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My Response to Karen Ocamb’s News Report and Blog Commentary of February 2009 Attacking the Protesters of Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson’s 2/15/09 One Archives Presentation on the Radical Faeries’ 30th Anniversary
by Chris Kilbourne
In this statement, I would like to respond to various points raised in a Frontiers in L.A. news report and associated blog commentary written by prominent LGBT journalist and news editor Karen Ocamb that attacked a protest I participated in on February 15, 2009 against a presentation on the 30th anniversary of the Radical Faerie movement given by gay community figures Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson. Because I believe important issues are raised in the matter of the protest event and Karen’s handling of it that require a certain expository care to realistically convey, it seems appropriate first to relevantly frame the situation and context under discussion, and then accordingly respond to Karen’s attacks more specifically in terms of those significant issues and concerns at stake for gay people and our future.
To start with, let me explain that this is the second piece I am writing as a member of the Gay Psyche Politics Collective, which is a group of gay-centered activists dedicated to the next, inwardly-oriented psychological stage of gay liberation as a new and key political effort both individually and communally needed in an oddly-stagnating age of seemingly triumphant assimilationism in order to justly achieve a more completely successful gay freedom, love, self, community and creative contribution to the world at large. This visionary homosexual emancipatory comprehension of an ideological and practical alternative to naïve gay assimilation has been inspired in large part by long-time gay psychological activist Mitch Walker, co-founder of the Radical Faerie movement and originator of gay-centered Jungian theory and practice.
The Collective sponsoring this blog originally came together to demonstrate against the talk on the Faeries at the One National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles by Don Kilhefner, co-founder of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center and Jungian community psychologist, and Mark Thompson, well-known gay editor and writer, in order to bring attention to their questionable revisionist efforts, as detailed below, to nullify Mitch’s historical leadership in, and the critical importance of, the better development of gay-centered psychological awareness for the future sake of enhanced gay liberation success starting with the Radical Faeries and thereafter. Indeed, Don’s and Mark’s partisan censoring of Mitch is particularly disturbing because, many years ago, they were both strongly allied with him. In fact, the Faerie movement, the first indigenous gay spiritual organization of modern times, was started (along with Harry Hay, principal founder of the original Mattachine Society in 1950) by Mitch and Don in 1979, and it was Mitch who then invited his good friend Mark to soon join them. Don and Mitch then went on in 1982 to start up the still-functioning Treeroots, Inc., an educational non-profit dedicated to forging a psychological approach in the progressive activist matter of better addressing Gay Spirit realization, a strategic direction they both at the time strongly felt was badly missing in the Radical Faeries to that movement’s detriment. The current controversy over Faerie history developed after Don resigned from Treeroots in 1994, going on to create the organization Tumescence, then the Gay Men’s Medicine Circle, and now 100 Gay Men. As for Mark, he was very closely involved with Mitch (although merely polite and somewhat distant with Don) for many years in the Radical Faeries and Treeroots, until a painful controversy about his own conduct erupted in the later ’90s, and he then also broke his association with Mitch. I know about this course of events because I have myself been activist partners with Mitch since 1979, and was also for many years in close personal and organizing relationships with both Don and Mark beginning in 1980 or a bit earlier.
But you would not learn anything of this history by hearing or reading anything Don has been saying or writing that I have heard about or seen, such as his regular column for Frontiers in L.A., the local LGBT newsmagazine, or his various articles in White Crane, the gay spirituality quarterly, wherein he incorporates many of Mitch’s pioneering ideas including a Jungian psychological approach to gay activism (albeit in a superficial, watered-down manner), but never credits Mitch there or in any of his other public pronouncements. Further, Don additionally attempts to erase Mitch from the gay history record in his bios that have regularly appeared in his brochures and articles, where he names himself along with Harry Hay as co-founders of the Radical Faeries, consistently failing to appropriately include Mitch. And then this past year, he published his three-part series on the history of the Radical Faeries (Frontiers, Jan. 27, Feb. 24, 2009; Frontiers in L.A., Mar. 25, 2009) where the only passing reference to Mitch or his contributions was that he was a marginal player who got into an argument one day with Harry and left, when in fact Mitch was in an ongoing intimate friendship with Harry from which had sprung the Faerie movement to begin with two years before Don was even brought in to help organize, and Mitch was throughout those early years a fully- involved member of the core organizing circle with Harry, Don and a small handful of others, in actuality until Mitch and Don in concert together publically resigned from the founding group in the summer of 1981.
This dispute over the gay past is not at all a mere matter of ego personalities or petty priorities. As Don’s historical revisions kept showing up, I became increasingly upset about what looked like a concerted effort on his part to badly distort how it seemed to me the Faerie movement came together and operated early on, and in the course of that malicious re-editing to officially eliminate Mitch’s ongoing and crucial participation, contributions and ideas from the record while covertly benefitting from many of them. I personally care very deeply about gay history and what the Radical Faerie movement was founded to explore, and in particular about the psychologically-oriented approach to gay liberation Mitch has cultivated over many years starting from even before the Radical Faeries, for which I accord him much respect in demonstrating such a dedicated perseverance in that neglected and very needful direction, as I have been inspired thereby to in turn devote my own life to also putting into better emancipatory practice some of the powerfully-useful conceptions he has forged, such as the formulation of gay-centered inner work, which refers to the enfranchising activist effort to become valuably gayer through homosexual self-awakening psychological means, what amounts to a profoundly-spiritual subjective quest that I believe takes us marvelously beyond any current gay liberational consciousness, moves us innovationally into the gay psyche’s more depthful contradictions and infinite alchemical possibilities, and because of that, into a new kind of interpersonal and community politics as well. So for Don to in essence erase Mitch from the historical record, it seems to me, is really about getting rid of the crucial ideas and practices Mitch stands for and that he brought to the Faeries and our community generally, while replacing all this with Don’s watered-down, uncredited versions deceptively framed in a bowdlerized activist history, to which, as you can see, I am having a very strong reaction.
After Don’s first article on the Faeries appeared in January 2009, along with an announcement that he would soon give a public presentation in L.A. on the subject, it became apparent to me that a rare opportunity was being provided to bring some powerful issues out into the public sphere more openly in an unusually-specific way, so on that appreciative basis I then wholeheartedly participated in planning and attending the subsequent demonstration against Don and Mark’s presentation, and also wrote an associated statement wherein I described in particular how my personal experiences with Don over the past 30 years had helped inform and shape my current understanding of gay-centered psychological theory and practice (see “Chris Kilbourne’s Protest Statement,” in this blog’s March 2009 archive).
At the Protest Event
One of the demonstrators’ basic intentions was to educate those who would be attending the One Archives presentation as well as others who might hear of the event, that there was another and importantly contrary perspective to Don Kilhefner’s on the Radical Faeries’ origin, history and purpose, particularly in terms of what it means to be gay today—and that this other view, associated with Mitch Walker, concerns the sense of a gay-centering moral imperative about deepening same-sex-loving psychological integrity through taking better cognizant responsibility for the personal gay unconscious as the next activist step of greatest significance in the worthy actualizational project of coherently seeking the best possible homosexual emancipation, practically and spiritually. And what better way to express and illustrate the progressive ideas of this contrary and otherwise unmentioned position on Faerie history than through applying them in a public setting, analytically, to the actual historical situation and personalities involved in the current controversy while the “official” version mutilationally unfolded inside the One Archives hall?
For me, it was a little scary going to a public activist event where we had no idea how we might be received, but as it turned out, about two dozen people responded to our call to protest Don’s manipulative whitewashing of Radical Faerie history and the powerful ideological struggles invoked in and over that story, and almost everyone entering the building appeared to be receptive to, curious about or at least tolerant of what we were trying to do there. Most took our handouts, which included a substantial statement by longtime gay activist and organizer Wendell Jones, my own pronouncement and a collective explanation of our protest group’s mission (see “Wendell Jones’ Protest Statement,” “Chris Kilbourne’s Protest Statement” and “Original Protest Statement” respectively in the March 2009 archives of this blog). Only one person arriving that I was aware of was openly critical, saying as he passed us, “eating our own again, are we?” It seems to me that question should have been more appropriately directed to Don and Mark. On the other hand, another entering fellow was quite excited to meet “the one who threw the fruit salad” (see my previous statement), telling me that as a young Faerie he had experienced Harry Hay as so dominating towards him that for a long time he was badly turned-off altogether by the Radical Faeries and wouldn’t have minded throwing something himself at the time.
Some people, once most of the audience was inside the Archives building, were apparently distracted or perhaps disturbed by our enthusiastic presence, singing, dancing and chanting as we were on the sidewalk out front, because soon enough the open door of the building in the direction facing the demonstration was firmly closed. Although no one in attendance directly confronted those of us outside, I found out later that during the question and answer period, when a protester who had gone within angrily raised his voice in response to Mark’s and Don’s dissatisfying answers to his equitably-put question as to why the two of them were in such key ways leaving Mitch Walker out of their presentation on Radical Faerie history, some audience members expressed their annoyance with the question by clapping when Don answered with a dismissive cliché: he, Don, was merely stating his own “truth” about what had happened historically, while others also have a right to “their truth” as well, and anyway, he didn’t see where there was any problem to begin with. It developed into a bit of a heated exchange between Don and the demonstrator (captured on video; see “Schism in Faerieland, Parts I-III” in this blog’s April 2009 archive) that the One Archives President, Joseph Hawkins, then stopped by offering our protest group an equivalent opportunity to present our position on Faerie history at a later date (which did occur in November of 2009).
I had wondered how Don and Mark would handle our action and its themes that day at the Archives, and I have since learned by listening to an audio recording of their entire presentation, that, for example, Don, as expected, never even mentioned that in reality, after an initial “honeymoon” period, he began to experience painfully increasing difficulty relating to Harry during the early Radical Faerie days due to Harry having a strongly-domineering personality, nor did he say anything about how he’d come to learn from Mitch back then to view this vexing problem with a gay psychological understanding. Neither did he talk about the negative implications for the Radical Faeries that importantly-activated, psychologically-based troubles occurring in the foundational organizing circle, most notably around the big problem with a bullying Harry, were never adequately addressed, and that he, Don, became quite aware of and involved exactly with these very concerns to the culminating extent of publically resigning from the original circle together with Mitch in notable protest against Harry’s persistent refusal to take any adequate responsibility for his rampant acting out of his own dark psychology, particularly as the leading figure of the movement, and how it was that this refusal was poisonously contaminating otherwise-auspicious Faerie organizing efforts through Harry’s subsequently unchecked need to continue selfishly controlling and dominating activist situations he was in, a badly-compromising arrangement which was making it ethically unbearable for Don to continue being fraternally involved at all with Harry as he didn’t want to continue contributing to what he had risibly come to all- too-clearly recognize as a disgustingly-hypocritical charade.
As I mentioned, I was once close friends and colleagues with both Don and the other presenter that protest day at the Archives, Mark Thompson, separately and together, for many years (as well as with Harry to a lesser extent), and even though I have not substantially related to either one in awhile now, I am sure Don and Mark knew very well why we were demonstrating against their fraudulence that Sunday, so their craven avoidance of the dark side of the Radical Faerie scene in their rose-colored presentation was particularly impressive although consistent, given the extra challenge to stubbornly ignore the pressing situational message of our persistent chanting outside, as both Don and Mark then blithely proceeded to do. Only when they were more directly confronted during the Q&A period by one of the demonstrators who had gone inside, did they at all address the matter, with Don saying he didn’t understand then and he didn’t understand now what the ruckus was all about, and Mark then piously backing him up. It’s very hard for me to see how Don’s answer can be anything but baldly disingenuous, given that he was once deeply and extendedly engaged himself in that same kind of “ruckus,” i.e., those key tactical matters involving effective exposure of the disturbing gay unconscious that Mitch introduced him to during their years of close comradeship. There are many old letters Mitch has from Don that I have seen which clearly show Don at the time coming to understand these gay psychodynamic and interpersonal affairs quite well (see “Doug Sadownick’s Statement, Part I” in this blog).
Overall, I think we demonstrators responsibly mounted a valuable public event thoughtfully aimed to fairly express seriously important ideas otherwise being manipulatively erased and passive-aggressively attacked inside the hall we were standing in front of. I expected some people would be disturbed, even though we didn’t disrupt anything. Arguably, our presence actually spiced things up into a more meaningful experience for all involved, and provided a depth of historical context that otherwise would have been completely and detrimentally absent. And besides, some disturbance has a necessary part in the journey of gay-self realization anyway. Complacency resulting from sufficient achievement of prior developmental steps, a common trap, is always the enemy of any better change, particularly pro-homosexual change emerging out of a vicious heterosexist historical context still influentially possessing an awful lot of noxious cultural momentum.
And speaking of which, after that Sunday at the One Archives, the Don Kilhefner faction was not about to let our colorful and thoughtful educational demonstration go by without subsequently raising the ante.
Karen’s Frontiers in L.A. News Article
Within just a few days of the protest, journalist and news editor of Frontiers in L.A., Karen Ocamb, was able to get an article by her published in that week’s issue (March 8, 2009) reporting on Don and Mark’s presentation as having been “marred” by the demonstration. She focused on “a handful of audience members [having] accused Dr. Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson of ‘erasing’ therapist Mitch Walker from history,” and singled out “therapist Dr. Doug Sadownick of the LGBT specialization in clinical psychology at Antioch University in Los Angeles” as the only named protester. In the next paragraph she described Don’s presentation, contrary to the demonstrators’ alleged accusation, as having included Mitch in its account of Radical Faerie history, contradicting the protesters’ apparent position, and thereby suggestively impugning them as having acted in bad faith, actually, with malicious intent. The article ends with “During the Q&A, several of the protesters who were in the audience of about 100 angrily shouted at Kilhefner before ONE said they would host a talk featuring Walker.” From Karen’s writing, it’s not clear why the protesters “angrily shouted” at Don. If their problem was so minor that it only involved whether one relatively-unknown individual was misrepresented in the distant history of some obscure organization, it would then seem that those demonstrating were indeed eccentric, cultish, even crazy. On the other hand, that some people mustered the will to speak out against Don and Mark’s implacable and meanspirited manipulativeness could suggest that something more important might have been occurring there than mere partisan or infantile acting out, something actually key to the whole matter that seems to have never even entered the reporter’s supposedly conscientious mind to even slightly consider.
Karen’s reductionistic handling of our complaint about “erasing” Mitch, subtly enhanced by her careful rendering of Don’s and Doug’s professional degrees but omitting that Mitch Walker is just as much a “Doctor” as the other two, implying a lesser status, manipulatively encourages a fundamental misperception that this disagreement is about some kind of petty personality struggle or revenge act by disgruntled factional malcontents. Karen could have at least mentioned our actual concern, which she did not in her news report, that Don’s minimizing or trivializing (more technically accurate than “erasing”) of Mitch’s importance in the formation of the Radical Faeries really points to a deeper problem that potentially affects all gay and lesbian people: how the unconscious gay psyche is not now and was not back then in forming the Faerie movement being sufficiently addressed and how that failure to adequately confront and struggle to better resolve the inevitable psychological scarring incurred by all gay people who must grow up in a violent heterosexist world, detrimentally affected what happened with the Faeries and continues to so affect each gay person and the community at large to this day. It is this deeper problem, the seemingly intractable but polluting difficulty of that persistent gay psychology related to what Jungians call the shadow, the morally-dark and rejected side of the conscious ego personality, that our protest group charges is irresponsibly misaddressed by Don in his public work overall, not just when talking about Radical Faerie history. Regarding this complaint, Don’s presentation at the One Archives event indeed, for all intents and purposes, did “erase” Mitch’s important contributions and ideas, including those about the liberational problem of the gay shadow and its gay-centered activist confrontation, which, for a period of time, Don had deeply respected, admired and followed, as can be seen in his many caring and detailed letters to Mitch from the early years of their longtime activist collaboration.
In her news article, it would seem that Karen intended through the avoidance of any adequate contextualizing, among other sly maneuvers, to deligitimate the protesters, to make them appear merely unreasonable, immature or worse, and, in this noxious vein, that of the dissidents there she would publicly name only Doug along with his professional livelihood in association with her smeared rendering suggests a particularly-vengeful intention to connect Doug detrimentally with unbecoming, even unprofessional, behavior, an immoral assault on him I will return to towards the end of this discussion.
Beginning to Look at Karen’s Blog Commentary
At the end of her Frontiers in L.A. article about the demonstration is a link to a blog posting where Karen declares herself free even of pretending to maintain journalistic standards. She writes, “So thank god for blogs! I've had an itch to tell a particular story for some time now—but because I'm personally involved, it never seemed appropriate....” Evidently it’s OK now, as she then proceeds to scurrilously discredit me and my friends, focusing her most extensive mal-attention again on Doug.
It’s interesting to note here for the purpose of contextually integrating the various facets of the larger matter presently under discussion, that Karen’s malign animus against Doug somewhat parallels the even more-involved situation between Don and Mitch, where, like Karen did for so many years with Doug in an even more passive-aggressive way (see Doug’s blog statement herein), Don has sought to minimize, denigrate and outright disappear Mitch, a good previous friend, when possible due to what I believe was and is Don’s intimately defensively-held resentment in particular due to Mitch’s queerly-persistent confrontational approach within gay activist contexts to more effectively dealing in as direct a way as possible with the ubiquitous problem of peoples’ unremitting and irresponsible acting-out of hidden shadow issues, when this included Don himself personally. That is, I believe Don had something very disturbing in his own psyche which implacably needed protective hiding when it was high time for that otherwise very-secretive area to itself be fairly honestly accounted for interpersonally in the principled gay psychological context Mitch and Don were attempting to liberationally establish, a fiercely inappropriate, regressive attitude of deep and mean insincerity which it seems to me has firmly held Don in its malignant grip til today. Karen similarly persistently sought to covertly oppose and erase Doug in all ways possible after he apparently tried to confront Karen in late 1993 on what he felt was her unconscious acting-out of her internalized homophobia on the dying Michael Callen, their mutual friend.
In her Frontiers in L.A. news article, as can be seen, Karen betrays her own ethical standard, that of being able “to tell someone else's story as truthfully and as unencumbered by ego as possible,” because a problematic bias prevents her from in any way fairly conveying the viewpoint of the protesters. In her blog commentary she does quote and then address several excerpts from the Original Protest Statement (which had before the event been emailed to her along with the other two protest documents cited above, among various other figures in the community), but she cites only ideational fragments that make it relatively easy for her to then mockingly discredit them. For example, she pulls out two paragraphs from that Statement discussing the endemic ethical failure situationally entailed for the Radical Faerie movement historically when destructive unconscious issues would get interpersonally acted out irresponsibly and self-defeatingly in Faerie organizing and at consequent events with the tacit approval of the collective, to which Karen, as if swatting a fly, derisively quips, “Huh? He goes on about ‘the shadow’ as if everyone knows what the hell he's talking about.” Here Karen shows off a sort of “know-nothing” disdain for the moral and political notion of sufficiently learning to take fair responsibility for one’s own subjective psychological problems otherwise maliciously active interpersonally, as the vitally-necessary transformative ingredient in effectively seeking better gay liberation individually and collectively, which has been Mitch’s basic activist message for several decades now. In her thoughtless mocking of the hard work entailed in responsibly owning the gay shadow personally, organizationally and community-wise, not to mention the ethical imperative thereto, Karen takes up a strong reactionary leadership role that implicitly upholds gay psychological irresponsibility.
Karen’s View of Me and My Friends
In her blog commentary, Karen focuses on Doug to a great extent, then Mitch and Wendell. I am mentioned by name only once, as being a “member of Mitch’s clan,” who along with Mitch and Doug, had given Mark Thompson “trouble” some years back. I am curious as to why she never refers to my own protest statement (sent to her along with the other documents cited above) where I present very personal and quite intimate, experientially-based knowledge of Don’s compromising behavior to which I apply a gay-centered psychological analysis, an understanding, by the way, which I also apply to my own life as well. Could it be that she couldn’t find a way to dispute the embarrassing truthfulness of what I wrote about Don and Harry Hay as well, so she just ignored it?
What she does claim is that I, along with the rest of a “small group,” a “little band of followers,” “cult-like” (according to Don Kilhefner), so violent (according to Mark Thompson) that we will “come after your dogs”—“were viciously attacking” Harry Hay and had “inundated” Mark “with nasty letters attacking his character and stuffed [them] in his mailbox at home and in mailboxes at” the graduate school he was attending at the time. Also according to her, at a store signing event for a new book by Mark, we ex-friends of his “shouted shadow questions that left Mark so frightened, he and Malcolm were hastily snuck out the back by Betty Berzon and Terry De Crescenzo.” She adds that we “had so terrorized Mark that he refused to do any publicity for ‘Gay Body’—and that essentially killed his book career,” showing that we were and are a more malign social threat than just “some jerks making nuisances of themselves.” Finally, after thoroughly invalidating us personally and our demonstration conceptually and morally, she ends her statement by summarily calling us “perennially petulant Peter Pans who seem to delight in tearing down others—in the name of therapy.”
In all this Karen makes it seem, as she had in her news article, as if I and my friends were obscure interlopers or disgruntled minor players in Harry’s, Don’s and Mark’s activist careers and lives, our controversial actions nothing but mean and idiosyncratic perpetrations on innocent movement heroes, when actually the story is quite different in so many basic ways, as I have begun to enumerate and as I will now endeavor to highlight more of in terms of my own personal experience.
History as I’ve Lived It
Speaking of my own experience, let me share with you here that, as I write this, I have to struggle deeply with how my own violent psychological issues want to affectively poison my ability to write functionally, by for example critically questioning whether some incompetent like me should even try to compose anything at all. I’m now feeling frightened that those aggressive forces still subjectively active will trap me in some mind-fuck way such that I will wind up being a violent hypocrite whatever I do manage to say. Now I feel disoriented and dazed because I want to express myself sanely and in respect to Gay Spirit yet instead get more bogged down in fuming toxic shame about my own inferior shadow self, no longer at all able to effectively address Karen’s attack on its merits. At this point I want to be open and non-defensive with what Karen (or Don or Mark) might critically see in me, yet then it could easily become all about my struggles with my own ugly features. I now sense the humiliating pull of that badly-wounded kid I once was, who crushingly experienced terrible rejection because I couldn’t conform to impossible and endless standards of social uniformity and straightness imposed by my family and others. Here I would like to restitutively describe how I ongoingly work with these shadow issues of mine, and that I have thus so proceeded for the last 30 years, and yet I’m then afraid I will still be harshly judged for failing to resolve all my own unfinished family business and infantile trauma during this seemingly-ample time. On the other hand, one would hope that, after twelve years of my own personal therapy as well as ongoing journaling, meditation, self-processing and confrontation by my activist friends, I have indeed made some progress in my effective responsibility for and self-healing of my own psychological violence, although it is of course an ongoing developmental struggle for me as for anyone trying to take better care on this personal moral level, which can only be an endeavor pursued but never entirely completed, as we are all imperfect mortal beings.
With that revealing acknowledgement of the ongoing reality of my own personal psychology in mind, I would certainly like to note here that integrating my inner contradictory hostility rather than acting it out irresponsibly myself, is a most seriously respected, ongoing challenge and development for me personally. It is apparent to me that back in the historical situations I am referencing here, I was considerably less related to and accordingly more easily tempted to defensively project out my own unintegrated aggressive impulses, lending a certain credence to criticisms of some of my more intense interpersonal and group actions at those times as about me being to some extent irresponsibly mean or unduly forceful. However, I would maintain that even when that was indeed the case, it does not nor can it ever justify or excuse any other involved party’s own unwarranted violence.
That’s enough attention to my shadow for the moment in this discussion, because I do want to return to Karen’s blog statement. Here I would like to more specifically show how the provocative behaviors of me and my friends that Karen finds so dastardly were not actually of a foul nature or intention, but rather were justly undertaken and caringly guided by a reputable Jungian psychological notion attemptedly appreciated in an activist homosexual manner, the principled idea of honestly and fully confronting the obstructionist gay shadow intra- and interpersonally, which is, then, in essence about sincerely trying to better constructively address the more difficult maneuverings of gay psychological defenses and resistances within ourselves and, where possible, with each other and in the community. Don and Mark were both fully active in efforting that challenging psychological forefront as a gay liberationist ideal for some years, but as described above, conflicts arose and so I would like to go more into how those conflicts, here in particular with Mark, developed and finally erupted out into a more public sphere, that sphere which then included the protest against Don and Mark’s 2009 One Archives event. I hope that looking additionally at my own experience and understanding of the persons and situations involved can shed further light on what has been and is going on regarding pertinent claims of historical factuality as well as the related psychological and political issues.
Overlooked in Karen’s mutilated history, it was actually Mitch’s ongoing relationship with Harry, as described by Stuart Timmons in his book, The Trouble with Harry Hay (1990), that formed the core of what then soon enough became the Radical Faerie movement after they first met in 1976. Instead following Don’s more recent lead, Karen portrays Mitch as a mere historical footnote of no lasting presence or importance. And where Karen makes it seem that those of us now associated with Mitch’s ideas were ill-willed troublemakers, as I’ve mentioned, it’s actually the case that both Don and Mark were for a long while themselves devoted fans of the particular approaches Mitch innovated, and of particular note here, Mitch’s gay activist tactical use of modulated confrontational maneuvers as legitimate methods for at times appropriately addressing badly acted-out feelings and other rampantly-unrestrained psychological issues oppressively operating interpersonally and in group organizational settings. Mitch first introduced in the early Radical Faerie context the since-then slowly-gathering impetus to more directly address the ongoing pernicious problem of the repressed gay unconscious, of the lingering, internalized homophobic effects from a millennium’s worth of vicious sociocultural stigmatization and murderous scapegoating, as an essential activist factor in best realizing liberatory Gay Spirit, and since then he has worked continuously to help bring about a more-embodied gay fulfillment of contemporary homosexual sacredness that he strongly feels could not be seriously better realized without such difficult ongoing confrontation with those otherwise hidden, aggressive, defended-against, inferior-feeling parts of the personal same-sex-loving psyche, the gay shadow. Thus, where Harry is considered to have contributed to the modern gay movement through his ongoing organizing prowess and ideas, and Don can be seen to be an important local gay community organizer, and as Mark is notable as a significant gay editor and writer, so too Mitch can rightfully be regarded as the originator of gay-centered psychology, the comprehension and psychotherapy of subjectivity from a homosexual point of view, an arguably vitally-necessary ingredient in the more beneficent development of better-enhanced gay freedom, consciousness, spirit and soul today and into the future.
Moreover, Mitch most certainly, and I, Doug and Wendell Jones to lesser and varying degrees, were close, at times very close, with both Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson, as well as with Harry Hay. We were all of us deeply mindful of and committed to the long-term work of justly attaining the fullest gay liberation. Thus, the ongoing political community involvement of the demonstration organizers, while controversial at times, has been anything but minor or meaningless. With that reasonably-appreciative sensibility in mind, I would like to go into how some of the incidents Karen badly slants to concoct such a negative picture of those who had protested Don and Mark’s talk, will be seen in a very different light when fair-mindedly contextualized within the larger unfolding history topically entailed, and in this statement most pertinently how that gay history was experienced through my own personal participation.
Let me tell you more about that. I first met Mitch Walker right before the initial Radical Faerie gathering, which I did not attend it, and I soon thereafter met Mark, who was then Mitch’s good friend. I had just turned 21 when on July 1, 1979, Mitch moved into the apartment right above mine in Berkeley, California. I was coming out and pretty confused about many things, although I felt a strong passion for seeking meaningful sense of the world. I had been an undergraduate student of architecture at U.C. Berkeley, but had dropped out at the beginning of that academic year after an agonizing two terms due to a growing experience of utter alienation from the school’s big-money orientation and the pretentious and entitled attitude it expected. I had become so disillusioned with the direction I was then headed in that I took a big risk by instead becoming a street artist to support myself financially. It was not an easy choice, yet by the time I met Mitch, I was beginning to make a successful living at it, and as such I now fancied myself something of an up-and-coming baby bohemian, an open-minded denizen of new cultural and political possibilities who was accordingly ripe for, though it took me some months to intelligibly begin relating to, Mitch’s unusual gay ideas and queerful presence. Still, it wasn’t long before I started to become his friend and to see the world more clearly through what Harry called the “gay window,” and that fey perspectival formulation then started to make fascinatingly constructive sense to me, especially as I began to venture more consciously, under Mitch’s warm encouragement, into the living subjective world within my own gay mind.
Soon I became very eager to more actively participate in the Radical Faerie scene, and I met Don and Harry probably in early 1980. As well as enthusiastically attending the second national gathering that August in Colorado, I had previously begun in San Francisco facilitating Gay Voices and Visions workshops, a group format Don had put together encompassing a multi-week reading and discussion series on pioneers of gay-centered thought. I became increasingly involved with the main Faerie organizers while attending many, many local Radical Faerie meetings and gatherings, mainly in the San Francisco area, during the subsequent early years of Faerie organizing. I helped generate understanding and interest in the ideas of Harry, Mitch and Don, which was probably a useful contribution to the movement as a great number of the Radical Faeries in the U.S. turned out to live in the S.F. Bay area. I also remember organizing a particularly striking Faerie group there called “Primeval Slime,” from a quote by Harry Hay (“The term ‘spiritual’ represents the accumulation of all experiential consciousness from the division of the first cells in the primeval slime, down through all biological-political-social evolution to your and to my latest insights through Gay Consciousness just a moment ago.”—from “A Call to Gay Brothers” printed on the first Faerie gathering flyer). This innovative “Slime” group of five or so Faeries focused on confronting the gay shadow as a ritual initiation into better-engaged Gay Spirit, and probably met for a year before I then moved to L.A. in 1983 to become more involved with Treeroots, the non-profit corporation Mitch and Don had formed after they resigned from the original Radical Faerie organization in protest against Harry’s anti-psychological attitude.
Given my pretty extensive and loving connections with Don and Mark, which I will recount more of below, it is remarkable to me that things could historically have evolved in such a divisive way that Karen Ocamb, someone entirely innocent of the original events, could come along to now paint me, Mitch and others as “delight[ing] in tearing down” Don and Mark, and could further be particularly offended that we would dare to challenge the latter two when they had merely been worthily “advocating the spiritual and psychological exploration of gay identity,” and when all of us had at one time been the seemingly greatest of trusting comrades and friends.
Now, what even Don and Mark used to agree was healthy discourse, is considered by them and their supporters to be reprehensibly unacceptable.
Karen seems upset by those of us who sometimes employ direct confrontation as a political tactic to psychologically engage a deeper and more sincere discussion, and yet she is apparently unaware that Don and Mark, as I have pointed out, were themselves for many years deeply respectful of and influenced by Mitch’s use of that same type of provocative method in strong advocacy for the better determination of gay subjective truths in activist interpersonal contexts, even when that might inevitably entail disturbing or unapproving defensive reactions, particularly when such truths involve better homosexual sensibilities or resisted-against psychological actualities. Why would Don and Mark now want to disguise or hide the fact that each at one time highly appreciated, at least conceptually, the initiatory, empowering potential inherent in strong gay self-expression sometimes necessitating even powerful public confrontation to more seriously expose and then effectively grapple with the roots of homosexual interpersonal aggression, with the awfully repressed, resisted and entrenched parts of the damaged gay unconscious, for the long-sought emancipatory sake of better-actualized same-sex-loving personhood?
I would like to investigate here a little more the way in which confrontation has been an important theoretical and practical issue in the unfolding history of thematic political dialectics involving gay-centered psychological activism and Harry, Don, Mitch, Mark, myself and others. But because I’ve already written some about my involvement with Harry and Don in my first statement, I would now like to focus more on Mark and how things grew to be so publicly confrontational with him, and how he is very far from being any kind of victim in the pertinent matters Karen refers to in her blog statement.
My Further Organizing Efforts
As noted above, I moved to Los Angeles in 1983 to continue and deepen my Treeroots activism, and right away I began co-facilitating the new multi-week workshop experience called “Gay Soul Making, Dreamworld Descent of the Hero Shaman,” which combined readings and discussion on gay-centered thinkers and Jungian thought with practical psychological engagement. The workshop was a synthesis of Don’s previous study group and Mitch’s emphasis on more directly addressing the gay psyche through methods like dreamwork and active imagination. I was a board member of Treeroots and co-facilitated variations of that workshop for years with Don, Mitch and others, including Mark on occasion. Mark had moved to L.A. from San Francisco not long after I did and he also became quite involved with Treeroots as a board member, corporate officer and activist participant, which presence he maintained for many years.
In addition to our Treeroots endeavors, all of us remained involved to some extent over the years with the Radical Faerie movement. In early 1984 Don, Mitch and myself helped organize a local Radical Faerie group, “Star Circle,” to put on a regional week-long gathering which turned out to be quite successful operationally and qualitatively. At this event, Mitch talked prominently about ways in which the psychological shadow could be a serious problem during Faerie convocations, for example in terms of how certain people were missionarily going around at the gathering saying that being a Radical Faerie sincerely enough would magically bless a person so he wouldn’t have to worry about HIV transmission through unsafe sex, with this dangerously-risky message and resultant behavior being entirely tolerated by almost everyone there and even encouraged by some. As the gathering proceeded at a remote location east of San Diego, and which was attended by probably 100-150 gay men, some became quite upset with me as well as Mitch for persistently publicly engaging individual and group shadow dynamics, including our own, and for attempting to upfrontly demonstrate in a gay-centering manner that we all have psychological defenses and issues which, if not more directly addressed, always orchestrate destructive and usually covert forms of interpersonal collusion and coercion.
The Star Circle event became known afterwards in some quarters as the “Shadow Gathering,” and while most participants seemed to have had a positive and valuable experience, a few others were so negatively charged by what Mitch and I were trying to broach there on the novel frontier of gay psychological politics, due, it seems to me, to the strong challenge this bold new stance presented to their own paranoid needs to aggressively dominate, manipulate and control others, that these disgruntled malefactors then started agitating to “ban” us from future gatherings, a sort of counter-psychological position that then festered in the local Faerie scene for years. That meanspirited impulse to get rid of a now-demonized enemy on the part of a polarized and vocal Faerie minority served to further validate a political sort of “shadow fascism,” or the viciously-controlling domination of defensive acting-out unconsciously exerted through covert group collusion, which was unfortunately strongly alive at that time and previously in the overall Faerie community as I knew it during those years (as well as in society generally). As I see it, no homosexual person can escape being psychologically infused with the repressive and destructive ugliness of badly-aggressive shadow business in particular because we gay folk are all crushed but still-living products of that cruelly-toxic heterosexist society which Mitch and I had been trying to counteractionally challenge by attemptedly outing the difficult problem of vigorously-defended-against gay shadow at the Star Circle event and further by morally insisting that Radical Faeries take better responsibility for the consequent violence towards themselves and each other destructively enacted by this problematic gay subjectivity when insufficiently attended to.
This is not to say that my own personal shadow business should not also be at issue in the historical discussion here undertaken. In that regard, I can feel how a part of me gets off in a suspiciously-infantile fashion on being provocative, pushy and even outrageous, if not dramatic, and I certainly was at that Faerie gathering! It’s an impulse which is perhaps modeled after my maternal grandfather’s emotionally aggressive, though creatively noteworthy, show biz persona. I think in this important respect I somewhat follow after him (besides his being a dramatic old Hollywood queen I lived with early on as a child) in that he was known to have some very dark impulses, and yet he could do some very good things, like the screenplay to The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 film for which he, Noel Langley, received the main credit. Looking back at my actions in the matters of Faerie history I am here exploring, I think when faced with other peoples’ intense hostility, I may have been provoked at times to myself become overly aggressive in some of the unfair and bullying ways that I also saw Harry Hay in addition to my grandfather enact quite often, and knowing of the damaging results consequent to these other two men misusing their power and authority, I can understand how that contradictory aspect of my own behavior could have itself contributed destructively to the strong polarization of the scene and of the anti-psychological Faerie faction particularly (as well as perhaps furthering the confusion of the large majority in between the factions at that time), and I now certainly regret my relative immaturity in participatory regard to the situation back then. Yet I feel that, no matter my own aggressive irresponsibility in contribution to the historical conflict among the Faeries I am here relating, because it was then the case (and still is now) that I was sincerely working (and had been doing so for years) to better address my own dark shadow stuff and persistently attempt to work it through responsibly, whatever acting out of my psychology which may have been occurring pales next to the massive degrees of vicious, even at times frenzied, hatred and vituperation I would personally experience from the uglier of the anti-psychological Faeries and that I would observe in their terrible attempts at the worst sorts of interpersonal manipulative machinations, rumor-mongering, collusions, ostracizing, etc., and in no way could my own personal psychology have been the cause of their dark psychological business or of the hypocritical forms of controlling group-mindedness consequent to this mucky business traditionally having an ongoing free hand that were cumulatively threatening to regressively turn Faerie gatherings into increasingly trivializing playgrounds.
I raise here for the second time in this discussion the matter of my own psychological culpability in difficult interpersonal situations unfolding historically in order to consistently express the spirit of my living struggle to be as sincere as possible with my own shadow material, that I am a three-dimensional human being also, thus so risking this frank exposure here as I try to stand up authentically for an important new ethical and political principle centrally involving the enhanced freedom of fuller gay subjective truth. As much as a part of me doesn’t approve, I know it is ultimately good for me to face my own psychology openly as I try to address other people’s equivalent business, accordingly showing up in an important way what a gross hypocrisy existed among the Radical Faeries back then and among Don, Mark and Karen now, where, on the one hand, people would (and do) hold forth ideals of gay freedom, equality, openness and loving inclusiveness, and yet would quickly hypocritically take it all back and instead nastily attack those fellows that a controlling few found offensive or disagreed with when interpersonal emotional and psychological honesty was truly at vulnerable personal stake. Don, by the way, as I recall only came to perhaps a couple of the initial organizing meetings for the Star Circle Shadow Gathering, and otherwise didn’t really participate, not even attending the gathering itself because (as I understand it) he didn’t like how generally unconscious he anticipated that the scene amongst the Faeries was still going to be. That he would much later come to write a series of articles on Faerie history in which he makes it seem as if he had had no negative feelings or problems about all this is, again, a most remarkable sleight of hand.
The Mark Thompson I Knew and “Loved”
I don’t remember Mark being involved at all with that 1984 Star Circle gathering, although in the ’90s he co-organized a widely-announced series of S/M Faerie-like events called “Black Leather Wings,” in the first of which Mitch was also involved. My only more-direct experience of this latter endeavor concerned my then-close companion, Felipe, who attended either the second or third of those S/M gatherings and got mixed up with a young woman who thought it would be a good idea to use her knife to make several long rows of rather severe and badly scarring cuts across his chest as some kind of initiation, into what was unknown. I was not happy about it when Felipe returned. My life back then as well as now was dedicated to the realization of more psychologically conscious homosexual personhood, and from that gay-centering stance, it seemed to me that Felipe had been badly seduced by his psychic defenses into hurtfully acting out against the sacredness of his own homosexual nature. That the “initiation” was done in unsanitary conditions, causing a painful infection, only served to underscore the very real dangers posed potentially by what seemed to be a gay man’s provoked yet unaddressed mother issues difficultly resident in his shadow psychology. In retrospect, it makes sense that this violent enactment had mal-appropriately occurred under the supervisory oversight of master Mark, head organizer, since, not a couple of years later, he was himself to become embroiled in an HIV infection scandal that he avoided responsibility for appropriately addressing by resigning from Treeroots and cutting off all contact with his long-time friends in gay-centered inner work, a messy drama that has also been documented elsewhere in this blog and that I will explore more of shortly.
During the later 1980s I returned to school in psychology and became licensed in 1991 as a Marriage and Family Therapist. I worked as a counselor in a couple of substance abuse rehabs, I was a children’s social worker for the county, and then I became a clinician at a public high school-based health clinic where I saw individuals and families, supervised trainees and pioneered groups for abuse issues in general as well as for LGBT youth specifically. I slowly built up a private psychotherapy practice which grew to full-time by the end of the ’90s. During this period as well, I continued facilitating gay soul-making groups almost continuously through Treeroots and also began therein to develop a collegial activist relationship with Doug Sadownick.
During the early ’90s, Don resigned from Treeroots and I became closer to Mark. At that time I moved to Silver Lake from Hollywood, not too far from where Mark lived with his partner, Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd, and we started to visit each other fairly regularly. Soon after my move, there was a small gathering of gay men at Mark’s house where I read a paper I wrote critiquing author Robert Hopcke’s gay Jungian analysis of the film, The Wizard of Oz, in his 1989 book, Jung, Jungians and Homosexuality (This was also one of the first times I encountered Doug). I argued that rather than understanding the movie’s story the way Hopcke did, in terms of an asexual integration of a gay man’s authenticity regarding gender values and the persona, it made more sense to see this tale as most pertinently about adolescent sexual awakening, in which case Dorothy could represent the feminine aspect of the gay guy’s ego in search of a masculine soul, here symbolized by the phallic power of the broom and the mysterious wisdom of the wizard. Such an interpretation of gender and what Jungians call “soul” or romantic love, unlike Hopcke’s idea of a “male anima” figure (which appears in his 1990 book, Men’s Dreams, Men’s Healing), was more in line with that better integration of gay liberation and Jungian thought seen in Mitch’s post-Jungian theoretical understanding of gay male love, first formulated in the later ’80s, as developmentally arising from out of a symbolic “Uranian complex,” wherein the young gay boy unconsciously falls into incestuous longing for his father and accordingly regards his mother as both a competitor and a role model (see Mitch’s 2009 book, Gay Liberation at a Psychological Crossroads).
There was another Treeroots meeting at Mark’s home during this period, which Malcolm also attended, at which we explored sponsoring a conference on gay spirituality. It was proposed that the event be inclusive of non-gay-centered religious groups and supporters (like Malcolm), which I strongly opposed. Consequently the conference idea fell through, and this may have been the last effort in which Don was involved with the rest of us. I suspect Don didn’t like my critical position on inclusiveness, which was perhaps a contributing factor in his decision to finally resign from the corporation, though I’ll probably never know for sure because he has up til now not explained any of his relevant reasons, motives or feelings in any way I am aware of. Don has never, to my recollection, communicated directly to myself or anyone else I know anything about why he departed Treeroots after more than a decade’s participation as its co-founder, at that time disengaging all practical connections with his long-time associates, or about any opinions he had concerning this seismic move, Mitch, me or what we were doing, even though he had seemed for a long period quite supportive of Mitch’s ideas. As discussed above, he later was to behave as if Mitch did not exist, while incorporating into his own more-recent projects and philosophy various of Mitch’s major ideas and practices (such as being a gay community psychologist, shaman and Jungian), without crediting him in the slightest.
As for Mark’s partner, Malcolm Boyd, I ran into him fairly regularly over the years I am here relating, though I didn’t interact with him much beyond polite pleasantries. I could not at first understand what someone like Mark saw in him. Admittedly, Malcolm had been prominently involved in the African-American civil rights movement of the ’60s, and caused a notable stir when he publically came out as a gay Anglican priest in the ’70s, but he was still deeply and faithfully involved in the Christian religion, an institution inextricably associated with at least a thousand years of vituperative homophobic oppression, and which I found absolutely repulsive. Malcolm was also a good 20 years older than Mark, and he acted like it—Mark had a perky, S/M “bad boy” streak and Malcolm was a disembodied bore. Mark complained to me not a few times about the torment he suffered sleeping in the same bed with someone to whom he felt no erotic connection. What they did have in common was a cozy bourgeois attitude of comfortable “hipness” and persona-driven “sincerity” that I found ultimately distasteful, but which I guiltily overlooked while I shared indulgent social afternoons drinking wine and eating pleasant lunches while lounging with Mark in his hot tub.
Mark occasionally would make wry sexual comments to me suggesting he could be open to some kind of physical intimacy, and yet we both mostly kept our distance in that regard. Emotionally, though, our fondness for each other seemed to deepen.
Among many gifts of his affection over the years, Mark once gave me a 20-gallon rose plant full of beautiful white blooms for my garden, as well as not being shy about professing his ongoing love for me more directly. For my part, I had felt deeply saddened and cried copiously when I first heard that Mark had seroconverted to HIV-positive back in the earlier ’90s. But in retrospect, I’m not sure exactly how close we really became given that after not too long he would so completely and coldly turn his back on me. Actually, it appeared fairly easy for Mark to tell me he loved me, and I came to express my love for him too, though for my part, I couldn’t clarify if the awkwardness I felt about it was due to my own internalized homophobia or was a reaction to some unresolved unconscious issue I sensed in him but couldn’t get at more directly, as it always seemed like his apparent emotional authenticity came with a subtle limit, an underlying quality of interpersonal impersonalness or unreachable distancing that cautionarily signaled deeper, more disturbing and unaddressed matters.
Aside from the occasional nude encounters we had in his hot tub, one time, though, we did engage in some very light sex-play with each other and Felipe. Mark tied me up and gently whipped me. I don’t know why he was so careful with me. Even though I acted like it was enjoyable, there really wasn’t much to it. I regret that back then I wasn’t psychologically strong enough to have more openly addressed my concerns and feelings with him in that scene or even more generally. I think at the time I rather liked the idea of trying to get closer to him even if it wasn’t very deeply satisfying due probably to the problematic aspects of his character I mentioned above in combination with my own emotional limitations back then.
Although I had remained pretty active in the L.A. Radical Faerie scene into and through the ’90s, Mark stayed only peripherally engaged. However, he was very busy with Black Leather Wings during much of this period. He found the regular Faeries too “vanilla” for his S/M tastes, but he did become more directly involved with the overall Faerie community in 1995 when he contributed a short essay to an issue of the local Radical Faerie journal, Faerie Dish Rag (FDR), which a group of activists including myself produced to address the problem of the gay shadow in the L.A. Faerie scene at that time. If I may digress for a bit about this latter situation due to its narrative relevance, our activist Faerie group called itself Star Circle, but it was now a collective which had been forced to split off from the heretofore-main organizing group that had been sponsoring gatherings in the area for a decade. This organizational split erupted in 1994 after a particularly-disastrous regional gathering, referred to more extensively by Wendell in one of his blog pieces (see “Wendell Jones’s Response to Karen Ocamb—Part I,” March 2009 archives). That ruinous event, in a wet, remote and dangerously-cold winter environment, had been set up and controlled by a rogue faction of conspiratorial Faeries who hijacked the organizing process and were vocal opponents of directly addressing the psychological ways individuals and groups can behave violently and thus hypocritically, particularly when high ideals are involved like with the Radical Faeries. It was tragically poignant to me that the resulting gathering (which I did attend) turned out to be such a disaster, as it rained heavily and then literally froze at the location site, forcing most of the paltry participants to miserably abandon ship. It might be added for history’s sake, that arguably the most successful Faerie gathering in the Los Angeles area was the one just prior to the winter fiasco. This previous event took place in Malibu in 1993 and there the organizers had been more so dealing with the shadow, if some of them reluctantly, because Wendell and I were fully engaged throughout and we both pushed persistently for common-sense structures and conceptualizations to progressively address Faerie psychology and the gay shadow that were incorporated in the planning and organization. Clearly, there wound up being a few activists involved in this Malibu convocation who were as usual furious that their hidden agendas for exploitative domination were again being thwarted. Some of these persistently ill-willed schemers were the following year then able to take tactical advantage of my own need for a recuperative break and Wendell’s simultaneous distraction because of his close friend’s dying from AIDS to mis-organize that year’s big event. And it was as Wendell then became increasingly more vocal about this exploitational faction’s violent neglect of serious health concerns starting from before the gathering, that subsequently they vengefully responded by clandestinely producing an issue of the local FDR, which had previously been collectively published by all of us involved Faeries, using that abducted issue as a forum for vicious lies and ugly slander against the pro-psychological Faeries, not unlike what Karen Ocamb was to do fifteen years later in her blog.
We who had been attacked, wholeheartedly joined by Mark Thompson, cohered more tightly as an activist group in the face of this fierce onslaught, and in response we put out a counter-issue of the FDR that challenged the aggressors back by confronting not only their outrageous hypocrisy but our own shadow feelings and issues as well. This clarified group of psychologically minded Faeries then went on to meet monthly for the next several years at my house in Silver Lake, and that Star Circle group soon evolved into the latest incarnation of the “Primeval Slime” Faerie circle from the early ’80s, but now it was more psychologically sophisticated, there were more participants, up to 20 people, and it could be very intense. In this experimental effort, folks were bravely trying to open up to, constructively provoke and honestly explore their deeper hurt-rage, shameful primitive psychological trauma, all the taboo stuff of the archetypally-darkened gay shadow, to better learn about and work to integrate it more healthfully, progressively and spiritually, for the sake of becoming increasingly empowered and effective as meaningful homosexual men, in consequence practically seeking together a new dimensionality of gay liberation experience through interactively undertaking group ritual forms of provocative psychological initiation mutually. As an integral participant who came to virtually all of those monthly meetings for at least a couple years, Mark knew very well about the importance of gay shadow confrontation, and was actively engaged throughout in the group process, which included much fierce directness, though his struggle to more fully access the better-embodied depths of his own awful hurt-rage and toxic shame was evidently always terribly difficult for him and sometimes painful for me to witness due to his childhood trauma having been, as he has indicated in some of his writings, particularly brutally tormenting.
It was with members of this fresh activist incarnation of the Radical Faerie Star Circle that Mark led small S/M workshop events in the Los Angeles area, and it was within this sub-cultural milieu that one of these workshop participants in the spring of 1997, while consistently having tested negative for the prior several years, suddenly found himself infected with HIV after several particularly-bloody fisting scenes with Mark, who was openly known as HIV-positive. And it was within this progressive association of gay men, unusually devoted to facing the challenge of gay-centered inner work, that Mark then suddenly turned his back on his commitment to the principles which underlie that endeavor, and along with those principles, his long-time friends and colleagues. I will examine these disturbing events in more detail in the following section.
Master Mark and His Unaddressed Violence
As I just indicated, those of us who had been regularly meeting monthly in Star Circle also became involved to varying degrees in Mark’s S/M efforts of the time. Among his diverse such activities, Mark developed a local pet project separate from Black Leather Wings that was intended to be an initiatory experience for gay men desiring to better deal with psychological trauma in their bodies through invoking carefully-orchestrated “daddy”-“boy” scenarios. Mark fancied himself a “master” in such matters based on his many years’ experience going back to the S/M community in San Francisco (he also edited the book Leatherfolk [1991]). In Los Angeles, he convened regular workshop “scenes” with up to a half-dozen or so guys from the Star Circle group and others whom he would help open up to very intense somatic feeling states.
I think in many ways this was an admirably-bold experiment. Mark, following the new gay activist direction forged by Mitch Walker, became seriously interested in bringing the Jungian appreciation of the shadow to Harry Hay’s uplifting vision of gay valuation in a constructive S/M context. He agreed with Mitch that actively addressing the gay shadow was critically important in the justly-fulfilling effort to more progressively actualize good Gay Spirit, and he wanted to exploratorily focus on the terribly-powerful remnants of childhood homophobic trauma somatically as well as through attending to how the gay boy’s problematic relationship with his father specifically gets activated in S/M play, thereby aiming to more effectively embody and work through these inner gay difficulties to accordingly liberate homosexual libido into fresher and greater possibilities for valuable self-realization, also ideas Mitch was enthusiastically espousing.
It turned out, unfortunately, that Mark’s mastery had its dark limits, which were revealingly reached when the terrible series of incidents started to unfold around him that I briefly summarized above. First, one regular participant in his L.A. workshop series became infected with HIV, which back then could still amount to a medical death sentence, so it was a really big deal, and on serious reflection it then became rationally evident to this person that Mark was the likely infector. I wasn’t personally involved in any of the events at question, so I don’t know first-hand what actually happened, but according to the person involved (and other witnesses I have heard from), he on multiple occasions engaged in very messy and mutual “ass-play” interactions exclusively with Mark. As I see it, no matter the literal particulars involved for him, Mark as workshop leader should have been able to persistently struggle to address everyone’s feelings and needs (or get the appropriate help) so as to reach for some type of relational reconciliation and relative affective resolution as to what was going on psychologically and factually in terms of the problem presented by the HIV seroconversion of the workshop participant. All of us in our Star Circle inner-work group, including the seroconverter, had been committed to persistently confronting subjective concerns, and it was naturally expected that in his own handling of the crisis, Mark would continue to be thus so devoted. Such attitudinal fellowship was one of the key components in the cutting-edge liberation project of gay-centered inner work we had at this point engaged in together for years, an activist theory, practice and dedication which had developed out of the failure among the Radical Faeries organizationally to take adequate responsibility for the gay shadow problem.
But instead, shockingly, Mark rejected any reasonable recognition of his own possible literal and psychological parts in the unfolding fiasco, and after one meeting with the unhappy seroconverter that apparently displayed this closed-minded attitude, he refused to deal with the matter any further, leaving the other fellow feeling coldly rebuffed and badly unsatisfied. Then, in an even more disturbing turn, Mark suddenly and unilaterally shut off any communication at all with any of us inner-work friends, and instead of relating proceeded to start defaming and demonizing the rest of us as an evil cult. Evidently he was accusing us of abusively persecuting him in vengeful reaction to his simply wanting to innocently leave the group, as I first heard of from Wendell when he told me about his and Mark’s last conversation together, where apparently Mark talked seriously as if he was the victim in this whole situation! And then, even more provocatively on his part, and equally galling to the rest of us, he continued to make public appearances representing himself as a worthy gay community and S/M leader while acting as if there was absolutely no controversy going on, about which I’ll highlight more of below.
Since Mark had always seemed fully supportive and was often heavily engaged in our mutual liberational activities, it was shocking for me, then, both personally and as a fellow activist, when he so dramatically betrayed that long worthy effort and our apparently-good friendship. Well, maybe not entirely shocking, for in retrospect I can see that, as I alluded to before, Mark, for all his evident commitment to facing his psychological issues, always exhibited a certain guarded, emotional distance in how he communicated about what was inside of him, and outside the group he did all too easily adopt an affected sort of smarmy, bourgeois social-etiquette persona that struck me as distinctly unprogressive. It really wasn’t unexpected to recognize, even though it was painful, then, that Mark could have acted as if everything was sincerely fine for so many years between us, working closely with me and Mitch and the others, seemingly deeply devoted to the serious investigation of gay psyche, and then when the chips were truly down that he could so suddenly and coldly abandon this brave work and turn brutally on us previously quite-close colleagues.
Mark’s quick reversal and thorough betrayal, which also involved a fairly significant change in his character and basic demeanor from what I could tell, strongly implicates the powerful psychological defense called splitting, it seems to me, and as such points to a fairly serious, unaddressed problem in his basic personal psychology provoked by an otherwise-intolerable current stressor. I believe it had been a limitation all along for Mark that even when he tried he could not really be sufficiently sincere or authentic in his working relations with his fellow organizers or with anybody, actually, regarding more intimate levels of disturbing and difficult feelings he might have been experiencing (or that others were experiencing), and that in the end when these more dangerous subjective levels were strongly enough instigated in the context of his gay-centered inner work efforts and associations, through the threatening revelation of long-hidden dysfunctional consequences of those more-defended levels, he then misguidedly attempted to handle the consequent overwhelming affective threat of unbearable personal shame and humiliation defensively, reactionarily, by scapegoating his inner-work associates, by projectively imbuing us with his own scary and unresolved, infantile hatred and other internally-frightening shadow material now dangerously stirred up, instead of taking fair and accurate responsibility for these unwanted self-aspects as would be ethically expected. And worse, the more Mark’s inner-work friends responded to his attitudinal reversal by caringly trying to constructively engage him about it, the more he acted out his violent projections by claiming we were thereby viciously attacking him. Now, in conspiring with Don Kilhefner to speak on the Radical Faeries in a freshly-whitewashing way (as I heard from the tape recording of the One Archives Faerie presentation) which makes it seem as if he had none of the history I am here relating, no critique of Faerie hypocrisy, no involvement in intensive gay-centered shadow work, no big problem over his questionable leadership behavior, Mark further provokes those of us he has already meanspiritedly betrayed so thoroughly. Such persistently-nefarious behavior interpretively suggests psychologically a repetitious enactment of past emotional trauma painfully disowned and instead mis-attributed to projected-on others previously cared about, thereby compulsively playing out an ancient abuse pattern of embittering betrayal through the covert arranging of pertinent unfolding situations over and over again.
Of course, one would reasonably have to anticipate that there must be an aspect of risk realistically involved in any seriously-challenging endeavor, such as what I and my fellow gay activists were bravely attempting to do psychologically both with ourselves and with others. That is, if we stand for confronting malicious psychological defensiveness in the community we may well get attacked back in a difficult or damaging fashion, and if we engage in an intimate group process powerfully provocative of objectionable psychological material, someone or something could go too far or too fast therein and how is that then handled. This was the question of appropriate responsibility powerfully raised in our group by the charged situation that dramatically developed between Mark and the rest of Star Circle, and here I want to clearly indicate that most of us involved participants tried to be sensitive and responsive all along to the dangers in what we were attempting by our radical process together, to do the best we could to ongoingly appreciate and account for that riskiness, and to endeavor to handle any difficult developments regarding ourselves and each other nevertheless arising as conscientiously, judiciously and prudently as possible within the ethical context that we were freely-consenting adults in purely voluntary association. When his own behaviors of a more egregious nature were appropriately questioned by the rest of us in that dedicated context, Mark quickly betrayed any such caring attitude toward the group process and utterly failed to help keep the ethically-necessary dialogue going.
As Mark continued to act openly in the guise of unquestioned authority and guide while aggressively spurning his former close friends in a cowardly manner that mocked the gay psychological morality he had previously seemingly espoused, all for the sake of irresponsibly avoiding a requisite obligation that could have just as well been adequately addressed, several concerned people eventually felt a moral duty to speak up more openly about what was going on. In particular, the workshop participant who became HIV-positive decided in May 1998, a year after the incident first exploded, to compose a public letter to Mark. Here is what he said:
I am writing this letter to formally and clearly state my belief that I know of no one beside you who could have infected me with HIV. Any reluctance on my part to name this fact in the past has been simply a matter of my own denial, shock, and fear, which I have been able to work through over the past year. Your total avoidance of me and complete disavowal of the real consequences of our risky and largely unconscious sexual acting out only firmed up any doubt I harbored about the source of my infection.
I have been far too passive and polite with you. I am ashamed of my cowardice. I have been co-dependently protecting you from my outrage toward you. Your loud and sensationalizing protests about the way that you are being harassed and victimized by your friends-turned-cult over this past year have grown intolerable to me. I feel that my own silence around your gross dismissal of my need to process with you my pain, loss, and anger about my HIV infection, specifically my belief that you infected me, has indirectly enabled you to tout yourself as a victim. I fully expect you to continue your spineless whining, but at least with my position more clear, your protestations can now be put in their proper psychological context.
My assertion that you infected me is based on the humiliating, unfortunate, but nonetheless true consequences of our sexual activity (1993-95). I believe that you infected me during one or more of our ass raping episodes which involved profuse bleeding from wounding to your own ass and mine. We shared the same sling which would become covered with blood, ass slime and contaminated lube. We significantly impaired our judgment through using alcohol, pot, and, on one occasion, “xtc.” I have thoroughly reviewed all other possible sources of infection in the time period between a year before my last negative test result and my HIV diagnosis. There is no other feasible occasion within which I might have become infected.
We increased the risk of our sexual acting out by never discussing the real possibility of your infecting me through reciprocal fisting scenes. I was afraid to speak to you about me feelings. I felt intimidated by you and shamed for being “oversensitive” or “paranoid.” You seemed uncomfortable speaking about the real threat that your HIV posed to me, and in general, you encouraged and enforced only the most superficial feeling life between us. Nonetheless, you treated me as if you were introducing me to a “sacred” experience. You presented yourself as a mentor and “daddy” to me. I literally put myself in your hands.
During the time that we were sexually and emotionally relating I did not feel empowered to speak up to you. It is here in my decimated sense of self and inability to gauge the danger of our unsafe sex that my “borderline” traits gave you an advantage over me. I would suggest that my belief in the likelihood that you infected me is not a symptom of my “borderline personality” as you have obnoxiously said to others. While you have much experience cavorting with borderlines, you have little insight into the actual matter. My memory is not impaired. I do not have hallucinations. I am not delusional. We have many witnesses to several occasions of our dangerous sexual scenes. Many people saw the copious blood and felt that something was seriously frightening about our activity. That no one had more of an ability to intervene is cause for concern and reflects an overall lack of consciousness in our group at that time.
My continued struggle with my woundedness shows up in my inability over the past year to have had enough of a sense of self to stand behind my beliefs about the riskiness of our past sex acts, and my masochistic propensity to have secretly carried the burden of this information in dire fear of falsely accusing you and risking the loss of your love, such as it is.
Imagine for a moment that you were capable of empathy and that my seven years of intensive inner work have actually offered me an appreciation of reality. Imagine that you really did infect me through unsafe sex and that I had to watch you systematically deny all contact with me. And finally, imagine that I had to watch you portray yourself as a victim being harassed by a cult consisting of gay men, myself included, who insist that you stop dodging the consequences of your actions.
Your refusal to take any responsibility for the murderously unsafe sex we had together is painful and feels like an enormous betrayal to me. In this act of refusal you have undermined any integrity that had existed in our work together. This last year has been utter hell for me. My anxiety around becoming sick, the meds, their side effects, uncertainty of the future—all of that—has been exhausting and overwhelming. You have demonstrated not one moment of true empathy for me around this experience. You are not a leader around gay soul making. You are an imposter, a big fat murderous faker. You had the opportunity to mourn with me our stupidity and unconsciousness, to accept your part with some dignity. But you have lost that chance and instead have chosen to attack your friends and drag yourself down in the process.
Until you come to your senses, if ever, you pose an actual threat to any psyche or body who unwittingly puts her or himself in your emotional or physical care. I feel that it is my obligation to help name your shadow as needed in an effort to keep your frantic and violent behavior to a minimum.
Other people have also had seriously-challenging ethical experiences with Mark, though few have been willing to openly discuss these often-sticky matters, let alone publicly present such concerns. Another person who had some in-depth experience for some years with Mark and his S/M associates also eventually got up the courage to write him a letter, and here I’ll quote from my copy of what also was intended as a public statement:
This letter will document and amplify my public protest of your appearance [riding on the back of a convertible] in the Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood on June 28, 1998.
I felt compelled to speak out on Gay Pride Day because you were yet again portraying yourself as a community leader when you have consistently refused to take responsibility for your own unconscious violence against other gay people.
...
After all the pain that you have caused in our community, how could you find the audacity to literally parade yourself as a leader? When gay people are desperate for psychological healing and true leadership, you offer instead a puffed-up charade of celebrity.
It is tragic that you appear to hate your own gay soul. But it is outrageous that in your self-hatred you have acted out against me and others in life-threatening ways. Your behavior reeks of terrible, corrosive homophobia that you have consistently refused to acknowledge. That is why I called you HOMOPHOBIC at the Gay Pride Parade.
There are far too many examples of your homophobia to name in one letter, but I will describe those I know best from my personal experience with you. Our relationship began when I paid to participate in several of your leather-sex workshops. Therefore, a student/teacher relationship was established the first day we met. You advertised yourself as a teacher of spiritually oriented sex play, and I paid you to fulfill that role. At the time, I was very much dominated by my own internalized homophobia, which made me vulnerable to your unconscious violence.
For the many workshops that you taught, you repeatedly failed to create safe containers that should support authentic exploration of gay soul. This was particularly true for the six-day Dark Eros workshop you lead in August 1994. One of your assistant teachers, Michael Dane, was utterly identified with his own sadism, and took no responsibility for its harmful manifestations. On the first night of the workshop, he forced me to suck his cock blindfolded, and then shamed me when I asked him to wear a condom. When I sought your support after this incident, you encouraged me to speak with the man myself, but did nothing as a leader of the workshop to discipline him. You could not see the real danger that this pathological individual posed to myself and others, and the extent to which his presence during the event caused a constant rupture in the container. In retrospect, I see that your inclusion of Michael Dane as a teacher at the Dark Eros workshop was a reflection of your own lethal homophobia and destructive power.
Although you spoke frequently about the importance of psychological awareness for spiritually based leather sex, you were rarely able to express or partner your own feelings when relating to me directly, and actually avoided my awkward attempts to be authentic. One memorable example was an intense scene where you whipped me until I was welted and sobbing. Instead of fully processing the painful feelings that had come up, you initiated an old-fashioned make-out scene, seeming to comfort me when in fact you were suffocating both of us with your vampirism.
During the winter and spring of 1996, you and I participated in a monthly S/M gathering at Winston Wilde’s house. After our first few meetings, you admitted to me that you were concerned about Winston’s irresponsible aggressive behavior, but you did nothing to protect me from his abuse, which you witnessed on several occasions. Winston repeatedly acted out his anger toward me by putting me into physically challenging positions without any prior negotiation. In one notable instance for which you were present, Winston prevented me from breathing when I was already bound and gagged, making it extremely difficult for me to communicate an end to the scene. To control my very breath when he was not in control of his own anger was an outrageous violation of my being. You remained uninvolved, but my own body was far more sensitive, responding with a traumatic, nine-day episode of hiccups during which I could barely eat or sleep – and coughed up blood. The hiccups became so severe I had trouble breathing and was rushed to an emergency room. This was a clear sign to me that something was terribly wrong with our gathering, but my subsequent expression of fear and confusion to both you and Winston produced no change in the harmful dynamics between us. Rather than provide any sort of leadership, you continue to enable Winston’s aggression. You were present on repeated occasions when Winston put his cock in my mouth with no condom, when you knew that he had never been tested for HIV. I accept responsibility for the way in which my self-hatred allowed me to participate in this life-threatening behavior. I am simultaneously enraged that, because of your own deep self-hatred, you did nothing to interrupt the pattern of abuse.
Several times over the past year and a half I have asked you to discuss these issues, but on every occasion, you have stalled and put me off, avoiding any acknowledgement of your personal responsibility. You have written and published books describing gay shadow, but when you are faced with the extent of your own, you claim innocence and attempt to silence anyone who dares to name it.
I am disgusted by your numerous attempts to defame many individuals in the gay-centered inner work community. Although there have been repeated requests and opportunities over the past year and a half for authentic dialogue, you have instead chosen to spread damaging rumors about your former friends. In doing so, you have successfully distracted attention from the real issue, which is your inability to take responsibility for the harm you have caused others.
...
Because you have failed to take any responsibility for your behavior with myself and other members of the gay community, I have found it necessary to express myself publicly around these issues.
...
For my own integrity, it has been essential to communicate my experience to you and all others who read this letter.
I, Chris Kilbourne, also felt a lot of hurt and anger; I think anyone who had been as personally close to Mark as I was and as some others were as well, would experience a similar sense of betrayal, and anyone else who was depending on him as a leader of a politically-important gay liberation effort, as were those he had been mentoring, should also reasonably have been quite disturbed. Many of us tried to express our reactions in different ways and for some months following eruption of the HIV infection imbroglio.
After this discordant episode had begun to spin out so dramatically, there was a coincidentally-scheduled reading at a local store for Mark’s new book, Gay Body: Journey Through Shadow to Self (1997), in which he attempted to show, using his own life story, how important it is for a gay man to face his dark psychological issues and feelings. Many of us considered it important to be in attendance at this reading, that if Mark was going to continue irresponsibly misleading others as he had been doing, it was incumbent upon those who so-well knew better to at least attemptedly confront this hypocritical behavior, especially given that he kept taking on a mantle of leadership, here as the great editor and writer of important books on gay life and spiritual matters, and otherwise, who else might be ensnared in some possibly-harmful way? It was particularly disgusting to me that his new volume was directly inspired and influenced by the gay-centered inner work he was now betraying.
At the reading I listened to Mark who, in a rather weak voice, nervously shared innocuous selections from his book while pretending there was nothing else going on. He made himself appear fragile and pitiable, far from the rather intense persona, the strong figure, that I was familiar with from our public work together. It seemed to me this wounded demeanor was purposefully assumed to manipulate his supporters and others into sympathetically seeing him as the vulnerable victim, with his ex-friends in the audience thus being contrastingly highlighted as the would-be assaultive aggressors. Now set up to play out this misleading story, Mark’s betrayed colleagues could easily become demonizeable and scapegoatable if anything untoward happened there.
Still, in spite of that set-up, I felt my truth had a right to be heard at the book event, because I personally found Mark’s extraordinary disingenuousness in that moment grotesquely offensive morally and a brazen public display of irresponsibility intolerably despicable, as he was implicitly blaming innocent others for his own destructive gay shadow and its prior bad choices of the sort I have been relating. In other words, I became incensed, and finally, after what seemed to be interminable patience on my part, I couldn’t stand it anymore, I could no longer remain silent for the sake of protocol or etiquette. And so I did the unthinkable and interrupted, asking in a firmly-conversational tone, “Mark, what about the shadow?” He ignored me and kept reading, though now somewhat flustered. After another long wait, I then said a few times, not all that loudly, in a sort of spooky-sounding voice (it is untrue that anyone screamed at him as Karen Ocamb proclaims in her blog commentary), “the shadow, the shadow, the shadow.”
As I was assessing it, Mark’s whole presentation was itself a contemptible insult to the valuable ideas his book was supposed to be espousing, and consequently I felt pressed by my conscience to attempt rectifying what seemed like a terrible wrong in what he was doing and in the audience’s seemingly-blind assent thereto, as that repulsive situation implicated me through the background imbroglio behind the event’s special moral meaningfulness, or that I should at least point out there was a big ethical problem manifesting in the room, as a way to handle myself at a duteously-answerable crossroads (is that not an embodiment of “journey through shadow to self”?). Then, after I began to speak up for the second time, some people, Mark’s supporters,—or more aptly, his protectors, enablers and accomplices—became predictably hostile. Malcolm, who was sitting in front of me, soon whipped around and, uncharacteristically, rather maniacally started screaming at me, repeatedly, to “shut up.” It was fascinating to witness someone I knew as an emotionally pretty vacant, mild-mannered, doddering old man suddenly transform, bright purple-red, spittle spraying from his gaping mouth, abundantly overflowing with a lively viciousness and black vehemence that could only be the sincere manifestation of the very devil himself of Malcolm’s own repressed Christian shadow. I’d never seen him as animated and numinous than in those few moments, and felt deeply honored to have had an invocational part in so vividly exposing that supposedly-virtuous man’s otherwise quite hidden and very, very ugly violence. The security guard at the bookstore, now seeming like the stolid embodiment of repressive, controlling judgmentalness, then tried to intimidate me into leaving, but I resisted, saying I had done nothing except exercise my free speech rights. Community activist Teresa De Crescenzo and her partner, psychologist Betty Berzon, close friends of Mark and Malcolm, were looming above us at one point yelling, trying to shame, mainly, Doug, who was sitting next to me, and accusing him of exploiting Mark’s special occasion to gain publicity. Terry was angry but also seemed confused and asked at one point what we meant by the shadow. Among the answers Doug and I gave her, I suggested that it had something to do with how for her the youth agency she founded and oversaw (the now defunct Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services) could have gotten embroiled in an ugly legal drama over allegations of child abuse not too long before this bookstore event. That seemed to take her aback. And meanwhile Mark, amid all the ruckus, in cowardly fashion soon enough simply ducked out the back door, an entirely unnecessary exit that Karen Ocamb, his new enabler, conveniently twists in her blog statement into a desperate escape from persecutory hounding by loony fanatics.
The dramatic extent of Mark’s egregious personal and political betrayal in his attempts at that book reading in 1997 to portray himself as both victim and leader, was like pouring more salt in the wound for the rest of us ex-associates sitting there. It was simply dehumanizationally outrageous. I and likeminded others had only the rare opportunity to give voice in broader ways to our appropriate outrage about what was going on ethically during that period, while Mark was busily employing his and Malcolm’s large networks of professional and social friendships cultivated over years to spread ugly and cruel slanders intended to make sure we would be given no credence. In her blog commentary, Karen makes it seem as if we were just meanly harassing or almost stalking Mark. This is a very nasty distortion meant to distractingly reverse the actual power situation going on. Mark is the bad-faith provocateur. He is a very skilled political animal, having honed his abilities over decades in the oftentimes cut-throat worlds of gay publishing, journalism and cultural society through the dark arts of passive-aggressive demonizing, interpersonal collusion, manipulative schmoozing and so on. I expect that by outlining what actually transpired in some of these important historical situations which Karen’s account misleadingly covers where I have personal knowledge, it can perhaps serve as a counterbalance to Mark’s political expertise (among other factors) in weighing currently controversial matters like just what should appropriately constitute relevant gay history or a progressive gay community ethics today.
Mark was in no fashion any sort of innocent bystander irrationally stalked by malevolent “thugs” in all this, as Karen makes it maliciously appear in her vituperative discussion. By framing it that way she is, in my opinion, parroting Mark’s later, simplistically face-saving, demonizing-of-your-accusers spin on what had actually transpired. In reality, Mark, apparently having given up on being psychologically minded in the face of his successive leadership failures now culpably exposed, instead flip-floppingly resorted to the sleazy tactics of his own not-long-ago-denounced, anti-psychological opponents in order to attemptedly handle his colleagues’ increasing upset with what was alarmingly coming to be more clearly revealed as a toxic and destructive incompetence previously defensively well-disguised, one such underhanded maneuver by Mark being the vociferous and persistent reputational tarring of any messengers of embarrassingly revealing information by way of vile gossip and character assassination, as I heard from third parties over and over again that he was privately doing after he dissociated from the rest of us. In this ethical light, it was first of all his personal failure to responsibly and fairly continue his commitment to his own gay-centered psychological work in the face of challenging inner material vigorously stirred up, and then his nasty defensive behaviors in consequence, that caused Mark’s problem with the rest of us. His initial cowardly mistake was only morally compounded by his resulting smear attacks against his former comrades, amounting to outrageously disgusting displays of hypocritically homophobic slander and scapegoating deception, particularly notable expressions of moral cowardice coming as they did from this previous, long-term, seemingly warm friend and self-promoted admirer of gay liberation ideals (he edited the book Long Road to Freedom [1994]), a sickening revanchist mockery that is only additionally engorged by then enlisting gullible people like Karen Ocamb to now eagerly do more such dirty smear work publicly.
Other Encounters with Mark Thompson
It is my understanding that at least one copy of one of the public letters about Mark’s egregious behavior I cited before was left in Mark’s mailbox at his house at the time, but other than that and an initial period of attempted phone calls after his break with us, no one associated with our group that I am aware of ever contemplated approaching Mark’s home much less actually harassing him, unlike what Karen says in her blog, although we certainly upfrontly challenged him and culpable remaining associates of his on their hypocrisy when there was fair public opportunity, which was the only way Mark had left us to be able to effectively communicate with him about what we felt were more than legitimate concerns.
I did confront one of Mark’s S/M cohort, Winston Wilde, fairly regularly for a short period of time when I would run into him spontaneously at my gym. I would talk out loud with Winston nearby while doing sit-ups, loud enough for others in the small work-out room to hear, about his own instances of bad-faith collusion with Mark in acting out violent behaviors that I was aware of, and his cowardliness for avoiding taking any responsibility for these distasteful matters. He finally “told on me,” as if he were the victim of his unethical behavior. The gym owner ordered us both to his office and listened to our clashing stories, then said to tone it down. Yet the owner from then on seemed less sympathetic to Winston, who I think tried to avoid me more effectively after that.
Another example of “public opportunity” had to do with the fact that Mark was at this time attending graduate school in psychology at Antioch University Los Angeles, and the person who’d written the second public letter to Mark I quoted above, who was also a student in that program at the time, used a flier for a non-school workshop Winston was conducting that had been dispersed all over the school featuring a testimonial quote from Mark praising Winston’s abilities, where things had then been re-arranged to become agitprop in such a way as to expose both Mark’s and Winston’s outrageous shadow behaviors and concordant irresponsibility, and that altered flyer was then also dispersed at the school.
In regard to another such activist situation, Doug and a now-deceased colleague, Sandra Golvin, were both in the same psychotherapist internship training program with Mark, one year apart, at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center, wherein they each felt morally impelled after the big blow-up to engage in honestly confronting Mark rather than do the usual persona politeness. One time, Sandra distributed a mock press release to all the interns and staff challenging Mark’s ongoing unethical behavior. Sandra also challenged Mark in their mutual supervision group, as had Doug the year before her. It was certainly controversial of them to insist that it was a new ethical imperative of gay community responsibility for someone of Mark’s high-minded but ongoingly hypocritical stance to be fairly confronted on such important moral grounds rather than colluded with through assent-implying silence, yet of an aptly-relevant nature given that Mark was in training to become a licensed professional clinician.
After all this roiling development unfolded in the later ’90s, things then calmed down, with Mark seeming to lay low for a time, but gradually he has made more public appearances again of a questionable nature until now openly teaming up with Don to pour additional salt in the still-worsening wound of their accumulating ethical lapses. These two fraudulent recreants are even going further in tandem than each has done before in camouflagedly flaunting his shameless violence, brashly making freshly outrageous, false and misleading claims regarding themselves, their activist lives and the early history of the Radical Faerie movement. They unblinkingly mount these ill-willed distortions in the widest public sphere they can and repeat them over and again, as if they were apostles of lies who could testamentally make their twisted alterations thereby stand the test of time. And perhaps they very well could, if we others didn’t speak up about and write down our own experiences of what actually transpired. One recent example of Don’s and Mark’s persistent and coordinated historical falsifying can be found in the Summer 2009 issue of White Crane, in which they interviewed themselves about the Faeries (likely wielding their power as board members of the journal’s nonprofit publisher), allowing them to repeat Don’s dogma that he alone with Harry started the movement. They also announced plans to have a national Radical Faerie conference and publish a related book, which will no doubt boost their murderously self-aggrandizing historical re-elevation further, a nasty revanchist project connivingly pushed additionally in Mark’s new memoir, Advocate Days and Other Stories (2009), where, following Don, a benignly-rendered Mark equitably exists in a laundered autobiographical tale of the years I have been covering not only without any of the dark history recounted in my discussion or even any mention of his two-decade, deep activist relationship with Mitch Walker, but to top it all off, the last paragraph of the book consists in a dedicated acknowledgement to the wonderful Don Kilhefner, whose “courage, vision and persistent activism” have “encouraged” Mark during the past three decades and now, presumably, during his unctuous rendering of an expurgated life assiduously scrubbed clean like what Don has himself sleazily undertaken in self-complimentary regard to his own sordid historical story, to the fulsome point that, as Mark oleaginously proclaims in a ringing testament to the lush corruption of a well-oiled mutual admiration society through the book’s final words, “I among many others owe him boundless gratitude and praise.”
Returning to Karen’s Blog
That Karen in her blog commentary accuses us, Mark’s long-time close associates, of unfairly attacking him and viciously destroying some career of his, and more so as if he was a mere victim and indeed had been in any significant way “destroyed,” enacts a typical example of powermongering reverse psychology. It is Mark, via his low-life cheerleader, Karen, who by this twisted fashion continues his vicious attacks on those who know something about his bad-faith failings. Just as abusively-unjust power always meanly blames the victim, Karen, as Mark’s spokesperson through her vicious commentary, claims we who have been unfairly betrayed are almost-insane, community destroying monsters. Yet it is she who foully corrupts her own power as a prominent gay journalist and supposedly-rational discussant through her fawning iterative validation of Don’s and Mark’s noxious manipulations. She almost gleefully compromises her journalistic ethics as well as logical discourse by consistently failing to at all question her one-sided sources or give any serious merit to the issues and ideas we protestors at Don and Mark’s Faerie event were trying to address, instead cavalierly ridiculing and lazily dismissing them. Her flippant attitude to such morally meaty gay matters only serves to suggestively indicate the like regressive attitudes of her ideological patrons in this dark affair, Mark and Don.
There has been a lot of hurt and outrage about Mark’s not only past but ongoing betrayal felt by quite a few people with whom Mark was back then developing a powerful new kind of same-sex-loving intimacy, a more-enlightened gay intersubjective closeness comprehensionally rooted in the evolving consciousness of our liberation movement as it has inevitably begun moving maturationally into what may be chronologically understood as its next historical phase, a psychologically-focused stage, and thus more tangibly into the dynamic realm of living gay psyche, where subjective existence is sourced and out from which objective reality can be shaped anew. Mark had betrayed much more than his personal relationships with the few other people around who were and are bravely attempting to forge a new gay activism for an age of victorious assimilationism, and who accordingly could use all the support we could get in that cutting-edge effort, for it’s not in any way easy to so contrarily go against the ever more vigorous current of the collective anti-psychological, hetero-centric zeitgeist as reflected in presently popular notions such as “gay marriage” and “gay soldiers,” which foul pull in my opinion is ultimately what is being paradoxically enabled by the double-dealing likes of bad-faith Mark, Don and Karen, good gay chameleons that they are.
Unlike such two-faced betrayers, some other gay people seem alternatively called upon morally to try upsetting the repressive trajectory of socially-enforced psychic violence by instead speaking the discomfiting truth about better liberating gay psyche. For myself in feeling pulled in that more healthful activist direction, I sense that impulse arising ultimately from a vital Gay Spirit within which insistently seeks my full actualizational emancipation homosexually, and that big freedom spirit persistently agitates in me the eagerness and will to promote its better advancement in myself, others and in the world overall. But then I can feel how that better attitude is then undermined by my own internalized homophobic negativity, which tries to thwart or twist my enhanced well-being emotively from within. I am quite familiar with how difficult and uncomfortable the internal struggle to successfully partner intra-subjective violence and bad feeling can be, and thus why most people would stay away from such an otherwise badly-needed effort. Yet even as I can appreciate how the struggle to seriously self realize more psychologically as gay is so challenging because of the painful gay shadow, it seems to me that in the end there is no legitimate ethical excuse for avoiding this inevitable growthful task, especially when one is seemingly a sincere espouser of lofty ideas about progressive gay truth, love, spirit and soul like Don, Mark and now Karen suggest themselves to be, and yet hypocritically attacks the only people who are seriously grappling with the prospective psychological reality of Gay Spirit and soul individually and politically in persistent, disciplined and organized homosexual ways absolutely nobody else I am remotely aware of is daring to even consider, much less undertake.
Karen’s Assault on Doug
Through her anti-protest efforts, Karen launched a particularly savage assault on Doug Sadownick. Not only did she singularly smear him by name in her brief article that appeared in Frontiers in which she wrote that our protest “marred” their presentation (in her opinion perhaps, although for many others it was enhanced, made more lively and interesting), but she really went to town on him in her blog commentary, in particular accusing him of treating her quite meanly and selfishly over their mutual care of Michael Callen, a well-known gay singer who died from AIDS in 1993, for which she—as she freshly reveals here—has held a huge but heretofore covert grudge against him all these years.
My relevant perspective on Doug, with whom I have worked closely in a mutual activist context now for more than 15 years, is that obviously he has a shadow, as do I, but that doesn’t make him an ogre like Karen portrays. I know he strives to be personally ethical by psychologically confronting the inner violence of his own childhood trauma in a way that is more dedicated and courageous than almost anyone else around, and has done so for years. For example, I observe him to regularly publicly identify, take responsibility for and attempt to better handle his own aggressive shadow material in a bravely-honest manner that I find powerfully admirable and inspiring. In dramatic contrast, not once does Karen own any of her own psychological issues or motives at all in anything I’ve ever seen her write or heard her say in her entire career. Indeed, at one point in her blog diatribe, she recalls at the time pondering for a bit whether there may have been any possibility that Doug was on to something when he apparently told her that she was acting out her unresolved family issues during their clash those many years ago, but then she mindlessly dismisses the possibility simply out of hand, with a quick, clear and resolute “no.” If I were the one being confronted with the prospect of such a serious moral lapse, I would feel it important to consider the matter carefully and over time, especially if it could involve my own subjective blind spots of internalized homophobia and unintegrated violence. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that we are all flawed mortals, and that others can sometimes see important things in us that we would ourselves vociferously deny.
Furthermore, I know that Doug has long considered actively taking up better psychological responsibility to be a profoundly-important political act. Which brings me back to Karen’s commentary, where she makes such a landmark big deal out of Doug’s proclaimedly-terrible “screaming” at her in one specific incident. Perhaps Doug wasn’t just acting out here, as she makes it seem. Unlike Karen, who promotes as virtuous the acidic delusion that her personal shadow doesn’t affect her public life (she writes, “And what gives [Mitch]—or his followers—the right to tell me about my goddamn ‘shadow’ when I have not asked for his ‘help,’ thank you very much.”), I and Doug both know all too well that our own shadows need to be inclusively considered in all this in order to accurately foster the better integrative gay self-realization project within instead of one-sidedly acting out irresponsibly on others, and I know that even from before the situation with Karen arose, Doug was committedly working to face his shadow in his own therapy and in our organizing efforts together. In doing so, Doug was learning to become a new kind of gay movement figure, a psychological activist of homosexual self-alchemy, and that pioneering position in my opinion was what he was attempting to enunciate with Karen in the incident which so polarized her. From this more progressive point of view, it is Karen who ignorantly betrays the heart and soul of gay liberation when she crudely disparages Doug or anyone sincerely trying to address the gay shadow problem personally, comprehensionally and communally, when she merely attacks him for what was likely a rare opportunity to more seriously grapple with these unpleasant, perhaps, but vitally significant matters of fuller gay psyche, soul and freedom that he was perhaps inviting her to take up with his provocative stance to her.
Karen’s endlessly-festering and secretive outrage over Doug’s strong position in their dealings long ago regarding the dying Michael Callen, reveals to anyone with any insight into the compensatory and duplicitous nature of the psychological shadow that what she vengefully accuses Doug of doing likely amounts significationally to a defensive deflection of her own disowned emotional and behavioral self. Moreover, her renounced shadow is further revealed when she fails to allow for the serious possibility that Doug’s side of the disputed incident between them is anything but malign, thus again demonstrating her escapist tendency to easily demonize those she doesn’t like or understand because of her own problematic psychology. In this case, her accusation that Doug’s selfish agenda was to somehow prevent Michael from better reuniting with his family, even if that was true (which it is not), would still suggest how insidiously homophobic her thinking is, because she seems so oblivious to the glaring promotional symbolism of her own pro-familial stance. From a gay-centered perspective, the family system inherently is oppressively heterosexist and thus effectively homophobic if not overtly extensively corrected for. According to Doug (see his statement herein), before Karen had arrived on the Michael Callen care scene, Michael had been very much engaged in developing a strong gay-centered attitude and had vigorously expressed to Doug, who was in charge of his overall care, that he wanted to die a “gay death,” without the contamination of his biological family who had caused such great grief throughout his life. He was particularly afraid they might take advantage of his weaker moments and wanted Doug to help protect him from that. This is entirely plausible to me, and lends further credence to then seeing Karen’s final act with Michael which Doug then vigorously confronted her on, wherein she spontaneously facilitated a last-minute phone “reconciliation” between an all-but comatose Michael and his parents while Doug wasn’t there, as a passive-aggressive, homophobic and self-aggrandizing effort to actually uphold the oppressive status quo in the end. That Don Kilhefner was a sort of supportive spiritual advisor to her around this time, as she also reveals, additionally suggests his own otherwise-hidden connection to the psychologically regressive, anti-liberationist mentality Karen displays in the affair of Michael’s death and her blog discussion of it as well as generally. How disgusting to think that she may have been guided by Don to view her reactionary animus to Doug as about some kind of, as she says he put it, “spiritual path,” when that hostile attitude was more likely intended to protect from exposure how she had badly used Michael as a private pawn in her own misguided agenda to uphold heterosexist institutions at his defenseless expense.
In Conclusion
In sum, this piece has argued for the pivotally-timely importance of gay-centered inner work through thematically thereso illustratively responding to Karen Ocamb’s meanhearted attack on me and my friends in her news article and blog commentary about our protest against Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson’s 30th anniversary Radical Faerie retrospective on Feb. 15, 2009. In mounting this commentary on the need for better gay psychological awareness, I wanted to focus less on Don because I had written about my experiences with him in my earlier protest statement, and because he is also dealt with elsewhere in this blog, yet because the current demonstration flare-up was instigated by Don’s covert manipulations in recent public writings and pronouncements about Radical Faerie history, it was necessary to re-visit to some extent my relations to him. In general, I wanted to address Karen’s complaints about us protestors primarily through relating my own history and experience of the matters at hand, a history I feel Karen, Don and Mark try to avoid about me, and an honest recounting of which I hope effectively conveys a valid and even beneficial perspective on the vital activist effort to help usher in the revolutionary next psychological stage of gay liberation organizing and result. In my own commentary, then, I briefly went through my history of involvement with the early Radical Faeries and with Don, Harry Hay, Mitch Walker and in particular with Mark Thompson, because he has been most actively supporting Don in the violent effort to significationally erase appropriate recognition of Mitch’s contributions to the Radical Faerie scene and by implication the importance of those contributions about the gay shadow and gay-centered inner work to the gay movement overall. Because my own history with Mark is experientially thick, there are matters I can recount which are not accessible elsewhere. In that testimonial vein, I showed how Mark’s involvement in the more progressive work to functionally actualize a gay psychological theory and practice began somewhat peripherally yet grew over time, as did my intimate relationship with him, which all culminated in an ongoing inner-work group we both devotedly participated in for several years until the big blow-up about his questionable competence, thus demonstrating that Karen’s portrayal of me and my friends as merely trouble-making pests is far from reality. I described how it was Mark who had meanly betrayed his friends, citing two public letters rebuking him for those bad behaviors entailed in his cowardly reversal, thus arguing that it is Karen who enables dysfunctional and destructive “leadership” in her blind support of irresponsible Mark and Don. Finally, I wanted to put in my two cents supporting my associate Doug Sadownick in the face of what I see as Karen’s particularly unfair assault on him, especially considering how her influential position as news editor at the only L.A. gay and lesbian paper allows her by fact or reputation to broadcast her anti-psychological rationalizations, and thus her revenge politics, to a potentially large audience at Doug’s highlighted expense.
I have also tried in my discussion to allude to my own subjective self-awareness and ongoing inner work as a further way to distinguish myself from my opponents. Although it has been challenging for me to get down this statement carefully and intelligibly, I have found the opportunity to do so growthful and encouraging, and it is my hope that some of this more expansive quality may have been conveyed in the account herein articulated concerning the same-sex-loving struggle to better psychologically organize gay liberation theory and practice today.
