—what we now call “internalized homophobia.”

• Carpenter identified the Old Testament Biblical prohibitions of homosexuality for the Hebrews as taboos against practicing religious rites popular among the Canaanites whose lands they had migrated into. They are about ritual and racial/cultural purity concerns, not morality.

• He called homosexual relationships “homo-

Carpenter predicted that homosexuality would be accepted as normal in human life. Though, of course, there’s still much contention about this, his prediction has effectively come true.

genic attachments,” with emphasis less on the sexual activity than the depth of passion, affection, and intimacy (the suffix “–genic” meaning “producing,” as in “erotogenic,” and/or “suitable for” as in “photogenic”). He believed these attachments should be recognized and honored by society, both for the sake of the gay individuals themselves and for the society at large, which he believed, benefited from the stability and well-being of socially contributing gay people in happy relationships. He made a good argument for what has become the same-sex marriage debate of early 21st century gay activism.

• He praised the blending of gender traits in what he calls “intermediate types,” which he described, for instance, as “combining the emotionality of the feminine with the practicality of the masculine.” He noted that homosexuals are good counselors and go-betweens for men and women, thus supporting stronger families. He wrote that homosexuality bestows beneficial traits; among these are good interpersonal interactions and religious and spiritual sensitivities.

“I believe that the blending of masculine and feminine temperaments would in some of these cases produce persons whose perceptions would be so subtle and complex and rapid as to come under the head of genius, persons of intuitive mind who would perceive things without knowing how, and follow far concatenations of causes and events without concerning themselves about the why—diviners and prophets in a very real sense. And these persons—whether they prophesized downfall or disaster, or whether they urged their people onward to conquest and victory, or whether by acute combinations of observation and experience they caught at the healing properties of herbs or determined the starry influences on the seasons and the crops—in almost all cases would acquire and did acquire a strange reputation for sanctity and divinity—arising partly perhaps out of the homosexual taboo, but also out of their real possession and command of a double-engine psychic power.” (Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk)

• Carpenter practiced a form of meditation (very much like Zen or Transcendental Meditation that appeals to modern-day gay men, including myself, by the way) consisting of two techniques: “(a) that of concentration—in holding the thought steadily for a time on one subject and (b) that of effacement—in effacing any given thought from the mind.” The goal was “the power of stilling Thought, that ability to pass unharmed and undismayed through the grinning legions of the lower mind into the very heart of Paradise” (Pagan and Christian Creeds).

• He experimented with sexuality and meditation techniques. While visiting the Oneida Colony in New York State in the 1870s, he was introduced to their practices of male continence and karezza, that is, delaying or refraining from ejaculation in order to cultivate erotic arousal and spiritual exaltation, a practice that has reappeared in modern gay culture as “Tantric massage” and been promoted widely through the Body Electric trainings.

• Carpenter used his own term for homosexuals, “intermediate types,” “intermediate” meaning between the two opposites and comprising aspects of both. He also used “urnings,” the popular self-chosen term of the day coined by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1860s in Germany and popularized in England by John Addington Symonds. Urning was derived from “Uranian” from Uranus, the then most recently discovered planet (in 1781) just as homosexuality was the most recently recognized human identity. Uranus was held to control homosexuals the same way Mars and Venus were held to control and/or symbolize males and females. “Uranus,” by the way, means “heaven,” so Uranians are “inhabitants of heaven.”

• Carpenter lived at the time Darwinism and other evolutionary ideas were sweeping science and civilization. He understood evolution as a process which (after Lamarck) he called “exfoliation,” using an image from the natural growth of plants which unfold into a variety of organs—leaves, petals, sepals, stamens, husks, seeds—throughout the life of the plant. They are driven by “desire,” that is, the

George Hukins, Edward Carpenter, Charles Sixsmith, George Merrill (center, bottom)

urge to live and become something new. Carpenter placed the coming of age and self-aware consciousness of Uranians as a part of the general transformation of consciousness that is modernity, symbolized by the astronomical discoveries of the modern era like that, of course, of the planet Uranus. He argued the “probability of the intermediate man or woman becoming a forward force in human evolution.”

• He was an idealistic populist. Not entirely unlike Francis of Assisi and spiritual revolutionaries of an even earlier style, he rejected his privileged middle-class heritage and valorized and, with utopian downward mobility, made himself part of the working class. He championed back-to-nature simplicity of life.

• He saw that utopian styles of community living would be appropriate for homosexuals. He himself lived in a sort of rural community at Millthorpe Farm with his working-class life partner George Merrill, welcoming a host of visitors and cohabiters over the years from all levels and classes of British and American society, including notably the novelist E.M. Forster (who based his character in the eponymously titled novel Maurice about an aristocrat who discovers fulfillment in relationship with a working class lover after Carpenter) and, as we’ll see, after the grandson of an American President.

• He even observed that intermediate types’ “genius for emotional love…gives Uranians their remarkable youthfulness” so that homosexuality effectively retards aging, something the youth-obsessed first generation of liberated gay baby-boomer men are living out in the current day.

All This Seems Familiar

As I have read Carpenter’s writings, including Frank B. Leib’s marvelous explication of his ideas, Friendly Competitors, Fierce Companions (Pilgrim Press, 1997), I have been impressed and amazed at how prescient Edward Carpenter appears to have been. This last idea just mentioned, for instance, that homosexuality retards aging, while slightly whimsical of course, is something I’ve written about numerous times, believing this an important observation about consciousness and embodiment that I’ve thought I was making for the first time.

Indeed, so many of these points just mentioned are things I’ve been writing about myself—and reading in the books of the contemporary “gay spirituality movement”—in these gay liberation and postliberation days of the turn of the 3rd Millennium, and thinking I was being insightful and relatively original, indeed, out of my liberated gay hippie

countercultural activism, revolutionary! These ideas were part of my modern worldview. They hardly seemed like 19th Century ideas. But there they are in Carpenter’s opus.

How is this? Did Carpenter have the ideas first? Did I get them from him? Were they original to him? Or would he have had the same experience of discovering that his ideas had come from his own predecessors? And then who were they? And how could so many of us today be having these ideas, handed down by him, without most of us ever even having heard of Edward Carpenter?

In the New Age-influenced thinking of modern gay mythologizing, I've asked myself, tongue-incheek—and only partly self-aggrandizing: Am I the reincarnation of Edward Carpenter?

What is Reincarnation?

Perhaps there is a better way to conceive of that egotistical conceit, one that hints at a deeper perception of what consciousness itself is and what homosexuality is, and that our homosexuality helps us realize when we seek to delve deep into our experience of ourselves.

Asking such questions—delving deep—is what spirituality is really about. Obviously, many people, including some gay people, never really ask themselves deep questions. But homosexuals are probably more inclined than the general population to ask such because, in the process of coming out, we are forced to consider why we feel ourselves different from other people. We’re forced to think about the nature of consciousness itself.

So what is reincarnation anyway?

There are three basic proposals for what happens to human consciousness at death: everlasting life with redemption in heaven or damnation to hell, reincarnation into another lifetime, and final end of consciousness and oblivion.

The popular version of reincarnation mythology which Edward Carpenter would have been exposed to in Victorian England, as well, for that matter, as the original myths dating back into the distant past is, in contemporary American terms, that people get “recycled.” Carpenter was friends with Annie Besant, and through her then was well acquainted with, if somewhat skeptical and dismissive of, Madam Blavatsky and Theosophy, her synthesis of world religion, especially Vedanta, psychic phenomena and mysticism.

This notion of soul recycling is based in part on the phenomenon that people sometimes seem to have recollections from time periods before their

own birth, i.e. so-called “past life memories.” Sometimes examples of this phenomenon are quite striking and resist easy explanation. Memories seem to be passing from one life to another. Though the hard evidence for past life memories is elusive, people seem to want to believe it, perhaps because we all have experiences we can attribute to such memories or to karmic consequences whether there’s hard evidence or not. Reincarnation is a mythological explanation for a kind trans-lifetime déjà vu, which, like regular déjà vu, though inexplicable, is a normal part of human experience (and so a clue to the nature of consciousness).

The very idea itself of past lives resonates with an age-old belief of human beings. Reincarnation means nobody ever really dies; we all just keep coming back as new persons. It’s a relief from the fear of eternal damnation and finality. And the “proof” of past lives is that people so easily believe it.

The East has a very different understanding. Reincarnation and the concomitant suffering over and over again is what Hindus and, especially, Buddhists struggle to prevent—by attaining highest consciousness in this lifetime (of not existing as a separate self).

According to the modern, multi-culturalist study of comparative religion, all religions and myths are “right” insofar as they present wisdom about how to live a good life and offer hints to a greater truth than any of them in which all are seen as alternative appearances of the same transcendent reality.

Such an understanding of religion and mythology reflects the wisdom in the familiar parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant: each of the blind men, you recall, had a different idea of what the elephant was, based on what part of the animal he was touching: a wall, a rope, a snake, a tree, a Sultan’s fan—all were right, but all were also wrong. It takes a higher perspective, with more data input, to create a comprehensive vision of the whole reality. It takes all the various religious myths combined (along with scientific explanations as well), and then risen above, to begin to give us a comprehensive picture of what reality—and consciousness—really is.

Carpenter had conceived a similar idea: “Deep, deep in the human mind there is that burning, blazing light of the world-consciousness.” He used the Greek term henads (“shape” or “cause”) from the philosopher Proclus to refer to the “Platonic forms”—or what 20th Century psychoanalyst Carl Jung called “archetypes”—that give rise to the specific myths of religion. He wrote in Pagan and

Christian Creeds: “The shadow-figures of the creeds and theogonies pass away truly like ephemeral dreams; but to say that time spent in their study is wasted, is a mistake, for they have value as being indications of things much more real than themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the human mind.”

Popularly, all the predictions and models for afterlife (or non-afterlife) are intended to ease the fear of death, the first two by saying death isn’t real, the third by saying that death ends the issue. Mystically, esoterically, they are all about giving up attachment to self and ego in order to experience greater consciousness here and now in the midst of human life. Even the cynical—if indeed also somewhat enlightened—view that death-is-death-and-then-it’sover recognizes that human beings are reabsorbed back into the matter of planet Earth and that there’s a peace that comes in not being aware of it. What atheists might call oblivion, Buddhists might call “emptiness.” Even when ideas about afterlife are that there is not an afterlife, they’re still about the meaning and significance of human consciousness.

Afterlife mythologies may, of course, actually describe some sort of conscious experience following death or, perhaps, even more likely during death (which is what there is hard evidence of in the socalled near-death experience). But that is but their secondary function. In the comparative religionist view, the real point of these myths in religious worldviews is to define cosmology and the nature of God and, even more importantly, to provide a map for mystical and contemplative experience.

The ideas of afterlife help define the nature of God in their universes. In what modern ecologically-concerned anthropologists would call Younger Cultures (a distinction Carpenter would have liked), the patriarchal, monotheistic universe of heaven and hell myth sees God as an ultimate judge; He is one, and lifetime is once, and followed by judgment and everlasting disposition with—or without—Him, King and Sovereign of the Universe.

In the Older Culture universe of the reincarnation model, God is more the impersonal processing of the laws of cause and effect. There isn’t the need for a “He” and “He” doesn’t do any judging. That universe is more “democratic” and participatory. The model reflects the perennial belief that human intentions, will, hopes, and dreams, go forth from individuals to collectively create the future. We possess creative power—participate in God—as we put out “karmic vibrations.”

The afterlife is a metaphor for full conscious-

ness. What myths like the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead and the Christian stories about the Particular and the General Judgment, Purgatory, Hell, and Heaven really describe is the levels of consciousness available to awareness. They offer imagery for delving into self-awareness and expanding consciousness. They are meditation-induction techniques.

Whenwe talk about “eternity” or “forever,” we’re often not really talking about extension in time, though that is the metaphor we’re using. We’re talking about depth of feeling and experience. So when you tell a lover, “I will love you forever,” it really means “I love you as deeply and intensely now as I can express.” It is not a prediction about the future. Haven’t we all experienced telling somebody we would love them forever—until we broke up. Afterlife is like that. It really isn’t about the future. It’s about the depth and intensity of the present experience of consciousness.

Reaching heaven or achieving nirvana is realizing the beatific vision of God, the fullness of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss right now. Eternity isn’t a long time; it’s the deep, wondrous, fullness of the present moment.

The myths of reincarnation hint at the vast scope of consciousness. The imagery of transmigrating souls moving from one lifetime to another “metaphorizes” personal growth and evolution of consciousness. These myths move the “self” out of individual ego into a more collective Self of humankind or of Planet Earth (Gaia)—Carpenter used the term “Universal Self” or “Omnipresent Self.” In The Drama of Love and Death, Carpenter wrote: “All ourselves must consequently be one, or at least united as branches of the One.”

Though in the West, especially in pop thinking, reincarnation is often embraced as the revelation that you don’t really die; in the East, especially in Buddhism, it’s the revelation you never really existed in the first place. Even in this life your ego is an illusion (and source of suffering). Enlightenment and liberation comes from discovering that there is no ego, only “karmic vibrations” from the lives of people who’ve lived before that are continuing to propagate through collective consciousness and show up in your life as “destiny,” “karma,” and coincidence/synchronicity.

What I think makes sense—and can seem wonderful and explanatory to the modern mind –is that rather than an individual soul that passes from one lifetime to another in temporal sequence, what really

“reincarnates” is those resonances from the lives of people who’ve lived before us. The meaning of reincarnation isn’t so much that a soul moves from one life to another, as that the “karmic vibrations” of each life continue to ripple through space-time-consciousness to influence the lives of those who will live later. Rather than a process of transmigration—like a soul transplant—what reincarnation mythology suggests is more like a radio or TV broadcast signal. The vibrations go out into the spiritual ether and are received by other individuals who are properly “tuned” to receive them. And those individuals become what they resonate with. That is to say, our thoughts, concerns, interests, obsessions, as well as feelings, judgments, and reactions shape who we become.

That’s the basis, by the way, of my whimsical comment referred to earlier about homosexuality retarding aging. Because we’re, generally and prototypically, childless, we don’t experience the vicarious reliving of childhood in offspring and the concomitant changes that come with having children to identifying with one’s own parents and so shifting one’s self-image towards the older. Many of us thus tend to maintain our self-identification as boys— and tend to look “boyish” even into old age. This reveals something not only about gay consciousness, but about how in all human beings self-image and self-perception gets manifested in the physical body. It’s truly a demonstration of “mind over matter”: our bodies grow into who we think of ourselves as. The things we resonate with create who we become.

Reincarnation mythology is a way of identifying with and participating in ideas, movements, and events in history that are associated with particular individuals. Thinking “I’m the reincarnation of medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart,” for instance1, is a way of expressing and cultivating a mystical conception of the universe as the Godhead’s effort to experience itself as ongoing creation. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To the extent I identify, say, with Meister Eckhart or the end-of-the-Renaissance cosmologist heretic Giordano Bruno—or to choose a less ambiguously gay predecessor from those pre-modern times, St. Aelred of Rievaulx, or a non-religious figure like Alexander the Great or, from more recent times, Lawrence of Arabia or Oscar Wilde—the more likely my present experience will reveal to me things associated with them. As soon as you start looking for “karmic resonances,” you necessarily find them. Self-fulfilling prophecy is a major part of how all mythological thinking operates and then proves itself.

We can deliberately and consciously partici-

pate in this process, and so create spiritualities and myths and metaphors that speak specifically to us. And the measure of their truth is how they make us behave. If we’re loving, generous, compassionate, they can be said to be “true.” If they make us behave badly, killing other people, burning heretics at the stake, committing genocide on unbelievers, then they have to be said to be “false.” How they “speak to us” is through fascination and intuition. This is the meaning of the aphorism “Follow your bliss” of the renowned mythologist (and the “great light” and “wise old man” of the present writer’s own spiritual journey), Joseph Campbell.

Reincarnation then is more like a metaphor for intuition than it is a metaphysical explanation for survival beyond death. What’s reincarnating isn’t individual souls, but the life force itself. And that life is resonating—like the string of a violin or, so rich and complex the harmonies and overtones, more like an entire symphony orchestra—with the karmic vibrations of everybody who’s ever lived, that is, with the karmic vibrations of the Universal Self. The “karmic patterns” that play out in our lives are the thoughts—and dreams—of planet Earth struggling to wake up to itself, that is, to its Self.

Carpenter wrote: “The doctrine of the Universal Self is obviously fundamental; and it is clear that once taken hold of and adopted it must inevitably revolutionize all our views of Morality—since current morality is founded on the separation of self from self; and must revolutionize too all our views of Science. Such matters as the Transmutation of Chemical Elements, the variation of biological Species, the unity of Health, the unity of Disease, our views of Political Economy and Psychology; Production for Use instead of for Profit, Communism, Telepathy; the relation between Psychology and Physiology, and so forth, must take on quite a new complexion when the idea which lies at the root of them is seized. This idea must enable us to understand the continuity of Man with the Protozoa, the relation of the physiological centres, on the one hand to the individual Man and on the other to the Race from which he springs, the meaning of Reincarnation, and the physical conditions of its occurrence.” (My

Days and Dreams)

Perhaps what causes us to resonate with the thoughts of Edward Carpenter is a shared reality of common “karmic” resonances from the lives of all the homosexuals who’ve lived before. The source of our queer gay identity is our intunement with the souls of our predecessors.

So then we might say, speaking mythologically, that we are all reincarnations of Edward Carpenter, as he was an incarnation of all those who’d lived before him.

Resonances with Our Predecessors

This is the understanding that my own life has led me to. Being gay is resonating with a pattern in that cosmic/planetary/collective mind that is mythologized and anthropomorphized as God. Our gay spiri-

tuality then is to participate fully in this pattern and to contribute to the pattern by ever improving its usefulness to and enjoyment by the collective mind. That is, because we resonate with a pattern in the Mind of God—which is ever struggling to become more fully conscious of Itself through human beings—we experience the spiritual impulse to improve the human race. That is one of our functions in human evolution, a “procreation” of culture and awareness, an “exfoliation” of the Universal Self.

Such a vision allows us to see ourselves as heirs to the lives of our “gay” predecessors: the shamans, medicine men (and women) of Older Cultures, and, down through time, the drug-using Ecstatics, wandering monks, Mattachine troubadours, priests,

Reproduced with permission of Sheffield Libraries Archives and Information

Milthorpe, home of Edward Carpenter and George Merrill

wizards, sorcerers, hermits, eccentrics, and wise men who’ve lived lives, like ours, outside the mainstream.

When we think the primitive pre-agrarian life of so-called Older Cultures difficult and brutish, by the way, we fall victim to a very self-serving model of modern Younger Culture society which portrays all human condition before the six or so thousand years of “civilization” as detestable and hard. The fact is the hunter-gather life in the hundred thousand years before the development of agriculture and civilization was relatively leisurely and simple and joyful— Edenic-like. It was in those days that people had time to indulge spiritual imagination. Of course, we know very little of those Older Culture times, but a few remnants have survived to the modern day. Carpenter called them “primitive folk” and observed that among them intermediate types were generally welcomed and sometimes revered; they were the creators and guardians of culture:

“And we may almost think that if it had not been for the emergence of intermediate types—the more or less feminine man and similarly the more or less masculine woman—social life might never have advanced beyond these primitive phases. But when the man came along who did not want to fight—who perhaps was more inclined to run away—and who did not particularly care about hunting, he necessarily discovered some other interest and occupation—composing songs or observing the qualities of herbs or the processions of the stars. Similarly with the woman who did not care about housework and child-rearing. The non-warlike men and the nondomestic women, in short, sought new outlets for their energies. They sought different occupations from those of the quite ordinary man and woman—as in fact they do today; and so they became the initiators of new activities. They became students of life and nature, inventors and teachers of arts and crafts, or wizards (as they would be considered) and sorcerers; they became diviners and seers, or revealers of the gods and religion; they became medicine-men and healers, prophets and prophetesses; and so ultimately laid the foundation of the priesthood, and of science, literature and art. Thus—on this view, and as might not unreasonably be expected—it was primarily a variation in the intimate sex-nature of the human being which led to these important differentiations in his social life and external activities.” (Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk)

So Carpenter was suggesting that intermediate types among primitive folk invented civilization and religion!

Gay Spirituality

There are two major thrusts in what I referred to earlier as the contemporary “gay spirituality movement.” Both of them, I think, Edward Carpenter would have agreed with; the second he’d have enthusiastically championed.

The first is that the popular stereotypes of gay/ queer men and lesbians perpetuated by disapproving and scapegoating religionists is simply wrong. We are not perverts and moral failures; we have full, rich, sometimes even admirable, spiritual qualities. We should not exclude ourselves from religion—especially just because a small number of small-minded preachers loudly spout homophobic language to stir up righteousness and outrage in their flock and get them to vote “conservatively” and donate to their churches. Gay people should remain active in mainstream religion and/or find welcoming congregations (which can include Eastern and alternative religions) where they can practice their religion comfortably.

The second thrust is that gay/queer, gendervariant consciousness itself accords an inherently spiritual, even “enlightened,” perspective on human life and the meaning of existence. This is so even if many homosexuals don’t exemplify this in their actual lives; the internalized homophobia propagating through society (in great part because of those sex-negative, anti-homosexual, small-minded preachers) so distorts their personalities that they “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Among the homosexual population are deeply spiritual seekers; by virtue of their having confronted and overcome the homophobia and the gender role indoctrination of male-dominant society, they can see through to the deeper meaning behind religion. They understand the metaphorical, mythical nature of religious imagery. They see how the myths can and should be modernized to suit modern consciousness. They are at the forefront of spiritual evolution.

Both thrusts contain the intuition—the second a little more obviously than the first—that gay/queer people’s spiritual insight and revelation of self-to-self arises out of their homosexual orientation. Homosexuality isn’t just a form of sexual activity or a preference in partners; homosexuality is an epistemological stance more basic to personality than sex, though sex is one of the main ways it manifests itself; it is a filter through which the whole world is experienced.

That same dynamic that I proposed retards aging changes our experience of the world. We don’t shift our self-identification towards being parents. Sex

and relationship don’t seem to be about childrearing, and so don’t call for child-protective naïveté in regard to the issues of adult life. We have no need to develop prudery and denial to protect children from being exposed prematurely to sex. We can experience the world more vibrantly sexual. (Maybe the youthfulness-bestowing quality is just a hormonal consequence of regular masturbation and frequent orgasms—a predilection of youthful males, and a benefit of liberated sexuality. This is, after all, a behavioral manifestation of this very dynamic of not identifying oneself with one’s seemingly sexless parents.)

Indeed, the attraction of likes provides a whole separate basis for perceiving and judging experience from the attraction of opposites. In spiritual/ philosophical terms, this is the difference between monism and dualism, between a universe in which all is One manifesting as the Many in order to return to the One through the attraction of self to self and a universe in which the Many are polarized into competing and conflicting, though paradoxically alluring and attracting, Opposites in order to propagate the whirl of interaction and perpetuate themselves with new births.

These are two different—and complementary—ways of viewing the world. Spirituality should speak to people of the meaning of life in terms that describe or arise from their worldview. Gay people speak to other gay people of spiritual experience in the terms of their common experience of attraction to likes, especially with its sexual components. This is what “gay spirituality” is.

I think this is an idea with which Edward Carpenter would be very comfortable. It’s his “vibes,” I can imagine, that speak to me in my mind as I write these sentences, his karmic resonances that I intentionally attune myself with to deepen my own Uranian experience of spirit.

Practices for Expanding Consciousness

Modern science, especially astronomy, has shown us a universe more wondrous, ancient, huge, and mysterious than any of the myths of old. We can experience this wonder directly simply by going out at dawn and dusk and observing the movements of the Sun and Moon in the sky as our planet moves through space in conjunction with them. This can be a scientifically sophisticated spiritual practice for participating in the growing self-awareness of planet Earth and the continuing evolution of consciousness and of religion. (As a way of altering one’s usual experience of this, by the way, imagine you’re looking down into space, instead of up.) From gazing out at the sky and observing the celestial bodies, we become aware of our place in the larger universe. We see the hugeness of it all. We are moved to wonder.

A cognate practice, then, for participating in—and spiritually enriching—the collective pattern of what Edward Carpenter would have called Uranian or Intermediate Type and we’d call gay or (with some caveats2) queer is looking down into our common history, becoming aware of the scope of the pattern and opening ourselves to the wonder of it.

For wonder is one of the most spiritual of human experiences. It’s at the heart of all religious experiences. Einstein commented that it’s at the heart of all true science. Wonder at the scope of expanse of sky back in those hunter-gatherer days may well have been the origin of both religion and science. For wonder founds and inspires curiosity; it pushes open the boundaries of the mind to encompass ever bigger and more complex thoughts, while stirring emotion and plucking at the heartstrings. Wonder transcends judgment and pushes the mind into direct experience without the mediation of thought and opinion. “Beauty” is

Edward Carpenter, 1906

what we call this experience when it is of artistry— and of human countenances. Wonder is what we call it of wide-open vistas, high mountain peaks, planetary motion, and transcendental ideas.

Certainly most human experience of beauty and sexual attraction contains some element of wonder. Sexual attractiveness itself is stimulation of those heartstrings that ring with the love of life and the poignancy of the human condition. Heterosexual love stimulates wonder. And it is a truly wondrous thing that heterosexual mating can procreate new life. But there is a mundaneness about heterosexual sex. For all that attraction is inspired by beauty, heterosexuality is fundamentally pragmatic and purposeful. That is exactly why the religious Fundamentalists say it’s God’s only plan. It has a purpose.

Homosexual attraction perhaps even more finely stirs wonder. There’s very little pragmatic about homosexual sex; it doesn’t serve a social purpose. That’s why we, Uranian inhabitants of heaven, can see there is something even more spiritual in it. The goal of homosexual love is indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh, of course, but inspired by sheer wonder and joy at same-sex beauty, and for the sake of ennobling the flesh. Homosexual consciousness functions—and affirms pleasure—at the level of spirit.

Contained in the idea of homosexuality itself is the exciting realization of being different from most people and being part of a sort of secret elite. However opprobrious the mainstream world sees us, it’s arousing and wondrous to us that we’re part of this elite.

Just like looking out at the night sky, looking down into history and the expanse of time before us is a way of experiencing the scope—the hugeness—of collective mind. So reading Edward Carpenter’s writings, though a little dated in scientific perspective and a little quaint in style and composition—for those very reasons—is expanding your awareness of time and your awareness of the scope of your gay consciousness.

There is spiritual meaning and wonder to be found in the experience of homosexuality. Investigating and contemplating the nature of homosexuality itself is a spiritual discipline that offers insight, consolation, inspiration, motivation, virtue, and purpose.

According to the famous aphorism (attributed to that mystic Meister Eckhart) “the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.” If so, then for us our homosexuality is the “lens” of that eye.

What is wonderful today—what serves for us as the stories of the gods did for the an-

cients, what inspires us with religious-like awe and fascination and trembling—is the nature of our own consciousness itself. A “new myth” is being born in our times, a self-reflexive explanation of what the universe is and what we human beings are within it and how the old myths have been hints to this transcendent truth and now make sense in terms of the big questions. How did matter evolve consciousness? How does awareness reside in and give rise to the human body?

Edward Carpenter said practically the same thing. The “Religion of the future,” he wrote, “…must come from the bosom itself of the modern peoples; it must be recognition by Humanity as a whole of the Common Life which has really underlain all the various religions of the past; it must be the certainty of the organic unity of mankind, of the brotherhood of all sentient creatures, freeing itself from all local doctrine and prejudice, and expressing itself in any and every available form.” (The Drama of Love and Death)

The evolution of consciousness is the manifestation of the planetary mind of Earth. Incarnation of consciousness in flesh is the wondrous reality that underlies all religion and spirituality. Becoming aware of consciousness as that new myth gives meaning to all the myths of old by showing them as clues to the nature of consciousness. Becoming aware of the nature of myth pushes forward the evolution of consciousness. This is, at least in part, a reason for gay consciousness: to help the planet wake up.

Delving into the history and scope of what we now call our gay consciousness is a way of participating in the evolutionary thrust of this queer perspective on Transcendent Reality and helping the human race move into the future. This is real spiritual work, even if on its surface it can look like only sex play and even debauchery. Indeed, part of the spiritual work is seeking beneath the glitzy surface of gay sex culture to find, and give, spiritual meaning to the sexual drive and to bodily pleasure. It is to find the life force manifesting itself in the beauty and erotic allure of young men and women relishing their incarnation in pleasure-generating flesh. It is to find beauty and pleasure as expressions of the evolution of consciousness.

This idea of homosexuality as sourced in past-life karmic resonances is, of course, just a myth. But it’s a good myth for us to believe. It provides meaning and profundity for our lives.

For most of us homosexuals, there is nothing we can do about our sexual orientation. It’s as fundamental to who we are as our eye, hair, and skin color or—even more saliently—our right or left handed-

ness. It’s a neurological dynamic that is not subject to change. So what’s for us to do but create positive, life-affirming meaning?

And that is what religion always is: Pretend for the sake of making life better and giving meaning to life and articulation to the deep structure of space-time-consciousness—or what it is—that is the substance of the multidimensional universe of which we are conscious parts. So this notion about reincarnation and karmic vibes not only helps us explain our homosexuality to ourselves, it shows us what religion really is. This pushes us forward in the evolution of consciousness—so that we are, as Edward Carpenter said, a “forward force” and it gives us a mission.

The question is how to make religion a positive force for harmony, as it purports to be, instead of a cause for war and discord—as it has turned out to be. If our sort of people invented religion in the first place, we should be especially interested in recreating it, preserving the beauty and artistry of religious high culture forms while abandoning the judgment, self-righteousness, and discord that come from thinking religion a revelation of absolute truth by a personal judging—and favorites-playing—God. Not only is gay liberation about sexual freedom and psychological well-being of homosexual individuals in modern democracies, it’s about the maturation of planetary consciousness.

Ithinkthese observations and meditations are very consistent with Edward Carpenter’s thoughts. I think I am resonating with him when I offer these as a case for why modern readers should be interested in books written a century ago. In that quote above from Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk, his later book fleshing out the historical, spiritual and religious aspects of Uranian consciousness, you can see his strong sense that intermediate types— us homosexuals—are gifted with divinatory and psychic powers and act as a forward force in human evolution. I have to acknowledge that I couldn’t find my proposal about the nature of reincarnation in Carpenter’s writings, though it is hinted at in the citation above about the Universal Self as the explanation of reincarnation. I’ll have to call this proposal an improvement I’m making to our collective consciousness.

Carpenter’s discussion of the “doctrine of the Universal Self” goes on to present his moral and utopian vision. These sound like the dreams and aims of the Radical Faeries and a whole host of idealistic and “politically correct” lesbian and gay

activists and spiritual revolutionaries. (Note how he ties those Greek “heroic friendships” and a little bit of nudity right in there with saving the world.)

[This doctrine] “must have eminently practical applications; as in the bringing of the Races of the world together, the gradual evolution of a Non-governmental form of Society, the Communalization of Land and Capital, the freeing of Woman to equality with Man, the extension of the monogamic Marriage into some kind of group-alliance, the restoration and full recognition of the heroic friendships of Greek and primitive times; and again in the sturdy Simplification and debarrassment of daily life by the removal of those things which stand between us and Nature, between ourselves and our fellows—by plain living, friendship with the Animals, open-air habits, fruitarian food, and such degree of Nudity as we can reasonably attain to.”

So the invitation is for the reader to see a level beyond the words, down into the spiritual mind of the gay and lesbian, homosexual throngs who have lived before us and sought to understand what was special about them and then to validate that discovery as their contribution to the evolution of life on Earth.

That Uranian role in spiritual evolution is certainly one of Edward Carpenter’s central ideas we can all resonate with. And it can be the important reminder that we find in that so terribly old-fashioned name for ourselves: by our homosexuality, we are inhabitants of heaven.

What a wonderful—and necessary—realization! What a wonderful legacy for Edward Carpenter to leave us all! We can all proudly claim him as a previous incarnation. w

1 The 14th century Rhineland mystic Meister Eckhart was a favorite of Edward Carpenter’s deeply religious father and so certainly was an influence on the younger Carpenter who might well have had that very thought— especially during the period he was exposed to Theosophy. There is no way to know if Eckhart was “gay”; he was a monk. But he certainly wasn’t “heterosexual” in any meaningful way.

2 Included in the term “queer,” at least in its academic and formal use, is the idea, based in the writing of Michel Foucault, that sexual identity is “constructed,” not “essential.” So, technically, “queers” wouldn’t concur with this idea of a common link among all homosexuals down through time. Practically, of course, “queer” is the choice of a younger generation seeking to distinguish its own particular values and reactions against the previous generation’s status quo. The term is a way younger homosexuals can insinuate their own vibes into the collective resonance.

Kyle

Photographed by Dot

O tan-faced prairie-boy, Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift, Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among the recruits, You came, taciturn, with nothing to give—we but look'd on each other,

When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me. —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Two Poems

by Ampersand Charmpop

remember...

Do you remember when we met? Neither do I... but it was before all this, long before all these noises these bodies all these strange and dark times...

It was in the light, wasn't it? Yes, it was: that pure, deep, rich, and endless, wordless Light at the beginning of everything, at the end of nowhere, in the warm wide Lap of Spirit, or Mystery, or what we called It then: we knew exactly what the Name was then, we did: we forgot.

And we agreed, didn't we? yes, we did: to meet again, somewhere, in these bodies, and dark times.

And what exactly was it we were going to do? Do you remember? Did we know?

Other than to hold each other, again, of course, yes so glad to see each other, again, of course, yes so glad we agreed, yes, so glad we said

For Hartsong...

whoop it up and hoop it up and cry and drum and shake it like tomorrow isn’t coming because we’re all on the edge

Yes. but there's something more, isn't there? There's something still yet to come... it may be simple or awful or joyous, or hard... but we knew when we came here we'd be asked to be brave: and we promised we would be, remember? We agreed. And later, long after these bodies... these sounds... in that pure deep endless rich and wordless Light, once more in the Lap that we never forgot. we'll laugh, and we'll cry: that it took so long that it seemed so strange that it felt so hard and so deep and so sad... we'll laugh we'll remember, and we will agree again.

of each other’s dreams hands joined around that big fire that big sad that big, big, big joy.

moss on petrified wood

by J Elliot

for paul montone apologies to walt whitman

if life can grow on petrified wood can love then grow on petrified heart?

moss on what might once have been live oak brings to mind something you told me so long ago before i turned to stone

I receive now again of my many translations—from my avataras ascending—while others doubtless await me;

An unknown sphere, more real than I dream’d, more direct, darts awakening rays about me— So long! Remember my words—I may again return, I love you—I depart from materials; I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The Walt Whitman Service Area

Photo Essay by Scribble aka Paul Festa

Poems from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Fecund America—to-day, Thou art all over set in births and joys!

Thou groan’st with riches, thy wealth clothes thee as with a swathing garment!

Thou laughest loud with ache of great possessions!

Poems

by Jim Wise Walt

Not for you, Walt Whitman, the empty nothing of the House of the Dead.

You pass those irresistible gates at will to sit with me on spongy grass greening wet in the sun.

You are always around, Walt.

My Boyfriend Jesus

My boyfriend Jesus is a player, a slutty sage, a promiscuous Christ who will go with anyone who looks at him. Frat boys, bears, twinks, old men, rough trade, even women. He gets around, my Jes, and I know he will always stray, give his love to anyone who asks, lay himself on every willing altar he can, but I don’t mind cause we’re polyamorous, my Jes and me - our lives are crowded with lovers. Sometimes he likes to get away from it all, wander barefoot into the desert, drop that hooded cloak he loves, slide his ratty torn jeans down over narrow brown hips and dance naked in the fading sun, then we sleep out there, the two of us wrapped in that old cloak and make our own heat to keep us warm. There are moments at Mass, the Host will settle on my tongue and I can still taste that desert salt, still smell the musk of a day spent sweating in the sun, and my heart will start to race as I wonder if anyone else can taste it too.

7/13/2011

You are my color-mad finger-string, belly-laughing that I am not alone.

You are my paternity test, proof that I actually belong on this incomprehensible world of greed and lunacy.

Gawkers point and taunt:

“What planet are you from, Freak?” and I answer, head held high, “This one. It’s mine and my father’s before me. You can get off at the next stop.”

More than any bible, I find God in your fistful of leaves. Your songs are stronger than any sunbaked prophet obsessed with sin and sky.

I hold prayer book in hand and the cover is imprinted with your wild raving gentle face. You taught me every song I know.

You are not like other ghosts, Walt, waiting on words and binds and circles in the dirt.

You come at will and haunt me with delight.

You are the wizard who ensorcels my soul.

You are the magician who pulls me out of your battered felt hat into the dizzying light of the sun.

Surprise me, Walt.

Tramp me through fields, swim me in your hidden pond, show me how a flower smiles.

Tuck me into dreams sweet as an unwalked road.

Not for you, Walt Whitman, the empty nothing of the House of the Dead. It’s only a place to sleep. Every day you rouse yourself and take to the open road.

Living Always

by Jimmi Kocher-Hillmer

Aunt Betty said, "You can have any books you want from my car.”

It was 1975 and she was returning to the Bucks County hometown after teaching all her adult life in New Jersey. From the back seat of her Nova, I took a Hawthorne compendium, Walden and Leaves of Grass. Read Thoreau immediately. Wrote a senior year high school literature paper on Hawthorne. The Whitman followed me around. Fifteen years later on a rather long dark night of the soul, I was heavily contemplating which Pittsburgh bridge to jump off. That dusty copy of Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose on the bedside table called out to me. The occasionally opened tome presented me this never-before-encountered poem.

O LIVING always-always dying!

O the burials of me, past and present

O me, while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever!

O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not-I am content;)

O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at, where I cast them,

To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind!

His words. My tears. Many many tears. World rent asunder till a gleam of dawn broke on another day. Heart wrenched back into gear. Mind clearer. Pass on and leave the corpses behind.

I had this book. It followed me around. I read a poem. It saved my life.

PLQs, Meet Walt Whitman...Animated

by Mitchell Santine Gould, curator, LeavesofGrass.Org, and director general, General Picture

I suspect, though I cannot prove, that Straight America has a greater affection for Walt Whitman than for any other figure in gay history, but his spirit broods particularly over Gay America. In 2004, when LeavesofGrass.Org invited testimonials for the approaching 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass, Reverend Troy Perry described it perfectly: "Yes, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is beloved by all people and speaks to all people—but his work resonates especially deeply with LGBT people."

When Rev. Perry wrote me, the National Endowment for the Arts had just published Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. This study showed that most Americans were reading less than in previous years, with the steepest rate of decline—28 percent—occurring in the young. For example, a comparison of poetry fans in 1982 and 2002 shows that the number of adults reading poems or listening to a poetry reading decreased from about 20 percent in 1982 to 14 percent in 2002. RFD readers realize that by now, almost all of our historic gay bookstores have followed major portions of the book-publishing industry to the grave. If Generations Gay have always resorted to books to hand down the life-giving stories of our tribe, and if Generation Queer is neither buying books nor reading them, how can we hope to pass on the hero’s journeys which gave us a glimmer of hope in our darkest trials?

We can't answer that question until we figure out where the post-literate queers (PLQs) are. I have caught them in the act of reading graphic novels and watching animated films. Today, the Young Adult Library Services committee of the American Library Association publishes an annual report called Great Graphic Novels for Teens. The fact that animated films have taken a lion's share of box-office proceeds each year over the past decade is pretty much self-evident. Facts such as these tell us how to reach the next generation.

Once I realized that Generations Gay's best hope to communicate their reverence for Walt Whitman's life and legacy is to translate Leaves of Grass into the new idioms—the graphic novel; the animated film—I got to work, but it hasn't been fast or easy. Animation may be the queen of the visual arts, but she's a damn harsh mistress. As a mere Whitman scholar, the miracle behind my efforts to animate Walt's poem “As Nearing Departure” is like the miracle of the dancing bear: the big deal isn't that he dances well–the big deal is that he can dance at all. Nevertheless, I am singlehand-

edly producing a 5-minute film based upon this short, obscure 1860 poem, also called “To My Soul.”

Before the Civil War, Whitman was planning an Emerson-styled book tour, presumably on the western frontier, to promote his "evangel-poem of comrades." I believe “As Nearing Departure” captures his anxiety about this plan. It opens in a dark cloud of gloom. Even in the best of circumstances, a book tour could exhaust a new author's finances. But the times were especially dark: not only was the nation one year away from its greatest crisis, the Civil War, but it was only then beginning to recover from the paralyzing financial Panic of 1857. Beyond all this, I suspect, Walt was aware that he would make a conspicuous target for an assassin. Many great poets could write about being slain for their message, asking, in effect: if they kill me, then what? But only Whitman would dare go on to actually answer that question.

100 years before Martin Luther King, this was Walt's "I have been to the mountaintop" moment, according to my understanding of the poem, so my film will follow Whitman into the spirit world and beyond. Having spent several years in refining the designs for Walt and his mysterious camerado Fred Vaughan (whose actual appearance remains unknown), I am trying to attain the quality seen in a feature film. I have only recently been able to focus on production design, developing an Impressionist "look" for the backgrounds to complement the 2D "cel look" of my characters. Many barriers remain to finishing the film, such as modeling the horse-drawn omnibus which Fred drove, and the majestic steam ferries which plied the East River between New York and Brooklyn.

My goal is help Generation Queer see beyond the Straight cliches about a broken-down, stragglehaired old bard who crows, O Captain! My Captain! and instead meets the hairy-breasted superhero who soars through the rings of Saturn, crashes the midnight orgies of young men, breeds a nation of "bully children," reverently runs his fingers through the tall grass of graves, and finds letters from God dropped in the street. DC and Marvel Comics have recently given us a steady diet of latter-day gods, but they are mere phantoms of good who can only fight silly phantoms of evil across a movie screen. Gays and Queers have their own heroes, rooted in real, historic struggles for rights and dignity. All we lack in telling their stories is the power of the new artforms—until now. w

Stills from Mitchell Gould’s To My Soul

A Proposition to the Good Gray Poet

by Don Perryman (Dawn)

I, Don Perryman, of these manifest states in the twenty-eighth year of my open road, a struggling, singing camerado

Arm’d with my own voluptuous manhood, with a bachelor’s degree, with a love for exuberant, free-wheeling poetry, with reams of unpublished stuff of my own, much of it imitative of Leaves of Grass,

Proclaim this day for all to hear my shouting, my glib certitude,

To hear the loud clarion of my prideful song belch forth,

To hear the throbbing shuttle of my mocking vocal cords,

To hear the resonant reverberations of my warbling tongue say,

Walt! Allons! I love you! Repondez s’il vous plait!

Give me your pure and passional answer, yea!

I lift you up; by God, you shall no longer lie alone in the dark of the grave;

I embrace the desiccated brain case that held your kosmic cogitations;

I embrace your intangible esprit de corps;

Reminding you that I am, of course, a married man with no real penchant for necrophilia, With a wife who wants me home nights, With an exhausting teaching job that keeps me busy weekdays,

With two boys, babbling, toddling, getting into the cookie jar, distracting me from my writing:

I see you there my children – I have eyes in the back of my head and radar in my earlobes and I’ ve got all kinds of far-out means of perception;

I am actually one helluva guy!

I see you there my children—I accept the splendor of your joy as you ingest your fill, yea, more than your fill of chocolate chip cookies, Reminding you that there will be no more groceries till payday.

Do I get off the subject? Very well then, I get off the subject. What the hell. I’ve got lots on my mind and since I’m breaking all the rules of poetry slavishly obeyed by those flaccid, indoor Cambridge hacks anyway – well, what difference does it make, I mean, really?

But oh, Walt – you do no object to my calling you Walt, do you?

I swear you shall not object!

Do the students in my English classes object?

Do the professors in the great democratic universities of this grand republic object?

Do Buddha or Christ or Zoroaster object?

Do the editors of magazines that print literary parodies object?

Oh, Walt – gladly would I journey with your robust, resurrected carne, And become free and open like you, And become pure and clean and loving like you, And become, yea, a fisher of men like you;

But oh, Walt, the times must have changed somehow.

Oh, a great twentieth century pain has come over us all, Walt.

Oh, little would you imagine the exigencies of modern reality, Walt.

Oh, little would you know of this mundane life that comes of being practical, and logical, and sensible, and dependable, and not too excitable, and just a tiny little bit humble, and more or less understandable, and somewhat conventional, and basically, well, you know, heterosexual.

Oh, never mind, Walt, – it wouldn’t have worked out anyway.

Note: This poem, written four decades ago by a very different, much more deluded me, amuses the me that I am now. Even though it would be another two decades before I finally came to know myself as a gay

man, my attraction to Whitman—and to the possibility of being gay—was already there. What a relief to say now that I was wrong—it definitely would have worked out!

“Standing with Apple” by artboydancing

Centerfolds

by Raymond Luczak (after Walt Whitman)

When faced with a basketful of photographs showing you evolving over the years, you said, “I meet new Walt Whitmans every day.” You were something of an exhibitionist, weren’t you, relishing the importance of being photographed. You knew that a single picture could accomplish more far quickly than a single poem could. The repetition of your eyes, beard, and face has fossilized how we see you: an old man.

By the time your hair grayed at thirty, you were already a Christ in training. Then you exploded with orgasms of revelation. In the prime of your forties, you stood tall, fit as an ox and horny as a bull. You didn’t trim your locks. You knew you had to seem unkempt, wild enough to inspire terror in the untamed. You knew what lurked between their legs, the untenable desire to master the body’s scriptures.

How much should we know of you, Walt?

We live in an age of gossip passing for news. Boyd McDonald said, “People in show business are in the business of showing themselves.” Nude, you posed in a Thomas Eakins photographic study when you were in your sixties, profiling fertile belly, burning bush, and dangling root. No one knew it then, but you were already America’s first male celebrity centerfold.

Kindred comrades became more open in the 1970s, ecstatic with discovery and affection even in the flickering eight-millimeter blue films. They smiled radiantly, dressed with warm caresses, with arc lights heating the contours of what need seen.

They were alive with the innocence of libido. Being naked and hard on camera was still taboo. Who knew that porn could be tender? We weren’t yet a nation of amateur centerfolds.

What now, Walt, you think of today’s porn stars? Their humongous cocks are perpetually stiff. Never mind that most of us aren’t well hung. Their sinewy bodies set new standards a few match. Their chests, like their balls, are shaven. They rarely smile at each other. No joy. They’re too busy grunting with ass in close-up. Thanks to editing, they seem forever insatiable. Fucking and sucking’s just another factory job.

Things were simpler for men like you in your time. Either you married and had sex on the side, or you lived alone as a bachelor at a boardinghouse. “The right woman” was always a pipe dream. Information about your kind was suspect. It was always about the eyes mirroring desire. Sometimes love of the rough kind grew, but there wasn’t a recognized word for it. Love was the far more obscene word

Walt Whitman photographed by Thomas Eakins, J. Paul Getty Museum

My Days and Dreams: The Worlds of Edward Carpenter, Gay Freedom Pioneer

By Joey Cain

Oneof the earliest advocates of freedom for the people he termed “Homogenic”, Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) set the stage over one hundred years ago for what would become today’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Freedom Movement. At a time when same sex loving men were imprisoned for their desire, he lived openly for nearly 40 years with his dear “boy”, George Merrill. Carpenter’s writings and life inspired several generations of homosexual people, including the novelist EM Foster, who wrote his novel Maurice after visiting him. Carpenter’s influence on Mattachine Society and Radical Faeries founder Harry Hay directly contributed to the birth of the modern LGBT movement. Even the poet Allen Ginsberg traces his gay poetic lineage back to Walt Whitman through Carpenter.

Yet Edward Carpenter in his own time was widely know as many things: a poet, socialist, critic of “Civilization”, mystic, vegetarian, rational dress advocate, anarchist, simple life advocate, women’s freedom supporter, pagan; in short, a harbinger of the many new worlds of the mind and body that were overthrowing the certainties of the Victorian era and giving birth to the Modern period.

Towards Democracy and Millthorpe

Edward Carpenter was born in 1844 into an upper middle-class family in Brighton, England. While attending Cambridge University in the 1860s he discovered the writings of Walt Whitman celebrating male - male love and extolling a transcendental vision of radical democracy. Ordained a minister in the Church of England in 1870, he renounced his Orders a few years later. As part of the University Extension Movement he worked as a traveling lecturer in the industrialized North of England where he saw first hand the poverty brought upon the working masses by capitalism.

What he experienced combined with the influences of Whitman, Emerson and Ruskin, leading him to question the basic assumptions of Victorian society: property and possessions as a measure of self worth; Christianity’s setting of the spirit against the body; modern science’s complete reliance on the intellect as a way of knowing at the expense of the

intuitive; “civilization’s” assumed superiority over and exploitation of “primitive” cultures; social propriety’s forbidding of the expression and fulfillment of sexual needs and the desire for love.

In 1877 Edward Carpenter sailed from England to the United Sates to meet the man whose writings had changed the course of his life: Walt Whitman. As part of his trip he visited with other Whitman “Disciples” such as the ecologist and naturalist John Burroughs and Whitman biographer Richard Maurice Bucke. He spent time with Ralph Waldo Emersion whose transcendentalist philosophy meant a great deal to him. However it was Whitman who was the goal of his sojourn. During the course of his American visit Carpenter and Whitman spent many days and nights together, including a week at the home of a friend at 1929 North 22nd Street in Philadelphia. There were trips together to the farm outside of Camden owned by the family of one of Walt’s boyfriends, Harry Stafford. At the nearby Timber Creek, Whitman initiated Carpenter into the nude sunbathing and dips in the creek which Walt credited with aiding him recover from the strokes he had suffered four years before. At some time during his visit Carpenter and Whitman developed a deeper intimacy and were erotically involved with each other.

In 1883 Carpenter published, Towards Democracy, his book of visionary poetry.

Towards Democracy...has been the start point and kernel of all my later work, the center from which all the other books have radiated. Whatever obvious weaknesses and defects it may present, I have still always been aware that it was written from a different plane from the other works, from some predominant mood or consciousness superseding the purely intellectual.

—My Days and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes, 1916

Carpenter employed Walt Whitman’s free verse form for his own deepest feelings and would continue to add poems to the collection through four editions, completing it in 1905. The book became a

source of inspiration and spiritual renewal for many activists in Britain’s Socialist and Anarchist movements during the first decades of the 20th Century.

Seeking a way of living that would fulfill his desires for manual work and “the absolute necessity for a more open air life”, Carpenter purchased a small land holding called Millthorpe, outside the northern city of Sheffield, England. There he worked the land as a market gardener, selling his produce in the local towns. He put into practice his ideas about creative labour and free association.

Over the next four decades Millthorpe would became a symbol and retreat for those who were inspired by the way of life that Carpenter, his friends and lovers developed there: manual work on the land, equality and honesty in personal relations, a ‘simplification of life’, vegetarianism, a rejection of soul deadening consumerism and the breaking down of class distinctions.

Socialism and the New Life

When not market gardening, Carpenter worked as a Socialist activist in the industrial city of Sheffield. A center for steel manufacturing in England, Sheffield was a city ravaged by pollution & poverty, a glaring example of the class inequality wrought by capitalism.

The real value of the modern socialist movement… has lain not so much in it’s actual programme as (1) in the fact that it has provided a text for a searching criticism of the old society and of the lives of the rich, and (2) the fact that it has enshrined a most glowing and vital enthusiasm towards the realization of a new society.

—My Days and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes, 1916

Carpenter’s lectures and articles in socialist periodicals though out the 1880s gained him a following amongst the radicalized intelligentsia debating poverty, class inequality, sexual relations, new ethical codes and alternative spiritualities. These radicals sought to transform themselves and create a “New Life” in order to bring about the social revolution. Carpenter appealed to them with his advocacy of a “larger socialism”, one that embraced the liberation of the emotional and spiritual life along with the economic. Philosophically sympathetic to Anarchism, he worked with all the elements of the socialist movement believing “we are all on the same

road” to a society free of exploitation and domination, whether that domination be of capitalist over worker, men over woman, humans over nature or the spiritual over the body. Carpenter put his ideas into practice in his own life, helping to start several important Socialist organizations, papers and a publishing company. His form of ‘ethical socialism’ became a vehicle for a whole series of idealistic campaigns including efforts to stop air pollution, promote vegetarianism and oppose vivisection and cruelty to animals.

Carpenter composed the song “England Arise” which became the anthem of the workers movement in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. He included it in his collection of songs, Chants of Labour: A Song Book of the People.

Consciousness and Evolution

Edward Carpenter believed that there were, three great stages of Consciousness: the simple consciousness (of the animal or primitive man), the self-consciousness (of the civilized or intellectual man), and the mass-consciousness or cosmic consciousness of the coming man… and though we may not yet be in a position to define the conception very exactly, still it is quit evident, I think, that some such evolution into a further order of consciousness is the key to the future…

—My Days and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes, 1916

This idea of a new consciousness evolving formed the bedrock of Carpenter’s life and work. Through his writings he attempted to explore the who, what, when and how of this emerging state of consciousness. It led him to the study of religions, particularly Hinduism and European paganism. In 1890 he traveled to India and Ceylon and spent time with a Gnani, or teacher. He delved into pre-christian myths and rituals as sources for understanding of the unconscious.

Sex Radicalism and Homogenic Love

Since the day in 1869 when he first read Walt Whitman’s poems espousing the “life-long love of comrades”, Edward Carpenter had dreamed of being part of a group of Loving Comrades with whom to share his life and “move the world.” He began to make that dream manifest in the 1880’s when he moved to his farm, Millthorp.

It was in 1886 that his first great love entered his

life, a razor-grinder named George Hukin whom he met through the Sheffield Socialist movement. Even after Hukin married and Carpenter was living with another man, they remained extremely close and intimate. Next was a man named George Adams, who lived with Carpenter at Millhorpe. Another, a socialist comrade named Alf Mattison from Leeds. But all of these relationships were with men whose sexuality was ambiguous and who eventually married.

Then, in 1892 while traveling home on a train, Carpenter and the man who was to become his constant Comrade for the next 36 years exchanged glances. George Merrill, like Carpenter, had been sexually drawn to men all his life. Unlike Carpenter, he had grown up in the working class slums of Sheffield, had held a series of different jobs, and was sexually sure of himself from an early age. The two began a relationship and in 1898 George Merrill moved in with Carpenter at Millthorpe. They were to live together in a loving but non-monogamous partnership until George’s death in 1928. Drawing other same-sex loving men and women to Millthorpe, they provided inspiration, comradeship and a living example of sexual freedom that crossed the rigid class boundaries of the time. At the same time as his relationship with Merrill was developing, Carpenter started writing the pamphlets and books that would lay the early intellectual ground work for the birth of today’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Freedom Movement.

Throughout 1894 Carpenter wrote a series of pamphlets that brought the issue of sex out of hiding and into open discussion. In them he challenged the sexual and emotional limits placed on woman and men by Victorian society. The pamphlets dealing with opposite sex passion and love were published in 1896 as Love’s Coming of Age: A Series of Papers on the Relations of the Sexes. The book sold in the hundreds of thousands, becoming Carpenter’s most successful book. It influenced both left

wing activists and the emerging woman’s movement around the world by providing a starting point for an honest and frank discussion of the relationship between the sexes.

One of the 1894 pamphlets was so radical it could not be published with his other writing on sex. That work was Homogenic Love and It’s Place in a Free Society. Carpenter relied on history, anthropology and science to advance his ideas that Homogenic people not only contributed to the health of society, but had a unique role in the ongoing evolution of humanity. Using the skills gained as a socialist activist and writer, Carpenter proposed that homosexuals were part of the struggle for individual freedom and rights, the same as women and the working class.

Though dated 1894, Homogenic Love appeared in the fateful year of 1895, just months before the very public trials and imprisonment of the poet and play write Oscar Wilde on the charge of ‘Gross Indecency’, stemming from his homosexual relationships. The anti-gay hysteria generated by the trials made it especially difficult to advocate for same-sex love. Undaunted by that fear and reaction, Carpenter published another pamphlet, An Unknown People in 1897. In this work he challenged the assumed binary gender roles imposed on men and women. Drawing once again on history, anthropology and science, he looked at individuals who combined varying elements of masculine and feminine, the Intermediate Types as he call them, and what their characteristics and contributions to society were.

The Homogenic Trilogy

Between 1902 and 1914 Carpenter published 3 ground breaking books that openly espoused his ideas and beliefs about Intermediate Types and their place in society and history.

The first of these books, Iolaus; An Anthology of Friendship, was published in 1902 in both England and the United States. This was the first collection Continues on Page 58

Carpenter with George Merrill

Reproduced with permission of Sheffield Libraries Archives and Information

Faerie Elders: What and Where Are We?

by Stuart Norman

My backstory: At 62, I'm considered an elder by my peers. I've been a Radical Faerie for at least 30 years, not long after our tribe was founded by Harry Hay and John Burnside in 1979, at a gathering in Arizona. My first experience at a faerie sanctuary was at Running Water Farm in the Appalachian mountains near Burnsville, NC. RFD was published there at the time until 1989, when it moved to Short Mountain Sanctuary in Tennessee. I often wrote for it. Not too long afterward Run Wha, as the sanctuary was lovingly called, had to close because of water and sanitary restrictions from the growing town. I think some prejudice was probably involved in this legal action.

I came out late at age 32 and quickly had to catch up and explore all the gay options. Soon, I became an activist. I was attracted to faeries because I had been a hippie, and the other dark attraction I had to understand was leather/SM. I soon realized that I must become a shaman for these tribes as an extension of my personal, lifelong spiritual path. It took a few years to accomplish because I had to largely pull myself up by my bootstraps because there was no previous existing tradition. I finally realized that I had become a shaman while living in the San Francisco leather community in the mid-1980s. After that, I became a national teacher of the spiritual and shamanic aspects of BDSM, but I didn't sever my ties to faeries, I had to “corrupt” them and my leather brothers to accept each other because there was much misunderstanding between these tribes. Being brotherhoods, they had much more in common than they knew. I was one of the first “leatherfaeries”, therefore my title: Cyrwyn, The Leatherfaerie Shaman. I've done much faerie and leather activism since.

Fastforward to the present. I live in rural, northwest New Mexico. I have been a board member of Zuni Mountain Sanctuary for seven years.

Gay elders do exist and sometimes are recognized and revered, but many who are not nationally famous are also ignored by younger gays, ignorant of history. The same unfortunate condition exists among leatherfolk and faeries. Our communities have lost too many of us to AIDS. The faerie sanctuaries are places where some elders may be welcome and revered, but I think our sanctuaries should

become special places for faerie elders and offer them support. We are a valuable resource of history and wisdom, tradition and insight. I have proposed that ZMS be a leading light in bringing this dream to fruition, but there is much needed work to be done to make it possible. We need housing and support for the special needs of elders. Our bylaws have a provision that semi-private housing may be built on ZMS land by those making a commitment to live there and support the sanctuary. These houses would be owned by ZMS, but the resident would be granted a lifetime right of residency. We don't have the money for those improvements. We're in process of major building maintenance and building a bathhouse for which we do have the money. We also need to build a basic bunkhouse for those visitors who need shelter because of health or from our severe winters. We need volunteer workers from the larger faerie community to help us. Fortunately, we are beginning to receive this support. However, ZMS doesn't have enough dedicated, experienced stewards even to carry on the everyday work, so current stewards are overwhelmed. We don't even have residence space for more stewards. We'd appreciate you considering to commitment to serve furthering the ideal of sanctuary at ZMS. So it goes.

I'd like to see ZMS become mostly self-sufficient within the next five years. What with the shaky economy, environmental changes and potential social upheaval ZMS must become sustaining or it may not continue to exist. This is especially dif-

Photo courtesy Stuart Norman

ficult to achieve because of our arid climate, short growing season, remoteness and sometimes severe winters. We need to build in-ground greenhouses to extend our ability to grow vegetables and herbs. Again, more money and human energy are needed. One possible solution is making and promoting sanctuary as a cottage industry.

AlthoughI have no major health issues, I can't live at ZMS as it exists now. It just doesn't have the resources that I need to live a fulfilling life. I'm fortunate that I own my home and have made it a comfortable place to live. I exist on Social Security, but without any health insurance. If I become impaired in any way I'm not sure what I could do. The horror of having to go to a conventional retirement center is worse than death. I'd like to live at ZMS when I'm older and have my needs met by a loving community. I hope that I could be a productive resource there until my health needs overwhelm the ability of sanctuary to provide. However, we're not a medical center or hospice, nor should we be, but perhaps offering some hospice services could be achievable. We can already offer some alternative

health practices and healing workshops. I'd rather die there than in a hospital. We have considered providing a graveyard for faeries who would like to be buried on our land.

I am asking the other faerie sanctuaries to consider making this possible for themselves. Or could new sanctuaries be created specifically for our elders? Such projects have been proposed for gays in general, but the few that have been created are expensive. A leatherfolk retirement home/medical center was proposed by a well-known leather activist in the mid-90s, but collapsed for obscure reasons, I think because the energy behind it couldn't be sustained by those who proposed it. What would it take to create a cost-efficient living community specifically for elders and their (younger) caretakers? The elders would be available as mentors to give workshops, seminars and interviews, counseling and perhaps write to pass on our faerie traditions, history and magick. They would earn their keep. w

[Editors note: In the Winter issue, we hope to feature an article about how the fey community surrounding Short Mountain is responding to elder needs in their community.]

“Night Cactus” by Bear Das

Momma’s Boy (Circa 1976)

by Stephen Washington, #70342956, TRCI82911 Beach Access Road, Umatilla, OR 97882

WhenI got home that day I gave the screen door a good hard yank behind me when I went through it. I wanted every one of my “normal”, well-adjusted family members to know that I was home.

“Psssst, Stephen is home.”

The screen door made an echoing clap sound as it slammed violently shut. It smacked of, and like a cunning beaver’s tail on a placid pond.

I listened. . . and listened some more; but nothing stirred from my angry announcement. Nonplussed, I spun ‘round and bunched my mother’s handwoven welcome mat beneath my muddy shoe. I dismissed my mother’s crafty pride into the corner with a malicious sweep of my foot. Take that you goddamned welcome mat!

I looked down and realized that I was still bleeding. My blood droplets rained on the hardwood floor. From my nose? My lip? The split on my head?

I accosted the screen door again, this time with an ardent “Rrrrrrr!!”, then another violent yank.

[CLAP]

“Stephen? . . Honey, is that you?”

Did Rose Kennedy own a black dress? Of course it was me. It was signature notarized me. My terrible mother knew it was me. She knew no other scabbed-up, bruised, frequently bleeding boy who consistently disturbed her domestic tranquility on purpose, every weekday between quarter and a half past three. She know me when she heard me.

“Stephen Honey?”

I quickly shook the temporary scars from her beloved welcome mat and smoothed it back where she had proudly displayed it. My blood smeared a tell-tale streak to the corner where I kicked the mat. I began to cry again, they were still angry tears.

“Stephen, I’m in the sunroom Honey! . . . come hug your Mumma!”

I trudged through, around and over nothing except lemony furniture polish and annoying ammonia snaffles between the mudroom and my terrible mother. When she saw me she shrieked.

“OH DEAR, NOT AGAIN!!”

I was repulsed to shivers when she hugged me up and constricted my wind.

“They beat me up again Mumma.”

She ran her recently lotioned fingers through

my hair, but only because she wanted to. She cried crocodile tears on me too; I felt the warm, fat drops hit my cheek and roll off. It was all an act.

When she finally succeeded in consoling herself, she kissed my forehead and patted my bum, like always. The same kiss and pit I get when I got home everyday. The same ones I got before I left for school every day. She didn’t face that them boys beat me up again. Completely embarrassing. Absolutely unnecessary. Just plain terrible.

“LET, ME GO!!” (I didn’t say it.)

She put me down and got on her knees. We were nose to nose, her hands all over my face.

“Did you fight back like I showed you?”

I was overcome with an avalanche of forgotten satisfaction; yes I did fight this time! In fact, I didn’t even consider running away??

“They called me a sissy Mumma, and a . . . and aaaaaah . . .”

I quickly collapsed into a blubbering, bleeding

“Seeking the Truth” by artboydancing

bag of bumps and bruises. She hugged me up off my feet again and pressed my leaky swollen face against her squishy breasts. My tears streamed down her freckled chest. My blood stained her silken blouse. She stroked my hair over and over and kept kissing my forehead. It was terrible.

“LET, ME GO!!” (I didn’t say it.)

My mother put me down and led me to the medicine cabinet. I got grown up aspirins, the soapy wash rag treatment, Bactine spray and two Snoopy Band Aids. Finally, she stopped crying.

“Honey, I made you chicken and rice soup and I got a tub of orange sherbet today...your favorite, hurry Stevie before the chicken melts and the sherbet flies away!”

My terrible mother cast me that bouncy brow, rumpled forehead look that always seeks my approval. As soon as she got it she skittered across the hall toward the kitchen. In her childish haste her bosoms taxed the buttons of her blouse as she skipped like a little girl. She wasn’t little though; she was my terrible mother. I only followed her because she made me want to. I’d have been content to ingest dirt and flush it with sucks of puddle water. My soul was simply miserable.

“Stevie, Honey, do you wanna eat on the porch? . . . on the seaside? There’s a really nice breeze.

When would the physical and emotional pain end? Would it ever end? Would I get picked on and beat up my whole life? Why was I so different from the other boys? How could they hate me when I liked them so much? I even liked them after they teased me and beat me up. I still wanted to hug them and kiss them. They called me a “pansy”, a “sissy”, and “queer bait.” Was I really supposed to be “Stephanie” like they teased?

“Will you eat with me Mumma?”

She wrinkled her forehead into rolling waves of

porcelain flesh and bounced her expertly plucked eyebrows at me. I wanted my eyebrows plucked like that. The fragrance of Avon cold cream, intersected by Elizabeth Taylor’s ‘White Diamonds’ engulfed her. I wanted to be engulfed like that. But I still wanted to play in the mud and chase bugs. Why couldn’t I be defined as clearly as the other boys? It just wasn’t fair; I envied my mother. Why couldn’t she just be a smelly old crone?

“If you want me to sit with you, Honey, I must certalinly will. But I only made enough to top your belly. . . I’ll still sit with you Honey, if you want me to?”

I nodded yes, even though I wanted her to go away. Why couldn’t she just say: “No Stephanie, I won’t . . .”, and then say “. . .and as soon as you are done eating, you scrawny little sissy, you are going to prance your pansy ass upstairs and clean your room!”

For one thing, mother cleaned my room spotless for me every single day. She made my bed fresh, every single day. She washed my clothes and folded them away in my highboy, every single day. She even scraped and cleaned away the crispy green smears I lazily applied to the underside of my headboard. She did these things every single day and never told anyone but me. She’d kiss my cheek and pat my bum and whisper in my ear that it was our secret. She was terrible.

“Mumma, when will it stop? . . . when will they stop hurting me? . . will it ever get better for me?”

She pressed her nose to mine and said.

“Honey, it will stop . . it will get better. Being true to your real self hurts sometimes. Happiness requires that you be honest and true to your real self. It might get worse before it gets better, but it will get better. . . I promise you that!”

My mother was terribly right. w

“When I Was a Little Boy” by artboydancing

Attending Gay Men’s Gathering in Scotland with Edward Carpenter Community

by Bob Burnside

As David and I whooshed through the blurred scenery on the recently opened high speed train from London to Edinburgh, I contemplated my Scottish heritage-was I going home? We checked out a couple bars in E town-one had an Eagle poster on the wall & played 70s disco.

A bus ride through increasingly hilly terrain, lush green fields with sheep landed us in Dumfries (attach google map link). We were picked up and taken to Laureston Hall, a castle (with ramparts) connected to a manor house.

The water management of this place is amazing. There is a beautiful stream that runs down the back of the property to the loch at the boat dock. They have dammed the stream, created a pond from which they pipe water down the hill into a generator from which they get electricity for all 30 residents, 60 guests and some left over to sell back to the utility.

A collective ran Laureston and served vegan meals partly from a huge garden, that we volunteer tended. Of the 63 men, we were the only "yanks" so we were instant celebrities. The group was split into seven sub-groups, where we would remain throughout, meeting for an hour each day from wide-ranging discussions to foot massage and walks in the woods.

I think a lot of the guys come from repressive environments where they don't have much chance to scream or act silly, so this week is like a campy, queeny A-bomb explosion-fun to watch and infectious.

There was an initial heart circle where we were introduced to each other, making mental note of whom we wanted to follow up with.

A memorable field trip was to a fortified tower, Threave Castle, a ruin on an island, crumbling walls revealing a prison and fireplace providing the only heat to what must have been a very crude existence. We continued to Threave Gardens with many centuries-old plantings, lush and lovely.

There were several Bridge games going during the week, played in drag, makeup and jewelry.

We were surprised at how many smoke cigarettes, hard for David to quit;

We signed up to present or teach games or run activities during the week. David (nurse) and I

Photographs courtesy Bob Burnisde

(long-time HIV survivor) held a discussion on HIV. I also presented a slide show of pulp paperback covers (a hit).

The big social event was high tea, mid-week. I wore a baby costume including an over-sized nightshirt from the drag room. David was a caveman with fake fur over one shoulder mini and necklace of bones we found in the woods and a rangy wig. We had to make up calling cards so that we could be formally introduced. Many had elaborate costume, some requiring changing during the event. Victorian, scullery maid, formal men's wear, cheap slut were some of the characters. Cucumber sandwiches with no crust and scones with whipped cream were

featured. Later we danced on the lawn to a wind-up Victrola and a scone fight ensued. One of the sporting events was a handbag toss.

Towards the end of the week was the cabaret. Each of our groups had planned a skit to present so it was more communal than the "talent shows" I have seen here with individuals showing off. In fact, it ended with the whole group singing Over the Rainbow and then we learned how to circle dance.

Everyone was very nice to us. It was interesting to get to know individuals and their histories growing up in the British culture. A couple of them have visited us here in the United States. w

It Can Be Like This...Always: The First B.C. Radical Faerie Camp

By Marmot

Now comes the hard part. Removing the nail polish – my glittery blue nail polish. It is the final physical manifestation of my re-entry.

I’m sick of re-entering. I don’t know why I have to leave.

I’m reminded of why I have to leave as I get caught up in the morning rush eastbound on the Trans-Canada from Vancouver to New Westminster. I’m going to work to make the money which allows me to do such things as register for and drive to gatherings; cobble together outfits from Value Village, and buy a rainbow nation of nail polishes. The sun glints off a few remaining specks in my cuticles. I scratch idly at them to get them off, as the cheery announcer on the radio recites the list of accidents, volume, and construction delays snarling the morning commute.

Exiting onto Canada Way in Burnaby, I realise that the beast requires propitiation in the form of gasoline. I stop at a Chevron station, and look up at its exterior wall to see signs offering Van Houtte coffee, a Lottery Centre, Bread Garden comestibles, and a Royal Bank ATM to pay for it all. Sixty-two dollars later, I’m off again.

Four days earlier, I was pulling into the Evans Lake Forest Camp, located just north of Squamish at the end of a long, rough, hilly road winding its way through thickets of beautiful, moss-encrusted maples. At the end of it I found a collection of slightly distressed buildings – albeit, as we discovered, filled with character and positive energy – set within a grassy meadow and surrounded by coniferous forest. Beyond, loomed the still snow-blanketed mountains of the Coast Range. At one end of the

camp, the namesake lake lay placidly, reflecting the tableau like some pastoral motel room painting from the 1950s.

The organising team had visited here before, and we knew of the magic. But as we donned our faewear – me in a thick, flannel lumberjack shirt, silver lamé girl’s halter top, utili-kilt, black motorcycle boots, blue glitter nail polish, and a ten inch machete hanging from a glittery orange belt – I worried. Was this going to be a gong show of truly titanic proportions? I could tell Stitch – resplendent in Boy Scout uniform and leather chaps – was worried, too. But then Luke Warmwater glided up in the back seat of a car chauffeured by Thorn and OH! with the serenity and poise of the Queen Mother visiting a copper mine in the Northwest Territories. “Hello boys!” he chirped, a huge grin on his face. In no time, we had the checkin table ready, covered with gorgeous textiles from Value Village (price tags intact) and the classically Canadian tacky holly-leaf bowl filled with sticky foil-wrapped toffees.

A few minutes later, a car drives up and Tulip hands me a wrapped, rectangular gift, along with a card. Pulling off the paper, I find a wooden box. Opening it, I discover a beautiful First Nations talking stick, carved in the image of a whale – a gift from Full Circle, a faebrother who could not attend. I think I knew then that everything was going to be okay.

We had come with an intention – to let the participants absorb the magic of the land, and the magic of the community we became, and claim the gathering as their own. A mantra of our organising

Tyler, Epick, Dale, Frank, and William

team was, “we provide the vessel: the Faeries will come and fill it.” The first night, we had a marvellously messy opening which climaxed with the emergence of two members of the newly minted Vancouver mission of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Novice Sisters Merry Q. Contrary, aka Morgain Lessloss, and Novice Sister Ethica Slüt, aka Marcus Greatheart. After calling in the spirits of the four cardinal directions, more or less accurately (“they know where they are!” Sister Ethica declared); they anointed each and every one of us with glitter. Then it was off to the dining hall for a meal typical of the gathering – actual camp food: noodles and meat, white crusty rolls, and salad. Afterwards, we roasted marshmallows at the fire pit by the lake, and the staff baked us cookies.

The following three days carved out a unique identity for the B.C. Faerie Camp, which had many distinct features:

Heart Circles

Almost every single person came to heart circle every single morning. The participants, almost by consensus, scheduled nothing else during heart circle time. I think the size of the gathering helped make this possible. It was small enough (67) to be intimate; yet large enough to have a lot going on. The shares were incredible, with guys seamlessly picking up where others left off – creating amazing webs and themes. Every heart circle ended the same way: arms around each other, facing everyone, singing “Dear Friends, Queer Friends.”

Of course the new talking stick was the talisman, and it sat in the centre of the circle, on a blanket, along with a singing bowl which cast the circle and ended it, a bleached rack of ancient deer antlers, and other impromptu altar items. As the circles continued and the shares progressed, I could literally see the woo pouring into that talking stick, and flowing out again into the next Faerie who took it. The stick went home with a member of the Vancouver circle, to be kept for a time by those who need it, and then brought to our local monthly full moon heart circles.

Sacro-eroticism

There were a plethora of workshops on movement and erotic touch alongside activities such as naked oil wrestling and a bondage demo/participation. It was gratifying to see how many people contributed to the community altar in the meditation space – a place where we talked about community, gave and received massages, and practiced yoga

and meditation. I entered at one point to see three solitary guys reading, gazing at the altar, and sitting in the lotus position, eyes closed. In the same space, an hour or so later, someone was leading a group of naked men, paired up, going through Rosen method movements. Later, Sequoia led a demonstration of erotic massage. The next day, a workshop on intentional community was magically interrupted by a snaking line of men, carrying a string on which were tied messages and twigs, which they affixed like a sheet of prayer flags over the altar.

We also created a unique Cuddle Space – an intimately sized room, just adjacent to the main room where we assembled for heart circle – supplied with snacks and furnished with mattresses scavenged from the cabins and covered with cartoon-y sheets loaned by participants. Here, people talked, cuddled, made out, and fucked. In the evenings, an impromptu addition to the cuddle space was created in the next door recreation hall – where we also had heart circle.

The Satyrday Ritual

On Satyrday night, I experienced the most amazing ecstatic dance that I can recall – a ritual of spiritual embodiment that the Vancouver faerie circle has come to know as Moving Authentically. Blindfolded and (mostly) naked, men writhed, jumped, stomped, swirled, and rubbed up against one another to a music mix that seemed timeless and tribal. Afterwards, we discovered one of our number (Hagrid) had lined the path to the lake with paper bag luminaries, at the end of which soft drumming accompanied the greeting of the Lady of the Lake to the communal fire. I will never forget the magic of seeing her and her companion silently sliding their canoe back into Evans Lake illuminated in the orange glow and a light mist; as the gentle beats gradually grew louder and more frenzied, as men got up and circled spontaneously around the growing flames. A ritual totally spontaneous. The following night, there was more music – drums, accordion, maracas, and other musicmakers – which accompanied conversation and the ritual preparation of s’mores.

Newness in the Midst of Continuity

One of the truly delightful features of the B.C.R.F.C was the fact that almost half the participants had never been to a Radical Faerie gathering before. They came mostly from hidden and not-sohidden corners of British Columbia and Washington. Among them included a number of transmen,

whose presence contributed to the unique energy and magic of the gathering. And all newcomers were welcomed with open arms, none more open than the warm and nurturing embrace of Darlene the Ambassador’s Wife, who truly is an ambassador of Faerie woo to all Virgin Faes; as any of us who have attended our first Breitenbush will have experienced. “I’m Darlene the Ambassador’s Wife... and who are you?”

At the same time, our gathering also featured the presence of a faebrother who had been at the first “Gathering of Radical Faeries” in 1979. Sequoia, who had not been to a gathering in many years, came and shared his gentleness, wit, wisdom, and incredible skill in massage and bodywork with us all. For me, one of the most moving experiences of the gathering was when he got up at the Sunday evening K(no)w Talent Show to read James Broughton’s Shaman Psalm, written after the 1980 gathering. He later put the signed copy in the silent auction— and I won it. I plan to read it aloud at next year’s B.C.R.F.C. A new ritual, perhaps?

Quite apart from the unique twist to old rituals and activities, the presence of this “something new” in the northern part of Cascadia inspired a workshop on building long-term, intentional, sustainable Faerie community in British Columbia – in the form of a new sanctuary or some other co-habiting arrangement. A temporary website has now been created, and the conversation continues. We want to live out our ethos every day, being agents of transformation, birthing the “spirit children” of which James Broughton spoke, providing a model of love, hope, and fabulousness in a world daily sinking further into despair, violence, and consumer fetishism.

If I had to sum up the feel of the gathering, I would say that it was animated by two qualities: spontaneity and spiritual intimacy. That everything worked, that themes and rituals emerged which seemed so seamless – so right – was proof of the wonder of Faerie woo. Faerie woo: the powerful, shamanistic magic and energy which the mundane world cynically laughs at, but for those of us on the inside, is proven every time we assemble. Where two or three Faeries are gathered together, there is Tribe. It reminded me of nothing so much as the old “Andy Hardy” movies or “Our Gang” shorts – a bunch of kids spontaneously collaborating to put on a show for the sake of the sheer exuberance of being. And having it turn out perfectly, precisely because of the rough edges and the supposed miscues. This spontaneity was symbolised for me in so many ways: the ritual by the lake, the silent auction (which

we hadn’t really planned on having, and which Doncha Lovit took ably in hand), and the K(no)w Talent Show.

For me, the B.C.R.F.C. gathering epitomized our core tribal value of spiritual intimacy – celebrating the sacred body: our beautiful physical bodies, in their glorious variety of ages, shapes, sizes, genitalia, and abilities; and the Body...the tribe...the community...the “Us”-es (to borrow a word from Harvey Milk)...the Radical Faeries. This unity was symbolised by the beautiful stained glass pendants all the participants got as they entered the Land – a gift of Luke’s.

Whether it was Clover’s gaily decorated pavilion, complete with hammock and blankets, alongside the path to the lake; the dedicated attendance at Heart Circle; the easy familiarity in the Cuddle Space; the sense of being As One in the various rituals; or the coming together of virtually the whole camp to tidy the place up on Monday afternoon, leaving it cleaner than when we found it (to the delight of staff) – the whole event was marked by what we Faes seek to attain on a daily basis: spiritual intimacy with one another.

At the debriefing meeting of the organising committee a few days after the gathering, the decision to mount a second B.C.R.F.C was almost a formality. As Stitch said, “We’d be lynched if we didn’t put it on again!” And I’m glad. A special woo was created that Victoria Day long weekend; and it was confirmed in so many ways. The staff of the Evans Lake Forest Camp, eager to have us back; a bank account in the black with the guarantee of a deposit and Faerie Fee Funds for 2012. Yes, we will be back. We will be welcomed home – once again.

In fact, we never have to leave. It can be like this...always. w

Drawing by Miles J. Santiago-Serano

J.P. Hartsong 1979-2011

by Ampersand Charmpop

Onthe afternoon of June 29th, 2011, in Sunny Valley just miles south of Wolf Creek, when the moon was almost new, our brothersister, whom his mother named Jerome Patrick Cronin, once also known as Luna, once also known as Scarlet, once also known as Spiral, most recently known as JP Hartsong and now known affectionately as Root Sister, or Rootsie, separated his soul from its earthly vessel, and moved along ahead of us. He died as he lived, isolated but not alone. He died as he lived, troubling and tending that spot on the map where the individual leans up against the community, and that spot where the self faces down its shadow. He died as he lived: in unswerving devotion to his magic, to his spellwork, to his beliefs. And those of us he left behind must grieve for his death, but we remember him well, we celebrate his life, and do what we can to reconcile his loss with all he left us.

He came to the Faeries from the South, swept off the road into Wolf Creek Sanctuary in the Winter of 2004, and hit the ground flying: moving deeply into the tribe, putting down roots both actual and metaphorical, immediately immersing himself in our traditions (and the history of the land and community at Wolf Creek in particular,) and almost-spontaneously he was woven through the strangely-consistent yet sublimely-uneven fabric of our Faerie realm, as if he’d been there all along, awaiting himself, learning, teaching, challenging, manifesting. He was a devout altar-keeper, he was a skilled fire-tender, he was a singer, and a drummer: the songs he remembered and the songs he taught and the songs he created will echo endlessly through the valley and through our dreams, and the joyful image of him drumming in a fever, his mouth slack with Spirit, can never be unseen or forgotten.

He brought to all things he touched, and in his last

years even to things he didn’t touch, an intense passion that was his entirely, and sacred. He was devoted to hearing and answering the cries of our Mother Earth and to walking gently and reverently upon Her: he spoke often of every step as sacred, he cried often for Her sorrows, and he prayed always for the return of the Old Ways, when we will live in Harmony with Her, again, not just Surviving but Reaching Around, giving back, re-planting and gathering the berries, and the pinyon, and the camas. These passions took him beyond the Faerie fold and just as deeply into the other communities that held and honored him: the Dance of Legend, the Sacred Hoop, the Reclaiming Witches. And his passion for strengthening the bonds of community through cross-pollination wove these communities along a strong common web, the work of which continues, and will.

His wild cackle, his dry wit, and his subtle winks: these will perhaps be missed the most. But these are just words, just poetry from someone who loves him: his final words remain, too, and speak the clearest.

Among his last written words to our community: “use the heart circles folks. Don't let it stay inside. Love each other - It took me a while to get it.”

Among his last written words to our family: “All I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you.”

Among his last spoken words, to his brother: “I’ll be in the wind.”

And now he’s gone, into the West, to be with the Ancestors, and await us. We will honor his requests, and remember him as he was: as Aries, as Faerie, as Witch, and as Stubborn-Red-Headed-Genius, as Coyote, as Clown, as Song-Catcher, and as Warrior; and we remember him as he is now: in the wind; and we will look forward to that future day when we embrace again. w

J.P. Hartsong by Adrian Chesser

Continues from Page 47

of its kind to trace the history of passionate samesex friendships from ancient to modern times with the deliberate intention of tracing a “Homogenic” history. The book became a token of love among same-sex loving people, discreetly inscribed and given by lovers to their beloved. In some circles it was known as “the bugger’s bible.”

The next book was 1908’s The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Woman which incorporated Carpenter’s two earlier Homogenic pamphlets plus more. It was first translated and released in Germany a year before finding a British publisher willing to bring it out. Once published however, the English edition would go through six printings between publication and 1930, becoming one of the largest selling and best know works on the subject. Published in the USA in 1912, the young Harry Hay found it in a locked case in the LA Public Library in 1922 and read it. It contributed to his ideas about homosexuals; ideas that would eventually lead him to start the Mattachine Society in 1950 and found the modern phase of the Gay Movement.

The 1914 study, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folks: a Study in Social Evolution continued Carpenter’s research into the social roles performed by Intermediate Types in various cultures. He identified several distinct roles and a preponderance of his evidence lead him to explore two in greater

Continues from Page 13

We ended by saying farewell to the Good Grey Poet and our other beloved dead:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

depth: the religious (priest, wizard, witch, inventor of arts and crafts) and the warrior.

Carpenter was to write two more works dealing with same-sex affection. 1924’s pamphlet, Some Friends of Walt Whitman: A Study In Sex Psychology was based on a lecture he gave at the British Society for the Study of Sex-Psychology. He had helped found the Society which was dedicated to addressing sexuality, and especially homosexuality, in an enlightened way. The other work was co-written a year later and explored the bi-sexuality of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly entitled, The Psychology of the Poet Shelley.

Edward Carpenter died a year after his beloved George Merrill, on June 28th, 1929, exactly 40 years to the day before the first rock was thrown at police outside the Stonewall Bar in New York City, sparking the riot that would lead to the ongoing fulfillment of his dream. w

This article was based on the 2008 San Francisco Public Library Exhibit of the same name. To view a web version of the exhibit and for more info on Edward Carpenter go to www.edwardcarpenterforum.org. Primitive Folks: a Study in Social Evolution continued Carpenter’s research into the social roles performed by Intermediate Types in various cultures. He identified several distinct roles and a preponderance of his evidence lead him to explore two in greater depth: the religious (priest, wizard, witch, inventor of arts and crafts) and the warrior.

At Destiny, we have tried very hard to keep Whitman’s spirit with us through our Whitman Gathering, and I hope that this short description might someday serve as a small cultural artifact for some scholar or curious queer looking for clues about such strange disciples as we. May they find what they seek. w

Frame from Mitchell Gould’s To My Soul

Prison Pages

Edited by Myrlin

As I write this column a Hunger Strike continues at the Pelican Bay Secure Housing Unit (SHU) in California. It is an Anti-Torture Strike in California Prisons as reported by Consortiumnews.com in an article by Marjorie Cohn, July 19, 2011. She writes:

The torture of prisoners in U.S. custody isn’t confined to foreign countries. For more than two weeks, inmates at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison have been on a hunger strike to protest torturous conditions in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) there. Prisoners have been held for years in solitary confinement, which can amount to torture. Thousands of inmates throughout California’s prison system have refused food in solidarity with the Pelican Bay prisoners, bringing the total of hunger strikers to more than 1,700. Inmates in the SHU are confined to their cells for 22 ½ hours a day, mostly for administrative convenience. They are released for only one hour to walk in a small area with high walls. The cells in the SHU are eight feet by 10 feet with no windows. Flourescent lights are often kept on 24 hours per day. Solitary confinement can lead to hallucinations, catatonia and even suicide, particularly in mentally ill prisoners. It is considered torture, as journalist Lance Tapley explains in his chapter on American Supermax prisons in The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse.

The thing that strikes me about all of this is that we are led to believe that these Secure Units are only used to hold the worst of the worse, when in fact my experience shows that they are used for many more reasons than that. Jason van Antwerp an inmate in Washington State writes:

I have been in Solitary Confinement which means I am restricted to my cell 23hrs a day. I have been in Solitary since December 20th 2009. Someone tried to rape me and take advantage of me and now they have me in protective custody pending an out of state transfer. Do not know where I’ll go or when. But it has been approved for me to go out of state “Somewhere!”

I am frustrated by stories such as this but perhaps even more with the politics that continues to keep people locked up behind bars. For example, Truthout.org recently reported on “Five Prison Reform Ideas Being Ignored on Capitol Hill.” These include such titles as: Federal Prison Bureau Nonviolent Offender Relief Act of 2011 and Second Chance for Ex-Offenders Act of 2011. All of the bills mentioned in this article would help

reduce the prison population but are not being acted upon. My concern is that the Prison Industrial Complex is fighting to see that they don’t happen. Building prisons is more important [To view the Truthout Article go to the Source www.truth-out/ five-prison-reform-ideas-being-ignored-capitolhill/1310313558.

NPR recently presented a report entitled: Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law by Laura Sullivan. In the article it is made clear that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the American Legislative Reform Council (ALEC) worked hand in glove to influence the state legislators to come up with the bill that was passed. The article shows that the underlying purpose of the Ariz. Immigration laws was to build more prisons in the state and keep them filled with migrants caught up under these laws.

“They talked like they didn’t have any doubt they could fill it,” Nichols said. That’s because prison companies like this one had a plan—a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona’s immigration law.”

I include these references to illustrate the inequities involved in our current political and societal systems as they relate to those who are in prison. Having worked with the Brothers Behind Bars program for almost 8 years now I have come to see how crazy the whole thing is. Prison rules are a minefield unto themselves. One institution will not allow any photos coming in without shirts on. I have had to photoshop shirts onto some pics just to get them in. Some limit the weight of letters to one ounce and on and on it goes.

Occasionally I receive letters from inmates that get me really riled up. For example in a letter I received from Carson Evans, he states, “I’m writing to ask that the editors draw attention to my case.” He then goes on to reference The White House Boys, Marianna, Florida. As I did a Google Search on this title, I found quite a few web sites devoted to the scandal at the reform schools in Marianna and Okeechobee Florida. The more sites I visited and the more stories I read the sicker at heart I became.

Continuing from Carson’s letter: I was sent to the reform school as a kid and they put me in the dangerous cottage called “Jefferson Cottage.” There the staff use to wake the boys up in the middle of the night and raped us and beat our butts until I bled. There’s more sadness to this story. I love my Gay

Prison Pages

Edited by Myrlin

folk and the lawyers who have worked on the case. There were over 400 boys abused and raped with a leather barber strap. One boy died in a clothes drier. The case is in the Circuit Court of the Sixth Judicial Circuit in and for Penellas County, State of Florida Civil Division. Case No.: 08-19597CI-19

I have a copy of the Case and am horrified by what I have read. To contact Carson Evans, he can be reached at: Carson Evans #G-100196, Santa Rosa Correctional Institution, 5850 E. Milton Rd, Milton, FL 32533.

Another incident is reported in a letter from Michael Heller which references some of the mistreatment of Gay inmates by staff. I believe his reference to the chuck hole is the hole in the cell door through which meals are passed.

Hello, I transferred prisons from ________ to _____. I was gay bashed by a guard, who discovered I was gay from reading my mail – out loud – to other guards and prisoners. When I was handcuffed, he pulled my arms through the chuck hole, twisting my fingers backwards, then when I said I’d report him, he opened the door, slapped me, then pushed me on the floor, stomping with his heavy boot on my throat, his friend stepped on my knee. He called me a “faggot” and “sissy” and threatened that I wasn’t going

to make it home alive—I’d never see my outdate. I reported him and he wrote a ticket claiming I pulled his head through the chuck hole, scratching his head. I had tons of scratches and bruises that the doctor and my mother saw (at visit). I was found guilty despite several eye witnesses whose names I gave –the adjustment committee claimed I didn’t request witnesses and they didn’t write down anything I said about the guard gay bashing me. I wrote everyone I could, but they all called me either a liar or crazy. My Mom spoke to the warden 3 times, face to face about continued harassment by the guard and his openly anti-gay friends. He wrote ticket after ticket. The only one that heped me was a mental health worker ______ ______ (I suspect he was gay too.) When the guard pushed me and another tripped me, they called me “faggot.” I wrote Internal Affairs with no response. The Counselor of Seg refused to talk to me or answer questions. Everyone else was given showers, but me, they claimed I “refused.” The read my mail out loud, calling me names. They stole hundreds of dollars of food out of my box and stole mail and magazines from me. With the change in location, I am OK now. I love the food, the change of scenery. I have my fan, books and mail. I’m OK.

Some of the men you will meet in

Azteca Monica (NM) Tim Cook (KY) Mike Diffendorf (FL) Bradley Hixon (CA)

BBB.

Earl Everingham 413556 Racine Correctional Institution PO Box 900, Sturtevant, WI 53177-0900

“Did You Ever?”

Did you ever love someone and know he didn’t love you?

Did you ever feel like crying but saying “What good would it do?”

Did you ever look into his eyes and say a little prayer? And whisper, “Lord, I love him but I know he’ll never care.”

Never fall in love, My Friend, you’ll find it doesn’t pay…

It only causes broken hearts and happens every day.

Did you ever wonder where he’s at each night?

Or if he’s even being true? Moments with him will make you happy but you’ll find you’re really blue.

Love is grand.. the price you pay is high…And if you had a choice between life and death, you’ll find you’d rather die. Never fall in love, My Friend, you’ll be hurt before you’re through Cause you see, My friend, I know… Because I fell in love with You!

Donald (Donny) Chance 236705 Northwest Correctional Complex 960 State Route 212 Tiptonville, TN 38079

Attention Very Important

If you have been to prison, are still in prison or simply know someone who is currently in in prison who is Gay, Bi-sexual or Transgender, I am writing a book titled: “Inside the Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender Community of male prisons.

I am looking to publish in this book stories which express what life was like being GBT and in prison. Other stories I will accept are very inspiring stories of living a gay lifestyle, coming out and positive advice you would give to the incarcerated GBT inmate.

I welcome stories of rape, child molestation and drug addiction but only if they have a positive ending, meaning the victim who must be GBT can express how he overcame such horrible acts.

Please send your submissions and photos to: Rodney Wrice D-94833 1T-142L, 5150 O’Byrnes Ferry Road, Jamestown, CA 95327 or Post them on my page at: RodneyRockhard.com/myspace

Michael Sparks 575612 Stiles Unit, 3060 FM 3514 Beaumont, TX 77705-7635

Freeman Payne 302858 Farmington Correctional Center 1012 W. Columbia Farmington, MO 63640-2902

Zuni Mountain Sanctuary

the skinny.....

SUBMISSIONS

We accept submissions via U.S. Mail, or email at submissions@rfdmag.org. When sending electronic files by either method, save the text files as an MS Word Doc, Rich Text (RTF), or Simple Text. Images should be high resolution (minimum one mega-byte (1 MB) in TIFF or JPG. Your work may also be used on our website.

WRITING

We welcome your submission. Suggested length is 500 to 2,500 words. We will carefully edit. If you intentionally mean to vary a spelling, let us know. We will contact you if your submission is selected. Contributors receive one copy of the issue in which their work appears and a second copy upon request. Your may also be used on our website.

ART

We always need fresh drawings and photos. Drawings should be quality black and white. Photos can be color or black and white. Original digital camera files work well. Original artwork should be scanned at 300 dpi or higher. Line art should be scanned at 1200 dpi. We may crop your photo to fit our format.

DUE DATES

Advertising Rates

October 20th for Winter, January 20th for Spring, April 20th for Summer; July 20th for Autumn.

ADVERTISING

For rates, contact us by phone or email or get it from our website.

BACK ISSUES

Recent issues are $7 postage paid. Many earlier issues are available. Call us or email us at business@rfdmag.org for availability.

COPYRIGHT

RFD is copyrighted. Credited material remains the property of the contributor. Non-credited material may be republished with attribution.

MAILING

RFD is published quarterly and mailed around the Solstice or Equinox of the quarter. Second class mail can take a while. Let us know if you have not received your copy after a month. Second class mail is NOT forwarded. Let us know if you move.

Our basic advertising rate is $4.00 per square inch per issue. For repeat issues we offer discounts of 5% for two issues, 10% for three issues, and 15% for a full year (four issues).

If you do not have a prepared ad, the RFD staff can prepare one for you from your photographs and text. We charge $75/hr for layout.

Prepared ads should be provided in PDF format or high resolution JPG or TIF (300dpi or 500KB minimum file size). We will scan ad artwork for a fee of $20. RFD is not responsible for poor reproduction due to low resolution artwork. Following are some examples to help you size your ad.

RFD PO Box 302 Hadley, MA 01035-0302

Subscriptions: subscriptions@rfdmag.org

Submissions: submissions@rfdmag.org

Advertising: advertising@rfdmag.org

We accept advertising for products or services that we feel may be of positive value to our readers. Repeating ads will be re-run as given unless new copy is provided by closing date. New ads coming in late will be run next issue unless otherwise stated. Full payment for ads is required by closing date for ad to appear in the new issue.

“Ritual Fashion Disaster”

It’s spring time, the start of the gathering season, which means time to get out your drag: the old, the new, the borrowed, the true.

We at RFD thought it was high time to celebrate the fabulous frocks in which we cavort and play and trannifest amongst ourselves and to the world at large. After 30 years of its publication, this is the first issue dedicated to Fey Fashions!

Call it drag, call it gender-fuck; how do you transform through what you wear? How does the outermost layer of yourself inform all about your innermost self/ves. What transformations and redefinitions of self have you experienced by what you wear— where and when and how?

Given Jack Smith’s precept that the costume creates the character in his dramas, how has your drag explored and expressed the theater of you— whether in ritual, on sanctuary lands, or in city streets?

And now that we are a full color rag—send us your best images as well as words.

a reader created gay quarterly celebrating queer diversity