"Why Protest?"
Response to Karen Ocamb — Part I
Setting the Scene
In her recent article in the Los Angeles gay magazine Frontiers, “Protests Mar Radical Faerie Event” (February 24, 2009, p. 19), and her linked blog entry, “Who's History? My Curious Encounter with the Radical Faeries” (http://www.bilerico.com/2009/02/
whos_history_my_curious_encounter_with_t.php), Karen Ocamb attacks a demonstration I helped organize protesting a presentation by Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson marking the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Radical Faerie movement on February 15, 2009 at the One Gay and Lesbian Archives in L.A., thus publicly joining forces with Don in his systematic efforts at trivializing, distorting and/or erasing Mitch Walker’s participation and contributions to and beyond the Radical Faeries, which involve powerful and controversial issues and implications thereso being conveniently swept under the rug.[1]
I think it is imperative to respond to Karen’s unconscionably ill-informed assaults on the motives and integrity of the protesters, particularly because she has dismissively trivialized an essential debate we are trying to conduct on the moral and ethical state and future of the gay liberation movement, by framing it reductively as nothing but a petty tantrum over who can claim credit for personal co-founding of the Radical Faeries. In my opinion, the issue at hand is far more significant than the details about historical accuracy, and is anything but an effort to satisfy thinly veiled, narcissistic motives. However, I think one of the reasons Karen was so easily able to cynically mischaracterize the discussion as a grossly petulant and egocentrically-informed fight for primacy on our part, and as an apparently innocent expression of his own sincerely held truth in a tossing sea of varying opinions on Don’s part, may have been to some degree due to a lack of best articulated clarity in our own original literature, which included my “Call” to protest as well as Chris Kilbourne’s supplemental essay and also the protesters’ overall message, as presented for example on the signs being carried, a weakness of analysis which Karen then readily exploited.
For many years, I have felt angry that Mitch’s role has been so minimized by the mainstream gay media in general and systematically by Don Kilhefner in particular not just because I care about Mitch (which I do) but because the failure to adequately name what Mitch stands for—the need for a psychological theory and practice to most fully and effectively actualize gay spirit—is in my view historically regressive and destructive, and I experience this egregious neglect as a matter of grave urgency. This anger I feel is constellated right now specifically over the issue of who founded the Radical Faeries, but it actually more broadly relates to an ongoing controversy as to whether or not our gay liberation movement overall will grow and develop more-so in a healthy psychological way. A lack of differentiation here about where my own anger lay no doubt also colored to a certain extent my objectivity in my earlier Call to protest, and therefore my ability to most effectively inform the general reader about what was really important in this debate, and about how these foundationally-informing, gay liberation movement issues fundamentally bear on the health and well-being of all gay and lesbian people now.
So to reiterate, the main reason I decided to defend Mitch’s historical role in my Call and in our subsequent protest, was because I was concerned about the ideas and vision for which he stood and most pointedly about the necessity for psychological responsibility and consequent ethical action in order to become more emancipatedly gay! I cannot emphasize enough how important this issue is as a political matter. We all know that the world hangs by a thread, and the only possible answer to this global dilemma lies within the human mind, every single one. As individuals and in groups, we can find ourselves unwittingly behaving in violent and destructive ways we did not consciously intend, often causing actual damage to ourselves, those closest to us, and to the surrounding world. If we don’t better investigate the nature of how our minds individually and collectively shape reality, then we are destined to keep acting out problematic unconscious business, thus sabotaging and destroying our worthiest goals. This is common-sense psychology, what Carl Jung talked about as the challenge of the shadow. Mitch has tried valiantly for many years to bring this idea to the gay liberation movement because he felt that we gays were still deeply oppressed by the lingering effects of horrible sociocultural bigotry even after becoming proudly gay-identified, yet were also uniquely equipped by nature and circumstance to creatively better address our unconscious motivations and psychological possibilities in part due to our shamanic predisposition, such that if the latter was effectively enough brought to bear on the former, then the dynamic result could innovationally model a new era of psychologically-grounded, transcendental mindfulness for all human beings: a new Aeon, the Age of Aquarius. Taking up what amounts to a kind of spiritual leadership role, in his evolving view as I understand it, was what the Radical Faerie Movement had to be fundamentally all about. It seems to me that this core informing vision is the main issue at hand over the Faerie history debate, and how Mitch’s attempt to bring gay psychological mindfulness to the Faeries on that basis, and to the gay liberation movement more widely, has been ignorantly and sadistically marginalized by vicious opponents to the detriment of our greater gay and lesbian futurity.
Why Protest? (A Continuation of My Original Statement)
That said, I want to address the above-mentioned concerns about Karen’s attack on the protest through a somewhat step-by-step analysis of her blog and the larger issues involved, but first I would like to describe the chronology of how the protest developed, and some more of my own background that led to my involvement in this matter.
Just four days before the Faerie anniversary event, I first saw a new article by Don Kilhefner in Frontiers on the origins of the Radical Faerie movement (issue date: February 24, 2009). As I said before, I was already upset that Don had previously been attempting to rewrite history by severely minimizing Mitch Walker’s psychologically visionary contributions to the formation of the Radical Faeries; but seeing this new article, which was even more distorted, made me angrier still, because Mitch is the only person I know who has consistently encouraged Radical Faeries and everyone else to seriously confront the unconsciously motivated ways people can be hurtful to each other through destructive activities such as unsafe sex, personal dishonesty, and domination in group activities. Mitch gave me invaluable personal support to act ethically when I was pressured by fellow activists (including Harry Hay and Mark Thompson, on separate occasions that I will discuss below) not to confront issues of seriously dangerous activity in Faerie gatherings and the gay community, an obstructionist problem I also encountered in the AIDS activist movement. Confronting these usually covered-over but widespread issues through the years has resulted in a backlash from people who seem to privilege an unreal notion of community harmony at the expense of taking real personal responsibility for how we gay people actually treat one another, often in very harmful ways. I felt that Don’s writings about Faerie history were a part of this backlash, and that attempting to marginalize Mitch’s contributions to the Faeries was a way of ignoring Mitch’s invaluable, ongoing critique of violent unconscious activity between gay brothers persistently happening yet being largely ignored due to the problem of the gay shadow.
There were only a few days before Don was presenting his version of Radical Faerie history at the One Archives, so, with no time to waste, I wrote a personal statement to send along with the call to action (see this blog's archives for “Wendell Jones’s Protest Statement”), which focused on historical distortions in Don’s latest Frontiers account, basing my argument in large part on Stuart Timmons’ extensively researched history of the same period in his book, The Trouble with Harry Hay.
My Personal History with the Faeries
I first became associated with the Radical Faeries through attending an ACT UP Faerie circle in the late ‘80s, and I went to my first large Faerie retreat for nine days at Camp Shalom in Malibu around the Fall of 1989. Neither Harry Hay nor Mitch Walker attended this gathering, but I heard plenty of gossip about both. I knew there had been debates between them regarding issues of how decisions were made, but I considered those disputes to be old personal concerns and rivalries typical of the progressive movement that did not involve me and were better left in the past. My first gathering was an ecstatically joyful event. I did establish a close connection with Harry’s partner, John Burnside, who was there. He took me under his wing and personally chose to be paired with me as a Faerie elder in a ritual of initiation into the Faerie brotherhood. This led to an ongoing friendship with both John and Harry, who I soon met after the gathering.
Then I spent a week with Stuart Timmons at that time helping John and Harry pack their belongings for a move from Hollywood to West Hollywood after their house had partially burned down. Harry was charming and charismatic; I respected and adored him in many ways, but he regularly got into disagreements with other Faeries in planning groups. Many Faeries I knew resented and criticized Harry behind his back for dominating groups, but he was excused by most as a curmudgeonly yet loveable senior Faerie eccentric, a sentiment I shared, especially since I virtually always agreed with his points in group. We held similar political view, so we rarely disagreed about anything.
This changed a few years later during the planning for our annual retreat in late November of 1994, when actual life-and-death concerns for possible participants who had AIDS were raised. Some Faeries had suggested changing the venue to the high desert, in an area that regularly froze at that time of year and which had no indoor accommodations for people who were seriously immune-suppressed. At a large meeting attended by AIDS activists like Wayne Karr, Connie Norman, and Greg Carlyle, we spent hours hammering out a consensus to keep the gathering at Camp Shalom, which had warm bunks and safe gathering structures in a more temperate rural setting. I couldn’t go to all the small planning meetings because I was spending most of my time caring for a dying Faerie friend, Wade Richards, who wanted to attend the gathering. Though I wasn’t able to be at every meeting, I trusted the good faith of our consensus agreement.
So I was very upset when I subsequently learned that a small sub-committee had overturned the group consensus and changed the location for the gathering. When Wade requested that I attend the next planning circle meeting to raise objections, I was uncertain what to do. I was shuttling between Wade’s home, long stays at the hospital and my own home—and was totally frazzled. I turned for advice to Mitch Walker, because I had developed a casual friendship with him by this time and knew he had experience dealing with group conflict in the Faeries in the past. I think I was looking for someone to push me to take the time to do what I knew was best, which was to stand up for the needs of the immune suppressed.
Mitch cautioned me about the temptation to demonize others in the group, and to stop, slow down, and seriously consider my position before I went to the next meeting. He explained that there were advantages to a gathering held in a more remote location which I had not experienced, but which others had. He asked me to critically consider if I was being tempted to act out my own power complexes, compared to whether or not there really was an important health consideration for some fragile Faeries that could potentially endanger their well-being. After serious reflection I felt there truly were major issues here about the gathering location beyond my own feelings about it. Wade’s family and doctor had told me in no uncertain terms that it would be crazy to take him to such a cold, remote, and isolated rural area considering his health status. After I pointed this out, Mitch then encouraged me to still be aware of and critically relate to my feelings of anger over this matter of the location, and on that more awake basis, to approach the group in the most principled way I could with my concerns, if that was my decision as to the action I felt I had to take.
Now hoping to work out a reasonable solution, I decided to attend the next planning meeting. After I got there and just before it started, Harry took me aside and said the location decision already made was now final, and if I stayed to espouse a contrary view I would only be disrupting plans which needed implementation. Then he pressured me to leave, so I co-dependently departed. I subsequently called all the immune-suppressed Faeries I knew and informed them that if anyone wanted to argue a case for the Camp Shalom site further, they should contact the planners, as I did not have the time, energy, or will to fight the problem out in endless meetings.
After the group began getting calls objecting to their plans, an unscheduled anonymous Faerie newsletter suddenly appeared claiming that I had been calling Faeries at the behest of Mitch Walker and telling them that the planners wanted them dead. At this time, unfortunately, I had to step out of the planning issue altogether to care for Wade, who was getting much worse. He died the night the gathering started. Just days before his death, as his condition deteriorated more, various Faeries began arriving at his hospital room to try and take him to the upcoming gathering so as to prove the safety of their choice of location. His family told me to get them out and the doctors insisted he not be moved. I found it synchronous that minutes after his death, the first night of the gathering, a rain storm opened up over the hospital and then moved to the high desert where it drenched, hailed on, and froze all of the tents at the gathering. When I traveled there the next day, many Faeries had already left because of the difficult conditions.
As this whole episode unfolded, some Faeries began blaming Mitch for my actions. I was angry with these nasty distortions and responded by participating in the production of a series of newsletters in which I invited Mitch, Mark Thompson, who at the time was an ally, and others to respond to the issue of decision-making in the Faerie community. The “official” planning group responded back with a newsletter describing me as a cancer which had to be cut out of the Faerie movement, and announced the end of open Faerie meetings in Los Angeles.
One writer in this newsletter complained that Mitch had walked around Faerie circles in the past chanting, “AIDS is in this circle,” creating a disturbing mood which now had to be opposed. When I asked Mitch about it, he explained (and many other Faeries later confirmed) that in the earlier days of the epidemic, some Faeries had insisted strongly that there could not be infectious transmission through unsafe sex if it was practiced with love and Faerie spirit, or that the disease was not a transmissible one to begin with. As a health educator, therapist, and AIDS activist before ACT UP in the early 80s, Mitch had helped advocate for clients who were left to die in their beds in the hallway at County USC Hospital, and he knew first hand the dangers a person faced through viral infection. He vigorously warned people in Faerie circles to recognize the coming threat realistically, and to look at the ways they could unconsciously harm each other if they didn’t. Something clicked inside of me at this point, and I finally began to realize clearly what Mitch was talking about when he cautioned that failure to understand our own personal psychology could have devastating consequences for our lives and for the gay liberation movement.
Insights, Conclusions, and Lessons
Since that time, I have worked to support better facing the issues I have raised here through my participation in Radical Faerie and other progressive organizing activities. During these years, Mitch’s ongoing example as a gay leader has encouraged me to take responsibility for my own psychology more effectively, and to develop my creative talents as much as possible in a way no other gay leader I know of has ever done. His example as a principled gay activist, and the ideas he has promoted in his writing and person, have helped me lead my life in a profoundly more grounded and hopeful way, and even helped me nurture a ten-year relationship with a loving partner, an experience that until a decade ago had proved painfully elusive for me.
So when I recently saw Don’s belittling of Mitch’s crucial role in the creation of the Radical Faeries in that February 24 issue of Frontiers, I quickly wrote my original response and worked with other Faerie organizers from the past to call the One Archives protest. Karen asks in her blog why I didn’t just write a complaint to Frontiers instead of demonstrating. That’s like comparing apples and oranges; to make a strong protest statement at a live event is not at all the same as sending a little letter to a magazine editor that might be published, if at all, weeks later. Further, I have seen how the local gay press distorts news and then ignores responses attempting to clarify deficient reports. For example, the now defunct magazine IN L.A. stated last year that no other group beside Don’s Gay Men’s Medicine Circle helps gay men in the West Hollywood area deal specifically with gay psychological issues, when this has not been true historically or presently. When I saw this claim last year, I wrote a polite letter praising coverage of Don’s work, but pointing out that indeed, there is at least one other active organization fully dedicated to addressing the mental health challenges gay men face. For the last 11 years, in fact, I have participated monthly in West Hollywood with between twelve and forty mostly gay men to discuss homosexual psychological issues ranging from dating and intimacy to assimilation and gay soul in public workshops and seminars sponsored by the nonprofit organization Treeroots and more recently the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis. IN failed to print this or any other letters correcting their mistake, or to make any other attempt to address their misleading coverage. Frontiers has recently merged with IN and for a long time had itself not been printing any letters to the editor. I had no reason to believe they would react any differently in this new situation. Considering the demise of other local gay news coverage, Frontiers in L.A. now has a virtual monopoly on that coverage. With Don’s event just two days away, it was clear that the only way to realistically assure getting my view of the issue heard in public was to take direct action.
I hope this additional explanation of my motivation and some of the history involved will help clarify the importance of the issues at stake in the current debate. The call to protest unconscious violence in our community is not trivial or a mean-spirited attack against important gay leaders. It is an appeal to each of us to responsibly work to create a more ethical and self-aware gay community that can better nurture our individual and collective growth during a time of what I see as increased repression in our society as a whole (in spite of all our so-called LGBT rights and Obama).
There are numerous other inaccuracies in Karen’s blog entry that still need to be pointed out, which I will attempt to address in Part II of my response.
ENDNOTE
[1] As this piece is being written, the latest issue of the national gay magazine, The Advocate, came out (March 11, 2009), in which an article about the 30th anniversary of the Radical Faeries (on page 24), once again depicts Don as the founder of the movement along with Harry Hay, and no mention of Mitch. This is the most recent of various references to Don as one of the two principal organizers of the Radical Faeries that have appeared in gay publications in the last several years, as well as in brochures, ads, and the website Don maintains that regularly announces his workshops and public events.
In her recent article in the Los Angeles gay magazine Frontiers, “Protests Mar Radical Faerie Event” (February 24, 2009, p. 19), and her linked blog entry, “Who's History? My Curious Encounter with the Radical Faeries” (http://www.bilerico.com/2009/02/
whos_history_my_curious_encounter_with_t.php), Karen Ocamb attacks a demonstration I helped organize protesting a presentation by Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson marking the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Radical Faerie movement on February 15, 2009 at the One Gay and Lesbian Archives in L.A., thus publicly joining forces with Don in his systematic efforts at trivializing, distorting and/or erasing Mitch Walker’s participation and contributions to and beyond the Radical Faeries, which involve powerful and controversial issues and implications thereso being conveniently swept under the rug.[1]
I think it is imperative to respond to Karen’s unconscionably ill-informed assaults on the motives and integrity of the protesters, particularly because she has dismissively trivialized an essential debate we are trying to conduct on the moral and ethical state and future of the gay liberation movement, by framing it reductively as nothing but a petty tantrum over who can claim credit for personal co-founding of the Radical Faeries. In my opinion, the issue at hand is far more significant than the details about historical accuracy, and is anything but an effort to satisfy thinly veiled, narcissistic motives. However, I think one of the reasons Karen was so easily able to cynically mischaracterize the discussion as a grossly petulant and egocentrically-informed fight for primacy on our part, and as an apparently innocent expression of his own sincerely held truth in a tossing sea of varying opinions on Don’s part, may have been to some degree due to a lack of best articulated clarity in our own original literature, which included my “Call” to protest as well as Chris Kilbourne’s supplemental essay and also the protesters’ overall message, as presented for example on the signs being carried, a weakness of analysis which Karen then readily exploited.
For many years, I have felt angry that Mitch’s role has been so minimized by the mainstream gay media in general and systematically by Don Kilhefner in particular not just because I care about Mitch (which I do) but because the failure to adequately name what Mitch stands for—the need for a psychological theory and practice to most fully and effectively actualize gay spirit—is in my view historically regressive and destructive, and I experience this egregious neglect as a matter of grave urgency. This anger I feel is constellated right now specifically over the issue of who founded the Radical Faeries, but it actually more broadly relates to an ongoing controversy as to whether or not our gay liberation movement overall will grow and develop more-so in a healthy psychological way. A lack of differentiation here about where my own anger lay no doubt also colored to a certain extent my objectivity in my earlier Call to protest, and therefore my ability to most effectively inform the general reader about what was really important in this debate, and about how these foundationally-informing, gay liberation movement issues fundamentally bear on the health and well-being of all gay and lesbian people now.
So to reiterate, the main reason I decided to defend Mitch’s historical role in my Call and in our subsequent protest, was because I was concerned about the ideas and vision for which he stood and most pointedly about the necessity for psychological responsibility and consequent ethical action in order to become more emancipatedly gay! I cannot emphasize enough how important this issue is as a political matter. We all know that the world hangs by a thread, and the only possible answer to this global dilemma lies within the human mind, every single one. As individuals and in groups, we can find ourselves unwittingly behaving in violent and destructive ways we did not consciously intend, often causing actual damage to ourselves, those closest to us, and to the surrounding world. If we don’t better investigate the nature of how our minds individually and collectively shape reality, then we are destined to keep acting out problematic unconscious business, thus sabotaging and destroying our worthiest goals. This is common-sense psychology, what Carl Jung talked about as the challenge of the shadow. Mitch has tried valiantly for many years to bring this idea to the gay liberation movement because he felt that we gays were still deeply oppressed by the lingering effects of horrible sociocultural bigotry even after becoming proudly gay-identified, yet were also uniquely equipped by nature and circumstance to creatively better address our unconscious motivations and psychological possibilities in part due to our shamanic predisposition, such that if the latter was effectively enough brought to bear on the former, then the dynamic result could innovationally model a new era of psychologically-grounded, transcendental mindfulness for all human beings: a new Aeon, the Age of Aquarius. Taking up what amounts to a kind of spiritual leadership role, in his evolving view as I understand it, was what the Radical Faerie Movement had to be fundamentally all about. It seems to me that this core informing vision is the main issue at hand over the Faerie history debate, and how Mitch’s attempt to bring gay psychological mindfulness to the Faeries on that basis, and to the gay liberation movement more widely, has been ignorantly and sadistically marginalized by vicious opponents to the detriment of our greater gay and lesbian futurity.
Why Protest? (A Continuation of My Original Statement)
That said, I want to address the above-mentioned concerns about Karen’s attack on the protest through a somewhat step-by-step analysis of her blog and the larger issues involved, but first I would like to describe the chronology of how the protest developed, and some more of my own background that led to my involvement in this matter.
Just four days before the Faerie anniversary event, I first saw a new article by Don Kilhefner in Frontiers on the origins of the Radical Faerie movement (issue date: February 24, 2009). As I said before, I was already upset that Don had previously been attempting to rewrite history by severely minimizing Mitch Walker’s psychologically visionary contributions to the formation of the Radical Faeries; but seeing this new article, which was even more distorted, made me angrier still, because Mitch is the only person I know who has consistently encouraged Radical Faeries and everyone else to seriously confront the unconsciously motivated ways people can be hurtful to each other through destructive activities such as unsafe sex, personal dishonesty, and domination in group activities. Mitch gave me invaluable personal support to act ethically when I was pressured by fellow activists (including Harry Hay and Mark Thompson, on separate occasions that I will discuss below) not to confront issues of seriously dangerous activity in Faerie gatherings and the gay community, an obstructionist problem I also encountered in the AIDS activist movement. Confronting these usually covered-over but widespread issues through the years has resulted in a backlash from people who seem to privilege an unreal notion of community harmony at the expense of taking real personal responsibility for how we gay people actually treat one another, often in very harmful ways. I felt that Don’s writings about Faerie history were a part of this backlash, and that attempting to marginalize Mitch’s contributions to the Faeries was a way of ignoring Mitch’s invaluable, ongoing critique of violent unconscious activity between gay brothers persistently happening yet being largely ignored due to the problem of the gay shadow.
There were only a few days before Don was presenting his version of Radical Faerie history at the One Archives, so, with no time to waste, I wrote a personal statement to send along with the call to action (see this blog's archives for “Wendell Jones’s Protest Statement”), which focused on historical distortions in Don’s latest Frontiers account, basing my argument in large part on Stuart Timmons’ extensively researched history of the same period in his book, The Trouble with Harry Hay.
My Personal History with the Faeries
I first became associated with the Radical Faeries through attending an ACT UP Faerie circle in the late ‘80s, and I went to my first large Faerie retreat for nine days at Camp Shalom in Malibu around the Fall of 1989. Neither Harry Hay nor Mitch Walker attended this gathering, but I heard plenty of gossip about both. I knew there had been debates between them regarding issues of how decisions were made, but I considered those disputes to be old personal concerns and rivalries typical of the progressive movement that did not involve me and were better left in the past. My first gathering was an ecstatically joyful event. I did establish a close connection with Harry’s partner, John Burnside, who was there. He took me under his wing and personally chose to be paired with me as a Faerie elder in a ritual of initiation into the Faerie brotherhood. This led to an ongoing friendship with both John and Harry, who I soon met after the gathering.
Then I spent a week with Stuart Timmons at that time helping John and Harry pack their belongings for a move from Hollywood to West Hollywood after their house had partially burned down. Harry was charming and charismatic; I respected and adored him in many ways, but he regularly got into disagreements with other Faeries in planning groups. Many Faeries I knew resented and criticized Harry behind his back for dominating groups, but he was excused by most as a curmudgeonly yet loveable senior Faerie eccentric, a sentiment I shared, especially since I virtually always agreed with his points in group. We held similar political view, so we rarely disagreed about anything.
This changed a few years later during the planning for our annual retreat in late November of 1994, when actual life-and-death concerns for possible participants who had AIDS were raised. Some Faeries had suggested changing the venue to the high desert, in an area that regularly froze at that time of year and which had no indoor accommodations for people who were seriously immune-suppressed. At a large meeting attended by AIDS activists like Wayne Karr, Connie Norman, and Greg Carlyle, we spent hours hammering out a consensus to keep the gathering at Camp Shalom, which had warm bunks and safe gathering structures in a more temperate rural setting. I couldn’t go to all the small planning meetings because I was spending most of my time caring for a dying Faerie friend, Wade Richards, who wanted to attend the gathering. Though I wasn’t able to be at every meeting, I trusted the good faith of our consensus agreement.
So I was very upset when I subsequently learned that a small sub-committee had overturned the group consensus and changed the location for the gathering. When Wade requested that I attend the next planning circle meeting to raise objections, I was uncertain what to do. I was shuttling between Wade’s home, long stays at the hospital and my own home—and was totally frazzled. I turned for advice to Mitch Walker, because I had developed a casual friendship with him by this time and knew he had experience dealing with group conflict in the Faeries in the past. I think I was looking for someone to push me to take the time to do what I knew was best, which was to stand up for the needs of the immune suppressed.
Mitch cautioned me about the temptation to demonize others in the group, and to stop, slow down, and seriously consider my position before I went to the next meeting. He explained that there were advantages to a gathering held in a more remote location which I had not experienced, but which others had. He asked me to critically consider if I was being tempted to act out my own power complexes, compared to whether or not there really was an important health consideration for some fragile Faeries that could potentially endanger their well-being. After serious reflection I felt there truly were major issues here about the gathering location beyond my own feelings about it. Wade’s family and doctor had told me in no uncertain terms that it would be crazy to take him to such a cold, remote, and isolated rural area considering his health status. After I pointed this out, Mitch then encouraged me to still be aware of and critically relate to my feelings of anger over this matter of the location, and on that more awake basis, to approach the group in the most principled way I could with my concerns, if that was my decision as to the action I felt I had to take.
Now hoping to work out a reasonable solution, I decided to attend the next planning meeting. After I got there and just before it started, Harry took me aside and said the location decision already made was now final, and if I stayed to espouse a contrary view I would only be disrupting plans which needed implementation. Then he pressured me to leave, so I co-dependently departed. I subsequently called all the immune-suppressed Faeries I knew and informed them that if anyone wanted to argue a case for the Camp Shalom site further, they should contact the planners, as I did not have the time, energy, or will to fight the problem out in endless meetings.
After the group began getting calls objecting to their plans, an unscheduled anonymous Faerie newsletter suddenly appeared claiming that I had been calling Faeries at the behest of Mitch Walker and telling them that the planners wanted them dead. At this time, unfortunately, I had to step out of the planning issue altogether to care for Wade, who was getting much worse. He died the night the gathering started. Just days before his death, as his condition deteriorated more, various Faeries began arriving at his hospital room to try and take him to the upcoming gathering so as to prove the safety of their choice of location. His family told me to get them out and the doctors insisted he not be moved. I found it synchronous that minutes after his death, the first night of the gathering, a rain storm opened up over the hospital and then moved to the high desert where it drenched, hailed on, and froze all of the tents at the gathering. When I traveled there the next day, many Faeries had already left because of the difficult conditions.
As this whole episode unfolded, some Faeries began blaming Mitch for my actions. I was angry with these nasty distortions and responded by participating in the production of a series of newsletters in which I invited Mitch, Mark Thompson, who at the time was an ally, and others to respond to the issue of decision-making in the Faerie community. The “official” planning group responded back with a newsletter describing me as a cancer which had to be cut out of the Faerie movement, and announced the end of open Faerie meetings in Los Angeles.
One writer in this newsletter complained that Mitch had walked around Faerie circles in the past chanting, “AIDS is in this circle,” creating a disturbing mood which now had to be opposed. When I asked Mitch about it, he explained (and many other Faeries later confirmed) that in the earlier days of the epidemic, some Faeries had insisted strongly that there could not be infectious transmission through unsafe sex if it was practiced with love and Faerie spirit, or that the disease was not a transmissible one to begin with. As a health educator, therapist, and AIDS activist before ACT UP in the early 80s, Mitch had helped advocate for clients who were left to die in their beds in the hallway at County USC Hospital, and he knew first hand the dangers a person faced through viral infection. He vigorously warned people in Faerie circles to recognize the coming threat realistically, and to look at the ways they could unconsciously harm each other if they didn’t. Something clicked inside of me at this point, and I finally began to realize clearly what Mitch was talking about when he cautioned that failure to understand our own personal psychology could have devastating consequences for our lives and for the gay liberation movement.
Insights, Conclusions, and Lessons
Since that time, I have worked to support better facing the issues I have raised here through my participation in Radical Faerie and other progressive organizing activities. During these years, Mitch’s ongoing example as a gay leader has encouraged me to take responsibility for my own psychology more effectively, and to develop my creative talents as much as possible in a way no other gay leader I know of has ever done. His example as a principled gay activist, and the ideas he has promoted in his writing and person, have helped me lead my life in a profoundly more grounded and hopeful way, and even helped me nurture a ten-year relationship with a loving partner, an experience that until a decade ago had proved painfully elusive for me.
So when I recently saw Don’s belittling of Mitch’s crucial role in the creation of the Radical Faeries in that February 24 issue of Frontiers, I quickly wrote my original response and worked with other Faerie organizers from the past to call the One Archives protest. Karen asks in her blog why I didn’t just write a complaint to Frontiers instead of demonstrating. That’s like comparing apples and oranges; to make a strong protest statement at a live event is not at all the same as sending a little letter to a magazine editor that might be published, if at all, weeks later. Further, I have seen how the local gay press distorts news and then ignores responses attempting to clarify deficient reports. For example, the now defunct magazine IN L.A. stated last year that no other group beside Don’s Gay Men’s Medicine Circle helps gay men in the West Hollywood area deal specifically with gay psychological issues, when this has not been true historically or presently. When I saw this claim last year, I wrote a polite letter praising coverage of Don’s work, but pointing out that indeed, there is at least one other active organization fully dedicated to addressing the mental health challenges gay men face. For the last 11 years, in fact, I have participated monthly in West Hollywood with between twelve and forty mostly gay men to discuss homosexual psychological issues ranging from dating and intimacy to assimilation and gay soul in public workshops and seminars sponsored by the nonprofit organization Treeroots and more recently the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis. IN failed to print this or any other letters correcting their mistake, or to make any other attempt to address their misleading coverage. Frontiers has recently merged with IN and for a long time had itself not been printing any letters to the editor. I had no reason to believe they would react any differently in this new situation. Considering the demise of other local gay news coverage, Frontiers in L.A. now has a virtual monopoly on that coverage. With Don’s event just two days away, it was clear that the only way to realistically assure getting my view of the issue heard in public was to take direct action.
I hope this additional explanation of my motivation and some of the history involved will help clarify the importance of the issues at stake in the current debate. The call to protest unconscious violence in our community is not trivial or a mean-spirited attack against important gay leaders. It is an appeal to each of us to responsibly work to create a more ethical and self-aware gay community that can better nurture our individual and collective growth during a time of what I see as increased repression in our society as a whole (in spite of all our so-called LGBT rights and Obama).
There are numerous other inaccuracies in Karen’s blog entry that still need to be pointed out, which I will attempt to address in Part II of my response.
ENDNOTE
[1] As this piece is being written, the latest issue of the national gay magazine, The Advocate, came out (March 11, 2009), in which an article about the 30th anniversary of the Radical Faeries (on page 24), once again depicts Don as the founder of the movement along with Harry Hay, and no mention of Mitch. This is the most recent of various references to Don as one of the two principal organizers of the Radical Faeries that have appeared in gay publications in the last several years, as well as in brochures, ads, and the website Don maintains that regularly announces his workshops and public events.
