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So What if I Screamed?
Responding to Karen Ocamb’s Blog, Don Kilhefner’s Lies, and My Own Provoked Shame and Rage, as an Act of Gay-Centered Psychological Activism
By attempting a truly thoughtful exposition into importantly subjective matters, I should point out that it is all the more incumbent on me to consequently appreciate the manner in which the following meditations will inevitably be arising from and thus contaminated by, as all writings are, my own psychological reality and its limitations from, among other things, growing up gay in a heterosexist world. In line with that acknowledgement, then, I’d like to balance the discussion I am about to undertake through owning what Jungian thought considers the “problem of the shadow” in my gay psyche and how that may be involved with my argument. As well is it relevant here to note, of course, that I am certainly no bystanding observer to the matters at hand, but am indeed passionately, although I hope not blindly, involved. In that regard, then, perhaps my not-insignificant relevant experience and knowledgeability concerning the topics we will here be delving into further, which assets have been garnered through two decades of gay-centered inner work, scholarship, activism and teaching (such as, more recently, through my role as inaugural Director of the innovative LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University Los Angeles, the first such graduate training program in the country, and also through my efforts as a founding member of the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis in West Hollywood, the first educational and training facility devoted to analytically understanding homosexual individuation as a deeply valuable, even sacred path of estimable self-realization for gay people and for all human beings), will prove helpful in navigating my way through the various challenges entailed in the following journey with a full measure of authentic honesty, fairness and accuracy.
Since I hope, in the course of my narrative, to try to attend to when and how my own shadow complexes may be becoming activated, I will begin here, at the start, with the subjective fact hitting me now, that I find it quite difficult to clearly write in a gay-centered and coherent way at all, due both to the manner in which my traumatized early psychology takes me into literary “car wrecks” on a regular basis when I try, as well as to how my emotional impulsivity and narcissistic neediness attempt to obfuscate my better objectivity and a fair Gay Spirit orientation in formulating what I am going to say in the first place. The power plays I am trying to expose in our community mirror power plays going on in my inner object relations, my subjective dynamic themes, I am sure. Likewise, the brooding civil war between psychological mindfulness and mindless allegiance to insidious psychological violence erupts in my lived experience (which is that of a gay man attempting a proudly gay-centering existence in a contemporary human world increasingly driven toward madness by unbridled heterosexism and its attendant symptomology of extroversion, commercialism, numbing assimilation and so on) when I contemplate how to construct this hopefully-dialectical essay in a well-done fashion to then reactively face a rising affective tide of internal doubt and corrosive self-criticism which proceeds to flood me with potentially-crippling toxic shame, accompanying images of terrible self-loathing and the desperate need to escape.
Part I of this blog details the historical and situational context of an ACT-UP styled protest that I and some activist friends held on February 15, 2009, focusing in particular on the ongoing deceptions being spun by Los Angeles gay community “elder” Don Kilhefner that were part of the catalyst for this demonstration.
Part II concerns analysis of a defamatory blog commentary written by L.A. LGBT journalist Karen Ocamb in response to the demonstration that included her revisionist “take” on a relationship with a now-deceased friend she and I had shared many years ago.
In both of these parts, followed by a brief concluding summary of my entire statement, I will include my perspective on the presumed intent and possible reasoning behind both Don’s and Karen’s distortions—and the implications thereof for the greater gay liberation movement itself, as we all decide if we are going to more so evolve as valuably same-sex-loving or instead procreatively stagnate homosexually to then regressively dissolve into assimilationist irrelevance.
Part I: The Radical Faerie Demonstration
We were demonstrating against a 30-year-retrospective on the founding of the Radical Faerie movement that longtime gay community leaders Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson were giving, which retrospective wound up being attended by well over 100 people. Karen then wrote a biased report on the demonstration in the gay newsmagazine Frontiers in L.A., to which was attached a blog entry referral that led to some went-to-town dishing-the-dirt about the demonstrators and their intentions, in particular really taking me to task personally for some “water-under-the-bridge” stuff between her and me regarding the care of a dying singer named Michael Callen.
The vocal but cheerful protest against Don and Mark’s presentation at the One Archives centered around the fact/idea that the two men were engaging in a shady business of manipulative historical revisionism—with the seemingly uninformed support of various people such as Karen. They were out to tout their warped and factually inaccurate version of how a movement little known by most gay and lesbian people today, but perhaps terribly important to our further same-sex-loving destiny, got started, and what then became of it: the Radical Faeries.
The Faerie movement is historically important because it marks the first large-scale effort to organize gay-identified men on an indigenously-homosexual spiritual basis, unlike gay synagogues, churches, etc., thereby enunciating a freshly-profound degree of gay-centering interest—the notion of an endogenous Gay Spirit—that has not only crystallized what is now an ongoing tradition of homosexually-foregrounded spiritual literature (e.g., de la Huerta, 1999; Johnson, 2000, 2003; Thompson, 1987/2005, 1994) and activities but, even more pertinently in regard to the issues at hand, has set the historical stage for a broader and currently more-controversial conversation, now taking place, which concerns extending that pioneering Faerie sensibility into a gay-centering, psychological, grassroots therapeutics and activism.
The visionary homosexual movement of the Radical Faeries was originated in the later 1970s principally by three committed gay activists: Harry Hay (co-founder of the Mattachine Society in 1950, the first lasting attempt to organize gays on a political basis in North America[1]), Don Kilhefner (co-founder of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in 1971, the first institution of its kind) and Mitch Walker (the first “out” gay author to be published in a prominent Jungian journal in 1976). John Burnside, Harry’s lover, should also be named as an important supporting (“passive-aggressive”?) figure standing by Harry’s side through it all.
The group issued “A Call to Gay Brothers” in the Spring of 1979 for “A Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries” that September Labor Day which was subsequently attended quite successfully by an overflow crowd of 220 enthusiastic men, leading to the birth of a new gay cultural phenomenon which has since spread around the world (McCleary, 2004; Thompson, 1987/2005; see also www.radfae.org; www.radicalfaeries.net; www.rfdmag.org).
In the version of this Faerie birth story currently being told by Don Kilhefner, now supported by Mark, Karen and others, not only do movement co-founder Mitch Walker, his important participation and his theoretical/practical contributions have hardly any presence or significance, but there is not even mention of a huge controversy and schism that developed in the early Faerie organizing group due to Mitch’s trailblazing insistence both on honestly facing psychological shadow issues (that is, negative and contradictory subjective motives) which were getting acted out personally among and by individual organizers and as a group, and on fairly recognizing that such difficult issues were intimately entailed in what sincerely pursuing the vision of Radical Faerie self-becoming meant in practice, rather than, as usual, shadow problems being left to the domination of unconscious, unexamined ego-defenses operating within a social “law of the jungle” morality. Mitch’s ethically-daring and controversial stance within the organizing group eventually lead to an ideological polarization into two opposing camps on the decisive issue of Faeries needing to be purposefully psychologically-minded, which split historically crystallized irreparably when Don deliberately joined with Mitch to heatedly resign from the founding circle at its Summer Solstice 1981 meeting to start a psychologically-oriented pursuit of the Faerie gay vision, while the anti-psychological faction, led by Harry and John, pursued a campaign of ignoring, scapegoating and demonizing the rebels as irrelevant, as the cause of any problems going on and as viciously hateful, even antisocial and psychotic, people.
It then appears that, after Don and Mitch had worked together for several years in their successor organizing group, Treeroots, Don realized that his continued sincere participation would actually require his becoming much more open with himself and the other organizers about his own shadow business, rather than merely upholding Mitch’s views with platitudes while persisting in keeping his own shadow psychology secretively hidden away, and at that point Don then suddenly turned on Mitch, privately accused him enragedly of being a vicious exploiter, and then refused to have anything more to do with him personally, although he continued to participate in Treeroots for another decade. Since Don quit Treeroots in 1994, he has gradually taken over Harry’s old role of erasing and demonizing Mitch and the history I have just outlined, while himself claiming to now possess all those attributes that were being homosexually forged by his one-time closest associate Mitch Walker when they worked together, such as Don’s claims to being a gay Jungian theorist / psychotherapist, a gay shaman and a gay psychologist-community leader. Since Don has risen in the last decade to greater prominence, through his ongoing column in Frontiers in L.A. gay newsmagazine as well as in diverse other articles and public presentations, his intent to control the Faerie story has meant a persistent and so far fairly-successful effort to defame and blacklist Mitch, his ideas and associates while Don puts out his ideas and associates as the only viable versions of gay psychological theory/activism and the kind of people to be trusted in these matters, people such as Mark Thompson, who has his own ax to grind with Mitch over the same kind of shadow problem, and more recently, Karen as well, who, it turns out, has secretly carried on honing a big ax against me and anyone associated with me for her own reasons for a very long time, a matter I will explore below.
The basic birth story of the Radical Faerie movement, and some material about the eventual schism that emerged over the central question posed by Mitch and later Don (shouldn’t the Faeries be psychologically responsible?)—can be found in a few history books and archival documents (e.g., Hay, 1996; McCleary, 2004; Thompson, 1987/2005; Timmons, 1990) but there is little as yet that offers much discussion of or even access to the fuller historical picture I will be exploring here, other than the dwindling number of still-living participants and what pertinent documentary material there may be. Therefore, I would like to use the occasion of this blog statement to sketch out aspects of that bigger picture as I have come to understand it over time, such as the story of Don turning on Mitch I mentioned above, which I first heard from Mitch years ago. To do so, I rely for the established account of the early development and schism of the Radical Faerie movement on Stuart Timmons’ biography, The Trouble with Harry Hay (1990), which is based on considered interviews with all the main actors of the time, and, in regard to some of the dishier aspects of Faerie history I will get into, I will be relying not only on personal recollections but on a large body of freshly accessible (and rather juicy) personal letters written by Don Kilhefner to Mitch Walker during the early Faerie period, some of the revealing contents of which I will shortly share.
A Historical Digression—But Important!
The first pairing of nascent Faerie leadership took place between Harry, who, along with John, was living in New Mexico on a Native American reservation and writing about traditions of gay-centered consciousness, and Mitch, who was living in San Francisco and coincidentally developing a novel theory and practice of gay-centered depth psychology.
Don was later brought along, in part because of his stellar reputation as a community organizer, in particular as co-founder of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, and also in part due to his passionate interest in Harry and Mitch’s gay-centered visionary concerns. The three radicals, writes Stuart, quoting Mitch, then “made a ‘three-sided square’” with John Burnside “helping out as needed” (Timmons, 1990, p. 262) in terms of the budding effort to successfully promulgate a new gay movement.
The initial Faerie gathering proved ecstatic for many. But vision is one thing, and human personalities another.
Not that I think it’s entirely fair to compare myself to Harry, especially given the particular antipathy towards a more psychologically-minded attitude gay men of his generation commonly understandably developed due to how homophobic the field had been and often still remains, but as someone who has had to face his own “leadership complex,” I find Harry’s blanket denial either naïve or disingenuous. Isn’t it at heart true that all of one’s idealism (inflation?) in wanting to join with others for the greater gay good is best realized if one then also takes into account one’s inevitable and often rather ominous gay shadow personality of unresolved interior contradictions, traumas and bad feelings that not only goes along for the ride but even more so enjoys sabotaging sincere gay intentions as its own queerly-tricksterish way of contrarily insisting on first being related to better itself and eventually then being reparatively humanized integratively toward a truly-larger homosexual end?
First off, there is the general archetypal aspect of the shadow problem impacting existential human life (the Jungian view). Each human being must face the subjective bifurcation in the personality of competing unconscious and conscious “selves,” a condition which has historically evolved as a result of humanity metaphorically being exiled from the Garden of Eden of what must have been our original mental innocence and unconscious wholeness in instinctual animal life. This historically-generated, intrapsychic war-of-wills has now been dialectically evolving towards the breaking point for an aeon, fed ever more vigorously by the still-incomplete rise of a relatively-stronger ego complex post-Enlightenment. The compensatory shadow cast by a better-willed ego is presently in my opinion an indisputable fact of rational / technological life which we humans broadly refuse to realistically recognize, despite the greater social and ecological holocausts stalking our times with growing proximity in dire consequence.
And in the context of this gathering, archetypally-sourced, historical shadow dilemma, specifically in relation to same-sex-loving life today, lies the more particular Marxist-Freudian phenomenal fact of a millennium’s-worth and more of persistent State / Ecclesiastical-sponsored homophobic violence in Western cultural traditions now filtered through the mind-fuck of our so-called loving but quite heterosexist parents cradling us in their resulting crass consciousness.
It is certainly the case with me, apropos gay shadow problems, that without ongoing therapy and significant help from supportive others for my own foul heterosexist trauma, I would today be little more than a psychological invalid masquerading as a decent gay person.
So how is it possible that Harry could not have had any important shadow issues for himself entailed in being a big gay leader and thinker?[2] But as is too typically the case with highly defended people, the attempt by Mitch to honestly address what seemed to be a significant problem in regard to Harry’s own unintegrated aggression and will to dominate along with the consequent supine and even enabling cooperation of the organizing group as a whole, was reactively demonized unconditionally and persistently by Harry as itself violently aggressive via what seems to me to have been, speaking in a psychoanalytic way, the unaware defensive projection of a strong negative transference onto Mitch that an emotionally-polarizing Harry fiercely refused to face.
To Punish the Gay-Centering Psychological Messenger is Homophobic, One-Dimensional and the Vestige of a Dying Ethic
Despite that Stuart’s account of the confrontational incident referred to above between Harry and Mitch is biased in favor of Harry’s version by way of suggestively characterizing Mitch as narcissistically attempting to pressure Harry to unreasonably accept Mitch’s form of psychologizing, my own personal experiences of the parties involved (including of Stuart) is that this characterization actually amounts to a projection by Stuart as well as by Harry—that is, they are the ones unselfreflectively forcing others to accept their “one-dimensional” views of psychology (The psychological defense of projection, by the way, in which one finds some distasteful aspect of oneself in someone else instead of in oneself, seems to me a ubiquitous and rampantly-employed psychodynamic maneuver among unselfreflective people and the societies they create today).
By “one-dimensional,” I am referring to political theorist Herbert Marcuse’s psychological notion of how it is that a “false consciousness which is immune against its falseness” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 12) gets created by certain figures in “advanced industrial societies” to oppressively control discourse therein. The “one-dimensional man” [sic] suffocates “needs which demand liberation” through the way he or she reduces complexity in thought such that the “false consciousness of [this] rationality becomes the true consciousness” for that individual and the entire community (p. 11).[3]
Mitch Walker, while fiery as a person committed to gay-centered truth and eros, is also, as I can honestly attest to after having been associated with him for a long time now, the most aware and responsible man in terms of his own personal psychology whom I have ever met—not to mention the kindest and funniest.
Mitch does not in the least deserve the nasty shadow projections meanly aimed his way by those who are actually righteous gay upholders of “the old ethic,” a term used by Jungian analyst Erich Neumann (1969/1990) to distinguish between the ancient system of repressive social control where the shadow is projected onto a scapegoated “other,” and “the new ethic,” a coming, better-matured human morality wherein the shadow is more accurately and responsibly owned inwardly as a problem of subjective provenance, eventually to be personified within as a would-be alchemical friend.
I have never seen Mitch, nor can I imagine him, irresponsibly acting out his shadow business in the abusive ways I several times encountered with Harry, as I will relate below. Now, I have witnessed Mitch to at times become expressively quite angry and raise his voice intensely when confronting what he felt was intense emotional violence directed at him from someone else, but I have observed him during those times as consistently holding to a careful ethic to stay with what he deems is the truth about the situation there being confronted while recognizing the subjective integrity of all parties involved, meaning that while Mitch could be intimidating and willful in a similar manner to how Harry often struck many who knew him, I always felt a strong qualitative or moral difference in their styles or uses of strong feeling, such that Mitch did not stoop to any of the nasty dehumanizational maneuvers I noted with Harry (and others).
But it is Mitch who is routinely smeared as some kind of unethical monster and accordingly scapegoated by the self-righteous likes of Don, Mark, Karen and their supporters, all inheritors of Harry’s animus towards Mitch, and they do so, in my opinion, for the same defensive reason as with Harry, because Mitch, in his work, now at the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis, vigorously challenges the violent acting-out behavior and parallel entrenched one-dimensionality of thought plaguing gay activist life (and all activist life as far as I can tell) by persistently naming and attempting to address this problem directly, and by supporting others who are also trying to really “walk the talk,” to use a street term, of being deeply gay and committedly psychological, all of whom are there so bravely undertaking to “right the historical record” about, and reinvigorate what is worth salvaging in, that still-fresh vision for better homosexual personhood and society espoused by the Radical Faeries 30 years ago, through infusing it in the present day with attemptedly gay-centered psychological self-awareness for themselves, each other and the world.
Herbert Marcuse talks about pernicious invisible forces in “advanced industrial society” that tend to “liquidate elements” trying to bring “Time and Memory” back to personal and collective liberational life. These totalitarian forces inside us all, according to Marcuse, are aimed at little more than a total “fight against history,” because accurate “remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insight” regarding a freer future (Marcuse, 1964, p. 98).
Crazy About Harry
I first met Harry Hay in 1989 when I was writing a cover story for the L.A. Weekly (Sadownick, 1990) on the Gay Spirit movement, just at about the same time as I had started practicing gay-centered, inner psychological work. Going to his home in Hollywood on La Cresta Court that he shared with John Burnside and a couple others, I encountered a tall, dignified yet lively and personable man with his sparse white hair in a short ponytail, by this time in his later 70s, who immediately struck me inspirationally with the wonderfully-serious gravitas of his gay charismatic dynamism. He spent several hours teaching me about the history of gay-centering thought I will detail more of in Part II, as well as about the Radical Faeries. He also looked deeply into my eyes, telling me he could recognize the lovely Faerie boy inside of me. I felt seen, heard, appreciated—and worried. I had already tasted enough therapy to be aware of how I might, in the face of his close and affectionate attention, be starting to project my own distortional, shadow, looksist complex onto him in now distastefully seeing Harry as nothing but a “dirty old man” who was seemingly graciously giving me so much time as a well-practiced cover to then take ruthless advantage of a nubile gay person. I tried to inwardly partner this homophobic projection and, rather, to open up to him; it was not lost on me how “historical” the moment of being alone with this queer sage was. However, despite my best efforts to contain my homophobic paranoia, Harry did indeed confirmatorily walk right into my proverbial fears. At some point he lifted his hands to my face, whispering that I was a “beautiful Faerie, coming home.” And then he suddenly clamped his palms and fingers into a surprisingly-vigorous vice grip, pulled on my head and quickly moved his lips closer and closer to mine, until I soon queasily experienced the father of the gay liberation movement forcibly tongue-raping me, as he pushed his probing lingual organ into my confused mouth it seemed as far as it would go and then started rubbing around, even though I was not responding (being pretty stunned).
However, there could have been worse things. After my initial surprise gave way to disbelief, then anger, hurt and resentment as he kept it up, I firmly but gently pulled away. (At the time, I was too codependent as a person to be able to realistically engage him in any kind of frank sharing about what had just gone on). We then proceeded as if nothing had happened, enjoying the rest of a nice-enough talk about the “Faerie vision,” and after that I stayed in touch with him, including several other significant interactions, and have a wonderful picture of us together at the 1993 March on Washington, although my feelings of hurt, disgust and disappointment with his molestation and subsequent obliviousness about it also stayed with me privately over the years, reinforced by several lesser encounters with Harry’s coercive side, such as one later incident where he started aggressively intimidating me about becoming a “troublemaker” associate of Mitch Walker, which repeated incidents helped me appreciate how serious was Harry’s duplicitous aspect.
When Mitch, during the height of early Faerie organizing (1978-1981), tried to point out similar hypocrisies (Mitch has said that he was vigorously mouth-raped also at his first meeting with Harry in 1976) that apparently were typically erupting from Harry’s domineering personality, at first genially indicating what a contradiction it was that the leader advancing “subject-subject consciousness” as an indigenously-enriching characteristic of compassionate gay mental functioning could seem to be at times exploitationally controlling and meanly punishing in the manner of a straight patriarchal authority-figure, Mitch was only met by blanket denial, tantrums and a fierce paranoid projection that Mitch was now trying to overthrow Harry and “take over.”
What is so fascinating about the newly-revealed letters written by Don Kilhefner[4] to Mitch Walker, which Mitch has kindly shared with me, is that they expose the way in which Don himself got started in gay-centered psychology by learning how to see Harry’s violence for what it was—the opposite of what is needed in any kind of good leader, not to mention in someone espousing gay-centered spiritual hopes and dreams. Here in these letters we see a whole other picture of Harry than his official self-portrait, and as well we see a “Don” of whom a relatively recent friend of his like Karen Ocamb, for example, apparently has little knowledge, just as she seems to know nothing about the “other” Harry. This is the Don who is in 1981 living with Harry and John in Los Angeles, in a “Faerie sanctuary” at their rented house on La Cresta Court, and who gradually becomes increasingly exasperated:
Right now I’m feeling like I want to get a good paying job to get some money to allow me to move out of here as quickly as possible. If I’m going to be alone, I’d rather do it in my own apartment somewhere than in a house with other “loving, sharing” people. (6-14-81)
The Cleaning Episode
Later in the letter, Don relates how he had already told Harry and John several days earlier that working with Mitch was very “significant” to him, and further, that his “admiration and respect for Mitch Walker continues to deepen [emphases in the original],” with the implication that these attitudes have now strengthened even more due to the cleaning day episode. Don ends the letter hoping his venting doesn’t bring Mitch down. Although he’s feeling “very angry” at the way Harry and John have treated him, he then shrugs, “What’s the use,” since “there is no way of working with” the problem with H & J “in a way it’ll be heard.”
Later letters detail how Don was moving ever-more intimately into a seriously-involved union with Mitch and with Mitch’s ideas (including the notion of holding “Primeval Slime Workshops” to address all that dark material being exiled by Harry and John) while simultaneously moving away from Harry’s person and formulations, a sea-change in allegiance dramatically demonstrated at the June 1981 Summer Solstice meeting of the Faerie core organizing group, the Gay Vision Circle, attended by Harry, John, Mark, Mitch, Don and several others. According to the account given in Stuart Timmons’ biography, at the meeting
Don began complaining of problems he was having with John and Harry. He talked about the accusation of Faerie Fascism, and said he believed Harry and John were power-tripping, especially Harry. He was not specific, but he eventually reached his point, which was that he was resigning, that his “heart was no longer in the project.” (Timmons, 1990, p. 282)
This move was followed by an analogous complaint from Mitch, who then also resigned. Through this coordinated action, which had been planned out carefully beforehand, Don and Mitch together formally departed from the Faeries to create the nonprofit corporation Treeroots, a portentous turn of events for the future of important gay possibilities, the historical implications of which resonate even more so today than at the time.
But that was then, and this is now. And everything looks different now.
So Back to the Main Story
As hopefully the reader can tell by this point, the One Archives demonstration by me and some associates was engaged in to protest the Don and Mark song-and-dance charade that disappears key historical facts and processes.
We also had a broader purpose.
We wanted to put forward the idea that a more effective form of grassroots movement politics than what has so far yet been conceptualized or actualized by Don or Mark or our other more-official gay leaders might concern itself in an unprecedented manner with what, although often called “mental health” by bureaucrats and academics, from a gay liberationist perspective might better be termed “the revolutionary instinct to personally individuate in a gay way.”
We protesters were worried that this important hygienic idea was and is being effectively silenced in the more so accessibly mainstream understanding of what was progressively possible in gay liberation ideology. Writes Marcuse: “In this process, the ‘inner’ dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 10).
The general homosexual public, for example, knows very little about the varied creative efforts and collaborations that flow from what I consider to be the sort of far more ideationally wealthful and sincerely caring, gay-centering psychological leadership which does exist in today’s gay community, including the 27-year work of the California non-profit group Treeroots and, as of late, the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis. This lack of enriching public discourse on the most interestingly-innovative work of those committed gay activists who have better progressively embraced psychological mindfulness as the necessary next stage of our gay emancipatory movement, is in no way merely accidental or just due to general anti-psychological or anti-gay factors, but is in significant part the sad result of active stifling by some relatively-powerful gay people, a dishonorable organizing effort which is not only enraging to me as one of those attemptedly-thwarted activists because of its vicious hypocrisy, but more foundationally because such meanspirited opposition is just plain life-threatening and life-denying to all gay people and even the whole world, as this “one-dimensionality” of false comprehension plaguing our community casts a veil of cult-like suspicion on the actual evolutionarily-more-advanced project of psychologically-enhanced gay soul making in prudent terms of the best homosexual futurity for ourselves and for everybody, which better possibility then unfortunately becomes the true victim of oppressively colonizing and impoverishing historical erasure as two-facedly enacted by the righteous likes of supposedly gay-affirmative friends such as Don Kilhefner and his collaborators.
Don enacts and promotes this infectious forgetfulness in many ways. For example, he writes a monthly column in Frontiers in L.A., the only remaining gay paper in town of note, in which he regularly lauds himself as a kind of Abraham Lincoln of gay liberation and of the Radical Faeries, who almost single-handedly bonded with Harry to create the Faerie movement. This ample self-aggrandizement in the gay media has been going on for years, despite the fact that more than a few folks gag at Don’s holier-than-thouness (a retching I have witnessed first hand in various community-organized settings, for example, when Don at the last minute failed [again!] to show up at last year’s June 2008 Lesbian and Gay Psychotherapy Association of Southern California 14th Annual Conference, without a phone call even, where people were depending on him to give the Keynote Address [a cold act he has also pulled off elsewhere over the years]). Additionally, Don has taken his “I started the Radical Faerie movement with Gay Founding Father Harry Hay” dog-and-pony show on the circuit, in print and radio interviews in L.A. and elsewhere, and of course, at the One Archives event in question here, which we protestors were demonstrating against because we felt thoroughly sick and tired of the leveraged monopoly Don and his supporters enjoy when it comes to comparatively uninterrupted, propagandistic publicity in contrast to the attendant blacklisted silence plaguing those of us who are active with Mitch Walker at the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis and elsewhere.[5]
“In the Dark”—Indeed!
Further, when Don was asked during the question-and-answer period about the demonstration going on outside and the whole issue of his “lapse” in historical reckoning by one of the protestors who decided to attend this part of the talk, he gave the following response: “To tell the truth, I didn't know what the argument was about 30 years ago, and 30 years later I am as much in the dark.” You can see Don saying those very words on a You Tube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dFMYXjE30c; Arimoto, 2009), which will also give you a fuller taste as well of the demonstration, with attendant commentary.
Cronyism
To make matters more rancid, Don elicits the collusive help of certain “yes-people” to better grease his underhanded schemes. At the forefront of this corrupt bunch right now might be journalist Karen Ocamb, who has won some community respect in the past for trying to write in a competent way about our gay political struggles, but who has also raised more than a few eyebrows both for at times seeming to abuse this influential (albeit entirely local) power for personal motives that hardly appear “objective,” perhaps most egregiously as demonstrated in her recent handling of the One Archives protest as I will review below, and then again for what many consider to be her persistent interpersonal ineffectiveness (due, for example, to her notorious self-absorption about her own take on current events, which can go on and on).
Another helpful buddy is, oddly enough, Mark Thompson, who acted (from all appearances) in his typical lumpish way as co-presenter with Don at the protested One Archives event. How bizarre is this Punch-and-Judy pairing! To give you a full account of the years-long history involving Mark’s questionable behavior with men he took under his S&M wing would take volumes, and would itself be quite instructive. Suffice it to say, for now, that Mark, following Don and Mitch, also broke from the Harry Hay approach to the Radical Faeries and joined the Treeroots effort, although he did so in his typically diplomatic way (that is, keeping all options open). During the years I knew Mark fairly intimately, from 1987-1997, when he was being a sort of mentor to me in matters of heart related to learning about Faerie sensibility, gay psychology and, for a short while, the leather world (not ultimately my cup of tea), Mark emerged as the main spokesperson in the gay community for Mitch’s gay-centered vision and psychological project. Mark wrote a trilogy of influential books (Gay Spirit [1987/2005], Gay Soul [1994], Gay Body [1997]) which served ultimately to highlight Mitch’s groundbreaking efforts to bring depth psychology to Harry’s visionary gay-centering ideas. Mark’s seemingly relentless commitment to life-saving homosexual conceptions is what drew me to trust that I could rely on his tutelage, a trust he eventually betrayed.
So to observe Don and Mark at their Archives event now lie happily in the same stinking bed of one-dimensionalizing gay history-production, and obliviously yak away with each other like the best of friends about how wonderful the Faeries were and how lovely it was to bond with the Saint-like Harry over co-founding that glorious movement (and a doubly-ironic denouement to boot in that Don had himself renounced any association with the Radical Faeries for upwards of two decades or more), is just a bit like picturing fiercely competitive Bettie and Joan suddenly making nice, after ages of trying to throw each other down the stairs, because of a more-threatening figure now in their midst, one who can then opportunely be fed to the cat instead.
While it isn’t completely clear as to why and how Don elicits such manipulative help from former foes and influential writers, his revisionist historical approach in taking undue credit for the Faerie movement’s formation may be accounted for in some interesting, albeit predictable, ways.
Besides the obvious “law of the jungle” motive, that would rather kill, so to speak, than share credit, there might be additionally-disturbing psychological reasons of a type that could be relevant for all of us today, of a repressive shadow type requiring enhancedly-organized recognition, which latter theme underlay our demonstration at Don and Mark’s talk on the Radical Faeries. Our hope was and is that open discussion of the psychological roots behind individual falseness in regard to key collective matters such as the history of homosexual organizing, can lead to successful cultivation of a new gay community morality upfrontly based on responsibly sought, gay-centered psychological self-awareness.
I suspect that one of the main rationales behind Don’s unethical distortions may have to do with what “political psychologist” Peter Dunlap calls “the fear of the future” in his recent book, Faith in the Future: The Advent of Psychological Liberalism (2008). Dunlap sees the next stage of political evolution as inciting each of us to face our unconscious processes in a more ethical and rigorous way. He knights this new age, “psychological liberalism,” to distinguish it from the now-passing era of “political liberalism” heretofore predominant, which itself had been a considerable advance from the previous stage of “religious liberalism” (and before that, the “group identity” of “tribal liberalism,” and even earlier, the “mammalian” qualities of “social hierarchy”) in so far as it endows individual subjectivity with unprecedented moral freedom and parallel responsibility (2008, pp. 98-99).
I might, furthermore, wager that this sole, hardly-generous and supposedly-authentic personal “opening” came merely as the result of a public airing of Don’s perplexing and consistent lack of emotional authenticity and psychological mindedness (given his prominently self-professed role and moniker as gay-community Jungian psychologist, therapist, etc.) at an educational presentation colleagues and I gave at the Los Angeles Lesbian and Gay Psychotherapy Association Conference in June 2008, where we deconstructed his writings, both to honor him (he is, after all, the only attemptedly gay-centered, Jungian-minded movement figure out there besides those of us who work with the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis), and to demonstrate how much further we can go as a people than what is being intimated in his Hallmark Card proclamations to Gay Youth, Adults, Elders and Ancestors (what Marcuse might call a “caricature of dialectics” [1964, p. 89]). For his part, Don discusses homosexual issues either in an imitative New Agey manner (he adores Eckhart Tolle, a real gay visionary if there ever was one) or in a totally politically-extraverted way. He doesn’t consider any actually-homosexual archetypes in the slightest (he couldn’t, as he would have to cite Mitch’s work on the Double [Walker, 1976], for starters).
Also, Don never refers to anything the least bit erotic (in fact, he often shames the erotic), and offers no practical and consistent road map as to how gays or lesbians could actually work on themselves in a homosexually-centered, interiorly-focused fashion by engaging unconscious processes through appropriately-reconfigured methods such as self-confrontation and “active imagination” (a classical Jungian concept: duh). To be fair, Don has mentioned writing down feelings and seeking out therapy, but such occasional, simplistically-put advice often feels more like hectoring, and is never actually framed in any gay-centering fashion. He does not point gay people either to their numinous same-sex-loving eros or to their revolting gay inferiority based in the trauma of heterosexist injury, nor to how persistent alchemical work on the latter business increasingly leads to transpersonal transformations in relation to the realm of the former (For an interesting gay-centered gloss on Don’s writings in this regard, see Mitch Walker’s fairly close reading of his work in Gay Liberation at a Psychological Crossroads, 2009; also see www.uranianpsych.org).
Additionally, Don’s writings, epitomized by his recent piece in the newly-edited anthology, Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (Mecca, 2009), only reference a by-gone past as viable model for the gay future, and do absolutely nothing to discuss any of the more authentically forward-oriented material someone like political psychologist Dunlap, much less my colleagues and myself as gay-centered psychotherapists efforting an ethically-new liberatory competence subjectively and interpersonally, would discuss as crucially pertinent for better fulfilling the important destiny of same-sex-loving peoples now. Don’s articulations of gay psychology amount to nothing much but one-dimensional, disembodied abstractions; they consistently fail at offering what Marcuse calls authentically real “two dimensionality” (or “un-mutilated experiential context” [1964, p. 204]) in such ways as I have been pointing out, like the lack of dialectic or of any deep involvement with feeling.
Don’s words apparently aim progressively towards enhancement of the “good life” for us gay people through being more so gay-centered. But such intimations are actually wreathed in a nostalgia and manipulativeness that really point us backward to a pre-psychological time, to the busy extravert life Don so enjoyably lived at the height of his early gay political activism and to ideas he absorbed from Mitch and Harry when he worked with them in the Faeries and Treeroots but that have been exploitatively reduced to serving as a mere gloss on his underlying emotional motives. When Don tries to realistically see into the future in his writings, it seems to me, his defenses only boomerang him to prior times and sensibilities, but not even a past involving what really occurred so much as one adjusted in his mind to better suit his present psychodynamic needs.
In the state of political and individual oppression, “The functional language is a radically anti-historical language,” adds Marcuse (1964, p. 98). It “fights against a dimension of the mind in which centrifugal faculties and forces might develop” in relation to memory, where richly acquired qualities might emancipatorily “hinder the total coordination of the individual with the society” (p. 98).
To rub the point in further, I will again cite Peter Dunlap, who, being more of a psychologist than Herbert Marcuse although strongly influenced by him, posits that there are “three emergent capacities” required of competent leaders who are responding to the crises of today (these being environmental degradation, abuse of power and the psychological dilemmas of “depression, self-disgust, and loneliness”), abilities needed to help them and us get beyond this enslaving type of mental one-dimensionality: (1) the capacity for “generational attention” (which focuses our awareness on the crises of our times); (2) “affect freedom” (or fluency with one’s emotions); and (3) the capacity for destiny (to think about how the future is beckoning now) (Dunlap, 2008, pp. 11-13).
I believe these failures of insight which I have pointed out in Don’s supposed leadership, are most likely sourced in fiercely-assertive psychological defenses (concerning a fear of the past that leads to a fear of the future) which in turn emphatically determine Don’s so-far fairly effective, community-wide embargo on Mitch and Mitch’s ideas of rigorous psychological gay-centeredness and attendant homosexual emotional honesty, a particularly ironic boycott in that Mitch’s considerations seem to me way more authentically and fully gay-centered than any of Don’s, as well as being thus so deeply involved with both the gay shadow problem and the homosexual erotic as the electrically numinous, royal road to fullest same-sex-loving self-realization. It never ceases to amaze me that when faced with a choice between Don’s stale, sleazy and almost-asexual avuncularism and Mitch’s innovatively queer and lively vision of romantic twinship love as a perpetually-upwelling metaphor for introversionally enacting a homosexual sacred marriage between the human and the divine, there would be any significant confusion between relevant truth and falsehood in terms of the same-sex-loving contextual situation relating to these two historical persons here at hand being looked at. But then again, that such confusion is presently going on perhaps says something important about the pernicious preponderance of internalized homophobia still badly infecting our gay love and potential (more on this lingering psychological demon soon).
The New Frontiers of Gay Activism
As gay-centered psychological organizers, the members of the Gay Psyche Politics Collective who have created this blog and the protest against Don and Mark last February, regard the better-disciplined activation of the innate impulse in homosexual subjectivity to authentically seek a deeply realized and libidinally embodied gay-identified personhood, and the closely-related work involved in expeditively fostering a maturationally-oriented gay community much more so capable than currently of accurately prioritizing and interventionally facilitating such enhanced homosexual individuation, as the most innovative, vital and important activist terrain facing any ethical same-sex-loving person today.
That is, “coming out” is experienced as a radicalizing emotional and cognitive development by which a gay person, among other things, wakes up to how he or she has been brainwashed by the family and society to negatively regard his or her same-sex-loving essence. He or she is thereby increasingly released to better undertake that slow but heroic effort of integrationally allying with an interior “gay knowing” which has been and is ongoingly being autogenously consolidated from persistently yummy homosexual feelings involving sex, love, fantasy and intimacy, an estimably salutary effort to rewardingly reach a newly self-respecting, interior alliance in bold constitutional contrast to that sad alienation which was unjustly based on what once seemed an inevitably-ordained, homophobically heterosexist sensibility about such otherwise-good amatory experiences. Through successfully attaining this inner reorientational point in the empowering self-recovery process, a gay person begins building a sound and viable self-identification with his or her venereal gay source that in turn not only constellates as the sure sense of being a meaningfully valuable homosexual person but as such becomes the sure developmental platform from which to improvedly come to know this perpetually upwelling Homo-eros inside as a well-felt, and even “intelligently” felt and awakening, presence of great numinous substantiality quite able to magically transport him or her inductively into an even more marvelously-transmuting journey initiatorily to compositionally become still better tangibly whole and self-realized as a meaningful homosexual human being—now on entirely different and healthier terms than those of one’s heterosexist parents or society, on one’s own autochthonously-generated, homosexually appreciative terms.
The process of gay identity formation individuationally operating in the appropriate personal growth of a successfully functioning same-sex-loving individual is thus conceived of as actually ongoing throughout the lifespan, as consisting in multiple stages or degrees of authentic homosexual self-fathoming, of sincerely-fulfilling gay personality-making, from birth to death. We same-sex-loving folk have only just, in terms of this more modern and humanistic picture of contemporary gay psychology pivotally informed by that subjective evolutionary phenomenon which therapist Carl Rogers (1961) called “becoming a person,” begun to more seriously appreciate what it can mean significationally to self and others to “come out” transformatively as gay inside subjectivity to the deepest and most liberatory possibilities momentously intimated by the revelatory notion of a greaterly-complete homosexual identity or valuable personhood than presently humanely well-recognized.
In addition to the affirmative considerations of further gay personality development looked at just above, the gay-centering attitude being illustratively followed out here also then helps us better recognize important antagonists to stronger homosexual self-actualization.
The enemy in our midst is not simply unjust laws and bigoted social institutions themselves, although of course these external malefic factors are quite real, noxiously inimical, and must be utterly vanquished. As psychological activists, however, I and my associates engage an additional “front,” so to speak, in the necessary struggle against cultural fascism. We train our eye on what might be considered an even more pernicious enemy than bigoted social laws and customs. I refer here to the ideology of heterosexism and accompanying homophobia now operating as a psychological principle or attitude, what might be overarchingly referred to as “internalized heterosexism.”
From a gay-centered psychological activist point of view, the bad effects of noxious heterosexism on a growing homosexual person work to destroy the present and future gay mind in a variety of overt and covert ways, but I think this foul influence operates most nefariously as we are forced by circumstances to unconsciously identify early on with our heteronormative parental complexes (the psychic internalizations of mother and father) over and against our indigenous Gay Spirit. From our parents’ point of view, being gay is almost always seen as, at worse, a terrible sin or a bitter blow, and at better, something alien to courteously tolerate or goodheartedly accept (but not, goddess forbid, anything really important enough to actually celebrate for its own procreative wonder, majesty and possibility!)
At the moment of this writing and as I think about the matter, two ways I can feel my own internalized heterosexism trying to control me right now are: through ominously fearing effective retribution for the strong, challenging stance I’m taking up here, dreadedly imagining an overwhelming punishment by the sorcerously-powerful likes of vengeful Don via his eager attack dog, Karen (What terrible dish might she have stored up about me? That last trick I took home from Pavilions years ago?); and invalidationally wondering if I am actually being too cowardly in this discussion to deserve to be taken seriously (one reason perhaps for my delay in responding to Karen’s blog?). Now I find myself day-dreaming about going away on a cruise with a hot guy; am I in reality here running away from both the burning relational fire of my homosexual libido and the abysmal pain involved in recovering from how my parents and society badly traumatized me for opening to the marvelous same-sex-loving passion erupting in my emotions and my body? There certainly is a lot of disruptive affective provocation being well privately invoked here by my act of trying to write effectively about troublesome matters concerning the likes of Don and Karen! Why do I even have to compose this assertive and challenging blog statement at all? Can’t I just be safely normal and mindlessly live behind a white-picket fence like all acceptable people do?
For decades now, gay liberationists have diagnosed any form of homosexual self-acceptance that superficializes, reduces or otherwise minimizes being gay as expressing ambivalence toward full same-sex-loving emancipation. They have termed this compromised position, “assimilationism.” Relatively constructive aspects of gay assimilationist political effort would have us fighting for our social rights, including marriage and military equality, yet fuller success in such conservatively-normalizing ways could also lead in concert with continued thwarting of alternate gay social developments to a new type of destructive homosexual collusion with contemporary cultural “Nazis” to still render a good-enough “Final Solution” on being importantly gay through situationally enforced, mass forms of reactionary integrationist dilution.
The scariest thing I find about today’s increasingly ideologically-neutered gay community politics is that hardly anybody at all seems even slightly interested in the concept much less practice of being gay-centered, such that it would accordingly appear as if dissipationally compromising assimilationism perhaps has already pretty fully won out as our liberational movement’s overarching goal.
I would even go so far as to say that the apparent domination of such integrationist ideology aptly there so symptomatizes the most egregious mental health problem we gays contemporaneously face, when we consider how it might be reflecting a limitational devaluation of much greater possibilities in same-sex-loving personhood that is deleteriously sourced in powerful forms of covert self-hatred, toxic shame and other rotten consequences of still-foully-internalized homophobia. In regard to this confounding problem of the lasting injuriousness of vicious social victimization to the victims, I might note that ACT UP co-founder Larry Kramer has often made poignant analogies (e.g., Kramer, 1994) between what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany and gays during the AIDS health crisis; the Jews were so identified with their abusers that they did not notice they were being asked to contribute to their “Final Solution” until the doors to the cargo trains shut once and for all. As we know from the renowned scholar Hannah Arendt (1976) as well as through its reference by Larry Kramer, the Final Solution could only have successfully taken place with significant Jewish cooperation.
Ironically enough, among the worst colluders (who could also be known as “Kapos”) of today’s gay assimilationism as a strategic tool for helping eliminate what is actually a currently-rising cultural threat—due to the increased validational success of the modern gay liberation movement—of a fuller, more so politically-revolutionary homosexual self-realization occurring on a large social scale, in my estimation, are some of the gay activist leaders who seem most vocal in outwardly decrying assimilation, notably here, Don Kilhefner, Mark Thompson and, as their sycophantic propagandist, Karen Ocamb. I would argue that Don, Mark and Karen are misbehaving ethically in a deeply self-compromising fashion in assertively taking up their conscious positions on the importantly-problematic matters herein being explored, matters such as Don’s coldblooded historical mutilations and Mark’s smarmy cooperation therewith, and as a result wind up amounting significationally to little more than anti-gay wolves in fey sheeps’ clothing. Those supposedly high-minded community people who act immorally in such a noxious duplicitous fashion are certainly not in the end helping us same-sex-loving folk live a better gay-centered life. They may promotionally claim to gaily walk their talk, but then they point away to some vague or even opposite direction, ultimately to a direction subliminally vitiating if not more overtly self-destructively heterosexist, as I hope to further show through a close reading of Karen’s blog, now to follow.
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